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I am just starting to read a "most highly anticipated book of 2026" based on a recommendation from a local "political" bookstore's almost daily spam newsletter I am on a mailing list for. The topic is the basis of force of International Law. I had not anticipated the book personally, nor had I heard of the author, a professor at an elite Northeastern college. But the topic sounded a bit irresistible to me in light of current events-- and in a book highly anticipated by someone no less-- so I snapped it up. Already on reading the Introduction, alarm bells are going off. The introduction indicates that the Nuremberg Trials will be a focus, which makes sense, but as for contemporary topics, while it makes reference to Putin's aggression against Ukraine, there is not one mention of Gaza. Since it was Gaza that motivated my interest in the topic to begin with, I ask myself, what can be said of a book on the topic of international law published rather deep into 2026 that does not promise in its introduction to treat the issue of Gaza? I start to wonder, is this going to be the at least one book per year I have been told I should try to read that I do not agree with?
I don't remember where I came across this piece of advice about one's reading habits-- it seems likely to have come from Current Affairs editor Nathan J Robinson or someone like that-- but I do remember my distaste for the idea when it was proposed to me. I don't think it should be much of a challenge to imagine why a very prolific reader would suggest such a thing. It can't be a bad thing to expose yourself to the caliber of thought of influential people you disagree with. Challenging your beliefs strengthens your own argument on the theory that what does not kill my principles makes them stronger. But the thought of deliberately putting myself through the exercise of trying to stomach the literary voice of a Bill O'Reilly, an Ezra Klein or an Ann Coulter makes me gag. I couldn't see myself doing it as a matter of habit. But as my habit demands a steady stream of new titles to read, I would keep it in mind.
What happened instead was that the advice became a guidepost for me for those instances I was already familiar with of finding myself in the middle of reading a book I had innocently "anticipated" for some preconceived notion that turned out to be something else-- rather like what I am now preparing myself for with the book on International Law that I'm currently reading. In short, it is now my firmly established habit that while I won't generally seek out titles I expect to disagree with for the purposes recommended by whoever introduced me to the concept of the intentional annual hate read, when I find myself in the middle of one I will finish reading it on the basis that it will satisfy the ideal quota.
For instance, last year, probably on the basis of a recommendation from the very same political bookstore's newsletter, I leapt on Breakneck, by Canadian tech writer Dan Wang on the topic of China's intention to dominate engineering at which it is largely succeeding. I came across the title fresh from learning about the Chinese version of AI which reportedly actually does machine learning with far fewer resources than the over-hyped American vaporware version, as well as the electric vehicle from Chinese car company BYD models of which can be purchased for less than $20,000 wherever they are allowed in the market, and which can be fully charged in the time it takes to fill a gas tank. I expected some journalism about what made Chinese innovation possible and how it could be emulated in the United States, and failing that support for the idea of liberating the US market for Chinese products. I did not expect a whiny echo of Ezra Klein's neo-liberal Abundance bullshit, which is what I got. Had it not been for the Hate Read quota, I might have abandoned it close to the jump, but I soldiered through. If nothing else, I got some value for the bucks I spent on it.
A very similar experience occurred reading the much vaunted collaboration of emeritus Princeton economics professors (and real life husband and wife) Anne Case and Sir Angus Beaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. This was a book that had been mentioned in several recent titles I had read that had earned my respect. In finally undertaking the filling in of this gap in my personal bibliography, I was focused on the first half of the title, a reference to the phenomenon of suicides, overdoses and other avoidable deaths due to neglect and lack of healthcare among the largest poorest percentiles of Americans. I was not keyed into the puzzling emphasis on the second half of the title, the preservation of Capitalism in spite of the epidemic of desperate deaths. Nothing could have prepared me, given the severity of the problem discussed for Case and Beaton's insistence that Medicare for All was not part of the solution, but rather that what was needed was more capitalism. In light of its obtuse insistence on Capitalism as not only the cause but the cure of the epidemic, it never fails to surprise me that the bulk of references to the book that I come across in readings to this day do not mention this gaping flaw.
A little more in keeping with the Hate Read Quota, I purposely selected Dirtbag by Amber A'Lee Frost a couple of years ago when it came out. It's a collection of memoir-flavored essays about her brand of irreverent leftist politics as could be encountered via her writings for Jacobin, Current Affairs and other leftist journals and particularly her semi-regular hosting of the Chapo Trap House podcast with Will Menaker, Matt Christman, Felix Bederman and (formerly) Virgil Texas. I have been edified by Frost's formerly fresh perspective on multiple occasions over the years, but had become impatient with the growing pre-occupation with Democrat Derangement Syndrome at least in my sparser and sparser encounters with the dirtbag scene, and what once seemed fresh has now taken on a patina of stale. Pre-COVID it was impossible not to trip over members of the Trap House in any casual surfing for leftist media online, but as my own quest for a leftism I can live (and hope) with post Bernie Sanders has developed over time, I am finding the Dirtbag left, outside of some overlap with my own orientations, to be a mostly empty pose. My last encounter with Frost was in a discussion around the launch of her book in which she reveled in the disgust she felt for the earnest sincerity of Greta Thunberg. Having nothing else lined up at the time and knowing that Frost's style would at least be palatable and might occasionally be entertaining I took the plunge. As I expected, the charm of the Dirtbag approach had worn off for me. Beware of being trapped in a pose. You might get stuck that way.
I was introduced to former New Republic editor Martin Peretz's The Controversialist by an essay by the Nation's Jeet Heer (himself a former writer for New Republic) who highly recommended it for its fascinating "unreliable narrator" view of the devolution of a leftist into neo-conservatism. Peretz had gone through a period of disgrace following the disaster of the Iraq War that he pushed aggressively in the pages of his magazine and had written the memoir to explain himself and to make an attempt at another few moments in the conversation. True to Heer's word, it was a fun read. It was clear to me that from the start what Peretz had always been was a Zionist first and foremost. Any beliefs that contradicted that stance had had to be jettisoned along the way and at the end of a long career of contrary refinement, Zionism was essentially all that was left.
Am I about to face something similar with the book I'm reading? I don't know but I am itching to find out.
While we are on an extended vacation we retroactively present Atarashii Gakko with their hit Pineapple Kryptonite. Thank you for your understanding.
Imagine a system of thought that not only tells you that your Truth is privileged, but that holds that your affluence has been justified by Rationality. Imagine a world view in which elaborations of the extent of wealth inequality between percentiles of the national, let alone global, population can be dismissed as missing the point that greater wealth overall means that more people (perhaps including yourself and those intelligent enough to call themselves your readers) are living better, happier longer lives today than possible in the remote past. The plight of the most poor though real according to this world view is still an improvement over poverty that existed before the skyrocket of wealth among the wealthiest nations engendered by industrial innovations of the past 200 years. And never mind that inequality of incomes and outcomes might be exacerbated by the damages inflicted on the parts of the world where the poorest live in service of extracting the resources demanded for sustaining growth in the wealthiest parts of the world. It is a mistake according to this system of belief to measure the success of a society in terms of how far short it falls from an "unattainable" ideal of equality; it should be measured instead against the extent to which its enlightened cleverness has increased its distance in aggregate from a dismal past.
This world view overlooks the fact that beyond your affluent neighborhood people are struggling, because you hardly need statistics to tell you that your storybook world is direct evidence that wealth has actually increased, and your own abundant happiness is itself evidence that wealth contributes to an increase of happiness in the world. You insist that the $3 per day that the most miserable percentile along whom you inhabit the earth live on is hundreds of percentages more than the pennies their even more miserable forebears made do with (and more evidence in itself that life has become better globally since your world view took sway), although this may be what blinds you to the trifling problems of the poorest of your own country who are tens of times wealthier with access to goods and services such as smart phones and televisions, cars and refrigerators that the most miserable can't even dream of owning in the poorest parts of the world. Notions of injustice in this worldview are really a blindness to how fortunate we all are in the aggregate even if some of us are vastly more fortunate than others. But don't take your word for it, this is science we're talking about. This is the enlightenment and the wisdom of the market, inventions of a clever group of mostly men, mostly pale rich men, mere centuries ago.
How do you imagine someone with this world view might perceive global warming? You would be right if you imagined that this person would both acknowledge the healthy nature of the challenge as well as pooh pooh those who fret about it and urge drastic change rather than merely trust that more cleverness from the smart, enlightened class that caused it and that daily exacerbates it will address it as needs to address it arise.
Why take his word for it, though, even if it is backed up by rigorous statistical analysis of the data? Because he is a scientist. He has advanced degrees in cognitive psychology and linguistics.* He teaches at Harvard. He lives in Boston. He is a best selling author of good genetic stock.
What do you got?
~~~~~
* On which topics, read him.
I made some revisions:
1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation. It must return all of its gains to a public commons and put an end to itself.
2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps Tech Bros. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible.
3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of the elites of Western culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class will be forgiven only if that is unforgiveable. The culture that replaces the criminal elite of technofeudalism as soon as we are able to put an end to it shall succeed only if it is capable of delivering economic growth and security for what the public and the planet needs.
4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software. It requires us to get along with each other and with everyone and everything we share the planet with such that we all prevail TOGETHER.
5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed. We must criminalize AI weaponry technology worldwide and confiscate its funding and its profits to be redirected toward fulfilling human needs and toward planetary restoration to undo the harms that made it possible.
6. National Planetary and community service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving move away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost. There is no need for war if we are all engaged in the human and planetary struggle.
7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm's way. No war.
8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive. We must replace electoral politics with representatives and leaders scientifically randomly selected from among all of us to represent each of us for short, non-consecutive terms. Truly government of, for and by the people is the only way out of the mess bought and sold electoral politics has made and enabled.
9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret. See Number 8.
10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed. See Number 8
11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice. We need to learn to disagree intelligently. We are not enemies. We are just sisters and brothers who can, must and will get along.
