So it would seem that the gloriously rational chimera, on which the hopes of many a totalitarian ruler are presently pinned, has landed. AI, we are told, is here to enslave populations in places like China or Russia, to win elections in places like the U.S. and Great Britain, and to do just about everything else except make a good cup of tea.
It’s a sobering recollection, actually, in the time of coronavirus, which is said to have carried away some 300,000 lives, mainly of the elderly or the infirm, in the span of a hundred days, causing a global commotion unseen since the last world war. Yet during the same hundred days, in the spring of 1994, nearly one million people died in Rwanda…
Stalin is said to have told Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, that if she kept making a nuisance of herself he would “appoint another Lenin’s widow.” Similarly, Bashar Assad is the Kremlin’s exarch in Syria because the Russians have appointed him to this position, and if he continues to make a nuisance of himself he may be replaced with another, better Bashar Assad.
The Kremlin has seized the opportunity to advance the plan of tagging the population – “bio objects,” if the gentle reader recalls my post of July 11 last year, is the official term on the government’s websites – to turn its citizens into what we might call “smartserfs,” eventual inmates of a “smartgulag.”
Comments on last week’s post, fifth in this Sicilian Defense epopee, proved yet again that the reader is astute as he is gentle. “Never let a crisis go to waste!” ironized Andrew G. Van Sant…
What manly China has largely succeeded at, however, is not so much the quelling of the plague as pulling the wool over Western eyes with regard to the quelling of the plague. Last week China claimed that 3,333 people had died of the virus.
The title of the present series of posts, as I’m confident the gentle reader realizes, refers to a popular chess opening whereby Black, who by the rules of the game is a move behind, essentially cedes to White control of the center, using its energies to build up a rival alternative until the timing may be right for a Sicilian Vespers. The Sicilian’s motto, “lie low,” is writ large upon this strategy, and the knack of invisible resistance to domination by central government – whether Arab, Norman, or a myriad others leading up to the present day – is dormant...
The word “weather” (in German, Wetter) is by etymological transmutation the Russian for “wind” (veter), and as it happens a Sicilian scientist has just come out with what to me is a very plausible explanation of why northern Italy is now the global epicenter of the Chinese plague. Hubei, the man suggests – the region where the virus first spread – is geomorphologically analogous to the Pianura Padana, if only in that both are windless enclosed flatlands, now under cloudy winter skies. Let us not laugh before we take aboard a few more suppositions. Wind and light are the reasons,...
Some years ago I used to joke, with reference to my own character, that as a white heterosexual male with formidable conservative credentials I was destined to die of AIDS in Africa while fighting for socialism. It is not that my character is perverse, or that I think one thing and do quite another, it is simply that extreme opposites are strangely congruent and I have always been drawn to their invariant properties.
I was intending to say nothing more of the plague, except to poke fun at it now and again for being such a pathetic contender for the title of the Black Death – much the way a book by somebody like Henry Miller might aspire to the eminence of the Great American Novel – but, as the gentle reader will presently see, I have succumbed. The Great American Novel, by the way, is in my humble opinion You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up, written in 1938 by an Englishman named Eric Knight and known to millions of...
