Wednesday O/R/T: TTAC Goes AI, Princess George Is Dethroned, No White Men For Harris, No Music For Young Men

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copywritten but still bitten, it almost sound like, almost pumpin’, but it ain’t down like

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Now, on to the show!

Well, before this they had natural stupidity

If you’ve been reading The Story Of TTAC on this site, you know just how Bizarro World things got during my decade with the site. We’re talking moral depravity aplenty, little German men attacking big African-American strippers, plus more Opus Dei action than you’ll find in two Dan Brown books. And yet I feel, with plenty of justification, that the lowest moment in the site’s history is… right now.

Recent news-ish articles on TTAC contain the disclaimer that This article was co-written using AI and was then heavily edited and optimized by our editorial team. Given that most of the articles are 7th-grade essay length of 500 words or thereabouts, exactly how much heavy editing and optimizing is going on?

But wait, it gets better. Some commenters are claiming that the phrase “AI” is being deleted from their responses.

The clear objective on VerticalScope’s part here is to shove TTAC’s face even harder into the ground, all the better to make their feckless “AutoGuide” site shine in comparison. Surely the next move is to have all the articles auto-generated by a bot that reads other sources. What a miserable fate for a website that once meant so much to me and to many of you as well.

On a positive note, I do think the large language model is doing a better job than the bizarre circus-freak assortment of perverts and mentally ill people who make up the bulk, literally, of the staff at most major websites now. There’s also something to be said for matching the quality of your product to your reader; one commenter on the “AI” story wrote that

But fewer $80.000 Super Duty trucks and more Mavericks, Rangers and $40,000 F-150s, and perhaps some Fusions and Tauruses (and who knows, maybe a $35,000 Mustang GT?) would probably go a long way to profitablilty.

That’s right, super genius! Nothing hurts Ford’s profitability more than selling all the $80k Super Duty trucks they can build, and nothing would help it more than bringing back the Taurus!

Look how they massacred my boy

During the formation lap of the Belgian GP, I made two predictions to Danger Girl. “There’s no way Hamilton doesn’t bully past these two butter-soft pansies in the first lap… and there’s no way he wins the race.” I was essentially correct on the first prediction. Checo Perez, who should be in Chinese F4, and Sharrl LeClaire, who has all the aggression of a milk-soaked Pocky, both moved over for Sir Lewis with the sort of submissive eagerness not seen since Dakota Johnson made her big-screen debut.

Having done everything but salute Sir Lewis as he drove by, LeClaire then turned into Kevin Magnussen when it was time to balk Oscar Piastri, the only non-Silver-Arrow driver on the grid who was interested in racing for the lead. Without those three laps of double-blocking and weaving, Piastri would have had another win. The kid is mentally strong now and looking dangerously like McLaren’s #1 driver.

Let me tell you who looks like the Mercedes #1 driver: George Russell. Who did his own strategy on the fly then held off FIA-penalty-immune Hamilton for the win even as Sir’s team was encouraging him to take a run at it. It was the most uplifting and emotionally impactful F1 race I’ve seen this year, but then something like this happened:

FIA: Alright, George, your car is legal.

Mystery person: hey, you should weigh that a second time.

FIA: We don’t weigh cars a second time.

Mystery person: You should, though. You should weigh it again.

FIA: Oh my God, it’s 1.5 kilos light.

And chust like that, the race was awarded to Sir Lewis, who up to this point had been griping to everyone who would listen that he hadn’t been given an option to run on George’s strategy. The fact that George did his own strategy, and that Lewis is the strategically weakest driver on the grid not named Zhou, made no difference.

Conspiracy theory time: Mercedes knew that George would wear his tires down into an underweight zone, and someone on the Hamilton side snitched to the FIA. That requires some nose-holding to believe, but how else could it have gone down?

It doesn’t matter. Other than the worst of the LH44 fans, who have been shotgunning social media with treatises on what a difference three pounds can make, everybody knows that George won the race. Most criticially, George knows. He out-thought and out-drove Lewis yet again.

Other notes:

• The Briatore Era at Alpine is here in earnest. Expect results to follow.

• Sainz to Williams? What does he know? Or is there anything to know?

• Is it really a concern about violence at the Mexico GP that has prevented a Perez demotion? And why is everybody so convinced it’s Danny Ric’s seat, when Tsunoda has so comprehensively out-performed him this year, including coming up to his back bumper from 20th?

Jeff Bridges: not the only Dude now

Segregated fundraisers: so hot right now. So on the heels of the wildly successful “White women for Harris”, we have “White Men for Harris”…

…except we don’t. It’s White Dudes for Harris.

Does this matter? I’d suggest it does. Let me make one thing perfectly clear, Nixon-style: a significant portion of ACF will vote for Kamala in the election, for reasons that range from the sensible to the hysterical. In that regard, the left-leaning ACFers are the same as the right-leaning ones. What fascinates me about the white-dude meeting, led by Jeff Bridges, Mayor Pete, and so on, is their choice of word. I don’t think “dude” is a nod to the famous “Big Lebowski” character. I think it was a deliberate choice.

After eight years of blaming white men for everything under the sun, White Men for Harris would have felt too close to Hitler Nazis for Harris. So the Democrats dug out an old trick. Remember how Black men used to be called “boy” in the South? Doing so was intended to un-man them, in the classic sense. It was meant to reduce their sense of power and agency.

Therefore, White Men become “White Dudes”, or “White Guys”. Slate sent a reporter to the event. He was both perceptive and giddy:

Is this what it’s like to be a part of a movement? One of the more interesting aspects about the White Dudes for Harris stream was how all the speakers resisted the desire to scold or lecture the assembled Caucasians about the many, many world-historic crimes they have unleashed upon the face of the earth. The tone was positive and empathetic, confident that white men are capable of goodness—a departure, I think, from the hectoring morality that would go on to doom the momentum of Clinton’s 2016 campaign. The opportunity to extinguish MAGAdom is so enticing that it has purged one of the most self-sabotaging inclinations in the American liberal’s coalition: the fractious adjudication of identity that can too often become a priority over winning elections. The White Dudes for Harris cause grows stronger every day. We are cringe, but we are free.

There’s something painfully schizophrenic about the way parts of the Left approach white men. On one hand, they’re the root of all evil, and the ultra-villain. On the other hand, they’re cringey nerds, Brooklyn Dads, weak and feminized. The coin is flipped towards whatever side is most expedient at the moment.

I’m not sure it helps VP Kamala’s chances to draw such an obvious line between the white men who support Trump and the white dudes who support her. Put aside your choice of candidate. Do you want to be a dude or a man? Do you think the XB-70 and the Browning Automatic Rifle and the 454 Stingray were engineered by white dudes? When it was time to take Mount Suribachi, did they search for dude volunteers? Other than Dude Wipes, what have dudes ever done? Remember that the word itself started as a slur, for men who couldn’t do the real work of ranching.

I am very conscious nowadays about speaking of men, not guys or dudes, when I converse with other men. I suggest you be the same way. If you’re for Harris, then stand up and be a white man for Harris, alright?

(Note: this does not apply to my female readers and “readers of color”. Do not appropriate my culture, which includes unnecessary references to the XB-70 Valkyrie.)

OK… Millennial?

My son, The Commander, is playing bass in a week-long “rock camp” this week. After several weeks spent doing plane stuff and serious Air-Force-ish leadership stuff, I thought this would be a nice way to relax before the beginning of school. He’s having a great time, largely because he’s way ahead of his fellow teenagers when it comes to playing and understanding music.

Here’s what has me a bit frosted: There are about ten bands in this camp, five or six kids each. They all had to pick songs to learn and perform. Almost without fail, they have been “guided” by the counselors to pick stuff from the Nineties. You know… Stone Temple Pilots, Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Creed, and so on. When my son and another kid tried to get at least a Vulfpeck song on the agenda, they were flat-out denied “because nobody knows those songs”.

So I did the math. The first STP album is now 31 years old. Let’s say I’d been in a camp like this, at John’s age. It would have been 1986. 31 years behind 1986 is… 1955. Go look at the top songs of 1955. I would rather have chewed glass than play most of that junk, although it isn’t like my kid and I don’t play “Autumn Leaves” on a fairly frequent basis.

Back in 1986, I didn’t want to play a single thing older than Zep IV, and I was focused on modern rock from Iron Maiden, The Fixx, and so on. So why aren’t they letting kids play their music? Isn’t there something wrong with that? How much of it is the relative lack of non-rap/trap/crap music on the charts now, and how much of it is parents forcing their tastes on their kids? Why do only two of 50 kids know about Vulfpeck, which is probably the most important art-rock band on the scene? Why are they all so thoroughly versed in the work of Nirvana, for God’s sake — music that felt tired and cliched five years after it came out?

I don’t know what the solution is, but it’s not to point young musicians backwards all the time. Not that I’m innocent. When it was time to state his favorite record, my son said “Heavy Weather”, released the same year Brother Bark was born. I try to play the new stuff in the car, but there’s only so much “GLORB” I can take.