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.

Reading the report "Alternative Influence: Broadcasting the Far Right on YouTube"

Intro:
"For a short time on January 4, 2018, the most popular livestreamed video on YouTube was a broadcast dominated by white nationalists. More specifically, it was a stream by YouTubers Andy Warski and Jean-François Gariépy, facilitating a debate between a white nationalist and a libertarian. The debate topic was scientific racism, which they refer to as “race realism”—a contemporary incarnation of the long-standing claims that there are measurable scientific differences between races of humans. Arguing in favor of scientific racism was infamous white nationalist Richard Spencer, known for having popularized the term “alt-right.”1 Ostensibly on the other side was Carl Benjamin, a YouTuber who goes by the pseudonym Sargon of Akkad. During the broadcast, the debate became the #1 trending live video worldwide on YouTube, with over 10,000 active viewers. The archived version of the broadcast has been viewed an additional 475,000 times.

....

This debate is part of a larger phenomenon, in which YouTubers attempt to reach young audiences by broadcasting far-right ideas in the form of news and entertainment. An assortment of scholars, media pundits, and internet celebrities are using YouTube to promote a range of political positions, from mainstream versions of libertarianism and conservatism, all the way to overt white nationalism. While many of their views differ significantly, they all share a fundamental contempt for progressive politics—specifically for contemporary social justice movements. For this reason, I consider their collective position “reactionary,” as it is defined by its opposition to visions of social progress. United in this standpoint, these YouTubers frequently collaborate with and appear with others across ideological lines. Together, they have created a fully functioning media system that I call the Alternative Influence Network (AIN)."

Follow the Money

The revolution will have to be monetized.

Diversity is monetized because corporate America sees the growing non-white population as the future. Once the demographic shift in the US was set in motion, business had no choice but to pursue the new non-white consumer dollar. Its long-term planning necessarily became modeled on that population shift. It became invested. And advertising became propaganda for diversity.

Leaving aside the cultural and political forces that brought us here, American business is invested in the diverse future because that's where the consumers will be.

It gladly cooperates with government social engineering, which is itself massively monetized, and its advertising, in appealing directly to minorities over declining and taken-for-granted whites, over-represents them wildly. This poz propaganda (pozprop?) thus reinforces the confidence of the non-white consumers and further demoralizes whites.

Corporate America is invested in diversity because of demographics. But all profit really needs is demographic increase, not replacement. All of this came to mind while watching this from Frame Game Radio:



Regardless of how it got there, Disney remains invested in the diverse new order because that's where the money is. It won't be detached from it unless there's money elsewhere. White identity and reproduction need to be monetized at some point soon for white Americans to rehabilitate themselves as a people.

Recently Team Diversity was alarmed by new projections deferring that Glorious Moment when white America loses majority status by five whole years. A demographic shift accomplished overnight by historical standards--and they're angry and alarmed at this speed bump. Trump is deliberately trying to raise the percentage of the white population!

It wasn't good for morale. On the other hand, it's good (if not huge) for the morale of beleaguered whites. Ten years would be even better.  Right now, most whites remain conditioned against explicit racial awareness, and prohibited from speaking in favor of it. But that's changing along with the increasing intensity of anti-white culture that's found a focus point in the "Resistance",  itself aroused by the stirrings of white identity that is Trump, which, following the hate spiral back in time, was really produced by long years of anti-white propaganda culminating in the disaster for whites and racial comity in general that was Barack Obama.

Team Diversity points out correctly it matters little because whites aren’t having babies and non-whites are. Right now white Americans who aren't utterly de-sensitized see the projected future before them--as represented by film, television and advertising--as non-white. It's made to seem inevitable. But white cultural identity is taking shape, and it's only a matter of time before someone realizes there's a dollar to be made there.

Implicitly white artists are emerging (against their own wishes), and at least one recent project, Justin Timberlake's "Man of the Woods", appears as, at least, an unashamed celebration of rural white origins.



