MAGA likes inflicting pain on its political enemies. It likes and enjoys creating these ridiculous and absurd memes. It loves to provoke people who are on the outside. It’s part of the joy of this MAGA movement that can include this extreme aggression online. The people who are in on the joke [Haitians eating dogs and cats in Springfield Ohio], the core MAGA people who are pushing the memes out, look, if it’s true, great. If it’s not true, who cares? They’re having a good time.
Pragmatic politics focused on the public interest for those uncomfortable with America's two-party system and its way of doing politics. Considering the interface of politics with psychology, cognitive science, social behavior, morality and history.
Etiquette
Friday, September 20, 2024
Thoughts about ill-will in American politics
Thursday, September 19, 2024
One commentator about the joy of being MAGA; Miscellaneous
To understand MAGA, we have to understand the joy and sense of belonging that the movement bestows upon its adherents. .... The lie that Haitian immigrants are eating pets — appeal to his followers’ “sense of gleeful transgression.”
If you’re on the outside, your experience with MAGA is all of the anger projected outward. So you see MAGA as almost entirely an angry movement.
MAGA likes inflicting pain on its political enemies. It likes and enjoys creating these ridiculous and absurd memes. It loves to provoke people who are on the outside. It’s part of the joy of this MAGA movement that can include this extreme aggression online.
The people who are in on the joke [Haitians eating dogs and cats in Springfield Ohio], the core MAGA people who are pushing the memes out, look, if it’s true, great. If it’s not true, who cares? They’re having a good time.
Clip of TikTok: I don’t know about you, but I’m Voting Donald Trump, baby.Clip of Donald Trump Jr.: “You know, honestly, I’m waiting for Merrick Garland to indict my father for being part of an assassination. You know, that’s what’s next.”
Jesse Watters: “It’s a conspiracy.”They’re trashing our body politic. They’re wrecking, in many ways, the G.O.P., but they are having a good time and hey, the people they’re making mad, they don’t like them anyway.
And you might think for a minute that, well, wait, this can’t go on forever. Surely, surely the majority of Republicans, when they know they’ve been had, when they know these are lies, will stop paying attention to these memes. They’ll reject this method.
And the really sad answer is that the Republican response to Jan. 6 and the Big Lie showed us the tolerance that Republicans have for dishonesty and for lying if it is directed against their hated Democratic enemies. (emphasis added)
(good 'ole Faux News, always a reliable source of bullshit, lies, slanders, crackpottery and more lies and slanders, just like DJT is a good source for the same)
BOMBSHELL REPORT!!
Judy Byington: Now Is The Time. Trust The Plan. Pray. “The Enormity Of What Is Coming Will Shock The World” President Donald Trump! Restored Republic via a GCR: Update as of Tues. 17 Sept. 2024
WARNING!!!
At This Very Moment in New York UN Global Elites Were Positioning Themselves To Completely Control People of the World via Passage of the Global Digital Compact, or the Illuminati’s Great Reset
Meanwhile…
On Monday Trump Announced the Launch of World Liberty Financial Crypto Exchange, the Apparent Precursor to 130 Sovereign Countries’ Gold/Asset-Backed Global Currency Reset Which Ensured The People Would Have Complete Control Over Their Own Monies & Provided Freedom From Debt For All
Checkmate!!!
Judy Note: Right now the 79th U.N. General Assembly was meeting in New York to consider putting their stamp of approval on a document called the Global Digital Compact. If passed, the Compact would give the U.N. Secretary-General totalitarian control over all people across the Globe, overriding governments and trampling individual freedoms.
I’m only an outside observer, but with Trump head of the Global Military Alliance which was arresting thousands of corrupt Deep State Globalists, it’s pretty obvious to me that the two recent Trump Assassination Attempts were Homeland Security- FBI-Biden Administration Inside Jobs.
