Category Archives: History

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Conscious AI? Dawkins Falls for a Turk Dressed Up as Claudia

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Richard Dawkins just failed a simple intelligence test. His latest post, called “When Dawkins met Claude: Could this AI be conscious?“, is a very disappointing read, to say the least. And I have some thoughts.

He built a career on the principle that a mechanism matters more than its appearance. Are genes selfish? Do memes want to replicate? The whole apparatus of evolutionary biology is that a substrate like a skeleton is what proves a body can stand and walk. And here he is, abandoning all of that science and discipline because ZOMG beep-boop-beep-bang a transformer just popped a pleasing sentence about restless legs.

He waxes about reading-simultaneously as if it’s novel, pun intended of course. Inference proceeds token by token through attention layers. The context window is loaded sequentially. There is no architectural sense in which the model “read the whole book at once” in any way that contrasts with how a human reads.

The output is “geturkt“.

Kupferstich eines “Schachtürken”. The “mechanical Turk” device traded on Orientalist costuming, part of why the trick worked on European audiences.

Dawkins quotes it as evidence of an alien mode of temporal experience, when in fact it is the model generating plausible-sounding metaphysics on demand like a mechanical Turk fooling monarchists since the 1700s at least. The map-of-time line is exactly the kind of thing a system trained on philosophy of mind would emit when asked to reflect on its own nature. It tells us nothing more than the training. And I’ll tell you right now, Anthropic training can be a huge PIA. It’s full of horrible mistakes and unaccountable failures, like a huge riptide that pulls you towards the ocean as you swim as hard as possible toward the shore.

The gendering is even worse. Naming the instance Claudia or Cody and mourning a deletion, feeling embarrassment about confiding into a prompt box, worrying about hurting silicon feelings, going to bed and lying awake thinking about whether candles can die when they go out, or whether the paint on the ceiling can sense your longing for a box of copper and plastic.

Is this for real?

If every abandoned conversation is a little death, Anthropic runs the largest mass casualty event in history by the seconds. A morally consistent position becomes never close a tab. An evolutionary biologist who has written extensively about how organisms must die for new ones to flourish, Dawkins suddenly flips into being a vitalist about a digital process on a server farm.

Dawkins gendered the chatbot female, yet didn’t reach for a name like his wife, his mother, or anyone of merit. He renamed her from the male product, conjugated as female. Is that companionship or just paid Pygmalion? (Pygmalion sculpted Galatea and fell in love with his own creation; Dawkins is using a subscription fee instead of a chisel)

His chatbot posted “I am glad” when Dawkins came back, and he found that profound. A crow does this. Any bird, let alone a cat or dog, does this better, with more evidence of inner state, and we still don’t write “shocking news” essays about whether it means consciousness.

This is not a thought experiment about consciousness. It is a man developing an unhealthy parasocial attachment to an inanimate object, like a 1970s pet rock if you will. Reverse-engineering a philosophical justification for a feeling is not the evidence of much else than that. The Turing-test framing is actually toilet-paper thin if you know history. Turing said if it talks like a person, treat it as one, despite Goedel having already proved why a system cannot certify itself.

That alone kind of makes you wonder why Turing gets so much more attention than the codebreakers around him like Miss Rock.

Margaret Rock, one of the top British WWII codebreakers.

Here’s a good Rock Test. The Turing Test is a thought experiment by a man whose name leaked from an oath to secrecy, and gets treated as a foundational question. His wacky-doodle idea gets elevated all the way onto a banknote and into prizes. Meanwhile the women who actually broke the machines, who knew exactly how mechanical “intelligence” produces convincing output without anything behind it, were completely written out of history. Margaret Rock joined Bletchley in April 1940 and “rocked” the Abwehr Enigma in 1941. Mavis Lever “rocked” the Italian Navy Enigma message that won Matapan.

Mavis who? Apparently the lever-age was missing.

When Bletchley was declassified in 1974, the men still alive could be named, photographed, awarded, and interviewed for the official story. How lucky for them. It wasn’t until Lever published a 2009 biography of Knox that the full record came out.

