“Whatever may have been my political opinions before, I have but one sentiment now: that is, we have a government, and laws, and a flag, and they must all be sustained. There are but two parties now: traitors and patriots. And I want hereafter to be ranked with the latter.”
-Ulysses S. Grant
One of my favorite local bands from back in the day.
“Rejecting identity politics doesn’t mean rejecting your own distinct culture. It means that cultural and racial differences shouldn’t be organizing principles.”
– Razib Khan
Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital; that, in fact, capital is the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed—that labor can exist without capital, but that capital could never have existed without labor. Hence they hold that labor is the superior—greatly the superior of capital.
-Abraham Lincoln
I first him read this on the PBS News Hour on Labor Day probably twenty-five years ago. I’ve thought of it every Labor Day since.
“Parochial isolationism requires fantasy, and it’s deadly for others.”
– Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon
I saw this the other day and can’t get it out of my head. I haven’t seen or read White Noise but it squares with the spirit of End Zone.
L.M. Sacacas, Render Unto the Machine:
My present thesis is something like this: The claim or fear that AI will displace human beings becomes plausible to the degree that we have already been complicit in a deep deskilling that has unfolded over the last few generations. Or, to put it another way, it is easier to imagine that we are replaceable when we have already outsourced many of our core human competencies.
Put somewhat differently, the message of the medium we are presently calling AI is the realization that modern institutions and technologies have been schooling people toward their own future obsolescence.
Indeed, we might go further and say that the triumph of modern institutions is that they have schooled us even to desire our own obsolescence. If a job, a task, a role, or an activity becomes so thoroughly mechanical or bureaucratic, for the sake of efficiency and scale, say, that it is stripped of all human initiative, thought, judgment, and, consequently, responsibility, then of course, of course we will welcome and celebrate its automation. If we have been schooled to think that we lack basic levels of latent competence and capability, or that the cultivation of such competencies and capabilities entails too much inconvenience or risk or uncertainty, then of course, of course we will welcome and celebrate the displacement of our labor, involvement, and care.