Luke Ford

Ed West writes:

One of the curious trends of recent years has been the rise of “the radical Rich” – billionaires devoted to progressive social movements, whether it’s same-sex marriage or open borders. A recent example is the effort to punish North Carolina for passing a law saying that anatomically male people who identify as female cannot use women’s toilets.

I try to imagine what my feminist grandmother in the 1920s would have said had she been told that the cutting-edge social cause in a century’s time would be the right of men to use women’s loos. “LOL,” probably.

First the soft drinks manufacturer Pepsi demanded that the state repeal the law. Then Bruce Springsteen cancelled a gig there, followed by Ringo Starr. Various large, sharp-elbowed corporations have since piled in to protest, and Deutsche Bank has cancelled plans to expand its office in the state; this is a company that has a large office in Saudi Arabia, where women aren’t even allowed to drive, let alone choose which loo to use.

Are executives really that heated up about this great toilet injustice, or is it that big businesses love social justice causes which distract from economic injustice and annoying questions about tax avoidance, low wages and predatory practices? This process, known as “pinkwashing”, has become particularly noticeable since our culture became dominated by northern California some 20 years ago. Silicon Valley, the epicentre of 21st-century politics, is painfully right-on when it comes to social issues but chillaxed about ruthless capitalism. Or as the Puritans used to say of the proto-leftist Quakers in colonial America: “They pray for you one day a week and prey on you the other six.”

Take Uber, the app that allows people to hire very cheap taxis, driven by random people in their own cars, at the touch of a button. Since its foundation six years ago Uber has sold itself as promoting women’s rights and racial justice, with adverts carrying catchphrases such as “employing women globally” and “While taxis often refuse people in minority neighbourhoods, Uber is there”. It also “pays” its drivers (in actual fact freelancers) a relative pittance, and in so doing undercuts traditional black cabs.

Similarly, Airbnb, the website through which people rent out their homes, has run campaigns celebrating America’s immigrant history at Ellis Island. Airbnb is to hotels what Uber is to taxi drivers, but it’s especially interesting because, unlike hotels or B&Bs, Airbnb providers are in practice able to ignore discrimination laws; if you don’t like the look of a person, you can refuse their request. To me, its business model seems to be based on the reality that house-swapping works very effectively if people are allowed to follow their own instincts (ie, prejudices). Airbnb admits it faces “significant challenges” with the issue.

Then there is Starbucks, which last year tried to get on the bandwagon by encouraging customers to talk about racism and social injustice with its baristas. The stunt backfired – could anything be more awkward? – and attention soon turned on the company’s own lack of diversity in its higher ranks (always a tricky issue).

Comments:

* Current Western liberalism is a condition I call empathobesity. Briefly, just like obesity is a result of a generally healthy affinity for food gone mad, emapthobesity is a suicidal excess of an otherwise useful instinct of empathy.

The ironic thing is that for a long time, the ascent of the West has been the consequence of an impulse towards empathy and egalitarianism. Thus we see a gradual trend in the West towards a broadening of the circle of political empowerment. In England, where this trend seems to start first, we have the Magna Carta in 1215, Habeas Corpus (formally in 1679 but a convention for centuries before), the English Civil War which ended with Charles I beheaded (and which included distinctly leftist egalitarian factions like the diggers and levellers), the various reform and representation acts of the 19th and 20th century culminating in universal adult franchise, feminism, the sexual revolution of the 60s, gay, animal, transgender rights, gay marriage, illegal migrant rights and possibly chimpanzee/cetacean personhood in the near future etc, etc.

Thus we see that power has been diffusing outwards from the king, to lords, to powerful commoners, to middle class commoner men, to all men, to all adults, sexual minorities, animals etc.

For the first few centuries, this trend helped expand the proportion of educated and empowered people able to push back the frontiers of science and technology. It is no coincidence that England, where this egalitarian trend first manifests, also underwent the industrial revolution before other nations. Thus for centuries, a leftward shift was both a cause and consequence of scientific and technological progress.

In my view, this egalitarianism has been a trend in the West for so long that it is now a reflex action, a secular religion.

However, around the early/mid 20th century, this impulse has run into diminishing or even negative returns as power/respectability has now started to diffuse to demographics whose participation is fraught with unintended consequences or who are wholly irrelevant to scientific/technological progress.

This hypothesis succinctly explains both the rise of the West over the past few centuries, and it’s decline in the past few decades.

See tarkmarg.blogspot.com especially here.

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* One thing that Trump did in this campaign, that has been little noticed or remarked upon, was to break the polite gentleman’s rule that you don’t make an issue of the other candidate’s funding sources. Trump said, flat out, that Jeb Bush was “owned” by his donors. This could be huge, or rather “yuge”. Would he be willing to say to Hillary in a national debate: “You are George Soros’ favorite candidate. He has spent millions of dollars to get you elected. What is it that he expects to get in return for that? The American people have a right to know. Tell us.”

* Shorter Jim Vandehei: We need a third party to give a voice to voiceless disenfranchised destitute Jewish billionaires, because the two we have doing that aren’t enough.

* I can just imagine Mark Zuckerberg, America’s sweetheart, out there campaigning before crowds of 25,000 and more, telling them how he’s going to lay them off and replace them with cheaper immigrants from India and Pakistan. With his personal charm and that winning message, he’d be huuuge!

I’m listening to the audio of Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble, by Dan Lyons. He describes the Silicon Valley billionaires and wanna-be billionaires as people who saw the Aspergery, conniving, backstabbing little prick at the heart of Social Network and thought, “I want to be that guy.”

* A third world “West” will be a disaster, a disaster unparalleled in modern history, a true regression to a hellish mean. It would be horrible for the West, the World, Jews, Gentiles, Israel. Just thinking of a Muslim France controlling the French nuclear arsenal should horrify anyone. It should especially horrify Israel.

But as for Israel, comments like that of Ruth Marcus are par for the course in Israeli public life, and are meaningless. To an opposition party, Israel is always “verging” on a trajectory of a disaster and although Israel was “verging” on slipping to a third world economy (according to Marcus), somehow Israel never actually got on that trajectory. You will note that that article was written in 2012. Since then the Israeli economy has continued to grow nicely, and Kadima, Marcus’s party, has zero seats in the Knesset. And deep down the Israelis do not mind the incredibly high ultra birth rate, they simply want to turn the ultra Orthodox into working and fighting citizens. But the birth rate they like. The ultra Orthodox Ashkenazi population, once you shave their beards, has a high potential.