news

Rybar November 28, 2023

So it seems likely that SCOTUS is going to side with the hedge fund manager suing the SEC saying that they violated his right to trial by jury by using administrative courts instead letting him have a jury trial after he got caught defrauding investors. I have to wonder, how fucking out of touch is this dude and all the other people supporting him if they think a jury of people off the street is going to give them a better verdict and punishment than an administrative court? Yeah man, I'm sure the jury full of pensioners and poor people who can't get out of jury duty for your securities fraud case are going to be very sympathetic to you lol. If I end up on a securities fraud jury, I'm voting guilty and pushing for the death penalty regardless of whether it's applicable or not. It seems like they think it's going to make the SEC's job harder by having to prepare for a jury trial, but it might actually make it easier.

It’s prolly been dropped here already but this hostage release video is amazing

https://twitter.com/AryJeay/status/1730012959517131117

https://nitter.net/AryJeay/status/1730012959517131117

A number of examples of algorithms and AI being used to collude in today's NC - https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/11/new-technologies-to-get-around-old-laws-ai-is-being-widely-used-to-evade-antitrust-fix-prices-and-worse.html

Researchers there wrote earlier this year that while the use of AI might be new, the antitrust laws that govern this type of behavior have been around for more than 140 years. And while AI might increase the speed of price-fixing based on up-to-the-second data, they’re otherwise nothing new:

Let’s just change the terms of the hypothetical slightly to understand why. Everywhere the word “algorithm” appears, please just insert the words “a guy named Bob.” Is it ok for a guy named Bob to collect confidential price strategy information from all the participants in a market, and then tell everybody how they should price? If it isn’t ok for a guy named Bob to do it, then it probably isn’t ok for an algorithm to do it either.

From 1m ago

09.34 EST

Truce talks reach 'dead end' as Mossad team ordered to leave Qatar — Times of Israel

A team from Israel’s Mossad intelligence services has been ordered home after talks in Qatar for another pause in fighting in Gaza reaching a “dead end”, the Times of Israel reports.

“Due to the dead end in negotiations, and following instructions from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Mossad head David Barnea ordered the negotiating team in Doha to return home,” said a statement from Netanyahu’s office issued on behalf of the intelligence agency.

“The Hamas terror group did not fulfill its obligations under the agreement that included releasing all the women and children that were on the list provided to Hamas that had authorized it,” the statement said, according to the Times of Israel.

- The Guardian

Adding another victory to their nation's pile of recent W's Mali's youth football team has won third place in the men's FIFA 2023 U-17 World Cup. On December 1st Mali defeated the Argentinian team 3-0 in the third place playoffs.

We've received the general feedback about the megathreads, and have decided that it would be unwise to make the posting inside the news megathreads overly strict - this is a community website, not a wikipedia discussion page. However, in the interest in keeping the news megathreads just a little more focussed on their purpose, we shall now be:

• Removing off-topic jokes and shitposting - on-topic jokes are fine, such as about the IDF Cum Brigades. Remember, the general megathread (and the rest of the website) exists!
• Removing comments that are obviously stray general megathread comments, like personal comments, informal comments about hobbies, etc - unless they are meant to be stories in relation to a relevant topic (e.g. talking about a friend who's in Palestine).
• Encouraging more linking of sources in top-level comments, even if I have to hunt down the links myself.
• Encouraging people to not do much commenting for the sole purpose of inflating comment counts to reach arbitary records, though we'll likely only actually remove comments if it gets overly obnoxious (hundreds of comments at the tail end of megathreads, for example). Yes, I (and even some admins) are hypocrites and are guilty of doing this in the past. This is literally 1984.

To be honest, I don't expect this to be a big problem, and I don't expect to have to remove substantially more comments than before - I hope that a mere reminder every now and again will be sufficient to keep things on-track. As @[email protected] said in that thread so eloquently, the true merit of the news megathread isn't a mere discussion of the news per se - many websites have that function - but that it allows much easier discussion of relatively obscure issues (to western audiences) on a site that is mostly populated by westerners. The worst thing we could do as moderators is stifle that kind of discussion and jokes.

The weekly update is here!

The Country of the Week is Burkina Faso!

As mentioned in the preamble, feel free to post or recommend any material related to Burkina Faso, whether from a thousand years ago or yesterday. You can post it anywhere in the thread, but you can also reply to this comment if you wish.

If you're feeling particularly ambitious and want homework, you could take on any or all of these questions (no reward, but I'll be very proud of you):

• Who are the main political actors? Are they compradors, nationalists, international socialists, something else?
• What are the most salient domestic political issues; those issues that repeatedly shape elections over the last 10, 20 years. Every country has its quirks that complicate analysis - for example, Brexit in the UK.
• What is the country's history? You don't have to go back a thousand years if that's not relevant, and I'm counting "history" as basically anything that has happened over a year ago.
• What factions exist, historically and currently? If there is an electoral system, what are the major parties and their demographic bases? Are there any minor parties with large amounts of influence? Independence movements? Religious groups?
• How socially progressive or conservative are they? Is there equality for different ethnic groups, or are some persecuted? Do they have LGBTQIA+ rights? Have they improved over time, or gotten worse?
• What role do foreign powers play in the country’s politics and economy? Is there a particular country nearby or far away that is nearly inseparable from them, for good or bad reasons? Is their trade dominated by exports/imports to one place? Are they exploited, exploiters, or something in between?
• If applicable, what is the influence of former colonial relationships on the modern economy and politics?
• Is the country generally stable? Do you think there will be a coup at some point in the future, and if so, what faction might replace them?

The previous country was Argentina.

This is our Geopolitics Reading List so far! Please chime in with suggestions!

General Theory:

• Super Imperialism, by Michael Hudson.
• Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis, by John Smith.
• Superexploitation and the Imperialist Drive of Capitalism: How Marini's 'Dialectics of Dependency' Goes beyond Marx's 'Capital', by Andy Higginbottom.
• Capital Volume 3 Lecture Series, 32 videos, 10-15 minutes each, by Andy Higginbottom.
• World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, by Immanuel Wallerstein.
• Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire, by Radhika Desai.
• Capitalism, Coronavirus and War: A Geopolitical Economy, by Radhika Desai.

Canada:

• Canada in the World: Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination, by Tyler Shipley.

Chile:

• 1000 Days of Revolution: Chilean Communists on the Lessons of Popular Unity (I cannot personally find an online version).
• Santiago Boys Podcast, analyzing Allende's government and Cybersyn.

Lebanon:

• A History of Modern Lebanon, by Fawwaz Traboulsi.

United States:

• Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narcotrafficking in US and Mexican Culture, by Oswaldo Zavala.

Venezuela:

• Objective Conditions in Venezuela: Maduro’s Defensive Strategy and Contradictions Among the People, a longform article by Steve Ellner.

does Hamas have an international foreign legion

another week, another thread.

Would a Trump admin have a different U.S. response to the Israel-Palestine conflict? Or would it just be different messaging? Because it seems like Biden has given Netanyahu carte blanche, which Trump probably would have done as well.

Today I learned that a good chunk (15%+) of Americans age 20-24 are NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training).

Mia Wagner, Denmark's girlboss minister of digitalisation and gender equality who was appointed just a week ago, has gone on sick leave after paying out and being hospitalised with heart problems.

She joined the right-wing Liberal Party and was appointed minister immediately after following a purge of liberal ministers as a result of a change in party leadership. Before becoming minister she was a lawyer and then a girlboss investor in bazinga startups, both facilitated by companies owned by her rich daddy.

US delegation to Israel carries clear message for its leadership

The US delegation expected to arrive in Israel later today will reiterate the same message that VP Harris delivered to the COP28 summit in Dubai, Al Jazeera’s Alan Fisher says.

Harris said the US would not accept the forced relocation of Palestinians or any redrawing of the territorial borders of the strip.

“That message will be carried out by Philip Gordon [Harris’s national security adviser], who will be meeting with an Israeli delegation in the next few hours,” Fisher said. “This is the White House sending this message to Israel.”

Then maybe stop supplying it with bunker busters used to blow up apartment complexes and hospitals perhaps? Empty gestured double speak assholes. Watch what they do not what they say. It's far too late to salvage the Bidet Administration. Yes I called an empty headed food drop wiper.