Category: Culture

At least we’re smarter than they are


A dragon descends on Oxford. Image by ChatGPT.

Ezra Klein has a must-read piece in the New York Times this morning: Now Is the Time of Monsters. (You can read this link without a subscription to the Times.)

Klein lists the monsters:

1. Authoritarian resurgence

2. AI and technological upheaval

3. Climate crisis

4. Demographic shifts

As Klein writes, “Any one of these challenges would be plenty on its own. Together they augur a new and frightening era.”

I should hasten to say, as Klein also does, that demographic shifts in the form of falling birth rates don’t scare me. That’s mainly a right-wing goblin, and I suspect that it’s only falling birth rates for white people that matters to them. I think I would merge Monster No. 4 into Monster No. 1 — the racism of authoritarians.

I’m also not as worried as some people are about AI’s taking over the world and making the human mind obsolete. But again I think there is a connection to Monster No. 1: Authoritarians will find all sorts of ways to use artificial intelligence as a tool to keep the rest of us down — ever better lies and disinformation, for example. To me, Monsters No. 1 and No. 3 are the biggies, with Monster No. 3 amplified by the authoritarian denial of climate change because of the money and power they get from an oil economy that oligarchs own and control.

When I lose sleep over Monster No. 1, the greatest comfort comes from knowing that no one is alone. The smartest people in the world see what’s happening. It’s the smartest and best people in the world up against the richest and meanest, with the richest and meanest having persuaded the poorest and dumbest that they’re on their side.

Yes, the people who are developing AI’s must be very smart, but they are more like idiots savant interested mainly in the technology and the money.

As for the MAGA crowd — Trump, his appointees, the Christian nationalists, the brownshirts, the right-wing radicals, Trump voters — they are all as dumb as rocks. We’ve got to outsmart them.

Klein offers no solutions. He only describes the monsters. As the smartest and best people in the world try to figure out how to deal with the dumbest, the meanest, and the richest, it occurred to me to wonder if Monster No. 2 — artificial intelligence — might have some useful advice.

Using ChatGPT’s “o1” engine, which is supposed to be better at reasoning than “o4,” I asked a question:

I am going to paste in an essay from this morning’s New York Times written by Ezra Klein. The headline is “Now is the time of monsters.” He lists several existential problems that the world faces today. Please analyze this piece with an eye toward philosophy and psychology. These problems are collective problems. But the question I would like for you to answer is, given these collective problems, what can an individual do not only to help, but also to preserve individual stability in a time of rapid change and chaos. These ideas need to align with my personal politics and philosophy. I am am a progressive. I would like to live in a world shaped by John Rawls’ “justice as fairness.”

The link below is the AI’s response. Most of it, I think, is what any nice and well-mannered intelligence would say. It contains very generalized ideas; there is no brilliant strategy that no one has thought of before. I do like the point about “narrative reframing,” though: “Successful social transformations often begin in the imagination, with bold visions that inspire people to action.”

If AI’s are capable of imagination and “bold visions,” I haven’t yet figured out what questions to ask. But I do think that, as smart people, we should be learning how to use AI’s, and we should keep abreast of their development. The Wikipedia article on ChatGPT says that the man who exploded a truck in front of the Trump hotel in Las Vegas used ChatGPT to help plan it.

Can AI’s help us plan the resistance?

Ezra Klein: Now Is the Time of Monsters

ChatGPT’s response

Alcohol as an institution


At the Belhaven pub, Dundee, near the fireplace

I am nine days into a dry January. We all seem to be rethinking alcohol these days, and that can only be a good thing. But, speaking only for myself, I don’t think the time has come for me to give up alcohol.

A lot of ink has been spilled of late after the Powers That Be reversed course and told us that even light drinking has no health benefits. Most of what has been written, though, has a one-size-fits-all tone and seems to forget three important things.

The first thing is that, genetically, one size does not fit all. There are genetic differences in how people metabolize alcohol. This is a little complicated, but it’s worth understanding. The differences have to do with how quickly a certain enzyme cracks apart the alcohol molecule, and how quickly a different enzyme detoxifies the cracked-apart byproduct.

The second thing is that, genetics aside, we are all very different. How old are we? How healthy are we? How stressed are we? Do we tend more toward bad habits, or more toward good habits? When we drink, what do we drink, and how much?

These are all factors that change throughout our lives. The day probably will come when, at a certain age, I will stop drinking because of my age, just as I have realized that, because of my age, I should drink less. Consider Queen Elizabeth II. Her doctors advised her, at the age of 95, to stop having her evening cocktail. She was 96 when she died. I seriously doubt that alcohol shortened her life or impaired her health, even though, on average, Britain, like most countries, has a big drinking problem.

The third thing is that alcohol is an institution. Institutions provide social glue. Alcohol as an institution has many forms — a glass of champagne at a celebration, a pint at a pub with a friend, wine with dinner, cocktails at a reception. The growing of grapes and the making of wine are an art as well as an economic institution, as is the making of fine whiskey and the brewing of beautiful ales. Pubs are a social institution of which I highly approve. These institutions are ancient. People have been making alcohol for at least 10,000 years. Even the most important of Christian sacraments requires wine.

The genetic mutation that allows humans (and some other primates) to efficiently metabolize alcohol was definitely a good thing. That mutation occurred about 10 million years ago, and it allowed our ancestors to eat fallen fruit that had started to ferment. Other fruit-eating animals can metabolize alcohol — birds, for example. Dogs are not fruit-eating animals, and they don’t have the mutation. Bees, because they consume nectar, can metabolize alcohol, and to do it they use the same enzymes as humans.

In short, for humans and some other animals, it would be perfectly correct to think of alcohol as a kind of food, even though it’s an optional food and clearly not something that we can make a diet of.

As for my dry January, my goal is January 25, not January 31. That’s because January 25 is Burns Night, an annual Scottish institution (with toasts!) that I’ve been happy to adopt. Burns Night marks the death of Robert Burns, January 25, 1759. Burns was only 37 when he died. But I don’t think it was alcohol that did him in.

Midwinter pottage


Click here for high resolution version

If C.J. Sansome was right in his Shardlake novels set in Tudor England (and I think he was), then pretty much everybody (except for Henry VIII) lived on pottage then. What was in the pottage depended of course on what you had. A good variety of garden vegetables would have made a huge difference. If you had some meat or fish, so much the better. If you could eat your pottage with a dark, hearty bread made from rye, oats, or barley, with some ale, then you were truly rich. And probably healthy as well. Butter and cheese? Princely.

Historians say that medieval peasants burned 4,000 calories a day. That would mean that they worked from dawn until dark. They probably were very thin, because that’s a lot of calories for poor people. Henry VIII weighed almost 400 pounds when he died. Thus I think it’s safe to assume that he wasn’t living off of pottage and that he wasn’t working from dawn until dark.

I’m 98 percent vegetarian. This was the first beef stew I’d made in more than two years. The midwinter gloom made me do it.

The beef, though, is almost like a seasoning. You don’t need much beef. It’s the vegetables that make the stew, the heavenly combination of potatoes, carrots, onions, and peas, in a sauce reddened with tomatoes. The key to good beef stew is the brown flavor, umami, which comes from browning the beef, the onions, and the flour (for thickening) before the other ingredients or any water are added.

When I think of beef stew, I automatically think of cherry pie for dessert. There was no cherry pie today, though. That’s something I’d make only for company.

Young men and the right-wing rabbit hole

⬆︎ Two Europeans who are not down the right-wing rabbit hole. Listen with headphones, or with a good sound system.

That people like Donald Trump, or Elon Musk, should be what they are makes a certain kind of sense. They have money and power, and they want more money and power. In their narcissism, they think they totally deserve what they have. They think they deserve our adulation for having it — lords of the universe.

But for young men there is no excuse. If voices like Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, and Jordan Peterson sound like hope, then something inside is stunted. The options outside the rabbit hole are unlimited. They’re just not as easy.

The New Testament in Scots

If you are a native speaker of English, then Scots is a language that you already 65 percent (more or less) understand. Totally aside from my interest in Scotland and Sir Walter Scott, I find that fact, from linguistics, fascinating. At first I conceived of Scots as just a dialect of English. But scholars see it otherwise, and now I’m convinced: Scots is its own language.

