Articles of Interest: Daddy Fascism, Prime Time Firing Squad, and the Science of Squirting

Pardon my silence. I was at the Ms. Nude Canada competition in Ottawa. Deservedly, Kiwi the Stripper won the masters devision. Congrats, Kiwi! 

I’ve been catching up on Mark Fisher this week, starting with Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures and going all the way back to Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009) I’ll have more to say about that this weekend, but let’s look at what’s going on in The Culture, shall we? 

According to AP:

"The Pentagon says the firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan will be livestreamed after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the execution would be “public.”

PBS Reports:

"Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike is awake and speaking at a hospital, her lawyers said Tuesday, six days after the state's failed attempt to execute her by lethal injection left her unconscious and on a ventilator."

Macleans is thinking on facial recognition:

"Above all, the danger of facial recognition technology lies in its flexibility. There is now an inconceivably large wealth of facial data, unregulated and stored across private and public institutions. The infrastructure for collecting more is already deeply embedded in cities and homes. And there are no meaningful safeguards on which political or corporate power can wield it and to what end."

Bill Gates told Ezra Klein a lot of terrifying things about the AI present and not-too-distant future.

This just in from The White House:

"Federal judge strikes down Utah's controversial VPN age verification rules" [via techradar]

What, exactly, is Peter Thiel's relationship with Lord of the Rings?  

Scientific American tried to get to the bottom of squirting.

Religious scholars are trying to teach Claude to be good.

ChatGPT is not just replicating New Yorker style cartoons, Nieman Lab reports; it's forging them along with artist signatures.

The Sovereign Institute reports:

"Cyberhaven monitored 1.6 million workers across 639 organizations and found that 11 percent of data pasted into ChatGPT is classified as confidential. That number is not a projection or an estimate. It is a measurement of what is happening inside real organizations, in real time, right now."

Related:

This Business Insider article–What 'M3gan' gets wrong about AI, according to experts–was written three years ago but with everything we know now it feels like it was written decades ago. "It is unlikely that AI will ever simulate meaningful human-to-human companionship, like M3gan provides Cady in the movie, one expert said." Okay!

Futurism reports that AI is creating "doom loops" all over the economy:

The closer you look, the more you see doom loops everywhere. Journalists, for example, used to publish work under the assumption that online platforms would drive readership to them. But now, tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini simply summarize their articles without sending readers to their sites, sparking a crisis that seems poised to wipe out the independent media.

[...]

The irony, as the Microsoft document pointed out, is that the AI industry is a snake eating its own tail: the very products that it’s pushing on users rely on fresh cultural content even as they destroy the economic incentives to create it.

In news pulled straight out of The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Mediaite reports:

President Donald Trump's rally in Texas descended into chaos, with at least seven interruptions that saw police forcibly remove hecklers as supporters chanted, "We love you, Daddy Trump!"

By way of William Stroud in The Brooklyn Rail:

The psychologist Robert Coles, in The Political Life of Children, a book in his larger Inner Lives of Children Trilogy, examines the stories and myths that a nation uses to socialize generations of people in order to establish the consent of the governed. In a society structured, in both a psychological and material sense, fundamentally on issues of race and class, our experiences as children form the basis for our political attitudes. Reich posits that the authoritarian ideology that prevailed in Nazi Germany was rooted in the patriarchal family—that the identification with state power is analogous to subservience to the supreme authority exercised by the father in patriarchal society and internalized in childhood. With economic dependency of the wife and children on the husband and father, the family served as the precursor and institutional structure for maintaining authoritarian rule.

Anyway, here's an actual shirt you can buy: