Eric Levitz @EricLevitz

A few tentative thoughts I’ll have to refine. I’m sure there’s a lot I’m missing. Espaillat and Reynoso were both decidedly left-wing. So what’s the difference between them and their successful challengers? A few core differences: Are you loyal to the incumbent party machine or to a movement for “worker power” — that is, a disciplined, ideologically cohesive organization that can offer skilled volunteer labor as a substitute for campaign contributions, and that will exert ongoing leverage over the candidate, not just during elections. To demonstrate loyalty, it’s helpful to have sent costly signals, or rather signals that were costly in some earlier period: obsessive anti-Israel sentiment is the most important ideological litmus test, of course. More prosaically, a track record of volunteering (also a way to cement loyalty — there is a path for you, loyal cadre, if you have the right surname, biography that can be characterized the right way, etc.) gives a good indication of where you stand.  Failing that, pliability and dependence on the door-knockers, micro-influencers, etc., will do in a less favorable district. These non-core candidates (e.g., Lander) can demonstrate momentum, the power of the network, which will bend other electeds in your direction.  For now, I assume the biggest policy upshot of the expanding DSA bloc will be on foreign and defense policy. We’ll learn more about the psychological disposition of these new members, i.e., how attention-seeking and otherwise unstable they are, how they handle scrutiny, etc. My intuition is that thr DSA bloc represents a turn against personality-driven candidates who excel by building their own donor bases — the goal is to build a team and a brand that transcends individual candidates. AOC is bigger than the DSA, which gives her flexibility. It will be important to have more elected officials in more prominent roles who are smaller than the DSA.

“how about these prices” as he’s trying not to laugh is comedy gold, man

€ric M. Butterworth @E_Butterworth

3 days ago

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@katrosenfield I was bored and procrastinating on more involved writing projects (I suspect you’ve posted argumentative replies for similar reasons at some point in your life, tho admit I could be mistaken)

My issue with your post was its dismissive/derisive attitude towards the backlash to Wayne's tweet, much of which was justified imo for the reasons stated above. I have little complaint with the sentiments expressed thereafter (We agree that history is full of ironies/tragedies, that many laudable social developments have plausibly had some unfortunate second or third-order consequences, and that people can be excessively resistant to discussing those consequences).

@katrosenfield (whoops; meant to include these attachments)

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Yeah, I do read "critiques" differently here. The other key phrase to me is his declaration that he isn't "super" rightwing on suffrage and is willing to entertain all kinds of arrangements. To me, that strongly signals that he thinks we should at least consider actually abridging suffrage in general -- and women's in particular. Separately -- and this is all orthogonal to my complaint with your take -- I just find Wayne's argument substantively weak. Gender polarization isn't exceptionally high right now. And women have been able to vote for a very long time. The social trends that people like Wayne tend to worry about are mostly post-60s developments (if not, post-90s). In my view, the big drivers of falling marriage rates/family formation and gender antagonism within the culture are the advent of oral contraception, the sexual revolution, the emergence of a post-industrial service economy, the explosion of on-demand entertainment, and rising general prosperity (the last two making it much more comfortable for people to defect from the dating market). You can argue that women's suffrage was a precondition for some of that. But the fact is, the divorce rate barely increased for 40 years after women got the vote. It was a separate social revolution in the 60s that really upended gender relations. And some post-60s (/post-2010s) trends have been felt even in patriarchal societies where women cannot vote. Birth rates are falling in Saudi Arabia! The other problem with Wayne's argument is that it fails to consider the counterfactual. I don't think female suffrage was a precondition for most of the economic and technological changes of the past century. So, the question is what gender relations would be like in a world where women weren't allowed to to vote but 1) oral contraception was widely available, 2) female-coded, post-industrial service roles became a steadily larger share of the economy as the labor intensity of manufacturing fell and 3) digital media immersed young men and women in content geared to maximize their engagement/flatter their identities/stir up their resentments? Personally, I suspect that sales of "yum, male tears" mugs would be substantially higher in that world. The idea that women would gamely accept disenfranchisement in anything resembling modern America's technological and economic climate is laughable. And to some extent, the hypothetical is just unthinkable; every single liberal democracy felt compelled to enfranchise women much much earlier in the modernization process. So, in addition to being offensive in its casual openness to abridging basic rights -- and condescending in its tone -- Wayne's argument is also just dumb imo

@katrosenfield (As I think I've said before, I've admired some of your work; your piece on the pathologies of the young adult fiction world years ago was a service. And I enjoyed/sympathized with your recent reflection on cancellation. But I think this take is wrongheaded)

