Quotulatiousness

August 8, 2019

An excellent illustration of market segmentation

Filed under: Britain, Business — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Wikipedia entry for “market segmentation” defines it this way:

“BEER”by Jonnee is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Market segmentation is the activity of dividing a broad consumer or business market, normally consisting of existing and potential customers, into sub-groups of consumers (known as segments) based on some type of shared characteristics. In dividing or segmenting markets, researchers typically look for common characteristics such as shared needs, common interests, similar lifestyles or even similar demographic profiles.

No single product is going to be universally popular, and it’s generally a bad idea to present it that way. The producers of a new product ideally try to identify the groups of potential customers who are more likely to want to buy the new product, and tailor their advertising to those groups. The more accurately they can identify and communicate with these customer groups, the greater the chances that the product will be a success in the market.

Beer isn’t universally popular (Gasp! Shock! Horror!), so brewers try to identify different kinds of beer drinkers and market their brews to those sub-groups:

The point about a market being that you can put your stuff out there and see who buys it. The buyers will – they are rational beings after all – select from the varied offerings and their selections will be the ones which best increase their utility by their own measurements of that utility. Thus the Shagmenowbigboypint might get a bit more business toward closing time, who knows? Not necessarily entirely female business either.

And even to stop being puerile about it. We’ve only this one system that does provide multiple choices – that’s what a market is. But in order for ever finer meeting of utility it’s necessary for ever finer slices of the market to be addressed. That is, we need to have free market entry so we can find out what it is that actually meets peoples’ desires.

Banning something that appeals to some slice of that market is thus defeating the point and object of that very market’s existence. Sure, lots of women won’t buy a sexist beer. Some will, as will some men. The aim and art of the whole exercise being to allow those who won’t not to, those who will to.

Or, as we can put it, every beer being Shagmenowbigboypint is as bad as no beer being Shagmenowbigboypint.

June 17, 2019

“We’ve reached peak identitarian bollocks”

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brendan O’Neill follows up on the disturbing story of two lesbians who were physically assaulted on a London bus:

Talk about ungrateful. Brits, and people around the world, offered empathy and solidarity to the two gay women who were battered by thugs on a London bus. And yet now one of the women has turned around and told us we only care about them because they are white. It’s only because they are “two attractive, white, cisgender women” that so many people and organisations gave a damn about them and tweeted about them, apparently. Thanks a bunch. We offer our human concern for your wellbeing and you tell us we’re being racist. We’ve reached peak identitarian bollocks.

The woman in question, who goes only by the name “Chris”, has written a piece for the Guardian. Natch. The intro lets us know what we’re in for: “The photo of me and my date went viral – but only as we’re white, feminine and cisgender.” Translation: you racist, transphobic idiots wouldn’t have cared half as much if this had been two bloodied and bruised black women or trans women. The “commodification” of “my face” came at the “expense of other victims whose constant persecution apparently does not warrant similar moral outrage”, says Chris.

What is most striking about her piece is that she flagellates herself for her privilege. Yes, this woman who last month was badly beaten allegedly on account of her sexuality is now beating herself up in the national press over her privileged identity. She says she has “evaded much of the violence and oppression imposed on so many others by our capitalist, white-supremacist, patriarchal system because of the privileges I enjoy by dint of my race, health, education, and conventional gender presentation”. What a strange, self-hating mindset it must take to be victimised for your sexuality and then to say: “God, I’m SO privileged.”

Chris even does us the service of providing a list of people who are far less privileged than her and who us phoney empathisers should finally start noticing. It is “open season”, she says, on “people of colour, indigenous people, transgender people, disabled people, queer people, poor people, women and migrants”. This is classic virtue-signalling. She is engaging in the Oppression Olympics while making it clear she doesn’t deserve any gold medals in said Olympics because she is white, educated, cisgender, etc. A masterclass in identitarian showboating.

June 16, 2019

QotD: Critical gender studies

Filed under: Education, Health, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The first thing you must understand is that gender is a social construct. “Woman” and “man” are concepts arbitrarily invented by society. They have nothing to do with reality. A child is assigned one of these labels randomly at birth by primitive, backward-thinking doctors who, for no good or objective reason, have decided that a human child with a penis must be a boy and a human child with a vagina must be a girl. These words are all interchangeable, as are the body parts. None of it means anything, really.

But remember that the generic people we meaninglessly call “women” are beautiful and powerful and their arbitrary womanhood should be constantly celebrated. Women must band together and lift each other up. Women must be represented equally in all of our institutions. Women are truly wonderful, splendid, special creatures.

But there is nothing special about women. Literally anyone can be a woman. A woman is not anything in particular. A person with a penis can be a woman. A person with a vagina can be a woman. If a bucket of sand came to life and wanted to be a woman, it could be a woman. There is no aspect of womanhood that is ingrained or biological or inaccessible to males. And womanhood certainly has nothing at all to do with your body parts.

But if you don’t have a uterus then you shouldn’t be giving your opinion on women’s rights. No uterus, no opinion. That’s the motto. We’re tired of men making decisions about women’s bodies.

But there is no such thing as a woman’s body. Transwomen are women, too. A transwoman is just a much a woman as any other woman. There is absolutely no difference between the two and to suggest otherwise is the height of bigotry.

Matt Walsh, “Explaining Progressive Gender Theory To Right Wing Bigots”, The Daily Wire, 2019-05-14.

May 12, 2019

Mechanisms for redressing employment gender imbalances

Filed under: Business, Education, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

We’ve often been told that too many men occupy positions of power and influence in the working world, but what would it take to meaningfully address those imbalances?

Equity … is based on the idea that the only certain measure of “equality” is outcome — educational, social, and occupational. The equity-pushers axiomatically assume that if all positions at every level of hierarchy in every organization are not occupied by a proportion of the population that is precisely equivalent to that proportion in the general population that systematic prejudice (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.) must be at play. This assumption has as its corollary the idea that there are perpetrators (the “privileged,” for current or historical reasons) who are unfair beneficiaries of the system or outright perpetrators of prejudice and who must be identified, limited and punished.

[…]

Now it doesn’t seem like mere imagination on my part that all the noise about “patriarchal domination” is not directed at the fact that far more men than women occupy what are essentially trade positions. Nor does it seem unreasonable to point out that these are not particularly high-status jobs, although they may pay comparative well. It is also obvious that none of these occupations and their hierarchies, in isolation, can be thoughtfully considered the kind of oppressive patriarchy supposed to constitute the “West,” and aimed at the domination and exclusion of women. By contrast, the trade occupations are composed of cadres of working men, with difficult and admirable jobs, who keep the staggeringly complex, reliable and essentially miraculous infrastructure of our society functioning through rain and snow and heat and gloom of night and who should be credited gratefully with exactly that.

Let’s assume for a moment that we should aim at equity, nonetheless, and then actually think through what policies would inevitably have to be put in place to establish such a goal. We might begin by eliminating pay scales that differ (hypothetically) by gender. This would mean introducing legislation requiring companies to rank-order their sex representation at each level of the company hierarchy, adjust that to 50:50, and then adjust the pay differential by gender at every rank, so that the desired equity was achieved. Companies could be monitored over a five-year period for improvement. Failure to meet the appropriate targets would be necessarily met with fines for discrimination. In the extreme, it might be necessary to introduce staggered layoffs of men so that the gender equity requirements could be met.

Then there are the much broader social policy implications. We could start by addressing the hypothetical problems with college, university and trade school training. Many companies, compelled to move rapidly toward gender equilibria, will object (and validly) that there are simply not enough qualified female candidates to go around. Changing this would mean implementing radical and rapid changes in the post-secondary education system, implemented in a manner both immediate and draconian — justified by the obvious “fact” that the reason the pipeline problem exists is the absolutely pervasive sexism that characterizes all the programs that train such workers (and the catastrophic and prejudicial failure of the education system that is thereby implied).

The most likely solution — and the one most likely to be attractive to those who believe in such sexism — would be to establish strict quota systems in the relevant institutions to invite and incentivize more female participants, once again in proportion to the disequilibria in enrollment rates. If quotas are not enough, then a system of scholarship or, more radically (and perhaps more fairly) women could be simply paid to enroll in education systems where their sex is badly under-represented. Alternatively, perhaps, men could be asked to pay higher rates of tuition, in some proportion to their over-representation, and the excess used to subsidize the costs of under-represented females.

April 22, 2019

Internal challenges to Microsoft’s current discriminatory hiring practices

Filed under: Business, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Quartz, Dave Gershgorn looks at how Microsoft is facing internal dissent over their current hiring practices, which actively encourage discrimination against certain racial and gender groups:

Some Microsoft employees are openly questioning whether diversity is important, in a lengthy discussion on an internal online messaging board meant for communicating with CEO Satya Nadella.

Two posts on the board criticizing Microsoft diversity initiatives as “discriminatory hiring” and suggesting that women are less suited for engineering roles have elicited more than 800 comments, both affirming and criticizing the viewpoints, multiple Microsoft employees have told Quartz. The posts were written by a female Microsoft program manager. Quartz reached out to her directly for comment, and isn’t making her name public at this point, pending her response.

“Does Microsoft have any plans to end the current policy that financially incentivizes discriminatory hiring practices? To be clear, I am referring to the fact that senior leadership is awarded more money if they discriminate against Asians and white men,” read the original post by the Microsoft program manager on Yammer, a corporate messaging platform owned by Microsoft. The employee commented consistently throughout the thread, making similar arguments. Quartz reviewed lengthy sections of the internal discussion provided by Microsoft employees.

“I have an ever-increasing file of white male Microsoft employees who have faced outright and overt discrimination because they had the misfortune of being born both white and male. This is unacceptable,” the program manager wrote in a comment later. The Microsoft employees who spoke to Quartz said they weren’t aware of any action by the company in response, despite the comments being reported to Microsoft’s human resources department.

When contacted by Quartz, Microsoft pointed to comments by three company officials in the message-board threads. A member of Microsoft’s employee investigations team responded to the initial post in January, writing that the company does not tolerate discrimination of any kind. Another Microsoft staff member, who leads the team that helps the board of directors determine executive pay, explained the diversity-based compensation initiative. “Our board and executive leadership team believe diverse and inclusive teams are good for business and consistent with our mission and inspire-to culture,” she wrote. “Linking compensation to these aspirations is an important demonstration of executive commitment to something we believe strongly in.

February 16, 2019

QotD: The attraction of Islam to would-be converts

Filed under: Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… humans are hierarchical apes who crave rules. The astonishing number of western converts to Islam (astonishing considering what Islam is as a way of life) particularly the women shows the craving for rules, spoken and unspoken is far stronger than rationality. And the fact that young men aren’t converting en masse to Islam (which gives them a much greater power than any western culture) means some traces of Noblesse Oblige remain. The idea of keeping your women imprisoned and veiled for their protection; the idea that those other men will of course rape them and hurt them; the idea that strange women are fair game, are still revolting and repulsive to men who were told “never hit a girl. Never, ever, ever” as little boys.

Sarah Hoyt, “Noblesse Oblige and Mare’s Nests”, According to Hoyt, 2015-05-05.

January 22, 2019

“I grew up in pre-history, or rather in Portugal (in some ways, same thing) in the 60s”

Filed under: Education, Europe, History, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Sarah Hoyt on “toxic masculinity” and the rise of angry feminism:

… it’s such a just-so story it spreads and hides. It hides so well that people don’t realize they’re infected. But its distorting effects twist society’s processes to the point that something vital stops working.

Yes, the entire myth of “toxic masculinity” is one of these. It was born of the disappointment of feminists. Look, in the days when women were actually held back, those that made it were exceptional people.

