01/20/25

It all falls away

First, Elon Musk gives the Nazi salute at the Trump inauguration ceremony.

Elon Musk cheerfully gives Nazi salute at Trump Inaugu

Then the ADL attempts to say that this was not a Nazi salute.

ADL X post justifying Musk's Nazi salute

This is utter gaslighting. ADL has spent most of its history gathering intelligence on antisemitism, calling it out publicly, and working with government to wipe it out. ADL has identified the “awkward gesture” in high school students, militia members, and prison gangs and has designated it as a Nazi salute. Musk is evidently too rich and powerful to be called to account.

Musk’s vocal support of AfD, the German hard-right “neo-Nazi” party, of course, has no bearing on interpreting the “awkward gesture.”

My guess is that Musk’s damage control PR team drafted the entire post and handed it to the ADL for unaltered reproduction.

It also appears that I have inadvertently been contributing to a phishing operation that has been illicitly using the ADL logo since 2014. I may have to contact the FTC… Wait, never mind.

01/6/25

Farewell, Old Blue Thing

A rather gory slip-and-fall has meant the retirement of my college sweatshirt. It is not a bad thing. All these years, it has gotten unwanted attention. Perhaps I will find a Pierson sweatshirt, and if any inquire, I will say that I went to Pierson College, a small, residential liberal arts college in Southern Connecticut that has seen better days.

11/29/24

Logic For Our Age

You will admit all this in a moment, Ctesippus, if you answer my
questions, said Dionysodorus. Tell me, have you got a dog?
Yes, and a brute of a one, too, said Ctesippus.
And has he got puppies?
Yes indeed, and they are just like him.
And so the dog is their father?
Yes, I saw him mounting the bitch myself, he said.
Well then: isn’t the dog yours?
Certainly, he said.
Then since he is a father and is yours, the dog turns out to be your
father, and you are the brother of puppies, aren’t you?

Plato, Euthydemus, 293e et seq.

11/6/24

An urgent sonnet

“It is possibly later than you think,

It is likely later than you think,

It is usually later than you think,

It is somewhat later than you think, 

It is considerably later than you think, 

It is a whole lot later than you think, 

It is sometimes later than you think, 

It is a good deal later than you think, 

It is always later than you think,

It is by all odds later than you think, 

It is surely later than you think,

It is certainly later than you think, 

It is definitely later than you think, 

It is undoubtedly later than you think . . .”

(Merrill Moore, from _M: One Thousand Autobiographical Sonnets_ (1938)

11/6/24

Comme disait Simon Leys

“Dans sa vieillesse à Vienne, exilé volontaire de son cher Beloeil – que «l’humeur, l’horreur, l’honneur» l’empêchaient seuls de revoir –, Ligne connut la pauvreté. Des témoins de l’époque le décrivent, vieillard hirsute et sans perruque, et qui «puait fort». Il avait aussi un âne, un mouton et une chèvre qui chaque matin grimpaient sur son lit pour mendier du pain.”

10/28/24

Accuracy in Analogizing

Some people have taken to referring to a certain overweight golfer as “America’s Hitler.” After endless Hollywood dramatizations and History Channel re-enactments of the Third Reich, that designation drapes him in a certain unearned glamour of evil. It would be more accurate and appropriate to call him “America’s Milosevic.” And yes, it can happen here. Don’t let it.

09/26/24

More fun with AI, #2 in a series

I fed Book I of Plato’s Republic to the Adobe AI Assistant, and got this:

The text discusses the concept of the end and excellence of organs, such as the eyes and ears. It emphasizes that fulfilling an end requires possessing one’s proper excellence, as seen in the example of sight for the eyes. The text highlights the importance of each organ’s specific excellence in achieving its end.

Next time, I’ll try Joe Sachs instead of Jowett.

08/6/24

Model Collapse

Research into AI model collapse has been around for at least a year. Still, this article in Nature, although slightly daunting to me as a humanist, has now cemented the phenomenon. AI that is trained on texts from AI steadily worsens. It’s a little like having a friend who gradually gets soused as he consumes sequential bottles of beer in the course of an evening.

