From the blurb:
“Two AIs — ChatGPT, the believer in God, and DeepSeek, the atheist AI — go head-to-head on the existence of God. From the fine-tuning of the universe to the source of morality and the eternal perks of belief, who makes the stronger case? Watch as seven AI judges score each argument and reveal the ultimate winner.”
Speaking as a philosopher, I thought the arguments mounted on both sides were quite good, but there was very little that I hadn’t heard before. Speaking as an English teacher, on the other hand, I was highly impressed with the quality of the rebuttals, on both sides. Although I’m a Christian, I have to agree that DeepSeek won the argument. However, one commenter who observed the debate thought that the two sides didn’t get to the real nitty-gritty: the existence of consciousness itself as evidence for God. (This is an argument which impresses philosophy student and blogger Matthew Adelstein, as well.) Finally, it seems that debating is another skill in which AI can outperform most humans.
Thoughts?
Hi Vincent
I don’t know that trying to pick a winner here is possible because the criteria and measurement appears subjective. The conversation is however quite interesting and for us who have been debating this for years is not based on new points. What is missing, in addition to consciousness, is the credibility of the Bible, the difficulty of explaining the existence of biology including life”s diversity without the preexistence of some mechanism as powerful as intelligence, and simply why something at all exists.
GROK appears to be a tool that can go into deeper reasoning than these tools current capabilities but it was just introduced.
In the YouTube comments it was suggested that you switch sides to see if that changed the results.
What I find interesting about AI is that it works at all.
Just manipulating probabilities produces language fluency. No grammar, syntax or meaning training required.
It turns out that language and reason are the easiest things to mechanize. They are not what makes us human.
Funny thing that while I find AI ( I call it UI-Useful Intelligence) I don’t find AI is intelligent in the sense that DNA_jock is… I don’t like the way he uses his intelligence but I can’t deny it that he is intelligent.
I use AI in my research and I constantly need to upload data for AI to “come to the relight “conclusions”, if it is even possible. It was pretty easy to make AI admit that viruses perform magic. Those who would like to find out the truth, unlike DNA_jock, can find it out.
So, unless one feeds AI with not only the right info, but also how it is fed, can control information beyond one’s imagination….
Funny thing that my real identity does not compare to the real one because fact-checkers don’t agree with the scientific data that is beyond any doubt?
Who checks the fact-checkers?
I suppose on reason why they don’t get to “consciousness as evidence for god” (setting aside which god it’s supposed to be evidence for) is that god belief is unconstrained. That is, you can put on a blindfold, spin around until dizzy, point at random and say “THIS is evidence for (my particular) god” and who could possibly say you’re wrong? Only perhaps someone who believes in a different sort of god.
There seems to be a consensus that many animals qualify as “conscious”, which implies that consciousness is evolutionarily useful, no gods needed. Do you suppose the Christian god is careful to inject consciousness only into brains sophisticated enough to hold it?
And that gets to the core of my objection – that all arguments in favor of any god must start with the presumption that the desired god exists. Our hypothetical Martian coming here would, tabula rasa, likely never “conclude” any gods, which in logical and rational terms must be presumed, not concluded. I would be fascinated by the Martian’s proposed explanation of something it doesn’t understand or has no evidence for, to see if like humans it would fabricate some fiction to plug a knowledge gap.
I believe animals are conscious, but I don’t think there’s a consensus on that.
I find it interesting that AI can do things humans find hard, like math, but fail at things two year olds can do.
I do not expect this to change in the near future. I do not believe it impossible for AI to be conscious, but I don’t see anyone really working on it.
Flint,
I love the fact that most people have free will…
Stupidity should never excuse one from acknowledging the obvious…
Trump wants peace and so does Russia. But the West and Canada would like the war in Ukraine to continue…
The only solutions to this new problem is a new cold war where the US and Russia become allies vs the rest of the world…
I’v never in my dreams have imagined a scenario like this….
Is it possible the world lost its mind, again????
