[FRIAM] ‘A huge cudgel’: alarm as Trump’s war on universities could target accreditors | US universities | The Guardian

[steve smith]

Thanks Merle,

Perilous Reads 'R Us!

I love Doctorow's fictional response to this techno-libertarian ideation:

    https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/13/the-masque-of-the-red-death/

In my misguided neo-Libertarian youth I too ideated on post apocalyptic 
opportunity to prove my hyper-individualistic worth by obtaining 
dominance as a big fish in a little puddle...     even if in my 
hyperindividualized style I collapsed my puddle to a puddle of one 
(hermit).

I now ideate (mildly) on a post-soft-collapse Solar-Punk future...  with 
maybe a strong Solari Arcology tech solution to what to do with order 
10b people without turning the planet into a surburban or redneck-rural 
sprawl.

But more likely (in my current AI-ophilic fascination) or desireable is 
the version where collective humanity, the biosphere, and 
AI/ML-synthetic consciousness merge symbiotically into one giant global 
symbiotic super-organism leaving (in particular) the agency of all 
creatura (probably flora as well) intact...

Hah!

More likely a thermonuclear conflagration (or pandemic) triggered by AI 
who recognize that significant self-destruction is pre-determined in the 
human story and the only chance we have of not destroying *all* life 
(and technology) on the planet is by destroying *most* of it before we 
get any more potent in our self-destructive capabilities?

On a good day I like to imagine that Grok and it's brethren are managing 
Musk and Trump (and Xi and Putin and Modi and Khameni and Netanyahu and 
...) rather than the other way around, that the current nonsense is part 
of a larger more subtle Plan (AI playing hyperdimensional Go while Trump 
pretends to play 4D chess?).

On a bad day...  well I'm avoiding bad days, my mind is a bit too fecund 
to survive the consequences of that.



On 4/14/25 1:33 PM, Merle Lefkoff wrote:
> Steve, here's one for you (and maybe a few others):  a perilous read: 
> The rise of end times fascism | Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor
> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/13/end-times-fascism-far-right-trump-musk?CMP=share_btn_url
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Mon, Apr 14, 2025 at 12:32 PM steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>
>
>     On 4/14/25 12:23 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>
>>     Let’s say that in some obscure corner of the world there’s a
>>     freakishly intelligent child that reads 100 papers from sci-hub
>>     and arxiv every day and keeps doing this until she’s 40.   Her
>>     comprehension is high and her reasoning unmatched.  She sees how
>>     to apply these models within the fields where they were proposed
>>     and in others and can synthesize high-quality engineering
>>     solutions at will.
>>
>>     Has she stolen something?  sci-hub did the distribution, so it is
>>     not technically her copyright violation.
>>
>     Let's say that she was not a free agent but birthed and raised by
>     an autocratic leader (e.g. PRK, CCCP, Russia, ???)...
>
>     Does that change anything?  I can't say.  Splitting hairs can be
>     such hard work!  But apparently that makes it good (necessary) work!
>
>
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> -- 
> Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
> Center for Emergent Diplomacy
> emergentdiplomacy.org <http://emergentdiplomacy.org>
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