I had an acquaintance in college who was a dedicated leftist and who also believed in substantial group differences in average IQ.1 One day she was fretting at me that advances in data science, genetics, etc. were going to make this unpalatable reality impossible to ignore, with detrimental consequences for both racial justice and social harmony. Facts and logic were going to explode the noble lie, oh no!
Obviously I had to physically restrain myself from laughing at her. Assuming for the sake of argument that such differences exist and are easily measurable, only somebody totally autistic would think that mere scientific evidence for them would cause them to be acknowledged.2 Just look at all the ridiculous “sky is green” type beliefs that society already successfully forces everybody to internalize. You mentioned biological and cognitive differences between men and women, which are far more obvious and noticeable than those between populations, but which we successfully force everybody to pretend do not exist. And that’s far from the silliest thing everybody pretends to believe, in our society or in others.
Put it another way: there is no such thing as a secular society, every country has a state religion, and you won’t get very far opposing it. Were there people in Tenochtitlan who secretly believed that blood pouring down the sides of the great step pyramid day and night wasn’t actually necessary to placate the gods? Yeah probably, but if any of them had tried to point that out, they would have been laughed at (and sacrificed). Were there people in the Soviet Union who privately doubted whether dialectical materialism was the true engine of history? Probably, yes, but everybody besides Leonid Kantorovich was smart enough not to mention it.
What are the religious precepts on which our society is founded? There are a few, but a belief in absolute racial equality is clearly one of them, and that view is now enshrined in the “real” constitution (civil rights caselaw and its downstream effects on corporate HR). Anything which contradicts that precept is just a total nonstarter. If a few nerds somewhere found irrefutable evidence of important differences between groups, they would quietly hide it, and if some among them were like Reich too autistic or principled to do that, they would be ignored, shouted down, or persecuted. Possibly this would even be a good thing — every society needs its orthodoxies, and sometimes those who corrupt the youth need to drink the hemlock.
We’ve gotten far afield, though. As an inveterate shape-rotator, my favorite part of the book was Reich’s description of the statistical and mathematical techniques that can be used to determine when population bottlenecks occurred, how recently two populations shared a common ancestor, and when various mixing events occurred.
Jane Psmith and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: Who We Are and How We Got Here, by David Reich”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-29.
1. Not to get all “Dems are the real racists”, but anecdotally this view does seem slightly more prevalent among my left-wing friends than my right-wing friends, though that seems to currently be changing.
2. Somebody totally autistic or somebody who had already drunk the kool-aid on literally every other ridiculous official viewpoint imposed by our society. In her case it was probably the latter. As I said she was a leftist, and women in general are much less likely to be autistic but much more likely to value social conformity.
March 20, 2025
QotD: “[T]here is no such thing as a secular society, every country has a state religion, and you won’t get very far opposing it”
February 28, 2025
QotD: A jaundiced view of the feminist movement
Note that governments, back in the day, did not attempt to act as a nanny, warding off daily harms from unsafe commercial products, or was government in the business of educating the young, nursing the sick, or managing the personal lives of all the children of all ages inhabiting the nation.
The idea of the men who invented feminism was that propelling women into the workforce would increase the tax base, break apart the nuclear family, and increase sales of expensive drugs to promote temporary sterility.
Breaking the family in turn would make women more dependent on the government than on their menfolk, and draw the unreasoning admiration women typically bestow upon their protectors and breadwinners onto the Powers That Be. The fanatical devotion that mothers of convicts show, when they insist forever that their child is innocent, would then be channeled into the ballot box toward whatever demagogue with a vacant smile promised to remove dangerous liberty from the hands of the children, regardless of age, inhabiting the nation.
Pornographers like Hugh Hefner encouraged feminism on the grounds that it would increase vice, and hence the monetary gain from the public sale of vice.
Then, once women were in the workforce, excluding them from the military and other areas where men are better qualified was said to be a sign of hidden bigotry against them. The idea of this bigotry was so stupid that a new word had to be coined to hide its meaning, and that word is “sexism”.
The word “racism” — which at the time had a meaning — was decapitated and the word “sex” — and at the time this word also had a meaning — was sutured onto the neckstump, to produce a new word intended to denounce a nonexistent hatred and contempt felt by men against women.
There have been wars between races and tribes since time immemorial, and hatred between races and tribes. But the war between the sexes is not really a war, because both sides keep flirting with the other, and settling down, and having babies and suchlike.
John C. Wright, “No More Lads”, John C. Wright’s Journal, 2020-01-28.
January 20, 2025
“You can’t have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn’t mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes”
Kat Rosenfield shares her concerns about what the accusations against Neil Gaiman indicate about the problems with allowing women to be legally unreliable narrators:
There’s a moment in the Gaiman exposé where the main accuser, Scarlett Pavlovich, sends him a text message asking him how he’s doing. Gaiman says he’s struggling: he’s heard from people close to him that Pavlovich plans to accuse him of rape. “I thought that we were a good thing and a very consensual thing indeed,” he writes.
“It was consensual (and wonderful)!” she replies.
Except: she doesn’t mean it. We know this because Lila Shapiro, the author of the piece, breaks in to tell us as much:
Pavlovich remembers her palms sweating, hot coils in her stomach. She was terrified of upsetting Gaiman. “I was disconnected from everybody else at that point in my life,” she tells me. She rushed to reassure him.
But also, we know this because she didn’t mean it is sort of an ongoing theme, here. And that’s what I want to talk about.
