The commerce secretary wasn't the one pushing for them in the first place. The president was.
I mean, look, there's plenty of conflicts of interest, and stuff that sure looks like graft, and claims of people making insane amounts of money off of stuff. But in this case, the commerce secretary's options were 1) do the tariffs or 2) get fired. Minion? Sure. Minion without the self-respect or ethics to quit when they were being told to do unconstitutional stuff? Also sure. Pushing these policies, as though they had agency in the matter? No.
Self-dealing by someone connected to the state, yes. Extortion, no.
It takes a fair amount of money to take a court case to the Supreme Court. You can pay it all (and still maybe lose), or you can let the law firm have part of what you win. This happens all the time in the US legal system. It's not extortion; it's essentially venture funding by the law firm. (Yes, I'm aware of the pattern in the previous sentence, but I'm in fact a human, and not even LLM-assisted.) If the company doesn't want to play that way, they don't have to. They can pay the full cost of the lawsuit themselves.
Well, they've managed to launch and land strikes on every country in the region. "Successful counterattack" is a considerably higher bar than that, IMHO.
> why do people hate on AI writing but LOVE AI coding?
People don't like AI writing because it reads like something written by corporate drones rather than actual humans.
People love AI coding for a couple of reasons. First, code doesn't read like prose. You don't complain about how code reads. (OK, people do, but the point of code is to execute.)
Second, people love AI coding because it's fast. It gets the code written far faster than a human would write it.
But isn't that true of AI writing as well? It gets the text written far faster than a human would write it.
So my "aha" moment: The people complaining about AI writing are the readers, and the people loving AI coding are the writers. When humans have to read that AI-written code, will they still love it? (Or can AI actually read and revise code well enough that nobody will ever have to get there?)
There used to be a page on arcade.stanford.edu that was a takedown of Girard. It seems to have disappeared, or I would point you to it.
Girard writes beautifully. The problem is with his evidence. He says things like Jesus being an instance of the scapegoat, which is true, but he also says that the disciples were in on it. Never mind that the gospels say that they didn't understand until after Jesus rose from the dead; Girard says that those who are scapegoating someone won't say that that's what they're doing. And viola, evidence against Girard's position magically becomes evidence for it.
Same with Oedipus, and literally dozens of other examples that the article gave that I don't remember what they are. It goes on and on and on, giving examples where Girard's "evidence" does not say what he says it says.
So if you actually read Girard, look carefully at his examples. Don't get carried away by the beautiful writing; think about what the example says and what Girard says it says.
I am not really interested in things like "evidence" that the gospels are consistent with Girard's examples, nor of "takedowns". That's not really how things work in comparative literature.
What you are doing in this field is re-interpreting works of literature to find common themes and shed insight on human nature by looking at these themes. The fundamental assumption here -- which is a radical assumption -- is that works of literature that are considered classic or great works of literature -- contain within them information about human nature, that is, hidden information, and this applies even to, or especially with respect to, fictional works such as Don Quixote.
As an example, you can claim children desire power. And as evidence of this, point to children's stories, reintepreting them as power fantasies. Which is basically correct. Now let's say that you are talking about Lord of the Rings, and arguing that here we have the lowly hobbit that ends up saving the whole world and Kings bow to him, you can use that as one piece of data. But now comes the "takedown", and the critic says "No! You have it wrong! The point of destroying the ring is to get rid of power! You have it all backwards". But the critic is missing the point. I hope everyone can see that. Tolkien might have been consciously warning readers about the dangers of power, but it would not have been a successful children's book if it did not involve the lead character starting out powerless, acquiring power, and being someone the child reader identified with. Or at least the odds of it being successful would be much lower. In most children's books, you are acquiring power -- because children fantasize about that, it is human nature. It does not matter what moral lesson the author is trying to get across, his human nature finds a way of expressing itself in the work.
Now, you can reject the core assumption that literature reveals aspects of human nature, it's fine, but there is no point in arguing that core assumption. If you reject it, then don't read Girard.
But if you don't reject it, then because you are re-interpreting works and looking for overlooked themes, the name of the game is to accumulate a large body of examples, not to debate a single example. And you judge the success of your examples primarily by their explanatory power, not because you think the original author intentionally made a certain theme that heretofore was overlooked.
But because you are providing novel interpretations of existing works, you can always find plenty of arguments that the original works were intended to be interpreted differently. It's trivial, but not a compelling critique. It is up to the reader to decide whether interpreting the work through this lense sheds more light on the work in the sense that applying the same interpretation to the large body of works cited results in something that "makes sense", as Girard is building a case that a certain theme in human nature occurs in works of literature over and over again, and having this theme available helps you to better understand the work.
This is very different from theology, or legalism, where people focus on debating a single verb tense in a specific verse. Because Girard is not doing theology or legalism, he is doing comparative literature, so he provides a hundred examples of common themes, and after you read him, the next time you read literature your mind is trained to look for these themes and you can identify them and interpret what you are reading in a different way.
Now going back to the original sharp assumption, this means that you do not only know something new about literature, but something new about human nature.
But the problem is that a large number of Girard's examples don't support his position. He's not comparing literature; he's looking for things that might be anywhere in the neighborhood of his thesis, and then torturing them until they fit. That's closer to topiary than botany (to torture an example of my own). Sure, once he ignores parts and says other parts are wrong, then what's left supports his position, but that is not comparative literature.
And, yes, in comparative literature you can take a minor theme from a particular piece of literature (or even several pieces). But it should never be untrue to the piece it's pulling from. And Girard is, repeatedly and egregiously.
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