#authoritarian dictatorships

[odinsblog]

RUSSIA’S SHAM ELECTIONS, where people are “helped” by armed soldiers who check to ensure they vote correctly—or else.

Does this look like they are helping to conduct a fair, peaceful and democratic election process? Or does it look like repressed voters under duress, who are being forced to vote for Putin under threat of armed Russian soldiers? (source) (source) (source)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The surprising truth about data-driven dictatorships

Here’s the “dictator’s dilemma”: they want to block their country’s frustrated elites from mobilizing against them, so they censor public communications; but they also want to know what their people truly believe, so they can head off simmering resentments before they boil over into regime-toppling revolutions.

These two strategies are in tension: the more you censor, the less you know about the true feelings of your citizens and the easier it will be to miss serious problems until they spill over into the streets (think: the fall of the Berlin Wall or Tunisia before the Arab Spring). Dictators try to square this circle with things like private opinion polling or petition systems, but these capture a small slice of the potentially destabiziling moods circulating in the body politic.

Enter AI: back in 2018, Yuval Harari proposed that AI would supercharge dictatorships by mining and summarizing the public mood — as captured on social media — allowing dictators to tack into serious discontent and diffuse it before it erupted into unequenchable wildfire:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/yuval-noah-harari-technology-tyranny/568330/

Harari wrote that “the desire to concentrate all information and power in one place may become [dictators] decisive advantage in the 21st century.” But other political scientists sharply disagreed. Last year, Henry Farrell, Jeremy Wallace and Abraham Newman published a thoroughgoing rebuttal to Harari in Foreign Affairs:

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/spirals-delusion-artificial-intelligence-decision-making

They argued that — like everyone who gets excited about AI, only to have their hopes dashed — dictators seeking to use AI to understand the public mood would run into serious training data bias problems. After all, people living under dictatorships know that spouting off about their discontent and desire for change is a risky business, so they will self-censor on social media. That’s true even if a person isn’t afraid of retaliation: if you know that using certain words or phrases in a post will get it autoblocked by a censorbot, what’s the point of trying to use those words?

The phrase “Garbage In, Garbage Out” dates back to 1957. That’s how long we’ve known that a computer that operates on bad data will barf up bad conclusions. But this is a very inconvenient truth for AI weirdos: having given up on manually assembling training data based on careful human judgment with multiple review steps, the AI industry “pivoted” to mass ingestion of scraped data from the whole internet.

But adding more unreliable data to an unreliable dataset doesn’t improve its reliability. GIGO is the iron law of computing, and you can’t repeal it by shoveling more garbage into the top of the training funnel:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/05/29/garbage-in-garbage-out-machine-learning-has-not-repealed-the-iron-law-of-computer-science/

When it comes to “AI” that’s used for decision support — that is, when an algorithm tells humans what to do and they do it — then you get something worse than Garbage In, Garbage Out — you get Garbage In, Garbage Out, Garbage Back In Again. That’s when the AI spits out something wrong, and then another AI sucks up that wrong conclusion and uses it to generate more conclusions.

To see this in action, consider the deeply flawed predictive policing systems that cities around the world rely on. These systems suck up crime data from the cops, then predict where crime is going to be, and send cops to those “hotspots” to do things like throw Black kids up against a wall and make them turn out their pockets, or pull over drivers and search their cars after pretending to have smelled cannabis.

The problem here is that “crime the police detected” isn’t the same as “crime.” You only find crime where you look for it. For example, there are far more incidents of domestic abuse reported in apartment buildings than in fully detached homes. That’s not because apartment dwellers are more likely to be wife-beaters: it’s because domestic abuse is most often reported by a neighbor who hears it through the walls.

So if your cops practice racially biased policing (I know, this is hard to imagine, but stay with me /s), then the crime they detect will already be a function of bias. If you only ever throw Black kids up against a wall and turn out their pockets, then every knife and dime-bag you find in someone’s pockets will come from some Black kid the cops decided to harass.

That’s life without AI. But now let’s throw in predictive policing: feed your “knives found in pockets” data to an algorithm and ask it to predict where there are more knives in pockets, and it will send you back to that Black neighborhood and tell you do throw even more Black kids up against a wall and search their pockets. The more you do this, the more knives you’ll find, and the more you’ll go back and do it again.

