Open Mic for the week of 7/24/2023
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
Welp, Twitter is changing its branding, for some reason, to X.
I didn’t know that Twitter’s branding needed changing or would benefit from it (let alone changing from “twitter” to “X”) but, yep, it’s changing.Report
I’ve said before, if Musk does nothing with Twitter other than destroy it, I’m glad he bought it. It sounds like he has bigger streaming aspirations for it, along with payment processing.Report
You’d think that the thing that Twitter kinda did would be something that would be easily supplanted.
But BlueSky is imploding because of the importance of everybody being able to censor everybody else and Threads blew up because it insists on providing an algorithmic timeline rather than a timeline timeline and this is nuts.Report
Odd, he was in the payment processing biz before, and got out.
Agreed on the destruction of Twitter. I’m still a daily visitor, but it’s really become a cesspool of late.Report
I thought he got kicked out of PayPal because he tried the “X” business there first. I could be wrong.
I dunno, this whole situation is an object lesson in “the very rich are different from you and me: they can be hopelessly foolish and still think themselves wise, and usually they retain enough money that it looks to them like they are”Report
NPR had a story this morning about Elon regaining the world’s richest person crown. When you’re worth as much as he is, setting $44 billion on fire is a somewhat trivial exercise.Report
Apparently, Meta also has a product named X.
So this change might be in dispute.
HOW IN THE HELL DO YOU NOT TALK TO LEGAL FIRST WHAT THE HELL I FEEL LIKE I AM TAKING CRAZY PILLSReport
Always consult trademark counsel.Report
Here is the thing about Twitter, it was among the least used of social media platforms. Only something like 12 percent of Americans had Twitter accounts and most of the content was driven by a minority of that minority. The thing about most of the content is that it came from people with relatively to very highly levels of public presence most of the time:
1. Politicians seeking to interact “directly” with the public;
2. Academics/wonks/journalists/celebs; and
3. Various chronically online communities.
Three is the most surprising and I have seen someone compare Twitter to a Usenet that anyone can see. 3 is also where various communities became very disconnected from the real world.Report
International users. Also I am not a right-wing Trump supporter. I don’t care about Parler.Report
As the other blog notes, Biden’s big strength in the 2020 campaign was realizing 3 is true so not engaging in 1. The Democratic candidates that were most Twitter friendly hit a hard wall by not being able to realize that 1 isn’t really interacting directly with the public.Report
It’s become a significant bipartisan problem. We talk most about the negative impact social media has on the broader left at OT a lot because of the particulars of our debate flashpoints. But taking out my crystal ball I think there’s a good chance in retrospect people will, for example, say DeSantis crashed and burned not just for being terrible at retail but for pandering to chronically online conservativism that beyond a certain point just looks bizarre to normal people.
This is where Biden’s age is paradoxically helpful for his prospects. His team of younger, ivy leaguers may pull his admin into some weird directions but his persona is unaffected. As other national political figures age out he increasingly looks like the most normal person in the room, even if ‘normal’ comes with the caveat of ‘for someone my grandfather’s age.’
I suppose Jaybird or someone can mark this comment and we can come back in 18 months or so to laugh at how wrong I was but I feel pretty good about this one.Report
The people who seem to like DeSantis are hardcore culture warriors that want to use the levers of the state to punish anything they see as mildly progressive but who find Trump aesthetically vulgar and professionally corrupt. I am not sure why DeSantis is not seen as vulgar but that is a story for another day.
But it turns out that most people are not Ross D or the Claremont Institute, and they are either fine with Trump on policy and style or completely against him on both. The audience for “I like Trump’s policies but not his delivery style” is very small.Report
Barbie earned an estimate 155 million during its opening weekend and Oppenheimer earned a very respectable 80.5 million: https://variety.com/2023/film/box-office/box-office-barbie-oppenheimer-opening-weekend-shatter-records-1235677601/
FWIW, the estimates earnings for both films combined was 150 million.Report
“Elite colleges have long been filled with the children of the richest families: At Ivy League schools, one in six students has parents in the top 1 percent.
A large new study, released Monday, shows that it has not been because these children had more impressive grades on average or took harder classes. They tended to have higher SAT scores and finely honed résumés, and applied at a higher rate — but they were overrepresented even after accounting for those things. For applicants with the same SAT or ACT score, children from families in the top 1 percent were 34 percent more likely to be admitted than the average applicant, and those from the top 0.1 percent were more than twice as likely to get in.”
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/24/upshot/ivy-league-elite-college-admissions.htmlReport
I’m sure that if you talked to 95% of the non-1%ers there at the school, they were all DELIGHTED to have the opportunity to rub shoulders with these guys.
These are the guys you go to Harvard *FOR*.
Play your cards right, now your kid’s a legacy too.Report
I suspect it’s very discipline-driven. Looking to go into politics, law, upper-echelon business? Yeah, Harvard or Yale gives you a leg up. But for most people in the sciences, a good state school, especially if they have a good department in your specific field, will be a better choice. And for education or social work or other lower-paying fields, I’d argue a very expensive elite school isn’t a wise choice, given the debt it will generate.
then again: I’m a prof at a little-known state regional who went to state schools, so maybe I’m talking out of my butt and justifying my own choices, IDK. (I will say I doubt I’d get into an elite school these days; it’s a lot harder now than in the 80s)Report
I suspect JB is doing is typical trollingReport
Oh, absolutely! But this is for the whole “Ivy League” thing. It’s my position that, as unsavory as it is, the “legacies” are one of the reasons that people want to go there.
Getting rid of the legacies will be much more “fair” but it’s also going to make going to the Ivies less valuable.
That will take a decade or so to make itself apparent, though.
For the people who need a degree in the sciences, there are a ton of the Top Of The Line schools that you’ve heard of and a handful of the less-well-known ones that have a state name and then “school of mines” afterwards.
And then there’s the whole issue of how, for the majority of folks getting a degree, state schools are perfectly good ways to get one of those. (I, myself, got my degree from what we called a “commuter college” back in the 90’s. It didn’t even have dorms until 6 or 7 years after I graduated.)
Now we’re in a weird place where most of the employers that I talk to have started asking for certain certs and weighting the certs as much as college degrees.
You can get most of the certs out there for less than $500 and the big ones after than for less than a grand.
You just have to know your stuff fairly cold.Report
I think I’ve earned an I-told-you-so here. I’ve been saying for years that the Big Lie the left has been pushing about standardized test scores being just a measure of your parents’ income hurts talented people from low- and middle-income households.
Standardized tests are the hardest component of college admissions to influence with money, and all this “whole person” fluff is trivial for rich parents to buy. By deemphasizing standardized tests, they make it much easier to justify rejecting high-performing low-SES white and Asian students.Report
I should clarify that as private institutions, they don’t have to justify their admissions choices. They can admit whomever they want. But there’s a certain fiction they’re trying to maintain that doesn’t really line up with their actual admissions policies, and deemphasizing standardized testing helps to maintain that fiction.Report
As it turns out, they did have to justify their admissions choices.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdfReport
A guy died paddleboarding outside of Obama’s home. They’ve released the name of the guy and it was one of the sous chefs who worked at the White House during Obama’s tenure.
Poor guy.Report
The heat wave in Phoenix is so bad that people need medical treatment for burns just because they trip and their skin contacts asphalt: https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/24/health/arizona-heat-burns-er/index.htmlReport
https://twitter.com/TheTNHoller/status/1683345888427806723?s=20
Kim Daniels, the head of DeSantis’ African-American task force caught on mic saying the Jews Control EverythingReport
Wow, Saul comes out swinging at a black female Democrat!
I think the tweeter (and you) are missing some of her message here in the eagerness to dunk — not to completely forgive it, but the overall context is about overcoming adversity, the vagaries of fate, and the ways that God uses these events for ultimate good. She also says “I thank God for slavery”, because the many long twists and turns ended up meaning that she gets to be an American.
It’s essentially a sermon with dramatic language and with an overarching point, and this point is particularly a religious one. It’s bad of the tweeter to strip these phrases out of their context* and pretend that she just said these things in their strongest form out of the blue. It’s the flip side of what conservatives did in 2008 with Jeremiah Wright, the pastor at Obama’s church who said all that “anti-American” stuff.
ETA: *though s/he helpfully includes a video which provides some of the context that was missedReport
Out of context she sounds like a bigot.
In context she just sounds depraved.Report
TMZ is reporting that Gisele Bundchen is “not happy at all” about the news Tom Brady is dating Irina Shayk.
Now, I personally think that 9 months is a little early to start dating again but Brady has more Superbowl rings than the Pittsburg Steelers so it’s not terribly surprising that he’d be seen as a somewhat hot commodity.
If you initiated the divorce, though, you should *NEVER* even *HINT* that you’re not happy with your ex- dating someone. That’s just going to get you into TMZ.Report
So for fun i clicked your link, and then clicked the first “Irina Shayk” link because I’d never heard of her, and the links sidebar on that page includes a headline “Gisele Bundchen Not Bothered by Tom Brady Moving On with Irina Shayk”.
I’m starting to think they may not actually 100% know what Gisele thinks about this.Report
There’s an old trick where you tell your three closest confidants three different secrets.
Then see which ones show up in the Enquirer.
When you see the “He’s been daydreaming about getting a new pet octopus!” story show up in the Enquirer, time to dump ol’ Ned.Report
Like the old spy-industry trick of writing different versions of a document with different typographical errors, and when the document gets quoted in the news, looking for the typographical errors to see which office leaked it.Report
Obviously she needs to go out there and win him back. If anyone is capable of it, it’s Gisele.Report
I’m not entirely sure that (rich) celebrities have relationships.Report
Lord, I hope she looks better in person. Eye of the beholder, I suppose.Report
The New York Times Magazine has an article talking about the origins of Covid.
The stuff that I thought was notable:
What the hell is that framing? What the hell?
And, at the end:
Wait. What? You’re tying in the Kennedy Assassination?!?
What the hell?Report
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/07/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-is-just-a-regular-old-democrat-now.html?utm_medium=s1&utm_campaign=nym&utm_source=tw
In other news, Freddie is Very Upset AOC doesn’t hate the Democratic Party as much as he does, and thus, has dubbed her just a normal Democrat, because she hasn’t set fire to her relationships to make people on Twitter happy.
Maybe she should dislike wokeness more, to get a true leftist like Freddie’s approval.Report
You can just tell that he’s seething with envy that she got to undercut unions instead of him being able to!Report
What Freddie leaves out, and it’s a very significant omission to Freddie’s point, is that after the strike Bidens’ people went out and jawboned the railways into giving their workers paid days off (which was the primary sticking point of the strike). So yes, the party blocked the workers from striking, but it also got the workers what they were threatening to strike over.Report
Are you saying that Freddie and his editors purposefully left out valid information to make their leftier-than-thou point?Report
I wouldn’t say that; it’s entirely possible he doesn’t know because the strike was widely publicized while Biden getting the workers their days off barely made page 4.Report
I’m going to be blunt here – I have sympathy for randoms on Twitter.
But, if you’re whole deal is getting paid quite well by Substack to be the proud true lefty voice, unlike the priveliged woke PMCers who have ruined leftism by caring about things the left shouldn’t (*cough “identity politics” *cough), maybe you should be as informed as political dorks like you, me, and Saul are.Report
In my neighborhood there are the Revcoms, the Revolutionary Communists, who regularly march and loudly demand change now, no, NOW!!
What makes me giggle at the “now” is that I have been aware of them since 1979 since they were demanding change “NOW!!”
In over 40 years of marches and chants and banging of drums they have never swung a city council seat, or hell, even a neighborhood council seat. They are utterly and completely ineffectual without the ability to do anything, change anything, or stop anything.Report
From later on in the essay:
Report
Why should anyone give a rip abut her “ideological consistency”?
Seriously this guy’s own writing makes him sound like one of those leftists that everyone parodies, from the Pythons to Portlandia.Report
He gets into that in the next paragraph!
Report
What “immense, embarrassing hagiography” is he even going on about?
I missed the hagiographies, but what I have seen is an immense, embarrassing stream of tweets and essays about AOC from conservatives, trying to gin up something, anything, so as to discredit her as the female Pol Pot.
And since they keep coming up empty, I think its starting to drive them mad.Report
You’re unaware at how much AOC had been celebrated?
“The Squad”? Covers on various fashion magazines? Various blog commenters defending her going to the Met Gala unmasked surrounded by masked employees?
No idea any of that happened? This is completely new information for you?Report
I mean, if I can be petty, that’s the actual reason Freddie doesn’t like AOC – because she’s actually popular outside the self-hating Online Left, and AOC realizes, as seen in the results of referendums and voting patterns, the future of passing social democracy in this country depends on left-leaning PMC’s who are open to left-wing economics.
But, since Freddie is a self-hating PMC, he refuses that, and thinks only true socialism is the anti-woke kind. The reality is, if all the people Freddie got into arguments at a bar in 2007 were now anti-woke, he’d be the most woke guy around. But, they’re all largely MSNBC liberals to AOC soc dems, so Fredide can’t be aligned with them.Report
Alslo she won’t sleep with him.Report
I see a normal politician getting a normal amount of press, except for the embarrassing obsessive fixation of conservatives and theater kid leftists.
I mean, really…”She a regular Democrat” as an attack? Really??
More Regular Democrats, please.Report
You don’t remember her moral authority from crying outside of the fence? How she was sticking it to “the man” by wearing a “Tax The Rich” dress to the ball designed by someone who hadn’t paid their taxes?
You don’t remember any of that?Report
I mean, I remember those things. I’m just not obsessed with them like conservatives like you are obsessed because you don’t like her views on things, and how online leftists like Freddie are obsessed because unlike online leftists like him, AOC can actually be popular outside of their small, insular circle.Report
I admit: The only one that still bugs me is the whole Met Gala thing where she wasn’t wearing a mask around the help, who were.
But I’ve been ticked off about the whole “politicians not following mask mandates” thing for a while as lefties explained to me that the only *IMPORTANT* rules were the ones that applied to *ME*.Report
Jesse,
please accept the existence of people who are not you.Report
“He gets into that in the next paragraph!”
Jaybird, it’s been long-established that Chip doesn’t actually read things. He’d rather just have emotions about stuff.Report
Except there’s no actual evidence the AOC has actually acted consistently inconsistently in any real way.
Unless “ideological consistency” means voting down anything that doesn’t immediately bring AOC’s preferred form of social democracy to the US. Acting the way Freddie and other Very Online Leftists want AOC to her would make her Cynthia McKinney 2.0, instead of somebody who has helped move the party to the left in the past few years, as you and other are so quick to complain about.
Hell, she, along with only 8 other Democrat’s just voted against a pro-Israeli measure, which was a decent chunk of the type of foreign policy Freddie claimed AOC didn’t try to to do anymore.Report
He has a paragraph dedicated to that!
He disagrees that she voted against it, though. He claims that she voted “present”.
Here’s a relevant Slate article: AOC Apologizes After “Present” Vote on Iron Dome Funding Bill: “Yes, I Wept”Report
I’m talking about the vote that happened last week – surely, in time for Freddie to note it.
https://jewishinsider.com/2023/04/congress-israel-house-of-representatives-75th-anniversary-founding/Report
OH! Because I thought he was talking about the Iron Dome one.
You thought he was talking about the 75th Anniversary one?Report
The Further Left in the United States really believes that if the Democratic Party disappears than they would become the natural replacement on the left side of American politics. Not only that but they will achieve overwhelming majorities even in Deep Red Areas because they will be delivering real socialism too people. They are incredibly dumb.Report
Also from the essay:
Report
“We demand the revolution and we demand it NOW!!”Report
I mean yes, Freddie and a lot of other Blue State Online Leftists, with a bonus of being a white male, acts as if there’s no point to a popular front against fascism. See Chapo and the like.Report
“The SDP are social fascists!!!”Report
At least all the supporters for democracy in the United States are in one political party rather than being an uneasy alliance of Non-Communist leftist working class people, Roman Catholics, and the Weimar equivalent of the “In this house” faction of the Democratic Party.Report
No starbursts for Freddie.Report
Jacobin just wrote a similar piece: https://jacobin.com/2022/02/the-end-of-the-aoc-honeymoon.
“In 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was heralded as the millennial successor to Bernie Sanders. Today, some on the Left are starting to have doubts.”
It makes you wonder if all these journalists have a secret chatroom where they coordinate smears.Report
Jacobin is filled with people who think the revolution will grant them tenured positions in academia automatically. When will you admit you just hate Democrats and will ally with anyone who professes to hate Democrats?Report
It’s more that I have a handful of beliefs and another handful of policy preferences.
To be quite honest, I’ve not yet been offered anything that strikes me as being trading for.
You interpret my mockery as “hate” when, seriously, it’s not that. I do see them as *MOCKABLE*. Silly and puffed up and full of themselves. But that’s closer to “source of amusement” than “hate”.Report
Nah, there’s no secret chatrooms – right on Twitter, online leftists have either thought AOC was an op or a fake since she was elected, since she didn’t act immediately like a Twitter shitposter.
Like, this might be news to you, but the fact the Left Left thinks AOC is a sellout hasn’t been news since like, 2020 at the latest when she didn’t go Bernie or Bust.Report
…she did immediately act like a Twitter shitposter. It was a thing for a while.
It’s part of what got Amazon HQ2 to pull out of NYC.
Seriously, this happened.Report
I think something that is getting lost in the discussion in these comments, and something that I think is relevant, is that I think Freddie is arguing primarily with actual further leftists in this article. He isn’t expecting the great masses of us liberal, Democratic Party supporters to be aghast with AOC’s behavior. But he is strongly questioning why she is still getting adulation from the genuine actual socialist/communist/anti-capitalist and, his favorite bugaboo, the identarian left.Report
Eh, that is giving him too much credit. New York Magazine is a magazine for bougie liberals, the kind of people DeBoer normally despises. DeBoer is the classic downwardly mobile professional/academic that thinks the revolution will bring him tenure. He hates Democrats as much as JB does.Report
Yup, like the article above Jaybird pointed too in Jacobin is fine, because that’s what Jacobin should be posting.
I do find it funny the guy who know has a Substack audience of right-wingers who talks about how terrible all the NY PMC’s turned on him, yet he can still get a job writing for them. Either he’s lying or cancel culture isn’t as a real as he claims it is.Report
I know some real deal writers who seem to like Freddie personally and as a colleague so maybe to the right people he can show he is not a fool? I never met Freddie personally and only know about this from seeing interactions on social media but my guess is that he doesn’t mind having and using connections to get pieces in New York.
JB’s citing to Jacobin and defense of Freddie is revealing. It is really just a strange bedfellows alliance between people who hate Democrats for whatever reason.Report
Maybe they’re only pretending to like Freddie because he slept with them.Report
What I find hilarious about this is that it’s not about whether the position is correct or incorrect, but about WHO HAS STANDING TO HAVE IT.
Which, seriously, strikes me as giving the game away.Report
I notice here, and across other sites, liberals are mocking Freddie, but only the conservatives are supporting him.
I get a strong whiff of authoritarianism from Freddie, Jacobin and the other online leftists.
The obsession with ideological purity, dismissal of solidarity and coalition building… if they had any power AOC would now just be a blurry spot next to pictures of Bernie.Report
Balloon Juice! Lawyers, Guns, and Money! They’re all in agreement! How can Freddie not see this!Report
I think you and Freddie are really just upset that liberals like AOC are actually closer to the political center than you are and that the general public by and large has no great antipathy towards her.
I mean, c’mon man, guys on your side of the aisle are out there setting fire to Barbie dolls, shooting cans of beer and raving gibberish about pedophiles while AOC is attending elegant state functions and helping the President improve the economy..Report
She’s looking great in her “Tax the Rich” dress surrounded by masked employees.
My criticisms of AOC have nothing to do with her aesthetics. Her aesthetics are off the chart.
