Who Are The Sexually Marginalized?

Hint: It's not the LGBTQWERTY crew.

Reading this essay about what Tik Tok is doing to young women made me realize that the progressive Catholics, led by the dimwitted Pope Francis and that monumental pervert, Father James Martin, have managed to lift up the voices of some of the most pampered people on Earth while kicking the most marginalized in the groin as hard as they could. They've accomplished the exact opposite of their stated goals.

Trauma dumping on the (Tik Tok) for you page sucks young girls into a pit of self-loathing...

Spiraling is an actual psychological term for becoming mentally dizzy. TikTok’s “for you page” (FYP) is overwhelming, piping a steady stream of the most viral videos to kids—a big departure from the social media norms of yesteryear, which mostly shared amateurish updates from kids’ subscribed channels. Girls who would normally say hi to friends and show off their pets now get adult content and other non-age appropriate material direct to their inbox. Feeding “smash-innocence” content to kids is part of the TikTok spiral...

The TikTok spiral, as described in a special Wall Street Journal series, is like digital cocaine...

TikTok provides the perfect milieu for body-image stressed girls to fixate on their perceived flaws and spiral into pathological habits...

In a manner analogous to an anorexic’s self-disgust at seeing her own body in a photograph, a gender-questioning girl can begin to hyper-focus on her female body with intensifying animus. Embodiment itself becomes triggering. One popular sound effect features an older woman’s voice musing, “I miss the girl you were,” before a voice representing the user replies, “I gutted that b**ch from the inside out.”

The most marginalized sexual community is straight, young women. They are getting whacked from all angles. 

Note: From here on out, I'm going to use the terms girl and boy because they're a cleaner shorthand for the set girl, young woman, woman, etc. The terms also imply those years when courtship is most common.

Girls crave the focused, respectful, protective, sexual attentions of boys. This is central for God's plan for sexuality. Boys are designed to court pretty girls because they crave sex. Girls compete with each other for boys through appearance. After puberty, girls are naturally more neurotic, particularly about their worth in the eyes of boys.

Predictably, our progressive, secular culture has wrecked all of the mechanisms by which their neuroses are calmed.

• Girls are told they don't need boys. How we kneel at the altar of evolution and at the same time contradict its central motive force illustrates how we've discarded logic and objective reality.
• Boys are given cataracts of pornography. Orgasms are easily available without the need to be worthy of a girl.
• Boys are told masculinity is wrong. All of the traditional male attractions for girls are suppressed.
• Girls are told that they should pursue careers instead of becoming wives and mothers. Again, where are the evolutionary biologists?
• We see examples of girls beating up boys in our entertainment all the time. This works in two ways. First, it tells girl the lie that they don't need a boy to protect them. Second, it demotivates boys from becoming better boys by sneering at one of their most attractive qualities to girls.

It goes on and on and on. JP II laid this all out with logic, theology and wisdom in his Theology of the Body. Dim bulb Francis and his henchpervert James Martin are so thoroughly steeped in modern, progressive thought that they dismissed God's reality in exchange for far-left critical theory which categorizes each of us by group membership.

And so, in Fiducia Supplicans, they've managed to genuflect to one of the most powerful groups in the West while neglecting the ones that are most marginalized.

#FiduciaSupplicans manages the progressive daily double of lifting up the privileged while stomping on the marginalized.

The hallowed LGBTQWERTY get yet another reward while young women are robbed of romance and husbands by a sexually perverted society. pic.twitter.com/wLK6uY2lBK

— K T Cat (@ktcat) December 30, 2023

Does God have a plan, a template, an objective moral structure for sex or not? If not, why not? How did He manage to overlook our strongest evolutionary motivating force?

If He does have an objective moral structure for sex, why is it different than what JPII laid out in Theology of the Body?

BOOM.
"I'll just leave this little pamphlet here. You may read it at your leisure ..."

They don't address that in the confusing mess that is Fiducia Supplicans because it's not important to them any more than "uplifting marginalized voices" is. I described moral masturbation in the past and I think it fits perfectly here.

The diversity crowd feels a frisson of pleasure when someone like Lori Lightfoot, a black lesbian, wins an election. They're silent when Macy's leaves a 170,000 square foot hole in the Magnificent Mile and when Chicago murders skyrocket, almost all of which are black-on-black.

It's not that they don't know, it's that they are solving a totally different equation than what they claim.

They are not fighting inequality, they're morally masturbating. Diversity, trans, racial justice, all of it is just pornography. It feels so good, but nothing gets done. Further, they risk nothing, since it's the mania du jour. No one will be canceled if they encourage a young girl to take lethal doses of testosterone. Instead, they might be elected President.

The secular left has played havoc with the sex lives of the younger generations all while claiming to inclusive and accepting. With Fiducia Supplicans, progressive Catholics have joined them.

They want to feel morally righteous while joining with the most powerful organizations on the planet. The marginalized can get lost.

Which they are.

A Catholic Inclusion Apocalypse

The Catholic Church in Africa and eastern Europe is in open revolt against the pope who is all about listening and being inclusive, especially towards marginalized voices. I guess the Africans weren't all that marginalized after all. Who knew?

Meanwhile, the West is a free-fire zone. See the letter from a large group of American clergy below.

So much love and acceptance! So very equitable!

This is ChatGPT's vision for an Inclusion Apocalypse. Winning!

Dig this.

In text form:

The Confraternity of Catholic Clergy (USA) wishes to address the recent turmoil over the proper interpretation and application of Fiducia Supplicans from the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith. We unite our concerns with those of our brethren in the British Confraternity of Catholic Clergy as stated in their public announcement. Sinful behavior and disordered inclinations can never be blessed or condoned. Even the appearance of endorsement of any moral evil must be avoided at all cost lest one infer that the one giving the ‘blessing’ is also a formal cooperator in evil, which is always forbidden.

The distinction that individuals can be blessed without approving their lifestyle and moral activity is certainly valid. Inmates in prison are frequently ‘blessed’ but always in the context that Divine assistance is being invoked on the persons themselves, not on their criminal behavior. At the same time, however, great care is warranted lest the façade be made that not only the person but also their actions and beliefs are also receiving an ‘imprimatur’ of sorts. Cohabitating couples (heterosexual or homosexual) if blessed together give the impression that their relationship is acceptable in the eyes of the Church, which it is not. While a cleric can ‘bless’ any human person, he cannot bless immoral or disordered behavior. Loving the sinner does not mean loving the sin. Jesus commanded the woman caught in adultery to “sin no more.”  He did not ‘bless’ her lifestyle but He forgave her sins.

