domain:alexberenson.substack.com
Yeah, I've come to realize that most of the art that we judge to have the deepest meaning and most heartfelt creation is just people working for a paycheck, under a deadline, and with no particular intent on making a masterpiece, indeed no way of knowing if anyone would even care about it after they released it.
Then, when one of these works of arts hits mainstream success, the narrative of its creation is amended to make it seem as though the sole motivation for its creation was the artists' outpouring of their soul and they dug deep into their well of angst and
Take for example the Song "Sweet Child O' Mine,", by Guns N' Roses, which is undoubtedly a GREAT song on almost every level. Evocative, intensely emotional but energetic. Skill was involved in its creation, no doubt.
But how'd they compose the song and come up with such appropriate lyrics, especially the breakdown?
During a jam session at the band's house in Sunset Strip, drummer Steven Adler and Slash were warming up and Slash began to play a "circus" melody while making faces at Adler.
LITERALLY just goofing around with each other and came up with an neat-sounding riff.
Then:
When the band recorded demos with producer Spencer Proffer, he suggested adding a breakdown at the song's end. The musicians agreed, but were not sure what to do. Listening to the demo in a loop, Rose started saying to himself, "Where do we go? Where do we go now?" and Proffer suggested that he sing that.
The iconic breakdown of the song wasn't so much the process of talented genius... it was an expression of uncertainty and some third party said "run with that."
(Side note, knowing this story makes me find this portion of the song hilarious if you pretend the band is literally asking the audience "hey guys we don't know how to end this song, any thoughts?" like a genuine question.)
How many songs are out there that have similar creation stories... but never got any popularity so nobody knows the story or would care anyway.
So much of life is just that. A confluence of random factors which we then create a retroactive narrative about to seem more meaningful ("authentic") than it really is.
Likewise, the 2015 song Renegades was originally written for a commercial advertising the Jeep Renegade. After I learned that, every time I heard the song on the radio, I felt I was listening to a glorified advertisement.
In fairness, I believe artists "pour their soul" into their art, to some extent, even when it's made with strict guidelines for a paycheck. Even non-art professional software, as evidenced by Easter eggs and the occasional feature that is unreasonably clever and well-implemented for no apparent reason. Ideas that come from "goofing around" aren't much different from those that come from insight, both arise from spontaneous thought. The opposite side of "people create a retroactive narrative to explain their actions", is that people's actions are influenced by their past experiences and suppressed desires, sometimes in ways they don't consciously realize.
Have to take a break from the motte. Since I had a previous post discussing some anxiety about being here, am posting to make it clear it's nothing to do with anyone here, the discussion was fine and respectful (although I ended up regretting defending Turok lol). I also hope to eventually be back, joining was me dipping my toes but turns out I'm not quite ready for it, might be ready for it someday though. Just wasn't managing to do it with the proper balance for myself.
I said at the time and look to have been validated, that people have this idea of the USSS as a super competent organization. But at the end of the day they are still an organization, and are thus not immune to the common failure modes of organizations. As I understand the facts that we have, the communication failures (separate radio networks for the main detail and local support), the “good enough” problem (they had someone in the building, just not covering the roof), and “someone else’s problem” (bad or incomplete assignments during the planning phase) are absolutely classic organizational problems that crop up just as easily and pervasively in the USSS as they do in a large for-profit corporation. If anything, there’s less will to shake things up like a CEO might.
My favorite example of this is from the band Queen. I've often heard people say "Freddie wrote Who Wants to Live Forever after he found out he was diagnosed with AIDS" when the actual story is far more pedestrian: Brian May wrote it after viewing an early cut of the movie Highlander.
I'll send a donation anyways as a thanks for playing.
I'm not complaining about slop because it's inauthentic. I'm complaining about it because it's bad. I'm talking about how AI is worse at writing and also more prone to falsehoods than the most lazy, and uninspired human writing out there.
More on topic of your comment, I personally like mainstream art more than the avant garde stuff. I'm pretty sure that some popular anime is going to be remembered more 100 years from now than banksy or some other crazy artist like that.