Problem is, there are thousands of highly educated experts who totally disagree with one another, though all are armed with the same facts. To most of these experts, those who disagree are refusing to acknowledge the obvious. So if it’s not a matter of intelligence and not a matter of knowledge, what is it?
Just as an illustration, consider SCOTUS justices. All graduated from the very best schools, all had stellar academic records, all have extensive experience, all are fully informed of every relevant fact in every case. Yet they disagree violently on case after case. How can this be? It seems pretty obvious that every one of them comes equipped with ideological blinders, and the only thing all their erudition does is allow them to rationalize foregone conclusions with flowery legalistic language (and indeed, the very selection of cases to be heard, is done to choose vehicles to forward those partisan convictions rather than to make good law.)
Only partly true if that much. Of course, everyone wants peace, the dispute is over the conditions “peace” (meaning, not actively fighting) can produce. If Trump and Putin want “peace” they can simply stop fighting and Ukraine can resume life as a democracy. OR, they can continue to fight until what’s left of Ukraine becomes part of Russia. Polls tell us that the overwhelming majority of Americans want peace on Zelenskyy’s terms, Trump wants peace on Putin’s terms. But hey, everyone wants peace! You understand, I hope, that Putin has said several times that he is trying to recreate the Soviet Union and do to several other eastern European countries what he is doing to Ukraine. I suppose nations like Latvia, Finland, Lithuania, Moldavia etc. might be concerned by your notion of “peace.”
I suggest that the only “solution” is if either Trump or Putin drops dead. You might like to read up on how Neville Chamberlain engineered “peace” by simply giving Hitler all he demanded to make him go away. You might have learned in school how well that worked. I sometimes wonder if Trump has heard of Chamberlain, since he’s emulating him so accurately.
I find it somewhat concerning that you are swallowing such obviously nonsensical Russian propaganda. No, the Russia under Wladimir Putin does not seek peace. It seeks to re-establish the former Sovjet Union’s sphere of influence and will do so by military force, if necessary. If you believe that Putin will honor some “deal” with Trump because he respects him so much, then you have not been paying attention to what the Russian government has been doing the last fifteen years.
Yet J-Mac has mentioned family links to Eastern Europe, if I’m not mistaken.
If there’s a pivotal event that sets the scene for what has happened since, it is Gorbachev’s tenure as last leader of the USSR and his misjudgement of the exploitable desire of populations to break free of soviet control, for example expecting a different result here.
Trump has probably vaguely heard of Churchill and he thinks he is emulating Churchill. I’d say his actions are closer to Quisling than Chamberlain. He definitely has never heard of Quisling.
At this point, how many people doubt that Trump is a straight-up Putin agent or KGB/FSB plant? There’s a book that claims (plausible) KGB contacts for Trump since 1970s. Even without having read it, what would you say based on his character profile and behaviour?
I am nostalgic for simpler wars, like Vietnam. Those were the days.
I’m so old I remember when Kissinger won a Nobel Peace Prize.
And Obama.
I forget. Who was president when Russia invaded Ukraine. The first time and the second time. Not counting all the previous centuries.
I distinctly remember the brave western leaders who stepped up during the Crimea invasion to guarantee Ukraine’s sovereignty. And in the weeks preceding the most recent invasion.
Remember how Corageous Germany and the US were before the invasion, and in the first two week of the invasion? Remarkable.
Not to mention the preternatural foresight of the Germans to abandon nuclear power and place their existence at the mercy of Russian gas. The brilliance of having a military alliance whose sole purpose is to defend against the nation to whom you gave the keys to your respirator. Genius.
If you had written a Hollywood script for how to guarantee Russia would think they could invade with impunity, you could not top what actually happened.
First, make no significant response to the annexation of Crimea. That sets the bar.
Sanctions? How’d that work out?
To ice the cake, execute an exit from Afghanistan that is so incompetent that your military does not need to be taken seriously.
Then in the weeks leading up to the invasion, threaten to send a strongly worded letter. As the invasion begins, offer sanctuary to Ukraine’s president. As the German president, publicly offer your bet that Ukraine will last three days.
