The Bluestocking, vol 306

this morn, the skies did open with a persistent drizzle

Happy Friday!

If you notice something different about the newsletter this week, it’s because—a mere million months after joining Substack—I finally got around to fiddling with the colour and font options. (The buttons are now a colour I call “McInerney Yellow”.) And thanks to everyone who had STRONG OPINIONS on Australian Traitors last week in the comments section. This week, feel free to discuss Starmer.

Two gobbets of pod-based joy for you this week: Page 94 answering listener questions, and Blocked and Reported talking about the British gender-critical schism, an episode that has really tested my confident belief that you never get in trouble for things you say on a podcast.

Helen

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Nightmares From My Father (Times, £)

For students of Labour history [the impossibility of slotting Starmer into an established Labour tradition] is a problem. […] What colleagues and voters who read this biography will really want to know is how and why he went from Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet to fireside chats with Tony Blair. Why he exiled Corbyn, the predecessor he called a friend, and jettisoned the leftish manifesto upon which he was elected. Why he wanted to be Labour leader — secretly practising responses to budgets from almost the moment he was elected an MP — when no policy now seems too important to abandon. Or, to borrow a lyric from the Wedding Present, the indie band he befriended at Leeds University: to ask him if the ends was worth the means … was there really no in-between?

“Keir’s like a ratchet,” one friend says. “He relentlessly moves in only one direction, he never goes backwards.” For now, the ratchet is cranking rightwards. Starmer is surrounded by conviction Blairites and weary warriors of the party’s right who do like politics: their own. This “ordinary-looking man in a hurry to get somewhere” — to use Baldwin’s nicely epigrammatic phrase — has chosen a route to power that the people he has left behind fear has made him a prisoner of the factionalism he professes to dislike.

But in the last couple of dozen pages, as Starmer muses on the kind of government he would like to lead, an intriguing possibility arises. This is a man preoccupied primarily with fixing what is broken without fuss. Stitching Katy’s dress. Digitising the case files of the Crown Prosecution Service, an achievement of which he is self-parodically proud. What if, once in power, once has fixed the problem of how to win an election, he abandons the people he hired to defeat the Corbynites as quickly as he abandoned the Corbynites themselves? While the plans for government he shares here are distinctively Starmer, they are also more Miliband than Blair.

Patrick Maguire, one of the best journalists writing about Labour today, reviews Tom Baldwin’s biography of Keir Starmer. The whole review is interesting, but the section above stood out—what if the Manchurian Blairite becomes the Manchurian Milibandite when he gets into office?

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PS. A friend who is reading the Starmer biography has discovered that it quotes my Substack post on how Keir Starmer’s defining quality is his ruthlessness. That post was also an attempt to make sense of the defining act of Starmer’s leadership so far: suspending his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn from Labour.

But if his ruthlessness is Starmer’s superpower, his weakness is a lack of speed. The terrible unedifying bundle in the Commons this week partly came about because Starmer badly needed to reverse out of his holding line, which dates back to October, that Labour wants a mere “humanitarian pause” in Gaza. Instead, he wanted his MPs to have the chance to endorse something with the magic word “ceasefire” in it. But he had not already used one of his own Opposition Day debates to do this—that is, parliamentary time reserved for the non-governing parties to propose motions—with the result that his MPs have faced everything from actual threats to disruption while out campaigning.

So Labour tried instead to piggyback on to an SNP Opposition Day debate on Wednesday, which upset the SNP and broke protocol. (The SNP motion was deliberately crafted to have lines in it—e.g. about Israel’s “collective punishment” of Gaza—that Starmer couldn’t support. The idea was that Labour would be ordered to abstain and the SNP could then say, “look, Labour don’t back a ceasefire”.)

Thanks to Hoyle’s intervention, Wednesday ended well for Labour on a technical level: Labour’s amendment was selected, it passed, its MPs now officially back some kind of ceasefire. But that was a result of luck, rather than judgement. And there is widespread unease about the amount of intimidation that MPs are facing on this issue.

