"An honest propagandist for any Cause, that is, one who honestly studies and figures out the most effective way of putting over his Message, will learn fairly early that it is not fair to ordinary folks--it just confuses them--to try to make them swallow all the true facts that would be suitable to a higher class of people. And one seemingly small but almighty important point he learns, if he does much speechifying, is that you can win over folks to your point of view much better in the evening, when they are tired out from work and not so likely to resist you, than at any other time of day."
Sinclair Lewis - It Can't Happen Here (note, that's his villain speaking)
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Hmm, where shall we start tonight's peripatetic prose on conning? Maybe with the prosaic conman-in-chief? Various Democrat-aligned American comedians have been pulling material in spades from Trump's decline into senility, but as usual, chasing momentary profit masks the more salient, wider point. This is not a 2026 issue. He was a laughing stock even in the '90s. Old or young, Donnie is, was, has always been an incoherent babbling buffoon. Even while he retained "the gift of gab" said gab contained zero substance. At his utmost cogent, he might verbalize a platitude or truism. In any decade, any rational mind listening to a couple of sentences of his verbal diarrhea could spot in him an overeducated moron, a spoiled rich brat never called out on his mistakes, a transparently obfuscating blowhard with a third-grade vocabulary and a three-year-old's grasp of causality. No animal which communicates in that chimpanzee swagger will ever be anything more than a troglodyte. But for that to matter you'd need a public capable of distinguishing the loftiest prose from chimp grunts, and it's not as though Obama's vapid "hope and change" mantra held more meaning than "make rabblerousing great again."
On a completely unrelated topic, it was trendy from the late '90s to the mid 2010s to proclaim that women speak twice or three times more than men, with a knowing wink intimating this merely confirms the mental inferiority of men as dumb animals incapable of verbalizing* and presumably communicating in nothing but primitive grunts like Tim the Tool Man. Studies both back then and last year have tended to deflate that otherwise unproven assumption, with, yes, okay, women speaking consistently more, but not by much. Ten percent? Twenty at most? So now if you look up the issue you run across feminist complaints that the trope of women verbalizing more was nothing but patriarchal propaganda to put down women as chatty... even though it was the feminists and daytime talk shows of 20y.a. who popularized it as superior communication. Their revisionism is likely prompted by another realization from the intervening years which appears to have been expunged from search engines in the interest of women's dignity: that their excess speech was not, in fact, communicating anything. It comes from an increase in mundane chatter, the hi-how-are-you-hi-I-am-fine-how-are-you-also-fine-great-bye-bye droning background radiation of social life. Women just feel a need to "touch base" more. Give a guy <A TOPIC> and he'll talk your ear off too.** But for a couple of decades nobody thought to question whether the speech in question was meaningful or not. Meaning is extraneous.
So. This is a post about chatbots.
I'm seeing more and more exasperated nerds and nerdettes trying to point out that even if a bot can instantly write you a ten-page commentary on any topic, that in no way implies it's logically constructing a coherent analysis. Well, sure, thinks I, what else is new? LLMs are cut-and-paste machines, working at stunningly finer pixel-scale grain than any such effort in history, but by necessity still just outputting a probabilistic extension of a sequence reiterated in billions of extant examples. Ask a bot's opinion on a movie and it will output strings of "cinematography" and "scintillating" and "emotive" and anything else you're accustomed to hear out of a critic's mouth, precisely because you, the asker, are accustomed to hearing them. Ask it to make a movie and it will paste predicted figures onto a standardized backdrop and animate them in accordance with the maximum likelihood of such arrangements. At no point is actual creation involved. At no point does the output reflect reality any more faithfully than the topic's match to existing content. The more a culture interacts via such automated output, the more it will, by necessity, both contract toward the lowest-common-denominator and lose its grounding.
But if you take issue with this, be intellectually honest enough to admit the problem is not the supply. It's the demand. The "reality" TV-watching public is too stupid to detect the gradual degradation of communication and cultural capital.
Not uneducated.
Not constrained.
Not victims of circumstance.
Stupid.
Humanity appears to have achieved Orwell's versificator, a useful tool for placating the proles, the subhuman cattle comprising the overwhelming bulk of the species. Gabbing. Limitless, prompt and bountiful gabbing. Is that a bad thing? Yes, but not for any of the humanitarian reasons you'd like to boast as moral high ground. The people don't want your help. They want the platitudes. They'll never know the difference. They will likely live happier lives for it. So why is the versificator bad? And it is. Disastrous.
But admit to yourself where exactly your anger should be directed.
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* Seriously though, 1800 pages, do I look like I have trouble verbalizing my thoughts?
** I'm pretty sure that if you look closer at men's speech, you'll find the prosocial platitudes replaced with slogans, chants and catchphrases. Sorry, bros, but "wazzaaaaaap" is still very much not a word. All of this is, by-the-by, not getting into the issue of gossip, of the invasive personal/interpersonal nature of women's chatter, which I'm guessing is where the difference and the mis-perception of talking "more" actually lies.
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