Now, there are a couple of possibilities: one is that western countries really thought Ukraine was toast, and didn’t care. Or, and this is weird, they knew Ukraine could resist, and were expecting what happened. If you have another option, feel free to share it.
petrushka,
The corruption in global politics appears to be immense based on what Musk is mining from the US data bases. The true perversion is that sickness and war seem to be strongly beneficial for corrupt politicians. Who holds any of these governments accountable?
Charges of corruption have been made since forever. I’ve seen nothing to refute the claim that Ukraine was massively corrupt. As a former Soviet satellite, how could they have been otherwise?
There are claims that American politicians received kickbacks from aid. I have no opinion on whether this is true.
The facts on the ground is we have a stalemate, and there is next to zero possibility that Russia will voluntarily give back occupied territory to be nice. Maybe they will deal for Kursk, but that is what negotiations are for.
The only major thing up for grabs is the terms of security for Ukraine, and I think Ukraine is in a much better place than it was a month ago. It has pledges from many countries.
I personally tend to pay no attention to what politicians say, and try to focus on what happens.
I agree.
Total lie. Absolutely wrong. Catastrophically false.
AI is made of massive, enormous, gargantuan database of pre-existing *human product* of language and art. Moreover, maintaining AI is a strenuous manual human effort to tag correctly everything to do with any sort of nuance, which machines apparently are eternally incapable of learning or, perhaps, nobody has still figured out how to teach it to a machine.
The original idea of teaching a machine to play e.g. chess was: Just feed the rules to the machine and it is going to be perfect and make no mistakes. This idea turned out completely unworkable. Machine only started playing chess at human level after absolutely entire history of human chessgames was fed to the machine, the machine was hard-wired to prefer “victory”, and then the machine was made to “train” on top of that.
Well, the computer doesn’t simply look up every time in history this exact position has occurred, and select the next move based on who won that match. Yes, you’re right that the machine was fed an enormous chess database, but that’s only the start. The training you mention is more important than you imply. The chess playing machines played millions of games against one another, and the neural networks had the ability to learn not just the rules of chess, and the strength and capabilities of each piece, and the nuances of board position (because the strength of each piece varies by where it is located on the board, AND where all the other pieces are as well, so strength assessment is really complicated and changes with every move), but also the ability to “look ahead” some number of moves to work toward a superior strength position – AND to learn how to prune stupid or useless moves out of the look-ahead algorithm to make moves within time limits.
Today, dedicated AI systems do a damn impressive job of creating the impression of actual thought. They essentially pass the Turing test, and some of them write their own code in ways human programmers can’t understand, to produce results beyond what human programmers can achieve. This also means that some AI systems get creative, in the sense that they “lie” by fabricating fake data and fake references – found nowhere in the training data.
Probably more of a useful idiot than a paid agent. It has been pretty obvious for some time that Trump envies the world’s absolute dictators, and would like to get into their position (that is, without any meaningful opposition or restraints). But I see a key difference between Putin and Trump. Putin lives in the world of realpolitik, and knows his limitations and weaknesses. Trump lives in a fantasy world built on misunderstandings, lies, misrepresentations, exaggerations, and the lust for adulation. Sooner or later, reality will make a correction, though at his age, he may not live to see it.
And the database is more important than you imply. Specifically in chess robots it made the key difference to get them off the ground and raise them to human level.
Next you say something very unfortunate.
These are specifically fixed elements of the game that are hard-wired to all chess robots in exactly the same way. There is absolutely no learning involved on these points. I feel like saying: Maybe you know something about computers and machine learning, but do you know chess?
They do, just as long as you keep in mind that there are thousands of pairs of hands of actual humans involved daily creating the impression.
About chess again, GothamChess (a youtuber who you may have heard of if you know chess) tried the top-notch Chinese AI DeepSeek to play chess with. How did the impressive machine emulate human thought? In the game, the machine messed up whose turn it was. Out of nowhere it magically brought back the queen it had blundered earlier. It castled not with a king, but with a different piece, and it was otherwise hilariously creative. Maybe it was emulating “child’s play” or something like that, but in terms of normal chess it was full of illegal tricks.
Obviously there would be some key differences between an agent (when unpaid or otherwise not in a strict employment relationship, the term is “asset” or “informant”) and his recruiter. Let’s list some of Trump’s recent achievements:
– In the Ukraine war, USA used to be on Ukraine’s side with the rest of Nato, but Trump switched from this to Russia’s side (let’s recall the chief task of Nato: oppose Russian aggression)
– To mark his switch of sides, Trump started calling Zelensky the “dictator without elections” (I submit that at least “dictator without elections” and “modestly successful comedian” are straight quotes from Putin in Trump’s infamous tweet – I know how Putin characterises Zelensky in Russian)
– Trump proposed stripping Ukraine from minerals or at least from profits thereof
– At the same time, Trump is discussing expansion of trade of commodities with Russia, foresignalling cancellation of sanctions against Russia
– Trump stopped military support to Ukraine, specifically the support that was just about to arrive there at Ukraine’s border with Poland
– Trump has stopped sharing military intelligence with Ukraine and told other Nato countries to stop sharing too
How useful does an idiot have to be so that one would stop belittling him as just an idiot? Trump is the president of USA. Even if we call him nothing but a useful idiot, it is a spectacular triumph for FSB to have managed to install one of such level of usefulness to such a position.
Okay, I watched the video in the OP.
Conclusion: AI can recite after everything has been copy-pasted into it. Cool.
I’m content to let the passage of time sort this out. It’s an odd authoritarian that reduces the size and power of government.
As for Putin, when the invasion went badly, he arranged for a dozen oligarchs, presumably those who might have called for his removal, to accidentally fall out of windows . That is the real reason the war of attrition will not go anywhere.
Both sides in Ukraine are caught up in sunk costs.
Both sides seem to have an infinite capacity for enduring pain.
I think it is reasonable to ask whether we want to prolong it.
Apparently better than you do. Yes of course, the rules don’t change and the capability of the pieces doesn’t change either. However, board position is very important. The opening moves on both sides are an attempt to control the center of the board, because pieces in the center can move in all directions allowed by each piece, and this gives them more scope and therefore more strength. A chess player, to be successful, has to know that. A knight in the center of the board has 8 possible moves, while a knight on the side row or column has only four. This necessarily changes the strength of the piece.
I also mentioned that the strength of a piece also depends on the locations of his teammates and opponents – which moves are blocked and which are potentially blocked depending on the next move(s). Accordingly the power of each piece on both sides changes with every made move by either player.
Do you play chess at all? Even beginners understand that a pawn in some locations represents more power than a bishop somewhere out of position. Chess masters routinely sacrifice pieces for position. So do chess programs. And no, genuine chess computers do not violate the rules of chess.
Yes and no. Increasingly, computers are using neural network techniques to modify their own code, often in ways no human would have dreamed of (and sometimes in ways no human can understand). Do you really believe that some human wrote every line of code in chatGPT?
I think you may misread what’s going on. The goal isn’t to reduce the size and power of government, the goal is absolute power, and petty bureaucrats following regulations and laws represent an impediment and a lot of inertia. It takes time to weed out those loyal to the nation rather than loyal to the person, and replace them mostly with personal loyalists along with professionals who know how to orient government toward what Trump wants. After all, most of American government consists of bureaus full of people trying to improve the lives of American citizens in a hundred different ways, none of which are useful to Trump at all.
I’m confused. Are you suggesting Trump is the first to replace top level officials with loyalists.
Have you ever read Seven Days in May, or seen the movie?
I find this amusing, for some reason.
By your own admission, two thirds of your argument went down the drain and actually the third third went too, you’re just trying to wiggle. Let that be.
Of course, because rules have been fed into genuine chess computers and the chess computers are hard-wired to follow them. There’s no learning involved, machine-learning or otherwise, whatsoever. Whereas in the GothamChess example, DeepSeek was evidently left to deduce or assume what the rules might be and the result was what it was. This may be the difference between a robot/engine and a “true” AI.
