Standard Nazi Rhetoric
On the twelfth of January this year I saw a post on X that disgusted more than it should. It was not one of grok ai's non-consensual unclothings of a woman or girl, thankfully I only saw those reported on. This was a post pretending to make a logical argument about those on the left, partly as a provocation and a joke, but definitely also sincere. Sincerely fascist.
It is not a surprise to find fascists on Elon Musk's Nazi hangout, dropping slurs and the most heinous shit you will ever read, when they are not generating sexual images of children, or asking @grok 'is this true' under posts they either want confirmed or debunked by the hallucinating plagiarism bot. But something about this post in particular especially annoyed me. A significant part of that would be that the post was written in response to the ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdering Renee Nicole Good.
Posted by Devon Eriksen (@Devon_Eriksen) on 8 January 2025, the overlong and repetitive screed is reproduced below in all its punishing 'glory' (in italics), interspersed with my commentary (in a regular font):
A vast number of humans, probably a majority, aren't people.
They are large language models.
Nothing here to judge with any clarity so far. This could be a simple conceit with no malicious intent to be understood as the piece continues. It might be a person expressing a genuinely held delusion. Or it could be a metaphor describing a view of human cognition. It will turn out to be none of these, but we are not there yet.
I'm not saying this as a generality, as a clever or funny way of saying, "they are stupid".
No. I mean something very concrete and specific, and there are a lot of people who appear very intelligent, maybe even win awards for writing good poetry or something, who are nevertheless not people, not fully sapient, just a large language model walking around in a human body.
Here we hit the point. This is, as I stated above, provocation, joke, and sincere belief. Not that people (Devon has yet to specify which people) are actually large language models (LLMs), but that metaphorically they function just like LLMs. They deny this when they write, 'I'm not saying this as a generality, as a clever or funny way of saying, "they are stupid".' But we will get to their justification in due course.
First, you have to understand what a large language model is.
It's a computer (organic or inorganic), which has been trained on a data set consisting solely of language (written or spoken), and rewarded for producing language that sounds like the data set, and is relevant to a prompt.
That's all there is in there.
I am far from an expert in LLMs but this does not seem to be a wholly accurate description of what they are. However, it is sufficient for Devon to continue with their argument. And parts of the description ('organic' and 'rewarded', for example) are specifically designed to support the argument irrespective of their truth or falsity.
This is why ChatGPT and Grok lie to you constantly.
It's not because they are somehow just indifferent to the truth — they actually do not understand the concept of "truth" at all.
This is the most accurate Devon will be, enjoy these two sentences as the highpoint of the essay. It does not last.
For something to be a "lie", or an "inaccuracy", there has to be a mismatch between the meaning of words, and the state of reality.
And there's the critical difference. You see, in order to identify a mismatch between the state of reality, and the meaning of a sentence, you have to have a model of reality.
Not just one model, of language.
It may not be obvious at this stage but Devon is conflating reality with opinion, specifically political opinion. Even more specifically, their political opinion.
This is why Grok and ChatGPT hallucinate and tell you lies. Because, for them, everything is language, and there is no reality.
So when I say someone is a large language model, I do not mean he is "stupid". He might be very facile at processing language. He might, in fact, be eloquent enough to give great speeches, get elected president, win the Nobel Peace Prize, and so on.
What I mean is that humans who are large language models do not have a robust world-object model to counterweight their language model. They are able to manipulate symbols, sometimes adroitly, but they are on far shakier ground when trying imagine the objects those symbols represent.
The bit about hallucinations is true, however inaccurate that concept (or the concept of lying) might be for a machine that does not think, does not know or understand anything. LLMs are probabilistic, guessing at the most likely next word based on vast amounts of training data.
The remaining bits after the first paragraph in this section are progressively worse. Unfortunately, they are where the argument starts to come together. A person who is an LLM, Devon argues, may be good with language, may give great speeches, may be elected president or win the Nobel Peace Prize. While you might be tempted to imagine this refers to Donald Trump and his aspirations, and the beliefs of his supporters, I think it is more likely to refer to Barack Obama.
I am sorely tempted to dismiss the final paragraph in this group of three as word-salad. So I will do just that.
Which brings us to this woman.
Renee Nicole Good. Devon for whatever reason, plausible deniability, misogyny, shying away from the reality of the event that might smash the whole fragile edifice of their argument, refuses to name her.
Most conservatives understand her behavior in terms of concepts like "suicidal empathy", or "brainwashing", or an "information bubble", interpreted as reasons why she is delusional, but the truth is far worse than that.
To delusional is to have an object model of the world that is deeply and profoundly wrong. But to have an object model of the world that is deeply and profoundly wrong... you have to have one in the first place.
From this point on, most of the argument consists of rephrasing the same point in different ways. Something like, 'liberals and leftists only understand the world as good and bad linguistic indicators, they strive to be rewarded for saying what they regard as the good linguistic indicators, or acting in a way that will attract good linguistic indicators about them, but none of this matches reality'. Or something of the sort. By this point every time I read the post I am bored and annoyed, and begin to suspect Devon does not have a very tight grip on their argument.
To sapient humans, words are symbols, grounded in object model of reality, that we use to communicate ideas about that reality. We need those words because we don't come equipped with a hologram projector, or telepathic powers.
But for another type of human, that object model isn't very large or robust at all. It consists only of a grass hut or two with a few sticks of furniture, and it can never be matched up with the palaces in the air which she weaves out of words.
And so, to her, there is no reality. Or at least very little.
Huh? Obviously, the claim is that for the rational people like Devon there is very little distance between reality and words, whereas for irrational people like Renee Nicole Good there is a huge gulf between reality and language. Devon also seems to be conflating language with perception and understanding. We see in this a building block of the thesis he laid out at the begining, that some people are less human and therefore more disposable than others. This is the revolting argument at the centre of this disgusting post. And it only becomes clearer.
I am going to have to quote some longer sections here between comments because each paragraph is really just one part of a much longer paragraph setting out the argument I previously summarised. One I could probably abbreviate to a venerable claim from the right, 'liberals and leftists are NPCs'. It is equally as stupid and inaccurate, but has the advantage of brevity.
Reality consists only of her and her immediate surroundings in time and space, and words referring to anything bigger or more complicated are not descriptions of reality... they are magic spells which will make other humans drop loot or give her social approval.
You cannot correct her worldview with contradictory evidence, because there is no worldview to correct.
You cannot confront her with the logical inconsistencies in her worldview, because her object model doesn't actually have any, it's not complex enough for that.
The relevant parts of her world-object model can be summed up as follows:
"If I say Goodthing, I get headpats and cookies from all the people like me."
That model is simply not big or complicated enough to contain notions like self-defense or vehicular assault. She has no theory of mind for a man whose job includes violence. She cannot explain or predict his behavior.
I will butt in here briefly to observe that Devon either does not understand that people possess and act upon empathy, or is taking his lead from various prominent far-right and fascist ghouls who see empathy as a bad thing, as weakness. His pretended lack of empathy is performative and selective, and often intended to shock and infuriate. Back to the tiresome post.
It is too far away from her daily experience to fit into her reality at all.
And if she can't imagine things like these, how can she possibly imagine concrete meanings for vast and complex ideas like demographic replacement, culture shift, and western civilization?
If Devon were not already mask-off, this should be the moment readers realise that they are unquestionably addressing the far-right. For 'demographic replacement' read 'great replacement theory', the lie that nefarious forces (often coded to mean 'the jews') are trying to replace 'white people' with people of colour and that this would be bad. With the implication that this would be bad because people of colour are inferior on this racist worldview. 'Culture shift' and 'western civilisation' gesture at the same idea and reinforce it.
This is not about intelligence or lack of it. This is about what her brain is trained to do.
Her upbringing, education, and life did not force, or even encourage, her to develop a robust world-object model. It wasn't necessary for her to get safety, approval, or cookies. She just had to be glib.
Erm, which is it, Devon? Her worldview is about getting headpats and cookies, or safety, approval and cookies are not necessary?
So it really didn't matter if she had an IQ of 125, or whatever, because if she did, then she was just an IQ-125-large-language-model, and only used that brain capacity for writing clever poetry, and saying things that aligned her to her local social matrix.
Well, art, and existing in a social context are desirable. But since they work best in the presence of empathy that would be alien to Devon's worldview. The rest is mean-spirited 'humour' that all too obviously reflects the true corroded, rancid opinions of a fascist.
She couldn't actually understand the world no matter how smart she was, because her brain was trained up wrong.
I don't know if this is correctable, or if there was some critical developmental phase that was missed, but it doesn't matter, because once the LLM-humans are adults, they won't sit still for corrective therapy, percussive or not.
What's important is that they can't be taught things. They can be programmed to repeat stuff, and if you win a culture war, you can even program them to say the sensible stuff. But even then, they will just be saying it for headpats and cookies. They will never truly understand the sense of what they are repeating, because they don't understand things.
They are just Large Language Models.
And we have to figure out some way to take the vote away from them.
And that is that. A deliberate attempt to dehumanise a murder victim, and by extension all women and anyone on the left. You will probably have noticed that people of colour are barely alluded to. They are evidently so far outside Devon's consideration that they cannot be dehumanised, since in that worldview they are not human to begin with.
Comments