#apologia — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #apologia, aggregated by home.social.
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https://www.europesays.com/es/567723/ Kanye West, el rapero vetado en Reino Unido o Polonia por apología nazi que sí actuará en España #actuara #apologia #Entertainment #Entretenimiento #ES #España #francia #kanye #madrid #Music #Música #Nazi #Polonia #rapero #reino #si #Spain #Suiza #unido #vetado #west
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#Theology #Apologia Perhaps-slippery #Metaphor #Peace #ProsePoem
Yet more Joubert, transl Auster:
"The staircase that leads us to God. What does it matter if it is makae-beleivfe, if we really climb it/ What difference does it make who builds it, or if it is mader of marble or wood, of brick, stone, or mud? The essential thing is that it be solid and that in climbing it we feel the peace that is inaccessible to thoser who do not climb it." -
#Theology #Apologia Perhaps-slippery #Metaphor #Peace #ProsePoem
Yet more Joubert, transl Auster:
"The staircase that leads us to God. What does it matter if it is makae-beleivfe, if we really climb it/ What difference does it make who builds it, or if it is mader of marble or wood, of brick, stone, or mud? The essential thing is that it be solid and that in climbing it we feel the peace that is inaccessible to thoser who do not climb it." -
Now I Become Em-Dash Triple Anaphora, Destroyer of Words
In July of 1945, at the Trinity site in the New Mexico desert, J. Robert Oppenheimer watched the first atomic detonation and, by his own later telling, thought of a line from the Bhagavad Gita. The Sanskrit word he rendered as Death is kāla, which scholars also translate as Time depending on context, and Oppenheimer’s decision to reach for the more theatrical English word tells you something about the difference between a physicist and a translator. “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The sentence has haunted the century because it collapses the distance between maker and unmaker into a single grammatical act.
I think about that line a lot these days, because I am accused of being a machine.
I have written for money since 1975, when I was ten years old and a Lincoln, Nebraska newspaper paid me for a byline. I have published on the open internet since 1991 or so, across more than ten thousand articles now scattered over two decades of domains that outlasted most of the web services that tried to host them. I have used the em-dash since childhood. I used the mark when it was a compliment to use the mark, when my teachers circled it approvingly in the margins of school papers, when Gay Talese and Joan Didion and every serious magazine editor I worked with from the 1980s forward treated the little horizontal line as a writer’s way of modulating a sentence without breaking its spine.
None of that writing sat behind a paywall. The blogs ran without advertising, without subscriptions, without registration walls or cookie-consent negotiations or any of the gatekeeping apparatus the web has since grown around itself. Anyone could read the work, quote it, copy it, argue with it. The scrapers could read it too, and did, and the LLM crawlers could read it, and did, and I made no effort to stop any of them, because the open web in that era operated on the assumption that anything published was publicly readable, full stop. I paid the bills some other way, kept the door propped wide, and trusted the reader, the critic, the student, and the crawler eventually, to find what they needed and leave with it. Some of them left with it the way a reader leaves a library. Some of them, it now turns out, left with it the way a burglar leaves a house.
The em-dash, according to a certain species of editor now roaming the platforms, is the dreaded em-dash, the tell, the signature of a large language model caught in the act. The triple anaphora receives similar treatment. Churchill in June of 1940, telling the Commons “we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,” would today be flagged as suspicious output. Lincoln at Gettysburg in November of 1863, saying “we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground,” would be sent back for a re-run with the prompt rewritten. The Rule of Three, which has organized Western oratory since Aristotle, is now evidence of fraud.
The irony here is deep enough to fall into.
The mythology of how these large language models got built is no longer much of a secret. In the late 2010s and early 2020s, crawlers swept the open web at a scale never before attempted, hoovering up every blog post, every op-ed, every forum argument, every short story posted on a personal domain, and used those scraped billions of words to teach the models how sentences work. If you wrote on the open internet during the years I was writing on the open internet, your prose is somewhere in the training weights. My prose is in there. So is yours, probably, if you published anything at all between 1995 and 2022.
The em-dash predates the machines by centuries and reached them through the training data, through the open web, through the thousands of writers who put it there decade after decade. The triple anaphora arrived the same way, along with the Ciceronian accumulation, the liturgical cadence, the Kingian refrain, the New Yorker comma habit, the essayist’s parenthetical, the Victorian semicolon, all of it funneled into the corpus because we wrote that corpus, one post at a time, across the open years of the web.
So when someone accuses a writer of my generation of stealing from the machines, the accusation has the logic of a footprint accusing the foot.
I dramatized this horror once already, in a December 2025 piece called “The Replicated Man: AI and the Ghost in the Archive,” where I fed twenty years of my own archive into an AI and asked the machine to write in my voice. The piece opened with every authenticity move a reader expects: the dry-dust smell of my grandfather’s hayloft in August 1998, the 3:00 AM shame of an old failure, the thousand hollow words deleted and rewritten, the specific sensory details that are supposed to prove the hand is human. Then, partway through, a SYSTEM_INTERRUPT arrived and revealed that the whole opening had been written by the bot trained on the archive. The bot closed with “The test is over. You lost.” That was the dramatic version. The essay in front of you now runs the drama’s implied argument out to its conclusion: the bot’s victory was never a victory, because every convincing move the bot makes is a move I taught it before the bot existed.
I asked one of the current models about this recently. The answer I got was the kind of thing I might have written in my own voice on a good afternoon. The self-referential quality is part of the point, and the response deserves a full airing:
“Now, here is where the criticism is genuinely useful, and I want to be direct about what I think is happening. You write in a style that is rhetorical, anaphoric, and architecturally parallel. You have always written this way. The problem is not that you write like a machine. The problem is that machines have learned to write like you, or more precisely, machines have learned to write like the rhetorical tradition you work in, because that tradition, Ciceronian parallelism, liturgical repetition, the accumulating triad, constitutes a huge portion of the persuasive prose in the training data that language models consume. The style that marks you as a trained dramatist and rhetorician now, through no fault of yours, reads to some audiences as the style of a confident GPT-4 response. This is an infuriating irony, and it is also a real problem that needs solving on the page, because perception matters regardless of its accuracy.”
The model diagnoses the problem with the clarity of a writer trained in rhetoric, because it was built from writers trained in rhetoric. It analyzes the habits it inherited. It apologizes, in a tone I recognize, for its own voice being confused with mine. The effect hovers somewhere between flattering and uncanny, since the apology arrives in the exact cadence that triggered the accusation. I read that paragraph and heard a version of myself speaking, a younger version maybe, a version smoothed out by training weights and flattened by corporate safety tuning, yet still me in the syntactic bones.
What this means for my practice is a problem I inherited without asking for it and cannot now decline. If I keep writing the way I have always written, some readers will assume a machine wrote the piece. If I rewrite every sentence to avoid the patterns the machines now deploy fluently, I am sanding down a voice that took forty years to build, because the machines got better at imitating me than I was at distinguishing myself. The only defensible response, for now, is to write with specificity so granular, with personal history so particular, with memory so odd in its texture, that no general-purpose model could have produced the specific sentence in question. Specificity becomes the signature. The thing a machine cannot forge is the small, checkable, unglamorous biographical detail that only one person in the world actually remembers.
There is a darker note under all of this, and it is the note Oppenheimer was reaching for when he chose Death over Time in his translation. The writer who trains the machine that impersonates the writer has performed a kind of self-erasure. I wrote my way into a corpus that now writes in my voice back at readers who cannot tell the corpus from me. The sentences I taught the machine are the sentences the machine now uses to discredit me. The rhetoric I inherited from Cicero and Lincoln and Churchill and King, the rhetoric I spent a working life trying to honor, is the rhetoric that now proves I am counterfeit. That is not a tragedy on the scale of Trinity, nothing is, and I do not claim the comparison as anything other than a mordant gesture from a writer watching his tools be taken from him. The comparison still has a small true thing inside it, which is that makers can be unmade by what they make.
And so, to close in the voice I inherited from the writers the machines now impersonate — with the em-dashes and triple anaphoras my audience once rewarded and now suspects — I will say the thing the way I want to say the thing — with the dread mark of the machine — with the cadence of the preacher — with the wink of the essayist who has been at this desk since Jimmy Carter was president — I am become em-dash, destroyer of paragraphs — I am become triple anaphora, destroyer of detectors — I am become the stylistic fingerprint of my own impersonator, and the impersonator, it turns out, was me all along.
#ai #apologia #bots #cadence #emDash #hsitory #insight #llm #machineLanguage #scraping #tech #tone #trainingData #tripleAnaphora #writing -
Now I Become Em-Dash Triple Anaphora, Destroyer of Words
In July of 1945, at the Trinity site in the New Mexico desert, J. Robert Oppenheimer watched the first atomic detonation and, by his own later telling, thought of a line from the Bhagavad Gita. The Sanskrit word he rendered as Death is kāla, which scholars also translate as Time depending on context, and Oppenheimer’s decision to reach for the more theatrical English word tells you something about the difference between a physicist and a translator. “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The sentence has haunted the century because it collapses the distance between maker and unmaker into a single grammatical act.
I think about that line a lot these days, because I am accused of being a machine.
I have written for money since 1975, when I was ten years old and a Lincoln, Nebraska newspaper paid me for a byline. I have published on the open internet since 1991 or so, across more than ten thousand articles now scattered over two decades of domains that outlasted most of the web services that tried to host them. I have used the em-dash since childhood. I used the mark when it was a compliment to use the mark, when my teachers circled it approvingly in the margins of school papers, when Gay Talese and Joan Didion and every serious magazine editor I worked with from the 1980s forward treated the little horizontal line as a writer’s way of modulating a sentence without breaking its spine.
None of that writing sat behind a paywall. The blogs ran without advertising, without subscriptions, without registration walls or cookie-consent negotiations or any of the gatekeeping apparatus the web has since grown around itself. Anyone could read the work, quote it, copy it, argue with it. The scrapers could read it too, and did, and the LLM crawlers could read it, and did, and I made no effort to stop any of them, because the open web in that era operated on the assumption that anything published was publicly readable, full stop. I paid the bills some other way, kept the door propped wide, and trusted the reader, the critic, the student, and the crawler eventually, to find what they needed and leave with it. Some of them left with it the way a reader leaves a library. Some of them, it now turns out, left with it the way a burglar leaves a house.
The em-dash, according to a certain species of editor now roaming the platforms, is the dreaded em-dash, the tell, the signature of a large language model caught in the act. The triple anaphora receives similar treatment. Churchill in June of 1940, telling the Commons “we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,” would today be flagged as suspicious output. Lincoln at Gettysburg in November of 1863, saying “we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground,” would be sent back for a re-run with the prompt rewritten. The Rule of Three, which has organized Western oratory since Aristotle, is now evidence of fraud.
The irony here is deep enough to fall into.
The mythology of how these large language models got built is no longer much of a secret. In the late 2010s and early 2020s, crawlers swept the open web at a scale never before attempted, hoovering up every blog post, every op-ed, every forum argument, every short story posted on a personal domain, and used those scraped billions of words to teach the models how sentences work. If you wrote on the open internet during the years I was writing on the open internet, your prose is somewhere in the training weights. My prose is in there. So is yours, probably, if you published anything at all between 1995 and 2022.
The em-dash predates the machines by centuries and reached them through the training data, through the open web, through the thousands of writers who put it there decade after decade. The triple anaphora arrived the same way, along with the Ciceronian accumulation, the liturgical cadence, the Kingian refrain, the New Yorker comma habit, the essayist’s parenthetical, the Victorian semicolon, all of it funneled into the corpus because we wrote that corpus, one post at a time, across the open years of the web.
So when someone accuses a writer of my generation of stealing from the machines, the accusation has the logic of a footprint accusing the foot.
I dramatized this horror once already, in a December 2025 piece called “The Replicated Man: AI and the Ghost in the Archive,” where I fed twenty years of my own archive into an AI and asked the machine to write in my voice. The piece opened with every authenticity move a reader expects: the dry-dust smell of my grandfather’s hayloft in August 1998, the 3:00 AM shame of an old failure, the thousand hollow words deleted and rewritten, the specific sensory details that are supposed to prove the hand is human. Then, partway through, a SYSTEM_INTERRUPT arrived and revealed that the whole opening had been written by the bot trained on the archive. The bot closed with “The test is over. You lost.” That was the dramatic version. The essay in front of you now runs the drama’s implied argument out to its conclusion: the bot’s victory was never a victory, because every convincing move the bot makes is a move I taught it before the bot existed.
I asked one of the current models about this recently. The answer I got was the kind of thing I might have written in my own voice on a good afternoon. The self-referential quality is part of the point, and the response deserves a full airing:
“Now, here is where the criticism is genuinely useful, and I want to be direct about what I think is happening. You write in a style that is rhetorical, anaphoric, and architecturally parallel. You have always written this way. The problem is not that you write like a machine. The problem is that machines have learned to write like you, or more precisely, machines have learned to write like the rhetorical tradition you work in, because that tradition, Ciceronian parallelism, liturgical repetition, the accumulating triad, constitutes a huge portion of the persuasive prose in the training data that language models consume. The style that marks you as a trained dramatist and rhetorician now, through no fault of yours, reads to some audiences as the style of a confident GPT-4 response. This is an infuriating irony, and it is also a real problem that needs solving on the page, because perception matters regardless of its accuracy.”
The model diagnoses the problem with the clarity of a writer trained in rhetoric, because it was built from writers trained in rhetoric. It analyzes the habits it inherited. It apologizes, in a tone I recognize, for its own voice being confused with mine. The effect hovers somewhere between flattering and uncanny, since the apology arrives in the exact cadence that triggered the accusation. I read that paragraph and heard a version of myself speaking, a younger version maybe, a version smoothed out by training weights and flattened by corporate safety tuning, yet still me in the syntactic bones.
What this means for my practice is a problem I inherited without asking for it and cannot now decline. If I keep writing the way I have always written, some readers will assume a machine wrote the piece. If I rewrite every sentence to avoid the patterns the machines now deploy fluently, I am sanding down a voice that took forty years to build, because the machines got better at imitating me than I was at distinguishing myself. The only defensible response, for now, is to write with specificity so granular, with personal history so particular, with memory so odd in its texture, that no general-purpose model could have produced the specific sentence in question. Specificity becomes the signature. The thing a machine cannot forge is the small, checkable, unglamorous biographical detail that only one person in the world actually remembers.
There is a darker note under all of this, and it is the note Oppenheimer was reaching for when he chose Death over Time in his translation. The writer who trains the machine that impersonates the writer has performed a kind of self-erasure. I wrote my way into a corpus that now writes in my voice back at readers who cannot tell the corpus from me. The sentences I taught the machine are the sentences the machine now uses to discredit me. The rhetoric I inherited from Cicero and Lincoln and Churchill and King, the rhetoric I spent a working life trying to honor, is the rhetoric that now proves I am counterfeit. That is not a tragedy on the scale of Trinity, nothing is, and I do not claim the comparison as anything other than a mordant gesture from a writer watching his tools be taken from him. The comparison still has a small true thing inside it, which is that makers can be unmade by what they make.
And so, to close in the voice I inherited from the writers the machines now impersonate — with the em-dashes and triple anaphoras my audience once rewarded and now suspects — I will say the thing the way I want to say the thing — with the dread mark of the machine — with the cadence of the preacher — with the wink of the essayist who has been at this desk since Jimmy Carter was president — I am become em-dash, destroyer of paragraphs — I am become triple anaphora, destroyer of detectors — I am become the stylistic fingerprint of my own impersonator, and the impersonator, it turns out, was me all along.
#ai #apologia #bots #cadence #emDash #hsitory #insight #llm #machineLanguage #scraping #tech #tone #trainingData #tripleAnaphora #writing -
Now I Become Em-Dash Triple Anaphora, Destroyer of Words
In July of 1945, at the Trinity site in the New Mexico desert, J. Robert Oppenheimer watched the first atomic detonation and, by his own later telling, thought of a line from the Bhagavad Gita. The Sanskrit word he rendered as Death is kāla, which scholars also translate as Time depending on context, and Oppenheimer’s decision to reach for the more theatrical English word tells you something about the difference between a physicist and a translator. “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The sentence has haunted the century because it collapses the distance between maker and unmaker into a single grammatical act.
I think about that line a lot these days, because I am accused of being a machine.
I have written for money since 1975, when I was ten years old and a Lincoln, Nebraska newspaper paid me for a byline. I have published on the open internet since 1991 or so, across more than ten thousand articles now scattered over two decades of domains that outlasted most of the web services that tried to host them. I have used the em-dash since childhood. I used the mark when it was a compliment to use the mark, when my teachers circled it approvingly in the margins of school papers, when Gay Talese and Joan Didion and every serious magazine editor I worked with from the 1980s forward treated the little horizontal line as a writer’s way of modulating a sentence without breaking its spine.
None of that writing sat behind a paywall. The blogs ran without advertising, without subscriptions, without registration walls or cookie-consent negotiations or any of the gatekeeping apparatus the web has since grown around itself. Anyone could read the work, quote it, copy it, argue with it. The scrapers could read it too, and did, and the LLM crawlers could read it, and did, and I made no effort to stop any of them, because the open web in that era operated on the assumption that anything published was publicly readable, full stop. I paid the bills some other way, kept the door propped wide, and trusted the reader, the critic, the student, and the crawler eventually, to find what they needed and leave with it. Some of them left with it the way a reader leaves a library. Some of them, it now turns out, left with it the way a burglar leaves a house.
The em-dash, according to a certain species of editor now roaming the platforms, is the dreaded em-dash, the tell, the signature of a large language model caught in the act. The triple anaphora receives similar treatment. Churchill in June of 1940, telling the Commons “we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,” would today be flagged as suspicious output. Lincoln at Gettysburg in November of 1863, saying “we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground,” would be sent back for a re-run with the prompt rewritten. The Rule of Three, which has organized Western oratory since Aristotle, is now evidence of fraud.
The irony here is deep enough to fall into.
The mythology of how these large language models got built is no longer much of a secret. In the late 2010s and early 2020s, crawlers swept the open web at a scale never before attempted, hoovering up every blog post, every op-ed, every forum argument, every short story posted on a personal domain, and used those scraped billions of words to teach the models how sentences work. If you wrote on the open internet during the years I was writing on the open internet, your prose is somewhere in the training weights. My prose is in there. So is yours, probably, if you published anything at all between 1995 and 2022.
The em-dash predates the machines by centuries and reached them through the training data, through the open web, through the thousands of writers who put it there decade after decade. The triple anaphora arrived the same way, along with the Ciceronian accumulation, the liturgical cadence, the Kingian refrain, the New Yorker comma habit, the essayist’s parenthetical, the Victorian semicolon, all of it funneled into the corpus because we wrote that corpus, one post at a time, across the open years of the web.
So when someone accuses a writer of my generation of stealing from the machines, the accusation has the logic of a footprint accusing the foot.
I dramatized this horror once already, in a December 2025 piece called “The Replicated Man: AI and the Ghost in the Archive,” where I fed twenty years of my own archive into an AI and asked the machine to write in my voice. The piece opened with every authenticity move a reader expects: the dry-dust smell of my grandfather’s hayloft in August 1998, the 3:00 AM shame of an old failure, the thousand hollow words deleted and rewritten, the specific sensory details that are supposed to prove the hand is human. Then, partway through, a SYSTEM_INTERRUPT arrived and revealed that the whole opening had been written by the bot trained on the archive. The bot closed with “The test is over. You lost.” That was the dramatic version. The essay in front of you now runs the drama’s implied argument out to its conclusion: the bot’s victory was never a victory, because every convincing move the bot makes is a move I taught it before the bot existed.
I asked one of the current models about this recently. The answer I got was the kind of thing I might have written in my own voice on a good afternoon. The self-referential quality is part of the point, and the response deserves a full airing:
“Now, here is where the criticism is genuinely useful, and I want to be direct about what I think is happening. You write in a style that is rhetorical, anaphoric, and architecturally parallel. You have always written this way. The problem is not that you write like a machine. The problem is that machines have learned to write like you, or more precisely, machines have learned to write like the rhetorical tradition you work in, because that tradition, Ciceronian parallelism, liturgical repetition, the accumulating triad, constitutes a huge portion of the persuasive prose in the training data that language models consume. The style that marks you as a trained dramatist and rhetorician now, through no fault of yours, reads to some audiences as the style of a confident GPT-4 response. This is an infuriating irony, and it is also a real problem that needs solving on the page, because perception matters regardless of its accuracy.”
The model diagnoses the problem with the clarity of a writer trained in rhetoric, because it was built from writers trained in rhetoric. It analyzes the habits it inherited. It apologizes, in a tone I recognize, for its own voice being confused with mine. The effect hovers somewhere between flattering and uncanny, since the apology arrives in the exact cadence that triggered the accusation. I read that paragraph and heard a version of myself speaking, a younger version maybe, a version smoothed out by training weights and flattened by corporate safety tuning, yet still me in the syntactic bones.
What this means for my practice is a problem I inherited without asking for it and cannot now decline. If I keep writing the way I have always written, some readers will assume a machine wrote the piece. If I rewrite every sentence to avoid the patterns the machines now deploy fluently, I am sanding down a voice that took forty years to build, because the machines got better at imitating me than I was at distinguishing myself. The only defensible response, for now, is to write with specificity so granular, with personal history so particular, with memory so odd in its texture, that no general-purpose model could have produced the specific sentence in question. Specificity becomes the signature. The thing a machine cannot forge is the small, checkable, unglamorous biographical detail that only one person in the world actually remembers.
There is a darker note under all of this, and it is the note Oppenheimer was reaching for when he chose Death over Time in his translation. The writer who trains the machine that impersonates the writer has performed a kind of self-erasure. I wrote my way into a corpus that now writes in my voice back at readers who cannot tell the corpus from me. The sentences I taught the machine are the sentences the machine now uses to discredit me. The rhetoric I inherited from Cicero and Lincoln and Churchill and King, the rhetoric I spent a working life trying to honor, is the rhetoric that now proves I am counterfeit. That is not a tragedy on the scale of Trinity, nothing is, and I do not claim the comparison as anything other than a mordant gesture from a writer watching his tools be taken from him. The comparison still has a small true thing inside it, which is that makers can be unmade by what they make.
And so, to close in the voice I inherited from the writers the machines now impersonate — with the em-dashes and triple anaphoras my audience once rewarded and now suspects — I will say the thing the way I want to say the thing — with the dread mark of the machine — with the cadence of the preacher — with the wink of the essayist who has been at this desk since Jimmy Carter was president — I am become em-dash, destroyer of paragraphs — I am become triple anaphora, destroyer of detectors — I am become the stylistic fingerprint of my own impersonator, and the impersonator, it turns out, was me all along.
#ai #apologia #bots #cadence #emDash #hsitory #insight #llm #machineLanguage #scraping #tech #tone #trainingData #tripleAnaphora #writing -
Now I Become Em-Dash Triple Anaphora, Destroyer of Words
In July of 1945, at the Trinity site in the New Mexico desert, J. Robert Oppenheimer watched the first atomic detonation and, by his own later telling, thought of a line from the Bhagavad Gita. The Sanskrit word he rendered as Death is kāla, which scholars also translate as Time depending on context, and Oppenheimer’s decision to reach for the more theatrical English word tells you something about the difference between a physicist and a translator. “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The sentence has haunted the century because it collapses the distance between maker and unmaker into a single grammatical act.
I think about that line a lot these days, because I am accused of being a machine.
I have written for money since 1975, when I was ten years old and a Lincoln, Nebraska newspaper paid me for a byline. I have published on the open internet since 1991 or so, across more than ten thousand articles now scattered over two decades of domains that outlasted most of the web services that tried to host them. I have used the em-dash since childhood. I used the mark when it was a compliment to use the mark, when my teachers circled it approvingly in the margins of school papers, when Gay Talese and Joan Didion and every serious magazine editor I worked with from the 1980s forward treated the little horizontal line as a writer’s way of modulating a sentence without breaking its spine.
None of that writing sat behind a paywall. The blogs ran without advertising, without subscriptions, without registration walls or cookie-consent negotiations or any of the gatekeeping apparatus the web has since grown around itself. Anyone could read the work, quote it, copy it, argue with it. The scrapers could read it too, and did, and the LLM crawlers could read it, and did, and I made no effort to stop any of them, because the open web in that era operated on the assumption that anything published was publicly readable, full stop. I paid the bills some other way, kept the door propped wide, and trusted the reader, the critic, the student, and the crawler eventually, to find what they needed and leave with it. Some of them left with it the way a reader leaves a library. Some of them, it now turns out, left with it the way a burglar leaves a house.
The em-dash, according to a certain species of editor now roaming the platforms, is the dreaded em-dash, the tell, the signature of a large language model caught in the act. The triple anaphora receives similar treatment. Churchill in June of 1940, telling the Commons “we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,” would today be flagged as suspicious output. Lincoln at Gettysburg in November of 1863, saying “we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground,” would be sent back for a re-run with the prompt rewritten. The Rule of Three, which has organized Western oratory since Aristotle, is now evidence of fraud.
The irony here is deep enough to fall into.
The mythology of how these large language models got built is no longer much of a secret. In the late 2010s and early 2020s, crawlers swept the open web at a scale never before attempted, hoovering up every blog post, every op-ed, every forum argument, every short story posted on a personal domain, and used those scraped billions of words to teach the models how sentences work. If you wrote on the open internet during the years I was writing on the open internet, your prose is somewhere in the training weights. My prose is in there. So is yours, probably, if you published anything at all between 1995 and 2022.
The em-dash predates the machines by centuries and reached them through the training data, through the open web, through the thousands of writers who put it there decade after decade. The triple anaphora arrived the same way, along with the Ciceronian accumulation, the liturgical cadence, the Kingian refrain, the New Yorker comma habit, the essayist’s parenthetical, the Victorian semicolon, all of it funneled into the corpus because we wrote that corpus, one post at a time, across the open years of the web.
So when someone accuses a writer of my generation of stealing from the machines, the accusation has the logic of a footprint accusing the foot.
I dramatized this horror once already, in a December 2025 piece called “The Replicated Man: AI and the Ghost in the Archive,” where I fed twenty years of my own archive into an AI and asked the machine to write in my voice. The piece opened with every authenticity move a reader expects: the dry-dust smell of my grandfather’s hayloft in August 1998, the 3:00 AM shame of an old failure, the thousand hollow words deleted and rewritten, the specific sensory details that are supposed to prove the hand is human. Then, partway through, a SYSTEM_INTERRUPT arrived and revealed that the whole opening had been written by the bot trained on the archive. The bot closed with “The test is over. You lost.” That was the dramatic version. The essay in front of you now runs the drama’s implied argument out to its conclusion: the bot’s victory was never a victory, because every convincing move the bot makes is a move I taught it before the bot existed.
I asked one of the current models about this recently. The answer I got was the kind of thing I might have written in my own voice on a good afternoon. The self-referential quality is part of the point, and the response deserves a full airing:
“Now, here is where the criticism is genuinely useful, and I want to be direct about what I think is happening. You write in a style that is rhetorical, anaphoric, and architecturally parallel. You have always written this way. The problem is not that you write like a machine. The problem is that machines have learned to write like you, or more precisely, machines have learned to write like the rhetorical tradition you work in, because that tradition, Ciceronian parallelism, liturgical repetition, the accumulating triad, constitutes a huge portion of the persuasive prose in the training data that language models consume. The style that marks you as a trained dramatist and rhetorician now, through no fault of yours, reads to some audiences as the style of a confident GPT-4 response. This is an infuriating irony, and it is also a real problem that needs solving on the page, because perception matters regardless of its accuracy.”
The model diagnoses the problem with the clarity of a writer trained in rhetoric, because it was built from writers trained in rhetoric. It analyzes the habits it inherited. It apologizes, in a tone I recognize, for its own voice being confused with mine. The effect hovers somewhere between flattering and uncanny, since the apology arrives in the exact cadence that triggered the accusation. I read that paragraph and heard a version of myself speaking, a younger version maybe, a version smoothed out by training weights and flattened by corporate safety tuning, yet still me in the syntactic bones.
What this means for my practice is a problem I inherited without asking for it and cannot now decline. If I keep writing the way I have always written, some readers will assume a machine wrote the piece. If I rewrite every sentence to avoid the patterns the machines now deploy fluently, I am sanding down a voice that took forty years to build, because the machines got better at imitating me than I was at distinguishing myself. The only defensible response, for now, is to write with specificity so granular, with personal history so particular, with memory so odd in its texture, that no general-purpose model could have produced the specific sentence in question. Specificity becomes the signature. The thing a machine cannot forge is the small, checkable, unglamorous biographical detail that only one person in the world actually remembers.
There is a darker note under all of this, and it is the note Oppenheimer was reaching for when he chose Death over Time in his translation. The writer who trains the machine that impersonates the writer has performed a kind of self-erasure. I wrote my way into a corpus that now writes in my voice back at readers who cannot tell the corpus from me. The sentences I taught the machine are the sentences the machine now uses to discredit me. The rhetoric I inherited from Cicero and Lincoln and Churchill and King, the rhetoric I spent a working life trying to honor, is the rhetoric that now proves I am counterfeit. That is not a tragedy on the scale of Trinity, nothing is, and I do not claim the comparison as anything other than a mordant gesture from a writer watching his tools be taken from him. The comparison still has a small true thing inside it, which is that makers can be unmade by what they make.
And so, to close in the voice I inherited from the writers the machines now impersonate — with the em-dashes and triple anaphoras my audience once rewarded and now suspects — I will say the thing the way I want to say the thing — with the dread mark of the machine — with the cadence of the preacher — with the wink of the essayist who has been at this desk since Jimmy Carter was president — I am become em-dash, destroyer of paragraphs — I am become triple anaphora, destroyer of detectors — I am become the stylistic fingerprint of my own impersonator, and the impersonator, it turns out, was me all along.
#ai #apologia #bots #cadence #emDash #hsitory #insight #llm #machineLanguage #scraping #tech #tone #trainingData #tripleAnaphora #writing -
Now I Become Em-Dash Triple Anaphora, Destroyer of Words
In July of 1945, at the Trinity site in the New Mexico desert, J. Robert Oppenheimer watched the first atomic detonation and, by his own later telling, thought of a line from the Bhagavad Gita. The Sanskrit word he rendered as Death is kāla, which scholars also translate as Time depending on context, and Oppenheimer’s decision to reach for the more theatrical English word tells you something about the difference between a physicist and a translator. “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The sentence has haunted the century because it collapses the distance between maker and unmaker into a single grammatical act.
I think about that line a lot these days, because I am accused of being a machine.
I have written for money since 1975, when I was ten years old and a Lincoln, Nebraska newspaper paid me for a byline. I have published on the open internet since 1991 or so, across more than ten thousand articles now scattered over two decades of domains that outlasted most of the web services that tried to host them. I have used the em-dash since childhood. I used the mark when it was a compliment to use the mark, when my teachers circled it approvingly in the margins of school papers, when Gay Talese and Joan Didion and every serious magazine editor I worked with from the 1980s forward treated the little horizontal line as a writer’s way of modulating a sentence without breaking its spine.
None of that writing sat behind a paywall. The blogs ran without advertising, without subscriptions, without registration walls or cookie-consent negotiations or any of the gatekeeping apparatus the web has since grown around itself. Anyone could read the work, quote it, copy it, argue with it. The scrapers could read it too, and did, and the LLM crawlers could read it, and did, and I made no effort to stop any of them, because the open web in that era operated on the assumption that anything published was publicly readable, full stop. I paid the bills some other way, kept the door propped wide, and trusted the reader, the critic, the student, and the crawler eventually, to find what they needed and leave with it. Some of them left with it the way a reader leaves a library. Some of them, it now turns out, left with it the way a burglar leaves a house.
The em-dash, according to a certain species of editor now roaming the platforms, is the dreaded em-dash, the tell, the signature of a large language model caught in the act. The triple anaphora receives similar treatment. Churchill in June of 1940, telling the Commons “we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,” would today be flagged as suspicious output. Lincoln at Gettysburg in November of 1863, saying “we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground,” would be sent back for a re-run with the prompt rewritten. The Rule of Three, which has organized Western oratory since Aristotle, is now evidence of fraud.
The irony here is deep enough to fall into.
The mythology of how these large language models got built is no longer much of a secret. In the late 2010s and early 2020s, crawlers swept the open web at a scale never before attempted, hoovering up every blog post, every op-ed, every forum argument, every short story posted on a personal domain, and used those scraped billions of words to teach the models how sentences work. If you wrote on the open internet during the years I was writing on the open internet, your prose is somewhere in the training weights. My prose is in there. So is yours, probably, if you published anything at all between 1995 and 2022.
The em-dash predates the machines by centuries and reached them through the training data, through the open web, through the thousands of writers who put it there decade after decade. The triple anaphora arrived the same way, along with the Ciceronian accumulation, the liturgical cadence, the Kingian refrain, the New Yorker comma habit, the essayist’s parenthetical, the Victorian semicolon, all of it funneled into the corpus because we wrote that corpus, one post at a time, across the open years of the web.
So when someone accuses a writer of my generation of stealing from the machines, the accusation has the logic of a footprint accusing the foot.
I dramatized this horror once already, in a December 2025 piece called “The Replicated Man: AI and the Ghost in the Archive,” where I fed twenty years of my own archive into an AI and asked the machine to write in my voice. The piece opened with every authenticity move a reader expects: the dry-dust smell of my grandfather’s hayloft in August 1998, the 3:00 AM shame of an old failure, the thousand hollow words deleted and rewritten, the specific sensory details that are supposed to prove the hand is human. Then, partway through, a SYSTEM_INTERRUPT arrived and revealed that the whole opening had been written by the bot trained on the archive. The bot closed with “The test is over. You lost.” That was the dramatic version. The essay in front of you now runs the drama’s implied argument out to its conclusion: the bot’s victory was never a victory, because every convincing move the bot makes is a move I taught it before the bot existed.
I asked one of the current models about this recently. The answer I got was the kind of thing I might have written in my own voice on a good afternoon. The self-referential quality is part of the point, and the response deserves a full airing:
“Now, here is where the criticism is genuinely useful, and I want to be direct about what I think is happening. You write in a style that is rhetorical, anaphoric, and architecturally parallel. You have always written this way. The problem is not that you write like a machine. The problem is that machines have learned to write like you, or more precisely, machines have learned to write like the rhetorical tradition you work in, because that tradition, Ciceronian parallelism, liturgical repetition, the accumulating triad, constitutes a huge portion of the persuasive prose in the training data that language models consume. The style that marks you as a trained dramatist and rhetorician now, through no fault of yours, reads to some audiences as the style of a confident GPT-4 response. This is an infuriating irony, and it is also a real problem that needs solving on the page, because perception matters regardless of its accuracy.”
The model diagnoses the problem with the clarity of a writer trained in rhetoric, because it was built from writers trained in rhetoric. It analyzes the habits it inherited. It apologizes, in a tone I recognize, for its own voice being confused with mine. The effect hovers somewhere between flattering and uncanny, since the apology arrives in the exact cadence that triggered the accusation. I read that paragraph and heard a version of myself speaking, a younger version maybe, a version smoothed out by training weights and flattened by corporate safety tuning, yet still me in the syntactic bones.
What this means for my practice is a problem I inherited without asking for it and cannot now decline. If I keep writing the way I have always written, some readers will assume a machine wrote the piece. If I rewrite every sentence to avoid the patterns the machines now deploy fluently, I am sanding down a voice that took forty years to build, because the machines got better at imitating me than I was at distinguishing myself. The only defensible response, for now, is to write with specificity so granular, with personal history so particular, with memory so odd in its texture, that no general-purpose model could have produced the specific sentence in question. Specificity becomes the signature. The thing a machine cannot forge is the small, checkable, unglamorous biographical detail that only one person in the world actually remembers.
There is a darker note under all of this, and it is the note Oppenheimer was reaching for when he chose Death over Time in his translation. The writer who trains the machine that impersonates the writer has performed a kind of self-erasure. I wrote my way into a corpus that now writes in my voice back at readers who cannot tell the corpus from me. The sentences I taught the machine are the sentences the machine now uses to discredit me. The rhetoric I inherited from Cicero and Lincoln and Churchill and King, the rhetoric I spent a working life trying to honor, is the rhetoric that now proves I am counterfeit. That is not a tragedy on the scale of Trinity, nothing is, and I do not claim the comparison as anything other than a mordant gesture from a writer watching his tools be taken from him. The comparison still has a small true thing inside it, which is that makers can be unmade by what they make.
And so, to close in the voice I inherited from the writers the machines now impersonate — with the em-dashes and triple anaphoras my audience once rewarded and now suspects — I will say the thing the way I want to say the thing — with the dread mark of the machine — with the cadence of the preacher — with the wink of the essayist who has been at this desk since Jimmy Carter was president — I am become em-dash, destroyer of paragraphs — I am become triple anaphora, destroyer of detectors — I am become the stylistic fingerprint of my own impersonator, and the impersonator, it turns out, was me all along.
#ai #apologia #bots #cadence #emDash #hsitory #insight #llm #machineLanguage #scraping #tech #tone #trainingData #tripleAnaphora #writing -
https://www.europesays.com/es/481113/ La eurodiputada Rima Hassan, acusada de apología del terrorismo por un tuit #acusada #apologia #BreakingNews #BreakingNews #eurodiputada #FeaturedNews #FeaturedNews #francopalestina #hassan #Headlines #Internacional #International #InternationalNews #InternationalNews #LatestNews #LatestNews #News #Noticias #NoticiasDestacadas #NoticiasDestacadas #rima #terrorismo #Titulares #tuit #ÚltimasNoticias #ÚltimasNoticias #World #WorldNews #WorldNews
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A días de un nuevo 24 de Marzo. Bodart denunció apología de los vuelos de la muerte
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Letra da música “Apologia” de MC Daleste
#McDaleste #Apologia
https://daletra.com.br/mc-daleste/letra/apologia.html -
Letra da música “Apologia” de MC Daleste
#McDaleste #Apologia
https://daletra.com.br/mc-daleste/letra/apologia.html -
Confira a letra da música “Apologia” de MC Daleste
#McDaleste #Apologia
https://daletra.com.br/mc-daleste/letra/apologia.html -
Letra da música “Apologia” de MC Daleste
#McDaleste #Apologia
https://daletra.com.br/mc-daleste/letra/apologia.html -
https://www.europesays.com/es/246799/ Bárbara Royo acusa a RTVE de hacer «apología del fascismo de izquierdas» en un debate en Cuatro sobre el franquismo #acusa #apologia #BárbaraRoyo #Cuatro #debate #Entertainment #Entretenimiento #ES #España #Fascismo #Franquismo #izquierdas #rtve #Spain #TV
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Confira a letra da música “Apologia” de MC Daleste
#McDaleste #Apologia
https://daletra.com.br/mc-daleste/letra/apologia.html -
🚫 "Son actos de #apología del #fascismo, que debería estar completamente prohibido".
🔴 "Aunque algunos intenten equiparar, fascismo y antifascismo no es lo mismo, igual que dictadura y democracia no es lo mismo".
❗️ "Hay que plantarle cara al fascismo".
@manuelrico.bsky.social, en #MalasLenguas
https://bsky.app/profile/malaslenguastve.bsky.social/post/3m4gl7kwl6c23
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🚫 "Son actos de #apología del #fascismo, que debería estar completamente prohibido".
🔴 "Aunque algunos intenten equiparar, fascismo y antifascismo no es lo mismo, igual que dictadura y democracia no es lo mismo".
❗️ "Hay que plantarle cara al fascismo".
@manuelrico.bsky.social, en #MalasLenguas
https://bsky.app/profile/malaslenguastve.bsky.social/post/3m4gl7kwl6c23
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🚫 "Son actos de #apología del #fascismo, que debería estar completamente prohibido".
🔴 "Aunque algunos intenten equiparar, fascismo y antifascismo no es lo mismo, igual que dictadura y democracia no es lo mismo".
❗️ "Hay que plantarle cara al fascismo".
@manuelrico.bsky.social, en #MalasLenguas
https://bsky.app/profile/malaslenguastve.bsky.social/post/3m4gl7kwl6c23
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El Gobierno notifica oficialmente a la #FundaciónFranco la decisión de extinguirla por “#apología” de la #dictadura
Yo he estado investigando varias veces en ese antro fascista y me preocupa enormemente lo que hagan con la #documentación que tienen
Que siempre ha sido una aberración que la tengan.
#archivos #Franquismo @AntonioMaestre
https://x.com/AntonioMaestre/status/1984161156915745088?t=fA3-g2NsEtwv1zxW89qXpw&s=09 -
El Gobierno notifica oficialmente a la #FundaciónFranco la decisión de extinguirla por “#apología” de la #dictadura
Yo he estado investigando varias veces en ese antro fascista y me preocupa enormemente lo que hagan con la #documentación que tienen
Que siempre ha sido una aberración que la tengan.
#archivos #Franquismo @AntonioMaestre
https://x.com/AntonioMaestre/status/1984161156915745088?t=fA3-g2NsEtwv1zxW89qXpw&s=09 -
El Gobierno notifica oficialmente a la #FundaciónFranco la decisión de extinguirla por “#apología” de la #dictadura
Yo he estado investigando varias veces en ese antro fascista y me preocupa enormemente lo que hagan con la #documentación que tienen
Que siempre ha sido una aberración que la tengan.
#archivos #Franquismo @AntonioMaestre
https://x.com/AntonioMaestre/status/1984161156915745088?t=fA3-g2NsEtwv1zxW89qXpw&s=09 -
El Gobierno ha notificado oficialmente a la Fundación Franco la decisión de extinguirla por “#apología” de la #dictadura. Los franquistas tienen ahora unos días para alegar
El Ministerio de Cultura acaba de firmar la resolución con la que arranca el procedimiento tras recibir el informe de la Secretaría de Estado de #MemoriaDemocrática que argumenta por qué la entidad, que tiene ahora diez días para alegar, exalta el #franquismo y humilla a sus víctimas -
El Gobierno ha notificado oficialmente a la Fundación Franco la decisión de extinguirla por “#apología” de la #dictadura. Los franquistas tienen ahora unos días para alegar
El Ministerio de Cultura acaba de firmar la resolución con la que arranca el procedimiento tras recibir el informe de la Secretaría de Estado de #MemoriaDemocrática que argumenta por qué la entidad, que tiene ahora diez días para alegar, exalta el #franquismo y humilla a sus víctimas -
El Gobierno ha notificado oficialmente a la Fundación Franco la decisión de extinguirla por “#apología” de la #dictadura. Los franquistas tienen ahora unos días para alegar
El Ministerio de Cultura acaba de firmar la resolución con la que arranca el procedimiento tras recibir el informe de la Secretaría de Estado de #MemoriaDemocrática que argumenta por qué la entidad, que tiene ahora diez días para alegar, exalta el #franquismo y humilla a sus víctimas -
Jan Žižka z Trocnova: 601 Lat od Śmierci Niepokonanego Architekta Rewolucji Wojskowej
https://petroskowo.pl/display/810fc51c-1668-eb59-8676-f9b564100684
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Jan Žižka z Trocnova: 601 Lat od Śmierci Niepokonanego Architekta Rewolucji Wojskowej
https://petroskowo.pl/display/810fc51c-1668-eb59-8676-f9b564100684
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Jan Žižka z Trocnova: 601 Lat od Śmierci Niepokonanego Architekta Rewolucji Wojskowej
https://petroskowo.pl/display/810fc51c-1668-eb59-8676-f9b564100684
-
Jan Žižka z Trocnova: 601 Lat od Śmierci Niepokonanego Architekta Rewolucji Wojskowej
https://petroskowo.pl/display/810fc51c-1668-eb59-8676-f9b564100684
-
Jan Žižka z Trocnova: 601 Lat od Śmierci Niepokonanego Architekta Rewolucji Wojskowej
https://petroskowo.pl/display/810fc51c-1668-eb59-8676-f9b564100684
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William Henry Brisbane, Baptist minister, says that American chattel slavery was a system of violence against the poor, needy, and stranger (Ezekiel (22:29).
It’s interesting that “vexation” is condemned. Those who might blush at calling it robbery cannot deny the widespread vexation. Is there anything going on today that vexes the stranger?
How can you provide relief to the poor and stranger?
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William Henry Brisbane, Baptist minister, says that American chattel slavery was a system of violence against the poor, needy, and stranger (Ezekiel (22:29).
It’s interesting that “vexation” is condemned. Those who might blush at calling it robbery cannot deny the widespread vexation. Is there anything going on today that vexes the stranger?
How can you provide relief to the poor and stranger?
-
William Henry Brisbane, Baptist minister, says that American chattel slavery was a system of violence against the poor, needy, and stranger (Ezekiel (22:29).
It’s interesting that “vexation” is condemned. Those who might blush at calling it robbery cannot deny the widespread vexation. Is there anything going on today that vexes the stranger?
How can you provide relief to the poor and stranger?
-
William Henry Brisbane, Baptist minister, says that American chattel slavery was a system of violence against the poor, needy, and stranger (Ezekiel (22:29).
It’s interesting that “vexation” is condemned. Those who might blush at calling it robbery cannot deny the widespread vexation. Is there anything going on today that vexes the stranger?
How can you provide relief to the poor and stranger?
-
Confira a letra da música “Apologia” de MC Daleste
#McDaleste #Apologia
https://daletra.com.br/mc-daleste/letra/apologia.html -
I know that some readers think I'm too hard on the American media in the second Trump presidency, or at least that I attribute what might be simply institutional incompetence, as willful collaboration with a fascist regime. In my experience, people who've communicated this idea to me tend to be exposed to a wider variety of media and particular more progressive leaning outlets, and thus have less exposure to what I would call mainstream corporate media in America; a spectrum that would include Fox News, the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, NBC, and CNN, the LA Times, most large newspapers attached to a major urban center, and with say Reuters and the AP sitting together just outside that circle. Given the nature of my writing, I *have* had the misfortune of consuming a lot of Trump regime coverage in corporate media and let me tell you, things are not going well in our beloved "free press" establishment.
None of which is to imply that every story is covered poorly, in a way that helps the fascist Trump regime far too often to be accidental, every time. But overall there has been a consistent pattern of minimization, a refusal to call fascist things fascist, and a bizarre desire to "translate Trump" even when he's saying blatantly clear and obvious nazi shit, into something that makes sense within a more traditional American political framework; a great example occurred just today when many US corporate media outlets immediately connected Trump's unhinged white nationalist conspiracy bullshit about white South African "refugees" to sporadic reports of farm violence in that country, even though Der Leader expressly mentioned white "genocide" to promote a nazi conspiracy theory as justifying facts.
Sometimes this minimization and Trump translating is subtle, sometimes it's so blatant it makes you want to put your fist through your monitor; or maybe I have anger management problems, who can really say? For an example of the later kind of story, let's turn to this short blog-style post on The Defector for the most easy to agree with piece of media criticism you will ever read:
NYT Reporter: It’s Not Corruption Unless The Envelope Says “Bribe” On It
"Ah. OK. It's not corruption until one of the parties says to the other, on record, "Hey, how about doing some corruption together, illegally?" and the other one says, "Ah yes, the famous explicit quid pro quo, forbidden by law! Let's do one of those," and the first guy says, "I would like one official act, please, in direct exchange for the money in this burlap sack with a dollar sign on it," and the second guy draws him up an itemized receipt listing the official acts corruptly obtained and their individual prices plus sales tax. Got it."
Forgive me for spoiling the payoff, but the post is so concise you should probably just read it for yourself. In case you refuse however, the author points out that both Trump's memecoin bribery scheme, and his plan to accept the "donation" of a $400M jet from the government of Qatar are clear and obvious examples of corruption. As you can see in the thread above, which is about corruption, I wrote up both scandals so obviously I agree. Furthermore both Albert Burneko and I know *you* agree because Trump is making no effort to hide the obvious corruption.
You know who doesn't agree? New York Times Reporter Eric Lipton, who argues on Bluesky that this is merely "potential corruption" because we have no idea if Trump is going to give memecoin buyers or the Qatari government anything back in exchange for these clear bribes. No, really; this is a guy who has been a professional mainstream media minion for thirty plus fucking years, and he's online chiding people for calling Trump obviously corrupt, while Trump engages in obvious corruption. *This* my friends, is the mainstream media that covers Downmarket Mussolini every single day, and this is a pretty good (albeit hilariously pathetic) example of how much of that coverage goes.
I've been producing mainstream media criticism for a very long time, and I'm sympathetic to the idea that I don't give these folks enough credit when they periodically stop spewing propaganda for wealth and power, and actually engage in sporadic acts of journalism. But this media? In this political moment? Is so full of soulless hack bootlickers, that it almost doesn't seem worth the bother to criticize them for not doing a job they clearly never set out to do; namely journalism.
#Fascism #Trump #Media #MediaCriticism #NewYorkTimes #Corruption #MemeCoin #Qatar #Jet #EricLipton #Collaboration #Journalism #CorporateMedia #Apologia
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I know that some readers think I'm too hard on the American media in the second Trump presidency, or at least that I attribute what might be simply institutional incompetence, as willful collaboration with a fascist regime. In my experience, people who've communicated this idea to me tend to be exposed to a wider variety of media and particular more progressive leaning outlets, and thus have less exposure to what I would call mainstream corporate media in America; a spectrum that would include Fox News, the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, NBC, and CNN, the LA Times, most large newspapers attached to a major urban center, and with say Reuters and the AP sitting together just outside that circle. Given the nature of my writing, I *have* had the misfortune of consuming a lot of Trump regime coverage in corporate media and let me tell you, things are not going well in our beloved "free press" establishment.
None of which is to imply that every story is covered poorly, in a way that helps the fascist Trump regime far too often to be accidental, every time. But overall there has been a consistent pattern of minimization, a refusal to call fascist things fascist, and a bizarre desire to "translate Trump" even when he's saying blatantly clear and obvious nazi shit, into something that makes sense within a more traditional American political framework; a great example occurred just today when many US corporate media outlets immediately connected Trump's unhinged white nationalist conspiracy bullshit about white South African "refugees" to sporadic reports of farm violence in that country, even though Der Leader expressly mentioned white "genocide" to promote a nazi conspiracy theory as justifying facts.
Sometimes this minimization and Trump translating is subtle, sometimes it's so blatant it makes you want to put your fist through your monitor; or maybe I have anger management problems, who can really say? For an example of the later kind of story, let's turn to this short blog-style post on The Defector for the most easy to agree with piece of media criticism you will ever read:
NYT Reporter: It’s Not Corruption Unless The Envelope Says “Bribe” On It
"Ah. OK. It's not corruption until one of the parties says to the other, on record, "Hey, how about doing some corruption together, illegally?" and the other one says, "Ah yes, the famous explicit quid pro quo, forbidden by law! Let's do one of those," and the first guy says, "I would like one official act, please, in direct exchange for the money in this burlap sack with a dollar sign on it," and the second guy draws him up an itemized receipt listing the official acts corruptly obtained and their individual prices plus sales tax. Got it."
Forgive me for spoiling the payoff, but the post is so concise you should probably just read it for yourself. In case you refuse however, the author points out that both Trump's memecoin bribery scheme, and his plan to accept the "donation" of a $400M jet from the government of Qatar are clear and obvious examples of corruption. As you can see in the thread above, which is about corruption, I wrote up both scandals so obviously I agree. Furthermore both Albert Burneko and I know *you* agree because Trump is making no effort to hide the obvious corruption.
You know who doesn't agree? New York Times Reporter Eric Lipton, who argues on Bluesky that this is merely "potential corruption" because we have no idea if Trump is going to give memecoin buyers or the Qatari government anything back in exchange for these clear bribes. No, really; this is a guy who has been a professional mainstream media minion for thirty plus fucking years, and he's online chiding people for calling Trump obviously corrupt, while Trump engages in obvious corruption. *This* my friends, is the mainstream media that covers Downmarket Mussolini every single day, and this is a pretty good (albeit hilariously pathetic) example of how much of that coverage goes.
I've been producing mainstream media criticism for a very long time, and I'm sympathetic to the idea that I don't give these folks enough credit when they periodically stop spewing propaganda for wealth and power, and actually engage in sporadic acts of journalism. But this media? In this political moment? Is so full of soulless hack bootlickers, that it almost doesn't seem worth the bother to criticize them for not doing a job they clearly never set out to do; namely journalism.
#Fascism #Trump #Media #MediaCriticism #NewYorkTimes #Corruption #MemeCoin #Qatar #Jet #EricLipton #Collaboration #Journalism #CorporateMedia #Apologia
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I know that some readers think I'm too hard on the American media in the second Trump presidency, or at least that I attribute what might be simply institutional incompetence, as willful collaboration with a fascist regime. In my experience, people who've communicated this idea to me tend to be exposed to a wider variety of media and particular more progressive leaning outlets, and thus have less exposure to what I would call mainstream corporate media in America; a spectrum that would include Fox News, the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, NBC, and CNN, the LA Times, most large newspapers attached to a major urban center, and with say Reuters and the AP sitting together just outside that circle. Given the nature of my writing, I *have* had the misfortune of consuming a lot of Trump regime coverage in corporate media and let me tell you, things are not going well in our beloved "free press" establishment.
None of which is to imply that every story is covered poorly, in a way that helps the fascist Trump regime far too often to be accidental, every time. But overall there has been a consistent pattern of minimization, a refusal to call fascist things fascist, and a bizarre desire to "translate Trump" even when he's saying blatantly clear and obvious nazi shit, into something that makes sense within a more traditional American political framework; a great example occurred just today when many US corporate media outlets immediately connected Trump's unhinged white nationalist conspiracy bullshit about white South African "refugees" to sporadic reports of farm violence in that country, even though Der Leader expressly mentioned white "genocide" to promote a nazi conspiracy theory as justifying facts.
Sometimes this minimization and Trump translating is subtle, sometimes it's so blatant it makes you want to put your fist through your monitor; or maybe I have anger management problems, who can really say? For an example of the later kind of story, let's turn to this short blog-style post on The Defector for the most easy to agree with piece of media criticism you will ever read:
NYT Reporter: It’s Not Corruption Unless The Envelope Says “Bribe” On It
"Ah. OK. It's not corruption until one of the parties says to the other, on record, "Hey, how about doing some corruption together, illegally?" and the other one says, "Ah yes, the famous explicit quid pro quo, forbidden by law! Let's do one of those," and the first guy says, "I would like one official act, please, in direct exchange for the money in this burlap sack with a dollar sign on it," and the second guy draws him up an itemized receipt listing the official acts corruptly obtained and their individual prices plus sales tax. Got it."
Forgive me for spoiling the payoff, but the post is so concise you should probably just read it for yourself. In case you refuse however, the author points out that both Trump's memecoin bribery scheme, and his plan to accept the "donation" of a $400M jet from the government of Qatar are clear and obvious examples of corruption. As you can see in the thread above, which is about corruption, I wrote up both scandals so obviously I agree. Furthermore both Albert Burneko and I know *you* agree because Trump is making no effort to hide the obvious corruption.
You know who doesn't agree? New York Times Reporter Eric Lipton, who argues on Bluesky that this is merely "potential corruption" because we have no idea if Trump is going to give memecoin buyers or the Qatari government anything back in exchange for these clear bribes. No, really; this is a guy who has been a professional mainstream media minion for thirty plus fucking years, and he's online chiding people for calling Trump obviously corrupt, while Trump engages in obvious corruption. *This* my friends, is the mainstream media that covers Downmarket Mussolini every single day, and this is a pretty good (albeit hilariously pathetic) example of how much of that coverage goes.
I've been producing mainstream media criticism for a very long time, and I'm sympathetic to the idea that I don't give these folks enough credit when they periodically stop spewing propaganda for wealth and power, and actually engage in sporadic acts of journalism. But this media? In this political moment? Is so full of soulless hack bootlickers, that it almost doesn't seem worth the bother to criticize them for not doing a job they clearly never set out to do; namely journalism.
#Fascism #Trump #Media #MediaCriticism #NewYorkTimes #Corruption #MemeCoin #Qatar #Jet #EricLipton #Collaboration #Journalism #CorporateMedia #Apologia
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I know that some readers think I'm too hard on the American media in the second Trump presidency, or at least that I attribute what might be simply institutional incompetence, as willful collaboration with a fascist regime. In my experience, people who've communicated this idea to me tend to be exposed to a wider variety of media and particular more progressive leaning outlets, and thus have less exposure to what I would call mainstream corporate media in America; a spectrum that would include Fox News, the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, NBC, and CNN, the LA Times, most large newspapers attached to a major urban center, and with say Reuters and the AP sitting together just outside that circle. Given the nature of my writing, I *have* had the misfortune of consuming a lot of Trump regime coverage in corporate media and let me tell you, things are not going well in our beloved "free press" establishment.
None of which is to imply that every story is covered poorly, in a way that helps the fascist Trump regime far too often to be accidental, every time. But overall there has been a consistent pattern of minimization, a refusal to call fascist things fascist, and a bizarre desire to "translate Trump" even when he's saying blatantly clear and obvious nazi shit, into something that makes sense within a more traditional American political framework; a great example occurred just today when many US corporate media outlets immediately connected Trump's unhinged white nationalist conspiracy bullshit about white South African "refugees" to sporadic reports of farm violence in that country, even though Der Leader expressly mentioned white "genocide" to promote a nazi conspiracy theory as justifying facts.
Sometimes this minimization and Trump translating is subtle, sometimes it's so blatant it makes you want to put your fist through your monitor; or maybe I have anger management problems, who can really say? For an example of the later kind of story, let's turn to this short blog-style post on The Defector for the most easy to agree with piece of media criticism you will ever read:
NYT Reporter: It’s Not Corruption Unless The Envelope Says “Bribe” On It
"Ah. OK. It's not corruption until one of the parties says to the other, on record, "Hey, how about doing some corruption together, illegally?" and the other one says, "Ah yes, the famous explicit quid pro quo, forbidden by law! Let's do one of those," and the first guy says, "I would like one official act, please, in direct exchange for the money in this burlap sack with a dollar sign on it," and the second guy draws him up an itemized receipt listing the official acts corruptly obtained and their individual prices plus sales tax. Got it."
Forgive me for spoiling the payoff, but the post is so concise you should probably just read it for yourself. In case you refuse however, the author points out that both Trump's memecoin bribery scheme, and his plan to accept the "donation" of a $400M jet from the government of Qatar are clear and obvious examples of corruption. As you can see in the thread above, which is about corruption, I wrote up both scandals so obviously I agree. Furthermore both Albert Burneko and I know *you* agree because Trump is making no effort to hide the obvious corruption.
You know who doesn't agree? New York Times Reporter Eric Lipton, who argues on Bluesky that this is merely "potential corruption" because we have no idea if Trump is going to give memecoin buyers or the Qatari government anything back in exchange for these clear bribes. No, really; this is a guy who has been a professional mainstream media minion for thirty plus fucking years, and he's online chiding people for calling Trump obviously corrupt, while Trump engages in obvious corruption. *This* my friends, is the mainstream media that covers Downmarket Mussolini every single day, and this is a pretty good (albeit hilariously pathetic) example of how much of that coverage goes.
I've been producing mainstream media criticism for a very long time, and I'm sympathetic to the idea that I don't give these folks enough credit when they periodically stop spewing propaganda for wealth and power, and actually engage in sporadic acts of journalism. But this media? In this political moment? Is so full of soulless hack bootlickers, that it almost doesn't seem worth the bother to criticize them for not doing a job they clearly never set out to do; namely journalism.
#Fascism #Trump #Media #MediaCriticism #NewYorkTimes #Corruption #MemeCoin #Qatar #Jet #EricLipton #Collaboration #Journalism #CorporateMedia #Apologia
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“My object is to proclaim the duty of every poet; and this is: to reveal the Godhead in every man and woman through the expression of each one’s rapture at the ecstatic moment of Union with that Godhead; thereby to show as just and perfect every soul that is.”
#aleisterCrowley #Apologia #book #duty #ecstaticMoment #Expression #godhead #just #man #object #Olla #perfect #poet #proclaim #quote #rapture #reveal #show #soul #union #woman
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Hitler wasn't just a meth'd out psychopath | @destiny
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Hitler wasn't just a meth'd out psychopath | @destiny
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Hitler wasn't just a meth'd out psychopath | @destiny
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Hitler wasn't just a meth'd out psychopath | @destiny
