We lived that history. We saved the evidence.

I had a nice lunch with my friend and debate partner at a restaurant new to us. The food was good, though the sound system was loud. As part of our discussion I mentioned that Democrats should kill the filibuster if they take the Senate in January (I hear a 60% chance they will) and mentioned a few of the reasons I mentioned in a recent post. My friend says the Senate should keep the filibuster to keep the Republicans from doing bad things. When I got home I saw an article by Eric Schmeltzer, a contributor on Daily Kos who went through the reasons the filibuster should be killed. He’s the guy who wrote the article I just mentioned, so some of the same things are said here, but with more reasons to eliminate the filibuster. Here’s a summary. Democrats have a good chance of taking control of the Senate. The chance of having 60 senators is pretty much zero. Some senators say that with the filibuster senators are forced to work together. That essentially means any big and important project is watered down. Something important, like an ethics bill with teeth, becomes a bill to fund studying the issue. The nasty guy vetoes it anyway. Or signs a bill with him getting the credit but is otherwise of no consequence. Either way Democrats have nothing to show for their effort. They can’t run on their big bill being vetoed because they didn’t pass a big bill. But if 51 senators pass an important bill that goes to the Oval Office and he vetoes it Democrats have something to run on. Yes, Republicans can pass horrible things with 51 votes. That’s still good for democracy.

Right now, the filibuster lets Republicans hide. They introduce extreme bills to fire up the base, knowing Democrats will block them, and they never pay a price. Voters hear about some awful GOP idea on the news, it dies in the Senate, and life goes on. So a whole lotta people look at Washington, see nothing change no matter who wins, and figure both parties are the same.

Republicans have ways to get their nasty bills through anyway, sometimes by declaring the filibuster does not apply in a particular area (such as confirming judges). But Democrats’ wonderful bills die in the Senate because of the filibuster. Back to those horrible Republican bills...

Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman’s big argument for keeping the filibuster, in a Washington Post op-ed this summer, is that without it, Republicans would have passed big chunks of Project 2025. Okay. Then voters would have lived under Project 2025, and they’d know exactly who did it to them. Which is my point. When people watch an election turn into laws that truly impact their lives, voting stops feeling pointless. You can’t tell somebody both parties are the same after they’ve lived through that. People who’ve seen what an election actually decides come back for the next one.

The Senate has had a Gang of Eight (the count may vary) that try to overcome inaction. The result is a mash everyone hates and can’t sell to the other 90-plus senators. Or there is an effort to find ten Republican senators of conscience – good luck finding even one. The only things the filibuster helps are Republicans and their special interest donors. Kill it. I had written that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wants all male military service members to be tested for their level of testosterone and take a course of treatment if it is low. Stewartking of the Kos community ponders why:

This comes from an idée fixe that Secretary of Defense Hegseth has that military efficiency is somehow connected with a man’s sexual prowess. Truly manly men have erections all the time, I guess, and that rampant manliness somehow equates to the ability to kill the enemy and destroy his property with high efficiency. History is full of counter-examples, of course – examples of people who were very efficient at warlike tasks despite either completely lacking manliness on account of being women or being male but lacking in the aspects of manliness that SecDef Hegseth is planning to test for.

To those counter-examples... Alexander the Great, one of the greatest military leaders of history, didn’t seem to be interested in women beyond fathering kids and had a life-long relationship with Hephaestion son of Amyntor, one of his generals. Major General Winfield Scott was quite fat, so wouldn’t pass Hegseth’s fitness standards. He was our nation’s senior general from 1841 until after the start of the Civil War. He successfully invaded Mexico in 1847 and he designed the strategy that finally defeated the Confederacy, though he was too old to actually fight. In the War of Independence Henry Knox, who was “full figured,” helped capture Fort Ticonderoga, then during the winter got its cannon to Boston, where they forced the British to evacuate. For the rest of the war he was commander of the artillery, then the first Secretary of War (back when it really was the Department of War). During WWII Audie Leon Murphy was underage, underweight, and illiterate. He became a great soldier who took care of those under his commands to the point he expected to sacrifice his life to protect his troops. He became America’s most highly-decorated soldier. There are a few more.

A focus on masculinity, and especially militaristic masculinity, is a central characteristic of fascism, as Italian philosopher Umberto Eco discusses in his famous essay “Ur-Fascism”.

Benito Mussolini stressed the importance of a New Man, stressed masculinity in public art, and loved getting his photo taken with his shirt off while doing manly things.

Fascists generally try to paint their opponents as feminized, either because they are actually women or, if they are men, because they lack characteristics the fascists see as defining masculinity.

Back to where we started, crazed masculinity in the military does not have broad political appeal. There are no political ads featuring the manly military. Perhaps the target for all this is the young men in the military. But a purge of the old guys, the ones who really know what’s going on and distrust the new leadership, can weaken the military. Mark Segal of Pridesource reported on the nasty guy’s attack on the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, wanting to purge it of displays that don’t feature straight white men. Segal says the attack is personal because he had donated his artifacts of LGBTQ history to that museum. Having your stuff displayed at a Smithsonian museum is a pretty big deal. But the nasty guy’s attack is more than personal. History is to tell us what happened. They should not be erased.

