Mailvox: Keeping out SJWs

An email from a member of the Ilk who not only grasps the key concepts, but is putting them into practice in her HR department:

We [are a sizable] company.  I consider myself part of the “Ilk” and have been following your discussion of SJW’s for several years, including reading SJW’s Always Lie. As a result, we have become more proactive during the interview process for new employees, trying to discover if they harbor or are amenable to SJW ideas.

I thought an example of a recent interview would be of value to others in business as a model for modifying their hiring process.

Like many applicants, today’s had recently left a job.  We have always asked, “Why did you leave your last job?”, listened to the various responses, like: “the company downsized”, “change in management”, etc.  However, other common responses now require further questioning.  Responses such as, “I didn’t get along with my boss”, “I had an issue with a company policy”, or other answers that indicate some level of dissatisfaction with the previous employer require more in depth questioning.

When asked why they left the last company, one applicant said, “I just didn’t like some parts of the environment and am looking for a better place to work.”  Years ago, that innocent-sounding response would not have drawn any attention.  Not any more.

The manager immediately picked up on the “problem with previous employer” tone underlying the answer.  So, further questioning was required.

Manager: “Really.  What was part of the environment you didn’t like?”

Applicant: “Some of the employee interaction just wasn’t for me.  It wasn’t professional enough.”

Manager: “That makes sense.  I wouldn’t like that either.  What was an example of unprofessional behavior?”

Applicant: “It was really just the way one of the manager’s treated some of the people.”

Manager: “Oh.  That can be frustrating.  What did the manager do?”

Applicant: “He treated some of the people in the call center unprofessionally.”

Manager: “Ok, but what do you mean by treating them unprofessionally?”

Applicant: “Well, he acted inappropriately around them.”

Manager: “When you say “inappropriately”, what do you mean?”

Applicant: “Well, we all thought it was harassment.”

Manager: “What kind of harassment, like yelling at people?”

Applicant: “No. Some of it was sexual harassment.”

Manager: “Oh no.  That’s not good at all.  So, you just left and didn’t do anything about that kind of harassment?”

Applicant: “No.  I spoke to lots of the other phone reps and we all agreed it was harassment.”

Manager: “So, after you spoke to the other reps, did you file a complaint?”

Applicant: “We tried.”

Manager: “So, when that didn’t work, did you file a lawsuit or do anything?”

Applicant: “That’s what we ended up having to do.  It was just that bad.”

Everything past this point was just the formalities of ending the interview without making the applicant feel like they were just arbitrarily eliminated from consideration.

The point I’m trying to share is the amount of effort, time and question asking skills it took to finally dig down to the real issue.  Most small and medium businesses are not used to “digging” during their interviews.  I know, having been guilty myself and many other business owners I know admit they do not “dig”.  If the person looks good, i.e. like they can do the job, they get hired.  That mindset used to work, but in today’s PC environment is too dangerous to the business’ survival, so it must be changed.

When a person finally admits to being the instigator of some type of action against the company and involving other employees in their “dissatisfaction”, then that seems to be a good example of an SJW.

I can hear the “moderates” saying something like, “But maybe they were sexually harassed.  It’s not fair to disqualify them when they were the victim of harassment.  They weren’t the problem.”  Conceptually, I agree.  However, the distinction seems to be the involvement of others or engaging in activities to “punish” the perceived offender; these are SJW characteristics.  A conservative person would simply have left the job if the environment was that uncomfortable.

So, hopefully this is of some value to others as they learn to keep SJW’s out, but I also hope you’ll comment on how you see the interview process being better utilized to screen SJW’s.  Also, how do you respond to the “moderate” mindset described above when it comes to hiring people?

I think questions such as “have you ever lodged a complaint against your superior” or “have you ever been party to a lawsuit against your employer” (prohibited by Federal law) should probably be added to the standard interview repertoire. A better approach would involve asking “have you ever been the victim of harassment”, as the average SJW is going to assume you are on her side and be eager to tell you all about how everyone from her kindergarten teacher to her previous boss treated her shabbily.

After which you smile, thank her for her time, and circular file the application. Unless, of course, you’re looking to be hit by complaints of one sort or another within weeks of her first day. SJWs Always Lie.

