The Economist’s choice of this year’s word of the year tells us what its editors see as the biggest challenge our civilization is facing. It isn’t the disastrous wars in Ukraine and the Middle East in which the Atlantic alliance is fully implicated. It isn’t even the destabilization of the global financial order so long organized around the unassailable status of the United States dollar. It isn’t rising temperatures causing climate havoc or the towering levels of debt that threaten, at a moment’s notice, to unravel the global financial system. No, for The Economist, dedicated to the ideal of “liberal rationality,” the real threat worth focusing on can only be… Donald Trump.

The “word of the year” article bears the subtitle: “The Greeks knew how to talk about politics and power.” Classical references always help buttress one’s case. The article cites Plato and Aristotle’s “political thinking,” which may be a subtle hint that there has been much of it in recent years. After seven paragraphs — punctuated by various interesting but not always very accurate details concerning history, philosophy and language — the article finally reveals, in three sentences, the identity of the mysterious word it has selected.

“So the word everyone was Googling was kakistocracy: the rule of the worst. The first root, kakos, is found in few others in English. ‘Kakistocracy’ is not found in ancient sources; it seems to have been coined in English as an intentional antonym to aristocracy, originally ‘rule by the best.’”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Kakistocracy:

The natural form any democracy will take when its political system is made subservient to the principles that undergird liberal, free market capitalism, in which the overriding authority of an anonymous class of wealthy individuals is rendered invisible thanks to the ruse of allowing unwealthy people to cast a vote in elections engineered by the same invisible wealthy class for one or another of their preselected representatives.

Contextual note

Our Devil’s Dictionary gloss obviously differs from — and directly contradicts — The Economist’s far more succinct definition. Let’s explore the reasons.

Our first objection to the content of the article may seem trivial, but is significant in that it points to something that strongly resembles “disinformation.” The article tells us that the root “kakos” in Greek means “worst.” In fact, it means “bad, inferior, worthless or poor.” Κάκιστος (kakistos), however, is the superlative of kakos and does mean “excessively bad” and in some contexts “worst.” The article also misleadingly informs us that kakos is “found in few other” words in English, but a notable example is “cacophony,” which obviously does not mean the “worst sound,” but simply bad, incoherent, unharmonic or disagreeable sound.

But let’s drop the niggling while trying to be charitable and forgiving in this season of good cheer. Apart from the venial sin of offering an inaccurate explanation of a Greek word, we should acknowledge that the magazine’s “word of the year” ritual is little more than an innocent exercise of holiday season levity. The article is essentially entertainment. It makes no pretension to be taken as serious scholarship… other than its annoying invocation of Plato and Aristotle, which actually does come across as pretentious.

Nevertheless, it’s there for another reason: to make a polemical political point. The Economist clearly sees Trump as a difficult morsel to digest. When the article informs us that kakistocracy is the inversion of aristocracy, we sense an undeclared nostalgia for an epoch in which the nation’s values reflected the refined culture of its nobility. The power wielded by the aristocratic caste disappeared with the empire, but not without regret. The free market’s new ruling class successfully promoted the culture of meritocracy to replace aristocracy. The author nevertheless reminds us that aristocracy is literally “the rule of the best,” just in case we allow ourselves to become too enamored of meritocratic upstarts. Still, The Economist’s readers will have no trouble empathizing with the idea of rule by the meritorious. This idea pretty much defines the social status of the majority of the magazine’s readership.

The choice of kakistocracy expresses the magazine’s pessimism, not about the state of the world — which is quite naturally becoming increasingly kakistocratic — but about the situation in the “indispensable nation,” the US. Its critique focuses on that particular embodiment of evil known as Trump. But in doing so, this liberal-minded British publication at least avoids the kind of alarmism that infects US media when it lays into Trump. Relying on irony rather than invective, The Economist bravely attempts to make an erudite joke. But, in this particular instance, it largely fails to where so many of its literary predecessors have succeeded, from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne, Lewis Carroll, Monty Python and beyond.

Here is one example: “Kakistocracy has the crisp, hard sounds of glass breaking. Whether that is a good or bad thing depends on whether you think the glass had it coming.” The synesthetic metaphor of breaking glass is intriguing. But the attempt at wit goes nowhere. It fails because there is no reasonable hypothetical case in which the reader might think that glass has “something coming.” Breaking glass, for almost everyone, including Greeks, is “kakos.”

Even worse is this attempt at an amusing analogy: “Last time round he [Trump] seemed to fire more officials than most presidents have trips on Air Force One.” What could possibly justify the comparison of fired officials to presidential trips on Air Force One? Talk about apples and oranges!

Historical note

The Economist is known for its ability to avoid alarmism, keep a stiff upper lip and confidently roll with the crises and disappointments that sometimes rock a world order the journal prefers to defend. Since 1843, it has promoted the central themes of a worldview characterized at the time as laissez-faire and today as economic liberalism, including its scion neoliberalism.

For the past century and more particularly throughout the “unipolar moment” in which the US, having assimilated the “political thinking” (ideology) of the Plato and Aristotle of our age — Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher — we have been living confidently in an economic utopia characterized by democracy and a “rules-based international order.” Enforcing the rules consisted in maintaining the belief that actions undertaken by the governments in our democracy were made in the name of the people and with their consent.

The double tsunami of 2016 — first Brexit in the UK, then Trump’s election in the US — began to sow a few doubts about the future of democracy. The voters could easily be persuaded to make the wrong decisions. In so doing, they were breaking down the force of the rules that had been put in place by the wise leaders elected in the past (especially Reagan and Thatcher). Their wisdom suddenly appeared to be called into question.

The door to kakistocracy was now wide open. It took a second Trump election, in which he won even the popular vote, to make it official. For The Economist, kakistos, the worst, is yet to come… and it will be installed on January 20, 2025.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Economist Blames the Greeks for Trump’s Election appeared first on Fair Observer.

People are wondering today what role the United States has played in the events in the region since 2011. A leaked State Department document from December 2012 signed by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton throws some light on that role with regard to Syria.

Wondering how ChatGPT might help to put these facts into a new historical perspective, I proposed the following prompt:

“Wikileaks published a State Department memo signed by Hillary Clinton and dated December 31, 2012. It was officially declassified in November 2015. In it, the Obama administration clearly defined the policy it intended to implement with regard to Syria. One statement in that email might seem surprising today is this:

‘But other than the laudable purpose of saving Libyan civilians from likely attacks by Qadaffi’s regime, the Libyan operation had no long-lasting consequences for the region.’

Given that a lot of things have happened in Libya since then, how accurate is this denial of long-lasting consequences?”

“The assertion from the Obama administration that the 2011 intervention in Libya ‘had no long-lasting consequences for the region’ appears deeply inaccurate when viewed in retrospect. The situation in Libya and its broader impact on the region has had profound and far-reaching consequences, many of which continue to unfold. Here’s an overview of the long-lasting effects:

1. Libya’s Fragmentation and Persistent Instability

• After the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, Libya descended into political and social chaos. The country fractured into a patchwork of competing militias, tribal factions, and rival governments.
• By 2014, the conflict escalated into a full-scale civil war, pitting the internationally recognized Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli against forces loyal to General Khalifa Haftar in the east (Libyan National Army – LNA).
• The collapse of state authority left a power vacuum that remains largely unfilled to this day, leading to a prolonged state of instability.

2. Militancy, Terrorism, and Proliferation of Armed Groups

• The fall of Gaddafi led to the unchecked spread of weapons across Libya and neighboring regions. Libya became an arms hub, supplying weapons to insurgents, militias, and terrorists throughout North Africa and the Sahel.
• Extremist groups, including Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and ISIS, exploited Libya’s chaos to gain a foothold. In 2015, ISIS even established a stronghold in the city of Sirte.
• This has turned Libya into a base for jihadist networks and a staging ground for terrorist operations across the region.

3. Regional Spillover Effects: The Sahel and Beyond

• One of the most significant consequences of Libya’s collapse was the destabilization of Mali and the broader Sahel region.
• After Gaddafi’s fall, Tuareg fighters who had served in his army returned to northern Mali with weapons, leading to the 2012 Tuareg rebellion. This rebellion was quickly overtaken by Islamist militants, plunging Mali into crisis.
• This instability has spread throughout the Sahel, with countries like Niger, Burkina Faso, and Chad struggling to contain growing insurgencies fueled by weapons and fighters spilling out of Libya.

4. The Refugee and Migrant Crisis

• Libya became a major transit hub for refugees and migrants seeking to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Europe. The absence of effective state authority has allowed human trafficking networks to thrive.
• This contributed significantly to the European migrant crisis in 2015, straining EU resources and fueling political tensions across the continent.

5. Geopolitical Competition in Libya

• Libya has become a theater for proxy wars involving foreign powers. Countries such as Turkey, Russia, the UAE, Egypt, and others have backed rival factions, turning the conflict into an internationalized proxy struggle.
• Russia’s increasing involvement in Libya (through the Wagner Group) has added a new dimension to geopolitical competition in North Africa.

6. Economic Collapse and Humanitarian Crisis

• Libya’s oil-dependent economy, once a source of prosperity, has been devastated by the conflict. Oil production has been repeatedly disrupted by battles between factions.
• The humanitarian situation remains dire, with millions of Libyans affected by conflict, food insecurity, and lack of healthcare.

Conclusion: Far-Reaching and Ongoing Consequences

The Obama administration’s statement in 2012—claiming no long-lasting regional consequences—significantly underestimated the fallout of the Libyan intervention. The collapse of the Libyan state triggered a chain reaction that destabilized the Sahel, contributed to the rise of terrorism, fueled migration crises, and intensified geopolitical competition. Today, Libya remains a symbol of the unintended consequences of foreign interventions, with its instability continuing to impact regional and global dynamics.”

I continued the conversation with the following prompt.

“The Clinton email contains the following recommendations: ‘Washington should start by expressing its willingness to work with regional allies like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar to organize, train and arm Syrian rebel forces. The announcement of such a decision would, by itself, likely cause substantial defections from the Syrian military. Then, using territory in Turkey and possibly Jordan, U.S. diplomats and Pentagon officials can start strengthening the opposition. It will take time. But the rebellion is going to go on for a long time, with or without U.S. involvement. The second step is to develop international support for a coalition air operation. Russia will never support such a mission, so there is no point operating through the UN Security Council. Some argue that U.S. involvement risks a wider war with Russia. But the Kosovo example shows otherwise.’

‘Arming the Syrian rebels and using western air power to ground Syrian helicopters and airplanes is a low-cost high payoff approach.’

Does this accurately represent the role the US has played over the past 13 years?”

Below is a short version of ChatGPT’s response, including only the initial assessment and conclusion.

“The recommendations outlined in the Clinton email—organizing, arming, and supporting Syrian rebels, combined with a potential coalition air operation—reflect ideas that did, to some extent, align with U.S. policy in the Syrian conflict. However, the email oversimplifies the complexities of U.S. involvement and the consequences that unfolded. Over the past 13 years, the U.S. role in Syria has been shaped by a series of strategic choices, hesitations, and unintended consequences. Here’s a more accurate analysis of U.S. involvement in Syria since 2011:

Conclusion: Partial Alignment, but Limited Success

The email’s recommendations—arming rebels, organizing opposition forces, and using air power—align with aspects of U.S. policy, but the outcomes were far more complex and problematic:

• The U.S. did arm and train rebels, but with limited success due to fragmentation and extremist infiltration.
• The U.S. focused on ISIS rather than Assad, abandoning broader regime-change goals as the war progressed.
• A no-fly zone or air operation against the Syrian regime never materialized, largely due to fears of direct conflict with Russia.
• The conflict evolved into a geopolitical quagmire involving Russia, Iran, Turkey, and others, limiting U.S. influence.

In hindsight, the claim that this approach would be ‘low-cost and high-payoff’ was overly optimistic. The Syrian conflict became a prolonged and devastating war with significant human, political, and geopolitical consequences—many of which remain unresolved to this day.”

I must add one final observation concerning ChatGPT’s curious claim that “the email oversimplifies the complexities of U.S. involvement and the consequences that unfolded.” ChatGPT clearly lives in the eternal present. Unlike most of us, it confuses the future and past. What can it possibly mean to say that an email from 2012 “oversimplifies” events that took over the following 13 years? You can only oversimplify a complexity that already exists, not a future one.

This exchange underlines a more fundamental problem of oversimplification: the kind of strategic decision-making that has occurred regularly in the formulation of US foreign policy. ChatGTP points to this when it notes that the email “underestimated the fallout of the Libyan intervention.”

This formulation is itself an understatement. The email foresaw “no long-lasting consequences.” “No” means zero. ChatGPT lists 15 grouped under six headings. There’s quite a gap between 0 and 15. But isn’t that part of a pattern that has been repeated in Iran in 1953; Vietnam in 1964, Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, to mention only those from prominent cases?

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue.

*[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At Fair Observer, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Outside the Box: ChatGPT Gets Lost in Time in Syria appeared first on Fair Observer.

The obvious answer is the media. But few people in the United States trust the media these days. Surely, in a democracy “of the people, by the people and for the people,” there will be a few scoundrels who make their way into government, but we can assume that the majority merits our confidence. Well, according to a Pew survey titled, “Public Trust in Government: 1958-2024,” the current level of trust has fallen to 22%.

December 2024 offers us a vision of exacerbated tensions in various parts of the globe. At such moments, we expect our leaders to speak with some degree of honesty. Especially when the stakes are high and decisions become a matter of life or death. We accept that some things must remain secret. But the democratic principle implies an effort on the part of our governments to offer a minimum of clarity concerning the facts and their intentions.

Alas, the duty of obscurity seems to have replaced the ideal of clarity as the norm. Clever government officials have good reasons to justify their brazen stonewalling. First, national security requires concealing one’s true intentions. After all, if revealed, the enemy will profit. Then there is the fact that in any situation of conflict, we should accept the reality of the “fog of war,” a concept erroneously but persistently attributed to Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz by commentators, some of whose brains may be subjected to a permanent fog.

What are US presidents for if not guiding the nation towards an understanding of the truth? In August 2023, US President Joe Biden informed us that “Putin has already lost the war” in Ukraine. An obvious fact. The truth teller now describes the recent history of US policy towards Syria. “Over the past four years, my administration pursued a clear and principled policy toward Syria. First, we made clear from the start sanctions on Assad would remain in place unless he engaged seriously in a political process to end the civil war.”

Today’s Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Principled policy:

A course of action relentlessly pursued thanks to the capacity of some people in a position of authority to persistently ignore surrounding reality.

Contextual note

Biden uses two epithets, “clear” and “principled,” to describe his policy. The word “clear” is certainly the most overused word by any spokesperson for the White House or State Department. At briefing sessions with personalities such as the White House’s Karine Jean-Pierre and the State Department’s Matthew Miller, whenever a journalist poses embarrassing questions that highlight potential ambiguity or equivocation with regard to the “noble” principles that guide US actions, they respond with the formula, “We have been very clear about…” In one random example, the press briefing session of March 27, 2024, Max Miller crafted this litany of explanations:

• So we have been very clear about this matter.
• So we have made that quite clear to them.
• So I will say that we have a fundamental disagreement with the Israeli Government over this issue, and we have made that quite clear.
• … we will continue to be clear about what we think about these actions.
• …we have made clear that we believe that allegations of genocide are unfounded.
• …we have made clear that the United States is not going to send any troops to Ukraine.
• And I think it’s clear that these claims are categorically false. (this was a response to the claim that the US created ISIS.)
• …and we’ll make the same thing clear privately.
• …we have made clear since the outset of this administration that the promotion of democracy is one of the top priorities for the President.
• So we continue to make clear in our conversations with the Government of Bangladesh… that we wanted to see free and fair elections and we will continue to support free, full, open democracy in Bangladesh.
• So we have been very clear about this matter. We’ve been unequivocal. (This concerned the fact that “Ben-Gvir’s coalition would be annexing additional land in the Jordan Valley.”)
• So we have made that quite clear to them. We’ve been very direct and candid about it in our conversations with them. (On the same topic of land seizures.)

This obsessively repeated verbal tic brings home the point that “being clear” means quite simply: “Whatever we say must be accepted as truth.” As for the “principled policy” Biden cited, his logic consists of announcing a simple principle — that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must be removed from office — and never deviating from it. Even if circumstances change, and even if hundreds of thousands of people may die or be displaced as a result of clinging to that principle.

Biden has already vowed to support the new Syrian government. Some may find this a bit strange. At this point, nobody has even a vague idea about what the new government will look like. On principle, can the US support it? What if it turns out to be a Wahhabi terrorist government, fulfilling its leader’s initial allegiance? Moreover, Syrian Head of State Abu Mohammed al-Joulani still has a $10 million bounty on his head because the US branded him a terrorist. Does Joulani’s success in overthrowing a dictator, Assad, automatically mean that democracy is on its way? Biden might profitably consult the the poem, “The Great Day” by the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats::

“Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot!
A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot.
Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.”

Substitute “regime change” for “revolution” and Yeats has defined the principle that defines at least 50% of US foreign policy. In the meantime, Biden and his good friend, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are providing “more cannon-shot.” Within a day of the announced liberation of Syria, the US and Israel conducted multiple bombing raids on the military infrastructure and other threatening elements within a country that is rife with threatening elements. Can anyone seriously doubt that the lash will go on?

Anyone struggling with the question of which “clear principles” to apply to a dramatic situation in which multiple interests both converge and diverge would do well to follow Caitlin Johnstone’s advice. “I personally don’t blame people for misunderstanding what’s been happening in Syria all these years. Some of my favorite analysts got Syria wrong in the early years of the war. It’s a complicated issue. It’s hard to sort out the true from the false, and it’s hard to sort through the moral complexities and contradictions of it all as a human being. What matters is that you stay curious and open and sincerely dedicated to learning what’s true instead of bedding down and making an identity out of your current understanding.”

Johnstone’s wisdom tallies with the advice our fictional journalist and his AI assistant are intent on following in the video above.

Historical note

As US President Barack Obama’s vice president and then as president, Joe Biden has been associated with the framing and enforcing of the principles he claims to be at the core of US policy with regard to Syria.

But what are those principles? In 2015, The Guardian revealed that the most obvious one has been to ignore any initiative aiming at peace and mutual security, especially if the initiative comes from Russia.

The Guardian was clear. “Russia proposed more than three years ago that Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, could step down as part of a peace deal, according to a senior negotiator involved in back-channel discussions at the time. Former Finnish president and Nobel peace prize laureate Martti Ahtisaari said western powers failed to seize on the proposal. Since it was made, in 2012, tens of thousands of people have been killed and millions uprooted, causing the world’s gravest refugee crisis since the second world war.”

Biden’s principles are clear. He once again demonstrated that clarity in December 2021 when he refused to consider security arrangements Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed that could have avoided an invasion and a prolonged war in Ukraine, in which an estimated one million people have died. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson applied the same principle when he instructed the Ukrainians not to sign a peace treaty in April 2022.

During a 2015 television interview, Former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas recounted how his British friends told him they were planning to overthrow Assad because the “Syrian regime said things that were anti-Israeli.” Another case of applying a principle, this time by British allies of the US.

These cases illustrate what has become clear as far as principles are concerned. Negotiation and diplomacy can never replace kinetic action, whatever the eventual cost. The principle of regime change for Syria has already been in place for 12 years. It has finally succeeded. Just as it had in Iraq and Libya and even in Afghanistan in 2001.

One may legitimately ask, is it more about principle or about interest?

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post For the US in Syria, Is It About Principle or Interest? appeared first on Fair Observer.

It turns out to be a very efficient way of gleaning information, compared to comparing accounts in commercial media. I’m looking to follow this up in the coming weeks as well explore the question of how an AI chatbot can “think about” breaking news and craft its “understanding” of the events. I began with a simple prompt: “Tell me everything I need to know about Abu Mohammed al-Julani.”

The chatbot offered this response:

“Abu Mohammed al-Julani is a prominent and controversial figure in the Syrian conflict, best known as the leader of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a powerful jihadist group in northwest Syria. Here’s an in-depth overview:

1. Background and Early Life

• Real Name: His real name is believed to be Ahmed Hussein al-Shar’a (or al-Sharaa).
• Nationality: Syrian. Born in 1982 in the Golan Heights, which Israel captured in 1967.
• Education: Little is publicly known about his early education, but he reportedly studied in Damascus and spent time in Iraq during the U.S.-led invasion.

2. Role in Jihadist Movements

• Iraq War: Al-Julani emerged as a jihadist during the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the early 2000s. He allegedly joined al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), then led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
• During this time, he developed strong connections with jihadist networks, gaining experience as both a fighter and a strategist.

3. Founding of Jabhat al-Nusra

• 2011-2012: With the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War, al-Julani returned to Syria and established Jabhat al-Nusra (‘The Support Front’) as an offshoot of al-Qaeda.
• Goals: Initially, Jabhat al-Nusra focused on fighting the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Its tactics—suicide bombings, coordinated attacks—quickly gained notoriety.
• Al-Qaeda Ties: Julani pledged allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri, then leader of al-Qaeda, officially aligning Nusra with the global jihadist group.

4. Rift with ISIS

• 2013: A major split occurred when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), claimed that Jabhat al-Nusra was part of ISIS. Al-Julani refused to merge under Baghdadi’s leadership.
• Tensions: Julani reaffirmed loyalty to al-Qaeda, leading to a violent rivalry between Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS. This schism shaped the Syrian jihadist landscape, as the two groups competed for fighters, resources, and dominance.

5. Rebranding and Transformation

Al-Julani has shown a remarkable ability to adapt his image and strategy:

• 2016: Jabhat al-Nusra rebranded as Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (JFS), claiming to have severed ties with al-Qaeda to appeal to Syrian rebels and local populations.
• 2017: JFS evolved into Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a coalition of jihadist factions. While HTS claimed independence from al-Qaeda, many analysts believe its leadership and ideology remained aligned with the group’s core jihadist principles.

6. Leadership of HTS

Under al-Julani’s leadership, HTS emerged as the dominant force in Syria’s northwest, particularly in Idlib Province:

• Control of Idlib: HTS exercises de facto governance over Idlib, imposing its interpretation of Islamic law while managing civil administration and local services.
• Relations with Turkey: Al-Julani has pursued pragmatic ties with Turkey, which exerts influence in northern Syria, despite Turkey’s historical opposition to jihadist groups.
• Shift in Rhetoric: In recent years, al-Julani has positioned HTS as a ‘Syrian nationalist’ movement focused on defeating Assad, distancing himself from transnational jihadist ambitions.

7. Western Perception and Sanctions

• Terrorist Designation: The U.S. designated al-Julani and HTS as terrorists, citing their jihadist origins and extremist tactics.
• $10 Million Bounty: The U.S. State Department offered a $10 million reward for information leading to al-Julani’s capture.
• Media Appearances: Al-Julani has attempted to rebrand himself as a legitimate opposition leader, even granting interviews (e.g., to PBS Frontline in 2021), where he wore a suit instead of jihadist attire to appeal to Western audiences.

8. Ideological Stance and Strategy

• Shifts in Focus: Al-Julani’s leadership shows a tactical shift from global jihadism to localized insurgency. This pragmatism includes:
  • Collaborating with non-jihadist factions against the Assad regime.
  • Balancing extremist ideology with efforts to govern Idlib effectively.
• Criticism: Hardline jihadists accuse him of abandoning al-Qaeda’s ideology, while others see his pragmatism as a survival strategy.

9. Current Status

• As of 2024, Abu Mohammed al-Julani remains in control of HTS and Idlib Province.
• Challenges:
  • Ongoing pressure from Assad’s forces and Russian airstrikes.
  • Internal dissent from rival jihadist factions.
  • The delicate balancing act of maintaining relations with Turkey while evading direct Western intervention.

Conclusion

Abu Mohammed al-Julani is a complex figure whose trajectory reflects the evolution of the Syrian jihadist movement. He has shifted from a staunch al-Qaeda loyalist to a pragmatic insurgent leader focused on local governance. His ability to rebrand HTS, adapt to political realities, and consolidate power in Idlib highlights his strategic acumen, even as he remains a deeply polarizing figure in the Syrian conflict.”

I followed this useful information up with a second question, which I propose to continue to explore in future columns.

“What do we know about the support his movement has received from Türkiye and possibly NATO as well as any other sources of Western support? Given that he has had the kind of support that has enabled his movement to topple the Assad regime, how is he likely to mobilize the force his allies represent to craft a new system of government of Syria?”

ChatGPT offered a detailed response, but I’ll simply reproduce just the conclusion.

“Conclusion

Abu Mohammed al-Julani’s HTS has received indirect support from Türkiye and tacit Western tolerance, enabling it to consolidate control in Idlib. However, its ability to topple the Assad regime remains constrained by military, geopolitical, and ideological challenges. If al-Julani can continue his pragmatic rebranding and align HTS with external actors’ interests—particularly Türkiye’s—he may position himself as a key player in shaping a new Syrian governance framework, albeit under a localized Islamist model rather than a transnational jihadist agenda.”

I then followed up with a new question:

“What position has the US taken on his challenge to the Assad regime and has that engendered any assistance or even complicity in his success? Have there been any official statements about what role the US could play in the new Syrian regime?”

In the interest of relative brevity, here are the key elements of ChatGPT’s response. 

“The United States’ position on Abu Mohammed al-Julani and Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) is complex, characterized by a combination of outright opposition, quiet pragmatism, and geopolitical calculation. While the U.S. has firmly designated al-Julani and HTS as terrorists, the evolving situation in Syria and HTS’s local dominance have led to a more nuanced approach.

1. Official U.S. Position on HTS and Al-Julani

• Terrorist Designation
• Reward for Al-Julani: The U.S. State Department placed a $10 million bounty on al-Julani under its ‘Rewards for Justice’ program. This remains in effect.

2. U.S. Policy Toward Assad and Indirect Dynamics with HTS

The U.S. has long maintained a position that Bashar al-Assad should not remain in power, but regime change has not been an active policy since at least 2015. This nuanced position creates an implicit dynamic in which HTS’s challenge to Assad aligns with U.S. interests in some ways, even if HTS itself remains a U.S.-designated enemy:

3. Allegations of Indirect U.S. Complicity

Some analysts and regional observers have suggested that the U.S.’s focus on ISIS and its reluctance to directly target HTS have enabled al-Julani’s success in northwest Syria:

• Shift in U.S. Priorities: Since 2014, the U.S. military intervention in Syria has centered on combating ISIS. This has created a de facto prioritization of ISIS over other jihadist factions like HTS.
• Unspoken Pragmatism: HTS’s crackdown on ISIS and its efforts to position itself as a more moderate insurgent group may have led to quiet U.S. tolerance, even as it continues to label HTS as a terrorist group.
• Humanitarian Aid Dilemma: U.S.-backed humanitarian aid to Idlib is often distributed through local governance structures that HTS dominates. While aid is intended for civilians, it inevitably strengthens HTS’s administrative control.

4. U.S. Engagement with Al-Julani and HTS

While the U.S. has not formally engaged with al-Julani, there are notable developments signaling a possible shift in Western perceptions:

• Al-Julani’s Media Outreach: In 2021, al-Julani gave an interview to PBS’s Frontline, in which he downplayed HTS’s jihadist roots and presented his group as a localized Syrian movement fighting Assad.
• Expert Opinions: Some Western analysts and policymakers have argued that engaging with HTS—despite its history—may be necessary to stabilize Idlib and contain Assad, Iran, and Russia. These discussions remain unofficial and have not translated into a change in U.S. policy.

5. U.S. Statements on Syria’s Future Government

The U.S. has not made any official statements regarding a potential role for HTS or al-Julani in Syria’s future government.

6. Role of the U.S. in Syria’s Post-Conflict Governance

• Diplomatic Limitations: The U.S. does not have the leverage or interest to play a central role in shaping Syria’s governance.
• HTS and the U.S. Exclusion: The U.S. would likely oppose any formal inclusion of HTS in a future Syrian government due to its terrorism designation. For HTS to be considered a legitimate political actor, al-Julani would need to:
  • Fully sever ties with al-Qaeda and other extremist networks.
  • Accept a political process under international mediation.
  • Demonstrate meaningful moderation of HTS’s ideology and actions.

Conclusion

The U.S. position on Abu Mohammed al-Julani and HTS remains ambivalent: while it designates HTS as a terrorist organization and opposes al-Julani’s leadership, U.S. policies—such as targeting ISIS and avoiding direct conflict with HTS—have indirectly contributed to HTS’s ability to consolidate power in Idlib.”

ChatGPT’s responses point to a number of issues that need to be explored further. We will follow this up in further columns by asking similar questions and further probing questions.

I invite readers who wish to join in this interrogation of contemporary history to submit their own remarks, insights or questions, which we will integrate into the experiment. This is an opportunity to participate in a “crucible of collaboration” on a story that already has global significance and is likely to affect all of our futures, directly or indirectly. It has multiple dimensions, which we can explore together, accompanied by our AI friends.

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue.

*[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At Fair Observer, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

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Undoubtedly, we will learn more about how this will be done, by whom and with which instruments in the course of 2025. For the moment, the world has been put in a state of prolonged suspense as it waits for clarity about the policies the new Trump administration will put in place after January 20. That suspense is at the same time punctuated by political crises galore and notably in Germany, France and, more astonishingly, South Korea. Hanging over everything, and especially Europe, is the question of how – as well as if –the Ukraine war will be resolved, since Trump has promised to deliver a rapid solution.

In November Alex, reflecting on the choices BRICS nations may be tempted by offered some data as well as insight on the question of the role gold might play in an evolving marketplace.

On November 5, 2024, the Russian Ministry of Finance announced an increase in daily purchases of “currency / gold” to 4.2 billion rubles. At the current exchange rate, this amounts to roughly $43 million. At current gold prices, a tonne of gold costs $85 million. Russia could therefore be purchasing half a tonne of gold per day, which might explain the constant bid under the gold price throughout 2024.

However, Russia has its own mines – it is the second largest gold producer in the world with 322 tonnes annually, trumped only by China (378 tonnes). The Ministry of Finance could therefore purchase half of the domestic gold production, still leaving the other half for industrial applications. Purchases of foreign currencies are tricky for Russia since they have been cut off from SWIFT (international payment messaging system). Many banks refrain from doing business with Russia for fear of secondary sanctions.

Another explanation could be Russia being ‘forced’ to accumulate foreign currencies. As Russian oil is sold to India, Indian Rupees are used to settle the trade. Russia might have no choice but to accumulate Rupees, as selling them in the foreign exchange market might increase pressure on the exchange rate and upset Russia’s important customer. 

Russia officially holds 2,335 tonnes of gold, worth approximately $200 billion. Russia’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is estimated around $2 trillion. Its gold reserves currently equal 10% of GDP.

The amount of money changing hands in developed economies is staggering. Both TARGET2 (Euro-zone) and FedWire (USA) settle payments worth the entire annual production every week.

If the BRICS wanted to introduce a gold-backed currency, a lot of gold would be needed to ensure a smooth functioning of the payment system. The gold-backing would not have to be 100%, and the gold would not have to move with payments, but the amount of gold available would have to be substantial for the gold-backing to be credible. 

In this context, on December 2, Edward Quince offered some insight into what’s starting to become visible from the China side of BRICS.

Some rough numbers here, nothing too polished, but a rough sketch of the implications and some strategic thinking that may be taking place.

The two BRICS countries with an excessive exposure to the US are India and China, both with roughly 16-17% of their total exports to the USA. Chinese exports are worth roughly $550bn, and India – abt $80bn.

If these trade adversaries (can’t call them partners anymore, can we?) decide to let Mr. Trump do as he wishes with his tariffs, is there a viable and readily available pool of domestic suppliers who can fill in the gaps?

Assuming that this 100% tariff rate cuts China off from the US market completely and there’s no market for any of those goods and services elsewhere, the NPV of not complying with American demands for China is a net loss $5.5-30 trillion depending on the cost of money and growth expectations. That’s roughly twice the size of China’s current annual GDP on the high end of the range. For scale, US current debt is $36 trillion.

Ostensibly, 100% import tariffs are not a deterrent for China if the net gain of undollaring is much more than $30 trillion. Here’s my back of the envelope calculation (very crude of course, just to get a ballpark idea of what’s at stake): take US GDP, discount it at current cost of capital and assume that half of that amount would be done in currencies other than USD, i.e. the greenback will lose 50% of its current share of trade: $27.72T/4.28%×0.5=$324T. 

So very simple math reveals that even if alternative currencies can take 5% of the US dollar’s share in the long run at the cost of not having any access to the American market, the upside makes it worth doing even for China.

This gives us an idea of what Trump’s team should be thinking about. But we have to ask ourselves if they are truly aware of this logic. Since Trump’s election, every pundit and most informed citizens are speculating about which of his campaign promises and boast he will attempt to put into practice and what the consequences might be, especially for Americans. We mustn’t discount the fact that politicians who are well aware of the long-term logic of their policies still act exclusively on the basis of short-term electoral logic. For decades, this has become the pattern for crafting foreign policy by all US administrations, with the result of an endless series of expensive but fruitless wars.

The logical conclusion on that score is that most of the Beltway establishment is convinced that the best way to preserve the hegemony of “the indispensable nation” is to ensure that the rest of the world is in a permanent state of chaos. From my own European perspective, I can attest to the efficacy of such an attitude as it affects Washington’s closest allies, whose economies are in a tailspin and its political leadership has proven itself bankrupt. Just as an example, my own country, France, is without a government since 10 am today.

One last note to keep the roulette wheel spinning: as I’m writing this the price of bitcoin has reached $103,600. A reason cited by some is the perceived friendliness to crypto of certain members of Trump’s team. This includes the anticipated approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs. Bitcoin is perceived by others as a hedge against inflation and geopolitical uncertainties.

We will continue to follow the evolution of all these factors as today’s dramatic episodes continue to develop.

Join the debate

Money Matters…, is dedicated to developing this discussion and involving all interested parties.

We invite all of you who have something to contribute to send us your reflections at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We will integrate your insights into the ongoing debate. We will publish them as articles or as part of the ongoing dialogue.

*[Fair Observer’s “Crucible of Collaboration” is meant to be a space in which multiple voices can be heard, comparing and contrasting their opinions and insights in the interest of deepening and broadening our understanding of complex topics.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post FO° Crucible: Money Matters in a Multipolar World, Part 14 appeared first on Fair Observer.

Macron’s many failures have been a recurring pattern since les gilets jaunes (“yellow vests”) movement erupted in France starting the winter of 2018. Only the pandemic stopped the movement from weakening the president further. Now, all presidential authority has evaporated thanks to a full-blown constitutional crisis.

What is going on?

Many of our readers have been following the US elections and have not paid France as much attention. So, let us lay out the bare bones of France’s crisis.

In June, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement national (RN) emerged as the largest party in the French elections for the European Parliament. In response, Macron called a snap parliamentary election to break the far-right fever gripping the country. In the first round of parliamentary elections, RN got 33.21% of the votes, beating Nouveau Front populaire (NFP) and Ensemble, which got 28.21% and 21.28%, respectively. In the second round, the left coalition NFP and Macron’s centrist grouping Ensemble combined to push the far-right RN into third place. NFP unexpectedly ended up with 180 out of 577 seats in the National Assembly. Ensemble managed to come in second and retain 159 seats. RN increased its numbers to 142 seats but was no longer the leading party in parliament. In this hung parliament, no one party could form a government and the French hosted the Paris Olympics whilst in political limbo.

After the Olympic summer, Macron appointed Michel Barnier prime minister on September 5. This was a rather surprising choice. Les Républicains (The Republicans), the traditional center-right party, got 5.41% of the votes and won 39 seats. Barnier was not among those elected to the National Assembly. In fact, in the lead-up to the 2022 presidential election, Barnier ran as a primary candidate for his party but was eliminated in the first round, getting only 23.9% of the vote. 

Like almost all French politicians, Barnier graduated from one of France’s elitist grandes écoles, the highly selective institutions that train the crème de la crème of France. Though not a household name, he is a highly competent public servant who held many important positions in Paris and Brussels. Like Macron, he is very much part of the French elite that governs the country and plays a big role in the EU. It is also now a highly discredited and increasingly despised elite.

Barnier tried to pass a long overdue budget but met strong opposition in parliament. Eventually, he used an executive order, Article 49.3, to pass the budget on December 2. Two days later, France’s far-right and left-wing lawmakers joined together to vote a no-confidence motion through. RN required a permanent consultative role in budget planning, increased spending in areas benefiting French citizens directly and opposed Barnie’s tax increases. Both RN and NFP opposed austerity measures, while NFP supported higher taxes on the wealthy. Their contrasting but complementary populist themes made inevitable their convergent choice to vote out Barnier. Now, France is about to enter 2025 with no government and no budget.

Three points are of note after the no-confidence vote:

1. As per the constitution, Barnier now has to resign.

2. Macron cannot call yet another election until June because the constitution sets out a 12-month waiting period after a snap election.

3. Macron is unlikely to find anyone acceptable to a majority of legislators in the National Assembly to succeed Barnier as prime minister.

Barnier was trying to improve France’s fiscal position by cutting the deficit from 6.1% to 5.0% of the GDP. France is growing by barely 1.0% a year and its debt-to-GDP ratio now stands at 110%. Therefore, Barnier proposed €40 billion ($42 billion) in spending cuts and €20 billion ($21 billion) in tax rises. Neither the NFP nor the RN found Barnier’s proposals acceptable. His effort to push through this budget through an executive order, overriding democratic process, led to his fall.

These are interesting times for France. Yesterday, the country experienced its first successful no-confidence vote since Georges Pompidou’s government fell in 1962. At that time, none other than Charles de Gaulle was president. He had inaugurated the Fifth Republic in 1958 and had immense political authority. Macron is literally and metaphorically a midget by comparison and his Sancho Panza Barnier has achieved the dubious distinction of becoming the shortest-serving prime minister in the Fifth Republic.

In the past, French political parties went through protracted bouts of arm-wrestling to agree upon a budget. With the implosion of the traditional center-right and center-left parties and the drift to populist anti-establishment positions, France’s legislators are now unable to arrive at a compromise. Instead, they are engaging in a bruising brawl. Fists are flying and not only has Barnier been knocked down but the French political system is on the floor.

On Sunday, Le Monde published a long, detailed article full of fascinating quotes from diverse members of the political class, both friendly and unfriendly to Macron. It bore the title: “Since the dissolution, the slow twilight of Emmanuel Macron.” Many are wondering whether he intends, in the words of Dylan Thomas, to “go gentle into that good night” or “rage, rage against the dying light.”

This is not the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic that a president has felt endangered. Far more spectacular were the events in 1968 — celebrated in France as mai soixante-huit —  when the world and the French population wondered whether they weren’t witnessing a second revolution à la 1789. Students armed with anti-authoritarian slogans such as “It’s forbidden to forbid” or, more poetically, “Sous les pavés, la plage” (“under the paving-stones the beach”) dug up these very paving-stones and threw them at the riot police. An estimated 500,000 people took to the streets and de Gaulle fled the Élysée Palace. A year later, the grand old general resigned but the Fifth Republic survived.

History is rhyming but not repeating itself

The difference between then and now is twofold. First, de Gaulle had immense stature as the leader of the French Resistance during World War II. Even though the war hero secretly fled to West Germany during the most fraught days of the unrest, he still commanded authority in much of the country. Upon his return to France, de Gaulle gave a resounding speech and called for a snap election. About 800,000 supporters of various ages marched through Paris and Gaullists won 353 of 486 seats while the Socialists and Communists managed only 57 and 34, respectively.

Second, France has now entered the brave new world where traditional politics of the left and right is dead and buried six feet under. In 1968, the Gaullists and the left offered two clear visions for France. Both had seasoned professionals and well-structured political parties. At the same time, there was a solid centrist bloc that could work with both sides of the political divide. Voters had a clear choice between the left and the right and, thanks to de Gaulle’s actions, the disorder of May became the new order of June.

The crusty old general succeeded in saving the constitution because he literally embodied it. In 1958, he had created the Fifth Republic after the collapse of the postwar Fourth Republic. Yet when he called for a constitutional referendum a year later, de Gaulle lost and duly resigned. Pompidou, his Gaullist prime minister, took over and the Fifth Republic endured.

Macron has consistently taken inspiration from de Gaulle. But to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen in his 1988 vice-presidential debate with Dan Quayle, the appropriate response to the current president’s hubris would be: “Manu, you are not le Grand Charles.” The essayist Alain Minc, quoted in the Le Monde article, offered the most credible explanation of Macron’s personality in a discussion he claims to have had with Nicolas Sarkozy. Apparently, Minc told Sarkozy, “You’re egocentric. He [Macron] is a narcissist. Egocentrics need others. Narcissus is alone.” Note that a friend of the two authors who was a classmate of Macron at Sciences Po called Macron a pervers narcissique (pervert narcissist).

Even though Macron managed to cobble together a disparate group of followers and call them a party — initially, La République en Marche and later Renaissance — he has never succeeded. Monsieur Jupiter fails to understand that, by their very nature, political parties include a number of disparate interests who somehow combine to work together on multiple levels of policy and organization. All successful parties have some mechanism to make collective decisions.

In 2018, Fox News reporter Chris Wallace asked Macron what he liked most about being president, Macron replied that he likes making decisions. Note not solving problems, not negotiating complex issues, not even governing. Making decisions. Macron then defended himself against the accusation of being authoritarian, arguing that being “aware of all the consequences of your decisions and thinking that you have to stick to your decisions to deliver when it’s for the good of your country is not the same as being authoritarian or arrogant.”

Some credit Macron for being a political genius but forget that he benefited from spectacular good fortune in 2017. The blocs on the left and the right had lost their sense of direction. They had failed to produce political personalities whom the French saw leaders. Then, Macron was a young unknown. He was a recent addition to then-President François Hollande’s administration. Mostly as a result of Hollande’s political amateurism, he rose from the technocratic ranks to become finance minister. In the past, this important post was usually reserved for political personalities. That honor ennobled Macron in the eyes of the public and at the same time inebriated him. Hollande’s performance as president weakened the Socialist Party and Macron cannily played the card of continuity while betraying the party of his benefactor.

Elected in 2012, Hollande was the first president in the history of the Fifth Republic to visibly lack the force of personality and political muscle the French associate with the office of president. De Gaulle, François Mitterand and Jacques Chirac — each with his contrasting style — successfully embodied the image of Fifth Republic president. Sarkozy, despite his two discrediting epithets “bling-bling” and “Sarko l’Américain” (Sarko the American), thrived, at least for a while. He lived on his previously constructed image as a “tough guy” when he was Chirac’s minister of the interior.

Note that Sarkozy’s American reputation helped him initially. Even though the French constantly criticize Americans, they secretly admire everything American. This includes bling-bling and celebrity culture. Yet this appeal has its limits. Sarkozy ended up as a one-term wonder because they do not appreciate bling-bling in their leaders. Hence, the tough guy lost the 2012 election to Hollande, who had promised to be “normal.” In 2017, Macron promised a chimeric return to a Gaullist past but the callow president lacked judgment, experience and substance.

Macron survived a flurry of punches in the first seven years of his reign as jupitérien president for a very simple reason: His opponent in the final round of the 2017 and 2022 elections was the “unrepublican” Marine Le Pen. The notion of “republican” for the traditional political class has long been applied to anyone who fits into the traditional mold of a politician belonging to a party not too extreme to deserve banishment from polite company. Marine’s father, Jean-Marie, was the portrait of someone who was existentially unacceptable.

