Wednesday Potpourri

First, I have made the point before, but it is good to find an expert who sustains it:

According to psychiatrist and body language expert Carol Lieberman, Kamala Harris suffers from "imposter syndrome," a psychological condition where a person lacks confidence in their competence and feels they don't deserve to succeed.

Second, Kamala Harris had a teleprompter for her interview with Oprah. That explains it all.

Third, yesterday Joe Biden came to my neighborhood to announce to the world that his administration had been a rousing success.

If you believe that, you will believe anything.

At the same time Walter Russell Mead was explaining in the Wall Street Journal that Biden had failed miserably at Middle East diplomacy. The Biden administration will surely go down as one of the most inept and incompetent in recent memory.

As tensions escalate and bombs fall across the Middle East, President Biden’s emissaries continue to urge all parties to calm down and dial back the violence. No one is listening, and this brings us to the central paradox of a troubled presidency stumbling toward an inglorious close. Mr. Biden may love diplomacy, but diplomacy doesn’t love him back.

No administration in American history has been as committed to Middle East diplomacy as this one. Yet have an administration’s diplomats ever had less success? Mr. Biden tried and failed to get Iran back into a nuclear agreement with the U.S. He tried and failed to get a new Israeli-Palestinian dialogue on track. He tried and failed to stop the civil war in Sudan. He tried and failed to get Saudi Arabia to open formal diplomatic relations with Israel. He tried to settle the war in Yemen through diplomacy, and when that failed and the Houthis began attacking shipping in the Red Sea, the ever-undaunted president sought a diplomatic solution to that problem too. He failed again.

Get the picture.

By now, no one in the region listens to the Biden team. Its greatest error was its wish to restore the Iran Nuclear Deal, and thus to insist on a moral equivalence between the two sides in the current conflicts.

Fourth, the current propaganda war against disinformation and misinformation is an invitation to tyranny. As Thomas Sowell once opined, who is to decide what is fact and what is fiction.

Victor Davis Hanson returns to the subject:

One of the most preposterous recent trends has been the political use of supposed expert letters and declarations of support from so-called “authorities.”

These pretentious testimonies of purported professionalism are different from the usual inane candidate endorsements from celebrities and politicos.

Instead, they are used by politicians to impress and persuade the public to follow the “expertise,” “science,” or “authorities” to support all sorts of injurious initiatives and policies—of dubious value and otherwise without much political support.

Think of all the health experts who collectively swore to us that the COVID mRNA vaccinations would give us ironclad and lasting protection from being either infectious or infected and were without any side effects.

Other “authorities” assured us the first nationwide lockdown in U.S. history would stop COVID without hurting the social or economic life of the country.

Ditto testimonies about the pangolin-bat origins of COVID or the authenticity of the bogus Steele dossier.

Do we still remember the 1,200 healthcare “professionals” who in June 2020 told us that hitting the streets in mass numbers to protest during the post-George Floyd riots was a legitimate exemption from their own prior insistence on a complete nationwide quarantine? 

And also,

Would that such suddenly tight-fisted, inflation-hawk Nobel laureates had earlier warned us of their concerns in 2021, before the inevitable Biden inflation emasculated the middle class.

In other words, when Biden wished to print trillions of dollars, partisan Nobel Prize winners in advance discounted the crippling hyperinflation that followed. But now, given their dislike of Trump, they reversed course, warning the country that Trump’s likely deficit spending was “irresponsible.”

As for the state of the world, Hanson explains that we should ignore the entreaties of the recent batch of former government employees, vouching for Kamala’s foreign policy competence….

No matter. Our Republican experts nevertheless assure us that Trump “is unfit to serve again as President, or indeed in any office of public trust,” while Harris, they insist, has “consistently championed the rule of law, democracy, and our constitutional principles.”

In such Orwellian language, destroying the border and federal immigration law with it, helping to unleash an unprecedented lawfare at election time to ruin a presidential rival, or urging court packing, an end to the electoral college and the senate filibuster are all championing “the rule of law, democracy, and our constitutional principles.”

Fifth, as for crime, it is obviously difficult to find accurate statistics. The FBI counts crimes, but it ignores the crime rates in certain large blue cities.

The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed that purports to be more accurate.

Left-leaning commentators and advocates have insisted over the past year that crime rates are falling. ABC’s David Muir asserted so while rebutting Donald Trump during the recent presidential debate. The nation’s largest crime survey says otherwise: Crime rates haven’t been falling, and urban crime is far worse than it was in the pre-George Floyd era.

The new findings were released this month by the National Crime Victimization Survey. Run by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and administered by the Census Bureau, the NCVS dates to the Nixon administration and is one of the largest federal surveys on any topic. It asks some 230,000 U.S. residents annually whether they’ve been the victims of crimes. It then asks about the nature of the crime, whether it was reported to the police, the demographics of the perpetrator and other particulars.

The NCVS report for 2023 finds no statistically significant evidence that violent crime or property crime is dropping in America. Excluding simple assault—the type of violent crime least likely to be charged as a felony—the violent crime rate in 2023 was 19% higher than in 2019, the last year before the defund-the-police movement swept the country.

But crime hasn’t risen equally across the nation. America’s recent crime spike has been concentrated in urban areas. These are the areas in which leftist prosecutors have gained the strongest footholds, where police have been the most heavily scrutinized, and where lax enforcement and prosecution have become common.

The results aren’t pretty. According to the NCVS, the urban violent-crime rate increased 40% from 2019 to 2023. Excluding simple assault, the urban violent-crime rate rose 54% over that span. From 2022 to 2023, the urban violent-crime rate didn’t change to a statistically significant degree, so these higher crime rates appear to be the new norm in America’s cities.

The urban property-crime rate is also getting worse. It rose from 176.1 victimizations per 1,000 households in 2022 to 192.3 in 2023. That’s part of a 26% increase in the urban property-crime rate since 2019. These numbers exclude rampant shoplifting, since the NCVS is a survey of households and not of businesses.

In contrast, violent-crime rates in suburban and rural areas have been essentially unchanged since 2019. In suburban areas in 2019, there were 22.3 violent victimizations per 1,000 persons 12 or older, compared with 23.3 in 2023—a statistically insignificant change. In rural areas, the rate was 16.3 in 2019 and 15.3 in 2023—again, not a statistically significant change. Our recent crime spike is essentially limited to cities.

Sixth, a few words from JP Morgan Chase CEO, Jamie Dimon:

If you do not control the borders, you are going to destroy our country... Now that they are sending migrants into New York... all my super liberal friends realize what a problem it is.

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Hamas Exposed

Hamas is not going it alone. The terrorist organization does not merely elicit something like support from the Biden administration. It has managed to take over the minds of far too many American students. 

Radical students have found in Hamas a new cause. They want to free Palestine, or so they say, even though they mean Juderein, which means, free of Jews.

In truth, Gaza has long been free of Jews, but that does not suffice Hamas. It wants to steal what the Jews have built. If not steal, destroy.

In that way they will not feel like perpetual losers. 

We have on occasion remarked on the bitter irony of gays manifesting for Hamas. They call themselves Queers for Palestine. They do not quite understand that if they fly off to Gaza or the West Bank and declare themselves to be proud homosexuals, they will be executed for having committed a capital crime.

As for the way Hamas treats women, glad you asked. Hamas practices honor killings, and condones marital rape and wife beating. How does it happen that dopey feminists embrace this.

When we think about American college students, we are obviously dealing with a cohort suffering from extreme intellectual deficiencies. Hamas has been more than happy to exploit this weakness. The old phrase was-- useful idiots. Funnily enough, it still pertains.

Now, Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has reported a story first offered by a German publication called Bild. The story shows the thinking of the leaders of Hamas, their battle plan and game plan.

Some have questioned the authenticity of the document. It was apparently not written by Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, but it was likely written by one of his lieutenants. The goal is not peace, but survival as a military force. To return to fighting against Israel.

Bild reports:

Now a previously unknown document from Hamas’s military intelligence service shows how terrorists want to manipulate the international community, torture the hostage families and rearm themselves. Additionally, they do not care about a quick end to the war or the suffering of Palestinian civilians.

The document, in which Hamas explains its negotiating strategy, was discovered on a computer reportedly belonging to the 60-year-old  terrorist leader Yahya Sinwar. He is said to have personally approved the content. The letter dates from spring of 2024 and was made exclusively available to the BILD.

The document explains the Hamas negotiating position. Evidently, Hamas will never accept a two state solution. We have reported as much. Clearly, it wants to destroy the state of Israel:

Hamas lists several key factors to be considered in the negotiations. They is intended to maintain the “ability of our armed forces” to operate against Israel. The Israeli political and military apparatus is to be “exhausted” and international pressure on Israel is to be “increased.”

Hamas is not seeking a quick end to the war which would help the people of Gaza. Quite the opposite: “key conditions [contained] in the agreement should be improved [in Hamas’ favor, added by the author], even if negotiations continue over a longer period of time.” (…)

Although Hamas admits that its “military capacity has been weakened”, it does not believe that a quick end to the fighting is necessary – despite the plight of its population.

As for the hostages, they are being used to manipulate public opinion, by persuading their families that if they surrender to Hamas, Hamas will free their loved ones.

What is particularly perfidious: Hamas abuses the kidnapped hostages in order to improve its negotiating position. The document states openly:

“Continue to exert psychological pressure on the families of the prisoners, both now and in the first phase [of the ceasefire], so that public pressure on the enemy government increases.”

Hamas repeatedly releases videos of the hostages, forcing them to beg for their freedom and criticize their government. After the murder of six Israeli hostages, the terrorists released videos showing the kidnapped Israelis.

It is barbaric psychological torture that has only one aim: to make the relatives of the hostages so desperate that they will do ANYTHING to free their loved ones. Even if that means going against their own government.

Even during the ceasefire, the Palestinian Islamists want to use the hostages to put pressure on Israel. “During negotiations for the second phase [of the ceasefire, added by the BILD], Hamas will allow the Red Cross to visit some of the prisoners as a gesture of goodwill and to convey messages to their relatives.”

The goad, apparently, is to increase the pressure on Israel to extend the ceasefire.

Hamas wants merely to survive, the better to prepare for new battles:

There is talk of a “political maneuver”: Hamas negotiators should propose that “Arab forces be stationed along the eastern and northern borders” with Israel. But these only have one purpose: “The Arab armed forces should serve as a buffer to prevent the enemy from entering Gaza after the war is over until they [Hamas, added by the author] have reorganized their ranks and military capabilities. “

This means that Hamas, backed by Arab armies, wants to prepare for new battles. Israel is supposed to be the scapegoat.

Israel should be made solely responsible for the unsuccessful negotiations. Hamas’ message to the media should be that Israel rejected a deal brought by the United States. It must be made clear to the media that Hamas has agreed, but that the deal is failing because of Israel’s “stubbornness.” Hamas should not be held responsible for the failure of an agreement.

For now this strategy seems to be producing a desired result. Masses of Israelis are marching in the streets, demanding that their government surrender.

Seth Mandel offers some commentary about the document at Commentary:

What’s most interesting about the document is that it describes what is obviously happening. I have not seen a reason to doubt the document’s authenticity nor have I seen proof of its origins, but it is as if someone claimed to have retrieved a document from Sinwar’s hard drive that argued, in detail, that water is wet.

And that helps explain some of the frustration of watching coverage of this conflict. Blaming Israel for the lack of a ceasefire deal, and for the longevity of the conflict in general, requires one to believe or pretend to believe the most irrational explanations for everything. …

This is purported to be a document from Sinwar’s command. But it could be a document from the brain of any sentient human being who has spent more than five seconds following the conflict. The most unrealistic part of the alleged document is the idea that it would take any effort whatsoever to manipulate Western media into parroting the Hamas line.

This document is believable as a strategy note straight from Sinwar or as a programming note straight from the executives at MSNBC.

There you have it, a formula for duping large numbers of people. For duping hostage families, supposedly intelligent students and Western diplomats. 

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Wednesday Potpourri

First, Columbia University set up a task force to study the incidence of anti-Semitism on campus. The interim president read the report and decided to do nothing.

The New York Post reports:

Jewish students at Columbia University were chased out of their dorms, received death threats, spat upon, stalked and pinned against walls, as the Ivy League school devolved into a cesspool of antisemitic hate in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 murderous raid on Israel.

The new and disturbing details emerged from the lengthy, 91-page document released Friday by the school’s faculty-led antisemitism task force, which revealed the extent to which the hate permeated the institution.

“Students described being shoved, pushed to the ground, berated for showing support for Zionist causes, and watching Israeli flags burned,” the task force’s authors wrote.

“They recounted seeing drawings of swastikas in their dorms, students yelling pro-Hamas chants, and being denied access to public spaces and opportunities simply because they were Jewish or Israeli.”

Faculty members went along for the ride:

One faculty member leading a class that delved into the Israel-Hamas conflict called a student who previously served in the IDF a murderer. Another professor extensively said a pair of Jewish donors to the university had “laundered” “dirty money” and “blood money.” 

During the spring, as protests and encampments roiled the school’s Morningside Heights campus, protesters, including outsiders and members of the university community, bellowed death threats at Jewish students. Demonstrators who held Israeli flags, meanwhile, recalled being assaulted. 

“There is a sense of personal threat, and we keep looking over our shoulders,” master’s student Omer Lubaton Granot, an Israeli veteran and father of a toddler, told an Israeli radio station in the wake of protesters seizing the academic building Hamilton Hall in April.

The report recommended anti-bias training and a new system for reporting complaints.

The truth is, as long as the perpetrators of this hate continue to be allowed to enroll in the university or even to stay in the country, nothing will change.

Keep in mind, not a word from the Biden Justice Department. No action from the administration. The only political leaders who went to Morningside Heights to meet with Jewish students and to express their support were Congressional Republicans, led by House Speaker Mike Johnson.

Second, in the meantime Great Britain is still undergoing labour pains. This time, the culprit is the new tax proposal offered up by Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves. It will sound familiar to Americans. She wants to raise taxes, especially on capital gains. 

The result, wealthy people are moving their money out of the country. This is from the London Telegraph:

Wealthy individuals and entrepreneurs are already fleeing Britain as fears grow over a raft of tax rises in Rachel Reeves’s first Budget.

An exodus is being reported by bankers, financial advisers and business chiefs with experts warning that the Chancellor risks ruining hopes of faster economic growth with a widely expected increase in capital gains tax (CGT).

It comes after Sir Keir Starmer warned last week that those with the “broadest shoulders” would carry the burden of fixing Britain’s ailing public finances.

Ceri Vokes, a partner at law firm Withers Worldwide, who works with entrepreneurs and private equity executives, said a number of her wealthy clients had already moved overseas this year, with the election “the main driver”.

She added: “People with hundreds of millions of pounds [are leaving] because changes can be more impactful for them.”

Those packing their bags and moving overseas are typically entrepreneurs and private equity executives in the top income bracket, she said. Italy, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Switzerland are among the most popular destinations.

Third, I assume that this is not news, but we have experts on reading body language. What would we do without them? Among them, one Susan Constantine, analyzed Kamala Harris’s body language during her CNN interview. 

The conclusion, not very encouraging to the Kamala team. From Matt Margolis on PJ Media:

But it should come as no surprise that a body language expert who analyzed Kamala's performance during the interview told Fox News Digital that Harris lacked both confidence and a presidential demeanor. 

According to Susan Constantine, Harris frequently looked down during the CNN interview, which suggested that she was “not confident in what she’s saying.” Constantine explained that Harris did not project the “presidential appearance” required to command her position, adding, “She definitely needs to make some tweaks into her body language to appear more confident.”

"The fact that she's looking down a lot removes a lot of the fluidity and the authenticity," she added. 

Throughout the interview, Constantine noticed that Harris struggled to deliver clear answers, particularly when asked about her “day one” agenda. This led to what Constantine described as “head bobbling,” a sign that Harris was searching for the right answers but couldn’t confidently deliver them.

“When you bobble and waffle like that, that’s another signal that she’s not really… prepared.” Constantine also highlighted Harris’s tendency to break eye contact, which she described as “a form of deflection,” further indicating a lack of confidence. 

 

Overall, you know, as one woman to another, I would say if you're going to be a woman in power, you have to look like a woman in power," Constantine concluded. "And she doesn't at this time." 

Dare I say that Constantine was not the only one who noticed that the Harris posture does not command respect. It is more posturing than posture.

Fourth, if you believe that sentiment indicators are a good contrary indication of the stock market’s future, you probably noticed this story on the front page of the Wall Street Journal yesterday:

Americans have rarely been this giddy about the stock market.

They are piling into stocks as major indexes reach new highs and placing bets that the rally that has driven the S&P 500 up 18% this year has more room to run. 

According to contrary opinion, this signals that we are approaching a market top. Beware.

Footnote-- apparently, I was not the only one who read the signal.

Fifth, and then there is Kevin O’Leary, serial entrepreneur, star of a television show called Shark Tank. Apparently, O’Leary has ceased investing in blue states. The tax situation and the regulatory environment makes them uninvestible.

Who knew?

Matt Margolis has the story on PJ Media:

According to O'Leary, states like New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and California have become increasingly hostile to businesses, driving investment and jobs to more business-friendly locations, which, not coincidentally, happen to be red states.

“I don’t put companies here in New York anymore or in Massachusetts or in New Jersey or in California,” O'Leary stated. “Those states are uninvestable. The policy here is insane. 

The taxes are too high.” He highlighted Fargo, N.D., as a prime example of where his businesses are now relocating, noting that 40% of the workforce there operates remotely, including employees in Boston.

"New Jersey, what a mess. New York, uninvestable," he said.

The panel then asked O'Leary why New York was "uninvestable" and if it was just because of high taxes. The hosts were clearly not happy with O'Leary's characterization. 

“The regulatory environment is punitive,” he explained, explaining how a global data center project near Niagara Falls eventually moved to Norway due to the state's oppressive policies. “Thousands of jobs coming out of that... that’s New York. Uninvestable.”

It brings to mind the fact that more and more of the banking business has been moving from Wall Street to Dallas.

Sixth, the Wall Street Journal reported last month on the banks that are moving to Dallas.

Ross Perot Jr. gestured out the window as his helicopter circled a 4.5-acre pit alongside the skyline of downtown Dallas. Texas and U.S. flags hung from a crane within it.

The site is where Perot’s real-estate investment company, Hillwood, is partnering to build a $500 million  tower for more than 5,000 bankers and investors. That will make it the financial firm’s second-largest office, behind New York. As the helicopter swung northwest, windows glinted from two unfinished Wells Fargo office towers, scheduled to open next year. A bit farther away: a fourth office building under construction for Charles Schwab, which moved its headquarters from California to the Dallas area five years ago, and the footprint of a Deloitte campus doubling in size.

The sprawling landscape illustrates an expansion that has brought to North Texas a presence in financial services that now sits second only to New York City in the U.S. And growth of so-called Y’all Street is accelerating.

Or else, by the numbers:

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that Texas investment-banking and securities employment has increased 111% over the past 20 years and 27% since the pandemic, compared with 16% and 5%, respectively, in New York. The number of people employed in finance overall has risen 13% in Texas since 2019, compared with 2% in New York and 3% nationally.

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Judith Butler's Phantasms

To the best of my discernment Tyler Cowen is a serious economist. Thanks to the Lord, I am not qualified to judge the seriousness of his thoughts about matters economical.

But, yesterday, Cowen opined about one Judith Butler, an intrepid proponent of gender dysphoria and a warrior against what she sees as the advent of worldwide fascism.

If the word crackpot means anything, Judith Butler qualifies. And yet, Cowen takes it all oh so seriously. On his Marginal Revolution blog he writes this:

And yet — when it comes to the grounds of theory I think Butler is more right than wrong.  This is a very good book, and in some critical ways a very libertarian book (again to be clear I think Butler is wrong about most other things).  But on this issue — why so insist on such a rigid male-female set of binary categories?  Why be so afraid of alternative, more flexible approaches?  Why restrict our conceptual freedoms and ultimately our life practical freedoms in such a manner?  Especially when a minority of people — admittedly a small minority but also much larger than the mere category of “trans” — will suffer greatly from such attitudes and such practices?

Of course, all human societies, from the dawn of time, have insisted on binary categories. Has Cowen ever heard of Claude Levi-Strauss’s book, The Elementary Structures of Kinship?

Serious thinkers do not take Judith Butler seriously. She is a symptom of the degeneration of academic thinking in America.

Katha Pollitt in The Atlantic and Andrew Sullivan on his Substack take her apart without working up a sweat.

As Katha Pollitt points out, Butler’s enemy is vast indeed. She is at war against fascism, which she imagines, in her phantasms, to be a clear and present danger.

It is worth paying some attention to this war against fascism, against Hitler and his Nazis, against the radical and non-so-radical right, against the capitalist patriarchy. For someone like Butler, who has never learned to think, these are all the same.

Now, it is worth noting, even if just in passing, that, once upon a time, the European continent was awash in outright fascists and Nazis. For most of the time that fascists did their dirty deeds in that place, the American political leadership, beginning with the great Franklin Roosevelt, basically did nothing.

Intrepid fascist fighters that liberal Democrats are, their great hero sat on his hands for eight years of European fascism, to say nothing of Hitler. As it happens, the liberal intelligentsia has not lived down this dereliction.

And one ought to mention, if only in passing, that the track record of the extreme political left was nothing to admire or extol. After all, Communism produced over 100 millions corpses, most of whom died of starvation. See The Black Book of Communism. 

And let’s not ignore the fact that Nazism was a shorthand for National Socialism. If you think that radical socialism is going to save us, think again. If you believe that fascism is the sum of all evils, what’s left for communism.

Katha Pollitt finds something disquieting in Butler’s constant harping on the dangers of fascism:

Fascism is a word that Butler admits is not perfect but then goes on to use repeatedly. I’m sure I’ve used it myself as a shorthand when I’m writing quickly, but it’s a bit manipulative. As used by Butler and much of the left, it covers way too many different issues and suggests that if you aren’t on board with the Butlerian worldview on every single one of them, a brown shirt must surely be hanging in your closet. As they define it—“fascist passions or political trends are those which seek to strip people of the basic rights they require to live”—most societies for most of history have been fascist, including, for long stretches, our own. That definition is so broad and so vague as to be useless. You might even say that “fascism” functions as a kind of phantasm, frightening people into accepting views wholesale without examining them individually. It’s a kind of guilt by association—like comparing critics of your prose to Nixon.

Evidently, we are not dealing with serious thinking. Butler seems to like to keep trotting out the word “phantasm” which means something like phantom.

When you have taken your leave from reality you are left with phantoms, fictional beings that defy reality.

Then Pollitt makes a salient point, one that other commentators seem to have ignored. If gender is a social construction, why would we not believe that transgender identities are socially constructed. 

It does seem odd that Butler, for whom everything about the body is socially produced, would be so uninterested in exploring the ways that trans identity is itself socially produced, at least in part—by, for example, homophobia and misogyny and the hypersexualization of young girls, by social media and online life, by the increasing popularity of cosmetic surgery, by the libertarian-individualist presumption that you can be whatever you want. Butler seems to suggest that being trans is being your authentic self, but what is authenticity? In every other context, Butler works to demolish the idea of the eternal human—everything is contingent—except for when it comes to being transgender. There, the individual, and only the individual, knows themself.

And then there is Andrew Sullivan, who takes Judith Butler to school and has the good sense not to use her illiterate pronouns. Apparently, Butler systematically denies realities that do not conform to her mindless beliefs:

For Butler, in matters of sex and the body, nothing is as it appears, the individual has no independent existence or capacity for reason outside social and cultural forces, and even the basics of anatomy, like a penis, are just socially constructed all the way down. There is no independent, stable variable like nature or biology or evolution that can help us understand our bodies, and our sex. Everything is in our heads, and our heads are entirely created by others in the past and present:

He continues:

This is Blank Slatism in its ultimate form, a denial of any independent biological influence on human nature or behavior. The fact that we are a species of mammal, organized around a binary reproductive strategy for millions of years, in which we are divided almost exactly into male and female, and in which there are only two types of gametes, eggs and sperm — and no “speggs” — is, for Butler, irrelevant. It is not even a fact. The sex binary is, rather, a human invention — specifically, a product of American “white supremacy.”

