Tag Archives: morality

The Veterans Administration

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…won’t clean up after itself.  In this instance, literally.  This is the VA “hospital” room a veteran was placed in when he went to that…facility…for treatment that involved 18 injections.  Injections to be done in a room as filthy as this.

Dr Karen Gribbin, the chief of staff at the George E Wahlen Department of Veteran Affairs Medical Center, on Saturday reportedly said that Wilson should not have been in the room. She said the rooms should be cleaned prior to each patient and called on an investigation.

Wahlen is the imitation hospital at which this failure occurred.  The vetaran’s father, who posted the tweet, also tweeted

The condition of the room was the way it was when he went in, no other room was offered and no attempt to clean it up was made for the duration of his appointment[.]

Gibben also admitted that the veteran got his injections in that dirty room, but she claimed that the injection equipment—the needles, for instance—

would have been used just on him.

While that is, in fact, highly likely, how can we be sure, given the condition of the room and the level of professionalism and of integrity demonstrated by going ahead with the patient’s treatment there?

And this:

Gribbin was asked what the typical procedure was for when to clean patient rooms in order to ensure they are clean for each visit.

“We are investigating that. To be quite honest I do not work in that clinic area and I am not sure…exactly what that process is. We will be absolutely clarifying that, making sure our policies and procedures are well thought out and well communicated to staff[.]

She’s the Chief of Staff.  How is it possible that she does not know her own procedures or protocols?

Again, I say: disband the VA altogether and use its budget and nominal future budgets for vouchers for our veterans to see the doctors, clinics, and hospitals they choose, when they choose, and for the care they choose.  Enough of the VA’s trash.  Literally.

The original tweet, posted by the veteran’s father, can be seen here.  Poke through the reply thread, too.

 

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Diplomatic Cowardice

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In response to a remarks US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, made regarding Hamas’ role in the deaths and injuries of Gaza inhabitants as they keep trying to storm the fence separating Gaza from Israel, Palestinian Ambassador to the UN Riyad Mansour said Haley’s remarks “lacked credibility.”

What Haley said:

She said the terrorists hide behind innocent women, children and men to further their cause.

Haley in part said that, “Anyone who truly cares about children in Gaza should insist that Hamas immediately stop using children as cannon fodder in its conflict with Israel.”

What Mansour said:

We challenge the liars who advocated lies in the Security Council yesterday.

When asked if he was calling Haley a liar—was she one of the “liars” to whom he was referring—Mansour said she:

created a very strong resentment among the entire Palestinian nation.

And

With regard to Ambassador Haley, the fact that she goes on the tangent that she did…would make her whole story not credible, in addition to being extremely insensitive.

Mansour didn’t have the moral courage to say straight up that he was calling Haley a liar—or that he was not and clarifying that he was not.

This diplomatic cowardice is of a piece with the physical cowardice of the Hamas terrorists who do, indeed, cower behind women and children (and men who want nothing to do with terrorism, even if they do protest the fence).

Battle Against Hate Speech?

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Bob Pearson, co-author of Countering Hate and CIO of W2O Group says that AI is able to identify hate speech today.

All human beings follow patterns online.  You can see what language, content, channel, and people matter to them. You can see which words trigger information seeking, which language is most associated with hate topics or sites, which people are the most important influencers and you can see a range of behavioral characteristics.

Except that humans can’t define “hate speech;” we can’t even define “hate.”  All that can be done is for each of us, individually, to identify what it seems like that to us—not what it is to anyone else.  A Justice’s remark about pornography—that he couldn’t define it, but he knew it when he saw it—is worse than wholly inadequate when Government tries to regulate speech, or when private enterprises try to regulate speech in the public spaces they create as their business models or offshoots of them.  Such regulation is a threat to individual liberty.

Artificial Intelligence certainly is not up to this task of discriminating unacceptable speech from acceptable.  The definitions of those terms will be programed by a select group of humans—who can’t define the terms except as they personally apply the terms to themselves.  This frangibility is demonstrated by those cases that go to jury trials and the differing outcomes differing juries reach on substantially similar cases.  All AIs can do is reflect the prejudices of their programmers.