"Man of the Woods" was panned by critics and called out as problematic by the usual sources, but is proving popular. There's a cultural market out there business is afraid to go after. Diversity remains monetized, but all of a sudden there's...this. Money that has to be left on the table. Whatever the case, Justin Timberlake and any like him need to be encouraged in this direction.

Combining a cultural shift with sensible policies that at least do not subsidize non-white birthrates, would at the very least push that day of demographic reckoning wherein whites slip into a despised plurality farther still into the future. It's worth it just to see the look on their faces.

Who knows, before long, with rehabilitated white birthrates and depressed non-white birthrates, we might even be talking about a demographic shift back. If you will it, it is not a dream, as the man said.

Let the demographic bomb pass through the nation like a pig through a python. You may say I’m a dreamer...

Cowboys and Insinuations

Congresswoman Frederica Wilson and allies have charged General Kelly's "empty barrel" remark is racist. Everyone laughed: there's no traditional connotation between the two. But I like to think Kelly's opponents get it, just like I do: an "empty barrel" making a lot of noise is a black mediocrity making of herself a spectacle. Weary whites know the type. Weary blacks know the type. You must not show you know the type. Perhaps if it was a little less common.
And that's the problem. Nothing is so evident as that which is so strenuously ignored.

Racial slurs not directed at whites are becoming rarer. But they help maintain the sustained moral panic that is "anti-racism." Sometimes slurs are repurposed as needed.

New slurs are being added all the time--not by racists, but by anti-racists. Honest people going about their business are often waylaid by some new, unexpected restriction. They should know better--it's been decades since "niggardly" became unacceptable for just sounding like a word with which it had no etymological relation.

Lack of racist intent is no excuse. Ignorance of the laws of racism are no excuse. This being racism, there is no reference too obscure, no connection too tenuous. It isn't enough to not be a racist, one is expected to fight racism, report it, to hate it with his very soul. Justice is diligence.

As a result of our hyper-sensitivity to black sensitivity, the target of any offense determines offense, not some objective social standard.

Criticizing a black person's intelligence is almost always construed as a criticism of black intelligence generally, revealing a lack of confidence in black intelligence, mostly. This is getting embarrassing. The brilliant black thinkers of television and cinema still aren't showing up. Hailing Ta Nehisi Coates, Neil de Grasse Tyson and Barack Obama as exemplars of the black intelligentsia is a bit of a back-handed compliment. The condescension is driving aware black intellectuals out of their minds, but the aware are increasingly rare.

But the insistence on the existence of a thriving black intellectualism is making its absence obvious.

People are still paying attention, even in their forced silence. The increasingly absurd charges and demands of anti-racism and attendant injustice erode the perceived legitimacy of the anti-racist movement. It's a crisis that can't be recognized because it reveals the corruption of the entire endeavor.

It's always better if you can find the use of a racial epithet. It's simple, it draws the flag and stops play immediately. A hush falls. There's no explaining what so-and-so is inferring, which is a lot more work and frankly embarrassing when you're working with such material as Congresswoman Cowboy Hat.

But the accusation that "empty barrel" is racist is not entirely baseless, just hipster-level obscure.
"There's this racial epithet, you've probably never heard of it, it's a little obscure..."
The source is out there, if one is willing to slog through the narrative/historic jungle like an explorer looking for the mouth of a river. But yes, empty barrels are empty of justice and full of hate.

Thomas Wictor is a science fiction author with expertise in warfare munitions who produces epic Twitter threads. He's an often vociferous Trump supporter without white nationalist, anti-Semitic or racist tendencies, but he's not humoring the congresswoman. He's been all over the Wilson-Kelly controversy.

Vachel Lindsay was a poet of the early 20th Century who innovated what he called "singing poetry"--his poems were designed to be read at certain tempos, cadences, intonations, etc according to instructions in the margins ("a deep rolling bass"; "shrilly, with heavily accented meter"; "like the wind in a chimney"). The works were designed to be performed. Wictor calls him the first rapper. He's also an early sort of performance artist.



