No One May Discuss This

One of the things discussed in the article cited immediately below was the firing of the Google employee who wrote a memo critical of diversity efforts at Google. Software engineers trending young, he may well have been too young to remember that it cost the President of Harvard his job to raise the same sort of issues even as a theoretical possibility he expressed that he hoped was not the case.

A recent alumnus of Google writes that this sort of thinking has no place in any organization except for purpose-defined hate groups.

What you just did was incredibly stupid and harmful. You just put out a manifesto inside the company arguing that some large fraction of your colleagues are at root not good enough to do their jobs, and that they’re only being kept in their jobs because of some political ideas. And worse than simply thinking these things or saying them in private, you’ve said them in a way that’s tried to legitimize this kind of thing across the company, causing other people to get up and say “wait, is that right?”...

Do you understand that at this point, I could not in good conscience assign anyone to work with you? I certainly couldn’t assign any women to deal with this, a good number of the people you might have to work with may simply punch you in the face, and even if there were a group of like-minded individuals I could put you with, nobody would be able to collaborate with them. You have just created a textbook hostile workplace environment.... Not all ideas are the same, and not all conversations about ideas even have basic legitimacy.

If you feel isolated by this, that your views are basically unwelcome in tech and can’t be spoken about… well, that’s a fair point. These views are fundamentally corrosive to any organization they show up in, drive people out, and I can’t think of any organization not specifically dedicated to those views that they would be welcome in. I’m afraid that’s likely to remain a serious problem for you for a long time to come.

I notice that this last author opens by asserting that the views expressed are wrong, but declines to defend the proposition that they are: that belongs, he says, to someone with a different set of credentials than his own. What credentials would those be, I wonder? It sounds as if this proposition can only be studied from the perspective of disproving it, as it would be "fundamentally corrosive" to any organization to entertain them, such that any organization devoted to serious study would have to reject them outright. Certainly Harvard did.

The views expressed may well be wrong; perhaps it is even very likely that they are wrong. All the same, how much value should we put in the claim that 'all the studies' show X if not-X is a forbidden position that will cost you your career to entertain? Of course all the studies conducted by programs that refuse to consider the possibility of not-X support X. Of course all the people credentialed by programs that insist on X as a prerequisite for remaining in the program will assert X. That's not a significant finding in support of X being really true. Nor does the credential you get from this program, in which the hypothesis is required to be proven by the experiment, likely to inspire much confidence.

So there's a real problem.  Assume for a moment that he's right that you can't even entertain the question -- can't even float the question -- without creating a hostile work environment.  Maybe he is right about that:  certainly both here and in the Harvard case, the reaction to the question was explosive.  (NPR reports that female software engineers at Google skipped work today from upset.)  So it can't be done if it'll create a hostile work environment, not under current American law.  That's just it, then.  It would cause too many problems to ask, and that's the end of it.  We'll just have to assume the truth of the thing that we'd like to believe.

Haven't we tried that model before?  Indeed, isn't that the very model that Progressives like to mock as pre-modern, benighted, backwards, anti-science?

Bad Reputation

Though the original the goal of reputation systems was to issue access tokens to control entry into the groups, they are double edged. Donald Trump proved that the negative of a negative was positive and used his media disapproval ratings as an access token to Red State voters. There is nothing to prevent other candidates from doing the same or stopping groups from flipping the Chinese government reputation index by taking the inverse of the state metric.

A bad rep can be a good rep, depending on who's looking.

That's true about Trump, anyway. The more the media hated him in 2016, the more some people loved him for defying them. It was a kind of credential: you could trust him because the people who despised you hated him too. Maybe that's not the best credential, but it's also not nothing.

There's a Problem With This Metaphor

Hope is a Weapon.

Saw this today. Everybody reading this knows the story, but this is fascinatingly done. I have never seen my wife on the edge of her seat in a movie before. There is not a lot of speaking (despite the trailer). It works. But you must pay attention.



Curiously enough, the following below was shows as a trailer:

A lot more dialogue in any case.

53 Congressmen Call for Mutiny

This is alarming.

“As the respected leaders of our brave armed service members, you have no obligation to implement a hastily considered tweet designed to serve as a ‘wedge’ political issue; but rather you should honor your own independent duty to support and defend the Constitution of the United States,” the lawmakers wrote.

“We believe any serious or credible review of the law and the facts in the present case make it clear that the president’s proposed ban on transgender people serving in the armed forces will weaken, not strengthen our military, and is blatantly unconstitutional.”

If it is blatantly unconstitutional, it is a blatantly unconstitutional policy that then-President Obama maintained for almost his whole tenure -- as did every single President before him. Of course, we have recently learned that the mere fact that a thing has been considered constitutional for the entire history of the nation is no proof against it being declared unconstitutional now.

Still, it's a thin reed to hang a mutiny on. Military orders are to be defied only if they are so obviously illegal as to "shock the conscience," a standard that 'restore the policy we had last year' would rarely satisfy.

There is one military leader on the record as intending to defy the order, which is now a formal policy that will soon be transmitted to DOD. The Commandant of the US Coast Guard says he will defy the order. The Coast Guard is usually a Homeland Security outfit but capable of being transferred to the DOD during war or at the pleasure of the President. The Coast Guard apparently has 13 members who are openly transgender, all of whom he apparently had contacted to express his support.

Meanwhile, The Hill reports that defiance is becoming more standard in nonmilitary Federal agencies.

The growing opposition in the executive branch comes as the White House’s legislative agenda has stalled in Congress and Trump turns to his Cabinet agencies to change course in several policy areas. It also is emanating from career staffers or political holdovers whose resistance to Trump has, at times, been rooted in deep opposition to the president’s agenda.

The opposition can take benign forms, such as resigning in protest, which is obviously perfectly fine and even highly appropriate if you decide that you can't do the job for whatever reason. This opposition can also take other forms, such as the dangerous new culture of leaking American secrets to the press.

For members of Congress to openly call for a military mutiny, though, is... well, reckless at least. Insofar as they believe they are defending the Constitution, I suppose their oaths require them to do what they think is necessary. But they're asking for one hell of a crisis, and I hope they know it.

Biker War Movie Review

This week I had occasion to watch two movies that turn, in important ways, on bikers' relationship with the military. The first was 1971's The Hard Ride, a Vietnam-era story about a Marine who comes home with his best friend's body to try to arrange a funeral with his biker friends. The second was 1984's Tank!, where the military aspects are central, but bikers play a pivotal role in the final outcome.

Together with other movies of the era, these sketch an outline of a transformation in American culture. Spoilers below the break line.

What About Conscription?

What do you think conscription's for?

Europe is the continent with the fewest people willing to fight a war for their country. Globally, an average of 61% of respondents in 64 countries said they would. Morocco (94%), Fiji (94%), Pakistan (89%), Vietnam (89%) and Bangladesh (86%) had the highest percentage willing to fight.

The country with the fewest people willing to go to war was Japan, with just 11% of respondents saying they would fight.

Headline reference from this old movie:

Wow

From the NY Sun:

SAS soldiers are trying out “Star Wars”-style bulletproof helmets in the war against terror. The SAS is the UK’s answer to the Navy SEALs.

No, that is not accurate. The SAS has been around since 1941, and thus is not an "answer to" the SEALs because it predates them. Though the SEALs have predecessor units dating to WWII, they're all younger than the SAS. The SEALs themselves came to be during the Vietnam war, twenty years later than the SAS. The basic concept of the SAS isn't even similar, as it is an army-based commando unit conceived around airborne deployments, rather than sea-based naval commandos.

Cool mask, though.

Tattoo in Edinburgh

They're playing the Black Bear, transitioning to Scotland the Brave towards the end of the video. But you probably knew all that if you spend a lot of time around here.

That's from the end. If you want to see what the first rehersal of the massed bands looked like, here it is.

Happiness, German and American

The orchestral music identification video ended with an honorable mention by Robert Schumann called "The Happy Farmer."



Here's the American version of the same idea, "The Happy Camper." This is written and performed by the Reverend Horton Heat.



Happy Friday.

Democrats: Trump Doesn't Go Far Enough

So says Vox.

“Trade is at the core of our economic agenda,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement ahead of the formal launch. “We’re going to propose a better deal for American workers — one that puts their well-being at the center of our trade laws, not just the bottom line of huge corporations. Our trade laws have shortchanged American workers for far too long, and we Democrats are aiming to change that.”

The most striking proposal is a call for the creation of an “American Jobs Security Council,” a body that would review and potentially bar foreign purchases of American companies if they are deemed to be a major threat to American jobs.

That kind of scrutiny and interference with foreign investment would be unprecedented for the United States, says Edward Alden, a trade expert and senior fellow at the nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations.

I wonder what they'll do when they figure out that his immigration policy is even more popular among their blue-collar target voter demographic than his protectionist policies?

A Pleasant Exercise

This video includes evocative samples from one hundred of the great Western masterpieces of orchestral music. It's a great way to brush up on your recognition of famous pieces, and to rediscover ones you may not have thought of in a while that you'd like to listen to in full.



Enjoy!

Round the Mull of Kintyre

A retelling of the story of how the Kings of Norway lost the Hebrides to the Kings of Scotland.

Some appropriate music.

DB: "Trump taps decorated Army General for White House communications post"

My only regret is that I didn't think of this joke myself.

American Muslim Assimilation is Rapid

So reports Cato on its recent findings. The usual caveats about polling data apply, but they speak to some of them towards the end of the piece -- particularly the claim that these results come from lying to pollsters.

A Moment of Clarity

On the left:

A mere half-year ago... there was a shining moment where millions of Americans flooded the streets in cities across the country to register their rage that an unapologetic misogynist had just been made leader of the free world....

What wasn’t to like?

A lot, as it turns out. The leaders of the Women’s March, arguably the most prominent feminists in the country, have some chilling ideas and associations.

On the right:

I will let the liberals answer for their own sins in this regard. (There are many.) But we conservatives mocked Barack Obama’s failure to deliver on his pledge to change the tone in Washington even as we worked to assist with that failure.... It was we conservatives who rightly and robustly asserted our constitutional prerogatives as a co-equal branch of government when a Democrat was in the White House but who, despite solemn vows to do the same in the event of a Trump presidency, have maintained an unnerving silence as instability has ensued. To carry on in the spring of 2017 as if what was happening was anything approaching normalcy required a determined suspension of critical faculties. And tremendous powers of denial.

On the left, about the right:

If conservatism emphasizes the importance of national security, how does one understand the indifference to Russian interference in our election process? If conservatism extols the virtues of family and religion, how does one understand the tolerance of — indeed, if polling is accurate, the still overwhelming Republican support for — a person whose moral failings could lead to his being fired from every job except the one he holds? If conservatism defends free speech, where is the outrage over the attacks on a free press?

Those who argue that students need more exposure to conservative thinking to understand our current political dynamic seem to be missing the fact that, when it matters most, conservatives have stopped being conservative.

Viewed dispassionately, the lesson that the most visible conservatives appear to be teaching our students is that power is more important than principle, that winning is more important than adhering to an ethical code, that compromise is failure, and maybe worst of all, that facts don’t matter.

I won't bother to cite something from the right about the left, since I'm sure you've all read plenty of such articles in the past.

From The Week in Pictures

A Female Imam from Denmark

This story is relentlessly negative about her, but there's some potential for progress here. She may be more hopeful than is warranted, and she may be refusing to look at the parts of her faith that are hard. But that's something most people do -- when was the last time you heard a sermon calling us to focus our faith on the Book of Joshua? Christianity doesn't celebrate it, but treats it as a problem to be explained (or, more likely, ignored). Islam could learn to do that too.

I've not heard of Sherin Khankan before, so I don't know if she's truly on the level. But I'll look into her. Her basic idea, that Islam could use a Martin Luther, is not wrong.

Freedom of Attire

A march in Turkey celebrates the right to choose what you wear -- bikini, hijab, whatever you want.

The crack against the hijab, rightly enough, is that it is often not a free choice. Often it isn't, and it's hard to know when it really is. But one reasonable proxy for when it really is comes when the women wearing it are marching in favor of other women having the right to wear bikinis.

Don't We Just?