The #Charlottesville Madness

Posted on | August 12, 2017 | 1 Comment

At this point — it’s about 7:25 p.m. ET — police have still not identified the suspect who drove a car into a crowd protesting against a neo-Nazi gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia. We know that a 32-year-old woman was killed, and dozens more injured, but we don’t know who did it, and therefore we don’t know why it happened.

Caleb Howe at Red State has some disturbing video of the attack.

UPDATE: Now the suspect is identified:

Col Martin Kumer, the superintendent of Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail, told the Guardian that 20-year-old James Fields of Ohio had been arrested following the attack.
“He has been charged with second degree murder, three counts of malicious wounding and failing to stop at an accident that resulted in a death,” Kumer said in an email.
Ohio state vehicle registration records show that a Dodge Challenger car with a licence plate matching the one used in the attack is registered to Fields at his address in Maumee.

So at least we know that much. Honestly, if I was a young man and had a nice car like, I’d be picking up girls, not ramming it into a crowd. But the world has gone crazy, and nothing makes sense anymore.

UPDATE II: Judging from this report, that Fields was in the Army less than four months in 2015, my guess is he washed out of basic training.

Category: Crime

In The Mailbox: 08.11.17

Posted on | August 11, 2017 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 08.11.17

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Proof Positive: Warped
EBL: Bannon, McMaster, And Kelly
Twitchy: Patricia Arquette Tries To School Dana Loesch On 2nd Amendment, Fails Miserably
Louder With Crowder: Criminally Unfunny Chelsea Handler Calls For Military Coup Against Trump – But It Gets Better!

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Podcast #52 – The Nice Guy Episode, also, Friday Links And Resident Hawtness
American Power: Google CEO Sundar Pichai Should Resign, also, Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall Of Rome
American Thinker: Russian Collusion In Democrat Inner Circle?
Animal Magnetism: Rule 5 Machine Gun Friday
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For August 11
Bring The HEAT: New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack
Da Tech Guy: The Fundamentals, also, Very Old Fruitcake
Don Surber: Palin Wins A Battle In Her War On The NYT
Dustbury: Forget Your Frickin’ Network
The Geller Report: Croatian Priest Explains “Islam Is Worse Evil Than Naziism”
Hogewash: Blognet, also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Joe For America: Democrats Fighting Over Party’s Stance On Abortion – Is Pro-Life Side Winning?
JustOneMinute: Marketing Genius – Building An Invisible Wall
Power Line: More On The Leftist Judge Who Approved Mueller’s Grand Jury, also, Coming – Lilla-Livered Liberalism?
Shark Tank: The Most Asinine Argument For Abortion In The History Of Mankind, also, Rick Scott’s Bilingual Opposition To Venezuela’s Maduro Regime
Shot In The Dark: While We Wait For That “Tidal Wave Of Right Wing Terror”
STUMP: Editing The James Damore Google Diversity Memo – Improve The Summary And Focus (With GIFs!)
The Jawa Report: Where’s Dr. Rusty? At Last, Contact! Edition, also, Bombs Away!
The Political Hat: The Transgender Agenda
This Ain’t Hell: Montana Phony Coastie ID’d, also, China Warns On North Korea
Weasel Zippers: First Female SEAL Officer Candidate Quits After A Week, also, Newsweek Loses Shit Over Trump Women Wearing High Heels, also also Far Left’s New Idiotic Idea – Stop Economic Growth
Mark Steyn: Liberty & Immigration, also, Who’s The Crazy?

Today’s Digital Deals
Amazon Warehouse Deals

Category: Linkagery

Dadsplaining for @cynthiablee: Women, Victimhood and the #Google Memo

Posted on | August 11, 2017 | 1 Comment

Dear Professor Lee:
Your article (“I’m a woman in computer science. Let me ladysplain the Google memo to you”) is very interesting and well-argued, and far be it from me to question your professional qualifications or your experiential authority. For a woman to say, “This is what it’s like for me as a woman in situation X” — whether the situation is childbirth or being catcalled on the streets — puts any man at a disadvantage, if he wishes to criticize whatever argument is based on such distinctly female experiences. In this sense, the feminist slogan “the personal is political” becomes a trump card in the deck, so that as soon as a woman throws it onto the table, a wise man walks away from the game. Perhaps you see why this problem is directly related to James Damore’s now-legendary Google memo.

