It is impossible to distinguish the conservative from the liberal perspective on the gender issue. This was the theme of “The Tarts and ‘Tards’ of Hollywood.” Duly, Fox Businesshammers away today at the glass ceiling fallacy, this time “the ceiling keeping women out of the C-Suite” is said to still “hover over the sharp-elbowed world of Wall Street.”
As with alleged racism, this is the post hoc, backward reasoning error in thinking, whereby discrimination or disadvantage is inferred from the absence of women—or any other group with grievances—from a certain sector.
Recall that, “Another of Obama’s economic prescriptions for a deepening depression was to sign a pay equity act, during which he carped that women still earn just ’78 cents for every dollar men earn?women of color even less.’ Such false assertions rely on comparisons of ‘the average wage of all women working fulltime with the average wage of all men working full time.'”
From “Barack Against The Boys”: “Scholarly reams have been written disputing this phony calculus, as it omits vital variables: How long the woman has been in the work force, her age, experience and education; or whether her career has been put on hold to marry and mother. Just as women are more likely than men to have had an interrupted career trajectory, so too are they more inclined to enter lower-paying professions: education instead of engineering, for example.”
“Nonetheless, allow me to dispel distaff America’s claims of disadvantage with a decisive argument:
“If women with the same skills as men were getting only 78 cents for every dollar a man earns, men would have long-since priced themselves out of the market. The fact that the wily entrepreneur doesn’t ditch men in favor of women suggests that different abilities and experience are at work, rather than a conspiracy to suppress women.”
Mr. John Derbyshire, the man whose blurb appears on your book, has been unceremoniously sacked by the eunuchs at NRO.
What an apt appellation for that castrate, Rich Lowry.
Adds Peter Brimelow of VDARE.COM:
“[T]o appease a Left-wing lynch mob, John Derbyshire has just been fired from the new, Politically Correct National Review—despite (or perhaps because of) his unmatched brilliance there, to say nothing of his cancer and his years of loyal service.”
National Review has been PC—and worse, boring—for as long as I can remember.
John, who, as Aditya mentioned, had endorsed my book without flinching, was fired by the intellectual pygmies of NRO, for a tract titled “The Talk: Nonblack Version,“ published at Taki’s Magazine.
UPDATE I: NRO did at least employ John for a long time. They have never considered my work and have never replied to submissions.
UPDATE II: When you read Amy Davidson’s inane histrionic piffle, published in an elite magazine, you realize that ousting John for his views is more about enforcing mediocrity than enforcing conformity.
Americans cannot abide enormous talent, unless it is in a mindless or uncontroversial field such as sport or hard science. You have to be mediocre in writing and thinking and echo one of two party lines. I lived in Canada (I’m a Canadian) where my stuff appeared in the national press, no less. That could never happen in the US.
UPDATE III: Richard Spencer: “… it’s hard to mistake the trajectory of official ‘Conservatism’ as anything other than a gradual degeneration and dumbing-down. NR has gone from James Burnham and Russell Kirk to Kathryn Jean Lopez and various man-children spouting human-rights doctrines. … the mainstream Right [is] much stupider…more defined by the Goldbergs, Ponnurus, Lowrys, and Lopezes of the world…and more obviously a racket and dead-end. …”
UPDATE IV (April 10): In reply to the Facebook thread. Aditya, AMM, and others: To me, the Derb issue is never about whether you agree or disagree with his article, as Richard Spencer does (on FB, I quoted a slice of Spencer’s piece with which I agree). This perennial Soviet-style purging is never about “agreement,” to me. I do not know why people think that if you want to see a lot of well-written, wickedly witty, controversial writing in print (pixels or paper), as I do—you necessarily endorse all of it.
NONSENSE.
During the Iraq war, when the likes of Paul Craig Roberts, myself and other non-Beltway libertarians and paleos were writing up a storm against Bush’s barbarity–and being ousted and banished for it—Roberts noted that readers wanted to see a mirror of their opinions in his writing. This is so true. Readers judge me not in terms of style, thinking; quality of writing, a challenge to consensus, etc., but in accordance with how much I reflect their opinions; do they agree with me.
Cognitive consonance is what writing in the Age of the idiot is all about.
The narrowing of the American mind is not the fault of corporations; its The People’s fault, for heaven’s sake. Corporations would not survive if they ceased to cater to The People, who are tyrants in their own right. This leftist argument misconstrues the direction of the dumbing of America.
I am on record as saying that I am not comfortable with the racialist right’s tack. (To quote: “I think I reflect Western man’s disdain for race as an organizing principle, and for broad generalizations. Good luck with organizing modern westerners around race. I prefer to beat back the state so that individuals regain freedom of association, dominion over property, the absolute right of self-defense; the right to hire, fire, and, generally, associate at will. That’s the route to freedom.”)
But I simply love—and think it is necessary to a free society—to see all well-expressed, eloquent opinion and argument in print, at the pleasure of that print’s owners.
Of course, self-interest plays a role in wanting to see Derb and his work prevail. Derb is one of many canaries in this minefield of our own making.
UPDATE V: Maureen O’Connor of Gawker.com has actually done the job of a journalist in interviewing Derb. I hope he gets a book deal or makes a ton of money out of this shameful episode in the annals of NR.
UPDATE VI: “The first pessimists were the Old Testament prophets.” I love the Prophets, Jeremiah being my favorite. John Derbyshire on The B.S. of A. with Brian Sack (Full)
Craig Seligman’s Bloomberg column—it’s not worth reading—is about South African “Nobelist Nadine Gordimer,” known for her impenetrable prose, having “channeled her rage” over the reality of the “Rambo Nation” in yet more obscurantist prose.
(“Rambo Nation” is the title of the Introduction to “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.”)
Permissible rage over the new South African mobocracy has to be a mixed-race affair. After all, you can’t tell the story of the dispossessed white minority (Afrikaner farmers), currently “being culled like springbok in a hunting safari.”
“Hoodie on the Hill’ blared the Drudge-Report headline, as the street theatre playing out over the shooting death of Trayvon Martin crossed over to the House floor. There, concealed by the by-now iconic hood and “gangsta” glasses was one Bobby Rush, a Democratic representative. Rush blessed Trayvon Martin’s departed soul.
The name Trayvon is soon to be a trademark. It may yet spawn a franchise, as the youth’s grieving mother has had the presence of mind to file with the US Patent and Trademark Office.
If you’ve managed to miss the news, Martin was a 17-year-old black youth, shot dead last month by a Hispanic man with a Jewish surname. George Zimmerman—who, for the purposes of the “Racism Industrial Complex” is being considered white—was patrolling a Florida gated community, as part of his neighborhood-watch duties.
Other than that Martin was unarmed and that George Zimmerman has not been arrested, the facts of the case have yet to be established. Since then, the “Racism Industrial Complex (RIC)” (columnist Jack Kerwick’s coinage), has galvanized on behalf of Trayvon.
The Hollywood faction of the RIC sicced its followers on the wrong Zimmerman, after tweeting out an unverified address in the hope of getting the shooter lynched. Somewhere in the Sunshine State a retired Jew is on the lam. …”
To me, what stands out in this “Media Mash” featuring the “Racism Industrial Complex (RIC)” is the sub-intelligent level of it all. Via NewsBusters:
Reacting angrily to selective editing by NBC that suggested racial animus by George Zimmerman, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell complained to Fox News’s Sean Hannity last night that NBC News was engaged in an “all-out falsehood.” The story in question was a March 27 Ron Allen report on NBC’s ‘Today’ in which 911 audio was edited to make it sound like George Zimmerman said “he looks black” immediately after saying “this guy looks like he’s up to no good.”
In the actual 911 audio, Zimmerman only described Martin’s race after the dispatcher asked, “And this guy: is he white, black, or Hispanic?” “To edit that out is so distorting,” Hannity complained. “Sean, it’s not distorting, it’s advancing a falsehood, it’s worse,” Bozell corrected the Fox News anchor. [see video below page break]
What’s more, with Al Sharpton in the NBC family on cable channel MSNBC, the network has been ginning up another Tawana Brawley-like atmosphere where passions are whipped into a frenzy before all the facts are laid out on the table.
“The radical left has already acted as judge, jury and executioner in this. This is another Tawana Brawley moment we’re looking at folks,” Bozell noted, reminding viewers that “Sharpton never apologized for that” incident.
“Every single person who hung this person [Zimmerman] without knowing the facts has got to respond to this,” Bozell complained.
To pick up on the aforementioned sub-intelligent themes in the cognoscenti’s one-sided “conversations” about race, I just heard a black commentator advance the following on MSNBC: A white girl dying at the hands of a black is sad, but devoid of the significance that attaches to the crime when visited on a black. I paraphrase the moron.
The pundit didn’t seem a malevolent man, just deeply stupid, for the non sequitur he was advancing was that black-on-white crime can never spring from endemic and epidemic racial hatred. Thus is it devoid of social and symbolic significance. “Casualty of racial hatred”: This is a construct that exists (in the abstract) for blacks alone.
MSNBC’s Tamron Hall, who is unburdened by brains, tweeted her affections for the guest (from Freedom Watch we know that these shows are more often about entertaining the host’s “good friends.”)
tamronhall .@Toure passionate and fury all wrapped into one very smart and loyal friend coming up live in 2min
Seven black teens have been arrested on suspicion that they committed a hate crime when they attacked a 15-year-old Hispanic boy while he was walking home from school in Southern California, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office.
The March 14 beating in Palmdale was captured on video and posted on YouTube, but has since been removed from the site. The seven boys, ages 13 to 16, were arrested Wednesday for investigation of assault and committing a hate crime, Lt. Don Ford said.
The attack happened near Cactus Middle School, but Ford didn’t know if any of the teens involved were students there.
The video shows as many as 10 boys surrounding the victim and challenging him to a fight. The suspects then began hitting the teen while others watched.
During the beating, the teens made racially derogatory statements that were captured on the video, Ford said.
After the victim fell to the ground, the assailants kicked him multiple times in the head, knocked out several teeth and left shoe impressions on his skin, Ford said.
