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. 

Our Man in Caracas

 The Wall Street Journal has a story out this morning that reads like a chapter from a Graham Greene novel. One of Trump's personal cronies and golfing buddies has reportedly been lobbying from behind the scenes for years to try to "pry open" the Venezuelan oil market for U.S. business interests. If this meant working with Maduro, that was fine with him. And so, for a while, he concentrated his efforts on trying to persuade Rick Grenell and the rest of the Trump administration to make nice with the ruling regime. Cut a deal with Maduro to accept deportations and get the oil flowing, he told them. 

Let us keep in mind, here, that "accepting deportations" means cajoling Maduro into being willing to collaborate with the U.S. government in its effort to forcibly expel asylum seekers—many of them pro-democracy Venezuelan opposition activists who, in a sane world, would be natural allies for the United States—back to the hands of the regime they fled. And intermittently, of course—though not always—Maduro was willing to do precisely that. And the U.S. government was more than happy to send innocent people into his clutches. 

Fear of Death

 In his book on Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe—whom he groups together as "philosophical poets"—George Santayana discusses at one point those famous arguments in Lucretius's On the nature of things devoted to dispelling the fear of death. 

We have nothing to fear from dying, Lucretius assures us. Through a number of arguments, he seeks to persuade us that the soul cannot be immortal. It must, in fact, perish with the body. 

The Muggletonians

 In his capsule biography of the seventeenth century English preacher and self-declared prophet Lodowicke Muggleton, Lytton Strachey remarks toward the close of the essay that "one would be sorry if the time ever came that there were no more Muggletonians." 

E.P. Thompson, it is known, lived to see that sad era. In his book about William Blake, Witness Against the Beast, he describes his meeting with the last Muggletonian, with whose expiration in 1979 the entire prophetic sect sank into oblivion. 

"And that is what I have to put up with from you?"

 The Associated Press ran an appalling and heartbreaking story this morning about a man—an immigrant from Mexico and a father—who is now suffering from multiple severe brain injuries because ICE agents attacked him, reportedly fracturing his skull in eight places with a steel baton. 

When he woke up from the beating, he told reporters, he at first could not recall that he had a daughter. And still to this day—due to brain hemorrhaging and head trauma—he finds himself unable to remember treasured moments of his life, such as teaching his daughter to dance when she was five years old. 

Anti-Anti-Alarmism

 John Ganz mentioned in passing the other week—over on his Substack—a school of thought that he termed the "anti-alarmist left." He doesn't explain in detail who he has in mind, but I can gather from the context the sort of person he is envisioning: the type of smug leftist who refuses to call Trump a fascist; or who insists—at the very least—he is no more fascist than the entire U.S. imperial project has always been. The sort of leftist who—when presented with evidence of Trump's atrocities and extrajudicial killings—feels the need to interject with non sequiturs like: "well what about Obama's drone strikes?" 

(For the millionth time, let's say outright: Obama's drone strikes were also very bad. But he hasn't been president for ten years at this point, so can we focus for one second please on the person who is actually president right now, and will be for at least the next three years, and who is right now blowing up civilian vessels in the Caribbean, with no legal justification or due process whatsoever, and who appears set to continue killing more innocent people by these means at a rate of at least one per week?)

Let's Not Bomb Iran

Bret Stephens over at the New York Times—who sometimes comes across as the world's last doctrinaire neoconservative war hawk—seems to have learned nothing from recent events in Venezuela. He spent months banging the war drum in favor of a U.S. regime change effort to topple Maduro and install democracy. In the end—he got the war he wanted, but not the democracy. So it goes. 

Now—apparently without any self-reflection or reassessment of this strategy—he has moved right along to doing the same thing with Iran. In multiple recent columns in the paper, he has called for a U.S. attack to overthrow the Islamic Republic in favor of—I don't know; whoever fills the void? (A role which presently appears most likely to be filled by the son of the former deposed Shah, that ruthless CIA-backed autocrat best known for the terror inspired by his secret police.)

Historical Comparisons

 It's hard to win an argument with this administration by drawing historical analogies—when they themselves seem so eager to embrace all the worst chapters of American history. 

