22 Comments
Comment removed
December 21, 2022
Comment removed
Expand full comment

"Mike Lindell did a lot of drugs and then kicked the habit, but I think for some addicts, they just change their addictions"

*touches nose with forefinger* BINGO. I once said of my ex-wife's father "He's been sober for 17 years and he's still and asshole." (it was true but still contributed in the long run to the "ex-" part)

"Ah, my daily dose of fascism"

We should start a "Two Minutes Hate" segment only with videos of Chris Wray, Bill Bennett, and Chuck Shumer, and the rest of our Emanuel Goldstein's.

"Welcome to a world where "slippery slope" is not a logical fallacy but an inevitable and predictable process."

Predicting that the selection Sam Brinton for Junior Auxiliary Emergency Backup Undersecretary to the Director of Some Nuclear Stuff would end badly isn't a case of Slippery Slope because, well he's a F#@&ing FREAK who's completely messed up in the head. We knew it, they knew it, and it has nothing to do with him being gender or species fluid.

Expand full comment
Comment removed
December 21, 2022
Comment removed
Expand full comment

In the words of the loquacious F. Leghorn, "That boy - I, say - that boy ain't right."

Expand full comment

"It doesn't snow when it's negative 20 out."

*blink blink*

Expand full comment
Comment removed
December 21, 2022Edited
Comment removed
Expand full comment

"He's a Montana boy born and bred and I am the luckiest woman on planet earth to have snatched him up"

Any fish'll bite if you have good bait. *nods*

Expand full comment

Stacy Abrams was basically an unknown when she ran for Gov in 2018. People MAY have known that she was the GA House minority, but they did know she was a plus-sized Black female, so she got the early Kamala Harris treatment. In a mid-term backlash to Trump, she came within 50,000 votes (that's really not very close) of winning.

I'm not sure why she decided to go on the election denial rampage, but it has paid off handsomely for her, if not for her campaign employees or vendors. There is some evidence that it has also paid off very well for some of her close friends.

Having said that, Lindell has a story of his own, and he, like Tank Abrams, is nuttier than squirrel feces. OTOH, he has made his fortune by selling something a lot of people seem to really like.

Hmmm. Now that I think about it, Tank Abrams has also been selling something her customers really like, so maybe the two aren't that different at all.

Something to think about.

Expand full comment

"Now that I think about it, Tank Abrams has also been selling something her customers really like, so maybe the two aren't that different at all."

https://imgflip.com/i/7542fm

Expand full comment
Comment removed
December 21, 2022
Comment removed
Expand full comment

Just whipped that up for this here junket.

Expand full comment

Yes, the pig^2 yelling at the little blue bird is clever, but the key to defeating AI is the same as it's always been: chaos.

There was finally a prompt that stumped ChatGPT. Someone asked it to write a passage in the style of Finnegans Wake. It failed. Hard. It generated something, but it wasn't even close.

Incidentally, this is exactly how the Harlem Globetrotters beat that robot basketball team in the 1981 made for TV movie The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island.

Expand full comment
Comment removed
December 21, 2022
Comment removed
Expand full comment

"AI won't ever be as creative as humans is that our "programming" will always be infinitely more flexible than any AI. We write rules to break them."

AI - sometimes loosely referred to as "machine learning" - needs data, examples of the thing to be learned from which to construct the rules. If you're designed to follow the rules you can't break them.

Art is about creating tension and resolving it. Or... not resolving it. Or resolving it partially leading to new tensions. It's hard to quantify tension. Emotions like desire, fear, empathy, joy, longing, compassion create tension.

So the act of creating a sonnet a la Shakespeare is not merely unruled but purposely in violation of the rules whereas creating a Thomas Friedman op-ed just requires that you follow the rules: "China is Te Awesome!" ; *repeat topic sentence in every paragraph plus as your wrap-up, and throw it in the Title, too* ; "We need to regulate <think people like using freely>"

Expand full comment
Comment removed
December 21, 2022
Comment removed
Expand full comment

"Where are the Jonathan Swifts?"

Their spending most of their time trying to level up their XPs in Call of Duty.

Expand full comment

"but the key to defeating AI is the same as it's always been:"

Counting on our fingers and toes?

Expand full comment

"Incidentally, this is exactly how the Harlem Globetrotters beat that robot basketball team in the 1981 made for TV movie The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island."

This had to rattle around in my head a bit and I had a to do a little Google Fu but I remember now, Curly Neal slidin' around dribbling through a robots legs.

I was a junior in high school by then so maybe I thought it was a flashback from the weekend before...

Expand full comment

Whew! For a grab-bag, lots of stuff! BTW, what was the name of the AI you used for Batman-Joker?

Mike Lindell is already in trouble over his voting machine assertions. Obviously he has $$ to burn.

The Taliban? Hasn't Biden given $780million SINCE Kabul fell for "humanitarian" aid? Maybe it's being used to destroy women's schools.

