Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
Author: Ian Welsh Page 9 of 448
One reason I try not to post too much about Iran, other than blockade consequences, is that the level of bullshit flying around is so high, and it’s so hard to predict Trump. (He’s declared there was a deal over twenty times.)
However, this seems worth noting: Trump reposting Iran’s foreign minister:
Whether this will lead anywhere? Damned if I know. If I had to guess Trump’s threats to take Karch Island led to the military explaining to him that taking an island that is under artillery, missile and drone superiority by Iran, in a waterway which is mined, with the Iranians still having subs and plenty of speedboats left is a suicide mission.
But that’s just a guess, and probably wrong, since it assumes rationality.
I stumbled upon this graphic, it’s not quite right (the guy on the other side of Khameini is also alive) but it gives a sense of the scale of the leadership turnover in Iran:
Fundamentally the entire senior leadership of Iran was wiped out. The irony is that they were much less hawkish and far less willing to use force than the current bunch. Westerners (Israelis included) just cannot get thru their heads that assassination doesn’t work against functional organizations and societies. The leaders are simply replaced, often with more effective people.
Anyway, I hope there’s a deal that opens the Strait because I don’t want my food prices to double.
We’ll see.
(We’ll return to the “Freedom” series soon, probably with a discussion of Violence and Freedom.)
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Well, the “ceasefire” sucked while it lasted, but the war will suck more. Multiple US attacks on Iran, and Iranian retaliation against US bases. America hit water supply in some minor Iranian cities as well. We’ll see if it’s a brief spam or a full on resumption of war.
I suppose this was inevitable. Trump isn’t feeling enough pain, because Americans aren’t transmitting it to him yet. There’s been a lot of work on keeping gas prices low, at the cost of actual shortages starting in about a month to two months, and Trump won’t sign any deal Iran will accept, nor will he reign in Israel in Lebanon, which Iran apparently does actually see as a bottom line demand.
This is you going to hurt most of readers if it continues. A LOT. The Iranians have stated they’ll hit oil harder this time, and the world is already on the brink. The economic tsunamin coming will be unlike anything seen since the oil shocks, without the ability to simply “pay up” since the actual infrastructure will take years to rebuild.
This is shit-crazy. Absolute disconnect between elite interests (where they just raise prices) and the interests of 90% of the world’s population. We are talking famines in many countries, people going hungry even in the first world, lots of basic goods in short supply (for example most pills use hydrocrarbons and then there are plastic shortages, chip shortages, etc, etc…)
The bottom line remains that the US can’t actually beat Iran, since it can’t take out their missiles. So this is just a question of who can take the pain longer and whose military supplies will last longer, and my money is still that the US and Israel run out of interceptors before Iran runs out of missiles.
We’ll see if Iran stops playing around. I’d personally send some ranging missiles near the Israeli desalination plants, then suggest that as an indication of good faith half the Iranian money seized by the US be sent within 48 hours. If not, take out a plant. Ask again, this time 55%.
Iran needs to indicate that it can actually destroy Israel (which it can) and that it’s willing to do so because it seems like Israel is making all the actual decisions.
We’ll see how this plays out. Meanwhile, if you can, stock up on basic staples. You’ll be grateful you did.
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The evidence on AI’s effect on those who use it has been coming in, and it’s not good. While it doesn’t effect everyone, it seems to effect most people, and the worst affected, it seems, are the young. Olds have the advantage of growing up in world where they had to learn how to do things themselves. To be sure, phones and social media seem to have had a negative effect on attention span and learning ability, but AI is yet another assault, and it hits the young hardest.
This excerpt comes from a larger piece from a university professor on the inability of his students to read. The whole thing is worth reading, and the decline is truly precipitous: fundamentally most of them can’t read an entire book, and struggle even with long articles, and they can’t pull out the arguments made. The bit on AI follows:
Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.