By this point in the article we’ve been instructed, explicitly and repeatedly, that you can’t assume a relationship was consensual just because all parties involved gave consent. “Sexual abuse is one of the most confusing forms of violence that a person can experience. The majority of people who have endured it do not immediately recognize it as such; some never do,” Shapiro writes in one section. In another, she explains that it doesn’t matter if the women played along with Gaiman when he asked them to call him “master” or eat their own feces because “BDSM is a culture with a set of long-standing norms” to which Gaiman didn’t strictly adhere (as the meme goes, it’s only BDSM if it comes from the BDSM region of France, otherwise it’s just sparkling feces-eating sadomasochism.)
Shapiro spends a lot of time thumbing the scale like this, and for good reason: without the repeated reminders that sexual abuse is so confusing and hard to recognize, to the point where some victims go their whole lives mistaking a violent act for a consensual one, most readers would look at Pavlovich’s behavior (including the “it was wonderful” text message as well as her repeated and often aggressive sexual overtures toward Gaiman) and conclude that however she felt about the relationship later, her desire for him was genuine at the time — or at least, that Gaiman could be forgiven for thinking it was. To make Pavlovich a more sympathetic protagonist (and Gaiman a more persuasive villain), the article has to assert that her seemingly self-contradictory behavior is not just understandable but reasonable. Normal. Typical. If Pavlovich lied and said a violent act was consensual (and wonderful), that’s just because women do be like that sometimes.
Obviously, this paradigm imposes a very weird, circular trap on men (#BelieveWomen, except the ones who say they want to sleep with you, in which case you should commence a Poirot-style interrogation until she breaks down and confesses that she actually finds you repulsive.) But I’m more interested in what happens to women when they’re cast in this role of society’s unreliable narrators: so vulnerable to coercion, and so socialized to please, that even the slightest hint of pressure causes the instantaneous and irretrievable loss of their agency.
The thing is, if women can’t be trusted to assert their desires or boundaries because they’ll invariably lie about what they want in order to please other people, it’s not just sex they can’t reasonably consent to. It’s medical treatments. Car loans. Nuclear non-proliferation agreements. Our entire social contract operates on the premise that adults are strong enough to choose their choices, no matter the ambient pressure from horny men or sleazy used car salesmen or power-hungry ayatollahs. If half the world’s adult population are actually just smol beans — hapless, helpless, fickle, fragile, and much too tender to perform even the most basic self-advocacy — everything starts to fall apart, including the entire feminist project. You can’t have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn’t mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes.
December 14, 2024
Explaining the collapse in North American birth rates
The demographic collapse of both Canadian and American birthrates has many causes, but kulak definitely identifies a major one here:
📜Antidiscrimination law is the reason for the Birthrate Collapse.
In North America, for a guy to marry a girl, it’s basically expected that he must make enough more than her that he can pay for himself and support her while she provides for kids, without a decline in her lifestyle… and his status, quality of wife, and whether the marriage will be rocky or happy is determined by whether or not he can actually materially IMPROVE her lifestyle over unmarried life. Which was very achievable in the 50s and 60s when women were paid poorly and largely couldn’t get high status complex careers, and didn’t want to have to, and couldn’t, compete to male standards…
Whereas after antidiscrimination laws it is MANDATED 30-50% of high paying jobs must go to to women, no matter how many more hours men put in, or how less productive the women are. Ie. It is literally legally impossible for the average man to earn more than the average woman, no matter how hard or effectively he works… and because he WILL work harder to try, and because he competing against other men who are working harder to compete for the few high status jobs men can get, Men across the board are effectively POORER than women, they are doing way more work for equal or less pay and status.
It’s a meme now that girls will goof off at office jobs doing tik toks while the male workers are stressed and annoyed in the corner trying to keep the business afloat for the same pay. As such those girls won’t even date those men… because if you have to be stressed at the job for the same pay, you naturally seem poorer.
This is why western marriage and birthrates are collapsing.
And a follow-up response to another comment:
THis leads to spoiled delusional women convinced men are useless on the one hand, and the few self-aware women having to medicate to overcome their “imposter syndrome” as they subconsciously know they’re dead weight which psychologically breaks them.
November 23, 2024
Common sense on males in female sports from … checks notes … the United Nations?
Ramesh Thakur summarizes some of the findings from a recent report by the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls which somehow defies the narrative from most of the legacy media in the Current Year:
Has Hell frozen over? Uncommonly for the UN (think Antonio Guterres with the global warming hyperbole), one of its recent reports is full of common sense. In the last three years, I have been critical of UN performance regarding some high-profile issues, including World Health Organisation failings in responding to the coronavirus pandemic and a power grab for future pandemic management; lawfare against Israel by the world court and International Criminal Court; and UN Women’s betrayal of the raison d’être for its creation and existence with a shamefully delayed acknowledgment of the weaponisation of mass rape, sexual violence, mutilation and public humiliation of Israeli women on October 7th 2023.
Enter Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls. It’s a relief and a pleasure to acknowledge her positive report “Violence against women and girls in sport“. Published on August 27th, it was presented to the UN General Assembly last month. She notes that until very recently, the need for a separate category for females “to ensure equal, fair and safe opportunities in sports” was a “universally recognised principle”. Maintaining separate-sex sports is a proportional action that corresponds to legitimate aims within international law. Females also have a right to privacy under international law which is forfeited by compelled mixed-sex spaces in intimate facilities. Alsalem explained to Fox News on October 21st that this is primarily a human rights issue, not a cultural or an individual issue.
