Trumpery, Populism and Nationalism: What are the implications for Scotland, the UK and Wider World?
Trump 2.0 raises all sorts of questions even in Scotland where we are supposedly immune to that sort of thing. I will examine the Scottish question later, but first we need to sort out some basic ideas about populism and nationalism, because it is too easy to treat them as synonyms.
It is common these days to juxtapose ‘liberal cosmopolitanism’ and ‘reactionary nationalism’ as the two dominant mindsets. And yet we know better than most that Scotland doesn’t fit that lazy conventional wisdom. Truth to tell, nationalism takes many forms, because it is protean, shifts its shape according to political, social and cultural conditions. The social base of nationalism in Scotland in our day is liberal, educated and progressive: in which being young(ish) and educated are much better predictors as to whether you support an independent Scotland or not. That’s where we are in 2025.
When it comes to understand Trumpery, we are in a bit of a bind. His is certainly neither liberal nor cosmopolitan, still less socially and culturally progressive.
So what is it? It’s better to start with a related but conceptually different idea: populism. If the central idea of nationalism is ‘the nation’, that of populism is ‘the people’. On the one hand, ‘the nation’ is in essence a linear, diachronic notion of a cultural entity evolving through time. ‘The people’, on the other hand, is synchronic, set in place rather than time; horizontal, if you like, but above all, homogeneous.
In practice, nationalism and populism can, and often do, meld into each other, but to comprehend them we need to keep them separate in our heads. As the American academic Rogers Brubaker put it: ‘”The nation” … unlike ”the people” does not designate one part of a political community that is opposed to another part; it designates a political or cultural whole, a politically or (ethno) culturally bounded community’ (Brubaker, 2020).
The myth of ‘we are the 100% people’
‘The people’ is in essence a moral, not an empirical category. Populists do not claim that ‘we are the 99%’, but that ‘we are the 100% people’. This is not an argument about numbers, though, because ‘the people’ is defined in such a way as to exclude those judged not to be fit, because they are ‘not like us’. The boundary is deliberately drawn to be exclusive, and above all, to exclude ‘the elite’, however defined. ‘The people’ is not to be defined in empirical terms; it is about ‘real people’, ‘authentic people’ defined for the purpose. As Jan-Werner Müller observed, it is ‘a particular moralistic imagination of politics, a way of perceiving the political world that sets a morally pure and fully unified people against elites who are deemed corrupt or in some other way morally inferior’. (Müller, 2017).
Those defined as ‘liberal elites’ – the ‘other’ to populists – do not think of themselves as such. Think back to Michael Gove’s comment at the time of Brexit that ‘we have had enough of experts’, or the Daily Mail’s designation of judges as ‘enemies of the people’. Or, on the other side, Hillary Clinton’s infamous description of Trump supporters as ‘a basket of deplorables’; an elephant trap into which she plunged headlong, never to scramble out again. Dismissing populists as driven by resentment, frustration, and ‘just emotion’ (not reason) drives the wedge in deeper.
So populists are not only anti-elites, whoever they may be, but anti-pluralists, which helps to explain why ‘multiculturalism’ especially in the form of ‘immigrants’ – black and brown people, even when born and bred in the country (‘and where are you really from?’) are the bêtes noires. No matter that ‘the other’ might embrace ‘the people’, as we saw in the support for Trump in 2024 among Hispanics and even some African-Americans. Being inside the people’s tent is much more comfortable than being outside it. Otherwise, you get labelled as one of the elite, bizarre as it seems.
There is also a political style that goes with this. Trump epitomises it. ‘… a kind of personal narcissistic affirmation with the middle finger [this is America, after all] defiantly raised to the well-brought up’. It’s about the seemingly immediate and earthy, despite it being easy to argue that ‘reality’ is to the contrary. Think not only Trump, but Boris Johnson: manifestly from wealth and privilege, but able to play the people’s game. So it’s partly about political style: Johnson not Starmer; even Salmond not Swinney. The ‘personalist’ after all is much closer to ‘the people’. It’s about juxtaposing ‘high’ and ‘low’ political styles. The ‘high’ is more abstract and restrained; the ‘low’ is more concrete and immediate.
