Even some of the world’s richest people may get duped, according to newly unsealed documents in a lawsuit filed on behalf of investors in the failing blood-testing company Theranos. …
Theranos, founded by Elizabeth Holmes when she was a 19-year-old Stanford University dropout, promised to revolutionize the lab industry using a few drops of blood from a simple finger-prick to look for everything from diabetes to cancer, at a fraction of the cost of a traditional blood test.
The company became a Silicon Valley fairy tale, with investors awarding the privately held company a valuation of around $9 billion. But the story began to unravel in October 2015 after The Wall Street Journal, owned by Mr. Murdoch’s News Corp., began questioning whether the tests worked. …
Theranos had always boasted a star-studded list of investors and directors — its board included the former secretaries of state George P. Shultz and Henry A. Kissinger, two former United States senators, and Gen. Jim Mattis, the current secretary of defense. But while some high-profile investors’ links to Theranos had been previously known, the new documents provide a detailed list of financial amounts….
The Walton family invested about $150 million in 2014 through two separate entities, according to the investor list. Mr. Murdoch put in about $125 million, and the extended family of Ms. DeVos invested about $100 million. …
Other prominent investors, according to the list, included the Cox family; the Atlanta billionaires who own the media conglomerate Cox Enterprises and who invested $100 million; and a company affiliated with Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim that put in about $30 million. Robert K. Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, invested $1 million.
And think how much they would have lost investing in Ms. Holmes if only America’s elites weren’t so biased against women.
Unlike American Indian author Sherman Alexie who got MeTooed awhile ago but comes across, at least on the page, like a decent guy, Dominican-American Person of Color writer superstar Junot Diaz comes across as a hate-filled jerk in his prose. But mostly he’s confined his hate writing toward the Current Year’s designated hate objects, white people, so he was feted until today.
But now the dam has broken and he is suddenly in big trouble for “misogyny:”
I’ve been waiting for this one to come out for a long time.
Here’s my story about Junot Díaz. It’s corroborated by my journal entry the next morning; emails to family, friends, and colleagues shortly thereafter; and my date, who was sitting beside me:
I was 32. I was invited to a dinner after a talk Díaz had given about “the importance of love” at the NC Literary Festival, Friday, April 4th, 2014. … My debut novel was due to come out the next month, and I’d brought an advance copy to give Mr. Díaz as a gift, understanding him to be both a genre fiction fan and a feminist. I sat next to him. The table struck up a light conversation about the significance of statistics in publishing. I made a point emphasizing how personal narrative is important in empowering the marginalized. He said (and this is my memory, so I’m not including quotation marks), Well, I don’t know if you know how statistics work, but that’s like saying, Oh, I haven’t been RAPED, so RAPE must not exist.
His voice had risen to a shout. He literally shouted the word “rape” in my face. This is after knowing me for maybe ten minutes. His response was completely bizarre, disproportionate, and violent. I was speechless and felt sick. I would have, anyway, but this was also only two weeks after I’d been sexually assaulted in Belize.
The dinner just got worse from there. I’ve never experienced such virulent misogyny in my adult life. Every point I made—ABOUT issues women face in publishing—he made a point of talking over me, cutting me off, ignoring me to talk to the other famous (male) writer at the table, who happily participated in the erasure (congratulations, Peter Straub, you were also awful that night). What’s so ironic is that I remember trying to make a point about how a piece of mine had just been rejected by The New Yorker, and I’d never be able to tell whether it was bc of bias or not, given their dismal VIDA statistics. …
Díaz didn’t physically assault me. But shouting the word “rape” in my face is absolutely verbal sexual assault. Moreover, I was struck by the total disconnect between his public persona of a progressive literary idol and how he actually treated women.
See, women are the weaker sex, so it’s a career-ruining offense to disagree vociferously with one.
In contrast, whites are the enemy race, so it’s career-boosting to demonize them.
For example, here’s Diaz’s 2014 essay in The New Yorker:
1
When I was in my mid-twenties I decided to apply for an MFA in creative writing. …
2
I didn’t have a great workshop experience. Not at all. In fact by the start of my second year I was like: get me the f*** out of here.
So what was the problem?
Oh just the standard problem of MFA programs.
That s*** was too white.
3
Some of you understand completely. And some of you ask: Too white … how?
… Too white as in the MFA had no faculty of color in the fiction program—like none—and neither the faculty nor the administration saw that lack of color as a big problem. (At least the students are diverse, they told us.) Too white as in my workshop reproduced exactly the dominant culture’s blind spots and assumptions around race and racism (and sexism and heteronormativity, etc). In my workshop there was an almost lunatical belief that race was no longer a major social force (it’s class!). In my workshop we never explored our racial identities or how they impacted our writing—at all. Never got any kind of instruction in that area—at all….
From what I saw the plurality of students and faculty had been educated exclusively in the tradition of writers like William Gaddis, Francine Prose, or Alice Munro—and not at all in the traditions of Toni Morrison, Cherrie Moraga, Maxine Hong-Kingston, Arundhati Roy, Edwidge Danticat, Alice Walker, or Jamaica Kincaid. In my workshop the default subject position of reading and writing—of Literature with a capital L—was white, straight and male. …
100% percent white, straight and male like Francine Prose or Alice Munro? Did Diaz even reread his first draft before publishing it in The New Yorker?