She’s a female Trump.Report
You’re going to be 90, and still upset over that Met Gala dress as AOC is finishing her final term as Senator of Brooklyn (after we split New York into 7 states to deal w/ the fact Wyoming has 12 people and 2 Senator’s), aren’t you?
Also, a female Trump would be massively corrupt and ya’ know, trying to lead an authoritatian takeover of the government, not say, tweeting things older Gen X men don’t like.Report
I’m not upset over the *DRESS*. I’m *AMUSED* about the dress.
I’m upset over the masking.Report
“You’re going to be 90, and still upset over that Met Gala dress ”
And you’ll be right there next to him, still upset that Trump said MS-13 was bad.Report
It’s weird that you see this as some kind of gotcha. The average person knows virtually nothing about economics, so the fact that they can’t see through her shtick doesn’t validate it. Yes, of course I’m angry that ignorant voters are being led astray by a charlatan, and that my country is being made worse off as a result. If you actually understood the issues, you would be, too.Report
She isn’t anywhere near the center but I think she’s probably pretty fairly representative of her district, which is what she’s supposed to be.Report
Eh, I don’t get the vibe from reading him that he’s one of those mindless socialists. I do think he’s a true believer in marxism, has no delusions about how popular it is (not at all) and he’s a damned good writer. He’s sort of like a mirror image of certain libertarians and, for the record, he votes Democratic.Report
As incisive as Freddie can be my biggest criticism of his writing writ large is his failure to grapple with the actual track record of Marxism. Which isn’t to say America’s form of capitalism doesn’t have a lot to criticize about it. Neoliberalism has rightly started to take some hits, and I think it’s broadly a good thing that with the Cold War behind us we can be more honest about the downsides, and consider more realistic types of mitigation and less-than-market fundamentalist approaches where there is in fact a greater good at issue. What makes no sense though is the failure to appreciate the really, really significant upsides, and at least the possibility of accountability and flexibility in the system. Conversely the only significant Marxist power seems to be Marxist in name only and is reverting to more of an authoritarian mercantilism. Anything else calling itself Marxist looks more like a front for the military or some other group to loot whatever sad country they’ve come to govern.Report
Your second half of the paragraph answers the first in Freddies view (as best as I understand it). Marxism hasn’t been correctly “tried”.Report
I’ve probably said this here before, but regardless: While I can’t speak for Freddie, because he actually writes very little on Marxism and Marxists, and what he does write is very basic and does not engage with any Marxist literature in any sort of depth, Western Marxism (not merely a geographical descriptor, but a reference to a family of Marxist schools of thought; Google the phrase for more info) has spent almost a full century now trying to address the failures of actually existing Marxist states and movements, as have several other adjacent leftwing intellectual traditions. How well they’ve dealt with the failures is a matter of debate, of course, but they’ve attempted to do so in various way. Since I don’t think Freddie’s goal is to convince anyone of the truth or importance or whatever of Marxism in any way, I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect him to repeat 90 years of left discourse for the sake of an audience who will never be interested in actually reading or thinking about any of that discourse.Report
Maybe if he didn’t pretty frequently give a nod to his belief in (support for?) Marxism I’d agree. However while I’m not generally one to criticize a writer for not writing on some particular topic it seems like something a political writer of his bent would at least occasionally take a swing at making the case for to a broader audience.Report
Eh, the only reason to do that is if you’re trying to convince the sorts of people who are likely to be skeptical of Marxism because of Stalin that they should be Marxists, and I’ve simply never gotten the impression that’s what he’s trying to do. I mean, how often do you find liberals, conservatives, and libertarians out there addressing the various horrors capitalism over the last couple centuries? Not often, because in general, they’re not trying to convince people who are skeptical of capitalism because of famines, coups, genocides, or wars for oil.Report
I’m not necessarily saying an apologetic, even if part of a positive case for something usually involves addressing the more major criticisms. For example Reason.com and CATO are out making the case for libertarianism in a way to appeal to a popular audience. I’d also say that center left outlets from legacy organs (NYT, WaPo) to less mainstream stuff like the Intercept are doing the same from an implicitly social democractic perspective (albeit a vulgar one perhaps) and employ pundits that try to deal with some of these kinds of questions. Once in a while they will take on a criticism of the perspective.
Anyway, when a mainstay of popular writing by a Marxist is to lament that no one takes Marxism seriously in this country I think at some point it’s fair to say ‘well, tell me why they should.’Report
He can be a good writer but he is also apparently a man so unpleasant in real life that he was terminated from university administration and his various online interactions with liberals who critique him show he is very thin-skinned.Report
I won’t get into the way this site’s liberals and centrists talks about the left (a hilarious blindspot since the site’s inception), or Freddie’s motivations, and I’ll note I agree with a few things he said, but here is where he is absolutely wrong, and I being wrong on this particular part renders the rest of his opinion piece moot, I think:
For years, the standard line has been that Bernie and AOC and the Squad have value beyond their votes because they serve as a symbol of what’s possible on the far-left of partisan politics, and their visibility will inspire more people to vote for left candidates, donate to their campaigns, or run for office as socialists themselves. In 2016, I was told that, win or lose, Sanders’s primary battle was generating a permanent infrastructure for left organizing within the Democratic Party, that the email lists and donor corps would live on past that primary and beyond Bernie and become a tool for durable lefty muscle within the Democratic system.
Perhaps Freddie simply hasn’t been paying close enough attention, but there continues to be a war within the national Democratic Party, as well as many state level Democratic Parties, between the centrist establishment and the increasingly influential progressive upstarts like AOC. The national and state parties have gone out of their way to undermine progressive candidates, especially for US Congress, not infrequently potentially giving up seats by pushing centrist candidates over charismatic young progressive ones. AOC, Bernie, and the rest of the squad, meanwhile, are out there every election year campaigning for progressive candidates. I know this because I’ve watched it happen up close. And while their progress is slow, they are winning: the size of “The Squad” grows each election cycle, usually despite the national party’s clear preferences for more moderate candidates.
Anyone on the left who is interested in moving the Democratic Party to the left (I confess, I am not) has to respect what AOC and the other progressives in Congress have done, because they have been remarkably effective given the power, and the wealth, of the forces who resist them. That Freddie doesn’t see this, or chooses to ignore it, suggests a level of unseriousness to his criticisms that I don’t think any other part of his piece can overcome.Report
I agree with everything you wrote here generally. I would like to say that if you view Freddie’s piece here as talking to Democratic Party members writ large then your critiques are rock solid. But I think if you view Freddie’s piece as being directed mainly at the world of the visible, vocal and active left that lies mostly beyond the left flank of the Democratic Party then his article makes a lot more sense (albeit in a peevish and irritable way which is kind of his writing voices standard tone when talking to his fellow travellers in the left-o-verse).Report
An important thing to understand about Freddie is that he has always (and I mean always) been ignored by the left. I don’t mean they willfully avoid him; I mean they mostly don’t know he exists, or to the extent that they know he exists, they don’t know anything about his views.
