Down with Meritocracy; Up with Diversity

Lately we have not heard very much talk about how we are going to compete against China in the world markets. We have not been talking about how we are going to compete in technological innovation, in manufacturing and in industry. One reason is: we believe that we are going to sue them into submission.

Onshoring manufacturing is a wonderful idea, but we must ask ourselves the difficult question: do we have the brainpower to do the job? Do American workers know enough to run factories? Do we have enough engineers and scientists to compete effectively against a nation that has been minting millions of them, year after year.

Well, stop your worrying. We might not have the best and the brightest. We might not have the most capable minds, but we have diversity. Or, at least we are going to have a lot more of it. 

Consider this on the easiest level. If you have a classroom filled with the brightest students you can stretch the limits. You can teach them the most advanced subjects and you will know that they can keep up. You will be producing groups of students who can master advanced math and engineering skills, and who will thus be capable of bringing manufacturing home to the USA.

But, if you have a diverse class where some of the students are significantly better than others, you will be obliged to dumb down the learning process, so that the lesser minds do not get completely lost. If half of your class does not know algebra, you are not going to be teaching calculus. The price will be that the best minds will not be challenged and will not achieve their best.

So, it’s all about affirmative action, and making America’s best universities look like America. We will be admitting students who cannot do advanced work in STEM subjects and will be hiring faculty who cannot teach it anyway.

As a result of the insurrection currently being played out on our streets, we will be seeing, Steven Hayward explains (via Maggie’s Farm):

... an expansion of explicit race-conscious affirmative action admissions and hiring.

We are competing against a viciously meritocratic educational system. And we have convinced ourselves that we need to scrap meritocracy. 

Twas not always thus:

The irony here is that the idea of meritocracy, and the development of achievement tests like the SAT, were the invention of liberals to open up university admissions to talented students and end the days of universities (especially elite ones like Harvard and Yale) being mostly finishing schools for the wealthy and connected elite.

But now, thanks to a better work ethic, Asian-Americans are profiting the most from their white privilege. The same was said in the past about Jews:

But the problem for the left is that at Berkeley, Harvard, and other elite universities, not enough officially sanctioned minorities (meaning blacks and hispanics) score well enough to qualify for admission on a straight-up basis, while too many Asians (who are increasingly considered “white” by the identity-mongers) score so highly on the SATs that Harvard, Yale, UC Berkeley, and other elite universities could fill perhaps 40 percent of their freshman classes right now with Asians. UCLA has for a while now been said to be the “University of Caucasians Lost among Asians.”

Obviously, schools that choose to ignore the SAT and ACT test scores, replacing them with fuzzy qualities like personality, are going to be dumbing themselves down. Or else, they are going to have separate programs for students who major in STEM subjects. Separate but unequal. 

As you know parents of Chinese students have sued Harvard because their children were disadvantaged because of their race. The parents lost in district court and are now awaiting a Supreme Court ruling. Hayward believes that these schools, given their respect for the rule of law, will do everything in their power to subvert an eventual loss in the courts:

Meanwhile, there is a torpedo in the water heading for the current “diversity” regime of race-based preferences. I suspect that the drive to jettison the SAT is a pre-emptive move in anticipation of an eventual adverse Supreme Court ruling in the lawsuit over Harvard’s discrimination against Asian applicants. If the regime of “diversity” and affirmative action admission is to survive, colleges will have to come up with a new scheme of “holistic” admission screening to get around the problem of meritocracy. Better to get a head start.

Bringing Education to Minority Children

We all know about the Success Academies, New York City Charter Schools whose pupils excel at learning. At a time when more than a few products of the nation’s school system are out on the streets rioting, looting and pillaging it is not frivolous to look at programs that work. That is, programs that ensure minority children a good education and open the door to a better life. One understands that the skills acquired at rioting and even protesting are not marketable. 

And now we have another crazy educational experiment, being performed in a Bronx Charter School. This school is emphasizing an education in the classics, beginning with Latin. The children are invariably minorities and poor.

In today’s cultural environment, we anxiously await the moment when the thought police come for this school, because the classical authors studied there were all white.

It used to be the case that high school students were encouraged to study Latin, the better to gain an understanding of the English language and of other Romance languages. Nowadays, such an education barely exists even at America’s best universities. If you want a classical education in college you will need to look at Hillsdale College or St. John's College.

Anyway, the experiment in classical education seems to be working well, for the students involved.

The New York Post reports:

A dead language is bringing these Bronx kids to life.

Students at Classical Charter Schools are all taught Latin – and more than a quarter of the network’s kids scored at the highest tier on a recent national exam on the ancient tongue.

“When we were founded nearly 15 years ago, we set out to offer children in the South Bronx something they never had before,” said the network’s founder Lester Long.

“We wanted to offer Latin, giving them a world-class education rooted in the classics. As these exceptional national scores show, we are accomplishing that goal.”

Results from the National Latin Exam, released in May, showed that 34 out of the 120 Bronx Classical students in the 6th, 7th and 8th grade who took the test were recognized for having received a top score.

Eleven in the 6th and 7th grade got a certificate of outstanding achievement, for receiving a score of 36 to 40 out of a possible 40.

In addition to Latin, Bronx Classical kids – who number 1,000 across four schools – are also immersed in subjects that are quickly vanishing from American education, including debate, philosophy, and rhetoric.

While they initially question the devotion of time to a bygone language, network teachers said students soon become absorbed in the distant worlds of Aristotle and Plato.

These children are being given the chance to compete against their peers. And they are doing very well at it. Tell me which part of that offends you.

New York City's Crime Wave

Defund the police and dismantle New York City’s anti-crime unit… and guess what happens. Criminals shoot up the city.

WINS reports:

There have been 112 victims in 83 shootings over a nine-day period ending Saturday, according to police. Most of those shot were expected to survive, but at least six people have died in the past week and others suffered serious or critical injuries. 

The NYPD on Sunday released this info detailing the nine-day stretch of shootings.

Friday, 6/19 - 8 shooting incidents with 9 victims.

Saturday, 6/20 -18 shooting incidents with 24 victims.

Sunday, 6/21 - 2 shooting incidents with 5 victims.

Monday, 6/22 - 11 shooting incidents with 17 victims.

Tuesday, 6/23 - 10 shooting incidents with 10 victims.

Wednesday, 6/24 - 3 shooting incidents with 5 victims.

Thursday, 6/25 - 5 shooting incidents with 8 victims.

Friday, 06/26 - 9 incidents with 10 victims.

Saturday, 06/27 - 17 incidents with 24 victims.

Who Is Robin DiAngelo and Why Does Anyone Care?

If you haven’t heard of Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility, consider yourself blessed. It’s a huge best seller and DiAngelo is in great demand as an anti-racism consultant.

Consider this book and the success it has garnered a sign of American decline. When they write about the decline and fall of the American empire, this book might even deserve a chapter.

Anyway, one of our favorite liberal writers-- one of the few who has unimpeachable integrity-- Matt Taibbi has explained what the book is about. Thus, he saves us all the trouble of reading it-- a good thing, since it is apparently borderline illiterate. And Taibbi also takes down the toxic culture that the book and others like it are producing.

What does DiAngelo have to say? She says that it’s all about race, that we are all about race, that the content of our character counts less than our racial composition. Naturally, this would make us wonder about people who are biracial or triracial, but we are invited to ignore that.

Taibbi explains that defining people solely by their race is: Hitlerian. Considering how much time and effort the denizens of the American left have spent denouncing Donald Trump and other Republicans as Nazis, we are delighted to see the real Nazis stand up. Those who believe that your race defines you, over and against anything else, are the true heirs to the Third Reich.

Taibbi explains:

DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category.

It is guilt by association, and the greater part of the guilt is placed on white people, because of their race:

If your category is “white,” bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy (“Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities… Whiteness has always been predicated on blackness”), which naturally means “a positive white identity is an impossible goal.”

Of course, I do not know what she has to say about Asians, but presumably they count as people of color. As for their being oppressed, no one with a brain would suggest such a thing. Exception given to the fact that when Asian children try to gain admission into elite universities, their race is held against them. It has something to do with diversity.

DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except “strive to be less white.” To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as “leaving the stress-inducing situation” – is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the “ordeal by water” (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.

For my part, thanks to my barely controlled pedantic streak, I am delighted to see Taibbi take down DiAngelo’s writing-- which is painfully illiterate. Just think, people who have been educated in American schools and colleges do not know bad writing when they see it. They are lapping up a book that is impossibly poorly written.

Taibbi explains:

DiAngelo’s writing style is pure pain. The lexicon favored by intersectional theorists of this type is built around the same principles as Orwell’s Newspeak: it banishes ambiguity, nuance, and feeling and structures itself around sterile word pairs, like racist and antiracist, platform and deplatform, center and silence, that reduce all thinking to a series of binary choices. Ironically, Donald Trump does something similar, only with words like “AMAZING!” and “SAD!” that are simultaneously more childish and livelier.

Better yet:

Writers like DiAngelo like to make ugly verbs out of ugly nouns and ugly nouns out of ugly verbs (there are countless permutations on centering and privileging alone). In a world where only a few ideas are considered important, redundancy is encouraged, e.g. “To be less white is to break with white silence and white solidarity, to stop privileging the comfort of white people,” or “Ruth Frankenberg, a premier white scholar in the field of whiteness, describes whiteness as multidimensional…”

As for Martin Luther King’s asking us to judge each other by the content of our character, that is so yesterday. DiAngelo wants us to judge each other by our race:

White Fragility is based upon the idea that human beings are incapable of judging each other by the content of their character, and if people of different races think they are getting along or even loving one another, they probably need immediate antiracism training. This is an important passage because rejection of King’s “dream” of racial harmony — not even as a description of the obviously flawed present, but as the aspirational goal of a better future — has become a central tenet of this brand of antiracist doctrine mainstream press outlets are rushing to embrace.

As for a definitive judgment, I like this one:

White Fragility,... may be the dumbest book ever written. It makes The Art of the Deal read like Anna Karenina.

Democrats have embraced the DiAngelo form of racism baiting, mostly because they believe it to be a political winner:

Democratic Party leaders, pioneers of the costless gesture, have already embraced this performative race politics as a useful tool for disciplining apostates like Bernie Sanders. Bernie took off in presidential politics as a hard-charging crusader against a Wall Street-fattened political establishment, and exited four years later a self-flagellating, defeated old white man who seemed to regret not apologizing more for his third house. Clad in kente cloth scarves, the Democrats who crushed him will burn up CSPAN with homilies on privilege even as they reassure donors they’ll stay away from Medicare for All or the carried interest tax break.

And now, thanks to the leftist anti-racism mania, we are all being encouraged to snitch on each other, as though we were living under the East German Communist Party or in Mao’s China:

People everywhere today are being encouraged to snitch out schoolmates, parents, and colleagues for thoughtcrime. The New York Times wrote a salutary piece about high schoolers scanning social media accounts of peers for evidence of “anti-black racism” to make public, because what can go wrong with encouraging teenagers to start submarining each other’s careers before they’ve even finished growing?

“People who go to college end up becoming racist lawyers and doctors. I don’t want people like that to keep getting jobs,” one 16 year-old said. “Someone ... started a Google doc of racists and their info for us to ruin their lives… I love twitter,” wrote a different person, adding cheery emojis.

A bizarre echo of North Korea’s “three generations of punishment” doctrine could be seen in the boycotts of Holy Land grocery, a well-known hummus maker in Minneapolis. In recent weeks it’s been abandoned by clients and seen its lease pulled because of racist tweets made by the CEO’s 14 year-old daughter eight years ago.

Parents calling out their kids is also in vogue. In Slate, “Making a Mountain Out of a Molehill” wrote to advice columnist Michelle Herman in a letter headlined, “I think I’ve screwed up the way my kids think about race.” The problem, the aggrieved parent noted, was that his/her sons had gone to a diverse school, and their “closest friends are still a mix of black, Hispanic, and white kids,” which to them was natural. The parent worried when one son was asked to fill out an application for a potential college roommate and expressed annoyance at having to specify race, because “I don’t care about race.”

Clearly, a situation needing fixing! The parent asked if someone who didn’t care about race was “just as racist as someone who only has white friends” and asked if it was “too late” to do anything. No fear, Herman wrote: it’s never too late for kids like yours to educate themselves. To help, she linked to a program of materials designed for just that purpose, a “Lesson Plan for Being An Ally,” that included a month of readings of… White Fragility. Hopefully that kid with the Black and Hispanic friends can be cured!

In truth, there is nothing new about this. We saw it in the attacks on Brett Kavanaugh, though there it remained under something like control. And people who associated with Donald Trump have been attacked and vilified. That it should have extended into the family and the schools and the media should not be a large surprise.

So, the country is going stark raving mad. It will take more than therapy to cure this malady: 

At a time of catastrophe and national despair, when conservative nationalism is on the rise and violent confrontation on the streets is becoming commonplace, it’s extremely suspicious that the books politicians, the press, university administrators, and corporate consultants alike are asking us to read are urging us to put race even more at the center of our identities, and fetishize the unbridgeable nature of our differences. Meanwhile books like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird, which are both beautiful and actually anti-racist, have been banned, for containing the “N-word.” (White Fragility contains it too, by the way). It’s almost like someone thinks there’s a benefit to keeping people divided.

Constant Criticism Kills

Here’s some news you can use. Or not.

As you know, therapy culture mavens are constantly and irritatingly telling you to express your feelings, openly, honestly and shamelessly. If something someone does irritates you, let them know. It is good to criticize, complain, carp, nag and otherwise find fault with your mate or even your partner. Presumably it is going to help them to self-improve.

As happens with most therapy culture nostrums, this one is bad for your health. Well, not exactly bad for your health, but certainly it is bad for the health of the poor sap you are complaining about all the time. Not only is it bad for his health; it is likely to kill him. It’s called, death by a thousand cuts.

One does not know, from the way the report is summarized in The Daily Mail which spouse is more likely to criticize the other. One suspects that those of the female persuasion are more likely to find fault. After all, what good was all that feminism if it did not teach women how to tear down patriarchal pretense.

So, better not to share your brilliant analysis of your mate’s faults. Remember that Aristotle said that friends see the best in their friends. Assuming that your mate still counts as a friend, try seeing his or her best, and ignoring his or her faults. The more you carp on his or her faults the more likely he or she will die, sooner. Besides, if he or she has so many faults, what kind of fool would marry him or her.

The Daily Mail reports:

It’s not always easy to bite your tongue in a long-term relationship. But pointing out your other half’s faults could send them to an early grave, a study suggests.

It found older people who reported higher levels of criticism in their partnerships were significantly more likely to die within the following five years.

In fact, those who were criticised the most were more than twice as likely to be dead when researchers followed up with them half a decade later than those who were criticised the least.

The effect was the same for men and women alike, and independent of factors such as whether a person had other close family or friends. Lead author Professor Jamila Bookwala said frequent criticism can put damaging stress on the body.

How was the study conducted?

They were asked about their relationships, including how often they felt their partner criticised them. Answers were given on a three-point sliding scale – with one meaning ‘hardly ever or never’, two meaning ‘some of the time’, and three meaning ‘often’. With every unit increase in the response scale, the risk of the person being dead when researchers followed up increased significantly.

‘So those who indicated they were criticised “often” had a 44 per cent higher risk of being deceased five years later compared with those who indicated they were criticised “some of the time” and the same is true when comparing those who said they were “hardly ever or never” criticised and those who were criticised sometimes,’ said Professor Bookwala.

Of course, now that you know this, it might also provide you with a new weapon, to use against your hapless spouse. On the other hand, your hapless spouse, facing a barrage of criticism, might very well choose to fight back or to walk away.

While we are on the point, consider the fact that our current president has been under direct attack, via criticism, harassment and verbal assault, every day since he won the election, almost on an hourly basis. Yet, none dare call it sedition. Clearly, he has chosen to fight back, which is not necessarily a bad approach. But still, what effect do you think that this is having on his ability to do his job? 

Teletherapy

Will therapy, especially the psychoanalytic variant, be one of the casualties of the pandemic?

Adam Gopnik does not quite say it, but one may reasonably draw the conclusion from his excellent survey of therapy in the age of Covid-19. Whatever conclusion you draw, Gopnik’s survey of the state of today’s therapy is clear and comprehensive, well worth a read.

