Tag: Kirn Quibbles
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Kirn misses it
Here he balances out yesterday’s precise hit! We’re in what I’d term the “taste destruction” phase of cultural change. It’s similar to what food co’s did once to wean us off good food and prepare us for products like Wonder Bread, only it involves language, images, and music. You’ll accept less once you forget there…
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Kirn hits it
Kirn has seemed quiet or preoccupied lately. Today he hits the HARDASS REALITY button: There is a terrible emotional drag on daily life now. One must try to be cheerful, but in simple public interactions one witnesses a blankness, a loss of a sense of ordinary honor & caring. Meanwhile, everywhere, people drifting, living in…
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Good question
Latest from Kirn: When I was a kid, there was a huge Cold War-inspired math, science, and physical education push. It wasn’t quite my bag but it made a lot of sense and quite possibly paid off in many ways. Why is there not one now? I don’t get it. I’ve been grinding on the…
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Would be nice…
Latest from Kirn: Someday creativity, free speech, civil liberties, peace, prosperity, and a balanced respect for tradition and exploration will not be assailed as “extreme” positions. The Boy Scout in me hopes that a more open Twitter will help in this process. I think it might. I think it won’t. This is one of the…
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Zirn Zibbles
Influencers really need to realize their weak points. Well, everybody does, but it’s more consequential when influencers grab onto the latest obvious scam. Kirn doesn’t realize that tech is his weak point. Or else he’s working for the enemy. Today he’s advertising something called Urbit, the latest version of Gab or Parler. Urbit comes with…
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Waaaaay beyond quibble
Latest from Kirn: AI doesn’t suffer from impostor syndrome, nor does it ever feel suicidal, which is how one knows it isn’t sentient in any meaningful sense. It can never be human-like until it possesses the capacity to review its deeds, judge them, despair, and permanently turn itself off. This is so fucking dumb it’s…
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More Tirn Tibbles
Another case where Kirn misses a point because he’s not inside the tech world. I believe deeply in creativity, innovation, imagination & in the idea that they must be protected because they benefit all of us. The framers of the Constitution believed this too. It is why they gave special attention to patent law. We…
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Back to Kirn Quibbles…
Kirn’s latest pithy: The forces of adamant top-down control & the forces of creative distributed responsibility both feel that they now have an opportunity in technology to manifest long-held dreams. So they’re fighting. Nope. Wrong three ways. First: Distributed responsibility is NOT creative. Strong cultures don’t need a lot of top-down control because they’re bound…
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I don’t see the cede
I can’t quibble with this Kirn oracle, but I can’t call it realistic either. Beneath the hard dry crust of the establishment, a powerful dynamic reservoir of turbulent independent energy is starting to exert real counter pressure. It does not have a name yet, this force or movement, but it is developing as a real…
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Strong stuff, weak history
Strong stuff from Kirn: So much imagination, eccentricity, dreaminess, and creativity went into the creation of the tech we use now. Yet it is becoming the instrument of our species’ most simplistic and brutal instincts for raw power, deception and coercion. Damn it, I want that Renaissance they promised! First part is wrong. The true…
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Latest Kirn quibble
Kirn’s latest pithy point: We need a few experts on the history of experts. Such a figure could estimate their average accuracy. My guess is that it hovers between 1 and 2 per cent. If it were any higher, we would not have needed new ones every few years. This is a beautiful observation about…
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Dams
A great image from Kirn: Every day little dams are being placed in the rushing current of the English language. The builders think they will hold. They believe new technologies will help their project succeed. Shakespeare laughs. More to the point, pimps and hoes laugh. New language comes from the peasants, not from the writers.…
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Big Birn Bibble
Kirn is seriously wrong on this one, and commenters called him down. When my son was very little he asked me: “Why do so many people live in little houses when there are mansions?” “It’s not their choice,” I said. “Then whose choice is it?” he asked me. I am still trying to come up…
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Much better!
Here’s a much more valid and informative comment by another of Kirn’s discussers. Polarization is bad now but it was worse in the early 70s. At that time there was a full-on violent left wing insurgency underway. Thousands of bombings by people who believed they were the vanguards of a communist revolution. Then it ended…
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RTFM, idiot.
In Kirn’s continuing discussion of misdefinition, one commenter says: Half-seriously just waiting at this point for the Regime to redefine election victory: “Ballot totals are only part of the story. To truly understand who won an election, we need to take a holistic look at a number of variables…” That’s not a wild ironic redefinition,…
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