Last Monday, the New York Times reported that an advisory group for New York’s Education Department, under pressure to fix slumping graduation rates at its public schools, would propose not improving the education of the students but making the Regents Examinations, which the state has required since 1876 for a high-school diploma, optional. Other options such as “capstone projects,” presentations, or “performance-based assessments” would also enable graduation.
What offends the most about the proposal to make the Regents Exam optional is that it is understood by all that the children of the ambitious, upwardly mobile, or rich will continue to take standardized tests to distinguish themselves from their competitors for admission to top undergraduate schools. Rather, this is merely a shabby way for New York’s Education Department to help “clear the books” of students whose educational experiences have not prepared them for life. Unstated, but no secret, is the disparate impact this will have on black and Hispanic students who are disproportionately likely to be given a diploma as a substitute for an education. Instead of teaching them properly, New York cynically proposes to choose the path of least resistance: lowering standards to the point of near-indeterminacy, so that undertaught students can be handed a certificate and passed along to the workforce or the undergraduate system as someone else’s problem to fix
This isn’t about going or not going to college. Without standardized testing, you can hide the fact that, like already happens in Baltimore, the entirety of the students in inner-city schools lack proficiency in reading and math. You can simply not educate these kids at all.
Folks, remember: anti-racism is austerity. You’ll pay more taxes, get fewer services, and pay out of pocket for what the taxes used to cover. Those who don’t have money to cover additional out of pocket costs will be exceptionally screwed.
Many good people were duped into supporting anti-racism and the BLM. They sincerely thought they were doing good. But look where it led. It’s time to stop before we destroy an entire generation of low-income kids for short-lived joys of acute self-righteousness.
I have to keep reminding myself that language means something different to most other people. I have moved between several languages easily my entire life, so I can’t comprehend the reality of the people who only have one language. They are terrified of other languages because they genuinely can’t imagine not feeling like crap in a different linguistic environment.
Quebec is having yet another language freakout, and I’m trying to be understanding. They have excellent coffee, so I’m willing to cut a lot of slack.
This is amazing. Argentina is a country that deserves better, and now it has a chance.
It’s been a very long time since anybody heard anything remotely resembling hopeful news from South America. Coupled with the nationalist protests in Spain, this is a good moment for the Hispanic world.
Here’s a text message exchange I had with my husband who’s back home while I’m in Canada:
N: I picked up a hot hen at Sam’s.
Me: I assume what you mean to say is that you bought a roast chicken for dinner.
He wasn’t trying to be funny. “A hot hen” is a literal translation from Russian. We have no idea why the gigantic birds sold in North America are called chickens and not hens.
Going back to the subject of over-representation, it’s curious but not remotely surprising that the scientists at the center of the OpenAI scandal – Altman, Brockman and Sutskever – are Jewish. And half of the company’s employees are Israeli.
This isn’t just IQ. These are the people with both brain power and vision. Jews are very over-represented among this small group.
In 2022, 12 women were murdered in Ireland – the highest number in a decade. 5 of them were murdered by immigrant men. There is no femicide epidemic in Ireland. There is an open borders epidemic. Anyone who tells your otherwise is gaslighting you & doesn't care about women.
I’m an immigrant and I don’t murder anybody. Most of my friends are immigrants, and nobody is remotely violent. But this is massive over-representation. Really striking.
The taboo on noticing over-representation is that, supposedly, once people notice it, they will do terrible things to the over-represented group. The theory makes no sense because everybody already notices. The prohibition on saying it aloud doesn’t prevent anybody from knowing. All that happens is that people get mad at the efforts to protect them from observing reality.
For antisemites, wherever bad things happen you can find a Jew, and that proves that Jews were behind it. The tragic and inconvenient thing is that if you look hard enough you can often—by no means always—find some Jews involved in bad things. But you can also find them involved in good things—that just doesn’t count. Sometimes, when you can’t find some convenient Jews people just make up Jewish involvement.
This is a very lazy manipulation of the sort that the left loves and the right should avoid.
Take violent crime. Of course, not all black people are violent criminals. The overwhelming majority of black people are law-abiding and peaceful. But it’s also true that black people are over-represented among violent criminals. We aren’t allowed to mention this clearly observable fact of reality because we are told it’s offensive to the law-abiding and peaceful black people. Confusing over-representation with blanket condemnation gets us to a place where we have to pretend that reality doesn’t exist.
