State of the Discussion

I don't know if or what to extent this fits in this thread, but rather than starting yet another one I am linking here a gift article in today's Atlantic by a Reagan appointed judge about the reasons for his resignation: tl;dr Trump's lawlessness:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/11/federal-judge-resignation-trump/684845/?gift=cx0iluuWx4Cg7JjlT8ugCRF_CkCtm_1560slsmw2zv8&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

At heart, MAGA's problem is one of definition: who counts as Amurikans? Ramaswamy obviously feels that he qualifies. (No clue what his personal definition is. Maybe "anyone Trump supports is in"?) Others, using different definitions, differ. And not just about him.

The thing is, there are lots of definitions. And a movement based on exclusion is in trouble without a single, unified, definition. A charismatic figurehead can, with work, paper over the differences, at least for a while. But MAGAworld looks to be losing their unifying leader, so the fractures over definition are appearing. Put another way, the knives are coming out.

Didn't mean to denigrate Uncle Charlie or the others. Its just that a hallmark of American conservatism in my life has been the ability to build a wall between people they care about and ones they don't. Its how you get compassionate and caring people who see no problem with ICE wearing masks and shooting a priest in the face with pepper balls. I don't believe one negates the other, but one doesn't excuse the other either. Its complicated, like people do.

wj - ...actors can play parts, with authentic appearing emotions, even about experiences they have never personally had — all it takes is having seen someone else experiencing it.

Agreed, but look at what I said: What you do need, however, is some life experience to connect it with. Note that I did not say that they need to have that precise experience, just enough to act as a bridge between their own experience and others'. As russell says, it takes empathy, or as they used to say "fellow feelings." An AI has no experiences, and isn't a person, so can have no personal perspective and cannot reflect. It has to be trained to extrapolate within very narrow ranges and cannot imagine or improvise or project. Even a sociopath has a better perspective for understanding. At least the sociopath is embodied and sensate and conscious. An AI is a database with a good costuming department.

What you do need, however, is some life experience to connect it with.

I’m not so sure about that. Certainly it can help. But actors can play parts, with authentic appearing emotions, even about experiences they have never personally had

What is required is empathy. Which machines do not have.

They can imitate. They cannot empathize. Those are different things.

russell is well on his way with this prompt.

And I don't think that one has to have written a song in order to understand and serve the emotions of the song. What you do need, however, is some life experience to connect it with.

And I'm not talking about a CGI/animated puppet for real performers (a la Gorillaz or Dethklok). That's just human musicians cosplaying something else. What Spotify, Sony, Warner, etc. are after is on-trend content generated by trained expert systems in response to prompts or to the other content listened to by users of their services.

the Monkeys

the Monkees were a made-for-TV group but the songs were written by some of the best pop song writers of the day, and the music was performed by real live A list studio cats.

plus, at least one of the guys (Mike Nesmith) was actually a competent musician and songwriter.

net/net, not at all like AI generated music.

A lot of musical styles, especially commercial pop styles, are highly formulaic, so it wouldn't be that hard to have AI crank it out.

And what you would get would be highly formulaic pop music. Which a lot of people really like, and would be a perfectly fine commodity and lifestyle accessory. It may sound like I'm being dismissive when I say that, but I'm not - that is what a lot of music is made for, and how a lot of music is used.

It's like the art prints at your doctor's office waiting room. They aren't Rembrandt, or even Andy Warhol. But they are pleasant to look at, and don't clash with the color scheme.

Again, not being dismissive. It's nice to have pleasant, undemanding stuff to look at (and even ignore) when you're waiting for an appointment.

What you will not get from AI is a Leonard Cohen, or a Tom Waits, or a David Bowie, or a Paul Simon. To cite some better-known examples. You might get a Beatles of the quality of "I Want To Hold Your Hand", but not an "Eleanor Rigby".

