Oct
27
2025

What To Do Until the Undertaker Comes

Just a suggestion: as long as Congress doesn't seem to want to do much except make sure Your Federal Government isn't giving anyone food stamps, they could implement a more reliable funding source for Air Traffic Control. Scott Lincicome points out an interesting fact:

You hate to see other countries get out of front of the US when it comes to privatization. I wish (for example) that there was more progress on Privatizing the United States Postal Service.

Also of note:

  • I didn't even know I was in it. At the Dispatch, Leah Libresco Sargeant has some bad news, I guess: You Can’t Opt Out of Sam Altman’s Erotica. Apparently this was big news:

    Skipping down to the naughty bit, Sam says:

    In December, as we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our “treat adult users like adults” principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults.

    Leah's commentary:

    This decision seems to be part of Altman’s larger plan to double down on a chatbot that sounds like an endlessly encouraging companion, rather than a clipped, professional assistant. His choice to allow sexting will have obvious negative consequences for his users—and, just like pornography, it will have serious negative effects on those who never even engage the chatbot directly.

    Altman’s announcement framed the issue as though only the users, not he, are moral actors here. “If you want your ChatGPT to respond in a very human-like way… or act like a friend, ChatGPT should do it (but only if you want it, not because we are usage-maxxing),” he said. He argues chatbots should be responsive to users’ desires, including those for sexual role play, but he disclaims his own role in providing a sexbot.

    It is odd to treat adult spaces as though the marker of maturity is simply abundant pornography. In response to Altman’s post, one user asked: “Why do age-gates always have to lead to erotica? Like, I just want to be able to be treated like an adult and not a toddler, that doesn’t mean I want perv-mode activated.” Altman ducked the question, replying simply, “You won’t get it unless you ask for it.”

    I'm pretty libertarian on this, but Leah points to the riskiness of AI normalizing sex practices that are deviant and often dangerous.

  • "Don't send my white boy to Harvard, the dying mother said." Well, that's only a slightly modified varson of the classic lyric. Substituting "Jewish" for "white" is also acceptably good advice.

    Jonathan Turley notes the latest signs of a hostile academic environment down in Cambridge: Harvard’s Unblinking Hypocrisy: Dean Retained After Denouncing ‘Evil’ Police, ‘Whiteness’.

    Gregory Davis is really sorry for the “disruption.” For a Harvard resident dean, one would think that he was referencing a malfunctioning fire alarm, not years of racist, hateful messages.

    It is akin to Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger (D) referring to the “poor choice” of words of her endorsed candidate for attorney general, Jay Jones, when he said that he wanted to kill his political opponents and their children.

    These figures reflect the cynical calculation that apologies are just background music in an age of rage — heard but not really registered.

    Jonathan provides examples, including:

    Not long before his appointment [as resident house dean], Davis suggested that “Whiteness is a self-destructive ideology that annihilates everyone around it. By design.” As a professor of critical race theory at UCLA and “gender identity law” at Southwestern Law School, Davis has helped fuel race-based anger against conservatives and police. He has written that everyone “should ask your cop friends to quit since they’re racist and evil.” In another post, he explained how “Rioting and looting are parts of democracy just like voting and marching.”

    Davis encouraged students who are “Black or otherwise of color, queer, neurodivergent (ADHD), first-generation, a public high school graduate, from a low-income background, or from urban areas” to reach out to him for advice.

    Like many radicals exposed for hateful comments, Davis deleted his postings and offered a perfunctory apology. It is the type of “check-the-box” apology that is now so common. Liberals like Zohran Mamdani spent years denouncing the law enforcement and calling for defunding of police, only to offer the same shrugged apologies when he ran for mayor. None of their radical supporters believes the apology any more than their critics. The key is that it was made, and the media can now move on without causing real damage.

    Business as usual, in other words.

  • The AAUP regrets to inform you that you're a fascist. The National Review editorialists headline the most unsurprising news of the month: University Professors' Union Backs Ideological Conformity in Higher Education.

    And yet, AAUP’s magazine published an article titled “Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity” by Lisa Siraganian, a professor at Johns Hopkins University and the president of her university’s AAUP chapter. It became the subject of some heated criticism, and a Chronicle reporter wrote a Twitter/X thread that fairly described some flaws in the article, particularly by pointing out that the broader public accurately perceives academia as leaning left. In an attempt to defend the article, the AAUP account responded with the following: “Fascism generally doesn’t do great under peer review, but perhaps it’s the intellectual values of academia, which emphasizes critical inquiry & challenges traditional norms, that may be inherently less appealing to those with a more conservative worldview.”

    It is difficult to identify what is most wrong in the AAUP’s post. By arguing that academia skews left because “fascism” doesn’t survive intellectual scrutiny, the AAUP suggests that anyone who isn’t sufficiently progressive is a Nazi who needs to be ejected from higher education. Could there be a more stark confirmation of the public’s perception of universities as ideological hubs unaware of their own internal hegemony? Still, the AAUP applauds itself, its affiliates, and university culture as practicing “critical inquiry.”

    As I think I mentioned in the past, the AAUP tends to attract faculty who aspire to union thuggery.

Recently on the book blog: