The think I noticed was that the rhetoric of retribution was about evenly split between End Times dogwhistles and QAnon dogwhistles. Either way, it's pretty clear that I, being an academic, am on the wrong side of the friend/enemy distinction.
I think the potential for some sort of campaign of retribution is very high, and California campuses have to be near the top of that list. I especially worry for my friends and colleagues at UCLA, but I think we all need to be wary.
More simply than that murk, though, I'd expect that The Papaya of Hate would either pardon or under-bus-chuck whoever oversaw the whole thing, and then sleep secure in the cover that the USSC has given him over presidential immunity.
I didn't read your comment about bringing in Shapiro as being about the timing, but rather the positioning. I think both reflect Klein's commitment to staying together and keeping up appearances for the sake of the kids.
That Shapiro conversation really captures the reasons why I think Klein is an unproductive voice. Shapiro claims over and over throughout the conversation that "the right" saw Obama in a particular way, and Klein spends all of his time trying to empathize with how they might have felt, rather than stating that Shapiro spent his entire career crafting the very narratives by which the right learned to see Obama in that way.
It's the asymmetry of empathy that is just allowed to sit there and not be spoken of that makes me dismiss Klein. Shapiro can just passive voice away his own role as an ideological insurrectionist and sower of division and Klein cedes that ground in order to imagine himself a good and sensitive listener and participant in dialogue.
Interesting article. The narrative of how the Supreme Court came to be so weaponized is good, and the role that Originalism played in it is plausible. I'd like a much more solid set of grounds laid out for that, but that would likely push the length of the article beyond what a popular venue like The Atlantic would support - more of an academic press book argument than a middlebrow magazine argument.
The part I found weakest, though, was the connection implied between Originalism and the abandonment of constitutional amendment as a path to change. It seems to me that the procedures for amendment codified in the Constitution themselves account for why that process has been abandoned. The threshold of support required for amending the Constitution is excessive.
The only times it has ever worked, it did so because of either war or an extension of franchise to a broader group of Americans that created the potential for new cross-cutting alliances which could overcome those difficulties. I don't see that Originalism has altered anything with regard to amendment. What it has done is given conservative legal activists a recognizable brand on which to build a legal sophistry that can provide cover for a judiciary coup.
The Constitution is deeply flawed and limiting. It probably should have failed in 1860 or in 1929, and only extraordinary extra-Constitutional means preserved the nation in both instances, but the flaws remain. We would probably be better off with a new governing document, but there is no way that the nation would ever go back together as a 50-state union if the document went away. We've lost our sense of a common good.
I have had to admit that I will be the slowest person on the trail from now on, because the people I used to pass have all got e-bikes. I’m old-fashioned, I guess — the goal is to conquer the uphill bits on your own, not to pass the job over to some batteries.
I hear you on the e-bike thing despite riding one myself most of the time. Paradoxically, I too want the uphills to be a challenge, and chose my e-bike because it promised *less* than the other e-bikes. I wanted minimal added weight and the ability to be able to set the pedal assist low enough to keep the rides challenging and natural feeling, with just enough of an electric tailwind to make the steepest parts of the trails rideable, rather than forcing me to hike-a-bike. It's not quite as challenging as riding full-acoustic, but it reduces the effort by a third, while doubling the time I spend riding, so it's a net gain for my fitness.
Alas, the rest of the e-bike knuckleheads I encounter seem to be addicted to the thrill and illusion provided by the boost, or are wanting the motor to shuttle them up the hills so that they can bypass the struggle and just get the downhill rush. And the social riders among them are hopeless on this front. The most competitive among them always rush to be first up and are in a hurry to get to the gnarly bits, and they haze everyone else into conforming and upping their boost just to keep from being dropped. Most of the group would be happier with less boost, but the biggest man-child always seems to drive the consensus.
I am in the process of turning my older, non-electric, hardtail mtb into a more gravel-and-excursion oriented bike for when weather limits me to the mixed-use bike paths. Those hills are much more manageable than the local wilderness trails.
My latest tests show my cholesterol getting out of hand despite having a healthy diet and getting the recommended exercise. Not a surprise, given the family history. Will probably end up on statins soon enough. Diet and exercise have held off genetics for a decade-and-a-half longer than most of my line, but there's only so much to be done with that.
On the Horst Wessel side of it, though, much of the religious right is referring to Kirk as "a warrior for God" and "a soldier of Christ." The Christian side of the culture wars is heavily influenced by the "spiritual warfare" types. They literally believe that they are engaged in spiritual combat against demons who have jurisdiction over geographical areas. It's very animist - I'm wondering if it isn't to Christianity what Shinto is to Buddhism. As such, I expect more hagiography, and more militant hagiography, as they seek to meld temporal military service with spiritual military service in their political theology. It's a very small narrative step from the valorization of the fallen soldier as political martyr and extending it to all of the Left Behind mythology and fantasies of one big, final End Times battle for the soul of humanity. Kirk is ideally situated for this project.
One of the things I think about a lot WRT these conversations is the difference between retributive and restorative justice approaches. For me it's not a question of whether to forgive or not to forgive, but rather a question of whether or not a path to reconciliation can still exist, and what sort of changes might be required to effect such a reconciliation.
I'm reminded of a passage in Dave Grossman's On Killing (nota bene, Grossman is not a good person and his research is deeply flawed in my estimation, but not in a way that negates what I'm about to describe). He talks about the Japanese treatment of Chinese prisoners, and how Japanese recruits were required to bayonette helpless prisoners in front of their comrades as a way of destroying their old sense of identity and making them feel as if there was no way to redeem themselves in the eyes of their old communities. They were made monstrous in order to be wielded as monsters.
I'm always deeply concerned to try, as much as decency will allow, to leave some path back for reconciliation. It doesn't have to be (and probably shouldn't be) a free-and-easy path. They should have to do the work of restoration, of reparation, to earn that reconciliation, but unless we work to keep such a path available I don't think that we will ever be able to restore the breach.