His work was popular, and still familiar enough to make it into a 1964 edition of  "A Treasury of the Familiar" anthology I have at home. The poem above, The Congo, is the source of the "empty barrel" epithet says Wictor, and if this was anything but "racism" I would scoff. But I suspect he's right.

The poem is subtitled "A Study of the Negro Race" and is in three parts: "Their Basic Savagery", "Their Irrepressible High Spirits" and "The Hope of their Religion". The first part portrays black Americans as boisterous primitives ill-suited to the industrial world, and is the source of the supposed empty barrel epithet:

Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable,
Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table,
Pounded on the table,
Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom,
Hard as they were able, Boom, boom, BOOM,
With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom,
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM.
THEN I had religion,
THEN I had a vision. I could not turn from their revel in derision.
THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK,
CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK.

The poems were meant to be performed and in accordance with margin notes for tempo, inflection, style "like the wind in a chimney" ; "with a philosophic pause", etc.

The first part portrays blacks in their most threatening light: bloodthirsty savages with a historic grudge:

Boom, steal the pygmies,
Boom, kill the Arabs,
Boom, kill the white men,
Listen to the yell of Leopold's Ghost
Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host.
Hear how demons chuckle and yell
Cutting his hands off, down in Hell

Lindsay thought African brutish would be redeemed by Christianity.

In the third part the Apostles and "pioneer angels" cutting through the brush bring the Africans to Jesus, and the sinister "Mumbo-Jumbo" of voodoo is left in the jungle:

Mumbo-Jumbo is dead in the jungle.
Never again will he hoo-doo you.
Never again will he hoo-doo you.
Redeemed were the forests, the beasts and the men,
And only the vulture dared again
By the far, lone mountains of the moon
To cry, in the silence, the Congo tune:--
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you,
Mumbo...Jumbo...will...hoo-doo...you."

I suspect Lindsay was too forthright and literal-minded for that last line--the vulture invoking voodoo after its defeat--to mean what I want it to mean: the vulture is foretelling the certain return of Mumbo Jumbo, in due time.

All of this is horribly racist now but Lindsay was sympathetic to the cause of black civil rights and some of his earlier work endeared him to such as W.E.B. Dubois.

The only thing I see him guilty of is naivete and condescension. In that way this bizarre character from another era is very much like your average earnest white liberal.

Mumbo Jumbo, for his part, is alive and well.

When Dindu Meets GI Joe

Those charging that General Flynn's criticism of Congresswoman Frederica Wilson is racist aren't entirely wrong.

I don't take racism as it's defined seriously, and I don't imagine the general is personally "racist" or motivated by racial animus. But in adding to his criticism of her behavior towards Trump the charge of an earlier graceless public act, and calling her a mediocre fraud ("empty barrel"), there is, just as the opposition sees it, an implied criticism of black America from a non-apologetically white perspective.

The congresswoman is a familiar stereotype that Must Not Be Named, the Black Buffoon. Public figures have had to be careful in criticizing such people, to steer clear of implication that they are noticing the type. Naming the Fool outright is out of the question of course for the time being.

Indulging blacks in this fashion has been bad for whites and is a steady, ongoing degradation of our national character. This grows along with black cultural power. Black culture and style is inseparable from the violence and hatred of the ghetto and emanates from the same deep well of true identity. I no longer accept the argument that a "black culture of violence" harms black America.

Black America chooses its more violent culture, despite all the wailing. When attacking the presumed injustice of the legal system and incarceration rates--seeking the release of as many of their own as they can manage by whatever political means--they act as a separate nation demanding autonomy. Arguments invoking civil rights now are all attempts to rationalize black norms as dysfunction imposed from without. Black civil rights are a racial supremacy movement disguised as an appeal to our own values.

Citing the statistics for such as wealth, parental involvement, education, crime, is applying white criteria to black culture. In the absence of whites, as in the ghetto, black norms default to a harsher order. This is autonomy. Black America is asserting itself, asserting its particular culture, liberated ("free at last") from more restrictive white norms and even displacing them in the broader shared culture, with considerable help from without, of course.

