Friday roundup

Andrew Ferguson at The Weekly Standard on the upcoming get-your-minds-right sit-down Starbucks is going to make its employees - er, associates - endure:

The Starbucks event is a superior instance of American business’s approach to problem-solving. It begins with a grand gesture: the closing of the 8,000 company-owned Starbucks outlets, including those that are right across the street from each other. The ensuing program—details not yet revealed—will be presented as an act of contrition on the part of an artificial entity, the corporation, that by its very nature cannot feel contrition, or anything else. It will be an intimate and personal process staged by hired “diversity trainers” for maximum publicity. And it will be wreathed in unassailably uplifting politics to hide the creepy methods that are, we’re told, the fruit of the very finest social science. I bet the baristas can hardly wait.

Reprogramming Day was announced in a press release issued via a two-and-a-half-minute video (another sign of our times: a video is necessary in the age of tl;dr). The CEO of Starbucks, an earnest man named Kevin Johnson, stared into the camera looking woebegone and jowly. He said he felt terrible that police were called a few days earlier to haul away two black men from a Philadelphia Starbucks on the assumption that they were loitering. In pursuit of more enlightened racial attitudes, he said he will join all his partners—his genteelism for employees—in submitting to “training around unconscious bias [and] conscious inclusion.” He said that this will be “just one step in a journey.” Then he said it was the “first step in a journey.” Then he said it again.

Three of the organizers enlisted by Starbucks, from such humdinger outfits as the Equal Justice Initiative, the NAACP Legal and Education Fund, and Demos, say this can't just be a one-off, that this new level of puking all over itself must become an ongoing aspect of company culture.

We have been clear from the start that the company must build a framework for anti-bias training that extends beyond the planned May 29th training and that becomes part of the company culture. In addition to the need for an anti-discrimination curriculum—which will consist of an ongoing education for all employees, with real measures for evaluation and monitoring—we made clear that a thorough review of the company policies . . . is necessary as they move forward. We expect to issue a report to Starbucks, with recommendations about the company’s policies, a multi-phase training framework, and the ongoing work they will need to undertake in order to really move the ball.

Ferguson does a fairly deep dive into results of studies looking into whether all this diversity hoo-ha has really had any impact on the insides of the heads of employees or students or whatever comprises the body of a given organization. Results: It ain't doing zip.


Are you surprised to learn that its main impact is that it's kept management from getting sued?

John Hawkins at Townhall offers "5 Ways America's Success Is Ruining Our Culture."

South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg has used his veto power to squelch the plans of the Women'sCare Center, which offers services to women who are incoveniently pregnant but nonetheless want to keep their babies, to open a clinic on the city's west side. Hopefully, the final chapter on this is not yet written. Per Alexandra DeSanctis at NRO.

Jonathan Lesser at Politico on how it's time and then some to give up on subsidizing electric cars, not to mention jackboot measures like what California has in mind:

If you believe the headlines, traditional automobiles are speeding toward a dead end. All those V8s, V6s and turbocharged vehicles we’ve grown to love will soon be replaced by squadrons of clean, whisper-quiet, all-electric vehicles. And if you believe the headlines, the environment will be much better off.
Policymakers at every level have done their part to push electric vehicles by creating a tankful of subsidies. Thanks to laws signed by both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, electric-vehicle buyers can feast on federal tax credits of up to $7,500 that reduce the initial purchase cost of their vehicles. Not to be outdone, many states also dangle their own mix of goodies for electric vehicle buyers, including purchase rebates as large as $5,000, additional rebates for vehicle chargers, and free use of public charging stations—which, of course, are only “free” because they’re subsidized by ratepayers and taxpayers. Some states even give electric vehicles preferential access to carpool lanes.
Then there are the electric vehicle mandates. In January, California Gov. Jerry Brown decreed that 5 million electric vehicles must be on his state’s roads by 2025, along with 250,000 charging stations. Eight other states are following California’s lead. One California lawmaker has even introduced legislation to ban all internal combustion vehicles by 2040.

He looked into the matter and found that

 . . . widespread adoption of electric vehicles nationwide will likely increase air pollution compared with new internal combustion vehicles. You read that right: more electric cars and trucks will mean more pollution. 

Speaking of electric cars, Dylan Byers at CNN on how Mr, Grandiosity, Elon Musk, is trying the patience of his benefactors:

 On a recent earnings call, he interrupted analysts who asked about capital expenditures and Tesla Model 3 production: "Boring, bonehead questions are not cool," Musk said to one. "These questions are so dry. They're killing me," he said to another. 

While Musk may be right that one Tesla crash pales in comparison to tens of thousands of fatal auto accidents, it doesn't mean it doesn't warrant coverage. As Jalopnik's Ryan Felton points out, "it'd be wholly irresponsible to avoid scrutinizing whether [autonomous] technology can perform in the real world."

Musk's dismissal of analysts' concerns is also hard to justify. Musk's visions can't be achieved without financing. Today, Goldman Sachs predicts Tesla will need $10.5 billion in new capitalover the next two-and-a-half years to keep operating and meet targets. 

Musk is a long-term thinker in a short-term world, but his runway is running out. Tesla needs to demonstrate real, tangible progress to convince everyone other than his most bullish investors that he's still a safe bet.  

A parlor game I often run in my head consists of coming up with a top-ten pantheon of figures who shaped conservatism. Most of the names I usually include are probably among yours, too: Edmund Burke, Frederic Bastiat, Herbert Spencer, Michael Oakeshott, Richard M. Weaver, James Burnham, William F. Buckley.

We'd do well to take a closer look at nineteenth-century British jurist and writer James Fitzjames Stephen. His best-known work, Liberty Equality Fraternity, derives its title from the slogan of the French revolutionaries, and is one of those literary situations in which the employ of an idea is for the purpose of showing how it's inevitably going to be distorted (sort of like Hayek dedicating Road to Serfdom to the world's socialists).

At Law and Liberty, Mark Pulliam juxtaposes Stephen's worldview with that of John Stuart Mill, whom Stephen was refuting in his book.

LITD likes the way Stephen thinks:

Stephen and Mill both embraced utilitarianism, but advocated dramatically different views of liberty, owing in substantial part to their disparate conceptions of human nature. Stephen believed that Mill — who espoused unfettered individual liberty in matters of conscience, speech, and morality — had “formed too favourable an estimate of human nature.” Unbridled liberty, Stephen complained, “would condemn every existing system of morals” (which ultimately rest on compulsion). Stephen insisted that Mill was naïve in presupposing that man’s self-control, guided by customs and reason, would protect him from his baser instincts — passion, wickedness, and weakness.

Stephen, in contrast, was a devotee of Thomas Hobbes (and especially his magnum opus, Leviathan), and had a deeply pessimistic vision of mankind, whom he regarded as prone to conflict and overwhelmingly “selfish, sensual, frivolous, idle, … and wrapped up in the smallest of petty routines.” Accordingly, Stephen felt that goodness had to be inculcated externally, by society’s promotion of virtue and religion. Left to its own devices (as envisioned by Mill’s harm principle), humanity would resemble a “stagnant marsh … putrefying and breeding fever, frogs, and gnats.” Stephen saw laws promoting morality as a desirable form of coercion, constituting (in a hydraulic metaphor that he frequently turned to) pipes, channels, and pumps, directing the “water” (humanity) to a useful purpose — “a proper water-works.”

If Stephen’s reasoning at times seems anachronistic to the modern reader, it is because we have become accustomed to the Pollyannaish view of human nature held by Mill — a utopian fallacy of modernity. If man is basically good, as modern liberals and radical individualists assume, he will independently make sound decisions and can realize his potential greatness of character entirely on his own. Stephen sharply disagreed.

Stephen defended the Calvinist notion that man is a flawed creature who struggles in choosing between good and evil. Man’s inherent vices can be overcome only by appealing to his better nature, liberating him to enjoy ordered liberty — the “freedom to be good and wise.” To this end, Stephen supported the propagation of morality, culture, tradition — and even religion — through law. To Stephen, the restraint of antisocial conduct builds character and makes liberty within civil society possible. In Stephen’s words, “Liberty means not the bare absence of restraint, but the absence of injurious restraint” (emphasis added).

By providing a context of culture and morality, and discouraging his baser instincts, civilized society allows man to exercise virtuous (i.e., true) choice. This is the essence of “ordered liberty.” Because morality is reinforced externally, through government and other institutions, Stephens believed—paradoxically to some modern readers – that “liberty…is dependent upon power.”

Stephen was a brutal realist, and an energetic instrumentalist. He believed that society can and should legislate morality; the failure to do so would lead to intemperance, debauchery, torpor, and anarchy. Stephen was anxious about the envious gaze of political majorities when it came to matters of economics (which he analyzed under the rubric of “equality”), but he felt that it was essential for a bourgeois society to reinforce its cultural norms through the apparatus of the state. Other than supporting the enforcement of morals, Stephens hewed to what is now regarded as the libertarian (or free-market) position, whereas Mill — the storied defender of liberty — advocated egalitarianism, and eventually even socialism. Ironically, Mill’s notion of laissez-faire did not extend to economic relations.

Stephen realized that the prevalence of indolence, imprudence, hedonism, and ignorance among mankind would — absent intervention — ineluctably lead to inequality of results. Left to their own devices, some people would become more prosperous than others, and Stephen felt strongly that such unequal outcomes were essential in a free society. “Human beings are not equal,” he recognized. Eschewing Mill’s egalitarianism, Stephen maintained that “Of all items of liberty, none is either so important or so universally recognized as the liberty of acquiring property. It is difficult to see what liberty you leave to a man at all if you restrict him in this matter.” Thus, to Stephen equality of results was antithetical to equality under the law (or liberty, properly understood), and to the rule of law.

Stephen emphatically rejected Mill’s view of women’s rights. Mill advocated complete equality between men and women, meaning the elimination of all privileges and disabilities based on sex. In the 19th century, this was a radical notion, which Stephen vehemently opposed. What Mill regarded as the subjugation (or “subjection”) of women Stephen (ever the instrumentalist) saw instead as arrangements necessary to preserve the bourgeois social order vital to the promotion of morality. Distinctions between the sexes, Stephen argued, are not only justified by physical differences (explaining why only men are conscripted for military service), but also to protect the institution of marriage and to foster women’s vital role as mothers and homemakers. Stephen’s views on this subject — a mixture of paternalism and pragmatism — generally mirror those of modern social conservatives.

Stephen’s view of “fraternity” — the relations among members of civil society — is misanthropic. Stephen expressed a negative view of mankind, which he regarded as being engaged in a Darwinian conflict, owing to the Hobbesian human condition:

I believe that many men are bad, a vast majority of men indifferent, and many good, and that the great mass of indifferent people sway this way or that according to circumstances…. [B]etween all classes of men there are and always will be real occasions of enmity and strife, and that even good men may be and often are compelled to treat each other as enemies either by the existence of conflicting interests which bring them into collision, or by their different ways of conceiving goodness. (Emphasis added.)

In his editor’s Foreword, Warner [editor of the 1993 edition of Stephen's book] describes Stephen’s vigorous defense of Victorian England against the challenges it faced by saying that he “lovingly cradles the high culture” of his era as the culmination of western civilization — the apogee of human progress. This state of affairs had been arrived at without universal suffrage, and Stephen was quite apprehensive about the threat that expanding democracy posed to the status quo he cherished. The threats of demagoguery and class envy — implicit in democracy — had to be resisted to preserve liberty.

Stephen provides good ammo for those arguments in which a lefty (or most breeds of libertarians) wants to say, "You conservatives talk a good game about freedom, but you sure do want to hold everybody up to your own moral standard."

Uh, yeah.

The difference between the FBI's investigation into Madame Bleachbit's email and its investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election cycle, explained

 . . . with great clarity, by Andrew McCarthy at NRO.

He does so in the course of setting straight what the New York Times seeks to obscure in its look at what we now know was called Crossfire Hurricane:

f you’re a fading Baby Boomer, you’re faintly amused that the FBI code-named its Trump-Russia investigation “Crossfire Hurricane.” It’s an homage to the Rolling Stones golden oldie “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” — which, come to think of it, might just be a perfect handle for John Brennan, the former Obama CIA director whose specter hovers over each critical juncture of the case.

The young’uns may not believe it, but back before it was known as “classic rock,” you couldn’t just play your crossfire hurricane on Spotify. You had to spin it. Fittingly, that is exactly what the New York Times has done in Wednesday’s blockbuster report on the origins of the Trump-Russia probe.

The quick take on the 4,100-word opus is that the Gray Lady “buried the lede.” Fair enough: You have to dig pretty deep to find that the FBI ran “at least one government informant” against the Trump campaign — and to note that the Times learned this because “current and former officials” leaked to reporters the same classified information about which, just days ago, the Justice Department shrieked “Extortion!” when Congress asked about it.

But that’s not even the most important of the buried ledes. What the Times story makes explicit, with studious understatement, is that the Obama administration used its counterintelligence powers to investigate the opposition party’s presidential campaign.

That is, there was no criminal predicate to justify an investigation of any Trump-campaign official. So, the FBI did not open a criminal investigation. Instead, the bureau opened a counterintelligence investigation and hoped that evidence of crimes committed by Trump officials would emerge. But it is an abuse of power to use counterintelligence powers, including spying and electronic surveillance, to conduct what is actually a criminal investigation.

The Times barely mentions the word counterintelligence in its saga. That’s not an accident. The paper is crafting the media-Democrat narrative. Here is how things are to be spun: The FBI was very public about the Clinton-emails investigation, even making disclosures about it on the eve of the election. Yet it kept the Trump-Russia investigation tightly under wraps, despite intelligence showing that the Kremlin was sabotaging the election for Trump’s benefit. This effectively destroyed Clinton’s candidacy and handed the presidency to Trump.

It’s a gas, gas, gas!

It’s also bunk. Just because the two FBI cases are both referred to as “investigations” does not make them the same kind of thing.

The Clinton case was a criminal investigation that was predicated on a mountain of incriminating evidence. Mrs. Clinton does have one legitimate beef against the FBI: Then-director James Comey went public with some (but by no means all) of the proof against her. It is not proper for law-enforcement officials to publicize evidence from a criminal investigation unless formal charges are brought.

The FBI had what it needed to charge Madame Bleachbit with - well, all the things Comey enumerated in his July 5, 2016 presser, just before he said there would be no recommendation to indict.

By contrast, it has never had any probable cause to launch a criminal investigation in the matter of Russia and the Trump campaign. Hence the investigation's counterintelligence status, and the planting of a spy in the Trump campaign.

The NYT had an agenda in its reportage on this: to confuse you, the reader:

The Times averts its eyes from this point — although if a Republican administration tried this sort of thing on a Democratic candidate, it would be the only point.
Like the Justice Department and the FBI, the paper is banking on Russia to muddy the waters. Obviously, Russia was trying to meddle in the election, mainly through cyber-espionage — hacking. There would, then, have been nothing inappropriate about the FBI’s opening up a counterintelligence investigation against Russia. Indeed, it would have been irresponsible not to do so. That’s what counterintelligence powers are for.
But opening up a counterintelligence investigation against Russia is not the same thing as opening up a counterintelligence investigation against the Trump campaign.

The media-Democrat complex has tried from the start to conflate these two things. That explains the desperation to convince the public that Putin wanted Trump to win. It explains the stress on contacts, no matter how slight, between Trump campaign figures and Russians. They are trying to fill a gaping void they hope you don’t notice: Even if Putin did want Trump to win, and even if Trump-campaign advisers did have contacts with Kremlin-tied figures, there is no evidence of participation by the Trump campaign in Russia’s espionage. 

There. Now you can proceed with a level of understanding that your overlords wish you didn't have.

Beautiful and glorious

The Senate confirms Gina Haspel to be CIA director. A fine day for that agency and our nation.

I'm starting to take a shine to Sarah Sanders

She's got that plain-spokenness borne of solid conviction that makes Nikki Haley such a rock star. I dig her a lot more than I do her dad. It would be interesting to see how she did serving an actually conservative president.

Here's how she handled a question about the dustup over the "animals" remark:

"The president was very clearly referring to MS-13 gangs members who enter the U.S. illegally and whose deportations are hamstrung by our laws," Sanders said. "This is one of the most vicious, and deadly gangs that operates by the motto of 'rape, control and kill.' If the media and liberals want to defend MS-13, they're more than welcome to. Frankly, I don't think the term the president used was strong enough."

"MS-13 has done heinous acts. It took an animal to stab a man 100 times and decapitate him and rip his heart out. It took an animal to beat a woman they were sex trafficking with a bat 28 times, indenting part of her body. And it took an animal to kidnap, drug and rape a 14-year-old Houston girl," she continued. "Frankly, I think that the term animal doesn't go far enough and I think the President should continue to use his platform and everything he can do under the law to stop these types of horrible, horrible, disgusting people."

Tell it, sister!

The way for a secular agnostic bothered by a gnawing emptiness to move off dead center regarding Bible skepticism

Great piece at The Resurgent today by Peter Heck, on the subject of a particular internal within the findings of the Pew Research poll on contemporary Americans' spiritual and / or religious views and beliefs.

He cautions that before we find too much encouragement in the stat that roughly 50 percent of those polled believe in the God of the Bible, we should consider something:

many of those same folks don’t regularly read or study the Bible and often know very little about it. That leads to a phenomenon of Burger King Christianity where adherents literally “have it their way,” taking out the parts of Scripture or the faith that runs afoul of their social, cultural, political, or philosophical preferences.

For Biblical Christians that might seem to be a sobering reality, but it is also highly motivating. The American church has unquestionably slipped into a complacency where we “do church” on our terms, often reducing the power of the transformative gospel to a feel-good, do-good self-help social club. We shape it so that it conforms to our beliefs rather than shaping our beliefs to conform to its truth. We water down its doctrine and rub off its sharp edges to make it palatable and comfortable for our lives. There’s no struggle, there’s no transformation, merely assurance and affirmation.

People cannot be saved by a false Jesus, and they can’t be changed by a false gospel. That means Bible believers should recognize we are living the words of Scripture where, “the harvest is plentiful but the workers are few.” 

The comment thread below it is worth a look as well. It's refreshingly free of the snark and vitriol that characterizes most exchanges in such forums. In fact, its a lively exchange of viewpoints worth considering.

I've been thinking about this one in particular:

Certainly our culture is full of "salad bar Christians" who are quick to adapt moral positions to fit the times. Being non-judgmental seems to be the highest biblical virtue to some. 

But, there is no absolute science to interpreting the Bible as evidenced by the number of Christian denominations and the squabbles over doctrine and dogma. How much literalism should be applied to the Bible? How much allegory? What does a relationship with Jesus really mean...are the implications clear? I do agree that there are a whole lot of distractions today that impede or distract people from evolving their understanding of what they believe and how they should live. For some, religion is largely social...for others it is very personal....others are not at all comfortable with evangelizing....since faith is something one must come to in his/her own way. It's tough selling a supernatural Bible to a culture that needs visual evidence. 

Such questions make for handy excuses for the secular agnostic to dismiss study of scripture on the grounds that it's just too full of vague metaphor and gaping holes in historical accounts to be worth much more than serving as a balm for the existentially desperate.

I've even recently, in the course of being pestered on social media by a hardcore leftist atheist, seen the Bible characterized as "a compilation heavily edited by an all-male group 300 years after the last event documented in it occurred."

It's clear to me, though, that there is a certain type of person - or rather, person at a certain point of ontological inquiry - who is not that far gone, who indeed doesn't ever crack a Bible, much less go to church, but who harbors a growing, gnawing sense that his secular agnosticism is utterly incapable of addressing his moments of darkness - and who, furthermore, understands that it's impossible to press on with his existence if living with that darkness is the best that can be done. I know, because that person was me once, and not so long ago.

The exact right words have to be found for each particular situation, or course, but it seems to me a general - and appropriately respectful - way to proceed goes something like this:

I invite you to suspend your cynicism and ask yourself a purely historical question. Why has the Bible come to assume such an authoritative role in the development of our civilization? Why do we number our years from the birth of Jesus? Why were universities traditionally church-affiliated? Why have Biblical names been so common throughout the centuries? 

Just set your preconceptions aside momentarily, even if you pick them back up immediately after a bit of exploration. Just approach the Bible from the standpoint that a whole lot of people and institutions made it central to their missions, even if they were wrong. 

Then just start into reading somewhere. The late Billy Graham recommends starting with the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, rather than with Genesis. That may be the most effective.

Read it with an unclouded curiosity. Who was this Jesus? What, indeed, are some ways one might interpret his parables? Why did he undergo the savage torture, humiliation and execution he experienced that grim Friday, knowing that it could all end in an instant if he'd tell the authorities what they wanted to hear? How are you with four accounts of the empty tomb?

I submit that if you really permit yourself some humble inquiry, you'll start to be touched by the humility of Jesus, and then the other figures you encounter: his apostles, and then, going backwards, Abraham, Moses, Esther, David, the prophets.

