Linkage

For more than two decades, I’ve been what some might call a hoarder but what I’ve more affectionately dubbed a “digital packrat.” Which is to say I mostly avoid streaming services, I don’t trust any company or cloud with my digital media, and I store everything as files on devices that I physically control. My mp3 collection has been going strong since the Limewire days, I keep high-quality rips of all my movies on a local media server, and my preferred reading device holds a large collection of DRM-free ebooks and PDFs—everything from esoteric philosophy texts and scientific journals to scans of lesbian lifestyle magazines from the 1980s.

Sure, there are websites where you can find some of this material, like the Internet Archive. But this archive is mine. It’s my own little Library of Alexandria, built from external hard drives, OCD, and a strong distrust of corporations. I know I’m not the only one who has gone to these lengths. Sometimes when I’m feeling gloomy, I imagine how when society falls apart, we packrats will be the only ones in our village with all six seasons of The Sopranos. At the rate we’re going, that might not be too far off.

Amazon is far from alone in this long-running trend towards eliminating digital ownership. For many people, digital distribution and streaming services have already practically ended the concept of owning and controlling your own media files. Spotify is now almost synonymous with music for some younger generations, having strip-mined the music industry from both ends by demonetizing more than 60% of the artists on its platform and pushing algorithmic slop while­ simultaneously raising subscription fees.

Of course, surrendering this control means being at the complete mercy of Amazon and other platforms to determine what we can watch, read, and listen to—and we’ve already seen that these services frequently remove content for all sorts of reasons. Last October, one year after the Israeli military began its campaign of genocide in Gaza, Netflix removed “Palestinian Stories,” a collection of 19 films featuring Palestinian filmmakers and characters, saying it declined to renew its distribution license. Amazon also once famously deleted copies of 1984 off of people’s Kindles. Fearing piracy, many software companies have moved from the days of “Don’t Copy That Floppy” to the cloud-based software-as-a-service model, which requires an internet connection and charges users monthly subscription fees to use apps like Photoshop. No matter how you look at it, digital platforms have put us on a path to losing control of any media that we can’t physically touch.

Standing ovation for chx:

Karoly Negyesi: Well, even framing this as "AI" is misleading. The entire field is essentially based on a short paper written by John von Neumann in the 1950s. In that paper, he declared—without a single shred of proof, and yet people readily believed it—that the human brain is obviously digital. People have believed this so strongly that even today, neuroscientists struggle to describe how the brain works without using digital metaphors. But the truth is, the human brain does not work like a computer.

So, calling these statistical pattern-matching systems "artificial intelligence" is just misleading. 'Retrieve a memory', your brain doesn’t retrieve a memory. It’s not a computer. It never was. Everybody knows this. You never retrieve a memory the way a computer does. You do not store your memories as a computer does. That whole concept is just not true.  

There was a brilliant book about this a couple of years back that described how, in different eras, people compared the brain to whatever technology was available to them. Descartes compared it to a machine. Von Neumann compared it to a digital computer. None of that is true. Of course, we still don’t quite know how the brain actually works. So then we pursue something called artificial intelligence, and by that, we mean something that matches this completely misplaced and untrue metaphor of the brain.  

The whole premise of artificial intelligence is broken. It’s just not true. You are building a castle on quicksand. There’s nothing there. And beyond this, there’s just so much wrong with it. Almost blindly trusting whatever a large language model spits back at you—because, once again, I don’t think people fully understand or even partially understand what they are getting.  

So, no, I don’t think AI is progressing in the way people think it is. I mean, obviously, there’s some progress, but it is not going where people think it can go.  It’s never going to match a human brain—at least not this way.  And quite likely, not within our lifetimes. Probably not even within a few centuries. We will not have a machine that is capable of doing what the human brain is capable of. Mostly because—we still have no clue how the brain actually works. 

Trump is not a political anomaly. He's not a disruptive force that came out of nowhere. And contrary to the column inches of pearl-clutching pundits, he didn't hijack the Republican Party - he unmasked it. His presidency is the product of decades of strategy, ideology, and deliberately nurtured, festering decay.

[…]

Republican voters bear direct responsibility. They are active participants in America’s political apocalypse, not passive victims manipulated against their interests. After witnessing years of his break-it-without-buying-it governance and hearing his promises of harm, the Americans who voted for Trump in 2024 weren't deceived. They were convinced. They didn't hold their noses while voting for mass deportations and stripping transgender people of their civil rights. They huffed the scent and loved it.

Blaming Trump alone offers psychological comfort, by localizing a systemic problem in a single figurehead. It legitimizes the false promise that removing one man solves the underlying condition. It absolves millions of their responsibility while leaving intact the machinery that produced Trump - and will create future authoritarian leaders.

