RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-dangerous-contempt-for-work/

Large numbers of younger American workers, especially Gen Z’ers, those born between 1997 and 2012, are demonstrating some dangerous attitudes about work and employment. The problem isn’t a lack of jobs. Nearly half of small businesses recently reported having unfilled job openings, nearly twice the half-century historical average. And 41% say they have raised compensation. Overall, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 10 million unfilled jobs at the end of April, followed by 399,000 new jobs in May.

A more likely explanation is changes in mores and attitudes towards work. “Funemployment,” for example, according to Investopedia describes “those who lost their jobs and choose to use their newfound freedom to pursue leisure activities such as traveling, going to the beach, and being physically active until they find a new job.”

Taking one’s time to find a new job while drawing unemployment benefits is nothing new, but usually those who do so are working for cash to increase their income. The “funemployed” are spending money on “leisure activities,” and many live with their parents.

Then there are those who still work but practice “quiet quitting,” basically goldbricking on the job by doing only the bare minimum. Gallup estimates that half of the workforce practices “quiet quitting,” especially Gen Z’ers and younger Millennials. This attitude was facilitated during the Covid years, when the trillions of dollars in federal and state money sloshing through the economy made it affordable to blow off employment or risk one’s job. And don’t forget, during the lockdowns many employees got hooked on working from home, where supervision is lax and goofing off on the company’s dime is easy.

But again, changing attitudes toward work are more pertinent than money when it comes to a lack of respect for honest labor. According to 74% of managers in a Resume Builder survey, Gen Z’ers are “difficult to work with. . . . About half (49%) of [managers] find it difficult to work with Gen Z’ers all (11%) or most of the time (39%). Additionally, 16% say they find it difficult a lot of the time, while 20% say some of the time and 10% say not much of the time. Only 4% said they almost never find it to be difficult.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/06/08/should-christians-declare-a-state-of-emergency-too/

“Just to be clear, we’re not advocating that Christians declare a state of emergency. Declaring something a “state of emergency” is little more than an attempt to cut off debate and characterize the other side of an issue as an enemy.”

Less than six months after President Joe Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act, which codified gay marriages, the Human Rights Campaign declared its first-ever “state of emergency” for “LGBTQ+ people.”

Why? Because of a supposed spike in “legislative assaults sweeping state houses this year.”

“More than 75 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been signed into law this year alone, more than doubling last year’s number, which was previously the worst year on record,” the HRC says.

But look closely. Almost every single bill on the “assault” list is legislation designed to protect children from the omnipresent and increasingly aggressive “transgender” community.

The list includes things such as bans on doctors performing sterilization procedures or prescribing dangerous puberty-blocking drugs to minors. It includes Florida’s ban on public schools teaching children under age 9 about gay sex, and removing books from elementary school libraries that are too pornographic to show on local news programs. It includes protections for girls who don’t want to share lockers with boys (who claim to be girls) or be forced to unfairly compete in sports with physically dominant males. The list includes laws that prevent schools from “transitioning” children behind their parents’ backs.

It’s our guess that most people would view these sorts of measures as reasonable safeguards, not worthy of a “state of emergency” declaration.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-wests-culture-of-therapeutic-individualism

Recent years have been marked by policy failures on crime, homelessness, border control, family support, education, and health care. A major cause is progressives’ ability to transform questions about the best way to reform structures into emotional referendums on individuals. In a therapeutic, interconnected, and individualistic age that prizes feelings and “emotional safety,” making policy debates personal is a winning tactic. Progressives consistently resort to the fallacy of composition to shut down competing arguments.

The fallacy of composition arises when we mistakenly generalize from the part to the whole, or vice-versa. A phone book is hard to tear, but that doesn’t mean that an individual page is. Venezuela is an authoritarian nation, but that doesn’t mean that Venezuelans are. Brazilians tend to be good at soccer, but that doesn’t mean a particular Brazilian necessarily is.