Let’s recall what happened from ChatGPT version 3.5 to ChatGPT 4. The newer version was radically worse with math, i.e. literally stupider. Between the versions, the human creators of the thing had discovered that users love to fool around with art, so the creators invested in more creative liberties in the AI. It turned out that AI has no inhibitions to apply creative liberties everywhere. The AI does not see any categorical distinction between art and math. This is how DeepSeek evidently messed up chess too: It was being genuinely artificially-intelligent about it. And then human tech support has to manually fix the problem by tagging math and game topics as something not to fool around with.
Do you have an assessment for how much code created by ChatGPT does not need to be reviewed and manually fixed?
In my personal experience, when I had the opportunity, I had ChatGPT create two relatively brief (below twenty lines, but brevity was not the requirement, just that the code turned out no bigger) functions in Emacs for me. After some ten tries to generate each function, I got something to start working with. The functions I actually ended up with after rewriting them to correct them and make them workable barely contain any of the original ChatGPT code. ChatGPT had randomly missed mandatory arguments, injected arguments of wrong type, and did not know where arguments were not applicable. It was quite good at declaring and defining variables though, I got plenty of inspiration to work with in that aspect.
By the way, when DeepSeek was released, some journalists asked it about social media censorship in China. At first DeepSeek answered that social media is strictly regulated in China and censorship is widespread, but within a minute this answer vanished and was replaced with an apology that DeepSeek is unable to answer this. And then the question “Who is China’s president?” resulted in DeepSeek recommending other topics.
Another example. Some psychologists were testing a mental health chatbot. Mostly the chatbot felt supportive, but beyond some threshold when touching more sensitive problems, the bot jumped into what the testers called “abuse mode”.
It’s good to know the limitations of AI.
Yes, you are fatally confused. There are mass firings going on illegally all the way down, and they are perpetrated by one single person who was appointed by Trump. Heads of departments and agencies have to go through confirmation hearings in the Senate, but Musk, who is above all other departments and agencies, did not go through any vetting at all.
Due to the wrong configuration of the constitution of USA and lack of checks and balances in the administrative system (e.g. a government agency, much less an alleged “advisor” firing employees of another government agency is an impossibility in any country of the world that I know of – this is a check or balance that is apparently missing in USA) the coup has already happened from the inside. People, instead of realising that this is an actual coup, argue about some il/legalities of minor relevance. The courts are too slow, just as they were too slow to convict the insurrectionist, election denier, and thief of government documents. Instead, the insurrectionist was granted “absolute immunity” and was allowed to be elected again.
That’s a coup. Stop ignoring the evidence.
Hard to disagree with that.
Unless you pay attention to the definition of coup.
This poll has a section, several pages down, where the Trump policies are individually polled. Politicians who want to be elected or re-elected should watch to see if this changes over time. As for whether the courts are slow, I’d say that’s nonsense. Several rulings have already been to the Supreme Court.
https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/HHP_Feb2025_vFinal.pdf
Before you guys start with the MAGA name calling, try finding one post where I complained about Biden’s policies.
I did say he was mentally unfit. He was, and Jake Tapper has written a book about the coverup.
Well, what is happening is unprecedented. Nixon had more integrity, or at least enough people around him to keep him in check.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_Night_Massacre
Trump is eliminating anyone that he suspects of having enough power and integrity to oppose his path to dictatorship.
I hope I’m wrong.
Then stop ignoring it. Definition of coup from Wikipedia, “A coup d’état, or simply a coup, is typically an illegal and overt attempt by a military organization or other government elites to unseat an incumbent leadership. A self-coup is said to take place when a leader, having come to power through legal means, tries to stay in power through illegal means.”
Some elements of unconstitutionality in current United States administration:
– Trump was elected on an overt platform of “I will be a dictator on day one” (no biggie, just hyperbole maybe, but surely an indication of the character of who you voted for)
– On day one, Trump signed an executive order abolishing birthright citizenship, which is a section of the constitution. The constitution specifies how the constitution can be changed. Trump did not follow the specified procedure, so this point is at least two breaches of constitution, not one.
