Post Surgery Politics

  Recuperating from surgery on Tuesday, so still a little rocky. My brain is not in the mood for extended exgesis. Take the following for what they are worth. 

Capitalism’s ‘Metabolic Rift’  Los Angeles Review of Books 

 

(3) Undoing Trump’s Golden Age of Corruption

sch 7/23

Writing, story, film stuff

Recuperating from surgery on Tuesday, so still a little rocky. My brain is not in the mood for extended exgesis. Take the following for what they are worth.

The Art of Opposition by Courttia Newland review – piercing essays on culture and creativity  The Guardian

The Red Mouth by Sheila Armstrong review – profound exploration of Ireland’s deep time  The Guardian

This vivid lyricism calls to mind other Irish writers such as Paul Lynch or Sara Baume (Patch and his dog, in particular, echo Baume’s gorgeous debut Spill Simmer Falter Wither). Looking farther afield, the reading experience resembles that of Samantha Harvey’s Booker-winning Orbital, where another handful of individual lives and private concerns are set against a vast and sublime beauty – only this time we are not up in the heavens, but down in the dirt. Just as with Harvey’s novel, some readers of The Red Mouth might bemoan the lack of dialogue or explicit plot. There are no big epiphanies: time unfolds in quiet increments; new losses are accrued; mysteries are set up only to remain unanswered. However, as Brigit, one of Fleming’s daughters, comes to realise, such is life: “things happen, one after the other, and there is no smooth parabolic curve that can connect all the checkpoints … uncertainty is the only certainty”. In Armstrong’s meditative and profound novel, such uncertainty, so exquisitely rendered, is more than enough to sustain us to the end.

Hagitude author Sharon Blackie: ‘At 60 I wasn’t ready to give up, I was just starting’ | Fairytales | The Guardian

In the tradition of Angela Carter, Marina Warner, Emma Donoghue and Helen Oyeyemi, Blackie wants to reclaim these stories from the Disneyfication of the past century. Many of the heroines in her books would rather throw a frog at a wall than kiss one, and are “very much more likely to rescue than be rescued”. The heroine’s journey is one of young women discovering their agency through courage, grit and wit.

Blackie is determined to push back against the wicked stepmother and evil-witch tropes, to restore the “wise old woman” to her rightful place at the heart of society. Frustrated that all the well-known mythical women belong to Greek and Roman legends – “raped left, right and centre, and always secondary to men” – she set out to explore the Celtic folklore of her half-Irish, half-Scottish ancestry. “I discovered all these different ways of being a really interesting and useful old woman,” she says. “Why does nobody know about them?”

Her favourite mythical being is the Cailleach (“old woman” or hag in Scottish and Irish Gaelic), associated with winter and wilderness and as old as the land itself. “A very powerful role model for the challenges we face today,” she says. But the Selkie, a seal woman who is stranded out of water and has her skin stolen, or the miller’s daughter, whose father cut off her hands and must regrow them, are rich metaphors for her own story and for female narratives in general. Rebirth, transformation and renewal – the message of Blackie’s books is clear: be ready for “the Call”, which is most likely to come when you fear your story might be over.

‘Barn Cat Proliferation’ by Caitlin Woodford – The Hemlock Journal - lovely story.

Charles Brockden Brown Declares Independence by Ed Simon 

 The Enduring Power of Bro Language 

But "dude," "man," and "bro" are a specific type of vocative known as "familiarizers." Familiarizers mark a relationship as casual and provide social nuance beyond their attention-getting function. Their true power lies in how they help perform interactional work like signaling closeness or commiseration, expressing or softening disagreement, and managing conversational turns. Consider the different relational messages being delivered by the "bro" used in "Bro, you ate my pizza!" versus the one in "I love you too, bro." 

David Thomson On Cinema And America - by Andrew Sullivan (podcast) 

sch 7/23 

 

Surgery and Recuperating

 Recuperating from surgery on Tuesday, so still a little rocky. My brain is not in the mood for extended exgesis. Take the following for what they are worth. 

Started this on Monday with: 

Submissions

Merion West: Agnes, The First Day of Feeling Free, After Making Landfall

The William Faulkner Literary Contest:  The First Day of Feeling Free

 

 7/20: A rejection for "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976 - 1984"

Thank you for submitting your work to us. We regret that we are unable to publish it, but we appreciate your interest in Joyland Magazine, and wish you all the best with your writing. 

Joyland Magazine

7/21: surgery - sister came and brought me back from the hospital. Oh, my sides hurt. CC came after my sister left. I had fixed pork shoulder ala CC for her. It turned out well. Insomnia is the big problem.  Thankful for Netflix to keep my attention. I added some to my research project - the insomnia was that sharp.

Rejections for "After Making Landfall" 

7/22:

Thank you for submitting “After Making Landfall” to our editorial team. Although we found value in reading your work, we have decided not to publish it. 

May the publishing gods find this piece its perfect home. 

Pinch

Subscribe at www.pinchjournal.com

The main in the sides - two holes whose purpose is not understood by me. CC called to check on me. I sleep, wake, watch Netflix, sleep, and repeat. 

  

A headache and I realize it is not a good idea to go cold turkey from caffeine while recuperating. I order from Domino's.

 

7/23

Thank you again for your interest in our journal and for taking the time to send us your writing. 

Though we have decided to pass on this story, we want you to know that it received several positive reviews. 

We hope this is taken as encouragement and that TGLR will remain on your radar when you seek publication opportunities in the future. 

Best wishes for a prosperous summer.

Sincerely,

Shyla, Lea, Amy, Toni, & The Good Life Review Short Fiction Team

I walked my furtherest today - to the street where I catch the bus down to the convenience store for more caffeine. I rode the bus back. It was as much as I could do. More sleep, more Netflix.

I thought I could do The Odyssey. No way.

This is taking a chunk of energy and I want to be very, very lazy.

 

sch  

 

 

 

 

Odyssey Stuff

 Recuperating from surgery on Tuesday, so still a little rocky. My brain is not in the mood for extended exgesis. Take the following for what they are worth. I am just glad that the dimbulbs who were so certain that Mr. Musk has oracular abilities have had their moronic minds smashed.

The Odyssey: How Nolan won the culture war with new IMAX movie | The Independent

Chastity, nodding and enormous pores: will women also love Nolan’s Odyssey? | The Odyssey | The Guardian 

Why you don’t really get Homer 

The Odyssey does not come from the same world as the other pinnacles of Greek culture we all know and love and tweet about. For one thing, it is much older: the events it recounts take place during the late Bronze Age, around 1200 years before the golden age of Attic culture that spawned Socrates and Plato. The poem itself was set down in writing only after centuries of oral transmission — but even the written document is older than not just Plato and Sophocles, but the Persian War, the Olympic Games, and even the Archaic poets like Sappho and Alcaeus. In fact, Homer barely ever uses words that mean “Greek” or “Hellenic” at all: The Iliad and Odyssey are really about a mess of tiny, disunited Mycenaean kingdoms whose subjects wear boar’s tusk helmets and fight with bronze weapons and write, on the rare occasions that they write at all, in a complicated ideographical script called Linear B that was only deciphered in the Fifties. 

No heroic figure better illustrates just how different these two worlds — the Homeric and the Attic — were than Odysseus. It is true that he was often admired by the Greeks of the Athenian Golden Age: the intelligence evinced by his ruses was impossible to ignore for such a self-consciously brainy civilization. But just as frequently, Odysseus was deplored for his lack of scruple, his amorality, his low cunning. Pindar suspected that “the fame of Odysseus is become greater than his toils, through the sweet lays that Homer sang”. Sophocles had his main character, Philoctetes, berate Odysseus for being a “shameless wretch! from whom nor truth nor justice, / Naught that becomes the generous mind, can flow”. Even Socrates, who was generally rather keen on intelligence as a virtue, stopped short of straightforwardly defending the man from Ithaca in the Lesser Hippias, preferring instead to show how his interlocutor is just as bad as Odysseus, because he is a deceiver, not of others, but of himself.  

Go woke, get rich: why rightwing hate campaigns don’t affect the box office | The Odyssey | The Guardian

Musk seethes as ‘The Odyssey’ conquers at the box office - Daily Kos

Paris Review - From Homer’s ‘Odyssey,’ Book I by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson

I like Wilson's work. It runs nicely on the tongue.

sch 

Saturday Morning - Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick!

 Up early and questioning what I am about to do now that I've gone through the morning's readings.

Last night, very early this morning, I found accidentally a site having Indiana case law dating back to the 1800s. What I have been trying to get at with my trips to Indianapolis was right there. I got the cases I needed to be downloaded, so not going out of town on Monday. But I am still sleepy.

A classicist’s verdict on Nolan’s Odyssey: a soulful hero flatters our times as women and nuance pushed overboard (The Guardian)

Of course, Nolan isn’t just trying to replicate the Odyssey, and I’m not expecting him to. This is not – OK, not entirely – the chagrin of a Homerist missing her favourite scenes (no matter how I felt when I found out that Homer’s delightfully brash princess, Nausicaa, Odysseus’s key in getting back to Ithaca, had been chopped). What I’m pointing out is what is lost, or changed, in a Nolan–Hollywood–Homer crossover, and why that matters. As Nolan himself has said: “I was intrigued by the idea of a Hollywood studio taking on the biggest of stories.” So this is about uncovering what, in Nolan’s movie, looks like the Odyssey, and what is a product of his own choices. I’m here to think through what an epic hero and his world looks like to Nolan, and to Hollywood. And that is a really telling ride.

***

In the gap between the sung verses of Homer and Matt Damon declaiming to an Imax camera, what this Odyssey offers us, by way of a hero and the grandiloquent experience of epic cinema, is a man who seeks redemption and solidarity among men, recognition from women, and absolution for a civilisation’s fall. Make of that, in the current climate, what you will.

Emily Hauser is an ancient historian, broadcaster and Times bestselling author of Mythica: A New History of Homer’s World, through the Women Written Out of It.

Keith Richards on New Music, Old Friendships & the Future of the Rolling Stones | Billboard Cover

 

Did Homer dream of androids? (Engelsberg ideas)

Another Homeric use of automatos is even more striking. In Iliad 18 we are told that Hephaestus, the god of sweat and technic, made 20 devices which can glide through the halls of Olympus ‘all on their own’. This is the passage that Aristotle cites in his Politics. ‘The tripods of Hephaestus’, he says, ‘see what to do in advance’ and then ‘perform their own work.’ What Aristotle means by this – and Homer, too – is that Hephaestus’ tripods can navigate the whole of Zeus’ palace, bearing to the gods whatever they may happen to desire, wherever they happen to be.

It is not just the gates of heaven, then, which are both sensitive and active. The Olympians’ tripods can drive through the corridors of heaven: Homer tells us that they ‘roll to the halls where the gods convene’ and then return, ‘all on their own’, to Hephaestus’ splendid forge. They certainly would be, as Homer calls them, ‘a marvel to behold’.

In light of all this it is not meaningless to ask: was Homer’s heaven the birthplace of AI? Machines that can drive through a vast mountaintop complex would now be called, if only conversationally, intelligent.

***

Since Descartes, to simplify a long and subtle history, ‘machine’ and ‘intelligence’ have functioned as counter-concepts. In antiquity, on the contrary, the predecessors of our word ‘machine’ and the concept of ‘intelligence’ were very closely linked. There is no machine after all that is not a materialisation of mēchanē, or cunning. The function of any machine is to realise some desire of its originating intelligence.

An unintelligent machine may well function as a mere tool of that intelligence or cunning – roughly, what Hesiod seems to call mēchanē. But if all natural powers are originally purposive, as the ancients felt and believed – then intelligence, too, is purposive. To construct an intelligent machine is therefore to construct a radically purposive machine.

This means that a truly intelligent machine cannot and will not be exhaustively instrumentalised by its creators. If an unintelligent machine can function as a pure tool of its designer, an intelligent machine is, by definition, no longer just a tool. A smart device has device – like the Cyclops. And, for that matter, like Pandora.

An intelligent machine is one that has its own mēchanē, its own cunning. As such, it has its own imperatives and objectives, its own drives. Intelligence possesses some inner purposiveness, some tendency that humans do not fully comprehend in themselves. Did Homer really know why he dreamt of androids in the eighth century BC? And do we really know now?

 

‘A revolutionary act to watch it’: the film India’s censors do not want you to see (The Guardian)

 Trehan describes the ordeal of trying to get Satluj released as “dystopian” and decries “undemocratic censorship” and alleged political interference under the Narendra Modi government re-shaping India’s film industries. He claims Indian cinema has been widely co-opted as a propaganda arm for the government’s rightwing, religious nationalist agenda, where there is “only room for one kind of story to be told”, particularly in mainstream Hindi films.

“It is clear to me that there is no creative freedom in India today,” says Trehan. “When you see the level of censorship happening, films getting blocked by the film board and banned from release, it makes you question: does democracy exist in this country any more?”

Even today, discussions of Punjab’s separatist movement – which raged in the 1980s and 1990s, fighting for an independent Sikh homeland called Khalistan, before it was crushed by the state – remain highly sensitive for the Modi government.

 

  The Common-Law mind and the renewal of America (Engelsberg ideas)

The history of the Anglo-American Common Law is a history of renewal, restoration and reinvigoration that is grounded in practicalities and tangibility. It does not try to answer ‘what is Justice?’ deductively. It searches for justice inductively, case by case, precedent by precedent, and roots itself constitutionally in the community’s capacity for self-government. Not without an endearing sense of grandiosity, Winston Churchill was still right when he said in his sweeping history of the English-speaking world that the claims and disputes across its vast stretches obtain according to the Common Law, at least in theory, and not uniformly. Lincoln the lawyer was dealing in the same terms and, naturally, he had a ‘Common-Law mind’. His life on the judicial circuit showed he understood that the real gem of the Common Law was redress and remedy, not revolution. In its deepest working sense, even the most ordinary, granular case could distil the most fundamental political question there is: what sort of government do we want? Better yet, what sort of government does our history of cases and precedents point us toward?

***

It is by asking and answering such questions that America rediscovers and regenerates itself. Lincoln saw and understood this, which lent him both wisdom and his remarkable belief in the American constitution. America at 250 should remind us of its capacity for self-rediscovery and its durability because of the instincts of the Common Law deeply woven into its DNA. It should remind us, as Lincoln the Common Law lawyer understood, that American democracy is a renewable charter.

 Mark Kermode reviews The Odyssey

 Group paddles 50 miles on White River to boost conservation efforts

Indiana Aligns with Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky, Michigan, and Missouri as Indianapolis Revives the White River into America’s Emerging River City, Unlocking Kayaking, Waterfront Tourism, Wildlife Conservation, Cultural Attractions, and New Travel Experiences Across the Midwest (Travel And Tour World )

Burt Reynolds & Tarantino

 Tarantino does more talking:

 sch

Notes For A Friday: Ethics, Mary Beard, Odysseus, Rejections. Morons In Government

I did group, almost falling asleep at the end. I came home and did a nap. Something like 4 hours. When I woke, I was a little disoriented about time and date. The sky outside was as dull and gray as it had been this morning.

 What I thought would be a small diversion became this post. It has been at least 4 hours since I started. Now, I have run through my emails and have nothing more to say about the outside world. Or life. Or whatever you find here.

I regret to notify you that it has been decided that "Agnes" will not be published in Flying Island Journal at this time. On behalf of the journal's editorial team, I wish you the best of luck with your writing endeavors.

Sincerely,

Hiromi Yoshida

--

Hiromi Yoshida, MA, MLS, SpLIS

Poetry Editor

Flying Island Journal

hyoshidajj06@gmail.com

And:

Thank you for allowing us to consider "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976 -1984" for Midwest Review. We are sorry to report it was not selected for publication. 

We are honored you thought of us as a home for your work. 

Sincerely,

The Editors, Midwest Review

‘The Odyssey’ Review - by Sonny Bunch ( The Bulwark )

The Odyssey is more fractious, more fissured. It is, first, two hours of abuse and defeats and arguments and disappointments and the occasional bit of grubby cleverness, followed by an hour of glorious vengeance. (So glorious, in fact, that people in my audience were clapping at the mere plucking of a bow and the beautiful twang of its reverberations.) Odysseus, like Oppenheimer, is a man who changed the world, albeit one who had some regrets after the fact: Change is momentous, change is dangerous. When you shatter norms and fail to respect what has come before, you risk calamitous darkness. 

Nukes, Data Centers, A VAT in our future: Race and Gender-Based Contract Practice Ends | Indiana Week in Review | July 17, 2026.

 

Donald Trump claims election insecurity; Markwayne Mullin warns states to cooperate - and so we all join the madness?

Trump's remarks on election security: What to know is that there is no meat on this bone.

John Ware: troubling light on The Troubles (The Article)

Neither Confirm Nor Deny is a book written by a journalist who, with his colleague Geoff Seed, took personal risks and now presents a rigorously researched and balanced account of what happened in Northern Ireland.  It is not a book that makes you want to go into the garden and hoist a Union Jack — nor, come to that, an Irish Tricolour.   Ware explains – in almost too much detail — how undercover security work during serious conflict can, unimpeded by the law, take an ethical nose-dive.  It is to be hoped that this book will make such events, and the moral judgements behind them, much less likely in the future. 

‘At times I felt I’d bitten off more than I could chew’: Christopher Nolan on sweeping the Oscars, making The Odyssey – and getting a puppy (The Guardian).

Bitten by Willie Nile - again!

 The Odyssey review – Nolan goes god-tier with breathtaking epic of men, monsters and moral metamorphosis (The Guardian)

The result is a gigantic, shimmering mirage, a mysterious three-hour vision of crazy episodes that does not yield up wisdom or contentment, but only a grim resolution to continue with the fight, to make sense of ruined lives, to re-enter the scorched battlefield of loss. 

 I've seen only one John Waters movie, Hairspray, but maybe I should have seen more. He was just not on my or my friends' radar. Still, I knew who he was. ‘The minute I had success, I stopped taking drugs’: John Waters on 60 years of screen carnage (The Guardian) is a good reminder.

Nor should the comedy in either film disguise their underlying seriousness. Hairspray may treat the Civil Rights era with a deft touch but its indignation is palpable. Both movies celebrate resistance in the face of racism, fascism and tyranny. What do these movies have to say about the US in 2026? “I think they say that anger can be good, but the way you change things is through humour.” Is there anything he wouldn’t joke about? “I’m certainly not going to go into Israel and that whole situation. It’d be a lose-lose for me to even try. But I’ve always walked the edge of what you can’t make fun of. In all my movies, I make fun of things I like, not things I hate. That’s why I’ve been getting away with this for 60 years.” 

The Day She Returns review – another Hong Sang-soo round of slow, reflective boozing really hits the spot  (The Guardian) has some interesting writing advice:

...The film withholds overt meaning like a short story … and is quietly engrossing.

Our Hero, Balthazar review – a darkly comic satire of incel culture and gun violence | Movies (The Guardian) hits on a subject I have no understanding of and has me pondering this paragraph:

Deathdealer_16 turns out to be Solomon (Asa Butterfield), a Texan living in a trailer with his grandma, none too pleased to see Balthazar. But the two strike up a friendship, with Balthazar besotted by the shooting range, and Solomon eager to prove to the New Yorker there’s more to him than incel futility. Hitting a homoerotic pitch (“You wait to see the rest of what I’m packing,” says Solomon after revealing his glove box pistol), the film is at its strongest outlining this queasy interdependence. It’s a buddy-movie travesty of the mutual incomprehension and fascination between liberal and red-state America, suggesting that resignation to and glorification of gun violence aren’t so far apart. 

It seems to me we are now a nation of the infantilized. I thought that was the goal of prison. Have the powers that be learned their lessons from the pirson-industrial complex and applied them to the nation at large? 

Why Is Digital Freedom Making Us Exhausted and Sad? (The New Atlantis)

For more than two decades, Han has shaped a form of writing equal to his concerns: brief, concentrated books that think in movements rather than arguments. Their brevity feels deliberate, as if composed for the attention economy yet guided by another sense of time. Winding through subjects as varied as Zen, smartphones, and gardening, they often return to the same question: What has become of freedom in the digital age? 

***

Burnout, depression, anxiety: these are the maladies of our time. No one denies their spread, but their wider significance is a matter of debate. For Han, they are not signs that the new order is breaking down. They are signs of its success. We are free — and the result is not liberation but exhaustion. 

***

What Han would later diagnose as burnout is not just a condition of exhaustion; it is a condition of perception. Moods are how we feel the world, even before we think about it. They are less like emotions than the background conditions of our experience, like slow-moving weather patterns that give times and places their character. They cannot be examined like objects from the outside — we are always already within them — but they can be named and described. In Heidegger, Han found a way to notice them. And it made him weather-wise, alert to the world at a time when the weather was changing.

The Berlin Wall came down during Han’s years as a student, marking the end of the Cold War. For most in the West, the mood was jubilant. Liberal democracy and the free market had triumphed, and the specter of totalitarianism seemed to recede into history. The future, many assumed, belonged to societies that were more market-driven — and therefore more free. Han, however, had seen enough to question that story of progress. Growing up under the extreme pressures of Korean capitalism, he knew that domination could take many forms. South Korea had not followed the Big Brother model of the North, yet its people labored with an intensity that suggested another kind of domination — one rooted not in surveillance or prohibition but in competition, achievement, and the inner compulsion to perform.

If the twentieth century had feared domination by the state, the twenty-first would reveal another possibility: domination by freedom.

***

By now, we understand the basic mechanics of the profit model. While complex in one sense, its logic is painfully simple: keep users using; sell their attention to advertisers. In the early 2010s, news about predictive algorithms came as a shock. It seemed uncanny that an advertising algorithm could detect a woman’s pregnancy before anyone else knew about it. But the headlines have long since moved on. What once seemed unsettling has faded into the din of daily life, normalized under the regime Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism.”

When Zuboff began writing about it in 2015, the public imagination often returned to a familiar nightmare: Orwell’s Big Brother, the all-seeing avatar of the surveillance state. Zuboff argued that the comparison was misleading. Today’s most powerful surveillance systems are not instruments of the state, nor do they rule by repression. They are transnational, driven by a market logic that shapes behavior without appearing to command it — what she called “Big Other,” a diffuse computational order that monitors and modifies human action at scale.

***

Han’s new book, The Tonality of Thought, approaches freedom in a different mood. Consisting of three public lectures, the book returns to themes that have run through his work for more than two decades. Han is not searching for a stronger self, but for a way beyond the self — another way of inhabiting the world, combining German Romantic ideals with Eastern thought. “If I may compare my thinking with a fruit,” he writes, “then its skin and flesh are deeply romantic. The seed, in contrast, is Far Eastern.”

***

In this clearing, Han’s thinking lets Western concepts take root differently. Among them is eros — a term that, in Greek thought, signifies much more than desire in the everyday sense. It is the soul’s movement beyond itself, toward a beauty that transcends possession. Eros reorients the reflex of self-enclosure, the habit of drawing the world inward and rendering it usable. The soul, instead of grasping, is laid hold of.

Against a Zen backdrop, this can seem difficult to place: the Western longing for beauty seems to unsettle the stillness of Buddhist detachment. Han’s books, inhabiting that tension, do not systematically resolve it. Instead, they bear its fruit in a mood that attunes us to the world. What matters for Han is that both movements, in their different ways, loosen the grip of a possessive inwardness. The question is no longer how to possess the self, but how to move beyond it.

***

Han begins from a different premise. Freedom in the digital age is found not in resisting the Other, but where the Other resists us. It is a question of ends: does freedom secure the ego or free us from its grip? One posture is habitually on guard, the other habitually open. For Zuboff, who draws again from Sartre, the danger is plain: “Hell is other people.” For Han, the more radical danger is an “inferno of the same” in which the Other disappears.

A life organized entirely around the self — its projects, its performance, its wants — leaves no room for the kind of relations in which freedom can actually take shape. The word freedom, Han likes to note, shares a root with friend. One is not free alone. Freedom arises from vulnerability. It begins not in mastery but in exposure, where one is no longer fully one’s own.

Which, since John Locke is integral to my research project, makes me think of Locke's idea that true freedom reaches its height in civil society - with other people, ordered liberty.

 AI Is Changing What We Can Do. Who We Become Is Still Our Choice. | The Humanist Review of AI

Let’s step back and ask one of the central questions of ethics: “What kind of people should we want to be?” Ethics, in the classical sense, is about how to live well. And that involves more than producing the right outward acts. It involves becoming the sort of person who can recognize what is right, choose it for the right reasons and respond to the world with the appropriate thoughts and feelings.

How, then, could an automated oracle help? It cannot tell you what to feel, because feeling is not something you can summon by obedience. But neither can it settle the matter by telling you what to do. Reasons matter, and to be a morally responsible agent you must reason for yourself. That thought is central to the ethical tradition that reaches back through the European Enlightenment and to Immanuel Kant. Central to Kant’s thought was the ideal of people fully in charge of their own lives, reasoning toward the right decisions through a kind of self-government he called autonomy. People who simply do what they are told, even when what they are told to do is right, are not living autonomous lives. Nor is this a uniquely European idea. Confucius taught the virtue of yi, which involves recognizing what is right and acting in harmony with moral principle. Buddhism offers similar lessons. What matters is not just what you do but the intention with which you do it.

Accordingly, philosophers have rightly been suspicious of “moral deference”, in which someone decides what to do based on what another person or institution declares to be right. Moral guides, your priest, your rabbi, your imam, your guru, even a humble philosopher, can help you think things through. They can draw your attention to features of a situation you may have overlooked. But if they are doing their job, they will not simply listen to your quandary and pronounce a course of action without giving reasons. They will want you to do what is right because you understand why it is right, because only acts that arise from your own deliberation are fully yours. If they espouse values you do not recognize, your compliance does not turn their judgment into your own.

I should add that I am not assuming values are matters of mere belief rather than knowledge, or endorsing relativism, the notion that different normative traditions are entitled to their different answers. You can reject moral deference and affirm autonomy while still believing that there is such a thing as moral truth, and even moral expertise. Perhaps many moral questions, perhaps even all of them, have a universally correct answer. It remains the case that, even if LLMs give excellent answers to moral questions, you still should not defer to their conclusions. You should try to understand the reasons they offer, because it remains important that people act on the basis of their own, admittedly imperfect, understanding. That, in my view, is itself one of the universal moral truths.

***

Once we recognize that people, media outlets or spiritual guides may try to shape us in these ways, we can take that into account. We can ask what interests they have in influencing us. We can consult a range of sources with different interests. I know the pastor has an interest in getting me to make a larger offering. I know that Fox News tilts right and The Guardian inclines left. So, I can weigh what they say accordingly.

But the most effective forms of manipulation are invisible. And one problem with applying this strategy to AI is that we often lack any clear picture of the interests, if any, that guide it. That is one place where public education would help. One strength of LLMs, however, is that, unlike the pastor, they are often willing to tell you what they “know” about the forces that shaped them. And researchers have explored the political bent of the major models. There is a lot of evidence that existing LLMs tend to lean somewhat left of political center. It would be unfounded conspiracy-mongering to suggest that some secret center-left cabal is controlling things behind the scenes. Once you consider the shape of politics in the North Atlantic world, where the main LLMs are based, more ordinary explanations present themselves.

***

Political outlooks also differ in ways that reflect evaluative disposition rather than straightforward factual belief. Moral psychologists Graham and Haidt, for example, argue that concern about fairness tends to diminish, and concern about group loyalty to increase, as one moves rightward.^[8] If so, users should know that fine-tuning may favor equality over national loyalty, reflecting the outlook of the cosmopolitan, highly educated people who help shape these systems. Autonomy is strengthened when people can judge advice in light of the perspective that informs it.

***

But notice that an AI guide that did agree to simply choose options would not be much use if you could neither identify the relevant features of your situation nor see what your options were. An LLM cannot tell you anything useful unless you can inform it about your situation. And grasping what matters in your situation is a capacity you can acquire only through practice. There is always something else you might consider. You have to learn what is relevant and how to respond to it.

I would add it is not enough to learn, but to remember and to have faith in what you know in the face of a world that does not care. I knew much. Depression became nihilism as my faith in ethics, in people, in what I was doing with my life dissipated.

Oops, I stopped reading too soon.

Aristotle thought that we develop this capacity through habituation, by practice. For him, the virtues were not rules or isolated good acts but settled dispositions of character, ways of seeing, feeling and responding that are formed over time until they become, in a good sense, second nature. Confucius, in a different key, stressed the role of ritual and custom in shaping good habits of response. Our sensibilities, our capacities for detecting what matters in the human world, do not come ready-made. That thought, largely sidelined for a time in modern moral philosophy, was revived in the twentieth century by thinkers such as Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot, who urged that ethics return its attention to character, judgment and human flourishing.

One role of fiction, in fables and parables—in novels and short stories, in film, video and even painting—is to let us imagine complex moral situations and so develop habits of judgment and feeling. Conversational exchanges with an LLM, in which scenarios are built out collaboratively, could certainly engage the imagination in ways that help shape character and sensibility. Still, it is likely to remain true that we develop these capacities mostly by using them in the situations we face, alone and with others. Time online draws us away from those encounters.

I once told a friend of mine that the hardest ethical questions were between two equally bad choices. It seems now that may not have been taken as much comfort. I think that was the last time I saw Paula.

I am not a Saul Bellow fan. He put me off my writing for decades. I felt it was a milieu that had no reality - factual or emotional - for me. Yet, I keep coming back to him. Wondering was I wrong about him. Did I close my mind? I wish I had read Philip Roth first rather. Bellow was older - closer to Mailer, whose fictions leave me cold. But I admire Nelson Algren - also of Chicago and close to Bellow's age. And Vonnegut, Heller, Gore Vidal were of the same generation. There is someone else from the Fifties dancing in the shadows of my mind who leaves me as disinterested in his topics as does Bellow. I cannot get a name to form. Cheever's people have all the sexual tics and social anxieties. Yet, I understand their problems better. Augie March I found a novel worth reading, but Humboldt's Gift preceded it by decades. 

And today I received a link to ‘Ravelstein’ Revisited - by Jonathan Marks (The Bulwark). This fit into the previous entries in this post. It might have also sparked a bit of reflection on my Bellow bias. A recession of sorts. It is a consideration of a Bellow novel for which I have only read disdain, to be polite.

 I DON’T THINK THAT CHICK’S EXPOSURE, sometimes intentional, sometimes unintentional, of his own defects justify his shameless exposure of a friend. To be sure, Ravelstein and Chick both merit praise from Bellow’s perspective. Bellow, throughout his career, took a special interest in ineffectual intellectuals, most notably Moses Herzog in Bellow’s novel Herzog, whose book-learning and talent for observation does little to make him wise. Herzog is, however, raised above his fellow moderns, who are less foolish than he is in some ways, by his high ambition, rare in a world ruled by economics, natural science, and the quest for the comforts those pursuits provide. Herzog wants to “live out marvelous qualities vaguely comprehended.” That desire, pursued even to the brink of madness, matters more than the failure of Herzog to gain more than the mystical conclusion that “only the incomprehensible gives any light.”

Chick and Ravelstein, who attempt but fail to understand a world Chick deems “mysterious,” are honorable in the same way Herzog is, a way that is compatible with great foolishness. Perhaps Ravelstein, who understood the quest for human completeness to be nearly always futile, wouldn’t mind being understood as a noble failure. But I doubt that even Chick’s Ravelstein would consider the abandonment of his lifelong convictions and preferences in the face of death to be the kind of failure that is noble.

Yeah, pretty sure I will only read Ravelstein if I am stuck with nothing else to do.

Effing brilliant:  Star Shrapnel by Ata Zargarof 

Book Review: Talking Classics by Mary Beard  

sch 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Good News (not) From Indiana

 Off to a slow start this morning, recuperating from my road trip to Indianapolis yesterday. Indy drivers exhaust me nowadays. 

Yesterday I got a bunch of my cases scanned and sent back, got tired and stopped, came back here and found out I missed two pages in a case I needed to have. The trip wore me out good but I got to thinking that I have to go back now. 

Up earlier today than expected. Thinking about heading back to Indy. 

Only it is gloomy and thunderstorms are predicted. No, I think I will stay here and do domestic stuff. 

Definitely Monday for a return while I have a car at my disposal. 

And I did not get to see The Interview, either. Caffeine. I need caffeine. And a shower. 

I guess Trump did another of his hot air speeches. Cizzilia compared it to Rivera & Capone's vault.

 Trump alleges vast conspiracy to commit and cover up election fraud; any fraud committed was under his watch, nothing said about actual manipulation; too bad hot air is now taken as reality.

Trump addresses nation on election security but offers no new proof: Five takeaways 

The Real Threat to Our Elections Is Donald Trump 

Too bad the President paid more attention to the economy than his wounded vanity: Remarks on inflation, employment and monetary policy (Dallasfed.org).  

Now for the good news (not) from Indiana. ICE is here, ruining lives. School kids  suffer while the state runs a surplus and we spend billions of dollars on bombs for Iran. And the State Of Indiana demonstrates its prudish lack of humor.

Indiana, ICE and the Destruction of Immigrant Families (Mother Jones)

Joanna and her two young sons are US-born citizens. She comes from a multi-generational Latino American family. Manuel was born in Honduras. Indiana has been his home for over fifteen years. He owns a successful roofing business that employs several people. He’s a mentor and leader to them and others in the community. Joanna earned a degree in psychology from the University of Washington. They started a family. They work hard, pay taxes, own their home, have two cars. Their children attend the local elementary school. They volunteer and are active members of their church and their community. Manuel was in the final stages of obtaining permanent residency when ICE “took” him. Their family is one of tens of thousands of mixed-status households in Indiana.

“The new administration thinks, We’re going to just deport everybody and get everybody out of here,” Joanna says. “But there’s not an understanding of how our communities have been here for so many generations, that we are the American community already.”

ICE holding 28 people at Clark County Jail after unannounced operation Wednesday | Indiana (newsandtribune.com)

CLARK COUNTY – At least 28 people were detained Wednesday and Thursday in Clark County and are now being held in Clark County Jail on behalf of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to jail records obtained by the News and Tribune.

Reports of an ICE presence outside of the Home Depot in Clarksville fostered some concern Wednesday morning after local activism group Do Something Southern Indiana posted pictures of a black unmarked Ford F-150 with blue and red lights there on Facebook.

Clarksville Police Chief Nathan Walls confirmed with the News and Tribune on Thursday that ICE, or a different agency acting on behalf of ICE, had been in town. He said nobody told the Clarksville Police Department about any immigration-related operations occurring Wednesday.

Cuts to SNAP, Medicaid could impact free school meals at high-poverty schools (Indiana Capital Chronicle)

If a school loses Community Eligibility Provision status, families will need to apply individually to prove they meet income restrictions for free or reduced-price meals.

The income limit for a family of four is $42,900 a year for free meals and $61,050 for reduced-price meals.

Families who earn too much will no longer qualify and will need to pay out of pocket.

The Center for American Progress estimates this would cost the typical Hoosier family with two kids an extra $1,080 a year.

“Inflation’s already pretty high,” said Lyndsay Coe, a single mother in Indianapolis who relies on $302 a month in SNAP benefits and free school meals to feed her daughter.

“We have a bare refrigerator” by the end of the month, said Alexandra McMasters, a single mother of two children living in Clinton.

Laid off from her job in healthcare, McMasters now works part-time for the U.S. Postal Service.

Yeah, I am in that kind of mood this morning - how else to feel with this news? Even though this last bit ought to provoke a good laugh.

Food truck removed from Statehouse Market over slogan; could have free speech implications (Indiana Capital Chronicle)

Kirollos Barsoum, communications director of the State Personnel Department, said “Participation of food trucks and other vendors at the Statehouse Market is by invitation and is at the discretion of the State Personnel Department. We routinely evaluate vendors based on a variety of operational and programmatic considerations, and we reserve the right to modify the vendor rotation or discontinue participation at any time.”

The Capital Chronicle also asked for copies of any complaints received and he said “no responsive written records exist.”

Zachary Cormier, an associate professor of law at Indiana University’s Robert H. McKinney School of Law, said there could be First Amendment implications. Offensiveness alone can’t be precluded by the government.

For it to regulate that kind of speech, he said, it’d need to rise to the level of obscenity. That standard, while varying from community to community, tends to be high.

“And usually these types of business slogans that are meant to be provocative,” Cormier said, “you know maybe even have some type of sexual connotation or double entendre, don’t normally rise to that level.”

***

Sims, the food truck owner, also felt he didn’t get a chance to appeal or come up with a solution since the email stated the decision was “final.” Nobody had complained to him while at the market, he said, and he’ll lose between $4,000 and $5,000 in revenue from the two Thursdays he’ll miss in August and September. 

Need to get ready for the rest of my day. 

sch