The same rules for each side?

The New Neo Posted on by

Alan Dershowitz believes that even partisans must apply the same rules to each side:

Now that it is President Trump who is being targeted, my partisan Democratic friends are vociferously rejecting these neutral civil liberties arguments, because they do not now serve their partisan political interests. Nor do they seem embarrassed by their apparent hypocrisy and double standards. Hypocrisy is a small price to pay for partisan political victories.

For me, the primary test for whether an argument is principled or partisan is “the shoe on the other foot” test…

The time has come for all Americans who believe in enduring principles of morality and justice to insist on consistency. Ralph Waldo Emerson was wrong when he demeaned “foolish consistency” as “the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

Consistency of principles is neither foolish nor small-minded. It is the essence of any moral system. Principled consistency may be difficult to achieve, especially in our current hyper-partisan atmosphere.

That last sentence is the understatement of the year, perhaps of the century. I agree with the point Dershowitz is making, and I try to live by it. But I’m not naive enough to think many people will follow his call.

On Charlottesville

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been mulling over what to write about the recent events in Charlottesville, and I think the best way to start (I’m a bit pressed for time today) is to link to this post by William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection. I’m in very substantial agreement with what he says there, so just read it and then come back here.

I’ll add that this past weekend while the events were unfolding I was at a big family celebration that took up most of my time, so I didn’t follow the news with my usual intensity. But I couldn’t avoid this news, in part because it was brought up several times in conversations with relatives. As is often the case for me, those relatives were pretty much of like mind with each other—the range was liberal to left, at least for the vocal ones (there may be one or two closet conservatives)—and so I can report that all of the talkers seemed to assume that the demonstrators were Nazis and Trump is a Nazi and that the only side that was violent in the Charlotteville confrontation was the Nazi side. My only contribution to the conversation (and I think this was only on the first day) was to mention that even Nazis have a right to demonstrate peacefully, a la Skokie and the ACLU.

Alas, when you’re talking to a group during a social engagement, you can’t provide a link like that, and if they don’t get the reference it goes unnoticed. I got a few blank looks, and that made me think that this particular crowd had no idea what I was talking about when I mentioned Skokie and the ACLU. If so (and I’m not 100% sure I was right about that), then the free speech foundation of at least the beginning of the entire episode—supported by the tradition of even a group as far left as the ACLU—would have been lost, and we therefore were starting out with a lack of common ground.

I hate Nazis, neo or paleo. I have no sympathy for either white supremacists or those who hate white people. And violence has no place in demonstrations, and the city of Charlottesville should have had enough police there to make sure to nip any violence in the bud.

As far as Trump goes, he should have issued this statement of his at the outset instead of after a delay. However, I do not think the delay means he has any sympathy with neo-Nazis or white supremacists, either. Excerpt:

Racism is evil — and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans,” Trump said in response to the attacks in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend.

“Those who spread violence in the name of bigotry strike at the very core of America,” Trump said.

Of course, it won’t satisfy his critics. Nothing would, including if he had said those words at the outset. He would have been accused of lying for political gain.

Leaving the left: Keri Smith, changer

The New Neo Posted on by

Several readers have suggested that I read this essay by a thoughtful former SJW who has just about had it with what she sees on the left:

I’ve been undergoing a pretty significant change in the way I interpret the world and how to ”˜be’ in it…

I see increasing numbers of so-called liberals cheering censorship and defending violence as a response to speech. I see seemingly reasonable people wishing death on others and laughing at escalating suicide and addiction rates of the white working class. I see liberal think pieces written in opposition to expressing empathy or civility in interactions with those with whom we disagree. I see 63 million Trump voters written off as “nazis” who are okay to target with physical violence. I see concepts like equality and justice being used as a mask for resentful, murderous rage.

The most pernicious aspect of this evolution of the left, is how it seems to be changing people, and how rapidly since the election. I have been dwelling on this Nietzsche quote for almost six months now, “He who fights with monsters, should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” How easy is it for ordinary humans to commit atrocious acts? History teaches us it’s pretty damn easy when you are blinded to your own hypocrisy. When you believe you are morally superior, when you have dehumanized those you disagree with, you can justify almost anything. In a particularly vocal part of the left, justification for dehumanizing and committing violence against those on the right has already begun.

