Sunday, February 25, 2018

Defining the left-right dichotomy

Thomas Sowell has explained clearly the differences between right and left wing politics, and wrote this is a book several years ago:
THE LEFT-RIGHT DICHOTOMY

One of the fertile sources of confusion in discussions of ideological issues is the dichotomy between the political left and the political right. Perhaps the most fundamental difference between the left and the right is that only the former has even a rough definition. What is called “the right” are simply the various and disparate opponents of the left. These opponents of the left may share no particular principle, much less a common agenda, and they can range from free-market libertarians to advocates of monarchy, theocracy, military dictatorship or innumerable other principles, systems and agendas.

To people who take words literally, to speak of “the left” is to assume implicitly that there is some other coherent group which constitutes “the right.” Perhaps it would be less confusing if what we call “the left” would be designated by some other term, perhaps just as X. But the designation as being on the left has at least some historical basis in the views of those deputies who sat on the left side of the president’s chair in France’s Estates General in the eighteenth century. A rough summary of the vision of the political left today is that of collective decision-making through government, directed toward—or at least rationalized by—the goal of reducing economic and social inequalities. There may be moderate or extreme versions of the left vision or agenda but, among those designated as “the right,” the difference between free market libertarians and military juntas is not simply one of degree in pursuing a common vision, because there is no common vision among these and other disparate groups opposed to the left — which is to say, there is no such definable thing as “the right,” though there are various segments of that omnibus category, such as free market advocates, who can be defined. ...

Conservatism, in its original sense, has no specific ideological content at all, since everything depends on what one is trying to conserve. In the last days of the Soviet Union, those who were trying to preserve the existing Communist regime were rightly referred to as “conservatives,” though what they were trying to conserve had nothing in common with what was advocated by Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek or William F. Buckley in the United States, much less Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, a leading conservative in the Vatican who subsequently became Pope. Specific individuals with the “conservative” label have specific ideological positions, but there is no commonality of specifics among “conservatives” in different venues.
No, the commies were not conservatism, and conservatism is not just the opposition to social change.

Sowell classified Nazis and Fascists as left-wing, because they were socialists seeking social change. Yes, they were socialists. They were called right-wing largely because they were anti-communist, and hence hated by leftist commie sympathizers.

You cannot define a movement by saying what it is not. It is defined by its beliefs.

Right-wingers are guided by a belief in the natural order of the world. Sometimes that order is rooted in human nature, faith, science, culture, tradition, or natural law. The precise reasoning may vary, but their conclusion is that changing the natural order is impossible, impractical, or undesirable.

Left-wingers are guided by what I call kindergarten morality. They only accept concepts of fairness that can be explained to a five-year-old. If someone has more toys than someone else, they will think that it is unfair. The right-winger will probe deeper, and is likely to conclude that there are good reasons for how things are.

Here is a leftist opinion from Steve Pinker:
AR: You write that “globalization helped the lower and middle classes of poor countries, and the upper class of rich countries, much more than it helped the lower middle class of rich countries. Of the claim that only the rich are doing well, while everyone else is “stagnating or suffering,” you write “most obviously, it’s false for the world as a whole: the majority of the human race has become much better.” How should American domestic politics reflect this fact: That our planet, however grim it may look, is fairly prosperous? Are conventional, free-market economics actually working?

SP: This is an acute dilemma. If you are a morally serious person — whether a humanist or a Judeo-Christian, who believes that all human lives have equal value — then policies that lift billions of people out of crushing poverty at the expense of millions of Americans who are laid off from factory jobs are a moral no-brainer. But of course it would be political suicide for an American politician to consider this tradeoff for millisecond. Still, there are other America-centric reasons to favor globalization: cheaper goods for hundreds of millions of American consumers; bigger markets for American exporters; and the greater stability of a richer world, with fewer migrants, epidemics, and insurgent movements.
It would be political suicide to express that, because no one really believes that all human lives have equal value. That is just a silly slogan that you might say to a kindergarten class to get them to all do the same thing.

A right-winger would be more skeptical of a plan to gut the American middle class in order to reduce Third World (and enrich the super-rich). There will always be poverty. You can't build a great nation by selling out its citizens to outsiders. You cannot expect people to be like other people on the other side of the world.