For a long time, I think he felt like his audience was liberals (which is why you saw him in the comments on liberal blogs all the time, but he was nowhere to be found on left blogs), whom he perhaps wanted to move left, and, at least among the small subset of liberals who are activists, to make them better activists, based on his experience with the failures of the anti-war movement at the turn of this century. The problem is, liberals despised him, as you could easily see in the replies to his comments on liberal blogs.
So, the people he saw as his ideological peers ignored him, and the people he was trying to talk to despised him; how is he to have an audience, particularly once his academic career was obviously over, and the publisher of his book wanted him to have a public presence to help book sales? I think his public writing since the book was published make it clear whom he chose for his audience.
Of course, this piece looks like it’s meant for liberals, based on where he published it and the fact that, unless he’s completely out of touch with left discourse, he knows where the left stands on AOC, and none of his arguments seem directed at those positions. However, he formulated these arguments in a Facebook post, and his Facebook posts are mostly read by his rightwing audience, so it stands to reason that while he may have published it in NY Magazine with the goal of riling up liberals, he first aired these opinions because AOC is one of the people his audience loves to hate the most.Report
See also (as a sort of general reply to the liberals here): https://twitter.com/wideofthepost/status/1684297226380513284?t=Y9EGlIJKNIqKMzZCK9z8bQ&s=19Report
Freddie at various times has proven himself to be thin-skinned and unpleasant when people pushed back or disagreed with him. That is not quite a way to make friends or convince people. He had a lot of negative things to say about LBGTQ people he deemed insufficiently bohemian and seems to have really disliked when the LBGTQ movement pushed for same-sex marriage legalization because he thought it was giving into a bourgeois institution or something like that.Report
Oh, I agree, Freddie’s always been a jerk. His pre-hiatus method of argument was something like this:
Frieddie: My position is A, which is obviously correct.
Freddie’s interlocutor: I believe A is wrong for these reasons, and B is actually correct.
Freddie: B? Are you really that stupid? Here are the obvious reasons B is wrong…
Freddie’s interlocutor: I disagree with those reasons for thinking B is wrong, for these reasons…
Freddie: You would think that because you’re an ugly loser!
As you probably know, this method of argument got him in pretty big trouble, leading to his hiatus, because “ugly” was replaced with, or ultimately led to, even worse insults and accusations.Report
I think a lot leftists especially the kind you seen in the United States that constantly sneer at the Democratic Party are actually scarred of power and secretly fine with not being in power. This is for a few reasons:
1. They think power always corrupts (it is true that it can corrupt);
2. I think the main reason though is that they dislike that holding power means dealing with things like competing interests, resource management, prioritization, spending political capital, and perhaps most seriously, the fear and anxiety that theory might have adverse or unexpected consequences when implemented.
A lot of lefties in my view hate this all and would prefer to remain “pure” and just sprout theory and grand desires instead of trying to run things and discovering this stuff is hard and oops, people did not like that change.
Biden and AOC actually try to do things and implement policies that they think will help and do so knowing the limits of their offices and the overall political scheme. Biden’s first student loan debt forgiveness program was nixed, so he came back shortly with a different program and attempt to get around what felled the first. AOC is actually trying to influence policy and law in ways that she can to make life better for people.
The Jacobins, Bri Bris, El Chapos, and DeBoer’s of the world just sneer and mock the Democrats and liberals for not being anti-Capitalist while engaging in the grifter economy at times (including being pet leftists right-wing media uses to bash Democrats and liberals), and stroking their chins about how the Revolution will turn America into their imaginary Sweden in three months. Plus, I am sure they all think they will be in some form of leadership council at the vanguard of the Revolution. A lot of them are privileged trust funders to boot or as least as upper-middle class bougie as the “winemoms” that they sneer it.
So I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the chronically online dirtbag left and paper revoluionaries, will someone please give me tenure at Jacobin. Or the Bruenings who claim to be left-wing but spend most of their time writing stuff against abortion and then class, not race BS.
Erik Loomis is a real leftist. People like Freddie are posers.Report
I don’t know who “The Jacobins” are, as Bhaskar is a Dem Soc, but they publish everyone from MLMs to progressive Dems, with various types of anarchists thrown in. Chapo stopped being at the center of the online left years ago. Freddie has never really been part of any online left (and I gather his participation offline has primarily been in organizing labor and anti-war stuff). So yeah, I have no idea who you’re talking about. Also, I don’t know what being afraid of being in power even means here. I know it was, many, many years ago, a criticism of people who criticized the Democratic Party from the left, but given what, say, DSA and Socialist Alternative have been doing for the last several years, I assume no one who’s paying attention uses it anymore. The rest of this just seems like pointless psychologizing to me, built on an idea of the online left from 2016.
I assume you chose Loomis because he and Freddie used to go at it a lot back when Freddie commented on LGM a lot, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.Report
Apologies for linking to a story from the New York Post but it seems like it’s actually discussing matters of fact so…
Dad of teen fatally shot in Seattle’s ‘organized protest’ zone blames city for encouraging ‘lawlessness’: suit
We discussed the shooting at the time, here.Report
So, the city encouraged boys who were brought up right to stand their ground and exercise their 2nd Amendment rights?
What’s the problem here?Report
Yeah, we got into this at the time. What were the black kids doing out on their own? Why were they making mischief instead of doing homework? They were no angels!Report
The Gulf Stream could collapse anywhere between 2025-2050 according to a new study in Nature: https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/25/world/gulf-stream-atlantic-current-collapse-climate-scn-intl/index.htmlReport
“Scientists uninvolved with this study told CNN the exact tipping point for the critical system is uncertain, and that measurements of the currents have so far showed little trend or change. But they agreed these results are alarming and provide new evidence that the tipping point could occur sooner than previously thought.”
“measurements of the currents have so far showed little trend or change” Err what? So, there’s been no significant change, but it could change drastically anytime?Report
anywhere between 2025 and 2095Report
UPS, Teamsters reach labor deal to avoid strike
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/25/ups-teamsters-reach-contract-to-avoid-strike-union-says.html
UPS and the Teamsters said they reached a tentative deal on a new contract.
The labor agreement is still subject to a ratification vote by the more than 300,000 workers.
The preliminary deal includes wage increases for both full- and part-time workers.Report
Good.Report
I am beginning to feel some serious, bone deep, worry for Israel. Like, I’ve always had an intellectual apprehension for where the course of the country was headed in the long term without the two state solution but I’m getting genuinely worried for the country in the short term right now.Report
Jaybird, your illiberal concern-trolling about democracy-in-action happening in the ONLY liberal state in that part of the world is as antisemitic as it is predictable. Maybe worry about the fascists back in Colorado instead of coming up with some weird boogeyman overseas?
