Hogan’s Heroes

In 1965 there was an American TV show called Hogan’s Heroes. It was a silly yet clever comedy about captured Allied soldiers in a Nazi prison camp during World War II.

The joke was that the bad guys were complete idiots. The prisoners would consistently run circles around their captors, running effective sabotage and espionage operations right under the noses of the clueless Nazis.

The idiocy on display in that show was deliberate. Not so the Nazi-inspired “extreme law enforcement” shenanigans currently going on in Washington D.C.

Given the ridiculous arrests and inflated charges being leveled against the hapless citizens of that city, the goal is clearly not to enforce the law, but rather to create a climate of fear. The administration has also announced that it plans to use the same terror-inducing tactics on other Democrat-leaning U.S. cities.

The current administration seems quite proud of the fact that it is drawing on the Nazi playbook. Instead of running the country, it is busy dismantling scientific research and higher education, waging vendettas on its perceived political enemies, and randomly rounding up Americans for detention or worse.

Yet there is something striking about the particular combination of Nazi inspired cruelty and white supremacy on the one hand, and sheer stupidity on the other. It’s as though, after sixty years, we are getting Hogans Heroes, the documentary.

Like desktop publishing

I am old enough to remember when you needed to manually assemble a technical paper that you were submitting for publication. You needed to print out the separate sections in extra large print, physically paste them onto a large sheet of card stock, cut out and paste in the developed photo prints for your figures, and then mail the whole thing in to the publishers to be shot by them with a high quality overhead camera.

Then one year, all of that ended. Thanks to the magic of desktop publishing, no part of the process needed to exist in the physical world anymore.

The world didn’t come to an end. Sure, it became easy for anyone to make paper submissions look like they were polished and professionally typeset.

But that didn’t change the fact that the original contents of your paper needed to be of high quality. When reviewers judged your work, the now highly polished look of every paper submission simply factored out in the wash.

I suspect that something similar will happen as A.I. becomes more and more ubiquitous. We will all learn to see the difference between truly original work (the kind created by human minds), and highly polished summaries and restatements of the work of others (what Large Language Models are spectacularly good at).

It will be like desktop publishing all over again.

Trolling the troll

I love the way Governor Gavin Newsom of California has recently been trolling the troll in the White House, simply by faithfully imitating his idiotic style of posting to social media. It is yet another case of a high functioning person successfully calling out a low functioning person by parodically adopting their style.

It was just as much fun back when Tina Fey cut Sarah Palin off at the knees simply by faithfully imitating her. In that case as in this, there was no need for exaggeration.

In both cases, the original was already plenty ridiculous and, quite frankly, an embarrassment. All that was needed was somebody to help point out the obvious.

Future recording technology

We will never have the experience of hearing Jenny Lind singing, or Benjamin Franklin speaking. During their time on this Earth, there was no recording technology to capture their voices for future generations.

Similarly, we will never know what it was like to see a performance of the great stage actor David Garrick. His life came and went before the invention of film recording, so our knowledge of his performances will forever only be secondhand.

Each of these recording technologies represents a schism in human experience: Anything that happened before the invention of a given recording technology is, in a particular sense, unknowable.

I wonder what future recording technology will create a similar schism. Will some future technology, one that we cannot yet imagine, create new possibilities for preserving the human experience for future generations?

Perhaps people will look back ruefully upon our own era and say “Before 2030, we can never know what … was truly like.”

Reality is so Woke

Yesterday the U.S. president took issue with the Smithsonian Institute for focusing on “how bad Slavery was”. An American history museum having the bad taste to discuss American slavery, he explained, is too Woke.

I wonder which aspects of being a slave in America he considers too Woke to discuss.

Would it be the dehumanization and violence? Being stripped of your basic human rights, treated as property, subjected to regular beatings, whippings, sexual violence, and other forms of cruelty intended to enforce submission and maximize labor output?

Maybe families living in constant fear of being torn apart by sale, with husbands and wives, parents and children being permanently separated, never to see each other again?

Or maybe the thing that’s too Woke to discuss is people being forced to perform backbreaking labor from sunrise to sunset in harsh conditions with inadequate food and clothing, while being stuffed into cramped housing that lacks basic necessities and causes disease and hardship.

Maybe the Woke part is discussing denying slaves access to adequate medical care, or the two centuries of intergenerational trauma precipitated by slaves having lived under the constant threat of violence and separation.

Of course we can all see the president’s point. He is a very delicate and sensitive flower, and those annoyingly Woke historians should know better than to disturb his fragile sensibilities.

ogden nash

it’s time for us to celebrate
that once upon this very date
was born the poet ogden nash
a poet who made quite the splash
if he were still alive he’d be
one hundred years and twenty three
but then again it must be said
he’s just as old now that he’s dead

Off switch

Sometimes way too many things happen in the course of a single day, and you just start looking for an off switch. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there actually were such a thing?

You could then chill out for the rest of the evening, basking peacefully in the knowledge that nobody would be bothering you for the next several hours. Then in the morning, over a nice hot cup of coffee, you could flip the switch back on.

Animal Farm

It has been 80 years to the day since the publication of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The book is even more relevant today, given that the current U.S. Administration is trying its best to turn that novella into a documentary.

One particular quote from the book jumps out at me:

“If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

― George Orwell, Animal Farm

The self-evident truth of that statement was, until recently, simply taken as common sense in the U.S. But now things are different, as we have recently learned.

Telling people what they do not want to hear can now get you disappeared, and sent off somewhere to be tortured. To paraphrase Sinclair Lewis, it can happen here.

Three steps

Step one: Watch in disbelief as the United States elects an insecure man-child as its president.

Step two: Watch nervously as the insecure man-child meets with the brutal dictator of Russia, upon whom the man-child has a huge man-crush.

Step three: Watch in horror as the insecure man-child leaves that meeting saying that the brutal dictator can feel free to continue to wage war against another nation that is both a democracy and a long time U.S. ally.

At this point, is anybody at all surprised by the sheer incompetence?