Author Archives: thezman

The Math of Amnesty

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The last amnesty was thirty years ago and has been shoved down the memory hole. You never hear pols talk about it. The press never asks about it, largely due to the fact they are too stupid to understand it. That and the lessons of the last amnesty reflect poorly on the current push to pass another one. Everything about American public life operates like a marketing campaign so the facts are flexible.

The most important lesson from that last amnesty is that the numbers presented by the government will be wildly underestimated. When it was passed, the pols said the high number for amnesty was a million. It turned out to be 3.2 million. This was not due to deception. It was ignorance. The people writing these bills rely on lobbyists who lie on spec. Just listen to the current presidential candidates talk and it is clear they don’t know the first thing about the topic.

There’s also the bias against frank talk. The political class is convinced they must lie to the public in order to avoid getting in trouble. It is not without merit. No one likes the bearer of bad news so if you’re in the vote getting business it is a good idea to avoid delivering bad news. Mass communications and modern behavior science techniques have us swimming in a sea of deception now, but that’s a topic for another day.

The point is we have a complicated subject that is not a lot of fun for the sensitive types who dominate our public debates. Add in the bias to paint a smiley face on everything and the only things we hear from our rulers are based on the best case scenario. Bearing that in mind take a look at some of the numbers in this Pew study.

In a reflection of changes in the overall economy since the Great Recession, the U.S. unauthorized immigrant workforce now holds fewer blue-collar jobs and more white-collar ones than it did before the 2007-2009 recession, but a solid majority still works in low-skilled service, construction and production occupations, according to new Pew Research Center estimates.

The size of the unauthorized immigrant labor force did not change from 2007 to 2012, but its makeup shifted slightly. The number of unauthorized immigrants in management or professional related jobs grew by 180,000, while the number in construction or production jobs fell by about 475,000, mirroring rises and declines in the overall U.S. economy. The share of all unauthorized immigrant workers with management and professional jobs grew to 13% in 2012 from 10% in 2007, and the share with construction or production jobs declined to 29% from 34%.

Despite these shifts, unauthorized immigrant workers remain concentrated in lower-skill jobs, much more so than U.S.-born workers, according to the new estimates, which are based on government data. In 2012, 62% held service, construction and production jobs, twice the share of U.S.-born workers who did. The 13% share with management or professional jobs is less than half of the 36% of U.S.-born workers in those occupations.

Unauthorized immigrants made up 5.1% of the nation’s labor force in 2012, numbering 8.1 million who were working or looking for work, according to previously published Pew Research estimates (Passel and Cohn, 2014). But as this new analysis shows, they account for a far higher share of the total workforce in specific jobs, notably farming (26%), cleaning and maintenance (17%), and construction (14%).

Now, there’s no way of knowing the exact number of illegal aliens. Pew is estimating the numbers from Census figures. It’s not perfect, but it gives us a clue as to how many people will be seeking amnesty. If we assume that at least some of these people are married and some of those have children, the 8.1 million figure is the absolute low end. The final number will be higher, but how high?

The easy thing to do is look at the last amnesty. If they were off by a factor of three the last time, we’re looking at close to 25 million this time. The last time they based the one million figure on total illegal population, not just those working. That means the 25 million could very well be a low estimate as well.

Then we have the fact that amnesty will invite swarms of new immigrants. This is exactly what happened in the 80’s. The hint of it last summer resulted in the Children’s Crusade that saw thousands of kids brought over the border by slavers. Immigrants know the rules better than the government officials so they will not pass up a shot to bypass all the rules and get that precious green card and the welfare benefits that go with it.

Then there is fraud. The current system is designed to fail. If you try to work the system honestly, you will wait in line for a decade to get in the country. The vast complexity invites fraud from both sides. The immigrants want to game the system rather than wait in line. The hacks in the bureaucracy just want to push paper around without breaking a sweat. The result is lots of fraud.

My own sense is Bush will collude with Boehner and McConnell to pass an amnesty of some sort. They will have to couch it in different terms and tart it up with phony-baloney enforcement language. The result will be the same. We will see 30-40 million foreigners handed citizenship papers by the end of the decade.

You better get working on your Spanish, esé.

Maximus! Maximus! Maximus!

