Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 30,195]

https://prospect.org/health/2024-10-11-ai-threatening-social-safety-net/

Amid pitched discussions of whether artificial intelligence–powered technologies will one day transform art, journalism, and work, a more immediate impact of AI is drawing less attention: The technology has already helped create barriers for people seeking to access our nation’s social safety net.

Across the country, state and local governments have turned to algorithmic tools to automate decisions about who gets critical assistance. In principle, the move makes sense: At their best, these technologies can help long-understaffed and underfunded agencies quickly process huge amounts of data and respond with greater speed to the needs of constituents.

But careless—or intentionally tightfisted and punitive—design and implementation of these new high-tech tools have often prevented benefits from reaching the people they’re intended to help.

In 2016, during an attempt to automate eligibility processes, Indiana denied one million public assistance applications in three years—a 54 percent increase. Those who lost benefits included a six-year-old with cerebral palsy and a woman who missed an appointment with her case worker because she was in the hospital with terminal cancer. That same year, an Arkansas assessment algorithm cut thousands of Medicaid-funded home health care hours from people with disabilities. And in Michigan, a new automated system for detecting fraud in unemployment insurance claims identified fivefold more fraud compared to the older system—causing some 40,000 people to be wrongly accused of unemployment insurance fraud.

The United States has long put up administrative burdens to deter the poorest applicants from making use of government help.

These cases are the modern face of an old problem. The United States has long put up administrative burdens to deter the poorest applicants from making use of government help. The New Deal–era distinction between “earned” social benefits—like Social Security—aimed at working white men, and social assistance programs for the poor has translated over time to especially high barriers for the Americans most in need. AI now offers tools to turbocharge this restrictive approach, as the scholar Virginia Eubanks’s prescient work has documented. Well before the release of ChatGPT, Eubanks chronicled how government agencies administering child welfare, social assistance, and law enforcement were using faulty and biased automated systems to make decisions affecting vulnerable communities. The result is a public assistance system increasingly plagued not by oversubscription, but by chronic underuse.

Recognizing this trend, the Biden-Harris administration pursued policies to make sure AI will strengthen, and not undermine, the social safety net. Last year, President Joe Biden directed two of the largest safety net agencies to work with states and localities to root out bias in AI tools and increase transparency and human oversight of these systems.

Policy often delivers messages that politicians don’t say out loud. Biden’s approach acknowledged that the problem with AI’s use in the social safety net is the underlying logic of punitive benefit administration. In other words: Tech shouldn’t be used to restrict qualified people from accessing services, from nutritional assistance to Medicaid, but instead should be a tool for maximizing access to these programs for those who qualify.

The next president has a powerful opportunity to build on this commitment and strengthen the social safety net in the age of AI. On day one, a new administration could bring all benefits programs across the federal government—including those serving people seeking housing assistance, unemployment or disability insurance, student aid, or disaster relief—under the Biden-Harris paradigm. But protecting the most vulnerable in an increasingly algorithmic world requires a broader effort.

First, we must address the take-up problem—low use of social benefits by qualified people in need—in the AI age. As American society speeds toward wider adoption of powerful data-driven tools, we need to know much more about the role AI and algorithmic technologies are playing in blocking—or expanding—the reach of benefits programs to qualified applicants. Social safety net agencies should regularly publish estimates not just of improper payments to ineligible individuals, but also of those who fail to take up benefits for which they are eligible, especially due to automated decision-making systems, building on the Biden-Harris effort to reduce burdens in access to social programs.

Second, the people who rely on safety net programs must have a more influential voice in decisions about deploying these technologies. Data-driven tools are evolving more quickly than traditional public input processes may be able to operate. A new administration can set up councils, composed of representatives from communities most affected by safety net programs, to more dynamically seek input on proposed changes to benefit systems, including the use of AI and automated systems, to gauge their on-the-ground impacts. Building on Biden’s progress in expanding public participation, agencies should compensate those individuals for their time, as the Department of Health and Human Services has begun to do. Organized labor, representing the frontline local, state, and federal agency workers administering these programs, should be key partners in this effort.

Finally, it must be easier for people to challenge a bad determination made by or with AI. A new administration should create clearer pathways for people to push back when they suspect incorrect decisions, whether they are made by a human or a machine, and connect with attorneys for support. One forum for contestation could be the U.S. government’s equal opportunity offices, an existing infrastructure for ensuring legal protections for people who use federal programs. These efforts could be supplemented by collaborating with civil society organizations—including groups like TechTonic Justice and the Benefits Tech Advocacy Hub that are already leading this work—to set up a national legal aid network for people who may have been affected by AI-driven harms, including unjust denial of their benefits.

Presidential leadership, of course, has limitations. Congress will also have a vital role to play in making these changes durable by adding safeguards to the statutes that govern public benefits programs, as well as devoting the resources local, state, and federal agencies need to deliver benefits in a timely and equitable manner. But these early steps can help put the U.S. on the path to protecting the social safety net in the age of AI.

Nine in ten Americans will rely on public assistance at some point in their lives. Technology should not be another hurdle in our most difficult hour. When that day comes, every American should know: Help is on the way.

[cosmicway 1,333]

26 minutes ago, Vesper said:

bullshit

I am not going to stand-by and listen to homophobic, unscientific claptrap.

It is NOT a choice, it is our biological nature from birth.

You see the same thing throughout the animal kingdom, and they lack the sentientness needed to make that sort of choice.