This is what Patrick Ball from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group calls “empiricism washing”: take a biased procedure and feed it to an algorithm, and then you get to go and do more biased procedures, and whenever anyone accuses you of bias, you can insist that you’re just following an empirical conclusion of a neutral algorithm, because “math can’t be racist.”

HRDAG has done excellent work on this, finding a natural experiment that makes the problem of GIGOGBI crystal clear. The National Survey On Drug Use and Health produces the gold standard snapshot of drug use in America. Kristian Lum and William Isaac took Oakland’s drug arrest data from 2010 and asked Predpol, a leading predictive policing product, to predict where Oakland’s 2011 drug use would take place.

[Image ID: (a) Number of drug arrests made by Oakland police department, 2010. (1) West Oakland, (2) International Boulevard. (b) Estimated number of drug users, based on 2011 National Survey on Drug Use and Health]

Then, they compared those predictions to the outcomes of the 2011 survey, which shows where actual drug use took place. The two maps couldn’t be more different:

https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.00960.x

Predpol told cops to go and look for drug use in a predominantly Black, working class neighborhood. Meanwhile the NSDUH survey showed the actual drug use took place all over Oakland, with a higher concentration in the Berkeley-neighboring student neighborhood.

What’s even more vivid is what happens when you simulate running Predpol on the new arrest data that would be generated by cops following its recommendations. If the cops went to that Black neighborhood and found more drugs there and told Predpol about it, the recommendation gets stronger and more confident.

In other words, GIGOGBI is a system for concentrating bias. Even trace amounts of bias in the original training data get refined and magnified when they are output though a decision support system that directs humans to go an act on that output. Algorithms are to bias what centrifuges are to radioactive ore: a way to turn minute amounts of bias into pluripotent, indestructible toxic waste.

There’s a great name for an AI that’s trained on an AI’s output, courtesy of Jathan Sadowski: “Habsburg AI.”

And that brings me back to the Dictator’s Dilemma. If your citizens are self-censoring in order to avoid retaliation or algorithmic shadowbanning, then the AI you train on their posts in order to find out what they’re really thinking will steer you in the opposite direction, so you make bad policies that make people angrier and destabilize things more.

Or at least, that was Farrell(et al)’s theory. And for many years, that’s where the debate over AI and dictatorship has stalled: theory vs theory. But now, there’s some empirical data on this, thanks to the “The Digital Dictator’s Dilemma,” a new paper from UCSD PhD candidate Eddie Yang:

https://www.eddieyang.net/research/DDD.pdf

Yang figured out a way to test these dueling hypotheses. He got 10 million Chinese social media posts from the start of the pandemic, before companies like Weibo were required to censor certain pandemic-related posts as politically sensitive. Yang treats these posts as a robust snapshot of public opinion: because there was no censorship of pandemic-related chatter, Chinese users were free to post anything they wanted without having to self-censor for fear of retaliation or deletion.

Next, Yang acquired the censorship model used by a real Chinese social media company to decide which posts should be blocked. Using this, he was able to determine which of the posts in the original set would be censored today in China.

That means that Yang knows that the “real” sentiment in the Chinese social media snapshot is, and what Chinese authorities would believe it to be if Chinese users were self-censoring all the posts that would be flagged by censorware today.

From here, Yang was able to play with the knobs, and determine how “preference-falsification” (when users lie about their feelings) and self-censorship would give a dictatorship a misleading view of public sentiment. What he finds is that the more repressive a regime is — the more people are incentivized to falsify or censor their views — the worse the system gets at uncovering the true public mood.

What’s more, adding additional (bad) data to the system doesn’t fix this “missing data” problem. GIGO remains an iron law of computing in this context, too.

But it gets better (or worse, I guess): Yang models a “crisis” scenario in which users stop self-censoring and start articulating their true views (because they’ve run out of fucks to give). This is the most dangerous moment for a dictator, and depending on the dictatorship handles it, they either get another decade or rule, or they wake up with guillotines on their lawns.

But “crisis” is where AI performs the worst. Trained on the “status quo” data where users are continuously self-censoring and preference-falsifying, AI has no clue how to handle the unvarnished truth. Both its recommendations about what to censor and its summaries of public sentiment are the least accurate when crisis erupts.

But here’s an interesting wrinkle: Yang scraped a bunch of Chinese users’ posts from Twitter — which the Chinese government doesn’t get to censor (yet) or spy on (yet) — and fed them to the model. He hypothesized that when Chinese users post to American social media, they don’t self-censor or preference-falsify, so this data should help the model improve its accuracy.

He was right — the model got significantly better once it ingested data from Twitter than when it was working solely from Weibo posts. And Yang notes that dictatorships all over the world are widely understood to be scraping western/northern social media.

But even though Twitter data improved the model’s accuracy, it was still wildly inaccurate, compared to the same model trained on a full set of un-self-censored, un-falsified data. GIGO is not an option, it’s the law (of computing).

Writing about the study on Crooked Timber, Farrell notes that as the world fills up with “garbage and noise” (he invokes Philip K Dick’s delighted coinage “gubbish”), “approximately correct knowledge becomes the scarce and valuable resource.”

https://crookedtimber.org/2023/07/25/51610/

This “probably approximately correct knowledge” comes from humans, not LLMs or AI, and so “the social applications of machine learning in non-authoritarian societies are just as parasitic on these forms of human knowledge production as authoritarian governments.”

The Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop summer fundraiser is almost over! I am an alum, instructor and volunteer board member for this nonprofit workshop whose alums include Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Bruce Sterling, Nalo Hopkinson, Kameron Hurley, Nnedi Okorafor, Lucius Shepard, and Ted Chiang! Your donations will help us subsidize tuition for students, making Clarion — and sf/f — more accessible for all kinds of writers.

Libro.fm is the indie-bookstore-friendly, DRM-free audiobook alternative to Audible, the Amazon-owned monopolist that locks every book you buy to Amazon forever. When you buy a book on Libro, they share some of the purchase price with a local indie bookstore of your choosing (Libro is the best partner I have in selling my own DRM-free audiobooks!). As of today, Libro is even better, because it’s available in five new territories and currencies: Canada, the UK, the EU, Australia and New Zealand!

[Image ID: An altered image of the Nuremberg rally, with ranked lines of soldiers facing a towering figure in a many-ribboned soldier's coat. He wears a high-peaked cap with a microchip in place of insignia. His head has been replaced with the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The sky behind him is filled with a 'code waterfall' from 'The Matrix.']

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

 — 

Raimond Spekking (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Acer_Extensa_5220_-_Columbia_MB_06236-1N_-_Intel_Celeron_M_530_-_SLA2G_-_in_Socket_479-5029.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

 — 

Russian Airborne Troops (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vladislav_Achalov_at_the_Airborne_Troops_Day_in_Moscow_%E2%80%93_August_2,_2008.jpg

“Soldiers of Russia” Cultural Center (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Col._Leonid_Khabarov_in_an_everyday_service_uniform.JPG

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[spiderlegsmusic]

Future generations will look back on this time period like we do the dark ages. Religion, in its death throes, is fighting to make a comeback in relevance by banning women’s healthcare because they want more babies born whose health and well being they won’t contribute to.

And fuck you if you were raped and molested by a stranger or family member resulting in pregnancy. Even if you’re 12. You have to carry your rape baby, especially in Texas where we lead the nation in rape babies doubling the next highest state.

Like we view the dark ages

We have a depraved degenerate piece of shit subhuman claiming to be ordained by god, confirming that yes, religion is bullshit and just a way to control the superstitious masses. If god existed, it would in no way want to be associated with trump and would actively distance itself.

The fact that that traitor insurrectionist piece of shit is allowed to run for president after trying to overthrow the govt by force (jan6), bureaucratically(fake electors scam), and by extortion (the Georgia find me more votes scam), is beyond me.

The whole country saw what he did. It’s just that republicans have gotten sick of losing elections so now they embrace fascism. They will support trumps authoritarian autocratic dictatorship because it means they won’t lose anymore elections.

And we will just let him.

See, this election isn’t Trump vs Biden. The democratic challenger could be a flaming bag of shit, it wouldn’t change the stakes. Every year, people say this election is so important and they’ve been wrong. But this year they are correct. This isn’t Trump vs Biden. It’s dictatorship vs democracy. Trump wins and he’ll crown himself king for life. Anyone who opposes him will be thrown in prison. Listen to his speeches, he says the quiet part out loud. Everyone in his campaign is saying trump’s next term will be all about retribution. RETRIBUTION against those who wouldn’t allow him to steal the last election.