The same manipulative trick undergirds the quoted article by Jonah Goldberg. Jewish people are massively over-represented among the fanatical far left. This doesn’t mean that all Jews are far left. I’m not. Goldberg isn’t. But compared with the Jewish share of the population, the presence of Jewish people among the far-left groups is really striking. Why shouldn’t we talk about it? And why shouldn’t we talk about the over-representation of black people in violent crime?
Screeching “anti-semite” at everybody who notices that 80% of the people at their workplace with BLM stickers and land acknowledgements have last names like Haimovitz is akin to calling people racist for noticing violent crime statistics.
Clearly, there’s something that makes far-left ideology attractive to an outsize number of Jewish people. I would like to be able calmly to discuss what that is.
The terror of generalizations about shared traits stems from the idea that everybody is a unique individual and can’t possibly have any characteristics that one hasn’t freely chosen.
This idea is utterly stupid, though. There is a million of things about us that we haven’t chosen. We are a product of genetics, upbringing, history, ethnicity, sex, race, culture and other things. And if we want to have choice and control, we need to recognize that such factors have a gigantic limiting presence. We have to know what those limits are and how much we can modify them. No, you can’t quit being a woman and become a man. But you can decide to be a non-traditional, stereotype-buckling woman and enjoy yourself massively. No, you can’t sprout a second head but you can understand the reasons why certain ideas appeal to the head you already have.
Women are massively over-represented among people who endlessly bitch about their spouses on social media. Massively. I’m a woman who’d rather chew her leg off than post a weepy video with complaints about my husband on TikTok. But I’m not blind. I can observe and state openly that almost all such posters are female. The overwhelming majority of women on the planet don’t do such stuff. But those who do are almost all women. Most dogs aren’t poodles but all poodles are dogs. Why is this so hard to comprehend?
I just can’t take it if we are now going to start embracing the fear of over-representation on the right.
I just found out that one of the Central Park rapists from 1989 was elected a Councilman in NYC last week.
He ran with the same party that has spent years screeching about Trump’s pussy comments. Apparently, whatever Trump said in the famous tape is a lot worse than an actual gang rape that put a woman into a coma.
There’s an important lesson in SBF’s story. And that lesson has to do with boundaries.
The world we live in puts up fewer and fewer boundaries for us. There are fewer external boundaries than at any previous time in history. We can have any kind of sex life, for instance, and nobody cares. We can wear whatever we want or cover ourselves with piercings and tattoos according to our individual judgment. We can go on social media and gush out emotions. There are no externally imposed dietary boundaries. And so on and on.
The only boundaries we have are self-imposed. Nobody is coming to tell us to stop wasting time, money, energy, breath, etc. It’s up to us to build boundaries and defend them. Those few who get it and boundary up severely will be OK. The rest will be screwed.
Sam Bankman-Fried made an outrageous amount of money in a very short time and with minimal effort. He could have had a really nice life. But instead he lost everything and is going to jail. And the only reason is that he knew nothing about boundaries. He hemorrhaged money so fast it was impossible to cover the losses. Nobody ever told him about self-discipline, self-control, self-imposed routines and limits. Reading about his absolutely insane spending, I felt like surrounding myself with sofa cushions on all sides. The torrential gushing of this individual is uncomfortable to hear about, let alone imagine.
Different people will construct their boundaries out of different materials. The important thing is to do it. Find a structure to keep yourself in check and avoid becoming a human geyser like the poor, confused SBF.
To be clear, I’m incapable of understanding Bankman-Fried’s financial machinations and can’t pass judgment on their legality. I say he’s a poor excuse for a human because of his personal qualities, not his business decisions. He’s a guy who has an excellent brain for math. That’s all he is. He’s extraordinarily uneducated and just downright stupid in everything else. Yet he’s never been able to comprehend his limitations. He decided that his gift for math gives him the right to judge what’s good and what’s bad and refashion the world with his money.
Bankman-Fried has no humility, no desire to learn, and no self-awareness. Somebody referred to him in the comments to my previous post as “a financial narcissist”. That’s exactly what he is. A huffy, pouty narcissist who is unable to notice anything beyond his permanently wounded fee-fees.
It’s scary to observe these man-children with pots of money who, instead of just running their social media companies, launching rockets or selling crypto, start meddling in politics, buying elections, and refashioning society to make their extreme sexual and personal dysfunction stand out less.
What lies at fault here is our messed up understanding of intelligence. We don’t see the difference between hardware and software. Bankman-Fried has superior hardware that he got as a fluke of nature or a gift from God. But he never bothered to download any software onto his outstanding hardware. As a result, his brain produced defective results.
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