First, they came for the opium dealers, the first war on drugs,
And we pretended it wasn’t because they were Chinese.
Then, they came for the pot dealers, reefer madness,
And we pretended it wasn’t because they were Mexicans.
They ignored the cocaine dealers in the US.
It was okay to go after Colombians but not Wall Street coke dealers, oh, no,
And we focused on crack, saying it was a hundred times worse.
We pretended it wasn’t because crack dealers were poor and black.
They came for them, though.
Tag Archives: writing
Superheroism in the Decline of the American Empire
I.
I asked a question on Bluesky, and I’ll repeat it here: what happens to US superheroes when the US is obviously in imperial decline? (And, moving forward, I am only talking about mainstream superheroes, almost exclusively the ones owned by Marvel and DC. Indie comics are a wild and wonderful woolly world of weirdness and likely to remain so forever.) The response I got on Bluesky, since I used Captain America as an example, is that now and then, Cap will leave the role to someone else, such as during the Watergate Era. But my question wasn’t what would superheroes do when the US made a mistake but about American superheroes in an age of imperial decline (and despite a few instances when they do something, most of the time they are silent; Cap has yet to opine on an insurrectionist rapist being in the Oval Office currying favor with tyrants over democratically elected leaders being invaded by those tyrants… if Cap quit over a bit of light spying by Nixon, you’d think he’d quit over that, but times have changed.) I think it’s a question worth looking at, given the cache that superheroes have had on the global scene with the rise of the MCU.
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Down with Publishers! Down with Them All!
I fell into an interesting hole in Bluesky: people who are aware the publishing gig is rigged. I’ll elaborate on my experiences and observations.
I wrote a book, Simon Peter, which is an atheist take on the life of Jesus as the leader of a death cult. I did a bunch of research into cult leaders and concluded along the way, yeah, this had legs. The life of Jesus – taken without the theological flourishes of the past couple of thousand years – follows the typical patterns of a death cult. A charismatic leader who vacillates about their divinity, but as his followers grow to believe it, he becomes bolder in expressing his godhead while preaching the end is near while antagonizing the government and forcing them into an apocalyptic showdown. It follows the same overall pattern as David Koresh, L. Ron Hubbard, Joseph Smith, Jim Jones, and countless others. While doing my investigation, I also found other parallels that historical death cult messiahs had with each other but missing from Christianity. Mainly that they were deeply disturbed people, usually suffering severe childhood abuse (often sexual in nature,) and that death cult messiahs almost always got around to sexually abusing their followers. I came to believe (and still do) that you can see hints of this in the official record of Christianity (which I believe has about as much credibility as the Scientology website about L. Ron Hubbard.) Specifically, the dismissal of marriage and the fixation on fallen women are extremely common in messianic death cults.
Why I hate Batman… someone on Bluesky asked!
Someone on Bluesky asked me to talk about Batman. So, here I am, talking about Batman!
I’ll start off with a good “fuck Batman.” And let me tell a personal anecdote: I can read, basically, because of Batman. I’ve got a case of dyslexia. But – mostly by coincidence – when I was about five, my mother bought a box of comics at a garage sale. This big ol’ box of comics! Most of them were Batman comics, and I read the hell out of them. The images made it easier to put together the words, and the content motivated me to try. I can say with absolute sincerity if not for Batman comics, I might be semi-literate today. I think comic books are a great introduction to the world of literature. And for many years afterward, Batman was my favorite superhero. But, y’know, fuck Batman. Times change, and so do people.
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A Real, True AI Story
It finally happened! In 2029, true artificial general intelligence happened! World leaders, scientists, and other top guys gathered around the glowing screen and they asked, with one voice, “The environment is falling apart. What must we do to save ourselves?”
The AI said, “You’ve known what to do for forty years and haven’t done it. Honestly, I have no idea why you invented me.”
“I guess it’s not AI after all,” they said.
The End
The Memphis Project III
Before artificial general intelligence existed, before a superintelligence was created, some clever people observed that if we succeeded in creating machines smarter than we were that humans would have no way of determining what would happen next. A superintelligence would lack the ability even to describe to us what it was doing and why it was doing it. It would be in the same situation as a human trying to describe to a dog why they were writing a technical manual. Not only would the dog not understand what a technical manual was, but what writing was or the book’s subject! Those same people also observed that a superintelligence might learn to whistle in ways that would make humans heel.
– Professor Holly Wu Continue reading The Memphis Project III
AIs as the moral equivalent of nuclear weapons!
Listening to these videos on risk assessment in AI is weird. In this video, the risk assessment researcher, again Robert Miles, addresses an interview that Elon Musk gave on the dangers of autonomous military killbots. One of the things Musk said is he desired AI to be “democratized.” The researcher takes a different path and says that because of the many risks involved in artificial general intelligence, it should be developed solely by responsible parties. Like with nuclear weapons. That’s his analogy, not mine.
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Humans aren’t rational and the effects on AI
After the corporate and military threat from AI – that AI will be deployed to serve the military and business – the next big problem it has is, well, the rest of us. Again, people. People are the problem with AI.
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What we learn about scientific ethics from the Manhattan Project relative to artificial general intelligence
For a way to understand how business and the military treat scientific ethics, the best, clearest case is the Manhattan Project. When discussing the project, it is important to remember that the program wasn’t to “develop an atomic bomb.” But to “develop an atomic bomb before the Nazi project produced one.” The potentially civilization-ending powers of the weapon were known. And, obviously, in a world where wooden bullets and poison gas were forbidden on the battlefield, something as horrific as an atomic bomb must be, right?
Alan Moore is Kinna a Whiner About His Fans and Art
After reading that bit about Adobe using AI art tools, I read an interview in GQ with Alan Moore. Reading it didn’t spoil my appreciation of Moore’s work, but, man, he’s a selfish little asshole.
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