Monthly Archives: June 2014

Democracy

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John Derbyshire has a piece up starting with the anniversary of Tiananmen Square, moving into the strengths and weaknesses of the Chinese model and finishing with this.

Universal-suffrage democracy may have been a good idea 120 years ago, when most adults did productive work into their sixties, then died. In today’s top-heavy welfare states, it just empowers tax-eaters to loot the national wealth.

Tomorrow’s politics will be the art of providing make-work for as many as possible of the employable minority while pacifying the un-employable majority with a state dole. In that world, universal-suffrage democracy will be untenable.

Already, unconsciously, we are making appropriate adjustments. Our universities, after a few aberrant decades of experimenting with open inquiry and the advance of knowledge, have reverted to their medieval purpose (the purpose that Chinese higher education always had): to train an intellectual elite for the propagation and defense of the state ideology. Then it was Christianity (in China, Confucianism); now it is utopian egalitarianism—“political correctness,” the Narrative. The advance of knowledge can go hang.

Since we are already making cultural adjustments to the inevitable future, can the political adjustments be far behind?

There’s a branch of the dissident that holds a view of the intermediate future that is a mix of District 9, Elysium and Terminator. They think most of us will be thrown into camps without regard to race, sex, age or ethnicity. We’ll live on garbage from the other group of humans, the elites. The elites will rely on super smart robots to keep their position and keep the rabble in their camps. Some small servant class will exist to maintain the robots and tend to the elite.

Some put greater emphasis on the robots, while others underscore the camps. There are surely others who have a combination of favorites, with some other elements added into the mix. Either way, the future is Hell, as they imagine it. Nordic people imagined Hell as barren and cold, while south people imagined it hot and fiery. People’s sense of the horrible future is a reflection of what they imagine to be a horrible present. The future is what you fear now, not what you’ll fear tomorrow.

One common thread that runs through the various subcultures that make up the dissident right is a rejection of democracy. Most people outside conventional poltics styart with the assumption that democracy is a terrible idea.  Seeing people you know are struggling with the basics of living, in-line to vote makes plain that democracy turned self-government into a lottery. The capable have to hope the incapable tick the right box or they are tricked into it by the parties.

That said, you can’t argue with the results. Life in Europe and America is vastly better now than 1900. People are healthier, better fed and we live much longer. Outside of the urban reservations, violence is no longer a factor. In 1900 a person traveling alone cross country needed to be armed and prepared to kill. Today, a person traveling cross country only has to worry about what sights to see on the way.

Rule by dimwit seems to be working out, despite it all.

On the other hand, to the people in a car heading for a cliff, the ride may seem like it is going very well. Democracy in America is a relatively new thing. The 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920. The woman’s vote did not emerge as a force until after the second world war. Minorities were prevented from voting until the 1960’s. Our experiment in universal suffrage is only a couple of generations along. Maybe it just takes  a few generations for democracy to nuke itself.

The real problem is what it does to the governing institutions and the ruling class in  control them. In the 19th century, both political parties catered to the property holders, business men and the educated elite. That’s where the votes were so that’s where the politicians went looking for votes. The result was the parties were representative of the nation’s various interests, all of whom had the same general goals in mind. As a result, national politics was regional, not tribal.

Once you flood the voting booths with millions of people lacking an ownership stake in the country, politics becomes tribal. The parties seek to assemble collection of tribes, even though they may not have shared interests. This attracts a different class of politician. In order to get white union guys to vote with black welfare queens, you have to be cunning and persuasive. The appeal is emotional, not logical. The result is what we see. Both parties are dominated by sociopaths.

Democracy has its place and it is a requirement of civilized governance. It must be tempered and that’s what we lack. Returning the Senate to the states, for example, would cripple the federal welfare system. States would never tolerate the meddling in their affairs we see now. Of course, the Senate would attract a different class of politician. Low-life grifters like Chuck Schumer and John McCain would be of no use to their respective state legislatures.

The conditions under which we re-apply the brakes to our run-away democracy is the mystery. Maybe that’s where the doom and gloom set has it right. History is not exactly full of successful reformers steering their society away from the rocks. Instead, it is the story of one crash after another. A societies are boon, prosper and then die. It is the cycle of history that has been observed over and over. Maybe it is not doom and gloom, but a fatalistic acceptance in the arc of history.

How To Be A Man

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I watched a good bit of the Gavin McInnes film How to be a Man. It was free through Amazon so I gave it a shot.  Maybe it would not be that horrible. It was better than I expected. It is a short film, by today’s standards. I’m not a heavy consumer of video these days so I have to rely on the internet for this stuff. According to this the typical movie is 2.6 hours. That seems terribly long to me. Maybe that’s why I have not been to the theater in many years.

Gavin McInnes is a likable guy on screen. He plays a middle-aged beta male, Mark McCarthy, who thinks he used to be a real man. In fact he was a stand-up comic, who had brief success and then took a job at an adverting agency. At middle age he lives in an apartment with his pregnant wife. He has just learned he has terminal cancer and therefore will not be around to raise his unborn child. He hires an old friend’s kid to help him create a series of videos explaining how to be a man. The rest of the movie is these two bonding through a series of adventures.

An idea lingering in the background of the movie is that Bryan may be McCarthy’s son, as Bryan never knew his father and McCarthy used to party with Bryan’s mother in the old days. As the two work through adventures, creating videos about life lessons, McCarthy wants to teach his unborn child, a father-son relationship develops. In the end, McCarthy has learned how to be a father and Bryan becomes a man. In between we get some yucks and corn-pone advice about life, as told by urban elites.

In his articles and TV appearances, McInnes keeps returning to the issue of drug use and his allegedly wild youth. I say allegedly because I have no evidence to suggest his was an unusually wild youth. It is all relative, of course. When you live in a place like Baltimore, drugs, crime and regular gun fire is the wild life. Disheveled dudes with lots of ink and drug problems are a dime a dozen, but, in the swank coastal enclaves it may seem outlandish.

Anyway, the movie is sort of a walk down memory lane for McInnes. He is credited as one of the writers and I suspect the adventures were written by him. Through the movie, I kept waiting for the main character to have the revelation about his life that seems to be standard in these films. You know, the good guy, who is miserable suddenly sees how good he has it. We never get that. Instead there’s some suggestion that maybe the main character is figuring it out, but it is left unresolved.

For a short free movie it is a fine option if you have time to kill. McInnes actually has some talent, but something seems missing with him. He’s one of those guys who is above average at a lot of entertainment stuff, but not great at any one thing. It seems that people who do well in that business do one thing really well. Then again, maybe we just notice it, because they end up doing that one thing in movies or TV. The entertainment rackets are a strange business.

Crime & Punishment

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I’ve posted a few times on my ideas for reforming the prison system. This incident in New York is a good example of the problems in our handling of the defectives.

The state gave him no meds and no psychiatric referral, releasing the murderous ticking time bomb from prison on an unsuspecting public.

Daniel St. Hubert, a paranoid schizophrenic who spent five years in the slammer for trying to strangle his mom with an electrical cord, was operating with barely any safety net when he was sprung last month.

Nine days after he walked out of the upstate Clinton Correctional Facility, police say, he used a steak knife to kill a 6-year-old boy and seriously hurt his 7-year-old playmate at a Brooklyn housing project.

Police also suspect St. Hubert killed an 18-year-old college student and critically injured a 53-year-old homeless man.

St. Hubert’s sister said she pleaded with officials for help for her mentally ill brother before and after he was released May 23 from prison.

Judith Perry said he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic with aspects of drug-induced psychosis.

“I begged them and they didn’t do it,” she told the Daily News on Thursday.

“I spoke to the social worker in regards to his mental capacity and when will he be able to see a doctor. They told me it doesn’t happen right away. It usually takes a couple of weeks. Usually they’re discharged with medication.”

Prison officials declined to discuss whether St. Hubert was treated for mental illness behind bars. Records show he was committed to mental health facilities three times — once in 2010 and twice in 2011.

You have the whole range of pathologies on display here. First you have a person with a long history of violence being released from prison. Even not knowing about his mental condition, no responsible adult should sign off on this act, but our prisons are not run by responsible adults.

Then you have the mental problems. That alone should have kept this person off the streets. There’s no fixing this man with current technology. Only a lunatic would think putting a monster in a cage for a given period of time changes the nature of the monster.

The bigger issue, the real root of what ails us as a civilization, is the insularity of the government functionaries. This madman went through the system. Government bureaucrats signed off on his release. We should be able to easily get this information and know who, exactly, is responsible for letting this maniac loose on the public. This will never happen. No one will be named. No one will be sanctioned. No one will be held accountable to the people.

