I’ve been hearing so much over the years about this guy, George Soros, who is supposedly my puppetmaster. Unfortunately, I knew nothing about Soros except that he was a really rich guy, and right-wing nutjobs seemed to think he was hiding under their bed. Now, all is explained.
OK, so he’s a billionaire philanthropist who donates to good causes. That’s about it.
A fascinating bit of historical propaganda.
The message is about “The danger of increasing procreation of inferiors” and shows how the good German family on the left, with their two children, will be overwhelmed by the crude nose-picking progeny of those others. How awful! Clearly the people on the right must be culled. We know how that turned out.
We’ve outgrown all that, right? Only alt-right neo-Nazi scum are still peddling that kind of nonsense.
You know, like @WhiteHouse.
I just want to say that it is true that some people will have larger families than other people, but it doesn’t matter — all those children are still people, still have the same potential, and it is the responsibility of the nation to care for them all and give them all the opportunity to use that potential.
(via Kieran Healy)
When Trump goes down, Mike Pence does not get a pass. He must be recognized as a sycophantic enabler, equally guilty in all crimes against humanity.
No, I’m not going to quote it here. I can barely get past the first paragraph without gagging. It’s obsequiousness to such a degree that it ought to justify a firing squad.
I suppose the alternative is to stop raising boys to be such selfish little shits, but that’s going to take at least another generation.
OK, Democrats, who are the progressive women you’re going to support in the next election? (No, not Hillary Clinton, who I know would be better than the current toxic TV personality in chief, but I said progressive).
Also, I know women can also be toxic. Wanna bet the Republicans are grooming aggressively paranoid and disconnected from reality NRA mouthpiece Dana Loesch for high office?
The Republicans passed their horrible, evil tax plan. Guess who is going to benefit? This Koch scion.
Jesus. If all he was was a guy with bad taste with a shirt business, fine, OK, sure, express yourself, let’s see if you can make a go of it with a business selling your ugly shirts. But no, he’s just a parasite with rich relatives. He can’t fail.
Once upon a time I worried that all the right-wing militias were going to tear up this country. But it’s looking more and more like it’s going to have to be revolution against the undeserving rich, and the chickenshits who parade around with guns are going to be on the wrong side.
Who’s at fault for the Trump presidency? Ariel Dorfman says it so well. It’s not the Russians, it’s us.
I’m tired of hearing about how Russia intervened in the recent U.S. election and tired of the talk about collusion, and I’m especially fed up with the speculation that all this will doom the Trump presidency.
My weariness is not due to a lack of indignation at how a foreign country covertly helped a reckless con man become president. And I would certainly celebrate if the uncovering of crimes forced President Trump to abandon the White House and slink back to his tower. But I fear that the Russia investigations — and the hope that they will save the republic — are turning too many opponents of this administration into passive, victimized spectators of a drama performed by remote actors over which they have no control.
The psychic, intellectual and emotional energy expended on this issue would be better employed, I believe, by addressing a more fundamental concern: What was it, what is it, in our American soul that allowed the Russians to be successful?
Short of evidence that Russian hackers explicitly flipped voting machines, all they did was feed false information to a receptive audience that wanted to believe what Fake News was selling. We keep looking for an external cause for an American failure, and the real cause is right here at home: a wealthy oligarchy that’s been wrecking education for decades, that feeds the sense of entitlement of racist white people, that discourages taking a close look at policies and practices of the military-industrial complex, because that’s become a wonderful money funnel for the rich. Both Republicans and Democrats have been supporting a system of oppression that keeps the electorate fat, stupid, and greedy, and makes them easily manipulable. That we’re also vulnerable to manipulation by foreign sources is our fault, our weakness.
Real patriots would have been working for the last several decades to make the electorate better educated, better able to evaluate information, and more critical of our government. That’s where the strength of a democracy lies, and we’ve been undermining it for generations. Instead, we’ve built up a population that listens to Fox & Friends uncritically, that keeps Alex Jones and Ann Coulter in business, that thinks their illusory notions about what God is thinking is a path to truth.
The investigation into the Russian conspiracies is a good thing — if it ends a dangerous and corrupt regime, I’m all for it. But it’s superficial. At best, it’s going to flip open a manhole cover that will expose the sewer of the American id. The real test will be whether we can then dive in and clean up our own problems.
Track Palin, son of Sarah and Todd Palin, was arrested for breaking and entering. Ooh-er, it is a sordid story.
UPDATE on story @ktva broke yesterday–court docs outline what happened at @SarahPalinUSA residence: pic.twitter.com/IfTIoyNds1
— Daniella Rivera (@RiveraDanie) December 18, 2017
He apparently was doped to the gills on alcohol and painkillers, and had broken into the house and beaten up his father for denying him a truck or car, and then strutted about the house while armed. My favorite line in the police report is this one:
Communication was attempted which failed due to Track yelling and calling myself and other officers peasants and telling us to lay our guns on the ground before approaching the residence.
The family really does think of themselves as royalty, don’t they? Comes with being a Republican, I guess. Their prominence is a legacy from John McCain, after all.
Ted Chiang cuts straight to the heart of issue: it’s not artificial intelligence we should fear, it’s capitalism and its smug, oblivious, excessively wealthy leaders.
