The trouble, or so I’ve been told, is that like so many of the homeless she refuses help when offered, and both the policy and the culture of institutionalized do-gooding prevent the people who might save her life from doing anything about it. To force help on dying people must not be considered. And for the current generation of said do-gooders, that’s the end of the story. Nothing to be done. For reasons that I find impossible to understand, just utterly senseless, many progressives have decided that forcing help on the homeless and the sick is a worse outcome than simply letting them die. And letting them die is exactly what we’re doing.
At some point you have to admit that your preference for altruistic neglect is still just a preference for neglect.
My culture cannot handle nuance.
Several decades ago, about the time I was born, there was a push to empty and close “institutions,” known otherwise as “asylums.” Abuse, neglect, and a lack of accountability were rampant in these places, and shuttering them and changing our understanding and expectations of healthcare for the disabled or mentally unwell was an unequivocal good.
But what did we replace that system with?
For those with money and time, assisted living facilities or home care is an option. But what about everyone else?
With mental institutions banished to the dustbin of history, they were never replaced with a viable, more humane alternative.
That we feel repulsed by the alternative to our constitutional democracy, having seen it up close, is a very good sign. In this sense, hypocrisy plays an important part in the moral formation of us fallen creatures. Pretending to be a better person than you are is a pretty good way to become a better person than you are. So let’s allow each other the space to do that. Let’s take one another’s embrace of the boundaries of our politics seriously, even if the people you oppose aren’t about to confess all their past sins.
Sometimes I think my lifetime was front-loaded with goodness; that so much of life until now has been good, and at some point, this can’t possibly hold. The excess and craven want of my culture will finally crest and begin to devour itself. In doing so, we find a truth we’ve worked for so long to avoid.
We’re out of balance, and imbalance doesn’t last.
Honestly, what makes me more depressed: that a course correction sure feels as though it’s on the horizon? Or that it might not be?
For graduates it has become a game of ‘musical chairs’ where you pay a huge sum to buy a ticket to play the game (University costs), but the number of chairs (graduate level jobs) remain the same. As the number of players increases year on year, massively in just a few decades, supply way exceeds demand. So graduates have to up their game and pay for another even more expensive ticket to get a Masters. Even worse, those who go on to do PhDs find there are no academic jobs available, as again supply has exceeded demand for many years. Graduates in the social sciences and humanities are particularly vulnerable but Turchin’s point is that, for a rapidly increasing graduate population there is a precarious future and lots of debt. This may be exacerbated by AI, as it eats into cognitive work, so has that group as its sweet spot.
This frustrated aspirant class, for Turchin, is dangerous. Always isolated from working class people, they have little in common with the non-graduate class or ideas like collective bargaining and trade unions. They have the time and support from their propertied parents to become activists and protestors and often pick up causes on campus around cancel culture, climate change, transgender issues and social justice. Poverty is not the problem, recognition of identity is.
I find myself in this "precariat" class. Most of my friends are in this group, too. We went to college with the promise it would lead to better jobs, higher wages, more social mobility, yet most of my friends are burdened with crippling debt.
I'm an anomaly. Early investments in the market have stablilized my economic position, and while I have no debt, financially, I'm solidly lower-middle class. But I own my home and have non-essential assets I could sell in an emergency. I live on less than $25k a year, but without debt, this is not diffcult.
I've watched identity politics take hold in my cohort. It captured me for a time, too, and I'm sure still animates me in some ways. I'm embarrassed by my participation in this push to focus so intently on identity, and I'm horrified at how so many of my contemporaries still behave. Compassion for others — those of a different class, gender, or belief — has disappeared in the face of a relentless focus on our differences. Tellingly, so many people closest to my ideological home — liberal, (ex?)Democrat, progressive — have adopted the worst habits of the political opposition. They've become closed off to new perspectives, refusing to engage with the ideas of a person on the basis of their gender, their race, their class. Worse, they still claim to be liberal, though this behavior is the antithesis of liberalism.
What is worrying is how easily we all march lock-step into the future, even when the signs of discontent are ringing in our ears. We are like those cartoon figures who run off the edge of the cliff and hang smiling in mid-air, before the fall. We don't adjust or adapt, we simply behave according to the groupthink of the socio-economic group we find ourselves in. The trick is to sit back, look, listen and read people like Turchin. You don't have to agree with him but it is voices like his that at least provide substance to predictions, not about 10nyears [sic] from now but next year!
This is a pretty damn salient analogy. Our current system of capitalism heavily favors those with capital, i.e. shareholders. If you have money in the stock market, you're the beneficiary of capitalism. Instead of money going to the employees of a company, that money is funneled to those that own stock in said company, i.e. "maximizing shareholder value." Those at the top make more and more off the labor of the working class.
This system has to change for our culture to avoid a painful (and maybe bloody) revolution. Wealth being funneled to the upper classes needs to be given to the working class, as they rightly deserve. It is, after all, their labor. But politically, this redistribution of wealth has been branded a handout, welfare, socialism. Tellingly, Republicans have convinced their own working-class constituents to vote against their best interest by making "socialism" such a toxic word.
These days, nuance has no place in America. That has something to do with our media and something to do with our level of education. It's remarkably difficult to explain the financial system or the stock market, and attempting to explain the nuances of capitalism, socialism, and how the two are blended to form a more equal, fair, just society is near impossible. Dependent on their political affiliation, people are triggered by the mere mention of either word and conversations about the nuances of policy become impossible.
Even when it was no better than it ought to have been, however, there was a freewheeling joy to the early Expanded Universe which is poignant to look back upon from the perspective of these latter days of Star Wars, when everything about the franchise is meticulously managed from the top down. The Expanded Universe, by contrast, was a case of by the fans, for the fans. With new movies the stuff of dreams only, fans painted every corner of the universe in vivid colors of their own, then thrilled as this content appeared in actual book and comic stores with the actual Star Wars logo on the front of it. The Expanded Universe could be cheesy, but it was never cynical. One could argue that it felt more like Star Wars — the original Star Wars of simple summertime fun, the one that didn’t take itself so gosh-darn seriously — than anything that has appeared under the name since 1998.
I couldn't have written it better myself.
Students of history like to say that every golden age carries within it the seeds of its demise. That rings especially true when it comes to the heyday of the Expanded Universe: the very popularity of the many new Star Wars novels, comics, and games reportedly did much to convince George Lucas that it might be worth returning to Star Wars himself. And because Lucas was one of the entertainment world’s more noted control freaks, such a return could bode no good for this giddy era of fan ownership.
We can pin the beginning of the end down to a precise date: November 1, 1994, the day on which George Lucas sat down to start writing the scripts for what would become the Star Wars prequels, going so far as to bring in a film crew to commemorate the occasion. “I have beautiful pristine yellow tablets,” he told the camera proudly, waving a stack of empty notebooks in front of its lens. “A nice fresh box of pencils. All I need is an idea.” Four and a half years later, The Phantom Menace would reach theaters, inaugurating for better or for worse — mostly for the latter, many fans would come to believe — the next era of Star Wars as a media phenomenon.
And then, eventually, came the sale to Disney, which in its quest to own all of our childhoods turned Star Wars into just another tightly controlled corporate property like any of its others. The Expanded Universe was officially put out of its misery in 2014, a decade and a half past its golden age. It continues to exist today only in the form of a handful of characters, Grand Admiral Thrawn among them, who have been co-oped by Disney and integrated into the official lore.
In the postmodern world where we invent reality hour by hour, depending on how we feel, being gay now includes heterosexual sex — and by far the biggest group in the “LGBTQIA+” umbrella are bisexual women in relationships with straight men. At some point, gay men will wake up and realize that they have abolished their own identity — indeed merged it into its opposite. But they have another tea dance to get to and another Instagram vacation pic to post. Most are pathetically uninformed, or programmed by tribal insecurity to follow the queering herd.
Andrew Sullivan, yet again.
The madness of being called “LGBTQ” still makes my head spin (how can I be gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender?), but stranger still is how prevalent it is among fellow gay men. Many seem to have internalized this language — this ideology — part and parcel.
And good luck saying as much out loud. I’ve been chastised, yelled at, lectured, ignored. The groupthink on this runs deep.
The Mapping Center for Evangelism and Church Growth’s founder and president Chris Cooper suggests using the app to conduct neighborly activities such as putting on a barbecue for potential converts, but scattered throughout the app’s training and promotional videos are suggestions to undertake the controversial practice of “prayerwalking.” An idea becoming increasingly popular among Christian supremacist groups, prayerwalking involves believers flooding so-called “un-Christian” territories in order to combat “demonic strongholds.” In practice, it varies from blessing new neighbors to gathering groups to pray in front of everything from mosques to drag bars in service of “spiritual warfare.”
I don’t want to think less of these people, but they don’t make it easy.
Scientists were surprised to find that people who had been eating the high-fat, high-sugar snack also had changes in how their brains learned.
While participants were having their brains scanned, the researchers had them do a basic learning task, requiring them to push a button associated with a picture when they heard certain tones. When people who had been eating the high-fat, high-sugar snack didn’t get the picture they expected, their brains showed greater activity in parts involved in evaluating situations.
This high-sugar, high-fat diet “is changing something really basic about how we learn,” DiFeliceantonio said.
In a different study, four days of having a breakfast high in saturated fat and added sugar was linked to reductions in performance on some learning and memory tests, according to researchers in Australia. People who had a healthier breakfast didn’t have the performance changes.
