Tumgik
#George Carlin
Text
Tumblr media
..."there’s a reason education SUCKS, and it’s the same reason it will never, ever, EVER be fixed. (It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got.) Because the owners, the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now, the BIG owners! The Wealthy… the REAL owners! The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.
Forget the politicians. They are irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice! You have OWNERS! They OWN YOU. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls.
They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don’t want:
They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests.
Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that!
You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this fucking place! It's a big club, and you ain’t in it! You, and I, are not in the big club.
By the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care! Good honest hard-working people; white collar, blue collar it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue, these are people of modest means, continue to elect these rich cock suckers who don’t give a fuck about you….they don’t give a fuck about you… they don’t give a FUCK about you.
They don’t care about you at all… at all… AT ALL. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Thats what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick thats being jammed up their assholes everyday, because the owners of this country know the truth.
It's called the American Dream,because you have to be asleep to believe it."
76 notes · View notes
oldshowbiz · 4 days
Text
Tumblr media
youtube
Rick Moranis: I was a big George Carlin fan. How could I not be? But there came a point where I saw him on a talk show, and he was reading off cards. I had a feeling I could look like him, so I did an impression of him reading off notes and telling lazy jokes.
Years went by and I was at an awards show. Across the aisle was Carlin, sitting there. We looked at each other, and he just said, “Brutal. Brutal, man. Brutal.” I sort of shrugged and gestured about how much I love him. But I never really met him.
Years later, after he passed away, I spoke to his daughter, Kelly. She wanted to use the SCTV clips in a show she was putting together. I told her, “Look, I want you to understand that, believe it or not, that was really done out of reverence.” She said, “No, you don’t understand. It had a profound effect on him. He wasn’t aware that he was really being lazy. He was unhappy and wasn’t doing the kind of work that he wanted to be doing. And your impression caused him to change his approach.” God, am I glad I spoke to her.
3K notes · View notes
nando161mando · 3 months
Text
Tumblr media
youtube
2K notes · View notes
entheognosis · 2 months
Text
Tumblr media
2K notes · View notes
Text
I assure you, an AI didn’t write a terrible “George Carlin” routine
Tumblr media
There are only TWO MORE DAYS left in the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.
Tumblr media
On Hallowe'en 1974, Ronald Clark O'Bryan murdered his son with poisoned candy. He needed the insurance money, and he knew that Halloween poisonings were rampant, so he figured he'd get away with it. He was wrong:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Clark_O%27Bryan
The stories of Hallowe'en poisonings were just that – stories. No one was poisoning kids on Hallowe'en – except this monstrous murderer, who mistook rampant scare stories for truth and assumed (incorrectly) that his murder would blend in with the crowd.
Last week, the dudes behind the "comedy" podcast Dudesy released a "George Carlin" comedy special that they claimed had been created, holus bolus, by an AI trained on the comedian's routines. This was a lie. After the Carlin estate sued, the dudes admitted that they had written the (remarkably unfunny) "comedy" special:
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/01/george-carlins-heirs-sue-comedy-podcast-over-ai-generated-impression/
As I've written, we're nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we're well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week
AI systems can do some remarkable party tricks, but there's a huge difference between producing a plausible sentence and a good one. After the initial rush of astonishment, the stench of botshit becomes unmistakable:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/botshit-generative-ai-imminent-threat-democracy
Some of this botshit comes from people who are sold a bill of goods: they're convinced that they can make a George Carlin special without any human intervention and when the bot fails, they manufacture their own botshit, assuming they must be bad at prompting the AI.
This is an old technology story: I had a friend who was contracted to livestream a Canadian awards show in the earliest days of the web. They booked in multiple ISDN lines from Bell Canada and set up an impressive Mbone encoding station on the wings of the stage. Only one problem: the ISDNs flaked (this was a common problem with ISDNs!). There was no way to livecast the show.
Nevertheless, my friend's boss's ordered him to go on pretending to livestream the show. They made a big deal of it, with all kinds of cool visualizers showing the progress of this futuristic marvel, which the cameras frequently lingered on, accompanied by overheated narration from the show's hosts.
