This is your weekly NFL open thread. I have to confess that I’m a little disappointed that Philip Rivers broke Dan Fouts’s San Diego record last week; I know the game has changed, but when I think Chargers, I still think first of Air Coryell and Fouts.
Nero eviscerates PopeHat
The Popehat project–endless, tedious, insufferably smug posts about
minutiae–only really works if you read your own goddamn sources.
Top tip for bloggers whose raison d’etre is smugly correcting others: actually read reports before posting about them.
Milo is referring to this amusingly clueless post by Ken White, in which the inveterate champion of free speech flirts with abandoning his principles because a) he doesn’t like #GamerGate, b) he doesn’t like certain GamerGaters, including me, and c) girls had feelbadz! It’s a pity, because the guy has done some genuinely good work defending free speech in the past, but has somehow failed to recognize that SJWs represent one of the most serious enemies that his chosen cause has ever known.
Ken tried to belatedly explain his failure to bother reading the entire UN report before responding to it in an update.
Further information suggests I was far too benefit-of-the doubt here, which is what happens when you write fast and when you generally despise some of the people involved. Some of this is still right, but regard the conclusions and characterizations with skepticism. Taking a second look. See, e.g., the fact that they cited this [footnote 118] for the video game discussion I cite below. When I’m wrong I’m wrong. Will revisit.
Hey, I think we all understand that there is no time for actually “reading” things or ensuring one is accurately “informed” before leaping to the defense of a woman experiencing feelbads; it is a white knight’s pleasure to destroy his own reputation if by doing so he can save a fair maiden from even a single incident of cyberviolence.
I haven’t read the report myself nor do I have any intention of doing so. I have not hitherto found either the United Nations or Literally Who to be interesting or even remotely credible. But I do find Ken’s excuse-making to be fairly typical of the moderates who are always happy to bend over backward to rationalize the most blatantly dishonest SJW behavior while repeatedly casting aspersions at those who actually stand up to them. And I expect there will be further backtracking on the subject, as I would be very surprised if the SJWs responsible for the report got anything right at all.
“Cyberviolence” is a false and deceptive issue. I have been the recipient of far more “cyberviolence” and death threats than all of the Literally Whos combined, and for much longer; if it is such a serious issue then why hasn’t the UN or Ken White rushed to my defense at any time in the last 14 years?
When I reviewed and critiqued the economics study on immigration and jobs here yesterday and the day before, I gave the benefit of the doubt to the economists whose views on immigration creating jobs opposed my own. I interpreted every statistic and every assumption in a manner that favored their perspective, not mine. That is exactly what you must do if you wish to provide a serious analysis that will withstand objective review. But by his own admission, Ken White gives the benefit of the doubt to those who oppose people he generally despises. And that is why, despite his legal work on behalf of free speech, he cannot be considered an intellectually credible individual.
So there’s a solution to, that you know. Don’t read the blog any more. Unfollow the Twitter feed. Look for someone whose viewpoint is more acceptable to you. Maybe even write it up yourself.
But that’s not the GamerGate way.
Also, note how angry you are, and then look at the original again. I warned that UN speech restrictions are suspicious, I pointed to multiple things to be concerned about, and I even questioned the content at issue — I just didn’t see how crazy the sourcing was, yet. And I suggested that any actual codes that come out of it should be examined carefully.
But none of that is enough for you. You want hate. It’s not enough for you unless I excoriate the people you hate.
That’s why normal people don’t take you seriously.
This is deeply amusing coming from an individual who is literally mentally unstable. How would he know what normal people take seriously? Ken, you’re not normal. You’re not honest. You’re not intellectually rigorous. And you’re not credible. People like me would be delighted to continue to ignore you, but you go out of your way to attack us online, both on PopeHat and on Twitter.
Neither of the two commenters was demanding that Ken hate or excoriate anyone, they were simply expecting him to show at least a modicum of discernment concerning various individuals and institutions widely known to be less than entirely truthful. He failed to do so, and when rightly taken to task for it, he completely mischaracterized their responses.
Of course, it does make a certain amount of sense that he would side with the SJW whack jobs. Birds of a feather and all that. And as we all know, SJWs always lie.
How is this woman still a candidate?
I’m sure you will be just as shocked as I am to learn that Hillary Clinton has been caught lying about her emails again:
The U.S. Defense Department has found an email chain that Hillary Clinton did not give to the State Department, the State Department said on Friday, despite her saying she had provided all work emails from her time as secretary of state.
