Diversity: FAIL

Judge Sotamayor gets reversed a lot.

That by itself could point to a raised level of diversity in the kinds of opinions in the judicial system.

The trouble is that it is her reasoning, not her conclusions, with which her fellow judges disagree. They don't think she gets the whole judging thing all that well.

Which is the first problem with imposing physical diversity in the hopes of achieving diversity of opinion: you may get diversity, but it will be achieved by lowering the overall quality of the whole.

The second problem with imposing physical diversity in the hopes of achieving opinion diversity is that you really can't judge a book by its cover.

Sphere: Related Content

A Post Which Roils

One of the blogs I troll is called In Socrates' Wake, written by teachers about teaching, especially the teaching of philosophy. I'm not a teacher, except by the abhorrent personal habit of forcing my wisdom on others, unfettered by their acceptance or appreciation of same.

Usually, ISW is instructive, even enlightening, and always thoughtful.

This post, while instructive and enlightening, just made me want to scream.

Teaching Feminist and Race Theory: problematic assumptions and positive transformations

I teach feminist and race theory to five students, four of whom are white, none of whom are female. Yet, for all their lack of diversity, they understand the philosophical relevance of gender and race. Critical theory for them, however, was remarkably new when they began. While they began their studies with me in order to broaden their perspective in social and political philosophy, none of them had ever reflected on some of the contemporary social structures and implicit patterns of thought that are implicitly sexist and/or racist. None of the students were sexist or racist when they entered the course, and they would have been quite defensive about being labeled as such. Yet, on campus, and in other classes, this was the challenge they faced.

I dare you to read it all.

Instead of screaming, I wrote this:

The most interesting aspect of this is how self-absorbed and myopic is the entire field of feminist and race theory. I am critical both of your methods and your goals, either of which you may accept or reject.

Because while you complain to young learners how difficult life is for someone who is not white and male, millions of non-white non-males are out in the world ignoring, sidestepping, or overcoming the hurdles placed in front of all of us, striving, excelling, and winning.

With the assumption of systemic "oppression", you doom all who buy into your world view to a life of learned helplessness. All of their hopes and dreams must go into cheating the system which they have been told oppresses them, or into the ballot box, which is cheating by official means.

Because individuals are not bound by the nature or the common limitations of the groups to which they belong. It is profoundly racist or sexist to say that they do.

I was struck by your statement that the students coming in had a remarkable lack of diversity, listing as your only evidence that four of them were open-minded white males. That displays an amazing lack of introspection, even hypocrisy. Because I'm sure you would agree that people are not defined by their skin or gender.

On another level, by stating a priori that there is "systemic oppression", you as the authority in the classroom establish that principle as an inarguable tenet of the class. This puts the student on the defensive. That's great for establishing the power of the teacher in the classroom, but not great for actually learning anything other than that racism and sexism are bad, which your students already seem to have known coming in.

Further, it makes the students feel guilty for being who they are. If that is your goal, you're nothing but a jerk with a lectern.

So I will assume it is not your goal. But it appears to be your major accomplishment.

As I said, it's one of the blogs I troll.

Sphere: Related Content

The Trouble with the Base

Reading this Corner piece from the great Ramesh Ponnuru, two things struck me.

First, I noticed a trend: people are picking apart the Republican party and the conservative movement into constituent groups -- Married Anglo-Saxon Protestants, conservative Catholics, et al. Seeing a lack of physical diversity, they then prescribe as remedy the abandonment of foundational ideology.

The troubles with that line of thinking are legion, but the main thing about it is the continual confusion of the Republican Party with the conservative movement.

The Republican Party is a liberal organization. It was founded in the liberal furnace of Abolition, tempered by war with the truly conservative forces of Southern aristocracy, and had its new car smell become malodorous with the stench of Reconstruction. It was the party of the intellectual, of noblesse oblige, and of the black voters they freed from bondage.

Nowadays, the Republican Party exists as a vehicle to win elections, based primarily around the popularity of laissez faire economics. That social conservatives largely identify with it is because A) social conservatives are largely free-market types, as well, and B) they have nowhere else to go.

Modern Conservatism, forged by Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan, is an alloy of the conservative notion of not fixing what is not broken with the ideas of Enlightenment and classical liberalism. It attempts to keep America fixed in its foundational form. It's a bit of a coincidence that conservative in America means classical liberal.

This unification of the Republican Party and conservatism is a holdover from Ronald Reagan, so forged by the power of his ideas and his steadfast support of them. People are naturally wont to label themselves, and to adopt the ideas of those peers and leaders with whom they largely agree. This, too, welds the Republican Party and conservatism.

But even with the difference between the Republican Party and the conservative movement, it must be recognized that the people who make up these groups are motivated by a set of beliefs. Almost all Republicans have as a core belief that people are better off when they can fend for themselves economically. Government, in this mindset, exists to defend us from each other and from outsiders. As Reagan said, government is not the solution, but the problem.

Another core Republican belief is that all men are created equal. We do not want discrimination, even if it is intended to remedy earlier discrimination in some other direction.

