News bits

Bit 1 - Crackpots on parade

Current Affairs, the magazine of politics and culture, writes about the Democrat Kennedy in the 2024 race for president: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a Lying Crank Posing as a Progressive Alternative to Biden -- The only ‘herd immunity’ we need is against abysmal candidates like RFK Jr. He has spent decades as a professional liar and is not the kind of person who should be anywhere near power.

That seems to at least imply that Current Affairs won't be endorsing RFK Jr. in the 2024 elections. RFK Jr. is an anti-vaxx crackpot.

Bit 2 - Republicans undermine democracy and the courts

An opinion piece in Salon opines: 

Republicans prep with a new talking point: 

Jury verdicts don't count 

John Durham's report cements the new GOP line of attack on democracy: Rejecting the legitimacy of jury trials 

When E. Jean Carroll won her defamation and sexual abuse lawsuit against Donald Trump earlier this month, Republicans knew exactly who they wanted to blame. No, not Trump's defense attorney, who called no witnesses and offered no evidence in his client's defense. No, not Trump, who keeps undermining his weak denials of the crime by bragging about how guys like him "historically" and "fortunately" get away with sexual assault. No, they blamed the jury.

"That jury's a joke," huffed Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., echoed the same claim, grousing about "a New York jury," as if it's preposterous to try a case in the same jurisdiction where the crime actually happened. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., also took a swipe about the "New York jury."

Fascist Republican Party attacks on democracy continue . . . . . . . 

How the radical right thinks: Scrambled brains

The WaPO published a review written by Becca Rothfeld of the Josh Hawley book, Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs. We all fondly remember Hawley for his brave salute (from behind safe police lines) to the traitors trying to overthrow government during the 1/6 coup attempt and then running like a coward to evacuate the Senate when things got too hot for this manly masculine man-stud.

Left: Brave Josh in solidarity with the traitors 

Right: Chickenshit Josh running away

Becca writes:

How to be a man? 

Josh Hawley has the (incoherent) answers.

In ‘Manhood,’ the senator joins a long tradition of those who bemoan masculinity’s endangerment and offer advice for saving it

For practically as long as men have existed, they have been in crisis. Everything, it seems, threatens them with obsolescence. As far back as the 1660s, King Charles II warned English men that a new beverage called coffee would destroy their virility, and in the early 1900s, opponents of coeducation worried that feather beds, dancing and even reading might emasculate little boys. Men were in peril at the turn of the 20th century, when the founder of the Boy Scouts cautioned that “we badly need some training for our lads if we are to keep up manliness in our race instead of lapsing into a nation of soft, sloppy, cigarette suckers,” and they had not recovered by 1958, when the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. reported in Esquire that “something has gone badly wrong with the American male’s conception of himself.”

A gender rule book is precisely what Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri attempts to provide in “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” the latest in a long line of guides. Recently, there’s Jack Donovan’s “The Way of Men,” which boasts that it is for anyone who has ever “wished for one day as a lion,” and Jordan Peterson’s best-selling “Twelve Rules for Life,” which is nominally gender-neutral but in fact instructs readers in the art of masculinity (and which is a literal rule book). 

Hawley toes the same wavering line in “Manhood,” in which he posits that masculinity is, at once, a biological endowment and a personal achievement. .... But Hawley’s opus is less of a riot than its predecessors. As serious thinking about gender, works like “Iron John” and “Manliness” fail, but as parodies and performances, they succeed by dint of their sheer outrageousness. Hawley, a Republican and an especially dreary type of fervent Christian, is too much of a dour moralist to write, as Bly does, that inside every man lurks a “primitive being covered with hair down to his feet,” ....

Manhood” sees itself as a tragedy, not a farce. American men, it proclaims, are in dire straits. They are not working, getting married or raising children. Instead, they are taking drugs, feeling sorry for themselves and watching pornography on their phones. Hawley’s tone is alternately sympathetic and scolding as he suggests that men have become aimless and irresponsible, a development that will surely prove catastrophic for the country. “No menace to this nation is greater than the collapse of American manhood,” he writes, because “self-government” succeeds only when citizens cultivate “strength of character.” Women, it is implied, do not have enough of this precious resource to keep the country running.

Like a campaign speech, “Manhood” is an adventure in impressionistic and impassioned disorganization. Chapter breaks may as well be accidental; most passages could be reshuffled into any section without any loss of coherence. Hawley identifies six roles that men should occupy — husband, father, warrior, builder, priest, king — but never manages to distinguish them clearly from one another. Men in each guise are supposed to do hackneyed and abstract things, like “endure.” We are treated almost at random to tirades about the “chattering classes” and, quaintly, the French Revolution, which is characterized not as an assault on monarchy but as a “campaign of wholesale atheism.”  

Insofar as it is possible to impose an organizational principle onto “Manhood,” the book takes up four distinct projects, though not in any particular order. The first is halfhearted biblical exegesis. The second is wholehearted self-promotion. Hawley is keen to cast himself as a man of the people by neglecting to name his elite alma maters (Stanford and Yale Law School), ....  

