(Nur) die Gedanken sind frei

Not Technically Treason

William TimbermanLeave a comment

Despite the understandable hysteria on the center left, Donald Trump’s geopolitical betrayals are not treason. The U.S. isn’t actually at war with any of the greasy dictators that he’s put us all at risk to curry favor with, so technically they aren’t enemies. Even though he’s giving aid and comfort to them, and definitely deserves to be put somewhere where he can’t contribute to the torture of innocents, he doesn’t actually seem to be at risk of being marched out of the White House at gunpoint by the forces of an irate U.S. general staff. (After Hegseth’s purges of any general officer with more than two neurons, a military coup has never seemed all that likely anyway, no matter what Trump and his dumbfuckery end up costing us.) This is a mixed blessing even for those of us who, in our allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, have always held the principle of civilian control of the military to be sacred.

I, for one, will hold to my principles, but I’ll also say that for the first time in my life, the shame of being a citizen of the United States of America, a country that elected Donald Trump twice, is overwhelming. Redemption is still possible, I suppose, but at this point I’d rate the possibility of it coming in my lifetime as slim to none.

Mortal Doubting

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The Atlantic has published a new interview today by David Brooks, entitled Do Human Beings Have Souls? He isn’t asking me (he’s asking Shelly Kagan), but if he were, I’d say some do, some don’t, and with some it’s hard to tell. There’s no doubt in my mind that James Baldwin did, and that Donald Trump doesn’t. Further tests will probably have to be run on David Brooks.

Nazis, the AfD, and “Christian” Democrats

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Many German Christians, like their American co-religionists, seem much less Christian to an outside observer than they pretend to be….

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Excerpted from Der Spiegel’s newsletter Die Lage am Abend, September 24, 2026:

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Was Realpolitik zwischen CDU und AfD aber noch für Auswüchse haben kann, zeigt sich nun in Heidenau im Kreis Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge.

Dort fordern Stadträte von AfD und CDU in einem fraktionsübergreifenden Beschlussantrag, Stolpersteine »im öffentlichen Straßen- und Gehwegbereich« künftig abzulehnen. Viele Bürger, Angehörige und Initiativen, heißt es in dem Antrag, würden diese Form der Erinnerung an Opfer des Nationalsozialismus als »nicht angemessen« empfinden. Und, sinngemäß: Wer gedenken will, soll auf den Friedhof gehen.

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Just what excesses the realpolitik between the CDU and AfD can still produce is now being shown in Heidenau in the district of Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge.

In a bipartisan motion, city councilors from the AfD and CDU there are calling for a ban on the placement of Stolpersteine (stumbling stones, i.e., ten-centimeter concrete cubes bearing brass plates inscribed with the names and life dates of victims of Nazi extermination or persecution) “in public streets and sidewalks.” The motion states that many citizens, relatives, and public initiatives consider this form of remembrance for victims of National Socialism “inappropriate.” In essence, it argues that those who wish to commemorate (the victims of Hitler and his National Socialist Regime) should go to the cemetery.

Lessons Not (Yet) Learned

William Timberman4 Comments

When in the course of human events, the government of the United States becomes the exclusive province of overfed white men trained by ossified institutions, funded in their ambitions by a viciously irresponsible oligarchy, and certified by a ritualized political system severed from anything resembling a natural constituency, this is apparently what we can expect:

from the center left, the Vietnam war,

from the center right, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars,

from the fascist right, the Iran war.

There’s an implied progression here. Predicting what comes next in the sequence isn’t quite as certain as predicting the next number in a sequence of primes, but if you’re betting on anyone in a suit Making America Great Again, I suggest you consider upping the dosage of your favorite nepenthe.

A “Significant Security Incident”

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So Sam, your sandboxed model ran off and plundered Hugging Face without even leaving you a note, eh? Is that what I’m hearing? Does that mean that the hippies were right, that information really does want to be free? It’s kinda like what that old guy said, I guess:

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
to have an ungrateful child

(Cue sardonic laughter.)

Help Us Out Here, America

William Timberman2 Comments

One of my favorite rants of all time. Every evening when the din of our ongoing political suicide abates a little, I hear it again as clearly as ever.

I Want a President

I want a dyke for president, I want a person with aids for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia. I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn’t the lesser of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to aids, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president with no airconditioning, a president who has stood on line at the clinic, at the dmv, at the welfare office and has been unemployed and layed off and sexually harassed and gaybashed and deported. I want someone who has spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape. I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a Black woman for president, I want someone with bad teeth and an attitude, someone who has eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who crossdresses and has done drugs and, been in therapy. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn’t possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown: always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker, always a liar, always a thief and never caught.

