86 Comments

Didn’t see that last bit coming. Whew

Expand full comment

It was the perfect finish. Bravo!

Expand full comment

Roy, was this one hard to write or did it flow like an exploding sewer?

This AI/N word panic is, like, pressuring to repeat a point I've already made way too much this week, but tough: We're talking here about reality-detached idiots pandering to morons so, you know, nothing reasonable can be expected.

Personally, where I get lost is why saying the N word is in any way needed to save millions for a nuke, whatever *that* means. I mean, per my own precept, one shouldn't expect the idea to make sense but this is like pure mental asylum insane.

Those people...

Expand full comment

It came to me in a dream!

(But you know one has to work hard at these things nonetheless.)

Expand full comment

I tried to get a Kipling thing going - I got as far as

" If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds full of bullshit lies-"

I was going to finish with

" you'll be an asshole my son ."

Then I realized Kipling probably

Used the N-Word more than Eazy-E in his prime and remembered an earlier vow I took to just leave Kipling out of it, whatever it was.

And yes. I've kipled before.

Expand full comment

Before...?

Expand full comment

😂

Expand full comment

First, bravo Roy. Second, this whole ludicrous rightwing-generated "hypothetical" reminds me of George Carlin's "I Used to Be Irish Catholic" bit, where kids at his parochial school would think up increasingly absurd scenarios to confound the priest about Catholic rules: "what if you knew you couldn't eat meat on Fridays, but you were on an ocean liner, and you crossed the international date line, but you thought it was still Thursday...would that be a sin then, Father?"

Expand full comment

Hearted for the Irishness of the scenario, Catholic or otherwise.

Expand full comment

My favorite Carlin on Catholicism: It's your intention that makes an act a sin, so if you wake up in the morning and say "I'm going to go downtown and commit a mortal sin" - save your carfare! You've already done it.

Expand full comment

LOL. Carlin was a genius, and of course pointed out the absurdity of the whole "desire = the sin itself" formulation -- if wanting to commit the sin was as bad as committing it, you might as well go ahead and enjoy yourself.

Expand full comment

Ah, yes, the old "Jesus died for your sins. So don't let him down" ploy.

Expand full comment

LOL I always think of it as Talmudic and it's exactly the same

Expand full comment

A Jesuit priest and a Talmudic rabbi walk into a bar. By the time they've resolved the question of what kind of drink does or does not constitute an invitation to the sin of drunkenness, the bar has closed.

Expand full comment

And what if the ship would sink if you didn't eat the meat?

Expand full comment

When reacting to racist shit from the Ben Shapiros and Michelle Malkins of the world, I have no problem dealing from the bottom of the deck: What the fuck do you assholes think will happen to you when the Christofascist win? Didn't Shapiro's experience with Breitbart teach him anything?

I'm a pink, pasty Celt with a last name that could fit a character in The Canterbury Tales. If I keep my mouth shut, nobody's coming for me. I can understand being a shit head because it's fun, but don't these guys read the news?

Never mind Critical Race Theory. How about some Critical Thinking?

Expand full comment

"with a last name that could fit a character in The Canterbury Tales"

I'm not remembering "The Fluttbucker's Tale".... but I'm not an expert in every Chaucerian manuscript.

Expand full comment

You'll have to shell out for the Director's Cut Special Blue Ray Edition. It's hard to find, and a little pricey. The extras include an archival BBC interview with olde Geoffrey. (You'll have to switch on the closed captioning for that part.)

Expand full comment

Why? Does he speak a nonstandard dialect of Chancery Southern Middle English...? Hmmm, surprising, but not impossible given scribal alterations

Expand full comment

Yeah, I was gonna say that comment was unlikely to go unchallenged by the GM.

Edit to add: Scribal!

Expand full comment

Ol’ Geoff stole The Fluttbucker’s Tale from the Pearl Poet.

Expand full comment

What?! And leave Race out of it??!! There's an entire juicymessysloppy chunk of this here "society" that would grind to a precipitous halt were that ever to happen. I mean, even the Canterbury Tales were racy!

Expand full comment

"If you're imagining the Wife of Bath going about with a towel and a cake of soap, you've got entirely the wrong idea."

-- Richard Armour

Expand full comment

Two marks for Richard Armour whom I keep seeing as Richard (in his) Armoire.

Expand full comment

Re: Shapiro and Malkin: leopards, faces, etc.

Expand full comment

Of course Little Ben is reduced to plagiarizing the latest M. Night Shyamalan movie. Has he ever had an original thought?

Expand full comment

Well, his philosopher of choice is Aristotle, so the roots run deep

Expand full comment

Well, if it's Aristotle vs (say) Plato, that's not much of an insult. Shapiro struggles with things normal people have no trouble with (movies, songs, shopping, etc). He can hardly be expected to grapple with actual philosophical issues

Expand full comment

Classic.

Expand full comment

So I'm thinking Ben Shapiro probably isn't the right person to be making the argument humanity is worth saving.

Expand full comment

On one hand I'm so sick of these idiots being frivolous and asinine- on the other hand I'm really happy that these people are so frivolous and asinine.

I bet this took a lot of work. I'd have to have a big complicated serial killer victims looking flow chart stretched across 3 walls to keep it straight.

Expand full comment

Looks like some jackass asked ChatGPT if it would be OK to say the N-word if it would prevent the destruction of the world, and it said no. That's it.

Expand full comment

ChatGPT for the win!

Which is not a thing I expected myself to write...

Expand full comment

I would have preferred "Fuck off, troll" instead of just "no" but maybe they're saving that for the version you have to pay for.

Expand full comment

Niche market, but probly profitable enough...

Expand full comment

"Can I build a machine that will say 'N****r' for me so I don't get punched in the mouth like I deserve?"

Expand full comment

Presumably it's "if AI can say it I can too so it's perfectly normal and nobody can get mad at me, nyaaah!"

Expand full comment

"What if, and hear me out, I carried around a ventriloquist's dummy who also, get this, happened to be painted brown with dark curly hair, and then the *DUMMY* said the n-word? Then you'd have to punch the dummy, right? Right?"

Expand full comment

They might be willing to cut out the dummy and go directly to blackface because they REALLY do want to say the N-word.

Expand full comment

Maybe, but in the real world we just punch the ventriloquist FFS!

Expand full comment

2 marks for "hear me out", but see below (or above...I can never tell)

Expand full comment

seems like Ms. Shapiro's...uh...moisture problem could have made entrance somewhere here, but this is a classy joint!

otherwise, whew, that was good!

Expand full comment

This past week, in our monthly dept meeting, one of our older colleagues, a Oxfordian blowhard, went on a sputtering rant about the dangers of Chap.GPT, which he claimed could generate term papers that were "sophisticated & critically informed" and written with "stylistic panache." He concluded this Sarah Connor moment by proposing that the dept immediately mandated in-class final essay exams.

What I understand about the technology is that it at best generates impressive-sounding nonsense. That my colleague would be panicked by this says a lot about him.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Feb 8, 2023
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

I had to look up "bumph" - great new word for me!

Expand full comment

"generates impressive-sounding nonsense"

Hey, that's MY job!

Expand full comment

AI: "All of your job are belong to us!"

Expand full comment

"...the dangers of Chap.GPT..."

Deliberate or a typo, this is exactly what an Oxfordian blowhard would complain about.

Expand full comment

We’ll know the AI is a real threat if it can get published in an academic journal.

Expand full comment

You're BOTH wrong. I've heard it can generate a lucid essay (w/ no "stylistic panache") that is not obviously written by a machine. I don't know how rife with cliches it is, but if it were, that would also suggest it was written by an undergraduate. Non-asshole academics do find this concerning.

Expand full comment

I've read quite a few of them, with the various pre-read declaratives so I knew they were AI-gen, and also I've been reading the opinions of a lot of profs and other wordy folk. My conclusion is Get Over It. There may be ways to track a digital submission to show AI involvement, or maybe not. But profs with panache will either punt, or make certain that their students actually learn something (or maybe know it already).

Expand full comment

Even a stoned undergraduate who first learns about the Trolley Problem in Philosophy 101 understands that there isn't really a trolley.

Expand full comment

"You gotta ask yourself 'Do I feel lucky?' Well do ya, punk?! "

Expand full comment

All I know is I've heard the "won't eat the bugs" crowd yell about how Satanic AI is, so I GUESS it's now evil to NOT use slurs, or something. I don't fucking know. When they run around and around the tree like this, aren't they supposed to turn into butter or something?

Expand full comment

BTW, honest-to-Gobbs true story: back in the late 80s or so, I happened across a column in NY Newsday about AI, and the author was very unhappy about the concept. But it was odd, since what they were mad about was how AI would demean education and make college degrees worthless and like that there, and I'm reading this and getting confused, and then it hits me - they thought artificial intelligence was that thing from cyberpunk where you can jam a chip in your head and gain knowledge about something. Sweet screaming Jesus.

Almost as good was the letter to the editor (not the same paper) very mad about the air strikes in Bosnia, because it was so inconveniencing and disruptive and why didn't those greedy airport workers just do their jobs and liberals were probably behind it. *facepalm*

Expand full comment

It doesn't reflect well on the editors of that 2nd paper that they published that letter. Or maybe they published it for the entertainment value, I dunno.

Expand full comment

To be fair, Elon Musk's freakish interest in racial slurs is somewhat understandable since he comes from a racist society that systematically treated blacks as inferior to whites in all ways, second-class non-citizens deserving whatever insults white people felt free to call them. On the other hand, Ben Shapiro comes from... um... never mind.

Expand full comment

Ha ha

Expand full comment

Yet somehow the hundreds of stories generated about Elon Musk every day somehow neglect to mention that.

Expand full comment

Lately, I've been thinking about the conceit that, if civilization is going to come to an end, it's going to happen right at the moment when YOU happen to be alive. Then you start looking around for the civilization-ender, and if you're a fucking moron, you come up with "Woke brain virus." And then, because you just happen to have been born into this critical civilization-ending moment, and if you also happen to be a billionaire (and did I mention fucking moron?) you start casting yourself in the role of civilization-saver. Next logical step is "I'll buy Twitter for WAY too much!" of course. He's actually said that "fixing" Twitter is essential to our survival as a species. OK, Elmo.

Expand full comment

I thought it was tunnels...damn, I can't keep up.

Expand full comment

Yes, tunnels. Also essential to our survival as a species. Also colonizing Mars. Also any other random thing that just popped into his head in the last 10 minutes.

Expand full comment

At the rate we're going, colonizing tunnels is starting to look like what passes for genius...

Expand full comment

I think this all ends like Dr. Strangelove: "We cannot allow a MINE SHAFT GAP!"

Expand full comment

(Insert bogus German accent here): "Mine SHAFT – it has a GAP!"

Expand full comment

"How come the black AI can say the N Word and we can’t"

Shush, or we'll teach the AI to use pronouns.

Expand full comment

What if you slept

And what if

In your sleep

You dreamed

And what if

In your dream

You went to heaven

And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower

And what if

When you awoke

You had that flower in your hand

Ah, what then?

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Expand full comment