Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the latest ‘Commentator’ post. The idea here is to start with the best/most interesting articles I come across in a sweep of a large number of publications and to use those as a jumping-off point for my own riffs on politics and the news.
At the partner site Inner Life, the ever-curious, ever-creative Mary Tabor "Only connect ..." discusses the poet Robert Hass.
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Best,
Sam
OF INTELLIGENCE LEAKS AND LOGISTICS FAILURES
Yesterday’s news fades fast, fast. Almost nobody at the moment is talking about the major U.S. intelligence leak or hapless Airman Jack Teixeira, most unimpressive of whistleblowers.
I’ll just say that that story, as it’s now being presented, doesn’t quite add up. The version we’re meant to accept is that Teixeira of the Massachusetts Air National Guard — not even of the regular military — had abundant access to top secret documents providing a high-level perspective on America’s conduct of the Ukraine War; and that Teixeira shared hundreds of those documents with his online gaming group solely “to inform and impress.”
But whatever. For now, let’s accept the story as it’s presented and draw a few conclusions from what we know. The most obvious inference — as Glenn Gerstell, the NSA’s former general counsel, writes in The New York Times — is that “America’s secrets aren’t sufficiently protected.” The current ‘perimeter-based system’ allows individuals who pass through the security complex to have fairly sweeping access to sensitive materials, which allows for major leaks from low-ranking figures like Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Joshua Schulte, and Teixeira.
The next inference is that the leak may be symptomatic of a larger morale issue within the U.S. armed forces. More so than Teixeira (so far), the intriguing figure in the story of the leak is Sarah Bils aka Donbass Devushka. Bils had been a fairly senior noncommissioned officer in the Navy, left the service in late 2022, at which point she was already active on the pro-Russian Donbass Devushka telegram channel, “glorifying the Russian military and the paramilitary Wagner Group,” as The Wall Street Journal writes. It was Donbass Devushka that, in early April, picked up Teixiera’s previously-obscure leaks and circulated them into the Russian-speaking world. As with Teixeira, Bils’ motives for such a radical turn are a bit opaque. The Wall Street Journal quotes Bils as saying that she “left the Navy for medical reasons, after suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.”
Something about both Teixeira and Bils strikes a chord for me. I’ve spent much of the past year interviewing and working with American soldiers (predominantly veterans). When I’ve been on actual active-duty bases, I’ve had the pronounced, unsettling sense that the current crop of military personnel are severely demoralized — for instance, I had the very odd experience last year of having the Public Information Officer (whose job is to run interference against all possible negative stories) tell my camera crew, within hours of our being there, of a rape she’d experienced while in the service.
It’s entirely possible that all soldiers are all fucked-up at all times, but there is the sense that the current generation (which had its baptism-by-blood by unilaterally withdrawing from Afghanistan) is not exactly in a great psychic space. And that seems to be the case for both Airman Teixeira and Sailor Bils. If the story of 2022 really was that the military of one superpower — Russia — turned out to be largely a paper tiger (and that, in great part, for reasons of demoralization within the ranks of the armed forces), there’s some cause for concern that America’s armed forces may not be quite as potent as they seem.
The more immediate worry of the leaks is what they say about America’s military logistics — how, for instance, America has been begging South Korea to send weapons to Ukraine. As David Ignatius wrote in The Washington Post in the immediate aftermath of the leaks, “The West’s ‘arsenal of democracy’ isn’t close to matching Ukraine’s needs. In theory, logistics should be Ukraine’s great advantage against a Russia facing what were supposed to be ‘crippling’ sanctions.” The reality is more of a grinding war of attrition with both sides facing dwindling supplies.
At the BIG Substack, Matt Stoller has an interesting angle on the Pentagon’s logistics issues. Stoller digs through a recent DoD report on defense contracting and finds, basically, that the same supply-chain and subcontracting issues that affect the rest of the U.S. economy are affecting military procurement as well. It’s sort of a myth to imagine that armaments are a giant stockpile sitting somewhere safe. Armaments, it turns out, are produced more in the American way — through ‘just-in-time manufacturing’ and with very high profit margins for the handful of monopolistic major contractors. “What the report found is not so different than health care, big tech, finance, or any other industry segment; defense is run by a few giant middlemen who do exceptionally well by shareholders, outperforming commercial rivals and the S&P index,” Stoller writes.
As Stoller notes, though, defense is fundamentally different from health care or finance, and this sort of too-clever-by-a-half, Michael Lewis-ish approach to weapons manufacturing runs into the problem that conflict and chaos will inevitably disrupt the supply chains and cut into the just-in-time business model. As Stoller writes of the trend towards contractor monopolization (the critical decisions for which took place in the ‘90s), “All of this monopolization was done in a unipolar moment, when just-in-time manufacturing, in which suppliers kept no inventory on hand, was applied to everything, even military stockpiles. This was, in retrospect, insane.”
