Daily Archives: 15 September 2026

Dishonesty of the Left and of the Ex-Right

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Michigan’s closet socialist and Progressive-Democratic Party nominee for the US Senate, Abdul el-Sayed, has said that he would

mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my faith.
Tomorrow, I’ll mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my country.

When Michigan’s Republican Party candidate for the US Senate, Mike Rogers, demurred, calling el-Sayed’s downplaying the tragedy of those Americans lost to terrorism—a cynically dishonest downplaying IMO—disgusting, the ex-conservative and now Leftist apologist and conspiracy pusher, Tucker Carlson, piped up.

Understanding that the Bush administration was wrong to kill hundreds of thousands of people and waste trillions of dollars in Iraq, even though, again, Iraq did not do 9/11, is disgusting?
We are really not sure who Mike Rogers is, but if anyone in Michigan’s Senate race is “unfit to serve in public office,” it is him[.]

Leave aside Carlson’s foolishness in saying he doesn’t know about Rogers, but he knows about Rogers’ unfitness. There’s plenty of cynical disinformation and misdirection in the rest of Carlson’s apologist statement favoring el-Sayed.

The Bush administration did not kill hundreds of thousands of people and waste trillions of dollars in Iraq. That claim, originating from Iranian-backed Iraqis, has long since been debunked. Nor were trillions of dollars spent in the operation, much less wasted. The outcome was the removal of the murderous Hussein regime from power, with the Iraqis given, finally, a chance to govern themselves. That they’re apparently not optimizing on that chance is irrelevant to this discussion’s subject.

The premise that we went into Iraq in response to 9/11 is deliberate misdirection. We invaded Iraq that second time to prevent Saddam Hussein from having WMD—in particular chemical weapons, which he had a history of using on the Kurds in Iraq, on the Arabs in southeastern Iraq, on any other group of Iraqis who disagreed with him. (That Hussein no longer had chemical weapons was learned only after the fact.)

Mishmash

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In a WSJ article about the Great AI Freakout, centered on fears of a supposedly coming AI apocalypse, there was this bit, which illustrates the press’ involvement in potentiating the freakout, all gathered up in one mishmash of…error.

Opposition to the widespread network of Flock Safety AI-enabled surveillance cameras in the US took hold this summer, just as details about OpenAI’s autonomous hacking of the company Hugging Face became public. In the background was a drumbeat of pushback against data centers and worries that the technology could result in widespread job loss.

Laying all of these at the feet of AI is the article’s news writers’ disinformation (and they’re not alone in perpetrating this).

Opposition to Flock Safety’s cameras has very little to do with AI and very much to do with opposition to widespread and spreading government surveillance of us ordinary Americans.

Opposition to data centers has very little to do with AI and very much to do with the data centers’ need for water and electricity at the expense of rising water and electricity costs to us ordinary Americans and to the potential for polluting potable water. (As an aside, while those concerns were, early on, largely justified, data center designers’ and builders’ increasing emphasis on recycling the water they use and including their own power plants in the construction designs largely eliminates the basis for those concerns.)

Buildout of the data centers, further, creates a myriad of construction and ancillary jobs, and the operation of the centers still leads to increases in employment, if only modest ones.

Even the autonomous AI hacking of Hugging Face is overblown. The hacking capability itself is a legitimate concern, but the escape of the AI hackers wasn’t executed by AI so much as it was allowed by the human AI developers’ negligence in maintaining an air gap between their development facilities and the Internet.

At bottom, AI is like any other tool: highly useful when used properly, highly dangerous when used carelessly or misused deliberately.

We’re not all going to die in 10 years, as a colleague of the disgruntled, or panicky, ex-Anthropic employee howled. Far more likely, we’re going to prosper once we grunt through the transition, just as we have done during and after all our prior technology leaps.