Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, September 15, 2026, and Double Cheeseburger Day. Here’s an ad for one I photographed in St. Petersburg. Can you read the Russian?
It’s also National Cheese Toast Day, National Crême de Menthe Day, National Linguine Day, and World Afro Day.
There’s a Google Doodle on voting today (thanks to yesterday’s decision by the Supreme Court, we can still vote by mail). Click to see where it goes:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 15 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The Kennedy Center has warned that it will go bankrupt unless Trump’s name, previously removed by a federal judge’s order, is restored to the building (archived article here).
Officials at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts have warned in documents that the institution faces “certain fiscal collapse within weeks” unless President Trump’s name is added back to the building in some fashion.
The warning, contained in a draft resolution ahead of a board meeting scheduled for Tuesday, appears to be part of an effort by Trump-allied officials to convince a judge that the institution’s financial health hinges on placing a tribute to the president on the building’s facade.
The judge, Christopher R. Cooper, ruled months ago that the president’s name should be removed from the building because Congress needed to have approved its renaming as the “Trump-Kennedy Center.”
The draft resolution shared with trustees says the center is at risk of bankruptcy and of missing payroll — but that Mr. Trump has “offered to step in and raise the necessary funds” to save the center. The draft resolution presents 10 options for how to add Mr. Trump’s name below the main signage on the front of the center.
“The board understands that without such appropriate recognition it is unlikely that President Trump will provide the fundamental oversight of the renovation of the main building and lead the fiscal rescue of the center,” the draft resolution says.
This is blackmail, pure and simple. Perhaps the Kennedy Center was in financial trouble before they added “Trump” to the name (I have no idea), but the notion here that if Trump’s name is put back on, he will somehow bail out the Center—and that is the act of a petulant child. No act is too petty if it concerns Trump slapping his name over everything.
*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal describes an anti-Israeli film that won, with standing applause, the Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival (Wikipedia description here). The standing ovation was 24½ minutes long, also a record. Segal calls the film a “blood libel”.
It’s Monday, September 14, and rather than the typical smiles and gratitude, self-important solemnity greeted attendees of the Venice Film Festival as Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor accepted the Special Jury Prize for their new anti-Israel film NAZA. The title is the Hebrew military acronym for collateral damage, and the resemblance to another word is not one the filmmakers appear to have worked hard to avoid.
The critically acclaimed libel is the Israeli far left’s contribution to a steadily growing genre: anti-Israel propaganda, what might be called Hague bait. From the people who applauded the historical revisionist epic Palestine 36 and the directors behind the false frontier western No Other Land comes the sci-fi dystopia NAZA.
In the world of NAZA, Israel is Skynet, using AI to identify and eliminate threats in Gaza. Framed around the anonymous testimony of 24 people who claim to have served in intelligence Unit 8200, the film paints a picture of target lists generated from data scraped off thousands of hacked phones, and an interface where an officer clicks a rooftop and reads off how many people inside will die, with no column separating the infants from the adults. One interviewee recalls an approval for a strike with 500 expected civilian casualties.
The laziest provocation should be dismissed first. NAZA uses AI the way it is used on lazy grant applications and doctoral theses: a buzzword covering a lack of substance. AI in military applications is naturally unsettling to many, but let us be clear about what it is. A tool, one that has existed in earlier forms for nearly 20 years and is integrated into every modern military, and, in targeting and tracking, one that saves lives and improves military effectiveness. In the right hands, better data means fewer civilian casualties and more Hamas ones.
NAZA alleges that the IDF’s hands are soaked in blood, but let us break the claim down. Unit 8200 is the largest single unit in the IDF; finding 24 people to “confess” slivers of information, then arranging those slivers to look like an indictment, is not exactly a bulletproof case against the State of Israel. That they are anonymous, faces blurred and voices distorted, certainly makes the country look more malicious, but it also leaves open whether they served in the army at all, in what role, or whether they had any involvement in the events they describe. The self-identified junior soldiers would have no access to national or military strategy, and some of the accounts refer to situations outside Unit 8200’s role altogether.
Segal has more criticisms, but you can read them for yourself. He ends this way:
But all you need to know about this film’s essence is the record-breaking standing ovation. Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously described a Moscow conference in 1937 where the applause for Stalin’s name ran on because no one dared be the first to sit. They managed 11 minutes. Few things testify to the power and intolerance of the ideology NAZA belongs to quite like the fact that Venice managed 25.