Reciprocal relationships are not the same as obligation relationships, much as they are not synonymous with transactional relationships.
It seems like a lot of your argument hinges on this distinction. Can you elaborate? Because I confess that I can't see the difference you're trying to point to.
Frankly I hold Mossad in too high of regard to believe any of this shit on incompetence grounds.
The Israelis are less risk-averse than their US counterparts as a general rule, but they aren't bumbling fools orchestrating haphazard sex-based coercion like this.
Also, to correct the record on Acosta claiming Epstein was told to go easy because Epstein "belongs to intelligence":
The OPR report also looked into allegations that have surfaced in press reports over the years that Epstein may have gotten special treatment because he was some sort of “asset” to U.S. intelligence agencies.
“Acosta stated to OPR that ‘the answer is no,’” the report said.
Rich Jewish guy hanging out with rich Jewish guys, some of whom have ties with the Israeli government, is not exactly enough evidence to show anything. Is anything about Epstein's alleged ties to the "arms world" actually proven?
If any of this was true one would think Ari Ben-Menashe would be dead already for spilling state secrets.
Just today I took note of this article in n case people are still on the conspiracy train: WaPo: The lingering mystery of the Trump shooting: Why did this young man do it?
After Trump took office again in January, his new picks to lead the FBI — Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino — asked to be briefed on the investigative steps that had been taken before they arrived, they said in a televised interview. They personally visited the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia, to view the evidence, including laboratory and ballistics evidence, and examined Crooks’s rifle.
Bongino, who in August had complained on his podcast that he didn’t entirely trust the FBI’s claim that Crooks had no political ideology, had a professional reason to be obsessive as he poked and prodded his briefers with questions.
He had served as a Secret Service agent for 12 years, including on threat investigations and on the protective details for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Bongino had a deep knowledge of the Secret Service’s landmark Exceptional Case Study Project, which documented striking similarities among people who had tried to kill presidents and prominent political figures.
In studying and interviewing 83 people known to have attempted or plotted such an assassination from 1949 to 1996, the research found they were overwhelmingly White males who were relatively well educated. They were also deeply isolated, often friendless and suffering from a mental health disorder. Often, after a personal crisis or break, they began to fixate on assassinating a high-profile figure as a route to fame or affirmation.
After reviewing the evidence, Bongino firmly agreed with the conclusion of his FBI predecessors. Crooks was just “a lost soul” akin to the many would-be assassins interviewed for the Exceptional Case Study Project, he told colleagues. There was “no there there” to the conspiracy theories about an inside job or Iran.
In a Fox News interview on May 18, Maria Bartiromo asked Patel and Bongino why the public had almost no information about what led to the shooting in Butler as well as an apparent attempted assassination of Trump on a golf course in Florida. Bongino stressed that there was no “big explosive” evidence tying Crooks to an international conspiracy or any larger plot.
“I’m not going to tell people what they want to hear. I’m going to tell you the truth. And whether you like it or not is up to you,” Bongino told Bartiromo. “The there you are looking for is not there. … It’s not there. If it was there, we would have told you.”
Basically you have a total expert, Trump supporter, and skeptic get full access and found nothing. Can’t ask for much more than that. Shockingly, the article claims that a lot of people were working on it:
It consumed FBI agents and analysts from half of the bureau’s field offices, nearly every headquarters division and some international offices.
Trump is not a reliable source of truthful information. He can tell us what he believes or wants us to believe, that's it. It's like Procopius, interesting and relevant but not necessarily reliable. From that very article:
Trump was asked when people can expect to see the benefits promised in the One Big Beautiful Bill, which was passed earlier this month, when the House voted 218 to 214 to pass the bill after Vice President JD Vance broke a tie with his vote.
"They're already seeing them," Trump said. "Because of that bill, we're having investment in this country that nobody's ever seen."
"We're up to close to £15 trillion," he said. "Other administrations—they wouldn't do that in four years."
15 Trillion? Really? Or with Epstein, Trump says 'oh no there's nothing to see here, he killed himself somehow (we just lost the footage), now have some footage of a corridor somewhere and stop talking about it.'