Faith and Leadership
But it’s not simply about the style of doing politics. It’s about the politics of faith, rather than the politics of scepticism. The former focuses on the redemptive quality of politics; the latter, on pragmatism – ‘what works’. To be sure, democracy has these as two sides of the same coin; the redemptive and the pragmatic. Simply relying on the latter isn’t enough. As the political philosopher Margaret Canovan observed: ‘… any attempt to banish the redemptive aspect of democracy is likely to be self-defeating. As a way of interpreting democracy it is rather like trying to keep a church going without faith. In politics as in religion, loss of faith tends to lead to corruption and surrenders the ground to revivalism’ (Canovan, 2005). But, as we know historically in Scotland, faith without works has its own road to perdition.
So what does this have to do with 2025, and Trump in particular? Getting shot at, and surviving – with or without the grace of God – reinforces the salvationist image. Not for nothing did he come out of television; he is not much of a businessman. It’s theatrical, but dangerous all the same. Note too that it’s about ‘leadership’, and there is a close tie-in between ‘the leader’ and ‘the people’, with the former uniquely able to interpret the popular will. If this sounds historically familiar, that’s because it is. The leader (‘führer’, after all, in German) incorporates and expresses the ‘popular will’, even getting close to claiming that ‘I am the people’, a process of internal authentication. Parties and institutions can simply be swept aside as obfuscating the people’s will, as complicating the decision process.
You cannot, of course, run a complex society like this. That requires considerable attention to detail, the interpellation of specific decisions, and being able to smooth out the contradictions between them. As Canovan pointed out: ‘it is hard to see what could make Britain’s Inland Revenue, Department of Social Security or even Parliament itself feel like the expression of the popular will’.
It remains to be seen what Trumpery will do to America. [Does it? – Ed] There is, though, a deep history of populism there. Indeed, it was in the late 19th century that the American People’s Party came to be, and there is a long history in a society (if it is indeed one society) founded after all on ‘we, the people’, even though in 1776 ‘the people’ which mattered were a small select band of white Anglo-Saxon landowners. Populism has a deep US history, running through McCarthyism, George Wallace, Nixon’s “silent majority”, The Tea Party, from which Trump is simply the latter-day extension. Jan-Werner Müller commented: ‘what does “Make America Great Again” actually mean, other than that the people have been betrayed by elites and that anybody who opposes Trump must also somehow be against “American Greatness”.
Nowhere, these days, is immune. Populism is virtually everywhere; and while they are not ‘the same’, the family resemblances are remarkable. This is because populism has a lot of fodder to feed off: economic change which destroys employment routines, technology replacing people, shrinking social democracy, so-called globalisation. It’s not simply about style and rhetoric. And if populism has particular appeal to those so-called ‘left behind’ it is not a coincidence.
And here? There was, and is, Brexit, the elephant still lurking in the room, which no-one will seemingly touch with the bargepole. The political success of the Tories and Johnson in 2019 can be understood not simply as the expression of English nationalism, but rather of populism. It was not so much that ‘the English nation’ was being recovered, but that ‘them’ – metropolitan elites and the European technocrats were acting against ‘the people’.
And in Scotland? Our nationalism as expressed since 2014, through the Scottish referendum on independence, and the rejection of Brexit in 2016, seem to place us on the other side of the populist divide. But never say never. Opinion polls in late 2024 put the Reform Party on about 14% of the vote in Scotland, and furthermore, there is a substantial proportion of people (about one third in the top quartile) with ‘authoritarian’ (rather than ‘liberal’) views.
Meanwhile, we watch and wait with trepidation on what Trumpery might bring. The potential for collateral damage to Scotland, and Britain, is great.
References:
Rogers Brubaker, ‘Populism and Nationalism’, in Nations and Nationalism, Vol. 26, 2020.
