Saw this being hinted at, and while thinking about it I figured out you can actually make a strong case for this, no matter how silly and outlandish it sounds.

This is not as saying there’s a magical malignant entity, like a ghost in the machine, that took control of out AIs and will in the future cause all sort of problems. But there is something maybe darker and far more subtle going on.

AI is demonic in the sense that what controls it is something not human.

Not a literal meaning, but as an enhanced metaphysical sense, one step beyond traditional metaphysics as we use it: something one step beyond human comprehension. Not again in the form of “god of the gaps”, since that one simply indicates a loss of meaning, the definition of something know with its form given completely wrong. You think “god” is in the “gap” of something you don’t currently comprehend. In this case the demonic is not a mistaken symbol, but a correct, pertinent one. Not an aspiration to a definition, but the best fit, the one true step. The right sound. A correctly defined not-observed, that takes control. Not being there, not being known. A Lovecraftian horror space that averts vision. Something that molds humanity, without humanity awareness of it, beyond its shell.

Which is just a fancy way of saying that the main practical category of all this is that no one controls it. You can see these big companies, run by techno-fascists, chasing after their own drug-induced delirious visions. Which is certainly true to some extent, but they really don’t lead anything. They are themselves the most delusional. What happens, in practice, is that the machine “has” to be fed. Impersonal. There is no will driving this compulsion. Worldwide economy happens to be destroyed, sacrificed to this demon that has to feed.

No one has any control. It just is.

You can’t “win” against Kryptonite. It’s built precisely to unmake you.

P.S.
Again in contrast to god of the gaps, in that case the signature feature of a gap is that it always recedes. What is a god-gap today will be known scientifically tomorrow. AI is demonic because it operates in reverse: it always advances, the gap expands, until everything is devoured and nothing left is known. Where AI expands, human consciousness shrinks. The fascist-demon carapace will have removed consciousness from existence.

There would be a whole lot that maybe is worthwhile, but I’ll try to be terse here.

I wrote about Crimson Desert back in 2019. Most people misremember when they say the game started as an MMO. More precisely it was always intended (within the vagueness of what was disclosed back then) as a sort of single-player story that then opened in some shared “MMO” zones for its end/post game. At the time I simply stated that, in the context of game design, the principles that make a single-player game directly conflict with those of an MMO. We now know how it ended: they dropped the multiplayer part, and the game is fully offline, without any form of co-op. Firmly closed against any sort of open activity.

More recently, in discussions outside this blog, I was very skeptical before release, and critical/cynical now. Like many others I doubted that the engine worked as well as they advertised, and despite many glitches and flaws they surely delivered and won on that whole angle. I’ve read some perspectives claiming that Pearl Abyss wanted a game to advertise its engine. I don’t see this likely, but they definitely hit that target. If their goal was to use the game as a way to showcase an engine, to then sell to other studios, then it’s all a flawless win. But again, I don’t see any concrete sign that they want to sell this technology to someone else.

Right before the game’s release the controversy was all about no one being able to pin down what the game actually was going to be. It looked like 10 different games smashed together, but where all of them were turned to eleven. It was all exaggerated, but in a way that didn’t simply look off, but downright implausible. No one had a real idea of how playing this game would actually “feel.” Whether you loved or were dismayed by those previews, it all seemed “unlikely”. What I think I correctly anticipated, before release, is that this overall “confusion” would CONTINUE even after release. EVEN for those who have already played the game for 10-20+ hours. What the game truly is, and whether great or awful, continues to be hard to decide. And creating radical disagreement.

In typical internet controversy this obviously becomes a fight between two factions, and as it often happen in these cases, these varied opinions that appear to directly contradict each other are instead, for the most part, all valid and true at once. They are all apparent contradictions, but they are simply shining different lights across the surface of the game. It just depends what face you’re presently observing.

That’s a terse way for me to say that there’s plenty that this game does brilliantly, but usually it’s also more interesting to learn from what this game does wrong.

It is also possible to find some synthesis, like an overall take that is valid: Crimson Desert feels precisely like a game realized by a talented team of programmers thinking that they could execute game design equally well, on their own. It certainly doesn’t come together as a “good game”, it simply is not.