Oh, wait.
Nevermind.
The whole idea of the legal reforms of the judiciary being unable to overturn decisions by the Cabinet or its ministers is one that has echoes in the US.
Getting rid of judicial review (or even putting limits on it) has always been a non-starter. I suppose that I could, in theory, see a case where the judges shoot down this or that law and it goes back to the legislature and the bill has to pass again with 75% support (or what have you) to be put back on the books.
THAT SAID, it doesn’t look like there’s a codified system in place for this. The term “extremely unreasonable” is used. Like, they can ignore court decisions if they are “extremely unreasonable”. Haaretz reports that they’re abolishing the “reasonableness” standard and, lemme tell ya, I have some *IMMEDIATE* puckering when I read that (even as I know that we wouldn’t be able to hammer out “reasonable” here if we limited the discussion to the lawyers).
All that to say: It’s probably going to get bad. Very bad. Bad to the point where people might be roused out of being on the same side they’ve been for the last however many years/decades.
The argument “what if we did that in the US” doesn’t usually work out because it’s so very difficult to map religious ethnostates to the US 1:1 but this is stuff that doesn’t particularly overlap with either “religious” or “ethnostate” and that makes it a lot easier to avoid the usual landmines. We’ll have *NEW* landmines.Report
I think it’s simple a slow reversion to the regional mean of sectarian states in a state of perpetual conflict. The West mostly beat this inclination out of itself centuries ago but the ME hasn’t. Israel probably had a window to buck the trend but I think that window has closed, and there’s nothing anti Semitic about noticing it. For us Americans this just means we need to start looking at the relationship as purely transactional like we do with the Arab states.Report
There’s plenty of stuff we need to do that we ain’t gonna do in a million years.Report
Truth.Report
“The West mostly beat this inclination out of itself centuries ago”
True for the US, Canada, and Australia (if you weren’t here when they came through). True for the middle 80% of most countries in Central or Western Europe or Central or South America. There’s a lot of area that’s not true for, though.Report
This is where an outsider needs a better guide … does the court have any other standard besides ‘reasonableness’ ? Haaretz implies no, and honestly, that seems … unlikely?
It states the bill abolishes the “reasonableness standard”
“The bill to abolish the reasonableness standard, which ends the High Court’s authority to strike down government decisions that it deems unreasonable, passed the third and final Knesset vote needed to ratify it into law on Monday afternoon.”
…and concludes
“Under the newly approved law, the Supreme Court is no longer allowed to invalidate any government decision, including those made by the prime minister, ministers, or Knesset members, such as appointments or dismissals.”
Is there no other standard than reasonableness for the Judiciary to invoke?
I have no formed opinion of how exactly a Judiciary functions under a ‘reasonableness’ standard that isn’t tethered to a written code which prescribes what is reasonable under the code. It’s one thing to wave at common law that’s built upon hundreds of years of case law… but for an 80-yo state? Maybe we just need a better explainer on what exactly ‘Reasonableness’ is and upon what it rests.
I certainly understand that in terms of power, some who have it feel they are losing it… it’s unclear exactly how it would function as having no judicial review at all.
I’m vaguely reminded of how folks around heree joke about Originalists; and as I’m seeing the new Rightist Judicial theory of ‘reasonableness’ emerge (phrased over hear by LEFT and RIGHT as Common Good), it makes me paraphrase the old saw: If you didn’t like the Originalist Judiciary, wait until you get the Common Good Judiciary.Report
I saw an argument for why there can’t be a written code and it involves codifying second class status for second class citizens and you can’t get away with that in the current year.
So here we are.Report
That would lay things bare, wouldn’t it?Report
That most reliable authority Wikipedia designates Israel’s judicial review as ‘High Court — American Model.’
That would suggest to me that there is a lot more to it, as there is in the US. The entry on the reform had a little bit more. I assume a reliable explanation would require an Israeli lawyer to educate us.
Under Israel’s current constitutional framework, all legislation, government orders, and administrative actions of state bodies are subject to judicial review by the Supreme Court of Israel, which has the power to strike down legislation and reverse executive decisions it determines to be in violation of Israel’s Basic Laws.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Israeli_judicial_reform#:~:text=Under%20Israel's%20current%20constitutional%20framework,in%20violation%20of%20Israel's%20BasicReport
“it makes me paraphrase the old saw: If you didn’t like the Originalist Judiciary, wait until you get the Common Good Judiciary.”
I’d retort that is socialcons didn’t enjoy the backlash they got from Originalist Judiciary decisions wait until they get a snoot full of the backlash they get when the Common Good *cough* I mean ‘Reasonableness’ Judiciary hands down their decisions.Report
LIke, I can see your point about “unreasonableness” being a bit of an odd bird and clearly needing reforming or clarifying. But that point crumbles into ashes when one takes into account that the government trying to do this clarifying is one that was elected with a hairs breadth of a majority and is doing the clarification from an entirely one sided piece of legislation with no buy in from the other 49.9999% of the country.Report
Ehud Barak made the most generous offer possible by an Israeli politician in the Camp David Accords and it was rejected. This led to the permanent collapse of the Israeli Left. Sharon attempted to see what a unilateral withdrawal would be like with Gaza and the aftermath turned Israel off to that. There is just a lot of distrust at this point. The biggest stickling point is what to do with all the Palestinians outside the West Bank or Gaza. The Palestinian leadership also seems to be still in maximum defiance mode.Report
It’s inarguable that the Palestinians screwed themselves over with Barak. Sharon hit on the next best solution (unilateral withdrawal) until histories most consequential brain clot felled him. But ever since Sharon went down the right has gone nuts in Israel while the left, shattered and scattered by the failure of the peace movement, has been in disarray. That doesn’t change the long term problem of the question of the territories.
But right now the Israeli’s have a Trump, but competent, married to the Israeli right wing nuts and they’re in charge. I’m worried about that far more for the short term.Report
‘
Psychologically, I think the Palestinians might realistically know they can’t destroy Israel or cause all the Jews to go “home’ but want something that can be seen as victory where Israel is defeated. That is why I suspect there was a surge of terrorism after the Gaza withdrawal rather than a let’s see what happens next situation. No Israeli government is going to cosign to this.
There do seem to be plenty of Palestinians and their allies who still believe that the only just solution is the total defeat of Israel. Some even believe the “Zionists” must go home to Europe even if they are descendants of Jews from Morocco or Yemen.Report
Perhaps, but had Sharon not suffered that stroke and had unilaterally withdrawn to lines he thought were tolerable in the territories the Israelis would be in a much stronger position today and wouldn’t have near the same prospective long term problems.
Interestingly none of that is directly relevant to the utter crap-fest that the Israelis are facing at the moment though. That’s entirely internally inflicted on themselves.Report
CNN is reporting that the Hunter Biden plea deal has fallen apart.
This may be true but they don’t mention Trump. What about Trump?Report
Wait, nevermind. Whew!
Report
Wait! It unraveled again.
What about Trump?
Report
Why would Trump be relevant to this discussion?Report
Because Jared Kusher did worse.Report
I suppose, but Jared Kushner is a simple and pretty ironclad accusation.
1. Jared served in Trumps administration
2 Jared accomplished many things under Trump that the Saudi’s very much appreciated.
3. Some of those things were very much to the detriment of the interests of the USA.
4. Afterwards the Saudis gave Kushner a billion dollars via a sweetheart investment deal.
Contrast this to Hunter
1. Hunter never served in any administration Joe Biden was involved in to any degree.
2. As far as we can tell Hunter (and some other Biden family members) ripped off several foreign companies for hundreds of thousands of dollars by trading on his last name and they got nothing in return for their payout.
3. The interests of the USA were not impacted in any way by this behavior.
They seem completely different to me. Don’t they seem completely different to you?Report
Of course! Which is why we shouldn’t be talking about Hunter.Report
One can talk about Hunter all one wants but it’s a short conversation:
Hunter is a pathetic failson who traded on his old man’s name.
*universal agreement- conversation over*
It’s when right wingers try to connect this anodyne, obvious and very boring point to Joe Bidens’ administration that the wheels fall off.Report
Because then the conversation reveals that Joe is a great and loving father.Report
Uh, that is not the message the Hunter Biden obsessives want to get out tho.Report
But that’s the message normal people outside the bubble see, which is why it hasn’t hurt Joe one bit.Report
Universal agreement, ok. Conversation over? Why?Report
Typically when all sides agree on the particulars a given conversation ends. I’m unaware of any leftists who disagree that Hunter is a pathetic failson who traded on his old man’s name.Report
How about when there are still credible accusations being investigated.Report
I’ve seen no evidence these “credible” accusations have revealed anything beyond that in shocking news, rich people will spend money on their friend’s kids art (also, Hunter appears to be a good artist regardless) and that companies will waste money on the idea it’ll give them access, regardless of if it will or not.
See, literally, NBA teams hiring friends of players or former college coaches/teammates before they hit free agency.
But hey, as a compromise, let’s ban from the Presidency any politician who kid is an adult.Report
What credible accusations would be referring to; or did you have a typo and meant to type “incredible accusations”?Report
For calibration purposes, do you think that Blasey Ford’s accusations against Kavanaugh were “credible”?
Just to show my hand up front, it seems like the usage of that word in connection with public figures has a lot to do with the political party of the target.Report
Let’s keep our eye on the ball here.Report
They were. As certain allegations against hunter Biden have proved to be. The key difference is the DoJ prosecuted Biden after an extensive investigation and set aside the kavanaugh allegations without even a wife because the White Hiuse hadn’t asked them to follow up.Report
To that “shoe on the other foot” approach, if this were a Republican who had been in Washington for 50 years and had family being investigated, I wouldn’t be so confident that there was never a shared bank account, that he’d spent his entire career without ever taking a taste for himself, that there was nothing that even hinted at impropriety.Report
That’s where i am too, as a man of no party — it seems perfectly credible to me (though certainly not proven) that Joe Biden might have either greased some wheels for his son or even personally benefited, because it’s the sort of thing we know some politicians do to varying degrees. It’s also credible that he did not do any of that stuff and there’s no fire despite any of the smoke.Report
I’m definitely a GOP guy, but also, you know, sane enough to admit that there can be scoundrels on my side.Report
It’s entirely possible that Joe Biden could have done what you’re talking about. But so far no one has found any sign he did so or even been able to credibly define what “thing” he might even be alleged to have done.Report
If nothing else, he certainly got paid better.Report
Here’s some direct report on the unraveling.
What about Giuliani!Report
Or Oral Roberts? Or the My Pillow guy?? Or Bob?!Report
And the conditions of release:
The drug testing one is the one that strikes me as least gameable.Report
These seem like pretty standard sorts of post-conviction release terms to me. (As suggested by the fact that they’re all on a preprinted standardized form.)Report
Here’s an interesting take from a former federal prosecutor on what he thought went down:
Report
Ah, Jeez. Poor Sinead.
I listened to her stuff non-stop in the 90’s.
Report
A gorgeous voice, a beautiful soul, and one of the bravest people to grace the public scene in our lifetimes.
This is another celebrity death that kind of shakes me.Report
A really beautiful tweet from Rob Schneider (yeah, I know):
I remember the night @SineadOConnor ripped up a picture of the Pope when I was on SNL.
Though I didn’t see it happen.
It was an episode where I was very busy (in a lot of sketches) and there are moves that performers have where they know they can get laughs. Anyway, I was back stage in quick change (getting dressed for the the next sketch) and I didn’t know anything had happened. I came out and during the next sketch, I just felt the audience had changed. My usual physical moves that got laughs fell silent. No sketches got laughs after that. And the rest of the night was eerily quiet. It wasn’t till after the show that I had learned that Sinead had tore up a picture of the Pope. I didn’t realize at the time that it would be a big controversy. I spent some time with her at the after party at the Tea Garden and she was gentle and lovely and didn’t seem to have a worry about anything. We laughed about a few things trying to understand each other’s accents and had a drink and she could not have been lovelier.
All these years later you realize that fame and all that comes with is very destructive to gentle souls. It is my sincere hope that the peace that eluded Sinead in life she can have now, resting in God’s embrace.Report
Huh. That is sweet.Report
Mitch McConnell appears to have had a cerebral-vascular accident of somekind during a press conferenceReport
Do we know that for sure?Report
He stopped speaking and had to be led off the podium. Came back and didn’t say anything about in a later Q&A. Your call on what that means besides being an old guy still recovering from a concussion.Report
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/26/world/asia/japan-gay-j-pop-shinjiro-atae.html
In a potential first for a Japan, a JPOP star announces he is gay.Report
CNN reports that Anheuser-Busch is going to have layoffs. Less than 2% of its 19,000 employees (so under 380).Report
https://www.fox26houston.com/news/houston-woman-detained-in-dubai
Houston woman detained in Dubai, charged with screaming in public
You know, you might want to understand the laws / culture of the country you visit, just to ensure you can get out. While not illegal, I can’t remember the number of people who were either refused entry or told to cover up when they showed up in “inappropriate” clothing in catholic churches in Italy. Sure, just walk past the sign telling you that and ignore it and get offended when you’re called out.Report
‘Murica!
