January 5, 2016 What Are The Causes Of Insecurity? Luke Ford No sacred cows.

What Are The Causes Of Insecurity?

Posted on January 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

Insecurity is in the nature of being human. It is a commonplace, even if most people make a serious effort to disguise it. Too many things to know, too many to learn, too many rejections — most everyone has had significant experience of the things that undermine confidence. But, what makes for more than the usual amount of insecurity? What contributes to some people becoming “insecure?” Here are a few of its causes:

Temperament: Little human personalities can be different from the moment of birth. Just as not all children have the same color eyes or hair, neither do they have the same temperament. Pre-school kids have distinctive and lasting characteristics on such dimensions as being reactive vs. calm, tending to approach or avoid new situations, and being introverted or extroverted. While not guaranteeing fractured confidence as an adult, inborn qualities can make a contribution to it.
Overly Critical Parenting: Security can be undermined by parents who are too critical, neglectful, or frankly abusive. Sometimes neglect is unavoidable, as it tends to be in families where there are lots of children or the parents are working long hours outside of the home to put food on the table. But sometimes the insecurity develops because of something more subtle. If you are born to extroverted parents and you are introverted (while your siblings are more like your folks), you may feel like an odd-duck, not quite fitting in. If your dad was hoping for an athlete and you are an artist, the same sense of parental disappointment might be hard to miss.
Bullying: Kids can be targeted by the classmates for all sorts of reasons including the way they look, where they live, how they dress; and racial, religious, or ethnic differences. Gender matters too, especially if you are the sole female in a physics class with a wise-guy classmate who makes fun of you and a teacher who hasn’t the capability to stop it, as I witnessed back in high school.
Body Image: In a society filled with spectacularly beautiful advertising images, it is difficult to be plain; and worse yet, unattractive in any way. Too tall, too skinny, too fat — God help you. Too much acne, bad hair, a lack of finely-tuned motor coordination, same problem. Some of us continue to see ourselves in terms of that early self and struggle with the sense of insecurity produced back then.
Learning Problems: This can take the form of a learning disability, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), or even being average in a school filled with high achievers.
Multiple Changes of Residence: Being the new kid is not usually fun, especially for introverted young people who struggle with fitting in and finding friends. Insecurity can follow.
Parental Overprotection: When parents prevent their children from doing things that are simply a part of growing up, they can communicate to the child that he isn’t up to the task. Moreover, they rob the young one of the chance to grow from experience, learn what he needs to know in the social sphere, and become more confident. He may also be at risk of being seen as “different” by his peers, because he is the kid who “isn’t allowed” to do things most other parents freely permit.

Posted in Psychology | Comments Off

NYT: Coordinated Attacks on Women in Cologne Were Unprecedented, Germany Says

Posted on January 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

New York Times:

BERLIN — German authorities said on Tuesday that coordinated attacks in which young women were sexually harassed and robbed by hundreds of young men on New Year’s Eve in the western city of Cologne were unprecedented in scale and nature.

The assault, which went largely unreported for days, set off a national outcry after the Cologne police described the attackers as young men “who appeared to have a North African or Arabic” background, based on testimony from victims and witnesses. More than 90 people have filed legal complaints, the police said on Tuesday.

The police in Hamburg also said that 10 women had reported being sexually assaulted and robbed in a similar fashion on the same night, and they urged witnesses to come forward.

Germany took in more than one million migrants last year, and with the country struggling to deal with the political, social and wider consequences of the influx, the delayed public response has led to concerns that the authorities were playing down the seriousness of the assault to prevent it from becoming a point of contention in the broader debate.

The assault took place late on Thursday on the vast public square in front of the city’s main train station, a central transit point for anyone coming or going from a fireworks display over the Rhine and the bars and nightclubs in the heart of the city, in the shadow of its landmark cathedral.

Heiko Maas, Germany’s justice minister, warned on Tuesday against linking the assaults to the influx of refugees, saying that the ethnicity of the perpetrators was irrelevant.

“The rule of the law does not look at where someone comes from but what they did,” Mr. Maas told reporters in Berlin. “We will investigate what circles the perpetrators may have come from.”

The Cologne police say they believe several hundred men, ages 15 to 35, were involved in the violence that began in the early hours of the New Year, after the square was cleared because men had been throwing firecrackers into the crowd.

Wolfgang Albers, Cologne’s chief of police, said the assaults had taken place in the chaos that followed, as the square was emptied. The men appeared to have broken into smaller groups, the police said, with each one encircling a woman; while some would grope the victim, others would steal her wallet or cellphone.

One victim reported that she had been raped, the police said.

Henriette Reker, Cologne’s mayor, called a crisis meeting on Tuesday to address the issue. Ms. Reker, who was stabbed during a campaign event in October by an attacker who opposed her welcoming attitude toward migrants, called the assault “absolutely intolerable” and pledged her support for the authorities’ investigation.

The city holds a large festival every year before Easter, when thousands of costumed revelers throng the streets to celebrate with parades and parties, and Ms. Reker echoed the concerns of many about safety during the Carnival season.

In an effort to prevent further violence, Ms. Reker said that city officials would begin working on measures to help young women protect themselves and to explain the city’s attitudes and norms to its many newcomers.

“We will explain our Carnival much better to people who come from other cultures,” she said, “so there won’t be any confusion about what constitutes celebratory behavior in Cologne, which has nothing to do with a sexual frankness.”

Cologne, with roughly one million inhabitants, is among Germany’s most ethnically diverse cities, and it took in more than 10,000 refugees last year, many of them young men from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. The city authorities said they would increase security after the assaults, as they continued to search for suspects.

