The previous essay, “ID’ing A Trumper” needed this additional character stereotype. The headline below his picture was:
Princeton, MN (KROC-AM News) - Five Minnesota law officers are recovering today from gunshot wounds suffered in an apparent exchange of gunfire with a 64-year-old man at a rural residence in central Minnesota this morning.
You know this doofus is a Trumper.
Or all of these guys:
After 7 years of this nonsense, Trumpers have become a “group” of their own. Like Republicans, they are a minority but also like Republicans they are grossly and powerfully overrepresented in society. As Wikipedia notes, “The label Trumpism has been applied to national-conservative and national-populist movements in other democracies, and many politicians outside of the United States have been labeled as staunch allies of Trump or Trumpism, or even as their country's equivalent to Trump, by various news agencies; among them are Jair Bolsonaro, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán, Jacob Zuma, Shinzo Abe, Javier Milei, and Yoon Suk-yeol.” So, Trump’s brand of racist fascism has spread (or was already there and Trump allowed them to crawl out of their rat holes) to assholes around the world. Trumpism has become sort of a culture with some pretty obvious trademarks. As one source explained, “MAGA idealism which includes white supremacy, xenophobia, control over women’s bodies, capitalistic values and a lack of morality.”
Characters like this guy don’t need the hat or the disrespectful shirt to be identified. You know by the expression on his face and the rest of his body language that he is uneducated, entitled, racist, ignorant, and proud of all of that. Likewise, this bunch of shouting, inbred, arrogant fools are easily identified as Trumpers. 
If they weren’t Trumpers they’d be Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Hell’s Angels or Outlaw biker gangbangers, Blood & Honour America Division neofascists, Aryan Nation skinheads, Jewish Defense League terrorists, and nothing keeps these characters from belonging to all of the above clans of nutjobs and the many more “organizations” where white people join in mutual hatred of anyone who isn’t “like us.” The fact that there are so many young Trumpers proves that Kornbluth was on the money with “The Marching Morons” and the saying “stupidity kills, just not fast enough” is sadly true.
However, my inspiration for this essay came at my local YMCA. An old white guy (surprise!) is often wrapping up whatever routine he has when I arrive at the gym. He shaves at the Y and while there is nothing special about his face it takes him about 10 minutes to get the job done. All the while, he has the water running full force as he scrapes the dead skin and scraggly hair from his face. That kind of arrogant, entitled, wasteful, anti-environmental attitude just screams “Trumper!” and it got me thinking about the other identifying behaviors of Trumpers.
Arrogance and entitlement are the primary hallmarks. Mostly, we’re talking about middle-aged to old white people, sadly not just men. Even more sadly, not just old men. When you see some one blasting down the freeway at 20+mph over the speed limit, weaving between cars like a video game, you likely automatically think “asshole” and “Trumper.” When someone tries to push their grocery cart in front of a long line of socially distanced shoppers, you know this is another Trumper. When someone is yelling at a cashier for some imagined slight or, back in the masking days of COVID, for asking the customer to either back off or wear the required mask, we think “Trumper.” An illegally loud vehicle--motorcycle, pickup, car, or semi--90% certainly a Trumper. Obviously, swastika or Confederate flag tats and patches and hats are Trumper ID marks. When someone takes an assault rifle into a business, school, church, or concert crowd and kills the usual mass murder quantity of innocent people, you think “Trumper.” When someone is commenting on science, technology, medicine, religion (especially Christianity), or economics and it is beyond obvious that they know nothing about that subject, you should probably think “Trumper” and 99% of the time you’ll be right.
You can always find an exception and, especially in this case, “the exception proves the rule.” You will be wrong in assuming any form of assholery to be Trumpism so rarely it will be of no consequence. That is one hell of a hallmark for a political/social movement: always wrong, never learns from mistakes, and so deep into the wingnut echo chamber that no new information ever seeps in.
This month’s (September 2023) Wired Magazine is sub-titled “Dear AI Overlord’s, Don’t Fuck This Up.” Obviously, the bulk of the magazine is devoted to opinions of how bad or good Artificial Intelligence is going to be for near and long-term humanity. Mostly, as usual, the Wired opinions are from liberal arts majors who have no idea what they are talking about as far as AI’s technology.
In the month’s “Dear Cloud Support” essay, the opening question is “’I failed two captcha tests this week. Am I still human Bot or not?’” The second I read that statement I realized the question missed the real problem. It is not a yes-no problem, it is a 1-out-of-three problem, at the least. It isn’t just AIBots who are the threat, it is equally or more stupid humans (Low Intelligence) and badly designed AI systems that are the threat. The battle for survival is between the LI&AIBots vs High Intelligence (HI). In the short term, the stupid people will cause the most harm. Long term? Who knows?
There are a couple of articles that delude to the idea that engineers and computer programmers aren’t up to the job of keeping AI reasonably moral. They, clearly a pack of liberal arts dweebs, imagine that, finally, the world will need the kinds of “skills” that a liberal arts degree supposedly promotes. No evidence of that appears to exist in the modern world and lots of contradicting data would argue to the contrary. For example, Steve Jobs, a liberal arts scumbag who learned from his philosophy classes which kinds of decisions are moral and which are not. So, he focused his life on always picking the amoral “what will profit Steve the most” options. There is no shortage of executives, politicians, and entertainers who disprove the idea that anything about a liberal arts education creates any sort of “better” citizen.
Not that a STEM education produces any sort of predictable outcome, either. The amoral academic environment is probably the culprit. Between the cut-throat publish-or-perish competition, the corporate shills who crank out drugs, processes, and products for companies at the expense of the taxpayers who support marginal “education” facilities, and the low bar academia sets for educator standards and skills it doesn’t matter much what a kid majors in, exposure to this environment is probably doing to do at least as much damage as it provides useful education.
As Law 2 in the “Five Laws of Stupidity” clearly explains, “The probability that a person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.” And that includes education credentials or professional standing and accomplishment. Law 1 states “Everyone always and inevitably underestimates the number of stupid people in circulation” and Law 4 explains “Non-stupid people always underestimate the destructive power of stupid individuals.” At the least, 50% of every population is “below average” and that is assuming the distribution is “normal,” not heavily skewed-right with a really long tail as I suspect. The existence, abundance, and persistence of the Trump Cult is serious evidence that, at least in the USA, some serious down-breeding is causing our average IQ to drop dramatically. So, assuming that “average IQ of 100” might be optimistic.
If I had to put my fate in the hands of an AI system that was Open Sourced and monitored by the smartest people in the world or the random-number-generator that is, optimistically, what the Low Intelligence crowd represents at best, I’ll take AIBots and HI over anything the LI crowd can produce.
