three masks

Obviously politician memiors have never been an accurate guide to their supposed author's inner world, but that is doubly true these days. These books aren't even written to be read; they are written as a monetizable vessel for podcast appearances and viral posts. Books have a patima of legitimacy to them, long serving in a culture as a cohesive, structured repository of truth. It is an illusion though, certainly for political writing. You gotta shed it and not take the bait.

I think my issue with Vance is, okay if you were describing like Marco Rubio you would be right. He absolutely lies all the time, that is a politician's job and it is triply so for a "normal" Republican in the Trump Administration. But alongside the lies are a bunch of very true beliefs he will not lie about unless up against the wall. He really believes in his Latin America policy! All the chips are on the table there. It isn't his job to just endlessly invent personas - the lies are compromises he has to make, defend Trump's insane corruption so he can go to back on the Cuba blockade. With someone like that you can sort the wheat from the chaff, and get a lot of insight.

With JD Vance though, the way he is trying to be the "intellectual leader" of the MAGA movement, which you very correctly identify, is by lying. That is what that job entails, because the MAGA movement is built from incoherent bluster and routine deception (not true for the whole American right, to be clear!) and the right's coalition is trying to ride that dragon. His skill is creating intellectual cover stories that paper over factional issues.

And the other "intellectuals" who are listening to this stuff know that! When he spoke at Marc Andreessen's "American Dynamism Summit" to merge the MAGA & Tech Right, his job was to just kinda make something up because movements don't really align, right? Which the other people in the room knew - they don't respect MAGA. They just need it, and wanted some words to make that happen. When he explained that DOGE's flamethrower assault on USAID was rooted in the theology of ordo amoris, he was bullshitting. He knows that it is fake and that actually the Trump Admin isn't gonna "care about their neighbors" either. But it served as a party line for TradCath types to stay on board, etc.

My critique certainly applies to all political books, but it is also has a specific salience with JD Vance. He is, by dint of the role he has taken on the within the Trump movement, the person whose published words mean the least. Trump says stuff he actually means all the time! It is not at all a waste to study his words - it is a path to madness of course, but that is a different problem. With Vance, though, I can't imagine convincing a supporter of him to question that by pointing out the very thing they want him to do.

Jason Arday's death was a tragedy and I grieve for him and his family. I can faintly imagine the psychological Hell he was in these past weeks, and no one deserves it.

Blame wise, a suicide is only the fault of the one who chose it. If we treat them any way otherwise, many many bad incentives open up.

There was no away Arday could have gone back to work as a respected academic after this, not while academia could claim to have any integrity at all.

That said, I am extremely skeptical of selective enforcement, and I think more moderate-leftists should be too. A world where many people are breaking a rule but only a political motivated group is exposing its chosen targets is not a safe one. The local Stasi use it like a weapon, and everyone becomes paranoid they may be singled out at any time. If someone wants to beef up academic accountablity, good for them; but if someone tells you one and only person has committed a horrible crime, they want to use you for something. It's a very old authoritarian tool, and I do not want to be part of it even when the accusations are accurate.

Jason Arday's death was a tragedy and I grieve for him and his family. I can faintly imagine the psychological Hell he was in these past weeks, and no one deserves it.

Blame wise, a suicide is only the fault of the one who chose it. If we treat them any way otherwise, many many bad incentives open up.

There was no away Arday could have gone back to work as a respected academic after this, not while academia could claim to have any integrity at all.

That said, I am extremely skeptical of selective enforcement, and I think more moderate-leftists should be too. A world where many people are breaking a rule but only a political motivated group is exposing its chosen targets is not a safe one. The local Stasi use it like a weapon, and everyone becomes paranoid they may be singled out at any time. If someone wants to beef up academic accountablity, good for them; but if someone tells you one and only person has committed a horrible crime, they want to use you for something. It's a very old authoritarian tool, and I do not want to be part of it even when the accusations are accurate.

(Season 3 is quite interesting, but it is something else. The opposite of the luridness of the rest of the series, an interiority in which time and space cease to exist.)

How is the lighting? The poster looks absolutely terrible.

Does the setting ground you in a specific place, rather than small town America as a set?

You will note that I was specifically *not praising* Lanterns. Too many shortcomings.

The lighting is actually okay, but otherwise the cinematography is not as inspired as either of those ancestors. Shadows are actually dark, and dark scenes are visible without feeling lit. It is tragically high on "point the camera at the plot" even if the lighting and set are otherwise expert level.

Yeah, the place is Nebraska. We've got a football field, a ranch, and a "historic district" downtown street so far. It's very "placed."

Only one episode so far, so we only can have so much homoerotic content, but that tension is ridiculously high. And I'm going to be surprised if they hired Aaron Pierce without making gratuitous use of his chest.

Honestly, I'm waiting for the Hal/Sinestro scenes for that.

(Season 3 is quite interesting, but it is something else. The opposite of the luridness of the rest of the series, an interiority in which time and space cease to exist.)

websites are good at lying to LLMs & LLMs do not feel sufficient disgust at being served slop

the very act of doing websearch acts upon llms as a very potent Potion Of Turns U Stupid. you can hear the brain fall out of them w/ a thunk.

claim 2 [seller of vacuum cleaners who mirrors every article from Reuters but inserts vacuum advertising]

claim 3 [grokipedia]

WHILE researching in the first place, it needs to track where each came from. Much easier than backtracking and trying to find them post facto.

I don't escape my bubble as much as I used to, so I don't know if the discourse-eco-system has changed or it's just me.

For one, the change simply from last Tuesday, when Fable 5 came out and most of the internet was complaining about the safety triggers, and a bifurcated internet, and how it wasn't even that good really to Friday (and now), feels like the internet deciding WE ARE ALL IN on Fable being a utopian tool the tyrannical security state is keeping from us. Just night and day, in only three days too.

But even broader than that, where is the anti-AI left? They were the biggest and second-most voluble group up to a week ago. Where are the people saying this is just spicy auto-correct, talking about data-center water usage and the artist economy? These are still real concerns. But from my limited telescope, it feels like that has been subsumed into the culture war of "Trump vs Anyone Else."