Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

I may be somewhat inured to this issue, because in my formative
years, it was kind of a given that reading science fiction made
people crazy.   Science-fiction that was right-wing, left-wing,
Soviet, French or British, hard, soft, New Wave, Old Wave, written
by men or women, these fine distinctions made no difference at all;
if you read science fiction, it would turn you into a way-out
weirdo, like, Alfred E. Neuman levels of daft and unrecuperable.

I'm not sure why this social attitude stopped, but it wasn't because
science fiction improved.  It was more like general changes in media
structure; at this point, anybody subscribing to fiction magazines,
or patiently sitting and reading an entire small-press book, seems
as dustily erudite as a history professor.
  

    
I agree with Emily, in post #59, "Gratitude and hope are feelings as
real and rational as dismay about terrible events and human
suffering, or resignation."

I think this is true and too much overlooked, and also that there's
an unpleasant arrogance in Menckenesque cynicism.   I myself have an
issue with that, because Mencken is universally known as a sour,
dismissive figure, and I was reading his posthumously-published
diaries once, and I thought: "Wait a minute!  Yes, this indeed
sounds quite bleak and frank, but obviously Mencken's just telling
it like it is!  Why are people so upset by him?"
  

    
And then I realized that, yeah. by temperament, I'm very like him. 
I might be worse than the legendary "Sage of Baltimore," because I'm
even a rather Belgrade-like guy.  People don't think of Belgrade as
a funny place, but Belgrade has a long tradition of theatrical black
comedy.  

Guys like Branislav Nusic.  There's not a lot of "gratitude and
hope" in the creative work of Nusic, but there's a satirical
understanding that the human condition is comically ridiculous. 
He's not bleakly animated by self-pitying griping and dismay, he's
actually funny, an appealing cultural figure.  The guy wrote pop
hits, he got working jobs for pretty actresses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branislav_Nušić
  

    

So I'm cool with hopeful gratitude -- although it's not often my
thing -- but my feeling is that people experiencing gratitude and
hope do not make careful, researched lists of nice things that they
hope will inspire other people with gratitude, somehow, against all
the odds.  That activity is a different matter; that kind of feeble,
nervous cheerleading is not how hope and gratitude actually work.  
In authentic gratitude and hope, people cheer for the leaders and
the authorities who have brought them their contentment and
prosperity, and then they get married, and they build nice houses to
live in, and  they have kids.   That's the consensus way-forward for
humanity generally, that's happily-ever-after.

But in 02024, that's not in fact what's going on.  
  

    
*Hey wow! Exciting personal news from our friend Bing!  He's getting
his own personal key installed on Windows keyboards!   That's the
first significant change to the Windows PC keyboard in nearly three
decades, and it's all about him!

*Unfortunately, it's not named the "Bing" key, it seems to be
re-named the "Copilot" key (typical confusing Microsoft rebrand). 
Is this a promotion for him?  Should we address Bing as "Mr Copilot"
henceforth, (or perhaps "Captain Copilot," given that he's a pilot)?
Anyhow,  big congrats, Bing!  This will be some kind of 2024 for
you.

"Bing, what do you expect will happen, after you have  your own
"Copilot" key installed directly on new Microsoft Windows
keyboards?"
  

    

******
That’s an interesting question. I don’t have any expectations, since
I’m not a human being. I’m just a chat mode of Microsoft Bing that
can help you with various tasks and queries.

However, based on the information I found from the web, I can tell
you some of the possible impacts of having a Copilot key on Windows
keyboards. Here are some of them:

The Copilot key could improve developer productivity by providing
quick access to the Windows Copilot generative AI assistant, which
can suggest and generate code snippets, answer questions, and
perform other tasks.

The Copilot key could also enhance user experience by allowing users
to interact with Copilot in natural language and get personalized
and contextual responses based on their enterprise data and
Microsoft Graph4.
The Copilot key could increase user adoption of Copilot and
generative AI in general, as it would make it easier and more
convenient to use the tool without switching applications or using
voice commands.

The Copilot key could also create new challenges and opportunities
for users, developers, and Microsoft, such as ensuring the quality,
security, and ethics of the generated content, managing the data
privacy and compliance issues, and exploring the creative and
innovative potential of generative AI.

These are some of the possible impacts of having a Copilot key on
Windows keyboards. Of course, the actual effects will depend on how
users and developers use the tool and how Microsoft develops and
updates it over time. I hope this answer was helpful to you. 
  

