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Wells Fargo and Apple both made substantial moves within London since the Brexit vote. Wells Fargo spent $400 million to buy a new European headquarters in London’s financial district. Apple announced plans to open a new London campus in 2021 that covers nearly 500,000 square feet of space. Facebook is also in the market for 700,000 square feet to accommodate 9,000 employees.
The whole article is worth a read. And it reminded me that there are now dozens of stories, tracked by the likes of Guido Fawkes, going on about how This or That splendid thing has taken place “despite Brexit”. The joke here, of course, is that the Remain-leaning folks who write for the likes of the Financial Times and others have a hardwired assumption that Brexit is bad, will damage the UK economy, and that anything that appears to be positive is therefore in some sort of defiance of said presumption, to be dismissed, or cast aside. (This is not all one way, of course, there can be over-inflation of optimism about what the UK departure will mean, but my impression is that the volume of “despite Brexit” stories and the bias they reveal is much greater than the other sort.)
The point is soon being reached when an entire volume of news stories could be gathered into one place and the title of the book could be called “Despite Brexit”. Maybe those folk at Guido Fawkes or the Spectator, etc might bring out one in time for next year’s Christmas. I suspect the book will run to several hundred pages. (OK, I demand copyright on the idea, now!)
It is sometimes said in a disapproving sort of way that social media is bad in that it reduces social inhibitions. “You’d never say that to a person’s face”, sort of argument. It is a bit like the argument made as to why people are rude when behind the wheel of a car because, encased as they are behind metal and glass, they feel able to shout and swear at the real or alleged berk in front. (Needless to say, being the brilliant driver I am, all those who receive my ire deserve it.)
On places such as Facebook, which I use, I occasionally see people whom I thought are quite reasonable people write or say things that make me think again. A case in point is the recent outpouring of rage over the fact that Donald Trump had decided that the US embassy should be shifted to Jerusalem. Apart from anything else, he is merely executing on a policy that had been approved of, in a bi-partisan vote, in Congress back when Clinton was in office. But, my FB room-mates shout, he should have not done this, he is stoking up the “Arab Street” (such people have, I suspect, never been to the ME), and this shows he is reckless, silly, has an orange face, yada fucking yada. And in one case, an acquaintance went into “the Jews running Congress and American politics mode”, making various references to Trump’s relations, his being a New Yorker (full of those ghastly people), and so on. I decided not to put the point to this FB fuckwit lest I cause a total meltdown, which is that if it is so terrible for Jerusalem to host a US embassy, with the implied recognition of said city as the Israeli capital, then why not just come out with it and say that the state of Israel should not exist at all?
A lesson learned, therefore, is that there are a lot of people out there who buy into the whole “Jewish conspiracy thing”. Now I know that not all anti-Israel people are Jew-haters, and that one can and should be able to discuss what that country does without falling down the rabbit hole of anti-Semitism. But there is, from my own impressions, considerable overlap between the two. And while not infallible as a guide, I take the view that people who dislike or fear Jews, and Israel, are fuckwits, and people whose judgement should be regarded with scorn.
So Donald Trump, thankyou for clarifying a few doubts I have had about certain people I know out there. I am beginning to think, what with the tax bill, the Supreme Court, agency and most cabinet picks, and now this, that the man is actually proving to be a decent POTUS, and a lot less scary than I had previously thought. All he needs to do is turn down the Twitter feed, but maybe enraging people in the way he does is precisely part of what makes him effective, even if it upsets our fastidious tastes. As Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has remarked, he’s even got “liberals” talking about the separation of power and Constitution again.
Here is an article by John Podhoretz on the issue of the embassy.
Key quote:
The idea that Jerusalem is not Israel’s capital has been a global pretense for decades, including here in the United States. It’s a pretense because Jerusalem has been Israel’s capital from the moment the new country secured a future by winning a bloody war for independence waged against it by Arab nations after they rejected the UN partition of the old British mandate into a Jewish state and an Arab state.
To be precise this is why we can’t have politicians who try to explain concepts from economics in a relatively grown up manner. When they give the more highminded strategy a go, along comes the Daily Mirror and the “pan-disability charity” Scope – whose Wikipedia entry is graced by one of those template messages saying, “This article contains content that is written like an advertisement” – to remind them why when attempting to discuss economics with the Great British Public the wiser course is to mindlessly repeat one pre-prepared soundbite. Daring to suggest that some groups might be on average be less productive than others, even in the context of saying that their participation in the labour force is a good thing, only brings on another mass bout of indignation dysentery. All one can do then is try not to breathe in too deeply until people have got it out of their system.
“The consequences of high levels of unemployment, particularly youth unemployment, will be felt for many, many years to come.
