Boydstun

I've known of Andy many years. He is a treat to hear. I like his little books on capitalism and on the hero in literature. The other man is Robert Begley. I've seen him deliver dramatic renditions of famous American speeches, what we used to call standard oratory in the old speech tournaments. He is an Objectivist and is the husband of philosopher Carrie-Ann Biondi, whom you may know of. Dang, Andy had to mention IHOP. Sweet bird of youth.

Dream Weaver, those guys, and I also, are too old and sedentary to be eating pancakes. I concur with you that maple syrup is best. I have it on my Kashi cereal every morning. Occasionally, I still make cornbread, and when I put syrup on it, that would be real maple syrup. There is another sort of syrup, which is called Log Cabin. It is made from brown rice, and I find it a good fit with Rice Krispies. I expect the name Log Cabin will not be crashing under the consciousness-raising efforts. Although, there is perhaps opposition from some that my ancestors cut down trees to make shelters such as log cabins. I cut them down when dead or dying and use them for firewood, and I shall not be moved. I watched Gone with the Wind the last two evenings. Melanie and Mammy are the best characters, notwithstanding the good of breaking by us of the stereotype of black people conveyed in the film (and too much sympathy for the Confederacy and the slavery era). James Baldwin once remarked that it was the best bad movie ever made. Mammy is never going to be abolished or forgotten, and that actress is not going to be forgotten either as superb, even as minds with better understanding of race relations and their possibilities for betterment see the film.

KyaryPamyu, I doubt that a robot which was not artificial life could obtain any understanding at all or is capable of meaning anything to itself in its computations. And without those, an OR scenario for the robot cannot take on meaningfulness that choices of alternatives for animals have. Hence choice of alternative by a silicone brain, not living and not in a living robot, cannot amount to a volition. Of related interest: Ascent to Volitional Consciousness by John Enright.

Lines In the line Round: round to wider round, race and trace one’s arc farther to farther one’s start, pressing through the space of this magnanimous earth. In the line Alive: the dance, the chase, romance, the smiles, the glance, the kiss, undress. The touch. In the line Time: ray through all days slowing, olding, palely knowing. Scribe of my line, this me, passing into dispersing, swirling tomorrows of companions.

Dishonesty is unfastening from full reality and precludes the possibility of genuinely protecting objective values. I've seen only one public figure in the US tell possibly as many big lies as Sergei Lavrov in his public career: our recent President, Donald Trump. The name Lavrov is rightly joined with the title Liar whenever he's at the mic for year after many year. Depend on it: what he says in any years to come, as in all his past, will be a tissue of lies upon lies. Why the Kremlin Lies

Yes. A "preemptive" strike, whether by Bush in Iraq or by Putin in Ukraine, is aggression. Bush and Putin were solely to blame in ultimate responsibility. (True, Saddam was a murderous dictator. Nevertheless Bush's "preemptive" invasion was an aggression, and should be forever condemned unequivocally.) Putin's continued war-making in Ukraine is continued human depravity, and does not merit a bit of sympathy from civilized peoples, who instead should rally for taking the tiger to dust.

Rand writes in her mature philosophy “Your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver” (AS 1020).* This line is consistent on its face with Descartes’ doctrine that the human body is a machine, although Rand would contradict Descartes’ accompanying picture in which all nonhuman animals are devoid of consciousness. Rand had benefit of our diesel-electric locomotives, our particle physics, our chemistry, and our biology, profoundly enriching, over the four centuries since Descartes, what is “mechanical,” what is a “machine,” and what is mind in animals and humans. We can more easily see than Descartes could see the driver of the bodily machine as requiring the brain not only as means for sensory reception, imagination, and direction of the body, but as means of the driver’s own and only existence. With advance of science and without Descartes’ religious constraints, bolstered by his radical divide of extension and thought, we bind the entire driver: with brain and with perceptions of world and body and with the life and mortality of the body. Rand shares a pair of errors with Descartes in supposing that automatic mechanical sensory and motor responses cannot be in error—cannot present a falsehood apart from subsequent judgment—and that purely mechanical mind could not be free.(<–from Foundational Frames: Descartes and Rand) *Mind can be not only controller of the instrument, but at the same time, the song of the instrument. "I am my own song and the harp on which it is played" (Anthem, 1938, p.236 ; cf. Phaedo 85e–86d, 93a–95a and De Anima 407b27–408a29). Veridical perception, I say, is neuronal system indicating in consciousness things as they are. Illusions are neuronal system indicating in consciousness things in some ways as they are not. I say percepts are leaders to reality, due to our constitution. Percepts not only present. They indicate, due to our constitution. Their character of automatically indicating in consciousness is what makes percepts components in empirical cognition. The proverbial straight stick partially in air and partially in water indicates a bent stick. Understanding how it comes to look bent does nothing to change the circumstance that the perceptual presentation is misleading (contra Branden 2009 [c.1968], 47–48; Kelley [. . .]; Peikoff [. . .]). The stick’s looking bent is not on account of some inference we have made, not even an inference unconsciously made.

Since the death of Alan Gotthelf in 2013, attendance at sessions of the Ayn Rand Society at APA meetings have greatly declined. Last month there was an ARS session in which a paper was read and a prepared Comment was presented. There was no one in the audience. This Eastern APA meeting was in Montreal. I did not attend because train service beyond Albany has not yet been restored, and I'd not have wanted to be flying in and out of Montreal with the risk of snowstorms so great at that time of year. The present leaders of ARS are going to consider whether to continue having in-person sessions. I still expect the ARS book comparing the philosophies of Aristotle and Rand to brought to completion, whether or not ARS in-person sessions continue.

Some of what we know about of brainworks of human memory and concepts: Brainworks. Great helps: Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain by Stephen Grossberg (2021). Principles of Neural Science, Part IX, edited by Eric Kandel et al. (2013, 5th edition).

I'd like to add another link to a paper (2019) examining the Gibson affordance concept in perception: On the Evolution of a Radical Concept: Affordances According to Gibson and Their Subsequent Use and Development.

I suggest that a machine—say, a learning machine such as an artificial neural network one—has not educed a human concept even if it has been designed to learn dimensions of similarity among a group of items and even if its groupings according to degrees of similarity along those dimensions are registered by measure values and even if a label for each of those comparatively similar-member collections were to be given by the machine, these distinguished collections would not be like human concepts, and for three reasons: (1) Human perceptual comparative-similarity groupings are made against a background of possible actions upon them and uses for them by the agent who is on his way to forming a concept. This is contemporary Ecological Psychology continuing its research down from James and Eleanor Gibson, who acknowledged that their leading idea of "affordances" in perception had been a gift from William James and John Dewey. Rand, Peikoff, and Kelley did not put enough emphasis on this aspect of perception. Rand did set out that while the human is learning what things are, he has a parallel assessment going on as to whether the item might be to be avoided or might be desirable. Rand once mentioned, correctly, that most concepts are amenable to definition. In my 1990 paper "Capturing Concepts" I proposed than prior to learning to make sentences, the toddler (all of us) embed our single-word utterances and concepts into action-schemata. To get nearer to human concepts, even the most elementary concepts, a machine probably would need to be a robot, an agent, given a set of values and their interrelations by human designers and given ability to register and assess affordances. Perhaps the lab at MIT has been working on this. (2) Human perceptual learning is as part of a process of development towards acquisition of discursive thought and communication. Single-word stage of human conceptual consciousness and the predicative multi-word stage are motivated very much from urge to more and more precise communication with other humans. With this motivation not attending machine learning, and coloring its concepts and their interconnections, I think machine concepts would be but a stick-man of ours. Indeed, getting outputs from the learning machine we desire does make the machine operations in some community with humans, though not directly with other learning machines. This condition and its profundity in human conceptualizing was silently passed over by Rand, but it should not be neglected in a fully realistic picture of human conceptual operations. (3) A machine able to learn comparative similarity groupings among items would be doing something that humans can do, though perhaps without the affordances and background sociality of human cognition concerning the items. Other analyses of similarity computations besides the measurement ones given by Rand have been set out in the psychological literature. One could program a machine to detect particular similarities using these various computational schemes, but unless the results have different advantages, I don't see how one could determine whether Rand's measurement-analysis of similarity was receiving some confirmation that it is the better. And in the case of learning machines, I'm unsure if it can be determined which of the computational schemes is doing the work in learning to sort. Further, to show such sorting capability does not show conceptual ability. If a test for conceptual ability could be shown—say, passing a Turing test—and it were shown that machines using Rand's measurement-omission scheme for forming concepts from similarity groupings were the most successful in the machine, then we might say Rand's distinctive idea concerning the nature of concepts has received some recommendation from trials in machines. But that is a big IF, and unless we take passing a Turing test as showing understanding (and using sets in knowing concepts and numbers!), we'd not want to conclude that the machine has human-like concepts at all. And between you and me and the fence post, I don't think understanding at all is possible without the agent being conscious and, therefore, alive.

