Notices by Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝ (richpuchalsky@mastodon.social), page 2

Argentina is as far as I know unique in having elected an anarcho-capitalist leader, I wonder how that's going.

(How does one know that anarcho-capitalists are not anarchists? Lots of ways. But one of them is that there will not be a President Anarchist.)

https://hachyderm.io/@molly0xfff/114027830134298393

In order to view this job as good, you have to view what the state generally does as good, at least enough so that your limited ability to choose projects puts you on the side of the angels (although one of your helpful co-workers is of course going to do them.) Is what the US state is doing generally good?

We have the largest carceral system in the world. We have an advanced military logistics system that we used to commit genocide.

The article says that Marcotte views what he was doing as "putting rectangles on screens". OK -- for what purpose? 18F is a part of GSA that acts as a sort of internal contractor to other parts of the government on tech issues. What are the other parts of the government doing? Is the rectangle a drone targeting rectangle that gets smaller as the pictured person on the screen gets closer?

But people at 18F have some ability to choose projects. No drone chasing -- as an individual.

I'm trying not to harsh on this piece by Ethan Marcotte, which has the now-common "make a list beforehand of things you won't do" advice. Well and good, the problem is that people don't do this early enough.

If you join a hierarchical organization -- especially, say, the administrative apparatus of an empire -- you certainly have to make that list. Because you will be doing the bad things eventually.

https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/leaving-18f/

OK, but did all of those entities suddenly go bad under Trump? They did not. For instance, Biden instructed his administrative state to ignore policies that would have kept it from delivering weapons for genocide. The administrative state under Obama helped make the US the largest fossil fuel producer in the world, something which will cause deaths in the hundreds of millions.

Agencies are supposed to carry out legislation, as modified by executive policy and court orders. They certainly can be guided by their own expertise but they are not supposed to set the goals involved.

What happens when the legislators, executive, and courts are bad? Then they will instruct the administrative state to do bad things. *The whole point* of that state is to then do the bad things.

Maybe being the I.T. guy for this system is not a great thing even when you are personally savvy enough to avoid being part of a future "IBM and the Holocaust" book.

That's sort of the first half of it. The second half is: what does a hierarchical system *do*? Why build it in the first place?

The point of it is to empower hierarchical control. For instance, the military is not supposed to declare war (or peace) on its own.

People making an ethical or moral stand about their work is fine, it's a good thing. But they have the ability to see further into the future than a few months. People have to start taking this more seriously and letting themselves see a wider picture of what's going on than a small rectangle.

/fin

The guy who has taken over US AID is pro Bosnian genocide

https://www.propublica.org/article/usaid-peter-marocco-state-department-bosnia-serbia-diplomacy-trump-foreign-policy

All right am I going to do this? Maybe.

Why the Niemöller "Poem" is Bad

a thread

1/173 (joking, but not really)

(actually this is 0/18 at least for now)

(4) When a strong pattern is established by repetition, it's the repetition-breaking moment that establishes the effect. What's the last verse, which breaks the pattern?

Then they came for me! Oh no, not me! No one left -- to speak out for me! Wow the reader identification is great here, who has trouble identifying with a threat to -- me? (i.e. themselves)

(3) Repetition is not in and of itself bad in poetry. There are plenty of good poems that use it.

How is it used in this one? First they came for the X / And I did not speak out / Because I was not an X. For all of the variations of the English version of the poem (I'll get to the translation later) that is all the poem is for all of the verses but the last. You can see why people like it, it's very "accessible".

(2) So what is it? It's a speech that he gave lots of times and was gradually transformed by him and others into what it now is. The history of how people wanted to read it has everything to do with its final form.

So first: why is it bad as an aesthetic artifact? I'll get to various other kinds of badness later.

tl/dr: It's bad because it uses simple repetition for a sentimental effect.

(1) OK it's a "poem", everyone knows it, everyone currently is wallowing in it, it's bad. Why the scare quotes around "poem"? Because it was not written to be or really intended to be a poem.

I should write at the outset that although Niemöller was basically a Nazi, I firmly believe in a separation of artist from art. It's possible for a bad person to make good art or a good person to make bad art. Criticism of who he was is not why it's bad art.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came

(7) But we can learn something from them. First, the order in the initial speech was probably: Communists, disabled people, Jews, occupied countries. First of these to get edited out were disabled people. Just not something people in a eugenics-influenced society reading it in English wanted to consider.

Then, of course, Communists out. Not very sympathetic especially for an American audience. Socialists and trade unionists in.

(6) OK I've gone by the aesthetic part as quickly as I could. Next, textual variation. There's a well known part of criticism that goes through textual variations of works. For instance, Walk Whitman wrote different versions of various poems in _Leaves of Grass_, put them in different orders etc. The textual variations abound here because it never was intended as a poem in the first place.

(5) I can't really bear to do a close reading of this, there is so little there. It wasn't intended as a poem and it barely functions as one. I will note that in what is referred to as the original German, the repetition is broken -- the first verse says "Nazis", and the others don't. This was taken out by whoever translated it for good (aesthetic reasons) to clean it up a little: making the repetition stronger, makes the idea more general for greater reader identification.

@Infoseepage

It's not even good liberalism. Probably one of the best philosophers of liberalism was John Rawls, who envisioned a polite, civilized dialogue as the way to settle societal basics. He was famously asked what happened if Hitler showed up to the dialogue and replied that all you could do in the thought experiment was tell him to go away (and in real life, to go to war).

@HeavenlyPossum

Imagine a long-lived person who was born in 1929, and is now 96 years old. When they were 18 years old, they were a well-informed leftist and were horrified by the 1947 Taft-Hartley law. "This completes the Wagner Act legalization of unions if they don't cause trouble," the leftist says, "unions are going to dwindle and become just a part of business."

Now it's 2025. "General Strike now!" someone posts, "and join a union! We can do this!"

The 96 year old wonders what to say.

1/n

USAID is a tool of US soft power, that is entirely true. It's also a tool of blackmail when aid is threatened to be withdrawn if the recipients do things the US doesn't like.

Is a good for a country that is helping to destroy world ecosystems to have more soft power? No it is not. No amount of going on about the Soviets will change that.