When success becomes self-sabotage

A liberal professor writes about the structural damage to the Left that the left-wing success in academia has wrought:

Liberal political education, such as it is, now takes place on campuses that are far removed, socially and geographically, from the rest of the country—and particularly from the sorts of people who once were the foundation of the Democratic Party. And the political catechism that is taught is a historical artifact, reflecting more the idiosyncratic experience of the ’60s generation than the realities of power politics today.

The experience of that era taught the New Left two lessons. The first was that movement politics was the only mode of engagement that actually changes things; the second was that political activity must have some authentic meaning for the self, making compromise seem like a self-betrayal.

These lessons, though, have little bearing on liberalism’s present crisis, which is that of being defeated time and again by a well-organized Republican Party that keeps tightening its grip on our institutions. Where those lessons do resonate is with young people in our highly individualistic bourgeois society—a society that keeps them focused on themselves and teaches them that personal choice, individual rights and self-definition are all that is sacred.

It is little wonder that students of the Facebook age are drawn to courses focused on their identities and movements related to them. Nor is it surprising that many join campus groups that engage in identity movement work. But the costs need to be tallied.

For those students who will soon become liberal and progressive elites, the line between self-discovery and political action has become blurred. Their political commitments are genuine but are circumscribed by the confines of their self-definitions. Issues that penetrate those confines take on looming importance, and since politics for them is personal, their positions tend to be absolutist and nonnegotiable. Those issues that don’t touch on their identities or affect people like themselves are hardly perceived. And classic liberal ideas like citizenship, solidarity and the common good have little meaning for them.

As a teacher, I am increasingly struck by a difference between my conservative and progressive students. Contrary to the stereotype, the conservatives are far more likely to connect their engagements to a set of political ideas and principles. Young people on the left are much more inclined to say that they are engaged in politics as an X, concerned about other Xs and those issues touching on X-ness. And they are less and less comfortable with debate.

Over the past decade a new, and very revealing, locution has drifted from our universities into the media mainstream: Speaking as an X…This is not an anodyne phrase. It sets up a wall against any questions that come from a non-X perspective. Classroom conversations that once might have begun, I think A, and here is my argument, now take the form, Speaking as an X, I am offended that you claim B. What replaces argument, then, are taboos against unfamiliar ideas and contrary opinions.

Conservatives complain loudest about today’s campus follies, but it is really liberals who should be angry. The big story is not that leftist professors successfully turn millions of young people into dangerous political radicals every year. It is that they have gotten students so obsessed with their personal identities that, by the time they graduate, they have much less interest in, and even less engagement with, the wider political world outside their heads.

Unfortunately, if we look at the complete failure of the Bush-era Right, and the current fecklessness of the Republican House and Senate, we can’t really say this tendency is limited to the Left.


As promised

Utsav Sanduja@u
If only it were a phone call or two…or an e-mail or a two.

My friend, you have no idea what you’re talking about.

You just don’t.

Vox Day@voxday
He doesn’t, but he will. I will post all of our recent emails back and forth on my blog tomorrow.

My objective was not to embarass anyone, nor is the content of the emails even remotely embarrassing to anyone, but merely to demonstrate that Utsav was lying and attempting to create a false narrative about my behavior. It really was just a phone call or two and an email or four, as you will see.

9/6/2017 21:36: Andrew emails me and asks me to talk to Utsav. He provides me with the number.
9/6/2017 21:58: Utsav emails me to request a call.
9/7/2017 08:44: I email Utsav to tell him that I rang but he did not pick up.
9/7/2017 08:54: Utsav emails me to tell me to call him in 15 minutes.
9/7/2017 10:09: I call Utsav. We talk for 16 minutes and 31 seconds. It’s a good, positive call.
9/7/2017 10:47: I email Utsav to thank him for taking the time to deal with this.
9/7/2017 11:07: Utsav emails me to direct my attention to this statement by Andrew.
9/7/2017 11:49: I email Utsav to ask what the policy on prospective libel and defamation will be.
9/7/2017 13:07: Utsav emails me to tell me it’s being reviewed.
9/7/2017 20:38: I email Utsav with my suggestions for how Gab could handle defamation complaints.

