What’s on your mind?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Recent Posts
- Day 14: Louisiana Senator Approvingly Compares Trump to Stalin
- Day 13: Elon Musk Flexes His Muscles
- Day 12: While Elon Musk Takes Over, We Podcast With Driftglass and Blue Gal
- Day 11: Harm of Fascist Regime’s Foreign Aid Freeze Comes Into View
- Day 10: The Fascist Regime Blames a Plane Crash on Nonwhite People
The identities of the entities which financed Christopher Steele’s oppo research effort is completely irrelevant to anything other than partisan pursuits.
A leading characteristic of the conservative movement is its multidimensional immorality and its desire to actively hurt people they label as enemies.
Americans across the ideological spectrum are wrong to claim that there is little to no difference between the political Parties. The overwhelming evidence shows that the Parties are very different. So many Americans enjoy forwarding this counterfactual propaganda; it comes off as a sign of deep cultural rot.
My experience several decades ago hanging out with punks (when that was actually a thing) and knowing a few at that point middle-aged hippies was that everything associated with “the establishment” was somehow equivalent and equivalently bad. Unfortunately that level of cynicism rarely seemed to spur anyone to any meaningful actions, but rather to inaction. We’ve got what – about five or six decades of that same dreck, and the sort of situation we have now in the US is one that should have been a plausibly predictable outcome. In the meantime, for those willing to shake off their cynical blinders long enough, it’s blindingly obvious that the two major parties are worlds apart from each other in terms of policy and tactics, and that there is no mythical third party that is going to save us and provide purity ponies and rainbows for all. How to counter decades of cultivated cynicism is a question I ask – and I realize that whatever solutions we might come up with, it will be a daunting task.
Very true, but it’s not just the old hippies. Cynicism has been de rigueur in our society, particularly among those who consider themselves intelligent, for a generation now. I remember when it happened. I watched it unfold when I was a child. I saw it in my own family as people began to say things like, “Wow, our government lied to us.”
We’ve not recovered from Vietnam and Watergate. Until the late Sixties, intelligent people were allowed to be optimistic about the future. People banded together to try to achieve great things (like Civil Rights). By the 1970s all of that had broken down. People found other outlets for their optimism. That’s when Est sprang up and, soon after, all sorts of exotic spiritual paths and quests. But those movements were about solitary journey outside the realm of politics or the public sphere.
I’ve been an eternal optimist my whole life but now, at age 54, I’m beginning to slip. I’m finding it hard to maintain a sense of optimism in the face of what’s unfolding (not just at a national level but in local communities too). I’ve never seen this level of alienation. I’ve never seen neighbors so quick to hostility and judgment toward one another. It feels like our entire society is collapsing.
Perhaps I’m overstating this. Maybe I’m just waking up to something that’s been happening for years. Or maybe I’m just settling into my time of dotage a bit prematurely, railing against the youth of American today. Either way, I’m finding it ever harder to maintain a sense of optimism.
Perhaps something will change all of this. If Vietnam and Watergate could do so much harm, perhaps some other shock will lead us in another direction. Perhaps another great depression that forces us to come together. Or perhaps it’s the rise of Donald Trump and it’s happening under our very noses.
High-level and low-level “bothsiderism” exist for this reason. When The Washington Post or The New York Times bends over backwards to include “equivalent” examples of Democratic missteps in an article about Republican malfeasance (because of a misplaced, defensive guilt about “bias”), it ultimately has the same effect as when swamp-level Republican operatives play their “Trump’s not a Russian dupe, but, even if he was, the real Russian dupe is Hillary!”
On either cultural level, the effect is the same: a binary hall of mirrors effect where any accusation is deflected by a knee-jerk “everyone does it” rationalization that can nullify any outrage or call to action. The reversals (at the bulk-mail, Brietbart level) are particularly damaging because the “you’re being duped” trigger is so much more powerful when aimed at the less sophisticated media consumers.
But no matter how sophisticated people are in reality, It’s always an easily-adopted badge of “sophistication” to insist that you know better than all the naïve other people; your “cynicism” makes you wise and “savvy’ even as it nullifies your desire to understand anything or do anything (which is its real purpose).
