Tag Archives: culture

Punctuation

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OK, another letter wants a response. Or it’s been a slow day….

CEOs and billionaires don’t worry that people will think they’re stupid because of their poor composition. But the rest of us try-hards know that whether it is justified or not, many readers will judge writers’ intelligence and authoritativeness by their grammar and composition.

Not so much intelligence or authoritativeness, as much as their degree of care and accuracy regarding their writings on their subject matter. Carelessness does, and legitimately so, detract from the credibility of their musings on their subjects. Even if they’re credentialed as the last word on the subject.

ee cummings was the only writer who could get away with no punctuation or capitalizations as a matter of course. And his poetry was only middling.

On Some Letters

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Some letters in The Wall Street Journal‘s Monday Letters section want comment.

Even though they [Paul Ehrlich and his wife] included in the book the warning that “we can be sure that none of them will come true as stated,” the scenarios became tools of critics.

And justifiably so. The Ehrlichs correctly observed that the details of their warnings would vary with reality, but they were insisting that the thrust and core of their predicted scenarios must inevitably occur.

…it is hard to dispute that the earth has finite natural resources, limited human carrying capacity and that excessive growth has resulted in environmental destruction.

It’s true enough that the planet, being of finite size, must have finite resources. But those upper bounds are so far beyond the reach of “human carrying capacity,” as to be laughable as limits. And coring an entire planet is about the only limit demonstrable to human carrying capacity. Nor has there been any “excessive growth” leading to environmental destruction. It’s uncontrolled, irresponsible growth that has done that, and when controls are applied, while not limiting growth with them, prosperity has occurred and existing destruction repaired. See, for instance, the terrors of acid rain and the ozone hole.

Ehrlich wasn’t a prognosticator, a modern-day Nostradamus. He was writing—and I assume hoping to sell—a book. Catastrophe and fear of the unknown sell better than optimism and serendipity.

Gee, I write private detective novels and a few political philosophy books, all of which I hope to sell. Each of them contains a measure of catastrophe and fear, or predictions of catastrophe. Maybe I can be a population bomb or climate expert, too.

People who deal in hypotheticals and emotions are generally unswayed by facts. Likewise, those who deal in proven outcomes are unmoved by feelings and theoretical futures. Thus, we speak (or yell) past each other, using very different languages. I don’t know how this ends.

One way in which it ends is those hypotheticals and hysterical feelings are continually falsified by unrolling reality, facilitating an increasing ability simply to ignore the fear-mongers and leave them behind.

It’s a Feature, Not a Defect

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In the race for Artificial Intelligence dominance—which isn’t necessarily existential, but it comes close—the US has a slight global lead, the People’s Republic of China is close behind, and the European Union is…not participating.

The EU Artificial Intelligence Act, the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, the Data Act, and the Cyber Resilience Act, among others, impose stringent and duplicative regulations that stifle innovation, drive up compliance costs, delay product launches, restrict access to data, and expose companies to billions in fines.
Before AI systems are even put on the market, the AI Act alone requires predeployment risk assessments and mitigation systems, high-quality data sets, detailed logs, documentation of system functionality, and human oversight.

All this is done in the name of what the EU thinks of as safety—protect the environment, transparency for the sake of transparency, protect the consumer from…something, protect…. It’s being done, too, with careful deliberation and full knowledge of the consequences, both of being right and of being wrong.

The EU has chosen, and it has long done so in a broad reach of milieus, what it views as safety over what it views as freedom—here, to innovate. As someone once more or less noted some years ago, those who choose safety at the expense of freedom will have neither. And from that, they will lose security.

This is the EU opting out of the contest, hoping that the winner will remember the EU with fondness and a willingness to share. Which is no security at all.

How Onerous

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Florida, in addition to requiring in-state unions to hold periodic recertification elections, is about to enact a bill that would require at least 50% of the members of government unions to show up in person to vote, with a majority of those voting “aye” to achieve recertification. I can hear the union squalls here in Texas.

South Florida [Progressive-]Democratic Senator Shevrin Jones said the bill would be “unions’ nail in the coffin.” American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said the bill is “designed to decimate our Florida locals and their contracts” because it “effectively forces” elections where “you have to turn out 50% of your entire bargaining unit or you lose your contract.”

50%! The horror. If it’s really that difficult to find that much union support—a quarter of the membership plus one—among its members, there’s a hint there regarding the utility of unions in the minds of their members.

Union managers should take this and run. The bills could have required a majority of union members to vote “aye” in a recertification election, rather than just that puny minority to get recertification.

Not Just Vetting

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The headline and subheadline laid out the problem; the article expands on it.

Naturalized but radicalized: Recent terror attacks expose glaring problems with citizenship vetting
After four attacks on the U.S. with one common thread—immigration—the time may have come to make transformative changes to the system that decides who comes in.

That’s a mostly accurate description, but only that; Congresswoman Harriet Hageman (R, WY) identified the other critical dimension of the problem.

Throughout history, we have expected people who immigrated here to become assimilated to the American culture. And I think over the last 30 years or so, there’s been this idea that we no longer need to do that, and this is an example of the consequences of those kinds of bad policies[.]

Our vetting does nothing to assess a potential immigrant’s interest in or willingness to assimilate into American culture, a culture that prizes individual initiative, individual responsibility, and acceptance of, or at least willingness to, live under American values of free speech and religion, keeping and bearing arms, and the rest as illustrated in our Bill of Rights.

Once in the US—legally, mind you—and on what amounts to probation, remaining here on a green card or while on the green card working toward citizenship, potential immigrants are not pushed to learn American English (or even British English) beyond taking a few simplified English as a Second Language courses, nor are they required to learn about American culture and values beyond what it takes to pass a dumb-downed citizenship test.

English needs to be specified as our official language, and government officials at all levels of our hierarchy need to interact with citizens and immigrants in English. Beyond that, their children need to be taught in American English in school, not in their native language, and that schooling needs to include more American history and civics (as it must for the children of us citizens, come to that).

With no incentive to assimilate anywhere along the way, potential immigrants, staying separate from us, gain a sense of isolation even in their enclaves. Of course they’re easily radicalized.