Just Sayin' you can't Just Say That

Is this for real?

Donald Trump retweeted three video clips of anti-white Muslim aggression, without comment. Instantly the news cycle was convulsed. Trump's tweets course through the neural pathways of the system like dopamine.

The outrage seized on the source, a British woman facing jail for speaking against Muslim immigration. Guilt by association always helps to distract from substance. And of what is she guilty? Stuff like the offending tweets, I imagine.

As for the substance of those tweets, there's always the obscurantist option

  

Glenn Greenwald might be slipping into millennial-speak when he issues the nonsensical phrase "random Muslims", but it helps his argument still. He means presumably random acts by Muslims, but there's nothing random about patterns. These videos are documentary proof of a pattern. They only reach us through the interference of Glenn and his ilk.

(I'm reminded of something I witnessed a few years back. A newly assigned New York Times reporter working in Palestine wrote of her impressions of Palestinians mourning for those killed by Israeli troops. The funerals were outpourings of intense lamentations, but after and beyond that the deaths were taken with a stoicism this western, Jewish woman did not recognize.
The implications were clear, if not to her. A cyber-posse rode out, Glenn and others, I think all Jewish, and she was publicly chastised for the racism of suggesting even a cultural difference between Jews and Palestinians. She quickly pleaded ignorance and apologized. Her impressions were mistaken, coercion made clear to her now.
After this satisfactory conclusion Greenwald observed approvingly "this is how it's supposed to work." What "it" is exactly he didn't say, but I don't think it's journalism.)

It is surreal: the Anglo-descended president of the United States roundly denounced by the West's respectable class for documenting foreigners attacking and humiliating westerners in their home countries. With the vast pozzed middle acquiescing or supporting them. One British luminary promised Trump would be met with massive protests if he dared visit, and he's to be believed. A vast, motley horde is at the globalists' command.

"Delete your account" British pols literally demanded, without the customary humor. Indeed, ashen is the only way I can describe the pallor of one horrified luminary who suggested Trump be charged with hate crimes. The elite appears terrified. Trump's actions are unfathomable.

Trump's re-tweets constitute a revolutionary act.

 As much as it's rustled the gilded jimmies of our degenerate elite, it may--it has to, one thinks--be giving hope to indigenous British caught between a hostile government and hostile Muslims.

Trump's intrusion into British domestic politics subverts and betrays the global elite, talking past them to the white populations they loathe and fear. It's astounding that it's happening, and that it needs to in the first place.

The progressive order is global, and by its very nature. Opposition tends to be local, by its very nature. Beyond the harried and harassed of the alt right there is no global opposition. Trump may have changed all that. Just the--forgive the phrase--raised consciousness of it could be transformative.

What a global alt right would look like is anyone's guess. But just the idea of it, widely held, has the potential to accelerate a showdown with the global elite that seems better coming sooner rather than later.

Ross Douthat called Candidate Trump a "traitor to his class" for his economic nationalism. Now he's a traitor to his time, the Current Year. As for the Brit-pol suggesting Trump could be charged under the same laws as the woman he retweeted, the law is the law. The president isn't above the law in his home. Why should he be above Britain's laws? US citizens have been denied visas for political views. Why not the president?

Leonid Bershidsky is a Jewish Russian expatriate journalist who writes opinion for Bloomberg. Here he makes a show of leaving Russia in 2014, citing Putin's press restrictions and the annexation of Crimea. He's spent a career in Russian media for a western audience, working for such as the Moscow Times.

The New York Times' profile of Tony Hovater, "the Nazi Next Door", went down harsh, from the hard left to the normie middle. Mr Bershidsky offers a chaser:

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.

I expect nostalgia to kick in eventually, for those simpler times.

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.

They might not have had to do that if Hillary Clinton had won.

“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.

What's in a Name?

In denying Robert Lee a desirable assignment because his name incidentally causes a (questionable) racial offense between two groups, neither of which he belongs to, did ESPN violate civil rights law?

Lee is discriminated against by default: Asian man can't do this (granted, very particular, silly-ass) thing, because it would constitute an offense upon blacks by whites. Well, I would argue, just what did Mr Lee (a venerable Chinese name, which must not be other-ized) do wrong? How is White Supremacy his fault?

Absurd as it is, it's just a unique manifestation of a daily occurrence: Asian guy gets shunted aside by the Diversity Express. It's all perfectly consistent with the current diversity zeitgeist; it's just the law hasn't caught up yet, perhaps.

Presumably a white man named Robert Lee would have been denied the assignment, sooner and with greater trepidation. In the current frenzy they might've caught it and not assigned him in the first place, sparing themselves the embarrassment--but they know now; we can rest assured ESPN will avoid entirely such potential mass microaggressions, and we'll be spared the terror of such as a Jeff Davis calling University of Kentucky games.

But--would have a black have been denied the Virginia gig? I'm not so sure--and I'm certain if he was denied the gig, he would have a case, for which he would easily find an experienced attorney. Is there any doubt black Robert E Lee (the E is for Eazy) would have a case?  It's silly in concept but sinister in practice: under the guise of fairness we're carving out more privileged spaces, such as professional opportunities, for favored ("protected") groups.

Whites are being robbed of their national and cultural patrimony as well as their fair shot through merit. Asians, alone among major ethnic or racial types, share with them that second outrage. Robert Lee getting shunted aside by the Diversity Express is standard practice. It happens all day every day, in less comic ways.

There is a message here, to Asians and other non-black minorities, about the hierarchy of grievance; they must know their place. ESPN and others genuinely take for granted their prosperous, law abiding and boring Asian countrymen. They are, in the quaint phrase ridiculously applied to black Americans, "invisible". In the language of critical theory, our elite routinely "otherizes" Asians in this way. The undeniable message for Asians  is you don't count in this context.

What does the law say?

Under the laws enforced by EEOC, it is illegal to discriminate against someone (applicant or employee) because of that person's race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information. It is also illegal to retaliate against a person because he or she complained about discrimination, filed a charge of discrimination, or participated in an employment discrimination investigation or lawsuit. 

The law forbids discrimination in every aspect of employment. 

The laws enforced by EEOC prohibit an employer or other covered entity from using neutral employment policies and practices that have a disproportionately negative effect on applicants or employees of a particular race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), or national origin, or on an individual with a disability or class of individuals with disabilities, if the polices or practices at issue are not job-related and necessary to the operation of the business. The laws enforced by EEOC also prohibit an employer from using neutral employment policies and practices that have a disproportionately negative impact on applicants or employees age 40 or older, if the policies or practices at issue are not based on a reasonable factor other than age.

"[D]iscrimination in every aspect of employment" is as broad as it is clear.

As we all know under Title VII a "disproportionately negative effect" of otherwise "neutral" policy is how troublesome objective employer requirements, like IQ tests, are outlawed because of their dispareate negative impact on, usually, blacks.

Clearly Lee demonstrates a disproportionate negative effect on his own protected class, Asians, by policy--but is it "neutral"? What does that mean in this context? And if ESPN had to make this argument in court--that exceptional policy in deference to black feelz is "neutral"--well, I'd just like to hear it, that's all.

It is illegal for an employer to make decisions about job assignments and promotions based on an employee's race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information. For example, an employer may not give preference to employees of a certain race when making shift assignments and may not segregate employees of a particular national origin from other employees or from customers.

An employer may not base assignment and promotion decisions on stereotypes and assumptions about a person's race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information.

It seems ESPN is guilty at least of name discrimination.  `

Criminalizing Context Recognition

It had to end here. The Trayvonicus lynch-meme sputters on, but is starting to look like a particularly depressing Al Sharpton hoax as we learn George Zimmerman's injuries were documented and consistent with a beating. Eyewitnesses testified to them from the start of course, but most Americans have only the legal discovery process to thank for the belated information. The networks were too busy with the sort of yellow journalism that had Marcia Clark declaring George Zimmerman sustained no injuries because, as the security camera video clearly shows, he retains powers of locomotion and isn't cradling his gutted entrails like a football just hours later (not since Bill Frist video-diagnosed Terri Schiavo...).  Of course this evidence was available to the special prosecutor brought in to bring Zimmerman up on charges. Didn't make it into the affidavit. Hey, I think I found that crime you been looking for!
But Zimmerman's real misfortune is to not have been born George Ramos. That's what so aroused the elite media, at first expecting nothing more than another ritual sacrifice to the national god of black resentment. Now they have this potential national race riot on their hands. So no matter if Zimmerman looks increasingly innocent; the thing must be seen to its (responsible elites hope) riot-defusing conclusion. As if by evil design then it will run alongside the president's election campaign of race-baiting demagogy--five more months, including summer, pumping the bellows of resentment (November or Bust!)--on one hand and the traditional summer season of black on white violence on the other. The diversity demagogues are fighting this one like there's no tomorrow. Maybe they're right.
 But they have a fallback position. At first they told us, and some (blessed naifs) believed George Zimmerman stalked and murdered a black boy. That position is no longer tenable. But there's no walking this one back down. So out comes the lamest of the stable of American white racism tropes: racial profiling. No matter what transpired, it all came as a result of Zimmerman's racist stereotyping. Cognition aforehand! Note that whether Zimmerman was right or not about Trayvon Martin isn't allowed in polite discussion; Martin's good nature is presumed. But a prosecution based on racial profiling would have to contend with this question, and the reality of statistical probabilities and black menace, in a high profile criminal trial. Does the left really want that?
It will get interesting, watching them argue this with a straight face against the backdrop of the traditional summer season of black on white violence. But of course they will. To maintain critical race theory's dominance over convention requires ever-greater powers of media denial, and the powers so far on display have been awe-inspiring. Ignoring violence such as last summer's flash-mobs in the age of Drudge and American Renaissance would seem impossible, but the respectable media did such a good job of it many of them truly don't even know it happened ("news to me" was one reporter's response, given as he defended censoring race out of a reported attack; and I'm willing to bet he still hasn't made the connection between his dereliction and his ignorance!).
And if they don't get to notice they'll be damned if we do either. So now George Zimmerman is a potential test-case for criminilazing "racial profiling", not by law enforcement (whatever validity that may have), but by a common citizen. The ABC News article linked ABC News article linked to above, revealing the extent of Zimmerman's injuries as well as Trayvon's (one set of bruised knuckles; one gunshot wound) gets around to it in the last paragraph:

However, the prosecution contends that Zimmerman instigated the confrontation after profiling the teen, who was walking home after buying skittles and ice tea. They prosecution says Martin was breaking no laws and was not disturbing anyone as he walked back to his father's girlfriend's home.

With the FBI now threatening hate crime charges, George Zimmerman may become the first American citizen convicted of racial stereotyping.

The Business End of Empathy

McClatchy is reporting that liberal advocacy groups are going after the lead plaintiff in the Ricci case, who is expected to be called to testify at this week's confirmation hearings for supreme court nominee Sonya Sotomayor:

On Friday, citing in an e-mail "Frank Ricci's troubled and litigious work history," the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way drew reporters' attention to Ricci's past. Other advocates for Sotomayor have discreetly urged journalists to pursue similar story lines.
Specifically, the advocates have zeroed in on an earlier 1995 lawsuit Ricci filed claiming the city of New Haven discriminated against him because he's dyslexic. The advocates cite other Hartford Courant stories from the same era recounting how Ricci was fired by a fire department in Middletown, Conn., allegedly, Ricci said at the time, because of safety concerns he raised. The Middletown-area fire department was subsequently fined for safety violations, but the Connecticut Department of Labor dismissed Ricci's retaliation complaint.

Sotomayor's confirmation is an all but forgone conclusion. The point now is to obscure or discredit, after having failed to bury, Ricci, something Sotomayor attempted as an appellate court judge. Despite the White House's later attempt to portray Sotomayor's vote there as admirable judicial restraint, the true nature of that decision--dodging a constitutional question in fear of its consequences--was exposed at the time in Jose Cabranes' dissenting opinion (PDF). A judicial advocate of a certain interpretation of law welcomes the opportunity to make that interpretation--if it can be made without looking foolish or inept, thus later precluding such as a supreme court nomination. Luckily for Justice Ginsburg, she has no such worries (or shame).

Aside from the fact that Frank Ricci's history has no bearing on the legal question presented by Ricci v DeStefano, and liberal critiques of the ruling have depended on ignoring or mischaracterizing the actions of New Haven's mayor (in collusion with--or under threat by--an openly bigoted, convicted felon community organizer), PAW, in its desperation to obscure the corrupt machine politics arising from, and the legally unsustainable basis of, "disparate impact" as a model for anti-discrimination law (indeed, the fundamental conflict between "disparate impact" and "disparate treatment" which this case exposes), wants you to deplore Frank Ricci (and the lawsuit that bears his name) for (1) having the temerity to file a discrimination lawsuit, and (2) having once been fired.

The irony of a "liberal" effort to discredit someone for filing a discrimination lawsuit and losing his job, possibly for "whistleblowing", is further proof that fiction cannot compete with reality. "Bleeding Heart Liberals", we hardly knew ye. Whether PAW is oblivious to, or merely takes for granted, the legal reality that who is entitled to legal protection from discrimination is a matter of some discrimination, I cannot decide. But it's either sublime confidence or sheer nerve, provoking the public's habitual skepticism toward discrimination litigation in what is ultimately an attempt to preserve its current foundation. That very skepticism is what PAW and others typically identify as racism, reaction, ignorance, etc.

The open disdain of some for certain classes of people, including those who dare challenge quota hiring, is the flip side of a certain philosophy that, in this debate, falls under the shorthand term, empathy. If the word is not merely superfluous twaddle (and we have to assume it is used for some purpose), and has meaning, it must assign relative values of moral worth, holding other values constant, to classes of persons; these values must then bear upon the application of law. Minority trumps majority, female trumps male, poor trumps rich, etc. Of course this is nothing more than current "liberal" convention plainly expressed, which is precisely why some seize on the president's coded invocation to expose that convention. "Empathy" here is a euphemism for "favor."

The oblique and muted liberal critiques of Ricci have featured just this sort of reasoning, by people too steeped in their conditioning to recognize it; is it not empathy for the "white firemen" after all, to find in their favor? Categorically, no. They earned the decision by virtue of being right. Why, some have asked, are the Republicans calling Frank Ricci to testify? Is it not because he is sympathetic? Yes--but the confirmation process is a political process. The valid political counter-argument to Ricci's testimony would be to call Mayor DeStefano, for instance, to testify; this would also be a means of putting our "empathy" to work for us in deciding who deserves it more. It would further be an expression of confidence in the logic and justice of this faction's position.

Both sides on the Ricci divide were citing a political factor when describing the plaintiffs as "sympathetic." The best defense of "empathy" thus lapses into absurdity: it doesn't mean anything specifically, just that we should be good. When your best defense is irrelevance, it's time to concede.

A faction laying claim to "empathy" or any other virtue (think "patriotism", for instance), would make a talisman out of a word. It's not the enlightenment arising from meaning but the obscurity of emotion they invoke. Otherwise empathy is meaningless, as its defenders here have ably demonstrated.
The law is there to to limit power and just the sort of demagogy that invariably invokes such words as empathy. In the Ricci case the law served just that purpose. Watching the knives come out for Mr. Ricci, we see the ruthlessness upon which an unyielding claim to virtue is dependent. What is the law before virtue itself, after all? Empathy, like the classic liberal ideal, has been distorted by the political reality of modern America into its opposite.