Public Reason: Is someone bringing information or analysis of the situation to the table? Or is someone just trying to make somebody else clickthrough so they can sell their eyeballs to advertisers? Read the first! Ignore the second!
As for the substantive points at issue, it seems to me simply stupid that Trump did not conspire to engage in an insurrection—more than a riot and less than a war—to overturn the proper functioning of the government, and simply stupid to argue that the President is not an officer of the United States when the Constitution requires that he swear to “faithfully execute the Office of the President”.
As for the procedural points at issue, the ironic thing is that in slagging Jonathan Chait Henry Farrell is, of course, reinforcing what he sees as the malign tendencies pushing Chait to become ChaitGPT—and thus becoming part of the problem. Which is why Farrell wants to shift the conversation to personal intellectual hygiene, in some sense:
Henry Farrell: Why Jonathan Chait says outrageous things <programmablemutter.com/…>: ‘The political economy of ChaitGPT…. We live in an attention economy… forces the successful… to become a crude approximation of themselves if they aren’t possessed of exceptional self-control…. Large Language Models were creating a reverse Turing Test, where it would be increasingly difficult to distinguish certain prominent op-ed columnists from the vectorized clouds of statistical associations between text-tokens that might be used to model them…. My objection to most professional contrarians isn’t that they outrage my core beliefs, but that they don’t do so in particularly interesting ways. It’s much harder to distinguish Chait from ChaitGPT than it ought be…. But much more importantly, I wouldn’t particularly fancy the chances of many of the rest of us…. We still live in a world that’s… condensing our opinions and beliefs into crude summaries and simplifications. Fixing that—rather than bagging on any one individual opinionator, however annoying—seems to me the bigger problem…
