Why Hollywood is liberal

A sociology professor writes in the NY Times:

It’s award season in Hollywood, and it looks like the big winner will be progressive politics. ... What makes actors so liberal?

He gives some explanations, including demographic ones, but strangely omits the most obvious demographic, except to say that the industry "had become an ethnic niche for Jews."

There is, however, a third explanation worth pondering: that the emotional requirements of acting are conducive to progressive politics. ...

But in a recent paper, the psychologist Adam Waytz and his colleagues report a more nuanced finding: The main thing distinguishing liberals and conservatives in this regard isn’t how empathetic they are overall; rather, the key difference is how much empathy they feel for specific groups. Where conservatives empathize foremost with family members and country, liberals extend the bounds of empathy to include friends, the socially disadvantaged and citizens of the world, to whom they’d like government to lend a hand.

No, I really doubt that the Harvey Weinsteins of Hollywood have any more empathy for anyone, except fellow Jews. They live in gated communities and want personally nothing to do with the socially disadvantaged. Pretending to have empathy for specific groups is just part of their religion.

The same paper has this interview:

[Philip Galanes] The motto of the foundation is: “Every life has equal value.” And in your new book, Steven, there’s the idea that we can’t want something good for ourselves without wanting it for everyone. But in truth, I want better things for my husband and my kids than for you. Is that evil, or human?

[Bill Gates]]BG That’s natural. It’s even predicted by evolutionary logic. What makes Papua New Guinea — where there’s no police and revenge after revenge — different from Western society is that when we give ourselves over to the law, we want it to be executed impartially. We gain stability. But if you could get your son off, of course you’ll try.

[Steven Pinker] You left off a crucial piece in framing the proposition, Philip — which comes from Spinoza. He said those under the influence of reason desire nothing for themselves that they do not desire for all humankind. But reason is not a powerful part of human nature. Innately, we favor family over strangers, our tribe over other tribes. It’s only when we’re called upon to justify our beliefs — not consult our gut feelings, but convince others of the right way to act — that we conclude that all lives have equal value.

Spinoza was a 17-th century Jewish atheist philosopher. Pinker's "Better Angels" book attacks Christianity, and instead credits Spinoza for inventing peaceful thinking. Pinker has a sequel about to be published, Enlightenment Now.

In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing. ... Enlightenment Now makes the case for reason, science, and humanism ...

I am skeptical about humanism, but I'll wait for the book. I previously criticized Better Angels.

Thinking that all lives have equal value is not a rational or enlightened view. It is just what I call kindergarten morality. That is, it is something we tell small children in order to induce certain behaviors. With small kids, you can get away with unjustified platitudes if they sound fair to a 5-year-old.

Even Gates seems to concede that his own slogan runs contrary to evolutionary logic. Saying that lives have equal value is just a dumbed-down way of saying that we get stability from applying the laws impartially.

Update: I see that the Grammy Awards TV show featured Hillary Clinton reading from an anti-Trump book, and the show had the lowest viewer rating in its history. Face it -- Hollywood is at war with mainstream America.

New fossils from ex-Africans

NPR Radio reports:

Archaeologists in Israel have discovered the oldest fossil of a modern human outside Africa. The fossil suggests that humans first migrated out of the continent much earlier than previously believed. ...

A detailed analysis of the jawbone and the teeth confirmed that it indeed belonged to someone of our species, Homo sapiens. And when they dated the fossil, it turned out to be between 177,000 and 194,000 years old, making it the oldest known such fossil outside the African continent.

No, we have Neanderthal fossils older than that, and they are human and found outside Africa.

These new fossils are from humans who were not modern humans, and not known to be ancestors to modern humans. What was found was that the teeth look slightly more similar to Africans than to Neanderthals and other human relatives. And they only got about 100 out of Africa, so this is not a big deal.

Lost without Indian engineers

The San Jose Mercury News reports:

Foreigners are wrecking America, some say, but new data suggests that Silicon Valley would be lost without them.

About 71 percent of tech workers in the valley are foreign-born, compared to about 50 percent in the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward region, according to a new report based on 2016 census data. ...

Although 2016 data released by the federal government last year shows that outsourcing companies — mostly from India — raked in the bulk of H-1B visas, Google took more than 2,500 and Apple nearly 2,000 to hire foreign workers, about 60 percent of them holding master’s degrees.

