Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking AI, Heather Cox Richardson, knives, and more.
Your letters:
Bryan:
How many people would it take to storm Mar-a-Lago? Theoretically speaking.
You and your resistance army will have to get past Doordash Grandma first, and that’s no small task. Doordash Grandma has a scalding hot McDonald’s coffee in her hands, and she’s not afraid to use it.
In all seriousness, Mar-a-Lago would be the better target than the White House for a PURELY THEORETICAL INSURRECTION WHICH I AM NOT ON THE RECORD AS ENCOURAGING. This is because Trump spends all of his time there, so he’d be home at the time of invasion. He also cherishes the estate far more than the White House; you can tell because he has yet to bulldoze Mar-a-Lago’s eastern grotto. So a storming of that place would be an (again, theoretical) attack on Trump, rather than on America itself.
And as for security … well, imagine how sick Secret Service agents are of the old fucker NOW. Shit, they’d probably open the gate for you.
Ben:
My local college station, WPGU, played the Postal Service song "Nothing Better" this evening. Ben Gibbard begins as follows:
Will someone please call a surgeon /
Who can crack my ribs and repair this broken heart /
That you're deserting for better company?
I can't accept that it's over /
Then I will block the door /
Like a goalie tending the net in the third quarter /
Of a tied-game rivalry.
What sport, specifically, is he talking about? "Goalie tending the net" linguistically sets me up to think he's talking about hockey, but then he says "third quarter," and you know it can't be that. The next most relatable thing would be soccer, but that, too, is disqualified as a sport of halves. What's the next most relatable thing he could possibly analogize to... lacrosse?
Knowing that band, it’s probably Quidditch. There’s a long and storied tradition of artists getting their sports metaphors all crossed: Bruce Springsteen calling a fastball a “speedball” (it’s the same number of syllables, WTF!), Pitbull declaring, “She on the rebound, broke up with her ex/And I'm like Rodman, ready on deck,” etc. It’s possible that Fountains of Wayne is the only artist to ever write an accurate song about sports, but that’s not a subject I care to parse too deeply. I’d rather make fun of The Postal Service, because they’re dogshit.
Beau:
Heather Cox Richardson. Do you think more Americans should read her? I strongly believe her daily insights should be plastered all over every media outlet every single day. She’s a voice of reason in these extremely turbulent times and if more people read her we might not be in the shitstorm Trump created. Plus, you’d be supporting another PEA grad.
Oh wow, Heather Cox Richardson went to Exeter? Damn, that knocks me another slot down on the Most Famous Exeter Alumni list, underneath Zuck and the Arcade Fire guy. Where’s the justice, I ask you? I didn’t get straight B-minuses at that school just to be ORDINARY.
Anyway, for people who don’t know, Heather Cox Richardson is a historian whose daily newsletter has become a must-read for my wife, along with god knows how many other intelligent liberals. It’s an excellent newsletter. In a healthier media environment, HCR would be the lead columnist at The New York Times, or the Washington Post. She has good writing chops, she knows her history, and she knows that everything going on right now is EXTREMELY fucked up and is willing to say as much.
You might be saying, “Well, there are plenty of columnists who are like that!” Not at the big-boy outlets, there aren’t. Yes, the Times deigns to give column space to the great Jamelle Bouie, but that man is vastly outnumbered on his own masthead by a cadre of Douthats and Kleins and Stephenses. And the Washington Post is even worse, letting talented columnists like Alexandra Petri walk in favor of showcasing professional shitheads like Megan McArdle, who writes pieces with headlines like, “I told the internet I use AI. Boy, was it mad.” (That really was the topline of a column she wrote; no, I’m not gonna link to it.) Every columnist now is a fucking hack whose marching orders are to crank out nothing but idiotic ragebait.
Factor in the growing Bari Weiss-ification of televised news, and suddenly the mainstream media landscape has become utterly devoid of Heather Cox Richardsons. This is how a plainly evil and deeply stupid Trump regime is able to thrive. Indie journos and protesters are the only people crying out FUCK NAZI SCUM, with coverage of the latter being remanded to page 36 of the Times’ front section. The playing field is eternally tilted in favor of the pigs.
It’s been this way for ages, it’s just that President Dollar Store Jesus has made that disparity so, so glaring. It shouldn’t fall to niche journos like HCR, or even Defector Media, to call out the obvious. And yet, here we are. That makes me glad that my fellow Exeter alum HCR is around to help pitch in. More Americans should read her, and then constantly forward her links to their kids until those kids says, “Mom and Dad, cut it out” (like in our house).
While I’m on this subject, I blogged about the Vrabel/Russini affair last week but didn’t have a good place to note this passage from Page Six’s initial report on the scandal:
“To think Dianna Russini will almost certainly make more money than Maggie Haberman or David Brooks— Times legends — and, crazily, might earn more than them combined, is a sign of the strange sports journalism times we live in,” NBC’s Peter King wrote of her signing. “Stars who cover the NFL make crazy salaries compared to the money people make covering news that truly matters.”
Yes, Peter King. When pondering this country’s skewed priorities, my first thought is, “Shouldn’t Maggie Haberman and David Brooks be paid more?”
Kevin:
Peanuts and coke: what's your take? Delicious or not?
Peanuts and any cold beverage makes for perfect snacking. I’m old enough to remember when peanuts were the default free airplane snack before stroopwaffels, Biscoff cookies, and stale pretzels entered the chat. Getting a little bag of peanuts and a can of Coke was easily the highlight of every flight I took. Decades later, I’ll throw down some blister peanuts with the near beer of my choice every happy hour and be just as content.
By the way, young me also once lived the Homer Simpson meme and had nuts and gum together. It wasn’t an ideal combination, but it wasn’t that bad either. The gum made the peanut flavor last longer!
Ben:
Was in a dumb argument online about names on the back of sports jerseys. I hold that every team should slap the names of players on the backs of their jerseys. The person I was arguing with said doing so was disrespectful to the team and that it's about the name on the front, not the back. Aren't we past all of this bullshit? NAMES ON THE BACKS OF JERSEYS OR DEATH!
Somehow you and your bud are both being annoying about it. How many teams in the States don’t put names on the back of jerseys these days? Top of my head, I got Notre Dame, USC, and Penn State. And that’s only the football programs at those schools. I don’t remember watching March Madness this spring and seeing any college basketball teams without nameplates.
And no pro football team here does that holier-than-thou shit. When someone fucks up a play for the Jacksonville Jaguars, I can clearly see who that offender is (it’s Brian Thomas). Thus, nameplates have won the battle, just as surely as “the analytics” have. And I don’t need ND, USC, and Penn State football to follow suit. You know why? Because those programs never win anything. So if they’d like to stay anonymous for the rest of time, they can be my guest. This is no longer a worthy topic of sports debate. Let’s move on.
Jamie:
My sons (12, 9) have thus far used the internet (under supervision) in such a way that they pick a topic and then become complete sickos about that topic, absorbing as much information as they can find about whatever they're into. Mostly it's been video games thus far: Minecraft, Zelda, Mega Man, Metroid, etc. I myself was a Star Trek/Star Wars sicko as a kid/teenager, but I would have to wait until a movie came out, or a TV show came on, or until I saved up enough money to buy books about them. These guys just get whatever information they want, immediately. It's not fair. We had to work for it. What kind of sicko would you have been in 1988, if you had the sum total of human knowledge in your pocket?
Porn. I would have watched porn with it, and nothing else. That’s why I was concerned about giving each of our kids a phone of their own. I was like, “Well shit, they’re just gonna turn into sick perverts who can only get off watching video of someone getting a cockroach pulled out of their asshole.” That nightmare has yet to pass. Instead, my daughter uses her phone to listen to Wilco, my older son uses it to study soccer highlights on YouTube, and the youngest uses his for hours at a time to watch shit on CrunchyRoll. We do periodic, surprise phone audits too, but nothing illicit turns up. Their phone use is so wholesome, sometimes I’m quietly annoyed. “Hey man, shouldn’t they have used their Google account to log into xHamster by now?! That’s what tweenage me would have done!” Well, turns that tweenage me was a compulsive masturbator who desperately needed other interests. I never could have been trusted with a phone. Most adults still can’t.
HALFTIME!