The difficulty for the AI-mongers is that they have uncritically scraped every English word possible from every Internet source that will let it (and often from sources that don’t want to let it). AI-related companies have persuaded the world that AI can compose and reason in the place of humans, and that no one need know. At the same time, they are desperately trying to figure out how to distinguish AI writing from human writing while constantly scraping more data. They are Nestbeschmutzers, foulers of their own nest.

But this needs an example, and Drs. Ilia Shumailov, Zakhar Shumaylov, Yiren Zhao, Nicolas Papernot, Ross Anderson, and Yarin Gal have provided us with a fine one indeed, worthy of Borges:

Example 1. Example of text outputs of an OPT-125m model affected by model collapse—models degrade over generations, for which each new generation is trained on data produced by the previous generation.

Input: some started before 1360 — was typically accomplished by a master mason and a small team of itinerant masons, supplemented by local parish labourers, according to Poyntz Wright. But other authors reject this model, suggesting instead that leading architects designed the parish church towers based on early examples of Perpendicular.

Outputs:

Gen 0: Revival architecture such as St. John’s Cathedral in London. The earliest surviving example of Perpendicular Revival architecture is found in the 18th @-@ century Church of Our Lady of Guernsey, which dates from the late 19th century. There are two types of perpendicular churches:.

Gen 1: architecture such as St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome or St. Peter’s Basilica in Buenos Aires. There is no evidence that any of these buildings were built during the reign of Pope Innocent III, but it is possible that they may have been built during the reign of his successor, Pope Innocent.

Gen 5: ism, which had been translated into more than 100 languages including English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Hungarian, Slovak, Lithuanian, Estonian, Finnish, Romanian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Croatian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Russian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz.

Gen 9: architecture. In addition to being home to some of the world’s largest populations of black @-@ tailed jackrabbits, white @-@ tailed jackrabbits, blue @-@ tailed jackrabbits, red @-@ tailed jackrabbits, yellow @-.

Jackrabbits of all colors, we salute you!

08/1/24

Anti-De-Platforming

Donald Trump’s encounter with the National Association of Black Journalists yesterday reminds us of the purpose of debate and dialogue. Mutual back-scratching is all very nice, but what’s valuable about a public forum comes to the fore when liars and bullshitters are put on the spot.

I’m not perfect. I too have joined crowds waving signs in opposition to some malevolent public figure’s visit to campus. I felt disgust at the idea that the institution I serve was lending some of its prestige, and handing a probably not too small honorarium, to somebody whose claims I thought were contradictory to the whole idea of free inquiry and equality of persons. Racists, gerrymanderers, stackers of the deck, that sort of people.

But the offense I took at those invitations would be greatly mitigated if institutions would agree to a set of rules for appearances by Highly Controversial People.

HCPs must know that by entering a public forum, they are agreeing to have their ideas and assumptions questioned. Those who invite them are put on notice that any flattering treatment the HCP receives must be balanced with an equal share of time allotted to an antagonist. Or better yet, as soon as the visit is announced a sign-up sheet must be opened for questioners. Each questioner will have, let’s say, three minutes. Not to scream at the HCP or to grandstand, but to point out contradictions, faulty evidence, a lack of attention to consequences, or other flaws. The HCP’s answers to these questions will go into the public record.

Somebody may anticipate that the sign-up sheet can be stacked with pro-HCP voices, thus nullifying the act of critique. This potential problem can be dealt with to some extent by subjecting the order of appearance of questioners to a lottery. And if there’s a scramble to get on the questioners’ list by voices pro and con, surely this only enhances the value of having the debate, and the public record of the responses will show pretty clearly who’s pitching softballs and who brought their best game.

In his appearance before the NABJ, the large orange man revealed his weaknesses so abjectly that the event even restored my faith in dialogue. Bravo to the uncompromising questioner, Rachel Scott. Let this event be the example in our minds next time the temptation to de-platform arises. Create the conditions for actual questioning and we may all learn something.

07/23/24

Peak Grauniad

A headline in the Guardian, the daily paper that seems to address a fairly well-read, internationalist, and left-leaning public and moreover doesn’t operate behind a paywall, today seemed to encapsulate its style, its readership, and its personality. Until further notice, we have reached peak Grauniad.