Large companies, the Seattle Times pointed out, are better equipped to bring in workers under the H-1B.

Lost without them? Not a chance.

Americans sent a man to the Moon without Indian engineers. Sure, we had Werner von Braun, but nearly all the work was done by Americans.

And now we need Indians to make some web sites for Google and Facebook? This is pitiful. Every one of those H-1B jobs could be better done by an American.

Most people are irresponsible for their actions

Artist Raoul Martinez gives this TeDx talk:

Much about who we are is determined by the lottery of our birth. We inherit genes we didn't ask for, and are faced with a world we played no part in creating. In short, we are shaped by forces over which we have no control. Raoul Martinez examines the radical implications this has for our personal and political freedom. He challenges the way we think about responsibility, blame, punishment, and, ultimately identity, compelling us to question the forces — religious, cultural, economic and political — that have shaped us.

He previously wrote this book:

‘If our choices are produced by a brain we didn’t choose, I don’t think it makes sense to say we are truly responsible for our actions,” says Raoul Martinez, pausing to sip from his glass of stout. I eye him over my cappuccino. If I spilled his pint now, would I deserve punishment for this action, in the form of a punch on the nose from the 33-year-old author of this season’s must-have text for thinking radicals? Apparently not. “If that is true,” resumes Martinez, “then the moment we blame or say certain actions deserve punishment seems to be incoherent.”

This may seem the stuff of a million undergraduate philosophy essays on the free will versus determinism puzzle. ...

What makes his arguments unusual is that they lead to some chastening conclusions. Here are a few: prisons need to be emptied of all but those who pose a threat to society. Elections must be exposed as a shabby trick on a deluded populace, a lie of democratic choice in a system controlled by money. The media must be revealed as what it is – a corporate capitalist machine to mass-produce stupidity (with the happy exception of this article). The planet needs to be conceptually reconfigured as something other than a resource to be despoiled to keep us in lifestyles that don’t make us happy or fulfilled. The pursuit of economic growth, profit and consumption must be shown up as a damaging value system that, as he puts it, “drives us to chase things that don’t matter and disconnect from things that do”.

He appears to be some sort of neo-nazi who has carefully tempered his conclusions to be palatable to the Crtl-Left.

If he is right, then it is a waste of time to try to persuade or reform other peoples and cultures. If you want to raise your nation into something better, then you have to exile or exterminate the undesirables.

Democracy is a big sham. Votes are manipulated, and predicted by demographics. Ultimately you need some sort of ethnic cleansing to maintain democracy, or else the barbarians will take over.

Economic growth is another false god. We already have enough riches to make everyone happy, at least in the USA. Chasing profits disconnects us from the corrupting influences of forces outside our control.

He seems to believe that some people can achieve freedom, while most people are effectively slaves. We should stop pretending that the slaves have any agency in their behavior, and start treating them likes the slaves that they are.

I am not saying I agree with him. He states some strange opinions about what is good and bad. He overstates genetic determinism. But if he says he has no free will, maybe we should believe him.

Here is a leftist-atheist-evolutionist who denies free will:

I have no confidence in free will, even though, like all people, I feel as if I have agency. But if I think about it for a millisecond, I know that I could not do otherwise than what I do—nor can anybody else. Has that made me fatalistic, subject to a deteriorating mind? I don’t think so! ...

I don’t deny for a minute that all of us feel that we make real choices, and could have made different choices. But feeling that and believing that it’s true are different matters. We can still feel that we have agency, but at the same time realize that we don’t—and society will survive. It’s members will be like me, and though you may say that’s not such a good thing, I contend that a nation of determinists is not a nation doomed.

It is hard to see how democracy can work if most people do not have free will. It is also hard to see the libertarian ideal of a consensual society can exist, if people do not have the freedom to make the choices that they appear to have.

Brooks on the power of touch

David Brooks writes in the NY Times:

In 1945, the Austrian physician René Spitz investigated an orphanage that took extra care to make sure its infants were not infected with disease. The children received first-class nutrition and medical care, but they were barely touched, to minimize their contact with germs. The approach was a catastrophe. Thirty-seven percent of the babies died before reaching age 2.

It turns out that empathetic physical contact is essential for life. Intimate touch engages the emotions and wires the fibers of the brain together.

I don't believe this. It suggests that 37% of the babies died because they were not touched? No, they were dying of something else, and "barely touched" is just an excuse.