I’m not actually sure that Stoller’s analysis reflects what the report is really saying. The report overall paints a fairly optimistic picture of arms procurement: “In aggregate, the defense industry is financially healthy,” the report’s authors sunnily conclude. But, between the intelligence leak and the ‘Contract Finance Study Report,’ some kinks in America’s war-making machine start to become discernible — and kinks that speak, interestingly, to a few of our societal maladies. Arms procurement may be overly subject to industry monopolization, the swamp of subcontracting, the profit motive; and America’s intelligence edge (its great trump card so far in the Ukraine War) is undermined by, apparently, the anomie and isolation of its own service personnel.
OF AI AND CENSORSHIP REGIMES
I’m taking a hard line against AI and trying to think of all the ways it’s likely to ruin civilization unless strict protocols are swiftly put into place. There’s the impending AI arms race, the demolition of white-collar work, the assault on creativity, the existential threat to core elements of our identity, but I keep overlooking freshly nefarious uses of AI. I forgot about its tendency to exacerbate existing political divisions and I forgot, too, about how readily it may be deployed in censorship regimes.
On the other hand, the Chinese Communist Party picked up on that use of it right away. And, as The New York Times reports, the CCP has, with alacrity, issued draft rules for ensuring that AI systems “reflect ‘socialist core values’ and avoid information that undermines ‘state power’ or national unity.”
But China is far from the only entity that has moved swiftly to fuse AI with existing censorship protocols. Debbie Nathan, writing for The Intercept, noticed that both DALL-E 2 and Midjourney refused to generate art based on the prompt word ‘abortion’ and, on a more exhaustive search, discovered that ‘Fallopian tubes,’ ‘condom,’ ‘IUD’ all ran into similar content restrictions.
Nathan believes that the algorithms are specifically targeting words “associated with women’s bodies, women’s health care, women’s rights, and abortion.” My guess is more that the AI developers are just going after anything potentially litigious or controversial. “The AI developers are playing whack-a-mole with the word prompts they’re prohibiting,” says an AI researcher quoted in the piece. I’m pretty sure I ran into this earlier in the week. On a site that I use, and post on, all the time, I suddenly ran into a ‘community guidelines’ notification threatening me with restrictions to my account. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what the problem was, and then realized, through trial-and-error, that I’d used the phrase ‘idiot-proof’ and wasn’t allowed to post until I’d removed it.
The new censorship regimes, as conducted by DALL-E 2 and any site using AI community guidelines tools, are an extreme example of what Jaron Lanier calls “technological lock-in,” the idea that the cultural norms of a particular era get incorporated into technology and prevent the tweaking of that technology even as cultural norms shift. That seems to be particularly unfortunate in the case of AI — that it’s coming along exactly when the culture happens to be in a highly puritanical and infantile frame of mind. Nathan quotes one DALL-E 2 user writing with frustration on Reddit, “Do they want a program for creative professionals or for kindergartners?”
And, yes, that’s fundamentally the question that we’re all dealing with at the moment — whether in our discourse we can handle salty language like ‘idiot-proof’ and ‘abortion,’ or whether we really need the governance of strong community guidelines — and that debate has now drifted into AI space, with the ready-at-hand-solution being for the chatbots to take care of our speech for us.
By the way, Substack keeps finding itself in the crosshairs of this debate. The Anti-Defamation League recently took aim at Substack, writing a post declaring that “Anti-Semitism, False Information and Hate Speech Find a Home on Substack.” And The Verge’s Nilay Patel berated Substack CEO Chris Best for declining to say whether or not Substack would censor a hypothetical racist post. “You know this is a very bad response to this question, right?” Patel said, somewhat prematurely declaring victory. “You’re aware that you’ve blundered into this. You should just say no. And I’m wondering what’s keeping you from just saying no.”
Well, what was keeping Best from saying no was a commitment to free speech, and the certitude and leaps of logic by people like the ADL and Patel is what’s concerning here. The assumption is that the baseline must be one or another sort of community guideline, as opposed to a default of free speech, and it’s almost a given from there that the exhausting work of case-by-case policing of community guidelines (which Twitter and Facebook failed so miserably at) is best outsourced to AI programs that would at least have the merit of consistency.
It’s sort of the tragedy of our time that liberals have so completely aligned themselves with censorship regimes and, with them, the inexorable advance of AI into the social sphere. In particular, the ADL’s letter against Substack is a doozy of double-speak and accusation-by-association. The ADL opens by describing Matthew Coleman’s killing of his children as a result of his QAnon beliefs and by describing how conspiracy theories led to the January 6th Capitol attack before writing, “Concerningly, similar rhetoric has been noted on Substack.”
