I keep coming back to the mirror dualities of the oppressed and oppressor under authoritarianism.
The oppressed is portrayed as both weak and godlike. The stereotypes are always some variation on sloth and incompetence, but yet somehow also a menace capable of destroying the "pure" society. To use the most relevant current example, Antifa being both little femme soy boys who would always get beat up by "real men" while also being an international terrorist organization on the brink of overthrowing the US government, the unarmed presence of whom makes the heavily armed agents of ICE flee for their lives. Antifa is both having absolutely no impact on ICE, and also having such an impact on ICE that the military needs to come in to protect them. The contradiction is obvious but never seems to occur to those who hold both to be true at the same time.
But few talk about the duality of the oppressor. The sovereign throughout history has always been both a ruler above the law, sometimes even the representative or incarnation of a divine force. Yet, this same superhuman/god-man is also a baby who needs constant care. This is absolutely a through line from the very earliest records of sovereign cults to modern cult leaders, CEOs, and Trump today. Power, for these people, is expressed both as the ability to force others to enact their will and in the ability to compel others to care for them. Can any of these "men" cook? Can they fix anything themselves? They are driven everywhere, cooked for all the time, constantly protected from danger. Kings are still dressed, at least for rituals. I could dissect masculinity here, but that's a whole thing.
It is as though the drive to care for our children, who must be taught to behave within acceptable norms, is hijacked by "leaders" who demand our care and attention... even at the expense of our literal children. And recently we've seen some of those very CEOs, with LLMs and return to office demands, show that their judgment is also little better than children, making decisions while pretending to understand a subject.
The oppressed are portrayed as both god-like and impotent and are, in fact, neither. Meanwhile the rulers portray themselves only as invulnerable and are, in fact, childish in their ability to survive without constant support. Their greatest fear from the collapse of society is figuring out how to make sure people keep taking care of them.
It just keeps rattling around in my head.
#USPol
Chronologically Consistent Generative AI
Songrun He, Linying Lv, Asaf Manela, Jimmy Wu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11677 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11677
MedicalOS: An LLM Agent based Operating System for Digital Healthcare
Jared Zhu, Junde Wu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11507 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11507…
MVP4D: Multi-View Portrait Video Diffusion for Animatable 4D Avatars
Felix Taubner, Ruihang Zhang, Mathieu Tuli, Sherwin Bahmani, David B. Lindell
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12785
Improving Decision Trees through the Lens of Parameterized Local Search
Juha Harviainen, Frank Sommer, Manuel Sorge
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12726 https://
GOAT: A Training Framework for Goal-Oriented Agent with Tools
Hyunji Min, Sangwon Jung, Junyoung Sung, Dosung Lee, Leekyeung Han, Paul Hongsuck Seo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12218
Towards Foundation Inference Models that Learn ODEs In-Context
Maximilian Mauel, Manuel Hinz, Patrick Seifner, David Berghaus, Ramses J. Sanchez
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12650
Topological Signatures of ReLU Neural Network Activation Patterns
Vicente Bosca, Tatum Rask, Sunia Tanweer, Andrew R. Tawfeek, Branden Stone
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12700 htt…