Can AI treat loneliness?

Although I mostly live alone, I fortunately do not suffer from feelings of loneliness. That might be because I am an introvert, comfortable with solitude and being in my own thoughts and engaging in fundamentally solitary pursuits like reading and writing. It takes very little interaction with other people to satisfy my need for human companionship. But for those who thrive when engaging with others, solitude can be a real problem, leading to feelings of loneliness. Loneliness can also strike people when they are in the presence of others if they do not feel a sense of connection with them.

There has been some attention paid recently to the question of loneliness, with suggestions that its adverse effects go beyond just mental health.

A 2023 report issued by Vivek Murthy, then the U.S. Surgeon General, presented evidence that loneliness increases your risk for cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, and premature death. Persistent loneliness is worse for your health than being sedentary or obese; it’s like smoking more than half a pack of cigarettes a day.

Estimates suggest roughly half the US population over sixty say they feel lonely. The causes of loneliness among older people are not surprising. Friends and family die, and as their physical capabilities decline, people go out less less, engage in fewer activities, such that their social circle starts shrinking and they find new friends harder to make.
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ICE unleashes the sadism

I was sickened to read how people are being treated in ICE detention camps.

Migrants at a Miami immigration jail were shackled with their hands tied behind their backs and made to kneel to eat food from styrofoam plates “like dogs”, according to a report published on Monday into conditions at three overcrowded south Florida facilities.
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Dozens of men had been packed into a holding cell for hours, the report said, and denied lunch until about 7pm. They remained shackled with the food on chairs in front of them.

“We had to eat like animals,” one detainee named Pedro said.

Degrading treatment by guards is commonplace in all three jails, the groups say. At the Krome North service processing center in west Miami, female detainees were made to use toilets in full view of men being held there, and were denied access to gender-appropriate care, showers or adequate food.
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The killing fields of Gaza

While the events in Trump-world such as the Epstein files get a lot of attention in the US media, the real horror is what is happening in Gaza where it seems like Israel is engaged in the wholesale slaughter of Gazans. They are killing in large numbers the elderly, women, children. desperate people waiting for aid, first responders, medical workers, journalists, starving people trying to get food, people in cafes, any gathering of people, anyone else that they happen to feel like killing, and stops aid convoys trying to ease the suffering.

There used to be a time when the Israeli authorities would go through some form of ritual after each massacre of civilians, saying that it had been done inadvertently while they were seeking out militants. But that veneer of deniability had long worn thin and now they do not even bother, only saying it when they cross a fresh frontier, such as bombing a Catholic church. The Israeli government used to once boast that the Israeli Defense Forces were the most disciplined and ethical in the world. That was never true and is never true of any military. Any army of occupation inevitably ends up terrorizing the local population and the IDF is revealed to be just another army of cold-blooded murderers.
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The big unresolved question from the Scopes trial onwards

As I emphasized in my posts during the past week, the Scopes trial did not resolve any of the major legal questions involving evolution. But many of those questions were resolved in subsequent cases over the next 80 years, as I chronicle in my book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom that reviewed the 80-year legal fight by religious groups to combat the teaching of the theory of evolution in public schools, that began with the Scopes trial in 1925 and ended with the Intelligent Design trial in Dover, PA in 2005

But there was one issue raised by the prosecutor in his defense of the Butler Act (that forbade the teaching of evolution) that is still unresolved and that is what is appropriate to teach children in public schools and who should get to decide it. Should it be the public through its elected representatives? Should it be educators? What should be role of subject matter experts?

In many countries, especially those with a national educational system, the answer is simple: the government does. In general, there is a ministry of education that sets the standards, curriculum, and even lesson plans and teachers are trained in it. There is no real basis for legal challenge and in theory they could decide to teach anything at all. In reality, public opinion acts as a major constraint on teaching nonsense. But in the US, education is very much a local affair, with each local community having its own school boards that determine these things, and these can vary widely. The state can set overall guidelines, while textbooks and standardized tests provide some measure of uniformity, but not much.
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The surprising impact of the Scopes trial

As discussed in the last three posts, as a purely legal matter, the Scopes trial was inconsequential, setting no legal precedent whatsoever. While the Dayton civic leaders achieved their goal of creating huge publicity around the trial, like all publicity stunts, the hoopla eventually died away, the crowds disappeared, and life went largely back to normal. The Butler Act that triggered the trial was quietly repealed only four decades later. The first major case involving the teaching of evolution was the 1968 Epperson v. Arkansas in which the US Supreme Court struck down a law similar to the Butler Act that banned the teaching of evolution in public schools. This was the case that the Scopes trial sought to be and yet few have now heard of that case while the Scopes Monkey trial, as it has come to be known, is firmly embedded in the public culture.

