Author: sauer@technologists.com

curated news excerpts & citations

Bulwark: What We Choose to Nazi

The Department of Labor is posting Heroic Realism propaganda. What, exactly, are they telling us?
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But it’s not the use of AI that’s giving everyone pause, of course. It’s that these pictures, released by the Department of Labor social-media accounts and bearing the department’s seal, are uncomfortably reminiscent of posters from the 1930s. To be more specific: the ‘Heroic Realism’ of Nazi propaganda posters and the similarly stylized patriotic posters later produced in the United States.

Why is this style being used now, and what are these images for? Only a few of the images explicitly say. But their purpose is explained in the accompanying captions: They’re promoting the department’s work on Project Firewall, meant to restore “pathways to the American Dream by ensuring American Jobs go to American Workers.”
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There is a final irony. As millions of Americans are facing a real possibility of hunger in the days ahead and as tech giants like Amazon lay off tens of thousands of workers—adding to the material conditions that will make enlisting in the army ICE is building a more appealing option—all this AI-generated slop is being used to harden false, in-group thinking among impressionable and disillusioned young men. The very AI tools that are adding to today’s employment problems are being used by the Trump administration to chip away at reality, one white-supremacy meme and one fascistic propaganda video at a time.
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404 Media: ICE and CBP Agents Are Scanning Peoples’ Faces on the Street To Verify Citizenship

Videos on social media show officers from ICE and CBP using facial recognition technology on people in the field. One expert described the practice as “pure dystopian creep.”
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Ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee Bennie G. Thompson said in a statement “Mobile Fortify is a dangerous tool in the hands of ICE, and it puts American citizens at risk of detention and even deportation.” He also said “ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien. ICE using a mobile biometrics app in ways its developers at CBP never intended or tested is a frightening, repugnant, and unconstitutional attack on Americans’ rights and freedoms.”
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Free Press: Are Conservatives the New Snowflakes?

Members of the right once derided the left for emotional hypersensitivity. Today, they lead the charge to suppress ideas that unsettle them.

Slave owners tried very hard to justify themselves. In the early years of the 19th century, wave after wave of preposterous pseudoscience was published to help them rationalize what was obviously wrong but incredibly profitable. Soon, speech criticizing slavery was policed. Books were banned; possession of some, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, were criminalized. Newspaper owners were targeted, their presses thrown into the river. Abolitionists were lynched and driven from the South. Slave owners’ sublimated guilt was so fragile that they needed soft and hard power—indeed, the entire force of culture and government—to maintain the specious lie that slavery was not only not bad, it was right.
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The Civil War was driven by greed and cruelty, but another way to see it is that it was started rashly and stupidly by men and women who lived in a delusional, paranoid bubble in which they were the victims, that they were the ones being persecuted (by the North) instead of being the villains who enslaved and raped and killed. Slave owners were monsters, but they were also incredibly sensitive, unable to face what they’d done and terrified of living in a world where they couldn’t keep doing it.
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Jess Piper: Show Me Misery

Author’s Note: This essay is about Missouri, but it applies to any other state with a GOP-dominated legislature. A state captured by the oligarchs. My state is representative of the “red states” you often read about.

We’ve elected clowns, and now we are privy to the horrible circus.

I live in Missouri. The Show Me state — a state that represented Midwestern values like kindness and morality and responsibility in government for decades. The bellwether state. A moderate state.

We elected a President from this humble state. He had a sign on his desk that said, “The buck stops here,” yet Truman would no longer recognize his state. He would mourn our trajectory under 22 years of a GOP Supermajority. His sign has no place in this state.

Republicans have no accountability, and the buck stops at a culture war and the awful circus they drum up to avoid accountability.

Harry S. Truman would loathe the officials running the state of Missouri. Particularly, our Governor, Mike Kehoe. A supposed “moderate” Republican who is tearing our state to shreds and dismantling the things that once made us a good neighbor.
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Charlie Sykes: Spooked by Reagan

How thin-skinned is the uber-touchy Donald Trump? As you may have heard: A single Canadian ad triggered an extraordinary presidential snit and new trade war. Trump was so upset that he cancelled trade talks with Canada and then slapped an additional 10 percent tariff on American consumers of Canadian products.

And in a brilliant example of the Streisand Effect, he managed to call international attention to the words of Ronald Reagan, highlighting his massive break with the conservative icon.

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Anne Applebaum: Dislike and Disdain

Trump expresses his true feelings about America and Americans
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In truth, the administration’s unannounced destruction of the East Wing of the White House reflects a similar kind of disdain, and belongs to a similar kind of tradition. Ignoring the National Capital Planning Commission, eschewing the deference that presidents have usually shown to public opinion and precedent, Trump sent in the bulldozers before anyone was able to stop them.

The message is the same as in the AI video: Trump doesn’t care about public opinion, or that it belongs to the American nation rather than himself, or that it was the product of Thomas Jefferson’s belief in order, proportion, and discipline. He believes that only he can decide what it should look like, and he wants it to reflect his Mar-a-Lago taste: bigger, uglier, with the Rose Garden covered in concrete and fake gold ornaments pasted onto the walls of the Oval Office. He is discarding history, tradition and propriety, destroying a symbol that belongs to all of us, weakening one of the few remaining images that unite us.

He is also doing so at the cost of $300 million, thanks to donations from wealthy Americans under conditions that are unclear. Why have Apple, Amazon, Comcast, Google, Lockheed Martin, the Winkelvoss brothers, the family of Howard Lutnick and more than a dozen others given money to this project? What do they hope to receive in exchange? Secrecy is another hallmark of authoritarianism, and so are permanent conflicts of interest. Plenty of those surround this project too.
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Al Jazeera: Is Trump’s pardon of Binance boss Changpeng Zhao a conflict of interest?

Zhao is a convicted criminal who founded the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, found guilty of allowing site to be used for money laundering in connection to child sex abuse.
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Over the course of seven years, prosecutors said Binance had facilitated more than 1.5 million virtual currency trades – totalling roughly $900m – which violated US laws and sanctions, including ones involving al-Qaeda and Iran.

In addition, investigators said drug traffickers and networks linked to child sexual exploitation used Binance to move and convert illicit funds anonymously. The exchange’s weak customer verification system and tolerance for high-risk transactions made it a hub for illegal operations, they alleged.
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Adam Kinzinger: The GOP’s Long Dance With Racism

The leaked Young Republican chat shows a party culture decades in the making
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The bigotry and racism exposed when someone leaked transcripts from a chat group of Young Republicans has much of the country rightly outraged. But not Vice President J.D. Vance. …
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The Vice President makes no sense. First, these young Republicans are not kids. Eight of the eleven in the chat group are between 24 and 35 years old. Not one was under 18. (Vance himself is 41.)

Second, there’s no evidence the racist and anti-Semitic comments (and there are many more than I noted above) were jokes. “I was only kidding” is the refuge of a bigot who just doesn’t want to be held accountable.

Third, there’s something deeply wrong when the Vice President of the United States seems more concerned about racists being “ruined” than the racism itself. This is smoke that tells me there’s a big fire inside the GOP.

As someone who spent most of my life rising in the Republican Party, I always knew there were bigots among us. But I hoped they weren’t more common than in the rest of society. I didn’t hear much from them because they knew I wouldn’t tolerate it. And yes, people on the other side sometimes used racism against me. There are bad apples in every barrel. But as time passed, and I considered the trend inside the party, I recognized that both GOP culture and political strategy have a serious racism problem.
(Adam Kinzinger more…)
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Jennifer Rubin: Demolishing the Presidency

A White House teardown ordered by a reckless child is the perfect metaphor

Donald Trump has done far, far worse things. But images of the demolition of the White House’s East Wing, including water being sprayed throughout to douse the debris, were viscerally appalling. Maybe it was the resemblance to the damage wrought to the Pentagon on 9/11. Maybe it was an instinctive defense of a national symbol—last destroyed by a monarch in the 1812 war. …
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Trump promised this sort of desecration would not occur. But, as we know too well, the lifespan of his promises is a nanosecond. A leaked memo telling employees not to release damaging images is the sort of internal rebellion that a White House literally falling apart must dread.
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… it is of a piece with the recent string of moronic moves by a White House apparently in the grips of panic.

When you resort to a vulgar AI video (“not only juvenile but also betray[ing] striking contempt for tens of millions of Americans he ostensibly leads and for the concept of democratic free speech,” as CNN’s Stephen Collinson observed), or when you insist that the images of millions of No Kings protesters blanketing social and legacy media are fake, you give the impression you are not only crass and delusional, but panicked.

Don’t forget his jaw-droppingly irresponsible stunt, the Marines’ exercise of “firing high explosive rounds from M777 Howitzers” over a major California freeway that—no surprise!—ended in disaster. …
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Dean Blundell: The White House Was Never Meant To Be A Palace For A King—Until Now

The founders built a modest president’s residence for a republic. Bulldozing the East Wing to make room for a donor‑funded ballroom flips that choice

Yesterday, demolition crews began tearing into the East Wing of the White House. The stated aim: clear space for a new, privately financed ballroom—a project touted at $200–$250 million, roughly 90,000 square feet, with a capacity up to 999 guests. A new monument to America’s King, seeking a palace fit for a king. The images are jarring: water trucks suppressing dust as excavators bite into a wing that, for generations, handled the unglamorous work of the People’s House.

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