I don't do an especially good job of handling these sorts of disputes, but it's not because of anything I have done. The people we engage with have been primed to see our rejections of their positions as a rejection of them, and our criticisms of their influencers as criticisms of them. These conversations are not meant to be exchanges, they are rituals, and when we are on the other side of them we are not people to be listened to and understood, we are opportunities for them to test their courage in service to their community. If we agree, then we can be welcomed into the community. If we disagree, then they have been courageous because they stood up for their community in the face of our scorn and hostility to them.
This is why appeals to reason fall flat. The MAGA movement is not a debate. It is a worldview. And worldviews do not yield to evidence; they yield to rupture.
If rupture is rare, then resilience must be cultivated. Not through fact-checking alone, but through narrative reformation—stories that offer coherence without conspiracy, dignity without domination, and agency without scapegoating.
We have glimpses of what this looks like. When labor movements organize around dignity on the job rather than resentment of the outsider, they create belonging through solidarity. When local communities reclaim public institutions—schools, libraries, clinics—they generate meaning that resists privatization and fear. These efforts are fragile, but they remind us that counter-narratives are possible when they are lived as well as told.
That means confronting the architecture of belief not with contempt, but with clarity. It means recognizing that for many, MAGA is not a political position—it’s a survival strategy. And if we want to dislodge it, we must offer something more resilient than resentment. We must offer belonging.
While I was looking for productive readings to help us find a way out of this I found a Carnegie Endowment policy guide for countering disinformation that I think offers some helpful findings about which sorts of interventions are most effective. I was especially pleased to find Table 1, the Overview of Case Studies because it identifies a few things that we can do which have been shown to be effective. Chief among those are supporting more local, grass-roots reporting, and educating people to give them better media literacy. The first of those points to what Greenberg was saying about offering other ways of belonging - getting outside of the big, national narratives and giving people information that they can connect with personally because they know the people who are providing the information. We have to re-localize our communities. Influencers provide the illusion of this connection through para-social relations. If we can do better with real connections, then we can reverse this.
Easier said than done. To quote one of the people interviewed in Sherry Turkles Life On Screen: "RL is not my best window."
The second - better media literacy - is basically what I teach at university, and yes, it is difficult. It takes time, and effort, and practice, and it doesn't really work unless the person doing it is willing to put their worldview and their identity in the balance as part of the effort. In my experience about one in five of my students are willing to risk this, and fewer than half of these actually carry through and start to actually break through the media narratives to find actual, actionable information that could make a difference.
And as small as that success rate might be, its existence is the reason why the present administration is working so hard to turn America agains their educators. They know that everything they are doing right now is fraying the crap out of those worldviews they have so carefully built up over 40 years, and they cannot afford to allow any communities of resistance to give people a more attractive counter-narrative and sense of identity.
Meanwhile, since the UC itself is too busy running scared as the Yam of Grievance and his cabal seek to destroy higher education, looks like all of us involved in the actual educational mandate of the schools will have to fight this bullshit ourselves.
Especially galling when so many of us have so few protections, employment or physical, in the first place. We are exposed while UCOP and the Regents dither and appease.
I'll admit, I'm a bit nervous going back to teaching in a couple weeks while the right is this riled up and screaming bloody murder against universities as if we had a god damned thing to do with the escalating political violence. Campuses are not safe. And now the Vice President of the United States is personally advocating for a doxxing campaign against us.
And my doctor wonders why my blood pressure has gone up since last exam.
What I believe the algorithm is doing - and by that, I mean what the media oligarchs are doing - is destroying real world communities (churches excepted) and then pushing hard to take over the para-social communities that exist on the Internet to replace those communities with hollowed out versions that are mostly propaganda. Kirk was very good at creating those para-social communities and attracting broken, lonely, powerless people to them, then giving them scapegoats to target with their outrage.
Approval. Sense of belonging. In-group prestige through symbolic action. Very heady brew for young minds.
Vance is aiming hard for that space at the moment. I don't think he can hold it. I hope he can't.
We're going to get violence either way, but I'd rather it no have any direction or momentum. Better static than current.
CharlesWT - It usually provides links to its sources. I'll have to add a source links requirement to the prompt.
Links to sources would be helpful, but the deeper issue of transparency involves the selection criteria that results in those sources being included. It's one of the questions I routinely ask my lower division undergraduate students when it comes to their own papers: "what purpose does this citation serve in developing an understanding of the critical perspective from which you are writing?"
Newfield addresses this deeper sense of transparency in the article intro where he writes: "At the same time, critics have identified a set of operational flaws in the ML and deep learning systems now discussed under the “AI” banner. Four of the most discussed are social biases, particularly racism, that become part of both the model and its use; opacity, such that users cannot assess how results were generated; coercion, in that architectures, datasets, algorithms, and the like are controlled by designers and platforms rather than users; and privacy violations, which result from combinations of bias, opacity, and coercion focused on the surveillance, accumulation, and monetization of data. What I'm pointing to here falls under the second and third operational flaws. We don't know why the LLM chose these particular points to amplify. They are as opaque to us as the proprietary systems by which search results get ordered on search engines.
The lack of epistemological and methodological awareness are a deep problem, and these are the reasons why I scoff at Altman's comparison of the latest iteration of ChatGPT as being like interacting with an expert with a Ph.D.. The lack of these deeper levels of awareness are more a marker of someone much earlier in their intellectual development.
ij - sounds like you are thinking through some of the issues that Christopher Newfield discusses in his Critical AI article "How to Make 'AI' Intelligent; or, The Question of Epistemic Equality." [https://doi.org/10.1215/2834703X-10734076] I don't see that the article is open access, so I'll excerpt a chunk of the intro here to give y'all a sense of what Newfield is arguing... In this article I will not provide a historical account of how AI research in its various iterations has alleged rather than specified the intelligence it aims to simulate. Instead, I will first suggest why it is so hard for most technologists and the officials they influence to care about rigorous definitions of intelligence before they attribute it to software. I will then analyze one philosopher's rigorous definition for its implications for current debates about AI.
