It came up in context of her visiting the White House but I think it’s worth revisiting what political journalism was like in the late 2000s, for context about what it has turned into today
I honestly have nothing kind to say about a single one of them and regret, knowing what I know.
She proudly did not write emails in the 2000s when literally everyone else did, but when she joined the board of directors at an AI company at $350,000 a year she suddenly got gun ho that we have to “win” the AI “race” against China. She’s so principled!
Kessler has been the Post's diplomatic correspondent covering Rice since 2002. His book catches her walking and talking and flying, huddling with diplomats, joshing with reporters, and protecting her patron, President George W. Bush. Kessler says that Rice writes Bush a note every night-on paper, with pen. The Secretary of State does not write e-mails. Rice, like Bush, prides herself on working out and staying fit. Kessler tells about Rice kicking off her shoes at a dance party hosted by Coit Blacker, a friend of Rice's. Blacker speculated to his partner "that if he aimed a quarter at her butt, it would bounce off like a rocket." He did; it did. "She was flattered," Kessier writes, "-and proud."
Oh my god I am still traumatized from when Glenn Kessler (yes that Glenn Kessler) chose to recount a Stanford professor bragging about the first Black national security adviser and his former Provost being so athletic he could bounce a quarter off her ass.
www.washingtonpost.com/archive/life...
lol remember when she and Robert Gates were hired by Exxon Mobil to lobby for Rex Tillerson to get her for her job, which she did, and he was such a bad manager 60% of the senior workforce resigned in disgust?
Always fun to see how the “targeted” ads change after I finish grading student case studies and I’ve been looking up various companies. None of the ads are useful. Absolute sham industry 😂
Yesssssss
This is incredibly interesting — archaeologists have been able to reconstruct the diets of different prehistoric Europeans from 5,000-8,000 years ago by analyzing the charred remains of food in clay pots. Extremely cool!
Absolutely and I think that’s a good nuance to add to what I was saying
Maybe another way of putting it is that I think there needs to be a lot more formal political organizing around this than there has been so far (hooray for neoliberalism destroying white collar worker solidarity), and that there needs to be a broader focus on macro-politics not just self-motivation.
Similarly, across industries workers are told that they must use AI, regardless of how useful it feels, or they will be denied promotions or outright fired. Saying we should resist under those conditions is fine, but you have to then deal with all of the many ways unemployment affects wellbeing.
Like, the police show up to nonviolent protesters at AI companies and data centers and drag people engaged in constitutionally protected speech into prison. If we want to say people should feel more empowered to speak up and resist, we have to account for how the state uses violence to repress that.
I don’t think we disagree on the need to regulate these companies, and the need for more vocal, more widespread criticism and rejection of the way they corrupt every formal and informal institution they touch, but IMO demanding resistance without accounting for reprisal is just slactivism.
Which is too bad, because Foucault was very much aware of the state’s willingness to use violence to enforce discipline. In other words, I don’t think you can approach resisting AI philosophically without engaging with the biopolitics of AI, including disciplining those who dissent from it.
I also think it’s fine to say we need a better political imaginary to create a broader horizon of possibilities in which we feel the capacity to act, but that has hard structural limits (employment precarity) and physical risks (violent reprisal by the state) that they don‘t really engage with.
So I can accept the argument on their terms, but I would also say that the conceptual development of those terms will be limited by there being a much more broadly accepted, alternative set of definitions for the splitting and rejoining they are trying to do. That’s fine, it’s how these things work.
Ahhh, so that would explain some of where I diverge — they are using concepts with discrete meanings in psychology in a philosophical context I am unfamiliar with. In psychology, agency IS a situated possibility to act, inseparable from self-efficacy, the belief in one’s capacity to achieve a goal.
Joi Ito, former director of MIT's media lab and now president of CIT, had numerous email exchanges with Epstein about "girls." They have never been published. It's high time they were katemanne.substack.com/p/theres-ano...
The insult atop injury, don’t believe your eyes only believe my excuses, is so brand aligned with the 2020s I honestly don’t know what to say about it anymore.
Not sure which one you mean but the one I’m referring to happens every March in Orlando.
“Why is everyone so mad about my swastika tattoo? It’s a Sanskrit symbol of purity and good luck. How was I supposed to know it had other meanings? I was 23 and in Europe in the mid-2000s.”
I searched for “goat” on Bing the other day and nothing about animals came up on the first two pages it showed me
This industry already demands people move as often as military servicemembers (with none of the support or stability), attend conferences in expensive and politically dangerous locations, and work to near-breakdown for arbitrary metrics none of our committees had to meet, and sometimes it just hits.
Watching my colleagues and peers network and enjoy themselves at a discipline-specific conference I would like to attend, and trying to explain to them that I never will so long as it stays in Florida (for the obvious reasons), and wondering if I’ll have any future at all in academia
Having slept on this, I am angrier about it. Proton is not transparent about this risk and actively lies to users about how secure their data is. It’s not “their fault” they are bound by Swiss law, but they actively deceive users about what that law requires. Just another bunch of tech scammers.
Amen and god bless us, specifically
Kinda sad, tbh
I think one problem is that the helplessness is actually grounded in the reality of not having agency and the hyper-wealthy being utterly careless about the human toll their whims impose on society.
I’ve had this attitude for like 20 years now, and it’s never failed me.
I kinda think Reason Magazine will run a piece defending Kalshi, picked up by the Daily Wire portraying them as a free market under assault by the censorious left, turned into a Fox and Friends segment about the value of teaching kids to gamble, ending with their getting a no-bid $300m DHS contract.