Consider the examples below:

Apart from the first example, all the rest implicate progressive sensibilities, in that a progressive might engage in the fallacy and misconstrue the collective policy proposal as offensive to individuals. We often see this in our public debates, where a normative proposal (as are those in the left-hand column) is regarded, by progressives, as an attack on certain people (the right-hand column). Progressives thus collapse a complex discussion about collective entities into a debate about the treatment of individuals. This stems in part from the moral foundations of cultural progressives, who value equal outcomes and the minimization of harm. Those committing the fallacy of composition prioritize the therapeutic, privileging the psychological feelings of sensitive individuals at the margins above the collective dimensions of social problems to impede rational, democratic solutions. The political becomes the personal.

Public morality has evolved since the mid-1960s to the point where most taboos revolve around racism, sexism, homophobia, and other identitarian versions of the care/harm moral foundation. In short, our moral landscape has tilted in favor of the Left. This permits what the scholar Cass Sunstein terms “opprobrium entrepreneurs” to institutionalize the fallacy of composition on their cardinal issues.

https://www.thepostemail.com/2023/06/05/one-word-at-a-time/

“The most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy.” So said President Biden at Howard University’s commencement recently. Was he telling a bald-faced lie? At the very least, he was corrupting the language. Herein, a primer on some of the more egregious crimes against clear thought that are currently bedeviling well-meaning Americans. But first a word on precisely what the culture vandals are out to destroy.

The American Way of Life

Despite the best efforts of the neo-Marxists and their collaborators in both parties, America still possesses a distinctive way of life. Those who subscribe to it believe that “governments are instituted among men” to secure the rights of individuals, and that individuals do not exist to serve governments. They believe in the rule of law, equality before the law (as the only sort of equality government should concern itself with), and basic law and order. They believe in freedom of religion, speech, and press and in the right to bear arms. They believe in a person’s right to run his own life and in his obligation to take full responsibility for it. They believe in private property, in earning one’s keep, and in the economic freedom and opportunity afforded by capitalism. They put great stock in science and technology, and they see industrialism as an overwhelmingly beneficial human achievement. They see the family as a fundamental and essential institution, and if they are religious, they are likely Judeo-Christian. Their language is English, and they do not believe that all cultures are created equal.

Diversity

If every American subscribed to the American way of life, it would be a very bad thing, we are told. That’s because diversity is good, they say. Race, ethnicity, culture, religion, sexual identity–the more ways in which the members of any group of Americans differ from each other, the better. No valid rationale for this conception of diversity has ever been offered. Usually, it is simply asserted, as in this statement from the website of the Boston Foundation, “Diversity is core to what makes cities great.” Diversity thus conceived is always treated as intrinsically and self-evidently beneficial. In truth it is an Orwellian pseudo-concept conjured out of thin air to serve a subversive political agenda. Only a confused, compliant, or deeply cynical mind would accept it at face value.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/06/is_genocide_too_powerful_a_word.html

Genocide is a potent word.  It refers to the decimation of an entire group.  It results in destruction on a massive scale.  It defies the imagination even though we have often witnessed it in the 20th century.

To most people, it is the concerted evisceration of a particular group, whether they be Jews annihilated by the Nazis, Uyghurs by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), or the Ukrainians by Stalin.  Of the latter, the term Holodomor comes to mind.  It was a man-made famine that affected the Soviet republic of Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, causing mass starvation in grain-growing regions.  In acknowledgment of its scale, the famine is often called the Holodomor, a term derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger (holod) and extermination (mor).”

These events need to be understood as the prelude to global actions that are now convulsing the world and whose ultimate goal is the destruction of human life.

Often begun as a bid for the welfare of humanity, these decisions must be regarded as the “alibis of tyrants” with resultant deadly consequences.

Consider the dictates that have caused and will continue to cause food shortages and starvation.

https://lawliberty.org/why-ai-cant-think/

Just for fun, I tease the hell out of ChatGPT in spare moments. Chatbots have no self, that is, no purpose for existing, and therefore can’t think. There is no such thing as thought in the abstract: thought is always someone’s thought, and mental activity doesn’t constitute thought unless it comes from a thinker who has a reason for thinking. To think, we must distinguish between significant and insignificant objects of thought, that is, those that matter to us and those that don’t (the exception that proves the rule is paranoid schizophrenia, which makes everything significant).

