In his study of Rimbaud, Henry Miller challenged us to name the last time a single poem, unassisted, had succeeded in changing the world—the way it had in his subject's day.
Well, I don't know about a poem. But I do know that a single Substack post appears to have briefly tanked the U.S. stock market yesterday. The week before that, a single X post generated a similar panic in the software industry.
As another round of talks start up to try to negotiate an end to the war sparked by Putin's invasion of Ukraine, President Zelensky of Ukraine has continued to warn about the risks inherent in trying to buy Putin off by offering him pieces of another country's territory. It is "a big mistake to allow the aggressor to take something," he reportedly put it.
I was reminded of something I was just reading in Montesquieu's Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline. He says that the Western Roman Empire, in its waning days, sometimes made overtures "to appease with money the peoples threatening invasion."
The old phrase "campaign in poetry; govern in prose" got tossed around a lot back when Mamdani was running for mayor of New York City.
Now, I guess we are getting a sense of what that means.
Trump officials are always very proud of their crude aggressiveness in interviews.
Pam Bondi gave a disgraceful performance on Capitol Hill last week. When she was grilled about the Epstein case or whatever it was, she responded by calling Jamie Raskin a "washed-up loser lawyer."
I imagine she considered this a great rhetorical victory.
Trump's campaign of extrajudicial killing in the Caribbean and Pacific has long since fallen below the top fold of the newspapers. It is no longer treated as either a major news story or a particularly urgent political scandal.
But that's not because the killings have stopped. Just yesterday, the U.S. government murdered another 11 people at sea. The week before that, they killed 3 people in yet another strike on a civilian vessel.
One of the various sources of the renewed wave of AI panic sweeping the ranks of pundits this week is the fact that the very thing we thought was most human and least likely to ever be automated—namely, artistic creation—is turning out to be one of the first casualties of generative AI. Screenplays, poems, novels, and illustrations turn out to be some of the things that are easiest to replicate with machines. Which is terrifying.
But before we succumb to the general anxiety, let us ask exactly what it is we find so appalling about this fact. Are we feeling some threat of existential hollowness or erasure at the fact that something else can now do what we thought we alone could do? This hardly seems warranted. At any rate, the fact that AI chatbots can write blogs too is not all that intrinsically different from the fact that other human beings can write them.
I was saying just the other day on this blog that there was a weird and growing disconnect between the panic consuming the world of Bay Area AI developers, and the generally blasé attitude toward AI on the part of the rest of us "normies."
This was definitely a week, though, in which the gap suddenly shrunk. The panic caught up with the rest of us—helped in large part by a single, well-written and algorithmically-optimized X post called "Something Big is Happening."
A friend was saying to me the other day that AI appears destined to create another "Copernican Revolution."
He wasn't saying this in the sense that it would be a scientific breakthrough. Rather, he had in mind the sense of psychological homelessness and estrangement it would produce.
Recall that before Copernicus, Galileo, and the rest dethroned the Earth from the center of the universe—our cosmos seemed like a cozy, womb-like environment build to humankind's needs and specifications.
The Wall Street Journal has a story out this morning that reads like a chapter from a Graham Greene novel. One of Trump's personal cronies and golfing buddies has reportedly been lobbying from behind the scenes for years to try to "pry open" the Venezuelan oil market for U.S. business interests. If this meant working with Maduro, that was fine with him. And so, for a while, he concentrated his efforts on trying to persuade Rick Grenell and the rest of the Trump administration to make nice with the ruling regime. Cut a deal with Maduro to accept deportations and get the oil flowing, he told them.
Let us keep in mind, here, that "accepting deportations" means cajoling Maduro into being willing to collaborate with the U.S. government in its effort to forcibly expel asylum seekers—many of them pro-democracy Venezuelan opposition activists who, in a sane world, would be natural allies for the United States—back to the hands of the regime they fled. And intermittently, of course—though not always—Maduro was willing to do precisely that. And the U.S. government was more than happy to send innocent people into his clutches.
In his book on Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe—whom he groups together as "philosophical poets"—George Santayana discusses at one point those famous arguments in Lucretius's On the nature of things devoted to dispelling the fear of death.
We have nothing to fear from dying, Lucretius assures us. Through a number of arguments, he seeks to persuade us that the soul cannot be immortal. It must, in fact, perish with the body.
In his capsule biography of the seventeenth century English preacher and self-declared prophet Lodowicke Muggleton, Lytton Strachey remarks toward the close of the essay that "one would be sorry if the time ever came that there were no more Muggletonians."
E.P. Thompson, it is known, lived to see that sad era. In his book about William Blake, Witness Against the Beast, he describes his meeting with the last Muggletonian, with whose expiration in 1979 the entire prophetic sect sank into oblivion.
The Associated Press ran an appalling and heartbreaking story this morning about a man—an immigrant from Mexico and a father—who is now suffering from multiple severe brain injuries because ICE agents attacked him, reportedly fracturing his skull in eight places with a steel baton.
When he woke up from the beating, he told reporters, he at first could not recall that he had a daughter. And still to this day—due to brain hemorrhaging and head trauma—he finds himself unable to remember treasured moments of his life, such as teaching his daughter to dance when she was five years old.
John Ganz mentioned in passing the other week—over on his Substack—a school of thought that he termed the "anti-alarmist left." He doesn't explain in detail who he has in mind, but I can gather from the context the sort of person he is envisioning: the type of smug leftist who refuses to call Trump a fascist; or who insists—at the very least—he is no more fascist than the entire U.S. imperial project has always been. The sort of leftist who—when presented with evidence of Trump's atrocities and extrajudicial killings—feels the need to interject with non sequiturs like: "well what about Obama's drone strikes?"
(For the millionth time, let's say outright: Obama's drone strikes were also very bad. But he hasn't been president for ten years at this point, so can we focus for one second please on the person who is actually president right now, and will be for at least the next three years, and who is right now blowing up civilian vessels in the Caribbean, with no legal justification or due process whatsoever, and who appears set to continue killing more innocent people by these means at a rate of at least one per week?)
Bret Stephens over at the New York Times—who sometimes comes across as the world's last doctrinaire neoconservative war hawk—seems to have learned nothing from recent events in Venezuela. He spent months banging the war drum in favor of a U.S. regime change effort to topple Maduro and install democracy. In the end—he got the war he wanted, but not the democracy. So it goes.
Now—apparently without any self-reflection or reassessment of this strategy—he has moved right along to doing the same thing with Iran. In multiple recent columns in the paper, he has called for a U.S. attack to overthrow the Islamic Republic in favor of—I don't know; whoever fills the void? (A role which presently appears most likely to be filled by the son of the former deposed Shah, that ruthless CIA-backed autocrat best known for the terror inspired by his secret police.)
It's hard to win an argument with this administration by drawing historical analogies—when they themselves seem so eager to embrace all the worst chapters of American history.
Just yesterday, I was writing on this blog that the administration's actions in Venezuela were all too reminiscent of U.S. expansionism in the 1846 Mexican-American war.
I was reading in the Wall Street Journal yesterday about the career of the value investor Jeremy Grantham, sometimes known as the "Permabear." He has been saying for years—if not decades, at this point—that the entire equity market is in a bubble. We're talking more than just an "AI bubble" here. Plenty of people think those stocks are criminally overvalued right now. Grantham does them all one better—he thinks that the pricing of the entire stock market has gotten unmoored from any rational relationship to underlying earnings and other measures of intrinsic value.
He's probably right; and this week is offering him a measure of vindication. Panic about new AI tools—and how quickly they can be used to build software performing a wide variety of specialized functions, with minimal if any knowledge of coding required—has sent software stocks into a tailspin. This "Anthropic" effect has been enough to pull down the larger tech sector for a few days, plus the larger stock indices—the Nasdaq and S&P 500—that are most reliant on it. Meanwhile, investors are "rotating out" into previously less favored parts of the market: mid-caps, foreign stocks, "defensive" sectors, etc.
I wrote the other week on this blog that the spectacle of what the U.S. is doing in Venezuela right now is enough to destroy any lingering idealism of any political species—whether of the right or of the left. Marco Rubio's testimony before Congress last week—in which he explained in detail how the U.S. is harvesting the proceeds of oil wealth that it is extracting from the South American country at literally the barrel of a gun—was the final capstone in this edifice of disillusion.
Suppose you were a leftist idealist still smitten with the rhetoric and mythology of the Bolivarian revolution. If you hadn't had your "Kronstadt" moment yet—if Maduro's stolen election and his arrest and torture of hundreds of political dissidents hadn't been enough to convince you that this "revolution" was going the way of other Stalinist debacles past—then surely the spectacle of Maduro's own top henchwoman now openly collaborating with the Yankee imperialists for the sake of mutual profit should be the final nail in the coffin.
There is a certain type of dialectical philosopher who is always trying to convince us that the good things we want to believe in are already present, implied as a necessary consequence, in the bad things whose existence we are forced to acknowledge.
Albert Camus says that the rebel's metaphysical rejection of the universe implies a standard of ultimate values according to which that universe is found wanting. Ergo, nihilism actually incorporates and necessitates its opposite: there is thus "a path through nihilism that leads beyond nihilism."
After much badgering over the past few months, my sister finally talked me into watching Kpop Demon Hunters on Netflix this week. I had to grudgingly admit, by the end of it, that I had enjoyed myself. It was pretty good and quite fun—even for someone who went in prepared to dislike it.
One scene toward the beginning, though, struck me as an odd choice. The three main characters are taking a plane ride to get to a venue for a show. A flight attendant brings them their midday meal, and they fall upon it ravenously. "Carbo load!!" they shriek, before stuffing their faces with gimbap.
