The Boston Globe had an article out yesterday about the growing nationwide movement to ban foie gras.
Like a lot of people, I at first assumed this movement was just a bunch of annoying self-righteous busybodies looking for any available moral crusade.
This attitude on my part lasted precisely as long as it took someone to describe to me for the first time what is actually involved in making foie gras.
A New York Times article yesterday surveyed the budding anti-AI movement across the country that has sprung up in the least likely places and brought together people of wildly different ideological persuasions. It seems the days of Captain Swing and Ned Ludd have come again, and chiefly for the same reasons: elites are forging ahead with a technological change that will radically undermine the livelihoods of millions—and they have no clear plan as to how this is all supposed to work out in a way that is tolerable for the human population.
Indeed, the people most involved in developing the new technology openly tell you that it will probably cause massive employment displacement—at least in the short term. Some of the more starry-eyed AI boosters envision that it could soon eclipse the need for human cognitive labor entirely—setting the market value of human brain power at something close to zero.
The New York Times ran an article yesterday looking into just how disastrous Trump's budget cuts to the food stamp program have been for poor families over the past year.
When Trump's "big beautiful bill" passed last summer through the reconciliation process, it cut tens of billions of dollars from the program and introduced a range of new criteria designed to restrict people's eligibility.
Just twenty-four hours before the attempted assassination at the White House Press Correspondents' dinner on Saturday, the U.S. military killed two more unarmed and defenseless people in a strike on a civilian vessel in the Pacific.
Since just the start of April, Trump's administration has carried out at least six such extrajudicial killings, bringing the total number of people he has murdered in these strikes—without charge or trial—to above 180.
Reading any given newspaper this week would furnish you with plenty of examples of the insane malice of this administration.
We talked in the previous post about the DOJ trying to reintroduce firing squads to federal death row.
The Trump administration is also apparently floating plans to deport Afghan refugees from a U.S. military base where they've been living in Qatar to the war-torn state of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Reading through the evening edition of the New York Times last night, it was all too painfully clear that in our world of abysmal chasms between poor and rich—some lives are seen as utterly disposable, others as infinitely precious.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night—as William Blake once put it.
One of Trump's odd-ball riffs that he periodically refers back to is his ongoing contention that he probably isn't going to make it to heaven after death.
"I want to try and get to heaven, if possible;" as he put it; "I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole."
I am fascinated by these right-wing influencers who seem to have suddenly discovered that war crimes are bad. I am happy for them, don't get me wrong. I'm glad that when Trump threatened to annihilate Iranian "civilization," many of these MAGA pundits suddenly discovered that threatening genocide or mass murder against a civilian population is a moral wrong.
But—this was hardly the first time Trump demonstrated a sociopathic disregard for human life—and on all the previous occasions, these same MAGA die-hards were cheering him on.
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.)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.)
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.
At long last, Hungary's "illiberal" quasi-autocratic president Viktor Orban has been voted out of power. Neither the Kremlin's relentless support, nor Orban's capture of civil society and major media organizations in Hungary over the last sixteen years, nor a last ditch effort by J.D. Vance and Donald Trump to intervene in his favor, proved enough to save his campaign. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Orban together again.
Seeing Putin's man in Budapest stripped of power, as ordinary Hungarians defied his relentless pro-Kremlin propaganda in order to vote for European unity, Ukraine, and liberal democracy—I can only think of E.E. Cummings's words:
This morning, I was driving over the George Washington Bridge while listening the latest episode of the Ezra Klein show.
Klein was reminding us on his podcast about some of Trump's recent megalomaniac threats against the people of Iran.
The decision of the Taiwanese opposition leader to meet with China's Xi Jinping yesterday met with foreseeable blowback from the current Taiwanese government—who quickly (if obliquely) portrayed their conversation as appeasement.
"[H]istory tells us that compromising with authoritarian regimes only comes at the cost of sovereignty and democracy, and will not bring freedom or peace," Taiwan's president reportedly said after the meeting, while pressing for more defense spending.
At some point in divinity school, I remember spending a long afternoon brooding over an academic paper about St. Augustine's debate with the Manichees. Slowly, after toiling through all the metaphors and thought experiments (there was a man tied up and forced to wield a sword at one point; that much I recall), I came to understand the "problem" of free will with which Augustine contended.
After all, it has often been proposed in popular apologetics—as a solution to the question of theodicy—that perhaps God does not actively wish us evil (in spite of evidence to the contrary), but rather chose to endow us with free will—and all our suffering stems from that. (Perhaps not our own free will, but that of our first parents—in which case, one has to ask what kind of freedom we inherited, but no matter...)
Trump's threat yesterday to destroy the "whole civilization" of Iran, unless they agreed to his terms for a ceasefire deal, was many things. It was genocidal, for one. If Trump had actually followed through on his threats in a way that had killed or erased a lot of civilian targets, a statement like that would meet anyone's definition of the "intent" requirement under the Genocide Convention.
But was it an implied threat of nuclear annihilation, specifically? I didn't read it that way. I interpreted it as a characteristically (though evilly and irresponsibly) hyperbolic restatement of Trump's earlier threats to attack bridges, power plants, and other civilian infrastructure in Iran (which would be a war crime in any case, even if no nuclear weapons were involved—so I hardly mean to absolve Trump for any of this).
As the Artemis II astronauts completed their loop around the moon this weekend, the news reports were full of descriptions of the sheer awe and wonder the lunar travelers experienced as they beheld the Earth's natural satellite up close.
One astronaut, in her amazement, even coined a new term for the feeling, which quickly went viral: "moon joy."
A video recently went viral, according to the Intercept, of body cam footage showing a small town police officer wrestling a grandmother to the ground at a No Kings protest.
Her crime?
Wearing an inflatable penis costume.
As I was scrolling through the headlines on the New York Times yesterday, the storied paper insisted I pause over one video. The thumbnail showed the lugubrious face of Ross Douthat. The headline below it read: "Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?"
The answer, presumably (given the source) is going to be "yes."
Well, Trump has unveiled his new budget request for the coming fiscal year—and it appears to be a nightmarish exaggeration of a classically evil GOP wish list. It proposes to spend 1.5 trillion more dollars next year on the military, as Trump wages an illegal war of aggression in the Middle East and routinely threatens similar invasions in Latin America.
And how does he propose to pay for this? By slashing safety net programs for the poor, of course.
Those last two books of Bertrand Russell's career—Unarmed Victory (about the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Sino-Indian war) and War Crimes in Vietnam—both written in the tenth and final decade of Russell's life—are both oddball entries in his oeuvre that share a number of eccentricities in common.
I won't say they are my favorite Russell books. They are missing some of the wit and wry humor that are so conspicuous and delightful in the middle phase of his career (though there are still flashes at times of both in the books).