There is no love, no goodness in Trump. He’s an asshole to everyone. He quotes Hitler and counts Putin, Kim, and the Hungarian dictator Orbàn as friends. He’s a scumbag using religion to solidify his cult status over the simpleminded racists who support him. He’s not a christian, he’s not friendly and he thinks Hitler did good things

Even if you hate Biden, it’s not him you are voting for by voting for him. You’re voting for a continuation of democracy, which may be battered by things like horrible Supreme Court rulings (citizens united, repealing Roe v Wade, corporate personhood) but it’s better than a Trump led dictatorship. Once democracy is gone, it’s never coming back without war and death. Is this what you want? Do you think you will survive bombs hitting your neighborhood, your apartment building? Ask people in Ukraine what that’s like.

It’s not Biden vs Trump. It’s dictatorship vs democracy. It’s black and white, no shades of gray. If trump wins, you will never vote in a meaningful election again. And if you or anyone you know complains, they will disappear. Those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it. And history is repeating itself. Hitler won by one vote. Trump won in 2016 despite getting fewer votes because of the electoral college. And if he loses again, he’ll pull the same shit as in 2020, but more forceful.

Keep trump out of the White House.

For fucks sake!

[hybridmindthoughtsreloaded]

Agenda 47

Agenda 47 would turn America into an unconstitutional authoritarian police state with the President as dictator. It would effectively shred the United States Constitution into pieces.

1: Make homelessness and Urban Camping illegal. Violators would be rounded up by Government agents, charged with a crime, and put into FEMA camps away from society. Effectively killing the 8th amendment of the United States Constitution.

2: Death penalty for Human traffickers and drug dealers. This would operate the same way China operates for these crimes. Anyone accused and arrested for these crimes would have a swift trial and if convicted be swiftly executed. Effectively adopting the justice system of a Communist Dictatorship.

3: Using Executive Orders on day one to end natural born citizenship in America. Effectively killing the 14th amendment of the United States Constitution.

4: Implement an unconstitutional Nationwide "Stop and Frisk" policy and deployment of federal assets, including the National Guard, if local law enforcement refuses to comply with this order. Effectively violating the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 and killing the 4th amendment of the United States Constitution.

5: Strictly enforcing existing gun laws and implement nation wide "Red Flag" gun laws that violate the 2nd amendment of the United States Constitution.

This is Trumps Agenda 47. This is the future the Right-Wing wants for America. This agenda is not hidden, its displayed proudly on Donald Trumps own website for everyone to see. This is the future your children will live in if you don't take a stand against this and fight for our rights, fight for the Constitution, fight for the freedom of future generations.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servility, dictatorships promote cruelty; more abhorrent is the fact that they foster idiocy. Buttons babbling imperatives, effigies of caudillos, predetermined living and dying, walls adorned with names, unanimous ceremonies, mere discipline usurping the place of lucidity... Fighting those sad monotony is one of the writer's many duties. Will I have to remind readers of Martín Fierro and Don Segundo that individualism is an old Argentinian virtue?

Dictatorships foment oppression, dictatorships foster servility, dictatorships foster cruelty; but most abominable is the fact that they encourage idiocy. Buttons that babble imperatives, effigies of caudillos, pre-set alive and dead, walls exuberated by names, unanimous ceremonies, mere discipline usurping the place of lucidity ... To combat this sad monotony is one of the many duties of the writer. Will I have to remind readers of Martín Fierro and Don Segundo that individualism is an old Argentine virtue?

—Jorge Luis Borges, remarks to a gathering of Argentine writers ('Words spoken by Jorge Luis Borges in the food offered to him by the writers') in Aug, 1946. Below: The Hydra of Dictatorship, a pen-and-ink drawing by Jorge Luis Borges (1946)

(Robert Scott Horton)

[tomorrowusa]

Whether DeSantis would actually do more damage to American democracy in office than Trump could remains hard to say. Perhaps, perhaps not. But we should recognize that he is not putting himself forward as a critic of Trump’s authoritarianism. He is promising, on the contrary, to exceed it.

Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine – Intelligencer. 

Those discussions over whether DeSantis or Trump would be worse remind me a little of the pointless debates that extremists have over whether Hitler or Stalin murdered more people.

Both Trump and DeSantis are enemies of democracy. Discourse about them should center on how we would beat either of them. Democratic unity in 2022 resulted is a much better than expected election. We’ll need more of the same to protect democracy in 2024.

[megslay]

IDK which Baby Boomer needs to hear this but communism is NOT interchangeable with authoritarianism or dictatorship.

At its core, communism aims to achieve a classless, stateless society without hierarchies. Without classes or states, the means of production are communally owned.

Knowing this, it's obvious communism is fundamentally incompatible with dictatorship or authoritarianism. These two political systems MUST operate within a state framework because the state provides the institutional means to exercise and maintain power. Likewise, class dynamics help to establish hierarchies and maintain the concentration of power at the top.

Now, I know... there are authoritarian countries like the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea that are labeled as "communist", but they are not practicing communism. Rather, they're appropriating elements of the communist ideology. However, these deviations from Marxist principles betrays the core ideology.

To put it into perspective, it would be like saying an economic system that doesn't prioritize profit is "capitalist". It fundamentally doesn't make sense because it deviates significantly from the traditional understanding of capitalism.

Thus, equating communism with dictatorship is a misunderstanding of what true communism entails...And doesn't this make you curious about WHY there is this misconception about communism in the U.S.? Why is it believed to be synonymous with authoritarianism or dictatorship?

Well, it stems from Cold War-era propaganda, capitalist biases, media spins, and what we're taught in school. There's been a long history of emphasizing the authoritarian aspects of "communist" regimes without distinguishing between the philosophy from how it's botched applications. That's pretty irresponsible, don't ya think?

Now, if you're a smart cookie, you'll ask yourself, "Who benefits from the widespread association of communism with dictatorship and repression?"

Well, that'd be the people at the top of the capitalist pyramid (and spoiler: you're NOT in that club). By making communism out to be a boogeyman, the folks at the top discourage us from questioning the status quo and thinking about alternatives that might shake up the current pecking order.

So, the capitalist class equating communism with dictatorship is like using fear mongering to keep things just as they are... which, if you think about it, sounds pretty authoritarian, doesn't it?

[islam-defined]

The Quote

[protoslacker]

Strongman rule is a fantasy.  Essential to it is the idea that a strongman will be your strongman.  He won't.  In a democracy, elected representatives listen to constituents.  We take this for granted, and imagine that a dictator would owe us something. But the vote you cast for him affirms your irrelevance.  The whole point is that the strongman owes us nothing.  We get abused and we get used to it. 

Timothy Snyder in Thinking about. . . .. The Stronman Fantasy.

And Dictatorship in Real Life

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

"Beware the cult that sells you a utopia, because any dictatorial action can be justified by such a false vision."

-- Rio Veradonir

[odinsblog]

There was no election in Russia.

There was no campaign.

There were no debates, which was unsurprising, because no issues could be debated.

Above all, there were no real candidates, bar one: the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, the man who has just started his fifth, unconstitutional term in office.

Russians did line up at polling stations, but these were not actually polling stations. They were props in an elaborate piece of political theater, a months-long exercise in the projection of power and brutality.

While that exercise unfolded, Putin’s only significant political opponent, Alexei Navalny, died under mysterious circumstances in a prison north of the Arctic Circle. Two Russian presidential candidates collected the requisite number of signatures to stand, both said they opposed the war in Ukraine, and both were removed from the ballot.

Three practically unknown people were allowed to remain on the ballot, but they did not criticize Putin and did not oppose him in any way. One of them declared that he hoped Putin would win. In Russian-occupied Ukraine, men in balaclavas forced people to vote at gunpoint.

Some Western media nevertheless covered this orchestrated drama as if it really were an election. Reporters interviewed voters, cited “exit polls,” even commented on the “results,” as if these things mean anything in a country whose leadership lies openly about everything: economic statistics, war casualties, Russian history. Reuters ran a headline declaring Putin had won “in a landslide.” The earnest coverage was exactly what Putin hoped he would get. He knows, after all, that he is an illegitimate leader, and he knows that he abandoned the Russian constitution.

This non-election was his messaging exercise, designed to show Russians, and the rest of the world, that he intends to stay in power anyway, illegally.

(continue reading)

[n2qfd]

[ravenkings]

one thing i never understand about these leftist tankie types always going like “but the united states does it!!!!1111!!!!!” when their preferred anti-liberal authoritarian regime kills a bunch of people or does something shady is that, even IF we decide to accept their statements as the truth (which is in and of itself highly dubious) WHY do they think they’re assuming the moral high ground in defending this kind of behavior REGARDLESS of who is doing it????????

[mossadegh]

As we commemorate the 70th anniversary of the overthrow of a nationalist government in Iran, we might also reflect on its broader implications — seven continuous decades of authoritarian rule.

The Mossadegh Project

[smashing-yng-man]

In case you're wondering just how far mentally and morally gone the MAGA cult have become.