I’d like to (belatedly) welcome the author, Keri Smith, to the ranks of political changers. How far she ends up going in the political sense—all the way to the right, part of the way to the right, smack in the middle, or still slightly to the left—is up to her. But I salute her in her journey. I was never as far to the left as she seems to have been, but I recognize the process of suddenly noticing political things one never saw before. It’s a frightening and even shocking and yet exciting and stimulating journey, and I wish her well.

Smith is surprised at what she sees in people on the left, and considers it to be a change since the 2016 election. I would note, however, that it’s only more readily apparent since the election, because what she’s describing is not only something inherent on the left but something basic to humanity. Nietzsche’s words are cautionary for the right, too, in our efforts to fight the forces arrayed against us on the left.

James Damore explains his firing

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s what he writes:

I was fired by Google this past Monday for a document that I wrote and circulated internally raising questions about cultural taboos and how they cloud our thinking about gender diversity at the company and in the wider tech sector. I suggested that at least some of the male-female disparity in tech could be attributed to biological differences (and, yes, I said that bias against women was a factor too). Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai declared that portions of my statement violated the company’s code of conduct and “cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.”

My 10-page document set out what I considered a reasoned, well-researched, good-faith argument, but as I wrote, the viewpoint I was putting forward is generally suppressed at Google because of the company’s “ideological echo chamber.” My firing neatly confirms that point. How did Google, the company that hires the smartest people in the world, become so ideologically driven and intolerant of scientific debate and reasoned argument?

Damore’s answer has to do with Google as what used to be called a “total institution” back in my college days of sociology classes. (I was a soc major for a while before I switched to psych, and the total institution concept was one of the things that stuck in my brain as meaningful.) Damore doesn’t use the term, but I do. Workplaces such as Google now feed their employees and take up tons of their time, constituting little worlds unto themselves—so hey, why not tell their employees how to think? In fact, they hardly have to do the latter; it just happens naturally in a total institution:

For many, including myself, working at Google is a major part of their identity, almost like a cult with its own leaders and saints, all believed to righteously uphold the sacred motto of “Don’t be evil.”…

Public shaming serves not only to display the virtue of those doing the shaming but also warns others that the same punishment awaits them if they don’t conform.

In my document, I committed heresy against the Google creed by stating that not all disparities between men and women that we see in the world are the result of discriminatory treatment.

There’s much more, but the gist of it is that once the document was circulated more widely within Google and then online, the SJWs (he doesn’t call them that) raised a hue and cry and Google almost had no choice but to fire him, or “the mob would have set upon” the company itself.

Damore manages to write the entire thing without mentioning politics, left or right, conservatism or liberalism or libertarianism. It’s quite a feat, because of course what he’s talking about is the intolerance of diversity of opinion that is part and parcel of modern-day liberalism (which has become increasingly leftist). I applaud him, though. He’s a brave guy. And he might end up getting some money from Google as well—although whatever amount it is, it will be a mere drop in the bucket for the groupthinking giant.

[NOTE: Read this to get the flavor of the counter-reaction:

Getting rid of Damore thus might have been the right thing for Google. But the fact that he will now be a reactionary culture hero is bad for the rest of us. He is a familiar type””one who postures as a brave truth-teller passing around sexism like samizdat. These men draw power from being censored. We flatter them when we treat them as dangers rather than fools.

That’s the kind of thinking Damore’s up against. I suppose the rest of us are up against it, too.]

A lie…

The New Neo Posted on by

…gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its boots on.

And so does a faked photo on Twitter.

That “truth” quote is one of my favorite quotes, but I’m fascinated by how many versions of it exist, and how many people are reported to have been its originator. Sometimes it’s boots that are so slow to don, sometimes shoes, sometimes pants, sometimes breeches, and sometimes the truth is just mysteriously disabled and comes limping along.

More on that tedious Google flap

The New Neo Posted on by

The article of the day is this by Cynthia Lee entitled, “I’m a woman in computer science. Let me ladysplain the Google memo to you.”

Lee is “a lecturer in the computer science department at Stanford…[with] a PhD in high-performance computing.” That “ladysplaining” bit seems to be an attempt to be cute by alluding to a popular expression, “mansplaining,” which is a feminist criticism of the way men write/think. But what is she parodying there? Feminism—because, at least as far as I know, men don’t use the expression “ladysplaining” when they’re criticizing the way women write and/or think.

