National Combustion, Part 2: Artificial Intelligence and the Collapse of the State

The fundamental equation:
 Political instability + Artificial Intelligence
-> Collapse of the State

Forces of history, combined with the ways artificial intelligence multiplies the forces of technology, are already acting to undermine the polity of the United States. The recent Republican meltdown in the U.S. House of Representatives is a foreshadowing of what is likely to come.

National Combustion, Part 1 (link in next paragraph), drew on social scientist  Peter Turchin’s historical framework to make sense of how we came to this fraught moment, when it seems quite possible the United States might slide into civil war.  Yes, many of the January 6 insurrectionists are in jail and Donald Trump’s national con-job is fraying. Yet the factors going into Turchin’s model of “political disintegration,” with abundant historical antecedents, remain the same today as on January 6th, 2021. It’s no great mystery that we are in a highly unstable political situation;  it matches a pattern that has been repeated time and time again in human history. So much for American exceptionalism.

U.S. society is already crossed by multiple fault lines besides that of the Big Lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 Presidential election. On guns, voting rights, reproductive rights, minority rights, workers’ rights, the distribution of wealth, public health, immigration, affirmative action, educational freedoms, content of school and library books, historical analysis challenging the status quo, white nationalism—these fault lines, already under tremendous stress, could split open as a result of a precipitating event, sudden or prolonged. Another disputed national election; a political assassination; a nationwide or even international cyberattack; a Waco-like siege of an anti-government enclave; a takedown of the grid by actors unknown; a spate of terrorist attacks; a pandemic; a depression—any of them could unleash the partisans itching to fight a civil war against the federal government.

Continue reading “National Combustion, Part 2: Artificial Intelligence and the Collapse of the State”

Biden, Ageism, and the 46 Percent

Biden’s Age Handicap

Yesterday I saw two TV commercials for the upcoming NFL football season.  Both of them highlighted fast running, tackling, and catching passes (and instantly being tackled).  Seeing it immediately made me realize why Joe Biden is polling roughly equal to Trump for President, with some pundits venturing if the election were run today Trump would win or come close. To those of us on the Left, this seems both frightening and barely credible.

Even setting aside the flaws of polls in predicting elections—especially 14 months out—one can still be alarmed by at least one poll showing a horse race at 46 vs 46 pct. Who are the 46% favoring Trump?  Let’s say 20-25% of the U.S. population  are die-hard Trump supporters; many of them are members of a cult who could even find justification for Donald Trump murdering a child in broad daylight. Another 10%  are from the ranks who are not die-hard Trump supporters but who would vote for any Republican in any election.

That leaves another 10-12% of the Americans who support Trump against Biden for reasons not immediately clear.

It’s clearer if you take popularity of football as a symptom of the ageist mindset that undermines Biden’s stature.

Continue reading “Biden, Ageism, and the 46 Percent”

National Combustion, Part 1: Political Disintegration and the Potential for Civil War

Foretastes of a new American civil war

If a new civil war comes to the United States of America, it will  not come in the form it did in the 19th Century, with two large intact geographic blocks—the Confederacy and the Union–each with their own military locked continuously in armed conflict. It’s likely to take one of two tracks: (1) a coup attempt, like the January 6 insurrection; or  (2) it will look more like the late 20th Century convulsions in Northern Ireland, known as “The Troubles,” marked by scattered and sporadic acts of violence inflicted by loosely networked paramilitary groups.  In Northern Ireland, more than half the 3,500 people killed were civilians, in a conflict that spanned about 30 years from the late 1960s to the late 1990s.

We are getting foretastes of something similar, now largely committed piecemeal by individual right wing “lone wolves” terrorizing racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, LGBTQ communities, and increasingly school board members, electoral officials, businesses that openly support progressive causes, law enforcement, and members of the judiciary.

The overall effect is to sow fear and mistrust broadly among citizens, citizen groups, and institutions. The intent of each violent individual is narrow, but the cumulative impact is wide, and deep.  If paramilitary groups like those in Northern Ireland grow in strength in the U.S., the cumulative impact will be all the greater. What’s more, horrifically lethal weapons and ammunition now widely available in the U.S. and being stockpiled by extremists make individuals and groups far more powerful than those in Northern Ireland of the 1990s. The death toll from a low-level but widespread civil war in the U.S. would dwarf the numbers in ‘The Troubles’ of Northern Ireland.

Partisan divisions and proliferation of weaponry make for a combustible mix  that threatens a breakdown in the institutions that so far have kept America relatively stable.

The attempted coup on January 6, 2021, the attempt by a militia to kidnap and kill the governor of Michigan in 2020, and many individual hate crimes—mostly associated with white supremacy—are symptoms of what social scientist and historian Peter Turchin calls “political disintegration.”  The conditions and causes for disintegration follow a pattern seen many times before in history among various states, and more often than not the outcome is bad for democracy.

One of the more common outcomes is civil war. The objective of the Michigan militia was expressly to start a civil war. Likewise, that was the express hope of Dylan Roof,  who shot nine Black parishioners in a church in 2015. These are just two of the highest profile evildoers among many extremists who have sought, or advocated for, a civil war.

In his recent book End Times, Turchin illuminates the patterns of social and political disintegration from the past that closely resemble what is happening around us today. Continue reading “National Combustion, Part 1: Political Disintegration and the Potential for Civil War”

Another Weapon in the Radicals’ Arsenal: Deepfakes

Deepfakes: when you can’t believe your eyes, what can you believe?

Recently I sent out a link to an article on deepfakes that appeared in Reuters (not paywalled): https://www.reuters.com/world/us/deepfaking-it-americas-2024-election-collides-with-ai-boom-2023-05-30/.

Here’s another perspective from Jim Puzzanghera published in the paywalled Boston Globe where the content is nearly identical but adds a couple of political points.  From the Globe:

There are very few rules right now and few, if any, are likely coming. Democrats in Congress have introduced legislation mandating the disclosure of AI in political ads, but no Republicans have signed on.

and . . .

On June 22, the Federal Election Commission deadlocked along party lines on a petition by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen to consider rules banning AI deepfake campaign ads. All three Republicans opposed the move, with GOP commissioner Allen Dickerson saying the agency lacked the authority.

and . . .  from Republican strategist Eric Wilson (not to be confused with the true conservative and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project Rick Wilson)  who maintains that regulation isn’t needed right now:

I want to tamp down the moral panic because this is something that happens with any new technology. You go back to TV debates and people were worried about what that would do for voters,” he said. “We’re having conversations about it, but no one’s sitting around and having struggle sessions around artificial intelligence on our side. . . . 

We are unlikely to see professional campaigns use generative AI for disinformation purposes. That’s not to say that malign actors like nation states aren’t going to try it.

Yeah.  What malign nation states could Wilson possibly be referring to? Maybe states like Russian and China that are already hard at work confusing the American public with fake news and outright untruths? Who are already busy trying to undermine trust in our institutions, particularly the federal government? Who are hoping for an America increasingly fragmented into warring tribes? Whose activities support the agenda of the Radical Right? Those nation states?

Continue reading “Another Weapon in the Radicals’ Arsenal: Deepfakes”

Debt Ceiling Impasse: Biden Needs to Go on Offense

Delay is the enemy

Let there be no mistake: Republicans are forcing the current debt ceiling crisis for political purposes. It is not about fiscal responsibility. If it were, the Republicans would not have cavalierly raised the debt ceiling three times during the Trump presidency, thereby pumping up the debt by about $7 trillion.  The Republican debt ceiling hostage-taking is calculated to push the economy south sufficiently to undermine Biden’s economic policies through the 2024 election. If the result is a recession or a depression does not matter that much to them, as long as it creates economic pain and thereby gets votes in 2024. True conservatives—the Party siding with rich people and corporations—would prefer it be only a recession, but if driving the economy over a cliff is what is required to boot Democrats out of power, they’re on board  The MAGA Republicans who have contrived the deficit dilemma really have no political philosophy apart from fear and detestation of the federal government, and a concept of individualism bordering on anarchy. So they don’t care either way. These are bad people who cannot be counted on to act in good faith.

These bad people—either by extreme action or through the tacit threat of extreme action to include physical violence—are the ones driving the debt ceiling crisis.  Their main strategy is intimidation. This strategy of intimidation is what stayed Merrick Garland’s hand in pursuing Trump and Trump henchman over the stolen documents case back in 2021  and continuing into 2022.  It is also delaying President Biden’s hand in his fight with House Republicans over the debt ceiling.

Let there also be no mistake regarding House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s shows of negotiating with the White House: the MAGA Republicans are capable of, and willing to, sabotage any compromise between McCarthy and the President at the last minute.