You'll notice something - and this is a most non-empirical thing for me to say - a stirring in your heart. You'll get little glimpses of light intruding onto your darkness, even if they're fleeting. 

Take it at your own pace. Put it down if the "yeah-but-what-about-this-angle" voice in your head won't leave you alone. 

But if you approach it with a willingness to meet it on its own terms, there's a good chance you'll keep picking it up, and your curiosity will grow into hunger.

What I've posted here is my first foray in a direction that I'm hoping will lead to an essay for another website. I may share some more preliminary thoughts here as I develop that. Then again, I may leap right into that essay. Inspiration can be like that.

Blessings.

The layers of disingenuousness and mendacity piled atop Trump's "animals" remark

Here the context:

SHERIFF MIMS: But now ICE is the only law enforcement agency that cannot use our databases to find the bad guys. They cannot come in and talk to people in our jail, unless they reach a certain threshold. They can’t do all kinds of things that other law enforcement agencies can do. And it’s really put us in a very bad position.

THE PRESIDENT: It’s a disgrace. Okay? It’s a disgrace.

SHERIFF MIMS: It’s a disgrace.

THE PRESIDENT: And we’re suing on that, and we’re working hard, and I think it will all come together, because people want it to come together. It’s so ridiculous. The concept that we’re even talking about is ridiculous. We’ll take care of it, Margaret. We’ll win.

SHERIFF MIMS: Thank you. There could be an MS-13 member I know about — if they don’t reach a certain threshold, I cannot tell ICE about it.

THE PRESIDENT: We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in — and we’re stopping a lot of them — but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals. And we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before. And because of the weak laws, they come in fast, we get them, we release them, we get them again, we bring them out. It’s crazy.

CNN, the New York Times, ABC News and C-SPAN all took it out of context and reported it as if the VSG had called all immigrants, or at least all illegal aliens, animals.

Now, this level of rottenness is to be expected from these organizations. They have but one interest: putting some anti-Trump points on the board. But is it too much to ask that an ostensibly conservative pundit - namely, Jennifer Rubin - not try to wax righteous, splitting the difference in a ridiculously contorted tweet acknowledging that the VSG meant one specific group, but then, without so much as a sentence break, gets into some kind of "conflate" crud:

Even if he was referring to the tiny percentage of immigrants who commit crimes, his efforts to conflate criminals with all illegal immigrants is repulsive, as is calling any human being an “animal.”

And, no, Jennifer, "animal" is the exactly accurate term for MS-13 members.

I can't stand the term "fake news," mainly because when I come across it, the odor of the Very Stable Genius and Sean Hannity wafts off of it. But the mainstream media is permeated with a demonic force. It's no longer in the information-conveying business. Just this week we've had this "animals" lie go viral, as well as reports about "protestors" on the Gaza border. Also the NYT trying to downplay the importance of the revelation in Kim Strassel's WSJ piece about the DoJ planting a spy in the Trump campaign.

I'll leave you with another tweet, from David Bahnsen, that sums up the LITD position:

I beg for my conservative friends to be honest about his shortcomings, & then you people come in w/ this complete, abject nonsense. That is not what he said, and you know it. Your indefensible lies feed the Trumpian wave. There was no ambiguity that he was talking about MS-13

How fast the truth gets mutilated in a world driven by gotcha politics.

Your must-read for today, if you'd like to see common sense push back the identity-politics onslaught

Coleman Hughes, an undergraduate philosophy student at Columbia University, is a young man with his head squarely on his shoulders.

Where to begin deciding what to excerpt from his essay at Quillette entitled "The Racism Treadmill"?

I guess giving you the first few paragraphs, to set the table for his argument, would be good:

The prevailing view among progressives today is that America hasn’t made much progress on racism. While no one would argue that abolishing slavery and dissolving Jim Crow weren’t good first steps, the progressive attitude toward such reforms is nicely summarized by Malcolm X’s famous quip, “You don’t stick a knife in a man’s back nine inches and then pull it out six inches and say you’re making progress.” Aside from outlawing formalized bigotry, many progressives believe that things haven’t improved all that much. Racist attitudes towards blacks, if only in the form of implicit bias, are thought to be widespread; black men are still liable to be arrested in a Starbucks for no good reason; plus we have a president who has found it difficult to denounce neo-Nazis. If racism still looms large in our social and political lives, then, as one left-wing commentator put it, “progress is debatable.”

But the data take a clear side in that debate. In his controversial bestseller Enlightenment Now, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker notes a steep decline in racism. At the turn of the 20th century, lynchings occurred at a rate of three per week. Now, racially-motivated killings of blacks occur at a rate of zero to one per year.1 What’s more, racist attitudes that were once commonplace have now become fringe. A Gallup poll found that only 4 percent of Americans approved of marriages between blacks and whites in 1958. By 2013, that number had climbed to 87 percent, prompting pollsters to call it “one of the largest shifts of public opinion in Gallup history.” 

Why can’t progressives admit that we’ve made progress? Pinker’s answer for what he dubs “progressophobia” is two-fold. First, our intuitions about whether trends have increased or decreased are shaped by what we can easily recall—news items, shocking events, personal experience, etc. Second, we are more sensitive to negative stimuli than we are to positive ones. These two bugs of human psychology—called the availability bias and the negativity bias, respectively—make us prone to doomsaying, inclined to mistake freak news events for trends, and blind to the slow march of progress.

But while psychological biases may sufficiently explain progressophobia on most other topics, our denialism about racial progress calls for a deeper explanation—an explanation in terms of widely-held beliefs about race and inequality.

One such belief is the notion that disparities between blacks and whites—in income, housing, employment, etc.—are caused by systemic racism. The award-winning writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, for instance, summed up the state of racial progress like so: “I could see that some fifty years after the civil rights movement black people could still be found at the bottom of virtually every socioeconomic metric of note.”2 Ibram X. Kendi, another celebrated race writer, put it bluntly: “As an anti-racist, when I see racial disparities, I see racism.”

But the premise built into the thinking of Coates and Kendi is false. I call it thedisparity fallacy. The disparity fallacy holds that unequal outcomes between two groups must be caused primarily by discrimination, whether overt or systemic. What’s puzzling about believers in the disparity fallacy is not that they apply the belief too broadly, but that they apply it too narrowly. Any instance of whites outperforming blacks is adduced as evidence of discrimination. But when a disparity runs the other way—that is, blacks outperforming whites—discrimination is never invoked as a causal factor.

He looks at some examples of disparity, in the realm of income and employment. Then he gets to an aspect of the issue that is much more difficult to quantify, but essential to the discussion: culture:

One crucial way in which groups differ is culture. Culture matters enormously. The importance of culture is, ironically, a value often expressed by progressives. When presented with arguments that point to genetic influences on human behavior, many on the Left respond by emphasizing the importance of culture over genetics, that is, nurture over nature (see Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate for more.) Moreover, cultures differ from one another. This is true by definition. It’s unclear what the “multi” in “multi-culturalism” could possibly mean if cultures were all the same. Put these two premises together, and you arrive at what should be an equally banal conclusion: if culture matters enormously, and cultures differ from one another, then differences between cultures matter enormously.
\But, together with the disparity fallacy, the denial of cultural explanations for disparity has become the received view among progressives. Coates, for instance, has dubbed cultural explanations of disparity “lazy.”5 Others believe such arguments to be intrinsically racist when applied to blacks. The sociologist and award-winning author Michael Eric Dyson has argued that cultural explanations of black/white disparities are seen by whites as “heroic battles against black deficiency.”6

But intuitive examples of the importance of culture are all around us. Disparities in athletic achievement, for instance, are inexplicable without reference to culture. Although blacks make up 14 percent of the U.S. population, they account for only 8 percent of MLB baseball players. This relatively small disparity has been enough to prompt articles in US News, NPR, and Vox that blame the decline in black baseball representation on everything from mass incarceration to racial bias to a generic sense among white fans that “baseball culture should stay white,” as the Vox piece summarized it.

Meanwhile, blacks account for a staggering three-fourths of all NBA basketball players, while whites account for a mere 18 percent. Curiously, progressives have not seen the under-representation of whites in basketball as requiring any explanation whatsoever. When whites are under-represented somewhere, it is assumed to be a choice or a cultural preference. But when blacks are under-represented somewhere, progressives descend on the issue like detectives to the scene of an unsolved murder, determined to consider every possible explanation except for the “lazy” one: that in black culture, basketball is more popular than baseball. 

The whole piece is full of little gems like these statistics:

 60 percent of blacks attribute disparities in income, jobs, and housing mainly to factors other than bias, according to a 2013 Gallup poll. A more recent Pew poll found that 60 percent of blacks without college degrees say their race hasn’t affected their chances of success in life. 

He later gets to the essence of what he means by his term "the racism treadmill." Past injustices that no longer exist keep getting trotted out to impart a connotation to present situations that is forced and doesn't hold up to scrutiny:

I submit that the Racism Treadmill, and the dogmas that motivate it, account for much of the progressophobia of the activist Left on the topic of race. The Treadmill shows itself in the way progressives appropriate the tragedies of history in order to summon rhetorical gravitas in the present. Carceral policy is not just bad, it’s the “New Jim Crow”; posting reaction GIFs on social media that portray black people is “digital blackface”; and, even though three separate analyses have found no racial bias in police shootings, such shootings are said to be “reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynching,” as a United Nations report put it. It seems as if every reduction in racist behavior is met with a commensurate expansion in our definition of the concept. Thus, racism has become a conserved quantity akin to mass or energy: transformable but irreducible.

Here's a statement that is buried in one of his concluding paragraphs that is thunderous in its implications, which are much more broad than just the issue of race:

. . . the stated goals of progressives, however sincerely held, are so apocalyptic, so vague, and so total as to guarantee that they will never be met. 

Trying to accommodate progressives is like nailing Jello to the wall. There's never any clear aim, no point at which society can say "mission accomplished."

He ends by saying that the way out involves what we have all known for some time: giving up unwarranted rage.

 

Why we call them Western civilization-haters

Ben Shapiro succinctly yet incisively nails it. This is exactly why the hard Left, radical Palestinians, and jihadists of both the Sunni and Iran-bloc stripe cannot stand the fact that the US recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel:

What drives the leftist press's coverage? Simply put, antipathy to the West. Israel is seen as an outpost of colonialism by leftists, and has been since the 1967 war. Then-President Barack Obama expressed the view well in his 2009 speech in Cairo, suggesting that Israel's rationale relied on its "tragic history" that "culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust." In this view, the Palestinians were shunted aside in favor of providing national reparations to Jews; the Jews took their Western ways into the heart of a foreign region.