The euphoria that accompanied the first wave of arrivals in Germany this summer has since given way to growing unease about the difficulty of integrating hundreds of thousands of people of a different religion and who were raised in a different culture.

Far-right and anti-immigrant groups in Germany, and others who oppose the influx, swiftly seized on the episode, saying it demonstrated the dangers associated with accepting huge numbers of migrants.

Lutz Bachmann, head of the anti-immigrant Pegida movement, accused German leaders on Twitter of complicity in the assault. In a post that named Ms. Merkel; her deputy, Sigmar Gabriel; and other politicians, Mr. Bachmann said, “You are all responsible for the abuse in Cologne!”

Posted in Germany, Immigration, Islam, Rape | Comments Off

Jonah Goldberg: It’s time to put the term ‘neocon’ out to pasture

Posted on January 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

You know a term is a dirty word when its proponents want it put out to pasture.

Jonah Goldberg is a neo-con. By no means, is he conservative. Neo-cons were behind the disastrous Afghan and Iraq invasions of 2002 and 2003 respectively.

During the 1980s, “liberal” became a dirty word, so Americans left of center embraced the term “progressive” instead.

During the 1970s and 1980s, neo-cons took over the conservative movement, moving it left. Neo-cons now dominate the Republican party.

As Burt Blumert put it: “Neocons, as ex-Trotskyites, are bad enough, but those who follow the pro-pagan Leo Strauss are deadly. He advocated the Big Lie. Forgive me for all the gory details, but these people – with their other leaders like Bill Buckley and Irving Kristol and the help of the CIA – perverted the American right into loving the welfare-warfare state.”

What does it mean to be conservative? To be against equality. Conservatives are against equality and against nation building. Neo-cons are for equality and for imposing democracy and western values at the point of a gun.

Most Jews are not neo-conservatives. Neo-cons account for a tiny proportion of Jews but they are immensely influential due to their money, brains, energy and cohesion. It is much easier to get a job as a public intellectual if you are a neo-con than if you are a conservative like Paul Gottfriend.

Gottfriend is particularly biting about Jonah Goldberg and other Fox News neo-cons.

Jonah Goldberg writes:

In interviews and on the stump, Sen. Ted Cruz likes to attack President Obama, Hillary Clinton and “some of the more aggressive Washington neocons” for their support of regime change in the Middle East.
Every time we topple a dictator, Cruz argues, we end up helping terrorists or extremists.
He has a point. But what interests me is his use of the word neocon. What does he really mean?
Some see dark intentions. “He knows that the term in the usual far-left and far-right parlance means warmonger, if not warmongering Jewish advisers, so it is not something he should’ve done,” former Bush advisor Elliott Abrams told National Review. Another former Bush advisor calls the term “a dog whistle.”
I think that’s all a bit overblown. Cruz is just trying to criticize his opponent Marco Rubio, who supported regime change in Libya.
But Abrams is right – and Cruz surely knows – that “neocon” has become code for suspiciously Hebraic super-hawk. That’s absurd and absurdly reductive. So maybe it’s time we retired the term, which is now a catchall for “things I don’t like.”
At first, neocons weren’t particularly associated with foreign policy. They were intellectuals disillusioned by the folly of the Great Society. As Irving Kristol famously put it, a “neoconservative is a liberal who was mugged by reality.” The Public Interest, the first neoconservative publication, co-edited by Kristol, was a wonkish domestic policy journal.
Kristol later argued that neoconservatism was not an ideology but a “persuasion.” William F. Buckley, the avatar of supposedly authentic traditional conservatism, agreed. The neocons, he explained, brought the new language of sociology to an intellectual tradition that had been grounded more in Aristotelian thinking.
The neocon belief in democracy promotion grew out of disgust with Richard Nixon’s détente and Jimmy Carter’s fecklessness, but hardly amounted to knee-jerk interventionism. When Jeane Kirkpatrick articulated a theory of neoconservative foreign policy in Commentary magazine in 1979, she cautioned that it was unwise to demand rapid libertalization in autocratic countries, and that gradual change was a more realistic goal than immediate transformation.

Posted in Jews, Jonah Goldberg, Neoconservatives, Paul Gottfried | Comments Off

Cumberland County HIV positive black man ordered to trial on new charges of raping child, airing it on the internet

Posted on January 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

REPORT: It took only a few minutes Monday for a district judge to order William C. Byers Augusta to stand trial in Cumberland County Court on new charges linked to the rape of a 6-year-old boy that was aired over the internet.

The child rape and conspiracy counts were the third set of offenses police filed against the North Middleton Township man, who is accused of acting with an HIV-positive Harrisburg man, 61-year-old Ira Task, in orchestrating and broadcasting the assaults.

Public Defender John Shugars, who represents the 19-year-old Byers Augusta, stipulated with Assistant District Attorney Nathan Boob that an affidavit of probable cause listing the accusations against Byers Augusta correctly outlines the testimony the alleged victim would present if called to the witness stand.

That stipulation spared the child from appearing before Fegley, Shugars noted. He said both sides agreed to allow Fegley to determine whether to send the new charges on to county court based only on the information in the affidavit, although he stressed that this client wasn’t admitting guilt.

Posted in AIDS, Blacks, Crime, Homosexuality | Comments Off

Does America need people named Artyom Gasparyan? Asking for a friend.

Posted on January 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

High IQ people are less likely to commit crimes because they have a clearer picture of the future and more capacity for abstract thought (necessary for empathy). But when they do go on a rampage, they are more dangerous than dummies.

