Faces

Teenagers outside the National Portrait Gallery.

Quote of the Day

”They tried to bury me, but they didn’t know I was a seed.”

• Sinéad O’Connor

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Willie Nelson & Sinéad O’Connor | Don’t Give Up

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Is Rahm Emanuel the Answer to the Democrats’ problem?

Here’s a bracing read from Tina Brown which touches on some sensitive spots for us liberals.

The culture of politics and its actors has shifted at warp speed and it’s not going back. I now feel the worst thing that happened to the Dems was Trump being re-elected in 2024 rather than 2020. There would have been no Big Lie or January 6th choir singing us into four years of conspiracy theories. There would have been no wasted efforts to put Trump behind bars that merely served to make him a vengeance-crazed hero to the MAGA faithful, no four years of him outlawed in his gilded Elba surrounded by a posse of rabid ideologues, kleptocrats, and misfits who are now at his side at the White House, schooled this time in where the levers of power lie.

Most importantly, we would not have been deluded by the Biden hallucination of Things Going Back to What They Used to Be. The notion that the country could be restored to a Cretaceous pre-Trump era of reverence for the Constitution, security treaties, and the Rooseveltian state was like imagining the Newport Folk Festival could ever be the same after Bob Dylan showed up in 1965 with his electric guitar.

The Biden interregnum just allowed the Democratic old guard to stew in their timid appeasement of the far left for another four years and keep repeating the liberal dogma that the rest of America had started to hate. Only two weeks ago, the outgoing chairman of the DNC Jaime Harrison reassured the flock, “Our rules specify that when we have a non-binary candidate or officer, the non-binary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six offices must be gender balanced with the results of the previous four elections.”

It’s worth comparing Harrison’s almost parodic communication style- and what he thinks voters are up at night about – to that of JD Vance on Face the Nation on Jan 26. When host Margaret Brennan challenged the VP with the injustice of Afghan refugees waiting to be admitted into the U.S., Vance equably replied, “I don’t really care, Margaret. I don’t want that person in my country, and I think most Americans agree with me.” The callousness was breathtaking, but the clarity was unmistakable. Surely, there is a way to communicate that is neither mothballed in virtuous euphemism nor repugnantly heartless. Faced with a choice, alas, clarity wins. Vance’s response became an instant meme with “I don’t really care, Margaret” T-shirts for sale on Amazon…

Read on.

As I said at the beginning, this touches a nerve. Part of the problem that faces those who are opposed to Trump & Co is that they are more effective communicators than Democrats or (more generally) liberals are. Why? Because we cannot bring ourselves to talk the way they do. That’s why they dominate social media and we don’t.

The difficulty, of course, is that there are good, decent reasons for our reservations. We wouldn’t be seen dead talking like they do. But we have to find ways of getting through to cheesed-off voters who are not particularly interested in politics. And we should stop virtue-signalling on how ‘pure’ we are compared to those vulgar hooligans. Otherwise the democratic game’s up. Virtue may be its own reward, but only for those who dwell in dreamland.

Books, etc.

One of the best pieces of luck I’ve had in ages was to find myself this week in a symposium on security in Europe with Richard Ned Lebow, a great historian who’s had an extraordinary life — which included a brief spell in the Carter administration. He’s spent much of his scholarly career working on international relations, and in particular on the motivations behind warfare. So the first thing I did after we parted was to go to the library to dig out this book of his.

In it he argues that four generic motives have led states to go to war — fear, interest, standing and revenge. Using an original data set, Ned examines the distribution of wars over three and a half centuries and concludes that only a minority of them were motivated by security or material interest. The majority were for ‘standing’ or revenge — an attempt to get even. And that most wars are counterproductive.

He has a new book coming out soon from Cambridge University Press. The title? Why Nations Still Fight!

My commonplace booklet

I asked ChatGPT to “Draw me a cartoon showing President Trump in a grass skirt”.

Here’s how it replied:

I can’t create images directly, but you can visualize a humorous cartoon of President Trump wearing a grass skirt by imagining:

• Setting: A tropical beach with palm trees, a tiki bar, and a sunset in the background.

• Trump’s Appearance: Wearing a green grass skirt, a floral Hawaiian lei, and maybe even a coconut bra for extra humor. His signature hairstyle remains intact, blowing slightly in the breeze.

• Expression: A confident, exaggerated smirk as he does a hula dance, arms outstretched.

• Speech Bubble: Something like, “Believe me, folks, no one does the hula better than me. Tremendous moves!”

If you’d like, you can hire a cartoonist or use digital drawing tools to bring this idea to life! Let me know if you’d like more details.

Now all I have to do if find someone who can draw!

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Spring is sprung

In a college garden on Monday evening.

Quote of the Day

“Faced with the bewilderment of my countrymen, by the disintegration of a government in thrall to the enemy, by the fact that the institutions of my country are incapable, at this moment, of functioning, I, General de Gaulle,. French soldier, realise that I now speak for France”

• Charles de Gaulle, London, June 1940

Hmmm… Who now speaks for the American people?

(h/t Sheila Hayman)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

David Bowie | All the Young Dudes (Live at the Isle of Wight)

Link

He was a genius. May he rest in peace.

Long Read of the Day

On February 27, the New York Times had a story about how Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, was exhorting Google employees to strain every muscle to ensure that the company won the AGI race.

On Wednesday, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, said the company could lead the industry in artificial general intelligence — when machines match or become smarter than humans — if employees worked harder.

“I recommend being in the office at least every weekday,” he wrote in a memo posted internally on Wednesday evening that was viewed by The New York Times. He added that “60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity” in the message to employees who work on Gemini, Google’s lineup of A.I. models and apps.

This gave Henry Farrell a wicked idea. Building on an insight that he and Marion Fourcade had expressed about how LLMs were very good at regurgitating the ritual or boilerplate texts that are the stuff of organisational life, he decided to ask ChatGPT to recompose Brin’s exhortations as a Stakhanovite speech by Joseph Stalin in the early 1950s. Here’s what it came up with:

Comrades! Heroes of Soviet Computing!

In this, the year 1952, as the Great Soviet Union marches ever forward, the forces of reaction and bourgeois incompetence in the decaying capitalist West tremble before the inexorable advance of Soviet science and technology. The time has come for us to seize the greatest prize of all—Artificial General Intelligence!

I call upon you, the vanguard of Soviet computing, to redouble your efforts! Let every programmer, every mathematician, every engineer commit themselves to at least 60 hours a week of unrelenting toil!

Lovely stuff. Made my day.

It might be a small consolation, but Musk is getting poorer by the day

Sunday’s Observer column:

Extreme wealth has always played a role in democracies. Money has always talked, especially in the US. Years ago, Lawrence Lessig, the great legal scholar, calculated that most of the campaign funding for members of Congress and aspiring politicians came from one-twentieth of the richest 1% of Americans – about 150,000 people. This is about the same number as those who are named “Lester” and explains the title of his book: The USA Is Lesterland.

But that particular corruption of American politics only involved billionaires like the Koch brothers playing organ-grinders to congressional monkeys. The obscene wealth generated by the tech industry has catapulted a new organ-grinder into the heart of the machine. He was able to pay his way in with a spare quarter of a billion dollars that he happened to have lying around. And now the wretched citizens of the US find themselves living in Muskland…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

An archival document from an epidemic that was scandalously hushed up at the time.

(Thanks to Ida, a former Wolfson Press Fellow, who discovered it.)

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Putin Scolds Trump: “I Got You Elected and You Haven’t Said Thank You Once”

MOSCOW (The Borowitz Report)—In a testy meeting at his Kremlin office on Tuesday, Vladimir Putin scolded Donald J. Trump for failing to show proper gratitude for getting him elected president of the United States.

For almost an hour, Trump was on the receiving end of blistering attacks from Putin and his vice president, JD Vasilevsky.

