In Slate, a smart Jewish guy from Mexico City explains to gringos that the American Establishment’s political Conventional Wisdom of 2000-2015 — the key to the White House is amnestying Mexican illegal aliens — is silly.

The Democrats Have a Latino Problem
Hispanic voters were supposed to be the party’s future. It’s not working out that way.
By LEÓN KRAUZE

OCT 10, 201812:47 PM

… Then, there is the Hispanic vote. It would seem reasonable to assume that after three uninterrupted years of demonizing, ostracizing, and persecuting the country’s Hispanic immigrants, Trump and his nativist enablers would have hell to pay with Latinos at the ballot box, come November and beyond. Trouble is, they might not. Hispanic voters have become a maddening puzzle for the Democratic Party.

2016 was supposed to be the year America’s great demographic “sleeping giant” would finally awake, shaken out of its slumber by Trump’s rhetoric. Some predicted a massive “We have arrived” moment that would include a surge in voter registration and a dramatic increase in turnout at the polls. A “Latino wave,” an overoptimistic colleague told me, would come ashore and prove that Hispanic voters truly held the key to the White House.

On Election Day, the wave was merely a splash. There were certainly stories of accomplishment, like the Latino vote in Colorado and Nevada, but Hispanics did not reject Trump in the resounding, almost absolute way that, say, black Americans did. According to exit polls, Trump won 29 percent of the Hispanic vote, outperforming Mitt Romney’s tally by 2 points.

Two things have happened since then. First, Trump’s attacks on Hispanics immigrants have reached an astounding degree of cruelty. …

Latinos have not responded in kind. While Trump was enacting his anti-immigrant agenda, Latino voters seemed to have slowly warmed up to the president. In last week’s NPR/PBS/Marist poll, 41 percent of Hispanics approved of Trump’s performance (black Americans? 12 percent). This is no outlier. Another recent poll put Trump’s approval among Latinos at 35 percent. An average of both would put Trump—again, an overtly nativist president—within about 10 points of Barack Obama’s 49 percent approval among Hispanic at roughly the same time in his presidency.

… The polls, says Suro, also dispute “the presumption that Trump’s immigration policies have alienated large numbers of Latinos.”

The fact that Donald Trump is viewed in a relatively favorable light by as many as 1 in 4 Hispanic voters should be alarming for Democrats, but it’s not even their biggest problem. That would be turnout.

Latino voters make up about 12 percent of the American electorate, with more than 27 million eligible voters. Those numbers will continue to grow in the coming years. The question is whether Hispanic turnout will increase as well. So far, it doesn’t look promising.

From the New York Times:

Relative to other progressive special interests, the immigrant rights movement has traditionally been a pauper’s crusade, lacking in billionaire benefactors and financially outmatched by ideological rivals like the Center for Immigration Studies, the Federation of American Immigration Reform and NumbersUSA.

Mark Zuckerberg, Laurene Powell Jobs and George Soros have recently begun donating to specific immigration causes like family reunification and giving seed money to migrant entrepreneurs.

Not to mention Bill Gates, the Koch Brothers, Michael Bloomberg, and Sheldon Adelson. But the immigration skeptical side has an ophthalmologist in Northern Michigan, so how can Mark Zuckerberg et al compete with that kind of funding firepower?

Continuing with the Steinbrenner-Trump parallels, a reader points to this recent Sports Illustrated story about what happened to Steinbrenner’s feuding, tabloid-addicted New York Yankees on August 9, 1978, when the Yankees trailed the Boston Red Sox by 8.5 games. Steinbrenner was just about to fire a bunch of front office George Costanza-like employees over what Billy Martin had just said about Reggie Jackson, but then he decided to delay pulling the trigger to see how the headlines in the papers would play it.

But there were no headlines because the New York Daily News, Post, and Times all went on strike that night and stayed on strike through the rest of the regular season. With no newspaper headlines to play up their internal disagreements, the team came together, went 37-14 the rest of the way, beat the Red Sox in a famous 1 game playoff (the Bucky Dent homer), and beat the L.A. Dodgers to win their second straight world championship.

The Untold Story of the Yankees’ Stunning Rally in ’78

The story you know: 40 years ago, the Yankees rallied from 14 games back to overtake the Red Sox. The one you don’t: key to their revival was a New York newspaper strike that calmed the Bronx Zoo, brought the team’s focus back to baseball—and heralded a change in American life.
By Tom Verducci
September 19, 2018

This would make a good inspiration for a bestselling Young Adult dystopian trilogy of novels for teenage girls to read: Robots replace HR ladies in the hiring process, but the robots hire more white men because white men tend more often to get the job done.

From Reuters:

Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women
Jeffrey Dastin
8 MIN READ

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc’s (AMZN.O) machine-learning specialists uncovered a big problem: their new recruiting engine did not like women.

The team had been building computer programs since 2014 to review job applicants’ resumes with the aim of mechanizing the search for top talent, five people familiar with the effort told Reuters.

Automation has been key to Amazon’s e-commerce dominance, be it inside warehouses or driving pricing decisions. The company’s experimental hiring tool used artificial intelligence to give job candidates scores ranging from one to five stars – much like shoppers rate products on Amazon, some of the people said.

“Everyone wanted this holy grail,” one of the people said. “They literally wanted it to be an engine where I’m going to give you 100 resumes, it will spit out the top five, and we’ll hire those.”

But by 2015, the company realized its new system was not rating candidates for software developer jobs and other technical posts in a gender-neutral way.

That is because Amazon’s computer models were trained to vet applicants by observing patterns in resumes submitted to the company over a 10-year period. Most came from men, a reflection of male dominance across the tech industry.

Uh, presumably, Amazon’s AI looked not just at old resumes but at how old resumes correlated with job performance among those hired.

Jeff Bezos has hired a lot of people, male and female, over the years and has kept records on how they did. Judging by Jeff’s net worth, which plummeted today to $153 billion, some of them were pretty productive for him; and, even at Amazon, some hires were wash-outs. Jeff’s robots noticed that the old hires with the more masculine-sounding resumes tended to do better than the ones from Womyn’s Studies majors.

In effect, Amazon’s system taught itself that male candidates were preferable. It penalized resumes that included the word “women’s,” as in “women’s chess club captain.” And it downgraded graduates of two all-women’s colleges, according to people familiar with the matter. They did not specify the names of the schools.

Amazon edited the programs to make them neutral to these particular terms. But that was no guarantee that the machines would not devise other ways of sorting candidates that could prove discriminatory, the people said.

The Seattle company ultimately disbanded the team by the start of last year because executives lost hope for the project, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity. ….

Another said a new team in Edinburgh has been formed to give automated employment screening another try, this time with a focus on diversity.

From the NYT opinion page:

A Damaging Bid to Censor Applications at Harvard

If a lawsuit over affirmative action is successful, would-be college students may have to hide their race.

By Elise C. Boddie, Oct. 10, 2018

Professor Boddie has advised universities on how to comply with federal law on affirmative action.

Being black enough to qualify for affirmative action has been very, very good to Prof. Boddie’s career.

Imagine this scenario: An admissions officer sits down to read a stack of applications, but they’re heavily redacted because the college must censor all references to an applicant’s race.

Okay, let me try to imagine this … Hmmmmmmm … Sounds good! Let’s do it.

It would be a lot like how applicants for openings in symphony orchestras audition behind a curtain. Or how law school tests are graded “blind” without the grader knowing the name of who took the test.

The admissions officer can consider an applicant’s gender, where she grew up, whether she preferred the Yankees to the Red Sox and every other conceivable part of her background or identity. But not her race, even if it had a formative impact on her life.

That could become the reality for every college if a group of Asian-American students denied admission to Harvard wins a lawsuit. They want to outlaw the modest use of race in admissions that the Supreme Court has twice upheld as vital to college students’ education. …

The lawsuit asks the court to bar colleges from being able to consider, learn about or even become aware of an applicant’s race. Eventually, applicants might stop discussing their race altogether, omitting things like leadership roles in their high school’s Latino Student Alliance or choosing not to write about icons like Dolores Huerta — all because they might be worried about indicating their racial identity.

This case could have a devastating impact. Consider a black student who grew up on the South Side of Chicago or a Hmong applicant who lives in a working-class neighborhood in Minneapolis. Both of them have likely had very different experiences from white applicants.

