Those institutions are not capable of withstanding these assaults much longer without cracking. The people in the country know this, or, at the very least, except for the 35 percent who are the real cargo-cultists out there, they sense it deeply in their bones. They feel the deepening acceleration of the spiral. The Democratic Party doesn’t have the power to lead and the Republican Party doesn’t have the will and, even at its best, the media is overmatched by the sheer magnitude of bullshit this administration shovels out as a matter of course every hour of every day. This is absolutely no time for the most eloquent voices in society to be on the bench.Because, like the man said, that's where the money is. Such questions!
So why, sir? Why in the hell are you out there giving speeches to motherfcking bankers in motherfcking Brazil? As the NYT reports
...a new $50 coffee table book by former White House photographer Pete Souza, Obama: An Intimate Portrait, is selling so fast the publisher can’t keep up.
“That shows the immediate nostalgia that we have for Barack Obama, given the dramatic contrast between him and his successor,” Updegrove said.
Schmidt is a known womanizer despite being married for 37 years to Wendy Schmidt, who said in 2012 they started living separate lives because she felt like “a piece of luggage” following him around the world.
News outlets have been sniffing around Schmidt’s former flames looking for a Harvey Weinstein-like bombshell, a source close to Schmidt told The Post. But sources say there’s nothing there.
“They haven’t found s–t. Because there is no sexual harassment. There has never been any issue. They have had nothing. People have looked into it and people have not found anything,” the source said.
The source added that if something foul was afoot, Google would have canned Schmidt completely.
“Why would they keep him on the board, then have to do this all over again?” the source asked.
Another source close to Schmidt said that any rumors of sexual harassment were “totally not true.”
But the insider could not deny Schmidt’s well-documented romantic past and said the techie’s entanglements were “consensual” and that there are “no complaints” against the exec or “settlements” from the company.This seems a notable escalation. At this rate I predict someone will go down early in the new year for refusing to give oral sex.
It dangled from a branch for days, wrapped with bright ribbons and studded with large nails and oversize safety pins.Are Santerians joining the fight against gentrification? Was the tongue just there to get the hipsters to shut up, for maybe five effin minutes, about the latest greatest cable series?
It weathered and hardened from gray-black to a leathery brown. From a distance, as professionals and students walked past the tree at the west end of Palmer Square Park to trains and buses each morning, it could have been mistaken for a hanging length of bark. But within 10 feet, it was clearly something else: a footlong tongue.
Why was a tongue, likely a cow’s, so carefully disfigured and displayed near the luxury apartments and condominiums in rapidly gentrifying Logan Square? In a neighborhood that’s now home to loads of 20-something hipsters, it could be an elaborate performance art piece or a joke.
But Logan Square and nearby Humboldt Park have much longer histories as working-class enclaves filled with first- and second-generation immigrants, so another possibility presents itself.
Tongues have long played roles in Afro-Caribbean religions like Santeria. The symbolic engine of speech, a tongue can be used in many such faiths to try to get someone to remain silent, according to Lisa Poirier, an assistant professor of religious studies at DePaul University.
“Often it has to do with a court case,” Poirier said. “You can take a tongue and bind it up to get someone to shut up.”
Such practices flourished for centuries among enslaved populations in North and South America and the Caribbean who didn’t believe police and judges would treat them fairly, Poirier said.I can get you a toe, Dude. I can get you a toe this afternoon.
“They had to find these religio-magical ways to bring about the ends they sought,” she said. “You could put a name on a piece of paper and put it inside the tongue, then seal it in with pins, but you wouldn’t necessarily need to do that,” she said. “You could just have someone’s name in your mind as you dealt with the tongue, bound it up.
“The logic is clear,” she added. “There’s a clear connection between the tongue and speech, and you can find the things you need in an urban setting like Chicago. Cow tongues are easily available.”
Poirier said that despite the shocking appearance, it’s not that out of the ordinary, even today. “It’s sort of widespread throughout the Americas,” she said. “It speaks to the fact there are still people who feel they won’t get a fair shake in the justice system.”It remains to be seen how much more normalization of voodoo and superstition will be necessitated by our new diversity. The expectation that it will wither away over generations, which would have been taken for granted, probably can't be articulated without controversy now. Now the expectation is that we'll bring any new religion or culture into the "mosaic" of American diversity, unaltered and celebrated as Vibrant! Make a little room, Lutheranism, there's another brotherhood of faith here.
Walking near Palmer Square Park while the tongue was still in place, local resident Marina Goldshteyn noted the area’s shifting demographics.
“I know the neighborhood is changing a lot, but it hasn’t entirely,” she said. The cow tongue, however, is no more. A Chicago Park District worker noticed the tongue and cut it down earlier this week.
My trip to the bank about a month ago was somewhat unusual, and I knew it would require special attention from a teller...I couldn’t believe that this person was the person with whom I was about to interact. What I was seeing was a beautiful woman. She seemed in her mid-twenties, about five feet seven or eight inches tall. She had exquisitely smooth and lustrous brown hair, arresting brown eyes, and a classic movie-star beauty which reminded me of a young Ingrid Bergman. As I was preparing myself to deal with such a stunning specimen of womanhood, I asked myself, “Why is she here? Why is she not working for a modeling agency selling perfume or diamonds?”
I asked this because in my line of work and the circles in which I travel, you don’t often find jaw-droppingly beautiful women who are just standing there waiting for you to come up and talk to them. During our encounter I had to look away from her a few times because I didn’t want it to seem as if I, a happily-married husband and father, were mooning over a girl practically young enough to be my daughter. (The temptation was there, believe me.)One thing feminists didn't conjure entirely out of thin air is misogyny. Males experience evolutionary despair (felt as heartache) at being exposed to desirable females who are not available to them.
Anyway, she was perfectly nice and professional, and our entire transaction took about ten minutes. I left the bank satisfied that I had completed that errand and was free to run the next one. Yet as I stepped into the parking lot, I experienced a thoroughly unwelcome emotion, one I hadn’t experienced in a long time: heartache. A nice, jarring stab of it, too. And this wasn’t even mature, manly heartache, the kind no one could really blame me for having. No, no, this was a return of the angsty, juvenile heartache that everyone over thirty wants to forget. This was the heartache that plagued countless lonely nights throughout my pretty goddamn pathetic youth. I remember them well.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
Of course, I never once felt any resentment or anger towards the nice girl at the bank. But I knew she was the cause of this heartache. But how? Why? The answer came to me immediately: she never smiled at me. Not once. For me, she was nothing less than a vision, the epitome of what the human form can attain. For her, however, I was just another customer, deserving of prompt service and common courtesy and nothing more. This beautiful creature couldn’t even spare me a single solitary smile. Realizing this made me feel so mean.
Powers said the resignation was a condition of a settlement Lowe reached with the college. She will receive $240,000, which includes final wages and attorney fees, to settle her tort claim of discrimination and a hostile work environment, according to Powers.Speaking of money, the school is reeling (no sympathy for its collective emotional labors) since the shutdown, having already impoverished programs to promote diversity (and of course conceding more money to it following the takeover), losing faculty and students.
In 2015, Evergreen hired a new president. Trained as a sociologist, George Bridges did two things upon arrival. First, he hired an old friend to talk one-on-one to members of our community — faculty, staff, and students. We talked about our values and our visions for the college. But the benefit of hindsight suggests that he was looking for something else. He was mapping us, assessing our differences, our blind spots, and the social tensions that ran beneath the surface. Second, Bridges fired the provost, Michael Zimmerman. The provost, usually synonymous with the vice president for academics, is the chief academic officer at an institution of higher education. Zimmerman would have disapproved of what Bridges had in mind and would have had some power to stop it. But he was replaced by a timid (though well-liked) insider who became a pawn due to his compromised interim status and his desire not to make waves.
Having mapped the faculty and fired the provost, Bridges began reworking the college in earnest. Surprise announcements became the norm as opportunities for discussion dwindled.We know Bridges as the bow-tied, submissive flak-catcher of the protests. That's a very different fellow described above. I bet that describes a lot of these types.
The president took aim at what made Evergreen unique, such as full-time programs. He fattened the administration, creating expensive vice president positions at an unprecedented rate, while budgets tightened elsewhere due to drops in student enrollment and disappearing state dollars. He went after Evergreen’s unparalleled faculty autonomy, which was essential to the unique teaching done by the best professors.
All of this should have been alarming to a faculty in which professors have traditionally viewed administrative interference in academic matters with great suspicion. But Bridges was strategic and forged an alliance with factions known to be obsessed with race. He draped the “equity” banner around everything he did. Advocating that Evergreen embrace itself as a “College of Social Justice,” he argued that faculty autonomy unjustly puts the focus on teachers rather than students, and that the new VP for Equity and Inclusion would help us serve our underserved populations.
But no discussion was allowed of students who did not meet the narrow criteria of being “underserved.” Because of the wrapping, concerns about policy changes were dismissed as “anti-equity.” What was in the nicely wrapped box turned out to be something else entirely.The civil rights movement is now pure plunder--ironic that this is one of Ta Nehisi Coates' favorite words. The fury of protesters, the pettiness of their complaints, these are measures of a sort of how deep into the nation's ruin they are. They'll have to work harder and harder to extract less and less from the American legacy, with more and more identities elbowing up to the trough.
Should white men be blamed or thanked for inventing most of the technology that makes our lives better? A new study by Stanford economist Raj Chetty exploiting his unique access to your old 1040 tax returns argues that the massive gaps in inventiveness (as measured by patents) seen among the races, the sexes, and the regions of the country represent a tragic case of what he calls “Lost Einsteins: The Innovations We’re Missing”:
Whites are more than three times as likely to become inventors as blacks. And 82% of 40-year-old inventors today are men.
Chetty says, based on his study of 452 patent holders who were New York City public school students and for whom he has third-grade test scores:
High-scoring black kids and Hispanic kids go into innovation at incredibly low rates…. There must be many “lost Einsteins” in those groups—children who appear to have been similarly able at a young age to their white and Asian peers but who never got a chance to deploy their skills. ["a mind is a terrible thing to waste"]
Chetty writes: A lack of exposure to innovation can help explain why high-ability children in low-income families, minorities, and women are significantly less likely to become inventors. Importantly, such lack of exposure screens out not just marginal inventors but the “Einsteins” who produce innovations that have the greatest impacts on society.Chetty is a real scientist but still evinces the obliviousness of a new class spawned by America's new diversity: the high-IQ, no-clue Southeast Asian newly arrived in the West, or marinated in its self-abasement in its schools, taking up political correctness and lecturing us with a the sort of confidence that comes from complete ignorance.
By the way, it’s unclear why Chetty’s study of inventors is entitled “Lost Einsteins” rather than “Lost Edisons."
Chetty, who sometimes seems not all that familiar with his adoptive country, appears to have gotten the European scientific theorist Albert Einstein (who, although he once worked in a patent office, was not much of an inventor) confused with the American inventor Thomas Alva Edison (whose name is on 1,093 U.S. patents).
Einstein, Edison…they both begin with “E.” Chetty lectures:
In particular, targeting exposure programs to women, minorities, and children from low-income families who excel in math and science at early ages (e.g., as measured by performance on standardized tests) is likely to maximize their impacts on innovation. The Indian immigrant doesn’t seem all that aware that encouraging blacks (and, to a slightly lesser extent, Hispanics) as well as girls to study science and engineering has been an enormous social priority for the past half century.Operating from the assumptions of disparate impact--that any disparity (favoring the majority) in achievement is a measure of discrimination, because there can be no disparities in God-given abilities between groups--Chetty purports to reveal a vast reserve of black and brown talent going underutilized, impoverishing the nation. He appeals not to our morality but to our practicality: equality is a material resource of a sort. But like Steve points out, finding and promoting that talent out of political and social concern has been one of the central projects of the United States for longer than Mr Chetty has been alive.
In the newly evolving view of institutional racism, individual intent was at best a secondary consideration. Instead, employment discrimination should be defined and attacked as a differential [disparate impact], rather than...as an act of prejudice. It's measure was simply the gap between the white and minority rates. This presumptive new definition in turn rested on an implicit normative theory of proportional representation absent that institutional racism had built into the workplace, absent the discrimination that institutional racism had built into the employment structure...It's chief political strength lay in its practical utility as an implicit and self-justifying formula for equity. This was captured in the workaday concept known as "underutilization," a term...accepted as early as 1961. [bold added]The concept was introduced out of impatience. Anti-discrimination law was not yielding results in achieving proportional representation--which was the whole point, despite the focus on discrimination as an objective wrong.