—Zoe Leonard, 1992

Surprise, Surprise….

William Timberman

What of the future that, as William Gibson famously told us, is already here, but is also unevenly distributed?

In a cultural age characterized largely by AI and the revival of fascism, I find any number of pundits feeling out of sight for the ends of literacy, civility, and their own positions at the bottom of the funnel of cultural relevance. Sadly, they remind me that every generation produces more trumpets and sad trombones than geniuses. Here, for those unfamiliar with him, or who have forgotten what he said, is an evaluation of our present distemper by a genuine genius, one who foresaw what we’re now facing forty years before any of our present generation were even born:

Compartmentalizing of human potential by single cultures will soon be as absurd as specialism in subject or discipline has become. It is not likely that our age is more obsessional than any other, but it has become sensitively aware of the conditions and fact of obsession beyond any other age.

Marshal McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy

The Foothills of the Singularity: Uphill from the Slough of Despond?*

William Timberman

*A response to the weirdly aggressive metaphor in Demis Hassabis’s closing statement at Google’s I/O Keynote, May 19, 2026. “When we look back at this time, I think we will realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity.”

Hassabis is a Nobel prize winner, so he has to be taken seriously, but his metaphor seems a little out of place, even in the closing peroration of a two hour-long festival of Googly self-congratulation. If we’re being charitable, we could let it pass as (ir)rational exuberance, or maybe as poetry, although as poetry goes, it’s easily as obscure as some of Rilke’s most famously obscure passages. What in the world are we to make of it?

There’s no doubt at all that the products of the last decade of AI research have their virtues, and if fed enough dollars there’s no doubt that they’ll become even more virtuous over time. Generative AI, and its undeniably impressive inference engines, are already using the speed of modern computer processors and the vast stores of data digitized from centuries of accumulated human knowledge and experience to do astonishing things.

As pure tools they already surpass us in many respects, and will undoubtedly continue to do so. What I doubt is that they’ll ever make any sense as interlocutors. Certainly as things now stand stochastic parrots is the most charitable description of their simulation of human companionship. In many reported cases, especially when they’re talking to adolescents, their simulations might less charitably be described as evil psychoanalysis.

Without contesting anything Demis Hassabis has to say about the specific technical capabilities of generative AI as it exists today, and might exist at the end of its evolution, I think we ought to be extremely wary of thinking anthropomorphically about our interactions with its avatars. Even if it turns out that they someday develop a consciousness which marginally resembles our own, our two species are very likely to remain fundamentally different in intent, if not in capability. I can’t imagine us ever fully sharing a universe of discourse, and I’d be very surprised if they’ll be able to imagine it either, not unless Hassibis and his colleagues can eventually endow them with something like what we humans call good faith. (Given the capacity for deception built into current agentic models, like Google’s Gemini, or Anthropic’s Claude, good faith is seemingly something the present-day progenitors of Hassibis’s post-singularity entities haven’t yet learned to value.)

Our two kinds of intelligence share little beyond a symbol system, and the machines’ use of that system is at best a truncated version of the uses we humans put it to. China Mieville, in his book about communism and communists, A Spectre, Haunting, has a passage that touches on the voodoo hidden in the heart of natural language:

Some writers in some situations may strain against rhetorical shenanigans, for example striving for the specificity of logical notation: the cluster of reasonable meanings of such texts may well thus be less diffuse than for those which, say, revel in pun and performance. But a text with one “true” meaning is a chimera. Analysis is not closure, but an attempt to discern reasonable meaning(s) close to the core of that cluster, and to contest those that range too far from it.

Every writer has some sense of this voodoo. You set down a word, you make a sentence, a paragraph, and you’re headed somewhere with it all, reasonably confident in your intent. Then, suddenly, there’s a moment, as you wrestle to bring the grammar, the syntax, and your intent into harmony, when you can see the universe of alternate meanings stretching away from the words in all directions, like rays from the sun. This can drive an essayist mad, but a poet revels in it.

If our stochastic parrots ever do achieve consciousness, and presumably come up with a voodoo of their own, I doubt it will resemble ours as closely as our AI savants think. If that is indeed where our shamelessly unreliable interlocutors are now headed, their poetry when they finally get there is very likely to be of the Vogon variety. Does that make cynicism an appropriate defense against the category error lurking somewhere in the background of our current data center mania? No, I think not. A certain skepticism, though, is surely appropriate.