From googling this, I see that Spitz was a Jewish psychoanalyst student of Freud.

One unintended effect of this disenchantment is that it becomes easy to underestimate the risks inherent in any encounter. The woman who talked in an online article about her date with Aziz Ansari is being criticized because what happened to her was not like what happened to the victims of Harvey Weinstein and Louis C.K. There was no workplace power dynamic and no clear violation of consent. The assumption seems to be that as long as there’s consent between adults, everything else is kosher.

Surely that’s setting the bar amazingly low. Everything we know about touch suggests that even with full consent, the emotional quality of an encounter can have profound positive or negative effects. If Ansari did treat her coldly or neglectfully, it’s reasonable to think that the shame she felt right after was the surface effect of a deeper wound. Neglectful, dehumanizing sex is not harassment, but it’s some other form of serious harm.

This is weird. Ansari is not accused of treating her coldly or neglectfully. He is accused of the opposite.

The accusations against Louis C.K. did not involve any workplace power dynamic or clear violation of consent. His accusers were groupies who went to his hotel room after a comedy act, and they reported that he explicitly asked them for consent, and he refrained if they said no.

The abuse of intimacy erodes all the building blocks of agency: self-worth, resiliency and self-efficacy (the belief that you can control a situation). It is precisely someone who lives within a culture of supposedly zipless encounters who is most likely to be unable to take action when she feels uncomfortable. It’s the partner’s responsibility to be sensitive to this possibility.

The slut who went home with Ansari later complained that he was just like the other men that she dated. Did that mean that she was unable to recognize her discomfort? No, that's crazy. It meant that she knew exactly what she was doing, and was consciously consenting to it.

Brooks is probably mainly known for appearing on TV representing Republicans, when in fact he denounces Donald Trump in the harshest terms. For his personal life, see this 2015 Politico story:

New York Times columnist David Brooks is getting the full Washington book party treatment Thursday night, with a fancy party to be hosted at the Kalorama mansion of his old friends Atlantic owner David Bradley and his wife. The new Brooks book, The Road to Character, extols the virtue of a noble life via the study of a handful of leaders and thinkers. However, it’s the effusive 110-word display of admiration and gratitude Brooks gives to Anne C. Snyder, his 30-year-old former New York Times research assistant, which is catching people’s attention. Brooks, easily one of the most admired conservative columnists in America, with a distinguished list of bestselling books, and a vocal critic of morality and cultural habits, devotes the opening paragraph of the “Acknowledgements” section to Snyder, gushing about the “lyricism of her prose” and the “sensitivity of her observations.” Brooks says it was Snyder’s influence that led him to write a book about “morality and inner life” and that she was a close partner in the “three years of its writing.”

The big-thinking journalist even gives credit to Snyder for the ideas in The Road to Character, writing: “If there are any important points in this book, they probably come from Anne.” Contacted Wednesday, Brooks backpedaled a bit. “That phrase,” he said, “was probably a poor choice of words on my part. I was trying to be appreciative and lighthearted.” Yet Anne Snyder, who now lives in Houston, stands in the acknowledgements as the only person not given a specific title: Fact-checker, editor, friend, parent, or even “ex-wife.” Brooks recently divorced his wife of 28 years, Sarah Brooks, and she gets a brief nod in the very last paragraph of the Acknowledgements for the “amazing job” she has done raising the couple’s three kids. Brooks didn’t respond to a question about his relationship with Snyder, and when asked whether the columnist and Snyder had ever been in a relationship, Brooks’ publicist answered only in the present tense: “He is not in a relationship with Anne Snyder.”

Yeah, it was just what you think. Politico was astute to notice this. Brooks is now married to Anne Snyder. It is funny how a mistress can persuade him to dump his wife and write a book about “morality and inner life”.

I am not trying to MeToo Brooks, he is irritating with bogus research reporting and anti-American politics. One professor remarked:

We all know that New York Times columnist David Brooks deals in false statistics, he’s willing and able to get factual matters wrong, he doesn’t even fact-check his own reporting, his response when people point out his mistakes is irritation rather than thanks, he won’t run a correction even if the entire basis for one of his columns is destroyed, and he thinks that he thinks technical knowledge is like the recipes in a cookbook and can be learned by rote. A friend of facts, he’s not.

