Archive for 2017
August 8, 2017
For years, I’ve thought that “Brave New World” was the clear winner in the dystopia prophesy contest, but the regressive left keeps reminding me to keep “1984” in the running. Like in other ideological purge cases, such as the firing of Mozilla CEO Brandan Eich and the browbeating of Harvard University president Larry Summers, leftists have urged Damore’s total banishment from the tech world until, in the words of one Twitter user, he learns “what it takes to actually be an engineer and a decent human.”
In other words, until Demore stops questioning Silicon Valley political groupthink and learns to love Big Brother, he will not be welcome in a technical profession that has nothing directly to do with politics.
The rigid politicization of everything and the drawing of ideological battle lines are bad for Google, as Demore’s memo points out, but they are even worse for America. While college students cry out for “safe spaces” from dissenting ideas, the real safe spaces Americans need are those in which to work, find friendship, and discuss opposing ideas without risking their livelihoods.
Silicon Valley turned into Mizzou so gradually I barely even noticed. But remember, your top priority can be shareholders, it can be diversity, or it can be technical excellence. But you can only have one top priority. Google’s seems pretty clearly to be diversity.
Related: Female Silicon Valley Engineer: Google Can’t Seem To Tolerate Diversity.
It’s fine to question Damore’s characterization of women. (As a female engineer in Silicon Valley, I endorse his suggestion to “treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group.”) It’s okay to disagree with the proposed solutions. But the backlash was egregiously swift and brutal. Google representatives issued multiple statements denouncing the document. Past and present colleagues chimed in over the weekend with calls for the engineer to be ousted. Media outlets like TechCrunch, Gizmodo and Motherboard jumped on board to declare the memo an “Anti-Diversity Manifesto.” It appears that the ideological echo chamber extends beyond Google’s campus.
Silicon Valley has a very peculiar definition of diversity that requires proportional representation from every gender and race, all of whom must think exactly alike. Given that Google has failed to reach this ideal despite nearly a decade of efforts, Damore might be right to suggest that it try a different tack. Google rejects 99.8 percent of job applicants, making it far more selective than any Ivy League university. It’s not unreasonable to posit that in this top 0.2 percent of the population, there may be various ways in which talent manifests differently between the sexes.
Suggesting that men and women are different, though, can be a perilous endeavor. In 2005, Harvard President Larry Summers speculated that the under-representation of women in top science and engineering positions might have something to do with the male tendency to exhibit extreme traits — to, say, have very high or low IQs. The remarks were widely condemned as an allegation that women have an innate disadvantage in science and math. Summers apologized profusely, but it was too late. The faculty convened and issued a no-confidence vote, and the president stepped down shortly thereafter.
Suppressing intellectual debate on college campuses is bad enough. Doing the same in Silicon Valley, which has essentially become a finishing school for elite universities, compounds the problem.
When an institution puts “social justice” ahead of its actual mission, decline is inevitable.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Caregiving Is Hard Enough. Isolation Can Make It Unbearable. We’re lucky in that — for both my side and Helen’s side — we have lots of people happy to work together. Not everyone has that going for them.
FROM IOWAHAWK: Helpful tips from Google on how to gender-target your ad campaign.
Setting a bid for a specific demographic group.
You may get a higher return on investment (ROI) or increase your chances to show your ads to people who are more likely to buy your products by setting a specific bid for a demographic group. Follow these steps to set a bid for an audience that you’ve already added to your ad group.
Google is happy to help exploit gender differences among its products — you are its product, by the way — but stifles any internal dissent arguing that those differences might be real.
Because shut up. And also you’re fired.
FROM THE DAILY CALLER: Like her predecessor, Eric Holder, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch used an email alias to conduct government business, The Daily Caller has confirmed.
Using the pseudonym “Elizabeth Carlisle,” Lynch corresponded with DOJ press officials to hammer out talking points in response to media requests about the meeting. The tarmac encounter drew criticism from conservatives because Lynch was overseeing the federal investigation into whether Hillary Clinton mishandled classified information on her private email system.
Honestly, can anyone give me a straight-faced, non-gymnastic answer why the Attorney General would use an alias in government business emails? This was not yoga tips or cookie recipes.
Tina Lam and Michael Cheng of San Jose said that in 2015 they were looking at parcels being auctioned online by San Francisco’s tax office when they saw a description of “this odd property in a great location.”
“Part of Pacific Heights, the right location, land in a good neighborhood. We took a chance,” Cheng told the San Jose Mercury News. He said they bought the land sight-unseen, beating out 73 other bidders and dropping $90,000 for the street and its common areas.
In an expensive city, the homes on Presidio Terrace are in a league of their own. One had an asking price of $16.9 million last year, which dropped by $2 million. It’s a steep price to be neighbors with the likes of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D) and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, who have called the street home.
Lam and Cheng are now the owners of the common space of Presidio Terrace, which includes its sidewalks, garden islands, leafy palm trees and other lush greenery beautifying the homes of 35 mega-mansions after the association that manages the common areas failed to pay property taxes going back decades, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Wealthy lefty strongholds sure can be sloppy about paying their fair share.
WELL, YES. ALSO MAN-HATING. Paranoia and Paternalism Fuel the Fight Against “Rape Culture.”
THE ATLANTIC ON HOW SILICON VALLEY TOOK OVER JOURNALISM. The piece is written by Franklin Foer, who describes how Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook, bought the New Republic and promptly began the Buzzfeed-ification of that once august center-left magazine:
My master was Chartbeat, a site that provides writers, editors, and their bosses with a real-time accounting of web traffic, showing the flickering readership of each and every article. Chartbeat and its competitors have taken hold at virtually every magazine, newspaper, and blog. With these meters, no piece has sufficient traffic—it can always be improved with a better headline, a better approach to social media, a better subject, a better argument. Like a manager standing over the assembly line with a stopwatch, Chartbeat and its ilk now hover over the newsroom.
This is a dangerous turn. Journalism may never have been as public-spirited an enterprise as editors and writers liked to think it was. Yet the myth mattered. It pushed journalism to challenge power; it made journalists loath to bend to the whims of their audience; it provided a crucial sense of detachment. The new generation of media giants has no patience for the old ethos of detachment. It’s not that these companies don’t have aspirations toward journalistic greatness. BuzzFeed, Vice, and the Huffington Post invest in excellent reporting and employ first-rate journalists—and they have produced some of the most memorable pieces of investigative journalism in this century. But the pursuit of audience is their central mission. They have allowed the endless feedback loop of the web to shape their editorial sensibility, to determine their editorial investments.
“Unexpectedly,” the Atlantic’s own lust for clickbait isn’t mentioned the piece: CTL-F “Andrew Sullivan,” brings zero results. At the beginning of September of 2008, Jonathan Last of the Weekly Standard wrote a post at his Galley Slaves blog titled “The Atlantic Becomes a Laughingstock,” that neatly foreshadows what Foer wrote for the Atlantic’s September 2017 issue on TNR:
What’s caught my attention here, then is The Atlantic. I am, and always have been, an enormous booster for the Old Media, and smarty-pants general-interest magazines in particular. What’s so notable in this whole affair isn’t the tarring of Palin but the fact that The Atlantic Monthly is the vehicle for the irresponsible spreading of smears about Palin and speculation so inane that it can’t be counted, by any reasonable measure, as analysis. (Here, I’m thinking of Sullivan’s claim that he thought it possible both Palin and McCain would relinquish their nominations.)
If Andrew Sullivan were to have written everything he wrote this week at his own website, I wouldn’t have said a word about it. The real scandal here isn’t Sullivan: It’s what The Atlantic has become by publishing him.
As for Sullivan’s page views, I sincerely hope that David Bradley isn’t making his editorial decisions based solely on eyeballs and dollars. Were that so, you could simply give The Atlantic‘s pages over to Perez Hilton or Slashdot or Matt Drudge or any other number of content formats. But the point of The Atlantic, like other great journals, is to be something different–to be a stage in the world of ideas, even if it’s not the most profitable thing.
I find the prospect of The Atlantic devolving into some version of Free Republic or Daily Kos to be immensely worrisome. Hopefully David Bradley will do something to put his house in order. Soon.
Let’s give Foer the exit quote: “Journalism has performed so admirably in the aftermath of Trump’s victory that it has grown harder to see the profession’s underlying rot.”
I question both halves of that premise, especially the first.
HELPFUL TIPS FROM GOOGLE on how to gender-target your ad campaign. Because gender differences.
Related: The Google Memo: Four Scientists Respond On Gender Differences.
UPDATE: The site’s down but here’s an archived version. “So, if the sexes and races don’t differ at all, and if psychological interchangeability is true, then there’s no practical business case for diversity. On the other hand, if demographic diversity gives a company any competitive advantages, it must be because there are important sex differences and race differences in how human minds work and interact.”
YOU DON’T SAY: Europe’s Taxes Aren’t as Progressive as Its Leaders Like to Think.
Europeans believe their tax codes are highly progressive, giving lower earners a break while levying significant proportions of the income of higher earners and corporations to fund generous social benefits. But that progressivity holds true only for direct taxes on personal and corporate income.
Indirect taxes, such as the value-added tax on consumption and social-security taxes (disguised as “contributions”), are a different matter. The VAT disproportionately affects lower earners, who spend a higher proportion of their incomes. And social taxes tend to kick in at lower income levels than income taxes, and extract a higher and more uniform proportion of income.
The result in Germany is a progressive system that isn’t.
You mean to say that Europe’s wealthy progressives have devised a tax scheme which makes it appear as though they’re paying their “fair share,” while in fact socking it to the little guy? Maybe Sarah Hoyt will let me borrow her shocked face.
I’VE HEARD OF “BREASTAURANTS,” BUT THIS IS RIDICULOUS: Chinese restaurant offers bra-size discounts. “Once the promotion started, customer numbers rose by about 20%. . . . some of the girls we met were very proud – they had nothing to hide”.
OH GOODIE: The 2020 Democratic Purity Olympics Are Already Under Way.
Wouldn’t you know it, on the very delicious-to-watch week that Republicans start jumping off the leaky Trump frigate, some Democrats began testing attacks on one of their own, possible 2020 presidential contender Kamala Harris. The charge, leveled by a few folks on the left, including one member of the Democratic Party Unity Commission (!), is the usual one: that Harris is a corporate stooge in the mold of you-know-who and if the Democrats are even thinking about nominating her, the dis-unity commission will get to work sabotaging her.
I hold no particular brief for Harris, who’s been a senator for all of seven months. Frankly, to me, this presidential talk seems awfully premature. Yes, Barack Obama had served briefly; he was elected to the Senate in 2006 and started running for president the next year, whereas Harris would have three years under her belt. But Obama had electrified the political world with that convention speech back in 2004, and that night he showed obvious presidential potential. Harris asked some good questions in two Senate hearings, but I’m a little mystified as to why that gets her on presidential lists. She was shortlisted by some people before she was even elected.
She’s telegenic, a female of color, and sufficiently progressive — or is sufficient not sufficient enough for some Democrats?
As David Dayen pointed out in the New Republic in early 2016 as her Senate run was getting off the ground, she has a history of being overly cautious (uh, just like you-know-who), especially with regard to her decision not to prosecute Steve Mnuchin’s bank for foreclosure violations. The California attorney general’s office had found ample evidence of possible wrongdoing, but Harris declined to pursue the matter and hasn’t said why.
So she should say why, if she runs for president, and people can judge whether her response is adequate. That’s part of the scrutiny.
But these attacks have the feel of something else. They have the feel of a group of people, most or all of them Bernie Sanders supporters, itching to refight 2016 and demand a level of purity that lo and behold only one candidate can possibly attain.
Corn, popped.
SPRINGTIME FOR LENIN: The New York Times “finds something else to love about Vladimir Lenin: He enjoyed camping,” Twitchy notes, linking to a tweet of theirs plugging their pro-Lenin hagiography that actually reads, “What Lenin’s love of camping and hiking did for nature conservation in Russia.”
Because if there’s one thing that the Soviet Union was known for, it was nature conservation. Not to mention, human conservation.
Exit quote, from the NRA’s Cam Edwards: “Find someone who loves you the way the New York Times loves Soviet Communism.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: No Spouse, No Kids, No Caregiver: How to Prepare to Age Alone.
WHOSE LIFE IS IT, ANYWAY? Medical Ethicist: ‘Right to Try’ Bill Will Not Improve Experimental Treatment Access. “This is a politically motivated, Libertarian-ideology attempt to rein in the power of the FDA in the guise of trying to help patients.”
As we were reminded in recent weeks by the sad case of Charlie Gard, your life is the State’s, comrade.
LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela inches closer to default.
Inches?
The country, which is engulfed in crisis, owes $251 million to bondholders on Monday.
The payment comes after a weekend in which the attorney general was kicked out of office, a controversial legislature took power, and the military thwarted an alleged attack by a small paramilitary group.
Experts anticipate that Venezuela will make the payment to bondholders. But it has other payments coming due in the near future and could fall short on those if the economy continues to tailspin and the United States hits it with heavy sanctions.
“This model is broken, and default is inevitable,” says Siobhan Morden, an expert in Latin American bonds at Nomura Holdings. Oil “sanctions will probably arrive sooner and force default sooner.”
Meanwhile, “Chávez loyalists hold firm amid chaos.”
It’s an easy prediction to make, that the Left will portray Maduro as they eventually portrayed Stalin — the brute who betrayed the revolution of his noble predecessor.