12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin. We need to expand our sense of possibilities and find room within them for peace, for the meeting of human needs and for the enabling of truly meaningful and inclusive human and planetary flourishing in all of their varieties at every step.
13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet. The Global North and West, through cultures of unique rudeness and gall, disproportionately benefit from the world's resources due to remorseless exploitation of the Global South. Our elite academies have been built in the Global North and West to produce a body of learning that excuses this. We must redress these imbalances once and for all. There is enough wisdom and intelligence in this world (including even, believe it or not, in suppressed , neglected and ignored patches of the Global North and West) to figure out how to accomplish this rebalancing without further harm to the planet or punishing those undeserving of punishment and with enough urgency, strength and righteousness of purpose to force recalcitrant resisters of the formerly dominant classes to come cooperatively along.
14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war. See Number 13.
15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia. See Number 13.
16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk's interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn. The concept of the market and the grand tales that are told around it are fables that serve the purpose of the marketeers. We need to re-orient the production of goods to the meeting of needs. A place of not necessarily remunerated honor can be maintained for those individuals or groups who direct (with our consent and via public ownership of the means) the production of goods thanks to the best ideas and inspiration.
17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives. There will be less "crime" in a world where needs are met. We must replace the criminal justice method of responding to injustices with a system of restorative justice.
18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.
19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all. Billionaires fucking suck. Since 1990, the world's wealthiest 10% have caused twice as much global warming as the bottom 90% and the smaller the top percentile the worse the violation. A society that does not ban wealth hoarding is not serious about surviving.
20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite's intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim. See Number 8.
21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful. See Number 13.
22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what? The future we need but that our bad habits have kept us from is possible, and making it happen has never been more crucial. We are plural. We are singular. We walk into the future together or alone. Together is better.
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| Images of identical strangers curated by François Brunelle in a collection called I'm not a Look-Alike. |
Language currency dictates that the shorthand for Americans to refer to the ownership of the geopolitical and military activities of the United States government is "We." As alienated as Americans are from the activities of the government in general, and this administration in particular, it's a reflex to complain about "we", "us', "our president", "our war", "our hegemony". I don't know about you but I had nothing to do with it and if I felt any true responsibility for it, I would disown it. But in spite of the benefit to the warring classes of the reflexive use of "we" by Americans who are excluded from any say in the way the US government and its military conduct themselves in this world-- regardless of whom their votes elect-- the benefit is a built in unmerited self-implication in the guilt: we were never consulted and our opinions would never be heeded. This is the nature of the government we find ourselves subject to. According to polls, we do not approve of it, and yet that fact and, thanks to Trump's inflation, an arm-and-a-leg will get you a cup of coffee.
What kind of world do we want to build?
More to the point: Who is 'We'?
This is a question that anyone who is interested in the future of the planet must take seriously. For many, we is of course the community, the nation, the hemisphere, the species, the planet. In reality, American society in particular indulges the worst predilections—the predilections that privilege the worst most diseased people. When there is blame to go around, "We" is to blame. We allow the greedy to get rich. We allow the rich to lie to us and have their way with the only planet we've ever known. We allow the powerful to police us (and even worse to police themselves). We allow police to deprive us of our freedom. These are indulgences that we give without thought.
We sound culpable, and yet any less than superficial analysis will reveal that the "We" who passively let the worst have their way with the world are absent from the pronoun. There is no us there doing the letting. The worst do not ask our permission. They do not burden us with a choice of how we are to survive. They simply employ us as they wish in return for the meager means to prolong our survival into tomorrow's labor pool.
There was once a prevailing sense of community that mitigated the order we found ourselves in on gaining consciousness of the world. Community educated us and involved us. It got many of us organized in the workplace, and to some extent at the polls. That decayed particularly rapidly in the 1980's with the rise of Reaganism and Thatcherism, the twin brands of Neoliberalism. It was Margaret Thatcher who tolled the death knell by declaring, "There is no such thing as society." Her words marked the open race to enclose every last commons for corporate profit. There was no turning back. Government was rapidly re-oriented from community and commonality to the principle that individuals were responsible for their own predicaments and that no function of government was too sacred to be privatized. Billionaires were simply individuals who wanted the success available to all badly enough to work for it. The poor by behaving imprudently were choosing poverty for themselves. Employers were not obligated to care for their workers-- they were paying their workers to be ambitious enough to care for them. Employment was not for life, but "at will". Your co-workers were not comrades but competition. You were expendable. Contrary to the fiction that each individual was responsible for the circumstances we all found ourselves in, the hard reality for those beholden to employers for their sustenance was that every individual was an island in a hostile sea, an atom cast adrift in a void. No such thing as society meant no such thing as "We". Collective impact on the world being impossible in this collective-less world, activism now extended only as far as individual performance characterized by bumper sticker self-expression and "ethical" shopping.
