Read it.

Read it.

In a 1946 essay in the London Tribune entitled “In Front of Your Nose,” George Orwell noted that “we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”

The intellectual battlefields today are on college campuses, where students’ deep convictions about race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation and their social justice antipathy toward capitalism, imperialism, racism, white privilege, misogyny and “cissexist heteropatriarchy” have bumped up against the reality of contradictory facts and opposing views, leading to campus chaos and even violence. Students at the University of California, Berkeley, and outside agitators, for example, rioted at the mere mention that conservative firebrands Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter had been invited to speak (in the end, they never did). Demonstrators at Middlebury College physically attacked libertarian author Charles Murray and his liberal host, professor Allison Stanger, pulling her hair, twisting her neck and sending her to the ER.*

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IN a low-key, musical version of the match between Garry Kasparov and the chess-playing machine called Deep Blue, a musician at the University of Oregon competed last month with a computer to compose music in the style of Johann Sebastian Bach. Steve Larson, who teaches music theory at the university, listened anxiously while his wife, the pianist Winifred Kerner, performed three entries in the contest — one by Bach, one by Dr. Larson and one by a computer program called EMI, or Experiments in Musical Intelligence.

Dr. Larson was hurt when the audience concluded that his piece — a simple, engaging form called a two-part invention — was written by the computer. But he felt somewhat mollified when the listeners went on to decide that the invention composed by EMI (pronounced ”Emmy”) was genuine Bach.

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But saying so is the ThoughtCrime of Noticing.

Jonah Goldberg points out some inconvenient truth.

Fighting Nazis is a good thing, but fighting Nazis doesn’t necessarily make you or your cause good. By my lights this is simply an obvious fact.

The greatest Nazi-killer of the 20th century was Josef Stalin. He also killed millions of his own people and terrorized, oppressed, enslaved or brutalized tens of millions more.

Nazism was evil. Soviet Communism was evil. It’s fine to believe that Nazism was more evil than Communism. That doesn’t make Communism good.

Left-wing talking points to the contrary notwithstanding, Nazis were socialists (National Socialist Party).

Communists have killed at least three times as many people as the Nazis ever did.

The Nazis stopped killing people in 1945; communists have continued to the present day.

There are no Nazi governments any more; communism still oppresses China, Viet Nam, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela.

Media handwringing to the contrary notwithstanding, there are probably more transgender people in the U.S. than actual Nazis. Indeed, there are probably more Hell’s Angels in the U.S. than actual Nazis.

Read it.

Who knew there were so many black people in the KKK?

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

Part of what is going on is an attempt by white liberal urban elites to offload their African-American inner city problem people onto the deplorable whites of suburban and rural America.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Ads critical of Google’s decision to fire an engineer over a diversity memo are appearing all over Venice near the company’s office.

One of the unofficial advertisements shows the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs with the accompanying phrase “Think different.” Right underneath that image is a picture of Google CEO Sundar Pichai saying “not so much.”

Sounds as if the geeks are revolting.

Another one uses the same tagline “Think Different,” but instead of the two tech leaders, there are just the logos of the two respective companies. “Get Hired” is featured next to Apple’s insignia, while “Get Fired” is positioned next to Google’s.

Both forms of conspicuous critique have apparently been spotted at bus stops and on park benches.

Sundar Pichai’s Important Part must be feeling pretty sore right about now….

UPDATE: Pictures: Meanwhile, at a bus stop in Venice, CA …

Sarah Hoyt is not afraid t ask the hard questions.

Asking simple questions like “If men and women are exactly alike, what does a company gain from increasing diversity?” pokes a huge hole in political correctness, and makes it impossible for them to hold these contradictory ideas in their heads in peace.  If they tell you it’s because little Suzie who wants to be a programmer is being discriminated against, ask why we should instead discriminate against little Bobby, who wants to be a programmer, if they’re both exactly alike in any thing but sexual organs.  We’re not hiring them have sex, are we?  If we must have affirmative action, wouldn’t it be better to pick those people who grew up in poor conditions or something, and ignore other characteristics?

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Free speech — it’s not just a good idea; it’s the law.

California Labor Code § 1102 requires that “no employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees through or by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity.” Furthermore, the “whistleblower” provisions at §1102.5 prohibit employers from adopting rules preventing disclosure of, or retaliating against an employee for having disclosed, “information … to a person with authority over the employee, or another employee who has authority to investigate, discover or correct the violation … if the employee has reasonable cause to believe that the information discloses a violation of state or federal statute, or a violation of or noncompliance with a local, state, or federal rule or regulation, regardless of whether disclosing the information is part of the employee’s job duties.”

The CTRL-Left steps on its own … well, you know.

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Spiritual faith has long been shaped by the lettering on a religion’s sacred texts. This is particularly the case with Judaism, so we visited three Hebrew scribes—in Jerusalem, New York City, and the liberal enclave of Berkeley, California—to understand why such laborious traditions continue.

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August 19th. Be there or be square.

Perhaps I need a new Category: Sauce for the Goose, wherein proglodytes get whapped with their own sticks.

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Well, the engineer WENT THERE. No, he did not say the chicks are naturally unqualified or under-qualified to do engineering work. You might have heard that. You can see from looking at the document yourself that it’s a deliberate lie. There are many others being told. Anyway, what he did say is what people who’ve looked into it awhile, by which I mean more than a few minutes, know already. The chicks just don’t wanna do it. Figuring this out is not hard, since the alternative would have to be, there’s a huge glut of chicks wanting engineering jobs and their applications are being ritually blocked or turned away at some point in the pipeline. Well, where’s the glut? And where’s the blockage? Can you imagine the job of hiding such a restrictive device, in this climate…or being the device, the manager who says “no chicks on my team”?

ThoughtCrime exists even when you don’t see any. Emmanuel Goldstein is out there somewhere corrupting you even when you don’t know it.

About the most offensive thing the guy actually did say was where he said women are, on average, more emotional. It’s true, but I try to avoid saying things like that because we live in an age wherein men are acting more like women. Nevertheless, even this was given some strong backing by real-life events when it emerged that female employees at Google were skipping work because they were so traumatized by his memo. Those who defend the firing, point to this “trauma” done to the fairer sex within Google’s workforce, as evidence that the company made the right decision. Had they taken no action, so the argument goes, the female employees could have sued due to the hostile work environment.

Which is, of course, offensive only when it’s said by men. When women say it, it’s a feature, not a bug.

From whence arises this expectation that a workplace should be comfortable? And if it isn’t, you can sue? Oh yeah right. Lawyers.

As a lawyer, I can bears witness to this. Lawyers are paid to game the system, which is why I’ve never practiced law — I’d have had to spend too much time washing my hands.

Mr. Damore’s memo is called “Google’s ideological echo chamber”…and, he was fired for writing it. His own sacking proves the truth of what he wrote, because he got fired for saying the wrong things. Nevermind whether I like it or not, or you like it or not…it’s simply unworkable.

And that’s the bottom line.

Ross Douthat sums it up.

At the same time, there was a sense in which Damore had to be fired, precisely because of the intertwined realities that he described. Silicon Valley is a very male environment, a land of nerd kings and brogrammers whose deepest beliefs tend to be the sort that men come up with when they don’t have very many women around — arch-libertarian, irreligious, utopian in a mechanistic style.

But the internet industry is also part of a wider elite culture that is trending in the opposite direction, becoming more feminized and feminist, and inclined to view male-dominated enclaves with great suspicion. So Silicon Valley’s leaders use corporate wokeness, diversity initiatives and progressive virtue signaling as a kind of self-protection, a way of promising that they’re mostly men but they’re the good kind of men, so that discrimination lawsuits and antitrust actions and other forms of regulation are less attractive to their critics.

I strongly suspect that more than a few Silicon Valley higher-ups agreed with the broad themes of Damore’s memo. But just as tech titans accept some censorship and oppression as the price of doing business in China, they accept performative progressivism as the price of having nice campuses in the most liberal state in the union and recruiting their employees from its most elite and liberal schools. And for questioning that political performance while defending the disproportionate maleness that makes it necessary, the Google memo-writer simply had to go.

Debra Soh points out some inconvenient truth.

Titled Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber, Mr. Damore called out the current PC culture, saying the gender gap in Google’s diversity was not due to discrimination, but inherent differences in what men and women find interesting. Danielle Brown, Google’s newly appointed vice-president for diversity, integrity and governance, accused the memo of advancing “incorrect assumptions about gender,” and Mr. Damore confirmed last night he was fired for “perpetuating gender stereotypes.”

Despite how it’s been portrayed, the memo was fair and factually accurate. Scientific studies have confirmed sex differences in the brain that lead to differences in our interests and behaviour.

…

Many people, including a former Google employee, have attempted to refute the memo’s points, alleging that they contradict the latest research.

I’d love to know what “research done […] for decades” he’s referring to, because thousands of studies would suggest otherwise. A single study, published in 2015, did claim that male and female brains existed along a “mosaic” and that it isn’t possible to differentiate them by sex, but this has been refuted by four – yes, four – academic studies since.

This includes a study that analyzed the exact same brain data from the original study and found that the sex of a given brain could be correctly identified with 69-per-cent to 77-per-cent accuracy.

Of course, differences exist at the individual level, and this doesn’t mean environment plays no role in shaping us. But to claim that there are no differences between the sexes when looking at group averages, or that culture has greater influence than biology, simply isn’t true.

Read it.

I won’t be blogging about most of the discussion of this situation because of its tedious repetition, but I found the following reaction interesting:

The Register understands that Pichai’s memo mentions section 1.5.II of the company’s code of conduct, which states “We are committed to a supportive work environment, where employees have the opportunity to reach their fullest potential. Googlers are expected to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias, and unlawful discrimination.”

Google’s alleged decision to fire Damore has sparked wide debate about freedom of speech. It’s not hard to see why, as section 1.5 of Google’s code of conduct says “Any time you feel our users aren’t being well-served, don’t be bashful – let someone in the company know about it. Continually improving our products and services takes all of us, and we’re proud that Googlers champion our users and take the initiative to step forward when the interests of our users are at stake.”

At the core of Damore’s document is his belief that Google’s diversity programs are hurting users. Yet Pichai seems to be pointing out that Google has limits on the diversity of opinions it is willing to tolerate.

Grab some popcorn. This one’s far from over.

This is actually one of the few times I’ve seen somebody connect the dots between the supposed policy that Google’s management is allegedly enforcing and the actual case to be made that they are, in fact, violating that policy. ‘All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.’

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Apparently, euthanasia is Just Another Instance of White Privilege.

My take is, that people who want to kill themselves ought to be encouraged to do so, since they are predominantly people whom we could well do without. But that’s me.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Inquiring minds want to know.

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Now if they can just find a way to get AlGore to STFU….

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I’m sure you’ve seen advertisements from Blue Apron and Hello Fresh and other such ‘meal kit’ companies.

Here’s an inside look at perhaps the most prominent one.

Hello Fresh meal kits can also be purchased ad-hoc from my local Yuppie Hipster Food Mart, SPROUTS. So there is that.

Joel Kotkin breaks it out.

With President Donald Trump’s Dr. Demento impersonation undermining his own party, the road should be open for Democrats to sweep the next election cycle. And, for the first time since their horrific defeat of 2016, not only nationally but also in the states, the Democrats are slowly waking up to the reality that they need to go beyond the ritual Trump-bashing.

No one will compare the recently released “A Better Deal: Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Wages” slogan to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, or even Newt Gingrich’s “Contract for America.” One Bernie Sanders supporter called it “anodyne, focus-grouped, consultant-generated pablum.” Yet, at least it attempted to identify the party with something other than Trump hatred, which is all most Americans think the Democrats are all about.

Read it.

The fact that it’s characterized as a ‘screed’, when it appears to be an earnest and thoughtful presentation of the writer’s argument, demonstrates what sort of bias he’s up against.

The fact that it is publicly available, on the other hand, offers us hope that the rot isn’t too bad yet.

Read it.

I’ll bet that put her panties in a wad.

Bee is a rather prominent Voice of the Crust.

