Dispatches from the Empire

Snowden Ten Years Later

Now, ten years later, I offer this as a time capsule of what those early months of Snowden were like.

Cormac McCarthy, Novelist of a Darker America, Is Dead at 89

With an eye for the darker side of human nature, his novels remain some of my favorite.

Headed Into the Abyss by Brian T. Watson 📚

I just finished, laying here in my bed, the dogs and cat asleep beside me. Crickets chirp out my window. In the distance a train’s whistle breaks and rolls over the valley.

More than anything, I prize seeing things clearly. Nothing fills me with that particular and precious joie de vivre — that electric sizzle — quite like close proximity to the truth. But most people don’t like the truth. We’ll do anything to avoid it, if we know it at all. So it’s a rare thrill to read something so transgressive in its honesty, so clear-eyed.

Credit to Brian T. Watson for his courage to accept the inevitable, and then to write it. May his acceptance be an inspiration.

America Is Headed Toward Collapse

The long history of human society compiled in our database suggests that America’s current economy is so lucrative for the ruling elites that achieving fundamental reform might require a violent revolution. But we have reason for hope. It is not unprecedented for a ruling class—with adequate pressure from below—to allow for the nonviolent reversal of elite overproduction. But such an outcome requires elites to sacrifice their near-term self-interest for our long-term collective interests. At the moment, they don’t seem prepared to do that.

Will a Dollar General Ruin a Rural Crossroads?

Some say they recognize that the county needs tax revenue. “But are we going to sell our soul for anything that comes along?” said Bobby Conner, who grew up in Ebony and now works on tourism initiatives for Brunswick County.

Welcome to America, where everything is for sale.

Poll: 61% of Americans say AI threatens humanity’s future

The poll also revealed a political divide in perceptions of AI, with 70 percent of Donald Trump voters expressing greater concern about AI versus 60 percent of Joe Biden voters. Regarding religious beliefs, evangelical Christians were more likely to “strongly agree” that AI poses risks to human civilization, at 32 percent, compared to 24 percent of non-evangelical Christians.

Strange bedfellows.

Widely used chemical strongly linked to Parkinson’s disease

The McMansion as harbinger of the American apocalypse

In the wake of the recession, the United States declined the opportunity to meaningfully transform the financial system on which our way of life is based. The breach was patched with taxpayer money, the system was restored, and we resumed our previous trajectory. The McMansion survived what could have been an existential crisis; it remains an unimpeachable symbol of having “made it” in a world where advancement is still measured in ostentation.

One day we will look at five-thousand-square-foot McMansions and Hummers and desert golf courses the same way we look now at thalidomide: a ginormous fuck up. That’s assuming we manage to plan for the future and come through a political fight antithetical to the mortal coil of capitalism: late, fossil, or otherwise.

Cory Doctorow: The Swivel-Eyed Loons Have a Point

You might have some swivel-eyed loons in your life. I certainly have my share. Remember that we have common ground.

When they say they don’t trust vaccines because the pharma compa nies are corrupt and their regulators are toothless, that’s not your signal to defend the manifestly corrupt pharma companies who murdered 800,000 Americans with opioids, nor to cape for the regulators who let them get away with it.

Likewise, we all want to “save the children.” It’s just that some of us want to save the children from real threats who never seem to face justice – youth pastors, Catholic priests, rich people with private islands, border agencies practicing “family separation” – while swivel-eyed loons want to save kids from imaginary threats (adrenochrome-guzzling Satanists).

Remember all the things they’re right about. Lean into the common ground. Help them understand that corporate power, and its capture of government, is our true shared enemy.

How Could AI Change War? U.S. Defense Experts Warn About New Tech

“If we stop, guess who’s not going to stop: potential adversaries overseas,” the Pentagon’s chief information officer, John Sherman, said on Wednesday. “We’ve got to keep moving.”

A cliff? What cliff…

Faster, faster!

A Paper That Says Science Should Be Impartial Was Rejected From Major Journals. You Can’t Make This Up.

According to its 29 authors, who are primarily scientists (including two Nobel laureates) in fields as varied as theoretical physics, psychology and pharmacokinetics, ideological concerns are threatening independence and rigor in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine. Though the goal of expanding opportunity for more diverse researchers in the sciences is laudable, the authors write, it should not be pursued at the expense of foundational scientific concepts like objective truth, merit and evidence, which they claim are being jeopardized by efforts to account for differing perspectives.

This encapsulates why the Left, once the bastion of Enlightenment principles, has left me behind in recent years.

It should go without saying — but in today’s polarized world, unfortunately, it doesn’t — that the authors of this paper do not deny the existence of historical racism or sexism or dispute that inequalities of opportunity persist. Nor do they deny that scientists have personal views, which are in turn informed by culture and society. They acknowledge biases and blind spots. Where they depart from the prevailing ideological winds is in arguing that however imperfect, meritocracy is still the most effective way to ensure high quality science and greater equity.

The lack of nuance on the political Left is troubling and has become stunningly common. Here are some of their greatest hits: I’ve been called a “white supremacist” by fellow grad school writers because I edit their work. (In their view, the very act of editing is oppression.) Fellow academics have called me “conservative” because I argue for compassion for everyone — including for white, rural, conservative people. I’ve been called a transphobe because biological sex is real, and I have no compunctions saying so. I’ve been called an “assimilationist” because I’m a gay man who lives in a small rural town surrounded by conservative straight people.

(It’s important to note that the Left hasn’t swung out farther left. They’ve swung toward illiberalism, and in that sense, I think they’ve made a swing to the right.)

One needn’t agree with every aspect of the authors’ politics or with all of their solutions. But to ignore or dismiss their research rather than impartially weigh the evidence would be a mistake. We need, in other words, to judge the paper on the merits. That, after all, is how science works.

Logic, reason, the scientific method, the pursuit of objectivity… when and why did these ideals fall from favor?

Bank failures visualized.

The A.I. Dilemma

50% of AI researchers think there’s a 10% or greater chance that AI will cause the extinction of the human race.

Thomas Edsall’s opinion piece in the New York Times about rural American resentment has been lodged in my head these last few days.

I asked Maria Kefalas, a sociologist at Saint Joseph’s University who wrote “Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America” with her husband, Patrick J. Carr, who died in 2020, to describe the state of mind in rural America. She wrote back by email:

My best guess would be that it comes down to brain drain and college-educated voters. It has always been about the mobility of the college educated and the folks getting left behind without that college diploma. Not one high school dropout we encountered back when we wrote about Iowa managed to leave the county (unless they got sent to prison), and the kids with degrees were leaving in droves.

Those whom Kefalas and Carr defined as “stayers” shaped “the political landscape in Ohio, Iowa, etc. (states where the public university is just exporting its professional class).” The result: “You see a striking concentration/segregation of folks on both sides who are just immersed in MAGA world or not,” Kefalas wrote, noting that “people who live in rural America are surrounded by folks who play along with a particular worldview, yet my friends from Brooklyn and Boston will tell you they don’t know anyone who supports Trump or won’t get vaccinated. It’s not open warfare. It’s more like apartheid.”

Urban-rural “apartheid” further reinforces ideological and affective polarization. The geographic separation of Republicans and Democrats makes partisan crosscutting experiences at work, in friendships, in community gatherings, at school or in local government — all key to reducing polarization — increasingly unlikely to occur.

Historical Marker Database.

I am in love with America.

I say this as a native son, born & raised in the Midwest heartland in a rural town not that far from a big city. I now live in an another rural town, this one far more remote than the one where I was raised, in another part of the country. On a political map, my life has been inverted: where I once lived in a blue part of a red state, I now live in the reddest part of a blue state. I spent much of my twenties moving from city to city across the country, from the South to the Pacific Northwest, always looking for something I never quite found: community. Being the child of a small town, cities felt too unaccountable, too anonymous. While I once craved the liberation of anonymity, that same anonymity came to feel hollow and detached.

Being gay, this anonymity initially felt freeing. Away from the confines of my childhood town, I could be whoever I wanted to be. I explored my sexuality without guilt or shame. I inadvertently became a different person every couple of years. I was a die-hard liberal, crystallizing into something more critical of the Left with age. I used to look to the political Right with suspicion: when you’re gay and raised in a conservative town, you learn not to trust conservatives. But with age, I can see these people as what they are: all too often afraid of change, and full of guilt and shame about who and what they are. The most difficult lessons are ones in which you realize the world isn’t as black-and-white as you thought. People that hate others for what they are merely hate themselves. I wish humans were more complicated than this, but we’re not. We’re predictable and obvious.

After years in the city, I became bored with the homogeneity of thought: almost everyone thought like me. We were all educated, liberal, and financially somewhat comfortable. Sure, most fellow millennials had very little money, but they never seemed to lack a purpose, always jetting off to work a third job giving books to the homeless or working long hours at a fancy restaurant with some prestige. But alarmingly, none of my friends seemed to want to travel too far from the city. There was a profound lack of curiosity about people that live in the spaces between cities, which is precisely how rural spaces have come—both understandably and somewhat condescendingly—to be defined. Worse still, during the rise of Trump and the rural populism that fueled it, there was a profound and sharp animosity that became palpable. My urban, liberal friends could not understand why Trump appealed to so many rural people, and my friends on the Left started to think of rural people as ignorant, racist, and dumb.

Let’s pause for a moment.

I am a gay man living in rural America because, plainly, I love it. I love the landscape, the general absence of people, the fact I can get in my car and be hiking with my dogs in ten minutes and not see another human all day. I love many of the values of small-town America: accountability between neighbors, the sense that kindness counts for something. I love waving hello to people whether I know them or not—and having them wave back.

But I’m a gay man living in rural America. Many of the values I don’t share with the people I’m surrounded by, first and foremost religiosity. I was not raised religious. Growing up, the people, both adults and fellow kids, that insisted, explicitly or implicitly, that I should feel bad about myself were the religious ones. As an adult, armed with the knowledge that they were merely trying to make me feel as insecure as they did themselves, I have some compassion for what they must go through. No wonder so many religious people believe in hell: they put themselves through it on a regular basis.

And then there is the poverty of rural places, which is unique in some of its causes and effects, from urban poverty. (Though it is just as unjust.) Desperation fills the vacuum left when a sense of purpose is taken from someone. For most rural people, this was a decently-paying job that has been automated or shipped overseas in the last four decades. It is no wonder why alcoholism and opioid use and drug addiction and suicide are on the rise in rural places. When a person no longer has purpose, they look for meaning wherever they can. If that’s in the momentary solace provided by painkillers, so be it. This is not a mystery.

I’ll be candid: this poverty and the afflictions that stem from it make me very uncomfortable. I have a hard time trusting some of my neighbors because I know they struggle with heroin addiction. Some of them are religious. Many of them own high-powered guns. They are no different than the people I grew up around, my neighbors back in the Midwest. As someone who was bullied and ridiculed by many of those people, it’s hard not to pre-emptively judge rural people, to not assume they are bigots who hate me merely because I’m gay.

This is where I find myself: alive with the memories of growing up in a rural place, both good and bad. I have lost many friendships over the last few years with my more educated, urban friends because I do not tolerate the bigotry and condescension of rural people, even though I understand it. At times, I too am filled with that condescension.

And at times I am filled with doubt. Will I ever feel truly at home in a rural place, where I’m often the only gay person around? Will I ever feel at home around my neighbors, some of whom are addicts? Will I ever be able to be free of the judgment I feel for those religious neighbors that attend a church I know preaches against the sins of homosexuality?

I don’t have any answers. But this is where I am: trying to find a place in America where I do feel at home.