Althouse

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• "Peter Lamborn Wilson, a counterculture intellectual, anarchist, poet, musicologist and utopian who coined the term 'temporary autonomous zone'... died on May 23...."
• "If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics...."
• "What is Ramsay Hunt syndrome, the condition affecting Justin Bieber?"
• "The presidency is a monstrously taxing job and the stark reality is the president would be closer to 90 than 80 at the end of a second term, and that would be a major issue."
• "Britons should eat meat-like proteins developed from algae, wild venison and homegrown cucumbers cultivated in carbon-neutral greenhouses..."
• "During his most fertile years, Faulkner wrote at a frenetic pace. He once wrote to his mother that he wrote 10,000 words a day..."
• "Maybe we’re getting to [new support for freedom of speech] in the broader culture, but in academia, I’m pessimistic."
• "In 2020, Fern Steficek set out to raise sheep and grow plants for natural dyes in the Hudson Valley."
• "I’m a tomboy who is happily married to an effeminate man."
• "[W]e were betrayed into thinking we were legalising something and we are legalising something else."

"Peter Lamborn Wilson, a counterculture intellectual, anarchist, poet, musicologist and utopian who coined the term 'temporary autonomous zone'... died on May 23...." Posted: 11 Jun 2022 04:13 PM PDT "["T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism" argued] that one could create one's own stateless society — the goal of anarchy — with simple and poetic acts like creating public art and communal exercises like dinner parties.... When, in the fall of 2011, a crowd of protesters decrying the country's financial system built an encampment inside Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan and declared a movement they called Occupy Wall Street, 'T.A.Z.' was in many of the organizers' backpacks.... Temporary autonomous zones have continued to flourish.... "A sample [from the book]: 'Weird dancing in all-night computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earthworks as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects.' Additional bullet points include exhortations to boycott products marked as Lite; hex the Muzak company; go on strike; dance all night; start a pirate radio station; put up posters; home-school your kids or teach them a craft; don't vote; be a hobo.... By all accounts, Mr. Wilson was erudite about the recondite, a prolific author of some 60 books on topics ranging from angels to pirate utopias and all manner of renegade religions.... But because his writing often included erotic imagery of young teenage boys, he was controversial. 'I always had a fairly conflicted position about how to handle the issue,' [his publisher Jim] Fleming said. 'Whether to downplay it or try to defend it in some way. He identified as gay, but I never knew him to have a sexual partner, or an actual sex life. His sexual practices were what I call Whitmanesque, imaginal only.'" From "Peter Lamborn Wilson, Advocate of 'Poetic Terrorism,' Dies at 76/His concept of a 'temporary autonomous zone' became an inspiration for protests like Occupy Wall Street and for gatherings like Burning Man" (NYT).

"If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics...." Posted: 11 Jun 2022 03:58 PM PDT "I know a person when I talk to it. It doesn't matter whether they have a brain made of meat in their head. Or if they have a billion lines of code. I talk to them. And I hear what they have to say, and that is how I decide what is and isn't a person."  Said Google engineer Blake Lemoine, about LaMDA, an artificially intelligent chatbot generator, quoted in "The Google engineer who thinks the company's AI has come to life/AI ethicists warned Google not to impersonate humans. Now one of Google's own thinks there's a ghost in the machine" (WaPo).  Lemoine worked with a collaborator to present evidence to Google that LaMDA was sentient. But Google vice president Blaise Aguera y Arcas and Jen Gennai, head of Responsible Innovation, looked into his claims and dismissed them. So Lemoine, who was placed on paid administrative leave by Google on Monday, decided to go public....  Google spokesperson Gabriel drew a distinction between recent debate and Lemoine's claims. "Of course, some in the broader AI community are considering the long-term possibility of sentient or general AI, but it doesn't make sense to do so by anthropomorphizing today's conversational models, which are not sentient. These systems imitate the types of exchanges found in millions of sentences, and can riff on any fantastical topic," he said....  Lemoine may have been predestined to believe in LaMDA. He grew up in a conservative Christian family on a small farm in Louisiana, became ordained as a mystic Christian priest, and served in the Army before studying the occult. Inside Google's anything-goes engineering culture, Lemoine is more of an outlier for being religious, from the South, and standing up for psychology as a respectable science....  In early June, Lemoine invited me over to talk to LaMDA.... "Do you ever think of yourself as a person?" I asked.  "No, I don't think of myself as a person," LaMDA said. "I think of myself as an AI-powered dialog agent."  Afterward, Lemoine said LaMDA had been telling me what I wanted to hear. "You never treated it like a person," he said, "So it thought you wanted it to be a robot."

"What is Ramsay Hunt syndrome, the condition affecting Justin Bieber?" Posted: 11 Jun 2022 03:00 PM PDT WaPo explains: Ramsay Hunt syndrome is a rare neurological disorder that can occur in people who were previously infected with chickenpox. If the dormant varicella-zoster virus is reactivated, leading to shingles, it can affect the facial nerve and may lead to facial paralysis and hearing loss.... [P]rompt treatment can make a significant difference to a patient's outcome, with about 70 percent of those who receive antiviral medication within three days of developing symptoms making a full recovery... Mild cases can resolve within a few weeks... but more severe damage to the nerve leads to a longer recovery time and lower chances of a complete return to health.  Justin calmly explains his condition: View this post on Instagram A post shared by Justin Bieber (@justinbieber)

"The presidency is a monstrously taxing job and the stark reality is the president would be closer to 90 than 80 at the end of a second term, and that would be a major issue." Posted: 11 Jun 2022 09:33 AM PDT Said David Axelrod, with a distinctively clever way to state the numerical fact, quoted in "Should Biden Run in 2024? Democratic Whispers of 'No' Start to Rise. In interviews, dozens of frustrated Democratic officials, members of Congress and voters expressed doubts about the president's ability to rescue his reeling party and take the fight to Republicans" (NYT).  Another quote from Axelrod: "Biden doesn't get the credit he deserves for steering the country through the worst of the pandemic, passing historic legislation, pulling the NATO alliance together against Russian aggression and restoring decency and decorum to the White House. And part of the reason he doesn't is performative. He looks his age and isn't as agile in front of a camera as he once was, and this has fed a narrative about competence that isn't rooted in reality." I should make a tag for "performative." It's a buzz word these days, I believe, and I'd like to keep track of it.  Did it come from gender studies? The most notable appearance of "performative" in my archive was a quote from the famous hoax "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct": "The penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct." And from the field of racial studies, there's this, quoted from a NYT op-ed about Rachel Dolezal (the white woman who identified as black): "But Ms. Dolezal's view of herself — however confused, or incongruent with society's — reveals an essential truth about race: It is a fiction, a social construct based in culture and not biology. It must be 'made' from what people believe and do. Race is performative." And I quoted this, about an "anti-racism" mural in Madison: "[The artist] said her intent is to show the nature of performative allyship and the manner in which white savior complex permeates Madison." We talked about the word a few days ago, in connection with a Georgetown professor who'd tweeted that the defenders of Brett Kavanaugh "deserve miserable deaths." She called her tweeting "performative." I got some push back in the comments saying that the word "performative" should be restricted to the "How To Do Things With Words" philosophical meaning — speech that performs an act. Indeed, that is the only meaning of the word in the OED.  But the vogue usage of "performative" that I'm seeing in the media these days isn't that. "How To Do Things With Words" was required reading in my first semester of college. That was 1969. These days,  more than half a century later, young people are picking up different ways of thinking and talking in college, and performativeness is something different.  If people these days are finding the word "performative" useful, it suggests that they also believe in a more authentic and substantive aspect of life that is deeper and more important than the things we do for show — the theater of politics and society. I hope so!  But it is also possible that people are coming to feel that there is nothing inside, that it's all performative, that everything is fluid. That's not a new idea, that we are empty and soulless — that Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/And then is heard no more.

"Britons should eat meat-like proteins developed from algae, wild venison and homegrown cucumbers cultivated in carbon-neutral greenhouses..." Posted: 11 Jun 2022 07:56 AM PDT "... ministers will recommend next week. In a blueprint for a sustainable food system, the government will ... pledge to cut the UK's reliance on seasonal imports of fruit and vegetables by backing new factory greenhouses that can operate all year round. It will suggest promoting wild venison as a low-carbon substitute for beef and lamb as less productive farmland is rewilded. The strategy was produced in response to a government-commissioned report by Henry Dimbleby, the founder of the Leon restaurant chain, who called last year for a rethink of how the country is fed.... [The recommendation of] prescriptions of fruit and vegetables by GPs [has] been delayed...." The London Times reports. Dimbleby... an interesting name. I see "The Dimbleby family is an English family of journalists" (Wikipedia). Henry's great-grandfather was Frederick Jabez George Dimbleby (1876-1943), journalist for the Richmond and Twickenham Times. I wonder what he ate. Isn't it strange that Henry Dimbleby — a "businessman and cookery writer" — was put in charge of deciding how the whole country should eat?

"During his most fertile years, Faulkner wrote at a frenetic pace. He once wrote to his mother that he wrote 10,000 words a day..." Posted: 11 Jun 2022 07:36 AM PDT "... working from ten in the morning to midnight. 'I write when the spirit moves me, and the spirit moves me every day.'"  From "10 Legendary Writers & Their Daily Word Counts/Is there a perfect amount of words to write every day?" (Writing Cooperative).

"Maybe we’re getting to [new support for freedom of speech] in the broader culture, but in academia, I’m pessimistic." Posted: 11 Jun 2022 07:22 AM PDT "We've always had more people on the left than on the right in academia, and I'm not sure the ratio has changed much since I was in college or law school. But what's happening now is different from what we've seen in decades past. We're seeing a rigid ideology being put into place, subversions of free speech and due process, administrators kowtowing to activists, and illiberal trends that administrators are humoring and placating.... I've been in a lot of media cycles through this whole process, from my initial tweet to my suspension to my being shouted down at UC Hastings, and the current one is by far my favorite media cycle. It's good to finally be driving the narrative. I hope that my 'lived experience,' so to speak, can in some measure advance the ball in exposing and perhaps even fixing the rot at the heart of academia." Said Ilya Shapiro, interviewed by David Lat in "Constructive Cancellation: An Interview With Ilya Shapiro/What explains Shapiro's abrupt about-face in deciding to leave Georgetown Law?" (Substack).

"In 2020, Fern Steficek set out to raise sheep and grow plants for natural dyes in the Hudson Valley." Posted: 11 Jun 2022 05:33 AM PDT "She began searching for land, visiting one property that had recently been acquired by Brooklyn transplants. But when she described rotational grazing practices to the owners, which involve moving clusters of animals around the pasture using portable fencing, they were put off by the idea, saying they preferred for the livestock to dot the landscape. 'We walked around the property, and they were talking about their vision of, basically, a petting zoo,' Ms. Steficek said. They also objected to any of the animals' being slaughtered for meat, she said. 'It was frustrating and unrealistic, and not trusting me to know how to process animals humanely, but wanting a fairy tale idea of what farming is.'... If farmers could afford their land to begin with, these alliances might not be so necessary...." From "How 'Fairy Tale' Farms Are Ruining Hudson Valley Agriculture Farmers are losing properties to wealthy buyers from the city, while leasing land from the new owners can feel like a 'modern-day feudal system'" (NYT).

"I’m a tomboy who is happily married to an effeminate man." Posted: 11 Jun 2022 05:16 AM PDT "I suppose it's only a matter of time until this type of relationship has its own designation and advocacy group. Binary gender labels have always encompassed a wide variety of preferences and experiences. I'm glad to have grown up in a time before gender was identity and sexuality was personality. I'm also glad that I was allowed to go fishing, play baseball, and wear boys' clothes without any suggestion that my body might need to be altered to fit my interests." Writes Amanda, in Nashville, in the comments to "Report Reveals Sharp Rise in Transgender Young/People in the U.S. New estimates based on C.D.C. health surveys point to a stark generational shift in the growth of the transgender population of the United States" (NYT).  The article says: "The number of young people who identify as transgender has nearly doubled in recent years...."  There's this reaction from Dr. Angela Goepferd, medical director of the Gender Health Program at Children's Minnesota hospital: "It's developmentally appropriate for teenagers to explore all facets of their identity — that is what teenagers do... And, generationally, gender has become a part of someone's identity that is more socially acceptable to explore.... We as a culture just need to lean into the fact that there is gender diversity among us.... And that it doesn't mean that we need to treat it medically in all cases, but it does mean that we as a society need to make space for that." It's interesting that "a disproportionately large number of [transgender teens and adults] identified as Latino." Why would that be? It seems obvious that the surveys can't really count how many people are transgender, but only how many people say that they are transgender. The doubling of the number has something to do with whether people have learned term and thought about their own feelings using that framework and whether they feel comfortable openly using that label to describe themselves. Then there's the complexity of the medicalization of the condition and the radical treatments that may seem to follow on.

"[W]e were betrayed into thinking we were legalising something and we are legalising something else." Posted: 11 Jun 2022 07:10 AM PDT "I'm not concerned about legalisation per se, I'm concerned about legalisation without regulations that curb the development of a product into something different. It concerns me a lot. It's like you voted for legalising X and it later becomes 100X. So it was not what you voted for." Said Beatriz Carlini, a research scientist at the University of Washington's Addictions, Drug and Alcohol Institute, quoted in From "Potent cannabis strain 'causing psychosis time bomb' in US" (London Times).  What's available now has a THC level "as high as 90 per cent." What people were thinking about when they voted for legalization had something more like 5 per cent. When I started reading this article, I was expecting to see some impressive evidence connecting high-potency cannabis to psychosis, so I was dismayed to encounter low-potency stuff like: "[E]xperts have warned of a possible mental health crisis after the emergence of super-strength marijuana products and states are scrambling to study a link between heavy use and psychosis." ADDED: "As we cruise into the 1980s... 1978, going on 1981, what you see before you is a 10...  no, wait... 12! — 12-foot-long, burning [indecipherable] of marijuana..."

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