Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Readiness Is All: ChatGPT and the Future of Authorship

Posted on by

Act I, Scene I

[Enter three pigs, Jolly, Merry, and Happy]

Jolly: Oh, how fair the morn has broken,
And how sweet the dew on the grass.
We three pigs, no words unspoken,
Shall build our houses that shall last.

Merry: But hark! What threat looms o’er us?
The wolf, who seeks to do us harm.
We must build strong, lest he come nigh us,
And bring upon us his foul alarm.

Happy: Fear not, dear brothers, for I shall go,
And build my house of straw and hay.
With haste, I’ll have it done, and lo!
The wolf shall never come our way.

…

[Enter wolf, snarling and snapping]

Wolf: These pigs, they think themselves so clever,
With their straw and hay, so flimsy, light. 
But I’ll show them, with my cunning, never
Shall they escape my appetite.

–ChatGPT, given the prompt to write The Three Little Pigs in the style of Shakespeare

The other day, after a discussion we were having about the danger the artificially intelligent ChatGPT tool seems to pose for unemployed writers like myself, my wife and I decided to test the robot with a series of prompts to see just how much of a threat it really is.

We weren’t just interested in having a chat with ChatGPT; we wanted to see what ChatGPT could do. What kind of literary stuff was this writing robot made of? After some simple writing exercises, we asked it to write the story of the three little pigs in the style of Shakespeare. You can see some of the result above and the whole mini-play below. Continue reading →

Reagan Spending vs. #TeaParty Austerity

Posted on by

Tragic Farce

Would Tea Party Republicans have voted to give Reagan his 50% spending increases and 700,000 more government jobs?

In an article from the Washington Post on “Tea Party” Congressman Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina, these paragraphs caught my attention:

Mulvaney mostly meets with voters through weekly town hall meetings. Sometimes he brings with him a 30-minute PowerPoint presentation, full of bar graphs and fever charts depicting the growing federal deficit and the surging cost of health care. In January, Mulvaney added a chart on the automatic spending cuts, known as sequestration, which next year will total about $100 billion.

To him the numbers make sense. “In the greater scheme of things, they are not that big,” Mulvaney said.

But, every once in a while, a personal anecdote punctures his certainty. Earlier this month, a friend and former campaign volunteer stood up at one of the town hall meetings to tell Mulvaney…

View original post 977 more words

Tortured Argument from a Straight Talker: On Democrats, Progressives and Centrists

Posted on by

“Two parties can never do justice to the diversity of thought in a polity. By restricting virtually all dialogue to false either/or, win/lose dichotomies, they can only ossify the division between the powerful and the people. The actions of a bipartisan oligarchy are necessarily restricted to a very limited palette, the colors of which the ruling class chooses. Thus, we wind up with “health care reform” lacking a strong public option, despite such being very popular among the voters. Robust publicly funded health care, let alone a single payer system, is ruled out out of hand by the leader of the allegedly “progressive” half of the oligarchy.”

Tragic Farce

I’m in the middle (or hopefully, at the end) of a much more involved debate than I was expecting on Twitter with a fellow named Milt Shook, who operates a blog called, colorfully enough, Please…Cut the Crap. It’s on a topic that is bound to get a reaction from me: the question of whether progressives harm Democrats’ chances with centrists and other purported persuadables by criticizing the party’s standard bearers. He puts his case in a nutshell in the last graph of an article he calls “Stop Complaining About Dems. In 2014, Voters Will Still Only Have 2 Choices: Them or Disaster“:

Voters have two choices every November, and these days, the choice is between competence and disaster. When you trash “the Democrats” mercilessly, the Republicans gain. And if you don’t think we lose when Republicans gain, then you haven’t been paying attention. And we cannot…

View original post 1,256 more words

DemocraticUnderground and the Fracturing of the Democratic Grass Roots, Part I

Posted on by

Seems appropriate to repost this, somehow…

Tragic Farce

A couple of days ago, I accidentally stumbled upon a fascinating American subculture I was not well aquainted with:  the prickly, stranger-shy cluster of rightist (though many self-identify as “liberal”) Hillary Clinton voters who were so enraged by the alleged (not to imply falsely alleged) chicanery between Team Obama and the DNC during the 2008 Democratic primaries that they picked up stakes and headed for any hill they felt sure Obama or the Democrats hadn’t defiled with their presence.

In my ramblings on the internet over the last few years, I have encountered many a Clinton supporter of the left who was driven to internet purgatories where other disaffected or disaffiliated Democrats gathered to share solace and critiques of Obama’s America with lefties (Greens, Naderites, Marxists) who had given up on the Democrats as the best hope for progressives long, long ago.  Indeed, I’ve lately felt much more…

View original post 1,194 more words

Gary Wills: GOP Tactics Echo Antebellum South’s Secessionism

Posted on by

Gary Wills has a very enlightening new piece in the New York Review of Books about the debt-ceiling/shutdown crisis manufactured by the Tea Party wing of the GOP. I can’t add anything to it, Please just go and read it. It’s an opinion of the American present deeply informed by the American past.

