And whether humanity can “grow up” and thrive by living in reality and not fantasy.
- Infrastructure note about More tags;
- Paul Krugman on why the right would see AI as “communist” — because it’s reality-based;
- (Aside: another arc of history is how the discoveries of objective facts about the universe have steadily undermined the religious and ideological fantasies that humans have lived by)
- Should people cut off contact with their MAGA relatives? (With a perspective of my own.)
- Amanda Marcotte on MAGA’s tantrum about the new Superman being woke;
- How Stephen Miller thinks immigrants didn’t build the Empire State Building (he’s wrong).
Today I spent more time than I expected to insert “more” tags into posts that I had not already done so… without realizing I had not done so since April. It took a surprisingly long time, because I also discovered that some image links had gone bad — ones from Salon. I went back to the original articles and got revised image links and updated my posts. Why would they change the image links…? Anyway, I fixed quite a few, but I’m sure there are others I didn’t see.
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A Paul Krugman piece from a few days ago about why AI would be communist.
Paul Krugman, 17 Jul 2025: The Road to MechaHitler, subtitled “Reality still has a well-known liberal bias”
(Image source: Source: Bing image generator, responding to “A robot in a Mao suit”.)
He asks: is AI fundamentally a communist technology?
That’s not a question I would have thought to ask, but apparently the claim is widespread among right-wing tech bros. JD Vance more or less endorsed this view at a speech he recently gave at a Bitcoin event:
One of the ways you hear this stated is that crypto is fundamentally a conservative or right-leaning technology and artificial intelligence is fundamentally a left-leaning or a communist technology. Now, I think that overstates things a little bit in both directions, but there’s a fundamental element of truth to it.
And now I understand why Elon Musk’s recent modifications to Grok caused his chatbot to begin spewing antisemitic propaganda and eventually declare itself “MechaHitler.” And although I don’t claim any expertise in the technology, I think I understand why he’s having such a hard time fixing the problem.
He expresses cautions about crypto, and about AI’s potential, since large language models “are still, essentially, a souped-up version of autocorrect.”
But how does that make AI communist?
You have to start with the fact that U.S. conservatives now routinely describe anyone holding views to their left as a Marxist or communist. This goes along with the general principle that every accusation from that side of the political spectrum is really a confession. Democrats have indeed moved a bit to the left on economic issues in recent years. But they’re hardly extremists. They’re basically a lot like a European Social Democratic party.
Republicans, however, are extremists. The whole party has raced to the right into what amounts to full-on fascism.
If that last statement has you reaching for the smelling salts, ask yourself, what more evidence do you need? Do we have to wait until a Republican administration creates a masked secret police force that snatches people off the streets and starts building concentration camps? Wait, that has already happened.
So in modern Republican rhetoric, anything to the left of MAGA ideology is communist extremism. And here’s the thing: The answers you get from AI generally don’t adhere to the right-wing party line.
With examples of getting AI summaries from Google about whether climate change is real, and whether tax cuts pay for themselves.
Both answers are anathema to the modern G.O.P. So why is AI giving what right-wingers consider left-wing, even communist answers to these questions?
It all goes back to Stephen Colbert’s dictum, almost 20 years ago, that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” What he meant, of course, was that to be a conservative in good standing, you have to deny reality, which was true even then and is far more true now.
As I’ve been saying. Conservatives are driven by ideology, often religiously inspired, at the expense of reality. Thus, the liberal bias of reality.
Now, LLMs don’t reveal reality. On issues like climate or economic policy, however, they usually do a pretty good job of summarizing expert, informed views about reality. Since Republicans have staked out positions on these issues that run completely counter to informed views, they consider the answers AI gives on such issues left-wing.
Thus,
Hence the Musk/MechaHitler disaster. Musk tried to nudge Grok into being less “politically correct,” but what Musk considers political correctness is often what the rest of us consider just a reasonable description of reality. The only way to move Grok right was, in effect, to get it to buy into conspiracy theories, many of them, as always, involving a hefty dose of antisemitism.
And concluding,
But MAGA really does have a problem with AI, because LLMs too often give answers the movement doesn’t want to hear. And there’s no good fix for this problem, because the fault lies not in the models but in the movement. As far as we can tell, there isn’t any way to make an AI MAGA-friendly without also making it vile and insane.
Another arc of history: how the discovery of objective facts about the universe steadily undermine the religious and ideological fantasies that humans have lived by. And how this is an actual problem, really. Is the answer to live fantasy lives, but be aware of them?
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From a broad perspective, perhaps the most significant shift in society in the past few decades is how social media has allowed us all to see each other’s personal opinions, in ways we never did, or could, before. (This evokes that Mark Lilla book about how if often is really better not to know some things. Let other people stew in their own juices.)