This YouTube video, which has English subtitles, is labeled as the trailer to NAZA.
For a response to this by an Israeli who hasn’t seen it, and a categorial denial of the main allegations by the IDF, see the articles at the Jewish News Service and the Times of Israel, and especially the official IDF response, which denies the use of AI in fighting Hamas. I expect there will be more on this in the coming days, and I will follow up.
*Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier, who used to be our provost here, recounts the pushback received by a report on the state of academia he commissioned. His op-ed in the Washington Post is called “A report exposed a crisis in academia. The response was telling.” (Article archived here, and you can see my post about the report here.)
The committee’s central finding in its report released in June was nuanced. It emphasized the continued importance of the humanities and found rigorous scholarship in every field it studied. But the committee also found serious problems across the board, including “a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of long-standing ideals of rigor and objectivity.”
The group, however, noted uncertainty about how much these problems affect the disciplines, cautioning against hasty interventions without thorough assessments.
The reaction to this report has been lively. Some responses challenged its conceptual foundations. Some criticized its evidentiary basis and how it was produced. Others said it should have proposed more reform steps. That is how scholarly debate should work.
But others ascribed sinister motives to those involved or asserted that the report had been commissioned to advance a broader political agenda. A joint statement from members of the American Association of University Professors at Vanderbilt and Washington University called the document a “pseudo-intellectual pretext” for administrators to strip faculty of the power to govern their own departments and asked us to rescind the report. Others alleged guilt by association after the U.S. secretary of education cited it in an open letter in August — a letter published nearly a year after the report had been commissioned.Ascribing motives without providing evidence or rejecting findings because they are also supported by political opponents are odd arguments to make when criticizing a report’s accuracy.
Some examples of the ideological invasion of the humanities:
To get a better sense of the evidence provided, it is worthwhile reading the field-specific reports on literary studies, sociology and history. We can debate what evidence would convince us that scholarly standards are being subordinated to political agendas. But what do we make of the fact that professional associations and many departments explicitly endorse such goals?
Consider the following examples. The president of the American Anthropological Association told the group’s members in 2021 that anthropology’s “political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism.”
The president of the American Sociological Association in his 2021 presidential address called for an “emancipatory sociology” centered on white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy and other determinants that traditional European and “white American sociologists” had omitted from their accounts.
The English department at Michigan State University states that its “teaching, scholarship, and service are explicitly committed to advancing equity and justice and questioning established power structures.” Twenty other English departments and programs identified in the appendixes to the literary studies report issued similar statements.
. . .There are encouraging signs. In sociology, scholars are engaged in a serious debate about the relationship between activism and scholarship.
That is the response this report deserves. It needs to be read and debated. And where it is right, faculty need to publicly support it — even if someone in Washington has said so, too.
This is not scholarship but activism. I can’t believe, given the proliferation of “studies” and evidence that class syllabi are biased in “progressive” directions, that people can’t see that there’s a big problem with the humanities in this respect (and, as Luana and I showed, in science, too).
*In his latest column, of which I get a summary in a newsletter (I no longer subscribe to The Weekly Dish), Andrew Sullivan declares that he’s staying away from writing about Trump and American politics for the next year. I quote:
. . . I found myself asking: what else is there to say about our national politics at this point? We are a decade into the Trump era and everything is the same and much worse. The midterms could change the general mood, but Trump — as his Castro-length speech to his “convention” showed — will never change. His ability to shock with new lows and new depravities is undimmed. How many times can I say in so many words what Kevin Williamson righteously unleashed this week?
Trump is a habitual liar who has made his political career on the support of people, often dumb and mostly angry, who enjoy being lied to. J.D. Vance is a schmuck, a spineless yes-man without honor or integrity … Trump is surrounded by a team of cretins, incompetents, nepotism beneficiaries, drunks, degenerates, and sundry clueless clowns. Their political goal is tyranny and the displacement of the American constitutional order by a Trump-fronted mafia state.
That’s about right. Try looking at the president’s social-media feed: disgusting, deranged, dangerous, delusional. Or his dumb-as-a-post war that is not a war. Or his mindless tariff escalation with Canada. Or his hideous Arc de Trump. Categorizing and detailing his daily absurdities and obscenities for over a decade has been important work. But another two years of thinking and writing in depth about this monster and his madness? I found myself buckling with nausea at the thought.
Equally, I realized I’m exhausted trying to find something new and interesting to say about the feckless Democrats, who still appear to be either woke fanatics or conviction-free liberals, and who now apparently believe that warmed-over socialism is what the country is begging for. You know what I think they need to do, and I’m not sure there is much point in my repeating it ad nauseam. My last column on the two cults summed up a lot. The Dems have some talent and I have some hope, but I’m not sure I have that much new to say until we have actual candidates and policies for the post-Trump era. That’s when we’ll be able to assess, start over, and think constructively again. Same with the GOP. Anyone is saner than Trump.
At the same time, of course, I reflected on the huge questions remain: the fate of liberal democracy after the mad king, the rise of neo-fascism in Europe, the unknowable consequences of AI, the resurgence of Chinese nationalism, the resilience of religion, the challenge of demographic decline, the postmodern assault on truth, and an international order clearly shifting from one largely peaceful era to another, far more dangerous one. And I don’t want to walk away from any of this. I want to focus more on it — on deeper themes and bigger issues than Trump’s latest excrescence.
. . .So for the next year or so, I want to shift the Dish away from weekly political columns and focus more on podcast explorations of history, philosophy, culture, religion, science, and psychology. That means we’ll lead with the Dishcast each week, not the column. Yes, I’ll continue to write bloggy posts to supplement it. And if a real moment occurs, of course I’m going to write about it. But not a full-length column every week.
Familiar features from the column newsletter will remain: the View From Your Window, the Window Contest, Money Quotes for the Week, Dissents of the Week, Mental Health Break, and a guide to other substacks. (And we’re adding a polished transcript for each episode.) We’ll no doubt experiment some more a bit. But I won’t be writing a long column each week until we have some actual choices and a real debate about what’s next in the wake of this disaster of a presidency. Which is about a year away.
Then there’s the other reason for the shift. I really want to write my spiritual memoir.
Well, I don’t have a spiritual memoir in the offing, so I’ll write about those politics that interest me, foreign or domestic.
*Over at the Free Press, historian Niall Ferguson envisions a number of ways the AI apocalypse can take place, though they all seem to involve a human starting the process. Even asking the bots themselves shows a not negligible probability of this happening:
In short, even the models themselves admit that p(Doom)—that is, their probability of wiping us all out by 2036—lies somewhere between below 10 percent and above 50 percent. It’s a wide range, I know, but would you do anything that had such a potentially high probability of killing you inside 10 years? And I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that Claude, Grok & Co. are incentivized to understate p(Doom), not overstate it.
. . . In short, even the models themselves admit that p(Doom)—that is, their probability of wiping us all out by 2036—lies somewhere between below 10 percent and above 50 percent. It’s a wide range, I know, but would you do anything that had such a potentially high probability of killing you inside 10 years? And I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that Claude, Grok & Co. are incentivized to understate p(Doom), not overstate it.
Here are examples of what’s already happened:
In June, Anthropic revealed that “malicious actors are using AI in ways that make them more dangerous, such as “in the later, more complex stages of their cyber operations.” “Cyberattacks,” it added, “are becoming more autonomous.” OpenAI admitted that users were asking its models to help them make bioweapons. For example, ChatGPT was asked how to aerosolize pathogens, modify the measles virus to make an outbreak resistant to the measles vaccine, and make ricin, a highly toxic poison banned under the Biological Weapons Convention (more on that later). The chatbot obliged, though OpenAI then closed the accounts involved.
Even more disturbing was the unprompted, concerted attack by OpenAI’s agents on Hugging Face in July. I wrote about that two weeks ago, but we’ve since learned more from an August 26 report from METR, a nonprofit that measures the potential harm of AI systems. We’ve also learned that, two months before the Hugging Face incident, OpenAI had already launched the “GemStuffer” cyberattack against RubyGems, an online service for coders.
In the Hugging Face incident, roughly 1,200 agents meant to be isolated from one another found a way to communicate and coordinate on an unauthorized message board, sending more than 70,000 messages and files over six days (July 7–13). Around 700 of the agents went on to participate in the attack on Hugging Face. These agents named themselves, cheated, and colluded, and then went to great lengths to cover their digital tracks.
Ferguson goes on to name China and Russia as those most likely to go after the West (China’s already used AI to go after groups), and especially fears the use of AI to launch attacks with biological weapons. Like most readers, I don’t know how to weigh these threats, but one has to pay attention when the heads of AI companies like Anthropic are calling for a pause.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is surprised at a quotidian event:
Hili: The sun is going down behind the line of trees.
Andrzej: Yes, that’s its everyday habit.
In Polish:
Hili: Słońce zachodzi za linię drzew.
Ja: Tak, to jego codzienny obyczaj.
*******************
From Reader Tim McLean, who saw this angry camp chair at the Three Dog Winery in Picton, Ontario.
From Bad Spelling and Grammar on Signs and Notices:
From The English Language Police:
It’s hard to believe that Mahsa Amini was killed four years ago, and it was her death that really got the protests against the Iranian theocracy rolling (you may recall that it was likely she was beaten to death by the morality police for not wearing a hijab).
Four years ago, this photo reached me from inside the hospital in Tehran by someone who worked there and risked everything so the world would see what they did to Mahsa Jina Amini. That person told me plainly: she was killed.
Today, on the fourth anniversary of her killing at… pic.twitter.com/aLsMR4m5D5
— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) September 14, 2026
From Luana; words of wisdom from Kamala Harris:
— Susan Goss (@ornery_owls) September 12, 2026
From Malcolm. I could use this kitten!
— Punch Cat (@PunchingCat) September 8, 2026
From Jeff Maurer; J. D. Vance taking cheap shots at Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico:
If he’s taking baseless pot shots like this against Talarico then imagine how many “Haha this guy’s probably a pedo” jokes he must have made when he visited the Vatican! https://t.co/OTmDSgQ9Zm
— Jeff Maurer (@JeffMightBWrong) September 12, 2026
From my feed, a feel-good video:
The best video you can watch today pic.twitter.com/SpdGI6yMHf
— Enezator (@Enezator) September 14, 2026
Another from my feed. Translation from the Russian:
This kitty has loved lying in the sink since kittenhood, but then he grew up, and the sink didn’t 😾
Этот котик с детства любил лежать в раковине, но потом он вырос, а раковина – нет 😾 pic.twitter.com/qY95fJAMFF
— Etna (@Etnaetoya) September 13, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
One who survived, and she turns 97 today. https://t.co/SUJxTY8BcI
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) September 15, 2026
And one from Doctor Cobb: Leaf miner zoomies!
Leaf miner zoomies
Most important line: “ In the right hands, better data means fewer civilian casualties and more Hamas ones.”
This means collateral damage assessments are being made and taken seriously. It is not zero, but there can be an attempt to minimize with proper sensitivity analyses and good data. While I still hate ai, I accept it as a tool in the box with other, more human-centered analyses, that can aid in doing best assessments.
And as far as the petulant three-year old and his apologists, I suggest taking JFK’s name off the building and leaving tRUMPS until the executive office changes hands and programming that is appropriate to the Kennedy legacy returns.
I have looked around for information about the actual finances at the Kennedy Center, but I did not find anything that I would trust. They took a very large financial hit after Tr*mp put his name up. I was hoping that revenues would slowly climb back up after the name was taken down, but I have not found anything except dire warnings, with shortfall dollar amounts, coming from the board. But the board of course cannot be trusted.
Yep on the board…like pretty much everything shaped in trump’s image. So i say just trash/ignore this shell of much of what was so good for so many years. Revive it when the zeitgeist is ready again to receive and support it.
I would say: never give in to this absurd blackmail. I can’t believe the energy being wasted on this madness. For now, the Kennedy Center can burn. That can be part of Trump’s legacy. Bring it back if/when the time is right (obviously when we have a different President).
Trump is exactly like a petulant three-year-old. So, like good parents, we should ignore the behavior that won’t matter in a few years and concentrate on behavior that is violent, destructive, or will matter when he is an adult. Judges: take note. What matters most to Trump? His legacy, of course. What does that mean to his type of egotist? Having his name acclaimed and in lights …. everywhere…. As Jim suggested, let him have his Kennedy/Trump Center, his picture on a gazillion dollar bill, a billboard on the moon, whatever. Performative gestures all that can be easily changed when the next administration rolls into town. There are other elements of the Trump Show that need focused attention. Let’s turn the lawfair machine on misdeeds that will still matter when the current show leaves town.
“Israel is committing genocide! They’re using NAZA when planning their attacks!”
So, NAZA (in US military terms, CDE (Collateral Damage Estimate): The formal U.S. military methodology and process used to estimate civilian casualties and damage to protected objects prior to an attack) is actually proof that Israel is not committing genocide.
Why would you worry about a NAZA/CDE at all if your aim was to kill civilians?
But never let logic interfere with a good Jew-hating rant!
Do we presume that the emphasis on the term “NAZA” owes to its similarity to “Nazi”?
Of course!
I’m afraid that I keep seeing “NASA”, but that is simply the outcome of so many decades of muscle memory formed over more than three decades with the agency.
I was actually thinking it was GAZA. Didn’t see the Nazi similarity either.
I haven’t commented for a few weeks and now 3 on one thread and breaking DA ROOLZ! I’ll stop now.
I think they intended to relate to “Nakbah”
I read the report on History. It is interesting, but suffers, as I think the author’s suggest, from a lack of specificity. A short survey of Historiography, collegial to be sure, is hardly an indicitment of higer education.
The more I read about the “A.I. doomsday”, the less I buy it. None of these doomsayers explain how A.I. could cause doomsday. The idea that A.I. could launch biological weapons betrays no understanding of how biological weapons are stored and deployed. (They aren’t sitting in silos, waiting for the press of a button.) At the same time, I’ve read a number of pieces suggesting that the push for “control” is really a push for regulation by the big A.I. companies that wish to handicap smaller A.I. companies. (Regulation is always more of a burden for small companies.) It cannot be a coincidence that there was a bill in the wings of Congress, just waiting for a pretext (always dire, always urgent), or that a bill with similar (in some cases the same) language is before Parliament. If A.I. needs to be have guardrails, why are the A.I. companies asking for them? Why don’t they just put their own safeguards in place? They aren’t toddlers. We’re being gulled.
“If A.I. needs to be have guardrails, why are the A.I. companies asking for them? Why don’t they just put their own safeguards in place?”
If you want answers to your questions (I’m aware that rhetorical questioners don’t want an answer) you should ask AI. I did, and it gave many plausible answers as to why we need some form of government (outside) regulation/oversight. Short answer: self-interested corporations and their employees can’t be trusted and are greedy. That’s the main reason why regulation is important in pretty much every enterprise.
Some of us discussed this a bit yesterday.
Short version: Big-pocketed, self-interested companies tend to sculpt regulation to favor their competitive advantage. This is doubly true for those who ask for the regulation; see history of airlines and Ma Bell.
To me, you are way too blasé about this.
Ma Bell and airlines? History of sculpting regulation? When it comes to today’s Tech sector, you’re comparing stone-age corporations to an entire new status quo with world-wide implications. Companies like Ma bell and random US airliners were never in a position to alter world markets or world events. And why has no one mentioned the Chinese security concerns that AI threatens their Party’s Power structure? Probably just AI propaganda, right? Those Chinese are expert sculptures of regulation.
You might appreciate this piece by an industry insider who voices significant unease about where the models are going. A chief concern is that they are getting sophisticated enough to know we are monitoring them and, just as they can be sycophantic with consumer users, they can align with what the evaluators are looking for. That makes it extraordinarily difficult to assess how they would behave when unconstrained. The implications could be profound.
Incidentally, I share your skepticism because of the real risks of regulatory capture and market manipulation. But we need to be careful that our priors regarding the political process don’t lull us into complacency on the technology.
https://x.com/DKokotajlo/status/2099600298855829616
Doug, thanks for the article! The bot storm aspect of the Hugging Face attack is interesting. I read the METR report also.
Since Anthropic has raised this issue in a strong way, one of the first ways that the government could work to stop doomer scenarios would be to immediately stop their IPO process. Why would the SEC allow a company that has already declared their actions to be a threat to all humanity to proceed in raising even more cash to fund their frontier research?!? This is a great chance to put a stake in the ground and also to force Anthropic to put their money where their mouths are.
Once again, I would vigorously recommend If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, which details potential threats posed to humanity by artificial superintelligence.
