Google's Little Race Problem

Google is in the wokey headlights just now because it doesn't think that the graduates from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) meet its exacting standards. Paul Mirengoff has the whole procedure.

See, Google has ranked colleges as follows: "elite," followed by "tier 1" and "tier 2." But HBCUs don't make the cut for "tier 2." So they are ranked as "long tail."

Racist! Google is racist!

Now I have a classification system for liberal bad behavior: Left's Conceits, Left's Crimes, Left's Errors. Well, why not? And I think that this siti-yation -- as they say in Treasure Island -- contains all three. And I'm not sure that this doesn't always apply.

Left's Errors aspect: Back in the Sixties, a second after the Civil Rights Act was passed, liberals decided that merely criminalizing racial discrimination wasn't enough. That was their first mistake. Why? Simply because it is one thing to judge that, say, having a whites-only fountain is discrimination; it is another to say that, because a particular corporation does not have a racial makeup that matches the racial proportions in the community, this represents discrimination.

Left's Conceits aspect: The second problem is to imagine that we evolved and educated liberals could, with politics and government, right the wrongs of yesteryear with top-down liberal-led programs of racial discrimination that we call quotas, or affirmative action, or diversity, or allyism, or fighting "systemic racism." It is a conceit, often found around ruling classes, that any political program it advances will achieve the results expected. Unfortunately there is Science™ that shows that this is not so. It is called the Law of Unintended Consequences. Even La Wik recognizes the Law of Unintended Consequences as a Thing.

Left's Crimes aspect: As the Paul Mirengoff article articulates, the whole quota/affirmative action thing has seriously hurt Blacks. it goes like this:

1. "Elite" universities tend to recruit black students with qualifications somewhat below the white and Asian students -- good but not great credentials -- in order to meet their racist diversity goals.
2. "Tier 1" and "tier 2" universities are forced to accept "mediocre black students" to meet their racist diversity goals.
3. "Long tail" universities like "HBCUs are left to select from a pool of applicants with credentials insufficient to warrant admission to good non-HBCUs even with the benefit of racial preferences.

"Expert agree" that the mismatching of black applicants to university results in lower overall achievements for blacks. Google finds that “HBCU computer science students struggle with the most basic of coding, algorithms and data structures.”

I think that the "mismatching" problem is a crime. But that's just me.

Of course, this also comes under my Little Darlings problem. When you accept the overlordship of the ruling class, and become its Little Darlings, as "the workers" once did, and then women and minorities and now LGBT+, you will thrive under the sponsorship of the ruling class until the day that you are no longer politically useful. Then, like the soldiers of Napoleon's Grand Army that invaded Russia, you will be left by the roadside, probably to die of hunger and disease, certainly of despair.

And it is notable, I would say, that the abandoned Little Darlings don't really ever cotton to the reason for their despair.

Do the white working class today blame the 19th century reformers for their plight? Or FDR for eight years of top-down failure in the Great Depression? Or the compulsory unionism that made US steelworkers and autoworkers uncompetitive with the world market in the 1970s?

Anyway, it hardly matters. The damage is already done. As I say, the only question in the aftermath of lefty conceits, crimes, and errors is the size of the butcher's bill.

Will it be a butcher's bill on the scale of a Stalin or a Mao, or simply the abandoned folks "dying of despair" in rural America?

We can only hope.

Peterson's "Beyond Order"

I only realized that Jordan B. Peterson's follow-up to 12 Rules was to be published March 2 on the day before publication date. So I ordered my copy of Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life right away. For some reason the book is not yet banned on Amazon.

Hey, you good little girls at Penguin: how come I didn't know about the publication date? Are you still too triggered that, well, everybody knows that Peterson is a... well... something Eeeuww? 

But now I am half way through Beyond Order, and I'll tell you what surprises me. There's a lot of Nietzsche and Jung in it. And Dostoevsky. And then he tells the Mesopotamian myth of Tiamat and Apsu and Marduk. And when he is done with that it is on to the Egyptian Osiris, Isis, and Horus. And how Harry Potter fits exactly into the myth story arc. 

I would have thought all that would be a bridge too far for a best-selling self-help author. Anyway, the book is #8 on Amazon right now on March 8, 2021.