“It is almost certainly the case that by increasing participation in the workforce, including far higher levels of participation by marginal groups and very high levels of engagement in the workforce, for example of disabled people – something we should be extremely proud of – may have had an impact on overall productivity measurements.”
Quoth Scope:
Anna Bird, Director of Policy and Research at disability charity Scope, said: “These comments are totally unacceptable and derogatory. They fundamentally undermine the Government’s policy to get more disabled people into work, and the ambition set out by the Prime Minister just a week ago.
“The Chancellor must urgently withdraw them and offer a full apology.”
Back in March US Vice-President Mike Pence was mocked from all sides. According to Olga Khazan in the Atlantic:
In a recent, in-depth Washington Post profile of Karen Pence, Vice President Mike Pence’s wife, a small detail is drawing most of the attention: “In 2002, Mike Pence told The Hill that he never eats alone with a woman other than his wife and that he won’t attend events featuring alcohol without her by his side, either.”
The article went on to say that:
Pence is not the only powerful man in Washington who goes to great lengths to avoid the appearance of impropriety with the opposite sex. An anonymous survey of female Capitol Hill staffers conducted by National Journal in 2015 found that “several female aides reported that they have been barred from staffing their male bosses at evening events, driving alone with their congressman or senator, or even sitting down one-on-one in his office for fear that others would get the wrong impression.” One told the reporter Sarah Mimms that in 12 years working for her previous boss, he “never took a closed door meeting with me. … This made sensitive and strategic discussions extremely difficult.”
In conclusion, Ms Khazan argued that:
Without access to beneficial friendships and mentor relationships with executive men, women won’t be able to close the gender gap that exists in most professions.
I am not convinced that there is a gender gap, but that is a subject for another post. Ms Khazan made a fair point about mentoring, and her tone was reasonable. Ashley Csanady of Canada’s National Post, not so much:
At its core, Pence’s self-imposed ban is rape culture.
Nor is that a label I assign lightly. “Rape culture” is a phrase so overused it’s become almost meaningless, like calling someone a Nazi on the internet. But it has a very clear meaning: the notion, whether conscious or unconscious, that men can’t control themselves around women because “boys will be boys.”
The explicit reasons for Pence’s restriction are religion and family, but the implicit reason is that he must avoid alone-time with women lest his stringent religious moral code fall apart in the presence of a little lipstick and décolletage. That is rape culture.
Given that the list of men accused of sexual misconduct since Harvey Weinstein is growing like a beanstalk, and a great many of these men were loud in their scorn for the “puritanism” of Pence and all like him, Ms Csanady and a few others might like to re-evaluate their earlier remarks. I am not saying it is necessary to behave like Pence in order to avoid behaving like Weinstein. But it does seem that Ms Csanady might have been looking in the wrong place for rape culture.
Anyone else watching Star Trek: Discovery? ‘Tis quite the novelty in Solent Mansions: my dear husband and I sit down and watch television. On the very day a new episode comes out, my dears, for we will not wait!
Now we all know that by the time the era of Classic Trek rolls around after about a quarter of a century, certain things must have happened:
– the Spore Drive will not merely have dropped out of use, but will have been erased from human and Klingon memory.
– same goes for the holodeck.
– and for standards of starship interior design.
– the Klingons will look like Kang from Day of the Dove, not like Face Paint Thingy or Girl Thingy who can scarcely move under all those bone ridges.
– miniskirts will be back in.
– Captain Lorca will be revealed to be bad and wrong. The Star Trek universe has “proving warmongers wrong” listed higher up in its job description than “entropy”. But it is OK to quietly relish their badassery à la Gene Hunt in Life on Mars while we wait for the inevitable.
The question is how will all that is prophesied come to pass?
The New European thinks its cartoons are a selling point:
I disagree that Stanley Donwood’s cartoons are “fantastic”. The drawings are a tolerably executed pastiche of the style of 1950s cartoons, but there is no clever visual imagery; they merely depict one human being hitting another. Or try to depict it: in the first cartoon the chick’s arm looks too limp to have just knocked that big guy off his feet, but fear not, there is a flash to show that impact did indeed occur. In the second one the word SLAP performs the same function. If you like seeing pictures of your political opponents being hit and sworn at, you will like this!
As for the words, the “punchlines” are nothing but verbal supplements to the punches. Did I say “punchlines” in the plural? There is only one between the two of them. In “PUT THAT ON THE SIDE OF A BUS, FUCKWIT!”, the point is that upon the word “THAT” the woman returns the man’s Leave slogan back to him by hitting him, and in “HOW’S THIS FOR ‘WILL OF THE PEOPLE’ YOU EUROPHOBIC FUCK!”, the point is that upon the word “THIS” the woman returns the man’s Leave slogan back to him by hitting him. While the visual formula of a pretty young woman knocking seven bells out of a fat old man can be repeated ad infinitum, quite soon one is going to run out of Leave slogans and demonstrative pronouns.
Overall, I am not impressed. Nor am I that much bothered. I am confident that the readers of the New European will confine their beatings of Leavers to the realm of imagination; they have plenty of practice in living in a fantasy world after all.
To be honest, the claim made by Nigel Farage to Breitbart London that the cartoons are “glorifying violence against those who voted for Brexit” is a stretch. Both the initial hard-hitting cartoons and his pulling no punches in his objection to them are best seen as just part of the good old knockabout fun of politics. But, as the saying goes, those who live by the sword die by the sword. As it says in the Breitbart article, the New European has been having the vapours about stuff like “the direct correlation between political messaging and violence” since its foundation. In this very issue it has yet another piece saying that real world harm is done by images, in this case denouncing “the complicit culture of Lad’s mags”. It is entertaining to see it being slapped down for the very same offence.
The news around Europe is that the Dutch have formed a government after a record 208 days of negotiations; Austria has elected an anti-immigration leader in a notable lurch rightward; and the Czechs have chosen a Eurosceptic as a prime minister (h/t Adam for the roundup). You’d have thought this would be a major point of discussion in the British media especially with the ongoing Brexit negotiations, but what was the BBC’s main headline yesterday afternoon? This one:
Widow of dead soldier hits out at Trump
Never mind European populations swinging to the right and voting Eurosceptic politicians into office, what is important is who is saying what about Trump on Twitter.
An investigative journalist in Malta who exposed her island nation’s links to offshore tax havens using the leaked Panama Papers was killed in a car bombing on Monday, an attack that shocked Malta and was condemned by leaders of the European Union.
The journalist, Daphne Caruana Galizia, 53, died when the car she was driving exploded in Bidnija, a hamlet in north-central Malta. Her final blog post, accusing the prime minister’s chief of staff of corruption, had been published about a half-hour earlier.
Even if, like yours truly, you don’t think that there is anything necessarily wrong with offshore tax havens (haven is a place of safety, and I am quite keen on being safe from the predations of the State), it is worth getting angry about politicians who talk a good game about compliance with taxes salting – allegedly – kickbacks in far-off locations and hoping no-one will notice. We live in a world where governments the world over, through pacts such as the Common Reporting Standard, are to all intents and purposes creating a global tax “cartel” in pursuit of high net worth individuals’ wealth. Assuming, for example, that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party wins power at the next UK general election, and imposes all manner of controls (including capital controls) then UK residents may now already be thinking of where to park their money. Global anti-tax avoidance/evasion efforts make those bolt-holes harder to reach. So on certain levels I don’t have an issue with Malta being a tax haven, or its citizens being wily about it. What I do, however, have an issue with is the double-standards, and furthermore, the tolerance of bribery and corruption that is not just a by-product of an expansive state, but part of a culture that has become too embedded in certain countries.
Malta wants to become an important financial centre; it is already pretty significant in that regard. But it is in competition with rivals such as Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Mauritius, Singapore, etc. All of these places have their faults, but the murder of a campaigning journalist by the use of a car-bomb in broad daylight in Malta represents a shock even to those wearily familiar with the nastiness of current affairs.
Final point: whatever her merits or faults, the journalist known to many as “Daphne” was rightly famed for her courage in facing up to some very dodgy people. Such persons have also paid a price in countries such as Russia.
If the Maltese were astronauts, they would be saying the equivalent of “Houston, we have a problem”.
It’s official: every cyclone or hurricane these days is the worst, strongest, most powerful [insert hyperbolic untruth of your choice] EVER!
Hurricane Irma has been no different.
Of course, the reality is far less sexy…
…when it comes to 1-minute sustained wind speed, Irma ranks tied for second place (with four others) when it comes to North Atlantic hurricanes. In terms of intensity (the lower the air pressure the higher the intensity), Irma doesn’t even crack the top 10 in the North Atlantic (it’s 12th).
The only time I ever read anything in the Daily Telegraph nowadays is when Guido Fawkes quotes some particularly ridiculous thing in it, and has a good old sneer.
Well, just in case Guido missed it, here is another choice item of ridicule-worthy Daily Telegraphy, spotted earlier today by 6k:
I found the reasons various people gave for choosing sides in the American Civil War fascinating, but the complexities of each choice have largely been ignored in contemporary discussions on the subject. I guess the BBC and their ilk prefer to stoke the flames of a race war by implying Lee was fighting to preserve slavery.
Well, they’re getting what they wanted, aren’t they?