There is a second reason why the Scots language warms my heart (other than the fact that it is beautiful to listen to). It’s that speaking Scots has long been stigmatized in Scotland. To feel properly respected outside the places they grew up, people who grew up speaking Scots learn to “code switch” to standard Scottish English. This is very much like what happens with people, like me, who grew up where the Southern Appalachian English dialect is spoken. We learn to code switch to avoid stigmatization of the way we talk. Some of us can learn to mask our Southern Appalachian accents almost completely. Others retain traces that, to a careful ear, give them away. (More on that below.)

During my recent trip to Scotland, I made a pilgrimage to McNaughtan’s Bookshop in Edinburgh. It is a fascinating place, and, I think, the only seller of rare and antique books in Edinburgh. The owner is very knowledgeable and very helpful. I bought two books while I was there. I had them shipped home so that I didn’t have to deal with them as luggage. One of the books is The History of the Book in Scotland, Volume 4, from the Edinburgh University Press. I will write about that book later. The other is a translation of the New Testament into Scots, published in 1983.

To convince you that you already 65 percent understand the Scots language, I’ve included below an image from page 101. It’s Luke, chapter 2, verses 1 – 14, a section of the New Testament familiar to us all — the Christmas story. For comparison, I’ve also included the same verses from New International translation.

I suggest reading the Scots aloud, paying attention to the sound and phonetics. Most of it will be perfectly understandable, though there are some words you won’t recognize (though many are decipherable from context). I will list those words below.


⬆︎ Click here for high-resolution version.

Siccan a thing: Such a thing

Ilkane: Those of that ilk; that family

Haundfastit: Betrothed

Boukin gin: Very pregnant

Brocht: Brought

Barrie: A baby’s flannel coat

Heck: A slatted wood frame or rack

Hirsel: A flock of sheep

Uncolie frichtit: Extremely frightened

Liggin: Lying

Syne in a gliff: Then all of a sudden

Kythed: Appeared

Yird: Earth


⬆︎ Click here for high-resolution version.

The translator of this work was William Laughton Lorimer, a language scholar who taught Greek at St. Andrews University and who died in 1967. The translation was, of course, from the Greek.

Many people in Scotland are working to reverse the stigmatization of Scots. Sadly, Southern Appalachian English remains just as stigmatized.

I mentioned above that some traces of Southern Appalachian are detectable even in professional actors. For example, there is the tendency not to distinguish between “ken” and “kin,” and “pen” and “pin.” The actor Samuel L. Jackson, who grew up in Chattanooga, provides some good examples of this, especially in Star Wars.

The smartest podcast I’ve ever listened to

Jonathan Rauch is one of my oldest friends. I’ve known him for forty years. Ken Ilgunas is one of my newer friends, fourteen years. I’ve listened to them at the dinner table a good many times, but listening to them in a podcast is even better.

Both are writers. They are of different generations, which makes their conversation even more interesting.

Here’s the link: Jonathan Rauch on the 2024 election, 1960’s Star Trek, and the magnetism of sociopaths.

Jonathan’s next book, to be published by the Yale University Press in February 2025, is Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain With Democracy. My own tiny press, Acorn Abbey Books, has brought out new editions of two of Jonathan’s books that were previously out of print, Denial and The Outnation.

Scottish pubs


The Royal Pub, Edinburgh

The pubs alone justify a trip to Scotland. The lack of pub culture, as I often have complained, is one of America’s worst flaws. Pubs are a social glue, and America is increasingly an unglued kind of place.

Edinburgh pubs can be very grand. Village pubs are small and cozy, almost always with a fireplace. Pub food will be fairly inexpensive and a touch rustic — soups, roasts, pies, and vegetables such as potatoes and broccoli, treated well.

Ken and I had a long afternoon in Edinburgh, looking at old publications and some first editions in the National Library of Scotland, which is an archive, really, since the items in the collections can be fetched and inspected, but not checked out.

After that it was a lecture at the Sir Walter Scott Club of Edinburgh, with wine and canapes after the lecture. It was a delightful group of people, most of them my age. My questions about cats in Scott’s novels stumped everyone I asked. I’ll have a post on Scott’s cats after I get home.

While waiting to catch a train at Waverley station back to East Linton, we had some ale at the Royal Pub. And I admit that, back in East Linton, we had one more slosh (Scotch, this time) by the fire at the pub in the East Linton Hotel.


The Crown pub, East Linton


French onion soup and a cheese scone, the Crown pub, East Linton

East Linton

East Linton is a village about 20 miles east of Edinburgh, population 2,000. For several decades, trains from Edinburgh headed toward England bypassed East Linton, because the station had been closed. A new train station opened in December 2023, and East Linton is very much on the map again.

East Linton is my home base for this visit to Scotland. I easily got in my 10,000 steps yesterday with a walk out into the rural areas surrounding Linton, even though a storm, Bert, had brought wind and snow. After all, when you visit Scotland, the weather is a part of what you come for.

The old stone construction in the photo is a dovecot (the Scottish call them “doocots”). They were for raising doves. To have a dovecot was a status symbol. The breakfast photo is at the Linton Hotel.

Tomorrow: Edinburgh.

A bistro and bar in Trumptown


Grilled salmon with green beans and garlic mashed potatoes

I had been waiting for this place to open for months, following their progress on their Facebook page. It’s the first real bistro in the benighted red county I live in. The place is named “The Dalton” (I’ll explain below why its name also is my surname), and it’s in the mean, racist, theocratic little town of King. I love bistros, but I’m also fascinated by the clash of what I might call bistro culture with white Christian theocracy, in a town that normally feeds on wings, barbecue, burgers, and baloney.

The main thing to know about King, North Carolina, is that it’s a white-flight suburb of the nearby (blue-voting and remarkably civilized) city of Winston-Salem. King is an ugly little town that consists mostly of a one-mile strip development with fast food, grocery stores, a tire store, and a “Christian Supplies” store, whatever that is. The town is politically dominated by a large Baptist church with a crew of nasty little Bible-college preachers. (I’ve seen and heard these preachers at county commissioner meetings when something like putting “In God We Trust” on county buildings and county vehicles is on the agenda.)

Baptists, of course, including those who are secretly sinful, don’t want others to have the freedom to buy alcohol. For years, the power of these Baptists was able to keep “liquor by the drink” and ABC stores out of King. In North Carolina, cities and towns can be either “wet” or “dry,” depending on how the town’s voters vote in a referendum. In 2022, proponents of liquor by the drink were at last able to get a referendum on the ballot. In November 2022, it passed, 63 percent to 37 percent. It has taken almost two years for King’s first bar to open.

The best restaurants make most of their money off of alcohol rather than food. So at last a bistro — with a big bar — had a chance to make a go of it in King. They got the best old building in town. For years, King’s high street had been run down and seedy, with only one strong business, a drug store. Several buildings on the high street are being renovated now. If the Dalton restaurant succeeds, it should lift the entire (very short) high street along with it. The high street is named Dalton Road.

The road is named for the old Dalton plantation that was a few miles north. The plantation is historically significant, not least for the wills and other records of the plantation’s owners, David Dalton Sr. (1740-1820) and David Dalton Jr. (1781-1847). The Dalton family papers are in the Z. Smith Reynolds Library of Wake Forest University. I am not descended from the Daltons who owned the plantation. Rather, that branch of the Dalton family and my branch forked in Albemarle County, Virginia, in the early 1700s and migrated south from the Charlottesville area separately. The Daltons arrived in Virginia very early, during the Williamsburg period. Two names come up again and again in the family trees — Timothy, and David. Where you find Daltons, you will find a David.

I have not yet met the owners of the bistro. I’d love to ask them some questions. They have made a huge investment in renovating and equipping the building. I asked my waitress how many people were working that afternoon. Fourteen, she said. That is a huge staff. Most country eateries operate with two to four people. The place is nicely furnished, though not lavish. They have proper heavy white china and good flatware. The prices are reasonable. My waitress said the place has been packed in the evening. It must be a tough calibration for “upscale” menus in downscale locations, where the food has to be good enough to justify higher prices and to satisfy customers with higher expectations, while not being too expensive or so citified that people don’t understand it.