Likewise, as we cannot bless abortions, pornography, marital infidelity, child abuse, terrorism, and all grave evils (like fornication and adultery), we must also avoid conflating immoral things with those who commit them. Prudence requires us to avoid sending the wrong message. Moral truth is as precious as dogmatic truth. Yes, the Church has not changed her perennial teaching on human sexuality and the sanctity of marriage, but we should neither muddy the waters, either. 

Admonishing sinners is still a work of mercy and obscuring their moral vision is not; even if it is called a ‘blessing.’

This is an absolutely perfect example of the postmodern left. From anti-racism to tolerance to inclusion to diversity to affirmation, they set everyone at each other's throats because they cannot admit the existence of irreconcilable differences except when it comes to straight, white men vs. everyone else.

The postmodern left is dismissive of all ideas other than their own.

Bonus War Zone Report

Over in Philly, Archbishop Chaput is having none of it. 

“Deliberate or persistent ambiguity—anything that fuels misunderstanding or seems to leave an opening for objectively sinful behavior—is not of God,” Chaput stated.  

Please, spare us from any more synodality. 

Of Priests And Girlfriends

I'm just wondering, if two gay dudes can come up to a priest for a couple's blessing where the priest can be certain that within 48 hours the dudes are going to be getting hot and heavy, can a different priest bring his girlfriend to a fellow priest for a couple's blessing?

How about a guy and his favorite prostitute?

What about those perverts who dress like nuns, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence?

Where's the line and who's drawing it?

It's as clear as mud.

Merry Christmas!

 Merry Christmas, all. I hope you and yours are having a lovely holiday season.

Ship Of Church Fools

Pope Francis didn't recognize the implicit tradeoffs in Fiducia supplicans and thus started a world war within the Church. More importantly, he screwed over civilization.

The video below is what he ignored in his boundless "compassion."  

Ship Of Church Fools

In his outstanding book, Ship of Fools, Tucker Carlson illustrates how our two political parties have merged on many, many issues, always to the detriment of workers. For example, Democrats used to oppose illegal immigration because they supported the farm workers union. Republicans supported illegal immigration because they supported the farmers. Now that the Democrats have embraced modern Nazism and are bent on making whites a minority, illegal immigration is out of control and the entry-level, blue collar labor market is being obliterated.

If you're a high school graduate not going on to college, you're hosed.

The video above showing women in despair as they realize they will never find a husband and have a family is a consequence of our embrace of sexual libertinism and feminism. Both of those have their upsides. It's good that gays don't have to hide any more. It's good that women can now choose careers over family if they want.

There are no solutions, only trade-offs.

Sexual libertinism means fewer husbands for the women who want them. Guys will do whatever it takes to get laid. If chicks put out and porn is everywhere, fewer men will prepare for marriage by keeping fit, getting a career and wooing a girl. Feminism has led to women earning more. Women don't want a man who earns less than they do. The mathematics of it are implacably bad for marriage. The guys aren't trying because they've got porn and the women are excelling in their careers, making the men less attractive.

And then the crash. The women in the video above are not atypical. There are even more in the pipeline. There is a ton of feminine pain all around us and it's only going to get worse. You can see that in the depression rates.

No One Stands For Marriage Any More

Fiducia supplicans was the Catholic Church surrendering to sexual libertinism. It cannot be seen any other way. The pope and his "compassionate, inclusive and non-judgmental" allies in the Church hierarchy removed the one and only guardrail in Catholicism that protected women from the fate shown above when they divorced being a sexual couple recognized by the Church from procreation.

Just as the Democrats were the workers' only protection from having wages slashed by competition from illegals, the Catholic Church was the only remaining institution protecting women by insisting on the sexual restraints that make marriage more likely.

Under Fiducia Supplicans, Anything Goes

If getting it on with other guys earns you a priest's blessing, why doesn't a pornography addiction do the same? All the pope has done is substitute the moral judgments of the Jesuits for the moral judgments of St. Paul. What makes that galactic perv Father James Martin the final arbiter of right and wrong? Why aren't I the final arbiter of what is right and wrong for me?

When Sam Brinton was named to a high position in the DoE and it was discovered he had a thing for sex while wearing a leather dog costume, I penned this blog post and I think it's apropos for what the Jesuits just did to all of us.

This snippet appeared directly beneath this photo of Sam and his "dog."

Those are the fruits of Obergfell. What is wrong with Sam doing ... err, whatever it is he's doing there? There was always only one guardrail when it came to sex and that was how babies were made. Once we ditched that, bestiality, pretend-bestiality in this case, and pedophilia were the inevitable, logical future steps for the simple reason that we can't explain why it's wrong.

Some will claim that consent is the real guardrail, but consent is subjective. Baby-making is objective. Babies and the making thereof constitute a hard limit for acceptable behavior. Consent is in the eye of the beholder. Hey, I know some really mature ten-year-olds. Why can't they give consent? Are you some kind of prude or something?

If the civil war within the Church is lost by the forces of rational thought, the ones who demand that our teachings be logically consistent and founded on objective reality, scripture and divine inspiration, then we will all be in a similar position to the border towns in Texas today, hopelessly overrun by forces unleashed when the side protecting them caved.

There is no backstop to Catholicism when it comes to protecting women who, by their biological nature, crave a husband and family. If we're defeated, the despair of nihilistic hedonism will consume us all.

Pope Francis Assassinates Archduke Franz Ferdinand

 ... Church factions mobilize for war.

I couldn't help generating a fake newspaper for the occasion.

The Jesuits are calling up their reserves.

On the other side, the response of the bishops of Cameroon is typical of the fury consuming the African Church.

Statement of the Bishops of Cameroon on homosexuality and the blessing of "homosexual couples" 

In the face of semantic abuse designed to distort the value of the realities and true meaning of family, couple, spouse, sexuality and marriage. 

In the face of the wave of indignation, questions, and concern that the Declaration Fiducia supplicans on the question of the blessing of homosexual couples has aroused among the People of God. 

In the name of the truth of the Gospel and for the sake of human dignity and the salvation of all humanity in Jesus Christ. 

We, the Bishops of Cameroon, on the subject of homosexuality and the blessing of "homosexual couples", unanimously declare the following: 

1. In conformity with our 2013 Declaration on Homosexuality, we firmly reaffirm the truth of the Church, Mother and Teacher, which teaches the sacredness of the sexual identity of man and woman created in the image of God (Gen. 1: 26), the dignity of their sexuality and of marriage which is the foundation of the family. The human person is created male and female: "Male and female he created them" (Gen. 1:26). This immutable difference, which is the foundation of their relationship and complementarity, is fulfilled in the bonds of marriage. 
2. Homosexuality falsifies human anthropology and trivializes sexuality, marriage and the family, the foundation of society. In African culture, this practice is not part of family and social values. It is a flagrant violation of the heritage bequeathed to us by our ancestors. In the history of peoples, homosexual practices have never given rise to societal evolution, but are clear signs of the implosive decadence of civilizations. In fact, homosexuality sets humanity against itself and destroys it. 
3. The profound identity of sexuality is misunderstood, hijacked and perverted outside the conjugal relationship between man and woman. Consequently, homosexual acts are not "sexual" but "relations against nature" (Rom. 1:26). 
4. Marriage is an institution that legitimizes sexual relations and filiation for the foundation of a new family. It is the union of one man and one woman who commit themselves to a life as a couple, to found a family and to live together in love. Homosexual unions are not marriages. It distorts the meaning of marriage by reducing it to a sterile, hedonistic and perverse bond: "the infamy of man to man" (Rom. 1:26). 
5. Men and women each have the natural right to assume the specificity of their nature. This right is unchanging, irreducible and structuring, and is to be considered in the context of the couple, sexuality and the family, as the basis of paternity in the case of a man, and maternity in the case of a woman. The free orientation of sexuality brandished by the promoters of homosexuality is a negation of this right. 
6. Homosexuality is not a human right Rather, it is an alienation that seriously harms humanity, because it is not based on any value proper to the human being: "it is an abomination" (Lev. 18:22). Rejecting it is in no way discrimination, but a legitimate protection of the constant values of humanity in the face of a vice that has become the subject of a claim to legal recognition and, today, the subject of a blessing. 
7. In a literal sense, "to bless is to speak well of". And to speak well of a "homosexual couple" by an act of blessing would be to encourage a choice and lifestyle that cannot be recognized as objectively ordered to God's revealed purposes. We therefore declare any form of blessing that tends to recognize "homosexual couples" as a state of life to be not in conformity. 
8. Faithful to the constant teaching of ecclesial Tradition, which declares acts of homosexuality to be intrinsically disordered and contrary to natural law (Catechism of the Catholic Church n. 2357), We, the Bishops of Cameroon, reiterate our disapproval of homosexuality and homosexual unions. 
9. Consequently, we formally prohibit all blessings of "homosexual couples" in the Church of Cameroon. 
10. Since God does not desire the death of the sinner, but his conversion to eternal life, we recommend those inclined to homosexuality to the prayer and compassion of the Church, with a view to their radical conversion. We also invite them to leave behind their mentality of victimization, in which they take pleasure in seeing themselves as "victims", "weak", "minorities" in order to seize the opportunity for conversion that God gives them in the multiple interpellations of his Word. 

Given in Yaounde, December 21, 2023 

That's going to leave a mark. It looks like the Camerooniks are loading their artillery onto trains heading for the front. Those are some pretty big howitzers right there.

There is a bigger truth playing out in all of this, but I'll leave that for a future post. For now, let me just observe that the pope who constantly drools about listening, acceptance, forgiveness and love has managed to start a world war within the Church. If it hadn't been brutally predictable, it would have been ironically hilarious.

For Those Who Don't Quite Get The Point Of The War

This video is worth watching. It perfectly describes what is at stake here. I put the scrub head at a spot that summarizes what is happening in case you don't want to watch the whole thing.

Moral Chaos Says 3 = 17

 And the hits just keep on coming from Pope Francis' Fiducia Supplicans which allows priests to bless inflatable sex dolls or something like that.

First, let's posit, with no little justification, that all of this was done with the very best of intentions. Pope Francis wants everyone to feel welcome and loved. His problem is that he also wants three to equal seventeen or, if that's too difficult, he wants us all to ignore that it doesn't.

It's that impatient dismissal of logic that blows everything to kingdom come.

Many, many people within the Church are not willing to say that 3=17. Africa, for example, is rising up in great discontent.

Today's newspaper in MALAWI: Say no to "Blessing same-sex couples in Malawi. pic.twitter.com/J4JVgpDrMi

— Rev Fr Petros Mwale (@fr_petros) December 20, 2023

Plenty of priests are registering their unhappiness. Father Dwight Longenecker's essay on the topic, a howl of despair, is a good sample.

The recent document Fiducia Supplicans signed off by Pope Francis is probably the most disastrous piece of work in what will be seen as the worst papacy in the 20th-21st centuries...

I can’t help wondering what the motivation for the document was. Who was pushing for this? Not just Fr James Martin SJ and the gang at New Ways Ministry. I suspect if you “follow the money” there would be some other interesting links. Was this pressure from the fabulously wealthy German church? Was it pressure from the Uber-rich international pink lobby? Who knows? But what I do know is that the perception and reception of the document is disastrous.

The first problem is with the whole question of blessings. Did the authors of the document really not understand that their “theology of blessing” doesn’t matter one little bit compared to the popular understanding of blessing? Yes, yes we know a blessing is a benediction, a solemn prayer for God’s grace and goodness to be bestowed on a person or object, and that it is okay to ask for this blessing for anyone.

OK, but that is not what ordinary people think. They think to give a blessing is to grant approval of a person and permission for their actions...

The vast majority of people do not know about the “theology of blessings”. They simply believe the headlines–that the Catholic Church now approves of gay sex.

In attempting to make more people feel good by dismissing any need for logic or consistency, the pope has managed to make more people feel bad.

At a macro level, this is the same problem as the open border. We want to be compassionate to the migrants. We want to give them a better life. To get what we want, we ignore reality. No thought is given to the practical realities of housing 150,000 migrants in NYC.

It's the same problem as equity. We want black kids to do as well as white kids in school. We ignore the reality of their home life and simply grant them all the same titles and rewards. We ignore the need for objective and empirical data and we get rid of standardized testing. No thought is given to the practical realities of giving high school diplomas to functionally illiterate students.

At the micro level, the laity is trying to cope. Here's a sample of what is happening at the local level at some parish here in the US.

The advice I gave my RCIA class last night: we don't know how to read this in a way compatible w what we know to be true via Scripture and the perennial Magisterium.  Therefore we are irremediably confused.  Therefore, ignore and carry on as before.  The advice was well received.

Illogical good intentions produce chaos and pain.

And on and on it goes. Moral Chaos gives us a brief frisson of pleasure, but it doesn't take long for 3=17 to wreck all kinds of things.

Moral Chaos Comes To Denver And Rome

Yesterday, the Colorado Supreme Court decided that they didn't like Donald Trump so he wasn't allowed to run for president in Colorado. That really was the full body of their decision. Trump hasn't been convicted of anything yet so there was no triggering event for the decision. They just felt better for doing it.

KT's Moral Chaos Hypothesis scores again.

KT's Moral Chaos Hypothesis: People with power, whether that is economic, political or (para-)military, lost their Christian moral foundations a while back. They're only now realizing that a majority of the population has lost them as well. That means that all bets are off. There are absolutely no boundaries to behavior any more. Money, sex, power, it's all up for grabs and you'd be a fool not to take what you want.

