This fortnight, I have been mostly reading:

• TikTok's algorithm leads users from transphobic videos to far-right rabbit holes — Olivia Little & Abbie Richards at Media Matters for America: TikTok’s “For You” page (FYP) recommendation algorithm appears to be leading users down far-right rabbit holes. By analyzing and coding over 400 recommended videos after interacting solely with transphobic content, Media Matters traced how TikTok’s recommendation algorithm quickly began populating our research account’s FYP with hateful and far-right content. TikTok has long been scrutinized for its dangerous algorithm, viral misinformation, and hateful video recommendations, yet this new research demonstrates how the company’s recommendation algorithm can quickly radicalize a user’s FYP. Transphobia is deeply intertwined with other kinds of far-right extremism, and TikTok’s algorithm only reinforces this connection. Our research suggests that transphobia can be a gateway prejudice, leading to further far-right radicalization.
• Pru Goward AFR column on ‘underclass’ condemned as disturbing and abusive — Amanda Meade in the Guardian: An article by the former New South Wales Liberal minister Pru Goward which portrayed lower socio-economic Australians as dysfunctional and lazy “proles” has been condemned as disturbing, abusive and inaccurate by anti-poverty advocates. The opinion piece in the Australian Financial Review by the former NSW families minister argues there is an “underclass” of Australians who are “appalling” housekeepers and neglectful parents and “almost entirely lacking [in] discipline”. […] “Government agencies view them with alarm as huge cost centres; they are over-represented in their use of government crisis services and are always the last to give up smoking, get their shots and eat two servings of vegetables a day,” Goward wrote in Wednesday’s AFR.
• Pompeo Effectively Admits To Assange Allegations — Caitlin Johnstone: After a lot of flailing and humming and hawing Pompeo does eventually make what sounds like a concrete denial with the curiously-worded phrase “I can say we never conducted planning to violate US law.” But even this wouldn’t be a denial of the claims in the Yahoo News report, because the report is mostly about the intelligence community and the Trump administration trying to find legal loopholes that would allow them to take out Assange. For example, this quote from the Yahoo News article: “A primary question for U.S. officials was whether any CIA plan to kidnap or potentially kill Assange was legal.” This would in no way be contradicted by Pompeo’s claim that “we never conducted planning to violate US law.” It would mean that there were discussions and plans about assassinating Assange amid conversations and debates about whether it would be legal to do so. The fact that they didn’t plan to violate US law doesn’t mean they didn’t plan to assassinate Assange if they could find a legal loophole for it.
• Why is the idea of ‘gender’ provoking backlash the world over? — Judith Butler in the Guardian: Anti-gender movements are not just reactionary but fascist trends, the kind that support increasingly authoritarian governments. The inconsistency of their arguments and their equal opportunity approach to rhetorical strategies of the left and right, produce a confusing discourse for some, a compelling one for others. But they are typical of fascist movements that twist rationality to suit hyper-nationalist aims. […] In his well-known list of the elements of fascism, Umberto Eco writes, “the fascist game can be played in many forms,” for fascism is “a collage … a beehive of contradictions”. Indeed, this perfectly describes anti-gender ideology today. It is a reactionary incitement, an incendiary bundle of contradictory and incoherent claims and accusations. They feast off the very instability they promise to contain, and their own discourse only delivers more chaos. Through a spate of inconsistent and hyperbolic claims, they concoct a world of multiple imminent threats to make the case for authoritarian rule and censorship. […] This form of fascism manifests instability even as it seeks to ward off the “destabilization” of the social order brought about by progressive politics. The opposition to “gender” often merges with anti-migrant furor and fear, which is why it is often, in Christian contexts, merged with Islamophobia. Migrants, too, are figured as “infiltrating”, engaging in “criminal” acts even as they exercise their rights of passage under international law. In the imaginary of the anti-gender ideology advocates, “gender” is like an unwanted migrant, an incoming stain, but also, at the same time, a colonizer or totalitarian who must be thrown off. It mixes right and left discourses at will.
• Global Climate Wall: How the world’s wealthiest nations prioritise borders over climate action — Todd Miller, Nick Buxton, and Mark Akkerman, the Transnational Institute (TNI): Seven of the biggest emitters of GHGs – the United States, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada, France and Australia – collectively spent at least twice as much on border and immigration enforcement (more than $33.1 billion) as on climate finance ($14.4 billion) between 2013 and 2018. Canada spent 15 times more ($1.5 billion compared to around $100 million); Australia 13 times more ($2.7 billion compared to $200 million); the US almost 11 times more ($19.6 billion compared to $1.8 billion); and the UK nearly two times more ($2.7 billion compared to $1.4 billion).