Some of the problem is the size and wealth of the corporate platforms that have dominated the internet and its opportunities for data accumulation and that now want to dominate “AI.” But there is also a deeper and more difficult cultural problem, and that is the highly restricted role of culture itself, or the role of cultural analysis of technology. There have been frequent periods when technologists are able, intentionally or not, to keep cultural analysis from having coauthorship of the meaning, operations, and effects of the technology or of narratives of its future. “The Age of AI” is one of those periods when practitioners who bring culturally grounded skepticism to technological development are less likely to be treated as equal partners than to find themselves unemployed, as did computer scientist Timnit Gebru in 2020 (Simonite 2020a, 2020b).
This is happening in spite of the fact that the long history of asking “What is intelligence?” also belongs to historical and cultural disciplines—philosophy obviously, but also to feminist studies, which radicalized the context dependence of knowledge in standpoint theory, and ethnic studies, which demonstrated the role of ascribed race in structuring epistemological frameworks, just to name two of the many domains of philosophically informed cultural research. Of course major contributions to this question have been made by scientists and technologists, but these have been boundary crossers, traveling back and forth between cultural and technological disciplines and bringing their procedures and findings together. There is much discourse from practitioners affiliated with AI-labeled technology about the technology's power to benefit all humanity. This is not the same as a full discussion among epistemic equals about whether this assertion is actually true, whether our diverse societies want it to be, and what would make it true in ways that diverse societies might want.
This is a deep, complicated, and massively multilateral conversation that will take years or decades. It requires much better public education processes than what we see today in the mainstream media.1 It means continuous travel of informed people among multiple disciplines and synthesis of disparate methods and their results. This is not happening. AI discourse is largely a question of when, not if, and it assumes that technologies will be pushed out to the consuming masses by large corporations and the start-ups they fund on a schedule that they determine. A (problematic) call for a pause in AI research presumed that the revolution of superior machine intelligence is here and that proper management ensures an unspecified flourishing future (Future of Life Institute 2023).2 AI discourse often functions as a manifest destiny about which great minds are said to agree.
At the same time, critics have identified a set of operational flaws in the ML and deep learning systems now discussed under the “AI” banner. Four of the most discussed are social biases, particularly racism, that become part of both the model and its use; opacity, such that users cannot assess how results were generated; coercion, in that architectures, datasets, algorithms, and the like are controlled by designers and platforms rather than users; and privacy violations, which result from combinations of bias, opacity, and coercion focused on the surveillance, accumulation, and monetization of data.
Readers of Critical AI are among those increasingly focused on a fifth operational flaw: much ML research takes place in companies like Google, in which managers have authority over the publication of research results. Famous cases like the one I mentioned above, the firing of Google ethics researcher Timnit Gebru (and her co-lead Margaret Mitchell), suggest that much or most AI research is happening in the absence of academic freedom, which puts researchers at risk while also distorting research results by allowing the suppression of findings that don't fit a rollout narrative or corporate image. Corporate manipulation of research results is a known issue thanks to the automotive, tobacco, chemicals, and fossil fuel industries, among others.
Then there is a sixth issue that I'm considering here—the question of whether “AI” is intelligent in the first place. And there is the related question of why this sixth question is not central to public AI debates.
Reflecting on the work of two authors can help us address these underexamined questions. The first is C. P. Snow and his famous meditations on the divide between “Two Cultures” (which Snow described as scientific vs. literary outlooks but which I will discuss in terms of technological vs. cultural knowledge). The second is programmer and philosopher Brian Cantwell Smith's recent analysis in The Promise of Artificial Intelligence (2019) of two kinds of intelligence: reckoning and judgment. Smith sheds light on the mentality that the editors of this special issue identify as data positivism, but which Smith's notion of “reckoning” helps me talk about more explicitly as computational intelligence of a certain kind. Snow helps explain why culture-based understandings of intelligence are not part of the current debate, and Smith shows what can happen when they are. Although Snow did not intend to, he helped take humanities disciplines out of the future-defining process for several generations. Smith offers us ways of putting them back in.
In the body of the article Newfield fleshes out these points a lot and settles into a discussion of intelligence as not just a matter of number crunching and pattern recognition ('reckoning') but also of what Smith (mentioned above) calls 'registration' (a situated perception of the world and the reckoner's place in that system) and also of judgment (which I will gloss as a commitment to reconciling reckoning and registration in order to test and negotiate a shared understanding that fits both the data and the human relationships that are entangled/implicated in that data, or as Newman interprets Smith: "'The system (knower) must be committed to the known, for starters. That is part of the deference' in which one defers to the object in order to know it. But there's a further matter, in which the knower must be 'committed to tracking things down, going to bat for what is right,' and feeling in some deep way existentially 'bound by the objects' (93). Intelligence, Smith is saying, depends on an underlying awareness of existence, both one's own existence and the existence of the world. For Smith, epistemology is prior to ontology, and we can add that a feeling of existence is prior to them both—and a fundamental precondition of intelligence.)."
In terms of Charles' Veronica Mars example, Grok has "reckoned" what others have communicated about the show, but in assembling its commentary it cannot exercise judgment because it does not understand the cultural systems in which those communications gain or lose their significance, nor situate itself in relation to the various parties involved in the communication.
It has grokked nothing, it has only parsed and systematized according to its own training algorithms.
The Veronica Mars output is a "good" summary in that it assembles together a lot of information and represents it in a way that appears faithful, but it doesn't rise to the level of any critical insight, and it does not provide any transparency for the sources of its information or the reasoning behind its selection. It feels like an intellectual cul-de-sac to me.
Vance exists to elevate himself and to service the billionaires that have enabled his political career in the hopes of getting their political desires fulfilled. Vance would be less distractible and more motivated in his pursuit of a Project 2025 agenda, cutting deals with the Techno-Oligarch wannabes to make sure that they were rich enough and isolated enough from government interference to not be affected by the restrictions brought in the name of Christian Nationalism.
On the bright side, Vance is a negative-charisma asshat with none of Trump's instincts for the grift. I don't think he'd get the same sort of laughing support that Cheetolini gets, and Newsom would mock him incessantly.
It's an outrage and a travesty, and it's happening to a person whose misfortune I read with great satisfaction. I hope that this outrage is prevented - slowly - and that the perpetrators' misfortune is the source of great future satisfaction.
...and the horses they rode in on (which, I suspect, were all nidstangs).
So many poxes. So many houses.
Means testing requires an administrative state and the collection of a lot of very gameable data. I'm pretty sure it would cost less to mail the check to Bezos than it would to try to exclude him in order to keep the money only in the hands of the needy.
To piggy back on JanieM's criticism there: It has obviously not occurred to him -- or if it has, he declines to believe it -- that "benefitting someone in some way" might well benefit everyone else too, even if only indirectly. But then, some people don't seem to think that a happier, healthier populace could possibly be good for everyone. (For what definition of "good," he might ask...)
The general sense that I get of him and many other libertarianish folks is that every time they look at a public good, they start trying to convert it into smaller piles of private goods for which they can find deserving owners. It's the oft-quoted Thatcher bit about there being no such thing as society.
Michael - Given the title of the linked piece -- "The Humanities as Service Departments: Facing the Budget Logic" -- the author never got to the point I was expecting. What I was looking for was a reconciliation of two facts. On the one side, the author's table showing that A&H generated large amounts of tuition revenue at little expense. On the other, the administration's assertion that A&H departments had relatively few students in their degree programs. He put the conclusion right there in the title, but apparently couldn't bring himself to say it.
I think that what you are noting here is a product of the venue. It's published on the MLA site, so the readers (mostly language and literature faculty) are already oriented towards that conclusion and mostly reading for the findings. Newfield unpacks more of his conclusions when writing for the general public. It seems to me that A&H faculty should (a) have recognized that they were turning into service departments and (b) have been proactive on the question of how to be better service departments (while retaining their historical roles). The goal ought to be that when someone proposes A&H cuts, the non-A&H faculty scream.
Was more true a decade ago than today. Generative AI is convincing a segment of non-A&H faculty that a lot of the service that A&H provide for them can be handled by tech rather than teachers, because they have been using Gen AI to make their own work more readable. The same is true of coding and calculation. The high-ROI STEM fields use AI to parse the code they write to crunch their data, and they use MATLAB to do their calculations...
...relying, of course, on the judgment and understanding they developed while having to learn to write, code, and calculate the old-fashioned way. The high school graduates that come through those service classes are not going to go through that struggle, and therefore not develop that judgment themselves.
Whatever the case, the non-A&H faculty have a lot less solidarity with the A&H faculty than they used to, thanks to two decades of austerity budgets, and especially now as their research grants are being stripped away.
It's a bad scene all around. And the biggest casualties in all this are the teaching mission of the universities and the economic futures of the students who are being forced into ever increasing debt and being given a much degraded version of an education thanks to all of this.
Our lecturer's union is fighting against this trend (being wholly dedicated to the educational mission and having the majority of its members teaching in service departments). Our working conditions are our students' learning conditions. But the regents and the professional management class at the university system level are entirely isolated from the teaching mission side of things and think that this level of precarity gives them more flexibility when dealing with state budget austerity. They don't care about the quality of the student education, only that the quality of that education relative to their rival institutions (you know, the US News rankings, and admissions numbers) remain high enough to hold place or move up.
It's quite sad - moreso when you are in the middle of it and care more about the educational mission than about all of the rest.
The only thing that seems to budge the statewide people is when they start to worry about bad publicity damaging the institutional reputation. But that sort of media attention is also hard to come by. It takes a combination of really bad circumstances and massive coordination efforts to get media attention, and it's really hard to keep that attention for more than a blink with so much shit flooding the zone every single day.
Two quick websites for getting a sense of the geography of income inequality in major US cities: https://inequality.stanford.edu/income-segregation-maps
These show increases in concentration of rich and poor over time, but the levels of concentration vary by city. https://inequality.media.mit.edu/#
This one looks not just at neighborhood median income, but tracks the places that people of varying economic backgrounds visit in several cities to show the geography of daily association.
Hard to say if these patterns persist outside of major metropolitan areas. I imagine that smaller data sets lead to greater uncertainty of results.
GftNC - the analysis of how the humanities and social sciences actually end up subsidizing STEM are not in the review synopsis that I linked, but rather in the book being reviewed, so here's another link that gets at those details some more (esp. in section 2): https://profession.mla.org/the-humanities-as-service-departments-facing-the-budget-logic/
There's a lot more analysis like this in The Great Mistake.
Tony P. - I find it tragic that Newsom has opted to put redistricting up to a vote, but I fully understand and accept the necessity of it, and will vote in support of it when it comes to that. This all could have been avoided had the Roberts Court done the right thing and allowed the Wisconsin gerrymandered districting to be struck down. It's fully on Roberts' shoulders that partisan redistricting is considered to be allowed under the constitution. Likewise, their systematic erosion of voter protections under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has allowed the GOP to attempt this latest scheme to disenfranchise opposition voters by wasting their votes on non-competitive districts and empowering their own voters in competitive districts.
I'd gladly vote to go back to non-partisan redistricting after the fact if this GOP power grab is unsuccessful. I don't want to disenfranchise Republican voters, but neither am I going to get caught up on principle while the other side cheats to win.
I don't know if it will be enough to break the fall, but taking the high road is conceding the contest, and that cannot happen.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “I just can’t…”
The think I noticed was that the rhetoric of retribution was about evenly split between End Times dogwhistles and QAnon dogwhistles. Either way, it's pretty clear that I, being an academic, am on the wrong side of the friend/enemy distinction.
I think the potential for some sort of campaign of retribution is very high, and California campuses have to be near the top of that list. I especially worry for my friends and colleagues at UCLA, but I think we all need to be wary.
On “IANAL, but…”
More simply than that murk, though, I'd expect that The Papaya of Hate would either pardon or under-bus-chuck whoever oversaw the whole thing, and then sleep secure in the cover that the USSC has given him over presidential immunity.