But, I think, what defines it best, is the frustration, from looking at it from the outside. The same frustration I have with Black Desert, precisely. Crimson Desert is a really bad “game” built around technology that (despite a myriad of flaws) is quite outstanding. WELL MORE THAN ENOUGH to seize a game of the year type of prize, EVEN in the year of potential GTA6. We are truly talking about a game that defines a DECADE, a worldwide milestone. It is in light of this absurd, sky-high potential that Crimson Desert is infuriating. Not because it’s not as great as “we” project, but because it’s actually MEDIOCRE. Despite its technology and foundation, it never reaches the quality of an “average” game. All its flaws are, as it usually happens instead, within the technical limits, or budget, or needing more months/years of development. As it happens with Black Desert, we are talking about fundamental problems that are EASY AND QUICK (cheap) to solve.

How is it possible for a game that was in development for several years, that the same (hardcoded) button to loot items is the same you use to jump? It goes beyond the typical “devs don’t play their own game.” This is something that would irritate me within 5 minutes testing a dev build. How it’s even plausible that this made into a released game!??

This makes Crimson Desert (and Black Desert) an absurd anomaly.

We’ve never seen something like this. It never happened. Games usually stumble and fall DESPITE the developers best efforts. Often it’s merely about technical skills that limit the scope and vision, but in general you try your best and have to live with what comes out. Crimson Desert is a unique case because ANY team could have done so much better, given what’s available. Its flaws, for the most part, are ridiculously obvious to see and solve for anyone with an average design sensibility.

And again, the best way to frame and understand Crimson Desert, is in light of what I wrote, at length, about a single inventory item in Black Desert. Despite the topic is completely different, the contextual frame is exactly the same. Pearl Abyss is a team that slips and falls constantly on BANALITIES.

What will be left of all of this? In a year or two? The tech is certainly noteworthy, but this is not a game that will have any stay in players’ hearts. Including those who rightfully love what the game is, right now. I doubt there’s any replayability, in a way like Skyrim is always fun to replay (there’s no “RPG” depth and progression, the story is not there, the varied activities and free player agency are illusions for a game that is exceedingly linear). I don’t see this game remain in the conversation for more than a couple of weeks.

Let’s say they give the game an expansive DLC (it’s quite probable), I expect it to have zero improvements in the game’s current systems, but I guaranteed it will add ten brand new ones, all executed poorly. If it follows Black Desert path: nothing will be fixed or improved, some things will be broken further, a whole clumsy lot will be added on top of this already overcrowded pile.

Gameplay itself, the combat, is trivially easy and repetitive. Hordes of the same 5 guys that occasionally switch how they dress, but that you all fight in the same way without a threat. Ironically this is exactly like Black Desert, a game with an insanely deep combat system… but performed against enemies that are glorified training dummies. They barely pretend to move around you. In Black Desert it’s all a mindless grind where the only skill level is how fast you can farm them. The game is a speedrun. That’s the only skill ceiling. You either kill slow or fast.

You could make a case about bosses in Crimson Desert. From what I’ve seen, some players struggle, even for a long time. But boss design is mostly built around some gimmick that once you find out you can exploit. I’ve seen this praised, because it actually pushes you to perform specific attacks rather than lamely spam the basic one, but it’s all technically bad. For example I saw a player struggle for a whole hour against a boss whose special attack was digging and disappearing underground. There are tons and tons of problems with this boss, but the main one is that the player was trying hard to anticipate the special attack, to stun the boss, and failing most times (for him, done too early, a single attack of this boss would one-shot him, so he was forced to kill it without a single mistake). Turns out that you stun the boss by acting LATE rather than early. If you try to anticipate the attack, you fail, but if you instead stun it while it’s already disappeared underground (still as soon he goes under), then the stun works. And it makes absolutely no logical sense, because you’d intuitively assume that once the boss is underground it’s then impossible to hit.

In general, from what I’ve seen, boss design in this game is really mediocre, and I would put it one notch below even what “Where Winds Meet” delivers.

As I’ve written elsewhere, “bizzarre” game design is not an ingredient of Crimson Desert, it’s been the MAIN ingredient since Black Desert. One one hand the game is excessively overdesigned (not going to comment for the “focus interaction”, which would be a main topic otherwise), while at the same time being so clumsy, easily fixable with the bare minimum of care.