Lee doesn’t appear to address what I consider the most important part of the Google incident—not the memo itself or the discussion that ensued, but the fact that its writer was fired as a result of the pressure.

I’m not going to go through the whole article point by point. Suffice to say it seemed to be ignoring the problems I discussed in a recent post on the Google flap: the difficulty of judging whether equality of opportunity exists, versus a focus on equality of outcome. This is the heart of the matter for me. Instead, Lee writes:

Regardless of whether biological differences exist, there is no shortage of glaring evidence, in individual stories and in scientific studies, that women in tech experience bias and a general lack of a welcoming environment, as do underrepresented minorities. Until these problems are resolved, our focus should be on remedying that injustice. After that work is complete, we can reassess whether small effect size biological components have anything to do with lingering imbalances.

I find this incredibly confusing. These seem to be two separate (and possibly-related) issues: how many women are in tech jobs and why there might be fewer of them than some women would like, and the environment faced by the women who already do work there. I suppose there might be a connection if you assume that the women already employed are telling the women applying for jobs not to apply because the atmosphere is so bad, but nowhere does Lee indicate such a thing is happening. So, how does she justify the fact that the first needs to be worked on before the second is tackled?

Also, the word that jumped out at me in that paragraph was “injustice.” Why is it an injustice to not be met with a “welcoming environment”? It might not be nice, or pleasant, or satisfying, or comfortable. But feeling a lack of “welcome” is hardly unjust.

What does that word “unjust” signify on the part of Lee? What is she trying to say? Is she saying that welcoming environments at work are a right? It is such a different way of thinking than the one in which I was raised—old dinosaur that I am—that I keep teasing away at it and trying to divine what it signifies. Entitlement? Demands? I can recall many many environments, at work and at school, that were not just unwelcoming but were actively hostile to women, and the idea at the time was to qualify, break through, prove your worth, and tough it out, and slowly but surely things would improve. If tech is a relatively new field that relatively few women have entered till now, wouldn’t that sequence I just listed be a better solution than the idea that a welcome mat needs to be laid out or it’s unjust?

I’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s in the Lee piece that could be food for thought. But I have a busy day/evening ahead of me, so I’ll leave that to you folks for now.

Obama knew about those little North Korean nukes

The New Neo Posted on by

The Obama administration was aware of the threat by 2013. But it didn’t go with the narrative, you see:

It was clear what Obama officials were doing in 2013. The DIA report represented inconvenient facts that threatened President Obama’s North Korea “strategic patience” policy — a policy to do nothing about North Korea and kick this problem down the road to the next president. Obama officials tried to downplay the DIA assessment to prevent it from being used to force the president to employ a more assertive North Korea policy.

Apparently, there has also been a lot of pressure and wheeling-dealing going on behind the scenes by the Trump administration vis a vis China:

I believe Trump officials timed the release of the North Korea missile warhead information to bolster their efforts to pressure China to abide by new sanctions imposed on North Korea last weekend by the UN Security Council. If so, this is a good strategy to highlight to Beijing the urgency that it abide by these sanctions and also implement other kinds of diplomatic and economic pressure against North Korea that it has so far refused to employ.

I hope it works.

In more current North Korea news, China has some warnings for both parties:

Clarifying it’s position in the nuclear stand-off, China said it will stay neutral if North Korea launches an attack that threatens America. But if the US strikes first in an attempt to overthrow Kim Jong Un’s government, China will step in to stop them…

“China should also make clear that if North Korea launches missiles that threaten US soil first and the US retaliates, China will stay neutral,” it added. “If the US and South Korea carry out strikes and try to overthrow the North Korean regime and change the political pattern of the Korean Peninsula, China will prevent them from doing so.”

China has long worried that any conflict on the Korean peninsula, or a repeat of the 1950-53 Korean war, could unleash a wave of destabilising refugees into its northeast, and could end up with a reunified county allied with the US.

The headline to the article from which that quote comes is rather misleading, by the way, and makes the Chinese statement seem more anti-Trump and anti-US than it actually was.

I found this fragment of a draft for a post that I wrote on July 15 and never published

The New Neo Posted on by

Looking over the news today, do you feel as tired as I do?

And I don’t just mean about the continuing Donald Trump Jr. saga. I mean about the fact that it’s practically worthless, except as propaganda.

That’s been somewhat true for a long time. But

And that’s the end of the draft. I suddenly ran out of steam.

