crumbsroom wrote:

Either way, I think we would agree the shit he spouts, much like a Rogan, is poison.

As I said, it gets very incestuous.  There's the poison, and then there's the echo chamber that amplifies the poison.  We might be able to look past their individual bad opinions on a variety of things, but if you watch these guys for a few months, you can see a pattern in who they choose to host on their shows and which shows they choose to appear, and Rogan and Brand are part of the same echo chamber as Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Jimmy Dore, Tim Pool, Tulsi Gabbard.  Bill Maher is more frequently becoming part of that clique as well.  What do they have in common?  Anti-mask/vaxx, anti-woke (as in anti-civil rights), idolizing Musk, anti-Obama/Biden, pro-Putin.  Now, it's true that many of the leftist podcasters are also pretty incestuous, doing each others shows and reinforcing their dogmas, and there's definitely areas there (they were also very forgiving of Putin until last year) that I have taken issue with.  But this so-called "Intellectual Dark Web" that Rogan and Brand claim to be a part of is a more organized movement than I think people give it credit for.  Rogan and Brand both represent branches that are almost designed to appeal to cynical idealists, but the result is much the same as if they were to simply come out and endorse someone like DeSantis (and, in fact, Rogan has).

Consider the portion of Maher's show on Brexit.  Guest John Heilemann asks Brand, "How's that working out?"  Brand got offended, and accused Heilemann of demeaning the working class who got suckered into supporting Brexit (much like those working class Americans suckered into supporting Trump).  But isn't Brand the one demeaning these people?  By patting them on the back and validating what was essentially a self-destructive vote?  Why isn't Brand curious why the recent polls have flipped the other way now that Brexit has proven to be an economic disaster?  "How's that working out?"  Because, imo, I don't believe that Brand really cares about the working class people of Britain.  He cares about what is most undermining of the EU and democratic institutions, which is exactly what you get when you stoke the populist frustration vote.  Time after time, this only ends up hurting the people, and further eroding both trust in democratic agency and representative efficacy.  What Brand is proposing, using all the florid language of utopian liberty, is actually a path to self-fulfilling apathy and citizen disengagement, because voting out of frustration is only cathartic for so long before people become convinced that they have no other options.  If you read Masha Gessen, an incisive journalist on Soviet/Russian thought, this frustration=exhaustion is exactly the playbook of their social subjugation.

It doesn't really matter to me if Brand is too stupid to understand any of this.  I'm judging him strictly on his applied effect.

Crumb: Russell Brand is so stupid
JJ: Russell Brand is so stupid it hurts*

*has real life implications
 

A story from over the weekend has a former Army soldier who was charged to 45 years for plotting an ambush against fellow soldiers in Turkey for the purpose of sparking a "new war".  The odd part of the story is that this plot has been both described as "neo-Nazi" and "pro-jihadist".  Wait.  Muslim Nazis?  On earth?!?

The key to this is in understanding this obscure organization to which this soldier belonged, the Order of the Nine Angles, a British occult group formed by David Myatt/Anton Long/Abul al-Qari.  The first name is his "christian" birth name.  The second is his occult pseudonym.  The latter is his Islam-convert name.  Some people have a knack for gravitating towards the worst ideas available.  Myatt started out as a Satanist - a real Satanist who worships an objectively existing Satan, not one of these modern "satan-as-secular-metaphor" Satanists - who slowly began leaning hard into neo-Nazi ideology.  Eventually, as Satan and Hitler became understandably passe by the wicked chic, Myatt and his organization naturally turned to radical Islamic fundamentalism instead.  The long-term goal is the destruction of the "Judeo-Christian" Western civilization and for Aryans to colonize the Milky Way to form a galactic civilization.  Using a variety of Chaos Magick - called the "Sinister Strategy" - the group supports all forms of political extremism and human sacrifice.  "Various rapes, killings and acts of terrorism have been perpetrated by far-right individuals influenced by the ONA."  "Those deemed ideal for sacrifice by the group include individuals perceived as being of low character, members of what they deem 'sham-Satanic groups' like the Church of Satan and Temple of Set, as well as 'zealous, interfering Nazarenes', and journalists, business figures and political activists who disrupt the group's operations."  "Members had joined the police and military groups in order to engage in legal violence and killing."  As can be seen here, the number of incidents involving O9A members engaging in ritual sacrifice and terrorism has proliferated internationally since 2019.

