October 3, 2024
"If writing requires a person to store information using multiple types of working memory at the same time..."
Writes Cal Newport, in "What Kind of Writer Is ChatGPT? Chatbots have been criticized as perfect plagiarism tools. The truth is more surprising" (The New Yorker).
I quoted that last line and asked ChatGPT to write a 1 or 2 sentence blog post reacting to it. I got: "This perspective highlights the transformative potential of tools like ChatGPT, not as shortcuts, but as catalysts for deeper intellectual engagement and self-expression. Embracing technology in this way can truly empower students to explore their ideas with newfound confidence and creativity."
Trump's word: "fight."
NYT opinion columnist M. Gessen displays shockingly little concern for free-speech values...
I think we need a harm reduction philosophy of covering Trump and his party and the election. And these are some things to consider: One is to cut his or Vance’s mic when they start lying.
So not only is censorship the go-to remedy, but it's one-sided — openly one-sided.
And I know this is a hugely controversial idea, and it’s usually controversial because it will enable them to scream censorship, but there needs to be a philosophy of journalism that is oriented toward the public good.
That is, Gessen has thought through the censorship problem and determined that "harm reduction" or "the public good" supervenes the free flow of ideas to the people and allowing us to choose what we like. Gesson seems to object even to the speech that is objecting to the suppression of speech — to the "them" who "scream censorship."
When I talk to my students about it...
Gessen teaches journalism at the City University of New York.
I always say: Imagine that information is water and some of the water is poisoned.
How is speech like water? Speech comes from a human mind. And when is speech "information"? When it is truth? Poison is not water, but an additional substance tainting the water. Lies and mistakes in speech are not like poison in water. How would you go about purifying speech and turning it into "information"? The traditional American ideology is that the way to get to the truth is to have a free flow of words — a marketplace of ideas — and to let people read and hear and think and have their own discussions about what is true. How could you possibly know the truth in advance and deliver it to the people?
But Gessen pushes on with the analogy, which has been tested in the CUNY classroom:
And if you are tasked with conveying the water to the public...
So a censor is posited at the outset.
... it would be a crime for you to convey poisoned water.
The censor is presumed to have the capacity to tell truth from lies. And the government is visualized as having the power to criminalize speech.
And I think that political lies, lies in the public sphere, are just as poisonous to our politics as poisoned water is to humans. And if we think of ourselves as conveyors, as mediators, as media, who transport this information, this water, then we have this abiding responsibility to do something about it. We can’t just turn to one of the candidates and say, “I’d like to see you take a sip of that. And see what happens to you.”
So one idea is to turn off the microphone when the disfavored candidate is deemed to be lying. But that is not all. Gessen continues:
I think we also need to figure out ways to contextualize the candidates. Certainly, this two-minute-per-person debate format is not conducive to creating nuanced or contextualized pictures.
Ah! Nuance! Context! I have tags for "nuance" and "context." I love when that happens. A chime goes off in my blogger brain. But back to Gessen:
But what if we had a different format? What if journalists prepared fact-based reports to create context for the debate? Who said that the debate absolutely has to be broadcast live? If we have one person who is lying in the debate, maybe that’s not the best possible format.
If you increase the power of the journalists who are known to disfavor one of the candidates, why would that person agree to debate? There are so many other outlets for free speech. The water overflows its once-solid banks and floods where it will. Now where is your fantasy of control?
October 2, 2024
"At one point, Vance wanted to correct something about how Haitians got into this country — and he was RIGHT...."
Muted mics were only supposed to be used if things went off the rails. But this was a civil policy back and forth about what voters say is the most or second most important issue in this election! We can't have debating in a debate! Shut up now! https://t.co/aC69URTs9O
— Ben Domenech (@bdomenech) October 2, 2024
"... I’ve written pretty harshly about Vance.... But I thought he actually did himself and his ticket some good."
Says Matt Bai, in "Did Tim Walz miss a crucial moment at the VP debate? The governor didn’t seem to have a clear objective in his face-off with Republican JD Vance." That's a free-access link, so you can read the whole conversation Bai has with Megan McArdle and Gene Robinson.
"Russian Telegram channels published video of triumphant troops waving the Russian tricolour flag over shattered buildings in Vuhledar."
