Three Columnists on ICE in Minneapolis

Matthew Rose, an Opinion editorial director, hosted an online conversation with three Opinion columnists.

Matthew Rose: On Saturday, agents from the border patrol in Minneapolis shot and killed Alex Pretti, an American citizen. We don’t have a full accounting of what happened, but the available video evidence shows he was filming the agents with his phone, as many locals have done since the full weight of federal immigration enforcement descended on the city.

Lydia, you’ve been to Minneapolis recently. Tell us what you saw and give us some context for what just happened.

Lydia Polgreen: I have never been a fan of the conceit of American journalists covering the United States as if it were a backwater foreign nation, but in Minneapolis last week I could not shake the impulse to compare my experiences in a city I know so well (I spent a chunk of my childhood in the Twin Cities, and my father is from Minneapolis) with my experiences covering civil wars in places like Congo, Sudan, Sri Lanka and more. Watching the video of Pretti’s killing, I thought: If this was happening on the streets of any of those places, I would not hesitate to call it an extrajudicial execution by security forces. This is where we are: armed agents of the state killing civilians with an apparent belief in their total impunity.

I left before Pretti was gunned down, apparently in the back while he was on his knees. What I saw was so reminiscent of other conflicts — civilians doing their very best to protect themselves and their neighbors from seemingly random violence meted out by state agents. Those agents, masked and heavily armed, are roaming the streets and picking up and assaulting people for having the wrong skin color or accent, or being engaged in the constitutionally protected acts of filming, observing or protesting their presence. Anyone who knows me knows that I am allergic to hyperbole, but sometimes you need to simply call a spade a spade. This is a lawless operation.

David French: We are witnessing the total breakdown of any meaningful system of accountability for federal officials. The combination of President Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons, his ongoing campaign of pardoning friends and allies, his politicized prosecutions and now his administration’s assurances that federal officers have immunity are creating a new legal reality in the United States. The national government is becoming functionally lawless, and the legal system is struggling to contain his corruption.

We’re tasting the bitter fruit of Trump’s dreadful policies, to be sure, but it’s worse than that. He’s exploiting years of legal developments that have helped insulate federal officials from both criminal and civil accountability. It’s as if we engineered a legal system premised on the idea that federal officials are almost always honest, and the citizens who critique them are almost always wrong. We’ve tilted the legal playing field against citizens and in favor of the government.

The Trump administration breaks the law, and also ruthlessly exploits all the immunities it’s granted by law. The situation is unsustainable for a constitutional republic.

Michelle Goldberg: The administration is very consciously reinforcing that sense of impunity. First there was Stephen Miller addressing the security forces after one of them killed Renee Good: “To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties.” On Sunday, Greg Bovino, the self-consciously villainous border patrol commander, praised the agents who executed Pretti.

I wish people weren’t allowed to carry guns in public. But they are, and after watching Republicans bring semiautomatic weapons to protest Covid closures and make a hero of Kyle Rittenhouse, it’s wild to hear the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Kash Patel, say, on Fox News, “You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines, to any sort of protest that you want.” The point here isn’t hypocrisy; it’s them nakedly asserting that constitutional rights are for us, not you.

Rose: David, I wanted to pick up on your description of the federal government as lawless. As you’ve written, we seem to be in the world described by the Nazi-era Jewish labor lawyer Ernst Fraenkel and what he called “the dual state.” There is one we live in, where we pay taxes and go to work, and life seems to work according to common rules, and the other where the rules no longer apply. Is this what we’re experiencing?

French: We’re living in a version of the dual state. Not to the same extent as the Nazis, of course, but Fraenkel’s framing is still relevant. The Nazis didn’t create their totalitarian state immediately. Instead, they were able to lull much of the population to sleep just by keeping their lives relatively normal. As you say, they went to work, paid their taxes, entered into contracts and did all the things you normally do in a functioning nation. But if you crossed the government, then you passed into a different state entirely, where you would feel the full weight of fascist power — regardless of the rule of law.

One of the saddest things about the killings of Good and Pretti is that you could tell that neither of them seemed to know the danger until it was too late. They believed they were operating in some version of the normal state (what Fraenkel called the “normative state”) where the police usually respond with discipline and restraint.

Good and Pretti both had calm demeanors. They may have been annoying federal officers, but nothing about their posture indicated the slightest threat. Good even said, “I’m not mad” to the man who would gun her down seconds later. Pretti was filming with his phone in one hand and he had the other hand in the air as he was pepper-sprayed and tackled.

The officers, however, were in that different state, what Fraenkel called the “prerogative state,” where the government is a law unto itself. The officers acted violently, with impunity, and the government immediately acted to defend them and slander their victims. As the prerogative state expands, the normative state shrinks, and our lives often change before we can grasp what happened. (...)

Rose: With immigration enforcement in Trump’s second term, we have a quasi-military force, backed by more funding than most countries give their actual militaries, deployed for the most part to enforce civil, not criminal law. Should we instead think about this as spectacle? Caitlin Dickerson of The Atlantic, interviewed by our colleague Ezra Klein, argued that immigration enforcement under Trump is being implemented for maximum visual impact.

Goldberg: That’s increasingly the critique of conservatives who don’t want to break with Trump, but also are having a hard time rationalizing ICE’s violence in Minneapolis. Erick Erickson blames what’s happening in Minnesota on the D.H.S. secretary, Kristi Noem, marginalizing Tom Homan, the border czar, in favor of Greg Bovino from Customs and Border Protection, who clearly relishes street-level confrontation.

And the administration obviously wants to make a spectacle. We don’t know why the guy who shot Renee Good was filming, but it could well have been to feed their insatiable demand for content, which in turn is feeding their recruiting efforts. Did any of you see the clip where one of the agents shooting tear gas at protesters can be heard saying, “It’s like ‘Call of Duty.’ So cool, huh?”

I’m glad that some people on the right have at least concluded that this looks bad for their side, since it could create political pressure on Trump to pull back. At the same time, I don’t think you can divorce the policy from the spectacle. Both are meant to terrorize their enemies.

Polgreen: There is no question that spectacle is the goal here. Michelle just mentioned Bovino — he has been swanning about Minnesota in a long, green wool coat that lends him a distinctly fascist look. The way these officers are kitted out is nuts. Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, described it to me as “full battle rattle.” There is also a cartoonish aspect to the whole thing — social media is replete with videos of agents slipping on ice and falling, ass over teakettle, onto the frozen ground. You look at the videos of the shootings and there is an air of incompetence to the whole thing, even amid the horror. It is almost as if you can’t believe how amateurish and unprofessional these guys are.

Elliott Payne, the president of the Minneapolis City Council, told me about one encounter with an agent armed with a Taser. The guy held it sideways, like some kind of gangbanger, menacing Payne and other city officials as they tried to ask questions about why a man at a bus stop was being detained. Payne told me it was something out of a bad movie. No trained law enforcement officer would ever hold a weapon that way. It would be comical if it weren’t so utterly terrifying. (...)

Rose: ... when people ask you what they can do, what’s your advice?

French: This is a crucial moment in American history. I think about it like this: When we learn about our family histories, we often ask what our ancestors were doing. Did they serve in World War II? Did they serve in Vietnam? Where did they stand during the civil rights movement?

This is a moment important enough that our grandchildren and even great-grandchildren might ask: What did you know? What did you do? Think hard about what you want your answer to be. Think hard about what you can do that will stand the test of time — whether it be peacefully protesting (including peaceful civil disobedience), volunteering for a political campaign, providing meals and clothing for immigrant families or anything else that protects the vulnerable and defends human dignity.

One of the worst answers, however, would be to look a curious grandchild in the face and say: Well, I posted a lot on social media.

Polgreen: I read so much about how we live in an atomized society, glued to our phones and social media but untethered from our communities and neighbors. Minnesota is demonstrating how quickly and fearlessly communities can come together in spite of the political and technological forces seeking to keep us divided. They also built on their past experience — many of these networks of support began during the George Floyd protests. Some were groups that wanted to march against the Minneapolis cops, and others wanted to protect neighborhoods from property damage. Now they have been reactivated to work together to help one another. A lot of us formed these kinds of networks during Covid. This would be a great time to reconnect with them. Be prepared to protect the people around you. (...)

French: I’ll be completely honest. It’s a little harder for me to have hope when I know that the core political support for Trump’s aggression is coming from my own community. Without the lock step (and seemingly unconditional) support of so many millions of evangelicals, Trump’s administration would crumble overnight. So I keep looking for signs of softening hearts and opening minds in Trump’s base — among the people who helped raise me, who taught me about faith, and who told me in no uncertain terms that politicians must demonstrate high character before they can earn your support. I feel a pervasive sadness about this moment.

That’s what is so grievous about civil strife. You often find yourself in opposition not to some hated, distant foe, but rather in opposition to people you’ve loved your whole life — whom you still love.

But there is hope. It’s a mistake to believe that the G.O.P. and its Christian supporters have crossed a Rubicon, never to return. And it’s a mistake to believe — even for the most hardhearted — that their aggression is a sign of their strength. They are masking weakness, and courage is their kryptonite.

by Matthew Rose, Lydia Polgreen, David French and Michelle Goldberg, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Mark Peterson/Redux

Socialism For Dummies

[ed. Prompted by a recent letter to the editor in our local paper (below):]

Overview of Socialism

Socialism encompasses a range of economic and political systems advocating for social ownership and democratic control of the means of production. It aims to address inequalities created by capitalism by redistributing wealth and ensuring that production meets the needs of the population.

Types of Socialism

1. Democratic Socialism: Focuses on political democracy alongside social ownership.
Advocates for reforms within a capitalist framework.
Examples include the Nordic countries, which combine a welfare state with a capitalist economy.

2. Market Socialism: Combines public or cooperative ownership with market mechanisms.
Allows for profit generation while ensuring that profits benefit society.
Examples include certain policies in China and Vietnam.

3. Revolutionary Socialism: Seeks to overthrow capitalism through revolutionary means.
Often associated with Marxist ideologies.
Historical examples include the Soviet Union and Cuba.

4. Utopian Socialism: Envisions ideal societies based on cooperative living and shared resources.
Early proponents include Robert Owen and Charles Fourier.

Focuses on creating small-scale communities as models for broader societal change.

5. Religious Socialism: Integrates religious principles with socialist ideals.
Variants include Christian socialism, Islamic socialism, and Jewish socialism.
Emphasizes moral and ethical dimensions of social justice.

[ed. each with various branches, subsets, etc...]

Conclusion

Socialism is not a monolithic ideology; it includes various forms that differ in their approaches to ownership, governance, and economic management. Each type reflects distinct historical contexts and societal goals. (sources: Google/AI/Wikipedia, history books, libraries...)

-----

Letter to the Editor:

"Well that’s just great socialists. Now you and your Islamic jihadi buddies have something in common with the Nazis. You both want to exterminate Jewish people. You even just hired one of your own to be mayor of New York. One of the same people that attacked and bombed New York on Sept. 11, 2001. Yep, the Nazis hated America also.

No, democracy is not in trouble, but you “Democrats” sure are. Most Americans are not as ignorant and violent as you are and they have more productive things to do than standing around protesting and complaining. If future elections are honest and as more Americans become better off for their families, your corruption, fraud and failures will become even more exposed.

If you “Democrats” sincerely want to help America, you will need to stop lying, siding with criminals, and hating on America and law enforcement. If America is so racist, why are all the tired, poor, and miserable people from socialism trying to come here? Better yet, why don’t all you socialists move to Iran, China, Russia, Somalia, Venezuela, etc.? In America it’s called assimilation and obeying the law. If you have a problem with that, then get the heck out. (...)

Affirmative action. Now it seems the socialists have decided to just change the name to diversity, equity and inclusion in order to get by the Supreme Court decision. After recently realizing that their federal grant money is now in jeopardy, the socialists are trying to just delete DEI references in order to maintain these programs and hope nobody notices. After all these years, nobody knows what affirmative action/DEI has actually accomplished.

“Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” John Adams."

***

[ed. Another fine American Patriot who's views are highlighted here only to show the stereotypical responses (bordering on parody) one gets whenever talking to a MAGA extremist. They're all here: the ad hominem attacks, incoherent accusations (socialists bombed NY on 9/11? Islamic socialists?), projections, and of course, that old time favorite - if you don't like it, just move! Classy as always. ]

***

*Note: New York mayor Zohran Mamdani and most self-identified socialists in this country are Democratic Socialists:

Democratic socialism

Democratic socialism differs from state communism in that the state is not all-powerful, and the political system remains democratic. Democratic socialism is associated with the Socialist parties of western Europe (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany, etc). They generally propose a mixed economy – with state ownership of key industries, like coal, electricity, water and gas, but allow private enterprise to operate in the rest of the economy. Democratic socialism proposes a progressive tax system to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor – through the provisions of a welfare state. Democratic socialism is often associated with the Nordic countries – where the government takes approximately 50% of GDP, but also there is a thriving market economy, giving a high standard of living. (via:)

Aspects of Democratic socialism

• Advocates nationalisation of key industries (often the natural monopolies, like electricity, water)
• Prices set by the market mechanism, except public goods, such as health and education.
• Provision of a welfare state to provide income redistribution
• Support for trade unions in wage bargaining
• Use of minimum wages and universal income to raise low-income wages
• Progressive tax and provision of public services. For example, marginal income tax rates of 70%. Tax on wealth

It’s important to note that socialism is not the same as communism, although the two are often confused. Communism is a more radical ideology that advocates for a stateless, classless society, while socialism typically operates within the framework of a democratic government. In practice, many countries have adopted aspects of socialism without fully embracing a socialist system. These can include things like nationalized industries, strong labor protections, and progressive taxation policies. [ed. and Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, SNAP, etc.] Ultimately, the goal of socialism is to balance individual freedom with social responsibility, creating a society where everyone has the opportunity to reach their full potential. (via:)

Fascism in America

Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed “to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers.”

On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!”

“You are away from home, separated from your families, no longer at a civilian job or at school and many of you are risking your very lives,” the pamphlet explained, “because of a thing called fascism.” But, the publication asked, what is fascism? “Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze,” it said, “nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it.”

Fascism, the U.S. government document explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.”

“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said.

Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.”

Fascists understood that “the fundamental principle of democracy—faith in the common sense of the common people—was the direct opposite of the fascist principle of rule by the elite few,” it explained, “[s]o they fought democracy…. They played political, religious, social, and economic groups against each other and seized power while these groups struggled.”

Americans should not be fooled into thinking that fascism could not come to America, the pamphlet warned; after all, “[w]e once laughed Hitler off as a harmless little clown with a funny mustache.” And indeed, the U.S. had experienced “sorry instances of mob sadism, lynchings, vigilantism, terror, and suppression of civil liberties. We have had our hooded gangs, Black Legions, Silver Shirts, and racial and religious bigots. All of them, in the name of Americanism, have used undemocratic methods and doctrines which…can be properly identified as ‘fascist.’”

The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’” And they would use three techniques:

First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’ against minority races, religions, and other groups.”

Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. “In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations.”

Third, fascists would insist that “the world has but two choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as ‘communists’ everyone who refuses to support them.”

It is “vitally important” to learn to spot native fascists, the government said, “even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy.”

The only way to stop the rise of fascism in the United States, the document said, “is by making our democracy work and by actively cooperating to preserve world peace and security.” In the midst of the insecurity of the modern world, the hatred at the root of fascism “fulfills a triple mission.” By dividing people, it weakens democracy. “By getting men to hate rather than to think,” it prevents them “from seeking the real cause and a democratic solution to the problem.” By falsely promising prosperity, it lures people to embrace its security.

“Fascism thrives on indifference and ignorance,” it warned. Freedom requires “being alert and on guard against the infringement not only of our own freedom but the freedom of every American. If we permit discrimination, prejudice, or hate to rob anyone of his democratic rights, our own freedom and all democracy is threatened.”

by US Army/War Department/Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American |  Read more:

Image: US Army

[ed. Dictators are gonna dictate, it's what they do. The real blame lies with supporters who give them their power, willingly. The people who think their personal fortunes or the country's will be enhanced by standing in the shadow of a strongman. And others: tuned out and oblivious, who "just aren't into politics" or rely on "talking points" to tell them what to think. It's all here. Now. See also: January 10, 2026:]

***

Yesterday, in an apparent attempt to regain control of the national narrative surrounding the deadly shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis, Vice President J.D. Vance led the administration in pushing a video of the shooting captured by the shooter himself, Jonathan Ross, on his cell phone. (...)