It took a financial disaster caused by the reckless abandon of the elite to cause stirrings of consciousness of how far we had fallen from our ability to come together to reclaim our shared destiny. "Change we can believe in." turned out to be a lie, but "We are the 99%" became a rallying cry that woke some of us from our slumber. It inspired the Presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders who re-introduced us to the concept of "Not me. Us." The stifling of the pandemic of Social Democracy in 2020 was throat clearing for the elite handling of the COVID pandemic. When Social Democracy threatened to bring us together in solidarity, COVID atomized us again. We have not recovered. Social media consolidates the commons-suffocating impulses of the right and it fragments the many warring strands of the left. The right gains ground in spite of its inherent unpopularity. Meanwhile, the left can only bicker over the tattering of what's left of the planet and of Us.
What is to become of us? May we relearn how to find out together.
~~~~~
An antidote to the dissolution is Naomi Klein's Döppelganger and particularly its ultimate chapter: Unselfing.
In a Twitter post (or X or whatever), Shaun Maguire, a 41 year old venture capitalist with Sequoia Capital and advisor to Trump wondered aloud: "How did we get to the point Where (sic) so many Americans are rooting against America?" Ryan Grim offered this response:
If this is an honest question, I'd say: Americans are rooting against America because we facilitated a genocide and followed it with a surprise attack on a girls elementary school followed by attacks on universities, medical centers, more schools, a world famous pharmaceutical research center, a volleyball team, an unfinished bridge we claimed was transporting weapons and then a nuclear power plant. We are now promising endless attacks on civilian infrastructure.
We are hunting and targeting anyone who might be involved in ceasefire negotiations.
Most people do not pay enough attention to have absorbed all the propaganda about the U.S. and Iran. So people coming to this fresh see us for what we are: absolute monsters. And monsters must be stopped. That's why people are rooting against us and for civilization to prevail.
To which I would add, who are the traitors here? The American people, or the "President" who was apparently blackmailed by Israel into conducting an illegal war against a county that not only was not attacking us but that after at least 2 other unprovoked attacks by this President including most recently the murder of a general by bomb last summer, was prepared (and expecting) to enter into talks with the US and Israel that very day but was besieged by deadly weapons instead. Without consulting Congress or making even a gesture of an attempt to persuade or seek buy-in from the American people (which given the shaky foundations of this bellicose Administration's motives would have been fruitless anyway). Is it the people who were not asked or informed (to this day) about the intentions, let alone the reasons for engaging in this war, or is it the "President" whose reckless conduct of this purposeless assault on a non-threatening country has already deeply damaged the American economy and threatens very much to engender a global depression that is likely to dwarf the one a century ago. Who is the traitor? The answer was recently unilaterally glued onto the front end of the Kennedy Center.
The firm I work for has been aggressively pushing employees to find ways to use generative AI -- particularly OpenAI's Chat GPT, Anthropic's Claude and GitHub's Copilot-- as much as possible in their work. When you buy a hammer, it's usually because you have something you want to nail. With AI, it's as if the hammer purchaser now insists that everyone in the household find ways to incorporate the hammer into their daily tasks. How can a hammer help you wash those dishes? Could anything be nailed or clawed when you walk the dog? The message from the Executive suite has been so consistently insistent that it seems there is a decided effort amongst them to pretend that an employee's natural curiosity to know "WHY" one' s work habits must be re-designed by one to accommodate what should be a tool doesn't exist. I figured i was never going to get an answer from any of the geniuses upstairs, so I asked AI itself: Why are companies "expecting" employees to use AI without explaining why?
Companies are pushing AI adoption without clear, detailed explanations because they are operating under intense competitive pressure to achieve rapid efficiency gains, often driven by a "fear of missing out" (FOMO) and the need to justify heavy investment costs. While many leaders view this transition as an inevitable "partner" to employees, the rush to implement tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot often results in top-down mandates that lack necessary training or a clear "why" for daily operations.
Here is a breakdown of why companies are acting this way:
1. Competitive Pressure and FOMO
• The Hype Cycle: Management is bombarded with information that AI is a "game-changer," leading them to implement it quickly to avoid appearing obsolete, often without fully understanding the practical applications themselves.
• Competitor Fear: Companies fear that if their competitors adopt AI faster, they will lose market leadership and revenue.
• Investor Pressure: Companies are investing heavily in AI and must prove to shareholders that these investments are being used, prompting them to mandate usage to drive up adoption metrics.
2. "Performative" or Rushed Adoption
• Mistaking Efficiency for Productivity: Many organizations equate AI "usage" with "productivity," wrongly assuming that simply using the tool equals better results.
• The Sunk-Cost Fallacy: Having spent massive amounts on AI licenses, leaders feel compelled to force staff to use them, regardless of whether they add immediate value, hoping the technology will improve over time.
3. Misguided Focus on Cost Reduction
• Cover for Cost-Cutting: Some companies are using AI as a strategic justification for layoffs or to avoid hiring, replacing human headcount with automation.
