More Random Observations On The Way Down
Donald Trump, as part of his crusade to keep the stock market’s tech bubble alive, obviously for the sake of his and his family’s material profit, is not only rejecting all pleas for regulation of the development of artificial intelligence, but is even proposing to boost its idiot-friendliness by changing its name to something even more false than the current one. Specifically, he objects to the word “artificial,” not (of course) for the proper reason — namely that it carries the implication that these computer programs are actually doing by non-natural means something similar to what humans do when they think, an implication which is pure marketing, i.e., an utter lie — but rather for the wonderfully Trumpian reason that the name belittles the greatness of America’s AI, which should, he says, henceforth be dubbed not artificial intelligence but “superintelligence.” Proving, as if every other word out of his mouth had not sufficiently established the point, that Trump has neither the most basic understanding of what intelligence is, nor the most basic appreciation for the civilizational necessity of maintaining a language in which words have coherent, consistent, and commonly understood meanings.
In other news that the public supporters of Trump have been continually telling us for the past ten years is not happening and would never happen, the Führer has banned a few major U.S. media outlets from White House briefings, on the grounds that their coverage of him is “NEGATIVE” and “FALSE,” which, in case you haven’t noticed by now, is Trumpspeak for “non-compliant” and “unflattering to a certain demagogue.” It is asking too much of the MAGA morons, I know, to wonder how they would have responded to such a ban had Barack Obama been president and Fox News the banned news outlet, let alone to ask them why they think the press is one of the few private entities explicitly named in the U.S. Constitution, and specifically in the context of outlining the right to freedom of speech. Heck, it is too much to ask these idol worshippers why an American president — if and only if his name happens to be Donald Trump — shouldn’t rename major bodies of water in a fit of pique, threaten allies with military invasion, tear down half the White House without approval, usurp congressional authority on economic policy on phony national emergency grounds, profiteer like a drunken pirate at billion-dollar levels off his own “policy decisions,” openly demand and accept personal bribes and tributes as the price of doing state business with America, start long, aimless wars without congressional oversight, excecute insignificant foreign sailors and/or petty criminals in international waters with impunity, cheer on and defend the cold-blooded murder of American citizens exercising their constitutional rights to freedom of speech and assembly if they happen to be criticizing his masked brownshirt thugs, and of course be the most stalwart and unwavering American apologist and enabler of an aggressive free-world-hating KGB-spawned Russian dictatorship since the Weather Underground terrorists.
I note that a court has ordered the White House to reinstate those aforementioned news organizations’ permission to enter Trumpian space, on the grounds that this summary removal of access was “likely unconstitutional,” which is a polite way of saying that, well, tyranny is sort of against the law in the United States of America.
Don’t bother trying to explain that to Trump’s apologists; they won’t understand what you are talking about. Communists are the only authoritarians they recognize, and therefore they will blissfully abide by absolutely any presidential usurpation if they can persuade themselves that the usurper is “anti-communist.” Much like Germany in the 1930s — and increasingly again today, it seems.
There have been, historically, some brilliantly pithy descriptions of looming political catastrophe that one wishes could remain dated and “of their time,” though of course what made them pithy and brilliant in the first place was precisely the fact that they expressed a wisdom that was for all times. Such is the case, most conspicuously, of Yeats’ “Second Coming,” the famous first stanza of which is definitely of the moment, though published in 1920.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
To see how it all turns out, I refer you to the rest of the poem, which you may read at your leisure. Warning: it isn’t heartening.
