#opacity

[thetendertongue]

right to opacity — from Glissant: the right to not be fully known, decoded, or made transparent; to resist being flattened into one meaning or one identity; a refusal or surveillance, overexposure, total explanation; a poetics of protection

[unsolicited-opinions]

Is it wrong for Iran to want to have nuclear weapons? Israel has them - why don't they need to denuclearise if we talk about peace?

Anon is saying: Israel has them, therefore it's unfair to deny the Iranian regime the nuclear weapons it seeks.

The fairness argument sounds intuitive until you ask what 'fair' actually means in a world where states have different intentions, different records, and different legal obligations

In geopolitics, morality isn't about ensuring everyone has the same toys. It's about harm reduction.

If you apply a consistent moral principle like "it is wrong for a state to explicitly call for the mass murder of another people," the deceptively simplistic fairness assertion falls apart.

Iran's regime hangs protesters from cranes, murders ~40,000 of its citizens in a couple days, and routinely calls for genocide of another people...which makes it awkward to argue they should have the most destructive weapons in human history bEcAuSe FaIrNeSs.

This isn't a rational argument, let alone a moral one.

Which of these is not like the others?

The US's nuclear deterrence threat: "Don't attack us with nukes or we'll take you with us"

France's/UK's nuclear deterrence threat: "Don't attack us with nukes or we'll take you with us."

Israel's nuclear deterrence intent: "Don't wipe us out, or we'll take you with us"

The Iranian regime's explicit, publicly-stated intent for their weapons: "Death to Israel".

The Islamic Republic has made "Death to Israel" and the destruction of the Jewish state a core pillar of its identity for nearly 50 years. It funds proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas on the basis of this shared, explicitly genocidal goal.

When a regime that regularly executes its own citizens for protesting and that calls for the erasure of another country wants nukes, the world sees a high-risk actor shaped by an apocalyptic theological faction whose doctrine holds that engineering chaos accelerates the return of the Mahdi. It's an actual operational framework that treats civilizational catastrophe as a goal.

No country officially supports Iran acquiring a bomb. No sane leader even approves of the idea in private.

Since antizionists are fond of citing internal law they haven't read, let's look at the legal angle:

Iran is a signatory to the NPT. By signing it, they legally committed to never developing nuclear weapons in exchange for access to peaceful nuclear technology. When the regime pursues a bomb, it isn't just making a weapon, it's also breaking a legal contract it chose to sign - and it has already violated the NPT repeatedly.

Israel did not sign on to the NPT and is not, therefore, bound by it.

The "fairness" framing of the Ask also ignores how Israel actually holds its weapons.

Israel has never officially admitted to having nukes - it has conducted no nuclear tests and made no announcements in a policy called amimut (opacity). The purpose of amimut is to prevent a regional arms race. A confirmed arsenal might force every neighbor to seek to match it, but an unconfirmed one deters without triggering an arms race.

Iran, by contrast, has been openly enriching uranium toward weapons-grade while chanting "Death to Israel" at state functions.

Anon's framing falsely assumes the only relevant variable is who has the weapon.

In reality, the relevant variables are (1) who holds it, (2) what they've said they'll do with it, (3) what legal obligations they've accepted, and (4) what their actual record of behavior looks like.

By every one of those measures, Israel and Iran are not comparable cases.

Pretending they're comparable and calling it a matter of fairness isn't an attempt at moral consistency - it's selective framing meant to conceal the overtly malign and dangerous intent of the regime in Iran.

[huariqueje]

Opacity - John Moore , 2011.

American, b. 1941 -

Oil on canvas , 48 x 36 in. 