The fundamental strategy of a lot of tech startups has been to degrade pre-existing infrastructure by under-pricing, for years if necessary, until the old methods are so diminished that they can start charging monopoly pricing. Uber is the classic example: Ubers were far cheaper than taxis for about a decade. Now they’re often more expensive, if the taxis exist at all. Certainly where I live in Toronto, the Taxis did somewhat survive, and cost less.
But overall the strategy was a success, taxi companies were devastated and Uber’s doing great now. All it took was years of losses and predatory pricing: their model wasn’t superior, their product wasn’t superior except having a good app, but they had far more access to patient money, willing to take losses for years to get to the oligopoly pricing end-state.
Neither Anthropic nor Open AI are remotely profitable. Every single query costs more to run than is charged, even to paying clients. A recent increase in prices, still far below running costs, has hit users with massive bills. There’s no evidence AI is better than humans at most tasks, and the real cost (and sometimes, even subsidized, the current subsidized price) is higher than just having employees. AI is often faster, but it makes mistakes humans don’t, and needs to be checked.
But if you make your employees use it they’re going to be degraded and lose the ability to do their jobs well. The more you do something, the more your body and brain optimize for it. The less you do it, the worse you get.
AI’s strategy for replacing workers is threefold: first, sell executives on getting rid of pesky workers for AI, because it’s supposedly easier to manage.
Second: Subsidize while companies lay off the workers and replace them with AI. Once the workers are gone, jack up prices; and,
Third: by encouraging companies to force workers to use AI and to replace workers with AI in some cases, make the workers less capable: stupider. Over time as more and more people become dependent on AI to think and work for them, they will lose the ability to do the work themselves. AI may be shitty, but it will be better than the dullards AI makes its users into.
It’s an ingenious strategy, really. Make people stupid, and replace them with a product which costs more and is inferior to them for most tasks before they were made stupid.
The longer term issue will be that AI isn’t creative: it uses the embodied creativity of past humans, in terms of their writing and their discoveries to simulate intelligence. But as humans produce less and less new creative work, AI will be reduced to eating its own results, and indications are that leads to model collapse: AI’s are dependent on human, and by making humans redundant and stupid they will themselves become stupider and less effective over time.
We live in a time where we can’t look ahead, ever, at technology and make even the smallest effort to control the end results, it seem. At least in the West. Or, rather, we refuse to deal with obvious negative issues if doing so means a few people won’t be able to get as filthy rich.
Dumb.
And soon we’ll be even dumber.
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Since the ceasefire started, Iran has said that both it and any peace agreement must include Lebanon. America agreed, Israel didn’t, and the invasion of Lebanon has continued.
Yesterday Iran lost its patience and hit Israel. Israel responded. One set from each side.
For now.
But Iran has said that if Israel keeps attacking Lebanon, Iran will attack again, and much harder.
And more interestingly, Ansar Allah (the Yemeni Houthis) have closed their strait to Israeli traffic. This isn’t a full closure, but it could wind up as one.
I think it’s important to understand a bit of the psychology here: the people in charge before the war didn’t have strong emotional ties to Hezbollah. Old men. But a lot of the people now in charge do, they were personally involved in setting up Hezbollah. They trained Hezbollah. Some of them fought with Hezbollah.
There are strong self-interest reasons for Iran to want to keep Hezbollah strong, which means Israel out of Southern Lebanon. But there are also emotional ties and those matter, because Iran has to be willing to take hits to Iran if it wants to really help Hezbollah.
Of course one attack doesn’t mean much, what will matter is if Iran meant it when they said that if Israel keeps attacking Lebanon (which it will), they will attack again, and next time with much more force.
Threats that aren’t promises don’t mean much. Still, this attack has shown that Iran wasn’t just willing to walk away from Lebanon. They weren’t just spewing words when they said that any peace deal had to include both Lebanon (really, Hezbollah, since the central government is actually willing to let Israel occupy Southern Lebanon, since it’s full of Shi’a Muslims, and the government doesn’t include Muslims), and Iran.
