Elsewhere (193)
Heather Mac Donald on the myths of Black Lives Matter:
Police officers —of all races— are disproportionately endangered by black assailants. Over the past decade, according to FBI data, 40% of cop killers have been black. Officers are killed by blacks at a rate 2.5 times higher than the rate at which blacks are killed by police. Some may find evidence of police bias in the fact that black people make up 26% of the police-shooting victims, compared with their 13% representation in the national population. But as residents of poor black neighbourhoods know too well, violent crimes are disproportionately committed by black people. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, blacks were charged with 62% of all robberies, 57% of murders and 45% of assaults in the 75 largest U.S. counties in 2009, though they made up roughly 15% of the population there. Such a concentration of criminal violence in minority communities means that officers will be disproportionately confronting armed and often resisting suspects in those communities, raising officers’ own risk of using lethal force.
College Fix reports on the importance of getting in that leftist indoctrination while minds are soft and yielding:
Stef Bernal-Martinez, a self-described “radical queer progressive educator” at Central Park School for Children in Durham, North Carolina, took her entire first grade class to a local Black Lives Matter rally this past Thursday. Yes, during the school day… “The project that my class took on in this quarter was a study of the Black Lives Matter movement,” she says. “And so, we’ve been investigating and asking questions about the issues and the causes that people are fighting for, and my kids… were very excited to, sort of, join the movement themselves.”
Parents of the children in her class were informed,
The students will be wearing Black Lives Matter t-shirts during the march on Thursday.
No, don’t raise that eyebrow. When it comes to impressionable six-year-olds, progressive role models are important. Ms Bernal-Martinez is of course enthused by “social justice work” and tells us that she endures a life of oppression in a “White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy.” When not busy indoctrinating the small children left in her care, she spends her time “envisioning a world without physical or intangible borders.”
And Guy Sorman on Finland’s experimental welfare model:
This year, the Finnish government hopes to begin granting every adult citizen a monthly allowance of €800 (roughly $900). Whether rich or poor, each citizen will be free to use the money as he or she sees fit. The idea is that people are responsible for their actions. If someone decides to spend their €800 on vodka, that is their decision, and has nothing to do with the government. In return for the Universal Basic Income, however, the public accepts the elimination of most welfare services.
One catch that springs to mind is what happens when those who are inadequate to the task of living spend the $900 on booze or drugs or whatever and then find themselves in dire straits – hungry, possibly homeless. Will the Finns allow such people to face the consequences of their own choices and irresponsibility? And what about any children they might have? And then of course there’s the issue of incentives and the corrosion of the work ethic, as discussed here previously in the lively comment thread following this post, in which “activist and union organiser” Godfrey Moase insists that a “universal income” would unleash the enormously talented artists hidden inside us all, and whose supporters announce, triumphantly, that getting money for simply being would “make employment optional.”
Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.
Parents really need to start doing some research on who’s teaching their kids.
And then when they find out that Teacher is a left-wing radical, they have quite the conundrum on their hands: fight the system and risk being destroyed or KNOWINGLY submit to it.
Not looking means not knowing. If you’re hurting for resources (time, passion, money), ignorance might be your only viable option.
I am the Latinx/Xicana leader that I look up to.
Shouldn’t that be “Xicanx”? I imagine it sounding like an utterance from Sylvester the Cat.
Parents really need to start doing some research on who’s teaching their kids.
If one’s children are enmeshed in the public school system (U.S.), it is safe to assume their teachers are part of the problem. Either they’re left wing loons or they are beholden to the unions which exist to protect teachers’ careers and not further children’s education. Better to home school or send your kids to a decent parochial school. How much is it worth to make sure one’s child is learning to read at age 6 as opposed to learning to shout “power to the people.”
Browner than thou and therefore more righteous:
Learn your place in the victimhood hierarchy.
Cower in the shadow of feminist logic:
You see, our feminist lionesses are every bit as competent as those hairy, smelly men, and that’s why we must lower standards and make STEM subjects “less competitive,” and therefore less intimidating to “women and minorities.” If you think that’s absurdly precious and incoherent, you’re right. And we’ve been here before, of course.
It obviously doesn’t, as demonstrated by those that didn’t. But you asked “Why do some people believe…” and I offered some speculations. Perhaps your question was supposed to be rhetorical? In that case, you are free to pretend that I ignored it.
Learn your place in the victimhood hierarchy.
If anyone asks I just assume I’m at the bottom. Saves a lot of time.
If anyone asks I just assume I’m at the bottom. Saves a lot of time.
As the person doing the asking is generally asserting their rank – either directly by invoking some rather doubtful victimhood, or vicariously, supposedly on behalf of some allegedly put-upon group – that would save a lot of faffing. On three occasions I’ve been informed, quite sternly, that my white, cis-male existence is the “lowest difficulty setting” of life. This knowledge was imparted in such a way as to imply that I should therefore feel bad and should bow in deference to the person doing the scolding and any group of their choosing.
Oddly, the people who initiate this kind of exchange tend to be from backgrounds much wealthier and more comfortable than my own.
Heard this one too. Occasionally amplified to something like “straight white cis male able-bodied Christian” or the like. I find it a poorly thought out metaphor that seems to ignore how difficulty settings usually work in favor of a knee-jerk complaint that sounds vaguely like “you have it easy”. For most games, though, difficulty settings go something like this –
Low difficulty: Your character draws less aggression. Threats ignore you more, and when they do come after you, you have an easier time finding allies to do your fighting for you. You are offered free stuff, discounts, and the game cheats to let you into special areas early. If you ever feel you are stuck, the boss monster might just fall over dead halfway through the fight and you will be declared the victor anyway. On the other hand, since you are not challenged, you will develop less skill. Your score will be penalized, and your accomplishments devalued. Other players may give you things out of charity, but may also ridicule you for sucking.
High difficulty: Your character is a priority target. You will have to do all your own fighting, and then some. Your score is increased, making this the best way to be remembered in history for your accomplishments, but it’s still a long shot due to the difficulty of getting there. You will have to get good to stand out among the competition, and can’t hope for participation trophies. However, this at least means your accomplishments will be taken seriously. Other players will frequently envy your success and accuse you of having cheated somehow.
Now which one of these sounds like the lot of a buzzword buzzword white male, and which one sounds like a recipient of affirmative action, white knighting, holistic admission algorithms that totally aren’t racial quotas I swear, selective service exemptions, protected class status, and having the President send in the fucking Army to clear your path?
Any SJWs started a #BelgianLivesMatter hashtag?
Thought not
I find it a poorly thought out metaphor that seems to ignore how difficulty settings usually work
Yes. But like much else such people mouth, I don’t think it’s intended to withstand much scrutiny. The idea, I think, is to shut down discussion before any serious scrutiny can occur. It’s essentially a piety-signalling device and a way to indulge in browbeating. For people who get their jollies from psychological malice.
It’s quite funny to watch these exchanges unfold online, especially when the scolding party assumes that their target must have every attribute deemed “privileged,” only to be corrected on one detail or another. For instance, someone points out that the allegedly privileged party is actually gay or has brown skin or whatever, and then lots of furious recalculation has to be done, lots of intersectioning, to determine where that person sits in the all-important hierarchy of victimhood. That this neurotic classification and point-scoring is probably best avoided doesn’t seem to occur to the ones doing the scolding.
Any SJWs started a #BelgianLivesMatter hashtag?
Unlikely, Doc. It would require self-awareness, and might make somebody feel bad, possibly.
How about those Belgies, huh? Let’s let them run everything.
and, for the record, the way to handle muslim ghettos that your police are scared to enter is to send in the army, have a big fight and don’t allow that idiocy any more.
The latest entry on the victimhood hierarchy:
Gay men no longer need representation on the LGBT committee…
Sorry fags – but you’re men, so sod off….
Laurie Penny would write about herself.
We await her inspirational three-volume autobiography, How Brave I Am.
A citizens dividend is actually quite a capitalist idea.
Adam Smith was an advocate of taxing land-titles based on their value (and not harmful taxes on work such as income tax, EENI, ERNI and VAT). The idea could be expanded to tax all other titles such as mineral extraction rights, copyrights and patents, and might solve some of the problems we see with big business rent-seeking (by making licensing more likely thus stopping the use of patents to block others which is 100% NOT the idea).
The advantages of taxing unearned income are massive, the problem is that it would abolish the establishment and therefore it will not be allowed to happen.
Re: Laura Parson
Laura Parson is a doctoral candidate in the teaching and learning department, higher education concentration, at the University of North Dakota. She has a MEd, Adult Education concentration, and TESOL certificate from Westminster College.
That’s certainly the CV of one uniquely qualified to critique STEM curricula.
Shouldn’t that be “Xicanx”? I imagine it sounding like an utterance from Sylvester the Cat.
Sounds like a brand name for a new herpes medication.
A citizens dividend is actually quite a capitalist idea.
Adam Smith was an advocate of taxing land-titles based on their value
While I haven’t put a lot of thought into the matter, I am inclined to agree on the second part. Along with something similar WRT common goods, the meaning of which I now see has become completely politicized on Wiki and defined away from what it really means, so fat chance with that. Don’t see how the latter ties to the former. How is a citizens’ dividend a “capitalist” idea? Unless “citizens’ dividend” has some meaning other than people receiving the wealth generated by other people. Even if the wealth is extracted from common goods, giving it to others simply by the virtue of their existence does not seem very capitalistic. Not to mention the can of worms deciding who is a citizen, does it apply to children, to what age, etc. etc. etc. and the consequences, intended or otherwise. Even wealth from common goods requires a good bit of labor and capital to exploit. The fish don’t just jump into the boat. Well, excepting those crazy silver carp. And shmoos. But I digress…
Uh small problem with your citizens dividend- US has a $20 trillion deficit. Here in Oz a few hundred billion and growing. I’m curious as to where this money is actually supposed to be coming from.
Uh small problem with your citizens dividend- US has a $20 trillion deficit.
And that’s just the stuff you know about. When you add in unfunded liabilities such as social security, Medicaid/Medicare, etc., the total is around $70 trillion. I.e. about the same size as annual World GDP. World, not US. Which basically means that the population of the entire world would need to agree to work for one full year and give everything to Uncle Sam just in order for the US to be debt-free. And start from scratch, presumably. Ain’t gonna happen.
What is happening, however, is that central banks the world over are engaged in an effort to suppress their currencies by buying up their own debt, keeping interest rates low or even negative, etc. The intended result of this policy is to increase people’s propensity to consume in the here and now rather than saving money, on the idea that this will increase GDP growth. Of course that doesn’t work, because most people aren’t stupid and they realize that if interest rates are negative they actually need to save more now in order to have enough money to retire on when they stop working.
The other effect of financial repression, which I think is also intended, is to get people used to the idea that their standard of living is going to decrease over time. If I retire today with a given sum of money, this amount will shrink over time (negative interest rates), while the cost of living will increase (albeit slowly) at the rate of inflation, which all central banks are trying desperately to keep positive. Thus the fixed income which I have in retirement keeps shrinking both in nominal terms and in real terms and my standard of living decreases.
Of course this policy may be preferable to the alternative, which is to tell everybody today that the government borrowed too much money, that it can’t possibly ever repay it, and that therefore all the promises that it made (social security, etc.) are null and void.
So there we have it. One way or the other we’re screwed.
“…the cost of living will increase (albeit slowly) at the rate of inflation…”
Except maybe for the cost of energy, which is going to “necessarily skyrocket” for some reason. Wait – when the cost of energy goes up, doesn’t the price of almost everything else also go up?
So there we have it. One way or the other we’re screwed.
The immigration mess is part and parcel of the whole problem, as well. The elites looked around and compared their unfunded promises with their declining demographics and thought that importing a lot unassimilatable brown people could shore up their social net by assuming menial jobs and pumping more money in the system. Surprise, it hasn’t turned out that way.
Laurie Penny would write about herself.
We await her inspirational three-volume autobiography, How Brave I Am.
https://twitter.com/GodfreyElfwick/status/712223230568886272
#JeSuisLauriePenny
#JeSuisLauriePenny
Oh dear. I see dozens of people are still trying to convey to Laurie why events in Brussels are not the ideal platform for her usual “poor me” pantomime. From what I’ve seen, they aren’t having much success.
It’s like trying to shovel toothpaste up a hummingbird’s arse.
Except maybe for the cost of energy, which is going to “necessarily skyrocket” for some reason. Wait – when the cost of energy goes up, doesn’t the price of almost everything else also go up?
Yes and no. Depends on the dynamic or otherwise nature of the economic system. If more wealth must be spent on energy, less is spent elsewhere, everything being held constant. Which never happens. Things that can happen are, but not limited to:
1) People figure out how to use energy more efficiently.
2) People figure out how to create energy by consuming fewer other resources, thus lowering the cost, albeit over a longer time frame than the immediate.
3) uh…more stuff i don’t have time to get into right now…
The “energy underlies everything and thus figures into the cost of everything” meme, while somewhat true, was a cover for 1970’s inflation (in the US, don’t know about elsewhere) to cover for the failures of Keynesianism.
Of course it’s a bit more complicated than that and my rough outline has exceptions and other complications (the latter of which I feel would even more prove my point), etc. but that’s the short version.
Anecdote Alert! I recall prices going up when oil was north of $100/bbl (higher production and shipping costs were cited) but I guess I missed when they came back down after the oil price crash.
The immigration mess is part and parcel of the whole problem, as well.
I have a feeling that this won’t quite work as intended, indeed. In France, the “social contract,” such as it is, seems to be based on the idea that good jobs can be protected by making labor laws so inflexible that people can’t get fired. In turn, the people who have jobs pay high taxes (aka protection money) to ensure that there is a wide-ranging safety net available to those who do not have jobs. Over time, this has led to a tiering of the population into people who are employed (typically older) and people who are not (typically younger). The intersection of that dynamic with the demographic profile of the old (mainly ethnic French, i.e. white) and the young (increasingly basané) will lead to some interesting developments. Mainly, will underemployed young people of North African extraction accept to work for low wages and pay high taxes to support the comfortable retirements of older French people with whom they have nothing in common, be it culturally, ethnically, religiously, etc.?
Methinks not.
But then of course Frau Merkel preempted the entire long-run deterioration that France is looking forward to by allowing it to happen in Germany in one fell swoop.
Anyone care for a poke at the horrible current Google Doodle? “My Afrocentric Life” by “Akilah Johnson, Washington DC”. It’s got very nearly every cliche at once – from an obligatory “Rosa Parks” and “Douglass, Frederich(?)” to “POWER” graffiti, an upraised fist, and – gallingly – a Black Lives Matter protest. It also features some Eye of Horus and ankh Egyptian symbolism in the idiotic NOI sort of “Black Egyptian” mold. In summary, Google are once again going from passive aggressive leftism to appallingly stupid passive aggressive leftism. In a sane world, the principals would be sacked by now.
and – gallingly – a Black Lives Matter protest
Oh, does it? Gee, we really hadn’t noticed that. But it’s not like it’s the main theme of the picture. You really have to squint to see it. I think you’re making too much of this. It’s not at all like a microagression. Not at all. Because microagressions are wrong. And this can’t be wrong. It was done by an innocent child. Now you’re on to impinging her freedom of speech. Yada-yada-yada…
Thanks. Now every time I hit Google today, I’m gonna wanna puke.
Well, it’s not like the Egypt symbols could be taken as an endorsement of Black History claims of a global conspiracy to hide black involvement in things or the fist could possibly be Black Panthers or anything. Nothing of the kind. Purest. Innocence.
It’s some brainwashed DC public school teenager’s angst-filled cry. Lighten up.
Re: Microbillionaire | March 22, 2016 at 08:17
Your point is well taken. Let me rephrase it:
Some people seem to believe that “a civilised society” requires a willingness to pay Danegeld, because they believe that the alternative is even worse.
Does that work?
@mojo: I don’t blame said teen. I blame said teen’s teachers (so very, very much) and the goodthink brigade at Google HQ who think it’s oh-so-important and worthy of inflicting on us, despite a high percent of – let’s not deny – propagandish psychosis and endorsement of black power ideologies. “Don’t be evil” is really taking a beating these days.
Said teachers presumably being very much along the lines of Mx. Bernal-Martinez, I meant to include.
Sooo…anyone still seeing the Google Doodle or did they take it down? It’s not like it’s midnight GMT so …?
Just gone down, seemingly. It’s been up since at least yesterday, so it’s not as if it was that easy to miss.
Laurie Penny would write about herself.
We await her inspirational three-volume autobiography, How Brave I Am.
Four volume. One for each title word.
“I” being the thickest volume, surely.
Google Doodle
If you Google “Google Doodle,” this is the first hit. It’s fun to visit.
In honor of our host, this is pretty nifty, too.
FFS
http://www.salon.com/2016/03/22/tintins_racist_history_symbol_of_brussels_solidarity_is_uncomfortably_divisive/
Poor Laurie. How she suffers when other people get hurt.
As is now usual with these sorts of stories, my first thought was, “Thank the heavens, it’s not Mizzou again.
Re making STEM less competitive… almost all the pharmacists I see in this town are women and when I was doing computer science at the local uni the lecturer told us we had it easy in the maths subjects as we could get marks for trying, whereas the pharmacy students had to get the answer exactly correct or get zero.
I used to ask the advice of a barista in the cafe I frequent for particularly knotty problems as she was one of said pharmacy students and one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. She’s doing post grad medical research now.
The state of STEM education doesn’t seem to have put any of them off.
@Sporkulus: I guess I’m just inured to that particular tribe of lefties. Like I said, a dime a dozen, maybe a bit more if they now have to go all the way to Yonkers to get a grad degree in baby brainwashing.
“It’s like trying to shovel toothpaste up a hummingbird’s arse.”
If in flight I can see how that might be difficult.