This is not to say black American culture is achieving some natural stasis in the absence of control. Black America still exists in a broader white order. Black culture can't help being deformed by white influence and technology. Black Americans assert a black culture deformed by the vastly different and more advanced white Western culture of liberalism and rights. It's kind of a monstrosity.

Damage isn't limited to the degradation of black-white relations, or to standards of behavior generally (a profound effect no one beyond the hard right mentions); it's also become a proven demagogic template for a growing list of grievance identities. The seeds of our destruction were sown in the noble ground of civil rights.

A more prosperous and well-adjusted black America would not have inspired the host of similarly modeled grievance identities (people always tryna be black!).Who knows? Diversity might have had a chance.Proponents of diversity should be the first to discourage our disastrous indulgence of black dysfunction.

All of this bears on this latest cultural skirmish.

When Trump engaged the NFL controversy he engaged the same explicitly racial movement the league has caved to, if only implicitly on the side of whites. This is just not done. Whites are getting uppity.

This asymmetrical (explicit v implicit narratives) civil war began with Trump's candidacy (or his challenging Obama's citizenship). He was an affront and remains intensely that to the constituent groups of the Narrative. He's a special affront to blacks, due to his "birther" roots, but more significantly due to his threat to the present order. Being the primary beneficiary of that order and its highest moral caste tends to quicken the mind when it's suddenly challenged. And despite all the bellyaching, rather because of it, blacks draw the most benefit for effort put in from the present social and political order.

Trump has evinced all the traits of the typically non-racist boomer over a lifetime in the public eye and he tends toward socially liberal. But he has an interlocutor problem: he doesn't know he's not supposed to say certain things. This is taken for obtuseness. There's a cynical aspect obscured by all the conspicuous outrage: the dope doesn't know to keep his mouth shut! What they're really criticizing is a curious lack of guile that must indicate a moron. Yet they keep losing these little fights. This is driving people insane.

But what you see is usually what you've got. And what I see is that Trump just didn't care if attacking Obama looked racist, he, Donald Trump in his considerable self-regard, knew it wasn't. He knows he isn't racist because he doesn't feel it. He reflects his generation in that regard. Where he differs--shockingly, to his stunned peers--is that he wants his due credit. Like a naif, he wants to behave as if race is just a social construct. The fact his fellow boomers view this sensible view with horror reveals a tragedy: an entire generation going to see God clinging to a humiliating and disastrous myth.

The general is a boomer too. They trusted black America, they've been faithful to equality, they've endured bitterness and violence--they've been patient. Now they're being ridiculed. They look to their children, better not to talk about the children, the children are being peeled away from them. White baby boomers were double-crossed. Do they know it? Young rightists hate the boomers for good reason. But if anyone should be mad it's the boomers: they are the great betrayed generation.

I like to think the general has developed some awareness of this vast con. And here comes this typically buffoonish black character. Sure, she's wielding the most powerful narrative weapon of all, the Numinous Negro, but she's inept, she's not even holding it right, and he's got what is maybe the only firepower to match it, Our Troops.
Bumbling into the fight he was cut down, she never had a chance. All she could manage were some potshots fired in retreat.

What is she saying when charging the general with racism? She's invoking the black premium which is added like affirmative action points added to minority college applications.

There's a standard invocation, in this case Lawrence O'Donnell applied it: "General Kelly called a black woman an empty barrel!" 

He called her stupid. One might call anyone stupid, of course. But not black people. Black people are not allowed to be stupid. That's exactly what O'Donnell is saying, it's exactly how his ilk thinks, and they behave as if utterly unaware of its implications or contradictions.

Also black people are really not allowed to be ignoble. The congresswoman is tacky and buffoonish, in a characteristically black way.

So when Kelly thought to get in an extra dig, calling out Wilson's showboating at a previous event that too involved the deaths of public servants, and the mortified reactions of the whites (I'm assuming) that day to it, is what struck me. The Narrative normally comes round to collect you if you dare such even oblique notice of black silliness and lack of decorum. It didn't this time.

That is a very good thing.

