Arclist

Essays and poems delving into current culture.

[rmelcher]

Michael

He was tall and very thin, with the striking red hair and fair skin of a person of Irish descent and temperament. He’d grown up in rural Appalachia. At some point in his college years the breadth of his awareness expanded dramatically and he, along with many of our post war generation, became a vocal reformer, a gadfly, and a revolutionary in spirit. In the years following he migrated to…

View On WordPress

[rmelcher]

Starting Out (Pynchon as Parenthesis) Part One

“It’ll get easier. Someday it’ll all be done by machine. Information machines.” Gravity’s Rainbow I’m stranded in this Sargasso moment, awash above the blank pages in a sea of bewilderment, bordering too often on despair or at least demoralization, questioning who we are and what we are to do, placing words on screen or paper, appearing too often useless. How can I meet the YouTube moment,…

Starting Out (Pynchon as Parenthesis) Part One

[rmelcher]

America In The Squeeze

Guns versus smartphones I’m just turning 75. My life has been formed, and is almost completed, throughout a breathtakingly brief and cataclysmic era in global history. In future accounts it may be referred to as ‘The Neoliberal Era’, ‘The Era Of American Hegemony’, ‘The Age Of Economic Globalization’, or perhaps, as the cataclysm intensifies toward its resolution, ‘Capitalism’s Final Crisis’.…

View On WordPress

[rmelcher]

Where Are We?

Where Are We? ”It cannot be repeated too often: nothing is more fertile in marvels than the art of being free, but nothing is harder than freedom’s apprenticeship. The same is not true of despotism. Despotism often presents itself as the repairer of all the ills suffered, the support of just rights, defenders of the oppressed, and founder of order. People are lulled to sleep by the temporary…

View On WordPress

[rmelcher]

February 22, 2025 at 6:09 AM

We aren’t helpless. All of what’s against us is part of what Naomi Klein calls ‘The Shock Doctrine’, and others call ‘Flooding The Zone’. The object is to bombard people with a sense of constant crisis, so that we become numbed, disoriented, confused and discouraged, and ultimately we loose focus and give in to despair. A counter to this is embracing a wider vision, one that no longer perceives…

February 22, 2025 at 6:09 AM

[rmelcher]

Direct Cinema

‘Essential’, ‘Unforgettable’, ‘Body Horror Classic’, ‘Feminist Cult Classic’, ‘Dark Comedy’, are some of the quotes being thrown around about ‘The Substance’, a new film by Coralie Fargeat, starring Demi Moore. The best description I’ve seen is the line in the teaser from New York Magazine, “An enraged scream in cinematic form”. Having been released during the season of America’s self immolating…

Direct Cinema

[rmelcher]

Women Talking

In (2023) I managed to see most of the movies nominated for the Best Picture at the Academy Awards. (except ‘Elvis’ – I was never much into Elvis and am not particularly fond of biopics in general.) That was the year ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ won the award. Sarah Polley’s film ‘Women Talking’ was awarded ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’ I thought it deserved ‘Best Picture’ – at least. When…

View On WordPress

[rmelcher]

October Surprise

I sit in this cafe in Santa Fe drinking my coffee and reading about the approaching hurricane, billed as potentially ‘one of the most destructive hurricanes on record for West-Central Florida.’ I open the MAPS app on my phone and enter St. Petersburg, Florida, zeroing in on the strip of barrier island beaches along the Gulf of Mexico, until I find the section called Treasure Island. I scan the…

View On WordPress

[rmelcher]

October Surprise

I sit in this cafe in Santa Fe drinking my coffee and reading about the approaching hurricane, billed as potentially ‘one of the most destructive hurricanes on record for West-Central Florida.’ I open the MAPS app on my phone and enter St. Petersburg, Florida, zeroing in on the strip of barrier island beaches along the Gulf of Mexico, until I find the section called Treasure Island. I scan the…

View On WordPress

[rmelcher]

“Shut Up and Get Back To Work”

I could only be somewhat amused at U. S. House Speaker Mike Johnson’s performance addressing students and the press at Columbia University, telling them to stop their nonsense and get back to classes. Behind him stood a grinning Elise Stefanik, joining in the act, both performing for stock footage to be used in the upcoming fall campaigns. It struck me that a major lesson to be taken in a week…

View On WordPress

[rmelcher]

From ’God, Human, Animal, Machine’ by Meghan O’Gieblyn

Eclipse From ’God, Human, Animal, Machine’ by Meghan O’Gieblyn Donald Trump himself, a man whose rise to power may or may not have been aided by machines, is often included in this digital phantasm, one more emergent property of the network’s dazzling complexity. He is a politician, it is often said, who understands, or at least intuits, more thoroughly than anyone how to manipulate a system…

View On WordPress

[rmelcher]

Civil Wars

MEGALOPOLIS Civil Wars I just finished the remarkable new book by Nancy Pelosi, The Art Of Power. It was on the one hand an inspiring first hand account of indomitable courage and determination in the face of difficult odds and a history of the major political struggles I’ve witnessed since 1987. On the other hand it’s an account of a time of civility in politics and government that has frayed…

View On WordPress

[rmelcher]

Civil Wars

MEGALOPOLIS Civil Wars I just finished the remarkable new book by Nancy Pelosi, The Art Of Power. It was on the one hand an inspiring first hand account of indomitable courage and determination in the face of difficult odds and a history of the major political struggles I’ve witnessed since 1987. On the other hand it’s an account of a time of civility in politics and government that has frayed…

View On WordPress

[rmelcher]

DNC Night Three

Last night felt to me like a religious ritual and a call to final battle. Watching an aged Bill Clinton was to me like listening to the incantation of a high priest who, more than anyone, represented for me the political aspirations of my generation. Through all of the struggles with Newt Gingrich and all the scandals and persecutions I remember Clinton saying that his only real enemy was the…

View On WordPress

[rmelcher]

From _’God, Human, Animal, Machine’_ by Meghan O’Gieblyn*

Donald Trump himself, a man whose rise to power may or may not have been aided by machines, is often included in this digital phantasm, one more emergent property of the network’s dazzling complexity. He is a politician, it is often said, who understands, or at least intuits, more thoroughly than anyone how to manipulate a system that runs on empty signifiers - a system that has become so unhinged from semantic meaning, so thoroughly reduced to syntax, that one can simply throw a bunch of meaningless phrases - what the journalist Masha Gessen calls “word piles” - into the ether and divert the narrative away from its original source. Robert A. Burton, a prominent neurologist, argued that Trump is so good at understanding algorithms because he himself is an algorithm. In a 2017 op-ed for _The New York Times_ Burton claimed that the president made sense once you stopped viewing him as a human being and began to see him as “a rudimentary artificial intelligence-based learning machine. Like deep learning systems, was working blindly through trial and error, keeping a record of what moves worked in the past and using them to optimize his strategy, much like AlphaGo, the AI system that swept the Go championship in Seoul. The reason that we found him so baffling was that we continually tried to anthropomorphize him, attributing intention and ideology to his decisions, as though they stemmed from a coherent agenda. AI systems are so wildly successful because they aren’t burdened with any of these rational or moral concerns - they don’t have to think about what is socially acceptable or take into account downstream consequences. They have one goal - winning - and this rigorous single-minded interest is consistently updated through positive feedback. Burton’s advice to historians and policy wonks was to regard Trump as a black box. “As there are no lines of reasoning driving the network’s actions,” he wrote, “it is not possible to reverse engineer the network to reveal the ‘why’ of any decision.

[https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/567075/god-human-animal-machine-by-meghan-ogieblyn/]

[rmelcher]

https://wordpress.com/post/arclist.com/961

[rmelcher]

Arclist

Arclist