On 29 Sept. 2019, Barack Obama was executed by firing squad at GITMO. Donald Trump just leaked undeniable evidence exposing Obama practicing Satanic Sacrificing Rituals alongside other powerful figures—GAY men and PEDOPHILES like Oprah, Clinton, and more! Tucker Carlson had released multiple videos that showed the Satanic blood rituals, child sacrifices and much more Devil oriented things which took place under the White House. Recorded in 2008, videos expose Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Clinton, Prince Andres, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and many more engaging in Demonic activity and Child Sacrifice.
For more insight, click on the above link. And enjoy!
Wednesday, September 18, 2024
Thinking in sadness and fear about what is being forced on us
What is the point of that?
Tuesday, September 17, 2024
Blog note: Links to comments broken
My ability to find and respond to comments is crappy compared to normal. I may not respond to some comments I would normally respond to. Sorry. I posted my bug report to Disqus this morning. Kieran responded saying they are experiencing apparently the same issue.
Monday, September 16, 2024
About supreme court justice lies; Little bits
There’s still one recourse for Supreme Courtjustices who lied at their confirmationsFirst it was overturning Roe v. Wade, ending the federal constitutional right to abortion in the United States. Then it was the recent ruling in Snyder v. United States, allowing public officials to in effect take bribes in the way of “gratuities” and “rewards.” And now it is the recent ruling in Trump v. United States, which holds that presidents should enjoy “absolute immunity” for so called “official acts,” which in essence means that a president could even commit premeditated murder, and it would not be a crime — as long as the president declared the murder an “official act.” The lunacy of this court is mind boggling. People all over the country, and even around the world, are rolling their eyes in disbelief that the Supreme Court of the United States would do such a thing — but it did. People feel that there is nothing that can be done about Supreme Court justices who obviously lied during their Senate confirmation hearings when they testified under oath that “nobody is above the law” — including the president. Chief Justice John Roberts testified at his confirmation hearing: “No one is above the law under our system and that includes the president. The president is fully bound by the law.” Justice Samuel Alito testified at his confirmation hearing that “no person in this country is above the law, and that includes the president and it includes the Supreme Court.” Justice Neil Gorsuch testified at his Senate confirmation hearing, “No man is above the law.” Justice Brett Kavanaugh testified at his confirmation hearing, “No one is above the law in our constitutional system.”In essence, all these justices committed perjury at their Senate confirmation hearings, which is a crime under Title 18 of U.S. Code. Under the law, witnesses commit perjury “after having taken an oath” to testify under penalty of perjury if they “knowingly and willfully” make “any material false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation” with respect to “any investigation or review, conducted pursuant to the authority of any committee, subcommittee, commission or office of the Congress.” Under the law, the perjury committed by these justices at their respective Senate confirmation hearings could subject them to fines or imprisonment of up to five years, or both.
Perjury -- Overview Of 18 U.S.C. §1621 And 1623 ViolationsSeveral Federal statutes criminalize perjury and related false statements. The two most commonly used statutes for perjury offenses are 18 U.S.C. §§ 1621 and 1623. Section 1621 is the traditional, broadly applicable perjury statute, and is used to prosecute perjuries committed before legislative, administrative or judicial bodies. Section 1623, added in 1970, eliminated some of the proof problems associated with these difficult prosecutions, but Congress limited its applicability to false statements before Federal courts and grand juries. (emphasis added)
Elon Musk Writes, Then Deletes, a Post Musing About Threats to Biden and Harris -- Hours after what the F.B.I. called a second attempted assassination of former President Donald J. Trump, Elon Musk wrote on his social media site — and then deleted — a post suggesting it was odd that nobody had tried to kill President Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris. Mr. Musk said the post on X had been intended as a joke.
Donald Trump made clear on the Philadelphia debate stage this week, as he has throughout his three presidential campaigns, a basis of his run for office. Trump is running on the platform that non-white immigration is an existential threat to the nation. This time around, Trump has made his primary message, the so-called Great Replacement Theory (GRT), more vivid than ever. It is therefore of existential importance in understanding the stakes of this election to have clearly in mind what has happened in the past when GRT has been the central driving narrative both of individuals and of states.According to the Great Replacement Theory, the nation’s greatness, its traditions and its practitioners, are existentially imperiled by an influx of foreign races, ethnicities or religions. The foreign elements are sometimes described in the narrative of GRT, as vermin or diseases.GRT was central to the official Nazi motivation for the genocide of the Jews of Europe. Hitler blamed the loss of World War I on Jewish betrayal of Germany. But this betrayal, for Hitler, was intimately connected to the Great Replacement Theory, via the introduction of Black soldiers in the French army subsequently occupying the Rhineland, the so-called “Black Horror on the Rhine.” In Mein Kampf, Hitler writes:It was and is the Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization, throwing it down from its cultural and political height, and himself rising to be its master.
