Tuesday, April 9, 2024

Something's not right ( reposted from 3/14/11)



People on the so-called right like to pick on Sunny Hostin on the View. What she said yesterday about climate change is a case in point. The only thing about what she said that might have some merit is this: she said that "something was going on". Yep. I think so. Something is going on alright.

So this poem came to mind again.

I think the thing that might do us in is this mania for artificial intelligence. It's kind of a Terminator type scenario that I'm thinking of. People are relying too much on machines to do our thinking for us. What could go wrong. Plenty. Anyway, here's the poem.

4/9/24:

Looking over today's news and recollection of the most recent news gives me the kind of dread expressed in Second Coming .  Mostly, I fear that people have abandoned all sense of reason.  In such a circumstance were to become the norm, something dire must occur to break the impasse.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
 

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