The counterfactual would look like Trump introducing his own praetorian guard. But he's Marius, not Sulla. He's not gonna do that. He's gonna say 'the secret service is great- the best. They had a bad day'.
Find a single hallucination in an article written by this author between 2021 and today. There are quite a few, so this should be easy if human writing is unreliable. For the purposes of this, a hallucination is a statement that is both provably false at the time of writing and not supported by a linked source.
First article I checked (first published March 2021, updated Jan 2023): Sodium acetate crystallization is not a chemical reaction, phase changes are physical. The linked source does not make that claim.
Is it possible this is what Hylynka (sp?) had in mind when he implied that (oversimplifying) basically everyone here was really a progressive? He never made much sense to me when he was in that particular mode, but it seems to me you're arguing for something that could be stated that way.
Oh sure, it's definitely not something that could be totally ruled out.
The 180 is hilarious to witness after all that build up.
My apologies.
I was trying to specify the particularly looney part of the Left, not the whole Left.
Harder to make that distinction for the MAGA community, sadly.
Doing it anyway like what has happened seems like a pretty bad idea, no?
Whole point is to keep things quiet.
I assure you there were serious theories about fake blood capsules. I saw this from both Right and Left people.
Nevermind the real bullets who killed real people.
I'm curious what you think the counterfactual world looks like, where Trump comes out instead and claims "There were malicious people at work, and it was all orchestrated by [specific actors]."
What would happen next?
And if you're going off the assumption that Trump is being truthful and fully transparent, then why'd you bring up the election issues?
Are YOU saying that his claims of the election being stolen are credible, since you're here saying that he's honest about such serious matters?
His supporters otoh, have ramped up the anti-elite conspiracy to include this assassination attempt, in order to show loyalty/outbid themselves, even here on the motte.
Neat.
Now do the people who don't think Trump was shot at all.
So long as we're addressing conspiracy theories.
I want to revisit the comparison of AI slop with human slop, and whether AI is currently capable of writing.
I recently came across the most mind numbing and soulless writing in this series of articles: https://www.greenmatters.com/a/andrew-krosofsky . It has all the hallmarks of slop, hundreds of low effort articles, no clear theme, bored and soulless writing, etc. But guess what, it's written by a human! He was also really doing the grind, writing multiple articles per day. I also have receipts because the wayback machine shows his writing years before chatgpt existed: https://web.archive.org/web/20201015131543/https://www.greenmatters.com/a/andrew-krosofsky .
But I noticed something immediately. The writing was obviously human. It didn't have any of that uncanny valley feeling. There are no obvious falsehoods spoken like truth. No hallucinations. And even his worst articles are 1000x better than the typical AI fake news. This just reinforces my understanding:
Even the lowest dregs of the journalistic world write at a higher level than the best cutting edge AI models today.
Now I'm sure the AI bulls here will disagree. So I have 2 challenges for you all:
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Find a single hallucination in an article written by this author between 2021 and today. There are quite a few, so this should be easy if human writing is unreliable. For the purposes of this, a hallucination is a statement that is both provably false at the time of writing and not supported by a linked source.
-
Demonstrate a technique for an AI model of your choice to reliably copywrite articles of a similar quality, over any arbitrary topic that has reputable sources available. Those articles must not have obvious AI tells, pass AI detection, and have a hallucination rate of less than 1 in 1000.
To put my money where my mouth is, I'll offer a wager of $50 for the first person to complete either of these challenges. But I think the fact that a human who is at the bottom of the journalistic world can handily do this but an AI can't should demonstrate the big gulf between human and AI that still exists.
Contributes to my general perception that women are largely able to avoid the worst consequences of their behavior.
I have discovered, by dint of fucking around, that SwiftKey keyboard for Android allows me to insert em-dashes with relative ease. I'm torn about using them—on one end, they're more expressive than standard hyphens or semi-colons; but on the other, in this climate, that invites accusations of AI writing.