Early in his essay Gopnik lights on the most salient point: most therapy is basically theatre. It is about dramatizing problems, not working on them or solving them. It is about learning to tell stories in an entertaining fashion, not resolving difficulties and learning how better to navigate the shoals of everyday life. If you were wondering why so many New Yorkers are Drama Queens here is the answer:

First, the new reality has altered the theatrics of therapy in ways that make both sides of the encounter aware of how much of psychotherapy is theatre to begin with. 

Apparently, the notion of a reciprocal exchange of thoughts, feelings and information has never been part of the therapy playbook. Nor is it at play in the theatre.

With the analyst sitting behind the patient, no reciprocity was possible or even desired. With one person doing all the talking, it is quickly going to feel like a dramatic performance. Looking someone in the eye, interaction face to face, these were proscribed by Freud-- apparently, by his admission, because he didn’t like to be looked at.

In the new age of teletherapy therapists are now being traumatized by the knowledge that their patients can actually look at them. Yikes.

Gopnik explains:

Like other therapists, the first thing that she mentions is not how differently she now sees her patients but how newly conscious she is of them seeing her.

Psychoanalysts in particular are very conscious of being in character, of playing a part. Apparently they trained in bad method acting class, and feel compelled to hide their faces and to mask their emotions.

“I spent a day doing my work and I wasn’t wearing shoes,” the analyst Mark Gerald admits. But, he realized, “if you’re a psychoanalyst you know that whatever you are wearing or not wearing is somehow playing a part. We’re the people who believe in the power of the invisible parts of the iceberg. Anyway, some of my patients are actually staying on the couch while they’re on the phone. It was part of their commitment. So I put back on my shoes. Shoes were a way of honoring the work.”

Staying on the couch makes you supine. Is that the best position from which to engage meaningful work? Besides, it is generally considered a sign of weak character.

Gerald, who is also a photographer, is an expert on the significance of the empty offices. Last year, he published a book of photographs documenting analysts’ offices across the world. Hovering around his photographs is the possibility that the psychoanalytic imperium, already faltering in New York under the twin pressures of skeptical insurance companies and changing intellectual fashion, may, in the face of the pandemic, be coming to an end—with all those offices soon to be abandoned, like forgotten Egyptian tombs.

Obviously, these therapists are not used to being looked at. They have never had face.They do not give their patients face. So, the whole process becomes extremely awkward. Precious few occupations allow this level of disrespect:

In remote therapy sessions, with the loss of familiarly structured therapeutic spaces, a kind of staring contest takes place. Patients may be startled to see a therapist in her home, but it’s nothing compared with the surprise therapists sometimes feel at seeing how their patients actually live.

And this:

Leonard Groopman, a psychiatrist affiliated with Weill Cornell, puts it bluntly: “You’re full frontal now for forty-five minutes. It adds hysteria to an already hysterical situation.”

Of course, canny analysts understand that Freudian practice began with hysteria. Despite the fact that Freud’s accounts of his treatment of hysterics were a fraud. Despite the fact that the social contagion of hysteria disappeared with the early years of the twentieth century, psychoanalysts cling to it, like a transitional object from their childhood.

Therapists are also fascinated to see their patients’ faces.

Because I can see their faces closer up, there’s an intensity. I can see the tears; I can hear the cracks in the voices. There’s something about seeing anxiety not in person that’s very strong and moving. It’s almost like interviewing kidnap victims or hostages. It’s also much harder to do a session on video—partly because I hate looking at myself, and I’ve gotta look at that all day. You have a mask of invisibility that you impose on yourself, and suddenly you’re seeing yourself seeing your patient, and it’s disconcerting, to say the least. ‘I look like that?’ You imagine an aura of empathy, and what you see is more like indifference shading into worry.”

Trust me, there is nothing intrinsically disconcerting at looking people in the eye. If these therapists think that it is, perhaps they need more therapy.

