More often than meeting people who were strongly in favor or against redistricting, I met people who either had not heard of Proposition 50 or didn’t understand it. Others simply felt disillusioned by politics. They didn’t believe that politicians, no matter from what party, would have a positive impact on their lives, and they didn’t expect help from them.
Chris Arnade:: “…. Hong Kong is not walkable, [but] that doesn’t mean it’s not a singular and fascinating city, a humid gem in an ocean of global uniformity, and one that is ultimately rewarding as a pedestrian.” As always, I love his travel writing and street photography.
Photos from yesterday’s No Kings rally and march in downtown San Diego, in Waterford Park. There were three rallies in the city, and more than a dozen around the county. I was one of thousands of people who turned out.
Eight years ago today I attended my first meeting of the La Mesa-Foothills Democratic Club. It has been quite a ride since.
I marched at the San Diego No Kings event this morning. I’ll have photos later. It was intense. My phone needs recharging and so do I.
Loni Anderson, Star of ‘WKRP in Cincinnati,’ Dies at 79 — “In 1980, she starred in the biographical drama and made-for-TV movie ‘The Jayne Mansfield Story,’ opposite a young Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Hungarian actor and bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay.”
I’m going to the No Kings event Saturday. I didn’t want to shlep a sign but then I thought — T-shirt! Ordered one, but it arrives Sunday. Oh, well — there will be other protests. Sadly, we’re not going to get rid of the 🤡and his 🍩enablers in one day.
My hotel room has no desk. It has an ironing board and iron but no closets, so once you’ve ironed your clothes, there is nowhere to hang them up.
I haven’t ironed anything since I ironed my shirt on our wedding day in 1993, but don’t you need to hang things up immediately after you iron them, if you’re not going to wear them right away?
Here’s something I saw today — this restaurant next door to my hotel. Colombian. It wasn’t great, but I’m glad I tried it anyway.
President Donald Trump is desperate for an enemy to justify the extreme force he wants to deploy on blue states and is trying his hardest to convince people that antifa is so dangerous that, as Attorney General Pam Bondi said at the roundtable this week, they need to be exterminated like ISIS or Hamas. The Trump administration also has a nearly pathological habit of accusing their enemies of being exactly like them. Which is why they think the left is a dark money-funded domestic terror cell full of pedophiles and spree shooters that wants to destroy America.
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[Jack] Posobiec, an influencer who never ascended to Kirk’s level because he just can’t stop going full Nazi, said at the roundtable, “Antifa has been around in various iterations for almost 100 years in some instances, going back to the Weimar Republic in Germany.” What happened to antifa after that, Jack?
— Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day, The war against giant frog costumes
The Romantic: How Diane Keaton’s quest for beauty left an imprint on American culture — A beautiful appreciation of a beautiful spirit and woman.
The Oatmeal’s comic/essay about AI art starts as yet another AI rant, but then goes in an interesting direction that more or less aligns with how I think about using AI for writing. I use it for what the Oatmeal calls administrative drudgery — dragging cans of paint up the stairs to paint the Sistine Chapel. But I do not use it to write.
New Paper Finds That When You Reward AI for Success on Social Media, It Becomes Increasingly Sociopathic. “… when [AIs] were rewarded for success at tasks like boosting likes and other online engagement metrics, the bots increasingly engaged in unethical behavior like lying and spreading hateful messages or misinformation.” Fortunately, this is not a problem when people use social media.
An intriguing defense of Julian Jaynes' theory of how human consciousness emerged
Scott Alexander reviews Julian Jaynes’s alternative-science masterpiece, “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” and argues Jaynes is half-right:
Julian Jaynes' The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind is a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciousness. And second, that it posits a breakdown of the bicameral mind. I think it’s possible to route around these flaws while keeping the thesis otherwise intact. So I’m going to start by reviewing a slightly different book, the one Jaynes should have written. Then I’ll talk about the more dubious one he actually wrote.
Alexander argues that what Jaynes discovered is not the breakdown of the bicameral mind — left-brain and right-brain merging into an integrated whole. Jaynes discovered the origin of theory of mind.
Until the Bronze Age, people operated without theory of mind, and they hallucinated gods to compensate. When theory of mind emerged, it spread like a virus.
Turn on what Terry Pratchett called “first sight and second thoughts” and try to look at the Bronze Age with fresh eyes. It was really weird. People would center their city around a giant ziggurat, the “House of God”, with a giant idol within. They would treat this idol exactly like a living human – feeding it daily, washing it daily, sometimes even marching it through the streets on sedan chairs carried by teams of slaves so it could go on a “connubial visit” to the temple of an idol of the opposite sex! When the king died, hundreds of thousands of men would labor to build him a giant tomb, and then they would kill a bunch of people to serve him in the afterlife. Then every so often it would all fall apart and everyone would slink away into the hills, trying to pretend they didn’t spend the last twenty years buliding a jeweled obelisk so some guy named Ningal-Iddida could boast about how many slaves he had.
If the Bronze Age seems kind of hive-mind-y, Julian Jaynes argues this is because its inhabitants weren’t quite individuals, at least not the way we think of individuality.