How did that come to be?
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How the Scopes trial came about

As I discussed in my two previous posts, in strictly legal terms, the 1925 Scopes trial had little impact. But it was never meant to be primarily a legal issue. Right from the beginning, the whole case was designed as a publicity stunt and in that respect, it succeeded spectacularly. The newly created American Civil Liberties Union announced that it would challenge the 1925 Butler Act, passed in March of that year, as a violation of free speech and put out an ad saying that it would represent any teacher who was charged under it. A small group of Dayton civic leaders saw such a legal challenge a public relations opportunity and decided that such a case should take place in their city and quickly moved to ensure it, fearful of being scooped by other cities. They put the case on a very fast track, which is why a mere four months later, a lightning pace in the legal world, the Scopes trial took place.

In my book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom that reviewed the 80-year legal fight by religious groups to combat the teaching of the theory of evolution in public schools, that began with the Scopes trial and ended with the Intelligent Design trial in Dover, PA in 2005, I describe how the case came about.
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The Scopes appeal

As I said in my previous post, the Scopes defense team wanted their client to be found guilty of violating the 1925 Butler Act guilty so that they could appeal to the higher courts on the constitutional grounds that it violated free speech guarantees. This was why Scopes’s main attorney Clarence Darrow actually asked the jury to bring in a guilty verdict, which they were happy to do after just a few minutes deliberation.

The following extract from my book, God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom that reviewed the 80-year legal fight by religious groups to combat the teaching of the theory of evolution in public schools, that began with the Scopes trial and ended with the Intelligent Design trial in Dover, PA in 2005, describes the aftermath of the trial

The Scopes verdict was appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court. Many people on the defense side, including the ACLU, tried to have Darrow removed from the defense team for the appeal since they wanted to bring the focus back to the issue of free speech and feared that Darrow’s strong antipathy to religion would result in that issue dominating once again. But Darrow and his allies outmaneuvered them and he stayed on.
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Recalling the Scopes trial on its 100th anniversary

This week I will review some aspects of the famous 1925 Scopes trial that lasted from July 10 through Tuesday, July 21. It has cast such a long shadow, and has reverberated so much in public consciousness, that it is worthwhile to have a quick summary of the actual events of that trial, in order to separate the facts from the folklore that has arisen around it as a result of the hugely popular play and film Inherit the Wind, the former produced in 1955 and the latter in 1960.

The trial itself was brief, lasting just eight days, much of it involving wrangling over legal technicalities that took place with the jury out of the courtroom. It involved the question of whether John T, Scopes had violated the Butler Act passed by Tennessee in March of 1925 that said that “it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” There were only two occasions when the two famous attorneys William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow were able to make speeches and these occurred in the middle of the trial during legal skirmishes.

What follows is an extract from my book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom that reviewed the 80-year legal fight by religious groups to combat the teaching of the theory of evolution in public schools, that began with the Scopes trial and ended with the Intelligent Design trial in Dover, PA in 2005.

Day 1, Friday, July 10: The morning saw the grand jury and witnesses appear to issue a new indictment, since the older one was discovered to have had a technical flaw. Scopes had to tell a reluctant student that he would be doing him a favor by testifying against him, and then was duly indicted again. After lunch, jury selection took place.
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Trump has declared war on the Hispanic community

One of the noteworthy features of the 2024 election was the deep inroads that Trump made into the traditionally Democratic voters in the Hispanic community.

The [Rio Grande] Valley, a longtime Democratic stronghold, has in recent years been used as evidence of Donald Trump and his maga movement’s appeal to nonwhite voters. In 2021, when Villalobos was elected, Republicans celebrated the win as a sign of good things to come. “Amazing news! McAllen, Texas is a major border town of 140,000 people. 85% Hispanic—and just elected a Republican mayor,” Steve Cortes, a former Trump adviser, posted on Twitter. “The macro realignment accelerates in South Texas, and elsewhere, as Hispanics rally to America First.” In last year’s Presidential election, Trump won every county in the Valley, including one where Hillary Clinton had beat him by forty points, in 2016. McAllen had the second-biggest shift in party share of any large city in the nation, trailing only Laredo, another Texas border community. “In the Rio Grande Valley, the Red Wave Makes Landfall,” the Texas Observer declared, calling the 2024 election a “bloodbath” and wondering whether Texas Democrats were “doomed.”
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Republican gains in the Valley are the result of overlapping forces. The Valley’s population tends to be patriotic and religious, with relatively lower rates of educational attainment. Republicans touted their support for law enforcement and oil and gas—significant sources of employment in the area—while local Democrats were increasingly seen as complacent, and in some cases corrupt. In 2022, McAllen’s congressional district, which had been held by Democrats for more than a century, elected its first Republican. (The district had been redrawn after the 2020 census to make it more favorable to Republicans.)

But Trump has declared war on the Hispanic community, targeting anyone of that heritage for harassment, detention, and deportation. ICE agents have focused their attentions on neighborhoods where they live and places where they congregate to find work and targeting anyone who happens to look Hispanic. This has resulted in many of them being afraid to go out anywhere or show up for work.
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