Week of February 23rd, 2020

Happy leap day! Hope you’re doing well. I have had a hell of a week due to a massive project that was due on Wednesday in which I had to build a shell from basically scratch. Many very late nights were involved. I’m looking forward to Break week after next when we can catch up and I can start editing my movie.

First, politics! Yay!

I know you watched the debate and heard Senator Sanders taking heat and having a tough time. The audience was giving him a lot of shit. After the debate, the Senator remarked about the makeup of the crowd while parroting some apparently not exactly true information. But it makes you wonder why he didn’t say as much onstage. I can’t help but remember this glorious moment of Trump destroying Jeb! in 2016 as an establishment candidate. I think the more that Senator Sanders evokes Trump, the better he will do in this election. Also, why the hell do these debates have live audiences?

I’m sure you’ve heard the “Bernie Bro” narrative making a resurgence. Yes, the biggest problem with Senator Sanders isn’t that he’s an anticapitalist with a soft spot for communist dictators, it’s the toxicity of his young fans on Twitter. I can’t believe this is a narrative the media is really trying to pass off as honest. Every politician has toxic fans, so of course the most popular one in the race, whose fans tend to be younger, would have a such a base on the most toxic social media platforms. Jennifer Rubin, per her tendency, published an opinion piece so comically wrong that it demands to be seen. (Trump is right about her.)

Seeing this come up in debates is almost surreal. I can’t help but think it’s due to President Trump weirdly legitimizing Twitter as a central part of the political discourse. I wouldn’t suggest that Twitter ought to be ignored outright, but it’s influence is way overemphasized. And Senator Sanders’s opponents are trying to capture his bloated base, so instead of attacking him for his odd admiration for the Soviet Union, they play the whole Social media game. The Daily Beast has a whole section Ahead in the Trolls about this bullshit, including an article about a Senator Sanders staffer EXPOSED for the crime of being extremely funny on a private Twitter account. I’m particularly partial to the following:

Amy Klobuchars face looks like that optical illusion where it’s an old lady but also a young woman depending on how you look at it but with her it’s just two different old ladies

I can’t stand people pretending to be humorless to score political points.

Next, here’s one of the worst ideas in U.S. political history: telling Republicans to vote for independent Senator Bernie Sanders to weaken the DNC to help Trump win. God this looks like a monkey’s paw situation. I don’t understand what people find so hard about the concept of “vote for the best electable candidate.” Senator Sanders was an independent because he was to the left of the Democratic party. I find this clip to be particularly hilarious. Just watch the face of the white woman in the background light up. I can only hope to one day be involved in such an ill-conceived but cool-sounding O P E R A T I O N   C H A O S.

As I touched on with the silly Jennifer Rubin article, there’s been much discussion about how the Democratic National Convention ought to operate. So called “democrats” are so rightfully afraid of Senator Sander’s campaign, that they, including this President Obama campaign staffer, think that maybe democracy was a mistake. The superdelegates can save us! And isn’t it fucking hilarious that Elizabeth Warren speaks so strongly against the electoral college but thinks that the DNC just ought to do what it do. God she’s full of shit.

Speaking of Senator Warren, her Super PAC is now up and running and shady as hell! It’s worth remembering this. Hell, it’s still on her website!

Coronavirus did a number on the market, and it’s worth being worried about. It’s spread to every inhabited continent, and isn’t really slowing down. There will be a U.S. outbreak. Trump is being a big idiot and not listening to his own experts. The response is being headed by Vice President Pence, and he said this week on The Rush Limbaugh Show that Trump picked him in part for his experience handling the HIV outbreak in Indiana as governor. Well, that’s terrifying, because he did a terrible job at that. Free HIV testing was no longer available due to the local Planned Parenthood closing. Experts found that the outbreak was coming from needle use and recommended that free sterile needles be distributed in at-risk areas. He initially declined, citing moral objections to giving drug users needles which I think is exactly what you would imagine a Governor Pence doing. The delay almost certainly worsened the outbreak.

All that being said, the number of diagnosed Americans is still in the double digits, which is why this article is so absurd. We can’t blame President Trump for a pandemic yet to happen. And Senator Warren, yep her again, announced the greatest possible solution: redirect wall money to Coronavirus action. Because nothing slows down an international epidemic than open borders.

