Don't Cry For Me

 Cry for Donnie:

At least now, we know who the real snowflakes are.

Freedom To Think? Not In Florida

 

Some may think I spend too much time these days writing about the Benighted United States of America. Perhaps I do, but its seemingly inexorable slide into ignorance and autocracy is surely something that needs to be monitored and fought against. The latter, of course is not my battle directly, but any movement that works to restrict access to information that all democratic countries need to make wise choices should face universal condemnation.

While many states qualify for such censure, Florida seems to be the leading poster-state in this regard. Governor Ron DeSantis, using his "anti-woke' rhetoric to garner votes from the ignorant and stupid, seems to be leading the charge against good citizenship in general, and education in particular by ensuring that people are kept in the dark about that country's dark, racist past and present.

 I have been doing considerable study in the past few months of Black American history. A National Geographic documentary, Rise Again: Tulsa and The Red Summer, informed me of things I had no idea of. While many have heard of the Tulsa Race Massacre, I would imagine many (and I was one of them) have no idea of the number of massacres that preceded Tulsa. The full documentary is now available on YouTube, and I place it at the end of this post.

The above, and anything else that would result in an informed populace is now anathema in Florida. The redoubtable TizzyEnt explains:

For those who believe in being well-informed, here is the Tulsa video which I hope you get a chance to view at some point.

As well, allow me to make one more recommendation. Reconstruction: The Accident of Race and Color is a book that taught me things I had no idea of regarding the history of race in the U.S., including the fact that in the antebellum South, there were places such as Charleston and New Orleans that had mixed-race communities with thriving, prosperous and essentially integrated communities. It was, in fact, the Reconstruction Era that robbed them of those conditions and rights that they had long enjoyed.

It is this kind of knowledge that DeSantis and his ilk are working very hard to suppress.

Caught Without A Figleaf

While I have been retired from teaching for quite a number of years, every so often I am reminded of the often counter-productive influence that parents can exert over the learning experience. I'll get to what prompted my latest revisitation of the past in a moment, but first, a couple of contextual memories.

One year, when teaching Grade Nine, I was given a note from a parent who objected to her child being taught about Greek myths. They were, apparently, counter to their religion, the parent apparently under the misapprehension that I was somehow promoting false gods. I offered an alternative course of study for the student while the rest of the class pursued the subject, but I never heard another word from the parent, so all proceeded as before.

Another time, a parent phoned me objecting to his daughter reading Flowers for Algernon, which contained a very, very circumspect allusion to sexual activity. This was part of an independent study of novels which came with a very extensive reading list. The parent informed me that such a book should not be made available to any student, and I told him that while he was well within his parental rights to exercise influence over what his daughter read, no one had the right to dictate what others could or could read. End of discussion, and his daughter (an excellent student, by the way) chose another book.

In the intervening years, thanks to feckless administrators who choose political expediency over principles, Canadian parents have gained much more power over what schools teach, but the problem seems to be particularly acute in backward states such as Florida, where the governor (and likely presidential nominee aspirant) Ron DeSantis has made it his mission to restrict the things students there can learn, all under the figleaf of combatting 'the woke agenda.' As he said last year after his second gubernatorial victory, "Florida is where woke goes to die."

It apparently also is the place where art appreciation is an endangered course of study, given its 'wokeness'.

Ah, the Renaissance. A period that saw the growth of intellectual reason, the flowering of art and culture, and a lot of very hardcore pornography.

Such is the opinion of aggrieved parents of kids at Tallahassee classical school in Florida, anyway. Their sixth-graders (who are aged around 11-12) were shown a picture of Michelangelo’s sculpture of David during a Renaissance art class. Fairly normal, one might think – particularly for a school that advertises itself as providing a classical education. Nope: a firing offence. One parent called the sculpture “pornographic” and so much outrage ensued that the principal of the school, Hope Carrasquilla, was forced out.

The 'sin' of Ms. Carrasquilla and her staff, apparently, was a failure to send out a parental letter 'warning' that their  kids were about to be exposed to an exposed statue, which set off three parents:

 According to Slate, who interviewed Barney Bishop III, the school board chair responsible for forcing Carrasquilla out of her job, three parents were behind the bulk of the David-related outrage. Three parents. Three! But the number of angry parents doesn’t matter, because, according to Bishop, parents are always right. “Parental rights are supreme, and that means protecting the interests of all parents, whether it’s one, 10, 20 or 50,” Bishop said to the Tallahassee Democrat.

Shockingly, the board chair has little confidence in teachers' professional judgement:

“The rights of parents, that trumps the rights of kids,” he told Slate. “Teachers are the experts? Teachers have all the knowledge? Are you kidding me? I know lots of teachers that are very good, but to suggest they are the authorities, you’re on better drugs than me.”

While most of the world will likely be amused by the retrograde thinking in Florida, its implications are much wider, as I have recently posted about. The threat to critical thinking is very real:

it’s just the latest example of a terrifying lurch towards censorship and authoritarianism in Florida. Governor Ron DeSantis, who has been described as the “Education Governor” is on a censorship crusade and his first major battleground has been schools. DeSantis wants to completely reshape K-12 and higher education in the state and, so far, he’s been getting his way. Florida’s Republican-dominated legislature has already passed a number of laws limiting how gender, sexuality and race can be taught. Now the state is trying to limit sex education with a draft law that would ban schools teaching about menstrual cycles before the sixth grade. Give it a few years and showing a child a picture of Michelangelo’s David will be a criminal offence, punishable by firing squad.

Knowledge is power. The growing authoritarian impulse in the United States in general, and Florida in particular, makes it clear that education has become weaponized to maximize the chances that those in power stay in power, while the disenfranchised remain where they have always been: at the bottom of the social and political hierarchy. 

