Lightning Round!
A Slack Tide spectacular on everything from politicized Christianity to Trump to Substack debates to fishing to AI to American decline to time's passage to hope to fear to Lana Del Rey.....and more!
If you’ve been around here a while — and many of you have, we’re coming up on our fifth anniversary in October (that’s a half-decade of deathless prose, matchless insight, and overused parentheses and em dashes) — then you know I tend not to get swept up in Substack internal policy debates. Which I regard as circle jerks, another activity I tend not to participate in, as it’s unsightly, unhygienic, and who wants the dry cleaning tab?
For instance, I deliberately sat out the Great Nazi Debate of 2024. (Should Substack allow Nazis on their platform?) Because who cares? It’s a platform. There are unspeakably atrocious people on every platform, even if some platforms have more than most. (See Elon’s Disinformation Emporium.) But I’ve probably encountered two wannabe Nazis in my entire time here — a lot fewer brushes than I’d have if say, I worked for the Trump administration. Though there was one the other day, when I found myself in a Notes scuffle, and a combatant called me the n-word, despite my being a person of whiteness. I was flattered, since I had been working on my base tan. But what can you do? Except maybe say, “Bye, Felicia!” in German (Tschüss, Felicia!), and move on with your life, as the sad little master-race’er heads back to his rage-masturbatorium.
I’ve been moderately more interested in the current debate, in which Substack partnered with Pangram, the AI-detector, so that readers could use AI to determine whether a writer is using AI (who said irony is dead?). In theory, I should be for it. As I only use AI as a search engine, to ask grammar and usage questions (such as “is masturbatorium a real word?”), and to produce unflattering cover-art of subjects when Getty Images isn’t getting the job done. But I would never dream of using AI to knock out actual sentences or paragraphs. As someone who has been a writer my entire adult life, I’m already paranoid enough about getting replaced by fellow humans. I don’t need to grease the skids by helping along machines from Sam Altman’s dark imaginings.
So I should theoretically be for Pangram, even if it functions as a tattletale hall monitor. If someone’s cheating, that’s worth knowing. (At least while it’s still considered cheating — soon enough, when the kids who used AI to write all their English papers graduate, it won’t be.) Except that there are now enough stories of false positives being hung around honest writers’ necks (see my pals over at Flylab, one of the best fishing sites on Substack, who have written about this), that I’m not for it if it still only has beta-level reliability. Writers trying to make a living need enough help these days, without having the replacement tools turned on them for no good reason. Taking AI’s word for this, with iffy results, is a bit like naming an arsonist as the new fire marshal.
But that won’t stop me from splitting the baby, anyway. Two months ago, when my questions cupboard wasn’t exactly bare, but my muse just didn’t find anything it wanted to write to (I should blame myself, but why, when I can blame you?), I did an all-AI questions-generated Ask Matt, covering the waterfront. The answers were 100 percent mine, as the writing here always is. (My solemn pledge. If you get a false Pangram positive, it is indeed fake news — I like the sound of my own voice too much to let a bot perform under my byline.) And the results were received warmly enough, since readers are generally less insecure than writers are. So not having a 2,000-word essay I wanted to blow out this week, I thought I’d repeat the experiment, letting Chaz (as I call ChatGPT, to warm things up a bit) throw some fire in the hole on every subject from religion to politics to AI to writing to fishing to fear to hope to time’s passage to you name it. All, while I respond in more rapid-fire fashion than I usually do, when turning a single reader question into an entire essay. Sometimes, small plates are preferable to overfilling entrees. But do keep those human questions (for which there’s no true substitute) coming, at askmattlabash@gmail.com. I’ll let Chaz get us started. (He/It is in bold):
What is the difference between righteous anger and simply enjoying being angry?
Righteous anger is when I’m angry. Merely enjoying being angry is what other people are when they disagree with me.
You’ve written critically about the politicization of Christianity. What would American Christianity look like if Christians stopped trying to win elections and started trying to save souls?
Well, they wouldn’t have to try as hard to save souls, for starters. Because the unsaved wouldn’t come at Christianity with as much of a cocked fist, having been exposed to so many un-Christian Christians whose politics have both sullied and supplanted their God. (Not all Christians, or anywhere close to all, mind you. Don’t want to paint with too broad a brush.) As Gandhi is often falsely accused of saying: “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so not like your Christ.” The words might not actually be Gandhi’s, but the sentiment is widespread. And if you’re supposed to be in the multiplication business instead of the division business — which is pretty much the mandate of the Great Commission — then the existence of that sentiment should give you pause. As should this hilarious bumper sticker, which I recently photographed in a Safeway parking lot:
Is there anything Trump has been right about that his enemies are incapable of admitting?