You wrote a long scoldy blog post taking issue with a position that I endorse -- namely, that Wayne's initial tweet warranted a dismissive reply (both because its argument was weak and because the post itself denied the objects of its critique charity). I replied to you to express my disagreement. I'm also not totally clear on the substance of your position. Say Wayne had said, "I'm not even super right wing on chattel slavery. I'm certainly willing to entertain all sorts of arrangements. But if you look at contemporary America and don't have *any* critiques of emancipation, then you must not allow yourself to have ordinary thoughts." If people had responded to that by treating Wayne with derision, would they be wrong? Can one reasonably have contempt for the idea of "critiquing" an African Americans' claim to fundamental rights, on the basis of an unsubstantiated speculation that some aspect of modern society would be better if they were subjugated? Could one take offense at a person saying that they were willing to "entertain all kinds of arrangements" on the issue of slavery -- implying that they're willing to consider assigning some human beings something less than the status of free person? If so, what distinguishes that case? I'm not saying there can't be a coherent distinction. But what is it? Why can't people consider a woman's right to vote sacrosanct in a similar way, such that they express contempt when a person 1) declares that they are willing to entertain arrangements that restrict women's suffrage and 2) brands everyone who has no "critiques" of the 19th Amendment as intellectually deficient? Finally, I find the suggestion that you object to mockery on principle (as it's cheap and undignified) to be disingenuous. You clearly consider mockery a legitimate tool; you literally just employed it against me! And have previously done so against plenty of others x.com/katrosenfield/…

Kat Rosenfield @katrosenfield

9 months ago

man, to write like this

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@katrosenfield I read it

Imo, it is both anti-anti-Zionist and critical of Zionism. Margot's song + the closer ("Just us") critique the notion that one can only be truly safe with one's in-group, and implicate Zionism in that argument (the first half of Margot's song makes this connection explicitly) x.com/EricLevitz/sta…

Eric Levitz @EricLevitz

5 days ago

This is not how I interpreted the ending, fwiw. [spoilers] The show is militantly "anti-woke." It basically suggests that the endpoint of all identity politics is dehumanization of those outside the valorized identity group. But in one of the final songs, it strongly implies

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Yes. It's very South Park, in trying to offend all comers. And the whole thing is definitely animated by resentment about the place of Jews in progressive "hierarchies of oppression" or whatever. But the first half of Margot's song + the "just us" closer both critique excessive in-group identification -- and the belief that one can only be safe among one's in-group -- in a manner that implicates Zionism. Anyway. Not saying the show's politics are "good" or anti-Zionist per se

This is not how I interpreted the ending, fwiw. [spoilers] The show is militantly "anti-woke." It basically suggests that the endpoint of all identity politics is dehumanization of those outside the valorized identity group. But in one of the final songs, it strongly implies that Zionism (at least, in some forms) is an illustration of this. (It's complicated, since the show is simultaneously parodying aspects of "woke" anti-Israel activism. But I think the actual text is, at a minimum, deeply ambivalent about Zionism, or about how to reconcile its opposition to identity politics with Jewish ethno-nationalism.)

Cassie Pritchard @hecubian_devil

5 days ago

Everyone periodically finds this video and gets mad at it for being Too Woke, but it’s actually anti-woke satire by a Zionist, and the play ends by breaking the fourth wall and just playing explicit pro-Israel propaganda videos

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AI is rapidly gaining abilities that once belonged to humanity alone. Chatbots can already build apps, make video games, compose songs, and write terrible literary fiction. Soon, they may even be able to dread their own deaths. Or so some in tech think vox.com/technology/492…

@brown_body78592 @OMbulletpoint @AndyMasley I think it’s good to make the data centers pay for the power/energy infrastructure that their demand will require. Issue is just with requiring on-site generation, at least if the externalities aren’t taken into account when siting the projects in the first place

A clear real problem, and one of many reasons I think requiring data centers to "provide their own power" via onsite generation is so goofy. It's basically requiring noise and air pollution near where it's built

Brian Entin @BrianEntin

6 days ago

Neighbors have put mattresses and plexiglass up in their windows to block the noise from this data center in Virginia. It's a high pitched whine from the natural gas turbines that power it. The noise never stops 24/7.

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Many in Silicon Valley believe AI is (or could soon become) conscious. But that belief rests on a deeply uncertain assumption: That only a small fraction of what brain cells do is necessary for sentience vox.com/technology/492…

The idea that AI could become conscious rests on a widely held -- but deeply uncertain -- theory of how *humans* became sentient. If "computational functionalism" is right, then we may be on the cusp of engineering nigh-infinite digital slavery vox.com/technology/492…

Excellent positive example of how to navigate the inherent ambiguity surrounding AI consciousness without falling into dramatic overconfidence in either direction, nice work @EricLevitz vox.com/technology/492…