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How AI Can Make History (The Verge)

One of the first challenges he encountered was that 18th-century fur traders do not sound anything like a language model assumes. Ask GPT-4 to write a sample entry, as I did, and it will produce lengthy reflections on the sublime loneliness of the wilderness, saying things like, “This morn, the skies did open with a persistent drizzle, cloaking the forest in a veil of mist and melancholy,” and “Bruno, who had faced every hardship with the stoicism of a seasoned woodsman, now lay still beneath the shelter of our makeshift tent, a silent testament to the fragility of life in these untamed lands.”

Whereas an actual fur trader would be far more concise. For example, “Fine Weather. This morning the young man that died Yesterday was buried and his Grave was surrounded with Pickets. 9 Men went to gather Gum of which they brought wherewith to Gum 3 Canoes, the others were employed as yesterday,” as one wrote in 1806, referring to gathering tree sap to seal the seams of their bark canoes. 

“The problem is that the language model wouldn’t pick up on a record like that, because it doesn’t contain the type of reflective writing that it’s trained to see as being representative of an event like that,” said Humphries. Trained on contemporary blog posts and essays, it would expect the death of a companion to be followed by lengthy emotional remembrances, not an inventory of sap supplies.

I thought this was a very interesting way of illustrating a problem with generative AI: it’s only as good as the corpus on which it’s been trained. Large Language Models can generate Olde Worlde language, but might also assume that everyone throughout history had the interiority of a 21st century Tumblr user.

That points to another problem. The current Large Language Models have been trained on books written by human authors like Stephen King—which the companies involved haven’t paid to plunder. But the next wave might be trained on . . . AI-generated copy made by the previous generation of LLMs. That would be the textual equivalent of photocopying a photocopy.

Chaser: Ed Zitron is extremely bearish on the current AI boom, arguing that the image and video generation is superficially stunning but still falls squarely into the Uncanny Valley. I’m not this downbeat—I know people who already find ChatGPT very useful—but it’s still a good counterpoint to the hype cycle.

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Quick Links

1. “It feels insane to me that the people who “deserve” Ozempic are the diabetics because they “need it” for their sugar control while totally ignoring the fact that those very same diabetics are likely getting prescribed Ozempic for the very same reasons as the people who “don’t need it,” namely: weight loss. I actually don’t think that we should be creating classes of deserving and underserving with respect to medication. Particularly when those judgements are based on exterior things, like fame, wealth, privilege, or access.” A great essay on Ozempic and judgement (Substack).

2. “These letters did not result in my release; if anything, they prolonged my stay [in a psych hospital]. I got my phone back — it would soon be revoked again, wisely — but in that brief interim, I sent out a newsletter to my hundreds of subscribers declaring that I was getting a divorce and asking them to Venmo me money for the custody battle I foresaw.” Emily Gould’s New York magazine essay on getting divorced (or not) generated a lot of commentary. She certainly sounds, er, high maintenance. Also I would say that classically, if you are a female writer, marrying a male writer is a Very Bad Idea. But the most interesting reaction, for me, was from Phoebe Maltz Bovy, who liked the essay for its countercultural turn:“It is a BREAK from the trend of insisting that in all hetero conflicts, the man is in the wrong.”

3. How to be a good podcast guest (Paul Bloom, Substack). Useful advice on both technical and intellectual stuff.

4. “So my fear is this: you might not be asexual. You might be suffering from PSSD [Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction]. You might not be a victim of stigma against your sexual identity; you might very well be a victim of the pharmaceutical industry.” Are you asexual or just on antidepressants? This Substack from 24-year-old Freya India, on Gen Z issues, is new to me (GIRLS).

See you next time! This newsletter now goes out to more than 19,000 people every week, but I’m always hungry for more readers. So if you enjoy it, please forward it to a friend.