The Damage Done by Democrat Elites to Fly-Over States and Cities

Chris Hedges:

I rage against this demonization of the working class because it’s a very dangerous cop-out. The Democrats had this term to essentially enact the kind of New Deal reforms that might’ve been able to save what’s left of our very anemic democracy. And they didn’t. And why didn’t they? Because figures like Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer would not have political power but for their corporate backers. I mean, nobody wants Biden. Nobody wanted Biden in the primaries. It took the Democratic establishment to force everyone else out. The guy’s not even sentient. But they don’t want to lose their positions of privilege and power, and they’re really willing to take the country down because if they pushed for these kinds of reforms, then Goldman Sachs and Raytheon - and let’s not forget the Israeli lobby - wouldn’t fund them. They are creatures of this system, so that’s the problem. They will blame people who don’t rush out and vote for them. The liberal East Coast establishment, the college educated, the quote-unquote “knowledge industry,” they have no contact with these people at all. And that isn’t to excuse some of their opinions. . .

Reagan started it, but Clinton was the Democratic impetus for this, where they talked in that “I feel your pain” language of liberalism but thrust a knife in the back of the working class. So are there irredeemable racists and bigots? Of course there are. But to write off the entire working class like that and essentially blame them for their own, I think, very legitimate rage has been a way for the Democratic Party and the liberal establishment to wash their hands of culpability.

. . . They packed the equipment up and shipped it to Monterey, Mexico. And the plants, they’re just empty lots now, but they’re massive and they’re surrounded by cyclone fencing, weed-choked lots, a kind of painful reminder of the jobs they used to have. What happens in Anderson? Well, it’s completely predictable: opioid crisis, diseases of despair, massive numbers of suicides, and so on.

You can find the full interview of Chris Hedge's (by Matt Taibbi) at Racket News.

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The Humor Divide

I agree with Batya Ungar-Sargon's observation that the main divide in the United States is not race, but economic class. I also agree with Jonathan Haidt's observation that those who have lost touch can be identified by their lack of humor:

Intellectual life used to be fun," Mr. Haidt said. "There's an emergent community, from center left to center right, of people who feel politically homeless and are recognizing that the big division is no longer between left and right, but between people who are on the extremes, who are humorless and aggressive and deluded by their passion and tribalism, versus the middle 70 percent of the country.

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Daryl Davis Offers the Perfect Antidote to Cancel Culture

What is Cancel Culture? In their excellent new book, The Canceling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott offer many examples of cancel culture along with this definition (p. 9):

Cancel Culture is just one symptom of a much larger problem: the use of cheap rhetorical tactics to "win" arguments without actually winning arguments. After all, why bother meaningfully refuting one's opponents when canceling them is an easier option? Just take away their platform or career. Nobody else will dare to tread the same ground once you make an example of them.

There is good news here, however. Once you understand Cancel Culture as one part of an unhealthy societal conversation, the solution becomes quite clear: We don't have to argue like this.

What's the opposite of cancel culture? Free speech. Lukianoff and Schlott explain:

In the meantime, you should know that Free Speech Culture is a set of cultural norms rooted in older democratic values. Embracing Free Speech Culture means turning back to once popular sayings like "everyone is entitled to their own opinion," "to each their own," «it's a free country," and even "don't judge a book by its cover."

Who is my favorite person who exemplifies the opposite of cancel culture? Daryl Davis. Here's one of his recent Tweets:

Daryl's story is incredible. I've described it in prior posts (and see here and here), but here is a recent succinct description of Daryl's wisdom and heroism by Joe Rogan:

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FIRE’s Statement on AI and Free Speech

Greg Lukianoff, President of FIRE, gives his opening statement to Congress on AI and Freedom of Speech.

Text of Greg's Speech:

My name is Greg Lukianoff, and I am the CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or “FIRE,” where I’ve worked for 23 years. FIRE is a nonpartisan, nonprofit that uses litigation, scholarship, and public outreach to defend and promote the value of free speech for all Americans. We proudly defend free speech regardless of a speaker’s viewpoint or identity, and we have represented people across the political spectrum.

I’m here to address the risk AI and AI regulation pose to freedom of speech and the creation of knowledge. We have good reason to be concerned. FIRE regularly fights government attempts to stifle speech on the internet.

FIRE is in federal court challenging a New York law that forces websites to “address” online speech that someone, somewhere finds humiliating or vilifying.

We’re challenging a new Utah law that requires age verification of all social media users.

We’ve raised concerns about the federal government funding development of AI tools to target speech including microaggressions.

And later this week, FIRE will file a brief with the Supreme Court explaining the danger of “jawboning” — the use of government pressure to force social media platforms to censor protected speech.

But the most chilling threat that the government poses in the context of emerging AI is regulatory overreach that limits its potential as a tool for contributing to human knowledge.

A regulatory panic could result in a small number of Americans deciding for everyone else what speech, ideas, and even questions are permitted in the name of “safety” or “alignment.”

I’ve dedicated my life to defending freedom of speech because it is an essential human right. However, free speech is more than that; it’s nothing less than essential to our ability to understand the world.

