Interesting - James basically argues with replacing many versions of unit testing with assertions and the associated integration / system / whitebox tests. Any test that checks something redundant is probably worthless.
I tend to agree - tests should encapsulate business logic, and not really any level below that. You shouldn’t test that a library or language does what it says it does; the library / language should have its own tests for that. Essentially, this looks like testing at the highest level that’s reasonable.