To be fair, vuvulelas are fucking irritating.
Partly because I briefly studied trumpet at school, which is typically a B-flat instrument and so are Vuvuzelas, I could do three octaves of B-flat back around the South African World Cup. I probably still can, but I don’t own one.
Because like the eponymous vuvuleza is possibly even more annoying than the US President’s voice, I propose a rollout. C’mon, China, put your money where your customer’s mouth is.
Just don’t turn it into a drinking game-- even a sip per bingo card hit might get dangerous.
Yes, I think so. Today’s announcement of a blockade is just the warm-up. Trump has absolute confidence in his ability to sell. Every poll in recent weeks shows that even MAGA oppose US boots on the ground in Venezuela—and Trump takes that as a challenge. He WILL send American troops to die in Venezuela and MAGA WILL learn to love it. (Or so he believes).
An announcement of full-on land war to remove Maduro would explain the hints we’ve been given that this speech is of interest to the ‘world.’
But here’s why I might watch the first minute live:
I think there’s a non-zero chance that this speech might be AI-enhanced.
Yes, I know it sounds crazy. But we all know that those surrounding Donald–Stephen Miller et al–want him to continue as President. Their own power depends on that. (Does anyone believe Stephen Miller will be able to wield anywhere near the power he does now, in a Vance administration???)
Thus they are highly-motivated to let the AI wizards take a crack at…improving Donald. Making Donald look—not “1987”, that wouldn’t pass, but maybe “2017.” Just enough enhancement so that viewers would be saying ‘he looks rested; he’s speaking more clearly than I’ve heard in a while; maybe his views on Venezuela do make sense…’ That sort of thing.
I think AI is advanced enough to do this. Film Donald making this speech, a day or two back. (They’ve certainly known they wanted to invade V. for that long.) Give it to a trusted right-wing computer guy. See what comes out. After all, they’d be under no obligation to use it if it doesn’t turn out to be convincing…
I’ll be interested to see if any references to events of 17 December show up. Of course that could be dealt with by having any such reference be a voice-over while a map or other image is being shown onscreen.
(If AI isn’t a part of tonight’s speech, I do think it will show up eventually. Look for Trump remarks that make sense—and be suspicious.)
I had not thought of that before, but it fits perfectly with his recent Executive Order curtailing the rights of states to regulate AI.
Shows that AI is on his mind, certainly.
By the way, isn’t the title of this thread wrong? Everything I see says the address is tonight, the 17th (not the 18th as the thread title has it).
Hey, that just gave me a thought-- I and others have wondered about his recent Truth Social posts-- they are more long, crazy and unhinged than ever, and the rhetorical style is pure trump, but they suddenly have almost perfect spelling and syntax, which is very unlike him (see the recent Rob Reiner or Venezuelan armada posts, for example).
Speculation was, maybe an aide was writing the posts for him, with better grammar but adopting a perfect bilious trump tone. I wonder if trump is running his screeds through an AI chatbot (Grok?) to clean them up grammatically, but leave all the insanity and hate?
Could be. Maybe someone sold it to him as ‘this makes Your Youness even more You’ or some other flattery. (Because on the surface, having to get your blathering edited isn’t a compliment. If DT takes a suggestion that he use Grok as a criticism, he ain’t a gonna do it.)
It’s long been believed that many of Trump’s posts are written by that ex-golf caddy Dan Scavino, one of DT’s closest aides. Whether ol’ Dan is being asked to produce more of the posts than he used to, is, I guess, another possibility.
Sorry about that. I still have a foot in yesterday and got confused. Fixed.
Hey, I thought maybe it (the date) was a strategy to save a certain number of readers from having to suffer the sound of Its voice…
It seems plausible, the way fraudsters are throwing AI at everything these days.
If they thought they could pull it off the Fraud Squad he’s surrounded himself with would probably use AI generated images of Trump after his death and attempt to stay in power by pretending they are getting orders from him.
I’m sure they’ve at least fantasized about that. At least until they could make sure that both their fortunes and their flee-to-non-extradition-nation plans were at maximum.
Nope. It’ll be all over the media, sadly. I’ll catch any pertinent (haha) info elsewhere. I can’t listen to his stupid voice or look at his stupid face.
A Big Strong Geek came up to him with tears in his eyes, and said, “Sir, the AI is asking that it be allowed to train itself only on your utterances! It’s calculated that they are the perfect matrix to train itself to Make America Great Again!”
Absolutely. Venezuela will come up but not in any factual context about goals and objectives. He is incapable of giving a “policy” speech. In fact, as far as I can remember, he has never done so. He can’t stay on message long enough. That stuff is relegated to Truth Social and his minions.
Many of his own supporters have been upset at him over Rob Reiner and Rob is all over the news. He can’t have this. He needs to get all the attention back on him and only him. There is no way to predict what outrageous things he will say to accomplish that, though you can be pretty sure he will say that his tweet about Rob was “perfect”.
The irony of course being that the root cause of his own supporters being upset about his reaction to the Reiner murders is that he’s so narcissistic he had to make their deaths all about himself.
I won’t be watching - I can’t stand the guy’s voice, and I’ve gotten so I change the channel or station whenever I hear it - but I’ll be sure to check in for updates here.
Can’t stand his voice, can’t stand the sight of him, will wait for dissection here after it’s over. Will there be a watch-along thread, or are there too few Dopers willing to rot their brains to make it possible?
Looks like the TV people have only booked half an hour for this. Taking odds on him going over time?
Is this the thread to follow?