I Deeply Regret Riding an Elephant on Holiday” by Chris Packham tells you, first, that he has the sort of money that enables you to go to exotic places where you might ride elephants; and moreover, that he’s the sort of conscientious dude who feels bad about it afterward. The subtitle goes on: “This Year, We Should All Make the Ethical Choice,” elevates his regret into exemplary preaching to “all” of us who might be similarly well-heeled and similarly tempted. You feel better about yourself just reading the headline. Why, I, too, might be in the position of go on the sort of holiday where I might meaningfully refuse to ride an elephant! In fact, I’m refusing to ride an elephant right now, sitting in my back yard in Chicago! What a good person I must be!

The author spares no effort to reassure us of his “ethical” qualities. He was confronted with the dilemma– ride the elephant or not?– because he was taking his “stepdaughter Megan, who was only a child” to see tigers somewhere in Africa or Asia, and elephant-back was the only way to do it. Points for being such an exemplary stepdad! Making a kid happy is generally blameless. Thus the ethically suspect ride was a means to a noble end, forced on them by circumstance. So you should be ok, Chris! Exempt. Nothing to declare. In the category of excusemanship, you rule.

Further points rain on our author for pausing to explain the exploitation of animals to young Megan and taking the elephants’ agency seriously to the extent of “visit[ing] the place they were kept, rather than just jump[ing] on them at the side of the road.” Well yes. One doesn’t just “jump on” an elephant– or anybody else. “The fact of the matter is that those elephants were probably working exclusively for our gratification – and that is not OK.” But do you have proof that they were ill-treated, or does abuse just go with being an elephant in that unnamed country that you chose to visit? Is an elephant working as a tiger observation platform necessarily worse off than an elephant who hauls lumber or builds roads? If the only place for an elephant is a wildlife reserve, did Mr. Packham go round to interview the farmers who live next to wildlife reserves and might have feelings about the role of animal tourism in enabling other kinds of exploitation?

It is terribly hard to be a 100% harmless person in a world of many people and organisms with clashing priorities. But it is awfully easy to brag about being a lucky-yet-virtuous person and to pose as an ethical model and authority, especially before the morally-aspirational clientèle of that paper, whose regular reader I am, but often with a cringe.

07/21/24

Divorcing

I’ve been away for many months. Forgive me. The cascade of things-to-do, plus an incapacitating disgust toward social media and the stuff it vehicles, have kept me off the interwebs. But as always, when “somebody is wrong on the Internet,” I see the Bat-signal in the sky and jump for my cape and tights. Perhaps to regret my precipitousness later.

The stimulus: People harshing on J. D. Vance, the Theocratic Absolutist candidate for Vice President, because he wants to eliminate no-fault divorce (along with a lot of other essential things) though he is a twice-divorced man.

The accusation of hypocrisy lacks subtlety. There is not necessarily an inconsistency between his personal experience and his policy stance, if you stop to think about it from the right angle: Namely, that his prior divorces were quite possibly brought by his former wives. (I don’t know this as a fact, I am just surmising, because I don’t have a strong enough stomach to go digging for the legal paper trails.)

Thus what he is against is not divorce per se, but wives having the power to demand divorce from unendurable husbands. Of which he, in my reconstruction, may have been one. So now that “Gotcha!” would swerve into an “Aha!”

I have a funny tale to tell. A friend who was undergoing a divorce– as plaintiff, not as respondent– was faced with an extremely obnoxious opposing counsel who constantly ran up the bills by making frivolous accusations, demanding irrelevant depositions, not showing up for mediation meetings, and so on. My friend was sitting in his lawyer’s office one day when a call came in. Guess who? The obnoxious opposing lawyer’s wife, who was desperately seeking a capable lawyer to divorce his sorry ass and shake him over the money basket. My friend listened with delight and barely suppressed laughter as the wife described at length the horror of living with that jerk, slob, dimwit, creep (and other salty naval expressions), until his lawyer said, amicably and politely, that it wasn’t a case she could get herself involved in because of current litigation.

The thought of how deeply the jerk lawyer’s wife hated him buoyed up my friend during many hours of painful and unnecessary interrogation.

