Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
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“The Wary, Warming, Wildly Consequential Alliance of Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani”
The New York Times traces the history of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohraan Mamdani’s relationship, reporting that “the political fortunes of the nation’s pre-eminent young progressives are entwined, whether or not this was either’s intention, in a cautious but burgeoning alliance between two former insurgent underdogs who happen to represent the same patch of Queens.”
The article notes that “While both have been caricatured on the right as champagne socialists, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez worked before seeking office in the kinds of service jobs, as a waitress and bartender, that Mr. Mamdani would never need as the son of an esteemed filmmaker and academic. While Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is now a fourth-term congresswoman, Mr. Mamdani is seeking to jump several rungs from recently obscure local official to the job often described as the second-most difficult in American politics.
“And while both have warm ties to leaders and members of the D.S.A., especially in New York, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s recent history with the group has been far knottier. Some in the national D.S.A. have pushed a censure resolution accusing Ms. Ocasio-Cortez of ‘tacit support of Zionism,’ suggesting that she has been too equivocating in her denunciations of Israel. She is no longer endorsed by the national D.S.A., though she remains endorsed by its New York City chapter. Mr. Mamdani, by contrast, has often been held up as the D.S.A. gold standard—not merely aligned with the organization but central to its efforts, steeping himself in its local campaigns.”
“A would-be mayor who has said he does not believe there should be billionaires has met with the billionaire former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, among other business leaders,” the Times reports. “He has distanced his campaign from some elements of the national D.S.A. platform, with relatively little pushback from influential members of his base.”
“In her public role as a surrogate for Mr. Mamdani, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has focused more often on another wing of the party, urging mainstream Democratic holdouts to get in line. That list has included the Democratic leaders of each congressional chamber, who are both New Yorkers: Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries. ‘I am very concerned about the example that is being set,’ Ms. Ocasio-Cortez told reporters recently. ‘If an individual doesn’t want to support the party’s nominee now, it complicates their ability to ask voters to support any nominee later.’ Earlier in the summer, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez shepherded Mr. Mamdani around Washington for a good-will meet-and-greet, introducing him to lawmakers stunned at his victory and discussing lessons from his primary.”
“Why Left-Populism Lacks Momentum”
On the topic of the electoral left,
discusses the Democrats’ struggles outside of metropolitan cities like New York for : He observes that the “dilemma for reformers and insurgents on the broad left…is that the pillars of a seemingly popular, left-leaning economic agenda are well known but haven’t yet challenged Trumpism’s political dominance.”“Consider what resonates with working-class voters,” Vassallo writes. “Social Security and universal health care are popular. So are higher wages and stronger collective bargaining rights. So is more affordable housing. So is ‘making more stuff’ in America. Grassroots demand for tougher enforcement of the nation’s antitrust laws continues to gain traction (including in deep-red states). This is terrain that almost axiomatically favors economic populists and progressives. So why aren’t independents and working-class voters who have defected to the right instantly buying what progressives have to offer?
“Some partisans will rehash the argument that these voters, polarized by the culture wars, have become blind to the right’s nefarious motives and deaf to the left’s entreaties. But the reason the left’s economic pitch lacks momentum isn’t because millions of ordinary voters are apathetic about an epochal surge in inequality or ‘duped’ into voting against their interests. It is because globalization, technological change, and other issues that affect the distribution of decent work and opportunity have injected more complexity into the lives of households struggling to maintain a foothold and plan for the future. And the left, weighed down by its own agnostic views of development and national progress, has grown divided over how to best respond to this complexity.”
The article continues: “Voters reeling from high costs are similarly uncertain about which political program can deliver clear benefits without difficult trade-offs. Convinced that elites have rigged the economy, working Americans across the ideological spectrum are in a burn-it-all-down mood. Many, though, are also wary of major interventions, from high tariffs to bold climate targets, that might make affording a decent life more burdensome. Accordingly, their political decision-making—to the extent they even have time for politics beyond the latest headlines—is arguably guided by a simple but reasonable question: Which political party is, on net, going to make my life easier?”
Vassallo goes on to observe that, “Since Al Gore’s 2000 campaign, Democrats have struggled to offset perceptions they have no convincing answer for workers displaced by trade, decarbonization, and sectoral trends that have largely favored superstar cities. From the perspective of forgotten Americans, these trends are interconnected. Trade competition and corporate consolidation have wiped out high-wage manufacturing jobs and small businesses. ‘Onerous’ regulations, meanwhile, have indeed sometimes curbed expansion in resource extraction, cutting off other avenues for growth in micropolitan and rural areas that have few other ways to attract investment….This deficit of viable economic activity is acutely felt by disadvantaged Americans, as it seems to have no end in sight. And it has reinforced the concentration of wealth, opportunity, social capital, and R&D in major metros whose professional class constituencies have benefited the most from globalization and who are better positioned to adopt green technologies.”
“Jeffrey Epstein Helped Broker Israeli Security Agreement”
At
, and break a story on Jeffrey Epstein’s active involvement in the advancement of Israeli military interests: “Jeffrey Epstein used his political network and financial resources to help broker a security cooperation agreement between the governments of Israel and Mongolia, according to a trove of leaked emails from former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. This new set of emails between Barak and Epstein has largely been ignored by the mainstream press, but includes crucial new context on Epstein’s operation.”“Messages spanning from 2013 to 2016 show intimate, oftentimes daily correspondence between Barak and Epstein. Their conversations address political and business strategy as Epstein coordinated meetings for Barak with other members of his elite circles. In 2008, Epstein pled guilty to charges of ‘procuring a minor for prostitution’; Barak has denied knowledge of Epstein’s sex trafficking and abuse of minors.”