This isn't true. The living proof of that is Israel's eternal connection to Jerusalem. That's why both radical Muslims (including the Palestinian leadership) and the far left deny Israel's historic bond with its homeland and hope desperately to stop public recognition of that bond. If Israel exists because Jewish connection pre-existed everything else, then Israel isn't a new outpost of the West; it's the oldest center of the West. That's why Trump's announcement is important: It's a recognition that the West was founded on Jerusalem, rather than the other way around.

Peace will come when everyone recognizes what Trump has recognized: The Jewish connection to Jerusalem is unbreakable. And peace will come when Israel's enemies realize that violence can't change that underlying fact.

It's not just the capital of the Jewish state. It's the oldest center of the West. It predates Athens and Rome.

And it signifies the foundation for the representative-democracy concepts, and beginnings of philosophy, science and Western art that Athens and Rome bestowed on us.

That foundation is God's covenant with humankind. The rest stems from that.

And that's why, to Leftists and radical Muslims, the fact that it remains a Western city is intolerable.

Wait a minute; wasn't "denuclearization" the intent of the summit?

It turns out that North Korea's feathers are ruffled over more than the joint US- South Korean drills:

Donald Trump’s historic meeting with Kim Jong-un has been thrown into uncertainty as North Korea warned it could be cancelled over US military exercises and if Washington presses ahead with its one-sided demand for Pyongyang to give up its nuclear arsenal.

Kim Kye-gwan, North Korea's deputy foreign minister, warned on Wednesday that Pyongyang was not interested in talks that would pressure the rogue state to "unilaterally" give up its nuclear programme, taking aim at "unbridled remarks" by John

Bolton, the US national security adviser, and other high-ranking White House officials.
In a statement issued by the North Korean Central News Agency [KCNA], Mr Kim took issue in particular with Mr Bolton's references to the so-called Libya model of nuclear abandonment and his statements on "complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation."

Mr Kim claimed the remarks cast doubt on America's sincerity, underlining that his country was not Libya, which met a "miserable fate." 

Well, Mr. Kim, internal stability is your situation to handle. Your country doesn't have to turn out like Libya. Yes, the US pushed for his ouster, but that was in the context of the Arab Spring (a phenomenon that yielded decidedly mixed results). It seems like a safe bet that the US and indeed "the international community" would be so thrilled, given the exponentially greater degree of your bellicosity that it would work closely with you to facilitate joining that community,

This stage - the beginnings of an unraveling - doesn't surprise me at all. I thought there was less to the abrupt turn about than meets the eye.

This is why LITD never held its breath regarding some big, abrupt turnabout in the North Korean attitude

 . . . and why we never joined the Very Stable Genius's water-carriers in assuming it was time to talk about a Nobel Prize.

Kim remains a paranoid little tyrant:

North Korea's government says it is considering calling off a planned nuclear summit between dictator Kim Jong-un and U.S. President Donald Trump.

Kim's regime said through state-run news agency KCNA that ongoing 'Max Thunder' joint military exercises between the United States and South Korea are actually a 'rehearsal for invasion' of the North. 

'The United States will also have to undertake careful deliberations about the fate of the planned North Korea-U.S. summit in light of this provocative military ruckus jointly conducted with the South Korean authorities,' KCNA said.

South Korea's Yonhap News Agency reported that Pyongyang also canceled high-level talks with Seoul, scheduled for later in the day.

The North Koreans cited the military drills as the reason.

The meeting was to happen in the border town of Panmunjom, as a followup to Kim's April meeting with his South Korean counterpart, Moon Jae-In.

For crying' out loud, these drills are routine.

We now have some indication of what North Korea would / will insist on at the summit.

Touchy, touchy.

What would you call the opposite of economic development?

Whatever the term would be, that's what the city of Seattle is practicing.

Amazon and even Starbucks, know to be a pretty social-justice-friendly outfit, are not amused.

It's not like the city is lacking revenues. It just spends beyond its means, and these companies know it.

The Seattle city council approved a new tax on large employers Monday, drawing the ire of the city’s business juggernauts Starbucks and Amazon.
The council unanimously approved a tax that amounts to a yearly tax of about $275 per full-time employee, which came as a compromise after a $500 tax per worker encountered fierce pushback, the Associated Press reported. The tax is intended to combat homelessness and respond to what officials call a housing crisis, one in which rents have risen substantially in recent years.

Amazon threatened to stop work on a 17-story building if the $500 per-employee tax passed, and while the company is not pulling back activity right now, it issued a statement criticizing the "tax on jobs" and saying it may seek to grow elsewhere.
"We are disappointed by today’s City Council decision to introduce a tax on jobs," Amazon Vice President Drew Herdener said in a statement. "While we have resumed construction planning for Block 18, we remain very apprehensive about the future created by the council’s hostile approach and rhetoric toward larger businesses, which forces us to question our growth here."

Amazon has been considering different cities as the cite of its new headquarters, leading many lawmakers to offer deals to attract the tech giant to their cities. For now, it will continue the construction of a 17-story tower near its hometown headquarters and will continue to lease new office spaced in Seattle.

As Seattle’s homelessness problem has grown and new taxes and spending have been proposed, corporate leaders argue the city’s government is not competent to solve the problems. Herdener blasted the city for its failure to spend money efficiently as tax revenue has climbed.

