This in today from Brian Beutler:
The New Radicals
Democrats need to be the uncompromising ones now.
Brian Beutler
Sep 30
Over the past year and a half I’ve warned promiscuously about the dangers of “funding Donald Trump’s government.” I’ve taken to referring to bipartisan spending bills, which have passed with Democrats casting decisive votes, as “enabling” legislation.
This language is provocative. It is meant to be provocative, in part because I want Democrats to think about their place in history right now. If democracy collapses or America becomes a pariah state, Republicans will be to blame, but people will ask, what did the rest of the society do to try and stop them?
But I also mean every word of it. I use all of that language advisedly. I understand that playing constitutional hardball can cause collateral damage. The Democratic Party has been pathologically averse to conflict with Republicans throughout the Trump era. But when, for instance, they tapped out of a government shutdown fight that they were winning, fear and neurosis weren’t the only factors. They were genuinely upset on behalf of federal workers, who were going without pay. They are bleeding-heart liberals in the earnest sense of the term. It’s Republicans who don’t give a shit about those people, which is why, until Trump came along, it was always Republicans who’d refuse to fund the government under Democratic presidents, and it was always Democrats inveighing against their tactics.
But Republicans weren’t just shutting down the government because they’re callous and sadistic (though they are both, and increasingly so). It was because they’d been radicalized against the government they were expected to fund.
I think the basis of their radicalization was completely insane. All radicalisms aren’t created equal. The Republican Party’s fanaticism makes it unique in the democratic world, even among far-right parties. But I do think it was genuine.
This piece is about two things: First, it’s about why constitutional hardball makes sense from the perspective of radicals. Second, a decade into the this era of rising Republican fascism and the corruption of the American state, it’s about why it’s time for the worm to turn—for Democrats to become the more radical of the two parties. And, in their case, for good reasons.
We wouldn’t be where we are if Republicans hadn’t radicalized against American democracy before Donald Trump took over their party.
This story begins over 90 years ago, with the enactment of New Deal. An alliance of wealthy interests and bigoted, paranoid right-wing fanatics, hated how Franklin Roosevelt had transformed the country. Together, from the jump, they plotted its destruction.
But in part because its earliest incarnations excluded black citizens, the new social compact was broadly popular. The nascent “conservative movement” was badly outnumbered.
As more and more kinds of people began benefiting from the welfare state, though, opposition to it grew and intensified. Whole political philosophies were developed or coopted to backstop and brand what was at bottom raw revanchism. This was not “conservatism” as most people used the term, and thus it remained a fringe formation for decades. But it began to metastasize.
Barry Goldwater helped consolidate it within the Republican Party. At first, it was just one faction. A minority partner. But over time its ranks swelled. In 1994, it became the GOP’s largest faction, and the whole party began behaving in more radical ways—mostly toward the end of undoing the New Deal. The modern era of lengthy government shutdowns and routine legislative hostage taking begins with Newt Gingrich. Under him, Republicans institutionalized “starve the beast”—the party’s strategic, lockstep opposition to tax increases—in order to create the fiscal pressure required to crush Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
Now, again, this is a crazy basis for reactionary politics. But if you are a prelapsarian weirdo who thinks American values were only truly and constitutionally expressed when the country was economically and racially segregated, and a small group of connected elites controlled the government—well, you probably find the post-war settlement pretty troubling. The leading legal lights of the movement would write about “restoring the lost Constitution,” and the “Constitution in exile.”
And if that’s what you’ve convinced yourself has happened—or if that’s what you at least claim to believe—radicalism makes perfect sense. As Goldwater said, “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”
When people with that mindset took over the GOP, we were doomed to a lengthy, turbulent period of destabilizing attacks on modernity, and, eventually, democracy.
Together we can turn the tables on the democracy-hating reactionaries who’ve brought the country to the brink of ruin. But we need to link arms. And we need to convince Democrats to see things our way.
Unfortunately, Republicans lacked popular support for both their methods and their objectives.
When they’d shut down the government to take people’s health care away, the public would get mad at them and they had to back down. But they kept doing stuff like that, often in spite of themselves. Sometimes things just got out of hand. They couldn’t get their way holding the whole country hostage, but they could maybe force Democrats to blink by acting like feral animals. Republican leaders exploited this ambiguity routinely during the Obama years. Our members are crazy! They’ve taken over! They’ll do real damage unless you appease them. In 2011, that approach paid off handsomely. Between threatening to shut down the government and threatening to send the country into credit default, Republicans pocketed enormous, one-sided concessions from President Obama and congressional Democrats. A couple years later, when Obama refused to defund his signature health care law, they stumbled into a pointless shutdown more or less in spite of themselves.
Eventually Obama got wise. He refused in principle to negotiate with a gun to his head, and Republicans basically dropped the extortion tactic. But you can see why a president who takes the public’s wellbeing seriously might be inclined to placate the radicals.
Donald Trump does not take the public’s wellbeing seriously. He is unlikely to be head-faked into better behavior. But his abettors in Congress might bend to intense and growing public pressure to force him into line with the rule of law. My view in the second Trump presidency is that there is a now real and politically viable basis for radical action in America. By Democrats.
The term “enabling legislation” is meant to evoke Hitler’s transformation into a dictator. Not because I think Trump is Adolf Hitler (though he is capable of evil on that scale), but because the delegation of power Democrats have accepted is analogous to how Hitler consolidated his.
Trump has been breaking the law—including the budget law—on a daily basis, and in many ways, since his second presidency began. Providing Republicans the votes they need to help Trump get away with these abuses amounts to capitulation: You’re in charge, you can keep doing this stuff. Maybe in principle we’d like to stop you, but we’re not going to try. We’re going to resign ourselves to giving up our power.
Predictably, with each new grant of authority, Trump has grown more lawless. He has shuttered duly enacted federal agencies. His deportation regime combines Gestapo and Stasi tactics. He defies court orders. He steals appropriations earmarked for states that voted against him, then raids the fisc to build himself monuments and run propaganda advertisements on television. He launched a war against Iran. He trades stocks based on inside information, and sells the inside information to Wall Street. He’s pocketed billions of dollars in less than two years. Congress has abided it all; the courts have abided most of it.
When I write that Democrats shouldn’t fund Trump’s government until the law-breaking ends, I use the term “Trump’s government” not in the nature of partisan spin, but because, under Trump, the government is rogue. The Constitution is in exile.
And so 15 years later my view is that Democrats should conduct themselves a bit like Republicans did in Obama’s first term.
Not exactly like Republicans, not to spurious or non-germane ends. But with the same kind of radical fervor, on behalf of values the public supports.
The biggest difference is that Obama was not an aspiring dictator, and there was no sense in which funding the government was funding his government, or enabling his lawlessness. To non-ideologues, Republicans seemed in thrall to a quixotic fervor. The public may have wanted them to break the Democratic lock on power, and even attempt to do unwise things, like cut deficits in aftermath of a deep recession. They didn’t want them to behave like saboteurs.
In 2011, they mugged Obama with a bunch of random policy demands in exchange for their votes to fund the government. The goal was to make his presidency a slog, pick his pocket, as much as to vindicate any deeply held principles.
I don’t believe Democrats should do this. I don’t believe they should deny their votes for appropriations in exchange for, e.g., restoring abortion rights or settling long-run health-policy debates.
But they should refuse to fund illegal activity—the war in Iran, routine due-process violations, violations of the Hatch Act. And they should certainly refuse to strike any budget deal with Trump so long as he means to violate it—by unilaterally defunding agencies, withholding disaster relief and federal grants to blue states, or any other means.
If Trump wants to insist on the right to make unilateral war, and spend tax dollars on campaign aids, and otherwise govern like a king, such that he will veto a budget that requires him to faithfully execute the laws, let him shut down his own government.