“I got you elected and you haven’t said thank you once,” Putin shouted. “When you were running for president, you didn’t have any cards. With me, you had cards.”

Attempting to mend fences, Trump offered to let Putin run his next Cabinet meeting instead of Elon Musk.

Link

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The Island

Thanks to Max Whitby (Whom God Preserve), we had a lovely day on Lindisfarne (aka Holy Island) off the Northumberland coast. The upturned boat in the picture belongs to a friend of his who is (he says) a connoisseur of arcane tools. I’m fascinated by islands but had never been to this one. I’ll be going back. The only problem is that many thousands of other souls feel like that every year. So this was a pretty good time to go.

Quote of the Day

”The international relations scholar John Ikenberry once described the US as a liberal leviathan. Today, the liberal leviathan has become a rogue elephant.”

• Timothy Garton Ash, writing in the Guardian last Wednesday.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bruce Springsteen | Tougher Than the Rest

Link

Long Read of the Day

Against optimism: the Whiggish blindness of Dario Amodei

On February 21 my Long Read of the Day was an extraordinary essay by Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, the AI company responsible for Claude, the LLM I use mostly. I chose it because it was “the best attempt I’d found of a real expert in the field setting out an honest account of the potential upsides of AI.”

This prompted Andrew Brown, one of the most thoughtful people I know, to write an elegant critique of the Amodei essay, which he describes as “a kind of Ozymandian relic of the world of yesterday”. His riposte is a model of what intellectual discourse should be like — respectful, fair, eloquent and perceptive. Which is why I enthusiastically commend it to you.

Andrew’s main point is that technology is always just part of the human story. Here’s a sample of how this plays out in his essay:

It’s not as if Amodei is a bad or callous man, who thinks that there can’t be a problem. He’s obviously someone who cares about the world, with whom it would be fascinating to talk. He knows there can be problems; he’s just confident they can be overcome:

“With advanced health interventions and especially radical increases in lifespan or cognitive enhancement drugs, there will certainly be valid worries that these technologies are ‘only for the rich’ [but] developed world political institutions are more responsive to their citizens and have greater state capacity to execute universal access programs—and I expect citizens to demand access to technologies that so radically improve quality of life.”

Apparently no one has told him about the American health care system.

Well worth your time.

Books, etc.

Screenshot

I wrote about this in the Observer yesterday.

Oscar Wilde’s quip, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life”, needs updating: replace “art” with “AI”. The Amazon page for Alexander C Karp and Nicholas W Zapiska’s new book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West, also lists: a “workbook” containing “key takeaways” from the volume; a second volume on how the Karp/Zapiska tome “can help you navigate life”; and a third offering another “workbook” comprising a “Master Plan for Navigating Digital Age and the Future of Society”. It is conceivable that these parasitical works were written by humans, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Mr Karp, the lead author of the big book, is an interesting guy. He has a BA in philosophy from an American liberal arts college, a law degree from Stanford and a PhD in neoclassical social theory from Goethe University in Frankfurt. So he’s not your average geek. And yet he’s an object of obsessive interest to people both inside and outside the tech industry. Why? Because in 2003 he – together with Peter Thiel and three others – founded a secretive tech company called Palantir. And some of the initial funding came from the investment arm of – wait for it – the CIA!

The name comes from palantíri, the “seeing stones” in the Tolkien fantasies. It makes sense because the USP of Palantir is its machine-learning technology – which is apparently very good at seeing patterns in, and extracting predictions from, oceans of data. The company was founded because at the time all the Silicon Valley tech companies either disapproved of government, or were staffed by engineers who were adamantly opposed to working for the US military. This created an opening that Karp and his colleagues astutely exploited to build a company which is simultaneously appears to be booming (current market capitalisation: $200bn), while also being regarded by critics of the industry as the spawn of the devil…

Read on

Linkblog

Errata

For those readers who were intrigued by the long-range (200km) hybrid car (Lynk) I mentioned on Friday, here’s a link. Apologies for not providing it.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!