It's All Connected

It isn't hard to come to the realization that one of the common denominators in almost all of the existential threats currently facing humanity is our flawed natures; human folly, shortsightedness and credulity have much to answer for. Climate change, resource depletion and pandemics readily come to mind as examples of what our collective folly has led to.

Were we apt students of life, we would realize that our refusal to think critically makes us our own worst enemy. Connecting the dots should not be the gargantuan task that it is for far too many people. 

Today's Star examines the inevitability of another pandemic and the things scientists are doing to prepare for it. One such scientist is Gerry Wright, a McMaster professor in biochemistry and biomedicine, who identifies a major impediment in meeting the next pandemic.

Gerry Wright feels confident that science will find the solutions to the next pandemic.

Perhaps not as quickly as we’d like. And not without obstacles. The race to fight COVID, which drew on decades of research, revealed how quickly scientists could rally.

But the flip side to these successes is the corresponding and deeply alarming rise in misinformation online.

 “The thing that terrifies me is that a person with an iPhone can think they’re an expert,” he says. “That people think their opinions matter just as much as those of people who’ve dedicated their lives to understanding science — and that this is now almost a widely accepted concept — is going to result in a super-dangerous future.”

The claims of false cures, promoted by people like Trump, served as a major stumbling block in attacking Covid.

Wright says he first became alarmed in 2020, when then U.S. president Donald Trump flouted the advice of top science agencies by touting the unproven benefits of the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID.

He says his worries deepened the following year when ivermectin, an antiparasitic medicine used to treat some human conditions and which is also a veterinary drug, was falsely hyped as a COVID miracle cure, even as effective vaccines were being rolled out.

“I just knew that we were in deep, deep trouble.”

While McMaster researchers worked flat out to find solutions for COVID, Wright says he knew it was equally pressing to combat misinformation.

He now heads the Global Nexus for Pandemics and Biologic Threats, a McMaster-led initiative that brings together scientists and medical researchers, along with experts in economics, political science and the social sciences. 

“I understand molecules. I don’t understand people,” says Wright, noting the hub will also provide interdisciplinary training for students, so they can think across typically siloed fields. 

One has to wonder if such efforts will be sufficient, given the new capacities for deception driven by A.I.-generated imagery and voice mimicking. And remember that there will always be those who will quite eagerly exploit such technology for their own diabolical ends.

As it has always been, the fate of humanity rests in our hands and in our minds. Not too much reason for optimism, is there?

 

 

You Can't Say We Haven't Been Warned

Anyone who has ever watched the film Colossus - The Forbin Project or enjoyed the revamped Battlestar Galactica or read Robert Sawyer's The Terminal Experiment will know that artificial intelligence, whether embraced willingly or created accidentally, never ends well. Safeguards are overlooked or abandoned, or sometimes the A.I. develops unintended abilities that spell disaster for humanity. Hubris, as the Greeks taught us, can be deadly.

The speed at which A.I is developing in the real world suggests it is time for some sober second thought. The fact that that is not happening, as you will see in the following, is testament to the competitive nature of entitles like Google and Microsoft. We may currently be enthralled by developments like GPT Chat, but are do we truly understand it and its potential, both for good and ill?

If you only have time to watch one of the two following videos, watch the first one. The second one is a more in-depth examination of the topic.

No doubt those who oppose or urge caution in this rapid evolution of A.I. will be dismissed by many as Luddites. I have the feeling, however, that to label them thus is taking a real gamble with humanity's future.

Internet Sleuths

While the internet often does much harm to innocent parties, it also allows for a form of social and even criminal justice when bad things happen. Invariably, these bad things occur when people behave in ignorant, racist and unkind ways. One of the foremost sheriffs of this landscape is Michal McWhorter, a Floridian who uses as his Twitter handle TizzyEnt. Most of the mischief he chronicles consists of Americans behaving very badly, but the following, culled from the streets of Toronto, was originally posted by a Canadian, @thatdaneshguy, whose Twitter account, I see, has been suspended. 

It features two men (pictured above), one a professor at George Brown College, Tom Supra, and the other, Jerry Jarosinski, an employee of Klick Health, behaving in an indefensible manner.

One hopes that a measure of justice will ensue. Judging by some of the comments in response to this tweet, the odds seem good: 

The Math Hatter

@hatter185

·

9h

Replying to

@TizzyEnt

and

@thatdaneshguy

Hey

@GBCollege

, I'm sure you don't want this kind of man teaching at your prestigious place of higher learning, especially considering what I'm sure is a diverse student body.

Leon Z.

@LeroyJe50292138

·

8h

Replying to

@TizzyEnt

and

@thatdaneshguy

@GBCollege

You should be ashamed to be represented by such a terrible, racist, and frightening person.

Allegra and Milo's Mum - RIP Gracie

@cmurphy307

·

1h

Replying to

@TizzyEnt

and

@thatdaneshguy

@klickhealth

is this the sort of behaviour that's condoned by your company? This is pretty embarrassing for your company if it is. I can guarantee you that if I was a minority I wouldn't waste any time giving your company my business. Jerry Jarosinski needs a come to jesus talk.

MaryAnne B52

@MaryAnneB52

·

4h

Replying to

@TizzyEnt

and

@thatdaneshguy

@thatdaneshguy

has his @account suspended I wonder why. I hope it’s not because of both those racist from Toronto I saw it was on collage and young st. It’s a hate crime in Canada what those two did to that Asian woman. I hope he gets his account back he helps so much

Clearly, the ball is in the court of George Brown College and Klick Health, which ironically has received accolades for inclusiveness. Feel free to spread the word about these two misfits.

I shall keep you informed of any developments in this sordid affair.