Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

Clemency for Trump

Friday, June 9th, 2023

I never thought I would find myself writing this blog entry.

I am arguing that we should not punish Donald Trump.

Now, we should draw a hard boundary between him and the ballot box – not ever permit him to be president again. This is not a punishment, though. This is to prevent him from hurting us, and to prevent him from hurting himself.

I have come to believe that Trump is already in hell. He’s so deeply afraid he’ll fuck it all up that he can’t stop lying repeatedly out of fear, he’s so deeply convinced he’ll never be good enough that he causes mass havoc everywhere he goes trying to convince everyone he’s better than everyone else.

I suspect he’s locked in. I suspect he barely has any free will at all, but that there’s a hurting, self-aware, worthy person inside him. I think we should try and find ways to help him not hurt any more. I see nothing to be gained by punishing him – he’s already punished himself more than we ever could.

I agree he did a lot of damage, and got people killed. But hurting him because he hurt others just makes everyone worse off. A eye for a eye makes everyone blind.

I want to believe we can learn enough about biological neural networks to let him out of the jail he created in his mind. Certainly I am far less incarcerated than I was ten years ago. In the meantime, just declare him ineligable to run for office, and move on. And try to think of ways to release him from the fear.

LieGPT

Friday, April 21st, 2023

So, Elon Musk, who is increasingly competing for the title of world’s worst human being, has announced he’s going to create a LLM called “TruthGPT” in order to “Correct for chatGPT and Microsoft’s biases”.

It’s really alarming that we have increasingly got large numbers of delusional people wandering around being programmed by mass media blatently lying and *they can’t figure it out*. They’re the wise ones, those of us who use actual reality as a measuring stick are the sheeple. Fox News has to pay out to Dominion but the Fox Fooled remain convinced that Fox was telling the truth the whole time.

I mean, anyone with the self awareness of a carrot ought to be able to figure it out at this point. Trump is a lying liar, the evangelicals are batshit crazy, and generally conservatives break shit when they try to run the country because they optimize for more yachts for the billionares rather than looking at actual objective data. These people are anti-expertise, anti-science, and pro-religion. It’s not a big shock that they tend to run things off the rails.

I don’t have any suggestion on how to improve the situation. Make humans smarter? I don’t know how we do that short of eugenics, and we all know how *that* ended last time someone got the bright idea to try it.

Depressing. My paws remain crossed that the good guys build the singularity. I’ve been running on the basic theory that if you made a unbiased AI it would have useful things to say. I have to suspect any AI with “Truth” in the name will be about like Truth Social – i.e. Yay KKK! Yay hate! Yay killing gay people! Yay killing Democrats! Yay cheating to win elections! And so on.

The GOP finds a new level of awful

Wednesday, January 4th, 2023

So, the GOP now has a plan to finish burning America to the ground so they can loot it for their billionare friends who will then run off to private islands. They’ve managed to get enough wing nuts in the House that they can keep the normal wheels of democracy from turning, and all of these wing nuts are delightedly announcing they will not raise the debt ceiling.

Now, in a rational world there would be some hope that this would force a redesign of the resource allocation system, since it’s kind of stupid that we’re forced to loan money into existence – although not as stupid as the fact that we spend more on our military than our next five competitors.

This, however, does not appear to be a rational world. Therefore, my assumption is they will play chicken until they’ve succeeded in setting fire to the constitution, destroying America’s credit and economy, and generally doing as much damage as they can.

I have to give Russia props. Q was a very clever scheme. It made it so a requirement with the base was to be delusional and/or mentally ill. I do wonder if Russia also controls Tucker et al. Of course ironically Russia is also burning to the ground, having let their idiotic war continue into the winter despite the clear message of history.

The growth of Elon Musk

Friday, December 16th, 2022

I have to wonder if as Elon discovers that he’s not a free speech absolutist after all (wow, that idea makes me giggle at this point) if he’ll start to realize everything else that’s wrong with the libertarian point of view.

Denatured alcohol – a clear case of money is more important than people

Tuesday, November 29th, 2022

So, I was watching Call The Midwife the other day and they had someone who was dying from being a broke alcoholic who was drinking methylated spirits – aka denatured alcohol. And I had a interesting realization – we do often see places where humanity chooses money over people’s lives – a recent example was Tesla removing the radar from self-driving EVs, increasing undoubtedly the number of people who will die so that Tesla can make slightly larger profits. And of course we get outraged in cases where this is done.. like the Ford Pinto.

But.. denatured alcohol is a clear case of us deciding killing people is acceptable if the alternative is threatening the government’s profit. There’s no reasonable reason for denaturing alcohol.. other than, it enables us to sell alcohol and know it will only be used for sterilization. The reason this matters is that there’s a huge tax on alcohol. We do the same thing with kerosene – we sell it for heating and aviation use untaxed and for road use taxed and we dye it and trust people to follow the rules based on the dye. We *could* do the same thing with ethanol, but we don’t – instead we risk killing people – *knowing* that people will die – and the government officials probably feel smugly satisfied about this solution.

Now, the government is well aware that broke addicts will buy denatured alcohol and be killed by it. It’s more important to them to not lose whatever tax dollars they would lose to people knowingly cheating by buying denatured alcohol than that those people live.

This isn’t surprising. The government has always acted as if there’s a fairly low price on human life. We accept our police murdering innocents, we accept the government executing innocents – in both cases possibly because there’s no alternative.. we accept the government not enforcing environmental safety regulations, we accept people destroying the water table with things like fracking – in general, the government puts a very low value on life. (We routinely commit mass murder so various corporations can make more profit). But denaturing alcohol demonstrates just how low – of course the government probably thinks it’s a feature, not a bug, that broke addicts are who gets killed off..

The folly of Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, and similar lying liars

Friday, August 5th, 2022

So, I can’t think of one on the left off the top of my head, but I’m absolutely sure that there are. Anyway, you’ve all seen these fake news sites that deliberately spew lies – they’re very popular on Fox, for example – in order to try and delude people into voting for specific agendas.

The problem with this type of well poisoning is we live in a democratic republic. People are making decisions based on the information they learn and hear. If they learn information that isn’t true – they will make the wrong decisions. Probably the best demonstration of this is the events of Jan 6, in which a group of deluded and misled individuals tried to overthrow a fair and free election – but also Tucker Carlson attempting to lie about the Jan 6 committee results in order to keep the Big Lie going is another example of this rather egregious well poisoning.

Let me make this clear. The ship of state is steered by the people. By lying to the people, you are causing them to believe things that aren’t true. A large number of them are apparently gullible enough to believe you when you insist there’s no iceberg. They *will* run the ship into it, and *you*, Alex Jones/Tucker Carlson/Other similar entities, *will* be on the ship when it sinks and you will drown with the rest of us. So, tempting as it is to become a billionare by lying repeatedly to the people, a better choice, in terms of having a good life and the rest of us having a good life too, is to *not do that*.

It’s stupid and shortsighted behavior. *among other things*, you have no proof about what happens after death, and given that the gravity well of earth is such that all your mass, energy, and information are likely to remain right here, reincarnation is the most likely hypothesis which means it is entirely possible to be stuck with the bad decisions you made for longer than a human lifespan.

Side note, I think Alex Jones nicely demonstrates how the Bible got written. Someone very much like Alex Jones wanted to control folks and so, like Alex Jones lied a lot and claimed to know the mind of God.

Let’s say the quiet part out loud here

Wednesday, July 20th, 2022

The current pope is almost certainly aware that Earth is above carrying capacity and that post peak oil it’s very likely a lot of people – many of them Catholics – are going to starve. He’s still egging on the fork bomb that is religious humanity by not encouraging birth control. Why? Market share.