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San Francisco Sheriff’s Deputy ring accused of pit-fighting inmates

San Francisco sheriff’s deputy Scott Neu is accused of leading a ring of corrupt jail guards who coerced prisoners into gladiatorial combat with threats of rape and violence.

Neu serves at County Jail No. 4 at 850 Bryant St despite having settled claims that he raped a woman prisoner and two transgendered prisoners while working at the jail. He sports a tattoo reading “850 Mob,” believed to describe the name used by the corrupt deputies to describe themselves. At least four other deputies are implicated in the program of sexualized torture.

The San Francisco Public Defender’s Office had undertaken an investigation into Neu’s behavior, in cooperation with an independent private investigator, and had planned to issue their report only after the prisoners who came forward were released and safe from retaliatory violence. However, Neu had reportedly planned a fresh round of fights, leading to a hasty release of their findings.

Neu and his co-conspirators gambled on the outcome of fights. One fight pitted the smallest inmate in the jail against the largest, and the fighters say they were threatened with rape and beatings by the guards if they didn’t spar. Neu is also said to have coerced prisoners into training for the fights with threats of rape and violence. Neu has a reputation for sadistic practices overall, including making prisoners gamble to receive their food, clothes and comfort items. Even when prisoners won the games Neu forced on them with the red dice and the deck of cards he carried, he would sometimes take away their “winnings” and give them to other prisoners.

The Deputies’ Union attorney Harry Stern claims the Public Defender is making a big deal out of nothing. He says that the prisoners were encouraged to “wrestle to settle disputes about who was stronger,” and were “encouraged” to work out. He dismissed the entire affair as “little more than horseplay.”

The rape business is the great unspoken horror in modern America. The number of prison rapes of men is higher than all female rapes. It is a barbaric aspect of the prison system that is quietly and not so quietly tolerated. Think of all the times you’ve heard someone make a joke about a guy getting raped in prison.

The other aspect of our prisons that does not get mentioned is the guards. Most prison guards are sadists. Many are criminals. It’s the most obvious example of how poorly we handle the criminal class in America.

Managerial Meta Language

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David Brooks fills the William Safire chair at the Times. That means he fills the role of “good conservative”, as imaged by the Left. That means he will disagree with orthodoxy, but always avoiding anything that may vex his paymasters. His job is to put a little shine on their otherwise dreary conventional liberalism.

Since most of what’s important has been ruled off-limits, Brooks has to root around for something about which he can write in a non-liberal way. I don’t think you can call Brooks a conservative. He’s more of a faculty lounge elitist. He may think his coevals are nuts, but he’ll take them over this guy any day.

Last week he had this up and for some reason people were discussing it. Here is the opening graph:

Several years ago, Doug Lemov began studying videos of excellent teachers. He focused not on their big strategies but on their microgestures: How long they waited before calling on students to answer a question (to give the less confident students time to get their hands up); when they paced about the classroom and when they stood still (while issuing instructions, to emphasize the importance of what’s being said); how they moved around the room toward a student whose mind might be wandering.

This is classic Brooks. He starts with a reference to some obscure guy tickling the feet of managerial class types. Then he touches on the high points so you believe he has spent a lot of time on the subject and then it is off to the usual stuff about the usual stuff. That means lots of catch phrases and new age word combinations.

The managerial class is adopting their own meta-language. I blame the MBA schools for most of it, but it has an internal momentum now. For example, later in the piece he writes:

Since it is easier to think deductively, most people try to turn cloud problems into clock problems, but a few people are able to look at a complex situation, grasp the gist and clarify it by naming what is going on.

Such people tend to possess negative capacity, the ability to live with ambiguity and not leap to premature conclusions. They can absorb a stream of disparate data and rest in it until they can synthesize it into one trend, pattern or generalization.

I have a 1% IQ and I have no idea what he is getting at, at least with any certainty. Maybe he means that some people are big idea guys and others are “make the big ideas work” guys. The phrase “negative capacity” is a phrase without meaning, at least in English.

We can all think of many other skills that are especially valuable right now:

Making nonhuman things intuitive to humans. This is what Steve Jobs did.

This is classic signalling. We’re suppose to believe that before Steve Jobs, we were all staggering around like zombies, banging into one another.

Purpose provision. Many people go through life overwhelmed by options, afraid of closing off opportunities. But a few have fully cultivated moral passions and can help others choose the one thing they should dedicate themselves to.

I’m at a loss as to what this is supposed to mean.

Opposability. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” For some reason I am continually running across people who believe this is the ability their employees and bosses need right now.

I doubt Brooks knows many plumbers or computer programmers. In fields where there is a tangible work product, holding the right answer in mind is what the boss needs right now.

Cross-class expertise. In a world dividing along class, ethnic and economic grounds some people are culturally multilingual. They can operate in an insular social niche while seeing it from the vantage point of an outsider.

Is it possible for someone to be more insular than David Brooks and his coevals at the Times? Even monks in a monastery mix it up with the hoi polloi more than the trust fund babies at the Times.

When I started this post, I was going to riff on the general crackpottery about new ways of thinking, but the weird use of language got me side tracked. If you are ever in a room with these people, it is like being the one zebra without stripes. But, that’s the point. You’re not supposed to feel like you belong unless you belong.

We are in the consolidation phase now. The managerial class is closing ranks and blowing the bridges and tunnels connecting them with the rest of us. If you find yourself on the wrong side of the river when the bridge is blown, you’re left behind. That’s why the people who read David Brooks read David Brooks. They need to know which way the herd is going. Maybe the Canadians have the right idea.

The Mysteries of Life

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This is interesting..

EAST WILLIAMSBURG — A young man punched a 65-year-old on Grand Street after saying that the victim’s dog was “a p—y” compared to his pit bulls, police said.

The victim was walking on Grand Street near Graham Avenue on Tuesday, March 17 around 12:10 a.m. when the suspect tried to pet his dog, police said.

The suspect, who was about 20 years old, said, “I got two pit bulls and your dog is a p—y” before hitting the victim in the face, causing swelling, redness and a bloody nose, police said.

It was unclear what kind of dog the victim owned.

The victim went to Woodhull Hospital for his injuries. The suspect was described as being 5-foot-6, 160 pounds and wearing a black jacket.

No one has been arrested for the incident.

The people of New York are on the lookout for a man wearing a black jacket. How hard could it be to find this strange person wearing a black jacket?

At least five robberies or attempted robberies with the threat of gun violence happened in Williamsburg in the last week.

In one incident, the victim, who did not give his age, was walking on Ten Eyck Street near Union Avenue on Tuesday, March 17 around 12:40 a.m. when three men stopped him, police said.

One displayed a black firearm and said, “Give me your wallet and phone, and don’t yell or I’ll shoot you,” police said.

The victim handed over $870 worth of property, including an iPhone 6, a Baruch college ID, a MetroCard, credit cards and $20.

One of the men then hit the victim in his face, causing pain, swelling, bleeding and bruising, saying, “We know where you live so don’t call the police.”

The men then fled on Ten Eyck Street.

One man was described as being 20 years old, 6-foot-10 and 180 pounds. Another man was also 20, 5-foot-6 and 150 pounds. The third man was about 6 feet tall.

Again, we have perfectly accurate descriptions of the men. One was very tall. Another was short and the third was medium height. What other data point could the police need to apprehend these criminals?!

On Wednesday, March 18 around 11:50 p.m. on Meserole Street near Graham Avenue, Dontay Cooper, 18, approached a 25-year-old woman and said “Don’t scream, I have a gun, give me your money,” police and the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office said.

He took $40, MetroCards, IDs and credit cards, according to a criminal complaint.

Cooper was also charged with two other robberies in the area.

On Monday, March 16 around 5:10 p.m., he threatened a woman with a gun on Kingsland Avenue near Driggs Avenue, police said, taking cash, credit cards and an iPhone.

He was also charged with threatening a woman with a gun on Maspeth Avenue near Conselyea Street on Tuesday, March 17 at 11:11 p.m., the criminal complaint said, also taking cash and credit cards.

His bail is set at $100,000, and his next court date is on Wednesday, March 25.

Dontay? Must be Italian.

