From Brian Drayton: “An essential fact to meditate upon is that regardless of what we say, the way we act, the way we are, is “our testimony to the whole world.” In that connection, what are we showing, and what can we show, about what we believe about the foundations of our activities?”
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Amor vincat The Golden Rule comes to Philly
April 28, 2023
I’ve been anticipating this for a long time now. The Golden Rule was a ship that some amazing and crazy activists tried sailing into the Pacific nuclear test zones back in 1958 to protest nuclear weapons. About ten years ago a campaign organized to fix it back up and it started a tour of the eastern U.S. last year. It’s finally coming up the Delaware River and I’m excited to see it and to connect with all the others excited to see it (I knew Golden Rule sailor George Willoughby back in the day and it’ll probably be a reunion of some of my old Philly peacenik crowd circa the 1990s).
There’s a Facebook page for its Philadelphia events. I’ve copied them below. I can’t make the Haddonfield Meeting event, as my own Cropwell Meeting set up a fabulous event that day before we knew the Golden Rule schedule, but I’ll try to make the Tuesday afternoon and evening ones.
Sun May 7: 10:00 am — 12:30 pm, Haddonfield Friends Meeting (Shore Support) SIGN UP FOR THIS EVENT HERE: https://fb.me/e/1cUiatSh5
Learn about the resistance embodied in the actions of the Golden Rule, and especially the role of George Willoughby, a past member at Haddonfield.
- Tuesday, May 9
3 – 4pm The Northwind Sailing Schooner escorts Golden Rule to
Penns landing. (All seats filled)
https://northwindsail.org/ meets and
4 – 5 pm Penn’s landing greeting event with flags, bells etc.
City Councilor Mark Squilla is expected to present a Citation.
5:30 – 7 pm Cherry Street TBA speakers, video, workshop on
TPNW?
- May 10 WED
Local action 11 — 1 at Vietnam Veterans Memorial — Speaking and leafleting to passers by
SIGN UP FOR THIS EVENT HERE: https://fb.me/e/2zUhSZKws
1 – 3 Break free time
3 ‑6 Boat tours and sails at Penn’s Landing
- May 11 Thurs.
Local action May 11 7 – 9 Swarthmore Library,
Swarthmore College — Israa Al-Helli ialhell1@swarthmore.edu
and the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies will participate.
- May 12 FRI
Local action 11 — 1 at Korean War Memorial — Speaking and
leafleting to passersby SIGN UP FOR THIS EVENT HERE: https://fb.me/e/I4plU3io
1 – 3 Break free time
3 ‑6 Boat tours and sails at Penn’s Landing
- MAY 13, SAT 1:30 – 4pm Peace walk from Liberty Bell with stop at
Christ’s Church at 2nd and Market for brief peace observance.
Participants will then proceed to Penn’s Landing and meet others
at Golden rule for concert at pier. 4 – 8 pm Golden rule concert,
speakers, food fun dancing and the ever popular “Wash the Flag”.
This will be the official send off… (Golden Rule leaves the
next day)
AI’s Quaker answers are old news
April 27, 2023
Sometimes I highlight responses that have come into Quaker Ranter. Elaine Leet wrote a nice email that about my post on the AI chatbots using Friends Journal as a source for material for their Quaker responses. Here’s part of her message:
The most important thing to keep in mind about ChatGPT and AI, IMO, is that it’s from the past and about the past, all history and established patterns… Friends Journal is about the present and the future, especially those wonderful videos featuring real present-day Friends. The Now and Tomorrow need to be our focus.
Read her full response in the comment section.
Yes, you could type Quaker queries into the ChatGPT typing monkey or you could, you know, support Friends Journal
April 19, 2023
Via Mackenzie Morgan on a Mastodon thread, a Washington Post article, “Inside the secret list of websites that make AI like ChatGPT sound smart.” The best part is that it lets you type in URLs to see just how much data the chatbot is pulling from particular websites.
Of course, I had to start looking at my niche of Quaker websites. Yes, behind my laid-back demeanor I can be quietly competitive, so I ranked them. The count is “tokens,” which the article describes as “small bits of text used to process disorganized information — typically a word or phrase.” This is a Google AI chatbot but presumably all of these bots are scraping the same open website data.
