F**king Mondays: Andrew Sullivan Jumps The Shark
Plus an AI breakthrough in cancer research, and a reminder of how awful Donald Trump is.
It’s Monday and time to start your week with your favorite, very sweary column!
Andrew Sullivan jumps the shark
In an essay that appears to be expertly crafted to look like the worst piece of punditry of all time, OG blogger and eternal crank Andrew Sullivan argues the 2024 race is shaping up to be a big bore. So to shake things up, we apparently need Tucker Carlson and Robert F Kennedy Jr. to provide voters with an alternative. He writes:
I hope you’re sitting down, but in all this, two men stand out to me: Tucker Carlson and Bobby Kennedy Jr. Very different, but weirdly simpatico, it did not shock me that the vaccine-skeptical Kennedy was given time on Carlson’s show to make his presidential pitch. (Watch the segment here.) Both have become anti-corporate populists, lone rangers in their own partisan coalitions. Both believe the US war against Russia is misguided, and led by the same dumb elites who took us into Iraq. Both have come to suspect the US military, intelligence services and pharmaceutical industries. Both loathe Tony Fauci — the patron saint of the pharmaceutical-government-media complex.
And yes, it would be easy and probably wise to dismiss them as cranks and conspiracy theorists. (But watch this ABC News segment to see how MSM attacks on this theme can backfire.) Both Tucker and Bobby represent, it seems to me, something nonetheless real: a deepening suspicion of corporate and government authority, a refreshing willingness to junk partisan orthodoxy, and, in an age of utter cowardice, what can only be called nerve…..
I’ll confess I also find them appealing, in a way Trump and Biden could never be. Kennedy sees clearly how the Dems have become the party of big corporations, HR authoritarians, and the mega-wealthy. Carlson sees the totalitarian essence of wokeness, its denial of core American values, and the cynical distraction of critical theory madness when most middle-class Americans are overwhelmed, overworked, and dying prematurely in large numbers. Neither is easily intimidated. Kennedy also feels in his bones the spiritual desolation out there, and grasps our duty to balance prosperity with care for the planet.
In fairness to Sullivan he does appear to be vaguely aware that he is delivering this missive directly out of his backside, but good Lord is this awful. It isn’t the idea that the political system in America is dysfunctional (it is), but the sheer laziness of his argument. Is Sullivan really saying that we need a race baiting TV pundit and a 5g/Antivax conspiracy theorist to “to rattle the corporate, media and government elites, to force a rethink on both the complacent right and loopy left, and to break up the Trump-Biden dynamic, which is as depressing as it is toxic for the country as a whole”? You’d expect this kind of tiresome bullshit from 18 year olds raised on a Youtube diet of Russell Brand and Ben Shapiro, not a veteran political observer like Sullivan.
As a reminder: Joe Biden delivered the Democrats a stunning victory in 2020, taking the White House and both houses in Congress. He navigated the country through the Covid crisis, delivered a whopping $1.7 bipartisan federal spending bill, brought NATO back to life and rallied the globe against a tyrant, added millions of jobs to the economy, presided over a huge expansion of the economy, expanded medicare, medicaid, and Obamacare to millions of people, had a wildly successful midterms election, and has created a historic student debt relief program. Most importantly, Biden is the only active Democratic politician capable of building a large enough coalition of voters to keep a fascist tyrant out of office — a feat we know he is capable of because he did it in 2020. But you know, boring.
If the presence of a lying madman who tried to overthrow the US government only two years ago wasn’t enough, we now apparently need two of the biggest disinformation merchants in American history to enter the race to keep things fresh. I say this with the utmost respect to Andrew: for the love of God, shut the fuck up.
Breakthrough Artificial Intelligence tool accurately identifies cancer
This is pretty amazing. A team of doctors, scientists, and researchers have created an artificial intelligence model that can precisely detect cancer. They believe that this breakthrough could hasten the diagnosis of the disease and accelerate the process of getting patients into treatment:
The AI tool designed by experts at the Royal Marsden NHS foundation trust, the Institute of Cancer Research, London, and Imperial College London can identify whether abnormal growths found on CT scans are cancerous…
The AI model was then tested to determine if it could accurately identify cancerous nodules. The study used a measure called area under the curve (AUC) to see how effective the model was at predicting cancer. An AUC of 1 indicates a perfect model, while 0.5 would be expected if the model was randomly guessing.
The results showed the AI model could identify each nodule’s risk of cancer with an AUC of 0.87. The performance improved on the Brock score, a test currently used in clinic, which scored 0.67.
AI might end up destroying all of our jobs and creating armies of semi-sentient robots programmed to kill us, but it can also be used to do immense good like this. I’m fascinated by AI and do believe we are at the beginning of a revolution, perhaps as big as the internet. Like all technology, it isn’t inherently good or bad — it’s what we do with it. So more of this please.
Never forget
After killing hundreds of thousands of Americans through sheer stupidity and incompetence, getting impeached (twice), and trying to overthrow the government, Trump’s reputation has taken a bit of a hit. But with all the chaos, destruction and death, many people have forgotten what incited the virulent opposition to Trump in the first place. And that was his appalling treatment of women.
Trump was accused by 19 women of rape and/or sexual assault and has gone on record calling women “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals”. Thankfully we are getting a reminder of what kind of man the GOP is lining up to elect as their candidate for 2024 courtesy of journalist E Jean Carroll, who is currently embroiled in a civil battery and defamation lawsuit with the former president. Carroll claims Trump raped her in a dressing room in New York in the 1990’s — a charge Trump denies, but can no longer evade now he is out of office.
As of today, Trump’s attempt to have the case thrown out has been denied the judge. So thankfully he’s going to have to testify and answer the allegations with the whole world watching.
Conspirituality Podcast appearance
I’ll be appearing on the Conspirituality Podcast this week for an interview with Derek Beres. It’s a big honor to be invited on the show as it is not only one my personal favorites, but generally regarded of the most important podcasts in the country right now. Conceived in the wake of the the Covid pandemic, the Conspirituality team have relentlessly exposed New Age cults, anti-vax wellness grifters, and conspiracy theorists. If you’re not subscribed to the show, you really should be. I’ll be chatting to Derek about rising antisemitism and Russell Brand amongst other topics, so stay tuned!
Happy Monday :)
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Is Sullivan living in a cube-shaped Bizarro world?
DeSantis goes “to war against wokeness” by using the power of the state to crush dissent, and Sullivan sees in this “the totalitarian essence of wokeness”?!
Critics of “woke” complain openly against that it supports equality for all, and Sullivan sees wokeness as “a denial of core American values”??!!
Carlson spends hour after hour attacking critical race theory as THE evil of our time, and Sullivan sees Carlson as not being pulled into “the cynical distraction of critical theory madness”???!!!
And that’s from just ONE sentence he wrote!
Congratulations, that’s very cool ! I have been following the D Beres podcast, good stuff.