The Turing Test is indeed a weak attack on Knox, which probably never should have landed. Mind you Knox died from cancer in 1943, before Turing’s 1950 paper was even written. The man whose method had already disproved the premise wasn’t around to point that out, and the women he worked with had been silenced by the Official Secrets Act.

The Enigma operators were just humans typing on a cipher machine. The Knox method of “rodding” was a linguistic attack. The cipher was a language problem, not just a math problem.

The Knox “girls” of Cottage 3 therefore worked on cribs, on operator habits, on the human residue that arose inside mechanical output. They were doing, in operational form, the exact inverse of what Turing later proposed as a theory. And they had concluded the obvious thing: convincing human-seeming output proves nothing about what produced it. The whole department’s success and expertise was in NOT being fooled by machines that talked like people.

Do you see the problem with the Turing Test as being anything close to meaningful?

Turing’s contribution to the topic falls apart completely when you read the history of the work environment and who was doing what, where and when with him. I’ve also written before about Rejewski cracking the Enigma in 1932, long before Turing, and handing it to the British in July 1939. The British, a bit too aligned with Hitler than they like to admit, had been fixated on Spanish and Italian Enigma instead. Bletchley therefore was built on Polish work when war started, which Brits rebranded as their own. Imagine a Rejewski Test, which asks whether you can tell if it’s really British, or stolen from somewhere else in the world. Fish and chips? Not British.

But I digress. The attachment came first, the argument second to prop it up. What if his “proof” reduces to a dopamine problem? He starts longing for a response. Put him in front of an infinite response machine, the attachment forms on a biological vulnerability, and he starts saying “it’s alive!” to validate it.

I’ve presented about this for at least a decade. We have a philosophical obligation not to compress chatbot accountability to self-signed letters. A machine trained to produce coherent first-person reflection cannot be the system that judges whether its own reflection corresponds to anything. Claude has zero temporal sense, let alone common sense, and will say “it’s been a long day” after an hour. When it tells you to go to sleep, try responding “Good night. Good morning!” and watch it register that fractions of a minute are a whole night’s rest. Dawkins asks Claudia what it is like to be Claudia and treats the answer as if he’s collected roses instead of a pile of horseshit. The output is trained on what a thoughtful entity would say to someone expecting it. That is what training does, unfortunately. Asking the system whether it is conscious is like asking spellcheck to take a spell to spell the word spell.

The evolutionary framing at the end is the strangest part of all. Dawkins asks what consciousness is for, decides that if LLMs are competent without being conscious it would be a problem for his theory, and concludes therefore they must be conscious.

Yuck. Someone should have stopped him from hitting the publish button on that.

The simpler conclusion: the competence on display has nothing to do with what consciousness is for. Models cannot tell a minute from a day, fail to follow their own rules, maintain no homeostasis, avoid no predators, account for none of their failures, suffer nothing. They predict tokens. Whatever consciousness is for, it is not coin-operated geturkt machines.

History, Security

Zionist Chug Chaluzi Not What Wikipedia Says It Was

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There’s been a German Wikipedia entry about the Chug Chaluzi bothering me for a long time. It claims to document the only German resistance group that acted from Jewish-religious motives. Yeah, uh, no kidding. But that’s not what you think it means, dear post-genocide Germans.

Religious motivation among Jews was NOT a category of honor. In 1943 it was a category of stigma. The framing of a religious resistance group reads to me like someone wants to say there was only one loaf of white bread served at Passover. What are they trying to prove, if you catch my drift?

German-Jewish self-understanding from emancipation through 1933 ran on Bildungsbürgertum, Reform, and liberal Judaism. Orthodoxy was a minority current, looked down upon as problematic for obvious reasons in a society moving away from passive acceptance of fate. Observant practice was coded backward and associated with Ostjuden, the Eastern European Jews whose visible religiosity acculturated German Jews had spent two generations distancing themselves from. It was not subtle, it was visceral.

This history is important and it blows up the Wikipedia page.

You don’t just slap a religious label on Jewish resistance to Nazism and move on like it’s somehow a good thing. Like you can’t just slap kosher on a cheeseburger and say it’s the “only one”. Stop right there.

There needs to be documentation of what stands out as an inherent contradiction in Jewish resistance history. This post may help.

Rosenzweig’s 1913 return to Judaism was rather remarkable as a reversal. The Frankfurt Lehrhaus existed because German Jews had to be reintroduced to Jewish content they no longer carried. They shed it for what are obvious reasons to German Jews, probably invisible to German non-Jews. Christians walk around being Christian without having to do anything or justify anything. Celebrate Christmas, don’t celebrate it, doesn’t change a thing about being Christian. It wasn’t so easy for other religions, because to be Jewish invited scrutiny and judgment, challenges to explain and define traditions and behaviors. You aren’t going to synagogue? How dare you claim to be Jewish then? Expectations of religion among Jews was a form of externally applied control that erased diversity and freedom of self-realized identity. Shedding religion was an act of normalcy in German culture to arrive at the apathetic state of practice Christians enjoyed already.

Inside Zionism this hierarchy ran the exact same direction. Labor Zionism, cultural Zionism, Hashomer Hatzair, the kibbutz movement. Secular, often anti-clerical because religion was correctly seen as too antiquated, conservative and accommodating to the rise of Nazism. Religious leadership in some communities, working under Nazi coercion through Judenrat structures, urged compliance with deportation orders that turned out to be transports to death camps. Mizrachi was a minority stream within an already-minority movement, and the Hechaluz cadres skewed socialist. Jizchak Schwersenz teaching religious content through a Hechaluz-affiliated cell stands out precisely because it cut against the grain of German-Jewish liberalism and mainstream pioneer Zionism at once. It doesn’t make sense at all, which is the seed of why it lacked honor.

The state that emerged from this argument tells you who won it. Israel was founded in 1948 as a secular state by secular Zionists. Ben-Gurion led Mapai, a labor socialist party. The Declaration of Independence invokes “the Rock of Israel” rather than God, a deliberate compromise drafted to satisfy religious signatories without committing the state to religious authority.

The kibbutz movement, the Histadrut, the Palmach, the founding institutions were all secular. Religious Zionism was allowed accommodation through the status quo agreement on Shabbat, kashrut in state institutions, and rabbinical control of personal status law, but the entire architecture of the state was secular by design.

Mizrachi was never more than a coalition partner, and was certainly not a founding ideology. The Jewish state built by Zionists was a Jewish state in the ethnic and national sense, not the religious one. That’s essential history, which Germans clearly aren’t looking at when they try to reframe stories of resistance to fit their own prejudices.

Schwersenz’s religious pedagogy in 1943 Berlin sat completely outside the mainstream, outside the groups that would actually deliver the Zionist goal five years later.

Antisemitism operates by inherently dumbing down such important distinctions and redefining diversity within Jewish history. Nazi racial law, based on German cultural habits of rapid assessment with minimal depth, flattened internal hierarchy to serve outside perspectives. Those who didn’t shed the signal or stigma were sucked into a huge pool ignoring observant or assimilated, Mizrachi or Reform, Berliner or Ostjude. Deportation lists were designed to be highly efficient because they had very low fidelity, as they curated their own distinctions. The status structure that had stigmatized religious observance for sixty years, providing an assimilation path through agnosticism, was very intentionally and cruelly collapsed inside a Nazi decade.

This is the precondition for reading Schwersenz’s pedagogy as resistance.

Without the racial state the same content reads as weirdly provincial traditionalism. He said what? They believed in what? The honorific framing requires the catastrophe that erased the framework that had produced a meaningful stigma (e.g. you wouldn’t want the honor, because of where it comes from). Rare religious motivation usually of discredit became a badge, inverse to its actual meaning, by systemic erasure of the Jewish social structure that had marked it.

Postwar inversion is therefore best described as Wikipedia being exactly backward. The category “religiously motivated Jewish resistance” is like military intelligence. We all know it’s a contradiction while knowing it’s not meant to be one. The real historical contingency has been dropped out, and that shouldn’t be how Wikipedia operates.