Vegetative Robots and Value

Happy Moment (in the early 1950's, I think)

KyaryPamyu, thank you for the mention and link. From my fundamental paper "Existence, We" in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (V21N1, July 2021):

Frank, have you ever read or heard someone claim "objective reality does not exist." Or are you thinking of when someone, such as George Berkeley, argues that there is nothing real that is not being discerned by a mind? That is, when you consider the possible claim "objective reality does not exist", are you really considering the possible claim "all things to be real must be discerned by a mind, and they aren't anything until discerned. So there are no physical things not depending on mind."? Nothing in this post is rhetorical. I'm simply asking you, Frank, which meaning do you have in mind. I'd like to know which. But meanwhile I think you are on to something when you note that a claim that "objective reality [is] unreal can just as easily refute mind as well." The being God is alleged to exist, to be immaterial, to be all-knowing, and to not require any sort of process for Its knowledge. It has been said to speak things to humans, and to non-existent things to bring them into existence. Before speaking the world into existence, It would not seem sensible for God to say to Itself "I and my speaking do not exist". And supposing It did not say that, but upon the occasion of speaking the world into existence, it followed by remarking "the world does not exist." It seems this being would be disinclined to make either such statement in those situations. And characters like Leibniz would argue that God would not make such remarks as those. Then too, if a regular person, a human being, were to say "objective reality does not exist," that would be inconsistent with any claim to have made such a statement. To claim "objective reality does not exist, and I made that claim" really puts me in a pickle because the act of making a claim is an existent.

Abel Prize 2022

I should paraphrase Dagny ("Why have we left it all to the fools?"): Why have we left the platonic realm of mathematics to mystical platonism? The great empiricist account of this realm, which takes history of mathematics as essential in constituting the realm, is Philip Kitcher's The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge.*

Go Gramps! Thanks for sharing your interesting life course at your site. Do you live near Sedona? The old identification "Students of Objectivism" faded away many years ago. Whether one studied Objectivism decades ago or just started this year, the replacement identification of one's self is Objectivist or Not, and if the latter, what are your differences from and coincidence with Rand's philosophy. One is said to be an Objectivist, said both by David Kelley and by Leonard Peikoff, if one concurs with the elements of the philosophy that are essential to it. Which elements are among the essential ones is left to the judgment of the self-identifier. I hope to read your installments, and sometimes comment a bit on them here. I have some information on Rand's formal education is science, which you mentioned, and I'll try to list it here when I get a minute to look it up.

More precisely, that should be: ". . . logic has its necessities from some of the belonging-formalities in the world (belonging-formalities of, in my metaphysical categories, passage and character, I expect). So: logic having it roots in belonging-formalities within those categories of existence, in parallel with mathematics having its roots in belonging-formalities in the category situation.

Our Governor got elected to office running on keeping the Toni Morrison book Beloved away from the high schoolers. To win that many votes, you have to get a lot of votes from people who don't have children in public school. Lots of voters who were simply Republican anyway or who just wanted to vent their hatreds of this or that sort of person without the honesty to say it outright. I have not read Morrison's book, and I don't intend to. I heard it got a bump in sales once talk of its banning became the highlight of the campaign for Governor. We did not have economic issues at that time because the incumbent Democrat had the Commonwealth of Virginia in budget-surplus. Unsurprisingly, our present Governor has made statements to some segments of his supporters along this line: "I believe that life begins at conception." Talking his position on when abortion should be illegal. Talking that way and no doubt praying for the sake of his Party that no such bill arrives on his desk. Now the election is over and the Republicans got their man in on protecting the children from Morrison, we hear nothing on the topic. They won the election, and that was the point. They had had higher, deeper hopes, of course: to ban abortion and get rid of same-sex marriage. But their real God is getting power and keeping it and what with the view of the electorate in general elections and all, they'll have to tread lightly on those. I don't know that what children are being taught in school concerning sexual orientation and gender identification is the most important source of influence on children today on those issues of life. The wider culture and exposure to it by children might be the more important source (Putin is protecting his country on that front). The other evening, on our anniversary, we went out to dinner at a nice restaurant where we had asked for the waiter who had served us when we first moved here and on the evening of the day of our wedding 7 years ago. He is a single parent with two sons. We hadn't seen him for a long time because he had sustained serious injury from falling down a stairs in their home. A few years ago, he had been telling us of his elder child's conflicts at school over his coming into a period of thinking he wanted to become the opposite sex. He wasn't getting support at school, but derision and hostility. Getting caught up with the father, our waiter, the other night, he mentioned that that son is now a junior in college, is happy, and has a girlfriend. My husband had always been bisexual. He and his former wife raised the children and on through college. Both of their sons turned out to be straight. They got some pain in school back in their youth over vicious remarks being made concerning gay people. They knew it was baloney, but it hurt to hear such stuff because their father was gay. Fact is, we too, are the American family. I became part of that family 27 years ago, and the grandson, now age 22, has always known me as Grandpa Stephen. You don't need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. We simply have won the wide culture war in which the enemy tried to keep who we are invisible or seen as evil or mentally defective. The power of economic boycott now overruns the decisions of the Resistance US Supreme Court, they being very far out of step with wide respect and love for gays and lesbians in this culture that we helped make more decent. On literature being read by high schoolers, the poetry also bears watching for banning: How beautiful are your sandaled feet, princess! The curves of your thighs are like jewelry, the handiwork of a master. Your navel is a rounded bowl; it never lacks mixed wine. Your waist is a mound of wheat surrounded by lilies. Your breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle. Your neck is like a tower of ivory, your eyes like pools in Heshbon by the gate of Bath-rabbim. Your nose is like the tower of Lebanon looking toward Damascus. Your head crowns you like Mount Carmel, the hair of your head like purple cloth— a king could be held captive in your tresses. How beautiful you are and how pleasant, my love, with such delights! Your stature is like a palm tree; your breasts are clusters of fruit. I said, “I will climb the palm tree and take hold of its fruit.” May your breasts be like clusters of grapes, and the fragrance of your breath like apricots.

KyaryPamyu, So far as I recall, Kant did not write of his categories of the understanding as a universal grammar. He did write of general logic being analogous to a universal grammar. From the Jäsche Logic: “[We] set aside all knowledge that we can only borrow from objects, and reflect simply on the exercise of the understanding in general, [and] then we discover those rules which are absolutelay necessary, and independently of any particular objects of thought, because without them we cannot think at all. These rules, accordingly, can be discerned a priori, that is, independently of all experience, because they contain merely the conditions of the use of the understanding in general, whether pure or empirical, without distinction of its objects. . . . The science, therefore, which contains these universal and necessary laws is simply a science of the form of thought.” (Cf. KrV A52–55 B76–79) “Hence, also, it follows that the universal and necessary laws of thought can only be concerned with its form, not in anywise with its matter. The science, therefore, which contains these universal and necessary laws is simply a science of the form of thought. And we can form a conception of the possibility of such a science, just as a universal grammar which contains nothing beyond the mere form of language, without words, which belong to the matter of language.” That last sentence gives us some idea of what Kant means by saying that reflection on the exercise of the understanding enables us to discern absolutely necessary rules of our thought such as the constraint against contradictions. This reflection, then, is Kant’s replacement for Aristotle’s ‘intuitive induction’. Before school age, we follow elementary grammar in speaking our native language. We conform to that language’s grammar a good deal, and it has become habitual. We learn expressly what grammatical forms we are following and should be following from grammar school (after we have learned to write). Some earlier humans had to have reflected on the language, such as Latin or German, to have discovered its grammar. Kant’s analogy on the use, express statement, and normativity of grammar with the use, express statement, and normativity of logic that Jäsche and Abbott here publicize is corroborated as standard in Kant’s lectures on logic by student notes, the Bloomberg (early 1770’s), the Dohna-Wundlacken (1792), and the Vienna. The D-W notes indicate that because logic must contain a priori principles, “logic is a science and grammar is not, because its rules are contingent” (page 432 in Young 1992). I should mention that in Kant’s various remarks on logic, talk of the necessary v. the contingent is shorthand for (what is earlier stated as) the absolutely necessary v. the contingently necessary. Kant’s own logic lecture notes compiled by Jäsche were always available to German readers from 1800. Kant therein, in his Introduction to the discipline of logic, made an analogy between logic and grammar. (I see now that Capozzi and Roncaglia have also drawn attention to this analogy in the third chapter, p. 143, of The Development of Modern Logic [2009, L. Haaparanta, editor].) Logic is the form of thought, with contents of thought its matter; as grammar is the form of language, with particular words its matter. A book of Kant’s in 1798 includes his view on the relation between thought and language. That book is Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, which was always available in German, but did not come into English translations (two) until the 1970’s. From the Anthropology in a third translation, the Cambridge translation (2007) by Robert Louden: “All language is a signification of thought and, on the other hand, the best way of signifying thought is through language, the greatest instrument for understanding ourselves and others. Thinking is speaking with oneself . . . consequently it is also listening to oneself inwardly (by means of the reproductive power of the imagination). . . . Those who can speak and hear do not always understand themselves or others, and it is due to the lack of the faculty of signification, or its faculty use (when signs are taken for things, and vice versa), that, especially in matters of reason, human beings who are united in language are as distant as heaven from earth in concepts.” (300) Kants drew an analogy also between how logic is discovered and how grammar is discovered. This analogy is mentioned Jäsche Logic. The parallel of grammar-logic discovery is set in further parallel, in Kant’s Prolegomena, to how fundamental categories of the understanding (necessary factors in making percepts [“appearances”] in experience into that experience) are discovered. Kants proffers a notion of the reflective act by which one could (mainly Aristotle, who did) originally discover the rules of logic together with their character of absolute necessity and normativity. We are able to violate logical rules. Can Kant account for that under his conception of the nature of logic? One cannot succeed in holding onto the absolutism of logical rules while saying also that we can violate them and that they are due only to the constitution of the mind. One kind of error Kant mentioned in the Anthropology was the error of mistaking linguistic signs for things they signify and vice versa. Such signs, Kant calls artificial, in contrast to natural indicators such as smoke for fire. Kant observed that people having common language can yet signify in their vocabulary concepts quite different one person to the next. He implies that this variance is due to infirmities in the faculty of signification, which rather suggests that if we were all working correctly in our linguistic significations, we should have no variance among persons in concepts signified by a word. I seriously doubt that, given the variance in individual backgrounds of experience and education and given the creativity in thought, especially in more abstract thought. Were Kant’s rigid connection between vocabulary and right concept correct, infirmity of word-concept powers would yet not explain how errors of logic or grammar are possible. The same goes under my denial of the word-concept complete rigidity of right signification, for then there is utter incommensurability between the would-be explanation and the thing to be explained, since the rules of logic and grammar are fixed, in Kant’s view, in all the heads talking and thinking to themselves and with others. Error of signification and its source (source pretty vague in Kant) does not help to explain error in logic or grammar. The Objectivist conception of logic is contrary that of Kant. Rand’s conception of logic was as a tool of identification. All existents possess identity. That is a full-bodied identity, including both (i) which among existents is this particular one and (ii) what sort of thing is this existent. The identities of existents are what they are in the world whether or not a mind discerns them. What are the proper ways of forming concepts, forming their definitions, and making inferences are ways tuned to identities in the world and getting and holding fast to those identities. Rand rests logic on an axiom “existence exists.” Logical maneuvers are maneuvers of consciousness, and consciousness is identification of existents, all of which have identities. Rand’s axioms are not established as true because they cannot be denied without falling into contradiction. No, that is a necessary condition for adopting a truth as an axiom, but the truth has to be established by observation and dealings with empirical reality. The wrongness of contradiction also has to be established in that empirical way. Not by enumerative induction in the case of PNC. Not by abstractive induction in the case of PNC. Rather, I say, in the way one picks up necessary form from empirical engagements. I’m thinking of necessary forms in the world, which forms can be grasped as necessary when they are grasped. Such would be apprehension that anything shaped like my left hand will have one less space between its appendages than there are appendages. Or that turning a left-hand glove inside-out makes a right-hand glove. Or that any object having the shape of an apple can be quartered with only three cuts of the knife. One knows those truths by experience, and one knows they are necessarily so of the world, so that empirically testing them for possible falsification would be stupid. I call such formalities in the world waiting to be discerned belonging-formalities of my metaphysical category situation. Rand did not take note of such forms in the world, and doing so might make one nervous of regression to Aristotle’s ideas on form. There is no such regression to Aristotle in this idea of forms in the world belonging to concretes. And the idea can boost Rand’s idea that identities in the natural world are not put there by the mind and that necessities in the formalities for right logical thought get their ultimate necessity from the world and get their normativity from aiming to identify correctly. (My working conjecture so far is that the belonging-formalities of the world underlying the tooling-formalities of logic are simple likenesses, differences, sameness, and repetitions in the world.) On the Objectivist view of logic, errors in logic are simply because one can run afoul of rules for success in the purpose of logic. The necessity of logic is not the incapability to think otherwise than logically, but the necessity of following the rules to get the prize insofar as that aim is facilitated by logical rules. In another sense of necessity, logic has its necessities from some of the belonging-formalities in the world (in my metaphysical categories passage and character, I expect). Objectivism agrees with your 2 in that sensations are not constructed by or made into percepts by activity of mind such as conscious or unconscious inference (see Kelley 1986, 61–62, 75–78, for example), but need not deny the established science showing receptors to be active sensors, nervous tissue, which is living (an activity) and excitable. Under your 4, Objectivism holding that essences are epistemological rather than metaphysical means only that what truths of the world should be taken for essentials in one’s definitions of things depends on one’s present context of knowledge of the world and in particular one’s present context of knowledge of what depends on what in the world among classes of things in the world. That is in contrast to the Ancient and Medieval essences, which were not a function of one’s context of knowledge at all, and which possessed causal powers (formal causes) in the world. In your 7, I think offhand it would be better to say "applied to the schematized categories" and to say "sensory experience" or "sensible intuitions" rather than "sense data." Rand thought of cognition in terms of measurements both in perception (e.g. perceptual similarities) and in conception. But she thought of measurements as mind discerning magnitude relations actually in the world. Because magnitude relations (she called "quantity") are in the world, discernment of them is useful to us (and the other high animals) for successful life and exactitude of fit of the human mind to the world.

necrovore had written in response to a post by SL: To which SL responded: SL, that response indicates you are going with the informal fallacy of relevance that is known as the Circumstantial ad hominem, specifically: because your interlocutor is not a parent with a child in school, his position is false. That does not logically follow. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ There are about 16,800 school districts in the USA. Cases of "inappropriate" books in school no doubt get outsized political media attention in comparison to what is mainly underway each day at school in those districts. I doubt the incidence of "inappropriate" books in schools warrants the criminal statute adopted by the Florida county. Sounds more like using one's criminalization powers to make the problem look big enough for outraging voters and getting certain politicians elected on the basis of the hyped issue. I came to a juncture in life at which I considered becoming a high school teacher, getting qualified for that in physics/chemistry/mathematics. But my life-partner dissuaded me, because of the hot issue at the time of legally barring gay people to be public school teachers. (Gov. Reagan's opposition to that initiative in CA in those years was one shining moment for him in my book.) Criminal penalties for selecting wrong books in teaching sounds like a pretty big discouragement for entering teaching.

There is no monolithic "the parents". When I was in grade school and high school, overwhelmingly, parents of children at my public schools would not have wanted the students exposed to the theory of evolution in the classroom. My own parents included. Some parents would have disagreed with the majority. And there were wise educators who would favor teaching objective science to the students, rather than bolstering the dogma of religion (majority, power-wielding religion) in public schools. My parents certainly would not have wanted students in public schools being exposed to the idea in class that there was something wrong with the position White Supremacy. When I was in high school, and a young practice-teacher selected the recent novel "To Kill a Mockingbird" for our literature class, that was a controversial selection. Tax payers in the Deep South wanted it banned from public school, and there were politicians ready to make hay by cozying up to those bigots. Today, there are some parents, taxpayers and voters, and some politicians who want it kept under wraps that the USA is populated with millions of bigots still committed to White Supremacy (with respect to Black Americans). I grew up in Oklahoma. It was maybe a dozen years ago, thanks to the internet, that I first learned of the White torching of a prospering Black district of commerce in Tulsa, now known as the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. More recently, some of my white high school classmates learned of this atrocity, and some, the decent ones, were livid over never hearing of it in our Oklahoma State History class, which the State required for all public high schools. Many of we students were dedicated in the 1960's to the cause of racial equality under the law and to racial desegregation, notwithstanding the racism of our parents. From my neighborhood outside the city limits, you could go to the nearest city high school, which was being integrated, or you could apply for an exception to attend some unintegrated city high school on account of wanting to take something like German or swimming, which were not offered at the nearer school. Some of the students in our all-white neighborhood insisted, to our parents' chagrin, on going to the integrated school precisely because it was integrated. One fortunate situation of students today is the internet for getting information. Even if the schools went back to the way it was in my childhood and youth, where gayness was never mentioned, the young folks could learn what they want to know about it from online information. I could only go to a dictionary or encyclopedia entry, which were really quite opaque. As far as sex and school goes nowadays, whether public or religious, I gather that things are more iron-fisted puritanical threatening due to the meddling from the adults in the society. It is now criminal (fines or imprisonment) for students in high school to have consensual sexual intercourse with each other. That is not at all how it was back in the day. Dating (heterosexual) and steadies were about sexual relations, and adults not your parents could just pound sand.

Teaching Evolution