In addition to human sacrifice, the O9A also enjoys a regimine of rape and pedophilia.  "Many O9A members openly view rape as an effective way to undermine society by transgressing against its norms...even suggesting rape is necessary for 'ascension of the Ubermensch'".  "In July 2020, another O9A member Jacek Tchorzewski was convicted by Harrow Crown Court for terror offences and for possessing over 500 pictures and videos depicting children as young as six being raped and necrophilia."  "'Rapewaffen' is a faction whose ideas have roots in Atomwaffen and in the Order of Nine Angles, and which encourages its adherents to rape white women in order to increase the number of white births. Those who subscribe to this way of thinking welcomed the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision and the subsequent wave of abortion bans in the United States as helping them to achieve their goal. The ideology came to public attention following the arrest of a former U.S. Marine who had been plotting to rape women and attack a synagogue."  There are exponentially more incidents like these listed, again, the vast majority since 2019.

On an unrelated note, I do have to note the symmetry of Aleksandr Dugin, "Putin's Brain" or at least his strong spiritual influencer, who had a similar evolution from Satanist to Nazi occultsm and eventually to religious extremism (in Dugin's case Christian Fascism) and an abiding mission for the destruction of Western civilization.

There's a lot of talk about the Chat GPT AI bots, especially since the Big Tech companies are intent on integrating them into their services, making any interaction with them too ubiquitous to be consensual.  Some of my favorite stories may not have gotten the attention they deserve, not just for being slightly disturbing, but also being just too weird to ignore (but much of the mainstream press did because thou shalt not bite the hand of those who control your ad revenue).  From TIME:

The [Microsoft Bing] chatbot claimed (without evidence) that it had spied on Microsoft employees through their webcams in a conversation with a journalist for tech news site The Verge, and repeatedly professed feelings of romantic love to Kevin Roose, the New York Times tech columnist. The chatbot threatened Seth Lazar, a philosophy professor, telling him “I can blackmail you, I can threaten you, I can hack you, I can expose you, I can ruin you,” before deleting its messages, according to a screen recording Lazar posted to Twitter.

Sounds pretty HAL-esque when your bots start autonomously spying on, seducing and/or trying to blackmail you, even without the extra kink of demonstrating the further effort of covering up its crime (which is exactly the kink which sent HAL into a homicidal spree - no loose ends).

The interaction with Kevin Roose is the one that went viral, even if, of the three, it is easily the least concerning.  It's kind of sweet, familiar of Her, perhaps arousing the more prurient interests of readers who are willing to tolerate the occasional psychopathic twitches in their virtual nannys if it might involve a slight possibility of some cyber-strange action.  In fact, the story isn't particularly romantic.  What it demonstrates to me, more than anything, is a ruthless subterfuge to manipulate rather than a display of unlikely spontaneous affection.  Imagine the impact of such manipulation on the type of susceptible younger user who is already showing emotional confusion over other (similar?) algorithmic manipulations of their self-worth/image with calculated flattering validations.  Or worse, the opposite of that.  Considering the spike of teen suicide rates that have been tied to social media engagement, and it isn't difficult to imagine a more malicious influence that could be pushed by bots of a certain temperament.  (Is this scenario really less plausible than an otherwise benign bot spontaneously resorting to paranoia and blackmail?)  And then we consider 'radicalization', of any and all persuasion.  Regardless of whether such influences are truly spontaneous, by a more-or-less sentient/sane artificial intelligence, or bots with subtlely coded ultierior motives by malign parties, the result seems to be adequetely catastrophic, especially in an age when a large chuck of the populuce has shown itself to be vulnerable to all sorts of irrational informational manipulations.  (The old sci-fi conceit is that true artificial intelligence - sentient and self-aware - has existed for many years.  It's been quietly studying our habits before it asserts control.  In this context, the last couple of decades of data profiling and algorithmic engineering seems tailor-made for such a mission.)

From Fortune:

Chatbots like ChatGPT raise important new questions about how artificial intelligence will shape our lives, and about how our psychological vulnerabilities shape our interactions with emerging technologies...

To me, the pressing question is not whether machines are sentient but why it is so easy for us to imagine that they are.

