Scattershots – 9may18 (updated)

George Rebane

When I speak of the notion that ‘the Left is evil’, I am not talking about some outlier faction representing a minuscule fraction of that population.  Invoking that notion for me requires showing that a large fraction, which includes the Left’s thought leaders and intellects, is practicing a given evil policy.  Here is an example today rampant on the nation’s campuses.

Among the several types of thought police colleges have now instituted to detect and corral wrong thinking by students, the Bias Response Teams (BRTs) on many campuses today are perhaps the most prevalent and insidious.  These outfits are set up to surreptitiously monitor students’ speech “and to encourage others to report if they have been the target or witness of a bias incident.”  To identify a bias incident, BRTs apply the gold standard that states "the most important indication of bias is your own feelings”.  What happens then varies, but all such BRT ‘investigations’ of bias and subsequent recommendations to administration, which often invoke draconian retributions, are nothing but unabashed violations of the students’ First Amendment rights. (more here)

National Propaganda Radio took the lead this morning in fashioning a narrative to counter Trump’s latest foreign policy success in getting the fat kid to release three American hostages he’s held for the last few years.  They’re coming home with SecState Pompeo returning from his second trip there to set up the upcoming summit, another first for our President.  NPR spun the story as a potential disaster in the making since it wasn’t clear to them whether Trump had prepared any response to the fat kid’s presumed demand for some quid pro quo.  And Trump’s lack of preparation (according to their mavens) will torpedo the talks.  The desperation of the Left in these whole cloth fabrications has become a reliable source of political humor for at least half the country.

That AI creates or destroys jobs debate is getting pretty lame.  Of course, the advent of more AI is destroying jobs in BOTH the number of job types and the absolute number of jobs, each employing one full-time-equivalent (FTE) human.  But there is a contingent of elites out there whose message is ‘Not to worry, AI will continue to create more jobs.’  That message is beyond vague, and overwhelmingly misleading.  The 30apr18 WSJ’s special section on AI featured ‘Seven Jobs Robots Will Create – or Expand’ containing the list of job types to be created/expanded.  It was meant to be a comforting article for the great unwashed and discomfited.  All the jobs listed 1) required workers on the high end of the IQ scale, and 2) in toto would require many times fewer FTE workers than those losing their jobs to AI.  Sooner or later this bamboozle will be known to all.

The Dems are doing their best to apply double, triple, quadruple standards manufactured on the spot to suit their attempt to torpedo another Trump nomination – currently of Gina Haspel as the new CIA director.  The lady was undercover for 30+ years laying her ass on the line for our country, in a position that had nothing to do with making policy, and the liberal lamebrains are insinuating that she was the mother of waterboarding.  The progressives are putting her through a kabuki dance – ‘torture doesn’t work’ - trying to trip her up about the future use of ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques.  She is holding up well, promising to uphold the moral high ground of the law and not to torture captives for information.  Most of the country hopes that when push comes to shove, our intelligence agencies will do whatever straddling of the line is necessary to get timely information from enemy hostiles when national security or American lives are on the line.  If our enemies ever become convinced that the US will not squeeze, say, the raghead leaders that we capture, we will be in deep pucky.

Comments

[scenes]

re: Bias Reponse Teams.

I thought you were shittin' me.

http://leadership.oregonstate.edu/diversity/bias-incident-response/bias-response-team

plus a hundred other articles on the things. Hey, nobody can blame me. I didn't vote for Obama the second time.

An interesting bit of research would be to come up with a list of schools with really fine educations that aren't necessarily military academies or heavily religious in intent and publish it. Probably more than a few parents would like to see that.

re: AI

One of the amusing things to me about the de-skilling and eventual disappearance of a lot of work is how little humans brought to the plate in a lot of cases. None of this will matter until it really rains down on those more well-off folks who consider themselves immune from all this, at that point it becomes an 'emergency'. I think folks will be surprised when a number of jobs that require the employee to be 'on the high end of the IQ scale' get swept into the maw of automation.

[scenes]

A copy of the 'Reported Bias Incident Response Protocol' complete with incident reports on the back end.

http://leadership.oregonstate.edu/sites/leadership.oregonstate.edu/files/OID/BRT/reported_bias_incident_response_protocol.pdf

I was thinking about reporting BillT for being a meanie to Paul.

I found a pic of a BRT team member.

https://i.imgur.com/tqIc34z.png

[Walt]

Be careful on Proggy media.
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/05/09/twitter-is-banning-conservatives-for-posting-facts/

[Bill Tozer]

This is a quote from a cute little article I posted in the Sandbox, but on topic.

“To me, if you the support the confederate flag ( or Virginian battle flag) you refuse to recognize or validate my opinion or how it makes me feel or than the flag when used in a battle on the confederate side the intended use was perverted.”

The quote stuck because of this part.

