College administrators and sexual assault cases: the story of a sort-of-changer

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a curious article by Lee Burdette Williams, the former dean of students at the University of Connecticut. In it, Williams describes her growing disillusionment with the way in which sexual harassment and sexual assault cases are handled by universities and in particular university administrators such as herself. She acknowledges that accused men have not received the benefit of fairness in the proceedings, and her upset over that was one of the reasons she quit a job she’d previously loved.

I call it a curious document because although it’s essentially a political change story, and Williams seems like a nice person who has become more aware of some things, in other ways she exhibits naivete and even cluelessness. Perhaps this isn’t unusual; change is often difficult and slow.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

…[W]hen it comes to accusations of sexual assault, I have known both men and women who are brave and honest, and men and women who lie without a moment’s hesitation. So yes — “believe the woman” is a good place to start, but it is not the place to finish. And that journey from start to finish? There are many twists, detours, and roadblocks, but it must be taken. And to do so — to travel that complicated road — is not in itself a dismissal of a woman’s accusation.

Actually, “believe the woman” is a terrible place to start. It introduces bias at the very beginning of the process. “Believe the (any category of person)” is always a terrible place to start. Does Williams not understand why justice wears a blindfold? Does she not get the idea of a neutral, objective process? In some ways she appears to do so, but cannot jettison the idea that, because at times in the past women may have been routinely dismissed as liars, suddenly deciding to believe women at the outset of a proceeding and to disbelieve men is no sort of corrective at all. It merely reverses the injustice.

This is blatantly obvious.

Nevertheless, Williams appears sincere in her regret. The essay is entitled, “‘How Much Damage Have My Colleagues and I Done?’ – A former dean of students loses faith in how colleges handle sexual assault.” I doubt that most deans in Williams position have gotten as far as she has in understanding what went wrong, although in her essay she alludes to the fact that there are others who are aware of the problems.

The news on the 2020 election

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s been over a half year since the 2020 election. The left, the Democrats, the MSM, and the powers of social media have all long ago declared the subject of whether there was fraud in the votes and/or vote-counting over and done with, finished, the science and the law settled, in favor of “no fraud whatsoever – move on you lying crazy people on the right!”

And yet here we have a rather lengthy summary of the current ongoing audits and challenges.

One of the problems with uncovering whether election fraud has occurred is that it takes so long to do so. Another is that it’s very hard to prove because sometimes the evidence is not available for a number of possible reasons. And even if somehow it’s proven, it can be hard to prove the exact extent of it and whether it would have changed the result.

So, even if somehow election fraud is finally proven, it’s usually way too late and/or impossible to do anything about it in terms of changing the election and unseating the people who are now in office as a result. That acts as a motivation for fraud, if the goal is to win elections and take power.

The only solution is to make fraud difficult or impossible to accomplish. The left argues that that is already the case and that any further efforts would unconscionably disenfranchise people, especially minorities. The right begs to differ.

Uncovering the actual, proven existence of significant fraud in the 2020 would injure the left’s argument even if it wouldn’t change the result, and therefore the left is determined to prevent the investigations into the possibility of fraud. But some of these investigations are still going forward.

The recurring question of why the Jews didn’t leave Germany and Europe in time

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a reposting of an old piece of mine that I think could use another go-round. The reason is that I often see people reference the idea that the Jews of Germany ignored or rationalized or denied or excused what was happening in Germany during the 1930s, and didn’t sound the alarm and leave in time. The idea is used to illustrate various points, but the reason I’m posting this is that for the most part the idea simply isn’t true. I’d like to try to clear that up once again.

I’ve also written or taken voluminous notes for drafts on other misconceptions – for example, that Jews went meekly “like lambs to the slaughter” and never resisted when in fact they might have or could have. Another topic for another time.]

It occurs to me from a recent exchange in the comments section that it might be a good idea to visit the topic of the reaction of the Jews of Germany to Hitler.

First I’d like to clear up one thing: the question of what percentage of the German population was Jewish back then. I wrote a post about the topic in September of 2005. Here’s an except:

…[I]n the course of doing some research on World War II and the Holocaust, I came across a statistic that absolutely stunned me: the percentage of Jews in the population of Germany prior to World War II and Hitler’s rise.

Since then, every so often I will ask people if they can guess what it might have been, and no one’s ever gotten it right off the top of their heads, or even come close.

So, what percentage of the population of pre-WWII Germany do you suppose was Jewish? Take a moment and think about it. Then guess.

You can do that now.

Here’s the answer, and it will almost undoubtedly surprise you (unless, of course, you were reading this blog years ago and remember that previous post):

According to the census of June 1933, the Jewish population of Germany consisted of about 500,000 people. Jews represented less than one percent of the total German population of about 67 million people.

Now that we’ve got that cleared up, let’s go to the larger topic: did the great majority of these Jews naively and hopefully fail to see the Nazi menace, and did they stay in Germany too long?

The answer to that is: it doesn’t seem that way. Actually, the majority of them left rather than wait it out. And many who waited it out did so because they could not leave—either because they were old and ill, and/or poor, and/or because all avenues of escape were closed to them.

Here are the statistics:

Increasing antisemitism prompted a wave of a Jewish mass emigration from Germany throughout the 1930s. Soon after their rise to power in 1933, the Nazis negotiated the Haavara Agreement between Zionist authorities in Palestine, which was signed on August 25, 1933. Under its terms, 60,000 German Jews were allowed to emigrate to Palestine and take $100 million in assets with them. Between 1929 and 1939, a total of 250,000 Jewish immigrants arrived in Palestine, mostly from Germany. Of these, 174,000 arrived between 1933 and 1936. After that, the British Mandatory authorities imposed limits on Jewish immigration, which led to clandestine illegal immigration. This wave of immigration was part of the Fifth Aliyah, and saw many Jewish doctors, lawyers, professionals, and professors leave the country.

The United States was another destination for German Jews seeking to leave the country, though the number allowed to immigrate was restricted due to the Immigration Act of 1924. Between 1933 and 1939, more than 300,000 Germans, some 90% of them Jews, applied for immigration visas to the United States. By 1940, only 90,000 German Jews had been granted visas and allowed to settle in the United States…

Overall, of the 522,000 Jews living in Germany in January 1933, only 214,000 were left by the eve of World War II.

It was probably easier to leave earlier in the 1930s as opposed to later. But from the above numbers you can see that a lot of people were trying—and even succeeding—during the mid-30s. For example, by my calculations, one-third of the entire German Jewish population managed to get to Palestine by 1936, before things tightened up and it became much more difficult to emigrate there (but even before that, numbers were limited by law).

What’s more, some who did leave Germany early on got trapped in their supposed places of refuge as time went on:

Some 100,000 German Jews also moved to Western European countries, especially France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. However, these countries would later be occupied by Germany, and many of them would still fall victim to the Holocaust.

In most cases emigration required cunning, connections, and money, and even then it often failed. The German Jews were generally more well-off and assimilated than Jews in countries where the Jewish population was much larger, such as Poland. I’ve talked mostly about Germany so far, but as is evident from the statistics, the Jews of Germany constituted a very small minority compared to the Jews of Europe. However, German Jews were more directly affected early on by Hitler and the Nazis and their restrictive laws. In other parts of Europe, the Jews would have been alerted to the dangers only later. But they were subject to all the restrictions mentioned, and it’s actually quite amazing that many made it out at all.

For every person who managed to leave, I would guess (although I have no way of knowing for sure) there were many many more who tried very hard and yet failed. A personal anecdote: I have read the translation of a series of letters written by a Polish Jew who was a relation by marriage. These documents are utterly heartbreaking and chilling. They begin in 1936 and continue to 1939, although there is one very brief one written in the early 1940’s. They consist of reports of what’s happening in Poland and requests for help in order to emigrate to America, where my ex-husband’s uncle (the recipient of the letters) was living at the time.

The writer was eventually trapped in Poland and murdered in the Holocaust. He was an ordinary man in the sense of having no particular wealth—as I recall, he had a small textile business—and he even had a brother in the US willing to help and pull every string he could find, including promising the US government that he would take financial responsibility for him. All to no avail.

