Clone Wars category archive
Republican Thought Police 0
Farron points out that, if it looks like a book ban, walks like book ban, and talks like a book ban, well, it’s a book ban.
Still Rising Again after All These Years 0
PoliticalProf decodes de code.
Republican Family Values 0
If this is not a miscarriage of justice, I have no idea what would qualify as such.
I am beyond appalled.
Aside:
I know someone who had a miscarriage.
She was devastated.
As far as she was concerned, she had not “had a miscarriage,” she had lost a baby. In her case, it happened under medical care, so she was she was not faced with the issue that this woman was faced with–what to do with the baby.
That Republicans would choose turn someone who suffered an unavoidable medical emergency into a criminal defendant exemplifies the moral bankruptcy of the organization that portrays itself as the party of family values.
Today’s Republican Party is a vile and loathsome thing.
One Coin, Two Sides? 0
In a thoughtful article which I saw at The Roanoke Times, Richard Kyte muses on the implications of ChatGPT and its clones. Suffice to say, he has a few questions.
A snippet:
Imagine all the things that implies, all the ways in which human beings put words and images together. And then imagine that much of that is done by some kind of entity that has no self-awareness, no personhood, but is capable of precisely imitating the full range of expressive activites that, up to this point in world’s existence, have been the exclusvie province of human being.
While on the topic, methinks this article from Psychology Today Blogs on deepfakes (in this case, deepfake porn) is also relevant. AI and deepfakes seems to me two sides of the same coin.
Artificial, Yes. Intelligent, No. 0
Rebecca Watson cautions us not to believe the hype about “artificial intelligence.” An excerpt:
. . . it’s unfortunate that “AI” caught on years ago to describe these chatbots because at this point we just have to use it so people know what we’re talking about, but this kind of “AI” has absolutely nothing to do with anything that could be called “intelligence.”
Or you can read the transcript.
Normalizing Nastiness 0
Methinks Steven M. has a valid question.
A Notion of Immigrants 0
The Supreme Supremacist court has spoken.
Here’s a shortened version of their ruling:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
(I found the poem here.)
A Notion of Immigrants 0
At Psychology Today Blogs, University of Miami Professor Seth Schwartz explores why many white Americans, particularly Baby Boomers, seem so hostile to immigrants, despite having been raised in a country which once proudly billed itself as “a nation of immigrants.”
It is a perceptive, thoughtful, and timely piece worth the three or four minutes it will take you to read it.
It’s All about the Algorithm 0
But algorithms don’t just happen. They are created, and it appears that those who create them do so in their own image:
Those virtual robots, which were programmed with a popular artificial intelligence algorithm, were sorting through billions of images and associated captions to respond to that question and others, and may represent the first empirical evidence that robots can be sexist and racist, according to researchers. Over and over, the robots responded to words like “homemaker” and “janitor” by choosing blocks with women and people of color.
Follow the link for much, much more.
Misdirection Play, the Transphobia Tactic 0
At the San Francisco Chronicle, Scott Wiener, a California state senator who recently received bomb threats about his sexual orientation, susses the strategy. Here’s a bit (emphasis added); follow the link for the rest.
“Air Tag, You’re It!” Silent Stalkers Dept. 0
Bruce Schneier reports:
He goes on to opine that Apple doesn’t seem to have thought this whole Air Tag through.
Follow the link for more.
Devolution 0
Rex Huppke is less than optimistic about the fate of the polity; he fears that glorification of stupid which has taken root in some quarters does not bode well. Here’s just a tiny a bit from his article (emphasis added):
You can draw a straight line from the glorification of numbskullery and the rejection of facts to the Jan. 6 attack.
Yet somehow, since Jan. 6, the stupidity being peddled has only gotten worse. Trump and an astonishing array of Republicans and right-wing media types continue to insist the 2020 election was stolen. There is zero evidence to support that and, in fact, even the former president’s most loyal flunkies who have ham-handedly “audited” election results in various states have come up with zilch.
The Lies of the Land, True Believers Dept. 0
Psychology professor Cortney Warren parses Aaron Rodgers the Dodger’s vaccination doublespeak (as you will recall, he said he was “immunized,” but avoided the word “vaccinated”) and probes the question of whether or not he believed his verbal dance would be seen as the lie that many others see it as. Here’s a bit (emphasis added):
Aside:
Methinks the sentence I emphasized sheds a spotlight on lots of what goes on in “social” media.