In other words, Coleman and the January 6th rioters had nothing actually to do with Substack, but the ADL is “concerned” that similar rhetoric could be found somewhere within the tens of thousands of Substack newsletters and that therefore a strict censorship regime needs to be imposed on the platform as a whole.
This is the kind of thinking that Substack and Best are drawing a hard line against. It’s important now and will only continue to be more so as the censorship becomes increasingly AI-ified.
Unfortunately, that really seems to be an uphill battle at the moment. It’s not just that liberals have taken on an assumption of a baseline of censorious ‘community guidelines.’ It’s that our society as a whole has accepted the premise of a ‘frictionless’ existence. More than anything else, we want things to run smoothly. That’s been the main selling-point of capitalism — and capitalism all the more so in the age of Amazon and Apple. AI is such a logical extension of that frictionless existence that it seems to be almost irresistible. But culture, to have any meaning, requires debate, points of resistance, friction. In the end, the AI bots are products and are subject to the market — to what consumers really want it to be. So the question gets thrown to us: do we want to be treated “like creative professionals or like kindergarteners?” As the lock-in takes hold, now is the time to decide.
MACRON L’INDIFFERENT
The ‘dingus of the week’ is, as Substacker lyz would put it, world-record holder Tucker Carlson. I don’t know what else to add about his departure except that the summary firing couldn’t have happened to a more deserving guy. The issue, by the way, is that he was too much of an asshole for Fox News — which is really saying something. It had emerged in the Fox-Dominion lawsuit that Carlson said various nasty things about his colleagues, including calling one of the senior executives a cunt. (Carlson’s only regret apparently was that the mean things he’d off-handedly said about Trump had made it into the court record while what he’d said about his colleague — whom he really, truly despised — hadn’t.)
But, for me, the person I’m most annoyed with at the moment is Emmanuel Macron, who really chose an inopportune time to decide that he was Charles de Gaulle and to insist on Europe (read: France) as a third global hegemon. I’m really not at all sure what Macon thought he accomplished by his very public meddling in the early stages of the Ukraine War — his attempt to build a bridge to Putin at a time when any peace agreement could have only sold out Ukraine — but he’s repeating the same act with China.
In an interview with journalists from Les Echos and Politico Europe on his return from a very chummy visit with Xi Jinping earlier in April, Macron said, “The great risk Europe faces is that it gets caught up in crises that are not ours, which prevents it from building its strategic autonomy.” By ‘crises,’ he explicitly meant Ukraine and Taiwan and drew a clear link between them: “Europeans cannot resolve the crisis in Ukraine; how can we credibly say on Taiwan, ‘watch out, if you do something wrong we will be there?’” he said. “If you really want to increase tensions that’s the way to do it.”
Macron’s statements represented a sharp turn-away from the security bloc led by the United States and predicated on line-in-the-sand conflict zones like Taiwan and Ukraine. And represented a departure from the European Union’s own position on Taiwan. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who accompanied Macron for part of the China visit, stuck to the hard line on Taiwan: “The threat of the use of force to change the status quo is unacceptable,” she said she told Xi. But Macron seemed to be eager to negotiate his way to a new stance, discussing Taiwan “intensely” for hours with Xi and, in his post-trip rumination with the journalists, saying, “The question Europeans need to answer is is it in our interest to accelerate a crisis on Taiwan?” To which his answer was: “No.”
On the Persuasion podcast, Timothy Garton Ash suggests that Macron doesn’t necessarily need to be taken all that seriously. “As always, with Macron, there are so many different thoughts flying around, not all of which are entirely consistent,” Garton Ash says. But this apparent need to be contradictory may have real consequences. Whether by coincidence or not, China launched large exercises in the waters around Taiwan just hours after Macon’s plane had cleared Chinese aerospace. As Garton Ash says, “China would be absolutely delighted by this scenario: a Europe which is distinguishing itself from the United States, notably over Taiwan.”
Of course, there is no law saying that Europe has to follow the United States’ lead, that France can’t have its own foreign policy, but, in practice, Macron’s idea that France/Europe should be the world’s “third superpower” means a lack of resolve towards Ukraine and Taiwan just when both are most needed. The idea of a ‘third superpower’ is fanciful — it means a military buildup that both France and Europe have no real interest in — but what it means really is a policy of studied indifference, Europe deciding (with a particularly Gallic sangfroid) that it just doesn’t care about the invasion of Ukraine or Taiwan and the humanitarian catastrophe that would accompany a Russian or Chinese victory.
Looking around in early 2023, what I’m seeing is that the Western coalition that held up so well throughout 2022 may be starting to fracture. According to Politico, the Biden administration has been quietly telling Kyiv that, with the GOP in charge of the House, “the pace of U.S. aid to Ukraine will likely slow.” The Europeans are getting ideas of a proud neutrality. And the revelations in the intelligence leaks about the U.S. military’s supply chain are concerning. What else is there to say? That there are various frustrations to be had with the U.S.-led coalition. I’m sure that, in the hours Macron spent huddled with Xi, he complained bitterly about the U.S.’ needless provocations over Taiwan. And I can understand that annoyance — why, for instance, both Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy found it so important to meet in person with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen. (They couldn’t have talked on the telephone?) But those are details. What matters is the territorial integrity of Ukraine and Taiwan and the commitment of the free world to protect them. Now is really not a great time for Macron to get philosophical and try to rethink the whole world system.
SUDAN’S CIVIL WAR
There is, I must say, barely any coverage in the Anglo-American press of the outbreak of violent conflict in Sudan. Der Spiegel, which has been the best at these types of stories, is one of the only publications I’ve come across with anything like a decent explanation of what’s going on.
The conflict, Der Spiegel claims, is really a sort of delayed time bomb of Darfur. General Hemeti, commander of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, earned his stripes commanding Janjaweed militias during the Darfur conflict. “Hemeti acted brutally, but more than anything else, loyally,” Der Spiegel writes, and then-Head of State Bashir rewarded him with command of the newly-created RSF. “Bashir had created an uncontrollable monster,” Der Spiegel writes.
The revolution that brought down Bashir in 2019 resulted in military rule, but, as Der Spiegel puts it, “the military showed no interest in relinquishing power,” and conflict proved inevitable between two leading generals — Burhan, the commander of the regular armed forces and the de facto president, and Hemeti. Al Jazeera, taking an anti-American slant, blames Western diplomats for pushing a peace deal on Burhan and Hemeti before either was ready for it. “The army wanted to absorb the RSF in two years, while the RSF wanted to remain an autonomous force with its own command for another decade. Both feared losing power and relevance to the other in a new political environment. Still, Western officials pressured both forces to sign a deal,” writes Al Jazeera.
That may be, but, whoever’s to blame, the outbreak of war — and the evident failure of the revolution — is a catastrophe for Sudan. The two sides are understood to be fairly well-matched and the fighting is pervasive. "It's so random, there are no targets here,” Shadin Alfadil, a former revolutionary activist, tells Der Spiegel. “There are no words for it. I don’t know if I’ll ever see my family again,” says doctor Sara Mohamed.
What is interesting about all this crap of devashuka & jack-the-leaker is that HASBARA IDF unit-8200 at any given time has 10k IDF young soldiers committed to keyboard warriors fighting for the MOSSAD narrative
Much of what is seen by these 'kids' is the exact same shit that unit-8200 'autists' have been doing 10+ years and same-same in US-NAVY-INTEL with 4chan
IMHO all this is just proof that air-force is also now running its own mind-fuckery online;
As to the validity of the leaks? Who really cares top-level MIL today only cares about DEI
UKRAINE war is being fought by Ukraine, those boys are dying, and US-MIL is 99% concerned with DEI and sodomy at the highest levels to POTUS Biden.
Some say this is because +30 years of USA hegemony made US-MIL lazy, assuming that like IRAQ all US wars going forward could be fought by button pushers, they just got lazy and spent all their time ass-fucking
Occams-Razor says this is most likely the case
jack the cuck never saw combat, its clear that devashuka never did either
What is a known known is that 4chan / 8chan have been ran by US-NAVY intel forever just like Q was ran by Kushner/Brietbart
During all USA wars people who objected to the war were sent to prison, Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman; USA is at war with Russia, because Russia has natural resources the USA must steal; Of course Russias entire history has been fighting off invaders, they're very good at defense of the homeland
jack the homo-cuck leaker, remember this is a kid who ran a under 18 group who all gave themselves moninkers from gay-porn films, its clear that little-jack is part of a vast air-force/navy grooming operation, which is actually quite common in navy-air branches, jack was grooming under 18 online to be future homo-warriors, the question begs to be asked was this on mil time or his own time?
Lastly the question of how did a 21 year old kid get access to 'intelligence' ? Europe early on reported that jack was a courier that ran used equipment off base and reconditioned old equipment for re-deployment, so he had access, normally computers are 'scrubbed' bleachbit 10x zero out the HD, but its clear that nobody did shit, so jack was doing his own forensics on the used computers and finding tons of 'shit', the fact that he passed it online to his homo-butt buddys for +2 years show that nobody really gave a fuck
"Truth is stranger than fiction, fiction must make sense" - twain