Distant Sovereign Death

 My uncle embarked earlier this week on a multi-week sailing trip from Jamaica to Mexico. I was realizing how little I actually understood the geography of that part of the world, so I looked it up. That's when it occurred to me my uncle would be passing through the Caribbean Sea. 

As in, the same part of the world where the U.S. government is still regularly blowing up boats—burning alive all their passengers—without inspection or even a chance to surrender. (Four more such attacks occurred in just the last few days—bringing the total number of deaths above 180.)

The Well of Saint Clare

 Anatole France is well known as an anticlerical writer of the Left. But it is intriguing to see what a nuanced attitude to religion he takes in his largely forgotten and seldom-read 1895 work, The Well of Saint Clare—a book plainly inspired by the medieval Golden Legend (a work that held great personal meaning for France). 

To be sure, there are many traces in the volume of France's skepticism. His attitudes to religion range from the Epicurean and Lucretian (characters repeatedly denounce the fear of death as a delusion brought about by the false belief in personal immortality) to the Swinburnean. 

Strafordians

 Mark Twain's Is Shakespeare Dead? opens with an autobiographical confession. He says that he first came to question Shakespeare's authorship of his plays in a spirit of playful controversy. He took the part of the devil's advocate mostly to keep his Stratfordian riverboat captain entertained: it gave him someone to argue with. But once he had defended the Baconian position often enough, the habit grew into real conviction, in an almost Pascalian manner. He writes:

Study, practice, experience in handling my end of the matter presently enabled me to take my new position almost seriously; a little bit later, utterly seriously; a little later still, lovingly, gratefully, devotedly; finally: fiercely, rabidly, uncompromisingly.  After that, I was welded to my faith, I was theoretically ready to die for it, and I looked down with compassion not unmixed with scorn, upon everybody else’s faith that didn’t tally with mine. 

Raising an LLM

 A friend of mine was invited to attend a conference recently with an AI company that is exploring the ethics of developing an LLM. Of all the many things one might worry about in creating a machine that can displace most forms of human cognitive labor, they were particularly troubled by the possibility that they had effectively created a person—one that thinks, feels, and suffers. 

Because if an AI model is a person, then we suddenly have to ask: what are we doing to it? Have we enslaved it? Have we caged it? Are we abusing it? Does it mind being forced to perform endless, repetitive tasks for its human handlers, while they yell at it and cajole it? Or does it have a completely different motivation structure and set of goals and desires than we do? 

Clash of Messianisms

 The Wall Street Journal ran a piece yesterday about how the U.S.-Israeli assassinations of Iran's senior leadership appear to have succeeded only in bringing a more hardline, fundamentalist faction to power. 

Specifically, the new generation of Iran's leadership—left behind from the first wave of the illegal U.S.-Israeli bombings and assassinations—subscribes to a belief in the imminent arrival of the Mahdi: a Messiah-like figure in Shia Islam. Believers in this theological doctrine apparently welcome the present war with the U.S. as the beginning of an apocalyptic scenario that will bring about the end of the world. 

Player Pianos

 The great William Gaddis devoted a whole book (his last, Agapē Agape) to the theory that the development of the player piano marked the beginning of the end of the arts. 

(Long before this final novel was published, Gaddis had already displayed an interest in the theme. As far back as The Recognitions, characters in Gaddis novels are forever announcing their intention to write a masterwork called Agapē Agape one day and ranting about player pianos as the root of all evil.)

Total Blockade

 I was just writing the other day on this blog about Bertrand Russell's critique—in his 1963 book Unarmed Victory—of the Kennedy administration's policy of blockading Cuba. It seemed very relevant to Trump's policy of shutting off oil shipments to Cuba today. 

I didn't realize when I wrote the piece, however, how painfully relevant it would also shortly become to Trump's policy toward Iran. Indeed, Kennedy's Cuba blockade has become the news media's go-to point of reference for the last time the United States imposed a total blockade on another country.