Month: January 2025

Real journalists start to fight back


Jennifer Rubin and Norman Eisen, at Substack

Yesterday, Jennifer Rubin resigned from the Washington Post and announced a new venture, based on Substack, called The Contrarian. Rubin and Norman Eisen have assembled a list of stellar contributors who are named in one of their first posts, On Meeting the Autocratic Moment.

Rubin and Eisen write:

Democracy faces an unprecedented threat from an authoritarian movement built on lies and contempt for the rule of law. The first and most critical defense of democracy—a robust, independent free press—has been missing in action. Corporate and billionaire media owners have shied away from confrontation, engaged in false equivalence, and sought to curry favor with Donald Trump. It is hardly surprising that readers and viewers are fleeing from these outlets. Americans need an alternative.

Regular readers of this blog know that I have long been a voice in the wilderness critical of a mainstream media that dropped the ball years and years ago. It started in 1996, with Fox News. Journalists at that time believed that it somehow violated their principles to plainly call a lie a lie. Instead, the new — and extremely dangerous — ethic of journalists was to write as though there were two sides to things. At a critical time in history when new technologies started putting newspapers out of business and made dispensing disinformation on social media incredibly cheap, it has taken about twenty-five years for authoritarians to hijack the American democracy. They did this by getting 77 million Americans to believe their lies.

Though it is extremely encouraging to see more and more journalists breaking away from publications owned by billionaires (such as the Washington Post), the truth is that journalists get much of the blame for where we are today. They could have decided years ago that truth was their highest principle. Instead, they bought into, and even doubled down on, the belief that their job was “balance,” to report “both sides,” thus becoming amplifiers of malignant right-wing and Republican narratives whose obvious goal was oligarchy. Journalists, most of them members of a blind herd, were unable to see what will happen when lies are treated as though they can be taken seriously.

What we are seeing now is anticipatory obedience, a horrifying new stage of failure. The previous ethic of “both sides” has now crumbled into at last taking sides — not with the truth, but with authoritarians. We know very well what this looks like. It is a form of corruption that has happened everywhere when authoritarians come to power.

At this point I have no idea how to reach the millions of Americans who can no longer distinguish truth from lies and who actually have come to love — and advocate for, and vote for, and troll for — what to the rest of us are obvious lies with obvious intentions.

There are not two sides to the story of where we are today. There never has been. Acknowledging that is not going to magically save us from those who are preparing to turn us into Russia. But it’s a start.

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.

Pathos vs. tragedy


Source: Gutenberg.org

I have long remembered an English professor, Emily Sullivan, elaborating on the distinction between pathos and tragedy. Pathos, she said, is merely sad. Pathos has no meaning. Pathos has none of the edifying characteristics of tragedy, such as a character’s downfall because of a fatal flaw.

If at that time I had read The Old Curiosity Shop, I think I would have asked her if the novel’s pathos made it a bad novel. I think she would have had to say yes, and I think I would have agreed.

Clearly Oscar Wilde would have agreed, too. He famously said that one would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the ending. I’m paraphrasing Wilde so as not to have a spoiler, in case you don’t know how The Old Curiosity Shop ends.

I love Charles Dickens, and thus it is hard to find that I hated The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) in much the same way I hated Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), and for the same reason — endings that combine cruelty and pathos with no redeeming meaning. That sets up an interesting discussion about whether the ending of Wuthering Heights (1847) is mere pathos. I would argue that for some mysterious reason Wuthering Heights rises above mere pathos, as though Catherine and Heathcliff were ghosts all along. But that’s a discussion that could go on for an hour or two, over a bottle or two of ale.

Still, I admire 19th Century readers, even though they loved The Old Curiosity Shop. They were patient, and they were smart. But their lives were harder than ours, so maybe it was easier for them to go along with stories in which bad things happen to good people. Here I should add that the villains in The Old Curiosity Shop all got their just deserts.

One sometimes hears people defending bad stories by saying, “But that’s the way life is.”

I detest that argument. Stories are stories precisely because they don’t have to be — shouldn’t be — like life. And any writer who gives heros and heroines anything other than their heart’s desire, and villains anything other than their just deserts, needs a good hard talking to. Therein is the key to tragedy. Tragic heroes fail to get their heart’s desire, because of a fatal flaw. That we understand and accept. But Nell Trent and Tess Durbeyfield did not have fatal flaws.

The Dark Enlightenment


The view from an upstairs window

It’s a bleak time for those of us who live in the world of ideas as much as in the real world. Today, unless gangs of violent and raging liberals egged on by Joe Biden storm the U.S. Capitol and try to prevent the Congress from certifying Trump as the winner of the November election, the Congress will … certify Trump as the winner of the November election. We liberals, creatures of the Enlightenment, can only grit our teeth and watch as democracy and the law take their course.

It’s a stunning piece of work. An elite of highly privileged people who openly hate democracy have used the institutions of democracy to advance their project of dismantling democracy. It takes a lot of lies to do that. It also takes a lot of people (77,303,573, to be precise) ignorant enough and foolish enough to fall for it.

And it also takes a lot of weakened institutions that could have stood in their way but didn’t, with the media, the justice department, and the courts at the top of the list.

I admit that, every day of late, I find myself pacing back and forth, from upstairs window to upstairs window, trying to figure out what is likely to happen in the next four years. But mostly, I think, what happens in the next four years is unpredictable.

We know what they want. We recoil at the horror of their ideas, best described as the Dark Enlightenment. We know that the men who are about to install themselves in the White House very much believe in this Dark Enlightenment and have a playbook.

But what’s unpredictable is what they actually will do, and to what degree the institutions of democracy remain strong enough to stand in their way. Even though they have a theoretical playbook, they have conflicting interests, and they are not nice people. We can expect them to waste a big part of their energy in conflict with each other, as opposed to conflict with the beast — the Enlightenment — that they all hate and want to overthrow. As JD Vance told a podcaster, “There is no way for a conservative to accomplish our vision of society unless we’re willing to strike at the heart of the beast. That’s the universities.”

Vance uses the word “conservatism” to describe the ideas that are threatened by the universities. I’d call it something else. It’s not just people that we’re up against. It’s also ideas, ideas that are very dark and very ugly.

For those of us who live in the world of ideas and thus know some history, these dark ideas, along with their ugly playbook, are things we’ve seen before. They want something that can’t be done without violence and a means of getting a lot of people out of their way. They’ve already used violence, and they’ve already made a lot of threats against people who are in their way. Now we will see how far they will go.