Chicago’s Zulu War: ‘The Cops Have Told Us They Aren’t Gonna Touch Them’

Posted on | September 1, 2018 | 3 Comments

A startling reality of life in Chicago is that gangs of black teenagers roam the streets randomly assaulting white people:

Chicago police today confirmed final charges filed against ten juveniles following two hours of chaos in Wrigleyville on Wednesday evening.
“It’s been a problem all summer,” a Clark Street merchant said this morning. “They’re kids. The cops have told us they aren’t gonna touch them. We can’t touch them. What can we do?” . . .
The mayhem began around 4:20 p.m. when six teens shoved boxes of candy into backpacks and ran from Walgreens, 3646 North Broadway, according to police. The boys then began selling the candy in outside of Wrigley Field as Wednesday’s afternoon game wrapped up, according to witnesses and social media video.
But the spree took a serious turn one hour later when 911 callers reported that “10 to 15 children” were surrounding and battering people in the 3500 block of North Clark Street around 5:35 p.m., police said.
One man was beaten up outside the Cubby Bear, 1060 West Addison. Police on the scene summoned an ambulance for the victim who was bleeding from his ear. Another victim was attacked by the group near Irish Oak, 3511 North Clark Street.
Around the same time, the mob stole merchandise from a smoke shop in the 3400 block of North Clark Street, according to police.
Police said a 35-year-old man who dialed 911 while following the group was threatened with physical harm by the youths. He backed off when confronted, but pressed assault charges after the teens were in custody.

These attacks took place near Wrigley Field, home of the Cubs baseball team. Click here to see videos showing some of the gang violence. In the first video, a teenager sucker-punches a woman outside a restaurant. You see that there are several muscular men — “door staff,” i.e., bouncers — outside the restaurant, as apparently this kind of security is necessary for the safety of restaurant patrons in the neighborhood. It reminded me of the British fighting off Zulus at Rourke’s Drift.

This is far from a rare occurrence in the city. The Chicago Sun-Times has spoken of “the annual summer wilding problem.” Evidently, these random attacks on white people by swarms of black teenagers happen routinely, and a Chicago police officer says department policy prohibits them from taking effective preventive measures: “All we’re allowed to do now is ‘herd’ them toward [Chicago Transit Authority] stations.”

WBBM-TV reports: “Nearby store owners and workers, who refused to talk on camera, said this type of violence is more common than people realize, adding some groups see the traffic [around] a Cubs game, not as a gathering for baseball, but as an opportunity to rob and victimize others.”

Thomas Lifson observed earlier this year at American Thinker: “A ‘good’ neighborhood is no guarantee of safety anymore in Chicago. The breakdown of civil order, in other words, is well underway in the Windy City. Bit by bit, civilization is slipping away in Chicago.” As Labor Day weekend brings summer to a close, Chicago has experienced nearly 200 homicides since Memorial Day weekend, plus more than 900 wounded, with the city’s total homicides for the year nearing 400.

Category: Chicago, Crime, Racism

Bonus Black Hole Book Post (It Has Rivets)

Posted on | August 31, 2018 | Comments Off on Bonus Black Hole Book Post (It Has Rivets)

— by Wombat-socho

Oh, the embarrassment. An author sends me a review copy of his most excellent hard-SF technothriller, and I completely forget to do the review in yesterday’s book post. Well, I promised him a review before the end of the month, which is now here, so you get a bonus book post!

Michael Rothman’s Primordial Threat is a great combination of hard SF (the kind, as we used to say in the glory days of Astounding/Analog, that had rivets) and modern technothriller – much of the plot revolves around a missing scientist who may have the solution to the deadly threat of a black hole approaching Earth. Rothman has a solid grip on both the science and the bureaucratic machinations within the government that are almost as big a threat as the oncoming hole. Definitely recommended.

Also, I erred yesterday when I wrote that Karl Gallagher’s Torchship Trilogy was also a Prometheus Award winner; it was nominated, but did not win. Buy it anyway.

