Jejune Sympathies

 A couple weeks ago, the leftist streamer bro Hasan Piker generated yet another round of inevitable headlines when he appeared to imply that the United States is a bigger terrorist than Al Qaeda. 

Obviously, this was a ridiculous question to pose in the first-place. These are not commensurable entities. The U.S. is a global power that has existed for two hundred and fifty years, has the largest military budget in the world, and fields troops on every continent. Al Qaeda, meanwhile, has existed for less than a few decades and never had anything close to that reach. 

All Too Human

 One of the greatest sources of confusion in the interminable AI debate is the fact that many of the people building the most sophisticated models also hold a quasi-religious belief in the inevitability of an eventual AI "singularity," which they have long endowed with divine and apocalyptic traits. 

In trying to figure out how seriously to take both their warnings of "existential risk" from AI, as well as their utopian promises of eventual "superabundance" or immortality from the same technology, then, our challenge is constantly to have to figure out how to separate out the scientific from the mythological elements of the way the designers are thinking about their new machine. 

Nightmare Scene

 In his Reflections on the Guillotine, Albert Camus argues that every government that wants to maintain the death penalty should have to conduct all of their executions in public. Indeed, they should broadcast footage of the state murder as widely as possible. 

He argues this because, in the absence of it, the public has no window into what actually happens in the death chamber. This allows the authorities to draw a veil of decorum over the whole hideous proceeding. As Arthur Koestler observes, in his Reflections on Hanging, the officials and the newspapers can talk about the execution in somber tones afterwards, leaving us to believe that all was transacted with the utmost calm and respect. 

Suddenly Surrounded

 Yesterday, driving through the deep South, I was pulled over by someone representing himself as a member of the county sheriff's "counter-narcotics" team. He ended up searching my vehicle, lining up and photographing the covers of some novels and nonfiction political books I had with me in the car, and berating me about going to a protest. 

"Why not just say you're heading to a protest? That's your right. But we've got people trafficking drugs. We've got people trafficking human beings. We've got people trafficking terrorism. Why not just be honest with me? You're going to a protest. Doesn't it feel better to be honest with me? Don't you feel better?"

Closed System

 The other day, I found myself in a conversation with a very conservative Catholic. I kept worrying I would out myself somehow as a secular liberal. But somehow instead I kept being taken for a Protestant. 

In reality, I don't consider myself as a member of either camp. If anything, I aspire to live up to Graham Greene's dictum to be a Catholic in a Protestant country and a Protestant in a Catholic one. But I guess in this conversation, I was in Catholic country, and so I kept finding myself putting a gentle word in for Luther. 

Merry Men?

 As of the last reporting I saw yesterday, UK authorities still have no clear account of the motives or identity of the people they arrested earlier this week outside of the Fairfold air base. They released the suspects surprisingly quickly, however, which tends to suggest no one actually thinks they were linked to a violent terrorist plot. 

According to the Wall Street Journal, one emerging theory among the locals holds that "the men, all from London, may have been in the area to steal fuel[.]"

Farm Populism

 Reading V.L. Parrington's epic three-volume study of the Main Currents in American Thought, it is clear that a persistent theme in the work—indeed, a characteristic obsession of Parrington's—is that American farmers and agrarian interests have long been the source of every progressive, popular, democratic, pacifist, humane, and reformist impulse in American life. 

John Dos Passos's USA trilogy often reflects the same assumption. When Wilson's war in Europe looms, the characters in Dos Passos's epic often talk as if it were a given that the small farmers of the great Midwestern Plains would be one of the surest political obstacles (alongside industrial workers) to this push for war and profiteering.