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Amy Wax

I need not dilate further on this woman’s virtues of bravery and truth telling. That she remains so free from rancor after her recent experience of the left-wing mob of law professors howling for her head is  a testament to her character. And she is right, the university is rendering itself irrelevant, and the question we tax payers must ask is: why are we paying these people?

Why are we paying for universities? What are we getting from them but ill-educated mobs of leftists? Indeed, positively badly educated people, who think they know everything and really know nothing.

 

 

 

You might also want to look at Heterodox Academy for a statement of the underlying problem.

The Problem

Taleb on Trump

 

Published on May 18, 2017, and still relevant. Trump, says Taleb, is trying to do the right things. He is trying to get rid of the metastasizing growth of bureaucracy caused by tax codes and ecological fantasies of clean energy.  Trump has never had a boss in his entire life. Second point, does Trump gain from stress and turmoil? Essay question: Is Trump an anti-fragile President?

Like all market people, they overemphasize the role of the stock market, but that is their professional deformation. But on the main issues, Taleb has pointed out the essential features of Trump’s nature and program.

 

Men!

The morally inferior second sex is at it again. Yet another phenomenon which is good for men is held to be bad for women. Or so says a ridiculous study highlighted in today’s National Post. The study can be downloaded here.

The Findings

“The rise of the bromance “is very, very good for men,” said one of its authors, Professor Adam White . It offers young men the opportunity for, as the research found, “elevated emotional stability, enhanced emotional disclosure, social fulfilment and better conflict resolution, compared to the emotional lives they shared with girlfriends.”

“€œBeyond the need for sex, we found that for this cohort of men, bromances performed a very similar, and often superior function to romances.”

“But it’s not necessarily benefiting women, and in fact it may well be disadvantaging them,” White said.

“What happens in 50 years, say, if these bromantic relationships really take off and men decide, ‘Hang on, we really enjoy these. These are much better. We can gain more emotionality from it. We’re less regulated, we’re less policed,’” White said. “And therefore women actually just become the sexual fulfillers of men and nothing else. That’s the worrying aspect.”

Dalwhinnie predicts

Men will withdraw until their price goes up. Women who figure out that a man is a relatively scarce phenomenon first will prosper. And then watch the pendulum swing.

But just look at how this piece of sociology is constructed.

Sample size:

Would you base your important social findings on 30 interviews about the “bromantic” lives of male undergrads? In short it appears that the authors sought young hetero men who were living with other young hetero men.  Thirty interviews now constitutes real science, or sociology, at least.

Publication

The study  was published in Men and Masculinities, a journal ranked as 68th out of 138 in the category of sociology, according to Wikipedia.

Analysis, Dalwhinnie

For the past forty years we have been inundated in feminist blather – you know the line: over-privileged and frequently over-promoted middle class achieving women whining about the arduous nature of their sex’s role, the fact that everything that goes wrong in their lives is either the fault of men or biology, the patriarchy and anything but their characters and talents. Men growing up in the period since 1970 have heard nothing else.

It has always been true that the emotional lives of both sexes have been principally with their own sex, and that the relations between the two sexes were economic, sexual, and pro-genitive – they were purpose-driven, when the primary point of existence was progenitive (child-productive) marriage. The notion that the primary emotional bonds of men are exclusively with women, and women with men, is about as old as Betty Friedan.

 

I overheard in a bar last week a mannish woman and a feminine man strongly agreeing that:

  • women were shortly to be earning more than men
  • men would be relegated to second-class status
  • this would in some real sense be a desirable state of affairs
  • Young women were calling each other sluts as a term of approval, and not without reason.

So, let us review the state of affairs in the contemporary western world:

  • carping women with a deep sense of both grievance and entitlement;
  • people who cannot control their emotions (principally young sheltered women) insisting that other people then must control their own behaviour;
  • males who find that their freedom of expression and action is severely curtailed by their girlfriends;
  • declining male participation in overtly feminized educational (read ideological training) institutions;
  • An ideological environment in which the moral superiority of the female is endlessly proclaimed;
  • people talking about “campus rape culture” as if such as things existed outside the fevered brains of the lesbian thought police;
  • women seeking casual sex, and getting it, while complaining about men’s lack of commitment;

leading to

  • lack of family formation
  • population decline

I would say the problem is self-solving. And no, I do not think this is a sustainable state of affairs. It is sheer moral, social and cultural decadence.

But if a few straight guys want to live together and experience fraternity for a few years, that is “bad for women”. Let me be clear: what women want is men who are not going to kow-tow to feminist crap. Men will not argue the point, they will simply exemplify being men. Women may not say so, but leadership must come from the male. Males have done so for as long as there have been humans and men will continue to do so, despite anything you read.

