News, Notes, and Notions for 3Mar24
Writing about the never ending war between progress and conservation, while the battle is in my own backyard and soul, plus things worth reading and watching
To go up the driveway to Up Yonder where my parents live, where I grew up, where my mother’s family has been in some form or fashion since before there was a West Virginia, America, Virginia, or much else, is an exercise in shifted perspective. The familiarity of home and what has always been in the blinking flash that is my lifetime clashes with the State of West Virginia currently - literally, not just a reference to the song - paving the paradise of lakeside woods I hunted and played in as a child to put in a parking lot right next door.
My own default setting as a conservationist has taken a bit of a pounding over the whole thing. In my capacity as a writer for the Fayette Tribune newspaper, which covers adjacent Fayette County, I’ve been writing about the ongoing spat between locals and the National Park Service over the demolition of old and, for the most part, dangerous to visitor structures. When you look at the list, there are some interesting buildings, like the Prince store and some houses that were once rather grand, but there are also things like old sheds, smokehouses, and such. Locals of course, and I don’t blame them, think everything should be preserved at all times forever. But locals - and I is one - are working off sentimentality and emotion whereas the National Park Service is working off budgets, funding, regulations, and more work than can get done with too few to do it while more and more visitors pour in.
As I wrote in The Fayette Tribune about it:
“The fact of the matter is not everything can be preserved forever, no matter how historic or sentimental it might be. While the NPS should take heed of local feelings and attachments, good stewardship of the New River Gorge and the communities and sites therein also means understanding deeming something “historic” isn’t a magic spell, but a physical thing that requires actual money as time and the elements try to destroy it. Locals who are rightly passionate about the history of these places should work with the NPS to emphasize the areas of greatest importance and interest to potential tourists, while understanding those same tourists seeing dilapidated buildings is not putting West Virginia’s best foot forward in one of the most naturally beautiful areas anywhere in the world.”
Unknown to the readers, especially the locals who are annoyed at me for not waging war against the feds over something that has already been determined to be done, I have my own issues with the state in my family’s backyard. Keeping consistency and integrity while those two things happen at once is not easy. I can’t preach progress to the folks over in Fayette County while not qualifying why I am spitting venom at the shady land deals, flat out lies, and obvious corruption that is going on in my own backyard. What the folks in the Gorge think the NPS is doing, the state is actually doing 20 minutes away without those same folks not making a peep about it, because Yay, new state park.
But this is natural. Folks mostly concern themselves with themselves, and what affects them, or at least what they spend their bandwidth on caring.
One thing I try very hard in doing commentary, especially when writing locally in West Virginia or for a niche publication or audience of some kind, is to remember to use my own perspective as a tool for insightfulness, not a self-indulgent hammer at others who see things differently. I remind myself that I’ve gone around the world a time or two, seen and done many things, and while I’m from and among my West Virginia brethren the perspectives of being from, leaving, coming back is a minority viewpoint.
One of the rules for fiction writers - a skill I don’t possess - is to show, don’t tell. That’s good advice in any pursuit, but I also try to do it in writing commentary or explainer pieces. Leave preachy for church, just lay out well researched and cited facts and try to walk folks to the overlook where you want them to view the subject from where I’m at.
But it is HARD, sometimes, especially when you watch the heavy equipment ripping through land your ancestors have been on for over 200 years. Things change. The land grant for the 1000 acres of Up Yonder, river valley, and the ferry site across the Gauley signed by then-Governor of Virginia James Monroe that our family was granted and even won in court cases at the turn of the 1800s no longer applies. The house my folks still live in, and I’m sitting in as I write this, was built from eminent domain money and deconstructed general store when the state flooded that same valley to make the lake in the early 1960s. And here we are 60 years later with the state once again at our doorstep.
I’m reminded every time I go out the driveway to leave Up Yonder and pass the clearcut earthmoving of what was the woods of my youth. It is good practice on my adulting skills; to look at it and choke down the feelings, to think on that feeling when writing about other folks' issues and perspective, to remember to be humble because the government and time and a thousand other things are mostly outside my control. Then, as best I can, take all of that, use the privilege I have to be able to write about it and have others read it, and try to distill it down and produce something that is productive and helpful to the folks reading it, and explaining the present moment to posterity.
Conservation and progress are always at war, and somewhere in there I have to project that my paved over parking lot will be a paradise for a whole bunch of folks who will enjoy the new state park. Plus, I have to try and write about it, the New River Gorge, West Virginia, and anything else I’m covering without being a hypocrite.
How do I do that? I haven’t got the foggiest idea. Still, onward.
Worth Reading:
Excellent points from Michael Siegel here about the latest AI freakout, this time over Google’s Gemini AI:
The thing is … as with all outrages, a lot of this is performative. First of all, many of these “woke” images were the result of deliberate attempts to fool the AI. For example, with the Nazi soldiers with dark skin, Gemini initially refused to generate them but then did it when “soldier” was misspelled. The image of black Founding Fathers was notably posted on Twitter and the New York Post without the prompt that led to the image, which makes me think a similar gaming was done.3
Moreover, the people who are screaming about Google going “woke” said nothing when Microsoft’s AI was tricked into spewing racist garbage. That’s because everyone understood that the problem wasn’t Microsoft being full of racists; the problem was that their AI was ill-prepared for internet trolls.
With Gemini, the program was ill-prepared for a second generation of internet trolls.4 The difference is that these trolls have platforms on Fox News and the New York Post. So when they got the AI to create a picture of the Founding Fathers as black, they used it to stoke the current moral panic over wokeness instead of, as most well-adjusted people would do, shaking their heads and laughing at how easily Google fell into a morass that should have been fairly obvious.
This is one of the reasons I am cautious about referring to “AI” as, well, “AI”. It does not demonstrate independent intelligence or sense, common or otherwise. It simply responds to programming. Very sophisticated programming, but programming nonetheless. As with all programs, if you try to optimize it to do everything, it will succeed in doing nothing.
Can't recommend this enough, if for nothing else the very helpful history in how the various developmental stages of AI have brought this moment, to help discern what should & should't be concerns. Really thought provoking study from Brent Orrell and David Veldran
Our friend Tom Lobianco covers the kiss and make nice session between Donald Trump and Club For Growth:
Former President Donald Trump and the head of the conservative donor group, the Club for Growth, made amends Friday night in Florida, as the de facto Republican nominee continues lining up support.
Trump and Club president David McIntosh had a sharp falling out roughly two years ago, heading into the 2022 midterms, as the two split sides in the Ohio Senate primary. McIntosh and the Club backed Josh Mandel over then recent-MAGA convert J.D. Vance, who won Trump’s endorsement.
The fracture continued last year through the start of the Republican primary, as the Club, bankrolled in part by some of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s top supporters, spent millions of dollars on-air in Iowa on ads stating it was time for the party to move on from Trump.
That effort failed and DeSantis, among many other former opponents, fell in line for Trump ahead of the New Hampshire primary.
In remarks to the group Friday night, Trump brushed off the old spat and said he was looking forward to winning elections again with the longstanding conservative group.
This is very interesting to chew on from our friend Alan Elrod writing at Liberal Currents":
While I have changed significantly since my time growing up in the churches of Christ and since my time at Harding, my mind and personality were undeniably informed by this upbringing. I still carry a stubborn individualism and skepticism toward top-down orthodoxies.
The cult of Trump offers little room for either, even if it pretends to have commitments to liberty and anti-establishmentarianism. I am in many ways now an outsider. But I come from America’s religious heartland, and I have dedicated my career now to engaging with and understanding the dynamics in the rural, post-industrial, and peripheral landscapes where the most hard-edged populisms have emerged to menace liberal democracy.
The decline of faith as a social adhesive and the rise of the Trump cult in many of these places in America makes 2024 all the more dangerous. This essay has not been an exercise in historical analysis but rather a feeling out of the moment from the perspective of someone reared in a particular corner of evangelicalism. And I hope that it has some clarifying power. America will need to confront not only Trump and Trumpism but the belief system that upholds them if we are to salvage our democracy.
Noting that “He somehow manages to rap more slowly than he actually talks, which is certainly remarkable,” Erik Kain breaks down the Ben Shapiro rap song:
I have never had much patience for the argument that art cannot be political. But where it runs afoul is when it stops being clever or sincere and just becomes preachy and propagandistic. When I have complained about overly aggressive progressive politics worming their way into modern television and film, my beef is not that “you go woke, you go broke” it’s that when you begin to preach and talk down to people, or use corporate tokenism instead of authentic representation, and when that messaging becomes more important than crafting quality art or telling quality stories, it becomes propaganda. Or profiteering. Or both. The problem with “woke” has never been the desire for more equality, only the tactics used by its most vociferous proponents and the way this style of message-over-content has trickled into so many works of art and been adopted by so many corporations as a marketing tactic.
By that definition, Shapiro’s rap is wildly woke. It is all messaging, all politics, all little pithy attempts to say “Haha look at us, you can’t cancel us, we’re too rich and famous!” Which is true! You can’t really cancel someone outside of your political camp to begin with. Remember Milo Yiannopoulos? He loved to troll the left and was quite good at it, but was it the left that cancelled him in the end? He wasn’t afraid of the left because they had no power over him. That’s not how cancelling works. The right cancelled Milo, and they would cancel Shapiro, too, if he started saying things that didn’t toe the line. You have to be a powerhouse like Trump to change an entire movement to fit your own beliefs (in Trump’s case, whatever Trump wants, that dark black vortex of ego and charismatic narcissism). But if Shapiro started saying “Hey, you know maybe we need more gun laws and maybe women should have the right to an abortion up to conception and we should probably tax the rich more” he’d be cancelled in a heartbeat. A Shapiro rap that was all about how actually trans people deserve respect and we should have non-gendered bathrooms would have been ballsy. There’s nothing brave at all about Shapiro taking digs at Lizzo. The left can’t cancel anyone outside of the left. Shapiro knows this. All these guys just want you to be afraid. If you’re afraid enough you’ll be angry enough that even the lamest mockery of the Other will get you off and you’ll lap up the schadenfreude like junkies. They’re not pushing drugs, no, just the next best thing.
Worth Watching:
Ecuador is a real cautionary tale from where the country was a decade or so ago and today. From DW:
Ecuador is a country with pristine nature, lots of natural resources - and a corrupt government. The film follows Paúl Jarrín and his resistance group, who are fighting against the exploitation of his homeland, accompanied by the journalist Fernando Villavicencio. During the tenure of President Rafael Correa, Ecuador became massively indebted to emerging superpower China. As a result, China secured access to the country's immense mineral resources. The exploitation of the land not only threatens the country's biodiversity, but also the indigenous population. Paúl Jarrín and his group are battling Chinese mining companies. Some mine uranium in the nature reserves -- and use mercenaries to try to silence Paúl and his fellow campaigners. Paúl's group succeeds in storming a Chinese mine. When journalist Fernando Villavicencio gains access to thousands of secret contracts between China and Ecuador, the government tries to silence him. After filming ends, journalist Fernando Villavicencio enters politics to continue his fight against corruption and the exploitation of his country. He runs for president of Ecuador. On August 9, 2023, Villavicencio gives a campaign speech in Quito. As he leaves the stage, he is shot dead. "My Stolen Land" is about China's insatiable hunger for natural resources -- and just how aggressively China has acted over the last decade to gain access to these resources in Africa and Latin America.
Our friend Peter Pischke does great work at CultureScape, and this one on SciFi no exception:
Why is hard sci-fi a dying genre in Hollywood? Why if shows like The Expanse manage to break out do we not see more shows & films like it?🤔 In this episode of CultureScape, Peter Pischke interviews Charles Gannon, a Nebula-nominated author of hard science fiction novels and an awarded expert in game design and science writing. Charles discusses the challenges and rewards of writing realistic sci-fi, the state of popular culture and media, and the future of the genre.