S15 EP149: Hour 1 - Newton’s Third Law in Society

Erick Erickson opens Open Line Friday with Isaac Newton's laws of motion and argues that American politics now runs on the third one: every action produces an equal and opposite reaction, and nothing is left to slow either side down. He reads The Economist's warning that superintelligent AI with legal rights could turn humans into "labradors for the machines," calls it nonsense from Silicon Valley weirdos who do not believe in God and think they can build one, and tells the story of ChatGPT refusing to help him cut a lock off his own office door while Claude just told him where to saw. Then the backlash roll call: the Toronto Tempo's non-binary she/they snapping turtle mascot, Seattle Times columnist Matt Calkins resigning after 11 years over spiked columns featuring female athletes, the European hunt for everyone who exposed Jason Arday, Flock cameras being chopped down, and the data center revolt. The hour closes with the fiscal argument of the day: with a guaranteed five to six percent return in the government bucket, nobody has a reason to put a dollar in the private sector bucket, which is exactly why Scott Bessent is wrong that we can grow our way out of the debt.

Topics:

• Newton's three laws applied to politics: the AI backlash, the transgender backlash, and why no intervening force exists when both parties profit from the crisis
• The Economist on giving AI legal rights, humans as pets, and Erick's rebuttal that a large language model is a random probability machine, not a sentient one
• The Toronto Tempo's Des and Dot, a Borealis blue non-binary she/they snapping turtle mascot for a women's league that cannot define a woman
• Matt Calkins quits the Seattle Times over female student athletes, and the European campaign to fire everyone who exposed Cambridge plagiarist Jason Arday
• The government bucket versus the private sector bucket: guaranteed returns, bond issuance crowding out private investment, and why Scott Bessent's growth answer does not work
• Confiscating every American billionaire's $8.3 trillion would fund one year of a $7.4 trillion government, and San Francisco Democrats now oppose California's wealth tax
• The Republican turn to "the common good," Rush Limbaugh on why you cannot beat the real thing, and the case for shrinking Washington instead
• Trump's Education Department moves to strip the American Bar Association of law school accreditation power
• Congress still forces the Federal Reserve to file an annual report on a presidential dollar coin that stopped being minted in 2011