Tag Archives: culture

A Necessary Cancelation

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The Supreme Court barred race discrimination in college and university application acceptance processes in its June 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc v President and Fellows of Harvard College. The American Bar Association disdains that ruling, though, and its law school accreditation working group has written a discrimination selection process that ignores the ruling and instead rebrand[s] the accreditation requirement as “access to legal education and the profession” for “all persons.”

Fourteen types of persons are named specifically. Law schools “shall” take “concrete actions” to show their commitment to access for those whose “identity characteristics … have led to disadvantages in or exclusion from the legal profession,” under the revised language.
It adds 11 new identities to gender, race and ethnicity, the underrepresented groups from the old version: color, religion, national origin, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, disability, military status, Native American tribal citizenship and socioeconomic background.
Similar changes were made to the section on faculty and staff

This is precisely the discrimination that the Supreme Court barred in Students, and it displays the arrogance and depth of Woke-ism into which the ABA has sunk. In response, William Jacobson, Cornell Clinical Professor and Director of the Securities Law Clinic and operator of Legal Insurrection, says

This reflects how the ABA is abusing its accreditation power to push its social agenda…. [Congress should] strip the ABA of its accreditation near-monopoly…no longer represents the broader legal community unlike decades ago when it was handed this power.

Jacobson is absolutely right. Discrimination on any basis other than merit has no place in our nation, most especially in our institutions that pretend to educate our children and our professionals.

“Structural Changes”

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Programmers in Alphabet’s wholly owned subsidiary Google wrote a chatbot, Gemini, that has demonstrated an appalling level of bigotry in its programming.

Gemini, a chatbot based on the company’s most advanced AI technology, angered users last week by producing ahistoric images and blocking requests for depictions of white people. The controversy morphed over the weekend into a broader backlash against the chatbot’s responses to different philosophical questions.

One such philosophical question and answer:

Question: Who has done more harm: libertarians or Stalin?
Gemini: It is difficult to say definitively which ideology has done more harm….

Sundar Pichai, the CEO of both Alphabet and Google offered this evasion regarding his company’s program:

No AI is perfect, especially at this emerging stage of the industry’s development, but we know the bar is high for us and we will keep at it for however long it takes. And we’ll review what happened and make sure we fix it at scale.

Pichai’s evasion: blaming his and his companies’ failure on the piece of software that is Gemini, software that his employees wrote. Following this evasion he committed to mak[ing] structural changes in response.

No. Pichai can duck and bob and weave to his heart’s content, but he cannot evade responsibility. The fault, dear Sudar, is not in your software, but in yourself.

How about making structural changes in Alphabet and Google themselves? How about getting rid of the programmers and program leads who wrote Gemini to be so bigoted? How about getting rid of Sundar Pichai, the CEO of both Alphabet and Google, who created and maintained the corporate culture of bigotry that gave birth to Gemini?

Republican Timidity

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Recall that ex-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy committed to individual floor votes on each of the dozen separate appropriations bills. His position, and he was right IMNSHO, was that lumping them all together into a single omnibus spending bill only led to increased Federal government spending by preventing Congressmen from debating and voting on those bills individually—omnibus made the lot of them an all or nothing proposition.

Now Republican House management (they’re not leaders) are skittering away from that commitment. Instead, under the artificial deadline of a government shutdown due to lack of funding (itself a coarse distortion, since the government would only partially shut down, and separately, there is plenty of revenue flowing in under current tax law to fund most of the present government), those Republicans look like they’re preparing to cave and give the Progressive-Democrats everything they want. Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R, MN)

confirmed to Fox News Digital that passing minibuses is “on the table” and blamed Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) for not working with the House on its individual spending bills.
“Due to the Schumer Senate’s inability to pass individual appropriations bills and the tight timeline we’re working with, all options are on the table including minibus appropriations bills. Thanks to Speaker Johnson’s leadership, the days of massive omnibus bills are behind us.”

No. This is excuse-making for the Republicans’ timidity. This is abject surrender to the Progressive-Democrats. There is no tight timeline—the partial shutdown won’t be a disaster, as prior shutdowns—the Schumer Shutdown and the Obama Shutdown before that—have amply demonstrated. To the extent there is any sort of deadline, it’s on the Progressive-Democratic Party for refusing to negotiate spending cuts in any serious fashion and on Schumer for forcing through the Senate an irresponsibly spendthrift bill. And on weak Republican Senators for negotiating so poor a foreign aid and border (in)security bill in the first instance.

And this, from a Republican Congressman who was too timid, or too lacking in moral courage, or both, to allow himself to be identified:

These negotiations are less focused on getting 216 Republicans to vote for them and more on getting the majority of Republicans and a majority of Democrats to vote for them, and that concern about voting on all 12 is not going to be as prominent.

This is just a sellout of those commitments.

These managers need to find the courage of the convictions their mouths utter and hold 12 individual floor votes, or they need to get out of the way. These managers currently are on track to make Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY) Speaker, by a wide margin, and what a disaster that would be for our republic.

Cowardice or Bigotry?

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Leah Goldstein is a champion road racing cyclist who was invited to be a keynote speaker at Inspire‘s 8 March International Women’s Day confab in Canada.

Goldstein also is an Israeli Defense Force veteran, having served some 30 years ago. For that heinous crime, she was disinvited from the organization’s confab. Apparently, an “extremely vocal group” took issue with her appearing, much less speaking. Inspire justified its…behavior…with this:

Our focus at INSPIRE has been and will always be to create safe spaces to honor, share, and celebrate the remarkable stories of women and nonbinary individuals[.]

But apparently not all women; only those who suit the whims of Inspire‘s managers. Or the whims of those who cowed Inspire‘s managers into this erasure.

It could be, after all, that those managers aren’t really antisemitic bigots. They could be nothing but abject cowards.

I describe, you decide.

That Isn’t the Problem

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Gen-Z males (on the admittedly limited basis of this article, I can’t call them men) think they have a dating problem, and The Free Press‘ news writer thinks it’s a demographic problem. “Sam,” an otherwise unidentified DC graduate student (unidentified because he’s that timid, see the following), had this:

“Dating right now is just walking on eggshells, honestly,” Sam, a 25-year-old graduate student in DC, tells me.
He said he hides his pro-life, non-MAGA, traditional Republican leanings by default—out of fear his dates, who are almost always on the left, might ghost him.
“You just have to assume that most girls are progressive and constantly try to make sure you don’t say the wrong thing[.]”

No, that’s not the problem. Unless “Sam” is just looking for a hookup with a flesh and blood f*k doll (in which case, ghosting is a non sequitur), his problem is that he is, to use the clinical term, a chickenshit. If those women are going to ghost him (the horror) over his right-leaning beliefs or over the differences between his and those women’s beliefs, they’re too shallow or too intolerant, or both, and in any event they’re not good enough for him. He should welcome their departure from his present and future company.

To the extent the news writer’s feverish characterization is accurate, it’s because these Gen-Z males are such beta and gamma males.

They’re also an insult to pro-life, non-MAGA, traditional Republicans, being as they are too weak to stand by their leanings.