Not KT's Moral Chaos Hypothesis: There is no cabal of the powerful guiding anything in any direction in particular. It looks like that from time to time because the interests of some subset of the powerful align temporarily and they all pull in the same direction. Instead, it's all Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX everywhere.

More KT's Moral Chaos Hypothesis: There's no moral grounding to what is happening. In fact, it's the lack of a moral grounding that is at the heart of my hypothesis.

In Rome, Papa Francis went all in on sexual degeneracy. Oh sure, his decree said that gay couples can get blessings in some informal, spontaneous way which doesn't celebrate the sin and blah blah blah, but that was all utter nonsense. Anyone can get a spontaneous blessing any time from a priest. That includes gays. It's not a big deal unless you walk up to the Holy Dude loudly proclaiming the righteousness of your sins. The only reason the pope called out the LGBTQWERTY stuff was that he wants to normalize it.

Hey man, there are no rules. If you doubt that, dig what the pope's Jesuit henchman, Father James Martin, a pervert of biblical proportions, did almost immediately after the pope's announcement.

That's a married gay couple, holding hands with a photographer and NYT reporter present. The pope's own main man on LGBTQWERTY just did an end zone dance right in front of the Catholic laity.

Not to worry, I have no doubt that from our pulpits, the demoralized pew-sitters will get a steady stream of "God is love" pablum until the cows come home and James Martin has sex with them.

On the southern border, there are no more rules than there were last week.

All of this is happening because it makes some of us feel good, temporarily. There's no immediate price to be paid so feeling good isn't being balanced out with pipers who are demanding payment.

I need to wander off and do some odds and ends, so let's just sum it all up with another quote from the blog post linked above.

Who cares (how much it all costs in terms of money and Americans unable to find decent jobs)? It's all printed anyway! Either our children will pay for it in the form of a larger debt or the blue-collar deplorables will pay for it in the form of inflation. Absent an objective moral structure to guide decisions, there's absolutely no reason to care about either the children or the working class.

Radical Inclusion Isn't

I needed to get this one down in electronic prose so here we go.

Plenty of Catholics I know talk about variations on the theme of "radical inclusion." It means not being judgmental. It's all nonsense. What they're really doing is drawing a line at a different place than Saint Paul did in his Epistles.

St. Paul is the dude what talked about women being obedient and men keeping it in their pants. He's the one who expressly forbade homosexuality. Unwilling to say anything negative to the LGBTQWERTY crew, my progressive Catholic friends like to pretend they're accepting and inclusive. They aren't.

Each one of them would say that a grown man having sex with an 11-year-old girl was dead wrong, period, good night, that's all she wrote.

The problem is that while St. Paul can defend his position with logic, they cannot. This is the difficulty intrinsic to discarding tradition. All those old, white dudes dealt with the debate points we face today and they developed the Catechism through argumentation. You can throw it away if you like, but your Epicurean opponents will come at you with the same points that Augustine and Aquinas faced.

So an 11-year-old is off limits? Fair enough. How about a 17-year old? Are we good there? If so, what about someone who is 16 years and 51 weeks? 16 years and 50 weeks?

See how this works? They walk it back in fine increments and you realize you don't have a solid reason to draw the line anywhere.

St. Paul solved this problem with biology and Genesis. Babies come from the vaginal, sexual union of one man and one woman. Men, women and babies are all created in the image of God and have the spark of the divine within them. Both of those are solid foundational concepts. Niceness, inclusiveness and equity are not.

So our progressive Catholic friends find themselves having to re-fight the battles of the last 2000 years without the help of Augustine, Aquinas, Chesterton or any of the other geniuses. They discarded those musty, old, white men because ... because ... because, well, they weren't inclusive. How hideous.

You threw away Augustine, Aquinas and Chesterton? Marvelous!

You're on your own, Jackson.

Better Than I Deserve

 I was just sitting outside, enjoying a couple of pipefulls of some fine, Virginia tobacco, enjoying an Old Fashioned made with an excellent Alabama whiskey and listening to the Newsboys only to come inside and have my wife ask me to make some bisuits.

Butter bombs, to be exact.

That was preceded by her asking me to deep fry a whole chicken.

How am I doing? Better than I deserve.

Update: The deep-fried chicken came out underdone. It had very small red dots in the flesh, as if there were small, individual points deep in the meat that didn't get cooked. The recipe called for 20-30 minutes at 350 degrees. This is the second time I've used the recipe and the first time I did 25 minutes and the bird came out perfectly. This time, I did 27 minutes and it was underdone.

Go figure.

In my post-mortem, I realized that deep-frying is pretty forgiving on the high side. Since there was no breading to burn, I could have done the 30 minute version and been just fine. It wasn't like the meat was going to get tough or dry.

Live and learn.

Don't Existing Civil Rights Laws Cover This?

Here's something I don't understand. I thought we had gallons of regulations establishing civil rights rules with respect to being eligible for Federal funding. I didn't think you could get Federal money if you were racist, sexist or such. If that's the case, how does Rutgers still have a dime of Federal coin?

Rutgers Professor Brittney Cooper says that white people are evil villains and need to be “taken out”

When you call for white genocide in our top universities, you get promoted.
pic.twitter.com/OHo3Ncn5Ho

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) December 9, 2023

Is it that the regulations only govern discrimination in hiring and admittance? Can universities hold all the Nazi rallies they want so long as they allow Jews on campus?

Are there hate speech regulations that govern Federal funding as well? I asked ChatGPT and got this result.

Yes, federal funding can be denied to private universities that engage in racism. This is generally guided by various federal laws and regulations that prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance. Key among these laws is Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Title VI states that no individual in the United States shall, "on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance." Therefore, if a private university receives federal funding and is found to be engaging in discriminatory practices that violate Title VI, it risks losing that funding.

Aside: ChatGPT does a far better job answering questions than Google search results do.

Anyway, this response and the Google search results seem to indicate that you can scream, "Weiße raus!" morning, noon and night, provided white people are allowed to attend your classes. I'm not sure I believe that. I cannot believe that we could have the reincarnation of Senator Theodore G. Bilbo (D-MS) teaching at a private college that receives Federal funding.

I used the example of advocating Nazism while allowing Jews to attend class and asked ChatGPT if this was governed by any regulations. Here's what I got.

Department of Education Guidelines: The U.S. Department of Education oversees the enforcement of laws against discrimination in educational institutions. Universities must comply with guidelines that ensure they are not fostering a hostile environment based on race, nationality, or other protected characteristics.

Again, I can't believe that this sort of speech doesn't violate something in the massive pile of Federal regulations. How can a university allow one of its professors to rant about the white devils and not have that be a hostile environment for whites?