As it happens, some therapists are abandoning the therapy model for a more practical and useful coaching model:

Jaime Grodzicki, a psychiatrist who specializes in addiction, says that pandemic conditions have led him to combine a classic “analytic” model with a “coaching” model: he is available to his patients whenever they need him, and aims to talk them through daily crises rather than to guide them through a long-term program of insight. “For a population who self-medicate through anxiety, having the anxiety and the availability of the substance is a dangerous combination,” he says, noting that the wine-and-spirits stores of New York remain open, and many deliver.

Social Worker Warriors

Now that the Minneapolis City Council has voted to disband the police department, and to replace police officers with social workers, and now that New York City Mayor Comrade de Blasio promises to defund his police department, the Babylon Bee has courageously stepped forth to propose the next step:

Disband the Navy SEALs. Are all races represented proportionally in the SEALs. We imagine that they are not. Besides, SEALs are taught to kill, and we can’t have that.

In place of the uber-tough SEALs, we will now send social workers to deal with terrorists. We will send a band of wide-eyed bushy-tailed female social workers into terrorist encampments. They will ask the terrorists to explore their feelings.

There, that will end terrorism.

The Babylon Bee has this report:

—The Navy SEALs are being disbanded and replaced with a new branch of the military: The United States Social Workers.

The social workers will be dropped into terrorist hideouts to talk with militants about their feelings and defuse the situation. The move was made as a push against police work and firearms continues across the nation. As people continue to call on police departments to be defunded, the next logical target was the Navy SEALs.

"I can tell that you're angry at America -- do you want to talk about that?" one social worker asked after she was dropped off at a terrorist compound in Afghanistan. The terrorist replied by firing his AK-47 into the air.

"Interesting!" she said, scribbling down notes. "Tell me about your relationship with your father."

No social workers have returned from their deployments yet, but when they do, they will file a report and schedule a follow-up visit a month or so later.

Of course, what happens when the terrorists decide that these social workers are a gift from Allah-- for other than therapeutic purposes. Is that why no social workers have returned from deployment?

Linda Sarsour's Anti-Semitism

She’s back. If she ever went away at all, radical Palestinian terrorism sympathizer and all-around anti-Semite, Linda Sarsour is back. Most recently, Sarsour was associated with the Bernie Sanders campaign. She helped organize the Women’s March, though she later was forced to resign from it. She helped organize Black Lives Matter in its early days and was lauded by the Obama White House as a “champion of change” in 2012.

So, if you were looking for a giant carbuncle of leftist anti-Semitism, not just on the fringes, but within the Democratic Party, you cannot do better than Linda Sarsour.

So, two weeks ago, when Sarsour organized a rally to celebrate the liberation of slaves on Juneteenth, lo and behold, Jews were told that they were not welcome. In her terms, Zionists and police officers were excluded for being part of the oppressor class.

The Algemeiner reports:

It was an event to celebrate freedom and protest ongoing bigotry and discrimination.

But the group Muslims4Abolition openly engaged in bigotry and discrimination in promoting its Juneteenth rally last Friday in New York. The event, an advertisement made clear, was “open to all, minus cops & Zionists.”

Juneteenth marks a day in American history that celebrates the freedom of the last slaves, more than two years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation (because slaves were still being kept in parts of the country).

It should surprise no one that an event which specifically excludes Zionists — those who believe in a homeland for the Jewish people — would draw support from Linda Sarsour and her organization MPower Change.

It isn’t as though any of this should be news. And yet, it certainly did not bother the Bernie Sanders campaign. Or the Squad that is currently taking over the Democratic Party.

In particular, consider this:

She has repeatedly spread a blood libel linking US law enforcement personnel training in Israel to the shooting of unarmed black people in America.

“If you believe in the idea of ending police brutality and the misconduct of law enforcement officers across the country,” she told the Islamic Society of North America’s 2018 convention, “then you do not support an organization that takes police officers from America, funds their trips, takes them to Israel so they can be trained by the Israeli police and military, and then they come back here and do what? Stop and frisk, killing unarmed black people across the country.”

There’s more in the article. The question now is what Joe Biden thinks of Linda Sarsour. We know what the Obama administration thought of her. We know that Bernie Sanders was not bothered by her anti-Semitic rants. Now, someone should ask Joe Biden whether he still thinks that she is a champion for change.