McLuhan anticipated that the electronic age would be one of constant change, such that nobody could adapt quickly enough. As a result, people would be plunged into nostalgia, and yearn for their old, solid identities.
Gilmore Girls looms large in the world of innkeeper-fluencing. “Have you wondered what Lorelai Gilmore actually does for a living?” says Caroline Cardamone, a 20-something innkeeper at a bed-and-breakfast in Wisconsin, in one of the dozens of TikToks she’s posted about picking up breakfast burritos for guests, dusting a lot of doily-adorned wood, and doing laundry. John Lavin, who bought a century-old bed-and-breakfast in Blue Ridge, Georgia, in early COVID and soon started posting about it on TikTok, has been described by followers as “Luke Danes and Lorelai Gilmore rolled into one person.” Lavin says he’s never watched the show, but understands what they’re getting at: “People project this kind of fairy-tale life.”
What concerns me about the audience for this shit is their shared point-of-reference. When our only touchstones are characters from a terrifically uninspiring television show from twenty years ago? When you can make a Gilmore Girls reference and that somehow conveys meaning?
Are we not through the looking glass when media becomes more real than reality?
The opposite to rockism is “poptimism”: successful music is often very good, the thinking goes, and should be treated as such. Poptimism has largely taken over music criticism. Pitchfork, a website once synonymous with snooty taste, went from reviewing Kylie Minogue as an April Fool’s joke to putting her in its “Best Songs of the 2000s” list. A lot of pop music, Kylie included, is very good, and it’s good that it can be properly appreciated. Poptimism can also apply to children’s art: for example, the Studio Ghibli cartoons. Plays based on My Neighbour Totoro and Spirited Away are currently running or scheduled to run in London, thanks to demand from adults as much as kids. And why not, when the works in question are brimming with soul and subtlety?
But poptimism comes with a bias towards celebration rather than critique, which obsessive fans of stars like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift zealously enforce. When one Pitchfork writer only deigned to give Swift’s album Folklore an 8/10, she got death threats. Another poptimist assumption is more sinister: that might is right. If millions of people like something, then who are you to disagree? When anyone, from Martin Scorsese down, suggests that filming people in tights against green screens isn’t the pinnacle of cinema, they get called elitists. It just so happens that going along with this non-elitist conception of quality makes a lot of rich people in Hollywood even richer. People have sleepwalked into arguing that the LA executive is more a man of the people than the struggling indie film director.
There are no kidults without poptimism. You can only jump into a ballpark aged 30 without shame if you’ve been warmed up on Harry Potter reruns.
I don’t know whether the board was right to fire Altman. It certainly has not made a public case that would justify the decision. But the nonprofit board was at the center of OpenAI’s structure for a reason. It was supposed to be able to push the off button. But there is no off button. The for-profit proved it can just reconstitute itself elsewhere. And don’t forget: There’s still Google’s A.I. division and Meta’s A.I. division and Anthropic and Inflection and many others who’ve built large language models similar to GPT–4 and are yoking them to business models similar to OpenAI’s. Capitalism is itself a kind of artificial intelligence, and it’s far further along than anything the computer scientists have yet coded. In that sense, it copied OpenAI’s code long ago.
…
…if the capabilities of these systems continue to rise exponentially, as many inside the industry believe they will, then nothing I’ve seen in recent weeks makes me think we’ll be able to shut the systems down if they begin to slip out of our control. There is no off switch.
“Am I changed? Is she changed? Was there any point to this?” Ms. Minkin said she asked herself. “I don’t know that her overall opinion has changed, and I don’t know that my overall opinion has changed. But maybe if we’re all softening at the hard edges, that’s enough?”
Her voice made clear it was a question, not a conclusion.
Hundreds of people stormed the airport to greet that flight—of 45 passengers, 15 were Israeli, many of them children. “Allahu Akbar,” they shout in videos that have emerged online, some men waving Palestinian flags. On the tarmac, they attack an airport employee, who desperately explains: “There are no passengers here anymore,” and then exclaims, “I am Muslim!” Some of the rioters demanded to examine the passports of arriving passengers, seemingly trying to identify those who were Israeli, and others searched cars as they were leaving. Another video emerged of two young boys at the airport, proudly declaring that they came to “kill Jews” with knives.
According to the local health ministry, more than 20 people were injured in the skirmishes. One video showed a pilot telling the passengers over the intercom to “please stay seated and don’t try to open the plane’s door. There is an angry mob outside.”
This is horrifying.
I’m ashamed to admit I still fall for the “I cant believe this is happening now” line of thinking. Yet I cannot believe this shit is still happening.
The danger in not being able to imagine it happening is that it then happens. October 7th is evidence of that. How, then, to demand people imagine — or even fear — the worst, so that they might remain vigilant?
