Culture
Why would we even want immortality?
Whenever I read about someone who sees a technological route to immortality I think about this “ravenous desire for personal immortality” combined with “a total indifference to all that could, on a sane view, make immortality desirable.” So you want a digital imitation of yourself to live on after you die. But why?
A few people have asked me to write more about recent AI endeavors, but here’s the problem: I can’t summon the interest to become sufficiently well-informed. I wrote a bit about the responses of some writers to the opportunity (as they see it) to outsource their work, but I haven’t used ChatGPT or LaMDA or DALL·E or Stable Diffusion or any other recent AI project — and I haven’t used them because the very idea bores me stiff. It’s as simple as that. I just can’t think of a reason to be interested. So instead I’ll do the things that I am interested in. It’s a good policy, I find.
From Alan Jacobs’ compilation of his limited writing on Artificial Intelligence.
Wouldn’t you want to sell?
Is Jeff Bezos trying to sell The Washington Post? It sure looks like the Bezos team is planting stories that the Post is for sale, because his favored publications are saying, well, it’s for sale. Bezos denies these reports. But when I see something in The Daily Mail, I know someone, somewhere, is scheming. (The Daily Mail also seems like the go-to publication for Bezos’ girlfriend Lauren Sanchez, who it frequently describes as stylish and rocking.) If you owned _The Washington Post—_a place with a few great reporters, and then hundreds of screaming activists who hate journalism, hate each other, and hate you—wouldn’t you want to get the hell out? Meanwhile this week, the Post announced layoffs.
French Laziness
I am determined to retire in order to spend what little remains of my life, now more than half run out … consecrated to my freedom, tranquillity, and leisure.
Montaigne, via Are French People Just Lazy?
Books
“I’m very skeptical of books,” he expands. “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you f***ed up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”
Sam Bankman-Fried, quoted by Thomas Chatterton Williams
I have read books that (slight hyperbole) could and should have been 6-paragraph blogs. The authors, however, were paid quite well. Those books make me feel cheated.
I have read books that (slight hyperbole) could have been 6-paragraph blogs, but would have been opaque or misunderstood without unpacking those six tight paragraphs. Once that was worthwhile, usually not.
I have read books that never could have been 6-paragraph blogs because they just keep on delivering good stuff and they trust the reader think through most of the ramifications. Those books are hardest to read, but the most rewarding.
Civilizational conflicts, Ideological conflicts
European governments and publics have largely supported and rarely criticized actions the United States has taken against its Muslim opponents, in striking contrast to the strenuous opposition they often expressed to American actions against the Soviet Union and communism during the Cold War. In civilizational conflicts, unlike ideological ones, kin stand by their kin.
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
Ideology in Disguise
As [Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed] tells it, what happened when the wall fell was not the triumph of freedom over oppression so much as the defeat of one Western ideology by another. The one that came through was the oldest, subtlest and longest-lasting, one which disguised itself so well that we didn’t know it was an ideology at all: liberalism.
Paul Kingsnorth, In This Free World
Antimodernity
To be resolutely ‘anti-modern’ is not to be in any way ‘anti-Western’; on the contrary, it only means making an effort to save the West from its own confusion.
René Guénon Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World
Politics
Bermuda Triangle Party
The G.O.P. should be renamed B.T.P., for Bermuda Triangle Party. Enter it, weird stuff happens, and you go straight to the bottom … George Santos is what you inevitably get once you’ve already normalized Donald Trump, Roy Moore, Lauren Boebert and “Space Laser” Greene.
Vice President Marjorie Taylor Greene?
We’re in a dark place if Donald J. Trump is no longer crazy enough to win a Republican primary without help from someone crazier, but, well, we are in a dark place. The Dispatch wouldn’t exist if we weren’t.
…
The core of hardcore partisanship is the belief that the worst member of your party is preferable to whatever the other party is offering. Trump/Greene would test that faith like few other things could. If you can tolerate helping those two to power, you can tolerate anything in the name of brainless Team Red loyalty.
Nick Cattogio, VP MTG?
When Everything Is Classified, Nothing is Classified
“Everything’s secret,” Michael Hayden, former CIA and NSA director, once said. “I mean, I got an email saying, ‘Merry Christmas.’ It carried a Top Secret NSA classification marking.”
If Mick Mulvaney could get a do-over …
Consensus Winner of Most Embarrassing Op-Ed Ever: If He Loses, Trump Will Concede Gracefully, (Mick Mulvaney, 11/7/2000)
Tradition is a bulwark against the power of commerce and the dissolving acid of money, and by removing these, all revolutions in the modern period have ended up accelerating the commercial and technological shift towards the Machine.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 