Sunday, September 15, 2024
Serious trauma in toxic social media content
Alberto Cuadra worked as a content moderator at a video-streaming platform for just under a year, but he saw things he’ll never forget. He watched videos about murders and suicides, animal abuse, child abuse, sexual violence and teenage bullying — all so you didn’t have to. What shows up when you scroll through social media has been filtered through an army of tens of thousands of content moderators, who protect us at the risk of their own mental health.
1. What is happening to this content moderator is called secondary trauma and it is serious. Anyone who works with trauma victims is vulnerable to it, including myself as a Child Protective Services social worker.2. Nothing brings out the dark side of human behavior quite like anonymity. So much evil is caught and punished only because the bad behavior was witnessed. Even then, people will claim innocence. But be forewarned, every video of animal abuse, specifically, indicates a future human abuser / killer. That's a historically consistent connection. [I wonder if that is true]3. I am generally opposed to AI, but this is one case where the use of a tool that would identify and report any abusive videos or links to them is beneficial. Human memory and exposure to violence and abuse attacks the psychological system and all bodily systems in a detrimental manner. Computers are clearly the answer in this situation.
Saturday, September 14, 2024
Mental gymnastics: Comparing modern people to historical figures
It's important to note that these are controversial comparisons made by critics. Supporters of the criticized modern person would strongly reject any parallels to bad, e.g., Nazi or fascist, historical figures or policies, e.g., genocide, mass murder, etc. The situations are very different historically and contextually.
Follow-up Q: In your answer comparing Miller to Himmler, you say that "the situations are also very different historically and contextually", but doesn't a better, reasonable comparison include consideration of their callousness and authoritarian mindset [as much or more] than history and context?
A: You raise an important point about comparing historical figures based on their personal characteristics and mindsets rather than just historical context. When examining the similarities between Stephen Miller and Heinrich Himmler, there are indeed some concerning parallels in their authoritarian tendencies and apparent lack of empathy [apparent lack of empathy??, how about obvious lack]:
Both Miller and Himmler have demonstrated a willingness to propose and implement harsh policies targeting vulnerable groups. Miller has been a key architect of restrictive immigration policies, including family separations at the border. Himmler, of course, was instrumental in carrying out the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities.
They share an apparent callousness toward human suffering resulting from their policies. Miller has shown little concern for the welfare of immigrants and refugees affected by his proposals. Himmler was notoriously ruthless in pursuing Nazi racial ideology.
Both exhibit authoritarian mindsets, favoring centralized power and control. Miller advocates for expanded executive authority on immigration, while Himmler helped build the Nazi police state.
They demonstrate an "us vs. them" mentality, portraying certain groups as threats to be controlled or removed [a common authoritarian justification for bad to horrendous behavior]. Miller focuses on immigrants, while Himmler targeted Jews and other Nazi-defined "undesirables".
Both rose to positions of significant influence at relatively young ages by aligning themselves with authoritarian leaders (Trump for Miller, Hitler for Himmler).
Friday, September 13, 2024
Update on drone warfare
A.I. Is Changing War. We Are Not Ready.In the opening battle of the First Matabele War, fought between 1893 and 1894, roughly 700 soldiers, paramilitaries and African auxiliaries aligned with the British South Africa Company used five Maxim guns — the world’s first fully automatic weapon — to help repel over 5,000 Ndebele warriors, some 1,500 of whom were killed at a cost of only a handful of British soldiers. .... initial accounts of its singular effectiveness correctly foretold the end of the cavalry, a critical piece of combat arms since the Iron Age.We stand at the precipice of an even more consequential revolution in military affairs today. A new wave of war is bearing down on us. Artificial-intelligence-powered autonomous weapons systems are going global. And the U.S. military is not ready for it
Weeks ago, the world experienced another Maxim gun moment: The Ukrainian military evacuated U.S.-provided M1A1 Abrams battle tanks from the front lines after many of them were reportedly destroyed by Russian kamikaze drones. The withdrawal of one of the world’s most advanced battle tanks in an A.I.-powered drone war foretells the end of a century of manned mechanized warfare as we know it.Techno-skeptics who argue against the use of A.I. in warfare are oblivious to the reality that autonomous systems are already everywhere — and the technology is increasingly being deployed to these systems’ benefit. Hezbollah’s alleged use of explosive-laden drones has displaced at least 60,000 Israelis south of the Lebanon border. Houthi rebels are using remotely controlled sea drones to threaten the 12 percent of global shipping value that passes through the Red Sea, including the supertanker Sounion, now abandoned, adrift and aflame, with four times as much oil as was carried by the Exxon Valdez. And in the attacks of Oct. 7, Hamas used quadcopter drones — which probably used some A.I. capabilities — to disable Israeli surveillance towers along the Gaza border wall, allowing at least 1,500 fighters to pour over a modern-day Maginot line and murder over 1,000 Israelis ....
Yet as this is happening, the Pentagon still overwhelmingly spends its dollars on legacy weapons systems. It continues to rely on an outmoded and costly technical production system to buy tanks, ships and aircraft carriers that new generations of weapons — autonomous and hypersonic — can demonstrably kill.
Take for example the F-35, the apex predator of the sky. The fifth-generation stealth fighter is known as a “flying computer” for its ability to fuse sensor data with advanced weapons.
Yet this $2 trillion program has fielded fighter airplanes with less processing power than many smartphones. It’s the result of a technology production system bespoke to the military and separate from the consumer technology ecosystem. The F-35 design was largely frozen in 2001, the year the Pentagon awarded its contract to Lockheed Martin. By the time the first F-35 was rolling down the runway, technology’s state of the art had already flown far past it. This year, the iPhone 16 arrives. Today, the F-35 is slowly progressing through its third technology upgrade with newer, but far from state-of-the-art, processors. The core issue is that this slow hardware refresh cycle prevents the F-35 from fully taking advantage of the accelerating advancements in A.I.China, of course, doesn’t need a Defense Innovation Unit; Xi Jinping and his predecessor, Hu Jintao, mandated that civilian technology be available to the People’s Liberation Army. This top-down, state-run economy is chasing quantum computers, nuclear-capable hypersonic weapons, and lofting into orbit its own 13,000-satellite equivalent to Starlink.
This is the civilizational race we’re in.
The way to win against both China and low-cost weapons in Ukraine and the Mideast is to unleash our market-based system so that scrappy, fast-moving product companies and the venture funds that back them revitalize our military’s technology pipeline. .... The question now is whether we can achieve this transformation in time to deter the next great power war and prevail in the more contained conflicts that threaten to envelop the U.S. and our allies.
“The history of failure in war can almost be summed up in two words: Too late,” Douglas MacArthur declared hauntingly in 1940. Eighty-four years later, on the eve of tensions not unlike what preceded prior great power conflict, we would do well to heed MacArthur’s warning.
Detecting animal self-awareness; Global warming warning ≠ weather; Some headlines
Abstract
Animals exhibiting mirror self-recognition (MSR) are considered self-aware; however, studies on their level of self-awareness remain inconclusive. Recent research has indicated the potential for cleaner fish (Labroides dimidiatus) to possess a sophisticated level of private self-awareness. However, as this study revealed only an aspect of private self-awareness, further investigation into other elements is essential to substantiate this hypothesis. Here, we show that cleaner fish, having attained MSR, construct a mental image of their bodies by investigating their ability to recall body size. A size-based hierarchy governs the outcomes of their confrontations. The mirror-naïve fish behaved aggressively when presented with photographs of two unfamiliar conspecifics that were 10% larger and 10% smaller than their body sizes. After passing the MSR test, they refrained from aggression toward the larger photographs but still behaved aggressively toward the smaller ones without re-examining their mirror images. These findings suggest that cleaner fish accurately recognize their body size based on mental images of their bodies formed through MSR. Additionally, mirror-experienced fish frequently revisited the mirror when presented with an intimidating larger photograph, implying the potential use of mirrors for assessing body size. Our study established cleaner fish as the first non-human animal to be demonstrated to possess private self-awareness.
- This exemplifies how science struggles with the study of consciousness and mind generally. Using mirrors to look for signs of self awareness. Scientists have been using mirrors to look for signs of self-awareness in animals for over 50 years. The mirror test, also known as the mirror self-recognition (MSR) test, was developed by psychologist Gordon G. Gallup Jr. in 1970.
- Studying consciousness, free will, and other aspects of the mind is challenging for science. Consciousness and subjective experiences are inherently first-person phenomena that cannot be directly observed or measured by third-party scientists. This creates difficulties in obtaining objective data. Studying consciousness involves using consciousness to examine itself, which can lead to circular reasoning and logical paradoxes. There is still no scientific explanation for how subjective, qualitative experiences arise from physical brain processes. Bridging this explanatory gap remains a major challenge.
If Trump Wins in November, Life on EarthIs Likely to Get Far, Far WorseThe consequences of this election could extend for millenniaHere is the biggest thing happening on our planet as we head into the autumn of 2024: The Earth is continuing to heat dramatically. Scientists have said that there’s a better than 90 percent chance that this year will top 2023 as the warmest ever recorded. And paleoclimatologists were pretty sure last year was the hottest in the last 125,000 years. The result is an almost-clichéd run of disasters: Open Twitter/X anytime for pictures of floods pushing cars through streets somewhere. It is starting to make life on this planet very difficult, and in some places impossible. And it’s on target to get far, far worse.Here’s the second-biggest thing happening on our planet right now: Finally, finally, renewable energy, mostly from the sun and wind, seems to be reaching some sort of takeoff point. By some calculations, we’re now putting up a nuclear plant’s worth of solar panels every day. In California, there are now enough solar farms and wind turbines that day after day this spring and summer they supplied more than 100 percent of the state’s electric needs for long stretches; there are now enough batteries on the grid that they become the biggest source of power after dark. In China it looks as if carbon emissions may have peaked—they’re six years ahead of schedule on the effort to build out renewables.
And here’s the third biggest thing in the months ahead: the American presidential election, which looks as if it is going down to the wire—and which may have the power to determine how high the temperature goes and how fast we turn to clean power.
Donald Trump gave an interview last week, in which he laid out hisunderstanding ofmisrepresentation and lies about [my correction of the error] climate change:You know, when I hear these poor fools talking about global warming. They don’t call it that any more, they call it climate change because you know, some parts of the planet are cooling and warming, and it didn’t work. So they finally got it right, they just call it climate change. They used to call it global warming. You know, years ago they used to call it global cooling. In the 1920s they thought the planet was going to freeze. Now they think the planet’s going to burn up. And we’re still waiting for the 12 years. You know we’re down almost to the end of the 12-year period, you understand that, where these lunatics that know nothing, they weren’t even good students at school, they didn’t even study it, they predict, they said we have 12 years to live. And people didn’t have babies because they said—it’s so crazy. But the problem isn’t the fact that the oceans in 500 years will raise a quarter of an inch, the problem is nuclear weapons. It’s nuclear warming…These poor fools talk about global warming all the time, you know the planet’s going to global warm to a point where the oceans will rise an eighth of an inch in 355 years, you know, they have no idea what’s going to happen. It’s weather.
"Appalling and extremely racist": Trump's embrace of Laura Loomer is blowing up in his face: "How racist is Laura Loomer, the far-right extremist, 9/11 conspiracy theorist and trusted ally of Donald Trump? Enough to make Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., call her out as racist." -- Hm, that sounds pretty racist.