The following excerpts will give you a flavor of the sentiments and thoughts expressed in these missives. Here’s a quote from the earliest letter that survived (from 1936):

Our situation here grows worse from day to day. A Jew here is worse off than a dog that runs about the streets…The burden of taxes is unbearable. Not a week goes by that there isn’t something new. And it is always on the Jew. It is truly indescribable. You Jew, you have money for everything. And on the other hand, the Jew is persecuted as a Communist. The whole story of the Middle Ages is being repeated.

…Polish Jewry is in a desperate state. Above all, there are no prospects in life for the young people. Very few marriages are taking place among Polish Jews, and so on. The young people see no future for themselves here. They want to emigrate, but unfortunately the world is completed closed to them…Above all, we are very frightened…These days, the people in high places speak openly about how they need to rid Poland of at least 100,000 Jews. Anti-Semitism is growing by leaps and bounds. They send free anti-Semitic newspapers into every village. The Jew is blamed for everything.

Here is one from 1939:

Now, my dear brother, let’s get down to business. You write that you spoke to a “lawyer” [Eng.] and he told you that he would find out everything that needs to be done. My dear brother, you should know that I dwell on this day and night; I simply don’t sleep.

Most importantly, you must understand what I write you. First, the American consulate here is very strict about the papers it receives. First, the papers must indicate that the person submitting them is in a good financial situation ”“mainly that his income exceeds his expenses, that he can support [the immigrants.]. If so, they grant a visa. I don’t know if you can show this. If your boss [Eng.] can provide certification that you are paid, for example, $70, and that you require only $40, and you can also show that you have a couple of thousand in the bank, that is good. My dear, I would very much like to rescue the children from this fire. I believe that there is sure to be a war in Europe, and you are well aware what the word “war” represents.

They do everything they can to get rid of the Jews. A young person, if only he has the wherewithal, wants to escape, as if from hell. Oh, my dear brother, we must do everything with great care and deliberation, to see that things go well, because in the American consulate in Warsaw they look to see who has better papers, and better guarantees, and those people get a visa sooner. That’s the thing you have to see to. There are people whose papers have been lying in the consulate for three years already, and still nothing has happened. And whoever has papers that show that someone can put up a lot of money as a guarantee, and also makes a good living, then it’s OK. May God help us get this done successfully.

Here is one from later in 1939:

If I had something happy to write, I would write to you twice a week. Unfortunately, such terrible things happen occasionally, they are indescribable. What times we are living in! People were mistaken in their belief that the aristocracy will win, and that courtesy and decency will rule. Instead, we have barbarism, ferocious violence, concentration camps and women buried alive with babies in their arms. This continues, and England still supports it and gives [untranslatable word] and so on.

…And it’s now clear that war is inevitable. Hitler has arms and people; he needs bread. All of world Jewry must be ready to fight all on fronts with strength and money and influence, to make sure that he fails. For he has decreed that Jews are bad and must be stamped out and their possessions taken.

Now, my dear brother, I know you are eager to know what has happened with the papers you sent. It is not a simple matter. Everyone loves the Jews but nobody wants them [as immigrants in their country]. The American consulate is inundated with [illegible word] and it goes with great difficulty.

From two letters late in 1939:

This week I got your letter with the [illegible word] that you wrote to the senator [word is in English]. I see that you are devoted and want to rescue my children from this powder keg. Today it said in the paper that America will be closed for 5 years…

America pities and sends wishes to the Jews. Can’t they let in a couple of million Polish, German, Rumanian and Austrian Jews?

It’s like the rich man who was very charitable. A poor man came begging at his door in winter. It was exceptionally cold. The rich man stood at the door and gave him alms. Shouts the poor man, I don’t want alms. It’s cold and I’m freezing. Let me in so I can warm myself a bit. No answer. The rich man gives him a couple more pennies, but doesn’t let him in.

There was a time when the Spanish and German Jews were chased out and Poland took them in. And now in such developed countries as America and England”“they know how to give alms but they won’t allow you to come in and warm yourself.