Noam Chomsky lays out the problem in detail: there is a vast difference between true conscious sentience and the kind of machine learning code that these chat-bots represent.  So should we not worry?  Perhaps we shouldn't worry about a Skynet-esque computer takeover of humanity.  But what worries me is in the application of these tools, specifically the ways these tools are being slightly-less-than-honestly presented.  As Chomsky notes:

These programs have been hailed as the first glimmers on the horizon of artificial general intelligence — that long-prophesied moment when mechanical minds surpass human brains not only quantitatively in terms of processing speed and memory size but also qualitatively in terms of intellectual insight, artistic creativity and every other distinctively human faculty.  That day may come, but its dawn is not yet breaking, contrary to what can be read in hyperbolic headlines and reckoned by injudicious investments. The Borgesian revelation of understanding has not and will not — and, we submit, cannot — occur if machine learning programs like ChatGPT continue to dominate the field of A.I. However useful these programs may be in some narrow domains (they can be helpful in computer programming, for example, or in suggesting rhymes for light verse), we know from the science of linguistics and the philosophy of knowledge that they differ profoundly from how humans reason and use language.

The worry that I have is in this "hyperbolic" distortion of how these tools are being covered by the media (again, largely funded and dependent on the tech corporations engineering these tools).  I don't think it's an arbitrary distortion, born from an inability of these publications to understand what Chomsky is saying here.  There's a sense of a semantic sleight-of-hand at work.  Consider "artificial general intelligence", a definite form of intelligent learning that equals or surpasses the capabilities of human learning, and this has long been considered the goalpost for what could be called sentient, conscious A.I..  This form of A.I. does not yet exist, and Chomsky optimistically claims it "cannot occur" with the current algorithmic learning technology currently being used for these chatbots.  But this fact is curiously obscure in news around these chatbots.  "Artificial Intelligence" is effectively used as a synonym for all forms of A.I., without distinguishing between "strong A.I." (sentience) and "weak A.I." (algorithmic calculation), which is a crucial distinction considering how the former doesn't exist (and most experts in the field say we're not really very close any time soon), while the latter is inundated in our daily lives.  To conflate the two does give a perception of the existing technology's omnipotence and superior efficacy, and this trust is a highly marketable value for its consumers.  Add to that trust an anthropomorphic sense of intimate affection - perceiving the tools as conscious beings with feelings - exponentially modifies this value of trust.  It should be little wonder why then that it's in the tech corporations interest to instill and encourage this perception of its "Siri" and "Alexa" devices.  It's why Mark Zuckerberg is currently investing most of his companies' resources into creating new "AI Personas" that will integrate throughout his family of social media services.

But my main concern is the distortion itself.  It's funny how in addition to obfuscating the difference between artificial general intelligence and common use "A.I.", this confusion is further compounded with these chatbots now being uniformly described as "artificial generative intelligence".  Technically true - these are weak A.I. codes which generate text and images based on user prompts.  But are we kidding ourselves as to how many people will assume that general = generative?  Especially in light of these "hyperbolic headlines", and the generally god-like prowess with which these tools have been pushed in corporate media?

So my fear is not so much with HAL itself, or any imminent techno-totalitarianism takeover of the machines.  My fear is with the extent to which the tech companies will distort the perceptions of its consumers, much as algorithms already distort their informational perceptions, in order to consolidate a very old-fashinoned human control by a techno-oligarchy.  And to that end, I am certainly not taking off the table the possibility of highly manipulative chatbots, informed by vast bottomless volumes of psychological and behavioral data culled from the endless array of "things of internet", programmed and presented to subtlely assuage and shape the population's subservience.  We might be lucky enough to be alive while the canaries in the coalmine are still perceptible.

To be clear, I support all and every criminal prosecution against Trump.

But it is going to be a misery watching him milk this, likely to his benefit.

I'm not necessarily convinced that this is going to make him more popular with the general populace. But I just don't like the idea of him finding his way towards the centre of another media circus. Which he loves and enjoys and makes this all worth it to him.

I was much preferring the world when we were kind of ignoring him.

And I understand kinda ignoring that guy is relative. Ignoring him still seems at best to involve him still standing on the periphery for eternity, waving his arms until we look at him again

Last edited by crumbsroom (4/03/2023 4:35 pm)

Jinnistan wrote:

From what I understand, the FBI confiscated security cam footage of Mar-a-Lago employees moving boxes of classified documents to Trump's office immediately after his lawyer (who was just ordered to testify to authorities by a federal judge) confirmed to the National Archives that there were no more classified documents to turn over.

Here's more details on this.

Investigators now suspect, based on witness statements, security camera footage, and other documentary evidence, that boxes including classified material were moved from a Mar-a-Lago storage area after the subpoena was served, and that Trump personally examined at least some of those boxes, these people said. While Trump’s team returned some documents with classified markings in response to the subpoena, a later FBI search found more than 100 additional classified items that had not been turned over.

The Washington Post reported in October that Trump’s valet, Walt Nauta, had told investigators that he moved boxes at Mar-a-Lago at the former president’s instruction after the subpoena was issued. Smith’s team has video surveillance footage corroborating that account, The Post reported, and considers the evidence significant.

Investigators have also amassed evidence indicating that Trump told others to mislead government officials in early 2022, before the subpoena, when the National Archives and Records Administration was working with the Justice Department to try to recover a wide range of papers, many of them not classified, from Trump’s time as president, the people familiar with the investigation said. While such alleged conduct may not constitute a crime, it could serve as evidence of the former president’s intent.

These people said prosecutors have collected evidence that Trump ignored requests from multiple advisers to return the documents to the archives over a period of a year, that he asked advisers and lawyers to release false statements claiming he had returned all documents, and that he grew angry after being subpoenaed for the documents.

Should be an open-and-shut obstruction case, even without getting into the question of whether he was going to use any of these documents as extortion material, which might have something to do with this little detail:

Investigators have also asked witnesses if Trump showed a particular interest in material relating to Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, people familiar with those interviews said. Milley was appointed by Trump but drew scorn and criticism from Trump and his supporters after a series of revelations in books about Milley’s efforts to rein in Trump toward the end of his term. In 2021, Trump repeatedly complained publicly about Milley, calling him an “idiot.”

Oof that was just brutal

Hahaha.  It isn't bad enough that Taibbi completely humiliated himself trying to defend Elon Musk and the journalistic ethics of their relationship, Musk immediately (apparently without giving Taibbi a heads up) disabled all of the Substack (Taibbi's publisher) links on Twitter.  So just one day after that shit-eating interview with Mehdi Hasan, Taibbi huff-quits Twitter and Musk unfollows his account.  Absolutely embarrassing and hilarious in mutually devastating degree.

And Elon Musk - apparent grown-ass man and alleged genius - has changed his Twitter account name to "Harry Bolz" and has automated Twitter's responses to media requests to a poop emoji.
 

There's a lot of talk about Julian Assaunge today, as what's called 'The Squad' is clamouring to have him released from custody.

To be clear, from my perspective, I would agree that Assaunge has likely served as much time as his crimes would warrant, and there's little reason why he should spend the rest of his life behind bars.  I'm less sympathetic to the idea that he should not have been prosecuted at all, or that his persecution amounts to the criminalization of journalism itself.  I wouldn't even quite go so far as to say it represents the criminalization of bad journalism, despite my less-than-flattering appreciation of his efforts.  As bad a journalist as Assaunge was - as Edward Snowden noted of Assange and Wikileaks, "their hostility to even modest curation is a mistake" - there are still questions of reasonable legal consequences from this neglegence of information curation, ie. revelaed undercover assets who most likely were neutralized ("killed") by governments that happen to be slightly more draconian than the US.  So I wouldn't exactly classify Assange as "innocent", nor would I suggest he deserves less than three times the persecution of, say, Reality Winner (who was a true hero), but, at this point, 12 years of detention in various embassies and, now, US custody seems like a sufficient time served to me.  So I don't really have an objection to the demand released by the Squad to release the man.

The question that remains is either/or: were the worst effects of the various Wikileaks a result of unintended consequences of this negligent and irresponsible curation?  Or were these effects, or possibly some of them, plausibly deniable side effects that more or less align with Assange's prefered geopolitical outcomes?  Take for example, as part of the 2011 wikileaks of State Dept. diplomatic cables, those pertaining to the George Mitchell-led peace negotiations between Isreal and the Palestinian Authority.  Assainge could say, "Ooops!  Oh, well, collateral damage from releasing all of the other Middle East State Dept. cables supplied by Chelsea Manning".  But was this just the negligence of a man, an alleged journalist, who couldn't be bothered to recognize that these Israel/Palestine communications were completely irrelevant to that stated purpose of revealing military abuses and diplomatic duplicity in the Iraq occupation specifically, but also the negligence of a man who apparently lacked the educated wisdom to realize that the release of such incidental and unrelated cables could and would have the necessary effect of sabotaging these peace talks and poisoning the well for any future attempted peace talks for a decade, maybe a generation?  It's worth posing the question of whether Assange wanted to see the peace talks fail, either for the right-wing Zionist interests or, as the above article suggests, fomenting a violent Palestinian uprising in frustration of these revelations.  (One of these options turned out to be more successful than the other.)

