untethered

Censorship is the eighth dirty word. The first seven are okay now, actually. Censorship is the last dirty word. Can’t say it.
YouTube channel Black Pigeon Speaks was taken down without explanation this morning

The reason we know; the only curious thing is the timing. The subject of his last video was censorship and I think I’m seeing a trend.

BPS was meticulous in avoiding terms of service violations, but was certainly slated for removal at the first opportunity–but what determines that in YouTube’s estimation? What holds them back in the first place from wholesale banning? Having demonstrated they won’t explain themselves and no one will force them to, what restrains them?

Going nuclear in a day on the right might prompt a response, finally, from somewhere in the government or society. Congress taking up the anti-trust issue must factor in. But be certain, if things get really bad for the Narrative, they’ll probably drop the big one. Everything they’ve done this far shows their commitment to censorship of any rightist or populist dissent, even over profit.

How much autonomy is YouTube allowed? The erratic nature of its censorship–waiting a day to purge Crowder and then abjectly apologizing, for instance–indicate Google is applying all the pressure (not community outrage), and intervening at points when CEO Susan Wojkiki isn’t being diligent enough. Thus the tearful apology.

In 1971 German author Dieter Forte had some international success with a play, Martin Luther and Thomas Munzer, or the Introduction of Bookkeeping, portraying the Reformation as a battle between the people and capital, with unfortunate consequences. Munzer is the Reformation preacher who split from Luther, leading radical reformers in attacking the feudal system. He was executed for his role in the disastrous German Peasant’s War.

Medieval banking magnate Jacob Fugger lectures Luther’s protector, the Duke of Saxony:

Do you know we have over one hundred church holidays a year? Over a hundred, my dear prince. Church masses, pilgrimages, I don’t know what. The people eat and drink themselves full and don’t give a thought to work… And then these fast days! I’m always having to petition for new exceptions for my workers. A worker should work and not fast! This has finally got to be regulated. Daily work should be sanctified. People should thank God that they can work at all. They can receive their reward in heaven. Then they won’t need so much on earth, and we shall finally have cheaper labor costs. So much for your Luther.

Pagan religious observations provided the peasantry with relief from toil before there was such a thing as “days off”. The Church’s maintenance of them created an authority interfering with exploitation of labor where before there had been only custom.

It long ago become a cliche to find capitalism’s very roots in Protestantism. But we are now in Protestantism’s dotage, its optimism gone, its authority gone–done in by its own materialism, I say.
 Those days once consecrated to rest are now dedicated to consumption–and the work to pay for it. Protestantism probably made inevitable religious holidays’ present role–you no longer sacrifice, to propitiate God, but indulge, to assist the economy. An economy based on indulgence–is a funny thing to find at the end of a road that began with a revolt against indulgences.

Every historical movement since the invention of money has had a strong if not dominant economic component. Feminism in the pre-hysteria United States was largely about drawing women out of the home and into the labor force–labor arbitrage.

Whether economic incentive is a necessary or a sufficient cause of the disease feminism is now doesn’t matter. It’s hard to imagine getting to where we are without it–expanding the labor pool for the world’s greatest economy is how we funded the demise of the family. America fuck yeah.

The patriarchy, despite its misogyny and lack of representation, kicked it all off with technological innovation: maintaining the home required less labor with progress generally and specifically in the introduction of modern appliances such as refrigerators and vacuum cleaners. The initial instrument of women’s liberation was the washing machine.

There is a racist classic: “if we’d known you’d be this much trouble, we’d have picked the cotton ourselves”. Likewise, maybe we shouldn’t have been so industriously helpful to women in their former misery.

Then comes the pill, of course. Its benefit to the economy has been well documented–and celebrated, here in the new New Republic

Legal access to the pill before women turned 21 both increased how many women were in the labor force as well as how much they actually worked. Access to the pill reduced the likelihood that a woman would have a baby before the age of 22 by 14 percent. That, in turn, increased young women’s labor force participation by 7 percent. The women who first had legal access to the pill because of their states’ laws worked 650 more hours than their peers who only got it later… 

Between 1972 and the early 1990s, the share of women in their prime working age who were in the workforce rose from 72 percent to nearly 84 percent. Had that not happened, the economy would have been about 11 percent smaller in 2012…

This leaves out the perceived economic incentive of legal abortion, which Chelsea Clinton recently blurted out to some controversy. I won’t try to make myself an expert on the subject: I’ll assume there’s mainstream consensus it benefits the economy by limiting labor turnover.

But taking the long view there’s an economic argument against the Pill–if you take out the feminism: it’s dysgenic. It degrades your human capital. Not just the quality of available labor, but that of the population is degraded, and society has to absorb the cost of the Pill effecting higher levels of dysfunction.
Of course.
But this cold calculation chills people who cheer the economic benefits of a childless society. For whom the nation with more children is on the wrong side of the “fertility differential”.

I don’t think it’s the economists that are that short-sighted. It is, or has become, the feminism now, stupid. Increasingly, like “diversity”, the cost feminism will extract from the economy will become obvious and unmentionable.

It likely isn’t quantified, or allowed to be quantified at this point, but the economic returns to business from the great migration of women out of the home must be diminishing now. All those jobs where women are competitive with men have long been open to them and their industries have taken advantage of the expanded labor market–now, compelled by feminism, the same businesses are expected to produce equal representation everywhere, regardless of how paltry the pool of available and qualified female labor.

Feminism has made a lot of money for the economy. Now it wants that money back, with interest, forever.

Talking with our German friend Tanja.

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German social democracy is in crisis: 

The Social Democratic Party (SPD) went into last week’s European elections with some bold, albeit vague campaign slogans: “Come together and make Europe strong” was one. “Europe is the answer” was another. Given the party’s humiliating performance, taking in a new historic low of just over 15 percent, one has to wonder whether they were asking the right questions.

The Social Democrats lean hard on “more Europe” as the solution to Germany’s problems, and are far more likely to praise French president Emmanuel Macron than defend the leader of their British sister party, Jeremy Corbyn. They banked on selling themselves as a stable, mildly progressive bulwark against creeping right-wing populism but seem to have lost this role to the Greens, who broke 20 percent in a nationwide election for the first time…

Catastrophic as the election may have been, it was anything but unexpected. The Social Democrats have been lumbering from one defeat to the next for nearly two decades, their toxic brand of what Oliver Nachtwey calls “politics without politics” costing them hundreds of thousands of members and millions of voters. The European elections were merely the latest confirmation of a seemingly unstoppable downward spiral for what was once the proudest, strongest socialist party on earth…

On paper, the party’s campaign talking points were practically indistinguishable from their competitors. So why did the Greens do so well while the SPD crashed and burned?

At the risk of oversimplifying things, the SPD in 2019 has a serious credibility problem. The Social Democrats have spent nine of the last fourteen years carrying water for Angela Merkel’s grand coalition in Berlin, burning through eight different leaders in the process. It seems whoever dares take up the mantle, whether party stalwart Sigmar Gabriel or the most recent disappointment Martin Schulz, puts their entire political career at risk. What’s left of the SPD’s base is sick and tired of the coalition, and anyone who associates themselves with it soon becomes a political liability to be disposed of after the next electoral defeat and superficial attempt at rebooting the party.

The Green Party and “far right” Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) are drawing off the SPD’s refugees, but if the boldface (added) below is true, they are anything but populist:

The reasons behind the Greens’ appeal are fairly evident, as the Fridays for Future protests dominated German headlines in the months leading up to the elections and climate change became a key issue for many voters. The Greens seem to offer a modern, progressive answer to climate change and tap into the cultural attitudes of urban and middle-class milieus. Unburdened by historical ties to labor unions or other working-class organizations, they can deftly navigate between groups and more authentically embody liberal Europeanism than their stale Social Democratic counterparts. More importantly, unlike the SPD they’ve been in the opposition throughout Merkel’s reign and can plausibly claim to represent a breath of fresh air. For the first time in their history, they may have a real shot at the chancellorship in 2021.

There are practical reasons for a coalition of Greens and nationalists that will unfortunately never happen, as borders and population control are the greenest policies of all. Of course, that’s if you take the Greens at their word. As for the nationalists, everybody takes them at their word, which I think is telling of the justice of their cause.

The SPD’s coalition partner, the Christian Democratic Union, is no longer led by the outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel and her chosen successor, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, is already under fire for proposing speech restrictions ahead of elections and arousing suspicions of incompetence:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has dismissed a report that she believes her successor as CDU party leader is not up to the job. 