Other books I’ve been re-reading recently: S.M. Stirling’s The Peshawar Lancers, a tale of derring-do set in an alternate Earth where a comet strike in the Northern Hemisphere has effectively destroyed Western Civilization, except for the French in North Africa and the British, who evacuated their best and brightest to India, which has become the seat of the Angrezi Raj. Someone is trying to kill cavalry officer Athelstane King and his academically-inclined sister – but why? It’s up to King, his Sikh sergeant, and an Afghan bandit chief to find out, but can they defeat a Russian agent who can see the future? A lot of people consider this one of Stirling’s best novels, and it’s very much worth your time and money.

Also, Keith Laumer’s The Long Twilight (repackaged by Baen with Night Of Delusions and some other short pieces) which is the tale of a pair of starship captains, Grallgrathor and Lokrien, marooned on Earth in the 10th century and engaged ever since in a vendetta stemming from Lokrien’s murder of Grallgrathor’s Norse family…a vendetta that changes human history. Now, an experimental broadcast power station draws both men to it as it goes out of control and causes a mid-ocean typhoon, and the truth of the murders comes out at last – but has the truth come too late to save the Earth? There are some interesting subtexts in the book regarding AIs, humans born in synthetic wombs and taught by those AIs, and (a recurring Laumer theme) the true nature of reality. I’ve substituted the cover from the Ace edition because, frankly, the Baen cover is terrible.

Category: Books

In The Mailbox: 08.31.18

Posted on | August 31, 2018 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box One Year Anniversary – Episode #365
EBL: Media Whore Michael Avenatti Takes On The Federalist’s Caroline Court
Twitchy: Chuck Yeager Pulls No Punches About Hollywood’s Depiction Of Neil Armstrong’s Lunar Landing Moment
Louder With Crowder: Mike Rowe – Don’t Blame The Snowflakes, Blame Yourselves
According To Hoyt: Priorities
Monster Hunter Nation: My DragonCon Schedule
Vox Popoli: NBC News Tried To Bury The Weinstein Story

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – The Denial Edition
American Thinker: Radicalized Democrats – Destroying Their Country And Their Own Party
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Chinese Shenanigans Friday
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For August 31
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Da Tech Guy: Should We Get Ready For The Wellstone/#NeverTrump Memorial Sequel?
Don Surber: Why We Don’t Care, Katy Tur
Dustbury: I Have No Mouth And I Mist Vlog
First Street Journal:
The Geller Report: U.S. Announces It’s Cutting All Funding To Palestinian Terrorist Supporter UNRWA, also, Bill Clinton Sits With Louis Farrakhan At Aretha Franklin’s Funeral
Hogewash: Don’t Know Much About History, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Legal Insurrection: Beta O’Rourke Attempted To Flee The Scene Of Drunk Driving Accident, also, Neil Armstrong Biopic First Man Omits Planting Of American Flag On Moon
The PanAm Post: The New Stupidity Of Maduro That Will Sink Venezuela Even Further
Power Line: Thoughts From The Ammo Line, also, DOJ Sides With Plaintiff Alleging Harvard Discriminates Against Asians
Shark Tank: Democrats Hypocritically “Monkey It Up”
Shot In The Dark: Unpacking Peggy McIntosh
The Political Hat: They Day
This Ain’t Hell: “Faggot” Gets Marine LTC Fired, also, David Hogg Threatens To “Destroy” Smith & Wesson
Victory Girls: Kaepernick, The NFL, & Collusion
Volokh Conspiracy: Short Circuit – A Summary Of Recent Federal Court Decisions
Weasel Zippers: Black Trump Supporter – “I Can’t Keep Up With All The Jobs Created In Indiana”, also, Texts & Emails Reveal Police Told To Stand Down, Not Engage Protesters Who Pulled Down “Silent Sam” Statue
Megan McArdle: Poll By Sinking Poll, Trump Inches Toward Impeachment (Wishful thinking. – ws)
Mark Steyn: The Unfiltered President

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Category: Linkagery

The Church of Fear: Desperate Democrats Have Become the Prophets of Doom

Posted on | August 31, 2018 | Comments Off on The Church of Fear: Desperate Democrats Have Become the Prophets of Doom

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
— H. L. Mencken

After a hectic few days here at Chez McCain — our Army son and his wife are in town, among other things — I fell asleep Thursday night re-reading The Russian Revolution by Alan Moorehead (1958) and, after waking up to get my first cup of coffee, began checking in online to discover what I’ve missed lately. One depressing tidbit, pointed out by libertarian writer Cathy Young, was that anti-Semites have begun claiming that the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web,” maligned by the Left as a crypto-fascist “alt-right” scheme, is actually run by (of course) the JOOOOZZZ!

The persistence of such paranoid obsessions is discouraging, but should be expected, so my eye-rolling dismay at the “IDW JQ” is probably unnecessary — the fringe is gonna fringe, the kooks are gonna kook, and you just have to learn to shrug this off. And I suppose by now I should also not be surprised to read dangerous nonsense on the op-ed pages of the New York Times. Take it away, Pankaj Mishra:

Hate crimes continue to rise across the United States, Britain and Canada. More ominously, demographic, economic and political decline, and the loss of intellectual hegemony, have plunged many long-term winners of history into a vengeful despair.
A century ago, the mere suspicion of being thrust aside by black and yellow peoples sparked apocalyptic visions of “race suicide.” Today, the “preponderance of China” that [19th-century Australian author Charles Henry] Pearson predicted is becoming a reality, and the religion of whiteness increasingly resembles a suicide cult. Mr. Trump’s trade wars, sanctions, border walls, deportations, denaturalizations and other 11th-hour battles seem to push us all closer to the “terrible probability” James Baldwin once outlined: that the rulers of the “higher races,” “struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen.”

You can read the whole thing, which has been re-tweeted by every liberal with a wifi connection, perhaps because it’s a brown man telling white liberals what they want to believe, i.e., that Trump’s presidency represents nothing but the last dying gasp of “white supremacy.”

This is simply a rationalization of defeat for Democrats and their leftist sympathizers around the world who had believed that Barack Obama’s presidency represented a permanent revolution in American politics, the final defeat of everything the Left has always hated about America. The Democrats shoved all their chips onto the table betting on Hillary Clinton to win what the Left imagined would be in essence Obama’s third term and, when she lost in November 2016, this provoked an existential crisis on the Left, not only in the United States but worldwide. If Trump could defeat Hillary, after all, what was to prevent a right-populist uprising against left/center hegemony anywhere else? The answer to that question proved to be “not much,” and suddenly every country in Europe seemed to sprout its own Trump-style populist movement.

The #Brexit vote in England, along with the triumph of Viktor Orban in Hungary and Matteo Salvini in Italy, further exposed the weakness of the left/center establishment that had supported mass immigration of Muslim “refugees” into Europe. Almost overnight, it seemed, the establishment was on the defensive everywhere, challenged by right-populist voices who were tired of being passive spectators to the enactment of a policy agenda imposed on them by political elites who claimed that they were merely following an inevitable trend of “progress.” It was not a latter-day fascism, but mere common sense, that inspired citizens to wonder whether the changes to their society were really “progress” at all. Once they became skeptical about that, people with common sense realized that there was nothing inevitable about these changes, because they could vote out the elitist politicians who were implementing these changes and elect leaders who would stop this agenda of so-called “progress.” Thus, Trumpism has become a worldwide phenomenon, and the Left is frightened and desperate.

But let’s remember Vox Day’s Three Laws of SWJs:

1. SJWs Always Lie.
2. SJWs Always Double Down.
3. SJWs Always Project.

Pankaj Mishra’s op-ed represents the psychological projection aspect of this. Because the Left’s anti-white agenda of flooding Europe and America with Third World refugees is finally being met with organized political resistance, Mishra claims this is an expression of irrational fear, rather than a change justified by legitimate concerns about the consequences of the center-left establishment’s open-borders policies. Instead of admitting the reality of what has happened (i.e., people finally waking up to where the elite’s policy agenda is leading us), instead Mishra has to reach back in time to the late 19th-century to craft a clever narrative of how Trumpism represents a revival of discredited racial theories of the past. The New York Times publishes this, and every liberal on Twitter re-tweets it, because this explanation flatters the sensibilities of the elite, who are always eager to believe that they are “on the right side of history,” and that their critics are reactionary troglodytes in thrall to obsolete “myths” and ignorantly opposed to “progress.”