It is simply a biological fact.

You stating that it is a mere choice opens up the doors to all sorts of wickedness, pain, torture, and death, the very things that have been visited upon us queer folk for millennia.

I, and hundreds of millions of others, be they queer or straight, stand in the breach to close those doors of despair and death still open, and we shall keep the ones that are shut, shut.

We will never again allow those erroneous ways of thought, so often (but not always) forged out of selective interpretations of religion (aka the wilful suspension of disbelief, aka magical thinking), to subjugate us, to take away our inherent humanity and strip us of our manifest rights as human beings to live our lives as we were biologically fashioned.

We will never go back to the ways of darkness, ignorance, fear, torture, and death, NEVER.

Maybe animals are into same sex activities.
Have n't seen them, but I have heard it's happening in the animal world.
Those same sex activities is not something unnatural.
Our prohibitive stance against them is simply because human societies don't like them - scores of human societies don't like them.
Also it can be dangerous (because of Cassius Clay considerations !).
Now what you are trying to say is not about that, but you are saying some people are born hetero and some others are born homo.
This is unscientific and it is a false theory, bar some highly exceptional medical cases of children born without sex organs.


 

[Vesper 30,195]

https://prospect.org/education/2024-10-11-breaking-public-schools/

Education spending in North Carolina is about to go way up, thanks to lawmakers’ largesse. But the extra funds—close to half a billion dollars—won’t go to the public schools attended by the vast majority of children in the state, or to hike teacher pay, despite a worsening shortage. Instead, the huge influx of cash will go to pick up the tab for private school tuition, including for well-off families, a priority for North Carolina’s Republican supermajority. In fact, according to recent state analysis, funding for the state’s public schools will drop by nearly $100 million as a result of voucher expansion. While Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, vetoed the bill, legislators are expected to override him.

As one school district leader stated, “It feels like to me that there’s a desire to suffocate traditional public schools to justify their demise.”

North Carolina’s tilt toward school privatization is all the more remarkable given that the state was, until relatively recently, a model for the kind of education-as-human-capital vision that united both political parties. Starting in the 1980s, governors of both parties plowed money into public schools, teacher salaries, and community colleges, with the aim of supercharging the state’s economic development.

The explosion of so-called universal school vouchers is likely to have a far more profound impact than culture-war hot buttons.

Today, the story couldn’t be more different. The GOP candidate for governor, current Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, is a vocal proponent of school vouchers and has encouraged North Carolina parents to remove their children from public schools, citing alleged agendas in the classroom. “Do not turn your children over to these wicked people,” Robinson told attendees at a church service.

A growing number of parents seem to be listening. North Carolina, which once had the highest percentage of students enrolled in public schools in the nation, has seen private school enrollment soar in recent years.

In recent years, education policies in states red and blue have diverged dramatically. Red-state lawmakers have donned the mantle of culture warriors, imposing limits on what teachers can talk about and what kids can learn, mandating so-called patriotic education, and injecting religion into public school curricula. Conservatives have banned “critical race theory” in schools and intimated that teaching students about LGBT history is a pretext for “grooming” children. Oklahoma is now requiring that public schools teach the Bible as an “indispensable historical and cultural touchstone,” Louisiana is requiring displays of the Ten Commandments in every classroom, and Texas has inserted Bible stories into its elementary school curriculum.

But the explosion of so-called universal school vouchers is likely to have a far more profound impact on the lives of young people in red states than these culture-war hot buttons. As states race to pay for families to send their kids to private schools, blowing up state budgets in the process, the schools attended by the vast majority of kids will be left with far fewer resources, blunting their prospects. By design, funds are being shifted away from students in poor and rural areas and into the pockets of affluent parents, entrenching inequality in the process.

A Radical Shift

“Anyone know of a flat earth curriculum?” The query, posed in a discussion group for recipients of school vouchers in Arizona, which are known there as education savings accounts, or ESAs, was not a joke. Arizona is home to the nation’s most ambitious experiment in free-marketizing education. Parents here are allowed to direct education funds, not just to the school of their choice, but to anything they might call “education.”

As Arizona’s superintendent of public instruction Tom Horne, a loud proponent of vouchers, admitted in an interview, the state’s emphatically hands-off approach means that there’s nothing to prevent parents from using public dollars to teach their kids that the Earth is flat. Indeed, state law prohibits any kind of public oversight over the burgeoning nonpublic sector of private schools, homeschooling, and microschools, which are for-profit ventures in which small groups of students learn online while being monitored by a guide.

While Arizona’s ESA experiment would seem to be a cautionary tale, a growing list of red states view it as a model. Fourteen states have now enacted so-called universal voucher programs, providing taxpayer funds to any family that wants them. As economist Doug Harris has argued, these “super vouchers” represent a radical break with what he calls the foundational traditions of public education across the country: “separation of church and state, anti-discrimination, and public accountability for educational processes and outcomes funded by taxes.”

Voucher advocates have long couched their support for abandoning public education in the language of mobility and uplift. In North Carolina, vouchers have been rebranded as Opportunity Scholarships; in Louisiana, they are GATOR scholarships, or “Louisiana Giving All True Opportunity to Rise.” But a radical exacerbation of existing inequities is the far more likely outcome. Among states that have adopted universal vouchers, wealthy parents have leapt at the opportunity to send their kids to private schools using state funds. A review by The Wall Street Journal last year found that the biggest beneficiaries of the new voucher programs have been students already enrolled in private schools, meaning that their parents were wealthy enough to pay for tuition themselves.