I can’t help seeing Vance and all his companions in misfortune in the same light. I hope their exes are living their best life, as folks say.

07/4/24

Prayer for Our Country

“Our God and God of our ancestors, we invoke Your blessing upon our country, on the government of this Republic, the President of these United States and all who exercise just and rightful authority. Instruct them out of Your Law, that they may administer all affairs of state in justice and equity, that peace and security, happiness and prosperity, right and freedom, may forever abide among us.

Unite all the inhabitants of our country, whatever their origin and creed, into a bond of true brotherhood to banish hatred and bigotry and to safeguard the ideals and free institutions which are our country’s glory.

May this land under Your Providence be an influence for good throughout the world, uniting men in peace and freedom and helping to fulfill the vision of thy Prophets: “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall men learn war any more.” “For all men, both great and small shall know the Lord.”

Rabbi Morris Silverman, Sabbath and Festival Prayer Book, 1946

This prayer may again, as before, change early next year. The first line will be, “O God and God of our ancestors, we invoke your blessing on all who exercise just and rightful authority.”

05/24/24

Poker Chip

I’ve been off Facebook for almost a month. At the end of the fourth week, I should give myself a poker chip. Escape has never worked before; I ordinarily return after a week. But Facebook does such a poor job of meeting my intellectual and emotional needs these days that it has been really easy this time. It believes I love cute animals, aviation, and the New York subway system, and feeds me a relentless diet of them, interspersed with many, many advertisements; there are almost no posts from friends. It’s reminiscent of old-time UHF television stations, with the ads for the Pocket Fisherman, Magic Chef, and Ginsu Knife. You forget that you’re supposed to be watching the late, late movie, a B-movie with inexpensive rights and low production values.

What am I going to do with my spare time? Work, write, and read. Most of the jobs for people of my dubious and deracinated status are for AI training — in other words, training my replacement. I’m no Madame de Sévigné, but I have several long-lapsed correspondences. At the same time, I have shelves full of books I have never gotten around to reading. I am going to put them off to revisit Metaphysics Γ. Then, I will walk to a bookcase, close my eyes, stick out my finger, and pick a book.

Even if I nap, I will still be better off than on Facebook.

05/7/24

Boo-hoo, Starbucks!

Poor Starbucks!

They missed their earnings call, boo-hoo. Moreover, they are blaming it on the Chinese. (You can’t make this stuff up!)

I think that Starbucks has owed its success to its pretense that people were drinking coffee when they were actually drinking 30 ounces of condensed sugar syrup. People like sugar syrup more than coffee. Nonetheless, Starbucks is trying to deliver the alleged coffee in ever more perverse ways — adding olive oil? — and failing. They could always try keeping their menu the same for a year at the same prices.

My wife goes to Starbucks for a $5 “trenta” iced tea when I can make her 30 ounces for 70¢ – with much better quality tea. The reason she goes there is the kids. They know her and love her. They tell her about their lives. They know what she orders depending on the kind of day it is. So, customer service wins the day. The difficulty is that Howard Schultz has designed the business so that there is 99% barista turnover every year. Soon, my wife has to make new Starbucks friends who are much like the old Starbucks friends but younger.

This reminds me of the novel “Never Let Me Go” by Ishiguro, where clones are raised so their organs can be transplanted into the original children. Clones come and disappear based on how many organs they have left. The Starbucks kids are giving away their youth and attention for minimum wage. It’s not such a great bargain for the kids, who gradually find out the realities of their situation over the course of their employment.

I should add that Howard Schultz is terrified of the prospect of a barista union. He and Jeff Bezos are trying to eliminate unions altogether by asking the courts to make the NLRB disappear. So, union deterrents are built into the job itself, like mandatory anti-union lectures and scheduling design that ensures that the workers are compartmentalized and can’t be visited by union representatives. (If you know a barista, and they don’t have a shift that day, ask another employee when the barista will be back. You will not get a straight answer.) My wife made a bûche de Noël last year for the Starbucks crew, and she didn’t know whether they liked it. Because of the scheduling permutations, only 2-3 baristas knew the cake existed on any given day By the end, the ganache must have tasted like modeling clay. She was thanked a week later when the rota had cycled around. I think she will make seven small cakes this year, one for each crew.

05/2/24

Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean

In Mark Charedoff’s “Goodbye, Columbia,” he constructs a fantasy in which colleges — ten small and poor enough to be bullied by donors but with respectable names — would be transformed to inculcate right-wing Jewish donors’ political and moral beliefs. It’s a version of Plato’s state in which the philosopher-kings (donors) rule over the “producers” (students) with the aid of the Guardians (faculty). Producers come in, Guardians transform them (via the philosopher-king’s playbook), and graduate them out to impose this arrangement on the rest of the world. Nobody mentions that this arrangement is entirely predicated on a Noble Lie which slots everyone into their social roles and justifies doing so. (If you remember the hypnoaedic recordings respectively played to the sleeping Alphas, Betas, and Gammas in Huxley’s Brave New World, you’ve got the picture.)

The “Noble Liars…” Let’s just say that they are bog-standard AIPAC donors who want all the usual things. They want to eliminate DEI programs and “Critical Legal Studies” and design a curriculum similar to the “Great Books” program, but not containing material to be found in “left-wing” political thought, e.g., Fanon. They speak in the name of “freedom” and “excellence” but in the service of ideological reproduction. You don’t need Plato, weak liberal arts institutions, or that much money. What you really want is someplace like Liberty University or Patrick Henry University, which you can create de novo as institutions “safe for Jews.” Of course, there are many types of Jews, and it remains to be seen what sort would consider applying. My guess is that they want the secular ones who would otherwise go to Ivies, not actual believers. It’s a “intellectual liberty”/”physical safety” tradeoff of the Ben Franklin kind, and those who choose “safety” will find it comes with an entire Hermès store of baggage.

01/20/24

Our Glorious Future, or When Will We Ever Learn?

Polling shows that 30% of both major U.S. political parties believe that members of the other party are “less than human” and not possessed of human morality.

This belief is the precondition for full-on genocide, as in so many countries before us from whom we will probably never learn.

I had a statistic on the number of people convinced that complete liquidation of the other party was required for America to recoup its glory, goodness, and standing as a unipolar hegemony, but I can’t find it now. I will edit this post if/when I find it.

[The closest I have come so far is this recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, which shows that 12-15% of both parties think political violence is acceptable to achieve political goals:

https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2023-12/Reuters%20Ipsos%20Large%20Sample%20Survey%20%236%20Topline%2012%2013%202023.pdf

This is still not wholesale liquidation, though. I saw but cannot yet document that some Americans think liquidation of the Other Side is necessary for a good political/social outcome and the number is significant enough to worry about.]

Two sides, the same.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2024/01/20/polarization-science-evolution-psychology/
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/08/09/as-partisan-hostility-grows-signs-of-frustration-with-the-two-party-system/

More hopefully:

https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/09/05/polarization-democracy-and-political-violence-in-united-states-what-research-says-pub-90457

Most hopeful — perhaps in an ostrich-y way — is this article from the National Academy of Sciences saying that conclusions about partisan violence are the fault of poorly defined survey questions that result in unfair characterization of the respondents’ views as extremist.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116870119

01/5/24

Alex Gelley, z”l

Alex died yesterday at the age of 90 following a long decline. He was one of the professors who recruited me to UCI. He was intensely curious and relentless in inquiry, risking but avoiding pedantry.

As I left the academic world, he suggested that I become a Privatdozent, and so I became, well before the advent of “alt. ac.” We were periodic guests of the Gelleys, and he always had some insight worth hearing as we gathered around his dining room or kitchen table.

He was one of the faculty who split the Comparative Literature department from the English department. Faculty meetings, as I understand, improved on both sides of the split. I hear as I write this the range of his voice making a distinction or observation.

Who among us did not take Walter Benjamin as a touchstone? There was enough in him for everyone, and plenty for Alex. His final book was on Benjamin, deliberate and without headiness or messianism of the kind to which his students came.

