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.

Continue reading →

Ross Douthat’s columns often have some thoughtful insights but, more often than not, also incorporate some fundamental misunderstanding of human nature which void his conclusions.  Not here, No Culture for Alienated Men:

There is a lot of talk lately about a crisis of manhood, manifest in statistics showing young men falling behind young women in various indicators of education and ambition, answered from the left by therapeutic attempts to detoxify masculinity and from the right by promises of masculine revival. The root of the problem seems clear enough, even if the solutions are contested: The things that men are most adapted for (or socialized for, if you prefer that narrative, though the biological element seems inescapable) are valued less, sometimes much less, in the peacetime of a postindustrial civilization than in most of the human past.

In a phrase, when we talk about traditional modes of manhood, we’re often talking about mastery through physical strength and the capacity for violence. That kind of mastery will always have some value, but it had more value in 1370 than in 1870 and more in 1870 than it does today. And the excess, the superfluity, must therefore be repressed, tamed or somehow educated away.

Continue reading →

Ted Gioia, The Final Triumph of Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023):

Given the overall tone of society, we need brutal books that shake us up—but those are precisely the ones that publishers don’t want us to read.

We’re living in a paradoxical time. People and events are pushing us to the brink—and in the most ugly ways imaginable. But at the very same time, a pervasive daintiness and primness has taken over the world of books. It’s gotten so bad, that many books for kids are also marketed to grown-ups and vice versa—perhaps the lasting legacy of Harry Potter.

Sometimes I can’t even tell the difference. I start reading an award-winning new book, and ask myself: Is this targeted at me, or an early teen? Welcome to the Namby Pamby Era in fiction.

Just a few days ago, a novelist withdrew her book from publication—because it was set in Russia in the 1930s. This might hurt feelings (of Ukrainians, etc.). So the book got axed. For better or worse, that’s the literary culture in the year 2023. At this rate, we’ll soon have a new ending for War and Peace, with Napoleon returning from Moscow in triumph. Anything else would be indelicate.

This is why the culture wasn’t ready for Cormac McCarthy’s last works. And it’s also why we need them all the more.

Continue reading →

Thomas Chatterton Williams, Don’t Censor Racism Out of the Past:

Creative expression of any quality… must perform several important functions that are not reducible to advocacy—even and perhaps especially when it comes to groups that have been mistreated. Setting aside the idea that intellectuals and artists ought to be free to state even ugly and mistaken sentiments, it is downright odd to presume that any idea conveyed within a work of art benefits from its endorsement. The cliché exists for a reason: Art holds up a mirror to society, one that does not and ought not merely reflect back its most flattering aspects. Through honest engagement with impure reality, we can perceive and also confront our deepest failings.

James Baldwin famously argued that “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Axiomatically, a history of racism that is not preserved cannot be faced. The people and institutions who attempt to wash away all past ugliness are condescending to audiences, and the audiences who accept these erasures are self-infantilizing.

Continue reading →

Following Christ in the Machine Age: A Conversation with Paul Kingsnorth:

We “are all uprooted now,” Kingsnorth writes^[2]:

The rebellion against God manifested itself in a rebellion against creation, against all nature, human and wild. We would remake Earth, down to the last nanoparticle, to suit our desires, which we now called “needs.” Our new world would be globalized, uniform, interconnected, digitized, hyper-real, monitored, always-on. We were building a machine to replace God. …

Out in the world, the rebellion against God has become a rebellion against everything: roots, culture, community, families, biology itself. Machine progress — the triumph of the Nietzschean will—­dissolves the glue that once held us.^[3]

I’ve been reading Kingsnorth for a while – probably about a decade now.  He converted to Orthodox Christianity a few years ago.  It was a choice that I didn’t anticipate.  I read him now both because I’m interested in what he has to say and to better understand what led him to take the path that he has.

Jennifer Ludden, Marisa Peñaloza, Would you live next to co-workers for the right price? This company is betting yes:  [Ed.: Signs of a housing crisis #147]:

When Cook [Medical] announced a year ago that it would build hundreds of homes to sell to employees at below-market prices, [Tommie] Jones was among the first to sign up… Cook’s move isn’t purely philanthropic. As rents and home prices across the U.S. have skyrocketed, more companies are finding it harder to recruit and retain middle-income workers. Record-high job openings and low unemployment have made the competition worse, fueling staff shortages.  So a growing number of employers around the country have decided to build their own housing for workers, mostly for them to rent but sometimes to buy…. Cook is offering these homes to employees at below-market prices. It’s an incredible opportunity for Jones, who has been with the company nearly four years and — with extra pay for the swing shift and her work as a trainer — makes just over $20 an hour.

