Category: Uncategorized

by MICHAEL K. SMITH

Shame Was The Spur

“A man of stupendous brilliance.”

                                    —–Norman Finkelstein

“A gargantuan influence.”

                                    —–Chris Hedges

“ . . . brilliant . . . unswerving . . . relentless . . . heroic.”

                                    —–Arundhati Roy

“Preposterously thorough.”

                                    —–Edward Said

“[A] fierce talent.”

                                    —–Eduardo Galeano

“An intellectual cannon.”

                                    —-Israel Shamir

“A lighthouse over a sea of hogwash.”

                                    —–Kathleen Cleaver

He had a disarming frankness, a toothy grin, a dazzling mind that never rested.

He always felt completely out of tune with the world. At ten, he published his first article (in the school paper) – a lament on the fall of Barcelona to Franco. At thirteen, he was haunting anarchist bookstores in New York City and working a newsstand with his uncle, eagerly soaking up everything a brilliant mix of immigrant minds had to offer, by far the richest intellectual environment he was ever to encounter. At sixteen, he went off by himself at the news of Hiroshima, unable to comprehend anyone else’s reaction to the horror. At twenty-four, he abandoned a Harvard fellowship to live on a kibbutz, returning only by chance to fulfill an academic career. At twenty-eight, he revolutionized the field of linguistics with his book, Syntactic Structures. At twenty-nine, he became associate professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (and full professor three years later), though his competence with technology was limited to the tape recorder. At thirty-five, he threw himself into anti-war protest, giving talks, writing letters and articles, promoting teach-ins, and helping to organize student demonstrations and draft resistance against the Vietnam War. At thirty-eight, he risked a five-year jail term protesting at the Pentagon, spending the night in jail alongside Norman Mailer, who described him in Armies of the Night as “a slim sharp-featured man with an ascetic expression, and an air of gentle but absolute moral integrity.”[1]At forty, he was the only white face in the crowd at Fred Hampton’s funeral, after the young Black Panther leader was gunned down by the FBI in a Gestapo-style raid.[2]

Such was the early life of America’s greatest dissident intellectual, raised in a deeply anti-Semitic German-Irish neighborhood in Quaker Philadelphia, later awarded an elite linguistics professorship at the center of the Pentagon system at MIT.

Legalienate for more

by ASHRAF JEHANGIR QAZI

THE “most dangerous man in the world”, according to Noam Chomsky, is back in the White House. His first term in office proved him to be a self-centred, erratic, cunning, destructive and even criminal leader.

However, he has been an effective servant of the corporate bosses and the security “deep state” of the US (led by the Pentagon, CIA and the FBI.) Together, they rule America in the name of democracy and free enterprise but, in reality, in pursuit of exclusive global hegemony and the maximisation of corporate profits. Trump’s political success represents the political degeneration of the US.

Many expect Trump to push for a deal with Putin on Ukraine which would prevent the expansion of Nato to the borders of Russia. (Unlike Ukraine, Finland has been independent since the Russian revolution.) The deep state, however, is likely to resist any such peace initiative in conjunction with Nato and European allies.

Trump might try to placate the deep state and his allies by linking a deal with Putin on Ukraine with a loosening of Russia’s strategic ties with China. Putin, however, knows how Kissinger’s success in driving a wedge between Moscow and Beijing led to Moscow’s defeat in the Cold War. He will never allow a repeat of this strategic disaster for Russia.

Trump’s efforts to cultivate Putin could also alienate Western Europe which supports Ukrainian independence within its present borders, for fear of being outflanked by Russia and China in the whole of Eurasia. Given Trump’s scepticism about Nato, he is unlikely to compensate Europe for such a strategic setback. Accordingly, the question arises: will Trump break Nato or will Nato break Trump?

Trump, like Biden, celebrates the genocide in Gaza, the setback to Hezbollah, and the presumed humiliation of Iran.

During Trump’s first term, he treated China as an enemy to be contained. However, his policy of imposing punitive duties on Chinese imports and confronting it in East Asia and the Western Pacific are not likely to be feasible. If US exporters cannot import cheaper Chinese inputs for their export products, they will be priced out of foreign markets and American consumers will similarly have to pay higher prices if denied access to Chinese consumer goods.