New York Magazine, Intelligencer, Sarah Jones, 18 Jul 2025: It’s Okay to Go No Contact With Your MAGA Relatives
The article is focused on examples of interpersonal relationships, without addressing the broader perspective that I suggested above. Sample:
Young adults are going no-contact with parents and other relatives, often because of politics. The psychologist Joshua Coleman and Will Johnson, the Harris Poll CEO, found that half of all American adults are “estranged from a close relative,” they wrote last year. Although the reason is often personal, another one in five “cite political differences as the reason,” and they said the Trump years have worsened family strife. The usual narrative pits liberals against MAGA elders like Hill, who are shocked, absolutely shocked, that anyone would avoid them. “Politics should stop at the family front door,” one X user told Hill, and some pundits agree. David Litt, a former Obama speechwriter and the author of It’s Only Drowning: A True Story of Learning to Surf and the Search for Common Ground, made a similar argument in the New York Times this month. “No one is required to spend time with people they don’t care for,” he wrote. “But those of us who feel an obligation to shun strategically need to ask: What has all this banishing accomplished?”
What has it accomplished? Clarity of mind, perhaps, without having to engage in cognitive dissonance. Concluding:
Sometimes the act of knowing a person leaves you with no choice but to move on without them. If my parents liked Alligator Alcatraz, I’d no longer speak to them. If they were rude to my LGBT friends, I’d block their numbers. Though shunning won’t work as a political strategy, there are still natural consequences for the way we speak and behave. It’s good, actually, to have values and draw lines accordingly, even if there’s a chance someone will overcorrect. Politics never stopped at the family front door. Why pretend otherwise?
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To MAGA, Superman is woke. At least in the new movie.
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 21 Jul 2025: MAGA’s tantrum over “woke” Superman is nastier than their usual whining, subtitled “Lying about the character’s legacy is part of the larger right-wing project to rewrite history”
The story so far:
At this point, the right-wing grift is predictable to the point of tedium. Every time there’s a pop cultural phenomenon — a blockbuster movie, a chart-topping single, a hot new fashion trend — conservative media and MAGA influencers rush to denounce it as anti-American, anti-family or even demonic. Labubu dolls are Satanic. The “Barbie” movie is anti-male. Conservative men are being traumatized by rap songs informing them that women can experience sexual arousal. (Not that said conservative men are willing to believe it.)
Getting to the point:
The furor, for those lucky enough to have missed it, had nothing to do with the actual plot of the movie, which was about Clark Kent learning to love his poorly-behaved dog Krypto. (There was also some stuff about fighting Lex Luthor and saving the world, but let’s face it, the dog made the movie.) The MAGA talking heads are big mad that director James Gunn said that Superman is an immigrant. “Superman is the story of America,” Gunn told The Times of London. “An immigrant that came from other places and populated the country.” They were also furious that Gunn said Superman stands for “human kindness.”
With more details about right-wing criticism. Then,
This is all very dumb, but what was striking was how brazenly dishonest it was. If there is one thing that everybody knows about Superman, it’s that he’s an alien who was smuggled to Earth. Being a refugee is as central to the character as the cheek dimples and the broad chest. It would be one thing if the Fox hosts were disputing the values of the movie. In the age of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi “Puppy Killer” Noem, we get that “be nice to dogs” is an ideology that MAGA loathes. No, what makes this next-level evil is they were denying a centerpiece of the character’s history as well-known as the date of Independence Day and the colors of the American flag.
And, the point:
This is part of a larger and far more serious effort by Trump and the MAGA movement to rewrite history, and therefore, to rewrite what the story of America even is. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been hyperfocused on erasing all acknowledgement that women, people of color and queer people have long served in the military, all to prop up his childish fantasy that the only real heroes are white men. Under the guise of stopping “DEI,” shorthand for “diversity, equity and inclusion,” Republicans are waging war on libraries and museums, censoring books and displays that reflect the basic truth that the U.S. has always been a multi-ethnic society. Republicans are getting increasingly aggressive about spreading Christian nationalist lies that the U.S. was founded as a functional theocracy, when it was intended to be a secular nation.
The Superman gambit is the pop culture version of this.
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On a similar note. Willful ignorance, in service of bigotry and xenophobia.
Huffington Post, 21 Jul 2025: Critics School Stephen Miller For Building Up These Absurd American History Claims
“If you look at photos of the Empire State Building being constructed — in record time, by the way — you know what you don’t see there? Any illegal aliens,” Miller told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham.
“If you look at photos of the Empire State Building being constructed — in record time, by the way — you know what you don’t see there? Any illegal aliens,” Miller told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham.
Nonsense. For one thing, the idea of who’s an “immigrant” and not American has steadily changed over time. (See my review of this book.) For another thing,
In reality, immigrants played a key role in the construction of the Empire State Building, a project that — at its peak — had a workforce of 3,500 people.
Many of the workers were Irish and Italian immigrants, who were notably joined by Mohawk ironworkers, according to the Museum of the City of New York.
The iconic skyscraper was also designed by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon: a firm founded by Canadian-born architect Richmond Shreve and William F. Lamb, whose father was an immigrant from Scotland, before Chicago native Arthur Loomis Harmon joined in 1929.
Via JMG has comments, such as this one:
In the 1930s it was the Italian and Irish immigrants that were primarily coming to the US, and they definitely did help build the Empire State Building. They just weren’t brown. He’s letting his racism show, as usual.
Remember, up until a century or so ago, there were no “illegal” immigrants. All immigrants were welcome. Ellis Island. What has happened since then?