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How Google’s trial secrecy lets it control the coverage

I'm coming to Minneapolis! Oct 15: Presenting The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books. Oct 16: Keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

"Corporate crime" is practically an oxymoron in America. While it's true that the single most consequential and profligate theft in America is wage theft, its mechanisms are so obscure and, well, dull that it's easy to sell us on the false impression that the real problem is shoplifting:

https://newrepublic.com/post/175343/wage-theft-versus-shoplifting-crime

Corporate crime is often hidden behind Dana Clare's Shield Of Boringness, cloaked in euphemisms like "risk and compliance" or that old favorite, "white collar crime":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/07/solar-panel-for-a-sex-machine/#a-single-proposition

And corporate crime has a kind of performative complexity. The crimes come to us wreathed in specialized jargon and technical terminology that make them hard to discern. Which is wild, because corporate crimes occur on a scale that other crimes – even those committed by organized crime – can't hope to match:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/12/no-criminals-no-crimes/#get-out-of-jail-free-card

But anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. After decades of official tolerance (and even encouragement), corporate criminals are finally in the crosshairs of federal enforcers. Take National Labor Relations Board general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo's ruling in Cemex: when a company takes an illegal action to affect the outcome of a union election, the consequence is now automatic recognition of the union:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth

That's a huge deal. Before, a boss could fire union organizers and intimidate workers, scuttle the union election, and then, months or years later, pay a fine and some back-wages…and the union would be smashed.

The scale of corporate crime is directly proportional to the scale of corporations themselves. Big companies aren't (necessarily) led by worse people, but even small sins committed by the very largest companies can affect millions of lives.

That's why antitrust is so key to fighting corporate crime. To make corporate crimes less harmful, we must keep companies from attaining harmful scale. Big companies aren't just too big to fail and too big to jail – they're also too big for peaceful coexistence with a society of laws.

The revival of antitrust enforcement is such a breath of fresh air, but it's also fighting headwinds. For one thing, there's 40 years of bad precedent from the nightmare years of pro-monopoly Reaganomics to overturn:

https://pluralistic.net/ApexPredator

It's not just precedents in the outcomes of trials, either. Trial procedure has also been remade to favor corporations, with judges helping companies stack the deck in their own favor. The biggest factor here is secrecy: blocking recording devices from courts, refusing to livestream the proceedings, allowing accused corporate criminals to clear the courtroom when their executives take the stand, and redacting or suppressing the exhibits:

https://prospect.org/power/2023-09-27-redacted-case-against-amazon/

When a corporation can hide evidence and testimony from the public and the press, it gains broad latitude to dispute critics, including government enforcers, based on evidence that no one is allowed to see, or, in many cases, even describe. Take Project Nessie, the program that the FTC claims Amazon used to compel third-party sellers to hike prices across many categories of goods:

https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/amazon-used-secret-project-nessie-algorithm-to-raise-prices-6c593706

Amazon told the press that the FTC has "grossly mischaracterize[d]" Project Nessie. The DoJ disagrees, but it can't say why, because the Project Nessie files it based its accusations on have been redacted, at Amazon's insistence. Rather than rebutting Amazon's claim, FTC spokesman Douglas Farrar could only say "We once again call on Amazon to move swiftly to remove the redactions and allow the American public to see the full scope of what we allege are their illegal monopolistic practices."

It's quite a devastating gambit: when critics and prosecutors make specific allegations about corporate crimes, the corporation gets to tell journalists, "No, that's wrong, but you're not allowed to see the reason we say it's wrong."

It's a way to work the refs, to get journalists – or their editors – to wreathe bold claims in endless hedging language, or to avoid reporting on the most shocking allegations altogether. This, in turn, keeps corporate trials out of the public eye, which reassures judges that they can defer to further corporate demands for opacity without facing an outcry.

That's a tactic that serves Google well. When the company was dragged into court by the DoJ Antitrust Division, it demanded – and received – a veil of secrecy that is especially ironic given the company's promise "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful":

https://usvgoogle.org/trial-update-9-22

While this veil has parted somewhat, it is still intact enough to allow the company to work the refs and kill disfavorable reporting from the trial. Last week, Megan Gray – ex-FTC, ex-DuckDuckGo – published an editorial in Wired reporting on her impression of an explosive moment in the Google trial:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

According to Gray, Google had run a program to mess with the "semantic matching" on queries, silently appending terms to users' searches that caused them to return more ads – and worse results. This generated more revenue for Google, at the expense of advertisers who got billed to serve ads that didn't even match user queries.

Google forcefully disputed this claim:

https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1709726778170786297

They contacted Gray's editors at Wired, but declined to release all the exhibits and testimony that Gray used to form her conclusions about Google's conduct; instead, they provided a subset of the relevant materials, which cast doubt on Gray's accusations.

