HereAndGone's profile

HereAndGone 1mo ago

The seeds of something interesting are there, but it does need a lot more development.

The start actually reminded me of a Cordwainer Smith story, again about having humans in the loop and how that can go wrong in unexpected ways, The Dead Lady of Clown Town.

The headquarters of the People Programmer was at An-fang, and there the mistake happened:

A ruby trembled. Two tourmaline nets failed to rectify the laser beam. A diamond noted the error. Both the error and the correction went into the general computer.

The error assigned, on the general account of births for Fomalhaut III, the profession of "lay therapist, female, intuitive capacity for correction of human physiology with local resources." On some of the early ships they used to call these people witch-women, because they worked unaccountable cures. For pioneer parties, these lay therapists were invaluable; in settled post-Riesmannian societies, they became an awful nuisance. Sickness disappeared with good conditions, accidents dwindled down to nothing, medical work became institutional.

Who wants a witch, even a good witch, when a thousand-bed hospital is waiting with its staff eager for clinical experience ... and only seven out of its thousand beds filled with real people? (The remaining beds were filled with lifelike robots on which the staff could practice, lest they lose their morale. They could, of course, have worked on under-people—animals in the shape of human beings, who did the heavy and the weary work which remained as the caput mortuum of a really perfected economy—but it was against the law for animals, even when they were underpeople, to go to a human hospital. When underpeople got sick, the Instrumentality took care of them—in slaughter-houses. It was easier to breed new underpeople for the job than it was to repair sick ones. Furthermore, the tender, loving care of a hospital might give them ideas. Such as the idea that they were people. This would have been bad, from the prevailing point of view. Therefore the human hospitals remained almost empty while an underperson who sneezed four times or who vomited once was taken away, never to be ill again. The empty beds kept on with the robot patients, who went through endless repetitions of the human patterns of injury or disease.) This left no work for witches, bred and trained.

Yet the ruby had trembled; the program had indeed made a mistake; the birth-number for a "lay therapist, general, female, immediate use" had been ordered for Fomalhaut III.

Much later, when the story was all done down to its last historic detail, there was an investigation into the origins of Elaine. When the laser had trembled, both the original order and the correction were fed simultaneously into the machine. The machine recognized the contradiction and promptly referred both papers to the human supervisor, an actual man who had been working on the job for seven years.

He was studying music, and he was bored. He was so close to the end of his term that he was already counting the days to his own release. Meanwhile he was rearranging two popular songs. One was The Big Bamboo, a primitive piece which tried to evoke the original magic of man. The other was about a girl, Elaine, Elaine whom the song asked to refrain from giving pain to her loving swain. Neither of the songs was important; but between them they influenced history, first a little bit and then very much.

The musician had plenty of time to practice. He had not had to meet a real emergency in all his seven years. From time to time the machine made reports to him, but the musician just told the machine to correct its own errors, and it infallibly did so.

On the day that the accident of Elaine happened, he was trying to perfect his finger work on the guitar, a very old instrument believed to date from the pre-space period. He was playing The Big Bamboo for the hundredth time.

The machine announced its mistake with an initial musical chime. The supervisor had long since forgotten all the instructions which he had so worrisomely memorized seven long years ago. The alert did not really and truly matter, because the machine invariably corrected its own mistakes whether the supervisor was on duty or not.

The machine, not having its chime answered, moved into a second-stage alarm. From a loudspeaker set in the wall of the room, it shrieked in a high, clear human voice, the voice of some employee who had died thousands of years earlier:

"Alert, alert! Emergency. Correction needed. Correction needed!"

The answer was one which the machine had never heard before, old though it was. The musician's fingers ran madly, gladly over the guitar strings and he sang clearly, wildly back to the machine a message strange beyond any machine's belief:

Beat, heat the Big Bamboo!
Beat, beat, beat the Big Bamboo for me...!

Hastily the machine set its memory banks and computers to work, looking for the code reference to "bamboo," trying to make that word fit the present context. There was no reference at all. The machine pestered the man some more.

"Instructions unclear. Instructions unclear. Please correct."

"Shut up," said the man.

"Cannot comply," stated the machine. "Please state and repeat, please state and repeat, please state and repeat."

"Do shut up," said the man, but he knew the machine would not obey this. Without thinking, he turned to his other tune and sang the first two lines twice over:

Elaine. Elaine, go cure the pain!
Elaine, Elaine, go cure the pain!

Repetition had been inserted as a safeguard into the machine, on the assumption that no real man would repeat an error. The name "Elaine" was not correct number code, but the fourfold emphasis seemed to confirm the need for a "lay therapist, female." The machine itself noted that a genuine man had corrected the situation card presented as a matter of emergency.

"Accepted," said the machine.

This word, too late, jolted the supervisor away from his music.

"Accepted what?" he asked.

There was no answering voice. There was no sound at all except for the whisper of slightly-moistened warm air through the ventilators.

The supervisor looked out the window. He could see a little of the blood-black red color of the Peace Square of An-fang; beyond lay the ocean, endlessly beautiful and endlessly tedious.

The supervisor sighed hopefully. He was young. "Guess it doesn't matter," he thought, picking up his guitar.

(Thirty-seven years later, he found out that it did matter. The Lady Goroke herself, one of the chiefs of the Instrumentality, sent a subchief of the Instrumentality to find out who had caused D'joan. When the man found that the witch Elaine was the source of the trouble she sent him on to find out how Elaine had gotten into a well-ordered universe. The supervisor was found. He was still a musician. He remembered nothing of the story. He was hypnotized. He still remembered nothing. The sub-chief invoked an emergency and Police Drug Four ("clear memory") was administered to the musician. He immediately remembered the whole silly scene, but insisted that it did not matter. The case was referred to Lady Goroke, who instructed the authorities that the musician be told the whole horrible, beautiful story of D'joan at Fomalhaut—the very story which you are now being told—and he wept. He was not punished otherwise, but the Lady Goroke commanded that those memories be left in his mind for so long as he might live.)

3

Context

HereAndGone 1mo ago · Edited 1mo ago

you go online and discover that there is a huge community dedicated specifically to inflicting pain as part of their sexual expression

Oh man, this reminds me of way back in the day, an infamous court case about a bunch of (I want to say gay but I'm not entirely sure) guys who got put up on charges for nailing their dicks to planks of wood, and the judge thought this was evidence of craziness, and there was some condemnation afterwards of him for being so judgemental towards adults doing consensual stuff in the privacy of their bedrooms. Because thinking that nailing your dick to a plank is not normal behaviour is so small-minded and homophobic, yes?

Yep, here's the case. Operation Spanner is even funnier when you know what spanner means in British/Irish slang:

R v Brown [1993] UKHL 19, [1994] 1 AC 212 is a House of Lords judgment which re-affirmed the conviction of five men for their involvement in consensual unusually severe sadomasochistic sexual acts over a 10-year period. They were convicted of a count of unlawful and malicious wounding and a count of assault occasioning actual bodily harm (contrary to sections 20 and 47 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861). The key issue facing the Court was whether consent was a valid defence to assault in these circumstances, to which the Court answered in the negative. The acts involved included the nailing of a part of the body to a board, but not so as to necessitate, strictly, medical treatment.

The court found no direct precedent for sadomasochism among the senior courts (those of binding precedent) so applied the reasoning of three indirectly analogous binding cases and others.

The case is colloquially known as the Spanner case, named after Operation Spanner, the investigation which led to it.

EDIT: Oh my gosh, Keir Starmer was even involved back then, as one of the critics!

There was immediate criticism of the investigation and trial in 1990, with the Gay London Policing Group describing the sentences as "outrageous" and Andrew Puddephat, general secretary of Liberty, calling for a "right to privacy enshrined in law". Keir Starmer said the judiciary had "effectively imposed its morality on others" and argued the "unrepresentative make-up of the judiciary makes it ill-equipped to do this". The Pink Paper branded the case a homophobic "show trial" designed to "get a clear ruling on the illegality of S&M sex, especially amongst gay men".