Margaret Canovan, The People (Polity, 2005).
Jan-Werner Müller, What is Populism? (Penguin, 2017).
But is this old-school, stale-fart humanism really everywhere these days?
On the topical Greenland question, apparently a proposed Constitution drafted in 2023 had this in its preamble, translated to English:
“The Greenlandic people are part of nature. We must protect nature, its ecosystems, biodiversity and all its life forms. We live from and with nature which is an inviolate principle for a sustainable society in the future”,
https://www.arctictoday.com/greenland-drafts-constitution-for-its-ultimate-independence/
which is quite a different kettle of fish (even though the draft goes on to say that fish would be collectively owned by humans). And indeed, the executive authority which USAmerican President Donald Trump currently wields was largely copied, consciously or otherwise, from the British Imperial Royal Prerogative. A form of executive power that the draft Greenland Constitution reportedly rejects, by the way.
The point should be clear, that political Constitutions are in substantial part a list of checks against democracy, which is a largely meaningless means-focused mode of governance that in a sick society serves to spread sickness, as should be painfully obvious.
So the author is a member of the liberal elite and thinks his and his pal’s nationalism is saintly and all-pervasive throughout the land. Possibly because painting a flag on your face and waving a flag is different from wearing buffalo horns with a flag painted on your face and waving a flag.
Many people paint a flag on their face at international sporting events- it is not a threatening act.
The people that painted a flag on their face in 2014 referendum accepted they lost as did Alex Salmond and all leaders of Yes side. (this doesn’t mean you have to stop arguing for what your cause.)
Trump and his acolytes:
never accepted they lost 2020 vote
tried to get election officials to overturn result including threatening them
Trump incited his acolytes to storm government in an attempt to overturn election result and violently overthrow government
Trump has now pardoned his acolytes who broke law on 6th January 2021.
The above actions are to be found in handbook of How to be a Facist – Chapter 1.
To compare Trump, his policies and supporters actions to independence movement only serves to show how ridiculous you and your comments are.
Well said. Skelp the boy’s erse.
He is an arsehole!
All the people who excuse Trump, accommodate Trump etc need to have this basic fact rammed down their throat.
Trump proved he does not believe in democratic process so should have been automatically debarred from both standing for election or even voting again.
The action of not accepting the outcome of an election, trying to overthrow it and pardoning those convicted is Page One, Chapter One in ‘How to Be a Facist’ handbook.
This post gives us plenty to ponder, and the distinction between nationalism and populism is very useful. On an ideal level, nations are diachronic, linear and therefore pluralist, while peoples are synchronic, horizontal and aspire to homogeneity.
Nations and nationalisms are committed to recognising historical contingencies. Nations are inevitably complex, containing a multiplicity of existing groups and institutions each with its own overlapping and competing interests and values. The Scottish Football Association and the Scottish Rugby Union are different constituencies, and different again from the Scottish Poetry Library and the Scottish Women’s Institutes. But all contribute towards defining Scottish nationality.
Peoples and populisms on the other hand aspire to simplicity. They operate by prescriptive definition, sidestepping awkward facts and appealing to supposed biological or cultural essentialisms. At worst, populism can become a religious cult: the people are who we say they are, and anyone who disagrees is a heretic and a non-person.
From this perspective we can draws useful comparisons between Trumpery and – say – Nazi Germany. Nazi ideology was abhorrent and inhumane, but it had some internal consistency and some respect for external facts. It was aimed at an electorate with a generally shared language, culture and social assumptions. It addressed widespread, perhaps justifiable, political grievances such as the Versailles settlement after World War I. Nazi ideas about race found some support in widely prevalent ‘scientific’ theories of the day. In short, Nazi ideology related intelligibly to perceived social realities: it offered a plausible way of aligning nation and people.
Trump is very different. As Dave McCrone notes, he is a creature of the television industry who migrated seamlessly to social media. He has always floated free of physical and historical realities, a fact reflected in his political schtick.
His pronouncements pay little regard to truth or consistency and his actions bear little relation to his pronouncements. He has appealed (with some success) to Latinx and Afro-American voters while also courting white supremacists. Some of his supporters proclaim themselves as White Nationalists (whatever White may mean here), others as Christian Nationalists. None of this makes any logical sense. Not all Whites are Christians and not all Christians are White, and on the global scale most Whites and Christians are not US citizens.
Trump’s goal may be to break lots of things and move fast before reality (or public opinion) catch up with him. How this will play out is anyone’s guess. It may lead to chaos and meltdown, or to gridlock and stasis. Is it helpful to remember that in Ancient Greek democracy one meaning of ‘stasis’ was faction or civil war?
Yourself and David McCrone are surely guilty of drawing a manichean contrast between populism and nationalism.
I would say that populism is less about ideology and more about method. It’s a method which bypasses the normal circuits of political power and the accepted language of political discourse. It seeks to mobilize “the masses” with, shall we say, a non-parliamentary discourse, and considers elections merely one of many other kinds of legitimate zones of contention (lawfare, Januray 6th).
It does indeed seek to present reality as a contrast between the “people” and the elite or equally often “the system”, and invariably offers empty solutions for complex problems. Its leaders, sooner or later, go over the heads of their own parties, parliaments, constitutions etc to appeal to “the people” (Boris Johnson, Trump, Orban, Carles Puigdemont) and its followers are prone to conspiracy theories and paranoia.
Note that there can be left-wing populism and right-wing populism. Also that there can be populist nationalism and democratic, parliamentary nationalism. The SNP clearly are of the latter, and Trump of the former. I would define Trump as a white populsit American nationalist – a guy’s whose campiagn slogan was MAGA can hardly be taken to be anything other than a nationalist.
As Tom Nairn pointed out, nationalism is Janus faced. And there is clearly a difference between expanisve, imperialist nationalism (colonial Britain, Nazi Germany) and defensive, democratic, self determination nationalism such as is the core of the Scottish independence movement. If Scotland were independent tomorrow, many of us would cease to consider ourselves or be identifiable as Scottish nationalists, but probably an equal number of people would continue to be nationalists.
A nationalist worldview, which sees nations as an end in themselves, existing and developing over time in an identifiable meaningful way, can be contrasted with, say, a Marxist view of history which sees the development of History in terms of classes (Marx has almost nothing to say about the Nation State) or a Freudian / psychonalatical view of history where “repression” is the key to culture and society, or the neo-Hegelian Liberal view of History in which “progress” and the expansion of free markets and bourgeois parliamentary democracy are the destiny of humankind, expressed most famously by Fukuyama with his phrase “the end of History”, essentially rehashing for our time what Hegel said about History after Napoleon’s victory at the battle of Jena I think it was…
I don’t think we know what Trump will bring, though I think we know it will not be good and will probably be very bad, especially for minorities. Is the US democratic system robust enough to stymie him? In terms of foreign policy, for example, will be really be able to roll back US foreign policy and embrace isolationism instead? And which global power will occupy the space such a USA leaves behind? Will the sheer upheaval of all the things he says he wants to do not check him?
We’ll soon find out, but whether you want to call him a nationalist or a populist or, as I prefer, a populist nationalist, it’s worrying…
If a person ceases to be a nationalist once independence is attained, why must they be nationalist now? It seems like nominal nationalism. I think you draw an excellent distinction here between those people and those who will continue to be nationalists after independence, but are there not those who support independence who would not regard themselves as nationalists now and have no desire to; nominal means ‘in name only’? I am not a nationalist, my experience of it (generally, in different places, countries and times) over many years has never endeared me to it, even in its mildest form (the why is not really relevant here). But I support independence.
Arguing about the distinctions between nationalism(s) and populism(s) seems quite moot to me.
I agree, the independence movement is made up of nationalist and non-nationalist supporters and indeed someone like Tom Nairn was critcized by thinkers like Beveridge and Turnbull, who are unashamedly nationalisit intellectuals, for merely supporting independence for instrumental reasons, ie, to further progressive politics.
