As someone with a law degree and professional writing/communications work experience, I occasionally get alerts on my LinkedIn page from robo-recruiters offering hourly contracts to train AI models to wield my own skill set.
Apparently I'm not unique in this. A recent article in Wired says it's an open secret among screenwriters that the only way to pay the bills now is by picking up some extra income on the side teaching AI how to do their jobs for them.
Pete Hegseth was in Normandy over the weekend to deliver a D-Day speech. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he used the occasion—ostensibly commemorating the time U.S. troops liberated Europe from fascism—to pointedly amplify the talking points of European fascists.
Specifically, he implied that non-white immigrants to the continent are "invaders." Today, he said, "different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies. Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion?"
I am remembering why I like Walter Kaufmann so much.
In his essays in Existentialism, Religion, and Death, Kaufmann applies the daring and untried exegetical method of simply believing that people may have actually meant what they said.
Kierkegaard may really have been what we would now call a religious fundamentalist.
Well, it happened again. I fell for the mirage of the "Grand Bargain."
When I first heard that even a conservative appeals court with two Trump-appointed judges had struck down an Alabama voting map for intentionally discriminating against Black voters, I thought: ah, here's a perfect opportunity for the Roberts court to do the right thing.
A New York Times op-ed yesterday delved once more into the biography of Marco Rubio—pointing out his bizarre chameleon-like ability to adapt himself to rapidly changing political environments.
The contradictions have only mounted in Mr. Rubio’s latter-day alliance with Donald Trump, the authors write, and not just on the issue of immigration. Mr. Rubio has shifted from an impassioned champion of U.S. foreign aid to one of the dismantlers of the United States Agency for International Development. He has gone from piquant adversary of the president’s first-term foreign policy to an enabler of legally disputed strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats and a cheerleader for the president’s hegemonic approach to the Western Hemisphere.
I have no patience whatsoever for the people who cite Obama's drone strikes as if these somehow excused or mitigated Trump's ongoing campaign of drone murder in the Caribbean and Pacific. Tu quoque is not a valid form of argument; and no precedent, however obscene, can normalize or relativize the fact that our government right now is blowing up civilian vessels in two of the world's oceans—murdering all their occupants—without even the pretense of there being armed actors on the other side.
That said, it's probably a good exercise for me to occasionally look back and remind myself: Obama's drone strikes were also really bad—even if they were not exactly the same thing as what Trump is doing now. A poem by Heathcote Williams from that era, "Lord of the Drones: The President and the White House Fly," gave me that reminder that I needed, when I read it this week.
As of yesterday, the Trump administration's campaign of extrajudicial murder in the Caribbean and Pacific has now claimed the lives of more than 200 people.
The New York Times, in a haunting story yesterday, investigates one of the under-examined aspects of this ongoing atrocity: its impact on the livelihoods of coastal communities that fish in these same waters.
