BeautifulMind ♾️ @ BeautifulMind @lemmy.world

Late-diagnosed autistic, special interest-haver, dad, cyclist, software pro

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The article could have, but didn't, make the point that our politics and the rhetoric surrounding it today serve the right by subverting faith in democracy, and by exhausting likely voters' critical faculties:

Yesterday, David Roberts of the energy and politics newsletter Volts noted that a Washington Post article illustrated how right-wing extremism is accomplishing its goal of destroying faith in democracy. Examining how “in a swing Wisconsin county, everyone is tired of politics,” the article revealed how right-wing extremism has sucked up so much media oxygen that people have tuned out, making them unaware that Biden and the Democrats are doing their best to deliver precisely what those in the article claim to want: compromise, access to abortion, affordable health care, and gun safety.

One person interviewed said, “I can’t really speak to anything [Biden] has done because I’ve tuned it out, like a lot of people have. We’re so tired of the us-against-them politics.” Roberts points out that “both sides” are not extremists, but many Americans have no idea that the Democrats are actually trying to govern, including by reaching across the aisle. Roberts notes that the media focus on the right wing enables the right wing to define our politics. That, in turn, serves the radical right by destroying Americans’ faith in our democratic government.

source

There's also the tendency for people to assign to the incumbent all of the problems that happen on his watch- at this point, even with material improvements for most people, it's a hard sell to convince people that they're better off when every bit of right-wing media is devoted to telling people they're worse off and the mainstream media just both-sides it like there isn't one party trying mightily to end American democracy.

There is little to no human expertise that goes into those systems, it’s all self learned from the data.

The human expertise is in the data. There's no such thing as spontaneous AI generation of expertise from nothing. If you train up an AI on information that doesn't have it, the AI won't learn it. In a very real way, the profit margins of AI-generated content rest wholly on its ability to consume and derive output from source material developed by unpaid experts.

Also, when the data is the output of people with biases, the AI will do the same.

Nobody's calling to stifle technology or progress here. We could develop AI to do anything. The question is what should that be?

There's a distinction to be drawn between 'things that are profitable to do and thus there isn't any shortage of' and 'things that aren't profitable and so there's a shortage of it' here. Today, the de facto measure of 'is it useful for society?' seems to be the former, and that doesn't mean what's useful for society, it's what's usefuI for people that have money to burn.

Fundamentally, there isn't a shortage of art, or copy writers, or software developers, or the things they do- what there is, that AI promises to change, is the inconvenient need to deal with (and pay) artisans or laborers to do it. If the alternative is for AI vendors to be paid instead of working people, is it really the public interest we're talking about, or the interests of corporate management that would rather pocket the difference in cost between paying labor vs. AI?

It's my bike, I ride my bike.

Indoors, I've got Zwift, which looks a bit like a game.

Outdoors the resolution is better, but the NPCs can be belligerent.

Indulge?

We indulge in things we like, not in things we think are bad. DeSantis probably just cued us all to know he thinks of antisemitism as more of a guilty pleasure than a vice.

But do we really need AI to generate art?

Why can't AI be used to automate useful work nobody wants to do, instead of being a way for capital to automate skilled labor out of high-paying jobs?

I also noticed that after a recent sweep/camp cleanup of homeless encampments in Seattle, the local Sinclair station (KOMO) was quick to run footage of people (presumably to be representative of Seattle folk generally) basically gloating that AT LAST they did something

Yes, the right are going to do everything they can to give others the impression that everyone else also regards poor people to be vermin, to be purged... preferably violently. The purpose of this sort of language is always to condition its audience to accept, if not cheer for, violence.

“There is no bombing at the airport war in Ba Sing Se”

I try to help

At this point I think we can safely conclude that Hamas doesn't care if Israel collectively punishes Palestinian civilians any more than Israel cares when Hamas lobs rockets at Israeli civilians - that is, they don't like it when it happens, but it happening will in no way persuade them to stop.