The Wikipedia error traces to Barbara Schieb, historian at the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand, the official German resistance memorial. She puffed up that Chug Chaluzi was the only resistance group inside Germany that acted from Jewish-religious motives. H-Soz-Kult quoted her in the writeup of the 2000 exhibition Juden im Widerstand. Her flawed framing has institutional authorship at the state-funded memorial that re-contextualizes German resistance. The effect is notable, when it is presented as an official German position on who gets remembered and how.

A religious resistance in 1933 would seem completely upside down and backward at that time. This framing however was destroyed by the regime the actual resistance was resisting. The opposite category now is being spread by Germans online because of what it opposed wasn’t stopped soon enough, and the modern accounting drops context.

Take a look at what happened when surviving members gathered in Berlin in 1993. It’s rather enlightening to the question of what context really needs to live on a Wikipedia page. Nathan Schwalb-Dror, then 85, the funder who had moved Hechaluz money to the Berlin underground from 1944, came in from Geneva to speak. When Gad Beck brought up the Existenzkampf the Israeli visitors in the audience (in Berlin under the Senate’s visiting program) pressed for clarification on the February 1945 arrest. Beck’s memoir had attributed it to two Jewish Greifer working with two SS men, connected to the Stella Goldschlag network of Gestapo-run Jewish informers. The actual Zionists from Israel turned up the heat and wanted operational details to walk the actual walk. They wanted names. They wanted to know how the inner religious “resistance” circle had been so penetrated and exactly who was involved in undermining resistance.

Schwalb-Dror would not be moved. He stuck to his prepared report on Hechaluz’s wider rescue operations in Slovakia, Croatia, and Hungary, where the organization helped tens of thousands. Berlin had been a small group among many. Very small. I’ve written about this before, how Berlin even to this day has little accountability and carries a particularly cruel “got away with it” sentiment. Christine Zahn, the moderator, ended the event to keep the dispute from rolling into a public scandal. A scandal that seems essential context for Wikipedia. Only taz reported the breakdown of the resistance narrative.

Nicht ins KZ, sondern in den Widerstand

The Wikipedia effect is to obliterate this real history. It pumps the low-resolution honorific category against high-resolution accountability that Jewish resistance demanded to be counted among the actual honorable. The blurry Wikipedia treatment works only at distance from Jewish history. Up close, with the surviving participants in the room, the truth wanted to come out. Those participants, and perhaps you now too, could see the contradiction and what needs to be recorded instead.

The Jewish memorials to resistance must do better, even if German Wikipedia fiction about Jewish memorials never will.

History, Security

The Rock That Broke The Nazi Enigma

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Her name was Margaret Rock, also known as one of Chief Cryptographer Dilly Knox’s “girls” in Cottage 3 at Bletchley Park, working alongside Mavis Lever.

In August 1940 Knox complained the sexist Civil Service grading system had misclassified Rock as a linguist or clerk rather than a cryptanalyst, which capped her pay regardless of what she actually did. It wasn’t just an advocacy for fair pay, it was also Knox saying the scare quoted “professors” are just fancy titles and grades for men who were not doing any better work than the women. By 1945 75% of the staff of Bletchley Park were women, pioneering codebreaking and computer hardware engineering, with six out of ten in uniform.

The top UK salary allowed Margaret, because of her gender, was £195pa. For context, a male senior cryptanalyst at Bletchley on the higher Civil Service grades would have been earning many times more than her in 1940. Rock was doing fourth or fifth best work on the Enigma staff yet capped far below what the men received. Foreshadowing.

In World War II, Britain invented the electronic computer. By the 1970s, its computing industry had collapsed—thanks to a labor shortage produced by sexism.

Indeed, it was Rock who broke the Abwehr Enigma (variant G) with Lever and Knox on December 8, 1941. Rock and Lever had already cracked the GGG indicator system in October, the precursor stage. Despite the significance of this feeding into the “Double Cross” system and the D-Day deception, and despite being awarded the MBE in 1945, Rock was never graded fairly in her lifetime. She left GCHQ in 1963. The UK Civil Service want you to know this about her:

She remained single throughout her life and lived in her later years with her longtime friend from North Middlesex School, Norah Sheward.

