Branko Bukal

made in YU

[Dr Andreas Krieg @andreas_krieg]

Sealed inside their own echo chamber, Israelis convinced themselves of a myth of military hegemony, total impunity, a small state that could play global superpower. This has been the narrative of defiance within Israeli discourse since 7 October

The bubble is slowly bursting. Hamas is still standing. Hezbollah fought the IDF to a stalemate. Iran extracted major US concessions without firing a shot. And Israel is more isolated than at any point in its history.

The "regional great power" was always just borrowed American muscle. They were just the last to notice.

[Eugen Jakovčić @jakovcic_eugen]

Oliver Frljić, izbjegličko dite, onaj čije su Euripidove Bakhe na splitskom ljetu izazvale prvotno zabranu intedanta Milana Štrljića, pa su intervencijom Ive Sanadera vraćene na scenu, opet igra. I to s Vješticama iz Salema.

Podkast Novosti naglas: 👇

https://t.co/NcTJwLPjsw

[Branko Bukal @BBukal]

@rochowanski its true,
reminds me on Belgrade in 90's, "Zene u crnom"
Woman in Black movement

[Dmitry Pozhidaev @DDPozhidaev]

@The_Davos_Man Over indebted Yugoslavia is just a convenient myth for those who deny the socialist model. Yugoslavia's debt-to-GDP ratio peaked at 32% in 1982; compare it to France's current debt of 111%. https://t.co/jfpwoLuv1O

[Iran Embassy SA @IraninSA]

The way the United States closed the Strait of Hormuz.

[Branko Bukal @BBukal]

@Volod_Ishchenko please write an essey now

[Branko Bukal @BBukal]

@leonidragozin its a crazy world, little kids playing with matches

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Here's an interesting thought experiment: what would the world have been like had the U.S. decided to take towards electricity the approach it's currently taking towards AI?

Imagine if, say, the United States in 1890 had declared electricity a matter of national security, classified the designs of Edison’s dynamos and Tesla’s induction motors as export-controlled, integrated its electrical companies directly into the War Department, framed the generator as a strategic weapon rather than a general-purpose technology, and spent the following century building its foreign policy around ensuring that only it, and politically-aligned nations, had access to the light bulb.

Batshit insane, right? Well that’s pretty much EXACTLY the posture it’s taking towards AI.

Had that happened, it’s painfully obvious we’d ALL have been immeasurably poorer for it, materially and morally.

And the United States first and foremost, given that for electricity - as will undoubtedly be the case for AI - the real value didn’t lie in control of the technology but in its widespread diffusion and in what you built on top of it.

Think about the U.S.’s “electricity giants”: companies like GE, Whirlpool or RCA didn’t get rich by “owning” electricity - they got rich by selling what electricity made possible into a world that was electrifying as fast as it could. The U.S.’s electrical fortune was built on the world electrifying alongside it, not against it.

Does the analogy hold for AI? Yes, surprisingly well. I like Jensen Huang’s recent description of AI (https://t.co/XcLK2iJEsS) as a "5-layer cake" made of 1) energy, 2) chips, 3) infrastructure, 4) models and lastly 5) applications.

The implication of his point is that each layer save for the last one - the application layer - will ultimately be largely commoditized, and as such that’s where the real value lies: in the millions of specific products, services, and industrial processes that get built on top of the other 4 layers.

It’s typical network building: the layers underneath eventually become utilities, and utilities are low-margin commodity businesses. It happened with electricity, it happened with phones, it happened with railroads, it happened with the internet itself. The operators of each layer got commoditized over time, while the durable, century-defining fortunes accrued at the top of the stack: GE on top of electricity, Apple on top of the mobile and telecom infrastructure, Amazon and Google on top of the internet.

There's no reason to think AI - a general-purpose technology of the same order - will turn out any different.

And in fact, we're seeing this happening in real time: take the release of DeepSeek V4 today. What is it if not a commodification of the model layer in Jensen Huang's "5-layer cake"? A frontier-grade model, given away under an MIT license, running on non-Nvidia silicon - and shipped by a lab that explicitly frames it as "AGI belongs to everyone" (https://t.co/b40MxBf4NW).

When a product that cost tens of billions of dollars to develop can be downloaded for free and run on commodity hardware, that product is, by definition, a commodity.

This means that the whole notion of an "AI race" is now absurd on the face of it: you cannot race for control of a thing that is being given away for free by someone who isn't racing.

And doubly absurd because, as we just saw, the economics of general-purpose technologies actively punish "race winners": the value accrues at the application layer, which requires the maximum possible diffusion of everything underneath it. "Winning" by hoarding the model layer is like "winning" electricity by refusing to let people have a generator - you don't capture the value, you prevent it from ever being created.

That's the topic of my latest article in which I argue that the whole "AI race" framing isn't just wrong, it's one of the most successful regulatory capture operations in history.

Shaped by a handful of US companies - like Palantir, Anthropic and OpenAI - it's a perfect example of an industry convincing the public to cheer for its own enrichment by dressing it up as a civilizational struggle.

Link to the article here: https://t.co/Tw8rA2E8IF

Enjoy the read!

