Musings from Southern New Mexico

Month: April 2023 (Page 1 of 2)

“You Look Like a Smart Fella”

Somehow this catch phrase of hucksters going back over a century (at least according to old black & white movies) has morphed over time into something like:

“They want us to believe [rational claim supported by abundant credible evidence], but we are too smart for that. And we will show them that [reasonable approach to dealing with clear problem] will not be tolerated by real Americans like us.”

Some variation on this has served as a mantra for each of Fox News’s faux journalists for decades. Carlson is only one popular purveyor of this snake oil on Fox News and other beneficiary-subsidized propaganda outlets in this country.

Today he was let go.

This seems to me as comparable to a Band-Aid applied to a compound fracture.

“Issues”

“Kill the occasional whore to let the other whores know who is in charge.” – the Republican strategy on “health care.”

“Kill the occasional n***** to let the other n*****s know who is in charge.” – the Republican strategy on “law enforcement.”

Every Republican “issue” is a means for downgrading one segment of society. The rubes (i.e., those who aren’t fabulously wealthy white Anglo-Saxon protestant straight men) who buy this con contribute greatly to their own oppression. The starving pauper blames his empty pockets on a starving pauper who looks a little different from himself (as directed by am impressively corpulent hand). It is the perfect con.

Well played, fascists. Well played.

Demonizing Major Unrelated Segments of Society

The United States of America has a population of about 331.9 million.

California has a population of about 39.24 million.

The New York City metropolitan area has a population of about 18.82 million.

Anti-democracy propaganda organs have a particular loathing for these two major portions of society. There are certainly others, but these two stand out. These two areas represent approximately 11.8% and 5.7%, respectively, of the whole.

Apart from its general implications of the lesser humanity of individuals with greater melanin, more ovaries, or less adherence to the One True Religion (R) than “real Americans,” vast swathes of general society can also be considered thus by virtue of their location.

“Othering” has a long and storied history of use to promote authoritarian rule. It is strange to me that, among those “othered” are the two most successful and dynamic examples of a state and a city metro area are the subject.

Weird.

The AI Hubbub

Artificial intelligence seems to have blown past the Turing Test line while no one was paying attention. Wide eyed conjecture on what this technology will be able to do has provided a bounty of breathless reporting in the past few weeks. Rather than attempt to assuage this, I think I will jump on this particular bandwagon. My reason, however, has not been covered (at least, in the small amount of reporting I have consumed on this topic).

I view the issue of AI from the perspective of how reporting has changed since the advent of Fox News. The foreign-created propaganda platform charged onto the scene to compete -very successfully- against legitimate news organizations, with the apparent aim of throwing a monkey wrench into the works of representative democracy. In the person of a non-journalist such as Ingraham and Hannity, the [alleged] News Corporation found that an amoral person can be counted on to faithfully deliver a false narrative in the guise of legitimate news.

Amoral individuals still fear consequences. Even in the current state of jurisprudence (where a large fraction of the judiciary serve to alter the law via increasingly insane “interpretations”), there is a non-zero chance that a propagandist will be held accountable for large-scale criminal activities. The discussions ‘twixt the Fox News propagandists revealed during the grand jury hearings of the ex-president indicate that those individuals fear consequences.

AI will not. There was a point beyond which these individuals (who had already put all their chips down on “stoking crackpot conspiracy theories” as the jackpot winner) were hesitant to proceed. AI will never face consequences. If the current model of paying humans to convey a false narrative has worked so effectively that it got an accused child rapist into the White House, then the future of not paying AI to convey a false narrative without the human restrains caused by fear of consequences will be a next step win.

Surprisingly (Somehow), Saboteurs Commit Sabotage

Poorly qualified to completely unqualified political hacks – who were clearly gifted unearned appointments to various judicial posts to act as saboteurs to legitimate law – are somehow causing naïve idiots to clutch their pearls when they commit the sabotage they were obviously appointed to commit.

Weird.

If you read up on the long-term strategy of deranged right-wing loons, you will see that this has been the goal since at least the Goldwater split (Goldwater considered the John Birch Society and their ilk a shameful stain on his party). I recommend Wrapped in the Flag: What I Learned Growing Up in America’s Radical Right, How I Escaped, and Why My Story Matters Today by Claire Connor. This book is arguably more relevant now than at its 2014 publication.

It seems that the fraction of the judiciary which may be considered saboteurs has finally achieved the critical mass of grotesquely corrupt “jurists” – who can “interpret” the law such that the words (usually in English) do not mean what English speaking people think they mean – can effectively claim that any law means the most fascist “interpretation” the words can be tortured into.

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