The claim, which she called nonsense, was made by two unidentified officials in a Bloomberg article on Tuesday. 

Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer will take over as leader of the CDU (Christian Democratic Union) next year. 

She has been criticised in recent days for suggesting a debate on rules for how “opinion is manufactured” online. 

The suggestion was prompted by a viral YouTube video, in which prominent vlogger Rezo accused the government of failing to tackle climate change and income inequality. Dozens of other YouTubers subsequently called on German voters to withhold their votes for the CDU and their coalition partners, the Social Democrats.

Populist nationalism is on the rise as elsewhere in Europe, but with much discontent going over to the far left Green Party I suspect the mainstream parties will align with them expressly to deny the AfD any role in a governing coalition.

Chemnitz and the AfD’s rise:

Once a model socialist town named Karl Marx City, Chemnitz in the east German state of Saxony has witnessed dramatic political changes over the years.

In this edition of Insiders: Unreported Europe Ayman Oghanna visits the city which once fought for the fall of a totalitarian communist regime but is now fast becoming the symbol of Germany’s newly assertive far right, once again exposing the country’s east-west divide.

It started in August 2018 when a German man was stabbed to death, allegedly during a brawl with two refugees from Iraq and Syria. What followed, was a week of angry anti-immigrant protests that saw neo-Nazis, far-right groups and thousands of ordinary citizens marching together in Chemnitz against migration.

The protests stand as a watershed moment amongst the outpouring of anti-immigrant hatred that has swelled as Germany’s far-right grows bolder and stronger, following the 2015 migrant crisis.
At the heart of Germany’s newly assertive far right is the AfD, Alternative for Germany, a populist anti-immigrant party.

Whilst the AfD has only been around for six years, it has already achieved stunning success, becoming the third largest party in the Bundestag.

All in keeping with my pet theory that the right place to be, it turns out, was on the commie side of the Iron Curtain. These places have not been led along the primrose path to destruction and have some nerve left it seems.

Raumpatrouille Orion, the “German Star Trek”:

I’ll be livestreaming tomorrow at 2PM Pacific Time, interviewing a German friend about life there today.
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A lady neuroscientist behind something called Me Too Stem is, quite predictably, catching hell for being a flake and maybe a crook:

An outspoken campaigner against sexual harassment in science is facing a crisis of leadership at MeTooSTEM, the volunteer organization she founded last year to support victims and hold perpetrators and institutions accountable.

Since November, seven members of the leadership team have resigned, citing concerns about the behavior of its founder, BethAnn McLaughlin, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

In their resignation letters, former MeTooSTEM leaders said that McLaughlin kept them in the dark about key decisions and reacted with hostility when they asked about the small organization’s finances and legal structure. They also worried that McLaughlin had alienated allies through her combative tweets.

Me Too Stem claims “women in STEM have the highest rate of sexual harassment outside of the military” and deplores that of an annual 37 billion dollar National Institute of Health budget not a cent of grant money has been diverted from “abusers” to, say, Me Too Stem.

McLaughlin won the “Disobedience Award” from these folks:

She’s already lost a tenure track position for alienating her allies. I like to think it’s Karma for this:

BethAnn McLaughlin has no time for James Watson, especially not when the 90-year-old geneticist is peering out from a photo on the wall of her guest room at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s Banbury Center.

“I don’t need him staring at me when I’m trying to go to sleep,” McLaughlin told a December 2018 gathering at the storied New York meeting center as she projected a photo of her redecorating job: She had hung a washcloth over the image of Watson, who co-discovered DNA’s structure, directed the lab for decades—and is well-known for racist and sexist statements. 

The washcloth image was part of McLaughlin’s unconventional presentation—by turns sobering, hilarious, passionate, and profane—to two dozen experts who had gathered to wrestle with how to end gender discrimination in the biosciences. McLaughlin, a 51-year-old neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) in Nashville, displayed the names of current members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) who have been sanctioned for sexual harassment. She urged other NAS members—several of whom sat in the room—to resign in protest, “as one does.” She chided institutions for passing along “harassholes” to other universities. “The only other places that do this are the Catholic Church and the military,” she said.