Also, Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez touted her “awards from MIT Lincoln Lab &others for accomplishments in microbiology” in a Twitter feud with Senator Cruz (in which he was also being a dingus). Those accomplishments in microbiology? She got second place in a High School science fair sponsored by MIT. I’m not kidding. I need AOC to write my resume.

Moving on from all that, here’s the follow-up to the quantum mechanics video I shared, if you’re interested… and I’m guessing you’re probably not. I find this stuff fascinating.

Fuck Disney. I know, a real hot take. But, sorry, faking wokeness while serving Chinese communists pisses me off. As I’m sure you’ve heard, they’re making a live-action Mulan movie for some fucking reason. But they’re removing Captain Li Shang, the romantic interest. Why? Well, really it’s fucking obvious why, isn’t it. By the text of the film, it is obvious that Captain Li falls in love with Mulan while she’s presenting as a man. And then he’s totally unbothered when she turns out to be a woman. It’s the gayest straight romance Disney could possible fabricate, and a lot of overly-online bisexuals love this shit. It’s a good time. Type “Li Shang,” and Google suggests “bi.” And that means it ain’t flying in China! So they cut it.

And if Disney just said, “Uh, that’s on Communist China, not us,” I’d be fine with it. I’m not that guy, you know? But that’s not what they did. No, they say they removed Captain Li because he’s Mulan’s commanding officer and that the romance made them feel uncomfortable in the post #metoo era, as if Captain Li was rapey. If you watch the fucking movie, there’s absolutely nothing untoward, though, probably due to the creators not wanting that shit to be too homosexual. Mulan asks HIM out after the war. Captain Li is respectful and dutiful. The film demonstrates the flaws in China’s social structure at the time. The excuse falls so flat. China’s censorship is really harming American progress, and anyone trying to let them get away with that is being weak.

Billie Eilish is in trouble for saying true things about Hip Hop music. I don’t have much to say about this, but I know this article will make you mad.

Well that’s all I got. World’s going to shit. What else is new?

Thanks,
Jacob Morris

Week of February 16th, 2020

Hope you’re doing well. I’m sick as hell and way behind on a programming project. Joy.

Perhaps you saw it, but my younger brother posted the first trailer (for your left ear’s enjoyment apparently) to his first feature-length, though probably not feature-quality, film. I am in this, and it’s coming out this spring, so it is technically my first feature. I couldn’t be prouder. In addition, his friend announced the end of his Portal fan movies with a trailer. I love seeing the academy film tradition that we saw start continue on its own terms.

Did you see the debate this week? If you didn’t, do. It’s tremendous entertainment watching Mike Bloomberg self-destruct as shitty apologetic Donald Trump and making me root for Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchar. Strange. We saw that Senator Sanders fucking hates Bloomberg and that Senator Klobuchar fucking hates Buttigieg, and both justly, if you ask me. Moderate Republicans rooting for Buttigieg can fuck right off (just look at this shit). There were so many wonderful moments. Everyone was so intense and aggressive. Everyone was visibly angry and unreasonable. It’s everything politics should be. Though, it is very important to note that something very shady is going on. NBC, without explanation, cut this part of the debate wholesale from the video on all platforms. It is very, very suspicious.

President Trump should be laying low and getting his approval rate up. He should go kiss some veterans and shake hands with babies or whatever the hell politicians do in times like these. He should be the winner of this week’s debate! Instead, he’s being a fucking idiot and pardoning his buddies. Not only is it disgraceful, it’s fucking stupid. Wait until after the election, damnit! This is the president’s race to lose, and it looks like he might just do it.

And now, Senator Sanders has reversed his promise of transparency over his medical records despite having had a heart attack! Geritocrasy is a great time.

Have you heard of what’s been going on with Dr. Jordan Peterson? He was such an important alternate culture right-wing icon back in, say, 2017. I was even a fan before I realized that he’s a terrible philosopher who makes his clout on misquoting Kant. Even when I was a fan, it was clear that he wasn’t totally stable. He’d talked about his depression and mental illness from time to time, and seemed to be in some personal pain. In 2018, he started losing his marbles. His daughter, a critical part of the JP lore, got him onto an all-beef diet which he advocated. He started to become more and more incoherent, which is why I stopped following him, and it’s now come to life that his mental health was severely declining.