From "Ukraine says its forces have withdrawn from defensive bastion of Vuhledar/Eastern city had resisted repeated attacks but Russian troops are close to ‘encircling’ it in Donetsk advance" (The Guardian).
"Mind-blowing that Tim Walz said he was 'friends with school shooters' 🤡" said Elon Musk...
... at the top of the X page headlined "Controversy Over Tim Walz's School Shooter Comment/Last updated/17 minutes ago/Grok can make mistakes, verify its outputs."
Why can't he just answer? He left out a word or 2. It was supposed to be "friends with victims of school shooters" — right? Why let this fester? Why so withholding? It doesn't make sense!
Tim Walz goes silent when they ask him about being friends with school shooters 🤣pic.twitter.com/XgytfRhwP1
— Hodgetwins (@hodgetwins) October 2, 2024
"In contrast to the various septuagenarians on the national stage, [Doug Emhoff is] a youthful, keenly focussed guy who says 'awesome' a lot."
Writes Sarah Larson, in "Doug Emhoff Takes His Gen X Energy on the Road/On the trail, Emhoff has made loving music, and his wife, look like a campaign in itself. 'If he’s a Cure fan, I’m gonna die,' one rallygoer said" (The New Yorker).I asked Google what's the most famous Cure song. I got this:Now, there's your nontoxic masculinity. Aim higher younger-than-boomer guys. I saw JD Vance's fuchsia tie at the debate last night, but there are miles ahead on the road to detoxification.
"There is a quite narrow truth at the heart of the film: yes, many grifters have flourished under the guise of 'diversity work,' descending like vultures..."
Writes Vinson Cunningham, in "Is Matt Walsh Trying to Make “Am I Racist?” the “Borat” of the Right?/In his work with the Daily Wire and in a new movie, the conservative podcaster and activist tries to expose the hypocrisies of the left" (The New Yorker)
It felt like an imitation of Kamala Harris's "I grew up a middle-class kid" — Tim Walz began his answer with "I grew up in small, rural Nebraska, town of 400."
Here's the transcript of the full debate. Walz answered:
Well, and to the folks out there who didn't get at the top of this, look...
That "look" makes me feel as though I'm being chastised for not paying attention. Am I one of the "the folks out there who didn't get at the top of this"? What does that even mean? "At the top of" what? "Get at the top"? Did he mean those who didn't watch — get in on — the debate from the beginning? Anyway, that sets up this:
... I grew up in small, rural Nebraska, town of 400. Town that you rode your bike with your buddies till the streetlights come on, and I'm proud of that service.
That's like Harris's "grew up in the middle-class" safe space. Instead of answering the question asked, he goes back to a snapshot of his youth. Somehow he's "proud of that service." The service of riding your bike around until it got dark. Much as I'd love to see the kids of America riding their bikes around and I'd be willing to regard them as performing a "service" if it would help, Tim Walz was just deflecting the question and doing so in a way that reminded me of all the times Harris deflected questions by directing us toward a picture of her as a child. Walz's picture is at least a happy one.
October 1, 2024
Let's talk about the Vice Presidential Debate.
At the Mushroom Café...
"Iran fired a large barrage of missiles at Israel on Tuesday evening, an attack that could set off a sharp escalation in the long-simmering conflict...."
The NYT reports.
"I just wanted to get out of legacy media. I feel like it’s just really, really difficult to do the kind of reporting that I want to do on the internet..."
Says Taylor Lorenz, quoted in "Taylor Lorenz Exits Washington Post to Launch ‘User Mag’ on Substack/Lorenz, who is leaving the newspaper to launch the publication, says that it will 'cover technology from the user side,' in contrast to traditional coverage of social media" (Hollywood Reporter).
"Donald Trump is gaining on Kamala Harris in the polls. I have some theories why."
The audience for the theater of hurricane empathy is vast, observant, and ready to put its critique in writing.
This is the most VEEP-like photo ever -- pretending to be on a phone call but forgetting to plug in the antiquated earphones while pretending to write on a blank piece of paper instead of actually doing anything. https://t.co/tkzHPplKhe
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) September 30, 2024
"Perhaps no previous politician has taken up the mantle of Dad in quite the way Tim Walz has."
I'm reading "Tim Walz and J. D. Vance’s Battle of the Dads/Duelling visions of fatherhood will define the Vice-Presidential debate" by Mollie Fischer (in The New Yorker).
