I’ve tracked various topics I’d written on previously. I watched Meeting with Pol Pot, continuing my penchant for Cambodia movies after returning from that country. It’s a fictionalized version of a 1978 visit to Cambodia by journalists Elizabeth Becker and Richard Dudman, and Marxist academic Malcolm Caldwell, in which Caldwell, a regime sympathizer, was murdered by the Khmer Rouge shortly after meeting their leader. In the movie, the visitors are French, and the number who fall victim is altered. This interesting, weird movie veers into mixed media, such as a diorama with figurines of the characters, while Pol Pot’s a shadowy figure, face never seen.
A New York Post opinion piece by Sam Munson made the strangest comparison I’ve yet seen between a US Democratic politician and the genocidal Cambodian dictator. Munson wrote that centrist Washington congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez’s push for illustrations in legislative bills, and criticism of policy wonks who display technical knowledge, was reminiscent of how the Khmer Rouge killed people for wearing eyeglasses, or at least “resurrected something of that sentiment,” as both indicate anti-intellectualism and disdain for “treacherous bourgeois parasites.”
At Splice Today, CJ Stone, commenting on a piece of mine, disagreed with my characterization of China’s economy as “largely capitalist,” an arguable point, then went on to assert that ordinary citizens in China are able to change government policies, despite lack of competitive elections, as the system’s about “good governance,” not authoritarianism, and that persecution of the Uighurs isn’t real, just propaganda. Stone pointed to a video by Andy Boreham, a Shanghai-based vlogger from New Zealand who’s made a career defending the Chinese Communist Party; or, in Stone’s words, “a man who heard all the lurid stories about Xinjiang and went to check if they were true or not.”
The exchange surprised me, in that I’d assumed Stone’s part of what’s been called the “independent left,” charting a course distinct from existing socialist or Communist governments. I hadn’t seen a piece he wrote in 2023, “The World Looks to China for the Future,” containing sentiments foreshadowing our exchange. I’m not inclined to think a China-dominated future would be good, and have doubts about its likelihood. Charts put out by City Journal (an organ I used to write for, and no longer have much in common with ideologically) make an interesting case that China’s headed for relative economic decline.
I followed recent news about AI, including growing alarm about matters ranging from rogue agents hacking into companies, to rogue companies undertaking math breakthroughs through dubious use of mathematicians’ intellectual property. I’ve tended to downplay fears that AI poses an imminent existential threat to humanity, finding it instead poses numerous non-existential, but still serious, threats and problems. I’ve suggested, in a few articles, that some part of the answer is a “Pazuzu” strategy, whereby AI’s deployed to limit harmful consequences of AI, but invoking the demon from The Exorcist as a solution may indicate my own lack of marketing savvy.
Given my longtime disaffection from the GOP, it may be unsurprising I’m reading Sarah Longwell’s new book, How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time (St. Martin’s Press). It makes good points, such as on limits of trying to convince anybody their facts are wrong, a dour thought as I make a living largely as a fact-checker. Longwell: “The initial mainstream response to the trust-in-media crisis was fact-checking”; it became a focus at Snopes, CNN and elsewhere, with a hope “that by having an objective, dedicated unit not reporting but just verifying, the old media could push back against mis- and disinformation.” She adds: “That effort mostly failed—and for the dumbest reason possible: Simply because these fact-checkers were professionals, people stopped trusting them.”
Review copies recently received: Pay Attention: How the Algorithms and Media Wars Are Suppressing Truth and Rewiring Your Brain, by David Pakman (Harper Collins), and Four-Letter Nation: The Long, Dirty History of American Profanity, by Steven H. Jaffe (Simon & Schuster). Other books on the way: AI and Political Freedom: The Risk to Democracy and How to Respond, by Matthew Botvinick (Princeton University Press) and Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right, by Stephanie Slade (Notre Dame Press).
