Buying Peace?

 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." 

Governing in Prose

 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. 

A Sneer is Not an Argument

 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. 

Invisible

 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. 

Playtime

 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. 

Peak AI Panic is Back

 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." 

Copernican Revolutions

 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.