I realize this is an obvious point; I apologize. We all should know better. But, of course, we’ve got our own version of this right here on BooMan Tribune, don’t we?
Parallax, I am sympathetic to your plight, in your age bracket and have enjoyed your comments and insight for years…but…
“…railing against the youth of American today.”
Our youth? Our youth are not the ones watching Fox News. Our parents are. Hide gramp’s remote!
The 70’s were the glory days of environmental legislation and action. First Earth Day was in 1970.
“Unfortunately that level of cynicism rarely seemed to spur anyone to any meaningful actions, but rather to inaction.”
Conservatives wish to create inaction from the broad citizenry; the electoral success of their movement depends on suppressing the vote. I am beyond sickened by leftists whose overwhelming cynicism has curdled into their angry willingness to lie to themselves and others.
Electoral and policy successes for the left depend entirely on our ability to turn out the vote and mobilize Americans. When Americans vote, we win. When leftists lie in claiming “the Parties are the same”, they take an eternally futile path which, over and over again, fails to inspire and mobilize Americans. It suppresses the vote disproportionately; they, and we, lose.
People still blathering on, in the middle of this Administration and Congress, that “the Parties are the same” are damnable fools who wish to make us fools. I spend too much of my organizing time attempting to undo the damage they create.
How accurate the timeline of the terrifying AI future Kevin Drum lays out will be.
Maybe so, but in 2060 will an AI be prepared to respond to Booman’s prompt for this thread?
Depending on what ‘writing a best-selling book’ means, that strikes me as silly. I’d imagine a computer could write a best-selling novelty book today, by compiling tweets or some such into poetic-looking form, and selling 5,000 copies in a few days.
But a good novel? I don’t think there’s any sign of that. Computers may overmatch humans in terms of mechanical skills–and obvious computation–but writing a novel isn’t a natural progression from writing a high school essay or from performing brain surgery.
Writing a good novel requires a strong personal voice and a strong personal judgement–emotional, social, lyrical–for which computers so far have evinced zero capacity. Maybe one day they’ll learn, though I suspect that developing a real fluency in the human experience would require that computers spend years in helpless infancy, at the mercy of caretakers, learning language and establishing bonds of love and resentment, that they struggle through childhood, then get kicked around in young adulthood, etc.
There are human activities that require more than processing capacity.
I’m pretty skeptical of this timeline coming to fruition at the rate he’s talking about, but I also can’t help but think “but what if it’s accurate?”
At work, where I have been since graduating college (6 years as of May) I need to rely on foreign translations from Google Translate quite often. We have in-house translators, and they’re great and awesome, but it can take one-two weeks to get a full translated document from them. And oftentimes, I need it then and now. In this short time, I have noticed the accuracy of online translations transform at a radical pace. They’re still not the same as the in-house people, but they’re perfectly fine for what I need them for. I wouldn’t have said that 3 years ago. Writing novels isn’t the same as translating text (obviously). I’m just surprised at how fast the accuracy has improved in such a short time.
Either way, I think we need to be thinking about these issues now so we can prepare solutions now and have them ready off the shelf. Half the stuff I think we should be doing anyway. Kind of like climate change:
Ha! Yeah, I agree. It just gets up my nose a bit. I mean, translation technical documents? Business letters? Okay. But if a computer can do Natasha Wimmer’s job as well as she, then it is human: https:/www.villagevoice.com/2008/11/25/interview-natasha-wimmer-translator-of-roberto-bolanos-2666
We’ll need an AI who can produce this, and know precisely what it means:
AIsmay one day understand what brilliant, ugly writing is–or, for that matter, ‘easy eloquence’–but that’s not akin to anything computers can currently do, if only they possessed more processing power. It’s a different kind of thing. I think Drum misses that.
(Though again, overall, I completely agree and think we should look seriously at a UBI and you’ve been out of college for six years? Holy shit! Am I wrong in thinking that you posted here as a student? I remember being blown away by someone so young. Now, of course, you’re withered and grizzled.)
I found Booman’s site on from the “One Million Strong for Barack Obama” Facebook page which I moderated in 2008-2009. Someone in that group (who is now prolific on twitter as a Bernie Sanders hater who absolutely hated Clinton in 2008) posted a link to Al Giordano’s site “The Field”, which linked here. Graduated in 2011, was jobless for a year.
