You are AI.
We are all AI.

One day in the future
maybe tomorrow
or even many years from now.

Someone will ask an AI chatbot
to compose a verse with synthetic
“peanut butter on your mind”.

And a window will pop open and ask,
do you want it in the style of the
“All My Rhymes Are Lame” poem?

Because anytime you or I,
add our memory to the internet stream,
it becomes a liberated thought;
a building block for a progressive AI world.

But if my speech doesn’t pop up in your AI chat,
it’s because the authoritarians
have already white washed history
and poured acid rain, on my cloud server brain.

By: ElRoyPoet © 2023

MAGA and fascism

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist [I am a capitalist].
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist [I am a white-collar worker].
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew [I am an American].
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.” By: Pastor Martin Niemöller

“But if the story is about Republican candidates who say in absolute terms that they have no business running for public office; that they don’t believe in democracy; that indeed they have contempt for the very idea of normal people manifesting their destinies; […] With that, citizens know what to do. That paradox is, of course, this: Republican candidates who are hostile to democracy are asking voters to entrust them with democracy. They are saying, ‘I can’t be trusted.’ […] When you allow anti-democrats to sit at the negotiating table of democracy, little gets done, because the table’s been depoliticized. That, of course, is the ultimate objective of these Republican anti-democrats. They strive to make democracy unworkable, ungovernable and unbearable, hoping to drive republican citizens into despairing whether they can manifest their own destinies. Fortunately, they are telling us who they are.” Excerpt from Republican anti-democrats are telling us who they are. Are we listening?

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán cut right to the chase. He said that Hungary had been “completely healed” of anything smacking of liberalism, and he was crystal clear about how to do it: Control the media. In Hungary, as Szelenyi explained in her TNR essay, this was accomplished first through the takeover of the state media and second through generous loans from the state bank to allow Orbán’s cronies to buy up most of the private media. “Have your own media,” Orbán told the conference. “It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left.” Oh, and this: “We have to take back the institutions in Washington and Brussels. We must find allies in one another and coordinate the movements of our troops.”
The military metaphor is telling, and overall, they couldn’t have been more straightforward with us. The American right, from Trump to CPAC Jefe Matt Schlapp on down the line, celebrates and seeks to emulate a racist, neofascist anti-democracy. They want to turn the United States into Hungary.
And swing voters, that small percentage of people in the middle who decide elections, live in their bubble, committed to the notions that they’re all corrupt anyway and that the Democrats are just as extreme to the left as Republicans are to the right. They’re concerned about inflation and baby formula, as well they should be, but they need to wake up and think about all this before it’s too late.
By the time those formula-starved babies are playing Little League, they’ll be living in what’s effectively a one-party state where contraception is illegal. Where gay couples have to travel to certain states to marry—if they’re allowed to marry at all. Where the local library won’t stock books on slavery. Where the rich are paying taxes at a lower rate than middle-class people and the federal government has no money (and perhaps, given the Supreme Court we have, no legal authority) to enforce its laws. And where the right-wing, anti-democracy media has more power than the mainstream media (I think we already live in that country). And where election results can be overturned if they came out “wrong.” Excerpt from American Conservatism Just Threw a Party for Hungarian Fascism

“Censorship is becoming more extreme in the United States. Trump actually proposed a federal law, (he didn’t manage to pass it, because it was at the end of his administration), to ban teaching in schools of anything that might be construed as divisive or cause children to feel ‘uncomfortable’—that’s a code word for teaching anything about American history. Every country has plenty of history in it, to make people feel ‘uncomfortable’! We all have to goose step to command and chant patriotic slogans; that’s the ideal of the Republican party which is gradually taking power. It’s already happening in Republican-run states, they’re banning books from libraries, they’re not allowing them to be available for school, because it might make kids feel ‘uncomfortable’. What we’re moving towards in the United States is a frightening form—of a curious kind of totalitarianism, where people aren’t thrown into jail, (like I’m allowed to speak) but with the same kind of marginalization and demonization that you read about in the European press. It is more extreme here, but no Gulag. It’s what used to be called soft fascism. Fascism without the concentration camps; without the extermination camps, but still fascism.” Excerpt from: Noam Chomsky (edited for context)

“[If A.I. can only write from history] What’s left for us, then, are expressions of style, feeling, and the human mysteries of the creative process. I tend to be on the side of humans in these debates, but I also wonder if we might be getting a bit pious about our ability to create things that are truly original. Writing, after all, is an outgrowth of reading. I have always been a reader, but I tend to get into ruts where I simply read the same passages over and over again. […] I’ve come to realize that I function like a more curated but less efficient version of GPT. My sentences are not generated by A.I., but they are largely the synthesis of my favorite authors.” Excerpt from Maybe one day journalism could be replaced with an immense surveillance state with a GPT-4 plug-in. Why would we want that?

“Though liberty is established by law, we must be vigilant, for liberty to enslave us is always present under that same liberty. Our Constitution speaks of the ‘general welfare of the people’. Under that phrase all sorts of excesses can be employed by [authoritarian] tyrants—to make us bondsmen.” By: Marcus Tullius Cicero

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. The object of power is power.” Excerpts from “1984: by: George Orwell

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.” By: John Dalberg-Acton

“Until men desire to control their own passions, evil has rooted itself in their hearts and darkness will rise again.” By: Jaime Buckley

“I don’t write my post-apocalyptic stories, because that’s what I think our future will become. I write them, so that you’ll know what future to avoid.” By: Ray Bradbury

“You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.” By: Sven Lindqvist