Read it.

This school is currently pretty diverse: 46% white, 26% Hispanic, 17% black, but the nonwhites are exceptionally smart. In English tests, both the Hispanics and blacks score above the state average for whites. So it’s a nice bubble for wealthy liberal white families.

Posturing aside, blue state Party of Haters have as solid an appreciation of race realism as any al-right punching bag.

Read it.

Slavery is DoublePlusUnGood for white people, but People of Color apparently don’t have a problem with it.

Read it.

One of the things you can always count on from liberals is that their earnest care about the poor and disadvantaged always ends when policies to alleviate inequality might affect them. Like this story from the Wall Street Journal today about how parents on the Upper West Side of Manhattan (it hardly gets any more correctly liberal than the Upper West Side) object to a plan to admit student with—gasp! lower test scores!—to the schools where they send their own kids:

Parents Worry About Diversity Plan for Some Manhattan Middle Schools

A New York City proposal to diversify middle schools on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, by setting aside seats for children with low test scores, is facing stiff resistance from parents worried their high-achieving children might lose access to the popular public schools.

Read it.

Identity politics turns to bite the Fashionable Victim Groups that feed it.

Shiva Ayyadurai, an independent candidate challenging Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren in November, is suing Warren’s hometown of Cambridge for demanding that he removes signs labeling her a “fake Indian.”

Ayyadurai, who has billed himself as the “real Indian” in the race, was born in Bombay, India.

Ayyadurai’s federal lawsuit, filed Sunday, accuses the city of violating his free speech when officials ordered him to remove two campaign signs picturing Warren in a Native American headdress along with the slogan: “Only a real Indian can defeat the fake Indian.”

That’s clever. I would vote for such a candidate.

Steve Sailer runs the numbers.

One place where White Privilege definitely exists is at the upper pay ranges at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama, which enjoyed a bonanza fiscal year, adding over $120 million to its vast endowment.

One of the weirder aspects of the SPLC has long been its adamant refusal to hire any blacks for its best jobs. The SPLC’s new tax form lists its 11 highest paid employees for the year ending 10/31/17, and sure enough they are still all white.

Steve Sailer consults his Victim Scorecard.

According to the Theory of Intersectionality, your lack of privilege points are the sum, or perhaps product (Intersectional theorists aren’t really into math), of all the Marginalized boxes you can check. Is “Harvard student” one of those deprived boxes?

Apparently so.

My understanding is that merely by being Black at Harvard involves automatic Oppression by White Privilege.

Or something.

Read it.

Sounds like a win-win. How can we encourage this behavior?

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When police arrived at the scene, the furious crowd threw rocks and bottles, smashing a window of the officers’ vehicle.

Most. California. Story. EVER.

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Hey, these things happen.

Read it.

Get your order in quick.

Steve Sailer does an extended fisking of a recent interview with Reich in the New York Times.

Mostly the interview was an attempt to absolve Reich from Racial ThoughtCrime by explaining that his book didn’t really mean what it said.

Read it.

David ‘Camera’ Hogg finds out that activism doesn’t outweigh academics.

He ought to try Brown.

Read it.

A French waiter said that getting fired for his behavior at a Vancouver restaurant was a “discrimination against my culture.”

Guillaume Rey, who worked as a waiter at Milestones Restaurant from October 2015 to August 2016, claims that his attitude, which one time left another server “borderline in tears,” was due to cultural differences, the New York Post reported. Rey is currently filing a suit with British Columbia’s Human Rights Tribunal, arguing that many French people are raised with a more aggressive and direct culture than Canadians.

I guess he wouldn’t object if I just walked up and punched him out for no reason. I’m Irish; it’s part of my culture.

Read it.

Doubtful. They aren’t a Fashionable Victim Group and so have no weight.

Asians aren’t seen as a “real” minority—nobody has them in mind when they speak of minorities, and thus the hiring of many Asians does not count for those in pursuit of “diversity.” This exclusion has been formalized into the bureaucratic euphemism “underrepresented minority,” which means “minorities who are not Asian.”

For purposes of racial shaming, Asians are apparently Honorary White People. (From Yellow Peril to Yellow Privilege in a generation — there’s American exceptionalism for you.

There has always been something faintly ludicrous about the “Asian-American” identity. A survey conducted in 2012 by the Pew Research Institute of the attitudes of the six largest (Indian, Filipino, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean) of the more than 30 distinct nationalities collected under the umbrella of the “Asian-American” identity found that fewer than 15 percent of respondents considered themselves to be “Asian-Americans.” All races are, to varying degrees, artificial constructs. The “Asian-American” identity is an artificial construct that scarcely anyone claims.

Scorecards! Getcher scorecards here! You can’t tell the victims without a scorecard!