Biological advantages for males in competitive sports include strength (162% greater punching power on average!), weight, muscle mass, speed, height, reach and endurance. Separate categories for males and females were created to recognise this biological reality and provide equal, fair and safe opportunities for females to win recognition, prize money, fame and career advancement. Allowing biological males into female sports is unfair and amounts to cheating by males who are simply not competitive in male sports (think swimmer Lia Thomas). It steals women’s dreams, aspirations and rewards. Alsalem’s data show that more than 600 female athletes in over 400 competitions have lost nearly 900 medals across 29 different sports. Other reports document instances of injuries from trans-on-females encounters, including teeth knocked out, concussions resulting in neural impairment, broken legs and skull fractures. Thus safety is yet another another concern.
Despite the unfairness, invasion of privacy, opportunity costs and safety risks, many athletes and coaches who object to trans-inclusion policies are silenced or forced to self-censor at the risk of losing sporting opportunities, scholarships and sponsorships. Many who do speak out despite such formidable hurdles are accused of bigotry, suspended, expelled and subjected to unfair disciplinary proceedings. Many (like Moira Deeming) face hostility if they assemble to discuss how to deal with these issues, violating the fundamental human rights to freedom of belief, opinion and expression. Some have quit sport entirely under the cumulative stress. Because “biological sex is central” to women’s “experiences of discrimination and violence”, countries that permit biological men to compete in women’s sports deny women “their femaleness”. To counteract the “worrisome trend”, she recommends the creation of open categories in sports competition and non-invasive and confidential sex screening procedures to ensure fairness, safety and dignity for female athletes alongside inclusive participation for everyone.
The trans-extremist assault on female spaces in the workplace and sporting arenas has been in the thick of the culture wars. Amidst the wreckage of those wars, the DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) industry has morphed into DIE (division, intolerance, exclusion), promoting resentment, language-policing and unjust outcomes instead of real solutions. Trade-offs are central to public policy decision-making. The last major issue on which this was ignored was the panicked response to Covid and we will be paying for the resulting disasters for many years yet. By putting the spotlight back on the importance of balancing competing and clashing rights through policy trade-offs, this report provides a key to navigating our way out of the wreckage. It’s potentially also helpful in Sall Grover’s appeal in the Giggle v. Tickle case, as is the return of Trump to the White House. Alsalem is right to note that these policies originate from and exist almost entirely in Western countries. Their hold on many parts of the UN system is evidence of the hegemony of Western ideas and practices as the global norm. The adoption of trans and multigender language and the inclusion of trans athletes in international sports is confirmation of cultural imperialism at the cost of women-specific human rights.
November 21, 2024
QotD: The 1965 Immigration Act
Caldwell’s book is far too nuanced and expansive to cover here. But he identifies key moments and key changes. The 1965 Immigration Act was the beginning of a huge experiment in human history. It was complemented by open bipartisan-elite toleration of mass undocumented immigration across the southern border. And civil rights became something other than ending racial discrimination by the state: It became a regime of ending discrimination by individuals in economic and social life; then it begot affirmative action, in which race played an explicit part in an individual’s chance of getting into college; and it culminated in the social-justice agenda, which would meaningfully do away with the American concept of individual rights and see it replaced by a concept of racial group rights. Caldwell sees the last 50 years as a battle between two rival constitutions: one dedicated to freedom, the other to equality of outcomes, or “equity.” And I think he is right to see the former as worth fighting for.
But how do we get out of this trap? That’s where the depression sinks in. Neither Caldwell nor Klein see a way back to a common weal and a common good. Ezra offers some technical corrections — ending the Electoral College, the filibuster, and winner-takes-all voting. And they might help, although their potential unintended consequences should be carefully considered. Then he recommends meditation to control our own primal instincts — a role that Christianity traditionally held. (I don’t disagree with Ezra on the benefits of meditation, but it’s hardly a game-changer in America in 2020.) Caldwell proposes something far more drastic: a repeal of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Yes, you read that right. The proposal’s perversity matches its impossibility — and it’s buried in one sentence on the penultimate page of the book.
So much of Caldwell’s polemical history is fresh air; but the bleakness of its reactionary mood reveals how tribal Caldwell has become. He can barely eke out a few sentences reluctantly acknowledging some of the good things that the last 50 years have brought — in the lives of many women, in the prospects for African-Americans, in the dignity of homosexuals. He never acknowledges that Obama actually stood a chance of healing racial divides, if the GOP hadn’t demonized him from the start. And as an old friend of Chris’s, I know him to be a more gracious and humane person than this polemic might, at times, suggest. But that such a good man has gotten caught up in polarization and tribalism and such a brilliant man sees no hope for a peaceful resolution merely reveals how deep our problem is.
I have a smidgen more optimism. I see in the long-delayed backlash to the social-justice movement an inkling of a new respect for individual and creative freedom and for the old idea of toleration rather than conformity. I see in the economic and educational success of women since the 1970s a possible cease-fire in the culture wars over sex. I see most homosexuals content to live out our lives without engaging in an eternal Kulturkampf against the cis and the straight. Race? Alas, I see no way forward but a revival of Christianity, of its view of human beings as “neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”. This means such a transcendent view of human equality that it does not require equality of outcomes to see equal dignity and worth.
Yes, I’m hoping for a miracle. But at this point, what else have we got?
Andrew Sullivan, “America Needs A Miracle”, New York, 2020-01-31.
November 5, 2024
It’s not really about Peanut and Fred
Tom Knighton explains that the online furor isn’t really about poor Peanut the Squirrel and Fred the Raccoon … but they’ve become a trigger for a lot of simmering anger over the abuse of power and the unequal application of justice:
By now, you’ve probably already heard about Peanut the Squirrel and Fred the Raccoon. If you haven’t, then your blood pressure is probably thankful.
The short version is a man from New York rescued a baby squirrel, named him Peanut, and raised him. The squirrel became an Instagram star, apparently, thanks to cute pictures of him wearing cowboy hats and so on.
A woman from Texas, apparently, reported the man for having Peanut and a raccoon named Fred. Anonymously, at the time.
As a result, state officials stormed the house, took Peanut and Fred from their home, interrogated the man and his wife as if they were terrorists, tossed the house like officials were raiding a drug kingpin’s house, questioned the wife’s immigrant status (she’s from Germany), then euthanized both animals, supposedly to test for rabies.
And as a result, a lot of people are pissed.
I’m pissed.
Now, I’m someone who has put meat in the freezer by my own hand. I have no delusions about where meat comes from and I’m not some crazed animal rights activist that thinks animal lives are the same as human lives.
But that doesn’t matter because none of the outrage is really about the squirrel.
No, it’s about justice.
See, the issue with Peanut here is the uneven application of the law.
For Peanut, the letter of the law had to be applied. An animal raised inside of a home with other animals raised inside of the same home, none of which showed even an inkling of being diseased were taken from their loving owners because of some BS regulation that shouldn’t have applied in this case.
This after four years of more uneven application of the law.
For example, we’ve seen George Soros-backed district attorneys vow not to prosecute people for some crimes. Some of those are victimless crimes, which doesn’t bother me, but it also includes things like shoplifting, which is anything but victimless. As a result, shoplifting got so bad and brazen in some places that many chains just shuttered locations because they couldn’t make a profit.
It wasn’t all that long ago that we were locked in our homes and told we couldn’t go to church, to school, to visit our dying family in the hospital, to do anything except for approved activities, and even then, there were rules we were forced to follow.
All of that went out the window when a career criminal died at the hands of a police officer and mobs throughout the nation set fire to entire neighborhoods. At that point, the deadly virus that was akin to ebola and the Black Death really wasn’t that bad and people should totally be fine with rioters destroying communities.
Very few of them were arrested and even fewer were convicted over their actions during those riots.
[…]
See, on every level, our nation of laws has been corrupted so that only some people get a pass while others don’t. Peanut and Fred didn’t have to be seized like they were. While the law is the law, anyone could see that there was no threat to people or the animals. There was absolutely no reason for any of it, but the law was suddenly the law whereas New York is notorious for giving certain parties a pass when it comes to the law.
Then we have them questioning the wife’s immigration status, whereas they turn illegal immigrants back out onto the streets after committing actual crimes. It’s rank hypocrisy at best.
But the truth is that while the law itself provides equal protection, the application of that law is anything but equal. There, some animals are more equal than others, and so Peanut and Fred were murdered by the state.
We love our pets. We cherish them. We understand the sense of loss when people lose a pet.
October 16, 2024
Many of the posh pro-trans activists are objectively anti-gay
It’s starting to be a true wedge issue in the LGBT community, as the logic of the pro-trans activists leads quite directly to the suppression of the gay and lesbian parts of that community:
It was hardly a plague of locusts, but it was disruptive nonetheless. During the annual LGB Alliance conference at the Queen Elizabeth II centre in Westminster on Friday afternoon, teenage activists unleashed thousands of crickets into the auditorium. The inconvenience was only temporary. The crowd simply relocated to another room and the event went on as before.
As those responsible were apprehended, many people were struck by just how young and posh they were. By this point, it should surprise precisely no-one that anti-gay activism in its current form is a predominately bourgeois pursuit. The symbolism of the crickets was, of course, deliberate. It was an attempt to dehumanise those in attendance, to suggest that they were akin to parasites, vermin, spreaders of disease, a common trope of those who seek to demonise minorities.
Images via @leng_cath on X
The perpetrators were children, and so it would be unwise to speculate too much on their motives. It is likely they were being manipulated by the group that has claimed responsibility, calling itself “Trans Kids Deserve Better”. As Bev Jackson, co-founder of LGB Alliance said on my show last night:
Trans kids do deserve better. They deserve better than to be told lies that that they might have been born in the wrong body. They deserve better than to be told that these hormones and surgeries that they are clambering for will somehow solve all their problems. Many are on the autism spectrum. Many are struggling with their sexual orientation. We know that. They deserve better than to be told that we hate them. And they deserve better than to be labelled trans when they’re going through all the turbulence of adolescence, when your feelings about yourself are in constant flux.
Irrespective of the intentions of the teenagers involved, this was anti-gay activism. To attack a group of lesbian, gay and bisexual people who have assembled to discuss the ongoing threats to their civil rights could hardly be defined in any other way. Likewise, to refer to groups such as LGB Alliance as “anti-trans”, “transphobic” or “hateful” – as activist media outlets such as the Metro and the Guardian have been known to do — is also an anti-gay strategy. In order to address a problem, one needs to label it accurately.
Gender identity ideologues are, by definition, anti-gay. They are campaigning to force their pseudo-religious belief-system onto the rest of society, one that claims that same-sex attraction is a myth, and that a mysterious spiritual sense of “gender” is the defining feature of homosexuality. Even if they have convinced themselves that they are “pro-trans” and “compassionate” and “progressive”, the implementation of their demands would result directly in the demolition of gay rights. And so “anti-gay activism” is not only an accurate description, it also cuts to the heart of what is at stake.
July 1, 2024
The Anglosphere “imported American racial progressivism, and then commenced to import American-style racial problems. Thanks, America.”
At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter discusses meritocratic racial quotas in employment and higher education as a “Universally Disagreeable Compromise”:
Graphic for Rhode Island College’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
The race question has been a fault line in American society from its inception. In the aftermath of the hypermigration of the early twenty-first century, it has only become more complicated and divisive, not only in America, but throughout the Anglospheric world. The rest of us imported American racial progressivism, and then commenced to import American-style racial problems. Thanks, America.
The question seems to ultimately revolve around who shall receive the economic spoils. The “equity” that is endlessly referenced by diversity commissars is literally the home equity held by the white middle class, which the diverse and their champions openly intend to expropriate and redistribute.
The most contentious battlegrounds are in academic admissions and corporate hiring, in which the imperative is to minimize the number of White men, and maximize everything that isn’t White men. How the everything else is maximized is of no particular account. A team composed entirely of black men is just as “diverse” as a team which also features Black lesbians, Arab homosexuals, and Thai ladyboys. It is the presence of White men that makes organizations less diverse: a team composed entirely of Black men, with the exception of a solitary White male token, is less diverse than the all-Black team.
For generations now we have suffered under the affirmative action regulations imposed under the banner of Civil Rights. For proponents, Civil Rights are a civic religion, and they guard the advantages won by adherence to their faith jealously. For the victims of affirmative action – which includes both those rejected from employment or university, as well as those subjected to the incompetency of affirmative action admits and hires – affirmative action is a hateful absurdity.
The underlying problem, which to this day only Internet edgelords will openly discuss, is human biodiversity. The various ancestral groups are, in fact, different, in ways that go beyond the merely cosmetic, to include general levels of cognitive aptitude, along with specific behavioural proclivities. To a certain degree this is due to upbringing, but only to a certain degree; upbringing can bring a child as close to his genetic potential as possible, but cannot push him beyond it. The best that nurture can do is to allow nature to flower; it cannot change nature. The natural outcome of this is that, under a purely race-blind, meritocratic dispensation, there will be noticeable and ineradicable differences in the representation of various races within any given profession.
Whether or not one supports a purely meritocratic approach to admissions and hiring then tends to depend a lot on whether one belongs to a group that is likely to do well, or poorly, under such a system. East Asians tend to support a more meritocratic approach, because their high test scores, good study habits, and strong work ethic mean that they will be extremely competitive. Blacks, on the other extreme, are far more skeptical of meritocracy, intuiting that a ruthlessly meritocratic approach would tend to see them pushed out of the professions at the expense [or rather, to the benefit] of Whites, Asians, and Indians.
The current system is practically the worst possible system. The official narrative is built upon the foundational lie that we are all the same under the skin, and that any difference in group-level socioeconomic outcome can only be the result of bigotry, racism, systemic racism, implicit bias, and the historical consequences of slavery or colonialism. This lie has driven our society quite insane, leading in particular to the demonization of Whites – a large fraction of whom buy into the narrative of ethnomasochistic guilt with religious zeal, and another large fraction of whom reject this framing of their racial character as sick and ugly. To a large degree the culture wars are driven by this very division. In the American context, this division maps quite closely to Constitutionalists vs Civil Rights adherents, i.e. it is a holy war between the two dominant civic religions. It is not accidental that this also maps to Republican (i.e. those who wish to preserve the Old Republic built by the Constitution) vs Democrat (i.e. those who wish to complete the transformation of the Republic into something [like] the Our Democracy they’ve been growing in the soil of Civil Rights).
As William M Briggs has pointed out ad nauseum, the prohibition of “disparate impact” and “discrimination” under the Civil Rights regime is an absolute nightmare for corporate America. On the one hand, to discriminate on the basis of race (or any other identity) is plainly illegal; on the other, to not discriminate is invariably to open oneself to charges of discrimination, as the various statistical differences between racial groups work themselves out in aptitude tests, SATs, grade point averages, or job performance. This places employers in the Kafkaesque position of being required to discriminate without being seen to discriminate. They must put their thumbs on the scale to ensure equal outcomes, without being caught doing so.
For Whites especially, this has been a very bad deal. Because no organization will ever be sued for taking on too many officially victimized minorities, there is no upper limit to the number of diversity hires; but if the student body or corporate org chart falls below a given group’s fraction of the population, lawsuits are almost guaranteed. This then produces an inevitable ratchet effect which systematically excludes White people from their own society, with corrosive effects on competence, morale, and confidence in institutions. It doesn’t help that, because we are still officially meritocratic, the leadership classes subject us all to constant gaslighting: we are discriminated against openly by people who brag about discriminating against us while insisting in the same breath that there is no discrimination. It is not surprising that many of us are ready to burn these people at the stake.
April 5, 2024
In the still-ongoing “war of the sexes”, when can women just accept they’ve won and cease hostilities?
At the amusingly named Handwaving Freakoutery, you can see a scorecard for the war of the sexes that has been ongoing since I was a child and seems no closer to ending than back in the 1960s:
I say this to make it absolutely clear that unlike a lot of boorishly banal material you might encounter within the wretchedly named “Manosphere”, this is not intended to be a whiny article. I’m not complaining, nor am I calling for societal change or action. I’m simply wondering exactly how dominant female privilege has to get before they declare victory and take their boot off the necks of men. I really don’t know the answer to this question, but we’ll speculate about that below after the wall of graphs. HWFO loves graphs.
Herein we will go point by point through as many measurable societal markers as I can think of, leaving no marker unmarked, and put together a Gender War Scoreboard describing as accurate a snapshot as possible of the current state of the United States. Then we’ll close with some analysis about how badly it would have to get before the women finally just declare victory and move on. This post shall be too big for email.
To assign our score, we will look at sets of data that fall generally into two categories. For victimization ratios and similar, we’ll just look at percentage by gender. For comparing two uncapped sets of data, such as life expectancy, we’ll look at a ratio and make them both add to 100 for an apples-to-apples comparison. Then we’ll add them all up at the end to tally the score.
Salary
HWFO covered the gender wage gap in 2022, but I’ll summarize it here so you don’t have to read back. According to a 2008 analysis by the Department of Labor, now 16 years old, the raw gender wage gap was 20.4% in 2007:
Most of the gap was explainable by career choice and lifestyle choice differences:
When compared properly that looks like this:
Sixteen years ago, the bits of the gender wage gap that weren’t explained by career and life choice differences only totaled 6%. This fact has been known for a decade and a half and is constantly hidden from view by Pew, the NLWC, and any other major organization that profits from the perception that this gap is large and persistent. It has also assuredly closed to narrower than that 6% in the ensuing decade and a half, but nobody’s replicated the Department of Labor analysis. Look closely at the effects in the green bar identified by the Department of Labor. “Child birth” is how you become a mother. “Child care” is something mothers do. “Working part time” is something mothers do. “Time out of the labor force” is something mothers take. “Occupational choice” is something women change when they become mothers. Here are some graphs from Kleven et al, March 2019:
The solid lines are women. In every studied area, the women make equal or more than the men do up until the birth of their first child, and then they make less. The gender wage gap difference is in the choice to have children. Women choose to make professional concessions to raise a family while the men don’t. Is this fair? Some might say no, but only if they also don’t want to be the primary caregiver for their kids. Some would say yes, for the following two reasons: (1) women choose this, especially in feminist societies, but also (2) men are punished socially for choosing this. If you do not believe me, go make two fake male Tinder profiles with identical cute photos in them, and in the bio of one say “corporate lawyer” and the other say “part time daycare worker” and see which one gets more hits. Then do the same with a female profile. Men are socially punished by women for making the career concession, women are not socially punished by men for making it.
Often when these sorts of “equal pay for equal work” studies are properly controlled for mothering and career choice, they find that men are paid less than women for equal work. Google was pretty famously forced by their neo-progressive staff to do an internal analysis of the subject, and uncomfortably discovered they were overpaying women for being women on an “equal work” basis. The results were twofold. First Google paid all the men a one time bonus, then Google quietly never investigated it again so they could get back to paying women more.
February 19, 2024
The End of Race Politics by Coleman Hughes
Given how far race relations in the United States (and in Canada) have disintegrated since 2009, it’s almost surprising to find someone taking up arms against the race preferences and active discrimination being implemented by governments, organizations, and companies across North America, but Coleman Hughes’ first book does exactly that:
… almost as soon as the 1964 breakthrough in overcoming racial classifications took hold, it was abandoned. In a perverse echo of the past, sanctioned preferential treatment for blacks slowly began to replace sanctioned preferential treatment for whites. Set-asides, quotas, affirmative action all proliferated, all rooted in the old, crude racial classifications. The notion that affirmative action was a temporary adjustment, to be retired in a couple of decades at most, gradually disappeared. In fact, it was extended to every other racial or sexual minority and to women. Even as women and many blacks and other minorities triumphed in the economy and mainstream culture, they were nonetheless deemed eternal victims of pervasive misogyny and racism.
The more tangible the success for women and minorities, the more abstract the notion of “systemic oppression” became. Critical race theorists argued that color-blindness itself was a form of racism; and that all white people, consciously or unconsciously, could not help but be perpetuators of racial hate, whether they intended to or not. That’s how we arrived at a moment when Jon Stewart decided he’d tackle the subject of racial inequality in America by hosting a show called “The Problem With White People”, and when “The 1619 Project” actually argued that the American Revolution was not driven by a desire to be free from Britain but to retain slavery, which Britain threatened.
The poignancy of Coleman Hughes’ new book, The End of Race Politics, lies therefore in the tenacity of his faith in the spirit of 1964. “Color-blindness” is not the best description of this, because of course we continue to see others’ race, just as we will always see someone’s sex. No, as Hughes explains: “To advocate colorblindness is to endorse an ethical principle: we should treat people without regard to race, both in our public policy and private lives”.
That’s a principle the vast majority of Americans, black and white and everything else, support. It was the core principle for Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Martin Luther King Jr, and Bayard Rustin. “If I have advocated the cause of the colored people, it is not because I am a negro, but because I am a man,” insisted Douglass. Henry Highland Garnet — the first African-American to speak in Congress after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment — even apologized for speaking of various different races, “when in fact there is but one race, as there was but one Adam”.
Fast forward to 2015, when the University of California called the phrase “There is only one race, the human race” a “micro-aggression”; or 2020, when the phrase “All Lives Matter” was deemed evidence of “anti-blackness”. The 21st Century, the brief era of color-blindness behind us, reached back to the 19th to insist that race defines us at our core, can never be overcome, and marks us all either an oppressor or a victim. The left, including the Democratic Party, has now adopted this worldview, along with a legal regime to actively discriminate against some races and not others: “equity”. That’s why Hughes cuts to the chase and calls these reactionaries in progressive clothing “neoracists”. They are. What else would one call them?
They are race-obsessed. They view any human interaction as a racial power-struggle, and compound it with any number of further “intersectional” power-struggles. They do not see two unique individuals with unique life experiences interacting in a free society. They see group identity as determinative everywhere; and therefore want to intervene everywhere, to discriminate against whites and successful non-whites in favor of unsuccessful non-whites. Individual rights? They come second to group identity.
[…]
One in five “black” Americans are immigrants or descended from them, Hughes observes. Only 30 percent of Asian-Americans think of themselves as “Asian” at all, rather as a member of a specific group — like Korean or Indian. Within the Asian box, you also have huge diversity: “In 2015, 72 percent of Indians over 25 had at least a bachelors degree. yet only 9 percent of Bhutanese did.” Ditto “Hispanic”. Any formula that conflates Cubans with Mexicans and Colombians is absurd. And don’t get me started on the LGBTQIA+ bullshit.