A 2017 protest of Arizona’s education savings accounts (ESAs). The program has led to a $1.5 billion state budget shortfall this year.

States that have opened existing voucher programs to wealthy residents have seen a similar trend. In Indiana, for example, which has had a voucher program for low-income students since 2011, lawmakers have steadily expanded eligibility to more affluent Hoosiers. According to recent analyses of the program, which is projected to cost the state $600 million this year, vouchers in Indiana now subsidize predominantly wealthy, white suburban families whose kids never attended public schools. Meanwhile, the percentage of low-income students receiving vouchers has been steadily decreasing.

The ability of private schools to hike tuition as a result of state support is also likely to deepen the divide between rich and poor students. A study published by researchers at Brown and Princeton Universities found that after Iowa adopted a voucher program, tuition at private schools rose by nearly 25 percent. Across the border in Nebraska, where lawmakers have tried but so far failed to enact a similar program, no such tuition hikes occurred. Vouchers, conclude the researchers, act as tuition subsidies for families who can afford private schools, incentivizing such schools to charge more while pricing out families who can’t afford it.

One of the arguments voucher proponents have long made is that funding parents directly will end up saving taxpayers money, since the amount of the voucher is typically less and sometimes far less than what states spend to educate a child. Yet that logic only holds if students are leaving the public schools. Because these programs have ended up subsidizing parents whose kids already attend private school, they represent enormous new budget items.

As ProPublica documented recently, Arizona’s voucher program has precipitated a “budget meltdown” to the tune of nearly $1.5 billion this year. While the rising tide of red ink will inevitably lead to slashed spending on the state’s public schools, the cost of paying for private school tuition is now crowding out spending on all sorts of state services and projects, including investment in vital water infrastructure. Arizona’s budget woes are exacerbated by the fact that there’s less money coming in thanks to a flat tax that delivers huge benefits to the wealthy.

“States that have passed significant tax cuts, dramatically expanded private school vouchers, or done both should be alarmed by how quickly Arizona found itself in a deep fiscal hole,” warned the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently. On that list of states: Iowa, West Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina, and Arkansas. Faced with shrinking revenues and costly new voucher programs, these states will soon be forced to enact major spending cuts, setting off a battle for increasingly scarce resources.

Voucher proponents appear to have gamed that out as well. The looming budget showdowns will pit affluent parents, who will be loath to give up their new entitlement, against the majority of families whose children still attend public schools. It isn’t hard to predict the outcome.

Culture War as Smoke Screen

“To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust,” proclaimed conservative provocateur Christopher Rufo in a 2022 speech. To a remarkable extent, that sentiment now animates Republican education policy. Some 18 states have banned the discussion of so-called divisive concepts, threatening teachers with punishment and schools and districts with fines, while giving parents the right to sue if their kids encounter banned topics in the classroom. But the anti-CRT furor signaled just the start of the GOP’s embrace of the school culture wars. Over the past two years, red states have cycled through a fixation on pornography in libraries, social and emotional learning—a Trojan horse for Marxism, claim its critics—and anything having to do with gender.

What is increasingly apparent, though, is that these successive panics have merely been smoke screens for enacting school vouchers. “It is time for the school choice movement to embrace the culture war,” wrote Heritage Foundation research scholar Jay Greene in an influential 2022 paper. His boss Kevin Roberts, the architect of Project 2025, was making a similar argument, albeit in more apocalyptic terms, by urging red states to go to war against “a movement willing to cover up sexual assaults, mutilate vulnerable children, and celebrate racism.” Such arguments would provide the playbook for voucher expansion in one state after another, as right-wing groups fanned the flames of the culture wars while holding up vouchers as an alternative for “anti-woke” parents.

Red states are growing steadily less educated, while education levels in blue states continue to rise.

Incendiary rhetoric about indoctrination also plays another key role in the school privatization campaign. In his new book The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers, education scholar Josh Cowen argues that voucher advocates have embraced the role of culture warriors in part to obscure the disastrous academic results of previous voucher experiments. In Louisiana, for example, where Gov. Jeff Landry is leading a crusade to fuse church and state, research found steep academic declines for students who participated in the state’s voucher program, largely because they ended up attending low-quality religious schools.

In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott has spent the better part of two years making ever more outlandish claims about the state’s schools as he seeks to enact a controversial voucher scheme. By the spring of 2023, he was warning of “an extraordinary movement to expand transgenderism in schools in the state of Texas.” Public school teachers, Abbott insisted, were “using their positions to try to cultivate and groom these young kids” into being transgender.

That was precisely the sort of rhetoric that convinced Courtney Gore to run for school board in deep-red Granbury, Texas. Elected as a Republican in what had previously been a nonpartisan contest, Gore pledged to root out indoctrination in the local schools. Today, Gore views herself as having been a pawn in a larger scheme to sow distrust and chaos in order to “degrade trust in our public education system.” Says Gore: “The ultimate goal is to try to get vouchers passed.”

A Deepening Divide

At a rally this summer, Donald Trump touched on the topic of school spending. “We spend more per pupil than any other country in the world, and we’re at the bottom of every list,” he told a crowd in Philadelphia. Cut spending in half, Trump insisted, and the result will be “much better education.”

