収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

Accountability has been rare for American politicians my entire life. Oh, sure, if they do illegal things in the wrong way, you might see something happen. You’ll get some corruption charges, and there’s even a decent chance those’ll stick.

But rarely if ever has any of that had anything to do with punishment for abusing their power. Particularly when it comes to foreign policy.

So let’s talk about how you, as an ordinary citizen, actually can try to punish them in a way they care about.

The only meaningful way you punish politicians is to take power away from them.

That’s it. Trump may turn out to be the first meaningful exception ever, and I pray that’s true. But until that’s no longer up in the air, the only meaningful punishment is taking power away.

Conversely, the reward is giving them power.

Punish by taking power; reward by giving power.

Hence, voting.

For you and me, on the street? That’s what we got. If you want to punish a politician, you take power from them. If you want to reward one, you give them power.

It’s very simple, and yet, that’s also where it gets oh so tricky.

There’s a big chunk of the American left still going off on Biden over Israeli actions, with the whole “Genocide Joe” horseshit*, the “no difference” lie – not as bad a lie as “TRUMP WON!!” but still pretty fuckin’ bad for those of us whose lives depend on the outcome of elections – and vowing to withhold their vote and trying to get others to do the same.

So let’s back up a minute and look at the ugly reality on the ground.

Israel is blocking aid all over the place, as everyone knows. Israeli far-right are destroying aid and attacking aid workers, and they’re in Netanyahu’s coalition. It’s bad.

Biden’s pushed back not just verbally but to the point not only of airdrops (I can almost hear the shouts of “MEANINGLESS!!” even as I type this), but in building a pier against Israeli wishes to ship in tons and tons more.

(Cue the shouts of “You mean to land American troops to help the Israelis!” and to pre-empt that, no, and also, fuck off; cue also “bullshit pier broke in a storm, it’s meaningless and already over!” and I note they’re hoping for repairs to be completed in another week, with something like a thousand tons of aid shipped in before it got damaged.)

Do you think Bibi’s government is okay with them doing that that? Seriously? Because they are not okay with the US doing that. That pier existing at all is seen as a violation of Israeli sovereignty even if they’re keeping quiet about it. And some of them were overtly cheering the damage last weekend, hoping it never comes back into operation.

So yeah. They’re mad. And they’re not okay with it.

That’s just aid. Food. Water. Medicine. It’s not even the most meaningful step, in foreign policy terms.

American government public criticism of Israeli tactics has historically been very rare, and by that, I mean, “Israeli forces attacked an American ship and killed American sailors and the response was polite and muted.” (Reagan and Bush I, surprisingly, were exceptions in that “Only Nixon can go to China” way, I suppose.)

Biden, meanwhile, has withheld military equipment (via delay, all he can legally do), has singled out Israeli divisions as ineligible to receive aid due to their actions on the ground (another thing he can legally do to limited degrees, and it’s very new against Israel), has publicly rebuked Israeli actions, has pretty clearly forced what little Netanyahu has begrudgingly allotted for fleeing civilians, and as of last weekend, appeared to be actually getting somewhere pushing that cease fire everyone’s been calling for, all against Bibi’s wishes.

Most of this shit’s new! It really is! These are steps in the right direction.

Yet, I again hear the howls of MEANINGLESS! and NOTHING! But in reality, in terms of diplomatic and foreign affairs dealings with a many-decades key regional ally, this is a lot. It’s a lot as in he’s in real political trouble for even this much.

Biden is sticking out his neck on this. Maybe he has to – I’m sure he’d rather be talking about anything else, honestly. But he’s still doing it.

However, the people who want what he’s doing – and want much, much, much more – are trying to punish him for not already doing that much more.

Now, before we go on, I’ll say this, because it’s important: if his opposition in the upcoming election was someone who would actually do more to stop the war instead of urging the Israelis to do more and worse – including nukes from one particular idiot – this stance would make perfect sense. It would be functional basic politics. It would be smart.

I’ll even go further; if his opposition were merely no worse, it would still make sense. Even if they were slightly worse – but only slightly – it could still make sense, depending upon the situation.

But that’s not where we are. Instead, the reality is that we have an opposition who wants as much more killing as possible, who sends former US ambassadors to write genocidal slogans on bombs to sabotage peace prospects as completely as they can. That’s who we have, and if given power, they will execute on all of it.

Whether you like it or not, in reality, that’s where we are.

And so, in this context, punishing Biden for not doing enough is not smart, and it’s not functional politics.

It is, at best, self-sabotage, because if you punish the politician doing at least some of what you want – by removing them from power – while at the same time you reward the one doing the opposite of what you want – by giving them power – the lesson will not be to do more of what you want, because the power is what they care about.

The lesson will be do less of what you want, or nothing at all.

Or maybe even to decide the opposition was right, and go in with them.

It doesn’t matter what you say about your motives. The hard reality on the ground will be that you punished the ones who leaned your way, and rewarded the ones calling for more killing faster, and you did so in the only way that matters to them: the giving and taking of power.

When a politician takes even the a small step in your direction when their opposition is charging away, do not punish the one leaning towards you, and do not reward the one running away.

Unless, of course, they actually are doing what you really want.

And I gotta tell ya – sometimes, I genuinely wonder.

—
* (this term at this point is an instamute from me, just like “shitlib”)

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Here’s what’s driving me crazy, okay? Here’s what’s driving me crazy about all this LLM shit in particular.

I made a baby version of this myself. Years ago, in UNDERGRAD, on a MAINFRAME, in FORTRAN IV, writing an English parsing and construction AI in a language that didn’t even have STRINGS.

I had to make up the language statistical data and did so over an hilariously minimal domain because I was making it all up and even that much was a lot of work. But I knew what it would take to get the real data I’d need and I couldn’t get that. I was thinking about what it would take to scan every library on campus and thinking that would maybe be enough to start. Maybe.

So I just made up probabilities over a tiny subset of language – I think it knew like 150 words and how they all related or could relate to each other.

It was, obviously, a silly little toy.

And even then, when I showed it off, and had my limited little conversations with my very stupid bots, the chair of the department freaked out so bad that he walked out on me, because oh my god the machine was conversing with me.

I mean it. He left the room.

Later – presumably when he recovered his composure – he said it was truly extraordinary and gave me the best possible mark, but he clearly didn’t really want to talk to me about it any further, not that I really tried much – it was last quarter and I was on my way out.

And that was just when it was my little toy.

But even then

E. VEN. THEN.

Even then, as dumb as it was, as limited as it was, it was shriekingly obvious that there had to be fundamental connections to actual understanding for it to have any actual intelligence at all. That you COULD NOT DO IT without that.

Not if you wanted it to actually fucking work.

Not if you wanted its output to have anything to do with reality.

Not if you wanted it to actually fucking think.

(I did try. I had some baby approaches to that, too. They were hopelessly inadequate except for – maybe – establishing a framework in terms of how to figure it out.)

It is a hard problem

and it is an obvious problem.

But now you’ve got these jackholes, these goddamn Blindsight cultists, these AGI spirit dancers and these EA “longtermers” becoming increasingly aware that they are not, in fact, here for the long term, and so in their panic have not only decided that knowledge is an entirely acontextual mechanical process, but that thinking isn’t actually real and that the actual physical universe doesn’t matter, because if you just throw enough stolen words on the fire somehow somewhere MAGIC WILL HAPPEN yielding STEP THREE: PROFIT and they’ll get to dry-hump their confirmation-bias god-computer all the way to Line Goes Up Forever Heaven, and they’re absolutely going to keep pushing this insane calliope of jumped-up spreadsheets until they get there…

…no matter how many people are consumed in their grasping desperation.

They’re pushing this stuff into health care.

Into HEALTH CARE.

Insurance companies are using it to deny claims. Doctors are being told to use it for their own notes and diagnoses…

…and it thinks Godzilla plays baseball, that a fictional character invented a real life piano key tie, and that you can improve your pizza sauce by adding glue.

And they know that.

And they do not fucking care.

That’s the thing that drives me crazy.