Many outside the Left attribute this sort of not-noticing to a sort of group evolutionary strategy. It is an effort to promote their cause or protect their shibboleths. I don’t think that is the case. That suggests a psychological reductionism. The wide-spread phenomenon of not reporting the race, but including the other facts that allow one to figure it out seems like an unconscious tick.

Human beings have been human beings for about 200,000 years. For about 190,000 of those years, we roamed around in small family bands, hunting and gathering as necessary. We also murdered one another with a high frequency. Roughly 15% of humans died at the hands of other humans in this period. You had to have a thick psychological shell in order to make it under those conditions.

Even in settlement, violence, death and mayhem were common. We take our peaceful, secure lives for granted, complaining about all sorts of trivia. For most of human civilization, death, pain and agony were always ready to lay their icy hands on your shoulder. Watching half your children die from the runs is not an easy thing. So, humans, I suspect, figured out how to not think about it.

My hunch is this hilarious not-noticing we see from members of the cult is a coping strategy gone haywire. The world as they imagine it collides with the world as it is so they simply filter out the dis-conformation. I bet if you asked the authoress of that piece why she neglected to list the races, she would dismiss the question and change the subject. Or, if you pressed, shift the focus to your bigotry and race obsession.

Cinderella With a Riding Crop

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This article the other day got a lot of traffic. The weirdness of third wave feminism is that the new model broads are as tough as any man and so dainty they could very well die if they hear a discouraging word.

KATHERINE BYRON, a senior at Brown University and a member of its Sexual Assault Task Force, considers it her duty to make Brown a safe place for rape victims, free from anything that might prompt memories of trauma.

So when she heard last fall that a student group had organized a debate about campus sexual assault between Jessica Valenti, the founder of feministing.com, and Wendy McElroy, a libertarian, and that Ms. McElroy was likely to criticize the term “rape culture,” Ms. Byron was alarmed. “Bringing in a speaker like that could serve to invalidate people’s experiences,” she told me. It could be “damaging.”

Ms. Byron and some fellow task force members secured a meeting with administrators. Not long after, Brown’s president, Christina H. Paxson, announced that the university would hold a simultaneous, competing talk to provide “research and facts” about “the role of culture in sexual assault.” Meanwhile, student volunteers put up posters advertising that a “safe space” would be available for anyone who found the debate too upsetting.

It’s tempting to think this is some sort of attention seeking gag, but it is something you can observe in the wild. Nancy Pelosi, for example, almost had a stroke watching Bibi Netanyahu speak in front of Congress. She was physically pained just sitting there. The psychic torment of hearing someone say things she does not like became physical agony.

The other day, I had to drop my office manager off to get her car from the mechanic. She is an old communist. We were making small talk and I made a passing reference to Whittaker Chambers. Old lefties are still vexed over the Alger Hiss affair. She was so upset I thought she was going to hurl herself out of the car.

If that were the extent of feminism, I think we would be OK. But, crazy does not work that way. This hilarious story from the Wall Street Journal provides the whip hand of feminism, so to speak.

Hillary Clinton seems to be preparing to run for president, and the former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina may yet enter the race on the Republican side. Whoever wins the White House in 2016, today it seems easily possible that within the next decade, the U.S. will follow Britain, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, India, Israel, Thailand, Norway and dozens of other countries in electing a woman to our most powerful office.

Can we predict the consequences? Yes, we can—and the news is good.

Research has found that women are superior to men in most ways that will count in the future, and it isn’t just a matter of culture or upbringing—although both play their roles. It is also biology and the aspects of thought and feeling shaped by biology. It is because of chromosomes, genes, hormones and brain circuits.

And no, by this I don’t mean what was meant by patronizing men who proclaimed the superiority of women in the benighted past—that women are lofty, spiritual creatures who must be left out of the bustle and fray of competitive life, business, politics and war, so that they can instill character in the next generation. I mean something like the opposite of that.

All wars are boyish. People point to Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir as evidence that women, too, can be warlike. But these women were perched atop all-male hierarchies confronting other hypermasculine political pyramids, and they were masculinized as they fought their way to the top.

Despite everything we know pointing to the contrary, the future will be run by the gals. Hey, it could happen. Of course, the smart ones at our elite colleges could end up brain damaged with all that fainting at the sound of discouraging words. So, maybe the meek will not inherit the earth.

