A few days ago, NRO reported that law professors Amy Wax and Larry Alexander started a firestorm by writing an opinion piece that extolled bourgeois values such as education, employment, hard work, marriage, and charity. Worse, the co-authors pointed out the fact that all cultures are not equally beneficial and constructive. Worst of all, they criticized “the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-‘acting white’ rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants.”
Inevitably, the two professors were accused of racism by some on the left. Apparently, things like valuing hard work, grit, and persistence is something only white folks do. Well. I wonder what minority football, basketball, and baseball players think of that. Would they agree that they got where they are by avoiding hard work? Would they agree that grit and persistence are “white” traits?
Two of the world’s greatest living economists, Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell, happen to be black. Did they succeed by avoiding hard work and education? American physician and surgeon, Charles Richard Drew (also black), developed improved techniques for storing blood. Did he do that after dropping out of school?
Isn’t claiming that only white people care about things like learning, honesty, jobs, and kindness sort of, well, racist?
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Are Hard Work and Persistence Really “White Things?”
I like it. No matter what kind of a sob story foreigners proffer, there are people in this country who are just as bad off or worse. If we’re going to spend money, let’s spend money on our neighbors before scattering it abroad.
Funny how people who can predict the precise temperature and sea level of the entire earth twenty, thirty, forty years from now can’t predict where a hurricane is going to go in the next six days.
Here in famously pet-friendly Los Angeles, I encounter dogs that are blatantly not service animals on a daily basis. Recently, during a morning visit to my local café, I laughed when a woman whose tiny dog was thrashing around at the limits of its leash and barking fiercely at other customers loudly proclaimed that it was a service animal. “It’s my service dog,” she said to me, scowling. “You’re not allowed to ask me why I need it!”
Most of the news bulletins I’m exposed to are on the radio, as I’m tootling around hither and yon. So it took me a while to discover that what the media call “peace activists”, “anti-racists” and “anti-Nazis” are, in fact, men and women garbed in black from head to toe, including face masks. Thus, as I pointed out on the radio last month, the violence on American streets derives from today’s paramilitary wing of the Democrat Party – antifa – working itself up over yesterday’s paramilitary wing of the Democrat Party – the Ku Klux Klan. Both have stupid pseudo-exotic self-romanticizing names and, as many commentators have observed, both have strict dress codes intended to conceal their identities. From white sheets to black bandanas is a mere fashion evolution: the purpose is the same – to do ugly things one could not confidently do with one’s face known to all.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Coming Terror
Big Tech fumes over Trump’s decision to deport a million kids Which, of course, he hasn’t done; he’s merely decided that the law applies to them same as everybody else (what a concept). Does that mean they’ll be deported? Well, are the estimated six million illegals now in the country being deported? Don’t ascribe an efficiency to government that isn’t historically accurate.
Pro-Trump British student facing probe for mocking ISIS
Unless they live in Chicago, of course, in which case they might get popped by some random gang-banger ‘of color’ — he doesn’t seem able to do anything about that, but by God he can frustrate the enforcement of Federal law.
This is evil. This is horrifying. This is the kind of stuff Microsoft did in the 90s that made everyone hate it so much they still have to fight against the repercussions of decisions made two decades ago because of the sheer amount of damage they did and lives they ruined. I’m at the point where I’d rather go back to Microsoft, whose primary sin at this point is mostly just being incompetent instead of outright evil, rather than Google, who is actually doing things that are fundamentally morally wrong. These are the kinds of decisions that are bald-faced abuses of power, without any possible “good intention” driving them. It’s vile. There is no excuse.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on ‘I Used To Want To Work for Google’
CNN and MSNBC are repeating the false claim that DACA recipients are “children” or “kids,” while actually most are adults.
While DACA recipients were illegally brought to the United States by their parents when they were children, the minimum age to apply for the program is 15 years old. In fact, the majority of the applicants were over the age of 20 based on 2014 data from the US government. Some have estimated that the average age of dreamers is 25 or 26 years old–hardly children.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Democrat Florida Legislator Wants to Make It a Crime to Leave Your Kid in the Car for Just One Minute
College is the new High School and that should terrify everyone.
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Higher education erosion is a continuation of a long trend. College graduates, we know, are not what they used to be. In 1970’s, 1-in-2 college grads aced the Wordsum vocabulary test given by the General Social Survey. Today 1-in-6 do. Using that as a proxy for IQ of the median grad, in the 70’s it was ~112, now its ~100.[1] College degrees are increasingly expensive and may increasingly signal nothing at all. The only similar good that explodes in cost while at the same time loses value is the American wedding. Black or white, selling hope means getting into the gown business.
