Tag Archives: responsibilities

Privacy—and Trust

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Parents of children in the People’s Republic of China have a new “aid.”

ByteDance is peddling a “study lamp” that lets teachers and parents constantly monitor children, ostensibly while the children are doing their schoolwork.

The lamps come equipped with two built-in cameras—one facing the child and another offering a bird’s-eye view from above—letting parents remotely monitor their children when they study. There is a smartphone-sized screen attached to each lamp, which applies artificial intelligence to offer guidance on math problems and difficult words. And parents can hire a human proctor to digitally monitor their children as they study.

What else, though, is ByteDance monitoring, what other data is ByteDance collecting about the kids, the things they’re doing, with whom they’re doing it, parents’ handling of their kids? And passing it on to the PRC’s intelligence community under that 2017 law?

There’s also the question of trust. Not trust in Big Brother—or Uncle Xi—but trust between children and parents, and the ability of children to trust at all. What message are parents sending to their own children when the parents—and other authority figures, known to the children to be there at the parents’ request—insist on being, constantly and immediately, over the kids’ shoulders to be sure those kids are behaving properly? That the kids are fundamentally untrustworthy, maybe? That they’re unworthy in some way?

And there’s the creation of dependency on instant answers.

Some Chinese media outlets and parents have also criticized the idea of placing an interactive touch screen in front of children as they study, warning that the lamp would make children accustomed to seeking easy answers from technology.

And what brave new world for us when ByteDance brings these…devices…to America?

Arrogance and Cowardice

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Texas’ Progressive-Democrat State congressmen have joined Wisconsin’s Progressive-Democrat State congressmen and Indiana’s Progressive-Democrat State congressmen in their abject cowardice, masked by their o’erweening arrogance.

In order to block legislation of which they personally disapprove, they’ve run away from the State’s House of Representatives explicitly to deny a quorum and to block a bill that would expand access to the ballot box while also expanding the sanctity of each Texas citizen’s vote.

Texas Democrats walked out of the state House’s chamber just before midnight on Sunday to deny Republicans the quorum needed to hold a final vote on a controversial bill that would tighten voting laws in the state.

This has been all too typical of the Progressive-Democratic Party over the last several years. If they can’t get their way, they block democracy—especially our republican form of democracy—altogether with their cowardly and toddler-esque temper tantrums.

Or they rule with their pen and phone. Or, when they’re in complete control, they simply ignore all others and act unilaterally. Or as President Joe Biden (D) has said, repeatedly, regarding the spendiferous and tax exploding bills Party currently is ramming through, he’d like to have Republican bipartisanship, but if they won’t come along, he and Party will act alone.

This instruction from the State’s House Minority Leader Chris Turner (D, 101st District (centered in Tarrant County) says it all.

Members, take your key and leave the chamber discreetly. Do not go to the gallery. Leave the building.

Do not go to the gallery. Slink away through the back door and alley. Do not face Texas’ citizens.

Keep in mind, too, that this isn’t the first time that Texas’ Progressive-Democrats have run away from their duties.

“Polling Error”

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An “expert panel” claims it has figured out the polling errors the industry has made over the last several election cycles—all the way back to the Eisenhower election cycles, in fact.

Pollsters oversampled one party or the other.

NSS.

The “experts” missed the real problem, though, or they chose not to mention it (which elision, if that’s what they’re doing, would be consistent with polling behavior).

Regardless of the cause of their oversampling (and this panel suggested a number of them), the pollsters—in every poll—knew they were oversampling one party or the other by the time they’d closed each poll and begun going over their data. The pollsters then made the decision to make no effort to correct for that oversampling, or to say in their published results that they were oversampling and had no reliable method of correcting for that.

They chose, instead, to masquerade their results as valid without caveat of any sort.

That’s the dishonesty of the pollsters.

And this: the number of polls examined may be too small to indicate whether the apparent bias toward Democrats/Progressive-Democrats is valid, but the appearance should be investigated in its own right.

The Party of Systemic Racism

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Recall that the chairman of the Lamar County Democratic Party, Gary O’Connor, called Senator Tim Scott (R, SC) an oreo over Scott’s speech responding to President Joe Biden’s (D) speech to a sparsely populated joint Congress.

In response to the backlash to his blatantly racist and deliberately cast slur, O’Connor tendered his resignation from his position in the party.

Now we have the truth of those Progressive-Democrats:

Representatives of the Lamar County Democrats met Tuesday to consider the resignation of Gary O’Connor, the Lamar County Democratic Party chair. However, the party said in a statement that they decided not to accept the resignation after taking the “last few days to reflect upon this incident.”

O’Connor has apologized to Scott. The Lamar County branch of the Progressive-Democratic Party has its own, nominally parallel, claims regarding O’Connor’s racist slur:

Lamar County Democrats recommit ourselves to conduct our private conversations and our public social media discussions with anti-racist, pro-reconciling attitudes and language. We strongly condemn bigotry of any kind and will continue our historic efforts to work for justice and equality for all our fellow citizens.

Leave aside the fact that “anti-racist…language” includes such racist moves as attempting to force the 1619 Project into children’s school curriculum and into college and university required coursework, trying to force children to “deconstruct” their racial status and “privilege,” trying to force children and their parents explicitly to support “anti-racism” and activists like BLM, and so on.

Apologies, however sincere as O’Connor’s seems to be, at least in its construction, are nothing but empty words, though, absent sustained and observably changed behavior. Such a thing takes open, improved behavior over a considerable amount of time. Especially, it requires that behavior; simply going to ground and being silent and hidden doesn’t cut it.

Recommittals like the Lamar Progressive-Democrats’ are meaningless unless they’re accompanied by sustained, measurably improved performance. Such a thing by an organization takes changed behavior over an even longer period, and it’s best accompanied by a change in management personnel, including here those Representatives of the Lamar County Democrats.

The Lamar Progressive-Democrats’ statement, though, is especially noncredible given their decision actually to do nothing: their refusal to accept O’Connor’s resignation as their chairman. Insisting he stay on is simply their empirical (as opposed to rhetorical) demonstration that the branch, as a body, condones racism. Had that gang valued O’Connor’s contributions while decrying his racist spew, they would have accepted his resignation as chairman and reassigned him to another, lesser position within the branch.

Allen West, Chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, has the right of it. He said he was

sick and tired of the duplicitous hypocrisy of the true party of racism.

And

He said he would be sending a box of Oreos to the Texas Democratic Party.