Because if you erase the demonstrations, you erase why we demonstrated. If you erase the hatred, you erase what we had to overcome. And if you erase Stonewall, Gay Liberation and the first Pride marches, future generations might believe the rights they have today were simply given to them. They weren’t. We fought for them. Those artifacts in the Smithsonian are not just objects. They are witnesses. They say: We were here. This happened. We fought back. Donald Trump can try to rewrite America’s history. But he cannot change one essential fact: We lived that history. We saved the evidence. And we are still here to tell the story. You cannot erase people who refuse to disappear.

In Monday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Stephen Walt of Foreign Policy. He compares the nasty guy to Machiavelli’s The Prince and concludes he would make a bad prince. Machiavelli says that being feared is better than being loved. But there is something worse: being hated or despised. To avoid being hated don’t go after your subject’s property or women. The nasty guy has violated both by grifting through every chance he can create and by being a pal of Jeffrey Epstein.

What about being despised? Machiavelli warns that a prince is “rendered despicable by being thought changeable, frivolous, effeminate, timid, and irresolute.” Nobody would call Trump “effeminate,” but the other adjectives apply in spades. For all his macho bluster, Trump’s vacillations and inconstancy are now well-established, and leaders made of sterner stuff (e.g., Chinese President Xi Jinping) have figured this out and taken advantage of it. Corporate leaders, university presidents, and law firms that bent the knee to Trump early in his second term look both craven and foolish, while those who stood up to him now seem both courageous and farsighted. Not only is Trump no longer feared as much as he once was, but he’s also well down the road to being both hated and despised.

Sarah Longwell and Andrew Tobias of The Bulwark explain why people hate data centers. That’s especially true in rural (Republican) areas that have the land where data centers have room to build. First, data centers raise energy prices (or water prices), a cost increase to the locals. Second, they’re loud and ugly. Third, data centers are seen as taking jobs. So data centers feel like a thing being done to them in which they have no say. That’s why they are a big issue and why politicians are trying to tread carefully. A news tidbit says ICE agents were told to stop arresting non-criminals. That prompted Mike Nellis to tweet:

ICE being told to stop arresting non-criminals is an extraordinary admission of guilt by the Trump administration. They’ve spent the last two years arguing that they weren’t arresting people indiscriminately based on the color of their skin, and now they’re basically admitting to it and telling their own agents to stop.

Of course, some will say, believe it when I see it. In the comments Rambler797 posted a tweet by Sarrah Bellus:

James Talarico to Fox News on redistricting: “If Republican policies are so popular, why do they need to redraw these maps; why not run on their policies?”

Zac Harmon added:

Talarico is *really* good at this. The Fox News host couldn’t accomplish his spin and was told by his producers to “wrap it up” because of it.

Rambler797 also posted a tweet from theleahfiles:

In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond studied a dozen societies across thousands of years, from the Maya to the Vikings, to answer one question: why do great civilizations fall? What he found wasn't drought, war or bad luck. None of those were ever enough on their own. The one thing present in every collapse was how the people at the top responded to what was happening below them. The warning sign he found again and again was leaders who were completely insulated from the pain of ordinary people. When the powerful never feel the consequences, they stop seeing the problem, and when they stop seeing it, they stop fixing it. The Maya kings kept enriching themselves and building monuments while the farmers who fed them went hungry. Their civilization didn't fall because of one bad year. It fell because the people in charge had stopped living in the same world as everyone else. Diamond called them "distant managers." They are the people in power who live so far from the damage that they are the last to understand how bad it has gotten. By the time they notice, the fields are already empty. His most important finding was that collapse is a choice. Every society that fell had leaders who could have changed course and chose not to. The question for us is whether we will keep letting people who can't see us make that choice for us. Because we are there folks.

In today’s roundup Dworkin quoted Jack Jenkins of Religion News Service:

At last month’s Family Leadership Summit in Des Moines, Iowa, Joe Mitchell, a Republican running for U.S. Congress in the state’s second congressional district, jabbed at his Democratic opponent, state representative the Rev. Lindsay James, saying she “calls herself a pastor.” He then turned to the crowd of conservative evangelical pastors and coined a term he said applies to James, a Presbyterian minister, and other faith-forward Democratic candidates — namely, Lutheran minister the Rev. Sarah Trone Garriott, an Iowa state senator also running for another seat in Congress, and James Talarico, a state representative and Presbyterian seminarian running for U.S. Senate in Texas. “I call them PINOS,” he said, explaining the term is an acronym for “Pastors in Name Only.” “Because they’re not real pastors, right? They don’t profess the true gospel of Jesus Christ,” added Mitchell, who has attended an evangelical church in the past.

The pastors running as Democrats are the real pastors, the one teaching the love of Jesus. There are several of them and doing well. The pastors running as Republicans are the ones who have contorted the love of Jesus into an excuse for dominance and oppression. Their campaigns aren’t doing so well.

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.