This summer, Elon Musk spoke to the National Governors Association and told them that “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.” Doomsayers have been issuing similar warnings for some time, but never before have they commanded so much visibility. Musk isn’t necessarily worried about the rise of a malicious computer like Skynet from The Terminator. Speaking to Maureen Dowd for a Vanity Fair article published in April, Musk gave an example of an artificial intelligence that’s given the task of picking strawberries. It seems harmless enough, but as the AI redesigns itself to be more effective, it might decide that the best way to maximize its output would be to destroy civilization and convert the entire surface of the Earth into strawberry fields. Thus, in its pursuit of a seemingly innocuous goal, an AI could bring about the extinction of humanity purely as an unintended side effect.
This scenario sounds absurd to most people, yet there are a surprising number of technologists who think it illustrates a real danger. Why? Perhaps it’s because they’re already accustomed to entities that operate this way: Silicon Valley tech companies.
Consider: Who pursues their goals with monomaniacal focus, oblivious to the possibility of negative consequences? Who adopts a scorched-earth approach to increasing market share? This hypothetical strawberry-picking AI does what every tech startup wishes it could do — grows at an exponential rate and destroys its competitors until it’s achieved an absolute monopoly. The idea of superintelligence is such a poorly defined notion that one could envision it taking almost any form with equal justification: a benevolent genie that solves all the world’s problems, or a mathematician that spends all its time proving theorems so abstract that humans can’t even understand them. But when Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holds-barred capitalism.
I’ve always thought the dread of AIs was overblown and absurd and not at all a concern. Chiang exposes it for what it is, the fear that lies in the id of Musk, and Bezos, and Zuckerberg, and every greedy gazillionaire who is frantically pointing “over there!” to distract us from looking at where they’re standing: the fear that someone else might be as rapacious as they are.
I’m sure you’ve heard by now that the Trump administration has informed the CDC that they’re no longer allowed to use the words “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based”. That’s weirdly specific and random, in addition to being contemptibly authoritarian. There’s something funny going on here. I have questions.
Why? This is strangely like telling someone “Don’t think of an elephant” — don’t think of a vulnerable transgender fetus with your evidence-based brain, people! So what are the scientists at the CDC supposed to think when, for instance, they see statistics on Zika-induced developmental abnormalities? As Tara Smith points out, scientists were also given alternatives: instead of talking about science, they should say CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes
. So we’re supposed to consider what people wish were true? All right, I wish I had the body of a 30 year old and a million dollars.
Damn. Doesn’t seem to be having an effect.
But I also want to know why those specific seven words. Why not “homosexual”, “abortion”, “euthanasia”, “pollution”, “climate change”, “infertility”, and “tampons”, which conservatives would also find enraging? What specific input triggered the need to dictate censorship of these words?
Who? This edict came from somewhere, from someone who thinks they have the power to police the language. This is really mysterious. The HHS, which is in charge of the CDC, is currently leaderless, although Alex Azar has been nominated to run the show. Azar is an Indiana Republican who ran HHS under the Bush administration, and since has worked as a lobbyist and division head for Eli Lilly, a big pharmaceutical company. His appointment hasn’t been approved, so would he have any say at all? Why would a “pharma shill” object to science and evidence? The Indiana connection is ominous (is Pence tinkering behind the scenes?) but it sounds like maybe, once again, it’s underlings running amuck while the system is rudderless.
What’s next? If they think they can purge a useful, non-ideological word like “vulnerable”, there’s nothing to stop them from getting rid of all of the substance coming out of work from scientific organizations and replacing it with nothing but bureaucratic glurge, which, it wouldn’t surprise me, might be their real goal.
You know, I was also just wondering why anyone would want to be known as a Trump appointee. It seems to carry the taint of corruption and incompetence. I know if Trump tapped me to run the CDC (a position for which I’m completely unqualified), I’d have a terrifying moment of introspection in which I’d wonder what horrifying crime against nature and humanity I’d committed to deserve this rebuke.
Oh, no! I just realized that Freethoughtblogs lacks a style book! We have a short guide we send out to all the new bloggers that summarizes the mechanics of writing here, and includes general suggestions, like frequent admonitions to overthrow the patriarchy and return the implements of wealth generation to the hands of the workers, but nothing about style. We just tell ’em to write what they want and how they want, and it’s a free-for-all out there. I think if we said anything about style beyond encouraging godless liberty and a worker’s paradise, we’d have a revolution.
But OK, I know a lot of places enforce a house style and even dictate the kind of content that is acceptable. Let’s see what our competition is up to.
The Daily Stormer has a prime directive.
Oh. Well. I guess I’m not surprised. Nuance and thought get in the way of hatred and violence, so of course oversimplification and reduction to crude caricature is the order of the day there.
What about tone?
This fits. I’m sure you’ve noticed how often the most abominable people use the “I was just joking” defense, or scream “Satire!” at you (the Morris North Star, for instance, publishes prominently a disingenuous disclaimer that they write satire, so that when they accuse an administrator of promoting white genocide, they can quickly disavow it). But we all know they really mean it.
I’m feeling rather nauseated. I don’t think I go on. All the other freethoughtbloggers will be relieved to know that I wouldn’t impose a style guide on them even if that were within my power to do (we have an administration style best characterized as anarchy.)
But please do remember that when an alt-right Nazi or troll from /pol/ smiles and tries to tell you that they’re just having fun, they’re not. They actually are horrible, awful, people who might be dressed up in clownface.