• Overestimating Current Capability: Leaders often rely on hype and assume AI can do more than it actually can, leading to scenarios where staff are forced to use tools that are not yet effective for their specific roles.
4. A Disconnect Between Leadership and Staff
• The "Training Gap": A recent AWS report noted that 56% of organizations have AI plans, but only 31% of workers feel their employer provides training, demonstrating a major gap in preparing staff for the shift.
• Lack of Understanding: Executives often lack awareness of the practical, day-to-day training needs of their employees, leading to a "tool push" rather than a true adoption strategy.
5. Hope for Self-Directed Learning
• Assuming Organic Adoption: Many leaders mistakenly assume that because AI tools are "easy" to use, employees will figure them out on their own, not realizing that proper implementation requires new workflows and training.
Disclaimer: Some companies are now moving from encouragement to mandating AI, with firms like Coinbase taking disciplinary action against employees who fail to adopt AI, which has increased employee anxiety and resistance.
I couldn't have said it better myself. I was inspired to see what AI had to say on the topic by a recent video from Senator Bernie Sanders in which he chats with Anthropic's Claude AI model about the implications and portents of the explosion of AI for workers and for humanity. The atmospheric setting for the video is evocative of stark sci-fi horror and appropriately so: Claude's candor about the threat it poses is at times chilling. It's also a bit fictional.*
While watching Naomi Klein in conversation with author Karen Hao at British Columbia's Chan Center for the Performing Arts about Hao's sensational 2025 investigation Empire of AI (in an extremely worthwhile hour and a half that I cannot recommend highly enough), I was inspired again by Bernie's AI Chat to ask Google the following:
How is it ethical to use generative AI given its profoundly deleterious environmental effects, its unacknowledged exploitation of people, the way it is hyped as being something it is not, and the race that some of the worst actors in commerce are engaged in to win the AGI race?
The results were led off with an AI summary of the response:
AI Overview
Using generative AI ethically is challenging due to high energy/water consumption, exploitation of training data and human labor, potential for misinformation, and the competitive "AGI race" prioritizing profit over safety. Ethical use requires high transparency, opting for models trained with consent, and strict limits on usage, according to perspectives from Medium, TechTarget, and Earth.Org.
Environmental Impact: Training and operating AI models require massive energy and water for cooling, often straining local resources and increasing carbon emissions.
Exploitation of Labor/Data: AI systems are often trained on massive amounts of data scraped without consent, including copyrighted creative works. Additionally, they rely on "invisible labor" from low-wage workers, often in the Global South, for labeling and moderation.
Misinformation and Hype: Generative AI is frequently marketed as more autonomous or intelligent than it is, leading to inaccuracies (hallucinations) and a lack of accountability.
The AGI Race: The commercial race to achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) causes companies to prioritize speed over safety, ignoring potential harms.
Strict Use Cases: Only using AI as a tool for support, not to replace human judgment, creative work, or to generate misinformation.
Transparency and Consent: Selecting models that offer transparency about their training data and ensure fair compensation for creators.
Data Security: Ensuring no confidential or personal information is entered into public AI tools to prevent exploitation of user data.
Regulation: Urging for, and abiding by, new legal frameworks that require accountability, accountability for environmental impact, and protection for labor.
Some argue that because of the foundational issues with how these models are developed, truly "ethical AI" does not currently exist, as noted in a WIRED article and a blog post by Matthew Cheney.
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Should we trust AI's (copped) opinion on the question? Either AI is wrong here-- in which case it proves the point that AI cannot be used in any way that requires trust in its output-- or it's not. And if it is right in spite of itself, the ethical use of AI is questionable for the very reasons it states.
~~~~~
*Ed Zitron's skepticism of AI's prospects as game changer are based on the state of its actual business versus the hype of its claims.
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| Henry Agard Wallace |
When it comes to political celebrities, they don't make them like they used to. Reading Clay Risen's Red Scare, I was introduced to a figure from the 1948 US Presidential election, FDR's second vice president (serving in this third term from 1941 - 1945), Henry Agard Wallace. FDR chose Wallace after a falling out with the VP of his first two terms, conservative Texan John Nance Garner. From Risen's chapter on him, Wallace was "a curious cornstalk of a man from Iowa.":
He was born on a farm in 1888, the son of Henry C. Wallace, the U.S. secretary of agriculture for much of the 1920s. Young Henry was a wizard of the land and all its bounty. He studied agriculture at Iowa State University, then went to work for his family’s publication, Wallaces’ Farmer. He became known around the Midwest for his uncanny ability to meld science and economics, business and old-school farming smarts into new insights that helped him grow wealthy—as it did many of his readers, who followed his prescriptions religiously. On the side he founded a seed business, the Hi-Bred Corn Company, producing highly efficient hybrid crops. He held on to it through his decades in politics; at the end of his life, in 1965, it was estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars.
“You feel that he would not tell you the time of day without first searching his soul to see if it agreed with the clock,” read a profile in The New York Times.”
