Cui bono?

The Republicans passed their horrible, evil tax plan. Guess who is going to benefit? This Koch scion.

Jesus. If all he was was a guy with bad taste with a shirt business, fine, OK, sure, express yourself, let’s see if you can make a go of it with a business selling your ugly shirts. But no, he’s just a parasite with rich relatives. He can’t fail.

Once upon a time I worried that all the right-wing militias were going to tear up this country. But it’s looking more and more like it’s going to have to be revolution against the undeserving rich, and the chickenshits who parade around with guns are going to be on the wrong side.

Snowflakes! Snowflakes everywhere!

I’ve already expressed my opinion on Star Wars: The Last Jedi: it was a movie. It was OK. I’m not as enthused as some.

But still, there were some excellent notes in that movie that only sunk in after a while. It did a great job of inclusion. As we all know, representation matters, and also, it’s silly to assume that the science fiction future (or in a galaxy long ago and far way) would be a little bubble of contemporary American culture.

Also, the heroes of the story were all women who were representing caution and restraint and careful planning, while the bad guys were all paragons of toxic masculinity. Look at Kylo Ren, with his temper tantrums and his obsessions; Snoke, who could have been Tywin Lannister for all his greedy scheming; even the two good guys, Poe and Finn, were impulsive dumbasses whose half-baked ideas for sudden victory all failed and almost wrecked the brilliant, well thought out plans of Leia and Holdo.

And now there is the predictable petition to strike Star Wars Episode VIII from the official canon. You have got to be kidding me. Someone is taking Star Wars way too seriously.

This is not a chapter of your holy books. It’s a movie that a lot of people liked very much. There is no inviolable body of dogma; Disney did not slap an official label of “Sacred Precepts of the Prophet George Lucas” on the title screen that you can have scraped off. People will decide whether they like it or not without regard for its sanctioned status in some imaginary list of “real” Star Wars movies.

Over 35,000 people have signed this inane petition.

I should start a petition to damn all the people who signed that petition to hell. It would have as much effect.

There is an analogy to be made between Peter Jackson’s movies and giant predatory robot cities

Wait, what? Peter Jackson is actually making a movie of Mortal Engines, the novel about giant predatory cities roaming a post-apocalyptic landscape?

Ambitious. Let’s hope he doesn’t plan to turn the first novel into a sprawling nine-movie series with buckets of extra ideas poured in. I don’t know if he can make a lean, exciting story any more.

It’s possible

This is a good article about the alien bubble silicon valley is rolling around in. What shocked me most was this one incredibly stupid comment.

On his blog, Y Combinator president Sam Altman argued that political correctness was damaging the tech industry. This is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics, he wrote.

If it helps, Altman himself is gay.

No, it doesn’t help.

Altman himself is an entrepreneur, which seems to mean he hustles and shuffles money around, but hasn’t actually accomplished anything himself. He certainly hasn’t said anything novel about physics — he’s a college dropout, and his physics knowledge is probably somewhat less than mine, which isn’t saying a lot. Go ahead, check out his Wikipedia page, and tell me what he has done.

And that’s my objection to his statement — he has zero evidence for the idea that tolerating homophobia benefits science, or that a culture that actively promotes tolerance by rejecting bigotry is somehow equivalent to an oppressive culture that punishes people for their sexual orientation. I’ll just point out that it was people saying disparaging things about gay people that led to the chemical castration and suicide of Alan Turing. Germany had many prominent scientists and engineers in the 1930s, and supported science well, but also had the idea that Jews were bad, and so America was gifted with Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, Enrico Fermi, John von Neumann, Leo Szilard, James Franck, Edward Teller, Rudolf Peierls, and Klaus Fuchs. One of my graduate advisors, George Streisinger, was a Hungarian Jew whose family fled the Nazis.

These are all equivalently stupid.

It’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about women if we want them to be able to say novel things about computer science.

It’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about black Americans if we want them to be able to say novel things about refrigeration technology.

It’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about Jews if we want them to be able to say novel things about biology.

When you string it together that way, one thing that you ought to notice is the word “people”. Who? What people? It is the assumption about the identity of people: they are non-gay, non-woman, non-black, non-Jews. They are, of course, rich white men, like the ones who populate the Silicon Valley tech bubble. We have to allow rich white men to say whatever they want in order to allow them to reinvent bodegas, reinvent the bus, reinvent food, and do all those other irrelevant things that will make the privileged richer.

It’s possible. It’s possible. It’s possible. “It’s possible” is not an evidence-based statement in support of a policy. It is the kind of open-ended, vague weasely string of words disconnected from cause and effect that allows great evil to thrive in the crevices of its ambiguity.

It’s possible that if we cook and eat the flesh of Sam Altman, we’ll become immortal gods on Earth. Won’t know until we try.

Russia isn’t the issue — it’s our vulnerability to exploitation that matters

Who’s at fault for the Trump presidency? Ariel Dorfman says it so well. It’s not the Russians, it’s us.

I’m tired of hearing about how Russia intervened in the recent U.S. election and tired of the talk about collusion, and I’m especially fed up with the speculation that all this will doom the Trump presidency.

My weariness is not due to a lack of indignation at how a foreign country covertly helped a reckless con man become president. And I would certainly celebrate if the uncovering of crimes forced President Trump to abandon the White House and slink back to his tower. But I fear that the Russia investigations — and the hope that they will save the republic — are turning too many opponents of this administration into passive, victimized spectators of a drama performed by remote actors over which they have no control.

The psychic, intellectual and emotional energy expended on this issue would be better employed, I believe, by addressing a more fundamental concern: What was it, what is it, in our American soul that allowed the Russians to be successful?

Short of evidence that Russian hackers explicitly flipped voting machines, all they did was feed false information to a receptive audience that wanted to believe what Fake News was selling. We keep looking for an external cause for an American failure, and the real cause is right here at home: a wealthy oligarchy that’s been wrecking education for decades, that feeds the sense of entitlement of racist white people, that discourages taking a close look at policies and practices of the military-industrial complex, because that’s become a wonderful money funnel for the rich. Both Republicans and Democrats have been supporting a system of oppression that keeps the electorate fat, stupid, and greedy, and makes them easily manipulable. That we’re also vulnerable to manipulation by foreign sources is our fault, our weakness.

Real patriots would have been working for the last several decades to make the electorate better educated, better able to evaluate information, and more critical of our government. That’s where the strength of a democracy lies, and we’ve been undermining it for generations. Instead, we’ve built up a population that listens to Fox & Friends uncritically, that keeps Alex Jones and Ann Coulter in business, that thinks their illusory notions about what God is thinking is a path to truth.

The investigation into the Russian conspiracies is a good thing — if it ends a dangerous and corrupt regime, I’m all for it. But it’s superficial. At best, it’s going to flip open a manhole cover that will expose the sewer of the American id. The real test will be whether we can then dive in and clean up our own problems.

Another piece that places the blame squarely on the science establishment, as it should

For years we’ve been seeing women rise through the training ranks of academic science, experiencing fearsome attrition, but we said that men were also being weeded out by grad school and post-doc positions and the harsh competition to land a tenure-track position. And then we noticed that a smaller proportion of women were actually getting those jobs, so we mostly shrugged our shoulders and said, well, it’s a painful grind to get there, so it must be fair (how intolerable it would be if we all suffered unnecessarily, after all), and so the ladies must simply be less capable of handling the rigors of a career in science — said rigors being the same obstacles that the Men of Science created and put in place. We talked about estrogen and “nurturers” as if those were inimical to doing science, instead of irrelevant (although I try to imagine a culture of science that were more nurturing and supportive and cooperative, and can’t help but think that that would be so much better). We try to pretend that hey, these differences in outcomes are purely biological or genetic or hormonal, and gosh, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, maybe we’ll answer the question of how it happens later, if we just throw more men at the analysis.

I think the question has been answered repeatedly. People have written at length about the answer. It seems that every month there’s another piece that summarizes the real source of the problem — the latest, and it’s a good one, is in Marie Claire magazine. The answer, as always, is the same.

Male scientists are the product of a misogynistic culture, and they like to pretend that they’re objective, self-aware participants in that culture, even when they’re oblivious, and see exploitation of women as their due. It’s droit du seigneur for the 21st century. We’re not going to fix it until more men wake up, or, since that’s unlikely, more women crack the ranks of science and slap the men awake.

Or we can just wait for the old male scientists to die off.

Republican royalty

Track Palin, son of Sarah and Todd Palin, was arrested for breaking and entering. Ooh-er, it is a sordid story.

He apparently was doped to the gills on alcohol and painkillers, and had broken into the house and beaten up his father for denying him a truck or car, and then strutted about the house while armed. My favorite line in the police report is this one:

Communication was attempted which failed due to Track yelling and calling myself and other officers peasants and telling us to lay our guns on the ground before approaching the residence.

The family really does think of themselves as royalty, don’t they? Comes with being a Republican, I guess. Their prominence is a legacy from John McCain, after all.

I’m more afraid of Elon Musk than I am of rogue AIs

Ted Chiang cuts straight to the heart of issue: it’s not artificial intelligence we should fear, it’s capitalism and its smug, oblivious, excessively wealthy leaders.

This summer, Elon Musk spoke to the National Governors Association and told them that “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.” Doomsayers have been issuing similar warnings for some time, but never before have they commanded so much visibility. Musk isn’t necessarily worried about the rise of a malicious computer like Skynet from The Terminator. Speaking to Maureen Dowd for a Vanity Fair article published in April, Musk gave an example of an artificial intelligence that’s given the task of picking strawberries. It seems harmless enough, but as the AI redesigns itself to be more effective, it might decide that the best way to maximize its output would be to destroy civilization and convert the entire surface of the Earth into strawberry fields. Thus, in its pursuit of a seemingly innocuous goal, an AI could bring about the extinction of humanity purely as an unintended side effect.

This scenario sounds absurd to most people, yet there are a surprising number of technologists who think it illustrates a real danger. Why? Perhaps it’s because they’re already accustomed to entities that operate this way: Silicon Valley tech companies.

Consider: Who pursues their goals with monomaniacal focus, oblivious to the possibility of negative consequences? Who adopts a scorched-earth approach to increasing market share? This hypothetical strawberry-picking AI does what every tech startup wishes it could do — grows at an exponential rate and destroys its competitors until it’s achieved an absolute monopoly. The idea of superintelligence is such a poorly defined notion that one could envision it taking almost any form with equal justification: a benevolent genie that solves all the world’s problems, or a mathematician that spends all its time proving theorems so abstract that humans can’t even understand them. But when Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holds-barred capitalism.

I’ve always thought the dread of AIs was overblown and absurd and not at all a concern. Chiang exposes it for what it is, the fear that lies in the id of Musk, and Bezos, and Zuckerberg, and every greedy gazillionaire who is frantically pointing “over there!” to distract us from looking at where they’re standing: the fear that someone else might be as rapacious as they are.

Why am I seeing this everywhere?

It’s odd. Suddenly, in social media and email, I’m seeing this little cartoon everywhere.

Why does Trent Reznor have a reputation for ruining Christmas? I had Nine Inch Nails cranked up on the stereo all weekend — I’m home alone, and it’s great music for grading. I’m in the godless Christmas spirit already!

Also, I found Nine Inch Nöels. Finally, some good Christmas carols.

Definitely not safe for work, though.