Here’s a taste:

Republican leaders in Congress are too cowardly to say that the voting restrictions being enacted by Republican-controlled state legislatures are racially motivated. They accept the blatant lie that they are aimed only at non-existent “fraud.” They will not crack the open code by which their partners claim to object to Obama because he is a “foreign-born Muslim” when they really mean “a black man.” They will not admit that the many procedural laws adopted to prevent abortion are in violation of the law as defined by the Supreme Court. They go along with the pretence that all the new rules are “for women’s health.” De facto acts of secession are given a pseudo-legal cover.

Thus we get people who say they do not want the government in control of women’s health under Obamacare—just after they order doctors to give women vaginal probes the doctors do not consider medically necessary. Or that they do not want the government telling Americans what they should do about their health—just before they prohibit “navigators” from even discussing choices about their health. The same people who oppose background checks for gun purchases now want background checks for anyone the government authorizes to explain the law to people. This is a gag rule to rank with antebellum bans on the discussion of slavery.

So we have one condition that resembles the pre-Civil War virtual secessionism—the holding of a whole party hostage to its most extreme members. We also have the other antebellum condition—the disproportionate representation of the extreme faction. In state after state in the 2012 election, there was a large vote for President Obama, but a majority of House seats went to Republicans. In Pennsylvania, for instance, Obama won 52 percent of the votes cast, but Republicans got over twice as many seats (13 to 5), thanks to carefully planned gerrymandering of districts by Republican state legislatures. This advantage will be set in stone if all the voter restriction laws now being advanced block voters who might upset the disproportion.

The presiding spirit of this neo-secessionism is a resistance to majority rule.

(My only comment on all this I said a little over two years ago,)

Related articles

Bear with Me While I Tinker with the Look

Posted on by

I’m trying to make the joint more reader friendly. I’d appreciate your feedback. Did I take a step in the right direction or go off the deep end?DicknJane

I’ll tell you what I like about this new look: I think the posts are more readable. It had been bothering me for a long time that the block quotes were low-contrast. It was even difficult for me to read them. With this design, the type is at least a bit larger. I just don’t want it to look too Sally, Dick and Jane, if you know what I mean. You’d tell me if it did, wouldn’t you?

I’m not crazy about the background color. Don’t be surprised if it goes from very dark purple to very light yellow in the click of a mouse. I’m going to tend to want it very light so the text in the margins is readable.

Any other comments you’d care to share, I’d be delighted to entertain.

“Putin Lights up the Fire [of Revolution]!”

Posted on by

Pussy Riot, the Russian feminist collective and punk rock band, three of whose members (Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alekhina and Yekaterina Samutsevic) were recently sentenced to two years in prison for “hooliganism,” have just released an answer to that sentence in the form of a blood-racing and rather catchy rocker of an anthem . Don DeLuca, music critic of the Philadelphia Inquirer, posted an informative little piece about the group and the song.

These women are serious punks!

TragicFarce.com

Posted on by

Note to regular readers: I’ve made TragicFarce.com the official domain name of this blog. You can still get to it as you have in the past, using my WordPress URL: christofpierson.wordpress.com; it will just be redirected to the new domain name, which you should notice in your browser’s URL address box, if not today (I’ve been told) then in the next 72 hours. You can also write to me with questions, comments, job offers, etc., at cpierson at tragicfarce.com.

“Things You Should Know Before Trying to Run a Freakshow”

Posted on by

Image

Do they have lectures like this in other cities? Or is this an “only in New York” thing?

 

A lecture by Dick Zigun founder of the Coney Island Circus Sideshow will reveal secret information gathered during 30 years of producing circus sideshows.

Cautionary information for those foolish enough to try and produce a freak show and humorous tales of triumph and horror learned from my three decades of attempting the same for those in the general public who have no intention of trying.

Topics to be covered include:
Tattooed Faced Junkies
Little People’s Big Egos
Dressing Room Excapades
Pickled Punks, Giant Killer Rats, Tattooed Dogs and The Law
Why you don’t want to own a big snakes but need one
Employees as slaves, rivals or thieves
Tents vs Buildings
Insurance and Payroll Taxes vs. Working Illegal
Burning Your Territory (not if you want to return the next season)
Good vs Bad Publicity
Etc etc etc

This is a 2 hour lecture followed by a one hour Q and A.

I wish I could go but I have a prior engagement. If anyone else wants to, tickets are $25-$50. Details are here.