Category Archives: culture

True, But

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A letter writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Friday installment of its Letters section suggested a solution to our nation’s baby-birth dearth.

The problem isn’t finances—it’s perceived inconvenience.
Children are a responsibility: a limitation on us in an age of careerism and radical individualism. But they also contain a hidden wealth that exceeds anything else—and hope for the future. We need to stop framing decisions about childrearing as simply another cost-benefit analysis and present young people with a more beautiful vision of what family life can be and do for the world.

The problem, though, also includes this simple, critical fact: today’s young people have already experienced what family life is, not hypothetical “can be’s.”

It’s necessary to address that realized experience in these proposed presentations. Absent that, such presentations will be perceived as just another installment in the empty words of lectures by older generations.

Who Tested this Stuff?

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Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram (which he controls through his Meta) claims to be protecting child users from predators.

However.

When Instagram began fencing off teen accounts last year for safety reasons, content from people under 18 all but vanished for adults.
Teen accounts were automatically private, and posts and reels from those accounts no longer circulated in the Explore tab and main feeds, except in the case of adults who were already following teens. Predators suddenly had a lot harder time finding targets.

Actually, not so much.

But two moms affiliated with the family-advocacy organization ParentsTogether Action discovered a workaround, which they shared with me: When a teen account comments on a public post or video reel, and an adult account that hasn’t already been flagged for suspicious behavior sees it, the adult can chat up the teen in the comments and even send that teen a follow request. If the teen accepts, the two can engage in private direct messaging.

Those direct messages can—as these tests also proved—include nude picture exchanges, and then the sextortion operations can begin.

Zuckerberg’s claims, through his Instagram team, regarding these exchanges:

When the test accounts shared nude images with one another, they initially appeared blurred in the teen account, but the teen account user could opt to view the photos. Instagram says its nudity protection feature—on by default for teen accounts and including warnings about the dangers of sharing such images—has encouraged teens to think twice. In June, more than 40% of blurred images received in direct messages remained blurred, the company says.

And 60% did not remain blurred, apparently. If Zuckerberg’s Instagram programmers are that capable of identifying the teen accounts, why are nude images allowed to be transmitted to them at all?

These “workarounds” are so obvious that I have to question how seriously Zuckerberg is taking these threats to our children.

Who tested this stuff? Apparently, no one qualified or serious.

College and Basic Arithmetic

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As Allysia Finley noted in her Wall Street Journal op-ed,

Kids in elementary school learn—or are supposed to learn—how to add fractions and round numbers. But many students at the University of California, San Diego—a top public university ranked sixth nationally by US News & World Report—can’t do either, according to a new analysis from the university. Read, and weep for the future of America.
Roughly one in eight freshmen lack rudimentary high-school math skills, defined as geometry, algebra, and algebra 2. It gets worse: students who had been placed in a remedial high-school math class in 2023 had roughly fifth-grade-level abilities. Only 39% could correctly round the number 374,518 to the nearest hundred—a third-grade skill.

The absolutely wrong answer is what UCSD is doing—setting up its own remedial arithmetic classes for its entering freshmen.

No.

Colleges/universities are not places for remedial education. They’re places in which to extend legitimate high school education. The managers of the so-called higher education institutions need to take two steps to reinstall that purpose and capability.

The first is to reject from admission who cannot do proper math—at the very least geometry (including executing proofs) and trigonometry, and then basic differential and integral calculus (Finley accurately described the current nominal requirement, but it’s much too light: algebra is a junior high level of arithmetic)—and dismiss those mistakenly admitted. One way to reduce the latter is to go beyond SAT and ACT scoring, which have dumbed down their math sections, and administer their own mathematics tests, emphasizing geometry, trigonometry, and calculus.

The other step is to start tracking high schools whose applicants cannot do that basic math, and simply reject out of hand applicants from those high schools that have not taught math to that basic level. Those high school administrators will have demonstrated that they do not take education seriously, and so their schools are not worth the trouble of consideration.

Campus Extremism

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Robert George, multiply-titled Professor at Princeton University, had some thoughts on how to deal with this.

So what should we do? The answer isn’t complicated, but acting on it will take determination and courage. Colleges and universities must return to offering a rigorous liberal arts education that refuses to engage in indoctrination and challenges groupthink. College courses must actively cultivate the virtues of curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual humility, analytical rigor, and above all, dedication to the pursuit of truth.

He added this:

This might seem like an unattainable ideal, but it isn’t. I’ve seen firsthand that it’s possible. Twenty-five years ago, Princeton University authorized me to establish and direct a program in civic education dedicated to helping young men and women become determined truth seekers, courageous truth speakers, lifelong learners, and responsible citizens.

He succeeded in his small world, and he cited a number of examples at other schools. But these are anecdotes, not a general trend of success. At many of the other schools he touted, antisemitic and terrorist-supporting riots mostly peaceful protests seized buildings and common grounds, vandalized the buildings and generally prevented the sort of free-exchange of ideas George touted. Those destructive disruptions occurred while school managers meekly watched and many of the schools’ professors participated in the disruptions.

No. The only way to achieve George’s ideal, extremely worthy that it is, is to remove from schools those school administrators and professors, whether ideologues or simply too timid to oppose ideology over education. Both kinds are worthless wastes of payroll.

The detritus must be removed before cleanup can begin.

Religious Bigotry

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West Virginia had a requirement that all school students get vaccinated against the Wuhan Virus (my term, not the State’s), regardless of religious views regarding vaccines or how the vaccines are structured or made or from any other religious perspective. The State permitted no religious opt-outs at all. Raleigh County Circuit Judge Michael Froble waved the BS flag at that requirement and has ruled that parents can, indeed, opt their children out of the vaccination program based on their religious beliefs.

The larger question is why a lawsuit and judicial ruling was needed in the first place.

Is the State’s bar of religious exemption demonstrative of religious bigotry by the relevant State officials? Not necessarily. Some religion-based objections aren’t actually based on religion, but those false assertions are quite rare. It is strongly suggestive of officials’ religious bigotry, though.