Under Harvard’s current admissions process, they could discuss the role race played in their lives. A white applicant might also want to share her experiences with race.

Suggested prompt for a white applicant wanting to write about race under the current system: “Gradually I began to hate my ancestors.”

Anyway, the college application essay is at present one of the ways young people are instructed that being whiny and woke is the way to get ahead in The Current Year. Restricting essays to impersonal topics — E.g., Write about something you have learned and why it’s interesting — would be a good way instead to get across the message that college is for learning about the real world.

Look, the current college system appears to be damaging the mental health of college students, if the data collected in The Coddling of the American Mind is reliable. Why not experiment with alternatives in the hope of finding methods that are less detrimental to the health and happiness of the young?

From Vox:

We “refuse to be silent any longer”: magic as self-care after Kavanaugh

Modern-day witches are creating rituals to foster solidarity, activism, and healing.

By Tara Isabella Burton @NotoriousTIB [email protected] Oct 10, 2018

First, take a candle.

Then, pour some salt into your hand.

Then, keeping the grains in your palm, take a pen to write out a thank you to Christine Blasey Ford, the woman whose allegations of sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee — and now justice — Brett Kavanaugh, stunned a nation.

Or, if you prefer, simply say, “I believe you.”

It’s just one of the many quasi-religious rituals circulating the internet — particularly pagan and #resistance circles — in the wake of Kavanaugh’s confirmation. These rituals help self-identified witches process trauma, anger, and grief.

By the way, my new Taki’s Magazine book review of The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff concludes with a discussion of how the differences between medieval European beliefs in witchcraft and modern African beliefs in witchcraft influence contemporary concepts like “systemic racism” and “implicit bias.”

From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:

2013: A Race Odyssey
by Steve Sailer

October 10, 2018

With the spectacular failure of clinical psychologist Dr. Prof. Christine Blasey Ford’s vague charges against Brett Kavanaugh to elicit any corroborating evidence, moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s new book about the apparent epidemic of politics-related mental illness that began around 2013, The Coddling of the American Mind, is exceptionally timely.

The spirit of the age cries out for tales of victimization, and, unsurprisingly, the supply has grown to meet the skyrocketing demand. What does it say about our culture that we just witnessed a professor of psychology be vastly praised for testifying to a purported chain of events without any additional evidence emerging that it wasn’t all just in her head?

Read the whole thing there.

Regarding Trump’s style of battling publicly with all and sunder, including his own underlings such as Jeff Sessions, I often point to the similar style of Trump’s idol, New York Yankee ballclub owner George Steinbrenner. The George Steinbrenner character voiced by Larry David on Seinfeld was an older, cuddlier version than the one I remember from the late 1970s.

Commenter Yojimbo/Zatoichi, however, points out that Steinbrenner’s Yankees didn’t invent the mode of the team where the owner exchanges insults with the star in the newspapers. Charlie O. Finley was doing much the same thing with the Oakland As in the early 1970s.

One common denominator was the star slugger of both teams was the intelligent, boastful, moody, and talented Reggie Jackson. Another was that it seemed like a post-1960s thing.

It was seen as being related to the major leap in candor in Jim Bouton’s 1970 book Ball Four, as part of the Sixties cultural revolution against hypocrisy and discretion.

In the 1890s, the National League got taken over by brawling big city Irishmen and the game stagnated economically as it became more disreputable, what with all the cursing and fans throwing bottles at umpires and what not. Ban Johnson saw an opening and in 1901 launched the American League to provide a more respectable ballpark experience that would be attractive to middle class families. Johnson’s cleaned-up version of the game was an immediate hit and the AL soon became the dominant league.

Baseball became identified with boyhood and rural innocence, even concocting out of whole cloth an origin story that baseball had been invented in 1839 by a future Civil War hero in idyllic Cooperstown, NY, which is just about the most beautiful small town in America. (Instead, the game more or less evolved into the form we know in New York City.)

Finally, in 1970 washed up pitcher Jim Bouton published his diary of the 1969 season, Ball Four, that frankly (and hilariously) disclosed what relievers really talk about in the bullpen. That book was initially controversial, but it was so funny and in tune with the post-Sixties spirit of the age that it became a classic.

