I have an excuse for the late open forum today, but it’s my problem, not yours, so I’ll just say: as Heddy…I’m sorry, Headley, would say,
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I have an excuse for the late open forum today, but it’s my problem, not yours, so I’ll just say: as Heddy…I’m sorry, Headley, would say,
Ethics Alarms 
Any comment on this?
http://www.dailyuw.com/opinion/article_6a4b1b00-9822-11eb-a958-b3d856aceccf.html
The guy is a bigot and a moron. He demands subservience to engender trust.
Someone should tell him that nothing says we have to give up our culture to ensure your culture exists.
Ditto. The piece is not worth the time and energy to rebut.
Have you read the comments, most of them rip the author to shreds.
And those commenters will soon find themselves being investigated by the student body.
Jack Marshall wrote, “And those commenters will soon find themselves being investigated by the student body.”
I suspect most of the commenters won’t care one bit.
That’s some crazy thinking.
jvb
I don’t get the sense that any of the words came from the author. It is all pure CRT, almost verbatim. He sounds like a deeply unhappy person who has consumed large quantities of propaganda. I don’t really know where to start analyzing this, so I’m just going to ramble and hope something smart comes out.
All of the articles I read in this vein seem to be written by people with a completely external locus of control. The individuals seem to think they ought to be able to dictate to everyone else what they can think, say and do, and because they cannot, the world is a horrible place with everyone out to get them. Nothing that happens to them is the result of their own actions, but they want to be made some sort of god who can control everyone who doesn’t think and feel exactly as they do about everything. If you go through life thinking that the only way you will ever have control over your own life is if you can control everyone else’s life as well, then I would guess you would always feel pretty powerless and unimportant. I pity these people for their misery, and resent them for trying to blame their problems on everyone else.
Trying to understand their thinking is very difficult for me, for several reasons. First, they are very offensive in their rhetoric, which makes me want to dismiss them as assholes. They are assholes in many ways, but they are also deeply unhappy, and need and deserve help if they want it. Just not the help they think they need.
Second, I was always taught by my parents to take responsibility for my own actions, that life isn’t fair, and that if I wanted my life to improve then I needed to do that for myself. The way these people think is alien and bizarre to me. I have a very hard time putting myself in their shoes, and feel a distinct urge to tell them to stop whining about how unfair life is. The only person who you have any control over is yourself, and wishing otherwise is pointless waste of time and energy. I try to remind myself that not everyone was taught these things as children, and that it can be hard to relearn a way of thinking that is deeply ingrained.
Third, their assumption that they have any right to dictate how others can think, feel or behave is deeply repugnant to me. I really cannot find any way to get myself around this one. To me it is almost like modern leftism is a religion that has replaced the biblical god with the god of self. These people truly seem to think that they are the center of the universe and everyone in their universe is obligated to cowtow to their thoughts and feelings. It is the mindset of a child. A rather young child. A toddler screaming in the checkout lane who wants some candy that their parents refuse to buy, throwing themselves on the floor yelling “that’s not fair!” My mother had a saying for those situations: “Wish in one hand and shit in the other. See which one fills up the fastest.” I don’t know what else to tell these people.
Understanding people who think like this is important, particularly because the number of people who seem to think this way seems to be increasing exponentially. You cannot reach people you don’t understand. You have to understand these people to understand the cultural forces that are shaping them, and pushing them to prominence.
I think some of the problems stem from social media, which retrains young people’s brains to rely on the number of likes they get for a tweet, post or video to determine the morality and ethics of a statement or action. The algorithms behind those likes can manipulate the compass wherever someone wants it to point. It is a form of social engineering with invisible hands and invisible footprints. Media, academia, entertainment and sports wrap the moral compass up in a pretty package and reflect it back at the like count. To a young, naive or gullible person, the like count looks real, but it isn’t. It’s all an illusion created by powerful people with goals that don’t match the propaganda. When real life doesn’t match the like count, cognitive dissonance takes over, and the person starts trying to force it to match.
The people behind the algorithms currently seem to want to inflame racial tensions, burn down major cities, and impose some sort of communofascist totalitarianism on the country, and the world. It is frightening.
Wow! That was really good!
What Joel said; COTD!
“I think some of the problems stem from social media, which retrains young people’s brains to rely on the number of likes they get for a tweet, post or video to determine the morality and ethics of a statement or action.”
I don’t do social media, never have, never will; the closest I’ve gotten, and will get, is nextdoor.com, which does have some redeeming value.
Anywho, infrequently auditing The Hill (could there possibly exist a more vast collection of Lefty d!p$#!ts?) turned up something interesting. When you can click on the thumbs up/thumbs down votes, the identity of the voting commenting account appears, click on the accompanying avatar reveals the date the account was established and number of comments that’ve posted.
The majority of the votes in the categories of upvoting Lefty comments and downvoting Righty comments are what I call Voting Accounts: Recently established (mere weeks old) and no comments posted, ostensibly just for up/downvoting.
Despite an admittedly unscientific approach, no similar situation has been determined for upvoting Righty comments and downvoting Lefty comments; make of that what you will.
If I were to guess, I would say the “people” who do nothing but upvote lefty posts are not people at all. They are probably bots, trained to upvote posts with particular phrases. I could be wrong, though. Bots and people behave a lot alike these days.
Directly related to your #4 https://stevewitherspoon.home.blog/2020/09/14/emotional-childishness-is-a-societal-cancer/
Oops, that should have been #3
That link isn’t taking me to the post. It goes to an oops page.
https://stevewitherspoon.home.blog/2020/09/14/emotional-childishness-is-a-societal-cancer/
The oops has been fixed.