Some people are saying that Trump needs to reign in Israel. That’s… sort of true. But I think what’s happening is simpler: Iran has recognized that America won’t rein in Israel, so Iran must establish deterrence over Israel as well as America. And that means hitting Israel.
Probably they should next send some ranging shots near Israel’s desalination plants, or their big nuclear reactor.
We’ll see how this plays out. Trump’s going to be under increasing pressure. I estimate that some shelves in America are going to be bare in about two to three months, as diesel for shipping to stores runs out in parts of the country. Prices will keep going up. Polling for the mid-terms will keep getting worse, and while Billionaires are so far using this as a profit taking opportunity, the cascade thru the supply chains is going to mean that soon things they care about are going to go up in price, or simply become unavailable: plastics, for example and chips, which require helium.
I don’t know how this will play out, because it depends on the psychology of a few key decision makers; it depends on what the hold Israel has on Trump is; it depends on if lawmakers are more scared of the Israli lobby than polls; and it depends on Iranian leadership’s pain tolerance and how much China is willing to keep supporting their economy.
That’s a lot of variables, and most of them are variable related to leadership decisions among people I don’t know very well.
People in leadership matter. When Israel jerked Kissinger’s chain in the 70s , he convinced Nixon to halt weapon shipments to Israel until they came to heel. But Israel’s lobby was weaker then and Kissinger and Nixon were both hard men: actual “alphas”. Actually dominant. Not pussies. Trump is a classic weak bully who folds under real pressure. They weren’t.
The bottom line, though, is simple. Iran beat America. Now it has to defeat Israel. If it can’t, or won’t, Southern Lebanon and Hezbollah as screwed.
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I think everyone who’s observed American, indeed, Western politics is aware that whenever a strong economic left winger comes along the attacks on him are almost always primarily about violations of “woke”.
Corbyn was attacked for anti-semitism, when he might be the most anti-racist person on the Earth. The idea that he was anti-semitic was laughable on the face, he’d be the first person putting his body on the line if there were actual threats to Jews.
What was remarkable about the smears against Corbyn is that the guy is practically a Saint. He’s as pure as driven snow or aquifer water run through a triple filter.
Not everyone is. Al Franken did some inappropriate things, though none of them rose to the level where he should have stepped down.
Woke is used because it works, especially sexual harassment allegations. It doesn’t just work against the left. New York Governor Cuomo was taken down for sexual harassment, which I always found hilarious, because this is a guy whose policies killed thousands of people during Covid when he stuck Covid patients in old folks homes. That’s gross negligent manslaughter, in my books, and he should have gone to prison, not just lost his job, but it was the sex stuff that took him down.
That doesn’t mean the Democratic establishment wanted him gone. Oh no. They supported him to the hilt against Mamdani in the NYC elections. Anything can be forgiven if you serve corporate interests, nothing can be forgiven if you don’t.
Platner’s the latest target, and man is he ripe. There’s the skull and crossbones tattoo: Nazi symbology which he got as a soldier twenty years ago.
They attacked him on that. It didn’t work. It didn’t work for the same reason attacks on Trump didn’t use to work: because Platner appears very anti-establishment (and unlike Trump, probably is.) He’s a left wing economic populist. This is from the top of his policy page:
So out came the sexual allegations. First the fact that near the start of his marriage he sent texts to women. That caused marital issues (surprise!) but Platner and his wife got counseling. Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner:
“It makes me really angry, disappointed,” Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, said in a direct-to-camera video Platner’s campaign released Saturday night. “And I find it really shameful that there’s a group of media outlets and people who are willing to spread gossip instead of talking about real issues that Graham is running on.”
One might wish to discount this: political wives are famous for publicly dismissing scabrous behaviour. But it was years ago, and she has stayed with him.
Of more interest, I think, is this:
The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal reported that Gertner told Platner’s campaign about the sexually explicit texts last year, near the start of his Senate bid. Her disclosure came during a conversation with campaign officials about potential opposition research into Platner, the two outlets reported, with the Times citing a former senior official in Platner’s campaign and the Journal citing people familiar with the matter.
I believe this falls under “the call came from inside the house!” Platner and his wife were foolish enough to trust Democratic officials, not realizing that the Democratic party is the opposition, far more than the Republicans.
Now we have the New York Times, doubling down:
Amid the turmoil, Mr. Platner worked the phones, rolling through calls to ex-girlfriends who might publicly acknowledge that while he may have been a bad boyfriend, he was, in fact, a decent guy.
In interviews with The New York Times on Wednesday, several women did just that, describing Mr. Platner as a fun and caring partner, and saying they felt safe with him. Some remain friends with him to this day, years after their relationships ended.
But in extensive conversations over the past two months, three other women who had been romantically involved with Mr. Platner offered a far more complicated assessment, describing volatile and “toxic” relationships that were unsettling and at times emotionally wrenching.
Mr. Platner could be charming and charismatic, they recalled in interviews, but also demeaning to women and, in at least one case, even physically threatening. He drank heavily and was regularly unfaithful.
OK. Sounds like some of his ex-girlfriends like him, and others don’t. But there’s no allegation of rape or assault, only “once physically threatening” and you know that if there were, they’d have run with it.
I don’t think Platner sounds like the greatest guy with women, but I think it’s also unlikely you’ll find many people, men or women, who have had multiple relationships and all their ex’s don’t have anything bad to say about him. I also don’t think that any of this is disqualifying for office.
Serious war crime allegations, since he was a soldier, would be. A pattern of corruption in business would be. “Has, on occasion, been a jerk to women and unfaithful” is laughable. Neither FDR nor JFK were faithful, their behaviour was far worse than Platner’s, and FDR, at least, was arguably the best President America ever had for ordinary citizens.
But for whatever reason, Americans take allegations like these much more seriously than gross corruption, bribe taking, insider trading, or mass murder.
Or—they did. Because so far this doesn’t seem to be working against Platner. Americans are finally getting their priorities straight again: certainly rape or assault should be disqualifying (though neither were for Trump), but sexual immorality? Please.
The woke attack takedown, perfected and used for a couple generations now, is beginning to fail. Voters are looking at the actual issues and thinking “actually, I care more about the fact that I can’t afford rent, food, gas and healthcare.”
In this I finally see some hope that Americans voters might be growing up. For may years now Americans have basically gotten the politicians they deserve, with some exceptions. To deserve better they have to stop being suckers. The takedown of Thomas Massie by the Israeli lobby was a bad sign. The failure, so far, to take down Platner is a good one.
What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.
From 2012 to 2014 this blog’s project was a large number of pieces on ideology, and quite a few have been about character: how it is created by experience, and how specific types of character (like sociopathy) are selected for amongst our leadership classes. I want to reprint some of these, because they’re fundamental and at least half my readership has never read them.
We’ll star with “Matters of Character”.
Let’s parse this out:
1) Character (personality), determines how people act.
2) While part of character is clearly genetic, much of it forms out of our experiences. Different experiences create different types of character. As a simple thought exercise, you would be a very different person if you had been born five hundred years ago in, say, Central Africa, than you are today.
3) As children, our primary experience is of school. We are a very schooled society, with the upper classes starting school at age 5 or so, and continuing into their mid twenties. Twenty years of schooling is not uncommon. Fifteen to sixteen is completely normal.
4) This schooling takes place when we are forming much of our character, when we are most susceptible to having our character changed.
5) In addition to this, we are influenced by media of various kinds (including books), our parents, and our peer group.
6) Different time periods form different characters, as do different nations, because people born in those times and places have different experiences. The more synchronized events are, as Newberry has noted, the stronger this is. In a mass media society, with relatively fast technological and social change, it makes sense to speak of generations. The character of people born 20 or 30 years apart in modern societies will be different, and within cohorts similar experiences will tend to create somewhat similar patterns of character.