Continue reading →

Kenneth Chang, New Mars Map Lets You ‘See the Whole Planet at Once’:

A new global map of Mars offers a fresh perspective on the planet.

The map, released earlier this month, was pieced together from 3,000 pictures taken by the United Arab Emirates’ Hope spacecraft, and it shows the red planet in its true light.

Greg Jaffe and  Patrick Marley, In a thriving Michigan county, a community goes to war with itself:

The eight new members of the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners had run for office promising to “thwart tyranny” in their lakeside Michigan community of 300,000 people.  In this case the oppressive force they aimed to thwart was the county government they now ran…. The new commissioners… swore their oaths of office on family Bibles. And then the firings began. Gone was the lawyer who had represented Ottawa County for 40 years. Gone was the county administrator who oversaw a staff of 1,800. To run the health department, they voted to install a service manager from a local HVAC company who had gained prominence as a critic of mask mandates….

Derek Thompson, America Fails the Civilization Test: Continue reading →

Jamelle Bouie, Harlan Crow, Clarence Thomas’s Benefactor, Is Not Just Another Billionaire:

When we want to memorialize an atrocity or a crime – when we want to remember the consequences and costs of evil – we focus on the victims… You won’t find a statue of Osama bin Laden at ground zero…

I don’t know what is in Crow’s heart. But he is a wealthy man. He is a powerful man. And power is attracted to power… Does Crow secretly admire these figures of his fascination? Probably not. But he doesn’t seem to understand them, either. He doesn’t respect the weight and meaning of the histories in question.  What Crow has done is trivialize them. He has made them objects of curiosity. He has stripped them of specificity; they are meant to represent evil at its most generic and abstract…

To gaze at your collection of tokenized evil is to separate yourself from the perpetrators and their victims. It is to tell yourself — consciously or, more likely, subconsciously — that there’s nothing you could do to ever be like them.

Or so you hope.

Susan Neiman, There Are No Nostalgic Nazi Memorials: Continue reading →

Matthew Walther, What the Owner of an AR-15 Sees in Every Single Place He Goes:

Understanding the cultural appeal of AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles like those used in Nashville may not be as urgent a matter as the policy question concerning their availability. Indeed, though I generally support gun rights, I favor imposing restrictions on the manufacture and ownership of AR-15-style weapons. But the problem is deeper than the guns themselves — not just the existence of the evil people who pull the triggers but also the specific place these weapons occupy in American life and the logic by which their ownership seems justifiable to enthusiasts.

The AR-15 is situated at the intersection of a relatively innocent hobbyism and the sinister mainstreaming of features of the militia culture of the 1990s, even among people who lead law-abiding lives.

Nadya Williams, Updating Homer for Sensitive Modern Readers: A Tongue-in-Cheek Proposal:

As noted in the title, this essay is intended to be tongue-in-cheek. As a historian of the ancient world, I assure you that there is absolutely no way to sanitize antiquity properly to respect anyone’s sensibilities. The pre-Christian Greco-Roman Mediterranean, in particular, was a world filled with horrific abuses that are almost unimaginable for us, except that they are well-documented in our sources. And that is the point. Both the literary and historical past exist not for the purpose of making anyone comfortable, but to challenge us, as people living in a particular time and culture, to continue to learn about and from the human experience.

David Ho, Carbon dioxide removal is not a current climate solution — we need to change the narrative: Continue reading →

Mac Bryan, Maryland Campaign Medal of Honor Series: James Allen, 16th New York Infantry:

Born in Ireland, Pvt. James Allen mustered into service with Company F of the 16^th New York Regiment on April 24, 1861 at Potsdam, in upstate New York at the tender age of 17. During Allen’s enlistment his regiment participated in all the battles of the Army of the Potomac from First Bull Run to Chancellorsville, until his term of service expired in 1863.

Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker, Iraq Veterans, 20 Years Later: ‘I Don’t Know How to Explain the War to Myself’.  “Nearly 20 years after their deployment to Iraq, veterans grapple with their younger selves and try to make sense of the war.”

Driftglass with the appropriate response to David Brooks, Nostradumbass Returns to Form: The Ongoing Adventures of David Brooks:

So since the Sulzberger family continues to pay Mr. David Brooks an obscene amount of money to extrude the same steaming logs of Beltway insider claptrap over and over again, decades after decade, I see no reason why we shouldn’t amuse ourselves by repurposing some of it to create an equally plausible and much more satisfying fairy tale about how the Republican primary Cocaine Bear Lane is wide open and how one of several, promising American Cocaine Bears could jump into that lane and perhaps ride it all the way to the Republican nomination!

Continue reading →