Ceding that I know nothing of working conditions at Google or elsewhere in Silicon Valley, and most certainly cannot speak for the experiences of women in high-tech careers, nevertheless there are general points in your argument which need to be critically examined, e.g.:

It’s important to appreciate the background of endless skepticism that every woman in tech faces, and the resulting exhaustion we feel as the legitimacy of our presence is constantly questioned.

Notice my emphasis on your use of the word “feel” here. My own feelings have been hurt a thousand times in the course of my career, and I might complain of “exhaustion” at annoying patterns of behavior I’ve encountered in the workplace, and the bottom line is this: Nobody cares.

Although I have done a great many different jobs in my life, no one has ever hired me for the job of Director of Emotional Empathy. And while I have often worked in diverse environments, it was never my job to be Token White Male, hired to comply with an implicit quota.

Here again, Professor Lee, you can perceive the relevance of my point to the situation at Google, a company that recently won a court decision in a federal Labor Department investigation of the alleged “gender gap” in its personnel policies. Every male employee at Google must be aware that the company has been under pressure to prove that its policies are fair to women. The company has spent vast sums to hire lawyers to defend itself against the accusation of sexism, and must consider the potential of even greater costs for further litigation. Ergo, woe be unto any male employee at Google who doesn’t watch his step around The Woman Issue.

Let me now quote your argument more extensively, Professor Lee:

If, as the manifesto’s defenders claim, the population averages do not have anything to say about individual Googlers, who are all exceptional, then why is Google the subject of the manifesto’s arguments at all? What do averages have to do with hiring practices at a company that famously hires fewer than one percent of applicants? In the name of the rational empiricism and quantitative rigor that the manifesto holds so dear, shouldn’t we insist that it only cite studies that specifically speak to the tails of the distribution — to the actual pool of women Google draws from?
For example, we could look to the percentage of women majoring in computer science at highly selective colleges and universities. Women currently make up about 30 percent of the computer science majors at Stanford University, one key source of Google’s elite workforce. Harvey Mudd College, another elite program, has seen its numbers grow steadily for many years, and is currently at about 50 percent women in their computer science department.
Yet Google’s workforce is just 19 percent female. So even if we imagine for a moment that the manifesto is correct and there is some biological ceiling on the percentage of women who will be suited to work at Google — less than 50 percent of their workforce — isn’t it the case that Google, and tech generally, is almost certainly not yet hitting that ceiling?

Isn’t it obvious, Professor Lee, that statistics about the number of women currently enrolled in computer science programs do not tell us anything about previous discrimination in Google’s personnel policies? That is to say, when Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin (both male, incidentally) in 1998, they recruited employees from the pool of tech workers then available, most of whom were likewise male. There was no widespread K-12 educational crusade to teach STEM to girls in 1998 and so, as the Google workforce grew, the company necessarily acquired a disproportionate male-to-female ratio of employees. Even if the company had, five or 10 years ago, consciously begun recruiting female employees to remedy this “gender gap,” and even if its current policies were entirely gender-blind, there would still be a residual disproportion in numbers, inherited from those early days when the company was just Larry and Sergey hiring buddies they knew in Silicon Valley.

You see, Professor Lee, that we need not use anthropological arguments about male-female differences to understand this. It’s just common sense, supplemented with a bit of basic economics. And now, to counter your playing of The Gender Card — telling us how women in tech feel about male skepticism toward their qualifications — permit me to throw into this game The Dad Card. Raising children (and I’ve got six of them, ages 14 to 28) is an experience that is quite educational, and until you’ve accomplished this task successfully, you are deficient in certain knowledge that can be learned in no other way than by experience.

“It’s not fair!”

Every parent must learn how to deal with this childish complaint. You have made a decision, denying the child something he desires, or requiring him to do something he doesn’t want to do, and he responds by calling into question the justice of your parental authority.