If the UK was a modern, progressive, democratic fully federal republic, there would be those who would see no need for independence, about half roughly I would say, and those who would still prefer independence.
It ought to be said that nationalism mainly gets a bad press when it is in opposition, when it wants to change something. The nation States of Europe are all in essence nationalist entities and no one thinks that odd much less backward or reactionary. The EU was specifically set up to direct the innate nationalism of European nation States to a common cause for that acknowledged reason.
I can understand why it is easier for Scottish nationalists to settle for calling Trump a populist rather than a nationalist, but he absolutely is one: a white, right-wing, populist nationalist, not to say fascist…
The Nazis were racialists more than nationalists. They believed in the pseudo-scientific Ayran race, which Germany embodied, more than anything else… hence their absolute obsession with bloodlines…
I agree with much of this but by your characterisation, what nation state in the world is not ‘nationalist’ and can we equate a state with its individual people? One’s original nationality is an accident of birth and I am not born a nationalist just because I live in a nation state, by what you describe as the apparent default of simply accepting the idea of nation state = nationalism.
Well, in terms of Europe, I’m talking about Nation States, as I said in my reply to you.
For example, voting rights in General Elections are not given to non-nationals, for all that they might be EU citizens resident in a second country for years. That’s nationalism. At a more banal level, so is the newsreader on Spanish TV putting everything in the third person plural at 9.00om every night: “In our country today….” / “Our country was represented in the tennis, of course, by Rafa Nadal” etc etc. It drives me crazy.
It’s got to be said though that nationalism and the modern Nation State go absolutely hand-in-hand from the French Revolution onward, through the 19th century to so many “national awakenings”. The basic idea is that there is a “people” homogenous enough to be identified as such, and that every people needs to have its own State. That’s the baseline of nationalism I would say.
Anyway, it’s a spectrum, and Trump is at the very right of it…
I think Trump has to be considered in different categories than just ‘populist’ or ‘nationalist’. Of course he has elements of these but someone who makes very specific alliances with armed militia and has the backing of a huge White Nationalist movement is not just a ‘bit right wing’ or working with a populist style of campaigning. The mass deportation campaign he is already starting is unprecedented in US history and only has a very few precedents anywhere. Commentators, I think including David McCrone here, are severely underestimating the scale and brutality of what is about to happen and the consequences for millions of people deemed ‘illegal’.
When we really understand what’s going on here we need to name it for what it is and the language used here is inadequate.
Yeah, Bella, I think you’re right, I don’t think either “nationalist” or “populist” really capture Trump properly, though he is also both those things.
But he is probably something else, fascist I think is the word, though it’s true it is overused often.
It seems to me our political language hasn’t been updated to our times, we’re still using the lexicon of a hunderd years ago.
@Douglas, there are elements of court politics and dynastic politics on show in the incoming USAmerican administration, although some would say the predominant feature appears to be Clientelism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clientelism
When you use political office to further your own business interests, you are unlikely to be pro-business in the sense of backing your competitors.
If Donald Trump choked on a hamburger tonight and political power passed to his Vice President (or another), what would the character of the administration be? There would still be fascists swirling around, I guess, but isn’t Donald Trump the brand? Or perhaps, Der Brand.
It was interesting reading about the ‘MAGA granny’ who reportedly refused to accept President Trump’s pardon for insurrection and who compared MAGA to alcoholism. In that case, presumably the idea is not to let the masses sober up. It’s difficult to see how the illusion that a majority of Trump’s supporters will have their hopes fulfilled can be sustained for long. Apparently a television drama series called Civil War is trending. But the real USAmerican war is against the living planet, and Trump’s administration is only continuing that (in the tradition of Henry VIII). Where is the coalition for the defence?
Trump may not tick all the boxes to be called a Facist like Hitler or Franco (yet).