Wired removed Gray's piece, with an unsigned notice that "WIRED editorial leadership has determined that the story does not meet our editorial standards. It has been removed":

https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/

But Gray stands by her piece. She admits that she might have gotten some of the fine details wrong, but that these were not material to the overall point of her story, that Google manipulated search queries to serve more ads at the expense of the quality of the results:

https://twitter.com/megangrA/status/1711035354134794529

She says that the piece could and should have been amended to reflect these fine-grained corrections, but that in the absence of a full record of the testimony and exhibits, it was impossible for her to prove to her editors that her piece was substantively correct.

I reviewed the limited evidence that Google permitted to be released and I find her defense compelling. Perhaps you don't. But the only way we can factually resolve this dispute is for Google to release the materials that they claim will exonerate them. And they won't, though this is fully within their power.

I've seen this playbook before. During the early months of the pandemic, a billionaire who owned a notorious cyberwarfare company used UK libel threats to erase this fact from the internet – including my own reporting – on the grounds that the underlying research made small, non-material errors in characterizing a hellishly complex financial Rube Goldberg machine that was, in my opinion, deliberately designed to confuse investigators.

Like the corporate crimes revealed in the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers, the gambit is complicated, but it's not sophisticated:

Make everything as complicated as possible;

Make everything as secret as possible;

Dismiss any accusations by claiming errors in the account of the deliberately complex arrangements, which can't be rectified because the relevant materials are a secret.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/09/working-the-refs/#but-id-have-to-kill-you

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

Image: Jason Rosenberg (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/underpants/12069086054/

CC BY https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

--

Japanexperterna.se (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/japanexperterna/15251188384/

CC BY-SA 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

[librarycards]

Interview: Cavar in conversation with M. K. Thekkumkattil — fifth wheel press

[sarah] Cavar is the author of Failure to Comply (featherproof books, 2024) and Differential Diagnosis (Northwestern University Press,

My interview with MK Thekkumkattil, author of the forthcoming book "The Sexuality of Care," for Fifth Wheel Press. We talk about Madness + medical carcerality + poetics of noncompliance, and it's very fun.

MT: I loved that in Failure to Comply and Differential Diagnosis, so many of the ideas you’re talking about show up on a language level. I’m thinking about wordplay, echolalia, fragmentation – the way one word leads to another word and we follow a trail of language without necessarily knowing the meaning, and also without a direct through line between one self / fragment and another. Can you talk about how you developed this poetic voice? C: Fragmentation, repetition, and strangeness are the parts of my voice I’ve done the least, consciously, to “develop.” They were there when nothing else was, before I considered myself a writer with professional credentials. I feel inclined to recognize, respect, and record my slippages of thought and language, usually in some kind of commonplace book or just in my Notes app. I feel most comfortable when I allow language, as a sensory experience, to lead me to a space of meaning. When I was young, I did musical theater, played instruments, and did some classical singing, and I am still really fixated on sound and rhythm in my ‘creative’ works. I have had to learn to balance this fixation with a degree of legibility in other writing, which I think is why I am always returning to poetry as an outlet/free space. With Differential Diagnosis, one interesting challenge was balancing the above inclinations with a desire to be really explicit about certain things. I think about the phrase “point-blank” in relation to my writing. Point-blank being both a shooting range that generally kills its victim, and a figure of speech used to emphasize clarity. I felt that way writing this book –– like I was being shot dead, being clear with no room for compromise, when I began midway through the text to name anorexia. I was terrified of that word for many years. I am trying to name the things I once only whispered. My directness in Differential Diagnosis became a fun stylistic feature: we have deliberate haziness and confusion shot (again, the shooting) through with something clear and violent and uncomfortable. The word “hole” vs. what’s inside. Hole is such a crude word. But what could be inside it, deep in the darkness? We’ll never know.

[altrbody]

Glissant on opacity

[sarahvansloten]

Opaque path (2024), acrylic, Flasche, and Posca marker on paper, 22 x 30 in.

[ddaenig]

ꞝ 𖥻hyunjin 𔘓

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