Articles like this and his book are not intended to be serious science or commentary. The whole point is to titillate the feminists. That will sell some books and get him some speaking gigs. Who knows? Maybe he can get a TED Talk out of it. I wish him the best with it.

Looking at the CV of Melvin Konner, the author of the Journal piece, I can’t help but notice his age. He came of age when his field was ruled by blank slate fanatics. The action now is in genetics and biochemistry. I would imagine there’s more than a bit of friction between the two sides now. Guys like Konner have to sit and watch the young guns in the lab do all the exciting stuff.

TED: Social Gospel

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I used to think TED Talks were just to provide me with material. When I first started this blog, I was riffing on these things once a week for a while. But, that’s not why they exist. They are the modern equivalent of the preaching circuit. Instead of educated men of the faith heading out into the boonies to convert the heathens, we have educated men of the faith telling their coevals in the managerial elite that they are special little snowflakes.

This one got my attention for a couple of reasons.

Since you probably don’t want to sit through it, here’s the transcript of interest:

When we think about mapping cities, we tend to think about roads and streets and buildings, and the settlement narrative that led to their creation, or you might think about the bold vision of an urban designer, but there’s other ways to think about mapping cities and how they got to be made. Today, I want to show you a new kind of map. This is not a geographic map. This is a map of the relationships between people in my hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, and what you can see here is that each dot represents a person, each line represents a relationship between those people, and each color represents a community within the network.

Now, I’m here on the green side, down on the far right where the geeks are, and TEDx also is down on the far right. (Laughter) Now, on the other side of the network, you tend to have primarily African-American and Latino folks who are really concerned about somewhat different things than the geeks are, but just to give some sense, the green part of the network we call Smalltimore, for those of us that inhabit it, because it seems as though we’re living in a very small town.

Managerial class types love the phrase “big data” and they really love these weird splatter graphs they claim are derived from the big data. These presentations often look like a Jackson Pollock work. Unlike the artist, the folks who do these today know their audience is uninterested in ambiguity. They want to see how they’re the best and it better be clear. The result is big bold blobs of goodness in friendly colors like green and blue.

In this case, the Ted Talker puts himself and by extension the audience in the friendly green blob he calls “geek” which is a favorite term of the managerial class. Every liberal arts major with a self-actualizing job now says they are a “nerd” or a “geek.” The whole point of this graphic is to make the audience feel good, but also feel bad, in a good way. That distance from the blacks is to work the old guilt complex.

The other thing I think worth mentioning is the great divide in Western intellectual life. It feels like we have reached a place similar to the late medieval period when science was just getting going. On the one hand you have members of the ruling elite heading off into the Church, which has reached its peak scholastically. On the other hand you have others heading into new, secular intellectual worlds like law, philosophy and science.

The Ted talkers are having a spiritual experience. Instead of eating mushrooms and looking into the stars, they are dressing up and hearing a preacher tell them they are the brightest starts in the heavens. They don’t think of it as a mystical experience, but that’s the draw. They are an elect, invited to The Thing of all SWPL’s. No one goes to these things to learn stuff. They go to experience them.

Compare that to the people doing real science and speculating about the nature of the world. Look at this from Razib Khan’s blog and imagine the Ted Talk types confronting those graphics. Everything about human sciences, our understanding of people, history and culture is now being reexamined in light of new information coming from genetics. The revolution in scientific understanding going on right now dwarfs what happened in the Renaissance.

Even so, vast swaths of the managerial class are both intellectually incapable of mastering the new material and ideologically disinclined to accept it. To borrow an idea from Marine Le Pen, the cultural elite of our age are using software designed for the industrial age. The new knowledge pouring in from genetics and neuroscience simply does not fit their mental model of the world.

Ironically, the cultural elites of today are still fond of mocking Christians about Galileo. Yet, the roles are clearly reversed. The science deniers are the sort of people watching Ted Talks with tears in their eyes. History says the clerical class does no fold up easily and they will try to keep the new dangerous knowledge about humanity from getting into the public domain. That’s why we get all the shrieking about HBD.

