Tag: politics

The inevitable next level

In bombing Iran, the US has been using AI to pick targets. This is a playbook that was deployed first by Israel in the early attacks on Gaza. As I commented last year, “Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza has shown that they are willing to bomb and murder indiscriminately, outstripping even their hyped AI’s alleged ability to identify targets.”

As Israeli forces have attacked Beirut, they’ve ordered the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people. There can be no pretense that technology is providing them with pinpoint targeting information.

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No war, no ICE

Here’s a thing I wrote to my senators:

It’s important to resist the unprovoked war with Iran, especially on the heels of the unprovoked incursion into Venezuela. Reckless and indiscriminate overthrow of governments is just a recipe for chaos.

It’s also important to resist funding ICE. I mention this in the same e-mail because I’ve seen rhetoric online trying to use our foreign wars as an excuse to fund domestic security. Murder and oppression abroad cannot be an excuse for murder and oppression of our own citizens, however. The archipelago of detainment camps that ICE is attempting to build, the extradition of people that courts have ordered should not be extradited, and untrained officers given financial incentives to sweep in as many people as possible… All these things show that ICE must not be given money to grow.

To paraphrase Voltaire

Set aside the fact that Charlie Kirk was a vile bigot.1 Set aside the question of what motivated his killer.2

It is a performative contradiction to claim simultaneously that his legacy is one of free speech and open debate but that anybody who says bad things about him should be fired from their job. Such vehement rhetoric is incoherent on its face.

A true champion of free speech might wholly disapprove of what someone says, but would defend in their death the right to say it.

Higher-order bullshit

Three snapshot applications of AI:

During early phases of the war in Gaza, the Israeli military used software to select bombing targets on a scale that would not have been possible for human analysts.3

During the Trump administration’s initial attack on the federal government, there was lots of nonsense about how Elon Musk and DOGE were using software to identify waste. House Speaker Mike Johnson commented that Musk has “created these algorithms that are constantly crawling through the data, and… the data doesn’t lie.”4

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. commissioned a report with the ridiculous title “Make America Healthy Again.”5 It turns out that many of the citations in the study are erroneous, including references to articles which simply do not exist. Incorrectly citing things and misrepresenting results is plausibly human malfeasance or incompetence, but totally inventing sources suggests chatbot hallucination.

The wrongs committed here are morally different, and I don’t want to suggest a false equivalence. But each of these cases provides a specimen of how reliance on AI has been used to further dangerous agendas. Yet the reliance on AI is really just a sideshow.

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The futility of fine distinctions

It is now commonplace to point out that economic exchange can and should be positive-sum: When it works well, both buyers and sellers get more value than they would by not participating. This is followed up by saying that Trump thinks of exchange as zero-sum: Any time one side gets value, then they must be taking it from the other. It now seems to me that this is wrong about Trump— not unfair, but wrong.

The current tariff strategy is, even in his vision for it, a negative-sum gambit. He is willing to crash the whole plane, because he thinks that he and the USA will be on the top of the hierarchy among the people scrambling for survival among the wreckage.

Ignoratio elenchi, of sorts

Via ABC news:

In a sworn declaration, ICE Acting Field Office Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations Robert Cerna argued that “the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose” and “demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.”

The fact that ICE knows nothing about them proves that they are dangerous criminals?!? Although the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, neither is it evidence of dire terrorism.

Death by a thousand cuts

It is clear that the federal layoffs and budget cuts are indiscriminate, made without regard to the content of the jobs and programs being eliminated. Some of it is made at targets of opportunity, firing people hired in the last year because they are nominally in a probationary period. Some of it is illegal, done on the assumption that the courts can’t stop all the malfeasance— if courts can stop any of it.

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When the dog whistle is a middle C

President Trump has cut aid to South Africa because (he says) the government is persecuting the white minority. It’s easy enough to see Trump as a puppet here, with the hand up his backside belonging to Elon Musk— a white South African who grew up under apartheid and is salty about social justice.

Moreover, Trump has offered asylum to white Afrikaners who want to follow Musk to the US. Given Trump’s hostile rhetoric about immigration, the contrast is clear: He’s not really against immigrants as such, he’s against immigrants who are people of color.

Why foreground the fact that he’s a white-supremacist president doing the bidding of another, unelectable white-supremacist? Maybe the flagrant racism is a distraction from more subtle evils they’re doing, and there are plenty of those. But maybe they are just throwing all the shit at the fan to see what sticks.