Cal State is setting an example for the re-definition of “college readiness”towards “willingness to sit tight and pay the cash.” They are announcing college credit for courses that 9th graders should have completed (The typical grade for Algebra 1). The pessimistic take is easy to formulate: A reduction in academic rigor, pushing what were once high school expectations into college, happening in the largest college system in the US. If anyone can explain why we should be happy with a future of thousands of college grads with high school reading skills, I’m all ears for the optimism.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Higher Education Erodes
We reported on Sunday that the leaders of the Islamic Cultural Center of Quebec were upset about the “hateful” “Islamophobes” in a group known as The Love Brigades who had been distributing leaflets in their neighborhood about the extreme doctrines being propagated by the Center and its mosque.
The identities of the individuals who printed and distributed the leaflets have not been made public. Which is not surprising — in Modern Multicultural Quebec, expressing negative opinions about Islam may well land you in court, especially since the passage of M-103.
The article below from a dhimmi media outlet in Quebec joins in the two-minute hate against the Love Brigades. Read the article first, and then read a translation of the leaflet. You’ll see the extent to which the media and the politicians have misrepresented what the leaflet says. In the USA, the text would not be remotely actionable. At least not for now.
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on The Love Brigades vs. the Mosque of Hate
The second largest Powerball payout in history, $758 million, was won by a Massachusetts woman. She elected to receive a lump-sum payment of $480 million. Massachusetts now has its first Republican woman.
My thesis is that the ‘problem of universals‘ is a better conceptual framework for the modern political world than the ‘left vs. right’ paradigm that we inherited from 18th-century France.
Realists believe that, once we assign a name to a thing, however arbitrary that original assignment might have been, the assignment is locked — while the thing remains the same thing, the name we assign it ought to remain the same.
Nominalists believe that the names we assign to things are and remain completely arbitrary — if we wish to use a name assigned to a thing to include other things as well, we are free to do that.
Sound familiar?
As you might suspect, I consider myself a Realist, and judge most proglodytes to be Nominalists. A quick review of the way proglodytes use the terms ‘marriage’, ‘male’, ‘female’, ‘racist’, ‘sexist’, ‘homophobe’, and ‘free speech’ will, I suggest, adequately support my characterization.
The Nominalist agenda (and they always have an agenda) is summed up by Humpty-Dumpty’s response to Alice in Through the Looking Glass:
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’
Nominalists aren’t interested in Truth; they are interested in ‘which is to be master’. That’s all.
My thanks to ZMan, who first turned my mind toward this fruitful perspective.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Left vs. Right? No — Realist vs. Nominalist
The founder of the web browser Opera has accused Google of “anti-competitive” practices.
“A monopoly both in search and advertising, Google, unfortunately shows that they are not able to resist the misuse of power,” wrote Jon von Tetzchner, now CEO of Vivaldi, in a blog post on Monday.
He also intimated there may have been a connection between an interview published in tech glad-rag WIRED, where he criticised data gathering and ad targeting by Google and Facebook, and the suspension of Vivaldi’s Google AdWords accounts two days later.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Vivaldi Boss: It’d Be Cool if Google Went Back to the ‘Not Evil’ Schtick
The few times a month I bother to scan National Review, I feel the same way as when I watch a B-movie from the 1980’s. Yeah, it reminds me of that time I got to second base with Sally Sugarpants, but the movie is still terrible. Even more so now. Reading one of the bugmen NRO employs to write copy, tub-thump about their principles, I wonder what it must be like to live trapped in amber. Conservative Inc is a Potemkin village, where the people carry on as if nothing has changed since 1984. It’s creepy.
There is a reason, beyond the financial considerations, why these people cling so tenaciously to the past. They have nowhere else to go. They have always lived in a world, whose map is a tiny intellectual zone dominated by the Left. Around it is a blank space labeled “Here Be Monsters.” Even for those who figure out that the old Left-Right paradigm is no longer relevant, their fear of what’s out there has them staggering around on the fringes of the old world, like homeless beggars looking for a place to lie down.
This probably explains some of the Bernie Bros too. They no longer can tolerate Progressive Globalism, but they fear association with the Right, so they have staggered over to 19th century socialism. They don’t really embrace Bernie Sanders or his anachronistic politics, but they have nowhere else to go. It’s a form of populism they can embrace, without changing parties and supporting Trump. The Bernie Movement is just a convenient doorway for them to sleep in while the world sorts itself out.
,,,
You are either in the ideological camp based in biological realism or you are in the camp that embraces the blank slate and egalitarianism. If you reject both, you are a lost boy, staggering around in the darkness.
Say you have 10 toy cars, and are told to share them with someone else. You, being reasonable, suggest a five-and-five split. The other person, claiming poverty or special circumstance or simple greed, says they should get nine, and leave you one.