Political scientist Cas Mudde has suggested a classification I find particularly helpful, especially when it comes to determining what, exactly, we are confronted with in case of the AfD. Mudde has been at the forefront of the research on far-right parties and movement across Europe – few people can offer the kind of broad, comparative perspective he can provide. In his 2019 book The Far Right Today, Mudde concisely outlines what I believe is an extremely useful typology.

The first key distinction to draw is between the mainstream right and the far right. On the mainstream right, we find established conservative parties that are largely on board with the foundations of liberal democracy: the rule of law, universal suffrage, free and fair elections, minority rights, protection of baseline civil liberties. What defines them as parties of the right is that they are skeptical towards the idea of egalitarianism; they accept “natural” hierarchies which they contend should either be preserved or, at least, not leveled via state intervention. But they tolerate some measure of pluralism, respect democratic deliberation, and ultimately support and stabilize the democratic system.

Far-right movements and parties, by contrast, reject the system – they are fundamentally not on board with liberal democracy. Crucially, the far right is itself not a monolithic bloc but covers a range of ideologies as well as attitudes and dispositions. Cas Mudde helpfully distinguishes two main camps on the far right: the radical right and the extreme right. The distinction really comes down to a reactionary (on the radical right) vs revolutionary (on the extreme right) attitude and political project. The radical-right reactionaries disdain liberal democracy, but prefer to work mostly within the existing political and constitutional system to turn the clock back; they begrudgingly accept some level of restraint in their anti-democratic pursuit. If they got their way, they would probably erect something that is best described as an illiberal democracy: It still looks democratic on the surface, with elections and opposition parties, but the system is set up to entrench certain hierarchies, discriminate against historically marginalized groups, and consolidate power in the hands of the right. To me, Chief Justice John Roberts belongs in that bucket (and has a case to be one of their standard-bearers in the United States).

The extreme-right revolutionaries, on the other hand, will never be satisfied with just reformist reactionary measures. They desire to tear the system down. They accept no opposition, no restraint. They are not content to bend the law, they believe they stand above it. They don’t just want to make it harder for certain groups to participate in the political process, they want to purge them from the nation.

Racism is foundational to reproductive control, and the United States eugenics movement shared and inspired much of the Nazi philosophy of “racial hygiene” that sought to maintain the dominance and “purity” of the white race. Today’s conservative reproductive agenda is little more than racial hygiene’s modern iteration.

Transgender people pose a grave threat to this agenda, because they resist the idea that women are defined by an innate female essence rooted in reproductive biology, and that being mothers is, therefore, their nature and destiny. If someone born with ovaries and a uterus can escape the call of motherhood and if someone born without can be a woman, the white supremacist message falls apart. If gender is “just a feeling,” as some conservatives put it, then how can we say that women’s purpose is to bear and raise children? If people can “mess with” their reproductive organs, how can reproduction be the pinnacle of human life? Gender-affirming care poses a challenge to the reproductive imperative. It must be suppressed to sustain white supremacy, or, in the words of Conservative Political Action Conference speaker Michael Knowles: “For the good of society … transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.”

By rigidly policing gender norms and sexuality, anti-trans legislation reinforces the message that the proper and natural role of women is to bear children within a nuclear, heterosexual marriage. That is why the same bills that would ban gender-affirming care expressly allow nonconsensual surgeries on intersex newborns, because those interventions reinforce rather than undermine gender essentialism.

To white conservatives, womanhood is rooted in the reproductive body, and its achievement is motherhood. That message, in turn, serves to encourage reproduction with the aim of maintaining white demographic dominance. In other words, transphobia is a by-product of misogyny, which is a corollary of white supremacy. Anti-trans laws trace their roots back to racism.

Trams FTW!!!

Today the world faces a severe austerity pandemic: the high levels of expenditures needed to cope with COVID-19, the resulting socioeconomic crisis and other shocks due to structural imbalances combined with reduced tax rates have left governments with growing fiscal deficits and indebtedness. Starting in 2021, this initiated a global drive toward fiscal consolidation whereby governments began adopting austerity approaches exactly when the needs of their people and economies are greatest.

[…]

A long list of austerity measures is being considered or already implemented by governments worldwide. This includes eleven types of austerity policies that have negative social impacts on their populations, especially harming women: (1) targeting and rationalizing social protection (in 120 countries); (2) cutting or capping the public sector wage bill (in 91 countries); (3) eliminating subsidies (in 80 countries); (4) privatizing public services/reform of State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) (in 79 countries); (5) pension reforms (in 74 countries); (6) labor flexibilization reforms (in 60 countries); (7) reducing social security contributions (or “tax wedge,” in 47 countries); and (8) cutting health expenditures (in 16 countries). In parallel, three prevalent measures to raise revenues in the short-term that also have detrimental social impacts include: (9) increasing consumption taxes, such as sales and value-added taxes (VAT) (in 86 countries); (10) strengthening public-private partnerships (PPPs) (in 55 countries); and (11) increasing fees/tariffs for public services (in 28 countries).