Just yesterday, I was writing on this blog that the administration's actions in Venezuela were all too reminiscent of U.S. expansionism in the 1846 Mexican-American war. 

Permabear

 I was reading in the Wall Street Journal yesterday about the career of the value investor Jeremy Grantham, sometimes known as the "Permabear." He has been saying for years—if not decades, at this point—that the entire equity market is in a bubble. We're talking more than just an "AI bubble" here. Plenty of people think those stocks are criminally overvalued right now. Grantham does them all one better—he thinks that the pricing of the entire stock market has gotten unmoored from any rational relationship to underlying earnings and other measures of intrinsic value. 

He's probably right; and this week is offering him a measure of vindication. Panic about new AI tools—and how quickly they can be used to build software performing a wide variety of specialized functions, with minimal if any knowledge of coding required—has sent software stocks into a tailspin. This "Anthropic" effect has been enough to pull down the larger tech sector for a few days, plus the larger stock indices—the Nasdaq and S&P 500—that are most reliant on it. Meanwhile, investors are "rotating out" into previously less favored parts of the market: mid-caps, foreign stocks, "defensive" sectors, etc. 

The Two Disillusionments

 I wrote the other week on this blog that the spectacle of what the U.S. is doing in Venezuela right now is enough to destroy any lingering idealism of any political species—whether of the right or of the left. Marco Rubio's testimony before Congress last week—in which he explained in detail how the U.S. is harvesting the proceeds of oil wealth that it is extracting from the South American country at literally the barrel of a gun—was the final capstone in this edifice of disillusion. 

Suppose you were a leftist idealist still smitten with the rhetoric and mythology of the Bolivarian revolution. If you hadn't had your "Kronstadt" moment yet—if Maduro's stolen election and his arrest and torture of hundreds of political dissidents hadn't been enough to convince you that this "revolution" was going the way of other Stalinist debacles past—then surely the spectacle of Maduro's own top henchwoman now openly collaborating with the Yankee imperialists for the sake of mutual profit should be the final nail in the coffin. 

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. 

A Visit from Ahor

 Arthur Koestler's memoir Arrow in the Blue—a book that held great personal meaning for me when I first read it as a young aspiring writer and aspiring lefty activist—begins by introducing us to a sort of private cosmology that Koestler developed in childhood. It was largely a Manichaean universe, in which two countervailing forces battled each other eternally, with no ultimate victor.

On one side of the fight was Ahor—which stood in Koestler's mind for "Ancient Horror." It was a presence that Koestler associated in childhood with visits to the dentist; but which in adulthood would assume much more serious forms—his stint in a French concentration camp at the outset of the war, for example; or his sentence to prison in Franco's Spain for his reporting on the civil war. In essence, Ahor represented the forces of writhing, squirming evil—ever present in posse—that lie just beneath the superficial appearance of normality and stability in human life. 

A Pleasant Fiction

 In his Reflections on War and Death, Sigmund Freud writes at one point of the "feeling of strangeness in a world which used to seem so beautiful and familiar to us," which he and many of his contemporaries experienced at the outbreak of World War I. (Brill/Kuttner trans. throughout.)

The feeling, he said, came from a sense of "disappointment" or disenchantment at the spectacle of the way so-called "civilized" societies had descended into barbarism. The governments that had set themselves up as the embodiments and enforcers of morality internally were now behaving with crude brutality and dishonesty in their relations to other states. 

Wild Spiders

 At most news out of the Trump administration, I feel only a kind of impersonal disgust, revulsion, contempt or indignation. 

The current crisis over Greenland, though, is one of those times in the Trump era (and there have been a few before) when I have felt something closer to actual panic. 

These are the moments when you realize we are not led merely by a cruel and incompetent man—but by a kind of Hitlerian maniac, who would destroy the whole world and everything in it just to impose his arbitrary will on others. 

The Last Straw

 There's something for everyone to hate in Trump's new alliance with the authoritarian leadership of Venezuela. Every possible type of idealism, on either side, whether of the right or the left—no matter how debased or misguided—has taken a severe beating from this partnership made in hell. 