However he has shown Facist tendencies in his behaviour in trying to overturn 2020 election, his demonisation of minorities and how he is now portraying himself as not only the saviour of USA but as the embodiment of the country.
Niemand- you pose a very good question about how many people who support independence are labelled as nationalists when they would not vote for a nationalist party post independence.
I would suggest that within this group of the electorate there are a cohort who support independence for Scotland because they dislike Britain nationalism which is becoming increasingly strident.
I think most people just want a Scottish democracy.
I’m a republican and an ecologist not a nationalist.
Editor- I am sure you are correct and I never meant to imply anything else.
The point I was attempting to clumsily make was the hypocrisy of some opponents of independence decrying the nationalism of independence supporters and never mentioning British nationalism which has become increasingly strident since 2014. This strident, one size fits all, type of British nationalism is unpopular with large numbers of electorate in Scotland and may be a factor as to why support for independence is now far higher than support for the political parties promoting independence.
Yes British Nationalism simply doesn’t exist because they are so convinced that ‘Britain; is just the natural order of things.
Thanks, Douglas. When you detect Manichaeanism, I think we may be talking at cross-purposes. I can’t speak for Dave McCrone but I certainly want to use terms like ‘nation’ and ‘people’, ‘nationalism’ and ‘populism’ as analytical ideal types, useful for understanding, explaining and maybe even predicting social phenomena. Social phenomena themselves are infinitely complex and messy, and it doesn’t help that different people use the same words, often loosely and inconsistently, to describe different phenomena.
The hope is that using a predefined vocabulary may bring a degree of clarity. How well any given vocabulary fits the facts is an empirical question: we just have to try it and see, and if necessary refine our vocabulary. Personally, having some knowledge of structural linguistics, I find it the set of distinctions developed by Ferdinand de Saussure very useful – synchronic versus diachronic, paradigm versus syntagm, langue versus parole, etc. Ideally, a full discussion needs to use both poles of each distinction.
From this perspective, it’s perfectly possible to be both a nationalist and a populist – Trump, Orban et al. are good examples. It’s an open question how well these terms fit the ways in which political actors interpret their own actions. Over time a given actor may act from nationalist or populist motives, or quite possibly a mixture of both. And there is a lot of faking going on: Trump, Johnson, and Farage as anti-elitists – really? In the contemporary world many politicians act for reasons of expediency or personal popularity. Consistent ideologies – far less principles – hardly enter into the equation.
This doesn’t mean that analytical terminology has no value. Dave McCrone’s suggestion that Brexit is better explained in terms of English populism than English nationalism strikes me as genuinely illuminating, even if this was only one causal factor in a confusing muddle of events.
Similarly, it is helpful to see Scotland as a nation rather than a mere (possibly ethnic) people. We are both, but ‘nation’ implies greater depth, complexity and multidimensionality. Every nation may have its own matching people, but the converse may not hold. Some peoples exist only in the imagination, which is perhaps a good thing.
Thanks Dennis.
I actually think we are in a new terrain in the sense that what is most scary for me in the new US political landscape is the synergy – as business people would no doubt put it – between Trump’s destructive anarchy and Big Tech’s billion pound ongoing business concern. Where will it end?
That the same few guys who have provided the platform to disseminate so many lies and consipracy theorists over the last 10 or 15 years finally end up bankrolling the presidential campaign of the US President who recommended drinking bleach during Covid is terrifying. It’s a new set of circumstances and it paints a very bleak picture for the future of respresentative democracy… How can we possibly respond to this?
As for nationalism, I think the split between Salmondites and Sturgeonites is largely about the nationalism question. Salmond was supremely relaxed and confident about describing himself as a nationalist – “nations do best when they govern themselves” as he put it, Sturgeon was not, and even went so far as to suggest the word “national” be removed from the SNP name.
I think it’s perfectly fine to be a democratic nationalist. It’s an entirely legitimate political position. An indepedent Scotland would be no more natonalist than any other western democracy, and surely less than some countires like Spain, which is a very nationalist country and seems to me to becoming more and more so.