I was not aware of Wallace's challenge to Harry Truman, who as FDR's 3rd Vice President had succeeded Roosevelt when he died in office barely 3 months into his fourth term and was now, having terminated the second World War by dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, seeking re-election. Following the defeat of Germany with the close collaboration of Stalin, the winds of favor toward communism and the Soviet Union in the United States government had shifted dramatically, and the haberdasher from Missouri, Truman had been just the man to ride the current. Keeping ahead of the anti-Red sentiment that was winning elections for Republicans, Truman initiated a Loyalty Oath and background checks for over 2 million government employees-- mandating the termination (and often ruining the careers) of employees refusing the oath or found to have had communist affiliations and influences in their histories.
In Congress, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (popularly known as the House Un-American Activities Committee or HUAC) became a permanent committee under Democratic leadership. It had been around in one form or another since 1918 when it was formed as a bulwark against subversive European ideas such as particularly, Marxism and anarchy and revived for periodic "witch hunts" to out sympathizers and spies with the anathema ideologies and agendas of the day including, perennially, communism and at the approach of World War II, Nazism. At the conclusion of the war with Hitler defeated, the emphasis returned to heresies of the left. (A proposal in 1946 to investigate the Ku Klux Klan as Un-American was dismissed with committee Member John Rankin of Mississippi saying, "After all, the KKK is an American Institution.") Un-American came to mean strictly affiliation past or present with the Communist Party and Pro-Soviet sympathies in particular.
To Henry Wallace (whom FDR had appointed to the anodyne position of Secretary of Commerce when he demoted him as VP in an effort to broaden his appeal beyond the New Deal coalition with the more middle of the road Truman as his 1944 running mate, and continued to serve in Commerce after Roosevelt's death until September 1946 when he was fired by Truman over disagreements about policy toward the USSR), this burgeoning cold war attitude taking shape among the establishment of both parties was a mistake:
Declaring himself “neither anti-Russian nor pro-Russian,” [Wallace] said that a “get tough with Russia” policy would fail. The only solution, he said, was to cede global security to the United Nations, including the network of U.S. and British air bases strung across the world—in essence, disarmament. “Under friendly, peaceful competition the Russian world and the American world will gradually become more alike,” he said from the podium.
On his dismissal from Truman's cabinet, Wallace founded the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA) an organization devoted to promoting a foreign policy that maintained relations with the Soviet Union as well as a domestic policy broadening the social programs of the New Deal. He immediately entertained an ambition to challenge Truman for the Democratic nomination largely on the basis of providing a countermeasure to Truman's growing antagonism to the Soviet Union and to members of the American communist party. Rejecting the belligerence of the Democratic party leadership toward Russia, Wallace, speaking in front of a crowd at Madison Square Garden, declared that Congress "is asked to rush through a momentous decision as if great armies were already on the march. I hear no armies marching. I hear a world crying out for peace.”
Per Wikipedia:
Wallace's supporters held a national convention in Philadelphia in July, formally establishing a new Progressive Party. The party platform addressed a wide array of issues, and included support for the desegregation of public schools, gender equality, a national health insurance program, free trade, and public ownership of large banks, railroads, and power utilities. The party was described as "progressively capitalist".
Wallace's campaign received the endorsement of future Democratic Presidential nominee George McGovern of South Dakota, entertainers Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson and even movie star Ava Gardner. American Communists, too, were a natural constituency for the party, and while the Communist Party did not openly endorse Wallace, the PCA became a harbor for its members and for progressive minded Democrats many of whom voted with their feet to express their disapproval of the Democrats' growing antagonism to Russia and to the socialist ideals of American leftists. Wallace called his supporters "Gideon's Army" evoking the Old Testament story of the prophet who turned Israelites away from the idolatry they had fallen into and subsequently led a troop of 300 to victory over the vast Army of the Midianites.
Again Wikipedia describes the flavor of Wallace's iconoclasm:
Wallace embarked on a nationwide speaking tour to support his candidacy, encountering resistance in both the North and South. He openly defied the Jim Crow regime in the South, refusing to speak before segregated audiences. Time magazine, which opposed Wallace's candidacy, described him as "ostentatiously" riding through the towns and cities of the segregated South "with his Negro secretary beside him".
The response of mainstream Democrats to the possibility of excitement that Wallace's campaign might arouse among the rank and file was the creation of a counter organization, Americans for Democratic Action, nominally in favor of the expansion of New Deal benefits and social programs but primarily supportive of Truman's anti-communist foreign and domestic policy measures. Even labor in the person of Walter Reuther of the UAW was loath to side with the candidate supported by Communists. The hysteria being raised by both parties and the media-- as well as a well timed exposure by a Republican leaning newspaper of embarrassing private correspondence between Wallace and Nicholas Roerich, a Russian émigré and spiritual leader of the controversial Theosophy movement from Wallace's time as Secretary of Agriculture in Roosevelt's first 2 terms-- undermined the momentum of his campaign. The prevalence of Communists among his supporters became as even Wallace came to concede, "a liability."
From Risen's Red Scare:
In September 1948 Leon Henderson, the [PSA] chairman, warned Truman that his campaign against Wallace was creating a hysterical anti-Communist atmosphere that would last long after the election was over. Worse, he feared that Truman’s loyalty program was being used to political ends, cracking down on innocent people as a way of demonstrating the administration’s anti-Communist bona fides. “We urge you meanwhile to make clear to administration officials that political considerations must have no part in the grave business of determining a man’s ‘loyalty to his country,’ ” Henderson wrote.
In the final analysis, the PSA was barely a spoiler on election day. In only 2 states that went for the expected winner Republican Thomas Dewey, the governor of New York, did Wallace's performance come within the margin between Dewey and Truman. Truman won the popular vote, beating Dewey 49.55% to 45.07%, as well as the electoral vote (301 to 189). Wallace with only 0.29% of the vote was shut out from electoral votes and came in 4th behind Segregationist Strom Thurmond of the Dixiecrat Party with 2.37% of the popular vote and 39 electoral votes.
Truman with a stronger anti-Communist message than Dewey carried the day. Furthermore, as Risen notes:
Over the coming years, a person’s support for Wallace in 1948, let alone membership in the PCA, would become a mark of suspicion for anti-Communists. The Pittsburgh Press, a conservative afternoon daily, printed the names of local signatories to a Wallace petition—a list that would pop up in the files of many red hunters.
Wallace himself continued in politics only briefly after his defeat. In the anti-red atmosphere, he continued to face accusations of softness on communism, and was called to face accusations that he had encouraged Chiang Kai-Shek in 1944 to form a coalition with Mao Tse-Tung's communist party. He ultimately repudiated his pro-Soviet politics calling the Soviet Union in a 1952 article "utterly evil." He refused to endorse any democratic candidates until Lyndon Johnson's 1964 campaign against Barry Goldwater, although he disapproved of Johnson's Vietnam policy. Of Cuba, he said, "We lost Cuba in 1959 not only because of Castro but also because we failed to understand the needs of the farmer in the back country of Cuba from 1920 onward. ... The common man is on the march, but it is up to the uncommon men of education and insight to lead that march constructively".
Wallace died in 1965 after a furious battle with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, aka Lou Gehrig disease, which also afflicted Stephen Hawking.
Returning to 1948, Risen concluded:
Truman understood that, like it or not, the United States had no choice but to fulfill its new role in the world, to go once more into the breach. But in doing so, in steeling the country to stand up to the Soviet challenge, he chose not to dispel the accompanying fear—and, during his 1948 run for the presidency, he did much to exacerbate it. Alone, Truman’s attacks on Wallace did not cause the Red Scare. But by lending it a bipartisan cover, he made it easier for tens of millions of Americans to join the hysteria.
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| The recipient of this letter (one of an estimated 20,000 Federal Employees who received similar notification on Valentines Day 2025-- less than a month into the new administration) reported it was prepared with no input from his supervisor or HR Contact. Several thousand summarily terminated Employees were subsequently temporarily re-instated with backpay due to court injunctions, only for many of them to be fired once again in April with a less incendiary and more truthful notice of (a still illegal) Reduction in Force-- at great expense and no value to taxpayers. Russell Vought, the Project 2025 architect had said of the administration's treatment of Federal workers, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected... When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want to put them in trauma.” Spoken like a villain. |
"We as Africans are creditors, not debtors. Our energies fuelled the Industrial Revolution" - Jesse Jackson
Sasha Abramsky's American Carnage (whose title turns the phrase from Trump's first inauguration speech back on the fascist criminal himself) tells the story of several highly trained and experienced but recently hired or promoted government employees whose probationary employment status made them vulnerable in the early months of 2025 to the illegal decimation of the Federal government's workforce by the Administration's agents of chaos DOGE in the early days of Trump 2.0 following the playbook of Project 2025. Abramsky also reminds us of the obsession of Trump, his enablers and staff and the sympathetic punditry that lubricated America's nethers for another round of MAGA with Wokism, CRT, DEI (on which Trump was quick to gratuitously blame the crash of an army helicopter and a commercial air liner over the Potomac in the early days of the admin-- a harbinger of the rough days to come) and in particular the galling advancement of black women. One of DOGE's casualties featured by Abramsky was Adrian M, a career public health worker who had only recently gotten her dream job with the CDC when she was summarily fired with a canned, baseless probably AI generated letter informing her she was a poor fit for her position.
“I’m being called a poor performer, and my knowledge and skills don’t meet the needs of the agency,” she said, incredulously. “My knowledge and skills came from the agency. I wouldn’t have had my job if my skills weren’t good.”
The idea that she, as a Black woman from the South, had somehow had it easy in life because of her skin color made her laugh, it was so absurd.
The contemporary normalization of the Trump orbit's thinly veiled racism attempting to masquerade as an issue of free-speech and reverse civil rights for the white and privileged is case in point that 160 years after the abolition of slavery, white America has never recovered from its lost prerogative to own an African and still has it in for black people. To a great extent, the denial of universal healthcare, the stinginess of public spending on childcare, education and home ownership and hostility to a well compensated federal workforce-- deficiencies that hurt everyone-- have their root in America's pathology against black well-being.
