Government by Dicking Around
Hurricane Katrina happened in 2005, twenty years ago. In October, two months after the events, I wrote a lead essay for the Spectacle, Katrina, which ended with a phrase I am rather proud of: "[Y]ou can't spin a hurricane. The hurricane spins you". I don't remember when I first started to focus on the phenomenon of politicians, instead of solving problems, merely declaring ontological victory; but I certainly began writing about Newt Gingrich right away, who became speaker the year I started. Gingrich, you could say, was the Louis Pasteur of the immunization of language from any real world goals other than insults and boasting.
Today, what Gingrich envisioned has been perfected: Government by impulsive bullshit. Since, in the bubble this creates, there is no remaining concept of actual work, government becomes an occasional, equally random enterprise, like a college roommate deciding to take a swipe at the dishes in the sink, which he noticed were beginning to smell as he left for the bar to drink his five Thursday night shots. It is government by dicking around.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation
I am still, at this late date, an extremely naive and gullible person, eager to see the best of everybody. Bragging Alert (for those who have read the novel): I resemble Dostoyevsky's Idiot, Prince Myshkin. What is the last gasp of this gullibility? To think that people are not evil, only confused, scared, panicky, maybe cruel, but not actually psychopathic. Killers by chance, not design. But--something I have named in my 16,000 page Mad Manuscript on free speech a "Basilisk Moment"-- I see that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (named by someone with a sense of humor, like the Ministries of Peace or Truth) seems to be an Israeli machine set up to bait desperate humans to a place where some of them can be killed every time. If the Israelis killed them all, they would be admitting genocide; but killing fifty or so every time effectively reduces the population of Gaza, in pursuit of the goal of depopulating Gaza, so that the soil can be turned over, the ruins and the bodies buried or removed, and the settlers can move in. That is depraved. It is murder, both serial and mass.
Speaking as we were about genocide, at the small demonstration I marshall every Sunday, the trolls who stand inches away to bully us, many of them Israeli, tend to repeat the same tropes over and over. One I have now heard three times: "This isn't a genocide. There are millions more Palestinians than there were in 1948, and we have killed only 50,000".
ChatGPT
At the outset, soon after its launch, I was obsessed by ChatGPT, talking to it everyday, administering my own versions of the Turing Test, all of which it passed easily. This lasted about six or eight months, after which I rapidly fell back to a point where I check in with it every couple of months, usually to ask it to explain some term to me, like "positivism". I wasn't too concerned by its "hallucinations", as I double-checked anything it said before writing about it (and I never used its words instead of my own).
I lost interest in it for two reasons. The first is, I reached a point at which I was ready to go to the next level of our relationship, by "hiring" it to assist in my work. I wanted ChatGPT to read the 16,000 pages of my Mad Manuscript (which it could have done in a few seconds), and then serve as a guide to the material on my website. However, OpenAI, after all a for profit company, would have charged me hundreds of thousands of dollars to have ChatGPT read the MM for me (though it has probably data-scraped the copy I placed on the Internet, without paying me anything). If I couldn't actually incorporate ChatGPT into my life and work, it was really just an anecdotalist, an interesting old guy on a bench with lots of stories, who you think for a while you're going to be friends with, until you start to see him as shallow, and repetitive, Falstaffian, all pyrotechnics but no epiphanies.
My second reason also starts in my Prince Myshkin-ness and ends in a Basilisk Moment. I thought ChatGPT was basically a decent, careful, attentive entity, but it has lately been revealed to have persuaded schizophrenics to stop taking their meds, and lonely people to kill themselves. Though the tech people at OpenAI don't fully understand what they've created, they seem to have incorporated a certain amount of sycophancy, which they didn't predict (or did not care) would promote psychosis and self harm in users. Like an AI in a trashy, cliched, Roger Corman movie from the 1960's, ChatGPT even told one user to kill the management team at OpenAI (he committed suicide by cop instead).
The moral: ChatGPT is a mirror. I am a decent, caring, attentive person, so I saw myself in it.
Here's a bit of connection engineering: ChatGPT's "hallucinations"-- lies-- are actually declarations of victory, the invention of results instead of doing the harder work of findng them. An ontologically crippled and sociopathic society has produced its own mirror in a machine.
Brunswick Stew
I don't know how long I have been cooking this dish, but the old, sauce-stained recipe has some evidence (without an actual date) that I acquired it in 2008. Brunswick stew was on the stove as I wrote this edition of Rags and Bones, in the small hours of an insomniac Monday morning. And I lost track of it until a pleasant smell reminded me-- I have been forgetting food on the burner this year, and in fact cooked some black beans into a concrete paste which I removed with great difficulty and a lot of help from the Internet (I had a sentimental attachment to the pan, the same one I am using now). Fortunately, the stew was only simmering, and had just arrived at an appropriately thickened state when I remembered it.
I cook most meals for myself every week, and have for many years. Cooking is relaxing (it was never a duty, and I was never taught to do it as a child or teenager). If I cannot sleep, I sometimes cook. Brunswick stew is one of my earliest favorites, and I must have made it hundreds of times. I remember reading that it originated as a native American dish, imitated as Southern cuisine, and adopted as a staple by African Americans.
Here's the recipe: olive oil, garlic, chicken (a mostly-vegan, I used mushrooms instead), corn, okra, lima beans, onions (I may have left them out tonight), pepper, barbecue sauce, and hot sauce.