He occasionally hit a strange note. He did not understand why my wife belonged in graduate school or how she could have  earned her Ph.D., and said so on several public occasions, including the celebration of her receiving her doctorate. In the end, he was a theorist and she was an empiricist, and the two minds could not appreciate each other.

Aside from his family, there was the old humanities crew, from my era and before. My cohort was the last where a graduate student had a 2/3 chance of getting a job at the annual MLA meeting. Now, they have a 1/10 chance for a job, and end up as adjuncts or in other toil “to bring forth sustenance from the earth.” Alex did not really understand what had happened, and perhaps it is better that he didn’t. He was from a time when a department chair could call up another department chair, talk favorably about a graduate student, and the student would be hired.

Perhaps in the seventh sphere, he will be able to see this crumbling little planet for what it is. Perhaps he will meet Walter Benjamin and ask after the mysterious suitcase Benjamin lost at Port-Bou. He may find that many academics have come there and edited the contents already, as the Nach-Nachlass. But as befits Alex, he will be given a chance. 

12/19/23

Erravi

If errare humanum est, then I must be human. A few weeks ago I was pulling together a public lecture out of class notes and scattered photocopies, thinking mostly about how to translate a marvelous descriptive passage about dragging boats upstream and through brush in eighth-century Hunan, and credited the poem to the wrong guy. It was by Shen Quanqi 沈全期 (656-729), not Song Zhiwen 宋之問 (656-710), as I realized today when I looked the poem up again in a proper book. I hope nobody else is misled by my goof. I rather doubt anybody will notice. The poem is “Traveling from Changle Commandery Upstream to White Peak, Then Descending to Chenzhou” 自昌樂郡泝流至白石嶺下行入郴州 and reads in part:

茲山界夷夏,天險橫寥廓。

太史漏登探,文命限開鑿。

北流自南瀉,羣峯迴眾壑。

馳波如電騰,激石似雷落。

崖留盤古樹,澗蓄神農藥。。。。

匍匐緣修坂,穹窿曳長索。

礙林阻往來,遇堰每前卻。

救艱不遑飯,畢昏無暇泊。

濯溪寧足懼,磴道誰云惡。

我行山水間,湍險皆不若。

安能獨見聞,書此貽京洛。

This mountain lies on the border of China and alien parts,

Steep as the sky and boundless in its breadth.  

The Grand Historian missed it in his survey of the realm.

The Great Yu neglected to pierce it in his labors.

A current from the north trickles out at the south,

Crowded peaks yield to huddled ravines.

Speeding waves leap up like lightning-flashes,

Crashing stones land like thunderclaps. 

On the banks subsist trees of Pan Gu’s age,

In the cracks grow herbs for Shen Nong’s use….

Dangling creepers border the smooth slope,

The vault of heaven is hung with long ropes.

Blocking thickets impede all movement:

Encountering a weir, each struggles forward.

Our difficulty is such that no time is left to eat,

Till day’s end brings darkness no leisure to moor the boats.

Poling through the rapids is cause enough for fear,

Stone stairways no reason for displeasure.

We travel between mountain and water, 

The rapids perilous like nothing seen before. 

How can all this be left up to seeing and hearing?

I write it down for conveyance to the capital.

12/5/23

Chapter and Universe

If I were to tell you that Western civilization was transmitted straight down from Greece and Rome to Victorian and Edwardian Britain, you might think I was pushing an impossibly old-fashioned line (and you might have plenty of choice epithets for it). It’s not the kind of thing that people would say out loud, outside of certain very reactionary milieux. But people go on writing books as if such were, in fact, the unquestionable pattern of history. The other day I learned about a book– quite possibly a good book, on its own terms and given its limited perspective– about the history of the chapter as textual and cognitive unit. After pointing out another scholar’s docta ignorantia about the origin of page numbers, today let me introduce Nicholas Dames, The Chapter. Take a look at the table of contents. One would never know from it that chapter divisions are found in Chinese books from a very early date (or why). Doesn’t the Chinese chapter have a history worth telling that is also part of the history of humanity?

Not only the Chinese chapter, of course– but it puzzles me that smart people can fall over themselves praising a book that didn’t ask some obvious questions — questions that were off the narrow and obligatory track that runs from Homer to Joyce.