Emotional Childishness Is A Societal Cancer
I didn’t have to read beyond the title, even though I did, “Spring break reminded me I can’t trust white people It’s not an escape from the pandemic, it’s colonial violence By Andre Lawes Menchavez to know everything I need to know about the virtue signaling social justice warrior author; he’s an imbecile. He’s either an anti-white racist or an anti-white proxy racist. The author is welcome to his opinion even if that opinion shows that he’s a brainwashed moron.
https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2021/4/30/22410164/linux-kernel-university-of-minnesota-banned-open-source
Interesting fallout in the article regarding a university intentionally engaging in quasi-malicious contributions to the Linux kernel. My thoughts… In non-technical language:
1. The university is correct that obtaining prior permission would spoil their study.
2. The study does generate important information. Similar to the submission of a fake journal article, a fake patch demonstrates unfounded trust if it’s accepted.
3. I don’t really believe this qualifies as experimentation on people without their consent. It’s experimentation on a system those people engage in. Journal editors are paid to review submissions, I don’t think it’s ethical to impose this type of study on a system/project that is largely a volunteer effort.
4. The system is based on trust. The university indeed deserves accolades by building an automated way to identify problems to fix, but exploiting that built up trust by then introducing problems that wouldn’t typically be accepted without that prior established trust also skews the findings of the study.
5. The university is estopped from complaining about violating the trust. This is the system working as designed, and if the paper doesn’t disclose this result, it can’t be fully trusted.
6. Demanding the paper be retracted is overreach. I don’t think that demand should be met, but I also don’t think the university’s contributions be accepted at any higher level of trust until the study’s sponsors are transferred or retired. The demand for corrections to the problems the university contributed must be provided.
I think this experiment absolutely counts as human experimentation. I find this quote particularly unethical:
In a letter sent to the Linux Foundation on April 27th, Heimdahl and Loren Terveen (the computer science and engineering department’s associate department head) maintain that the university’s IRB “acted properly,” and argues that human-subjects research “has a precise technical definition according to US federal regulations … and this technical definition may not accord with intuitive understanding of concepts like ‘experiments’ or even ‘experiments on people.’”
The experiment essentially sought to discover whether humans would notice that seemingly harmless code submitted by a trusted source was actually malicious. That is a psychology experiment, and no ethical university psychology department would have signed off on such an experiment without first obtaining consent from the participants. That is one of the most basic tenets of psychological research on human subjects. Consent. Letting a tech department run these kind of experiments to get around the technical definitions of human-subjects experimentation and run such experiments without consent is extremely unethical. Pointing at legal definitions and federal regulations as an excuse for their behavior is also unethical. Just because it might be legal, doesn’t make it right. It shows an appalling level of narcissism and inability to think critically.
If it were me in charge of the repository, I would ban the university and anyone associated with the university from ever submitting pull requests again. Period.
I don’t think it is overreach to demand retraction of the paper. Letting people profit from their misdeeds is wrong. Their findings might be useful, but allowing them to profit off their breach of ethics only encourages more of the same unethical behavior by similar institutions.
Query: Is anyone else having problems with their “Reply” box? All I can see on mine is a single line of entered text and only the top half of the letters comprisisng that line are visible. Anyone? Beuhler? It’s been this way for a week or ten days. Is it my computater?
Okay on this end!
I don’t seem to have any issue with the reply box. It grows larger with each successive line once it fills up. This comment didn’t fill the entire box but that’s because I deleted the extra lines to see what happens. Maybe it’s your henweigh.
Weird. I’ll do some research.
Son of a bitch! I clicked on the gray box way on the right and it’s CURED! Somewhat. I get the full height of the letters but only one line at a time. Maybe I’ll click on the box again? Isn’t this exciting?
Nada.
Not a new topic, but what’s the line now on when they will no longer be able to pretend Biden is competent to even be his handlers’ sock puppet? He’s noticeably becoming worse; unable to even comprehend and read bits from a teleprompter without stumbling and getting confused.
https://www.westernjournal.com/watch-joe-biden-says-visit-vaccines-gum-corrects/?utm_source=spotim&utm_medium=E-mail&utm_content=replied-your-message&spot_im_redirect_source=email&spot_im_highlight_immediate=true&spot_im_reply_id=sp_MHM5Sp76_2595843_c_1s7mWXyWdt7RpUWkZ5MKNmAUjdx_r_1s8qGewxIrVwN4YxPTPhD1rrGD6&spot_im_content_id=sp_MHM5Sp76_2595843&spot_im_content_type=conversation&utm_spot=sp_MHM5Sp76
This fact-checker seems to think Biden is just fine!
https://babylonbee.com/news/the-babylon-bee-fact-checks-these-key-statements-from-president-biden
Well, who could argue with THAT? He must be doing better than it appears to us simple folk.
Wim, I’m afraid we’ll have demented Joe leading the free world for the next eight years. Nothing to see here. Move on. The media will continue carrying his water and Ron Klain will continue making all the policy decisions. Who cares if it devolves into a farce?
Wow, the geopolitical equilibrium is coming apart at the seams. Bad actors rearing their heads and getting away with alot, much like during the years from 2008 – 2016. Noticeably dissimilar to the years between 2016 – 2020.
What’s changed?
Beats me, at least I don’t have to read mean tweets from Orange Man.