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ChatGPT had a “meltdown” today, variously described as that, as “going crazy,” and so on. It can’t “go crazy,” there’s no mind behind it to go crazy. There is no one there, no there there, and most of all no metacognition there at all.

That last bit’s really important, and it reminds me of [our lord Jesus] [no, no, that’s Eddie Izzard again, stop it] and it reminds me of a generative-language (“AI”) spew article that our ever-worse internet search capability served me as the top non-paid hit when I was looking up a word I didn’t know.

It’s hard to describe how bizarre the article was, as it free-floated from one definition to another, as if in a fever dream, completely without rhyme or reason. One definition was a slang insult; the other was fairly technical in nature. At no point did the two meanings intersect, and yet, here this was being described as a short article explaining the meaning of the word in question.

Clearly, whatever training data was in use weighted the two definitions equally, and so, they were not just equal but the same to the text generator, and so, they were blended blindly together.

Anything – anyone – with metacognition – the ability to think about what they’re thinking – would understand immediately what was wrong here. But ChatGPT (or OpenAI or whatever was used to generate this trainwreck) didn’t, and so generated it just the same, and kept going for the amount of length required of it by whatever script some operator ran to crank out the word slurry necessary to serve some ads.

A few years ago, a set of novels made a big splash with the proposition that self-awareness was in fact a liability, and that true intelligence was not self-aware, that metacognition was a hindrance, not an aid. It was in some cases an attempt to work with the Fermi paradox, because such an intelligence would have no need for or interest in communicating with anyone or anything else. The most widely discussed of these was Blindsight, which I thought was a bit of a shame since to my thinking it was the least interesting of the three I read.

I really disliked it. Not for the tacked-on vampires plot (though as a novel I felt that weakened it badly), not for the dreary conclusion, not even for the thought experiment, but for essentially the reason we’re seeing right now.

ChatGPT is a Blindsight intelligence. Certainly, a primitive example – a far, far simpler example than in the novel – but one like those in that it’s completely lacking in self-awareness, weighting exclusively on external inputs with no metacognition.

And this kind of half-baked melange of text – this sad underbaked word pudding – is the result.

The ability to tell equally-weighted but completely orthogonal meanings behind language is what metacognition gets you, and self-awareness is what happens when you get metacognition.

Some of us have understood this from the start, which is why when I was doing this kind of work as an undergraduate – Google replicated my results circa 2006, but not in an inappropriate way, I never published because I didn’t have the massive library of data I knew I needed, I just made up a tiny model of it – I was focused hard on how can such a system consider actual meaning?

I considered it core to the entire concept.

My solution involved branching hierarchies of knowledge and almost certainly wasn’t enough to solve it, but it was a start, and good enough for my project. I also played about in my head with contextualising those words with external data in the form of visual, audio, and tactile information, but had absolutely no ability or support to bring it forward.

It freaked out the head of the maths department quite enough as it was. He was genuinely disturbed.

If whatever engine had rendered that stupid article had any actual concept of real knowledge behind the words, then it would’ve been able to detect what it was doing wrong. Properly trained, it would’ve stopped doing it – or more likely never started doing it at all.

Sure, while you could code around this particular case, and many others like it, having it happen in general would mean it would have to be able to think about what it was thinking.

And that means it stops being a Blindsight-style intelligence.

I always kinda hated that book. I’m almost glad for our current misadventures in “artificial intelligence,” just because they’ve finally given me such good examples as to why.

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The Arc of Dominion, Edda 25: Across All These Emptied Lines
Chapter 8: A Cowboy in a Monastery
1552 words
Rated E (Series rated M)

The ninja and the cowboy have made their way back to the monastery, where they are welcomed, and yet, both feel tasked to keep moving.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/40384572/chapters/128385124

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I got invited by @Taweret on Mastodon to share one image (no posters, no titles, no explanations) from 10 films that impacted me, one per day. The full game involved tagging a new person every day to invite them, but I’ve been too swamped lately so I skipped that part.

Now that it’s done, here’s the list of my #10Films, along with the reasons I chose them. The links go to the frames I chose to post without explanation

1: Spirited Away: There was a time in my life when I’d’ve absolutely swapped places with Sen, and been just another spirit worker in that spa.

Really, there’re been a couple of times.

2: The Manchurian Candidate (1962): If you think this hasn’t affected my writing you either haven’t seen this film or haven’t read any of my writing. xD

3: Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer: What the hell is an early Rumiko Takahashi film spinoff from an anime based on her least interesting manga doing in this list?

It’s because the world is never what you think it is and this story tells you that beautifully. It’s a masterpiece made from harem anime and trash and I adore it.

4: The Lion in Winter: My gods, the dialogue. Every word a dagger, every line a cut into flesh, all perfectly performed. Magnificent. (Also, move over Die Hard, this is the best Christmas movie ever made.)

5: Casablanca: Because sometimes, yeah, you have to give up everything to do what someone – meaning you – absolutely has to do. And it sucks and it’s not fair… but it’s still true.

Also, because maybe, just maybe, even the biggest shitheel in the world can decide they’ve had enough and say no – no more. (And no, I’m absolutely not talking about Rick.)

6: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension: Because going everywhere every direction at once has kind of been my forte. I haven’t been an an MD but I have performed in front of tens of thousands of people and I have done original science and if you were using a computer in the early 2000s you probably had some of my code on it, and I haven’t seen that guy spin around news coverage of anti-queer initiatives in a day.

How do y’like them apples, Banzai? xD

7: The Magic Christian: Do not be confused: this is not a good movie. But it’s a lot better in our current context than the one in which it was made. The final sequence involving the actual Magic Christian of the title is about how people of intent and wealth can create a completely artificial world that everyone involved decides to believe in which ignores reality at essentially every level, only to pull the rug out from under them at any moment.

Completely unrealistic, I’m sure.

8: D.E.B.S.: Welcome to 95% of my sexuality.

Also, the Kim Possible/Shigo (a.k.a. Kigo) movie we so desperately deserved but Disney would never, ever make.

These are, yes, exactly the same things.

9: Snatch: A brutal story about brutal people, brutally written and most of all brutally edited. See also its companion piece, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, which honestly I kind of prefer. But they’re both great.

Not long after this came out they finally figured out who that serial killer in Vancouver was, and we all learned that “Never trust a man with a pig farm” was far more true than we ever thought.

10: The Quick and the Dead: Welcome to the other 5% of my sexuality. And I don’t just mean Sharon.

Though I do absolutely mean Sharon.

Just… not just Sharon. xD

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Here’s something important about Pride and Pride Month and companies showing up at Pride events and all that, something most people don’t know or remember.

Until the 90s, and to a large degree still in the 90s, being “homosexual” meant being impoverished.

It meant being ruined. Unemployable. Fucking destitute.

This is why groups like GLEAM (trans-inclusive Gays, Lesbians, and Bisexuals at Microsoft) showing up at Seattle Pride was such a big deal, because it showed you did’t have to be destroyed by coming out. You could live an ordinary life. A… dare I say it… mostly normal one.

In short, queer didn’t have to mean desperate, and that mattered. It mattered a whole lot.

At the same time, companies showing officially up at Pride – as companies vs. employee groups, and it was rare for a long time – meant they agreed. It meant they wouldn’t fire your ass on the spot if they found you out – like most companies had done, for a very long time, and many still did.

In short, you could be queer and still have a job.

And at that point in time, in the 1990s, in the AIDS peak, that was fucking revolutionary.

I suppose it doesn’t mean that so much any more, but it’s absolutely what it meant back then. So when you talk disparagingly about “Rainbow Capitalism” and “Corporate Pride” – try to remember this history, because that’s how it used to be. That’s what it meant.

It still means that, to a degree.

Particularly now, now that it’s becoming harder again.

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(This entry wouldn't crosspost, and neither would (3), for unknown reasons. So I'm doing it by hand.)

I got into a fight with someone I thought of as a friend – an asshole, but also a friend, in that way that a lot of people have at least one asshole friend in their friend group. I’m not saying everyone has that, but… it’s kind of a thing.

And the thing is, this person is more of an anglophile than they want to admit, and they have a lot of connections to what is frankly described as English TERFdom. And I was hoping by throwing so much of my writing over to this other social network (not Twitter, not a blogsite) that I’d be able to keep nudging them away from all that.

But then, it seems, not as much. I suppose I’ve already posted about that already. Trying to have this discussion was pretty emotionally gruelling and in the end we got to a point where I just wasn’t willing to do it. But I’m keeping it some of here, mostly for a post I’m going to reference in the next Fascism Watch.

First reply under the break. More in the next few posts.

They. Will. Kill. All. Of. Us. If. They. Can.

Republican North Dakota is making trans youth health care a felony with 10 years in prison. Missouri has banned all trans health care, yes for adults too. (MSNBC also has coverage.) MAGA megachurch preacher Sean Feucht made a direct call for Christian nationalism. Republican Montana is the latest state introducing a wildly-broad drag ban – and they’ve banned the only trans elected member of the legislature from speaking at all because she spoke out against their bills. And Florida’s Republican legislature has passed a bill that is directly intended to take trans children away from their supportive parents – even if one of them lives out of state. (It still has to pass reconciliation, but it will, and DeSantis has said he supports it.)

This is literally genocide. That last one? That’s literally legal genocide. Genocide comes in a variety of forms, but taking children away from a population to give them to others to raise as their own is absolutely one of them.

And I’m barely covering the highlights here. There are no-go states for queers again. Many. People are fleeing, many raising money online to be able to leave. This is fucking real.

I don’t know what it takes to get people to take this seriously. Even a couple of days ago, people were being all jokey in replies on Facebook and I came down hard on them because it’s NOT FUCKING FUNNY.

I mean, Republicans are authoritarians. Many are fascists. They’ll straight up tell you they want to wipe us out. They do it fairly regularly. Remember calling for “eradication” at CPAC? Have you forgot already, like so many people seem to have done?

In reading this next quote, it is important to note that by “target children,” Republicans mean “exist.” What they actually want is Russia’s laws, where existing in public is illegal, and a felony. Again, this is them saying it:

While defending his bill in Florida that would ban drag and pride events, [Representative Fine] “if it means erasing a community, because [LGBTQ people] have to target children, then damn right we outta do it.”

via The New Republic

I don’t know what else they have to say to get cishets to act like they believe it. I mean, for years they celebrated AIDS deaths, laughing about it in public and even on the air. The fundamentalists who now control the Republican Party used to hand out flyers calling for all queers to be put in concentration camps and killed. One was called “The Death Penality for Homosexuality.” I should still have a copy somewhere, and I have to tell you, little else focuses the mind like being handed a pamphlet calling for your own murder.

And yet, the cishets mostly just keep pretending everything is business as usual.

I begin to understand how fascism seems so sudden for ordinary people. For the majority of people, they just ignore it – pretend it doesn’t exist – until they absolutely can’t. You can scream in their faces and they do. not. fucking. listen. and then it’s OH NO HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?! because as far as they’re concerned, it only actually happens when it happens directly to them.

I’ve always understood how it happens, and how it could happen here. But I never understood how anyone could be surprised when it does.

Now I do.

eta: As Transgender America struggles, national news doesn’t know what to write, and by not writing, fails themselves and everyone else. And if you’re wondering where all these laws come from and why they’re so similar, it’s because the authoritarian right have lawyers turning them out in legislature mills, such as the Claremont Institute.

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For the far right, It’s always been about eradicating everyone else. Starting with the queers, sure – but not ending there.

Yeah, that brownshirt wanna-be at CPAC reminded everybody about that, but for the fundamentalists who took over the GOP – who are still fundamentalists but are now coequally fascists – it’s always been about eradication. They said so themselves.

The problem has always been getting people they weren’t directly targeting to believe them when they said it. Gods know I tried, because I knew. And the reason I knew is I listened to them talking amongst themselves, to each other. Not the watered-down slide-in-sideways crap they said in their more carefully guarded external-propaganda moments.

The stuff they told themselves.

They meant it. They still do. And we won last time, and we can do it again.

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