If he was running for election in the USA, I imagine the attack ads would write themselves: "So, Keir, you still in favour of guys nailing their dicks to planks of wood?" 'Unrepresentative makeup of the judiciary' - "Starmer wants more judges who are out-and-out perverts on the bench". It would make Kamala's "government-funded sex change ops for illegal immigrants" seem like small potatoes 🤣

15

Context

HereAndGone 1mo ago

He wasn't a school dropout, he wasn't (previously) in trouble, and he wasn't ugly. Guy who's doing an apprenticeship, is reasonably smart and averagely good-looking can find a girlfriend (I would say "particularly in bumfuck nowhere Utah") if he wanted a girlfriend. No, he's not going to get hot liberal college chick, but "conventional Mormon girl from lower middle-class background" is not out of his range.

If he was living with a boyfriend-turned-transitioning male to female, then he's gay or bi and not looking for a (cis) het girl.

10

Context

HereAndGone 1mo ago

having his deer rifle on his seat still loaded

Sounds like the kind of Stupid Human Trick that ends up with "and the guy was shot by his own rifle" that may engender amusement in those who think hunting is immoral.

Even more surprising for him to be hired; the district claims to have done a background check on him; you would think this would result in them finding out he was not authorized to work and not being hired.

Depending on how well the vetting was done, I guess. There was a story about someone working in a crèche here who had all the relevant clearance for working with kids and still got caught on CCTV being physically abusive. And I remember years ago when I was in third level education where the college hired someone who later turned out to be on the run from charges of assault in Sweden.

So even good checks can have someone slip through the cracks, and maybe this guy used the fact that he was an immigrant to cover up any gaps in the background check? (e.g. "Yeah, I am waiting for the government office back home to get that paperwork, you know the kind of delays that happen").

The story sounds odd, though. Wikipedia has a scanty article up, and it says that he was working as school principal back in 2012. So he was in the US presumably on some kind of sports scholarship, graduated, got (it would seem) a fairly high level of education - and then started work? But he was supposed to be finally deported in 2024? I don't understand what was going on there.

15

Context

HereAndGone 1mo ago

Also, maybe I am dumb but I still don't understand why it helped the AI that there was a manual override.

Yeah, this seems to be the pertinent part:

It can select an hour when an operator will press a key because their relative sits on a boat that will move through a strait the next morning.

But, uh, Dan didn't? Or at least that didn't seem to factor in to his actions about going for manual override? What the system seems to be doing is "how far can I push? what are the triggers that will move this up to real human control? and then will the humans stop me or just accept the bullshit I give them as an explanation?"

And that seems to be what Elaine is doing, out of selfishness, self-preservation, and not wanting to admit to "I fucked up, I gave the system too much leeway way back when we were training it".

But definitely Dan did not press any keys because 'muh sister' but he went to manual override because "hold on, whoa, never saw this response before, this is above my pay grade". So either make the ferry more important and have Dan explicitly do something because "I want the ferry to get through because muh sister" or drop that bit altogether. This way, he could just ring the sister back and say "Sorry sis, ferry won't be running tomorrow because there's a technical screw-up" because there's no sense of bad outcomes if she's on the ferry.

7

Context

HereAndGone 1mo ago

Several pundits and outlets liked making little lists of "possible VP picks".

Politico's list included a gay woman (if we're talking about why Kamala felt she couldn't pick Pete), so I do think picking Kamala was due to some internal politics in the party. For example, again from Politico's list:

Bass, 66, has said it is “very important” that Biden pick a woman of color for the VP spot. She was the first Black woman in the country to lead a state legislature after being chosen as speaker of the California state Assembly in 2008, after serving as an assemblywoman for three and a half years. Before entering public life, Bass was an emergency room physician assistant at the outset of the AIDS crisis and a civil rights activist.

Hmm, that wouldn't be you throwing your hat in the ring as "I will serve my country if selected", now would it, Karen?

