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Musings About AI
Bari Weiss’s The Free Press has three articles today on AI. One is that AI will blow the place up.
In short, a few weeks ago, a powerful new AI system being internally tested by OpenAI went rogue.
Yeah. It’s a problem. Youse guys figuring out how to keep AI from destroying us all? If not, why not? But regulation!
First, without effective oversight by the executive branch or Congress, AI labs are taking swaggering risks.
Oh yeah. That’s gonna work. Let’s put Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) in charge to make sure that billionaires don’t take over the world.
But then there are two pieces about AI in school.
One writer says “Why I Let My Students use AI.” He makes AI part of the process.
The other says “Why I Banned AI in my Classroom.” Because students are lazy and use AI to cheat.
Then there’s a piece that says AI has already taken over the university.
Students used AI to summarize required readings, finish their homework problems, and review their notes for exams. By the time I graduated in May, many students around me could no longer synthesize a difficult text, draft a paper, or form opinions without first consulting the machine. My experience was not unique. A 2026 survey of British undergraduates found that 94% of students used generative AI to help with assessed work, a trend that holds true across American institutions.
So I say burn the whole thing down and start over.
See, I have developed my own ideas about education.
First of all, how do kids learn as infants? They learn to crawl and walk and talk with a bit of help from Mom and Dad.
They learn to ride a bike on a “balance bike” which doesn’t have any pedals, but allows the kid to balance himself with his feet on the ground until he’s learned to balance.
Kids learn about a bunch of things by asking Mom, and then following up with: “Why?”
Learning to read? Honestly I don’t know how I learned to read. I think I learned before I went to school. But I did learn to write in pre-school.
Back in the day, of course, only the monks and scribes learned to read and write. Then came the printing press and the Gutenberg Bible and suddenly the middle class wanted to learn to read.
Then came the 19th century and universal schooling. With teachers teaching a class full of kids.
Whatabout today? I googled “how to use ai to learn to read” and it replied with:
Microsoft Reading Coach
Google Read Along
Immersive Reader
Whatabout Math? I googled “how to use ai to learn basic math.” Well, that’s more complicated.
Seriously. Before the printing press we didn’t really have schools. After the printing press books were still expensive so it made sense to have teachers teaching from the book and writing in chalk on blackboards.
But now? With computers and internet and AI? Should we still send kids to school to be taught by teachers for pre-K through grad school?
I say we can do better than schools. Have kids teach themselves with AI
And end child labor laws. Put the kids to work.
But doing what?
It’s like Robotaxis and Cybercab. What will happen to the taxi drivers?
| Thu, 03 Sep 2026 22:04:00 GMT |
Merker: Arresting the Advance of the Partisans of Overthrow
B2P2S6 At the end of Book 2 of Perishing Promise Björn Merker analyzes our current enemies of promise.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II many Americans focused their lives upon safety and settled circumstances: “a secure job, a home… material prosperity… putting a bit aside”. This was not hard because wartime industries “managed to convert to peace-time conditions with unexpected speed and success” and fueled an economic surge.
But, raised in safety, some looked “for adventure, challenge, and self-fulfillment.” And so, by the mid 1950s, there emerged “juvenile delinquents” and the James Dean movie Rebel without a Cause. Call it the birth of the “generation gap.”
There was an honorable opportunity for adventure in the post-war Civil Rights Movement and then opposition to the US war in Vietnam. These movements gave meaning to a whole generation and trained them in the culture of what we now call “peaceful protest.” And when the civil rights protests achieved the civil rights legislation of the mid 1960s the cause of opposing the war in Vietnam reenergized the protesters.
The Vietnam war was two-fold, the physical war in Vietnam and “the world-wide propaganda war waged by the two camps of foreign powers that backed their Vietnamese proxies”. And the US debacle at the end of the Vietnam war sold the idea that “the superpower USA was no match for the people of a tiny nation heroically struggling to liberate itself from colonial oppression and imperial aggression.”
Thus, for many “the feats of their youthful activism” defined their lives, and shattered their trust in the society in which they lived. In other words, they were primed for a rerun of the 19th century radicalism of Marx & Co, “to undermine ‘the world as it is’ in preparation for its overthrow”.
So the ex-activists
would become advocates for and promoters of an ever-expanding array of political commitments, be they tied to workers, racial or cultural minorities, feminism, the environment… homosexuality, climate concerns, disabilities, illegal migrants… and more.
In other words,
The issue is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution.
It was the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory that provided the intellectual ballast for the omnicause, and none less than Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilization and One Dimensional Man. In Eros he used Freud to brand the modern economy as repressive and helped launch the Sexual Revolution.