By the early 1960s...liberal reformers were beginning to question the FEP [Fair Employment Practice] model...Rutgers law professor Alfred W. Blumrosen studied...New Jersey's Civil Rights Commision...a "plaintiff's lawyer" who would spend a sabbatical year in 1965-66 helping the new EEOC organize its enforcement procedures...he brought to his study a "tough minded" model of "maximum enforcement,"...a mental image, a model of how the state agency should operate in order to have maximum impact...Blumrosen concluded...the...commission's enforcement patterns "typified administrative caution...[i]t was a failure.".When an honest academic studied Massachusetts' enforcement of anti-discrimination law the results could not have been encouraging
Blumrosen's aggressive advocacy in a law review article still did not constitute an objective and comprehensive state study. But Leon Mayhew's Harvard dissertation in sociology did...his dissertation analyzed...the FEP commission in Massachusetts...it concentrated on the years since 1959...it focused more on the complexities of institutional processes than the efficacy of results...Not that it would have mattered to Blumrosen, but the liberal go-getters of the civil rights movement were getting their first real introduction to black America. I won't say they were just getting to know black America, because they still haven't started that.
Mayhew...was sympathetic to the purpose of the FEP commisions...but unlike Hill [another pit-bull activist government lawyer], Mayhew was bound by the canons of scholarship enforced by a dissertation committee...he closely followed the processing of 118 complaint cases. The pattern he found was surprising. The evidence showed that "complaints developed by individuals whose structural position provides limited perspective are objectively poor...they tend to be based on mere suspicion, they are quite likely to eventuate in a finding of 'no probable cause,' and they tend to be made against firms that do not discriminate"By 1966 the still-green EEOC had adopted disparate impact as the ultimate criterion, under pressure from feminists as well as the civil rights movement.
...the EEOC had inadvertently accelerated the social and political momentum of the civil rights movement toward a result-centered strategy that would equate race and sex in EEO enforcement. The new strategy would seek to determine the extent of both race and gender discrimination, and potentially the extent of any other categories of alleged discrimination, not by attempting to ascertain intent on a case-by-case basis, but rather by broadly applying a proportional model of statistical representation in the workforce.
...an opposing theory was pushed by the Nixon administration...based on an implicit theory of group rather than individual rights. Its core model was one of proportional representation of racial and ethnic groups, and it emphasized substantive rather than procedural equality. By the end of the Johnson administration the proportional or equal-results model was coming to dominate the enforcement strategies of the EEOC...the Nixon administration in its first year revived the moribund Philadelphia Plan...When...Congress reacted in dismay that autumn by trying to strip away the Plan's provision for job quotas, the Nixon administration hurled the full force of its lobbying muscle against them.By the Carter administration affirmative action was in effect as a "temporary" expedient in public pronouncements that was quickly (and more or less deliberately) morphing into an institution.
That same year [1977] Justice Blackmun in Weber agreed that quotas werIndeed. Groups like, say, Southeast Asians, entitled to entrench themselves in the political infrastructure, claiming their right to explain America to us.
"a temporary tool for remedying past discrimination without attempting to 'maintain' a previously achieved balance." Yet despite these disclaimers from the highest authorities, everything we know about the normal politics of social regulation points in the opposite direction. In pluralist America, interest groups have historically entrenched themselves in the political infrastructure in defense of their claimed rights and entitlements.
Activist with a decades-long track record of advocating for women and girls. Coupled with one of the most visible and desirable men in the world. Designers want to dress her. Adoring crowds gather to catch a glimpse of her. A woman for kids to look up to, settling comfortably into her role as pleasant figurehead on the world stage. These are things that Ivanka Trump wants to be. These are things Meghan Markle actually is.How dare Ivanka claim to be the princess!
Ivanka wanted to be a princess, a denizen of photo-ops and collectible dishes Middle America can order from Parade magazine, like Princess Diana. A person beloved and celebrated like royalty, and immune to the critical eye of the political media. Problem is, there’s no “princess” position in the executive branch.And, alas, none at the Daily Beast. Women here work for a living I tell you. Like Ms Markle, whose decades of achievement will eventually become legend:
Markle first publicly advocated for women and girls when she was just 11 years old, when she started a letter-writing campaign against an ad that suggested only women perform housework. The campaign got the attention of NickNews. Per the AFP, her role as a global ambassador for World Vision Canada took her to Rwanda and fostered her advocacy for children in other developing countries. She’s written about global stigma around menstruation, and spoken at the UN for International Women’s Day in 2015. During that talk, the self-described feminist said “Women need a seat at the table, they need an invitation to be seated there, and in some cases, where this is not available, they need to create their own table.”Ivanka as the failed feminist doesn't get to be princess. Markle has put in her time. Like in Beauty and the Beast she's rewarded for loving the homely face of feminism with the handsome prince of domestic luxury.
In contrast [to dowdy old Ivanka], Markle is the fashion industry’s newest muse, in much the same way the Middleton sisters were nearly seven years ago. According, again, to the Times’ Vanessa Friedman, Marklemania has already started. Every outfit she wears inspires crazed levels of imitation. Magazines are already using Markle as a peg in style headlines. The coat she wore during her official engagement announcement crashed its brand’s website. Markle, Friedman notes, will “unquestionably be the most desired guest for any brand” at London Fashion Week this winter.
Every day features a new Markle wedding dress fanfic piece written with the help of a bevy of designers and speculation. Will she pick Jenny Packham? Oscar de la Renta? She’s already described her perfect dress, says ABC (she actually didn’t describe anything specific at all). Whatever Markle picks, people will go apeshit over it."Whatever it is"? You mean, if she walks naked, like a royal figure in a familiar fairy tale, people will enthuse nonetheless?
There’s something uniquely 2017 fever-dreamy about the divergence of Ivanka and Markle’s fates. Markle, a working actress who once held a briefcase on Deal Or No Deal, gets to retire from the thornier parts of politics and into a life of a princess. Meanwhile Ivanka, the telegenic heiress of the man behind The Art of the Deal has found herself queen of the frogs.Not "fever-dreamy", just dreamy. One little girl's dream, like every girl's dream, to be whisked away...
Tony Hovater, the Ohio man whose profile in The New York Times caused much indignation last weekend, would have been in jail or at least under close police surveillance if he lived in Germany. In the U.S., Hovater is free to keep posting swastika-filled pictures on Facebook — but the writer and editors who published a piece about him that was bleakly neutral in tone face ferocious anger for "normalizing" the Nazi sympathizer.
A certain part of U.S. society's desire to set rules has been frustrated by the election of Donald Trump as president — though, in fact, it was frustrated even earlier, by years of Republican majorities in Congress. That frustration is manifesting itself as vocal outrage campaigns on the same social networks that have enabled Trump supporters to organize and white supremacists to find like-minded people in other parts of the country. But rather than bring change, the outrage will deepen rifts.Everyone who's anyone is angry the Nazi in the story is so nice and harmless--but they would be untroubled in Europe, where he would be thrown in jail for dissent no matter how decent. Bershidsky has the profile of the soulless international bug man, and this piece on its face is a common enough type: an author implicitly suggesting a radical solution in ostensible neutrality. But he goes so far I'm tempted to think it a disguised satire or something. If Bershidsky was alt right, a conspiracy theory of his working for the Deep State to make the movement look ridiculous.
After 1945, Germany chose to pass laws that made most radical right propaganda, as well as Nazi symbols, illegal. These laws are still in force. The Constitutional Protection Office watches people who tend to cut it too close. A tourist who throws a Nazi salute in jest can get arrested. It's not just swastikas that are banned — schools routinely forbid the wearing the clothes of certain brands that are associated with the neo-Nazi movement. Hate speech against groups of people, including races, is a crime. A vast majority of Germans approves of these rules. Those who don't — such as members of the far-right NPD party or the most radical elements within the milder Alternative for Germany party — keep quiet about it or run legal risks. Other countries without Germany's history of Nazi rule — such as Sweden and Switzerland — have also legislated against Nazi symbols.The standard social-media outrage campaign that quickly brought the NYT to heel is nonetheless waged over media that allows "Trump supporters to organize" and frees "white supremacists" from their isolation. The implied argument here is that social media may have to be sacrificed to social justice. The Left isn't winning there, but, as the author realizes, the Left was winning before social media's democratic revolution messed up the program. Social media is a front and fight the powerful don't need because they run everything outside of it.
A citizen who doesn't break the law is protected by society as a whole, however immoral his actions. It isn't writing about Hovater that "normalizes" his behavior; it's the lack of legal consequences when he embraces Nazi symbolism. Trump's election, Hovater told New York Times writer Richard Fausset, helped drive that home. He now brushes off attacks with "Yeah, so?"That's a mess of a paragraph. I'm not sure how Trump's election freed Hovater from thinking about criminal sanction. It's social sanction that has been lifted, slightly, for those with less to risk. What he seems to be getting at here is that social sanction doesn't cut it anymore, so criminal sanction may be our only recourse. That and not criminalizing a thing is "normalizing" it.
All the outrage campaigns against "normalizing" white nationalism and sexual harassment, two sins of which Trump has been accused, might seem like a call for legislative change. But there is no serious movement for German-style hate speech laws or Nazi symbol bans making their way through Congress. There are no proposals to match this year's German law that requires social networks to remove hate speech or face steep fines.But there's no support for that here. The noise of these daily controversies is just that for the most part. So far the Left hasn't had to give up its own freedom of expression to silence opposition for the most part, having the socials under their control and applying unashamedly biased policies. But that only goes so far. The Left is losing the Battle of Social Media and may have to call a bomb strike on their own position.
“Research shows that the dynamic that leads to outrage is not the same as that which effects change,” says Ronny Patz, a nongovernmental organization researcher at Munich's Ludwig Maximilian University. “When such waves, such scandals come into focus, it helps when there’s already a process afoot that matches the outrage.” He means a legislative process, and he's right. In response to the criticism of Fausset's piece, The New York Times felt compelled to issue a deftly worded nonapology and to remove from the piece a link to a website selling swastika armbands. But it's a long way from this kind of damage control to real, lasting change.
Such change would require going through the normal political process: drafting legislation, pushing it through Congress and getting it signed by the president, or overriding his veto. In the U.S., of course, the Supreme Court could also legislate outside this process, as it effectively did with gay marriage — something that wouldn't work in European countries, where referendums and parliamentary majorities have made the decision.We have here a chilling vision of what might have been. Hillary Clinton and her Supreme Court instituting controls on speech and media, with a punitive vengeance for our defiance in bringing forth Trump.
‘For people of color by people of color’
The student newspaper at Evergreen State College has a section in its opinion pages described as “for people of color by people of color.”
“This should be a place where we can be us without it being overshadowed by the dark cloud that is living under white supremacy and having to see things from a white perspective. This is why when we do cover these issues it will be in the context and from the perspective of POC and POC only,” according to the section’s editors as they reintroduced it to readers in September.
The anonymous column, known as “POC Talk,” debuted in the bi-weekly Cooper Point Journal last year and returned this fall to the newspaper’s pages following racial unrest that erupted at the public university this past spring.
“Dear White people, please take a step back, this isn’t brown-people-answer-white-people’s-questions-hour, we’re asking specifically for submissions from POC,” the section’s editors added in their September intro. “As being told no seems to be a difficult concept for some of y’all I await your emails about the Irish, how the term white fragility is mean (great example of white fragility) and how we need to view people through a color-blind lens (just lol). You will 100% not get a response!!!”\
Published in the Journal’s Letters Opinion section, POC Talk says it provides “no-holds-barred commentary on local happenings.” In the inaugural POC Talk column, it was suggested that a subject touched on in the column could possibly include “how do I rid myself of white-dread [sic] roommate’s numerous micro-agressions.” Topics the column has discussed include student activism, self care, the local comedy scene as well as the turmoil that upended the college after students in May accused a white biology professor, Bret Weinstein, and the university of perpetuating racism.
The Cooper Point Journal did not respond to multiple requests for comment regarding the column.This is the same Evergreen College that was being patrolled by a band of lesbians led by a black alpha trannie, all armed with baseball bats, after having shut the school down over some minor offense to their collective pride. Say what you will about the Left, it has the most colorful riff raff. Rightwingers are just embarrassing in comparison.
"Antifascist" demonstration Portland, Oregon. August 17, 2019. The two sides squared off across a field, defined by police cord...