And it all meaningfully converges right here:

(screenshot from resetera, in this case, but I assume it’s legit since I’ve seen personally even worse)

A piece (or two?) of AI art (let’s not even go there). Look at the frame clipping into the ceiling, then how the two paintings are positioned.

That’s the attention to detail, that’s how much care there is in building and shaping this world. That’s the immersion it supports.

Not as a meaningful example on its own, but as a metaphor you can apply to the rest of the game, especially its game design.

It’s the most accurate, pertinent metaphor.

Including of course those who will see that image, enjoy the warm tones, and say they are fine with it, that it’s really not a big deal impacting their experience. And they are totally right. This is not a damning example, but again the standard that is applied across the whole game, across all its system (including the horse movement and “handling”).

Both absurd and ridiculous, and actually so easy to “fix.” But as Black Desert has shown across its 10 years of its existence: no, it won’t be fixed, it won’t get better.

Or at least, that’s the rational outcome, given the experience with Black Desert. And so the rational conclusion giving the information that is available. They just don’t know what they are doing. They’ve picked what looked cool (including Cliff, as a placeholder for Jon Snow, since that was what was cool at the time of development of Crimson Desert, right when Game of Thrones was at its top) and mashed together a bunch of games. Whether it was Witcher 3, RDR2, Zelda. They had the better technology, just borrowing systems across all the successful games that come out: how can you possibly not qualify for GOTY, given that formula & clever strategy?

Yeah. Crimson Desert is literally all it appears to be: a mess. (or a great technology in the wrong hands)

Exactly the same of Black Desert.

Fascism exists always upstream, with the delusional control of truth values. Only until inevitability reality comes crashing down.

Taking cue from Trump fascist administration, having seen how they can easily manipulate and gaslight a very obvious murder into “self-defense”, Larian decided they could try gaslighting their fans into believing they “listened” to protests and corrected their course, while doubling down on their AI use.

And it’s done through the well trodden path of hiding their tracks.

Well, that’s great, right? There’s absolutely nothing to criticize here.

Problem is the message doesn’t stop there, despite many eyes will glaze over what comes next. And the message proceeds to radically UNDO and contradict everything it claimed in that first part:

Before you can even get to the stage of figuring out if AI can help or not, because, FOR SURE THEFT ALWAYS HELPS, maybe you should figure out what the fuck you’re actually doing and using, right? Just because you “try things” in a dumb, clueless way doesn’t absolve you from responsibilities.

Illegally appropriating the job done by someone else is surely a safe and proven way of “doing things faster.” It just works! I don’t even know why you want a debate on the usefulness of theft. All tech companies have figured out that theft is a successful model, the fastest path to getting rich, especially when governments are now completely corrupt.

So now you are using AI widely “across departments”, having decided that people’s criticism was ONLY ABOUT THE ART. So you figured out that EVERYTHING CAN BE STOLEN, just as long you don’t hurt some artistic sensibilities. Everything else must be up for grabs, right? Steal as fast as possible, loot this miserable world until it’s all gone.

Because that’s the point: everyone is doing the same. Everyone is participating in this looting, so who’s innocent? And if no one’s innocent, how can anyone be guilty?

We have successfully isolated this problem of “artistic origin”, then, having cleansed every other form of theft. So now lets cleanse the artistic side as well, so that WE CAN STEAL WHATEVER WE WANT?

“Without being 100% sure about the origins of the training data.” 100%! Do you know math? 100% is all there is. This is not a tactical game with 110% chance to hit, the d100 only goes 0-99, or 1-100. Statistics! Larian makes RPGs, after all.

“Then it’ll be trained on data we own.”

Oh, nice. So, if this wasn’t just a factually false statement, the only way to make this part “true” would indicate that Larian is now in the AI business and is developing, in-house, their own proprietary LLM model. They would be setting up their own server farm (good luck buying all that RAM required, considering you are trying to set your foot in what’s actually an oligarchy) and hire engineers to build an AI model from scratch. Because, technically, no other way exists.

Even assuming this obviously absurd scenario, there’s no way Larian could do that, because when we speak of LLMs (we’re really barely past kindergarten level here), we speak of something that SOLELY operates through “large amounts of data.” Where large is euphemisms for something HUGE. LLMs are heuristics (much like the human brain), they are statistical models. No matter how perfected is the algorithm upstream, the output can only be remotely useful when INCLUDING THE TRAINING DATA.