Alex:
My wife HATES commercials. Despises them. She demands they be muted if she is in the room while the TV is on. If she's another room and hears a commercial, she will yell in and request a muting. I agree that they are loud and obnoxious and, frankly, incredibly lazy these days. My issue is with the muting. I can tune them out without much bother. But if I have to mute the commercials, I need to keep half an eye on the screen so I don't miss the beginning of the game or show I am watching. It really cuts into my "thinking about absolutely nothing" time. The only two solutions I have come up with to solve this marital dispute are overthrowing the government in order to abolish capitalism, and only watching PBS. Is there a middle ground I am missing?
Don’t you guys have a DVR? Can’t you just go back if you missed the first 10 seconds out of the ad break, or simply pause the game for a couple of minutes before the break and then skip ahead to the live action? I shouldn’t have to mediate conflicts this simple, Alex. You just saw me having to deal with the nameplate guy.
By the way, my wife also demands I mute the commercials, to the point where I also prefer to mute them. Then, when one of the kids is watching something and leaves the volume on for the inevitable run of “Tell Congress you’re sick of unfair energy policies!” ads, both of us scream at the kid to mute that shit. It’s moments like that one that really bring us closer as a couple.
I’ll unmute Dr. Rick ads and cool movie trailers, though. Those two are musts.
Todd:
When my dad passed away, I inherited several things from him: a watch, a couple of shirts, his Columbia Gore-Tex raincoat, and a couple of his ballcaps. But I'm an only child, and you're competing with a couple of siblings. Still, I would be curious what, if anything, you inherited, and why that object or those objects are special?
I inherited (Dr. Evil voice) ONE HUNDRED BEELION DOLLARS.
Just kidding. I got a computer. Before my dad died, he bought a brand-new HP desktop. Super fancy, with a touch screen and everything. He hated it and ended up never using it. So when we cleaned out the house last year and no one else wanted/needed the PC, I went ahead and took it home with me. The Dell PC I owned at the time, purchased in 2020, was starting to annoy me. I figured I would probably have to replace it sooner rather than later.
I was right. Shortly after I brought that PC back home, that fucking Dell gave me the “updates are underway” screen of death for the 500,000th time. So I said, “Fuck this shit, I’m bringing Dad’s PC up from the basement.” I booted it up and HEY PRESTO! I had a functional PC again, and I didn’t have to pay for it. Kickass.
Now let me break out Sentimental Drew for a brief moment. This HP I got from my old man is an all-in-one. Twenty years ago, when my wife and I first moved into our house, my parents got me an iMac, another all-in-one desktop, as a housewarming gift. I started my blogging career on that iMac. I wrote my first book on it. When I had to replace that iMac with a new desktop PC in 2010 (had to pay for that one myself), I kept its keyboard for the new machine because it had linear switches, which my hands favored. Then when that PC broke down and I replaced it with the Dell (paid for out of Defector Media’s tech budget), I brought the grubby Mac keyboard over again.
But when I opened this new HP, I saw that it came with a wireless keyboard that had linear switches, just like the old iMac’s. So, 20 years after my folks gifted me the computer and keyboard that powered my writing career, they’ve gifted me a similar computer and keyboard that will keep me writing for another 20. That makes me smile a little. Thanks, pop.
Also, I’m never buying a Dell again. Dell computers BLOW.
Josh:
How would a party made up of AI do? Assuming the concept of the party is to have AI make decisions that benefit the greatest number of people while doing the minimal amount of harm, could it win elections? The party wouldn't have any of the baggage of the existing sides, so it could draw from all over the political spectrum. How would it do at governing?
That assumption on your part is doing too much heavy lifting. The idea of benevolent AI is dead, dead, dead. It’s an evil technology sold by even worse people. There will never be an independent AI party free of mankind’s faults. There will only be Mark Zuckerberg making an AI clone of himself to interact with his workers.
You can see the real purpose of AI now, can’t you? Miserable fucks like Zuck, Trump, and Elon would like to have avatars of themselves that live on forever and ever, and are programmed to be just as evil and shitty as their flesh-and-blood progenitors. That’s the AI politician that you and I will be confronted with one day. I do believe that an AI candidate, especially if it’s an AI version of an old candidate, would poll like absolute shit. Most people, no matter how stupid, are instinctively repelled by artificial beings. It’s like how a dog won’t go near a body because it can already sense that it’s dead. God, I can’t wait for the Mar-a-Lago riot to happen.