To the ruling elite, “progress” is always synonymous with their own success and influence, without regard for the welfare of the societies over which they feel themselves entitled to rule. During the 1930s, the elite in England favored appeasement of Hitler, and they smeared Winston Churchill as a warmonger, an enemy of “progress.” Even after the catastrophic course of events proved Churchill had been right all along, the appeasers never really accepted responsibility for their errors, and the lessons of Munich were largely forgotten. To this day, the peace-at-any-price mentality of the Chamberlainites continues to prevail among the elite, whose characteristic prejudices seem impervious to facts.

In this way, liberals are much like anti-Semites, whose Argus-eyed vigilance enables them to find Jewish influence everywhere. There has never been a time in the past 80 years when anyone who opposed the Left could avoid the accusation of “fascism.” Harry Truman was a fascist, according the Left, and so was Churchill. In 1951, when Bill Buckley published God and Man at Yale, one reviewer denounced him thus:

“The book is one which has the glow and appeal of a fiery cross on a hillside at night. There will undoubtedly be robed figures who gather to it, but the hoods will not be academic. They will cover the face.”

Yes, the Yale-educated intellectual Buckley was likened to a Klansman, and the same reviewer (who was, not coincidentally, a Yale trustee) also accused Buckley of employing “the technique of Dr. Goebbels.”

In my own lifetime, I have watched the Left smear their enemies in many different ways. During the 1990s, Richard Mellon Scaife was one of their demonized scapegoats, in the same way the libertarian Koch brothers have more recently been demonized. Not so long ago, we were assured by liberals that the Religious Right was seeking to impose “theocracy” on America, but a few years later, the same people insisted that the real danger was war-mongering “neoconservatives.” The latest hobgoblin in this parade of right-wing monsters (a continual pageant of fear produced by Democrats and their media allies) is the “white nationalist” threat blamed for Trump’s election. Liberals expect us to believe that we are living amid an epidemic of “hate crimes” for which Trump and his supporters are to blame, although evidence for this alleged epidemic is hard to verify. (See, for example, Chad Felix Greene, “The Reported Spike In Anti-LGBT Homicides Is Fake News,” Jan. 31.) This sort of political clairvoyance, claiming a magical ability to detect a “climate of hate” whenever Republicans win an election, is an evasive tactic, a way for Democrats to distract attention from their own failures.

If Hillary had won, they’d be telling us we’re living through a new Golden Age of Progress and Equality, no matter what the facts actually were. Because she lost, however, liberals want us to believe we’re living through a neo-fascist nightmare. This enables Democrats to continue promoting the same left-wing policy agenda that voters rejected in 2016, without pausing to consider the possibility that those voters were right. In other words, the claim that Republicans won because of a secret dog-whistle “racist” message is a way for Democrats to avoid admitting that they deserved to lose the election. Not once in my lifetime have I seen Democrats admit, after losing an election, that maybe the Republicans just had better ideas. Even after the pathetic 1988 Dukakis debacle — the third consecutive landslide defeat for Democrats in the 1980s — there was a resistance to accepting that, for example, releasing rapists from prison on furlough might be a bad policy. No, it was those dastardly Republicans and their racism that were to blame, liberals told themselves, and they’re still making the same excuse now.

Trump is president, the economy has never been better, and yet Democrats are still inviting Americans to worship in the Church of Fear — vote Democrat to exorcise those racist white demons — because this doom-and-gloom pessimism is the only message they’ve got.

We are less than 10 weeks away from the midterms, and if Democrats are defeated again, it will be because menacing the public with imaginary racist hobgoblins is no substitute for a coherent policy agenda.