If the theme of 12 Rules was to get started in life, to get out of that proverbial parents' basement, the theme of Beyond Order is really more for mid-life adults that are afraid to take the next step out of a dead-end career. Or don't know what to do about the wokey co-workers at corporate HR. And Peterson recommends a blend of creativity, courage, and responsibility, and stick-to-it-iveness.

Of course, if you read Helen Lewis's review of Beyond Order in The Atlantic you won't be any the wiser about who Peterson is and what he is trying to do. Lewis is a Brit feminist lefty, that went to a private Catholic high school and then Oxford, darling, and you can understand that she would have No Clue about what Peterson is about, and what his ideas mean to his readers. To give you a hint, here is Lewis on Maps of Meaning, Peterson's 1990s book.

Maps of Meaning, published in 1999, built on the work of academics like Joseph Campbell, the literature and religion scholar who argued that all mythic narratives are variations of a single archetypal quest. (Campbell’s “monomyth” inspired the arc of Star Wars.) On this “hero’s journey,” a young man sets out from his humdrum life, confronts monsters, resists temptation, stares into the abyss, and claims a great victory. Returning home with what Campbell calls “the power to bestow boons on his fellow men,” the hero can also claim the freedom to live at peace with himself.

Know what I think? I think that Lewis hasn't read Maps of Meaning. But, of course, it is trite to call Peterson's work a rehash of Campbell, just as it is right out of the lefty catechism to refer, as Lewis did in her famous GQ interview with Peterson, to Nietzsche as the "Nazis' favorite intellectual." Earth to Lewis: Nietzsche was a pro-European and an anti-nationalist.

The message in Beyond Order is that if you are stuck in a rut, it isn't going to do any good to hide from your problems. And it isn't going to do any good to burst out into the stratosphere, and it isn't going to do any good to pick up on one of the modern isms. Lewis:

Peterson writes an entire chapter against ideologies—feminism, anti-capitalism, environmentalism, basically anything ending in ism—declaring that life is too complex to be described by such intellectual frameworks. Funny story: There’s an academic movement devoted to skepticism of grand historical narratives. It’s called … postmodernism. 

Ahem. Do not all the most advanced minds agree, Helen Lewis, that postmodernism is the grand narrative that all other grand narratives are, to use a Brit word, bollocks, and apologies for power. But postmodernism is pure as the driven snow.

Odd, isn't it, that postmodernism is a favorite with lefties for whom political power is not just the best thing but the only thing.

Here's an interesting moment from Beyond Order. Peterson talks about the 160 city speaking tour for 12 Rules. He mentions the need to keep the audience's attention, and how he learned to focus on one or two people in the audience.

What you want to see from the person you are facing is silence. What you want to hear from the crowd is dead silence. You want to hear nothing.

Because when people stop paying attention they shift their weight; they whisper to their neighbor; they think about tomorrow.

I became increasingly aware that the mention of one topic in particular brought every audience... to a dead-quiet halt: responsibility[.]

Well I never. Odd, isn't it that the one thing that our lefty friends are against is the notion of individual responsibility. Responsibility for lefties is all about the responsibility of the patriarchy or white supremacy for the misery of the oppressed peoples.

But responsibility for lefties is never about each individual, be xhe never so humble, seizing the nettle of life, overcoming adversity and fear, and just getting on with it.

Given how the ordinary People of the Responsible Self respond to Peterson's work, I would say that folks like Helen Lewis should spend a little more time trying to figure out why, and a little less time back-handing Jordan Peterson.

For me, the reason for Peterson's success is obvious. Peterson is laying out the road to creativity from rote responsibility. And it is a road that a lot of people in the world are ready to hear.

At the Intersection of Math and Politics

There's terrifying piece at Quillette about the intersection of math and leftism by Greg Ashman: "Decolonising Math is Rooted in a Decades-old Conflict." It is, if you like, the argument between people that want to teach kids to understand math, and "those who assert the importance of explicit teaching, practice, and memorization." And never mind what it means.

Now, of course, the "understanding" crowd are saying that forcing kids to memorize and practice is, as my cousin says, "colonizing the curriculum," and marginalizing the human way of learning, especially the non-western approach to knowledge.

The point is that, if things like learning to talk can be achieved without explicit teaching and rote memorization, why not math? Ashman:

Humans have been speaking to each other for a long time and long enough for evolution to act on the process of children learning their mother tongue. In contrast, writing and symbolic math are only a few thousand years old at best and for much of that time have been the preserve of only a tiny proportion of the human population. There simply has not been sufficient time for us to evolve natural ways to learn to read or do math through immersion.

In other words, little babies are programmed to learn to speak; they are not yet programmed to learn math. 

The article made me think about things we learn where explicit teaching and practice are required and just accepted. Let me count the ways:

1. Learning a musical instrument. You have to practice to make perfect. Unless you are Mozart.
2. Learning to dance. It takes about two years to learn Argentine Tango so you can just lead it unconsciously. And you practice it till it becomes second nature. Then you can wow all the girls.
3. Learning to fly. Pilots are taught to practice emergencies, because you do not have time to think when something goes wrong.
4. Boot camp. Soldiers need all kinds of skills to be second nature. To stay alive.
5. Acting in a play. You need to learn your cues, your lines, your blocking, and it needs to become second nature.
6. Mental arithmetic. It helps to know that "1 minus 4 is 7 carry one" -- instinctively, never mind why. Much faster than counting on your fingers.

Need I go on?

Maybe this explains "white privilege." Whites -- i.e. everyone except Africans -- have been doing writing and math rather longer than Blacks from West Africa. And it shows. No fair!

Note, by the way, that Brahmins from India and the Chinese seem to have no problem in the math department. In fact, I'd say that the Chinese people are probably better at math than your average pimply white soyboy. And I explain that by a couple thousand years of Mandarin examinations.

Or, as a guy from Taiwan explained to me, on the subject of teaching literacy in the East Asian character system: the way they teach literacy is that each student has to learn 20 characters a day. Or they get beaten.

What I wonder is what will happen, One Fine Day, when the clients of the liberals wake up to the fact that lefty politics is all about lefty educated gentry feeling good about themselves. Lefty politics has almost nothing to do with helping minorities and "oppressed peoples."

Do you think they will descend into a rage that outdoes the Viking "beserker" rage? Or just say: "much as I hate to say it, my liberal patrons just aren't as caring and compassionate as they like to think."

What? Me Worry? Advice to My Liberal Neighbors

In his seminal Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy Joseph Schumpeter marvels that democratic governments ever get anything right. Says he in Chapter XXIII:

[D]emocracy does not mean and cannot mean that people actually rule... Democracy means only that the people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule over them... [D]emocracy is the rule of the politician.

Thus:

[T]he democratic method produces legislation and administration as by-products of the struggle for political office.

That H.R.1, the first legislation proposed by the current Congress, is all about rejiggering the rules for elections to favor the majority party, the Democrats, is thus not a bug but a feature. 

It is thus perfectly normal that the current $1.9 trillion stimulus package in Congress all about rewarding Democratic constituencies and very little about getting the economy back on course.

There are, by the way, some storm signals flying:

The American Spectator: "Inflation will destroy the middle class." The stimulus bill will stoke inflation and "a prolonged inflation will destroy the already weakened middle class and worsen the widening wealth gap in America." Is there any indication that the people in the Biden administration or that Nancy and Chuck have the least bit of interest in this?

National Review: "The Mother of all Stock Market Bubbles." The ratio of stock market valuation to GDP is right now 25 percent above the previous high at the peak of the NASDAQ bubble of 2000.

Powerline: "Storm Clouds for Biden." The Washington Post's business and economics columnist, Steven Perlstein, is retiring, and his last column basically tells the Dem faithful that their economic agenda will end in ruin.

And the politicians aren't paying attention because their trade is not fixing the economy but getting elected. And after you get elected you reward your supporters. And you think about ways to make it easier for you to get elected in the future.

Yes, but how do I protect myself? First, don't think you can completely protect yourself. But obviously you don't want to have too many dollars. You don't want to get sold out with an underwater mortgage.

And don't sell out at the bottom!

Meanwhile, a message to my liberal friends with the BLM and the #WeBelieve signs.

If you beat up on the police, what you get is fascism.

If you let your anti-fascist mostly peaceful protesters run wild, what you get is fascism.

If you permit runaway inflation, what you get is fascism.

If you beat up on the commoner middle class, what you get is fascism.

If your administration just caters to gentry-liberal virtue signalling, what you get is fascism.

This is actually not that hard. The tribe of the commoner is the nation. When the commoner is afraid, he rallies to the nation.

So, if you are a member of the Cathedral with all the perks and the power that go with it, the one thing you want to take care of is to keep the commoner sheep safely grazing. Don't sicc wokey wolves on them; and don't wipe out their modest jobs and their modest savings and their kids' education.

Do that and you will rule forever. The alternative is Literally Hitler.

When a Protest is "Mostly Peaceful" Then Maybe Crowd Control is Needed

When I had a chat with my Seattle City Councilman Dan Strauss a couple of weeks ago I was a little surprised by his invocation of the 1990 WTO riots in connection with police brutality in Seattle, especially considering that he would have been 13 at the time. I know know what it was all about, now that I have got into the CHAZ chapter in Andy Ngo's Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. Here's the quote:

Despite the ultraviolence of the Seattle riots, police were prohibited from using the best tool they had for crowd control: CS gas [tear gas].

That's because "Police Chief Carmen Best relented to political pressure from the Mayor's Office to ban the SPD from using [tear gas] despite its effectiveness."

I'd say that anyone with half a brain would recognize that the failure to deal firmly with Antifa has been a strategic mistake. But by concocting a story about Seattle Police Department brutality going back to 1990 my pal Dan Strauss gives himself permission to be a squish where crowd control is concerned.

Which leads to the whatabout issue with regards to Antifa vs. the January 6 riot. Which is the real problem? Antifa? The white supremacists? Or both? Or neither?

It's a "tell" isn't it, that the whole ruling class from Nancy Pelosi on down was genuinely shocked by the Capitol Hill riot on January 6: Build a Wall! Call out the National Guard! Notice that nobody really got hurt except rioter Ashli Babbitt. There was no bomb, like in the Capitol on March 6, 1970. Just a mob running through the Capitol building, taking selfies in the House chamber.

And yet, we learn, the Our Nance may have refused the offer of 10,000 troops from President Trump.

I have two questions. One is to understand what is really going on in the heads of chaps like Dan Strauss and Democrats in general with respect to lefty riots. Are they just lying, and going with the line that nothing to see here, just peaceful protests, because they want to destroy the GOP commoner voters? Somehow I can't believe that. I think that the problem is probably weakness, the "no enemies on the left" culture. The problem for a progressive politician is that he needs to be sympathetic to the protest/activist culture, because justice. If he is not as strong as the next lefty on the sacred right to "peaceful protest" then I suspect he can't have a career in Democratic politics.

Maybe it's just as simple as the existence of "oppressed peoples." First, there is systemic racism. Therefore we must protest against injustice. Therefore we can't be surprised if concerned activists sometimes cross a line; their hearts are in the right place.

And, clearly, both sides of the political conflict are fairly relaxed when their own side is in the streets, but terrified of the activists of the other side.

The other thing is the basic problem for all nationalistic Commoner Americans. When are our leaders going to figure out how to blow up the race card, and blow up the victim card, and blow up the "mostly peaceful protest" card?

I had a flash of intuition today reading two articles in Quilette about "suffering." You know, the suffering of a rough night on social media, and the paradox of increased "stress" in a time of physical plenty. The takeaway is that a good person cannot be indifferent to suffering; therefore we should do something about it.

The issue of suffering is also a big issue in Roger Scruton's Wagner's Parsifal: The Music of Redemption, i.e., redemption from suffering. There are all kinds of people suffering in Parsifal. But what do we do about it, Dick?

Obviously, while we are all called to ease suffering, there is a temptation for sufferers to take advantage of, or demand the compassion of others.

But that, of course, is exactly what our lefty friends tend to do. They demand that we redeem the sufferers, or we are racist-sexist-homophobes: What, they say? You don't care about other peoples' suffering?