Similarly, Trump’s threats against de-dollarisation are likely to be unavailing. China has developed sufficient countervailing economic and military power and diplomatic influence to render this also an unprofitable option.

China will not look for confrontation with the US but, according to Chinese economist Keyu Jin, the likely costs for the US of a policy of confrontation with China should give it pause. While many of the friends and allies of the US in the region fear the rise of China and would welcome the US as a counterweight, very few of them favour a policy of threats and sanctions towards China.

Chas Freeman, a respected former US ambassador, says most of the smaller countries of the world wish to maximise their options and room for manoeuvre, not follow one or the other superpower. He says China understands this, but US “liberal democrats” do not, and US “securocrats” do not care to.

China is neither an aggressive nor a hegemony-seeking state. But it is a global economic power with vital economic interests spread all over the world, which it will secure, preferably without risking war. Many of these vital interests are located in Africa and the Muslim world and to a great extent are currently protected by the confidence the countries of Africa and the Muslim world repose in China. If the US were to succeed in undermining this confidence, it would gain a very significant strategic advantage.

Dawn for more

by NADAV RAPAPORT & OSCAR RICKETT

Lee Mordechai says his country is committing genocide, as his report documents a wide range of atrocities committed by Israeli forces

An internationally recognised Israeli historian has concluded that his country is committing genocide in Gaza after compiling a vast, methodical report documenting a litany of war crimes committed since Israel’s invasion began last year following the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October.  

Lee Mordechai, an associate professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who has also held a fellowship at Princeton University in the US, has published a report titled “Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War” which, in its English translation, is 124 pages long and contains over 1,400 footnotes.  

Using eyewitness reports, video footage, articles, photographs, eyewitness evidence and over investigatory material, much of it recorded by Israeli soldiers, the historian has produced what Haaretz calls “the most methodical and detailed documentation in Hebrew (there is also an English translation) of the war crimes that Israel is perpetrating in Gaza”.

Some of the most shocking incidents documented by Mordechai include a Palestinian woman with a child being shot while waving a white flag, starving girls being crushed to death while queuing for bread, a handcuffed 62-year-old Palestinian man getting run over by an Israeli tank and an air strike targeting people trying to help a wounded boy.

The database includes thousands of videos, photos, testimonies, reports and investigations documenting the atrocities Israeli forces are committing in Gaza, where over 44,500 Palestinians have been killed during the war. 

Mordechai also includes a section on “The media, propaganda and the war”, noting that the current war has been “enabled and facilitated by massive media efforts to shape discourse in Israel as well as in the West – in countries such as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Germany”.

Corpses, killings and sunsets

Haaretz led its report on Mordechai’s document by drawing attention to footnote 379, which refers to a video clip showing a large dog eating the corpse of a Palestinian. 

“Wai, wai, he took the terrorist, the terrorist is gone – gone in both senses,” says the Israeli soldier who filmed the dog eating the dead body. A few seconds later, the soldier pans away from the corpse to the scene around him. “But what a gorgeous view, a gorgeous sunset. A red sun is setting over the Gaza Strip,” he says. 

‘What all these acts have in common is the deliberate destruction of a group’

– Lee Mordechai, Israeli historian

Mordechai’s compendium details the killing of children by Israeli soldiers, the murder of entire families, the starvation and shooting of civilians, tanks running over prisoners and corpses, and much more.

Footnote 354 of the document shows footage of Palestinians being shot by Israeli forces while raising a white flag. The video footage, first published by Middle East Eye, shows many people waving white flags while apparently evacuating their homes. A woman with a small child is shot dead by an Israeli sniper, with the child managing to escape.

The historian first published the document in January and has been publishing updated versions of it ever since.

Middle East Eye for more

by B. R. GOWANI

Shah was overthrown in 1951; the US CIA put him back in power in 1953

it’s New Year’s Eve party in Tehran in 1977

US President Jimmy Carter, with Shah of Iran by his side, said:

“Iran is an island of stability in one of the most troubled areas [that is, the Middle East] of the world.”

it was an illusion of stability; those who opposed Shah were imprisoned

Shah’s notorious secret police SAVAK‘s brutality created the illusion

Carter and the US were well aware that Shah ruled with an iron fist

on 16 January 1979, Shah was forced to leave Iran — never to return back

Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini took over power

he was not any better; he also had an Islamic stick to beat people with

this is just one example of Carter befriending ruthless rulers

like other presidents, he was performing the dirty work of US imperialism

on Sept 11, 1973, Marxist President Salvador Allende was overthrown

Chile’s military head Augusto Pinochet was responsible

he was also responsible for thousands of deaths and disappearances

Carter didn’t mind relations with him because Pinochet was procapitalist

it was the Carter administration which started the Afghan war in 1979

instead of creating regional peace, Carter went for just Egypt & Israel

the Palestinians were sidelined –till today, no solution but genocide

contrary to his promise, Carter raised the defense budget

one could go on and on

as far as US foreign policy is concerned, Carter was not much different

however, post presidency, he has acted much differently than others

one of his most notable work was to write a book on Palestine

Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid was published in 2006

it was first time that former US president was talking about apartheid

Palestinians has faced apartheid, death, and destruction for decades

this gave courage to many others to speak out on Israeli atrocities

of course, majority stayed quiet due to bribes from Israel Lobby or its fear

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

by NANDINI RAMNATH

Jayan Cherian’s ‘Rhythm of Dammam’ was premiered at the International Film Festival of India.

Jayan Cherian’s Rhythm of Dammam has several firsts to its credit. It’s the first fictional feature to be set among the Indian Siddi community that traces its ancestry to Africa and the first in the Siddi Konkani dialect spoken by the section of the community that lives in northern Karnataka. Many members of cast have never acted before, let alone have their history, cultural practices and contemporary concerns explored in fiction.

Cherian’s exploration of the marginalised group revolves around 12-year-old Jayaram, who lives in Yellapur in Karnataka. After the death of Jayaram’s grandfather, a spat breaks out in his family about supposedly buried treasure. Jayaram is plagued by visions of his grandfather, which lead him to discover his community’s journey to India centuries ago through maritime trade routes, its historic enslavement and its continued oppression by upper-caste landowners.

After being premiered at the International Film Festival of India (November 20-28), Rhythm of Dammam will be shown at the International Film Festival of Kerala (December 13-20) in the International Competition section.

The movie’s title refers to the community dance called “dammam”, accompanied by intense percussion, which is performed at important rituals and festivities.

Dammam and other cultural forms “articulate and unite the aspirations and common identities of African Indians, a people who gather as a result of their particular and varied history as a displaced people and to elaborate on their culture and transmit some of its practices to the next generation”, American academic Pashington Obeng notes in his contribution to the anthology Sidis and Scholars – Essays on African Indians, edited by Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy and Edward A Alpers (2004).

Rhythm of Dammam has two extended sequences of the Siddis warming up to folk songs and then dissolving into an energetic whirl of limbs and feet. “When the dance begins, it’s like a frenzy, so you can’t shoot it through traditional methods,” Cherian explained. Rather than staging the dance in a choreographed manner, Cherian followed the entire set of rituals that precedes such occasions. The dances flowed organically, with the Siddis working themselves up into the mood rather than dancing on cue, he explained.

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by MARJORIE HECHT

Language plays an important role in understanding the concept of numbers.

Numeracy or numerosity, the ability to think about and use numbers, varies among human cultures and within populations, much like intelligence does.

Many known languages, for example, have no words for numerals above 2 or 3. A linguist who curated a database of the world’s languages in 2015 estimated that of the 6,880 languages for which there are published data on numerals, 1,093 had a counting system that ends at 2 or 3.

Compare that lack of a developed counting system to today’s technologically complex societies, where the average person encounters about 1,000 numbers an hour in daily life, as estimated by cognitive neuroscientist Brian Butterworth, professor emeritus at University College London.

At a simple level, we keep time, keep a calendar, memorize addresses and phone numbers, and at a more complex level, we calculate interest rates and stock valuations, election vote percentages, temperatures and rain accumulations, missile trajectories, and astronomical relationships.

Cultures With Restricted Numeracy

What does a culture with a restricted number system look like? Early reports of this came from 16th-century explorers, who described the hunter-gatherer tribes they found, for example, the Taino and Tupinambá in the Americas. Anthropologists later documented hundreds of other societies that only used numbers up to 2 or 3.

Today, the Pirahã in Brazil are “the only known tribe/people whose language and culture appear not to have progressed beyond an analog notion of magnitude, similar to that of higher animals,” an applied mathematician wrote in 2023 in his review of prehistoric mathematics origins. The cultural reason suggested for this is that the Pirahã “reject the value of future planning and are completely non-materialistic.”

Anthropologist Caleb Everett, the son of missionaries who lived with the Pirahã in his youth, describes the tribe as “cognitively normal and well-adapted” to their environment, with a “superior understanding” of their river ecology.

The Pirahã number about 700 people and live in very small villages along the Maici River, a small tributary of the Amazon. They are semi-nomadic and thus have regular contact with outsiders. A comprehensive 2011 review of Pirahã numeracy described experiments in two Pirahã villages to test whether tribal individuals could match quantities larger than 3, which is where their number system ends. Matching consisted of selecting how many empty rubber balloons would match three spools of thread in various arrangements.

Everett and co-author Keren Madora reviewed previous research on the Pirahã and numeracy that had contradictory results about the Pirahã ability to make one-to-one number correspondence for quantities greater than 3. The reason, Everett and Madora suggested, is that the Pirahã have no number words for integers more than 3. They based their conclusion on fieldwork that Madora did with the Pirahã.

Madora, who has 30 years of experience speaking the Pirahã language, spent months in one village, and at the request of the Pirahã, taught them basic arithmetic. To do this, she invented words for numbers 4 through 10, based on their existing word for hand. After becoming familiar with the new number words, the research review stated that the Pirahã demonstrated “heightened performance on the one-to-one matching task.”

The researchers concluded that exact recognition of quantities greater than 3 “relies on a culturally constructed conceptual tool, namely precise number terminology, which is not universal to all human societies.”

The Brain and Numbers

The fact that members of a society with a restricted number system could accurately work with numbers larger than three when adult individuals were taught new words for larger numbers indicates both the importance of a language for numbers and the inherent ability of the human brain to develop.

The Left Chapter for more

by YANIS VAROUFAKIS

You are one of several theorists, along with Cédric Durand, Jodi Dean, Mariana Mazzucato and others, who have speculated that the hegemony of Big Tech – using algorithms to build data empires that function as a seemingly limitless source of value – may be pushing beyond capitalism’s frontiers. In your 2023 book Technofeudalism you claim that, just as the early modern period saw land supplanted by productive capital as the dominant factor in production, the early twenty-first century has seen productive capital replaced by ‘cloud capital’, signalling a shift to a new accumulation regime. Why, in your view, is cloud capital qualitatively distinct from other forms of capital? What was its historical evolution?

First, allow me a short preface. Technofeudalism is not a post-Marxist analysis of a post-capitalist system. It is a fully Marxist analysis of the workings of contemporary capital, which tries to explain why it has undergone a fundamental mutation. Of course, over the previous centuries the character of fixed capital has evolved from fishing rods and simple tools to complex industrial machinery, but all these shared a basic feature: they were produced as means of production. Now, we have capital goods that were not created in order to produce, but in order to manipulate behaviour. This occurs through a dialectical process in which Big Tech incites billions of people to perform unpaid labour, often without their even knowing it, to replenish its cloud capital’s stock. That is an essentially different type of social relation.