A giant step for human progress was the realization that, despite what our senses tell us, knowledge is hard to attain.

It's a never-ending, arduous, necessarily de-centralized process of testing and retesting, of chipping away at falsity to edge a bit closer to truth.

It’s not just about the proverbial “marketplace of ideas”; it’s about allowing information—independent of idea or argument—to flow freely so that we can hope to know the world as it really is. This means seeing value in expression even when it appears to be wrongheaded or useless.

This process has been aided by new technologies that have made communication easier. From the printing press, to the telegraph and radio, to phones and the internet: each one has accelerated the development of new knowledge by making it easier to share information.

But AI offers even greater liberating potential, empowered by First Amendment principles, including freedom to code, academic freedom, and freedom of inquiry.

We are on the threshold of a revolution in the creation and discovery of knowledge.

AI’s potential is humbling; indeed, even frightening.

But as the history of the printing press shows, attempts to put the genie back in the bottle will fail.

Despite the profound disruption the printing press caused in Europe in the short term, the long-term contribution to art, science, and again, knowledge was without equal.

Yes, we may have some fears about the proliferation of AI. But what those of us who care about civil liberties fear more is a government monopoly on advanced AI.

Or, more likely, regulatory capture and a government-empowered oligopoly that privileges a handful of existing players.

The end result of pushing too hard on AI regulation will be the concentration of AI influence in an even smaller number of hands.

Far from reining in the government’s misuse of AI to censor, we will have created the framework not only to censor but also to dominate and distort the production of knowledge itself.

“But why not just let OpenAI or a handful of existing AI engines dominate the space?” you may ask.

Trust in expertise and in higher education—another important developer of knowledge—has plummeted in recent years, due largely to self-inflicted wounds borne of the ideological biases shared by much of the expert class.

That same bias is often found baked into existing AI, and without competing AI models we may create a massive body of purported official facts that we can’t actually trust.

We’ve seen on campus that attempts to regulate hate speech have led to absurd results like punishing people for simply reading about controversial topics like racism; similarly, AI programs flag or refuse to answer questions about prohibited topics.

And, of course, the potential end result of America tying the hands of the greatest programmers in the world would be to lose our advantage to our most determined foreign adversaries.

But with decentralized development and use of AI, we have a better chance of defeating our staunchest rivals or even Skynet or Big Brother.

And it’s what gives us our best chance for understanding the world without being blinded by our current orthodoxies, superstitions, or darkest fears.

Thank you for the invitation to testify and I look forward to your questions.

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The Social Costs of Sincere Truth-Seeking

I founded this website in 2006 primarily as my way of documenting my journey, my attempt to make sense of things around me. I've always tried to get things right, but that doesn't always work out. Looking back, I've found more than a few articles on this site where modern-day me disagrees with the me of the past. There is no way to get everything right, because truth-seeking is a never-ending task. 90% of the recipe is not giving up, staying in the game, not falling prey to tribal impulses.

We live in a tribal world, however. A world were powerful tribal forces are concocted not only organically, but by large media operations, often working in concert with the U.S. government, including the U.S. security state. Many people scoff that that. They are fish who fantasize that they are totally free, not constrained by the water in which they swim.

Many of the people I formerly spent a lot of time with have remained fully immersed in the left-leaning corporate news ecosystem. They grew up with the NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, CNN and NPR. They have trusted these news sources for many years and they continue to trust them because they see FOX as the only alternative. They have been convinced by corporate media that they must avoid all independent journalists. Most of them think they are already well informed, but they have a one-sided understanding of many salient issues of the day, including censorship and warmongering, issues the democrats of ten years ago opposed, but now they largely favor.

How could that be? If you ask them, they have no answer for why they have flipped 180 degrees over the last ten years. They cannot point to any new evidence that explains their enthusiasm for supporting the war, including the war in Ukraine. It was so utterly strange how so many of them got quiet about the war in the Ukraine as soon as the U.S. turned its military might from Ukraine to Israel. How was it that so many of those gold and blue flags quietly disappeared from social media and front porches, without explanation?

Many of these same people, formerly ferocious opponents of censorship, now advocate for censorship. So much so that many of them deny the existence of the Censorship Industrial Complex, despite abundant evidence from the Twitter Files. Michael Shellenberger recently posted this graph on Twitter. Notice how Democrats have become big advocates for censorship:

Most people I know are intentionally and proudly ignorant of the decision of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision of Missouri v. Biden. They are sure they don't need to know anything about this decision even though they no almost nothing about it.  They run away when I try to tell them about these dystopian findings by the Fifth Circuit:

The Individual Plaintiffs have not sought to invalidate social-media companies’ censorship policies. Rather, they asked the district court to restrain the officials from unlawfully interfering with the social-media companies’ independent application of their content-moderation policies....The Plaintiffs allege that federal officials ran afoul of the First Amendment by coercing and significantly encouraging “social-media platforms to censor disfavored [speech],” including by “threats of adverse government action” like antitrust enforcement and legal reforms. We agree... [Article continues . . .]

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