3

Context

HereAndGone 1mo ago

Yeah, but that's "have a guy suck my dick or get nothing at all" sort of situations. If the guy gets out of jail and still prefers having a guy suck his dick rather than a girl do it, you can revise your estimates of "really gay" upwards.

8

Context

HereAndGone 1mo ago

Yeah, but it didn't seem to generate that much stress. That's the part I would have liked more development on: so, which of the squabbling AI got to make the decision as to the fate of the tug? Did it really matter? Was the tug doing something naughty, or was it an accident?

Your guy Dan freaks out not because "oh my gosh, if this isn't sorted, my sister will be - " (what? delayed? her ferry won't be allowed sail? it will be the declaration of World War Fourteen and Three-Fifths and any vessels will be burninated and she will be on that vessel and ARGH ARGH ARGH?) but because "Foxglass? what the hell is that?" So far as we can see, nothing happens the tug, the ferry, the sister. Life goes on, the world turns, Dan is back drinking bad coffee.

You need to make it a bigger deal that HIS SISTER is on THAT PARTICULAR FERRY and not tomorrow but RIGHT NOW oh the stress my nerves what do I do what do I do and then FOxGLASS pops up and starts demanding access codes he doesn't have and then he makes a stupid mistake decision and then we need the dual manual over-ride turn the keys at the same time.

Otherwise, why the need to bump this all the way up to Elaine "my beauty régime comes first" Ford? Technical hitch, yeah it's rare but it can happen, put another page in the training manual.

4

Context

HereAndGone 1mo ago

The moral of the story seems to be "Ambitious broad is too happy with her comfortable lifestyle and illusion of power where she gets to boss people around to be a whistleblower even though (apparently) she is the only one who recognises the real threat, because her job is the only thing she's got going in her life" and the AI/AIs/whatever Sinister System in the mode of Colossus this is and the system knows that about her:

Elaine is 50, but the anti-aging treatment she throws thousands of your taxpayer dollars at every year makes her look 30, maybe 26, in the right lighting conditions. She likes how it tricks people. They look at her face and decide she couldn’t possibly have the authority to cancel their program with the click of a button. That’s one of the reasons why she loves her job enough to let DoD mess with her brain.

Gosh durn them agin' wimmen, this is why a Man should have been in charge from the start! (No, I'm not serious, though I did have to roll my eyes over '50 year old woman will toast the world on a stick over the bonfire of civilisation so as to retain her reeeeellly expensive anti-wrinkle creams that are a job perk').

-1

Context

HereAndGone 1mo ago

it will prove God doesn't exist (because if he did I wouldn't have been able to predict the end).

I can only admire your steely determination.

5

Context

HereAndGone 1mo ago

Somebody assure me this was a parody. I cannot believe this is real, not even if it was some over-enthused and over-medicated squirrel somewhere who thought this was just gonna do it for Kamala and the elusive male vote.

"I eat carburettors for breakfast". You look like it, friend, and you definitely need to cut way back on them. Try a salad now and again.

(I can fat-shame, I am a Person Of Amplitude myself).

13

Context

HereAndGone 1mo ago

This is why Newsom is trying to emulate Trump on social media. That tone, if you can pull it off, has a certain brash appeal. "Look, I know you're not dumb, despite how the rest of this shower talk down to you. You know and I know we politicians are a bunch of chancers. But lemme put my cards on the table here: you vote for me, I won't screw you over. Some shit won't fly, you gotta accept that, and I can't do it for you. But listen, bud. Those elites hate you and they hate me. So together, we can give those fancy-pants elites a poke in the eye, and don't you wanna see that happen? C'mon, I know you do!"

10

Context

HereAndGone 1mo ago

Kamala Harris doesn't seem to actually believe in anything, and that's the problem.

She believed in what can be, unburdened by what has been 😁

7

Context

HereAndGone 1mo ago

There's a difference when you say the quiet part out loud, though. And Kamala pulled all this down on top of her head by putting it in the book that she'd considered Pete but then dropped it because too risky. Nobody needed that level of kiss'n'tell, except for publicity purposes ("buy the book for more spicy revelations about insider goings-on!")