Of course, we racist-sexist-homophobes might be tempted to say: after you, Alphonse. Let me see you do your Good Samaritan bit before you force me to contribute. And anyway, what is left of the redemptive aspect of relieving suffering when it is forced? No more Good Samaritan: just another taxpayer.

One of the points that Scruton brings out in his analysis of Parsifal is the cruelty of Titurel, forcing Amfortas to perform the Eucharist even though Amfortas suffers increased pain from his wound. Whaddya mean, forcing someone to redeem someone else's suffering at the cost of enormous pain? Who are you to insist, Titurel, old chap? Maybe that is what our liberal friends do, forcing America to succor their victim du jour no matter the cost to the ordinary Commoner forced to do the liberal's will.

Oh well. More research is needed.

Lefties, LGBTs, Liberals and Their Conceit

Radio host Dennis Prager has a list of questions to help you determine whether your Democratic friend is a liberal or a lefty. E.g.,

8. Is it racist to claim that Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed the greatest music ever composed?

9. Is the national anthem racist?

The idea is that: if they unfriend you for asking the question they are a lefty; if they don't they are a liberal.

But I think that rather misunderstands the problem, as though political identity comes with various stands on the issues. It does, after a fashion. But first is the "fake tribe" you belong to, and whose flag you fly.

For instance, on my walk at the top of this hill at Palatine and 60th this morning I passed a gray-haired woman -- probably 70ish -- hauling her garbage can back to her yard. Her house proudly boasts a hand-made Black Lives Matter sign and is in the process of getting solar panels installed on the roof.

Now, is that woman -- who lives on the street with the best views -- a lefty? I doubt it. She is just virtue-signaling that she belongs to the Good People. I expect she has never had an original thought in her life. She just instinctively adheres to the notions and the ideas of her community, and that community is the community of gentry liberals. Right now, all across the land, good gentry liberals appalled by Trump and white supremacy have BLM and #WeBelieve and "Hate Has No Home Here" signs in their yards. 

I'm sure that if I had stopped her and asked why she had a racist sign in her yard she would be mortally offended. It would never have occurred to her that a Black Lives Matter sign means anything other than she is opposed to Racist Police Violence. If I had told here that the leaders of Black Lives Matter proudly identified themselves as "trained Marxists," she would be saying to her gentry friends later today "I can't believe he said that." Because it does not compute for her: it is crazy-cakes.

It is part of the educated gentry's conceit that they are the better people.

Meanwhile Ellie Gardey at The American Spectator writes that "Thirty Percent of Young Liberals Now Identify as LGBT." She offers two theories about this. One theory -- courtesy of the LGBT activists -- is that it represents the natural sexual identity of humans.

The opposite theory would be that LGBT identity is socially conditioned, and that over 30 percent of young liberals adopt gay or transgender identities at least in part because those identities are celebrated within young progressive communities. Young liberals today treat LGBT identity as a protected class, grant greater social status to those who are gay and transgender, and even devote an entire month of the year to parades and celebrations promoting LGBT identity. In such an environment, young people could be encouraged to form a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender identity.

Yeah. I mean, if young people are carefully taught that to be gay is to be special, why wouldn't they go for it?

Well, you know how I would understand this. First, from my reductive Three Peoples theory, I would say that it makes sense that People of the Creative Self, who believe that the best life is a creative life, would certainly be open to creativity in sexuality, rather than the boring old marriage and children of the People of the Responsible Self.

I would also add the following possibility:

I believe that girls and women are instinctively (but not consciously) repelled by the humiliation that women have suffered from the sexual revolution. In my limited experience with women down the years, they like to be gently courted. And when they submit to your advances they imagine a relationship from now till eternity. That's a far cry from the campus "hookup" culture which assumes that everyone is ready for, or at least half-a-bottle of vodka away from, a one-night stand. Remember "Mattress Girl?" Her problem was that she didn't like being dumped by her German boy-friend. Indeed the "sexual harassment" thing is that women don't like being treated as a merely "sexual" object. Not by fellow college students, and not by Andrew Cuomo.

