We can’t even bury fascism
Yesterday’s first post explains why I’m not up to speed on what’s happening in Israel and Gaza and likely won’t catch up for a day or two. Compounding the problem is the inherent complexity of what’s happening there on the ground and what’s now happening with the internet. Digby tweeted (to hell with Musk) yesterday, “I used to turn to twitter at times like these but now I have no clue what’s real and what isn’t…”
A couple of observations about that.
Amid concerns the rise of artificial intelligence will supercharge the spread of misinformation comes a wild fabrication from a more prosaic source: Amazon’s Alexa, which declared that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
Asked about fraud in the race — in which President Biden defeated former president Donald Trump with 306 electoral college votes — the popular voice assistant said it was “stolen by a massive amount of election fraud,” citing Rumble, a video-streaming service favored by conservatives.
The 2020 races were “notorious for many incidents of irregularities and indications pointing to electoral fraud taking place in major metro centers,” according to Alexa, referencing Substack, a subscription newsletter service. Alexa contended that Trump won Pennsylvania, citing “an Alexa answers contributor.”
Sam Stein tried it out. Yup.
After reading the wapo piece I decided to check it out. Alexa, was their electoral fraud in 2020? pic.twitter.com/b3TFhZ6tY2
— Sam Stein (@samstein) October 7, 2023
Multiple investigations into the 2020 election have revealed no evidence of fraud, and Trump faces federal criminal charges connected to his efforts to overturn the election. Yet Alexa disseminates misinformation about the race, even as parent company Amazon promotes the tool as a reliable election news source to more than 70 million estimated users.
This epic AI fail reminds me of a line from George Carlin’s classic routine on birth control pills: “The entire female population of the US is being used as the guinea pigs to find out if birth control pills are gonna have any side effects or not. Isn’t that nice. Really, if every lady who used them gets to 61 and one leg gets shorter than the other one…better call the pills back.”
Decades later, all of humanity are guniea pigs for AI. Can you feel it yet?
Dan Froomkin has been relentlessly critiquing press obscurantism especially in New York Times headlines. It’s either conditioned reflex or deliberate. Crazy shit happens in Washington, D.C. and somehow there are no agents behind the chaos. It just happens, or both sides are behind it. Calling out the perps is bad for subscriptions and might provoke threats of violence against reporters.
Responding the crisis in Israel, Dave Roberts points out the bullshit Republican response on this continent. (It’s Joe Biden’s fault, you may have heard.)
One of the signal features of RW foreign policy for as long as I’ve been alive is that they interpret *everything* as either “projecting strength” or “projecting weakness” because they are desperately insecure petty authoritarians & can only view human affairs through that lens. https://t.co/ptjlx9DgkM
— David Roberts (@drvolts) October 7, 2023
Roberts adds, “Same thing with Trump’s repeated articulation of that most primal reactionary fear: they are laughing at us. Someone, somewhere, is laughing at us. Someone, somewhere, doubts our manhood so we must project it more, more, more! It’s so sad & sweaty.”
Speaking of sad and sweaty, Stephen Miller felt a need to weigh in on the Hamas attacks (h/t Rick Perlstein):
Perlstein: “Fuerherprinzip? Check. The Antisemitic code? Check. The palingenic chauvinism? Check. The ontological othering of liberalism? The workship of WILL? Check and check.” Also, “(I forgot one: “‘Rules” are chumps”? Check.”
Does anyone else always picture Miller wearing a black SS uniform?
One final bit of sadness and implied threat:
Normally, you’d just feel sorry for someone whose life is this empty. But this is now a dangerous cult, and has been for a few years. https://t.co/gQw5ufP74l
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) October 8, 2023