By all means, let's allow the full weight of government regulations to fall on Rutgers.

Harvard Is Important

 ... certainly more important than the poor devils in Baltimore. For the Harvard president, we look the other way when she can't figure out that calling for the genocide of the Jews is wrong after she got her position through plagiarism. For the kids in Baltimore, we gundeck their test scores and shove them through the exit when they age out of school.

BALTIMORE (WJZ) -- Multiple Baltimore high schools changed more than 12,500 failing grades to passing over a several-year span, according to the findings of an audit released Tuesday by the Maryland Office of the Inspector General for Education.

The report was the product of a three-year review of grading procedures within Baltimore City Public Schools, which was launched in response to complaints about students being promoted despite poor academic performance and allegations that teachers were pressured to change grades.

Because the kids getting jobbed in Baltimore are black, no one feels safe telling the truth about them.

Its findings were based on a combination of documents, including emails exchanged by district and school staff, and interviews with educators and administrators, some of whom the auditors' say were reluctant to speak out of fear that it could cost them their jobs.

"A culture of fear and a veil of secrecy affected the BCPS system and kept many from speaking freely about misconduct," the report states. "Regrettably, these actions delayed the completion of this investigation and hindered the truth-seeking process."

So Claudine Gay is praised for breaking a glass ceiling, whatever that means these days, and keeps her job after blowing up the school's reputation because ... because ... well, we all know why, but I won't say it. No one feels safe telling the truth.

Exit Question

What can you say about the moral calculus that defends the Harvard president because she's black, but blows off the futures of thousands of black children, all in the name of racial justice?

Welcome To The Party, Chaver!

 ... as in this scene from the Christmas movie, Die Hard.

Sane people are quite rightly wound up about the rabid antisemitism showing its ugly face on the left. The three elite university presidents who were unable to say that calling for the slaughter of all Jews everywhere violates their speech codes revealed just how insane the progs have become.

Missing the Point

The reactions are justified, of course, but they are looking at a secondary infection, an opportunistic parasitism from the primary problem which is anti-white hatred.

Liz Magill of UPenn, the most egregious of the three with her condescending smile and superiority-infused, half-closed eyes, inspired me to do a Google search for the term "whiteness" restricted to upenn.edu. Here was one of the top entries. Here's a tidbit.

InVisible Culture — A Journal for Visual Culture 

Call For Papers 

Issue 36: “The Matter of Whiteness” 

Rounding thirty years since the emergence of a disciplinary “Whiteness Studies” in the 1990s, the subject appears just as reified and opaque as an object of study as it is ubiquitous in contemporary life. Taking a cue from the 20th anniversary edition of Richard Dyer’s White (2017) and its opening chapter “The Matter of Whiteness,” Issue 36 invites scholars to engage how in the interceding decades between the discipline’s advent and its contemporary resurgence whiteness has come to matter for a variety of humanistic and social science fields of study. As whiteness has come to matter newly for visual representation, academic study, and contemporary political life, it has also encountered, per Robyn Wiegman, a “fraught materialization” (2012, 196). If it matters–in its fragility, in its supremacy–scholars like Wiegman, George Yancy, Sara Ahmed, andmost recently, Nicholas Mirzoeff, have rightfully questioned the theoretical efficacy of critiquing whiteness as an object alone. Where do we go from here?

Right here and now, I'd like to call for plagiarism investigation. I'm pretty sure this was lifted, word for word, from a similar call for papers from the University of Heidelburg in 1936 where they pondered just what was to be done about the Jews.

Nazi screeds always sound better in the original German.

These days, the Jews aren't the primary target, they're simply in the anti-white splash zone. Welcome to the party, Chaver!

Our education system has been completely taken over by a descendent of Nazism. The world is divided into oppressors and oppressed, delineated by easily-identified groups. If you belong to a group that has been successful, like straight, white men, it's because you oppressed the unsuccessful. Jews are disproportionately successful. The only way that could have happened was by the Jews cheating, dominating the disadvantaged and conspiring to create structures of superiority.

See also: Asian applicants, Harvard discriminating against.

The Jews and the Asians were always going to get sucked into this because they're successful. It will keep happening over and over and over until the DEI parasites at the center of the race hate are replaced in our education industry.

Until the response goes straight to the heart of the anti-white hatred in our culture, it will never do more than treat minor symptoms.

You Wouldn't Think This Possible

Dig this hit from UPenn.

What is the relationship between Jewishness and Whiteness? What is the nature of their entanglement? This talk will address the figural meaning of the Jews within the Whiteness of the West, elaborating on Whiteness as a geopolitical practice of religion, indeed as a practice of myth, that institutes the global idea of race or that organizes the planet through racial capitalism.

Mein Gott, es ist perfekt!

The Progressives Reply

Saturday Night Live managed to paint Congresswoman Stefanik as the villain.

Wow. The dots are so close together that you don't even need to connect them.

Shouting "Death To The Jews!" Is All Good Fun Until The Einsatzgruppen Arrives

 Dig this collection of horrors from the presidents of some of our top universities.

Calling someone the wrong pronoun is considered harassment, but not chanting “Death to all Jews”!

According to Liz Magill,
President of the University of Pennsylvania, calling for the genocide of Jews is not a form of harassment. She blatantly refused to answer yes, that it was… pic.twitter.com/7Ri1Td0Cug

— ˜”*°• 𝔾𝕨𝕪𝕟𝕟 •°*”˜ (@GwynninPA) December 6, 2023

So shouting, "Juden Raus!" is fine until the mass graves are filled? 

Well.

The knee-jerk reaction is to say that they wouldn't be waiting for the Einsatzgruppen to put a bullet in the back of a black person's head before they said that shouting "Death to the blacks!" was bullying or whatever the term du jour might be. That fruit hangs way too low for me.

Instead, let's consider that this particular terminal terminus was perfectly predictable once the Judeo-Christian culture, which is based upon 3000 or so years of accreted logic, was jettisoned in favor of "hate whitey*" because European empires were more efficient and successful than the other empires. None of the lunacy emanating from Team Faculty Lounge makes a lick of sense, but this is where they ended up when they ditched rational thought and Millenia of wisdom in favor of Marxist-derived gibberish.

Their infantile DEI worldview has led them to permit calls for the genocide of the Jews. They sit there in Congress defending antisemitism and it's only now occurring to them that they can't get out of this particular logical conundrum without discarding their secular religion. It's a monkey-banana trap and they're caught in it.

It seems obvious to me that these university presidents didn't have an answer ready for this question. They clearly have never had discussions about it with anyone outside of their particular faculty lounge madhouse.

* - By dint of their hard work and success, Asians and Jews are in the whitey splash zone, so they get dragged into the hatefest from time to time. This is one of those times.