What is truly astonishing is that the administration thought this video would exonerate Ross and support the administration’s insistence that he was under attack from a domestic terrorist trying to ram him with her car. The video was leaked to a right-wing news site, and Vance reposted it with the caption: “What the press has done in lying about this innocent law enforcement officer is disgusting. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.” The Department of Homeland Security reposted Vance’s post.

As senior editor of Lawfare Media Eric Columbus commented: “Do Vance and DHS think we can’t actually watch the video?” Multiple social media users noted that Good’s last words to Ross were “That’s fine. I’m not mad at you,” while his to her, after he shot her in the face, were “F*cking b*tch!”

In the case of the murder of Renee Good, the shooter and his protectors are clearly so isolated in their own authoritarian bubble they cannot see how regular Americans would react to the video of a woman smiling at a masked agent and saying: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you,” only to have him shoot her in the face and then spit out “F*cking b*tch” after he killed her. (...) [ed. Probably the same way they reacted to the storming of Capitol Building...] 

Although ICE currently employs more than 20,000 people, it is looking to hire over 10,000 more with the help of the money Republicans put in their One Big Beautiful Bill Act of July. That law tripled ICE’s budget for enforcement and deportation to about $30 billion.

On December 31, Drew Harwell and Joyce Sohyun Lee of the Washington Post reported that ICE was investing $100 million on what it called a “wartime recruitment” strategy to hire thousands of new officers. It planned to target gun rights supporters and military enthusiasts as well as those who listen to right-wing radi0 shows, directing ads to people who have gone to Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fights or shopped for guns and tactical gear. It planned to send ads to the phone web browsers and social media feeds of people near military bases, NASCAR races, gun and trade shows, or college campuses, apparently not considering them the hotbeds of left-wing indoctrination right-wing politicians claim. (...)

When Kaitlan Collins of CNN asked Trump yesterday if he thought the FBI should be sharing information about the shooting of Renee Good with state officials, as is normally the case, Trump responded: “Well, normally, I would, but they’re crooked officials. I mean, Minneapolis and Minnesota, what a beautiful place, but it’s being destroyed. It’s got an incompetent governor fool. I mean, he’s a stupid person, and, uh, it looks like the number could be $19 billion stolen from a lot of people, but largely people from Somalia. They buy their vote, they vote in a group, they buy their vote. They sell more Mercedes-Benzes in that area than almost—can you imagine? You come over with no money and then shortly thereafter you’re driving a Mercedes-Benz. The whole thing is ridiculous. They’re very corrupt people. It’s a very corrupt state. I feel that I won Minnesota. I think I won it all three times. Nobody’s won it for since Richard Nixon won it many, many years ago. I won it all three times, in my opinion, and it’s a corrupt state, a corrupt voting state, and the Republicans ought to get smart and demand on voter ID. They ought to demand, maybe same-day voting and all of the other things that you have to have to safe election. But I won Minnesota three times that I didn’t get credit for. I did so well in that state, every time. The people were, they were crying. Every time after. That’s a crooked state. California’s a crooked state. Many crooked states. We have a very, very dishonest voting system.”

Trump lost Minnesota in 2016, 2020, and 2024.

Fossil Words and the Road to Damascus

Caravaggio, The Conversion of Saint Paul
via:
[ed. Fossil word(s). When a word is broadly obsolete but remains in use due to its presence in an idiom or phrase. 

For example, I've always understood the phrase Road to Damascus to be a sort of epiphany or form of enlightment (without knowing what it actually meant). Another example would be Crossing the Rubicon (a point of no return; or decision with no turning back). Of course, these aren't outdated words/phrases as much as shorthand for mental laziness (or trite writing habits). Wikipedia provides a number of examples of actual fossil words, including "much ado about nothing" or "without further ado" (who uses ado in any other context these days?); or "in point", as in "a case in point", or "in point of fact". So, to help promote a little more clarity around here -- Road to Damascus:] 

***

The conversion of Paul the Apostle was, according to the New Testament, an event in the life of Saul/Paul the Apostle that led him to cease persecuting early Christians and to become a follower of Jesus. Paul, who also went by Saul, was "a Pharisee of Pharisees" who "intensely persecuted" the followers of Jesus. Paul describes his life before conversion in his Epistle to the Galatians:

For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it. I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers...

As he neared Damascus on his journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?"

"Who are you, Lord?" Saul asked.

"I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting," he replied. "Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do."

The men traveling with Saul stood there speechless; they heard the sound but did not see anyone. Paul got up from the ground, but when he opened his eyes he could see nothing. So they led him by the hand into Damascus. For three days he was blind, and did not eat or drink anything.

— Acts 9:3–9

Wikipedia Style Guide

Many people edit Wikipedia because they enjoy writing; however, that passion can result in overlong composition. This reflects a lack of time or commitment to refine an effort through successively more concise drafts. With some application, natural redundancies and digressions can often be eliminated. Recall the venerable paraphrase of Pascal: "I made this so long because I did not have time to make it shorter." [Wikipedia: tl;dr]

Inverted pyramid

Some articles follow the inverted pyramid structure of journalism, which can be seen in news articles that get directly to the point. The main feature of the inverted pyramid is placement of important information first, with a decreasing importance as the article advances. Originally developed so that the editors could cut from the bottom to fit an item into the available layout space, this style encourages brevity and prioritizes information, because many people expect to find important material early, and less important information later, where interest decreases. (...)

What Wikipedia is not

Wikipedia is not a manual, guidebook, textbook, or scientific journal. Articles and other encyclopedic content should be written in a formal tone. Standards for formal tone vary depending upon the subject matter but should usually match the style used in Featured- and Good-class articles in the same category. Encyclopedic writing has a fairly academic approach, while remaining clear and understandable. Formal tone means that the article should not be written using argot, slang, colloquialisms, doublespeak, legalese, or jargon that is unintelligible to an average reader; it means that the English language should be used in a businesslike manner (e.g. use "feel" or "atmosphere" instead of "vibes").

News style or persuasive writing

A Wikipedia article should not sound like a news article. Especially avoid bombastic wording, attempts at humor or cleverness, over-reliance on primary sources, editorializing, recentism, pull quotes, journalese, and headlinese.

Similarly, avoid persuasive writing, which has many of those faults and more of its own, most often various kinds of appeals to emotion and related fallacies. This style is used in press releases, advertising, editorial writing, activism, propaganda, proposals, formal debate, reviews, and much tabloid and sometimes investigative journalism. It is not Wikipedia's role to try to convince the reader of anything, only to provide the salient facts as best they can be determined, and the reliable sources for them.

Comparison of styles

via: Wikipedia: Writing better articles
Image: Benjamin Busch/Import Projects - Wikimedia commons 

[ed. In celebration of Wikipedia Day (roughly Jan. 15). It's easy to forget how awesome this product really is: a massive, free, indispensable resource tended to by hundreds (thousands?) of volunteers simply for altruistic reasons. The best of the internet (and reminder of what could have been). See also: Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not]

Dan Wang: 2025 Letter

[ed. Dang Wang has a new annual newsletter out (pleasant surprise!) mostly about China and Silicon Valley - or more generally, US vs. China competition. He skipped producing one last year when his book Breakneck was published. Previous letters can be found here and here. Enjoy.]

***

One way that Silicon Valley and the Communist Party resemble each other is that both are serious, self-serious, and indeed, completely humorless.

If the Bay Area once had an impish side, it has gone the way of most hardware tinkerers and hippie communes. Which of the tech titans are funny? In public, they tend to speak in one of two registers. The first is the blandly corporate tone we’ve come to expect when we see them dragged before Congressional hearings or fireside chats. The second leans philosophical, as they compose their features into the sort of reverie appropriate for issuing apocalyptic prophecies on AI. Sam Altman once combined both registers at a tech conference when he said: “I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.” Actually that was pretty funny.