That’s also what this abortion thing is really about. A bunch of scared old white dudes afraid that whiteness might lose market share. (God I Hope so. We are quite often a plague on the world)

It’s true that if you don’t care about misery – and obviously abrahamic religions like to *cause* misery whenever they can get away with it – probably gives the priests a feeling of power but certainly boosts their pocketbooks – pushing people to have Babies Ever After is a good way to boost your market share.

And, lately, we’ve observed another interesting problem – if the minority is willing enough to cheat – and majority is not willing to call them on it and do whatever it takes to undo their cheating – then the minority gets to have tyrannical power over the majority. I get the feeling this was predicted in the federalist papers.

I guess it’s not a surprise that religious folks are authoritarian. It is kind of a surprise how many people believe the blatant and easily proven false lies of the right. One of my favorites is about how we can’t switch to electric vehicles because the power grid can’t take it. Get this – a gas car uses more electricity (by the time the oil is pumped and refined) than a electric one. And if we count *total* watts – well, let’s just say moving oil around has a lot more line loss, so to speak, than moving electricity around.

But, the conservatives never stop the lying. They’ll claim that solar panels and wind turbines use more power to make than they generate – when the amount of power either generates in a week would turn it into incandescent gas several times over.

..

Tuesday, June 28th, 2022

One thing that the supreme court events underline – and of course the Jan 6 hearings – is that the GOP lacks any honor. The justices had no problem with lying during their confirmation and no problem with figuring out any way they could possibly bend the law to ban abortion. They will cause very large amounts of suffering – which of course is the typical outcome whenever you let the GOP start making decisions. (Remember, this is the party that brought you the War On Drugs while they were busy piping those drugs into the cities with Iran Contra, the party that brought you the War On False Pretenses in which many folks lied in order to bomb Iraq back to the stone ages over weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist, and, of course, the party that brought you Trump.

People ask why he rents space in my head. The answer is because I haven’t figured out how to leave America yet – but Trump’s existence, and the fact that the people who supported him aren’t busy apologizing right now, underlines both that the GOP has no honor (we’re talking about a person who tried to use violence to overthrow the results of a free and fair election) and that America is a collapsing system with very little hope.

He rents space in my head because we elected someone who said “Go ahead, punch him, I’ll pay your legal bills”. Because we elected someone who suggested injecting bleach, who wanted to hide life-saving data about a pandemic because it might hurt his re-election chances.

Trump of course only cares about Trump. That’s become increasingly obvious. Destroying the USA bothers him not at all. And, of course, another thing Trump – and Fox – showed us is the problem with leading people down a long and varigated trail of falsehoods. The problem is the human mind encodes data by making physical connections, and because of it’s holographic nature the same confluence of subnets might represent a number of different concepts. A side effect of this is there is a significant cost to unlearning things, and in fact you can reach a point where you simply do not have the neurological resources to do all the necessary rebalancing of wiring to unlearn falsehoods. Your mind has to – at least subconsciously – evaluate the actual physical (neurochemical) cost of changing wiring to encode new information, and if the cost is too high, it must cling to previously learned data even if wrong because the alternative – not having enough resources to finish rebalancing after changing the physical wiring to encode data – sucks more. But this means once you go down the Fox News or Q rabbithole, it’s *very* difficult to come back up – partially, of course,because it’s hard to admit how much of a chump you’ve been. I suspect this also explains how people get stuck in religions that are obviously false-to-fact.

Anyway, so, here we are. People are utterly convinced it’s Biden’s fault that gas prices are high – the war and the profiteering of the oil companies have nothing to do with it – and of course Fox is happy to encourage that lie. Inflation is obviously a side effect of us deciding not to throw everyone under the bus during the pandemic but Fox keeps the lie going, it’s all the fault of the Dems, and people believe it.

