The Calliope of Dread

On the Morality of Violent Political Resistance

William Timberman2 Comments

From Ken White at the Popehat Report comes a long inquiry into the morality of political violence, ending with this concluding paragraph:

I think I have been perfectly clear. However, for the benefit of people easily offended by implication over bluntness, I think there is a plausible argument that it is morally permissible, and even morally necessary, to use political violence against the Trump Administration and its agents and supporters under the current circumstances in America. The arguments in favor are likely to grow.

Here is my response, edited to correct the name of the of the Border Patrol “commander at large” apparently in charge of ICE operations in Minneapolis:

I’m afraid I feel compelled to offer a different answer than Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King Junior gave their lives to defend. No community is morally obligated to suffer what Gregory Bovino and his murderous thugs have done in Minneapolis to Renee Nicole Goode, Geraldo Lunas Campos, and Alex Pretti. Any community attacked the way ICE has attacked Minneapolis is morally justified in taking up arms against their attackers and driving them back to the sewer that spawned them. Our Declaration of Independence, as well as our own right to defend ourselves, says as much.

Practically speaking, of course, an armed response by  a community under siege in the circumstances that Minneapolis finds itself in today would simply result in ending the lives of a few depraved assholes in exchange for the lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands of innocents. Abstaining from violence in these circustances has nothing to do with morality, but it does have everything to do with a resistance that is prudent as well as courageous. That’s why I agree, for the moment at least, that Governor Walz has the right strategy, if not the right tactics, to respond to the Federal Government’s atrocities. If we’re serious about our resistance, more consistent and more effective tactics will come to us eventually. In the meantime, sadly, we can count on continuing news of blood and cruelty that a genuinely moral person will find extremely hard to endure without striking back.

Questions. I Have Questions.

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So when is some foreign army gonna come grab our disgusting dictator and spirit him off to an unknown destination? Will they let us see the Epstein files afterward, do you think? And what’s the likelihood they’ll be wanting our oil as compensation for the favor? The 21st century is just getting so confusing.

To Speak Plainly:

William Timberman4 Comments

This document could have been published by the German Nazi Party of 1933. It betrays our democratic constitutional order, threatens our most reliable allies, and makes white supremacy the cornerstone of our future foreign policy, It is nothing less than a blueprint for the creation of a fascist international. Every citizen of the United States who values the democratic traditions of this country should renounce both it and the filth it represents, shun the people who dared to write it, and drive them all from office.

The Kirk Circus

William Timberman4 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.

Steve Jobs’s Last Stand

William Timberman

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….

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