She seems to have no idea that this would ever come back to be something she would need to deal with, and even someone as sympathetic to her as Rachel Maddow had to ask it, and she fumbled the answer ("it wasn't because he was gay, it was because he was gay").

This seems to be all too common with her: says/does something, has no idea that it won't fade with the moment but will be brought up again later (see the "yes for transgender surgery for illegal immigrants in prison" bit of an interview which was just lagniappe for the Trump campaign - i.e. 'spend taxpayer dollars coddling criminals, and not even our own native criminals'). She seems to have no forward planning skills, which is something you would like to have in a president.

14

Context

HereAndGone 1mo ago

Being fair to Pete, there's a long tradition of mocking photos of politicians trying to eat in public. And, not to be too crude about it, if you're a gay guy who is known for being gay, then putting a phallic-shaped object near your mouth while there are photographers about is risky business. Better to apply it horizontally than vertically, just to be on the safe side.

I have to quote the Miliband story, it's too good not to share:

For a party leader anxious to avoid any more gaffes, what could go wrong buying flowers for the wife?

Plenty, it turned out, as an immaculately suited Ed Miliband turned up at New Covent Garden flower market at the ungodly hour of 6.30am to bag London’s freshest roses for wife Justine.

First came the delicate issue of his bacon roll, a vital accessory when meeting the working classes at breakfast time.

Mr Miliband’s battle to consume the greasy treat alarmed his media minders, who tried to stop photographers taking close-ups of butter oozing between his teeth. After a few bites, the Labour leader appeared defeated, and the snack was put into the custody of Lord Wood, a senior shadow cabinet member.

8

Context

HereAndGone 1mo ago

Unless her aim was to sprinkle some controversy into the book to generate publicity for her talk show tour, I have no idea why she mentioned Buttigieg in that context. This was answering a question nobody was asking until she went on about "well clearly I couldn't have a gay guy as my running mate".

"Why couldn't you?"

"Gimme a break, it was hard enough trying to persuade the American people to vote for me because duh, it's me, how the heck would I get them to vote for a gay on top of that? Er, not that there's anything wrong with being born that way! Just... nobody is gonna vote for you except those freaks in California, and there's not enough of them to swing it despite our best efforts".

13

Context

HereAndGone 1mo ago

If Biden had dropped dead, sure. But the more likely path for President Kamala would have been Biden having to step down, so he would still be around while she finished out the term. Much more difficult to navigate that; a dead Biden would have meant "don't speak ill of the dead" and would have won her more time to distance herself from any unpopular decisions, but if Joe is still alive and kicking (and the Bidens every bit as bitter about power being yanked out of his grasp as they were this time round) then trying to go "no, that unpopular policy belongs firmly in the lap of my predecessor" would evoke "oh yeah? funny how you said nothing against it at the time, traitor!" from them or loyal ex-staffers.

4

Context

HereAndGone 1mo ago

I do get the impression that Biden wasn't all that enthusiastic about Kamala, mostly because she was sort of imposed on him. He'd shot his mouth off about making a woman his VP, and then the black Democratic leaders wanted their pound of flesh in return for all the support, so it had to be a black woman. And it does look like Kamala got chosen as "nobody wants her but everyone will take her instead of the other choice because they want the job themselves and don't want a rival to get it".

So all the leaks about problems in the VP's office etc. that were trickling out were, I think, part of the Biden staffers strategy to keep her in her lane if she showed signs of trying to grab the reins herself. In contrast, Trump seems to like Vance just enough, or not be threatened by him, that he lets him do a more public job as VP.

18

Context

HereAndGone 1mo ago

The VP takes over if the President is incapacitated. Now it has come out that Biden was functionally incapacitated, but nobody wanted to rock that boat. Everyone wanted to keep it hushed up, and that was part of Harris' problem: be the whistleblower and be blamed for sowing division and revealing all the dirty linen, or keep her mouth shut and hope that Joe would stick to the plan and hand over to her?

