One Spooky Bitch

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

“people who can afford homes —“ are typically 400-600k in debt for them. also if “can own your own home” is your threshold for the rich you are contemplating eating, i think you are genuinely stupid

1. "He's gonna declare martial law!" Okay, so what then? This isn't something you can enforce nationwide on a country of 350 million people with a military that has a combined force of less than 3 million people, including all support and logistics staff. That doesn't equal half the population of Los Angeles. Y'all need to fucking stop acting like we're approaching a mythical point where shit gets "serious." We're already there. People are already being disappeared.

Civilians are already being killed in the streets. We're there. And you know what? They're already getting near the limits of their ability to force compliance. ICE is dedicating a double digit percentage of their manpower to Minneapolis and they're not controlling shit. People are pushing back. Your default response when the administration says "We will force you to do this" shouldn't be "Oh no they're gonna make us do this!" It should be "Fuck you. Make me."

2. "Americans are doing nothing!" I did a post about this recently, but it bears revisiting: I don't know where the hell you're getting this, because everywhere that ICE or other arms of the federal enforcement apparatus go, they are being pushed back on, humiliated, driven out of neighborhoods, and shown the door. People are fighting back on a truly awe inspiring level. Stop assuming that "doing something" looks like an armed mass of civilians storming Washington and fighting the military in a pitched battle. This is movie bullshit. The world has not looked like that since the early 20th century. What you are seeing, right now, is what "doing something" looks like. Stop it stop it stop it. We ARE doing something, in vast numbers.

3. "He's gonna cancel elections!" This one has been pushed by bots for the last year, and big name people have been picking it up, and it frustrates the hell out of me so I'm going to hold your hand and tell you bluntly: He. Cannot. Do. This. There is no mechanism. Elections are controlled by the states, and they decide when they happen. There is no federal mechanism for control of elections. What's Trump gonna do? Post soldiers at every polling place in every swing state? Do you know how many polling places there are in every district? How much manpower this would require? He doesn't have the people to do it. He doesn't have the mechanical ability to do it. There are no tools to execute this plan. Is he gonna try to make elections unfair? You bet your ass, but our elections have never been fair. Voter suppression has always existed and will continue to exist until we fix it... but a blanket ban of elections or even some ability to make them not happen? Lol. He doesn't have the manpower or the means.

But what if he did? Let's game this out: Congress--or at least the House of Representatives--is not a perpetual body. At the end of 2026 the current congress ceases to exist, and the next one isn't convened until the following year. Mike Johnson will cease to be Speaker at the end of the year and wont be Speaker again in '27 unless his party wins a sufficient majority to elect him. Remember if there are no elections then republicans will not have their seats in 2027. There will be no congress, and without congress, Trump does not have a mechanism for governance. I dunno about you, but those Republican reps like having their jobs, their staff, their salaries, and all the perks that come with office. They do not get those if there is no Congress. That is not something they want.

But he said he was gonna! And? So fucking what? He says a lot of things. He issued an executive order at the start of his second term ordering all school districts in the country to immediately cease teaching "DEI" whatever the hell that means. Do you know what most districts that weren't actively kissing his ass said? "That's nice. Make me." And then he didn't, because the states control their own education systems, not Trump. His words don't have the force of law, and are limited by what he actually has levers of power to accomplish. We are **still having elections.** Several happened last week. The States decide this. Trump doesn't.

The Midterms are gonna happen. They're gonna matter and they're gonna have consequences. And you all need to stop acting like he has power over things he doesn't just because he says he does. That's propaganda and you're falling for it.

As with all things Authoritarian, when Trump says "I'm gonna force you to do this," your response should be as I articulated above:

"Fuck you. Make me."

You can practically hear him internally screaming at his past self for being an idiot. But what really makes the song important is this:

He freaking starts singing along with her. Let that sink in. Even though his past self walked away by this point, he heard and remembers everything she said after. He can only get a few lines out before he breaks down:

Cutting the song means the audience doesn't truly get the entire picture about how just much his heart and soul were destroyed by what happened with Belle. This moment is when angry and bitter Scrooge is born.

We're all familiar with that line, when the Ghost of Christmas Present throws Scrooge's own words of callous indifference back at him when he shows concern about Tiny Tim. It's a line that appears in nearly every version of A Christmas Carol...but I want to talk about probably my favorite use of it in any adaptation, and it comes from what is arguably the best adaptation: A Muppets' Christmas Carol.

Because here's the thing about that movie's version of the Ghost of Christmas Present -- he's genuinely friendly to Scrooge throughout their entire interaction. In many adaptations -- and in Dickens' original book -- the ghost is more harsh with Scrooge. It's in a well-intentioned way, but it's clear that the ghost dislikes Scrooge's attitude toward his fellow man and has no problem letting him know that. Some movie versions have him being more sassy with Scrooge than Dickens did, but there's definitely tension between them.

Then the Muppets have this guy

He sings and dances and is genuinely happy to meet Scrooge. I defy you to show me a version where "Come in and know me better, man!" is said with more genuine good will and spirit of friendship than how this guy says it. He doesn't speak harshly to Scrooge or criticizes him -- they even share a genuine laugh when Scrooge makes a joke about him having more than 1800 brothers, and he also jokes about being "a *large* absent-minded spirit." Before they leave Scrooge's house, he promises that "before the day is over, you *will* understand" what Christmas is truly about, and you know he means it. Hell, he almost sounds excited about the prospect of it.

And when they get to Bob Cratchit's house, the story plays out as it does in nearly every version (with the occasional added Muppet-related shenanigan), and more light-hearted humor is exchanged between Scrooge and The Ghost ("This is Bob Cratchit's house?" "How did you know that?" "You just told me" "Hmm. Well, I'm usually trustworthy"). They enter the house after Bob and Tiny Tim return home and we get another song, this one from Tiny Tim and the Cratchits before Scrooge asks whether Tiny Tim will live (and Michael Caine fucking nails the delivery, because of course he fucking does)

And then, The Ghost, who again has been nothing but genuinely nice to Scrooge up to this point, pulls out the haymaker

"If these shadows remain unaltered by the future, I believe the child will die. But what then? If he's going to die, he'd better do it and decrease the surplus population."

And it fucking lands. Because it's the first time that The Ghost has actively been critical of Scrooge and his actions prior to the night of their visit. Hell, it's the first time he's ever directly addressed anything from Scrooge's life before all of this started. And to me, it hits harder because of The Ghost's almost exclusively jovial and genial nature up to that point.

It's not said in an exceptionally harsh way, either. There's a bit of an edge to his tone, but other versions have definitely been more pointed about how they deliver it (the 2009 Jim Carrey version, for example, has the Ghost's face and voice morph into Scrooge's own for that line and lets the line linger for a moment before shifting back which is an incredible way to do it, imo), and almost immediately after, when he tells Scrooge it's time to leave, he is calmer and seems almost remorseful that they don't have more time together. Even their final exchange, when he tells Scrooge he will be leaving and begins to fade away, is full of what seems to be a genuine care for Scrooge's well-being -- as well as a call back that genuinely chokes me up a little

but ‘this jolly old gentleman here is very generous to charities’ and that shit-eating grin shows that this Fred, at least, actively enjoys giving his uncle shit and coming over just to get a rise out of him and to deliberately argue with him