If you fed an AI music generator a diet of any or all of those guys, you might get a simulacrum of their work. But it will be missing the special ingredient that actually makes you sit up and take notice when you hear their stuff - the human insight, the unusual chord change, the frisson that comes from the unexpected use of language in the lyric.

AI is inherently derivative. Derivative work can be useful, and has its place, but it isn't going to tell you anything you don't already know.

What makes the folks I named here artists, rather than simply entertainers, is the way in which they subvert the stylistic formulas they work in to discover meaning beneath the surface of the style.

Maybe someday some kind of AGI gizmo will be capable of that. If so, it probably will not be in a direction that resonates with humans.

But I am skeptical that AGI will ever actually be a thing.

My next thought was that lots (most?) pop stars are performers, and their songs are generally written by someone else.

Linda Ronstadt always maintained that she had no talent as a songwriter. Lots of very good songwriters wrote material with her specifically in mind, though.

wj - you can have AI generate the name of your star and generate genre appropriate "photos" of them. You can then use Claude to generate all the lyrics for your song from a simple, one sentence prompt. You can then feed those lyrics into Suno and have it generate a genre-appropriate song based on the lyrics complete with a vocalist.

It's all just a stew of algorithmically generated near-plagiarism.

You can watch Rick Beato do just that here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKxNGFjyRv0

I'm prepping and making changes to my syllabus for the writing class I teach that centers around college music - writing reviews of "college radio" albums from the '80s and '90s, and then taking what they have learned from doing that to comment on the music that is a part of their college lives today.

I had been having them write an essay exploring the question "Does College Music Still Exist?," and digging into the social side of what defines the music of that moment and that community. Sadly, I've never been satisfied with the depth of their engagement with the topic and have been wanting to change it up for a few terms now in the hopes of finding something that gets them thinking more deeply and feeling like they have something that the want to say.

My current idea is to get them thinking more deeply about the ecology of their music media. If the music you listen to is chosen for you by an algorithm, what makes it yours? Should Spotify allow the uploading and monetizing of music produced by AI? Can an AI generated pop star understand your broken heart? Do you really listen to songs you don't buy and music you don't own, or is it just something to consume like fast food?

I keep making stabs at how to turn all that into a philosophical question that can provoke reflection and inspire many different responses - something like "What's Wrong With Listening To Spotify?" or the like, but I haven't found one with the right mojo and moxie. Any ideas?

From here:

https://www.cnn.com/election/2025/exit-polls/new-jersey/general/governor/0

18-44 31% 45 or older 69%
Sherrill 67% 51%
Ciattarelli 32% 48%

The exit polling is broken down in what may be too many different ways at the link. The long and short of it is that being white, older, male, and less educated made someone more likely to have voted for Ciattarelli.

One interesting point is that they asked people if they were concerned about political violence. Not enough people weren't concerned to be statistically meaningful, so the vote breakdown on the "No" side was "N/A."

There's a drop-down where you can get exit polling for the elections in other states.

The thing is, Trump is an asshole and he's making a lot of people's lives more difficult than they need to be. And (R)'s are basically in thrall to the guy.

Last November, enough people were pissed at Biden for any of a variety of reasons, some of them legitimate, and so were willing to give Trump another shot at it.

And now they see Trump without the moderating influences of the people who more or less kept him in the ballpark of legitimate governance.

And they think it sucks.

All of that, plus it's not uncommon for off year and mid-term elections to favor the party not in power, with exceptions for wartime and cases where the party in power is actually nailing it.

That's my analysis, anyway.

On a lighter note, while thinking of examples of rightwingers only showing compassion to suffering encountered in their own circles (remembering that Dick Cheney's support for gay marriage was undoubtedly to do with having a lesbian daughter), I was reading various pieces about DC and smiled to see this:

Former US vice-president Dick Cheney, who has died, had intimidating power. For instance, when Cheney shot a friend while hunting, an apology was made by the friend to Cheney. His fearful aura made it all the more amusing when CNN accidentally published an obituary of Cheney in 2003, but it was unfinished and had been based on a template used for the Queen Mother. Cheney was described as “the UK’s favourite grandmother”.

