Well, I have to hand it to Anthropic. Despite being a profit-making entity, they were actually willing to take one on the chin this past week in their conflict with the Pentagon—and all for a point of principle.
Of course, I can't applaud them for wanting to work with the Pentagon in the first place. But they did have a certain moral line they refused to cross.
The United States used it in Fallujah in 2004. Israel reportedly deployed it in Lebanon in 2023. And now, according to Human Rights Watch, it's back again. In the second front in the current spiraling Middle East conflict that has opened in Lebanon—HRW reports—Israel has reportedly used white phosphorus munitions once again over populated areas.
This was not the first time I had read about this chemical—a deadly incendiary often used for illuminating areas, but which causes gruesome burns if it touches human skin—in the past week. The New York Times reported a few days ago that one of the motives behind Trump's executive order to protect the chemical glyphosate is due to its role in producing WP—a major source of profit for U.S. arms makers.
In yet another exercise in pointless cruelty, Trump revived this month one of his various mean-spirited policies from his first term aimed at punishing and deterring asylum-seekers: namely, the work permit rule.
Initially, of course, Trump simply wanted to destroy asylum entirely. On day one of his current term, he issued executive orders purporting to basically declare people ineligible for humanitarian protection wholesale.
Yesterday witnessed a whipsaw for the ages on the oil markets. At the start of the day, when I looked at the news, everything sounded like it was going to be unspeakably dire. The Strait of Hormuz seemed like it was about to shut down for the first time in recorded history. Oil prices were skyrocketing. Markets were tumbling.
I held off looking at the stock market numbers all day—in part because I couldn't bear to witness the carnage. But when I finally dared to check them after markets closed at four, I blinked in incomprehension at what I saw. Everything was green. The numbers had all gone up by the end of the day. And oil prices were back down.
I never found "Make Love Not War" to be a very eloquent slogan or an elegant solution to a human dilemma. The notion that the libido can simply be channeled from one outlet to another, i.e. that if people did more f-ing there would be less shooting, has always struck me as a very naïve, hydraulic model of human psychology.
In truth, the sex drive is no more innocent than the death drive; and plenty of people throughout history have managed to be sexually active at the same time that they were busy butchering other humans. Genghis Khan comes to mind. His prolific career as a mass murderer does not appear to have made him less prolific in other senses.
Of all the "experimental" and "avant-garde" novelists of the twentieth century, B.S. Johnson's work has lasted in a way that others' simply has not. (Who rests in Robbe-Grillet's mean flattery now?) And I can't help the feeling that his books succeed for reasons largely if not wholly unrelated to their formalistic experiments and convention-breaking eccentricities.
The things one most remembers from Albert Angelo, say, are the hideously realistic portrayals of life as a substitute teacher in working class England—not the pieces of paper cut out from the text. But then again, I have to ask myself—did I only pick up the book in the first place because of its formalistic experiments?
Of the various Senate Republicans who have expressed skepticism in the past about the president's war-making powers, a curious number of them nevertheless voted against the resolution this week that would have constrained Trump's ability to continue his illegal bombing of Iran.
The New York Times yesterday highlighted the case of Todd Young, the Senator from Indiana, who in the past had "warned of the dangers of a legislative branch that had ceded its war-making powers to the executive branch." Nevertheless, he helped vote down the war powers resolution. What gives?