The correspondence with General David Petraeus, who was commander of U.S. Central Command at the time, started shortly before she entered office and continued during her first days as the top U.S. diplomat in January and February of 2009.
The Defense Department provided the emails to the State Department in “the last several days,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said in a statement.
The exchange of 10 or so emails, the existence of which were first reported by the Associated Press on Friday, largely dealt with personnel issues, according to the State Department.
Clinton’s use of a private email account connected to a server in her home instead of a government-issued email address came to light in March.
News of the previously undisclosed email thread only adds to a steady stream of revelations about the emails in the past six months, which have forced Clinton to revise her account of the setup which she first gave in March.
Nearly a third of all Democrats and 58 percent of all voters think Clinton is lying about her handling of her emails, according to a Fox News poll released this week.
At this point, it is beginning to look as if the only reason the Lizard Queen is still in the race is in the hopes of being able to get elected and pardon herself. She’s not only jumping the shark, she’s doing backflips over it.
200 reviews
I’ve never had a book hit that many Amazon reviews before, so to see it happen in a month is rather pleasant. It’s also good to see that interest has remained high enough to keep SJWs Always Lie at #1 in the Political Philosophy category for the whole month since it was first published.
And speaking of reviews, Jan Weir of American Renaissance reviewed SJWs Always Lie. It’s a pretty favorable review, although the reviewer is subject to what I think of as Clemens Disease; I’m considerably less famous than Bono, after all, but I don’t often see articles about U2 that say “The pseudonymous singer, Bono (real name: Paul Hewitt Hewson). Anyhow, to the review:
While SJWs Always Lie is a highly entertaining read, I don’t want to leave the impression that it’s just a witty romp through the SJW jungle. It’s deadly serious about the damage SJWs can do to you and me as we try to get through our workday. One of their favorite venues for mischief-making is the Human Resources department, particularly in large companies that like to remind you from time to time that they have something called a Code of Conduct. This code is invariably vague, with lots of soothing phrases about commitment to equality, a “safe” workplace, and of course “diversity.” This is an open-ended invitation to all sorts of SJW mischief, which often takes the form of a whispering campaign against you, in which both accusation and accuser remain concealed from view. This has happened to the author, who eloquently describes the pit-of-the-stomach anxiety and confusion of being attacked by unseen assailants.
How to respond? Probably the most valuable part of the book is about what to do and not do if you’re attacked. Don’t apologize. Don’t resign. Fight back.
Target the enemy at every opportunity. Hit them wherever they show themselves vulnerable. Play as dirty as your conscience will permit. Undermine them, sabotage them, and discredit them. Be ruthless and show them absolutely no mercy. This is not the time for Christian forgiveness because these are people who have not repented, these are people who are trying to destroy you and are quite willing to harm your family and your children in the process. Take them down and take them out without hesitation. If you have any SJWs working under you, fire them . . . .
Mr. Beale also proposes a long-term plan for SJW-proofing our society. I found this the most intriguing part of the book. It displays a level of sociological insight and gravitas that is quite different from the light, snarky tone found in other parts of the book and promoted on the book’s cartoonish cover. The author analyzes the deep rot that the SJWs have caused our institutions, explains how we have made ourselves vulnerable to their control, and tells what we can do to end this vulnerability. His suggestions are too extensive to summarize here, but inter alia, we are enjoined to: Build alternative institutions (e.g., home school your children, create alternatives to SJW-infested Wikipedia); defund and destroy their propaganda centers (e.g., ignore their entertainment media); deny them employment; keep them out of your organizations.
It’s a bracing call-to-arms, based on an honest concept of justice.
I would be remiss if I failed to mention that, like it or not, I am an American Indian (one brother is out on the rez this week, as it happens), and my great-grandfather did ride with Villa. Damn near got killed with him too. In fact, I was talking to one of my brothers today and he told me a funny story about how he was out raking his lawn recently and someone from his wealthy neighborhood driving by stopped his car and tried to hire him to mow his lawn. My brother wasn’t at all offended; when the guy tried to apologize, he said, “why would I be upset that you think I look Mexican? I am Mexican.”
I told him that he should have burst out crying and started a Patreon account; apparently that is the correct SJW-approved response to microaggressions these days.
Despite his height, that brother looks the most Mexican in the family; his equally tall doppleganger works at a Mexican supply store at which I bought a tortilla press last year. Ender actually thought it was his uncle for a moment and was extremely confused about what he was doing there. I look the most Anglo, obviously, whereas another brother looks sufficiently Indian that he was invited to join the American Indian group at his college by strangers.
Having written a book about speech and thought police, perhaps I’ll have to write a book about race police one of these days.
One-quarter of a job
After reading the actual study that is being used to claim that immigration actually creates new jobs for native workers, I became so skeptical of their mathematical modeling, their theoretical justifications, and their cherry-picked data that I have reached the conclusion that even with the wind of the credit boom at their backs, I can disprove their conclusions on the basis of the same 1980-to-2000 period they used to make their claims.
First, however, I have to note some corrections that I have made to my previous post. Because I used the labor force and not the working-age population, my numbers were a little off. My conservative interpretation of the NBER model meant that the U.S. economy was 24,367,681 short of the number of jobs predicted by the model. And from 2000 to 2015, 16.4 million new immigrants have created a total of 5,832,319 new jobs, for an average jobs/immigrant ratio of 0.36, which is still considerably short of the 1.2 that had been claimed.
But the economists’ claims were actually more outrageous than I thought at first. You may recall that I was thinking perhaps the 1.2 job included the immigrant’s job, for a net benefit to a native worker of 0.2. But that was simply how the media characterized the study, which actually claimed the following:
“Consistent with our prediction, the impacts of immigration on employment growth have become greater as the estimates imply that each new immigrant is predicted to add 2.5 new jobs (1.9 for native workers) to a city in which he or she settles.”
So that is the prediction we will use for the 20-year period they used, 2.5 new jobs per immigrant. In 1980, the U.S. working age population was 142,520,008 and the employment population ratio was 60.0. That means there were 85,512,005 jobs in 1980.
From 1980 through 1999, there were 16,822,980 legal immigrants, not counting refugees or undocumented workers. According to the study, they created 42,057,450 new jobs, which means that there should have been 127,569,455 jobs in the United States in 2000.
Were there? In January 2000, the working age population of the United States was
178,259,050 and the Employment-Population Ratio was 64.6, meaning there
were 115,155,346 jobs, leaving 12,414,109 of the newly created jobs unaccounted for. In fact, 16.8 million immigrants created 29,643,341 jobs, or 1.76 per immigrant. That looks pretty good, with each immigrant not only finding work but adding three-quarters of a new job per native. Of course, a credit boom is going to make most economic statistics look good.
However, if we put the two periods together, what we see is that from 1980 to 2015, 33,180,780 legal immigrants have created a total of 35,475,660 new jobs, for a net rate of 1.07 new jobs per legal immigrant. If we then add the additional 12 million illegal immigrants estimated to be resident in the USA, this reduces the 35-year new jobs/immigrant ratio to 0.78, which means that each immigrant eliminates approximately one-quarter of an existing American’s job.
And if the number of undocumented workers is as high as 30 million, as Ann Coulter and Donald Trump have asserted, then the new job/immigrant rate is 0.56 and each immigrant eliminates nearly half of an existing American’s job.
Californication and cuckservatism
Taxpayers flee high-tax Democrat States for lower-tax Republican States:
In 2013, more than 200,000 people on net fled states with Democrat governors [led by New York, Illinois, California, Connecticut, and Massachusetts] for ones run by Republicans [led by Texas, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Arizona], according to an analysis of newly released IRS data by Americans for Tax Reform.
“People move away from high tax states to low tax states. Every tax refugee is sending a powerful message to politicians,” said ATR President Grover Norquist. “They are voting with their feet. Leaders in Texas and Florida are listening. New York and California are not.”
That year, Democrat-run states lost a net 226,763 taxpayers, bringing with them nearly $15.7 billion in adjusted gross income (AGI). That same year, states with Republican governors gained nearly 220,000 new taxpayers, who brought more than $14.1 billion in AGI with them.
Instapundit advises the newly flown wisely: JUST DON’T VOTE FOR THE SAME LOSER POLICIES WHEN YOU GET THERE.
But here is what I find interesting. Many of the same people who correctly understand that there is a serious political problem that arises from Californians moving to Colorado, New Yorkers moving to North Carolina and Minnesotans moving to Texas will nevertheless deny that the Irish, Italians, Germans, Scandinavians, and Jews, all of whom came from political cultures far more different from the political tradition established by the English U.S. Founding Fathers, could possibly have had any negative effect on the resulting American political scene.
I fail to see how it is even remotely possible to assert the one and deny the other. Indeed, logic dictates that the changes that stemmed from the multiple waves of immigration from various alien nations must have been considerably greater than the changes resulting from these state-to-state population transfers.
Millions of Mexicans immigrants can now vote. They are accustomed to
choosing between a nationalist party (National Action Party) and two revolutionary socialist
parties (Institutional Revolutionary Party and (Party of the Democratic Revolution)… which may well be the choice facing Americans in less than two decades. If the Republican party does not become the nationalist party, a new one will arise.
Mailvox: get your syllogisms straight
TB goes awry in the second step:
This post (which was about IQ, part of a larger issue of Civilization) seemed to me to be about the very foundation of the Civilization discussion.
1. Genetics and culture are inseparable,
2. Only British genetics can grasp and enact Western Civilization,
3. The U.S. cannot allow a drop below a certain level of British derived population.I understand that civilization requires trade-offs in education, economics, religion, and other systems. It just seems that the Civilization you describe was doomed the very moment it started. I believe the Constitution allows the nation to be hardier than this hot house flower being described.
2. is false. The U.S. Constitution is not synonymous with Western civilization. Western civilization is hardier than the U.S. Constitution, which was not only written by and for Englishmen, but is only understood correctly by them and those who have sufficiently adopted their culture.
More than that, it was only written for them and their descendants and was never intended to apply to anyone else except some of the German colonists who successfully grasped, accepted, and supported their unusual limited government philosophy.
The descendants of the countries who came later, the Irish, the Italians, the later Germans, the Scandinavians, the Jews, and the Hispanics are not the posterity of the Founding Fathers. It should be no surprise that they have not successfully defended a philosophy they have never accepted or understood nor respectfully abided by a document that was never written for them.
And my rebuttal to those who would argue is very simple and straightforward. Look around you. Do you see anything that is even remotely respectful of the concepts put forth in the U.S. Constitution?
The Speaker of the House resigns
Good riddance:
Speaker John A. Boehner will resign from Congress and give up his House seat at the end of October, according to aides in his office.
The timing was apt. I was just contemplating the correct way to define “cuckservative”.
The most useful definition I was able to articulate was this: “A self-professed “conservative” who will sell out his nation, his posterity, and his intellectual heritage rather than risk being called “racist”.
And speaking of definitions, Frank J. Fleming requested a word to convey the concept of the great feeling of temporarily having the latest tech. He appeared pleased with my suggestion of “iPhoria”.
I am available for further neologistic consultancies. Please call ahead to schedule an appointment.
Immigration is rape culture
Why, I wonder, is it so important for refugees to be segregated by nationality, considering that we’re told they won’t have any trouble immediately transforming into Germans or Swedes on the Magic Dirt basis?
A culture of rape and sexual abuse is being allowed to take hold in asylum centres across Germany as Europe struggles to cope with the migrant crisis, it has been alleged,
Women’s rights groups and politicians have highlighted assaults against women and children in at least one camp. And they suggest such incidents may be widespread, with many going unreported to the police.
Campaigners also claimed some men saw unaccompanied women as ‘fair game’, and also blamed conditions in which occupants were unsegregated by gender or nationality.
Johannes-Wilhelm Roerig, the federal commissioner for child sexual abuse issues, said: ‘I am most concerned that refugee children in camps, gymnasiums, or former barracks are not sufficiently protected from sexual assault.’
Campaign group Women For Refugee Women said the solution was to integrate genuine refugees as quickly as possible into society to remove them from the risks of overcrowded conditions. Its director Natasha Walter said: ‘People should not be in detention centres, they should be in the community where they can avail themselves of the normal protections given to citizens by the authorities.’
It’s fascinating how they are more concerned about the invaders being raped by their fellow invaders than they are about the citizens upon whom they are eager to inflict these fine, upstanding, hard-working new neighbors.
Immigration and new job creation
This is why you can’t trust one single thing the media says about immigration. Or, for that matter, economics. First, consider the assertions made in a ThinkProgress article attacking Bernie Sanders’s moderate position on immigration. I’ve emphasized the two of interest.
