Monthly Archives: May 2025

Cynicism…

Posted on by
Reply

…is alive and well in California. This is illustrated by the California Interscholastic Federation’s decision to increase the number of girls eligible to participate in State high school athletic tournaments while continuing to allow biological males—boys—to participate in those same girls’ tournaments.

[A]ny biological female student-athlete who would have earned the next qualifying mark for one of their Section’s automatic qualifying entries in the CIF State meet, and did not achieve the CIF State at-large mark in the finals at their Section meet, was extended an opportunity to participate in the 2025 CIF State Track and Field Championships[.]

Tl;dr translation: any girl who lost to a boy in an earlier stage of the competition will be granted the opportunity to compete and lose again to the same boy in the next stage.

The cynicism is made explicit by this remark by California’s Progressive-Democrat Gavin Newsom’s spokesperson Izzy Gardon:

CIF’s proposed pilot is a reasonable, respectful way to navigate a complex issue without compromising competitive fairness—a model worth pursuing.

No. There’s nothing respectful, reasonable, or fair in allowing boys to participate in girls’ sports.

More Foolishness

Posted on by
Reply

This time, it’s in a letter to the Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section by Isaiah Wilson (USA Col, Ret):

Understanding social dynamics in combat, including race and identity, is necessary for effective leadership and unit cohesion.

The problem with this claim is that in combat, logistics, maintenance, any other support function and in training for these, race is irrelevant, and identity is strictly and solely American. Subdividing our American military members, as it does in civilian life, only divides those members from each other, thereby creating…division, and that works disastrously against preparation and against execution.

Then Isaiah compounded his error.

Perhaps the reason America has struggled in combat is that we have underestimated the role of identity-centered understanding in military operations.

To the extent our military has struggled in combat, there has been too much emphasis on identity-centered understanding and the intrinsically racist and sexist divisions that emphasis creates. For all that, though, our military has not struggled in combat all that much. Our political leadership, though, has struggled mightily with combat, and that has gone to our detriment in nearly every conflict we’ve fought since WWII.

Keep the social justice claptrap out of the foxhole and out of our military in general, and return the training and operational focuses to producing the most lethal soldiers and the most lethal military establishment in the world.

Mischaracterization

Posted on by
Reply

The Vera Institutes of Justice’s Santiago Mueckay has one in his letter in the WSJ‘s Letters section.

[T]he Supreme Court has consistently affirmed that immigrants are entitled to due process under the US Constitution.

This is a cynically offered strawman argument. No one is arguing that immigrants are not entitled to our Constitution’s due process protections.

Illegal aliens, though—the ones targeted by rapid deportation efforts—hold themselves outside our social compact, outside our government’s jurisdiction, by breaking into our country in violation of our laws and then hiding from our government. From that, illegal aliens have no claim to, and no right for, any of the protections of our Constitution.

Mueckay will have to play with his dolly without me.

Another Reason Why

Posted on by
Reply

Here is another reason our nation’s student loan debt has gotten out of hand. The subheadline goes

Millions of Americans suddenly owe billions of dollars in student debt after years of forbearance

The foolishness of the forbearance itself contributed to the enormous risks the massive student loan overhang represents for our economy. There’s nothing sudden, though, about the reappearance of that debt.

The article then does nothing to correct this distortion. Here’s the lede:

Millions of Americans had their student-loan payments put on pause during the pandemic. Now they are back on the hook again.

They never were off the hook; none of those loans were forgiven in any legal way. They’ve always been on the hook. “Millions of Americans” have owed those billions of dollars all along. This sort of distortion is even more heavily contributory to those risks.

Full stop.

Blue Books

Posted on by
2

They’re making a comeback on campuses as a way to get around student cheating via ChatGPT and other AI packages. I say good for those profs and schools that are requiring them for assignments and exams. Blue books make the student do his own work at the moment of truth: writing down, in class, their own answers to the varying assignments.

There is a valid beef to requiring blue books [emphasis in the original].

Many of them believe students should be using AI to get smarter. It would be stupid not to. These tools will be a part of their lives and knowing how to use them effectively will be an important advantage in their future workplaces.
“They will use ChatGPT all the time for all sorts of things, and that will make them more efficient, more productive and better able to do their jobs,” said Arthur Spirling, a Princeton University professor of politics who gives proctored blue-book exams. “It is strange to say you won’t be permitted to do this thing that will be very natural to you for the rest of your career.”

There’s an obvious solution to that problem, though, and assignments and exams easily can be used to teach the use of AI. This would apply as well to STEM courses as humanities courses.

The professors can issue assignments and exams that mandate using AI to generate answers, then in class use blue books to require the students to critique the AI answers, identify AI “hallucinations,” and to improve the AI answers. To short circuit attempts to do the critiquing and editing in advance and simply writing down nearly memorized answers, the profs could require specific edit types of specific paragraphs or blocks of code or certain arithmetic sections or…. Alternatively, the profs could do the above as Part I of the assignment or exam, and then in Part II, provide his own AI-generated answer to a question and require the students to do the critiques and edits de novo. Then, returning to/maintaining basics, use Part III to pose questions that the students will not see until that point in the in-class exercise or exam and that the students must answer via blue book on the spot.

That last, especially, is how things work IRL.