Women Are Irrational

 ... just a little bit of mess in the kitchen sends them over the edge.

Dig this.

No big deal, right? I mean, I needed to make shrimp stock, so I figured that I might was well buy head-on shrimp in the shell, shuck the little buggers and then cook the shells and the shrimp in water with onions, carrots and a few seasonings. I put the shelled shrimp in cheesecloth bag so I could pull them out when they were done and leave the shells and veggies to simmer for an hour or so. Genius, right?

I decided that meant I needed to eat the shrimp for dinner, so I pulled out my Paul Prudhomme cookbook and got his recipe for Remoulade Sauce. That needed Creole Mustard, which I didn't have, so I found a recipe for that, too. The above image is what your kitchen looks like after making Creole Mustard and then Remoulade Sauce. See below for the final results highlighted.

I did the markup on my phone just for fun. Meh. I much prefer Photoshop.

Anywho, wife kitteh is in Seattle right now, so I posed the top photo to the family chat group and wouldn't you know it, I got an "OMG!" from wife kitteh! Women! I'm telling you.

So now I've got the kitchen more or less cleaned up so wife kitteh doesn't go on the warpath when she comes home.

Me, I wouldn't have noticed if I walked in and saw the kitchen like this.

AI Update

I've been working on a different project lately which started trying to get ChatGPT to write javascript code for a simple game where pieces move across a grid. It started out fine, but the pieces had a tendency to disappear or do the wrong things. I took a totally hands-off approach, just to see what would happen. It would give me the code, I'd run it and report back to ChatGPT the results. It would correct one thing and break or forget another.

It was pretty impressive even though it didn't really understand what we were doing.

The Dave Ramsey Gospel Reading

 ... is the one I was grinching about earlier.

Jesus told his disciples this parable: "A man going on a journey called in his servants and entrusted his possessions to them. To one he gave five talents...Immediately the one who received five talents went and traded with them, and made another five"...

"After a long time the master of those servants came back and settled accounts with them. The one who had received five talents came forward bringing the additional five. 

He said, 'Master, you gave me five talents. See, I have made five more.'

His master said to him, 'Well done, my good and faithful servant. Since you were faithful in small matters, I will give you great responsibilities. Come, share your master's joy.'"

I've never heard a sermon on this passage that even came close to its meaning.

Dave Ramsey likes to say that you should live like no one else so later you can live like no one else. He's all about developing useful, marketable skills and spending less than you earn. Stay out of debt and build wealth so later, you can live well. Also, so you can give well. I can't find the direct quote right now, but he says something like, "Poor folk can't help anyone." He's spot on.

Off-topic rant: Has anyone else seen how bad the results from Google have become? It's simply awful these days.

That passage is really, really straightforward. There is moral good in making something of yourself. Sloth is a sin. Most of the rest of Jesus' teachings hinge on being able to give to others in the first place. The dude what's watching porn and smoking weed isn't a lot of good to anyone, no matter how much of what little he has he gives away.

So why can't our priests and deacons talk about this? Have we villainized success that much?

I'd suggest that instead of hating slavery, racism and imperialism, we hate success. To borrow this tidbit again from Hilaire Belloc,

Whatever happens we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not.

It's hard to imagine that the Turks, the Mongols or even the peaceful, living-in-harmony-with-nature Apache would have eschewed the use of the Maxim Gun if they'd had access to them.

Instead of getting wound up about one warlike empire among many, we might want to ask ourselves why the Europeans developed the technologies they did. And no, "Because slavery!" isn't the answer. Everyone had slaves, but only the Christian, white, Europeans developed almost all of the technologies we use today.

Is that all this is? We don't dare praise hard work and investments from the pulpit because they reek of the white patriarchy?

Of course, none of our deacons really believe what they preach about this. They all work extraordinarily hard outside of their duties for the parish. Typically, their wives donate massive amounts of time to charity as well, all made possible by their husband's well-earned success. If they didn't take their talents and double them, they wouldn't be able to do any of it.

Dave Ramsey doing unto credit cards as they have done unto you.

Jesus Is Just About The Worst Boss In The World

 ... that's what I'm learning from recent homilies, almost all of which were preached by our deacons. Our priest is notably better, but now that I see what I'm about to describe, I don't think I'll miss it when anyone does it.

First, Jesus takes credit for all your successes. In a recent Sunday homily, we were informed that the Parable of the Talents is not about striving for success and God being pleased with your efforts.

Jesus told his disciples this parable: "A man going on a journey called in his servants and entrusted his possessions to them. To one he gave five talents...Immediately the one who received five talents went and traded with them, and made another five"...

"After a long time the master of those servants came back and settled accounts with them. The one who had received five talents came forward bringing the additional five. 

He said, 'Master, you gave me five talents. See, I have made five more.'

His master said to him, 'Well done, my good and faithful servant. Since you were faithful in small matters, I will give you great responsibilities. Come, share your master's joy.'"

No, it's all about giving the credit to God. Also, it's not about working hard or earning a profit. What Jesus is really saying is that we should give what we have to others because that's the way we will earn our reward.

A reward which, if the sermons I've heard for a decade or more are to be believed, Jesus will immediately take away from you because all credit must go to God.

Meanwhile, your sins are your own. You need to repent and change. If you do and good things result, don't expect any praise or congratulations. All credit goes to God.

That's the very definition of a horrible boss. When you succeed, they take the credit and when you fail, you get the blame.

Just where they get this idea is beyond me. They certainly aren't getting it from the Bible.

His master said to him, 'Well done, my good and faithful servant. Since you were faithful in small matters, I will give you great responsibilities. Come, share your master's joy.'

No, the version of God I hear in the sermons and when I go to other Catholic meetings looks something like this. 

The End Of Culinary Disco

 First off, my cooking lately has been dreadful. The kittens weren't around for Thanksgiving, but sister kitteh was in town and we had a Tanzanian nun over as well. Instead of turkey, we made those frozen lobster tails from Costco. Horrible. Simply horrible. No matter what you do, they're tough and they don't have the sweet, lobster flavor. Never again.

On Friday, youngest son kitten and the unicorn, his girlfriend, came over. We smoked a turkey this time, going with Champion Smoker Myron Mixon's recipe. It was horrible. Simply horrible. The bird got to the requisite 165 about 90 minutes too early, so I made a command decision and left in the smoker, but turned down the heat. The end result tasted bad because Myron's brine solution was awful. It was also tough from smoking or perhaps from the quality of the bird. Finally, some parts were overdone and some were underdone. How is that possible?

Speaking of overdone, but underdone, we made a tomahawk steak recently, the ones you get from Costco. This time I ever used a meat thermometer and I still got purple spots and parts that were the color of shoe leather. We used to swear by those tomahawks, but these days we just swear at them.

And the beat goes on. I can't remember that last meal I made that I really liked.

The End of Disco

... is what the racial justice thing feels like these days. It feels ... exhausted. Dig these.

Whiteness? Again? Aren't we done with that?

The girl was kidnapped by the Hamas savages on 10/7. Since Muslims are considered an "oppressed " group, you can't say they ever do anything wrong.

Dude was an immigrant. WaPo couldn't bring itself to say anything bad about a "migrant."

Honestly, it's all boring. It's all played out.

Dear Ireland, I Hate You

 ... signed, your Prime Minister.

Prime Minister of Ireland says the government is “very white” and it “needs to change.” pic.twitter.com/kTUaOk6M25

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) November 24, 2023

The Irish government is too white? Just what color are they supposed to be? It's Ireland.

Honestly, this stuff is starting to have a Last Days of Disco feel to it. It's all so end-stage ludicrous.

Equity Fails At Every Level

Yesterday's post was semi-incoherent, so I wanted to take another run at the idea so I could make my position on the matter completely incoherent.

The situation is this. At Charlottesville High School, they place a lot of value on the idea of equity. That is, when grouped by race, student cohorts should achieve roughly the same results. That's been an abject failure.

Above the students, at the teacher level, the teachers walked off the job because of student violence and disobedience.

Above the teachers, the principal has resigned.

UPDATE Monday, Nov. 20: City Schools Superintendent Royal Gurley has selected an interim principal to lead Charlottesville High School while the district conducts a search for a permanent replacement.

Kenneth Leatherwood will begin “immediately following the Thanksgiving Break,” Gurley said in a letter to the school district community Monday. Leatherwood replaces outgoing principal Rashaad Pitt, who announced he was resigning earlier this month.

To bring order, they've summoned a group completely outside of the control of the education industry. The cops.

Nearly 30 Charlottesville High School teachers reportedly called out sick Friday. The calls, a coordinated effort to draw attention to the violence, came one day after police were called to the school to address two back-to-back fights.

Some of the kids are eager to escape the violence.

Shamia Hopkins, a mother of a Charlottesville sophomore, finds the situation "disheartening and a little irritating." She told Crisis in the Classroom (CITC) her daughter wants to transfer schools to escape the ongoing violence.

"She just feels like no one hears, no one listens, there's not really any real consequences going on," Hopkins told CITC. "I don't want her to feel like she has to change her life because of things that are going on."

Hopkins also has a child in middle school who is afraid to one day attend Charlottesville. The mother of two says she shares her older daughter's stress, telling CITC she frequently wonders if she is "going to get a phone call today" while at work.

The violence includes large-scale brawls. 

The fighting in particular has been a cause for concern this entire calendar year, with multiple moments of violence caught on camera and circulated online. One large brawl that broke out on Thursday afternoon resulted in multiple smaller skirmishes and general chaos across school grounds. That chaos included an 18-year-old intruder who does not attend CHS gaining access to the building for the sole purpose of joining the fights; a CHS student let the 18-year-old in. Charlottesville police had to be called to help staff restore order; it took hours.

I found a deliberately blurred video of one of the brawls on the Interweb Tubes, but it wasn't worth sharing. Imagine 30+ kids going at it in the school library.

So Team Equity has failed the students, failed the teachers, had the principal resign and terrorized the families. Will anyone on Team Faculty Lounge in our universities adjust their way of thinking? Maybe. Maybe not.

For all of their faults, Davis, Cleaver, and black revolutionaries at least grappled with and appealed to the black lumpenproletariat. The critical race theorists, on the other hand, treat them like lepers—the lumpen class is nowhere to be found in their work, except as symbolic justification for their abstractions.

This is where the critical race theorists reach the final impasse. Their program has become a form of empty professional-class aestheticism, designed for manipulating social status within elite institutions, not for alleviating real miseries or governing a nation.

The disconnect was never with the black lumpenproletariat or any proles at all. The disconnect is with reality itself. Life is not the way the CRT folks describe it. It's not made up of the oppressors and the oppressed, neatly grouped by easily-identifiable markers. It's made of individuals who make their own choices, influence by the culture. That culture includes political leaders, teachers and the entertainment industry.

The basis for our culture, currently dominated by the progressives, is failing at all levels.

Bonus Data Point From California

Here's a good article on what's going on in Fresno, CA.

“You've got something like a reading rate of, a grade level reading rate of 17%,” Teresi pointed out, and that drops to just 9% in students performing at grade level in math, according to the same state diagnostic test.

Bullard High School Head football coach Don Arax says it’s much worse than that.

“I think the public would be shocked if there was a running video of the things going on on these campuses and even more shocked if they saw the way these problems were dealt with.”

From academics, to fights on school campuses, to teachers afraid even for their own safety. After four years on the FUSD school board former trustee Terry Slatic says, there's one thing at the heart of all of this.

“The culture of retribution and the hostile work environment at Fresno Unified School District is awe-inspiringly bad.”

Team Faculty Lounge is clinging to their CRT with an iron fist. 

Equity Goes Boom

 The teachers at Charlottesville High School have walked off the job.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (WVIR) - Charlottesville City Schools says it is working to address several issues at Charlottesville High School that ultimately led to it being closed Friday, November 17.

CCS announced earlier in the day that the high school would be closed due to an “unusual number of staff absences” and a “limited number of substitutes.”

However, Superintendent Royal Gurley later acknowledged recent fights at CHS were a factor in Friday’s closing. He says the fights are between a small group of students who have received both supportive and strong disciplinary actions with no luck.

Dr. Gurley says the school system will be stepping up efforts to make sure CHS is physically and emotionally safe: There’ll be additional supports in place Monday and Tuesday, including have police officers doing patrols on campus. There will also be changes to how employees offer coverage at the front door and throughout the building.

“We’ve had a situation where someone has come into the building,” Gurley said. “Having a police presence outside the building deters that.”

The Charlottesville Education Association claims , “unsafe conditions, the lack of substitute teachers and coverage, and the lack of response from administration led staff to take action today.” The association also says its staff will wear black and orange in support of CHS on Monday and Tuesday.

Monday and Tuesday didn't come.

The School Board and Dr. Gurley met this morning during a closed session to discuss student matters as related to school safety at CHS. As part of our discussions, we agreed to cancel classes at Charlottesville High School on Monday and Tuesday, November 20-21 to allow administrators and staff to continue planning for a “reset” of school policies, procedures, and culture so that we can return to our core purpose – offering a safe learning environment in which our students will grow and thrive. This will be especially important in light of this Monday’s announcement of the interim leadership for CHS. On Monday and Tuesday, all CHS teachers and staff will be present at the school during bell schedule hours (no zero period). All other Charlottesville schools will maintain their regular schedule on Monday and Tuesday.