So there is a disagreement, and you go to a mediator/arbitrator to work it out. He, of course, being of Solomonic disposition, splits the difference: you keep three, and the other guy gets seven. The unreasonable party just won.
It astonishes me how obvious this is, and how, time after time, “experts” demonstrate their complete ignorance of this fundamental feature of any arbitrated settlement. And it applies throughout life.
It applies to today’s delicate SJW snowflakes. Since their position is entirely unreasonable, any discussion that tries to find common ground ends up with a laughably stupid result.
The same principle applies to North Korea. Their positions are as extreme as any could be. Any attempt to negotiate means that they win before we even start, since by negotiating, we have conceded that there is something valid and acceptable about the demands of a madman.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Mediated Negotiations: The Unreasonable Party Always Wins
The belief that humans came out of Africa millions of years ago is widely believed. But it might be about to be entirely re-written, according to the authors of a new study.
They claim to have found a footprint in Crete that could change the narrative of early human evolution, suggesting that our ancestors were in modern Europe far earlier than we ever thought.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Established Story About How Humans Came From Africa May Be Wrong, Claims Controversial New Study
Years ago I was conversing with a hard-core economist, one of the benighted variety who assumes that everyone behaves like a wealth-maximizing robot. I observed that even if he were right in his presumption that economic decisions are made rationally and in a way that comports with economic efficiency, government stands in the way of efficiency. In my pithy phrasing: Politics trumps economics.
So even if the impetus for efficiency isn’t blunted by governmental acts (laws, regulations, judicial decrees), those acts nevertheless stand in the way of efficiency. A simple case in point is the minimum wage, which doesn’t merely drive up the wages of some workers, but also ensures that other workers are unemployed in the near term, and that more workers will be unemployed in the long-term. Yes, the minimum wage will cause some employers to substitute capital (e.g., robots) for labor, but they will do so only to reduce the bottom-line damage (at least in the near-term). The politics (the urge to regulate) trumps economics (the efficiency-maximizing state of affairs that would otherwise obtain).
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Politics Trumps Economics
Ethnically diverse Los Angeles boasts a population that’s nearly half Latino, 10 percent Asian, and 10 percent African American. The metropolitan area is also home to the largest charter school program in the country. In May, Los Angeles voters put school choice supporters in charge of the Los Angeles Unified School District board, a show of support for parents’ right to decide where to send their kids for an education.
In fact, demographic data across the United States show that charter schools are remarkably ethnically diverse. As of 2014, some 27 percent of the more than 3 million charter students nationwide were African American and 31 percent were Latino, according to Department of Education numbers.
So it would be more than a little disingenuous to attack school choice as a tool of racists. But that’s exactly how American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten is responding to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ push for more parental control.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Teachers Union Head Casts School Choice as Racism
Our grieving nation breathed a sigh of relief when the Associated Press broke the news that Hurricane Harvey was not a racist.
“Black, white, rich, poor: Storm Harvey didn’t discriminate,” read the headline, because the important thing to remember is that even though people were drowning by the dozens and disease was spreading rapidly and tens of thousands were losing everything they’ve ever owned, at least we could all clasp hands and celebrate the fact that Harvey—who may or may not be a white male—had no problem with indiscriminately killing human beings of all colors and ethnic backgrounds.
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Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner—a man not quite as black as a roasted coffee bean but is getting there—graciously assured the city’s estimated 600,000 illegal immigrants that he would block any efforts to deport them should they check into city shelters seeking solace from the storm.
Wait—600,000 illegal immigrants? Houston has more illegal immigrants than either Milwaukee, Las Vegas, or Albuquerque has people?
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Great Hate Flood of 2017
Scientific American, usually a reliable Voice of the Crust, let somebody under the wall.
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.*
One underlying cause of this troubling situation may be found in what happened at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., in May, when biologist and self-identified “deeply progressive” professor Bret Weinstein refused to participate in a “Day of Absence” in which “white students, staff and faculty will be invited to leave the campus for the day’s activities.” Weinstein objected, writing in an e-mail: “on a college campus, one’s right to speak—or to be—must never be based on skin color.” In response, an angry mob of 50 students disrupted his biology class, surrounded him, called him a racist and insisted that he resign. He claims that campus police informed him that the college president told them to stand down, but he has been forced to stay off campus for his safety’s sake.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Unfortunate Fallout of Campus Postmodernism
The underlying story is being passed around like a doobie by the hipster left; I’ve seen half-a-dozen reposts in various places.
Ms. Evans is African-American, Ms. Ramos Latino.
Uh, there is also the difference that Ms. Evans started in a blue collar workforce, 20th Century upstate New York, dominated by native-born Americans, while Ms. Ramos started in a blue collar workforce, turn of the century California, dominated by immigrants.
Of course, as in virtually all articles about one of the two key I-Words — inequality — there is no mention of the other key I-World — immigration.
And, of course, a single comparison between two cherry-picked examples is sufficient to drive government policy among the Chattering Class.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on A Tale of Two Janitors
Orval Faubus is rolling in his grave. ‘Sumbitch! All we needed to do was get them to segregate themselves! Why the hell didn’t we think of that?’
Of course, this is Princeton, and Princeton has always been a little strange. (Hello, Michelle Obama!)
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on The New Jim Crow: Segregation-Loving Ivy League Students Demand Separate-But-Equal Dorms
When Summer draws to an end, it is time for the Minnesota State Fair, one of the world’s great spectacles. You might expect a state fair to be a refuge from the daily onslaught of politics, but that is not the case. The parties have booths, and even in an odd-numbered year, politicians have booths. Still, this year’s event was low-key, politically, until you entered the seed section of the agriculture building.
We have written several times before about seed art, also known as crop art. Basically, the artist glues seeds of different types or colors to a board or other substrate to make a picture. One might expect this sort of folk art to be dominated by conservative ideas and values, but in fact it slants heavily to the left. This year, Trump Derangement Syndrome took over–with the judges as well as seed artists, apparently, as some of the anti-Trump designs won prizes.
WHEN I ASK people to picture a coder, they usually imagine someone like Mark Zuckerberg: a hoodied college dropout who builds an app in a feverish 72-hour programming jag—with the goal of getting insanely rich and, as they say, “changing the world.”
But this Silicon Valley stereotype isn’t even geographically accurate. The Valley employs only 8 percent of the nation’s coders. All the other millions? They’re more like Devon, a programmer I met who helps maintain a security-software service in Portland, Oregon. He isn’t going to get fabulously rich, but his job is stable and rewarding: It’s 40 hours a week, well paid, and intellectually challenging. “My dad was a blue-collar guy,” he tells me—and in many ways, Devon is too.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Next Big Blue-Collar Job Is Coding
As Hurricane Harvey survivors struggle with the aftermath, the cleanup, with power outages and portable generators, reporters far away in comfortable offices in New York think they have a solution to their problems; a new carbon tax.
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I once had to power my home for a week from a portable generator, thanks to outages caused by a major tropical storm. A portable generator is an expensive way to produce power, but its better than letting the food spoil.
The last thing people in that situation need is higher fuel bills.
Early Friday, the Politico’s Josh Meyer reported that the Department of Homeland Security had formally classified the activities of the left-wing and anarchist-driven movement known as “antifa” as “domestic terrorist violence” — in April 2016. Yes, during the Obama administration, which chose to keep this assessment hidden.
My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.
This is actually more about pigments than inks, but it’s still fascinating stuff. There are a number of ‘traditional’ formulae for medieval ink; I have tried every one I came across, and it’s incredibly difficult to get right. I can imagine what a pain in the ass it would be to actually grind and prepare your own pigments.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on X-rays Identify Medieval Manuscript Ink
The history of academic criminology is one of grand pronouncements that don’t often prove out in the real world. In the 1960s and 1970s, for example, criminologists demanded that public policy attack the “root causes” of crime, such as poverty and racism. Without solving these problems, they argued, we could not expect to fight crime effectively. On this thinking, billions of taxpayer dollars poured into ambitious social programs—yet crime went up, not down. In the 1970s and 1980s and into the 1990s, as crime rates continued to spike, criminologists proceeded to tell us that the police could do little to cut crime, and that locking up the felons, drug dealers, and gang leaders who committed much of the nation’s criminal violence wouldn’t work, either.
These views were shown to be false, too, but they were held so pervasively across the profession that, when political scientist James Q. Wilson called for selective incapacitation of violent repeat offenders, he found himself ostracized by his peers, who resorted to ad hominem attacks on his character and motivations. Wilson’s work was ignored by awards committees, and criminological reviews of his books, especially Thinking About Crime and Crime and Human Nature, were almost universally negative. In the real-world policy arena, however, Wilson attained significant influence: the Broken Windows theory of policing and public order, which Wilson developed with criminologist George Kelling, became a key part of the proactive policing strategies that would be largely responsible for the great crime decline starting in the mid-1990s.
In short, while academic criminology has had much to say about crime, most of it has been wrong. How can an academic discipline be so wrongheaded? And should we listen to criminologists today when, say, they call for prisons to be emptied, cops to act as glorified playground attendants, and criminal sentences to be dramatically reduced, if not eliminated? Answers to the first question are readily available—and suggest the answer to the second.