Saturday, February 24, 2018

Billy Graham on the Jewish stranglehold

The late Billy Graham was a devout evangelical Christian, so no one should have expected him to praise rival religions. His son preaches about the evils of Islam.

The Atlanta newspaper reports:
At first, Graham denied comments Haldeman made in his book, "The Haldeman Diaries" that Graham and Nixon had disparaged Jews in a conversation following a prayer breakfast in Washington D.C. on Feb. 1, 1972. Haldeman said Graham had talked about a Jewish “stranglehold” on the country.

''Those are not my words," Graham said in May 1994. ''I have never talked publicly or privately about the Jewish people, including conversations with President Nixon, except in the most positive terms.''

Graham was believed and the matter dropped until 2002 when tapes from Nixon’s White House were released by the National Archives. The 1972 conversation between Nixon and Graham was among those tapes, and Graham had to face the fact that he had been recorded saying the things of which Haldeman accused him.

The tapes proved damning.

''They're the ones putting out the pornographic stuff,'' Graham had said to Nixon. The Jewish ''stranglehold has got to be broken or the country's going down the drain,'' he continued.

Graham told Nixon that Jews did not know his true feelings about them.

''I go and I keep friends with Mr. Rosenthal (A.M. Rosenthal) at The New York Times and people of that sort, you know. And all -- I mean, not all the Jews, but a lot of the Jews are great friends of mine, they swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I'm friendly with Israel. But they don't know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country. And I have no power, no way to handle them, but I would stand up if under proper circumstances.''
I do not know what Graham's concerns about Jews were precisely, but it is a fact that "They're the ones putting out the pornographic stuff". The newspaper does not say anything to the contrary, except that Billy Graham apologized to the Jews. I guess he wanted to keep getting favorable stories in the NY Times and other Jewish media.

Apparently some people were offended by what Graham said.

It is a little silly to promote a religion, unless you can explain why it is superior to the alternatives. Graham may have thought that Jews and Moslems and others were going to Hell. So what? If you believe him, then you are probably a Christian anyway. If you subscribe to some other religion, then you are rejecting his message, and have no reason to care about his opinions.

Friday, February 23, 2018

Neanderthals were artists and thought symbolically

New research:
Hominins have lived in Western Spain’s Maltravieso Cave off and on for the last 180,000 years. At some point in those long millennia of habitation, some of them left behind hand stencils, dots and triangles, and animal figures painted in red on the stone walls, often deep in the dark recesses of the cave. The art they left behind offers some of the clearest evidence for a key moment in human evolution: the development of the ability to use symbols, like stick-figure animals on a cave wall or spoken language. ...

Now, two new studies have dated cave art and decorated shell jewelry from sites in Spain to at least 20,000 years before the first [African] Homo sapiens arrived in Europe. That date offers the first clear evidence of Neanderthal art, which means our extinct relatives were also capable of symbolic thought. ...

“There was already evidence that Neanderthals were behaving symbolically, using pigments and beads presumably as body adornment. We didn’t think it would be a huge leap if we found they also painted caves,” he told Ars Technica. “But if you had asked academics if they thought Neanderthals painted caves, most would have said ‘no.’”
Did they think that Africans figured out how to paint caves all by themselves?

Evidence has been accumulating for a long time now that Africans did not discover cave art until after they started interbreeding with European Neanderthals, about 40k years ago.

The article says that Neanderthals were "our extinct relatives", but they were actually direct ancestors of today's white Europeans.

It appears that the European Neanderthals foolishly accepted the Africans as refugees, but the Africans murdered the men, raped the women, and stole the inventions like cave art.

Thursday, February 22, 2018

Professor dares to defend culture

Penn law prof Amy Wax writes in the WSJ:
The culture of the Plains Indians was designed for nomadic hunters, but is not suited to a First World, 21st-century environment. Nor are 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. ...

A response published in the Daily Pennsylvanian, our school newspaper, and signed by five of my Penn Law School colleagues, charged us with the sin of praising the 1950s ...

Shortly after the op-ed appeared, I ran into a colleague I hadn’t seen for a while and asked how his summer was going. He said he’d had a terrible summer, and in saying it he looked so serious I thought someone had died. He then explained that the reason his summer had been ruined was my op-ed, and he accused me of attacking and causing damage to the university, the students and the faculty. One of my left-leaning friends at Yale Law School found this story funny—who would have guessed an op-ed could ruin someone’s summer? ...

Furthermore, the charge that a statement is “code” for something else, or a “dog whistle” of some kind — we frequently hear this charge leveled, even against people who are stating demonstrable facts — is unanswerable. It is like accusing a speaker of causing emotional injury or feelings of marginalization. Using this kind of language, which students have learned to do all too well, is intended to bring discussion and debate to a stop—to silence speech deemed unacceptable. ...

As John Stuart Mill said, “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”
She also got attacked for this:
She later said in an interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian that she thinks Anglo-Protestant cultural norms are superior.

"I don't shrink from the word 'superior,'" she said. “Everyone wants to come to the countries that exemplify" these values. "Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans.”
The word "Nazi" has become just a racial slur against white people. It doesn't really mean anything, except that the name-caller does not like whites.

Being pro-immigration or pro-diversity is just code for hating white people. Usually the proponents do not have any serious arguments, and they are embarrassed to admit that they just hate white people.

Wednesday, February 21, 2018

Why anonymous speech is right-wing

An anonymous poster writes this insight:
Anything anonymous inevitably turns Right Wing, because the only point of being Left Wing is for status, and you can’t win status anonymously, so left wing talking points quickly dissipate, there is no incentive to repeat the pretty lies of the left.

The less anonymous the forum, the less about truth and more about status-signalling the political discussion becomes. It’s why Left Wingers create and congregate in the most deanonymous discussion places, they quickly abandon anonymous places. They can’t hang with unvarnished discussion, and have no status to gain there, so they leave.
This could be empirically tested.

For example everyone praises Martin Luther King Jr in publicly identified speech. But what if we compare all that praise to what people say anonymously?

Reviewers all praised the movie Black Panther. Is it really that good? What do ppl say anonymously?

Almost no public figures criticize MeTooism. A couple of celebrities had some mild criticisms and were forced to recant. This is not healthy. What do ppl say anonymously?

Tuesday, February 20, 2018

5 Best Arguments Against Immigration

Here is a libertarian defense of immigration, at Reason.com:
The 5 Best Arguments Against Immigration—and Why They're Wrong ...

They take our jobs and lower wages.
Yes, that is true, but he says: "low-skilled immigrants make things cheaper for all Americans". The biggest thing pro-business libertarians want is lower wages.
They're using massive amounts of welfare.
This one is true also, but they argue that immigrants don't always claim the benefits they are allowed, and thus they collect benefits at a lower rate than poor blacks do.
They don't pay their fair share.
He claims that half of the illegals pay taxes. I doubt it.
They broke the law to get here and they're bringing all their relatives.
No, not all their relatives. Millions of them are on waiting lists to get in.
They're not assimilating.
They say: "By the third generation, just 25 percent of Hispanic households say that Spanish is the dominant language at home.

Maybe assimilation is not the best word here. Even when Mexicans and Hindus and others learn to speak English, they still do not become genuinely American.

Here is what I found most annoying:
More important, immigrants grow the population, which stimulates economic growth, the only way over the long term to improve standards of living.
No, this is crazy libertarian talk. The USA would be a much nicer place if we had 200M residents, and a lot fewer immigrants. While immigration has raised the GDP, it has lowered the standard of living.

And of course the immigrants are not libertarian. The more immigrants we have, the less we will have a free society.

Monday, February 19, 2018

Everyone wants rule by white Europeans

Amy Wax still generates controversy for some common-sense remarks she once made, so I read this Sept 2017 essay attacking her:
I was one of the 33 members of the University of Pennsylvania Law School faculty to sign a letter criticizing Amy Wax’s (joint with Larry Alexander) op-ed and subsequent comments regarding the decline of bourgeois culture and its role in America’s perceived social ills. ...

For starters, in defending her claims regarding the superiority of Anglo-Protestant norms, Wax stated “Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans.” This might be surprising to the hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants to African countries over the last two decades. While it is true that numbers 1 and 2 on the list of top destination of immigrants are the US and Germany, they are followed by those well-known WASP enclaves of Russia and Saudi Arabia. Number 5 on the list (the UK) fits Wax’s claim, but it is closely followed by that modern-day Mayberry the United Arab Emirates. ...