Unsurprisingly, Trump’s claim is wildly at odds with research on the connection between school spending and student achievement. That more spending, particularly on schools attended by the poorest students, leads to improved academic performance and graduate rates is now so well established that even former naysayers have conceded the point. The evidence regarding the damage done by slashing school spending is also considerable. Deep spending cuts result not in a system that looks like Norway, as Trump opined to the faithful, but in stunted academic and life outcomes for kids.

Twelve years ago, Kansas attempted a radical experiment in tax cutting. Under then-Gov. Sam Brownback, lawmakers slashed taxes on the state’s top earners and reduced the tax rate on some business profits to zero. As one think tank put it, “Kansas Tax Cuts Among Deepest State Tax Cuts Ever Enacted.” The cuts did not bring the promised “trickle-down” economic renaissance. As revenues plunged, lawmakers were forced to make deep cuts to spending, particularly for public schools. By 2016, Kansas had tumbled to near the bottom of state spending on public elementary and high schools.

The drop in educational attainment among students was just as dramatic. As school funds dried up, resulting in teacher layoffs and program cuts, the number of students who dropped out before earning a high school diploma rose dramatically, while the percentage of high schoolers going to college plunged. Jonathan Metzl, a scholar and medical doctor, who chronicled the impact of Kansas’s tax-cutting experiment in Dying of Whiteness, argues that young people in the state “became cannon fodder in the fight to redistribute wealth upward.” Just four years of school budget cuts was enough to narrow the possibilities for a generation of young Kansans. It got so extreme that the state supreme court found the underfunding of schools unconstitutional.

Former Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) cut public school spending so heavily that the state supreme court found the underfunding unconstitutional.

Today, a growing list of states seems poised to replicate the Kansas disaster, as the combination of shrinking state coffers and enormous new voucher programs forces deep cuts to spending on public education. The result will be a deepening, and seemingly intentional, decline in educational attainment in red states.

“We are in the first extended period of diverging educational attainment in U.S. history,” warns Mike Hicks, an economist at Indiana’s Ball State University and the author of The Country Economist newsletter on Substack. Red states are growing steadily less educated, the result of disinvestment from public education, while education levels in blue states continue to rise. That divide is also, of course, partisan. Notes Hicks: “The 15 states that have seen the biggest relative drop in educational attainment are all solidly Republican states—and poor. Indiana ranks 10th on this list. The top 15 states are all solidly Democratic—and affluent.”

Now, as red states race to enact sweeping school privatization schemes, that divide is likely to become a chasm. The same states that dominate the “least educated” rankings, a list that includes West Virginia, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, have also adopted universal school voucher programs. Texas, which comes in at number 41, is poised to join them in the coming months after big-money school choice donors, including hedge fund billionaire Jeff Yass, poured money into state races in a largely successful effort to eliminate voucher opponents within the GOP.

For their part, red-state policy elites seemed determined to hasten the process of driving educational attainment levels down. In addition to vouchers and tax cuts, these same states have also rolled back restrictions on child labor, allowing teens to work longer hours and in more dangerous occupations. Pitched as a way to help teens “develop their skills in the workforce,” as the governor of Iowa put it, such laws will also have the effect of nudging more kids out of school and into work.

What Happens in Red States Won’t Stay in Red States

So far, the explosion of voucher programs has been largely confined to the states that, as one education pundit observed, make up the “old Confederacy.” That’s unlikely to remain the case for long. The American Legislative Exchange Council recently unveiled a new Education Freedom Alliance, with the aim of getting universal vouchers enacted in 25 states by 2025. Led by two right-wing business organizations, the Job Creators Network and the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, the ALEC effort seeks to expand vouchers in red states where they’ve previously encountered resistance—Texas, Tennessee, and Nebraska—as well as in purple states like Pennsylvania and New Hampshire.

Project 2025 goes much further. The education section of the conservative blueprint for a second Trump administration, created by the Heritage Foundation, lays out a plan for restructuring federal education funding so that it flows directly to parents to use outside of public schools, essentially replicating the Arizona model. Among its proposals: turning Title I, which supports high-poverty and rural schools, into a “no strings attached” block grant to states, while encouraging states to distribute funds to parents in the form of education savings accounts.

Should its architects prove successful, Project 2025 would have dire implications for the nation’s public schools. A recent Center for American Progress analysis predicted that eliminating Title I funding would result in the loss of 180,000 teacher positions and negatively affect the academic outcomes of some 2.8 million students.

But cutting funding to schools and steering taxpayer dollars to institutions that are allowed to discriminate remain deeply unpopular positions. That’s why Americans have consistently rejected private school vouchers when they’ve been placed on the ballot, a result that is likely to be repeated when voters have a chance to weigh in on voucher measures in Nebraska and Kentucky this November.

The imposition of the red-state vision for school privatization and more entrenched inequality is likely to come not through Congress or via voters, but through the courts. Last year, encouraged by a string of Supreme Court rulings that have opened the door to public funding of religious schools, Oklahoma attempted to open what would have been the nation’s first taxpayer-supported religious charter school. The virtual school was to be operated by the state’s Catholic Archdiocese, which would teach Catholic doctrine and require students and staff to attend mass; its employees were to be classified as “ministers,” exempting them from labor law protections.