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Where Has All the Money Gone? — Robert Skidelsky in Project Syndicate: But in his Treatise on Money, Keynes provided a more realistic account based on the “speculative demand for money.” During a sharp economic downturn, he argued, money is not necessarily hoarded, but flows from “industrial” to “financial” circulation. Money in industrial circulation supports the normal processes of producing output, but in financial circulation it is used for “the business of holding and exchanging existing titles to wealth, including stock exchange and money market transactions.” A depression is marked by a transfer of money from industrial to financial circulation – from investment to speculation. So, the reason why QE has had hardly any effect on the general price level may be that a large part of the new money has fueled asset speculation, thus creating financial bubbles, while prices and output as a whole remained stable. One implication of this is that QE generates its own boom-and-bust cycles.
• On The Cusp — George Monbiot: If there’s one thing we know about climate breakdown, it’s that it will not be linear, smooth or gradual. Just as one continental plate might push beneath another in sudden fits and starts, causing periodic earthquakes and tsunamis, our atmospheric systems will absorb the stress for a while, then suddenly shift. Yet everywhere, the programmes designed to avert it are linear, smooth and gradual. Current plans to avoid catastrophe would work in a simple system like a washbasin, in which you can close the tap until the inflow is less than the outflow. But they’re less likely to work in complex systems, such as the atmosphere, oceans and biosphere. Complex systems seek equilibrium. When they are pushed too far out of one equilibrium state, they can flip suddenly into another. A common property of complex systems is that it’s much easier to push them past a tipping point than to push them back. Once a transition has happened, it cannot realistically be reversed.
• US government rights in patents on Molnupiravir, based upon funding of R&D at Emory University — Luis Gil Abinader at Knowledge Ecology International: Molnupiravir, the oral pill that is showing promising results as a potential treatment for covid-19, was invented at Emory University with U.S. government funds. After more than six years of non-clinical testing, Emory licensed molnupiravir to Ridgeback Biotherapeutics to continue its development as a potential treatment for covid-19. The discovery and further research efforts made at Emory between 2013 and 2020 benefited from an estimate of $35 million dollars in government support. As a consequence of these investments, the U.S. government has rights in key molnupiravir patents. […] Perhaps one of the reasons why Ridgeback is minimizing the role of the U.S. government in the development of molnupiravir is to avoid demands to make the drug available at a reasonable price. That kind of move has worked for companies like Novartis in the past. Yet, as a promising oral pill with many potential generic suppliers, the availability and affordability of molnupiravir will likely face intense scrutiny in the upcoming months. Harvard and King’s College researchers Melissa Barber and Dzintars Gotham recently estimated the cost of production for molnupiravir. Based on a previously developed algorithm and public information they concluded that the cost of producing molnupiravir’s active pharmaceutical ingredients, including a 10% profit margin, is $19.99 a course. In June 2021, Merck announced an agreement to supply the U.S. government approximately 1.7 million courses of molnupiravir for approximately $1.2 billion. KEI has obtained a copy of this contract, which is discussed in another blog published today. According to the contract, the U.S. government will pay $712 dollars per unit of molnupiravir, about 35 times the cost of production as estimated by Barber and Gotham.
• GOP Lawmaker Pushes Insane Claim ‘Octopus-Like Creatures’ Are in Vax — Zoe Richards in the Daily Beast: The email from the legislator contained a 52-page “report” with disinformation on COVID-19, including claims that “unknown, octopus-like creatures are being injected into millions of children worldwide.” The report also made claims that 5G technology had somehow been inserted into the vaccine to control people’s thoughts and called the pope and others “at the top” of the Roman Catholic Church “satanists” and “luciferans” for backing public health measures. The report additionally made the wild suggestion that the babies of vaccinated parents in Mexico were “transhuman”—born with “pitch-black eyes” and undergoing accelerated aging.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• The experts weigh in — This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow:
  