On “Precursors”
I didn't read your comment about bringing in Shapiro as being about the timing, but rather the positioning. I think both reflect Klein's commitment to staying together and keeping up appearances for the sake of the kids.
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That Shapiro conversation really captures the reasons why I think Klein is an unproductive voice. Shapiro claims over and over throughout the conversation that "the right" saw Obama in a particular way, and Klein spends all of his time trying to empathize with how they might have felt, rather than stating that Shapiro spent his entire career crafting the very narratives by which the right learned to see Obama in that way.
It's the asymmetry of empathy that is just allowed to sit there and not be spoken of that makes me dismiss Klein. Shapiro can just passive voice away his own role as an ideological insurrectionist and sower of division and Klein cedes that ground in order to imagine himself a good and sensitive listener and participant in dialogue.
On “An experimental first post”
Interesting article. The narrative of how the Supreme Court came to be so weaponized is good, and the role that Originalism played in it is plausible. I'd like a much more solid set of grounds laid out for that, but that would likely push the length of the article beyond what a popular venue like The Atlantic would support - more of an academic press book argument than a middlebrow magazine argument.
The part I found weakest, though, was the connection implied between Originalism and the abandonment of constitutional amendment as a path to change. It seems to me that the procedures for amendment codified in the Constitution themselves account for why that process has been abandoned. The threshold of support required for amending the Constitution is excessive.
https://www.californialawreview.org/print/the-worlds-most-difficult-constitution-to-amend
The only times it has ever worked, it did so because of either war or an extension of franchise to a broader group of Americans that created the potential for new cross-cutting alliances which could overcome those difficulties. I don't see that Originalism has altered anything with regard to amendment. What it has done is given conservative legal activists a recognizable brand on which to build a legal sophistry that can provide cover for a judiciary coup.
The Constitution is deeply flawed and limiting. It probably should have failed in 1860 or in 1929, and only extraordinary extra-Constitutional means preserved the nation in both instances, but the flaws remain. We would probably be better off with a new governing document, but there is no way that the nation would ever go back together as a 50-state union if the document went away. We've lost our sense of a common good.
On “We are all Usain Bolt now”
I have had to admit that I will be the slowest person on the trail from now on, because the people I used to pass have all got e-bikes. I’m old-fashioned, I guess — the goal is to conquer the uphill bits on your own, not to pass the job over to some batteries.
I hear you on the e-bike thing despite riding one myself most of the time. Paradoxically, I too want the uphills to be a challenge, and chose my e-bike because it promised *less* than the other e-bikes. I wanted minimal added weight and the ability to be able to set the pedal assist low enough to keep the rides challenging and natural feeling, with just enough of an electric tailwind to make the steepest parts of the trails rideable, rather than forcing me to hike-a-bike. It's not quite as challenging as riding full-acoustic, but it reduces the effort by a third, while doubling the time I spend riding, so it's a net gain for my fitness.
Alas, the rest of the e-bike knuckleheads I encounter seem to be addicted to the thrill and illusion provided by the boost, or are wanting the motor to shuttle them up the hills so that they can bypass the struggle and just get the downhill rush. And the social riders among them are hopeless on this front. The most competitive among them always rush to be first up and are in a hurry to get to the gnarly bits, and they haze everyone else into conforming and upping their boost just to keep from being dropped. Most of the group would be happier with less boost, but the biggest man-child always seems to drive the consensus.
I am in the process of turning my older, non-electric, hardtail mtb into a more gravel-and-excursion oriented bike for when weather limits me to the mixed-use bike paths. Those hills are much more manageable than the local wilderness trails.
My latest tests show my cholesterol getting out of hand despite having a healthy diet and getting the recommended exercise. Not a surprise, given the family history. Will probably end up on statins soon enough. Diet and exercise have held off genetics for a decade-and-a-half longer than most of my line, but there's only so much to be done with that.
On “Precursors”
On the Horst Wessel side of it, though, much of the religious right is referring to Kirk as "a warrior for God" and "a soldier of Christ." The Christian side of the culture wars is heavily influenced by the "spiritual warfare" types. They literally believe that they are engaged in spiritual combat against demons who have jurisdiction over geographical areas. It's very animist - I'm wondering if it isn't to Christianity what Shinto is to Buddhism. As such, I expect more hagiography, and more militant hagiography, as they seek to meld temporal military service with spiritual military service in their political theology. It's a very small narrative step from the valorization of the fallen soldier as political martyr and extending it to all of the Left Behind mythology and fantasies of one big, final End Times battle for the soul of humanity. Kirk is ideally situated for this project.
On “Guestpost from Wonkie”
Name and email saved. Website left blank. Mostly posting from Chrome.
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One of the things I think about a lot WRT these conversations is the difference between retributive and restorative justice approaches. For me it's not a question of whether to forgive or not to forgive, but rather a question of whether or not a path to reconciliation can still exist, and what sort of changes might be required to effect such a reconciliation.
I'm reminded of a passage in Dave Grossman's On Killing (nota bene, Grossman is not a good person and his research is deeply flawed in my estimation, but not in a way that negates what I'm about to describe). He talks about the Japanese treatment of Chinese prisoners, and how Japanese recruits were required to bayonette helpless prisoners in front of their comrades as a way of destroying their old sense of identity and making them feel as if there was no way to redeem themselves in the eyes of their old communities. They were made monstrous in order to be wielded as monsters.
I'm always deeply concerned to try, as much as decency will allow, to leave some path back for reconciliation. It doesn't have to be (and probably shouldn't be) a free-and-easy path. They should have to do the work of restoration, of reparation, to earn that reconciliation, but unless we work to keep such a path available I don't think that we will ever be able to restore the breach.