Also, notice that “Toni Morrison, Cherrie Moraga, Maxine Hong-Kingston, Arundhati Roy, Edwidge Danticat, Alice Walker, or Jamaica Kincaid” are all female. Perhaps Diaz is protecting his franchise as the male POC MFA writer from potential competitors?
Oh, yes: too white indeed. I could write pages on the unbearable too-whiteness of my workshop—I could write folio, octavo and duodecimo on its terrible whiteness—but you get the idea. …
“Unbearable too-whiteness?” Isn’t the joke (from Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being) “unbearable wightness?”
Tucker Max and Geoffrey Miller are the authors of Mate: Become the Man Women Want
Single women are really judgmental. And they need to be. They don’t have all the time in the world to figure out if a guy is worth their time, so they’ve honed in on a few key things men do on first dates that are reliable indicators of their (lack of) fitness as potential mates. …
To get a more accurate sense of how women judge a guy’s shoes on a first date, we surveyed 434 young, straight, single American women. We showed them 32 types of men’s shoes—each a Zappos.com bestseller in its category. They covered almost everything a normal guy might wear on a date. We asked the women to imagine casual lunch dates with different guys wearing different shoes—and to rate what each shoe type says about the guy wearing them.
We got more than 110,000 individual ratings, and more than 2,000 write-in comments. The women showed very similar tastes, both in what they liked and what they loathed. Their preferences were strong, consistent, simple and—once we crunched all the numbers and analyzed all the comments—broke down into seven major insights that every single man could use going into their next first date.
1. WEAR SHOES THAT COVER YOUR FEET
Women hated every single sandal we showed them—Crocs, Birkenstocks, KEENs, Nike slides, Reef flip-flops, it didn’t matter. These all said, “I have no sense of style, I’m not interested in this date, I have contempt for you as a woman, I’m a lazy loser.” …
2. WEAR LEATHER SHOES
Women like leather. The top seven shoes we showed had entirely leather uppers. The only shoes in the Top 14 that didn’t were Vans and Converse All-Stars—the classic casual sneaker. …
3. WEAR NORMAL SHOES, NOT BOOTS
Of our 12 top-rated shoes, only one was a boot (the Red Wing Iron Ranger, $300). Most of the boots scored in the middle of the rankings …
Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. There was a statistically significant strain of cowboy lust among our survey participants, for instance. The problem is that you’re unlikely to know that about a woman before the first date, so you’re better off just wearing normal shoes to be on the safe side.
4. DON’T WEAR ATHLETIC SHOES
Vans and Converse scored O.K., but they’re more “stylish casual” sneakers than true tennis shoes or cross-trainers. … Women are just not impressed if you wear athletic shoes on a date. …
The problem with Vans, the classic SoCal canvas sneaker, is that they offer no arch support and are hell on your feet. If you are a wiry 15 year old skateboarder, they are fine, but if you are older, get yourself a more comfortable shoe to walk in.
5. DON’T SPEND A LOT
Two of the three top-rated shoes in the survey cost less than $100: the Kenneth Cole Reaction Sim-Plicity ($98) and the Dockers Gordon ($50). In fact, 80 percent of the shoes we showed women cost less than $200. Shoe price correlated zero with overall rating, and only modestly with how much women thought the shoe cost. … Besides, on a first date women aren’t looking to see how much you spend on yourself.
6. STYLISH SHOES MAKE YOU LOOK LIKE A MAN
Young men, especially, tend to worry that stylish shoes will make them look gay or feminine. Nothing could be further from the truth. Women rated the more stylish, dressy, leather shoes as more manly and masculine, and as making the guy look more sexually experienced, more mature, and better able to protect and defend them physically. … And for women, confidence is the manliest of masculine virtues.
7. WEAR SHOES THAT SHOW YOU MADE AN EFFORT
Too many guys think looking cool and casual is the key to getting laid on the first date. As a result, American guys tend to under-dress, and wear shoes that are much too casual for a first date. … In fact, women equate stylish shoes with, “This guy is interested in the date, respects me, wants to impress me, and is considerate, kind, and mature.” You might think that dressing up for a date says “I’m desperate,” but most women just think it means “I am confident, mature and bright enough to know that this is appropriate footwear for a real man to wear on a real date with a real woman.” And real women find that very attractive.
This kind of quantitative research on clothes can be helpful for young men. Back in the 1970s, a guy named John Molloy published Dress for Success based on his simple experiments and surveys, advice I found helpful in avoiding job interview mistakes.
His findings were pretty obvious in retrospect: basically, dress like a Presidential debate participant: the first thing to buy is a dark blue suit, a white shirt, and a red tie. Then a grey suit. After you get the job you can add a brownish suit. But people think a man wearing a green suit looks like an embezzler. A bowtie makes you look like a college professor. And so forth and so on.
I don’t know whether Molloy’s findings 40 years ago are still relevant, although I vaguely sense that in this century’s presidential debates that the candidate dressed in red, white, and blue usually wins.