If history is any guide, the clerisy will try to co-opt the new knowledge. That’s what happened with the Church and science 500 years ago. How the Church of Modern Liberalism incorporates IQ and population genetics is a mystery to me. Maybe they just start burning heretics instead. Islam, when faced with challenges from science has chosen to kill the science. Maybe that’s where we’re heading. I don’t know.

Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster, Chupacabra…

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…and the famous backlash coming your way. For as long as I have been alive, the Left has been wringing their hands, on your behalf, over the coming backlash over your unwillingness to fall in-line. You heretics keep making demands and supporting extreme right-wing extremists of the most extreme kind and one day, the backlash is going to get you!

Sen. Ted Cruz announced a bid for the White House on Monday, drawing praise from grass-roots conservatives but a fierce backlash from Hispanic groups that said they were appalled at the prospect of the first Hispanic to announce for president this cycle being such a firm champion of a crackdown on illegal immigrants.

The freshman lawmaker, whose father was Cuban, has been one of the most vocal opponents of President Obama’s immigration policy. He voted against a legalization bill in 2013 and helped lead opposition to the administration’s deportation amnesty over the past six months.

Announcing his candidacy at Liberty University, Mr. Cruz sounded familiar conservative themes and said he believes “God isn’t done with America yet.”

“I believe in you. I believe in the power of millions of courageous conservatives rising up to reignite the promise in America,” he said.

Mr. Cruz is the first elected Hispanic Republican in history to seek the White House, but Hispanic groups found little to celebrate in the groundbreaking moment.

“We reject Ted Cruz, which is sad, because while he is the first Latino to declare his candidacy, he may be the most anti-immigration candidate on stage during the debates,” Cesar Vargas and Erika Andiola, co-directors of the Dream Action Coalition, said in a joint statement. “While Ted Cruz has a Latino name and immigration in his past, that’s where the similarities between him and the Latino community end.”

At least they did not call him a coconut – yet. You know that’s coming. When Michael Steele ran in Maryland as a Republican, local black activist threw Oreo cookies at him. The local press applauded their efforts to expose a man who was not “authentically black.” They actually put it that way in one of the papers.

I love how these hacks are trying to define what is and what is not acceptable thought for Spanish speakers. The proof of their ignorance is right there. Anyone who has been around Latinos knows they hate it when people try and speak for them this way. They really hate it, almost as much as they hate being lumped in with blacks.

The fact is, most Hispanics agree with Cruz on immigration. Open borders and illegal immigration are bad for them. Talk to any legal immigrant and they will chew your ear off about the evils of amnesty and illegal immigration. In this regard, John Derbyshire is well within the mainstream.

I’m not a fan of Cruz for President. I think he makes a fine senator. I think he is right about a lot of things. His opinion on legal immigration is completely nuts, but maybe he is persuadable on that issue. We’ll see. The fact that a vociferous anti-amnesty candidate is going to be on the stage offers some hope.

Dave Brat was running on a number of issues, but what stuck was immigration. He rode that to a huge upset of Eric Cantor. If Cruz starts to get traction with immigration, events, as they say, can take over and we could see the other candidates jumping on the issue. It’s how issue shifts from fringe to acceptable.

The Gawker Veto

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Last week the queer website Gawker bagged another crime-thinker when they “outed” Razib Khan as he was about to take up a space on the NYTimes website. Apparently it was assisted by the in-house racist of the NYTimes, Jamelle Bouie. That’s not surprising. The dumbest employee of the NYTimes is probably the best person to be their ambassador to the Gawker-verse.

As an aside, I always wonder how guys like Bouie and TN Coates live with themselves. They have to know they are ornaments and not taken seriously by their owners. None of the trust fund types running the Times and the Atlantic have any interest in what these guys are saying or doing. I guess it beats working the drive through.

Anyway, as Derb pointed out, it was a bit shocking to see the Times hiring someone like Khan in the first place. The religion of anti-racism pretty much precludes any discussion of genetics beyond the sort of stuff that turns up in grammar school text books. It just shows that the people at the NYTimes are completely unaware of what goes on outside their bubble.

Let me just say that I have read Khan for years and I enjoy his work. I don’t know him, but I suspect he and I would not get along very well. Therefore, my appreciation of him is purely intellectual. He is simply one of the best genetics bloggers/writers on earth. You cannot have an interest in population genetics and not read Razib Khan.

