The naughty apparatchiks
Republican vice-presidential candidate Senator JD Vance continues to stoke outrage against foreign-born members of his own constituency, sharing video footage with his 1.9 million social media followers that he claimed showed African migrants in Dayton, Ohio “eating cats” — but instead appears to show nothing more than poultry cooking on an outdoor grill.
“Kamala Harris and her media apparatchiks should be ashamed of themselves,” Vance posted Saturday on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter. “Another ‘debunked’ story that turned out to have merit.”
What kind of dang hillbilly doesn’t know a plucked chicken when he sees one?
The video was originally posted by the right-wing Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, who offered a $5,000 bounty to anyone that could provide “proof” of cat-eating immigrants in Ohio.
Why? Why the hell would anyone waste 5 grand on such a fatuous project?
See? See the puddy tats??
Backlash was swift, with replies ranging from, “I find it strange that a self-professed ‘hillbilly’ doesn’t know what whole chickens look like,” to, “HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW WHAT CHICKENS LOOK LIKE WITH THEIR LEGS ATTACHED YOU F****ING DIPSHIT.” Oliver Alexander, an open-source intelligence analyst, weighed in, sharing images of plucked chickens looking remarkably similar to whatever was being grilled in the video. “Clearly chicken you weirdo. Dude’s never seen chicken that wasn’t dino-nugget shaped,” he wrote.
Rufo did not respond to a request for comment on Saturday. The Vance campaign declined to comment on the record. An expert at the National Chicken Council did not reply to inquiries.
Those poopyheads at the National Chicken Council are such snobs.
Surely they could find someone somewhere eating rabbit. It’s a common dish in some places. Rabbit looks much more like a cat than chicken does. Seriously.
I hope swing voters see through this nonsense; the idea of eating animals we in the west don’t eat has too much power in our culture. I can see voters being convinced by such a claim, probably some of the same ones that whine ‘but her emails’ in 2016.
The novel “Cat’s Cradle” by Kurt Vonnegut gets its title from one of the characters talking about his bewilderment at the game of cat’s cradle; every time he looked at the string figures, he saw string figures, “No damn cat, no damn cradle”. The weird things that happened in the book were sometimes accompanied by this character holding his hands out and saying, “See the cat? See the cradle?”.
I could hear this character in my mind, looking at this video and saying, “See the cat? See the cradle?”.
The sheer number of “GC twitter” people on board with Trump’s (and the Manhattan Institute bros’) racist bullshit makes me sick.
A lesson I learned from the New Atheist movement comes to mind, a little line I started mentally sneering at people as I began to sour on the skeptic bros who flooded the meetups-in-the-pub and the comment threads on the blogs: Dude, it’s not a great feat of intellectual prowess that you figured out god doesn’t exist. The debate about religion is far more complex and interesting and important and relevant for what it reveals about the flaws in humans’ ability to think — the fact that highly intelligent people can fall under the spell of god-bothering, and the impact it’s having on society.
The people who never got past “Hurr durr, Christians are so dumb” always seemed, quite frankly, less pleasant to be around than many of the well-intentioned, thoughtful theists with whom I passionately disagreed about religion.
Not that there was anything necessarily wrong with people openly mocking the stupidity of Christianity. I didn’t disagree with what the “hurr durr” lot were saying. It’s just that by itself, they weren’t saying much, and in their lack of interest in the deeper ideas that swirled around the religion-atheism debate — the impacts it had on politics and social progress and justice and all that — they were revealing to me that they weren’t really my kind of people.
So it is with the “GC” movement, for lack of a better term. “Hurr durr look how dumb the libs are acting with all this troony nonsense” is a fair criticism. Liberals are indeed acting incredibly dumb about crossdressers and gender benders. But by itself it doesn’t offer anything but condescension, and without the broader context (well-intentioned people thinking they’re doing good by gays and women, but being misguided, for example) it can very quickly turn into a sour, anti-humanist right-wing self-serving attitude.
I’ve frankly had it with a lot of the people in the gender-critical twittersphere. My gender atheism hasn’t waned one bit, but I’m far less interested in socializing among the GC folks than I was a couple years ago, given that it’s turning into a right wing “hurr durr” fest. The Libs-of-TikTok-ification of the gender discourse is fucking tedious.
Interesting point.
I am in a way permanently stuck at the “how do they believe it?” phase because I just can’t figure out how they do believe it. How is it believable? Permanent enigma.
But, yes: for me that’s not a bridge to going right-wing or Republican. Nope.
[…] a comment by Artymorty on The naughty […]
I’m with you in the combined fascination and exasperation at people’s gullibility with respect to gender woo. (Is “fascinated exasperation” a thing? I’ll ask the robot god.)
And yeah, I’m very with you that it’s absolutely not a bridge to going right wing for me. There’s just as much irrationality and reckless unthinking over there. I’m still convinced the right are far less rational and far more reckless, in fact.
Update: I asked the robot god about “fascinated exasperation”. Its answer was pretty good!
The robot god is helpful! But spooky. Maybe it can help me find a more creative way to say “spookily helpful” next.
Interesting that it gets a “sort of” in there.
It’s those little faux-human moments that spook me the most with A.I.
One day, bored and hungry, I gave it a comphrehensive list of every single ingredient in my pantry and fridge, and asked it for some dinner ideas. Within one second it replied with a few decent meal ideas, and one really good one. But then, as if leaning into my ear to add a little personal aside, it said something like, And you know, if you to the store and pick up (this or that little thing), you could make this *other* meal, which would be *extra* delicious.
I thought, Holy shit! Computers aren’t supposed to think like that! (And yes, the *extra* meal was a great idea which sounded *extra* delicious.)
I really feel for the poor guy at Google who lost his job when he became convinced the AI was really alive.
(Me, to the computer, as I wrote this: what’s something like an aside, but that conveys more the idea of a friend sharing with another friend as a favour, rather than just a monologue to an audience. something more intimate.
ChatGPT: Ah, I see what you’re aiming for. You might be looking for a term like “confidential aside” or “personal note.” These phrases convey that the information being shared is meant for the friend’s ears only, adding a layer of intimacy and trust to the conversation. Another term that captures this kind of close, personal sharing is “intimate disclosure.”)
screams
What I find interesting about CGPT’s suggestions is that they appear correct, but if you think about them for more than two seconds, they’re actually wrong. Because what you asked for was something to describe frustration with the subject’s lack of comprehension, not with the fact that you find that lack of comprehension interesting.
“Frustratingly fascinating”, “Annoyingly compelling”, and “Infuriatingly intriguing” all apply the discontent modifier to your curiosity rather than to the sluggish thought.
It did this despite correctly summarizing the request immediately before.
It’s these kinds of things that reveal that LLMs don’t actually understand the text they ingest or generate.
Also, those are chickens. If you only glance at the thumbnail, it might read as a single, four-legged creature lying on its back with its legs up. But again, two extra seconds of attention should make it clear that there are at least three carcasses on that grill. The body-to-legs math doesn’t work for cat.
I wish we could ask ChatGPT if they’re chickens. That would either put the question to bed or blow the whole thing up, depending on where one stands.
(Ahh, now I get why ChatGPT can’t address any news less than 2 years old, even after it’s got the data fed into its digital gullet.)
But Ophelia, that “sort of” isn’t the idiomatic version (approximately) but the literal one (a variety of). These text generators (I refuse to call them, or anything, “AI’ because AI doesn’t exist, at least, yet) default to a semi-formal tone or register which no person would ever use and is, I suspect what people, or maybe just me, find creepy. (Something, I think Kubrick got spot on. HAL is creepy precisely because he mixes that formal tone with a weird sense of intimacy. Someone, Kubrick, or maybe Clarke, understood that that’s what happens when you try to fake a one to one conversation without any sense of the your interlocuter’s context. Any media that isn’t public oratory has that problem, of course, but with the one to many version we’ve at least had millennia to find approaches that work.)
You could, of course, ask the ChatGPT to answer in a deliberately informal tone, just as you could ask it to reply in haiku. You’d probably get a few ‘sort of’s then and maybe even the odd ‘sorta’. These things are amazingly flexible – they just aren’t intelligent in any useful way, or even ‘smart’ (which is why, as Nullius points out, the answer here fails basic logical analysis).
Also, yes, if you’re gender critical and you announce Trump is some sort (I mean variety!) of saviour, I will stop taking you seriously.
Christopher F. Rufo has of course a very high IQ, by the simple criteria that we have seen applied regularly here. He’s got dosh, he thinks the right ultra-right thots, and he pretends he can’t tell a chicken from a skinned cat – which is to say, he lies in a way that has an inexhaustible fascination for some people. I’m surprised Elon Musk didn’t add a favourable comment.
I found this on that good & responsible newsletter, Judd at Popular Information,:
‘Appearing on the All In podcast, billionaire investor Peter Thiell asserted that if the presidential election “is going to be close,” then “I’m pretty sure [Vice President] Kamala [Harris] will win because they will cheat.” Thiel claimed, without any evidence, that Democrats will “steal the ballots” to assure a Harris victory. ‘
A little further down is this:
‘Although Thiel was wrong, billionaire Elon Musk promoted a video of Thiel’s claims to his 190 million followers on X, adding the comment “[This is] exactly [what is happening].” Musk’s pinned post on X is a video that marries claims of fraud by mail-in voting with a white nationalist conspiracy theory. The video, which promotes the Great Replacement Theory, falsely claims that Democrats have purposely flooded the nation with undocumented immigrants and are using them to cast illegal votes by mail.’ The square brackets are there in this paragraph because Judd simply writes ‘Exactly’.
The video is put up by a group (I suppose) called ‘Western Lensman’. I am sorry, I don’t know to link with X, but I can assure you that the video is there.
So there we are. There are powerful enemies of democratic institutions around, and they are seeking to turn democratic states into corrupt Orban-esque oligarchies. Thiel is of course Vance’s mentor – one womders why he chose to mentor him.