“you refuse to recognize or validate my opinion or how it makes me feel or....”

Now, isn’t this what the Bias Rapid Reponse Team, PC, and the rules of engagement at school, at work, and at play all about? Rearrangeing the world to adjust to me instead of changing myself to adjust to the world. We must stop and recognize, then validate another’s opinion AND how it makes them feel at every turn all day long?

Suppose one utters something not meant as an insult in the least. In fact, no one takes it as an insult in a crowd, except one person. Even if it is not an insult, the whole world must stop because one person feels it is an insult. They may be way off base, but their opinion must be acknowledged (ok, I can go along with that so far), but then their opinion must be validated??? Go pound sand.

Once a year at our courthouse students come into a courtroom with a real judge present and play student court for a day. Happens across the land. The student have a trial for a student who did something against the rules. Every time, in most every situation, the student juries are must harsher on the student defendant than adult courts or a judge would be. At the college level, it’s worse. Kangaroo courts issuing punishments that far outweighs the crime.

Imagine being little Hilter Youth on campuses monitoring fellow students social media pages or standing outside a restroom door listening to what those 3 guys or gals are saying to each other and joking around. The logical extension of this is Maoist practices of the young turning in their parents for just stating their displeasure about the government. Off with their heads. Report the violators...to the government. Like living in East Germany under the USSR rule or North Korea, or any other godless regime.

This indeed is evil. Evil, evil,evil. N

[Bill Tozer]

Scenes @2:25 pm

Page 11 of the report, terms and definitions. Freedom of Speech.....if it does not conflict with the University’s values, lol.

[Bill Tozer]

Where’s the Bias Response Team when you need one?
Flashback: new college interns fired for starting a dress code petition. Petitions are for college campuses where the administrators always acquiese....not the workplace.

“The next day, all of us who signed the petition were called into a meeting where we thought our proposal would be discussed. Instead, we were informed that due to our “unprofessional” behavior, we were being let go from our internships. We were told to hand in our ID badges and to gather our things and leave the property ASAP.

We were shocked. The proposal was written professionally like examples I have learned about in school, and our arguments were thought out and well-reasoned. We weren’t even given a chance to discuss it. The worst part is that just before the meeting ended, one of the managers told us that the worker who was allowed to disobey the dress code was a former soldier who lost her leg and was therefore given permission to wear whatever kind of shoes she could walk in. You can’t even tell, and if we had known about this we would have factored it into our argument.

I have never had a job before (I’ve always focused on school) and I was hoping...blah, blah, blah...”

http://www.askamanager.org/2016/06/i-was-fired-from-my-internship-for-writing-a-proposal-for-a-more-flexible-dress-code.html

We weren’t even given the chance to discuss it! What, no recognizing and validating our opinions and how it makes us feel?

[Bill Tozer]

Good timing. Fed lawsuit filed over U of Michigan’s Bias Response Team.

https://speechfirst.org/2018/05/08/speech-first-files-federal-lawsuit-challenging-university-of-michigan-speech-code-and-bias-response-team/

[Bill Tozer]

More on BRT
At a community college in Minnesota three years ago, a female African American professor was reprimanded by the administration for “offending” three white male students during a discussion of “structural racism” in a communications course. With BRTs in place, white students will be more likely to file complaints against faculty of color as well as students of color for “offensive” remarks and actions. There is a real danger that these policies will boomerang to harm the very groups they were intended to protect. (This, for example, is a recent BRT complaint from John Carroll University: “Anonymous student reported that African-American Alliance’s student protest was making white students feel uncomfortable.”)

What’s more, BRTs will result in a troubling silence: Students, staff, and faculty will be afraid to speak their minds, and individuals or groups will be able to leverage bias reporting policies to shut down unpopular or minority viewpoints. BRTs will substitute diktats for debate when what we need most is constant, frank conversation. By almost any measure, colleges and universities are more diverse today than they have ever been, and that’s the paradox: BRTs will turn the genuine, transformative educational power of diverse voices into a farce.

https://newrepublic.com/article/132195/rise-bias-response-teams-campus

[Larry Wirth]

Ah So! Mebee Mz Haspel speak some Chinee?

L

[Marillyn Lock-Heed]

,,,this could be a safe space for League of Pale Faces to send their kids to,,,

https://newsone.com/3797890/yale-student-calls-cops-sleeping-black-classmate/

[George Rebane]

MarillynL 1203pm - You might explain to us why the news site and Yale so emphasized the race of the two students in the 'sleeping incident'. There was no mention in the article about whether sleeping at night in a students' common area was permitted or not. If not, then the reporting student was attempting to enforce university rules; if permitted, then she was just being a busybody asshole. But sadly I do understand how you and yours, following your forebears of the 1930s, see everything through race-colored glasses - identity politics über alles.

[Gregory]

Unions Could Lose 726,000 Members if Mark Janus Wins His Supreme Court Case
Union-backed report finds unions could be screwed.

http://reason.com/blog/2018/05/10/union-backed-report-says-janus-case-coul
https://illinoisepi.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/ilepi-pmcr-after-janus-summary.pdf

[scenes]

re: M. Lock-Heed@12:03PM

I like that story, it has a little something for everybody. 43 year old white philosophy student (although I'd love to know what kind of 'philosophy) spots unknown 34 year old 'African Studies' major asleep in dorm lounge at about 2:00AM. Calls cops. 43 year old student has a history of calling cops. Cops can't find 34 year old in database. Potential perp is black and therefore automatically guilty...or innocent, depending on your POV.

No doubt the 43 year old student will get hassled to death via the magic of social media and modern university administrations, the 34 year old will be on TV, get Al Sharpton involved, maybe make some money on the whole deal. Nice work if you can get it.

I can't see that either 'student' is Making America Great Again, so they are welcome to their own theatre of the absurd.

And so it goes.

[Bill Tozer]

AI, the End of Reality. Some quotes.

We’ll shortly live in a world where our eyes routinely deceive us. Put differently, we’re not so far from the collapse of reality.

The collapse of reality isn’t an unintended consequence of artificial intelligence. It’s long been an objective—or at least a dalliance—of some of technology’s most storied architects.....These developers wanted to create machines that could transform consciousness in much the same way that drugs did. Computers would also rip a hole in reality, leading humanity away from the quotidian, gray-flannel banality of Leave It to Beaver America and toward a far groovier, more holistic state of mind. Steve Jobs described LSD as “one of the two or three most important” experiences of his life.

Fake-but-realistic video clips are not the end point of the flight from reality that technologists would have us take.

The question of deciding what constitutes reality isn’t just epistemological; it is political and would involve declaring certain deeply held beliefs specious.

In 2016, as Russia used Facebook to influence the American presidential election, Elon Musk confessed his understanding of human life. He talked about a theory, derived from an Oxford philosopher, that is fashionable in his milieu. The idea holds that we’re actually living in a computer simulation, as if we’re already characters in a science-fiction movie or a video game. He told a conference, “The odds that we’re in ‘base reality’ is one in billions.” If the leaders of the industry that presides over our information and hopes to shape our future can’t even concede the existence of reality, then we have little hope of salvaging it.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/05/realitys-end/556877/

My thoughts: If we have chips implanted in our brains in the years to come, what we see, smell. taste, read, hear, think will be controlled by something. It will all be fakenews.

[George Rebane]

For those concerned with truth and reality, I am reminded that what our senses tell of reality is already a synthetic map which then gets interpreted and embedded into our consciousness by processors that have intrinsically been bent out of shape by life's experiences which we have a hard time knitting into one coherent and manageable whole. Fear not AI, it may even turn out to be the corrective lens to our existence.

[Bill Tozer]

But who controls what our senses apprehend? More importantly, by controlling all we read, see, hear, watch....we are to manipulated to believe someone else’s reality. or a reality of someone else’s choosing. Not to even touch on senses trigger thoughts, thoughts trigger emotions and emotions trigger feeling.
In five years implants will start. Stephen Hawkins called the year 2050 the end of humanity....when computers take over our brains.

Yes, I fear. I just have to look at the biggest suppression of speech in our nation’s history going on right now by the gatekeepers of social media (Zuckerberg types) and couple that with AI technology, well.....I fear.
Historically, the conservatives are suspicious of the public, and the liberals are suspicious of the private. I am growing suspicious of both. We ain’t taking about an AI “worker” were upper body mass no longer is a consideration or how many jobs will be created/lost. I fear mind control. Just look at the liberals with TDS! Where do they get those crazy ideas so skewed from reality? From Alternative reality. From defiled, polluted, and corrupted spin they lap up like a dog chewing on a T-Bone.

Here is my point, with a lead-in. They say humiliation is the involuntary surrending of the pride. Humility is the voluntary surrending of the pride. What I fear is the involuntary, not the voluntary manipulation of my senses, thus my thoughts..... Give me liberty or give me death.... Will it all be Big Bro K Street? Look at the apple, so pleasing to the eye...

[Account Deleted]

Mary Knock Knees at 12:03 - you might want to read about it at DK. Even they admitted that sleeping was not allowed in the common areas. All the rousted woman had to do was just go to her dorm room and shut the door. Instead, she hung around to hassle the white woman and argue with the cops. As was pointed out - just a case of a minor rule infraction blown up by a prissy peck-n-sniff and elevated to a full on Bull Conner racial incident by a hot head that can't follow rules. Just 2 children that never grew up with needless police involvement. It's getting harder and harder for the victimized in this country to find a slight. But by golly, they'll keep trying.

