Trump at 100

                Well, we’ve reached the end of 100 days of Trump, and I think we can say we’ve learned four things for sure:

1.       He’s a liar

2.       He’s stupid

3.       He’s a big, fat, compulsive liar

4.       He’s really f****** stupid.

That said: what do we do now?

                While we might fantasize about impeachment, I don’t think it is going to happen.  Even if it did, does the notion of Pence, Ryan, and McConnell running the government make you sleep any better?  I think we have to face the reality that our democracy is broken.  The courts and the intelligence agencies are holding up for now, but it’s only been a 100 days and they already look battered.  If we’re going to rebuild our democratic institutions, we have to be ready to take some radical steps.

                One of the things I think we have to work to replace is the two- party system.  One of the parties has decided that democracy isn’t as important as power and has done everything in their power to destroy the process of democracy – which is really all democracy ever is.  The Republicans have destroyed the Supreme Court’s non-political cover, turned the Senate into the House and declared war on everything that isn’t old, white, male and rich.  If the Republicans no longer believe in the system, then an oppositional party is futile.  Between gerrymandering districts and restricting the right to vote, they can continue this tyranny of the minority over the majority for the foreseeable future – which is no way to run a democracy.

                The Democrats aren’t much better.  The Clinton dynasty turned earnest Yale educated hippies into Wall Street/Davos class millionaires, selling influence wherever they could find a buyer.  Even the sainted Big O is now raking in $400.000 speaker fees after never prosecuting even one of the bankers who took us to the brink of disaster.  It’s easy to blame Citizens United for all the evils of money in politics, but the fact is that our fixation on two parties all but makes it inevitable that money will dominate.  Poor Bernie could never compete with the forces that big party politics always has lurking in the shadows.

                Rather than pinning our hopes on another compromise candidate in 2020, isn’t it time to recognize that most of us aren’t really represented by this system.  The Democratic elites will pick one their own when the time comes.  We will be regaled with stories about how they lead can drives for a girl scout troop made up of Syrian refugees who swam across the ocean to freedom – meanwhile, they’ll be selling us down the river in the board rooms of America.  Democrats talk about new generations of candidates, but they will never come as long as they have to be Ivy League grads.

                If we’re going to usher in a new era of democracy we need new democratic institutions.  We need a multi-party system that will allow the real issues people care about to be articulated and acted upon, and an environment that allows the organic leaders of those movements to rise to leadership.  BLM shouldn’t have to hope that the Democrats ‘get it.’  LGBTQ causes shouldn’t have to go to the back of the line while we litigate the ‘real’ issues of the day.  Women’s issues should have their own platform.  One big mush of a party fails everyone.  We need a vigorous debate.  We will agree on some things and disagree about others.  We will form different coalitions over different issues.  It will be messy, but it will be democratic – it will have a process.

                100 days in things look pretty bleak.  But Trump is merely the worst person a flawed system could produce.  In some fundamental ways, he isn’t that different – he’s just the sad clown at the end of the parade.

                

# 11

Machine Language

                Languaging has been the most important feature of human society for 30,000 years or so.  It has sparked what we call civilization and allowed humans to inhabit the globe.  In those 30,000 years, however, nothing has changed languaging as much as computers have changed it in the last 3 decades.  It would be fair to say that our interactions with each other and the world have never undergone such a profound change, and it has happened in the blink of an eye.  Probably nothing marks the rise of the cyborg more than the devices that we now use to navigate our world.  Everyone with a smart phone holds more information and computing power than existed in the world a mere 50 years ago.

                Who was the last person to have read everything published in their language and culture? Erasmus – maybe?  Ever since Guttenberg we have been speeding up the rate at which the meta-languaging of our culture reproduces and travels.  We have reached the point that machines can do it faster and better than the most capable humans.  The best chess master is no match for Watson, and Siri can spit out answers faster than the smartest and most well- read person you know.  Every teacher knows that if they bluff or flub an answer some student in the back row that you thought was dead or comatose just Googled the right answer and, contrary to everything you thought you knew about dead people, is raising his hand to correct you.  Calculations that used to take scientists hours and days to make are now routinely spit out of computerized instruments in seconds.

                What are we to make of the notion of knowledge or intelligence in this new context?  I think we can only make sense of these developments by realizing that we’re really talking about two very different things.  Information is not intelligence.  The purpose of human intelligence is not a more accurate description of what we take to be the external world.  Machine intelligence is not the same and does not operate on the same principles as human intelligence.  The only real danger posed by machine intelligence is to confuse it with the purposes and functions of human intelligence.  We have got to let go of the notion that our ‘brain’ is like a computer and that the more we can cram into it and the faster we can recall it the smarter we are. 

                I want to make it clear that I am not against machine intelligence – unless you want to replace humans with machines – in which case I’m with Hawking saying that is dangerous.    I think machine intelligence makes patterns and data comprehendible in ways that are both fascinating and useful.  I am not arguing against machine intelligence, I just want to draw a distinction between it and what I think are the uses and purposes of human intelligence.  In fact, I would even credit machine intelligence with bringing the West to this point of consciousness that clearly demonstrates that the Cartesian definition of knowing is hopeless.  We are no more a challenge to computers and their ability to store, recall and combine information that John Henry and his hammer were to the steam drill.  Now that we should no longer confuse information with intelligence we have a chance, at last, to ask what it means to know and to think.

                Just as we learned to stop using our bodies as machines to move and control the physical world, we have to now learn to stop using our consciousness as a machine to control and manipulate the social and material world.  The things that are lacking in the intellectual and spiritual world are not lacking because we need more data.  They are lacking because we have lost a sense of connection.  Maturana and Fell like to present the basic condition we all face as having to deal with the fact that we are always already both connected and autonomous.  We are in the world, not outside of it.  I am not saying that everything is relative and there is no reality.  I’m saying that we will never reconnect to the world through reason and science alone.  It’s easy to prove that climate change exists, but almost impossible to get someone who doesn’t already see it to agree.  We argue about facts and let larger truths and greater wisdom escape in the bargain.  Let the machines do what machines do, and let us start to figure out what it is we should do instead.

When Children Play With Cruise Missiles

                Americans love blowing things up.  When Donald Trump launched a few dozen cruise missiles into Syria, some otherwise sane commentators said he immediately became ‘presidential.’  How?  By all accounts, he decided on this course of action after seeing cable news footage of the barbaric chemical attack on children authorized by Syria and, by extension, Russia.  It wasn’t a part of a deliberate plan to seriously intervene in the humanitarian crisis there, a crisis his refugee ban makes worse everywhere in the world.  It represented a retreat from remarks he and his Secretary of State made days earlier.  In fact, the Trump administration, far from playing cowboy hero in this drama, enabled the attack on those civilians by signing off on any serious political intervention.  Trump wasn’t making a serious point; he was throwing a tantrum.

                The last thing Syria needs is more explosions.  Obama has been castigated for not blowing things up in Syria, but he may have done something that Americans have a hard time understanding.  He may have realized that there is no simple answer to the problem and until there is a consensus both globally and in this country about what should be done, the best action is to wait.  During the campaign, Gary Johnson didn’t even know where Allepo was, let alone what to do about it.  Congress denied Obama’s attempt to request for action, not that his policies for the region were all that great.  What do we think we want to do in Syria?  What outcome do we seek, and what process are we willing to follow to achieve it?  We’ve made such a mess of the region, it’s hard to see what we can do to fix it.

                Some people are happy that Trump acted against Putin.  Russia is playing a losing hand in Syria.  They are propping up a Shia dictatorship while millions of Sunnis live on their borders.  Putin is facing increasing dissent inside Russia and the likelihood of growing unrest and terrorism from the Muslim population they are repressing.  Let Putin play that hand.  Let him dig his own grave with his policy in Syria.  Of course, it will be brutal and ugly and difficult to watch, but without an international and domestic agenda that is willing to invest in the decades it will take return the prospect of a safe and productive life to the Syrian people, there is little else to do.

                The ONE thing that Trump could have done to alleviate the suffering in the region is to massively increase the role we play in settling refugees.  He has done the opposite.  He made Syrian refugees, most of them women and children and all of them products of a two- year vetting process, a pawn in his populist rants during the campaign.  He made them part of his ‘Muslim ban’ to protect us from some imaginary danger these refugees posed.  Nothing on that front has changed.  His administration is part of the Eurocentric backlash against people of the region who are part of a diaspora we created  in our quest for oil.  If he was concerned with the humanitarian crisis, the munitions of the United States Armed Forces was a curious choice to address it.

                Trump likely made things worse.  He hasn’t stopped the conventional slaughter by Syrian and Russian ground forces.  He may even have made it worse.  Like everything else he does, the fallout will be someone else’s fault.  Maybe instead of seeing his actions as ‘presidential,’ we should see them for what they really were.  The world’s most dangerous child playing with the world’s most dangerous weapons.  I hope you enjoyed the fireworks.