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I don't do an especially good job of handling these sorts of disputes, but it's not because of anything I have done. The people we engage with have been primed to see our rejections of their positions as a rejection of them, and our criticisms of their influencers as criticisms of them. These conversations are not meant to be exchanges, they are rituals, and when we are on the other side of them we are not people to be listened to and understood, we are opportunities for them to test their courage in service to their community. If we agree, then we can be welcomed into the community. If we disagree, then they have been courageous because they stood up for their community in the face of our scorn and hostility to them.
https://jamesbgreenberg.substack.com/p/beyond-facts-the-identity-politics
This is why appeals to reason fall flat. The MAGA movement is not a debate. It is a worldview. And worldviews do not yield to evidence; they yield to rupture.
If rupture is rare, then resilience must be cultivated. Not through fact-checking alone, but through narrative reformation—stories that offer coherence without conspiracy, dignity without domination, and agency without scapegoating.
We have glimpses of what this looks like. When labor movements organize around dignity on the job rather than resentment of the outsider, they create belonging through solidarity. When local communities reclaim public institutions—schools, libraries, clinics—they generate meaning that resists privatization and fear. These efforts are fragile, but they remind us that counter-narratives are possible when they are lived as well as told.
That means confronting the architecture of belief not with contempt, but with clarity. It means recognizing that for many, MAGA is not a political position—it’s a survival strategy. And if we want to dislodge it, we must offer something more resilient than resentment. We must offer belonging.
While I was looking for productive readings to help us find a way out of this I found a Carnegie Endowment policy guide for countering disinformation that I think offers some helpful findings about which sorts of interventions are most effective. I was especially pleased to find Table 1, the Overview of Case Studies because it identifies a few things that we can do which have been shown to be effective. Chief among those are supporting more local, grass-roots reporting, and educating people to give them better media literacy. The first of those points to what Greenberg was saying about offering other ways of belonging - getting outside of the big, national narratives and giving people information that they can connect with personally because they know the people who are providing the information. We have to re-localize our communities. Influencers provide the illusion of this connection through para-social relations. If we can do better with real connections, then we can reverse this.
Easier said than done. To quote one of the people interviewed in Sherry Turkles Life On Screen: "RL is not my best window."
The second - better media literacy - is basically what I teach at university, and yes, it is difficult. It takes time, and effort, and practice, and it doesn't really work unless the person doing it is willing to put their worldview and their identity in the balance as part of the effort. In my experience about one in five of my students are willing to risk this, and fewer than half of these actually carry through and start to actually break through the media narratives to find actual, actionable information that could make a difference.
And as small as that success rate might be, its existence is the reason why the present administration is working so hard to turn America agains their educators. They know that everything they are doing right now is fraying the crap out of those worldviews they have so carefully built up over 40 years, and they cannot afford to allow any communities of resistance to give people a more attractive counter-narrative and sense of identity.
On “Kuzushi and Charlie Kirk”
Meanwhile, since the UC itself is too busy running scared as the Yam of Grievance and his cabal seek to destroy higher education, looks like all of us involved in the actual educational mandate of the schools will have to fight this bullshit ourselves.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-09-16/university-of-california-faculty-sue-trump-over-ucla-fine-research-cuts
Especially galling when so many of us have so few protections, employment or physical, in the first place. We are exposed while UCOP and the Regents dither and appease.
I'll admit, I'm a bit nervous going back to teaching in a couple weeks while the right is this riled up and screaming bloody murder against universities as if we had a god damned thing to do with the escalating political violence. Campuses are not safe. And now the Vice President of the United States is personally advocating for a doxxing campaign against us.
And my doctor wonders why my blood pressure has gone up since last exam.
Look.
The fuck.
Around.
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What I believe the algorithm is doing - and by that, I mean what the media oligarchs are doing - is destroying real world communities (churches excepted) and then pushing hard to take over the para-social communities that exist on the Internet to replace those communities with hollowed out versions that are mostly propaganda. Kirk was very good at creating those para-social communities and attracting broken, lonely, powerless people to them, then giving them scapegoats to target with their outrage.
Approval. Sense of belonging. In-group prestige through symbolic action. Very heady brew for young minds.
Vance is aiming hard for that space at the moment. I don't think he can hold it. I hope he can't.
We're going to get violence either way, but I'd rather it no have any direction or momentum. Better static than current.
On “Excelsior!”
Finally found the email in my spam folder. It has your number, lj.
On “What to do?”
Looks like most of Andrew's stuff can at least be found on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Maybe change the links to Archive permalinks?
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Don't have anything of value to add to the discussion except that I'm glad y'all are handling this.
On “I’m forever blowing bubbles”
CharlesWT - It usually provides links to its sources. I'll have to add a source links requirement to the prompt.
Links to sources would be helpful, but the deeper issue of transparency involves the selection criteria that results in those sources being included. It's one of the questions I routinely ask my lower division undergraduate students when it comes to their own papers: "what purpose does this citation serve in developing an understanding of the critical perspective from which you are writing?"
Newfield addresses this deeper sense of transparency in the article intro where he writes: "At the same time, critics have identified a set of operational flaws in the ML and deep learning systems now discussed under the “AI” banner. Four of the most discussed are social biases, particularly racism, that become part of both the model and its use; opacity, such that users cannot assess how results were generated; coercion, in that architectures, datasets, algorithms, and the like are controlled by designers and platforms rather than users; and privacy violations, which result from combinations of bias, opacity, and coercion focused on the surveillance, accumulation, and monetization of data. What I'm pointing to here falls under the second and third operational flaws. We don't know why the LLM chose these particular points to amplify. They are as opaque to us as the proprietary systems by which search results get ordered on search engines.
The lack of epistemological and methodological awareness are a deep problem, and these are the reasons why I scoff at Altman's comparison of the latest iteration of ChatGPT as being like interacting with an expert with a Ph.D.. The lack of these deeper levels of awareness are more a marker of someone much earlier in their intellectual development.
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ij - sounds like you are thinking through some of the issues that Christopher Newfield discusses in his Critical AI article "How to Make 'AI' Intelligent; or, The Question of Epistemic Equality." [https://doi.org/10.1215/2834703X-10734076] I don't see that the article is open access, so I'll excerpt a chunk of the intro here to give y'all a sense of what Newfield is arguing...