It wouldn’t be news to the Central Committee that only the paranoid survive. The Communist Party speaks in the same two registers as the tech titans. The po-faced men on the Politburo tend to make extraordinarily bland speeches, laced occasionally with a murderous warning against those who cross the party’s interests. How funny is the big guy? We can take a look at an official list of Xi Jinping’s jokes, helpfully published by party propagandists. These wisecracks include the following: “On an inspection tour to Jiangsu, Xi quipped that the true measure of water cleanliness is whether the mayor would dare to swim in the water.” Or try this reminiscence that Xi offered on bad air quality: “The PM2.5 back then was even worse than it is now; I used to joke that it was PM250.” Yes, such a humorous fellow is the general secretary.

It’s nearly as dangerous to tweet a joke about a top VC as it is to make a joke about a member of the Central Committee. People who are dead serious tend not to embody sparkling irony. Yet the Communist Party and Silicon Valley are two of the most powerful forces shaping our world today. Their initiatives increase their own centrality while weakening the agency of whole nation states. Perhaps they are successful because they are remorseless.

Earlier this year, I moved from Yale to Stanford. The sun and the dynamism of the west coast have drawn me back. I found a Bay Area that has grown a lot weirder since I lived there a decade ago. In 2015, people were mostly working on consumer apps, cryptocurrencies, and some business software. Though it felt exciting, it looks in retrospect like a more innocent, even a more sedate, time. Today, AI dictates everything in San Francisco while the tech scene plays a much larger political role in the United States. I can’t get over how strange it all feels. In the midst of California’s natural beauty, nerds are trying to build God in a Box; meanwhile, Peter Thiel hovers in the background presenting lectures on the nature of the Antichrist. This eldritch setting feels more appropriate for a Gothic horror novel than for real life.

Before anyone gets the wrong idea, I want to say that I am rooting for San Francisco. It’s tempting to gawk at the craziness of the culture, as much of the east coast media tends to do. Yes, one can quickly find people who speak with the conviction of a cultist; no, I will not inject the peptides proffered by strangers. But there’s more to the Bay Area than unusual health practices. It is, after all, a place that creates not only new products, but also new modes of living. I’m struck that some east coast folks insist to me that driverless cars can’t work and won’t be accepted, even as these vehicles populate the streets of the Bay Area. Coverage of Silicon Valley increasingly reminds me of coverage of China, where a legacy media reporter might parachute in, write a dispatch on something that looks deranged, and leave without moving past caricature.

I enjoy San Francisco more than when I was younger because I now better appreciate what makes it work. I believe that Silicon Valley possesses plenty of virtues. To start, it is the most meritocratic part of America. Tech is so open towards immigrants that it has driven populists into a froth of rage. It remains male-heavy and practices plenty of gatekeeping. But San Francisco better embodies an ethos of openness relative to the rest of the country. Industries on the east coast — finance, media, universities, policy — tend to more carefully weigh name and pedigree. Young scientists aren’t told they ought to keep their innovations incremental and their attitude to hierarchy duly deferential, as they might hear in Boston. A smart young person could achieve much more over a few years in SF than in DC. People aren’t reminiscing over some lost golden age that took place decades ago, as New Yorkers in media might do.

San Francisco is forward looking and eager to try new ideas. Without this curiosity, it wouldn’t be able to create whole new product categories: iPhones, social media, large language models, and all sorts of digital services. For the most part, it’s positive that tech values speed: quick product cycles, quick replies to email. Past success creates an expectation that the next technological wave will be even more exciting. It’s good to keep building the future, though it’s sometimes absurd to hear someone pivot, mid-breath, from declaring that salvation lies in the blockchain to announcing that AI will solve everything.

People like to make fun of San Francisco for not drinking; well, that works pretty well for me. I enjoy board games and appreciate that it’s easier to find other players. I like SF house parties, where people take off their shoes at the entrance and enter a space in which speech can be heard over music, which feels so much more civilized than descending into a loud bar in New York. It’s easy to fall into a nerdy conversation almost immediately with someone young and earnest. The Bay Area has converged on Asian-American modes of socializing (though it lacks the emphasis on food). I find it charming that a San Francisco home that is poorly furnished and strewn with pizza boxes could be owned by a billionaire who can’t get around to setting up a bed for his mattress.

There’s still no better place for a smart, young person to go in the world than Silicon Valley. It adores the youth, especially those with technical skill and the ability to grind. Venture capitalists are chasing younger and younger founders: the median age of the latest Y Combinator cohort is only 24, down from 30 just three years ago. My favorite part of Silicon Valley is the cultivation of community. Tech founders are a close-knit group, always offering help to each other, but they circulate actively amidst the broader community too. (The finance industry in New York by contrast practices far greater secrecy.) Tech has organizations I think of as internal civic institutions that try to build community. They bring people together in San Francisco or retreats north of the city, bringing together young people to learn from older folks.

Silicon Valley also embodies a cultural tension. It is playing with new ideas while being open to newcomers; at the same time, it is a self-absorbed place that doesn’t think so much about the broader world. Young people who move to San Francisco already tend to be very online. They know what they’re signing up for. If they don’t fit in after a few years, they probably won’t stick around. San Francisco is a city that absorbs a lot of people with similar ethics, which reinforces its existing strengths and weaknesses.

Narrowness of mind is something that makes me uneasy about the tech world. Effective altruists, for example, began with sound ideas like concern for animal welfare as well as cost-benefit analyses for charitable giving. But these solid premises have launched some of its members towards intellectual worlds very distant from moral intuitions that most people hold; they’ve also sent a few into jail. The well-rounded type might struggle to stand out relative to people who are exceptionally talented in a technical domain. Hedge fund managers have views about the price of oil, interest rates, a reliably obscure historical episode, and a thousand other things. Tech titans more obsessively pursue a few ideas — as Elon Musk has on electric vehicles and space launches — rather than developing a robust model of the world.

So the 20-year-olds who accompanied Mr. Musk into the Department of Government Efficiency did not, I would say, distinguish themselves with their judiciousness. The Bay Area has all sorts of autistic tendencies. Though Silicon Valley values the ability to move fast, the rest of society has paid more attention to instances in which tech wants to break things. It is not surprising that hardcore contingents on both the left and the right have developed hostility to most everything that emerges from Silicon Valley.

There’s a general lack of cultural awareness in the Bay Area. It’s easy to hear at these parties that a person’s favorite nonfiction book is Seeing Like a State while their aspirationally favorite novel is Middlemarch. Silicon Valley often speaks in strange tongues, starting podcasts and shows that are popular within the tech world but do not travel far beyond the Bay Area. Though San Francisco has produced so much wealth, it is a relative underperformer in the national culture. Indie movie theaters keep closing down while all sorts of retail and art institutions suffer from the crumminess of downtown. The symphony and the opera keep cutting back on performances — after Esa-Pekka Salonen quit the directorship of the symphony, it hasn’t been able to name a successor. Wealthy folks in New York and LA have, for generations, pumped money into civic institutions. Tech elites mostly scorn traditional cultural venues and prefer to fund the next wave of technology instead.

One of the things I like about the finance industry is that it might be better at encouraging diverse opinions. Portfolio managers want to be right on average, but everyone is wrong three times a day before breakfast. So they relentlessly seek new information sources; consensus is rare, since there are always contrarians betting against the rest of the market. Tech cares less for dissent. Its movements are more herdlike, in which companies and startups chase one big technology at a time. Startups don’t need dissent; they want workers who can grind until the network effects kick in. VCs don’t like dissent, showing again and again that many have thin skins. That contributes to a culture I think of as Silicon Valley’s soft Leninism. When political winds shift, most people fall in line, most prominently this year as many tech voices embraced the right.

The two most insular cities I’ve lived in are San Francisco and Beijing. They are places where people are willing to risk apocalypse every day in order to reach utopia. Though Beijing is open only to a narrow slice of newcomers — the young, smart, and Han — its elites must think about the rest of the country and the rest of the world. San Francisco is more open, but when people move there, they stop thinking about the world at large. Tech folks may be the worst-traveled segment of American elites. People stop themselves from leaving in part because they can correctly claim to live in one of the most naturally beautiful corners of the world, in part because they feel they should not tear themselves away from inventing the future. More than any other topic, I’m bewildered by the way that Silicon Valley talks about AI.