• National Self-Sufficiency — John Maynard Keynes: The nineteenth century carried to extravagant lengths the criterion of what one can call for short "the financial results," as a test of the advisability of any course of action sponsored by private or by collective action. The whole conduct of life was made into a sort of parody of an accountant's nightmare. Instead of using their vastly increased material and technical resources to build a wonder city, the men of the nineteenth century built slums; and they thought it right and advisable to build slums because slums, on the test of private enterprise, "paid," whereas the wonder city would, they thought, have been an act of foolish extravagance, which would, in the imbecile idiom of the financial fashion, have "mortgaged the future"--though how the construction to-day of great and glorious works can impoverish the future, no man can see until his mind is beset by false analogies from an irrelevant accountancy. Even to-day I spend my time--half vainly, but also, I must admit, half successfully--in trying to persuade my countrymen that the nation as a whole will assuredly be richer if unemployed men and machines are used to build much needed houses than if they are supported in idleness. For the minds of this generation are still so beclouded by bogus calculations that they distrust conclusions which should be obvious, out of a reliance on a system of financial accounting which casts doubt on whether such an operation will "pay." We have to remain poor because it does not "pay" to be rich. We have to live in hovels, not because we cannot build palaces but because we cannot "afford" them.
• The Great American Science Heist: How the Bayh-Dole Act Wrested Public Science From the People’s Hands — Alexander Zaitchik, the Intercept: Speaking before the subcommittee, Rickover railed against the proposed policy changes. “Government contractors should not be given title to inventions developed at government expense,” he said. “These inventions are paid for by the public and therefore should be available for any citizen to use or not as he sees fit.” This seemed self-evident to Rickover. After all, he noted, “companies generally claim title to the inventions of their employees on the basis that the company pays their wages.” It befuddled and angered him that the U.S. government would consider giving up its own shop rights to industries that would never do the same. In his decades managing the development of nuclear reactors, Rickover had witnessed the very contest between public interest and private greed so clearly anticipated by mid-century advocates for keeping public science under public control. In the final months of the Carter administration, this position, advocated most forcefully during the wartime birth of today’s federal research establishment, was fading as a Democratic faith.

This fortnight, I have been recovering from surgery, tearing through my RSS backlog, and mostly reading:

• Thought for the day — Digby's Hullabaloo:
  
• Coming in 2040: No Future, the First Punk Rock Nursing Home — Lisa Borders at McSweeney's: Do the seniors in your life sneer at the idea of decorum? Spit at the mention of Rupert Murdoch, and go into an anti-Reagan rant like it’s 1984 and they’re canvassing for Mondale? Do they insist that none of the good music in the ’80s was played on the radio, except for college radio? Have you found old photos of Grandma when she was 20 wearing Doc Martens, ripped fishnet stockings, and a miniskirt? If you answered “yes” to any of the above, then No Future might be just the place for your elders to rock out their sunset years. Staffed almost entirely by the love children of Henry Rollins, we’re opening our doors in 2040 at this first-of-its-kind facility. From the moment you walk in, you’ll see the difference. Gone are the floral wallpaper borders, the fake oak wainscoting, the lingering scent of Febreze and death you’ll notice in other elder care facilities. We’ve designed No Future to resemble a warehouse squat, the kind in which your loved one likely attended many a gig. Our thin Berber carpeting was custom-ripped, cigarette-burned, and beer-soaked for maximum authenticity.
• Hayek’s Bastards: The Populist Right’s Neoliberal Roots — Quinn Slobodian in Tribune: Both neoliberals and the new right scorn egalitarianism, global economic equality, and solidarity beyond the nation. Both see capitalism as inevitable and judge citizens by the standards of productivity and efficiency. Perhaps most strikingly, both draw from the same pantheon of heroes. A case in point is Hayek himself, who is an icon on both sides of the neoliberal-populist divide. Speaking alongside Marine Le Pen at the party congress of the French National Front in 2018, self-described populist Steve Bannon condemned the ‘establishment’ and the ‘globalists’ yet built his speech around Hayek’s own metaphor of the road to serfdom, invoking the authority of the master’s name
• Good Morning, I.. WHOA! Uuh, I'll Come Back - Grant Hojohn — Phil Are Go!:
  
