Opinions, art, debate
For two years, Stacey Wales kept a running list of everything she would say at the sentencing hearing for the man who killed her brother in a road rage incident in Chandler, Ariz.
But when she finally sat down to write her statement, Wales was stuck. She struggled to find the right words, but one voice was clear: her brother’s.
“I couldn’t help hear his voice in my head of what he would say,” Wales told NPR.
That’s when the idea came to her: to use artificial intelligence to generate a video of how her late brother, Christopher Pelkey, would address the courtroom and specifically the man who fatally shot him at a red light in 2021.
Death must have been a sweet release for this poor dude. His family couldn’t be assed to say a few genuine words over his death and outsourced the job to AI.
There are whole swaths of population that are outsourcing their basic human functions to AI.
That a judge allowed this travesty in an actual courtroom is even more of a travesty.
Good news! The cancel culture is losing its bite because people finally found a way to stand up to it. Collective hounding of people for something they said, distasteful and clumsy as it might be, should have no place in civilized societies. The oft-repeated mantra that “you should be free to day whatever you want but you shouldn’t be free from the consequences” was a favorite trick of Soviet apparatchiks. It’s inane and stupid.
N and I didn’t have a wedding. We got married in difficult circumstances and simply went to the courthouse one day after I finished teaching.
We didn’t have a wedding but we most certainly have a marriage. It’s the most intense, vibrant and exciting marriage I have ever seen or read about. On June 6, we’ll be celebrating 18 years together.
We had no wedding experience but we do have a marriage. I’m sure a wedding experience is amazing. I’m happy for people who got to have it. I’m not criticizing those who had a wedding experience, God forbid. My life turned out differently and I never had it. But that didn’t preclude me from having a marriage.
It’s the same with college. You don’t need a college experience as portrayed on TV to have a college degree. The college experience – living on campus, attending all the events, hanging out with friends after classes – is great. But it’s not necessary or obligatory. You can get a degree without the experience.
The experience is definitely expensive. People get into the mentality that it’s worth saddling yourself with enormous debt very early in life, and that’s a mistake. We need more acceptance of limiting factors. If you can’t afford it, don’t buy it. You can still have your college education even if you start later in life and don’t do the dorm / activities / lounging around doing nothing for 4 years. I started my BA at almost 23, never lived in a dorm, worked several part-time crappy jobs at any given time, belonged to no student clubs and attended no activities because I had to work. And ended up having more degrees than any regular person can possibly wish for. All we need is to learn to accept reality and exist within its constraints.
I know a young mother of two who isn’t getting married because there’s no money for a wedding of her dreams. To me, it’s absolutely nutso-crazy-boom-boom. Thankfully, nobody is offering wedding loans en masse, so at least she isn’t getting into debt to finance the experience.
By the way, experience economy is a neoliberal invention, and I can talk about it later to prevent this post from getting even longer.
The saddest stories are those of people who took out gigantic loans to go to medical school but two years in realized that they hate it and decided to drop out. You can go to college in the US very cheaply or for free in any discipline but medical and dental schools are truly expensive.
What I genuinely don’t understand is this. All of those people asking, “but what should I do now? It’s unfair that I should be on the hook for $180,000 if I decided to quit this career. How come I should still pay back the loans?” These are clearly very low-IQ people who don’t understand the basic functioning of the society where they live. How were they accepted to medical school? Isn’t it predatory to accept these people, knowing that they’ll take on crushing amounts of debt and never graduate?
We need doctors, and I’m in favor of the government subsidizing the education of people who passed very, very complicated entrance exams and an IQ test.
MacKinnon served for 13 years as the President of the University of Saskatchewan, and he is horrified by its mandatory DEI training:
It is a propaganda module in which scholarly expertise and balance will not be found. It does not appear that the instructor has a university academic post and the programās ideological hue is revealed in the two required readings, one by Idle No More co-founder Sheelah McLean whose theme is that the success of Saskatchewanās white people is built on ā150 years of racist, sexist and homophobic colonial practices.ā . . . One participant, a law professor, was invited to leave after 30 minutes because he did not lend his voice to its purpose and orientation; he revealed that he was present because it was required. The purpose of the program is indoctrination and there is no room for dissent.