Wax’s evidence for the proposition that everyone wants to come to Anglo countries due to the cultural norms is about as robust as the evidence for the claim that diversity is our strength. Could be, but how could you prove it? If, as Wax and Alexander suggest in their original op-ed, the US began to deviate from its winning cultural recipe in the late 1960s, their empirical prediction should be that there is less demand to get into the US today than there was in the glorious 1950s.
Is this professor joking?

Yes, there is a lot less demand to live in Detroit since it started going diverse in the 1950s.

Nobody wants to live in Saudi Arabia or UAE, except for the wealth created by white Europeans.

The Chinese are colonizing Africa to exploit its natural resources but they are also coming to the USA to the maximum extent that our immigration and visa laws allow.

This attack on Wax is surprisingly lame. Somehow this guy thought that the issue was important enough that Wax should be condemned, but his essay confirms what she says.

Now her Penn Dean has asked her to take a leave of absence!

Sunday, February 18, 2018

Pinker defends cultural appropriation

More from Pinker:
Steven Pinker: Identity politics is the syndrome in which people’s beliefs and interests are assumed to be determined by their membership in groups, particularly their sex, race, sexual orientation, and disability status. Its signature is the tic of preceding a statement with “As a,” as if that bore on the cogency of what was to follow. Identity politics originated with the fact that members of certain groups really were disadvantaged by their group membership, which forged them into a coalition with common interests: Jews really did have a reason to form the Anti-Defamation League.

But when it spreads beyond the target of combatting discrimination and oppression, it is an enemy of reason and Enlightenment values, including, ironically, the pursuit of justice for oppressed groups. For one thing, reason depends on there being an objective reality and universal standards of logic. As Chekhov said, there is no national multiplication table, and there is no racial or LGBT one either. ...

In this regard nothing could be more asinine than outrage against “cultural appropriation”—as if it’s a bad thing, rather than a good thing, for a white writer to try to convey the experiences of a black person, or vice versa.
So what usually follows "as a"? Who is playing the identity politics game?

About 99% of the time, it is someone pushing leftist-Democrat politics based on hatred of white Christian men.

Jews have reason to promote their group interests, regardless of whether they are advantaged or disadvanted. Jews today are probably the most privileged group in the USA, and they still pursue their group interests.

The ADL just got caught making a false claim that the recent school shooter was a white nationalist.

At least Pinker defends free speech:
AR: There is, as you recognize a “liberal tilt” in academia. And you write about it: “Non-leftist speakers are frequently disinvited after protests or drowned out by jeering mobs,” and “anyone who disagrees with the assumption that racism is the cause of all problems is called a racist.” How high are the stakes in universities? Should we worry?

SP: Yes, for three reasons. One is that scholars can’t hope to understand the world (particularly the social world) if some hypotheses are given a free pass and others are unmentionable. As John Stuart Mill noted, “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.” In The Blank Slate I argued that leftist politics had distorted the study of human nature, including sex, violence, gender, childrearing, personality, and intelligence. The second is that people who suddenly discover forbidden facts outside the crucible of reasoned debate (which is what universities should be) can take them to dangerous conclusions, such as that differences between the sexes imply that we should discriminate against women (this kind of fallacy has fueled the alt-right movement). The third problem is that illiberal antics of the hard left are discrediting the rest of academia, including the large swaths of moderates and open-minded scholars who keep their politics out of their research. (Despite the highly publicized follies of academia, it’s still a more disinterested forum than alternatives like the Twittersphere, Congress, or ideologically branded think tanks.) In particular, many right-wingers tell each other that the near-consensus among scientists on human-caused climate change is a conspiracy among politically correct academics who are committed to a government takeover of the economy. This is sheer nonsense, but it can gain traction when the noisiest voices in the academy are the repressive fanatics.
So Pinker should be all in favor of those who attack the leftist identity politics. The leftist identity politics primarily attacks whites, men, Christians, and straights. The necessary response is to defend those groups. In particular, white Christian men should culturally appropriate as much as possible.

Saturday, February 17, 2018

Legally fired for telling the truth

Ars Tecnhnica reorts:
Former Google engineer James Damore has attempted to take civil and legal action against his former employer after being fired in August, but on Thursday, a federal memo revealed that one of Damore's filings has been unequivocally denied.

The National Labor Relations Board published its memo this week, which was issued in January after Damore filed a charge against his former employer on August 8. In spite of Damore withdrawing his NLRB filing in September, the board proceeded to examine and issue its own ruling: Google "discharged [Damore] only for [his] unprotected conduct while it explicitly affirmed [his] right to engage in protected conduct." The NLRB emphasized that any charge filed by Damore on the matter should be "dismissed."

In explaining the board's reasoning, NLRB member Jayme Sophir points to two specific parts of the controversial memo circulated by Damore in August: Damore's claim that women are "more prone to 'neuroticism,' resulting in women experiencing higher anxiety and exhibiting lower tolerance for stress" and that "men demonstrate greater variance in IQ than women."

Sophir describes how these gender-specific claims resemble other cases decided by the NLRB that revolved around racist, sexist, and homophobic language in the workplace. She says that specific Damore statements were "discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment, notwithstanding [his] effort to cloak [his] comments with 'scientific' references and analysis, and notwithstanding [his] 'not all women' disclaimers. Moreover, those statements were likely to cause serious dissension and disruption in the workplace."
Got that? If you recite liberal egalitarian opinions that are contrary to the facts, you are protected. If you cite scientific studies that contradict those opinions, you can be summarily fired.

Thursday, February 15, 2018

H-1B workers are like low-wage dog walkers

A couple of leftist Jewish professors write:
While the program might seem crazy at first, it would not be that different from the existing H1-B program, except that individuals like Mary rather than corporations like Google and Exxon would sponsor the workers.
The proposal is to bring in sub-minimum-wage migrants to do jobs like dog-walking.

It would make more sense to export our dogs.

This must be how the slave trade of 300 years ago was justified. It cost more to pay free citizens to pick cotton, so it was more economical to import slaves.

Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Pinker's new book promotes humanism

Harvard Jewish atheist psychologist Steven Pinker has a new book out about everything good can be credited to rationalist atheist Enlightenment thinkers a few centuries ago. They taught us that it is good to live in peace and harmony, and rescued us from the tyranny of narrow-minded Christians.

He writes a British summary:
The idea of a universal human nature brings us to a third theme, humanism. The thinkers of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment saw an urgent need for a secular foundation for morality, because they were haunted by a historical memory of centuries of religious carnage: the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch-hunts, the European wars of religion.

They laid that foundation in what we now call humanism, which privileges the wellbeing of individual men, women, and children over the glory of the tribe, race, nation or religion. It is individuals, not groups, who are sentient – who feel pleasure and pain, fulfillment and anguish. Whether it is framed as the goal of providing the greatest happiness for the greatest number or as a categorical imperative to treat people as ends rather than means, it was the universal capacity of a person to suffer and flourish, they said, that called on our moral concern.

Fortunately, human nature prepares us to answer that call. That is because we are endowed with the sentiment of sympathy, which they also called benevolence, pity and commiseration. Given that we are equipped with the capacity to sympathise with others, nothing can prevent the circle of sympathy from expanding from the family and tribe to embrace all of humankind, particularly as reason goads us into realising that there can be nothing uniquely deserving about ourselves or any of the groups to which we belong. We are forced into cosmopolitanism: accepting our citizenship in the world.
Also in the WSJ:
To what do we owe this progress? Does the universe contain a historical dialectic or arc bending toward justice? The answer is less mysterious: The Enlightenment is working. Our ancestors replaced dogma, tradition and authority with reason, debate and institutions of truth-seeking. They replaced superstition and magic with science. And they shifted their values from the glory of the tribe, nation, race, class or faith toward universal human flourishing.
So Pinker is a universalist egalitarian leftist who believes that he should sympathize with people on the other side of the world as much as his own family.

Pinker has no kids. He is married to a woman philosopher with no kids.

I am all for using reason and evidence, but this is kindergarten morality. Reason leads me to favor my family, tribe, and nation over others.

Even if you favor all those supposedly enlightened liberal values, most of the rest of the world does not. Helping the rest of the world means undermining those values.

Pinker complains about the Crusades, but he does not get to the heart of why the European Enlightenment was superior to what was happening in the Islamic world. An essential part was that the Christians were willing to fight wars to keep the Moslems out of Europe. That was far more important than the ramblings of those Jewish/Atheist thinkers that Pinker likes to cite.

He says that he favors a humanism that privileges individuals over groups, but has any great civilization ever been built with such thinking? Or without waging wars against enemies?

Bill Gates recommends Pinker's book. I haven't seen it. It probably has a lot of legitimate facts about how modern life is good, but his theorizing about causality is questionable.

Sunday, February 11, 2018

MeTooism is a plot to enslave men

For the last week, the mainstream news media has been filled with stories about how some White House aide had some fights with his ex-wives. The most serious specific allegation is that they had a fight 2 years into their 5-year marriage, and she ran off to the shower, and he opened the shower door, grabbed her by the shoulders, and yelled at her. She also said that the good times outweighed the bad, that he is a good man, and that she is now consumed with jealousy about his new girlfriend.

This is really trivial. It is hard to see how anyone could think that this was relevant to his White House job, even if it were true. Something else must be going on here.

I think that we are witnessing a new movement taking hold. A coalition of feminists and white knights is promoting the belief that in any dispute between a man and a woman, we must always take the side of the woman. They are aided and abetted by opportunists, who want to sell gossip or take down enemies, and cowards, who are afraid to express their true opinions.

As evidence for this, I point to the increasing ridiculousness of the accusations. It is as if the feminists and white knights deliberately want to make a spectacle out of baseless accusations, in order to make the point that we must all take the woman's side even if it has no merit.

Another target in the news is Woody Allen. The accusations against him don't make any sense, and were obviously cooked up to support a child custody dispute in court.

Furthermore, the accusers in most of these cases are pretty obviously mentally ill. The publicity is not helping them, because it is fueling their delusions, shame, anger, paranoia, and weirdo obsessions.

So what is the point of these accusations? What is the endgame that the feminists and white knights seek?

Believe it or not, there are people who genuinely believe that we should move to a matriarchal society. You see it from Hillary Clinton and others who say "the future is female". But you also see it from some men who consider themselves traditional conservatives. They seem to believe that marriages will be better if the husband is under a constant blackmail threat. That is, if things go bad and the husband does not behave as the wife wishes, then she will claim some sort of abuse, and he will be ruined. She will get the house, the money, and the kids, and he will be permanently blackballed from any respectable position in our society. His future employers will be told to fire him, as what happened to Porter, the White House aid.

What if we passed a law saying that in any dispute between a white man and a black man, the white man is always to be believed and the the black man is not allowed to testify? Everyone would agree that his would just be a trick to enslave blacks. Likewise, MeTooism is a trick to enslave men. The purpose to blackmail all men by holding them under a threat of an accusation from many years that will be impossible to refute.

Saturday, February 10, 2018

Women once ruled computers

Bloomberg excerpts Brotopia:
Based on data they had gathered from the same sample of mostly male programmers, Cannon and Perry decided that happy software engineers shared one striking characteristic: They “don’t like people.” In their final report they concluded that programmers “dislike activities involving close personal interaction; they are generally more interested in things than in people.” There’s little evidence to suggest that antisocial people are more adept at math or computers. Unfortunately, there’s a wealth of evidence to suggest that if you set out to hire antisocial nerds, you’ll wind up hiring a lot more men than women.

Cannon and Perry’s research was influential at a crucial juncture in the development of the industry. In 1968, a tech recruiter said at a conference that programmers were “often egocentric, slightly neurotic,” and bordered on “limited schizophrenia,” also noting a high “incidence of beards, sandals, and other symptoms of rugged individualism or nonconformity.” Even then, the peculiarity of male programmers was well-known and celebrated; today, the term “neckbeard” is used almost affectionately. There is, of course, no equivalent term of endearment for women. In fact, the words “women” and “woman” don’t appear once in Cannon and Perry’s 82-page paper; the researchers refer to the entire group surveyed as “men.” ...

Damore’s argument hinged on the conventional wisdom that being interested in people somehow correlated with poor performance as a software engineer. Men were more likely to be antisocial than women; therefore, he intimated, men were inherently better programmers. Damore presented this as a novel observation. In fact, it was the same lazy argument advanced by Cannon and Perry 50 years earlier.
The article (and book, I guess) seems to accept the idea that men are naturally more likely to be antisocial nerds, but reject the idea that men are naturally more suited to computer programming.

If you have some sort of equalist philosophical prejudice, then I guess you would believe that men and women, whites and blacks, Catholics and Moslems, etc would all be equally suited for computer programming. But then I would think that you would insist on believing that all are equally likely to be antisocial nerds.

Once you admit that one group is more likely to include antisocial nerds, then it seems obvious that the group will be more suited to some occupations than others.

Or perhaps there is a belief that our society should be re-engineered in order to make life easier for women and harder for antisocial nerds. If computer programmers were forced to spend half their time doing child care, then maybe it would not appeal to antisocial nerds anymore, and women would take over the field.

Tuesday, February 06, 2018

Female professionals going back 20 years

From a NY Post op-ed:
Men are scared, and feminists are delighted. But the urge to call out and punish male sexual transgression is bound to clash with an inescapable truth: We’re all in this together, men and women.

Consider what’s happening in the capital of Florida. Female staffers and lobbyists have found “many male legislators will no longer meet with them privately,” reported The Miami Herald. “I had a senator say, ‘I need my aide here in the room because I need a chaperone,’ ” lobbyist Jennifer Green told the paper. “I said, ‘Senator, why do you need a chaperone? ... Do you feel uncomfortable around me?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘anyone can say anything with the door shut.’”

“I’m getting the feeling that we’re going back 20 years as female professionals,” said Green, who owns her company. “I fully anticipate I’m going to be competing with another firm that is currently owned by some male, and the deciding factor is going to be: ‘You don’t want to hire a female lobbying firm in this environment.’”

This kind of thinking is catching on in aggressively P.C. Silicon Valley, where men are taking to message boards like Reddit to express interest in sex segregation — sometimes labeled “Men Going Their Own Way,” or the “Man-o-Sphere.” How will that work out for women in the tech industry, where they already face substantial challenges?
VP Mike Pence figured this out many years ago. Don't give women the opportunity to make a false accusation.

If trends continue, cautious men will keep all women at a distance, except when using prostitution services. Prostitution will be seen as the most politically correct sexual experience.

Meanwhile, the Wash. Post reports on male frustration on the other side of the world:
Nigel, a handsome gannet bird who lived on a desolate island off the coast of New Zealand, died suddenly this week. Wherever his soul has landed, the singles scene surely cannot be worse.

The bird was lured to Mana Island five years ago by wildlife officials who, in hopes of establishing a gannet colony there, had placed concrete gannet decoys on cliffsides and broadcast the sound of the species’ calls. Nigel accepted the invitation, arriving in 2013 as the island’s first gannet in 40 years. But none of his brethren joined him.

In the absence of a living love interest, Nigel became enamored with one of the 80 faux birds. He built her — it? — a nest. He groomed her “chilly, concrete feathers ... year after year after year,” the Guardian reported. He died next to her in that unrequited love nest, the vibrant orange-yellow plumage of his head contrasting, as ever, with the weathered, lemony paint of hers.
A trolling neo-nazi site celebrates:
Everything we’d hoped for when we began the Metooist journey is coming to fruition.

This is more than we ever could have hoped for.

There are two angles in this golden triangle:

Jews are getting destroyed at a much higher rate than anyone else
It is making feminism totally non-viable as a system, given that the implications of “any woman can say anything and be believed” means that no man is willing to be around women, and women are thus less desirable as employees or colleagues

This is liberal lupus: the body is attacking itself.

And the thing about this train is: it’s like an Amtrak – it has no brakes!

They can’t somehow walk this back or say that a time is coming when men won’t be mobbed and fired for touching a woman’s leg. They have committed themselves to giving women the right to destroy the life and career of any man they wish to target, and there is no path to take away that power within the liberal system. This is very similar to the way that when they triggered blacks and Antifa to attack Confederate heroes, there was no way to stop them from going after Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.

The liberal Jewish system can only go forward, never backward.

And how can sustained metoo possibly be compatible with the modern mutlti-sexual workplace? ...

The feminist idea was forced on society by Jews. It is unnatural. And its ultimate end is obviously sex segregation, which is the thing that it was initially designed to oppose.

Again, this is similar to the way blacks are now demanding racial segregation at universities and elsewhere.

The natural order will always assert itself. Everything works toward that end. The only way to keep the natural order at bay is to constantly be applying force against it, as the Jews have done. But the longer you do that, the more force is necessary as the pressure builds.

This is why this super-authoritarianism has emerged from the J-left, where everything is about shutting down speech and punishing people for any small disagreement with the system while also attempting to bury white people under a mountain of brown third world sludge. But that mindset is what created Donald Trump. And the pressure that is being applied to Donald Trump will ultimately create an even more aggressive right-wing force.

The tides of the universe itself are now turning in our favor, friends. All we need to do is continue the sabotage of the social order.
I wonder if the MeTooism folks realize that their actions are aligned with neo-nazi trolls.

Monday, February 05, 2018

No immigration reform is feasible

I meant to post of list of things that I have learned in 2017. I have sometimes posted such lists in previous years.

Here are a couple.

I no longer think that any reasonable immigration reform or compromise is possible. The white-haters are convinced that they now have the momentum to turn the USA into a non-white-majority country, and they will refuse to deal.

As someone pointed out, the Democrats are somewhat like the Palestinian Arabs who are always demanding some sort of deal, but then turn down every reasonable deal that is proposed. They are bent on radical policies that will lead to disaster.

Cape Town South Africa is running out of water. Would American tolerate something similar happening here? We shall see. I think that we will have some ugly fights, no matter what.

Sunday, February 04, 2018

Child support is evil

Dalrock is a Bible-reading Christian, and he criticizes other Christians
Brother Jed preaches the gospel of child support: ...

In preaching this evil gospel, for the destruction of marriage is evil, Brother Jed is ignoring the only truly innocent party to the process he loves: the children. Child support is designed to replace marriage, and it is wickedly effective at this. The point of the post Brother Jed was responding to was that child support creates a powerful incentive for women to deliberately become single mothers. ...

Over a million and a half children are now born out of wedlock each year in the US alone. Not all of this “progress” is due to the financial incentives Bro Jed loves so much. Part of the credit must go to the moral cover Bro Jed and other conservatives provide for single mothers.
Dalrock is right to call out these Christians who supposedly support Christian marriage, but actually support a variety of anti-marriage policies. The biggest is child support. If policymakers were trying to devise an evil plot to destroy marriage, it is hard to see how they could have done a better job.

Saturday, February 03, 2018

Why leftists hate YouTube

The Guardian reports:
He believes one of the most shocking examples was detected by his program in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. As he observed in a short, largely unnoticed blogpost published after Donald Trump was elected, the impact of YouTube’s recommendation algorithm was not neutral during the presidential race: it was pushing videos that were, in the main, helpful to Trump and damaging to Hillary Clinton. “It was strange,” he explains to me. “Wherever you started, whether it was from a Trump search or a Clinton search, the recommendation algorithm was much more likely to push you in a pro-Trump direction.”
YouTube is owned by Alphabet/Google, and management was openly supporting Clinton in the election. How can this be?

It is simple. YouTube has too much content for management to efficiently censor. The mainstream news media was ducking the real campaign issues. If you wanted clear-cut explanations for a Trump vote, you could find them on YouTube.

I watched the pro-Clinton videos also, but they were painful. Her ads appealed mainly to those who hate white males. Her incompetence and dishonesty were astounding. It was amazing that anyone could think that she was fit to be President.

The article complains that YouTube promoted videos by Alex Jones and his "far-right conspiracy theories". Jones does have some fringe material, but if you watched him, then you would have known the revelations in the House intel FISA abuse memo about a year ahead of everyone else.

YouTube tries to censor right-wing videos, but hasn't figured out how to do it yet. For a while, it was tagging disclaimers to some videos with offensive views. I watched a couple of them, and they were completely reasonable fact-filled videos. Google was effectively saying that these were dangerous facts, just as it was saying by firing James Damore.