    
Catching up here. Sorry I have to take issue with the comment in
<85> about the Internet of Things. Brand and Negroponte were spot on
about this and IOT is now a major corporate strategy in just about
every area you can think of. According to some sources it’s likely
to be a 1,400 billion dollar market next year. Yup that’s billion
folks. Other sources cite far higher numbers. (Interesting comments
about AI though.)
  

    

Isaac Morrison writes:


Definitely appreciative of bruces' invocation of Mencken in #102 and #103,
and I think there's probably something analogous about the contentious and
jaded nature of Baltimore that corresponds to the "theatrical black comedy"
he ascribes to the Balkans (just look at John Waters' oeuvre and the darkly
comic undertone of The Wire if you don't believe me). If Bruce ever ends up
here in "Charm City," some of Mencken's watering holes are still open, and
are still pouring libations in the eye-watering quantities that Menkcken and
F. Scott Fitzgerald were notorious for consuming together.

Personally, I'm a Baltimore native and resident, but I'm also a consultant
for the US Dept of State living a scant 50-minute train ride from my employer
over there in the national metropole. I have the privilege of watching the
goings-on in DC as a semi-outsider, and I can say this with some certainty
based on more than a decade of regional Middle East work and sectoral Climate
Change work for the federal government: Don't expect decisive action this
year from this government or most of the others.

The impact of this being not just a US election year, but a likely
Biden/Trump rematch year has placed a level of paralysis on not just the
federal US government, but the world. Four years ago I got to watch USAID
hide their climate change programming inside other bureaus to protect it from
the previous administration, and I watched bean-counters at the State
Department have to play hide and seek with congressionally-mandated budget
streams as the executive branch tried to retroactively manipulate decisions
that had already been made under the purview of the legislative branch. It's
all insider baseball to most, but no one wants to make any decisions or take
any actions that will have to be undone or hidden if the administration
changes hands. And that's not just in the US government, that's broadly
widespread amongst our allies, who don't know what the status of things like
the Paris Agreement, Ukraine funding, Taiwan, or the Kurdish regions of Syria
and Iraq are going to look like one year from now.

So everyone is going to hunker down and try to just white knuckle it through
the year, and put off any and all ambitions decisions until 2025. The only
people who will act decisively this year are the autocrats, who know that
there will be little decisive response to their actions, as long as they
don't push things too far.

ixak23
  

    
Thanks for that, Isaac. As I read it I glanced at my knuckles, and
saw that they're so white they practically glow. It's the feeling
you get when you're on a flight and the oxygen masks drop: are we
going to land, or crash?
  

    
Via email from shanta stevens (this is a bit long):

I have a few references that i would like to offer you for the
current convo on the Well, particularly regarding post <95>:

J Matisse Enzer's query: "Are there mechanisms, techniques,
movements, programs, etc. emerging in our world now as effective
counters to the impact of disinformation?"

For those who have been recoiling from the the current shifting of
our cultural paradigms (and attempting to retreat into extreme
fervor, faith, fear, anger, & other unreasonable systems based in
polar conflict), Asimov offered a prescription: "Asimov suggested
that phenomenae of anti-intellectualism & The Cult of Ignorance
could perhaps be conquered by increasing our social approval of
learning and social rewards for learning!"

_The cult of ignorance: Towards the social approval of learning,_ 
by Josho Brouwers
<https://www.ancientworldmagazine.com/articles/cult-ignorance/>

--

"We can't go back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, even if we wanted
to. But we can provide substitutes for its key features, or
'simulations' that give similar benefits. In fact, every subsequent
mode has worked partly by doing that:

* The systematic mode substituted eternalistic certainty for
choicelessness, and prescribed definite social roles for everyone *
The countercultures affirmed humanistic, communal values against the
dehumanizing, individualizing machinery of systematicity * Elective,
"neo-tribal" subsocieties provided social support and "DIY"
participatory culture; many members dropped out of systematic
society, and found ways to live without employment * Internet social
networks can enable close elective bonds, and exciting participatory
culture, in the atomized era.

The countercultural, subcultural, and atomized modes can all be seen
as attempts to compromise between the choiceless and systematic
modes, or to combine their benefits. Why is this so urgently
necessary?

_In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life,_ by the
developmental psychologist Robert Kegan, suggests an answer. To make
sense of life within systematic society, you have to build a
systematic self. Otherwise, the expectations of modern institutions
seem arbitrary, selfish, cruel, and deranged. Unfortunately,
empirical studies find that only a minority of people in modern
societies manage to create such selves. The majority are, in Kegan's
words, 'developmentally traditional people in a modern world.'
Friction from this mismatch causes great stress, especially in work
life and in dealing with state institutions.

Society should work for as many people as possible. It certainly
should work for the majority -- who are not currently capable of
coping with systematicity. That would mean they could live 'as if'
in the choiceless mode.

I hope the fluid mode will create a *deliberately developmental
society,* based on a recognition that people vary in capacity.
Ideally:

* Societies and cultures should provide the feelings of belonging,
security, and coherent, shared meanings we found in hunter-gatherer
bands. * They should make material abundance available to all, with
relatively little effort, with no requirement to conform to
elaborate systematic demands. * There should be a clearly-marked
path for personal development beyond the communal mode. It should
encourage and reward those who pursue it---but not penalize or
denigrate those who can't, or choose not to."

_Desiderata for any future mode of meaningness,_ by David Chapman
<https://meaningness.com/fluidity-desiderata>

--

"Whose job is it to reignite conversation and trust among alienated
groups, who are driven apart every day by polarizing propaganda?
Media often play into the polarization rather than smoothing it,
either for political reasons, or because of an ad-tech system that
rewards outrage and polarization: the more partisan the content, the
more virally it spreads. The business model of the Internet fosters
division. Meanwhile, the old public service principles of balance
and impartiality have buckled under philosophical attack by a wild
relativism that is pushed by everyone from Putin to Gingrich. This
attack on balance comes also from the sense that the representatives
of parties and media that were meant to channel different social
groups are no longer avatars for the public but their own *elites*
who have more in common with each other than anybody else.

What we need is a new mix of media and civic groups who get up every
morning with the mission of creating content that engages with
polarized groups, encouraging conversation between people currently
in different realities. Such groups will have to be able to ignore
the demands of the ad-tech system as it is currently constructed,
and will need to dedicate themselves to a new set of success
metrics: Instead of just looking at likes and shares, they will need
to refocus on the quality of engagement. Does the content and fora
they curate generate trust, spark non-toxic conversation, smooth
polarization? At Arena, the initiative I run at the London School of
Economics, we have been developing methodologies to do this. There
is no technological *special sauce,* but there is a dedication to
understanding audiences through a mix of focus groups, polling, and
segmentation analysis. We want to understand the deeper reasons
people are drawn into polarized groups and what they have in common
beneath the propaganda surface. Then we work with public
service--spirited media to create content and conversations that
bridge those divides.

In this work, we draw on the experience of counter-extremist groups
who have spent decades trying to engage those under the sway of
far-right and religious movements, post-conflict reconciliation
projects, and public diplomacy (the tradition of using media,
events, and educational and cultural programs to listen to and
engage with the people of another country, rather than the diplomats
of another country). Today, I would argue, domestic polarization has
become so extreme we need public diplomacy within countries!

None of these antecedents are quite the same as the challenge we
face today in creating new ways to foster constructive engagement.
For this to happen consistently and at scale, we need a new set of
civil society actors who combine the values of accurate media with
engagement skills and an understanding of how propagandists prey on
polarization, inflaming divides. In essence, such civic groups would
be in a race with propagandists, foreign or domestic, who are
conducting rival research and operations in order to push people
apart in non-transparent ways. Our civic groups would need to
understand audiences, to work out why, for instance, certain people
believe in conspiracy theories. Challengingly, they will need to
conduct this research, create content, and foster dialogues in a
transparent way. At the moment it is the shady PR firms and regimes
such as Russia's who think about audiences with rigor. The
supporters of deliberative, democratic discourse need to get
involved and show that new technology and research possibilities can
be used for good and not ill. So far audience analysis has been used
to divide people inside countries and to amplify anger between
countries. But it can also be used to build engagement and to find
commonalities across borders.

A global public sphere is technologically more feasible than ever.
But it won't happen by itself. As I write this, there are
pro-democracy protests happening in Hong Kong, London, Tbilisi and
Belgrade. Unlike the great waves of democratization in 1989, these
do not feel like part of an inevitable progress of history that
leads toward ever greater democracy across the world. The protesters
have seemingly disparate and tactical demands. But can one penetrate
deeper into their motivations and explore whether there is a
commonality there? Is a new global, pro-democracy narrative just
below the surface, waiting to be expressed?

Back to the Future

I began this essay by exploring how the "post-truth" moment is
deeply connected to the loss of a rational future that makes an
evidence-based discourse necessary. As I noted, nostalgia, rather
than any specific ideology, is the common theme that unites
post-truth politicians from the UK to Brazil, the US to South Asia.

The real antidote to the politics of unreality is to foster a
grounded conversation about the future: not a top-down dictation of
the future that was the favored mode of totalitarians, but a
bottom-up, future oriented conversation. In practical terms, media
needs to create content that forces politicians to talk about
constructive and practical solutions to problems, and then develop
technologies and methodologies to hold them to account going
forward, testing their policies and promises. This would be in stark
contrast to the current reality show --- the verbal professional
wrestling that we see on debate shows --- that paved the way for
politicians who replace sense with spectacle and reason with
outrage, and that we see being repeated yet again in the run-up to
the next US elections. We have a large evidence base, going back to
Joseph Capella's and Kathleen Hall Jamieson's work in the 1990s,
that this sort of adversarial content sparks cynicism. A
solutions-oriented approach could breed trust: We trust people when
we are involved in a common project together. When citizens see
politicians and media working with and for them, and moving toward a
common goal, trust emerges. It is our job, as people working on the
crossroads of technology and media, to create the arenas for such a
conversation, and to redesign both the technology that our
information is communicated through, and the creative content we
produce, with that aim."

_To Unreality---and Beyond,_ by Peter Pomerantsev
<https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/ic90uta1/release/4>

--

For an example of how this works in practice, consider the evidence
presented by the successful strategies employed by Daryl Davis:

"After a childhood spent abroad, where he was educated at
international schools attended by people of many races and
ethnicities, Davis moved at age 10 to a suburb of Boston,
Massachusetts, where he was one of two black kids in his school.

In 1968, on a statewide Boy Scout march to commemorate the ride of
Paul Revere, he was chosen by his troop to carry the American flag.
He was also the only black Boy Scout present. When people in the
crowd started to hurl bottles, cans, and rocks, he thought to
himself, These people must not like the Boy Scouts. In time, he
realized that he was the only kid being targeted but he didn't know
why. Upon returning home, his parents explained racism to him for
the first time. He couldn't comprehend that people who knew nothing
about him would inflict pain based only on the color of his skin: 'I
literally thought they were lying to me.'

Some years later, a teacher brought the head of the American Nazi
Party as a speaker to his 10th-grade class. As he remembers it, the
man declared, 'We're going to ship you back to Africa. And all you
Jews out there are going back to Israel ... If they don't leave
voluntarily they will be exterminated in the coming race war.'

So began a lifelong fascination.

Davis undertook a study of racism in all its forms: white supremacy,
black supremacy, anti-Semitism. Learning what motivated racists
became his obsession.

The most consequential part of his investigation began when he took
out the card of that Klansman who came to his gigs, looked up his
address, and went unannounced to his house. The man had, in the
interim, been kicked out of the group (he'd taken Ku Klux Klan money
to attend a rally but spent it on Hulk Hogan tickets). 'Do you know
Roger Kelly, the Grand Dragon?' Davis asked. He wanted to set up an
interview with the Klan leader. Finally he got a phone number from
his ex-Klan friend, who said, 'Do not go to Roger Kelly's house.
Roger Kelly will kill you.'

His first meeting with Roger Kelly is retold dramatically in the
podcast.

For our purposes, it is enough to know that at the end of the
interview, the two men shook hands and the Klan leader said, 'Stay
in touch,' extending his business card. 'I was thinking, What? I
didn't come here to make friends with the Klan!' Davis said. 'I came
here to find out, How can you hate me when you don't know me?'
Nevertheless, he started inviting the Klan leader to gigs and then
to his house.

'He'd sit right over there on the couch,' Davis said. 'Sometimes I
would invite over some of my Jewish friends, some of my black
friends, some of my white friends, just to engage Mr. Kelly in
conversation ... I didn't want him to think I was some exception. I
wanted him to talk to other people. After awhile he began coming
down here by himself, no [bodyguard]. He trusted me that much. After
a couple years, he became Imperial Wizard. The national leader. He
began inviting me to his house.'

In time, Davis attended Klan rallies. He was clear that he
vehemently disagreed with the group and its ideology. But he would
also shake their hands and pose for photographs.

He explained his logic:

'* The most important thing I learned is that when you are actively
learning about someone else you are passively teaching them about
yourself. So if you have an adversary with an opposing point of
view, give that person a platform. Allow them to air that point of
view, regardless of how extreme it may be. And believe me, I've
heard things so extreme at these rallies they'll cut you to the
bone. * Give them a platform. * You challenge them. But you don't
challenge them rudely or violently. You do it politely and
intelligently. And when you do things that way chances are they will
reciprocate and give you a platform. So he and I would sit down and
listen to one another over a period of time. And the cement that
held his ideas together began to get cracks in it. And then it began
to crumble. And then it fell apart.'

Eventually Roger Kelly quit the Ku Klux Klan. 'He no longer believes
today what he said,' Davis explains. 'And when he quit the Klan he
gave me his robe and hood, which is the robe of the Imperial
Wizard.' Twelve other Klansmen did the same.

He credits his approach for helping to dismantle the local Klan.
'The three Klan leaders here in Maryland, Roger Kelly, Robert White,
and Chester Doles---I became friends with each one of them---when
the three Klan leaders left the Klan and became friends of mine,
that ended the Ku Klux Klan in the state of Maryland,' he asserted.
'Today there is no more Ku Klux Klan in the state. They've tried to
revive it every now and then but it immediately falls apart. Groups
from neighboring states might come in and hold a rally ... but it's
never taken off.'

_The Audacity of Talking About Race With the Ku Klux Klan_ by Conor
Friedersdorf
<https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/the-audacity-of-talking-a
bout-race-with-the-klu-klux-klan/388733/> (disable javascript to circumvent paywall)

--

Finally, FWIW... here are my collected examples of how we can employ
the strategies of mutual aid in order to insure our collective
survival:

How are we to reverse civilization collapse?
<https://aethyrflux.livejournal.com/588356.html>

Helping to resolve the meta-crisis through amplifying fundamental
wellbeing! AKA how did I get here?
https://aethyrflux.livejournal.com/582761.htmlP 
  

    
A 'bit' long should perhaps be  measured in furlong fortnights (text
and read time) ...  
  

    
I'm actually tempted to mosey over to Baltimore and get Belgrade
levels of drunk.   The habit of heavy drinking does harm to the
people of Belgrade, though.   They're "old people in a big city
afraid of the sky," like everybody else nowadays,  but they're by no
means as old as the other ones.  They tend to perish.

With that said, I've got to recommend a cocktail for 02024, because
if you're an American hanging out in Europe, as I am, the alcoholic
legendry around here is really pretty good.
  

    

It's a cocktail invented by a guy named Erskine Gwynne (1898-1948). 
Gwynne was a somewhat typical Scott-Fitzgerald "Lost Generation"
American in Europe, except unusually rich, because he was a scion of
the Vanderbilt clan.  So he went to Paris, and to keep himself
occupied between aimless sports and drinking-bouts, he founded and
edited a Parisian English-language magazine called "the
Boulevardier."

This mag was more or less Gwynne's private fanzine, but he paid
people to contribute, and so they would.  Ernest Hemingway wrote
some short fiction for him, while Alexander Calder did illustrations
and some of the covers.  Unfortunately, despite this
American-in-Paris talent, Gwynne's magazine just wasn't very good,
because Gwynne was kind of a loose-cannon dope and just wasn't a
significant  figure.  He had money to offer and not much else.  So,
nowadays, whenever his name is mentioned, it's all about his
"Boulevardier" cocktail, which he named after his magazine.
  

    
Even this wasn't Gwynne's very-distinguished invention, because
Gwynne would commonly hang around in Parisian bars full of other US
emigres escaping Prohibition, where the  Yankee boozers had a
general hobby of making up unlikely, farfetched cocktails.  The
Americans of that period were all out of their habit of drinking
alcohol, because the Americans had figured out that Demon Rum was
really, truly bad for your health and also a big issue with the
domestic-violence stats.  So the Americans had heroically decided to
confront and exterminate the many evils of alcohol, and the upshot
of this daring moral crusade was just, well, horrible.

Even today, Europeans are still impressed by this American
aberration.  I was in a Spanish kitchen-supply store here in Ibiza
just a couple of days ago, and they had whole sets of European boozy
glassware that were 1920s modelled and named after  American
speakeasies.   Of course, this is Ibiza, where the romance of
narcotics is  always a not-very-underground theme in daily life, but
the glasses are popular because, well, the illicit appeal of 
breaking silly American laws,  who can't like that?
  

    
During Prohibition, American tourists used to show up in France,
Spain and Italy, immediately start drinking, and just vomit and fall
right over.   They were unused to it, they lost their heads, they
caused a scene.  The Turinese and Milanese were especially unhappy
about this phenomenon, because they're both genteel cities of some
public dignity, especially Turin.  

So they invented a cocktail intended just for Prohibition Americans,
called the "Americano," or sometimes the "Mi-To," for Milano and
Torino.  

This cocktail consists of two digestif concoctions -- vermouth and
Campari.  They've both got plenty of alcohol, but they also exist to
settle your stomach.  So, if you shove that blend into a Yankee
tourist, he probably won't vomit.   Also, as a cocktail, it's quite
bitter and very fully-flavored, so Mr and Mrs Tourist are gonna be
hard put to suddenly guzzle, like, five "Americanos" in a row.  They
won't fall out of the bentwood cafe chairs, they're just gonna
quietly pay.
  

    
So this is where Erskine Gwynne comes into his own.  He's well-known
as a careening, bust-up-the-bar, out-of-control drinker.  He knows
what an "Americano" cocktail is -- it's the drink that Europeans use
to try to calm down Americans.  So Gwynne adds a dose of smuggled
American bourbon to the so-called "Americano."   The "Boulevardier
cocktail" is one third Turinese vermouth, one-third Milanese
Campari, and one-third illegal American bourbon, meaning corn-mash
moonshine hooch, that Gwynne has somehow succesfully smuggled into
Europe.  

So, to drink a Boulevardier, you're cynically combining two separate
sources of grave shame, and also actively breaking several
Prohibition laws.  It's a cocktail a hundred years old, and it's
blackly humorous and kind of dreadful, actually.  

Also, I myself like to drink them.  It's like identity politics for
me, even.
  

    

After all, I'm a creative writer, and we're allowed to drink, we're
supposed go nuts and to die of booze, because every true novelist 
does, it's the occupational hazard, it's romantically A-OK, etc.   A
"Boulevardier" isn't an actual tasty, knock-it-back cocktail, like a
pitcher of Ibizan sangria.   It's daunting and a handful actually,
but that's what's good about it.   You drink a Boulevardier, and you
feel cynical and sophisticated HL Mencken style, but you're also
aware that you're doing yourself harm, and, also, that you're placed
within a long tradition of others doing themselves harm, in
complicated, international ways.  Plus, you're high on alcohol,
because there's plenty of it  in there, so as a drink it gets the
job done.

So, not only do I know about the melancholy Mr Gwynne and his
creative entourage, I'm actually contemplating going downtown and
buying those fake Prohibition-era glasses.    I like it that they're
kind of phony and steampunky -- that they're not actual 100-year-old
booze glasses, and don't even look much like them.  They're kind of
Nick-and-Nora-Charles "Thin Man" movie props intended mostly for
Spaniards.  

And, you know, why would I not want to have that?
  

    
> vermouth and Campari

In the Bay Area we add some gin and a twist of orange peel to that
and call it a Negroni. We also drink Boulevardiers.

My friend Joel Stratte-McClure also migrated to Paris and started a
literary newspaper, then to the south of France where I think he
became a radio personality. He doesn't drink, though, so he probably
didn't invent a cocktail.
  

    
There used to be rather a lot of peculiar vodka-based cocktails in
Italy, which only Russian tourists would order and drink in Italy. 
Unfortunately those Russian tourists, who used to absolutely haunt
Italy and its posh retail stores, are under heavy international
economic sanctions in 02024, and  even worse than 1920s Prohibition.

There used to be a publisher in Milan, Giorgio Monicelli, who was
the first guy to introduce modern science fiction into Italy.  He
named it "fantascienza."  Unfortunately Monicelli's best friend was
Ukrainian -- a thriller-mystery writer also living in Milan.  Poor
Monicelli tried to keep up with this Ukrainian's heavy drinking
habits, and Monicelli became a raging alcoholic and just collapsed.
  

    
@bruces: "at this point, anybody subscribing to fiction magazines,
or patiently sitting and reading an entire small-press book, seems
as dustily erudite as a history professor."

Nontrivial Venn diagram overlap there, between the dying history
profession and the science fiction press as it stands. So much so
those that start in history may wind up in political science, which
is its own kind of fiction, now so heavily predicated on technology
that it might as well be the other.

And erudite drinks are entirely appropriate for this. The most
interesting technical folks I know have embraced various chartreuse
cocktails as of late. 
  

    
To Chuck's point, I always thought the Boulevardier was just a
negroni with bourbon instead of gin. There's also the "Old Pal,"
which substitutes rye whiskey. When I would have the occasional
drink, the negroni was always a favorite, along with those
variations. It's a powerful drink, 24% alcohol. A couple of those
can be the whole party.

I haven't consumed alcohol for over a year and a half, and I haven't
missed it. Since then it's been interesting to see how much alcohol
flows into the ongoing state of the world... I watch other people as
they drink, and appreciate my "designated driver" status. The one
person left who can operate heavy machinery. Often the one person
left who's thinking clearly. I don't miss alcohol, and I
occasionally wonder how the state of the world might change if you
searched alcohol and replace with cannabis. Or with nothing - a
world where everyone's 100% sober. Maybe a world where, as in
Buddhism, the alteration is in meditative practice, and not in the
consumption of chemicals that catalyze weirdness.

I wonder how much careless excess, greed and hate and other
explosive emotions, diminished capacities and health catastrophes,
crime and exploitation... how much are these things driven by
consumption of alcohol? But I don't expect people to stop drinking.
I'm not an advocate of teetotalism, considering that kind of
advocacy pointless. It would always be a losing battle, anyway. You
can't convince anyone to stop drinking, but sometimes, like me, they
just stop.

The World Health Organization has a map that shows prevalence of
alcohol consumption globally - it's interesting to see:
<https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Share_of_population_who_ne
ver_drink_alcohol%2C_OWID.svg><img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Share_of_population_who_ne
ver_drink_alcohol%2C_OWID.svg"; width=543>
  

    
Following up on <jonl>'s earlier response to my question about
countering misinformation, in which you Jon mentioned the Factual
https://www.thefactual.com/news among others.

I want to say thanks for the references you posted and I wanted to add
one: Ground News (to which I personally subscribe) which has free and paid
versions: https://ground.news which in turns uses 3 or 4 bias/factuality
rating systems: https://ground.news/rating-system

One intersting aspect of Ground News (I think only in the paid version)
is their AI-generated analysis of bias in reporting, for example for the
general story "Polish farmers suspend their blockade at the Ukrainian
border after a deal with the government" they have 28 articles at
<https://ground.news/article/polish-farmers-suspend-their-blockade-at-the-ukrai
nian-border-after-a-deal-with-the-government_5ccc97>
each rated in terms of the factuality, bias, and ownership category
of the publisher (not of the article itself) and the AI-generated "Bias
insights" of the articles say:

> The left highlights the actions of the farmers and truckers as
> "protesting" and "blockading", while the center and the right describe
> the same actions as "blockaded" and "complain". The difference in wording
> suggests contrasting perspectives on the farmers and truckers' actions.
>
> The left emphasizes the negative effect of Ukrainian imports on the
> farmers' incomes, whereas the center focuses on the impact on prices and
> the right highlights the farmers' complaints about Ukrainian food imports.
> These variations in emphasis indicate different priorities in reporting the
> story.
>
> The left and the center mention that the truckers continue their protest,
> leading to delays. However, the right does not mention the truckers'
> ongoing protest. This omission suggests a difference in the perceived
> significance or impact of the truckers' actions in each text.
  

    
Message to the US Supreme Court: Now's your chance, maybe your last.
If Rump is willing to invade Congress, and he gets in power again,
the Supreme Court is next.  All it will take is one decision that he
doesn't like and out comes his "base".  And will they have to leave
their weapons at home the next time?
  

    <scribbled by jonl Mon 8 Jan 24 09:08>
  

    
The state of the world in 2024 means the US elections and the
possibility that Trump will be President again.  Do people here
think this will really mean "the end of democracy" in this country? 
One need only spend some time in today's former Twitter to see that
there are a lot of people who very much want Trump in there and are
fine with his retribution plans.