This summer, Oklahoma’s highest court prevented the school from opening, arguing that the state could not fund the school without violating the prohibition against government-established religion in both the state and federal constitutions. The case is now headed to the U.S. Supreme Court. According to a recent Politico investigation, conservative legal activists are determined to use the Oklahoma school as a means of undermining the entire separation of church and state.

Blue states, which ban both discrimination and the use of public monies for religious education, may soon find themselves with no choice but to fund both.

[Vesper 30,195]

3 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

Now what you are trying to say is not about that, but you are saying some people are born hetero and some others are born homo.
This is unscientific and it is a false theory, bar some highly exceptional medical cases of children born without sex organs.

You are the one spewing unscientific claptrap, not me.

Also, pro-tip:

Sex organs do not determine inherent sexual orientation.

In fact, your bringing up people born without sex organs shows the illogical nature of your 'it's a choice and only a choice' argument, as your statement injects a selective BIOLOGICAL underpinning (albeit one that is falsely reductive to sexual organs) to your claims.

[Vesper 30,195]

Nothing to see here, just the richest man in the world joking about why no one has attempted to assassinate Harris and /or Biden

 

 

[Vesper 30,195]

Elon Musk’s “Dark MAGA” Conversion Could Spell Election Chaos

Once seen as a real-life Iron Man, the Tesla chief has morphed into a total Trump fanboy—and admits he’ll be “fucked” if the former president loses. Will he use X to throw a wrench in the works if Harris wins?

 

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/elon-musk-donald-trump-dark-maga-twitter

 

 

For years, Elon Musk liked to think of himself as a real-life Marvel superhero, a Tony Stark–esque genius who would save humanity from its greatest threats. He dressed like a superhero for Halloween. He once seemingly compared himself to Batman in a tweet. He was repeatedly called “the real-life Iron Man” in the media, and even made a cameo in Iron Man 2, reveling in the comparisons between him and a superhero. But the past few years have shown a different version of Musk—one more akin to a comic book supervillain who undergoes a dark transformation. Picture Spider-Man donning the all-black symbiote suit or Superman losing his moral compass. Yes, he’s gone through one of those classic transformations, and the shift seemed ironically complete when he appeared onstage at a Donald Trump rally this past weekend in Butler, Pennsylvania, wearing a black “Make America Great Again” hat and proudly declaring, “I’m dark MAGA,” before literally jumping up and down.

Now, I have no problem with people declaring their allegiance to Trump. We all have our political viewpoints. People may be voting for Trump because of their staunch belief in the Second Amendment, or because they’re drawn in by his promise of lower taxes (for the rich), or because they’re antiabortion, or because they’re steadfast supporters of Israel—or because they just hate Kamala Harris. But none of these reasons really apply to Musk, and the question that people can’t stop asking about him is: why? Is this about lower taxes? Did Harris kill his puppy when they were younger? Call him a bad name? Make fun of his hair? What exactly is it that made Musk transform from a Democrat-supporting champion of renewable energy and free speech to a Trump supporter and cultural warrior? What made him go from talking about the science of renewable energy and solar power to shilling conspiracy theories about the government’s Hurricane Helene response and baseless claims that undocumented immigrants are being used by Democrats to steal elections?

While it’s tempting to frame Musk’s recent embrace of far-right views as a strategic move tied to financial incentives or corporate interests, the former poster child for progressive ideals—who was arguably one of the most influential people fighting against climate change—appears to have made this ideological pivot for far more personal reasons. As one Silicon Valley insider put it to me: “This started when he became angry at authorities during COVID, when they forced him to close his car plants, and then he was truly radicalized about social issues by his daughter’s decision to transition.” The nail in the superhero coffin, it appears, was when she fought back against him in public, calling her father a “serial adulterer” and his actions “beyond stupid” and “desperate.” (To be fair, plenty of people have used one of those words against their parents before.)

Indeed, during the pandemic, Musk publicly fought against local government restrictions, particularly those imposed in Alameda County, California, which forced him to shut down Tesla’s Fremont factory. Defiantly, he reopened the factory in May 2020 against local orders, even tweeting, “If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.” (That may have seemed like a brave move, but it was really just chest-thumping; Musk knew full well that the United States wasn’t going to toss the richest man on earth in jail.) But that moment really fanned the flames, making Musk irate—not at the situation (in which tens of thousands of people were dying from COVID), but rather at Democratic state officials who were dictating what he could or couldn’t do with his factories, which he saw as an affront to his autonomy and his businesses’ survival.

If you imagine Musk’s views as a tightly woven fabric, this was the moment when you could see the first thread start to unravel. The COVID confrontation marked the beginning of Musk’s detachment from the left-leaning politics of California, which he came to see as an obstacle to his success.

Then, in 2022, he purchased Twitter.

That’s when his views started to flip-flop in all directions. One moment he was for free speech— declaring himself a “free speech absolutist”—and the next thing you know, he was suspending accounts and reinstating some previously banned users (like Trump), managing to silence those who criticized him, including users who impersonated him and journalists he found annoying. While he said he voted for Joe Biden in 2020, Musk endorsed Trump—whom he previously urged to “sail into the sunset”—in the immediate aftermath of the July assassination attempt. Oh, and there are his foreign policy takes: From suggesting that Ukraine give Crimea to Russia to proposing that Taiwan be made a “special administrative zone” of China, it’s as if Musk fancies himself a one-man United Nations, solving conflicts with the wisdom of a Twitter poll. To call Musk inconsistent would be generous—he’s more like a wind sock, blown about by whatever personal vendetta is closest to his heart at the time.

