Firehose #143: Drunken Regrets

Also: Come out and heckle Moynihan about free speech!

Who hasn’t done or said something under the influence that they came to regret? Not you, not Moynihan, not Pete Hegseth. Yes, we should Be Best, or at least Better, but after the vicissitudes of this great thing called life, and/or the production of 1,000 680 podcast episodes, mistakes will get made. You just got to get up and climb that hill again.

* Oh look, here’s an opportunity to make brand new regrets! As advertised on Episode #503, Ol’ Hollywood is moderating a free-speech, do-the-ends-justify-the-means live Moynihan Report taping this Tuesday in NYC at the Village Underground, featuring friend o’ pod Nico Perrino and past guest Ilya Shapiro (#361):

* To whet your Moyni-speech whistle, here’s a Report convo this week with Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) Legal Director Will Creeley, about Mahmoud Khalil, Harvard, anti-Semitism, and other topical controversies:

* OK, OK, I’ll stop burying the lede. Here’s your insane Arch Stanton fanimated re-cap of the (even insaner?) Episode #502. Arch, for one, has nothing to regret.

* To wrap up our 2Way promotional activities, the Blonde Zionist also did a May Day special that started off with his long-promised report from Poland’s Nowa Huta, then continued with an interview of Clay Risen, author of Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America:

* This week I was on The Spectator Australia’s Fire at Will podcast with handsome host Will Kingston, yakkin’ about Donald Trump’s first 100 days:

* Also doing the 100-day eval thing was … that damned Moynihan fellow, this time as a guest on The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg (#182):

* Did Kmele punch the clock? Indeed, he was back on the Tangle Sunday podcast, talking with co-hosts Isaac Saul and Ari Weitzman about “race, identity, and racial categories. They explore personal anecdotes, societal perceptions, and the implications of race in science and genetics. They also get into the complexities of genetic diversity, the absurdities of race science, and the implications of racial disparities in society, as well as cultural stereotypes, the dangers of racial pride, and the need for a more nuanced understanding of race in policy discussions. They talk about the passing of Pope Francis and the complex relationship between faith and politics, particularly focusing on the legacy of the Pope and the reactions to his political involvement.”

* Kmele was also name-checked in this Semafor piece by Editor Ben Smith (#125, #227, #404, #480) about Doghouse Chatham House and other Signal groups, under the heavy-breathing headline “The Group Chats That Changed America.” Here’s a passage, with bolding and italicizing and parenthetical episodes added by me:

After a group of liberal intellectuals published a letter in Harper’s on July 7, 2020, some of its signers were invited to join a Signal group called “Everything Is Fine.” There, writers including Kmele Foster, who co-hosts the podcast The Fifth Column, Persuasion founder Yascha Mounk (#124, #195), and the Harper’s letter contributor [Thomas Chatterton] Williams (#121, #158, #188, #197, #373, Members Only #252) joined [Marc] Andreessen and a group that also included the anti-woke conservative activist Chris Rufo (#322).

The new participants were charmed by Andreessen’s engagement: “He was the most available, the most present, the most texting of anybody in the group — which shocked me because it seemed like he was the most important person in the group,” one said.

But the center didn’t hold. The Harper’s types were surprised to find what one described an “illiberal worldview” among tech figures more concerned with power than speech. The conservatives found the liberal intellectuals tiresome, committed to what Rufo described to me as “infinite discourse” over action.

The breaking point came on July 5, 2021, when Foster and Williams, along with the never-Trump conservative David French (#191, #325, #365) and the liberal academic Jason Stanley (#210), wrote a New York Times op-ed criticizing new laws against teaching “critical race theory.”

“Even if this censorship is legal in the narrow context of public primary and secondary education, it is antithetical to educating students in the culture of American free expression,” they wrote.

The conservatives had thought the Harper’s letter writers were their allies in an all-out ideological battle, and considered their position a betrayal. Andreessen “went really ballistic in a quite personal way at Thomas,” a participant recalled. The group ended after Andreessen “wrote something along the lines of ‘thank you everybody, I think it’s time to take a Signal break,’” another said.

The meltdown of this liberal-tech alliance was, to Rufo, a healthy development.

“A lot of these technologists hoped that the centrist path was a viable one, because it would permit them in theory to change the culture without having to expose themselves to the risk of becoming partisans,” he said. “By 2021, the smartest people in tech understood that these people were a dead end — so the group chats exploded and reformulated on more explicitly political lines.”

Rufo had been there all along: “I looked at these chats as a good investment of my time to radicalize tech elites who I thought were the most likely and high-impact new coalition partners for the right.”

* Uncharmed by Ben Smith’s output this week was Matt Taibbi (#226, #348), who reacted to a Semafor Mixed Signals episode with New York Times personality and Abundance co-author Ezra Klein with the headline, “In All-Time Loathsome Podcast, Reporters Cheerfully Admit Screwing Up Russiagate.” Excerpt:

Smith, whose decision to publish the loony Steele Dossier in full despite obvious factual problems struck me as nuts at the time, and later doubled down on the decision multiple times (including in a long Atlantic piece in 2023), now smiles and speaks of regrets. […]

A lot of our readers felt, and a lot of Democrats felt, like, there’s no way this guy was legitimately elected. There are two theories. One, it was Facebook. Two it was Russia. And lots of media energy went into chasing those two things. The White House felt totally under siege from, like, that set of questions. I think I have regrets about that in retrospect […]

“Do you regret publishing the dossier? Is what you’re saying? Is that the admission here, Ben?”

