Jonathan Parkes Allen 🌹

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it. Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying. Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence." Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter." Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter. They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created. One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility." Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies. That's the metered intelligence business model. And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

Unionists/ Yankee responses to this are about as expected. We venerate our ancestors with a statue, and they immediately want to kill you and blow it up. Care to explain why the visage of Robert E Lee warrants such a violent response?

I'm a Catholic, so my response to having only two kids as "bordering on sin" is nuanced. Choosing to limit family size intentionally without a grave reason is a big moral problem, yes. But that aside, I think we need to address something else on the pro-natalist Christian right (which I am very much a part of). It is generally unnatural to intentionally limit yourself to one or two kids. It is also unnatural to be open to life, to have 5+ children, with ZERO familial and community support. Traditional families had grandma living on the same street; spinster aunts and siblings who helped with babies; moms in the same neighborhood coming together daily to share the struggle. So many of the families at our church are struggling. Many kids, but parents live far away, don't practice the faith, or are estranged. Siblings are few and far between. Many of these people are trying to do something without the natural supports of a healthy community life. I'm all in on being fruitful and multiplying -- we currently have five kids and we aren't old yet! But we also need to be very aware of the breakdown of real community and the challenge that presents to big, fruitful, and often isolated families. We need more than encouraging "have more kids" if we are really going to rebuild a healthy Christian society.