Los Angeles Times: For days, dozens of Los Angeles police detectives worked around the clock to track down a man suspected in a monthlong series of carjackings, robberies and shootings.

The crimes stretched across Los Angeles County, from a shooting in Burbank that left two people wounded to a dramatic police chase after a carjacking in Carson on New Year’s Day. At least one man had been killed, a 37-year-old fatally shot in Panorama City.

Investigators believed the suspect, Artyom Gasparyan, was using stolen license plates to throw them off his trail. The Los Angeles Police Department put its elite Robbery-Homicide detectives on the case and deployed hundreds of other officers to find the suspect.

Authorities say the case finally broke Monday afternoon when undercover officers tracked Gasparyan to a car repair shop in the San Fernando Valley. At some point, police said, the 32-year-old noticed the officers, jumped in his silver Volkswagen and sped off.

Gasparyan was ultimately shot and critically wounded by police on the 5 Freeway in Sun Valley, where he crashed into another car while driving the wrong way near the Glenoaks Boulevard exit…

After Gasparyan was loaded into an ambulance, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck made an impromptu stop at the scene. Gasparyan, the chief said, was a “very, very dangerous individual.”

Police went public with their search for Gasparyan on Saturday, describing him as an armed and dangerous man wanted in a series of crimes that began in northeast Los Angeles on Dec. 6.

Soon after the LAPD’s announcement, Burbank police said Gasparyan was suspected in a Dec. 9 shooting in the 1700 block of North Catalina street, where a man was shot and wounded outside his home. A gardener working down the street was also shot in the foot as the suspect fled, the man’s co-worker told the Burbank Leader.

Posted in America | Comments Off

Boston Globe: Taking stock of the presidential race

Posted on January 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer quotes this op/ed:

Donald Trump: There have been plenty of hand-wringing stories seeking to explain Trump’s rise. Is it wall-to-wall press coverage? Social media? The key to understanding the contest for the Republican nomination is immigration. Once you have the key, you can unlock all the mysteries of the race. The Republican Party started out encouraging candidates to support comprehensive immigration reform, a massive error in political judgment. Trump went in the opposite direction, and has been rewarded with a commanding lead. Now Trump is threatening to resurrect Bill Clinton’s checkered history with women as a way to answer Hillary Clinton’s gender attacks. There’s a reason why Apollo Creed’s trainer didn’t want to fight a southpaw like Rocky. Unorthodox opponents are unpredictable and hard to beat.
Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio: In the battle for second place, the mainstream money is betting that Rubio will emerge as Trump’s main challenger. But remember, immigration is the key to understanding the Republican race. Rubio’s greatest vulnerability isn’t missed votes or his messy personal finances. The reason Cruz is pulling away from Rubio is that voters have sorted out who was on which side during the ill-fated battle over the Gang of 8 immigration bill, which critics derided as amnesty. Despite Rubio’s attempt to muddy the waters, he voted for the bill and Cruz voted against it. And as the poet said, that has made all the difference.

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* In all seriousness, for me this is where Occam and Hanlon cross razors.

Occam says globalist-pandering politicians would run rough-shod over such obvious and overwhelming public opinion at great risk to their personal careers only if there was some hidden cabal with both carrot (money) and stick (incriminating evidence of sexual deviancy) to prod these politicians to do their globalist bidding.

Hanlon says, politicians are idiots that are just parroting the stuff all the “cool kids” in their social circle say to each other as an in-group status display.

I suppose they don’t have to be mutually exclusive, but sheesh, it takes a total outsider and semi self-made billionaire to run on and win the presidency with an anti-immigration message?? No one else thought of that before Trump? I reckon Occam would say any traditional politician that may have been clean enough to pull off what Trump has is never able to make it out of the minor leagues in the first place.

* It only means they never foresaw a Trump, an anti-immigration outsider, coming along to muck things up. They thought they’d be able to sell amnesty to a shrinking Republican base, and Rubio was right in line with the future they envisioned.

* Money.

Problem is, when you can’t finance your own campaign out of your own pocket you have to rely on Wall Street money men and billionaires who want amnesty and open borders. I might add embrace the Neo-con view of the world as well. Trump and Paul are about the only ones who don’t want to start WWIII with Russia. The rest want it.

The sad fact is, all pols who lack the $$$ are constrained as to what they can say and support.

Trump can say the things he doesn’t because he isn’t owned by the Chambers of Commerce, Club for Growth or some pro-globalist billionaire as the rest of the GOP candidates are.

This money issue is also why the GOP has turned against the American people and by extension Trump. They don’t represent the people but a select elite that is willing to sacrifice the U.S. in the name of profit and power.

However this breaking of the social-political contract by the political establishment is also very dangerous. Outside of Pat Caddell I know of no one who wants to bring this up. Caddell has admitted the establishment is playing with dynamite by blowing off the public.

Once people realize they have no say so either politically or legally. Well as they say “all bets are off”. Won’t take much to set it off.

* It probably had something to do with his sponsors like that South Florida used car dealer and potential sponsors like Adelson. Rubio is genial but not very bright and doesn’t seem to want to work too hard to make a living. On top of that he has a lot of debt. So he was probably more eager to do what the sponsors wanted.

* Destruction of the [white, Christian, cis-male-or-whatever-nonsense] country is, as we all know, a feature, not a bug. And the fate of the Republican party is, of course, a non-issue. I think the elites simply 1) underestimated the goy rubes’ intelligence, and 2) overestimated their own.