Well, on what basis is a 5-year-old qualified to sit in judgment of the parent? If Mom says he can’t go swimming until he picks up all the Lego blocks on his bedroom floor, he must either comply with her decision or else forfeit his trip to the swimming pool. “It’s not fair!” he will complain, when the time arrives for the trip to the pool and Mom, finding the Legos still scattered on the floor, says he can’t go swimming with his friends.

The child will then predictably appeal to Dad, asking him to overrule Mom’s decision. This is when Dad gets the chance to teach the child an important lesson: “Who ever told you life was fair?”

You can go through life sulking, pouting and whining like a frustrated toddler, or you can grow up and become a responsible adult.

Everybody’s running around claiming to be a victim of social injustice — e.g., women are oppressed by “Eurocentric beauty standards” — which I consider to be evidence that parents have failed to do their basic job of teaching children to endure hardship without complaint.

If you sincerely believe your employer is treating you unfairly, quit. Go find another job somewhere else, but whatever you do, don’t sit around whining about your grievances, which will only have the effect of undermining the morale of your co-workers. Nor would I ever advise anyone to file a discrimination complaint against an employer, because this expands the problem by involving courts or regulatory bureaucrats in the company’s business, which always impairs productivity.

Unfortunately, Professor Lee, James Damore didn’t make these points in his Google memo, and so this unpleasant duty has fallen to me. Could I complain that it’s unfair that my time has been diverted to this task? Perhaps, but almost nobody cares about the value of my time.

Let the reader contemplate the value of the lesson I’ve attempted to teach this Stanford University professor. Ask yourself if any other commentator on the Google controversy has thought to make the points I’ve made. If you think my 1,300-word argument is valuable, you can share it with your friends by linking it on your Facebook page, or sending it by email or Twitter. And if you believe the two hours I’ve spent composing this argument have any value, then a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour would make it worth $14.50 — which you could pay me via PayPal.

Whatever you think is fair compensation, I would be most grateful, but if you decide not to hit the tip jar, don’t worry about me suing you for discrimination. The readers are my bosses in this fee-for-service arrangement, and I try to avoid complaining, because I’d prefer to keep the federal government from interfering in my workplace. What does freedom mean, if we can’t run our own lives without being threatened by whiny misfits who want to sue us because life is unfair? Grow up!

Fr. /v/
John Flynt is fearmongering, capitalizing on Google's self-victimhood after the #GoogleManifesto leak then drops #GamerGate.
Heh. pic.twitter.com/LnpVj0QrUu

— Hom-Ru-Beoulve (@rugliabeoulve2) August 11, 2017

WILL DARWINISM KILL FEMINISM? https://t.co/MCreraiF2c

h/t @BadgerPundit pic.twitter.com/Leb6nCA4Lv

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) August 11, 2017

Category: Economics, Sex Trouble

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | August 11, 2017 | 1 Comment

by Smitty

The knowledge that one has been hoodwinked: they took my cockandballs.
thinker
I sit on a step before a temple ruin. My flesh is become a metaphor for it.
A cautionary tale. One should reject every Progressive utterance.
There. Is. No. Corporate. Guilt. Not your country; not your civilization; not your gender.
Their nonsense caught me in college and lasted as long as the decadent drug debauch.
Liberated from manhood, I can only now reject being a victim, and dedicate my remaining heartbeats to opposing Progressive evil wherever it seeks to corrode and destroy that which is good, true, and lasting.
—
Picture via Darleen

Category: Friday Fiction

In The Mailbox: 08.10.17

Posted on | August 10, 2017 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 08.10.17

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
First Street Journal: Shirking Responsibility
EBL: Snakes On A Plane – Clinton, Lynch, And Comey
Twitchy: Colion Noir Accused Of Being NRA’s “Token”, EPIC Backfire Ensues
Louder With Crowder: Socialist Utopia! Venezuela Inflation Hits 248%

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: You Want To Vote For Gay Marriage? What Are You, Crazy?
American Power: Thanks To Democrats, President Trump Facing An Increasingly Dangerous North Korea, also, Robert O’Connell, The Ghosts Of Cannae
American Thinker: Venezuela’s Chaos Is The Logical End Of Democrats’ Vision For America
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Rhinoceros News
BattleSwarm: Governor Abbott Raises $41 Million, While His Democratic Opponent Owns A Gay Leather Bar
BLACKFIVE: Rhys Bowen, On Her Majesty’s Frightfully Secret Service
Bring The HEAT: News You Didn’t See
Da Tech Guy: Ten Two-Line Thoughts Under The Fedora, also, Report From Louisiana – Another New Orleans Deluge
Don Surber: Remember When Hillary Voters Were Racist?, also, Global Warming To Cause More Solar Eclipses
Dustbury: It’s More Than Just A Keyboard
Fred On Everything: Nuclear-Powered Cars, Al Gore, And More – A Broad-Spectrum Column
The Geller Report: Italian Citizens Fed Up With Muslim Migrants, also, Susan Rice Suggests Trump Tolerate Nuclear Norks
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of the Day, also, LOLSuit VIII News
Joe For America: Suddenly, California Liberals Want A Wall – To Keep The Homeless Away, also, Civil Rights Groups Plan Kaepernick Protest In NYC Because The NFL Is Racist
JustOneMinute: Was The DNC Hack An Inside Job?
Power Line: For Reporters, The Enemy Is Trump, Not North Korea, also, You Read It Here First – NYT Editors Deny Reading Their Own Newspaper
Shark Tank: Carlos Curbelo, The Great Moderate Hope For The GOP
Shot In The Dark: Blowback, also, If The Left Forgets history, Are We Condemned To Repeat It With Them?
STUMP: Cook County Soda Tax – The Current Mess
The Jawa Report: Another Day, Another Terrorist Attack In Eurabia, also, JihadTube Still Hosting Taliban
The Political Hat: Education Today – Ignorance, Wokeness, And Spanish-Language Pseudo-Bestiality
This Ain’t Hell: Zoya Bewildered By ACLU Survey – Please Help, also, WaPo Blames Reagan For Norks’ Nukes
Weasel Zippers: Obama Admin Knew About Nork Mini-Nukes In 2013 But Downplayed How Serious It Was, also, ICE Busts 32 Sex Offender Illegals In Sanctuary Area Of Long Island
Megan McArdle: Amazon Could Probably Conquer Drug Stores, Too
Mark Steyn: Pricing In The Nuking Of Cleveland, also, Hugs for Jihadis, Legal Hell For Those Who Oppose Them

Today’s Digital Deals
Amazon Warehouse Deals

Category: Linkagery

Google’s Free Speech* Code

Posted on | August 10, 2017 | Comments Off on Google’s Free Speech* Code

You either have the right to express your opinion or you don’t. Try to explain this to Susan Wojcicki, the head of Google’s YouTube division:

As a company that has long supported free expression, Google obviously stands by the right that employees have to voice, publish or tweet their opinions. But while people may have a right to express their beliefs in public, that does not mean companies cannot take action when women are subjected to comments that perpetuate negative stereotypes about them based on their gender. Every day, companies take action against employees who make unlawful statements about co-workers, or create hostile work environments.

What “unlawful statements” did James Damore make in his memo? What facts about biological and behavioral differences between men and women have now been outlawed? When was this law enacted? Did I miss something? Have words ceased to have any meaning?

Must we now put an asterisk next to the phrase “free speech,” and refer the reader to a fine-print disclaimer specifying the exceptions to the limited “right” of people to “express their beliefs in public”?

Since I’m asking rhetorical questions here, when did Google — ostensibly a profit-seeking capitalist enterprise — start hiring Stalinist commissars to enforce political conformity among its employees?

Speaking of profit-seeking capitalist enterprise, have you hit the tip jar lately? Just $5 or $10 would be appreciated, and it’s a small price to pay to encourage a notorious Thought Criminal who routinely writes stuff that would be enough to get anybody fired from Google.

MEN AND WOMEN ARE DIFFERENT!

(If any @Google employees RT this, you're fired.)

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) August 10, 2017

Category: Sex Trouble

SJWs Attacking Lesbian @ArielleScarcell for . . . Well, Being a Lesbian, Really

Posted on | August 10, 2017 | 3 Comments

“In the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell, the Thought Police (Thinkpol in Newspeak) are the secret police of the superstate, Oceania, who are charged with uncovering and punishing ‘thoughtcrime’ and thought-criminals. The Thinkpol use psychological methods and omnipresent surveillance (e.g. telescreens) to search, find, monitor, and arrest citizens of Oceania who would challenge the status quo — the authority of the Party and of Big Brother — even if only with a thought.”
— Wikipedia

The totalitarian insanity of Third Wave “queer feminism” has now escalated to hitherto unprecedented levels. Popular lesbian YouTube personality Arielle Scarcelli (@ArielleScarcell on Twitter) committed the ThoughtCrime of saying that the way she knew she was gay was that she liked . . . uh, female anatomy.

According to the social justice warrior (SJW) crowd, lesbians are not allowed to say this, because it’s transphobia. Whereas SJWs are generally OK with anybody who hates heterosexual men, all a guy’s gotta do is wear a dress and lipstick and suddenly he ceases to be a demonized enemy and becomes a sainted victim, like Nicholas “Sarah” Nyberg or Zachary Antolak a/k/a “Zinnia Jones.” Being transgender puts you at the apex of the SJW Hierarchy of Victimhood, and calling yourself a “queer, trans, nonbinary lesbian” means women are obligated to have sex with you because social justice. (The Riley Dennis Rule.)

Crazy? Yeah, but the lunatics running the “queer feminist” asylum make the rules and this means lesbians are not allowed to speak honestly about their lack of enthusiasm for men in dresses, and the usual SJW suspects who ganged up against Laci Green for dating Chris Maldonado are now ganging up against Arielle Scarcelli because of this video:

“The whole trans community went up in flames telling me I was transphobic and that I was a sexist also for degrading women and making women just about their body parts.” (3:45)

Do I personally approve of Arielle Scarcelli’s preferences? Or do I agree with everything Arielle Scarcelli has ever said? No, but it’s a free country and I can’t boss her around or prohibit her from speaking in her own defense. Our freedom to disagree with each other is just about as basic as it gets, and labeling disagreement “hate” — which is what the SJWs are doing to Arielle Scarcelli — is a threat to this freedom.

Some of my conservative friends might say, “Who cares? Let the LGBT coalition destroy itself in a circular firing squad. Serves ’em right!” The problem with that reaction is that once the SJW mobs destroy Arielle Scarcelli for being “transphobic,” they’re not going to stop there. No, next they’re going to find another target, and then another and another and another. It’s like 1938 and who cares about the Sudetenland? Except once you give Hitler that, he’s going to take the rest of Czechoslovakia next, and then it’s good-bye, Poland! SJWs are totalitarians, and as long as you keep retreating, they’ll keep advancing. You can’t let them nibble away at the edges of the First Amendment, just because the person they’re trying to silence today isn’t somebody you like. Today, they’re going after a lesbian, but tomorrow they’ll be trying to silence a Catholic or a Baptist or just somebody who cares enough about scientific truth to say to Zinnia Jones, “Hey, you’ve got a penis and that’s not female.”

Seriously, what are the SJWs saying about Arielle Scarcelli that they haven’t used to condemn heterosexual men for being heterosexual? She was accused of “objectifying” women because she was attracted to their, uh, female anatomy. As John Stossel would say, “Give me a break!”

“The Compulsory Approval Doctrine”?—?@PatriarchTree https://t.co/kl8MzgA69S pic.twitter.com/fCxscFepty

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) August 10, 2017

Libertarian friends, please pay attention to the SJW hate-mob attacking @ArielleScarcell. This "social justice" totalitarianism is insane.

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) August 10, 2017

Are you a responsible adult, or are you a helpless victim? The SJW mob habitually brandish their alleged victimhood like a badge of honor, accusing anyone who criticizes them of “hate.” This tactic is used to silence and/or marginalize dissenters from the SJW narrative. It expresses the vindictive mentality of those who seek to punish bakers and florists for refusing to participate in same-sex weddings. This is the intolerant spirit that got James Damore fired from Google. It is hostile to truth and antithetical to personal liberty. Arielle Scarcelli had the temerity to dissent from the SJW narrative, to mock their bizarre belief system, and for this she is being accused of “hate.”

SJWs have ceased to be a joke and have become a threat to our survival as a free society. Like I keep saying: People need to wake the hell up.