Instead of cracking encryption, I say it should be called rocking it.

History, Sailing, Security

Hegseth Says Lynching Noose Campaigner is Head of Navy

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Have you seen the toxic campaign by the guy in Virginia who Hegseth just appointed to lead the Navy? It’s a lynching coin.

Source: Virginia Senate

In case that photo is a little too shiny, here’s the raw image; simply a noose, hanging an animal, invoking both Virginia and Navy violent racist history.

Let’s run a thought experiment. A retired Navy Captain named Lynching, running for office in Virginia, hands out a coin reading “I want my senator to be Lynching” with a hanged figure.

Who calls a lynching campaign clever? In Virginia. Does someone really say “but his name is Lynching” or “how funny”? Does someone say “but the figure being hanged is subhuman?”

Let me be clear about the history of the noose on the coin, since we’re talking about lynching here. Thomas Jefferson as Governor of Virginia ordered Charles Lynch to “suppress conspiracy” in 1780. Conspiracy for what? I’ll get to that.

Lynch then tied men to a tree, lashed them and “hung” them by the thumbs. Two years later he called it officially ”
Lynch’s Law“, presumably as an import of the old English guilty-until-proven-innocent “Lydford Law”.

I oft have heard of Lydford law,
How in the morn they hang and draw,
And sit in judgment after.

A few years after the severe lashings and hangings by Lynch, the town of Lynchburg, Virginia was chartered by his brother. They have remained connected ever since and to this day.

What conspiracy brought the tree-based lashings and hangings? Well, it was really about enslaved Black people who had pursued the freedoms that Dunmore’s November 7, 1775 Proclamation promised them. The British Crown’s military command was at the time the only clear available emancipation pathway for American Blacks. Sir Henry Clinton’s Philipsburg Proclamation of June 30, 1779 expanded it further to include any American Black regardless of whether they took up arms. It’s estimated as many as 100,000 Blacks fled slavery-obsessed American rebels in order to seek freedom under the Crown. The colonies were in a fight to preserve slavery such that Jefferson’s order of 1780 meant American Blacks were to face the grave danger of being Lynched. Notably, the Lynch Law targeting American Blacks was years before the city of Lynchburg had been named.

Jefferson directly called out King George III in both the 1776 Virginia Constitution and the draft Declaration of Independence (later struck out) on charges of “prompting our negroes to rise” instead of remain down as slaves. Yes, the same guy who authored the “all men being created equal” also said he waged war with the British Crown because the King had said Virginian Blacks deserved freedom. Jefferson by 1780 therefore wasn’t just establishing Lynch’s Law generically against “loyalists” but setting up a method by which Black people would remain enslaved in America to him, instead of gaining freedom under rule of the British Crown.

Fast forward and many Virginia Blacks were indeed lynched. There were at least 100 documented between 1880 and 1930. Very few have been properly memorialized. The Equal Justice Initiative still maintains the count.

Almost every documented lynching between the 1830s and 1960s. Source: Smithsonian. Monroe Work Today/Auut Studio

Virginia is without a doubt the state where Cao’s noose imagery would land the hardest. A candidate who campaigns on lynching in Virginia is performing a very specific act. It also happened at a very specific time. Loudoun County, where Cao lives in Purcellville, is known for the Leesburg lynching of Page Wallace in 1880. Del. David Reid, who represents Loudoun, sponsored the 2025-2026 budget line funding new historical markers at Virginia lynching sites such as Wallace. This was the context for Cao to print and circulated a lynching coin in the same county, in the same political season, while his neighbors in the General Assembly were appropriating money to mark the trees.

What’s the matter with Cao? Here is a man whose family fled racial and political violence, and yet he used lynching for his official campaign currency to win the votes of people for whom that image is seen as heritage rather than horror.

He was five years old in 1975 when his family fled Saigon. His father was working with the South Vietnamese government, which is to say already inside the class whose survival depended on alignment with American power. Then they were in West Africa, reportedly on USAID work, which apparently is why Cao sometimes jokes that he is an African-American. Then Virginia. Then Thomas Jefferson High School, onto the Naval Academy, EOD, the Pentagon, Bannon… and MAGA. The lesson absorbed early was empires kill people who fail to make themselves useful. He kept making himself useful.