Hallucinating the end of history

While critics of AI cite the spread of slop and rising power bills, AI’s architects are more focused on its potential to produce surging job losses. Anthropic chief Dario Amodei takes pains to point out that AI could push the unemployment rate to 20 percent by eviscerating white-collar work.

The most-read essay from Silicon Valley this year was AI 2027. The five authors, who come from the AI safety world, outline a scenario in which superintelligence wakes up in 2027; a decade later, it decides to annihilate humanity with biological weapons. My favorite detail in the report is that humanity would persist in a genetically modified form, after the AI reconstructs creatures that are “to humans what corgis are to wolves.” It’s hard to know what to make of this document, because the authors keep tucking important context into footnotes, repeatedly saying they do not endorse a prediction. Six months after publication, they stated that their timelines were lengthening, but even at the start their median forecast for the arrival of superintelligence was later than 2027. Why they put that year in their title remains beyond me.

It’s easy for conversations in San Francisco to collapse into AI. At a party, someone told me that we no longer have to worry about the future of manufacturing. Why not? “Because AI will solve it for us.” At another, I heard someone say the same thing about climate change. One of the questions I receive most frequently anywhere is when Beijing intends to seize Taiwan. But only in San Francisco do people insist that Beijing wants Taiwan for its production of AI chips. In vain do I protest that there are historical and geopolitical reasons motivating the desire, that chip fabs cannot be violently seized, and anyway that Beijing has coveted Taiwan for approximately seven decades before people were talking about AI.

Silicon Valley’s views on AI made more sense to me after I learned the term “decisive strategic advantage.” It was first used by Nick Bostrom’s 2014 book Superintelligence, which defined it as a technology sufficient to achieve “complete world domination.” How might anyone gain a DSA? A superintelligence might develop cyber advantages that cripple the adversary’s command-and-control capabilities. Or the superintelligence could self-recursively improve such that the lab or state that controls it gains an insurmountable scientific advantage. Once an AI reaches a certain capability threshold, it might need only weeks or hours to evolve into a superintelligence.

If you buy the potential of AI, then you might worry about the corgi-fication of humanity by way of biological weapons. This hope also helps to explain the semiconductor controls unveiled by the Biden administration in 2022. If the policymakers believe that DSA is within reach, then it makes sense to throw almost everything into grasping it while blocking the adversary from the same. And it barely matters if these controls stimulate Chinese companies to invent alternatives to American technologies, because the competition will be won in years, not decades.

The trouble with these calculations is that they mire us in epistemically tricky terrain. I’m bothered by how quickly the discussions of AI become utopian or apocalyptic. As Sam Altman once said (and again this is fairly humorous): “AI will be either the best or the worst thing ever.” It’s a Pascal’s Wager, in which we’re sure that the values are infinite, but we don’t know in which direction. It also forces thinking to be obsessively short term. People start losing interest in problems of the next five or ten years, because superintelligence will have already changed everything. The big political and technological questions we need to discuss are only those that matter to the speed of AI development. Furthermore, we must sprint towards a post-superintelligence world even though we have no real idea what it will bring.

Effective altruists used to be known for their insistence on thinking about the very long run; much more of the movement now is concerned about the development of AI in the next year. Call me a romantic, but I believe that there will be a future, and indeed a long future, beyond 2027. History will not end. We need to cultivate the skill of exact thinking in demented times.

I am skeptical of the decisive strategic advantage when I filter it through my main preoccupation: understanding China’s technology trajectories. On AI, China is behind the US, but not by years. There’s no question that American reasoning models are more sophisticated than the likes of DeepSeek and Qwen. But the Chinese efforts are doggedly in pursuit, sometimes a bit closer to US models, sometimes a bit further. By virtue of being open-source (or at least open-weight), the Chinese models have found receptive customers overseas, sometimes with American tech companies.

One advantage for Beijing is that much of the global AI talent is Chinese. We can tell from the CVs of researchers as well as occasional disclosures from top labs (for example from Meta) that a large percentage of AI researchers earned their degrees from Chinese universities. American labs may be able to declare that “our Chinese are better than their Chinese.” But some of these Chinese researchers may decide to repatriate. I know that many of them prefer to stay in the US: their compensation might be higher by an order of magnitude, they have access to compute, and they can work with top peers.
But they may also tire of the uncertainty created by Trump’s immigration policy. It’s never worth forgetting that at the dawn of the Cold War, the US deported Qian Xuesen, the CalTech professor who then built missile delivery systems for Beijing. Or these Chinese researchers expect life in Shanghai to be safer or more fun than in San Francisco. Or they miss mom. People move for all sorts of reasons, so I’m reluctant to believe that the US has a durable talent advantage.

China has other advantages in building AI. Superintelligence will demand a superload of power. By now everyone has seen the chart with two curves: US electrical generation capacity, which has barely budged upwards since the year 2000; and China’s capacity, which was one-third US levels in 2000 and more than two-and-a-half times US levels in 2024. Beijing is building so much solar, coal, and nuclear to make sure that no data center shall be in want. Though the US has done a superb job building data centers, it hasn’t prepared enough for other bottlenecks. Especially not as Trump’s dislike of wind turbines has removed this source of growth. Speaking of Trump’s whimsy, he has also been generous with selling close-to-leading chips to Beijing. That’s another reason that data centers might not represent a US advantage for long.

Silicon Valley has not demonstrated joined-up thinking for deploying AI. It would help if they learned from the central planners. The AI labs have not shown that they’re thinking seriously about how to diffuse the technology throughout society, which will require extensive regulatory and legal reform. How else will AI be able to fold doctors and lawyers into its tender mercies? Doing politics will also mean reaching out to more of the electorate, who are often uneasy with Silicon Valley’s promises while they see rising electrical bills. Silicon Valley has done a marvelous job in building data centers. But tech titans don’t look ready to plan for later steps in leading the whole-of-society effort into deploying AI everywhere.

The Communist Party lives for whole-of-society efforts. That’s what Leninist systems are built for. Beijing has set targets for deploying AI across society, though as usual with planning announcements, these numerical targets should be taken seriously and not literally. Chinese founders talk about AI mostly as a technology to be harnessed rather than a fickle power that might threaten all. Rather than building superintelligence, Chinese companies have been more interested in embedding AI into robots and manufacturing lines. Some researchers believe that this sort of embodied AI might present the real path towards superintelligence. We might furthermore wonder how the US and China will use AI. Since the US is much more services-driven, Americans may be using AI to produce more powerpoints and lawsuits; China, by virtue of being the global manufacturer, has the option to scale up production of more electronics, more drones, and more munitions.

Dean Ball, who helped craft the White House’s action plan on AI, has written a perceptive post on how the US is playing to its strengths — software, chips, cloud computing, financing — while China is also focused on leaning on manufacturing excellence. In his view, “the US economy is increasingly a highly leveraged bet on deep learning.” Certainly there’s a lot of money invested here, but it looks risky to be so concentrated. I believe it’s unbecoming for the world’s largest economy to be so levered on one technology. That’s a more appropriate strategy for a small country. Why shouldn’t the US be better positioned across the entirety of the supply chain, from electron production to electronics production?

I am not a skeptic of AI. I am a skeptic only of the decisive strategic advantage, which treats awakening the superintelligence as the final goal. Rather than “winning the AI race,” I prefer to say that the US and China need to “win the AI future.” There is no race with a clear end point or a shiny medal for first place. Winning the future is the more appropriately capacious term that incorporates the agenda to build good reasoning models as well as the effort to diffuse it across society. For the US to come ahead on AI, it should build more power, revive its manufacturing base, and figure out how to make companies and workers make use of this technology. Otherwise China might do better when compute is no longer the main bottleneck.

by Dan Wang |  Read more:

The Depressed Person

The depressed person was interrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror. 

