“Everyone is allowed to share their opinion. I just hope he gets fired for it.”

Regarding the ongoing ‘Google memo’ saga, I thought I’d lift the following from yesterday’s comments:

To recap. A Google software developer with a PhD in biology writes a polite, conciliatory and politically centrist memo suggesting that there’s a leftist groupthink problem in the company that inhibits open discussion; that men and women on average have differing preferences and abilities, albeit with a large overlap, and so “diversity” policies might benefit from bearing that in mind; and that perhaps people should be treated as individuals rather than as mascots of allegedly oppressed identity groups.

This is immediately met with ludicrous and wilful mischaracterisation by “social justice” Twitter and the ‘progressive’ media, including deliberately deleting the memo’s links to supporting data; a general refusal to engage honestly with the author’s points, or in many cases even to read them; baseless accusations of every ‘ism’ going; personal doxxing; boasts of blacklisting; and demands that the author of the memo be fired for his heresy and never employed again. On grounds that his arguments are “violently offensive” and in need of being “silenced.” He is, you see, “committing violence” with his statistics. All of which rather proves the author’s point about leftist groupthink and its reliance on distortion, intimidation and outright hysteria.

The employee in question has of course now been fired. Readers who wish to be violently offended can read the memo here.

Update: 

Jordan Peterson interviews James Damore, author of the supposedly scandalous and “fascist” memo. Skip forward to 5’10:

Ian Miles Cheong pokes through the literature of Antifa affiliate Redneck Revolt: 

Much of the group’s official website includes rhetoric pulled straight out of Marxist publications, echoing various talking points about the evils of capitalism, property ownership, “artificial borders,” and basic systems of social order, including police, prisons, and courts. Redneck Revolt refers to these public institutions as “systems of social control [that] only exist to serve the rich,” and calls for the end of the “nation-state project.” It lists the US Armed Forces alongside the Ku Klux Klan as having “undermined the struggle for freedom among all people.” The “Resources” page of the group’s website offers a number of publications that promote violence, including a 36-page manual called the “Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla,” which advises readers on how to conduct urban warfare, with sections on “sabotage,” “kidnapping,” “executions,” and “terrorism.”

Related: “Violence can and should be… made commonplace.” And previously. 

Ed Driscoll on Lena Dunham’s latest gratuitous attempt to signal her piety: 

Dunham is now babbling “I live for my truth,” in response to being described, yet again, as a fabulist. In any case, as Ace of Spades writes of the above incident, the SJW crowd “are militant, they are dogmatic, they are intolerant, and they are vicious… They have convinced themselves that their Pleasurable Cruelty to people is justified because they act to vindicate the Righteousness of Strange Gods.” The incident may or may not have happened, but Dunham has chosen to position herself, as veteran journalist Kurt Loder tweeted, as “Lena Dunham, millionaire scourge of working-class women.”

Related, Iowahawk has an idea. 

Toni Airaksinen on complaints that women are being held back in class by “white” and “heteronormative” mathematics:

In a recent article titled Unpacking the Male Superiority Myth and Masculinization of Mathematics at the Intersection, Professor Luis A Leyva argues that factors such as teacher expectations and cultural norms “serve as gendering mechanisms that give rise to sex-based achievement differences.” Citing the “masculinization of mathematics,” Leyva then suggests that the apparent “gender gap” in mathematical ability is socially constructed (as opposed to arising from inherently different cognitive abilities) and therefore a “myth of male superiority.” 

Apparently, it’s “unfair” to hold all students to the same standards of proficiency, as this oppresses women. Or at least it oppresses feminists. And so mathematics must be corrected with “intersectionality theory” and lots of fretting about “whiteness” and “identity.” And very much related, this. Because the best way to teach engineering is to waste class time with lots of “social justice” hokum.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

As time was short this week, you’ll have to throw together your own pile of links and oddities in the comments. I will, however, set the ball rolling with, via Obnoxio, some classy signage; a collection of people posing for photographs with their television sets; a map showing the concentration of metal bands in Europe per million residents; some more Korean rap care of Elephants Gerald; and a reminder that among this world’s wonders are amateur video guides to public lavatories.

Oh, and this. 

One week, the administration declared that eggs would now be sold for no more than 30 cents a carton. The next week, eggs had disappeared from supermarkets, and still have not come back.

Hannah Dreier on Venezuela’s end-stage socialism:  

In the early days, the shortages seemed almost whimsical. My Venezuelan friends were used to going on Miami shopping sprees. When I made trips home, they asked me to bring back perfume, leather jackets, iPhones and condoms. I usually took two near-empty suitcases to carry back the requests, plus food and toiletries for myself. As the crisis deepened, the requests became harder to fill, and traced the outlines of darker personal dramas: Medication for heart failure. Paediatric epilepsy drugs. Pills to trigger an abortion. Gas masks.

And things were still somehow getting worse. The first time I saw people line up outside the bakery near my apartment, I stopped to take photos. How crazy: A literal bread line. Then true hunger crept into where I lived. People started digging through the trash at all hours, pulling out vegetable peelings and soggy pizza crusts and eating them on the spot. That seemed like rock bottom. Until my local bakery started organising lines each morning, not to buy bread, but to eat trash.

And from a safe distance, our betters speak. 

Being, as you obviously are, a crowd with your boots on, and all collaring the jive, you’ll want to lamp Cab Calloway’s 1939 Hepster Dictionary. 

By all means slide your jib in the comments.

Via Obnoxio. 

Speaking, as we were, of clown-shoe identitarians:   

Update:

Somewhat related, this: 

Act casual, say nothing. || Moonshiner’s cow shoe. || Meanwhile, in Scotland, life goes on as normal. (h/t, Holborn) || I suspect these are bigger than yours. (h/t, Pogonip) || Hey, it’s a job. || Ideal for peeling grapes and then sewing them back in their skins, the Da Vinci robotic surgical system. || Renting pandas. || Chimney pots. || Where did all the sperm go? || Why parents rarely want their children to be artists, part 19. (h/t, Stephen) || This. (h/t, Julia) || That. || Gusty. || Going rogue. || Girth, thickness and ellipticity: On the shapes of eggs. || “The germs which are in the mouth have spoken to a child!” (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || Tristan goes exploring. || Roman roads of Britain. || Ice fishing basics. || Da Vinci’s notebooks. || Sequel of note. || And finally, how to attract a crowd.

Ben Sixsmith finds another Guardian writer with a spiteful confiscation fetish: 

What I found most unpleasant in [Abi] Wilkinson’s article [advocating a 100% inheritance tax] is her acceptance that there could be “a small allowance for objects of sentimental value.” It brought the reality of the idea home. Imagine relatives being forced to beg to keep their family heirlooms. Your granddad’s books? Well, okay. It’s not as if they’re first editions. Your mother’s piano? Sorry, pal. Too big for this allowance. Your grandmother’s house? Forget it. We’re selling it off.

Michael Aaron on the mental contortions of being “woke,” and why they spread: 

How could it be possible that so many people, large cohorts of students, and indeed entire academic disciplines, are so bamboozled into believing much of postmodernist rhetoric, including that science is a symbol of the patriarchy (you’ve got to click on the link, the title is “Science: A masculine disorder?”) and that the concept of health is merely another tool of Western colonial oppression?

Lee Jussim on the bias of assuming unfair “gender bias”: 

The societal push to equalise gender distributions may be deeply dysfunctional, because it can succeed only by having the perverse effect of pushing people into fields they do not prefer. Of course, on moral grounds, we want to ensure that all people have equal opportunities to enter any particular career. But if there are bona fide gender differences in preferences and interests, equal opportunities may never translate into equal outcomes.

And Shannon Spada on political asymmetries:

A recent poll conducted by Pew Research Centre produced results suggesting… that Democrats are significantly more likely than Republicans to say that it would “strain” their relationship to learn that a friend had voted for the other party’s candidate. Among all respondents (not just college students), 35 percent of Democrats said that a friend voting for Donald Trump would strain their friendship, while only 13 percent of Republicans said that a friend voting for Hillary Clinton would have the same effect.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

Putting security tags on items that are frequently stolen is now “openly racist,” apparently, and “quite evil.”

As with an earlier example, note how the pious, “woke” approach is to howl at the effect, in public, ostentatiously, while carefully ignoring the cause. And so the politically corrected line of thinking stops abruptly, prematurely, in order to avoid arriving at a more probable, but unthinkable, conclusion. It’s a pretty good illustration of how “social justice” posturing so often inhibits realism by pre-emptively disallowing certain, fairly obvious inferences and observations. The range of possibilities one is allowed to consider before rushing to Mount Umbrage is dogmatically reduced. Resulting in a person who’s learned, with some effort, to be quite stupid.

This is one of these. // Attention, all fashion-conscious gentlemen. (h/t, Julia) // Why people get dashcams. // Where cash is (nearly) obsolete. // Students on socialism. // Lab-grown capillaries. // Lesbians, 1965. // Lauv. // On colour in film. // Fish farms, from above. // Seen from below. (h/t, Damian) // A brief history of cellophane. // Deconstructed cow. // An archive of vintage Galaxy magazines. // And one of Amazing Stories. // Tag is a pro sport. // Something error happen. // “Maintenance on this track has been deferred for a long time.” // “When she was seen two weeks after… her eyes felt a lot more comfortable.” // Chopsticks of note. // Two for the price of one. // I do like the planes. // And finally, via Elephants Gerald and probably best with subtitles, Song of Bolo.