Your vote tells us you want to hurt others

Radsci of the Daily Kos community wrote a message to his MAGA brother. It lays out several faults of the MAGA movement, though in a way that is likely to bring a defensive reaction rather than a reconciliation. Here’s a summary of some of what he said with a quote of the conclusion. If you voted for the massive surge of ICE goons and the harm they have done to people and families, you are not a Christian. If you are OK with a Russian asset in the White House who is hurting democracy, you are not a patriot. If you reject science over conspiracies, you are not a critical thinker. If you cheer hollowing out the institutions that counter fraud, you are not a conservative. If you don’t want a woman to pursue a professional life and make her own medical decisions, you are not a man.

The lies you are willing to accept make you a danger to yourself and everyone around you. Thus, you should not be surprised that we don’t want to be around you. That is unlikely to change, because now we know that your biases are even more dangerous than we previously understood. Those biases make you a target. The people stealing from you know how to exploit those biases and thereby manipulate you. Your problems were not caused by (insert name of favorite minority here). They were caused by the people you have been supporting with your votes. A vote for the current regime and its allies goes far beyond “politics”. It tells us that you want to hurt others. It tells us you are OK with destroying a 250-year-old democracy if that means you can hurt even more people who might not look or play like you do. And the entire world knows that this is where at least one third of the U.S. population, a solid core, now stands. That is the real MAGA legacy. Unfortunately, MAGA cruelty is a legacy that will diminish all of us, along with the nation we have cherished, long after the current regime is gone.

The comments to this post include stories of MAGA relatives that are no longer in their lives. I also think this comment got it right. It is from Larks Tongues in Aspic:

The fact that Trump makes you angry and disgusted enough to write this is all the validation your brother needs. His privilege is protected, the people he doesn’t like are getting punished, and liberals are having a sad. He’s getting exactly what he voted for.

Also on a rant is Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos. Bill responded to an article by Tyler Hassen, defined by Bill as a “DOGE Bro” and former “Houston Oil Executive” – the quote marks are by Bill. Hassen’s article defends what DOGE did, though admits it fell short. Bill opens his rant with:

I read your little sob story the other day. The one about how oh boo-hoo-hoo nobody understands what our mission of nobility and patriotic righteousness was when Elon Musk got us all together to streamline efficiencies and blah blah blah.

Bill included excerpts of Hassen’s article that discuss a bit of what didn’t work – things a regular person would have recognized before all the cutting began as not being able to work. These mistakes cost a great deal of money, far different from the claims of saving money. A tweet from Julie Roys caught my interest:

White supremacy doesn’t become Christian just because you attach Bible verses to it. Yet a growing group of pastors are doing exactly that, preaching racism and antisemitism to disaffected young men, building large online audiences, and monetizing the resulting outrage.

The tweet included a link to an article in the Roys Report, which has the tagline, “Reporting the Truth, Restoring the Church.” I went to the article, The rise of the Jim Crow theobros, written by Bob Smietana, a reporter for Religion News Service. The article introduces four of these men. I’m not so interested in who they are and what they say – like the tweet says, they are using the Bible to justify racism, even slavery. They also have requests for donations, subscriptions, and to buy their merch. They do reasonably well in hauling in the cash. I am interested in how, the why, and the consequences. These men have...

wedded old-school segregationist theology from the Jim Crow-era South with the hypermasculinity of the manosphere and the savvy of the attention economy to preach white supremacy, antisemitism and patriarchy, mostly to disillusioned young men on the internet. And along the way, they are turning outrage into cash.

Women engage with social media more than man do. The exception is extreme views. If a guy can attract angry, disaffected men – “they are hyper-tribal, hyper-loyal, they share and engage consistently” – one can build a following. But it is one that needs a constant stream of outrage, increasing bits of red meat. Samuel Sey, a black Christian blogger born in Ghana, says these theobros, as Smietana wrote...

chose ambition and controversy over preaching Christianity. To quote the Bible, he said in a reference to a New Testament passage, they want to gain the world but are losing their souls.

And Sey said:

You can’t keep saying all these things, and therefore there not to be a violent consequence at some point.

Smietana included comments by Jemar Tisby, the New York Times bestselling author of The Color of Compromise. Tisby said:

Redemption is a Bible word that means restoring a people to right relationship with God. But in the hands of white supremacists, redemption meant taking back the country for white people. That’s essentially what this resurgence of racism is about.

Tisby also said the people who believe it are becoming more vocal about it, but they’re unlikely to convince large numbers of people. They’re not effective evangelists of their ideology. Hunter Baker of the First Liberty Institute said for these pastors creating outrage is “almost like a fun activity.” They have a “pre-Christian identity,” rejecting the teachings of Jesus. When I was in high school here in Michigan the big card game was euchre. I don’t remember playing in much in college, but it was a standard game at my big corporate job. The department was all computer programmers (a term replaced with the more trivial “coder”) so at some point someone asked whether the winning partners were because they had been dealt better cards. Someone wrote a program to randomly assign cards to players, their “hands,” and save the assignments so several games with different teams could be played from the same combinations of cards. We showed that different players could have the same hands yet come up with different scores. The players did make a difference. Several years ago I visited a cousin in North Carolina. He attended the same high school I did and frequently played euchre with me and my nephews. He and I tried to teach his son and daughter, then in middle school, how to play. The game didn’t catch on. Part of it was euchre has some mighty strange rules. And part of it I was trying to avoid one particular word. Avoiding it just created confusion. Peter Olandt of the Kos community says many card games, like euchre, bridge, pinochle, hearts, and many more, are based on the idea that each player plays a card in turn, the cards are evaluated, and the person who played the card ranked the highest wins the round or “takes the trick.” More rounds are played until all the cards have been played. Many of these games have a way of declaring one suit – clubs, diamonds, etc. – to rank higher than the other suits. The word for that suit is used across many of these trick taking games. But using that word in this particular political climate can make some people (like me) uncomfortable. So what to call it? Olandt says the word may have come from “triumph” and that could be used. There is also “prestige” or “top.” Commenters proposed: “Prime,” but that has associations with Amazon. There is the Cajun word “atout.” And commenter raboof delights in bidding “no trump.” And with that this post to my blog is the 800th to be tagged with the nasty guy.

We saw this movie, the plot laid out clearly: Don't empower AI

My weekend movie was this afternoon. It was The Marching Band at the Detroit Film Theater at the Detroit Institute of Arts. There is one more showing tomorrow afternoon. In this French film Thibaut is an in-demand orchestral conductor. He is diagnosed with leukemia and needs a marrow transplant. Surprisingly, his sister is not a match – she’s not even his biological sister. That’s when he finds out he was adopted. His chances of a transplant are still good because he learns he has a brother, Jimmy, who didn’t know about Thibaut. Jimmy did know their mother, briefly, and was raised by friends in a poor village in the north of France. Jimmy agrees to be a donor and Thibaut goes into remission. A few months later Thibaut visits Jimmy again to say thank you. That’s when Thibaut learns Jimmy is in a community band. As the two get to know each other Thibaut realizes Jimmy, a cook at a school, has some real musical talent, which Thibaut tries to get him to develop. Along the way there is a clash between Thibaut’s well-to-do life and Jimmy’s working class life. Jimmy resents the meddling. And they ponder what would have happened, how would their talent have developed, if their adoption circumstances were different. Thibaut had started music lessons at age 3 and Jimmy didn’t. This movie is well done and I enjoyed it. Though it only now released in the US it came out in France two years ago and is a big hit. It was nominated for seven categories of the César Awards (the French Oscars). And having several sequences of music, some of them classical, is a big plus for me. On Sundays All Things Considered on NPR has been having a feature they call Cineplexity, how cinema highlights the complexity of life. Last Sunday the topic was AI. Host Elissa Nadworny talked to Scott Detrow and Geoff Brumfiel. At a time when the news is full of AI agents that go beyond what they’re taught to do they looked at movies that feature such a story. They discuss Ex Machina, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Terminator, and The Matrix. Speaking of The Terminator movies Detrow said:

I love them. But I do not love that they feel relevant to real life right now 'cause this - you have this latest wave of stories about AI right now. You have what's been going on in the Ukraine-Russia war where more and more of these drones, in particular, are being taken over by AI operatives. And I'm thinking like, friends, we saw the movie. James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger laid this out very clearly to us. If you give too much power to AI, it will seize control of power and come to kill you. ... I cannot believe we live in a world where '80s and '90s James Cameron movies feel like really important real-life warnings.

And talking about The Matrix.

But, you know, when Agent Smith - we heard that clip there - he talks about how humans have acted throughout history and just kind of, like, seized power and pushed other species to the side and changed the environment for our whims. And you start to see the smatterings of these autonomous AI agents, as they gain more and more power, starting to think about doing things like that. It is a little scary.

I see a distinction made here I want to emphasize. There are AIs that are able to synthesize information and explain things. And there are AI agents that do things for us. The first would tell us the shop that has the best price for a particular item. The second would actually buy it for us. An AI agent could automatically order components to keep an assembly line running smoothly. An AI could investigate and report on the security of a computer installation. An AI agent could try to crack the security of that installation. The agents appear to be what excites the tech bros, though what they are selling to the public (it will tell us how to cure cancer!) isn’t the agents. Yes, the agents can make a business run better. But the agents are what will harm us. Back on September 2 Terry Gross of Fresh Air on NPR talked to Natasha Singer, a New York Times reporter covering the intersection of technology, business and education and author of the new book Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle To Remake Public Schools. She found tech giants are using their money and might to “influence nearly every step of the education supply chain.” Each big company had a division to sell to schools. Some districts already refer to themselves as a “Google” or “Apple” district. Students get computers or tablets of that particular brand plus education software of the brand. They teach the teachers and students to use their software and AI. That means a competitor can’t break in. It also means: The company and its education products and biases shape the worldview of the teachers and students. If a student learns on a particular product they will use products from that company for the rest of their lives. That worldview is machine-centered. Teachers are to prepare their students for an AI-driven future (all the companies uses similar phrases). What is not included is: Do you want an AI-driven future? The hard questions are skipped. About 15 years ago the tech companies made a big push to get students trained in coding. They called it a national emergency because they said they needed so many coders. There was an effort to teach every kid how to code. There was a promise of high paying jobs that would change the world. They were told you can steer the products or the products will steer you. There was a big increase in students in universities majoring in computer science. Just ten years later some of those same companies released AI which can now write code and do it reasonably well. What’s the responsibility of society and those pushy tech companies to those kids who were promised the world and are now in the lowest rungs of the workforce finding their training is now close to useless and the job market dried up? Schools are now trying to figure out how to use AI in the classroom. Teachers are now having AI give feedback on a student’s essay: Does the word choice match? Is there a thesis statement. Is that thesis supported well? That feedback can come quickly. The busy teacher needs to read only the final product (plus the AI feedback). When students figure out how to get AI to write the essay it is then fed into the AI for evaluation. And what does the student learn? Is this how parents what their children to be taught? Do they want their children to be guinea pigs for AI? This stuff hasn’t been well studied yet. And some studies don’t look favorable to AI. Last year Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, the teachers' union, pushed for teachers to use AI, or at least know how to use it. The AFT announced a deal with a couple of the companies. Teachers would get a seat at the table with these companies to shape their products. A year later Weingarten said she had been wrong. Chatbots hook kids and were being used as friends and shouldn’t be. One possible reason for the change is Weingarten saw the whole country turn against AI. On hearing a tech bro declare the glorious benefits of AI in schools Singer has two concerns. First, that glowing world is hyped to sell products. Second, the purpose of school isn’t to train kids on the latest skills, it’s to help them learn how to learn, to discover their passions, to be an active citizen in a democracy. The tech companies are not asking what is in the best interest of the students and of the society. Estonia asked for an AI specific for Estonian schools in which the AI use the Socratic method of asking questions and not answering them. It asks the student what do you think? They use it in high school, not younger, and are studying how well it is working. Big Tech tilted education in ways that benefit Big Tech and also obscure more important things. The companies went big on coding. But not on data science, how to analyze big datasets. That includes important questions. Has the data been manipulated by researchers? Are you using the right statistical methods? Are the results statistically significant? Data science is crucial yet tech bros aren’t pushing it as an amazing career. Maybe they don’t want those important questions answered.

Kill the filibuster or say the rulebook won

Eric Schmeltzer, a Daily Kos contributor, has suggestions for Democrats on how to keep their majority once they get it this fall. My view is they need to sever relationships with billionaires and cut the billionaires’ hold over the rest of us. But let’s listen to Schmeltzer:

Pop quiz: It’s 2028, and Democrats have held both chambers for almost two years. Which of these realities would you prefer? A) We tried to pass an anti-corruption bill, but it got filibustered. B) We passed an anti-corruption bill, but President Donald Trump stood in the way of it becoming law. Here’s one more: A) We passed a bill that put healthcare back where it was before Trump’s disastrous “One Big, Beautiful Bill.” B) We passed a package that redefines healthcare in America, but Trump vetoed it. You probably didn’t need long, and neither will other voters. B is bold, which is exactly what turns one win into a series of wins. But for Democratic leadership, the time to figure out how you get to B is now. The good news is that the planning is happening.

Part of that good news is it seems possible next Speaker Hakeem Jeffries is on board with these ideas. Even so, this will require bold work. That healthcare package can be described as “Medicare for Anyone Who Wants It,” something you get through your taxes, not a monthly bill, is priced without a profit margin, and stays with you no matter where you live or work. So pass it, get it to the Oval Office. The nasty guy vetoes it. And in 2028 the message is easily: Remember how close we got with that bill. We must keep Democrats in the majority and keep Republicans out of the White House. A Brennan Center poll found 92% of voters say corruption is a big problem. An effort to end Citizens United shows 46% of voters don’t trust either party to fix it. That’s an opening for Democrats. Other needs to end corruption: Ban members of Congress from trading stocks. Ban the president from profiting off the office (we didn’t use to need a law for that). Ban anonymous money in elections (I’d like to go much further, but this Supreme Court...). Create an ethics office that doesn’t answer to the president (yeah, there is that effort by the nasty guy to allow him to meddle in everything not under Congress or the Federal Reserve). I would add: Ban all gifts to Supreme Court justices and create a Supreme Court ethics office they don’t control. Commenters added: Ban gerrymandering and pass voting rights. These ideas will cost Democrats something – and that is important. Yeah, he’ll veto all that. And Democrats run on that in 2028. These bills can be readied now so that within 100 hours of the new Congress being sworn in they hit the Oval Office desk. Democrats may control the Senate, but not a filibuster proof Senate. The common wisdom about the filibuster is if it is killed Republicans can pass horrible stuff and Democrats can’t stop them. But (1) people need to see the true impact of their vote – now they can vote for vile candidates knowing the worst won’t get through. And (2):

Let’s go back to the quiz and say the filibuster line to that guy in Saginaw, Michigan. Democrats have 51 votes and a rulebook they control, and they’re telling him that the rulebook won. Now say the veto line. He already knows whose fault it is, because only one guy in this country can veto a bill and everybody knows his name. People forgive a wall you can’t move. But a rule you could have changed and didn’t, well, that’s on you.