The election I was watching was the Public Services Commission elections in Georgia. No Democrat has won a PSC election since 2020. The two Dems both won yesterday, by a bit better than 60/40 margins. What I don't know is whether this was a local kitchen table issue (six Georgia Power rate hikes approved in the last two years), a broader direction issue (the Commission has been pro nuclear and fossil fuels, anti renewables), or a continued red-to-blue shift in Georgia generally (like some western states, Georgia has a lot of younger educated adults moving in, which eventually matters).

I myself am far too nervous to take this as anything too hopeful, encouraging though it is to read about. This, from Jamelle Bouie in today's NYT, muses on the result.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/05/opinion/trump-mamdani-spanberger-sherrill-democrats.html?unlocked_article_code=1.y08.9mv4.Mfkw0tFLN_aL&smid=url-share

How can a person show compassion and empathy to strangers while supporting politics that denies it to undeserving Others?

I'm not entirely sure How. But it's hardly unusual for people to hold different views regarding the abstract and the particular. Regarding "those people" and "this person."

Currently, a lot of people here have problems in the abstract with immigration. But they don't make the connection between the immigration issue in the abstract and that nice young lady who helps grandma with her housekeeping and her shopping. Said nice young lady being an obvious immigrant, complete with accented English and occasional issues with words that any middle school kid would know.

At most, they manage a rationalization of "but she's different." Even though she isn't, except to the extent that every person is different from every other. I'm not sure it is even possible to bring someone to realize that the abstract, the general case, is more like the specific individuals he knows.

Perhaps someone with a stronger grounding in psychology than I can say how many specific cases someone needs personal knowledge of before their view of the abstract will change. I am sure that it needs personal knowledge. Just being told that immigrantion impacts food prices, because much everybody who works in agriculture, whether picking vegetables or butchering beef? Only works if you know some of those folks, your children (or grandchildren) attend school with their kids, etc.

How can a person show compassion and empathy to strangers while supporting politics that denies it to undeserving Others? Its the "undeserving" part, if they actually think it through. Most people choose their political affiliation for non-rational reasons, they like the way a politician's persona or speech makes them feel. So you can feel compassion for orphans or Aids patients or kids on reservations because you see them suffer and don't think they deserve to suffer, but still support a politician promoting Aids as God's punishment for sin because those are other people you don't see, and you like the idea of people paying for their sins in the abstract. Besides, you met that politician once and he was funny and charming. Superficial, but good and moral people can be superficial.

No election results thread yet, so here's some (unexpected, to me) good news from here in Georgia. Two seats on the five member Georgia Public Service Commission were on the ballot (elections for this body have been delayed by lawsuits since 2020, it's a mess), statewide elections. Both Democrats won, which is noteworthy in itself because no Democrat has won a non-Federal statewide election in 20 years or so, but more noteworthy are the margins, which are currently 62-38.

Have just started to shift to teaching my students about speculative journalism (reporting of things like climate change that frame parts of the story using the tools [extrapolation, cognitive estrangement] of science fiction). I have them read a few Spec J pieces from High Country News based on the Fourth National Climate Assessment from 2018 with the stories set in 2068. In past quarters I have pulled up a copy of the Assessment to show the what and the how of the extrapolation.

All of the governmental links to the study are broken. The Ancient Orange One and his gibbering minions have taken down those sites. This despite the fact that it was his previous administration that published them in the first place.

And now I am torn as to whether the university will have my back if I simply point this out to my students. We've all been warned not to engage in anything that could be taken as political activism, and they are drawing a very risk-averse line in the sand for what counts as activism.

This is not sustainable.

In 2011, 30 percent of white evangelicals said that “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” Now, 72 percent say so

Kind of a necessity for them. If they still held to expecting morality of elected officials, there's no way they could vote for Trump.

Does clarify what their priorities are.