Category: American Politics

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Males woes: Charles Murray, Francis Fukuyama, and Heather MacDonald

Charles Murray is the author of The Bell Curve, Human Accomplishment and Coming Apart, among other works. Any conservative minded person ought to have read these books, and liberals who want to inquire into why we think them mostly wrong. His insights into why things are getting worse, for men, for family formation, for society, and then for women, provides a necessary corrective to Steven Pinker’s rosy view set forth in Enlightenment Now.

There is a moment in the interview below which prompted a blog posting this morning. The issue was the sorting of society on the basis of cognitive ability, which is the essential claim of The Bell Curve. Murray remarks (at 15:30) that “What we are doing now is creating a world which is congenial to people of high IQs. People of high IQ love complexity. They think complexity is fun. That’s why you have Kohlberg at Harvard coming up with his seven stages of moral reasoning….. But, a world governed by that kind of complexity is difficult to deal with if you are not very smart”.

The interview is well  worth watching. He preaches the idea that the point of law should be to provide a clear moral compass so as to allow people the maximum moral autonomy which is what he calls “libertarianism”.

I bring up this issue of simplicity and complexity because I spent an evening with liberals last night, possibly wrecking their digestion and certainly providing them with a memorable conflict. At the basis of much of the disagreement was the idea that social democracy – assuming we know what that means  – is a morally superior system because it displays the highest levels of compassion. Hence belief in social democracy means necessarily that one is morally superior, because one has more compassion. Thus if I hold that 53% of GDP should be spent by government, and my political opponent says 46%, or 36%, I do not have to think hard about the consequences of a bloated state sector because I have a superior measure of compassion.

Since the criterion of political virtue is compassion, and compassion is best judged by how well society takes care of the poor and the indigent, and thirdly, that this compassion is accomplished through Scandinavian style state intervention, then in substance there is not much further one needs to think about politics.

Forget for a moment the doubtful superiority of Scandinavian welfare statism for showing compassion. My objection is deeper, and less fact-based.

I find such a one-dimensional view of the purposes of political life repugnant. What about virtue, accomplishment, achievement, belonging, and greatness, collective or individual, in a society that understands and appreciates what greatness is?

I have just begun reading Francis Fukuyama’s Identity, the Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, and already it is evident that he is talking about the real issues of our time.

“But as important as material self interest is, human beings are motivated by other things as well, motives that better explain the disparate events of the present. This might be called the politics of resentment. In a wide variety of cases, a political leader has mobilized followers around the perception that the group’s dignity has been affronted , disparaged, or otherwise disregarded. This resentment engenders demands for public recognition of the dignity of the group in question. A humiliated group seeking restitution of its dignity carries far more weight than people simply pursuing their economic advantage”. (at page 7)

And what group has undergone a persistent social decline of status in the past thirty years? All men? Men of the American working class? Take your pick. This leads us to what Scott Adams and I have been talking about in relation to the Kavanaugh witch hunt. It is not merely the American working class male that is taking a beating, it is all males.

Heather MacDonald writes about the feminist industrial complex  in City Journal:

Our booze-fueled hook-up culture has made relations between men and women messier than ever, leaving many girls and women with pangs of regret—but those regrets do not equal rape. If we were actually in the midst of an “epidemic of sexual assault,” as New Jersey senator Cory Booker asserted the evening of the Ford-Kavanaugh hearings, we would presumably have seen women and girls take protective actions, such as avoiding frat parties and flocking to single-sex schools. None of those protective actions has occurred, however. Either women are too clueless to avoid patent danger, or the epidemic of sexual assault is a fiction. All evidence points to the latter conclusion. Judge Brett Kavanaugh may be the latest male to have his life torn apart by that fiction, but he won’t be the last.

Accordingly, I think a male backlash is finally going to manifest itself, not just by dropping out, as young men have been doing, but by male identitarian politics at the ballot box. It cannot start too soon. Compassion and social democracy will take back seat to a necessary social change that is long overdue.

