Opinions, art, debate
I can experience great tolerance for all kinds of people. But these cheerful morons drive me up a wall:
I hated then when I was on the left and that feeling remains unchanged now that I’m on the right.
No matter how many deaths of despair the destruction of work brings, there’s always some bright-eyed bimbo prattling excitedly about “liberating our true potential” by way of being excised from productive life.
People who are happy that AI will destroy “useless laptop jobs” are not smart. Do they really want the disciplinary regime we all experienced in 2020-2023 to be imposed by machines?
When my father died, I went to Canada and broke the COVID regime. A government employee started calling to hassle me. I told her, I’m here to bury my father. I can’t quarantine indoors. And I heard her voice break. I heard genuine human compassion for my loss. I wasn’t hassled after that and could do everything I needed. She probably had to remove me from the baddie list and committed an infraction to help me.
Do we really want to have machines do this instead? Leave no sliver into which human solidarity can penetrate? We want to leave ourselves completely without options so that woke Jack Dorsey can add another billion to his fortune and install an algorithm to punish us for transgressing the speech codes he happens to find pleasing? Are we nuts?
There’s a trillion things I manage to do in my work, bypassing the impersonal regulations, because I go to talk in person to a young guy or a middle-aged woman with a “useless laptop job”. Laptops are not the important part of their jobs. That they are human is what makes things work.
This is a great question. Thank you for asking it! I love these excellent questions I get in the Q&A.
In order to start a nuclear war, you need to be a fanatic. You need to believe in your cause to the extent where you’d make huge sacrifices for it, possibly even die.
By the time nuclear weapons were invented, there were no such fanatics in the USSR. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, there were fewer believers in communism in the USSR than there are Trump supporters at the meeting of specialists in “gender-affirming medicine.” Not among the regular people and most certainly not among the leadership of the country would you be able to find anybody who believed in the victory of international proletariat.
It was World War II that killed communist idealism. Soviet soldiers saw Europe. They saw that even the devastated, bombed out Europe had a standard of living nobody in the USSR could imagine. People who were evacuated deep into the country discovered such depths of materialism and corruption that they got cured of any communist belief forever.
In the 1970s and 1980s, there were many, and I mean MANY, more sincere communist believers in the US than in the USSR. Soviet people were plunged into extreme materialism. Materialistic people don’t want a nuclear holocaust. They want TVs, washers, and furniture.
The West suffered back then from the exact same incapacity to comprehend people in the region as it does now. Westerners imagined hordes of commie fanatics ready to erase civilization in service of an idea. But the Soviet problem was the exact opposite of a powerful ideology. It was the incapacity to take any idea seriously that was the real issue. It was the extreme cynicism of people who have soured on the very concept of an idea and a belief. You can imagine what the arrival of capitalism did to such people. One can be very happy in capitalism as long as one has an organizing idea beyond wanting to acquire material objects. But if you don’t, it destroys you.
Matt Walsh released a video debunking Candace Owens’ conspiracy theories about Erika Kirk. I admire it as I would any doomed, quixotic endeavor because he’s trying to present a rational argument to people who are engulfed in emotion and can’t engage in rational thought.
“There’s just something not right about this Erika” and “it just doesn’t feel right” is what they will repeat dumbly to any argument. These are the emotionally incontinent people I keep talking about. They worship their emotions and have never heard of the proposition that feeling can be wrong. Those who have no mechanisms of emotional self-regulation have an impoverished emotional range. They oscillate between primitive pleasure and resentful suspiciousness. This is an addictive combo that has a similar effect to smoking and drinking alcohol at the same time. Trying to engage the rational side of an emotional junkie is useless.
All of these people are in the process of being “liberated” from their jobs by AI.
Jack Dorsey just fired half his company because of AI, yet people are still blethering on about fertility rates.
Today in the car Klara and I were memorizing lines from Scripture for her Memory lesson. They have Memory every day, and as a result, she now probably knows more Scripture by heart than I do. Outside of religious considerations, I can say as a literary critic that there’s no better exercise for literacy and the capacity to appreciate great works of literature than this. It would be much easier for me to teach if my students knew their Bible. It’s tiresome to have to explain Cain and Abel every time I teach Unamuno, for example. One keeps wishing for some basic level of shared culture when one teaches.
Tomorrow, Klara’s class is performing an operetta for which they memorized some lines in Greek. This gave me an opening to talk about antiquity and Greek roots of some words.
This kind of school does make sense. It’s not AI’s fault that in many places school has been perverted through the use of education fads and application of inane ideology. You can make school useful. It’s not hard. Simply throw away all the fads and go back to the basics.
I asked AI to create 20 fill-in-the-blanks sentences to practice a grammar concept in Spanish.
Out of the 20, I had to throw away 6 because they illustrated a completely different concept.
Out of the remaining 14, eight needed heavy editing.
Three more needed light editing.
In the end, I spent slightly more time rewriting than it would have taken me to do the whole thing myself.
On the subject of AI, here’s a disturbing news item:
The next step is to put headsets on professors to see how many woke slogans they emit during class times. You can set a goal and punish everybody who doesn’t reach it.
In times of epochal transformations, change happens gradually. The only place where you can observe dramatic change is the language. That is why philologists are the first to notice it. Others only begin to notice when it’s too late.
Arkady Belinkov.
After the State of the Union, I once again started hearing the argument that Iryna Zarutska’s murder is being “politicized.” This is a misuse of the term that I want to address.
You cannot politicize something that is already by its nature a political issue. We seek political redress to the cause of the murder because it is unavailable through any other means. We seek a change in the criminal justice system that will culminate in isolating from society people with a lengthy history of arrests. This is not unprecedented. California had a very successful three-strikes law that, before it was effectively destroyed, provided a life sentence for the third felony crime whatever it was, even if that crime by itself did not merit a life sentence.
The issue now is whether it is justified to impose a life sentence on people who represent a habitual danger to society. Before murdering Iryna, Decarlos Brown had been arrested 14 times. Was that enough to put him in jail permanently? What about criminals with 30 arrests? 40 arrests? Should there be a limit on how much disorder at the hands of a single individual society is willing to tolerate?
It’s not unreasonable to argue that no, there shouldn’t be a limit, and every crime should be treated in isolation from what preceded it. It is also not unreasonable to argue the opposite. This is a discussion that must happen because it’s crucial to the life of the polity. Thus, by its nature it’s political.
Let’s abandon the approach that some things should not be discussed and should be left outside the realm of political discourse. Silencing concern does not lead in a good direction.
Did you hear that medal winners at the winter Olympics were given plushies in addition to medals?
Matt Walsh had a whole segment about why it was done but never mentioned the explanation that to me is obvious.
Corruption.
One of the organizer has a relative who sells plushies. This was a way to kick back a large sum ostensibly in payment for the toys.
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