Democrats should enumerate these kinds of conditions if and when they win the election, and they should enter negotiations acting like they mean it. No unconditional funds. No long-term budgets that make if impossible to enforce compliance for months and months at a time.
This should be their posture because it is righteous. It’s also very likely that—in contrast to 2011 and 2013, when the public rejected Republican constitutional hardball—Americans will side with Democrats. They know that what’s happening is wrong. When Democrats shut down the government last year, demanding an extension of expiring health-insurance subsidies, the public supported them and blamed Republicans for the shutdown. Will voters suddenly decide they’re okay with the Iran war if Democrats insist on defunding it?
It would also be good practice for the fights of the post-Trump era.
Much as Trump pretends to support Social Security and Medicare, he and Republicans have done grievous damage to public finance. The fiscal pressure on those programs is suddenly quite severe, and we should count on Republicans to re-embrace “starve the beast” tactics once Trump is gone. If Democrats are radicalized as they should be, they will insist on easing the pressure exclusively with new taxes on wealthy Americans and big corporations—the only real winners in the Trump regime.
Or, Democrats can maintain their current paper-tiger posture. Trump will smell weakness. He’ll refuse to concede anything—at least anything enforceable. He’ll get funding for his lawless regime, while rejecting all oversight requests out of hand. Democrats will have surrendered their recourse, and the grassroots rebellion against the party establishment will continue.
"This is the Voice of Moderation. I wouldn't go so far as to say we've actually SEIZED the radio station . . . "
Michael’s use of the term ‘hallucination’ about the pixels created was interesting. I asked Gemini to give me some vocabulary
Primary Terms
Is it a “Hallucination”?
In AI image processing:
It fascinates me that the term ‘intentional edits’ is used, which suggests that Adobe Photoshop has a mind of its own. This is not to bust Michael in any way, and I wonder if a possible strategy to deal with AI is to label anything it produces as a “hallucination”, a strategy which might have saved Eric Schimitt some embarrassment.
Since we are talking AI. Again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7KhLuc3Mck
Neil deGrass Tyson and Mordecai-Mark Mac Low have a really interesting discussion about what AI did and didn’t do re: the Navier-Stokes Millennium Problem. Did AI solve it? Kinda, maybe, we believe more yes than no, but because it didn’t “unpack” the solution (the counter-example it says it discovered) we can’t really learn anything from it except its conclusion.
Listen to the discussion, though, because the answer, and my summary, are the least interesting part of this.
“Hallucinations” was a feeble attempt at humor. The AI, in some fashion, interpolates between points. I would never describe the same thing done with Lanczos sinc resampling (see example below, minus the background change step) as hallucinating. It’s tempting to use for AI, though, because where Lanczos resampling is a well-defined algorithm, the AI is a black box.
I’ve compared the AI upsampled image to some of the upsampling methods included with ImageMagick (sometimes known as the command-line Swiss Army knife for image manipulation). The AI version seems superior to all of them, particularly in areas such as the teeth and the bridge on the glasses.
LLM upscaling invents new data based on what the model knows about pictures that look like the one you’re resizing. they classify image features based on their training, and then use what they ‘know’ about other images with those features to control how to generate the new pixels.
it’s like asking a landscape painter to make a wall-sized version of a postcard you like. he’ll use his own training to redraw the main subjects and then fill in all the new empty space with plausible details – stuff that wasn’t necessarily in the original, but is typically found in scenes he’s seen before. instead of leaving that giant field as a blank expanse of green, he’ll put a tree or a cow or a woman dancing with a group of kids fleeing from the Nazis in there because those are things you often find in pictures of fields.
with most traditional numeric methods, the new data is only based on the input image itself and (generally) deterministic math. no cows, just more empty field.
@cleek, yes to all of that. The AI has the enormous advantage that it can make use of lots more of the pixels in the input image that it’s up-sampling. Somewhere in those billions of parameters, if the training was done appropriately, the model matches to “it’s a facial portrait” then “these are teeth” then “here’s how to up-sample teeth”. Absent the nouns, of course. It’s just correlated patterns in pixels.
Back in the 1990s there was a bunch of interesting work done using wavelets to up-sample. They used the same sort of idea, starting from a greatly reduced version of the image, then progressing up through the wavelet levels and finally predicting what the wavelet coefficients should be for a “made up” level of additional detail. As I recall from a couple of conference presentations at that time, some of the results were startlingly good. (Scrolling through some of the responses from Google Scholar, I’ve noticed a few papers by people trying to train smaller neural nets to do that wavelet prediction.)
I’ve been working my way through Michael Pollan’s A World Appears, which has a lot of interesting thoughts from a lot of people across the spectrum on the question of whether we can build a conscious AI, or even a sentient one, and how would we know if we did.
The AIs can transform images into different styles.
The Simpsons.
Another for @wjca… When I first mentioned being interested in what AI tools could do with images, my initial hope was to recover old pictures. Eg, in this example, the snapshot was taken with an inexpensive 110-format camera (13×17 mm negatives), developed and printed in a grocery’s auto-machine (in 1979), then a picture of the print taken with an iPhone 17, then that image run through my own software to dewarp, then a 750×500 portion snipped out. That’s the upper image. The lower image is the same snip after running the picture through an AI “deblur” model. Embedded in the process to get an image here were three lossy encodings due to services being trapped in the dark ages.
At the time, she thought I was attractive but that she was not. I thought she was attractive but that I was not. We were both half wrong.
Tech issues aside, Michael, that’s a great picture. You were both young and happy, and there are few combinations more attractive than that.
Even though I haven’t read any of the specific debate Leslie is talking about, what I particularly liked (unsurprisingly, since I have skin in the game) were his views on “civil” versus “emotional” debate, which throw interesting light on lots of interactions on the internet, including here:
How Civil Should a Disagreement Be?
Ian Leslie
Oct 10
Steven Pinker and Scott Alexander have stumbled into a public debate about existential AI risk. Alexander exploded at Pinker on twitter/X for being consistently dismissive of doomers, like him. He angrily challenged Pinker to an in-person debate, with money on the winner. Pinker didn’t rise to this on twitter but instead published an open letter to Alexander, setting out his case against doomerism. His tone was conciliatory and impeccably civil. Alexander has now replied with a long – very long – post in which he takes Pinker to task for what he perceives to be the shallowness of his arguments, ignorance of the relevant literature, and arrogant dismissal of doomers.
I am not going to get into the content of the debate here, because I want to see it play out first. But I will say something about the different styles of debating employed by the participants. In contrast to Pinker, Alexander, in his article, is pugnacious, petulant, and personal. Pinker tried to take the heat out of the exchange; Alexander turned it up again. He’s received a lot of criticism for this. I have to say, I liked it. I found Pinker’s cool, eminently reasonable style a little unsatisfying, and I’m glad Alexander didn’t feel the need to adopt it.
Let’s remember, they are arguing about whether there is a significant chance our species could be destroyed by its own invention. That seems like something worth getting emotional about. The dryness with which doomers sometimes discuss such possibilities makes them sound mad rather than reasonable. More generally, a satisfying public debate should have a little spice, some electrical charge, even a little irrationality. Not just because that makes it more entertaining for the rest of us, but because it signals there is something at stake beyond victory or defeat in an intellectual game.
It also feels more honest. When you see what makes someone passionate or frustrated or annoyed you’re getting to see who they are and what they care about. Debaters who hide all unruly emotion behind a smooth veneer of civility can seem remote and inscrutable, and difficult to trust. (To be clear, I’m talking about marginal cases like this one, where both participants grasp the essentials of meaningful argument. I’m well aware that our public discourse exactly suffer from an excess of civility or a deficit of emotion.)
