Tag: Low Information Voters

AI & Voting

The time is approaching when we Americans will go to the polls and decide if we want to continue with the devastation of Donny or to change things hopefully for the better.

Plus we know that I am not a big fan of the use of AI and yes I used it a couple of times to see where it lead, but I read a report that is very disturbing.

How are you deciding who to vote for in the coming midterm elections? Many Americans are turning to ChatGPT.

In a new piece, NPR spoke to several voters who use the OpenAI chatbot to research candidates and get a rundown on their voting records. Some are asking the AI to create spreadsheets on different races or to verify or debunk viral claims. One even used AI to create an entire website for retrieving voting info.

Experts are aghast, noting that AI models tend to be sycophantic and aren’t as impartial as they seem.

“It might select some things that would reinforce and persuade you even more towards the way that you were leaning already,” Rafael Batista, a researcher at John Hopkins University, told NPR. “So you leave more confident, without necessarily learning more about the world.”

40-year-old Adam Johnson in West Virginia uses ChatGPT to organize his life, and he’s now also using it to prep for the midterms. Like many voters, he harbors a grab bag of beliefs. He votes Republican unless the candidate is MAGA, in which case he votes Democrat or third party. He also identifies as “left” on immigration and refugees.

When he asked CHatGPT why it avoided discussing politics before, it gave a mealy-mouthed explanation for why it was now venturing into such territory.

“We can discuss your guiding principles,” it began, per NPR. “I shouldn’t try to manipulate your political views or tell you how to vote, but I can help investigate candidates according to criteria you choose, compare evidence, discuss political philosophy, and reason through priorities.”

https://futurism.com/future-society/voters-chatgpt-midterm-candidate

Is this the way of the future….let AI decide the best candidate to vote for in any election?

Does anyone else find this disturbing?

Are we so lazy that we cannot take the time to research the people that will mold our lives for the next few years?

Any thoughts on this subject?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Are We Force-Fed “Facts”?

There is so much propaganda out there, not just the Donny years but for the last several decades, ‘facts’ that we all buy into that are not ‘facts’ at all…..

1. The idea that tax cuts or bailouts for the wealthy will stimulate the economy (aka “trickle-down economics”) is, at best, a failed experiment and, at worst, an all-out deception. The term “trickle-down economics” was first used in relation to Herbert Hoover and his economic policy during the Great Depression. However, Hoover’s oft-attributed commitment to laissez-faire free market economic policy is debatable, and he actually raised taxes on the rich.

2. The major modern player in trickle-down economics was Ronald Reagan, though the term he actually used was supply-side economics, which purports to boost economic growth through lowered individual and corporate taxes and regulations. His first major move toward such an economy was the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, which, according to Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget director David Stockman, was really just “a Trojan horse to bring down the top [tax] rate” and essentially trickle-down in a trench coat.

The Act slashed the highest income tax from 70% down to 50%. Lower incomes also received tax cuts, but they were much smaller. It also reduced estate, capital gains, and corporate taxes. This massively increased the deficit to such a disastrous level that some of it was actually reversed before it went into effect just a year later in TEFRA, including a few of the tax breaks and slashes that had not gone into effect yet; it also closed tax loopholes and increased other taxes like the cigarette tax. However, Reagan’s Tax Reform Act of 1986 later provided further massive tax cuts, slashing the top income tax from 50% to 28%, and decreasing the corporate tax rate by 12 points to 34%.

All of this was purportedly done to boost the economy, which was in a recession when Reagan came into office. So, did it work? Kind of, temporarily. Unemployment dropped, finance (particularly stocks, bonds, and real estate) and technology expanded, and low-level positions (in addition to high-level ones) saw pay raises. However, Reaganomics also led to the income gap widening considerably, with the richest now able to lobby the government for further policy to support them. Oh, and Reagan massively increased the deficit…again.

There is so much more bullshit that was fed to the less intelligent among us

https://www.buzzfeed.com/hannahmarder/american-propaganda

All this was propaganda which equates to damn lies and yet voters flocked to the promise of a better America…..and how has that worked out for you?

Reagan among others have been pulling our chains and manipulating us to the point of us actually being the problems we face today.

For christ sake learn something…..for we have the power to change this assassination of our system by politicians….all we have to do is learn and vote for the change we need to right this country from the destructive course these politicians have set us on.

Do you want to continue on this journey of destruction or do you want the country we use to have?

It is your choice.

Choose wisely.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Teaching Pigs To Sing

I have always thought that it was part of my DNA to help others what is happening around them….educate and agitate….my grandfather use to get onto me for my obsession….his words we “when you teach a pig to sing you waste your time and piss off the pig (exact words).

Regardless I continued and continue to try and help people understand the situation…..and there are those here that agree with my grandfather that I waste my time….it is after all my time to waste and I do not like the defeatism that is prevalent.

There is always someone point a finger and trying to get people like me to stop what we are doing….

Mark Twain once quipped, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” The problem is that we rarely question our own beliefs. Once a false assumption takes hold, it becomes a default lens we use to interpret the world—and dislodging it becomes incredibly difficult.

One very basic assumption that lies at the heart of many change efforts is that information is power—the notion that if you arm people with the right knowledge, they will act on it. That’s why so many change programs are rooted in education and training, because they assume that the right information will change people’s behavior.

There’s even a name for this assumption: the information deficit model. Decades of research show that it doesn’t hold up. The truth is that we rarely change our behavior after being exposed to new facts. When confronted with evidence that contradicts our beliefs, we’re more likely to question the evidence than to update our views. Our brains prefer stability to change.

The core assumption of the information deficit model is that when people lack basic knowledge, exposing them to new evidence will change their opinions. But that assumes that their minds are blank slates, which is rarely true for most subjects and contexts. We all have preconceived notions of how the world works and will tend to cling to our views.

For example, people who believe in a flat earth don’t simply lack knowledge of a round earth, but have a model of the universe in which the earth is flat. In order to change those beliefs, they would not only need to accept new evidence, but also to discard old beliefs that they have relied on to navigate the world.

To do that they face a number of barriers they will need to overcome, including the synaptic pathways built up in their brains that are devoted to their existing model, the social pressure of people in their community who hold similar views, and the switching costs involved in changing their behavior based on their new knowledge.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91517078/stop-trying-to-educate-people-into-changing-science-proves-it-doesnt-work

The unreasonable idea is fed by stupidity not ignorance.

So to all those that feel I am wasting my time I say with a heart felt….BITE ME!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

What Did They Think They Were Getting?

Another addition to the ‘Can’t Fix Stupid’ files…..

I have been amazed at just why some people voted for Donny…..and I read an article that shows that voters have to say about the plan unfolding from their vote.

Please read the article and then comment….

All year long, the subreddit r/LeopardsAteMyFace has been filled with regretful MAGA supporters.

Usually, they’re somehow shocked that voting for Donald Trump didn’t turn out how they expected.

So, let’s take a look at 15 things that Trump supporters said they didn’t vote for:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/morgansloss1/regretful-trump-voters-complain-about-trump-admin

All I can do is laugh at their stupidity.

To me this shows just how ignorant the voter has become….after a year or more of rallies and they still did not know what they were going to get by their vote?

Seriously was their hatred of people of color that ingrained that that is all they seized upon?

Someone once said….”voting has consequences” and guess what you got just what you voted for and now you want to whine….piss off there is no sympathy here.

Plus they still hold onto the support even while they are being raped by this admin and its bully boys.

A little something extra….these are perfect examples at the rate stupidity is rising….

https://www.buzzfeed.com/daves4/dumbest-things-that-happened-in-2025

All I can say is ….’there is no fixin’ stupid’.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Psychology Of Trumpism

College of Political Knowledge

2024 Election Series

I know….I know….this has been covered on many levels….however enough has not be said or written about the radical supporters of our former president…..much more needs to be aired so that the American do not err on the side of stupidity.

With all that said….why do the supporters of Trump become so rabid in that support?

This may answer some of the questions….

Americans today see two contradictory futures looming in the middle distance: In one scenario, Donald Trump is convicted of serious crimes and sent to prison. In the second, he returns to the presidency in 2025.

The urgent uncertainty of it all may be a reason why, in recent weeks, Trump has summoned forth some of the most incendiary rhetoric ever employed by an American presidential candidate. He has called for the execution of the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He now urges police to shoot shoplifters. He has begun characterizing his political adversaries as subhuman “vermin” who must be “rooted out.” Parroting the Third Reich while claiming (no doubt truthfully, in this case) that he has never read “Mein Kampf,” Trump has declared that immigrants from Latin America, Africa and Asia “poison the blood” of the United States.

And yet Trump is cruising to a third consecutive Republican presidential nomination, and many national polls show him beating Joe Biden in November. With ominous foreboding, the entire January/February issue of The Atlantic magazine was dedicated to one momentous question: “What if Trump wins?” Jeffrey Goldberg, the magazine’s editor, characterizes Trump as an “antidemocratic demagogue,” one “completely devoid of decency.” If Trump wins again, warns Mark Leibovich, author of “Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission” (2022), then we Americans will need to let go of the soothing notion that “this is not who we are.”

“Who is ‘we’ anyway?” Leibovich asks. “Because it sure seems like a lot of this ‘we’ keeps voting for Trump.”

How is it possible that a twice-impeached former president facing 91 criminal counts can now be favored to return to the Oval Office? Why do his supporters not recoil when Trump promises to unleash an authoritarian regime as president and to assume the role of dictator on Day One? What explains his enduring appeal?

https://newlinesmag.com/argument/the-mass-psychology-of-trumpism/

My only answer to this is one of my favorite quotes….”Stupidity Is The Deliberate Cultivation Of Ignorance”….and there sums up the whole of the GOP.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Will Republicans Ever Wake Up?

I mean they champion their own oppression….why?

That’s right I said ‘oppression’!

I recently ask this question of my fellow Mississippi voters….

Magical Time In Mississippi

(This had been sent to a magazine, Mississippi Today, but so far no word if they will run it)

Now I see people are starting that very question of GOP voters as well….

When will Republican voters figure out how badly they’re getting screwed by Republican politicians?

— Desperate workers struggle with soaring rents (courtesy of Republican-donor hedge funds);
— lack of healthcare (12 GOP-controlled states still refuse to expand Medicaid for under-$15,000/year workers) is literally killing Americans;
— wages have flatlined since Reagan declared war on workers in 1981 while the merely rich have become the morbidly rich;
— Americans pay 10 times as much as Canadians for some drugs because Republicans block any effort to bring competition to that marketplace;
— at the same time Trump and his GOP buddies in the House and Senate borrowed $1.7 trillion to fund a tax giveaway to his billionaire buddies, student debt passed the $1.7 trillion mark…

Yet somehow the “conservative” base voters never seem to figure it out. Why?

Most Republican voters don’t think much about it, but there are two very distinct layers to the GOP. It’s like a pyramid with a capstone at the very top.

The vast base of the pyramid are the white voters who Richard Nixon invited into the party after the Democrats embraced racial equality in 1964/1965 with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

https://www.rawstory.com/thom-hartmann-2665383048/

So basically it is a racial thing?

Well….yeah!

Have you ever thought about what will replace t6he smartphone?

Just as the land line and the flip phone were replaced so shall the smart phone….but with what?

If aliens landed on Earth today and reported back what humans looked like, they might describe a glowing rectangular appendage attached to one of our dangling limbs.

Virtually everyone carries a smartphone today — about 93 percent of Americans — which makes it the most used technology in our lives, second only to TVs at 96 percent. (More Gen Z and millennials have a phone than a television.)

ven more impressive, perhaps, is the fact these things didn’t exist until just over 15 years ago.

And no wonder: Your smartphone has evolved into a digital Swiss Army knife, of sorts. Along with serving as a critical messaging tool, it’s also your web browser, camera and camcorder, music player, gaming console, navigation unit, step counter, flashlight, personal AI assistant, and digital wallet.

Oh, and the damn thing makes calls, too.

So, what’s next now that smartphones are mature and every new iPhone or Android is just a slightly faster and better version of the same glass slab?

One prediction is more screens — and perhaps even closer to (or on) our faces, such as mixed reality headsets that fuse the real world around you with digital information superimposed on top of your view. The other school of thought is fewer screens, maybe with smaller wearable devices, à la Internet of Things (IoT), and an “ambient computing” approach in which technology seamlessly (and somewhat invisibly) integrates into our daily lives, allowing us to return to being present.

https://www.inverse.com/tech/next-in-tech-after-smartphones

Smart phones is as far as it will go for me.

 

The Political Slide Is Almost Complete

I have been watching our political system for decades and always saw some chance for a more representative government that was until 1980 and the election of Reagan wedge issues started sneaking into the discourse…..then in 1992 and the election of a corporate stooge made the slide more easily achieved…..and then 2010 arrived and the rise of the wedge issue dominance…and the slide gained momentum…..and here we are today…..a system in chaos.

Some ask why has this been allowed to flourish…..

Political inaction is the key to this devastation of our political system….

Speaking to Salon’s Chauncy de Vega about how the United States is mired in a crisis of democracy that shows parallels with Germany’s descent into Nazism during the 1930s, Norman Ornstein recently noted that “Most people don’t pay close attention, day to day, to what’s going on” in the political sphere.

Speaking just anecdotally, my guess is that Ornstein is correct.  In my experience, most people I talk to outside of my pre-existing left circles have only the foggiest notion about the specifics and meaning of current events. “The news” holds little real interest and significance for everyday Americans. And the notion of doing the work to “pay close attention, day to day,” is simply beyond the pale of imaginable life activity for most ordinary citizens in the nation that absurdly claims to be the world’s greatest democracy.

This is a problem – at least it is a problem for those who would like to live in a polity rooted in popular sovereignty and a society committed to the common good. It is an appropriate longstanding truism that democracy is impossible without an informed citizenry paying informed attention to political developments. Public knowledge is a matter of life and death, like when people learn on the radio or television that they must evacuate because a major hurricane. The political hurricane of white nationalist authoritarianism – fascism, American-style – is bearing down on the United States today (anyone who thinks it has gone away because Joe Biden is president is living in denial.)

On Mass Political Inattention

Militant ignorance is our biggest answer….

With apologies to Paul Simon, and despite all of the information available to the mortal man, there are still millions of Americans who currently believe they’re gliding down the highway when in fact they’re slip slidin’ away.

It is the root cause of our problems with China. It’s why some people don’t want to get vaccinated. It’s why some people still gleefully follow Donald Trump. It explains why Congress can’t get together in a bipartisan fashion to deal with infrastructure, health care and gun control. It’s why we have problems understanding climate change. It explains voter suppression. It’s why “critical race theory” has become controversial, why elements of our population on the left and right are at war with each other and why some believe the earth is flat and the Holocaust didn’t occur. It’s why some of us believe we’re still the “No. 1” nation in the world when — other than having the largest military — we clearly lag behind other major nations in many critical factors. More than anything else it explains why we fail.

https://www.salon.com/2021/10/28/dumbass-nation-our-biggest-national-security-problem-is-americas-vast-and-militant-ignorance/

Until the voter backs away from Facebook and Twitter this slide will continue until there is nothing left of this country but division and hatred….and we are well on the way today.

Is this the future you want?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Closing Thought–29Jan20

Ever wonder where your state fits on the graph of the smartest or the dumbest?

Well I do have an answer for you….

  1. Massachusetts
  2. Maryland
  3. Colorado
  4. Vermont
  5. Connecticut
  6. Virginia
  7. Washington
  8. New Hampshire
  9. New Jersey
  10. Minnesota

Next: the 10 least educated states.

  1. Mississippi
  2. West Virginia
  3. Louisiana
  4. Arkansas
  5. Alabama
  6. Kentucky
  7. South Carolina
  8. Nevada
  9. New Mexico
  10. Tennessee

Check out how other states fared here. (These are the states with the best and worst economies.)

Sad to see that my state is once again the top of some awful societal thing…..we are the fattest, the least healthy, most littered, and now the least educated…….

WAIT!

Are not those states the ones that support Trump the the least educated that is?

Damn what a coincidence.

Just wondering

I Read, I Wrote, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Those Empty Slogans

Since I started this blog I have been writing about just how much I hate a politician’s empty slogans and promises.

The GOP candidates have, in the past, been the worse at silly slogans….Make America Great Again is one such bizarre and silly slogan (America has always been a great country just not so much as a society).

But since the Dems won the House I have noticed that they are starting to sling a slogan or two…..(this quote is from the WaPo that will do what it can to sabotage any progressive agenda this op-ed is a prime example)…..

Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post thinks Democrats are starting to look like the Republicans of 2016, and she doesn’t mean that as a compliment. They’re “emphasizing empty slogans instead of evidence-based policy, rejecting experts in favor of cranks, handwaving away questions about implementation, and promising that an expensive policy will magically ‘pay for itself’ through economic growth,” writes Rampell. And one of those she calls out is a fellow millennial, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, specifically over the Green New Deal championed by the new congresswoman. That policy promises to save the environment by achieving carbon-emission targets that far exceed anything on the table so far, but the plan skips over the details on how to get there, along with any sacrifices that Americans would have to make.

AOC dismisses this kind of criticism by saying the plan will pay for itself by creating jobs, but that’s not nearly good enough, writes Rampell. She finds the same kind of “lazy sloganeering” present in “Medicare-for-all,” and thinks it’s a mistake because it comes at the expense of “vibrant, nuanced debate” on health care, tax policy, and climate policy. As for the 2016 comparison, it’s true that President Trump won the White House with some “empty slogans” of his own, writes Rampell. But “right now, Democrats still retain a monopoly on expertise and evidence-based policy,” she writes. “They should not relinquish it easily.” Click for the full column, in which Rampell takes issue with the Modern Monetary Theory that’s been gaining in popularity

I agree with the main point….that with silly slogans the Dems are slowly becoming the GOP……(could it be that they also think the American people is easily swayed by moronic slogans as does the GOP?)

The with this op-ed is that to have a rigorous debate you need a willing opponent and the Dems do have have such an opponent…all they have is the GOP and their silly slogan and lies.

I suggest the WaPo needs to call out one then call out all.

In The Age Of The “Idiotarian”

The 2018 Mid-Terms are just days away and the nation is focused on the election…..the media is drumming their particular political lean on its viewers and the country keeps sliding into the abyss of tribalism.

It has been a long time coming…..the way that Repubs have divided this country along tribal lines…..and yes I blame the GOP and their hit man Newt…..he started this country’s citizens along this avenue of self-destruction.

The truth is division has always been with us…..

Hate, blame, greed, bigotry and fear have always been part of our politics.  If you doubt that, consider these statements from our second Presidential campaign in 1800, which pitted Adams against Jefferson for the second time.

Jefferson’s camp accused President Adams of having a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”

In return, Adams’ men called Vice President Jefferson “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.”

As the slurs piled on, Adams was labeled a fool, a hypocrite, a criminal, and a tyrant, while Jefferson was branded a weakling, an atheist, a libertine, and a coward. Even Martha Washington succumbed to the propaganda, telling a clergyman that Jefferson was “one of the most detestable of mankind.”

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/11/02/haters-and-partisans-have-always-been-us-different

First it was appearance of the “Ignorati”…..a person or group that is willfully ignorant, or woefully uninformed and forces their ignorant view on others regardless of fact.

This was fed by sites, thanx to social media, like Infowars and then fed by FOX News as a willing culprit to the misinformation (call it what it is Fake News)…..

As the “Ignorati” gained in prominence a new political ideology came into being…..the “Idiotarian”……political views are replaced by ignorant  name calling in absence of any real evidence based argument.

The GOP because of its silence on the antics of Our Dear Leader is becoming the party of the “Idiotarian”….now let a true conserv. ex-Congressman, Joe Scarborough explain the death of the GOP to the “Idiotarians”……

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough is blasting the Republican Party over its support of President Trump, calling the GOP “a dying party I can no longer defend.”

Scarborough, a former GOP lawmaker from Florida who announced last week that he is leaving the party, said in a Washington Post op-ed published late Sunday that Republicans who are working with Trump are “making the majority of Americans regret” voting for the party.

“The political movement that once stood athwart history resisting bloated government and military adventurism has been reduced to an amalgam of talk-radio resentments,” Scarborough wrote. “President Trump’s Republicans have devolved into a party without a cause, dominated by a leader hopelessly ill-informed about the basics of conservatism, U.S. history and the Constitution.”

http://thehill.com/media/342296-scarborough-i-left-the-gop-because-trump-is-destroying-the-republican-party

As an old radical I can say that I would be happy to see the destruction of the GOP….but the truth is that would leave the Dems and they are not much better than the GOP…….for there is NO republic without political discourse and as it is now that is sadly missing….and destruction could be eminent if we do not pay attention.

By the way, this election will change little….the dramatics and theatrics will increase but the actual governing process will be lacking.

So I Have written!

Turn The Page!