Unless Larian is developing LLM from scratch, they DON’T OWN THE DATA. Because even if they fed to it all they produced through their own existence, for another HUNDRED YEARS, that would probably still be less than 2% of the amount of data necessary for anything remotely useful. Without even counting how much work and time and resources would require performing and fine-tuning that training. We are speaking of highly specialized work that ALSO has a cost.

It’s not a case that all those proprietary LLMs have been built coupled with “large amount of data” that was factually stolen. Or “legally” stolen because, again, when corruption runs rampant then you can just bend the rules. No company has enough data to feed any LLM. Even if completely stripping their own employees of any right, that still wouldn’t be enough to train an LLM. You need MORE. You need access to everything.

But here we have Larian, the ingenue. They only use a piece of technology they do not understand. They merely want to make a product faster to sell, as it is their capitalistic purpose. Chop, chop. Move on. If they simply, innocently use a tool, they DO NOT SEE anything the LLM has eaten and digested. They do not see the stolen data. They do not see the stolen art. They just FEED THEIR OWN, to this cancer spreading and devouring more. It’s just “their own end” of the bargain. They just use “the prompt.” Once a body has been masticated, it ceases to be a body. It’s blood and gore now.

So, let’s cover ourselves in blood and gore, to participate in this ritualistic sacrifice that is humanity.

Larian saying that they’ll use LLM on “data they own” is an euphemism saying they intend to continue stealing precisely has they’ve been doing. Nothing changes because as long they can persuade their fans that LLM “start where you see them”, with their prompt, and their actual process is occluded and hidden away from awareness, then… everything can be legally stolen because it can’t be tracked. And they intend to continue to participate in that vicious looting.

A note on the previous.

Twin Peaks was in some way a mythology of meaning. In the third season it blended the origin of evil with nuclear power, then coming after that a godlike presence through the electrical network.

Generative AI is going down a similar path, it’s becoming god-like in its symbolic meaning: a false idol, for a false people.

In the previous, again, my point was to emphasize how “all the AI does” is the magical trick of hiding some process. It’s hiding the money laundering, it’s hiding its costs, and it’s hiding the causality chain, the link between input and output. Which is ironic because that’s exactly what human consciousness is: a trick. A perceptive illusion.

Everyone is looking to that one magical and mysterious ingredient that will make AI truly “alive”, human-like. But it all becomes very clear, dismissing this mysterious fog, after you realize that it’s all about something you need to remove from the recipe. Because if you want to reproduce the ILLUSION of consciousness, then you need to understand the TRICK behind that illusion. Only then you can make it appear the way you want. The way everyone of us sees it.

And it’s all back to the usual. Bouncing between, the description of what we see and feel, and how to build artificial consciousness.

Through that clarity you can then observe.

Of course AIs cannot apologize, because as the scam is all about money laundering and corruption and the erasure of cause and effect, the same happens with the concept of “agency” and responsibility. When it comes to the theft of intellectual property AI companies are free of blame because “the machine did it”, whereas the process can’t be tracked. No one takes responsibility, you can use what the AI does because it’s “felt” as the machine produced it. So you can now own it and sell it again, having “laundered” the process. You stole, cleaned it up, now it’s yours.

The scam is all about hiding those tracks, which is why no one is responsible if AIs cause damage. Responsibility is simply redirected where it is the most convenient. “The machine did it.”

Everything about AIs is about erasure of some kind. Manipulation.

But the irony of all this is that we are looking into a mirror. The AI is false because we are all false. We are finding a perfect match, for our own final and perfect annihilation.

It just takes the easiest final step, to isolate the AI into a fully sealed black box to reach that mythical “superintelligence.” Because that’s the magical difference: we are blind to our own processes. “Not being privy to information about our own training” is what makes human consciousness possible.

This is the end, my friend. Like Achamian, we merely get a seat in the front row, to watch. Enjoy the show.

Great advances we’ve made through 2025!! We’ve now discovered that STEALING SOMEONE ELSE’S WORK is easier and faster than doing that work yourself! Such a novel concept!
Did you know that you’re far more productive and can make far more money by stealing from others, rather than making an effort on your own?!
Thieves are indeed geniuses who solved all problems!
Easy profits for everyone!

