Tag Archives: culture

If He Won’t….

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An essay writer in the WSJ pled, via his headline, For the Love of God, Please Put on Headphones.

One recent morning, I was reading the newspaper in a sleepy Manhattan cafe when two young women sat beside me and proceeded to conduct a work call on speakerphone. As they yelled to their colleague about a marketing presentation, a man at a nearby bench checked in with his girlfriend—also on speakerphone.
Into this racket walked an influencer type armed with a selfie stick. He was livestreaming his coffee run to an up-tempo backing track. “So excited for my cortado! I wonder how it will taste!” he shrieked at his screen as he spun around the room.

I doubt the essay writer wasn’t alone in the cafe trying to enjoy their morning when these noisemakers arrived and began their cacophony.

There’s a simple, straightforward solution for this sort of situation and for dealing with the noisemakers creating it.

Those in the public space should gather around him (them in the particular instance) closely, and make their own noise—loud conversations, loud calls of greetings to passersby, turn up the sound on their own playlists on their own cell phones—and strongly interfere with the loudcaster and the speakerphone shouters who think they’re too cool to put on headphones or, at least for the shouters to take their cell phones somewhere more secluded.

Separately, but not too far afield, I have to wonder about the last few generations, even into the boomers. Whatever happened to folks being willing to take direct action, to address a problem on their own initiative, instead of looking and crying out for someone else to Do Something, or crying to mommy government, or just crying into the air? Or screeding an essay into the æther?

Mishmash

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In a WSJ article about the Great AI Freakout, centered on fears of a supposedly coming AI apocalypse, there was this bit, which illustrates the press’ involvement in potentiating the freakout, all gathered up in one mishmash of…error.

Opposition to the widespread network of Flock Safety AI-enabled surveillance cameras in the US took hold this summer, just as details about OpenAI’s autonomous hacking of the company Hugging Face became public. In the background was a drumbeat of pushback against data centers and worries that the technology could result in widespread job loss.

Laying all of these at the feet of AI is the article’s news writers’ disinformation (and they’re not alone in perpetrating this).

Opposition to Flock Safety’s cameras has very little to do with AI and very much to do with opposition to widespread and spreading government surveillance of us ordinary Americans.

Opposition to data centers has very little to do with AI and very much to do with the data centers’ need for water and electricity at the expense of rising water and electricity costs to us ordinary Americans and to the potential for polluting potable water. (As an aside, while those concerns were, early on, largely justified, data center designers’ and builders’ increasing emphasis on recycling the water they use and including their own power plants in the construction designs largely eliminates the basis for those concerns.)

Buildout of the data centers, further, creates a myriad of construction and ancillary jobs, and the operation of the centers still leads to increases in employment, if only modest ones.

Even the autonomous AI hacking of Hugging Face is overblown. The hacking capability itself is a legitimate concern, but the escape of the AI hackers wasn’t executed by AI so much as it was allowed by the human AI developers’ negligence in maintaining an air gap between their development facilities and the Internet.

At bottom, AI is like any other tool: highly useful when used properly, highly dangerous when used carelessly or misused deliberately.

We’re not all going to die in 10 years, as a colleague of the disgruntled, or panicky, ex-Anthropic employee howled. Far more likely, we’re going to prosper once we grunt through the transition, just as we have done during and after all our prior technology leaps.

That Time Has Long Since Come

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The Trump administration wants a new rule that would achieve two ends governing how the 2030 census counts persons present in the US and how those counts are used.

The Commerce Department, which oversees the census, proposed not to count most immigrants toward the population used to apportion seats for the House, unless they have become citizens or hold permanent resident status. The proposed new calculation would exclude immigrants in the country illegally, which various analyses estimate total about 15 million.

And

In addition, the proposed rule would prohibit the Census Bureau from including race or ethnicity questions on the census form sent to all households, saying such data is “immaterial” to the constitutional mandate to conduct an actual population count. That would eliminate the most complete counts of the country’s Black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American populations, ending a key source of information used in civil and voting rights enforcement.

The time for this rule has long since come, and it needs to be enacted promptly, with no further delay.

Illegal aliens have no business voting in American elections—they are not Americans, and as they’ve demonstrated by their illegal entry and subsequent insistent dodging of immigration authorities, they have no intention of becoming citizens or even legal residency. This is especially the case since for years, they’ve been able to voluntarily leave for their home contracts, collect a significant cash stipend on arrival, and then return to the US and enter legally.

It’s also plainly obvious that race or ethnicity have no place in our voting rules. This is borne out by our 14th Amendment and Supreme Court rulings explicitly eliminating race and ethnicity from voting special treatments. In the end, too, the only ethnicity that matters in eligibility for voting is American ethnicity. Beyond that, all American voters are the same under our Constitution and our statutes. Segregating us into groups for voting district construction would be irrelevant were the segregation not openly racist.

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.

“Democrats vs. the DSA”

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That’s James Freeman’s headline on his Tuesday Best of the Web column in the WSJ. He’s badly mischaracterizing the matter, and he repeated his error in his lede.

Yes, it’s depressing how few elected Democrats are willing to stand up against the vicious Marxists intent on taking over their party. But rather than curse the darkness, let’s celebrate the brave few who signed their names and their sacred honor this week to an amendment that tells the truth about history’s most murderous ideology.

Freeman chose not to name the “four brave Democrats” who offered that (draft) amendment, and neither did the House Web site that published the amendment.

That’s relatively minor, though. Freeman’s error is his claim that only a few elected Democrats are willing to stand up to the Marxists taking over the Progressive-Democratic Party.

Party, in fact, is enthusiastically embracing those Marxists and their Democratic Socialists of America party. This is not a hostile takeover; it’s an enthusiastic marriage to the point of an elopement. The “only a few” who are opposing the merger are limited to Party’s extreme right fringe of Establishment Democrats.

And that is truly depressing.