Donald Trump dropped by the United Nations General Assembly Tuesday so he could once again remind the world he’s a lying psychopath who utterly rejects the values of international diplomacy upon which the United Nations was founded. You know, just in case anyone had forgotten in the year since he last addressed the UN.
Unfortunately, Trump’s speech was not drowned out by an idling helicopter, so the whole thing was recorded; you can watch it here if you don’t mind the damage it’ll do to your brain.
Trump’s biggest headline-grabber came when he casually mused — yet again — about committing a little light genocide if he feels like it. Trump insisted that the decision would be his alone, because he’s president and can do whatever he wants.
TRUMP: I have a big decision to make. Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before, maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world?
Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?
Trump added that maybe he wouldn’t have to kill an entire nation of 93 million people, because Iran will surely agree to a deal after the November US elections.
The New York Times put Trump’s ultimatum into historical context (gift link), which is a useful thing to consider now and then when we hear the US president saying insane shit, noting that Trump’s speech
amounted to a pure American rejection of the concept behind the U.N.’s founding in 1945: to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”
The global body’s charter, written largely by the United States, expressly prohibited members from threatening or using force against a country’s territorial integrity unless acting in self-defense, or with the U.N.’s authorization.
Trump is so done with quaint old-fashioned notions like that, because he much prefers living in the late 19th Century and doing the whole “gunboat diplomacy” thing, but with murder drones and lots of exciting footage of explosions.
Throughout the speech, Trump doubled down on the theme that not only is the US the only nation that matters, but also that he alone is the great mover of US policy, no one else. He bragged (err, lied) that unlike the useless UN, he is a man of action, don’t question him:
[While] others have talked, I have acted. While others have spoken of peace, I have made peace. While others have ignored threats, I have confronted them. While others have talked of courage, America has shown it. While others have promised strength, I have used it to make America the most powerful country in the world.
He also insisted that, with his pointless quagmire in Iran, “we are settling years of unfinished business and we're doing it well,” although as we mentioned, he hasn’t yet decided whether the unfinished business will be “settled” by an agreement or by wiping Iran off the map, a thing he seems to think can be done with America’s “annihilate an entire country just like that” bomb (it’s secret).
Funny, though, he didn’t mention that his Iran war has dragged on for nearly seven months, after he repeatedly declared it won, over, or just a week or two away from total US victory.
While he was at it, Trump also celebrated his brilliant sneak attack on Venezuela in January, because doesn’t the US president have the power to kidnap foreign leaders and install replacements who’ll let Trump take those nations’ oil?
He was so excited about what he’d accomplished, insisting that “to the victor belong the spoils.” That has to be somewhere in the UN charter along with all the stupid peace crap.
But WAR wasn’t Trump’s only obsession. As he did last year, though not in as much detail, Trump insisted that science isn’t real, especially if companies that support him might find science an inconvenient truth. He announced that as of right now, “artficial intelligence” has officially been renamed “super intelligence,” because he likes to say “super” a lot, and there can be no international agreements limiting the technology, because that’d be a “globalist scheme” to hurt US tech firms.
The man with a “natural instinct for science” because his uncle was an MIT prof explained that calling predictive algorithms “artificial intelligence” is very bad, because “the use of the word ‘artificial’ makes intelligence fake. It makes it sound fake. And it is not fake; it's actually amazing, but we have to be careful.”
For the record, no, the computers aren’t “intelligent,” they just do pattern matching really fast, although often very badly too, so for fuckssake we shouldn’t be calling it “intelligence” at all, goddamn it.
But yes, Trump insisted that the official name is now “super intelligence,” apparently unaware that AI researchers already use that term for something completely different, a so-far hypothetical version of machine intelligence that “has cutting-edge cognitive functions and highly developed thinking skills more advanced than any human.”
Exactly nobody expects Trump’s term to reshape the field, but it will be mandatory in a lot of government documents that will need to be fixed after he’s gone. Actually, that’s one task that current non-intelligent “AI” could handle pretty easily without blowing us all up or converting all mass in the universe into paperclips. Or uploading everyone’s brain into a My Little Pony simulation.
In another remarkable display of saying a mostly true thing but turning it into a completely backwards lie, Trump went on to crow that artificial intelligence is no more a threat to humanity than climate change is.
TRUMP: The very same people who said we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming, a name since reborn to climate change because the planet was cooling, not warming, and nobody was dead.
