Are We Guilty?

 Over the summer, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney indelibly (and correctly) said that the U.S. had essentially "attacked" his country in an unprovoked act of trade aggression. "America has changed, [...] and we will not return to our old relationship," he said. 

I was of course entirely with him on the merits. The Trump administration had started harassing Canada, belittling its nationhood, threatening to annex its territory, and using strong-arm trade war tactics to try to force it to cede sovereignty—all totally without provocation. It was and is an insanely gratuitous sabotage of a centuries-old friendship and alliance. 

Acte Gratuit

 I spent a lot of time last month, as part of the reflections around the 25th anniversary of 9/11, trying to pinpoint exactly what the difference was between the Bush and Trump administrations. 

After all, every Trump-era human rights abuse has its rough analogue from the Bush and Obama–led War on Terror. 

"It Doesn't Really Hurt"

 Up there with the notion that "everyone goes to the death chamber with great dignity and decorum," another great myth about capital punishment is that the state can somehow murder people "humanely."

As Arthur Koestler writes in his classic Reflections on Hanging, "the defense of a savage method of execution on the grounds that 'it doesn't really hurt,' is another leitmotif down to our day."

Jejune Sympathies

 A couple weeks ago, the leftist streamer bro Hasan Piker generated yet another round of inevitable headlines when he appeared to imply that the United States is a bigger terrorist than Al Qaeda. 

Obviously, this was a ridiculous question to pose in the first place. These are not commensurable entities. The U.S. is a global power that has existed for two hundred and fifty years, has the largest military budget in the world, and fields troops on every continent. Al Qaeda, meanwhile, has existed for less than a few decades and never had anything close to that reach. 

All Too Human

 One of the greatest sources of confusion in the interminable AI debate is the fact that many of the people building the most sophisticated models also hold a quasi-religious belief in the inevitability of an eventual AI "singularity," which they have long endowed with divine and apocalyptic traits. 

In trying to figure out how seriously to take both their warnings of "existential risk" from AI, as well as their utopian promises of eventual "superabundance" or immortality from the same technology, then, our challenge is constantly to have to figure out how to separate out the scientific from the mythological elements of the way the designers are thinking about their new machine. 

Nightmare Scene

 In his Reflections on the Guillotine, Albert Camus argues that every government that wants to maintain the death penalty should have to conduct all of their executions in public. Indeed, they should broadcast footage of the state murder as widely as possible. 

He argues this because, in the absence of it, the public has no window into what actually happens in the death chamber. This allows the authorities to draw a veil of decorum over the whole hideous proceeding. As Arthur Koestler observes, in his Reflections on Hanging, the officials and the newspapers can talk about the execution in somber tones afterwards, leaving us to believe that all was transacted with the utmost calm and respect. 

Suddenly Surrounded

 Yesterday, driving through the deep South, I was pulled over by someone representing himself as a member of the county sheriff's "counter-narcotics" team. He ended up searching my vehicle, lining up and photographing the covers of some novels and nonfiction political books I had with me in the car, and berating me about going to a protest. 

"Why not just say you're heading to a protest? That's your right. But we've got people trafficking drugs. We've got people trafficking human beings. We've got people trafficking terrorism. Why not just be honest with me? You're going to a protest. Doesn't it feel better to be honest with me? Don't you feel better?"