* If Rubio was an Arizona politician, maybe he would have sensed which way the wind is blowing better. But Miami is a disaster for would-be Presidents like Jeb. Miami is the best possible version of a Hispanicized America (and it’s still pretty awful).

* You say that but both AZ Senators voted for Gang of Eight. McCain is looking at being primaried and Flake’s future is dim.

* So this guy has come around to the Kaus/Coulter/Sailer theory about the success of Trump. What are the other current theories?

Alt Theory 1: Trump succeeds because of the Left’s PC jihad

Alt Theory 2: Scott Adams’s view that Trump is a “master persuader”.

Maybe all three theories apply. The way Tom Tancredo’s candidacy fizzled years ago suggests that maybe it’s not entirely about immigration.

* Tancredo didn’t succeed because he confirmed that immigration is a low-status issue for losers. Trump succeeds because he makes it a totally classy issue for winners.

Rubio isn’t just a political athlete who adopts views that people whisper in his ear. He’s a true believer. His campaign tagline is “New American Century.” He really does believe the invade the world/invite the world ideology. He supports more surveillance, more wars, more immigration. Rubio is smart enough to know where the base is, that’s why he ran against amnesty in the senate primary. But he’s a true believer in new american century/cannon fodder/american dream/proposition nation version of America. That’s who he is. It’s no accident that the “greatest generation” are some of his biggest fans.

* Rubio’s wife’s hot.
I (and Donald Trump) do think a disproportionate number of Latinas are hot, particularly the South American ones. Trump was on with Howard Stern a couple years ago and Stern brought up some celebrity female known for her looks (forget whom) . Trump was saying how this particular female celebrity was at most a 7. He then said if you look at beauty pageants in Venezuela and Colombia, all the women are 10′s.

* I seem to recall that Pat Buchanan was making a lot of enemies using that message long before Trump came along. In fact, I strongly suspect that Pat Buchanan is a behind-the-scenes adviser to Trump on immigration and foreign policy. Of course, Buchanan lacked both the large fortune and the stature of Donald Trump. As I noted before re Trump and Rand Paul in the foreign policy area, Paul may have the better message, but Trump is clearly the better messenger when it comes to a non-interventionist foreign policy. Sort of like Nixon goes to China, where nobody could question Nixon’s anti-Communist credentials. If Trump stays true to his often repeated and consistent foreign policy positions when and if he becomes President, who could possibly question his manliness and toughness? That, imo, is why he is a much better messenger than Rand Paul.

MORE COMMENTS:

* “So Rubio’s foreign policy and national security strategy is to invade Middle Eastern countries, create power vacuums for terrorist organizations, allow their people to come to America unvetted, give them legal status and citizenship, then impose a massive surveillance state to monitor the problem,” Alice Stewart, a national spokeswoman for Cruz, said in a statement to the Guardian.

“I’m trying to figure out if it is more incoherent than dangerous or vice versa.”

* “Our team” is supposed to spend our time following Trump, but the real bellwether is Ted Cruz. He’s a very smart guy and a very calculating guy. Most of the GOP candidates are dumb actors owned by billionaires. Cruz is smart and he’s thinking he will be the ABT (Anybody But Trump) option for the party men as long as he remains just inside where Trump is operating.

If Cruz is playing the old paleo card that suggests he thinks it is safe to do so while not upsetting the party men too much. It’s as if the tide went out in 1992 and is just starting to come back in all these years later. No one remembers what was once called normal and they are furiously baling as the tide relentlessly comes in.

* Cruz has been against both invade and invite since before Trump showed up. Temperamentally he’s the exact opposite of Trump: a brainy nerd who bores and annoys people when he talks.

* There is some overlap in the sanity Venn diagram between Trump, Cruz, and Paul, though it’s tough to figure out what Cruz actually believes. In any case, more of this from his campaign is welcome.

* You posted recently about how dumb Rubio is compared to Schumer. Cruz is a lot smarter than Rubio. Rubio seems like a friendly, good natured guy, but not very bright.

* Prior to Trump, I looked Cruz, didn’t like what I saw which was another Obama – a junior senator with no real track record but with the ego of the Hindenburg. Much like Rubio and Paul.

Three stooges who have more in common with each other than they care to note.

His vote for TPP and support of increasing H1-B’s 5x shows he’s no Paleo-con or even pro American. He’s a tool for Goldman Sachs.

Right now all Cruz is doing copying Trump’s positions after he takes all the heat for them. It makes him look like a jackal with no real base of his own outside of the evangelicals and dominionists that his father has courted for him

And he’s dead wrong if he thinks most Trump supporters would ever support a evangelical nut job like him. He’s a fool if he thinks Jeb and the RNC will give him the nomination. Won’t happen. That’s been promised to Jeb, not McConnell’s foot stool.

* Paul is very WYSIWYG, a sincere libertarian and anti-neocon. Trump is a wild card – is his campaign politics or entertainment, how many of his promises would he try to keep, does he even know that himself at this point? Cruz is somewhere in between.

* Cruz comes across to me as a cynical weasel. I heard an interview with him recently, and he did the whole congenial colleague schtick about Rubio. What he said was something like: “I like Marco. He’s my friend. But he is lying about my record.”. How many normal people could say of a man who was lying about us to gain advantage, that: I like him. He is my friend.

A normal, sane person would be offended and would dislike someone who told lies about him. A lot of these guys are just sociopaths. They have no real respect for the truth.

* Cruz is dangerously smart. He is a doner’s pet but knows what we want to hear.

People in high places read our esteemed host.

