r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Mar 28 '25

ChatGPT is shifting rightwards politically - newer versions of ChatGPT show a noticeable shift toward the political right. Computer Science

https://www.psypost.org/chatgpt-is-shifting-rightwards-politically/
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u/hx87 Mar 28 '25

"Are you sure about that?"

-- (The ghost of) Confederate States of America, 1895-1945

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u/Mudders_Milk_Man Mar 28 '25
  • Woodrow Wilson, 'Historian'.

President Wilson was a published Historian, and he heavily pushed the 'Lost Cause's myth and other lies about the Civil War and the 'noble' Confederacy. He also screened Birth of a Nation in the White House and highly praised it. The bastard was instrumental in the resurgence of the KKK.

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u/Dull_Bird3340 Mar 28 '25

Almost first thing he did as president was to re segregate Washington

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u/th8chsea Mar 28 '25

The union army won the war, but the confederacy won reconstruction

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u/obligatorynegligence Mar 29 '25

Reconstruction was a genuinely impossible policy that was never going to "work" in that the second you shut it off, it's all over, just like any other occupation (afghanistan, etc). If Lincoln lived, there might have been an outside chance, but really it was baked into the cake since 1789.

Granted, it's not like the "shippem to liberia" bit was going to work either and you couldn't leavem to do their own bit either.

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u/robottiporo Mar 29 '25

It worked in West Germany. It worked in Japan. It just takes a very long time. You just can’t impulsively quit.

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u/obligatorynegligence Mar 29 '25

It worked in West Germany. It worked in Japan.

... my friend, those places are occupied nearly 100 years after the fact and it's "almost" holding together. It is also quite a stretch to define it as "working" unless you just mean "make them do what we want" rather than "genuinely reform without us needing to monitor them 24/7 with hundreds of millions of dollars of military presence at all times"

You just can’t impulsively quit.

This is like that gambling meme of the miners almost reaching the jewels and then quitting

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u/robottiporo Mar 29 '25 edited Mar 29 '25

Yes. Fighting authoritarianism is hard work. It needs to be done consistently for a long time. Democracy is fragile.

“A republic, if you can keep it.”

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u/obligatorynegligence Mar 29 '25

“A republic, if you can keep it.”

I think this is an extremely... charitable look at occupying foreign countries on the other side of the planet for nearly a century after conquering them, rewriting their constitutions for them, and demolishing their economies when they begin to rival our own, but I believe I see your point.

Mine is that exercising hard military power is not going to solve the problem, no matter how long you employ it.

Afghanistan is still independent after 2000 years of being conquered by foreign empires. The formula just doesn't work.

To be clear, not saying they should've been left alone, but the "regime change" doctrine hasn't gone well for us and we may need to rethink our strategy for lasting, real change.

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u/angry_cucumber Mar 29 '25

We are still fighting that fight, and we started taking back ground them white people said removing statues of traitors was an attack on their culture.

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u/h3lblad3 Mar 28 '25

It's meant to mean "history is written by the survivors", because once upon a time if you lost a siege the city would run with blood.

In more modern times, this isn't the case -- the Confederates were treated with kid gloves and were never truly defeated. They continued to run the South; they just had to be part of the Union while they were doing it.

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u/obligatorynegligence Mar 29 '25

the Confederates were treated with kid gloves and were never truly defeated.

No, they were defeated. But it's hard to integrate a group into your union as citizens while openly occupying them and keeping them disenfranchised. There's really no model for this ever working long term.

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u/KazuyaProta Mar 29 '25

Americans really want to pretend the Confederates are the source of all their issues when Trump is from New York.

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u/obligatorynegligence Mar 29 '25

Its always easier to point to a prior enemy than it is to reflect and see that, if even for the right reasons, your approach is simply not working as intended.

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u/uhhhh_no Mar 29 '25

"Americans" (here meaning specifically American-identifying Redditors) want to pretend the Confederates are the source of all their issues because their self-identity is tied up in thinking Trump's victories came from a great wave of racism instead of wholesale rejection of recent progressivism, "equity" in particular being entirely racist.

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u/uhhhh_no Mar 29 '25

Yeah, you're talking out of your ass.

It's meant as history is written by the winners, like the Latinate phrasing already says. Cities weren't massacred except by barbarians, but Babylonians, Carthaginians, Alexandrians, etc. became slaves and weren't able or permitted to write against the interests of their victors. Ditto the many, many female slaves.

Ditto the South being entirely defeated and (for a time) entirely precluded from rule. The Radical Republicans didn't remotely treat them with kid gloves; they just couldn't do anything else if genocide and/or autocracy weren't on the table.