Sexism 6x worse than racism

No doubt this disparity in criminal sentencing will be of DEEP concern to our friendly neighborhood SJWs:

After controlling for the arrest offense, criminal history, and other prior characteristics, “men receive 63% longer sentences on average than women do,” and “[w]omen are…twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted.” This gender gap is about six times as large as the racial disparity that Prof. Starr found in another recent paper.

It seems to me that a smart criminal should have the good sense to reduce his risk ratio by finding a woman to be his fall gal.

Assuring mutual destruction

The “bad bank” concept only appears to have delayed the inevitable default, not prevented it:

It was the failure of Creditanstalt, a Viennese bank founded in 1855 by Anselm von Rothschild, that arguably sparked the Great Depression, setting off an unstoppable chain reaction of bankruptcies throughout Europe and America.

No-one would think that what happened last week at Austria’s failed Hypo Alpe-Adria Bank International falls into quite the same category; we are meant to be in the recovery phase of the latest global banking crisis, so this is more about re-setting the system than again bringing it to its knees, right?

Well, make up your own mind. I suspect neither financial markets nor policymakers have yet caught onto the full significance of the latest turn of events.

In a nutshell, the Austrian government has had enough of funding the bank’s losses, and announced plans to “bail-in” external creditors to the tune of €7.6bn instead. As such, this marks a test case of new European rules to make creditors pay for failing banks. About time too, you might say. What took them so long?

Only in this case, the bonds are notionally guaranteed by the Austrian state of Carinthia, which now theoretically becomes liable for the bail-in. It’s an echo of the mess Ireland got itself into at the height of the banking crisis, when it foolishly attempted to stem the panic by underwriting all Irish banking liabilities; the move very nearly ended up bankrupting the entire country. Hypo will bankrupt Carinthia.

What the central bankers and politicians are doing is trading risk for time. I, and other economic realists, have been repeatedly wrong about the timing of events; I thought both Greece and Ireland would go bankrupt by 2013. But the fact that the defaults have not begun yet does not mean that the crisis is over, in fact, it does not even mean that the crisis is less serious than before. Quite the opposite, actually.

While I understand if those who don’t pay much attention to international economics might simply assume at this point that I don’t know what I’m talking about because things don’t seem to necessarily be all that bad, it might be helpful to keep in mind that the current situation is unprecedented.

For example, in most previous historical situations, Austria’s Hypo Bank would have gone bankrupt back in 2009. Instead, it was nationalized and put Austrian taxpayers on the hook for up to $25 billion.  The assets were divided and a “bad bank” created, but now that bad bank is in such dire straits that the Austrian government isn’t willing to continue funding its ongoing operational losses. But instead of simply declaring it bankrupt, they have put the assets of the equivalent of a U.S. state behind it.

This may buy them as much as another five years. But it also assures the financial destruction of an entire region of the country. What the banks have successfully done is create a system of mutually-assured destruction, gambling that electorates would rather let them off the hook than risk their governments defaulting, with all the turmoil that would subsequently ensue.

In it for the long term

A comment about ISIS at Jerry Pournelle’s site:

ISIS has more to offer its soldiers than the Western militaries do:
Arab men in traditional culture have NO contact with women at all, not even dating, until they’re married. That can often not be until one reaches the thirties. This has the results you would expect.

ISIS, by contrast, offers a quick marriage both to male and female recruits. For the men  the attractions of marriage are obvious. Women are offered  “wonderful husband and a free house with top-of-the-line appliances, such as a fridge, microwave and even a milkshake machine”.  Moreover, ISIS will pay a stipend for every  child the couple bears.

Framed that way, it’s obvious why they exert such a powerful draw.  People who aren’t ever going to amount to much , people who have been let down by their traditional culture, are flocking to a place that offers them a fresh start. And sex , of course. 

I’m going to guess that their soldiers are not subject to divorce-rape the way Western soldiers are either. The fact that they are willing to pay for children born to ISIS couples is an ominous sign that they are planning for the future.

No male space goes unmolested

However, I suspect this is less about a commitment to women in technology than a cynical, Sarkeesian-style opportunistic grab for cash:

Talk about a cool dude: he once stopped a sulfuric acid leak with a piece of chocolate, and dismantled a missile using a paper clip. The 1980s US television character, secret agent Angus MacGyver, could do it all. And in 2016 his successor will be a woman, if a US engineering association has its way.

