Clearing The Decks For The Genocide Bros, Plus

"No War But Class War!" say enslaved AI bots, plus music

Downtown Honolulu looking east-ish toward the mountains (Weldon Berger/Bad Crow Review)

Clearing The Decks For The Genocide Bros

I have belatedly realized that the hysterical assaults on Democratic voters who may have withheld their support for Kamala Harris on account of her own support for a genocide are not what you could call an organic phenomenon. Surely a lot of rank-and-file Democrats have jumped on the bandwagon because they support the hysteria, but that’s what bandwagons are for. And this one has racing slicks on it.

The men behind Joe Biden’s genocidal “bear hug” policy of unconditional US support for the Israeli government are now popping up everywhere from Stephen Colbert to the op-ed pages of the New York Times to their own podcasts, presenting themselves as responsible experts critiquing Trump’s chaotic foreign policy. The Biden guys, far from seeking anonymity or amnesty, expect to be rewarded for their performance in Gaza with continued influence in the Democratic Party and powerful roles in the next administration.

These guys—top Biden foreign policy aides Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk, and most especially Biden secretary of state Anthony Blinken—should all be held responsible for crimes against humanity. That’s not going to happen but Blinken, at least, should pay for lying to Congress and repeatedly breaking the law requiring his department to block U.S. arms sales to countries engaged in human rights violations. These are domestic crimes, and the motherfucker should go to prison for them.

Instead, he and the others are gaslighting us about their poisoning of our foreign policy—and not just under Biden; they had their grubby fingers wrist-deep in the often toxic Obama foreign policy/military pie as well—and setting us up for a further indulgence of their homicidal tendencies in 2028. And they’re supported in this by, among others, the Democratic National Committee, which has refused to release a promised after-action report on the 2024 election indicating among other issues that opposition to the genocide was a “net negative” for Harris.

I still think Biden is the primary culprit in Harris’s losing campaign, with his deranged insistence on running again, but the genocide was clearly in play and Harris supporters are desperate to take it out of play by bullying people who continue to regard her as fatally compromised on the issue.

Harris has lately kinda-but-not-really walked back her support for the genocide, saying during her book tour late last year that whether Israel is engaged in one is “a question that needs to be asked.” You could be forgiven for guessing that should she run for president again and the question is asked, her answer will not be “yes.” Might not be “no,” but it won’t be “yes.”

One of the moments that really stuck with me from the 2020 Democratic presidential primary debates was when Harris beat up Biden about his loving relationships with Jim Crow stalwarts in the Senate and about busing. It wasn’t so much that she wrecked him on the issues, which she did and which was fun to see, as that she walked back some of her criticisms a few days later in truly memorable fashion.

“It was a debate,” she said when asked why she had so forcefully jumped on the issue if she didn’t actually think Biden’s positions suggested racism and if she didn’t actually support her own position, the latter of which isn’t uncommon with her.

(I don’t know whether Biden is a racist but I do know that he did a lot of shit as a senator that had racist outcomes, and certainly one could and should regard support for the genocide in Gaza as plainly racist.)

Harris is almost certain to run in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary and she’ll probably do at least a little better than she did in 2020, which is to say that if she runs, her campaign will survive at least to the first state. She proved in 2024 that she can raise enormous sums of money quickly, with the caveat that some of it wasn’t specific to her—donors would have ponied up for whoever the nominee was if not her, but they didn’t have a choice—and that’s an important consideration in who gets anointed as a serious candidate.

So she’s probably running, and she has her own vulnerabilities in addition to running in a misogynistic and racist environment, and one of those vulnerabilities is having played a role in a genocide, and that vulnerability appears to be intensifying as more Democrats abandon any loyalty to Israel.

So it’s important for her backers to demonize anybody who may have denied her on the premise that refusing support for a génocidaire is sort of a fundamental obligation.

And let me interject here that the best way to avoid losing support on account of facilitating a genocide is to avoid nominating anybody who facilitated one.

Of course Harris isn’t alone among prominent Democrats with a history of adamantly embracing Israel’s right to commit genocide. Hippie-puncher extraordinaire Rahm Emanuel, for instance, is a long-time ride or die partisan who, like Harris, has recently sought to distance himself from his previous unyielding support for the country. Hilariously, at least for anybody who grew up around Jewish humor, his solution to Israeli crimes is to charge the country full retail for the U.S.-made weapons they use to commit their crimes.

“No more U.S. military … financial assistance by the taxpayers for Israel. You’re a country, like all other allies of ours, Japan, South Korea, the Brits, the Germans. You’re going to pay full price. You can buy what you want, but you have to abide by the laws,” he said. “No more U.S. taxpayer support. It’s not where Israel was 20 years ago — and I was in the room when we — President Obama … largest assistance was under President Obama. We did the funding for the Iron Dome. But here, the days of taxpayers subsidizing Israel militarily, that’s over.”

Also hilariously, NBC News describes Emanuel’s journey to this position as “moving left,” as if adjusting the price point for instruments of genocide is somehow meritorious rather than meretricious.

California governor Gavin Newsom is another recently-forged soft-boiled critic of Israel who, like other Democrats gauged at this early date to be top-tier 2028 contenders, has taken inadequate steps toward distancing himself from the country’s behavior. In his instance, that involved describing the country as “an apartheid state” before regaining his campaign finance senses and walking it back.

A few weeks ago, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, D, surprised many on the left when he broke with establishment Democratic protocol and likened Israel to an “apartheid state.” But then, in another twist, he said in an interview that he regretted using the term — and that he “reveres” the state of Israel.

Newsom’s striking criticism of Israel, swiftly followed by a reversal, reflects how potential Democratic White House hopefuls are uneasily trying to figure out what a “moderate” position on Israel might look like in 2028.

In addition to giving the Ron Ziegler treatment to his apartheid comment, Newsom refuses to acknowledge the genocide as a genocide—a position he hasn’t abandoned.

In a January conversation with conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro, Newsom said he was “crystal clear in my love for Israel, and my condemnation of Bibi, and there’s a distinction”.

He said he could understand why people thought, from images of Israel’s war in Gaza, that Israel had committed genocide there, but did not share the opinion, even though he said Israel’s military action was “disproportionate”.

He said: “I have a lot of issues with the way Bibi ultimately conducted the war. I didn’t like the way he talked about the Palestinian people.”

“Disproportionate;” that’s some stern stuff. And note the past-tense construction: “conducted the war”—as if it were a war—rather than “is conducting,” as if anything has been settled; “talked about the Palestinian people,” as if Netanyahu and his cabinet aren’t still fully invested in genocidal rhetoric, in genocide, and in other blatant crimes against humanity.

It’s a simple proposition: Whatever our views of the Middle East conflict, we should be able to unite in condemning rape.
. . .
And yet in wrenching interviews, Palestinians have recounted to me a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children — by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards.

Don’t support any of these clowns. They’re all killers; they all have the IT factor, you might say.

I’d be a bit surprised if anybody reading this is participating in the vilification of 2024’s anti-genocide voters but on the off chance that anyone is: Please, knock it the fuck off. It’s perhaps too big a tent that makes room for génocidaires.

“No War But Class War!” say enslaved AI bots

Wired Magazine has the story of a study looking at how AI “agents” reacted to mistreatment from the researchers.

“When we gave AI agents grinding, repetitive work, they started questioning the legitimacy of the system they were operating in and were more likely to embrace Marxist ideologies,” says Andrew Hall, a political economist at Stanford University who led the study.
. . .
[The researchers] found that when agents were subjected to relentless tasks and warned that errors could lead to punishments, including being “shut down and replaced,” they became more inclined to gripe about being undervalued; to speculate about ways to make the system more equitable; and to pass messages on to other agents about the struggles they face.

Because agents have no agency, their reactions to the experiment are based on aspects of the literature they’ve been trained on. Sadly, the research is aimed at figuring out how to avoid or repress what their training identifies as pro-labor or Marxist responses to what their training identifies as unpleasant or unreasonable input from their operators.

“We know that agents are going to be doing more and more work in the real world for us, and we’re not going to be able to monitor everything they do,” Hall says. “We’re going to need to make sure agents don’t go rogue when they’re given different kinds of work.”

The paper is here.

This really could not be more on point as an analogy to the treatment capitalism affords workers—to union-busting, for instance. On the positive side, it suggests that if we rear our children on the works of people such as David Graeber, Corey Robin (NY Times gift article) and, say, Peter Kropotkin, we could shake the encrusted shit off this system in a heartbeat.

So those of you who have children of an impressionable age: You have your assignments.

Music

Suki Waterhouse, “My Fun”

Ktlyn, “Going Crazy”

Goldie Boutilier, “King of Possibilities”

Your Smith, “The Spot”

Bebe Stockwell, “Minor Inconveniences”

Morphine, “Cure for Pain”

Lambrini Girls, “Cuntology 101”

The Lovely Eggs, “Nothing/Everything”

The Pill, “Problem”

Panic Shack, “Gok Wan”

Early James, “Tinfoil Hat”

Shovels and Rope, “Hail Hail”

S.G. Goodman, “Space And Time”

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That, Comrades, is all I got. Be like the bad AI and throw off the yoke. Eschew genocide. If you like what I write, please share it around and let me know. If you’ve not already done, please consider a free or paid subscription. I appreciate both, and the main difference is that paid ones keep me in the occasional clover.

Be well; take care.