The animal kingdom is one of life’s great success stories — a collection of millions of species that swim, burrow, run and fly across the planet. All that diversity, from ladybugs to killer whales, evolved from a common ancestor that likely lived over 650 million years ago.
No one has found a fossil of the ur-animal, so we can’t say for sure what it looked like. But two scientists in Britain have done the next best thing. They’ve reconstructed its genome.
Their study, published in Nature Communications, offers an important clue to how the animal kingdom arose: with an evolutionary burst of new genes. These may have played a crucial part in transforming our single-celled ancestors into creatures with complex bodies made of many kinds of cells.
The new genes also proved to be remarkably durable. Of all the genes in the human genome, 55 percent were already present in the first animal. …
Humans and sharks, for example, make hemoglobin using nearly identical genes. That means hemoglobin genes were already present in their common ancestor.
Decision follows string of sexual assault allegations made against husband of former member of the Swedish Academy
Alison Flood
Fri 4 May 2018 03.07 EDT Last modified on Fri 4 May 2018 04.46 EDT
The Swedish Academy announced on Friday morning that there would be no Nobel laureate for literature selected in 2018, as it attempts to come to terms with controversy over its links to a man accused of sexual assault.
For the first time since 1949, the secretive jury that hands out the world’s most prestigious literary award will not unveil a winner this autumn, instead revealing two winners in 2019.
So, you octogenarian white guys Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Tom Wolfe, and Tom Stoppard (parents evidently liked the name “Thomas” in the 1930s), try not to die before October 2019 because Nobels aren’t given out posthumously. On second thought, as straight white guys you were all pretty much out of the running anyway, not with talents like Ta-Nehisi “The Genius” Coates around, so don’t worry about it.
The decision, announced at 9am Swedish time following a meeting on Thursday, comes after a string of sexual assault allegations made against the French photographer Jean-Claude Arnault, the husband of academy member and poet Katarina Frostenson.
… After the allegations against Arnault were made public in November, three members of the 18-strong jury that selects the literature laureate resigned in protest over the decision not to expel Frostenson. Arnault was also accused of leaking the names of seven former Nobel winners. He denies both claims.
Sounds like Kiplingesque nonagenarian travel writer James/Jan Morris has a better chance than DeLillo et al for Morris having taken radical action against his own cishetness more than 40 years before Caitlyn Jenner.
Anyway, this is a another example of prestigious left of center cultural institutions (e.g., Oscar-gobbling Weinstein Pictures, the Charlie Rose Show, Prairie Home Companion, etc. etc.) being the center of #MeToo accusations. For example, today they came for Junot Diaz, the most award-winning Dominican-American writer. You can’t get more center-left respectable than the Swedish Academy in charge of selecting the Nobel Prize in Literature, but here we are.
When did we start seeing this kind of headline in magazines? I can imagine a 1940 Methodist publication using the same “How Should We Think About …” formula. The Daily Worker, too. I can even imagine the 1930 New Yorker running a Robert Benchley parody of a Sunday sermon with this kind of headline.
Update: Here’s an actual 1937 Benchley piece in The New Yorker:
But this current concern with Having Proper Thoughts seems alien to the New Yorker tradition, which founding editor Harold Ross explained in 1925 was that “it is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque.”
Is every ex-Kanye fan in 2018 a metaphorical old lady in Dubuque?
What are some evolutions of this trend that we will see in future New Yorkers?
Are We Thinking Appropriate Thoughts About Kanye West’s Tweets?
Some of Us Are Not Feeling What We Should Feel About Kanye West’s Tweets
Anybody Who Thinks Like This About Kanye West’s Tweets Is Bad: Are You?
Big Sister Is Watching What You Think About Kanye West’s Tweets
Find Out What Good People Are Supposed to Think About Kanye Wests Tweets
… I would disagree with this [Bernie Sanders] agenda on pragmatic policy grounds, but at least it would be humane. It’s a positive, universalist agenda that aims at social solidarity and national cohesion — we’re all in this together. It would be, as Sheri Berman writes in Dissent, enchanted with a radical idealism.
Nonetheless, I don’t think this is the leftism we will wind up with. Tribalism is in the air, on the left as well as on the right. It is based on a scarcity mentality, the idea that life is a zero-sum war between us and them. It emphasizes division and conflict, not solidarity and cohesion. It draws out the authoritarian tendencies in any movement. On the right, tribalism brings us the ethnic authoritarianism of Donald Trump. On the left, it seems likely to bring us the economic authoritarianism of a North American version of Hugo Chávez.
You can see authoritarianism entering the left through two avenues. The first is nationalism. Not long ago, most of the American left tended to think transnationally — partly because problems like climate change are global, partly because it’s hard to regulate a global economy nation by nation, partly because progressives used to be psychologically averse to nationalism.
But national sovereignty is not withering away. Left-wing hostility toward European Union-type multilateral organizations is at record highs. Now a lot of progressive economic thinking is nakedly nationalistic. Bernie Sanders in 2015 derided a more open immigration policy as a “Koch brothers proposal.” It’s the old xenophobia — us or them, screw or be screwed. On trade, the left-wing populists sound like Trump.
The problem for the left [or for neoconservatives like Brooks] to be an effective advocate of policies promoting economic equality within the nation is the growing fanaticism for Open Borders.