“I would say I’m more ambivalent about it than I used to be.” […]

Klein described his own attitude toward Trump-Russia. “I was always very hostile to the ‘Facebook did it through disinformation’ theory,” he said. “I mean, you go back to what I said then. I never thought there was evidence that Russian disinformation, or ads, or something on Facebook, had turned the election. I thought James Comey had turned the election, which I still think is true.” […]

He went on:

The Russia stuff, I always thought that was worth investigating. I mean, I guess people can debate whether or not it got too much, and it definitely became a deus ex machina for liberals. I never believed that Russia had won the election for him, and I don’t think I ever said anything that would’ve suggested I did believe that…

Liberals had gotten themselves into a weird place where they wanted some explanation for how it had happened. There was some view that Mueller was going to come out with some report, and that would be the end of this. And I think something very different in the liberal mind is a recognition that there’s something very authentic in Trump’s appeal, and nobody comes in and saves you on a horse. And I think that’s really important. I also think the fact that Trump lost the popular vote, and that the election was so incredibly close in the battleground states in 2016, contributed to this feeling that this guy was a fluke and should be treated as kind of an aberration.

I’ve run into Ben maybe once or twice, don’t know Ezra, and have heard both are nice enough guys, but what the fuck?

Receipts ensue.

* Speaking of the so-called “Abundance Agenda,” Reason Roundtable host Peter Suderman can’t stop asking questions about that slogan, so I, uh, am getting terser with the answers (segment begins at 16:55).

* TheNuclearBlonde, from whom the above image emanates in the Chat (available only to paying subscribers, don’tcha know), informs us that, “Today is a most auspicious day, the anniversary of the legendary ‘No Step on Snek.’” People are sharing memes, outsider art, home decorating choices, Arch Stanton artistry, Chat GPT gospels, something called “The Feast of the Snekan”…. Y’all are mental, you know that, right?

* Speaking of which, participant to the above & local A.I. bard Randolph Carter has apparently solved the perennial problem of rhyming the word “Welch,” by instead orienting this newish Pavementesque ditty around eyewear:

* Comment of the Week, pursuant to the beginning of M.O. #258, comes from Ryan L:

As your resident astronomer, I'll give you my take on the potential biosignature discovery.

First, small technical correction: it wasn't oxygen that they claim to have detected but dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl disulfide. On Earth these are only produced through biological processes and they break down in the atmosphere quickly, so they're seen as potential biomarkers. Oxygen is similar -- it reacts (through oxidation reactions!) with lots of other stuff, so it doesn't last long unless their's a source constantly replenishing it. On Earth, that's life.

Also, the planet's gravity isn't that much stronger than Earth's. While it's true that it's mass is just under 9x that of Earth's, it's also 2.4x larger. GM/R^2, so the surface gravity is only a little over 1.5x that of Earth.

There are two facets to the DMS/DMDS potential detection. First, did the team actually detect it? They themselves claim a 3.4-sigma significance which, as some of you may know, is suggestive but not extremely strong. I'm personally part of a collaboration that made a fairly big splash with a 3-sigma detection (that I believe!) but we had other supporting lines of evidence, and we were really careful about how we worded it (sorry, not "detection", but "evidence for"...to be fair the paper we're discussing here doesn't really use the term "detection" either). The problem in this case is that teasing out these types of spectral signatures is hard. It's not like you just get a perfectly clean spectrum out of these instruments. There are instrumental features and variations you have to remove, and that can be difficult. I don't specialize in infrared spectroscopy, but I've worked with plenty of low signal-to-noise data in other contexts and it's not clear to me that the 3.4-sigma significance is really accurate when you try to account for some of these other systematic effects. I'm skeptical and it would not at all surprise me if this can't be reproduced. In fact, there's already people claiming that their analysis doesn't reproduce it.

Second, even if you believe the detection, is it actually a signature of life? In some ways that's actually harder to answer because it's tough to know all the different chemical pathways you can go through to produce this. We know DMS/DMDS have been detected in (presumably) sterile environments (comets) but those are much different temperatures and pressures. Personally, if someone showed me a strong detection of something like this, I'd be inclined to say that's it pretty good evidence for life. But I'd also want to see evidence for other biosignatures that would form through unrelated chemical pathways before really believing it.

As far as where to go for reliable reporting on these types of things, I'll plug Nature and Science. They both employe excellent science journalists. NYT and WaPo usually do a good job with this as well. Finally, AstroBites is a site where astronomy students write non-expert descriptions of recent papers. They don't cover everything but they do a good job when they do. Or, you can always ask me. I'm not a journalist but I'm happy to talk this stuff with fellow listeners (or even the hosts). But be warned -- I was once interviewed by a team from FreeThink and I don't think it ever made it into a published piece (they never told me, at least), so maybe I'm not up to Kmele's standards ;-)

Walkoff music, which might need to be the title of a new playlist, has one of my very favorite clever lines in rock & roll: