Diana Fleischman is an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Portsmouth. (Also, when she was going to graduate school at UT Austin many years ago, we dated very briefly.) Here she is debunking the gender pay gap myth.
She’s only in the first three minutes or so, the rest of the discussion features other people, including Andrew Doyle, the producer for Tom Walker’s “Jonathan Pie” fake British telejournalist videos. Here’s the Pie sex gap video they reference above:
They also interview Kate Andrews from the Institute for Economic Affairs and Joanna Williams, a Senior Lecturer at University of Kent.
A property owner spent nearly 5 years and $1.4 million trying to convert his laundromat into new housing in San Francisco’s Mission district, only to find that city’s far left political establishment hates letting new housing be built.
And they wonder why San Francisco has a homeless problem…
“Hey, it’s three days before Christmas! How about some light, uplifting content?
Sorry, this is what I have instead: Shoe0nHead dissecting the “MAPS community,” AKA “pedophiles who hang out on Tumblr” (and increasingly Twitter).
However, pace Shoe, the gay community has a long history of tolerating pedophiles among its ranks. NAMBLA was a member of the International Lesbian and Gay Association until 1994, when ties were severed due to political pressure. (And this bullshit isn’t helping her case either.)
Here’s a pretty important piece from an ex-radical about how embracing social justice warrior politics brings the radical nothing but misery:
When I became an anarchist I was 18, depressed, anxious, and ready to save the world. I moved in with other anarchists and worked at a vegetarian co-op cafe. I protested against student tuition, prison privatization, and pipeline extensions. I had lawyer’s numbers sharpied on my ankle and I assisted friends who were pepper-sprayed at demos. I tabled zines, lived with my “chosen family,” and performed slam poems about the end of the world. While my radical community was deconstructing gender, monogamy, and mental health, we lived and breathed concepts and tools like call-outs, intersectionality, cultural appropriation, trigger warnings, safe spaces, privilege theory, and rape culture.
What is a radical community? For the purposes of this article, I will define it as a community that shares both an ideology of complete dissatisfaction with existing society due to its oppressive nature and a desire to radically alter or destroy that society because it cannot be redeemed by its own means. I eventually fell out with my own radical community. The ideology and the people within it had left me a burned and disillusioned wreck. As I deprogrammed, I watched a diluted version of my radical ideology explode out of academia and become fashionable: I watched the Left become woke.
Snip.
Unfortunately, toxicity in radical communities is not a bug. It is a feature. The ideology and norms of radicalism have evolved to produce toxic, paranoid, depressed subjects. What follows is a picture of what happens in communities that are passionately, sincerely, radically woke, as seen from the perspective of an apostate.
Commentators have accurately noted how social justice seems to take the form of a religion. This captures the meaning and fulfilment I found in protests and occupations. It also captures how, outside of these harrowing festivals, everyday life in radical communities is mundane but pious. As a radical activist, much of my time was devoted to proselytizing. Non-anarchists were like pagans to be converted through zines and wheatpasted posters rather than by Bible and baptism. When non-radicals listened to my assertions that nazis deserved death, that all life had devolved into spectacle, and that monogamy was a capitalist social construct, they were probably bewildered instead of enticed.
Instead of developing a relationship to God and a recognition of one’s own imperfection, we wanted our non-anarchist families and friends to develop their “analysis” and recognize their complicity in the evil of capitalism. These non-anarchist friends grew increasingly sparse the longer I was an anarchist. They didn’t see how terrible the world was, and they used problematic language that revealed hopelessly bad politics. Frustrated with them, I retreated further and further into the grey echo-chamber of my “chosen family.”
Trent Eady says of his own radicalism in Montreal, “When I was part of groups like this, everyone was on exactly the same page about a suspiciously large range of issues.” When my friends and I did have theoretical disagreements, they tended towards the purely strategic or to philosophical minutiae. Are cops human? If we pay attention to the few white nationalists in town, will that stir them up? Is polyamory queer, or privileged?
Deep and sincere engagement with opposing points of view is out of the question. Radicalism is like a clan too suspicious of outsiders to abandon cousin marriage, and, like incestuous offspring, radicalism’s intellectual offspring accumulate genetic load. Narrow theories must perform increasingly convoluted explanations of the world. For example, Montgomery and Bergman describe Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s use of the term “Empire,” in their book of the same name, as both a miasma that “accumulates and spreads sadness” and an anthropomorphized figure that “works to usher its subjects into flimsy relationships where nothing is at stake and to infuse intimacy with violence and domination.”
No worldview maps reality perfectly. But when a worldview encounters discordant knowledge, it can either evolve to accommodate it, or it can treat it as a threat to the worldview’s integrity. If a worldview treats all discordant knowledge as threat, then it is an ideology. Its adherents learn to see themselves as guardians rather than seekers of the truth. The practical consequences of such a worldview can be devastating.
When I became an anarchist, I was a depressed and anxious teenager, in search of answers. Radicalism explained that these were not manageable issues with biological and lifestyle factors, they were the result of living in capitalist alienation. For, as Kelsey Cham C notes, “This whole world is based on fucking misery” and “In capitalist systems, we’re not meant to feel joy.” Radicalism not only finds that all oppressions intersect, but so does all suffering. The force that causes depression is the same that causes war, domestic abuse, and racism. By accepting this framework, I surrendered to an external locus of control. Personal agency in such a model is laughable. And then, when I became an even less happy and less strong person over the years as an anarchist, I had an explanation on hand.
Snip.
Escape from the paradigm of suspicion is hindered by kafkatrapping: the idea that opposition to the radical viewpoint proves the radical viewpoint. Minorities who question it have internalized their oppression, and privileged individuals who question it prove their guilt. The only thing radicals are not suspicious of is the need for relentless suspicion. As Haidt and Greg Lukianoff write of similar norms on campuses, “If someone wanted to create an environment of perpetual anger and intergroup conflict, this would be an effective way to do it.”
Radical communities select for particular personality types. They attract deeply compassionate people, especially young people attuned to the suffering inherent to existence. They attract hurt people, looking for an explanation for the pain they’ve endured. And both of these derive meaning for that suffering by attributing it to the force that they now dedicate themselves to opposing. They are no longer purely a victim, but an underdog.
However, radical communities also attract people looking for an excuse to be violent illegalists. And the surplus of vulnerable and compassionate people attracts sadists and abusers ready to exploit them. The only gatekeeping that goes on in radical communities is that of language and passion—if you can rail against capitalism in woke language, you’re in.
Every group of people has some mixture of stable, vulnerable, and predatory individuals. That radicals have a poor mix does not doom them. However, radicals also dismiss longstanding norms that would protect them, in favour of experimental norms. They are built with the best intentions and are aimed at solving real problems. But intentions do not matter if one does not consider incentives and human nature.
Abusers thrive in radical communities because radical norms are fragile and exploitable. A culture of freewheeling drug and alcohol use creates situations predators are waiting to exploit. A cultural fetishization of violence provides cover for violent and unstable people. The practice of public “call-outs” is used for power-plays far more often than for constructive feedback. Radicals value responding to claims of harm with compassion and belief. But abusers exploit this the way children exploit parents and teachers—crybullying becomes a way of punishing opponents or prey. While norms such as “believe claimed victims” are important in families and close friendships where trust and accountability are real, they become weapons in amorphous communities.
One particular practice illustrates this well. The accountability process is a subcultural institution whereby survivors can make demands of perpetrators and the community must hold them accountable. Radicals are hesitant to report abusers and rapists to the police, for fear of subjecting comrades to the prison system. But turning victims into judge and jury and shared friends into executioners is a recipe for injustice that satisfies no one. And in light of the instant truth-value given to claims of abuse, accountability processes are an oddly perfect weapon for actual abusers. As one writer for the zine the Broken Teapot says, “The past few years I have watched with horror as the language of accountability became an easy front for a new generation of emotional manipulators. It’s been used to perfect a new kind of predatory maverick—the one schooled in the language of sensitivity—using the illusion of accountability as community currency.”
Snip.
If an individual wants to end suffering, she should think hard about why she’s joined communities that glamorize violence, vengeance, and anti-intellectualism. Having left that scene, I am amazed at how much effort we put into making the world a more painful and difficult place than it is in service of a post-revolutionary utopia.
I can already tell that this post is going to be one of my go-to replies when a social justice warrior says something incredibly stupid on Twitter.
So French President Emmanuel Macron was forced to delay implementation of his carbon tax hike because the peasants were revolting French citizens were blocking traffic, burning vehicles, and battling police throughout the streets of Paris.
Nearly 300,000 protesters, many wearing yellow vests, took to the streets, including tens of thousands in Paris. Participation in the “yellow vest” protests, named after the yellow vests French drivers are required to keep in their vehicles for emergencies, fell to approximately 166,000 with 8,000 in Paris in the second weekend, but by the third weekend the protest gained momentum and violence.
The protests were sparked by Macron’s plans to increase taxes on gasoline, diesel, and electricity, and to enforce stricter limits on emissions from vehicles, in an effort to force people out of their cars and suburban homes, and onto public transit and back into densely populated cities. In Paris, protesters sang the national anthem and carried signs saying “Macron, resignation” and “Macron, thief,” and stormed barricades erected by the 3,000 to 5,000 security forces deployed to guard the presidential palace and National Assembly. Outside of Paris, protestors blocked highways, overran motorway toll booths, and obstructed access to gasoline stations and shopping malls.
On average, French gasoline costs a whopping $7.00 per gallon, and diesel more than $6.00 per gallon, with a majority of the price coming from fuel taxes imposed by the national government. These taxes had been scheduled to increase annually in the coming years, to meet Macron’s carbon dioxide emission reduction goals.
“We’re going to tax you until you bleed until you adopt a lifestyle more in tune with the way we think you should live.” For global leftists elites, global warming is not just a holy cause, but an existential struggle whose high stakes (“We’re all going to die!”) require ignoring any democratic pushback from the less-enlightened masses. And we’re just supposed to ignore the fact they write themselves cushy green energy tax breaks while imposing the overwhelming majority of the costs for such policies on ordinary people who live differently than they do. (While Paris burns, Macron is conspicuous by his absence.)
But it’s important to remember that conservatives have an existential threat of their own (deficit spending triggering hyperinflation that will destroy the economy), the solution to which (cutting back on the welfare state) is also deeply unpopular with wide swathes of the populace.
The difference, of course, is that the doomsday scenario of anthropocentric global warming is entirely conjectural, while hyperinflation has happened several times throughout history.
This is why you’re seeing the signs of that weird left-right populist nationalist fusion across Europe: No taxes increase, but also no welfare state cuts, while also restricting immigration so only natives get the cushy welfare handouts. That seems like an obvious recipe for electoral success in countries where even the EU’s weak tea “austerity” is increasingly unthinkable. But it’s not a recipe for growth, and can’t stave off the inevitable doom of a demographically unsustainable welfare state. In America it takes the form of President Donald Trump, a dogged tax-cutter and deregulator working diligently to get the economy growing again, but not someone who has tried to pare back the deficit or the welfare state in any meaningful way.
Europe’s sclerotic economy and demographic decline are going to bring on a crisis there long before it hits here, but it will eventually hit here. In the long run, the big government welfare state is likely to be seen as one of the longer-running mass delusions in history.
There will come a reckoning. The only question is whether you and I will be there to see it…
A former political operative for State Rep. Charlie Geren (R–Fort Worth) has now admitted that he made a factually inaccurate and anonymous report to Child Protective Services against Geren’s opponent during a contentious 2016 Republican primary campaign.
As part of a settlement resolving a lawsuit brought by Bo French, David Sorensen has acknowledged he made the anonymous and incorrect election eve report to CPS alleging that French was abusing his children. The former Geren political aide has also acknowledged the report was not accurate, and he has apologized to the French family for submitting it.
“Before and after Geren’s campaign, Sorensen worked as an operative on Democrat political campaigns and for the Democrat Party.” After this confession, Sorensen should never work on the campaign of any candidate for any political party ever again…
Just as Milton’s Satan would rather reign in hell than to serve in heaven, so also neoconservatives would never be part of any movement if they were not acknowledged as the movement’s intellectual leadership. Neoconservatives were content to have John McCain win the GOP nomination and lose to Obama, since this result did not impair the market for what Kristol, et al., were selling — political commentary and policy analysis. What really threatened their racket, however, was when Republican primary voters in 2016 refused to be herded into the camp of any of the neoconservative-approved candidates. Make no mistake, Bill Kristol would have much rather seen Jeb Bush or Chris Christie win the GOP nomination and then lose to Hillary, than to have a Republican president who wouldn’t take advice from Bill Kristol.
Questions of policy — is Bill Kristol in favor of enforcing our immigration laws, or not? — were ultimately less important to the fate of the Weekly Standard than their intellectual pride. Neoconservatives decided in 2015 that Donald Trump should not be the Republican nominee and, when their advice was rejected by GOP primary voters, the neoconservatives doubled-down and decided that Hillary Clinton should be president. When that didn’t happen, they doubled down again, and declared Trump’s presidency illegitimate. At no point, apparently, did it ever occur to them to ask, “What if we’re wrong?” The possibility of error was not something Bill Kristol (Harvard, Class of 1979) was willing to consider.
America is not a kingdom, and a president is not a king, but the pagan power of a dead king’s passage still stirs some part of our ancient souls. These rituals of our civil religion (the lying in state, the transport of the coffin, the missing man flyover) are both objectively a little silly and subjectively profoundly important as part of the social glue that still binds the nation together.