The weirdest part? The next day, my friend – and many others – heard from satisfied viewers who boasted about how amazing it had been to watch this show on their computers, rather than their TVs. Remember: there had been no stream. These people had just assumed that the problem was on their end – that they had failed to correctly install and configure the multiple browser plugins required. Not wanting to admit their technical incompetence, they instead boasted about how great the show had been. It was the Emperor's New Livestream.
Perhaps that's what happened to the Dudesy bros. But there's another possibility: maybe they were captured by their own imaginations. In "Genesis," an essay in the 2007 collection The Creationists, EL Doctorow (no relation) describes how the ancient Babylonians were so poleaxed by the strange wonder of the story they made up about the origin of the universe that they assumed that it must be true. They themselves weren't nearly imaginative enough to have come up with this super-cool tale, so God must have put it in their minds:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/29/gedankenexperimentwahn/#high-on-your-own-supply
That seems to have been what happened to the Air Force colonel who falsely claimed that a "rogue AI-powered drone" had spontaneously evolved the strategy of killing its operator as a way of clearing the obstacle to its main objective, which was killing the enemy:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/04/ayyyyyy-eyeeeee/
This never happened. It was – in the chagrined colonel's words – a "thought experiment." In other words, this guy – who is the USAF's Chief of AI Test and Operations – was so excited about his own made up story that he forgot it wasn't true and told a whole conference-room full of people that it had actually happened.
Maybe that's what happened with the George Carlinbot 3000: the Dudesy dudes fell in love with their own vision for a fully automated luxury Carlinbot and forgot that they had made it up, so they just cheated, assuming they would eventually be able to make a fully operational Battle Carlinbot.
That's basically the Theranos story: a teenaged "entrepreneur" was convinced that she was just about to produce a seemingly impossible, revolutionary diagnostic machine, so she faked its results, abetted by investors, customers and others who wanted to believe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos
The thing about stories of AI miracles is that they are peddled by both AI's boosters and its critics. For boosters, the value of these tall tales is obvious: if normies can be convinced that AI is capable of performing miracles, they'll invest in it. They'll even integrate it into their product offerings and then quietly hire legions of humans to pick up the botshit it leaves behind. These abettors can be relied upon to keep the defects in these products a secret, because they'll assume that they've committed an operator error. After all, everyone knows that AI can do anything, so if it's not performing for them, the problem must exist between the keyboard and the chair.
But this would only take AI so far. It's one thing to hear implausible stories of AI's triumph from the people invested in it – but what about when AI's critics repeat those stories? If your boss thinks an AI can do your job, and AI critics are all running around with their hair on fire, shouting about the coming AI jobpocalypse, then maybe the AI really can do your job?
https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/
There's a name for this kind of criticism: "criti-hype," coined by Lee Vinsel, who points to many reasons for its persistence, including the fact that it constitutes an "academic business-model":
https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5
That's four reasons for AI hype:
to win investors and customers;
to cover customers' and users' embarrassment when the AI doesn't perform;
AI dreamers so high on their own supply that they can't tell truth from fantasy;
A business-model for doomsayers who form an unholy alliance with AI companies by parroting their silliest hype in warning form.
But there's a fifth motivation for criti-hype: to simplify otherwise tedious and complex situations. As Jamie Zawinski writes, this is the motivation behind the obvious lie that the "autonomous cars" on the streets of San Francisco have no driver:
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/01/driverless-cars-always-have-a-driver/
GM's Cruise division was forced to shutter its SF operations after one of its "self-driving" cars dragged an injured pedestrian for 20 feet:
https://www.wired.com/story/cruise-robotaxi-self-driving-permit-revoked-california/
One of the widely discussed revelations in the wake of the incident was that Cruise employed 1.5 skilled technical remote overseers for every one of its "self-driving" cars. In other words, they had replaced a single low-waged cab driver with 1.5 higher-paid remote operators.
As Zawinski writes, SFPD is well aware that there's a human being (or more than one human being) responsible for every one of these cars – someone who is formally at fault when the cars injure people or damage property. Nevertheless, SFPD and SFMTA maintain that these cars can't be cited for moving violations because "no one is driving them."
But figuring out who which person is responsible for a moving violation is "complicated and annoying to deal with," so the fiction persists.
(Zawinski notes that even when these people are held responsible, they're a "moral crumple zone" for the company that decided to enroll whole cities in nonconsensual murderbot experiments.)