And it is these ideas which fundamentally bind us together, and these ideas we seek to further.

We cannot therefore reach out to other "groups" without recoiling in horror at the thought of dividing mankind up into groups. It stinks of the corpse of that war we fought in our youth, and it is not our way.

We believe our ideas are of universal appeal, and do not need to be packaged to pander to people based on their personal place in the nation's demography.

The second thing that struck me is that Ramesh Ponnuru is for some reason still reading Kathleen Parker.

Sphere: Related Content

Durbin Demands Blagojevich Not Put Another African-American In Senate

Perhaps seeking the role of outgoing Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), Dick Durbin (D-IL) demanded that Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich not choose an African-American to fill the Illinois Senate seat vacated when Barack Obama resigned amid a storm of controversy over corruption and other issues.

Still appealing to the right wing of his party after having recently won reelection on a "Drill here, drill now" platform, Durbin refused to endorse any of the candidates put forward so far, all African-Americans.

Durbin, who is White and has ties to rural downstate Illinois, cited race as a major concern. The senior Illinois Senator said if the decision were his, "I would look for the most talented person who could serve this state and who would be likely to run for reelection in 2010."

Sphere: Related Content

Diversity Police Plan Raid on Obama Transition

Over at the Politico, Lisa Lerer frets that men will be disproportionally represented in the Obama administration.

Early indications that men might dominate the hierarchy of Obama administration have women’s groups worried, even as a growing chorus of advisers reportedly pushes Hillary Rodham Clinton for secretary of state.

“There’s definitely been a reaction to the few groups that have been named so far,” said Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women. “I agree with those who are concerned that it would have been nice to see more women.”

I'm at a loss to parse the bolded sentence.

I'm also at a loss to explain why an ad entitled "Secret Diet Revealed" appeared below NOW president Kim Gandy's picture accompanying the story. Surely this was coincidental, and not an editorial decision by Politico staffers.

But it is no mystery why NOW president Kim Gandy should be worried and concerned by the alarming lack of diversity in the first few picks of the Obama Administration. It might signal the troubling condition that the former Senator, who was recently forced to resign, is choosing his leadership team based on some unwritten code of alleged merit, rather than adhering to a sample that would be representative of the wider population.

And that would be a stunning defeat for group-based symbolism, a worrisome development for a movement built on the triumph of image over substance.

Sphere: Related Content

Obama is Embarrassed by Americans

There's a reason people in Europe a multilingual. They're Europeans. They don't have a common language, except English.

And they're having a very difficult time becoming a European nation because of it.

I understand the value of learning other languages. I've learned a smattering of Spanish, French, Japanese, Latin, and Ancient Greek, though the latter two not conversationally. But learning these languages forces one to see a different map on reality, and helps in learning one's own language better.

But I understand even more the importance of language to culture. When I can walk into any restaurant, shop, or business and know that I can communicate without trouble with the people there, it makes my life easier. It makes it easier for me to succeed, and easier to trust my neighbors.

I want the people who are my countrymen to share my culture, ideas, and beliefs. That is why having a common language is important. In America, for better or worse, we speak English. Those who immigrate here should learn the language so they can fit in, rather than insisting that everyone else adjust to them.

Everyone the world over wants to learn English. They don't want to learn French. French is a pretty language, sure, prettier than English. But still, people clamor to learn the language of freedom.

Go figure.

Sphere: Related Content

I Have A Dream Ticket

There is an alluring desire to support Barack Obama because of the color of his skin. Those of us raised in the South in the 60's and 70's remember the rapid change from casual, tacit acknowledgment that blacks were second-class citizens who ought to drink at other fountains and sleep in other hotels, to our national shame at realizing that our ideal of equality for all had been a sham.

When two candidates are equally qualified and able to carry out the duties of some position, Affirmative Action says we should choose the one from the most oppressed (or our least represented) group. The unspoken premise is that people must be seen as members of a group, and not merely as individuals. According to those who favor Affirmative Action, we must atone for the mistreatment of some people in the past by advancing the circumstances of others who happen to look like those we've mistreated.

Similarly, Barack Obama repeatedly makes the same argument. In order to heal the racial divisions among us, we must support him for President. Only by electing a black person may this healing take place. The Democratic Party has chosen him for this, despite fewer Democrats actually voting for him than voted for his primary opponent, Hillary Clinton.

That this argument is the exact antithesis of the desire expressed by Martin Luther King Jr should have need explanation. But apparently it does. For Dr. King said he had a Dream.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

So how can we claim to fulfill the Dream by choosing the candidate based on the color of his skin?

Perhaps it is not so. Perhaps he was chosen based on the minuscule differences between the candidates. Yet once his affiliations and the content of his character became widely known, the primary vote totals broke down on pure demographic lines.

And this was not because people became more racist; rather, the character of the candidate became more widely known. And as it was known, it was disliked.

Now to heal the Party it appears that Hillary Clinton will be sought for Obama's running mate. The symbolism of a white woman playing second fiddle to a black man will be infuriating to feminists; Obama supporters will be unhappy at not being rid of the Clintons, especially after Hillary's mention of Robert Kennedy's assassination.