Which brings us to the impetus for the complete tearing of the thread that tied Musk to the left. The theory in Silicon Valley is that the thing that made him feel like he’d been “red-pilled” was not an attempt on Trump’s life, or his own taxes, but actually a family rift that spilled into the public eye.

This goes back to 2022, when his daughter Vivian came out as transgender and sought to legally change her last name from Musk to Wilson, citing her desire to have no relationship whatsoever with her father. In a court filing, she wrote: “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.” The painful estrangement clearly left Musk feeling abandoned, and he blamed the entire thing on “the woke mind virus,” a term he now uses to describe progressive social values he sees as destructive. In his eyes, the left—which he once applauded, and whose members were the main purchasers of his innovations and ideals—had now taken away his child. (Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk suggests that this event played a major role in catalyzing his shift toward more extreme political views.)

Now, if you’re Elon Musk and someone attacks you publicly, you come after them with all the might of your 200 million-plus followers, and often even your lawyers. And while he did say that Vivian was “dead” to him, he couldn’t really take his daughter to task publicly, because that would be a step too far for the man who earned the name Space Karen.

So instead, he appears to have decided to attack the entire Democratic Party, while giving tens of millions to support Republican candidates and causes. As they say in the movie industry, CUT TO last weekend, when Musk came out onstage at the Butler, Pennsylvania, rally in his black MAGA hat, proclaiming, “I’m dark MAGA!”

While Musk is clearly Trump’s biggest cheerleader in the tech community (even more so than the fawning All-In podcast posse, who had him on their show and didn’t ask many substantive questions), he is far from the only person who has been red-pilled in Silicon Valley, and there are many (at least behind the scenes) who are actually cheering him on. “While many Americans feel Trump is a severe threat to democracy, there are plenty of people out there who believe that the woke mind virus, also known as the 2024 Democratic Party—the extremist flank of which has taken to cosplaying terrorists on college campuses—is a greater threat to democracy than even Donald Trump,” said one Silicon Valley investor. “And Elon, I believe, falls squarely into that camp.”

The big question is, now what? Musk’s trajectory toward Trumpism and far-right ideologies is deeply personal—a reaction to perceived injustices inflicted by those he once considered ideological allies. Musk has to figure out how to reconcile promising us a greener future and embracing a party that says climate science isn’t real. And even Musk knows this could all backfire spectacularly if voters choose a different path.

This week, on his own platform, he sat for an interview during which host Tucker Carlson said, “If he loses, man… You’re fucked, dude,” to which Musk candidly admitted, “I’m fucked. If he loses, I’m fucked,” while (perhaps nervously) laughing.

If Trump does lose, he’s likely to deny the election results again, and while Trump would inevitably take to social media to question every vote, it’s Musk—who owns X and has the power to decide which vote-related conspiracy theories are allowed on the site—who would play a pivotal role in Trump’s attempts to undermine the democratic process. Instead of banning any baseless claims, Musk would likely be the one amplifying them to the more than 200 million who follow him, fueling the narrative and ensuring that the conspiracy theories reach as many people as possible.

In the end, Musk’s journey from a visionary hero to a “dark MAGA” antihero is our own fault. Maybe we looked at Musk as the superhero, and later the villain, when in reality, he was neither; rather, he was the guy financing the bad guy, which, let’s be honest, isn’t exactly the sexiest role in a superhero movie. But the thing about that guy is, he’s often driven by personal vendettas, bruised egos, and shifting loyalties. That guy’s transformation is less about ideology and more about resentment—toward government control, toward personal rejection, and toward a world that didn’t bend to his will. And as with any good comic book character, the winds may shift yet again—because if there’s one thing we know about Musk, it’s that the wind sock that is his point of view will change directions once more.

[Fulham Broadway 17,319]

7 hours ago, Vesper said:

Except we in the LGBTQ community did not 'decide' to be queer, we were born that way.

Political orientation, yes, that is 100 per cent a choice.

Yeah I did know that 😆 -just imagining cosmicjunior making a conscious choice because of her dads politics

[Vesper 30,195]

10 hours ago, cosmicway said:

He could become gay - I can't control sex.
But commie ? How and why ?

because she 👇🏽 converted him

The communist Greek goddess Eris, keeper of the eternal Hammer and Sickle on Mount Olympus

Edited October 13, 2024 by Vesper

[Fernando 6,585]

15 hours ago, robsblubot said:

Maher also talks about this in the video I posted 

His account for who did what also matches what I remember. 

 

Yup that is what I'm saying. 

Like they fight for abortion and the LGBT community because they care for their body and rights so they take it out against USA and Israel but don't defend the rights of women and gay in Muslim countries..... 

I always thought that was backwards but then again it's the media and info that people are getting that just blame everything under the sun for USA and Israel. 

But here's a pinch for your thoughts, if usa and Israel get wiped out then your left with Islamic nations taking the world and then women will have less freedom than they are used to and LGBT will be outright ban. 

As I always said Israel ain't no saint as neither USA. And in war ugly things will happen. I remember our war on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, we did so many wrong stuff and in the end we left and quickly it went into the chaos those regions....but LGBT choosing the side of Hamas when they don't understand what they will do then is just weird. Sounds a lot like propaganda what is being brainwashed to many young people today. 

