The Assumption Assumption

Via Steve Sailer, the story of maybe the most egregious Me Too takedown yet, of open software innovator Richard Stallman. From Jack Baruth

 “Wait,” some of you are saying, “that’s right! Jeffrey Epstein had a rape island! I’d forgotten all about it, what with Epstein’s convenient suicide and some remarkably media-friendly mass shootings occurring right as justice was about to be quote-unquote handed out!” Funny how that works. Perhaps it’s because Mr. Epstein had a full list of powerful and notable friends. One of those friends, apparently, was MIT artifical-intelligence savant Marvin Minsky, who is alleged to have had sex with a 17-year-old girl on the island.

When asked to give his thoughts on the matter, Stallman responded like any 110-octane autism-spectrum genius would: by questioning the terminology involved. He suggested that the correct word for Minsky’s alleged statutory rape was not “sexual assault”, noting that

a) Minsky had no way to know the girl was 17, not 18 ; b) she had been coerced by Epstein out of Minsky’s presence and might well have appeared to be entirely willing.
In true Stallman fashion, this was

a) absolutely correct from a logical perspective; b) mind-blowingly stupid from a perspective of The Current Year.

It’s no different from the thousands of logical but emotionally uncomfortable things he has said and written over the past forty years. Stallman has no way to understand how people feel about something; he doesn’t feel that way. The community of actual computer scientists and clued-in tech people has long accepted this because — and I cannot emphasize this enough — Richard Stallman is responsible for computing as we know it.

In a world where Richard Stallman did not exist, neither would Apple, or the Android phone, or “cloud computing”, or Amazon.com. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. The world without Stallman would be a world where you still used a Windows 95 computer, where you paid real money for every single piece of software on it. Internet Explorer would be the browser. Computing would be limited to the upper-middle-class, the way it was in 1985. No matter how you are reading this website, both you and I are using systems which incorporate GNU software. Even if you’re using Windows, which nowadays runs on a very GNU-like operating system beneath the covers.

Stallman's dull, correct analysis inspired a female student to take to Medium to launch a cancel crusade:

I was shocked. I continued talking to my friend, a female graduate student in CSAIL, about everything, trying to get the full email thread (I wasn’t on the mailing list). I even started emailing reporters — local and national, news sites, newspapers, radio stations. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. During my 45-minute drive home, when I normally listen to podcasts or music, I just sat in complete silence. The only reporter who responded quickly was one from WBUR, and they didn’t seem to be in a rush to publish this information. So, I told my friends that I would just write a story myself. I’d planned to do it after work today; instead, because I can’t possibly focus, I’m working on it now.

MIT does not deserve its women.

The world does not deserve them either. I thought back to every person who has ever asked me how to “fix” the gender problems in STEM, how to “get more girls” to join STEM programs. I thought about every time that someone has suggested “men are better at spatial thinking” and that “testosterone is linked to better performance in math”. In my mind I look at all these people, a crowd that is gathered. And in my mind, I stand up and I scream at them. I would put my hands around their shoulders and shake sense into all of them, individually, if I had enough time and enough hands The problems are so obvious.

There is no discernible substance in the girl's complaints, of course, just the standard leveraging of alleged brutish behavior by a high-profile man into an explanation of female mediocrity and demand for "more women in STEM" (to combat sexism in STEM, which is now in and of itself wrong--that is, even if more women in STEM degrades STEM, it's necessary because sexism exists there).

But what struck me is the assumption, always implied now openly expressed, that, in the absence of discrimination or bias all those old white guys who built the modern world would have been represented by women and minorities. The world would be much as it is, only better. Everything would have been created by the lost and neglected genius of Wakandans and Wymmn.

Indeed, the STEM-bette who wrote this piece didn't know who Stallman is before she saw her opportunity

Did I even really know who Richard Stallman was before those emails? To be honest, not really — I’m a mechanical engineer who didn’t pay enough attention, apparently. I did not possess the awe and reverence many people commenting and retweeting seemed to. Maybe if I had known I would have been more “careful”. Maybe if I had known I, too, would have been able to let such comments and behavior slide because of “genius”.

I keep waiting for "genius" to be outed as problematic (unless applied to your favorite rapper because he turned a clever phrase, once).

The assumption at the base of all feminist and anti-racist action is the denial of genius--which is assumed to be evenly distributed by race and sex. (Of course if it was evenly distributed it wouldn't really exist, yet...)

Scientific discovery and enlightenment are a passive process, inevitable, indeed, the modern world would be just what it is, but better, if not for "white supremacy"; it's just a question of who got the "privilege" to create it. This becomes sinister when you realize they are now insisting the future world be the creation of those who have shown no real talent for world-making: women and brown people.

When a female department head at Harvard's teaching hospital decided to take down the portraits of eminent alumnae  in a lecture hall because there was only one Chinese luminary among the white faces, there was the usual weak stir of protest (often accompanied by sops to "diversity" and "discrimination" by good people desperate not to stick their neck too far out).

It didn't seem to occur to anyone to ask why they didn't just include a few tokens, which is after all standard practice in all kinds of applications; the only reason I can fathom this wasn't considered is because they would have had to so lower standards to include just a few brown or female faces that the disparity between their achievements and those of the Old White Guys would be too embarrassing to endure, reinforcing the perception of their superiority. Putting someone who designed a better hospital gown next to someone who saved lives improving heart surgery is perhaps too much even for Woke Administration. Better a bare wall than one that offends.

So they did here what is happening everywhere, scrapping something entirely because it can't be racially and sexually diversified without embarrassment. I was going to write "without catastrophe" but realize to achieve equity they are quite willing to accept that--even the slow, hidden catastrophe that has to be resulting from talented whites being chased out of medicine, and everywhere, now. The result is ultimately measured in mortality. Every one of those offending white faces represents lives saved. Every talented white making way for a brown mediocrity represents lives to be lost. I'm sure if they had to, they'd fashion a rationalization as to why people must die to achieve "equity".

They aren't just eliminating Whites' past achievements taking down portraits, they're pre-emptively eliminating Whites' future achievements. They're taking down future portraits too.

One tweet in defense of whitewashing the lecture hall's wall makes the assumption the discoveries were inevitable, and if affirmative action had reigned, we wouldn't have a bare wall (and impoverished present), but a more colorful one:


Lost in all the emotion, falsity and grift, is the logical contradiction that would put to rest finally the notion that bias operates everywhere always, if only we were allowed to say it: if all this brown and female talent is out there--has always been out there--at some point someone would have figured out he can surpass his rivals--whether it be in business, education or sport--by abandoning bias and recruiting, and paying less for, all this untapped talent.

It is in fact what happened with sports. Here and there coaches and managers decided to break a cultural restriction against black players to acquire superior athletes. Once they've done this, their competitors have to abandon discrimination to compete.

Why does this not replicate in at least one endeavor not related to stereotypical black talents? Why is there not a women's univeristy somewhere collecting all these disaffected, brilliant students and cleaning up?

Total mystery. We may never know.

addendum

The cancel crusaders have historical predecessors, and some may find their way to eminence of a sort after all:

On May 25, 1966, Nie Yuanzi, a party activist and philosophy administrator at Peking University, and six other party functionaries authored and put up a “big-character poster” (called a dazibao) on campus denouncing the university’s administration as furthering the aims of the bourgeoisie. 

Mao seized on the message and ordered it to be read over the national broadcast and reprinted in the People’s Daily. In the coming weeks and months, Mao sought to purge dissent and purify the ideological foundation of China into his cult of personality. Leveraging Nie’s message into a broader call to rebellion, Mao used his Red Guard, a group of militant radicals mostly composed of students, to dismantle higher education and reshape art and literature to support his aims of control.

White Women Wantonly Whiting

Via Steve Sailer, the Twitter account for feminist advocacy group "Women's March":

"White women gonna white" appears to be a theme. From the organization's website:

We are outraged. We are organized. They forgot that 5 million women lit the world on fire two years ago. On January 19, 2019, we’re going to remind them when we flood the streets of Washington, D.C., and with sister marches in cities across the globe. Save the date: The #WomensWave is coming, and we’re sweeping the world forward with us.

Fire and flood. Sweeping the world forward on a wave of menopausal discharge. You can pretend to notice nothing (not noticing things is a Current Year survival skill we have all developed--without noticing) but the imagery is unavoidable.
I'm reminded of another unintentionally sinister slogan (sorry ladies, the logo is taken):

Cover the earth grrrls.

A google search for "white women" of course turns up more of the same. White women are letting the side down, perpetually:

Twitter:

Predator, Prey

None other than the New York Times has exposed, it would seem, the hypocrisy of early #MeToo leader Asia Argento. Only now I learn her struggle: she was compelled to fake orgasm to get Harvey Weinstein's face out of her vagina, just like Rose McGowan before her, except Argento maintained a consensual sexual relationship with Weinstein for years afterward. When she saw McGowan building a career and heroic identity out of enduring precisely the same thing and calling it rape (who knew?) she wasted no time reacquainting herself with her trauma.

Her accuser's story is about as un-harrowing as her tale of Weinstein (presumably he didn't have to fake his orgasms, but I'm not sure how that affects the balance), and the belated timing of his sexual trauma is as suspect as hers--she suddenly discovered her victimhood after Rose McGowan made it profitable; a month later, he discovered his, which she had just made profitable. A Hollywood hypocrisy cascade.

The Italian actress and director Asia Argento was among the first women in the movie business to publicly accuse the producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault. She became a leading figure in the #MeToo movement. Her boyfriend, the culinary television star Anthony Bourdain, eagerly joined the fight. 

But in the months that followed her revelations about Mr. Weinstein last October, Ms. Argento quietly arranged to pay $380,000 to her own accuser: Jimmy Bennett, a young actor and rock musician who said she had sexually assaulted him in a California hotel room years earlier, when he was only two months past his 17th birthday. She was 37. The age of consent in California is 18... 

The fallout from “a sexual battery” was so traumatic that it hindered Mr. Bennett’s work and income and threatened his mental health, according to a notice of intent to sue that his lawyer sent in November to Richard Hofstetter, [Anthony] Bourdain’s longtime lawyer, who was also representing Ms. Argento at the time.

Bourdain killed himself after being cuckolded by Argento, who was photographed cavorting with a younger, shinier supportive male--a journalist she met through the #MeToo movement.

A more cynical person would see Argento (daughter of Italian horror movie director Dario Argento) as adept at getting what she wants from men, and as comfortable trading career capital for sex as with trading sex for career capital. Morally there's no distinction--unless we're allowed to consider young women are more vulnerable than young men here, which we aren't. But I'm sure the sex is a lot better when you're on top, so to speak, whoever you are.

Leah McSweeney in Penthouse, under the title Toxic Femininity:

Born in Rome, Asia Argento was raised in a family of famous Italian artists. Her father, Dario Argento, is a director and screenwriter best known for his innovative and influential horror movies. Her mother is the actress Daria Nicolodi, who starred in several of her husband’s films. Beyond this, Argento has a lineage of family members who were musicians and composers, including her maternal grandfather, Alfredo Casella.

Ms Argento didn't land in Hollywood off a Greyhound bus. Which makes me wonder: where are the stories of naive girls arriving in Hollywood to be taken advantage of who don't go on to have careers? All the prominent and not-so-prominent actresses with tales of lechery seem to have made careers for themselves--that are winding down due to age or stalled, and they've all come forward after the coast was made clear by two clearly mendacious characters, Rose McGowan and Asia Argento.

On October 10th of last year, journalist Ronan Farrow published a bombshell New Yorker article in which 13 women made allegations against Hollywood kingpin Harvey Weinstein, sharing accounts not only of sexual misconduct and harassment, but also rape.  

Credited with initiating the contemporary #MeToo movement, the article detailed what it called Argento’s “rape” experience with Weinstein, one very similar to Rose McGowan’s own experience with the producer. Wrote Farrow: “Asia Argento, an Italian film actress and director, said that she did not speak out until now—Weinstein, she told me, forcibly performed oral sex on her—because she feared that Weinstein would ‘crush’ her.” Argento went on to tell Farrow, “I know he has crushed a lot of people before. That’s why this story—in my case, it’s twenty years old, some of them are older—has never come out.” 

...Argento and McGowan describe Weinstein giving them oral sex, and both say they faked an orgasm in hopes of getting the experience over with as fast as possible... 

Argento went on to have a consensual relationship with Weinstein for several years. The New Yorker article is what thrust the Italian actress into America’s cultural conversation. Before this, the American media knew little about her.

Sometime after Argento and Weinstein were done with their totally non-transactional relationship the aging actress happened to Anthony Bourdain

Anthony Bourdain met Argento on the set of his wildly popular CNN show Parts Unknown when he was filming in Rome. Argento, a single mother of two and Italian celebrity, ended up a guest on the show. In February 2017, not long after they met on camera, the New York Post confirmed the two had started dating. One quick scroll through the couple’s individual social media accounts reveals that Bourdain was completely smitten with Argento, posting photos of her on the regular with heartwarming comments.

Bagging Weinstein and then, in her sexual decline, Bourdain, suggests as a sexual adventuress Argento has been very successful. An old Saturday Night Live bit featured a South American baseball star whose limited English led him to answer every interview question with "Bas-e-ball has been berry, berry good to me"; when asked about his big new contract he says it with more emphasis "...berry, berry good...". The Hollywood sexual market has been berry berry good to Asia Argento. It probably was pretty good to Rose McGowan until it wasn't anymore, and #MeToo is likely more about that than anything else.

Taking their participation in that market and selling it now in a different market, as something else, makes this the political-social equivalent of dodgy financial practices like mortgage-backed securities full of bad loans. The clearly deranged McGowan et al are the moral Goldman Sachs of Hollywood, making money at both ends of the deal. Is there likewise a political-social bubble? How does that end?

Bourdain was openly supportive of Argento’s involvement in the #MeToo movement as she rose to be one of its most prominent and vocal crusaders. Bourdain never held back when standing up for her or any part of the #MeToo movement, even defending McGowan and her feminist activism. The #MeToo movement had accrued a strong new male ally in Bourdain...

Bourdain gushed publicly over Argento, and when it came to her career, he was her biggest supporter. This is what you do when you love someone and believe in them. He wanted her to succeed because he adored her. His influence led to her new role as a judge on the Italian version of X-Factor, and he hired her to direct an episode of Parts Unknown when the series filmed in Hong Kong...

But in the days leading up to his suicide, things between the couple seemed to get rocky.
On June 5th, three days before Bourdain’s suicide, paparazzi photos of Argento and the young French reporter Clément, 28, were published in the Italian gossip magazine Chi. The photos showed the two holding hands, kissing, hugging, and dancing in a bar in Rome.

Argento fought to have the photographs pulled. Bourdain was mysteriously no longer following his girlfriend on Instagram. Argento then posted an Instagram story of herself in a Sid Vicious shirt that said Fuck Everyone, and captioned the image: “You know who you are.” Three hours later he killed himself. And she deleted the image off of her instagram story.

Bourdain not only had to endure his public cuckolding by a younger man but the financial shakedown from the jailbait. But there would be no respite in death. The apparent cruelty of her behavior was an immediate problem for brand #MeToo. His still warm body would be thrown under the bus by McGowan on behalf of Argento, too grief-stricken to hoist it, I presume

As numerous eloquent tributes to Bourdain were published, Argento decided she was too grief-stricken to continue speaking publicly, and handed the torch to Rose McGowan. The former Charmed star penned a letter to the public on behalf of Argento, which McGowan’s publicist, Nathaniel Baruch at Brigade Marketing, promptly emailed to Rolling Stone. 

McGowan’s letter opens by saying Argento is now a victim not only of rape but of suicide. “Sitting across from me,” she writes, “is the remarkable human and brave survivor, Asia Argento, who has been through more than most could stand, and yet stand she does. She stood up to her monster rapist and now she has to stand up to yet another monster, suicide. The suicide of her beloved lover and ally, Anthony Bourdain. I write these truths because I have been asked to.” 

You know how to tell if someone is a flake? They use weird, unnecessary phrases like "these truths".

McGowan then discusses Bourdain and Argento’s alleged “open relationship” in an obvious attempt to justify the photos with Clément. It’s too bad Bourdain isn’t here to confirm her statement that he and Argento were “free birds” who “loved without borders.” 

McGowan reminds the reader to “NOT do the sexist thing and burn a woman on the pyre of misplaced blame,” and then says that Bourdain allegedly reached out to a doctor for help with his depression but did not take his advice. (How the fuck she knows that information and why she chose to disclose it remains a big fat question mark.) 

McGowan also states that both Argento and Bourdain suffered from depression, but “she did the work to get help, so she could stay alive and live another day for her and her children,” while Bourdain’s depression usurped him. “His decision, not hers,” McGowan writes. “His depression won.”

Bourdain's battered corpse was actually thrown under the bus a second time--Argento is saying he advised the payoff, implying she might not have. I wouldn't be surprised if Bourdain, whose lawyer handled the scandal for her, paid that hush money.

These women are monsters. Bourdain left an 11 year old daughter and estranged wife who were notably silent during this humiliation--ironic, considering all the mileage #MeToo has gotten out of the idea of "silent" female victims.

Sex and Betrayal

The public humiliation of Aziz Ansari marks the "me too" sexual inquisition's escalation into prosecuting romantic and sexual disappointment.

Women are compelled to sexual excess at the same time they are absolved of any responsibility for their safety. Birth control enabled widespread sexual license, which has in turn engendered crises for both masculinity and femininity, leaving women largely degenerate and miserable. Maybe it was inevitable feminism would seek to sever female agency from womens' romantic and sexual frustration.

Ansari has defenders and hasn't lost any work, and his significance might be that the inquisition stops short at least of anonymous revenge porn leveled on a prized diversity-celebrity. I'm actually rooting for intersectionality. For Ansari, the problem of where he goes to get his reputation back remains, and what's been done to him is a travesty. Imagine how bad it would be for him if his reputation wasn't already implicitly needle-dicked Indian weirdo.

Feminism tries, despite itself, to perform the traditional female role of protecting women by regulating sex. That feminism depends on sexual liberation, as feminists insist, is an obvious problem. Clearly sexual liberation harms women, vulnerable women the most. Feminism can't drop its commitment to liberation for various reasons, the most shameful of which is commerce, which is increasingly based on individual license and consumption.

So feminism makes lemonade, after a fashion. All that misery is fed back into the narrate-o-matic and comes out as toxic masculinity, which must be corrected, by ever more feminism.

We're liberated from biological responsibility but not from our biological psychology. We're a historical novelty with all this sex and so little reproduction, people indulging the physical and ritual aspects of thwarted reproduction to the point of boredom.

Sexual liberation has liberated women, no one more so, but liberation doesn't equal happiness. Women were promised something, something absurd and unrealistic, by the sexual revolution, just like men: they would have their cake and eat it too. They would be set loose from sexual morality and no harm would come to them. Keeping in mind a woman's idea of "harm" is broader than a man's. Feminism adopts this to politicize emotional harm. Feminism recognizes but won't admit that women are more vulnerable emotionally. It just keeps reinterpreting that vulnerability as oppression.

What to do with a movement that thrives on the fruit of its failure?

Careful What You Bitch For

Feminism rescued woman from her dependence on men. Nevertheless she persisted. She keeps persisting away at depending on men.

Beneath all the noise the ongoing Hollywood sexual harassment scandal documents the present of an age-old practice, women depending on sex to advance in male-dominated fields (and they're all male-dominated).

That's why "male dominated fields" exist in the first place. They're just vast, organized efforts to meet women.

There is a disparity in power for the women of course. Feminism is an attempt to correct that. Earnest feminists assume the power disparity is yet another trick of the patriarchy, and its elimination won't come at a cost but with a yield: all that female creativity previously denied bursting forth, presumably.

Mostly at this point feminists don't care. All "rights" movements are in the appropriation phase, what Steve Sailer has called the "Scramble for America": each politically favored group scrambling for its fair share of the ruin before the others hog it all up.

But the power disparity in the sex-for-advancement scheme exists for good reason: it's a lot harder for the male to get where he is than the female, who competes in a too-brief window of high value attractiveness against a sea of beautiful eager faces. What the male has to trade is essentially power that translates into a variety of opportunity (including the competing females); the female is trading her intimate self for just a piece of that. The woman who leverages that into her own genuine power is real but rare. More common I'm sure is the young homosexual twink who manages to do so.
Women simply won't tend toward the same aggressive/creative behavior in general that put the guys where they are in the first place.

It's all so depressingly obvious.

The inquisition is ruining it all. Not just for the men, but for the young women who were or would like to be complicit. Hollywood is driving away all those horny creative men that are the backbone of the industry. They are not going to replace them with women, woke transsexuals and gay negroes. Wake the hell up, ladies.

But replacement is precisely the game. The model is that of the university race or rape hoax yielding diversibucks and jobs: X group is deemed offended by Y, only correction for Y is more X.
The only way we're going to solve Hollywood's sexual assault problem is by putting more women in Hollywood. And the opportunities for that look promising--replacing men with women, not "solving" a sexual assault problem, which of course could just get worse.

By forbidding any criticism of the women involved (unless it's the rare case of a powerful woman adopting the male model) feminism seeks to maintain a natural advantage desirable women have always had. But in taking away this opportunity for ambitious men, and in driving so many out of an industry the face of which is already changed, they are squelching a great source of advancement for ambitious young women.

The naive assumption of course is that women will be replacing these men in, say, Hollywood, with no lack of decline in quality or profit--nay, with a certain increase in both.

But the reality is to the extent feminism appropriates Hollywood it weakens it, which, big-picture now, might not be such a bad thing. Because of all the feminism Hollywood puts out.