Hawley’s third fixation is liberalism, defined not as a political system but as an all-encompassing ethos that consists, primarily, of the fetishization of choice. There is no sin for liberals, he writes, but “the sin of intolerance.” This faulty account of liberalism as a philosophy of personal morality, rather than a philosophy of state action, is buttressed by even faultier intellectual history. It would be impossible to survey all that Hawley gets wrong — suffice it to say that America would be considerably more interesting if the Democrats read as much German philosophy as he believes they do ....  

The final strand of “Manhood” is standard self-help fare, much of it inoffensive. Who would contest that you should “stop buying stuff to make yourself feel better” or, even more banally, “aim to do something with your life”? I too regard courage, assertiveness and ambition as virtues, but if men aren’t the only ones who display them, in what sense are they “manly” virtues in particular? Surely women, too, can aim to do something with their lives. Hawley writes that “a man is built for commitment,” but he thinks men are supposed to marry women, so presumably he thinks that women are built for commitment, too. Men are “meant to lead,” but wait, “Genesis says God directed man — and woman — to rule” (emphasis mine). Hawley writes that he admires protesters in Hong Kong, but wait, they are led “by a group of young, very young, men and women” (emphasis mine again).

This exemplifies how the minds of America's radical right elites think, or fails to think. What I hear from the other elites who speak up in public sound about the same as Josh the Manly Man. Incoherent blither, mindless drivel and reality-detached partisan lies and slanders are the rule, not the exception. 

Josh's bravery reminds me of Sir Robin.

Sir Robin with his proud family crest on his shield

EXCLUSIVE: US GENERAL LAYS OUT AUDACIOUS PLAN TO HAVE TAIWAN INVADE CHINA IN 2024

 China will face an invasion force of Taiwanese irregulars and Chinese exiles in the spring of 2024, under a joint US and Taiwanese plan that is secretly underway. Citizens in Taiwan are currently being recruited and trained to launch a coastal attack, scheduled to land on a beach near Hong Kong. From this beachhead, the plan assumes that few shots will be fired, with mass desertions by a demoralized Chinese Red Army. This knockout punch of a people’s invasion would hypothetically lead to a surrender by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and new, democratic elections following by late 2025.

Read about it:

https://radiofreeozarks.net/taiwan-invade-china/

Impressive infographic of the invasion plan, complete with large red arrows (US Joint Chiefs of Staff).

Left: Taiwanese citizen recruits enjoying a Saturday workout

                            Right: The Chinese Red Army, possibly practicing surrender.

Editor’s Note: Radio Free Ozarks reached out to the regular Taiwanese Army, officially known as the Republic of China Army, for comment. At press time, a spokesperson for the Taiwanese Army denied any knowledge of any invasion plan, official or private, and derisively suggested that the idea seemed like a lame attempt at humor or satire. Can you believe that?

DarkBERT: The AGI trained on the dark web

From the Things Are Getting Interesting Files: Using the Tor browser and two datasets, researchers in South Korea have trained and produced DarkBERT. It is an AGI (artificial general intelligence) software trained on data from the dark web. tom's guide writes:

New DarkBERT AI was trained using dark web data from hackers and cybercriminals

While the large language models (LLMs) that power ChatGPT and Google Bard were trained on data from the open web, DarkBERT was trained exclusively on data from the dark web. Yes, you read that correctly, this new AI model was trained using data from hackers, cybercriminals and other scammers.

A team of South Korean researchers have released a paper(opens in new tab) (PDF) detailing how they made DarkBERT using data from the Tor network, which is often used to access the dark web. By crawling through the dark web and then filtering the raw data, they were able to create a dark web database that they used to train DarkBERT.

Although DarkBERT is a new AI model, it’s actually based on the RoBERTa architecture, which is an AI approach developed back in 2019 by researchers at Facebook according to our sister site Tom’s Hardware.

DarkBERT

In a research paper detailing the inner workings of RoBERTa, Meta AI explains that it is a “robustly optimized method for pretraining natural language processing (NLP) systems” that improves upon BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), which was released by Google back in 2018. As the search giant made BERT open source, Facebook’s researchers were able to improve its performance in a replication study.

Thanks to Facebook’s optimized method, it released RoBERTa which was able to produce state-of-the-art results on the General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) NLP benchmark.

Now though, the South Korean researchers behind DarkBERT have shown that RoBERTa is able to do even more as it was undertrained when it was initially released. By feeding RoBERTa data from the dark web over the course of almost 16 days across two data sets (one raw and the other preprocessed) the researchers were able to create DarkBERT.

Fortunately, the researchers don’t have any plans to release DarkBERT to the public. However, they are accepting requests for academic purposes according to Dexerto. Still, DarkBERT will likely provide law enforcement and researchers with a much better understanding of the dark web as a whole.

That's good for law enforcement. One can wonder how good it will be for criminals once DarkBERT leaks out into the public and the criminal community.