And Republicans, with their party in tatters, should rejoice. Because the combined negatives of these two on the same ticket is indeed like a dream come true -- for John McCain.
[Minor editing]

Sphere: Related Content

Obama's Hot Stock

Unlike many on the right, I don't think Barack Obama (D-IL) is anti-American. He simply supports change for his own sake. He and Reverend Wright are two peas in a pod: to convince others to give them money and power, they exaggerate the bad things about the country and deny the good things.

That describes all liberal politicians, come to think of it. Their desire for change is so great that they discard that which is good in order to be rid of what is bad. The Law of Unintended Consequences comes into play, as the good things once thrown away are sorely missed and never fully recoverable.

So in finding fault in overt patriotism -- flying the flag from private buildings, wearing flag lapel pins, and other public declarations of national loyalty -- the Obama camp wants to throw it all away, to express patriotism through criticism alone. America is great, "despite all its flaws". Why not just say the country is great? Why does every description have to be a left-handed compliment? ("Your wife is pretty, for an old woman.")

An Obama supporter called CSPAN one day, saying that the wearing of an American flag lapel pin is a desecration of the flag, which is not to be worn as clothing. The moderators said that was news to them. Of course it's nonsense, and not at all the reason why Obama won't wear one. He has said he believes it shows false patriotism to wear the pin, that the true patriot speaks out on issues important to our national security.

I would agree that a patriot may, and in some cases must, speak out when things are not right with his country. But it is not the case that he must always do so, and must never praise the country generally as being better than other countries. Pointedly, the only good thing about the country is not that we can criticize it.

I understand the value of individuality, of refusal to conform to public pressure. I also understand symbols, however, and the symbolism of wearing an American flag on your lapel pin (while running for President) is that you identify yourself with your country ... and your fellow countrymen.

Before at least one debate early in the primary process, Obama (a United States Senator) intentionally failed to put his hand over his heart as the National Anthem was played.

Some might call that an oversight, a simple faux pas of omission. But unless he did so with his eyes closed, he could not have failed to notice many others in the audience, as well as all of the other candidates, with patriotic hand over patriotic heart. At that point he had to choose either to recover quickly, and apologize when the music stopped, or maintain his unpatriotic stance. He chose the latter.

A man totally unconcerned with social custom could behave so; Barack Obama is not that man. He is utterly aware of social mores. It was an intentional act, a declaration that he does not hold love for country in his heart, and will not subjugate himself to her by saying so. He may not see it that way, but that's the trouble with abusing powerful symbols.

Is it not possible both to wear a symbol which is immediately understood by all to indicate love for country and show your patriotism as a critic, as well? Can one not hold hand over heart while decrying injustice? It's a foolish point he is to trying to make.

I think Obama only loves America, if he can be said to love her, as a man loves a prized racehorse or a favorite stock he holds. He sees the country as the 'before' picture in a real estate flip: not somewhere he'd like to live, but with a few changes, it will be good enough for someone else.

Sphere: Related Content

Missing Dissent

According to the mythos of the Inclusive Victims Movement™, dissent is patriotic. In fact, dissent is often said to be the highest form of patriotism, and for those who hold to such a view it seems to push all other forms of patriotism aside.

But conservatives can not and need not dissent, because (so the narrative continues) they are the ones in power, desperately clinging to their white picket fences. For a liberal to fail to dissent is a character flaw.

And from what would a conservative need to dissent? Since liberals only do Good Things, there is never any reason, according to the Inclusive Victims Movement, for anyone to dissent. Who can quarrel with going to church, or giving money to a hospital, or taking money from crooks, or lying about it afterwards?

Well, maybe a person wanting to be President shouldn't take money from crooks or lie about stuff willy-nilly.

Therefore, a person who wishes to be elected President of these United States by running on a platform of getting past race and coming together should do more than sit there when someone preaches things contrary to that platform.

If that person cannot stand up to the crowd in church and decry the wickedness, it is not, as Obama has falsely claimed, because he didnt know about it. Pastors do not long preach sermons with which the congregation is at odds, and congregations, unless they're dead, discuss what the pastor says in his sermons.

And men audacious enough to hope they can be President do not sit idly by while vile things with which they disagree are spoken. On friendly terms with a pastor, they will at least in private exercise their voice in dissent. Either Obama didn't disagree with the content of the pastor's message or he was to cowardly to dissent. We are left with one sad conclusion.

Obama knew about the content of the sermons because that's why he was there.

Sphere: Related Content

Why McCain? Why Obama?

It appears that the two major American political parties have chosen their candidates for President for the same reason.

The Republicans appear to have settled on John McCain as being a good compromise for their coalition of religious conservatives, war hawks, and free marketeers. The Democrats appear to have chosen Barack Obama as a good compromise for their coalition of religious liberals, doves, and socialists.

But I'm not being fair to either party with those descriptions. The Republicans are split between the country club elite and the church supper volunteers. The country clubbers want business stability, while the church supper volunteers want to see America stay true to its Christian heritage. Both sides of that split realize that they share a common enemy in Islamic terrorism, and that John McCain, American patriot, is the best man to deal with that threat.

The Democrats, on the other hand, are divided between the rich/intellectual posers on one side and the poor/uneducated mob at the other.

The Democrats for the last 100 years have been in love with socialism, but that is only a symptom of their true problem, which is an inability to face reality. They are in love with the fantasy that human goodness is all we need to have peace, love, and prosperity for all. Well, human goodness empowered by the State. But the leadership of the party know, in their elitist little hearts, that their socialist, pacifist pandering won't get them anywhere with those who have been freed from the clutches of the government-run education system.

That is why the Dems have this superdelegate business. They know that if they let their base choose, they'll always get an Obama, which would be a disaster for the country. It's patriotism, in other words.

So the answer for why McCain and why Obama is the same.

Sphere: Related Content

They Don't Need to Retract

In what can only be described as lunactivism, the 88 faculty members at Duke University who signed a letter assigning guilt to the Lacrosse team have refused to retract it, or even to issue an apology for their excessive zeal. It's a wonderful example of idealistic fervor trumping good sense.

Anyone can jump the gun and be wrong. Why not just say "Oops, sorry for ruining your lives!" and be done with it? This case, and in particular the faculty lynch mob, will give fuel to the anti-PC fire for years to come. An apology would have done a lot to douse that flame.

At The Minority Report blog, Daveinboca has a piece up about the Duke Lacrosse case. I don't call it the "Duke Rape Case", because the only people raped in that case were, figuratively speaking, the accused.

Why don't the Duke faculty need to apologize and issue a retraction of their infamous letter assigning guilt to the Lacrosse team? In a comment there, I said:

In their minds, they were right. It's the facts that were wrong, but only because this case was either A) an aberration or B) proof that rich White kids can do what they want.

Some of them in B) have it figured that the rich and powerful pulled strings and got the case to turn out how they wanted.

Others in A) are unhinged in a slightly different direction: they think that even though these particular rich White kids were put through the ringer this time, the justice system is still lopsided in their favor and it's only fair, because the academics just know this kind of thing happens to poor Blacks all the time.

No, it doesn't. While it may be true that the system is rigged against the poor, politicians don't pin their reelection hopes on prosecuting a particular set of poor Black defendants, or at least not on the basis that they're poor and Black.

Our legal system is biased in favor of the rich and powerful, but the bias is more heavily against the passive. Those who will fight the system, make noise, and do whatever they can to protest an injustice against them (whether justice is actually on their side or not) often will be rewarded, while those who roll over and accept their fate (deserved or not) will be punished.

Sphere: Related Content

Who Supports Discrimination?

One of the enemies of Justice is institutional racism. A governmental body that uses its power to discriminate is differentiating among people not on the basis of anything they have done, but on who they are, which is by definition unjust.

In the wake of the SCOTUS decision in Parents Involved v. Seattle School District (pdf), some are making a Federalist argument that the States should have the right to discriminate in order to rectify their earlier segregation, or in the Seattle case, some societal problem not explicitly caused by the government or the school.

Unfortunately for that line of thinking, one of the few things that the Federal government is Constitutionally mandated to enforce is equality before the law. Specifically, the Fourteenth Amendment and its equal protection guarantee is not up to the States to enforce -- there having been a war between the States over the matter, so to speak.

So it is the actual Constitution, rather than the fantasy one that the diversity activists believe in, which must be followed.

Congress is on very firm ground when they apply the Fourteenth Amendment. So is the Court. Equal protection of the law ought to mean that the laws apply equally to everyone, not that everyone is discriminated against equally.

There is a huge, and the Court says dispositive difference between implementing a policy of diversity to fix a problem caused by the government segregation, and implementing a policy of diversity to get racial diversity for its own sake. The Court has "repeatedly" declared racial balancing to be illegal, so any diversity plan must be more than just a race test, and must be clearly designed to reach some educational goal.

What most conservatives and I think all libertarians want is for the government (to the degree possible) to ignore a person's race when dealing with that person. And now I know why I always feel so uncomfortable with Census takers and other busybodies ask my race.

Because it's none of their business.

Sphere: Related Content

The Diversity Diversion

To be "Liberal" used to mean to be open-minded, generous, and compassionate. The Liberal man was open to new ideas, new ways of thinking, and new technology. He saw the discrepancy in means between himself and those less fortunate, and was moved to assist them. The goal of the Liberal man has always been a just society governed by enlightened kindness rather than by selfish ambition. That's still the liberal self-image, but the reality has largely become overwhelmed by strident voices of those out to prove a symbolic point, giving the appearance of concern yet caring not one whit for the betterment of their fellow man.

Why has modern Liberalism become such a joke that its very name is a byword?

Liberals have once again been diverted on the road to the promised land of the just society. As usual, they have fallen for their favorite logical fallacy, mistaking an outcome for its cause. Believing [cite] that the strongest and most free societies are ones with diverse subcultures, they incorrectly reason that diversity is the cause of the strength. They believe that diversity causes freedom.

The proposition that diversity is most present in the strongest and freest cultures, even if granted, does not imply that diversity made those cultures strong or free. Rather, freedom is the cause of both the strength and the diversity. Diversity is the golden child of freedom, and not the other way around.

When we speak of diversity, what is it that we mean? There are several types of diversity:
biological, random, natural, racial/type, geographical, skill / educational. It is a mistake to conflate these types of diversity, or to assume that one kind necessarily implies another.

Norman L. Johnson,writing on his research into diversity, cites social insects, ecosystems, social networks, and distributed economies as examples of systems in which diversity is crucial. Yet bee hives and ant colonies are remarkable for their lack of diversity. Their survival strategy is to treat individuals as common parts, indistinguishable, and dispensable. And while ecosystems and distributed economies are complex, modeling human society on them assumes a similarity that may or may not be present.

Strength doesn't require diversity, but unity. Diversity can provide added capability and resilience under changing circumstances, but it can also weaken. In fact, diverse communities show the least amount of trust, meaning that those communities are literally the weakest, not the strongest.

The problem with citing the strength of natural biodiversity or other such examples as argument for social diversity is that diversity is a good fit for only certain problems. Diversity within a group helps it adjust to changing conditions, but not if those conditions are designed carefully. Attacks against an entire diverse group require that the group be bound together. The more diverse a group, the more difficult unity is.

It is impossible to have diversity without strife. It's a tautology to say that people who have different points of view will disagree. This diversity leads inexorably to infighting. History is replete with wars between groups that are indistinguishable to outsiders, yet which differ too much to peacefully coexist.

Diversity is a by-product of our intentional decision to be free individuals. That freedom, and not the diversity, is what generates our strength. It is freedom that allows prosperity; diversity is at best unrelated to it. It is freedom which motivates the soldier to defend his country; diversity is at best not a factor in that, either. Perhaps you can teach me how diversity gives strength.

An attempt to remove diversity must need be an attack on freedom, but not all attacks on freedom target diversity. Diversity is an indicator, not a cause.

But the Liberal movement has been so smitten with the diversity bug that they see diversity as more important than freedom.

Conservatives are comfortable with both freedom and diversity. We want billions of free, diverse groups of 1.

Sphere: Related Content

Why America Needs One Language

America, from her birth, has had as a common bond a single language. It's not the only language in the world. It wasn't even invented here. But in hard times and prosperity, safety and danger, through political struggles and wars, the single language has allowed Americans of all origins to take full part in public life. Without the ability to speak a common language, we are a mere collection of colocated tribes, soon to disintegrate and be cast into the dustbin of history.

If they share a language, the poorest child can converse with the wealthiest financier, should the need arise. Without a common tongue, the rich and powerful can easily ignore even a mob in the street, a mob much more likely to turn to violence when its well-spoken, cogent and passionately delivered points are, through lack of understanding, ignored as gibberish.

Several factors contribute to the necessity of a common language. I apologize for the lack of scholarship here; your refund is in the mail.

• Efficiency
  
  The amount of waste and energy required to accomodate multiple languages is staggering. Teachers, government workers, and really everyone would be asked to communicate in the language preferred bythe few, at the expense of the many. While the elitist would suggest that is good and proper, it is no more realistic than it is just, and it is even less just than it is efficient. Far better to have a single standard and let everyone conform than to have as many standards as are required, which is to say, no standard at all. Taken ad absurdum, we would strain efficiency if all official functions had to have the capacity to be conducted in Esperanto or Klingon for the two people with those as their native languages.
  
  
• Psychology
  
  Language is not just a tool for communication, it is a mapping of ideas into reality. Language introduces an historical bias in favor of its roots. While both Spanish and English are European, and thus impart a European viewpoint on their speakers, the differences are pronounced. Americans have an ingrained trust and loyalty toward the United Kingdom, stemming initially from our common language and smelted in two world wars. We say we share a common history with the British, but we really mean a common language.
  
  
• Safety
  
  When a call comes to a 911 dispatcher, safety demands clarity, and clarity is shattered by a language barrier. The same applies to any interaction with police, fire rescue and emergency medical technicians.
  
  Captain's Quarters has the horrific story of a group of illegal immigrant women forced into prostitution by the "coyotes" with whom they had contracted for passage across the border. It turns out that the coyotes were actually pimps who took their identification and forced them to be used in a way so inhuman that 'prostitution' doesn't quite cover it. The business apparently was conducted all in Spanish. I make no attempt to create a bogeyman here: I believe the business was conducted in Spanish to obscure its purposes.
  
  Not speaking English, the girls were unable to call for help or explain their circumstances.
  
  
• Trust
  
  People who speak the same language trust each other more. Traveling in a foreign country and meeting a person who speaks your language, a level of trust is established immediately. Conversely, speaking in a private language engenders distrust among those who are excluded.
  
  Without a shared language, we rely on translators. Translators must not only convey the nuances of thought between two languages, but they must avoid the temptation to insert their own bias. So we must trust the group speaking the foreign language, and also the translator.
  
  
• Economy
  
  Encouraging a person to speak a language that most others do not is not doing it a favor. Those who cannot fluently speak the dominant language are destined to a life in the underclass.
  
  
• Unity
  
  Employers and employees, lawyers and waitresses, cops and prostitutes are united together in communication. A nation is united by history, culture, and defense of shared territory -- all of which for all practical purposes require a shared language.

We must resist all attempts to characterize monolingualism as racism, nativism, or any kind of intolerance. It is necessary. Without it, sooner or later we all end up working for the coyotes, or unwittingly becoming them.

Sphere: Related Content

Finally, A Use Found for Diversity

While trolling Classical Values (one of the services I provide to the web)(the trolling, not the site), I noted a piece from Simon, who said:

It looks like the biofuels guys have plans for our future. Biofuels are supposed to be he great panacea for the burning problem of the day - man made global warming. Hey not so fast. It turns out biofuels could cause food shortages.

Have you checked food prices lately? When the price of corn goes up, it affects not only the price of corn itself, but others, especially beef and pork. But it also creates a longer-term incentive for farmers to grow more corn, rather than soybeans, which creates a need for more chemical fertilizers and pesticides when farmers grow corn-over-corn, rather than using good crop rotation. And that puts demand on soybeans, wheat, and other crops, as fewer farmers crow those crops in favor of corn.

Higher corn prices will have an effect on illegal immigration, as well. Food prices in Mexico, where corn is a big part of the diet, have gone way up. That makes leaving Mexico to come to the US more attractive.

But it turns out that in producing biofuel (either alcohol or diesel), corn and other cultivated crops (except sugar cane) are not as good as untended prairie.

Cultivated crops require more fossil fuel to grow than they produce. But when you don't cultivate the crop, and just let it grow, weeds and all, two nice things happen.

First, you don't have to buy pesticide, fertilizer, or seeds, since the stuff just grows. Costs plummet.

Secondly, it turns out that the more types of plants you allow to grow, the more overall mass per acre that grows. It's this little thing called diversity, which is overrated in committees but works really, really well for growing biofuel, 3 times better than a monoculture.

I don't think biofuels are the answer to our energy needs. But they are a useful alternative to buying oil from people who want to kill us. Nuclear power and electric vehicles, or hybrid electric/diesel or electric/hydrogen vehicles would help a lot, as would using our own off-shore oil fields.

But an unhealthy (but highly diverse) coalition of farmers wanting grain subsidies, oil companies, ag companies, and environmentalists afraid of both nuclear power and oil spills has kept us from being weaned of foreign oil.

Sphere: Related Content

In Which a Banana is Exposed

What an amazing feat of mental acrobatics.

Ali Eteraz knows that something is wrong in politics, and his answer is to throw out all religion under the guise of throwing out jihad:

When I say “religious supremacism” I mean the ideology of theocracy, which in the Muslim milieu agitates for the domination of political Islam, ...

(ok so far)

... and in the Western milieu agitates for infiltration of the government by religious (usually Evangelical) zelaots who then legislate on the bases of their religious belief.

Spellcheck aside, the only place that superficially fits his opiated description is the United States, albeit with a President who has never once, in his entire career as an executive, legislated.

But to be as charitable as possible, I will assume that what he meant to say was that he can't oppose religious extremism that wishes to destroy his civilization without opposing all religious involvement in government. This, despite the historical and prima facie evidence that religion is a civilizing influence, serving to keep men from tearing at each other's throats. Religious fervor has helped, along with the respect for science, logic and the rule of law, to create and sustain the very civilization he is so quick to abandon.

It is exceedingly rare for a Christian, Hindu, Jew, Buddhist, or even a Gaian to use force to advance his religion.

By applying the label "theocracy", he lumps jihad and social conservatism together. It's the same old brown moral equivalency banana, wrapped in shiny yellow paper.

He goes further and exploits without development a false choice, as Simon outlines in his post, that he must either oppose or support religious and ideological exclusion in unison. As far as I know, neither Republicans nor Democrats are planning to decapitate their opponents following a feisty episode of Meet the Press, or no matter what happens in a given election. The French may see things differently, but in the country with Evangelicals pushing their narrow religious agenda, political violence seems not to be part of the strategy.

I find it entertaining that the explanation he gives for opposing the institution of partisanship includes a justification by status quo of institutions generally.

That might confuse, except when seen in light of his unstated premise: all cultures and philosophies are equally valid. If one distrusts the adequacy of his own philosophy so much as to regard it the equal of those who openly advocate genocide for those who fail to fully agree, I see no reason to grant him even the smallest concession of insight. Perhaps I am wrong in this, for he also appears to believe quite strongly in the moral superiority of his position.

To sum up: Ali, reject the choices you have for political parties, if you wish. While almost any explanation would suffice for such a step, the one you gave did not.

w/t: Simon at Classical Values

Sphere: Related Content

Socialist Pecking Order

The irrepressible Dr. Sanity writes today about the socialist pecking order:

From the perspective of the socialist utopian, what matters more than Women's rights or Gay Righs [sic] are the rights of a designated culture. The dogma of multiculturalism trumps the dogma of women's superiority. This is probably because for the socialist utopian, might makes right and the needs of the many always outweigh the needs of the few--and the few better remember that fact, or else. In the socialist utopia, there is no room for individuality or personal preference; or tolerance for differences. You always must subsume yourself to the collective; and the bigger the collective, the more power victimization can be exploited.

But the first (and only) lefty "virtue" is furthering social justice, and when you realize that there are more women than jihadists, it must be that jihadists are more oppressed than women. In lefty logic, allowing jihadists to abuse women furthers social justice.

In The Happy Chains of Individualism I tried to lay out the case for individualism as the basis for success in the American experiment. But the leftist multicultural agenda, being all about groups, has no room for individualism. The group is considered autonomous, its will inarguable. Dr. Sanity notes that there is a conflict between accepting the premise that all cultures should be considered equal and the obvious fact that in some cultures, we would not be able even to mouth the words that all cultures should be considered equal.

The discussion brings to mind the downfall of Tolerance: since all things should be tolerated except the intolerant, the only state of mind allowed should be toleration. To the pathologically tolerant, no rule or guideline can hold sway, because it would be intolerant to impose rules. Toleration as a basis for living is as disingenuous insipid as it is cowardly.

Yet Dr. Sanity is not the first to note the fundamental conflict between multiculturalism and liberalism. Paraphrasing Salman Rushdie, a voice of some gravity in liberal circles:

Western liberal intellectuals have become accustomed to believing that those the world over with darker skin are oppressed by the lighter-skinned ones. That almost instinctual belief is so intertwined with what it means to be a good liberal that all an African or South Asian demagogue need do is decry Western imperialism or oppression, and Western liberals will buy it hook, line, and lead-free sinker.

So Muslim extremists, with very illiberal points of view, engage the Western liberal media as willing allies simply by asserting the common enemy of Western dominance.

A parallel development is equally troubling to Rushdie, and that is the growth of multiculturalism. There is a pointed difference, Rushdie says, between rejoicing in the many and varied cultures we find thrown together in an increasingly global, mobile, interconnected world, and refusing to place boundaries of acceptability around behavior.

Those identifying with their own oppressed victim group should take note how quickly, if some culture wishes it, their socialist brethren will send them back to the kitchen, the closet, or the back of the bus.

Sphere: Related Content

The Magic of Diversity

It is a tenet of the diversity movement that variation of individuals within a group makes the group better. Every team, committee, or board must be formed with diversity in mind. The magic of diversity will lead to better decisions, avoid groupthink, and save us all. The trouble is that most often the wrong kind of diversity is chosen, and the magic turns to madness.

When we speak of diversity, what is it that we mean? There are several types of diversity: biological, random, natural, racial or type, or geographical. There is skill diversity; educational, opinion, viewpoint diversity, and so on. It is a mistake to conflate any of these types of diversity, or to assume that one kind necessarily implies another.

As Justice Clarence Thomas said in a BusinessWeek interview:

I've thought a lot about these things, and I've spent the bulk of my life, beating my head against a wall, trying to get people to see that they can have their grand theories but, in the end, you can't impose them on other people's kids. How many kids do you have? They're different, aren't they? If your kids are different—and they're all yours—what about just some kids who happen to be different shades of black, different degrees of Negro? They're all from different family settings—some two parents, some no parents, some raised by grandparents. Come on. How can you just all of a sudden treat them as all the same?

Suppose you were creating a team of ten people, and your goal (hypothetically) were to have three people with dark skin, three with blond hair, three females, four above a certain height, and three in each decade of age ranging from 20 to 50. To get this diversity, you could look at their resumes and have them submit by email answers to questions about nuclear physics, Central Asian history, and field hockey. That would let you select a diverse set of opinions and knowledge, which would then yield a chance of successfully getting the physically diverse group you are after.

What's that? Silly, you say? The obvious way to make sure to get the exact mix of physical attributes you needed would be to ask the people for their physical attributes, and ignore altogether their knowledge of flower or India's glorious past, since that has nothing to do with your needs.

But we see the reverse employed: to achieve a goal of certain knowledge and skills on a team, members are chosen for their physical or even educational diversity, in the hopes that somehow they will have the needed abilities. It would be far better to pick people with the needed skills and experience levels, and not worry about their irrelevant characteristics. They may not look different, but they will be as different as they need to be.

And even if the goal is opinion diversity itself, and not any specific set of skills, knowledge, or beliefs, using racial or other physical diversity to achieve opinion diversity relies on stereotyping. As Justice Thomas notes, a physically homogeneous group of people probably will not think all alike. Conversely, it is quite possible to find people of different physical descriptions who will have very similar views.

The key failing of using physical diversity as a proxy for viewpoint diversity is that it introduces unrelated variables, and we don't know what those variable are. There is tremendous, unknowable variation within what we call "races", and the difference in viewpoint between any two people of a given race might be greater than the difference between either of them and someone of another race.

So are diverse teams really better? A committee, team, or other group is tasked collectively with performing a project no one of them alone could do. A team requires therefore a range of skills. The skills of the team members must mesh together to accomplish the team goal. Choosing people for "diversity" yields random skill sets, and unknown skill levels. To believe that diversity implies meshing requires magical thinking: it will just somehow work.

Diversity should be a natural byproduct of choosing the right people for the job. Insisting on doing it some other way belies the belief that diversity aids the team, showing it to be an end in itself. Diversity in that case is not the source of any strength, but an exercise in bureaucratic phoniness.

Sphere: Related Content

Muslims Should Pray Only to Convert VaTech Victims

Debbie Schlussel notes, in her usual even-handed way, that there is a dust-up on a Virginia Tech mailing list for Muslims. The cause of this tussle? A female Muslim suggested that Muslims pray for the victims of Monday's massacre. That's what they get for teaching girls to read. They get all kinds of funny Western ideas, like asking God to help someone without an ulterior motive.

The liberal Arabic-language website Aafaq reports that a Muslim student set off a debate when she sent an email to the mailing list of the Muslim Students' Association at Virginia Tech asking the students to pray that Allah have mercy on those killed and wounded in the shooting attack at the university.

According to Aafaq, the dean of student affairs at American International University, Abu Hamza Hijji, responded, writing that Allah the Most Merciful forbids praying for mercy for the non-Muslim dead, or even for the non-Muslim living, and that it is only permitted to pray that they be rightly guided [DS: convert to Islam]. He added that what happened was a sad occurrence, but that does not give Muslims the right to transgress the laws of Allah the Most Merciful.
(Emphasis DS)

Apparently, those who say that God and Allah are the same thing were wrong. Allah appears to be a petty, bloodthirsty hater. Religion of Peace? In the sense that the dead are at peace, I guess.

Sphere: Related Content

The Liberal Error

I've noticed a tendency, a pattern of sorts, among modern American liberals. They seem most often to conflate side effects and cause.

Self Esteem

Liberals love to talk about self esteem, as though low self esteem were its own cause and not simply the mental health equivalent of scurvy. Without achievement, we lack the self esteem to stay away from suicide, drug abuse, and undesirable sexual activity. But just a little self esteem is enough to ward off these potholes of life. Too much self esteem leads to arrogance and sociopathy.

Low self esteem is undesirable, but high self esteem is just as bad. Furthermore, you can't supply the self esteem innoculation with unmerited praise, and the reward of doing a good job is often enough without any praise at all. As Dr. Sanity says,

Our cultural focus on enhancing "self-esteem" has resulted in the near-worship of emotions and feelings at the expense of reason and thought; on emphasizing "root causes" and victimhood, instead of demanding that behavior be civilized and that individuals exert self-discipline and self-control--no matter what they are "feeling".

Healthy, well-adjusted people have moderate self-esteem, but that cannot be given -- it must be earned.

Diversity

Diversity is not a source of strength in human societies, it is a symptom of it. Unity gives strength, .and people are different enough without foolishly trying to make them more different. A people who are unified is a stronger people. But to be strong, a people must have freedom;. A free people develop diversity. Mere enforced superficial (e.g., racial) diversity does not enhance strength in any way. This topic deserves more treatment, and will be the topic of a future post.

Guns and Violence

Just days before the Virginia Tech massacre, my son's high school English class viewed two videos about the Columbine school schooting. One delved into the actual motivations of the kids who committed the acts of murderous rage, and the other was Michael Moore's Waiting for Columbine. My son identified with the first documentary, saying (and I'm of course translating here from the original teenagerese) that he understood the pain of peer rejection. We agreed that was hardly an excuse to go killing people, but he pointed out that if someone were intent on killing, there's not much that can be done about it. Anyone with a library card can learn how to destroy.

Michael Moore's shlockumentary, on the other hand, he found ludicrous. He took Moore's point to be that if K-Mart had not sold the bullets the Columbine killers had used, they would not have been able to kill. Getting the bullets taken off the shelves would solve the whole problem, he thought Moore to be saying. Knowing as he did the amount of time and thought the Columbine killers put into their rampage, not having those bullets would not have held them back. Guns were their plan B. Plan A was homemade explosives, which failed. Without the bullets, even assuming they couldn't find any anywhere beside K-Mart, they would have come up with some other plan B.

The Columbine rampage didn't happen because bullets were available. It happened because humans ostracize those who are different, and we live in the time of leverage from which there is no return. The bullets were available because we live in a dangerous world, not the other way around.

Now gun control advocates are playing this VaTech massacre for all it's worth, saying that it was caused by the availability of guns. No, it was caused by a lack of guns in the hands of the victims.

Massacres are a result of gun control, not a reason for more of it.

I could go on listing examples in which liberals conflate cause and side effect, such as Global Warming (is the world getting warmer because of the CO2 in the air, or is there more CO2 in the air because the world is getting warmer?), or social justice (to a liberal, life is only fair if the outcome is fair; the conditions are judged by the outcome). However, I'm not really happy with this post, and though I am fairly happy with all of the points made, am not sure I've made my overall case.

Sphere: Related Content