And that’s it. That’s the crazy, desperate narrative at which Utsav was darkly hinting. Most of the emails were little more than sentence or two. And if you would like to know what my suggestions were, they were not particularly ambitious or draconian.

  1. Clearly state that libel and defamation are not free speech in the guidelines.
  2. Establish a Legal Review Board to which libel-related complaints sent to support can be reviewed. 
  3. If the Legal Review Board concludes that a post about which a complaint has been submitted is probable libel per current US legal standards, the account is given one strike, and the account holder is informed that his user details will be divulged to the target upon request by that user.
  4. Three strikes and the account is deleted and the account holder permanently banned. Each libelous post is counted separately, but multiple libels in a single post would only be counted once.

I felt this process would minimize legal disruptions to Gab, protect the Gab community from libel and defamation, provide any member of the community subjected to genuine libel a means of seeking legal redress without having to pay for the privilege of finding out who their attacker is, and remove any incentive for troublemakers to engage in libelous or defamatory behavior.

I’m not concerned about myself. As Supreme Dark Lord, I have the benefit of the Legal Legion of Evil, which I can assure Andrew Torba, despite his doubts, does exist. The various defamations that are presently published on Gab will be removed, one way or another. But there are others who are already coming forward who simply do not have such easy acccess the legal process that is presently required of them.

I felt that establishing a Legal Review Board would be a reasonable way of dealing with the obvious problem. Of course, I also feel that it is right to remove libelous and defamatory posts, even without waiting for a request from the target of the defamation. I do it here almost every day, usually without a request, because failing to do so renders the comments a wasteland of trolls, spammers, and people who derive some sense of spiritual satisfaction from rolling in filth.

Obviously, the management of Gab feels differently. Which is their right, but is also why the site will increasingly become a wasteland of trolls, slanderers, and people who derive some sense of spiritual satisfaction from rolling in filth. Since Gab did not take a reasonable stance at the start, their problem is only going to metastasize. I’m not surprised by any of this, in fact, I warned him in November that if he did not come up with a reasonable moderation policy, the site would eventually spin out of his control.

If people cannot get redress from Gab, they will seek it elsewhere. Andrew and Utsav really have no right to complain about how people do so when they are giving them no other choice. And yet, they are.

JeremiahEmbs · @JeremiahEmbs
So what’s the excuse for @FashDaddey calling me a child rapist?Is @a @u @support going to address this?Or are they going to pretend defamation is the same thing as free speech&make this site completely unusable for good people such as myself who will abandon this platform since it is not moderated.

 JeremiahEmbs · @JeremiahEmbs
@a @u @support What are you going to do Torba? Asia Registry is being informed you are no longer immune under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act as the site appears to be designed for defamation as there is no recourse for those abused by it.

Andrew Torba@a
If our registrar requires us to remove something again we will publish it here and let everyone know that you whined to them because someone hurt your feelings with mean words on the internet.

As I said in last night’s Darkstream, Andrew Torba is simply not ready for prime time. I have advised him for nearly a year, I think he is a talented young man, and I genuinely like him, but he has repeatedly demonstrated that he is still too emotionally fragile for any high-stress position that brings him into contact with the public. And furthermore, I would immediately fire any customer support representative who ever responded to one of my customers that way.


Gab’s Torba to release emails, recorded phone calls

Micus Expectorus@expectorant
Who the hell posts on a public forum criticizing an ally because he thought he got a phone call or two and didn’t want to pick up?

Look, we get you’re trying to be the lion for @a, but you’re coming across as a passive-aggressive weenie. You should grow up too.

Utsav SandujaPRO · @u
If only it were a phone call or two…or an e-mail or a two.

My friend, you have no idea what you’re talking about.

You just don’t.

Vox Day@voxday
He doesn’t, but he will. I will post all of our recent emails back and forth on my blog tomorrow.

I never write anything I’m not willing to expose to the public.

Vox Day@voxday
[9/7/2017 10:09:13 AM] *** Call to [number redacted] ***
[9/7/2017 10:25:59 PM] *** Call ended, duration 16:31 ***
[9/7/2017 8:01:25 PM] *** Call to [number redacted], no answer. ***
[9/7/2017 8:55:19 PM] *** Call to [number redacted], no answer. ***

Note that the first call was at @u’s request.

Andrew Torba@a
Note that these are recorded.

Keep going.

Please this will be fun.

I am more alpha than you will ever be.

Try me.

Andrew Torba@a
Vox I’ll publish every email you ever sent us and phone calls which have been recorded,

Please try me.

You can destroy your personal brand all you want, but you’re not going to drag down Gab with it.

Mark my words.

Vox Day@voxday
I am happy to grant your plea. Go for it.

Release the text of all 81 emails from 9/22/2016 to 9/7/2017 in their entirety. I suggest you redact the names and email addresses of all third parties.

You made the threat. Now deliver on it.


Irony: social media edition

Tariq Nasheed@tariqnasheed
There is a new social media app for white supremacists called GAB, & they have an East Indian spokesperson so they can hide their racism

Gab@getongab
This is utterly disgusting and defamatory. How is this possibly not “hate speech” @jack? Our co-founder is a Muslim Turkish Kurd you moron.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
Yeah, about that whole defamatory thing.

What if they called your co-founder “a pedophile”?

What if they did it on Gab?

Repeatedly?

UPDATE: I spoke to Gab this morning. Although the libel situation is getting worse there, they appear to have a good grasp on the relevant issues and will be refining their policies accordingly. I was also pleased to welcome a new volunteer to the Legal Legion of Evil, bringing the total to seven.

UPDATE: Andrew TorbaPRO · @a
Over the next several weeks we will be improving our flagging system to make it easier for you to report and label content that you believe may break our guidelines. Our guidelines are fair and common sense. Please review them.


7 reasons for Zuckenberg 2020

We can only hope the Democrats are dumb enough to nominate the would-be Augustus 2.0:

Here are seven reasons why Democrats should clear the decks for Mark Zuckerberg as their 2020 nominee:

1) He’ll be able to play the political outsider card harder and heavier than Trump.

2) Zuckerberg doesn’t need a dime of anyone else’s money.

3) Zuckerberg is the most effective tech CEO in America.

4) He understands the media ecosystem. Hell, at this point, he basically owns the media ecosystem.

5) Zuckerberg’s a family man—with a family that is the Modern Family to his opponent’s Real Housewives.

6) He will reject all the tropes, traps, and talking points that have led Democrats into trouble. (In other words, adios Nancy Pelosi!)

7) Kamala who?

Can you even imagine how the Democrats of 1960 would react to the idea that only 60 years later, their standard-bearer would be a godless, race-mixing Jew who is one of the wealthiest monopolists in the world?

For all the Alternate History novels about the Nazis that have been written, no one has yet landed on the most obvious one. Hitler builds a time machine, travels to 2017, buys a video camera, films a few hours, then returns and broadcasts it to the people of England, France, and the USA.

The Allied governments would have been overthrown and replaced with pro-German governments in an afternoon.


Another left-wing backfire

At this point, the Left can almost be defined as the ideology which regularly features policies which, when implemented, are guaranteed to provide results that are the reverse of those predicted.

Adriana Kugler, who teaches economics at Georgetown, recently published her research on the gender-gap in STEM fields. She found that STEM recruitment efforts that stress the gender-gap in STEM actually serves to discourage women.

“With the media, women are getting multiple signals that they don’t belong in the STEM field…”

“Society keeps telling us that STEM fields are masculine fields, that we need to increase the participation of women in STEM fields, but that kind of sends a signal that it’s not a field for women, and it kind of works against keeping women in these fields,” Kugler says.

Many of the common explanations for the lack of women in STEM don’t hold up under investigation, Kugler explained to Campus Reform. While previous research suggests women are less “resilient,” or more negatively impacted by “bad grades,” Kugler says there’s “no evidence” to support that.

Likewise, the claim that women do poorly in STEM solely because it’s male dominated isn’t supported by evidence either, Kugler says, noting that an aspiring female computer scientist won’t necessarily be turned away from knowing that the field is male dominated.

The trouble begins when the media and recruitment efforts capitalize on that preponderance of men, since it “sends an additional message to women that they don’t fit into those fields, and that they don’t belong there.”

