It Is Not Funny.

It has never been funny.

So Trump had his Dollar Store Nuremberg rally at Madison Square Garden last night, and the reviews have been devastating.

At least for normal people. If you’re a MAGAt, however, your job is to find at least some vaguely plausible defense of what is obviously and plainly indefensible. The typical defense has been some variant of ‘can’t you take a joke?’ suggesting that anyone who criticizes calling for ‘slaughtering’ Democrats is overreacting. My response is that anyone who has to repeat ‘it’s just a joke’ in response to criticism of their bigotry, isn’t joking.

Michael Shellenberger, however, found a new defense for bigotry. Having no ability to laugh himself, even at disabled people like his God Emperor Trump,¹Shellenberger attempts to defend the comment that got the most attention, a line by Tony Hinchcliffe, an alleged ‘comedian’ who goes by Kill Tony² as follows:

"It is absolutely wild times – it really, really is. And, you know, there's a lot going on. Like, I don't know if you guys know this, but there's literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now – I think it's called Puerto Rico,"

Senator Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, nobody’s idea of Woke, responded on Twitter:

This joke bombed for a reason. It's not funny and it's not true. Puerto Ricans are amazing people and amazing Americans! I’ve been to the island many times. It’s a beautiful place. Everyone should visit! I will always do whatever I can to help any Puerto Rican in Florida or on the island.

Scott’s response probably is related to the fact that about a million Puerto Ricans live in Florida. And can vote.

So, how does Shellenberg defend Hinchcliffe? By agreeing that Puerto Rico is indeed an island of garbage.

And the media disinformation about Puerto Rico’s trash problem is particularly egregious given that the media has itself covered the island’s garbage problem for years. In 2017, NPR published a story headlined, “After Maria, Puerto Rico Struggles Under The Weight Of Its Own Garbage.” “Puerto Rico’s yearslong debate over WTE continues as the island’s landfill issues mount,” wrote a waste industry publication in 2020. “Trash Crisis Leaves Puerto Rico Near ‘the Brink,’” wrote the progressive nonprofit media company, Global Press Journal, in 2021. And in 2022, Grist, a leading environmental news organization, published an article headlined, “Disaster debris is pushing Puerto Rico’s landfills to the brink.”

In fact, anyone who reads about how long Puerto Rico has failed to deal with its trash problem is likely to conclude that the island’s government deserves ridicule.

“Puerto Rico Facing Garbage Crisis,” read a Washington Post headline in 2007, ten years before a hurricane hit the island. “The mounting garbage problem has potentially disastrous consequences,” wrote a reporter, who quoted the regional administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency saying the problem "has to be addressed now.” It wasn’t.

Puerto Rico’s trash issues began receiving significant attention in the 1960s when its landfill system started experiencing strain. Puerto Rico enacted the Solid Waste Reduction and Recycling Act in 1992, aiming to recycle 35% of its waste, yet by 2019, only about 10-15% was being recycled. “In 2017,” noted Global Press Journal, “the EPA ordered the dump to close. But it is still receiving trash.”

Puerto Rico produces 5.6 pounds of trash per resident per day as compared to 4.4 pounds per day for the rest of the U.S. “They’ve been saying for about 10 years that they’re going to close the dump, but nothing has happened,” a resident told Global Press Journal in 2020. “We’re worse off because of the contamination. What kind of town are we going to leave to those who come after us? A polluted one.”

As such, there is a good case to be made that drawing attention to the island’s waste problem is merited if it helps inspire action. “After a proposed incinerator project stalled in 2018,” wrote the waste industry publication, “the territory’s long-term plan remains uncertain as noncompliant landfills are reaching capacity.”

Had there been anything within the same galaxy as a discussion of the need to solve Puerto Rico’s solid waste disposal issues, Shellenberger’s defense might just barely be reasonable. Since there was none of that, his attempts to say Hinchcliffe had a point are, like all else Republican these days, WEIRD.

It would have been bad enough had he stopped there. Because he is a humorless MAGAt, however, Shellenberger went even weirder, trying to use Large Language Model computer programs to prove that the joke really was funny.³

After I asked ChatGPT to explain the Puerto Rico joke, the AI search engine said, “It plays on the fact that there’s a massive ‘garbage patch’ in the Pacific Ocean—a well-known environmental concern. By suggesting that Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, is the ‘floating island of garbage,’ it can be seen as a satirical commentary on the neglect or mistreatment Puerto Rico has historically faced, especially following events like Hurricane Maria.”

X’s AI, Grok, said, “There's a real environmental issue involving large accumulations of plastic waste in ocean currents, often called garbage patches. By comparing Puerto Rico to this, the humor might aim to highlight environmental neglect, suggesting Puerto Rico, like these patches, is overlooked or disregarded” and that “This comparison could be seen as a critique of how Puerto Rico, as a U.S. territory, has been treated politically, economically, or in disaster response scenarios (like Hurricane Maria). It might imply that the treatment or portrayal of Puerto Rico by the U.S. government or media is akin to treating it like unwanted, disposable waste.”

Said Google’s AI, Gemini: It's trying to be funny by “Being shocking: Nobody expects Puerto Rico to be the punchline, so it catches you off guard; Using wordplay: It twists the idea of a "garbage island" to make a comment about Puerto Rico's problems; Maybe being satirical: Some people might see it as a way to criticize how Puerto Rico is treated, like it's just a pile of trash people ignore.”

I have no idea what he thinks these prove. The Wikipedia article I linked in the footnotes says

The largest and most capable LLMs are artificial neural networks built with a decoder-only transformer-based architecture, enabling efficient processing and generation of large-scale text data. Modern models can be fine-tuned for specific tasks, or be guided by prompt engineering.^[2] These models acquire predictive power regarding syntax, semantics, and ontologies^[3] inherent in human language corpora, but they also inherit inaccuracies and biases present in the data on which they are trained.^[4]

Note the bolded language. Those chatbots could easily have been trained by someone to give exactly those responses. There’s no reason to think of them as any more accurate than bird livers, sheep entrails, or tea leaves. It’s a rather neat rhetorical technique to fool the media illiterates, however. He presents something as resulting from a calculation using nifty new technology, which because it’s Math and Tech, two of the three letters in the magic STEM, it must be accurate! I don’t know that very many people are fooled by that, but it makes more sense as an intent to deceive stupid people than it does as evidence to win an argument.

The best way to ruin a joke is to explain it. If the joke were, y’know, FUNNY, Shellenberger wouldn’t have spent so much time proving that it was funny or accurate. Humor is a natural emotional response in humans and possibly other animals. Computers do not laugh. That’s even part of a beloved character's story. Large Language Model programs are the worst possible ways to defend a ‘joke.’

I would love to have a conclusion here, wrapping up my argument smoothly and ending with a zinger. I don’t. To me, Shellenberger’s actions here are boring and offensive. The only decent response is to apologize and go on, but decency isn’t something MAGAts do.

Vote Harris and send these idiots back to the sewers they crawled out of.

1. Trump mocks disabled reporter. That cannot be repeated often enough and it should have ended his campaign and his ability to exist in public right there. The fact that it didn’t is a severe indictment against all Americans.

2. Given the reaction to his lame line, I would not be surprised if the Trump campaign decided to read Hinchcliffe’s stage name as an instruction.

3. LLM’s, mistakenly called ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ are discussed at this Wikipedia article for both of you that didn’t know this.