[Bill Tozer]

NAACP: We Need Mandatory 'Implicit Bias' Testing for All Public Officials
The real-life implications of the NAACP's call would see the end of Americans' First Amendment rights.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/55880-naacp-we-need-mandatory-implicit-bias-testing-for-all-public-officials

[scenes]

There's been a bit of bias testing already done on police officers. It appears to be a mixed bag.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2016/04/27/this-study-found-race-matters-in-police-shootings-but-the-results-may-surprise-you

http://media.spokesman.com/documents/2016/05/The_Reverse_Racism_Effect.pdf

[Bill Tozer]

“Try watching the footage that could be created of Barack Obama from his speeches, and the Lyrebird impersonations. You could easily, today or in the very near future, create a forgery that might be indistinguishable from the real thing. What would that do to politics?

Once the internet is flooded with plausible-seeming tapes and recordings of this sort, how are we going to decide what’s real and what isn’t? Democracy, and our ability to counteract threats, is already threatened by a lack of agreement on the facts. Once you can’t believe the evidence of your senses anymore, we’re in serious trouble. Ultimately, you can dream up all kinds of utterly terrifying possibilities for these deep fakes, from fake news to blackmail.”

https://singularityhub.com/2018/03/06/malicious-ai-report-outlines-biggest-threats-of-the-next-5-years/#sm.00001tewzj52qjds5w5hoq58ulhik

It is often the case that AI systems don’t merely reach human levels of performance but significantly surpass [them].

“It is troubling, but necessary, to consider the implications of superhuman hacking, surveillance, persuasion, and physical target identification, as well as AI capabilities that are subhuman but nevertheless much more scalable than human labour.”

It warned advances may include speech synthesis to impersonate targets, facial recognition software being widely available and lifelike videos for political manipulation.

https://www.rt.com/uk/419423-ai-crime-robots-fraud/

Heck, we have already destroyed certain politicians in Latin Ametica by circulating doctored photos of the politicos doing the bromance thing with despised shady characters...many moons ago. They have AI answering phones now where not one human would even guess that they were not talking with a human. Just have AI call the wife and tell her about your day, ask some questions, tell her how much you miss her right now and carrying on a nice conservation explaining why you are running behind....while you are actually at the bar and the GPS proving you are not at the bar, but working your fingers to the bone. :).

[Marillyn Lock-Heed]

,,,'''When I speak of the notion that ‘the Left is evil’, I am not talking about some outlier faction''',,,

So SAD to watch the League of Pale Faces doing their best to vilify the left and gin up support for an anti-leftist pogrom reminiscent of the good ol McCarthy anti-commie era,,,

[George Rebane]

MarillynL 745am - Ms Lock, every time you post something in these comment streams, it once again displays how lightly and asymmetrically read you are. There is no "anti-leftist pogrom" going on in the land, and none is being 'ginned up' by the Right. But anyone with sixth grade reading skills and a bit wider purview of history knows that exactly the opposite is going on, and has been now for several decades - one need only look at the freedom-suppressing public policies that are now cemented into our laws and regulations, and the daily anti-conservative McCarthy coverage going on in our news and entertainment media. By all metrics available, our educational system is in the toilet, flushed there again by decades of ideologically immersed, incompetent, union led, leftwing teachers. It is you of the Left who constantly throttle back free speech, enterprise, and immediately hoist anything you perceive politically incorrect into the dock in the court of public opinion. And you, of course, most assiduously practice the Alinsky doctrine of first and foremost accusing the other side of the things that are fundamental to you and yours.

Give some examples of what you consider "an anti-leftist pogrom reminiscent of the good ol McCarthy anti-commie era."

[scenes]

M.Lock-Heed@7:45AM

Good point. I'd sure hate to see elements of the FBI go rogue and attack individuals for purely political purposes. You are a prophet, I tell ya.

[Bill Tozer]

Don’t be surprised if what I am about to describe sounds like a scene out of George Orwell's 1984, where the Thought Police would arrest any citizen criticizing the regime or otherwise disagreeing with the official view on everything from politics to culture. And they used surveillance that included informers and electronic devices like cameras and microphones.

That is what the University of Michigan has been transformed into — the equivalent of Oceania in 1984 or the former East Germany. As the lawsuit says, the university has created an “elaborate investigatory and disciplinary apparatus to suppress and punish speech other students deem ‘demeaning,’ ‘bothersome,’ or ‘hurtful.’” Yes, really: The student disciplinary code defines “harassment” as any “unwanted negative attention perceived as intimidating, demeaning, or bothersome to an individual” (emphasis added).

In other words, as the complaint says, “the most sensitive student on campus effectively dictates the terms under which others may speak.” Under this absurd but dangerous policy, a student expressing his positive opinion about Donald Trump could be considered “bothersome” to the many (or any of the) liberal students on campus.

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/56016-its-now-1984-at-the-university-of-michigan