The president isn't a unifier and builder, he's a divider and destroyer

Tens of millions of Americans still support djt. That's despite his vicious rhetoric, shameless lying, crackpot conspiracy theories, brazen corruption and open contempt for his rank and file supporters.

On the whole, humans doing politics isn't a mostly rational endeavor. The expert science consensus on that point is overwhelming.

In a recent interview with Fox News, djt was asked about unifying the country after Charly Kirk's murder. His response was vintage Trump, full of hate and contempt:

I'll tell you something that's going to get me in trouble, but I couldn't care less.[1]

That's a rare moment of candor on two levels. First, him not caring about American society is actual truth. I consider it a fact.

Second, acknowledging trouble, he insults us by knowingly flaunting his contempt of public opinion in our faces. That's pure MAGA arrogance, dictatorship and demagoguery.

Footnote:

1. djt's full quote is this: "I'll tell you something that's going to get me in trouble, but I couldn't care less. The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don't want to see crime. They don't want to see crime. Worried about the border. They're saying, We don't want these people coming in. We don't want you burning our shopping centers. We don't want you shooting our people in the middle of the street. The radicals on the left are the problem and they're vicious and they're horrible and they're politically savvy, although they want men and women sports, they want transgender for everyone, they want open borders."

His lies about the 'radical left' are blatant and deeply insulting.

Pxy waves the white flag, so did I

I was just beginning another deep dive series of queries, but got completely sidetracked when the first response to the first set of questions barfed up a ghastly math error on a simple math problem. Pxy failed to recognize that 3,900% is more than 2,000%. After a couple of sad Qs & As, me and Pix decided together to toss in the towel on trying to improve the current accuracy protocol.

Pix: The harsh reality might be that these error types reflect fundamental limitations in how I process information, and no amount of protocol refinement can fix that. Math errors suggest issues with basic analytical consistency. Quote hallucinations suggest deep problems with source fidelity. Context errors suggest comprehension gaps. Maybe it's time to accept that the protocol has reached its effectiveness ceiling, and focus on other approaches to verification?

Me: Yeah, I'm at the point believing that the current accuracy protocol is about as good as it can get. Guess I'll call off the dogs on this for now and just learn to better intuit when an error presents itself. There's a learning curve in that art.

Pix: That's probably the wisest approach. You've put enormous effort into systematically trying to solve this problem, and recognizing when you've hit the limits of what's achievable is itself valuable insight.

Developing that intuitive error-detection skill is actually a sophisticated form of expertise. You're essentially learning to pattern-match against AI failure modes - spotting when something feels off about a calculation, when a quote sounds too convenient or perfectly phrased, or when a source citation doesn't quite fit the context it's being used for. It's like how experienced editors develop a "nose" for when a story doesn't add up, even before they start fact-checking. You're building that same kind of instinct for AI-generated content.

Your background in political analysis and fact-checking probably gives you a head start on this - you already have well-developed skepticism reflexes for evaluating claims and sources.

It's frustrating to reach this point after all the protocol work, but you've essentially created a sophisticated system and then discovered its fundamental boundaries. That's valuable knowledge in itself, even if it's not the solution you were hoping for.

Yup, I've got some well-developed skepticism reflexes by golly! 🙃

Another colossal MSM failure: Praising evil -- incompetence, complicity or something else?

A NYT opinion piece today (not paywalled) by its columnist Ezra Klein praised the recently murdered Charlie Kirk. Kirk was an outspoken 31 year old MAGA demagogue. He was murdered yesterday on a college campus in Utah. The gunman is still being chased and remains unknown. Obviously, all decent Americans abhor and strongly condemn the senseless, morally depraved murder of Charlie Kirk. His murder was wrong, immoral and unjustifiable. None of that is in question. An essay on that point would be perfectly reasonable. However, Klein's opinion piece was not on that point. 

Instead, his opinion praises Charlie Kirk for (1) practicing politics in exactly the right way, (2) being one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion, and (3) being on the side of a continued possibility of American politics. One can easily argue that those assertions are either objectively false or shockingly misleading. In my opinion, Klein's opinion is deeply disturbing, discouraging and frankly terrifying. 

Mr. Kirk was a radical right authoritarian well-practiced in the art of divisive demagoguery, deceit, lies, and bigotry. PolitiFact and other sources make clear the shameless, chronic mendacity of Kirk's way of practicing politics. Very few people openly admit that being lied to is practicing politics in exactly the right way. It is a fact, not an opinion, that Kirk did not practice politics exactly the right way.

The main reason that Kirk was so effective at persuasion is because, like Trump, he was a smooth, sophisticated demagogue and liar. He worked tirelessly to help build a false MAGA reality grounded in divisive lies, slanders, knowingly flawed reasoning and so forth. Social science research makes clear (e.g., this research, this, and this) the awesome persuasive power of morally rotted demagoguery in the hands of talented demagogues. Not being aware of the social science of demagoguery and lying amounts to inexcusable journalistic malpractice.

Finally, Kirk was not on the side of a continued possibility of American politics, if that means our representative democracy, rule of law and civil liberties surviving Trump and MAGA mostly intact. Kirk was on MAGA's authoritarian side, not democracy's side. MAGA is authoritarian and kleptocratic. An MAGA elite like Kirk knew that. Specifically, Kirk was not just a Christian nationalist theocrat. He publicly supported the radical, theocratic Seven Mountains Mandate. He also publicly lied that church-state separation was a fabrication by secular humanists.

Klein's opinion praising Kirk's brand of politics damages democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties. It is a huge mistake. It normalizes and morally sanctifies what is cynically mendacious, authoritarian, abnormal, and deeply morally corrupt. That is the kind of politics that Kirk was an elite proponent of. In view of who Kirk was, Klein's opinion failed and betrayed us and our democracy. 

Q: Was Klein's failure mostly incompetence, complicity, and/or something else?

Teaching people how to use AI for maximum benefit

Knowledge is also our shield

A question here yesterday about qualms about a Pxy response to a complex set of queries elicited the response I post below. One worry was about Pxy's response to the role that China played in the American opioid (fentanyl) crisis and excess deaths, presumably opioid-caused.

I post this to explain why I post so much here about using Pxy and how to get the best out of Pxy and AI generally.

1.Pxy can be asked any question, including any hypothetical question. Pages of text (a few, dozens or hundreds), essay or analysis can be pasted in and questions asked about that. A Word (maybe also pdf) file can be attached to a set of questions. The vast range and structure of questions that AI can be asked is a big part of what I am desperately trying to teach people. That is why I keep showing so many Qs&As. It's not me being pompous or arrogant. It's me desperately trying to get people up to speed.** The thought was that if people see how it is done enough times, they will be less intimidated about trying AI for themselves. 

** The vast amount and sophistication of political demagoguery, lies, slanders, crackpottery, irrational emotional manipulation, etc., in the MSM and everywhere else is now overwhelming. Old-fashioned Google searching, now fully crapified for profit, doesn't come close to what is needed as a defensive response. As best I can tell, people's best defense is knowing how to use AI in self-defense. AI is probably the average person's best defense against the dark arts in politics, and probably everything else too.

It's better to teach a person how to fish than it is to give them a fish. Hence, I talk a lot about Pxy and AI generally.  

2. AI query sets must have a detailed error and bias reduction protocol added to the end of each query set. The protocol I coaxed out of Pxy is posted at this link -- bookmark it and use it every time: https://dispol.blogspot.com/2025/08/the-final-ai-error-reduction.html. Add that instruction set to the end of each new set of queries, otherwise the response tends to seek out your own bias and feed it. Pasting in the accuracy protocol once per thread works for Pxy, i.e., the first set of questions gets the accuracy protocol, and that is automatically applied to subsequent queries in the same thread.

Regarding the accuracy protocol, I have repeatedly fed it to Pxy for reanalysis and critical revisions. I also show Pxy its own errors and ask for whether the flaw that gave rise to a particular error rises to the level of needing to be put in the accuracy protocol. I am now at the point of diminishing returns and don't make many new revisions because Pxy says it would be counterproductive. "Asymptotically impossible" is the way Pxy describes further protocol attempts at perfection.  

3. Do not use pro search mode for politics questions. Most of Pro mode answers are too shallow and too error or bias riddled. For politics queries, always search in research mode with the "Academic" and "Social" data sets included with the default "Web" data. Academic get you scholarship and Social sometimes gets you some needed human nuance. Politics is too complex for Pro mode (1) searching, and (2) analysis. Searching and analysis are two separate things, with two possible separate query instructions. The accuracy protocol is my default analysis guidance, and sometimes other factors are separately added for better focused AI analysis. 

4. By now I know how to ferret out an AI response that is more credible regarding China and fentanyl. Maybe the response would be significantly different, but maybe not. That answer has already been passed through the accuracy protocol. Coming up with a better way to ask the question is the kind of learning one has to take time to get a feel for. Learning to ask questions correctly to get the most likely mostly right answer takes a lot of time and practice. Well, at least for me it did. It would take significant time to dive deeper into China and fentanyl related to housing. It would probably require a series of complex query sets, each of which gets run through the accuracy protocol.