Continue reading “Debt Ceiling Impasse: Biden Needs to Go on Offense”

Tribal Dynamics 2: Subversion and the Price of the Southern Strategy

Preface: a reader characterized one of my recent posts as “philosophical musings.” I get that, just as I get the frequent dismissal of philosophy as largely useless in solving real-life problems. But some philosophical musings are more relevant to real life than others. The discussion of “moral foundations” in Jonathan Haidt’s  The Righteous Mind is an insightful, clarifying guide to the most divisive political dynamics today. It matters to understand the values and motivations of political and cultural adversaries while withholding reflexive judgements. The “Authority/Subversion” foundation—a foundation key in greater or lesser degree to maintaining a stable society—sheds light in particular on the divisions within the Republican Party today.  

In an earlier post “Tribal Dynamics 1: Loyalty” I drew upon Jonathan Haight’s hypothesis of Left/Right tribal divisions being rooted in different degrees of adherence to five “moral foundations.” (See bottom of this post for a list of the five foundations as described in Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, and another [if you missed it before] link to a video discussion.) For example, the stronger adherence to loyalty among conservatives (loyalty/betrayal being one of the moral foundations) explains Sarah Huckabee Sanders—who privately knows better—spewing wild partisan accusations against Biden and the Democrats in responding to Biden’s State of the Union speech. Sanders dug deep into the Right Wing pit of grievances to demonstrate her loyalty.

The country is now witness to the roiling of divisions within the Republican Party—of which the widest is between the MAGA mob and true conservatives like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney  who have been branded traitors by the MAGA mob.

The distance the current Republican Party has diverged from traditional conservatism illustrates its unmooring from the positive anchor of the “moral foundation” which Jonathan Haight identifies as the “Authority/Subversion” foundation.

In Haidt’s framing, conservatives lean heavily toward respect for, and honoring of, authority. Conservatives are, for example, much more comfortable with an institution such as the military, where lines of authority are clearly defined by rank. (Note that Haidt’s framing does not equate conservatism with the policies of the U.S. Republican party, and certainly not the Trump wing. He is talking about a conservative construct that people are not inherently good, and therefore “need external structures or constraints in order to behave well, cooperate, and thrive. These external restraints include laws, institutions, customs, traditions, nations, and religions.” He cites especially Edmund Burke as a source of this construct.)

Continue reading “Tribal Dynamics 2: Subversion and the Price of the Southern Strategy”

Tribal Dynamics 1: Loyalty

Sarah Huckabee Sanders aces the loyalty test

“I’m amazed she would make a speech like that!  I know her! She’s a nice person! She has a sense of humor. . . .” That was the immediate reaction of Van Jones following Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s response to President Biden’s State of the Union speech on February 7. Jones was participating in a CNN panel performing a postmortem on Biden’s speech and the morose rejoinder by Sanders. The rhetoric of Sanders, the newly elected governor of Arkansas, bore the imprint of Trump’s inaugural “American carnage” address seven years earlier.

The opening mood on the CNN panel was one of shock and head-shaking perplexity at the bizarre content and bellicose tone of Sanders’s speech, made especially dark by contrast with the upbeat tone of the address by Biden that preceded it. Sanders ran through the litany of right-wing victimology from the tyranny of a bloated federal government, to hordes of illegal immigrants swarming across the Mexican border, to defunding the police, to transgender turpitude,  to disregard for the patriotic white working class, to the critique of institutional racism embodied in Critical Race Theory, and other “woke fantasies.” On behalf of victims of imagined religious oppression, she protested being told “every day” that “we must . . . partake in their rituals, salute their flags, and worship false idols.” Especially shocking was her disrespect toward President Biden, whom she called “the first man to surrender his Presidency to a woke mob who can’t even tell you what a woman is.”

Continue reading “Tribal Dynamics 1: Loyalty”

The Transgender Women Athlete’s Dilemma

The post below originally appeared as commentary in Road Race Management Newsletter, of which I am an associate editor.  The question of whether to include transgender women in women’s sport—specifically those who have undergone male puberty—has become caught up in political and culture wars to the neglect of science. Also the kind of language used around it feeds into the political or moralistic narrative. 

The Transgender Women Athletes Dilemma

Talking about equality, not fairness, is the way forward, and science indicates cisgender and transgender equality may exist in track and field and road racing in distances of 5000m and over, but not in shorter distances, and not in most team sports. 

Since this commentary originally went to press, the International Olympic Committee has taken steps to resolve the transgender women in sport dilemma by turning policy over to the governing body of each sport. Given the current state of science, this may be the best compromise. But just think how a member of the public will get turned off by the complexities of differences between sports. “Oh, is that really a woman? How come it’s a woman in sprinting, but a man in swimming?” Down the road, we need more science, and we need more clarity in the rules.

