Pun Salad

From across the pond, Daniel Hannan is looking askance:

The US wages economic war against Canada while cosying up to Russia and, now, China. There was a time when this would have shocked the world. How our expectations have sunk.

— Daniel Hannan (@DanielJHannan) September 25, 2026

Speaking of sunken expections vis-à-vis China, Jim Geraghty has some: No, the U.S.-China Relationship Is Not the Best It Has Ever Been.

Jim details an impressive number of additional data points. Summary:

On just about every conceivable front — arming and assisting U.S. adversaries, espionage, hacking and cyberwarfare, stealing intellectual property, smuggling oil, nuclear testing, detaining American citizens — the regime of the People’s Republic of China headed by Xi Jinping acts against American interests. These regime acts are not innocent misunderstandings or miscommunications. This is a ruthless totalitarian autocratic regime that wants a not-too-distant future where they are universally hailed as the ascending global power and the U.S. is pitied and mocked as a rapidly declining former great power — and, with de facto lackey regimes in Moscow, Tehran, and Pyongyang, calls the shots on the global stage.

Well, that's pretty disgusting. Sorry, Elvis, it's impossible for me to follow your lead here.

Also of note:

• Gee, I wonder if Kevin D. Williamson is going to cut any slack to … Unstatesmanlike Statesmen.

  Magic 8-Ball says: "Don't count on it."

  If it means anything, then “America First” means Americans first, even Americans as dotty and useless as Joe Biden, a contemptible and grubby little grasper who did not have much of a working brain back when he had something of a working brain. If you are a nationalist in any genuine sense, then your people are your people. But, of course, Trump is not a nationalist in any meaningful sense, for the same reason he isn’t really much of a patriot or a racist or a Christian—Trump is his own god, and he recognizes no loyalty at odds with his interests and no good that is not in accord with his appetites and desires. Trump may say that he cares about “America First,” but naturally he will wait and see what Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin or some Qatari potentate has to offer to him, too. Trump has on a hundred occasions sold out genuine American interests in the service of his own vanity and greed, and he’ll probably do it a hundred more times before he leaves office, however he leaves office.

  Magic 8-Ball also says: "Sorry, out of Dispatch gifted links this month. Subscribe."

• The right way to conduct a discussion. As (unsurprisingly) demonstrated by Steven Pinker, who pens An Open Letter to Scott Alexander.

  Background: Scott challenged Steven to a public debate on the usefulness of AI "doomerism". Scott is (fair to say) on the doomer side, Steven thinks that's a no-workie.

  Steven notes his previous thoughts on the more general topic, which he stands by:

  In fact my principal contribution to mass discourse on existential risk is a 31-page chapter called “Existential Risk” in my 2018 book Enlightenment Now. It addressed the criticism that the Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment, and ideal of progress were terrible mistakes because they will lead to human extinction by (among other things) runaway AI. My counterargument said nothing about maleness, polyamory, paranoia, or other irrelevancies. It did criticise doomer scenarios like the paperclipalypse, the AI that would cure cancer by conscripting all humans as guinea pigs in lethal experiments, the AI that would solve climate change by exterminating humanity, the AIs that would launch a global holocaust because humans were inconvenient, or the AIs that would grow exponentially until they boiled the oceans away with their waste heat or froze the planet with their spaceborne solar collectors. I argued that these scenarios had one or more of the following flaws:

  1. They had an underdeveloped conception of intelligence which treated it as a quantity of power which may be extrapolated from animals to dull humans to smart humans to AI to Artificial Superintelligence, the latter consisting of perfect omniscience. (This was the focus of my later exchange with Scott Aaronson.) I argued that any intelligent system is a mechanism which is good at solving some problems but not others, and which is inherently limited by knowledge about the world attainable only by observation and experimentation.
  2. They conflated intelligence with motivation, particularly self-preservation and dominance. I argued that these motives happened to come bundled with intelligence in Homo sapiens because we are products of natural selection, but they are not inherent to intelligent systems that are engineered.
  3. They assumed that an artificially intelligent system would monomaniacally pursue a single goal, heedless of side effects. I argued that trading off multiple competing goals is the essence of intelligence, so no genuine AI would wreak the ridiculous havoc imagined in the doomer scenarios.
  4. They assumed that human engineers would grant these systems unlimited and irreversible control over the earth’s physical infrastructure, amounting to omnipotence over every atom on the planet.

  Now, these arguments may be wrong, but they are far from trash talk. Similar ones have recently been made by many informed commentators, including Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Jerry Kaplan, Gary Marcus, Melanie Mitchell, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, and Andrew Ng. A 2025 Rand Corporation modelling analysis steel-manned the AI-extinction hypothesis by granting the assumption that AI had the objective to wipe out humanity, and concluded that there is “no describable scenario in which AI is conclusively an extinction threat to humanity.”

  This is far better than calling the people you disagree with a bunch of poopyheads.

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