Logically, it's an impasse, the consequence of which will be the eventual extermination of the Palestinians- an outcome that Bibi seems not to be bothered by at all

Now if only every congressman was subject to stringent financial oversight

You know, the kind that treats "not having a bank account" as a red flag

Was there ever any doubt?

Apparently, yes. I've been pointing out anti-democratic tendencies in our politics for over a decade, only to be called 'alarmist', because obviously Roe won't be overruled and so what if they gerrymander in red states, right?

Perhaps counterintuitively, I'm a little less-alarmed today than I was 5 years ago, largely because instead of telling me I'm crazy, the people who told people like me to calm down are telling each other to take action

I dunno, there's something so infuriating about having this guy purport to speak on behalf of all Americans when pretty obvs he hates most of us

Well, yeah. There needs to be a fantastic war in the Holy Land for the Rapture to happen, the final battle, Armageddon, stuff like that.

It helps to understand that a lot of these Zionist fundamentalists live in something of a death cult, they're frothing excited for the end of the world so they can all go to heaven.

Given the amount of hounding he's been through, this has the feel of what's good for the goose is good for the gander- I mean, being tied up in court even more (and subjecting everything related to it to discovery) is a lovely way to remind overly-litigious people that if you're gonna live by that sword, you can die by it too

I think the subtext of the polling, that poor and minority folks report lower rates of trust in "science", seems to be about the way that science doesn't occur in a vacuum, it occurs within power structures and when you're on the lower rungs of any system of power, that will shape your opinions about it.

My read on this is that when "science" becomes the sphere of mega-corporations and pharma giants, on some level it's going to occur to your everyday folk as a tool of oppression more than as a boon to civilization.

we started producing more food than we can eat and enabled us to focus more on what we enjoy

I'm all for eliminating scarcity and automating the kind of work nobody thrives doing, but I also recall Keynes famously predicted that if productivity kept on growing the way it was, it would be possible for people to work a 15-hour work week and still maintain a modern standard of living.

Well, productivity did keep on growing, and the promise of future-leisure time because productivity gains made want a thing of the past... didn't pan out.

US Cops shout "stop resisting" as they beat their victims, then later 'deplore' that they 'brought it on themselves' "Hamas should stop resisting" oh the humanity

Scotus then: We have the highest of ethics standards, just we are the only ones able to hold ourselves to them Scotus now: We have a new code of ethics, it's just that we are still the only ones able to hold ourselves to them

you’re born with them

Sure, you're born with them, but only if you're born to the right parents, in the right place on a map, at the right time. They're not holy writ, not natural law- they are an expression of a social contract, whereby you get them by upholding and respecting them in others.

That not everybody has the same rights should be a bright signal that they aren't God-given, they're granted by people, and if they're not actively upheld and protected, they're just nice words somewhere that will mean nothing when someone violates them

The reason I'm going to the effort to argue that our rights arise in the social contract is not to pretend they don't exist, it is rather to point out that unless people participate in protecting and upholding them, they can be taken away. My concern with the 'they are God-given' crowd is that they seem to want people to be passive about rights, and that's how they can be taken away.

On the one hand, congressmen know that if they don't back Israel unconditionally, they will be accused of being antisemitic, in league with Nazis.

On the other hand, Israel routinely violates human rights, it conducts an apartheid regime in the West Bank, it sponsors settlers whose actions clearly violate international law, and its conduct in Gaza looks more like genocide than it doesn't. And it does all of that with US backing, despite US law forbidding the US from giving military aid to countries that ...violate human rights.

So, if you recognize any of that, you're a Nazi?

It's so frustrating to know that our elected leaders are made to not recognize actual human rights violations, for fear of being accused of antisemitism even though Israel's government is not the same thing as the Jewish people.

My social media is full of Jews pointing out that Israel's actions goes against their faith, that they experience pain and shame knowing that Israel claims to do them in the name of Judaism.

Just once I wish American congresspeople had it in them to exhibit anything like moral courage.