Soon, it seemed in tune with the times for owners to explain to reporters exactly how they felt about their highest paid slugger’s current 0 for 13 slump and for the slugger to explain back what a cheap bastard the owner was.

It was a 70s thing: first the A’s fought in public and still won three World Series and then the Yankees fought in public and still won two World Series. Those two teams won 5 World Series from 1972 to 1978, being interrupted only by the Big Red Machine. The button-downed Dodgers who imposed strict message discipline upon all employees made it to 3 World Series in the 1970s but lost each time.

The more forward looking sportswriters liked to say that in the future everybody would air their dirty laundry in the newspapers and we’d all be better off for it (not least of all sportswriters). It was part of sportswriters’ 1970s theory that they were the new Woodward & Bernstein.

But in the long run, the institutions largely figured out how to control their images through access journalism and this 70s-style open contentiousness mostly faded away. But now Trump is running the White House like he’s George Steinbrenner in 1977.

Trump’s enemies say this obviously represents paranoid authoritarianism, but it’s really post-Sixties, post-Watergate openness.

You hear a lot about “affordable housing” these days, but it can be hard to make sense of the rhetoric since the term can have at least two different meanings.

1. “Affordable housing” can mean that new luxury developments must offer some of their units to selected people at low (i.e., subsidized) prices for some number of years, such as ten or twenty. Developers complain but they often wind up going along with these demands, even though it means a big subsidy from their full-price renters/buyers to the lucky few who get “affordable” places. This definition is popular with the sleazier sort of activist groups that are looking to get a handout.

2. “Affordable housing” can also mean building low budget cheap housing on expensive land. This definition is popular with the wonkier, more public spirited-type of Yes In My Back Yard activists. But this is usually less popular with property-owning neighbors than the first kind of affordable housing. One big problem with building cheap housing is that while when the building is brand new, it might attract a decent type of tenant, but a few decades later when it’s aging and dingy it’s likely to become a real slum. So neighbors who own property are generally not at all happy about plans to create affordable housing by putting in new construction with, say, 7.5 foot ceilings and a lack of amenities. In contrast, if you build new upscale housing, while it may well decline in relative price as it gets older and more bedraggled, it’s less likely to turn into an outright slum in the future whose undesirable tenants drag down the property values of neighbors.

To help us better understand many of the outpourings of rage in the media, I’ve asked Alex Portnoy’s mother to explain some of the background:

Let the goyim sink their teeth into whatever lowly creature crawls and grunts across the face of the dirty earth, we will not contaminate our humanity thus. Let them (if you know who I mean) gorge themselves upon anything and everything that moves, no matter how odious and abject the animal, no matter how grotesque or shmutzig or dumb the creature in question happens to be. Let them eat eels and frogs and pigs and crabs and lobsters; let them eat vulture, let them eat ape-meat and skunk if they like — a diet of abominable creatures well befits a breed of mankind so hopelessly shallow and empty-headed as to drink, to divorce, and to fight with their fists. All they know, these imbecilic eaters of the execrable, is to swagger, to insult, to sneer, and sooner or later to hit. Oh, also they know how to go out into the woods with a gun, these geniuses, and kill innocent wild deer, deer who themselves nosh quietly on berries and grasses and then go on their way, bothering no one. You stupid goyim! Reeking of beer and empty of ammunition, home you head, a dead animal (formerly alive) strapped to each fender, so that all the motorists along the way can see how strong and manly you are; and then, in your houses, you take these deer — who have done you, who have done nothing in all of nature, not the least bit of harm — you take these deer, cut them up into pieces, and cook them in a pot. There isn’t enough to eat in this world, they have to eat up the deer as well! They will eat anything, anything they can get their big goy hands on! And the terrifying corollary, they will do anything as well. Deer eat what deer eat, and Jews eat what Jews eat, but not these goyim. Crawling animals, wallowing animals, leaping and angelic animals — it makes no difference to them — what they want they take, and to hell with the other thing’s feelings (let alone kindness and compassion). Yes, it’s all written down in history, what they have done, our illustrious neighbors who own the world and know absolutely nothing of human boundaries and limits.

From Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth, 1969.