Baffled European

Tag: holocaust denial

  • You can do anything with computers these days

    It’s 2025, a quarter of the way through the 21st century. I’m stuck by the way I still so often think in 20th century terms. I was wondering how the administration will spy on its citizens and I initially imagined millions of inoffizielle Mitarbeiter informing the government about the indiscretions of family, friends and colleagues. The answer is staring me in the face as I write.

    Beyond destroying government departments, DOGE has been consistently targeting databases. Getting these is illegal, but that’s hardly a problem. They can now move all the data from all branches of government into a single dataset. At this point, the government can find out literally everything about anybody they want.

    On top of this is social media. They’ve already got AI trawling through everybody’s accounts, looking for signs of dissent. It’s just practice at the moment, getting rid of foreigners. It will work for everybody else just as well soon enough.

    It’s something AI is very good at. Fast and cheap. Produces pretty good results. It will make frequent mistakes, but that’s no problem. Collateral damage. None of those obeying Grok are going to question who to sack or disappear. It’s not their job and it takes too much time anyway. Who cares if you ruin a person’s life anyway? Empathy is causing the Downfall Of Western Civilisation.

    The best we can hope is that Peter Thiel is incompetent.

  • +3° cannot be avoided

    We’ve been having a dry spell. It hasn’t rained for weeks. Drought is a problem here in Brandenburg and it’s getting worse. Due to climate change.

    Of all the vandalism caused by the new US administration, probably the most predictable was climate science.

    The history in USA policy goes back to when daddy Bush decided to rename climate change “global warming” because it sounded positive. Something that we would want, rather than a bad thing. That set the tone for the next thirty years of obstruction, where climate change deniers sought to prevent any action taken to reduce CO₂ emissions.

    Now the pretence is over. They are not going to do anything about climate change. In fact, there are even moves in some states to make renewable energy illegal.

    Why are they doing this? To own the libs, obviously, but there must be a bit more than that. Do they think reality is whatever they say it is? That there is no objective reality? Maybe they genuinely think climate science is all a giant hoax?

    Whatever the case, the USAians have decisively rejected reality and embraced a fantasy instead. This cannot end well. Reality always wins in the end.

    Beyond the USA, it’s worth pointing out that if the governments of the world had shown as much enthusiasm for this issue as they have for tooling up for a great big fight, it would be solved by now.