Politics

Reading and Thoughts: Jan 2, 2026

First post of '26, the Bulwark does a fuckery, AI is going to destroy young people's career prospects, and Hayek's Bastards still are bastardy.

Geoff Anderson

02 Jan 2026 — 7 min read

Some front matter: I have been remarkably busy during the annual shutdown, including getting our carpets professionally cleaned (our dogs make this difficult, and once a year I rent a "Rug Doctor" machine, but that is like bailing water on the Titanic), and the fear that the annual horror that is the New Year's Eve celebrations (lots and lots of fireworks) that freak said dogs out.

This year though, we had weather on our side, as well as the fans that we needed to dry the carpets (one downside of doing deep carpet cleaning in winter during a series of rainy days) helped mask the explosions that freak them out. Might need to invest in some fans for the Fourth...

Anyhow, I haven't been posting much, but I have been reading. First up, a really shitty take by Bill Kristol at The Bulwark ...

When it Comes to Trump, Trust Women...

For the "no fucking shit" files, and where the fuck have you been brigades, this "insightful" bit of drivel is just a huge "nope".

Not "nope" in that it is wrong, because I seem to remember pink pussy-hatted women protesting at the start of the first Trump term. Gee, why didn't they point to that and say that women had the measure of Trump?

But nope in the three that Bill chooses to elevate:

He starts OK, pointing to Alexis de Tocqueville, and his prescient observations in the early 19th century. But then he goes on to talk about his three guiding lights.

And while I can tolerate the Laura Dern mention (this did inspire me to watch the original Jurassic Park. I might need to write about that movie) and her observation, the reference to Maya Anjelou is spot on, but he had to fucking elevate that sack of human garbage, Liz Cheney to this exalted list.

For fuck's sake, sure, she finally broke with MAGA and Trump after the January 6th attack on the capital, but prior to that, she was all-in, belly to the bar, doing shots with the best of the MAGA enablers. I read that she voted with Trump and his desires more than 90% of the time. She was vocal and effusive in her endorsement and support of Trump's campaign in 2020.

So, fuck her, fuck her family, and fuck her ethics. I won't go so far to say that Harris' enbrace of her during the '24 election was a tide turner, but it was a shitty look, and it was unlikely to sway any of the R column to defect, nor enough of the Independents to pull the lever for a woman of color as a Democrat.

Two of them spoke before his rise, but their comments are indispensable to understanding the phenomenon of Trump. One is the late Maya Angelou, who told us, “When people show you who they are, believe them.”

Fucking trash. And the tongue bathing they did about her father "Dick" when he passed was really some revisionist bullshit.

Read it for yourself:

The coming wipeout in the job market - AI and "grunt" work

This week, I also read an article in The Atlantic that resonated with my thinking, and my experience in corporate America.

Nick Geisler penned "The Problem with Letting AI Do the Grunt Work" (gift link) about his journey breaking into his career, with this revisiting of the early in career work that people in marketing or copy-writing begin with:

One of the first sentences I was ever paid to write was “Try out lighter lip stick colors, like peach or coral.” Fresh out of college in the mid 2010s, I’d scored a copy job for a how-to website. An early task involved expanding upon an article titled “How to Get Rid of Dark Lips.” For the next two years, I worked on articles with headlines such as “How to Speak Like a Stereotypical New Yorker (With Examples),” “How to Eat an Insect or Arachnid,” and “How to Acquire a Gun License in New Jersey.” I didn’t get rich or win literary awards, but I did learn how to write a clean sentence, convey information in a logical sequence, and modulate my tone for the intended audience—skills that I use daily in my current work in screenwriting, film editing, and corporate communications. Just as important, the job paid my bills while I found my way in the entertainment industry.

A lot of people start on this low rung. It is shit work, but it opens the door, it teaches the ropes, and it is how you get in the game.

AI is upending this pipeline, because as he follows up with, if you want to learn "How to be a Hip Hop Music Producer" you don't search or read fan mags, you just ask ChatGPT (or Claude, or Gemini, or Llama, or (heaven forbid) Grok) and you get an answer that is at least as good as this entry level content filler.

And it is getting bleaker. These jobs used to be that first step, a shitty one, but still part of paying your dues. And now, AI is foreclosing on that avenue.

The existential crisis is spreading across the creative landscape. Last year, the consulting firm CVL Economics estimated that artificial intelligence would disrupt more than 200,000 entertainment-industry jobs in the United States by 2026. The CEO of an AI music-generation company claimed in January that most musicians don’t actually enjoy making music, and that musicians themselves will soon be unnecessary.

That quip about music is prophetic.

Nick then encapsulates the real issue:

The problem is that entry-level creative jobs are much more than grunt work. Working within established formulas and routines is how young artists develop their skills. Hunter S. Thompson began his writing career as a copy boy for Time magazine; Joan Didion was a research assistant at Vogue; the director David Lean edited newsreels; the musician Lou Reed wrote knockoff pop tunes for department stores; the filmmakers Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, and Francis Ford Coppola shot cheap B movies for Roger Corman. Beyond the money, which is usually modest, low-level creative jobs offer practice time and pathways for mentorship that side gigs such as waiting tables and tending bar do not.

Alas, those side gigs may be all that there is for the youngs going forward, and that is fucking terrifying (and shoud be). When you hear people like Musk postulate that his "Optimus" robots and AI in general will give everybody a lifestyle of leisure and comfort, you should be terrified. Because that isn't how the establishment will let it come to be. (and in fact, he's clearly high on his own supply, and his robots are a fucking joke).

Still, I see this starting in my world. Where we would hire a slate of interns each summer, and offer jobs to many of them, the numbers have been plummeting (oh, we do still bring in interns, but those who get offers upon graduation is waning rapidly).

Soon, there will be no "mid-career" talent to prepare for leadership.

Bourbon Soaked detective novels

I have an admission. I love mid 20th century detective stories. I have binged several sets, particularly the hard boiled tales of Ross MacDonald (his character Lew Archer is superb). When my viewing this holiday came across a Phillip Marlowe tale, Lady in the Lake, I was intrigued, and I grabbed a couple of the books. I am likely to grab all of them. Raymond Chandler was a master of the art, and I am greatly enjoying this diversion.

And it is a diversion to reading the tough slog of Hayek's Bastards that I opined on a while back.

Hayek's Bastards - an interim message

I wrote how Cryn Johanssen's review of this book inspired me to pick it up.

And I have to admit that it is both a great read, but also frightening. I am in the 4th chapter, talking about the "Neuro-caste" topic, but what I've read so far is requiring me to shower in very hot water to get the ick off.

So many of these characters in the 70's through ... well ... now have put so much intellectual effort into finding a way to codify a racial component to competency and intellegence, basically to solidify their "beliefs" that black people are genetically inferior and that the "white" races are the natural top of the ladder.

Of course, they also get into some antisemitism, and have to admit that the Ashkenazy Jews and the "Mongoloids" (their word, not mine) are among the leaders in intellectual advances.

Yet in the service of this painting, there are some gems (and by gems, I mean things that make me get stabby):

Gottfredson presented on what has remained her leitmotif: the large and stable gap in Black/white IQ differences means efforts at parity in more advanced professions through affirmative action and preferential treatment are bound to fail in their intended goal and will lead to both lowered overall productivity and increased (justified) resentment from nonwhites.

The hatred of trying to create a level playing field that gives all groups a chance is deep in this ecosystem.

But one thing that does come out of their "research" is that if you truly implement a merit based environment, that is, if you look solely at their elite "white" population, they have the same proportion of dullards and geniuses. Same if you look at Blacks, south asians, or any population group. So they go back to trying to enforce some caste system with their northern "paler" skinned people on top, even so much as to invent a hypothesis that colder climates lead to more competition, and thus higher intelligence people being more likely, and that southern "warmer" civilizations being naturally less competitive, and less stress on resources, and thus they are obviously too lazy/unmotivated/lack drive or whatever.

That sounds like some southern plantation owner bullshit to me (and it probaby does to you as well).

Alas, this book is a tough slog. Not because of the words, but because of all the fucking stupid people who are well educated and were paid by racist capitalist and industrialists to confirm their priors.

As I said, lots of ick.