To be honest, while I followed Bakker’s blog from its very first days, almost 15 years ago, I didn’t take seriously all those “rants” against AI. About how AI would indeed at some point start to produce actual stories and replacing authors. It was obviously something that Bakker felt hitting close to home, being himself a writer, but to me that threat seemed far-fetched, something whose place was in a cautionary science fiction story, whose value was in being abstract and symbolic, the analysis itself. Themes of consciousness and epistemology, but less about a practical, imminent threat. But here we are, Bakker was right even at the fringes of that argument.

And it is somewhat ironical to me that now my own view on the current AI is “conditioned” not by some technical insight, but by the perspective given to me by those studies on consciousness and epistemology.

In the latter part of his activity Bakker was quite proud about having actually published in the scientific space his own work, titled: “On Alien Philosophy”

Given a sufficiently convergent cognitive biology, we might suppose that aliens would likely find themselves perplexed by many of the same kinds of problems that inform our traditional and contemporary philosophical debates.

He was trying to prove that, given the same structures, the problems we faced within philosophy of consciousness would be the same problem you’d “naturally” expect to incur. It’s just another way of saying that these problems were inevitable, logically occurring, giving the circumstances. Given the evolution of the brain. That the problems we see are the problems we should EXPECT to find, given the structure within which we operate.

The problem of today’s generative AI is essentially the same: if you have understood the nature of humanity and of human consciousness, then it would seem simply natural that we’d collectively fall INTO THIS TRAP. Because of our present circumstances. Given our own true nature, our internal build up, we should know that we are vulnerable precisely to this type of pitfall.

Because the “true nature” of generative AI, both in its economic and practical aspects is one of OCCLUSION. Of deception. The greater part of the function of AI is epistemic, becoming the natural “crash space” for human culture as a whole. We can start from the very simple concept of “private property.” We should be aware that, as with language, private property doesn’t truly exist “out in the world.” It is not a physical property, it’s not a law of physics. It’s simply an abstract concept whose value and meaning is fully contained in human culture. We decide and we agree, as a collective, to give private and intellectual properties a meaning. Then have laws to enforce all that. You can argue that animals have some form of the same, that they defend “territory,” because in the end it’s precisely what it is: application of strength. You impose a rule, as long you can impose your will.

But what happens when a powerful group of people decides that laws don’t apply anymore? Or more precisely, don’t apply to them?

In the early days it was only the artists who opposed AIs, whereas programmers more warmly embraced the “new tools” whose usefulness was more immediately tangible. It’s only normal given that illustrations are felt as more immediately “artistic”, made of that ineffable quality of creativity, whereas programming is seen a more logical, objective field where knowledge weighs more than personal artistry. But what is the difference, in the world? What is the actual truth? What is, truly, creativity? My point here is not about finding a convenient answers to these questions, but to indicate that the nature of occlusion, of NOT KNOWING what an artistic process actually is, is what enables generative AI to “perform” its own “scam.”

Because it’s all one GIANT SCAM we’ve all collectively fallen in.

What generative AIs are doing, from an epistemological point of view, is to HIDE the causal chain that links input to the output. If you decide to copy the work of an artist, to appropriate and sell it as you own, then you’re committing a CRIME. Because the original artist can find out what you just did, and sue you. Because he can then easily prove that he was the source of that original art. And there’s obviously a system of laws that regulates all of this. What generative AIs do in practice is to “mix the sources”, rather than doing a 1 to 1 copy, so that they STEAL FROM MANY, in a way that cannot then be easily backtracked. They “hide the process” of their algorithm so that it’s not possible anymore, in practice, to prove from what input the output was generated. Therefore, in the absence of an evident cause, the machine APPROPRIATES the process: we say that this output is a CREATION of the tool itself. So that it can be SOLD.

Generative AIs are not only “money laundering”, but also laundering the product itself, so that it can be STOLEN from the original authors and SOLD again by thieves.

On this level, artistic illustration and software programming are exactly the same. It’s funny how the programming world is a minefield of different licenses, whose subtle differences can only be extricated by lawyers. Because until today we’ve taken all this very seriously. It’s very complex. So complex that to avoid problems we have concepts like “clean room.” You cannot simply look at some code and then reimplement it for your own application, because you can still be accused of using a solution that belongs to someone else. “Clean room” identifies a process where the programmer explicitly avoids to even LOOK at the code, to prevent any form of bias, so that the final implementation will be fully “original” even if the process itself produces the same (or similar) result.

We’ve always taken licenses very seriously because as a society we’ve always taken intellectual propriety and personal contribution also very seriously.

But what happens when some Evil Corporation takes the gigantic body of work that makes the open source code, and uses it as a training field for its own proprietary “tool”? Since the outputs are “scrambled” we can’t anymore prove that these lines of code have been copied, and so stolen, from here. It’s still THEFT, but it’s hidden, the process occluded. An output without any evident input, so an output that fully belongs to whoever is holding it. A thief who’s laundered the money, so that the money is his.

Human progress exists solely in the NEGATION of intellectual property. Because if every man owned exclusively his own discoveries, then his knowledge would always die with him, and every newborn would have to start from absolute zero. As collective humanity we would have gone nowhere, because our own collective horizon would be bound to that 100 years yardstick. We would be stuck in stagnation. The thievery perpetrated by generative AIs is all the more insulting because we’ve collectively created this large body of work that we call “open-source”, so that it’s available to all humanity. Now we have these techbros thieves who found a “tool” that lets them STEAL this collective resource, and APPROPRIATE IT as if it’s now their own. Literally: rich people looting the community with impunity guaranteed by corrupt governments.

Nothing is “lawful” anymore. The thieves bought the governments and it’s corruption all the way down (and up).

We are all so collectively drunk on the idea of private property to believe that these billionaries can build their own AI factories “with their own money,” as it is their right. Without understanding that this is just another human abstraction with no root in the real world. The worldwide economy is not built into neat, independent packages, it’s all one thing. If “gamers” notice the problem first, because of hardware prices skyrocketing, it’s because hardware is adjacent. But wait long enough and you’ll see how YOU WILL ALL PAY those AI factories with the cost of your groceries. It’s all one system. We are all paying this worldwide displacement of investments. We make these thieves rich by taking a trickle for ourselves, empowering this process until nothing is left. Because these thieves let you also “resell” what they stolen, so that you are perfectly complicit in the process. So that this thievery includes you, by sharing responsibility, but always returning ultimately in their pockets. Wilful complicit thievery.

All those people who are now rejoicing for the great innovations that AIs have brought and will bring in the future, are people who will lose their jobs in the next weeks and months, who will see their families destroyed, who will pay with their health. Who are welcoming in their houses those same thieves who will loot and burn them to the ground. The trojan horse that is AI will destroy human culture and wealth at their very foundations, in a way that won’t be recoverable. We are indeed about to witness the apocalypse of man. Or rather, the ultimate celebration of human stupidity.

Imagine a very simple rule to regulate generative AIs: everything that comes from the community needs to return to the community. If something is the product of generative AIs, then it cannot be appropriated and owned. It can’t be sold. It can’t be used for profit.

One simple rule, and the whole field would immediately self-regulate, because it would immediately exclude the thieves. And stealing is the whole point here. Rich people stealing from all of us. But in reality those few thieves have enslaved the world, and we are all complicit in own own, now inevitable, collective end.

The view from here is crystal clear. Enjoy the show.

I like when it’s easy to prove stupidity in such a clear, conclusive way:

These is one of those emails that are floating about. In this case I’ve read some accusations that “Democrats are manipulating the mails.” To fabricate evidence against Trump.

So I’ve taken the image at full size, and had to squint for a while. Because the accusation is that these are two different e-mails, but I just couldn’t figure out why. Maybe “Jee” had been typed as “Jeee” with one extra “e”? But nope, everything looked exactly the same. So I just couldn’t even understand what the accusation was based on.

Until I did. Those “jee” I’ve highlighted look like “Jcc”, the “e” being turned into a “c”, a different letter.

So the accusation is that these aren’t actual documents, but something that has been written purposefully, and this is a proof of a mistake being made, because of replies to different email addresses.

But… It’s so easy to debunk.