Well he got addicted to Benzos, and his daughter shipped him off to Russia to recover cold turkey, contrary to medical advice receiving experimental treatment such as being put into an unnecessary coma. Strange. I think what feels so odd about it is that this is a man who has positively affected the lives of many young men with a message, though carrying some odd political and philosophical views, showed them why they must get their shit together. He got me to clean my room, metaphorically speaking, and it’s weird to see him vulnerable, weak, and possibly insane. People have been trying and failing to make sense of the man since 2017. I’ll give it a few years before I even try.

Whatever happens, now is a terrible time for hack writer Jim Proser to publish his new book Savage Messiah: How Dr. Jordan Peterson Is Saving Western Civilization, perhaps the worst possible attempt to answer that looming JP question. It’s existence is so wildly out of time and out of touch, I can’t stop laughing about it. It’s such a straightforwardly misguided perspective, and I cannot help but think less of the people who buy into it.

In prior years of my life, I was a bit more susceptible to pseudoscience, though if you told me that, I would reject in on its face. Schools and other apparently trustworthy sources are wrong about virtually fucking everything, but dangerously so, at least in my case, regarding quantum physics. The explanations of quantum physics that I knew were part of the reason that I held on to faulty conceptualizations of consciousness and our place in the universe. Learning that so much of the language surrounding popular discussion of quantum mechanics was bullshit freed me in some ways to think more clearly. This entirely scientifically-oriented video does a great job at expediently cutting through that BS and demonstrates why science is philosophy.

This week, I discovered that another listicle website has stolen one of my Reddit comments as content, which is great timing, since the CollegeHumor article from before is now gone as their parent company has gone bankrupt. It’s a pretty popular website, too, from what I gather. I’d like to pretend to wonder who reads these things, but I think we both know the answer. I used to read these things.

The President decided to break from tradition, and write a good tweet! He has actually done so a few times this week, but this reminded me of something I forgot to share last week. You may remember that two weeks ago I wrote a whole thing about Rush Limbaugh’s cancer diagnosis and about how grace is crucial. Almost immediately after I wrote that, Limbaugh was saying the worst shit about Buttigieg. Follow that link if you want, but you already know what it is. And of course, the storm of people wishing Limbaugh ill rose again. And it genuinely pissed me off, too. I think I forget to easily just how shitty the shitty things people like Limbaugh say and believe really are. But I think this cemented the example for me. If I ever prance around shouting that I wish someone and his family pain, that I wish someone destruction, that I think someone is beyond grace (just grace, not redemption, not vindication), slap me because I’m not sure who I would be anymore.

Finally, I send you this short video without any explanation or commentary.

Thanks,
Jacob Morris

Week of February 9th, 2020

Forgive me, this one’s a day (update: or two) late. I spent yesterday (update: Saturday) wrapping filming on my movie. Production did not go perfectly, but after all these years, I’ve got a big self-driven project under my belt. It’s a good, strange feeling. I’ll probably edit a rough cut over spring break. Until then, you know how school is. Then we’ve got to do effects and music and sound… it’s a process. I’ve learned to enjoy acting more and more, and I now occasionally fall under the delusion that I might be halfway good at it.

As I think I said before, I’ll tell you more about this whole process another time. And as the weeks go on, I constantly collect tales I can hardly wait to report back on. I hope that school’s going well for you. I’m guessing that it’s finally heated up. At least for me, it looks like the water’s about ready to boil. I’m not sure I have the energy for this shit anymore, which might be a bad sign. We’ll see how I fare this week... In theory, you have some trickier classes this semester, so I hope you hang in there.

As we lamented by text, Yang is out. I feel genuinely sad about losing a candidate which I purportedly supported only in irony—what the hell is wrong with me? First Sky Mother Marianne Williamson, then the Cool Guy who promised me a G a month? And now Boring-but-Safe Moderate Joe Biden is fading fast—though perhaps not as decisively as some outlets suggest in my opinion—let’s hold out for South Carolina. People other than the nice ladies at Indian Gardens are endorsing Buttigieg as if he were a moderate. Senator Sanders is the frontrunner, positioning himself to be several firsts, some mild—first Jewish president, first secular* President in a longass time—some less so—first openly socialist president, though this doesn’t mean a ton—we’ve had plenty of socialist presidents—and the first octogenarian president in office, something which, despite the silly protest of folks of various political perspectives, actually does matter. Humans have an expected shelf life and Bernie was probably “best before” 2002. If we do really go that way, I think Trump wins, but I certainly don’t think it’s a sure thing.

A new disruptive electoral element is former fake Republican mayoral multi-deka-billionaire spending three times as much as all other candidates combined. This motherfucker just drops a cool 400 million dollars on commercials without showing up to a single debate or town hall, making fellow billionaire candidate Tom Steyer look like a little fucking baby, and to my utter shock and horror, it’s working, particularly among black voters—a critical part of Joe Biden’s base—despite stop and fucking frisk. In the states in which he’s running, he’s beating Biden and threatening Sanders as the “moderate” opposition. He could win. This 2016 sequel is going off the rails.

There are, in my opinion, scant few tolerable candidates left in the race. I think now is a good time to remember how comically abusive Senator Klobuchar is to her staff because, well, I just might vote for her.

In more important political news, here’s Joe Biden having a serious conversation with a polar bear. And here’s the President of the United States mocking Michael Bloomberg’s height in a barely comprehensible word salad tweet!

I’m really not sure whether or not you would be familiar with The Moviebob. He’s an old face from the gamergate days—the feminist side. He’s a neoliberal and not a very well-liked guy. I try to track what he does because he’s one of those unique, always wrong voices I think are so valuable. I could go on about his antics all day, but I’ll just share a recent clip in which he gives off extreme supervillain vibes discussing how space travel is more important to him than world peace. I find this mindset positively fascinating as well as pathetic. It’s got this intangible self-important white guy energy that I’m certain Bob would detest if he saw it in a different form, and more deeply, it’s an unmissable expression of the misanthropic pessimism that I think is going to kills us.

The Oscars happened. I’m so glad I don’t care about the Oscars. And not in the way that my film friends don’t care about the Oscars, where they’re a waste of time when they make the wrong choice and an essential part of the art of filmmaking when they make the right one. No, I really do not give a shit either way. I was rooting for Joker to sweep because I thought it would be funny. Parasite, a really great Korean film, won best picture, prompting this instant classic video of an idiot who hasn’t seen the movie declaring that Oscar’s gone woke. There’s something about this uninformed, self-indulgent rage, something about being a living caricature.  Maybe laughing at these clowns is old hat, but being one of them is more so, and it took me a little maturing to see just how funny it is for someone to be just this lame. We live in a society.

Shoe0nhead, who hails from the other side of gamergate long ago, who now spends her days as a brother of Bernard (assuredly a gender-neutral term) slamming the DNC on Twitter, and a YouTuber whom, despite her flaws, I’m a fan of, posted a very good 20-minute video about the abuse of male students by female teachers, and it made my blood boil. I was straight-up triggered by a YouTube comedy video by a self-branded anti-feminist. What have I become?

Loss is an intense emotion. Duh. Well here’s something unsettling! With the help of a lot of ostensibly good-hearted people of remarkably poor judgement, this woman resurrected her deceased daughter in CGI form in virtual reality to give her some parting words and perform a representation of grief to masses wanted to experience a moment of vicarious pain. Unsurprisingly, the overwhelming reaction to this experiment was “What the fuck?” But I think it’s worth thinking about more, specifically in the context of Virtual Reality and ignoring the whole performance element to this situation. A creepy VR doll is not the first or only way we preserve an image of the deceased. We’ve been painting, sculpting, and staring at photos of the dead forever, and this comforts us. So one of the following must be true:

• This is just new and feels weird, but isn’t actually fucked up. This is difficult to imagine, but lots of new tech seemed offensive before we adjusted to it.
• This is fucked up and so is keeping photos and videos of deceased loved ones. We should be focused on the present and the future and ought not to keep emotional ties to the past. Iconoclasts rise up!
• The previous but even more extreme. All sentimental media is bad! There’s nothing necessarily wrong with art that conveys ideas or stories, but using media to feel the past again is a form of lying to ourselves, pretending that the past is the present, and we ought to be singularly focused on what we do now and what we do tomorrow.
• This is really fucked up whereas sentimental pictures and so forth are considerably less bad. It’s a matter of degree.
• This is fucked up whereas photos and videos are not because VR is a fundamentally different form of “media” to the image or video which requires a new ethical perspective. This suggests that VR is inherently disruptive to our society in a deep way that we almost certainly do not yet understand.

I really don’t know which one of these is true, and I’d love your perspective. But my gut tells me that reviving simple imitations the dead in a virtual world for personal emotional fulfillment is a form of blasphemy impossible to overstate and this is deeply, deeply sad. I think we need a modern conversation about the benefits of embracing a new stoicism in an age of technology capable of doing this to us.

For something a little closer to home, did you know that the academy has a podcast hosted by the new principal? I didn’t until recently. They’ve had a few familiar faces on, and now my brothers, which I thought was pretty cute. Part of me desperately wants to go on (which I think could be easily arranged) and, calmly and friendlily, hold nothing back. What I won’t do is go on and be an advertisement for the school or crawl back into my juvenile performance of religiosity. I think this will probably have to remain a silly fantasy for the time being.

Denis Prager news! Well, Denis Prager olds, this happened in 2008. Nevertheless, I think this is an important segment I mustn’t overlook. Here’s a two-part article posted by Prager about how his wife should fuck him even when she doesn’t want to because, and I quote,

A husband knows that his wife loves him first and foremost by her willingness to give her body to him.

The Prager lore is always deepening.

Well, I think that’s all, I say after writing way to many words. I’m going to have to start cutting these things down probably. Let me know if you’re not reading/enjoying these because I can stop attacking you with them every Saturday if you want. Oh well.

Thanks,
Jacob Morris

Week of February 2nd, 2020

Happy Birthday! What week it’s been, starting with the Super Bowl, then the Iowa Caucuses, then the State of the Union address, the President’s acquittal, and Yang returning to the debate stage. And in my life, I’ve had everything from filming the movie I wrote to debating creationism with a youth pastor. The ridiculous letter project is still a long ways away, so I’m thinking of sending you a collection of BS every once in a while by email as opposed to immediately emailing it to you whenever I see it. I hope you enjoy. Don’t feel obliged to click every link or whatever. I’m wondering if your semester’s heat is turning up. Mine is around now, so I’m strapping in.

First is a video essay from Big Joel, a leftist YouTuber who I go back and forth with regularly on Twitter. I like his essays, even though I usually don’t agree with him on anything, that is until now, I guess. Never thought I’d stand side by side with a utilitarian, but this criticism of ethics rooted in empathy made relevant to the social media age, and Twitter leftism in particular, is really powerful.

Harvey Weinstein? In my 2020? Actress Jessica Mann, one of his accusers, testified that he has both a penis and a vagina and no testicles, apparently intersex. Her description is fascinating and remarkably improbable. Intersex people are super rare, and their extremely low levels of testosterone mean that they are rarely sexually aggressive. But the real question is the following: How do we not know at this point? If it’s not true, Mr. Weinstein could just drop trou and save himself from prison. It’s not like his genitals have historically been deeply private objects… This should be easy to confirm or deny! If you told me in 2017 that I’d be this curious to see inside Harvey Weinstein’s pants, I’d have thought you’d grown a second head, something that Harvey Weinstein just might have at this point.

CNN received a bomb threat! It involved a Wii Sensor bar, a watch, some AA batteries, and a ceramic grenade shell shoved into a pocket pussy. This was deemed newsworthy.

Let’s discuss the Super Bowl. No not the game. I didn’t watch it this time. The commercials. I approach this topic with a degree of care, because I find the web articles about the hilarious advertising sports fans get subjected to each year to be generally insufferable. But advertisers get to decide things about our national culture, and they present ideas about who we are and what we like. I still think that there’s something interesting about high-profile advertising.

I’ll start with Audi’s baffling Frozen X Game of Thrones pandering climate change themed ad??? Supremely strange. I do not understand this and do not have much to say, but people apparently like this. The song has nothing to do with the theme, no ideas are communicated. It’s just a hodgepodge of somewhat recognizable motifs with some branding. I commend this ad for totally understanding that the heart of the commercial is the aesthetic, not the substantive, and this is the humorous result of that understanding.

Then, Facebook has the gall to present itself as prosocial in a clear attempt to make do after Dwane Johnson turns down being in its commercial. Props to Dwane Johnson, if that’s the case. I wonder if anyone buys this. I’m so deeply rooted in my anti-social media circlejerk (probably my longest-lasting character trait) that I sometimes think that everyone is kind of on the same page, just less passionate about it. But then I see stuff like this… Facebook wouldn’t make it if they didn’t think there weren’t people open to this vision of what Facebook is, and I’m sure its marketing people know better than I do. They’re blasting this thing all over YouTube right now.

John Legend and Chrissy Teigen pretend to be relatable in one of this year’s most fascinating ads. The premise is that the couple are the cool, young, West Egg rich, just like the Genesis GV80, and unlike the old, boring, fake rich. It’s message about wealth is staggeringly direct and brazen. There’s a good rich and a bad rich and the difference between the two is purely aesthetic, and Legend, Teigen, and this luxury car all fall on the good rich side. I think I could ramble for hours about how this frames the American Dream™ and dictates how we should understand social hierarchy, but instead I’ll just take mild offense at the jab at the guy in the loud suit. In my experience, a loud suit does not create a personality, but it certainly indicates one. I think that this Bud Light commercial with Post Malone tells a better message about wealth—money means you can buy more stuff. That definitely checks out.

Finally, There was a Rick and Morty X Pringles ad which desperately wants not to be an ad. Pringles is literally the bad guy and at no point is the product endorsed.

There was also, of course, the halftime show, hosted by Jennifer Laurence and Shakira. It doesn’t seem like something that should have happened this decade, but it was actually pretty well put together. It’s one of the better shows in a long history of flops, especially after Adam Levine’s abysmal showing last year. They did, however, push the line a bit. There was a lot of skin, even for Super Bowl halftime standards. There were poles. There were butts. I don’t really care, but I can respect how some parents weren’t fans. However Coach Dave Daubenmire is taking it one step further. He is suing the NFL for $867,000,000,000,000 dollars. For real. He claims that the show put his soul at risk of hellfire. I suppose JLo lit up his loins or something because damn does he have a high valuation on his wretched soul. You have to watch this. THEY WON’T EVEN LET YOU TALK ABOUT HOMOS ON FACEBOOK!!

This ridiculous week in politics began, but did not end, with Trump posting a shockingly normal tweet showing his “exercise” regimen. This was followed by Andrew Yang proposing a ban on killer robots. This is the future, I guess. The real insanity began with the Iowa Caucus disaster, which has shot the entire Democratic party in the foot. Before the Caucuses, began Yang joked about knocking elderly voters unconscious, and dragging them to the polling place. Unfortunately, the old people put up a fight, and he only got 5% of the first-alignment vote… once it was actually counted.

The action inside the caucuses was entertaining, as Biden continually failed to make it to the realignment, and at least one Buttigieg voter felt cheated upon discovering the former mayor’s homosexuality. This video is hilarious and very worth watching.

Apparently the cause of the embarrassing counting trouble was an app used to count totals. You’d think that counting could be done in-house, but apparently not. No one knows who made this app or how it works. The developer literally calls itself Shadow. This was immediately after the Iowa Democrats had touted new security measures. Along with that, it was reported that many leading the caucuses did not understand the rules and counted wrong. These people want to run our healthcare, and every Democrat ought to be upset about this process. Also, apparently, /pol/ tried to interfere by clogging the phone lines. To investigate this, reporters went to /pol/ and started sharing contact info to get interviews. God I hope this produces some stories.

But 0% results on Tuesday did not deter everybody. Pete Buttigieg, who did end up winning by a narrow margin (and losing the popular vote) due to his heavy Iowa campaigning decided to declare victory with NO VOTES IN. He literally says “an incredible result” when there are 0 reported results. The results that we did get were game changing. Now Buttigieg and Sanders are surging, and Joe “kisses his granddaughter on the lips” Biden is in deep trouble after barely campaigning in Iowa and achieving only 15% of the vote. His campaign was so shocked, it filed an injunction questioning the accuracy of the results.

The President had a very strong State of the Union address, exclaiming his significant economic achievements and avoiding the whole “withholding funds from Ukraine so they’ll investigate Rudy Giuliani’s conspiracy theories” thing. In it, he gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh, which was a pretty good meme.

As I’m sure you’ve heard, Limbaugh announced his cancer diagnosis this week, and it looks like he doesn’t have long to live. I don’t give a fuck what anybody thinks about his politics or his sleaziness, no one deserves cancer… and I do mean no one. Twitter disagrees. Democratic Congresswoman Gabbard posted her prayers for the Limbaugh family and got raked over coals for it. I’m still thinking about the vileness that I saw and my personal ethical philosophy. The celebration of suffering is evil, and I think I need to take a stronger stand against it. 

Then Trump was, predictably, acquitted but, as I’m sure you know, not evenly on party lines. Based Mormon Mitt Romney wrecked his entire political career to go against the circlejerk. Lou Dobbs, perhaps the nuttiest dude on Fox News, rated this as a betrayal worthy of Judas and Benedict Arnold. Following acquittal, Trump had an unhinged address in which he swore on National TV and described Steve Scalise getting shot in graphic detail with finger guns and sound effects and everything. Supremely entertaining and a bit disturbing.

As for me (if you even made it this far down… I don’t blame you if you didn’t), my atheist club had a guest, and I got to debate creationism with a youth pastor! It was like old times. What an idiot though… My classes have taken off, and I’m embarking on a project to build a Linux shell. Wish me luck. I got to see the second screening of the feature film I worked on. It’s coming together. I can’t believe we managed to pull it off. My movie’s production is kind of a mess at the moment, but that’ s usually how it goes. I’m really just trying to stay sane this time around. Take it a little easier. Write more, even if its in the form of unrequested emails. I hope you’re doing well,

Thanks,

Jacob Morris

How Computing Can Contribute to Ethics

This post was originally written for an assignment under a different name.

It should not be surprising that the rise of digital computing has initiated conversations about ethics regarding autonomous systems. Autonomous systems have crept into many facets of our society, often improving our quality of life, but also holding unchecked power over us. But the relationship between ethics and autonomous systems is not unidirectional, and automation affects ethics even as ethics inform our social understanding of automation.

Autonomous systems are our tools, but they differ in a deep way from the tools of our past. One might say it is trivial to understand the ethical reality of a hammer. A hammer is wielded. Whether it is used to build or to destroy, fundamentally it is used by a moral agent. One does not praise the hammer for its creations nor condemn it for its part in destruction. Instead, we praise or criticize the hammer, and perhaps its crafter, for its capacity to be used for its intended purpose. The hammer is ethically trivial in the sense that it neither takes on nor approximates moral agency and the true moral agent wielding the hammer for good or bad is almost always clear. This ethical understanding of our tools does not clearly apply to our newer autonomous tools.

Autonomous systems can at least approximate moral actions, if not truly take them on, and these moral questions are not purely hypothetical. We rely on the moral (or apparently moral) behaviors of autonomous systems regularly in the modern world for our privacy, finances, and safety. And as we prepare to delegate more of our moral decision-making to our machines, allowing them to drive our cars and diagnose our illnesses, these issues become even more pressing.

Some issues in this space have straightforward answers most of us can endorse, particularly in cases with explicitly bad actors who disregard the rights or well-being of the people whom the systems which they create affect. But it may not always be fair or rational to always assign the moral responsibility, good or bad, of the actions of an autonomous systems to those who created it. These moral issues do not have a single, future-proof solution, but they demonstrate that our ethical understanding of the world is mutable, and that our tools can change not just in form or utility, but in moral meaning.

Week of January 26th, 2020

How is monarchy a thing? Sure it’s less of a thing now, but it’s still a thing. At some point I should go on a rant about how “ceremonial” monarchs have a lot more power than you probably think they do. This guy got sentenced to 40 hours community service for insulting Queen Maxima of the Netherlands.

I cannot believe that this video is real. High school internal student news videos are a cringe goldmine (you remember the weird dude with scrap metal in the pocket of his coat), but this… this is something else. Richland High School in Washington has a mascot—the Cloud, named for the mushroom clouds created by the atomic bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Their team name is The Bombers. They have Japanese students. Holy shit.

What the fuck happened to irony? We’ve had this conversation ad nauseum. Let’s continue it. I think that this YouTuber’s content is supremely interesting, and he reminds me quite a lot of my mindset when I started Duckpond back in the day. This video breaking down the layers of irony is worth a watch.

Reddit is a greasy place. I’ve been there for a while, and, from time to time, it can still disappoint me. This was a real post in /r/AskReddit. I thought it was a joke. It is not. People in the thread are answering unironically. The horror.

Continuing their practice of incompetence, the Verge heralds ThinkPad’s latest creating as “The World’s First Foldable Laptop!” I just…

We had our first shoot day today. I was semi-in-charge, which I’m not used to, and the whole thing hinged on my ability to act. A strange experience. It’s honestly incredible to see so many people come together to bring something that I wrote in a waking fever dream to life. When you see this movie, I’ll tell you more of the ridiculous backstory.

Hope you’re doing well, and I’ll email you next Saturday!

Thanks,
Jacob Morris