In this article I will not provide a historical account of how AI research in its various iterations has alleged rather than specified the intelligence it aims to simulate. Instead, I will first suggest why it is so hard for most technologists and the officials they influence to care about rigorous definitions of intelligence before they attribute it to software. I will then analyze one philosopher's rigorous definition for its implications for current debates about AI.
Some of the problem is the size and wealth of the corporate platforms that have dominated the internet and its opportunities for data accumulation and that now want to dominate “AI.” But there is also a deeper and more difficult cultural problem, and that is the highly restricted role of culture itself, or the role of cultural analysis of technology. There have been frequent periods when technologists are able, intentionally or not, to keep cultural analysis from having coauthorship of the meaning, operations, and effects of the technology or of narratives of its future. “The Age of AI” is one of those periods when practitioners who bring culturally grounded skepticism to technological development are less likely to be treated as equal partners than to find themselves unemployed, as did computer scientist Timnit Gebru in 2020 (Simonite 2020a, 2020b).
This is happening in spite of the fact that the long history of asking “What is intelligence?” also belongs to historical and cultural disciplines—philosophy obviously, but also to feminist studies, which radicalized the context dependence of knowledge in standpoint theory, and ethnic studies, which demonstrated the role of ascribed race in structuring epistemological frameworks, just to name two of the many domains of philosophically informed cultural research. Of course major contributions to this question have been made by scientists and technologists, but these have been boundary crossers, traveling back and forth between cultural and technological disciplines and bringing their procedures and findings together. There is much discourse from practitioners affiliated with AI-labeled technology about the technology's power to benefit all humanity. This is not the same as a full discussion among epistemic equals about whether this assertion is actually true, whether our diverse societies want it to be, and what would make it true in ways that diverse societies might want.
This is a deep, complicated, and massively multilateral conversation that will take years or decades. It requires much better public education processes than what we see today in the mainstream media.1 It means continuous travel of informed people among multiple disciplines and synthesis of disparate methods and their results. This is not happening. AI discourse is largely a question of when, not if, and it assumes that technologies will be pushed out to the consuming masses by large corporations and the start-ups they fund on a schedule that they determine. A (problematic) call for a pause in AI research presumed that the revolution of superior machine intelligence is here and that proper management ensures an unspecified flourishing future (Future of Life Institute 2023).2 AI discourse often functions as a manifest destiny about which great minds are said to agree.
At the same time, critics have identified a set of operational flaws in the ML and deep learning systems now discussed under the “AI” banner. Four of the most discussed are social biases, particularly racism, that become part of both the model and its use; opacity, such that users cannot assess how results were generated; coercion, in that architectures, datasets, algorithms, and the like are controlled by designers and platforms rather than users; and privacy violations, which result from combinations of bias, opacity, and coercion focused on the surveillance, accumulation, and monetization of data.
Readers of Critical AI are among those increasingly focused on a fifth operational flaw: much ML research takes place in companies like Google, in which managers have authority over the publication of research results. Famous cases like the one I mentioned above, the firing of Google ethics researcher Timnit Gebru (and her co-lead Margaret Mitchell), suggest that much or most AI research is happening in the absence of academic freedom, which puts researchers at risk while also distorting research results by allowing the suppression of findings that don't fit a rollout narrative or corporate image. Corporate manipulation of research results is a known issue thanks to the automotive, tobacco, chemicals, and fossil fuel industries, among others.
Then there is a sixth issue that I'm considering here—the question of whether “AI” is intelligent in the first place. And there is the related question of why this sixth question is not central to public AI debates.
Reflecting on the work of two authors can help us address these underexamined questions. The first is C. P. Snow and his famous meditations on the divide between “Two Cultures” (which Snow described as scientific vs. literary outlooks but which I will discuss in terms of technological vs. cultural knowledge). The second is programmer and philosopher Brian Cantwell Smith's recent analysis in The Promise of Artificial Intelligence (2019) of two kinds of intelligence: reckoning and judgment. Smith sheds light on the mentality that the editors of this special issue identify as data positivism, but which Smith's notion of “reckoning” helps me talk about more explicitly as computational intelligence of a certain kind. Snow helps explain why culture-based understandings of intelligence are not part of the current debate, and Smith shows what can happen when they are. Although Snow did not intend to, he helped take humanities disciplines out of the future-defining process for several generations. Smith offers us ways of putting them back in.
In the body of the article Newfield fleshes out these points a lot and settles into a discussion of intelligence as not just a matter of number crunching and pattern recognition ('reckoning') but also of what Smith (mentioned above) calls 'registration' (a situated perception of the world and the reckoner's place in that system) and also of judgment (which I will gloss as a commitment to reconciling reckoning and registration in order to test and negotiate a shared understanding that fits both the data and the human relationships that are entangled/implicated in that data, or as Newman interprets Smith: "'The system (knower) must be committed to the known, for starters. That is part of the deference' in which one defers to the object in order to know it. But there's a further matter, in which the knower must be 'committed to tracking things down, going to bat for what is right,' and feeling in some deep way existentially 'bound by the objects' (93). Intelligence, Smith is saying, depends on an underlying awareness of existence, both one's own existence and the existence of the world. For Smith, epistemology is prior to ontology, and we can add that a feeling of existence is prior to them both—and a fundamental precondition of intelligence.)."
In terms of Charles' Veronica Mars example, Grok has "reckoned" what others have communicated about the show, but in assembling its commentary it cannot exercise judgment because it does not understand the cultural systems in which those communications gain or lose their significance, nor situate itself in relation to the various parties involved in the communication.
It has grokked nothing, it has only parsed and systematized according to its own training algorithms.
The Veronica Mars output is a "good" summary in that it assembles together a lot of information and represents it in a way that appears faithful, but it doesn't rise to the level of any critical insight, and it does not provide any transparency for the sources of its information or the reasoning behind its selection. It feels like an intellectual cul-de-sac to me.