Rather than investing in a robust post-pandemic recovery to bring prosperity to all citizens, governments are considering austerity measures that will harm populations. These adjustment measures are not new: the same policies have been advised over the years by the international financial institutions (IFIs). Austerity is an outdated policy that has become the “new normal,” an IFI strategy to minimize the public sector and the welfare state –to support the private sector. Countries constrained by debt and deficits are told to adopt fiscal consolidation or austerity measures rather than identifying new sources of fiscal space. Once budgets are contracting, governments must look at policies that minimize the public sector and expand PPPs and the private delivery of services, often promoted and/or assisted by multilateral development banks. These policies principally benefit corporations and the wealthy –they are “pro-rich policies” that exacerbate inequalities. To compensate for the negative social impacts, particularly on women, the IFIs often advise a small safety net targeted to only the poorest populations, which excludes the vast majority of people, punishing the low and middle classes. Pro-corporate policies accompanied by a small safety net targeted to the poorest do not serve the mainstream population; they are detrimental to the majority of citizens, especially women. The worldwide propensity toward fiscal consolidation is expected to aggravate social hardship at a time of high development needs, soaring inequalities and social discontent.

There’s no question that we are at the start of a debt crisis that’s certain to worsen dramatically in the coming years. Debt service obligations to multilateral, bilateral and private creditors directly reduce available funding for already under-resourced shock absorbers, social protections (including those that support women’s workforce participation and caring labor), public investment and investments in physical and social infrastructures that support growth and gender equality. Moreover, as in previous financial and debt crises, support from the Bretton Woods institutions (BWIs) is conditioned on austerity programs that entail, among other things, fiscal consolidation, public expenditure reductions, increased consumption and value-added taxes, user fees (that can restrict educational access for girls), and measures that contract public sector employment.

Constraints on fiscal space are already being felt anew across the Global South. Deeper constraints surely lie ahead. Indeed, there’s ample evidence that the austerity agenda has arrived, and it appears likely to be more severe than that associated with the crisis of the 1980s. Constraints on fiscal space and economic crises are always borne disproportionately by women, as per decades of research by feminist economists.

A debt crisis of epic proportions in the Global South is unfolding. The debt crisis—on top of the continued economic and social fallout of the Covid-19 crisis, the climate crisis, democratic deficits in several national contexts, and the breakdown of cooperation and traditional alliances in the global community—dim the prospects of mobilizing vast quantities of the medium- and long-term financial resources necessary to reverse backsliding and make progress on the full range of the UN SDGs by the looming 2030 target. SDG 5 provides the impetus for this paper.

As with previous debt crises and the pandemic, the burdens of today’s debt crises are borne disproportionately by women and other vulnerable groups and nations. It’s therefore crucial that we explore opportunities for expanding and creating the fiscal space that national policymakers can use to support SDG 5.  I consider strategies that focus on a subset of external financial flows (namely, external debt, concessional finance, and special drawing rights). Some of the strategies I discuss are “gender-indifferent,” meaning that they are neither informed by concerns about gender nor do they directly target gendered inequalities. That said, gender-indifferent external finance strategies directly increase fiscal space and can indirectly support gender equality, if national policymakers have the political commitment and tools to use the space created toward this end. I also discuss gender-informed external finance strategies that can, to various degrees, directly support gender equality. And because austerity policies disproportionately affect women and girls, any strategies that ease external financing burdens and constraints necessarily support gender equality. It’s my intention that those advocating for women the world over will find a set of attractive and viable strategies for creating, expanding, and engendering fiscal space through strategies aimed at external finance at a time of overlapping crises. It’s my hope that this paper will be of use to those advocating for green transitions and for a just, inclusive global economy.

I don't know how I was led to this article, but oh my giddy aunt, having been accused of perfectionism from time to time, and having oodles of executive dysfunction, I have Opinions about it.

Parents are flabbergasted when I suggest that perhaps their child lives within a messy and unscheduled life because they are putting off the responsibility to get the work done perfectly. Most people assume that a perfectionist is someone with a strictly organized environment and routine, the highest grades, and many accolades. Nothing below perfect is accepted by them and they strive daily for that sense of accomplishment. Yet, what many people don’t recognize is the behind-the-scenes agony that transpires inside a child’s (or adult’s) head when they strive for perfection. The amount of planning, rough drafts, materials, and time it takes to reach perfection can weigh heavily on anyone who rigidly believes that this is the only recipe for success. It’s no wonder why so many projects seem like gigantic monsters that should be avoided until a student has no choice but to face the fear and get it done or fail the class.