Almost forgot to do l.
Firet dose in, and I want to die.
More tomorrow’s if I wake up.
Category: Uncategorized
Wednesday
I am out of town. No, I don’t want to write about a lot of the particulars here. I will say that the American Airlines route between Reagan National and New Orleans is a great route.
I never thought I’d enjoy flying 737s and A319/320/321s, but, god, they’re so much better than the 2×2 CRJs and ERJs.
I’m actually curious whether I’d hate SkyGreyhoundSouthwest these days.
But being the handicapped guy flying First Class makes your trip a lot better. I really don’t know how they’d treat disabled access, either.
But Monday night before I left, things were rollicking more with the Reason and RFK Jr. controversy.
The reaction to what Liz Wolfe put out really hit on what’s wrong with the NeoHippie movement. The attraction with RFK Jr. makes more sense when you consider who they’re relying upon as their experts.
But it all starts to fit together. They loudly proclaim that they’ve been right about everything forever.
No, Jersey Dave, when you interview someone who’s a fucking nut, you don’t just leave it as an interview where you call the guest “great,” and leave it up for forever memorialization.
I don’t have a problem that you interviewed Nick Fuentes. As more things have come out, you can say that you completely disavow that person and don’t think they’re worth considering.
But, when you say that you’ve been right about everything forever, you can’t do that.
What Reason did was absolutely correct.
Wipe Your Grocery Bags
I watched this, and see where the attraction is coming from.
(And for full disclosure, I do subscript to Reason, and donate to the Reason Foundation…)
Tossing off random names rapid-fire is not an argument.
Someone who sounds somewhat knowledgeable, find the nugget that supports your priors, and stick with it.
But I really disagree on the foreign policy ideas.
His standard is that if whatever action is not in America’s interest, America should not be involved.
No.
If America can do something to help, it should.
Was the US wrong for helping the UN distribute food in Somalia?
No.
There’s also sections of the interview that speak to my inclinations about laws and regulations — they should expire. All of them. Everything gets deleted eventually.
Reactive force is often justified, and there’s many times where it’s not in pursuit of some other goal.
So, while I understand the attraction a bit better, I still think he’s coming in from the lollypop guild.
Show Me Where I’m Wrong!!1!
People will, and do, but you interrupt them so readily that it’s impossible to see if you’ve even really considered the contradicting evidence presented.
But the NeoHips getting behind him might well further the fewer-than-Marrou tack the Mises people have taken with the LP.
And the NeoHips can continue telling the world that they’ve been right about everything all the time.
They Were Wrong
The experts in Libertarian Party’s Russia Caucus said:
- Russia wasn’t going to invade Ukraine
- Well, even with the invasion, it’d be over very quickly
- The oil disruptions, would result in the complete collapse of the “Petrodollar” because Russia will start selling its oil in other currencies
So, haven’t slept a ton, but Elon captured it well:
As I write this a little after 0900EDT, they’ve taken the military headquarters where Russia was managing its efforts in Ukraine, and is headed towards Moscow.
The vaunted corporate press was really slow to start following things last night.
Cable News is dead, Jim.
Many of the primetime shows aren’t hitting 500K in-the-demo (so adults 25-54) with their primetime shows.
The chick on CNN who hosted the townhall with President Trump has similar career prospects to those who bought the correspondence course on TV repair around 1990. Or travel agents. Or Microsoft Exchange administrators. Or…
Things move on.
So might I, though not necessarily because I have no more useful skills. Medical things might justify heading towards private disability. Pffft.
Imma go see what I can see about what’s going on overseas. Will probablyend up flipping around channels….
Response w/out AI
Answering Mike’s concerns.
Bits inline….
I Wonder:
How would you cite an AI derived source? I can imagine my research methods professor saying that we couldn’t use that as a valid research tool. Something that would not be accepted as an academic source. In the early days of the digital age when we were both in college we could only use printed peer reviewed academic journal articles, magazine articles and other publications on microfiche. Only academic sources that we could put our hands on physically. Internet citations was a new thing and APA, MLA or the Chicago manual of style had not spelled out how to document a source from the world wide web. The internet was a “Brave New World” full of information that some in the academic world did not accept as valid or academic. Including my research methods professor. How would you cite an AI source if it pulled it’s answer from multiple sources to generate the answer? Will there be a custom url generated from that AI to copy and paste into the footnotes to direct you to their own sources of reference?
I think you’d cite similar to how you did early Intertubes articles. URL, date retrieved.
To add further support, I’d recommend making a copy (PDF? PNG?) That shows exactly what you saw as it was when you saw it.