• The Roots of White Evangelicalism’s Crisis Are in White Evangelical Churches, Not Republican Politics — Jesse Curtis in Religion Dispatches: Within a decade of Jim Crow’s demise, the hottest trend in white evangelical church startups taught that racial diversity in local churches threatened church growth. An influential cadre of white evangelical professors and mission theorists centered at Fuller Seminary assured a new generation of pastors that homogeneous congregations allowed worshippers to feel at home with “Our Kind of People” —i.e. white people—and facilitated healthy church growth. Race was a matter of pragmatism rather than justice; merely a tool that could be used to expand the evangelical coalition. They insisted this had nothing to do with the bad old days of segregation. They were merely finding the most effective ways to spread the gospel. Black evangelical pastors such as Clarence Hilliard warned that a theology of church growth that focused on homogeneous congregations and a personal ticket to heaven was quietly forming deep habits of selfishness in a racist society. It was 1976, and Hilliard wasn’t critiquing the Christian Right, because it didn’t exist. He was warning about what white evangelicals were learning in their own churches.
• Robodebt: A multi-layered policy failure — Peter Whiteford in Progress in Political Economy (PPE): The Robodebt fiasco involves policy failures across numerous dimensions. The most obvious – and in many ways the least important failure – is that it failed to achieve the budgetary savings that were its main objective. A more important failure is that the Australian government decided to act unlawfully. This was compounded by the failure of the administrative procedures of government to identify and prevent these unlawful acts. Even more seriously, hundreds of thousands of people were adversely affected. This human cost is difficult to assess and involves much more than financial losses. Just over 2,000 people who had received a Robodebt notice between July 2016 and October 2018 died during that period, although in the absence of an official coroner’s report, no causes can be attributed. However, it has been noted that from January 2017, Centrelink began tweeting the contact number for Lifeline, the national charity providing 24-hour support and suicide prevention services.
• This Modern World — by Tom Tomorrow:
  
• U.S. Military Training Document Says Socialists Represent “Terrorist” Ideology — Ken Klippenstein in the Intercept: A Navy counterterrorism training document obtained exclusively by The Intercept appears to conflate socialists with terrorists and lists the left-wing ideology alongside “neo-nazis.” A section of the training document subtitled “Study Questions” includes the following: “Anarchists, socialists and neo-nazis represent which terrorist ideological category?” The correct answer is “political terrorists,” a military source briefed on the training told me. The document, titled “Introduction to Terrorism/Terrorist Operations,” is part of a longer training manual recently disseminated by the Naval Education Training and Command’s Navy Tactical Training Center in conjunction with the Center for Security Forces. The training is designed for masters-at-arms, the Navy’s internal police, the military source said.
• Essentialism and Traditionalism in Academic Research — Ryan Kyger and Blair Fix: ‘Essentialism’ is the view that behind real-world objects lie ‘essences’ — a type of eternal category that you cannot observe directly but is nonetheless there. Racial categories are a common type of ‘essence’. To be racist is to attribute to different groups universal qualities that define them as people. Given the long history of racism, it’s clear that humans need little impetus to impose categories onto the world. Still, our instinct to categorize is not always bad. In fact, it’s a key part of science. Looking for patterns is how Dmitri Mendeleev created the periodic table. It’s how John Snow discovered that cholera was water-borne. And it’s how Johannes Kepler discovered the laws of planetary motion. So if categorizing patterns can be helpful, what makes essentialism bad? To be essentialist, in our view, is to reify a category (or theory) into a ‘higher truth’. By so doing, you don’t use evidence to inform a theory. You use theory to interpret evidence … and you don’t consider that you could be wrong.
• Health Drink — xkcd:
  
• The Horrifying Rise Of Total Mass Media Blackouts On Inconvenient News Stories — Caitlin Johnstone: Two different media watchdog outlets, Media Lens and Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), have published articles on the complete blackout in mainstream news institutions on the revelation by Icelandic newspaper Stundin that a US superseding indictment in the case against Julian Assange was based on false testimony from diagnosed sociopath and convicted child molester Sigurdur Thordarson. […] “We have not found a single report by any ‘serious’ UK broadcaster or newspaper,” says the report by Media Lens. “But in a sane world, Stundin’s revelations about a key Assange witness — that Thordarson lied in exchange for immunity from prosecution — would have been headline news everywhere, with extensive media coverage on BBC News at Six and Ten, ITV News, Channel 4 News, front-page stories in the Times, Telegraph, the Guardian and more.”
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal — by Zach Weinersmith: