zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — IMO, these paired mass casualty shootings call for mass humility on both sides of the divide — let’s build a corpus callosum for the nation ]
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Let’s just do this with headlines, the El Paso shooter above, the Dayton shooter below:

The moral would appear to be: no matter what “side” you’re on, there may be some folk who take it to an extremist extreme. They may kill for ideas on “your side” — at least in contemporary American politics. I tend to the left, so Crusius is no surprise, but Connor Betts, WTF?

ANd you’ll tell me it’s the opposite way around for some of you — WTF are Crusius and others like him doing?

And BTW, DoubleQuote!

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Okay — Connor Betts:

The Dayton shooting was the 250th mass shooting “event” in the US this year, but its exact motivation is unclear at the time of this writing — the shooter, Connor Betts, who was wearing a bullet-proof vest, killed his sister among others, and had written a “hit list” of girls while at High School at one point — so school issues and family feud are among the possible explanations for his violence, which killed 9 in 26 seconds before he was taken down by police. He was far from a Breivik follower, however. His Twitter page revealed, as reported by Heavy:

Or quoting Heavy again —

[H]e described himself as “he/him / anime fan / metalhead / leftist / i’m going to hell and i’m not coming back.” He wrote on Twitter that he would happily vote for Democrat Elizabeth Warren, praised Satan, was upset about the 2016 presidential election results, and added, “I want socialism, and i’ll not wait for the idiots to finally come round to understanding.”

That’s pretty aggressively [is that the word?] left and male, eh?

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Sources:

Heavy, Patrick Crusius: Suspect’s Twitter Page Shows Trump Support

Heavy, Connor Betts: Twitter Posts on Being a Leftist, Guns

Readings:

Politico, What Both Sides Don’t Get About American Gun Culture

The Hill, Graham to offer bipartisan ‘red flag’ bill with Trump’s support [added]

[ by Charles Cameron — a meditation on sea-level rise ]
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A thousand years later, the lesson King Cnut sought to teach his nobles still hasn’t altogether sunk in.

The North Carolina story is from 2012, and I haven’t been tracking to see if there have been any changes since then — but the attitude behind the gutting of the EPA under President Trump is simply “more of the same”..

Humility is the key word in the article on King Cnut.

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Sources:

ABC News, New Law in North Carolina Bans Latest Scientific Predictions of Sea-Level Rise

Wikipedia, King Canute and the waves

[ by Charles Cameron — better eat a muffin than a dog, stop at a stop sign than blow through it at 45, oh well ]
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It’s cute, sorta, that AIs can’t easily distinguish dogs from muffins:

But STOP!

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What’s not so funny is that the AI in many autonomous vehicles misreads a treated STOP sign —

— as a sign for a 45 mph speed limit. As Ivan Evtimov and colleagues indicate in Robust Physical-World Attacks on Machine Learning Models, “Physically realizing such an attack for road signs can raise concern in human observers.”

I’ll say.

Grab the wheel, conscious entity!

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Readings:

Becoming Human: AI, Why are Marketers All Talking about AI Now?

Wired, Simple Pictures that State-of-the-Art AI Still Can’t Recognize

Car & Driver, Researchers Find a Malicious Way to Meddle with Autonomous Cars

Arxiv, Robust Physical-World Attacks on Machine Learning Models

[ by Charles Cameron — another “life imitates art” and a Trumpian ouroboros ]
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In my view, humility shaves ckoser than Occam’s Razor — Occam tends not to shave our assumptions, while humility invites us to consider even our thoughts, even our certainties, as uncertain, as open to question.

Did I mention I’m the proud owner of the domain name, Church of the Open Question?

**

Life imitates art:

Upper panel: George W Bush and Bill Clinton on humility:

Lower panel: from Madam Secretary, season 3..

Trumpian Ouroboros:

That’s actually brilliant, IMO. And Trump relishes and repeats it:

"@KennicotAsks: @realDonaldTrump Of all the fellow celebrities you've met, which do you consider to be the most humble?" ME!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 10, 2014

Hey, Pope Francis is a close second..

The new Pope is a humble man, very much like me, which probably explains why I like him so much!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 25, 2013

And then there’s this — delicious — from a WaPo piece titled Donald Trump’s Secret Service code name is less humble, more mogul:

During a lightning round of a debate, Republican frontrunner Donald Trump picked a potential Secret Service code name that was truly coded: HUMBLE. When the braggadocious billionaire starts to receive actual Secret Service protection Wednesday morning, agents plan to call him something a bit more fitting: MOGUL.

Okay. Mebbe that’s a bit more modest.

Hm. MOGUL as in magnate, tycoon? Or MOGUL as in speed-bump on the ski slopes?

[ by Charles Cameron — trump triumphing, trump trumped — which is it, obvs? ]
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Both op-eds, both from Washington Post, yesterday, June 10 2017:

My point being that we tend to write as though what seems obvious to us is obvious period, when it obviously isn’t always. A pity.

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Sources:

Why Comey’s testimony was utterly devastating to Trump

Boy Scout James Comey is no match for Donald Trump

Oh I mean, everyone does it — I no doubt do it too. But according to Dorothy Lee, Linguistic Reflection of Winto Thought, among the Wintu there is an “attitude of humility and respect toward reality, toward nature and society”:

I cannot find an adequate English term to apply to a habit of thought that is so alien to our culture. We are aggressive toward reality. We say, This is bread; we do not say, as the Wintu, I call this bread or I feel or taste or see it to be bread. The Wintu never say starkly this is; if he speaks of reality that is not within his own restricting experience, he does not affirm it, he only implies it. If he speaks of his experience he does not express it as categorically true.