“With the media, women are getting multiple signals that they don’t belong in the STEM field, that they won’t fit into the field. That’s what we find,” Kugler told Campus Reform. “It’s very well intentioned, but it may be backfiring.”

It’s not really that hard. If you write “here there be dragons” on a map, some people are going to believe you. And a disproportionate number of those people are going to be women.


Priming is confirmed fake science

It’s sometimes a pity that science doesn’t have a simple “that’s obvious BS” card. Because I absolutely would have played it when the hypothesis of “priming” was not merely hypothesized, but asserted to be solid scientific fact:

In 2011, Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman published a popular book, “Thinking Fast and Slow”, about an important finding in social psychology.
In the same year, questions about the trustworthiness of social psychology were raised.  A Dutch social psychologist had fabricated data. Eventually over 50 of his articles would be retracted.  Another social psychologist published results that appeared to demonstrate the ability to foresee random future events (Bem, 2011). Few researchers believed these results and statistical analysis suggested that the results were not trustworthy (Francis, 2012; Schimmack, 2012).  Psychologists started to openly question the credibility of published results.
In the beginning of 2012, Doyen and colleagues published a failure to replicate a prominent study by John Bargh that was featured in Daniel Kahneman’s book.  A few month later, Daniel Kahneman distanced himself from Bargh’s research in an open email addressed to John Bargh (Young, 2012):
“As all of you know, of course, questions have been raised about the robustness of priming results…. your field is now the poster child for doubts about the integrity of psychological research… people have now attached a question mark to the field, and it is your responsibility to remove it… all I have personally at stake is that I recently wrote a book that emphasizes priming research as a new approach to the study of associative memory…Count me as a general believer… My reason for writing this letter is that I see a train wreck looming.”
Five years later, Kahneman’s concerns have been largely confirmed. Major studies in social priming research have failed to replicate and the replicability of results in social psychology is estimated to be only 25% (OSC, 2015).
Looking back, it is difficult to understand the uncritical acceptance of social priming as a fact.  In “Thinking Fast and Slow” Kahneman wrote “disbelief is not an option. The results are not made up, nor are they statistical flukes. You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true.”
Yet, Kahneman could have seen the train wreck coming. In 1971, he co-authored an article about scientists’ “exaggerated confidence in the validity of conclusions based on small samples” (Tversky & Kahneman, 1971, p. 105).  Yet, many of the studies described in Kahneman’s book had small samples.  For example, Bargh’s priming study used only 30 undergraduate students to demonstrate the effect.

I pay very little attention to “studies show” science for this reason.


Preserving ISIS

This is utter insanity. A strategic white paper by “a veteran authority on the Arab-Israeli conflict and strategic developments in the Mideast and expert on Israeli strategic doctrine” argues for saving the monstrous Islamic State.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The West should seek the further weakening of Islamic State, but not its destruction. A weak but functioning IS can undermine the appeal of the caliphate among radical Muslims; keep bad actors focused on one another rather than on Western targets; and hamper Iran’s quest for regional hegemony.
US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter recently gathered defense ministers from allied nations to plan what officials hope will be the decisive stage in the campaign to eradicate the Islamic State (IS) organization. This is a strategic mistake.
IS, a radical Islamist group, has killed thousands of people since it declared an Islamic caliphate in June 2014, with the Syrian city of Raqqa as its de facto capital. It captured tremendous international attention by swiftly conquering large swaths of land and by releasing gruesome pictures of beheadings and other means of execution.
But IS is primarily successful where there is a political void. Although the offensives in Syria and Iraq showed IS’s tactical capabilities, they were directed against failed states with weakened militaries. On occasions when the poorly trained IS troops have met well-organized opposition, even that of non-state entities like the Kurdish militias, the group’s performance has been less convincing. When greater military pressure was applied and Turkish support dwindled, IS went into retreat.
It is true that IS has ignited immense passion among many young and frustrated Muslims all over the world, and the caliphate idea holds great appeal among believers. But the relevant question is what can IS do, particularly in its current situation? The terrorist activities for which it recently took responsibility were perpetrated mostly by lone wolves who declared their allegiance to IS; they were not directed from Raqqa. On its own, IS is capable of only limited damage.
A weak IS is, counterintuitively, preferable to a destroyed IS. IS is a magnet for radicalized Muslims in countries throughout the world. These volunteers are easier targets to identify, saving intelligence work. They acquire destructive skills in the fields of Syria and Iraq that are of undoubted concern if they return home, but some of them acquire shaheed status while still away – a blessing for their home countries. If IS is fully defeated, more of these people are likely to come home and cause trouble.
If IS loses control over its territory, the energies that went into protecting and governing a state will be directed toward organizing more terrorist attacks beyond its borders. The collapse of IS will produce a terrorist diaspora that might further radicalize Muslim immigrants in the West. Most counter-terrorism agencies understand this danger. Prolonging the life of IS probably assures the deaths of more Muslim extremists at the hands of other bad guys in the Middle East, and is likely to spare the West several terrorist attacks.

This is utter madness and lends support to the idea that ISIS was, if not an outright creation of a US-Israeli alliance, at least supported by both the United States and Israel. This is not realpolitik, or whatever its advocates might like to style it, it is hubris and dangerous lunacy.
These jokers claim to be expert strategists, and yet they reliably fail to predict even the most obvious events. And their advice is reliably terrible.


Don’t argue with Damore

You’d think a reporter would be aware that he was overmatched when he went to interview the author of the Google manifesto:

During an interview with Business Insider, Damore, who was fired from Google for publishing a viewpoint diversity manifesto, claimed he “was simply trying to fix the culture in many ways. And really help a lot of people who are currently marginalized at Google by pointing out these huge biases that we have in this monolithic culture where anyone with a dissenting view can’t even express themselves,” he continued, adding, “Really, it’s like being gay in the 1950s.”
“These conservatives have to stay in the closet and have to mask who they really are. And that’s a huge problem because there’s open discrimination against anyone who comes out of the closet as a conservative,” Damore explained. He sparred with Business Insider’s Steve Kovach, who tried to claim that Damore attacked women in his manifesto.
“I was simply talking about the population level distributions. And I specifically call out that we should never treat an individual differently based on this because there’s so much overlap,” stated Damore. “The document was simply trying to address why there may be fewer women in technology than men. And it never said anything about the women at Google being any different than the men at Google.”
This prompted Kovach to reply, “Not at Google. But broadly it made assumptions about women as a general population though, right?”
“It didn’t make assumptions. It stated scientific facts about the population level distribution,” Damore responded.
“OK. I mean, that’s obviously up for debate too,” Kovach claimed, forcing Damore to explain, “Not really. I mean, these are empirical facts.”
“The population level distributions are not up for debate,” he continued. “Those have been documented hundreds of times.”

Clearly Damore did not realize that Mr. Kovach did not like the population level distributions. Therefore, they were an assumption, ergo subjective, consequently wrong. You’d think these SJWs would, sooner or later, get suspicious about the statistical improbability of their being absolutely right every single time.
Of course, if they grasped statistics, they wouldn’t be SJWs blithely refuting empirical facts as one man’s assumptions.


The underperformers of Google

Further evidence that the Ivy League’s affirmative action is rewarding the undeserving and the underperforming:

A Google Research project indicating that underrepresented minorities and Ivy League graduates were more likely to receive softball interviews at the company was shut down by Google’s human resources department upon seeing the results, according to an insider.
The Google insider (alias “Chuck”), who worked at the company for several years, was part of a team tasked with determining which Google employees were most likely to succeed at the company based on their interview feedback.
According to Chuck, the predictive model they created determined that employees who received mixed feedback at the interview stage performed far better than those who received only good feedback.
Those who were most likely to receive only good feedback (“inflated interview scores,” in the words of Chuck) tended to be Ivy League graduates or underrepresented minorities. Those who were most likely to receive mixed feedback (and, according to the model, go on to achieve the most success at Google) were more likely to be white and Asian men who did not go to Ivy League schools.
The insider’s team had been tasked with the project by Google’s HR department, but according to him, they promptly shut it down once they realized its results would not serve their goals.

Google is an SJW-converged organization at war with reality. That is why it is doomed.