Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky

I’ve been on a bit of a Tchaikovsky binge lately. I read Children of Time years ago and enjoyed it, but for whatever reason, didn’t read anything else by him then. I had a copy of Made Things knocking around though, and I finally read it a few weeks ago and was so impressed I started reading him in earnest. This is the… let’s see… seventh book of his I’ve read lately.

He sort of reminds me of Michael Crichton. He’s not a particularly notable prose stylist - his writing is entirely competent and sufficient, but not in any way really remarkable. But he tells very imaginative stories very well, so he’s a satisfying read.

This one is a sort of political thriller wrapped around a mystery that plays out a bit like a science fiction update of a Lovecraftian eldritch abomination story, leavened a bit with Emily St. John Mandel style misfit spaceship crew slice of life. I’m enjoying it.

Guaranteed they are.

Even if he wasn’t a racist fuckwad on his own, he’s of a generation of white New Yorkers for whom being racist against Puerto Ricans was sort of a universal minimum.

In a statement to the Miami Herald, a Trump campaign spokesperson said that Hinchcliffe’s joke about Puerto Rico does not “reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”

Bullshit.

They didn’t book him by accident. They booked him for one and only one reason - so that he’d say things that they expected would appeal to Trump’s supporters.

And that’s exactly what he did.

I hadn’t put it together before, but Israel is sort of an international case of affluenza - a spoiled, indulged rich kid who ends up a psychopath because daddy’s money has always given them whatever they want and shielded them from ever having to face the consequences of whatever they do.

It’s long past time to cut off their allowance.

And Netanyahu’s obvious provocation strategy is playing out exactly as intended.

I’d say more the latter, but people are multifaceted, so it’s likely not quite the case that it’s people being their true inner selves as just indulging a part of their true inner selves.

Oddly, this sort of thing is the reason that I tend to think that MTG is not as stupid as she appears to be (and the reason I responded to an earlier thread on the subject to ask people what they thought her ratio of malicious to stupid was).

It actually all started with the Jewish space lasers thing, but this one reminded me of it.

She’s clearly stupid (and angry - a common combination among her supporters too). But I just can’t convince myself that she’s so incredibly stupid that she actually believes this. I mean - there’s stupid, but then there’s so frighteningly stupid that she shouldn’t have even been able to survive to adulthood, and this is much more toward the latter.

I guess anything’s possible, but…

Let’s not kid ourselves - Israel will target whatever and whoever the fuck it wants to, entirely regardless of possible consequences, and the US won’t do anything meaningful about it, ever.

That was basically my view for a long time (though phrased much more entertainingly than I likely ever could have), but I’ve started to think that at least some portion of it is conscious malice - that she’s not as stupid as she appears.

Boebert, by contrast, clearly is as stupid as she appears. Admittedly, MTG could just have better instincts (they couldn’t hardly be worse), but I think it’s more likely that there’s at least some faint spark of intelligence there, such that she can at least sometimes recognize a particularly useful situation in which to unleash her anger and stupidity.

Or maybe not…

So what do you think MTG’s stupidity to malice ratio is?

In a sense, everything she says and does is malicious, but I think an awful lot of it isn’t technically motivated by malice - it’s just that she’s angry and stupid, so it just ends up also being malicious.

50/50? 60/40? 40/60?

I don’t think it’s any less than about 30% stupid, and I’d be surprised if it’s even that low. Yes - it’s certainly possible for a politician to cultivate an air of stupidity as a disarming cover for their malice, but I just don’t think she has it in her, and particularly not for an extended period. She really has to be, at least to some notable degree, pretty much as angry and stupid as she appears.

Identity in general doesn’t matter much on forums (as opposed to microblogs, like Twitter or Mastodon). Forums are focused on topics rather than people, and what is said is generally more important than who says it.

I keep wondering why we don’t see more of this.

IMO, planting trees is the most obvious and basic response to climate change. Literally what they evolved to do is to remove carbon compounds from the atmosphere.

They’re not going to solve the problem alone, but they’re such an obvious benefit, and planting them is something every community and even every individual can do right now.

Yeah! It’s obviously a deliberate manipulation when Google just links to negative stories about him instead of the positive ones, like… like… um… uh…

It’s safe to assume that the “uncomfortable” part is that he’s either going to have to admit to soliciting sex with minors or perjure himself, and neither one is going to end well for him.

“We do not currently assess” is ludicrously blatant mealy-mouthed misdirection.

Right. The country in which officials insist that soldiers should be entirely free to sexually abuse Palestinians can investigate itself.

Israel is a rogue state.

Israel is a rogue state.

Intelligence is a measure of reasoning ability. LLMs do not reason at all, and therefore cannot be categorized in terms of intelligence at all.

LLMs have been engineered such that they can generally produce content that bears a resemblance to products of reason, but the process by which that’s accomplished is a purely statistical one with zero awareness of the ideas communicated by the words they generate and therefore is not and cannot be reason. Reason is and will remain impossible at least until an AI possesses an understanding of the ideas represented by the words it generates.

It’s safe to assume at this point that delays and chaos (and the opportunities both will provide for fraud) are the exact point.

This time around, Georgia is going to be prepared to “find” Trump however many votes he needs.