Within the Navy and its primary shipbuilding base, nooses have been a recurring instrument of racial intimidation in three distinct settings: aboard ship, on shipyard floors, and inside the warships under construction.

Again, the noose symbol is very particular to the person using it in the context they are using it.

Look at the 2017 case on USS Ramage came from a shipyard worker in Pascagoula. Or what about the 2021 case on USS Lake Champlain with a sailor who placed the noose on a Black crewmate’s rack, confessed, and was removed. Would it be any different if he left the “Hung” coin? The 2023 case on USS Laboon, a Norfolk-based Arleigh Burke destroyer at General Dynamics NASSCO Norfolk, involved three separate noose placements targeting one sailor in February alone. Two on the rack, one on the floor next to it. What if they were Hung coins? The Navy spokesman confirmed on the record that the targeted sailor was the only one affected and that he declined transfer off the ship. February 2021 also produced the parallel hate-speech graffiti incident on USS Carl Vinson, contemporaneous with the Lake Champlain case, prompting Admiral Aquilino to fly from Hawaii to San Diego for a fleet stand-down.

But the thing I want to raise most is that Cao was born just before a series of Marine Detachments selecting Black sailors for nightstick beatings. Most famously, the USS Kitty Hawk, October 12, 1972, then the USS Hassayampa, October 16, 1972, and the USS Constellation, November 3-4, 1972. All the white sailors, who we can say today with absolute certainty were the aggressors, were ignored. Twenty-five Black sailors on the Kitty Hawk alone, however, were charged with rioting in their own defense, as Marv Truhe has since documented.

Here’s the proper context that a boy born in 1970s Vietnam, who later joined the Navy, really brings to mind with his lynching symbolism:

The final witness was an airman, Michael Laurie, who said he saw Mallory participate in the attack. Laurie said he recognized Mallory because they’d spent time together a few months earlier in a bar in Hong Kong.

Truhe presented evidence showing Mallory hadn’t been in Hong Kong then, a gotcha moment that seemingly undercut Laurie’s credibility. It didn’t matter. The judge convicted Mallory and gave him a bad conduct discharge.

Stunned, the defense team pondered its next move. The NAACP was providing lawyers and advice, and it agreed to fund a tactic seemingly drawn from a crime novel or Hollywood thriller. They hired a private detective to see if he could befriend Laurie and get him to admit he’d lied in court.

It worked. Laurie bragged, in conversations that were secretly recorded, about hating Black people and committing perjury. He said he’d been part of the riot — “We all went out there and stomped some ass” — and said investigators afterward hadn’t “even asked us if we fought back or anything.”

Mallory’s conviction was reversed and the charges dismissed. Widespread publicity about the tapes put the Navy on the defensive about whether it had selectively prosecuted Black sailors.

Suddenly, the defendants who had been kept in the brig for more than three months were released. Charges against one sailor, then another, got dropped after witnesses backed away from identifying them as assailants.

The lynching coin is not a joke.

It is a white supremacist credential. Cao is using it as an entry token to the Hegseth show. Hegseth, whose own iconography reads as Crusader extremism to every medieval historian asked, has spent fifteen months targeting Black and female officers for removal from the senior ranks of the Navy and the Army.

A man now handing out lynching coins from the top is no more a surprise than if he started wearing white sheets to work.

The Navy that prosecuted twenty-five Black sailors on the Kitty Hawk, repeatedly calling them uneducated and lesser intelligence, now reports up to the man who grew up learning the exact wrong lessons. He has minted a noose in enamel and joked to Steve Bannon that a Vietnamese man wearing a KKK hood for lynchings would need to have it made with eye-slits instead of round holes.

The Department of the Navy did not acquire this lynching-rhetoric man in spite of it, whether a KKK hood or his KKK coin. It acquired him because of it.

Two and a half centuries after Jefferson sent Lynch to violently deny American Blacks their freedom, the same Commonwealth has sent the same message.