You are absolutely right about Stanford and "how that nonsense starts". Everyone laughs at the college kids. Until they come at you out of Lord of the Flies.

Thanks for the reminder of the Double Standard: Republicans repudiate Herschel Walker as unfit. Dems vote for the charcuterie candidate. Then, his unvetted wife is the real power. Damn.

DC sucks. No idea what Gunn's vision is, but it can't be much worse than what we've been given. I'm not a fan of militant Black Adam anyway.

I understand how you feel about Trump. He's spent the past month shooting himself in the foot, groaning, and then doing it again. On the other hand, take a look at current leadership. Why the F an Omnibus bill that handcuffs the House GOP Majority for virtually the entirety of 2023?? As a result: McConnell's gotta go: https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/21/gop-cant-be-successful-until-mitch-mcconnell-is-gone/

So, we shall see, but I worry about DeSantis. Indeed, I worry about anyone else fighting the entire "system". The freaking FBI tried getting rid of Trump as he was inaugurated and then, again, with Twitter in 2020. Can anyone else stand up to that and, better, clean house? So far DeSantis has been good. But what any GOP candidate will be up against, my Lord...

Oh. I already contributed. Merry Christmas Jim.

Expand full comment
Comment removed
December 21, 2022
Comment removed
Expand full comment

"There's one party, with two sets of t-shirts, and all the little piggies don't want the trough to run empty."

Uniparty delenda est.

Expand full comment

"Eventually the robots will destroy us all, so we might as well have some fun with ‘em while we can."

Skynet smiles.

Expand full comment

In a scale of 1 to 10, you Mr Treacher are an A+. Merry Christmas

Expand full comment

🤔

Expand full comment

Everything I've seen for the last several election cycles has confirmed within me that the GOP is an inherently unserious party, uninterested in actually winning. The have squandered their donor resources, pick the wrong battles to fight, and cannot seem to shake themselves loose from the grifters and boat anchors that sabotage their electoral chances. Their messaging is incoherent and their platform is stuck in either the past (neocons) or populist-fantasy (MAGA), sometimes a little of both. When presented with a template for success, like Ron DeSantis, they seem hellbent to close their eyes and walk-away. The GOP has truly earned the "Stupid Party" moniker of the Stupid/Evil party dynamic. Merry XMAs and bah-humbug.

Expand full comment

"Merry XMAs and bah-humbug."

And Peas be with you as well, my friend.

Expand full comment

It's a weird week. No one wants to work and would love to have the upcoming holiday as an excuse to end the week early, but Christmas Eve isn't until Saturday and no one can stretch the excuse to Christmas Adam credibly.

Expand full comment

"Consequences for the Taliban??" That's a laugh. I'm sure they're quaking in their sandals.

Expand full comment

It’s rare that I have disagreement with Jim, but I do on this topic. Respectful disagreement.

The question isn’t whether you trust Elon Musk. The question is whether you trust him more than the old Twitter regime. The last regime had more than a decade to get things right at the Bird, and then the Bird Board begs to pass the baton of secrets to Musk without any negotiation - ready to trade their problems for his money (lots of his money). And suddenly everyone expects him to unravel a decade of deceit and make it all copesthetic in two weeks. Have any of these journalists or commentators ever tried to run a real business? Let alone a public one?

Chronic infections don’t heal in two weeks. They often require more than a single treatment, as the true causes are ferreted out - and many of these ferrets were deeply ensconced to hide their charades. But even the most Musk-leaning commentators don’t seem to understand the magnitude of the problem, despite the revealing chapter after chapter of Twitter files published almost daily, and Musk himself referring to the Bird as “a crime scene.”

Fixing these things takes a lot of work by a lot of people, and it takes some time. Just in his first few weeks, the Twitter pollsters have voted Musk out as CEO which is a joke on every level. First, how or why would he continue on as Twitter CEO with so much else on his plate? Not possible.

Secondly, why would he subject himself to such a poll in the first few weeks of the transition with so much upheaval front and center? Others may be that spontaneous and dumb, but not Musk, no matter how the irresponsible press presents it. He didn’t get to where he is by making decisions like they do, or like they assume he does. Such conversation is nothing but folly.

I think the wise men among us appreciate that Musk is very open about his policy changes as he makes them, and that he is receptive to constructive feedback. He also makes changes pronto for a more publicly informed policy in very short order without going up some opaque chain of sycophants. He lays it right out for the public and allows them to help develop the online format and protocols and such for this free and fair public dialogue across the earth.

While this may seem erratic to many, he is proving that he is serious about change that benefits free dialogue - at least as free as public dialogue can be. You can quibble with the details, and you can criticize him personally, but you are delusional if you don’t see changes that give more voice to the voiceless and less of an unassailable sledgehammer to the aggressive loudmouths.

Once a reasonably fair online policy gets worked out through a group effort by concerned users, led by men like Musk, the ongoing changes will recede and the focus can return to non-Twitter-centric topics that concern us all.

Expand full comment