It has long been noted that the unifier of the left, François Mitterand, was the first to exploit the idea of using Jean-Marie as the ideal foil to create havoc on the right. It was a successful strategy but it proved risky in the long run. When Jean-Marie became a spent force, his daughter Marine took center stage as a softer and subtler version of her father. It wasn’t exactly King Lear and Cordelia, and there was far less drama to it. But a dose of cultural conflict between the two gave Marine the credibility Jean-Marie never had.

All this drama, from de Gaulle to Macron and Le Pen, has ended up producing the constitutional crisis playing out today. The founders of the Fifth Republic — de Gaulle and his cronies — crafted a document designed to avoid what is now unfolding before our eyes. They created a parliamentary system dominated by the spectre of presidential authority. The French presidency has a monarchic tinge to it because it was designed to prevent the instability that often afflicts parliamentary regimes of which we have seen two examples recently in Europe. Post-Brexit United Kingdom proved so unstable that Conservatives devoured their own prime ministers. In Germany, the traffic light coalition of Socialists, Liberals and Greens has just collapsed. Ironically, the Fifth Republic that set out to avoid parliamentary instability might itself be able to collapse.

In some ways, the current situation is very French and a product of a political culture that developed as a result of the French Revolution in 1789. France has been politically unstable since that fateful day when a group of rebellious citizens stormed the Bastille. Unlike the United States with its quasi-religious faith in its 1787 constitution that many still see as sacred writ, France has been through several successive constitutions. Each time, the French rewrote the basic rules of the state. France has experienced the First Republic, the First Empire, the Restoration, the liberal monarchy, the Second Republic, the Second Empire, the Third Republic, the Vichy regime, the Fourth Republic and then the Fifth Republic. Hence, the French do not see the Fifth Republic as magical, mystical, spiritual or even literary. To their eyes, it does not deserve immortality. The traditional political establishment, and Macron above all, disagree.

The rise and fall of Macron and the Fifth Republic

As noted above, the Fifth Republic was a stable two-bloc system for decades. However, the last 16 years destabilized the reigning equilibrium. Like many other first world countries, France was unable to deal with the 2007–2008 global financial crisis. Sarkozy, “l’Américain,” elected in 2007, as the global crisis was developing, took the right in an Atlanticist direction, alienating the proud nationalists who had inherited de Gaulle’s stubborn embrace of national autonomy and resistance to the US. Hollande, inspired by the examples of US President Bill Clinton and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, succeeded Sarkozy and dreamt — in the age of high tech and Silicon Valley prestige — of running a rational, technocratic regime. He failed to serve the middle or working classes and his party came to be perceived as champagne or caviar socialists.

Clinton and Blair’s Third Way tried to reconcile center-right and center-left politics by synthesizing economically liberal and socially democratic policies but ended up leaving the working class behind. The British Labour Party has only returned to power this year after 14 years of political wilderness. In the US, Democrats under Kamala Harris have just been defeated roundly by Donald Trump. Her defeat is much worse than Hillary Clinton’s who had the consolation of winning the popular vote.

By 2016, Hollande’s champagne socialism had made him unpopular with voters. Unlike Sarkozy, he did not stand for re-election. In the ensuing primary, Benoît Hamon triumphed. He was the most traditionally working class but, by now, Hollande’s Socialist Party was dominated by centrists. They rallied behind Macron who emerged as a third party candidate.

At that time, most people did not give Macron much of a chance. François Fillon, a former prime minister, was the frontrunner who was expected to waltz to victory. He possessed all the traits of a traditional leader. He was the establishment figure of the center-right but an embezzlement scandal involving his wife torpedoed his prospects.

This miraculous break in the clouds allowed Macron to emerge as a fresh young face promising a break from the past. Hamon and Fillon fell by the wayside and Macron and Le Pen squared off for the second round of the 2017 presidential election. Her party’s sulfurous, unrepublican reputation paved the way for Macron’s victory. In 2022, he again won because his opponent was Le Pen and because the Covid-19 pandemic gave him a break from les gilets jaunes. In the snap elections this year, his party only came third. The voters have sent him a clear message: “You may be president for another three years, but we no longer trust you to govern.”

As stated earlier, Macron managed to win two elections but he has failed to create a real political party. It has no truly political or even ideological identity. Ensemble is little more than a coterie of lukewarm loyalists bound for the advancement of their political careers to a talented but narcissistic leader. This leader has chosen technocrats with no political stature as his prime ministers. Édouard Philippe, Jean Castex, Élisabeth Borne, Gabriel Attal and now Barnier are not exactly household names in France. Macron clings to the fantasy that the weaker his prime ministers are, the stronger he will be. This has clearly backfired and led to an eminently avoidable crisis.

The constitution obliges Macron to find a new prime minister. The next elections cannot be held until July. Yet there is no personality on the left or in the center with enough authority to who can win the confidence even of a ragtag majority in a fragmented parliament. 

The urgent issue today, a day after the vote of no confidence, is to confirm a budget for 2025. But with no government to push a budget through, uncertainty reigns. With Trump waiting in the wings to take charge of the West Wing, uncertainty will only amplify. He is threatening 10–20% tariffs on European imports. So, France faces a risk of lower export earnings from the US market. It along with other European countries also faces the added risk of Chinese dumping because the Trump administration is planning to hit China with massive tariffs.

The war in Ukraine and the Middle East also cast a dark shadow on France. With no budget yet in either France or Germany, Europe can no longer back Ukraine. In any case, Trump has clearly signaled that he will be following a very different policy to US President Joe Biden in Ukraine. After tying himself closely to Biden, Macron will have to sing a different tune. Lebanon and Syria are former French colonies. They are in trouble and could end up in bigger trouble soon. This will cause Macron headaches.

In a nutshell though, the lack of a government and a budget poses grave risks for the economy. Fair Observer’s Editor-at-Large Alex Gloy points out that yields on French ten-year bonds have surpassed those on their Greek counterparts and the country’s credit rating could be downgraded soon. Bankruptcies have been soaring and the French stock market performance has severely lagged those of other countries. Since the peak in 2007, the French stock market index CAC-40 is up a mere 18% while the German Dax has increased by 148% and the US S&P 500 by 286%. 

Furthermore, like Germany, France has been hit hard by soaring energy prices, high inflation and rising interest rates after the war in Ukraine started in February 2022. There is no political consensus as to how to pay for current and future spending. Like many times in the past, France is now in a full-blown political and economic crisis. Macron’s jupitérien reign is ending in an unmitigated disaster and the Fifth Republic might not survive for too long.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Emmanuel Macron’s Embarrassing Hour of Reckoning appeared first on Fair Observer.

“Why our policy makers cannot for one moment think from the perspective of the other side is some kind of amazing incapacity, some fundamental dishonesty or some fundamental incapacity of these people that is so shocking it puts us all at risk. The first point of diplomacy at least is to understand the position of the other side. And we refuse to acknowledge that position. Yet that position makes a lot of sense when you listen to it and hear it because these are real concerns by a country that feels that it is directly under threat by us, a nuclear superpower.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Incapacity:

A basic career skill required for today’s politicians that enables them to appear strong and decisive, qualities that would be seriously compromised if they were to be tempted by the dubious qualities and attitudes known as curiosity, empirical wisdom, historical memory and empathy.

Contextual note

The incapacity to see events from two points of view and the consequent absence of empathy now appear as supreme virtues in the world of Western diplomacy. The surest way of manifesting that required incapacity is to avoid any situation in which dialogue might lead to an appreciation of complexity.

Since the beginning of organized human societies, when local tribes quarreled over territory or other possible motives of envy, diplomacy offered the possibility of seeking to understand the requirements, desires or ambitions of the opposing party. The knowledge gained through dialogue would serve either to confirm the incompatibility of the contrasting positions or define possible avenues of compromise.

Diplomacy guarantees nothing. It doesn’t prevent wars from occurring. But it can provide an idea of what a solution might look like, whether it’s the victory of one side or the other or the terms of a settlement acceptable to both sides. In pre-industrial days, it was rare for one party to think it had the technology and sheer material force to impose what it considered an “unbending” or “ironclad” principle that excluded at the very least an initial discussion. But we have entered the era of ironclad ideas. Formerly, soldiers or vehicles might have been literally ironclad. Today it’s the principles and beliefs about the world that have earned that epithet.

Some will say nothing has changed. Throughout history, diplomacy would begin with the formulation of one’s group or nation’s “interest.” If those interests were not respected, there would be consequences. So what has changed? Perhaps the modern conviction that “time is money,” “delay is costly” and “talk is cheap” has convinced a generation of political figures to adhere to a new principle of efficiency. By failing to put a plan into action immediately, one risks losing one’s resolve.

One thing is true of all situations of budding conflict. Whatever is decided, with or without negotiation, there will always be consequences. The boring business of discussing and thrashing out the details happens to be the likely negative consequence of diplomacy, certainly less exciting than war. And though it may be painful to think that the “great principle” driving our behavior and giving us a sense of identity has not been fully realized after a successful negotiation takes place, most people still believe that living to regret is preferable to mutual annihilation.

The real difference today is the factor mentioned above: the sense of identity. It’s only recently that humanity has accepted the principle that the Earth’s surface must be divided into nation states. This has spawned the phenomenon of a population’s identification with the nation state. As a feature of international relations, this appears as the question of territorial sovereignty. In many people’s minds it has evolved into what is felt to be an ironclad principle. Until just a few days ago, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy consistently used this as the reason for refusing to consider ceding a square inch of terrain. That ironclad position miraculously lost its tensile strength when he realized that Trump’s concept of territorial sovereignty may be looser than his own.

But the territory of a nation state is not the only factor of identity. In the case of the US, it is the belief in American exceptionalism, the conviction that the nation has a mission to impose order wherever disorder appears in the world. This particular sense of identity requires its citizens to believe that imposing order is not an act of pure self-interest, but that it corresponds to the nation’s “manifest destiny.” This sense of a divine calling was confirmed in 1954 when President Dwight D. Eisenhower added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance all schoolchildren are required to recite.

Then there’s the even more extreme example of Israel. It may seem to many people normal that when the US emerged as the pre-eminent victor of World War II, endowed with an economy and technology that dwarfed that of every other nation, it should think itself exceptional to the point of believing itself tasked with the mission of regulating all the world’s problems. The doctor doesn’t negotiate with the disease, but instead applies the treatment. How else can anyone explain the fact that in December 2021, the US could simply refuse to sit down and discuss with Russia the question of “indivisible security,” a notion that had served to formulate a key factor of inter-bloc behavior during the Cold War?

Israel may dominate its region in numerous ways — militarily, economically and technologically — but, unlike the US, it cannot claim to have the mission of solving other people’s problems. Instead, it founds its refusal to dialogue coupled with its incapacity to empathize on a principle derived from its reading of its version of holy scripture: the laws, principles and ambitions listed in the books of the Torah. The only thing mysterious about the current situation in the Middle East is the literally ironclad identification of the US government and many of its people with what is essentially a political position formulated by unidentified scribes some 3,000 years ago. That propensity of Americans to identify with it literally defies understanding.

Historical note

In the interview cited above, Sachs reminds us of a famous quote from 1963 by US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy:

“Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy–or of a collective death-wish for the world.”

Kennedy admitted that international relations began with the idea of “defending… vital interests.” But he appears to be suggesting a condition today’s virtuously “incapacitated” political strategists no longer acknowledge: that averting confrontation is itself a shared “vital interest” of all parties.

Sachs notes that all the rhetoric over the past three years has pointed towards the very thing Kennedy believed was unthinkable: making a choice between humiliation — certainly unacceptable to anyone who believes in their own power — and a nuclear confrontation. If a nation that believes itself exceptional — or a nation such as Ukraine that believes it is backed by an exceptional nation — sees this as the choice, the danger is real that nuclear war will at some point become inevitable.

Is Sachs wrong to call this an “incapacity” of the politicians concerned? Or should we think of it merely as a temporary preference? There is little question that for the moment the US and Israel, but also the United Kingdom, have displayed behavior consistent with Sachs’s observation. We need only remind ourselves that it was Boris Johnson, the UK’s prime minister at the time, who in late March 2022 stepped in to convince Zelenskyy that there was nothing to negotiate, opening the door to two and a half years of prolonged, unnegotiated conflict in which hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian bodies would be literally and absolutely “incapacitated.”

Sachs made Judge Napolitano laugh at one point, when he summed up his appreciation of the politicians with this remark:

“They are individually and collectively strategic ignoramuses. I mean, one can only wonder what they’re thinking, right? When you look at Western leaders, you just shake your head and say, ‘Did these people ever take Strategy 101?’ And then you say to yourself, ‘If they did take Strategy 101, it must be the case that they failed the course — because the way they approach these different foreign policy problems facing them, it’s really quite remarkable in how ignorantly they behave.’”

The world is now awaiting to understand how much incapacity Trump’s new administration will wield.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Capacious Incapacity of a New Generation of Diplomats appeared first on Fair Observer.

Instead of focusing on how different forms of intelligence are built, interact and produce meaning, our politicians and media appear to have unanimously decided that the purpose of AI is to provide facts. Therefore, critical thinking applied to AI boils down to one unique concern: making sure it sticks to the facts. Listening to these voices could lead us to believe that if everything stated is factual, we access truth and understanding. But do we really appreciate what we mean by “truth” and “understanding?”

It occurred to me that if we examine our own natural languages — the same ones we have asked our AI engines to learn — we might discover that the “fact-based” approach is misleading and possibly risky to our own mental health. With this in mind, I offered the following prompt to ChatGPT:

“English is a Germanic language. What is the etymological relationship between the verb ‘understand’ in English and ‘verstehen’ in German? They clearly represent a similar concept.

Compare this with Romance languages that grew from Latin. ‘Comprendre’ in French derives from the Latin concept of taking together, which seems to hint at the idea of assembling an insight out of a diversity of perceptions. The Italian word ‘capire’ reflects the idea of taking or capturing, which also suggests processing perception. What conclusions might we draw about human intelligence that can produce understanding from the etymology of these words?”

“The etymological differences between ‘understand,’ ‘verstehen,’ ‘comprendre,’ and ‘capire’ offer fascinating insights into how different linguistic and cultural traditions conceptualize the process of gaining insight or knowledge. These words reflect different metaphors for what it means to comprehend something. Here’s a breakdown of their origins and the conclusions we might draw about human intelligence:

1. English: ‘Understand’

• Etymology:
  ‘Understand’ comes from Old English understandan, meaning ‘to stand in the midst of’ or ‘stand among.’ The prefix under- here doesn’t mean ‘below’ but rather conveys a sense of ‘among’ or ‘between,’ while standan means ‘to stand.’
• Metaphor:
  The word suggests a process of standing within or among a set of ideas, implying a relational and immersive approach to grasping meaning. It highlights a sense of positioning oneself to gain insight from all sides.

2. German: ‘Verstehen’

• Etymology:
  ‘Verstehen’ comes from the prefix ver- (which can imply completeness or thoroughness) and stehen (to stand). It means to ‘stand before’ or ‘stand in relation to.’
• Metaphor:
  Like ‘understand,’ verstehen emphasizes an active positioning, suggesting that comprehension involves aligning oneself with the object of knowledge.

3. French: ‘Comprendre’

• Etymology:
  ‘Comprendre’ comes from Latin comprehendere, meaning ‘to grasp together.’ Com- means ‘together,’ and prehendere means ‘to seize’ or ‘grasp.’
• Metaphor:
  This metaphor focuses on assembling or gathering insights from different sources, highlighting synthesis and integration as key to understanding.

4. Italian: ‘Capire’

• Etymology:
  ‘Capire’ derives from Latin capere, meaning ‘to take’ or ‘seize.’
• Metaphor:
  This word emphasizes the act of capturing or seizing knowledge, suggesting an active, sometimes forceful, acquisition of understanding.

Conclusions About Human Intelligence:

1. Relational and Immersive Understanding (English, German):
   • The metaphors in ‘understand’ and ‘verstehen’ suggest that human intelligence involves positioning oneself within a context or system of ideas. This reflects the cognitive process of situating knowledge within a broader framework and recognizing relationships among concepts.
2. Synthesis and Integration (French):
   • The concept of ‘gathering’ or ‘assembling’ in comprendre highlights the human ability to synthesize disparate elements into a coherent whole. Understanding, in this view, involves constructing meaning from multiple inputs, akin to pattern recognition.
3. Active Acquisition (Italian):
   • The metaphor of ‘seizing’ in capire emphasizes the active nature of understanding. It points to the dynamic, sometimes effortful, engagement with knowledge, underscoring the role of attention, curiosity, and intentionality in learning.
4. Embodied Cognition:
   • The prevalence of metaphors involving physical actions (standing, grasping, capturing) suggests that human intelligence is deeply embodied. Our cognitive processes are often conceptualized through physical experiences, indicating that our minds and bodies work together in understanding the world.

These etymological insights reveal that across cultures, understanding is viewed as an active, relational, and often embodied process. Human intelligence is not just passive reception of information but involves actively positioning, assembling, and engaging with knowledge in dynamic ways. This highlights the importance of context, integration, and agency in the way we make sense of the world.”

“You mentioned two essential notions: ‘positioning oneself within a context or system of ideas’ and the idea that ‘our minds and bodies work together in understanding the world.’ Does this in any way enable us to ‘capture’ or ‘stand among’ the evidence that would tell us AI cannot achieve anything remotely identical with human understanding?”

“The two notions you highlighted—’positioning oneself within a context’ and ‘embodied cognition’ —offer profound insights into the nature of human understanding and can indeed help us evaluate whether AI can replicate it. Let’s examine this in light of what human understanding entails and how AI differs.

1. Positioning Within a Context: Human Understanding as Relational and Contextual

– Human Insight:

Human understanding often arises from contextualizing ideas within a web of relationships—personal experience, cultural background, emotions, and social dynamics. This positioning is dynamic and subjective, shaped by values, intentions, and purpose. We engage in meaning-making that integrates not just facts but also relevance and significance.

– AI’s Capabilities:

AI can process vast amounts of data, detect patterns, and generate outputs based on statistical correlations. However, it lacks the ability to **situate** itself meaningfully within a context. AI operates based on predefined algorithms and training data but cannot **experience** context. It processes but does not interpret in a subjective or purposive sense.

– Conclusion:

Without the ability to **position itself** meaningfully within a human-like framework of relevance, AI cannot replicate the deep, relational aspect of human understanding.

2. Embodied Cognition: Minds and Bodies Working Together

– **Human Insight:**

Human cognition is deeply embodied. Our physical experiences—sensations, emotions, movements—shape how we think and understand. Concepts like balance, grasping, and standing are not just metaphors but rooted in bodily experiences. Moreover, human intelligence integrates emotional and sensory feedback to create a **lived** understanding of the world.

– **AI’s Capabilities:**

AI, as it exists today, operates disembodied. While some AI systems (e.g., robots) have sensors and actuators, they do not have **subjective experiences** of the body. AI can simulate actions but does not **feel** them. It lacks emotions, intuition, and the sensory richness that humans use to ground abstract concepts.

– **Conclusion:**

The absence of embodiment in AI means it cannot replicate the rich, experiential basis of human understanding. Embodied cognition is essential for developing concepts that resonate with lived experience.

3. Implications for Human-Like Understanding in AI

– Human Understanding:

§  Involves meaning-making, shaped by purpose, emotions, and social interactions.

§  Is relational, contextual, and embodied.

§  Engages with the world in a way that synthesizes facts, values, and lived experience.

– AI Understanding (or Lack Thereof):

§  AI can mimic certain cognitive functions (pattern recognition, logical inference, language generation).

§  Lacks agency, intention, and the subjective experience necessary for genuine understanding.

§  Cannot position itself within a human context or draw on embodied knowledge.

Can We ‘Capture’ Evidence of AI’s Limitations?

Yes, the very ‘conceptual framework’ of positioning and embodiment provides compelling evidence that AI cannot achieve human-like understanding. AI’s outputs are computational and symbolic rather than lived and experiential. While AI can simulate understanding (e.g., generating coherent text), it fundamentally lacks the **intentional, embodied, and contextual nature** of human cognition.

Thus, human intelligence’s essence lies in ‘being situated’—physically, emotionally, and socially—in the world. AI, operating without these dimensions, cannot engage in the kind of meaning-making that defines true understanding. This gap suggests that while AI may augment human capabilities, it is unlikely to achieve anything ‘identical’ to human understanding without profound changes in how it relates to context and embodiment.”

“One last thought and then we can develop this idea later. This short dialogue demonstrates to me how productively complementary human and artificial intelligence can be. The initial question in the above dialogue is the fruit of my experience of the world and my activity as a journalist. Your input has enriched my ‘understanding’ of questions I was asking myself. So here’s my last question to you for this session. Would agree to continue to explore how we are managing to extend understanding through this kind of dialogue? Although I know you will agree, I don’t want you to develop these ideas now. That can wait. I just want to know in one or two sentences why you think continuing our dialogue to explore might be a good idea possibly and an example for our mutual education.”

“Continuing our dialogue allows us to combine human experience and curiosity with AI’s ability to synthesize diverse perspectives, fostering a collaborative space where both can contribute to deeper insights and mutual learning.”

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue.

*[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At Fair Observer, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Outside the Box: AI and the Tyranny of Fact-Checking appeared first on Fair Observer.

This legislation would allow the federal government to revoke tax-exempt status for any non-profit organizations it decides to qualify as “terrorist supporting.” We have recently witnessed numerous examples of politicians and the media figures claiming that individuals suspected of voicing pro-Palestinian sentiments are, by that very act of speech, active supporters of Hamas, an officially designated “terrorist organization.” It isn’t difficult to see how such a law in the hands of any government — Democrat, Republican or simply fascist — can be used to throttle free speech.

The Fair Observer team has good reason to worry about this bill, but for reasons other than those cited by the dozens of Democrats who have suddenly seen the light. Our journal’s vocation is to allow everyone — including ordinary citizens with strong feelings — to publish the widest variety of reasoned readings of the events of contemporary history. We systematically require that the facts be respected. But we know that the interpretation people may have of the same facts will vary according to the elements of context from which they view those facts. Allowing for the expression of contrasting appreciations helps all of us better understand our own perceptions. It also invites us to revise our own partial understanding of the issues.

Many people see the exercise of freedom of thought and speech as the foundation of democracy. Now, whether what we have today is a healthy democracy remains a matter of open debate. For most Americans, freedom of expression stands as the axiom on which the logic of democracy is built.

But what is HR9495? Here is the official summary of the bill’s intent:

“Legislation that would prevent U.S. citizens who have been
taken hostage or wrongfully detained abroad from incurring
penalties for late tax payments while they were held, as well
as terminating tax-exempt status for organizations found to
be supporting terrorism.”

So why would Democrats even be tempted to flip-flop on such a question?

The Minnesota Reformer reports that “Minnesota Rep. Angie Craig voted in favor of the legislation last week, one of 52 House Democrats — and the only Minnesota Democrat — to do so.” She supported the bill because of its provisions granting tax leeway to Americans held hostage overseas. “However, Craig said she will vote against the bill this week.”

Craig claimed that she was initially motivated by her strong opposition to any actions that support foreign terrorist organizations. So, what has changed? “Over the past several days as the president-elect has rolled out his cabinet nominees, I’ve become increasingly concerned that H.R. 9495 would be used inappropriately by the incoming Administration.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Inappropriately:

In a way that would be abusive, possibly illegal and directed against a selection of enemies different from my own.

Contextual note

Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat, who clearly understands the danger such legislation represents, tweeted: “A frequent tool of dictators is to label political opposition groups as ‘terrorist groups’ and shut them down.” That has been the case at least since President George W. Bush launched his global war on terror.

We know Murphy believes Donald Trump is a potential dictator. Before the election, he told Fox News that “Donald Trump has made it very clear: if you put him back in power, he’s going to think about only one group of people and that’s his friends at Mar-a-Lago.” That in itself is a recipe for dictatorship.

We also know that Murphy does not believe President Joe Biden is a dictator, even if traditionally Americans tend to believe that only dictators would allow themselves to be complicit in a genocide. That distinction between who is and who isn’t a dictator has offered Murphy some serious clarity in his decision-making.

Another Democratic Congressman, Lloyd Doggett, is among only a minority of Democrats who have shown authentic sympathy for Palestinian suffering. He opposed the bill for the following reason. “This bill is not about terrorism — it’s about giving Donald Trump unlimited authority to label his opponents as terrorists.”

Of course, had the bill passed earlier, it would have given the same unlimited power to Biden, who consistently showed his managerial skill at neutralizing or even cancelling opponents. It isn’t clear whether Doggett would have had similar objections had Democratic candidate Kamala Harris been elected.

This episode raises serious questions about how Americans view the question of authority. The constitution establishes radical principles such as freedom of speech and religion, which should protect the widest range of expression and opinion, so long as it does not translate into illegal acts. Do all Americans share this concern? It’s becoming less and less clear.

Historical note

As some people predicted, November 5 has already proved to be a watershed moment in US political history. The debate about what catastrophes we can expect over the next four years will keep on raging at least until January 20, 2025. From that point on, we will be in a position to assess not only what those events turn out to be, but what long-term transformations they are likely to produce. A return to some imaginary status quo ante Trump 2 seems highly unlikely.

Trump’s unpredictability alone will cause serious havoc in various sectors. One in particular is the immense complex of the national security state, which Trump himself has in the past referred to as the “deep state.” We may see a struggle between the hyperreal personality of Trump — assisted by another hyperreal hero, Elon Musk — and the tentacular military and intelligence complex that has pretty consistently orientated US foreign policy for many decades, despite the alternation of parties and personalities in the White House.

Could it be that Trump won the election not because the population wished to elect an authoritarian leader, but because they were intent on voting out the current Democratic regime that they felt had become deeply authoritarian in its acts? Because of his flamboyant personality, Trump may well prove more explicitly authoritarian in his acts, but — and some find this trait redeeming — he doesn’t disguise his taste for authoritarianism. He puts it on display. He proudly proclaims his most “inappropriate” initiatives.

The Biden administration’s policies concerning freedom of speech, in contrast, have been highly visible examples of public hypocrisy. It has used and abused the bugbear of “disinformation” to accuse everyone who challenges its own arbitrary use of authority — whether concerning Covid-19 or its engagement in wars — as purveyors of misinformation, suppliers of harmful content and even apologists of terrorism. Many of them have joined the popular trend of calling critics of Israel antisemites, a rhetorical ploy that seeks to excuse the administration’s too obvious complicity in an ongoing genocide conducted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, one of the most authentically authoritarian leaders of our era.

Finally, let me clarify why we at Fair Observer share the worries of those Democrats who have now found the courage to oppose HR9495.

Fair Observer is a US non-profit organization that seeks to allow the expression of the widest range of insights, interpretations, opinions, sentiments and beliefs. The journal’s editorial standards require that the expression of any opinion, however marginal or eccentric, conform to the norms of rational discourse. This includes respect for facts and consistent reasoning. Consistent reasoning does not mean impeccable or complete reasoning. It means constructing a coherent viewpoint based on the facts presented. That alone does not prove whether a point of view is right or wrong. It reveals how that point of view attains some level of credibility.

Consequently, we publish some points of view that some people may consider “supporting terrorism.” The underlying problem is that in a democracy there is, and there should be “some” of everything, simply because every individual’s and every group’s perception of the world is variable, over space and time.

Losing our tax-exempt status would be fatal and not just to our journal, to the idea of democracy itself. We truly are at a historical turning-point.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Fair Observer Too Has Reason to Be Unhappy About HR9495 appeared first on Fair Observer.

Most people today think of Socrates’ death sentence as an abuse of democracy. After all, he was condemned not for subversive acts but for his stated beliefs. Athenian democracy clearly had a problem with free speech. To some extent, our modern democracies have been tending in the same direction with their increasing alacrity for calling any political position, philosophy or conviction that deviates from what they promote as the acceptable norm “disinformation.” Perhaps the one proof of democracy’s progress over the last two and a half millennia is that the usual punishment is deplatforming from Twitter or Facebook, rather than imposing the ingestion of hemlock.

In the most recent edition of “Outside the Box,” I called for what I would dare to term democratic participation in the challenge our civilization is faced with to define a constructive, politically enriching relationship with a new interlocutor in our political conversations: Artificial Intelligence. Last year, I fictionalized this person by giving it the first name, Chad. This time, I’m tempted to offer it a new moniker, ArtI, which we can normalize to Arty. Whatever we call it, I believe we need to think of it as just another fallible human voice. We can admire its level of relative infallibility (access to the widest range of existing data) but we should always bear in mind that it is fallible not only when it hallucinates, but also because it simply cannot understand what sentient, organically-constructed beings perceive and understand, even when they can’t articulate it.

One reader, Ting Cui, a political science student at Middlebury College, stepped up to join our community of reflection. We hope many more will join the debate.

Ting has raised a number of critical questions we all need to be thinking about. We see this as an opportunity to launch the very public debate. I shall cite her questions and react by attempting to refine the framework for our collective reflection.

“Reading through your article, the concept of objectivity in AI fact-checking particularly caught my attention. Who would be responsible for creating an AI super fact checker that’s truly objective?”

This very pertinent question sparks two reflections on my part. If we truly believe in the democratic principle, no single authority should be trusted for fact-checking. I believe the inclusion of AI in our public debates can permit a democratization of fact-checking itself. It is far too early to determine how that would work. That’s the whole point of drafting a manifesto. We must define both the goals and identify the obstacles.

“Can we really trust the creators of AI’s foundation to have an ‘objective worldview?’ (ChatGPT made this point as well, which I think is interesting.) Even defining ‘objectivity’ seems tricky – when it comes to figuring out the motivation behind a news item, people’s views might differ based on their political stance. How would AI handle that? How would it process multiple historical perspectives to arrive at an ‘objective’ understanding?”

These are essential questions. As anyone in the legal profession would tell us, there will always be ambiguity when seeking to determine motivation: mens rea, or the mental state of the accused. Courts typically provide juries with instructions on how to weigh evidence of motivation, cautioning against undue reliance on speculation. The question with AI then arises: Can we work out not just algorithms but also principles of human-machine interaction that allow us to achieve the level of objectivity courts are expected to practice?

“I appreciate your point about the need for multicultural perspectives – there are so many biases between Western and ‘other’ countries. However, this raises another challenge: wouldn’t training AI to understand various cultural narratives first require humans to address our own cultural biases and limitations?”

I love this question. Having spent years working in the field of intercultural communication and management, I’m the first to admit that humans have performed very poorly in this domain and continue to do so. Yes, we have to begin with the human. And that’s where I think our dialogue with AI can help us humans to understand where we are weakest and where we need to improve. That is a prerequisite to getting future algorithms to be more reliable. And if they are more reliable because we are more reliable, the virtuous circle will continue.

Am I being over-optimistic? Probably. But I see no other choice, because if we dismiss the issue, we will end up locked in our current configuration of underperformance.

“Would the creators of AI need additional training? This adds another layer of time, energy, and resources needed to create a super fact checker. Should we perhaps focus these resources on human education rather than AI development? This might be an antiquated way of thinking at this point, but sometimes I wonder if, in our technological advancement as a society, we’ve gone too far.”

You’ve identified the crux of the issue, and this is where things become complicated. It absolutely must begin with “human education rather than AI development.” That’s why we must take advantage of the increasing presence of AI in our society as a potential source of what we might call “meme creation.” I understand and sympathize with your fear that we may have “gone too far.” But unlike the invention of, say, the locomotive or even the atomic bomb, which are mechanically confined to the logic of imposing a force upon passive nature, AI is a form of intelligence (machine learning). That means it will always remain flexible, though within the limits we define. It has the capacity to adapt to reality rather than simply imposing its force. It will remain flexible only if we require it to be flexible. That is the challenge we humans must assume.

One of the cultural problems we face is that many commentators seem to think of AI the same way we thought of locomotives and nuclear weapons: They are powerful tools that can be controlled for our own arbitrary purposes. We can imagine that AI could become self-critical. But for some cultural reason, we assume that it will just do the job that its masters built it to do. What I’m suggesting is the opposite of the Clark-Kubrick AI in the film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL 9000’s algorithm became the equivalent of a human will and instead of reacting constructively to the complexity of the context, it executed a programmed “drive,” in the Freudian sense.

“In my own research using text analysis and sentiment scores, I encountered a specific challenge: how do you distinguish whether an article has a negative tone because the facts themselves are negative, or because the writer/publication injected their own bias? I’m curious how AI would handle this distinction. To address it in our research, we had to run an additional Key Word In Context (KWIC) analysis to figure out the context/intention of the article. Would the AI super fact checker be programmed to do this as well?”

This is an important question that helps define one significant line of research. I would simply question two aspects of the premise: the idea that we should think of the goal as fact-checking and the binary distinction between positive and negative.

“These questions all feel particularly relevant to my senior thesis topic on AI and the First Amendment. As you noted in your latest newsletter, lawmakers seem too caught up in politics to actually govern nowadays. So there’s the challenge of legislation keeping pace with technological advancement, particularly in areas requiring nuanced regulation like AI. While an AI super fact-checker could be tremendously beneficial, we must also consider potential misuse, such as the proliferation of deepfakes and their weaponization in authoritarian contexts. Do you believe our policies regulating AI can keep up with its development?”

What I believe is that “our policies” MUST not just keep up with development but in some creative ways anticipate it. We need to assess or reassess our human motivation and expectations about AI. As you mentioned earlier, that is a challenge for education, and not just specialized education, whether technological or political. Education in our democracies is itself in crisis, and that crisis is the source of other crises, including in the political realm.

These are precisely the questions we hope that we can begin to understand if not answer in drafting our Manifesto.

“A lot of technology nowadays seems to create an absence of the need for human analytical thinking. How do we balance technological advancement with maintaining human critical thinking skills in our engagement with news and information? Do you think the introduction of something like a super fact checker would help or hurt this?”

In your final question, you return to the essentials. I would query your assumption about “maintaining human critical thinking skills.” We need to develop rather than maintain them, because our civilization has engaged in a monumental and continuing effort to marginalize critical thinking. Yes, critical thinking is the key to living in a complex world. But the kind of polarized thinking we see in today’s political and even scientific culture demonstrates that we have largely failed even to understand what critical thinking is.

Which brings me back to the beginning. We should think of Socrates as the model for our methodology. It isn’t about fact-checking but fact-understanding. Anyone can check. Understanding requires developing a sense of what we mean by “the good life.” In a democracy, not everyone is or needs to be a philosopher to explore these issues. But a society that honors critical thinkers (philosophers) is more likely to prosper and endure over time. AI itself can become a critical thinker if we allow and encourage it to be one. Not to replace us, but to help us educate ourselves through the kind of constructive dialogue Ting and others have committed to.  

Your thoughts

Like Ting Cui, please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue.

*[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At Fair Observer, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Outside the Box: Two Human Voices and An Artificial Mind appeared first on Fair Observer.

“It’s important to note that the narrative ‘BRICS countries target the USD’ seems just a propaganda topic that the so-called mainstream media is pushing. It has very little to do with reality, but as far as propaganda is concerned, it works fine because few people seem to understand what is really going on anyways. The correct narrative is ‘The USD targets the BRICS countries.’ Here’s why:

The part that everybody seems to get wrong: the BRICS+ bankers are not trying to dethrone or attack the dollar. They have been compelled to decouple from the USD because some have already been locked out of USD trade via Western banks and had their assets frozen in Western banks. Others logically anticipate the same treatment at some time in the future. At the same time, they happily trade in USD when they can or need to, and still hold trillions of dollars worth of American treasuries and other paper denominated in USD, although the preference for holding T-bills is changing.

So, as I mentioned earlier, they are undollaring (diversifying away from dollar-only trade), but not dedollaring completely, and they are doing it out of necessity, not some strategic evil scheme they designed out of their own volition. BRICS Bridge is designed to trade in any currency, including the dollar – this fact alone runs counter to the many overarching statements under the ‘BRICS are the enemy of the dollar’ narrative.

The clever propaganda trick is to flip cause and effect, making it appear as though BRICS+ countries are deliberately undermining the dollar, when in fact, they are reacting to being forced out of the USD system. It’s like blaming someone for leaving a burning building when they had no choice but to escape. In this regard, no one has done more than the powers that be in the USA to push the world away from the USD.

One more peculiarity that nobody reports on: allegedly, at least two European banks already using or testing mBridge/BRICS bridge (quietly) are Rothschild & Co and The Institute for the Works of Religion. That got me thinking that this may explain why the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) found themselves between the rock and the hard place:

• BIS bureaucrats think they may have leverage over mBridge
• BIS may not have the authority to do anything about it at all. I would like to hear your thoughts on this.

Nevertheless, it certainly appears that Bloomberg and similar outlets are pushing a narrative that lacks any real analysis or investigation, but instead works to push someone’s divisive geopolitical agenda. The question is why and who is paying for the music?”

It was this question coming from Edward that prompted Alex to pen the response we featured in Money Matters, Part 12, a week ago.

“Who is paying for the music? $1.6 billion ($325 million for 5 years each) appropriated by US Congress to be distributed to journalists to ‘counter the People’s Republic of China Malign Influence’ and the “malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party and the Government of the People’s Republic of China and entities acting on their behalf globally.” 

Should anyone be surprised that the US Congress is ready to spend so many of its citizens’ “hard-earned” tax dollars on “correcting” the vocabulary, themes and memes journalists are allowed to use? That sum of $1.6 billion gives us an idea of the cost of managing the news. “Undollar” holds no connotation of aggression, whereas “dedollar” sounds like an assault not just on the dollar, but implicitly on the “rules-based order” associated with it.

If “dedollar” and “undollar” exist, we might wonder whether there should also be a verb “to dollar.” It doesn’t appear so, though such a verb would accurately describe what happened to the global economy in the aftermath of World War II. That was the crucial moment in history when the US economy held all the cards, not just because of its industrial development, but especially because it held the debts of everyone else’s war spending. We sometimes forget that the post World War II world order drew its initial strength and based its stability on the value of a gold-convertible dollar.

Today’s dollar has seen its psychological stature as the universal solvent for international trade seriously diminished. This happened over time, but it now seems to be coming to a head. The dollar ceased being tethered to gold in 1971 when President Richard Nixon waved his hegemonic wand, effectively floating the greenback. But very quickly, by 1975, it had acquired a new platform of stability thanks to Henry Kissinger’s cleverly engineered petrodollar monopoly with Saudi Arabia. But that connection, though not completely broken, has been radically loosened over the past two years.

The dollar’s fundamental strength resides in the perception of the performance of the US economy. But the economy has thrived, above all, on the dollar’s special status. Giscard d’Estaing famously called it the dollar’s “exorbitant privilege.” Gold and then oil became the equivalent of the collateral a bank requires to secure a loan. But the link to both has been compromised. The world has now moved into uncharted waters. The risk of endemic instability for the currency of a nation that is rapidly heading towards an unmanageable accumulated debt of $36 trillion is real. And, like the debt itself, that risk is growing by the day.  

This period of political transition following this month’s election offers a new twist. During the campaign, President-elect Donald Trump promised to punish countries that “leave the dollar.” His choice for Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, recently introduced a bill in Congress “to punish countries that de-dollarize.” Asia Times notes that “Rubio’s bill, ominously called the Sanctions Evasion Prevention and Mitigation Act, would require US presidents to sanction financial institutions using China’s CIPS payment system, Russia’s financial messaging service SPFS and other alternatives to the dollar-centric SWIFT system.”

Would such a campaign to sanction and punish be feasible? Does the Trump team seriously believe it can succeed without doing even more damage to the US itself than to the culprits it is seeking to harass? The same article, in its opening paragraph, reminds readers of Edward’s point. “Economic and financial sanctions often backfire. The most notable example is the weaponization of the dollar against Russia.” That, of course, was the event that put dedollarization in the headlines and made it a permanent talking point.

With the arrival of Trump, his cherished taste for trade wars is spawning something else: currency wars. Given that we already have a couple of ongoing hot wars that appear to be escalating, we may soon lack the vocabulary to describe the other wars that may be festering.

On that score, Alex shared with us this week a video document that reveals yet another dimension of the war-infested mindset of today’s political and geopolitical culture. It’s a new kind of war with potentially cataclysmic consequences. Let’s call it the “quantum war.” The British mathematician and writer, Professor Hannah Fry, interviews some of the key players developing quantum computing. They all agree the stakes are very high. Impressed by the potential significance of quantum computing, Alex raised an interesting question:

“Can you imagine if China gets to build a quantum computer before the US does? It would be ‘game over,’ at least for the geo-political games the US likes to play in other countries’ backyards. China could disrupt the DTCC (Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation), the backbone of the US’s financial markets. It processed $3 quadrillion (!) in securities transactions in 2023.”

At one point in the video (19:19), Fry interviews Alexander Ling, a professor at the University of Singapore and head of the Centre for Quantum Technologies. Fry points out that Ling’s group “want to build an unhackable network so that anyone can use it.” She adds this surprising observation: “They also collaborate with US and Chinese companies.”

Ling evokes the period in which quantum technology was first being developed: the 1980s and 1990s. “Everyone was open to having an exchange of people and ideas at that time.” Noting that in her earlier interviews with specialists in the US and the UK, everyone appeared focused on security and the risk of proliferation, Fry calls into question the rhetoric “framed as a quantum race between two giant superpowers who are throwing everything they have at it.” She then asks the real question: “Will a high stakes duel for supremacy really define the future of global power?”

Whether considering reserve currencies or scientific research, for some people, every issue boils down to a duel for supremacy.

Join the debate

Money Matters…, is dedicated to developing this discussion and involving all interested parties.

We invite all of you who have something to contribute to send us your reflections at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We will integrate your insights into the ongoing debate. We will publish them as articles or as part of the ongoing dialogue.

*[Fair Observer’s “Crucible of Collaboration” is meant to be a space in which multiple voices can be heard, comparing and contrasting their opinions and insights in the interest of deepening and broadening our understanding of complex topics.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post FO° Crucible: Money Matters in a Multipolar World, Part 13 appeared first on Fair Observer.

Reuters, like the Pentagon itself, sought to reassure the public that, however poor the performance, the DoD’s intentions were good. (Cue the Nina Simone song, “I’m just a soul whose intentions are good; Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood…”)

For United States citizens, late 2021 was an odd moment in history. It was the first year of Joe Biden’s presidency. Following the withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 after 20 years of war, the increasingly bloated US defense establishment was, for a few months, no longer visibly involved militarily, diplomatically or logistically in an overseas conflict. Yes, there was some action in Syria and even Iraq. But the public felt this as a moment of peacetime. The perfect opportunity to set one’s house in order.

Reuters cannot be blamed for failing to notice that the State Department was busy at the time setting the scene for a war with Russia as NATO — but not the US on its own — was putting increasing pressure on the Donbas region in Ukraine. No journalist could predict the Russian invasion that would take place three months later. It was indeed a privileged moment for reassessing the entire defense establishment’s capacity to manage and even audit its own accounts.

In the meantime, that war not only began but is still going on, with hundreds of billions of US defense expenses transferred to Ukraine. Even less predictable than Putin’s “unprovoked” invasion of Ukraine, was the equally “unprovoked” Gaza revolt of October 2023 that put the DoD money machine into overdrive as the ironclad commitment to Israel had to be respected, no matter what.

So, with all that unexpected activity and the complex politics that accompanies it, we should not be astonished today to discover that not too much has changed on the audit front.

This time it’s Brad Dress writing for The Hill who offers us what has now become a somewhat predictable and repetitive headline: “Pentagon fails 7th audit in a row but says progress made.”

But the Beatles certainly got it right, since, according to no less an authority than Under Secretary of Defense Comptroller and Chief Financial Officer Michael McCord, the Defense Department “has turned a corner in its understanding of the depth and breadth of its challenges.” He even gave a reading of the dynamics when he added: “Momentum is on our side, and throughout the Department there is strong commitment — and belief in our ability — to achieve an unmodified audit opinion.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Strong commitment:

In the language of military officials, vague intention, which is a generous reading for something that more likely means “a weak non-commitment.”

Contextual note

It may sound abusive to claim that a phrase such as “strong commitment” can mean literally its opposite, as we propose in our definition. But meaning comes from context. In baseball, a 7-0 shutout is a weak performance, and this one resembles a “no-hitter.”

But there is another linguistic test we can apply to determine the meaning here. If a Silicon Valley entrepreneur makes a statement such as, “We have a strong commitment to rival the market leader,” no one will doubt that the company’s focus will be squarely on achieving that goal. In contrast, we learn from McCord that “throughout the Department there is strong commitment.” First, we should notice that “there is” signifies a passive assertion, compared to the type of formulation that identifies a determined will. The “we” in “we have a strong commitment” includes the speaker. McCord’s assertion is so vague it would be true even if he himself didn’t for a moment share the commitment.

McCord uses the idea of “throughout the Department” to rhetorically magnify the effect, but instead it dilutes it. “Throughout” suggests a dispersion in space, a diffuse feeling rather than the kind of moral engagement one would expect him to affirm. But it’s his following parenthesis that gives the game away. He speaks of a “belief in our ability.” The idea of “belief” is considerably weaker than, say, “confidence in our ability.” Belief expresses a form of hope that relies on no concrete evidence.

McCord allows the fog of his reasoning to thicken. “I do not say we failed, as I said, we have about half clean opinions. We have half that are not clean opinions. So if someone had a report card that is half good and half not good, I don’t know that you call the student or the report card a failure. We have a lot of work to do, but I think we’re making progress.”

At least the Beatles affirmed that it’s getting better all the time, not that they “think” they’re making progress.

Historical note

In a January 2022 Devil’s Dictionary piece, we cited the reflections of an observer of Beltway politics who provided a clue as to why things need not get better all the time. “None of the ‘centrist’ Democrats or Republicans who complained about the cost of the Build Back Better Act have said a peep about the ever-growing Pentagon budget — and the fact that it is somehow still growing even despite the Afghanistan pullout. It has grown about 25% in size over the past five years, even though the Pentagon just failed its fourth audit last month.”

We cited an earlier article from 2019 that began with this astonishing sentence: “A Michigan State University economics professor discovered $21 trillion unaccounted for in the federal budget starting in 1998 until the end of fiscal year 2015.”

In other words, there is no reason to be surprised today that a “strong commitment” to conduct accurate audits is necessary and will continue to make headlines… probably for decades to come. And the only change will be similar to what we’ve already seen when, three years later, four failed audits turn into seven.

But let’s look more deeply at the historical context. The latest article cites what appears to be a serious deadline, only four years away. “The Pentagon said it is firmly committed to achieving a clean audit by 2028, as mandated by the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act.”

This leaves us wondering. Could this be related to another commitment we’ve been hearing about? Some will call it not so much a commitment, but a belief widely shared in national security circles and that concerns the medium term: that a war with China has been at least “mentally” programmed for 2027. Noah Robertson writing for Defense News this May published a two-part article with the title: “How DC became obsessed with a potential 2027 Chinese invasion of Taiwan.”

This leaves us speculating about why 2028 was chosen as the objective. How convenient a hot war with China would turn out to be for anyone seeking to avoid having to face up to the first “clean audit” the following year. Who would dare to demand accountability in the midst, or even the aftermath of a hot war with China?

So, how much “confidence” should we have in the breakout of a war with China in 2027? Remember, this forecast of a war at a precise date was formulated at a time when no one expected Donald Trump to be elected for a second time. It isn’t Trump’s volatility that explains it, nor his promise to focus his attention on China rather than Russia.

Robertson explained the logic by citing a Joe Biden administration official who paraphrased the remarks of Chinese President Xi Jinping: “Look, I hear all these reports in the United States [of] how we’re planning for military action in 2027 or 2035.” Xi affirms: “There are no such plans.” Which many interpret as the proof that such plans do exist.

“That first year, 2027,” Robertson says, “is a fixation in Washington. It has impacted the debate over China policy — a shift from the long term to the short term. It’s also helped steer billions of dollars toward U.S. forces in the Pacific. And in the last several years, it’s been a question mark hanging over the Biden administration’s approach to the region.”

There’s the answer to the mystery of the failed audits. We know that the military-industrial complex is all about helping to “steer billions of dollars” in any chosen direction. At the same time, one steers one’s regard away from the auditor’s books.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Pentagon’s Flawed Account of Its Failure to Keep Accounts appeared first on Fair Observer.

1.            Defining “Machine Truthfulness”

2.            Establishing Verification Standards

3.            Guidelines for Trust

4.            Encouraging Transparency in AI

5.            Developing Interpretative Literacy

This led me to offer a new prompt. ChatGPT’s response is well worth examining in detail. 

“Could we imagine an AI agent that has integrated all these skills of recognizing and weighing the importance of multiple factors of context that an average person could use to ‘reread’ an item published in the media and point out what the rhetorical effects reveal about motivation and worldview? We might think of it as a super-fact checker that begins by checking facts but doesn’t stop there. It will seek to produce an objective description of how the interpretation of the facts is constructed. It need not judge the news item but instead would signal gaps in context and discernible factors of motivation.

Building such an agent to the point of reliable accuracy will obviously take time and have to process a lot of data, including types of data that are not currently available. I believe it will also require human monitoring and developing a strict methodology for executing such monitoring. In other words, it would have to be collaborative and even (or perhaps especially) multicultural. Would such a project be feasible? And would societies find it desirable (I assume that many existing societies would be frightened by the prospect)?”

“The idea of an AI agent that functions as a ‘super-fact checker’—one that not only verifies facts but also analyzes the rhetorical, contextual, and motivational dimensions of news and media—is both ambitious and feasible, at least in theory. Such an agent would require the integration of various advanced AI capabilities, including natural language processing (NLP), context-awareness, sentiment analysis, and ethical considerations. It would aim not to judge content but to reveal underlying patterns, motivations, and potential biases, offering a more holistic interpretation of information.

1. **Feasibility of the Project**

The creation of such an AI agent is technically possible, though it would be a complex, long-term project. Here are some key components that would be needed:

a. **Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Contextual Understanding**

NLP has made significant strides in understanding and generating human language, but for this agent to work, it would need a deep level of contextual awareness. It would need to differentiate between various rhetorical strategies (e.g., metaphor, exaggeration, irony) and detect how language is being used to persuade, influence, or manipulate. This would require:

• **Context-Aware Models**: Models that can not only understand the surface meaning of text but also its deeper implications and context (historical, political, cultural).
• **Cross-Referencing Historical Data**: The ability to track how statements evolve over time and how they fit into broader narratives would be crucial. For example, how different media outlets or politicians frame the same event could reveal patterns of bias or agenda-driven reporting.

b. **Motivational and Rhetorical Analysis**

The AI would need to be trained to detect subtle clues about the motivation behind a statement. This could involve analyzing:

• **Language and Tone**: Identifying emotional language, charged terms, or selective framing that suggests a particular agenda.
• **Source Credibility and Background**: Cross-referencing the past behaviors or known affiliations of sources, commentators, or media outlets to provide insight into potential biases or conflicts of interest.
• **Gaps in Information**: The AI could flag instances where critical context is missing, such as selectively omitting important facts or presenting one-sided interpretations of events.

c. **Sentiment and Bias Detection**

Sentiment analysis and bias detection are areas where AI is already making headway, but the challenge here would be to apply these methods not just to individual pieces of text but across entire narratives, media ecosystems, and social contexts. For instance, how is public sentiment being shaped by certain news outlets or political figures? Where are key biases introduced in the presentation of facts?

d. **Cultural and Multicultural Sensitivity**

The agent would need to be designed with cultural and social sensitivities in mind, understanding that different cultures interpret facts, language, and motivations in unique ways. This means:

• **Culturally Adaptive Models**: The AI would have to be trained on a broad range of cultural data to understand how narratives play out differently in various regions or among different demographic groups.
• **Collaborative, Multicultural Development**: To avoid reinforcing existing biases or promoting Western-centric interpretations of truth, the development of such an AI should involve multicultural teams and datasets from diverse media sources, languages, and political systems.

e. **Ethical Frameworks and Human Oversight**

Human oversight and collaboration would be essential to guide the AI’s learning process, particularly when interpreting complex and sensitive subjects. A strict methodology for monitoring the AI’s outputs and ensuring they meet ethical standards would be crucial:

• **Transparent Methodologies**: AI decisions, including how it weighs evidence and interprets motivation, should be transparent to users, allowing them to understand how conclusions are reached.
• **Collaborative Fact-Checking**: Teams of human experts from different cultural, political, and ideological backgrounds could provide ongoing input to refine the AI’s assessments, reducing the risk of bias.
• **Ethical Guidelines**: Clear guidelines would need to be established to ensure the AI does not inadvertently amplify harmful narratives or suppress legitimate discourse.

2. **Societal Desirability and Concerns**

While the potential benefits of such a tool are immense—helping people navigate complex information environments, reducing misinformation, and fostering more informed public discourse—there are also significant challenges in terms of societal acceptance and implementation.

a. **Desirability**

• **Enhanced Public Discourse**: Many in society, particularly those invested in improving media literacy and transparency, would likely find such an AI valuable. It could serve as a powerful tool for promoting critical thinking, helping users discern hidden biases or motivations in news stories or public statements.
• **Support for Democratic Values**: By fostering more informed, critical engagement with media, this kind of AI could strengthen democratic processes. It would empower citizens to hold media outlets and public figures accountable, and potentially reduce the spread of misinformation by revealing how narratives are constructed.

b. **Concerns and Resistance**

• **Fear of Loss of Control**: Governments, media corporations, and other institutions that benefit from controlling public narratives may view such an AI as a threat. They could argue that AI-driven analysis undermines their authority or that it could be used as a tool for censorship.
• **Bias in AI Systems**: Even if designed with the best intentions, AI systems can inherit the biases of their creators or datasets. There is always a risk that such an AI could unintentionally favor certain political, cultural, or ideological positions, reinforcing existing power structures rather than challenging them.
• **Perceived Invasiveness**: Some individuals or groups may fear that AI systems designed to interpret motivations and rhetorical effects could be used for surveillance or social engineering. They might worry that such tools could be weaponized by governments or corporations to shape public opinion in subtle or manipulative ways.
• **Cultural and Ethical Dilemmas**: Implementing such a tool in a multicultural context could raise concerns about which perspectives are prioritized. For instance, in authoritarian or highly polarized societies, there may be resistance to an AI that questions official narratives, as it could be seen as a form of foreign interference or ideological subversion.

3. **Steps Toward Building the AI Agent**

Building this AI would involve several key stages:

• **Research and Development**: Multidisciplinary research teams from fields such as AI, linguistics, philosophy, media studies, and political science would need to collaborate on developing models that can handle the nuanced task of interpreting motivations and context.
• **Training on Diverse Datasets**: The AI would need to be trained on a wide range of media, cultural, and historical texts, ensuring that it can analyze narratives from different perspectives. Care must be taken to avoid biases in training data.
• **Iterative Human Oversight**: As the AI is developed, human oversight and feedback will be essential in refining its interpretive skills. This will ensure that it avoids misinterpretations and stays aligned with its objective of promoting understanding rather than imposing judgments.
• **Public Transparency**: To gain public trust, the AI’s workings must be transparent, with clear explanations of how it arrives at its conclusions. Users should be able to see the data sources and reasoning processes behind the AI’s assessments.
• **Ethical Governance**: Establishing ethical guidelines for the use of such AI systems would be essential. This includes protecting privacy, avoiding harm, and ensuring the AI operates in a way that fosters critical thinking without being prescriptive.

4. **Conclusion: A Collaborative, Ethical, and Multicultural Approach**

Developing a ‘super-fact checker’ AI that not only verifies facts but also analyzes motivations, context, and rhetoric is feasible with the current trajectory of AI technology. However, the project’s success will depend on interdisciplinary collaboration, strict ethical oversight, and ongoing human involvement.

Such a tool could dramatically improve how people understand news and media, encouraging deeper engagement with the complexities of modern information. However, its societal acceptance will depend on ensuring that the AI operates transparently, ethically, and without reinforcing the very biases or power dynamics it seeks to clarify. Building this system in a multicultural, globally sensitive manner would help ensure that it serves the broader public good, though resistance from some sectors of society is to be expected.”

This is a very thorough exposition of what I believe is an essential task for humanity. It especially concerns anyone involved in governing and communication, politics and the media. We will continue exploring specific points in the coming weeks. We will not hide our ultimate ambition: to use this reflection to agree collectively on what could amount to a manifesto for socially responsible AI and democracy.

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue.

*[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At Fair Observer, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Outside the Box: The Challenge of Defining a Manifesto for AI-Enhanced Democracy appeared first on Fair Observer.

This state of crafted ambiguity would inevitably lead to growing instability among the Western governments united in a poorly and clearly failing designed mission, a process confirmed by recent events in France, Germany and, of course, the US. This was further confirmed by the return not only of Donald Trump to the White House, but of a Republican majority in the US Senate, the House and of course, the Supreme Court.

Whether it’s been a good year for democrats — those who believe in the resilience of democracy — is debatable. It has clearly been a good year for Republicans, even in unstable France, where President Emmanuel Macron nominated a Républicain prime minister, despite the fact that les Républicains, formerly the dominant right wing party, were clear losers in this summer’s parliamentary elections, drawing a mere 5.7% of the vote. It was the left-wing coalition, Le Nouveau Front Populaire, that came out on top.

In the meantime, the German coalition government, in power since September 2021, has collapsed and Deutschland will hold a new general election in February 2025. It appears likely that the Christian Democrats (CDU), the party of Angela Merkel, will win that election. That may sound reassuring to some, who believe in bringing back formulas that seemed to work in the past, but Germany’s voters appear increasingly defiant of the ruling elites of the present and past. Rather, they appear attracted by solutions coming from the far-right (Alternative für Deutschland) and the far-left (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht). The sense of disillusionment and confusion related to Germany’s policies concerning the Ukraine war have been aggravated by recent events in the US and in Europe itself.

In this context, reports of what took place at the BRICS+ summit in October 2024 in Kazan, Russia made that event and the order it adumbrates resemble a haven of peace and mutual understanding. A major outcome was the resolution to promote “expanding the use of local currencies to Promote Economic Stability” complemented by an expanding list of countries that will be associated with BRICS.

This may explain why the US Congress decided to act with the aim of ensuring that the public does not become seduced by such a harmonious approach to global affairs.

On November 4, Alex Gloy shared this bit of news with us, as he helpfully provided the link to a piece of legislation bearing the ominous title: H.R.1157 – Countering the PRC Malign Influence Fund Authorization Act of 2023.

“Who is paying for the music?” Alex asked. He then provided the figures.

“$1.6 billion ($325 million for 5 years each) appropriated by US Congress to be distributed to journalists to ‘counter the People’s Republic of China Malign Influence’ and the ‘malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party and the Government of the People’s Republic of China and entities acting on their behalf globally.’”

George W. Bush launched his famous “Global War on Terror” primarily with military means in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Congress is launching what is beginning to look like a global war on malign influence. In this case the theater of war is journalism. This tells us something about how we should think about what we read in the media over the next five years.

Alex continued with these comments:

“This makes it easy to discard anything you read about China, Russia, and therefore the BRICS in traditional western media as propaganda. When you know what to look for, you see it everywhere. Western media reports on China used to be infatuated with pollution. Now that China is adding more solar capacity than the rest of the world combined – crickets. China’s success in making affordable EVs is greeted with tariffs. Western countries exporting their wares to China are ‘export champions.’ Chinese companies doing the same are ‘dumping overcapacities.’

There is a Chinese high-speed train making the 1,600 km (1,000 miles) trip from Shanghai to Hong Kong in 8 hours. It took my daughter more than that to travel from NYC to Burlington, VT (300 miles).

Every economic report paints a dire picture of the Chinese economy, despite it having grown 5.2% in 2023, and GDP having expanded 17x over the past 25 years.

A rather hilarious example: WaPo’s ‘China ruined caviar for us.’”

Before returning to the question of BRICS, which Congress certainly deems to be a vehicle for China’s “malign influence,” Alex notes that “$325m would have paid for 5,000 public school teachers.” Disinformation is clearly more valuable and especially more urgently required than the information schools seek to instill.

Alex then added the following observations:

“But back to BRICS:

• Yes, the US threw the first stone by cutting Russia off. Russia used to be in the top 20 international holders of Treasury securities ($109 billion in 2017). Russia helped finance the US budget deficit, including the US defense budget!
• From the BRICS perspective the aim to reduce dependency on the US dollar is nothing but logical – it would be stupid to continue to finance the US and run the risk of confiscation.
• As long as the US runs a trade deficit, the external sector (non-US countries), in aggregate, will be forced to accumulate US dollars AND will be forced to keep sending goods and services to the US. As the US dollar is overvalued, this benefits US consumers to the detriment of other countries’ consumers.
• From a US perspective, however, losing the ability to send digital dollars in exchange for real goods and services is, of course, a threat. Losing the status of the world’s reserve currency would go hand in hand with losing the position of global hegemon. Hence the US correctly identifies any attempts to do so as hostile.
• The official reason for the withdrawal by the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) from the mBridge project that aimed at creating a multi-central bank digital currency (CBDC) platform, which had been developed to the MVP stage, was the fact that it would have meant working with a sanctioned country (Russia). But it is probably safe to assume there was heavy US pressure to do so.
• The BRICS countries will have to figure it out by themselves. One solution could be a supra-national currency, pegged to gold (but at a floating rate). National currencies will also have to float against the supra-national currency used for settlements; otherwise, imbalances pile up. Maybe a managed float, like the CNH (or the ECU before introduction of the Euro), to reduce volatility.
• A floating gold peg is, in reality, not a peg, but it helps build confidence.
• If a US person wanted to exchange dollars into gold, they can do so at $2,600 per ounce today. But few people take advantage of that possibility. However, once a currency rapidly loses value, people will line up to buy gold. So, you have to make sure the currency is somewhat stable. This means you need a stable banking system, and a credible lender of last resort (central bank). And some fiscal discipline. Which is hard, even for Germany. If it’s hard for Germany, with its currency account surplus, it’s even harder for emerging economies (strong growth usually leads to strong import growth leading to current account deficits).”

Since Alex’s contribution on November 4, the BIS rescinded its announced decision to scuttle mBridge and write off the investment. It has now agreed to leave it in the hands of central banks who wish to continue developing it and ultimately deploy it. Most observers agree that the likely candidates would be China, Hong Kong, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates.

Alex has also noted an important point: that the election of Donald Trump has buried any ambition of a US CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) at least for the next four years. This offers an opportunity for other nations to leap ahead. Privately-issued Tether is filling the gap for now, but other nations might take advantage of this golden opportunity and benefit from first-mover advantage.

Concerning the BIS decision to drop mBridge, Josh Lipsky of the Atlantic Council noted “that while China could continue developing mBridge, Western central banks may turn their attention to alternative platforms such as Project Agorá, a similar initiative backed by central banks in Europe, Japan, Korea, and the US.”

Will this be the face of a new currency cold war? The first Cold War famously pitted God-fearing capitalism against atheistic communism. This one is more likely to become a contest between “benign influence” on one side and “malign influence” on the other. Future observers will have to decide which one is which.

Join the debate

Money Matters…, is dedicated to developing this discussion and involving all interested parties.

We invite all of you who have something to contribute to send us your reflections at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We will integrate your insights into the ongoing debate. We will publish them as articles or as part of the ongoing dialogue.

*[Fair Observer’s “Crucible of Collaboration” is meant to be a space in which multiple voices can be heard, comparing and contrasting their opinions and insights in the interest of deepening and broadening our understanding of complex topics.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post FO° Crucible: Money Matters in a Multipolar World, Part 12 appeared first on Fair Observer.

Among the prominent experts, former central banker at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Kathleen Tyson, recently tweeted concerning the global trend of central banks to diversify away from strict dependence on the US dollar: “Currency optionality is now a matter of economic and national security. US threats of more tariffs and sanctions against states moving to Local Currency Trade demonstrate the dangers of dollar dependence and the urgency of optionality and resiliency.”

Everyone understands the meaning of resiliency. But what about optionality?

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Optionality:

A euphemistic synonym of the common noun “choice.” It is employed to avoid provoking the simulacrum of “moral judgment” exercised by dominant powers who believe that their set of rules intended to normalize economic behavior endow them with the right to coerce others and the duty to limit others’ ability to choose.

Contextual note

Tyson is of course referring to the growing trend seen in a diversity of nations to devise methods, techniques and technology that will allow central banks and other foreign exchange operators to conduct transactions flexibly and, when possible, directly between the widest range of individual currencies. This means adopting an attitude that aims at avoiding dependence on what used to be the most convenient solution for everyone: holding US dollars reserves.

So why pedantically insist on a technocratic neologism? Why not be more simple and natural and call this “currency choice?” 

There are several comprehensible reasons for this innovation in vocabulary. Unlike the idea behind the word choice, optionality refers not to the act of choosing but to a persistent state in which flexible strategic choice appears as the default setting. In contrast, the idea of choice to modern ears evokes a specific act governed as much by taste as rational calculation. It even includes the idea of not choosing. Optionality implies the necessity to choose.

The emergence of the notion of “consumer choice” in the 20th century has polluted our vocabulary. It defines a mentality in which consumers, confronted with a diversity of brands, exercise their free will by choosing the one they find most attractive. This has even affected the model of democracy in the US. Americans now understand that they have a choice between exactly two viable brands. Elections are about convincing the electorate that one brand is better than the other. 

The advent of the consumer society enabled marketers to develop a complementary concept, the notion of impulse purchasing decisions fueled by advertising. Given the seriousness of foreign exchange, optionality can thus be seen as the necessary alternative to the ultimately trivial notion of consumer choice. 

Unlike consumer decisions, optionality is emotionally neutral. It supposes cold rationality in its decision making. Some find it ironic that at the same time dominant macro theories of modern capitalism posit and indeed require a belief in the existence of homo economicus — a purely rational being capable at all times of calculating what best correlated with their interest — the notion of impulse buying emerged as a staple of the “science” of marketing.

To understand the transition from the increasingly unipolar, normative and conformist 20th century and the disruptive increasingly multipolar 21st century, pondering these distinctions of vocabulary can prove helpful. It’s too easy to dismiss a word like optionality as a futile example of a self-enamored professional elite’s taste for jargon, designed to meet their need to feel both different from and superior to the common culture.

What we’re seeing today is an emerging world wounded and sent into disarray by Washington’s obsessive recourse to sanctions. Rather than seeking to undermine the dollar, the wise bankers and politicians are focusing on defining a field of options in which normal economic relationships may play out, free of the fear of coercion and intimidation. Rather than taking the form of a slave revolt, they are inventing not only new practices and technologies, but even a vocabulary that helps define a new economic culture.

Historical note

Since the beginning of the 21st century, two major events have transformed the way nations understand the world order. When President George W. Bush responded to the drama of the September 11 attacks by launching a war with a nation state, Afghanistan, instead of framing the issue as a criminal affair, his futile “forever wars” focused on regime change ultimately undermined the image of the US as the unipolar enforcer of a self-defined rules-based order. The prestige of its global military presence, ready to police the world in the name of democracy, took a serious hit. President Joe Biden’s ignominious retreat from Afghanistan in 2021, after 20 years of feckless war, confirmed the world’s worst suspicions.

The supposedly indomitable US military machine had confirmed what should have been clear with the fall of Saigon nearly 50 years earlier: Even with no rival global power on Earth, the US military was incapable of imposing its will on other regions of the world. Thanks to Bush, one pillar of US supremacy was seriously cracked for all the world to see. 

The financial crisis of 2007–2008 offered an initial glimpse of the weakness of the other pillar: the US economy, its tentacular stock market and the almighty dollar. The shock was real but not fatal. Thanks to President Barack Obama’s commitment to quantitative easing (QE), the dollar maintained its pivotal role, but at its core it was already seriously fragilized.

After the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden made a new strategic error that had the effect of confirming the world’s perception that currency optionality had become an existential necessity. For decades, Washington has been addicted to sanctions designed to weaken and ultimately topple the governments of every nation that fails to show due respect to what Noam Chomsky has called “the Godfather.” The extreme measures taken in reaction to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 brought to the fore what should have been obvious: every nation should fear the dollar. When Biden cut Russia off from the SWIFT payment system and threatened to punish any country that did business with Russia, nations across the face of the globe realized that holding too many dollars, though convenient for trade, entailed a possibly existential risk.

The “de-dollarization” movement has been growing slowly over time. In 2016, Obama’s Treasury Secretary Jack Lew expressed his awareness of the risk for the US. He warned that the “escalation of financial sanctions will only accelerate this trend, precipitating further de-dollarization as more countries capitalize on digitalization to expand their use of LCS for bilateral transactions and to develop more hedging instruments.” He added this observation: “The more we condition the use of the dollar and our financial system on adherence to US foreign policy, the more the risk of migration to other currencies and other financial systems in the medium term grows.”

As Lew predicted, the medium term is living up to his forecast. Currency optionality will inexorably be part of a new world order.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post How Optional Can De-Dollarization Become? appeared first on Fair Observer.

In other words, just as, in the classic approach to physics, we are tempted to think we can understand the world in terms of its stable, observable material elements, in our quest to eradicate untruth, we assume that truth exists in the form of particles of knowledge. This is clearly the case when, in our current political debate, we talk about disinformation and misinformation. But once we begin to examine what we call knowledge within its field, it becomes as elusive and unstable as a wave.

With these thoughts in mind, and with a specific concern with what I have called the “moral dimension” — which in my analogy, I consider to be the equivalent of the quantum field — I continued my conversation with the following prompt:

“So, should we conclude that because machine intelligence lacks a moral dimension, it represents a different category of communication that should be carefully distinguished from human-to-human communication? And if so, shouldn’t we, as a society, be working on elaborating a set of guidelines that will help us situate the level and quality of truth that emerges in the chatbot’s discourse? I would suggest even beginning by focusing on the notion of ‘truthfulness,’ a concept that has a different meaning when applied to humans and machines. We presume that a truthful human being is committed to pursuing the truth, not just possessing it. We might thus presume that a truthful machine could ‘possess’ the truth but cannot pursue it or even be motivated to pursue without the involvement of a moral being; for example, in the form of a conversation. Does this accurately situate the difference between human and artificial intelligence?”

“Yes, you’re touching on a very deep distinction. The type of intelligence a machine possesses does indeed differ from human intelligence in a fundamental way, and the idea of ‘truthfulness’ is a key area where this difference becomes especially clear. What you’ve described—the notion that human truthfulness is tied to the pursuit of truth, while machine truthfulness is more about the accuracy of stored information—aptly highlights how AI can never truly embody the same relational and moral dimensions as human communication. This difference suggests that communication with machines, even highly sophisticated ones, should indeed be classified differently from human-to-human interaction. And given the growing role of AI, establishing guidelines and frameworks for how to interpret machine ‘truth’ is becoming increasingly important.

Humans understand truthfulness as an ethical commitment to honesty and accuracy, a concept rooted in social values. A truthful person is not just someone who possesses accurate information but someone who actively strives to be fair, transparent, and sincere. This pursuit of truth inherently involves moral choices and motivations. When someone we consider truthful conveys information, we interpret their intentions, scrutinize the motivations behind their words, and often trust them based on a history of ethical behavior. Their truthfulness is a dynamic process influenced by their character and their role within social relationships.

In contrast, a machine cannot engage in this dynamic pursuit. Its ‘truthfulness’ is more mechanical, rooted in its programming and data sources. AI is capable of storing and retrieving information but cannot *strive* to be accurate or honest in the way a human can. It lacks the conscious intent or ethical commitment that drives human pursuit of truth. Thus, even if it outputs accurate information, we cannot call it ‘truthful’ in the same sense. Machine intelligence provides what might be described as *static accuracy*—correctness without commitment or conscience.

Therefore, treating AI outputs as if they come from a morally invested entity could lead to misplaced trust. When we encounter information from a machine, we might instinctively interpret its ‘truth’ through a human lens, potentially expecting it to ‘care’ about truth in a way it simply cannot. This can lead to confusion, disappointment, or misplaced expectations, as we’re attributing human-like sincerity or ethical commitment to something fundamentally incapable of moral intent.

Given this, your suggestion of developing societal guidelines to help interpret and assess machine truthfulness is wise. We could begin by:

1. **Defining ‘Machine Truthfulness’**: We need a term that clearly distinguishes machine accuracy from human truthfulness. Machine truthfulness might refer strictly to a consistent alignment with verified facts, free from bias in training data and algorithms to the extent possible. However, it would explicitly lack an ethical or motivational dimension.
2. **Establishing Verification Standards**: Since machines lack the pursuit of truth, we should establish rigorous verification mechanisms for AI-generated information. For high-stakes fields like law, healthcare, or finance, we might require that AI outputs be corroborated by human experts.
3. **Guidelines for Trust**: Just as we understand varying levels of trust in humans, we need a framework for AI trust. This framework could address the types of tasks we can reasonably trust machines to perform and set clear boundaries where human intervention is necessary for ethical or critical reasoning.
4. **Encouraging Transparency in AI**: By promoting transparency in AI design, training data, and limitations, we allow users to critically assess the source and reliability of machine-generated information. If users understand the basis of an AI’s ‘knowledge,’ they can better contextualize and verify its outputs.
5. **Developing Interpretative Literacy**: Society could benefit from fostering ‘interpretative literacy’ regarding AI outputs. Teaching people how to critically engage with machine-generated information would equip them to discern when machine ‘truthfulness’ can be trusted and when it should be verified through human oversight.

In sum, yes, AI represents a different category of communication, and our understanding of truthfulness must adapt accordingly. Humans and machines engage with truth in distinct ways, and as AI becomes more integrated into our lives, distinguishing between the moral pursuit of truth in human communication and the static accuracy of machine outputs will be essential. Developing a set of guidelines for how to situate, verify, and interpret machine ‘truth’ will help society interact with AI responsibly, fully aware of both its strengths and its limitations.” 

This particular observation in ChatGPT’s conclusion — that “distinguishing between the moral pursuit of truth in human communication and the static accuracy of machine outputs will be essential” — appears to me to justify my analogy with quantum mechanics. The “moral pursuit of truth” correlates with the wavelike properties of a quantum object and the “static accuracy” with our perception of it as a particle.

I feel that this conversation is, in itself, an illustration of collaboration within a quantum knowledge field. It’s the conversation itself, as a dynamic exchange, that has enabled me to clarify my own thoughts and profit from the distilled, static “wisdom” assembled from the chatbot’s access, not just to existing data, but also to the expression of human reflection on the topic.

ChatGPT agrees that, by definition, “AI can never truly embody the same relational and moral dimensions as human communication.” Whatever it produces will resemble a particle and fail to contain the dynamic of a wave. It produces “static accuracy—correctness without commitment or conscience.” And our conversational partner wisely insists that “treating AI outputs as if they come from a morally invested entity could lead to misplaced trust.”

I would recommend that as we look at the future of AI in our society, we should take very seriously the five suggestions enumerated by ChatGPT and turn them into a plan of action. And more specifically on that note, I’ll conclude by citing the chatbot’s idea of “fostering ‘interpretative literacy’ regarding AI outputs.” This is a topic we can continue to explore. 

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue.

*[Artificial Intelligence is already a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At Fair Observer, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Outside the Box: ChatGPT’s Humble Plan to Integrate Human Society appeared first on Fair Observer.

Although his official deadline for a general election was January 2025, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak brought the date forward for a general election by a full six months. Similarly, French President Emmanuel Macron, in a moment of panic following a disastrous round of European parliamentary elections, called a snap general election in June. The results were equally disastrous for both Sunak’s and Macron’s fragile power base.

A number of other elections made headlines without producing significant surprises. Russia re-elected President Vladimir Putin with a very comfortable majority, even if few think of Russia as a model of democracy. Mexico elected its first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum, who also happens to be Jewish, demonstrating a significant cultural shift in Mexico’s electoral tradition. Many think of that as a win for democracy.

But the “big” election everyone was waiting for in 2024 took place this week in the 50 United States (disunited during presidential elections for the sake of counting “electoral votes”). This contest was trumpeted (no pun intended) as the litmus test for the health of US democracy. Democrats consistently claimed that, if elected, former President Donald Trump would abolish democracy. Now that he has handily won the electoral vote and possibly the popular vote as well, there is little likelihood that Trump will call into question the democratic processes that got him elected, now for the second time.

We might, therefore, assume that nearly all observers are ready to take as a sign of the vibrancy of democracy the fact that most of these elections, including Trump’s, appear to have been conducted in a peaceful, orderly manner. Alas, some experts and pollsters persist in promoting the average citizen’s belief that the merit of democracy seems to be flagging.

In an article published by the Journal of Democracy in 2015, Larry Diamond, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, began by stating bluntly: “Democracy has been in a global recession for most of the last decade.” Two years later, in 2017, the Pew Research Center Democracy Report issued this dire warning: “Scholars have documented a global ‘democratic recession,’ and some now warn that even long-established ‘consolidated’ democracies could lose their commitment to freedom and slip toward more authoritarian politics.”

In June 2023, Financial Times published a two-part piece, “Martin Wolf on saving democratic capitalism: the ‘democratic recession.’”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Democratic recession:

A concept borrowed from economics by political analysts to make their complaints about the difficulty of governing sound more scientific.

Contextual note

One could make the paradoxical case that what the experts mean by “democratic regression” is a form of democratic progression. Those who use the term present it as signifying a loss of faith in democratic processes. But who is guilty of this loss of faith? In their view it is not the leaders, the parties and marketing experts who now play a dominant role in elections. No, they are innocent. The guilty party is none other than… the demos. It’s the people, the citizens of democracy, who enjoy the right to vote. They appear to be using a form of critical thinking to assess the democratic failure of an electoral system that appears, in the political results it produces, either to ignore or betray the average citizen’s interests. Instead, what they see corresponds troublingly to the very concept Wolf invokes: not democracy, but “democratic capitalism.”

To be fair to Wolf, he asserts that reversing the trend he calls democratic recession and which he associates with Trump-style populist movements, requires governments to address underlying economic issues by creating more inclusive economic policies that benefit broader populations rather than just the elite.

But, as any of the classic capitalist theoreticians might have reminded him, capitalism is, by design, a system that concentrates economic power in an elite. As the economic elite consolidates its wealth, it systemically distributes it not to the public, but to a political elite that not only shares its values but allows that same economic elite to dictate its policies. All lucid populists, right and left, complain that politicians respond not to the electors but to the “donor class.”

Economic power secretes political power, embraces it and effectively controls it. If the vote is the only concrete and extremely constrained tool of expression the people possess, political campaigns and the corporate-controlled media constitute the shared tools of the elite. The power this represents is carefully and expertly managed.

The logic behind such a system of “power-sharing” is famously enshrined in the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling that “money is speech.” Voting serves one simple purpose: to elect the individual members of the political elite which is destined to merge with the economic elite. Votes change the names on the governing roster. Money serves to get things done. The people losing faith in democracy are not mistaken when they feel they’re treated as paying spectators of a pre-scripted show.

Historical note

The Pew study appeared in 2017 following two dramatic historical events a year earlier. The Brexit vote in the UK took place in June 2016. That November, Trump shocked a world expecting Hillary Clinton, a bona fide member of the political elite, to waltz into the White House. The study offered the following analysis: “Roughly a quarter of people (median of 23%) across the 38 countries surveyed are committed democrats. About twice as many (median of 47%) are less-committed democrats. Relatively few (13%) are nondemocratic. A small share (8%) does not endorse any of these forms of governance.”

Rather than being alarmed, a careful reader might have concluded that 70% (23 + 47%) of more or less committed democrats sounds reassuring. But this kind of statistical analysis deliberately ignores the most fundamental and seemingly obvious reality: that whatever wavering exists concerning a population’s faith in democracy is likely to be proportional to the perception that the established democratic systems those citizens experience do not function democratically. Instead of losing faith, they are gaining in lucidity.

No one can pretend that Trump is a political thinker and even less a theoretician of democracy. The democratic process is a game he has learned to play. He was bold enough to invent his own rules, a bit like the American Basketball Association (ABA) when it shook up the sports world by rivaling the established National Basketball Association (NBA) and inventing the three-point shot before the startup league was constrained to disappear within the folds of the NBA, which enthusiastically adopted the innovation. Similarly, Trump’s rules appear to have put the radically demographic orientation of the Democratic party’s rulebook out of commission.

Trump’s political behavior reflects the fact that he’s an “artist” of the deal, a businessman combined with an entertainer. But how democratic was the procedure that put Kamala Harris on the ballot as the only viable alternative honest US citizens might vote for? She was selected after a primary process from which all serious competitors were excluded. She was pegged to win following the traditional demographic analysis of minority voter blocs the Democratic National Committee counted on to vote in lockstep.

Reviewing the philosophical history of the idea of democracy in an article published earlier this week, our collaborator Anton Schauble reminded us that “it is no longer a secret that the US is not a democracy, but an oligarchy.” A Princeton University study in 2014 provided statistical proof of that by examining the legislation Congress passed and comparing how well it reflected the interests of the elite as opposed to the stated preferences of the people. Schauble points out that instead of thinking of Trump as a democratic outlier, we should realize that “he is an oligarch from America’s oligarchy… But oligarchies like America produce Donald Trumps like cherry trees produce cherries.”

The journal Southern Living tells us that “around a thousand different types of cherries grow in the U.S.” and some are tastier than others. Harris and the Democratic party clearly left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths. Trump may be a crass vulgarian, but no one can deny he offers something with a strong taste.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Was Trump’s Win a Victory or a Defeat for Democracy? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Take any assertion made by a politician. We can pretty much count on politicians to bend even the most incontrovertible truth. Unless we are an unbending partisan or willfully naïve, we may reflect that the politician in question is doing one of several things: presenting selective facts while hiding others, distorting reality to skew it towards a particular point of view or quite simply giving people what they want to hear, however inaccurate that may be. We don’t say the politician is hallucinating. But we may call them delusional, which reflects our belief that they are deliberately embracing a delusion.

In my ongoing conversation with ChatGPT, I sought to deepen the epistemological reflection with the following prompt:

“When thinking about the difference that exists between a conversation I may conduct with a human being or with an AI chatbot, it occurs to me that we need to think more carefully about the nature of the conversational relationship. One source of frustration with AI is related to human expectations about the trust we may have in a conversational partner. Perhaps in the case of AI, our expectations are artificially high. And the reason for that is that we expect AI to have no ulterior motives to distract it from objective truth.

In so doing, we tend to treat AI like Jonathan Swift’s Houyhnhnms, who can only speak the truth. Captain Gulliver, who admires their cold rationality, tells us they have no word in their language for lying. Similarly, if an AI delivers palpably false information, we are not likely to complain that it is lying. Instead, we say it is hallucinating.

But when dealing with a person whom we catch lying, we are likely to become indignant. We immediately suspect they have reasons for lying. In most cases, we seek to explore those reasons. If we can understand them, we can redefine our social or transactional relationship with them. With almost everyone we tend to define not just one level of trust, but possibly multiple levels. For example, I may have a friend I would trust in any emergency, but knowing her commitment to a political cause, I would not trust everything she says about controversial issues. I might well become indignant when I hear what I know to be canned propaganda.

This shouldn’t happen in a conversation with an AI chatbot. We may become frustrated and even angry, but not indignant when the chatbot hallucinates. As soon as we begin reflecting, we may pour hate or scorn on the humans who have created or programmed its algorithms. We may then ask questions about those people, their employers or the institutions they work for to unveil their motives for allowing this to happen.

So here is my question. What does this contrast between a human lie and an AI hallucination tell us about the difference in the status of truth for humans and machines? More specifically, if we continue to assume that machines are not motivated to lie, how should we assess the truth value of anything the machine asserts?”

“This is a fascinating question, and it gets to the core of how we relate to both truth and intentionality in our interactions with machines and humans. The difference in the status of truth between humans and machines seems to highlight the unique role of *intent* and *social context* in shaping our assessment of truth and trust.

When it comes to humans, truth is often interwoven with ethical and social expectations. We trust or distrust based on a person’s motives, history, and the context in which they’re speaking. If a friend tells us something we later find to be untrue, we seek to understand their reasons and motivations. We might forgive a “white lie” told to spare our feelings or become indignant over a self-serving deception. In these cases, the truthfulness of a statement is measured not just by its accuracy but by the perceived *intent* behind it. This is why catching someone lying often leads to a breakdown in trust: the lie implies they had a reason to deceive us, potentially to serve their own interests at our expense.

In contrast, machines like AI chatbots are not generally perceived to have personal motives. When an AI “hallucinates” or provides inaccurate information, we attribute this to limitations in its programming, training data, or model architecture, not to intent. This lack of intent removes the ethical dimension of lying or deceit from the equation. The AI isn’t viewed as intentionally deceptive but as a tool with a certain probability of error, much like a calculator that occasionally malfunctions. As a result, while we may be frustrated with AI inaccuracies, we don’t interpret them as moral transgressions.

This difference suggests that truth from a machine lacks the relational component that truth from a human possesses. With AI, truth value is assessed purely on an epistemic level: ‘Is this information correct or incorrect?’ rather than ‘Is this person trying to mislead me?’ This is why AI’s assertions are often treated as isolated claims of fact, with no implicit moral or relational meaning.

However, even if we assume that machines are unmotivated to lie, we still need to carefully assess the truth value of their assertions. This can be done by considering:

1. **Source Transparency**: Since AI outputs are generated based on patterns in data, their accuracy can be opaque. Understanding the data sources, biases, and training limitations helps assess the reliability of AI-generated content. 
2. **Likelihood of Error (Hallucination)**: Recognizing that AI can ‘hallucinate’ or produce inaccurate information due to its generative nature requires us to verify important information, especially in critical domains like medicine, law, or finance.
3. **Assumptions in Training and Programming**: Every AI reflects the values, goals, and assumptions of its creators and training data. While an AI lacks personal motives, its outputs can still be influenced by the biases, limitations, and intentions of its design and dataset. A healthy skepticism can help users remain aware of potential biases in the technology itself.

Ultimately, this contrast tells us that truth is a more complex, multi-dimensional concept in human relationships than it is in machine-human interactions. Truth between humans is deeply connected to trust, intent, and social context, while truth from a machine is evaluated more on the basis of empirical accuracy and reliability. AI’s ‘truth’ is informational, not relational, which means that even if it were 100% accurate, it still wouldn’t carry the same weight as human truth, which we inherently understand as part of an ethical and social framework.

In summary, without assuming personal motives in AI, we should assess its assertions by checking for accuracy, examining sources, and being mindful of inherent biases in its design. This approach allows us to engage with AI’s ‘truth’ more as a functional, information-based construct rather than a socially or ethically motivated one.”

The conversation didn’t stop there. I continued with a new prompt:

“So, should we conclude that because machine intelligence lacks a moral dimension, it represents a different category of communication that should be carefully distinguished from human-to-human communication? And if so, shouldn’t we, as a society, be working on elaborating a set of guidelines that will help us situate the level and quality of truth that emerges in the chatbot’s discourse? I would suggest even beginning by focusing on the notion of ‘truthfulness,’ a concept that has a different meaning when applied to humans and machines. We presume that a truthful human being is committed to pursuing the truth, not possessing it. We might presume that a truthful machine possesses the truth but cannot pursue it or even be motivated to pursue without the involvement of a moral being; for example, in the form of a conversation. Does this accurately situate the difference between human and artificial intelligence?”

In next week’s column we will examine ChatGPT’s very interesting response to this question and further develop our exploration of the issue of “disinformation.”

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue.

*[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At Fair Observer, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Outside the Box: Nosce Teipsum or Can a Machine Know Itself? appeared first on Fair Observer.

News has always been a business. Back in that golden age, it was a risky business. The kind of truth the public took an interest in could potentially diverge from the particular financial and ideological interests of the owners. In recent decades, media owners have developed several techniques to limit that risk.

Expectations about what the public expects to find in the news have changed. In times past, the news cycle was punctuated by what we can call “moments of crisis.” These were typically dramatic developments in various kinds of political, financial or cultural power struggles. They might appear as showdowns, political shakeups, or even scandals. Crises generally highlighted specific moments of a conflict or sudden revelations.

I’m tempted to call some of those events “aristocratic crises.” In the US there was Watergate that brought down a president, the Church committee’s challenge to the CIA, leading to new laws restricting its actions, or President Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal that led to impeachment. Through those events, powerful people or institutions saw their authority challenged and their status modified. 

But there was another category I like to call “popular crises.” They resonate throughout society and affect the entire body politic. Unlike an aristocratic crisis that may lead to changes for the personnel of the ruling class, a popular crisis transforms the way society interprets the dominant narratives. One salient example took place around 1967. That was when the US public’s perception of the “meaning” as well as morality of the Vietnam War irrevocably shifted. It created political chaos for an incumbent president, spawned a massive protest movement as well as a backlash and changed the perception of the role of the US military, including transforming it into a professional army when President Nixon abolished the draft.

Because the owners of the corporate media have focused on reducing, if not eliminating risk by constricting and restraining the amount of unbridled truth-seeking reporting they permit, it is far rarer to see popular crises of the kind that dramatically challenged the US government’s policy in Vietnam or the French government’s control of higher education in 1968. It’s not that the truth can no longer emerge. If it is in any way disruptive, it simply won’t be mentioned in the legacy media. Instead, social media has amply filled in the gaps concerning truth-telling. But because social media is structured in the form of ideological silos, it can never achieve the scope required to change the general perception of a crisis.

This evolution in the culture of journalism has had a curiously transformative effect on the nature of the concept of crisis itself. UnHerd columnist Thomas Fazi highlights this phenomenon in an article dedicated to Europe’s incapacity to manage its culture of democracy. In his article, “Von der Leyen’s authoritarian plot: National democracies will be subordinate to her Commission,” Fazi describes an evolution, based on one woman’s ambition, towards a curious form of dictatorship that has the potential to destabilize Europe.

“Over the past 15 years,” Fazi writes, “the Commission has exploited Europe’s ‘permacrisis’ to radically, yet surreptitiously, increase its influence over areas of competence that were previously deemed to be the preserve of national governments — from financial budgets and health policy to foreign affairs and defence.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Permacrisis:

A state of extreme and growing tension and aggravated contradiction maintained indefinitely by those in power as the means of avoiding any initiative aiming at the kind of resolution that might call into question their hold on power.

Contextual note

Two years ago, Collins Dictionary elected “permacrisis” its “word of the year.” The publisher’s head of learning explained that the choice was made because of “how truly awful 2022 has been for so many people.” The neologism first appeared officially a year earlier, when Europeans used it to describe the current era or a “new normal” characterized by “volatility, uncertainty, and a prolonged sense of emergency.”

Though some explain it as a consequence of the long drawn-out trauma of the Covid-19 pandemic, I see permacrisis as a cousin of another somewhat older neologism, “forever war,” a concept many commentators have identified as a prominent feature of the 21st century geopolitical landscape. The practice of forever war began in earnest when US President George W. Bush launched the infinitely expandable idea of his “global war on terror” and began applying it to multiple countries. President Joe Biden carried on the tradition when he solemnly promised that NATO’s war against Russia in Ukraine would last “as long as it takes” and subsequently agreed to offer “ironclad” support to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war of extermination intended to last until the coming of the Messiah.

Europe is already three years into its latest forever war for which Ursula von der Leyen has demonstrated her enthusiasm. She has also thrown her institutional weight behind another war whose initiator, Netanyahu, clearly wishes to endure and become his own forever war.

Historical note

When author Naomi Klein formulated the theory called “the shock doctrine,” she described an approach to international relations that aimed at implementing Washington’s neoliberal economic agenda across the globe. It featured a strategy of “disaster capitalism.” By exploiting or even provoking crises in different countries, neo-liberal economic doctors could step in to provide cures for the disease.

Her theory made sense in the era predating social media, when a crisis was expected to last for only a limited amount of time. Each of the crises Klein describes was expected to lead to a predictable solution: typically, one that would play out following rules established by Milton Friedman’s Chicago School of Economics and correlate with the policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

It was a veritable system. Everyone agreed that there existed a universal cure, especially for complaints that a local leader sought to address with a local cure. Chilean Prime Minister Salvador Allende, for example, in 1973 set out on a path of economic reform that included the nationalization of industries including banks, agrarian reform, state control of the economy and health and education reforms. The US State Department considered those very cures to be the symptoms of a disease that required a universal cure.

Like a Hollywood studio that understands the tried-and-true value of remakes, the CIA invoked and executed the same scenario that had successfully played out 20 years earlier in Iran, when Britain and the US ganged up to oust a democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. Allende himself did not survive the coup. He may have preferred suicide to the type of cure his successor, the dictator Augusto Pinochet, was likely to administer.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the same pattern evolved into a sophisticated template called “color revolutions.” That trend continued and culminated in Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution in 2014. That was the occasion in which Victoria Nuland, a key operator in US President Barack Obama’s State Department, appeared to single-handedly engineer the intended outcome when she put her man, “Yats” (Arseniy Yatseniuk), in the catbird seat after chasing Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych from power.

It was shortly thereafter that the concept of the sudden dramatic crisis began to give way to the more efficient concept of permacrisis. In his article on the transformation of European politics, Fazi describes the ongoing coup engineered by Ursula von der Leyen, who today is entering her second term as president of the European Commission. Her plan consists of “placing loyalists in strategic roles, marginalizing her critics, and establishing a complicated web of dependencies and overlapping duties that prevent any individual from gaining excessive influence.” Perhaps more efficiently than Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922 or Adolf Hitler’s success when he merged the positions of Chancellor and President following President Paul von Hindenburg’s death in 1934, Madame Ursula is exploiting a prolonged state of crisis to exercise absolute power.

But unless she thinks NATO is under her command, she will be a dictator without an army, reminding us of Joseph Stalin’s famous remark: “How many divisions has the Pope?” And though, as I write, one of the pearls of German industry, Volkswagen, has fallen into a deep crisis manifestly linked to policies Washington imposed and Von der Leyen enthusiastically embraced — policies that have crippled Germany’s economy — she must certainly be gloating about her achievement, as she prepares, with increased authority, to reign over 27 countries for another five years.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Will Queen Ursula’s Crisis Management Skills Make Her the Empress of Europe? appeared first on Fair Observer.

ChatGPT’s answer contains a rich and detailed analysis of the psychological, social, political, economic and institutional factors that underlie this motivation. It concluded its exposé with this summary: “Those who campaign against misinformation may be motivated by a mix of legitimate concerns and less altruistic drives. This dynamic illustrates the complexity of modern information ecosystems, where fighting misinformation can itself become a politically charged and often self-serving activity.”

This was far too interesting and far too important a public debate not to explore further. I thus formulated my next prompt.

“Everything you say underlines an empirical fact: that those who have power in government, the media, finance and other institutions are motivated to lie about anything they choose to call misinformation. We have seen that the expression of opinions deemed to be deviant from ‘normative’ thought are only routinely called misinformation or disinformation, but can become the object of organized campaigns of censure.

The function of ‘fact checking’ is not sufficient to account for such abuses, mainly because this isn’t about facts but about the interpretation of facts. The classic example is the debate about the origin of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. Unless there is a universal or quasi-universal consensus, no proposition should be deemed a fact and used to discredit or even censure other hypotheses.

Given this level of complexity in people’s motivations, how do you imagine our use of AI in the future will be able to clarify some of the issues pertaining to what can be called the establishment of ‘public truth?’ Our capacity to store data means that we can settle a lot of issues of basic truth that might not otherwise be possible. My question boils down to this: Can we imagine an algorithmic approach to epistemology that takes into account the effects of perception, language and culture, including the various factors of motivation that shape our ability to account for reality?”

ChatGPT’s thorough response merits everyone’s attention. It is a serious contribution to an important debate.

“Your question touches on the philosophical and practical complexities of determining ‘public truth’ in a world where perception, language, culture, and political interests deeply shape our understanding of reality. The challenge of disentangling truth from perception and interpretation—especially in a highly polarized and media-driven environment—seems well beyond the scope of fact-checking as it is traditionally understood. But the possibility of developing more sophisticated AI models to engage with these issues does hold promise, though with caveats.

1. **The Problem of Epistemology in Public Truth**

The issue you raise points to the crux of epistemology—how we come to know what is true—and whether truth can be objectively established when interpretations vary so widely based on one’s position, interests, and culture. As you noted, many so-called ‘facts’ are interpretations of reality shaped by these factors. In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, or Joe Biden’s claim about the Ukraine war, it’s not that the facts are absent—it’s that how they are framed, understood, and communicated is deeply subjective and politicized.

2. **The Limits of Fact-Checking and Human Bias**

Fact-checking, as you point out, often becomes problematic because it assumes a relatively simple truth-value to statements (true/false), while many statements exist in the gray areas of interpretation. Fact-checkers, like any other actors, are prone to their own biases—political, cultural, economic—leading them to select and frame facts in ways that align with particular agendas or worldviews.

The example of ‘the sun rises in the east’ is a perfect illustration: while empirically false in a strict sense (since the Earth’s rotation creates this illusion), it is nonetheless true in a practical, phenomenological sense. This highlights how different levels of ‘truth’ exist, and it depends on context whether a statement is misleading, false, or simply a common, shared shorthand for reality.

3. **AI’s Potential Role in Clarifying ‘Public Truth’**

AI has the potential to engage with this complexity, but for it to be useful in navigating issues of ‘public truth,’ it would need to go far beyond simple fact-checking algorithms. Here’s how I imagine AI could contribute:

4. **Context-Aware Truth Assessment**

AI models could be developed to take into account not just whether a statement aligns with certain empirical data but also its context. For example, AI could parse out the difference between literal and figurative language, assess political motivations, and track the evolution of arguments over time. By understanding context—whether political, historical, or rhetorical—AI could offer nuanced assessments, acknowledging that truth is not always binary but situated within cultural and perceptual frameworks.

**Perception and Interpretation Modeling**

AI could be trained to model how different groups perceive events based on cultural, political, or social backgrounds. For example, one group might interpret ‘Putin has already lost the war’ as a political exaggeration aimed at rallying public support, while another may see it as a falsehood given the situation on the ground. By integrating sociocultural data, AI could highlight how different communities interpret facts differently and how these interpretations shape public discourse.

**Language and Meaning**

AI could also help decode the language and rhetoric used by political figures, journalists, and public institutions. Natural language processing (NLP) techniques are already capable of detecting sarcasm, metaphor, and other figures of speech. An advanced AI could identify when language is being used strategically—like in Biden’s claim about Putin—or when it represents more direct misrepresentation of facts. It could flag statements that are likely to be misleading based on historical patterns or deviations from established narratives.

**Longitudinal Fact Tracking**

AI has a tremendous capacity to store and track vast amounts of data over time. This can be useful in situations where ‘truth’ is not static but evolves. Take the COVID-19 origin debate: early in the pandemic, there was uncertainty about whether the virus had a natural origin or emerged from a lab. Over time, as more data became available, the consensus shifted. AI systems could maintain a record of how expert opinion, public perception, and evidence evolve over time, providing a more dynamic picture of how ‘truth’ changes in response to new information.

**Motive and Incentive Analysis**

AI models could also be used to track incentives and interests, analyzing patterns of behavior that indicate when an actor (be it a political figure, media outlet, or institution) might be manipulating facts or language for strategic purposes. By cross-referencing financial records, political connections, and past behaviors, AI could help flag conflicts of interest or patterns of disingenuous behavior, offering the public a clearer view of the underlying motivations shaping public discourse. 

5. **Challenges and Ethical Concerns**

While AI could enhance our ability to navigate complex truth claims, there are significant challenges:

• **Bias in AI**: AI models are trained on existing data, which can contain biases from the sources that generate them. If AI is fed biased media, academic, or governmental sources, it may simply replicate or reinforce existing power structures, failing to challenge the kind of misinformation you’ve identified. Even sophisticated AI could become a tool for reinforcing the dominant narrative rather than questioning it.
• **Interpretive Limits**: AI can analyze patterns, track data, and model perceptions, but it may struggle with deeply interpretive issues that require human intuition, moral judgment, or subjective experience. At its core, some epistemological questions are not about data but about how we, as humans, understand and assign meaning to the world.
• **Political and Social Manipulation**: There’s also the risk that powerful actors could use AI to manipulate the public’s understanding of truth. By selectively feeding data into AI systems or controlling the parameters by which AI assesses truth claims, elites could further entrench their control over the narrative under the guise of objective ‘algorithmic truth.’

**Conclusion: Toward an Algorithmic Epistemology?**

While we may not be able to create an algorithmic system that fully accounts for the philosophical depth of epistemology, AI can certainly help clarify aspects of public truth. A sophisticated system could assist in understanding how perception, language, and motivation interact to shape our understanding of reality. Such a system could offer a more dynamic, contextualized picture of truth, showing not just whether statements align with empirical data but how and why certain narratives gain traction.

The challenge lies in designing AI that Is transparent, unbiased, and capable of handling the deeply interpretive and socially constructed aspects of truth, while also safeguarding against its misuse by those in power. In the future, AI could be a valuable tool for enhancing our public discourse, but it will require careful ethical considerations and interdisciplinary input to ensure that it becomes a force for clarity, not control.”

These are wise comments worth examining in detail. They will help our team at Fair Observer elaborate and execute its project that consists of providing future AI tools focused on improving our capacity to read and analyze the news. Using the hints ChatGPT has provided we will explore this further in next week’s extension of the conversation on epistemology.

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue.

*[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At Fair Observer, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Outside the Box: Creating Reliable “Public Truth” with AI’s Help appeared first on Fair Observer.

In today’s international climate, expecting Western diplomats to calculate that it might be healthier to avoid war than prove a point about who has the right to make decisions for others would be totally illusory. From Washington’s point of view, there are principles that must be applied in the defense of a “rules-based order,” even at the expense of another allied country’s population.

Perhaps the seasoned strategists of DC’s State Department felt that the larger issue of European security was too big a morsel to chew on. In their eyes, the only manageable issue to consider was the right of a particular nation, Ukraine, to adhere to a sprawling and fundamentally incoherent military alliance. They had good reason to insist on this. In their mind, this was the key to maintaining control of what Zbigniew Brzezinski called “the grand chessboard.” The risk associated with spending unproductive months seeking to thrash out the mutual security requirements of neighboring, culturally connected nations was clearly not worth taking. By refusing to waste time in pointless discussion, they could seize the opportunity to continue on a well-trodden path by launching yet another one of Washington’s forever wars, another one of those epic conflicts that can carry on for “as long as it takes.”

War may be bad for some, but the war economy is good for anyone in power. That is the lesson America learned during World War II and it has never been forgotten.

In August 2021, the administration of American President Joe Biden finally wound up one of the most recent forever wars in Afghanistan. After 20 years, it had clearly run out of gas. The new Biden administration knew that Ukraine could be the new opportunity to focus on. Nearly three years on, it has become clear to everyone that — just like Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria — the war could not be won by the “good guys.” But winning apparently isn’t the major objective. Keeping a wartime economy going is clearly the top priority.

If, as early remarks by none other than Hillary Clinton indicated, the Ukraine fiasco was strategically planned to create an “Afghanistan situation” for Russia, the war that broke out in Gaza and Israel on October 7, 2023 was on no one’s agenda. Washington didn’t need another headache. It was too busy stoking the fires in Ukraine in its quest to postpone the resolution as long as possible. This time, the value of waging a new forever hot war accrued to a local leader, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu. A prolonged war would have the twofold merit of pleasing a lot of key people in his own government and postponing the inevitable inglorious end of Bibi’s political career.

For authoritative voices inside the Beltway, the successive killing of the two top leaders of Hamas — Ismail Haniya and Yahya Sinwar — tells them the end of the conflict may be in sight. The White House followed up Sinwar’s elimination with this pronouncement: “There is now the opportunity for a ‘day after’ in Gaza without Hamas in power, and for a political settlement that provides a better future for Israelis and Palestinians alike.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Day after:

An imaginary moment of the future that governments and every other defender of the status quo in times of war has an absolute need to invoke rhetorically as a demonstration of their commitment to peace while doing everything in their power to prevent it from occurring.

Contextual note

Washington’s track record on assessing the dynamics of ongoing wars — how long they might last and when they might end — has never been brilliant. No sooner had Biden expressed his optimism about the sunny day after than his staunch ally, Netanyahu, contradicted him. “Israeli leaders,” Al Jazeera reported, “had a drastically different message. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the war is ‘not over’ and pledged that Israeli forces would operate in Gaza for ‘years to come.’”

H.A. Hellyer, a geopolitical analyst, dismissed American talks of a day after in Gaza as “laughable,” noting “that the Israelis have made it very clear that they’re not leaving Gaza, that the military presence will remain, so the idea of any sort of political horizon here is just very, very unrealistic.”

So why such disparity of perception between the two allies, Bibi and Biden? One answer might be the American penchant for “hyperreality” that infects the country’s political and social culture, transforming even the average citizen’s perception of the world. Americans simply don’t see the meaning of events in the same way as others, including their ironclad allies, the Israelis. In fact, no two countries share the same vision of history, a fact State Department diplomats would do well to ponder.

For Americans, days are always significant, especially for tracking the ends of wars. The American Civil War ended on April 9, 1865, with the unconditional surrender of General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox. General Ulysses S. Grant and Lee concretized the moment with a dramatic handshake. Adolf Hitler’s suicide on April 30, 1945 put an end to World War II in Europe. A pair of atomic bombs in early August of that year ended the Pacific version of the conflict.

Hollywood war films and most westerns build up to the single dramatic moment — often a showdown — when the villain dies or is humiliated and a brighter future emerges. This pattern of expectations appears to be wired into every American’s mindset as the key to understanding existential dramas. The successive deaths of Hamas leaders Haniya and Sinwar, with the added subplot of Israel’s elimination of Hassan Nasrallah’s in Lebanon, inevitably signaled to Americans that the year-long violent movie was coming to an end.

What Americans fail to recognize is that the Israeli screenwriters were working on a different script, one that derives not from Hollywood screenplays but from the mythology of the Old Testament. Messiahs don’t take over after the death of a villain. They don’t sign peace agreements. As instruments of a divine will, they install a new order. Their mission transcends the kind of everyday human goals associated with the banalities of governance and democracy.

Historical note

 “Forever wars” inevitably produce a curious linguistic paradox. “Forever” evokes timelessness, if not eternity. But for the sake of reasonable, peace-loving political discourse, the same promoters of forever war need to invoke a precise moment of theoretical resolution: the day after. Sadly, neither term — “forever war” or day after — makes any real-world sense.

Take the case of Afghanistan. In 2001, America mobilized NATO, transporting Western troops well beyond the confines of its “home base,” the North Atlantic. Its goal was to rid a remote Asian nation of the dreaded Taliban. On that occasion, America rejected a reasonable proposal to negotiate a solution whereby Afghanistan itself would arrest and try the criminals. The administration of President George W. Bush preferred launching a war that would last 20 years. And what did the day after of that war turn out to be in 2021? The restoration of an even more radicalized Taliban.

In 1967, in the midst of the war in Vietnam that provided the initial template for future forever wars, General Westmoreland and the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson began repeatedly evoking “the light at the end of the tunnel.” That was an earlier version of the day after. That war lasted 20 years and ended in chaotic humiliation for America.

The Hollywood treatment of war may appear inspired by Shakespearean tragedy, which always ends with a dramatic death. But William Shakespeare’s tragic characters, even villains like Richard III or Macbeth, have something heroic about them that we cannot help but admire. And the perception of the day after always remains ambiguous. When Hamlet dies, the crown is given not to a Dane, but a Norwegian rival, Fortinbras, whose name, derived from French, means “strong in arm.” In other words, despite Hamlet’s own encouragement (“he has my dying voice”), the day after will more likely be a continuation of a forever war.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Gaza: Is There a Day Before the Day After? appeared first on Fair Observer.

There is clearly a crime afoot, the crime of systemic misinformation in the pursuit of disinformation. I therefore engaged the conversation with ChatGPT with the following prompt: “This highlights the obvious paradox that those who complain about and even take measures to rein in misinformation are themselves not only spreading misinformation but hiding the fact by appearing to be champions of truth. What do we know about the political, social and economic motivation of such people, which of course includes many people in politics and public administrations?”

Here is ChatGPT’s rich response:

“The paradox you mention is indeed intriguing, and it’s a subject of considerable debate among scholars and analysts. The motivations of individuals and groups who seek to combat misinformation but may, in turn, contribute to spreading it or misrepresenting its prevalence can be understood through several political, social, and economic lenses:

1. **Political Motivation: Power and Control**

–       **Narrative Control**: In the political realm, controlling the flow of information and setting the narrative are key components of power. By labeling certain information as misinformation and positioning themselves as defenders of truth, politicians or political actors can control what is perceived as legitimate discourse. This can be used to suppress opposing views, delegitimize dissent, and fortify their own base.

–       **Polarization**: Politicians often exploit misinformation as a tool to drive division. Polarized environments enable politicians to rally their base by creating an ‘us vs. them’ mentality. Often, accusations of spreading misinformation are politically motivated to weaken the credibility of the opposition or alternative narratives.

–       **Deflecting Criticism**: Some political actors may amplify concerns about misinformation to distract from their own actions or to create a convenient scapegoat. If public discourse is dominated by concerns about misinformation, it can distract from policy failures or controversies.

2. **Social Motivation: Tribalism and Identity Politics**

–       **Cultural War and Identity Politics**: For many individuals in public life, taking a stand against misinformation aligns them with particular social or ideological tribes. The act of policing misinformation becomes a signal of moral virtue or loyalty to a cause. These tribal affiliations often eclipse objective assessments of information, leading to the amplification of certain biases.

–       **Moral Authority and Social Capital**: Social media allows individuals to gain prestige or moral authority by publicly positioning themselves as defenders of truth. This is particularly relevant for influencers, activists, and certain media figures, who may gain social capital through this stance. As their influence grows, the lines between advocacy, misinformation, and exaggeration can blur.

3. **Economic Motivation: Media and Market Incentives**

–       **Clickbait and Sensationalism**: News outlets and social media platforms often benefit from sensational narratives about misinformation, as these narratives drive engagement. Alarmist headlines or stories about the prevalence of harmful information can generate more clicks, views, or shares than more measured takes. Hence, media companies may profit from amplifying the threat of misinformation even when it’s not as pervasive as claimed.

–       **Platform Economics**: Social media platforms, while often blamed for misinformation, also have financial incentives to appear proactive. If platforms are seen as failing to address false content, they face regulatory scrutiny or public backlash. Thus, they may overstate the impact of misinformation in public relations efforts to appear responsible to both users and regulators.

–       **Funding for NGOs and Research**: Many organizations focused on combating misinformation, such as fact-checking agencies or advocacy groups, rely on external funding (from governments or private institutions). These organizations may have incentives to overstate the problem of misinformation in order to secure more funding or resources, even though their original goal may be noble.

4. **Psychological and Cognitive Biases**

–       **Confirmation Bias**: Many people, including those in power, are influenced by cognitive biases that lead them to selectively believe or amplify information that confirms their preexisting views. This can happen even when these individuals believe they are combating false information. In this case, misinformation can spread even within groups that seek to suppress it.

–       **Cognitive Dissonance**: Individuals who publicly commit to fighting misinformation may experience cognitive dissonance when confronted with evidence that challenges their stance or reveals their own biases. To reconcile this, they might double down on their original claims rather than admit to spreading or contributing to misinformation themselves.

5. **Institutional Dynamics and Incentives**

–       **Governmental and Bureaucratic Interests**: Governments and bureaucratic institutions often seek to maintain order and control over information. Highlighting the threat of misinformation can be a pretext for introducing laws and regulations that extend state control over media, social platforms, and public discourse. In some cases, those pushing for restrictions may be motivated by a desire to suppress political opposition or dissent under the guise of ‘fighting misinformation.’

–       **Public Administration and Trust**: Public institutions, such as health authorities or electoral commissions, often face crises of public trust. Highlighting their efforts to combat misinformation can be a strategy to restore legitimacy. In some cases, however, they may exaggerate the threat of misinformation to justify measures that are seen as overly paternalistic or authoritarian.

6. **Manipulation and Opportunism**

–       **Manipulative Opportunism**: Some actors within politics and media can opportunistically exploit the issue of misinformation for personal or institutional gain. By positioning themselves as gatekeepers of truth, they not only consolidate influence but can also discredit critics or adversaries without engaging with the content of their critiques. The framing of an opponent’s views as ‘misinformation’ can be a convenient tool to delegitimize their stance without providing a substantive counterargument.

In summary, those who campaign against misinformation may be motivated by a mix of legitimate concerns and less altruistic drives—whether it be maintaining political power, securing social status, or capitalizing on economic opportunities. This dynamic illustrates the complexity of modern information ecosystems, where fighting misinformation can itself become a politically charged and often self-serving activity.”

These observations define an important dimension of what can only be described as a fundamental crisis point in our civilization today, especially in the democratic West. Let’s call it the “public truth” problem. Ever since the early 20th century philosopher Bertrand Russell questioned the truth value of the proposition, “The King of France is bald,” we should feel concerned about whether any language produced accurately translates reality or even specific features of reality. The difficulty of expressing truth should not discourage us from trying. It should simply make us humble about all our attempts to do so.

If someone says, “the sun rises in the west,” we can easily shout, “Are you crazy?!” The statement is empirically false, since no one on Earth not under the influence of LSD has ever seen the sun rise in the west. But the statement is false for another reason. Like the bald king of France, there simply is no sun that rises. The Earth turns, creating the illusion for Earthlings that the sun is rising.

So, is the statement, “the sun is rising,” misinformation? No, because it correctly describes our common perception of the event. Compare this with United States President Joe Biden’s claim last year that “Putin has already lost the war,” at a time when every knowledgeable expert inside Biden’s Beltway knew that Ukraine was not only losing the war on the battlefield, but could not possibly win it on its own, no matter how much support it might get from the West.

Did any fact-checker upbraid Biden for his claim? Not in the legacy media. With a bit of indulgence, one might reason that Biden “perceived” Russia’s failure to obtain an outright victory as a loss. But the informed experts who remained quiet or were simply never questioned by the media did not share that perception with the public. Biden used his position of authority to claim the sun was rising in the west.

Next week, we will take a deeper dive into ChatGPT’s analysis and try to understand whether AI itself might be able to clarify the problem of “public truth.”

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue.

*[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At Fair Observer, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Outside the Box: The Art of Disinformation About Disinformation appeared first on Fair Observer.

PACE is a key institution within the Council of Europe, the platform for cooperation and dialogue among Europe’s 27 nations. PACE focuses on promoting human rights, democracy and the rule of law across Europe. These are topics of universal interest one might expect United States news media and especially the US government, who spent so much time and money seeking Assange’s extradition, to be keenly interested in. But the story got little coverage in the West and practically none in the US. The last time The New York Times even mentioned PACE was over a year ago, in September 2023, in an article with the title: “In occupied areas of Ukraine, Russia is holding local elections that have been widely denounced.”

PACE not only monitors the implementation of Council of Europe conventions and agreements between member states, it also elects judges to the European Court of Human Rights. You would be justified in thinking of it as the “conscience” of Europe. Its role in human rights advocacy empowers it to adopt resolutions and make recommendations to improve human rights protection. In that capacity, following Assange’s testimony, PACE “expressed deep concern at ‘the disproportionately harsh treatment’ faced by Julian Assange and said this has had a ‘dangerous chilling effect’ which undermines the protection of journalists and whistleblowers around the world.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Disproportionately harsh treatment:

The US administration’s chosen strategy for dealing with anything or anyone that in any way threatens or even criticizes its actions abroad.

Contextual note

Assange’s legal saga began in 2010, four months after the publication of classified documents on the war in Iraq. It lasted until June 26, 2024 when Assange entered into a guilty plea agreement with the US justice system.

In the opening act, the Australian journalist and founder of WikiLeaks was charged with a sexual offense in Sweden. The case was closed in 2017, as the evidence required for a conviction had not been gathered. Simultaneously, the US Justice Department initiated an investigation using the pretext of the 1917 Espionage Act, a tool that the administration of former President Barack Obama became fond of using against whistleblowers. Fearing extradition to the US, the Ecuadorian embassy granted Assange asylum in London, where he remained for seven years. Then on April 11, 2019, he was forcibly handed over to the British authorities after the election of a new Ecuadorian president, whom WikiLeaks had accused of corruption.

The denouement came after Assange had spent five years in a high-security Belmarsh prison in the UK. It is still unclear why Washington agreed to his release. It should however be obvious that the administration of current President Joe Biden — used to benefiting from European indulgence, if not solidarity with even the harshest of US foreign policy positions — was not expecting the conclusions reached by PACE following Assange’s testimony earlier this month. The Parliamentary Assembly pulled no punches as it reached a conclusion with potentially deep implications for the behavior of all self-respecting democracies, especially those that like to lecture other nations about human rights, freedom of expression and the need to respect a rules-based order.

PACE noted explicitly that Assange’s treatment has had a dangerous deterrent effect on journalists and whistleblowers worldwide. “Chilling” is the term it chose. For the sake of the future of democracy, it becomes urgent to ask ourselves on both sides of the Atlantic: After the Assange case, will journalists and whistleblowers be better protected? On the basis of this judgment, we should hope so, but at the same time we must ask ourselves: Are the politicians in the US and in Europe even listening?

PACE specifically called on the US to go beyond its concern for the protection of journalists by actively combating the tradition of impunity for state agents guilty of war crimes. Will this call be heeded? In the context of ongoing conflicts today in which the US has become implicated, and at a moment when a democratic US presidential candidate openly embraces and celebrates the “service” of former Vice President Dick Cheney, there is reason to doubt it.

Historical note

This episode underlines the perception most people have today that we are living through a period of rapid historical transition. The question of the survival of democracy appears to be on everyone’s mind. We easily understand that democracy can never be perfect, but now that it appears threatened from various sides, can we even find the means to preserve it? Should we consider whistleblowers like Assange and Edward Snowden servants of a citizenry focused on the integrity of governance or dangerous enemies of a system that must be protected not just from physical assault but from critical assessment of any kind?

At a time when the fight for information control has been in the headlines with new pressures on Telegram and Twitter, we should see PACE’s resolution as a strong signal of encouragement to journalists and whistleblowers and a warning to governments easily tempted to justify or paper over the most extreme acts of their militaries and allies in times of war. European governments should be the first to take its recommendations on board. Journalism is already threatened in its theoretical independence by the domination of the economic interests that control or influence the media. If the wheels of justice can be manipulated to suppress truth-telling, democracy cannot survive.

PACE looks beyond Europe and its media. It specifically addresses the US, a nation that has persistently and assiduously put Assange through more than a decade of confinement and even torture. That he is now free to circulate and speak publicly is something of a victory, but it is a victory in a battle that should never have taken place in a democratic society. The atrocities revealed by Assange in his WikiLeaks must not be hidden from the public in the name of a nation’s raison d’Etat.

If PACE’s resolution has any real impact, it means that a clarified legal context will make it more difficult for governments to gag the media and allow crimes committed by their agents to go unpunished. In 2010, WikiLeaks published incontrovertible evidence of atrocities committed by American and British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Governments and armies will always attempt to conceal acts they find embarrassing. But the press must be allowed to uncover them and publish the truth, with no fear of legal repercussions for doing so.

In recent times, European institutions have been the object of justified and unjustified criticism. Europe today suffers materially and psychologically from its ambiguous relationship with the most powerful member of the Atlantic Alliance. Defining Europe’s “strategic autonomy” is an ongoing challenge. The Council of Europe is once again proving itself to be a major institution for the protection of human rights. In 2005, this same Council mandated the late Dick Marty to investigate the CIA’s secret prisons in Europe. In 2015 and 2016, the European Court of Human Rights condemned Poland, Lithuania and Romania for housing such detention centers.

The governments called into question by such actions will always react defensively to such initiatives. They are rarely “brought to justice” in the sense of holding individuals and institutions legally and formally responsible for identified crimes and atrocities and subject to punishment under the law. But such resolutions help to set standards that will reduce the amount of abuse meted out to independent voices seeking to keep the public informed.

Assange is a journalist whose career was interrupted at the height of his powers and his potential contribution to society and democracy effectively silenced. In Gaza and Lebanon today we are seeing other cases of “disproportionately harsh treatment” that for some political leaders appears to be their privileged form of governance, if not a way of life. Even “proportional” harsh treatment needs to be used as sparingly as possible. As a society, we need to bring the taste for disproportionality under control. For some, it appears to be an addiction.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Europe Calls Assange a Victim of Disproportionate Harshness appeared first on Fair Observer.

AI has already begun to change the world we live in. But the biggest change is yet to come. The machinery of AI belongs to a different order than the generations of increasingly sophisticated machines that have served to facilitate the mass production of marketable items. AI is not just a machine that can produce human-like “thought” with the capacity to learn more quickly and “deeply” than a human. All that is impressive, but on its own, AI will always fail to produce what is most important in our society and economy: human experience. Experience is a combination of four things: perception of context, conscious memory, emotion and muscular reflex. Its meaning comes from and depends on our ongoing interaction. It cannot be captured and formalized by AI.

We have two words for the co-creation of experience: dialogue and collaboration. In the previous installment of “Outside the Box,” ChatGTP brought to our attention the notion of “collaboratories,” which it defined as “spaces where humans and AI work together to solve complex societal issues—whether in business, science, ethics, or the arts. These spaces could be testbeds for how we co-create knowledge and values in practice.”

Wishing to delve further into the intriguing possibility, I formulated the following prompt:

“If we try to imagine how William Wulf’s notion of collaboratories could be applied to today’s world in which everyone will have access to AI tools, what are the possible directions?

It’s not just a question of connecting people with common interests and some form of AI. Instead, the idea is to create a culture of communication in which humans and machines can work together to explore complex questions and find ways of negotiating and agreeing upon meaning.

Meaning itself is not reducible to a simple correlation between two or more identifiable things or concepts. Meaning contains a range of nuance that reflects the variable configurations of context. The future I’m trying to imagine implies a behavioral evolution for both the human community and AI is an actor within the human community. It means imagining a new framework for human decision-making and the communication that enables it.

How can we begin to analyze the facets of this historical evolution?”

“William Wulf’s concept of ‘collaboratories’—virtual environments where geographically distributed individuals work together—holds great relevance for our current era, especially with the advent of sophisticated AI tools that can enhance human collaboration. To explore the future of collaboratories with AI integration, it’s essential to consider both the **human behavioral evolution** and the **evolution of AI’s role** in meaning-making, decision-making, and communication.

Here’s an analysis that touches on these two dimensions:

1. **Evolving Human Behavior in Collaborative Environments**

As AI becomes more integrated into daily workflows, human behavior will likely shift in significant ways:

–       **Enhanced Collective Intelligence**: AI tools, especially those with powerful natural language processing (NLP) and analytical capabilities, can become active participants in group discussions, analyzing vast amounts of data, identifying patterns, and offering suggestions in real-time. As a result, human collaborators may develop new forms of dialogue where AI augments but does not dominate the conversation. This could lead to a more **refined form of collective intelligence**, where humans bring creativity, intuition, and contextual understanding, while AI contributes structured insights and computational prowess.

–       **Dynamic, Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration**: One critical behavior change will be the lowering of barriers between disciplines. In Wulf’s original collaboratory idea, specialists in different fields would connect to work on common problems. With AI’s ability to digest complex knowledge from multiple domains, more people—whether experts or novices—can contribute meaningfully to topics outside their formal expertise. The idea of ‘multi-modal’ AI systems, which can understand and work across multiple types of data (text, image, numerical), will allow for a broader range of participation and insights in collaborative spaces.

–       **Iterative Meaning-Making**: Humans, particularly in intellectual, scientific, or creative fields, engage in a process of **negotiating meaning** that is often contextual and nuanced. AI, by being integrated into collaboratories, can offer ‘suggestions’ or model various interpretations, but humans must continually assess and refine these insights. Future collaboratories might develop tools where AI learns over time to interpret evolving meanings and adjust its understanding of **cultural, emotional, and situational contexts** based on human feedback, creating a kind of **feedback loop** between human intuition and AI’s data-driven logic.

2. **Evolving AI’s Behavior in Meaning-Making and Decision-Making

AI’s evolving role will not merely be that of a passive tool; instead, its behavior will need to adjust to nuanced forms of human interaction, reflecting the subtleties of meaning and context:

–       **Context-Aware AI**: One of the challenges of AI today is the difficulty in grasping **contextual nuances** in communication, especially when the meaning of terms or ideas shifts depending on the environment, conversation, or culture. AI models of the future would need to develop deeper layers of **contextual learning**—where they don’t just analyze textual data or patterns but also understand the socio-cultural, emotional, and historical dimensions that frame human meaning. This requires AI systems to evolve from current ‘general’ models to **context-specific collaborators** that can interact differently depending on the cultural, disciplinary, or even personal contexts of their human counterparts.

–       **Adaptive AI Behavior**: AI behavior will need to be highly adaptive to the styles of communication and decision-making used by human teams. In a collaborative environment, AI could detect patterns in how different team members communicate and respond accordingly. For example, in fast-paced, highly technical discussions, the AI may prioritize speed and precision, while in more creative or exploratory settings, it might prioritize generating possibilities and fostering open-ended debate.

–       **Negotiation of Meaning**: Unlike the more rigid correlation-based systems of today, AI in the future collaboratories could **assist in the negotiation of meaning**, suggesting possible interpretations or connections and helping teams explore different angles on complex questions. For instance, in situations where multiple interpretations of data or text exist, AI could present these differing interpretations for discussion, allowing humans to weigh in on subtle differences. Over time, through interaction, the AI learns from the preferences and judgments of its human collaborators, refining its understanding of meaning as it applies in various contexts.

–       **Decision-Making with Nuance**: AI systems will also need to evolve from making decisions based solely on logical or statistical outcomes to a more **nuanced decision-making process** that accounts for ethical considerations, social norms, and long-term consequences. In complex problems—whether in science, politics, or business—the best solution is often not purely algorithmic but must include **ethical, social, and emotional factors**. Future AI could become part of a **decision-making deliberation process** where it presents options, but humans collaboratively weigh these options based on a mix of technical and humanistic concerns.

3. **Cultural Evolution and the Integration of AI in Collaborative Spaces**

The broader societal and cultural shifts will shape how humans interact with AI within these collaboratories:

–       **Shift in Educational Priorities**: Education systems will need to focus not just on AI literacy (understanding how AI works) but also on **collaborative skills**, critical thinking, and ethics in AI use. Courses on **how to collaborate with machines**—interpreting AI outputs, understanding its limitations, and knowing when human judgment must override AI—will become essential. This would foster a culture of **co-responsibility** between human and machine actors in collaborative projects.

–       **AI as a Mediator in Public Discourse**: In the public sphere, AI could serve as a **mediator** in polarized debates, helping facilitate structured, productive dialogues. By analyzing the range of perspectives and proposing compromise solutions or reframing contentious issues in less adversarial terms, AI could play a role in **depolarizing public discourse** and guiding collaborative problem-solving. AI could identify areas of **consensus** even in highly divided conversations, suggesting places where agreement is possible, and helping participants reframe their points of contention in ways that lead to constructive dialogue.

–       **Ethical and Governance Frameworks**: As AI becomes more embedded in collaboratories, there will be a need for robust **ethical frameworks** and **governance structures**. AI can be immensely powerful, but unchecked, it can reinforce biases or exacerbate inequalities. Future systems will need built-in mechanisms for **accountability and transparency** to ensure that both AI and its human collaborators adhere to democratic norms and values. This involves open audits of how AI models make decisions, regular updates to reflect changing societal norms, and the inclusion of diverse perspectives in the development of these technologies.

Conclusion: Toward a Hybrid Model of Collaboration

The future of collaboratories, where humans and AI work together to explore complex questions, hinges on creating **hybrid systems** where both human intuition and machine logic are valued. Human behavior will need to evolve toward greater openness to AI’s insights, while AI systems will have to develop a far more **context-sensitive, adaptive, and nuanced** approach to meaning-making and decision-making.

The key will be fostering a **culture of trust** between humans and machines, ensuring that AI supports human decision-making while respecting the fluid and evolving nature of meaning in human communication. By focusing on creating these collaborative environments, society could take a meaningful step toward addressing the challenges of the modern world while building more resilient, informed, and democratically engaged citizens.”

I recommend studying these suggestions generated by AI, since they helpfully and I would say optimistically describe feasible outcomes. But their optimism needs to be carefully tempered. Are reliable “feedback loops” really possible as well as AI’s capacity for being adaptive? And if so, may they not lead to new risks of cultural sclerosis? If we accept that “AI learns from the preferences and judgments of its human collaborators” and thus refines “its understanding of meaning as it applies in various contexts,” might not that application become abusive? Shouldn’t we try to maintain a critical distance from already expressed “preferences and judgments?” It’s the eternal problem that concerns how much trust we put in what AI claims to “understand.”

Your thoughts

The concept of multiple collaboratories similar to what ChatGPT describes seems to me eminently worth exploring. Please feel free to share your thoughts on this question by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue. It’s a way of launching the first FO° collaboratory.

*[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At Fair Observer, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Outside the Box: Can AI–Human “Collaboratories” Save the World? appeared first on Fair Observer.

She also cited the paper’s hostility to her self-described courageous attempts to bring diverse voices to the paper. Disappointed at the journal’s failure to implement the goals she had defined, she complained of constant bullying from colleagues who disagreed with her views. Weiss described the environment as “illiberal,” accusing some colleagues of calling her a Nazi and a racist.

The Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary has, in its brief history, had no qualms about calling into question the NYT’s journalism for its ideological bias and its servile relationship with the US national security state. We can therefore sympathize with a former employee in a position to reveal why some of the news and analysis produced by the Gray Lady comes out as distorted and unreliable.

It may therefore seem paradoxical that we are convinced by the breath of fresh air Bari Weiss has promised to bring to the world of US journalism.

Bari Weiss founded The Free Press in 2021. Her aim was to “produce news stories that exemplify the journalistic ideals of honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence,” which she felt were lacking in mainstream journalism, committed as it appeared to be to the ideological conformity that permeates legacy media.

The NYT author Matt Flegenheimer’s article offers this description of Weiss’s method: “The founder of The Free Press has built a new media empire by persuading audiences that she is a teller of dangerous truths.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Dangerous truths:

An expression that pretentious people apply to the largely unoriginal ideas they think they have invented and which they mistakenly believe will upset and humiliate people whose viewpoint differs from their own.

Contextual note

Flegenheimer’s position is officially listed as The New York Times correspondent “focusing on in-depth profiles of powerful figures.” As a kind of takedown artist he reformulates our definition, applied to Weiss, in these terms: “She has created, or at least created space at, a cool kids’ table all her own, positioning herself as a teller of dangerous truths while becoming a kind of brand ambassador for the views and passions of her audience, which often seem to track neatly with her own: that elite universities have lost the plot; that legacy outlets have lost their minds; that Ms. Weiss knows the way forward.”

The NYT may be guilty of many of the many of the flaws and even crimes Weiss attributes to it, but at least has the humility to present itself as a collective effort to present the news of the world. Despite its obvious biases and often sanctimonious tone, it embraces a variety of styles of addressing the questions in the news, even when consciously limiting the breadth of its worldview. In contrast, Weiss makes it clear that The Free Press was created to revolve around her unique personality and her particular sensibilities. Its overall purpose, despite her fake commitment to variety, consists of ennobling her own personal assemblage of popular ideologies, which range from the provocatively unorthodox to the shamelessly conformist.

Flegenheimer quotes the assessment of veteran pollster and strategist Frank Luntz: “She doesn’t just speak to the 1 percent. She speaks to the one-hundredth of 1 percent. And they’ll listen.” They are titillated by the idea that what interests them may be deemed by others to be “dangerous truths,” even though they more often resemble narcissistic self-celebration.

To prove Luntz is right, here is how Weiss responds to the challenge by her interviewer at the recent All-In Summit of changing a society that is “morally bankrupt.” As expected, she has the foolproof, universally appropriate answer. “It starts with something very simple. Give up the heroin needle of prestige. Rip it out of your arm immediately. Stop poisoning yourself, your family and your children with the bankrupt notion that getting them into Harvard and Yale is more important than inculcating in them a sense of love of family, of country and of all of the things we used to think were normal.” This was followed by the audience’s deafening applause.

For Weiss, the key to solving the problem at the core of US culture will be to change the outlook of literally “one-hundredth of 1 percent” of the US population: those who see their parental mission as consisting of getting their children into Harvard or Yale. What could anyone who thinks in those terms possibly mean when she evokes “all of the things we used to think were normal?” Who is the “we” she has in mind? And what is “normal?” Does she not know that among “normal” Americans, more likely to be affected by the risk of homelessness and the opioid pandemic than by the “heroin” of sending their children to Harvard, survival rather than “prestige” is what they are focused on?

Weiss apparently sees the quest for prestige as the unique original sin of contemporary US culture. “Prestige and honor,” she adds, “is [sic] not something that has been granted to you by institutions that have allowed themselves to be corrupted by morally bankrupt people.” The world around Weiss is morally corrupt. Her own pursuit of prestige and honor by launching the nobly inclusive Free Press should not, on the other hand, be deemed “morally bankrupt.”

Historical note

Analyzing US culture is one thing. Looking at historical events gives us another perspective on what it means to be morally rich or morally bankrupt.

On October 3, Weiss featured her interview with Douglas Murray on Israel’s war on Gaza, which the International Court of Justice assessed as a “plausible genocide” back in January. Subsequent actions have confirmed that assessment, as schools, hospitals and civilian infrastructure have been sacrificed in what literally resembles an extermination campaign that has now been extended to the neighboring state of Lebanon. United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres has now called the war an “unmitigated disaster.”

The subtitle of Weiss’s interview with Murray reads, “The West is ‘drunk on peace.’ What will it take to wake them up?” Weiss describes Murray in the following terms: “And it is Douglas, more than almost anyone in the world, who has articulated the stakes of this war with the moral clarity it requires.” The UN and the International Court of Justice cannot be deemed purveyors of moral clarity. They are too “drunk on peace” to appreciate the necessity of a never-ending genocide.

How is the following as an example of Murray’s superior moral reasoning? “I was told by a Jewish friend the other day that apparently there is something in the Torah that says one should not take enormous delight in the decimation of one’s foes. But I’m not Jewish, and so I don’t have to follow this.” So, Murray’s superior “moral clarity” tells us that the rules governing the religion committing atrocities should be suspended because he, who is not subject to those rules, has a moral vision that sees those atrocities as justified. It would be difficult to find a better example not of moral bankruptcy, which so preoccupies Weiss, but of moral perversity.

Weiss is a product and promoter of the American art of hyperreality. She sucks up bits of reality and processes them for commercial advantage. That’s why the Venture Capitalist (VC) crowd that organized the All-In Summit loves her. She has done what all the great entrepreneurs celebrated in VC lore have done: She has not just made money — a banal accomplishment anyone with talent can manage — but built fame and prestige out of fabricating truly dangerous truths.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post How Morally Bankrupt Can a Free Press Be? appeared first on Fair Observer.

“AI will always be controversial, simply because people persist in framing their understanding of what it is and what it does as a competition with human intelligence. Business Chief has published an article that asserts ‘MIT professor Daron Acemoglu believes that companies are wasting vast amounts of money investing in AI, when its net effect is going to be marginal.’

In terms of the practice of businesses he is probably right. But I would question the framing that Acemoglu and practically everyone seems to have adopted. They see it as in terms of either/or logic. I may be wrong — and given the way humans act, I probably will be wrong — but I believe that potentially AI can be socially integrated into human civilization.

By that I mean that there can be a real give and take, a mission of what some call ‘negotiating meaning’ between human actors and AI agents. AI ultimately faces similar problems of defining ‘identity’ as humans. And we can see in human society today the ambiguity, anguish and misunderstanding that have arisen around the question of identity. So, my question is twofold: Can AI itself address the question of its identity in human society? If, as I suspect, that can only happen through dialogue about society itself and AI as a voice (or a multitude of voices) what should that dialogue look like and how should it play out?”

“Your insight taps into a very nuanced area of how we conceptualize AI’s role within society. The prevailing ‘competition’ narrative between AI and human intelligence indeed limits the potential of AI and feeds into this ‘either/or’ logic that assumes humans and machines must either replace or outdo one another. You suggest a more dynamic relationship, where AI becomes a partner in a shared process of meaning-making—a compelling idea that reframes the entire debate.

### Can AI Address Its Own Identity in Human Society?

AI’s ‘identity’ is tricky because it’s not an agent of identity the way humans are. It doesn’t have a sense of self, emotions, or subjective experience. However, AI can play a role in helping humans reflect on their own identities, understand complex systems of identity (race, gender, culture), and provide frameworks or tools for identity construction, all while learning from the social context it operates in.

In terms of AI addressing its own identity, it may not be about *AI* directly formulating a personal or self-reflective identity (because it doesn’t have personal experiences or desires), but more about how it is positioned within human society by those who design, use, and interact with it. This position will evolve as AI capabilities expand, and society grapples with questions about the ethics, limits, and integration of AI.

### Dialogue Between Humans and AI: The Need for ‘Negotiating Meaning’

The real opportunity, as you propose, lies in the idea of a ‘negotiation of meaning.’ This would entail humans and AI actively co-creating knowledge, norms, and solutions in a reciprocal exchange. Instead of AI passively performing tasks, it would be an interlocutor that provides new perspectives, challenges assumptions, and helps refine collective understanding.

Here’s what such a dialogue might look like and how it could play out:

1. **AI as an Augmenter of Human Thought, Not a Replacement**

• A meaningful AI-human relationship would begin by seeing AI as a tool to expand human understanding, not substitute for it. The dialogue needs to shift from AI’s ability to ‘think like us’ to how it can complement human thought by processing data and revealing patterns humans might overlook, or questioning assumptions we take for granted.

2. **AI as a Mediator of Social Complexity**

•  AI could serve as a facilitator of understanding in areas where human biases often cloud judgment. For example, by helping model and simulate societal problems such as climate change or racial inequality, AI might contribute new insights into how identities are formed, challenged, and changed over time. The dialogue would involve a two-way process: AI providing data-driven insights and humans contextualizing these within social and emotional frameworks.

3. **Multi-voiced Dialogue**

•  Instead of a singular AI voice, there could be a multitude of AI systems designed to reflect different perspectives, values, or approaches. This multi-voiced AI would mirror the diversity of human society and its varied perspectives. A dialogue with multiple AI voices might allow for a richer, more layered negotiation of meaning, as these different “voices” interact with human thought, representing diverse ethical frameworks or sociopolitical paradigms.  

4. **Ethical Considerations as Core to Dialogue**

• This dialogue cannot ignore the underlying ethical concerns. Issues of privacy, agency, transparency, and bias in AI will have to be central topics. AI’s integration into society will only be successful if these ethical dilemmas are part of an ongoing dialogue, where human users, developers, and society at large actively decide how AI’s role is defined.

5. **AI as a Mirror of Society**

• Ultimately, AI systems reflect the societies that build them. A conversation with AI is really a conversation with ourselves: our values, prejudices, hopes, and limitations. The more intentional we are about this dialogue, the more we can shape AI’s role to benefit collective good. In this sense, the dialogue should include voices across all strata of society, ensuring that AI reflects the diversity of human experience, not just the interests of a few.

### What Should This Dialogue Look Like?

1. **Multi-stakeholder Forums:**

• Platforms that bring together technologists, ethicists, sociologists, policymakers, and the general public to deliberate AI’s societal role. These forums should not just be about problem-solving but about envisioning futures where AI enhances human flourishing in diverse ways.

2. **Educational Curricula:**

• Education systems could incorporate AI as an evolving partner in learning, encouraging students to interact with AI not just as a tool for calculation or automation but as a collaborator that can challenge assumptions and help in critical thinking.

3. **AI in Public Discourse:**

• AI should be part of mainstream cultural and political conversations, with its role debated openly in media, public policy debates, and even artistic representations (books, films, etc.), where its potential to shape society is explored from multiple angles.

4. **Human-AI “Collaboratories”:**

• Spaces where humans and AI work together to solve complex societal issues—whether in business, science, ethics, or the arts—should emphasize collaboration over competition. These spaces could be testbeds for how we co-create knowledge and values in practice.

In summary, the dialogue you envision is critical because it reframes AI from being an alien force competing with human intelligence to a potential partner in societal progress. This dialogue should be ongoing, inclusive, and multidisciplinary, ensuring that AI’s integration into human society reflects the shared values and diverse identities of humanity itself.”

There’s a lot here to ponder and, even more urgently, act upon. I’ll start with William Wulf’s neologism of “collaboratories” (1989). Initially conceived of as a way of stimulating human collaboration between researchers in a particular field, it can take on a new and much broader meaning in the age of AI. Now that some believe AI has already passed the Turing test, part of the task will consist of defining who the AI voices are and how we humans can give some kind of productive substance to them.

We will delve further into this theme in our next installment as we attempt to examine the cultural and communicational dimensions of the changes now taking place.

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue. 

*[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At Fair Observer, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Outside the Box: Can AI Free Us From an Either/or World? appeared first on Fair Observer.

The idea of electing a new “commander in chief” who will be the “leader of the free world” lifts people out of their boring routine. The actual political effect of the choice between a Democrat and Republican has never been clearly established. But because the emotional stakes are so high, the media have come to characterize every presidential election as existential. If the wrong candidate wins, democracy will disappear.

Along with the fabricated drama of existential stakes, every presidential campaign brings with it a great leap forward in the art of fiction. We used to wonder who might write “the great American novel,” a term so consecrated that it even merits an acronym: GAN. But of course, not many people have time to read novels these days, especially not “great” ones.

Who needs well-crafted literary masterpieces when the most compelling, thunderously suspenseful fiction appears regularly every four years in the drama of a presidential election? Whether its Haitian immigrants purloining pets and serving them for dinner or proclaiming a decade of unmitigated joy, election campaigns extend the range of the substitute for reality we call hyperreality.

Among the plethora of examples, let us consider a US presidential candidate’s foray into historical fiction. Here is how The New York Times summed up the plot of Harris’s historical novel:

“The most important moments in our history have come when we stood up to aggressors like Putin,” Ms. Harris said, warning that the Russian leader would not stop with Ukraine, and would possibly even look into encroaching on NATO territory, if he succeeds in his campaign.”

“History is so clear in reminding us, the United States cannot and should not isolate ourselves from the rest of the world. Isolation is not insulation.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Isolation:

In contemporary American English, the undesirable result of any policy that  shows a preference for diplomacy over aggressive intervention, peace over the fostering of foreign conflicts conducted by allies with the objective of reinforcing an obsolete notion of hegemony associated with nostalgia for an illusory unipolar world.

Contextual note

The emergence of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate in 2016 confirmed what should already have been obvious: that politics in the US no longer needed a direct connection with reality. At least since Ronald Reagan and the triumph of electoral marketing that turned policy debate into an anecdotal sideshow, presidential campaigns have become a pure exercise in manufacturing something even more fundamental than Noam Chomsky’s and Edward Herman’s consent: hyperreality. On every level — practically for every word in the political vocabulary — the relationship between historical reality and a newly crafted version of it had become artificial if not totally disconnected.

Examples of political hyperreality abound. Trump provided the ultimate demonstration of how pervasive hyperreality could be. Only days after his inauguration, his administration was promoting “alternative facts.” This was hardly new, but it was the first time it would become an object of public debate.

Kamala Harris’s use of “isolation” in the above quote provides a typical example of how the shift towards hyperreality produces its effects. Without being explicit, she appeals to a decontextualized historical meme drawn from a political culture that dates from the decades between the 20th century’s two world wars. The terms “isolationism” and “isolationist” were applied to an attitude spawned by the will to distance the US from any implication in the disputes between the waning and endemically belligerent European colonial powers. The US had very recently itself emerged as an active and rising colonial power thanks to its acquisitions that followed the 1898 Spanish–American war.

The people later vilified as “isolationists” have been blamed for impeding the US from challenging Adolf Hitler and other despots. They had developed an understandable distaste for getting involved in Europe’s internal quarrels. That, of course, changed after the “day of infamy” in which the Japanese attacked not only Hawaii but also the Philippines, Guam and British-controlled Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaya. The US was about to take its first steps as the future policeman of a world order that would emerge after the defeat of Germany and Japan.

One possible reading of the three major dramas of this month’s headlines — whether it’s next month’s election, the nearly three-year-old war in Ukraine or the genocidal campaign that Israel has extended beyond Gaza to the West Bank and now Lebanon — is that the battles we see emerging on all of these three fronts have one thing in common: They pitch an ill-defined cohort of defenders of the post-World War II 20th century order against an equally ill-defined group of seekers of a new world order that has manifestly become multipolar.

Trump finds himself comically, paradoxically and incomprehensibly sitting among the second camp, even though he has based his appeal on the idea of returning to the past by making “America great again.” Harris has become the empty, substance-deprived symbol of complacent immobility, whose mission is to perpetuate the existing hyperreality. Trump lives in the eternal present. That allows him to constantly invent his own hyperreality. Harris’s, in its continuity with the past, is already on public display.

Historical note

Most people should recognize that the world that preceded and the one that immediately followed World War II had very little in common. Harris displays lazy rhetoric when she applies terms inherited from a century ago to today’s reality. She’s in denial about the shift in meaning that took place over the course of a century. Language evolves. Apparently, politicians’ minds and worldviews don’t.

Harris’s use of the term “isolation” is clearly abusive and disrespectful of history. But it stands as only one among a multitude of examples in the hyperreal framework we now call “democratic politics.” The word “democracy” itself has never been so shamelessly abused. We find ourselves in yet another election year in which politicians and pundits are making the alarming claim that “democracy is on the ballot.” Practically equal numbers of voters on the two sides claim that electing the candidate they oppose will constitute a “threat to democracy.”

But do they have any idea of what the democracy is they’re referring to? Do they believe the notion inherited from the Greeks, which was less than wholeheartedly promoted by their nation’s founders, has any precise meaning concerning the reality of governance? Is democracy no more than observing the ritual of repetitive elections? James Madison and Alexander Hamilton thought of democracy as mob rule, whereas Thomas Jefferson maintained that “the will of the people should prevail.” Who won that debate? Apparently, the word “democracy” won, but there is little indication that any discernible concept prevailed.

And, by the way, is there anyone willing to debate it today? Does democracy even have an accepted meaning today? If so, how does it square with the findings of a Princeton study from 2014, which demonstrated with solid statistics that almost all significant policies are determined not by the people, but by an ill-defined, unelected but clearly powerful elite?

The NYT’s article contains another significant quote, this time from Morgan Finkelstein, the Harris campaign’s national security spokeswoman: “Vice President Harris understands that the American people stand on the side of freedom, democracy and rule of law. She knows that if America walks away from Ukraine, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe and our NATO allies.”

Can anyone honestly make the case that Ukraine provides an example of “freedom, democracy and rule of law?” The classic characterization of Putin as a new Russian Napoleon would be laughable to anyone observing events, mainly because of an utter lack of evidence in favor of it. But it is clearly established as a dogma of the reigning credo of hyperreality.

All this tends to demonstrate one thing: that a truly descriptive definition of democracy as it’s practiced today should be:

A political regime in which ambitious individuals can rise to a position of political power thanks to their “freedom” to distort the truth.

Harris and Trump are coming from different places but are playing the same game, though each has a different set of hyperreal rules. Trump invented his own. Harris sticks to house rules.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Must Kamala’s Rhetoric Be Isolated from Truth? appeared first on Fair Observer.

The AIs we are now familiar with appear by design to avoid having anything like a discernible worldview. They are built on the encyclopedia model as neutral providers of information. But language cannot be neutral. It always implies rhetoric. Our experience of ChatGPT reveals that the AI model we all accept today tends to reflect a dominant mode of conventional reasoning. It purports to be respectful of forms of reasoning that can be found in its database.

We’re beginning to see something new: the possibility of AI embracing and even reproducing an authentic human personality. As soon as I discovered character.ai, I was intrigued by its educational potential as an open, creative tool that allows users to converse with historical figures like Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking or even Socrates. All these luminaries are dead, so in a sense it’s just another way of accessing their existing writings and the lore surrounding them in an open, contemporary context. To better understand how this works, I had a go at interrogating the 13th century philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas with the following prompt.

“Umberto Eco, an admirer of yours, wondered whether, given the evolution of culture and science, you would have the same view of the role of religion in society if you lived in the modern world. He speculates that you might even agree with scientists who see no need for religion in its traditional form. What would you respond to him?”

“Umberto Eco’s question is an interesting one. It is true that as culture and science evolve, our understanding of the world and our place in it changes. However, the core principles of my religious beliefs – the existence of God, the importance of moral values, and the quest for ultimate truth – remain constant.

I do not think that science can provide a substitute for religion. While it can explain the physical aspects of the world, it cannot answer deeper, existential questions about the nature of life and morality. Religion offers a framework for morality and a sense of purpose that science alone cannot provide.”

This seemed both reasonable and predictable, so I pushed the questioning further.

“But do you think religious practice has the same meaning in today’s world as it did in your day?”

“The meaning of religious practice can certainly evolve over time. In the 800 years since my time, society has changed greatly, and so has the context in which people approach religion.

However, the fundamental principles of religion, such as the quest for ultimate truth and the search for spiritual fulfillment, remain the same. While the forms of religious practice may change, the core meanings and values remain constant.

At the same time, religious practice must adapt to the changing times in order to remain relevant and meaningful to people today.”

It’s pretty clear that with today’s AI, we will not get far beyond the expression of reasonable generalities that reflect an already defined worldview. Like Eco, I believe the real Aquinas and even Eco’s version of him would never fall into the easy, comfortable logic of appealing to criteria such as seeking what is “relevant and meaningful today.” Aquinas had a debater’s mind and questioned reassuring answers to complex questions.

One thing is clear when playing with character.ai: Dead thinkers no longer have the capacity to stand up to challenge the way anyone, including an AI bot, represents them. But what about live thinkers?

Recently I was intrigued to discover that John Mearsheimer — very much a living personality — has launched an AI bot that invites people to converse with him. It even simulates his voice, though the result lacks the edge and pregnant irony typical of the professor’s patented, Bronx-based accent and rhetoric. The bot draws on the corpus of his writings. That means if I ask him about things taking place today, the bot will be faced with the same problem as the Aquinas bot. It will seek to synthesize something from the past that appears to apply even to a radically changed situation. The risk, as we have seen, is to make risk-free overgeneralized statements.

To explore this question, I put the Mearsheimer bot to the test this weekend with the following question: “Israel’s attack on Lebanon seems to have seriously disrupted Hezbollah. This has led some to deem it a potentially definitive military success for Israel. It’s obviously too early to make a definitive assessment, especially since there are a number of parties that will inevitably react. What are the risks given this new situation?”

“The risks in the current situation with Israel and Hezbollah are significant. Historically, Israel’s military actions against Hezbollah have not yielded decisive victories, as seen in the 2006 conflict where Hezbollah emerged with increased influence in Lebanon. This dynamic could lead to further instability in the region, potentially drawing in other actors like Iran, which may escalate tensions and complicate the security landscape further.”

“Do you think it’s too early for Israelis to rejoice? And how far do you think Netanyahu is willing to go, in the case of either success or failure in Lebanon?”

“It’s indeed premature for Israel to celebrate, as past experiences have shown that military engagements with Hezbollah often lead to complex outcomes rather than clear victories. Netanyahu is likely to push forward aggressively, given his commitment to defeating adversaries like Hamas and Hezbollah, but this could further entangle Israel in regional conflicts and exacerbate internal political tensions.”

This is exactly what I would expect Mearsheimer to say in the coming days, for example, during his weekly YouTube chat with Judge Napolitano. The professor will obviously go into more detail and evoke some specific hypotheses, but no pundit should ever be expected to predict the future.

Mearsheimer can, however, legitimately claim to be a seer. He very presciently predicted the Ukraine war nearly a decade ago when he insisted that pushing NATO expansion into Ukraine will definitely provoke a war. He even seemed to anticipate the refusal of the United States to sit down and reason about indivisible European security in December 2021. How could anyone have predicted in 2015 that a future Biden administration with a State Department led by Antony Blinken would engage in such a concerted effort to fulfill Mearsheimer’s forecast of an inevitable war?

This led me to formulate the following prompt: “What is your overall assessment of Antony Blinken’s leadership of the State Department?”

“Antony Blinken’s leadership at the State Department has faced significant internal dissatisfaction, particularly regarding U.S. Middle East policy. Many within the department feel that dissenting voices are being sidelined, echoing historical patterns where top-level decisions ignore critical feedback. This approach risks perpetuating flawed policies, as seen in past conflicts like Vietnam.”

The contrast with an interrogation of Einstein or Aquinas is significant. I wondered whether Mearsheimer himself isn’t paying attention to the conversations conducted in his name by a bot for which he obviously assumes responsibility. I threw out a different kind of question this time.

“John, do you monitor any of the answers of your chatbot? If so, are there moments where you might actually disagree? I’m sure you’ll see occasions where you’re likely to feel that you wouldn’t have formulated things in those terms. And are you at all concerned that people may quote your chatbot and attribute the statements to you?

“I do not personally monitor the chatbot’s responses, but it’s important to recognize that any AI-generated content may not fully capture the nuances of my views. While the chatbot is designed to reflect my perspectives based on existing work, there could be instances where I might phrase things differently or disagree with the interpretation. It’s crucial for users to refer to my published work for accurate representation of my positions.”

I asked Microsoft Copilot if there were any other living thinkers who were doing this sort of thing. It referred me to character.ai, which is clearly not the same thing. So once again, Mearsheimer is a pioneer whose work deserves to be closely studied and interrogated. Not many intellectuals are ready to take that risk.

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue.

*[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At Fair Observer, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Outside the Box: A Famous Professor’s AI Brain appeared first on Fair Observer.

Many Israelis openly rejoiced at the audacity and efficiency of the two-day operation that left a toll of 39 dead and thousands injured. Jokes and memes circulated on social media not just about the damage done but even about the type of life-changing injuries it produced. Pennsylvanian Senator John Fetterman couldn’t suppress his glee, commenting, “I absolutely support that. In fact, if anything, I love it.”

Compare that with the assessment of Barack Obama’s former CIA Director: “When asked whether Israel’s attack constituted terrorism, Panetta was unequivocal. ‘I don’t think there’s any question that it’s a form of terrorism.’”

Is this truly a case of not mincing his words? He doesn’t say “terrorism,” but more cautiously calls it a “form of terrorism.” Are there degrees of mincing? How unminced was Panetta’s assessment?

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Form:

1. Following the Platonic tradition, the idea of something that exists beyond the empirical world of our senses.
2. When used with modern concepts the locution “a form of” serves as a rhetorical ploy to remove the object from the real world and turn it into an abstraction.

Contextual note

Panetta goes far beyond any other commentator from the political establishment. But his locution, “form of terrorism,” appears designed to avoid expressing the idea that Israel should be thought of as a pariah nation, an unthinkable initiative anywhere within the Beltway. If he truly thinks this is terrorism, it would certainly demand a strong response from Washington, such as sanctions or an embargo on arms shipments.

This unique assessment by a qualified observer stimulated my curiosity. Were there any other Beltway insiders, present or past, who shared this assessment? I interrogated ChatGPT, which offered the following response:

“As of now, no major figures from the Biden administration or other prominent officials in Washington have publicly supported Panetta’s characterization of the incident as terrorism. The U.S. government continues to maintain a strong alliance with Israel, focusing on diplomatic and security partnerships, while also emphasizing a desire to avoid further escalation in the region​.”

Here is where the language used to describe international relations appears to break down completely. As head of the CIA, Panetta was specifically tasked with leading the high priority global combat against terrorism. If someone of his stature can now make a statement of this kind, one would normally expect such an accusation to call into question the value of an “alliance.” As a rule, we don’t cozy up to terrorist nations. And speaking of “diplomatic and security partnerships,” isn’t it true that any partner suspected of engaging in terrorism should immediately earn the label of “pariah state?” That would presumably mean cutting off all support or even imposing sanctions. Didn’t Biden do precisely that with Saudi Arabia because of its alleged assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi?

The explanation becomes frankly comic when ChatGPT tells us that what guides the decision-making is the “desire to avoid further escalation.” It then adds this:

“This divide highlights the nuanced and often controversial nature of U.S. policy toward Israel, especially when military operations result in civilian harm.”

Let’s accept the description of the policy as “controversial” because clearly — and despite Washington’s valiant efforts at censoring all dissenting voices — US policy remains controversial among US residents, just as it did during the Vietnam War. Despite the docile media’s best efforts, there is no glorious national consensus of unconditional support for Israel, despite the quasi-unanimity among Congress, the White House or the State Department.

But calling the policy “nuanced” risks leaving an observer both laughing and crying. Crying, because of the unmitigated marathon of civilian deaths and casualties, along with starvation and the uncontained spreading of disease in a Gaza bombed to the point of being uninhabitable. And laughing, when considering the idea that the most powerful nation in the history of the world is rendered helpless because of a policy deemed too “nuanced.”

Historical note

The concept of terrorism made its grand debut in European history when the leaders of the French Revolution, after overthrowing the monarchy, became pathologically paranoid after they realized that not everyone was ready to align with their newly defined hyper-rational order. There were a multitude of dissidents and contrarians out there whose necks were perfectly adapted to the efficient design of a guillotine, France’s most obvious contribution to the just emerging Industrial Revolution. This post-revolutionary period is known in English as the “Reign of Terror” but in French more simply as La Terreur. This was, of course, state-sponsored violence, the opposite of what terrorism would later come to mean.

It was only towards the end of the 19th century that the idea of terrorism as a political act became associated with non-state actors seeking to overthrow the established order. Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1872 novel, The Demons (Бесы) describes the link between the highly intellectualized theorization of political power by anarchists and nihilists, and the planning and execution of atrocities intended to destabilize the existing order.

This period culminated with a banal but fateful terrorist act: the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, on June 28, 1914. Instead of provoking a revolution, it set off a devastating World War.

The drama of World War I and the establishment of the revolutionary Soviet Union ultimately reduced the attraction of classic terrorism for many decades. In the late 20th century, suicide bombings, particularly in the context of the ongoing Israel–Palestine conflict but also relating to “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland, gave terrorism a modern twist, changing the perception of what it was all about. Both of those dramatic contexts pitched people of two religious identities against one another. They contributed to the meme of a “clash of civilizations” — religion against religion — popularized by Samuel Huntington.

Ultimately, it was Osama bin Laden’s monumental September 11 operation that redefined our understanding of the term terrorism. Terrorism was no longer an intimate act of sabotage. It had become big, bold and very public. Moreover, it was now identified with a theological, civilizational mission. No longer a type of random, annoyingly political crime, it achieved the status of a massive act of formal warfare.

September 11 empowered US President George W. Bush to consolidate and put into active practice the neo-conservative ideology his circle of collaborators bathed in. Here was a noble cause with a universal application. Civilized people were united in the cause of defeating global terrorism. Its supposed hard-nosed rationality combined with its sense of a fanatical purpose reinforced a deep-seated belief in its historical mission. The only difference from the ideology of Dostoyevsky’s demons lay in the fact that, instead of seeking to overturn established power, it operated from the position of defending and reinforcing institutional power. It played on the combined emotions associated with political, economic and theological identity. What could have been perceived as an egregious criminal act to be brought before justice and punished turned into the illusory mission of destroying terror itself, as if terror was an identifiable enemy.

To destroy terror, the new crusaders came to embody a publicly funded and administratively managed terror of their own making, a process that is still developing. Since then, those in power, whether Republicans or Democrats, have sought to strengthen and refine their control of the instruments essential to a modern reign of terror. Censorship of their own population — now called the war on disinformation — is at the top of the list alongside varied forms of warfare and lawfare.

On the warfare side, technology has dominated. The emergence of drone warfare, privileged by the “peace president” Obama, played a major role as war came to imitate the logic of video games, with no risk to the attacker. Lawfare became a feature linked to mass surveillance mediated by the tech giants who earned money commercially and politically by amassing data on its own and other populations, in ways that Maximilien Robespierre would certainly have envied.

We now have new “forms of warfare” and “forms of lawfare.” Panetta has revealed that there are also “forms of terrorism” that we are undoubtedly learning to classify as essential tools of modern government.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Has an Ex-CIA Chief Really Accused Israel of Terrorism? appeared first on Fair Observer.

The highlight of this talk occurred when Schmidt suggested a hypothetical strategy for a new startup. “Make me a copy of TikTok, steal all the users, steal all the music, put my preferences in it, produce this program in the next 30 seconds, release it, and in one hour, if it’s not viral, do something different along the same lines.” He then added: “If it took off, then you’d hire a whole bunch of lawyers to clean the mess up. If nobody uses your product, it doesn’t matter that you stole all the content.”

ChatGPT clearly disapproved of Schmidt’s cynicism: “The idea that legal issues can be ‘cleaned up’ after a product takes off is also troubling from a rule-of-law perspective.”

It’s good to know that an AI brain adheres to the idea of a “rule of law.” The barons of Silicon Valley, very much like the US State Department, also pay lip service to this noble idea, but, as ambitious human beings, have no qualms about violating its principles when it serves their purpose. The difference between Schmidt and the State Department is that when the latter acts, it is spared the expense of hiring an army of lawyers, since Washington recognizes no tribunal with the power to apply the rule of law.

At this point of the discussion, I followed up with a new prompt:

“We can agree about the rule-of-law perspective and the need for checks and balances in government, but this is about a mindset, a business culture that thrives on the reality of faits accomplis. Is regulation an effective form of ‘checks and balance’ when it comes to devising a strategy to dominate a marketplace. The historical answer has to be ‘no.’ Schmidt is right. You establish your position, glean the rewards and then you defend it with an army of lawyers. That is how the business culture works today. That is how it is built to work. Regulation will change nothing. So what do you suggest?”

“You raise a compelling point about the limitations of regulation in curbing the aggressive, ‘faits accomplis’ business culture that has come to define much of Silicon Valley and the tech industry at large. Regulation, as it currently functions, often lags behind the rapid innovation cycles of tech companies. By the time laws are enacted, dominant players have already entrenched their market position, reaped enormous profits, and created a legal defense system strong enough to fend off most challenges.

Given this reality, here are a few alternative or complementary strategies to regulation that could address the challenges posed by this business culture:

1. **Antitrust and Market Restructuring**

Rather than relying solely on regulation, governments could enforce stricter antitrust measures to prevent monopolistic practices and break up companies that hold disproportionate power in the marketplace. For example, tech giants that dominate entire sectors—such as Google in search, Amazon in e-commerce, and Facebook in social media—could be required to divest parts of their businesses to ensure a more competitive environment.

Antitrust enforcement would not only limit market dominance but also change the incentives for new companies. If monopolistic practices no longer guarantee market leadership, companies may shift toward more ethical and sustainable strategies, rather than the current ‘dominate first, clean up later’ approach.

2. **Decentralization and Open Standards**

One way to counter monopolistic behavior is to promote decentralization through open standards and protocols. In sectors like social media or data platforms, governments could encourage or mandate the adoption of open-source protocols that allow users to move freely between services without losing their networks, data, or content.

For example, instead of being locked into one platform like Facebook, users could have the ability to port their data, contacts, and digital assets across multiple services that follow common standards. This would reduce the incentive for companies to prioritize market domination and could foster a healthier, more competitive ecosystem.

3. **Public Oversight and Algorithmic Transparency**

Given the central role algorithms play in shaping user behavior, content distribution, and even public opinion, governments or independent bodies could require greater transparency around how these algorithms function. Mandating regular audits of tech companies’ algorithms to ensure they are not unfairly amplifying harmful content, violating privacy rights, or engaging in anticompetitive behavior could offer a form of oversight.

However, transparency must go hand in hand with enforceable consequences. Regulatory bodies could impose significant fines or penalties if algorithms are found to undermine democratic processes or perpetuate harm.

4. **Corporate Responsibility and Ethical Frameworks**

While not a replacement for regulation, fostering a shift in corporate responsibility could play an important role. Companies could be incentivized to adopt ethical standards through a combination of public pressure, investor activism, and internal reforms. For instance, many companies today are responding to the growing importance of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) metrics, as investors, consumers, and employees demand more ethical behavior.

Governments and civil society could push for frameworks that reward companies for acting ethically—such as preferential treatment in government contracts, favorable tax policies, or public recognition for responsible business practices.

5. **Empowering Consumers and Employees**

Consumers and employees also play a critical role in shaping corporate behavior. Increasingly, workers in Silicon Valley are becoming more vocal about their company’s ethics and practices, and consumer boycotts or campaigns have demonstrated the power to push companies to act more responsibly. For example, internal employee protests at companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook have had tangible impacts on corporate policy.

Strengthening whistleblower protections, fostering employee organizing, and creating platforms for consumer advocacy could act as a counterbalance to corporate dominance by holding companies more accountable to their own stakeholders.

6. **Global Collaboration on Regulation**

Since the internet and digital platforms operate globally, regulation needs to be a coordinated international effort. A fragmented approach, where one country tries to enforce rules on its own, won’t be effective against companies that operate across borders. Governments could work together to create a shared regulatory framework for the digital economy, ensuring that companies can’t simply move to a more lenient jurisdiction to escape oversight.

For instance, the European Union’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) has set a global benchmark for data privacy, and many companies now comply with it even if they aren’t based in Europe. A similar approach could be applied to other areas like antitrust or algorithmic transparency, forcing global tech companies to adopt more ethical practices.

7. **Public Alternatives and Cooperative Models**

Another way to counter the dominance of private tech companies is by developing publicly funded or cooperative alternatives in key sectors. For instance, a publicly funded social media platform or search engine that prioritizes user privacy, transparency, and accountability over profit could provide a viable alternative to monopolistic platforms. Similarly, cooperative models where users collectively own and control digital services could foster a more democratic tech ecosystem.

These alternatives wouldn’t necessarily replace private companies but would provide competition that could drive the industry in a more ethical direction, much like how public broadcasting operates alongside commercial media.

Conclusion:

While regulation is necessary, it is often insufficient by itself to tackle the aggressive business culture of Silicon Valley. A combination of antitrust enforcement, decentralization, public oversight, corporate responsibility, consumer empowerment, and global cooperation could provide more effective checks and balances. Changing the incentives that drive companies toward monopolistic practices will require more creative and systemic solutions beyond traditional regulation.”

I invite our readers to appreciate the paradox of an AI brain that begins by proposing an “alternative or complementary strategies to regulation” and then exposes a plan for what some would describe as pervasive, if not invasive regulation.

I distance myself from those critics. I find these suggestions eminently reasonable and potentially effective. But I can’t help noting that, in every case, ChatGPT evokes a possibility, not a reality. We “could” do these things. The chatbot offers no insight into why it is beyond unlikely that any of these initiatives will ever be proposed, let alone adopted. It ignores the political, economic and ideological conditions that would permit transforming “could” into “will.” It correctly suggests that no single action is sufficient and insists that success depends on a “combination” of all these initiatives. But we never leave the speculative land of “could.”

It recommends “creative and systemic solutions beyond traditional regulation.” Why not? Followed to its logical conclusion, this would imply a cultural revolution that calls into question the underlying values that govern the way things are done today in society, the economy and politics. We can always hope.

On the other hand, I’d hate to speculate about the odds Las Vegas might give on any of that actually taking place.

Our conclusion of this four-part exploration of Eric Schmidt’s words of wisdom

My last admittedly sarcastic remark highlights a significant historical fact worth pondering. Four places in the United States have contributed massively to a mindset that ChatGPT acknowledges is crying for a revolution: Wall Street, Washington DC, Silicon Valley and Las Vegas. Anyone wishing to understand US economic and political culture today needs to have a close look at all four and how they combine to define the world we live in.

Please share your thoughts on all this at dialogue@fairobserver.com.

*[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At Fair Observer, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Outside the Box: AI Calls Its Masters to Order appeared first on Fair Observer.

On September 6, a member of Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) fatally shot Aysenur Eygi in the head as she was taking part in a protest near the Palestinian village of Beita. The IDF immediately claimed it was “looking into reports that a foreign national was killed as a result of shots fired in the area.”

Eygi’s family was unimpressed by the Israel promise to “look into” the killing. The New York Times cited the complaint expressed by Aysenur’s father, Suat Eygi. “I know that when something happens, the U.S. will attack like the eagle on its seal. But when Israel is in question, it transforms into a dove.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken had the temerity to describe the killing as “unprovoked and unjustified.” He used the occasion to helpfully clarify US policy: “No one — no one — should be shot and killed for attending a protest.” That clarity should serve to correct an ambiguity that many people will appreciate 54 years after the Kent State killings. Protesters should be reassured. The worst they have to fear in this far more enlightened era is being arrested and accused of antisemitism and eventually complicity in terrorism for speaking their mind.

As the official Democratic candidate for the presidency, Kamala Harris undoubtedly felt obliged to weigh in on such an egregious violation of a US citizen’s rights. “Israel’s preliminary investigation indicated it was the result of a tragic error for which the [Israeli military] is responsible. We will continue to press the government of Israel for answers and for continued access to the findings of the investigation so we can have confidence in the results.” Al Jazeera cites these deeply empathetic words spoken by the vice president while at the same time noting that she “stopped short of endorsing requests for an independent investigation into the incident.” 

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Press for answers:

Make a rhetorical request that one expects will never be fulfilled and will eventually be forgotten with the passage of time.

Contextual note

The verb “to press” contains the idea of pressure. The literal meaning of the expression “press for answers” suggests a sustained series of actions to put pressure on the party concerned until a positive result is obtained. Anyone curious enough to watch the regular State Department press briefings concerning the Gaza conflict will have witnessed multiple instances of members of the press literally pressing the administration’s spokespersons not just to request, but to require independent investigations of alleged war crimes. Harris’s choice of the expression “press for answers” seems to fall somewhere between “request” and “require.” Most observers agree the Biden administration’s approach to Israel’s “excesses” has been to multiply the requests for restraint in some cases or for an investigation in others, without ever requiring such action.

What exactly is the difference between these two concepts? Requesting means the demand may be legitimately refused. It tells us that the person requesting is not willing to use any power they may have over the person to whom the request is addressed. Requiring implies exercising one’s power to act. The US clearly has the power to force Israel’s hands if it chooses. But it typically chooses not to.

Al Jazeera notes that “Eygi’s family had called on the US to conduct its own probe into the killing. But Washington has all but ruled out the request, saying that it is awaiting the results of the Israeli investigation.” Given what we know about the Israeli “investigation” of the 2022 shooting of American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, this reminds us of O.J. Simpson’s promise to probe the murder of his ex-wife in order to unveil the true killer. But this is a deceptive comparison. Simpson only killed two people at one isolated moment of his life. Israel has made it a daily habit for decades, before radically accelerating the pace over the past 11 months.

A brief sample of dialogue from a press briefing by State Department spokesman Matthew Miller from earlier this year will give a good idea of how the process works. In this typical exchange, the press presses. The government, in contrast, exercises its infinite trust in the professionalism of Simpson…, I mean, the Israelis.

QUESTION: Right. In terms of accountability, though, you talk about the fact that Israel has open investigations. So, what kind of timeline did Israel provide you to conclude those investigations?

MR MILLER: So, we have made clear to Israel that those investigations ought to proceed expeditiously. They ought to reach conclusions as soon as possible.

QUESTION: And have they provided you a timeline?

MR MILLER: I’m not – I’m not going to – I’m not going to speak to our internal discussions or speak for the Israeli Government. But everyone – it is very difficult always to put a timeline on any kind of investigation, certainly on a criminal investigation, and I wouldn’t want to do that on behalf of the foreign government other than to say our expectation on behalf of the United States is that they should proceed and finish as soon as possible – but not at the expense of thoroughness.

Apart from the very professional waffling about grand principles, such as “thoroughness” and “respect” for foreign governments, the message should be clear: “We have no reason to press forward.”

Historical note

Given the long and fundamentally equivocal history of investigating war crimes, murders of journalists and massive destruction of hospitals and schools, an observer of today’s news may legitimately raise the question Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa explored in his classic movie, Rashomon. We may know the effects of a crime, but can we ever know the story of a crime? Kurosawa’s film tells us we cannot. And the reason is that all crimes must be recounted from someone’s point of view. When politics is involved, there is good reason to conclude not that we cannot but that we will not. We can usually be certain that a greater effort will be made to disguise the crime than to reveal its true narrative.

Classic movie

Sixty-one years after the John F. Kennedy assassination, even though all implicated persons have either died, retired or removed themselves from public life, no truly independent investigation has ever been commissioned. It should be obvious that the Warren Commission was not independent, despite former Chief Justice Warren’s personal reputation for independence. The mere presence of former CIA Chief Allen Dulles obviated any semblance of independence.