Reefer Madness

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Maureen Dowd’s reefer madness column is getting a lot of run recently. One reason is it flatters the types of people who think Dowd is smart and savvy. The column is heavy on the signalling. Dowd and people like here know nothing about the proletarian word of legalized marijuana. That’s for the dirt people. This section is probably what got the readers most excited.

The caramel-chocolate flavored candy bar looked so innocent, like the Sky Bars I used to love as a child.

Sitting in my hotel room in Denver, I nibbled off the end and then, when nothing happened, nibbled some more. I figured if I was reporting on the social revolution rocking Colorado in January, the giddy culmination of pot Prohibition, I should try a taste of legal, edible pot from a local shop.

What could go wrong with a bite or two?

Everything, as it turned out.

Not at first. For an hour, I felt nothing. I figured I’d order dinner from room service and return to my more mundane drugs of choice, chardonnay and mediocre-movies-on-demand.

But then I felt a scary shudder go through my body and brain. I barely made it from the desk to the bed, where I lay curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours. I was thirsty but couldn’t move to get water. Or even turn off the lights. I was panting and paranoid, sure that when the room-service waiter knocked and I didn’t answer, he’d call the police and have me arrested for being unable to handle my candy.

I strained to remember where I was or even what I was wearing, touching my green corduroy jeans and staring at the exposed-brick wall. As my paranoia deepened, I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me.

That sounds fictional. But, she is an old woman and potency is higher with food grade weed these days. We’re a long way from mixing in pot with the brownies. Perhaps this is an honest recitation of her experience. In fairness, she does concede that her inexperience may have been the issue. Old age is most likely the bigger issue, but she can be forgiven for not acknowledging it. The reader is supposed to nod along, confirmed in their ignorance about the dirty world of legal weed.

Later in the column she sounds like the her parents circa 1968.

Colorado raked in about $12.6 million the first three months after pot was legalized for adults 21 and over. Pot party planners are dreaming up classy events: the Colorado Symphony just had its first “Classically Cannabis” fund-raiser with joints and Debussy. But the state is also coming to grips with the darker side of unleashing a drug as potent as marijuana on a horde of tourists of all ages and tolerance levels seeking a mellow buzz.

In March, a 19-year-old Wyoming college student jumped off a Denver hotel balcony after eating a pot cookie with 65 milligrams of THC. In April, a Denver man ate pot-infused Karma Kandy and began talking like it was the end of the world, scaring his wife and three kids. Then he retrieved a handgun from a safe and killed his wife while she was on the phone with an emergency dispatcher.

As Jack Healy reported in The Times on Sunday, Colorado hospital officials “are treating growing numbers of children and adults sickened by potent doses of edible marijuana” and neighboring states are seeing more stoned drivers.

I fully admit to being torn on the legalization issue. The zeal of libertarians on the issue has always turned me off. At the same time, the scolds on the right with their assertions about gateway drugs and “the children” fall flat with me. When you live in the sort of places I prefer to live, you know better.

Still, I can’t help but note the public reaction. Despite the fact Bill Buckley and National Review have been pro-legalization for fifty years, the Left has always claimed the Right is behind the war on drugs. Now, it is the old warhorses of the Left out wringing their hands over legalization. All those aging Boomers who used to love telling tales of their youthful experimentation are lecturing us about weed. I look forward to her next column on how television rots the brain and rock and roll causes children to misbehave.

The War on Poor People

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John Derbyshire calls the culture war a cold civil war. I like it, even though it is imperfect. In modern America, we have two groups of white people. One hates the other with the intensity of a thousand suns. The other can’t figure it out. That’s means it is less of a civil war than an occupation. The ruling whites despise the colonized whites or something like that. This story in America’s Paper of Record is great example.

More than half the members of the City Council have fired off a letter to Walmart demanding that it stop making millions in charitable contributions to local groups here.

Twenty-six of the 51 members of the Council charged in the letter that the world’s biggest retailer’s support of local causes is a cynical ploy to enter the market here.

“We know how desperate you are to find a foothold in New York City to buy influence and support here,” says the letter, obtained by The Post and addressed to Walmart and the Walton Family Foundation.

“Stop spending your dangerous dollars in our city,” the testy letter demands. “That’s right: this is a cease-and-desist letter.”

That can only make sense when you have lost your marbles. These people hate WalMart so much they will deprive their own people of charity to make it clear how much they hate WalMart. Why do they hate WalMart? It’s southern!

Last week, Walmart announced that it distributed $3 million last year to charities here, including $1 million to the New York Women’s Foundation, which offers job training, and $30,000 to Bailey House, which distributes groceries to low-income residents.

Walmart, which has been thwarted by union-backed opposition for more than a decade, said the handouts “can make a difference on big issues like hunger relief and career development.”

The retail giant said its business agenda “aligns with supporting the local organizations that are important to our customers and associates.”

But Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito called the donations “toxic money,” and accused Walmart of waging a “cynical public-relations campaign that disguises Walmart’s backwards anti-job agenda.”

There’s a level of crazy that lies beyond the ability to comprehend. This lunatic is just spitting out all the scare words she can conjure. There was a time when this sort of behavior disqualified you from public office – even in New York City.

Hurting Water’s Feelings

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I love the British press. So much so I get most of my news about the world from them, rather than American sources. What does it for me is the irreverence. Reading the New York Times or Washington Post, I get the feeling the writer filed his report while dismantling a bomb. There’s not much in the way of humor in our reporting. The Brits, on the other hand, will gladly mix tabloid nonsense with serious news on the same page or even the same article. They make the news fun.

This weird little story in the Independent is a great example of the devil may care habits of the British press.

In the latest episode of ‘Gwyneth Paltrow states the absolute ridiculous’, the actress has claimed that saying negative things to water can hurt its feelings.

The ‘consciously uncoupled’ star revealed that she follows the work of Japanese scientist Masaru Emoto, whose experiments attempt to investigate whether human consciousness has a direct effect on the molecular structure of water.

His theories go as far as to claim that shouting at rice – as one so frequently does – could turn it bad.

This is comedy gold, but it would never appear in an American paper. Our press cozies up to the powerful and famous. The Brits lampoon the rich and famous.

“I am fascinated by the growing science behind the energy of consciousness and its effects on matter,” Paltrow wrote in a blog post for her much derided clean living website GOOP.

“I have long had Dr Emoto’s coffee table book on how negativity changes the structure of water, how the molecules behave differently depending on the words or music being expressed around it.”

Handing over the keyboard to friend Dr Habib Sadeghi to explain what on earth she was talking about, he wrote: “Japanese scientist Masaru Emoto performed some of the most fascinating experiments on the effect that words have on energy in the 1990s.

GOOP?  Sure enough, it is a real site. I thought maybe it was an acronym for some British slang. She apparently runs or is the owner of an on-line boutique. Gwyneth Paltrow is a famous person.  Her wiki page says she is “an American actress, singer, and food writer. She made her acting debut on stage in 1990 and started appearing in films in 1991.” I thought she was an actress, but I have no recollection of seeing her in any roles. It gets even more weird when you look at her bio.

Paltrow was born in Los Angeles, California, and is the daughter of actress Blythe Danner and the late film producer/director Bruce Paltrow. Her father was Jewish and her mother is from a Christian background, and Paltrow was raised with “both Jewish and Christian holidays”. Her father’s Ashkenazi family immigrated from Belarusand Poland, while her mother’s ancestry is Pennsylvania Dutch (German) and white Barbadian (English). Paltrow’s paternal great-great-grandfather, whose surname was “Paltrowicz,” was a rabbi in Nowogród, Poland. Paltrow has a younger brother, Jake Paltrow, and is a half-cousin of actress Katherine Moennig, and a second cousin of former U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (AZ-08). Her uncle is opera singer and actor Harry Danner.

I’m going to assume that a woman who thinks you can hurt the feeling of water is very far to the left in her politics. I don’t know enough about her to say for sure, but that would be my guess. Yet, her very carefully constructed wiki page is heavy on the race stuff. There’s some heavy duty signaling going on there. Anyway, the rest of the story is pretty funny.

“In his experiments, Emoto poured pure water into vials labelled with negative phrases like ‘I hate you’ or ‘Fear’. After 24 hours, the water was frozen, and no longer crystallised under the microscope: It yielded grey, misshapen clumps instead of beautiful lace-like crystals.

“In contrast, Emoto placed labels that said things like ‘I love you’ or ‘Peace’ on vials of polluted water, and after 24 hours, they produced gleaming, perfectly hexagonal crystals.”

Her insightful post comes just a week after she compared dealing with internet trolls to being a survivor of war.

Speaking ahead of her appearance at the Code technology conference in California last Tuesday (27 May), she said: “You come across [comments] about yourself and about your friends, and it’s a very dehumanising thing. It’s almost like how, in war, you go through this bloody, dehumanising thing, and then something is defined out of it.”

“My hope is, as we get out of it, we’ll reach the next level of conscience,” she concluded.

Assuming Gwyneth Paltrow believes these things she is reported to have said, the women is as dumb as a post. Then again, she has become famous pretending to be other people, so maybe this is just another act. In a world where everything is fake and cheesy, pretending to be a celebrity airhead could be the way smart people get rich in the entertainment business.

More on the Weirdos

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Here is another take on Obama’s weirdness. Ralph Peters is a shameless warmonger, but he does have a good sense of the mood among veterans and active duty.

Congratulations, Mr. President! And identical congrats to your sorcerer’s apprentice, National Security Adviser Susan Rice. By trying to sell him as an American hero, you’ve turned a deserter already despised by soldiers in the know into quite possibly the most-hated individual soldier in the history of our military.

I have never witnessed such outrage from our troops.

Exhibit A: Ms. Rice. In one of the most tone-deaf statements in White House history (we’re making a lot of history here), the national-security advisor, on a Sunday talk show, described Bergdahl as having served “with honor and distinction.” Those serving in uniform and those of us who served previously were already stirred up, but that jaw-dropper drove us into jihad mode.

But pity Ms. Rice. Like the president she serves, she’s a victim of her class. Nobody in the inner circle of Team Obama has served in uniform. It shows. That bit about serving with “honor and distinction” is the sort of perfunctory catch-phrase politicians briefly don as electoral armor.

The near total lack of military service is one problem. The greater problem is the lack of earthling experience. Look at the bio of Susan Rice. It is impressive and so far out of the norm that she may as well be from another country.

This is a fundamental culture clash. Team Obama and its base cannot comprehend the values still cherished by those young Americans “so dumb” they joined the Army instead of going to prep school and then to Harvard. Values such as duty, honor, country, physical courage, and loyalty to your brothers and sisters in arms have no place in Obama World. (Military people don’t necessarily all like each other, but they know they can depend on each other in battle — the sacred trust Bergdahl violated.)

This understates the differences. Lots of people skipped the military and went off to college or a job. They live and work with people who made different choices. They have family members who made different choices. Few Americans have lived as a pampered, royal elite totally divorced from daily life in America. Susan Rice, like her boss, would end up under a bridge if not for the government. She is the ruling class and the ruling class is her.

President Obama did this to himself (and to Bergdahl). This beautifully educated man, who never tires of letting us know how much smarter he is than the rest of us, never stopped to consider that our troops and their families might have been offended by their commander-in-chief staging a love-fest at the White House to celebrate trading five top terrorists for one deserter and featuring not the families of those soldiers (at least six of them) who died in the efforts to find and free Bergdahl, but, instead, giving a starring role on the international stage to Pa Taliban, parent of a deserter and a creature of dubious sympathies (that beard on pops ain’t a tribute to ZZ Top). How do you say “outrageous insult to our vets” in Pashto?

This is the result of foreign rule. America has been colonized by these weird pod people who look like us, make noises that sound familiar, but otherwise they are nothing like us. America is ruled by foreigners. They live in the clouds and look down upon the dirt people, like ants. To the dirt people looking up, the cloud people are strange, otherworldly creatures with no connection to the earth.

Our Weirdo in Chief

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Way back when Obama started to run for president, it was wise to be skeptical about his chances for a few reasons. The main reason was that he was a weirdo. The number of people you will meet, who are the son of an African immigrant, is small. The number of mixed race people in the country is tiny. The number of mixed race people raised in Indonesia and Hawaii is the set of one. Obama is an extreme outlier when it comes to his personal story. He’s no like anyone you know.

Then there are the odd things he says, like calling Hawaii Asia or not knowing the number of states. During the 2008 primary campaign, he repeatedly displayed an unfamiliarity with America that was striking. That’s not the birther stuff. It’s just that the guy seemed to be a stranger. Pols always put on an act to seem like a regular guy from the neighborhood. Obama works hard to act like a human familiar with our customs, but it is not very convincing, but he won anyway.

That’s what is at the heart of the Bergdahl fiasco. At first it looked like it was a tempest in a teacup, but the furor is quite intense. Because Obama is immunized by the ruling tribe, he’ll suffer no consequences from it, but it will underscore that alien quality and that of the inner party that has put him in the job. Americans respect veterans so when they get pissed, they have our attention.

For all the yellow ribbons strewn across his hometown in Idaho and the gratitude expressed by his parents in an emotional visit to the White House on Saturday, it’s looking increasingly unlikely that Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl will receive a hero’s welcome when he returns to the United States after nearly five years in Taliban captivity.

From military forums across the country, a groundswell of anger is rising over the Obama administration’s silence on perhaps the most controversial question surrounding the deal that freed Bergdahl in exchange for five senior Taliban members: Was he a deserter?

Veterans of Afghanistan are livid. Apparently, this story has been percolating in veteran circles for years. Vets have the advantage of knowing how the military works, but also knowing how the politicians make the military work. They are much more cynical about the reality of military life than people who have no m,military service. It appears a lot of vets suspected a deal was coming. Now that the deal is official, the anger has spilled over into the general public.

Given the embarrassing behavior of the American media these days, it is truly shocking to see reports like this from the New York Times. Here’s another critical report from The Hill new site. Then you have this negative portrayal of the creepy parents in the Washington Post. If Obama has managed to shock his most loyal followers, this deal has gone beyond unconventional. The puzzle is why in the world would Obama sign off on this? It does not make a lot of sense.

That’s what brings us back to the weirdo factor. To an American, a soldier who walked away from his post is hard to defend. One that joins the enemy is intolerable. We all know that. Some of us may have sympathy for the guy or blame his defects on larger issues, but even the most liberal American draws the line at helping the enemy. It is why Jane Fonda remains an object of revulsion for most people.

For Obama, none of this registers. Obama has put a lot of time and effort into showing the Muslim world he relates to them and respects them. This has been assumed to be in reaction to the cowboy tactics of Bush. Today it seems like Obama really does relate to the Muslim world more than he relates to America. He seems to have more respect for the Taliban, which he never fails to pronounce with a foreign accent, than he does the US military. That’s rather un-American.

Presidents are usually strange ducks. Reagan had no friends and lived an unconventional life. He was thoroughly American. Clinton was a very strange man, but he was a familiar picaresque figure in southern politics. Even Poppy Bush was a familiar character on the American scene. Obama is a cross between vacuous French intellectual and African despot. He’s nothing like anyone you have ever known. We have a deeply weird man in the White House and the results have followed.

Tech Crunch is Racist

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This is interesting.

While the tech industry has long aspired to be inclusive, the numbers are dismal. Hardly a week passes by without media outlets highlighting concerns about sexism, ageism or “founder profiling” in our industry.

The truth is that TechCrunch will not be able to solve the SF housing crisis or increase STEM education in inner-city schools. We can’t offer entrepreneurship classes in rural America or require VCs to screen founders without considering their gender.

But there are great organizations who can. And we aim to support them.

Today we’re excited to announce TechCrunch Include, which is a program designed to help social enterprises (nonprofit and for profit) working to make tech a more inclusive place. The program offers a year’s worth of access to TechCrunch resources — financial as well as media and events. Our mission is to help these enterprises increase their effectiveness on a variety of fronts, including fundraising, volunteers, partnerships and media attention.

Participants will receive a number of benefits, including free exhibition space and tickets to Disrupt and Hackathon events, free attendance at all other events, and assistance with media/press strategy. In addition, TechCrunch will commit a total of $50,000 a year (starting in 2015) in direct financial support to select participants. TechCrunch already awarded $50,000 this year to Girls Who Code.

Consider this our minimum viable product. As we learn more about how TechCrunch can leverage its strengths, we may add to or modify this list. Of course, we’re open to feedback and suggestions.

So who should apply? We’re open to all types of organizations, as long as the mission is related to increasing diversity in tech. You do not need to be based in San Francisco or even the U.S. to apply. In keeping with TC’s love for startups, we’re especially eager to find compelling groups with early traction that will really benefit from Include.

Though not said, all of the dog whistles are there. This is for non-white males. Why does Tech Crunch hate white guys?

Oh, right, never mind.

The application is interesting. In the diversity rackets, you have to know all of the buzzwords and code phrases if you going to be a playa. That’s what the free form comment boxes are for. If they flat out ask if you’re black or have a vagina, it spoils the fun. They don’t really want diversity after all. What they want is people who think and act just like SWPL, but with vaginas or brown skin.

I filled it out and in the comment boxes and put “I hate white people!” over and over along with a few “I hate heterosexuals!” and “I hate men” thrown in for variety. Fingers crossed!