ADL targets whites for blame

CNN reports:

White supremacists were responsible for the majority of extremist killings in 2017 compared to other groups, according to a newly released report by the Anti-Defamation League.

Of the 34 people the league's Center on Extremism found were killed by domestic extremists last year, right-wing extremists killed 20 people, with 18 of those killed by white supremacists, it said in the report released Wednesday.

Really? Did I miss all those news stories? I only remember the one Charlottesville death, and that one might turn out to be an accident, or self-defense. The accused guy had no relation to the organizers, and his motives are unknown.

The ADL list of white supremacists includes one guy who "had been a supporter of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders—seemingly because he thought Sanders would smash the establishment." Another who "allegedly shot to death two of his roommates for making fun of his recent conversion to Islam." Another who "arrested on first-degree murder charges for the murder of his uncle, Randy Gene Baker. Baker’s wife and sister were similarly arrested. The motive was apparently personal."

This is a Jewish organization making bigoted and hateful attacks against non-Jews, and using group generalizations to impune bad motives to white non-Jews. Okay, fine, they hate non-Jews, whites, and right-wingers. They are like the mirror image of the Daily Stormer, which tries to blame everything on Jews.

No discernible empathy for Trayvon

From The Nation:

Indeed, four days after Zimmerman’s acquittal, the Pew Research Center asked people in a nationwide survey if they were satisfied or dissatisfied with the verdict. The racial divide could not have been starker: 86 percent of blacks surveyed expressed dissatisfaction, compared with 30 percent of whites. When respondents were asked if “race is getting more attention than it deserves” in the Zimmerman case, 60 percent of whites agreed, compared with just 13 percent of blacks. ...

Shortly after the Zimmerman verdict, my wife Stephanie and our children attended a bar mitzvah for the son of some dear friends down the block. Their kid now goes to the same high school as our daughter — a school that counts among its alumni both the musician Lauryn Hill and the alt-right shock jock Mike Enoch. At the reception, ... insisting that Zimmerman had killed Martin in self-defense. “I was taken aback,” Stephanie recalls. Our neighbor had “no discernible empathy for Trayvon.” ...

These new white supremacists are coming not with tiki torches but with reasoned arguments, buttressed by facts and figures, to make palatable racist ideas that many people, deep down, have always felt were true. And while white liberals have the luxury of deciding whether to maintain a fight against this white-nationalist threat, black people don’t; neither do Mexican Americans, Muslim Americans, or any number of immigrants.

To today's Left, you are a white supremacist if you side with the hispanic guy who was being beaten to death by a young black thug.

Empathy for Trayvon was almost 100% anti-white hatred. Those with reasoned arguments, facts and figures, inevitably conclude that there is an anti-white war going on.

You guys are all the same

The Daily Stormer gets called neo-nazi for pointing out things like this, but it says 68% of Those Metooed in 2017 Were Jewish. Not yet on the list is the biggest dark-skinned Muslim Hollywood star, Aziz Ansari:

We spoke to Grace last week. When we met, Ansari had just won Best Actor for his Netflix show “Master Of None” at the Golden Globes, where he declared his support for the fight against sexual assault and harassment by wearing a “Time’s Up” pin on the red carpet. ...

“I remember saying, ‘You guys are all the same, you guys are all the fucking same.’” Ansari asked her what she meant. ...

Grace compares Ansari’s sexual mannerisms to those of a horny, rough, entitled 18-year-old. She said so to her friends via text after the date and said the same thing to me when we spoke.

But Aziz Ansari isn’t an 18-year-old. He’s a 34-year-old actor and comedian of global renown who’s probably done more thinking about the nuances of dating and sex in the digital age than practically anyone else. He wrote a book about it, “Modern Romance”, and it was a New York Times bestseller. ...

Grace responded. “You ignored clear non-verbal cues; you kept going with advances.”

This is bizarre. By her own admission, Grace aggressively pursued Ansari and twice started to give him a blow job. When a woman puts a man's penis in her mouth, she is indeed giving a clear non-verbal cue. It appears to me that Ansazi did not ignore the cues at all.

Guys all the same? I infer from this that Grace has a long history of slutty behavior with men. She probably likes men who pretend to support feminist causes, while being sexually aggressive in private.

See Caitlin Flanagan for a more sensible view.

Update: This video has more analysis. They think Ansari is a big charlatan for promoting man-hating feminist drivel.

Increasingly Dangerous To Be A Christian

NPR Radio reports:

Report Shows It's Increasingly Dangerous To Be A Christian In Many Countries

Open Doors USA released its annual list of the most dangerous countries for Christians. Among those where anti-Christian hostility has grown are India and Turkey, two important U.S. allies. ...

Among the 50 countries on this watch list are ones you'd expect. North Korea is the worst place to be a Christian. Afghanistan is a close second. Most are countries where Islamist radicals target non-Muslims.

And the biggest offender is Afghanistan, which the USA has occupied since 2002.

Will someone please explain to me why the USA fights Islamic wars, for Islamic causes, and installs Islamic governments that persecute Christians?

Pinker swallowed the red pill

I mentioned that the Ctrl-Left was all upset that Steve Pinker made some favorable comments about the Alt-Right, and now a NY Times op-ed by Jesse Singal has joined the action.

The idea that Mr. Pinker, a liberal, Jewish psychology professor, is a fan of a racist, anti-Semitic online movement is absurd on its face,

Note the identity politics. The assumption is that you can deduce his views from the fact that he is a Jewish professor.

The clip was deeply misleading. If you watch the whole eight-minute video from which it was culled, it’s clear that Mr. Pinker’s entire point is that the alt-right’s beliefs are false and illogical — but that the left needs to do a better job fighting against them.

No, that is not Pinker's point at all. Pinker says that the Alt-Right has beliefs based on true facts, and on logical inferences from those facts.

This problem presents itself when it comes to “the often highly literate, highly intelligent people who gravitate to the alt-right: internet savvy, media savvy, who often are radicalized in that way, who ‘swallow the red pill,’ as the saying goes, the allusion from ‘The Matrix.’”

Pinker's point is that intelligent ppl on the Alt-Right have swallowed the red pill, and squarely accepted truths about the real world that mainstream academics try to conceal or deny.

That’s unfortunate, Mr. Pinker argues, because while someone might use these facts to support bigoted views, that needn’t be the case, because “for each one of these facts, there are very powerful counterarguments for why they don’t license racism and sexism and anarcho-capitalism and so on.”

This is an Alt-Right opinion. There is no agreement on the Alt-Right about what to do about racism and sexism. There is agreement that objective facts about race, sex, and human nature should be recognized, and addressed by policies.

Pinker has swallowed the red pill.

This is not really new, and his book The Blank Slate clearly demonstrates that he accepts aspects of human nature that his leftist colleagues prefer to ignore.

Pinker self-identifies as a Canadian-born Jewish atheist psychology professor. So it is fair to assume that his tribal sympathies lie there. Most of those on the Alt-Right have different identifications. Pinker is very hostile to Christianity, and has written that Christianity is an evil influence on the world. Some on the Alt-Right would say similar things about Judaism. So they have religious differences. That's obvious, and we don't need a NY Times op-ed to point that out.

Many on the Alt-Right expect Jews to be anti-Christian, so there is nothing remarkable there. The point here is that Pinker clearly identifies himself as someone who has taken the red pill, and that is what the Alt-Right likes to see.

The mental inference fallacy

Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett is an expert on emotions, and she mostly denies that there is any such thing in the way that ppl think of emotions.

In particular, she claims that ppl are mostly wrong when they try to read the emotions of others. In the case of animals, she writes:

In the world of animal research, mental inference is rampant. For example, baby rats, when separated from their mother after birth, make a high-pitched noise that sounds to us like crying. Some scientists inferred that the brain circuitry responsible for the crying must be the circuitry for distress. But these baby rats aren’t sad. They’re cold. The sound is just a byproduct as the baby rats try to regulate their body temperature ​— ​a task normally done by their absent mothers. It has nothing to do with emotion. But to an observer, even a well-meaning and highly intelligent one, the sound is easily and automatically perceived as sadness.

Mental inference is normal. Children assign fascinating personalities to their toys. Adults do likewise with their cars. People constantly guess at the meanings of each other’s actions, from raised eyebrows to teenage eye rolls. But scientists in the lab must resist the lure of mental inference, lest they fall prey to the mental inference fallacy and unknowingly taint their research.

Her popular book is How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. She just gave a TED Talk on the subject.

I haven't read the book, but I suspect that she is wrong in that she is denying human nature. Humans have natural innate biological emotions, and they are not all learned. But I suspect that she is right that nearly all humans are making fallacious mental inferences all the time. She claims to have a lot of published research to back her up on this, and I believe it.

Clumsy flirting is not an offense

This is funny. Feminists are in hysterics about this:

Paris (CNN)A collective of 100 French women including film star Catherine Deneuve have signed an open letter defending men's "freedom to pester" women, sparking an angry response from a group of feminist activists.
The open letter, which criticized the #MeToo movement and warned about a new "puritanism" sparked by recent sexual harassment allegations, was published Tuesday in French newspaper Le Monde.

The group of writers, performers, academics and businesswomen denounced a "hatred of men and sexuality" and the recent wave of "denunciations." Men's "freedom to pester" is "indispensable to sexual freedom," they wrote.
"Rape is a crime, but insistent or clumsy flirting is not an offense, nor is gallantry macho aggression." ...

Deneuve and others argue that while the Harvey Weinstein scandal had led to a "legitimate wake-up call to the sexual violence exercised against women," the "fever" of publicly denouncing abusers "really only serves the enemies of sexual freedom."

Cycle of shame: Harassed in the street, then again on social media

To make matters worse, they wrote, "the movement chains women to the status of the eternal victim" by framing them as "poor little things who are dominated by demon phallocrats."

Not only that, but the movement has spawned a wave of hatred toward the accused, they said, who are mentioned in the same breath as sexual aggressors without being given the chance to defend themselves.

This new type of "swift justice" has already claimed its victims, they wrote, citing men forced to resign "when all they did wrong was touch a knee."

This comment is a clear reference to the resignation of former UK Defense Secretary Michael Fallon, who stepped down in November after admitting to touching journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer's knee in 2002.

Even the NY Times published a MeTooism criticism:

But privately, I suspect, many of us, including many longstanding feminists, will be rolling our eyes, having had it with the reflexive and unnuanced sense of outrage that has accompanied this cause from its inception, turning a bona fide moment of moral accountability into a series of ad hoc and sometimes unproven accusations.

I am beginning to think that no one expects women to make any sense on this subject.

When those women wore black at the Golden Globes, were they trying to make a statement that they too had traded sexual favors to get movie roles? And when women complain about sexual harassment, how many of them are just trying to brag that they are pretty enough to attract male attention. Most of these complainers appear to be seriously mentally disturbed.

Pinker explains the Alt Right

Some leftists are upset by this:

Steven Pinker starts out by explaining that the alt-right are "highly literate, highly intelligent people" who have been "radicalized" by exposure to "true statements that have never been voiced on college campuses". ...

And what are some of these true statements he’s referring to? Handily, he provides examples in the very same speech:

“Capitalist societies are better than communist ones.”
“Men and women are not identical in their priorities, in their sexuality, and in their tastes and interests.”
“Different ethnic groups commit violent crimes at different rates.”
“Worldwide, the overwhelming majority of suicide-terrorist acts are committed by Islamist extremist groups.”

Here is an example of leftist denial of reality:

Susan Wojcicki is said to have been the loudest voice in Google’s executive ranks demanding the firing of heretic James Damore to encourage the others. The funny thing about it is that Wojcicki consistently explains that Damore had to be fired for the most maternal reasons imaginable: she felt that his memo affected her emotional relationship with her five children.

In her words:

Wojcicki, who was part of the team at Google that decided to fire Damore, recalled talking about it over dinner with her children, to whom she had always tried to promote diversity and equality.

“The first question they had about it [was], ‘Is that true?’” Wojcicki said on the latest Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher. “That really, really surprised me, because here I am — I’ve spent so much time, so much of my career, to try to overcome stereotypes, and then here was this letter that was somehow convincing my kids and many other women in the industry, and men in the industry, convincing them that they were less capable. That really upset me.”

So instead of answering whether the claims were true, she fired the guy.

As long as the Left is in the business of suppressing the truth, the Alt-Right will be primarily about exposing the truth. The truth will set you free.

Jerry Coyne says "Pinker smeared again by those who distort his words". I am not sure he has been smeared. This is a battle between the Alt-Right and the Ctrl-Left. Recognizing objective truths about groups puts Pinker on the side of the Alt-Right, even if he is a leftist Jewish atheist childless Canadian Harvard professor Trump-hater. If he went full Alt-Right, he would probably get kicked out of Harvard and ostracized from his intellectual circles. We can only expect him to go so far.

Skeptic article says Sandusky is innocent

Leftist evolutionist professor Jerry Coyne writes:

Was Jerry Sandusky, “the most hated man in America”, guilty of sexual child abuse?

Up to now, virtually everyone would have to answer the title question with a resounding “YES!”, but after reading a new article in Skeptic magazine by Fred Crews (former chair of English at Berkeley, a debunker of Freud and recovered-memory therapy and, for full disclosure, a friend), I’d have to answer “I’m not sure.” ...

At the time of the trial, nobody had any doubt about Sandusky’s guilt, and the press jumped on the story. ...

Then, in October of last year, Mark Pendergrast, who’s also published on the fallacy of “recovered memory”, came out with a book called The Most Hated Man in America: Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgement . In his view, Sandusky is “probably innocent.” But how could that be, with ten alleged victims in the trial  and the press backing up the allegations?

I haven’t read Pendergrast’s book, but the Skeptic article by Fred Crews, “Trial by therapy: the Jerry Sandusky case revisited“, summarizes the book in an accessible way. I’d recommend reading it, as Crews isn’t somebody who is gullible, and has spent his career as a skeptic, largely about Freud and issues of recovered memory. I note as well that THE expert on the fatal flaws of “recovered memory”, Elizabeth Loftus, has also endorsed Pendergrast’s book ...

Almost everyone believed Sandusky's guilt. Not me. At the time of the trial, I posted many times on this blog about the absurdity of the evidence against him. It was essentially all recovered memories of carefully coached witnesses who were also suing Penn State for millions of dollars. There was never any good evidence.

This case is just one of several where the public was overwhelmingly convinced of guilt, even tho the facts were wildly implausible. Others were the McMartin preschool, Duke lacrosse, UVa fraternity rape, Trayvon Martin, and Ferguson Mo police. These were all witch-hunts that no one with common sense should have ever believed.

When I first started posting on Penn State, I did not know anyone with an ounce of skepticism about the official story. No journalist or any public official showed any skepticism. It seemed obvious to me that the Freeh report was just a crooked lawyer hatchet job to generate legal fees for plaintiffs' attorneys.

Google Stifles Conservatives

A sample from the Damore v Google lawsuit:

Google Even Attempted to Stifle Conservative Parenting Styles

123. Google furnishes a large number of internal mailing lists catering to employees with alternative lifestyles, including furries, polygamy, transgenderism, and plurality3, for the purpose of discussing sexual topics. The only lifestyle that seems to not be openly discussed on Google's internal forums is traditional heterosexual monogamy.

124. In March of 2017, Google HR strongly suggested to a Google employee that conservative and traditional parenting techniques were unwelcome at Google.

125. Google HR brought up the following post that the employee made in response to a Google thread in which someone specifically requested conservative parenting advice:

"If I had a child, I would teach him/her traditional gender roles and patriarchy from a very young age. That's the hardest thing to fix later, and our degenerate society constantly pushes the wrong message."

126. Google HR stated, "We did not find that this post, on its face, violated any of Google's policies, but your choice of words could suggest that you were advocating for a system in which men work outside the home and women do not, or that you were advocating for rigid adherence to gender identity at birth. We trust that neither is what you intended to say. We are providing you with this feedback so that you can better understand how some Googlers interpreted your statements, and so that you are better equipped to ensure that Google is a place in which all Googlers are able to reach their full potential." In other words, Google scolded the Google Employee for, among other things, believing that gender identity is set at birth biologically-a position held by the vast majority of the world's populace that Google professes to serve.

127. These examples were just a few instances of Google bending over backwards to support liberal views while punishing conservative views.

This is not the worst. There are many pages of blacklists and other spiteful Google conduct.

Google could have avoided this lawsuit, and not fired Damore. My theory is that Google wanted this lawsuit. Sure, it will cost Google many millions of dollars to defend against it, but Google has other lawsuits against its racist and sexist management, and it probably regards those suits as more damaging.

Google also went out of its way to seize the dailystormer.com domain name, in a case of internet censorship purely for political views. (The site is currently at dailystormer.red. It is funny, irreverent, and sharply discusses political views of various groups, if you can get past the offensive imagery.) Apparently Google wants to be known as a censor of Alt Right views. It also wanted to be known as a big supporter of Hillary Clinton. Some social justice warriors will credit Google for fighting the good fight. I think that Google is a menace.

Google is a business, of course, and maybe its business interest is to be a 21st century white slaver company. It makes billions of dollars off white-haters and those sympathetic to white-haters. I am glad to see Damore call it out for what it is.

Likes Trump policies, hates the man

NPR Radio broadcast an interview on

Controversial Social Scientist Charles Murray Retires

Murray says that immigration, globalism, and liberalism are destroying America, and it will never be great again. He implies that any fixes would be so drastic that he would never publicly advocate them. America is in an irreversible decline, and he has no suggestion.

Furthermore, he is a never-Trumper. He hates everything about Trump, and probably voted for Hillary Clinton.

However, Murray agrees with everything Trump has actually done in office.

Why did anyone consider Murray a great thinker or social scientist? He is a walking contradiction. He is like Sam Harris and a long list of other intellectuals.

If you listen to what they say, and exclude all the sentences including the name "Trump", then you would conclude that they should be firm Trump supporters. But when asked about Trump, they start babbling nonsense about some sort of emotional rejection of him.

An intellectual should be able to give intelligent and reasoned arguments for his positions. And yet Murray cannot seem to give a coherent argument against Trump. What is the problem?

I believe America is declining. I posted before that we might not be able to put a man on the Moon again. But irreversible? No, it is just a matter or will.

When we put a man on the Moon, we were putting our best men on the project. We had a 24-year-old engineer in Houston making a critical decision for the Lunar Lander. Now that job would be filled using a lot of factors other than competence, and no one would similarly trust him or her.

Murray is either clouded by his limited thinking, or chicken to say what needs to be done.

Bonobos prefer socially dominant jerks

With all the talk about MeTooism, is there anyone who dares to say what baloney it all is?

Men and women have fundamentally different natures. They have to get together, or the human race dies out.

Men are the aggressors. Women passively enhance their beauty in the hopes of attracting a mate. Men have to prove themselves, and make the moves. Women act like prizes to be won, and just want to accept or reject the masculine advances.

Not always, of course. In some societies, the parents arrange marriages to cousins at an early age, and there is no dating.

New research shows that bonobos prefer the socially-dominant jerks, just like human female instincts, as NPR Radio reports:

NPR Radio reports today:
This bias toward helpfulness seems almost hardwired in humans. Back in 2007, for example, researchers reported that 6- and 10-month-old infants could evaluate social interactions that they saw in puppet shows. ...

Humans might not want to interact with someone who is not nice, but it looks like bonobos interpret the meanie's behavior as a sign of dominance. "Dominance is really important for apes because it determines access to resources, access to food and mating opportunities and things like that," says Krupenye. "They're attracted to an individual who might be a powerful friend or ally, as opposed to someone who is just generally helpful or pleasant."

The researchers did this experiment in bonobos because these apes are known for being particularly friendly and social.

See also SciAm article.

The researchers suggest that humans are different, but that is based on research on babies as young as 3 months. A 3-month-old human baby can barely focus her eyes on a shiny object. I do not believe that such a baby can make the complex social judgments described here.

Whether you agree with this or not, millions of women dress up and put on make up in order to attract socially dominant jerks making sexual advances.

The MeTooism crowd say that it is wrong for a man to make unwanted sexual advances. Maybe so, but why is it any more wrong than for a woman to dress like a slut?

The situations seem symmetrical to me. In both cases, the men and woman are following customary mating rituals. The woman who dresses like a slut is potentially creating discomfort for most of the men around her sexual advertising.

But men like to look at attractive women, you might say. This is like saying women like to attract male attention. Yes, they do, but there is a time and a place for it. Men usually do not like being distracted by cockteasers in the office, when they are trying to get some work done.

You might say that this burden on men is trivial. Maybe so, but is it any more trivial than the burdens on women that make up most of the MeTooism complaints?

Any honest discussion of MeTooism should address these issues: (1) Women instinctively desire socially dominant jerks. (2) Women only complain about sexual harassment if the man is not high-status enough. (3) Women who dress like sluts are just as obnoxious as the men who sexually harass.

My guess is that no one wants to address these issues because no one wants to deal with a bunch of irrational feminists anyway.

Who controls what you see

CH has posted a chart of who owns and runs the major media companies that control your mind. I was surprised at how few of them are white people.

Do you expect your news reporting to be ideologically balanced? Your entertainment? Of course not. Consider the source.