How, indeed, is “hate speech” to be discriminated from the merely rude or offensive or uncivil speech?  To narrow the thing a bit, think about civility—simple courtesy.  Why should a New Yorker’s version of civility be forced to take a back seat to a Midwesterner’s or a Californian’s version of civility?  Why should one of the other two be forced to take a back seat to a New Yorker’s version?  On what basis would any definer pick one or identify a middle ground that doesn’t wind up being a more insidious censorship?

Consider Marshall McLuhan’s the medium is the message.  Sometimes the overt rudeness—even “hate”—is a demonstration of a point.  Is burning our national flag an act of hatred or political speech?  Is posting a picture of Mohammed…?  Prove it: it’s a hard line to draw between that and rudeness on the one hand or actual hate on the other.

Not even civility is “simple.”  How is something as complex as hate speech to be handled?

Yet the whole argument over identifying, and then censoring, hate speech is irrelevant other than the threat to freedom that is that effort to identify and censor.

The problem he [Pearson] says, is that Facebook and other companies have not taken up the charge to make the battle against hate speech a major priority.

No, Pearson is utterly wrong on this.  Facebook, et al., must not take up the battle, any more than can Government be allowed to.  Any effort along these lines can only be the despicable bigotry and the equally shameful cowardice of censorship.  Bigotry because all such efforts amount to is one man, or a small group of them, imposing his prejudice of acceptability on the speech of all others.

Hackneyed as it’s become, Justice Louis Brandeis still is right: the answer to bad speech—however defined—is more, and better, speech—however defined.

Engage in the discourse, don’t cower away from it.

The Comey Memos

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The memos can be read here.  Aside from all the commentary on the memos’ content, a couple of other things jump out at me.

One is the level of classification: SECRET/NOFORN.  Comey noted at their start that he was unsure of the memos’ classification, so he marked them SECRET and invited his addressees to correct that as required.  One or more of them considered NOFORN—nor for foreign viewing, even if otherwise cleared to the level of secrecy; this is an addendum that gets added to unclassified material, too, on occasion—to be a suitable addition.  Reading around the redactions, this seems an obvious need.

The bigger deal though, is the amount of redaction that actually was done.  Out of 15 total pages of memos, some 34 lines had something redacted, and most of that was just a couple of words or a short phrase.  That little bit didn’t take all this time and the threat of a subpoena to get the memos marked and released to the House committees demanding them.  That emphasizes the question of what the FBI was trying to hide with its intransigence in stonewalling the release.

And that raises another question in my pea brain: having read the memos, there’s nothing in them that should have caused embarrassment to the FBI.  So: what else is the FBI hiding, what is it holding back that we haven’t heard about?

A Teachers Union Strike

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There have been teachers union strikes in Oklahoma, Kentucky, and West Virginia, and now there’s one set to go off later this week in Arizona.  Readers know my disdain for union strikes generally: they’re nothing but legalized extortion—”nice business you got here.  Be too bad if something were to happen to it.  Like, say, it’s destroyed because nobody works here anymore.”  It isn’t possible to negotiate when the other party is sticking a gun in your ear—even if it’s “just” a metaphorical gun.

But it’s especially despicable when it’s a teachers union strike.  These persons are using children as hostages to back up their extortion.  And the Arizona one is all about ego and hurt feelings.

Lynn White, a high school biology teacher in Gilbert, AZ:

People feel like the state doesn’t respect the job we do as public school teachers[.]

Never mind that respect comes the way any honest American gets it: by earning it with actual deeds.  It certainly doesn’t come because this or that person, or collection of them—think they’re special.  And in the case of public school teachers, those deeds are how well they teach, as demonstrated by the quality of their graduated students.  And that’s not very high (scroll down the table at the link to see Arizona’s bad and worsening performance in 4th grade math).

Arizona should replace the strikers en masse with substitutes and insist on actual teaching performance.