I go where I must, and do what I can.
This one from Josh was good
"The other problem with the Niemöller poem is that it presents as sequential; you can tell yourself that there will be months, years, eons between their coming for the Comeys and the Haitians and the time they come for you. So when, in the span of a few short days, they in fact come for the "domestic terrorists" and they also come for George Soros, and also come for James Comey, and also come for residents of the District of Columbia for the crime of speaking Spanish, and they come for unarmed women in New York City hallways, and for the farmers, and for John Bolton, and for the New York Times, and for Mikie Sherrill, and for the fired federal workers, and for anyone for whom they can manufacture an unsubstantiated claim of mortgage fraud, as well as for small children in their beds in shelters, I mean, my dude, other than the coming for "you," part, it’s the whole damn poem in the span of a week. But still, the poem only ever really works on the day they come for you."
"Free speech culture," as practiced in American, makes this deal seem like a scam. "Free speech culture" tells students that free speech means someone can come to their campus and say bigoted and evil things and that’s good, and that their remedy is more speech, but if they use that speech the wrong way, that’s bad. "Free speech culture" tells people that we should be more worried about a prominent podcasters’ speech being chilled than theirspeech being chilled. "Free speech culture" elevates the rituals of a particular elite, academic style of speech over substance, such that calling for censorship from a debate stage is pro-free-speech-culture. "Free speech culture" tells people they should shut up about the things that make them passionate so other people feel more comfortable disagreeing with them. "Free speech culture" is intellectually, morally, and philosophically incoherent and people perceive that incoherence. "Free speech culture" is currently telling students and professors that it’s their fault that government force is being used to deport and expel and fire and censor them because they dissented wrong. "Free speech culture" tells people that others have the right to denigrate them, but they have some ill-defined obligation not to respond too hard. "Free speech culture" tells people they’re wrong and illiberal to notice that people using government force to censor them were previously calling them illiberal and censorial.
My new joint!
“I don’t say this lightly: the system is no longer designed to be corrected by the very tools we’re told to use. Partisanship is largely a performative art, not a real debate of policy or ideas. Reform is still discussed but never allowed to mature. We are not living in the America that taught us how democracy works. We are living in the one that quietly replaced it while we clung to rituals that now feel performative.”
“The public was not convinced by our argument, in 2024, because we were shilling for the existing version of democracy—which is deeply corrupt, which does not work. When I got into politics twenty-five years ago, something like campaign-finance reform, government reform, democracy reform, was a top-three issue for Democrats. It was something we talked about every single day. Somewhere along the line that stopped; somewhere along the line we stopped talking about reforming democracy. So it became easy for voters to just believe that we were all corrupt, and that neither Republicans nor Democrats were actually sincere in fixing what was wrong with democracy.”
I really am kicking myself that I didn’t think of doing Childhood’s End on Jed’s podcast, but this is a reminder of why George Dyson is, well, George Dyson. Really good discussion about what the book has to say about AI and Social Media; it will challenge the way you think about these things.
