Basecamp's CEO made a refreshing move corporate-policy-wise:
The web software firm Basecamp is asking employees not to discuss politics or partake in activism on company time. Founder and CEO Jason Fried also announced that the privately owned firm would be dropping committees, obsequious peer-performance reviews, and “wellness” and other “paternalistic benefits” that try to nudge employees toward a particular lifestyle.
Alas, apparently a sizable swath of the company's staff wanted the woke stuff:
Tech journalist Casey Newton said about one-third of the company’s roughly 60 employees took buyouts shortly after, with one fuming: “Basically the company has said, ‘well, your opinions don’t really matter — unless it’s directly related to business…’ A lot of people are gonna have a tough time living with that.”
Matt Welch at Reason on the interface between pandemic policies and the current fashionability of the concept of equity.
A darkness is descending over Finland. Asserting sound Christian doctrine can get you charged with incitement, as Rev. Dr. Juhana Pohjola, Bishop Elect of the Evangelical Lutheran Mission Dicoese of Finland found out when he said marriage was between a man and a woman, or have you facing six years in prison as member of Parliament, medical doctor and mother of five Paivi Rasanen is for similarly speaking out about the Christian position on human sexuality.
It's called human nature. It's called the natural reaction to the entity in society with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force coming for what belongs to you:
Wealthy Americans will avoid paying 90% of the estimated $1 trillion increase in investment taxes that President Joe Biden is proposing this week, according to new study from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Business School.
The Wharton researchers concluded that tax avoidance, much of it legal, would cut nearly $900 billion of what the proposed increase on capital gains taxes could raise for the government.
"We don't think that the proposal has a lot of teeth," said John Ricco, director of policy analysis at the Penn Wharton Budget Model, a non-partisan fiscal policy research group at the business school. "There are a lot of games you can play to avoid paying this tax."
The University . . . has issued guidance promising an extra pre-tenure year to pretty much all assistant and associate professors while observing that the pandemic’s “specific” effects “will be different for different faculty members.” UPenn could’ve stopped there, and just said that the pandemic disrupted a lot of teaching, convening, and research, and that’s why it’s giving faculty some leeway.
Instead, the university went on to endorse a series of rather specific race- and gender-based assertions about how the pandemic affected college faculty, backed only by the sloppy, misleading application of junk science. It’s a study in how a sensible impulse can go awry in the hands of today’s woke campus bureaucrats.
UPenn officials asserted that “the negative implications [of the pandemic] for traditional measures of faculty productivity may be greater, on average, for women faculty and faculty of color, given gender differences in caregiving responsibilities, disproportionate negative health- and economic-related effects of the pandemic on Black and Brown people and communities, and greater expectations for women faculty and faculty of color to engage in mentoring and institutional service. Early data show that journal submissions during the early months of the pandemic were lower for women than for men.”
We couldn’t help but be curious about the research cited to justify these sweeping assertions.
Turns out, the pickings are pretty slim. The guidance is supported by only six references. Two of the citations explain how to write a pandemic impact statement and outline general pandemic effects on faculty well-being. That leaves four to address the pandemic’s disparate impact on women faculty of color and women faculty more broadly.
The citation used to justify the assertion that the pandemic had a disproportionate negative impact on the research and publication of women and on black and Latino faculty turns out not to be a study at all — but a June 2020 opinion column, published by the National Academy of Sciences and penned by Jessica Malisch, a biology professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, which advises universities on how to promote gender equity.
Malisch’s piece is, itself, a revealing exercise. Malisch offers a handful of references to support her call for changing campus hiring and tenure. But only two of these are studies which purport to study the pandemic’s impact on faculty research (the others are op-eds or actions guides). And neither of the two studies actually support Malisch’s point. To back her claim that COVID-19 has driven “a wedge between women and men in academia in terms of research opportunities,” Malisch cites an Inside Higher Ed story discussing a study which used data from the first few weeks of the pandemic—and which found that women faculty, overall, submitted more work than they typically did in that time period! The other study, focused solely on women economists, found that women were submitting working-papers at their normal rate. In other words, neither study actually made Malisch’s point.
UPenn’s other citation regarding the pandemic’s effect on women faculty of color was an Inside Higher Education guide titled, “Keeping COVID-19 from sidelining equity.” The guide simply posited that higher education “will most likely become less diverse and inclusive, given the pressure the pandemic is placing on women and faculty of color.” In other words, it was a think piece predicting inequitable impacts which was then used as evidence of inequitable impacts. This would be considered shady practice by used car dealers — research institutions should be held to a higher standard.
The guidance also claimed that evidence showed “journal submissions during the early months of the pandemic were lower for women than for men,” though the data in question relied entirely upon a study of submissions to Elsevier academic journals in the first eight or ten weeks of the pandemic. The researchers found that women submitted about as many submissions as normal, while men submitted more than they normally would (hardly evidence of the pandemic’s devastating impact on scholarly productivity). However, given that the study only examined submissions between February and May 2020 relative to that same period in 2018 and 2019, and given that the pandemic didn’t actually cause disruptions until mid-March 2020, it’s hard to gauge how representative this limited snapshot might be.