7) Society is nothing except people and their creations and interactions over time. Walk around an old neighbourhood one day, and look at the buildings, the road, the trees and think about all the people who made everything you see, and all the people behind those people. Read the laws, and know that people made those, and enforce those.
8 ) Because society is just people, past and present, the nature of society is formed by our character.
9) If we want a different society, we must deal with matters of character.
10) Because we should be leery of engaging in eugenics, for reasons which should be obvious, changing society involves changing character through changing our lived experiences.
11) Everyone’s character matters, but some people’s character matters more than others. The more power someone has, whether that power comes from political position, charisma, force, or money, the more their character matters.
12) Leaders inform the character of people. People tend to act up, or down, to their leadership.
13) Money is permission. The more money you have, the more you get to decide what other people do. This can be directly through hiring them, or indirectly by buying the products of other people’s time. As the market society has spread to more and more of our lives, what we do is what gets paid for.
14) Who we give money to, and be clear that what banks, government and financial institutions do is decide who gets money, and what they get to spend it on, determines much of the lived experience of adults, and indeed of children outside school, and with the rise of for-profit schooling, inside school.
15) Money positions are of three main types. Elected (taxes); officers (CEOs and so on who control a lot of money that isn’t theirs); actually rich (the money is their own).
16) In all three cases who gets that money is a social choice. Billionaires are a social choice, created by government policy including tax policy, and the entire structure of how profits are booked. Multi-millionaire CEOs are a social choice, created by tax and other laws as well as social norms. And politicians are a social choice, especially in a democracy, but even in autocracies, though in such societies few people’s active and passive consent is needed.
17) If we select for positions of power, whether monetary, political, or charismatic, people whose character is such that they do not insist on good outcomes for the majority of people, then those outcomes will occur only by chance, if the happenstance of technology and environment aligns in what amounts to random fashion. Having not been planned, having not been understood, any such prosperity and freedom will not last.
18) If society is just us, and is a matter of our character combined with environment and technology, then we must consciously choose what we want our character to be. If we look at how we raise children and see that it is not creating the sort of people required for a happy, free, healthy, and prosperous society, then we need to change how we rear children. This is a social decision, not an individual one: we can choose a different type of learning (not necessarily schooling), we can choose a different type of media, we can choose to encourage different types of parenting (parenting styles have changed massively over the last 100 years, more than once).
19) We can also change how we select our leaders, both political and economic, to whom we give money, and for what purpose. We already do: Who makes money is a social choice, embedded in our tax code, laws (like “IP”), and monetary system. We can make other choices and create a system where people make money because they do good, not because they do evil (see “bankers”).
20) We can change our adult experience of the world, and when we change how goods and services are distributed (note that I did not use the word “money”), we will change our experience of the world, and in so doing we will change our character.
21) We can do so even if our current character is flawed. The politicians who ended Jim Crow were themselves mostly racists. They were racists who knew that racism was wrong. It is possible to look at one’s own character and know that it is simply a product of experience: to say “I am racist and sexist but I still know that is wrong.” It is possible to be involved in corruption (Kennedy Sr., the first SEC chairman) and decide to help clean it up, to end it. It is possible to have all the accoutrements of privilege (FDR) and turn around and change society mostly for the better.
We are all products of our time and place. We are all products of our parents and our experiences; millions of small events which shaped our character, for good, for ill, for kicks.
All of us (except maybe a few enlightened sages).
The full realization of how shaped we are is one of the watersheds of any voyage worth having. If you cannot look at yourself, and see how shaped you were, then you are trapped by those experiences, an even more limited and finite being than you need to be.
Once, however, you see the shaping, feel it, know it, and acknowledge it, then you are not free, but you have the potential to be more free, to change what you are and who you are, both individually, and as a group.
Character matters. It is destiny. Change your character, change your destiny. Change the character of nations; change their destiny.
Change the character of humanity; change our destiny.
What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.