What's this all about? Why, equity, of course!

Whoa, at my local public high school:

✓ The principal has resigned

✓ Teachers & staff are calling out

✓ Frequent fights are common

✓ Teachers are cursed in the halls

Why is there so much disorder at CHS? Partly this is why: https://t.co/iqh6fhIFU2 pic.twitter.com/68uN57ohtg

— Brad Wilcox (@BradWilcoxIFS) November 19, 2023

Why does that say equity? Well, dig these stats from Great Schools for Charlottesville High.

This Is No Surprise

Just like Mayor Eric Adams of NYC discovering what any Army infantry staff sergeant could have told him would happen if he operated a sanctuary city after the southern border dissolved, the teachers are discovering that racial justice and DEI is just hooey. No expectations on a child for performance or behavior leads to poor performance and bad behavior.

It's not about the race of the child, it's about what the culture has told the children about their race. The black kids have absorbed their lessons about white supremacy and structural racism quite well and have made perfectly reasonable conclusions: studying and behaving are for chumps.

Here's what the CHS website has on its front page.

Equity for the win!

So now you've got a dysfunctional school where the kids at the very center of their "equity" focus can't read, right or do their figgerin'.

Reasons For Optimism

This is why I'm optimistic for the long run. Even the far-left teachers are throwing in the towel on the equity nonsense. DEI is not, at is were, sustainable.

Thomas Sowell's Secret

 ... is that he does straightforward research and follows the truth wherever it leads him. It struck me that Sowell is simply an honest intellectual. That he is unusual is an indication of where we are.

If Denial Was A River In Egypt

 ... the Egyptians would not allow the Palestinians anywhere near it.

Dig this.

This is the first Palestinian public opinion poll that I've seen since Hamas's October 7 operation to rape, massacre, and abduct Israelis.

75 percent of Palestinian respondents said that they support Hamas's October 7 operation to rape, massacre, and abduct Israelis. pic.twitter.com/r8BO17ruGb

— Daniel Rubenstein (@paulrubens) November 17, 2023

Here's the chart in larger form.

I think you'll need to click on it to get a good view. 

The upshot of it is that a majority of Palestinians are down with killing Jews by the truckload. Also, they like raping, torturing and kidnapping Jews.

A couple of thoughts come to mind. The first is that this torpedoes DEI like nothing else. The whole concept of Diversity is that it makes us stronger by bringing in people with different cultures and ideas. This is part of Tolerance, you see. Bringing in a pack of genocidal sociopaths would seem to be counter to the concept of Tolerance.

My bet is that this data will be suppressed so the DEI march can continue.

Another thought that comes to mind is that the Israelis need to de-Nazify Gaza. You can't let these people stay this way and live next to you. Since the Egyptians aren't about to let these maniacs into Egypt, the Israelis are going to have to do some serious re-education.

Finally, this is what the cease-fire crowd supports. Nazis.

If your worldview leads you to support Nazis, it might be time to re-assess your worldview.

How To Identify A Nazi

... is a course that apparently needs to be taught at our schools because as far as I can tell, the students can't seem to do it. Dig this encounter of Jewish students at ASU having to deal with Nazi-sympathizers among their classmates.

WATCH: Tonight close to 20 Jewish students at @ASU had to leave a campus building thru a back door with a police escort together with their @Chabad Rabbi Shmuel Teichtel to return to the Chabad House for safety after a Antisemitic incident.

The students attended a Arizona State… pic.twitter.com/QTC72liZWt

— Avraham Berkowitz (@GlobalRabbi) November 15, 2023

Look, if you're supporting a group that is led by authoritarians and wants to conquer a neighboring country so it can kill all the Jews, it's hard to see how they aren't Nazis. I mean, the uniforms are different, but really, that's about it.

I would doubt that if you asked the far-left radical nutcase students who threatened the Jews whether or not they supported the Nazis that any would say, "Yes!" Still, that's exactly what they are doing.

An alternate explanation is that they're Nazis.

ChatGPT Explains Why It's Such A Lousy Artist

I gave ChatGPT the following prompt.

Why does AI work so much better for writing fiction than it does for creating images? When you and I write our stories, poor results are easy to correct. When my prompts give me poor image results - too many people, improper facial expressions, people in the wrong locations, etc. - it can be nearly impossible to edit the prompts to get what I want.

Here's its reply.

The difference in performance between AI-generated fiction and AI-generated images largely stems from the inherent nature of text and visual content, as well as the complexity and flexibility of the respective AI models.

1. Complexity and Specificity: Writing fiction involves creating narratives, which can be guided and adjusted with relative ease. Text-based AI can follow a narrative flow and maintain consistency in themes, character development, and story arcs. In contrast, image generation requires translating abstract concepts into precise visual details. While text can be ambiguous or suggestive, an image needs to be specific in its depiction. This specificity makes it challenging to accurately capture nuanced details, like facial expressions or exact placements, in response to a prompt.
2. Editing and Revision: When writing fiction, it's often easier to make incremental edits and revisions. If a part of the story doesn't fit, it can be rephrased or rewritten. However, with images, even minor adjustments require a complete regeneration of the image, which can unpredictably alter other aspects of the image. The generative process for images doesn't easily allow for 'editing' specific parts while keeping others intact.
3. Interpretation and Ambiguity: Text allows for a certain level of interpretation and ambiguity, which can be a strength in storytelling. However, images are more literal and concrete. The AI has to make specific choices about colors, shapes, and spatial relationships, which can sometimes lead to unexpected or undesired results.
4. Training and Model Limitations: AI models for text and image generation are trained differently. Text-based models like GPT are trained on vast amounts of diverse textual data, enabling them to understand and generate a wide range of writing styles and content. Image generation models, while also trained on large datasets, may encounter more limitations due to the diversity and complexity of visual data. Also, accurately interpreting and executing complex visual prompts is a significant challenge.
5. User Expectations and Perceptions: When reading text, readers often use their imagination to fill in gaps or interpret descriptions. In contrast, images are immediately visually processed, and any discrepancies or errors are more directly apparent. Users might have a very specific visual outcome in mind, which can be hard to meet precisely through a text prompt.

In conclusion, the differences in the capabilities and outcomes of AI in fiction writing and image generation are rooted in the fundamental differences between text and visuals, as well as the current state and limitations of AI technology in interpreting and generating these different forms of content.

That's quite good.

Meanwhile, I've been working on the characters from my Hardy Boys ripoff mystery-comedy. I rather like the Aussies, Malcolm, 17, and Angus, 15. Malcolm is too ripped for my tastes, but he has the menacing air I was hoping to get.