…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.
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.
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.
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.
…the New York Times goofs again. Their desperation has caused them to relax their already loose standards to the point where they ought to be overcome with embarrassment.
They are not.
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.
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.
Or shall we call it fire-breathing?
In trying to ascertain what would work best with North Korea, I come up with the answer “nothing.” They’re been on a very bad and very belligerent course for a long time.
That said, I don’t really think this helps at all, although I doubt it will matter much in the end. It really all depends on how sane or insane North Korea’s leader is.
But I’m curious what you think.
Thomas Sowell is a kind of hero of mine. I’ve written about him many times before, and I miss him since his (well-earned) retirement. He’s one of the clearest and most original thinkers as well as one of the most elegantly parsimonious in his writing style. In addition, the guy is fearless.
Here’s a quote from a tribute to Sowell that I found in a link at Powerline:
…[T]he ability to see things as they really are engenders hostility from countless factions in thrall to countless illusions. To persevere throughout a lifetime of opposition seemingly without the slightest perturbation or instability of judgment requires the rarest of temperaments and an extraordinary measure of courage.
If you’re not familiar with Sowell’s work, read him and/or watch some of the myriad YouTube videos of interviews with him over the years. He was a political changer, by the way.
Commenter Richard Aubrey makes a point that isn’t unusual, and seems quite logical:
To say men and women differ in their capability is gender essentialism, which I am told is a Very Bad Thing.
But you need to say it in order to justify exerting effort to get more women.
However—originally, at least—the push to accept more women in any given field rested on the idea of equal opportunity, not sheer equality of outcome. Equality of opportunity is an American ideal, and it justifies trying to get more of a certain group into a certain profession if in fact there is not equal opportunity for those people in that group who are qualified.
I realize that, under the leftist drive for equality of outcome, we may have lost the important distinction between the two, or at least it’s become blurred. In other words, for a lot of people today, particularly the Social Justice Warriors among us, equality of outcome is the only important metric. Their “logic” is that, since all groups are exactly equal in capability and talents, equality of outcome is prima facie evidence of inequality of opportunity. So we must have equality of outcome in order to guarantee equality of opportunity.
But they’re not the same, of course, if in fact groups differ on average in capability and talents in a particular field. And in that little phrase “on average” lies the heart of the matter. And even if groups differ on average in one capability or another, there could still be an inequality of opportunity that would be desirable to address. The question is how to measure it and how to address it.
One problem with this whole topic is that it’s extremely difficult to tease out the influence of nature and nurture, and so it’s very hard to know whether any observed or measured average differences between groups are due to nature or to nurture. That’s a biggee right there, and I’m not going to get into all the evidence either way except to say that I’ve read tons about it and don’t see an answer. But another large and important point is that we are only talking about average differences. There is a tremendous amount of overlap.
There are a few arenas in which there is no overlap. For example, if there was a job where, for some strange reason, the qualification included having given birth physically (I can’t think of such a job offhand, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility), it would of course be limited to women. For a job in which incredible upper-body strength was needed, it would be limited to strong men and the infinitesimal number of Amazonesque women who could meet that standard. But most jobs don’t have that kind of either/or set of qualifications. Most jobs have qualifications that some people of each sex can fill.
As a hypothetical, however, let’s say there’s a job for which the qualifications are more likely to be met, on average, by men. Let’s say, however, that there is a fair amount of overlap and that quite a few women are up to the task as well (the sexes could be reversed, depending on the job and its qualifications). Let’s also say that there are almost no women employed in that field. One could still say that the number of women in the field should be increased in the interests of fairness and non-discrimination.
The problem is that if we don’t use absolute parity of numbers as the way to measure non-discrimination, we’re in a gray area where we don’t know what the right numbers would be. Whether we’re talking about women or any other group against which there is a history of discrimination in jobs, how can we judge when enough redress is enough?
I think part of the ill will going around these days is that, particularly where hiring women is concerned, a lot of people feel that enough is enough, and that for many years now there’s been a preference for women, a preference that is not only unfair to men but has also resulted in the loosening and lessening of standards. This tends to be true of all preferences designed to combat previous discrimination.
I’m old-fashioned, and I believe that the way to end discrimination against a group is to end discrimination against that group, rather than to institute reverse preferences or to lower standards. The problem with that idea, though, is how to make it happen without instituting such preferences, and how to measure whether a disparity of outcome for groups in any given field is the result of actual discrimination or of natural differences on average in interests and aptitudes.
When I first saw this tweet, I thought it very clever:
Difference between Nazi and Communist is when you say how horrible Nazis have been, they don’t say “Well, real Nazism has never been tried.”
It brought forth a wry smile from me.
But then I started thinking about the distinction. Because of course, both have been tried, and in fact the trial of Communism was a whole lot longer in terms of time. And in terms of suffering and death, although the geographic distribution and victims was somewhat different, the Soviets probably won that sweepstakes from the Nazis in terms of sheer numbers killed.
So, why the difference in attitudes of people these days towards each system? Communism is a theory with a philosophy that is more likely to appeal to naive but well-meaning people who just want everyone to get along, no one to be poor, and for us to be just one big happy family with no one so much richer or poorer than anyone else. The clearly demonstrated fact that this particular vision works very poorly in real life, and that its leaders tend to be of a very different mindset, is the source of both its appeal and the claim that the ideas are good but it’s just that somehow the wrong leaders got control of the ship.
Some of the original Nazis may have considered themselves to be do-gooders in the sense that they would do good for Germany and rid the world of people they considered problematic. But that’s not exactly a vision that appeals world-round. No, on its face (and deep down as well), Nazism sounds pretty repellent, or perhaps very repellent, to the majority of people. Even its vision seems dystopian rather than utopian, and instead of appealing to the “can’t we all just get together” aspirations of people, it appeals to their “I’ll smash you and I’ll come out on top” desires.
So although Nazism still has its adherents, they are a more isolated and less numerous group. And yet, I bet somewhere, somewhere, there’s a neo-Nazi who says that the problem with German Nazism was that Hitler went too far, too fast, or some such thing, and that if a more attractive and patient leader took charge Nazism would rise again.
I don’t need to go into all the details, because if you follow this link you can get up to speed on them. But the gist of the story is that a senior engineer at Google wrote an internal memo questioning the idea that the reason women were not as numerous as men in tech jobs such as softwear engineering was due to discrimination rather than some more hard-wired differences between men and women.
Well, you can imagine what that sort of heresy unleashed—a firestorm of anger, hurt feelings, and demands (not just from women, by the way, but from a host of outraged SJWs) that he be fired.
And so it came to pass, with Google saying that although they love discussions of all sorts of issues, that particular one violated their dogma (otherwise known as the Code of Conduct).
Chilling, terrible, predictable.
Why did I use the word “Summersed” in the post’s title? It harks back to a topic I wrote about extensively early in my blogging career, the firing of Larry Summers as Harvard’s president. His offense was very similar, although slightly different. He dared to question the idea that female under-representation in the upper echelons of sciences—the pinnacle of achievement—might be due to something more than discrimination, and that the question was at least worthy of study.
For that, he was drummed out. Now, granted, Summers was already an unpopular president at the university for many reasons, so for a lot of people this was just the excuse to get rid of him. But for many others, it was what he said—what he dared to say—that threw them so.
It was a sad thing to realize that in an institution with Harvard’s reputation, such questions were so beyond the pale that they could not be mentioned and certainly not studied—even if true. Maybe especially if they turned out to be true. In the ensuing years the rot has spread to industry, particularly Silicon Valley tech firms such as Google.
Personally, I don’t care if women aren’t biologically as likely to enter tech fields in equal numbers to men. Why should I care, as long as the women who do want to enter, and who can do the work, don’t face discrimination in hiring? I’m sure there are professions for which men—on average, which are all we’re taking about, rather than individual men—aren’t as likely to have the aptitude or interest as women do. Who cares?
Lots of people, apparently.
[NOTE: You can find my Summers posts here and here as well as here.]