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 Group Behind Project 2025 Has a Plan to Crush the Pro-Palestinian Movement”
The New York Times reports on “Project Esther, the [Heritage Foundations’s] proposal to rapidly dismantle the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States, along with its support at schools and universities, at progressive organizations and in Congress. Drafted in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel in 2023 and the mounting protests against the war in Gaza, Project Esther outlined an ambitious plan to fight antisemitism by branding a broad range of critics of Israel as ‘effectively a terrorist support network,’ so that they could be deported, defunded, sued, fired, expelled, ostracized and otherwise excluded from what it considered ‘open society.’”
“By summer 2024, Heritage had finalized a national strategy that aimed to convince the public to perceive the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States as part of a global ‘Hamas Support Network’ that ‘poses a threat not simply to American Jewry, but to America itself…’ The pitch materials…included goals such as reforming academia (defunding institutions, denying certain pro-Palestinian groups access to campuses and removing faculty) and lawfare (filing civil lawsuits, identifying foreigners vulnerable to deportation). Other initiatives included plans to enlist support from state and local law enforcement and to ‘generate uncomfortable conditions’ so that groups could not conduct protests.”
For more about the attacks on free speech critical of Israel, see “The ‘Free Speech’ Right Embraces Cancel Culture” and “In Defense of Woke Zoomers” here at Handful of Earth.
“Is FIRE Really for Free Speech?”
Regarding criticism of Israel,
reports on the the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s (FIRE) ambiguous stance on free speech surrounding this particular issue: “Ever since the ACLU forfeited its status as the premiere free speech legal advocacy group in America by becoming little more than a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has thrived. It filled the space the ACLU has left vacant since at least 2016, filing lawsuit after lawsuit in defense of the First Amendment rights of both liberal and conservative speakers. But on one issue—Israel’s war on Gaza—FIRE’s defense of free speech appears less than absolute.”He writes that “the group has scolded pro-Palestinian student activists for engaging in ‘disruptive protest’ on private property and for using drums and bullhorns, proclaiming in the latter case that the students ‘should be punished.’ FIRE’s CEO has called the pro-Palestinian protests of the last two years ‘mob censorship’ and ‘an absolute disaster for campus freedom of speech’ and accused protesters, without evidence, of targeting Jews.”
Woodhouse concludes: “With the overt politicization of the ACLU, FIRE is meant to be the standard bearer for the principled defense of free expression in America. But on this one issue it appears to have competing priorities—and that issue happens to be the one in the crosshairs of the Trump administration. Whether you believe that FIRE is hindering the White House in its sweeping attacks on political dissent or providing it with political cover may depend on one’s personal feelings about Israel and the war it is waging.”
I have written on my own personal experience with FIRE in “Why Free Speech? (Part 1).”
“AI Is the Future of War”
Leslie Alan Horvitz writes an extensive report on artificial intelligence and war at Asia Times. The section on Ukraine as a testing ground for AI warfare is particularly important and illustrates the fluid boundaries between “civilian” and “military” artificial intelligence uses: “Ever since the Russian invasion, launched in 2022, Ukraine has become a testing ground for AI in warfare. Outgunned and outmanned, Ukrainian forces have resorted to improvisation, jerry-rigging off-the-shelf devices to transform them into lethal autonomous weapons…By using code found online and hobbyist computers like Raspberry Pi, easily obtained from hardware stores, Ukrainians are able to construct innovative killer robots. Apart from drones, which can be operated with a smartphone, Ukrainians have built a gun turret with autonomous targeting operated with the same controller used by a PlayStation or a tablet.”
“It isn’t as if Ukraine has adopted AI weaponry without any tech experience. In the words of New York Times reporter Paul Mozer, ‘Ukraine has been a bit of a back office for the global technology industry for a long time.’ The country already had a substantial pool of coders and skilled experts who, under emergency conditions, were able to make the transition from civilian uses (such as a dating app) to military purposes. As Mozer reported: ‘What they’re doing is they’re taking basic code that is around, combining it with some new data from the war, and making it into something entirely different, which is a weapon.’”
Companies are now working on autonomous drone development for Ukraine: “If one kamikaze drone is good, dozens of them are better insofar as the greater their number, the greater the chance there is of several reaching their targets. In nature, a swarm of ants behaves as a single living organism, whether the task is collecting food or building a nest. Analogously, a swarm of autonomous drones could act as a single organism—no humans necessary—carrying out a mission regardless of how many are disabled or crash to the ground or whether communication from the ground is disrupted or terminated. Although humans are still in the ‘loop,’ these weapons could equally be made entirely autonomous. In other words, they could decide which targets to strike without human intervention.”
“You, Me and the AI Genie”
writes on the “AI genie” at : “I keep waiting for the genie’s abilities to hit a hard ceiling. I eagerly read articles that ask whether the technology is slowing down, or even going backwards as newer AIs train on an Internet stuffed with the mediocrities of older AIs. Then a new model comes along that can do things the previous model couldn’t, or does the same things more cheaply. The technology is decentralising and spreading. Costs are coming down. For every Ted Gioia saying AI’s an unsustainable bubble, Chomsky declaring it unintelligent or Freddie deBoer dismissing it as a media fad, there’s a UN report on the coming ‘digital divide,’ an Anthropic paper saying Claude’s thinking process is much more sophisticated than mere token prediction, or a Scott Alexander saying AGI is just round the corner. Meanwhile, people I know keep telling me they’re using it for such-and-such, or it’s threatening their work in such-and-such a field. The harder I will it to go away, the harder it dances on the grave of my pre-genie innocence.” “So we walk through an infinite landscape of Warhol soup cans, spat out ad nauseam and plastered all over our public space like so much senseless graffiti. By definition, these things, produced in this way, can never accumulate any cultural weight. I suspect that this generation of AI will never create a truly great novel, artwork or song, not because it isn’t smart enough, but because the very concept of ‘greatness’ requires both intentionality on the creator’s part and a coherent system for comparing and ranking a finite number of cultural products. I’m not sure the semantic apocalypse of generative AI allows for that possibility. When something is constantly making beautiful things, ugly things, stupid things and mawkish things on demand, by the million, without ever once making any distinction between them, you don’t have greatness. You just have a genie granting wishes.”
Wabi Sabi writes that “The posthuman world is too frictionless to truly enrage you, too dead itself to kindle any emotion that’s fully alive. Just like the spreadsheets, invoicing and form-filling we’ve been putting up with for generations, it tends to provoke no more than a grey, washed-out sub-irritation that you learn to tune out. Besides, your subconscious feels powerless in the face of the technoligarchy, and when aversion is combined with a sense of helplessness, the result isn’t rage but depression. Even depression seems too strong a word. It’s more like, I’ll already be having an off-day for completely different reasons, then a voice in my head will chime in with ‘By the way, generative AI also exists,’ and I’ll feel just that little bit worse. Our ancestors battled woolly mammoths. We struggle with occasional spasms of irritation, unobtrusive background angst and a vague existential unease.”
The essay concludes on a more hopeful note: “But those who prize authenticity above all else have always found a way to speak the truth anyway. Exile and execution never stopped them, so it’ll take a lot more than vulgarity and slop to silence them now. In fact, in the spirit of ‘problems equal opportunities,’ ‘pressure makes diamonds’ etc, I’m with those who think that AI will have the positive side-effect of forcing creators and thinkers to up their game. The only defence against something that can write like the average of everything that’s ever been written is to be relentlessly unaverage. To write more like yourself than you’ve ever written before. To create art that’s coherent, directed, original, self-expressive, daring, unabashedly emotive, unremittingly honest, and absolutely never a bunch of people-pleasing bullshit.”
For some of my thoughts on AI, see this week’s piece, “The Humanity of the Typo” and the earlier “Telos or Transhumanism?”
“Historians Rethink the Green Revolution”
At Geography Direction, Glenn David Stone summarizes new historical work on the so-called “Green Revolution” in 1960s Indian agriculture. “[T]he new histories make it clear that India was not importing US wheat because of overpopulation. After over a century as a colony, India’s agriculture and industry were both in a woeful state. Gandhi favored developing rural self-sufficiency and agriculture, but Prime Minister Nehru instead chose heavy industry (steel, chemicals)—with US’s encouragement. When the US offered free wheat—mainly to unload its ever-growing surplus—India accepted it to keep urban food prices low for factory workers. This undercut Indian producers and hurt domestic grain production. The food shipments, in other words, were a cause of foodgrain dependency. (Meanwhile, India encouraged farmers to switch from food crops to nonfood cash crops like jute which fueled a 1960s export boom. Ironically, most of the jute went to the US, where it made seats for the tractors that over-produced grain and made the sacks that held the grain being shipped to India.)” Contrary to popular mythology, he notes that the “Green Revolution years didn’t lead to faster agricultural growth or more food per capita—just to a higher percentage of wheat in the diet.”
Stone concludes: “[H]ow much impact these studies have on received wisdom is an open question. The legend of ‘people who make miracles in the world’ continues to be promoted by parties whose interests it serves. It suited the US government’s interests at the time: locked in a Cold War with the Soviets and a hot war in Viet Nam, the US jumped at the chance to point to a humanitarian triumph in Asia. (Even the name ‘Green Revolution’ was an explicit rebuke to red revolution.) Today the biotechnology industry and its allies zealously promote the legend as a flattering framing for the spread of genetically modified crops.”
“How Society Got a Sex Change”
At Compact,
analyzes the importance of gender ideology to the broader ideological project of producing “a fluid subject for a fluid world”: “Tradition and culture, from this perspective, are distorting forces that lead to poor choices and an inability to adapt. Transition signifies letting go of these old attachments. In this regard, transgenderism epitomizes a model of subjectivity prized by technocratic elites: malleable, untethered from tradition, and committed to an endless project of self-creation. Gender-identity literature emphasizes that ‘coming out’ is not a one-time act but a lifelong process across ever-changing jobs, homes, and relationships, implying an ideal subject ever ready to adapt themselves to an ever-changing world.”“This is the ideal political subject for today’s postliberal managerialism: heteronomous and willing to doubt its own judgment and intuition. People need not transition to live up to its ideals. By accepting the assertion that I cannot know the gender of the person sitting in front of me, I am accepting that I must doubt the evidence of my own eyes and look to others for an official line on reality. Nor can tradition or common sense tell me how to understand and treat others: I must look now to new official guidelines for the correct language and rituals. And since these are always changing, I must be ever alert, ever malleable, ever willing to shift to new truths.”
Frawley argues that “The embrace of gender identity, then, isn’t a cultural detour but the very logic of contemporary technocratic rule: distrustful of ordinary people, hostile to autonomy, obsessed with management. UNESCO’s work in Africa shows how global this project has become. When schools without plumbing receive gender-identity curricula, it becomes clear this is not about local need. It is about making new kinds of people suited to a new kind of world-building, which no longer happens in bricks and steel but inside people’s heads.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.
Thanks for this, Vincent. I had to laugh at this:
"I’ll already be having an off-day for completely different reasons, then a voice in my head will chime in with ‘By the way, generative AI also exists,’ and I’ll feel just that little bit worse."
I've had exactly this experience myself!