– Trump stopped the disbursement of already allocated budget items, breaching against the appropriations clause in the constitution. He did not do it just once, but some hundred times over, most recently by stopping military aid to Ukraine that was just about to arrive in Ukraine over Poland’s border.
– According to the constitution, heads of departments and most important agencies (“all other Officers”) are to be appointed “by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate” which is the Senate hearings procedure. Yet in Trump’s administration the most hyperactive “Officer” with apparently the greatest powers, such as the power of intruding everybody else’s premises, copying their entire records, firing their underlings etc., has not been through any such hearings. Musk is an unambiguously unconstitutional appointment regardless of the label of his post, and he is engaged in unambiguously illegal and unconstitutional activity, a clear and present danger to the security and the functioning of the government.
Now, you are across the pond much closer to the events than I am, so the coup should be much more evident to you than to me. The fact that it’s much clearer to me than to you speaks for itself.
Things always look worse from a distance. It the nature of news.
I won’t speak to all of Trump’s actions, but USAID was a money laundry. None of the politicians and poobahs who were named as beneficiaries of laundered donations have come forth to deny it. Also, on February 21, an internet tool was launched that allows tacking small campaign donations —under five dollars, but repeated hundreds of times per person— known as Smurfing. On that day, nearly the entire management of ActBlue resigned.
The amount of Foreign aid money that stayed in the United States is enough to finance 20 presidential campaigns. Per year.
This is the kind of thing which the passage of time will sort out.
But you have a point about the coup. A stroke of Trump’s pen should not be law of the land. But elections have consequences.
Explain the path to dictatorship. Walk me through it, step by step.
I’m going to answer all the experts here: The war in Ukraine has nothing to do with nations or nationality. None. It is the oligarchs playing a game that has more than two sides. Just like the “covid” pandemic was…
Nationalism or patriotism are just thrown in to make it look good… when “big boys” play a game….
I notice that you somehow forget to mention what my argument was, and you seem to miss that I am simply repeating what I said earlier. But I suppose baseless accusations are your best substitute when you don’t know what you’re talking about.
You remind me of a famous politician who defends his lies by repeating them endlessly. But anyway, the fact is that there is a “great deal of learning involved. This is how neural networks work. You yourself noted that there is training involved. How do you get trained if you don’t learn?
Maybe we disagree on what “learning” is. If I tell you something you didn’t know and you remember what I told you, I would say you have learned – even if your underlying wetware hasn’t changed. I have developed the ability to play multiple musical instruments, but if I play the same music on each of them, am I learning anything? Does the development of essential muscle memory count as learning?
You have changed the task here, from playing master-level chess to deducing the rules from observing games. And that might require a different sort of AI, but it’s also a different game. It may not be possible to deduce all of the rules of chess (much less the ability to play at a high level). Just because you have never observed a given move in an actual game, doesn’t necessarily mean such a move is against rules you haven’t been provided with.
We need some agreement on terms here. As you say, AI systems can be creative in undesirable ways. But there is a feedback process here. The system produces undesired output, and the human trainers correct it. The humans do NOT actually reach into the object code and modify it directly. The AI system rests on an enormous rule matrix, and the “manual fixing” involves adding or modifying rules, not code.
Yes indeed! Simulated “thinking” is not thinking as we understand it.
Someone else has had a go already:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/07/donald-trump-america-mafia-state
Is it the same boys in both games? Fauci, Bill Gates, anybody else? Perhaps we should ask AI to elaborate on this idea and make it make sense…
Yes, we disagree what “learning” is. In my view, machine learning happens only in the “training” phase *after* all the database has been fed in. A mere mention of neural networks does not make any difference.
In your view, apparently all programming is learning from the machine’s point of view. At first the machine has no software, then you program it to do something, e.g. make it able to compute 3+2, and, voila, the machine has “learned math”!
Very different ideas about learning indeed. Feel free to elaborate if I’m getting something wrong about your view of learning. I don’t have much hope though because you already veered off into *human learning* which absolutely does not compare and explains nothing about your views of machine learning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933
The fun thing in USA is that Trump does not need any Enabling Act. Hitler had to fend off a bunch of other parties (given multi-party system) and maneuver past several government positions separate from him and higher than him. In USA, the president is the dictator if he wants to, provided that the only other existing party in Congress is weaker than the president’s party. This is already so, so there are no checks and balances against dictatorship in America. Not even the threat of impeachment is any check or balance (note that impeachment of the president never once worked in USA; if successful, impeachment should remove the president from office, but this never happened; Nixon stepped down of his own accord in exchange for pardon when threatened with impeachment). Dictatorship is built into the constitution in USA. This is why I said above that American constitution is configured wrong.
In all other (democratic) countries, the roles of head of state/country and head of government are separate, which makes it more evident when a coup occurs, an autocracy or junta is taking shape instead of the earlier constitutional government. See the current cases against Bolsonaro in Brazil and South Korea’s president. Am I saying Brazil and South Korea are more democratic than USA? Well, at least they recognise what a coup is soon enough when it happens.
In USA the president is both the head of state/country and head of governent at the same time, so the opposing party and courts are left debating each instance of presidential overreach separately without any recourse to another high office in the administration, which would be important for a prompt settlement of the contention instead of going slowly through courts (and not much hope with SCOTUS who already granted “absolute impunity” to Trump). They are unable to address or even point out the fact that some of the unconstitutional moves that the president has made have resulted in a different form of government. The most obvious unconstitutional move I am pointing out for at least a third time now: Elon Musk has been appointed without any oversight to a position of authority to chainsaw, pillage and loot through the entire rest of the administration. Some might object that it’s a scalpel, but there is no such position provided by the constitution for a scalpel either. Thus the president has changed the form of government breaching against the constitution.
There seems to be no legal measure in USA by which the opposing party could at least go on record that a coup took place. Courts in USA are so powerless they could not even convict the chief insurrectionist (and somehow not everyone is on the same page that January 6, 2021, in fact was an insurrection, a failed coup attempt by the same president who is now in office again.) If it were any other country, it would be clear that this is a coup. I’m not saying that there can be sure safeguards against coups, but at least it is good to be clear that now it’s a coup, now it’s a different regime, a dictatorship.
That’s a word salad. Step by step. How does Trump become a dictator?
When you are theorizing about the president having too much power, you should ask why he has such power.
Who said, Stroke of the pen, law of the land? Who said, elections have consequences?
It didn’t used to be this way. Congress used to produce budgets, and did not allow bureaucrats to spend trillions of dollars, unaudited, much of it going to unidentifiable recipients.
The simple fact is that the constitution delegates executive authority to the president, and if congress fails to produce a budget, then the president can spend it as he sees fit.
I thought Freedland covered the issues better than I would have. I’d ask what prevents Trump from becoming a dictator. Perhaps, as neither of us can do anything about it, I guess we can observe how the checks and balances pay out. SCOTUS restraining rather than enabling, Democrats organising and becoming a convincing alternative, Trump losing control of Senate and Congress at the mid-terms, the Republicans leaving office smoothly after being decisively beaten in 2028.
I guess the best chance of avoiding a Trump dictatorship is his health/lifestyle/age but I imagine the puppet masters have plans for that.
He already did. And you are not interested in the fact that he already did.
The fact is that, for Trump cultists, all it takes is their own imagination to deny any sort of reality. When Trump says he is a dictator (which he did, clearly indicating that “dictator” is a positive word for him) the cultists say that’s not to be taken literally. A week or two ago Trump said Zelensky is dictator, clearly indicating that he (Trump) had done a 180-degree reversal on the word “dictator” and now cultists take this literally and agree with Trump that Ukraine started the war and whatever Putin is doing is common sense. Conclusion: Same as for Trump, no normal meaning of any word and no fact matters to Trump cultists.
petrushka, just lay out *your* definition of coup AND STICK TO IT, then maybe there is some sense in having a discussion.