Get your petty insecurities out on the table, I say. That’s certainly what Alexander does. In his article, responding to the tweet, Pinker joked about duelling, and said that Alexander writes “as if you are defending your honour”. He assured him, genially, that there is no need for this (honour being a concept alien to most intellectual debates, after all). But in his response, Alexander picked up on this theme and said, yes, actually, this is about honour:
I agree that in-person debates are confrontational and bad for truth-seeking. But I didn’t propose a debate in order to seek truth. I proposed it because, under California Penal Code § 415(1), it’s illegal for me to challenge you to a duel. I think your public writing on this topic has been dishonorable. Out of obligation, I will respond to the meaty arguments that you have set out for me. But what would be viscerally satisfying would be to make you get up on a stage where I read your own words to you in real time and ask “Really? Really?” after each sentence. Then I could watch you squirm as you try to square your output with your status as one of America’s top public intellectuals.
Some people have been appalled by this passage. It’s obvious to me that he’s joking (no, I don’t think Alexander is literally threatening violence). On the other hand, he is also serious. He’s being transparent about how he feels about the way Pinker has engaged – or not – with him and his school of thinkers. That isn’t merely petty; it is an oblique way of saying that Pinker ought to care more about this question than he does.
Emotion can be the enemy of clear thinking, but it can also be its friend. Recall that David Hume didn’t just say that “reason is the slave of the passions”; he said that it is and ought only to be. The passions tell us what to use our powers of reason on in the first place.
Emotions also motivate us to put more effort into our thinking. The Alexander-Pinker exchange bears this out, so far. On the substance of this issue I lean to Pinker’s side but I found his arguments a little shallow and unconvincing. Alexander’s are more detailed, nuanced and thought-through (and while he goes over the top in his parsing of Pinker’s previous statements, he does score some palpable hits there, as when he exposes Pinker’s misreading of the RAND report).
I would say that Alexander’s piece is a better piece of writing, even though it is over-long and overwrought. Pinker is a fine writer but Alexander is a master at combining clarity of exposition with antic wit and ‘voice’. When he takes the reader through complicated concepts you never feel like you’re reading a neutral explainer. He’s always fully present. For all that he’s a tech rationalist, his prose is more richly human than the more elegant Pinkerian style.
Does this mean I agree with Alexander on AI risk? No, not yet anyway. It’s more that Pinker came across as complacent to me. In Round Two, I hope to see him stoop to Alexander’s level and raise his game.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/10/9/800109899/community/trump-is-building-an-election-trap-and-millions-of-americans-may-not-see-it-until-its-too-late/
Links for Alexander-Pinker
Pinker’s response to Alexander’s challenge (which I think includes a link to the challenge on X)
https://quillette.substack.com/p/an-open-letter-to-scott-alexander
Alexander’s reply
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/an-open-letter-to-steven-pinker-on
Alexander’s reply is pretty masterful, especially when he quotes a Pinker book review to support p(doom) predictions that Pinker dismisses. But I’m pretty down on Pinker, I tend to think that he’s pretty slippery with his rhetoric.
I share lj’s antipathy towards Pinker.
Pinker is one of those public intellectuals who is famous mostly for their quasi-academic writing aimed at a popular press readership. He makes academic work more accessible to readers who lack the foundation that academic writing assumes and builds upon without expounding.
He annoys the crap out of many academics because they feel he builds academic strawmen to argue against in support of his own positions and misrepresents or does not adequately represent the positions and motives of those on the other side of the scholarly arguments that he is popularizing, and he takes those strawman representations to media venues that use them as culture war fodder.
So of course his pose is to be the dispassionate scholar who is above all this personal unpleasantness. He’s leaving all that to the audience that he courts at these media venues and aims that audience at his opponents.
I think the people who are ruffling their feathers in public over Alexander’s tone would never have come to the public defense of the positions that Alexander was defending because they prefer comity to spirited disagreement and ghost whenever conflict appears, leaving their embattled compatriots in the lurch.
