Ministerial vs. Radical Evils

 There is a certain type of dialectical philosopher who is always trying to convince us that the good things we want to believe in are already present, implied as a necessary consequence, in the bad things whose existence we are forced to acknowledge. 

Albert Camus says that the rebel's metaphysical rejection of the universe implies a standard of ultimate values according to which that universe is found wanting. Ergo, nihilism actually incorporates and necessitates its opposite: there is thus "a path through nihilism that leads beyond nihilism." 

Not Good at Eating

 After much badgering over the past few months, my sister finally talked me into watching Kpop Demon Hunters on Netflix this week. I had to grudgingly admit, by the end of it, that I had enjoyed myself. It was pretty good and quite fun—even for someone who went in prepared to dislike it. 

One scene toward the beginning, though, struck me as an odd choice. The three main characters are taking a plane ride to get to a venue for a show. A flight attendant brings them their midday meal, and they fall upon it ravenously. "Carbo load!!" they shriek, before stuffing their faces with gimbap. 

Los Eternos Indocumentados

 Jean Guerrero had a fascinating piece in the New York Times the other day about Trump's recent bizarre (and no doubt, to many, inexplicable) interference in Honduran politics.  

Of course, there are any number of reasons why Trump would suddenly decide to pardon the former Honduran strongman Juan Orlando Hernandez—after he was convicted of a conspiracy to smuggle cocaine to the United States—and back the same candidate in the country's recent elections as the MS-13 criminal syndicate. Maybe it's just that he identifies with all would-be authoritarians and crooks; maybe it's just his innate love of gangsterism and corruption showing through. 

Strange Irony of Fate

 In his immortal collection of concentration camp stories, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Polish writer and Auschwitz survivor Tadeusz Borowski recounts one episode of attempted resistance. As a group of people were being herded into the gas chambers, one woman made a lunge for one of the guard's holstered weapons. Freeing it from his belt, she waved it around and fired several shots into the commandant's gut. 

As he lay expiring on the ground, the commandant seemed genuinely shocked and indignant about what had just occurred. What could have made the woman want to do such a thing? "Oh God, my God," he reportedly said, "what have I done to deserve such suffering?" (Vedder trans.)

Stabbed in the Back

 At one point in his 1904 book of political and social commentary, The New Star Chamber, Edgar Lee Masters (one of my personal writer-poet-lawyer heroes) observes of the Spanish-American war and its aftermath: "Everyone knows that the Filipinos were our allies and that we betrayed them; that we broke our word with Cuba and that the course of the president has been uncandid and inconsistent."

He was referring to the fact that the U.S. pretended to support the national liberation struggles of both Cuba and the Philippines, in their effort to free themselves from Spanish domination—and then, when the U.S. had used the blood of their patriots to defeat Spain, turned around and stabbed them in the back by trying to assert a new U.S. claim to imperial rule in the former Spanish Empire. 

Alone Again (Naturally)

 I've always found the second half of Gilbert O'Sullivan's song "Alone Again (Naturally)" to be much more effective than the first. The 1972 hit single opens, as you may recall, with a story about the speaker being stood up at the altar and threatening to hurl himself off a tower in order to punish his erstwhile bride-to-be. After the chorus and bridge and all that, the song then shifts to a second narrative: about the death of the speakers' two parents. 

The first part of the song always strikes me as a bit forced and artificial. It has all the makings of a sentimental, mawkish scenario that the songwriter invented purely for the sake of wringing self-pity. The events position the speaker too perfectly as a unilateral victim, with the jilting bride as a cartoonish villain. I can't really bring myself to believe that any of this happened—or would happen to anyone—as described. 

Last Call for the AI Ark?

 There is an odd disconnect right now in the public's attitude to AI. On the one hand, the era of hype and fear about the new technology appears to have peaked around 2023 and to have been on a downward slope ever since. We've all gotten used to the presence of chatbots now. And however impressive they are—and I do indeed continue to be wowed that we have built a robot brain that can convincingly mimic human conversation—they also seem to be transforming our lives rather less than we had either hoped or dreaded. In daily life, they often provide little more to us than a variant on the old-fashioned search engine experience—a handy way to gather information from the internet quickly. 

Generative AI is in many ways so extraordinary compared to prior generations of information technology that I think we all assumed it would have to change the world. But sometimes, it may in fact be possible to build something amazing that nonetheless has little discernible impact on our daily lives. A few years into this collective social experiment, and jobs have not been systematically displaced by the new tech. The chatbots have proved most adept at drafting unwanted discussion posts or term papers for lazy college students; but any writing or creating that requires going beyond the most generic, mediocre, statistically-average boilerplate still requires a human touch.