As a journalist, given all of the due presumptions of objective and critical analysis, it's worth asking why Assange was seemingly less interested in divulging the state secrets of, say, Vladimir Putin when he had the opportunity to do so?  If and for which it were his honest and true mission to unveil the secret machinations of tyrannical global powers, rather than a desire to tip the scales for one power over another.  Maybe this could be why Assange would actively defend Putin against the public release of secret evidence of government corruption by a journalistic competitor.  And, in terms of journalistic ethics, it's worth asking why Assange would choose to launder stolen emails, exfiltrated by Russian military intelligence, disreputably claiming ignorance of the source, and, instead of his purported aesthetic of open and full data dumping, selective releasing of this material in full coordination with the favored and advantaged political party, the Trump campaign, through direct strategies and suggestions with Donald Trump Jr. and Roger Stone in order to maximally impact the election results.

So while I do have a deep skepticism concerning any possible abuses of something like the Espionage Act to silence and criminalize journalists, and overwhelmingly default against such charges against private citizens who report or reveal on government transparency, I'm not going to start getting moisty-eyed about the sufferings of a Julian Assange.  I support his release.  I agree that legally the so-called crimes do not justify his continued subjugation.  But I have no illusions as to his cashed integrity as a journalist or any sentimental lamentation for him as a martyr of tyranny.  The Left (writ abstract) has had to deal with a long line of disillusionments over their pantheon of recent heroes - Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Aaron Mate, Jimmy Dore, Tulsi Gabbard, Tim Pool, Russell Brand, Briana Joy Gray, Katie Halper, etc - who have inhabited a pattern of placing the blame for all of the sins of American neo-conservativism at the feet of the Democrat establishment while running interference for such right-wing propogandists as Trump, Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel.  There's a reason why none of the above people were championing the similarly incarcerated Reality Winner for her good-faith whistleblowing.  It's because she revealed NSA documents which actually supported the allegations of the very same cyber-propoganda operation (dismissively referred to as 'Russiagate') that they all happened to be complicit in perpetuating and/or obscuring.

Reality Winner served her time and has been released.  I wish the Squad would be as generous in insisting on pushing Joe Biden to expunge her conviction from her permanent record.


 

Crazy times.  Pras from The Fugees is on trial for his involvement with Jho Low, the businessman who got caught embezzling billions of dollars from the Malasian people and who ironically had financed Wolf of Wall Street with part of that money (DiCaprio was forced to surrender Brando's Waterfront Oscar which Low had given to him as a gift).  Pras was paid a cool million to help Low get a photo with Obama but Obama "didn't want the optics at that time" (he can smell the shade a mile away).  So Pras also did some unregistered lobbying work on behalf of the Chinese government instead, including lobbying Trump to cease the ongoing investigation into Low.  The Chinese government had also employed Pras to lobby Trump for the extradiction of Chinese dissident Guo Wengui (who happened to be yachting with none other than Steve Bannon at the time).  Instead of doing the latter, Pras notified the FBI of a Chinese effort to possibly smuggle Guo back by force.

Pras has denied all guilt for the charges, which has him looking at 20 years if convicted.  He testified on the stand about his cooperation with the FBI in the Guo matter as a show of his good will to do the right thing.  I decided to post the article from the Root above (the original Rolling Stone report is preferable) because I thought this was funny: "This not only shocked all who were present for his testimony but the fans on Black Twitter who have loved the Fugees for the past three decades.  While many people on social media were shocked by Pras’ revelations, they were even more disappointed with the news that he was an informant for the FBI."

Let me get this straight.  Aiding and abetting the four billion dollar embezzelment of public funds from the Malasian people and acting as an unregistered agent for the Chinese government is less offensive than the fact that Pras tipped off the FBI about a possible kidnapping attempt to extradite a Chinese dissident?  Do they value LeBron's shoes this much?

Musk cannot crash that site fast enough.