Yes, those “ee” look like “cc”, in fact you can compare the “jee” with “vacation” and you can see the “e” is like the “c”. ALMOST equivalent, because the top tip of that “c” is rounded off, whereas it’s cut off on the “e”, if you squint. But this is not the final proof. The proof is that you can simply check the preceding “jeffrey” on that line, and see that, indeed, the “e” look like “c”. So a double mistake? Maybe? Well, if that still isn’t enough, you can also check the end of that line. “Wrote”, is indeed also written “Wrotc.” And then again, just below, “indicment was billed”, where each “e” indeed looks like a “c.”

Just a scaling issue.

More worrying, on both “sides,” is that absolutely no one cares about the truth. They all care about scoring points. They are all trying to win games. And we’ll all lose.

On the recent trainwreck about autism.

What’s infuriating is not what Trump declares, that’s simply predictable and therefore boring. Whoever still listens to Trump, on any matter, is doing it in bad faith. Stop wasting your time feeling and then displaying your own outrage, or you’re just willingly taking your role on this performative theater. Stop giving your attention to idiots.

That said, it’s the World Health Organization to be embarrassing and out of time.

This is not science, as this falsely confirms there is some evidence, even if not conclusive.

Trump himself already anticipated this stance, and so already infiltrated it and made it a weapon of rhetoric. Which made his statement a misogynistic one, even before it comes to science. He essentially said that, even in the presence of a DOUBT (paracetamol may or may not be linked to autism) then IT WOULD BE PRUDENT TO AVOID IT.

“Pregnant women should tough it out.”

This WHO message would be coherent, not contradicting with Trump statements: “The World Health Organization (WHO) emphasizes that there is currently no conclusive scientific evidence”

“Currently,” while epistemologically correct, implies that paracetamol could be proven cause of autism tomorrow. To be safe you have to be prudent. Therefore this VALIDATES Trump message.

But the reason I’m wasting my own time, to write here, is because this is built again on something I pointed out over and over: the statement from WHO is REVERSIBLE.

You CANNOT claim to write science with REVERSIBLE STATEMENTS. The WHO is COMPLICIT to Trump, complicit to power and manipulation.

The real problem of that statement is that it is ambivalent and it WILL BE read both ways. It will be read by “partisans” as the WHO lambasting Trump because what he claims has no scientific evidence, same as it will be read by the opposite faction as a SUPPORT FOR CAUTION. Therefore confirming the warning: paracetamol (Tylenol) MAY be linked to autism, we just “aren’t quite sure.”

Trump already won in the presence of doubt, causing women to avoid Tylnol just to be on the safer side. MOST women will do it, because you cannot be wrong by being more prudent.

The full statement also continues to embrace and spread ambiguity:

“WHO recommends that all women continue to follow advice of their doctors or health workers, who can help assess individual circumstances and recommend necessary medicines.”

This statement, that at first glance may be 100% reasonable, is the real root of scientific stupidity, especially within a “guideline” message like this.

DOCTORS AND HEALTH WORKERS ARE NOT IMMUNE TO POLITICAL PROPAGANDA. Just because they are doctors doesn’t mean that they oppose Trump non-scientific guidelines.

STOP USING LOGICAL FALLACIES IN YOUR STATEMENTS. The argument from authority fallacy used here VALIDATES TRUMP.

Telling women to trust their doctors when their doctors are ALSO trapped in the same propagandist machine means DEMANDING WOMEN TO BE VICTIMS.

You don’t give a goddamned guideline by telling people to listen to their doctors who just happen to be zealots.

You give the guideline that Tylenol IS NOT linked to autism as there is NO EVIDENCE for a logical suspicion of a link. That its only motivation IS EXPLOITATIVE POLITICAL PROPAGANDA.

But you are all corrupt instead. All the way down, it’s all corruption and being subservient to power. They’ll call it diplomacy.

Let’s continue, I guess. This is another statement:

This one is, thankfully, not a reversible statement, but it still is A LOGICAL FALLACY.

The word “reputable” is enough to be yet another appeal to authority. It’s implied that a reputable study is one that was done through good methodology, but it’s not explicit. Reputation isn’t science. Methodology is.

You can replace “reputable” with “reliable”, and at least you could own that statement. “Acetaminophen is safe.” (given that “safe” is always contextual, and context is what the rest of the statement provides)

Even worse, the way various mainstream media are carefully wording their own statements. This is one example:

The science “isn’t clear” is then not only false, but just another calculated REVERSIBLE statement, done to serve Trump.