(Nur) die Gedanken sind frei

The Kirk Circus

William Timberman3 Comments

Everybody has a take. Everybody is deploring, threatening, scribbling cringeworthy hagiographies, lowering flags to half mast, offering up thoughts and prayers.

Charlie Kirk got what he deserved. He got what he’d already said he’d be willing to accept, if not endorse, as collateral damage in pursuit of what he considered to be a vigorous and necessary defense of the second amendment.

He never imagined that he’d be the one with a fatal bullet hole in him. Those would be reserved for Jews, immigrants, black and brown people, gay people, women who refused his benevolent instruction, empathetic people, people who’d read the wrong books, and above all, people who’d had a belly full of his trumpeted triumphs of the will to come, the triumphs that he and his equally deluded buddies were peddling to anyone stupid enough to take them at face value.

Civil society is in abeyance in the US. This was never our fault, but restoring it is nevertheless our duty. We can start by not shedding any tears for this sad, sick, puer aeternus, whose intelligence matured tragically earlier than his wisdom.

Unbidden Bits—September 9, 2025

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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.

A Humanist Doxology

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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

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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

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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.

The End Of the Beginning….*

William Timberman7 Comments

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

Unbidden Bits—June 12, 2025

William Timberman

Checking my web links this morning, I find that J.D. Vance has also been demanding that Governor Newsom do his job. Unfortunately he thinks that a governor’s job is to lick President Trump’s boots, express contrition for not doing it earlier, and to look the other way while the President conducts a Nazi-style armed invasion of his state, sends the most vulnerable of his people to concentration camps outside the country, and gets his propaganda minister to brag about it on Fox News.

No, J.D., that’s not Governor Newsom’s job, that’s not any state governor’s job. As Trump’s Vice-President, that’s your job. You’re the Toady-In-Chief. My advice to you is to stick to your knitting, and let Governor Newsom get on with the job of defending his people against the sociopath you work for.

In Defense Of Indifference

William Timberman2 Comments

We’re a quarter of a century into our new millennium. The Germans are eating less sausage, the French are drinking less wine, the Russians are trying to reverse-engineer 1991, and in the United States, our self regard has been abruptly terminated by an opera buffa Mussolini with a mouth like a guppy, and a face dipped in what looks like orange finger-paint. (Mussolini was an opera buffa character himself, of course, but the Italians invented opera, and they’ll always be better at it than anyone else.)

Despite what our newly-minted neofascist pundits are screaming at us these days, it isn’t time to re-think our principles, especially not at the behest of people who openly despise both thinking and principles. We already know what we need to know, namely that while we may not outlast them, our principles most definitely will. The rest is just noise.

Egg Freckles

William Timberman3 Comments

Siri is from Apple and is here to help us. We’re assured that it doesn’t spy on us like its relatives from Amazon and Alphabet do, so why do we hate it? Maybe being talked to like we were five years old by a machine the size of a grapefruit has something to do with it. Maybe being given answers that are either irrelevant or insane when we ask it a question does also. Artificial intelligence sounds like a fine idea. Being given artificial stupidity instead tends to confirm the contempt that we suspect the management of large corporations have for us. The tech bros fear the singularity. What they should fear is the Butlerian Jihad.