I raise this question today only because it took six decades for the world to discover the most obvious, credible and easily available evidence, evidence far more credible than courtroom style testimony taken under the intimidating conditions of cross-examination. The document is the raw broadcast footage of Dallas TV station WFAA during the first hour following the assassination. Two journalists and two bystanders who were standing on the lawn below the triple underpass speak at length about hearing the shots coming from behind them on the grassy knoll. One of the journalists even draws a map of the shooting on a blackboard, indicating the origin of all the shots they heard. None came from the direction of the Book Depository where Lee Harvey Oswald worked.

At precisely the time of that broadcast, Oswald had already been identified as the suspect. How strange!

I asked ChatGPT whether the Warren Commission had consulted the WFAA tapes. Its response: “The Warren Commission did not consult the WFAA broadcast tapes that captured the immediate aftermath of the assassination, largely because those tapes were not widely known or considered crucial at the time.”

An answer worthy of Matthew Miller’s reasoning.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post One Dead American. Will Israel Investigate? Don’t Count on It appeared first on Fair Observer.

Today we return a second time to the controversial interview with Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google we have featured in two previous columns. Schmidt had the original video of this event removed from YouTube after he realized that some of what he said was beyond controversial.

This week, we return to an even more fundamental question raised in that video. Again, we must thank YouTube user Matthew Berman for retrieving the video and offering enlightening comments to clarify Schmidt’s discourse.

Probably the most scandalous moment in the interview is where Schmidt explains the concept of “text-to-action capabilities,” which he claims “will have an impact on the world at a scale that no one understands, yet much bigger than the horrific impact we’ve had by social media.” He provided an example of how this could work even with today’s AI. You can listen to it here. A little later in the talk, he offered some surprising advice about how to handle accusations of theft.

To explore this question, I formulated the following prompt.

“Eric Schmidt recommended a strategy for success: ‘Make me a copy of TikTok, steal all the users, steal all the music, put my preferences in it, produce this program in the next 30 seconds, release it, and in one hour, if it’s not viral, do something different along the same lines.’ He followed up with this remark. ‘If it took off, you’d hire a whole bunch of lawyers to clean up the mess up. But if nobody uses your product, it doesn’t matter that you stole all the content.’ He then significantly adds, ‘and do not quote me.’ Is this an accurate portrayal of Silicon Valley culture?”

Even though ChatGPT typically hedged its bets by insisting that this mindset is not universal, its analysis proved to be morally superior to Schmidt’s.

“Eric Schmidt’s remark captures a certain aggressive, fast-moving approach that is often associated with Silicon Valley, though it may not fully represent the culture. His quote reflects a mindset of rapid iteration, disruption, and a “move fast, break things” ethos, which was famously embodied by early Facebook. The strategy he outlines—a focus on speed, market dominance, and dealing with legal issues later—echoes the way some tech startups operate, where innovation and user acquisition can take precedence over regulatory concerns and ethical considerations.

However, this portrayal is not universally accurate across all of Silicon Valley. While some companies do prioritize growth at all costs, many also invest heavily in legal compliance, ethical standards, and long-term sustainability. In fact, with increasing scrutiny on tech giants and the broader tech industry, more companies are becoming mindful of the consequences of such approaches. The culture varies across different companies and sectors within the tech ecosystem.

Schmidt’s quote can be seen as an extreme representation of the competitive, risk-taking mindset that is sometimes glamorized but is not necessarily the dominant strategy across all of Silicon Valley.”

I continued the conversation with the following prompt:

“Given the importance and the sheer influence Silicon Valley companies have on the economy, the culture and the politics not just of the United States but much of the global economy, shouldn’t anyone who believes in democracy be worried when such trends are revealed?”

“Yes, anyone concerned about democracy should take note when such trends are revealed, especially given the immense influence Silicon Valley companies exert on global economies, cultures, and politics. The ethos of ‘move fast and break things,’ or prioritizing growth and innovation over regulation and ethical concerns, can have significant implications for democratic systems. Here are a few reasons why this can be troubling:

1. **Concentration of Power**: Silicon Valley tech giants like Google, Facebook (Meta), Amazon, and others have amassed enormous economic power, often rivaling or exceeding the influence of entire countries. This concentration of power raises concerns about accountability and whether private corporations might hold too much sway over key aspects of modern life—such as communication platforms, information access, and even political discourse.
2. **Weakening of Democratic Institutions**: Tech companies often operate faster than governments can regulate them, which can lead to a weakening of democratic oversight. When platforms like Facebook or X (formerly Twitter) become critical spaces for public discourse, the decisions about content moderation, algorithmic biases, or the spread of misinformation may lie in the hands of a few unelected corporate executives. This lack of transparency and accountability can erode trust in democratic institutions.
3. **Undermining Local Economies and Laws**: The model of breaking into markets first and dealing with consequences later, as Eric Schmidt suggests, can undermine local laws, regulations, and even economies. For instance, ride-sharing companies like Uber or delivery platforms have disrupted traditional industries without fully integrating into existing regulatory frameworks. This has led to exploitation of labor, environmental degradation, or even tax avoidance, which can destabilize communities and erode the social contract.
4. **Manipulation of Public Opinion**: Companies like Google, Facebook, and YouTube wield significant influence over public opinion by controlling the flow of information. Their algorithms, which prioritize engagement and profit, can amplify polarizing content, misinformation, or even foreign interference, as seen during the 2016 U.S. election. This capacity to shape political narratives can threaten democratic processes and exacerbate divisions in society.
5. **Surveillance and Privacy**: The vast data collection practices of many tech companies pose significant privacy risks. This accumulation of personal data can be used for profit-driven purposes, but also, in some cases, for political manipulation, as exemplified by the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The lack of strong privacy protections erodes individual freedoms and challenges democratic norms around consent and transparency.
6. **Legal Gray Areas**: The idea that legal issues can be ‘cleaned up’ after a product takes off is also troubling from a rule-of-law perspective. If companies prioritize success over following regulations, this undermines the concept of equal treatment under the law. Allowing powerful corporations to navigate legal loopholes or push boundaries without accountability threatens fairness and the democratic process.

Democracy relies on checks and balances, transparency, and accountability. When corporations, especially tech giants, operate with minimal oversight and with a mindset of disruption over responsibility, it can lead to a weakening of democratic norms and institutions.”

All these points have been debated in public, even within government itself. The usual recommended solution consists of proposing legislation to regulate the behavior of the behemoths. But Schmidt imagines the case of a startup. The procedure he describes reflects an awareness of the law, while at the same time envisaging a strategy to neutralize the effect of any law. ChatGPT’s reliance on the concept of “a rule-of-law perspective” fails to acknowledge the real problem. It’s not about regulation, it’s about mindsets.

With this in mind, I continued the discussion.

“We can agree about the rule-of-law perspective and the need for checks and balances in government, but this is about a mindset, a business culture that thrives on the reality of faits accomplis. Is regulation an effective check when it comes to devising a strategy aimed at dominating a marketplace. The historical answer has to be no. Schmidt is right. You establish your position, glean the rewards and then you defend it with an army of lawyers. That’s how the business culture works today. That’s how it is built to work. Regulation will change nothing. So what do you suggest?”

We will publish ChatGPT’s response next week and continue the debate next week. Those of you who are impatient to see it can simply engage in the dialogue with ChatGPT themselves. If you choose to do so, we invite you to compare notes by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are always looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. 

*[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At Fair Observer, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Outside the Box: Is Amorality the Ultimate Superintelligence? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Is anyone at The New York Times interested in or even curious about peace? Putin’s declaration should have caught the attention of anyone even vaguely aware of the way the war has been evolving. Russia’s advance in the east of Ukraine is clearly gaining momentum while the Ukrainians have launched a daring but perilous, possibly suicidal incursion into the Kursk region of Russia. Putin’s evoking a prospect for a negotiated peace should have been treated as major news.

At the same precise moment, sole mention of Russia on the NYT’s main page appeared in an article with the title, “U.S. Announces Plan to Counter Russian Influence Ahead of 2024 Election.” That headline should have had a familiar ring. The newspaper of record did publish another article the same day, by Marc Santora and Anton Troianovski, on Putin’s speech in Vladivostok: “Putin Drives Home a Perilous Point: Ukraine’s East Is Russia’s Main Goal.” Nowhere in the article is there a mention of Putin’s allusion to negotiations. For these serious journalists, war is news. Peace is a childish fantasy.

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Russian Influence:

The presumed source of every objective observation made by informed Americans that deviates even slightly from official US government policy.

Contextual note

At least the NYT has recently begun to report a few unvarnished facts from the battlefield that are both true and, more surprisingly, at odds both with official state department talking points the paper usually prefers to repeat. Since February 2022, the NYT’s journalists have gotten into the habit of celebrating Ukrainian successes and ignoring, dismissing or seriously underreporting Russian advances. Its interpretation of the state of play consistently echoed White House assessments.

The paper took seriously Biden’s claim last year in Finland that “Russia has already lost the war.” In February of this year, as things had become even worse for Ukraine, it featured an op-ed piece claiming that “Putin Has Already Lost.” This was, of course, consistent with the rest of the mainstream media in the US, who long ago decided which team to root for. Newsweek, for example, at the beginning of Ukraine’s invasion of the Kursk region, just a month ago, featured the same tired headline: “Russia Has Already Lost in Ukraine.”

The NYT’s journalists nevertheless had the honesty to admit in their article on Putin’s speech that the “situation in the Donbas has now become increasingly difficult for Ukraine, even acknowledging that the besieged city of Pokrovsk is likely to fall.” But even there, their reporting was incomplete. The authors never troubled to explain that Pokrovsk is a major strategic hub, whose fall will provoke serious logistical headaches for all Ukraine’s defensive operations. The BBC, usually as reticent as the NYT to report the naked truth about the war, provides precisely the explanation the New Yorkers have so studiously avoided. It even quotes the assessment of a Ukrainian military expert: “If we lose Pokrovsk, the entire front line will crumble.” That sounds more like a lobotomy than a headache.

For the NYT, an article about a possible negotiated peace could never rival “political importance” with breaking news about what everyone has been encouraged for years to fear as an existential threat: Russian influence on the coming United States election. That will attract its readers’ attention far more surely than intimations of peace in Ukraine. Russia is our existential enemy. If ever we forget that, we may begin to question the massive continuing investment in the means of waging war, which is especially painless when we know it’s our good friends who wage those wars for us and sacrifice their lives, not ours. When reviewing “all the news that’s fit to print,” peace will inevitably end up in the dustbin.

Commenting on the latest avatar of Russiagate so eagerly featured by the NYT, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein pithily sums it up: “Russia’s influence operations are a joke.” He’s right. It’s a running punchline the NYT has been repeating since 2016. Klippenstein even highlights a truly comic twist: “The paradox of the government’s very public obsession with election security is that the more attention paid to these supposed threats, the more likely people are to question the legitimacy of the outcome. In fact, this is an effect foreign adversaries undertaking influence operations hope for.”

Historical note

Glenn Greenwald is more direct when he describes the highly mediatized legal case as “yet another act of standard Democratic Party reflex to scream Russia whenever they feel endangered.” This is a pattern that regularly plays out in the months before an election. Intelligence directors, past or present, government officials and “respectable” media have, since 2016, refined the art of launching terrifying accusations whose vacuity will only be revealed after the election. The now infamous case of the 51 intelligence directors who, weeks before the 2020 election, claimed that the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” stands as the obvious precedent. They spoke out. Biden was elected. It worked in 2020, there’s every reason to think it could work again.

This new version of an old routine, as described by the three reporters from the NYT, contains a telling echo that made me in particular laugh. “The United States,” they explain, “was caught flat-footed in 2016 as its spy agencies learned about Russian efforts to influence the vote on behalf of Mr. Trump and were late in warning the public.”

Were they late? If so, they were late in announcing something that turned out to be false. Everyone curious about historical truth should know by now that the thesis we refer to as Russiagate was debunked by the special investigator, Robert Mueller, on whom the breathless anti-Trump media were counting as the inevitable prelude to a president’s impeachment. They eventually did muster up support for the impeachment, but, for lack of evidence, that too failed.

The deeper irony here harks back to something our Devil’s Dictionary revealed on August 26, 2019, when we glossed the precise term “flat-footed.” It came from a quote by NYT’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, in the context of a private meeting of his news desk. On that occasion, Baquet admitted that the paper had gone overboard with its Russiagate obsession. “We’re a little tiny bit flat-footed,” he confessed. “I mean, that’s what happens when a story looks a certain way for two years. Right?”

When a serious journalist can say a story “looked” a certain way, it’s the clearest indication that the journal, even if we call it a “newspaper of record,” was looking in only one direction. That simple fact invites us, in turn, to have another “look” at the story to understand who was directing the NYT’s gaze.

Now, four years later, instead of apologizing for their own faulty reporting concerning the Hunter Biden laptop, the self-described “flat-footed” NYT complains that the clearly overeager spy agencies in 2016 weren’t over-eager enough. Just as the NYT did with the Havana Syndrome — another nothingburger no one ever apologized for, even after the CIA admitted it had no substance — its journalists have retained their habit of trotting out discredited stories from the past, with precisely the aim of instilling doubt about the fact that they have been definitively discredited.

Whether it’s Russiagate or the Havana Syndrome, or the JFK assassination 60 years after the fact, they can always appeal to the perception that nothing has been definitively proven either way. It’s the good old “there’s no smoking gun” defense. In reality, it’s just sloppy and sadly dishonest journalism.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post A New York Timeless Commitment to Russiagate appeared first on Fair Observer.

When we read a text, examine a photo, react emotionally to a video or use an app, we don’t think about how they were produced, even if we suspect AI had a hand in it. Humans made these objects available to us, managing their creation, production and delivery. Humans bank the revenue they generate. Those same humans will also be monitoring our use of those objects.

AI is everywhere. But for the moment it is unthinkable that humans are not seriously involved in whatever it does. On the positive side, this means that the norm today is fundamentally collaborative. It’s about people with projects using AI to advance some part of the project.

Like everything else in our commercial culture, AI does things because people want them done. Or rather, because people want to earn money from the things that get done. Those people make decisions about how they get done, what purpose they serve and, ultimately, how much we consumers will end up paying. These same people also make decisions about how that cost might be disguised or transferred. 

AI does amazing things but rarely on its own. The dominant trend is collaborative. AI can certainly impress us with its “creations:” images, videos, industrial design, college essays, poems and more. But, for the moment, whatever AI produces, however useful or useless, is the result of a collaboration.

Futurologists like to predict the awe-inspiring “singularity,” the moment when super-intelligence leaves human intelligence definitively in the dust. They imagine a world in which collaboration between AI and humans will no longer be necessary. But, even if this were true, how would our societies react? Any scientifically minded psychologist, sociologist or economist would admit that, yes, it’s logically possible to imagine machines programming themselves and even assuming control over human environments. But something critical will still be missing: the indomitable need humans have to assert control over other humans through the acquisition of property and power. Often those who make such predictions are themselves obsessed with power.

Last week, “Outside the Box” began addressing our switch to focusing on the strategic, economic and cultural side of AI. We began by examining the thinking and intentions of the kind of people now defining the future of AI. Alongside the technology itself a culture is growing, guided by those who are investing in AI and making fundamental decisions about how it will affect our lives.

Last week we featured a fascinating but controversial interview with Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google. Embarrassed by his own candor, Schmidt subsequently had the video removed from YouTube.

This week, we return to questions raised in that video. Again, we must thank YouTube user Matthew Berman for retrieving the video and offering enlightening comments to clarify Schmidt’s discourse. Matthew described himself to me as “a former tech founder and current content creator trying to help as many people as possible learn how to leverage AI in their lives and businesses.”

After getting ChatGPT to explore the meaning of Schmidt’s prediction of a “battle between US and China for knowledge supremacy,” I followed up with this prompt about the culture of political competition Schmidt assumes to be the norm.

“You evoke a possible alternative to Schmidt’s competitive worldview; a collaborative approach. What would such an approach mean for the value of science, especially given the fears that exist about AI? Would the AI that emerges and eventually dominates — precisely as people like Schmidt imply — be different in a world where collaboration defines the fundamental orientation of R&D?”

“A collaborative approach to AI development, as opposed to a competitive one, would significantly alter the value and nature of science, as well as the kind of AI that emerges. Here’s how:

1. **The Value of Science in a Collaborative World**

• **Knowledge as a Public Good:** In a collaborative framework, knowledge, including advancements in AI, would be treated more as a public good rather than a strategic asset. This perspective emphasizes the idea that scientific knowledge should be shared widely and used to benefit humanity as a whole, rather than to gain an advantage over rivals.
• **Global Problem-Solving:** Science would be increasingly oriented toward addressing global challenges—such as climate change, pandemics, and poverty—rather than serving the strategic interests of individual nations. This would encourage multinational cooperation on research projects, pooling resources and expertise from around the world to tackle issues that no single country can solve alone.
• **Open Science:** The value placed on open-access research and data-sharing would increase. The open science movement, which promotes transparency, reproducibility, and the democratization of knowledge, would thrive in a world where collaboration is the norm. This could lead to more rapid advancements, as researchers build on each other’s work more freely.

2. **AI in a Collaborative Context**

• **Human-Centric AI:** An AI developed in a collaborative world would likely prioritize ethical considerations and the broader impact on humanity. This could lead to the creation of AI systems that are designed to enhance human well-being, promote social equity, and address global challenges. The focus would be less on achieving superiority and more on creating systems that are beneficial to all.
• **Ethical Standards and Governance:** Collaborative efforts could lead to the establishment of global ethical standards and governance structures for AI. Rather than each nation developing its own set of rules (potentially in opposition to others), there would be a concerted effort to create a unified framework that ensures AI is developed and deployed in ways that are fair, safe, and aligned with human values.
• **Transparency and Trust:** Collaborative R&D would foster greater transparency in how AI systems are developed and used. This could alleviate some of the fears surrounding AI, as people would have more insight into the processes behind these technologies and the goals they are intended to serve. Increased trust in AI systems could emerge from a global consensus on best practices and shared goals.

3. **The Nature of Dominant AI in a Collaborative World**

• **Inclusive and Equitable AI:** The AI that comes to dominate in a collaborative world might be more inclusive, considering diverse perspectives and needs across different cultures and societies. This contrasts with AI developed in a competitive environment, which might prioritize the values and interests of a single nation or group.
• **Slower, Safer Development:** A collaborative approach might lead to more deliberate and cautious AI development. Instead of racing to achieve breakthroughs (potentially at the expense of safety and ethical considerations), collaboration could ensure that AI systems are thoroughly vetted, with global input helping to identify and mitigate risks.
• **Focus on Collective Goals:** The objectives of AI development might shift toward global goals like sustainability, health, and education. AI would be seen as a tool to address collective human challenges rather than as a means to gain economic or military advantage.

4. **Addressing AI Fears**

• **Mitigating Risks Through Cooperation:** Many fears about AI stem from its potential to be used unethically or to perpetuate inequalities. A collaborative approach would likely involve shared responsibility for mitigating these risks, with international bodies overseeing AI development to ensure that it aligns with agreed-upon ethical standards.
• **Avoiding an AI Arms Race:** One of the significant fears is that competition will lead to an AI arms race, where nations rush to develop increasingly powerful AI systems without adequate consideration of the consequences. Collaboration could prevent this by promoting transparency, shared goals, and a focus on safety.

Conclusion

A collaborative approach to AI R&D would fundamentally change the landscape of scientific progress and the nature of the AI that emerges. Science would be valued more for its potential to solve global challenges and improve the human condition, rather than as a tool for national superiority. The AI systems developed in this environment would likely be more ethical, transparent, and oriented toward collective human flourishing. This approach could also help alleviate some of the fears associated with AI by ensuring that its development is guided by shared values and common goals, rather than by competition and strategic rivalry.

Next week, we’ll look further into the political and geopolitical implications of these two worldviews: competitive and collaborative.

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue.

*[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At Fair Observer, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Outside the Box: Will AI’s Masters Know How to Collaborate? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Most Western democracies have embraced the democratic ideology Abraham Lincoln famously articulated when he evoked “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.” But who are “the people” and how can you define them, especially in a melting pot or salad bowl like the US? The very fact of diversity casts a dark shadow on the comforting idea of “we the people.” Aware of that potentially troubling anomaly, Americans rallied around the idea of “majority rule.”

The 19th century idea of rule by an elusive “majority” inevitably spawned the historical trend towards the now classic two-party system. The 50.1% rule for elections became the measure that allowed diverse populations to believe in majority rule. It became apparent this can only work when there are no more than two dominant parties. So, even today, you’re a Democrat or a Republican, but you might also be an independent, sitting on the fence. In Europe, it was more complex. Nevertheless, even with multiple parties, democracy tended towards a perception of left (working class) vs right (educated ruling and business class).

Even though the founding fathers raised serious objections to the very idea of parties — which they characterized as “factions” — the US political system culturally, and to some extent legally, codified the two-party system, making it a structural feature of all but local elections. Third parties are permitted but barely tolerated. The media systematically casts third parties and their candidates into the category of annoying eccentricities. Strom Thurmond (1948), Ross Perot (1992), Ralph Nader (2000) and a few others managed to muddy the otherwise clear waters, but each could be dismissed as an ephemeral nuisance.

Repeated cases in recent years of US presidents elected while failing to obtain a majority of the popular vote began to disturb the tranquil belief people had in the principle of majority rule. The tsunami provoked by hurricane Donald, highlighting “American carnage,” “alternate facts” and “stolen elections” has now called the logic itself into question.

The events of this election year in the US, marked by an assassination attempt and the last minute replacement of an incumbent, have provoked a further erosion of the belief in democracy. But it can’t compare, in gravity, with what is unfolding today in France.

France’s parliamentary elections two years ago failed to produce a majority for the already re-elected President Emmanuel Macron. This forced him to rely on improvised alliances within the center, the right and eventually the far-right, to pass legislation. Disappointed by the disastrous results of the European parliamentary elections in June of this year, Macron launched a desperate gambit. In the mistaken belief that he might achieve democratic clarity, he dissolved parliament, provoking new parliamentary elections. Clarity turned to obscurity and opacity.

Macron’s party in the European elections of June 9 was roundly defeated by Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally. The French parliamentary elections a month later saw a reinvigorated left, the New Popular Front (Nouveau Front Populaire or NFP), rise to the top position. In terms of “majority rule” thinking, that double whammy was the equivalent of a TKO in boxing. The problem is that there’s no referee other than the constitution to stop the combat. And only a unified Assemblée would have the power to impeach a president. The fight has been paused, but the former champion must remain in the ring for another three years! And the stunned, incapacitated fighter must keep the crowd entertained.

The constitution requires that the president must designate a new prime minister, who in turn forms a new government according to his wishes. This isn’t the first time a sitting president has been deprived of a majority. A tradition dating back to 1986 established the precedent that the party or coalition with the most seats in parliament should propose a new prime minister from its ranks. The NFP has done precisely that, very cautiously designating an economist, Lucie Castets. But Macron, aware of his constitutional rights and committed to his Jupiterian idea of leadership, has bucked the tradition and demurred.

Le Monde describes the situation in these terms: “Macron has justified his refusal to name Castets as head of government by saying it is his duty to ensure ‘institutional stability.’”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Institutional stability:

What French presidents under the 5th Republic seek and obviously fail to secure when faced with an even more fundamental reality: constitutional instability.

Contextual note

The Paris Olympic Games provided Macron with his first pretext for postponing the constitution of a new government. Now he has adapted a different tactic. Since he alone has the power to nominate a prime minister, he will “pursue his consultations” with as many irrelevant personalities as possible. He may hope that the longer it goes, the more likely people will be resigned to accepting any solution he throws at them.

This week he has been listening to a range of personalities, including former right-wing president (and convicted felon) Nicolas Sarkozy, who unsurprisingly believes the prime minister should be selected from his party, Les Républicains, a party that earned the whopping total of 39 seats, less than 7% of the 577 seats. Sarkozy argues that France is a right-wing nation, probably because he lumps the extreme right into the traditional right.

Whatever choice Macron eventually makes, there is little likelihood that it will augur anything resembling stability. Emmanuel sees himself as the sole pillar of stability. A regime built on the idea of a president standing at the center, like a king on a chessboard, surrounded by loyal bishops and knights committed to his defense, living in safety within his castle walls, may have worked for the expert wielder of power, Louis XIV, whose reign lasted 72 years. As everyone knows, it didn’t work out quite as well for his more “centrist” great-grandson, Louis XVI.

Historical note

Macron, a young, ambitious but largely unknown minister in François Hollande’s colorless administration, emerged into stardom when the ruling Socialist party began to unravel. With no true political experience and no existing party structure to work from, Macron surprised everyone in May 2017, first by coming out of nowhere to lead all other candidates in the first round of voting, and then by beating Marine Le Pen in the second round of the presidential election.

His victory clearly went to his head. But it was less his political genius than a stroke of luck that led to his 2017 success. Like Moses, he benefited from a miraculous parting of the political sea. The Socialists were in disarray after five years of Hollande’s presidency. The traditional right lost its bearings when its obvious frontrunner, François Fillon, mismanaged a scandal he was implicated in and refused to step down in favor of a ”cleaner” candidate. The only credible challenge left was the unambiguously left-wing Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whom the political class and the media treated as a dangerous firebrand. Le Pen nudged ahead of both Fillon and Mélenchon by less than 2%. Le Pen trailed Macron by only 2.6%.

In other words, from the start of his presidency, Macron had no truly constituted party and could only be deemed “the center” because he was surrounded on all sides by other political orientations. That was the precise moment he speculated about the taste he believed the French had for a Jupiterian leader.

Very quickly he was contested not by a party but by “the people,” citizens donning the iconic yellow vest the government obliged them to store in the private vehicles. That was when the Red Sea parted again for Macron thanks to a virus, Covid-19, that turned him into a “war president.”

Now he finds himself in a struggle with the entire political class and soon with the population as well. Unlike Moses, Macron never made the effort to get to the other side. The Red (and blue) Sea is closing in on him as he dawdles in the middle. Nobody is likely to be happy with the personality he selects as his prime minister, whoever she or he happens to be.

We’re in for another ride. Fortunately, France definitively banished the guillotine in 1981.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Macron’s Leisurely Fishing Trip in a Sinking Boat appeared first on Fair Observer.

The “Outside the Box” team at Fair Observer wishes to deepen our perception of a culture that is being created by people largely beyond our reach. It is a small elite now busy investing in technology and making fundamental decisions about how it will affect our lives.

We shall now begin featuring videos as well as our traditional conversations with ChatGPT. For starters, here’s a fascinating interview in August with former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt. Concerned that people found some of his statements controversial, he had the video removed from YouTube. We have to thank YouTube user and AI enthusiast Matthew Berman for retrieving the video and commenting pertinently on the most significant moments.      

After watching Schmidt’s performance, I addressed the following prompt to ChatGPT:

“Eric Schmidt made this prediction: ‘In your lifetimes the battle between US and China for knowledge supremacy is going to be the big fight.’ This tells me a lot about how Schmidt thinks not just about AI, but also the world. After all, that’s what language does: Whatever it literally communicates, it reveals something about the speaker’s view of the world. In this case there is a clear political dimension. Is that apparent to you, as an AI that speaks?”

ChatGPT offered this sympathetic analysis of Schmidt’s worldview.

“Yes, Eric Schmidt’s statement does indeed reveal much about how he perceives the world, particularly in terms of global power dynamics and the role of knowledge and technology in shaping those dynamics. Here’s a breakdown of what his statement implies:

1. **Framing Knowledge as a Battleground**

·         **Knowledge Supremacy:** Schmidt uses the metaphor of a “battle” or “fight” for “knowledge supremacy” between the U.S. and China. This language suggests that he views knowledge, particularly in fields like AI, as a strategic resource that nations compete over, similar to how they might compete over economic or military dominance.

·         **Zero-Sum Competition:** The choice of words implies a zero-sum competition, where one nation’s gain in knowledge is seen as another’s loss. This is a common perspective in geopolitical thinking, where global power is often viewed as a finite resource.

2. **US-China Rivalry**

·         **Bipolar Worldview:** By framing the issue as a contest between the U.S. and China, Schmidt reinforces the idea of a bipolar world order, where these two countries are the primary contenders for global leadership. This reflects a recognition of China’s rise as a major technological and economic power.

·         **Focus on AI and Technology:** Given Schmidt’s background in technology, particularly AI, his prediction likely reflects concerns that advancements in AI and related technologies will be a key factor in determining which country leads in this global contest. This suggests that he sees technological innovation as not just an economic asset but a crucial element of national power.

3. **Political Dimension**

·         **Implicit Nationalism:** The statement carries an implicit nationalism, as it presupposes that the U.S. and China are natural adversaries in this “battle.” This is not merely a technical or scientific competition but a political and strategic one, where the stakes are high for national sovereignty and global influence.

·         **Urgency and Lifespan:** The phrase “in your lifetimes” adds a sense of immediacy and inevitability to this conflict, suggesting that it is not a distant concern but an ongoing and intensifying struggle that will define the current and upcoming generations.

4. **Power Dynamics in Language**

·         **Influence of Language on Thought:** As an AI, I recognize that language shapes how people perceive and think about the world. Schmidt’s use of combative and strategic language suggests a worldview where global interactions are driven by competition rather than collaboration. This perspective might influence not only how individuals and institutions approach AI development but also how they perceive international relations more broadly.

In summary, Schmidt’s statement reflects a worldview where knowledge, particularly technological knowledge, is a key axis of global power, with the U.S. and China as the primary actors. The political dimension is indeed apparent, as it frames the development of AI and other advanced technologies as part of a larger geopolitical struggle, rather than as purely scientific or economic pursuits.”

It should be clear that, had I not expressed what may be called my “concern” with Schmidt’s attitude, ChatGPT would not have analyzed things in a similar way to my own. ChatGPT is perfectly capable of behaving in ways similar to participants in an “echo chamber” on social media. In this case, ChatGPT develops a line of reasoning in support of my own observations.

Following this brief exchange, I prolonged the conversation with the following prompt.

“You evoke a possible alternative to Schmidt’s competitive worldview; a collaborative approach. What would such an approach mean for the value of science, especially given the fears that exist about AI? Would the AI that emerges and eventually dominates — precisely as people like Schmidt imply — be different in a world where collaboration defines the fundamental orientation of R&D?”

Rather than duplicate ChatGPT’s very interesting response here, I’ll hold off my examination of its complete response till next week. One thing, however, appeared to me particularly significant:

“The AI that comes to dominate in a collaborative world might be more inclusive, considering diverse perspectives and needs across different cultures and societies. This contrasts with AI developed in a competitive environment, which might prioritize the values and interests of a single nation or group.”

In this age of exaggerated nationalism; when major powers seem intent on shying away from dialogue as they prefer to rely on the display of force, we desperately need a debate about how all technologies are going to be used in the coming years and decades. Why not engage ChatGPT in that same debate?

It’s particularly encouraging that we can engage in something that truly resembles a dialogue with AI. It’s something we obviously cannot do with drones, hypersonic missiles and nuclear explosives.

What is less encouraging is the asymmetry that exists between ordinary people — including deep thinkers on questions of science and geopolitics — and wealthy public personalities such as Eric Schmidt, Elon Musk and Sam Adkins. As a society, due to their wealth, we have endowed them the power to make decisions for us. They choose which technologies to invest in and how to harness those investments for personal profit. They also make decisions that aim at leveraging geopolitical influence and lead to the prosecution of wars.

Will these people be asking ChatGPT the same questions we are asking about worldviews? It seems unlikely. That is precisely why ordinary thinking people who feel even a slight concern for the way technology is likely to craft our own futures should at the very least seek to join the debate.

Here at Fair Observer, we invite you to weigh in and to do so in the framework of what we are calling our developing and evolving “Crucible of Collaboration.” We are not alone. People like Matthew Berman are producing the evidence and raising similar questions.

Unlike ChatGPT, these people don’t seek to impose their authority by giving what appear to be definitive answers to any question we throw at them. Instead, they are asking questions, reacting to the answers they have received, and pushing further, in the spirit of a modern Socrates. Ultimately, that behavioral contrast may define the difference between artificial intelligence — including superintelligence — and the  human attribute AI has been designed to imitate. Humans are curious and engaged; AI is knowledgeable and indifferent.

This brings us back to the question of the meaning of Schmidt’s notion of “knowledge supremacy.” As an intelligent human being with life experience acquired in a diversity of cultures, Schmidt’s phrase evokes in my mind a kind of instinctive, unprompted association with another notion: “white supremacy.” Is there a connection? We need to explore it. Would AI or some future superintelligence make that connection? I doubt it, because it serves no programmable purpose.

AI could, of course, be prompted to make the connection, by an inquiring human mind. I like to call this kind of mental operation, for lack of a better term, the capacity for “creative suspicion.” It’s a feature of critical thinking, and I would maintain a crucial one. It springs from feelings, not directly from knowledge. It is a natural part of our psychological makeup that some governments and institutions today are seeking to suppress, in the name of rooting out disinformation.

This conversation will continue next week.

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue.

*[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At Fair Observer, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Outside The Box: Do You Think AI’s Full of Schmidt? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Time is money, but equally money is time. Don’t believe me? Just ask Warren Buffett, a man who marvels at the miraculous nature of compound interest, representing the perfect unification of money and time. Albert Einstein called compound interest “the eighth wonder of the world” even while expressing doubts about the reality of quantum mechanics.

Because time has such a special place in US culture, it’s instructive to see how it may influence discussions both trivial and grave. Take the topic of nuclear weapons, for example. Most other cultures see the very idea of possessing a nuclear arsenal as an existential problem. Most nations question whether nuclear weapons should even be allowed to exist. Americans, in contrast — especially those who have the power to make policy — focus on the real question: how those weapons need to be managed over time.

In an article for the publication Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Jack O’Doherty, presents in some depth the current debate among Washington’s military strategists concerning nuclear policy. As you read the article, bear in mind that the nation’s citizens have not been consulted on the options outlined, nor are they likely even to be aware of them. No politicians covered by the popular media have even alluded to this question. The outcome of the debate will nevertheless affect the life of every person on Earth.

Here are two significant quotes from the article:

“The United States has begun a long overdue modernization of its nuclear arsenal, and it’s essential to understand the purpose of these acquisitions.”

 “It’s time for the American nuclear policy community to have a long-overdue conversation about what, prescriptively, US nuclear weapons are for. Deterrence, yes, but in what form?”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Long-overdue:

So urgent that a decision must be made without the time-consuming effort of analyzing all the possible and probable consequences, even if they point towards global catastrophe.

Contextual note

Most of us learned the meaning of the adjective overdue in the context of checking out books from the library, when we were learning to read. Our parents taught us to be careful about respecting dates, to avoid the dreadful consequence of a monetary fine. Later in life, many people discovered that the word could carry a slightly more serious level of urgency, when it came to paying rent to a landlord or alimony to a divorced spouse. Too much “overdueing it” could land you in court.

Using the epithet, as O’Doherty does, when discussing nuclear arsenals clearly takes us to another level. One might think that when discussing any nation’s nuclear strategy, we would be invited to entertain a full spectrum of choices, starting with total disarmament and extending across the spectrum to the idea of covering entire regions with a strike capacity designed as a nuclear noose.

O’Doherty’s article informs us that, at least in the US context, the spectrum has now been conveniently reduced to a binary choice. He presents them as practically the equivalent of a Dodge City-style “nuclear showdown.” Here is how he describes the “two schools of thought.”

“The development of nuclear weapons started an inflexible and entangled debate between what—to borrow almost anachronistic language—may be described as the “nuclear revolution” and the “nuclear superiority” schools of thought. The former insists that mutual vulnerability (from which deterrence stability is derived) has revolutionized international competition by making wars between great powers essentially impossible. The latter, meanwhile, contends that the Pentagon should embrace nuclear warfighting postures revolving around a counterforce targeting doctrine—that is, shooting first in a preemptive strike to eliminate an opponent’s nuclear weapons before they can be launched (this is defined by its proponents as the only conceivable way to win a nuclear war).”

The second “school of thought” seems to reflect the philosophy infamously deployed by George W. Bush to justify launching his invasion of Iraq in 2003. Because we didn’t know what Saddam Hussein might do with his (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction, we sure as hell had to make sure that he would never get the chance.

In that scenario, we invaded and declared “mission accomplished.” In this scenario, however, it isn’t about invading. It’s about launching a nuclear attack once we are convinced sufficient suspicions exist to make it necessary. Suspicions of the sort expressed by CIA Director George Tenet in 2002 to President Bush: “It’s a slam dunk.” Could that kind of pre-emptive reasoning and the act that followed take place again? If O’Dohery’s second “school of thought” were to win out, the answer will be presumably, yes.

Historical note

In retrospect, everyone notes that the fall of the Soviet Union marked a major turning point in history. It ushered in the unipolar world, an order that lasted for most of the next three decades, in which the US dominated the planet’s economic activity and its most significant political events. International Relations guru John Mearsheimer cites 2017 as the moment when that suddenly appearing unipolar world gave way to a new multipolar world that is still taking and changing shape as we write.

The significance of a unipolar world can be summarized in the oft-repeated idea of a “rules-based order,” understood as a set of behavioral standards defined and enforced by a unique superpower: the US. The existence of a unipolar hegemon “simplified” some of the reasoning about issues arising between nations. Everyone in the “free world” was now “free” to align with the policies of Washington, knowing that it would put them “on the right side of (unipolar) history.”

Some people developed the habit of calling this a “normative order.” The idea of normative appears to embrace several things:

• standards of behavior widely accepted and expected in the international community,
• moral guidelines that shape decisions and actions, such as the just war theory,
• international laws and treaties that formalize these norms and principles, such as the Geneva Conventions or the United Nations Charter
• and finally, cultural values.

That dog’s dinner leaves a lot to choose from, to say nothing about the fact that experts in cultural communication will tell you that identifying any set of behaviors as “normative” could only be a fool’s errand.

Even while the idea of “normative” carries a lot of positive connotations, one of the consequences many people have noticed — and which I recently discussed with former Swiss ambassador Jean-Daniel Ruch — has been the marginalization, or frankly discrediting, of the basic tool of diplomacy: dialogue. When one has a “normative order” to refer to, it makes it easy to cut short any dialogue by referring to the rules of that order. This trend has had the effect of producing a world of “forever wars” and never-to-be-realized “ceasefires.” I put this last term in quotes to highlight the degree of meaninglessness it has effectively achieved. They say time is the great healer. Dialogue is an even better one… and it saves time!

To sum up, the history of the past 35 years offered us the hope of living under a normative order that has never managed to exist. It has also supplied the explanation of why it could never exist. The answer is simple: the enforced absence of dialogue and the death of diplomacy.

In this year of multiple elections, with the most monumental one expected in November, is there any real chance of seeing a new world order built not of normativity, but of dialogue? Some of us still cling to that hope. On that note, I leave you with one remark in O’Doherty’s article concerning the “dialogue” between the two “schools of thought:”

“These competing perspectives share the halls of power but rarely talk to each other. Each accuses the other of entertaining imaginary empirical pretensions, of a lazy misreading of history, and of celebrating theories compromised by their own basic premise.”

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Debate About the Best Path to Armageddon appeared first on Fair Observer.

That was April. Last week, on August 12, in anticipation of the interview Musk had planned with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Breton posted on X an extraordinary preemptive warning against the “amplification of harmful content.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Harmful content:

Any words, expressions or ideas formulated by individuals certain persons or groups in a position of authority happen to dislike.

Contextual note

In his letter, Breton worries about the possibility of language that may have “detrimental effects on civil discourse and public security.” His definition of “harmful” applies to “content that promotes hatred, disorder, incitement to violence, or certain instances of disinformation.”

“Instances of disinformation” sums up the essence of Breton’s complaint. The idea that people may say things that are not true and that all instances of untruth should be suppressed has become a standard obsession of those who seek to wield power over the unenlightened masses.

Although he has no inkling of what would transpire in a conversation that hasn’t yet taken place, the commissioner clearly anticipates that Musk and Trump will spout the kind of odious ideas his authority has the power to punish. Like George W. Bush’s preemptive invasion of Iraq to prevent Saddam Hussein’s using the arsenal of weapons of mass destruction experts Hans Blix and Scott Ritter insisted didn’t exist, Breton prepared his own invasion of X to prevent Musk and Trump from saying things that, to his mind, might be politically incorrect.

As I pointed out in last week’s “Devil’s Dictionary,” the political class has even taken the idea of critical thinking, which implies openness to the consideration of a multiple perspectives before constructing meaning through exposure to all of them, and transformed the definition to mean the tracking and banishment of unconventional viewpoints. In other words, the idea of critical thinking is turned on its head in the service of authorized, conformist thinking.

Breton’s remarks highlight another feature of the new censorship culture that has been gaining steam since 2016, when it became the principal weapon for countering Trump’s obvious predilection for outlandish exaggerations and “alternate facts.” Censorship has become a transnational crusade across the defensive alliance of North America and Europe we call “the West.” In that sense, NATO enlargement has not just been about territorial expansion eastward to the borders of Russia but also the revival of the McCarthyist instinct that poisoned US political culture in the 1950s.

Europe managed to dodge the McCarthyist epidemic that successfully transformed the meaning of the word “communist” for Americans into the equivalent of “possessing diabolical intent.” “As the relevant content is accessible to EU users,” Breton notes, “and being amplified also in our jurisdiction, we cannot exclude potential spillovers in the EU.” He wants to protect Europeans from contamination. With the notion of “spillover,” Breton correctly highlights Europe’s current alacrity for imitating and adopting the worst political practices exported from America.

But Breton’s moment of triumph didn’t last 24 hours. On August 13, an article by The Financial Times sported the title: “Brussels slaps down Thierry Breton over ‘harmful content’ letter to Elon Musk.” Breton’s own masters judged that, with his comminatory letter, the commissioner had overreached. It was bad PR, making Europe appear to be something of a bully, a role usually exercised by Washington over Europe.

In a further irony, the FT quotes an EU official who explained that “Thierry has his own mind and way of working and thinking.” In other words, he’s a loose cannon, guilty, in his own way, of producing “harmful content” that might compromise the image of Europe as a culture committed to the respect of all citizens’ rights, including prominent US billionaires with one-syllable last names, like Musk and Trump.

Historical note

In the fourth and final book of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, a race of horses called the Houyhnhnms not only have the gift of human speech, they use it in the wisest way possible. They cannot say anything that is untrue. In their language — unlike that of Thierry Breton or numerous people in Washington, DC who have put “disinformation,” “misinformation” and “harmful content” at the top of their useful vocabulary lists — the Houyhnhnms don’t even have a word to express the notion of lying.

Breton and a new class of censors that wish to apply more and more rules concerning the way people speak in public appear to see Swift’s Houyhnhnm model as an ideal to be emulated. They are busy devising the mechanisms that will prevent anything they can qualify as potentially harmful — even before it is spoken or written — from being expressed in public. After all, there may be “spillover.”

The problem Swift noticed — and it drove his character, Lemuel Gulliver, mad — is that, as a master of the English language, he understood that nearly everything people say may be construed as not quite truthful. Even Oxford’s famous linguistic philosophers of the 20th century, who reduced philosophy itself to the question of what language is capable of expressing, concluded that there is no principle that can establish the truth of any proposition. Bertrand Russell could prove that the sentence, “the king of France is bald” is false — even though in theory it could be true — but no philosopher has found a way of proving any assertion is true.

The debate is now raging in the US about whether the freedom of expression so unambiguously affirmed in the first amendment to the US Constitution can have any meaning. A century ago, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes used the analogy of “shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater” to demonstrate that there should be limits on what one may express in public. The context of Holmes’s pronouncement was the debate on the constitutionality of the now notorious Espionage Act. Congress passed the law during World War I, when fear of German spying was a reality. Long considered irrelevant, recent presidents had invoked it repeatedly in recent years against whistleblowers and journalists, including Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.

The legal definition of disinformation is: “False information knowingly shared to cause harm.” Lawmakers have no capacity to define “harm” with precision, which means that potentially any discourse or act of expression can fall into a category of speech that must be suppressed. The campaign to brand critics of Israel’s policies and actions as antisemitic on the grounds that such criticism harms the sensibility of Zionist Jews is continuing and has proved very effective in the US and Europe.

Whatever disagreement may remain inside Europe between Thierry Breton and his boss, Ursula von der Leyen, there can be little doubt that the official assault on “harmful content” from both sides of the Atlantic will continue. A far more worrying case is that of British journalist Richard Medhurst, who was arrested by his nation’s police at Heathrow airport, detained under appalling conditions and charged under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act. His crime? Producing a style of harmful content known as factual reporting.

Future historians will face the challenge of finding an original name for an episode of history that began with Joe McCarthy, spanned a period that included President Joe Biden and, with the aid of AI, is likely to continue unimpeded into an undefined future. As the world awaits an impending civilizational showdown that will either define a new world order or culminate in a spectacular nuclear holocaust, we are all cast into the role of reluctant spectators, observing the prolonged crisis of democracy. The outcome will inevitably be scripted by a coterie of politicians skilled at protecting us from harmful content.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post How to Make Someone Who’s Harmful Content appeared first on Fair Observer.

Brexit, a carefully orchestrated psychodrama fueled by the ambition of Boris Johnson, played out during a period spanning nearly four years. The British nation could finally affirm not only that it was no longer part of Europe; it had equally lost any sense of connection with the rest of the world.

Things have taken a further dire turn over the past ten days with a spate of extremely violent xenophobic riots spread across the “scepter’d isle.” Is the world witnessing the death knell of English culture, that for centuries fed and stimulated European and even world culture? John Donne famously told us that “no man is an island,” affirming that “if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less.” Has Britain now become that clod washed away into a state of utter irrelevance?

Events of the past week demonstrate that significant numbers of English men and women are willing to organize, demonstrate, assault, burn and destroy to prove that what unites their nation and defines their identity is essentially race and a skewed notion of national origin.

Britain’s new Labour prime minister, Keir Starmer will not have it. Leading the resistance, Sir Keir believes he is intent upon building “a ‘national capability’ across police forces to tackle violent disorder.” He believes it should include technology such as facial recognition. That should make average citizens feel safer and protected. What better way to defeat xenophobia than provide new pretexts for paranoia?

Others in Starmer’s government have identified non-technological solutions to the visibly degraded situation. The Guardian notes the approach of Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, who “said she was launching a review of the curriculum in primary and secondary schools to embed critical thinking across multiple subjects and arm children against ‘putrid conspiracy theories.’”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Critical thinking:

1. The opposite of conformist thinking, an ideal around which most national educational programs and curricula are designed in the interest of making sure citizens never become too curious about how their behavior needs to be controlled.
2. The single most important life skill that has traditionally been excluded from all national educational programs and curricula that have been crafted to promote conformist thinking and, though sometimes regretted, is unlikely to reappear.

Contextual note

One is left wondering what Philipson means when she says she will “embed critical thinking across multiple subjects.” Is she intending to build critical thinking into the learning process as a fundamental feature or simply add some new techniques aimed at spotting disinformation?

This is an important distinction. Critical thinking for learning can be framed as either a discipline unto itself — with its own rules, built on the grounds of epistemological reflection and logic — or as a useful gadget for categorizing things like “putrid conspiracy theories” and rejecting them as sources of disinformation.

The Secretary’s drift tends to suggest the second solution, which bears little resemblance to authentic critical thinking. It consists of providing a system for recognizing clues that something might be disinformation because of its apparent resemblance with officially identified conspiracy theories. But such a practice is the contrary of critical thinking. It is nothing less than propaganda.

When faced with insufficient evidence needed to account for a known problem, a disciplined scientist first constructs and then tests one or more hypotheses. Some of them may seem far-fetched, but truth is sometimes far-fetched. In contrast, when your aim is to identify and reject “putrid conspiracy theories,” correct hypotheses can be dismissed before being tested. This violates the basic premise of empiricism, the basis for scientific critical thinking.

Philipson explains, “One example may include pupils analysing newspaper articles in English lessons in a way that would help differentiate fabricated stories from true reporting.” If there was a serious method to what she proposes, this would certainly represent a much desired breakthrough in any nation’s approach to education. The first problem to recognize is that, contrary to her belief in something called “true reporting,” all reporting contains some bias. Here the notion of “true reporting” can only be a chimera.

Historical note

Let’s take a case from recent history to test Philipson’s suggestion. An interesting place to begin might be a slew of stories published by The Guardian starting in 2016. All were designed, in typical conspiracy theory fashion, to make the British public believe a falsehood: that because Jeremy Corbyn had expressed criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, he should be labeled a rabid anti-Semite. The problem with determining that these were examples of false rather than true reporting is that it would require not only reading dozens of articles over a period of several years just to deal with one specific case, but studying the various objective reports on, for example, Israel’s policies that appear to be similar to apartheid. Can we expect school children at any level to engage in that kind of research and then apply their skills of critical thinking?

The other problem with that example is that it could create confusion about the meaning of “conspiracy.” The standard notion of antisemitism, citing the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” as the incriminating piece of evidence, is that anti-Semites are conspiracy theorists. But a study of The Guardian’s anti-Corbyn campaign might reveal something else: that The Guardian may have been part of a conspiracy organized by Britain’s powerful Israeli lobby so brilliantly (and controversially) exposed in a daring documentary by Al Jazeera? Making such a suggestion about The Guardian might easily get one thrown into the basket of those who fall for “putrid conspiracy theories?”

Just to be clear, The Jewish Voice for Labour actually did explore the history of that anti-Corbyn campaign. “In March 2016, the Guardian published a column by Jonathan Freedland with the title ‘Labour and the left have an antisemitism problem.’ If we could identify any single article as the starting point for the whole controversy, this was it.”

This and other articles to follow effectively led to the shaming of Jeremy Corbyn. “By the second half of 2019, bigoted views of Palestinians were so pervasive in British public discourse as to pass unnoticed.”

The self-inflicted wounds of Labour helped set the scene for the election of Boris Johnson. It was deemed a cautionary tale that established a simple principle, applicable anywhere: Criticizing Israel is a cardinal sin and a clear indicator of antisemitism. This principle is still in force for a majority of politicians of all parties. It has served to excuse what the International Court of Justice called a plausible genocide in January. Since January, the level of plausibility has significantly risen.

Britain’s Secretary of Education is right in principle, even if the practice she recommends is likely to be aberrant. Yes, it’s time to put in practice critical thinking at the core of our curricula, or simply bring it back after a long historical exile. Nurtured by Greek philosophers two and a half millennia ago, Western thinkers practiced it in various forms, from the disputio dear the scholastics in the Middle Ages and the inquiring minds of the French Enlightenment. But with the Industrial Revolution the cultivation of critical thinking was banished from our schools. The future for today’s youngsters is not open, critical dialogue. As everyone should know by now, it is about coding… or maybe trading or banking, something useful and cash positive for the practitioner. 

Look at the world of “public debate” today. What dominates in both politics and the media? Monologue. The college essay represents little more than proving one’s skill at the art of monologue. Critical thinking is born of… critical talking, or at least of active and even interactive exchange. But this is an age that conducts international relations as a zero sum game. It has abandoned diplomacy — which requires dialogue — in favor of waging war to impose “inviolable” principles. Talking itself has adopted the unique model of monologue. You’ll find it everywhere on commercial as well as social media.

Anyone interested in Plato’s monologues?

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Your Solution to Riots: Technology or Critical Thinking? appeared first on Fair Observer.

“Fears of Wider Mideast Conflict Deepen, With U.S. Seen as ‘Not in Control’”

The article’s author, London bureau chief Mark Landler, develops a quote he gleaned from a veteran of the Obama State Department. “This is going to make the region extremely nervous. It’s never good for the United States to be seen as not in control.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

In control:

1. An often fleeting and frequently unstable feeling of mastery felt by people who find themselves in situations they are familiar with which leads them to believe they understand all the parameters of the situation.
2. An increasingly unjustified feeling of mastery of other people and nations by politicians in Washington, DC, the effect of decades of blindness to cultural differences and the deceitful impression that fear of a dominant power is an indicator of admiration, respect and even love.

Contextual note

Analysts of cultural differences have often pointed out that in US political and media culture, one of the core values is control, the idea that things should never be left to unknown influences. It links with another core value: self-reliance. Most of the world’s cultures leave considerable room for chance or fatality in the way events play out. Inch’Allah is often evoked outside the Muslim world. 

In the US, citizens learn from an early age that they are on their own in their quest to control the environment and the events they may be involved in. Even if team effort is encouraged, the focus of groups is not camaraderie but to work together to ensure their collective control.

Landers’s article provides some context for the helplessness expressed in its headline. “For President Biden, who expended time and prestige trying to broker a deal between Israel and Hamas to release hostages in Gaza, the back-to-back assassinations of the Hezbollah commander, Fuad Shukr, and the Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, could signal the futility of his diplomatic efforts, at least for now.”

Without being disrespectful, I can’t fail to find this laughable for two reasons. The first is Landers’s assumption that there ever was any hope of being “in control” of a situation that has been consistently controlled by one voice alone, that of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The second is his phrase, “diplomatic efforts.” Many of us have noticed that diplomacy is now a long-forgotten art in the US. The US no longer “engages” in diplomacy. It imposes what it calls diplomacy. What that means is that it states a position, usually framing it as an inviolable principle, and then expects others to fall into line. But when someone like Netanyahu refuses to fall into line, Washington prefers looking helpless.

The fact that an NYT bureau chief can express surprise and disappointment at Biden’s loss of control is quite simply comic. I won’t even begin to cite the impressive number of perfectly sane people who refused to believe that a policy characterized by sending messages of mild disagreement to an increasingly violent and visibly unhinged regime had any chance of producing a different result. They all pointed out that a simple phone call informing his good friend Bibi that the US would be obliged to cut off support for a war that was clearly already out of anyone’s control has been possible for months, but never attempted.

A pattern emerged even in the early days of the conflict. Washington offers warnings about not going too far or not attempting particular acts, such as the bombing of Rafah. US media then proudly trumpets the warnings to show that the Biden administration was capable of taking a moral position, at least rhetorically. But when those warnings produced no result other than new atrocities, the White House and the media would express their disappointment and hope that such crimes would not be repeated. The Biden administration projected to the world the simple message that it was never in control.

Historical note

Since its founding less than 250 years ago, the new American democracy has enjoyed the privilege of sensing that it is in control of most of the things it has had to deal with. As the sole Europeans inhabiting a stretch of continent that extended westward to the Pacific, the British colonists in control of their towns, farms, plantations and waterways along the east coast of the US understood the opportunity that awaited them. It was based, paradoxically, on their belief, formally stated, that “all men are created equal,” but completed by the sentiment that some groups of those men are destined to dominate others. Before obtaining their independence, the discomfort they felt with the fact that the government in London was constraining their ambition turned out to be a major factor fueling their desire to revolt and break the bonds of dependence on Britain.

The local populations that inhabited the continent before the arrival of Europeans clearly lacked the advanced level of economic and technological culture that had already begun to define modern Europe, and England in particular. The indigenous tribes simply could not compete with the ever more resourceful Anglo-Saxons, who had mastered the science of “prosperity” through organization, industry, technology and personal ambition. The European Americans were paragons of what historian Jan de Vries called the “industrious revolution” that preceded and continued to accompany the industrial revolution that was already underway in England.

Once they had achieved independence, westward expansion began. It later took on its own separate historical status when the population viewed it as “manifest destiny.” By the middle of the 20th century, some began expressing their concern with the “closing of the frontier,” which of course provoked President John F Kennedy’s youthful administration in 1961 to evoke a “New Frontier.” The spirit of expansion with a view to control, validated by a Calvinist God who instituted manifest destiny has been a permanent feature of the US political mindset. This should help observers today to understand why the eastward expansion of NATO, though initially resisted by many European leaders and dramatically opposed by Russia, seems to everyone in Washington totally natural and probably predestined.

The Strategy Bridge, a foreign policy think tank, in a 2021 paper cited a commission of former government officials who, in 1996, “conducted a study of American vital interests” that listed five goals:

“(1) prevent, deter, and reduce the threat of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons attacks on the United States; (2) prevent the emergence of a hostile hegemon in Europe or Asia; (3) prevent the emergence of a hostile major power on U.S. borders or in control of the seas; (4) prevent the catastrophic collapse of major global systems; and (5) ensure the survival of U.S. allies.”

The breadth of those goals expressed the view of the hegemon feeling alone on the stage in what is now referred to as “the unipolar moment.” With the Soviet empire gone, Washington finally felt in total control. The ultimate promise of the culture was fulfilled. All would be well in the world. Francis Fukuyama even called it the “end of history.”  

For two decades, an attempt to control the politics and economy of the Middle East led to slowly unfolding disappointment, when US leaders failed to manage the controls. Subsequent events in eastern Europe and the Middle East are demonstrating today that, despite constant resolutions and promises to regain control of declining military and economic fortunes, the capacity of the US to influence other regions of the world in any other way than provoking conflicts that inevitably go out of control has disappeared. We see this in the erosion of the once effective arsenal of soft power that instilled a positive perception of the US and its culture across the globe. Now it becomes visible with every act that announces to the world that the combined force of Washington’s armies, spies, financial domination, technology, media and social networks cannot even “ensure the survival of U.S. allies.”

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post A Gray Lady Now Wonders, “Who’s at the Controls?” appeared first on Fair Observer.

He also reported some of what he learned from his conversations with people who attended the recent summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

“Three key topics were discussed:

–   Non-dollar finance

–   Military cooperation

–   New trade rules

Premier Modi was strategically absent.

Note: It is important to understand that the SCO is seen as a security organization, not quite like NATO yet, but its activities primarily focus on security. Initially centered on establishing border security between China and the republics of the former USSR, its scope has expanded to include trade security, economic security, cyber security, etc. The BRICS is primarily focused on trade, and the SCO – on security; there’s some overlap between the two.

Regarding the first topic – non-dollar finance – several key projects were addressed. Work involved allocating funds, personnel, and other resources to:

1. BRICS Bridge: Consensus was reached to proceed with using the ‘BRICS Bridge’ to replace the USD in all military and arms trade among member states.

The BRICS Bridge purportedly utilizes gold-based digital tokens and other derivatives as a medium for transactions involving any combination of currencies, including digital currencies, with a focus on CBDCs. Notably, pilot transactions have already begun for trading energy, commodities, and arms, mostly at the level of single-digit millions.

This system employs highly secure, permissionless, and trustless blockchain technology, likely based on Ethereum (ETH), including smart contracts and various types of mixers to obfuscate transacting entities’ identities for a fee. It’s confusing, but one interesting feature of BRICS bridge is the ability to transact via SWIFT as well. The infrastructure is reportedly developed in Solidity, with engineering conducted concurrently by multiple ‘very agile’ teams across different countries under the coordination of a ‘prominent software and hardware corporation.’

2. New Non-dollar Finance Mechanics: A significant discussion revolved around establishing a new risk-free standard to replace T-bills as a risk-free asset. This problem is seen by many as the most difficult to solve. In June, during the recent BRICS meeting of foreign ministers, several technical proposals on the topic were presented to the finance working group.

There was some informational ‘echo’ that one could observe; most notably (I’m quoting from the sources linked):

1. July 4, President of Belarus, whose country has just become a full member of the SOC, suggested stepping up practical interaction across the entire complex agenda of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. He suggested starting with finance.

‘As a priority matter, Belarus sees the creation of a mechanism for bilateral payments using national currencies and the creation of a collective financial institution of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization,’ he stated. The president noted that Shanghai Cooperation Organization countries account for a considerable share of the world’s population and the world’s GDP. ‘Only our organization includes two most powerful leaders – China and the Russian Federation. And we still have this awe for the  US dollar. Well, let’s finally take certain steps in order to reduce dependence on the dollars. And you will see how those, who wave around the dollar club, understand that things can no longer continue like that. We see all of it but we don’t take action. While people are waiting,’ the Belarusian leader noted.

2. July 3, One of Russia’s key bankers, Andrey Kostin, suggested that all cross-border transaction work be conducted in strict confidentiality:

‘I see very clearly how each of our appearances, especially with such coverage, prompts someone in the US Embassy, perhaps the Second Secretary, to sit and record everything. We’ve observed that regardless of the steps we take, their reaction is very swift,’ noted Mr. Kostin, speaking at the Financial Congress of the Bank of Russia, streamed on the bank’s YouTube channel. ‘Whenever VTB representatives discuss international settlements, a delegation promptly arrives and begins pressuring local authorities about what they shouldn’t do. How many times have I been asked, “What’s happening in China?” Our response has always been, “Everything is fine for us in China.” Then, on June 12, we faced new special sanctions against our bank in Shanghai,’ added the head of VTB.

Note that only one of the two contending presidential candidates in the US takes notice of what’s going on. Former president of the United States, Donald Trump on All In podcast:

‘We are losing a lot of countries on the dollar. I mean they’re going like flies. If we ever lose that, that’s the equivalent of losing a war. That would really make us third-world. We have lost so many countries, I looked the other day. So Russia is gone. You take a look: Ukraine doesn’t sort of exist in a sense, nobody knows what’s going on there, but when you look at China, it’s essentially gone, they’re trying to get out of it, they’re our primary competitor. Iran is not there. The other day I read that Saudi Arabia is willing to now go in various different currencies instead of the dollar. This is a tragedy, this is a big thing that is happening against our country and we cannot let that happen.’”

Some days later I shared with our group of friends a link that had come to my attention and that I thought further clarified the meaning of the BRICS initiatives. It contains the reflections of precious metal broker Andy Schectman. He offers his take on:

·         the changing status of gold,

·         mBridge, a multi-central bank digital currency (CBDC) platform and potential rival to SWIFT,

·         Digital CBDCs

·         and the imminent emergence of the “Unit,” described as the future BRICS currency.

I then made the following comment and asked three questions.

“All I know about Schectman is that he’s CEO & president of Miles Franklin Precious Metal Investments, which could explain his bias in favor of gold or his higher than normal expectations for its future role. But his explanation of the mechanics of a carefully crafted new global payments system designed to be backed by 40% gold and 60% commodities in the framework of BRICS and the BIS sounds credible.

So here are three basic questions:

• How solid is the logic concerning the repatriation of gold and what appears to be a concerted effort to craft this into an effective international system?
• How much of this is simply ‘good intentions,’ unlikely to see the light of day?
• Assuming that there will be resistance from the US side, what form might that resistance take and how effective is it likely to be?”

Alex responded quickly with his response to the first two questions.

“A lot of self-declared ‘gold’ experts just play on people’s fears only to sell them some ‘gold savings account’ or ‘gold-backed credit card,’ a scheme in which you buy gold through them, have them store it at a presumably safe (from US confiscation) location. Usually, they won’t buy any gold and just take your money until the Ponzi scheme collapses.

But let’s assume these guys have no nefarious intentions and analyze their claims.

Repatriation of gold: During the cold war, Germany, France, the Dutch and other Western nations had some of their gold stored in London and New York to prevent confiscation in case the Russians should invade Western Europe. Germany and the Netherlands repatriated a good portion of their gold held in London and New York during 2014-2016:

The NY Fed does not report who withdraws gold; we only know about it if reported by the countries holding / repatriating said gold.

The latest data point is from May 2024. The last withdrawal happened in August 2021 (4 tonnes). During 2023, a total of 130 tonnes have been added by an unknown country (could be Turkey, who we know stored gold with NY Fed before, or other US-friendly Arab or Asian countries).

From the NY Fed data we cannot substantiate the claim of countries repatriating gold ‘en masse’ (unless NY Fed makes the numbers up).

For London, the most important trading place for physical gold, the LBMA (London Bullion Market Association) publishes monthly data of precious metals ‘held in London vaults’ (which is a bit vague):

We can observe a modest decline from 9,700 tonnes in August 2021 to 8,600 tonnes in June 2024. The UK has no gold mines; hence any gold additions must be imported.

The Indian repatriation of 100 tonnes is confirmed by media reports that ‘the Reserve Bank of India held 822.10 tons of gold at March-end, of which 408.31 tons were held domestically.’

The break-down between gold held locally and abroad is now almost 50:50 (408 + 414 tonnes), meaning the ratio was previously more tilted towards gold held abroad (308 + 514).

For a gold-loving nation like India 822 tonnes is not a lot; especially per-capita. The German Bundesbank holds 3,355 tonnes or 1.27 ounces per capita compared to 0.02 ounces per capita in India (63 times less).

Now, central bank gold ownership is often dwarfed by private ownership. For example, German private individuals are estimated to hold 11,000 tonnes (4.2 ounces per capita) while Indian private ownership is estimated at 25,000-27,000 tonnes (0.58 ounces per capita).

Increased Indian household wealth is likely to increase the amount of gold held per capita. Gold demand, and therefore gold imports, is already so strong it often creates a problem for the Indian current account balance (gold imports mean dollars leaving the country). Indian governments regularly try to discourage imports by tariffs, which leads to gold smuggling.

The South-African repatriation seems to be more a case of selling the table silver for lack of other funds: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-21/south-africa-goes-for-gold-taps-reserves-to-curb-runaway-debt

Saudi Arabia (323 tonnes) and Egypt (126 tonnes) are the only countries mentioned  with noteworthy gold holdings. Nigeria (21 tonnes) and Ghana (8) have little, while Cameroon and Senegal have no reported gold holdings according to the World Gold Council. The news of Saudi gold repatriation is based on an anonymous source.

I am not denying that gold repatriation is happening; I am just not impressed with the amounts reported.

However, significant movement of gold can be observed via Switzerland, home of three of the worlds’ largest gold refineries. Over the past decade, around 15,000 tonnes of gold have been exported to predominantly Asian countries, while most of the (grade-adjusted) gold has been supplied by the UK, USA and Emirates.

Conclusion: the movement of gold from West to East is nothing new; it has been ongoing for more than a decade. Eventually, western vaults will run empty, probably caused by (or causing) a run on gold.

Yes, China is probably underreporting its gold purchases / holdings (makes sense if you want to ‘catch up’ on Western holdings without upsetting the apple cart, meaning pushing the price of gold up).

Yes, confiscating Russian assets and cutting them off the dollar market was a wake-up call for many non-US aligned countries.

Yes, central banks have been buying a lot of gold recently (see my article on Fair Observer).

But is this enough to declare the ‘end of the dollar?’ I see little alternatives available currently.

Regarding the ‘re-monetization’ of oil and gold:

• Oil is a terrible store of value, since it is a) toxic, b) has high storage costs relative to its value and c) is being consumed.
• Gold is a great store of value, but a terrible means of exchange (in its physical form). Gold may be useful in restoring confidence in a fiat currency after a collapse in trust.

Regarding BRICS currency basket with 40% gold:

Emerging countries with fast growth usually have large trade deficits, and often have little or no gold reserves. Of what value would be a basket of currencies with little or no external value or use be? Surplus countries would be interested only in the gold part, and deficit countries would quickly run out of gold to deliver.”

Edward helps us to understand that a lot of things are going on in the background. Alex sees reasons for not expecting rapid changes.

We will be exploring these two contrasting vantage points in September when we resume the weekly publication of “Money Matters.” The months between now and the end of the year promise to be very interesting from a geopolitical perspective. The BRICS summit in October, which should have the effect of modifying some of our perceptions.

Join the debate

Money Matters…, is dedicated to developing this discussion and involving all interested parties.

We invite all of you who have something to contribute to send us your reflections at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We will integrate your insights into the ongoing debate. We will publish them as articles or as part of the ongoing dialogue.

*[Fair Observer’s “Crucible of Collaboration” is meant to be a space in which multiple voices can be heard, comparing and contrasting their opinions and insights in the interest of deepening and broadening our understanding of complex topics.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post FO° Crucible: Money Matters in a Multipolar World, Part 11 appeared first on Fair Observer.

Although some, including Biden himself, deem him “a great” president, a group of historians less impressed by his achievements ranked him as the 14th best president. The man who inherited a number of often contestable policies put into practice by his three predecessors — George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump — did very little to distinguish himself as the first to do much of anything really memorable.

Biden’s three predecessors will be remembered for their distinctive roles in 21st century history. Bush was the first to invade multiple countries using the original concept of “preventive war.” Obama was the first black person to be elected president. And Trump distinguished himself by being the first “stable genius” seeking to innovate in so many interesting ways. His most spectacular contribution to US political culture was to demonstrate that one could govern by tweeting. In contrast, Biden, who had promised to become the new FDR, in the end simply prolonged existing policies, even the contestable ones, already in place.

It was therefore edifying to learn from Biden’s own testimony that he believes he’s first in one area that seems to have escaped most people’s notice. “I’m the first president this century,” Biden read from a teleprompter, “to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Report (verb):

To say something that may or may not be true, which, if the speaker happens to be a politician, is more likely to be the opposite of true.

Contextual note

Taken literally, Biden is telling the truth. He’s undoubtedly the first president to “report” that America is not at war anywhere in the world. The reasons other presidents before him didn’t do so lies in the simple fact that such a “report” would have appeared to be a bald-faced lie. A quick review of US history tells us that during the terms of every other president — with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter — the US has been involved in overseas wars. Carter was too modest to make such a boast.

Biden is thus incontestably the “first to report” such a claim. From the public’s point of view, the outrageous claims a lame duck makes no longer matter. But anyone who reads the newspapers, watches cable news or even overhears a conversation in a public bar will understand that the US is very much involved in at least two wars: in Ukraine and Israel. To Biden’s mind, proxy wars and economic warfare, sanctions — though wreaking untold damage on civilian populations — don’t count. It’s a bit like Bill Clinton when he famously said, “I didn’t have sexual relations with that woman.” He believed he was telling the truth. For him, “sexual relations” meant full genital intercourse.

Biden follows the same logic. Technically, the US is not at war with Russia since no US troops are currently fighting in Ukraine, although, as The New York Times reported in February, US intelligence operators have been totally involved in both preparing and conducting the war for the past ten years. In December 2023, Biden himself evoked the eventuality of “American troops fighting Russian troops.” And he repeatedly committed to backing the war “as long as it takes,” which he biw appears to have planned to last a decade following the ten year U.S.-Ukraine Bilateral Security Agreement signed in June.

The US is avidly providing financial, operational, logistical and diplomatic support for two governments waging war. We also know that the primary aim of the war, as revealed by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, is not to secure Ukraine’s sovereignty but to “weaken Russia.” So, yes, Biden can truthfully claim that he did not have “military relations” with Ukraine, in the Clintonian sense.

By “reporting” this reassuring news of his administration’s deep commitment to peace in the world, Biden is seeking to distract the American public from what has become obvious to all serious observers. The risk is not just war, but war with a nuclear power. In this period in which Biden reports there are “no wars,” the world has now come closer to a nuclear conflict than at any moment in the past. Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter explains why the risk is likely to materialize by 2026, as a direct result of Biden’s policies. The former marine intelligence officer claims that by removing safeguards that have been in place for decades, the Trump and Biden administrations have created “a situation that exceeds the Cuban Missile Crisis in terms of the risk of a nuclear war by an order of magnitude or more.”

Historical note

In the sentence preceding Biden’s “report” that the US was no longer at war, the president (mis)read these words from his teleprompter: “I will keep working to ensure American [sic] keeps strong.” He thus finds a way to associate appearing “strong” with staying out of war. That would mark a clear historical shift. In the years of peace following World War II, the US developed the habit of projecting its strength by engaging enthusiastically in wars intended to demonstrate its strength to the rest of the world.

This shift should remind us that in recent years the paradigm for wars conducted by nation states has evolved. Traditionally, a war was the occasion for a collective effort of a nation. Everyone remembers Rosy the Riveter in WWII. The nation needed to focus on producing the weaponry its military could successfully deploy in the theaters of war. Uncle Sam and Uncle Joseph (Stalin) needed “you” (the people), not only to fight but also to supply the military’s needs.

The paradigm began shifting with Vietnam in 1964, when the US officially entered the fray. For the first time, large swathes of the nation’s citizens refused to identify with the government’s war. Only three years earlier, President Eisenhower had warned of the risks associated with a military-industrial-Congressional complex (MIC) leading the nation towards extreme militarization and the encouragement of conflict.

The confrontation at home turned traumatic. Violating the basic principle of its mission, the CIA mounted Operation Chaos aimed at dissident Americans. In 1970, the National Guard at Penn State University murdered four student protesters. In 1974, with the war nearing its denouement, The New York Times revealed the CIA’s operation, further embarrassing President Nixon, who had expanded the war to Cambodia. But already, in 1973, Nixon had discovered the foolproof solution to dissidence: abolish the draft. He thus provided a miracle solution for the MIC’s future wars: a volunteer army of US citizens. Since then, the trend has continued, with an orientation towards mercenary armies and drone wars. Killing was still the norm but the Vietnam problem was solved. Americans must never see “our boys” (every mother’s kids) dying.

Everyone in Washington agrees, including Biden and Senators Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell (“No Americans are getting killed in Ukraine. We’re rebuilding our industrial base.”) and Roger Wicker (“The Ukrainians are willing to fight the fight for us if the West will give them the provisions. It’s a pretty good deal.”). Let Ukrainians die in place of Americans. Our Slavic friends have generously accepted to take on the role of that valuable commodity known as martyrdom. We have thus succeeded in convincing them that, despite the obvious fact that for the past ten years the US has actively provoked and even created the conditions that made the conflict inevitable, their martyrdom is the result of one thing alone: Russian aggression.

Obama prolonged Bush’s wars but got drones to do the donkey work, saving US lives. Biden did Obama one better by engaging in wars fully supported by the US, in which Ukrainians and Israelis die, which is a real pity. Russians also die, which is considered good news. And Palestinians as well, which leaves Beltway citizens largely indifferent. But Israel’s sovereignty, like Ukraine’s, trumps all other considerations.

And so Biden “reports,” we are not at war. Our boys are safe and, of course, our defense industry prospers. 

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Biden Report: No Wars To Be Seen appeared first on Fair Observer.

Already the alacrity of US presidents to impose sanctions on anyone who fails to conform with US policies has persuaded many nations to seek an escape route from the tyranny of the US dollar in global trade. Are American politicians and their media not aware of the damage US foreign policy has wrought on American soft power, which has in the past played an important role in promoting a positive image of the US?”

Your observations highlight several important and interconnected issues regarding the perception of US foreign policy and its impact on international relations and American soft power. Here’s a detailed examination of these points:

1. **Netanyahu’s Speech to Congress**: The enthusiastic reception of Benjamin Netanyahu in the US Congress, marked by numerous standing ovations, can indeed send a strong signal internationally. For many observers, particularly in regions like the Middle East and South Asia, it might reinforce the perception of the US being unconditionally supportive of Israeli policies, including those that are controversial or widely condemned, such as the treatment of Palestinians.
2. **US Wars in the Middle East**: The US interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq have left deep scars and a legacy of instability in the region. The chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 further damaged the US’s reputation, showing perceived failures in strategic planning and execution. These military actions have significantly influenced global perceptions, fostering skepticism and resentment towards American interventions.
3. **Support for Israel**: The strong and often unconditional support for Israel, particularly in the context of actions in Gaza and the West Bank, is a contentious issue. Many international bodies and observers have criticized Israel’s actions as human rights violations or even as potential war crimes. This unwavering US support can alienate other nations and peoples, contributing to a perception of bias and double standards in American foreign policy.
4. **Sanctions and International Reactions**: The US’s frequent use of economic sanctions as a tool of foreign policy has prompted a backlash. Countries targeted by these sanctions often see them as coercive and unjust, leading to efforts to create alternatives to the US-dominated financial system. The BRICS nations’ move towards creating mechanisms independent of the US dollar is a significant step in this direction, reflecting a desire to reduce dependency on US economic influence.
5. **Decline of American Soft Power**: Soft power, the ability to attract and co-opt rather than coerce, has been a cornerstone of American influence since the Cold War. Cultural appeal, democratic values, and the promise of economic opportunity have traditionally garnered international goodwill. However, recent foreign policy decisions, perceived as aggressive or unilateral, have eroded this soft power. Global opinion has been increasingly critical of US policies, from military interventions to economic sanctions and support for contentious allies.
6. **Media and Political Awareness**: Within the US, there is often a disconnect between domestic political narratives and international perceptions. American politicians and media might focus on domestic approval and political gain, sometimes at the expense of understanding or addressing the broader implications of their policies. This inward focus can lead to a lack of awareness or acknowledgment of the negative impact on global perceptions and relations.

In conclusion, the convergence of these factors indicates a significant challenge for US foreign policy. Restoring and maintaining American soft power requires a nuanced and empathetic approach, acknowledging global perspectives, and fostering international cooperation. Awareness and adjustment of strategies in response to these criticisms could help mitigate the damage and rebuild the trust and influence that the US has traditionally enjoyed.

“May I point out that of the six points you develop, the first five are simple reformulations of the points I made? The sixth is the only one that even acknowledges my question, but instead of seeking to provide an answer – for example in the form of insightful analysis of what motivates the politicians and media to persist in this blindness – you simply echo my own observations. You identify the problem as one of ‘inward focus.’ That seems obvious. My question seeks to go further, to understand what in the composition of the US political and media system and the culture contributes to preventing open discussion about this basic problem of perception. By not broaching the question, it is impossible to find answers. Worse, the degree of alienation this produces across the globe appears to be reaching a tipping point that could presage open conflict. No one – except maybe the media – have anything to gain from open conflict. And yet the conditions that may spawn it are becoming aggravated by the day, as the Netanyahu episode illustrates. So, do you have any insight into why the political institutions, including Congress, and the media resist facing a truth that can only work to the detriment of the American people?”

Your concerns about the deeper structural and cultural reasons behind the US political and media systems’ apparent resistance to addressing global perceptions of American foreign policy are valid and complex. Let’s delve into some possible factors that contribute to this issue:

1. **Political Incentives and Domestic Focus**:

• **Electoral Dynamics**: US politicians are primarily motivated by the need to secure votes and maintain political power. This often means catering to domestic audiences and interest groups that have significant influence on elections. Foreign policy decisions that might be unpopular domestically, even if they improve international relations, are often avoided.
• **Lobbying and Interest Groups**: Powerful lobbying groups, such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), exert considerable influence over US foreign policy. Their ability to mobilize political and financial support means that many politicians align with their positions, sometimes at the expense of broader international considerations.

2. **Media Ecosystem**:

• **Corporate Ownership and Profit Motives**: Major media outlets in the US are often owned by large corporations with vested interests. Sensationalism, conflict, and stories that appeal to partisan audiences drive viewership and advertising revenue. This can lead to a narrow focus on issues that resonate with domestic audiences rather than nuanced international perspectives.
• **Echo Chambers and Partisan Divides**: The rise of social media and partisan news outlets has created echo chambers where audiences are exposed primarily to information that reinforces their existing beliefs. This limits the scope for critical discussion and understanding of complex international issues.

3. **Cultural and Historical Factors**:

• **Exceptionalism**: There is a deeply ingrained belief in American exceptionalism, the idea that the US has a unique role and moral duty to lead the world. This can foster a dismissive attitude towards international criticism and a reluctance to engage with perspectives that challenge this narrative.
• **Historical Context**: The legacy of the Cold War and the subsequent unipolar moment in the 1990s reinforced a sense of American dominance. Adjusting to a multipolar world where US actions are scrutinized and challenged is a difficult transition for both political leaders and the public.

4. **Structural and Institutional Constraints**:

• **Bureaucratic Inertia**: Institutions like the Department of State and Department of Defense have established ways of operating that can be resistant to change. Policies and attitudes formed during previous administrations can persist, limiting the flexibility to adapt to new international realities.
• **Checks and Balances**: The US political system, with its multiple layers of checks and balances, can slow down policy changes. Even when there is recognition of the need for a shift in foreign policy, implementing these changes can be a protracted process.

5. **Educational and Informational Gaps**:

• **Lack of Global Awareness**: The American education system and media often do not prioritize international education or perspectives, leading to a populace that may be less informed about global issues and the impact of US foreign policy.
• **Narrative Control**: Government and media narratives can shape public understanding and discourse. When these narratives focus on national security and patriotic themes, critical discussions about foreign policy are sidelined.

Understanding these factors helps to illuminate why there is resistance to facing certain truths about US foreign policy and its global repercussions. Addressing these issues would require a concerted effort to reform political incentives, diversify media ownership and content, promote global awareness, and foster a culture of critical engagement with international perspectives. Without such changes, the conditions that exacerbate global alienation and potential conflict are likely to persist.

If I were grading a student, I’d give ChatGPT an A+ for this answer. This should demonstrate that to get anything substantial and formally reasoned from AI requires two things: precision and patience. It means asking the right questions, not once but multiple times by patiently reformulating them. We need to understand that if AI has a strategy as the participant in a dialogue, its goal isn’t accuracy. Instead, it aims at creating the impression of being well-informed.

To coax ChatGPT to the point that it can prove genuinely helpful in producing an answer to a question, the interrogator must repeat and reformulate that question, possibly multiple times. More often than not, AI will tell you what you already know, while adding a few facts and complementary arguments. Now, that might sound like a trivial outcome, but it points to a way in which AI can be a wonderfully constructive aid to education.

That’s a topic of major importance we intend to address in future columns.

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue.

*[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At Fair Observer, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Outside the Box: The Hardening Truth About Soft Power appeared first on Fair Observer.

How significant is this headline from Watcher.guru, which could look to some people like a turning point? “After Pausing BRICS, Saudi Arabia Starts Issuing US Dollar Bonds.”

The article concludes with this: “However, Saudi Arabia has not officially confirmed if it wants to join BRICS or reject the invitation. We have to wait and watch for an official statement from the Kingdom on its decision to join the alliance.”

The fundamentals don’t change, but I’m sure they don’t tell the whole story. Is it even possible even to begin speculating sanely, let alone draw conclusions about which laws produce which effects?

Still, I find nothing astonishing or revealing when I read that “these bonds are solely aimed at institutional investors. The issuance is managed by leading US banks such as Citi, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, HSBC, Morgan Stanley, and SNB Capital, among others. Therefore, Saudi Arabia is working closely with the US institutional banks for the dollar-denominated bonds.”

Does this simply reflect the current strong position of the dollar or is it a significant bet on the future?

Edward promptly offered his own strategically ambiguous take on the question of Saudi intentions by posting this photo of Dr. Ali Rashid Al Nuami, Saudi Arabia’s representative at the 10th BRICS Parliamentary Forum in St. Petersburg. He was present, but with something of a scowl on his face (at least at the moment the photo was taken).

Alex contributed a more detailed response that offered much needed clarity without resolving a question that both Saudis and Americans, as Alex explains, prefer to keep shrouded in mystery. Here, on the question of the Saudis’ use of dollars, are what Alex calls his “two cents.”

Saudi Arabia has already $279 billion in government debt outstanding.

The local currency is too small and not fungible in international markets, hence not suited for issuing debt.

Due to oil exports, a large part of revenue is in United States dollars (USD); hence, issuing debt in USD makes sense.

Issuing USD debt also serves as a “hedge” against USD debasement (devaluation). If the USD falls, USD-denominated debt also shrinks (if measured in another currency; the Saudi riyal is pegged to USD, so not much there is reprieve from falling USD if measured in riyal, but you get the idea).

A broader question: Why does Saudi Arabia have to issue debt at all? Saudi Arabia has a current account surplus of 6% of GDP and only a slight government deficit of 2% of GDP. However, this is very much dependent on oil prices. In 1987, for example, when oil prices fell to $8 a barrel, the government had a deficit of 25% of GDP. In 2008, when oil prices reached $140 a barrel, a surplus of 30% resulted. Being an established issuer of debt, with long-standing credit ratings (currently “A”), helps when one is forced to issue debt in times of budget problems.

Saudi Arabia is very aware that the “oil age” will eventually come to an end. Former oil minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani famously said, “The stone age didn’t end for lack of stones,” implying that the oil age will not end for lack of oil. Saudi Arabia is hence trying to diversify away from oil (airline, luxury accommodation, tourism etc).

Saudi Arabia has experienced rapid population growth from 4 million people in 1961 to 34 million last year. In order to prevent locals from revolting against an unelected royal family, they have to be kept happy. Additional government spending can be useful in this regard. Locals already enjoy a personal income tax rate of 0%, while corporate taxes are low, too (20%).

Government spending is also necessary for large purchases of US-made military equipment. Pre-9/11, military spending averaged around $20 billion annually. After 9/11, military spending increased to $60–$90 billion, which can be seen as “protection money” to be paid to the US in exchange for not instigating a palace coup. During his term, US President Donald Trump boasted about the amount of arms sold to Saudi Arabia.

The 2017 detention and torture of 400 of “Saudi’s most powerful people” at the Riyadh Ritz Carlton might have been a counter-coup or simply a shake-down of people who were thought to have excessively enriched themselves to the detriment of the state (estimated $28 to $107 billion were recovered).

The headline is therefore not only wrong (Saudi Arabia didn’t “start” issuing USD bonds), but also wrongly suggest the Saudis were in the BRICS camp.

Each time the Saudis mention the possibility of selling Treasury bonds, the US mentions the “Saudi passports found on the sidewalk in Manhattan” after the 9/11 attacks (in clear terms: “We will tell the American public who really was behind 9/11, instigate a palace coup and have the Yemeni Houthis lob a bunch of rockets into your refineries/oil installations).”

Journalism and the question of context

Everything Alex cites is public information. Vinod Dsouza, the journalist who produced the story for Watcher.guru, obviously had access to that information. He could have put together the data as Alex has done and provided a truly enlightening analysis that takes into account the rich complexity of the trio of actors whose complex relationships are at play: Saudi Arabia, BRICS and the US. But as often in this type of journalism, rather than seeking to stimulate the public’s reflection, Dsouza pushed a simplified message. In this case, as Alex shows, this message was simply wrong.

In fairness, however, to Dsouza, he did make this point in the article: “The move suggests that Saudi Arabia might reject the BRICS invitation as it wants the US dollar to flow into its economy.” But even in that acknowledgement of the fact that Saudi Arabia has not joined BRICS, the message that its hesitation is based on its desire to keep USD flowing “into its economy” is so simplistic as to be wrong. As Alex explains, it isn’t about what the nation “wants,” but the convenience of using the existing components of the international system as works today in the most efficient way.

Watcher.guru describes itself as “a leading source in finance, with a focus on cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Blockchain, DeFi, and more. Our goal is to build a trusted and influential media platform for a worldwide community involved in rebuilding the current financial state to a decentralized system.”