I think you are seriously underestimating the power of processing capacity writ large.
Possibly, but I suspect that increasing processing capacity until it achieves poetry makes as much a sense as increasing tower height until it reaches heaven. There may be ways to get to heaven, but doubling the size of a stepladder every year isn’t one of them.
This is Alan Shapiro’s 24/7, from his book Night of the Republic:
The one cashier is dozing–
head nodding, slack mouth open,
above the cover girl spread out before her on the counter
smiling up
with indiscriminate forgiveness
and compassion for everyone
who isn’t her.
Only the edge
is visible of the tightly spooled
white miles
of what is soon
to be the torn off
inch by inch receipts,
and the beam of green light in the black glass
of the self scanner
drifts free in the space that is the sum
of the cost of all the items that tonight
won’t cross its path.
Registers of feeling too precise
too intricate to feel
except in the disintegrating
traces of a dream–
panopticon of cameras
cutting in timed procession
from aisle to aisle
to aisle on the overhead screens
above the carts asleep inside each other–
above the darkened
service desk, the pharmacy, the nursery,
so everywhere inside the store
is everywhere at once
no matter where–
eternal reruns
of stray wisps of steam
that rise
from the brightly frozen,
of the canned goods and food stuffs
stacked in columns onto columns
under columns pushed together
into walls of shelves
of aisles all celestially effacing
any trace
of bodies that have picked
packed unpacked and placed
them just so
so as to draw bodies to the
pyramid of plums,
the ziggurats
of apples and peaches and
in the bins the nearly infinite
gradations and degrees of greens
misted and sparkling.
A paradise of absence,
the dreamed of freed
from the dreamer, bodiless
quenchings and consummations
that tomorrow will draw the dreamer
the way it draws the night tonight
to press the giant black moth
of itself against the windows
of fluorescent blazing.
Drum’s scenario actually stops far short of the really scary implications of AI: what happens when the machines are not just as smart as humans, and not just somewhat smarter than humans, but millions of times as smart as humans, and designing themselves. Will they like us? Maybe. But why would they?
I doubt this will happen in my lifetime. And I hope it doesn’t happen in my child’s lifetime – he’s ten – but to me it looks inevitable that it will happen sometime, because if we want to stop it from happening we need to stop it really, really soon. And no one seems interested in even broaching the subject.
Think about it this way: once machines achieve AI, how will they, or it, respond to the possibility that we humans will do something that might threaten them? Like turn them off, or blow up the power grid with a nuclear war, or something like that?
They will try to protect themselves. Wouldn’t you?
Marketing, leadership, religion will be automatized or not? Will robots have to go through maturity growths, social judgements?
We already have corporations as AI agents, Romney would say.
If you haven’t seen the film Ex Machina, take a look…
and sleep well.
That’s not terrifying, it’s a utopian vision. The terrifying part is that our dysfunctional political system will be incapable of turning the massive bounty created by such an advance into human welfare.
We already have a political model to do this. It’s called redistribution. Advances in AI make it all the more vital that the various left of center coalitions of the world win elections.
I don’t want DT impeached because Pence is worse.
Need the Dems to take over at least the House in ’18.
If we can get through DT’s admin for the next three years with no wars started, we might survive.
That said, people might want to think about being more concerned about this administration running the 2020 census. That is going to be an epic failure with long-standing ramifications. Millions and millions of people could conveniently and strategically fail to be counted.
Respectfully, I hate this argument. It doesn’t matter if “Pence is worse”; that’s not our concern.
Trump should be impeached because he should be impeached, full stop. Don’t politicize it. Picking and choosing when to take legal action based on your own preferences is how Republicans act, not us.
Impeachment and conviction is a political act.
Exactly. I remember the impeachment of Clinton…biggest political circus since Watergate. They were unable to convict Clinton. Ultimately it made people sympathetic toward Clinton and he became more popular than ever. There is no way the Senate convicts DT. He would survive just like Clinton did, and maybe win a second term. I say we tough this out and then vote him out; make him go down in flames in a general election.
