It's wacky!

As originally conceived, the Turing Test involves a human who is *making an effort to determine* whether their interlocutor is human or not.

It takes very little effort to prompt an LLM to demonstrate its non-human-ness! Just say something that would make a human reply “WTF are you on, bro?”

These pieces really do make it clear that it's not so much that men like this view chatbots as human women. It's that they don't actually view women as humans. We're flattery machines that are defective if we don't sufficiently flatter them.

It's not so hard to understand, IMO. For one thing, Americans get such a narrow range of options that they can't be politically articulate even if they want to be. I'd also note that no one higher up (like Trump) was prosecuted, so that is a giant green light

He's the most powerful African American person in the US and he's *from* a Gullah town, so he's not a random pick. He's also a race essentialist, so that's relevant too. Yes, it will be mostly rich white people who fuck up the island (if it happens).

Oh god, I always say this - to any phone customer support person (if they are human). Imagine having that job!

Clarence Thomas is *from* one of those towns and he doesn't care either. He gets paid. I bring him up b/c he's powerful. His rich pals could push a button.

Also worth noting: I see journalists I respect saying that text based social media is a dead end & you gotta be on tiktok making videos.

But there's a different between what journalists/influencers want and what ORGANIZERS want.

If you're an organizer, you can organize people here. That's a fact.

He's mad because he already knows all the answers

I think that is how they can be against something one day, and for it the next and there's no cognitive dissonance for them: it doesn't have to make sense so long as it stokes anger, fear, etc

Oh god yes. Grievance with a capital G. Conservatism is about loss, & even more, the *fear* of losing something. They would have nothing, politically, w/out grievance. So they just press that button over+over like an 5 year old at an elevator bank.

I wouldn’t call it ‘whining’, as if they were in any sense sincere. They are constantly trying different rhetorical tacks to see what works - seeing what shit sticks to the wall. Freesttyling for reactionaries.

They may be to the right in some ways, but they've carried the torch for Saint Ronnie, prob since Gingrich & more frankly during the trump decade. Their political kludge is based on him. I'd never vote GOP but ppl lacking *any conviction about anything*, like Dems and New Labour, are v, v scary.

There's no doubt that he is a *very* skilled director, from Duel onwards. So of course he's not a hack in any professional sense. Whether you *like* his movies is another question though.

It takes a kind of determination to be so perfectly wrong. Also, it's about the most ephemeral standing in politics: a 'perch' as front runner in the current chaos of the US 3 years before the election.