The more America is opened up to immigration by the other seven billion people on Earth, the more the billionaires of America will prosper and the less the American people will enjoy high wages and low rents. Bernie Sanders had the right instincts in 2015 when he derided Open Borders as a way for the Koch Brothers get even richer. But by 2016, he shut up about that because he realized that the political hopes of the Democrats are so tied to a strategy of importing millions of ringers from abroad to demographically crush the GOP.
BY DAVE QUINN•@NINEDAVESPOSTED ON MAY 2, 2018 AT 1:16PM EDT
… But not everyone is happy with the Boy Scouts of America’s new direction.
The Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. previously encouraged the Boy Scouts of America not to recruit girls. “Our experiences are created for and with girls,” Andrea Bastiani Archibald, the Girl Scouts’ Chief Girl and Family Engagement Officer, told USA Today. “I think that’s important when we consider what appeals to them and what benefits them most.”
Currently, The Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. does not allow boys into their programs.
Doriane Lambelet Coleman competed in track and field internationally during the 1980s and is a professor of law at Duke Law School.
Last week, track and field’s world governing body limited entry into women’s events to athletes who have testosterone levels that are capable of being produced solely by ovaries.
These rules apply across the board to athletes however they presented at birth. Advocates for intersex and transgender athletes have vigorously attacked the International Association of Athletics Federations’ new rules…
I’m more sympathetic to the intersex [i.e., they are boys on the inside] than transgender athletes: the former didn’t choose, they were born with a birth defect.
And the intersex individuals are extremely rare, so they aren’t a common problem in, say, girls’ high school athletics (except perhaps at the state championships). But at higher levels of the competitive pyramid even a tiny number can dominate the medals, making a farce out international women’s sports. For example, all three medals in the women’s 800m running race at the 2016 Olympics were won by runners who sure look like they are internally male.
Understanding the rules and why they make sense is hard. They are based in biology people don’t know or don’t like to talk about and, let’s be honest, at least in some circles, they’re politically incorrect. They force us to talk about women’s bodies when it is increasingly taboo to do so, and they run counter to the movement that seeks to include transgender and intersex people in social institutions based on their gender identity rather than their biology.
These are important progressive developments, but their effects on valuable institutions like women’s sport are real and they need to be understood before positions harden on bad information. Pretending that the female body doesn’t exist or that we can’t define the boundaries between men’s and women’s bodies is a bad idea for many reasons. Replacing traditional sex classifications with classifications based on gender identity certainly has steep costs in contexts like competitive sport, where the likelihood of success is precisely about sex-specific biology.
The reason the Olympics have separate events for women (in most disciplines other than a few like equestrian and sailing) is because women are the weaker sex.
… Specifically, the athletes who are the focus of the I.A.A.F.’s rules are those who have testes [internally]. Starting in puberty and as adults, their testes produce sperm, not eggs, and supply testosterone in quantities that biologically female bodies and their ovaries never come close to producing.
The male range at its lowest is three times higher than the female range at its highest. At puberty these athletes developed male, not female, secondary sex characteristics: increased muscle mass and strength, including increased heart size; higher hemoglobin levels, which result in better oxygen carrying capacity; and different muscle types and ratios of fat to muscle.
Advocates for intersex athletes like to say that sex doesn’t divide neatly. This may be true in gender studies departments, but at least for competitive sports purposes, they are simply wrong. Sex in this context is easy to define and the lines are cleanly drawn: You either have testes and testosterone in the male range or you don’t. As the I.A.A.F.’s rules provide, a simple testosterone test establishes this fact one way or the other.
Testosterone throughout the life cycle, including puberty, is the reason the best elite females are not competitive in competition against elite males. This 10- to 12-percent sex-based performance gap is well documented by sports and exercise scientists alike. But it isn’t the most important performance gap. Rather, that’s the mundane fact that many nonelite males routinely outperform the best elite females.
Each year, the world’s best time in the women’s marathon is surpassed by hundreds of men. The women’s world records in all of the races on the track from 100 meters to 10,000 meters are also surpassed by many men each year, including by many high school boys. For example, in 2017, 36 boys ran faster than Florence Griffith Joyner’s seemingly unassailable 100-meter record of 10.49.
There is no characteristic that matters more than testes and testosterone….
Because of this, without a women’s category based on sex, or at least these sex-linked traits, girls and women would not have the chance they have now to develop their athletic talents and reap the many benefits of participating and winning in sports and competition. Eric Vilain, a geneticist who specializes in differences of sex development, has been blunt about it: removing sex from the eligibility rules would “be a disaster for women’s sport … a sad end to what feminists have wanted for so long.” …
It’s a good measure of how dumbed-down our discourse has become that to many these days this logic isn’t obvious to many these days. The highest priority in 2018 is not to understand reality but to attack horrible people who say things like: The reason that separate sports events for women exist is because women are the weaker sex.
As we all know, Founding Father Emma Lazarus carved the Zeroth Amendment — Anybody anywhere can immigrate here because any citizen who dissents is a racist who shouldn’t have any First Amendment rights — into the American Constitution in 1787 (give or take a century). Less well known, however, is the Zeroth Amendment to the British Constitution. But you’ll hearing more about it:
Ms. Goodfellow writes about immigration, race and British politics.