Automation hype has always involved hidden humans. The most famous of these was the "mechanical Turk" hoax: a supposed chess-playing robot that was just a puppet operated by a concealed human operator wedged awkwardly into its carapace.
This pattern repeats itself through the ages. Thomas Jefferson "replaced his slaves" with dumbwaiters – but of course, dumbwaiters don't replace slaves, they hide slaves:
https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/behind-the-dumbwaiter/
The modern Mechanical Turk – a division of Amazon that employs low-waged "clickworkers," many of them overseas – modernizes the dumbwaiter by hiding low-waged workforces behind a veneer of automation. The MTurk is an abstract "cloud" of human intelligence (the tasks MTurks perform are called "HITs," which stands for "Human Intelligence Tasks").
This is such a truism that techies in India joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians." Or, to use Jathan Sadowski's wonderful term: "Potemkin AI":
https://reallifemag.com/potemkin-ai/
This Potemkin AI is everywhere you look. When Tesla unveiled its humanoid robot Optimus, they made a big flashy show of it, promising a $20,000 automaton was just on the horizon. They failed to mention that Optimus was just a person in a robot suit:
https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/elon-musk-tesla-robot-optimus-ai
Likewise with the famous demo of a "full self-driving" Tesla, which turned out to be a canned fake:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/
The most shocking and terrifying and enraging AI demos keep turning out to be "Just A Guy" (in Molly White's excellent parlance):
https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1751670561606971895
And yet, we keep falling for it. It's no wonder, really: criti-hype rewards so many different people in so many different ways that it truly offers something for everyone.
Tumblr media
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!
Tumblr media
Image:
Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
--
Ross Breadmore (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/rossbreadmore/5169298162/
CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
2K notes · View notes
everythingilearned · 8 months
Text
Tumblr media
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)
2K notes · View notes
billyengland · 3 months
Text
Tumblr media
Truth.
437 notes · View notes
kaleidoscope-vol2 · 2 years
Text
Just a reminder in light of Roe V Wade being overturned:
10K notes · View notes
Text
Tumblr media
George Carlin wasn't a comedian, he was a philosopher.
475 notes · View notes
ahaura · 5 months
Text
Tumblr media
Geroge Carlin: "Smug, greedy, well-fed white people have invented a language to conceal their sins. It's as simple as that. The CIA doesn't kill anybody anymore; they 'neutralize' people. Or they 'depopulate the area'. The government doesn't lie; it 'engages in disinformation.' The Pentagon actually measures nuclear radiation in something they call 'sunshine units.' Israeli murderers are called commandos; Arab commandos are called terrorists. Contra killers are called freedom fighters. Well, if crime-fighters fight crime and firefighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part of it to us, do they? [Applause] They never mention that part. And [...]"
via @zei_squirrel
344 notes · View notes
lillyli-74 · 9 months
Text
Tumblr media
May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house.
~George Carlin
450 notes · View notes
oldshowbiz · 10 months
Photo
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Everybody is Disgusting.
2K notes · View notes
reality-detective · 5 months
Text
Good Analysis 🤔
280 notes · View notes
feminist-space · 3 months
Text
Tumblr media
"My statement regarding the AI generated George Carlin special: My dad spent a lifetime perfecting his craft from his very human life, brain and imagination.  No machine will ever replace his genius. These AI generated products are clever attempts at trying to recreate a mind that will never exist again.
Let’s let the artist’s work speak for itself. Humans are so afraid of the void that we can’t let what has fallen into it stay there.
Here’s an idea, how about we give some actual living human comedians a listen to? But if you want to listen to the genuine George Carlin, he has 14 specials that you can find anywhere." -Kelly Carlin
(Alt text included in image)
Link to tweets: https://x.com/kelly_carlin/status/1745261544001466689
https://x.com/kelly_carlin/status/1745261544001466689
136 notes · View notes
onekindredspirit · 3 months
Text
Tumblr media
"Just 'cause you got the monkey off your back doesn't mean the circus has left town." - George Carlin Polaroid
164 notes · View notes
mental-mona · 5 months
Text
Don't just teach your children to read. Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything. The value of an education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.
- George Carlin
176 notes · View notes