Remember LUG (Lesbian until graduation)? Makes complete sense to me. Why get tricked into the male game of notching conquests on the bed-post? Just check out of the dangerous -- and male -- game of sexual league tables until graduation. Hey, you "safetyists" ought to be able to see the sense in that!

See I argue backwards from my current position as a 74-year-old, that the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" is grandchildren. Why? Because the alternative is oblivion, and who needs that? So, to get to grandchildren, you need children. And to get to children you need heterosexual sex. And unless you want seriously angry children you need those children to be conceived in marriage. As a Colorado philosopher once said:

Children want a mother and a father; their mother and their father.

In my view, the whole LGBT thing is one of the "left's conceits."

And there is another aspect of this, one that tends to get elided in the normal course of things. It is this. The creative life -- in sex, in career -- is not for everyone. Indeed, I would say it is only for seriously crazy people. That's because, in the creativity stakes, many are called but few are chosen. How many people get to have a successful business startup? How many people get to be a famous writer or artist?  That is why Jungians like Jordan B. Peterson talk about the Sacrificial Hero dying on the border between Order and Chaos. Creativity ain't for everyone. Even the successful creative person probably dies in the creative moment. Because you know what the other name is for a creative person? Exactly: Heretic; someone turning the existing orthodoxy -- that's Greek for correct opinion -- upside down. And most people hate the guy that turns everything upside down.

Someday soon, I believe, this whole lefty, LGBT, liberal thing is going to collapse like a burst balloon. And the reason will be that women will revolt against it. I don't know how or when. I think it is already starting, with the movement against "sexual harassment" and the rise of "safetyism." Women expect to be protected, and if you don't protect them they will find someone who will.

The Political Wages of COVID

Now that the COVID deaths and hospitalizations are trending down, and Joe Biden is safely in the White House and all the misinformation is being safely "curated" and Donald Trump is reduced to saying wait until next time, what next?

A good safe pair of hands like Victor Davis Hanson says that the Bidens will enjoy a couple years of stimulus growth through 2022 but then watch out.

Maybe. But I think that we are going to see the people that were wasted by the epidemic get really angry, starting this spring and summer.

• Whatabout all the small businessmen that lost their businesses?
• Whatabout the ordinary people that lost their jobs?
• Whatabout the people put on "furlough"?
• Whatbaout the people that have not being paying their mortgages and rent and now must pay the piper?
• Whatabout the "homeless" cast upon the waters as the Skid Row bums were nearly a century ago?
• Whatabout the women that find out that they weren't protected after all?
• Whatabout everybody except upper-class Gentry that are really struggling right now?

And whatabout millions of people deeply damaged that I haven't even listed here because I am too stupid to have thought about them?

Part of the problem is the foolishness of our ruling class, and its inability to think beyond the boundaries of its political world where everything is a question of division and accusation, and every solution is a question of dividing the loot and plunder among the supporters.

See, to make the economy recover after a financial crisis or an epidemic what you do is lower the costs of doing business, with lower marginal tax rates and reduction in regulation -- you know like Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. What you do not do is hand out loot to your supporters, as FDR did in the 1930s and Barack Obama did in 2009 and Nancy Pelosi is doing now. Why? Because loot and plunder just impoverishes everyone -- yes, even the beneficiaries who learn the wrong lesson that the name of the game is to be first in line for the handouts.

I imagine that the major items in the fabled $1.9 trillion stimulus is handouts to teachers unions, Democrat-run states and localities, government employee unions, and well-connected corporations. It will be money that will not benefit Americans as a whole. Politely, this sort of governance is called "make-work." And it doesn't work. It didn't work after the Crash of 1929. It didn't work in the inflationary 1970s. It didn't work in the aftermath of the Crash of 2008. And it won't work now. Our rulers Have No Idea.

And that is saying nothing about the bigger problems, the wasteland from a century of progressive and lefty dominance and hegemony with its conceits, its crimes, its errors. Of which our gentry rulers Have No Idea.

For some time I have been blogging variously on the Left's Conceits, the Left's Crimes, the Left's Errors. But I can see that I need to boil it down into one itemized list, simply stated first as problem, and then as consequence.

Because I think that the accumulation of lefty detritus, multiplied by the COVID cock-up, is going to be the Big Thing in the next few years.