Despairing, then, of describing the emotional pain itself, the depressed person hoped at least to be able to express something of its contextits shape and texture, as it were-by recounting circumstances related to its etiology. The depressed person's parents, for example, who had divorced when she was a child, had used her as a pawn in the sick games they played, as in when the depressed person had required orthodonture and each parent had claimed-not without some cause, the depressed person always inserted, given the Medicean legal ambiguities of the divorce settlement-that the other should pay for it. Both parents were well-off, and each had privately expressed to the depressed person a willingness, if push came to shove, to bite the bullet and pay, explaining that it was a matter not of money or dentition but of "principle." And the depressed person always took care, when as an adult she attempted to describe to a supportive friend the venomous struggle over the cost of her orthodonture and that struggle's legacy of emotional pain for her, to concede that it may well truly have appeared to each parent to have been, in fact, a matter of "principle," though unfortunately not a "principle" that took into account their daughter's feelings at receiving the emotional message that scoring petty points off each other was more important to her parents than her own maxillofacial health and thus constituted, if considered from a certain perspective, a form of neglect or abandonment or even outright abuse, an abuse clearly connected-here she nearly always inserted that her therapist concurred with this assessment-to the bottomless, chronic adult despair she suffered every day and felt hopelessly trapped in.

The approximately half-dozen friends whom her therapist-who had earned both a terminal graduate degree and a medical degree-referred to as the depressed person's Support System tended to be either female acquaintances from childhood or else girls she had roomed with at various stages of her school career, nurturing and comparatively undamaged women who now lived in all manner of different cities and whom the depressed person often had not laid eyes on in years and years, and whom she called late in the evening, long-distance, for badly needed sharing and support and just a few well-chosen words to help her get some realistic perspective on the day's despair and get centered and gather together the strength to fight through the emotional agony of the next day, and to whom, when she telephoned, the depressed person always apologized for dragging them down or coming off as boring or self-pitying or repellent or taking them away from their active, vibrant, largely pain-free long-distance lives. She was, in addition, also always extremely careful to share with the friends in her Support System her belief that it would be whiny and pathetic to play what she derisively called the "Blame Game" and blame her constant and indescribable adult pain on her parents' traumatic divorce or their cynical use of her. Her parents had, after all-as her therapist had helped the depressed person to see---done the very best they could do with the emotional resources they'd had at the time. And she had, the depressed person always inserted, laughing weakly, eventually gotten the orthoprecedence and required her (i.e., the friend) to get off the telephone. 

The feelings of shame and inadequacy the depressed person experienced about calling members of her Support System long-distance late at night and burdening them with her clumsy attempts to describe at least the contextual texture of her emotional agony were an issue on which she and her therapist were currently doing a great deal of work in their time together. The depressed person confessed that when whatever supportive friend she was sharing with finally confessed that she (i.e., the friend) was dreadfully sorry but there was no helping it she absolutely had to get off the telephone, and had verbally detached the depressed person's needy fingers from her pantcuff and returned to the demands of her full, vibrant long-distance life, the depressed person always sat there listening to the empty apian drone of the dial tone feeling even more isolated and inadequate and unempathized-with than she had before she'd called. The depressed person confessed to her therapist that when she reached out long-distance to a member of her Support System she almost always imagined that she could detect, in the friend's increasingly long silences and/or repetitions of encouraging cliches, the boredom and abstract guilt people always feel when someone is clinging to them and being a joyless burden. The depressed person confessed that she could well imagine each "friend" wincing now when the telephone rang late at night, or during the conversation looking impatiently at the clock or directing silent gestures and facial expressions communicating her boredom and frustration and helpless entrapment to all the other people in the room with her, the expressive gestures becoming more desperate and extreme as the depressed person went on and on and on. The depressed person's therapist's most noticeable unconscious personal habit or tic consisted of placing the tips of all her fingers together in her lap and manipulating them idly as she listened supportively, so that her mated hands formed various enclosing shapes-e.g., cube, sphere, cone, right cylinder-and then seeming to study or contemplate them. The depressed person disliked the habit, though she was quick to admit that this was chiefly because it drew her attention to the therapist's fingers and fingernails and caused her to compare them with her own. donture she'd needed. The former acquaintances and classmates who composed her Support System often told the depressed person that they just wished she could be a little less hard on herself, to which the depressed person responded by bursting involuntarily into tears and telling them that she knew all too well that she was one of those dreaded types of everyone's grim acquaintance who call at inconvenient times and just go on and on about themselves. The depressed person said that she was all too excruciatingly aware of what a joyless burden she was, and during the calls she always made it a point to express the enormous gratitude she felt at having a friend she could call and get nurturing and support from, however briefly, before the demands of that friend's full, joyful, active life took understandable.

The depressed person shared that she could remember, all too clearly, how at her third boarding school she had once watched her roommate talk to some boy on their room's telephone as she (i.e., the roommate) made faces and gestures of entrapped repulsion and boredom with the call, this popular, attractive, and self-assured roommate finally directing at the depressed person an exaggerated pantomime of someone knocking on a door until the depressed person understood that she was to open their room's door and step outside and knock loudly on it so as to give the roommate an excuse to end the call. The depressed person had shared this traumatic memory with members of her Support System and had tried to articulate how bottomlessly horrible she had felt it would have been to have been that nameless pathetic boy on the phone and how now, as a legacy of that experience, she dreaded, more than almost anything, the thought of ever being someone you had to appeal silently to someone nearby to help you contrive an excuse to get off the phone with. The depressed person would implore each supportive friend to tell her the very moment she (i.e., the friend) was getting bored or frustrated or repelled or felt she (i.e., the friend) had other more urgent or interesting things to attend to, to please for God's sake be utterly candid and frank and not spend one moment longer on the phone than she was absolutely glad to spend. The depressed person knew perfectly well, of course, she assured the therapist;' how such a request could all too possibly be heard not as an invitation to get off the telephone at will but actually as a needy, manipulative plea not to get off the telephone - never get off - the telephone.

by David Foster Wallace, Harper's |  Read more (pdf):

Image: uncredited

[ed. Hadn't seen this essay before, but it got me wondering how it might relate to Good Old Neon:]

***

My whole life I’ve been a fraud. I’m not exaggerating. Pretty much all I’ve ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. It’s a little more complicated than that, maybe. But when you come right down to it it’s to be liked, loved. Admired, approved of, applauded, whatever. You get the idea. I did well in school, but deep down the whole thing’s motive wasn’t to learn or improve myself but just to do well, to get good grades and make sports teams and perform well. To have a good transcript or varsity letters to show people. I didn’t enjoy it much because I was always scared I wouldn’t do well enough. The fear made me work really hard, so I’d always do well and end up getting what I wanted. But then, once I got the best grade or made All City or got Angela Mead to let me put my hand on her breast, I wouldn’t feel much of anything except maybe fear that I wouldn’t be able to get it again.The next time or next thing I wanted. I remember being down in the rec room in Angela Mead’s basement on the couch and having her let me get my hand up under her blouse and not even really feeling the soft aliveness or whatever of her breast because all I was doing was thinking, ‘Now I’m the guy that Mead let get to second with her.’ Later that seemed so sad. This was in middle school. She was a very big-hearted, quiet, selfcontained, thoughtful girl — she’s a veterinarian now, with her own Good Old Neon practice — and I never even really saw her, I couldn’t see anything except who I might be in her eyes, this cheerleader and probably number two or three among the most desirable girls in middle school that year. She was much more than that, she was beyond all that adolescent ranking and popularity crap, but I never really let her be or saw her as more, although I put up a very good front as somebody who could have deep conversations and really wanted to know and understand who she was inside. 