On “The Schadenfreude Express”
Vance exists to elevate himself and to service the billionaires that have enabled his political career in the hopes of getting their political desires fulfilled. Vance would be less distractible and more motivated in his pursuit of a Project 2025 agenda, cutting deals with the Techno-Oligarch wannabes to make sure that they were rich enough and isolated enough from government interference to not be affected by the restrictions brought in the name of Christian Nationalism.
On the bright side, Vance is a negative-charisma asshat with none of Trump's instincts for the grift. I don't think he'd get the same sort of laughing support that Cheetolini gets, and Newsom would mock him incessantly.
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It's an outrage and a travesty, and it's happening to a person whose misfortune I read with great satisfaction. I hope that this outrage is prevented - slowly - and that the perpetrators' misfortune is the source of great future satisfaction.
...and the horses they rode in on (which, I suspect, were all nidstangs).
So many poxes. So many houses.
On “David Brooks in Laodicea”
Means testing requires an administrative state and the collection of a lot of very gameable data. I'm pretty sure it would cost less to mail the check to Bezos than it would to try to exclude him in order to keep the money only in the hands of the needy.
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To piggy back on JanieM's criticism there: It has obviously not occurred to him -- or if it has, he declines to believe it -- that "benefitting someone in some way" might well benefit everyone else too, even if only indirectly. But then, some people don't seem to think that a happier, healthier populace could possibly be good for everyone. (For what definition of "good," he might ask...)
The general sense that I get of him and many other libertarianish folks is that every time they look at a public good, they start trying to convert it into smaller piles of private goods for which they can find deserving owners. It's the oft-quoted Thatcher bit about there being no such thing as society.
On “Giving Away the Store”
Michael - Given the title of the linked piece -- "The Humanities as Service Departments: Facing the Budget Logic" -- the author never got to the point I was expecting. What I was looking for was a reconciliation of two facts. On the one side, the author's table showing that A&H generated large amounts of tuition revenue at little expense. On the other, the administration's assertion that A&H departments had relatively few students in their degree programs. He put the conclusion right there in the title, but apparently couldn't bring himself to say it.
I think that what you are noting here is a product of the venue. It's published on the MLA site, so the readers (mostly language and literature faculty) are already oriented towards that conclusion and mostly reading for the findings. Newfield unpacks more of his conclusions when writing for the general public.
It seems to me that A&H faculty should (a) have recognized that they were turning into service departments and (b) have been proactive on the question of how to be better service departments (while retaining their historical roles). The goal ought to be that when someone proposes A&H cuts, the non-A&H faculty scream.
Was more true a decade ago than today. Generative AI is convincing a segment of non-A&H faculty that a lot of the service that A&H provide for them can be handled by tech rather than teachers, because they have been using Gen AI to make their own work more readable. The same is true of coding and calculation. The high-ROI STEM fields use AI to parse the code they write to crunch their data, and they use MATLAB to do their calculations...
...relying, of course, on the judgment and understanding they developed while having to learn to write, code, and calculate the old-fashioned way. The high school graduates that come through those service classes are not going to go through that struggle, and therefore not develop that judgment themselves.
Whatever the case, the non-A&H faculty have a lot less solidarity with the A&H faculty than they used to, thanks to two decades of austerity budgets, and especially now as their research grants are being stripped away.
It's a bad scene all around. And the biggest casualties in all this are the teaching mission of the universities and the economic futures of the students who are being forced into ever increasing debt and being given a much degraded version of an education thanks to all of this.
Our lecturer's union is fighting against this trend (being wholly dedicated to the educational mission and having the majority of its members teaching in service departments). Our working conditions are our students' learning conditions. But the regents and the professional management class at the university system level are entirely isolated from the teaching mission side of things and think that this level of precarity gives them more flexibility when dealing with state budget austerity. They don't care about the quality of the student education, only that the quality of that education relative to their rival institutions (you know, the US News rankings, and admissions numbers) remain high enough to hold place or move up.
It's quite sad - moreso when you are in the middle of it and care more about the educational mission than about all of the rest.
The only thing that seems to budge the statewide people is when they start to worry about bad publicity damaging the institutional reputation. But that sort of media attention is also hard to come by. It takes a combination of really bad circumstances and massive coordination efforts to get media attention, and it's really hard to keep that attention for more than a blink with so much shit flooding the zone every single day.
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Two quick websites for getting a sense of the geography of income inequality in major US cities:
https://inequality.stanford.edu/income-segregation-maps
These show increases in concentration of rich and poor over time, but the levels of concentration vary by city.
https://inequality.media.mit.edu/#
This one looks not just at neighborhood median income, but tracks the places that people of varying economic backgrounds visit in several cities to show the geography of daily association.
Hard to say if these patterns persist outside of major metropolitan areas. I imagine that smaller data sets lead to greater uncertainty of results.
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novakant - No need to correct ME. I've always pronounced it HANnah.
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GftNC - the analysis of how the humanities and social sciences actually end up subsidizing STEM are not in the review synopsis that I linked, but rather in the book being reviewed, so here's another link that gets at those details some more (esp. in section 2):
https://profession.mla.org/the-humanities-as-service-departments-facing-the-budget-logic/
There's a lot more analysis like this in The Great Mistake.
Tony P. - I find it tragic that Newsom has opted to put redistricting up to a vote, but I fully understand and accept the necessity of it, and will vote in support of it when it comes to that. This all could have been avoided had the Roberts Court done the right thing and allowed the Wisconsin gerrymandered districting to be struck down. It's fully on Roberts' shoulders that partisan redistricting is considered to be allowed under the constitution. Likewise, their systematic erosion of voter protections under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has allowed the GOP to attempt this latest scheme to disenfranchise opposition voters by wasting their votes on non-competitive districts and empowering their own voters in competitive districts.
I'd gladly vote to go back to non-partisan redistricting after the fact if this GOP power grab is unsuccessful. I don't want to disenfranchise Republican voters, but neither am I going to get caught up on principle while the other side cheats to win.
I don't know if it will be enough to break the fall, but taking the high road is conceding the contest, and that cannot happen.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.