King is sixteen miles to the south of me, so I won’t be tempted to go there very often.

As though to remind me that I was in Trumptown, as I was enjoying my grilled salmon an older couple came in. The man was “open carrying.” He had a pistol in a holster. This is legal in North Carolina unless a business posts a sign at the door forbidding weapons inside. This irked me at first. But the couple were quiet and polite and not out to make a scene. I’d never seen open carry in a restaurant before, but I’ve heard stories about how people who open carry want to make a show of it, like the people who make a show of holding hands and praying before they eat their barbecue and fries.

I have several reasons for wanting to support this place, but I’d do for only one reason — the fact that that ungodly Baptist church up the road didn’t want it there and lost the battle to keep it out.


⬆︎ The vanilla ice cream was only $2! Other dessert choices were $6 and $8.


⬆︎ King’s high street is on the National Register of Historic Places. I believe this was the old bank building.

Journalism for the few


Dorothy Thompson leaves the White House after a visit with Roosevelt, May 1940. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Today’s substack from Heather Cox Richardson contains a sharp warning about what Trump will do to those who oppose him, if he ever gets power again:

“On Saturday, September 7, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump predicted that his plan to deport 15 to 20 million people currently living in the United States would be ‘bloody.’ He also promised to prosecute his political opponents, including, he wrote, lawyers, political operatives, donors, illegal voters, and election officials. Retired chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told journalist Bob Woodward that Trump is ‘a fascist to the core … the most dangerous person to this country.’

“On October 14, Trump told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that he thought enemies within the United States were more dangerous than foreign adversaries and that he thought the military should stop those ‘radical left lunatics’ on Election Day.”

Our mediocre media soft-pedals Trump’s overt fascism. Most Americans are strangely unconcerned about what Trump intends to do if he ever gets power again, because journalists are afraid that to tell them would sound shrill and unobjective. We even have a new term for how the media normalize Trump’s depravity to avoid sounding shrill — “sanewashing.”

But scholars like Heather Cox Richardson don’t have to care what Republicans or centrists think about what she writes. She writes for a smaller set of people. She has, I believe, 1.3 million subscribers on Substack, as well as 2 million followers on Facebook. That’s a lot of people, but it’s only 1.3 percent of the American population.

Richardson writes today about Dorothy Thompson, a journalist who was expelled from Germany in 1934. Thompson was a rare journalist who risked sounding shrill when what she was writing about was gruesomely ugly. She had written in 1931 that Hitler was a man of “startling insignificance.”

In Harper’s Magazine in 1934, she wrote:

“He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill poised and insecure. He is the very prototype of the little man.”

It seems that Dorothy Thompson analyzed everyone she met in the same way she analyzed Hitler. She wrote a fascinating piece for Harper’s Magazine in 1941, Who Goes Nazi? She asks us to imagine a parlor game at a large gathering of people. She describes twelve people in the room, whom she labels A through L, and asks whether they would “go Nazi.” She wants us to see how It Could Happen Here. People today are just the same as people were in 1941. For persons A through L, which types seem familiar? Whom do you like, and dislike, the most? Which one is Elon Musk? Is there a Liz Cheney in the room? For those of us who would never go Nazi, why?

It’s an odd paradox, and only the best of journalists and historians can get at it — how it can be that some of history’s greatest monsters also are pathetic little creeps.

Here’s another paradox. Given any major issue, the higher the stakes and the greater the controversy, the harder it is to find out what is really going on. Sources that depend on large audiences have to water things down so as not be accused of taking sides. But, somewhere in the fog of propaganda, there will be a few who are doing their best to get at the truth. Dorothy Thompson did it then. Heather Cox Richardson is doing it now.

Update: The New York Times seems to have had a fit of conscience:

As Election Nears, Kelly Warns Trump Would Rule Like a Dictator: John Kelly, the Trump White House’s longest-serving chief of staff, said that he believed that Donald Trump met the definition of a fascist.