Revisionist History and Political CYA

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Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Congress from Michigan’s 7th Congressional District William Lawrence has been busily deleting politically inconvenient social media posts he’s made in the past. The smaller problem is that his deletions are nothing other than a coward’s attempt to revise his history. It’s the smaller problem because such revisionism is widely spread and all too common, even though that in no way legitimizes the misbehavior.

The larger problem here concerns those deletions and his rationalization of them. The deletions include posts pushing for such things as

police and prison abolition, called for nationalizing fossil-fuel companies to end their production, attacked moderate Democrats, and argued for a “fundamental overhaul” of the Constitution.
…
“f**k” the nuclear-family home and calling it an “isolating, individualistic, violent way of organizing society,” envisioning “a world of free and open migration,” and calling to “Abolish the Senate.”

That’s about as un-American as it gets. His rationalization, though….

Lawrence said that he currently does not support defunding the police or open borders despite what his earlier posts suggested.
“Like many millennials, I’ve done a lot of thinking out loud on the internet[.]”

That’s an illustration of Lawrence’s dishonesty. He spoke from his heart in those since-deleted posts. His deletions and his rationalizations are nothing more than him covering his political behind. What concrete actions has he taken, after all, to illustrate, if not demonstrate, his alleged evolution of his thinking?

Foreign Donations to American Colleges and Universities

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A letter writer in the WSJ‘s Monday Letters section answered the section’s subheadline—Should colleges and universities be required to disclose the names of foreign donors?

Transparency measures aren’t running universities dry of foreign funds.

I go much beyond that passive affirmative. There should be no debate over foreign money in our education systems. The schools should be required to reveal more than just names. They should give up, also, any restrictions, caveats, codicils, etc. that the foreign donor has attached to his donation. There should be no such money at all from donors who are citizens of or entities domiciled in enemy nations, like Russia, Iran, northern Korea, and the People’s Republic of China.

This is as much a national security matter as it is an education one.

Nor is there any free speech problem here. Foreign entities and individuals are not subject to American free speech constitutional clauses or free speech statutes.

That’s Nice

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Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has issued an ultimatum to Iran in the wake of the terrorists’ firing on one of our aircraft carriers and a guided-missile destroyer.

It’s simple: if Iran shoots at US ships, we will destroy (and sink) their oil tankers. All they have to do is not shoot at [the] US Navy[.]

That’s nice. Here’s a much better alternative, though. How about instead of, within Hegseth’s (and his boss, President Donald Trump’s (R)) preferred parameters of tit-for-tat, the Navy administered an extensive series of love taps on the sites from which attacks on our Navy might come, while simultaneously seizing the Iranian tankers, rather than destroying and sinking them?

The seized oil could be sold on at market prices, and the money used to help defray the cost of the Navy’s deployment into the Arabian Sea and Arabian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. The tankers themselves could be sold on (perhaps to US shippers to facilitate Jones Act shipping) or sent to American breakers to be sold for scrap, and the money from this used as prize money for the sailors involved.

At The Core of Progressive-Democratic Party Ideology

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It was stated in so many words by socialist (though he risibly denies it) and Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for US Senator from Michigan, Abdul el-Sayed:

…if we took seriously the idea that all of our kids were all of our kids. If we started with that idea that every child is our child….

Too many people on the right are writing this off as just so much Kamala Harris-esque word salad, and that’s dangerously failing to hear what he’s saying, what Party and its Democratic Socialist of America members have in mind for our republic.

El-Sayed is clear here. Children don’t belong to the parents; they aren’t the responsibility of the parents. Children are the responsibility of the community, of the state. Children are the state’s property.

“AI is Satanic”

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That’s what the headline on the WSJ article claims. The headline misleads, as the article itself goes on to say.

Experts call…tendency of machines to excessively agree with and flatter their users AI sycophancy. Vance chose spiritual terms. “I think that’s kind of satanic.”

Certain behaviors of AI can be satanic; that does not make AI satanic.

The larger issue for me, though, is what AI gets used for. It certainly can be abusive—or satanic, in the extreme—if it’s used wrongly, and misusing it can be done subtly enough that the user might not recognize the abuse. Vice President JD Vance (R) cited a friend who used an AI package for marital advice and got back validation of his own selfishness. Children have used AI packages for advice and have been led to suicide.

Those are uses of the tool, though. AI also has been used to good effect for business moves, to identify patterns in complex and/or noisy data, to point ways toward disease controlling chemistry.

 

Even where AI sycophancy leads to failure, even egregious failure, though, it’s not that AI is misbehaved or satanic, it’s that its human programmers have programmed the sycophancy into it through flawed programming and flawed testing.

AI in itself is just another tool, neither good nor bad intrinsically. It’s necessary to discriminate between the tool and what the tool gets used for. Build the data centers, and get training in how to use it. Then take care in its use, just as is necessary for any other tool, whether a power saw or a firearm.