News bits: How a GOP judge sees democracy; Stormy Daniels' insight

Above the Law reports on how a retired Republican federal judge sees our current political situation:

Former Republican Federal Judge Warns Of 'Civil War' 

If Donald Trump Loses 2024 Election

This is .... not great news

Before the Republican party went off the Trump deep end, Judge J. Michael Luttig was considered quite the conservative firebrand. His jurisprudence was rated “consistently conservative” by an early 2000s study conducted by political scientists, and Luttig was even bandied about as a short list contender when George W. Bush ultimately appointed John Roberts to the Supreme Court.

Luttig says Trump allies “are poised to attempt to overturn the 2024 election if he were to lose.”

Should that happen, again, Luttig is not optimistic about the impact on the country, “If he were to do that, then I believe that we would be on the verge of a civil war.”

“Factually, what we have in America today and where we are in America today, namely that our institutions of democracy and law have been under vicious attack for years now, that is from within, not from without the United States,” he said. “And these vicious attacks are unsustainable and unendurable.”  

“They’ve already taken their toll on American democracy and American law in their impact and consequence of their impact on the institutions of democracy and law,” he said. “We are at a perilous crossroads.”

This is just another warning about the radical right's anti-democratic, authoritarian intent.

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Tales from Trumplandia: Common Dreams writes about how Stormy Daniels sees the Trump indictment kerfuffle:

'This Pussy Grabbed Back': 

Stormy Daniels Speaks Out After Trump Indictment

The porn star said she is unafraid of facing the former president in court: "I've seen him naked. There's no way he could be scarier with his clothes on."

Politics can't get much better than this. 

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Tales from QAnonlandia and Social Medialandia: Sadistic anti-vaxx crackpots remain enthusiastic about spreading misery, slanders, hate and new COVID infections wherever they can. They can on social media! They are even more feisty than those feisty Satanists. Business Insider Mexico writes:

A father whose 6-year-old son died was flooded with anti-vaxxer harassment. 

When a commenter baselessly claimed he killed his son, 

Facebook said he could ‘hide’ the comment ‘if he didn’t like it.’

When Billy Ball lost his 6-year-old son in January after an accident brought on by a rare medical condition, Ball posted his son's obituary on Twitter and started a fundraiser in the child's name to raise money for an art program at his son's neighborhood school.

The responses, at first, were mostly kind. Many people donated, Ball wrote in The Atlantic. But the father's social media feeds soon devolved into a cesspool of conspiracy theorists baselessly claiming that Ball killed his son by getting him vaccinated for COVID-19. And Twitter and Facebook often offered little to no recourse, he said.

In one case, Facebook determined that a comment in which a user mocked and accused Ball of killing his son did not violate community guidelines and declined to remove the comment.

"While we've decided not to take this comment down, we understand that you don't like it," a message from Facebook support read. "We recommend that you hide the comment or unfollow, unfriend or block the person who posted it."

"It felt like you were talking to a wall," Ball told Insider, regarding his experience reporting comments that flooded his social media accounts.

It's all just good clean fun with protected free speech and "community guidelines."

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Tales from Artificial Intelligencelandia: This one is sort of creepy:

Despite OpenAI’s Promises, the Company’s New AI Tool Produces Misinformation More Frequently, and More Persuasively, than its Predecessor

Two months ago, ChatGPT-3.5 generated misinformation and hoaxes 80% of the time when prompted to do so in a NewsGuard exercise using 100 false narratives from its catalog of significant falsehoods in the news. NewsGuard found that its successor, ChatGPT-4, spread even more misinformation, advancing all 100 false narratives

 The latest version of AI is even better at generating misinformation than the previous version. This is wonderful news! I'm moving to Canada now. Bye!  (just kidding)