Something something something American Exceptionalism something something.Report
Every country has it’s a holes… There is no exceptionalism for that..Report
So it seems that Facebook does indeed have political preferences built into its algorithm:
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/27/1190383104/new-study-shows-just-how-facebooks-algorithm-shapes-conservative-and-liberal-bubReport
Good news!
Report
It seems at least one GOP Senator knows his history:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/28/politics/tim-scott-desantis-florida-black-history/index.htmlReport
Being Black might prevent Tim Scott from going with DeSantis stupidity.Report
The two interesting questions (to me) are:
* Did Scott just not do his homework or did he decide to ride a wave?
* By responding this way, what audience is he chasing? It’s not a message that would resonate with most Republicans, but might among the more hardcore Never-Trumpers who are also seeing only the kneejerk anti-DeSantis take.Report
I suspect he did his homework and decided to ride a wave. He’s also chasing the general election audience that very Presidential candidate needs to actually get elected as well as the black conservative audience who are repulsed by this characterization of slavery.. Given that his polling is in single digits . . .Report
I mean, for those who care about actually being right instead of just being on the right team, this is not even a close call — it’s a ridiculous slander. Someone even pointed out that those AP History standards that people were giving Florida a hard time about for rejecting included line making the same point that people are calling out now. This is pure political BS, and it’s breathtaking how extensively it’s now treated as “fact” in the mainstream press and general political conversation.Report
The most heinous part of the new Florida standard is the pernicious reference to learning trades that could lead to personal benefit. It’s a lie, is found nowhere in the AP class (or so says my Google-fu), and is a statement designed to make slavery seem less like the inhumane enterprise it was. There was NOTHING good, or right, or just about chattel slavery as practiced in the US. NOTHING. And to REQUIRE the teaching of anything otherwise is to require the teaching of lies. And I say this having grown up in a public school system in the south where the Civil War was taught as the War of Northern Aggression well into the 1980’s.Report
Anyone over 10 should understand that even bad things can have individual aspects that were good, without that fact changing the overall valence of the thing. There’s even a proverb about it that perhaps you might have heard before.
As for the standards — the College Board basically admits it here while claiming unconvincingly that it’s different:
“College Board officials denied that the AP course echoes the new Florida standards, noting that while the course “includes a discussion about the skills enslaved people brought with them that enslavers exploited as well as other skills developed in America that were valuable to their enslavers,” the class does not frame slavery in a positive light.”
But anyway, I’m done commenting about it here, and will just stick to silently judging people based on how much they try to cling to this criticism actually being reasonable.Report
you need to reread your sentence and the comments. Skills valuable to enslavers doesn’t equal skills for personal gain. 10 year olds would also understand that difference.
And frankly, with the forced family separation, rape, flogging and summary executions applied to slavery, I fail to see why you or any person of conscience would want to defend it.Report
The True Cost Of The Lithium Mining Boom Powering Electric Cars
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nl0E-UhKB5E&ab_channel=InsiderNews
Don’t even get me started on the cobalt mining.Report
Sesame is now an official FDA allergen. This has resulted in multiple products having sesame added to it when, before, they didn’t have sesame added to it.
Why?
Because it is easier for food production people to add a couple of sesame seeds and slap a “WARNING: CONTAINS SESAME!” sticker on the box than it is to deal with a potential cross-contamination lawsuit.
The FDA commissioner has stated that he did not see this coming.Report
“The FDA commissioner has stated that he did not see this coming.” Evidently the commissioner has never worked in private industry.Report
RFK Jr is playing footsie with neo-nazis or doesn’t mind if his interns do using his name. Let’s see how many conservatives here whine about this accusation being made: https://twitter.com/marisakabas2/status/1684941561467895808?s=20Report
Looking at it, yeah, I’ll complain. It’s two numbers. If they’re factually wrong, then he did it maliciously. If they’re not, then odds are he didn’t.Report
There are even criteria:
https://www.secretservice.gov/protection/leaders/campaign-2024#:~:text=Protection%20under%20these%20guidelines%20should,threat%20assessment%20and%20other%20factors.Report
He’s wrong.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/28/politics/fact-check-rfk-biden-secret-service-protection-denial/index.htmlReport
Here is a good explainer on LLMs — detailed but accessible to the layperson. Helpful background for our future philophical conversations about ChatGPT and how “intelligent” it is or isn’t.Report
I came across this piece previously and found it helpful as a non-tech person. I still think it weighs against the idea of ‘intelligence’ as commonly understood. I have a weird placement of being a lawyer required to do higher level thinking (yes, I toot my own horn) working at health tech companies that develop what we used to call ‘machine learning’ instead of ‘AI’ using the same kind of statistical models. Now, I have never worked anywhere that developed anything quite like GPT, but I have been at plenty of places that have created predictive models for diagnosis, benefits administration, and other tools in the healthcare space. All of these things are useful, and can be extremely accurate, but at its core what it’s doing is rapidly crunching huge amounts of data and spitting out a predictive response based on past performance. All of these things always come with a legal disclaimer (i.e. the human doctor still needs to use professional, clinical judgment before relying on any prediction). As I understand it the new ‘AI’ systems are really doing the same thing, using a statistical predictive model to create words, phrases, and sentences that are likely to be cogent and pleasing to the human reader, based on the inputs. But being cogent and statistically highly likely to please the reader is not the same thing as being substantively right about anything.
This is why I am still not feeling very threatened in my job security by these kinds of programs, at least not yet. The quality so far are such that they can create superficially pleasing output but not as far as I can tell conduct the kind of interrogation of ones own work and thinking necessary for what we typically consider human intelligence and problem solving. While weighing probabilities based on past experience is a component, it isn’t the whole thing.
At best we’ve built the software version of the police dog that alerts based on the cues its learned to read from its handler. I’m not convinced we will be able to do more as long as we are relying on these models, no matter how fast and thorough they get. The fundamental nature of the model is limiting.Report
Hmm, this was just posted a couple of days ago – are you thinking of something else? One thing it does is clarify that LLMs are more than just markov chains on steroids – words/tokens end up with intricate complicated relationships, so saying they just predict the next word is dramatically oversimplifying.
I’m certainly not saying that ChatGPT should be called “intelligent”, but to say it’s not anywhere near close, I think one ought to have some idea about how human brains store and access information and how it would be dramatically different.Report
I am a pretty prolific substack reader and it came up in my recommendations.
To me the core faulty or at least unproven premise is intelligence = probability machine. Now, maybe my objection is to some degree semantic. If they called it next gen machine learning I’d be a lot less inclined to see it as a massive over sell of what is going on with these things.Report
Oh OK, I took “previously” as “a while back”.
Some of this is just emphasis — definitely ChatGPT is not “intelligent’ like a human is, but it has some intriguing abilities that line up with aspects of human intelligence. E.g. a simple chatbot wouldn’t be able to draw analogies based on vector arithmetic.Report