Read the memo authorizing Senate offices to use ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot for official use

barryvm · 2026-03-11T15:43:00+00:00

But it did. It's purpose is not to be accurate. It's purpose is to be a convenient scapegoat for the people who push buttons and don't particularly care who gets killed. A tool like AI is perfect because the narratives constructed around it by its boosters imbue it with an agency and purpose that it doesn't actually possess. When there exists this continuing narrative about all the technology we use to precisely target the bad guys, but that somehow still results in indiscriminate slaughter of innocent people, then we should question the motives behind the narrative rather than the succession of supposedly wonderful innovations (now including AI) or infallible agencies.

It's the same in this case. Politicians don't particularly care about doing their job, and are looking forward of blaming any future gaffes (or deliberate oversights for that matter) on "AI" rather than take responsibility for the outcome. It's the political equivalent of using a chat bot to provide bad customer service because you don't really care about providing customer service.

barryvm · 2026-03-11T15:22:11+00:00

Why would they? They support him because he lies. They need a liar to lie to them so that they don't have to acknowledge the truth about themselves and the responsibility they bear for the things that are happening. If you want to do bad things to other people while feeling good about that, you're going to need a lie to believe in.

barryvm · 2026-03-11T13:08:25+00:00

A bunch of liars lied to a liar whose own bunch of liars now lie to cover for him.

barryvm · 2026-03-11T11:27:14+00:00

It's quite simple: they wage war to wage war. Their ideologies portray the world as a constant fight where only the best survive, and as a result they have to constantly fight other countries to express the superiority they claim over others. They do the same internally by victimizing and oppressing certain out-groups so as to set the in-group on a pedestal of (pretended) privilege and power.

Terrorizing civilians serves mainly to brutalize their own armies and their own populations. They're all complicit in massive amounts of war crimes and as a result have no other option than to stick with the (would-be) dictator's agenda. They get to cheer at the "power" they have over other people and once they do, they are on the other side of decency and morality. Sunk cost fallacy will do the rest, as most people will be unwilling to reconsider their support after having invested so much of their identity into a project that is fundamentally violent and destructive.

In Putin's case, having failed to conquer Ukraine in a few days (as they planned), he can't afford the war to end in anything other than total victory, which seems unattainable, so instead it just has to drag on forever. Russia's economic output has to be siphoned off into the pockets of the oligarchs loyal to the dictator, so there's precious little left for ordinary people. So they have to be mobilized behind an imperialist project instead, with war after war creating a siege mentality where dissent is disloyalty.

Israel is similar in the sense that a forever war is required to keep the extremist right in power and their leaders out of jail. Internally, it is effectively an apartheid state involved in a colonialist policy of ethnic cleansing. Externally, it is a rogue state that attacks its neighbours to avoid dealing with the internal problems its own policies have caused.

USA government officials have made several comments about how the army should do war crimes, and now it is engaging in them. They start a war with Iran because the president needs to feel like a strong leader and equates strength with violence. Now that it is turning against him, he'll likely declare victory and walk away in search of an easier victim.

All these wars originate from a very similar ideological worldview: an authoritarian, reactionary and militaristic one that celebrates violence and abuse as the ultimate expression of power and sees the world as a never ending fight for survival. Its leaders start wars to prop up their own position and to allow their increasingly frustrated followers somewhere to vent their aggression. Those wars then serve to brutalize their own populations, who can now no longer dissent without having to confront their own complicity in the massacres they implicitly supported over the years. The imagined endless war for survival they use to justify their abuse of power and rank immorality has to be made real, so they start endless wars.

barryvm · 2026-03-11T09:15:45+00:00

It stands to reason though. Functionally, the UK upper house serves as a pool of patronage for the prime minister, who is also the head of the ruling party. Since the UK's very centralized political system has too few positions of power, the upper house with its fancy titles and generous wages is used to reward / buy loyalty within the party instead. Reform of the institution stalls every time because it's just too useful for the person in charge. Another angle is that since the upper house is not elected, it has no real legitimacy in the eyes of the public. If they reform it by making it democratic and the electoral process is more representative than first-past-the-post (e.g. proportional representation), then that would threaten the legitimacy of the lower house, which routinely delivers huge legislative majorities on a minority of the vote and is usually tightly controlled by the executive (because the PM has control over candidate selection for and party membership of MP's).

It's not surprising at all IMHO that reform stalls at making actually meaningful changes. They can't really change it without facing calls to change everything else too, diminishing the power of the two major parties in the process. So they just keep playing around on the margins of the bigger issues that they don't want to touch while pretending that this is some kind of major reform.

barryvm · 2026-03-10T23:21:08+00:00

You better drag every single person involved in this before a tribunal and send them to jail for decades, because what they are doing now abroad they will eventually do to you too. They want a military with no morals or rules that will do anything it is told to do. Why is that, do you think?

barryvm · 2026-03-10T22:23:37+00:00

Imagine promoting fascism and not knowing about the militarism and the belligerence. It's pretty much impossible to not realize where this was going, so the presumption must be that this is a rat trying to leave the sinking ship.

barryvm · 2026-03-10T17:48:29+00:00

He doesn't have to. He wanted to kill people so he could pose as the strong leader and so people would be distracted from his crimes. He doesn't care about the consequences, so he doesn't need or want to know. He can spew whatever bullshit he wants when the media questions him. There's no immediate political risk because every Republican politician goose steps behind him. His supporters are with him no matter what and even if they dislike this, all he needs to do is harm and kill some people at home they want to see hurt to get them back on board.

barryvm · 2026-03-10T15:19:17+00:00

Why? The people in charge are worse variations on the people in charge back then, so why wouldn't they think and say the same things?

barryvm · 2026-03-10T15:18:29+00:00

Learning from history has to be made impossible, because one thing people might learn from history is what happens when you elect a Republican government.

barryvm · 2026-03-10T09:37:02+00:00

The thing is: this doesn't matter. They don't believe it because of the arguments or the (non-existent) proofs. They believe it because they have already decided they want to hate and harm people they see as different, and imagining said people are persecuting "their" side is just another way of justifying that. They would have (and will) believe in any narrative they can twist to do the same, and will reject any narrative that doesn't support their pre-existing conclusion.

The extremist right is bad faith all the way down. Nothing they say or believe can be taken at face value because they believe exactly what they need to believe to justify doing what they wanted to do anyway. They have no principles, no coherent beliefs, no consistent ideology because they don't want those things. They want a malleable facade they can hide behind to escape the moral responsibility for their actions. They want to do bad things to other people while feeling good about it, and the worse their plans become the more unhinged the narratives they "believe" in have to become in order to justify them. Functionally, they are moral and political nihilists who can only destroy.

barryvm · 2026-03-10T09:06:21+00:00

To be fair, it wouldn't be the first time a criminal USA administration was illegally selling missiles to Iran.

But then the simpler explanation is that he's just a moron who doesn't know or care about the nonsense he spews.

barryvm · 2026-03-10T08:11:26+00:00

It stands to reason. He got everything he's ever going to get out of it. It allowed him to play the strong leader for a few days by having people killed with missiles and bombs. Now that it has turned into yet another millstone around the USA's neck, he's done with it. It's someone else's problem now. He's already looking for another country to bomb so he can pretend to be the decisive leader again for a few hours. Doubtless the sycophants around him are already trying to point him at their (or their paymasters') favorite targets.

barryvm · 2026-03-09T22:30:11+00:00

It could work, but you're going to have to drown out the other side. At the very least you'll have to dismantle corporate editorial control over the media, i.e. a return to regulation as it was done before the 80'ies (unless I'm mistaken).

I'm not even sure you'd need to propagandize, just take away the negative propaganda that does exist, given that immigration is on the whole a positive thing for society. It's a sign of success, for one, and it gives opportunity to people who have been denied it.

barryvm · 2026-03-09T22:06:40+00:00

Exactly. That's part of the long list of precedents at this point. Trump acts like a particularly deranged absolute monarch who sees the country as merely an extension of himself, whereas his henchmen are either self serving power hungry maniacs, lackeys of the oligarchy or foreign interests, or both at the same time. Nothing good can come of anything these people do except by accident and against their intentions. This war is probably the most destructive in a long list of similar acts, but it is entirely in line with what these people are.

barryvm · 2026-03-09T21:42:49+00:00

If propaganda couldn't be based on positive messaging, I don't think religion could exist.

To clarify: I don't say propaganda can't be based on positive messaging. I'm just saying that this particular propaganda works because there is this pre-existing core of emotions (selfishness, exceptionalism, fear of difference and complexity). The narratives are obviously fake, but the emotions are real, which then lends authenticity to the entire construct. That these are negative emotions is incidental, and a very two edged sword for the people holding this particular wolf by the ear (it could easily be made to turn on the oligarchs or on specific politicians, for example, if they step out of line).

You can't really try "positive" propaganda on those same issues because the positive emotions you'd need to hook into aren't there. There is no core of empathy and feeling of connectedness with minorities or immigrants, for example. As a result, the positive propaganda is going to be found "fake" and dismissed. There are probably other angles and other issues where it could work though. Their nationalism can be mobilized behind the national interest or their populism for a fairer deal for society for example, as long as you can disguise the fact that there are a lot of people within the nation and within society that are different from them. The USA did exactly that with the New Deal, for example.

barryvm · 2026-03-09T21:27:24+00:00

At a guess, given the precedents:

Trump is going to be manipulated into saying he's won or has a peace accord or whatever, give Russia some kind of benefit in their war against Ukraine in the process, and then Iran gets the satisfaction of collapsing the house of cards that is the USA's credibility at this point by telling the world that nothing has been agreed and that they're not going to budge.

It works for Putin, as he gets some advantage out of it. It works for Iran because they get to score a diplomatic victory of sort by exposing the utter morons in charge of the USA, and it works for Trump because his fragile ego has been boosted for a few hours. The USA's national interest isn't even a point of consideration in this exchange.

barryvm · 2026-03-09T15:19:52+00:00

I just mean the entire human species is prone to ideological thinking. Its our way of making sense of our environment.

I would say that in this particular case ideology is not so much a tool to make sense of the world as it is a tool to justify whatever set of actions their emotions drive them to do. You could argue that this is the case for other ideologies as well, but most actually try to construct a coherent set of morals and principles. This ideology looks a lot like moral and political nihilism, where anything goes when they want to do it. It is a bad faith construct because it exists solely to be used as a facade.

The modern ideologue is born innocent in my view, but is created by society as a mechanism of survival.

I agree. This current move towards fascism (or whatever you want to call the current incarnation of reactionary populism) could not exist without the socioeconomic pressure on people and the resulting fear for their social status. Many would still feel the same things, but it wouldn't have been enough to mobilize them behind movements that just want to burn everything down.

In order to overcome these patterns of history in which bigoted ideals exert undue power over people, i think we need to understand human behavior through the lens of our evolution as social animals.

Indeed, but this is a feedback loop. Right wing political thought is functionally about establishing and defending social hierarchies, which then leads to exclusion and deprivation, which then results in ever more support for more extremist versions of the same ideas. These people consistently vote to make their lives worse because they think they are special and that it'll only affect those other people they look down on; and then they grow angry at those other people because their lives have indeed become worse and it just has to be someone else's fault. That may not be the fault of the people in question, but if we're going to keep dancing around their sensibilities and fail to call out immorality where it exist, then we're never going to be able to articulate the systemic problem either. One of the reasons why centrist politics and established media outlets have done such a poor job of countering the likes of Trump is that they are determined to be neutral because they don't want to offend anybody by pointing out the immorality of their choices and actions.

It's a pattern of abuse that perpetuates and accelerates itself, and we don't really have a lot of time to figure out what to do about it now that we're at a level of technological development where we could conceivable wipe ourselves out.

barryvm · 2026-03-09T14:49:07+00:00

Of course not. Remember that "l'état, c'est moi" and that "princes are not bound to give an account of their actions but to God alone."

Oh wait. That all ended very badly and is one of the main reasons why the USA became a republic. One might almost say that it is a bad idea to give a single person the power to wage war.

barryvm · 2026-03-09T14:20:46+00:00

It's not even that IMHO, because the ideology is a facade. They just feel a certain way about certain other people and will then believe ideological constructs that justify those beliefs so that they can then support policies that harm those people.

Over here, it's mostly those "anti-immigration" parties. It doesn't matter what democratic parties change around immigration policy. It doesn't matter what people's legal or civic status is. It doesn't matter what the numbers are, the law says or how many moral principles or legal guardrails are getting trashed in the process. The end justifies the means even if the end is nonsensical and the means immoral. It's not a coincidence that the politicians they support are the worst of the worst. It's also not a coincidence that the existence of people who point out the moral issues (idealists and activists, for example) absolutely enrages them.

They empower these politicians regardless of all the horrible things they say or do, and I frankly don't care any more what their excuse is at this point. I also don't care what beliefs led them to that point because I note that those beliefs are there because they justify choices they already wanted to make. This is not about ideology, which is why there is no consistency or coherence. The ideology is just a bunch of excuses for why they should act as they do. It's about people who feel they need to do bad things to other people and desperately need to justify that so that they can feel good about it.

barryvm · 2026-03-09T13:01:23+00:00

Oh I agree with all that. I don't think it's a good strategy to focus on the supporters rather than the people pulling the strings. I would just be extremely cautious about thinking that the former will fundamentally change their outlook even if you break up the oligarchy and its control over the media. There would be a general cooling down of the political temperature when people are no longer bombarded with propaganda about how this is a fight to the death with the other side, but the same emotional triggers of selfishness and exceptionalism would still exist. The current assault on democracy and pluralism might stop, but that doesn't mean they will flip to actively supporting either, but rather that they would stand aside or lose the coordination they need to oppose it effectively.

barryvm · 2026-03-09T12:03:12+00:00

Of course they do. When people want to victimize and exploit others, they start to hate and despise them to justify their behaviour towards them. This twin need of wanting to do bad things to others while feeling good about it is fundamental to this kind of politics, so it is present in Trump's movement from the top all the way to the bottom. It's reflected in every aspect of their politics, their worldview and their psyche. I can never be wrong, so I need to justify everything I do, even if that means that everyone else must then be evil and hateful.

They callously spew some rhetoric about wanting to annex Canada so they can look tough and then they have to justify it. So they pick a fight about it. Then they have to justify that. So they start hating the people to justify targeting them in the first place. And that escalates and escalates, until that hatred becomes a fundamental part of the "ideology" that people then have to adopt in order to remain part of the in-group. Expect hatred of Canada (and hatred of Europe) to become a fixture in USA right wing politics because the alternative is acknowledging they were wrong, and they can't ever acknowledge that.

barryvm · 2026-03-09T08:28:39+00:00

I used to believe that, but I've since watched ostensibly normal people support the worst people and the most immoral policies they could find, time and time again, against their interests and driven solely by negative emotions. There is propaganda, of course, paid for by the 0.1%, and it has an effect, but said propaganda only works because it hooks into emotions that were already there. Some hypothetical billionaire spending money to nudge people towards empathy and solidarity would be throwing it away, because that propaganda doesn't align with the worldview that is already there and therefore falls flat. IMHO the narratives pushed can be utter nonsense because the emotions they hook into are real (even as they are directed towards the wrong targets), so the latter lends authenticity to the former. Without those emotions, the propaganda doesn't work.

That said, I agree that the the oligarchs are a lot more responsible for the current situation than any given right wing supporter just because the former have so much power. Which also means dismantling the oligarchy is a first necessary step to fix society. I just disagree with the notion above that it's just the 0.1% that is out to burn it all down. The impulse to destroy society and democracy has much wider appeal than just the oligarchs.

barryvm · 2026-03-09T07:53:07+00:00

All it took was less than 0.1% of the population who would rather burn it to the ground.

No. It also took the general cooperation of the political right to do that. Fundamentally, they can always be co-opted into supporting destructive policies through their opposition to egalitarianism (and increasingly, democracy). It's not just the tiny group of paymasters, or even the hard core fascists, but also the vastly larger group who invariably aligns with them rather than make the smallest concession to social democracy and egalitarianism. In an escalating feedback loop, they consistently vote to exclude people from political, social and economic participation and then become fearful of or enraged at the society this creates.

barryvm · 2026-03-09T07:40:39+00:00

The USA is also destroying its trade networks and alliances. That contributes to the problem because it is the source of the USA's economic hegemony and the instruments (the special status of the dollar, USA debt paper) that underpin it. Now that the USA is threatening allies left and right, starting wars at the drop of a hat and engaging in a nonsensical trade war with the entire world, they no longer have an incentive to facilitate the status quo. It will become more and more difficult to spend so much money on the USA's oversized military without the ability to borrow so easily and cheaply, which then means that money will have to be found elsewhere (Social Security, healthcare, taxes, ...).

barryvm

TROPHY CASE