Restoring what the nasty guy broke is good. But passing something that gets vetoed and people are still talking about in 2028 requires boldness. And if they’re still talking about the bills in 2028 they can be signed in 2029. And a majority might hold for decades. So get moving. Emily Singer of Kos reported that Republicans are into the stages of grief over losing Congress. So far they’re into bargaining. I mention that because of an exchange that Singer relates, between former Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Robbie Smither, a Florida Republican voter who plans to vote Democratic for the first time in his life because of the nasty guy: Gaetz: “Bro we need your vote. ... I hate the war too. But the Democrats want to trans your kids.” Singer had Smither’s response:

“With all due respect, stop pissing on people and telling them it’s raining,” he shot back. There is absolutely no logical evidence that [Democrats] want to ‘trans’ my two sons. None.” Smither went on to say, “What we worry about is feeding him and his brother. Paying the mortgage and homeowners insurance on the house we’re raising them in.”

Which is why culture war issues are not working this year. Singer also reported that Republicans and their billionaire funders are (finally) dumping piles of cash into the campaign. But it won’t matter. Singer lists reasons: Campaign finance law says candidates get better ad rates that PACs. Democratic candidates in swing states are far out-raising their opponents. So the differences are smaller than they appear. Most importantly, no amount of money will change an election if the ads aren’t addressing the issues most important to voters. People want candidates to address high cost of living and high gas prices. What they are getting fearmongering on transgender issues. Republicans think transgender issues got them in power in 2024. Actually, voters were reacting to the economic mess recovering too slowly from the pandemic and thought Republicans would handle the economy better. Instead, Republicans screwed it up. Also, in states where those vile anti-trans ads ran and are running, the states already passed laws restricting transgender rights. Fearmongering now is less effective. An email from March For Our Lives reported that libraries across the country, including in Baltimore, six branches of the Los Angeles County Libraries, and all 20 branches at St. Louis County Libraries are giving out gun safe storage devices and gun locks, often for free. No paperwork, no ID, no questions. The Central Library of Baltimore gave out 100 locks in 24 hours.

One administrator put it plainly: "One homicide costs taxpayers a million dollars. One non-fatal shooting costs taxpayers $1.5 million. A safe costs $20. Gun locks are $15." That math is undeniable. And the fact that communities are finding ways to make it happen — through libraries, hospitals, health departments, and local officials working together — is proof that the movement for gun safety doesn't wait for Congress.

In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Justin Wolfers of Platypus Economics looking at the importance of a free press. This is at a time when the nasty guy banned three networks from the White House. The ban was blocked this morning.

Starting in 2003, Brazil’s federal government randomly picked municipalities for audits of federal money. Some audit results came out before an election, and some came out after. That’s the foundation for a great natural experiment. Claudio Ferraz and Frederico Finan compared the two groups. Corrupt mayors who were exposed before the election were far less likely to be reelected, and the effect was much bigger where there was local radio, because radio was how the story reached voters. Mexico shows something similar. When local radio and TV reported that politicians had misused public money, voters punished those politicians’ parties much more heavily.

In the comments Rambler797 reported diesel truck buyers (and I’m sure he is referring to pickups) are 90% men and 84% white. And 87% of their party affiliation is Republican. That’s why they are raging at the nasty guy on social media. Rambler797 then included a tweet by Curtis Namba:

Hey Truckers! Remember when diesel was so cheap under Biden you would caravan to DC waving your stupid Trump banners?

Nerd heaven? Mandalit del Barco of NPR reported on the opening of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles. Yeah, that’s George Lucas, creator of Star Wars. Of course, there is a great deal about Star Wars inside, but there is also a great deal that isn’t. There are reproductions of the Sistine Chapel ceiling and other world heritage sites. One gallery has a large collection of Normal Rockwell paintings.

But most of the collection is original work that Lucas says is often overlooked in the art world, including comics, Japanese manga, children's book illustrations, and pulp magazine covers.