Derb and the Magic Dirt

In which John Derbyshire discovers the power of proper rhetoric:

In the past couple of decades we’ve seen the rise of one particular explanatory strategy. That strategy recently acquired a name—or possibly it’s had the name for a while and I only just recently noticed. Whatever, I really like the name: Magic Dirt.

The core idea is that one’s physical surroundings—the bricks and mortar of the building you’re in, or the actual dirt you are standing on—emit invisible vapors that can change your personality, behavior, and intelligence.

That’s why, for example, you read so much about “bad schools” or “failing schools.” The thing to be explained is that schools whose students are overwhelmingly non-Asian minorities—blacks and mestizos—get much worse results on academic tests than schools whose students are majority white and East Asian. This has been so for decades, defying even extravagantly expensive efforts to change it, like the Kansas City fiasco of the 1990s.

Parsimonious explanation: innate differences in behavior, intelligence, and personality between the races.

Magical explanation: Bad schools! The bricks and mortar of these schools, the asphalt of their playgrounds, are giving out invisible noxious vapors that enstupidate the kids!

Bob Weissberg tossed and gored the whole “bad schools” flimflam in his 2010 book Bad Students, Not Bad Schools, which I recommend to your attention.

Another aspect of the Magic Dirt theory is the current popularity of economist Raj Chetty‘s researches on social mobility. Analyzing millions of individual tax returns from the 1990s, then the returns of those individuals’ now-adult children fifteen years later, Chetty found there’s more social mobility in some places than in others. Who woulda thunk it? Sample quote:

    For children growing up in places like Salt Lake City … the odds of moving from the bottom fifth of the national income distribution to the top fifth are more than 12 percent … In contrast, in cities like Charlotte, North Carolina … a child’s odds of moving from the bottom fifth to the top fifth are less than 5 percent. [The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Economic Opportunity,Brookings Institute, June 1, 2015]

Parsimonious explanation: Those places have different proportions of the various races, so race differences in average behaviors cause different outcomes.

Official explanation: Magic Dirt! Salt Lake City’s dirt has beneficial qualities that Charlotte’s just doesn’t.

A very cynical person—not me, you understand, but a hypothetical extreme cynic—might surmise that Prof. Chetty’s research is funded by the real-estate industry as part of their plan to reclaim America’s cities for upscale whites by driving out minorities and scattering them to distant towns and suburbs—so they can improve themselves by living on better dirt, you see?

Magic Dirt theory is a key component of immigration romanticism, too. Sure, Mexico and Central America are messed-up places, and presumably their inhabitants played some role in messing them up. If we just move thirty or forty million of those people to the U.S.A., though, our Magic Dirt will transform them into civic-minded Jeffersonian yeomen!

Our hypothetical extreme cynic might again wonder if there isn’t some commercial interest at work behind the scenes there. Central Americans work for very low wages—especially when they’re here illegally and dare not complain.

Magic Dirt: the explanatory power of it is truly wonderful. Perhaps we can use it to elucidate String Theory, or the Mystery of Consciousness.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Higgs boson is implicated somehow…

Simplicity + truth + contempt = effective rhetoric. As Derb illustrates, the core pro-immigration argument really is that stupidly ahistorical and cargo cultist. It is so obviously wrong that it can be accurately dismissed in just two words: Magic Dirt.

Economics and science fiction

But I repeat myself. Speaking first of the latter, all three QUANTUM MORTIS novels are now available for free for Kindle Unlimited and Amazon Prime subscribers. If you were vaguely curious about them, but not enough to actually go out and buy them, here is your chance to test drive them. I’d particularly recommend checking out QUANTUM MORTIS: A MIND PROGRAMMED, which is the literary update and remix of my all-time favorite SF novel, THE PROGRAMMED MAN.

From an Amazon review: “Space Noir. That’s what this is. It’s a classic spy vs spy tale, but this time the stakes are much higher and there are enough twists and turns to make a Finnish rally driver happy.”

QUANTUM MORTIS: A MAN DISRUPTED and QUANTUM MORTIS: GRAVITY KILLS are also available via KU.

And for those who are more interested in economics than in science fiction (to the extent that one accepts the idea that the former is not a subset of the latter), here are the first week’s readings in my draft econ curriculum. Don’t ask me where you can find the texts, if you can’t figure out how to do that, you needn’t bother with the readings.

1. What is Economics    

  • RGD Introduction
  • MURPHY Part 1 Lesson 1
  • HAZLITT Part 1-1

RGD: The Return of the Great Depression, Vox Day
MURPHY:  Lessons for the Young Economist, Robert Murphy
HAZLITT: Economics in One Lesson, Henry Hazlitt

It’s a little late now, multicultis

After 30 years of stumping for it, the New York Times belatedly develops some concerns about the consequences of mass migration:

They arrived in an unceasing stream, 10,000 a day at the height, as many as a million migrants heading for Europe this year, pushing infants in strollers and elderly parents in wheelchairs, carrying children on their shoulders and life savings in their socks. They came in search of a new life, but in many ways they were the heralds of a new age.

There are more displaced people and refugees now than at any other time in recorded history — 60 million in all — and they are on the march in numbers not seen since World War II. They are coming not just from Syria, but from an array of countries and regions, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, even Haiti, as well as any of a dozen or so nations in sub-Saharan and North Africa. They are unofficial ambassadors of failed states, unending wars, intractable conflicts.

The most striking thing about the current migration crisis, however, is how much bigger it could still get….

Nor is it only the Middle East and North Africa that European leaders need to consider. The Gallup Poll, based on data compiled from more than 450,000 interviews in 151 nations from 2009 to 2011, found that in Nigeria, which already has double the population of Germany, 40 percent of people would emigrate to the West if they could. And the lesson of 2015 — for them and much of the world — is that they can.
Continue reading the main story

While the flow of migrants to Europe this year already represents the biggest influx from outside the Continent in modern history, many experts warn that the mass movement may continue and even increase — possibly for years to come.

At least we know what the cause of World War III will be. Don’t ever forget who was responsible: the anti-nationalists who have championed open borders and multiculturalism. They are responsible. The bloodshed will be on their hands.

It’s time to start making a list, complete with quotes and links, of those on the Left and Right who have championed immigration and open borders. The future needs to know who were the destroyers of Western Civilization, so they will recognize the same arguments being made next time. If you’ve got a candidate, post it here.

My first candidate: David Brooks.

Globalization, with all its stresses and strains, has created a large
international class of middle-class dreamers: university graduates who
can’t fulfill their aspirations at home and who would enrich whatever
nation is lucky enough to have them…. The Republican Party is insane if its conducts a 21st-century immigration policy based on stereotypes from the 1980s.

It is time for the Men of the West to rise and defend their nations, as they have repeatedly done before. Hungary, Norway, and Germany are waking up. The Men of Poland are rising.

The “Shorty Awards” scam

Don’t pay any attention to these online fraudsters. Mike Cernovich explains why:

As you can see, Sawhorse Media has an interest in having people with large social media followings promoting its contest. They use the online presence of me and others to draw attention to its popularity contest.

I received enough votes to be number 3, which means I earned my Shorty Award nomination in Healthy Living fair and square.

(Michael Cernovich was among the top three vote getters in the Healthy Living category of the Shorty Awards.)

I expected Shorty to have some integrity. I can be a controversial person and I would have had no issue with the Shorty Awards pulling my nomination before the nomination period ended.

Yet Sawhorse Media decided to commit fraud on me and my Twitter followers. The Shortys were fine with having me in their contest when I was promoting their contest. When the nomination period ended and I was no longer of use to them, they deleted my nomination and removed me from their website.

After winning enough votes for a nomination, my official Shorty Award page was 404’ed.

The Shorty Awards did not give me any reason for its actions. They simply deleted my page, pretending as if I did not win a Shorty nomination by using my considerable social media presence to promote the Shorty Awards.

The reason you haven’t hitherto seen me write anything about these “awards” is because I figured out they were some sort of weird promotional scam on the basis of their mixed nomination system. They don’t actually want to honor the real social media presences, they just want to have an excuse to give awards to conventional celebrities in order to try to attract mainstream media attention.

I have no doubt that the Ilk could have gotten me on the list, but what would be the point? They simply would have found some lame excuse to DISQUALIFY me, just as they did to my two GGinParis co-hosts, Mike and Milo.

Why Ted Cruz needs Trump

This analysis of the GOPe road map suggests that every Republican who isn’t part of the Republican Establishment should be supporting Donald Trump, as he may be the only thing standing in the way of a third Bush coronation.

The pathway the RNC/GOPe constructed to elect Jeb Bush specifically was designed to eliminate/defeat Ted Cruz.

Stop.  And re-read this reality:

    The GOPe road map was specifically and intentionally created by scheme and construct, to intentionally block any possibility for Ted Cruz to achieve 2016 presidential victory.

As a direct and factual outcome there is nothing Ted Cruz can do to overcome the structural dynamics currently in place which block any possibility of him achieving electoral victory.  Period.

We have laid out the rules, laid out the road-map, and laid out the primary contests -REPEATEDLY- and we continued to asked anyone who finds themselves refusing this reality to outline a path for Cruz victory.

Unfortunately, it simply does not exist.

The RNC rules are now in place; the RNC primary dates are now all confirmed; the RNC delegate distributions all now set in stone;  and there’s enough key state polling data for anyone to use who wants to prove this false.

We have studied this road-map intensely.  We have explored the district-by-district level possibilities within each of the pre-March 16th 2016 states a hundred different ways, the numbers for anyone other than Trump just don’t add up.

The GOPe road-map was specifically created to block Ted Cruz, or anyone like Ted Cruz, from achieving victory.

Team Jeb is: Rubio, Fiorina, Christie, Huckabee, Kasich, Perry, Graham, Pataki and Gilmore. (10 establishment candidates all part of the RNC/GOPe machine)  We have outlined it all HERE.

If, for the sake of intellectual exercise, you remove Donald Trump from the race and apportion his supporters in a reasonable manner, what you will find is that the GOPe road map kicks back into play – and no non-jeb is able to pull enough support to defeat Jeb.

Remove Trump and Ben Carson becomes Herman Cain 2012; Cruz becomes Gingrich, Jeb replaces Romney and the 2016 outcome becomes 2012 ground-hog day.  Just as designed.

Here’s the kicker…. As previously mentioned, Ted Cruz is a smart guy, and therefore Ted Cruz also is aware of this.

Ted Cruz is fully aware of this – he picked up on it months ago.

That explains why Jeb still hasn’t dropped out despite the fact that his campaign is practically road kill after his inept debate performances. In other words, it isn’t Trump who is Jeb’s stalking horse, it is all the other candidates except Cruz.

So Cruz needs Trump to knock Jeb out of the race in order to have a chance himself. Or he might team up with Trump and offer a Trump-Cruz ticket, which is something that a lot of conservatives could live with. If I were in Cruz’s shoes, the latter is something I would be looking very hard at right now.

A serious Hugo contestant

Hey, if SJWs don’t have to read the books to rate them, we don’t have to read them to recommend them.

1 of 106 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars
I’m just going to rate this a 1/5 on principle…
By Zoe S. Galaitsis on October 6, 2015

I’m just going to rate this a 1/5 on principle, after Jim Butcher got nominated by Vox Day and his Rabid Puppies. Not sure what’s going on there but Butcher hasn’t come out and said a thing, not even to deny their platform of reviling women, gays, and non-Christians. I’m generally wary of reading anything by him or giving him any money at this point.

So the SJWs don’t like Jim Butcher now simply because he won’t submit and dutifully pronounce their ritual denunciations. This is one of the many reasons why they will always lose when resisted; they are the most untrustworthy and unreliable allies you could ever hope to have.

It seems to me that we’ll have to give serious consideration to The Cinder Spires: the Aeronaut’s Windlass. Very serious consideration.

This is my shocked face

ESPN finally gets around to shutting down Grantland:

Effective immediately we are suspending the publication of Grantland.  After careful consideration, we have decided to direct our time and energy going forward to projects that we believe will have a broader and more significant impact across our enterprise.

Grantland distinguished itself with quality writing, smart ideas, original thinking and fun.  We are grateful to those who made it so.  Bill Simmons was passionately committed to the site and proved to be an outstanding editor with a real eye for talent.  Thanks to all the other writers, editors and staff who worked very hard to create content with an identifiable sensibility and consistent intelligence and quality. We also extend our thanks to Chris Connelly who stepped in to help us maintain the site these past five months as he returns to his prior role.

There was no way the site was ever going to make money. It made sense as a means of keeping Bill Simmons happy, but there was no reason to continue it once they fired him.

I liked the idea, but it was too full of SJWs pushing the usual nonsense to bother sifting through it for the interesting articles. I quit reading it regularly long before the Sports Guy was ejected.