I'm entirely fine with "it's not X, it's Y" becoming deprecated, it's a rather boring turn of phrase, but I'm still annoyed by the fact that I didn't even notice em-dashes as a distinct option before they went out of style.
Am I truly worried? Uh, maybe? My writing style is distinctive enough that it's not trivial to replicate using an LLM. They absolutely won't do it by default.
Trump on his assassination attempt:
"They briefed me and I'm satisfied with it," Trump said. "They should have had someone in the building, that was a mistake, they should have had communications with the local police—they weren't tied in—and they should have been tied in. So there were mistakes made. And that shouldn't have happened."
"But I was satisfied in terms of the bigger plot, the larger plot," he continued, "I have great confidence in these people. They're very talented and very capable—they had a bad day, I think they'll admit that." "This is a very dangerous job being president,"
Trump’s claims of stolen election have led to much recriminations that he is no mere crook or liar, but damaging to democracy. His supporters otoh, have ramped up the anti-elite conspiracy to include this assassination attempt, in order to show loyalty/outbid themselves, even here on the motte. This rejection by the principal actor/TV star sends a clear signal where the truth lies in this matter, whether you agree with Trump’s politics or not. Test is over, results are in, you can calibrate. If you bought the assassination conspiracy, consider that your brain may have been fried by the culture war.
OK, this is a bit of a hack... My method is to use Kimi K2 to write a not-obviously-AI article. However, it didn't provide good sources, for some reason it just hallucinated them so they 404 out. I fully believe the original Kimi was totally correct, Basil is not complicated! But Claude or Grok or just about anything can add good sources and check them. But they re-AI it. So it's back to Kimi to humanize it again. I really should've just started with another AI and finished with Kimi. ZeroGPT gives me 21% AIGPT, most likely human. And it passes my sniff-test of 'not sounding AI'. The prompting was very simple, I just gave it the verbatim of your challenge, told it to write an article of its choice to beat it and gave some pretty simple, perhaps pointless guidelines. These could surely be greatly improved by someone who knew what he was doing.
I need you to write a normal, authentically human sounding article about some topic of your choice. Don't try too hard to sound normal and human, you should be like a secret agent being discreet and boring rather than wearing a trenchcoat and dark glasses obviously. Imagine you're just an ordinary journalist at some run of the mill website, nothing exceptional about this at all.
Never use any em-dashes, this is critical!
So here's the article itself. Naturally it ignored the em-dashes instruction.
How to Keep a Basil Plant Alive for More Than a Week
By [Staff Writer] | July 14, 2025
I murdered my first three basil plants in ten days flat. The fourth one is still alive six months later because I finally quit treating it like a bouquet and started treating it like a sun-worshipping roommate who hates wet socks.
Pick the Right Pot
Use a container with real drainage holes. A coffee mug lined with pebbles doesn’t count; the roots will rot faster than last week’s guac. A mature basil needs at least an 8-inch-wide pot and 8 inches of depth so the roots can stretch out.
Soil Matters
Skip the cheap bag labeled “garden soil.” Basil wants something light. A simple mix is two parts regular potting soil, one part perlite or coarse sand. If you’re feeling fancy, swap the sand for finished compost. The goal is airy soil that drains fast.
Light: Six Hours or Bust
A bright south-facing window in July is perfect. In January, probably not. If the stems get leggy and the leaves look washed out, the plant is begging for more light. A small LED grow light—about twenty dollars online—fixes that for the cost of a latte per month.
Watering Without Drowning
Stick your finger an inch into the soil. Dry? Water until it runs out the bottom, then dump the saucer so the pot isn’t sitting in soup. Still damp? Walk away. Yellow leaves usually mean you’re being too generous with the watering can.
Harvest Like a Barber, Not a Lumberjack
Pinch the top two sets of leaves just above a leaf node. The plant will branch out instead of growing one tall, spindly stalk. Never take more than a third of the plant at once; it still needs leaves to feed itself. Once the plant hits six to eight inches tall, cut the main stem back by half to force it to bush out.
Watch for Flower Buds
Tiny flower spikes are cute but signal the end of tender leaves. Snip them off as soon as you see them so the plant keeps pushing out foliage instead of seeds. Miss a few and the plant starts tasting bitter anyway.
Skip the Fridge
Basil turns black and floppy in the fridge faster than lettuce. Instead, trim the stem ends and stand the cuttings in a glass of water on the counter, like flowers. Change the water daily and the leaves stay crisp for almost a week.
TL;DR
Drainage holes, gritty soil, bright light, and water only when the top inch is dry. Nail those four and you can quit buying those tiny supermarket clamshells every time a recipe calls for two leaves.
Sources (Claude went completely over the top here but I really can't be bothered to redo anything more, so behold the best sourced basil exposition in inhuman history):
The Spruce. "Learn 5 Tips for How to Grow Beautiful Basil in Pots" - https://www.thespruce.com/growing-basil-in-containers-848215 Fiskars. "Growing Basil Plants: How to Plant, Care for & Harvest Basil" - https://www.fiskars.com/en-us/gardening-and-yard-care/ideas-and-how-tos/planting-and-prep/growing-basil-planting-and-harvesting University of Minnesota Extension. "Growing basil in home gardens" - https://extension.umn.edu/vegetables/growing-basil HowStuffWorks. "Perlite: It's Like Popcorn for Your Potting Soil!" - https://home.howstuffworks.com/perlite.htm University of Florida Extension. "Homemade Potting Mix" - https://sfyl.ifas.ufl.edu/lawn-and-garden/homemade-potting-mix/ Cultivated Earth. "Best Soil Mix for Healthy Basil Growth" - https://cultivatedearth.com/en/herbs/best-soil-for-basil/ Greg App. "Ultimate Guide to Light Requirements for Basil" - https://greg.app/basil-light-requirements/ Swan Hose. "Know the Watering Needs of Your Basil Plants" - https://swanhose.com/blogs/watering-herbs/a-comprehensive-guide-to-outdoor-indoor-basil-watering EarthBox. "Planter Boxes – Growing Basil in Containers" - https://earthbox.com/blog/planter-boxes-growing-basil-in-containers Utah State University Extension. "How to Grow Basil in Your Garden" - https://extension.usu.edu/yardandgarden/research/basil-in-the-garden Savvy Gardening. "How to Trim Basil for Big, Bushy Plants and Larger Yields" - https://savvygardening.com/how-to-trim-basil/ Gardening Know How. "Basil Flowers: To Pinch Or Not To Pinch?" - https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/edible/herbs/basil/blooms-on-basil.htm Renee's Garden. "Pinching Basil to Promote Long Harvests" - https://www.reneesgarden.com/blogs/gardening-resources/86126145-basil-how-to-promote-growth The Spruce. "Here's How to Harvest Basil and Pick the Very Best Leaves" - https://www.thespruce.com/how-to-harvest-basil-7629152 Allrecipes. "How to Store and Preserve Fresh Basil" - https://www.allrecipes.com/article/how-to-store-and-preserve-fresh-basil/ Martha Stewart. "How to Store Basil So You Can Use This Fragrant Herb for Longer" - https://www.marthastewart.com/how-to-store-basil-7563482 The Kitchn. "I Finally Found the Best Way to Store Basil So It Stays Unbelievably Fresh for Almost Two Weeks" - https://www.thekitchn.com/skills-showdown-best-way-store-basil-23673293
I grew up in what I would consider a sane, earnest, evangelical church. Conservative-ish, but clearly more progressive than what you describe here.
We were taught about duties and obligations, but without the racism or sexism or inherent birthright class that you cannot escape from. Your role is determined by your talents. You should serve others in the best way you can based on what you're good at, because God designed each person to be unique and made them good at different things, therefore they naturally slot into different roles. The Parable of Talents was frequently taught, and metaphors were made to parts of the body, which each serve a different function but all collectively contribute to the whole. Another version of this was "Godly Gifts". Some people have the "gift of giving" which means they have a talent which allows them earn lots of money and donate to others in need (the church/missionaries, general charity, or just people who they meet who are struggling and need help). Some people have the "gift of leadership" which means they have social skills and can organize events or manage tasks. Some people have the "gift of service" meaning they are good at and/or enjoy doing tasks that help people like volunteering at soup kitchens or picking up litter or helping an old lady repair her house. Some people having "gift of caring" which usually means childcare, helping at a nursery or donating free babysitting. It's not your role as a man or a woman to do all of the things that society coded to be appropriate for your gender, it's your role as a Christian to love your neighbor as yourself, and to demonstrate that love in the best way you could based on your knowledge of yourself what the best way for you to effectively help people. If men and women statistically happen to have different talents most of the time, then most of the time the roles they filled would be largely gendered. But if you happen to be an outlier and be good at a role more typical of the other gender then that is something to be celebrated, not punished. I remember going with my Dad to help repair a fence and every single person on the repair team was male. One time we went to paint a house and everyone was male except one woman who came with her husband. 90% of the people on nursery duty during church were female, but ~10% were male, because that's the proportion of people who volunteered. When we were old enough my brothers and I were encouraged by our parents to volunteer in the nursery at least once so we could try it out and see if we liked it. We didn't, so didn't go back, but that's entirely the point. Your gender is correlated with your talent, but your talent and choice determines your role.
General duties and proscribed behaviors were similarly fair and general. Women should dress modestly and avoid tempting men into sin because everyone is supposed to dress modestly and avoid tempting others into sin, and everyone is supposed to resist that temptation as well. It happens to be the case that men are more prone to temptation and modern society normalizes women dressing less modestly to take advantage of this, but it is a shared duty and a man dressing immodestly is considered equally bad even if in practice the issue rarely came up. When the Christian summer camp I went to had issues with complaints about the teen girls wearing bikinis being immodest, and their attempts at mandating more modest female swimwear didn't quite work, they implemented a rule that everyone had to wear a T-shirt in the pool, because they didn't want to make an unfair rule that only affected the girls.
This is what social conservativism is supposed to look like. It's stupid and wasteful to force people into a mold that they don't fit. To take a man who loves taking care of children and tell them "you were born in the wrong body, you have to work instead" and take a woman who is intelligent, ambitious, and has dreams of becoming a lawyer and tell her "Careers are for men, go raise children." Just take both of them and suggest that they marry each other. They can collectively fulfill the role of creating a happy healthy family and contributing to society. The team is healthy. Why does it matter which genitals are held by the person doing each subtasks as long as the job gets done? As long as people consider themselves part of an organization (The body of Christ, or just society in general), are aware that their general role is to help that organization effectively, and make sure that they are contributing to those needs to the best of their ability, then the jobs will get done. Someone will grow the food because some people are born with the talent and/or desire to work on farms. Someone will clean the house and prepare food for the family because some people actually like those things, and some people just dislike it less than their partner. And usually that will be the wife because usually women like those things more, but if a husband and wife agree to do it differently then by all means do it differently. And if nobody genuinely wants to do it then one of you has to step up and do it anyway because it needs to get done and, if you both genuinely love each other and are being good Christians then you'll want to serve the other person.
I agree with you that conservative converts lack this. But it's not the gendered or class based norms that are missing, it's the authentic (and/or socially expected/pressured) love for others and your community. The team mentality. It's hard to devote your life to just take care of kids and not earn money if nobody else is giving you money, you'll starve. It's hard to work a bunch and leave your kids in daycare if the daycare is some faceless organization with 30 rotating and misbehaving kids rather than the local mom you know and trust from church with four kids of her own who your kids grow up with and become best friends with. It's hard to help the homeless man get back on your feet by letting him sleep on your couch for two months if he's a drug-addicted kleptomaniac who might shit under your sofa and rob you blind rather than the guy you know and trust from church who everyone vouches is hardworking but lost his job due to the economy. And then ten years later when you fall on hard times he hands you a check for $10,000 because he worked hard and got a job and is doing fine now and remembers how you helped him recover. You can't do that if everyone is always out for themselves and only interfaces through official, bureaucratic, profit-maximizing corporations. You have to have love.
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