The woke also have a staggeringly crude understanding of power. Economic power? No doubt many whites have a huge edge in accumulated wealth in America; but the cultural power of African-Americans is global in reach and far outweighs the cultural clout of, say, white evangelicals or conservatives at home. Political power? Blacks, who are about 14 percent of population, are represented proportionally in the House — covering 29 states — and can claim the last two-term president, the current vice president, the House minority leader, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the mayors of the four most populous cities last year, and more than a fifth of SCOTUS.
For the neoracists, all racial disparities are entirely explained by “systemic racism”. But this obviously obscures the complexity of American society. “Culture” is a loaded and complex term, but it sure matters. A child with two engaged parents in the home has far more chances to succeed than a kid who barely sees his dad. Now look at the difference between family structure among many Asian-American groups and that of black Americans. And how can one blame “white supremacy” for the constant murderous mayhem of urban black spaces? Only by removing from young black men any concept of their own agency and humanity.
September 11, 2023
The DOJ versus SpaceX
I was a bit boggled when the US Justice Department announced it was going after Elon Musk’s SpaceX for alleged discriminatory hiring practices:
Image from SpaceX website.
The Justice Department recently filed a lawsuit against SpaceX, the California-based spacecraft manufacturer and satellite communications company founded by Elon Musk.
In its lawsuit, the DOJ accused SpaceX of only hiring U.S. citizens and green-card holders, thereby discriminating against asylees and refugees in hiring, an alleged violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act.
Musk denied the allegations and accused the government of weaponizing “the DOJ for political purposes”.
“SpaceX was told repeatedly that hiring anyone who was not a permanent resident of the United States would violate international arms trafficking law, which would be a criminal offense,” Musk wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
It’s uncertain if the DOJ is actually targeting SpaceX (more on that in a minute), but George Mason University economist Alex Tabarrok quickly found a problem with the DOJ’s allegations.
“Do you know who else advertises that only US citizens can apply for a job?” Tabarrok asked. “The DOJ.”
Tabarrok even brought the receipts: a screenshot of the DOJ job website that explicitly states, “U.S. Citizenship is Required.”
So, if Musk is discriminating against non-U.S. citizens in his hiring practices, so is the DOJ.
This makes the lawsuit prima facie absurd on one level. However, one could also argue that there could be good reasons to discriminate in hiring. And as is usually the case, for better or worse, the government gets to decide when it’s OK to discriminate and when it’s not OK.
And that’s where things get hazy.
Musk and others claim that companies such as SpaceX are legally required to hire U.S. citizens because of International Traffic in Arms Regulations, a federal regulatory framework designed to safeguard military-related technologies.
The DOJ disagrees. So who is right? It’s difficult to say, Tabarrok pointed out.
“The distinction, as I understand it, rests on the difference between US Persons and US Citizens,” he wrote on Marginal Revolution, “but [SpaceX is] 100% correct that the DoD frowns on non-citizens working for military related ventures.”
In other words, SpaceX appears to have been trying to comply with Department of Defense regulations by not using non-citizens in military-related work, and in doing so, it may have run afoul of the DOJ.
June 26, 2023
The struggle for equal rights turned into the struggle to oppress others so gradually, most people didn’t notice
From the most recent Weekly Dish by Andrew Sullivan:
Many, many moons ago, when I was a marriage equality pioneer and not a total pariah among the gays, I was asked to speak at the Human Rights Campaign Fund, as it was then called. Determined as ever not to read the room, I said (paraphrasing from memory): “The goal of any civil rights movement should be to shut itself down one day. And once we get marriage equality and military service, those of us in the gay rights movement should throw a party, end the movement, and get on with our lives.”
You can imagine how well that went down. And, sure enough, 30 years later, with marriage, military service and trans equality enshrined in the law, the HRC building now has a massive, six-story high poster hanging on it: “BLACK LIVES MATTER. TRANS BLACK LIVES MATTER.”
That tells us a bit about where we are today, and how we got here.
The point I was making in the early 1990s was that liberalism knows limits. A liberal politics does not seek to impose meaning on everyone; it creates the space for individuals to choose that for themselves. It doesn’t seek to deliver the truth about anything either; it merely provides the mechanisms for the open-ended pursuit of truth. A liberal politics will seek formal equality for members of minorities; but not substantive equality — what is now called “equity”. It would not require us to come to one, single understanding of reality; it would always allow diversity of opinion and encourage free debate. Live and let live. Remember that?
Technically speaking, that makes me a liberal conservative: accepting the reality of liberal modernity (even, in my own case, being happily at home in it), while seeking to limit its illiberal overreach and utopian ambitions. And that was what I tried to sketch out in Virtually Normal. It’s a book less about homosexuality than about politics itself. It’s about a politics of going this far — and no farther. From the NYT review in 1995:
Mr. Sullivan offers his own prescription for a “politics of homosexuality” that reconciles “the best arguments of liberals and conservatives”. It is a liberal stand, Mr. Sullivan argues, in that it puts a premium on individual liberty and equality before the law, but its requirements would apply only to government policies on homosexuality, avoiding “the regulation of people’s minds and actions” in the private sphere.
Homosexual citizens absolutely deserved equal rights, but the question of homosexuality itself would — and should — always be open to dispute and debate. Since a liberal society contains both fundamentalist preachers as well as lesbian atheists, it cannot resolve the core question. So it shouldn’t try. And it should celebrate, not bemoan, this ideological diversity.
I can see why the religious fundamentalists are queasy with the settlement that came from this. They have to live in a society that accepts civil marriages for couples of the same sex. The deal is that in return, they are free to deny the morality of such marriages, to reserve religious marriage to heterosexual couples, and not be forced to participate in any way. I can also see why queer theorists are queasy as well. They don’t like the heteronormativity of civil marriage, or the respectability politics that goes with it. But they in turn are free to live their lives as “queerly” as they want in society, to create culture that seeks to subvert and radicalize.
This, in the end, is my response to all the “slippery slope” arguments about gay marriage now being raised again on the right. There is no slope in the case I made. There is a clear line: formal legal equality alongside cultural and social freedom on all sides. From my liberal conservative perspective, the gay rights movement should have shut down in 2015 after Obergefell; and the trans rights movement should have shut down in 2020 after Bostock. Once gay men and lesbians and trans people achieved legal and constitutional equality, the fight was over.
But in the movement I was once a part of, many, of course, were not liberals, let alone liberal conservatives — but radicals, who reluctantly went along with marriage equality, but itched to transform society far more comprehensively. And these radicals now control everything in the hollowed-out gay rights apparatus. Their main ticket item is a law that would replace biological sex with gender in the law, and remove protections for religious liberty: smashing the liberal settlement. Combine that with acute polarization in the Trump era, and information silos, so that many gays get their sense of reality from MSNBC and Elton John, and you can see how the spiral into illiberal madness began.
June 19, 2023
Patterns of incompetence
In Palladium, Harold Robertson says that complex systems that we all depend on will not have the resilience to survive our society-wide failure of competence:
Graphic for Rhode Island College’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
At a casual glance, the recent cascades of American disasters might seem unrelated. In a span of fewer than six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate collisions resulting in 17 deaths. A year later, powerlines owned by PG&E started a wildfire that killed 85 people. The pipeline carrying almost half of the East Coast’s gasoline shut down due to a ransomware attack. Almost half a million intermodal containers sat on cargo ships unable to dock at Los Angeles ports. A train carrying thousands of tons of hazardous and flammable chemicals derailed near East Palestine, Ohio. Air Traffic Control cleared a FedEx plane to land on a runway occupied by a Southwest plane preparing to take off. Eye drops contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria killed four and blinded fourteen.
While disasters like these are often front-page news, the broader connection between the disasters barely elicits any mention. America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.
The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea that individuals should be systematically evaluated and selected based on their ability rather than wealth, class, or political connections, led to significant changes in selection techniques at all levels of American society. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) revolutionized college admissions by allowing elite universities to find and recruit talented students from beyond the boarding schools of New England. Following the adoption of the SAT, aptitude tests such as Wonderlic (1936), Graduate Record Examination (1936), Army General Classification Test (1941), and Law School Admission Test (1948) swept the United States. Spurred on by the demands of two world wars, this system of institutional management electrified the Tennessee Valley, created the first atom bomb, invented the transistor, and put a man on the moon.
By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws — most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.
The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity. In the language of a systems theorist, by decreasing the competency of the actors within the system, formerly stable systems have begun to experience normal accidents at a rate that is faster than the system can adapt. The prognosis is harsh but clear: either selection for competence will return or America will experience devolution to more primitive forms of civilization and loss of geopolitical power.
H/T to Theophilus Chilton for the link.
April 11, 2023
The end of single-sex spaces began in the 1970s, at least for men
Janice Fiamengo points out that the initial loss of single-sex spaces began a long time ago and for what — at the time — seemed sensible and egalitarian reasons:
Robin Herman of the New York Times was one of the first two female reporters ever allowed into NHL dressing rooms, starting with the 1975 NHL All-Star Game in Montreal.
There has been a good deal of talk lately about women’s spaces being invaded by biologically male persons identifying as women. Some women’s campaigners claim that the trans phenomenon constitutes an attack on womanhood itself, an attempt to “erase” women and replace them with men who perform womanhood. Some even call it a new form of patriarchy.
But well before women had their single-sex spaces threatened, something similar had already happened to men. Beginning in the 1970s, men’s spaces were usurped, their maleness was denigrated, and policies and laws forced changes in male behavior that turned many workplaces into feminized fiefdoms in which men held their jobs only so long as women allowed them to. The very idea of an exclusively male workspace or club — especially if it was a space for socializing (not so much if it was a sewer, oil field, or shop floor in which men did unpleasant, dangerous work) — came to be seen as dangerous. In light of the recent furor over single-sex spaces for women, it is useful to consider the source of some men’s justifiable apathy and resentment.
At my new academic job in the late 1990s, a woman who had been the first female historian hired into her department used to tell a story she’d had passed on to her from a male colleague. After the decision had been made to hire her, one of the historians said to another somewhat dolefully, “I guess that’s the end of our meetings in the urinal.” The joke ruefully acknowledged, and good-naturedly accepted, the end of their all-male work environment.
Though this woman didn’t have any trouble with her male colleagues, who welcomed her civilly, she told the story with an edge of contempt. Even thoroughly modern men, the story suggested, held a foolish nostalgia for pre-feminist days.
But was it foolish — or did the men recognize something real?
No one thought seriously, then, about the disappearance of men’s single-sex spaces. The idea that men and boys need places where they can be with other men (defended, for example, in Jack Donovan’s The Way of Men) would have been cause, amongst the women I knew, for scornful laughter. In 2018, anti-male assumptions had become so deeply entrenched that the female author of a Guardian article titled “Men-only clubs and menace: how the establishment maintains male power” simply could not believe that any decent man could legitimately seek out male-only company.
Under the circumstances of mixed groups of reporters crowding into team locker rooms after games, it’s rather surprising how few “towel malfunction” incidents have been reported.