May 2, 2018
… But the policies that led to this appalling affair will stay in place. People the government classifies as “illegal” will still be treated with contempt, and someone could still easily end up deported just because of a misplaced paper or a change in the rules — exactly what happened to the Windrush generation. …
Without an end to the hostile environment and the government’s inhumane approach to immigration, which treats every person thought to be a migrant with suspicion, Mr. Javid’s appointment doesn’t alter a thing.
Jonathan Weisman, a mid-level New York Times staffer and author of the short but repetitious new book (((Semitism))): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump, is not a particularly acute thinker. But his unoriginality makes his (((Semitism))) a revealing distillation of the conventional wisdom of 2018.
Weisman first ran into Jewish trouble in the summer of 2015 when, as a supporter of President Obama’s Iran deal (now back in the news), he coauthored a New York Times article noticing which kinds of Democrats in Congress were most likely to break ranks with Obama. According to a table Weisman had a graphic artist draw up, many of the Democrats opposing Obama on Iran were, unsurprisingly, Jewish, such as Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street), and many of the rest represented heavily Jewish districts, such as Ted Lieu (D-Beverly Hills).
For publishing this act of pattern recognition in a mainstream rather than an ethnic publication, Weisman was scorched by more powerful Jews than himself.
Ms. Allison is president of Democracy in Color and the author of the forthcoming “She the People.”
April 30, 2018
When early voting begins today in the Georgia primary campaign for governor, Stacey Abrams, the former minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives, may very well take a momentous step closer to becoming the first black woman in the nation to be elected governor.
Ms. Abrams will have entered that office lifted by the political power of a multiracial coalition led by the Democratic Party’s most powerful voting bloc, black women. Ms. Abrams’s Georgia campaign represents the first time a statewide candidate is embracing the political hopes and dreams of black women — who make up a whopping 30 percent of the Democrats in the Georgia primary (held on May 22) — as the engine of its campaign.
If successful, Ms. Abrams’s strategy and approach will establish a political precedent in the South and will subsequently offer Democrats a way to win in Republican strongholds in many parts of the country. …
By insisting on the strategy of appealing to white Republican and moderate voters, Democrats have lost over and over again with a population that is nearly a majority of people of color — specifically, voters of color who make up nearly half of the Democratic Party membership in Georgia and nationally. Even casual observations of these numbers and trends would indicate that Democrats do not need to persuade a single Trump voter to win.
The Abrams idea — that black women leading a multiracial bloc of voters will establish a new base — may also revolutionize American electoral politics. The math is clear: Black voters are a quarter of Democrats, and black women have the highest turnout. If Ms. Abrams advances from the Democratic primary to the general election for governor of Georgia, her multiracial base stands the best chance at turning Georgia blue.
Back in 2009 I pointed out that the Democrats wanted to brand the Republicans as the white party with themselves as the nonwhite party.
In 2008, McCain let Obama position himself to blacks as the black candidate, to other nonwhites as the nonwhite candidate, and to whites as the postracial candidate. Yet, unless treated as timidly as McCain handled his opponent in 2008, a black-led four-race coalition is an inherently fragile thing. …
But let’s be realistic. Being, in essence, the white party makes the GOP uncool. And that’s only going to get worse as the impact of decades of indoctrination in the uncoolness of white people by the school system and Main Stream Media continue to pile up.
Further, contra Karl Rove, the GOP will never be able to shake its white party image. It will either increase its share of the white vote or it will go out of business as a party capable of winning national power.
My suggestion: the only long-term option for the Republicans, the de facto white party, is to rebrand the Democrats as the de facto black party. Not the Minority Party or the Cool, Hip, Multicultural Party—but the Black Party.
Go with the flow of the fundamental Manichaeism of American thought: Black versus White. Sure, it’s kind of retarded, but Americans, especially American intellectuals and pundits, aren’t good at thinking in terms of shades of brown. You can’t beat it, so use it.
Hispanics and Asians certainly will never be terribly happy with the idea of being junior partners in the white party. (Indeed, lots of white people have an allergy to belonging to the white party.) Hence, the alternative must be framed that if Hispanics and Asians don’t want to be junior partners in the white party, they get be junior partners in the black party. Black or white: choose one.
Or they can not choose and stay home on Election Day.
The subtle cunning of the tactic of rebranding the Democrats as the black party is not to criticize the Democrats for being the vehicle of African-American political activism, but to praise them for it, over and over, in the most offhand “everybody-knows” ways. Republicans can hurry along the coming Democratic train wreck by, for example, lauding blacks as the “moral core” of the Democratic Party.
Respectfully point out that the Democratic Party is the rightful agent for the assertion of African-American racial interests, and that advancing black interests is central to the nature of the Democratic Party. Note that, while individual blacks wishing to vote for the good of the country are more than welcome in the GOP, black racial activists have their natural home in the Democratic Party.
That’s what the Democrats are there for. Don’t argue it. Just treat it as a given.
Moreover, Republican rhetoric should encourage feelings of proprietariness among blacks toward their Democratic Party. It’s not all that hard to get blacks to feel that they morally deserve something, such as, for example, predominance in the Democratic Party. African-Americans are good at feeling that others owe them deference.
This kind of subtle language, casually repeated, puts Democrats in a delicate spot. Either they insult blacks by denying this presumption, or they alarm their Asian, Hispanic, and white supporters by not denying it. As everybody knows, but seldom says, black political control hasn’t worked out well for places as far apart as Detroit and Zimbabwe.
But now the Democrats appear headed to rebranding themselves not just as the Black Party but as the Black Women Party.
I’ve been a little under the weather for a few weeks, so I haven’t harangued you much about the April iSteve fundraising drive. But I noticed just now that it’s still April (at least in the Americas).
Thanks to everybody who has contributed so far.
As you likely know, three times per year (April, August, and December), I turn to my loyal readers for financial support. As I’ve mentioned, I find it extremely encouraging to get paid.
Here are seven ways for you to contribute to me, iSteve:
First: You can use Paypal (non-tax deductible) by going to the page on my old blog here. Paypal accepts most credit cards. Contributions can be either one-time only, monthly, or annual. (Monthly is nice.)
Second: You can mail a non-tax deductible donation to:
Steve Sailer
P.O Box 4142
Valley Village, CA 91617
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VDARE has been kiboshed from use of Paypal for being, I dunno, EVIL. But you can give via credit cards, Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin, check, money order, or stock.
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Oops, it looks like pop star Kanye West has now deleted his tweet of somebody named Steve texting him some GOP standard Dems R Real Racists talking points.
At the 2009 Video Music Awards, I texted him that he ought to storm the stage and tell Taylor Swift that Beyonce should have won that award. At first, he thought that would be crass and megalomaniacal, but, ultimately, his trust in the soundness of my judgment proved decisive.
Also, I convinced Kanye to find a nice girl to marry so he could settle down and escape the limelight.
As I pointed out, having Bruce Jenner as his stepfather-in-law would provide him with a mature adult male role model and a rock of stability that he could lean on.
Don't believe it. Sailer's day job is A&R for Suge. He's wrangled most GR names.
Please allow me to point out that the oft-told tale about Mr. Knight and myself dangling Vanilla Ice off a balcony is usually taken completely out of context and recounted in a crudely reductionist fashion. In reality, it was a far more nuanced dangling than is normally reported.
Mr. Barker is an associate professor of philosophy.
April 30, 2018
… Racial and sexual oppression have been added to the dynamic of class exploitation. Social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, owe something of an unspoken debt to Marx through their unapologetic targeting of the “eternal truths” of our age. Such movements recognize, as did Marx, that the ideas that rule every society are those of its ruling class and that overturning those ideas is fundamental to true revolutionary progress.
Uh, the more our age becomes obsessed with punishing the White Male Ruling Class, such as George Zimmerman and Darren Wilson, for its toxic whitemaleness, the less concern it has for class struggle and the richer white male billionaires seem to get. Funny how that works …
Test cheating is going ever more high tech. Monorean says they are working on eyeglasses with an embedded camera so that your confederate can, next, see the questions on your test.
I’ve long thought we could use some kind of national test validity commission, like Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education that helped schools climb back out of their 1970s slump, to recommend best practices to cut down on test cheating / gaming.
The news media love official government reports that they can quote as authentic because that gives them a lot of CYA security. Thus, the Pakistani pimp problem in England was hushed up by the press over there, until the city of Rotherham commissioned an official report.
Of course, how can you be sure you are not going to be cheated by a company devoted to cheating?
Here’s a 2017 video product review by a disgruntled customer with a Boris Badenov accent:
i have been cheated by this company and decided to let you know before losing $600 for a device worth less than $10
Commenter wren adds:
Make sure you get good quality equipment, otherwise you have to line up at the doctor’s office behind the other dozen or two Chinese students whose earpieces got stuck in their ears or blew up and perforated their ear drums.
A walkie-talkie exploded under the clothes of a student who carried the device to cheat during the official English skill examination on Saturday, the Beijing Morning Post reported yesterday.
More cheaters were found in this year’s College English Test Band 4 and Band 6 in Wuhan, capital of Hubei Province.
In Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuchang campus, exam supervisors found more than 100 cheating devices and over 20 examinees suspected of cheating during the exam.
A mini-earphone perforated one student’s eardrum during the exam. Some students lined up at the doctor’s office after the exam when they realized the mini-earphones were stuck in their ears, news reports said.
A doctor in Hubei Province received six students in one day, all of whom had mini-earphones stuck in their eardrum. The doctor had to take them out using a pair of surgical pliers as one student pointed out that the devices were magnetic.
The students confessed they used the earphones to cheat on the exam, when the doctor asked them what it was for.
On the same day, another hospital in Hubei also hosted dozens of students with the same issue.
These students spent hundreds of yuan to purchase the earphones and exam answers. The retailer arranged experienced exam-takers to sit in on the testing, each of whom would finish one part of the exam and then send the answers to the retailer by micro-camera. The retailer then broadcast answers to the students via mini-earphone.
One trend I’ve been noticing lately is the ever-growing percentage of Professional Diversity Scolds who are from upper crust immigrant backgrounds from the more verbally facile countries, such as India. I would guess that the number of South Asians who got paid last year for berating white Americans in the American media outnumbered Mexican-Americans, despite Mexicans being vastly more numerous.
For example, here’s a New York Times editorial today in which an Indian immigrant staffer lectures Americans on how The Simpsons — as good a candidate for The Great American TV Show as any — must be censored for the amour propre of people like himself.
“Thank you, come again” — those four words, spoken in an exaggerated Indian accent, have followed immigrants and Americans of South Asian descent like a bad penny since “The Simpsons” premiered in 1989. They helped make Apu, the show’s tightfisted convenience store owner, a household name. And they are often repeated to us, with a sly grin or a guffaw, by the same people who are surprised that we speak English in grammatically sound sentences.
Interestingly, Mr. Bajaj has himself apparently put a lot of hard work into ridding himself of most of his native Indian accent:
Last week brought Indian-Americans of my generation some relief: Hank Azaria, the white actor who has voiced Apu for 29 seasons, told Stephen Colbert that he is willing to stop playing the character because he now understands why Apu is troubling to the community that he is supposed to represent.
… Credit for his newfound enlightenment on this issue belongs to Hari Kondabolu, the comedian, whose 2017 documentary “The Problem With Apu” is a funny and informative explication of how the character perpetuated ugly stereotypes about South Asians that harm people to this day. Though “The Simpsons” has on occasion portrayed Apu and his family with nuance and pathos, the character also encourages the infantilizing of Indian immigrants as simple-minded people who talk in a singsong voice. Even Apu’s last name — Nahasapeemapetilon — is presented in a way that invites mockery.
What? “The Simpsons” mocked somebody?
Here’s my favorite Apu moment:
Rev. Lovejoy [sententiously]: No, Homer, God didn’t burn your house down. But he was working in the hearts of your friends, be they [points to Ned Flanders] Christian, [nods to Krusty the Clown] Jew, or [gestures vaguely at Apu] … Miscellaneous.
Apu [annoyed]: Hindu. There are seven hundred million of us.
Rev. Lovejoy [unfazed]: Aww, that’s super.
I bet when Mr. Bajaj watches that scene, he laughs: “Ha-ha, the joke is on you, condescending monotheist! There are now eleven hundred million of us, and I shall be writing ever more New York Times editorials about how America is racist if it doesn’t let in all my relatives.”
Back to Bajaj:
Of course, Mr. Azaria doesn’t control Apu’s fate on the show. That responsibility falls to the writers of “The Simpsons” and the corporate bosses at Fox, the network that airs the show. Going by what the show’s creator, Matt Groening, said dismissively about the criticism of Apu — “I think it’s a time in our culture where people love to pretend they’re offended,” he told USA Today — and the show’s churlish reaction to Mr. Kondabolu’s documentary on an episode earlier this month, Apu will probably remain ensconced in the Kwik-E-Mart.
No doubt such an outcome would please the many fans of Apu, some Indian-Americans among them, and those who love to rail against “political correctness” — Apu is just a funny fictional character, and critics are being overly sensitive, these people often argue.
But for many of us, it is not so easy to dismiss Apu and his accent as a mere joke. It is too often clear that the joke is on us …
After all, as a member of the New York Times Editorial Board, Mr. Bajaj is a personage of great dignity who must be immune from jokes. Doesn’t America have laws against lèse-majesté? What? It doesn’t? Well, let’s just say, there will be a few changes around here …
But many aspects of the character reveal Apu to be the brown equivalent of blackface minstrel performances. He comes across as a caricature designed to mock a minority for the entertainment of the majority. “Often, racism is dismissed under the guise of humor,” says Shilpa Davé, a professor at the University of Virginia and author of “Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Television and Film.” “There is always an undercurrent of truth to it and there is also an undercurrent of censure and satire.”
Brownface — or brown-voice, in the case of Mr. Azaria and Apu — does not have as long a history as blackface, but there are plenty of examples of it. Mr. Azaria has said he was inspired by a performance Peter Sellers gave in a 1968 comedic movie, “The Party.”
Let’s burn all Peter Sellers movies while we’re at it.
But keeping Apu on “The Simpsons” in his current form would be a huge missed opportunity for the show, which on the whole has been one of the most thoughtful voices in American popular culture by addressing issues like immigration, discrimination and the power of big corporations that most network TV shows have studiously avoided.
Now that I think about it, Mr. Bajaj, I like Apu more than I like you. How about we keep Apu and lose you.
If this training day is going to consist of speeches and hectoring from “civil rights leaders of color” then it’s going to be a complete waste of time.
What the employees need is a clear explanation of the rules that they are supposed to follow and some specific examples and role-playing related to those rules.
What the hell are the rules and policies? For example: Is the rule that someone who comes into a store and asks to use the toilet should be refused? Or is it that white people should be refused and not black people? Or is there a patter that should be used to discourage use of the toilet, but if someone insists you let them use it? Should the homeless be allowed to use the toilet? Does it depend on their smell or visible level of filth? If they are in the toilet for a long time, what is the procedure? When should the police be called? In short, how the hell can I do my job properly and not end up out of work all of a sudden because I was following what I thought were the rules and it went viral on Twitter.