The survey drew indignant responses from Asian-American activists and civil-rights leaders, who objected to the portrayal of their community as prosperous, striving, and confident. This will only seem comic and perplexing to those who don’t understand the system of racial patronage premised on a narrative of victimization of which the “Asian-American” political project is a part.

Read it.

Less than four weeks after an unidentified man on Valencia Street attempted to tackle a self-driving car while it waited at an intersection, another neighborhood taxi driver took matters into his own hands by stopping in the middle of traffic to deliver a blow to a robot car hard enough to scratch the window.

Ned Ludd is dead but his spirit lives on in Mexifornia.

One of these days the backup driver will have a concealed carry permit and things will get Very Interesting.

Read it.

Poor iddle snowflake.

‘Journalists’ are the only people in the world who think they have a professional responsibility to be pig-ignorant.

Read it.

The great thing about being a liberal is that it is an endlessly adaptable creed. Back in the 1960s and 1970s when white people moved to the suburbs and urban cores deterioration, it was called “white flight,” and the left decried it as racist, etc. But now that affluent whites have moved back into the urban cores, it is called “gentrification,” and it is terrible because it ruins old neighborhoods and pushes out poor people. See what I mean how fun and easy it is to be a liberal?

Victor Davis Hanson extrapolates.

When the human experience is simplistically divided into two worlds, then things increasingly do not easily fit.

Specifically, what happens when the number of victims begins to outnumber the pool of oppressors? At that point can the oppressed become victims of the oppressed?

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line chronicles the disappointment.

After the 2016 election, the left and some Never Trumpers warned of dire consequences. Civil liberties would be curtailed. Court orders would be disobeyed. Russia would dictate our foreign policy. Trump would lead us into war. And that was just for starters.

Nothing of the sort has occurred. Nothing close.

This creates a problem for the left, its media allies, and some Never Trumpers. What happens when non-partisans realize that there are no catastrophic, or even particularly dark consequences from this presidency, just conservative policies and a bunch of unfortunate tweets? The answer is a dreaded one: Trump becomes “normalized.”

This dread explains, I think, why lefty outlets like the Washington Post must feed readers a daily dose of anti-Trump material. On an ordinary day, the Post’s readers can expect a minimum of two front page stories a day of some alleged Trump outrage, plus more on the inside pages.

Since a president, no matter how bad, cannot commit that many outrages per day, the Post’s stories are frequently ridiculous.

Read it.

But you knew that.

Read it.

When Attorney General Jeff Sessions advised people in pain to “take some aspirin” and “tough it out” during a speech in Tampa last week, the federal prosecutors in his audience laughed. Mitzie Katzen, who has suffered from complex regional pain syndrome since she was a teenager, had a different reaction.

“I was just floored,” Katzen says. “I could not believe what I was reading, and I thought that has to be somebody who has never experienced really severe pain for any length of time.” Katzen’s perspective on Sessions’ remarks illuminates the depravity of a policy that sacrifices the interests of patients like her in the name of fighting the “opioid epidemic.”

The people at tReason magazine are poster children for the sort of Progressives In A Clever Plastic Disguise of which ZMan so often complains. Apparently there is in the Constitution some invisible provision (probably in the same Zeroth Amendment that contains the Right to Smoke Weed and the Right For People Everywhere Outside Of America To Come Here) that gives an indefeasible right to any measure that might prevent somebody from experiencing anything unpleasant in life. The whiners aren’t all on the Left. (Hm. Is epigram.)

Yeah, pain sucks. I’ve been there. But getting hooked on a pharmaceutical and then spending your life ensuring that you can always have more sucks just as much.

Jeff Sessions’ job is to enforce the law. Consequently, he has an interest in any situation that might encourage people to break said law. This is a natural result of his job. Just because he isn’t willing to Whine Along With Mitzie doesn’t make him cruel, any more than Noticing the black people commit a lot more crimes per capital than white people makes one a racist.

Libertarianism in modern America has degenerated into the same arrested-adolescent pity party as progressivism, and its pretense of being the principled opposition to the Left is wearing very thin indeed.

The Other McCain is on the case.

Does everyone remember “TrigglyPuff,” the obnoxious feminist who repeatedly disrupted a 2016 event at the University of Massachusetts? While claiming to be a victim of oppression, Cora Segal was attending elite private Hampshire College ($63,512 a year, including room and board) and is, in fact, the daughter of a Harvard professor. Her sole claim to victimhood is her evident inability to say “no” to second helpings.

The phenomenon of privileged young people claiming to be oppressed by social injustice is a product of what Robert Hughes called the Culture of Complaint, “in which seemingly everyone claims victim status.” Since the election of President Trump, liberals have ludicrously compared Trump to Hitler, claiming that America is now a “fascist regime.” The absurdity of these claims is apparent to anyone with two eyes and a brain, so why do liberals keep playing this make-believe game?

Read it.

The Department of Education has decided it will not investigate or interfere if transgender students complain they are barred from bathrooms that match their chosen gender, according to Buzzfeed News.

On Thursday, Buzzfeed asked Liz Hill, a spokesperson for the Department of Education, if restroom complaints from transgender students are not covered by a 1972 federal civil rights law called Title IX. Hill answered, “Yes, that’s what the law says,” adding on Friday, “Title IX prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, not gender identity.”

Good. This isn’t the job of the Federal government.

Read it.

A number of Democratic congressional campaigns are banding together with a new union whose mission is to unite campaign staffers across the nation.

The Campaign Workers Guild (CWG) announced a deal Monday with Democrat Randy Bryce’s campaign — the Wisconsin challenger of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan — that would ensure campaign staffers get paid time off and at least $3,000 per month. The contract also includes a $500 reimbursement for health insurance and a system of reporting sexual harassment claims.

The biter bit. Pass the popcorn.

Read it.

I understand the SS used to use this as a toughening exercise.

Except that they used Alsatians, not hamsters.

Don’t suppose she wound up any tougher.

Read it.

Perhaps by holding his breath until he turns blue. It’s traditional.

I say we ought to take him up on it.

Perhaps a GoFundMe campaign. I’ll chip in.

Read it.

Really women and fake women fighting for the same ecological Victim niche.

Read it.

From the US, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Gates Institute, the Population Reference Bureau, the Population Council and the Ford Foundation are very active. In Britain, the charity Population Matters sees checks on population as vital to Africa’s ability to combat shortages of food, while the British quality press decries what it calls ‘unsustainable’ population growth in countries such as Nigeria. More broadly and more importantly, the US State Department, USAID, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and Britain’s own Department for International Development quietly spend billions on what they delicately call ‘family-planning’ in Africa.

…

All these bodies trumpet what appear to be noble causes: a planet where every pregnancy is wanted, a woman’s right to choose, sexual and reproductive health, and women’s empowerment. Yet while people should and do fight for these goals in their millions all over the world, in Africa they are imposed from on high and from outside by moneyed, bureaucratic agencies. The sums spent, though fairly modest in the Western scheme of things, are more than a little influential in Africa; and the results are not pretty.

Even less pretty are articles such as this one. I don’t see anyone forcibly sterilizing Africans. If people are willing to take money not to reproduce, or be persuaded by money spent on propaganda, that’s not ‘imposing’ anything.

Those who characterize persuasion as force seriously need to recalibrate their brains.

Read it.

As was once said of academia, the reason why student activist fights are so vicious is because the stakes are so small.

An episode that highlights everything wrong with petty student-politicians is now unfolding at the University of Kansas, where activists want to impeach the president of their own alternative student government.

That’s right: KU has two parallel student governments—an official one, and a rival Multicultural Student Government (MSG). Though both receive funding from the university, MSG isn’t formally recognized as an autonomous government, because that would be ridiculous. Instead, it’s a student group with extra rights and a yearly budget of $45,000 that comes from a $1 fee charged to everyone enrolled at KU.

As in many such cases, acquiescing to stupidity costs the innocent bystanders money.

MSG was born out of an earlier controversy. In 2015, student activists alleged that the president, vice president, and chief of staff of the KU Student Senate—the official student government—had refused to stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. The three leaders vehemently denied the charg, and put out a statement affirming that “black lives matter at the University of Kansas.” Nevertheless, activists called on them to resign from office because they were “standing in the way of institutionalizing a safer, anti-racist environment.”

KU activists were inspired by protests at the University of Missouri, which successfully forced a leadership change on that campus. But they ultimately failed to oust the trio. So instead, the activists decided to form an alternative student government that would represent the interests of marginalized students.

The Student Senate permitted the activists to form MSG, but KU Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little vetoed a proposal to fund it by charging students a $2 fee, on the grounds that setting up a second government was sort of a bonkers idea. Activists said the decision not to fund their group was pure racism—”This is racism, we don’t need to call it anything else,” said one—even though Gray-Little is herself a woman of a color.

Really, you can’t make this shit up. As a general rule, when you hear of some situation in a school that sounds like a parody, it’s more than likely true.

Read it.

For much of the first half of the twentieth century, eugenics was a term associated with possibility and progress. Charles Davenport, head of the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbor, defined eugenics as “the science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding.” Eugenicists thought they could fix a whole host of problems with a clear understanding of heredity and its applications. Their strategies for human improvement often had negative consequences for marginalized people like African Americans, people with disabilities, and gender nonconforming folks.

We often think of these marginalized people as victims of eugenics, and they often were. But we don’t often ask what they thought of eugenics. What did human improvement mean to them? What did they think of the possibilities of eugenics?

The chief trick seems to have been breeding with white people, which I suppose is why we have so many ‘blacks’ that are anything but.

Read it.

Amazing how many countries in the shithole parts of the world are eager to claim that the epithet applies to them.

Maybe we ought to take them at their word.

Read it.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

Apparently, being a fat ugly black woman will not only get you a seat in Congress, it will also get you on TV. Who knew?

Steve Sailer blows the whistle.

Thank goodness for Russian sleazeballs exploiting our immigration law loopholes: their whiteness allows the mass media to get worked up on the topic instead of still nervously shying away from, say, endemic Chinese birth tourism on the grounds that it might be racist to notice.

Not to mention the anchor babies from South of the Border Down Mexico Way. (I told you not to mention those!)

Read it.

Score cards! Getcher score cards here! Ya can’t tell the victims without a score card!

Read it.

Oh, fashionable victim schtick not working any more? Poor baby.

Read it.

The nerve of that guy.

Read it.

Tit for tat. BDS gives us a convenient way to identify all of the troublemakers.

Gary Spedding, a British cross-party consultant on Israel and the Palestinian Territories, told The Independent the blacklist was merely an excuse to legally justify barring activists and human rights observers from entering the country,

And a good excuse it is. These one-way idiots seem to think that they are entitled to cause trouble for Israel, but Israel is somehow not entitled to exclude them for it. Unbelievable.

Read it.

Maybe because they’re the bad guys? That’s just a guess, you understand.

Gidney, an associate professor in child study and human development at Tufts University who specializes in sociolinguistics, saw Scar’s accent as part of a disturbing pattern in the film: Foreign accents and non-standard dialects were being used to voice all of the “bad” characters. Gidney also noticed that Scar’s minions, the hyenas, spoke in either African American English or English with a Spanish accent. Gidney found this trend concerning, especially since the theme of the movie could be described as “the ‘natural order of things,’” he said. “I thought it was really disturbing that it was necessary to ‘take back the jungle’ from the British-sounding evil lion, plus the African American-sounding and Latino-sounding hyenas.”

God forbid we should pretend that anything is ‘the natural order of things’.

Gidney was inspired to embark on a study of language patterns in animated kids’ entertainment, teaming up with Julie Dobrow, a senior lecturer at Tufts who specializes in issues of children and media, to study how these trends play out on kids’ television shows. They’ve since analyzed about 30 shows and 1,500 characters, and they’re still at work on the project.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

The kicker: In many of the cases studied, villains were given foreign accents. A modern-day example is Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz, the bad guy in Phineas and Ferb who speaks in a German(ish) accent and hails from the fictional European country Drusselstein. Meanwhile, the study found that most of the heroic characters in their research sample were American-sounding; only two heroes had foreign accents. Since television is a prominent source of cultural messaging for children, this correlation of foreign accents with “bad” characters could have concerning implications for the way kids are being taught to engage with diversity in the United States.

Ah. ‘Engage with diversity’. There you go. The proglodyte hunt for Heretics and Sinners reaches into cartoons.

Read it.

Black Americans hate Spanish and aren’t crazy about Spanish-speakers either. They associate Spanish speakers with coming to take jobs by working cheaper and harder. They associate speaking Spanish on the street with plotting against them.

Apparently teaching your kid a second language is White Privilege or something.

Read it.

Apparently you have to get your victim points before the end of the year in order to qualify for something.

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Really — when was the last time you saw a black farmer? Eh? Eh? I rest my case.

Read it.

You know it had to happen.

UPDATE: Black woman who accused Charlie Rose of racism for not sexually harassing her also helped get a paraplegic fired

Steve Sailer passes the popcorn

The sight of two affirmative-action hires going at it about who is the better perceiver of black victimhood is much like watching a train wreck.

Read it.

Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Tim Ferriss, and most recently Sam Altman (but see his clarification) think there are too many opinions that are held to be taboo in Silicon Valley. There has also been a backlash against these posts, to the effect that the only ideas being suppressed are expressions of bigotry that don’t deserve debate and are actively harmful (see, for instance, Anil Dash’s response).

But some people are just confused. What exactly are these supposedly heretical ideas? Parker Thompson tried to collect ideas in a shared Google Doc, but that quickly turned into a dumpster fire.

Read it.

Presumably this is the suffering of black men rather than the suffering they inflict on others.

Check it out.

Can’t tell the oppressors without a score card.

Read it.

Another blow against wealth inequality. Democrats ought to be jubilant. Bernie Sanders ought to be ecstatic.

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The left has found itself stuck between a rock and a hard place. Bullying is bad, on the one hand, but on the other hand, isn’t it important to stick to the narrative of racism?

When a video of middle school student Keaton Jones addressing his bullies went viral, everyone was sympathetic. It wasn’t until two photos of Keaton’s mother holding a confederate flag was discovered that celebrities and journalists started to turn their backs to little Keaton’s plight. After all, racism is one of the few mortal sins left in the liberal media.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

I’m thinking she was probably a Democrat.