Neocons who thought the point of invading Venezuela was to install the democratic opposition candidate have obviously had to swallow their words. Now, they must accept that they got the war they wanted—but not the democracy. 

Je-m'en-foutisme

 Lion Feuchtwanger's The Devil in France—his memoir of internment and flight from wartime France, as the country was being invaded by the Nazis in 1940—invites obvious comparison with Arthur Koestler's Scum of the Earth. Both books were written by cultured and lettered men, speaking multiple languages, of impeccable anti-fascist convictions, who found themselves locked up and treated as "enemy aliens" at the start of the war. Both books cover much the same period and events:

France's paradoxical wartime internment of German anti-fascist refugees (even as France was being overrun by these refugees's worst enemy); the fall of the prewar government and its replacement with the collaborationist Vichy regime, which promised to hand the German refugees over to the invading Nazis in the notorious nineteenth clause of its armistice agreement; and the refugees' subsequent desperate efforts to escape from a country that—overnight—had become enemy territory. 

Betrayal

 If there is any constant at all in Donald Trump's ever-shifting foreign policy positions, it's that genuine friends to any pro-democracy movement, anywhere in the world—no matter how much it might appear to align with U.S. interests—should never trust him. The people of both Iran and Venezuela are having to learn that cruel lesson all over again this week.

The Iranian protest movement the past few weeks has been waging a heroic struggle in the teeth of overwhelming and brutal repression. 

Body Count

 How many people did the U.S. government just kill in our recent, undeclared war in Venezuela? 

The Trump administration has made clear, in so many words, that they don't care. They made sure to emphasize that no American lives were lost in the fighting. There was no death on "our side," as Trump put it bluntly, a few hours after the incursion. 

They pointedly declined to express any opinion on the number of Venezuelans who might have lost their lives. The message was clear: they don't care. They don't see those lives as having any weight or significance. 

If the Whole World Was a Cake

 It's almost impossible to overstate the madness of the fact that NATO troops are deploying to Greenland right now—not to defend the island from Russia or China—but to deter aggression from the United States. 

For years, the fear with Trump's rhetoric about NATO was that he might repudiate the U.S.'s obligations under the treaty and refuse to come to the aid of other member states if they were attacked from Russia. 

The Debasement Trade

 The Trump administration's latest attack on Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, this week—in the form of a transparently baseless criminal probe—suggests that they really are set on compromising central bank independence by any means necessary. 

I doubt there is any complex economic motive behind this—at least not in Trump's brain. He has made clear overtly that he wants the Fed to bow to his wishes to cut interest rates, and really—the reasons why he would want this are if anything overdetermined. Lowering interest rates tends to make the stock market go up—which Trump regards as a barometer of his political success. It would also benefit him even more directly by keeping aloft the obscenely elevated valuations of various speculative assets—crypto, e.g.—in which Trump is personally invested, and from which he stands to gain. 

Constant Querulous Prohibition

 A friend of mine who's a relatively new parent was complaining to me the other day that his life often feels confined these days to nothing more than "roaming and rotting." His one-year-old son—who has recently acquired the ability to walk—wakes up early and toddles off on a series of perambulations around the house. The rest of my friend's day is then made up of following along behind him to make sure he doesn't hit his head on any table corners, chew on any electrical cords, swallow any choking hazards, etc. (that's the "roaming" part); or else sitting with him in a play pen while my friend tries to keep both his own brain and a one-year-old occupied (that's the "rotting"). 

My friend obviously felt guilty even uttering a word of complaint about this; but I could relate perfectly well to what he was describing. Anyone who's provided any care of young children for extended periods of time—whether of relatives or their own kids, or as part of their jobs—will be familiar with the distinct boredom and misery it often entails. It's one of the few activities in adult life that requires both constant, laser-focused attention (to ensure the child's safety), but also a lack of serious mental stimulation. No one's going into a "flow" state from the sort of focus that childcare calls forth. The result is often a vague sense of mental vegetation instead. "Rotting" is a good word for it. 