We need public support to keep our sports thriving!  Partly that comes with advances in knowledge, partly that comes from education of athletes, coaches, officials, and the public, and partly that requires dropping the use of “fairness” in favor of “equality.” The term “fairness” creates an unnecessary moral barrier.

Whether transgender women should participate in non-recreational women’s sport is a question now embroiled in social, cultural, religious, and political clashes that evoke strong emotions, and the emotions make a hash of rational discussion.

It’s a bit crazy that the science has been overshadowed by issues irrelevant to sport. Sport itself is not religious or political. People can unify over sport in a way that crosses those boundaries—cheering on the same teams and athletes. Or cheering on excellence even when it’s not on your own team. That’s all good. We should keep it that way. Focusing on the science helps with that.

The language being used—pitting “fairness” against “inclusion”—makes objectivity all the more difficult. In general, fairness is a good. And in general, inclusion is a good. The debate rages about whether the inclusion of transgender women in women’s sport violates fairness in women’s competition. Advocates for abolishing transgender athletes in women’s sport maintain that biological males who have undergone male puberty who self-identify as female have an unfair advantage over biological women where strength and speed are decisive.

Sadly, there’s no middle ground for the athlete in this dilemma. As a transgender woman you are either included in women’s sport—leading to allegations of unfairness to women—or you are excluded.

The Concept of “Fairness” Muddies Rational Debate

The word fairness is loaded with moralistic overtones. The concept of fairness transcends sport: it’s about the fair treatment of all people in society at large. It’s a grim reality that transgender people, both men and women, are under assault in general—discriminated against, smeared, stigmatized, vilified, harassed, bullied emotionally and physically, and even murdered for their choice of identity. They have been called abnormal, unnatural, freakish, and even immoral. They have been accused of cheating in women’s sport. Trans people do not deserve this kind of cruel treatment. It’s manifestly unfair, and it all too often leads to depression and suicide.

Continue reading “The Transgender Women Athlete’s Dilemma”

Rewilding Challenge: North American Jaguar

Intro to Rewilding: George Monbiot

Just in case you are not acquainted with “rewilding,” the best introduction I know is a short video with George Monbiot below. Actually I was introduced to Monbiot by the audio of this talk on NPR about ten years ago. The video adds a couple of dimensions, but it might detract from the enthusiasm in Monbiot’s voice. (His enthusiasm is contagious, so if you are looking for a contagion to improve on COVID and flu, a listen here could lift your spirits.) He relates a snippet of his personal journey and expands the view to a planetary scale. If you’ve already heard it, you might still enjoy another go. Check it out:

 

NEXT: To see what an effort rewilding a significant portion of our planet’s land will take, we have to look at what humans have already seized, largely in the form of agriculture.

The landuse challenge, by the numbers

In Our World in Data, Hannah Ritchie reports that almost half of the world’s habitable land (land not covered by glaciers and deserts) is used for agriculture.  A thousand years ago, roughly 4 million square kilometers—less than 4% of habitable land—was used. Now that’s up to 48 million out of 106 million square kilometers: 45%.

Continue reading “Rewilding Challenge: North American Jaguar”

Reasons to Hate the Debt Ceiling

Battles over the debt ceiling cripple the economy

As of this writing (November 21, 2022), Republicans are poised to take over the House of Representatives next year, and one of the weapons they are expected to use to scare people with is the federal debt ceiling.  If the debt ceiling is not raised, all sorts of economic havoc could result, based on the failure of the government to pay its bills, and even go into default after a short lag time.  A default would send shock waves throughout the global economy, and make the U.S.—both government and the private sector—a less desirable entity to do business with.

Just the threat of a default makes other countries jittery—when, they ask themselves, will the U.S. actually default because of political wrangling?  Recurring battles over the debt ceiling weaken our position versus the developing BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) as well as established economies in the West.

What seems scary about the “national debt” and deficit spending

The “national debt” consists principally of the total of all the Treasury bonds, Treasury bills, and Treasury notes held by entities such as yourself, if you happen to hold a U.S. savings bond, as well as by the U.S. government itself. Currently the breakdown among all bondholders is about 36% held by American individuals and companies, 39% held by the U.S. federal government (used for such things as the Social Security Trust Fund, Medicare, and federal pensions) and 25% held by foreign investors such as China and Japan. The latter proportion strongly suggests that the U.S. government cannot be “held hostage” by foreign bond holders.

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