Lethality Fashions
La fanciulla del West
Author: William Timberman
Unbidden Bits—September 9, 2025
Does Stephen Miller really not realize that in painting targets on all our backs, he’s also painted one on his own? I can’t imagine being thrilled at the moral certainty that millions of people are wanting me dead. Despite all Miller’s public bravado, I have no idea how he can either.
I suppose sadomasochism has its own logic. I’m grateful I’ve never felt the urge find out how that logic works.
Trumpism’s Unspoken Antecedents
Joachim von Ribbentrop for foreign policy
The East India Company for economic policy
Joseph Stalin for scientific policy
The Taliban for social policy
The Spanish Inquisition for jurisprudence
Louis XIV of France for taxation
The Eastern Roman Empire for internal staffing and administration
A Humanist Doxology
Whatever their other talents, the best of us have always had one thing in common: a fierce, unyielding clarity about what it means to be a human being. Here, in this short clip of James Baldwin speaking informally, is the most succinct expression of that clarity I’ve ever encountered. There’s no cant here, no unspoken agenda, no recrimination. This is as naked, as vulnerable, and yet as implacable an expression of our true responsibilities to one another as it’s possible for a single voice to utter. James Baldwin honors us all, while reminding us all what little comfort we can demand for doing the right thing. There’s far more on display here than a single talented person’s eloquence. We’d do well to heed it.
Steve Jobs’s Last Stand
An earlier version of this post appeared as a comment on Cory Doctorow’s Medium article “AI software assistants make the hardest kinds of bugs to spot.”
Will someone please, please tell Tim Cook and Craig Federighi to stand firm on the barricades? Their ambivalence toward the current trends in AI reflects what’s always distinguished Apple from other companies in the tech industry. Apple under Steve Jobs built beautiful tools for independent thinkers and artists, and Steve became notorious for being diligent, even implacable, in his defense of individual creators. Maybe that was because he was Stewart Brand with electricity—and a blackjack in his hip pocket for dissenters—but it was precisely his “bicycles for the mind” attitude that offered salvation to many of us who couldn’t face spending our lives as corporate drones.
Microsoft under Bill Gates, on the other hand, seemed to exist for the sole purpose of supplying the operators of Moloch inc. with productivity tools, tools that were explicitly designed to accommodate their corporate customers’ desire to surveil and control their hapless workers.
I suppose you could say, at least early on, that of the two, Jobs and Gates, Gates was the more pragmatic. Would anyone say that today of Elon Musk and Sam Altman, his direct descendants in the evolution of thinking about technology? More to the point, with social media and the tech press now awash with reports of a newly-beleaguered Apple, will Tim Cook et al. feel compelled to incorporate LLM slop into Apple’s software on a hitherto unprecedented scale, or will they stick to their muzzleloaders and form an impenetrable cordon sanitaire around their real customers, those stubborn individuals who still believe in the human use of human beings?
Stay tuned….
Memento Mori
Dear Sir,
You’ll be dead soon. What’ll be the use of all that power and money then?
Will it establish and preserve a legacy? I doubt it—ambitious people will come from near and far to piss on a tyrant’s legacy as well as on his grave. Pigeons will shit on his statues, and the funding he leaves behind to have them cleaned will be reinvested in bitcoin by his heirs.
Will it found a dynasty? Carefully managed, it might, but your sons are morons, and despite what you say in public, we know you find them weak and contemptible—imperfect copies of a perfect original. The less said about your daughters the better. They’re old enough now to be as uninteresting and as greedy as your current and former wives, but not as submissive, at least not to you, now you’ve married them off to potential rivals. I mean, really, what point is there in funding the rise of someone else’s dynasty?
I know Janis Joplin once told us to get it while we can, but she was talking about love, not a commodity you’ve ever had much use for, then or now. Let that be your last thought on your way out of here: when the getting was good, you were busy getting the wrong things, and now you’re out of time.
Unbidden Bits—July 7, 2025
Me: But who’ll pick our fruits and vegetables?
Republicans: We don’t eat fruits and vegetables.
Me: But who’ll work in our slaughterhouses and meat packing plants?
Republicans: We only eat what we kill.
Me: Soylent Green, then?
The End Of the Beginning….*
The Supreme Court has finally finished booby-trapping every legal exit from our national fascist nightmare. For the moment at least, Trump’s Gleichschaltung appears complete. In a country of 340 million people, though, that’s almost certainly an illusion. Only the profoundly ignorant can rejoice in what comes next. Does Tommy Tuberville, for example, realize what his bodyguard bill is likely to look like from now on? Does he imagine that the Republican Party or the Trump administration is going to pay it for him?
*A previous version of this text appeared in the comments section of the Crooked Timber post The end of US democracy, by John Q
Lament
A haunted child
At his lemonade stand
Under a tree that was
Here before us
Will be here after us
Because it’s not in Palestine
There is no justice, child
Only the haunting,
the terrible beauty we can see
Because we’re not in Palestine
Unbidden Bits—June 20, 2025
Overheard at an imaginary reception:
I’m a chatbot censor—victim of the Musk purge. At Alphabet now. You?
Deus ex machina engineer.
Uh…?
I write science fiction.
Ah…guess we have a lot in common, then.