The article reports that, “In the shadows of Israel’s cyber [surveillance and weapons industry] boom was Jeffrey Epstein, who exploited his network of political and financial elites to help Barak, and ultimately the Israeli government itself, to increase the penetration of Israel’s spy-tech firms into foreign countries. Epstein actively supported the Israeli intelligence industry via venture capital investments and contributions to charitable organizations—‘non-governmental’ entities that laid the foundation for official Israeli security deal-making. The story of Israel’s 2017 security agreement with Mongolia is a window into the true nature and scope of Epstein’s operation.”
“Epstein’s alleged ties to foreign governments and intelligence agencies have been a source of speculation for years,” Hussain and Grim write. “But his role in the Mongolia Advisory Board plan and his intimate contacts with Barak, private sector tech firms tied to Israel’s security establishment, influential non-governmental organizations, and senior foreign government officials, show for the first time that he engaged in activities that altered the relationship between states—in this case, building formal security ties between the government of Israel and Mongolia.”
For more on Epstein’s lesser-known activities, see my article, “Jeffrey Epstein and the Cult of Scientism.”
“Americans’ Support for Israel Dramatically Declines, Times/Siena Poll Finds”
Corroborating The Economist’s findings featured in last week’s Weekly Grounding, The New York Times reports that “Nearly two years into the war in Gaza, American support for Israel has undergone a seismic reversal, with large shares of voters expressing starkly negative views about the Israeli government’s management of the conflict, a new poll from The New York Times and Siena University found. Disapproval of the war appears to have prompted a striking reassessment by American voters of their broader sympathies in the decades-old conflict in the region, with slightly more voters siding with Palestinians over Israelis for the first time since The Times began asking voters about their sympathies in 1998.”
The article reports that “A majority of American voters now oppose sending additional economic and military aid to Israel, a stunning reversal in public opinion since the Oct. 7 attacks. About six out of 10 voters said that Israel should end its military campaign, even if the remaining Israeli hostages were not released or Hamas was not eliminated. And 40 percent of voters said Israel was intentionally killing civilians in Gaza, nearly double the number of voters who agreed with that statement in the 2023 poll.”
“The survey also hints at challenges for the U.S.-Israel alliance in the future,” the report notes. “Israel has been the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign aid since its founding in 1948, receiving hundreds of billions of dollars in support. Younger voters, regardless of party, were less likely to back continuing that support. Nearly seven in 10 voters under 30 said they opposed additional economic or military aid.”
“AI Is Grown, Not Built”
At The Atlantic, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares discuss the existential threats posed by AI: “Artificial intelligence is software, but it is not human-designed and hand-crafted like any traditional program is. Instead, modern AI is grown, a bit like an organism. In important ways, the undertaking is closer to how a human gets made. Engineers understand the process that results in an AI, but they don’t much understand the AI that results.”
They go on to explain how AI is different from other software: “Nobody understands how all of the numbers and processes within an AI make the program talk. The numbers aren’t hidden, any more than the DNA of humans is hidden from someone who had their genome sequenced. You could, in principle, look at all of a human baby’s genes—strings of DNA that would say things like ‘CATTCA.’ However, you probably wouldn’t bother to do that, because you’d know that just staring at the DNA letters wouldn’t tell you how the grown-up person would think or act.
“The relationship that biologists have with DNA is pretty much the relationship that AI engineers have with the numbers inside an AI. Indeed, biologists know far more about how DNA turns into biochemistry and adult traits than engineers understand about how the numbers inside an AI yield cogent conversation and useful behavior. Biologists have been at the job for decades longer.
“Similarly, nobody can look at the raw numbers in a given AI and ascertain how well that particular one will play chess; to figure that out, engineers can only run the AI and see what happens. Whatever gradient descent stumbled into, that’s what the big heap of numbers will do. The machine exhibiting that behavior is not some carefully crafted device whose each and every part we understand.”
Of the wanton push to develop superintelligent AI, Yudkowsky and Soares write: “This is not the behavior of people who are carefully creating traditional software. This is the behavior of people who are growing a whole new sort of creature and then taking whatever they get.”
Soares did a recent interview on the topic that is well worth a listen. I also discuss Yudkowsky and the philosophical implications of existential risk in “Telos or Transhumanism?”
“Global AI Giants Target India’s Youth in Emerging Market Push”
Meanwhile, the more quotidian impacts of AI continue to increase globally. The Financial Times reports that multinational AI companies are targeting Indian youth in order to penetrate “emerging markets” with chatbot technologies: “Two of the world’s largest artificial intelligence companies are moving deeper into India, aiming to tap the world’s most populous country for new users and use it as a test bed for expansion into other emerging markets. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and the AI search engine Perplexity launched India-specific plans and products this summer, targeting the country’s vast number of young and price-conscious consumers.”
“India would provide a single and inexpensive market for AI to train on data sets, offering ‘very significant data advantages, and these companies could benefit from that,’ said [Mahesh] Makhija…technology consulting leader in India at EY…The data would assist in creating agents to help users do different tasks, which was their ‘holy grail’…[D]ata shows downloads of AI apps are up more than 500 per cent so far this year in India, compared with the same period in 2024…”
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.