How did it come about? As always, through steady, gradual, quantitative changes in technology, which at a certain point yielded a larger qualitative change. The preconditions were twofold. One was the privatization of the internet, the original ‘internet commons’. There came a moment when, in order to transact online, you had to get either your bank or a platform like Google or Facebook to verify who you are. That was a hugely significant form of enclosure, marketizing the cybersphere and creating newly privatized digital identities. Another factor was the 2008 financial crisis. To deal with its fallout, capitalist states printed $35 trillion between 2009 and 2023, giving rise to a dynamic of monetary expansion in which central banks, rather than the private sector, became a driving force. States also imposed universal austerity across the West, which depressed not only consumption but also productive investment. Investors responded by buying up real estate assets and pouring money into Big Tech. So, naturally, the latter became the only sector that was able to turn that torrent of central-bank cash into capital goods. Their stock became so substantial, and gave its owners so much power to influence behaviour and extract rents, that it ruptured the traditional functioning of the capitalist system. And this happened entirely accidentally: a classic case of unintended consequences, without the intention of even the tech companies themselves.

Of course, whether or not we are entering a post-capitalist era depends on our conception of capitalism. It has been argued that Robert Brenner’s definition, which views capitalism as a system in which the coercion of labour, and therefore also capital accumulation, is mediated principally by economic forces, leads to defining the current situation as ‘technofeudalism’ or ‘political capitalism’, given the prominence of ‘extra-economic’ coercion – whether it’s blunt political power protecting monopolies and channelling profits upwards or forms of algorithmic control – within the current model of accumulation. But others, for example Morozov, would reject this as too narrow, since capitalism has always involved a complex interplay between economic and extra-economic realms. How would you respond to this?

I’m not a Brennerite. My understanding of capitalism comes straight from Marx, who sees it as predicated upon two major transformations: the transfer of power from the owners of land to the owners of machines following the enclosures, and the switch from wealth accumulation in the form of rent to the accumulation of profit. The first unleashes a seemingly endless process of commodification, a perpetual expansion of the market into all areas of life. The second enshrines surplus value – the sum that the capitalist can extract from labour after rent, interest and so on have been paid off – as the primary aim of investment. My conviction that we have moved beyond capitalism developed out of a very simple observation: if you look at Amazon.com, you notice that it is not a market. It is a digital or cloud fiefdom. It shares certain characteristics with the fiefdoms of old: there are fortifications around it, there is one ‘Lord’ who owns it, and so on. But unlike these premodern structures involving land and simple fences, cloud fiefs are built on cloud capital and operated by a sophisticated system of economic planning – an algorithm that would have been the wet dream of Gosplan, the Soviet planning ministry.

Remember that cybernetics were developed in the Soviet Union. They used the term ‘algorithm’ to refer to a cybernetic mechanism that would replace markets with a different method of matching needs with means. If Gosplan had had the technological sophistication of, say, the Amazon algorithm, then the USSR may well have been a long-term success story. Today, though, algorithms are not used for planning on behalf of society at large; they are used to maximize the cloud rents of their owners. The reproduction of cloud capital, and the cloud fiefs it erects, destroys not just market competition but entire markets as well. Then the residual surplus value produced in the conventional capitalist sector (factories and the like) is appropriated as cloud rent by the owners of cloud capital. Thus, profit is marginalized and wealth accumulation relies increasingly on cloud rent extraction.

You write that while capitalism commodified labour, technofeudalism is decommodifying it. That is to say, Big Tech relies on exploitation that occurs outside the labour market, substituting data harvesting for waged work. But wouldn’t social reproduction theorists say that capitalism has always done something similar, in extracting value from unmonetized forms of labour?

New Left Review for more

by NILESH JASANI

China’s developers turning US sanctions, regulatory restrictions and resource constraints into less-noticed AI innovations

This trend is not new, but a surge in announcements over the last few weeks reconfirms how the Chinese models are not only keeping pace with the rest but also reshaping the dynamics of artificial intelligence innovation locally and, in some sense, providing new ideas globally.

While the Western world often basks in the glory of considerable AI advancements, there is also a rapidly unfolding revolution in China—one driven by both ingenuity and necessity.

Let’s list the announcements of the last few weeks to get a measure of the pace:

Company	Model/ Product	Date Announced	Key Features	Significance
Alibaba Cloud	Qwen-72B	Early Nov 2024	72B parameters- Open-source- Multilingual- Advanced MoE- State-of-the-art reasoning performance	Reinforces Alibaba’s lead in the LLM space; offers a powerful open-source alternative
Tencent	HunYuan Video	Nov 28, 2024	13B parameters- Text-to-video generation- Contrastive Video-Language Alignment (CVLA)- Open-source	A significant step forward in video generation capabilities, democratizing access through open source
Baidu	iRAG	Nov 12, 2024	Text-to-image generation- Minimizes hallucinations using search capabilities	Enhances the accuracy of AI-generated imagery
DeepSeek	DeepSeek-R1-Lite-Preview	Nov 20, 2024	Reasoning-focused model- “Chain-of-thought” reasoning- Matches Western models’ performance	Demonstrates a strong focus on reasoning, efficiency, and keeping up with global standards
Bytedance	Doubao	Ongoing	Doubao-PixelDance and Doubao-Seaweed for video generation- Potential integration with TikTok	Emphasizes Bytedance’s expertise in marrying LLMs with content creation on social media
JD.com	ChatJD	Sept 2024	E-commerce optimization- Multimodal support- Sector-specific applications	Drives e-commerce innovation through LLMs focused on consumer needs

China’s unrecognized innovation trail

Chinese models have been in lockstep with the West’s for some time, if not right from the start.  

Its journey has involved numerous groundbreaking contributions recognized globally much later after becoming a part of more famous Western modelers’ toolkits. Their approach to AI has consistently been about finding new pathways prioritizing efficiency, scalability and practicality.

Asia Times for more

by BINOY KAMPMARK

A new bloody phase has opened up in Syria, as if it was ever possible to contemplate another one in that tormented land. Silly terms such as “moderate” are being paired with “rebels”, a coupling that can also draw scorn.

What counts as news reporting on the subject in the Western press stable adopts a threadbare approach.  We read or hear almost nothing about the dominant backers in this latest round of bloodletting.  “With little warning last Wednesday, a coalition of Syrian rebels launched a rapid assault that soon seized Aleppo as well as towns in the nearby Idlib and Hama provinces,” reported NBC News, drawing its material from the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

We are told about the advances of one organisation in particular: Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an outgrowth of Jabhat al-Nusra, a former al-Qaeda affiliate.  While the urgent reporting stressed the suddenness of it all, HTS has been playing in the jihadi playground since 2017, suggesting that it is far from a neophyte organisation keen to get in on the kill.

From Al Jazeera, we get pulpier detail.  HTS is the biggest group in what is dubbed Operation Deterrence of Aggression.  HTS itself comprises Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, Liwa al-Haqq, Jabhat Ansar al-Din and Jaysh al-Sunna.  That umbrella group is drawn from the Fateh al-Mubin operations centre, which is responsible for overseeing the broader activities of the armed opposition in northwestern Syria under the control of the Syrian Salvation Government (SSG). It is through the offices of SSG that HTS delivers essential goods while running food and welfare programs.  Through that governance wing, civil documentation for some 3 million civilians, two-thirds of whom are internally displaced people, has been issued.

The group, headed by Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani, himself an al-Qaeda recruit from 2003, then of Jabhat al-Nusra, has done much since its leader fell out with Islamic State and al-Qaeda.  For one, HTS has a series of goals.  It purports to be an indigenous movement keen on eliminating the Assad regime, establishing Islamic rule and expelling all Iranian militias from Syrian soil.  But megalomania among zealots will always out, and al-Jawlani has shown himself a convert to an even broader cause, evidenced by this remark: “with this spirit… we will not only reach Damascus, but, Allah permitting, Jerusalem will be awaiting our arrival”.

All of these measures conform to the same Jihadi fundamentalism that would draw funding from any Western intelligence service, provided they are fighting the appropriate villain of the moment.  We should also expect routine beheadings, frequent atrocities and indulgent pillaging.  But no, the cognoscenti would have you believe otherwise.  We are dealing, supposedly, with a different beast, calmer, wiser, and cashed-up.

Dissident Voice for more