A group of Midwestern farmers sued the federal government Thursday alleging they can't participate in a COVID-19 loan forgiveness program because they're White.
The group of plaintiffs includes farmers from Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota and Ohio. According to the lawsuit, the Biden administration's COVID-19 stimulus plan provides $4 billion to forgive loans for socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers who are Black, American Indian, Hispanic, Alaskan native, Asian American or Pacific Islander.
White farmers aren't eligible, amounting to a violation of the plaintiffs' constitutional rights, the lawsuit contends.
Jack Butler at National Review examines how consultant behemoth McKinsey is the prefect representation of the technocratic overlord class:
. . . one pithy expression of woke capitalism was a letter, signed by hundreds of corporations and executives and published in the New York Times in mid April, reflexively and baselessly condemning election-integrity legislation such as that passed by the Georgia legislature.
Among the signatories was McKinsey & Company, the consulting behemoth. Its employees are hired the world over, ostensibly to improve other organizations’ internal operations. But the true nature of the company, as well as its recent history, gives its presence on that list an irony dark enough to be worth singling out even among the many corporate hypocrites and virtue-signalers who signed that letter.
McKinsey is one of the premier firms in the consulting world, with annual revenue of $10 billion and 2,600 partners. Its business model is more or less that of a typical consulting firm: Its employees parachute in to an enterprise that has decided itself needful of improvement, study that enterprise’s operations and imbibe its goals, then advise it on how best to go about achieving those goals. With such a remit comes quite an ego; ergo, McKinsey employees, whether consciously or not, partake of the essence of a kind of technocratic capitalism that can be difficult to distinguish from its public-sector counterpart. “Its partners like to think of themselves as the smartest guys in the room,” as The Economist put it. The best and the brightest, you might say. And with that tendency comes an inclination to view one’s fellow humans in the abstract, as cogs in various machines — projection, perhaps, on the part of many consultants who are themselves cogs in a machine.
Some consultants, I assume, are good people. Or at least one would hope so, given that the people in leadership roles in society seem increasingly cast from this mold. McKinsey alumni in government include Pete Buttigieg, Susan Rice, and even Tom Cotton and Ben Sasse, a welcome traitor to his elite class. Maybe there is at times a need for their services. At other times, though, they can seem simultaneously arrogant and useless, showing up at a place they know nothing about, repeating back what they are told on-site, and then providing a pedigreed, credentialed gloss on marginal efficiency improvements or on the hiring (or firing) decisions a given organization’s executives hoped to make before they showed up. Think less Manhattan Project whiz kids and more the Bobs from Office Space.
John McWhorter, at his Substack newsletter It Bears Mentioning, has another must-read entitled "Do Black People Enjoy Being Told They Are Weak and Dumb? The Elect Hope So." A taste:
Tom Taylor . . . [is] the head of the upper school at Riverdale Country Day school, and has penned an article where he serenely lays out his educational philosophy. You know the drill from the title alone: “Independent School Rhetoric and its Role in the Neoliberal Construction of Whiteness.” Some choice passages from Mr. Taylor’s opus:
In light of the deeply embedded and largely unexamined neoliberal ideologies in the foundation of NAIS [National Association of Independent Schools] (and thus in independent schools as a broadly constructed segment of the education landscape), it would appear that such schools are fundamentally problematic spaces.
Get ready, though: to people like this, problematic means blasphemous, and blasphemy requires desperate, and even hostile changes of procedure.
Neoliberalism and its attendant beliefs about the market, individual control, and meritocracy are existential elements of independent schools and, thus, any attempt at constructing an inclusive space or decolonizing community will face immediate challenges.
That is, the problems people like Taylor have with what they call neoliberalism justify deriding the idea of anyone having control over their fate (who isn’t white), and the things we consider it a positive trait to excel in – i.e. “meritocracy.”
Thus, private schools who find parents unwilling to accept moves toward culturally responsive schooling are free to draw a line in the sand, so to speak, and assert firmly and positively a philosophy of education that is explicitly anti-racist, decolonizing, and culturally affirming.
That is, parents’ objections are not to be heeded because today’s “antiracism” is a higher morality these “Nice White People” are too benighted to understand (although quite a few of them are South Asian and African, but never mind).
In light of the problematic elements of neoliberal ideology evident in the structures of independent schools, it is not merely a freedom they have to construct their environment in this way, but in fact an obligation.
Again, the school is channeling Jesus and will not be questioned. Thou shalt not question Tom Taylor.
Given the buzzwords, the period of composition, and current practice at such schools nationwide, we are reasonable to assume that the program Taylor is espousing will include excusing black students from real standards, teaching students to distrust one another across racial boundaries, narrowing scholastic coverage to “center” issues of oppression and inequity, “decentering,” well, just plain school as “too white,” assigning KenDiAngelonian texts as scripture, and creating an atmosphere where students and teachers are afraid to take issue with any of this because they don’t want to be rhetorically roasted alive and socially excommunicated.
And Taylor’s position is “If parents don’t like what we’re doing they can go fuck themselves. We’re right and they’re wrong.”
Half of self-characterized Christians in the US say casual sex is acceptable.
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