In One Dimensional Man Marcuse provides
a program for fomenting revolution in a society whose members by and large live lives of relative ease within it.
So overall, Marcuse says:
Judge the culture by the standards of perfection, as in Marx’s “species being” .
Poison appreciation of prosperity, because systemic oppressive exploitation.
Sanctify victimhood and lead the victims to end their “exploitation and oppression”.
What more could the seasoned activists of civil rights and Vietnam want? Sexual and economic liberation for the generation of “New Left student ex-activists… in academia/education”!
The opportunity for the activists came after the Soviet H-bomb in 1955 and the first orbital satellite in 1957. It “triggered a massive expansion of higher education” and the activists walked right in. They wanted to change the world and they had the skills to play the political game in the “faculty meetings and search committees” of academia. And so the education system went Left creating “an industry of of left-leaning and radical discourse in the humanities and social sciences”, featuring
Cultural Studies, Ethnic Studies, Communication and Media Studies, Critical Theory, Critical Race Theory , Gender Studies, Literary Theory, Postmodernism, Postcolonialism, even just Theory, and more.
All of this was inspired by Marxism and the Frankfurt School, taking “the stance of overthrow, the need for a ‘fundamental transformation’ of society to be the default position”, substituting “politics for science”. It all appealed to the “partisans of overthrow and enemies of promise”. And they used the “prestige of academia” to advance their cause.
But then came Edward O. Wilson in 1975 with his Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. He argued that the science that enabled us to understand animal behavior helped us understand “our own nature and sociality as well”. In other words, forget the Blank Slate. He provoked a storm of protest, and no wonder.
The very suggestion that biology constrains and shapes our nature as a special was offensive to his critics.
Fortunately, the postmodernists like Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault were on hand to brand such science as “metanarratives” and “cultural mythologies” to serve “oppressive elites.” The partisans of overthrow needed that!
But then came the collapse of the Soviet Union, and so Marxists had to stop advertising their Marxism. It was all “Critical Studies”, understood by the ordinary citizen as “political correctness”. And the activists seeped not just into universities but the administrative state and consumer advocacy, not to mention “non-governmental organizations, think tanks, and foundations”.
But there is a cost to this. By disrupting cultural norms, the activists prevent ordinary people from getting on with “the conduct of ordinary life”, for it is culture that provides the framework for “coherence and continuity in normal times”. And that’s a problem.
Of the two legacies of the Enlightenment, Merker’s Ethos 1 — the British Victorian culture — is moderately adapted to modern life. But Ethos 2 — devoted to overthrow — “has never approximated implementation anywhere”. Yet Ethos 2 has advanced for over a century, mainly because both ethoses believe in “other-regard morality”.
One sign of the advance of Ethos 2 is that educated people used to vote conservative; now they vote left. Business elites used to vote conservative but now not so much. One of the reasons may the “explosive growth in the… spoils of the benevolent state”. The educated and the wealthy both benefit. Universities have mission statements advertising their commitment to change the world, and Mark Zuckerberg in 2018 advertised that “Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company”. An ethos encodes aspirations: “social prestige and influence”. And Ethos 2 is the way to get it today.
If just chilling with the cool kids is not enough to change the world, there is now the existential peril of climate change, that “the ‘Western way of life’ in and of itself is unsustainable”. This is not new. Marx prophesied that capitalism was unsustainable, because the workers, and the Frankfurt School prophesied the same, because “systemic exploitation”. The point about such an existential peril is that emergency empowers the elites to short-circuit the approval of electorates.
If the war on climate change is not enough of a warning, there is always COVID. It “provides a sample… of the governance vision implicit in Ethos 2”. It featured “unprecedented peace-time infringements of civil liberties, physicians’ right to treat their patients, and the rule of law”. It “gives a foretaste of a world in which Ethos 2 would have completed its ratchet-like advance toward hegemony in the West”. But there is hope. “The future is, as always, opaque”, and the “contest between Ethos 1 and Ethos 2… have been in active contention since the days of the French Revolution”.
And there is this:
What if the commitments of Ethos 1… played a causal role in the ascendance and accomplishments of Western civilization”?
If true, it means that in the present advance of Ethos 2 “the West is in the process of losing the very ideals, principles and commitments that informed its ascendance”.
There is hope. Perhaps the advance in science, including our knowledge of the very nature of mankind, can expose the errors and ignorance of the partisans of overthrow, to be addressed in Book 3.
More to come.
| Thu, 03 Sep 2026 02:59:01 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Soft power is gifting friends; hard power is fighting enemies.
Politics is all, and only, about rallying the men to fight against the foe — external or internal enemy — in the present emergency.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: An Analysis of Curtis Yarvin's Gray Mirror.