All of the above redounds to the thesis of Dorothy Brown's recent book, Getting to Reparations, that America has yet to pay not only for the crime against humanity of its recalcitrant reluctance to break its habit of slavery only after Civil War in 1865, but for its continued punishment of descendants of slaves and others Americans of African descent for the crime of being black-- from post Reconstruction era Jim Crow to enshrined and hallowed practices of financial redlining to keep black people out of white neighborhoods and schools, down to our own era of rescinding of voting and other civil rights, gerrymandering, mass incarceration and police brutality. Brown, Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, knows what she's talking about. Her previous book, The Whiteness of Wealth exposed ways in which our taxation laws have been designed to keep black people poor without a single mention of race in the code. Brown advocates for reparations as partly some form of financial compensation to individuals (amounts, population and logistics to be determined by a healthily diverse, deeply informed and soul searching council of citizens) and most importantly by investment in black neighborhoods, schools, communities and businesses.
Before I read Brown's Getting to Reparations, I was undecided on the basis of what I knew I didn't know. Brown, whose book provides a test case for persuasion, describes late in the book an exercise she uses in workshops on reparation, in which the participant, before hearing the arguments assesses their own feelings about whether reparations should be paid on a scale of 0 for complete agreement to 10 for absolute disagreement, with the same exercise repeated for a post-assessment. I would say that having once been a 6 (based partly on the class-based reasoning of Adolph Reed as well as a pessimistic assessment of the feasibility of reparations by Matt Bruenig), I was talked down to a 3 by Marianne Williamson's impassioned case for making reparations a large part of her policy platform in 2020 and 2024. But even before learning of Brown's self-assessment scale, half-way through her introduction to Getting to Reparations, I was converted to a 0. I only needed to hear Brown's argument that the debt that America owes blacks has only deepened since 1865, and that reparations have been paid by the United States many times over to several groups, among them the families of Japanese internees in World War II, the Italian American victims of anti-Sicilian lynchings in Louisiana in the early part of the 20th century, and to some extent (and naturally sparingly and with great reluctance) to First Nations tribes. The clincher was learning that while Andrew Johnson saw to it that the floated promise of 40 acres and a mule to former slaves was broken before a single person was recompensed, the government paid reparations of up to $300 per lost slave to slave holders.
This was more than enough information to convince me that there was something pathological about America's unfinished business of repairing the harm of slavery and its lingering legacy to black people. Moreover, Brown reminds us that black people are not the only ones broken by this unpaid debt. My family on both sides came to America only after slavery was abolished, and yet to a person we have undoubtedly benefited from our whiteness. I have relatives whose first generation racism contributed to the post-slavery carnage of black Americans by whom they were able to parlay their whiteness into a comfortable life of privilege. But even my own bleeding heart immediate family has received advantages from the color of our skin through no particular effort of our own. I don't live in fear of me or anyone in my family being murdered by the police for driving while European. I have the luxury of ignoring my complexion when I walk through a new neighborhood or enter a store or apply for a college education or a job or a loan. (Affirmative action as Brown points out has never been for blacks only and in fact has demonstrably benefited white women the most.) These are the privileges of whiteness I'm aware of, but it stands to reason there are many more that I'm not.
The point is not that whiteness is a crime, but rather that American society in particular by the entrenchment of this difference in the way whites and blacks experience their lives is an indication that something is broken. The resentment that so many whites of the legacy slave-deprived class feel toward blacks stems to a great extent from this brokenness itself. Brown makes an excellent case that repairing the festering wound of white privilege by finally compensating blacks for the harms of slavery and post abolition racist policies will be a balm for the all too common proclivity of some (such as our current racist in chief) to evade the issue of this unfinished business by redirecting the butt hurt of their unacknowledged debt into anti-wokeness, anti-DEI and the suppression of Critical Race Theory as a way of avoidance of ownership of the melanin tax on their black brothers and sisters.
It's time, America. It's time.*
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* Some may object that white families have experienced cycles of poverty as well. Shouldn't they too get reparations from those who have benefited from their misery? Very probably, Brown says, and that is a topic for another discussion.
You now know everything there is to know about the disappearance of Savannah Guthrie's mother from her Tuscon Arizona home between 9:48 PM Saturday January 31 and 11:00 am Sunday morning February 1. So why has CNN for the past two weeks done nothing but report on Savannah Guthrie's mother's disappearance?* What have they reported on and what have we learned? Let's focus for a minute on Jake Tapper, the nasal voiced totem of CNN's particular brand of late neoliberal capitalist mediocrity whom CNN sent to Tucson for breathless on-the-scene milking of the fibers of a story that has refused to develop.
I asked Google and got this list of professional experts and a few individuals whose proximity to the events plausibly conferred witness status (for the purposes of filling airtime) that Tapper has questioned:
