For the last few weeks I’ve been hearing a lot about ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot that can tell stories, write code and answers questions. My brother had told me he’d had it write code for him and then correct bugs in the code when he pointed it out to ChatGPT. I was intrigued. I’d experimented some with Stable Diffusion that generates art based on prompts and also with short stories written by AI, but the buzz on the internet seemed to indicate this chat bot was taking things to a new level. This evening I finally sat down to try it out. I started by asking ChatGPT to generate ..read more

This was originally posted on Facebook on February 12, 2008. I just read John McCain’s victory speech after today’s Republican primaries. This passage caught my eye: They will paint a picture of the world in which America’s mistakes are a greater threat to our security than the malevolent intentions of an enemy that despises us and our ideals; a world that can be made safer and more peaceful by placating our implacable foes and breaking faith with allies and the millions of people in this world for whom America, and the global progress of our ideals, has long been “the last, best hope of earth ..read more

There is a lot of interesting writing going up right now marking the anniversary of the January 6, 2021 storming of the capitol. I’m marking this anniversary by revisiting material I published on Facebook in the weeks immediately after the right wing insurrection. I’m also drawing on the 40 minute NY Times’ documentary Day of Rage: How Trump Supporters Took the U.S. Capitol (published June 30, 2021) that offers minute by minute analysis of January 6, 2021 drawn from thousands of primary sources including a lot of video from the rioters themselves. Insurrectionist crowd dynamics One of the key ..read more

This was originally published by Tim Nafziger in Jesus Radicals on December 18, 2010 The arrest of Assange and attacks on Mastercard, Visa and Paypal by “Operation Payback” have garnered far more attention than the cables themselves. Their denial of service attacks shut down these major sites by loading the site over and over again very quickly. The real world equivalent might be a huge crowd of people showing up to the mall with no intentions of shopping so that no one could get in to shop. The New York Times quoted one Internet guru comparing Operation Payback to the battle a ..read more

Photo: Participants at the February 2017 Hope for the Future gatherings. From left to right: Rafael Barahona, Calenthia Dowdy, Ann Jacobs, Evelin Gonzalez and Colleen Whigham-Brockington. Photo by Jenny Perez Castro. This piece was originally published in June 2017 in The Mennonite magazine. It’s been seven months since I last wrote in this space about the results of the U.S. presidential election. Since then the broader shape of Trumpism has become clearer: there is a growing wave of misogynist and openly white supremacist groups in the United States that are emboldened to target women, Musli ..read more

This post was co-written by Tim Nafziger and Mark van Steenwyk in 2017 (see original) in response to the backlash against anti-fascists actions in Charlottesville, Virginian in August 2017. We’re reposting it with a new title because it feels even more relevant today as we watch the white liberal response to the burning of the police precinct building in Minneapolis last night. If you’re not a pacifist, see what happens when you substitute the word “liberal” for “pacifist.” If you aren’t Mennonite, consider what our message might look like to your own community. This is the second in a series ..read more

This morning’s NY Times piece, “How It All Came Apart for Bernie Sanders” is a must read for every supporter of the Sanders campaign. It’s not a pleasant article, but learning from mistakes is critical collective work, even when it happens in a painful public way. While the focus of my political work has not been electoral campaigns, I think we have to recognize that the Bernie movement is inextricably tied to electoral politics. So it must, to some extent, submit to measuring itself by that framework, which is the focus on the NY Times piece. It must also grapple with a grasroots movement mea ..read more

This poem was written two and a half years ago when I heard of the assasination of Michael J Sharp in the Congo. This poem previously published here. MJ was a contributor here on YAR for a few years. You can read his blog posts here. Lima Bean Eulogy We planted lima beans the morning after villagers found MJ’s body. The rotund little green dumplings nestling to the damp earth He nestled in a shallow grave with Zaida and Betu along the road from from Bukonde to Tshimbulu in Kasai. In a few weeks those dumplings will bust up, burst out and wind their way above our highest hedges. So this is ..read more