Since I grew up in pre-history, or rather in Portugal (in some ways, same thing) in the 60s, where sexism was matter of fact and every day, I can tell you that, yes, to have the same grades as a boy you needed to work twice as hard, be brighter, more nimble, and more consistently good. Any boy started out with a good 20% on me in any teacher’s head, because “boys are smarter” wasn’t disputed, or even questioned.

So I understand that in the early twentieth century, women that made it to positions of prominence, where they became known for professional excellence, had to be GOOD at it. Amazing, in fact.

And even then, they might hit a glass ceiling, because they were the nail that stuck up. Everything conspired to bring them down.

Female liberation was played against this. People looked at these women, knew what they’d achieved against what obstacles, and dreamed that “if only women were allowed to be on an even footing with men, they’d be the best at everything. Every woman would be a leader.”

This is a form of insanity, because women are still human, and most humans are … average. That’s why they call it “average.”

But you can see how what they saw would deceive them.

Except that the obstacles were removed and women … were people. Sure. There are exceptional women, just as there are exceptional men, but in many ways, even with contraceptives, we women are still running with our legs in a biological sack. Oh, men too. They’re just different sacks. And men’s impairments, in a way, apply better to business, to creating, to competition.

Look, it’s become “sexist” to refer to PMS and women’s hormonal cycle as being at all different than men’s hormonal gearing up. Yeah. Any ideology that requires me to ignore my lying eyes in favor of their theory is bad-crazy which can destroy society, so these are my middle fingers. Reality is what it is.

November 18, 2018

QotD: “Sexist” toys

Filed under: Health, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

As a female journalist who writes mostly about traditionally “male areas” such as economics and business, I should perhaps be expected to endorse a “blank slate” theory of male and female gender roles, where the preference for certain kinds of activities is driven by sexist socialization and discrimination, not innate ability. The problem is that this doesn’t necessarily match up with the evidence. Human children show gender-driven preferences for toys, as can be attested by those faultlessly progressive parents who have seen their boys turn their hands into a gun while their daughters make a doll out of an ear of corn. These preferences show up even in children too young to have gotten much socialization; they turn up even in rhesus monkeys, as males show a marked preference for wheeled toys over soft plush animals. I certainly believe that human society has a lot of sexist hangovers from its past. I draw the line at believing that this hangover is influencing rhesus monkey infants.

Megan McArdle, “Some Blue-Collar Workers Probably Shouldn’t Do Pink Jobs”, Bloomberg View, 2017-01-06.

October 26, 2018

An old-fashioned Fisking

Filed under: Humour, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The always-entertaining David Thompson harks back to the early days of blogging by indulging in what used to be called “a Fisking“:

In the pages of the New York Times, a philosophy professor named George Yancy is gushing his little heart out:

    It is hard to admit we are sexist. I, for instance, would like to think that I possess genuine feminist bona fides, but who am I kidding? I am a failed and broken feminist.

Upon which revelation, I suppose we could all just stop and go home. But no, let’s press on.

    More pointedly, I am sexist. There are times when I fear for the loss of my own entitlement as a male. Toxic masculinity takes many forms. All forms continue to hurt and to violate women.

The word toxic, by the way, is deployed no fewer than nine times, excluding various synonyms, as if it were an incantation. Now brace yourselves for some full-on testosterone-jacked beastliness.

    For example, before I got married, I insisted that my wife take my last name… While this was not sexual assault, my insistence was a violation of her independence.

To reiterate. Asking a fiancée if she’ll change her surname upon marriage, as is still the custom, perhaps to avoid confusing people as to whether you’re actually married or not, and possibly to avoid imposing on any children lengthy hyphenated surnames… this is not sexual assault. I’m glad we’ve cleared that up.

[…]

Or, as our educator puts it, tearfully, his face reddened with shame,

    When I was about 15 years old, I said to a friend of mine, “Why must you always look at a girl’s butt?” He promptly responded: “Are you gay or something? What else should I look at, a guy’s butt?” He was already wearing the mask. He had already learned the lessons of patriarchal masculinity.

Yes, adolescent butt-watching. Oh calamitous woe. And which, apparently, girls never indulge in. Presumably, we should only be sexually attracted to personalities, and never the fleshy packaging.

    There was no wiggle room for me to be both antisexist and antimisogynistic and yet a heterosexual young boy. You see, other males had rewarded his gaze by joining in the objectifying practice: “Look at that butt!” It was a collective act of devaluation.

Or possibly the reverse.

    The acts of soul murder had already begun.

I’ll just leave that one there, I think.

August 15, 2018

Robert Heinlein – Highs and Lows – #2

Filed under: Books, History, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 14 Aug 2018

Heinlein’s novels made science fiction mainstream and even contributed to modern libertarianism. His novels vary widely in the philosophies they explore, but ultimately they all reflect how Heinlein saw himself: as the self-reliant “competent man” protagonist of his stories, despite glaring inconsistencies.

July 7, 2018

The Incel Rebellion will (almost certainly) be streamed

Filed under: Health, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Fraser Myers looks at the incel ?movement? (not quite sure if that’s the right word to encapsulate that group of people, honestly) and explains some of the more commonly used terms by and about incels:

Incels are ‘involuntary celibates’ – men frustrated with their inability to find a sexual partner. Estimates on the size of the incel community vary from thousands to hundreds of thousands. The forum ‘r/incels’ on Reddit had 41,000 members when it was banned in November 2017 for violating the site’s rules on violent content.

Incel forums, like the website incel.me and the message board /r9k/ on 4chan, are awash with anonymous declarations of self-pity, self-loathing and, at times, a violent misogyny directed at the women deemed responsible for their loneliness. Behind a great deal of mindless chatter and ‘shitposting’ is a shared understanding of how they came to be despised by the opposite sex, alongside a bewildering array of slang terms to describe and explain the various states of ‘inceldom’.

According to the incels, there is a ruthless sexual hierarchy, and as ‘beta males’, they find themselves at the bottom. The foil to the incel is a ‘Chad’ – a confident, attractive man with multiple sexual partners, comprising usually attractive but supposedly shallow women, known as ‘Stacys’. Chads are envied and despised in equal measure. Then there are the ‘normies’ (normal people), hated for their herd-like mentality and mocked for their ignorance of incel culture. ‘Blackpilling’ refers to the acceptance that the traits you are born with mean you are destined to be romantically unsuccessful. The term is a play on the moral dilemma presented by the 1999 film, The Matrix, in which Neo is offered a blue pill to remain in a world of illusion and a red pill to see the world as it truly is – ‘redpilling’ is a central trope in online men’s rights’ activism, while blackpilling is the incel equivalent. Physical traits such as height, facial features or penis size (sometimes posted with accompanying pictures), are said to play a big role in the incels’ low status, while a large number of them also blame self-diagnosed mental-health problems, particularly autism-spectrum disorders.

But while many incels are open about their flaws, ultimately the blame is laid on the women who overlook them. Women are seen as effectively slaves to their biology, guided by so-called ‘hypergamy’: an attraction to higher-status men linked to evolutionary psychology. Some parts of the so-called manosphere – a loose constellation of male-dominated online subcultures, including men’s rights activists and pick-up artists – believe that evolutionary psychology can be used to a man’s advantage, that certain techniques can be deployed to overcome a lack of attractiveness and confidence to manipulate women into bed or into a relationship. Incels reject even this bleak view and insist that beta males accept their place in the social-pecking order.

This belief in a rigid social hierarchy inevitably produces problems when it comes to race. ‘Ricecels’ (incels of Chinese and South East Asian origin) and ‘currycels’ (of South Asian descent) are often found posting photos of ‘proof’ of a theory called ‘JBW’, that in order for them to be successful with women they should ‘just be white’. Some white incels look upon black men with envy for their perceived sexual success, while a minority rail against any kind of ‘race mixing’ – even as a form of escape from inceldom.

In addition, incels speak of an ‘80:20 rule’ when it comes to sexual competition: the most attractive 20 per cent of men are said to be sought after by the most attractive 80 per cent of women, with the least attractive 80 per cent of men left to compete for the remaining 20 per cent of women. In previous eras, this situation would have supposedly been prevented by institutionalised monogamy. Some incels call explicitly for a return to a patriarchal society. Today’s world of relative sexual freedom, contraception, no-fault divorce and dating apps, on the other hand, is blamed for offering an abundance of opportunities for Chads and women, at the expense of incels.

June 19, 2018

QotD: Homophobia and racism in the USA and in Europe

Filed under: Europe, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Outside the very privileged top of society, feminism doesn’t get the traction it gets in the US ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD. Not even in England. In fact every other country in the world is far more “ist” than the US, because being “ist” (racist, sexist and homophobic[ist for completism]) is the way things are done. I find it mildly amusing whenever gay friends think that the US is worse than Europe “because of all the religious stuff.” Uh. No. The US is more tolerant than Europe because we’re richer and more vast and we can ignore that which annoys us more easily. In Europe they live in each other’s pockets on what is for us tight resources. They have no “give” and cohesion and conformity is enforced, which means if you stick out, you get it. Not publicly and certainly not if you’re a tourist, but if you live there among the people you’ll find you don’t need to hunt for microaggressions.

And before people from Europe say it isn’t so — you don’t know. Anymore than Americans do who’ve never lived there as locals. You don’t know how much LESS of the racism and sexism and homophobia there is in the US than in your area. Hint, what you see in our movies and read in our papers is the greatest bullshit around. Those PRACTICALLY don’t exist in the US, for any functional purpose. I mean, sure, people might think women are inferior, or might hate gays, but unlike the internet sites colonized by the alt.right (and how many of those are Russian agent accounts no one knows) people expressing such feelings (actual hostility not imaginary micro-aggressions) are likely to be laughed at or mocked. Not so in Europe.

And then there’s the more tan areas of Europe, and what we’ll term the first world minus a quarter.

I’m not ragging on my birthplace. It has some admirable qualities. But if you think that it is more tolerant or laid back than the US you haven’t lived there. Sexism is internalized at such a level people don’t see it. They give lip service to women having jobs, etc, but those women still have to be “good housewives” no matter what their job is. Men still get the choice seats in cars (be fair, they are so tiny most men have to sit up front to fit, but it has become internalized, too), men still take pride of place without a thoughts. No, not everywhere, not in every family. BUT at a cultural level, it exists at a point that feminists here would have a heart attack. Again no time to look for micro aggressions, you’re too busy working through the macro ones.

But here is the thing that these people forget: They’re not AGGRESSIONS. They’re just culture. When a man as a matter of course takes the best seat, he’s not making a comment on YOU. Hell, he’s not making a comment at all. He’s just doing something so deeply ingrained that he didn’t think about it. If you think that’s enough to make it so that you can’t succeed or that you need to run around saying you live in a patriarchal or male-supremacist society, let me tell you, cupcake, you wouldn’t have succeeded anyway.

Sarah Hoyt, “A Very Diverse Cake”, According to Hoyt, 2016-08-31.

March 7, 2018

QotD: Feminism

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

A consistent theme of feminist discourse for more than 40 years is a completely negative portrayal of male sexuality. Feminists are united in the opinion that whatever men do in regard to sex is always 100% wrong. Male attraction to women is condemned in feminist rhetoric as “objectification.” If a man admires a woman’s beauty, he has thereby degraded her as a “sex object,” according to feminist theory. If a man verbalizes his interest in a woman, feminists denounce this as “harassment,” and if he expresses his interest in a woman by any physical action — a kiss or a hug — feminists consider this sexual assault. Of course, feminists consider heterosexual intercourse to be inherently oppressive, a violent act of male domination — “PIV is always rape, OK?”

Robert Stacy McCain, “Feminism’s Anti-Male Double Standard”, The Other McCain, 2016-07-02.

March 3, 2018

Arguments against having students read To Kill a Mockingbird

Filed under: Books, Education — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’m very much anti-censorship, so in the vast majority of cases where “pressure groups” are demanding that a book be removed from a school reading list, I’m usually against the idea. Recently, a demand to pull Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was denied, but Ann Althouse explains why, unlike so many other efforts, in her opinion this one deserves a fair hearing:

I think the argument against selecting this book — of all books — as the go-to reading about race discrimination is, in fact, very strong. I understand that schools defend their own choices and are dug in here, but the Kameetas made an excellent argument (as far as I can tell from this summary). The black characters are basically “spectators and bystanders.” I think the book is also a problem because:

1. It’s a rape story where the woman lies about rape. Why should the first thing children learn about rape be about the woman lying?

2. Rape is a complex subject, difficult for 9th graders to understand, and yet this rape story is cartoonish, in which the man is absolutely, unquestionably innocent. Why present a book as literature when it deals with this important subject in a completely unsubtle way, completely subordinated to another subject the author is bent on telling (the outrageous accusation against an innocent man)?

3. Racial discrimination is also a complex subject, especially as it persists today, but the racial injustice shown in the book is so exaggerated that it allows a present-day reader to feel smugly distanced. Nobody we know is that over-the-top racist, so weren’t those people back then terrible? That’s not how high-quality literature is supposed to work on readers. They should need to question their own simplistic preconceptions.

4. It’s not a subtle telling of the story of how courts work and might carry forward racial prejudice. The evidence of the man’s innocence is so completely obvious that you have a complete breakdown of justice. That doesn’t begin to enlighten students about how there could be racial disparities in the justice system today. It invites them to sit back and think people in the past were crazy.

5. There is blatant stereotyping of the poor white family, and their problems are not treated as perhaps a consequence of poverty. They’re treated as genetically deficient. They are truly the irredeemable deplorables.

6. There is great sentimentality about this book in the older generation. Having reread this book very carefully and written about it (in the Michigan Law Review, here), I hold the informed opinion that it is not a very good book and the practice of imposing on the younger generations — with endless pressure to regard it as a great classic — deserves serious, vigorous questioning.

February 18, 2018

“The minority of one is the most oppressed minority of all”

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Matt Ridley on the rising tide of neo-Victorian prudery in western society:

Is it so different here or are we slipping down the same slope? Pre-Raphaelite paintings that show the top halves of female nudes are temporarily removed from an art gallery’s walls; young girls are forced to wear headscarves in school; darts players and racing drivers may not be accompanied by women in short skirts; women are treated differently from men at universities, as if they were the weaker sex, and saved from seeing upsetting paragraphs in novels; sex is negotiated in advance with the help of chaperones. We have been here before.

In Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s novel of 1928, she portrayed the transition from the 18th century to the Victorian period thus: “Love, birth, and death were all swaddled in a variety of fine phrases. The sexes drew further and further apart. No open conversation was tolerated. Evasions and concealments were sedulously practised on both sides.”

How we laughed at such absurdity in my youth. But even for making the point that some of the new feminism seems “retrograde” in promoting the view that women are fragile, the American academic Katie Roiphe suffered a vicious campaign to have her article in Harper’s magazine banned before publication. “I find the Stalinist tenor of this conversation shocking,” she told The Sunday Times. “The basic assumption of freedom of speech is imperilled in our culture right now.”

The sin of blasphemy is back. There are things you simply cannot say about Islam and increasingly about Christianity, about climate change, about gender, to mention a few from a very long and growing list, without being accused of, and possibly prosecuted for, “hate speech”. Is it hate speech to say that Muhammad “delivers his country to iron and flame; that he cuts the throats of fathers and kidnaps daughters; that he gives to the defeated the choice of his religion or death: this is assuredly nothing any man can excuse”? That was Voltaire, one of my heroes. You may disagree with him but you should, in accordance with his principle, defend his right to say it. In demanding tolerance of minorities, many younger people seem to be remarkably intolerant.

There is an odd contradiction between the declared wish to live and let live — “diversity!”, “don’t judge!” — and the actual behaviour, which is ruthlessly and priggishly judgmental. They never stop drafting acts of uniformity, always in the name of the collective against the individual. The minority of one is the most oppressed minority of all.

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