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Scathing I don’t want people to kill insurance executives, and I don’t want insurance executives to kill people. But I am unsurprised that this happened. Indeed, I’m surprised that it took so long. It should not be controversial to note that if you run an institution that makes people furious, they will eventually become furious with you.
Suffice to say, however, being furious is not justification for gunning someone down.
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More Features, Not Bugs One of the worldviews that seems to appeal to the folks who are so excited about ChatGPT is “long-termism,” which assumes that humankind as a whole has a destiny, and that our tools will help us to reach it somewhat faster. What that destiny is, nobody knows. But work and education are hindrances to it, and, to the extent that they are necessary, should be sped through as quickly as possible. Since no real account is usually given of the thing that we are speeding to – it will involve space travel, algorithms, asteroid mining, and spreadsheets, but there’s a great nothing at its center – this worldview functions like nihilism. To me, work and education – like rest, love, worship, culture, strange hobbies, village pantomimes, dumb mistakes, chants that children jump rope to, heartbreaking last-quarter fumblings of the ball, graffiti on ugly bridges, all of it – are things we do because it is our job to be people.
Phil Christman, Plough, Dec 3 2024
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Foibles are Features As impersonal systems play increasing roles in information-gathering and decision-making, the personal element can be summed up as “human error.” … [T]hen of course the fields concerned with human nature—specifically, all the ways it is not predictable—are unseated, too…
[I]t is simply better to be a human when a personal God is at the heart of the universe. Human lives are easier to defend. Human joys have cosmic significance. Human foibles are “a feature, not a bug.” Human creativity is more arresting. Human language can be savored. Human stories must be told.
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A Treasure Malcolm Guite is posting poems he’s collected in his Advent Anthology, Waiting on the Word. I love to hear Malcolm read (and speak). Today’s offerings, a poem by Robert Hayden, and art by Linda Richardson, are particularly lovely.
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Sounds About Right [W]e are … not going back to a world where there is a set of trusted truth-mediating institutions, core sources of news and information that everyone recognizes and trusts, a “mainstream” of argument and opinion-shaping that sets the parameters of debate. – Ross Douthat, New York Times, 16 Nov. 2024
If true, then we’ll need to learn to think for ourselves. Not that I believe we will. Which is terrifying.
But lets work on it:
Lesson 1: Yes or No: Does hosting a gameshow make a person fit to be the President of the United States of America?
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What Might This Look Like in America? An imaginative conservatism should see in Scruton’s centring of beauty in architecture and design a natural affinity with the articulation of craft as a political and economic ideal in the likes of William Morris. There is a politics and an economics of conservatism to be forged, but it requires making of itself more than an aesthetic gloss of Reaganism.
Sebastian Milbank, “Don’t Idolise Roger Scruton”, The Critic, 03.Nov.2024
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RIP, Ted Olsen Executive power is important, and we respect it. But it has to be done the right way. It has to be done in an orderly fashion so that citizens can understand what is being done and people whose lives have depended on a governmental policy aren’t swept away arbitrarily and capriciously.
A principled and gifted lawyer and public servant. Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.
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Laura Olin [I keep coming back to] the fundamental text that is “Why must we go on?” / “Because there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.”
Is all this cringe? Undoubtedly; but I think we’ve entered a time that requires deep earnestness.
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True in every era; yet, it’s a smack in the face … the narrative on which many of us grew up no longer applies.
– Joan Didion - (h/t @ayjay)
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…well, we’ll live right on… From my friend, Dan Wilson:
… whatever the outcome… “well, we will live right on.” We will all go about doing what we do, get the kids off to school, go to work, do the laundry, and go about our lives. And that is as it should be because the greatest impact on our world does not come out of Washington anyway. It never has. Ultimately, it comes from each of us and how we live out our ordinary lives, our good deeds, humility, loving our neighbor, and loving God.
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