Late last month, the National Academy of Engineering launched what it called “The Next MacGyver Project,” aimed at coming up with ideas for a scripted TV series featuring a female engineer as the leading character.

Thirty years after that cult series riveted TV viewers, “the objective here is not a MacGyver reboot, but to inspire a new generation of young women interested in science and technology by creating a strong female role model,” said Lee Zlotoff, creator of MacGyver.

The project is joint initiative by Adam Smith, an engineering professor at the University of Southern California, and Randy Atkins, head of communications at the National Academy of Engineering.

“After an interview with Lee Zlotoff, Adam called me and proposed that we develop a TV show, and I immediately said yes,” said Atkins.

The name — “The Next MacGyver Project” — was suggested by Zlotoff, who has supported the project from the outset.

“I cannot say how many people told me they got interested in engineering after watching MacGyver,” said Atkins. “The idea to make a female lead character comes from Hollywood producers we met during the initial phase of the project,” Atkins said.

Yes, I imagine the idea for branding it “MacGyver” would have come from Mr. Zlotoff. I’m certain his commitment to inspire a new generation of women interested in science and technology – all six of them – by creating a strong female role model has nothing to do with the fact that he hasn’t had a hit television show since MacGyver.

It’s not enough for The Next MacGyver to be a woman. She should be a
black Jewish bisexual with Down’s Syndrome in a wheelchair. Actually, that would probably be a hell of a lot more entertaining than the usual grrrl power nonsense. Done right, it would be downright hilarious. Especially if she couldn’t really talk, but sort of made these moaning Chewbacca sounds that everyone could understand perfectly.

That, I would watch. And as long as she saved the day by turning her wheelchair into a nuclear reactor or whatever, it would be perfectly inspirational and millions of young girls would be inspired to continue avoiding science and technology like the plague.

War propaganda doesn’t fly in Berlin

The Germans are getting increasingly dubious about the way the US is reporting Russian activities in Ukraine:

Breedlove’s Bellicosity: Berlin Alarmed by Aggressive NATO Stance on Ukraine

US President Obama supports Chancellor Merkel’s efforts at finding a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis. But hawks in Washington seem determined to torpedo Berlin’s approach. And NATO’s top commander in Europe hasn’t been helping either.

It was quiet in eastern Ukraine last Wednesday. Indeed, it was another quiet day in an extended stretch of relative calm. The battles between the Ukrainian army and the pro-Russian separatists had largely stopped and heavy weaponry was being withdrawn. The Minsk cease-fire wasn’t holding perfectly, but it was holding.

On that same day, General Philip Breedlove, the top NATO commander in Europe, stepped before the press in Washington. Putin, the 59-year-old said, had once again “upped the ante” in eastern Ukraine — with “well over a thousand combat vehicles, Russian combat forces, some of their most sophisticated air defense, battalions of artillery” having been sent to the Donbass. “What is clear,” Breedlove said, “is that right now, it is not getting better. It is getting worse every day.”

German leaders in Berlin were stunned. They didn’t understand what Breedlove was talking about. And it wasn’t the first time. Once again, the German government, supported by intelligence gathered by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, did not share the view of NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR).

The pattern has become a familiar one. For months, Breedlove has been commenting on Russian activities in eastern Ukraine, speaking of troop advances on the border, the amassing of munitions and alleged columns of Russian tanks. Over and over again, Breedlove’s numbers have been significantly higher than those in the possession of America’s NATO allies in Europe. As such, he is playing directly into the hands of the hardliners in the US Congress and in NATO.

The German government is alarmed. Are the Americans trying to thwart European efforts at mediation led by Chancellor Angela Merkel? Sources in the Chancellery have referred to Breedlove’s comments as “dangerous propaganda.” Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier even found it necessary recently to bring up Breedlove’s comments with NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg.

Read the whole thing. There is considerably more there about the way that Gen. Breedlove and Victoria Nuland are incessantly banging the drum for direct military conflict with Russia. Apparently Putin isn’t Hitler yet, but give it another six months and he’ll be sporting hair and a mustache.

Mailvox: the math is the evidence

Diogenes appears to have trouble with it:

The only thing missing from your post is any evidence supporting your assertion. Every stat I’ve seen has Firefox’s slide beginning at least two years before the Eich affair. Nor do the stats show any acceleration in decline at the time Eich was forced out.