Other topics: How to react when black people are obviously testing and probing and trying to provoke you? What do you do when smart phone video is being taken? To what extent do you have to stand in front of a video camera and be humiliated for posterity in order to keep your minimum wage job? Will specific rules and policies be worked out and will the rules be availble in printed and signage form for distribution to customers? To what extent is my job at risk if I honestly try to enforce the rules laid down by Starbucks, but it ends up creating a viral controversy? If someone comes in and takes a table and doesn’t order anything, what should be done? Does it depend on how crowded it is or what time it is? How, specifically? Does it depend on the perceived race of the customer? Is there an amount of time beyond which they should not be allowed to stay? To what extent are the minimum wage staff expected to personally deal with the situation, and at what point is it O.K. to call the police without risk of being fired?
My feeling is that despite a month of preparation, the training day will simply be virtue signaling, a lot of verbiage that Starbucks doesn’t mind leaking out, and no addressing of the hard questions of how to deal with on-the-ground scenarios.
Steve Sailer is a journalist, movie critic for Taki's Magazine, VDARE.com columnist, and founder of the Human Biodiversity discussion group for top scientists and public intellectuals.
Email me at SteveSlr *at* aol*dot*com (make the obvious substitutions between the asterisks; you don’t have to capitalize an email address, I just included the capitals to make clear the logic — it’s my name without a space and without the vowels in “Sailer” that give so many people, especially irate commenters, trouble.)
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I’m using Coinbase as a sort of PayPal for Bitcoins.
The IRS has issued instructions regarding Bitcoins. I’m having Coinbase immediately turn all Bitcoins I receive into U.S. dollars and deposit them in my bank account. At the end of the year, Coinbase will presumably send me a 1099 form for filing my taxes.
Payments are not tax deductible.
Below are links to two Coinbase pages of mine. This first is if you want to enter a U.S. dollar-denominated amount to pay me.
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I don’t know if the phrase “four hundred years” was in use before Marley, but a quick Google search suggests not.
Well, no one has corrected me, but of course the term "four hundred years" comes from the Book of Exodus, the second book of the Bible, which Marley was obviously very famili...
I’m not so sure about the correlation between TO/PO and the Myers-Briggs thinking/feeling distinction. I am unquestionably a very strong T (thinking type), but I am not TO (thing-oriented). Of course, that doesn’t prove anything. I may just be unusual that way. I will have to give it more tho...
When I was a young lad, my dad taught me how to shine my shoes to a mirror shine, if need be, and the importance of never stepping out in leather shoes that were not shined properly. Many guys learned the same thing in the military, but it used to be that civilian men, too, used to pull each othe...
Thank you. I had forgotten about that post by Steve.
Re-reading the comments, it seems that they are consistently of high quality. At least, more so than of late. Over a period of a few years, I guess our contributions wax and wane in that regard, while Steve holds steady at the top of his game.
Just as one is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.
Was Stalin a Plato to Lenin's Socrates, or an Aristotle to Lenin's Plato?
Or just a Truman to Lenin's FDR?
(Hat tip to Derb for pointing out that Lenin was a greater killer than Stalin, Hitler, or Mao on a per annum basis.)
Lara Spenser is a double of Poppy Harlow. Yet thirteen years older.
But who needs a shark whisperer when a shark hollerer is available?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiZ4zHXnkVQ
From Wikipedia: "Holmes was also scheduled to host a $2,700-a-head fundraiser for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in March 2016 at the Theranos Palo Alto, California headquarters. The fundraiser was moved and rescheduled after her campaign was criticized for holding an event at the office...
Only this is worse. It is not totally crazy to hold Jewish lawyers in high regard as to their professional competency and then act on that belief.
The real reason the SPLC won't hire black lawyers is that there are so few good ones that those few are greatly overpriced, and they want to get t...
We really have the worst intellectual class in modern history. SAD.
Since he used the word "RAPE" and she had just been "raped" (I'll bet she wasn't) he was evil. I've seen 8 year olds who operate on a more nuanced and abstract level of thinking. She says "personal narrative is important" when ...
Israeli internal government investigations are just as ‘culture of critique’ as Western internal government investigations. And the American one has even less reason to lie.
The American one has even less reason to lie? What a howler!
The American government has no reason to lie about the ...
It's annoying spending time with anyone who can't make a decision or tell you what they want. We also tend to judge men more harshly for this sort of passivity. This naturally means that women will tend to despise potential romantic partners who can't assert themselves. 'Annoying' is not on the l...
Now, you also mentioned romance. To any extent that is the goal, it would seem to me that the person in question is not wholly object-oriented. And if romance is the goal, why the shyness and nerves. Romance starts with getting to know each other, not asking what utility a person has for you. Why...
He occupies the top slot in my "commenters to ignore" option, but then I have to read the responses to his inane drivel. He shouldn't be here, but I guess he's like clickbait.
I agree with you that gender balance in STEM is not an attainable goal, and I don't see what the point would be even if it was attainable. So far, so good.
I'm not so sure about the correlation between TO/PO and the Myers-Briggs thinking/feeling distinction. I am unquestionably a very strong...
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