Blaming it on white supremacy is just plain stupid. Sullivan corrects Butler:

 But of all the things you could call “socially constructed,” the sex binary is the least plausible. It existed in our species before we even achieved the intelligence to call it a sex binary. It existed before humans even evolved into the separate and mostly distinct genetic clusters we now call race. How’s that for pre-cultural! It is in countless species that have no access to an array of “practices, discourses, and technologies.” It structures our entire existence. Not a single cell in the body is unaffected by our sex. Our entire reproductive strategy as a mammal is rooted in it. If you can turn even this into a human invention — malleable and indeterminate and a “spectrum” — there is nothing real outside us at all.

So, down with Judith Butler. Cease relying on phantasms. Up with reality.

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The Big Baby Generation

The report reads like corporate boilerplate. It is chock full of the latest in vapid psychobabble, and declares that the new approach, involving care and nurturance, equity and inclusion, has made a company like the consulting firm Accenture into a new Mommy. 

Strikingly, the new Accenture feels more like a nursery than a competitive playing field. Management wants to show care for employees, to nurture them, to make them feel wanted and appreciated for their unique individuality. 

They tout the virtues of their new mommification, without remarking that the young hires who respond well to this treatment are basically a bunch of big babies. Everyone calls them Gen Z, but it might be more appropriate to call them the Big Baby Generation. 

Naturally, the great minds of Accenture have bought the tripe about bringing your authentic self to work. You need not conform to company norms; you need to be a unique total individual. 

The reductio ad absurdum of this silliness would lead each individual to speak their own personal and private languages. As was discovered in Babel, multiple languages ensures that nothing ever gets donw.

In truth, the notion of the authentic self is pure psychobabble. The only person who loves you for your uniquely authentic self is your mother. Once you join a corporate team or even a baseball team, you are expected to overcome your childish ways, to subsume your individuality and to embrace the corporate culture. 

However, that same research found that only 24% of US employees feel like they truly belong and bring their authentic selves to the workplace.

Notice the language. The new work environment should be nurturing, like a nursery. Has anyone ever suggested that you will become a better football player if you feel properly nurtured?

… an opportunity for company leaders to create more satisfying and nurturing work environments.

So, Accenture has broken down the wall between home and workplace, which is also the wall between church and state. It has allowed the workplace to feel more like a home, the better to welcome a group of young workers who have overdosed on therapy. Naturally the CEO touts his capacity for empathy, another quality that is especially well developed in young mothers. 

Jimmy Etheredge, CEO of Accenture North America … explains in the podcast, Can you be your authentic self at work?, leaders first have to walk the talk. “People should feel at home while at work. That starts with leaders being open, empathetic, and really tuning into meet people where they are. Authenticity can’t be faked, and when you’re really listening—and treating people as you would like to be treated—people pick up on that.”

It’s not about competing. It’s about showing how much you care:

“I think it boils down to something pretty simple…make caring your calling card,”

The company is no longer devoted to competing in the marketplace, to making its employees into teammates. It wants to be a safe haven, like a nursery where you are treated like a helpless child:

No longer just a place to punch a clock or climb a ladder, work today is expected to be a safe haven for the authentic selves of employees and an exciting way for them to contribute value for their companies, themselves, and the wider world around them.

It is not about being a good colleague or a good teammate. It’s about being a unique individual, a self-indulgent big baby:

The workplace is an arena where individuality has at times been snuffed out. Uniformity was prized over cultivating personal strengths, and appearing to have all the answers took precedence over lifelong learning. Today, more industry leaders are seeing the value in authenticity—an awareness of who you are and what you stand for and expressing yourself honestly and consistently to the world.

And if you cannot do the job, at least you can rationalize your salary by saying that you are bringing something unique to the operation:

Bozoma Saint John, a Hall of Fame-inducted marketing executive, author, and entrepreneur, “Why am I there if not to represent my specific and unique point of view? Culture. Language. Attitude…now, if I hide any of that or if I massage any of that tone…then we all lose. Because then I’m not able to actually affect the work the way that I could.

So, companies are adapting to the Big Baby Generation. It is sad. It is philosophically incoherent. It has made the workplace into a giant nursery.

Accenture insists that it is the latest and greatest in management. In truth, it is adapting itself to a generation of big babies who are unfit to compete in the world. It is going to be a cold day when they discover that the new nurturing workplace cannot sustain itself against international competition.

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