On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year

 A decade or so ago, when this blog was in its relative infancy, I remember reading through some collection of Lord Byron's poetry and being reminded of the existence of one piece entitled (or sub-titled, in some editions): "On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year." 

The thought briefly occurred to me: "Someday, when I turn thirty-six, I should use this line as a title for a post." 

Cosplaying Imperialism

 Trump's decision to invite a bunch of oil executives to the White House earlier this week to discuss carving up Venezuela between them is just too on-the-nose to make any further criticism seem necessary. What's the point of denouncing Trump's Venezuela policy as petro-imperialism if he doesn't even bother to disguise it? 

I think of Pablo Neruda's poem "Standard Oil Co." (Schmitt trans.): 

Their obese emperors from New York

are suave smiling assassins

who buy silk, nylon, cigars

petty tyrants and dictators.

Ever in Extremes, Ever in the Wrong

 I knew before picking it up that Christopher Hitchens's The Trial of Henry Kissinger belonged to the first, "good" phase of Hitchens's career—when he was still a left-wing critic of U.S. foreign policy—and not to the bad, second phase of his career, when he became a neoconservative (ahem, "liberal hawk," he would insist) and an apologist for Bush's war on terror. 

What I hadn't fully processed, though—until I got around to reading the book recently—is what an incredibly small chronological gap separated these two radically different stages of Hitch's career. 

Murder in Minnesota

 Yesterday, ICE apparently shot a woman in the face in cold blood.

They did it in front of witnesses—with cameras rolling. 

Now, the public can see with our own eyes what happened. We see an ICE agent approach the vehicle, swearing profanities, and try to pry open the door. 

The Penalty for Piracy

 In his 1932 essay, "The Modern Midas," Bertrand Russell remarks that the policy of the Western Allies toward defeated Germany, in the aftermath of World World I, was "so absurd that it is difficult to believe that the Governments were composed of grown-up men not in lunatic asylums." 

As he proceeds to lay out, the victorious Allies of the Entente swiftly decided, after the war, that they wanted to impose a ruinous indemnity on the defeated Germans in order to punish them for their role in the war. Thus, they burdened their erstwhile enemy with a monstrous debt that had to somehow be paid. 

Post-Work

 Matt Yglesias had a piece on his Substack the other day about the "post-work future." He has spent his leisure time the last year reading 19th century novels, he tells us—and part of what he takes from these works is an example of how people who are "idle" by social design—the landed gentry of the age—can nonetheless make valuable and civilized use of their time. 

This is something we all may have to learn to do, Yglesias says, in a world where "work" assumes ever less prevalence and importance, due to changes in technology. 

Weakness and Struggles

 The massive protests taking place in Iran right now—which the ruling regime has characteristically met with death and repression—are generally understood to have been sparked most immediately by rampant inflation. The Iranian rial has reportedly lost more than half its value in the last six months, and food prices in the country have spiked by more than 60%. 

One can attribute this economic collapse—with some justice—to the economic mismanagement of the regime. And indeed, the Iranian president didn't do himself any favors when he effectively threw up his hands the other week and announced that he was basically out of ideas for how to address the country's many economic problems. 

The Forever Wars Continue

 Well, the long-telegraphed Trump administration attack on Venezuela has finally come, and it was even more deranged, gratuitous, sadistic, pointless, futile, criminal, bloody and murderous than I had anticipated. 

It has been clear for months at this point that Trump's goons would eventually move to attack Maduro. What I did not expect is that they would conspicuously snub Venezuela's democratic opposition in doing so—even though installing the properly-elected leadership of the country is the only move that could have given even a veneer of specious legitimacy to the action. 

Sanctions and Blockades

 In the emerging literature of apologetics trying to preemptively justify Trump's apparent regime-change operation in Venezuela, it has become standard to speak of the South American country as a "failed state." Which it is, in many respects. But the question is: who made it that way? 

We could speak, as so many pundits do, in vague terms about "economic mismanagement." As further clarified in the news articles, this phrase usually translates to something like: "Venezuela shouldn't have let its economy become so dependent on the single export industry of oil."