[scientism @mr_scientism]

We’re in WW3 but it‘s just very slow because everyone deindustrialized.

[Thomas Fazi @battleforeurope]

Truly grim. Since there are virtually no Ukrainian fighting-age men left in Ukraine, it looks like they are planning to start rounding up the Ukrainian refugees in Europe. To the last Ukrainian.

[Branko Bukal @BBukal]

@nntaleb Unsucesfull bombing with deep penetration bombs of president Milosevic residence in Dedinje, Belgrade, it was properly build by Yugoslavia Comunist state, they new how to make underground structures, like Iran today

[Branko Bukal @BBukal]

@MarMusto yes, S.J.Gould wrote many beautifull eseys on topic of altruism in evolution

[Afshin Rattansi @afshinrattansi]

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs on the farce of Western countries telling Congo to ‘just govern properly’:

‘The Kingdom of Belgium created a slave colony in Congo for 30 years. The government of Belgium ran the slave colony for another 40 years. The CIA assassinated Congo’s first popular leader Patrice Lumumba, and then installed another dictatorship for the next 30 years.

And then Glencore and others now suck out your cobalt without giving Congo tax income. We don’t reflect on that. We say what’s wrong with you? Why don’t you govern properly?’

[Branko Bukal @BBukal]

@BrankoMilan very good article, thanks for posting it

[Volodymyr Ishchenko @Volod_Ishchenko]

Meanwhile, "Ukrainian studies" people are trashing Yuri Slezkine for calling out Ukrainian ethnonationalism. I have never felt such a chasm between what is discussed on academic panels about Ukraine and the reality of Ukraine, and even what is openly discussed in Ukrainian media and on social networks.

[George Galloway @georgegalloway]

This all began with Yugoslavia. I said at the time the dismemberment of the former Yugoslav state and then of Serbia would pave the way for imperialist war after war. And so it did. And would until it was stopped. And so it now is being in Iran. #Yugoslavia #Serbia #Iran

[Branko Bukal @BBukal]

@battleforeurope exactly

[Thomas Fazi @battleforeurope]

This is part one of a paper in which I argue that the EU has historically compensated for its lack of democratic legitimacy by cycling through a series of (self-)legitimising narratives — from postwar peace to market integration to “European values” — and reflect on how these have systematically failed to resolve the core tension between technocratic governance and democratic self-rule, and indeed have actually exacerbated this tension, leading both to an intensification of the EU’s imperial project but also to a growing backlash against it.

Abstract

The European Union has never possessed a democratic foundation in any meaningful sense of the term. In the absence of a European demos, a shared public sphere or any founding act of collective self-determination, the EU has historically compensated for its structural legitimacy deficit through the continuous production and rotation of legitimising narratives. This paper traces that evolution from the postwar peace project through market integration, monetary union and rights-based constitutionalism, to the emergence of an explicitly moral and geopolitical register centred on “European values”. It argues that this succession of narratives has never represented a maturing political identity but rather a series of compensatory symbolic adjustments — each one emerging from the exhaustion of the previous, none capable of resolving the underlying contradiction between technocratic supranational governance and democratic self-rule.

The paper further argues that the EU’s values discourse, far from reflecting a genuine normative commitment, has always functioned as an instrument of depoliticisation and elite power: a means of sacralising the integration project, narrowing the space of legitimate democratic contestation and externalising blame for domestically unpopular policies onto supranational necessity. Rather than opening politics, EU value narratives have consistently closed it, reframing fundamental political choices as moral imperatives, technical requirements or existential obligations beyond legitimate challenge.

This structural hypocrisy has now been definitively exposed. The EU’s loudly proclaimed commitments to the so-called rules-based international order, human rights, democratic sovereignty and the prohibition of aggression have been revealed as entirely conditional on geopolitical alignment. The contrast between the EU’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — framed as a civilisational struggle requiring unlimited solidarity and sacrifice — and its silence or active complicity in the face of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the strangling of Venezuelan sovereignty and US-Israeli military aggression against Iran lays bare what the values discourse has always concealed: that “European values” are not universal principles but instruments of Western geopolitical interest, deployed selectively and abandoned without embarrassment the moment they become inconvenient.

What emerges from this analysis is a portrait of the EU not as a community of shared values, but as a technocratic, anti-democratic juggernaut whose moral language has always served a dual imperial purpose: justifying the subordination of member-state democracies to supranational elite governance — a form of internal or “auto-colonisation” — while simultaneously providing ideological cover for the projection of Western power abroad. The paper concludes that the EU’s legitimacy crisis cannot be resolved through better narratives or more coherent values communication, but rather lies in the very model of supranational integration itself.

Read the article here: https://t.co/IHRbMbtWKj

[Paweł Wargan @pawelwargan]

The post-war Potsdam Agreement stipulated that both West and East Germany would denazify and dismantle the monopolies that were the bedrock of the Nazi regime. West Germany never complied and, unfortunately, annexed and dismantled the East after the defeat of its socialist project. The wrong Germany won the Cold War.

[Brave New Europe @BRAVENEWEUROPE1]

It marked the end of the rule of law.