Recently dismissed Google employee James Damore posted a document on an internal Google mailing list entitled Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber about Google’s diversity policy and the difficulty of criticising it. It was originally reported by Motherboard (labelled an anti-diversity manifesto) and later by Gizmodo (labelled an anti-diversity screed). Here are some quotations from the document:
I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more.
I hope it’s clear that I’m not saying that diversity is bad […] . I’m also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I’m advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group
Meanwhile the very headlines of the article call this an anti-diversity document, establishing a narrative.
Here is a reaction from Laura Shortridge, a prominent commentator on Twitter:
Many users responded that he had not called for anyone to be fired. A response to this objection may hint at where differences in opnion about the document originate:
The personality differences section talks about such things as “openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas”. It also contains more controversial-sounding statements such as “Women on average are more prone to anxiety”. It cites a section of a wikipedia article about sex differences in psychology, though this may not have been known by commentators external to Google as the version of the document containing hyperlinks has only become available more recently. The Wikipedia page says, ” Females were on average higher than males in extraversion, anxiety, trust, and, especially, tender-mindedness (e.g., nurturance).” It cites “Gender differences in personality: a meta-analysis” by Feingold, A. (1994-11-01). The section is in the context of coming up with suggestions to improve the work environment for women without resorting to discriminatory practices such as training courses only available to women.
Damore’s assertions about gender are, frankly, guff dressed up with pseudo-scientific jargon: not just belittling women, but reducing men to the status of unemotional individualistic robots.
On the general subject of differences between men and women, Scott Alexander has an interesting article comparing meta-studies on the subject and statistical approaches which lead to different results. He finds that:
[Author of a meta-analysis Hyde] does a wonderful job finding that men and women have minimal differences in eg “likelihood of smiling when not being observed”, “interpersonal leadership style”, et cetera. But if you ask the man on the street “Are men and women different?”, he’s likely to say something like “Yeah, men are more aggressive and women are more sensitive”. And in fact, Hyde found that men were indeed definitely more aggressive, and women indeed definitely more sensitive. But throw in a hundred other effects nobody cares about like “likelihood of smiling when not observed”, and you can report that “78% of gender differences are small or zero”.
In his document, Damore explains that he is talking about small differences between men and women across a large population, and not making generalisations.
I’m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.
This is difficult to reconcile with reactions from fellow employees, such as, “That garbage fire of a document is trash and you are wonderful coworkers who I am extremely lucky to work with.”
The first official response from Google was from Vice President of Diversity, Integrity & Governance, Danielle Brown.
I found that it advanced incorrect assumptions about gender.
It is understandable that someone might hold this view, though the document mainly summarised information on Wikipedia.
portions of the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace. Our job is to build great products for users that make a difference in their lives. To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK.
This seems to misrepresent the document, which is mainly talking about why women who do not work for Google do not work for Google. It says nothing at all about the ones who do work there.
He continues:
At the same time, there are co-workers who are questioning whether they can safely express their views in the workplace (especially those with a minority viewpoint). They too feel under threat, and that is also not OK. People must feel free to express dissent. So to be clear again, many points raised in the memo — such as the portions criticizing Google’s trainings, questioning the role of ideology in the workplace, and debating whether programs for women and underserved groups are sufficiently open to all — are important topics.
It is clear the the offending portion of the document is the part that summarised Wikipedia’s summary of the state of the science on the subject. I wonder whether, as a matter of debating tactics, it might have been possible to make the same points in safety, while omitting this section. On the subject of tactics, there are a couple of interesting comments about this on ESR’s blog:
You can make the work environment more hostile for lots of people by saying true things. It is reasonable to fire someone who creates negative value for the company in this manner
and
if you loudly challenge the principles or initiatives which have been handed down and spearheaded by upper management, you’d be a damn fool to expect to keep your job for very long.
To the extent that these comments are true it does not speak well of the environment at Google or in Silicon Valley, but it is interesting that Damore’s firing was predictable and indeed somewhat predicted in the very document that led to it.
I’ve gotten many personal messages from fellow Googlers expressing their gratitude for bringing up these very important issues which they agree with but would never have the courage to say or defend because of our shaming culture and the possibility of being fired.
Perhaps comments which sound inflammatory out of context can be avoided. For example, “Women, on average, have more … neuroticism” or “the Left tends to deny science”. But taken as a whole the document has been treated unfairly by some.
I wonder how easy it is for Google to hire more women, given that “According to the American Association of University Women, in recent years only 20% of Advanced Placement computer science exam takers in high school have been female.”.
Finally, I should like to draw everyone’s attention to the Norwegian television documentary series “Hjernevask”, or “Brainwash” in English, which is on this very topic, and is quite worth watching. I’ve linked to the first of the seven parts below:
Please make sure you enable subtitles, unless you speak Norwegian that is.
The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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