Weekly Grounding #47
News, links, writing
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.
“Is AI About to Kill What’s Left of Journalism?”
Rana Faroohar reflects on The Financial Times’ recent deal with OpenAI, which permits the tech company to train its large language models on FT content. The details of the deal were not disclosed to FT journalists, and Faroohar “worr[ies] that we are about to see a repeat of what happened in the mid- to late-1990s, when media companies bought into Silicon Valley’s line that ‘information wants to be free’ and didn’t take a hard line on protecting the copyright and value of their content.”
Faroohar observes that “These days, there are two ways to be in news. You can be the 1,000-pound gorilla, like The New York Times, which has reached escape velocity with more than 10mn subscribers. Or, you can be a high-end premium subscription organisation, which is the FT model. I’ve always thought that the latter was the better proposition, and an easier one to defend. It survived the last round of digital ‘creative destruction’ over the past 20 years. How will it fare in the next? I honestly don’t know the answer to that question.”
“Triggered: Free Speech and the Brazen Hypocrisy of the Right”
exposes the American right’s hypocrisy on free speech at . He contrasts the right’s (commendable) defense of those protesting covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates with its subsequent calls to quash the current anti-war demonstrations: “But now that there’s a protest movement they disagree with, the right has adopted wholesale the authoritarian tactics they once claimed to deplore. After demonstrations broke out in multiple American cities against Israel’s war on Gaza, [Congressman Dan] Bishop pantomimed Trudeau’s demagoguery, asking whether ‘pro-Hamas protests’ constitute a ‘foreign malign influence operation.’ Elon Musk, who once tweeted that ‘Canadian truckers rule’ and has denounced restrictions on free speech in Canada, Brazil, and the U.S., now claims that the pro-Palestinian student movement is ‘openly antisemitic’ and boosts accounts that have called for its censorship. Donald Trump, who complained for years about online censorship of conservatives including himself, called for the banning of pro-Palestinian groups from college campuses.”Woodhouse concludes: “Many Americans would be surprised to learn that, unlike in many Western European countries, in the United States, so-called ‘hate speech’ is also protected speech. Because of this failure to appreciate the First Amendment’s scope, it sounds more reasonable to suppress it. This is why the left portrays the articulation of every conservative view as an expression of bigotry while pleading for it to be censored. In the world before October 7, 2023, the right ridiculed the left for this transparent ploy. Now, they’re doing the exact same thing. The most astonishing part is that they seem to expect us not to notice.
For more on this topic, see my articles at Handful of Earth, “The ‘Free Speech’ Right Embraces Cancel Culture” and “In Defense of Woke Zoomers.”
“How Counterprotesters at U.C.L.A. Provoked Violence, Unchecked for Hours”
The New York Times chronicles how campus security and police allowed Zionist counterprotestors to violently attack the protest encampment at UCLA for nearly five hours: “The videos showed counterprotesters attacking students in the pro-Palestinian encampment for several hours, including beating them with sticks, using chemical sprays and launching fireworks as weapons. As of Friday, no arrests had been made in connection with the attack.”
The response was to punish the protestors rather than the counterprotestors: “The night after the [counterprotestors’] attack began, law enforcement warned pro-Palestinian demonstrators to leave the encampment or be arrested. By early Thursday morning, police had dismantled the encampment and arrested more than 200 people from the encampment.”
“Has the War Against Palestine Killed Jewish Comedy?”
At Counterpunch, Stephen F. Eisenman recounts the golden age of Jewish comedy in America followed by its steady decline. He writes that “The war against the Palestinians in Gaza has been the coup de grace for Jewish comedy. Not only are images of parents cradling dead children not funny, Israel’s response to global criticism has turned Jews everywhere into pariahs, but not like the itinerant schlemiels and schlimazels of traditional Jewish humor. By insisting the war is being fought not just on behalf of Israeli Jews, but the entire diaspora, Jews everywhere are made accessories to crime. When the Columbia University chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, renounced that claim, they were themselves condemned as anti-Semitic, and suspended from the university. There may be irony in an Egyptian-born, British-American university president, Minouche (Baroness) Shafik, suspending a Jewish peace organization on charges of anti-Semitism, but little comedy.”
“A Pagan and an Orthodox Christian Walk into a Podcast”
interviews on the Re/al/ign podcast at . They discuss the definition and timeline of “the Machine,” the impulse behind transhumanism, the differences between the Western church and Eastern Orthodoxy, and the relationship between paganism and Christianity, among other topics. It’s well worth listening to in full. “The Ambling Mind”
meditates on the “revolutionary” act of walking at : “I’ve lately heard a great deal about how writing is a form of thinking. There is a stronger sense in which one could take that claim, but it at least means that the practice of writing, in its material and embodied dimensions, is conducive to and even sustains specific forms of thinking. In the same way, we might perhaps say that walking is a practice that is conducive to certain modes of thought. We can walk in order to think, just as some might write in order to think. My sense is that this has something to do with the pacing of our thoughts. Both writing and waking, each in their own way, seem to calibrate the tempo of our minds to the rhythm of thought.”He concludes: “To walk, then, is to inhabit a fitting scale and speed. It is the scale and speed at which our bodies are able to find their fit in the world, and the world rewards us by spurring our thinking and disclosing itself to us. Perhaps this is the deeper fitness we should actually be after.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.
The left, with its lockdowns, pronouns, masks, Russophobia, mandates and Female erasure, and the right, with its imperialism, racism, militarism, xenophobia and antiabortionism, are Opposite Wings of the Same Vulture. There is no electoral solution. One must exit and start over from scratch.
The point of AI is to replace humans, period, in every facet of society.
And good one by Woodhouse about the pro-censorship turn by the "right." "Left" and "right" have for a long time been two wings of the same capitalist bird.
One could say this has been the case since the first time social democrats took over a national government, in Germany on 11/9/1918, two days before the Armistice which ended the WWI fighting between the big powers. The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) went on to bloodily put down a mass nationwide insurrection by workers and rank and file military personnel, a process which went on for several years. Among the dead were former SPD parliament members Rosa Luxemburg and Kerl Liebknecht. This has set the pace, right to today's lockdown-enforcing social-democrat-run regimes.
[EDIT to add: actually, by that point in 1918, it had been a year since the Bolsheviks, a party which believed in enacting a social democratic program via the seizure of state power by force, rather than elections. had already imposed a capitalist program ("state capitalist") upon the Russian working class. See Maurice Brinton "Bolsheviks and Workers' Control, 1917-1921," 1970.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/brinton/1970/workers-control/
"They discuss the definition and timeline of “the Machine,” the impulse behind transhumanism, the differences between the Western church and Eastern Orthodoxy, and the relationship between paganism and Christianity, among other topics. It’s well worth listening to in full. "
Sounds very interesting, thanks. Indeed thanks for every single item here. So glad to have come upon this Substack, which i've added to my list of recommendations.