From my morning reading, 4 stories about what constitutes reality in times of paranoia: Key paragraphs offered if you can’t crash the paywall.
1. A sober sociologist assures us that the twenty-somethings haven’t become Trumpers. If anything they are what I considered myself in the three years between 1968 and 1971 very independent minded. Take heart Democrats. Young MAGA votes
Opinion: “Then there is the matter of young people who might otherwise have voted for Ms. Harris abstaining from voting. Many young moderates saw her as too progressive or “woke.” Many young progressives saw her as not progressive enough, especially in light of the Biden administration’s military aid to Israel. Insofar as these people stayed home on Election Day, they led to an increase in the share of the young adult vote for Mr. Trump — but not an increase in the number of young people who supported him.”
2, And background for a book about truly Fake News that has continued to feed Trump’s Deep State BS…..and rang true in James Bondian 1967 when I was just starting my Sophomore year in High School and had probably never heard of Esquire Magazine
From the Onion of that Era “The Monocle” a silly story accepted by Esquire that was in on the joke but whose attempt to admit the ruse only drove paranoids deeper into their paranoia……..It was written in response to a story that peace would ruin the economy because the ending of Vietnam might bankrupt the military industrial system.
3. A story about the very odd comedian, Andy Kaufmann, about whom a new well received movie has just come out. He was like a Donald Trump only he knew he was a joke…….even if nobody else could figure that out.
4. And finally from the Washington Post a competition to write the best email by an AI program. The worst was the CoPilot that I am saddled with on my new computer. The best, and it was pretty good, was from an AI model I’ve never heard of. Claude AI
As an aside on AI. I put up a post-it above my computer that mentions HI. H standing for Harry. I spent far too long yesterday writing about how I absorbed information (worthy of a game of Jeopardy) starting with my stamp collection, going on to Readers’s Digest and more recently in the 1980’s reading books that might lift me a little closer to the desires of the fictional character Faust. I’m 74 now and will readily concede that I used DeepL to translate my English writing into French because I unlikely ever to master that language I’ve been working on for the last seven plus years. But I don’t need help in English except to catch typos, misspellings and commas. Facts however, I’ve counted on the pre AI Google to find facts that has escaped my porous memory. Quick…..Who was the 20th president of the US? That kind of stuff.
I don’t know where AI is going but I think it is headed into being a great conversationalist…..which I will enjoy speaking French to. But I’ve been synthesizing a lot of information for many years. One in three of my columns are pretty good. AI will always beat the pants out of me in the fact department……but will it every understand the why’s of the world better than Humans? Hmmm.