But it’s almost humorous to look at it today and think—Donald Trump, Jr.? What was all that sound and fury about, anyway? And will we ever hear about it again?

My answer to that last question is only if they need to revive the story for some reason.

This is what the WSJ thinks of Trump’s North Korean fire-breathing

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s their editorial:

The President’s point was that the North’s escalating threats are intolerable; he didn’t set any red lines. True to form, Pyongyang responded by putting the U.S. island of Guam in its cross hairs. Mr. Trump may be guilty of hyperbole (quelle surprise), but that is far less damaging to U.S. credibility than Barack Obama’s failure to enforce his prohibition on the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons in Syria. The foreign-policy elite who claim to be shocked also don’t have much credibility after their policy across three Administrations led to the current North Korean danger.

While the President’s words were unusually colorful, the Communist-style language may have been part of the message: Kim Jong Un isn’t the only one who can raise the geopolitical temperature. ..

… [T]he main audience for this rhetorical theater is in Beijing…

The other audience for Mr. Trump’s remarks is the North Korean leadership around the young Kim. If they believe they are doomed by Kim’s nuclear course, their best chance of self-preservation is to remove him.

My bet is on young Kim removing them first.

The rest of the editorial pretty much represents what I think of the basic situation. Trump is a blowhard, but he’s also a wildcard, and that can work to advantage because instead of hearing a mere statement that some action is “intolerable” or “unacceptable,” the foreign leader to whom such statements are directed just might believe that a US president means what he says for a change, and that certain unpredictable but upsetting actions might follow on the heels of the “mere words.”

Of course, the danger is that the leader hearing those words may react in a way that escalates things mightily, and may not be particularly sane or rational. There’s not much indication that the current leader of North Korea is either sane or rational, and so any reaction on his part short of an extremely violent one could depend on others reigning him in, either China or “the North Korean leadership around” him.

And plenty of people in this country and abroad believe that it’s Trump who’s neither sane nor rational. But, as I indicated, that can work in several opposing ways—either to make people more wary of riling him up, or more desperate to fight fire with fire and not just limit the fighting to fiery words.

And of course “the foreign-policy elite…claim to be shocked.” I think they actually are shocked, and feel oh so superior in their own ability to deal with North Korea. But, as the editorial also said (and it actually understates the case) they don’t have much credibility either. In fact, they have next to none (with me, anyway).

That’s the problem with North Korea. No one understands enough about Kim Jong-un to be able to predict his reactions to what the West does. If anything, he appears to be even more unpredictable than his father was, and that’s saying something. Anyone seeking to evaluate the positives or negatives of what Trump said must take that into account.

Thomas Sowell and Ebony

The New Neo Posted on by

After writing a post yesterday on Thomas Sowell, I happened to see this today:

As for Sowell, he’s…an economist and writer whom playwright David Mamet once called “our greatest contemporary philosopher.” Sowell, who never knew his father, was raised by a great-aunt and her two grown daughters. They lived in Harlem, where he was the first in his family to make it past the sixth grade. He left home at 17, served as a Marine in the Korean War, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, earned a master’s degree at Columbia University the next year, followed by a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Chicago.

Sowell, at 87, authored some four dozen books (not counting revised editions) and wrote hundreds of scholarly articles and essays in periodicals and thousands of newspaper columns. In 2015, Forbes magazine said: “It’s a scandal that economist Thomas Sowell has not been awarded the Nobel Prize. No one alive has turned out so many insightful, richly researched books.” Yet, thanks in part to the Ebony shutout, many blacks have never heard of him.

The “Ebony shutout” referred to in that last sentence is the fact that Ebony, the magazine for black people that has been published for over seventy years, has had a yearly list of “its ‘Power 100,’ defined as those ‘who lead, inspire and demonstrate through their individual talents, the very best in Black America,'” and has apparently never included Sowell. And that fact demonstrates—although it doesn’t need much demonstrating—the liberal bias of the media that caters to the black population in America, and helps to shape (“lead and inspire”) that group’s values and opinions. I wonder how many black people have heard of Sowell, who is not just a major thinker but who was a widely syndicated columnist for many many years.

That said, I am fairly sure that, as a reader of the NY Times, New Yorker, and Boston Globe for most of my life prior to 9/11, I hadn’t heard of him before my political change began, either.