It turns out humans don’t need AI to say incredibly stupid, ignorant things.
Dufus asks: “How’s that X chromosome feel?”
Confused response: “???? all humans have at least one?”
Dufus: “Women don’t. Moron”
She has a new fundraiser-essay, “The Unforgivable Sin of Ms Rachel”. I’ve only seen a half hour of it so far, but it’s magnificent — she is discussing the importance of empathy in raising children and normal human interactions, and is exposing the horrible anti-empathy arguments of conservatives. It’s 2½ hours long, unfortunately, but man, it’s good and thorough. Everyone ought to watch it. Learn more about the anti-Christian sin of empathy, and how the Sermon on the Mount is a crime against Jesus.
It’s also a fundraiser for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. I was motivated to donate.
Finally, the black widow egg sacs have released their hordes!
Here’s a close-up of one of the spiderlings. Black widows start off with more spectacular patterns — as they mature, they’ll get red and yellow bands and racing stripes, before turning solid black with a blotch of red on the abdomen.
Pretty!
I’m the executor for my late mother’s estate. Last week I thought I had completed all of my duties. I had liquidated all of my mother’s assets over the course of the past year, and then the final step was calculating the distribution of money, which was reviewed by our lawyer; that final summary was sent to all of the heirs, giving them an opportunity to dispute anything, and they then signed a form and sent it back to the lawyer. I wrote a whole bunch of checks and sent those to the lawyer.
Yesterday was the day the lawyer had received all of the signatures, all dutifully signed, had all of the pre-signed checks, and was going to pop them in the mail, and we’d be all done.
And then…another bill from an insurance company for my mother’s last days in the hospital arrived, for unspecified in-patient treatments, for $770. This was a year ago! The lawyer had posted a public notice last year telling all creditors that this was their last chance to get their final bite of the pie. It took a year to complete the accounting because these bills and claims had trickled in for months.
We thought we were clear. There was a 4 month cut off on claims, but it turns out there’s a medical exemption.
So today I get to recalculate everything with new final sum and rewrite all of those checks and send them to the lawyer. Oh boy.
You’ll never guess who the belated bill that messed up the completion of this chore came from: United Healthcare.
The US gutted research institution this year — so far, it has cost us $3.8 billion. What a savings! What shall we do with all that money instead?
How about repainting the border wall? (Which, according to the Cato Institute of all places, doesn’t work.)
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Tuesday that the entire border wall along the southern border with Mexico is going to be painted black to make it hotter and deter illegal immigration — and she credited President Trump with the idea.
Noem spoke during a visit to a portion of the wall in New Mexico, where she also picked up a roller brush to help out with the painting.
She touted the height of the wall as well as the depth as ways to deter people seeking to go over or under the walls. And then Noem said Homeland Security was going to be trying black paint to make the metal hotter.
“That is specifically at the request of the president, who understands that in the hot temperatures down here when something is painted black it gets even warmer and it will make it even harder for people to climb. So we are going to be painting the entire southern border wall black to make sure that we encourage individuals to not come into our country illegally,” Noem said.
The cost for this brilliant redesign is “between $500 million and $3 billion”, or somewhat more than Kristi Noem’s plastic surgery bill. Try not to think about how many research grants that sum could have funded.
Mary has planted lots of milkweed in our yard, and it’s paying off. We keep finding more caterpillars, and we’ve seen as many as a half-dozen butterflies at once fluttering over the tasty field of monarch food growing here.
It’s nothing compared to the swarms we’d see 20-25 years ago, but we’re doing our part to cultivate more.
Google is pushing hard to get us to use AI for all kinds of things. We should just ask Google our questions about biology!
After all, I, as a biologist have so much confidence in the power of AI to address difficult questions about biology. For instance, ask it to explain an ovarian cyst to you.
(I’ve put this image below the fold to avoid triggering nightmares or confusion.)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw the problem clearly in the 1940s. It’s the stupidity, stupid, and stupidity is more subtle and complex than you might think. Keep the MAGA movement in mind while reading this.
Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed- in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.
If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature. This much is certain, that it is in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one. There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid. We discover this to our surprise in particular situations. The impression one gains is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect, but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or that they allow this to happen to them. We note further that people who have isolated themselves from others or who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals or groups of people inclined or condemned to sociability. And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem. It is a particular form of the impact of historical circumstances on human beings, a psychological concomitant of certain external conditions. Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. It would even seem that this is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence, and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.
Yet at this very point it becomes quite clear that only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity. Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it. Until then we must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person. This state of affairs explains why in such circumstances our attempts to know what ‘the people’ really think are in vain and why, under these circumstances, this question is so irrelevant for the person who is thinking and acting responsibly. The word of the Bible that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom declares that the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome stupidity.
But these thoughts about stupidity also offer consolation in that they utterly forbid us to consider the majority of people to be stupid in every circumstance. It really will depend on whether those in power expect more from people’s stupidity than from their inner independence and wisdom.
That describes our current situation perfectly. We have a mob of people who have been incentivized to be stupid — unquestioning, dogmatic, full of certainty, and motivated to rationalize every stupid decision by those in power. Reason and evidence will not dissuade them; those are the tools we always considered the best of our civilized minds, and they’ve completely negated them. Stupidity is the secret weapon underlying fascism.
It’s an effective weapon. Here’s a depressing analysis that says, historically, “Once fascists win power democratically, they have never been removed democratically. Not once. Ever.”
The pattern is so consistent it’s almost funny if it weren’t so terrifying. Every single time it goes like this: Conservatives panic about socialism or progressives or whatever. They ally with fascists as the “lesser evil.” Fascists take power. Fascists immediately purge the conservatives who helped them. Then it’s 30-50 years of dictatorship. This happened in Germany, Italy, Spain, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Greece, Portugal, Croatia, Romania, and Hungary.
Want to know how many times conservatives successfully “controlled” the fascists they allied with? Zero. Want to know how many times fascists purged the conservatives after taking power? All of them. Every single time.
Now consider this: the United States has been taken over by fascist. It is a fascist state, and we don’t even have an effective resistance — the Democratic party is a floundering joke, led by people who are more interested in maintaining their petty powers than in defeating an existential threat. Sure, do write a “strongly worded letter” and give the fascists a good chuckle.
And here’s the part that breaks your heart. Violence works. For them. Fascists use violence while claiming to be victims. They create chaos that “requires” their authoritarian solution. Then they purge anyone who opposes them. Meanwhile, democrats keep insisting on following rules that fascists completely ignore. They file lawsuits. They write editorials. They vote on resolutions. And fascists just laugh and keep consolidating power.
The statistics are brutal. Fascist takeovers prevented after winning power democratically: zero. Average length of fascist rule once established: 31 years. Fascist regimes removed by voting: zero. Fascist regimes removed by asking nicely: zero. Most were removed by war or military coups, and tens of millions died in the process.
Wow. So pessimistic. Also, so realistic. No matter what, it’s going to take a struggle (maybe a futile one, but better that than to accept the coming tyranny) to defeat fascism. Our current leadership lacks the will to fight — as one example look at the packed, corrupt Supreme Court which could have been weakened during the Biden administration…and nothing was done. The Republicans have been building and strengthening oppressive institutions, but imagine, if the Democrats won the next election, would they, for instance, disband ICE? You know they wouldn’t: they’d compromise, at a time when we need decisive ruthlessness.
The only hints of optimism I’m seeing are from Refuse Fascism — they seem to believe that we can actually fight back and take back the country. I agree with Bonhoeffer that argument and debate are not winning tactics against stupidity. What we need is a strong shock to awaken the citizenry and jar them out of their cultivated dogma, and a mass uprising is the only thing we can do at this point to do that. There is a planned march on occupied Washington DC to protest on 5 November, we should all go.
You might want to tune in to the Refuse Fascism podcast to hear from voices that are simultaneously fully aware of how dire our situation is while also believing that mass action might actually help us overcome the current fascist regime. Check it out. If nothing else, Sunsara Taylor gives an invigorating speech in the first five minutes.
We have to get out of the mindset that we can patch it up in the next election.
The peak season for Argiope is late summer, and I’ve been physically wrecked for all of August, so I’d resigned myself to not seeing any of these big beautiful spiders this year. Then Mary went out to the garden to pick tomatoes, and there, right there in my back yard, is Argiope aurantia nestled down in our rather weedy crop!
Strictly speaking, I haven’t actually seen one yet — Mary took an iPhone photo of one. It’s 5 or 6 meters from my back door, which is out of my current range, but I can aspire to hobble out there sometime in the next few days, I think. It gives me something to aim for, anyway.
I got to go outside! Actually, I had to go outside, since I have a ravenous population of spiders in my lab that must be fed, or there will be consequences. The one problem is that I’m still stuck in a wheelchair, which turned out to be almost no problem at all. The only steps I had to deal with were 3 short steps just outside my back door, and the rest of the way was all ramps, all the way to the science building elevator. Then, of course, I had my assistant Mary to push me there and back.
Actual photo of Mary helping me navigate the science building this morning.
The only real problem was that, as always it seems, we had another major thunderstorm roll through, with skies dark as night and thunder and lightning and a drenching rain. I think it’s fine that my return to the lab would be heralded with spooky nightmare weather.
Now the spiders are all snug in their webs, happily crunching through mealworms and flies, and all is right in the world.