Abstract versus particular... dad.
I don't know if that's a fair representation of either man (or the theater surrounding them), but it makes me think about the way human beings can reason from the abstract or the particular. For example, in a legal case, one could begin with an abstraction like fairness or equality, listen to arguments by ideologues, and then decide what will be done, in the future, when particular cases arise, or one might wait for a concrete controversy between adversaries with a real stake in the outcome and then work from the particular to a rule that can be stated in the abstract.
Do you like things in context or out of context — abstract or concrete — when you're doing your own thinking? When you're stuck relying on the decisions of others?
"Not even 48 hours after word got out a 43-foot-tall nude effigy of Donald Trump hung suspended from a construction crane, the indecent artwork was gone."
Decorating your front lawn for Halloween in an election year.
"'Many, many of the other artists who saw it really hated it,' Mr. Pettibone told Art in America magazine in 2011."
From "Richard Pettibone, Master of the Artistic Miniature, Dies at 86/He painted tiny reproductions of works by Warhol, Lichtenstein, Duchamp and many others, raising questions about originality and creativity" (NYT).
You can see reproductions of Pettibone's works at the Castelli website, here. Sample:
"According to court documents, Ms. Harvey met Mr. Gadd in 2014 at the pub where he worked in London, and went on to stalk and harass him..."
From "Based on a True Story, or a True Story? In ‘Baby Reindeer’ Lawsuit, Words Matter. A defamation suit against Netflix boils down to how the company presented its story about Martha Scott, a fictionalization of what the show’s creator has described as a real-life stalking incident" (NYT).
September 30, 2024
"The river that has flooded this street is normally 20 feet below it...."
"Well, Kamala Harris, of course, hasn't had a lot of experience in foreign policy, but she's learned a lot at the side of President Biden as his vice president."
You won't have to wait even half a minute to see Kris Kristofferson in this clip of "Big Top Pee-Wee."
"The debate has been a source of anxiety for Walz, according to people close to him..."
September 29, 2024
"The woman is more important than the man, but it’s bad when the woman wants to be a man."
Andrea Grillo, professor of sacramental theology at the Anselmianum, a pontifical university in Rome, said that Francis’s statements sounded “as if a woman can only be a mother, wife, daughter or sister — roles that are always beholden to man. Whereas men are free to be what they will. … It’s a very old kind of 'wisdom' that the contemporary world has walked past.”
"September 27th is the most important day in the Middle East since the Abraham Accords breakthrough."
"The three [Arizona Democratic] state officials learned a computer glitch meant 98,000 voters had not provided proof of citizenship. In a candid phone call, they debated what to do."
The Washington Post reports (free-access link).
Their predicament was “an urgent, a dire situation,” Gov. Katie Hobbs said, according to audio of the call obtained by The Washington Post. Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said critics would “beat us up no matter what the hell we do.” Attorney General Kris Mayes worried they would be accused of rigging the 2024 election in a crucial state....
Nick Gillespie confronts Donald Trump about the deficit. Trump absconds.
WATCH: Former President Donald Trump blames COVID for his deficit spending. But @nickgillespie delivers a live fact check—much of that spending occurred before the pandemic.pic.twitter.com/EA0064nGn5
— reason (@reason) September 28, 2024
Starlink in Asheville.
Asheville is relying on @elonmusk for communication. Thank God for Starlink or we may have no information from the storm affected area at all. https://t.co/E13IcJwgKW
— Emily Zanotti 🦝 (@emzanotti) September 29, 2024
"The damage is so severe, we are telling drivers that unless it is an emergency, all roads in Western North Carolina should be considered closed."
Why isn't the hurricane damage the top story right now? That story isn't linked on the NYT home page.
But the next set of stories is the old 2024 presidential campaign:
He seems to think what he is saying is perfectly bland.
"Our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer [disinformation] out of existence. What we need is to win... the right to govern by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change....""Our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer [disinformation] out of existence. What we need is to win...the right to govern by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change."
— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) September 29, 2024
No thanks.pic.twitter.com/SLGHOLVjCr
"Saturday Night Live" cold opens with lots of political impersonations — including Dana Carvey as Joe Biden.
Also — beginning at 2:22 — Jim Gaffigan as Tim Walz.