* Invade/Invite is coldly rational thinking if you’re a post national globalist. Attack any cohesive group identity relentlessly. Strong group identity provides protection and protection is for the innermost Inner Party only.

Everybody outside of the Inner Party gets unprotection. Not protection. This treatment ranges from status marker labeling {slurs, insults, mockery} to mass murder.

And remember the goalposts are always moving in this vicious status game.

Someday if you only have Earth citizenship {and no other planet citizenship} then you will be considered backward, provincial, a hayseed i.e. a very dangerous person politically speaking.

* The degenerate witch Merkel gave her holiday speech (in a shiny dress!) with this background prop setup: EU flag deliberately positioned to mostly eclipse the German flag.

These people are the most vile traitors.

* The Trump can’t/won’t win crowd is desperate.

Trump will stomp Hillary. He already shut them both up this weekend on the war-on-women issue BY SIMPLY FIGHTING BACK.

Bill is a huge liability unless you’re running against weak cucks like Bush/Romney.

The secret to recent democrat success has been to run against spineless dickless balless cuckservatives. THOSE DAYS ARE OVER.

Posted in Immigration | Comments Off

Harvard Business Review: Diversity Policies Don’t Help Women or Minorities, and They Make White Men Feel Threatened

Posted on January 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments on Reddit about this HBR article:

* Diversity programs and Diversity teams do not exist to solve an actual or perceived problem but rather exist to cover the companies ass to make it look like the company is doing ‘something’ to solve a ‘problem’. See also: TSA

* Someone else put it best, diversity programs are the corporate version of, but I have a black friend.

* I work at a hospital. It’s also entirely obvious when we have a diversity physician and we even have coded language about them because their patient’s have some of the most catastrophic complications. What’s telling is that, after their patients have a bad outcome, their patients are then transferred to another team (often white, asian, or south asian doctors) for “higher level care.” …

I have bunches of stories. Primarily, the worst complications I’ve seen come from the surgical teams. Unfortunately, it’s a lottery who’s on surgical call the night of admission so it’s a toss up who becomes the treating team.

Often, patients admitted to the “diversity hires” have long, complex surgeries which are performed for reasons that don’t entirely make sense on review. Moreover, given the complex surgeries, outcomes can be poor.

For example, we recently had one case of a young 30 y/o F who was admitted for appendicitis, but was otherwise normal and healthy. Normally this is treated with a simple laparoscopic appendix removal. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, the patient’s emergent surgery was delayed by several days and she became very septic. The CT scan on admission showed a leaking appendix, which usually merits immediate admission to the OR. She ended up with removal of half her colon, perforation of her colon resulting in several deep abdominal abscesses, and a colostomy bag. Her course ended up becoming so complicated that she stayed several weeks in the ICU and almost died.

* I work at a top fortune 50 company. I was a manager for 5 years there, and you are so right. HR, EEO, Ethics, HRI, Corporate Investigations, and Legal are all COMPLETELY SEPARATE groups to protect the companies interest first. I’ve participated in investigations in every part, and 95% of the time the only vested interest is avoiding lawsuits. Employee protection? Naw. Morale? Naw. Safety? Only if it prevents lawsuits.

* Somewhere in the company there’s a director or executive that knows good staff are hard to recruit and retention is the most important thing. When you can’t retain staff, your training costs go up. People simplify processes in order to widen the recruitment pool, and the result is more, less skilled staff. Then your product starts to suffer.
Then you have to lay off staff because somehow your business has begun to “bloat”. So you do, and then the whole thing starts to implode.
I’ve seen it a couple of times and it’s one of the reasons my entire generation is commitment-shy with employment.

* I’ve sat through those programs. They cemented in my mind the conviction that minorities are less “coworkers” and more “walking, talking liabilities”.
Sad too, because I was one of the ones who didn’t give a f*** about a person’s ethnicity once I had decided they were smart and effective.
. EDIT: Okay lemme explain.
I worked in an engineering shop, 90% male, 70% white, 25% Indian, 5% other. The work culture was fantastic, it even felt kind of like summer camp, we were all in it knee deep and I was surrounded on all sides by brilliant minds. Nobody cared one bit about ethnicity: engineers, more than any other group, only care about “What works”.
Then we got acquired by MonoCorp Inc., and thus began the sensitivity training and sexual harassment training and diversity training. The training was the first time any of us had ever even had a passing thought about ethnicity. Suddenly ethnicity was capital-I important. Suddenly it was something we had to Be Aware Of. Now we felt like we should be tiptoeing about . . . something.
. EDIT2: Okay, here’s the short short version:
If your goal is for me to actually respect you, then you can’t begin our relationship by announcing that I’ve got to give you any kind of special treatment.
These sensitivity lectures are conflating “respectful treatment” with “respect”. And by demanding the former, they make the latter significantly harder to obtain.
You know how I treat somebody I actually respect? I openly call him/her a dumbass when they screw up. THAT is respect… because I’d never say that to somebody who actually is a dumbass.
.EDIT3: Some more examples come to mind:
One of my longest-term coworkers is British. I profoundly respect this dude, I think of him as at least equal to my talents. And I make fun of him relentlessly. I call him a damn limey, I ask when’s the last time he had spotted dick in his mouth, I’ve threatened to throw all his tea in the harbor again, and I tease him mercilessly about the last big mistake he made that I was the one to catch. That’s what respect looks like.
This walking on eggshells stuff? That’s how you treat weaklings.

* The “walking talking liability” bit was proven by the incident with that ridiculous try-hard “feminist” Adria Richards. She thought she had on some sort of impermeable armor that allowed her to be an incorrigible ass, thanks to being a black-jewish woman in tech employed by a “progressive” company. (I won’t even get into how the “Developer Evangelist” job title is one of the most meaningless job titles I’ve ever heard of – at a tech company, everyone is a developer evangelist, because everyone understands that the technology is what is bringing home the bacon). She absolutely reeked of “college-feminist-that-doesn’t-realize-she’s-in-the-real-world-now.”
Not only did she get a man with a wife and three kids fired from his dreamjob (and all the stress and heartache that entails – men really take it hard when they can’t provide for their children; in the extreme form it’s called Failed Provider Syndrome and is suspected to be the cause of a lot of murder-suicides, not to mention regular suicides) for making a private joke to his friend – that she had to make an effort to overhear and be offended by because it wasn’t even a sexist joke, it was just a joke about “big dongles” – but then she also got herself fired from SendGrid because thanks to her try-hard bullshit, SendGrid’s servers got DDoS’d by rightfully-outraged script-kiddies, and maybe a couple real hackers. Once she was fired the DDoS’ing stopped.

* I am a woman and I fucking HATE working for women. There is always some passive-aggressive bullshit going on that I am not clued in on. Being direct is a major No-No. Men do not normally have to deal with it because it is expected that the passive-aggressive approach won’t get noticed or something because it may not work with their husbands. But other women! We should KNOW what you mean when your boss says,
“No, it’s fine. You go work on your projects and I’ll just do my own work.”

* My sister graduated from university after completing the teaching program here. Everyone from her class has been having trouble getting the jobs they were promised were just so available right now (our province insists we need more teachers but the reality is we have a substitute queue over 4 months long and all the oldies refuse to retire). Everyone except the one guy who lost a finger (somehow that qualifies him as disabled) and two African American students.
The finger guy wasn’t qualified to teach the position they hired him for and the other two straight up admitted that they felt bad and singled out for their race as they were not as qualified as many of their peers (different teachable, science/math is almost always more valued and placed easier).
I understand what affirmative action / diversity quotas are trying to achieve, but I can’t imagine the stigma of ‘you only have this position because of your skin color’ is doing anyone any good. I don’t see how that’s any less a racist behavior.

* Let’s say you want 10% of your IT staff to be black. Black people make up 13% of the country, so that’s reasonable, right?
Well no. Black people go to college at a much lower rate than whites and Asians. Of the ones that do, they enter into stem programs at a much lower rate than whites and Asians, to say nothing of how well they do in those programs. Let’s say they go to college 2/3 as often as whites and go into stem 2/3 as often (both of which are optimistic numbers), then you would expect the applicant pool to be less than 6% black. The other 4% has to come from somewhere.

* A manager had to let one of his team go, so he brought them all in a room to break the news. “Times are tough, and one of you will have to go.”
“You can’t get rid of me, I am a woman and I will sue you for sexual discrimination”, Said the woman.
“You can’t get rid of me, I am a minority and I will sue you for racial discrimination”, said the black guy.
“You can’t get rid of me, I am a Senior Citizen and I will sue you for age discrimination” said the old man.
All eyes turned to the young white guy.
Sweating, nervously, the white guy said “Ummm, I think I might be gay”.

* At one company where I worked, we had our annual diversity training delivered online. There was an interactive exercise where you would answer a series of questions that were designed to help you understand how you personally relate to people of different ethnicity, cultural background, etc. The multiple choice answers would cover the spectrum from open hostility to vocal support and encouragement. Because I don’t really care one way or the other about color or creed or national origin, at least in terms of my ability to be civil and respectful of my coworkers, my answers would always tend towards the “neutral” responses.
I kid you not, at the end of the exercise I was told that my responses indicated that I was not aware of my own prejudices and not sensitive to my coworkers’ need to feel included.

* I experienced this back when I was applying for undergrad. Not to brag, but I had damn good grades and ACT scores. My friend, who happened to be a black guy, also had damn good scores — just not as good as mine. We applied to the almost all of the same schools (Ivy League, good regional schools, and some local state schools), and in every single instance, he was admitted where I was wait listed, given significantly larger scholarships than the ones I was offered, or given any aid at all when I received none. We helped each other write our essays, we both practice interviewed with each other, and our extra-curriculars were fairly similar.
The difference? I made the mistake of marking “Asian” on my applications. Being bi-racial, I could’ve gotten away with just marking “white” had I known what I know now; Asians have to score significantly higher on tests and get better grades than everyone else just to get admitted. That experience really made me resent all of this “diversity” bullshit.
Now, every time I see a black or Hispanic person in any difficult to reach position, I assume that they’re a “diversity hire.” I instantly make the assumption that they were handed the position on a silver platter not for their talent, skill, work ethic, or competence, but rather simply because of their skin color. The irony of forced “anti-racism” diversity quotas is that they only give very real justification for the people who were already racist, and provide some damn tempting motivations for those who were not racist to become so.
Now that the academic community is taking this problem seriously, we might be able to put an end to this garbage. As someone in the absolute worst demographic to be in regarding “diversity” (white/Asian conservative straight religious Southern male), I’m tired of busting my ass only to see others given a free pass, and then not only be ungrateful for the easy ride, but insist that somehow THEY are the victims.
TL;DR- “Diversity” programs screwed me in the past, and made me prejudiced, perhaps even a little racist.

* Anytime I see an Asian doctor, I know for a fact they have to be one of the best doctors out there due to how fucking impossible it was for them to get into med school.

* Thomas Sowell is a black economist and he talks about his life before and after AA in one of his books. Prior to AA people assumed he knew what he was doing, because racism is real and for a black man to have reached his level he must know his shit. I believe he was an Econ professor at Columbia. After AA people assumed he was a quota hire and even non racists began talking down to him.

* I’ve done the diversity training at a few companies, and it’s always absolute garbage. There are real good reasons to value diversity, but the shitlords that make these training videos are either idiots or being intentionally, nefariously obtuse. The first western philosophers and the first historians lived on the Ionian peninsula on the border of the Greek and Persian worlds, where modern Turkey is today. Their exposure to different cultures gave them the perspective to become philosophers and historians. In ancient Greece, semi-legendary lawgivers were always credited for the codes of laws in the various city-states. The legendary backstories invariably included a lot of travel, during which they’d see many cultures and learn from them. European civilization was in steep decline until it reinvigorated itself by importing cultural ideas and artifacts from the Middle East, brought back during the crusades. The Renaissance in Italy was spurred by exposure to widely varied cultures by merchants and sea traders. Exposure to diversity doesn’t just let you borrow good ideas, it helps you to hold a mirror up to your own culture and explore it in ways you never would have thought to.
Instead of talking about the selfish benefits that one can derive from embracing diversity, we make them watch a half hour video with people whining about how it feels to be treated differently, and then act surprised when the training doesn’t take.

* I work at a home health company that’s majority black women. I don’t know the statistics exactly but I’d guess 70% black women, and the rest being a mix of white and Asian men and women. We never had to worry about being under some arbitrary race/gender quota. And this gives us the power to hire and fire black women (and all others) based on their actual goddamn qualifications and work ethic. So many black women with absolute garbage work ethic show up for an interview with the idea that we’ll have to hire them anyway, and then all the other black women call them out for being fucking lazy and incompetent. My guess is those women end up getting a job somewhere that actually needs to fill out that diversity quota.
The company never needed external motivation to hire black women. Turns out, if you live in a heavily black city, and hire the hardest working people, you’ll naturally get a black staff. It takes actual effort into being racist and willingness to take less profit to do otherwise.

* Diversity is a loaded term and it only matters in certain contexts.
Mexico City is not concerned about diversifying.
The city of Watts is not concerned with diversifying.
Its like diversity only matters when too many white people are gathered in one area.

Posted in Blacks, Diversity | Comments Off

Steve Sailer: ‘I am Become Inanity, the Dumber-downer of Worlds’

Posted on January 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Between the nationwide campaign against the police on behalf of black criminals to the tone deaf radicalism of the academic left, the GOP’s task of getting an extra three percent of the white vote looks easier and easier.

* Politically correct dumbing-down is already making it more difficult for the USA to maintain its technological dominance.

Imagine you work in a research lab, and your co-workers of color (East Asians excepted) are considered more meritorious than you are, simply because they are not white. After a while, you see no reason to work more than they do. But since they know that they can get away with an amount of laziness and inefficiency which wouldn’t be tolerated if they were white, they see no reason to work more than the most nonchalant whites.

The letter asks a rhetorical question: “Why does physics education routinely fail brilliant minority students?”

If they fail their physics classes, how can they be considered “brilliant”?

Basically, the question means “Minority students are brilliant because I like them. And white nerds are stupid because I find them boring.” The question could have been written by a not-too-bright black activist.

* The Germans were REALLY right weren’t they? The Germans were the ones pointing out the truth…there is no such thing as Science…all science is biased depending on who is doing the Science-Ing.

* Physics is to white men as bongo drumming is to blacks. Most whites are hopeless at advanced physics; most blacks don’t play bongo drums; but no whites, no physics; no blacks, no bongos.

* I’m very close to a physicist who runs a research lab at UCLA, and can confirm that he is under immense pressure to hire minorities and women. Nevermind that his lab has included Eastern Europeans, east and south Asians, students from “flyover” sort of backgrounds, and even a woman, which is fortuitous, because women rarely train or express interest in his sort of research. There is tacit concern that he has not hired any black and Latino students, and just one woman. From what I understand, it hasn’t quite reached the point where this physicist has been intimidated into hiring less qualified students to satisfy pressures for diversity. But the hard sciences in universities are palpably a new target for the power grab we’ve already witnessed in the humanities and social sciences, whereas until recently people in those departments were largely insulated from all that.

Posted in America, Blacks | Comments Off

Merkel’s Germany

Posted on January 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

From Steve Sailer:

From BBC:

Germany shocked by Cologne New Year gang assaults on women
59 minutes ago
Cologne officials say the systematic assaults on women are a new type of crime
The mayor of Cologne has summoned police for crisis talks after about 80 women reported sexual assaults and muggings by men on New Year’s Eve.
The scale of the attacks on women at the city’s central train station has shocked Germany. About 1,000 drunk and aggressive young men were involved.
City police chief Wolfgang Albers called it “a completely new dimension of crime”. The men were of Arab or North African appearance, he said.
… At least one woman was raped, and many were groped. Most of the crimes reported to police were robberies. A volunteer policewoman was among those sexually molested.
What is particularly disturbing is that the attacks appear to have been organised. Around 1,000 young men arrived in large groups, seemingly with the specific intention of carrying out attacks on women.
A policeman who was outside Cologne station during the New Year’s Eve trouble told the city’s Express news website that he had detained eight suspects. “They were all asylum seekers, carrying copies of their residence certificates,” he said.
However, there was no official confirmation that asylum seekers had been involved in the violence. Commentators in Germany were quick to urge people not to jump to conclusions.

Feminist Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 suggestion that sexual assault can be viewed as a political crime makes a lot of sense.

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* These single lonely Arab Muslim men in Germany just want some sexy time (in Borat accent). Since when did sexy time become rape?

* I’m sorry to say that Merkel may go down in history as Germany’s greatest traitor. Still I ask: what the hell possessed her?

* Merkel’s Germany is getting a lot more germy given the reported rate of diseases like TB for the Arab migrants and HIV from the Africans. And you know where the left hands of the Arab migrants have been.

* At a much smaller scale the same seems to have happened in the cities Hamburg and Stuttgart as well.
In Cologne the whole event took place in front of the main train station, at the foot of the Cologne cathedral. The cathedral has a side entry which goes directly to this square. At the top of this entry there is currently a huge antiracist / pro-refugee statement hanging at the wall.
It is funny how those people get called “asylum seekers” now. Why not simply call them refugees?
Actually those people did much likely not come this to Germany, but rather 3,4 years ago. After the Arab Spring started already a lot of North Africans came Europe and claimed being refugees.
Big western german cities, especially Cologne, have suffered from violence and crime of exactly this group for years.
Actually the Arab Spring seems to have two main variants:
1) the Egypt variant which means young mean sexually molesting women like on the Tahrir square in Cairo
2) the Syria variant which means Sunni muslims trying to expel or murder every Non-Muslim.

* Hitler issued orders from the bunker that German society be destroyed. Maybe Merkel is just following through.

Posted in Germany, Islam, Rape | Comments Off

Making Twitter Sharia-Compliant

Posted on January 4, 2016 by Luke Ford

Frank Gaffney writes: Twitter seems to think 2016 is 1984. It has welcomed in the New Year with a change in the rules governing all of its accounts that is reminiscent of Orwellian thought-control. Or at least that practiced by another, non-fictional totalitarian system: the Islamic supremacist program known as shariah.

Shariah’s adherents demand that no offense be given to them, their religion, deity or prophet. Now, all other things being equal, they are close to ensuring that none will be forthcoming in 140 characters.

If successful, contemporary Islamists will have achieved a major step towards a goal they have been pursuing through other means for nearly two decades: the worldwide prohibition of “defamation of religions” – read, Islam. In particular, since 2005, their proto-Caliphate – the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) – has been working through the United Nations on a ten-year plan to impose this restraint concerning freedom of expression on the rest of us.

In 2011, with the active support of the Obama administration, this gambit produced UN Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18. It basically gives the imprimatur of international law to Shariah’s demand that speech, books, videos and now Tweets that “defame” Muslims or their faith be prohibited.

In July of that year, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton implicated herself personally in this affront to our First Amendment guarantee of free expression. She launched with the OIC and the European Union the so-called “Istanbul Process,” a tripartite effort to accommodate the Islamic supremacists’ demands that Western nations conform to Resolution 16/18 by adopting domestic strictures against offense-giving to Muslims.

On that occasion, Mrs. Clinton famously declared her willingness “to use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.” The message could not have been more clear to jihadists around the world: The United States was submitting to shariah blasphemy norms.

According to shariah, the proper response is to redouble the effort to make the infidel “feel subdued.” That means, worse behavior from the Islamists, not better.

Now, it seems that one of the greatest enablers of the global jihad, Saudi billionaire Alwaleed bin Talal, is seeing his substantial stake in Twitter stock translate into another breakthrough for Islamic supremacy: The suppression of Tweets that, according to the company’s new rule, involve “hate speech or advocacy against an individual, organization or protected group based on race, ethnicity, national origin, color, religion, disability, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status or other protected status.”

To be sure Twitter is a private sector enterprise. It is, therefore, free to deny its services to those whose content it finds objectionable. At least, as long as it doesn’t try to deny service to approved “haters” like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). This organization has deviated wildly from its early history as an effective advocate for civil liberties. Today, its invective-laced advocacy against individuals or organization who are supposed to enjoy “protected status” under our Constitution, namely that of citizens free to express themselves, can only be described as hate speech. Yet, the SPLC is embraced and even cited by the Obama administration and others among the leftists and Islamists who make up the “Red-Green axis” now feverishly working to silence any who they, as Hillary Clinton put it, “abhor.” (For more on this unlikely alliance, see Jim Simpson’s The Red-Green Axis: Refugees, Immigration and the Agenda to Erase America.)

What is particularly concerning is that the new Twitter rule sounds a lot like what is coming out of the Obama administration these days. See, for example, the Justice Department’s “Guidance for Federal Law Enforcement Agencies Regarding the Use Of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, National Origin, Religion, Sexual Orientation, Or Gender Identity.”

Speaking of the Justice Department, Americans who are inclined not to worry about losing the ability to Tweet their concerns about jihadism, shariah and anything else that might offend Muslims should bear in mind that Attorney General Loretta Lynch has put us all on notice that considerably worse may be in store for our First Amendment rights. Last month she told a Muslim Brotherhood-tied organization, Muslim Advocates: “Now, obviously this is a country that is based on free speech, but when it edges towards violence, when we see the potential for someone…lifting that mantle of anti-Muslim rhetoric…When we see that, we will take action.”

With Hillary Clinton’s prominent role in promoting restriction of free expression, and what appears to be accelerating momentum in the direction of ensuring conformity with shariah blasphemy restrictions, this would seem to be a good time for Republican presidential candidates – and the rest of us – to be expressing our adamant objections. If Twitter gets away with keeping us from doing it in 140 characters, we better make sure we do it otherwise, while we still can.

Posted in Islam, Twitter | Comments Off