Those men in need of strong remedial therapy from feminine domination are invited to explore a Sterling Men’s Weekend. More traditional methods of getting out of the house for respectable masculine company of a civilized sort are invited to enquire about the Masons. Masonic Lodges are active in every provincial, state, and local jurisdiction in every place formerly a part of the British, Romanoff and Hapsburg empires from Chile to Canada, and Russia to Australia.

The word “bromance” and articles like this suggest the Matriarchy is starting to be worried. They should be. Men have always gotten along. Now it appears to be quasi-revolutionary.

Or you can just watch Jordan Peterson.

My answer to aboriginal political exploitation of liberal guilt about their dire fate

 

From Francis Parkman, France and England in North America, volume 1,  Chapter XXIII, 1645-1648,  A Doomed Nation

It was a strange and miserable spectacle to behold the savages of this continent at the time when the knell of their common ruin had already sounded. Civilization had gained a foothold on their borders. The long and gloomy reign of barbarism was drawing near its close, and their united efforts could scarcely have availed to sustain it. Yet, in this crisis of their destiny, these doomed tribes were tearing each other’s throats in a wolfish fury, joined to an intelligence that served little purpose but mutual destruction.

Read Parkman on the early relations between whites and “Indians”, and among Indians themselves. It is a tale of ghastly tortures, raids, massacres, enslavements, kidnappings and discriminate slaughters of men, women and children by Indians, our native brethren, of other Indians and whites. Do not believe a word of this stereotype of Indians as the peaceful ecological guardians; they were engaged in a wars of brutish domination. The Iroquois tribal alliance triumphed over Huron and other tribal alliances from Hudson’s Bay to Tennessee. The Iroquois alliance exterminated the Hurons and the Neutrals; even the Nazis did not get all the Jews, nor the Turks the entire Armenian nation. And do not think I mean any insult to the Haudenosay Alliance; they were just the victors in the situation, as were the Aztecs in Mexico.

As to the Aztecs, no understanding of Amerindian culture can take place without reading the Conquest of New Spain, by Bernal Diaz.   The Aztec culture was based on ritual slaughter of victims whose hearts were torn out of their chests as they lay across stone altars at the top of cués, those sacrifice pyramids visited by tourists (which I view as an Auschwitz raised into a publicly proclaimed religion). Human sacrifice was their Mass. It was depicted in Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto. It is recorded that on the accession of Moctezuma to the Speakership of the Aztecs, 30,000 captives were slaughtered and eaten in a gigantic cannibal feast. In 1521, on the final assault of Cortez’ band across the causeways that protected the city of Mexico, some of the Spanish were captured. This is what happened:

“the dismal drum of Huichilobos [the Aztec sun god] sounded again, accompanied by conches, horns, and trumpet-like instruments. It was a terrifying sound, and when we looked at the tall cue from which it came we wsaw our comrades who had been captured in Cortes’ defeat being dragged up the steps to be sacrificed. When they had hauled them up to a small platform in front of the shrine where they kept their accursed idols we saw them put plumes on the heads of many of them; and then they made them dance with a sort of fan in front of Huichilobos. Then after they had danced the papas laid them down on their backs on some narrow stones of sacrifice and, cutting open their chests, drew out their palpitating hearts which they offered to the idols before them. Then they kicked the bodies down the steps, and the Indian butchers who were waiting  below cut off their arms and legs and flayed their faces , which they afterward prepared like glove leather, with their beards on, and kept for their drunken festivals. Then they ate their flesh with a sauce of peppers and tomatoes. They sacrificed all our men this way, eating their legs and arms, offering their hearts and blood to their idols as I have said, and throwing their trunks and entrails to the lions and tigers and serpents and snakes that they kept in the wild beast houses I have described in an earlier chapter.

The Conquest of New Spain is a book of such astonishing marvels and ghastly deeds that it reads more like a science-fictional account of an alien planet than it does a sober history, but it has the rare distinction of being an account of what an intelligent young soldier actually saw with his own eyes. Its veracity is overwhelming.

Do not weep with false pity for our North American Indians; they fought us every step of the way and the last resisters did not lay down arms until the early 20th century.

At the core of Amerindian religious conceptions was human sacrifice.  Even Quakers would have taken up arms against it.

Torture and human sacrifice of captives is not the whole story, nor is it a balanced story. But it happened, was endemic, and made wars with and among Indians particularly horrible.

The next time you hear some twat announce that he is giving a speech on traditional territories of the Ottawa, Huron, etc, do something rude.

 

PS: For more of the same, see the article in the Federalist on the same topic. Everyone has a cannibal and a slaver up the bloodline.

Iroquois Indian scalping white man in Canada from Encyclopedia of Voyages 1796 by Grasset de Saint Saveur and Labrousse

Law Society goes totalitarian

 

As the shit of post-modernism continues to ooze out of the universities, more and more institutions fall beneath the advancing sludge. My long-lasting distaste for the Ontario bar association (the Law Society of Upper Canada) is now more fully justified. Lawyers in Ontario are now being required to confess their sins of racism and repent.

LATEST UPDATE – September, 2017

Lawyers and Paralegals – Here’s what you need to KNOW AND DO for 2017:
1. Adopt a Statement of Principles  (mandatory)
2. Create, Implement, Review a Human Rights/Diversity Policy  (mandatory for legal workplaces of 10 or more licensees)
3. Participate in the Inclusion Survey (non-mandatory)

Lawyers are not merely being asked to implement programs they may not believe in, they are being asked to sign acts of confession that the policies they are being asked to implement are true, just, and appropriate. Jordan Peterson’s concern for being made to say imaginary pronouns invented by transsexuals was but the harbinger of a totalitarian impulse that will soon affect us all.

The Law Society writes:

Overview

All lawyers and paralegals play a vital role in Accelerating Culture Shift, one of 5 strategies adopted by the Law Society  to address the barriers faced by racialized licensees.

As part of this strategy you are required to create and abide by an individual Statement of Principles that acknowledges your obligation to promote equality, diversity and inclusion generally, and in your behaviour towards colleagues, employees, clients and the public. (Recommendation 3(1) in the Challenges Faced by Racialized Licensees Working Group’s Final Report)

The Law Society will ask licensees to report on this in their 2017 Annual Report.

This requirement applies to all Law Society licensees. A licensee is anyone who is licensed to practice law or provide legal services and includes retired licensees, licensees working outside of Ontario and licensees not currently practicing law or providing legal services.

Creating a Statement of Principles

The Law Society has developed resources to help in creating your personal Statement of Principles.

We have provided templates of two sample statements. To satisfy the requirement you may adopt and abide by either statement. Please feel free to modify the statements or create your own that meets the requirement. Statements of Principle must be in writing.

Principles:
To help achieve the objectives of valuing equality and enhancing diversity and inclusion, I have adopted this Statement of Principles.

No Discrimination or Harassment

I am aware that under the Human Rights Code every person has the right to be free from discrimination and harassment in employment.

I acknowledge my obligation not to discriminate against, nor harass, any person on the basis of the grounds under the Human Rights Code with respect to my employment of others, or in professional dealings with other licensees.

I acknowledge my obligation not to tolerate, condone, or ignore any form of Human Rights Code-based harassment or discrimination in my legal workplace, or in professional dealings with other licensees or any other person.

I acknowledge that the right to be free from discrimination and harassment applies to everyone at my legal workplace: clients, partners, associates, students, paralegals, legal assistants, or other employees.
Abide by Workplace Policies

I agree to review, understand and abide by all policies in my legal workplace that prohibit harassment and discrimination, and that encourage diversity and inclusion on the basis of the grounds set out in Human Rights Code or other grounds.

I will report any observations or allegations of harassment or discrimination.

If asked, I will cooperate in any investigation and complaints procedure at my legal workplace.

I will not reprise against, or threaten to reprise against anyone for making a formal complaint of harassment or discrimination, or for cooperating in any investigation.
Promote Diversity and Inclusion

To promote diversity and inclusion I agree to:

review, understand and abide by any and all of my legal workplace’s policies that encourage diversity and inclusion on Human Rights Code or other grounds;
encourage a culture of inclusion and diversity at my legal workplace, in order to help attract and retain the best talent and better serve my clients’ needs;
support strategies in my legal workplace (and beyond it, where appropriate) that prioritize diversity and inclusion on Human Rights Code and other grounds in hiring, promotion and retention decisions;
cooperate and engage in any efforts of the Law Society, my legal workplace and others to advance equality, diversity and inclusion in the legal profession and in the broader community;

Serve Clients/ the Public

I am aware that under the Human Rights Code, every person has the right to be free from discrimination and harassment with respect to the provision of services, including legal services.

I will provide legal services in a manner that is courteous and equitable, without discrimination or harassment.

I will ensure that no client or prospective client is denied services or receives inferior service on the basis of the grounds set out in the Human Rights Code.

I will respect both the letter and spirit of human rights legislation in professional dealings with other licensees or any other person.

 

Recall that this constitutes words being put into people’s mouths: you the Ontario lawyer are being required to sign your adherence to nebulous concepts such as diversity, inclusion, harassment and equality.

 

Let’s look at “equality” as the Law Society defines it.

Equality

The Supreme Court of Canada has held that equality is an “elusive concept” that “lacks precise definition.” * Equality does not mean treating all people the same for all purposes. In Canada, court decisions at all levels make it clear that both the Charter of Rights and Freedoms** and human rights legislation aim to achieve “substantive” rather than a “formal” equality.

Whereas “formal equality” involves “equal treatment for those in similar situations and different treatment for those in dissimilar situations” (‘treating likes alike’),” *** “substantive equality” does not always require treating all people the same.

Substantive equality, rather, is aimed at “recognizing and responding to difference and remedying discrimination and stereotyping.” **** It requires “acknowledgment of and response to differences that members of a particular group might experience” in order to be treated equally.*****
To be clear, it is substantive equality that human rights/diversity policies in legal workplace should be aiming for.

The Official Religion of our times is not Christianity. It is the religion of perpetual striving after equality, which is really equality of result, not of opportunity. It is an ideology that will provide endless opportunity for official interference in private affairs, the perpetuation of grievance, the cultivation of envy, and the violation of individual conscience. This is not accidental; it is its post-modernist purpose.

Everything was hellish before 1800

The biggest fact in the world that needs to be explained is how and why we have become so rich, compared to how the human race had lived for ever  before the last few centuries.

 

This graph portrays the economic progress in the last two hundred years as measured by life expectancy, GDP per capita, percentage not living in extreme poverty, energy consumption, war-making capacity, and percentage of people living in democracy.

These are the facts. Why, then, when things are getting better so fast, are we beset by concerns for global warming, climate catastrophes, income disparities, and every form of oppression, including completely imaginary ones? Why the atmosphere of general cultural pessimism?

The question that Deirdre McCloskey asked herself in her book Bourgeois Dignity was why the economics profession was unable to answer this question satisfactorily: why have things gotten better? her answer was that there occurred in western Europe and change in the deal: innovation came to be allowed, indeed encouraged, and you got to keep the economic value of your innovation. Hence the change int he human condition proceeded from a change in ideas. Not from trade, especially not from slavery, not from exploration, not from ripping off the ecology, but from allowing innovation.

You do not have to accept this explanation, but if you read McCloskey you will have difficulty in accepting another.

 

How Piketty misses the point

 

Thomas Piketty is a French economist who obsesses about the distribution of wealth. Deirdre McCloskey is an economist and philosopher who emphasizes the moral and ideational aspects of how we became so wealthy over the last several centuries. She calls it the Great Enrichment. She chastizes her fellow economists in how they have failed to explain the most salient feature of human existence since 1700: why is it that humans are sixty times wealthier than they were in 1700? Why is world poverty falling? This, she says, is the vital question. Economists who fuss about income inequality are missing the vital point.

McCloskey is the author of Bourgeois Dignity and many other great books.

Here she is on Piketty:

 

The most fundamental problem in Piketty’s book, then, is that he misses the main act. In focusing solely on the distribution of income, he overlooks the most surprising secular event in history: the Great Enrichment of the average individual on the planet by a factor of 10 and in rich countries by a factor of 30 or more. Many humans are now stunningly better off than their ancestors were.

This includes a gigantic improvement of the poorest — your ancestors and mine. By dramatic increases in the size of the pie, the poor have been lifted to 90 or 95 percent of equal sustenance and dignity, as against the 10 or 5 percent attainable by redistribution without enlarging the pie.

What caused the Great Enrichment? It cannot be explained by the accumulation of capital, as the very name “capitalism” implies. Our riches were not made by piling brick upon brick, bachelor’s degree upon bachelor’s degree, bank balance upon bank balance, but by piling idea upon idea. The bricks, BAs, and bank balances were of course necessary. Oxygen is necessary for a fire. But it would be unenlightening to explain the Chicago Fire of 1871 by the presence of oxygen in the earth’s atmosphere.

The original and sustaining causes of the modern world were indeed ethical, not material. They were the widening adoption of two new ideas: the liberal economic idea of liberty for ordinary people and the democratic social idea of dignity for them. This, in turn, released human creativity from its ancient trammels. Radically creative destruction piled up ideas, such as the railways creatively destroying walking and the stage coaches, or electricity creatively destroying kerosene lighting and the hand washing of clothes, or universities creatively destroying literary ignorance and low productivity in agriculture. The Great Enrichment requires not accumulation of capital or the exploitation of workers but what I call the Bourgeois Deal. In the historical lottery the idea of an equalizing liberty and dignity was the winning ticket, and the bourgeoisie held it.

That even over the long run there remain some poor people does not mean the system is not working for the poor, so long as their condition is continuing to improve, as it is, and so long as the percentage of the desperately poor is heading toward zero, as it is. That people still sometimes die in hospitals does not mean that medicine is to be replaced by witch doctors, so long as death rates are falling and so long as the death rate would not fall under the care of the witch doctors. It is a brave book Thomas Piketty has written. But it is mistaken.

Deirdre N. McCloskey, “How Piketty Misses the Point”, Cato Policy Report, 2015-07.

“The idea of equalizing liberty and dignity” – emblazon that idea into your memory, and save it for your next argument with some twee leftist.

 

 

 

 

Monopoly power is always the same

Some people are starting to notice the power of Google and other web giants to suppress points of view. The firing of their own engineer James Damore for pointing out the biological basis for women and men differing in their desires to be engineers was, it seems, only the beginning.

Now the repression appears to have widened. The Open Markets section of the New America Foundation concerns itself with  monopolies and abuses of dominant position: all very econometric geeky stuff. The head of Open Markets, Barry Lynn, issued a notice congratulating the European Commission for fining Google for economic crimes related to dominant market position. He was removed from the New America Foundation. It seems to have been the result of Google’s Eric Schmidt quietly expressing displeasure, as corporate titans are wont to do when underlings make trouble.

Matt Stoller, who belongs to the Open Markets group, wrote the following in the Huffington Post, US edition.

In response, Google had our group kicked out of our parent think tank, New America. Ken Vogel at the New York Times did the story on the specifics of how this happened. The combination, of the misbehavior in the search market and the attempt to suppress research into how Google operates, shows that the actual issue at hand is one of political power.

This moment matters. It matters because it shows that monopoly power, and Google itself, is a threat to the free flow of ideas upon which our democracy depends. It matters because it proves that if we do not stand up to monopolists, they will keep our public institutions quiet about their growing power. And it matters most of all because it shows that we can reclaim our democracy if we try.

At Open Markets, we obviously do not like the attempt at undermining our work, but on another level, we see this as a backhanded compliment by Google on how effective our work has actually been. After all, if we are worth silencing, then our words and research carries power.

Monopoly is a political problem. It is time to stand up for our rights. It is time to say, enough. And as we’ve seen, when we do tell the truth, the monopolists cannot abide.

Google’s tactics will not work. Our organization, Open Markets, is going independent. And we are launching a campaign called Citizens Against Monopoly, where we will ask Google’s CEO to stop this manipulation of our public commons. Join us.

I urge readers to stay on top of this story. Freedom is threatened as much by private economic power as by state action, frequently because private market power is exercized without recourse to standards of fairness that states are bound to. The portrait of Google  that emerged from the Damore story revealed a place dominated by leftist groupthink. The biological was an excluded category of truth; reference to it as an explanatory cause for why women did not participate in the ranks of elite engineers was the sin of “stereotyping” and a firing offence.

This kind of mental phase-locking would have no importance if Google made physical objects. It matters supremely when the company aspires to record, catalog and make findable all human knowledge. Because the same power to make findable can make things unfindable. The power to control the past is the power to control the future.

_________________________

Speaking of which, here is an example:

https://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/08/31/google-issues-ultimatum-to-conservative-website-remove-hateful-article-or-lose-ad-revenue/

With monopoly or market power, you can now be made to disappear.

Here s the stated policy which the site offended. How much would Barrelstrength offend, if it came to our Internet overlord’s attention?

“As stated in our program policies, Google ads may not be placed on pages that contain content that: Threatens or advocates harm on oneself or others; Harasses, intimidates or bullies an individual or group of individuals; Incites hatred against, promotes discrimination of, or disparages an individual or group on the basis of their race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or other characteristic that is associated with systemic discrimination or marginalization,” the email stated.

You can drive an armoured division through that one.

 

The anthropologist discusses race and his white grandchildren

 

In which the learned and well meaning professor tries to explain why, when polite people have been taught to be colour-blind, events cause people actually to talk about race. Which is not supposed to exist, right? Race is simultaneously supposed not to exist, and exists nevertheless. And he has white grandchildren.

“Ethnicity is essential to identity”, he says, and to suppress discussion of race is to handicap our children.

Ten points, sir, for honesty and truth.

Except, in my view, for the idea that race does not exist. Which is the grand denial of biology.