Sanders’ position on immigration has been called “complicated” and he has been criticized by immigration activists for supporting the idea that immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs and hurting the economy, a theory that has been proven incorrect. Both of his leading Democratic challengers, Hillary Clinton and Martin O’Malley, have recognized that new immigrants coming to the country actually boost the economy. But Sanders continues to align himself more closely with Democratic positions of the past.
“I frankly do not believe that we should be bringing in significant numbers of unskilled to workers to compete with [unemployed] kids,” Sanders said. “I want to see these kids get jobs.”
Studies have shown that immigrants actually create jobs for American workers. Researchers recently found that each new immigrant has produced about 1.2 new jobs in the U.S., most of which have gone to native-born workers. And according to the Atlantic, an influx in immigration can cause non-tradable professions — jobs like hospitality and construction that cannot be outsourced — to see a wage increase because the demand for goods and services grows with the expanding population.
Sounds pretty conclusive, doesn’t it? The “theory” that immigrants are taking jobs and hurting the economy has been “proven incorrect”. Not only that, but “studies have shown” that each and every new immigrant creates 1.2 new jobs!
Second, let’s go and look at the study that provided the basis for these assertions, “Are Immigrants a Shot in the Arm for the Local Economy?”, published in April 2015:
Most research on the effects of immigration focuses on the effects of immigrants as adding to the supply of labor. By contrast, this paper studies the effects of immigrants on local labor demand, due to the increase in consumer demand for local services created by immigrants. This effect can attenuate downward pressure from immigrants on non-immigrants’ wages, and also benefit non-immigrants by increasing the variety of local services available. For this reason, immigrants can raise native workers’ real wages, and each immigrant could create more than one job. Using US Census data from 1980 to 2000, we find considerable evidence for these effects: Each immigrant creates 1.2 local jobs for local workers, most of them going to native workers, and 62% of these jobs are in non-traded services. Immigrants appear to raise local non-tradables sector wages and to attract native-born workers from elsewhere in the country. Overall, it appears that local workers benefit from the arrival of more immigrants.
Now, to anyone who pays attention to economics, those dates should ring a bell. 1980 to 2000… just happens to closely coincide with the dates of one of the largest debt-funded economic expansions in world history. Not only that, but that period also precedes the U.S. interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq which led to the usual influx of “refugees” from those and other countries, such as Somalia, where U.S. forces were active. From 1980 to 2000, there were 841,149 annual immigrants, 23 percent fewer than the average in the subsequent 15 years.
Not counting undocumented workers, the U.S. has been “strengthened” by adding an average of 1,090,520 legal immigrants annually, which, when combined with the reports of the study, means that from 2000 to 2015, immigrants should have created 19.6 million new jobs for native workers in addition to supplying approximately 10.6 million new jobs themselves. (The latter must be the case due to the new jobs reportedly going to native workers and is a conservative estimate based on the EPR). This amounts to a total of 30.2 million new jobs created by immigration since 2000.
Now let’s look at the numbers from 2000 to 2015. In January 2000, the working age population of the United States was 178,259,050 and the Employment-Population Ratio was 64.6, meaning there were 115,155,346 jobs. Therefore, according to the NBER model, the beneficial effects of immigration are such that after 15 more years of it there should be 145,355,346 jobs in 2015.
In March 2015 the working age population had grown by nearly 15 million to 204,026,416, which is in line with the 10.6 million new immigrant workers, but population grew to nearly 320 million and the EPR fell to 59.3.That works out to 120,987,665 jobs, which is a mere 24,367,681 fewer jobs than the NBER model predicted. From 2000 to 2015, 16.4 million new immigrants have created a grand total of 5,832,319 new jobs, which means that either a) over 10 million native Americans have lost their jobs to immigrant labor or b) over two-thirds of the new immigrants are collecting welfare. Either way, these 16.4 million immigrants have not been a boost to the economy.
I should note that it would have been just as easy to use GDP and wage statistics to disprove some of the other assertions in the first article, but it should suffice to point out that the reason the Federal Reserve has maintained a zero interest rate policy for the last five years is to compensate for insufficient demand, thereby proving that the demand for goods and services has not grown in line with the expanding population.
The facts are absolutely clear: immigrants do NOT create new jobs for native workers and they do not boost the economy.