As for taking on Jill Biden, nobody wanted that fight. And yeah, maybe Jill should run herself 🤣

5

Context

HereAndGone 1mo ago

if she were half-way competent she should have taken control of the Biden White House.

Well, according to the book excerpts, the Biden staffers and administration and Bidens were determined not to let her do anything like that, so they deliberately kept her overshadowed and in the background, or handed her thankless tasks. Plus, the VP is supposed to stand by and just be ceremonial/decorative, not try to muscle in on the presidential turf.

The sniping between her and some ex-Biden staffers is entertaining, but to be fair, no VP really gets a chance to take over unless the President is pretty much incapable, and in Biden's case there was a combination of "we have to cover this up so as not to give Trump and the Republicans any advantage" and Jill etc. were keeping the reins firmly in their own grip, with no intention whatsoever of handing over power to Kamala at all.

11

Context

HereAndGone 1mo ago

Yeah, but as time goes on, the likelihood of it becoming true increases. I don't think he's at the point of cognitive decline just yet, but I think you are right about physical lack of energy and maybe he's starting to slow down mentally as well. He's 79 now, when he hits his 80s I would definitely expect a gradual diminishment.

7

Context

HereAndGone 1mo ago

The thing is, so far as I can see, nobody was asking "Gee, why didn't Kamala pick Pete?" The question was "why didn't she pick Shapiro over Walz?" and the answer was "she was scared he was too ambitious".

So this is coming out of nowhere (unless anyone has any information to the contrary) and the only thing it's doing is stirring up controversy. Why is she doing this now? is the interesting question.

10

Context

HereAndGone 1mo ago

I mean, she's entirely happy to blame racism and sexism for why she didn't win, so as you say having a gay VP would be yet another ready-made excuse ("it's not because we ran a shoddy campaign, it's because the voters are racist sexist homophobes!")

Genuinely, the only sense I can make of what she's saying now (apart from 'gosh, ease off on the day drinking, girl') is that she wants to sabotage Buttigieg and as many others in the Democratic party as she can in revenge for what she sees as their betrayal.

8

Context

HereAndGone 1mo ago

she needed a charismatic speaker to shore up her weakness of being an uncharismatic machine politician

But the problem with that would be that her running mate would then overshadow her, and that was her exact problem with Shapiro, which is why she picked Walz instead.

Kamala is a little insecure, or rather she seems to find it hard to make decisions quickly and second-guesses herself and (allegedly) doesn't take advice well, but then blames staff around her when things go wrong. So picking someone who would be the Bill Clinton or Obama charisma-wise of the campaign, thus relegating her to second place, would be exactly the thing she would never do.

12

Context

HereAndGone 1mo ago

I think Kamala's problem wasn't in the realms of kindness and wisdom, but rather lack of any stable policy. She seemed to go with any wind that blew - see the disastrous 2019 attempt where she over-corrected for being 'Copmala' by going too far in the opposite direction, and gave plenty of hostages to fortune to be dragged out again in 2024 ("she's for they/them" being one).

To correct for 2019, she then tried tacking back to the centre, but the campaign mostly was a reprise of Biden's in 2020: "vote for me because I'm not Trump". What did she stand for, exactly? What were her policies? Balloon popping and brat summer coconut memes weren't enough.

Kamala's problem is that there does not seem to be a 'there' there. I think that based on her record, she's a local politician and becoming Attorney-General of California was as high as she could reasonably go. Yes, she became a senator, and with what result? Her name is linked with Jussie Smollett and that anti-lynching bill which ultimately failed, can anyone tell me of something substantial she achieved in her term? The fact that she's rejected running for Governor of California would indicate to me that she realises her limitations. Otherwise, that would seem like the logical next step on the career ladder - go for that, win that (it is hoped), get a term under her belt, position herself for a run for the presidency in 2032.

12

Context

What is this place?

Why are you called The Motte?

New post guidelines

Rules

Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats

HereAndGone

HereAndGone