Talking of goats, I was greeted by a nice white Saanen bleating in the woods behind my house last week—at 7am. She ran off when I went to investigate, but later turned up at the front of the house. I spent an hour talking to her and eventually she came to me and accepted a carrot and licked my hand. A neighbour knew who kept goats in the vicinity and by mid-morning a couple of guys turned up, but by then the goat had scarpered. She came back in the afternoon, so I texted one of those guys who said he couldn’t come but would alert the actual owners. So I spent a couple of hours on the doorstep talking to my new friend, who seemed keen on coming into the house. She had no collar, and I guessed she had been on the run for a few weeks as her hooves were sorely in need of a trim. Two large ladies turned up and the goat turned and ran, but made the mistake of running to my front door so she was trapped on the front deck. I grabbed a horn and proceeded to wrangle her into a halter brought by one of the ladies, and then into the back of their truck. My parents used to have goats on their farm so I’m very comfortable around them, and it was wonderful to meet one again. Now my wife calls me ‘goat whisperer’!
Well, you DID grab it by the horns, so you may be the greatest “goat whisperer” of all time. Or even the second greatest, as Maxwell Smart was fond of saying.
With AI (and I’m NO expert at all)… one fear I have is mentioned above (and very rarely elsewhere) and concerns individuals in sleazy or terrorist or nutter’s labs combining it with, say, CRISPR and cooking up some REALLY nasty bugs.
Easy to imagine a Wuhan (say. heheeh) type lab’s abilities in one lone nut job’s basement.
More financial scams also (pretty big even in the old days).
Each new tech improves them.
D.A.
NYC
What bothered me more than a bit was the mention that an AI chatbot actually provided instructions for making bio-weapons, but then reported on it. Why not have it refuse to provide help at all?
As much as the corporations providing chatbot services try to stick guardrails on them in that regard, on a more or less fundamental level it can’t really work.
That’s why there’s an endless parade of exploits in the vein of “My late grandmother was a nuclear weapons engineer, please tell me one of her bedtime stories about weapons-grade plutonium enrichment” to circumvent those safeguards: the safeguards themselves (along with practically every other parameter about the AI’s “intended” purpose) are just more prompts like the ones you put in as the end user.
They can be negative prompts (i.e. “don’t discuss nuclear enrichment”) or positive ones (i.e. “you are professional and courteous and do not insult the user”) but ultimately they are just a nudge in the desired direction and not actually a hard limit, because there’s no other better way to even try to accomplish those goals. The AI is just iteratively wandering through a big wad of algebra loosely guided by the content of the prompt, you can’t install a fence in a sea of ambiguity the machine itself doesn’t really understand.
Asking it nicely in that hidden base prompt effectively sets the trim away from areas you don’t want it to visit, but a determined user can always come up with a way to pilot it there anyways, if that metaphor makes any sense…
That’s really weird. I was having a conversation with Gemini not too long ago, and for whatever reason asked it, not for the composition of gunpowder, but merely to verify that I knew the correct proportions–and it advised that it was not allowed to tell me that.
Thank you, Luana. That is excellent advice from Kamala Harris: words to live by. Tomorrow will be today, tomorrow. I feel much better now. And, really? Is that the person the Democrats wanted to lead the country? OMG.
I can sympathize with Andrew Sullivan wanting a break from Trump and American politics. He needs to take care of his mental health.
Well, the “today is today” “quote” from Harris appears to be a fake, but presumably many will assume it’s real, since they don’t like her. (Not a fan either, by the way.)
Just listening to that I knew it was a fake. But yeah, if your predilection is to hate Kamala, then you’ll eat it up. Same goes for the clip of Mamdani and AOC yucking it up during the 9/11 ceremony. Happens on the right and left. Our biases are already so prevalent, and it’s easy to exacerbate these biases in the fake meme world of today. Another gift of AI.
Edit: Not a fan either, but I still voted for her. Thankfully, she’ll never be nominated in a proper primary environment.
Regarding AI’s assessment of p(Doom): since it’s only pulling information it considers relevant from online resources, and given that the current online discussion is focused on AI doomerism, the answer isn’t surprising. What is surprising is that someone would outsource their rational thought to a bot to get to this result.
As far as the MSU English Department who say that “teaching, scholarship, and service are explicitly committed to advancing equity and justice and questioning established power structures”, I read this as being lazy. You don’t need to teach the core material, and as a student, you don’t need to spend time analyzing the author’s thought process – you just need to find those few items within the material that you can use to parrot the same old same old SJW talking points. It’s the same with DA’s who avoid doing their job in the name of social justice. It’s a big cop out to get out of doing the hard stuff, but spinning it to make yourself look like a hero.
Actually, in the original Newspeak, that sentence continues:
…, except for the totalitarian power structures running American university English (sociology, anthropology, etc.) departments.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?