In addition to the links being all broken when I link to soemthing like Twitter, I want something more permanent.
(Some of this is self-reflective since I periodically delete all of my Tweets. As I wrote recently, whatever I might have spat out years ago likely isn’t representative of how I behave or think now. Sorry Ms. SHRMP with your five-figure Federal student loans…)
AI has the potential to slowly erode the ability of future scholars to actually do the footwork and research of the subjects they are studying.
I generally agree. But that’s why you need to have something in mind before you turn to the AI to confirm your premises.
Will the questions the researcher asks the AI generate only a certain kind of response to reinforce the researchers world view of the subject?
Maybe? At the same time, it shows that hte researcher is actually thinking enough to ask relevant questions.
We already live in a world where academics and politicians only look to source material that reinforce the ideas they have or the ideas they want the general public to have. A person’s individual “bias” would have the researcher to use language in their questions to get a certain type of answer.
It’s not nice to pidgeon-hole MSNBC Viewers like that, Mike.
AI in the wrong hands would tend to make the general public more ignorant of the true state of the world and the issues we deal with today. All the while leaving everyone feeling empowered because they believe that AI has the power to present them with more information and a broader perspectives on the issues then they would be able to see left to their own devices. In reality the information presented would be to shape a certain view point and create a “group think” mentality that doesn’t have a clue or see the whole picture in the end. That would be by design of whoever controls the algorithm.
I see where you’re coming from. At the same time, I think you have to have a general idea where you’re going before you engage the tools. Then you use those tools to either help confirm your suspicions, or tell you that you’re full of shit.
I like it when someone proves me wrong about something, and helps me figure out where I was led astray.
But that’s not good for the dying media platforms.
So. Whatever.
This kinda fits with the controversy surrounding RFK Jr.’s potential debate on Rogan.
Whatever. I’m pretty confident that there’s not going to be anything worthwhile discussed.
So I just don’t listen. Whatever. /GenX
You Don’t Know
So many of my thoughts come back to something from Coach Mora.
I don’t know whether The ReOpening was good or not.
I guess it’s supposed to be something done in the style of The Office. Of course, I’d watched a few episodes of it, but the humor was largely lost on me.
Kind of the same thing with the special.
I have absolutely no idea. And I can’t really judge whether it did a good job in trying to capture the spirit of the inspiration.
I don’t like eggs. I couldn’t tell you which restaurants make a good omelet.
And even if there was a place that made one of the best ones around, I wouldn’t order it because I don’t like eating eggs.
Looking around on Twitter the day after, however, the response seems to be somewhat muted. I kind of expected to see rave reviews, just like the NeoHips’ rejoicing about The Debate. But I didn’t see that sort of adulation.
I think I’ve been trying to be better at thinking that sort of way.
If that makes me not part of the team, whatever. I can believe or not believe whatever I want.
Return of the Mac
Background music… (And apologies to myself, or anyone who reads this in the future, for any broken/dead links; everything gets deleted, eventually…)
MacMoMo that is. On Orkut back in the day, there was a particularly-radical Islamic grad student at a university in Scotland who was particularly intrigued with the “new left,” or “Libertarian Socialists.” His first name was Mohammad, which got shortened to “MoMo.” Since he was in Scotland, that morphed into “MacMoMo.”
Cathy Young, a former writer for Reason (a publication to which I’ve been subscribed on and off since about 1995, and to whose foundation I donate money) published a tweet storm from someone I think might be MacMoMo just absolutely eviscerating the thing that seems to be an undeniable truth in the NeoHippie LP Russia Caucus, that the gas attacks against people in Syria didn’t happen.
So, who I think is MacMoMo’s rebuttal to that.
It has to be a lie to continue granting unquestioned veracity to the storylines coming from these people who’ve “taken over” the Libertarian Party. The biggest proponent, one featured prominently in the LP’s antiwar rally in DC a short time ago, claimed on another podcast that the Rwandan genocide was because of something the US did.
The source for that? Edward S. Herman. The same guy who helped write coauthored Distortions At Fourth Hand. He also wrote extensively denying what the Serbs did in Bosnia/Kosovo during the 1990s.
The evidence for those things is pretty conclusive. There’s people alive who were on the ground that you can talk to. The UN and ICC held hearings on what happened.
But it takes me back to “The Debate,” which the NeoHip bobbleheads running the LP loudly-proclaimed was won by one participant. You have to snake around the reasoning, but it’s ultimately straightforward — Everything bad that happens is because of the US.
No. That’s not true.