- friendsjournal.org 1.44m
- quakerquaker.org 620k
- afsc.org 300k
- qhpress.org 290k
- westernfriend.org 230k
- nyym.org 210k
- afriendlyletter.com 160k
- pym.org 150k
- fcnl.org 140k
- quakersintheworld.org 140k
- quakerpodcast.org 130k
- quaker.org.uk 130k
- fgcquaker.org 120k
- Quaker.org 110k
- Quakerspeak.com 100k
- quakercloud.org 58k
- friendscouncil.org 39k
- quakerinfo.com 32k
- quakerinfo.org 22k
- thefriend.org 29k
- fwcc.world 12k
- fwccamericas.org 5.8k
There’s been a flurry of blog posts by Quakers typing things into ChatGPT. See Mark Pratt-Russum’s “A Quaker Pastor Asks ChatGBT to Write a Sermon” or Chuck Fager’s “Chatbot Names Top Quaker Issues; Makes Blog Obsolete?”
If the ChatGPT results sound like a rehashed Friends Journal article, as Chuck implies, well they mostly are: with Friends Journal and QuakerQuaker (huh!) accounting for as much of ChatGPT’s content as the next dozen-ranked sites put together. (Am I missing any content-rich Quaker site?)
So yes, you could type queries into a chatbot that has no idea what it’s thinking. Or you could, you know, support the Quaker media that Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, etc., are training their bots on. Real Quaker writing by real Quakers who write. I’ve long thought big tech is the biggest threat to Quaker media but now they’ve started competing against us with our own words. It’s really quite nuts.
Changing hats to wear mine as senior editor of Friends Journal. The reason our website seems to rule the roost of AI content-scraping is that we don’t have a paywall. Generous donors, mostly everyday readers, allow us to make all of our articles and QuakerSpeak videos and Quaker.org explainers free to read. Yes, chatbots are “reading” it, but so too are isolated seekers looking for a faith path and spiritual answers and stumbling on Friends Journal. Think about becoming an FJ sustaining member and at least join the free email list from the box on the homepage. I’m a bit surprised and humbled that QuakerQuaker is so high up.
Think about it: a donate to Friends Journal and QuakerQuaker will help ensure quality chatbot answers for generations to come!
War and Peace
April 4, 2023
Over on the Cropwell Meeting website, stories and pictures from a talk George Rubin gave this past weekend. George is a dear friend, a member of Medford (N.J.) Meeting, and a former Friends Journal trustee. But in the winter of 1944 – 45, he was a 19 year old kid from Brooklyn flying through heavy flak in a B‑17G Flying Fortress over Munich. His experiences as a bomber and prisoner of war turned him into a committed pacifist: “Human beings are too precious” he told us. I tried to transcribe as quickly as he spoke, taking pictures in the pauses in between sentences. It’s all quite a story.
Ten Miles Round
April 1, 2023
I wrote this month’s Friends Journal intro column, “A Humble Band of Prophets”:
I’ve been thinking a lot about that phone call [from a member of a struggling meeting] and about this month’s lead article by Andy Stanton-Henry, who urges us to think about what it would mean to focus our attention on a radius of ten miles. This exact measurement comes from a rousing line from twentieth-century Friend Thomas Kelly: “Such bands of humble prophets can recreate the Society of Friends and the Christian church and shake the countryside for ten miles around.” Kelly in turn got it from seventeenth-century Quaker founder George Fox, who said that anyone raised up as a modern prophet might “shake all the country in their profession for ten miles round.”
Ten miles seems like such a triflingly small distance to us today. It’s a few minutes at highway speeds. The U.S. Census Bureau tells us the average work commute is 27 miles; the Department of Transportation calculates that U.S. drivers average 36 miles per day.
Personal electronic communication has made distance even more meaningless, and it’s easy to build and maintain friendships unbounded by any geography. There’s a mea culpa in this: I’m one of those extremely online people who spends their days in constant communication with people well outside of a ten-mile radius. This can be productive, and yet: those ten miles.
You can read the whole article by following the link.
Friends Journal Apparently our weddings are now deemed glamorous
March 28, 2023
Glam This line is one of my favorites: “According to the History Channel, an English Dissenter called George Fox established the Religious Society of Friends, or the Quaker Movement, in England in the 1800s.” I’m not sure what’s worse: admitting you’re sourcing your work from the History Channel or getting the date wrong by a couple of centuries (Quakerism is considered to have started in 1652).
But in reality, I’m not sure you need to click through to the article unless you want to see just how bad it’s gotten on some of these SEO-chasing content farms. I’m pretty sure this was largely written by AI. The ZeroGPT detector picked up some sentences; I checked other articles written under the same bylines and ZeroGPT lights up whole paragraphs.
How is blockchain like Quakerism?
March 28, 2023
Filed in the “whaaa?” department: I find this more curious and surprising than enlightening but the author is a bone fide Friend who argues that the evolution of the internet is analogous to a Quaker model of organization.
Forbes