Staring at y'all in Liz Cheney
Look, at this point I should have lost my shock at the utter hypocrisy of the far left. I mean, really, it's not something that's new.
Liz Cheney was a bridge too far for the love-and-peace Left, but sure, let's welcome Marjorie Three Toes into coalition.
Hakeem Jeffries speaking with Jared Kushner means that he should be run out on the rails, but hey, Tucker Carlson is totally regretting pushing Donald Trump unto his lumpenproletariat fan base and should be listened to.
WASHINGTON, Sept 14 (Reuters) - Progressive U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and conservative podcaster Steve Bannon will together on Tuesday call for restrictions on AI systems, uniting two political adversaries around concerns that the technology will harm humans.
They will speak at the same Washington gathering on Tuesday, a sign of how concerns about AI are upending political norms.
Sanders joining up with the Dipsomaniac Prince of Darkness will ruffle nary a hair on the heads of his cult following. Why should it? They inveigh against "old" Democrats, saying they should get out of the way for the upcoming generation. But do they insist the same for the voters of Vermont? No, of course not. Bernard Sanders is eternally youthful, with a mind as supple as a baby's. (And as empty.) Their ability to compartmentalize their hatreds and their loves is truly a thing to behold.
This has nothing to do with the pros and cons of artificial intelligence. Of course, any technology like this should be studied and regulated. It would be foolish not to. But the moral panic over AI has become ridiculous. AI is not going to destroy humanity like some Skynet come to life. Not if safeguards are in place, and a strict regulatory regime. But no one is talking about AI in any rational manner. It's all couched in apocalyptic terms, from the Skynet scenario to "data centers are going to poison us all!". Newsflash: If you're reading this essay, you, too, are using a data center. Our modern technological civilization would revert back to the 1960s if we just "bombed all the data centers". People who posit violent solutions to complex problems are simply, well, morons. AI is a technology to be managed, not the gateway to Megiddo.
But, again, this has nothing to do with that very necessary debate. No. This is the two ends of the horseshoe coalescing around an issue of which the general public knows not much about in order to drive fear and garner votes. And you can bet the outreach came from Bannon, not Sanders.
Why do I say this? Because Bernie Sanders is an incurious, stubborn relic whose only sentences include a noun, a verb, and "oligarchy". (Or "billionaires" if he wants to change it up.) But Bannon? No, he's not some evil genius. Evil, yes, but no genius. But what he is is crafty. He knows that both his far right cultists and Bernie's far left cultists are apoplexed over the threat of AI. And he knows that he, for all his dullness, has more political nous than Sanders. He sees this as a wedge he can use to peel more leftists to his side, in that everlasting Horseshoe Conveyer Belt. Bernie, having no political instincts, can't see this. Not "won't"; can't. The idea that a man who has spent half his life in Congress and has only the renaming of post offices to his credit has any political acumen is laughable. Bannon helped Trump get elected in 2016. Sanders can't even approach that low-hanging fruit.
So Bernie, jumping on the latest bandwagon, is hitching it to Bannon's horses, completely unaware that he is, as always, being used. Because Bernie Sanders isn't some revolutionary genius. He's a deadbeat dad and a serial failure in everything he's done, save for convincing the Very Nice White People™ of Vermont to continue sending him to Washington. (The next DNC chair needs to tell Sanders that the party is over, and that the Vermont Democrats will run a candidate against him in 2030.)
Sanders is useless politically. He's been a lodestone on the Democratic Party—a party to which he does not belong—for far too long. If the party is to pivot away from the DSA uprising, it needs to begin by kicking Bernie to the curb. He can always go hang out with Steve. I'm sure they both smell as badly as the other.