Then you start looking at the things that get omitted from the storylines to protect those who you admire, and who might have been at fault.
Things happen. There’s no underlying reason or cause. There’s no grand conspiracies.
That realization is very, very difficult for many people to accept.
It speaks to things like whatever happened with the Nordstream Pipelines.
It could have been the US. It could have been Russia. It could have been Ukrainians. It also could also have been an accident. But there’s Sy Hersh saying that the US blew it up!
We’ll just gloss over contravening information about what Syria did with regards to chemical weapons.
Just leave out the parts that don’t fit, and you’ll be better off.
Um.
A similar line with the health effects of the mRNA vaccines. Any negative health thing that pops up for someone who was vaccinated is because of the vaccine.
Can’t be that there’s any other explanation. It has to be because of the vaccine.
Or not. It couldn’t be anything else, because there needs to be something immediately to blame.
Reax
I’d started writing this before the final episode of the podseries was released.
I still feel pretty much the same way I felt after hearing JKR’s final bits.
So I’m leaving this as is, and will add bits after….
I’ve been considering lately, and no shit, it’s been costing me sleep, things about the issues surrounding J.K. Rowling.
Then Richard Dawkins, hero of evangelical agnostics, came out and said that there’s only two genders. (Pls2bforgiving the CR link, but it’s what came up when I S’dTFW for it….)
This episode, in some of the Twitter discussion, was supposed to be the killshot for her reservations.
The individual interviewed in the episode described the mental health benefits that came from early transition.
But it was female to male.
I think what Ms. Rowling is concerned about is the sorts of things that only males can do.
Can a biological man be physically-abused by a female? Absolutely. But, it’s the exception, rather than the rule.
While I was working through this entry, I say this story float actroas my Twitter feed.
I fully understand why she feels the way she does about hard-fought women’s rights, safe spaces, etc., being taken over by predatory biological males.
Refusing to acknowledge that, to me, is pretty disgusting.
But it also shows a fundamental misunderstanding; people aren’t just going to assent, no matter how much damage you think you’ve inflicted with your cancellation efforts.
Leave people alone.
If there’s something made by a person you once admired, but no longer do, you have the choice. You don’t get to demand he/change it because it doesn’t comport with the views you hold at this instant. If it really bothers you that much, you can leave.
The work isn’t there to please you. It’s there to communicate whatever the artist wanted to commmunicate when he/she wanted to communicate it.
Maybe that same take isn’t there anymore. Maybe it is. Whatever. It’s not for you the consumer to change. If you don’t like it, stop paying attention.
Settling For Saturday
Odd week, but some resolution on what I’m going to be doing over the next few weeks.
It goes along with finding resolution on lots of things.
- I think I’m permanently finished with some things and places. i just don’t have any fondness anymore. I find it a bit fascinating how you can people can just erase anything someone might have found interesting. So whatever. The Gen X comes out; I’ll find something else.
- With that, perhaps more than is healthy, I’ve been looking into Yuri Andropov. Some of this is in reaction to the rally the LP shamefully signed its name on to in DC a few weeks ago. Growing up, and in school, I’d heard a ton about Prague 1968, but there wasn’t a lot I got on what happened in Hungary in 1956. When I was there (1993), Budapest was an interesting mix of modern and filthy. Seeing some of the more-recent pictures, it looks a lot better. But the Andropov-era scars were still around. Excuse the sourcing, but Putin loved the guy. I think there’s probably some backstory that can be absorbed from examination.
- I haven’t watched any XFL. I will probably watch some USFL when it comes back, but the desire to watch sports is somewhere behind many other things. Again. Whatever.
On forgiveness
Something I’ve been mulling lately is how long it’s appropriate to hold a grudge.
Not sure what got me on this line of thinking, but it did go into thinking about companies I’m refusing to forgive for things they did during COVID.
I have relatives who probably never bought another Nestlé product after the boycott. Did that go too far? I mean, hearing about this would have been well into the 1980s. (I really don’t remember many current events before about 1985; I remember, vaguely, worry about my dad with the crash into the bridge out of DC; my dad had been TDY at Ft. McNair that day. A bit with the Beruit Embassy bombing, Reagan’s reelection…)
But when do you stop being angry with companies for overbearing things they did? Is it okay to permanently withhold your business?
I do try to forgive people who’ve wronged me, but there’s some I’ll certainly never speak to again if I can….
*STFW for this*
Hmph. I’m going to send this to my psychologist to see what she thinks.
I don’t know. But I’m inclined to never visit the places that wanted vaxports ever again.