I’ll stop there, but I’ll add that these represent only a few short excerpts from a much lengthier series of letters that show a man who knows that he and his children are almost certainly trapped and doomed, and yet is fighting with all his might to escape. It is inexpressibly sad to read these letters and know what happened.

How typical this man’s sentiments and knowledge were at the time I do not know. But to me they suggest that a substantial number of the Jews who stayed in Europe in the 30s and died there in the 40s were quite aware of the fate that awaited them, either in general or very specific terms, and had tried their best to escape. But for most of them there was no way to do it and nowhere to go.

“Whiteness” as quasi-religious dogma in the New Anti-Racism Church

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “mkent” writes:

“White” isn’t a color or a race (they call it a race, but it’s not — not in the way they use it), it’s a class.

Thus John Kerry, Al Gore, and Joe Biden are not “white” or “male”, they’re “elite” — a whole different class entirely. Elites are not responsible for the sins of white males, and thus the anti-white and anti-male dictates of the ruling elite don’t apply to them.

I’ve noticed for years that the left loves jargon and often doesn’t use words in the way they’ve been ordinarily used. So I will add that the left often likes to speak of white people, but lately is very fond of speaking of “whiteness” instead (see, for example, the field of “whiteness studies”).

“Whiteness” as a word seems to have a function for the left, and my guess is that its function is to introduce a means by which the left can deny that it is being racist against white people, and instead is railing against a concept that white people supposedly have or supposedly represent, which is “whiteness.”

It also reminds me of Moby Dick and Melville’s discourse on the whiteness of the whale:

Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could not but occasionally awaken in any man’s soul some alarm, there was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught…

This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds. Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness, even more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb gloating of their aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or shark.

More – a great deal more – at the link.

Whether the left is talking about white people or whiteness, it’s speaking about a race plus a list of ethnicities from which some groups who are members of that race (for example, Palestinians and Pakistanis) are excluded and are considered by the left to have earned the designation brown (i.e. oppressed), and it is also (as mkent points out) a class, primarily but not entirely. For example, elite white people on the right are certainly included in the horrors of whiteness and may in fact be the worst exemplars of the concept for the left if those elite people are on the right politically. Elites on the left, on the other hand, can set themselves apart from and get dispensation from the terrible stain and sin of whiteness – to a certain degree anyway – by acknowledging their evil nature.

So confession is the first step towards at least partial absolution.

“Whiteness” is a sort of original sin in the dogma to the woke “anti-racist” left and the “anti-racism” cult which functions as a quasi-religion. In this respect, it both fills the religious gap left by the abandonment of religion by atheists and also supplements the religious belief systems of those in current-day “woke” religious denominations.

I got back too late…

The New Neo Posted on by

…to post at any length tonight.

So I’ll just do a quick roundup:

(1) Texas as the Little Red Hen: “Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday announced plans to build a wall along the state’s border with Mexico.”

(2) No, Trump didn’t tear gas protestors last summer, but the MSM said he did anyway.

(3) The American Psychoanalytic Association has officially flipped its lid – although perhaps that happened quite some time ago:

Dr. Donald Moss — a published author who teaches at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute — published “On Having Whiteness” last month in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

“Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has — a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which ‘white’ people have a particular susceptibility,” an abstract of the article on Sage Journals says.

I don’t have a diagnosis for Dr. Moss – who is white, by the way – or for the journal that published this garbage. But he certainly doesn’t seem to be a “mental health practitioner,” except in the Orwellian sense. Physician, heal thyself.

(4) The Chinese may have developed a COVID vaccine even before the first US COVID death occurred, and hidden the information from the world.

Obama the Expert weighs in on Critical Race Theory

The New Neo Posted on by

Oh, for the days when ex-presidents were silent in their post-presidential years, only to emerge for a ceremonial role or two. Those days are gone.

I believe that Obama is still working behind the scenes as one of the people guiding the present administration. But every now and then he also pops up publicly to say a few words in his accustomed loftily superior manner.

This time the topic is Critical Race Theory, about which he intones:

Progress has been made, former President Barack Obama told CNN’s Anderson Cooper, but he finds it’s still hard for the “majority” of white Americans to “recognize you can be proud of this country and its traditions and its history and our forefathers, and yet it is also true that this terrible stuff happened. The vestiges of that linger and continue.”

And what is Obama actually saying there? Does he really believe that the majority of white Americans who themselves have pride in their country are unaware that “terrible stuff” (such as, for example, slavery) happened? Obama is mendacious, among other things, because of course he knows that proud Americans who are white are well aware of the long hard struggle of black people for equality under the law, and its repercussions. Obama’s statement is nonsensical, but you have to actually stop and think about it to perceive that, and he’s counting on the fact that most people probably won’t.

But Obama is presenting himself as the authority on white Americans and how they think – just as he was the authority on that “typical white person” – the grandmother who raised him (see this post for a discussion of Obama’s 2008 reference). Obama has developed to a fine art the ability to say something incredibly racist in a way that masks not just how racist it is, but how condescending and accusative it is, while somehow preserving a calm professorial air of being above it all.

The title of that post I linked in the previous paragraph – which was written over two years ago – is “Obama paved the way for anti-white rhetoric.” And indeed, he did. He was a trailblazer in opening up that particular Overton Window and so many others, and the changes in race relations and race rhetoric since the day he took office have been both extreme and uniformly destructive. Obama has done more to harm relations between the races in this country than any other president in my lifetime, and he has managed to do it without most people even catching on.

[NOTE: Obama also uses one of his favorite words – “stuff” – in that paragraph I quoted. I wrote a post discussing how often he uses that word.]

Why did the Democrats pick Biden?

The New Neo Posted on by

Not long ago, commenter “baltimoron” wrote:

As much as I disliked Kennedy and Clinton, I could understand why Democrats and a few independent voters were willing to look past their flaws. I didn’t agree with them, mind you, but I understood it. Creepy Joe is different. I genuinely do not understand how the guy got as far as he did. He’s inarticulate, does and says weird things, no one seems to respect him, he has no built in constituency. How did the Democrats pick him?

It might seem that way on the surface. But Biden was a great choice, actually, if their most pressing goal was to stop Trump. After all, Biden had been Obama’s VP, so he had the reflected glory that seems to still shine on Obama with so many people. Secondly, Biden was thought to be a known commodity with a valuable reputation as a moderate. Therefore he could be sold that way to voters in 2020, even though the intent of electing him was not to have a moderate administration at all. Unlike quite a few radical leftists who were running against him in the 2020 primaries, Biden could appeal to the voters more or less in the middle, who hated Trump. And there were plenty of those.

Political operatives in the Democratic Party correctly figured that Biden could be successfully hidden and restricted in movement and appearances because of COVID. Therefore his cognitive and physical deficiencies would be at least somewhat hidden, and the press would cooperate. There was a risk there, to be sure: too many voters might notice anyway. But it was outweighed by the aforementioned pluses of a Biden candidacy, and anyway who would be the alternative if Biden wasn’t the candidate? The was no obvious better choice.

Biden is supposedly “likeable” – and if he isn’t (I never have found him so, even when I was a Democrat), people who are told something like that often enough can sometimes buy it if they want to. In Biden’s case, people wanted to because they were tired of all the contention around Trump. Biden was sold as a return to normalcy, whether the normalcy of the Obama years or the Clinton years, and that was very appealing to people who were weary of what they considered the unpleasant circus swirling around Trump’s every utterance, every tweet, and every move.

Biden himself also had another huge plus for Democrats on the left who were moving the levers behind the scenes – he has no principles and is malleable and was likely to do whatever the left told him.

As I said, there was no viable alternative to Biden, particularly when the choice eventually narrowed down (as it did) to Bernie Sanders vs. Biden. Sanders was too radical and would scare people back into Trump’s waiting arms. Therefore Sanders was simply unacceptable.

Nowadays few people talk about how great Biden is, except in terms of not-Trump and being “normal” . The lack of greatness doesn’t matter to them, because if all Biden did was to replace Trump, that would have been enough for them. The Democrats I’ve talked to about Biden also don’t seem aware of any deficits in him worth mentioning, even now. Whether this is because the MSM has successfully blocked news of those deficits or whether these people simply see only what they wish to see, I really don’t know. But I note the phenomenon.