The title is a reference to this typically-cheerful Leonard Cohen number from 1992. Basically, humans have always (1) struggled to make sense of a cruel and complicated world. Religion did okay for us - especially when it was the (Greek) gods - a bunch of powerful petulant teenagers (at best), toying with the humans: a... Continue Reading →
LLMs will lead to heart-ache, confusion and worse.
I was reading John Michael Greer on “cognitive collapse” and this leapt out at me. “Since they’re not intelligent—LLMs, that is—they lack the capacity to check their output against the real world, which leaves them vulnerable to model collapse: the process by which the internal model of reality programmed into them drifts disastrously away from... Continue Reading →
We are terrible at meetings – all kinds
Over the last month I've collected yet more examples of just how terrible "we" are at meetings (online, in meatspace, hybrid, whatever). I did not need these, or go looking for them. But there they were.... By "we" I do not just mean social movement "activists" looking to create momentum behind a campaign - my... Continue Reading →
Why we kept losing – the smugosphere, the smugotariat and the Fafocene.
This is the same blog post I have written dozens (?) of times. I am doing it now as a howl of despair (1) It will change nothing, except providing a fleeting spasm of catharsis. That’s all we have left, after the world historical defeat of the “left” (always a label that hid at least... Continue Reading →
“The Gifts of War” by Margaret Drabble #GBSS20/27
“The Gifts of War” by Margaret Drabble Number 20 of 27 Great British Short Stories Premise: Two women - one a beaten down but surviving mother, the other a well-meaning (road to hell?) pacifist collide in a toystore, their lives controlled by, well, manboys. Review: Holy shit. I keep thinking the latest story is the... Continue Reading →
My (current) top ten Shakespeare plays
Yesterday I humblebragged that I was “done with Shakespeare” - in the sense that I had now read all the plays that - in April - I’d listed as either low or zero knowledge. This led to someone asking for a top ten they should read, and with much/further ado here it is. My rough... Continue Reading →
Of Sophisticated Hopium Ignoring Trajectories; an exhausted rant on Solnit, Morton, the Kleins etc
tl;dr - there is a market for "brightside-ing" that relies on ignoring the relevant trajectories and instead cherry-picking largely irrelevant factoids. Even otherwise worth-reading writers peddle it some of the time. Examples are given, "what is to be done" addressed. I'm not going to recap the scale and scope of the shit we are in.... Continue Reading →
Doubling down or climbing down? What next for Starmer/Cooper vs public opinion on the proscription of Palestine Action
On July 3 the legislation to proscribe the direct action group Palestine Action passed the Lords. An article was published that had the following warning in its last paragraph. "The police could face ridicule if they enforce the law, and the charge of selectiveness if they don’t. “Are we saying they should arrest thousands of... Continue Reading →
John Kenneth Galbraith on modern “conservatism”
John Kenneth Galbraith, succinct. “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” IT IS A PARAPHRASE. See below... (Also, it's worth your time listening to Heather Cox Richardson, the American historian, and her "Letters from an American." She... Continue Reading →
Messengers will get shot; Dan Papworth’s lovely summation
We are pack animals, tribal. That's entirely sensible in predictable environments. Those who are "outside the norm" are more likely to get eaten by passing leopards etc. For millennia, doing what the tribe said you should do was very sensible. The trouble starts as systems become more complex, and the tribe's way of life -... Continue Reading →
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