Category Archives: ethics

New York’s Education Problem

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In addition to eliminating concrete examinations to assess whether a high school pupil (in New York, I hesitate to term them students), the State is instituted a carefully vague and unmeasurable in objective terms set of descriptions of a high schooler who’s suitable for graduating.

New York now wants its high-school graduates to be “academically prepared.” The rest of the qualities that make up the portrait are nicely nebulous: “critical thinker,” “creative innovator,” “effective communicator,” “reflective and future focused” and a “global citizen.”

The rest of them? “Academically prepared” also is carefully indeterminate. Prepared for what? According to what criteria? Measured by whom?

But the deliberately indistinct criteria still aren’t the most serious failure. That accolade goes to the “global citizen” pseudo-criterion.

Why not require the graduate wannabe to be an effective American citizen? Oh, wait—that would run counter to the Left’s holding that America is evilly racist, too full of itself on the world’s stage, and needs to be hammered down several pegs. Nothing exceptional about us except the depth of our depravity.

That New York isn’t alone in this abject failure—[a]bout half the states and hundreds of school districts have developed their own portraits—but that in no way excuses New York.

A Misreading

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Matthew Hennessey has misread what the Progressive-Democratic Party wants when it gains majorities in the House and the Senate.

There are no policies underpinning the Democratic grand strategy, no major proposals on the table for discussion and debate. There are only the Four Fears.

That’s not entirely accurate. There are those fears, which Party is fomenting in lieu of specifics regarding economic and foreign policy goals: fear of artificial intelligence, fear of data centers, fear of Donald Trump, and fear of MAGA.

Those, though, are just tools Party is using in pursuit of its major proposals. Hennessey is right, though, to the extent its major proposals are not up for debate.

The Progressive-Democrats have promised to eliminate the filibuster, reducing our republican democracy to a popular democracy and reducing our Senate to just another House, this time whose members have State-wide districts. They’ve also promised to stack the Supreme Court, reducing it from a Court upholding and applying our Constitution as it’s written to an activist court for whom our Constitution is just a collection of suggestions, if not entirely irrelevant, and which is malleable to Party demands.

Land Acknowledgments

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We stole your land. Sucks to be you. That’s what the Left’s precious land acknowledgments said at their core. As Kyle Smith put it in his WSJ Free Expression piece,

It’s as if a robber announced, “I took your jewelry and feel bad about it, but no way am I giving it back.”

Or, sucks to be you. Either way.

At any rate, it seems this particular bit of Leftist guilty bodice grasping (it’s not like they’re prepared to actually rend their YSL blouses) is beginning to fade to black. Some universities are quietly dropping them, and plays are making jokes of them in their preludes to their Acts 1.

Land acknowledgments, used so studiously by progressive do-gooder wannabes, were never more than expressions of contempt for the indigenes supposedly the addressees of the acknowledgments and insults to the intelligence of the rest of us, who also knew how we came into possession of lands that were variously bartered to us, taken by us, occupied by us where it was owned by no one. And especially those of us who recognized the arbitrary line in the dirt that the acknowledgments so carefully drew so as to ignore inconvenient history: that the indigenes whose land we’d allegedly taken had themselves bartered, taken, or occupied those same lands from their predecessor occupants all the way back to the original migrants coming across the land bridge connecting Siberia to Alaska those 10s of thousands of years ago.

Crocodile Tears

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Journalism organizations that heretofore pooled resources in order to cover Presidential events that occurred in venues lacking space for all of the journalists have chosen to refuse to cover President Donald Trump’s (R) small-venue events in response to Trump’s decision to bar three of their number from the White House press pool over those three’s dishonest reporting on administration matters. (Notice that: the bar is over dishonest news reporting, not over opinionating and commentary, as the pressmen have been arguing, thereby demonstrating the reporting dishonesty being sanctioned.)

“The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting,” the pool members, FOX News Media, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, and NBC News, said in a joint statement.

That’s just it, though. CNN‘s, MS NOW‘s, and Politico‘s news reporting has long been dishonest, and they’re not alone; they’re just the most egregious. That dishonesty begins with refusing to report all of the news—all of the facts underlying a news story—which is nothing more than lying by omission. This is a technique the broadcast outlets use especially broadly (viz., spiking the Hunter Biden laptop revelations of the New York Post). The outlets’ dishonesty extends to writing/broadcasting unattributed rumors—sourced to “anonymous,” or to “officials familiar,” even to mere “persons familiar.” That leaves us in their revered public with no means to check on those sources in order to evaluate for ourselves those sources’ qualifications on the subject matter, much less their actual presence in the alleged discussions. We can’t even evaluate whether those sources actually exist or if they do whether their claims are being accurately reported.

Overarching all of that is my long-standing question. Years ago, editors required at least two on-the-record sources to corroborate anonymously sourced claims. Journalists have long since walked away from that requirement, raising the obvious question: what concrete, measurable, publicly accessible standard of journalistic integrity do today’s journalists use instead?

Journalists’ silence on that question is a loud, clear answer.

In the end, Trump is right: journalists have no intrinsic right to enter the White House. They have all kinds of sources and means of ferreting out news regarding the administration and its doings without being inside an office building, however big a deal the building might be. If nothing else, they can interact with their anonymous sources and officials/persons familiar as those folks come and go from the office building.

Silly

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To the point of idiotic. Yet, that’s the nature of the position of Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei. He has said that

he hoped Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, when they meet later this month, could reach an agreement to ban the use of AI to develop biological weapons, an area of concern for researchers and national-security officials.

Yet he also said,

“The more long-term thing would be working together to put a speed limit on the rate of AI progress. I think that’s going to be very difficult” because of the military incentives of moving AI forward[.]

Which demonstrates the idiocy of his “hope,” even though he’s oblivious to it. The People’s Republic of China has as its avowed goal replacing the United States as the world’s hegemon. It’s been rapidly expanding its military capability pursuant to that end.

Actually, the “hope” is beyond idiotic. It’s national suicide to depend on an enemy nation to honor an agreement to not use AI for weapons development. How would we enforce such an agreement? How would we even detect violations of the agreement before the outcome was used against us? AI, after all, isn’t a nuclear weapon whose testing is easily detected, and was easily detected even with the technologies of the 1950s. AI development and testing, when done by researchers who take security seriously (which Amodei’s and Sam Altman’s researchers evidently do not), is done behind firewalled and air gapped barriers. Aside from preventing AI from escaping, it also prevents outsiders from getting in to watch.