Bye, Felicia…
If the USPS has a plot to delay ballot deliveries, they’re not doing a uniform job of it. The table below shows my ballot events so far here in Colorado.
Since it’s an open thread, I’ll note that I’m such an old UNIX guy that I still find it faster and easier to use groff/tbl to do a table, take a screenshot and embed the image than to wrestle with HTML’s table stuff.
He makes academic work more accessible to readers who lack the foundation that academic writing assumes and builds upon without expounding.
If this is true, and it sounds like a perfectly reasonable proposition, why cannot a talented someone equally versed in the subject do the same thing in reverse? There is something about the assumption of “readers who lack the foundation that academic writing assumes and builds upon” that raises, to me, the spectre of a sort of academic priestly caste who are uniquely able to understand all sides of an issue. This is not the first time I have seen intellectuals with the gift of accessible exposition dismissed in this way, and I think it is a dangerous path that leads some academics to assume their superiority of understanding. Dangerous to them, because it tends to induce blindness; and dangerous to society because intelligent people understandably resent the implication that, without the necessary initiation, their understanding is no better than that of peons labouring in the low-lying fields, and therefore go on to regard the academy with a jaundiced eye.
As it happens, I am not making particular claims for Pinker: I have not read lj’s links to the argument, although I am grateful for them and fully intend to. I have what may be covid with very weird symptoms at the moment, so my bandwidth is pretty limited just now. nous’s description of Pinker’s tactics sounds perfectly credible to me, But I think that dismissing someone’s arguments largely because their persuasiveness rests partly on an ability to argue civilly or dispassionately begs the question of why their interlocuters cannot do the same.
GftNC
No disagreement with the last, just some qualification, which I’ll contextualize with the others in a sort of reverse order…
I was chatting with friends about the recent stories in the media about University of California professors asking that the SATs be brought back for admissions purposes. My friend (Ph.D in Applied Mathematics) and I were both of the opinion that the problem being addressed here started a lot earlier than the admissions process, and he was complaining that when he was teaching as a graduate instructor, many of his professors were both elitist and ignorant of anything outside of STEM, and dismissive of humanities scholarship (fallout from the Sokol Affair). I noted that this is also true, but less prevalent on the Arts side of Arts & Sciences. It’s a problem because it undermines the public mission of the university.
Not all academics are able to communicate with those outside of their field and discourse community. Of those that are capable, some are uninterested in doing so when they could be doing research and interacting with their colleagues.
Some of the remaining are able to do the work, but are working on problems for which the relevant disagreements (and the importance of the differences) are only understandable with more of a foundation, and trying to reduce their complexity leads to greater misunderstanding. Others are writing about one of these topics, but unaware that they are insufficient to the task, and so lead the public astray.
Some would do outreach/education writing for popular press readers if it if the tenure process valued and acknowledged that writing, but the truth is that a book for the public will never weigh as heavily in the tenure process as a publication for the scholarly press, even though that writing takes as much expertise and time. This discourages such work, and furthers the divide between academics and the public. This sort of negative feedback loop starts affecting scholars well before they even reach graduate studies. Those who have been rewarded by this system look for and encourage others that share their orientation.
So the ones who end up doing the work are either publicly oriented scholars with academic security, academics hired to do outreach work for a research grant, activists, or scholars who are using their outreach to chase political ends of some sort – often in the Culture Wars.
I should add to the above that:
This assumes the American university model, and that other university models for organization and promotion will create different dynamics around the sorts of scholarly work that will further your career and security of employment.
And also…
Not all sides of academic disagreements have equal access and prestige in public discourse, or have as great a share in what counts with the public as “common sense” or “common knowledge,” or are equal in marketability and publicity potential as the other side.
Part of the scholarly fire aimed at Pinker comes as a result of this last one. His opponents feel that he leans into and reinforces public biases against the reputation of their own approach with bad faith, strawman representations and oversimplifications that serve his own rhetorical purposes while misrepresenting the conflict, or the information being simplified/approximated for a public audience.
All good and valid points, nous, particularly the very practical one about the necessity to concentrate one’s time and energy on work that will secure tenure etc. Once that is done, of course, such an academic can choose (if they have the talent) to pursue a course of making their views on elements of their subject accessible to a wider public. And, in my opinion, doing so in a civil and dispassionate way is most likely to persuade reasonable and unprejudiced people to their point of view.
The last part of your second comment is precisely what I was referring to when I said your description of Pinker’s tactics, if accurate, was a very credible explanation for his critics’ objections. Arguing in bad faith is always objectionable, and should be pointed out. If the person doing it has a greater public profile and access, that is a great shame. It is often the case, however, that people criticising an argument do so for ideological reasons, and may also be arguing in bad faith.
The problem is, by that point habit has often been established. To the point that they don’t even recognize that they could so choose. Some kind of career-related encouragement is probably need to make any significant progress here.
It’s all too easy to see any simplification of one’s argument as a “strawman.” Especially if stripping the argument down to its essentials reveals significant flaws.
In most of these cases there will always be some interpretation and translation involved, leaving conflict between stripping an argument to “its essentials” and stripping it to “your essentials.”
I always tell my students that if they are disagreeing with someone else’s points, then they need to outline the opponent’s position in terms that their opponent will say are fair representations of those positions. It is ethical to say that you disagree on some points and outline where and why. It’s not ethical to misrepresent their positions with a bad faith paraphrase.
The role Pinker takes on is similar to Gladwell, Gould and Diamond, among others, and all of them have been attacked for various issues, so it certain comes with the territory. For me, because Pinker started off as a linguist under Chomsky and has slid over to being a ‘cognitive psychologist’ (which is really not a carefully defined field)
Here’s a guardian take
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/sep/28/steven-pinker-celebrity-scientist-at-the-centre-of-the-culture-wars
One big problem is that Pinker flits from topic to topic, and to debunk him on one requires a lot of effort, which then has him simply move on to the next with no acknowledgement. Here’s an example of that
https://medium.com/@jimfarmelant/is-steven-pinker-overrated-as-a-public-intellectual-ca65b32c8eb1
Pinker annoys me to no end. Why does the world need an in many ways incredibly privileged person that everything is getting better all the time and that reason, science and ‘enlightenment ideals’ are steadily gaining ground? How does that help anyone, from those fighting for their lives in Sudan or Gaza to those trying to make ends meet for their families in the US or Europe.
Regarding the popularisation of the humanities and social sciences, I am all for it but it should be done without an overt agenda and the caveat that they are just as hard as the sciences to understand if you want to go beyond platitudes.
lol, this is part 231 of me being unable to submit a post to ObWi without including some grammatical error, sorry, but I hope you can grasp the meaning
“this is part 231 of me being unable to submit a post to ObWi without including some grammatical error,”
Wait, this is a requirement now? That “site update” was FAR more significant then I thought!
“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.”
Anyone who argues that those things are gaining ground steadily is hopelessly out of touch. Both with history and with events in his lifetime. By the same token, those who wail that things have never been worse are equally out of touch with reality. And there are plenty of both.
My take is, “Three steps forward, two steps back” is a lot closer to the truth. There’s no real question that reason, science and even “enlightenment ideals” have gained ground over time. There is also no doubt that progress comes in fits and starts, and backsliding (if that is the term), on one front or another, happens rather often.
I’d say we’re in the midst of one of those backsliding phases right now. But even so, on a lot of fronts I have no desire to go back to any time in the past. There are things in the past that we really ought to re-embrace. (California’s vision, in the early 1960s, for higher education, at a readily affordable price, available to anyone who is willing and able to do the work? Definitely leaps to mind.) But overall, I’ll take today, thank you very much!