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.  `

The Waiting

One more foul emanation of enforced diversity: that morbid interval after an act of mass violence, as we two increasingly divided sides of our split nation wait to learn the identity of the culprit and where the narrative impact will land. Diversity not only divides by placing entire communities of strangers in our midst, it divides us--what's left of "us"--by forcing us to take a stand regarding them.

Still, almost no one who's chosen sides already will be swayed either way. Whoever loses the coin toss feels it as a narrative setback, a blow to morale and a lost opportunity, but rarely if ever as a challenge to his assumptions. We continue, out of habit as much as anything else, as if there's still a fight for the acquiescence of the great distracted middle of apolitical citizens, the "normies". But as our political polarization continues and the atrocities pile up--both direct results of diversity--that middle becomes both smaller and increasingly numbed to the arguments. To the extent they consider it at all they assume they live equidistant between two extremes that can be reconciled, if only the zealous on both sides would calm down, by some splitting of the difference. That things might be the Manichean struggle between good and evil that we out here on the battle lines see defies common sense--and it should, but common sense is insufficient for understanding a deliberately distorted reality.

In this circumstance it takes a greater shock to move anyone in the middle either way. But with the Establishment's control of the Megaphone there is a profound disparity in the directional effect of those shocks. Not all crimes are equal; not all victims equally wronged. Through amplification of supposed right wing extremism and suppression of even the most heinous acts of, for two instances, Muslim terrorists and black criminals, we've long been in a situation where a drunken white's "racist" rant somewhere goes viral and becomes an occasion for white self-flagellation everywhere, while the vast majority of Americans don't know about such as the Bataclan massacre, and criminally rare is he who knows of its appalling nature. And as the terrorist attacks pile up and grow in brutality, the perceptual chasm widens, because it's been decreed beforehand that an equivalence exists.

It's a scam, by which white Americans surrender our notion of "us" and "them". Rest assured, they, whoever they happen to be, have not. The effect for intellectual callow American blacks, Muslims and others of this deliberate double standard has been to strengthen their in-group identity and demonize us as a hostile out-group.

And the extreme nature of the violence is not just telling of the depths of the hate we're up against, it's an outrage we're no longer allowed. The nature of the violence is entirely relevant, but we're supposed to equate a disaffected loner shooting up a church in outrage over a nonetheless accurate notion of the state of affairs--Dylann Roof--with a police assassin wound up by fantastic tales of a "war" being waged against him by racist cops. We can prosecute and condemn Roof's actions without denying reality. I'm not sure how many more Roofs can be prevented if we continue to deny that reality and fail to deal with it. Likewise the emergence of an angry loner--such as may be responsible for the Quebec mosque massacre--does nothing to negate or justify the continuing assault on our peace and heritage that Islam represents. Neither do I equate his actions with the torture of innocents by an organized band supported by a larger religious-political movement

This is the nature of tolerance: you aren't allowed proper disgust, revulsion and outrage. Its impulse is still there, however, and it gets channeled into our own destruction; witness the zealous anger of the social justice warrior.

Where the media has no option but to cover such atrocities it hedges with irrelevant or misleading  context about how terrorists don't represent all Muslims and "right wing Christian white men" represent a greater threat. The revealing disparity in the nature of the crimes--a bullied loner shooting up a church versus the gleeful barbarity of Muslims beheading their victims--is hidden in statistics, along with the reality the Muslim terrorist represents an organized effort which "moderate" Muslims seem utterly unconcerned with, until it lands on them--in which case their efforts against it are paraded as of a piece with our own struggle, when it is not. Muslims besieged by ISIS somewhere take up a protest and it's enthusiastically picked up in the global media as evidence of their solidarity with us. But moderate Muslims needn't even oppose their extremists--all they need to do is flee them (or pretend to be fleeing them) and a new theme arises, such as when terrorist attacks in Europe are deemed to have no relevance to the present "refugee" onslaught, for these migrants are, after all, fleeing the same thing back home.
All variety of reality goes into the Narrate-o-Matic, but only Narrative-friendly gruel comes out.

But what's utterly lost is what strikes me as the worst of it: the so-called "right wing" terrorist himself, the so-called "intolerance" and bigotry are all just more results of the enforced diversity of globalization, Muslim immigration and forced integration. Inevitable, predictable, understandable even--for the apologist stands ever-ready to understand the most heinous acts of the Other or of aggrieved minorities.
In light of the barbarous nature of Muslim terror, and the profound betrayal of its apologists, from moderate Muslims to Western elites, the reaction of the "right wing" is tepid.

And it gets worse still. The default, taken-for-granted position of the apologists is that any reaction--muted as it is still in the West compared to what would be provoked anywhere else in the world to such a threat and betrayal, to such a humiliation, to such barbarity--is evidence of the necessity to continue on course with the actions producing it. To finally squelch this Orwellian-describe "prejudice" and "phobia".

Trump Names the Tools

From the new administration's whitehouse.gov website:

Our job is not to make life more comfortable for the rioter, the looter, or the violent disrupter.

As if calling rioters rioters and looters looters wasn't triggering enough to the Establishment, in using the word "disrupter" the administration is calling out one of the pop-ideologies of the opposition that seeks to broaden from occasional rioting to "disrupting" daily life anywhere and everywhere, like last year's bizarre campaign against late breakfasts or hangovers, or something, called #BlackBrunch.

But the real trolling here lies in the fact that the Trump Administration--if it keeps its promise--constitutes the greatest disruption of the status quo in modern American history.

The Curious Case of Bradley's Button

Yesterday Steve Sailer noted today how Chelsea (nee Bradley) Manning's gender dysphoria, having gone from footnote to forefront during his incarceration along with the rise of the trans rights movement, is now seen by fashionable convention as a legitimate sympathy factor favoring President Obama's commutation of his sentence, as evidenced by the New York Times:

It's a cliche that politics are mostly, if not entirely, about social identity, as individuals vote in line with their perceived in-group values and needs. Needless to say, in the US social identity in politics and beyond has so long been pathologized for whites and encouraged, even romanticized, in minorities until it has become unchallenged convention that majority interests are inherently suspect and white interests nonexistent or evil. An astounding notion. It's hard to say how much of this is cynical manipulation and how much is the obliviousness of the elites' true-believing middle management corps.

In a nation with a dominant ethnic majority social identity politics arrange along class lines. In ours for a long time now they've arranged themselves around ethnic (now sexual and sexual preference) identity. Obama promised his election would transcend this. There was a curious, very un-progressive appeal to order inherent in it; even, that progressive bugaboo nostalgia played a part (reeling from something like a national identity crisis after President Bush squandered so much national prestige in his ill-fated Iraq invasion, we were encouraged to revisit what has become, however stupidly, our imagined greatest achievement--black civil rights.) We would be one, finally by squaring the circle of racism.

 Over his time in office we've come not only to see the impossibility of this, but the fact the elite wants nothing to do with it. Division is the point--diversity after all means division. It was social identity for me but not for thee, white people. This is what half the country rejected with Trump's election.

With the reaction to Trump's success--itself a reaction to this long process--this shaming dynamic of de-legitimizing white majority interests and valorizing minority interests reached its nadir, and, after a half century of unopposed triumph, it failed grandly in last year's presidential election. Maybe the de-legitimization of white interests represents less a transformation of politics than the death thereof, part and parcel of the surrender, led by Buckleyite conservatism in America, to the globalist order that is at the moment reeling from the one-two punch of Trump and Brexit. The interests of white Americans and Europeans were the very problem, it is now openly declared (though it's important to note this would have been considered insane at the beginning of this progress of slow-walking us to our demise), as witnessed by American slavery and the Holocaust. Now it isn't just populism that is the  enemy, but the population--to be corrected by the demographic diversification of that population into competing ethnic groups under an imperial multi-pole represented by Washington DC, New York and Brussels.

It's part, maybe the essential part, of that death of meaningful democratic politics in the West. As Kevin Grace said, "politics, as conventionally understood, died in that bunker in Berlin when Hitler put a bullet in his brain."

But politics go on, divorced from policy and meaning (for it remains to be seen if the Trump phenomenon, as much as anything else an insurgency against this order, will pan out). And that means politics as advertising. Advertising itself is advanced political method. And advertising is less about social identity--that gauche recognition of practical reality and real interests--than it is about aspirational social identity. Buy this product and display your status, or front a higher status, or even ascend thereby to a higher status (for perception is all--politics has taken this quite to heart). Status of course includes moral status--show your social "awareness" by buying "green" or "non-conflict" diamonds (wealth and virtue combine in the ultimate display).

A short conversation with the average anti-Trump civilian will quickly illustrate for you how much politics have become, for the fashionably conventional, aspirational social identity striving.

But with the transformation of Bradly Manning, hero or traitor, to Chelsea Manning, unassailable virtue-victim, represents a new aspect of social identity in politics. Now we are expected to identify and apply a premium or penalty depending on the social identity of the subject class or individual. The classes warranting a political, cultural and--apparently now with official recognition of Manning's identity--can only be expected to grow (and compete with each other), while the classes for which a penalty is applied will remain static (and shrinking along with demographic and cultural change): white, male, straight. This does not end well--unless we end it now in defiance, somehow.

Life in Black and White

Does endorsement of the rioting in Charlotte in response to a police shooting, without any of the usual plausible-enough elements of police misconduct--suspect was not "unarmed", cop is black, etc-- represent a Rubicon crossed for supporters of the Black Lives movement? Is it now that any shooting of a black suspect must prompt rioting? Have the white enablers of it all thought it through? Chilling to think that, at least for the brighter among them, they must have.

Black Lives' problem is the outrages have become like lines of coke with diminishing effect. And no one--black or white--is willing to take away the mirror. So we arrive at Charlotte, where none of the notes of narrative plausibility, such as they are, are present yet the anger and violence, if anything, greater.

The movement is deliberately grown with each new provocation of what constitutes its grassroots--and in an age of astroturf and Soros, the riotous mobs that keep showing up give it legitimacy as a popular black movement, despite the manipulation, which looks to be mostly effected by the social media of a small group of frankly not very impressive activists. The violence and numbers of protesters and the unanimous support among respectable blacks give the movement undeniable popular legitimacy. The anger is there, Soros et al just provide the lacking gumption.

But the fraud nearly inverts the reality; it isn't that black lives are less valued within white culture, but that life is less valued in black culture. From this--and it doesn't matter if it's cultural or hereditary or both--flows all the mayhem and malice that's come to be associated with black America, which of course includes violent police encounters.

Black America rejects white norms and demands its own; this is what black obsession with black authenticity is all about. The Black Lives movement can be seen as a struggle between white and black norms, where the moral insurgency, so to speak, leading the offense and represented by BLM and others, is mostly delusional, but very effective because its delusions we're all force to share.

The lives, property and dignity of others is less valued in American black society; personal strength, charisma and nerve are more highly valued. Whiter is politer. In the absence of white norms black America defaults comically to what is so well represented in hip hop--where black America has carved out nearly complete cultural autonomy from (and influence over) white America and which represents the authentic voice of black America, violence, obscenity and all: an African strongman system, fractured by modern atomization into a hellscape of thousands of  America's own little Big Men fighting over street corners. Hip hop is not "black America's CNN", as DMX said. CNN doesn't represent an ethnic community. Hip hop is much more like the Rwandan radio station that sent the Hutu out to massacre the Tutsi.

But none of this is spoken of; it's barely thought, if the behavior of virtually everyone in a position of authority is to be believed; and in a nation of 300 million a plausible police outrage should come along regularly enough. What's most remarkable is that they don't come along more often and more narrative-worthy. Considering the scale of the problem of black American malice--exposed by the rioting of the Black Lives movement--I'm beginning to see America's police forces as heroically restrained.

Black America fights for its autonomy as black America, and the values, mores and customs it desires; they are not yours. Only listen and you will hear just that. What do black America's white allies fight for?