We are now in an uncharted territory. For several decades, scientists have consistently warned of a future marked by extreme climatic conditions because of escalating global temperatures caused by ongoing human activities that release harmful greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, time is up. We are seeing the manifestation of those predictions as an alarming and unprecedented succession of climate records are broken, causing profoundly distressing scenes of suffering to unfold. We are entering an unfamiliar domain regarding our climate crisis, a situation no one has ever witnessed firsthand in the history of humanity.
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.
Is it any wonder so many younger people are overwhelmed by anxiety? We have to live with this.
On a good day, my anxiety about the climate (and the apathy of humans to the impending changes) is a low hum.
On a bad day, it makes my ears ring. I can barely get out of bed. I’m paralyzed by it, unsure of where to direct my anger. Often, my ire turns (unfairly or not) to people who just won’t stop having kids, followed by people that never make any efforts to want less — the only antidote to consumer capitalism. No amount of innovation will innovate our way out of the disaster that comes of always wanting ever more stuff.
Want less.
Unfortunately, most people I know can’t seem to find a way to want less. Family. Friends. Strangers. It’s everyone. The whole world feels as through its gone fucking mad, and the only way I remain a half-decent person is to spend much of my time far away from other people.
This “now is not the time” argument gets trotted out by Republicans after each and every gun massacre. Right after their tweets offering “thoughts and prayers”. Bullshit. The aftermath of a massacre is the time to demand sane gun control measures. That’s when the issue is clarified. Would Republicans argue that October 8 was “not the right time” for Israel to discuss Hamas terrorism? Was September 12, 2001 “not the right time” to discuss Al-Qaeda? Should FDR have delivered an address to the nation on December 8, 1941, advising that we relax, let cooler heads prevail, because the aftermath of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor “was not the time” to consider retaliating?
Young people now arrive at elite colleges with the assumption that not only will they be seen, heard and meticulously cared for, but also that their own politics will broadly align with those of the institutions they have chosen to attend. They have been given little reason to think otherwise.
With universities run as for-profit business, why are we surprised that students are now insisting “the customer is always right?”
To be clear: the customer is not always right.
Yet we’ve let this attitude persist in the larger economy for at least as long as I’ve been alive. Let’s not act surprised when this attitude follows capitalism everywhere it insists on going. Academia is no exception.
The naivety of some grown adults — in this case, college administrators hell-bent on making ever-more money off their students — is astonishing. If you use people, expect them to use you in return.
Many of us at Tablet believed strongly, and still believe, in the possibility of creating a better world. But something bothered us from the very beginning about these ideas, and the people pushing them. Every time we pressed on one of the newly mass-embraced policy proposals or narratives—intersectionality, decolonization studies, the Iran nuclear deal, Russiagate, Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, critical race theory, COVID lockdowns—a weird thing would happen: The idea itself fell apart at the seams within seconds of contact with reality, and yet its defenders got more sure of themselves, more performatively boastful, more passionate and gleeful about smearing anyone who dared to question them.
The more we listened to freshly minted universal experts, the more we were struck by the increasing lunacy of their pronouncements on every topic under the sun, always backed by “studies” and “science”—where COVID–19 came from, how many genders there are, which skin tones and personal experiences qualify a person for protection status and which do not, whether it was OK for a Syrian dictator to bomb and gas 500,000 of his people, whether the U.S. should ally itself with a Holocaust-denying medieval theocracy, whether the president of the United States was secretly a Russian agent, whether large American cities should let drug addicts and violent schizophrenics get high on the streets and steal stuff—and more. Indeed, over time, we were struck by how little the ideas themselves seemed to matter; what so many people seemed most attached to was power.
For one night’s opener, Usher wore a white three-piece suit: slacks and a tailored shirt with a vest. He held a drink of dark liquor — the main stage took on the ambience of a cabaret. Like Frank Sinatra, that other Vegas icon, Usher sang the hits. A fuchsia-clad dancer bent over at the waist. Usher placed his drink on top of her behind. The gesture was flirtatious and naughty without seeming rakish. The crowd erupted. His moves were graceful and fiery, infused with the influence of Sammy Davis Jr., Gene Kelly, Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Ben Vereen, Bob Fosse and James Brown — a kind of liquid movement that rivals the notes he sings.
R.&B. is nothing if not a marriage of opposing energies. A dance between hard and soft. Real life versus fantasy; vulnerability and force; Holy Ghost and heaving flesh. A thin line between love and hate. Traditional R.&B. men were complicated, and they weren’t always truthful about it. Yet the music’s expansiveness and range — topics like climate change, war and political disappointment were all fair game — gave us a pathway toward understanding the conditions of the day. Some contemporary R.&B. men ceded ground to hip-hop in storytelling about the world and in relaying broad truths. Similarly, Usher exists at the threshold of contradictory ideas. His persona gleams with sheen and shine, but he is often tightly coiled, a bundle of nerves underneath glistening skin.