Falsehoods about Biden no accident
CHAUTAUQUA–Artificial intelligence, or AI, provides both benefits and challenges.
To see challenges, first try checking results you get from a search engine.
Then try something harder. If, for example, you know a foreign language well, proofread what an electronic translator does.
Speaking about AI on July 1 to Advocates for Balance at Chautauqua, John Abbott, a longtime employee of International Business Machines, or IBM, asked a form of AI a question about government.
Guess what? The answer was full of bias.
It was as good as the information that the form of AI had or could get.
To borrow a phrase to which we’ll return below: “Garbage in, garbage out.”
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With that in mind, let’s pick up where we left off last week, with the reaction of some Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. supporters to his performance in the June 27 debate with fellow 2024 presidential candidate Donald John Trump.
You, faithful reader of this column, may recall the point respectfully made here in October 2020–as Biden and Trump were squaring off in a presidential campaign–that Biden “is no longer consistently firing on all cognitive cylinders.”
In that sense, nothing has changed, which isn’t surprising. Those who have seen others endure this know the general trajectory is almost always regression, not progression. It’s true that one can–and usually does–go up and down along the trajectory. Yet that isn’t the impression many create when they say that on June 27, Biden had an “off night.” Instead, they appear to be denying–or at least not acknowledging–his general trajectory. That, shall we say, isn’t persuasive.
Besides, as this column asserted in October 2020, “You can bet the ranch that if this were happening to any Republican presidential candidate, Democrats’ national-press cheerleaders–meaning much of the establishment press–would tirelessly pursue this issue.”
Was it (fill in the blank) of Biden’s campaign team to think it could hide this from many Americans in 2020? Sure.
Was it (fill in the blank) of Biden’s campaign and government teams to think they could hide this from many Americans since 2020? Sure.
Then again, why shouldn’t such team members be (fill in the blank)? They pulled it off from the beginning of the 2020 campaign until June 27, 2024.
During that time, willing accomplices in the establishment press largely refrained from telling the truth about Biden’s not firing on all cognitive cylinders.
As Biden sequestered himself at Camp David for about a week of debate preparation before June 27, his teams were secure in the knowledge that such accomplices share the goal of defeating Trump.
What could go wrong? They didn’t need Biden to have, on June 27, lofty oratorical skills. They needed only a passable performance.
Which they didn’t get. Having seen Biden’s performance, many Americans who since the beginning of the 2020 campaign had received their news largely from the Biden teams and such accomplices were stunned to see what other Americans had known all along.
It’s no surprise that those who didn’t know the facts hadn’t reached the right conclusions. “Garbage in, garbage out.”
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With many Americans newly enlightened, many such accomplices know their falsehoods about Biden will–or at least should–no longer fly with those who have fallen for them since the beginning of the 2020 campaign. Now many such accomplices have turned on Biden. Why? It’s not hard to surmise that their primary goal isn’t for Biden to win but for Trump to lose. They fear Biden won’t beat Trump.
Meanwhile, the most stunning aspect of this whole sorry episode isn’t that such teams and such accomplices told falsehoods for so long.
Rather, the most stunning–though not surprising–aspect is that so many people fell for the falsehoods for so long.
Yet don’t blame message recipients for the message’s falsity. This time one really can blame the messengers for the message.
After all, this message has been no accident. By and large, the messengers aren’t stupid. All along, they’ve known what they’ve been doing.
Their hand wringing now shouldn’t fool anyone.
Their turning on Biden now shouldn’t fool anyone.
No one.
Absolutely no one.
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On its website, https://www.abcatchq.com, ABC posts videos of all of its speakers.
ABC was formed in 2018. Its mission is “to achieve a balance of speakers in a mutually civil and respectful environment consistent with the historic mission of Chautauqua” Institution. ABC is its own Section 501(c)(3) organization, legally separate from the institution.
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Dr. Randy Elf’s Aug. 20, 2020, ABC presentation, on “How Political Speech Law Benefits Politicians and the Rich,” is at https://works.bepress.com/elf/21.
(c) 2024 BY RANDY ELF