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From the Wall Street Journal:
At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5 per cent, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71 per cent of the decline. This education gap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years. The divergence increases at graduation: After six years of college, 65 per cent of women in the U.S. who started a four-year university in 2012 received diplomas by 2018 compared with 59 per cent of men during the same period, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
Assuming that there is some connection between having a higher education qualification and pay (that connection is not by any means set in stone) then if this trend continues, not only will it eliminate any alleged “pay gap” to the detriment of women, but push it another way. Of course, it might be that some US men have worked out that college in many ways is a waste of their time, a cesspit of wokery and pointless diversions, and they’d be better off learning code, or industrial welding, or something that doesn’t saddle them with big debts.
Even so, the male/female college attendance gap in the US, and quite possibly in a few other nations, appears to be one of those stories that very clearly pushes against a standard narrative of how the cards are stacked in favour of we toxic males and that therefore this needs to be fixed in some way. In my day job, I routinely get lots of emails from banks, wealth managers and other firms going on about the wonders of diversity, etc, and rarely, if ever, is this college attendance point brought up. I have raised it once or twice with people, and it gets a sort of muffled response, if at all.
A few more paragraphs from the WSJ article, which is behind a paywall:
Over the course of their working lives, American college graduates earn more than a million dollars beyond those with only a high-school diploma, and a university diploma is required for many jobs as well as most professions, technical work and positions of influence.
Yet skyrocketing education costs have made college more risky today than for past generations, potentially saddling graduates in lower-paying careers—as well as those who drop out—with student loans they can’t repay.
Social science researchers cite distractions and obstacles to education that weigh more on boys and young men, including videogames, pornography, increased fatherlessness and cases of overdiagnosis of boyhood restlessness and related medications.
Men in interviews around the U.S. said they quit school or didn’t enroll because they didn’t see enough value in a college degree for all the effort and expense required to earn one. Many said they wanted to make money after high school.
Not, obviously, to the extent of wanting him to escape being thrown out on his ear in the coming California gubernatorial recall election, but reading about Newsom’s “epic battle” with Cecily Myart Cruz, President of United Teachers Los Angeles, the major LA teachers’ union, gave me a soupçon of sympathy with the man.
This is how Ms Myart Cruz responded to a question from Jason McGahan of Los Angeles Magazine about children falling behind in their education while Los Angeles schools were closed during the pandemic:
“There is no such thing as learning loss. Our kids didn’t lose anything. It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.”
From Cecily Myart-Cruz’s Hostile Takeover of L.A.’s Public Schools by Jason McGahan.
Via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit and Mike Antonucci of the Education Intelligence Agency, which I shall look at again.
The American generation which counts those who gave their lives this week among their ranks has grown up with elite, institutional and expert failure not as a shocking aberration but as the default setting. Time and again, foreign policy elites have issued the wrong diagnoses and the wrong prescriptions. Economic conventional wisdom has been shattered, upended, disproven. Politics grows more bad-blooded and less serious. Claims of competence and expertise are regularly proved to be unfounded. More recently, America’s cultural elite has turned on its own country: happy to pronounce America irredeemably wicked whilst kowtowing to Chinese censors.
And after all of this, America elected a president who treated his predecessor and the last four years as an unseemly aberration and whose staff boasted that the adults were back in charge. Thanks to the decisions of those adults, young American soldiers found themselves in a deadly trap at the gates of Kabul airport.
– Oliver Wiseman
What is happening in USA is indeed socialist but not Marxist socialism by any reasonable definition. Moreover, the establishment embracing radical identitarianism, the hysterical obsession with race, and using huge corporations as a vector for their ideology makes this far, far more like some lunatic strain of gonzo fascism really.
The Woke anti-fascists really truly are far closer to fascism than 99% of the people they call fascist (which is pretty much everyone who is not them).
– Perry de Havilland
“President Biden’s tax plans might soon make Europe look like a capitalist heaven by comparison. He wants to raise the long-term capital-gains tax from just below 24% to above 43%. Switzerland has no such tax. In Britain, inventor of the welfare state, it is 20% and in Germany 26%. On income tax, the U.S. may soon top the scale. Mr. Biden wants a top marginal income-tax rate of just below 40%. Add state and local income taxes, like California’s 13.3% for top earners, and wealthy U.S. taxpayers could pay more than their European counterparts.”
– Josef Joffe, Wall Street Journal ($)
I have been covering this news story about the tax proposals in my regular day job in the banking and wealth management/media sector. Joe Biden, who has been having such a shit-show lately over Afghanistan, is equally terrible over tax and the economy, and also a bit two-faced. This is a man who, let it not be forgotten, was a senator for Delaware for many years. Delaware is a bit like a mini-“Switzerland”, one of those states that is favoured by corporations and creators of trusts (South Dakota, New Hampshire, Nevada and Alaska are similar).
The US is going to have to familiarise itself with the “Laffer Curve” all over again.
