Wednesday 18 June, 2025
Temptation
Quote of the Day
”Don’t look at me in that tone of voice.”
Dorothy Parker
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Planxty | True Love Knows No Season
Long Read of the Day
Loathe thy neighbor: Elon Musk and the Christian right are waging war on empathy
Interesting piece by Julia Carrie Wong on the deep waters that the techno-fascist right are leading us into.
Here’s a sample
Just over an hour into Elon Musk’s last appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, the billionaire brought up the latest existential threat to trouble him.
“We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” Musk said. “And it’s like, I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide.”
The idea that caring about others could end civilization may seem extreme, but it comes amid a growing wave of opposition to empathy from across the American right. Musk learned about “suicidal empathy” through his “public bromance” with Gad Saad, a Canadian marketing professor whose casual application of evolutionary psychology to culture war politics has brought him a sizable social media following. By Saad’s accounting – and this is not dissimilar from the white nationalist “great replacement theory” – western societies are bringing about their own destruction by admitting immigrants from poorer, browner and more Muslim countries.
“The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy,” Musk continued to Rogan, couching his argument in the type of pseudoscientific language that’s catnip to both men’s followings on X. “The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response.”
Apparently American catholics, led by that prominent convert, J.D. Vance, are also becoming sceptical about the value of empathy. If you think that evangelical christians voting for Trump is weird, then you ain’t seen nothing yet.
My commonplace booklet
After a frantically busy Term we have run away to France and at the last minute I booked us into a hotel in Avallon — the Hotel de la Poste — about which I knew precisely zero other than (a) it would be a good overnight stay on the first stage of our annual slow drive down to Provence, and (b) it’s conveniently near a charging station. Upon arrival we find that:
The place was built in 1707 and was one of the first Post Office relay stations
It was one of the first restaurants in France to receive three Michelin stars in 1935
Over the centuries it has welcomed inter alia: Louis Philippe, The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Pablo Picasso, Liz Taylor and Josephine Baker.
Also, Napoleon stayed there on his way back to Paris after his return from Elba in 1815. I’m pretty sure that he didn’t pay for his room.
It’s ancient, friendly. unfashionable and doesn’t feel posh. A bit like this blogger, in fact.
Errata
Thanks to David Elliott and Bill Janeway for pointing out that Joe Weizenbaum’s Eliza program dated from the 1960s and not 1996! It’d be nice to explain it as a typo, but I’m afraid that sloppy proof-reading is a better one.
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