Two things came across my desk today that made me stop and ponder the meaning of life. By desk, I mean my phone while sipping my G&T mid-afternoon on my front porch. Don’t judge. We’ve been iced in for three days and I homeschool my kids. “Daddy needs his special teacher juice a little earlier today, kids. Math is hard.” By “pondering the meaning of life”, I mean I scratched my head and wondered aloud a phrase that rhymes with “cut the muck”. I’ll explain.
The first thing was this whole AI ChaGPT. What fresh hell is this nonsense? It’s a chatbot, obviously. It seems that people are simply using this program to write for them. Reporters, college kids, you name it. Adam has a great post on this on his site. I encourage you to check it out. He is one of the “natural writers” (as in, non-AI) I enjoy reading. Still I have to ask what is wrong with people today. I know that writing comes easily to me. I’ve been doing it for years and I rather enjoy it. I also get that not everyone can turn a phrase quickly. But to degenerate into the sheer slothfulness of letting a computer write your assignments start to finish? It also makes me wonder, a I withdraw more from the world and get my bearings in a world of tradition, how truly “fake” the world has become. The football player who collapsed on the field a month ago appeared in a video released by the league recently. Many are speculating that the video is itself a “deep fake”. Again I ask and encourage all to use their common sense. If things don’t appear to be right, they probably aren’t. Ask yourself every time, can I trust this thing before me? The answer most of the time these days is usually no.
I make this promise to you all here. Every word on these pages is my own and if they were first uttered by someone else I slap quotation marks around them.
The other thing several friends sent me today were the ridiculous comments made by Bergoglio in Zaire, sorry, Congo. Apparently the usurper prattled on about using your hands or playing with your fingers or something. “The thumb should point back at you, you rigid traditionalist. The index finger is to point at all the other rigid traditionalists and laugh. The middle finger…”
Stop right there, Jorge. I’m from Newark. I know how to use the middle finger. It was a question on the test to get my driving permit. Gotta’ make sure you know how to signal other drivers when the horn’s not loud enough.
Also, are we living in a literal clown world? “This finger does this. That finger does that. Blah blah blah.” Generic childish platitude gobbledegook. That’s how we “catechize” these days. And just this afternoon I reviewed my son’s doctrine test. He wrote an essay on why the Mass is a sacrifice and is, in fact, the self-same sacrifice of Calvary. He cited Scripture. He mentioned the Fathers and Doctors. He drew upon the Baltimore Catechism. He did all of this in two paragraphs.
I must be doing something wrong.
He never mentioned his fingers once. Maybe I’ll have him go back and edit it. He can mention how in the Traditional Latin Mass the priest’s fingers are extremely important. The priest, having pronounced the words of consecration does not separate his thumb and index finger again until the ablutions out of love for Our Lord lest he drop any particles. I bet even a chatbot could figure that out.
Harvey Millican's Blog: Musings of a Trad Dad 