Mar
20
2023

Doubling Down on Dumb

Power Line notes that President Wheezy continues to tout The three percent fabrication. As seen at Twitter (and rebutted by Elon Musk):

… and if you go to Twitter, you'll see "added context", providing links to Politifact (from July 2022), Factcheck (from February 16), and (even) CNN (February 17) debunkings.

In other words, Biden has been lying about this for a long time, and he plans on keeping it up.

Briefly noted:

  • Kevin D. Williamson looks at someone even more Deplorable than Biden:

    Donald Trump says he is going to be arrested on Tuesday. Maybe. Probably not. There are two things we know for certain about Donald Trump: The first is that he is the sort of irritating New York neurotic who believes that he ceases to exist when attention is not being paid to him, and the second is that he is constitutionally incapable of producing three consecutive sentences without a lie in one of them. A lie that brings him attention must be as irresistible as a well-seasoned hunk of porn-star jerky who pays him postcoital hush money rather than his usual arrangement, which goes the other way around. If you cannot see the hand of divine judgment at work in the prospect of this ailing republic being convulsed over an episode that, by the account of one of the intimately involved parties, had all of the impact of a Vienna sausage landing in a catcher’s mitt, then you have no religious imagination at all.

    A few hours after Trump’s claim—in all-caps, of course, from the great sobbing kindergartner of American politics—that he “WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK,” a Trump spokesman almost immediately “issued a statement clarifying that Mr. Trump had not written his post with direct knowledge of the timing of any arrest,” as the New York Times gently put it. The spokesman says “there has been no notification,” and people close to the case say that a Tuesday arrest is unlikely, So, more bulls—t from the bulls—t factory. Trump is, of course, calling for protests, as he did leading up to the riot of January 6, 2021, the street-theater complement to the coup d’état he was attempting to orchestrate through various implausible attempts at legal and institutional chicanery.

    It's not Tuesday yet, but it's a safe bet that, whether Trump is arrested or not, stupidity will reign.

  • Emma Camp explains it: Christopher Rufo Wants To Shut Down 'Activist' Academic Departments. Here's Why He's Wrong..

    In an essay published this week in City Journal, conservative activist Christopher Rufo argued that universities—or rather, the state legislatures governing these universities—should shut down "activist" academic departments. But rather than protecting higher education, forcibly shutting down left-wing academic departments would be nothing more than routine censorship.

    The rebuttal:

    "The argument is incorrect. Professors are not mouthpieces for the government. For decades, the Supreme Court of the United States has defended professors' academic freedom from governmental intrusion," Joe Cohn, legislative and policy director at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), tells Reason. "As the Supreme Court wrote in Keyishian v. Board of Regents: 'Our Nation is deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned. That freedom is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.'"

    Rufo also fails to consider how easily his ideas could backfire. "Political winds can change and the targets of censorship predictably change with them," says Cohn. "As FIRE has long warned, do not fall in love with the club that will be used to beat you over the head."

    This is the kind of thing that happens when Our Side puts "winning" ahead of principle.

  • Christian Britschgi notes the news in the latest edition of the "Twitter Files": Researchers Pressured Twitter To Treat COVID-19 Facts as 'Misinformation'.

    Researchers at Stanford University—in partnership with several nonprofits that have received government funding—worked with social media platforms to flag and suppress commentary on COVID vaccines, science, and policy that contradicted public health officials' stances, even when that commentary was true.

    This new information comes from yet another Twitter Files entry of screenshotted emails and reports from independent journalist Matt Taibbi that reveals the back and forth between the Stanford-led Virality Project and receptive Twitter executives about policing alleged COVID misinformation on its platform.

    Boy, Stanford has really gone downhill, hasn't it?

    In local news, NHJournal has an interview with Jim ("Don't Call Me Jimmy") Dean, President of the University Near Here. Speaking of the recent brouhaha at Stanford Law School, Dean says: "You’d have to give Stanford an F minus on this one."

  • Worried about AI killing us all? Read Steven Pinker on Alignment and Intelligence as a "Magical Potion".

    There’s a recurring fallacy in AI-existential-threat speculations to treat intelligence as a kind of magical pixie dust, a miracle elixir that, if a system only had enough of it, would grant it omniscience and omnipotence and the ability to instantly accomplish any outcome we can imagine. This is in contrast to what intelligence really is: a gadget that can compute particular outputs that are useful in particular worlds.

    Pinker has thought hard about this stuff, about a hundred times harder than the alarmists.


Last Modified 2023-03-22 6:03 AM EDT