Tag Archives: morality

Is This Believable?

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Yale has completed a report based on self-criticism that evaluates the school’s adherence to academic seriousness.

After a useful summary of the problems, the report offers 20 recommendations that run from the obvious (“lead by example”) to the challenging (“grade like we mean it”). On grading, the report recommends a new mean policy of 3.0 from the current norm of nearly all A grades. Older readers will think a standard of 2.0 ought to be the real mean, but 3.0 is progress.
…
Most encouraging is a full-throated endorsement of free inquiry and “enhancing open and critical debate on campus.” It urges each department, starting in 2026-27, to examine its “intellectual and methodological commitments” as well as the “range of scholarly approaches represented on its faculty” and “the diversity of perspectives in its curriculum.”

No, this isn’t believable without corroboration. Phishing efforts have grown markedly in their skill and imitation of the real enterprises they’re imitating and from which they’re redirecting their victims’ responses to their own nefarious sites. This Yale report seems nothing more than a similarly skillfully done misdirection effort. As the WSJ noted toward the end of the piece,

the reforms will have to be implemented by the same people who had no problem with university failings until they began to cost dollars and public support.

Three corroborations must occur before Yale can be taken seriously. In the near term, those same people who had no problem with university failings must be replaced in toto by others actually committed to reforming, with those same people being removed from all connection, however remote, to the school. In the intermediate term and longer, those reforms must be put in place, adhered to, and strictly and draconianly enforced. In the longer term, the self-evaluation must be repeated after one year to evaluate success and failure and to determine further reforms that are necessary along with corrective action regarding those failures.

How Unfit is Unfit?

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UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer (Labour) is busily screwing the pooch. His latest failures are two, and both are related to his choice of Ambassador to the US.

For months, Starmer had insisted that his government followed “due process” in appointing Mandelson as US envoy, telling lawmakers repeatedly that Mandelson had been vetted and cleared by UK security services for the post.
On Thursday, it emerged that Mandelson had, in fact, failed his security clearance but was approved for the job anyway.

Then,

Starmer said Thursday he wasn’t aware Mandelson had failed his vetting process….

That Starmer blamed others for his ignorance and fired a scapegoat is neither here nor there against the enormity of his failures here.

The real upshot is that either Starmer has been lying through his…teeth…or he’s utterly incompetent. Either one alone demonstrates his unfitness for public office, much less for heading up the British government.

Parliament’s MPs shouldn’t be wasting time nattering on about how Starmer should resign. The MPs should simply dump him with a no-confidence vote. Absent that, they’re as timid, waffle-y, and incompetent or dishonest as Starmer.

Be Nice if they Can Get It

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The headline and subheadline demonstrate a dangerous misunderstanding.

Iran’s War-Shattered Economy Means It Has an Urgent Reason to Negotiate
Damage done by US and Israeli attacks will take years to repair, putting pressure on Tehran to seek financial relief in talks.

No, it doesn’t. The claim here egregiously wrongly assumes that those in control of Iran, those reigning over the Iranian people, think like we do. Assuredly, they do not. Their view of this war is that they’re not dead yet, so they haven’t lost. They consider themselves winning, and they will consider themselves to have won (and here, they’d be correct by Western standards, too) if the fighting stops with them still in charge (their primary war aim) and in a position to continue pursuing nuclear weapons (their close second war aim).

Full stop.

Yes, it will take years to rebuild the economic and infrastructure damage done them, but the only economic and infrastructure functions that interest them are those necessary to their nuclear weapons development and building program. The rest, that which would ease the lot of the Iranian people, are of no interest to these rulers. That narrow view greatly shortens the timeline for repairing and rebuilding.

There is one parallel with Western values that does obtain here, more or less. The news writer had this in the piece at the first link:

The US blockade of Iranian ports will further strain the country’s budget.

So, too, was our own Revolutionary War a strain on the allied 13 colonies’ budgets. They ran out of money and just freely and willy-nilly printed up paper dollars, with consequent runaway inflation and refusal of so many suppliers, colonial and foreign, to accept that paper. This is the meaning of “not worth a Continental.” The colonies stayed in the fight, though, for eight (more or less, depending on when you mark the beginning and the end of the war itself) long years, ultimately outlasting more than defeating the British. There is one critical difference, though. The colonies and the colonials suffered that as a free people who were in charge of their destinies. Iran’s despotic rulers are the ones in charge of Iran’s their destinies, and they don’t care about their subjects.

Sure, getting financial relief would be welcome to Iran’s despots, but that’s nothing more than a happy side effect for them.

I’ve quoted Rafsanjani before; here he is again:

If one day, he [Rafsanjani] said, the world of Islam comes to possess the weapons currently in Israel’s possession [meaning nuclear weapons]—on that day this method of global arrogance would come to a dead end. This, he said, is because the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam.

They’re Lying

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Iran’s rulers, that is, but what else is new? Iran Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi last Friday:

In line with the ceasefire in Lebanon, the passage for all commercial vessels through Strait of Hormuz is declared completely open for the remaining period of ceasefire, on the coordinated route as already announced by Ports and Maritime Organisation of the Islamic Rep. of Iran.

Those Ports and Maritime Organisation-mandated routes are through the narrow channel between Iranian-held islands and the Iranian coast that’s on the northern, Iranian shore, of the Strait of Hormuz. That leaves ships in those routes under direct and immediate threat of seizure of destruction if the ships’ captains or owners don’t suit Iranian rulers’ whims. That’s not a completely, or even a little bit, open.

Furthermore, Araghchi was carefully silent on the matter of protection money tolls Iran’s rulers are charging those ships for “free” passage.

It’s good that President Donald Trump (R) is keeping the US blockade of Iran’s ports in place for the duration of the current cease fire.

In the realization, the IRGC has begun shooting at shipping attempting to leave through the Strait via the proper, international waterways. The IRGC has further announced that the Strait remains under strict management and control of the armed forces, regardless of what the civilian side of the Iranian government might say.

Iran’s rulers are busily making promises they can’t–or don’t intend to–keep.

Failing Public Schools

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And failing teachers union schools, but I repeat myself. These are the favorites of the Progressive-Democratic Party, and that favoring is independent of teacher performance. The Los Angeles Unified School District is the latest example.

Only 18% of Los Angeles eighth-graders scored proficient in math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, compared to 27% nationwide.

That’s OK, though. Here’s those teachers’ and their union’s participation ribbon:

United Teachers Los Angeles increases salary scales by 11.65% over two years—double the rate of inflation—plus four weeks of paid parental leave….

And

The agreement comes after the district warned in February that a looming $877 million deficit could require thousands of layoffs.

Guess, though, who will pay for this. The parents on the lower end of the area’s economic ladder. These are the ones who can’t afford to move away from these failures and move to live and work in jurisdictions with better schools. But the ones who will pay the biggest priced are those parents’ children. These are being consigned to a lifetime of ignorance, inability to perform the most basic functions of managing their own lives, and so to a lifetime of continued poverty and dependence.