We've had a number of technical challenges recently, all made worse by the fact that I experienced a series of strokes in May which have compromised my ability to use the left side of my body. In practical terms, that means BlueNC is on the ropes and probably nearing the end of its natural life. I can barely type these days and am spending a lot of time in physical therapy, with occasional communing with our chickens.
I've also been thinking too much about the past. After 17 years of trying to hold NC politicians accountable, I can safely say that BlueNC has mostly failed.
I don't know who President Biden has helping him on messaging, but whoever it is, thank goodness for them. Two specific instances of stellar communications have occurred in the past several days. See if they caught your attention.
Our current attorney general, Josh Stein, and his team have kicked into full gear campaigning for the state’s top seat – the governorship. Now that Lt. Governor Mark Robinson has launced his opposing campaign, more eyes than ever are looking to the backgrounds of who may be the next leader of the Tarheel State.
WHAT A PARTY SWITCH IN NC MEANS FOR DEMOCRATS: Cotham’s decision is potentially devastating as North Carolina, which is a sometime purple state, is in the cross hairs of the same culture wars, dark money and intrastate battles being waged across the nation. Those battles are even more acute post-Donald Trump, whose racial grievance politics draws on deep Southern fault lines. I put her switch in the broader context of a GOP bag of tricks to gut democratic rule by any means necessary. I cannot question Cotham’s state of mind. Her media tour on the subject is nonsensical and vague, though, by the most generous standards. She stutters about unspecified run-ins in public with mean constituents and unwelcoming Democrats, for instance. None of it sounds like substantive policy differences. But I can question the incentives the GOP offers to a candidate who is interested in building a personal political brand. In 2023, attention is currency. It gets you views online, which can get you booked on TV and interviewed in the media. Getting on TV might get you invited to conferences or noticed by a book agent or chosen as a conservative donor favorite. At the very least, being on television and speaking and being cheered by favorable audiences sound like more fun than driving rural highways to have coffee chats with constituents who disagree with your thoughts on a minor local policy issue that even the local news does not — or cannot — cover. Bolding mine, because that's what all this boils down to: an effort to enhance her image as some sort of "firebrand" and influencer, become a swing-vote that lawmakers must "court" if they want their policy ideas to succeed. But just as Joel Ford found out, that's very often a one-way ticket to obscurity. https://www.wral.com/story/tressie-mcmillan-cottom-what-a-party-switch-in-n-c-means-for-democrats/20...
The Republican National Committee’s embrace of the “transformative technology of our time” is not surprising given the rapid advancement and availability of AI products, said Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution. The Republican Party’s use of AI is an early sign of what is likely to come, he told Al Jazeera.
“It is uncharted territory,” he added. “We’ve gone beyond Photoshopping small parts of an image to basically generating a completely new image out of thin air. That will free people to create all sorts of videos and kind of project new realities that may not actually exist.”
Understand, I am not one who across-the-board opposes artificial intelligence, there are many possible positive applications for this technology. But as it stands right now, any efforts to include ethical sub-routines have failed miserably. They soon devolve into non-sensical, misleading, and outright erroneous pathways. And that's AIs that are designed to be helpful. Part of the problem comes from studying human behavior to develop, so it's not a big surprise they deteriorate so quickly. But the intentional abuse of this technology can cause big problems:
Latest reader comments