Welcome to the second reading list of the new year! For this darker, winter list, I’ve got a selection of mostly political analysis. Read on, and let me know what you’re reading over the winter.
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Near the end of his novel, The End of Eternity, Isaac Asimov has a few things to tell us about the use of automation and robots that bears interestingly on our use of AI today. Asimov wrote the book in the 1950s, during an earlier wave of automation. He had no specific knowledge of LLMs, of course. But in reading it, I felt as though the Good Doctor reached into our future.
Here’s a common story about what happens when someone joins DSA.
A politically engaged person arrives who cares a lot about one issue or approach. They join DSA to work on their special interest. As they join, they engage in a flurry of activity around their special interest: signing up with a national working group devoted to it, pushing their chapter to work on it, writing a Convention resolution about it, and so on.
In many cases, it ends badly.
Perhaps the Convention votes down the resolution about the person’s special interest. Perhaps no one else in the person’s chapter is interested in the topic, or the chapter takes a different approach to it. Or perhaps fights and feuds tear apart the national working group. Even if none of those things happen, the person might just burn out from putting all their time and effort into a single topic.
They leave DSA in a huff.
We see this story with a wide range of special interests. I’ve seen people go through this process on mutual aid, the Green New Deal, Palestine, disability justice, trans rights, Medicare for All, and other issues of note.
And so, I think DSA has a ‘special interest’ problem. I’ll also say a word about what do to about it.
Politicos from all over the Democratic Party have been declaring for the last year that a woman can’t win the presidency. Even Michelle Obama made the claim!
What’s up with that?
Let me start by saying the claim is obvious baloney. But once we’ve established the utter foolishness of the claim, we have to figure out what to do. Why do people keep making claims this like?
I’m going to provide an error theory to explain it. We’ll begin from the point that the claim centers on certain professional class liberal anxieties.
And it says more about them than it says about the world.
I’ve hit a flurry of interest in George Orwell in the last 6 months. My partner and I read a book of essays on Orwell by Rebecca Solnit – Orwell’s Roses – and then we watched a film on him at a local film festival.
In that spirit, I bought a book of short Orwell essays. In those essays, his criticisms of the left – written in the early 1940s, during World War II! – sparked my interest. I found the criticisms still relevant today, but relevant to a different group.
Let’s take a moment to look into this.