These are the same people that are now saying that AI is going to kill us all, that robots are going to attack us, that everything is going to be a total disaster. Same group of people! This is the group that came up with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, the Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine hoax, climate change, open borders.
As CNN notes, Trump has a lot wrong here: 1) No scientists have said we’ll all die in 12 years; they said, in 2018, that we had about that long to get the world off fossil fuels in time to prevent warming from increasing by 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7° F) over pre-industrial norms, the somewhat arbitrary goal that still looked possible when the Paris climate agreement was formed.
Also (two lies at once): No, nobody swapped out “global warming” for “climate change” to “hide” that the planet is cooling, because it isn’t. Both terms are useful to the discussion, because greenhouse emissions are heating the planet. The many effects of that warming are what gets called “climate change.” And if anyone pushed for one term over the other, we should blame Frank Luntz, who advised George W. Bush in 2003 to talk about “climate change” because focus groups found voters were more likely to demand action to stop “global warming.”
And of course Trump’s claim that nobody has died due to climate change is an obscene lie, given that it’s already caused more extreme weather, droughts, food chain disruptions, and population migrations than there would have been without global warming. Here we’ll just go with CNN’s overview:
[Experts] widely disagree that “nobody” has died from the various impacts of a warming world. It’s impossible to pinpoint a precise death number, but some estimates total in the millions. The deaths are likely to continue; the World Health Organization says, “Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year, from undernutrition, malaria, diarrhea and heat stress alone.”
We sort of wish we could teleport people into the pages of a book. Just send Trump, his Cabinet, and the top executives of the world’s fossil fuel companies into the first chapter of The Ministry for the Future (spoiler warnings at link), and we might see some changes, the fucking end.
OPEN THREAD.
[NYT (gift link) / Guardian / Politifact / CNN / The Hill]
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Meanwhile..
𝑁𝑒𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑦𝑎ℎ𝑢 𝑤𝑎𝑙𝑘𝑒𝑑 𝑖𝑛𝑡𝑜 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑈𝑛𝑖𝑡𝑒𝑑 𝑁𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠 𝑒𝑥𝑝𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑎 𝑔𝑙𝑜𝑏𝑎𝑙 𝑎𝑢𝑑𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒—𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑖𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑎𝑑 𝑔𝑜𝑡 𝑟𝑜𝑤𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑒𝑚𝑝𝑡𝑦 𝑠𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑠.
𝐴𝑠 ℎ𝑒 𝑡𝑜𝑜𝑘 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑝𝑜𝑑𝑖𝑢𝑚, 𝑑𝑖𝑝𝑙𝑜𝑚𝑎𝑡𝑠 𝑓𝑟𝑜𝑚 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑛 50 𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑡𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑠 𝑤𝑎𝑙𝑘𝑒𝑑 𝑜𝑢𝑡. 𝐴𝑛 𝐼𝑠𝑟𝑎𝑒𝑙𝑖 𝑡𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦 𝑙𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑟 𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑑 77 𝑑𝑒𝑙𝑒𝑔𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠 𝑙𝑒𝑓𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑛 ℎ𝑒 𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝑠𝑝𝑒𝑎𝑘.
𝑁𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑠𝑎𝑦𝑠 “𝑔𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦” 𝑞𝑢𝑖𝑡𝑒 𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝑑𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑎 𝑠𝑝𝑒𝑒𝑐ℎ 𝑡𝑜 𝑎 ℎ𝑎𝑙𝑓-𝑒𝑚𝑝𝑡𝑦 𝑟𝑜𝑜𝑚.
𝑊ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟 𝑁𝑒𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑦𝑎ℎ𝑢 𝑐𝑎𝑚𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑠𝑎𝑦, 𝑎 𝑠𝑖𝑔𝑛𝑖𝑓𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑛𝑡 𝑛𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑓 𝑔𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑛𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑠 ℎ𝑎𝑑 𝑎𝑙𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑑𝑦 𝑑𝑒𝑐𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 ℎ𝑎𝑑 𝑛𝑜 𝑖𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑖𝑛 ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑖𝑡.
OT: The mourning dove that has been coming around for two years (I named her Clio) and bobs her head at me for sunflower seeds and coos at me and comes around when she even hears my voice from out of the window BROUGHT HER BABY TODAY!!!!!!!!
I'm so excited. She trusts me enough to bring her little baby. I actually had to look it up b/c I've never seenone before and it was a baby mourning dove. SQUEE!!!!!!!!!