Mark Steyn wrote the other day,
Indeed, what difference would it make if it closed down its military? Obviously, it would present a few mid-life challenges for its corrupt Pentagon bureaucracy, since that many generals on the market for defense lobbyist gigs and board directorships all at once would likely depress the going rate. But, other than that, a military that accounts for 40 per cent of the planet’s military spending can’t perform either of the functions for which one has an army: it can’t defeat overseas enemies, and it’s not permitted to defend the country, as we see on the Rio Grande.
So what’s the point?
Good question. But why only ask it about the army?
While many here are distrustful of governments in general, most agree that if a government must exist at all it exists for the purposes listed in the preamble to the Constitution of the United States:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
I wish I could say “President Biden is failing at all these objectives”. Mere ineffectiveness would be so nice. He is worse than useless on every one of them. He is worse than the British government on every one of them, which is quite an achievement. ‘America is back’, all right, back to 1975. That affects us, too. Sharks attack when they smell blood in the water.
In a spirit of open-mindedness I invite American readers more familiar with their local situation than I am to suggest any mitigating factors which might raise Mr Biden’s score to zero on any of: forming a more perfect union, establishing justice, insuring domestic tranquility, providing for the common defence (Yanks could spell in those days), promoting the general welfare (promoting welfare dependency doesn’t count), and securing the blessings of liberty to himself and his posterity… on second thoughts, I must grant that he is doing OK at keeping Hunter Biden out of jail.
A 2016 BBC article describes how to spot vote fraud in African elections – in Gabon, Togo, Niger and suchlike places. ‘Vote rigging: How to spot the tell-tale signs’ says to watch out for such things as high turnout in specific areas, or discrepancies in votes versus ballots issued, and notes that delays in the result may be innocent but are suspicious. An older 2010 article I recall added to that list such things as anomalous ratios between 2nd and 3rd-party candidates. (A tin-pot-dictator style election where the favoured candidate gets 99% of the vote is sure to be suspected, but less attention may be paid to whether a given area’s ratio between the most popular losing candidate and long-shot third-party candidates actually makes sense.)
This kind of statistical evidence is apparently good enough to have the BBC sometimes condemning, sometimes pointedly suspecting black politicians in black countries. When it comes to white politicians in western countries, by contrast – Biden in the US, for example – a different standard is used. That election also showed large anomalous statistics and ratios in several specific areas (Milwaukee, for example). As for ballot/vote ratios, Montgomery, PA was not the only place where vote updates changed many votes but fewer ballots, and it too had a very implausible Trump-to-3rd-party-candidate vote ratio. But phrases like ‘no evidence’, ‘judge dismissed’ and ‘not proved’ seem to crowd out thoughts of statistics in the BBC as regards the white, western election, despite some of the oddities being even more obvious from a UK perspective.
Of course, no one can be made to see who has resolved in advance to keep their eyes shut, and nothing can be ‘proved’ if your standard of proof is set high enough – certainly not vote fraud (a point carefully analysed here – along with links to further statistical oddities). But using one standard of proof when the accused is black and another, higher one when he is white is the classic definition of racism.
Sadly, while there may be some readiness within the BBC to confront anti-black colour-prejudice, I fear there is none when the colour is orange. Although the BBC have suddenly and strongly gone off Joe Biden, and are walking back their post-inauguration praise of him, I doubt the effect will extend back to last November. And I have to concede that, at a time when the BBC have abruptly stopped trusting Biden, reminding them of Biden’s October 23rd 2020 remark about having
“the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organisation in the history of US politics”
is offering them information from a now-discredited source. 🙂
But at least black Africans can be sure the BBC will keep an eye on their election statistics, even if in a manner less than perfectly respectful of their equality to ourselves.
(Added later) A similar prejudice is visible in the fact that the US spends almost two-and-a-half billion dollars annually to support honest elections in various foreign states – and did so in 2020, much of it on procedures specifically designed to maintain election integrity in the face of the pandemic. This analysis shows the many ways the 2020 US presidential election failed the standards that the US required of the foreign recipients of those funds.
This was always the West’s problem in Afghanistan: it lacked faith in the very values it claimed to be delivering to that benighted country. We will liberate women from life under the burqa, Western officials said. But isn’t it ‘Islamophobic’ to criticise the burqa, or any other Islamic practice for that matter? Our elites have insisted for years that it is. We will replace your intolerant Islamist system with a civil society fashioned by clever professors, the West promised. But isn’t it judgemental and possibly a tad racist – certainly an offence against the ideology of multiculturalism – to imply that Western democracy is superior to Islamist theocracy? As one British think-tank says, in its definition of the term ‘Islamophobia’, it is wrong to suggest that Islam is in any way ‘inferior to the West’. The West’s post-9/11 bluster was continually undermined by the West’s broader descent into moral relativism. How can you assert the civilisational authority of Western values when your entire educational and university system is devoted to questioning and demeaning Western civilisation? You cannot partake in a clash of civilisations if you loathe your own civilisation.
– Brendan O’Neill
I was in favour of the initial post-9/11 campaign and frankly do not regret that. But as I and quite a few others said back in the day, the time for declaring victory and getting out came many years ago. The objective should never have been ‘nation building’, and this was not ‘for the Afghan people’, but rather a reprisal for the 9/11 attacks; a punitive mission rather than a forever war on ‘terrorism’. That should have been it. Make the point then let the perpetual civil war resume with a salutary reminder to keep the fight local. Oh well. As with Iraq, I vastly overestimated the ability of the ruling class in the USA to actually focus on what mattered (not that the UK version is any better, it is just the consequences of our own clown-class are rather less global than when their American counterparts screw the pooch for decades).
And so, the political masters of the now laughably mis-named ‘free world’ fly absurd flags, fretting about people being mis-gendered whilst the USA loses its longest war ever to a bunch of goat botherers with a good command of practical chemistry. Communo-fascist China must be wetting themselves with laughter. It is like a snuff movie set to a Benny Hill soundtrack.
The day before yesterday a man called Jake Davison murdered five people in Plymouth. In a pattern common with many spree killers he first murdered his mother and then went on to kill random strangers, including a three year old girl and her father.
The three major “spree” or “rampage” killings in British history were carried out in Hungerford in 1987, in Dunblane in 1996 and in Cumbria in 2010.
There was also a spree killing of five people in West Bromwich and Nuneaton in 1978.
There have been other mass murders following different dynamics, such as serial killers targeting particular categories of victim such as prostitutes or homosexuals, or medical murderers like Dr Harold Shipman, who may have murdered hundreds over his lifetime. There have also been other spree killers who were stopped or killed themselves after claiming fewer victims than those listed above.
Many years ago I wrote a pamphlet for the Libertarian Alliance about the Dunblane Massacre called “Rachel weeping for her children”. I wrote,
… in Britain there was almost no control of guns before the 1920 Firearms Act and widespread ownership of pistols for self defence until the 1968 Act and yet there was one of the lowest murder rates of any society in human history. In Britain, as gun laws have got stricter, gun crime has got worse. Everyone then would then say, unencumbered by any shred of evidence, “Aha! But crime would have been yet worse if the laws had not come in!” This was my first introduction to the enormous inertia of a failed policy.
Other than quoting that passage I will not repeat here any of the arguments about gun laws that I made in that piece.
I simply wish to pose the question at the top of this post. Why weren’t there any British massacres of that type, the rampage killer who attacks random people, early in the twentieth century? It cannot have been that guns were unavailable: the world wars flooded the UK with guns. So far as I know spree killings were rarer in the US during that period too. Not that there was an absence of mass murders during this time – there were several political/racial pogroms such as the Tulsa race massacre, but random killings seem to have been less frequent than in the decades before or afterwards.
The two major exceptions that I can recall, the Bath School massacre and Pacific Airlines Flight 773, were both carried out by means other than guns.
I may be wrong about the US. That list on Wikipedia omits what I would have thought was the progenitor of the modern type of random mass shooting: the University of Texas clock tower massacre in 1966.
I may be wrong about the whole thing. Perhaps there is no pattern to be discerned from what are, fortunately, very rare events. Yet it seems to me that there is just enough of a pattern there to make the question worth asking.
One of these links will take you to an article in today’s Times by David Charter:
“Texas stops teaching that Ku Klux Klan was morally wrong”
“Texas stops teaching that Ku Klux Klan was morally wrong”
“Texas stops teaching that Ku Klux Klan was morally wrong”
“Texas stops teaching that Ku Klux Klan was morally wrong”
Which link is it? It doesn’t matter*. You all guessed right. You had no need to actually read the article to predict with a high degree of accuracy what it would say. You had no need of a Times subscription to know that whatever Texas was doing would turn out to be something far less dramatic than the headline suggests.
I am not going to quote the article even now. Do not feel deprived. As I find increasingly often these days, the readers’ comments are better than the stuff above the line.
A commenter called Dick Marlow says,
I think that this headline is misleading.
As I understand it the State of Texas has decided that it should not enumerate in law incidents and beliefs that 99.9% of Texans accept were both wrong and repugnant. This is not the same as “stops teaching that the KKK was morally wrong” which can be interpreted as meaning the state permits teaching that the KKK was morally acceptable.
This is not what they are attempting to do. They are shifting the responsibility of identifying which unacceptable events need to be taught from the state legislature and shifting it downstream, nearer both the ISDs, parents and teachers.
But you already knew it would turn out be something like that.
Why do they do this? I cannot even say that a clickbait headline lets down a respectable article, since the unknown subeditor has merely re-phrased Mr Charter’s very first line. The Times used to be better than this. David Charter has been known to be better than this. It’s not like they’re fooling anyone: there is a veritable flood of comments saying, no, the Texas Department of Education has not decided to take a neutral position on whether the Klan was a Bad Thing.
What is the payoff for producing such obviously counter-productive propaganda?
*The important question, and the one to which you will not find the answer by hovering your mouse over the link, is which of them takes you to the cute video of a sloth in a boat.
[Overheard on a train in UK]
Passenger 1: “Have you seen what’s happening in South Africa? The authorities have let order completely break down. It’s getting so bad even BBC is starting to show coverage.”
Passenger 2: “Yeah, it’s terrible, Natal is starting to look like Portland.
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Who Are We? 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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