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AI is a WMD
I'm in TARTU, ESTONIA! AI, copyright and creative workers' labor rights (TOMORROW, May 10, 8AM: Science Fiction Research Association talk, Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures building, Lossi 3, lobby). A talk for hackers on seizing the means of computation (TOMORROW, May 10, 3PM, University of Tartu Delta Centre, Narva 18, room 1037).
Fun fact: "The Tragedy Of the Commons" is a hoax created by the white nationalist Garrett Hardin to justify stealing land from colonized people and moving it from collective ownership, "rescuing" it from the inevitable tragedy by putting it in the hands of a private owner, who will care for it properly, thanks to "rational self-interest":
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/04/analytical-democratic-theory/#epistocratic-delusions
Get that? If control over a key resource is diffused among the people who rely on it, then (Garrett claims) those people will all behave like selfish assholes, overusing and undermaintaining the commons. It's only when we let someone own that commons and charge rent for its use that (Hardin says) we will get sound management.
By that logic, Google should be the internet's most competent and reliable manager. After all, the company used its access to the capital markets to buy control over the internet, spending billions every year to make sure that you never try a search-engine other than its own, thus guaranteeing it a 90% market share:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task
Google seems to think it's got the problem of deciding what we see on the internet licked. Otherwise, why would the company flush $80b down the toilet with a giant stock-buyback, and then do multiple waves of mass layoffs, from last year's 12,000 person bloodbath to this year's deep cuts to the company's "core teams"?
https://qz.com/google-is-laying-off-hundreds-as-it-moves-core-jobs-abr-1851449528
And yet, Google is overrun with scams and spam, which find their way to the very top of the first page of its search results:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security
The entire internet is shaped by Google's decisions about what shows up on that first page of listings. When Google decided to prioritize shopping site results over informative discussions and other possible matches, the entire internet shifted its focus to producing affiliate-link-strewn "reviews" that would show up on Google's front door:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan
This was catnip to the kind of sociopath who a) owns a hedge-fund and b) hates journalists for being pain-in-the-ass, stick-in-the-mud sticklers for "truth" and "facts" and other impediments to the care and maintenance of a functional reality-distortion field. These dickheads started buying up beloved news sites and converting them to spam-farms, filled with garbage "reviews" and other Google-pleasing, affiliate-fee-generating nonsense.
(These news-sites were vulnerable to acquisition in large part thanks to Google, whose dominance of ad-tech lets it cream 51 cents off every ad dollar and whose mobile OS monopoly lets it steal 30 cents off every in-app subscriber dollar):
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech
Italians deploying mustard gas against Ethiopian forces during the Second Italo Ethiopian War, 1936. Italian military forces used between 300 and 500 tons of mustard gas to attack both military and civilian targets during the war. Italy denied usage of chemical weapons in Ethiopia at the time and until the 1980s.
"There are no coincidences, only the illusion of coincidences."
Hello from 2025, it sucks
Our government dialing it back to 2003 on steroids got me so nostalgic that I revived this blog
This quick little BBC interview from 1998 is like, a total mind fuck.
I need to learn who Alan Clarke is but he’s a British guy and he’s in this interview talking about “barbarians” in countries like “Persia” making “weapons of mass destruction”
He’s like, why are we not invading and handling Saddam Hussein?!
GV is says it all. He covers:
We never should’ve gotten into the Civil War, WWI, WW2
We cannot and should not be “world police” prophetically taking the oppositional stance to an oncoming war’s rhetoric that he anticipates specifically
That the Clinton Sex Scandal was pay back for trying to do universal health care (interesting! Never heard this but GV is always right)
That the American empire is collapsing even as people won’t acknowledge it’s existence
He anticipates massive currency instability
And again the whole thing is he’s being interviewed after releasing The Smithsonian Institution which is about time traveling to try and prevent the USA getting in WW2 which is GV’s obsession because of his beloved Jimmy Trimble was killed in the Pacific.
He’s sitting there in 1998 getting interviewed alongside a man who’s spewing propaganda that supports the oncoming invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran, and he’s arguing for peace.
He’s arguing for peace in the 1860s, and against wars started last week, a decade after his death.
He says with heaving sadness he figures humans must be by nature territorial and warring, that it’s unintelligible (age of chaos) that it’s all going to burn and rise again because the way we are only leads to destruction, and he’s sitting here getting interviewed about his "What if I Could Go Back in Time and Stop WW2?" fantasy book next to a guy doing complex war propaganda and he’s still trying to argue for peace now and in the future.
GV was anguished.
He was so good.
I seriously cry almost every time I listen to him or read him in any form, fiction, essay, interview.
He’s a lost prophet.
I love him so much.
I’ll come back and edit and add quotes and pics I guess.
Okay wow yeah, Alan Clarke
Here's the basics
Melvyn Bragg discusses politics and morality with Gore Vidal and Alan Clarke.
GV in 1998
I just noticed this Wikipedia page was for "Alan Clark" but the BBC episode says "Alan Clarke" and so does the BBC episode. So I made sure the Wikipedia page was for the author of the book The Tories: Conservatives and the Nation State 1922-1997 and it is.
Clark v Clarke
Why's that happened?
MORDECAI AND RIGBY! FIND THE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION OR YOU'RE FIRED!
By Stephen Millies
Before the planes can drop the bombs, capitalist newspapers and TV networks have to spread the lies. Who can forget George W. Bush’s Big Lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? The hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people whose family members were killed certainly can’t.
Now President Biden says that he’s convinced that the Russian Federation will invade Ukraine. He wasn’t talking about Russian Federation troops protecting people in the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics from intense shelling by Ukraine.
Biden was predicting a full-scale invasion despite Russian denials. To pump up this war crisis, the New York Times and other media outlets are alleging that Russia has prepared lists of Ukrainians to kill. This is pure war propaganda.