The fact that Gawker now has a veto over hiring at the NYTimes is not entirely surprising. One of the things about these leftists is they always end up handing power to the worst elements in their cult. From The Reign of Terror forward the pattern has always been the same. The movement grows increasingly fanatical until control is in the hands of psychotic lunatics.

The reason for this is that utopian religions have no natural limit. There’s no line that reads, “This is enough.” Christianity has those lines. Judaism has those lines. Once you do certain things, show you believe certain things, you are pious enough. Built into the religion is an upper bound and a caution about trying to go beyond it. The Catholic Church burned more than a few heretics for trying to immanentize eschaton.

On the Left, no such limit exists. They are premised on the firm belief that there is a way to arrange things just the right way to create heaven on earth. They don’t call it that, but the echos are there in discussion of health care or poverty programs, for example. Obama spent three years talking about his plan to have more people on government health services while also lowering the cost, a mathematical impossibility.

The dynamic that evolves is one where adherents compete with one another over who is the most pious. Since there’s no objective way to measure piety and no defined limit to piety, a weird race to the bottom ensues.The only way to “prove” yourself is to be more fanatical than the next guy. The following guy has to do more.

During the Reign of Terror, fear of being branded a counter-revolutionary led moderate men to embrace violence against their fellows. The result was an escalation of violence. The Nazis and Bolsheviks went through similar period of fervor during which members were purged and alleged enemies murdered. The Kmer Rouge is probably the most grisly example of how this process can quickly spiral into madness.

I think we’re seeing something similar happen with Progressives. I’m old enough to remember when respectable liberals would not be caught dead in the same room with a guy like Al Sharpton, for example. The ranting lunatics of MSNBC would have been confined to public access cable, not given their own nationwide platform. The face of Progressive America has grown increasing gnarled and ugly over the last two decades.

Now here we are with Gawker running the HR department of the NYTimes. If there are humans more odious than those who work at Gawker, I am unaware of them. These are the lowest of the low. Yet, the trust fund babies at the NYTimes fear them. Entertainment liberals tremble at the mention of Gawker. They have become the Sturmabteilung of the Progressive movement.

Handing authority of any kind to sociopaths is a terrible idea and it never ends well. The Obama coalition has always been fragile because it is a coalition of anti-social misfits and cultural anarchists. Turning over party discipline to sadists and borderline psychotics like Nick Denton is throwing a gas on the fire. Whether or not the remaining sensible elements of the Progressive church can take back control of their thing is unknown.

I’m not optimistic.

How Come These White Bigots Won’t Talk Race With Me?

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Unintentional comedy. “After an Uneasy Start, Finding Common Ground to Discuss Race Relations at Work

Carl Jones brought it up over lunch in the company break room: the news of the shooting death of an unarmed black man by a white police officer. “Did you read about it?” Mr. Jones, a software engineer who is black, remembers asking his colleagues. “How could this happen?”

He told his white and Asian-American co-workers about his feelings of outrage as they ate Korean takeout at the lunch table at their technology company in Manhattan. He described the waves of anger and anxiety sweeping over him.

Mr. Jones, the only black employee in his department, had always talked with his work friends about sports, movies and current events. But this conversation last summer was different. One white colleague challenged him, asking: “How do you know the shooting wasn’t justified?” Others averted their eyes and finished the meal in silence.

He knew then that he had crossed an invisible line. The discussion of race that day changed the social dynamics at the table, chilling his co-workers’ camaraderie.

“Everyone did their best to avoid the conversation,” Mr. Jones, 33, recalled last week as he described the day that he discussed the shooting in Ferguson, Mo. Race is often the elephant in the room, he said, and “a lot of times people feel uncomfortable talking about it.”

The reason they are uncomfortable would have nothing to do with the fact you can quickly get fired, if you are white, by talking about race. It has nothing to do with how guys like Razib Khan get sacked by the NYTimes for talking about race. Nope. Nothing to see here.

The universal attribute of all cults is a lack of self-awareness. The Times enforces a strict and ruthless set of speech codes at its offices. It works hard to enforce those codes outside its offices, by slandering people who violate those codes. Yet, they run stories like this one, totally unaware of how ridiculous it makes them look.

Too Much Neo in NRx

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I’ve mentioned in the past that I am not much of a Moldbug fan. Maybe one day I’ll do an in-depth post on the subject, but for now just understand that I’m more than a bit skeptical about the NRx thing.There’s a whiff of Scientology to it, with Moldbug playing the L. Ron Hubbard role. To quote myself, I suspect some of these guys have spent too much time working on their Frodo costumes.

Anyway, Jayman and HBD Chick were discussing this, as it were, on twitter today and it touches on one of my complaints about the whole neo-reaction stuff. That is, it is inward looking and strangely immune to the vast storehouse of knowledge around them. They spend so much time talking to one another, they seem to have forgotten there’s a whole big world out there.

I’ll grant that many of the things discussed on the dark side are off-limits outside of the fringes of the Internet. Much of what I post here would get me tossed in jail if I were based in Europe and I’m pretty mild compared to some of the stuff, so I get why they would spend more time on the fringe stuff.  It is, however, an error to think that there’s nothing of value being discussed by mainstream sites.

All that said, the Puritan => Progressive idea is, to be blunt, ridiculous and Occam is correct to take issue with it. The Puritans cast a long shadow in the minds of Progressives only because they were a convenient foil. In the early 20th century no serious intellectual talked about the influence of the Puritans or Puritanical America. That was a fad that bubbled up in mid-century.

Early Progressives were overtly Protestant, mainly Episcopalian and Methodist. Go further back, and I can argue that the abolitionist movement was the first flowering of American Progressivism. It was a secular cause for spiritual reasons. Everything about American liberalism can be framed as a secular cause for spiritual reasons. This wonderful essay on the subject from The Weekly Standard is a nice introduction.

I think the way to look at it is this. On the Continent, the 30 Years War discredited Christianity as a legitimizing ideology. When vast swaths of civilization were plundered in the name of Christ, it was a tough sell as a legitimizing ideology. In its place began to flower nationalism as the source of legitimacy.

In America, something similar happened but much later. In the name of Christ millions of Americans were slaughtered in the Civil War to free a handful of black people from bondage. Both sides were sure God was on their side only to learn that God was not on either side. Onward Christian Soldier sounded a bit ghoulish after Sherman’s March. As a result, mainline Protestant Christianity lost its energizing appeal to the ruling classes.

Yet, those same crusading passions existed amongst both the victors and the vanquished. In the South, a uniquely American form of Christianity filled the void. In the North, a form of European socialism filled the void. Over the the last 150 years, both sides have battled a cold civil war over which side has the right answer to the Great Question.

The Southern model has one big advantage in that it is not Utopian. Evangelicals are under no illusions about the perfectibility of man. The great disadvantage is it relies on an an invisible man in the sky with whom you are required to have a personal relationship. In a world of increasing skepticism about the supernatural, this is a hard sell.

The Northern model has the advantage of being adaptable. Because it functions more like a cult or tribal network, the adherents need only worry about who is in and who is out. Early Progressives, for example, were all for neutering the poor. Then you know who came along and they had to shift gears. Since none of their scripture is written in a dead language, change is easy.

The big downside is that it is Utopian. The Abolitionists were sure they could recreate the city on the hill if they just killed off all the slave holders in the South. Wilsonians were sure they just needed to sterilize the unfit. Today they avoid talking about killing people, but nothing can be allowed to stop “progress.”

This is, I think, where many of the NRx types lose their footing. They simply don’t know enough about history. Instead, they rely on the mythologized version from the Left. The other day I had a right-winger complain to me about the persecution of gays by the GOP. I had to remind him that it never happened.

The other defect I sense is the need for a unified field theory of progressivism. That’s where the Frankfurt school, Marx, Rousseau and all the rest get in on the act. American Progressives certainly borrowed from their European counterparts, but they also made up their own things too. Eugenics, after all, was an American innovation. It’s better to look at European and American intellectual life as complimentary, stealing ideas from one another when practical.

The important thing, I think, is to not get trapped in the chain of causality. American Progressives developed in a different environment from their European counterparts. There’s no analog to the triumph of New Deal Democrats in European politics, for example. While they borrowed heavily from European intellectuals, it is a different branch with its own unique history.