Teen Vogue gives us an idea that is so objectionable that we want to splutter in rage rather than address it. It’s also something hugely common in this modern world of ours and needs to be opposed precisely because of its commonality. When discussing book bans and the like, a librarian says, “In an ideal world, she argues, librarians would be the ones to discern what is appropriate for children of a certain age to read, rather than the government.” Absolutely no, no way, and thrice not. That is to pass the raising of our children over to the self-appointed experts rather than doing…
Author: Tim Worstall
In a new article, Teen Vogue reports that Black Studies are, in fact, for everyone. The subhead actually says “Rather than ‘indoctrinating’ me, it’s done the exact opposite.” The full title is “Black Studies Is Under Attack by Conservatives, but The Teachings Are for Everyone.” The problem with this is that the teachings that everyone gets from Black Studies are, in fact, indoctrination of a particular and very Marxist kind. We need to take a little step back. “Critical studies” is not a study of how to criticize. Instead, it’s the modern academic phrase meaning to look at everything through a Marxist…
Gizmodo tells us something they really didn’t mean to say in this little video chat about Twitter. They complain about how far to the right Elon Musk has taken the site – giving into conservatives, allowing there to be a place where you “can be a racist without getting called out for it.” The thing they don’t mean to say but do is how extreme the censorship was on Twitter before Musk. You recall what the defense of Twitter moderation was before? That only the truly extreme, meant to and capable of hurting people directly, was kept off? This wasn’t political…
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre lets slip an all too common woke and progressive claim – that what’s ours is what’s theirs. Of course, there are things in this life which are communal – our country, our rights, some of our responsibilities even. But our children are ours, not theirs. Which is the very thing that Jean-Pierre was arguing against. It’s in this piece from Jezebel: WH Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Trans Youth: ‘These Are Our Kids, They Belong to All of Us’ A more vile view of humanity is difficult to imagine. For the claim there is that…
We’d all like to increase the wages of teachers. They are, after all, going to educate our children for a decade and more. So, how do we achieve that? The answer seems to be that we fire all the bureaucrats. How we do that is school choice, for anyone actually running a school for the benefit of the students will pay the teachers and not the bureaucracy. No, really, this is how it works: “A New York City charter school’s starting pay for teachers will be $140,000 in the fall, more than double the national average…(…)… To afford the higher-than-average pay,…
The progressive media have reported that Elon Musk is something of a hypocrite. Musk agreed to limit free speech on Twitter in Turkey, even as he insists on more free speech on Twitter in the U.S. It’s not Musk being the odd one here. But the Daily Dot and Vice are trying to make the same case. Turkey is having an election. The current president has placed limits on what may be said publicly. Now we might think those are bad limits. But Turkey is another country and has its own set of laws. If we are in Turkey, we have to obey Turkish…
Wired and Ars Technica are cheering the idea that AIs, or artificial intelligence chatbots, will now be censored. Apparently, this is clearly a very good idea, that a chatbot should not be allowed to say anything that runs against the UN’s rules for whatever is fashionable this week. The suggestion itself comes from Anthropic, an AI startup. This would encode a “List of guiding AI values (that) draws on UN Declaration of Rights — and Apple’s terms of service.” Or, the other description, “a built-in “constitution” that can instill ethical principles and keep systems from going rogue. “ But this is always the…
Gizmodo tells us that Artificial Intelligence – all this Chat GPT stuff – must be regulated before it gets out of hand. This is an argument that has several problems, the most important of which is the one that isn’t being more generally appreciated. Others – such as Bloomberg – understand some part of the problem, which is that we don’t know what the end state is going to be. Therefore how can we regulate? We don’t know what’s going to happen so how can a bureaucracy tell us what to do? There’s also the point that journalists – like those at Gizmodo…
A new Gizmodo article reports that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida Republican Party have banned the use of ESG in investing decisions. They’ve done no such thing. Gizmodo makes this claim to deliberately mislead us by providing disinformation so that we are politically misled. This is not something that journalism is supposed to do. In fact, journalism that so much as tries to do this has another name – propaganda. “On Tuesday, DeSantis signed into law a bill that forbids state and local governments in Florida from investing public money into funds and entities that consider environmental, social,…
The problem with fact-checking is, who chooses the fact-checkers? Only when we know that will we know which political slant is being applied to what are facts and what are merely opinions. Wired uses the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is significantly biased and yet has gained a significant position in American media life. What SPLC does is state – according to its own prejudices – what is a “hate organization” and what is not. The SPLC position has now become the go-to group for large corporations. They outsource those decisions to SPLC, through which SPLC gains considerable power. Our example here…