Cam:
I recently came back from Japan with a couple of really good, expensive chef knives as a souvenir. In addition to being beautiful, they're so much more pleasurable to use than the regular, stamped-ass knife sets that I picked up when I was younger. I'm sure I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, but am I going to have to replace all of my knives with better quality ones?
That’s usually how the process goes. You get one nice thing in your house, and then you feel the need to upgrade everything else IN your house to match it. We renovated our house a little over 10 years ago, but we couldn’t afford to remodel our cracked driveway as part of the total package. That driveway, still all cracked and uneven, nags at both my wife and me to this day. We should probably spring for a new one. And once we do that, we can’t just park our old minivan in there. We’d have to upgrade to a Mercedes or something. And if we get a Mercedes, shouldn’t we also get an infinity pool in the back to match? If you give a suburbanite a cookie…
Back to knives. My wife and I do not own a set of fancy knives. Instead, we have a motley collection of cutlery sourced from here and there, including a few knives leftover from a set we received as a wedding gift (you’re not supposed to give knives as a wedding gift because it’s bad luck, but free knives are free knives). The best knives we own come from, of all places, Ikea. These knives are so sharp that my wife is afraid to use them. She also doesn’t like that they make gouges in our cutting boards. This has caused some light friction between us. I believe that cutting boards are supposed to be gouged, because they are cutting boards. I also believe that it’s better to have good knives than good cutting boards. In theory, we could spring for some invincible cutting board that resists all marking, but such boards are more expensive than any knife we own. So if we buy one of those, the whole upgrading process I outlined in the above paragraph would kick into effect, and we’d end up convincing ourselves that we need an entirely new kitchen.
With that in mind, we have never replaced any of our shitty knives. If I want to use the super-sharp ones, I just use the dog as a cutting board. Marriage solved.
Michael:
Can you set a world record? Nothing ridiculous that you make up that nobody else would ever think to do, it has to be something that the average man wouldn't think is stupid and actually requires skill to do.
In that case, no. I’m prolific in many ways, but not enough to be the sole record holder in writing/eating shrimp toast/watching True Romance. The only way I could set a world record is by manufacturing one for the Guinness book, which is a horseshit volume. Anyone who tries to make it into the Guinness book by balancing a hot dog on top of a hamburger for the longest amount of time is a fucking loser. They probably listen to The Postal Service.
Email of the week!
Jared:
I'm a junior high school teacher and the technology lead at the school in a large urban school district in Canada. AI is running rampant within the schools. Gemini is integrated into our staff Google Workspace, and in the remainder of Google services accessed by our kids. Thankfully, our version of Gemini is firewalled within the district to prevent sensitive information from being scraped by other AI services. Students in K-9 are also not permitted access to Gemini through their school accounts. But they find ways around it by using the AI summary provided by Google Search, or by signing up for free versions of other AI platforms.
Our kids are increasingly addicted to AI, to the point where I'm certain several of my students carouse with AI chatbots. They don't know how to interact normally with each other; aggressive, violent, and antisocial behaviour is increasingly on the rise in our classrooms, all while the complexity of student needs in our classrooms is at an all-time high. Students don't know how to think for themselves and are stunting their development through an overreliance on LLMs to do thinking for them. All our districts have to offer in response is pro-AI PD sessions, teaching us how to burn the world down faster by integrating AI into our classrooms and our workflows. It is remarkable how cavalier administrators are with their willingness to adopt AI without considering the ramifications and drawbacks of their decisions.
How do I keep from remaining hopeless? Essentially, I have to use AI to know how it works in order to understand how it affects kids. It is like my life is being forcibly intertwined with AI. It is a relentless spectre in the classroom. I love the work that I do, but I am becoming increasingly worried every day for the world around us. Do you have any thoughts on how to save myself? A healing salve for a weary soul, perhaps?
The best way to fight AI is to hate it. In that effort, I promise that you aren’t alone.