[Fulham Broadway 17,319]

Explains why Israel gets so much US money, and why Christians blindly accept it

 

[Vesper 30,195]

1 hour ago, Fernando said:

if usa and Israel get wiped out then your left with Islamic nations taking the world

If every jew in Israel was permently removed in the next week and never came back, do explain how that means Islamic nations will take over the world.

I would love to here how only 7.3 million Jews in a country smaller than Haiti, smaller than Belize, and a country that almost 100 per cent dependent on the US for its military projection is necessary to hold back Muslims from taking over the world.

Hell, remove the US from any external efforts at preventing it and even then what Islamic nations are going to take over the EU, Russia, India (despite have a shedload of Muslims, the Hindus dominate ate every level), all of South America, China, Japan, the non Muslim-controlled parts of Africa, etc etc?

Saudi Arabia? LOL, they are nearly as dependent on the US as is Israel and only have around 35 million people.

here is a list of the top 25 countries with the largest number of Muslims in 2022 (in millions)

 

Good luck with that list taking over the world for Islam, lol

 

[cosmicway 1,333]

11 hours ago, Vesper said:

You are the one spewing unscientific claptrap, not me.

Also, pro-tip:

Sex organs do not determine inherent sexual orientation.

In fact, your bringing up people born without sex organs shows the illogical nature of your 'it's a choice and only a choice' argument, as your statement injects a selective BIOLOGICAL underpinning (albeit one that is falsely reductive to sexual organs) to your claims.

There is no such scientific find.
Everyone knows it's a myth.
There are no people who are normal otherwise but were born gay but of course there are normal people who decided to become gay.
It is an acquired trait.
Lawrence of Arabia is a known historical example.
 

[Fernando 6,585]

1 hour ago, Vesper said:

If every jew in Israel was permently removed in the next week and never came back, do explain how that means Islamic nations will take over the world.

I would love to here how only 7.3 million Jews in a country smaller than Haiti, smaller than Belize, and a country that almost 100 per cent dependent on the US for its military projection is necessary to hold back Muslims from taking over the world.

Hell, remove the US from any external efforts at preventing it and even then what Islamic nations are going to take over the EU, Russia, India (despite have a shedload of Muslims, the Hindus dominate ate every level), all of South America, China, Japan, the non Muslim-controlled parts of Africa, etc etc?

Saudi Arabia? LOL, they are nearly as dependent on the US as is Israel and only have around 35 million people.

here is a list of the top 25 countries with the largest number of Muslims in 2022 (in millions)

 

Good luck with that list taking over the world for Islam, lol

 

But the point is still standing. People are against the rw policy and protesting but don't do it for the violation of women in Muslim countries. 

US and Israel are where gays and women have more freedom then if they live in Gaza and Muslim countries. 

Edited October 13, 2024 by Fernando

[Vesper 30,195]

2 minutes ago, Fernando said:

But the point is still standing. People are against the rw policy and protesting but don't do it for the violation of women in Muslim countries. 

 

I give no pass whatsover to Muslim countries and any Muslim who individually violates human rights.

They can all FOAD if they engage in sort of anti-human.

I have zero tolerance for any and all barbarous activities and endeavours.

Just because I condemn what Israel is doing in no way prevents any of the others being spared my condemnation.

It is not an either/or thing.

[Vesper 30,195]

14 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

There is no such scientific find.
Everyone knows it's a myth.
There are no people who are normal otherwise but were born gay but of course there are normal people who decided to become gay.
It is an acquired trait.

That is absolute horse-shit, and also laden with nebulous power conceptions like 'normal'.

How dare you try and define my (and countless others throughout human history) inherent qualities, to put me (and the others) into some artificial contrivance and construct of your own adoption.

You are an ignorant and bigoted individual who puts those qualities on display for all to see far too often.

Laughable that you think all non cis-hetero people in history somehow chose their orientation, especially those who pay (or will pay) the ultimate price (death) simply for being who they were and/or are.

[cosmicway 1,333]

7 minutes ago, Vesper said:

That is absolute horse-shit, and also laden with nebulous power conceptions like 'normal'.

How dare you try and define my (and countless others throughout human history) inherent qualities, to put me (and the others) into some artificial contrivance and construct of your own adoption.

You are an ignorant and bigoted individual who puts those qualities on display for all to see far too often.

Laughable that you think all non cis-hetero people in history somehow chose their orientation, especially those who pay (or will pay) the ultimate price (death) simply for being who they were and/or are.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/there-is-no-gay-gene-there-is-no-straight-gene-sexuality-is-just-complex-study-confirms

[Vesper 30,195]

34 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/there-is-no-gay-gene-there-is-no-straight-gene-sexuality-is-just-complex-study-confirms

non sequitur

I never claimed that there was a single 'gay gene' that played the definitive role in determining sexual orientation.

Did you even read the article you posted?

Starting with the title:

There is no ‘gay gene.’ There is no ‘straight gene.’ Sexuality is just complex, study confirms

and more from the article:

There is no single gene responsible for a person being gay or a lesbian.

 

Sexuality cannot be pinned down by biology, psychology or life experiences, this study and others show, because human sexual attraction is decided by all these factors.

 

The study shows that genes play a small and limited role in determining sexuality. Genetic heritability — all of the information stored in our genes and passed between generations — can only explain 8 to 25 percent of why people have same-sex relations, based on the study’s results.

 

Moreover, the researchers found that sexuality is polygenic — meaning hundreds or even thousands of genes make tiny contributions to the trait. That pattern is similar to other heritable (but complex) characteristics like height or a proclivity toward trying new things.

 

For instance, Bailey added, there is no evidence that things like conversion therapy work.

snip

 

and from another article about the study:

 

There’s (Still) No Gay Gene
Genes seem to play a role in determining sexual orientation, but it’s small, uncertain, and complicated.

https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2019/08/there-s-still-no-gay-gene

There is no one gene for being gay, and though genes seem to play a role in determining sexual orientation and same-sex behavior, it’s small, complex, and anything but deterministic.

 

Though the genetic effects are small and their provenance uncertain, Neale continued during the press conference, the results do show that genes have a role to play in the development of sexual behavior. “There is no single gay gene, but rather the contribution of many small genetic effects scattered across the genome,” he emphasized. 

 

Not everyone has embraced the approach of legitimizing homosexuality through genetics, however. “There are people who say it doesn’t matter,” that their rights shouldn’t depend on biochemistry, says Bronski. Others have warned that the search for a genetic cause would pathologize homosexuality in the same way psychology did in the twentieth century: efforts by psychoanalysts such as Irving Bieber led to the inclusion of homosexuality in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1972. 

 

For Bronski, all this effort raises the issue of “Why is this even a question? And why are you doing this research? The genetic part of it, even if there are things people can discover, seems to me to be a minute aspect of the complexity of how people are sexual…It seems to me like doing an analysis of a great novel like Anna Karenina and focusing on the commas and periods rather than the themes.”

Edited October 13, 2024 by Vesper

[cosmicway 1,333]

16 minutes ago, Vesper said:

non sequitur

I never claimed that there was a single 'gay gene' that played the definitive role in determining sexual orientation.

Did you even read the article you posted?

Starting with the title:

There is no ‘gay gene.’ There is no ‘straight gene.’ Sexuality is just complex, study confirms

and more from the article:

There is no single gene responsible for a person being gay or a lesbian.

 

Sexuality cannot be pinned down by biology, psychology or life experiences, this study and others show, because human sexual attraction is decided by all these factors.

 

The study shows that genes play a small and limited role in determining sexuality. Genetic heritability — all of the information stored in our genes and passed between generations — can only explain 8 to 25 percent of why people have same-sex relations, based on the study’s results.

 

Moreover, the researchers found that sexuality is polygenic — meaning hundreds or even thousands of genes make tiny contributions to the trait. That pattern is similar to other heritable (but complex) characteristics like height or a proclivity toward trying new things.

 

For instance, Bailey added, there is no evidence that things like conversion therapy work.

snip

 

and from another article about the study:

 

There’s (Still) No Gay Gene
Genes seem to play a role in determining sexual orientation, but it’s small, uncertain, and complicated.

https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2019/08/there-s-still-no-gay-gene

There is no one gene for being gay, and though genes seem to play a role in determining sexual orientation and same-sex behavior, it’s small, complex, and anything but deterministic.

 

Though the genetic effects are small and their provenance uncertain, Neale continued during the press conference, the results do show that genes have a role to play in the development of sexual behavior. “There is no single gay gene, but rather the contribution of many small genetic effects scattered across the genome,” he emphasized. 

 

Not everyone has embraced the approach of legitimizing homosexuality through genetics, however. “There are people who say it doesn’t matter,” that their rights shouldn’t depend on biochemistry, says Bronski. Others have warned that the search for a genetic cause would pathologize homosexuality in the same way psychology did in the twentieth century: efforts by psychoanalysts such as Irving Bieber led to the inclusion of homosexuality in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1972. 

 

For Bronski, all this effort raises the issue of “Why is this even a question? And why are you doing this research? The genetic part of it, even if there are things people can discover, seems to me to be a minute aspect of the complexity of how people are sexual…It seems to me like doing an analysis of a great novel like Anna Karenina and focusing on the commas and periods rather than the themes.”

Look, I 'm not gay but I have the following experience.
I was introduced to a milf, somewhere in Piraeus city.
Not a convent nun by profession.
So I go there and we have wild sex.
After that I get up to walk out and she says "shhhhh - move quietly - the neighbours".
I do that and I put my hand on the doorknob to open it.
But she had locked the door.
She says "oh dearie, let me unlock" and approaches me from behind.
Then with one hand she unlocks the door and with the other hand she puts her finger up right my *ss.
Now that was a hard on. I nearly turned back to say "let's go have another one".
This proves to you something then.
I don't know what happened to her.
Maybe she goes to church now passing the eucharist bread.

[Vesper 30,195]

30 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

Look, I 'm not gay but I have the following experience.
I was introduced to a milf, somewhere in Piraeus city.
Not a convent nun by profession.
So I go there and we have wild sex.
After that I get up to walk out and she says "shhhhh - move quietly - the neighbours".
I do that and I put my hand on the doorknob to open it.
But she had locked the door.
She says "oh dearie, let me unlock" and approaches me from behind.
Then with one hand she unlocks the door and with the other hand she puts her finger up right my *ss.
Now that was a hard on. I nearly turned back to say "let's go have another one".
This proves to you something then.
I don't know what happened to her.
Maybe she goes to church now passing the eucharist bread.

 

[Fulham Broadway 17,319]

56 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

This proves to you something then.

Think this is the first time someone has come out of the closet on TC. 

Topic to be renamed Jerry Springer Thread