Fukuyama on Identity

 

 

 

The only critique of Trump that has ever caught my attention

David Warren is more than usually brilliant in this caricature of Trump as a modern Mussolini. I do not think so myself, and remain to be persuaded. But it is an interesting suggestion. I prefer the Conrad Black interpretation, that Trump is actually draining the swamp. Warren writes:

Let us compare Donald Trump to Benito Mussolini. The comparison works better than one might expect. Both want the trains to run on time. Both are total pragmatists when it comes to making this happen. Both realize that “pure” socialism cannot work, ever. Both then think: surely dirigiste something. Mussolini swoons to the siren song of Pareto, actually attending his classes in economics at Lausanne. Trump forms his Pareto view of unions in the New York City real estate market. The ideal of unobstructed economic growth is shared. The application of a sledgehammer to perceived obstructions is also in common. Where both deviate sharply from Pareto is in their further fondness for unobstructed nationalism.

Now, Mussolini is reputed to be a Fascist. This seems fair, for he invented the term, as a party label for his masterplan to Make Italy Great Again. Yet, insofar as the term is used more broadly, to convey the centralized application of sledgehammer reforms, he was also an anti-fascist. It is a little-remembered fact that Mussolini was a deadly enemy of inefficient bureaucracies. (I myself much prefer them to efficient bureaucracies.)

By descent from Pareto, it could be said, both Trump and Mussolini acquired an obsession with numbers. All efforts are focused on making the national statistics move the right way. In material terms, this works for a while. Everyone in the 1930s, including all progressive politicians, thought Mussolini’s Italy an economic and social success story. Superficially it was: productivity up, unemployment down, and so forth.

But here I will stop my provocation, with a reminder that history never repeats itself. Only the laugh track is on a perpetual loop.

As (I think) a New York Jewish lesbian, Fran Lebowitz,  once said, “Fascism is too exciting, communism is too boring”.

A propos Trump and fascism, we will know when Trump is acting as a true fascist when Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are shot by firing squads, the Democratic Party declared an illegal organization, its members rounded up for beatings and arrests, and thousands of box cars dump hordes of wimmyn and pansies in the deserts of Utah to build their own prison camps, under guard towers with barbed wire, vicious dogs and tattooed bearded hillbillies as  . overseers. Now that, in my terms, is fascism.

Anytime you can vote the fucker out of power, and the vote will be respected, then you do not have fascism, you have democracy. As surely as George Washington was the first President, who left after two terms, Trump will leave office after his second term expires in 2024.

 

Image result for fascism is too exciting, communism too boring fran lebowitz

 

Kavanaugh, men and the Democrats

 

“Some people regard rape as so heinous an offense that they would not even regard innocence as a defense.” – attributed to Alan Dershowitz

People! You have seen the wimmyn’s mob try to take down a man whom I and most men believe to be innocent. You have experienced the expression of the racist and sexist notions that a group of white men are, by nature of their race and sex, disqualified from ruling on any matter. You have experienced the unleashing of witch hunts. As Senator Lindsey Graham said to two wimmyn “Why don’t we just dunk him in water and see if he floats?”.

I shall make a few predictions this morning.

  • As a result of what men have witnessed over the past month, they are beginning to realize that innocence is no defence; that their lives can be destroyed at any time by any woman recollecting any indiscretion, advance, or any figment of their (florid) imaginations, which may have occurred, or not occurred, at any point in their lives, including before they were legally adult;
  • that these accusations will cripple and scar their future existence, reputations and earning power, and that they will be held to mob shaming in a pillory of feminist vengeance;
  • That the Democrats have become officially anti-male, not merely pro-female;
  • That men have an interest to defend, that the male sex as a sex has an interest to defend itself from this calumny, harassment, denigration and illegal discrimination;
  • That men as a sex are realizing this fact;
  • That men will shun the Democrats in droves for a decade to come, and that the sex difference in voting Republican or Democrat will get larger, not smaller.
  • Finally, I think that enough people have seen what their future will be under the Democrats that they will provide enough votes for the Republicans to maintain their majorities in House and Senate.

I will say to all men, as males, your future is bleak unless you start resisting, in every dimension of your existence, the insistent, constant, ubiquitous denigration of your sex by the Feminist Thing.

I observe that Scott Adams, in milder but equally emphatic tones, is saying the same thing.

I think people, men especially but not limited to men, have reached their moment of reckoning.

Bret Kavanaugh will be confirmed and appointed. I do not wonder what mood he will be in for the next fifty years.

Refresher course: The constrained and unconstrained vision

 

Thomas Sowell has spent a life time fighting the unconstrained vision which, crudely, comes down to “I know best and there is no institution that should stand in my way of doing good as I conceive it”. The sincerity and passion with which they hold their view is the guarantor of its truth. “Man is born free, and yet everywhere he is in chains” said Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Only bad institutions make us behave badly. Since man is the creature of social arrangements, if we change the institutions we will change man, for the better. Nothing prevents us from the attainment of this goal except reactionaries, people of ill-will, ignorance, and the forces of evil.

Sowell, on the subject of sincerity in politics:

“People who have the constrained vision will understand that people make mistakes. and so therefore when someone says something the disagree with,…they see no need to question his sincerity, his honesty or whatever. But for those with the unconstrained vision, what they believe seems so obviously true, that of you are standing in the way of it, either you must be incredibly stupid, utterly uninformed, or simply dishonest.” (at minute 24 of the interview)

Hence, in the days when I still watched broadcast television, I saw the three political party reps talking about gay marriage (as I recall). The little faggot from the NDP [there is no more swiftly accurate designator] was insisting “we shouldn’t even be debating this”. His views exactly typified why normal people find leftists so intolerant.

And that is how it is with everything on the Left. We should not even be debating this, when what they think should not be debated is precisely what should be debated.

 

More on Google’s interference in the last American election

In case you think that our search engines are neutral, I have a bridge to sell you.

Be assured, as Victor Davis Hanson reports, every Mexican American he knew who spoke English voted for Trump. Apparently 29% of American “Latinos” voted for Trump to the shock of many.

Partisan and pro-Democratic action by Google is undenied. It makes the nonsense about Russian-sponsored  Facebook advertisements seem trifling.

 

 

 

 

 

Diversity means uniformity; inclusion means exclusion

You are not alone if you have begun to cotton on to the idea that “diversity” does not include you, dear reader. You are probably male, probably over forty, probably white, and you do not fit into the desired categories of “diverse” people that the Left favours. Tucker Carlson  started into the diversity mantra the other night by asking some long overdue questions.

 

 

Diversity is hogwash. I come from a formerly diverse society. It is called Quebec, and whatever you might feel about the French Canadians, they are very sound on the diversity question. They will have none of it, as long as diversity presents an English-speaking face. They have resisted “diversification” for centuries, which they call assimilation, and will continue to do so until they disappear demographically, which is a long way off. Having been raised in a society where I was the rejected outsider, I have come to appreciate how normal it is for a society to reject multiculturalism, and insist on the society’s right to perpetuate itself, even at great cost.

Perhaps by reason of personal history I am skeptical of diversity, or at least conscious of where it begins and ends. A common language is good, though not essential. But a common set of civic values is essential to the maintenance of liberty, order, cohesion, and yes, actual tolerance for diversity.

If you want to experience “diversity”, go to India. Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Jains Sikhs, Parsis: all vie for space, respect, and resources. Forty,  or is it four hundred, languages create a babble of mutual incomprehension.  Racial, caste, and ethnic differences are as great as anything in all of Europe, even considering how it is after the Muslim refugee invasion.

I want everyone to start questioning “diversity”.

A new bumper sticker is needed.

 

Question diversity

 

The Google video of 2016: Guardian values and Pharisees

Sergei Brin, cofounder of Google

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRf9UxsM-NE

https://youtu.be/FRf9UxsM-NE

(Paranoid note: every other video I have loaded appears in full, but Google’s video of its own meeting appears only as a hyperlink).

 

 

“I certainly find this election deeply offensive” said Sergei Brin, co-founder of Google. “So many people don’t share the values we have”.

And it goes from there. Fear. Everyone is supposed to feel fear at the prospect of the Trump regime. Minorities are in danger and need to be stood up for. Women likewise. Liberal values are to be stood up for. Yet the same corporation endlessly touting its values fired James Damore in August 2017 for politely protesting the corporation’s bias towards preferential hiring of  women.

I have had experience with Google employees at several levels of seniority over the years, and I feel quite certain that the vast majority are leftist Democrats, which is not surprizing considering the San Francisco Bay area culture. But what bugs me – as the movie reveals – is the enormous self-vaunting, the endless prattling on about their “values”. This is a company whose core business is to sell advertizing. It guts previous business models and replaces them with its own. This is normal creative destruction, in the manner that Schumpeter spoke of. However painful, this is the stuff of economic progress. And talk to former newspaper people if you want to know what Google has wrought.

When the Vice President says that “this is a place where you can bring your whole self to work”, clearly she does not include conservatives (min 16:30)

“We all talk a lot about what it means to be Googley”, said CFO Ruth Porat. The endless blather about tolerance, respect and diversity grates when one compares it to the outrageous and actual treatment of Damore. More, the tone of the film is that the poor people of Google have endured something like the 1940 Blitz of London, or having been unhoused by a hurricane, and that they need reassurance and a group hug, and assurance tot the 10,000 or so working on visa that their visas will remain valid.

Values, values, values: it is irritating and faintly nauseating.

A few years ago the late Jane Jacobs published a marvellous concise book called Systems of Survival. It dealt with the differences in morality between what she called Guardian institutions – the church, the regiment, the academy – and commercial institutions.

If you hand a suitcase of cash to a businessman, that is right and proper, because you are exchanging cash for a private benefit. If you hand a suitcase of cash to a public official, that is a crime of corruption. Why? Her book seeks to answer the question. She also said that corruption occurs when a commercial corporation adopts Guardian values. Thus, the old telephone monopolies constantly appealed to their status as institutions serving the public, and they had a genuine public service ethos. They could afford the attitude because they were monopolies.

Google has Guardian values, but instead of public service being its goal, that is, actually doing something for the general public, it constantly propagandizes its membership/employees with the notion that it stands for superior values: tolerance, inclusion, and diversity being the modern conception of virtue. It thus succeeds in being smug, intolerant, exclusive, and as proud of itself as the Roman Church of centuries past.

Is Google morally bankrupt? Is that not too harsh? It all depends on whether you pay attention to anything Jesus said about Pharisees, about words without deeds. It is not what we put into our mouths that defiles us, but by what comes out of our mouths that defiles us.

In the case of Google I am prepared to argue that the company needs all the self-vaunting talk of values to disguise from itself and its staff that its real business is centralizing the control of information. In short, an illiberal idea being carried out by liberals prattling on about their superior values.

 

__________________________

Here is Joe Rogan talking to James Damore, and you will find out all you need to know about Google’s values:

 

 

 

Taking on the Tyrant

Readers of this blog will not need further persuasion that this Liberal government of Canada is deeply unserious. At a time when Trump could place tariffs on the cars that Canada produces, at a time when trade negotiations are at a critical stage, our chief trade negotiator,  Chrystia Freeland, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, took time off to be a speaker at the the Women in the World Summit on Monday in her riding in Toronto, on the panel “Taking on the Tyrant.”

Nothing that I heard the minister actually say was dreadful, wrong or even objectionable. It was all said in defence of a rules-based order and liberal democracy. No objection here.

It was the close to incredible apposition of our foreign minister allowing herself to be associated, in a public stage, with an alarmist video likening Trump to Assad, Putin, and other unsavoury tyrants in this crucial stage of negotiations

Not a single American, Democrat or Republican, feels the least restriction or inhibition in slamming Trump for vices and defects real and imagined. At a US Embassy function in Ottawa earlier this summer, I hear a few – by no means all – American officials allowing themselves some serious criticism of their President. Okay, I understand how they can make anti-Trump noises to appease their many Liberal Canadian guests, and not too much should be read into it, except for this: they are free and feel themselves to be free, even as civil servants.

At a dinner party this summer, my fellow dinner guests were quibbling whether America is in the early stages of National Socialism or the early stages of Italian fascism. Yet not a single Democrat politician has been arrested, assassinated, or prosecuted. Not a single reporter has disappeared.

Freeland made a number of cogent points regarding the relationship between people having jobs, feeling secure, and not looking for magical solutions in politics.  [I take issue that the implementation of effective immigration law in the United States constitutes “magical thinking”.]

Yet that is not the point. To associate oneself with a conference in which a movie of goose-stepping Chinese troops and alarmist blather introduces the panel on which you choose to sit, then  all your talk about diversity, inclusion and the need for economic security will never be heard. You look like a complete wanker, Chrystia. And so does the Liberal government of Canada at this stage.

So here is some Steve Bannon- just to keep you steadfast in your determination to resist the multi-culti, irtue signalling twaddle.