I’ve found it next to impossible to transmit to people why I find these trainings to be incredibly humiliating. People see how much I read and write, how many languages I speak. And still they don’t get why having to listen to these momentous stupidities smugly delivered by individuals with zero intellect is crushing.
In July 2005, a successful Mexican businesswomanĀ Isabel Miranda de Wallace found out that her ne’er-do-well son Hugo was kidnapped and murdered. Isabel owned a billboard company and she used her billboards to put up the information about the tragedy that had devastated her family. As a result, Hugo’s murderers were found and incarcerated. And his mother became one of Mexico’s most important fighters for human rights, lionized on the pages of New York Times and Time Magazine.
Except…
It looks like Hugo was neither kidnapped nor murdered. And his supposed kidnappers were a bunch of utterly innocent poor bastards who were tortured and raped in jail on orders from the human rights champion Isabel Miranda de Wallace. Who wasn’t a grieving mother as much as she was a bloodthirsty corrupt maniac.
Except…
Maybe Isabel, although corrupt, was not a bloodthirsty maniac. Maybe she had a really big reason to act like she did.
Ricardo Raphael is a talented journalist and builds the 530-page investigative report of the famous Wallace case with the precision of a watchmaker. I have no idea to what extent his interpretation of the events is correct. But I did notice one thing that was disturbing to me. The Mexico that Raphael portrays is in the grip of extraordinary corruption and shocking chaos. There is no justice system as such. There’s nothing resembling morality, either institutionally or individually.
And with all this, every social and moral reject described by Raphael sees the United States as a convenient place to dump the overflow of Mexican dysfunction. The book’s real-life characters always end up in the US, mostly illegally or fraudulently, possessed of the most adamant conviction that the US exists to help them hide from the consequences of their criminality or moral turpitude.
Maybe this is one of the reasons why Mexico is such a mess. If people know they won’t have to face the consequences because they can always cross over in the US and be rewarded with a complete blank slate, they will be more prone to act badly.
An excellent book. I still have no idea what happened and who’s to blame but FabricaciĆ³n was very enjoyable to read.
I haven’t posted much today because I’ve spent all day reading a book about Mexico’s dysfunction. I’ll write in detail after I’m done reading (it’s 500+ pages) but my main takeaway so far is that we have no idea how fortunate we are in America and how precious our civilization is. We need to do everything not to allow the chaos that exists in Mexico (and almost everywhere else) spill over here.
I feel like coming up to strangers and saying, “you have no idea how good you have it, man. Don’t let it slip away. Please, please, be very careful.”
What is happening between India and Pakistan? Why is Pakistan off its rocker (more than usual) all of a sudden? Does anybody understand the situation and can share?
I find that people don’t fully understand the mechanism by which colleges release crowds of far-left operators into society. I’m all in favor of removing Women’s Studies, Black Studies, and all that, but these are disciplines that are lucky to get two students a year. They are unpopular and wilting. They have absolutely no impact on anything on a regular campus.
It’s all about numbers. If you don’t have high enrollments, you are a nobody. So who has numbers?
The overwhelming majority of students come to college hoping to study biology. Then almost all of them flunk out and end up in psychology. These are huge programs that teach absolutely nothing. As the dean of our Department of Psychology told me, “our courses are fluff. Anybody can pass them.” The degree offered by Psychology doesn’t give the graduates the right to conduct clinical practice, so they go into social work and all sort of government jobs. They are the real carriers of wokeness into the wider society because they are too dumb to retain anything beyond a vague sense of grievance and a bunch of slogans.
The real culprit is the idea that everybody needs and is cognitively capable of getting a college degree. This idea pushes many people into college who cannot begin to engage in college-level thinking. They are bewildered and lost and ascribe their confusion to racial and sex-based unfairness. They, and not the three forlorn Gender Studies minors (there’s very very rarely a major in this kind of discipline), are the angry wokefied mobs who terrorize the rest of us.
Once again, I absolutely support the idea of closing down Gender Studies immediately. They are a joke.
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