Category: Racism

The Back To School Labor Day Book Post

Posted on | August 30, 2018 | Comments Off on The Back To School Labor Day Book Post

— compiled by Wombat-socho
Actually, I’m not going back to school – the spring semester at UNLV went badly, and summer was worse, so I’m punting the fall semester and concentrating on tax & insurance stuff in preparation for the upcoming tax season. Also, reading some good books so I can pass along recommendations to you!

At the top of the list is the debut novel by Travis Corcoran, The Powers of the Earth, which won the Prometheus Award for Best Novel this year. Probably the best short description of the book is by Eric S. Raymond: “…an affectionate tribute to and critical response to [Heinlein’s] The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.” ESR is precisely correct, though there are some major differences in the Lunar revolutions Heinlein and Corcoran are describing, and Corcoran has a ways to go before he’s as smooth a storyteller as Uncle Bob. I myself found the opening chapters slow going, but the payoff is worth it. I’m looking forward to picking up the sequel, Causes of Separation. Meanwhile, I’ll have to content myself with Corcoran’s acceptance speech, which no doubt sent the CHORFs and Social Justice Wankers at ConJose to their fainting couches.

Also coming home with a Prometheus is Karl Gallagher’s Torchship Trilogy, which adds Torchship Pilot and Torchship Captain to the original novel, which I reviewed back in 2016. If you liked the original, or enjoyed either Firefly or Serenity, these will be right up your alley.

Robert Kroese’s The Dream of the Iron Dragon is sometimes described as “Vikings in space!”, but this is a gross oversimplification. The book starts with a scoutship from Earth (which is losing an interstellar war) meeting a dissident faction of aliens, nearly being caught in the destruction of the dissidents’ outpost, and being flung back in time to the Viking era, where they must bootstrap human technology into the era of star travel – or risk losing a war of extermination. The sequel, Dawn of the Iron Dragon, is out already and I’m hoping to get it read before the final book in the trilogy, The Voyage of the Iron Dragon, comes out in December.

I sometimes think Jack Vance is one of the most underappreciated authors in SF history. This is unfortunate, because his skill at creating bizarre human cultures was second to none – and as proof of this, I present the Durdane Trilogy: The Anome, The Brave Free Men, and The Asutra. The land of Shant on the planet Durdane has known peace for millennia, its sixty-two cantons pursuing their own cultures under the eye of the Faceless Man – the Anome, who punishes lawbreakers by detonating their torcs, the explosive collars every adult wears around his (or her) neck. Gastel Etzwane escapes life as a Chilite Pure Boy and becomes a wandering musician, only to find himself swept up in an intrigue to find the Anome and compel him to rally Shant against the invasion of the Roguskhoi. Part of that intrigue involves Ifness, a researcher from the Historical Institute on legendary Earth, sometimes an ally and sometimes an indifferent observer. Every page of the Durdane trilogy contains strange people doing strange things in the service of even stranger cultures, and yet – they are all recognizably human.

Category: Books

In The Mailbox: 08.30.18

Posted on | August 30, 2018 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Keith Ellison – What Did The DNC Know, And When Did They Know It?
Twitchy: Salena Zito Refuses To Be Bullied By Vicious Troll Mob, Defends Her Work In Epic Thread
Louder With Crowder: Tess Holliday’s New Cosmo Cover Praised, Because Everything Is Terrible

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Good Whites Vs. Bad Whites
American Power: Gregg Jarrett, The Russia Hoax, also, Emotional Abuse Allegations Against Keith Ellison
American Thinker: Protect Political Speech From Tech Oligarchs With The Civil Rights Act Of 2019
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily When You’ve Lost NPR News
BattleSwarm: Semiconductor Update – GlobalFoundries Gives Up On 7mm
CDR Salamander: Rotate 90 Degrees To The Left, also, Diversity Thursday
Da Tech Guy: Does President Trump Have The Authority To Replace NAFTA As Proposed? also, The Ignorance Of Socialist Youth Vs. The Wisdom Of Claria Csiong
Don Surber: Another Obama Mess Blamed On President Trump, also, Weinstein Paid Off Governor Cuomo
Dustbury: Increasingly High
First Street Journal:
The Geller Report: College Bans 9/11 Memorial Tribute Because It May Offend Muslims, also, Chemnitz Update – One Of The Killers Muslim Migrant With “Grave Previous Offenses”
Hogewash: “Defend And Respect The User’s Voice”, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Legal Insurrection: Iran’s Ayatollah Says Europe Can’t Save Nuke Deal, also, Brown University Removes Scholarly Article Deemed Harmful To Transgender Narrative
The PanAm Post: In Ecuador, Lenin Moreno’s Government Still Looking For A Road Map
Power Line: The Self-Regard Of John McCain, also, Politically Incorrect Cheeseburgers
Shark Tank: Soros Democrats Cast Dark Shadow Over Florida Politics
Shot In The Dark: Life With An Abusive Half Of The Electorate, Part III
The Jawa Report: Trolling For Fatwas
The Political Hat: Cisnormativity – In Anime, In Preschool, & In Human Behavior
This Ain’t Hell: Our Homeland Is Not A Sanctuary, also, Drag Queen Sailor Finds Acceptance In The Navy
Victory Girls: DeSantis & The Dog Whistle Only The Left Can Hear
Volokh Conspiracy: Liberty Isn’t The Central Value of The Constitution Either
Weasel Zippers: What This Chick-Fil-A Plans To Do With Employees During Remodeling, also, Watch Crowder Ask Trump Critics To Explain Why Trump’s A Fascist
Megan McArdle: A Statistical Misfire On School Shootings

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Category: Linkagery

The Subjectivity of ‘Harassment’

Posted on | August 30, 2018 | Comments Off on The Subjectivity of ‘Harassment’

If you wish to understand what feminism actually is, and how it affects daily life, I recommend Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism by Daphne Patai. First published in 1998, Heterophobia examines how claims of “harassment” are weaponized to destroy the careers and reputations of men and,in chapters 6 and 7, provides an exegesis of the feminist theory that justifies this deliberate destruction. Professor Patai once taught Women’s Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and knows whereof she speaks. Most of the examples of harassment claims Professor Patai cites are from academia, and she focuses on the “hostile environment” concept that feminists have embedded into law and policy:

Hostile-environment actions are now based upon the subjective experience of “unwanted” or “offensive” conduct (including speech), as perceived by the accuser and tested by the “reasonable woman” standard . . . It is becoming increasingly clear that this development transfers the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused, in violation of American due process. In addition, this shift has profound repercussions on the conduct of daily life. And such a consequence is . . . no accident. It is precisely what the proponents of sexual harassment regulations have in mind. (Emphasis added.)

One of the basic problems of “sexual harassment” is the extent to which it is based on subjective perception. Many older Americans may think of “harassment” in terms of the quid pro quo, in which male supervisors extorted sexual favors from female employees as a condition of their employment. Such practices were what the earliest sexual harassment lawsuits sought to punish and prohibit, but in recent decades these stereotypical cases (e.g., the lecherous boss imposing himself on a young secretary) are no longer what most “harassment” complaints are about.

In many cases, the claim that a workplace is a “hostile environment” for female employees is supported by a catalog of incidents — separate and unrelated to each other, occurring over a period of many months or years — which are portrayed by the plaintiffs as forming a coherent pattern of anti-female prejudice. When examined in detail, the various incidents cited as part of this “hostile environment” are often disputed; that is to say, an incident may be remembered differently by some participants, so that what the plaintiffs claim happened is contradicted by the testimony of other witnesses. This tactic of accumulating a pile of grievances (none of which were particularly egregious, when viewed as separate incidents) and then presenting them as a pattern proving that the workplace was a “hostile environment,” means that a disgruntled employee can become a ticking time-bomb of sorts. A male employee never knows whether his female co-worker in the next cubicle might have decided to start collecting “evidence” for a future complaint. He may consider her a friend with whom he can joke around casually, and then one day — BOOM! — he’s called into the human resources offices and confronted with the accusation of harassment. Something he said or did has been cited as “offensive” in the catalog of complaints made by his female colleague and he is expected to rebut the complainant’s tendentiously one-sided characterization of this incident. “It didn’t happen that way!” he will protest, only to discover that his version of the story counts for nothing.

