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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:

 

 

 

Maxime says it straight

 

 

“Trudeau’s extreme multiculturalism and cult of diversity will divide us into little tribes that have less and less in common, apart from their dependence on government in general. He went on to decry the possible “cultural balkanization” of Canadian society.”

Maxime Bernier is exactly correct.

I think he is the real Canadian Opposition. And if Andrew Scheer had any sense, apart from the calculus of the  immediate political impact of anything, he would gradually find a way to agree with Bernier. Because Maxime has just told truth in a public place, which is always called a “gaffe” by the MSM.

Liberals may claim their donations have increased, they may claim their vote has strengthened.  I doubt both. In taverns, barbecues and Legions across Canada,  people are waking up from the summer doldrums and nodding assent to Bernier. You can have too much multi-culturalism. If you doubt this, go to India, and experience real, not ersatz, multi-culturalism. The place scarcely coheres, so great are the internal divisions of religion, caste, language, and race. And canada is heading in exactly that direction, courtesy of the Liberals.

For a more intelligent discussion of this issue, as it relates to immigration, see Does Diversity Really Unite Us?: Citizenship and Immigration by Edward Erler.

 

Education despite universities

Caitlin Flanagan writes in this month’s Atlantic about why Jordan Peterson is so important. What it points to is that a liberal education is now being offered on Youtube, and not in university.

The young men voted for Hillary, they called home in shock when Trump won, they talked about flipping the House, and they followed Peterson to other podcasts—to Sam Harris and Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan. What they were getting from these lectures and discussions, often lengthy and often on arcane subjects, was perhaps the only sustained argument against identity politics they had heard in their lives.

That might seem like a small thing, but it’s not. With identity politics off the table, it was possible to talk about all kinds of things—religion, philosophy, history, myth—in a different way. They could have a direct experience with ideas, not one mediated by ideology. All of these young people, without quite realizing it, were joining a huge group of American college students who were pursuing a parallel curriculum, right under the noses of the people who were delivering their official educations.

“They could have a direct experience with ideas, not one mediated by ideology.”

Further, Flanagan writes:

But there is no coherent reason for the left’s obliterating and irrational hatred of Jordan Peterson. What, then, accounts for it?

It is because the left, while it currently seems ascendant in our houses of culture and art, has in fact entered its decadent late phase, and it is deeply vulnerable. The left is afraid not of Peterson, but of the ideas he promotes, which are completely inconsistent with identity politics of any kind.

They – reasonable, moderate centrists – are starting to wake up. That is my conclusion from the publication and writing of this article. They have understood the bankruptcy of the cultural Left and they are starting to see their children have realized this too.

———————————

Post Script:

She could have included Ben Shapiro, and Victor Davis Hanson in this list of educational shows or speakers.

Cultural appropriation and heresy hunting

 

From Kevin Williamson in National Review, for the abject surrender of a literary magazine to some leftist goons on the issue of black English in a poem, for which it issued a grovelling apology.

 

In the morally illiterate idiom of the moment, a white poet’s ‘appropriation’ of Black English serves ‘white supremacy,’ putting it in the same category of things as lynchings, cross-burnings, and segregation.

The American Left, having lost the contest of ideas — the Left’s last big idea was Marxism, which never has been successfully replaced as an intellectual foundation — is in the grip of moral hysteria, and its main occupation is heretic-hunting, inventing ever-more-absurd pretexts for simply declaring beyond the pale any idea or intellectual opponent progressives cannot successfully engage or, nearly as often, to bounce any white male occupying cultural space the heretic-hunters covet.

And there you have it, people.

It is we who need perestroika and glasnost, restructuring and openness. Fortunately it is coming through the agency of Donald Trump, the icebreaker, however slowly.

This anti-white stuff is coming for you, dude

 

Explicit anti-white racism is now de rigeur in our universities. If you think this is temporary, think again.

First demonstrate your contribution to “diversity”, as defined by the academic elites who seek to abolish themselves because, to no one’s surprize, they are white.The College Fix reports

For Cal Poly, requiring the diversity statement is one part of a larger effort school officials are engaged in to “improve diversity” via dozens of various endeavors outlined in its 30-page action plan. As part of the diversity initiatives plan, the university also has a goal of “increasing, in a Proposition 209-compliant manner, the hiring of diverse faculty utilizing cluster hires every other year.”

It is evident to me and to a growing number of reasonable people that the entire university sector is overinflated and needs drastic reduction of its financial resources. The government must stop subsidizing this racialist evil. And stop enserfing our children to debt for a useless and dangerous miseducation.

Here is a portion of Cal Poly’s action plan. To read it is to see the anti-white future:

 

Office of University Diversity and Inclusion
Diversity Action Initiatives
Items in bold are key initiatives.
Future Actions Initiative Anticipated Implementation Department(s) Description
Cultural Humility Institute
Winter 2019
Vice President for Student Affairs, Office of University Diversity and Inclusion
Cultural humility is a lifelong process of self-reflection, self-critique, and commitment to understanding and respecting different points of view and engaging with others humbly, authentically and from a place of learning (Tervalon & Murray-Garcia, 1998).

Student Diversity Advisory Committee
Fall 2018
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion
An advisory committee to the Office of University Diversity & Inclusion made up of student representatives to help guide work related to student concerns and to gain input on initiatives.

Campus-Wide Allyship Trainings

Fall 2018
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion and Cross Cultural Centers
An expansion of the currently offered Allyship workshops on Race & Ethnicity and Gender & Sexuality offered by the Cross Cultural Centers.

Collective Impact Strategic Action Plan Open Forum
Fall 2018
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion
The Inclusive Excellence Council will review the Collective Impact Recommendations and create a strategic plan to be shared in a Fall 2018 Open Forum.

Collective Impact Strategy Group Recommendations
June 2018
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion
The three Strategy Groups will have short- and long-term recommendations outlined.

Mandatory Implicit Bias Trainings for MPPs and Confidential Employees
Spring 2018
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion and Employee and Organization Development
The “Exposing Hidden Bias” workshop will be mandatory for all MPPs and Confidential Employees.

Collective Impact Listening Sessions
Spring 2018
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion
Open sessions reflecting the 3 Collective Impact Strategy Groups: Campus Climate, Curriculum, and Recruit & Retain. The sessions will garner input from participants.

All Faculty and Staff Association Meeting
Spring 2018
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion
A gathering of representatives from the 5 established Faculty Staff Associations.
Expand BEACoN mentors to include staff and alumni *
TBD
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion
Include opportunities for staff and alumni to provide mentorship for underrepresented students

Campus Climate Survey
2019
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion
A survey to assess campus climate will be re-administered.

New Employee Orientation
2017
Employee and Organization Development
An introductory training for new employees at Cal Poly. Onboarding for all new staff positions, including a diversity and inclusion segment.

BEACoN Research Mentor Program
2017
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion
The BEACoN Research Mentor Program pairs students with research mentorship under the guidance of faculty. Enhanced the faculty/student mentorship program to add paid research opportunities.

Collective Impact Process for Advancing Diversity & Inclusion at Cal Poly
2017
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion
The Collective Impact approach is premised on the belief that no single policy, department, organization or program can tackle or solve the increasingly complex social problems we face as a society. The approach calls for multiple organizations or entities from different sectors to abandon their own agenda in favor of a common agenda, shared measurement and alignment of effort. Unlike collaboration or partnership, Collective Impact initiatives have centralized infrastructure – known as a backbone organization – with dedicated staff whose role is to help participating organizations shift from acting alone to acting in concert.

Vice President for Diversity & Inclusion
2017
President’s Cabinet
The lead position in OUDI was elevated to executive level for greater impact.
Established the Chicana/o Latino/a and Indigenous Alumni Chapter
2017
Alumni Association
Supports and creates community for Latinx alumni.

Faculty Associate Positions
2017
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion
Faculty Associates are hired by OUDI to gain a faculty perspective in diversity and inclusion work.

Implicit Bias Trainings for Staff and Faculty
2017
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion and Employee and Organization Development
A two-part implicit bias workshop series that brings attention to the unconscious biases we all possess and provides some strategies for overcoming thier impact in our work and relationships.

Implicit Bias Trainings for Faculty Search Committees
2016
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion and Academic Personnel
This training introduces participants to implicit bias in decision-making and hiring. It is required for all tenure/tenure-track faculty search committees.

Diversity in the Curriculum Training for Faculty
2016
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion and the Center for Teaching Learning & Technology
A summer week-long workshop designed for faculty to incorporate diversity and inclusion topics into their curricula.

Bias Incident Response Team Established
2016
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion and Dean of Students
The Bias Incident Response Team (BIRT) is co-chaired by the Dean of Students and the VP for Diversity & Inclusion. The team meets to discuss the appropriate course of action on hate/bias incidents on campus. BIRT also works to support and provide resources to those who are targets and/or witness acts of bias in our campus community.

==========

Remember:

Diversity = uniformity

Inclusion = exclusion

It’s still legal to say what you think

I have been watching a considerable amount of the Rubin Report in my leisure, which I recommend highly. The hour-long discussions allow for an exchange of views, as opposed to a ritualized six-minute interchange on cable TV of talking points.

One of the heroes of truth is Douglas Murray, who has written The Strange Death of  Europe. Asked by Rubin what words of encouragement he has for others, he responded: “It’s still legal to say what you think”.

I want to add my two cents’ worth to that observation. It is surprizing the degree to which, in the absence of any secret police, and with human rights commissions still occasionally defeated in  public and embarrassing ways, that people feel so constrained to toe the line of political correctness.

Yet they do, and for good reason. There are innumerable enforcers out there, in almost any occasion in which polite society meets.

Last year I was talking to a lady at a cocktail gathering and had occasion to observe that North American Indians or blacks were overrepresented in our prisons – and no, I did bring up the topic but did not avoid it either. She asked me quite bluntly: “Was I racist?| I thought for a moment and said, “No. I merely observe statistical realities”. What I ought to have said, and wish I had said, “Are you a member of the thought police?”

Because there are many members of the thought police and they do not hesitate to comment on the slightest deviation – it is the slightest and not the greatest deviation they are sensitive to.

More than any other thing which lies behind the success of Trump is his capacity to talk ordinary language about difficult subjects: to talk like a real person and not in a series of carefully crafted talking points. What he has done is enlarge the capacity of ordinary people to react as normal people should to violations of common sense, good manners, and good public policy. The Emperor of PC has no clothes, which we have seen for some time. Yet it is the power to force people to say that His Majesty is splendidly clothed, to humiliate the general public by ceaseless participation in lies or doubtful propositions, that gives the guardians of PC their power.

To wit:

  • mass immigration is good for all people of the receiving society
  • free trade with China is actually free – that is, standards-based, law abiding  – trade
  • there is no link between Islam and jihad
  • that different rates of criminal incarceration among different ethnicities is a sign of racism or other injustice

Alexander Solzhenitsyn once said that Communism would not survive the day if everyone spoke the truth. As I have said recently, we are living in the liberal version of Oceania, and we will not get out of it until we each decide to tell the truth.

So say something.

———————————-

For  good measure, here is the interview with Douglas Murray.

 

 

 

How come when a Muslim male goes crazy he kills people?

And the cover up never stops.

From Pajamas Media, which I think captures the enormous effort to divert attention from Islamic jihad to mental illness, toxic masculinity, or “look. there’s a rabbit!”.

According to police, Hussain — who had lived for a time in Afghanistan and Pakistan — had “expressed ‘support’ for a website that was seen as ‘pro-ISIL.’” This and other fishy online activity had led the authorities to speak to him. Indeed, reported Warmington, Hussain had been on the radar of the Toronto Police, the Ontario Provincial Police, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Well, that certainly sounds dispositive. But while Warmington was serving up this hard information about Hussain’s jihadist sympathies and shady background (what was he doing all that time in Afghanistan and Pakistan?), virtually every other journalist or public figure in Canada seemed determined to lead the public down this or that garden path –whether by calling for even tighter gun laws, meditating on the mystery of the individual human soul, serving up academic hogwash about toxic masculinity, or embracing the argument that it was all about mental problems. They were willing, in short, to make any argument, however absurd, rather than to acknowledge the manifest possibility that a young ISIS fan named Faisal Hussain might be yet another enemy within, driven to mow down infidels in the name of the caliphate.

Islamic jihad taunts the liberal vision of diversity and inclusion with the adamantine fact of total rejection. No we will not assimilate. Yes you are fit to be slaughtered. You are vermin and we will destroy you.
Jihadists preach it, and all jihadists are Muslim, though not all Muslims are jihadists. I do not know what is to be done, but what I want to hear is public authorities wrestling with the question.
In Canada, as elsewhere, we hear the choirs preaching diversity and inclusion. Actually, if there was one style of masculinity I would call toxic, it is the Islamic male’s sense of rightfulness to seize or women, kill and enslave there rest of us, all in the name of the Prophet. This has gone on since the beginning of the creed’s war against all, kuffar.

 

Links

Social justice warrior is shamed by former colleagues.

  • from Quillette

White lives don’t matter, or any victims of crime, in Chicago

  • from City Journal

Stefan Molyneux on race and intelligence, on the David Rubin show

  • if it were just racism, it could be fixed
  • when you adjust for IQ, people have the same crime rates and the same capacity for wealth generation. Think about that for a moment.

Steve Bannon, Trumpite and agitator for the American working class, and Lanny Davis, former White House adviser and a Democrat, engage in a real debate

  • a polite, intense and well-mannered contest of ideas!
  • “50% of the families in our country do not have $400 for an emergency” – Steve Bannon
  • “We got here because we have allowed the global elite to run the show”. – SB

Everyone is smarter than Trump.

  • especially the media

Toxic femininity

 

Image result for heather heying

 

From Quillette, by Heather Heying

 

Creating hunger in men by actively inviting the male gaze, then demanding that men have no such hunger—that is toxic femininity. Subjugating men, emasculating them when they display strength—physical, intellectual, or other—that is toxic femininity. Insisting that men, simply by virtue of being men, are toxic, and then acting surprised as relationships between men and women become more strained—that is toxic femininity. It is a game, the benefits of which go to a few while the costs are shared by all of us…..

The movement that has popularized the term ‘toxic masculinity’ shares tools and conclusions with those who see signs of ‘white supremacy’ everywhere they look. Intersectionalists have in common with one another a particular rhetorical trick: Any claim made by a member of an historically oppressed group is unquestionably true. Questioning claims is, itself, an act of oppression.

This opens the door for anyone who is willing to lie to obtain power. If you cannot question claims, any claim can be made.

Thus: Racism is ubiquitous. And all men are toxic. I object—but objection is not allowed. Everyone who understands game theory knows how this game ends: Innocent people being vilified with false claims, and exposed to witch hunts. Sexual assault is real, but that does not mean that all claims of sexual assault are honest.

It is shocking that this bears saying, but there is a world of men who are smart and compassionate and eager to have vibrant, surprising conversations with other people, both men and women. The sex-specific toxicity that I have seen, when it has been obvious, has mostly been in the other court. All men are toxic and all women victims? No. Not in my name.

Why academia is doomed, and what will follow

“The coming implosion after the diversity’s victory”, from Mark Bauerlein, in Minding the Campus

 

Which brings us to the real issue: personnel. We have sunk to an intellectual level that we might call purely managerial. Thirty years ago, we had a genuine battle over the curriculum in which ideas and values were weapons (though not the only weapons). Should there be a Western Civ requirement? Are there great women writers out there, unjustly forgotten and waiting to be rediscovered? Do minority students want to see minority authors on the syllabus, and would they become estranged if they didn’t? Should we read Ezra Pound despite his vile biases?….

Now, diversity means just that: getting more underrepresented people in place. That’s all. The campus managers don’t think about what will happen then. Diversity among the personnel—that is, more proportionate representation of all “underserved” identities—is an end in itself. If you asked a dean what diversity is for, what purpose it serves, he wouldn’t have an immediate answer. He spends so much time in a habitat of tautology (“diversity is good for . . . diversity”) that the very question stumps him until he remembers blather from the Old Times about diverse perspectives and educational benefits and repeats it like a ventriloquist’s dummy. But don’t try pressing him on it. He doesn’t want to talk about it. The self-evident good of diversity has long been established, and he clings to it like a Catholic does his rosary…..

We must change the demographic. That’s the commandment. More women and people of color in the ranks. We see little evidence that managers and bureaucrats on campus have any other thought in their heads now. Diversity doesn’t amount to anything more than that. It’s a crass ambition, but a potent one because dissenters from it have no effective argument against it. It’s very bluntness and simplicity make it incontrovertible….

After all, if diversity is just a matter of demographics, liberal professors and administrators can solve the problem. All the white males and many of the white females should leave and ask that persons of color be hired. If the educators object, “But we have bills to pay and careers to pursue,” we answer, “But aren’t you asking white job applicants to find careers elsewhere and pay their bills in another way?” If the professors say, “But there aren’t competent people out there,” we answer, “Are you saying that people of color can’t do the job you do?”

The administrators and liberal ‘go-alongs’ are in a corner, and they know it.

___________________________________

More Jordan Peterson on the same subject. He predicted  that “4,000 college and universities will go bankrupt in the next ten years and it can’t happen fast enough”.