Courtesy of Tyler Cowen:
"One thing the contemporary world definitely has not come to terms with is how much a highly feminised culture will be (rather strongly) enforcing new forms of discrimination, albeit cloaked under different and rhetorically emancipatory principles."
In writing this blog, I clearly made the decision to remain anonymous. So, when I relate stories from my real life, my sharing will be always be limited by the first sentence.
With that said, I will soon be forced to participate in racial sensitivity training sessions. Not because of anything I've done, but because of a professional association with a company that has totally bought in on the idea of systemic racism. No doubt, I know to keep my thoughts to myself on this topic. The interesting factoid is that we were provided with some reading materials to review in advance. And my main takeaway is the following...
There is plenty of evidence if one looks at this country's history of grave injustices and governmental action that is clearly reprehensible. Those periods in time, those laws, those court cases, those policies, need no further explanation to see what they are and the motivations behind them. But, there is also plenty of history of our country recognizing these wrongs and then doing something to correct them, such that it is much better to be a minority, women, etc. today than at any other point in time.
But, what the advance readings seem to be doing, one and all, is referencing these histories, and then offering a data point about today, as if one is clearly caused by the other, but not doing any of the work to show you how. These works clearly choose to ignore the possibility that something else may be going on (h/t Thomas Sowell). For example, there was slavery in this country and the founding fathers owned slaves. You know what else, today black families have lower median incomes than white families. Two facts, not sure that they are necessarily related.
Over and over, the practice seems to be, here's the belief and conclusion that we want to draw, here's some data that could be interpreted in any number of ways, we offer no additional context other than what happened 150/100/50 years ago, go draw some conclusions. I guess that I would expect more from a theory that seems to be taking hold of our government, corporate boardrooms, and every single school and university.
But maybe I am asking too much.
The author is Thomas Sowell (2019).
I like folks who formulate their views of the world based on facts rather than groupthink and emotion – and, better yet, understand that there is commonly more than one reason for why something has happened. Sowell fits that bill. And this book makes that point.
It is very much written to be a retort to the politics and prevailing views of today. His premise: “…we should not expect success to be evenly or randomly distributed among individuals, groups, institutions or nations in endeavors with multiple prerequisites – which is to say, most meaningful endeavors.” In other words, we should not ever expect equality of outcomes, and always trying to explain such reality in the form of an -ism or malevolent action is incredibly naïve.
He does a good job of explaining, so I plan to quote generously:
“People from different social backgrounds may also have different goals and priorities – a possibility paid little or no attention in many studies that measure how much opportunity there is by how much upward movement takes place, as if everyone is equally striving to move up, and only society’s barriers produce different outcomes.”
And:
“Social mobility is the extent to which a society permits upward and downward movement. How much movement actually takes place depends also on the extent to which individuals and families avail themselves of the opportunities. Measuring social mobility by how much movement takes place proceeds as if nothing depends on how individuals and families behave. That certainly avoids complications for those promoting the prevailing social vision. But it also avoids empirically testing that vision.”
To wit:
“Deliberate, biased suppressions of other people’s opportunities are just one of the various other impediments to equal outcomes. But those things which offend our moral sense do not automatically have more causal weight than morally neutral factors such as demography, geography or language differences.”
His book reminds me of what Douglas Murray had to say – the utopia against which our racist and sexist society is compared simply has never existed. We have never seen equal outcome, distributions, or proportional representation. And complaining in advocacy of something which is unrealistic strikes me as a waste of time and resources.
The subtitle is How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America and the author is Scott Adams (2019).
This is the second book by the author that I have digested. Loserthink represents the mental traps that we fall into, whether it be cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, or believing that we can read other people’s minds, which can lead to confidence in bad ideas. Adams is focused on achieving clarity of thought and self-awareness and avoiding the mental mistakes that can hinder both. He just seems to get it. Recommended.
In the Douglas Murray book that I just read, this quote gets to the heart of the matter:
"But most often the question 'Compared to what?' will elicit only the fact that the utopia with which our society is being compared has not yet come about. If this is the case, and the monstrous claims about our societies are being made in comparison to a society which has not yet been created, then a certain amount of humility and a great deal of further questioning might be needed. Those who claim that our society is typified by bigotry but believe that they know how to fix any and all societal ills better make sure that their route maps are well plotted. If they are not then there is reason for everyone else to be suspicious about a project whose earliest stages are being presented as rigorous science when they more closely resemble an advocacy of magic."
The subtitle is Gender, Race and Identity and the author is Douglas Murray (2019).
“After slaying the dragon the brave warrior finds himself
stalking the land looking for still more glorious fights. He needs his dragons. Eventually, after tiring himself out in the
pursuit of ever-smaller dragons he may eventually even be found swinging
his sword at thin air, imagining it to contain dragons.”
Regardless of your politics, I think the author does a remarkable job of making sense of where we are. The identity politics of today are not about equality, as MLK fought for in his time, but about a redistribution of power. And when you recognize that, you realize just how disingenuous the loudest voices are.
To summarize it, I relate a dictum of Daniel Patrick Moynihan – claims of human rights violations happen in exactly inverse proportion to the numbers of human rights violations in a country. If this country really is as fascist, racist, homophobic and sexist as those waiving their fingers allege, the luxury of being so foolish so often and so loud would not exist.
The subtitle is Inside the Washington Establishment’s Never-Ending War on Trump and the author is Byron York (2020).
Depending on how you voted, you probably read the title and made up your mind about whether the book holds any value. That would be a mistake. To be clear, it is definitively a tome that is supportive of the President with respect to his impeachment ordeals. But, in reporting the first-hand accounts and reading the transcripts, the author’s narrative is definitely not some sort of revisionist history.
I admittedly ignored the news for the past 4 years, and so did not track the impeachment scandals nor have a strong view on what did or did not happen (I was generally skeptical because I did not think the media wanted to report fairly on Trump). And, after reading Mr. York’s rendition (he is a reporter for the Washington Examiner), I feel comfortable in taking the view that the accusations against the President were a whole lot of nothing.
In looking back, you had calls for impeachment before Trump was even sworn in. In addition, given recent events, I would remind everyone that 10 Democratic House members stood up to contest the electoral college certification in 2017. And within months, Representative Al Green (a Democrat from Texas) started making the call for impeachment on the floor of House. And, by October of 2017, he submitted his first resolution for impeachment – a House Resolution which got the support of 58 Democrats – and, included, I shit you not, Trump’s criticism of the NFL amongst the impeachable offenses. The moral of the story is, throughout his term, the Democrats were out to get him.
The crux of this story, of course, was supposed collusion with Russia. It started with a very sloppy and politicized investigation by James Comey – who was eventually fired because he lied to folks in the Justice Department and the Senate about what he was up to, and then leaked information to force a Special Counsel to be convened – and then came the Mueller investigation, which Democrats breathlessly hoped would be Trump’s final undoing. Lest we forget, all of this started with the Steele dossier, which we now know was funded indirectly by the Clinton campaign and the DNC, and ultimately was debunked by the CIA as internet garbage fairly quickly (and, yet, Comey, knowing this, still kept pushing it forward and leaked it to the media).
Here’s where I think the book does a wonderful job of telling the story. It has interviews with a number of the lawyers involved, brings up first-hand accounts of interactions and transcripts, and so by the end you can feel pretty confident that the right result was met – even if Mueller’s team tried to spin their report to suggest that the lack of evidence of criminal behavior was not enough to throw these allegations into the waste bin of history (rather than innocent until proven guilty, the new standard that they create is “not exonerated”).
The Mueller probe focused on 5 supposed instances of collusion:
-Carter Page supposedly went to Russia for the Trump campaign and was offered bribes to have Trump rescind US sanctions on Russia. After repeated interviews and Grand Jury testimony, no evidence suggested that was the case (including any evidence that might have come from the illegal wiretap).
-An allegation that the GOP platform on Russia vis-à-vis Ukraine was watered down to benefit Russia at Trump’s request. In fact, the exact opposite was true, both in terms of the content introduced at the GOP convention, and in practice as Trump supplied lethal and financial aid to Ukraine during his term.
-Michael Flynn. The story here is again a non-story. Obama imposes sanctions against Russia before the end of his term. Flynn, as the incoming National Security Advisor, tells the Russian ambassador not to overreact and wait for the new President to be sworn in. Comey, before being fired, suggested that no charges would be brought against Flynn. Mueller went after it again and also did not find any evidence of conspiracy.
-George Papadopoulos. A member of the Trump campaign who had allegedly told people that he knew about the Russian DNC hack ahead of time. First the FBI (under Comey) investigated it and came up dry, then Mueller’s team went through the motions and also found nothing about Russia and collusion.
-The most provocative element was the Trump Tower meeting where Don Jr., Manafort and Kushner met with a Russian lawyer who promised damaging intel on Hillary Clinton. In fact, when investigated, it turned out a music producer who knew the Trumps used that tease to get a meeting set up, only to have the lawyer show up and appeal to the Trumps that they should repeal the Magnitsky Act if elected. In real time, based on text messages and the like, it became clear the Trump side felt the meeting was a waste of time and ended it after 20 minutes.
There you have it, all five parts of the supposed Russian collusion story. And the Mueller team came to understand the lack of any there there pretty quickly as well. But, rather than shutting it down, they changed courses and pushed to figure out if there was an obstruction angle. Here’s where I point out the obvious conflicts – Mueller is a good friend to Comey (who was fired by Trump and leaked documents to force a Special Counsel investigation), and Mueller’s team was comprised not just of Democrats, but Democrats who contributed to campaigns, including Hillary Clinton in 2016.
In any event, the next saga included a push by the Mueller team to interview the President. The logic being that they needed to understand Trump’s frame of mind to determine whether he was trying to obstruct any investigations. Except there was no crime to obstruct an investigation for. And the Trump legal team had already made the concerted decision up front to provide access without claiming any Executive Privilege, thereby allowing them to say that there was nothing further that an interview with Trump could offer. In reality, the Mueller side wanted to meet with the President to set him up for a perjury trap, which the historical notes reveal was what they intended and did with Michael Flynn.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Bottom line, the Mueller special investigation brought charges against 7 Americans, and none of those charges made any reference to collusion or efforts to fix the 2016 election.
As for the actual impeachment that took place in 2019, it came after the Democrats won back the House and was a story of trying to reach a desired result by skirting transparency and due process. A conversation between Trump and the newly-elected Ukrainian leader, an overreaction by someone inside the DNI, who reports the information to someone else that runs to Adam Schiff, who advises that person on how to file a complaint, and then Schiff runs the investigation. The transcript of the call was released, and it doesn’t read like high crimes or bribery or any other criminal act. And the process under Schiff did not give the defendant any opportunity to question witnesses. The final charges consisted of “abuse of power” – which is not actually a crime or a specific violation of law, certainly not “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” – and “obstruction of congress”, which is funny since Trump released the transcript, but then in invoking certain constitutional privileges with respect to other information, the Democrats decide that they couldn’t wait for the actual court system to settle it.
We know how it ends. He is acquitted. And then Joe Biden wins the election. That was always the way to get rid of Trump. But reason and logic went out the window. We will see if they ever return.