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On the bicentenary of her death, Jane Austen is still everywhere, often where one least expects to find her. Most of her devotees will have their own story; mine occurred in a Manhattan courthouse, with its stale-coffee smell and atmosphere of anxious boredom, in the midst of jury selection for a criminal trial involving a double homicide. Upon learning that I taught British literature, the defendant’s attorney—a woman who spoke with intimidating speed and streetwise bluntness—skipped the usual questions (how much did I trust police testimony, had I ever been a victim of a violent crime) and asked instead whether I taught Jane Austen. Puzzled by her indirection, I answered yes. A theatrical flash of disgust crossed her face: I was, evidently, one of those people. At which point the presiding judge interrupted to say: “Careful, counsel. Some of us here like Jane Austen.”

A Child of the Crust writes for others of the same ilk. The concern with ‘first female to X’ and ritual denunciations of ‘supremacists’ are signature.

Dinesh D’Souza explains it all to you.

Why does this purported antifascism on the part of progressives so closely resemble the fascism that it claims to be opposing? More profoundly, what is “antifascism” as the term is now used on the American left?

To answer these questions, we turn to the founders of the so-called antifascist movement on the progressive left, the sociologist Herbert Marcuse of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

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Canada operates under a medicare system that is understood as single-payer. Not only does the federal government use money from its general revenue to finance this taxpayer-funded health care system, individual provinces also contribute by raising money through special levies that are deducted when Canadians pay their income tax.

…

“Health care in Canada isn’t free—Canadians actually pay a substantial amount for health care through their taxes, even if they don’t pay directly for medical services,” said Bacchus Barua, senior economist with the Fraser Institute’s Centre for Health Policy Studies, in a statement. He is the co-author of the institute’s report: The Price of Public Health Care Insurance, 2017.

For all those tax dollars, there is still a long waiting list for a host of operations, both routine and urgent. Another Fraser Institute study recently revealed that 63,000 Canadians left the country in 2016 to seek medical assistance elsewhere — usually the U.S.

If the U.S. gets a ‘free health care’ system, there won’t be any U.S. for us to escape to.

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We assume that if Harvard stopped discriminating against Asians, the student body would very quickly become 40% Asian. U.C. Berkeley is 42% Asian.

Harvard obviously thinks this would be a bad thing for Harvard, otherwise they wouldn’t discriminate against Asians.

Couldn’t hurt.

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Good luck wading through the article to find the three supplements in question. I couldn’t.

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Years ago, someone made a documentary – “A Private Universe” – in which they talked to to a gaggle of Harvard students at commencement & asked them what caused the seasons. Almost all said that summer happened when we were close to the Sun in our elliptical orbit, winter when we were farther away. Which isn’t true – not of Earth, anyhow.

Now you might think they were just jackasses, but they make up a key fraction of our intellectual/governing elite. It can’t be that simple – they can’t just be a bunch of ignorami – there has to be a deeper, more subtle explanation.

Well, Harvard. Children of the Crust, being indoctrinated into the Narrative. There is little room for education in that scenario.

David Cole has some advice for us.

Trannies remind me of libertarians. To be more precise, the thing I find most objectionable about trannies is also the thing I find most objectionable about the hardcore, uncompromising “no government” anarcho-voluntaryist libertarian types. These “get rid of government” crusaders spend every moment of their lives hectoring nonbelievers like me, trying to make us acquiesce to their vision of a world without the state. What cheeses me off is, if you want to be free, if you want to live “off grid” without government, if you want to grow your own food and barter hens and nanny goats for potatoes and butter, go do it. What’s stopping you? It’s a big world and easy to get lost in. Sure, there’s never any guarantee that you’ll be safe from the long arm of the state—Randy Weaver found that out the hard way when he and his wife made the logical decision to drop out of society rather than try to change it to suit their beliefs—but still, living off grid (which I’ve done several times in my life) is way easier than getting 300 million people to agree in unison, “We’re going to dismantle government and live as medieval farmers and tradesmen.”

The anti-government ideologues act like they can’t go and “be free” until they’ve persuaded the rest of us to follow suit. Essentially, they’ve made their freedom quest dependent upon me coming along for the ride, even though it’s a trip they could easily take solo.

He’s got a point. Cf. Harry Browne’s book How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World.