Later I was in analysis, I tried analysis like almost everybody else then in their late twenties who’d made some money or had a family or whatever they thought they wanted and still didn’t feel that they were happy. A lot of people I knew tried it. It didn’t really work, although it did make everyone sound more aware of their own problems and added some useful vocabulary and concepts to the way we all had to talk to each other to fit in and sound a certain way. You know what I mean. I was in regional advertising at the time in Chicago, having made the jump from media buyer for a large consulting firm, and at only twenty-nine I’d made creative associate, and verily as they say I was a fair-haired boy and on the fast track but wasn’t happy at all, whatever happy means, but of course I didn’t say this to anybody because it was such a cliché — ‘Tears of a Clown,’ ‘Richard Cory,’ etc. — and the circle of people who seemed important to me seemed much more dry, oblique and contemptuous of clichés than that, and so of course I spent all my time trying to get them to think I was dry and jaded as well, doing things like yawning and looking at my nails and saying things like, ‘Am I happy? is one of those questions that, if it has got to be asked, more or less dictates its own answer,’ etc. Putting in all this time and energy to create a certain impression and get approval or acceptance that then I felt nothing about because it didn’t have anything to do with who I really was inside, and I was disgusted with myself for always being such a fraud, but I couldn’t seem to help it. Here are some of the various things I tried: EST, riding a ten-speed to Nova Scotia and back, hypnosis, cocaine, sacro-cervical chiropractic, joining a charismatic church, jogging, pro bono work for the Ad Council, meditation classes, the Masons, analysis, the Landmark Forum, the 142 David Foster Wallace Course in Miracles, a right-brain drawing workshop, celibacy, collecting and restoring vintage Corvettes, and trying to sleep with a different girl every night for two straight months (I racked up a total of thirty-six for sixty-one and also got chlamydia, which I told friends about, acting like I was embarrassed but secretly expecting most of them to be impressed — which, under the cover of making a lot of jokes at my expense, I think they were — but for the most part the two months just made me feel shallow and predatory, plus I missed a great deal of sleep and was a wreck at work — that was also the period I tried cocaine). I know this part is boring and probably boring you, by the way, but it gets a lot more interesting when I get to the part where I kill myself and discover what happens immediately after a person dies. In terms of the list, psychoanalysis was pretty much the last thing I tried.

The analyst I saw was OK, a big soft older guy with a big ginger mustache and a pleasant, sort of informal manner. I’m not sure I remember him alive too well. He was a fairly good listener, and seemed interested and sympathetic in a slightly distant way. At first I suspected he didn’t like me or was uneasy around me. I don’t think he was used to patients who were already aware of what their real problem was. He was also a bit of a pill-pusher. I balked at trying antidepressants, I just couldn’t see myself taking pills to try to be less of a fraud. I said that even if they worked, how would I know if it was me or the pills? By that time I already knew I was a fraud. I knew what my problem was. I just couldn’t seem to stop. I remember I spent maybe the first twenty times or so in analysis acting all open and candid but in reality sort of fencing with him or leading him around by the nose, basically showing him that I wasn’t just another one of those patients who stumbled in with no clue what their real problem was or who were totally out of touch with the truth about themselves. When you come right down to it, I was trying to show him that I was at least as smart as he was and that there wasn’t much of anything he was going to see about me that I hadn’t already seen and figured out. And yet I wanted help and really was there to try to get help. I didn’t even tell him how unhappy I was until five or six months into the analysis, mostly because Oblivion 143 I didn’t want to seem like just another whining, self-absorbed yuppie, even though I think even then I was on some level conscious that that’s all I really was, deep down.  (more...)  ~ Good Old Neon

Numb At Burning Man

Numb at Burning Man (long..)

Every year, seventy thousand hippies, libertarians, tech entrepreneurs, utopians, hula-hoop artists, psychonauts, Israelis, perverts, polyamorists, EDM listeners, spiritual healers, Israelis, coders, venture capitalists, fire spinners, elderly nudists, white girls with cornrows, Geoff Dyers, and Israelis come together to build a city in the middle of the Nevada desert. The Black Rock Desert is one of the most inhospitable places on the planet. The ground there isn’t even sand, but a fine alkaline powder that causes chemical burns on contact with your skin, and it’s constantly whipped up into towering dust storms. Nothing grows there. There’s no water, no roads, and no phone signal. In the daytime the heat is deadly and it’s freezing cold at night. The main virtue of the place is that it’s extremely flat; it’s been the site of two land speed records. But for one week, it becomes a lurid wonderland entirely devoted to human pleasure. Then, once the week is up, it’s completely dismantled again. They rake over the desert and remove every last scrap of plastic or fuzzball of human hair. Afterwards the wind moves over the lifeless alkaline flats as if no one was ever there.

They’ve been doing this there since 1990, as long as I’ve been alive, and for the most part I’ve been happy to leave them to it. Burning Man might be where the world’s new ruling class are free to express their desires without inhibitions, which makes it a model of what they want to do to the rest of the world; if you want to know what horrors are heading our way, you have to go. But I don’t do drugs, I don’t like camping, and I can’t stand EDM. It’s just not really my scene.

What happened is that in February this year I received a strange email from two strangers who said they wanted to commission me to write an essay. They weren’t editors, they didn’t have a magazine, and they didn’t care where I published the essay once I wrote it; all they wanted was for me to go to Burning Man and say something about the experience. (...)

Up before dawn. Seventy thousand people would be attempting to get into Burning Man that day; to avoid queues your best bet is to go early. Three hours driving through some of the most gorgeous landscapes anywhere in the world, green meadows between sheer slabs of rock, glittering black crystal lakes, until finally the mountains fall away and you’re left on an endless flat grey plain. Nine thousand years ago, this was a lakebed. Now it’s nothing at all. Drive along a rutted track into this emptiness until, suddenly, you reach the end of the line. Ahead of us were tens of thousands of vehicles, cars and trucks and RVs, jammed along a single track far into the horizon. Like a migrant caravan, like a people in flight. If we’re lucky, Alan said, we should get in and have our tents set up before sunset. Wait, I said, does that mean that if we’re unlucky, we might not? Alan shrugged. He explained that once he’d been stuck in this line for nearly twelve hours. He’d staved off boredom by playing Go against himself on the surface of an imaginary Klein bottle... Every half an hour the great mass of vehicles would crawl ahead thirty, forty, fifty metres and then stop. (...)

I don’t know exactly what I’d expected the place to look like. For the best possible experience, I’d studiously avoided doing any research whatsoever. A hazy mental image of some vast cuddle puddle, beautiful glowing naked freaks. What it actually looked like was a refugee camp. Tract after tract of mud-splattered tents, rows of RVs, general detritus scattered everywhere. Our camp, when we finally arrived, was a disaster zone. A few people had already arrived and set up, but the previous night’s storm had uprooted practically everything. Tents crumpled under a collapsed shade structure; tarps sagging with muddy water, pegs and poles and other bits of important metal all strewn about like a dyspraxic toddler’s toys. The ground moved underfoot. When it rains over the alkaline flats you don’t get normal, wholesome, Glastonbury-style mud. Not the dirt that makes flowers plants grow. An alien, sterile, non-Newtonian substance, sucking at my shoes. (...)

My camp for the duration of Burning Man was named BrainFish. We were a theme camp. Most camps are just a small group of friends pitching their tents together, but some are big. Dozens or hundreds of people who have come to offer something. All free, all in the gift economy. A bar, or food, or yoga classes, or orgies. One camp runs a library, which contains a lot of books about astrology and drug legalisation, plus two copies of Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler. Mostly, though, theme camps are the ones with geodesic domes. (...)

What I learned, digging and hauling all day and talking to BrainFish at night, is that Burning Man is not really a festival. Festivals have a very long history. A thousand years ago, the villagers could spend the feast day drinking and feasting, while the bishop had to ride through town backwards on a donkey being pelted with turds. A brief moment of communal plenty. Leftists like me like the festival; what we want is essentially for life to be one big festival all the time. But as conservative critics point out, you can’t really consider the festival in isolation, and there’s no feast without a fast. There are also days of abstention and self-denial, when people are forbidden from laughing or talking, solemn mortification of the flesh. Burning Man is something new: a festival and an antifestival at the same time. Everything that’s scarce in the outside world is abundant. There are boutiques where you can just wander in and take a handful of clothes for free; there’s a basically infinite supply of drugs, and a similarly infinite supply of random casual sex. It is the highest-trust society to have ever existed anywhere in the world. At the same time, some extremely rich and powerful people come to Burning Man to experience deprivation and suffering. All the ordinary ties and comforts of a complex society are gone. No public authority that owes you anything, no public services, no concept of the public at all, just whatever other individuals choose to gift you. This is the only city in the world without any kind of water supply, or system for managing waste, or reliable protection from the elements. You are something less than human here. Not a political animal, but a mangy desert creature, rutting in the dust.

Not everyone experiences the same level of discomfort. There are plug-and-play camps, where they hire a team of paid staff to set up all the amenities, and you can just arrive, stay in a luxury caravan, and have fun. They get private showers. Everyone else despises these people, supposedly because it’s not in keeping with the ethos of the place. I’m not sure it’s just that. There’s something more at stake.

Tech people tend to have a very particular view of their role in the universe. They are the creators, the people who build the world, who bless the rest of us with useful and entertaining apps. But they’re never allowed to simply get on with their job of engineering reality; they’re constantly held back from doing whatever they want by petty political forces that try to hold back progress in the name of dusty eighteenth-century principles like democracy. As if the public’s revealed preferences weren’t already expressed through the market. Every so often an imbecile politician will demand that tech companies turn off the algorithm. They don’t know what an algorithm is, they just know it’s bad. The British government thinks you can save water by deleting old emails. These people straightforwardly don’t understand anything about the industry they’re trying to regulate, but if you suggest getting rid of the whole useless political layer people get upset. You can’t win. But Burning Man is a showcase for the totally unlimited power of the builders. Here they get to be Stalinist technocrats, summoning utopia out of the Plan. The difference is that unlike the Soviet model, their utopia really works. Look what we can do. From literally nothing, from a barren desert, we can build a paradise of pleasure in a week and then dismantle it again. And all of this could be yours, every day, if you give over the world to me.

But all these tech people are, as everyone knows, interlopers. Burning Man used to be for weirdos and dreamers; now it’s been colonised by start-up drones, shuffling around autistically in the dirt, looking at their phones, setting up Starlink connections so they can keep monitoring their KPIs in the middle of the orgy. Which just shows how little people know, because the hippie counterculture and the tech industry are obviously just two stages in the development of the same thing. They call it non-monogamy instead of free love, and there’s a lot more business software involved, but the doctrine is exactly the same: tear down all the hoary old repressive forces; bring about a new Aquarian age of pleasure and desire. Turn on, tune in, spend all day looking at your phone. It’s what you want to do. Your feed doesn’t want to harsh your trip with any rules. It just wants to give you more of what you want.

by Sam Kriss, Numb at the Lodge |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

What’s Not to Like?

Similes! I have hundreds of them on three-by-five notecards, highbrow and lowbrow, copied from newspapers, comic strips, sonnets, billboards, and fortune cookies. My desk overflows with them. They run down to the floor, trail across the room into the hallway. I have similes the way other houses have ants.

Why? To start, for the sheer laugh-out-loud pleasure of them. “His smile was as stiff as a frozen fish,” writes Raymond Chandler. “He vanished abruptly, like an eel going into the mud,” writes P. G. Wodehouse, the undoubted master of the form. Or Kingsley Amis’s probably first-hand description of a hangover: “He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning.”

From time to time, I’ve tried to organize my collection, though mostly the task is, as the cliché nicely puts it, like herding cats. Still, a few categories come to mind. The Really Bad Simile, for instance. Examples of this pop up like blisters in contemporary “literary” fiction. Here is a woman eating a crème brûlée: “She crashed the spoon through the sugar like a boy falling through ice on a lake.” (Authors’ names omitted, per the Mercy Rule.) Or: “A slick of beer shaped like the Baltic Sea spilled on the table.” Sometimes they follow a verb like tin cans on a string: “The restraining pins tinkled to the floor like metal rain, hunks of hair tumbling across her face in feral waves.” Or sometimes they just make the page itself cringe and curl up at the corners: “Charlie’s heart rippled like a cloth spread across a wide table.”

Writing about sex can drive a writer to similes of unparalleled badness. Someone has borrowed my copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but these more recent examples might do, from The Literary Review’s “Bad Sex in Fiction Award”: “Katsuro’s penis and testicles became one single mound that rolled around beneath the grip of her hand. Miyuki felt as though she was manipulating a small monkey that was curling up its paws.” Or this loving, if somewhat chiropractic moment: “her long neck, her swan’s neck … coiling like a serpent, like a serpent, coiling down on him.” Or finally (my eyes are closed as I type): “Her vaginal ratchet moved in concertina-like waves, slowly chugging my organ as a boa constrictor swallows its prey.” (...)

Donne’s simile belongs to another category as well, the epic or Homeric simile. Every reader of the Iliad knows something like this picture of an attacking army as a wildfire:

“As when the obliterating fire comes down on the timbered forest / and the roll of the wind carries it everywhere,” and so the Achaean host drives ahead for another five lines. Modern prose writers can also unscroll a simile at surprising length. John Updike dives right in: “The sea, slightly distended by my higher perspective, seems a misty old gentleman stretched at his ease in an immense armchair which has for arms the arms of this bay and for an antimacassar the freshly laundered sky. Sailboats float on his surface like idle and unrelated benevolent thoughts.” And one would not like to have been the beefy Duke of Bedford when Edmund Burke imagined how revolutionary mobs might regard him: “Like the print of the poor ox that we see in the shop windows at Charing Cross, alive as he is, and thinking no harm in the world, he is divided into rumps, and sirloins, and briskets, and into all sorts of pieces for roasting, boiling, and stewing.”
It takes a dramatic mind to carry a comparison through so logically and so far. The Homeric simile evokes a world far larger than a single flash of thought, however clever. Its length creates a scene in our minds, even a drama where contraries come alive: an army driving into battle, an ocean tamed into a harmless old gent, a bloody clash in the streets between aristocrats and rebels.

“Perceptive of resemblances,” writes Aristotle, is what the maker of similes must be. There is one more step. The maker of similes, long or short, must perceive resemblances and then, above all, obey the first, and maybe only, commandment for a writer: to make you see. Consider Wodehouse’s “He found Lord Emsworth, as usual, draped like a wet sock over the rail of the Empress’s G.H.O.,” or Patricia Cornwell’s “My thoughts scattered like marbles.”

The dictionary definition of metaphor is simply an implied comparison, a comparison without the key words like or as. The most common schoolbook example is, “She has a heart of gold,” followed by, “The world is a stage.” Latching onto the verb is, the popular website Grammarly explains, “A metaphor states that one thing is another thing.”

Close, but not enough. There is great wisdom in the roots of our language, in the origin of words. Deep down, in its first Greek form, metaphor combines meta (over, across) and pherein (to carry), and thus the full word means to carry over, to transfer, to change or alter. A metaphor does more than state an identity. In our imagination, before our eyes, metaphor changes one thing into another: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” Eliot’s metaphor is a metamorphosis. Magically, we see Prufrock the man metamorphosed into a creature with ragged claws, like a hapless minor god in Ovid.

Too much? Consider, then, what the presence of like or as does in a simile. It announces, self-consciously, that something good is coming. The simile is a rhetorical magic trick, like a pun pulled out of a hat. A metaphor, however, feels not clever but true. Take away the announcement of like, and we read and write on a much less sophisticated level, on a level that has been called primitive, because it recalls the staggering ancient power of words as curses, as spells to transform someone into a frog, a stag, a satanic serpent.

A better term might be childlike. Psychologists know that very young children understand the metamorphosing power of words. To a child of three or four, writes Howard Gardner, the properties of a new word “may be inextricably fused with the new object: at such a time the pencil may become a rocket ship.” Older children and adults know that this isn’t so. But for most of us, and certainly for most writers I know, the childhood core of magical language play is not lost. It exists at the center and is only surrounded by adult awareness, as the rings encircle the heart of the tree.

Still too much? Here is Updike, making me gasp: “But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.” No labored comparison, no signal not to take it literally. Like the pencil and rocket, their hands have become a starfish. Or Shakespeare, metamorphosing himself into an autumnal tree and then an ancient abbey: “That time of year thou may’st in me behold, / When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, / Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang.” Pure magic.

Yet why be a purist? At the high point of language, James Joyce blends simile, metaphor, and extended simile into one beautiful and unearthly scene, an image created by a sorcerer.

A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane’s. … Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird’s, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.

The passage is like a palimpsest. A reader can see through the surface of the language. A reader can penetrate to the traces of the real person still visible beneath the living words that are, as they move down the page, quietly transforming her. It is as if we are looking through the transparent chrysalis to the caterpillar growing inside, watching its slow and perfect metamorphosis into the butterfly. Too much? No.

by Max Byrd, American Scholar |  Read more:

Image: locket479/Flickr