Higher thought is self-conscious, in that it involves awareness of how we think. Kant distinguished between Vernunft, usually translated as “reason,” as opposed to Verstand, the simple categorizing and sorting function of the mind, or “understanding.” The English translation doesn’t quite convey the difference: Vernunft derives from the same root as Vernehmen, “to interrogate.” It implies a critical examination of how we think.

That helps explain why ChatGPT does so badly with self-referential jokes that it hasn’t heard before. GPT has no self, and the switch of the vantage-point of subject—what makes self-referential jokes funny to begin with—leaves it confused.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/owner-of-two-of-san-franciscos-largest-hotels-pulling-out-of-city-path-to-recovery-remains-clouded/

The owner of two of San Francisco’s largest downtown hotels is stopping mortgage payments and going into foreclosure on the properties, stating that the city faces “major challenges” and that reducing exposure to the market is in the best interest of investors.

Park Hotels & Resorts said Monday that it was stopping payment on a $725 million loan secured by the two hotels, the 1,921-room Hilton San Francisco Union Square and 1,024-room Parc 55.

The Hilton is San Francisco’s largest hotel, and Parc 55 is the fourth largest.

Thomas J. Baltimore Jr., CEO of the Virginia-based company, called the decision “very difficult, but necessary,” noting record-high downtown office vacancy, “concerns over street conditions,” and reduced convention business.

“After much thought and consideration, we believe it is in the best interest for Park’s stockholders to materially reduce our current exposure to the San Francisco market,” Baltimore said in a prepared statement. “Now more than ever, we believe San Francisco’s path to recovery remains clouded and elongated by major challenges – both old and new.”

The announcement comes less than a week after the San Francisco Travel Association launched a $6 million ad campaign – it’s biggest ever – to lure tourists back to the troubled California city.

The Always San Francisco campaign calls San Francisco “the most beautiful city in the world.” It features images of iconic San Francisco landmarks, opening with a drive across the Golden Gate Bridge. The opening ad has scenes of people dancing, drinking, and eating, and includes one pink-haired drag queen, Lady Camden, a one-time contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race.

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/the-millenarian-harms-race?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The adviser on artificial intelligence (AI) to the British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, says the world has about two years to prevent AI from threatening the human race.

Almost every day, it seems, experts are making bone-chilling predictions about the imminent threat to humanity from AI. Godfrey Hinton, the computer scientist who is considered to be the Dr Frankenstein to this monster, warned weeks ago about his own creation:

These things could get more intelligent than us and could decide to take over, and we need to worry now about how we prevent that happening.

Last month, more than 350 executives and researchers from the world’s biggest AI laboratories issued a joint statement that 

mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority.

Scientists at the Future of Life organisation wrote in an open letter:  

AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity.

Yet almost every day, it seems, experts are making bone-chilling predictions about the imminent threat to humanity from climate change.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/world-health-organization-north-korea-kim-jong-un-world-health-assembly-donald-trump-9fb7d02b?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

The World Health Organization had a bad pandemic, bowing far too much to Chinese influence and making it harder to discover the origin of Covid-19. The WHO added to that embarrassment recently when the World Health Assembly voted to allow North Korea to serve on the WHO executive board.

Yes, that’s the government in Pyongyang known for its network of camps where political prisoners starve to death. On the executive board, Pyongyang will have a say in setting and enforcing international norms about global health—which it will no doubt flout if WHO ever dared apply them to North Korea.

The farce continued when Donald Trump congratulated North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un on his social media platform, Truth Social. “Congratulations to Kim Jung Un!” [sic] wrote the former President. Keep in mind Mr. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the WHO after its Covid blunders, only to have President Biden rejoin.

Mr. Trump’s comments didn’t sit well with his rivals for the 2024 Republican nomination. “No one should be praising the dictator in North Korea or praising the leader of Russia who has launched an unprovoked war of aggression in Ukraine,” former Vice President Mike Pence told Fox News. Nikki Haley, Mr. Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, said “you don’t congratulate a thug.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said “we need to be getting out of WHO” rather than “congratulating” Kim for being involved in the WHO.

Meanwhile, WHO denied Taiwan even observer status to the World Health Assembly, and singled out Israel for condemnation over claims it violated the health rights of its Palestinian and Druze populations. Kim Jong Un will fit right in.