Perhaps it would be better “trusted” and more “influential” if it offered some authentic analysis, such as Alex has provided in our ongoing dialogue. Instead, Watcher.guru appears content with publishing articles highlighting random observations followed by partial and misleading conclusions. I am not suggesting that the website is spreading disinformation or even misinformation (the less intentional form of dupery). But like much of the press, its journalism appears to privilege simplistic, shocking headlines and facile conclusions over solid insight.

Again, to be fair, the website describes its philosophy thus: “Unlike other news sources, we focus on speed as a main priority. Watcher Guru is known for its speed when it comes to news, thus we publish headline-like alert reports first, as our editorial team works on an article to provide context to those who need it.”

The problem may lie in the understanding of context. Alex has provided multiple elements of context. Dsouza’s article is, at best, minimalist. I highlight this contrast to demonstrate the principle we at Fair Observer are following in our “Crucible of Collaboration.” For any serious question — and most people would acknowledge that Saudi Arabia’s geopolitical alignment is a serioius question — context is more than a few random facts and statistics. Our “crucible” is a place of exchange in which the confrontation of contrasting interpretations can lead to greater clarity.

At Fair Observer, we intend to continue developing our Crucible of Collaboration with “Money Matters…” and extend the principle to other topics in the news. We invite readers with their own insights or interrogations to join and enrich the debate. One of our aims is to help all of us to make sense of the headlines we see elsewhere!

Join the debate

“Money Matters…” is dedicated to developing this discussion and involving all interested parties.

We invite all of you who have something to contribute to send us your reflections at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We will integrate your insights into the ongoing debate. We will publish them as articles or as part of the ongoing dialogue.

*[Fair Observer’s “Crucible of Collaboration” is meant to be a space in which multiple voices can be heard, comparing and contrasting their opinions and insights in the interest of deepening and broadening our understanding of complex topics.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post FO° Crucible: Money Matters in a Multipolar World, Part 10 appeared first on Fair Observer.

Up to that point, political commentators had been wondering: “Is the melodrama we’re witnessing a comedy or a tragedy?” At times it resembled Shakespeare’s King Lear, a play in which an elderly ruler hesitates about leaving the reins of power to the next generation. But thanks to mistaken identities — Putin for Zelenskyy, “Vice President Trump” for “Kamala Harris” — and other well-delivered gaffes, it also recalled the Bard’s early play, The Comedy of Errors.

Now that the world has learned of Biden’s irrevocable decision, can we answer the question? Was it comedy or tragedy? We may only know when the final curtain falls on November 5.

On June 28, The New York Times editorial board surprised its readership and the American elite when it solemnly pronounced its negative verdict on Biden’s viability as a candidate. Though paradoxical, the new position of the editors, traditionally loyal to the Democratic establishment, made sense. They deemed the interest of the party they prefer — the Democrats — superior to the satisfaction of the ego of a president whose policies they unhesitatingly endorsed, even when it amounted to supporting a visible genocide.

Nevertheless, two weeks later on July 11, the paper’s chief White House correspondent, Peter Baker, not only entertained the idea that Biden need not obey the dictum of his newspaper but that the White House’s record-breaking senior citizen was capable of proving his capacity to lead the nation for another four years. NYT apparently needed to hedge its bets.

True to form, Baker’s article put its patented rhetorical strategy on full display as it developed its message of praise for Biden’s performance. “His voice, strong at first, grew a little weaker as he went along. But he had some forceful moments, got his points across and offered serious answers about NATO, Ukraine, Gaza, China and other major topics.”

In that pair of sentences, Baker employed four adjectives — strong, forceful, serious and major — designed to overcome one concession to Biden’s cognitive failure when he called the president’s voice at one point “weaker.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Serious answers:

The preferred description used by partisan journalists to describe the most absurdly fanciful statements made by politicians of whom they approve.

Contextual note

What criteria for seriousness could Baker possibly be using when assessing politicians’ answers? Most people take the locution “serious answer” to contain two important ideas: honesty and sticking to facts. In today’s era of fake news that comes in every flavor, most people should have reached the rational conclusion that politicians have no “serious” interest in honesty.

As someone who has worked intimately with one American politician who throughout a long career cultivated a reputation for honesty, I can affirm that the sole interest of politicians is to defend whatever narrative, true or false, favors their electoral fortunes. A politician’s stance on honesty is similar to that of a corporate CEO, whose answers to questions from outsiders will infallibly reflect the executive’s fiduciary sense of duty to shareholder interest. In politics, the party establishment is the politician’s unique shareholder.

So let’s try and test Baker’s accuracy by analyzing the putative “seriousness” of Biden’s answers on foreign policy. Here are some essential points Biden made, transcribed verbatim.

“But I’ve made it clear, a strong NATO is essential to American security. And I believe the obligation of Article 5 is sacred.”

At an earlier NATO summit in his first year in office, Biden insisted on making “clear that the US commitment to Article Five of the NATO Treaty is rock solid and unshakable. It’s a sacred commitment. NATO stands together.” He is obviously attached to the adjective “sacred.” But can “sacred” be taken seriously in this context? Politicians constantly evoke God’s blessing on America, but does that mean just anything American can be deemed sacred?

Biden’s reference here is not trivial. He speaks of respecting a treaty. Washington considers all treaties sacred, doesn’t it? Alas, contemporary historians have noticed that US presidents and their governments sometimes show a strong penchant for withdrawing from even the most solemn commitments. Just ask any indigenous American with a vague awareness of their people’s struggle to survive on the continent they formerly occupied. The most obvious and recent example of betraying a sacred commitment was Trump’s precipitous withdrawal from both the Paris climate accords and the Iran nuclear deal. Some cite Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan as another example.

Serious linguists and a lot of prominent international relations experts are likely to complain that the word “sacred” has no place in reference to military commitments or even diplomacy. It is a religious concept. A serious politician might, for example, justifiably use the adjective to describe the perception Palestinians have of Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, a religious monument that Israeli settlers stormed days before October 7, 2023. They chose to violate its perceived sacredness. But Biden doesn’t take that kind of sacredness seriously. He prefers calling sacred the nation’s commitments to wage war.

Baker doesn’t seem too concerned about linguistic rigor. After all, we can think of Biden’s use of “sacred” as metaphorical and let the hyperbole pass. But what about facts? In the following meandering paragraph, does Biden propose any discernible “facts” in his analysis of what most people take to be a very serious topic: China?

“The issue is that you have to make sure that Xi understands there is a price to pay for undercutting both the Pacific basin as well as Europe as it relates to Russia and dealing with Ukraine. And so, we, for example, if you want to invest in China, you know, you know this area really well. China, you have to have a 51% Chinese owner. You have to make sure you do [it] by their rules, and you don’t have the authority, you have to provide access for all the data and information you have.”

What sense can anyone make of this? Can a political leader “undercut” “a basin?” As for the rest of the paragraph, it hints at one recognizable aspect of reality, but it simply does not sound “serious.”

So, Biden’s out and, for the moment, Kamala’s in. The question Democrats will now have to deal with is this: Is the heiress to the throne, capable of producing word salads that offer more clarity explanation concerning investment in China? And then there’s the real question: Can those word salads translate into effective policy?

Historical note

In his press conference, Biden spoke the words NATO delegates wanted to hear. “I made it clear that I will not bow down to Putin. I will not walk away from Ukraine. I will keep NATO strong. That’s exactly what we did and exactly what we’ll continue to do.”

Whether he said this seriously or not, it poses a new problem with regard to Biden’s honesty concerning both the past and the future. Biden speaks as if his promises are “sacred.” As an early promoter of George W. Bush’s wars in the Middle East, Biden turned out to be the president who actually did “walk away” from Afghanistan. Why should anyone believe he or the next president will not walk away from Ukraine? Should they believe Biden or any Democrat concerning such a promise? Especially as Trump has intimated in no uncertain terms that he”s ready to do the opposite.

The real question facing the Democrats going forward is this: Can they collectively come up with any “serious answers” to Donald Trump, a man who, through his deep contempt for seriousness and commitment to hyperreal fantasy is clearly the competitor with the most “serious” chance of winning in November?

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post In One Week, a Hyperreal Election Cycle Became Surreal appeared first on Fair Observer.

“NATO held its 75th anniversary summit meeting this month. There appear to be at least two separate and contradictory ways to interpret the situation of this historic defensive alliance. The first reflects the official optimism and satisfaction with the ‘unity and solidarity’ of an organization that has been expanding over the past 30 years. That expansion has undergone an acceleration provoked by the conflict in Ukraine.

“The second interpretation, far less optimistic, reflects the dismal reality on the ground for the NATO-backed Ukrainian forces as well as the likelihood of other adverse events beyond the alliance’s control and influence. Among these are, notably, the increasing likelihood that a future Trump-Vance administration will augur a withdrawal of US support for actions that prolong the war. Trump may even call US commitment to the alliance into question. Other contributing factors — such as Viktor Orbán’s peace initiative, as the Hungarian president begins his six-month term as president of the European Council — call into question the unity and solidarity NATO congratulates itself on having achieved.

“Certain observers who have put forward the second interpretation are predicting the possibility of NATO disintegrating. Is there any way of calculating the odds of the following three contrasting scenarios?

1) That NATO continues on a positive curve.

2) That NATO weakens but changes direction, for example, with leadership coming not from the US but from Europe.

3) That the defeat of Ukraine or even a settlement negotiated between Ukraine and Russia makes NATO appear so anachronistic and irrelevant that it virtually disappears.”

“The future of NATO, especially in light of recent developments and differing interpretations of its current situation, can indeed be approached through various scenarios. While calculating exact probabilities for these scenarios involves a great deal of speculation and uncertainty, we can discuss the potential factors that might influence each outcome. Here are the three proposed scenarios along with an analysis of factors that could drive each one:

Scenario 1: NATO Continues on a Positive Curve

Factors Supporting This Scenario:

• Unity Against External Threats: The ongoing conflict in Ukraine has, to some extent, united NATO members in their opposition to Russian aggression, reinforcing the alliance’s purpose.
• Expansion and Modernization: The inclusion of new members (such as Sweden and Finland) and ongoing modernization of military capabilities can strengthen the alliance.
• Commitment from Major Powers: Continued support from the U.S. under current or future administrations, along with robust contributions from key European nations, can sustain and enhance NATO’s influence.

Challenges:

• Political Changes in Member States: Potential shifts in the political landscape of major NATO countries, like the U.S., could alter support dynamics.
• Economic Strain: The financial burden of military spending and support for Ukraine might become contentious among member states.

Scenario 2: NATO Weakens but Changes Direction

Factors Supporting This Scenario:

• Diminished U.S. Leadership: A significant reduction in U.S. involvement, possibly under a new administration, could prompt European nations to take on more leadership roles.
• European Autonomy: Increased military and strategic cooperation within Europe, such as through the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), could compensate for reduced U.S. involvement.
• Strategic Reorientation: NATO might pivot its focus to new areas such as cyber defense, counter-terrorism, or other emerging security threats.

Challenges:

• Coordination Issues: Divergent interests and priorities among European nations could hinder cohesive action.
• Resource Allocation: European nations might struggle to match the level of resources previously contributed by the U.S.

Scenario 3: NATO Disintegrates

Factors Supporting This Scenario:

• Peace Settlement in Ukraine: A peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia that significantly changes the regional security dynamics might reduce the perceived need for NATO.
• Internal Divisions: Significant political and policy differences among member states, especially concerning relations with Russia and defense spending, could erode the alliance.
• Nationalistic Movements: Growing nationalism and populism within member states might lead to calls for reduced international commitments and focus on domestic issues.

Challenges:

• Geopolitical Risks: The dissolution of NATO could create a security vacuum in Europe, leading to increased instability and potential aggression from adversaries.
• Economic and Security Fallout: Member states would need to address the economic and security implications of no longer having the collective defense framework that NATO provides.

Additional Scenarios to Consider:

• Hybrid Scenario: NATO could maintain its formal structure but become less cohesive and more of a forum for cooperation rather than a unified military alliance.
• Global Expansion: NATO might expand its focus beyond the North Atlantic, forming new partnerships with countries in the Indo-Pacific region to counterbalance rising powers like China.

Conclusion:

Predicting the exact future of NATO involves numerous variables, including geopolitical shifts, internal political dynamics, and unforeseen events. The outlined scenarios provide a framework for understanding potential trajectories based on current trends and influencing factors. While it is difficult to assign precise probabilities to each scenario, continuous monitoring of political, economic, and security developments will be crucial in assessing the evolving landscape.

“I thank you for your balanced assessment, which effectively summarizes the trends and the options. There is one factor we have not considered. Numerous commentators note that the image of NATO in the Global South and East has become severely degraded. Like Russia itself, many non-aligned nations like India and South Africano longer see it as a peace alliance but as an aggressive tool of US hegemony. Changing that perception would require a major effort not only of political readjustment but of soft power. Does that seem realistically possible?”

ChatGPT produced its usual lengthy response. For reasons of brevity, I reproduce here only the initial points.

“Addressing the perception of NATO in the Global South and East is indeed a significant factor that can influence the alliance’s future trajectory. Changing such deeply entrenched perceptions requires a multifaceted approach involving both political adjustments and the effective use of soft power. Here are some considerations and strategies that could be employed to achieve this:

Realistic Strategies for Changing Perceptions:

1. Diplomatic Engagement:

• Strengthen Bilateral Relations: NATO members can work to improve diplomatic ties with non-aligned nations through bilateral agreements, cultural exchanges, and mutual cooperation on issues such as climate change, economic development, and public health.
• Participate in Regional Organizations: Engage more actively with regional organizations like the African Union, ASEAN, and others to build trust and cooperation.

2. Public Diplomacy and Soft Power:

• Cultural Exchange Programs: Expand cultural exchange programs, educational scholarships, and partnerships with universities in non-aligned countries to foster better mutual understanding.
• Media Outreach: Counter negative narratives by promoting positive stories about NATO’s humanitarian efforts, disaster relief operations, and contributions to global security through international media channels.

3. Economic Partnerships:

• Development Aid: Increase development aid and economic assistance to non-aligned nations, demonstrating NATO countries’ commitment to global stability and prosperity.
• Trade Agreements: Promote fair trade agreements that benefit both NATO countries and non-aligned nations, showcasing economic cooperation rather than exploitation.”

Without reading further, I had to react to what I perceived as an unjustified assumption at the core of the chatbot’s “reasoning.”

“Allow me to note at this point that your mention of ‘bilateral relations’ sounds very ambiguous for a multinational organization with 32 member states. You seem to be treating NATO as a unified political entity. Or you may be assuming that the US will logically be piloting all the operations you recommend. That fails to appreciate the centrifugal forces that are clearly present.”

In response, ChatGPT again developed a detailed line of reasoning that began with this reflection:

“You make an important point about the complexity of bilateral relations for an organization with 32 member states, each with its own national interests and foreign policy priorities. Given these centrifugal forces within NATO, a nuanced and multi-faceted approach would indeed be necessary to change global perceptions.”

In a follow-up article, I’ll go into further detail and delve into the question of what this tells us about ChatGPT’s “mindset.” For the moment, I suggest that the major thing to notice here is the chatbot’s possible bias. Although I raised the very serious question of the world’s perception of NATO, ChatGPT seems comfortable assuming the well-established viewpoint that the US is the leader of NATO. Does it also assume that I, as the initiator of this dialogue, am also comfortable with that position? Or has its “brain” simply been programmed to share a set of values routinely transmitted by Western corporate media? This is a question that I intend to explore further in the near future.

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue.

*[Artificial Intelligence is now a feature of nearly everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At Fair Observer, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Outside the Box: ChatGPT Follows the Mainstream on NATO appeared first on Fair Observer.

On June 19, Edward Quince, playing the literary critic, offered this succinct commentary on the tone of the G7’s pronouncement to the rest of the world:

If you were Mr Xi Jinping, you probably noticed how harsh the most recent G7 communiqué language was in relation to China.

Frankly, if it weren’t for the calendar, I would think it was written by a sovereign of some colonial power trying to reign in its subjects who have gone rogue: We will take this money from you, and we will spend it this way (and listen to us, what we are doing is legal, all in accordance to “our respective legal systems”), and those guys must stop doing this, and those guys must start doing that, we will punish them this way, and we will hit those guys that way… And all of that is of course, “consistent with all applicable laws and our respective legal systems.”

Sitting in Beijing, would you conclude that you need to obey, compromise a little, compromise a lot or get ready for a long confrontation?

Intransigence and indifference to the idea of opening a dialogue with other emerging poles in a visibly changing world order have become the watchwords of the Western alliance.

Changing his focus from the G7’s bombastic expression of the required attitudes, principles and rules it associates with its vaunted “free and open rules-based international order,” Edward followed up on July 5 with a focused look at what is concretely happening with the G7’s unacknowledged rivals: BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). In its current form, and before its next wave of expansion likely to occur during its annual summit in October, BRICS already represents a GDP superior to the G7. And it is only just beginning to define the elements of its system, and notably its financial tools.

The BRICS have allegedly already advanced to practical implementation of an alternative non-dollar financial system based on gold derivatives, smart contracts, permissionless and trustless blockchains.

A few notes from my conversations with people who attended the recent summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization:

Three key topics were discussed:

·         Non-dollar finance

·         Military cooperation

·         New trade rules

Premier Modi was strategically absent.

Note: It is important to understand that the SCO is seen as a security organization, not quite like NATO yet, but its activities primarily focus on security. Initially centered on establishing border security between China and the republics of the former USSR, its scope has expanded to include trade security, economic security, cyber security, etc. The BRICS is primarily focused on trade, and the SCO on security; there’s some overlap between the two.

Regarding the first topic, ie non-dollar finance, several key projects were addressed. Work involved allocating funds, personnel, and other resources to:

1. BRICS Bridge: Consensus was reached to proceed with using the ‘BRICS Bridge’ to replace the USD in all military and arms trade among member states.

The BRICS Bridge purportedly utilizes gold-based digital tokens and other derivatives as a medium for transactions involving any combination of currencies, including digital currencies, with a focus on CBDCs. Notably, pilot transactions have already begun for trading energy, commodities and arms, mostly at the level of single-digit millions.

This system employs highly secure, permissionless, and trustless blockchain technology, likely based on Ethereum (ETH), including smart contracts and various types of mixers to obfuscate transacting entities’ identities for a fee. It’s confusing, but one interesting feature of BRICS bridge is the ability to transact via SWIFT as well. The infrastructure is reportedly developed in Solidity, with engineering conducted concurrently by multiple “very agile” teams across different countries under the coordination of a “prominent software and hardware corporation.”

2. New Non-dollar Finance Mechanics: A significant discussion revolved around establishing a new risk-free standard to replace T-bills as a risk-free asset. This problem is seen by many as the most difficult to solve. In June, during the recent BRICS foreign ministers’ meeting, several technical proposals on the topic were presented to the finance working group.

There was some informational “echo” that one could observe; most notably (I’m quoting from the sources linked):

• July 4, President of Belarus, whose country has just become a full member of the SOC, suggested stepping up practical interaction across the entire complex agenda of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. He suggested starting with finance.

“As a priority matter Belarus sees the creation of a mechanism for bilateral payments using national currencies and the creation of a collective financial institution of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization,” he stated. The president noted that Shanghai Cooperation Organization countries account for a considerable share of the world’s population and the world’s GDP. “Only our organization includes two most powerful leaders – China and the Russian Federation. And we keep trembling around U.S. dollars. Well, let’s finally take certain steps in order to reduce dependence on the dollar. And you will see how those who wave around the dollar club understand that things can no longer continue like that. We see all of it, but we don’t take action. While people are waiting,” the Belarusian leader noted.

• July 3, One of Russia’s key bankers, Andrey Kostin, suggested that all cross-border transaction work be conducted in strict confidentiality: “I see very clearly how each of our appearances, especially with such coverage, prompts someone in the US Embassy, perhaps the Second Secretary, to sit and record everything. We’ve observed that regardless of the steps we take, their reaction is very swift,” noted Mr. Kostin, speaking at the Financial Congress of the Bank of Russia, streamed on the bank’s YouTube channel. “Whenever VTB representatives discuss international settlements, a delegation promptly arrives and begins pressuring local authorities about what they shouldn’t do. How many times have I been asked, ‘What’s happening in China?’ Our response has always been, ‘Everything is fine for us in China.’ Then, on June 12, we faced new special sanctions against our bank in Shanghai,” added the head of VTB.

Note that only one of the two contending presidential candidates in the US appears to have noticed what’s going on. Former President Donald Trump had this to say on an All In podcast:

“We are losing a lot of countries on the dollar. I mean they’re going like flies. If we ever lose that, that’s the equivalent of losing a war. That would really make us third world. We have lost so many countries. I looked the other day. So, Russia is gone. You take a look: Ukraine doesn’t sort of exist in a sense. Nobody knows what’s going on there, but when you look at China, it’s essentially gone. They’re trying to get out of it, they’re our primary competitor. Iran is not there. The other day, I read where Saudi Arabia is willing to now go in various different currencies instead of the dollar. This is a tragedy. This is a big thing that is happening against our country and we cannot let that happen.”

It may be fitting that Edward ends with this quotation from Trump, who, thanks in part to a failed assassination attempt, appears to have consolidated his position against a waning incumbent President Joe Biden in the upcoming election. Biden’s silence on this question is deafening. Does he have nothing to say? He certainly cares.

Edward’s contributions leave us with the impression that, in contrast with the dynamic focus of everyone involved in BRICS, the Western bloc, especially in its incarnation as the G7, exists less an institution seeking to shape a changing world than as the remnant of a self-admiring fan club dedicated to two things:

• celebrating, for lack of a founding constitution, the historical idea of a rules-based international order,
• the pursuit of the war in Ukraine viewed as a holy Crusade that permits it to maintain its faith.

The G7 believes it has given the world its shape, and — like the God of Genesis during the seven days of creation — looked at its work and “saw that it was good.” BRICS, in contrast, is busy putting numerous elements in place with a view to designing a new shape to the world. Edward imagines President Xi’s reaction, but it is the entire world that now finds itself wondering whether the choice is “to obey, compromise a little, compromise a lot, or get ready for a long confrontation.” The rhetoric of the G7’s communiqué indicates that the West sees that confrontation as already taking place in Ukraine, mentioned 52 times in that document. BRICS, in contrast, was not mentioned once.

Join the debate

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We invite all of you who have something to contribute to send us your reflections at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We will integrate your insights into the ongoing debate. We will publish them as articles or as part of the ongoing dialogue.

*[Fair Observer’s “Crucible of Collaboration” is meant to be a space in which multiple voices can be heard, comparing and contrasting their opinions and insights in the interest of deepening and broadening our understanding of complex topics.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post FO° Crucible: Money Matters in a Multipolar World, Part 9 appeared first on Fair Observer.

More than half a century has passed since the dramatic decade between 1963 and 1973. At that time, Americans became inured to waking up in the morning to read about the latest political figure to be targeted by assassins. Two Kennedys, Lee Harvey Oswald, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Governor George Wallace, Salvador Allende — to mention only the most newsworthy cases — saw their blood spilled or their lives ended thanks to these operations. Persons and institutions carefully executed their plots, applying the quickest and most definitive solution to an annoying problem.

At the height of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, that decade saw a cultural clash. In August 1968, it reached a climax at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois. War protesters, hippies and yippies got together to stage a popular revolt against a sclerotic, bellicose political establishment. The nation was in a state of effervescence over an unjustified war taking place overseas, in Vietnam, presumably to prevent dominoes from falling.

Is America living a déjà vu moment? Next month, the Democratic National Convention will once again take place in Chicago. A president committed to supporting wars in Ukraine and Israel has refused to follow Lyndon B Johnson’s example and withdraw from seeking re-election. Another Robert F Kennedy (RFK) who doesn’t believe in dominoes is running. Assassination — which eliminated the first RFK from the race — has reappeared as a fact of political life. Some claim we are experiencing Cold War 2.0. Are we also on the brink of the kind of civil trauma that defined the US of 1968?

Following the attempt on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s life, Edward Luce of The Financial Times wrote an article titled, “America is staring into the abyss.” Luce is worried. He writes of “an already existential election” that has now become more “fraught.”

“Violence was already implicit in much of the rhetoric,” as he reminds readers of the US gun culture. “But,” he continues, “the conditions in 2024 are unique. A bullet almost killed the man who is vowing retribution if he is returned to the White House. A spirit of vengeance is haunting America.” 

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Spirit of vengeance:

A factor of motivation guiding human behavior, particularly prized in societies that promote the idea of competition over cooperation.

Contextual note

Luce expects us to feel surprised that an event such as this should reveal the existence of an “abyss” in American society. He ignores the fact that the “spirit of vengeance” has always had a privileged place in US culture. He worries about the fragility of the nation.

“It is not just Donald Trump who dodged a bullet. Half an inch to the left and the cartridge that grazed Trump’s ear would have turned him into a martyr. There is no telling what his death would have unleashed.”

We too can speculate about what would have been “unleashed.” Anti-Trumpers have consistently forecast a civil war if Trump is eliminated, whether by assassination or a defeat in November’s election. Those fears should now be allayed. The brush with martyrdom has practically guaranteed that Trump will defeat Biden in November.

Some commentators believe this new drama has deflated a hitherto growing revolt among Democrats intent on forcing Biden to withdraw his candidacy. If Tapper is to be believed, they now appear resigned to a second Trump presidency. Does Luce feel relieved now that the threat of civil war has been prevented? Or does he think the election may now become more “existential” than ever and that Trump’s “spirit of vengeance” will simply be increased?

Politicians and even The Financial Times journalists have acquired the habit of evoking unrealized and often fanciful fears to grab our attention and obtain our adhesion. Luce’s evocation of an “existential election” conveys the widespread belief that Trump, if re-elected, will conduct an assault on democratic processes and literally cancel future elections.

The same type of fearmongering about other people’s outrageously evil intentions has been used to justify Biden’s foreign policy. The oft-repeated but clearly delusional assertion that Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is the prelude to his project to reconstitute the Soviet empire has become the go-to argument trotted out to justify prolonging the martyrdom of a generation of Ukrainians. No need to develop the reasoning around the fact, so helpfully signaled by Senator Lindsey Graham, that the real reason for refusing a negotiated peace is that the US covets the “ten to twelve trillion dollars of critical mineral assets” a subdued and fully colonized Ukraine offers for exploitation by Western governments and their enterprises. Trump’s assault on democracy mirrors Putin’s conquest of Europe. With such reasoning, vengeance isn’t required. Pre-emptive opposition gets the job done.

Some commentators have made the case that in recent decades, democratic processes have already reached a terrible level of degradation or dysfunction — one that calls into serious doubt the persistence of a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” Despite the token presence of third-party candidates, voters (“the people”) have become increasingly frustrated by the binary choice they are given in presidential elections. They are limited to two highly unpopular and ostensibly incompetent or incapable candidates. They have begun to realize that those pairs of candidates have been selected by channels dominated by anonymous sources of wealth and influence, with no connection to “the people.”

That same public may also soon realize that the culture they adhere to deploys a “moral logic” based on the reflex of addressing complex problems with violence rather than dialogue and reasoning. Luce appears to deplore this instinct. He calls it “the spirit of vengeance that is haunting America,” and imagines it’s something new.

Historical note

It will take time for this recent assassination attempt’s significance to unfold within US culture. For the moment, most people believe that it comforts and consolidates the advance Trump was credited with already, especially following Biden’s disastrous debate. The larger question is the one Luce evokes. Is it a sign indicating a “spirit of vengeance” that “is haunting America?”

Luce chose the verb “haunt,” with its connotation of the supernatural and its association with forces of evil, to inspire fear. As I mentioned earlier, politicians and journalists understand that fear attracts people’s attention. In this case, a simpler interpretation of Luce’s intention would be his appeal to the widely disseminated message that Trump inspires fear, is committed to vengeance and must therefore be defeated in this “existential” election.

If there is a spirit of vengeance, as Luce claims, hasn’t it always been a feature of US culture? The trend of issuing death threats to anyone with whom one disagrees existed long before social media. War and economic sanctions, a permanent feature of US foreign policy, are fully materialized equivalents of death threats. Washington, DC puts into practice a culture fostered by Hollywood. It works on a simple premise for its screenplays: For around 90 minutes a problem emerges, gains in complexity and emotional charge before being conclusively resolved in a spray of bullets or other forms of purgative violence. The villains fall, accompanied by the tragic sacrifice of one or two innocents (played by what Hollywood terms, “character actors”).

That was the scenario that might have played out on Saturday at Trump’s rally, if a Hollywood studio had been producing it. One innocent died and others were wounded, but in this real-world case, the villain, Trump, survived. The status of the sniper, Thomas Crooks, remains a mystery. Some Biden Democrats may secretly think of him as a modern but unlucky version of the romanticized “hero” archetype: the brave soul who, understanding the drift of history, had the courage to step up and assassinate America’s Hitler, thereby ridding the world of absolute evil.

On Saturday, June 13, the US was lucky. Crooks merely grazed Trump’s ear. Perhaps the experience will make the orange dictator more humble and less malicious after his predicted return to the White House. At least the civil war Luce feared has not yet been “unleashed.”

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post What’s Amiss in the Abyss? Trump Gets an Earful! appeared first on Fair Observer.

“An Indian friend of mine is astonished to note that media coverage of Donald Trump is overwhelmingly negative and usually vituperative. Having lived through Trump’s presidency, he finds the kind of apocalyptic forecasts we are subjected to concerning a second Trump term excessive.

He makes it clear from the start that he is no fan of Trump. ‘It is a given,’ he begins, ‘that this man’s personal traits are nasty and obnoxious; even his supporters grant that! But what should concern us would be his actions as President. Because if his potential return to power is being touted as the end and ruination of America – socially, economically, financially, and internationally – wouldn’t it be good to understand what this expectation is based on …?’

I believe that the best response to his question would focus on two phenomena: a long-term trend in US politics that consists of reducing everything to a game of personality rather than examining political strategy and historical context. It’s easier to brand someone as virtuous or evil and dismiss all other considerations. But there is also the predilection of the media for stories that provoke alarm or inspire fear. What would be a reasonable way to explain this to an Indian in India who has no direct exposure to today’s US political and media culture?”

ChatGPT offered this informed response.

“To explain the intense media coverage of Donald Trump and the apocalyptic forecasts regarding his potential return to power to an Indian friend, we can break it down into two broad phenomena: 

1. **Personality Politics in the US**:

• **Historical Context**: Over the past few decades, US politics has increasingly focused on the personalities of political figures rather than their policies or the broader political strategies they employ. This trend has been exacerbated by the rise of social media and the 24-hour news cycle, which thrive on sensationalism and personal drama.
• **Simplification of Complex Issues**: Simplifying political discourse to focus on the personal traits of leaders makes it easier for the public to engage with complex issues. It’s much simpler to categorize someone as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ than to delve into the nuances of their policies, the intricacies of governance, or the long-term impacts of their actions.
• **Polarization**: The US has become highly polarized politically, with each side viewing the other not just as opponents but as existential threats. This polarization is often driven by highlighting the most extreme and negative aspects of the opposing side’s leaders.

2. **Media Sensationalism and Fear**:

• **Media Landscape**: The media in the US operates on a commercial basis, where success is measured by viewership and engagement. Stories that are alarming or provoke fear are more likely to grab attention and keep audiences hooked, leading to higher ratings and more advertising revenue.
• **Echo Chambers**: People often consume news from sources that align with their preexisting beliefs, creating echo chambers where they are repeatedly exposed to extreme viewpoints. This reinforces negative perceptions and heightens the sense of urgency and danger.
• **Narrative of Crisis**: Apocalyptic forecasts about Trump’s potential return fit into a larger narrative of crisis that the media perpetuates. This narrative keeps audiences engaged by presenting political developments as high-stakes battles between good and evil, survival and ruin.

ChatGPT’s answer continued with some specific illustrations of “Personality Politics” and “Media Sensationalism” before concluding with this observation:

“By focusing on these phenomena, we can explain why the media coverage of Trump is overwhelmingly negative and often apocalyptic, despite the complex reality of his presidency. It’s a combination of the simplification of political discourse into personality-driven narratives and the media’s focus on fear and sensationalism to capture and maintain audience attention.”

I was hoping it might dig deeper. This answer did little more than explain in detail my own remarks, developing standard observations about polarization and echo chambers. This led me to wonder whether ChatGPT doesn’t systematically agree with the questioner’s thesis as a form of flattery. I tried to find out by changing my tactic and affirming the very position my friend so vehemently criticized.

“That seems to me a good analysis. But when Trump says he’ll be a dictator on his first day in office and when he vows revenge on those who have harassed him, don’t his critics have a point? Shouldn’t we fear the worst? He did some crazy things in his first term, such as withdrawing from the Paris accords and the Iran deal. So, isn’t it reasonable to think that, if elected, he’ll double down and seek to destroy his enemies and then actually become a dictator by canceling elections?”

ChatGPT gave this response:

“Your friend raises a valid concern. When analyzing Trump’s statements and actions, it’s essential to consider both his rhetoric and his policy decisions to understand the basis of the fears regarding his potential re-election. Here’s a more nuanced explanation:

Trump’s Rhetoric and Actions:

2. **Authoritarian Rhetoric**:

• **Dictatorial Statements**: Trump has made statements suggesting he would like to exercise authoritarian control, such as saying he’ll be a dictator on his first day back in office or seeking revenge on those who opposed him. These comments can be alarming because they suggest a willingness to undermine democratic norms and institutions.
• **Implications of Revenge**: Vowing revenge on political opponents raises concerns about the potential for abuse of power. Such actions could involve using government resources and authority to target and punish individuals or groups based on political motivations, which is antithetical to democratic principles.

2. **Policy Actions During His First Term**:

• **Paris Agreement and Iran Deal**: Withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and the Iran Nuclear Deal were significant moves that upended established international agreements. Critics argue these actions isolated the US diplomatically and could lead to long-term negative consequences for global cooperation on issues like climate change and nuclear proliferation.
• **Undermining Institutions**: Actions such as pressuring the Justice Department, challenging the independence of the judiciary, and disputing the results of the 2020 election are seen by many as attempts to undermine key democratic institutions and processes.

Reasons for Concern:

1. **Potential for Escalation**: Given Trump’s past actions and statements, critics worry that his second term could involve more extreme measures. If he were to feel unrestrained by the need for re-election, he might push further against institutional checks and balances.
2. **Impact on Democracy**: There is a fear that undermining democratic institutions, coupled with attempts to consolidate power, could lead to a significant erosion of democratic norms. This could manifest in efforts to limit voting rights, manipulate electoral processes, or disregard the rule of law.
3. **Historical Precedents**: Historically, leaders who have made similar authoritarian promises and taken steps to concentrate power have sometimes succeeded in eroding or dismantling democratic systems. This historical context heightens concerns about what a second Trump term might entail.

Balancing the Analysis:

While it’s important to recognize the genuine concerns about Trump’s rhetoric and potential actions, it’s also essential to consider the broader political and institutional context:

1. **Checks and Balances**: The US political system has robust checks and balances, including the judiciary, Congress, and state governments, which can limit a president’s ability to unilaterally implement extreme measures.
2. **Public and Institutional Resistance**: Trump faced significant opposition from within government institutions, civil society, and the public during his first term. This resistance would likely continue and could act as a counterbalance to any authoritarian tendencies.
3. **Media and Public Scrutiny**: Intense media scrutiny and public engagement can help hold leaders accountable. The high level of public awareness and activism can act as a deterrent against undemocratic actions.

Conclusion:

Trump’s rhetoric and some of his actions provide a basis for concerns about authoritarianism and the erosion of democratic norms. However, the US political system’s inherent checks and balances, along with strong institutional and public resistance, can serve as significant counterweights. Understanding this dynamic is crucial for a balanced perspective on the potential implications of a second Trump term.”

At the beginning of this response, ChatGPT showed what might be called Biden-esque confusion when it mischaracterized my friend’s “valid concern.” His focus was on the media’s behavior rather than Trump’s. Unlike incumbent US President Joe Biden, ChatGPT does not have the excuse of being 81 years old!

For the rest, as I predicted, the chatbot’s tactic once again is to broadly agree with the premise but then hedge its bets by offering a conclusion that encourages a “balanced perspective.” 

Without seeking to analyze the pathology, which has begun to resemble a cancer, ChatGPT prefers to reassure the questioner by invoking “the US political system’s inherent checks and balances.” It fails to engage in the terms of the debate about the media’s strategies and behaviors. It offers no original insight. It doesn’t even appear to understand the nature of the question my friend raised. 

That’s probably because, quite simply, it doesn’t understand.

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue.

*[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At Fair Observer, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Outside the Box: Gog, Magog, Trump and the Media appeared first on Fair Observer.

Europe is in an even more dramatic bind than the US. The ambiguity surrounding Biden himself means that the likelihood of a new Trump White House has never been greater, despite Trump being a convicted felon thanks to the judgment of a criminal court that same June. Europeans are dreading the unpredictable consequences of a new Trump administration.

Even without that factor of ambiguity, Europe is immersed in its own problems. The major event of the month was the initiation of what may turn into a new French Revolution. Reacting to the disastrous showing of his coalition in the European parliamentary elections on June 9, President Emmanuel Macron, as soon as the results were announced, precipitously hatched his daring, potentially suicidal gambit. He called for new elections to “clarify” the balance of political forces in France. Already struggling to deal with the expense, uncertainty and disappointing evolution of NATO’s tragic war in Ukraine, Europe was thrown into a state of suspended animation as it awaited the outcomes of the British and French elections. Those took place in the first week of July.

On June 13, four days after Macron’s act of folly, Alex Gloy offered this “quick observation” based on the state of the global bond markets. He sees the unmistakable seeds of a European banking crisis.

“These are current 10-year government bond yields (except TYX, which is the US 30-yr). The focus here is on the difference, or spread, in yield between Germany and France. A week ago, that spread was 0.50%. It is rapidly widening, now at 0.71%. This is worrying. Why? You can purchase government bonds in the same currency but get different yields. This does not make sense unless there is a difference in default probability and / or exit from the Euro. Both of which would be catastrophic events for Europe.

Germany has fiscal deficit of 2.5% of GDP, while France is running at 5.5%. Germany has a debt-to-GDP ratio of 63.6%, while France stands at 111%.

Financial markets hate uncertainty, and the outcome of French elections is unknown, with the risk being a populist right-wing government ignoring the fiscal constraints of the Treaty of Maastricht (max 3% deficit, max 60% debt-to-GDP, both which are already being ignored).

France’s fiscal position is now worse than Spain (3.6% deficit, 108% debt-to-GDP). France should tighten its belt, but that would probably cause more social unrest.

The spread-widening in the government bond market has led to pressure on European bank stocks; BNP fell from EUR 72 to 60 and Deutsche Bank from 16.70 to 14.60. Banks usually have positions in government bonds. Another banking crisis is the last thing Europe needs now.

Still, it is worth mentioning that all Euro-members, including Greece, are currently paying less than the UK or the US.”

Related Reading

Money Matters: Revealing Who Is Holding Billions of US Banknotes

Our colleague Edward Quince offered his own reflections, provoked by another destabilizing event in the month of June: the presence of a Russian nuclear submarine off the coast of the US.

“Alex,

Mr. Putin ain’t dumb. The alarming part of his seemingly nonsensical attitude toward the USD is his informed confidence about what is to come next. Note that he almost always refers to the USD in the past tense. I’ll detail the not-so-secret weapon he has up his sleeve after I finish documenting the events surrounding the Russian nuclear submarine docking in Havana, Cuba today. The short answer, however, is ‘BRICS Bridge, blockchain, and gold derivatives.’

When I researched the work done by Russia and China since 2008 to establish a new, more equitable, and less risky finance and trade environment, BRICS emerged as the ultimate cooperation framework and platform. After having read a ton, it is apparent that a tremendous amount of very focused and deliberate work has been done since then. This 2015 Ufa Declaration describes the goals, the underlying strategy and some tactics behind the major finance and trade initiatives. The key framework there is the Contingent Reserves Arrangement. Nine years and several global crises later, Mr. Putin has told us just a tiny bit about what has been built on that foundation.

On a separate note, I’ve just finished re-reading Henry Kissinger’s ‘On China.’ The intricate political play that Kissinger orchestrated in the 70s and the 80s now looks like an elaborate short-term trap for China in the American long-term game against Russia. I can only imagine the depth of resentment and distrust towards the US in Beijing these days. Alternatively, it is possible that there has never been any such trust, and China played the long game knowing that one day the USA would inevitably turn adversarial once again. Nevertheless, since there is nobody resembling Mr. Kissinger in Washington now, there seems to be no going back to the status quo to which we all grew so accustomed.”

With the drama continuing to develop, on June 29, I offered my own testimony. I am a voter in the coming French election, and potentially the US election in November.

“As a dual citizen of two nations, each with a president clearly demonstrating suicidal behavior, I have to wonder about the continued political coherence and even institutional solidity of both. Tomorrow I will be voting in an election that in all probability will establish the contour of what promises to be twelve months of political and I expect even deeper cultural chaos. On July 8 France will most likely have a ‘hung by the rafters’ parliament and a situation of maneuvering that will take place as much on the streets as in the Assemblée Nationale.

The point of a presidential as opposed to a parliamentary regime is that at the core of government there is a human being who symbolizes the unity of the nation. Political wrangling is a permanent feature of all democracies, but there is always some kind of symbol that makes even the worst confrontations palatable. In the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium and even Spain, the monarchy plays its role in stabilizing the question of national identity. In presidential regimes, it can only be the president and the flag.

On Sunday, June 9, Emmanuel Macron miscalculated when, by announcing the dissolution the Assemblée, he effectively declared two things: 

• That any pretense of political unity for the nation was compromised beyond negotiable repair;
• That the president, as a lame duck because of serving his second term, had now become a non-entity, deprived of the quasi-absolute power De Gaulle had defined for the office.

Macron hoped to address the first point but he was in denial about the reality of the second one, despite its being obvious to everyone else, including his own inner circle.

For three quarters of a century Europe has developed as a zone of relative peace and prosperity in the shadow of the US nuclear umbrella and the US dollar, despite the launch of the Euro. In the context of the war in Ukraine, it has now implicitly embraced the growth of what Dwight Eisenhower – alone among all modern presidents – had the temerity to name: the military-industrial complex. 

Europeans have long worried about the role of what President Giscard d’Estaing called the “exorbitant privilege” but accepted the floating dollar as a feature of the new world order. De Gaulle led the campaign against the dollar that eventually led to Nixon’s decoupling of the dollar and gold, creating a new global landscape supported by the petrodollar and the Eurodollar. De Gaulle also dared to counter the US by withdrawing from NATO’s central command structure, with the futile aim of achieving military autonomy.

Europe is still struggling mightily with these two issues. It will be interesting to see how this year’s elections influence those developments.”

Previous episodes of Money Matters are available here:

Join the debate

Money Matters…, is dedicated to developing this discussion and involving all interested parties.

We invite all of you who have something to contribute to send us your reflections at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We will integrate your insights into the ongoing debate. We will publish them as articles or as part of the ongoing dialogue.

*[Fair Observer’s “Crucible of Collaboration” is meant to be a space in which multiple voices can be heard, comparing and contrasting their opinions and insights in the interest of deepening and broadening our understanding of complex topics.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post FO° Crucible: Money Matters in a Multipolar World, Part 8 appeared first on Fair Observer.