"City of Seattle revenues have grown dramatically from $2.8 billion in 2010 to $4.2 billion in 2017, and they will be even higher in 2018. This revenue increase far outpaces the Seattle population increase over the same time period," he said. "The city does not have a revenue problem – it has a spending efficiency problem. We are highly uncertain whether the city council’s anti-business positions or its spending inefficiency will change for the better."

Starbucks public affairs chief John Kelley said Seattle "continues to spend without reforming and fail without accountability, while ignoring the plight of hundreds of children sleeping outside."

"If they cannot provide a warm meal and safe bed to a five year-old child, no one believes they will be able to make housing affordable or address opiate addiction," Kelley said.

Even at least one trade union thinks it's wacky:

It is not just the leaders of major companies who question the wisdom of the new tax. John Boufford with the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades said it was confusing Seattle would be "fostering an adversarial relationship with businesses in this city."

"They're driving this economic engine," he said. 

The city council's position is the old Elizabeth Warren - Barack Obama society-helped-you-build-your-business-so-now-you-have-to-"give-back" stance.

But city council members argue corporations have benefitted from the city’s economic growth as others have been left behind. Council member Teresa Mosqueda said the new tax is a "down payment" on the work that must be done in the future.

"People are dying on the doorsteps of prosperity," Mosqueda said. "This is the richest city in the state and in a state that has the most regressive tax system in the country."

And supporters' signs at the council meeting where this went down showed off not only their penchant for the most banal of slogans but their utter economic ignorance:

The council received vocal support from many in the city who packed its Monday meeting and carried signs reading, "People before profits."

Even if the fallout grows more egregious, it's probably not a good bet that the overlords are going to suddenly understand how reality works.

 

 

 

 

 

When the threat is existential, extraordinarily brutal measures are the only moral way to go

Important David French piece at NRO today entitled "Waterboarding, Torture and American Wars."

LITD has already done a post about Kamala Harris's preening and grandstanding at Gina Haspel's confirmation hearing to be CIA chief. Such are the times we live in that Haspel couldn't give a response along the line's of French's essay.

He notes that twice in the last century and a half, the US was forced into the grimmest of decisions:

Morality in war is a complex and shifting thing. Let’s take, for example, two of the most famous and most successful operations in American military history — Sherman’s March to the Sea and Truman’s atomic-bomb strikes on Japan. Both of them involved deliberate, mass-scale targeting of civilian assets. The atomic bombings also included the deliberate mass killing of innocent men, women, and children. In ordinary times and in more “ordinary” wars, the morality of both actions is clear and unequivocal. They’re wrong. Indeed, in ordinary times and in ordinary wars, they’re more than just wrong — they’re unlawful.

And that’s the proper default position of American arms. Absent extraordinary circumstances, American forces should not deliberately target civilians or civilian assets.

That’s also the proper default position regarding enhanced interrogation. Absent extraordinary circumstances, American forces should not engage in “enhanced interrogation.” But these default presumptions should be rebuttable.

In the context of both the Civil War and World War II, American forces were engaged in an existential struggle. The Civil War was one of the first modern “total wars,” where the resources of the entire society are mobilized to wage war. The South in particular — with its smaller manpower and industrial base — had to mobilize all its resources to stay on the battlefield against the Union. And so, to defeat the South, intelligent Union generals like Grant and Sherman knew that they had to diminish Confederate resources, in both men and material. Thus, the war of attrition against Lee in Virginia. Thus, Sherman’s campaign to rip the heart out of the southern economy in Georgia.

In a very real sense, Sherman and Grant — as brutal as they were — saved lives. They cut short a war that was far bloodier than either side expected, and they ultimately ended the meat grinder of 1861-1864 — when Confederate armies stood toe-to-toe with a larger foe and bested it time and again on the battlefield. Do we condemn Sherman today?

Similarly, imagine the shock and horror in the American public had we chosen not to use the atomic bomb, fought Japan for every inch of the home islands, and then later found out that Truman sat on a war-ending weapon that could have spared the hundreds of thousands of American lives. 

Moving back to enhanced interrogation, it’s easy to imagine a very different kind of hearing than the one Haspel endured last week. Think of the hearing that would happen after a catastrophic terror strike that could have been averted through more dramatic interrogation measures. The architects of restraint would face thousands of bereaved families, each of them demanding to know why an interrogation technique (like waterboarding) — long used in training against our own soldiers — was deemed too brutal to use to avert catastrophe. The moral argument would look very different indeed.

This fallen world presents us with an endless series of tradeoffs. Sometimes they are most unsavory. At such moments, the one charged with making a decision must pray for the wisdom to discern the least unsavory.

That's what Haspel should have felt free to say to Senator Harris.

 

Monday evening just-because music

The current House Agriculture Committee farm bill: a test to see if free-market principles still have a place in post-American legislating

The Committee is set to consider it this week.

Will it collectively have the courage to stand for free-market principles instead of subsidies and government crop insurance?

The whole notion of an ongoing "farm bill" got started in 1933. Perhaps an argument could be made that an emergency measure was called for at that economically disastrous moment. But the opportunism that seems be a permanent post-progressive feature of Congress made for its continuation to this day in the form of updating in roughly five-year cycles.  The economic lopsidedness thereby resulting is far beyond what most government meddling does in terms of distorting the market value of goods and services.

This will be a great test of character for the committee's members, a classic case of whether sound principle or specials interests will prevail.