As Professor Patai says, the way sexual harassment law has developed shifts the burden of proof from accuser to accused, and it is difficult (if not impossible) to disprove such accusations. The nature of the claims typically involved is subjective — the complainant’s feeling that someone’s words or actions were “offensive” — and the accused will find it useless to defend himself by saying he did not intend any offense.

As a general rule, the more directly familiar you are with how “sexual harassment” claims happen in real-life situations, the less likely you are to sympathize with the complainants. Any manager or executive who has witnessed a few such cases is apt to be quite cynical and, when thinking in terms of prevention, will keep a close eye on personnel policy. A smart manager wants to be sure he doesn’t hire a certain type of woman, i.e., the marginally competent employee who arrogantly over-estimates her value to the company, and who therefore is prone to imagine that she is a victim of discrimination if she isn’t treated with extreme deference.

Because an unhappy female employee can be a ticking time-bomb, we may observe that the larger the proportion of women in a given workplace, the more time and effort management must devote to making sure their female employees never become disgruntled. These preventative measures impose costs on the company (e.g., hiring “diversity consultants” to run training seminars), to say nothing of the general drain on employee morale caused by paranoid fear that your co-worker might be plotting a lawsuit. One way a company can deal with this problem is as simple as it is obvious: Don’t hire women.

This is the great irony of sexual-harassment law: Originally conceived as a way to bring about “equality” in the workplace, to a surprising extent it has had the opposite effect, creating incentives to discriminate against women in hiring. Say what you will about white males, employers are at liberty to treat white guys like crap, without fear of being targeted by a “civil rights” complaint, whereas if you say anything a female or minority employee may consider offensive, that’s a lawsuit. One explanation of the so-called “gender gap” between men and women is that women are less likely to be hired by private-sector firms and more likely to work in government or non-profit institutions, such as schools. All the talk about “women in tech” arose, after all, because feminists working in academia or in tax-exempt activist organizations looked at Silicon Valley and realized that men were about 4/5ths of the workforce in this lucrative field. But why? Whose fault is it that women are majoring in Sociology or Gender Studies instead of Computer Science? And where is the incentive for an entrepreneur, struggling to launch a tech start-up on a shoestring budget, to take a chance on a female software engineer if hiring her means he has to treat her with kid gloves lest she accuse him of “discrimination”? Unlike the gigantic conglomerates, the entrepreneurial start-up firm can’t afford a human-resources staff and “diversity” consultants; still less can they afford the costs of defending themselves against a disgruntled former employee’s lawsuit.

The risk of a “discrimination” or “harassment” complaint is like a shadow hanging over the 21st-century workplace, undermining the spirit of teamwork and cooperation by infusing a paranoid sense of hostile suspicion into every interaction between male and female co-workers. This climate of fear is not the fault of ordinary men and women who just work their 9-to-5 shift, collect their paycheck and quietly endure the routine hassles of working life. Rather, the shadow of suspicion is the result of ideologues and activists — many of them ax-grinders in academia, who’ve never done a day’s work in the private sector — who have labored to foster a victimhood mentality among young women, encouraging them to believe that they are surrounded by misogyny.

When we behold the carnival of “social justice” protests on university campuses, we can see how this victimhood mentality has become central to the curricula of 21st-century higher education, inflicting permanent damage on the future prospects of students. Having been indoctrinated to believe that oppression is everywhere, they cannot function effectively in the competitive workplace where an ability to endure hardship without complaint is often the most valuable skill of all. Why would any manager want to hire these snowflakes, who are unable to cope with normal life, requiring “safe spaces” to protect their fragile feelings?

Category: Sex Trouble