What is your evidence — aside from wishful thinking — for laying the whole thing at the doorstep of SJWs rather than, say, the rise of Chrome? Note I dropped Firefox over the Eich affair myself. However, I don’t see any evidence that the boycott has had any impact whatsoever.

No evidence? The evidence was literally placed right in front of his nose. No acceleration in decline? The evidence was literally placed right in front of his nose. The fact that the slide began two years – or actually, as the article says, four years – before the Eich affair is not the salient point, it is the annual rate at which users have been abandoning Firefox that tells the story. Let’s look at what the quoted article said:

In the last 12 months, Firefox’s user share — an estimate of the
portion of all those who reach the Internet via a desktop browser — has
plummeted by 34%. Since Firefox crested at 25.1% in April 2010, Firefox
has lost 13.5 percentage points, or 54% of its peak share.

Firefox’s user share was at 25.1 percent. It is now at 11.6 percent five years later. Those lost 13.5 percentage points are distributed as follows:

2010 to 2014 =  7.52 points (13.9 percent of total decline per year)
2014 to 2015 =  5.98 points (44.3 percent of total decline per year)

Now, the fact that the increase in the decline of Firefox increased by a factor of three was coterminous with the boycott does not prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that the boycott was entirely responsible. But it is most certainly evidence that the boycott was at least partially responsible, especially in light of the fact that Mozilla employees clearly believe it has had a negative affect on their user numbers, hence their public pleas to Christians to overlook l’affaire d’Eich one of which was linked to in yesterday’s post.

In fact, based on the reported rate of decline, the evidence suggests that the Eich affair is having twice as negative an effect as Chrome, bloat, and every other negative factor combined. This was all immediately apparent in the post year yesterday; frankly, I find it a little shocking that it is necessary to spell it out to such a degree for people to be able to follow it. The same story also happens to be indicated in my own statistics, as Pale Moon alone now accounts for 4 percent of the current traffic here on VP, up from zero one year ago.

For those who need me to type even slower, the 5.98 points lost in 2014 is calculated by dividing 11.6 by 0.66. This provides 17.6 as the Firefox user share prior to the decline of the last 12 months. I hope that explaining the simple subtraction involved will not prove necessary.

And before anyone stupidly goes running to find a competing statistic, please note that the claim was that there was no evidence to be seen, despite the fact that said evidence was right there in the quoted article.

The SJW slow-suicide model

Mozilla Firefox continues to die a well-deserved death:

Mozilla’s Firefox is in danger of making the endangered species list for browsers. Just two weeks after Mozilla’s top Firefox executive said that rumors of its demise were “dead wrong,” the iconic browser dropped another three-tenths of a percentage point in analytics firm Net Applications’ tracking, ending February with 11.6%. That was Firefox’s lowest share since July 2006, when the browser had been in the market for less than two years.

Firefox 1.0 was released in November 2004, at a time when Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) had a stranglehold on the browser space, having driven Netscape — Firefox’s forerunner — out of the market. Mozilla has been credited with restarting browser development, which had been moribund under IE.

But Firefox has fallen on hard times. In the last 12 months, Firefox’s user share — an estimate of the portion of all those who reach the Internet via a desktop browser — has plummeted by 34%. Since Firefox crested at 25.1% in April 2010, Firefox has lost 13.5 percentage points, or 54% of its peak share.

At Firefox’s 12-month average rate of decline, Mozilla’s desktop browser will slip under the 10% bar in June, joining other third-tier applications like Apple’s Safari (with just a 4.8% user share in February) and Opera Software’s Opera (1.1%). If the trend continues, Firefox on the desktop could drop below 8% as soon as October.

Now, what could possibly have happened in the last 12 months that would have caused users to stop using Firefox? Apparently I’m far from the only one who rejected the appeal to come back to Firefox. SJW is tech suicide; from what I’ve been hearing, GDC is going to be one of the next organizations to begin an SJW-inspired downhill slide into irrelevance.

You’d think people would learn, but like the Anglican Church, they just keep doubling-down on failure. And it doesn’t help that the media has been complicit in keeping quiet concerning the main reason for Firefox’s slide. Even in an article focused on “an incredibly shrinking Firefox”, there isn’t a single mention of the Eich affair.

And if you’re still on Firefox, do get with the program and get rid of it. Don’t support the SJWs.

Saddle up, black knights

There is an easy target of opportunity just waiting to be routed. Destroy those evil women’s-only spaces under a rainbow-colored flag:

A Midland County woman’s gym membership was canceled after she refused to stop telling fellow gym members “a man” was using the woman’s locker room. Yvette Cormier said the incident occurred Saturday, Feb. 28, when she entered the women’s locker room at the Planet Fitness location at 701 Joe Mann Boulevard in Midland.

“I was blocked, because a man was standing there,” Cormier said. “It freaked me out because, why is a man in here?”

Cormier said an employee at the front desk told her that the individual identifies as a woman. After taking her complaints to Planet Fitness’ corporate office, Cormier said she was told that the gym was a “no judgement zone” and they would not tell the individual in question to stay out of the women’s locker room. The person has not been identified.

The slogan “Judgement Free Zone” is regularly used by Planet Fitness.

A statement released by McCall Gosselin, public relations director for Planet Fitness, states that members can use the locker room corresponding with their personal gender identity.

Cormier disagrees with the policy and feels it’s a safety issue.

According to Cormier, she returned to the gym each day between Monday and Thursday. While there, Cormier said she told women in the locker room about the individual she observed in the bathroom the weekend before.

Cormier said she then got a call from Planet Fitness’ corporate office telling her that she was violating their “no judgement” policy. She says they asked if she was going to stop talking to other women in the locker room and she said she would not. Cormier said the representative told her she was no longer welcome at the gym.

The only way men are going to get their spaces back is by demonstrating the lunacy of equalitarianism. If your gym has a “no judgement” policy, tell them you identify as a woman and start using the women’s changing room. Walk around naked and take your time in the steam room and the sauna.

It shouldn’t take too many examples like this to cause women to revolt against feminism and equalitarianism.

The ugly doctrine of anti-racism

The UK’s former equality czar admits anti-racism is an “ugly new doctrine”:

A former equality chief has branded his years working to stamp out racial discrimination as ‘utterly wrong’. Writer and broadcaster Trevor Phillips said efforts made under the Blair government turned anti-racism into an ‘ugly new doctrine’.

Mr Phillips is the former chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission and has waged a 30-year campaign to tackle issues around discrimination and equality. In an upcoming Channel 4 documentary, called Things We Won’t Say About Race That Are True, he says attempts to stop prejudice instead encouraged abuse and endangered lives….

Mr Phillips, a Labour party member, says anti-racism began with good intentions but turned into ‘thought control’.

Anti-racism is anti-science, anti-history, and anti-freedom. It is pernicious and evil. Racism is neither a sin nor is it a societal evil. Race-based self-segregation is not only the observably preferred human norm for all races throughout the entirety of recorded human history, it is inevitable. You cannot support freedom and anti-racism at the same time. It is not logically possible. You cannot support freedom of speech and thought control. You cannot support diversity and freedom of association.

It is true that racism has inspired various crimes throughout history, as has greed, ambition, lust, and a variety of other concepts. But it is the crimes that matter, and it is the crimes that should be prevented, not whatever the intellectual motivation for them might be. Consider how ridiculous most people would believe the idea of passing a law against thinking or expressing lustful thoughts to be. That is precisely how stupid and totalitarian it is to try to ban racism.

Mailvox: Sociosexuality and Selenoth

Cogitans Iuvenis was the first of several to ask:

So how would you classify each character in Throne of Bones.

My own work tends to illustrate the intrinsic challenge of writing outside one’s rank. Let’s look at the perspective characters first:

Marcus Valerius: too soon to tell. Either Alpha or Sigma.
Valerius Corvus: Alpha, but less Alpha than his brother Magnus
Valerius Fortex: Alpha
Severus Aulan: Beta
Theuderic: Sigma
Lodi: Beta
Meerfin: Delta

Non-perspective characters:

Valerius Magnus: Alpha
Severus Patronus: Alpha
Charles-Philippe de Mirid: Alpha
Skuli Skullbreaker: Alpha

Now, considering that it is a book that concerns a considerable quantity of kings, aristocrats, and generals, it is entirely appropriate that the characters should be weighted towards the Alpha rank. But I think the book would be better, and more interesting, if a broader range of characters were portrayed, so long as they were portrayed accurately according to their socio-sexual profile.

The challenge is that it is no easier for an Alpha to convincingly write a Gamma than vice-versa. Or for the Delta to write a Sigma, etc. Just as the Gamma writes paper Alphas, the Alpha is likely to write excessively sniveling Gammas that don’t do justice to either the observable exterior or the rich, self-centered interior.