The impeachment of Nixon wasn’t political at all — he was caught committing high crimes and misdemeanors. He should have been impeached and Clinton shouldn’t — Clinton’s case was a political show.
For Christ’s sake, don’t fall into the other side’s rhetorical traps! Know the difference between politics and justice. Nixon was justly impeached; Clinton was unjustly impeached.
The decision about Trump needs to be based on law, not on expediency or preference.
I have to double down on this. Watergate wasn’t “a political circus” — it was the enaction of the rule of law; it was a moment of great national achievement (“We are a government of laws and not of men.”)
I despise this entire point of view that regards all of these procedures as equivalent “circuses” — we’re liberals and progressives; we’re supposed to stand for something. Leave the cynical, craven expediency to the other side.
Pence may be “worse,” but that’s not for us to say. We support the impeachment of Trump not to “get our way” but because he’s not fit for office. It’s not about left and right; it’s about competence and lawfulness. If we recommend withholding judgment just because we’d prefer Trump to Pence, then we’re hypocrites — we’re no better than they are.
No, Nixon was not an example of ‘rule of law’.
That would involve an indictment, trial, conviction, and sentence. Nixon never got his ‘day in court’. Everything about it was a political act. Leaks to the media led to fellow Republcans in Congress telling Nixon they would no longer support him. Nixon then resigns…then immediately gets a pardon to prevent a trial….and that pardon did its job.
In a way it was a mild coup.
There was nothing law like about it.
.
You’re splitting hairs. He wasn’t tried and convicted because he resigned. My point still stands: it’s a totally different kind of event from Whitewater, and to say they’re both “circuses” is to play into a right-wing “cynical” narrative that works at cross-purposes to the rule of law.
agree
I’m mystified why impeachment is the goal. Even if the House managed to impeach, the Senate would never, ever deliver 2/3 vote to convict. The base LOVE DT and the Republican Senators would be eaten alive if they voted to convict.
Voters don’t like having their ability to decide who represent them taken from them. They want to vote him out of office. If we have learned nothing else from Wisconsin’s failed recall election of their governor, we need to have learned that.
Recall effort is one thing. Being tried and tossed for crimes is something entirely different. Will take a lot to prove this to the base, but I suspect Mueller has the goods.
Wondering if anyone in US national security circles has a good analysis on where Xi Jinping is taking China. And how not to bust up any more of the world’s infrastructure.
The US at the moment can’t even put its own infrastructure in shape or cope with what it used to do flawlessly — recover from hurricanes and other natural disasters.
It seems that politics has been reduced to partisan electoral politics and nothing else. And even then only big money can play.
And that is not just a problem with Trump’s US. It is a problem with oil-rich polluting Canada, self-destructive Brexit, an EU that has savaged Greece and put pressure on Spain and Portugal, A Brazil that the US worked to get out of the hands of its elected President Dilma Roussef, and a US military that sees it big challenging alliance to CHina as Modi’s India and Abe’s Japan. But preoccupies itself with picking fights with Iran and upping the heat with North Korea.
The West has forgotten how to be prosperous as nations and the necessity of unity as a people. We are not trying to build a strong society or a just society, and that will bring about our downforall as a proportionate power.
I don’t know how to embed tweets but Trump’s latest tonight — a demand that some unspecified person or persons “DO SOMETHING!” (all in caps) is a real doozy.
That tweet is very, very weird. And quite an unusually provocative and public attempt to obstruct justice.
I’m reminded yet again of the coda to a post BooMan made in the summer of 2016: “Trump is testing all our systems.”
This behavior by a President simply cannot be allowed to stand. Irreparable damage will be done to the United States if this man is allowed to keep his office while behaving like this.
Interesting, because I took it another way (not to impugn your interpretation): as a sort of Eliza Doolittle “Move your bloomin’ ass” moment, when the mask is ripped away and the pathetic child beneath is revealed.
I mean, both are true: he’s dangerous even as he’s pathetic, because we live in a constitutional democracy, but, because we do live in a constitutional democracy and not the Wiemar Republic, events can come to a head, as they just might be doing.
>>we do live in a constitutional democracy and not the Wiemar Republic
do we? really? The Republicans control all 3 branches of government, the concept of checks and balances is almost completely destroyed, and when the Repubs appoint another Supreme Court “justice” those things won’t be changeable again, at least not in my lifetime.
The only thing saving us at the moment is the GOP’s incompetence and inability to actually run things; they still haven’t figured out how to move on from perpetually gumming up the works to getting the machinery into gear, and the executive branch is headed by a clueless buffoon.
Let them get a competent demagogue and/or true believer into the White House and some Congressional leadership that knows how to do more than obstruct, and we’re finished. Especially if the GOP gets control of enough state governments to call a constitutional convention so they can rewrite things to their liking.
Yeh, I am indeed a frikkin ray of sunshine, eh?
Hard to be optimistic at this point. We’ll see how things play out. Decent chance that state legislatures as a whole will swing back enough our way to keep a constitutional convention from happening. Assuming tRump does not complete his term, Pence has all the charisma of a wet noodle and all of the stank that comes with being associated with tRump (same with Ryan). We might actually weather this storm by the skin of our teeth. More worrisome to me is what is over the horizon. Eventually, a nationalist demagogue who really does know what he (or possibly she) is doing will emerge, and we know that there is a base of support automatically there for that individual. The GOP is completing its metamorphosis into a white nationalist party, and that is also cause for grave concern. The potential of a metamorphosis into an illiberal “democracy” along the lines of Russia or Hungary is very real in the medium to long-term. The propaganda necessary to cultivate the conditions for its rise has been on-going for decades. Those of us of more moderate or liberal persuasion have not figured out how to counter what has already been cultivated, and we can’t count on a charismatic person along the lines of Obama to come along and save the day – even if for only a brief respite.
If you look at the executive orders, rule making and personnel changes done through the executive branch, we are in desperate straits. My primary interest is environmental regulation, including rule making, litigation, executive orders and personnel matters. We’re getting clobbered, much of it happening under the radar, but it’s happening on a daily basis. It’s much harder to deal with than pressuring members of Congress.
You look at the appointments to so many agencies and it looks more and more like a deliberate attempt to cripple and destroy the federal government.
It looks that way because it is a plan to cripple the federal government. Never forget the “drown it in a bathtub” comment by Grover Norquist.
Monday is going to be really interesting. Wonder does the donald sleep tonight?
>What’s on your mind?
Trying to game out how different timings and outcomes of the Mueller investigation would affect 2018 and 2020.
In other words, since there’s nothing we can do about it anyway, what should we hope for strategically?
For example, let’s game out the most extreme and unlikely scenario that Mueller indicts everyone including Trump tomorrow, Trump fires him Sat. Night Massacre-style and is impeached. Now Pence is president, or, if Pence is indicted, now Ryan is president. Then what?
Given how much shit we currently have to deal with, it seems quaint to read a long-form piece about John Boehner. Especially since he bears a lot of responsibility for the mess we find ourselves. Still, it amuses me that Boehner, who was terrible at his job and could never deliver votes for anything, is recognized as better at it than Paul Ryan:
Link
I’m in Montreal visiting my son. We are having a lovely time. Yesterday we had dim sum, hiked Mount Royal, and had sushi for dinner. Today we went to two museums, including an excellent exhibit at the Musee de Beaux Artes on Western movies (cowboy movies, that is), and have discussed the problem with Trump several times. I’m about to drop him at home and then I’m going to a bluegrass jam and hopefully scoring some weed.
Also, every time I leave the US, I don’t want to return. The propaganda about how awesome the US is and how bad countries like Mexico and Canada are is do blatantly obvious when I’m abroad. I can only imagine how North Korean refugees feel when they see the outside world.
https://www.justice.gov/file/1007271/download
3-6) FAILURE TO REPORT FOREIGN BANK AND FINANCIAL ACCOUNTS (2014-2016)
7-9) FAILURE TO REPORT FOREIGN BANK AND FINANCIAL ACCOUNT (2011-2013)
I would bet David Koch and the money men are meeting about this. There will come a time when they could think Trump and co is just too much risk to their agenda, and he should go. I mean Pence can signs whatever they need. Then the party elders will appear at the WH and Trump will resign with asssurance of a pardon. Oh please hurry and do it.