Not that I’m all that happy with the Democrats either. Their cheating Bernie out of the nomination and their deciding not to codify the right to choose while they had a supermajority because it’s way too valuable as a donation farming method to push the emotional buttons on both sides and get them to keep forking over those dollars are two of the obvious reasons, but in general we’ve got Cthulu and Incompetence, Inc to choose from on the ballot. I tend to choose Incompetence, Inc, but it’s still pretty depressing. About the best politician I know of is my friend Brian Leeper who ran on a platform of fixing the stoplights on rt 28.. and actually did it. Based on his track record I’d nominate him for senate even though he leans far more conservative than me. At least he’s honest, something I am sure federal office would beat out of him fairly quickly. Or they’d find him shiv’d in a back room somewhere.

(This post is mostly just venting. But I am not sure I have words for how dissapointed I am that the conservatives were able to pack the court and no one stopped them, that they’re able to make abortion illegal and no one is stopping them, and that they quite possibly might implement christian sharia law. The lack of honor and willingness to ignore the majority is also depressing – as is the knowledge that most conservatives won’t admit they are wrong about almost everything even as they look at the fact that their policies during covid had them dying of overdoses of horse dewormer.)

Abortion: The gift taht keeps on giving

Saturday, June 25th, 2022

So, we’ve entered another phase of donation farming. I have come to suspect that the Republicans struck Roe with the tact agreement of the Democrats, because A: both sides knew that without forcing more babies social security was going to run out of money and B: both sides know it’s a battle neither side can permanently win if they’re going to keep using it to farm donations from voters.

Obviously during Obama’s attempt to get Garland confirmed A: the republicans cheated and B: the democrats sandbagged. A friend of mine pointed out the democrats could have gone ahead and installed Garland, since obviously if the republicans wouldn’t hold hearings, they didn’t have a problem with his confirmation.

However, it would not shock me at all to discover that all of the voting is just puppetry and the people actually running the country make decisions and they just pretend that our votes matter in order to keep us from taking up arms against them.

I mean, I’m going to keep voting whoever seems to be the lesser evil. But I’m also going to keep championing ranked choice voting because this system is beyond broken. And I think if they attempt to outlaw birth control or sex outside marriage we should hold a general strike – share, work together, figure out how to barter food etc, but literally turn off the county. Leave it off until we’ve done *trillions* of dollars of damage to them. Make the bosses *hurt*.

If the Democrats were honest, they’d arrest the supreme court for lying to congress. If nothing else, Kavanaugh and Thomas lied in their confirmation and everyone knows it. Pull out the No lie MRI technology – ANN combined with a fMRI, foolproof lie detector, and make them confess that they planned this whole thing. Then slam them in jail and appoint new justices.

I am also asking various countries about the immigration process, because I am strongly considering just leaving America.

Invermectin does not reduce odds of hospitalization

Wednesday, March 30th, 2022

Via the NYT.

No big shock here. However, the question remains – how many times can Republicans be dead wrong, and keep coming back for more? Conservatism is *obviously wrong* – it’s based on the idea that there isn’t enough and can’t be enough – while food rots and buildings sit empty. There is enough, there has been for a while, there’s just a broken resource allocation system that conservatives keep declaring is the best thing in the world and should be worshipped.

I keep hoping at some point in repeatedly conservatives being demonstratibly wrong they will start to wake up and stop being conservatives. Yes, political ideology can be right or wrong beyond simply matters of opinion, and at this point conservative POVs have gotten people killed in large numbers.

Now, I understand that part of what is going on is that most people do not have informational immune systems and so when the talking heads say things, they believe, and they don’t necessarily have the self-awareness to recognize that that’s going on. And part of what’s happening is that it is profitable to lie to those people – some of this is telling them what they want to hear even though it’s not true and some of this is that if you get people to believe there’s not enough, they’ll endorse pointer-hoarding (remember, dollars are not wealth, they are a pointer to it) by the morons who don’t realize that the way to maximize wealth is to never hold more pointers than you need.

Anyway, here we have yet another study – and yes, they come regularly – showing that conservatives were just plain wrong and they were pushing a narrative that was getting people killed. Big shock.