I classify Puigdemont as a populist, by the way, because he took the gamble of holding a non-state sanctioned referendum despite being told to desist by the Spanish Constitutional Court, going over the heads of everybody directly to the Catalan people, in the hope that he would get enough votes to claim a majority for independence. He won the vote but not by nearly enough, and this is another character trait of these leaders, they like taking risks, they like going against the grain…
Would Salmond have done something like that? Quite possibly. Sturgeon? No chance.
I completely agree that we are in new terrain. There must be some fit between language and the realities we’re trying to describe (otherwise language and communication would collapse). But the fit has always been loose, and it has got looser in recent decades. Old conventions have frayed with accelerating rates of economic and technological change, matched by social fragmentation and polarisation.
Words like ‘nationalism’ and ‘populism’ don’t mesh well with new realities but they’re the best we have. Backward-facing terms like Nazism and fascism are unhelpful because they focus on social and political conditions that no longer exist. Ideally, we need new forward-facing terminology, but political events are highly contingent and can only be properly identified with hindsight. We won’t know what Trumpism is till after it has happened. Does Trump himself know what he is doing? His muddled pronouncements suggest not.
Yeah, I agree Dennis, the one hope we can reasonably hold onto is that these people in charge in the USA really don’t know what they’re doing and, with so many gigantic egos in the same room, the whole thing might just fall apart… They’ve got the national bureaucracy to deal with, the people who actually run the USA, and it won’t be as easy as they think to get past the deep state as they might think.
As for Trump he’s the bullshit president for the ChatboxGTP bullshit age we live in. I’ve worked with someone who lies like Trump, that is, so often they are way beyond the point of knowing when they’re even lying. The much vaunted Chatbox is the same. I don’t normally use it, but today I asked it for the name of the stormcurrently buffeting Scotland, and it came right back at me with “Storm Christopher”, so completely wrong. I then asked it for a reference about a Spanish film-maker on a specific topic and it gave me one for an interview with Variety magazine from 2017, and I went and found the interview, and there was no mention at all of the specific topic I had asked about at all. So, just bullshit…
We’re never needed novelsists and film-makers more to stand up to Power. Just not American ones, please…
PS: Here below is the kind of bullshit Chatbox comes out with, the AI system Trump has pledged to spend the 500 billion dollars on which was earmarked for Green Tranisition…
I ask Chat what director Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film is called and it gives me the name of PARALLEL MOTHERS which is from 2021, not THE ROOM NEXT DOOR, which opened (and bombed) in the UK just last October 2024. So I ask about the latter, correcting Chat…
The it gives me this nonsense: “The Room Next Door (La habitación de al lado) is another recent film directed by Pedro Almodóvar, but it’s actually a short film, not a feature-length one. It was released in 2023 as part of a project for a French platform called Cinéfondation, where filmmakers were invited to create shorts around the theme of “love and loneliness. In this short film, Almodóvar explores the relationship between two men living next to each other in an apartment building, with themes of desire, loneliness, and connection emerging in a very Almodóvar-esque way. It’s a more intimate piece compared to his usual feature films, but it still carries his signature emotional depth and visual flair. Would you be interested in watching this one as well? It might give you a nice glimpse into his more recent creative explorations!”
This is all just nonsense. It’s not a short film. It’s not about two men living next door. It is a feature film based on the book by Sigfid Nuñez, starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore…
Chomsky and others have argued that the AI model which the loser geeks funding the facscist Trump will always make mistakes because it is based on a predicative model. It’s not “intelligent”, and nor does it actually read, it merely recognizes words and assigns a meaning to them based on probablity…
Some researchers at Glasgow Uni recently published a paper called “ChatboxGPT is Bullshit” pointing to a fundamental flaw in the whole AI model they have so casually rolled out on an unsuspecting population.
It’s just a piss take, it’s not wrong sometimes, it is wrong about as often as it is right. But if the US gov is going to spend 500 billion dollars on it, we’re going to get it whether we like it or not…right?