untethered

Requiem for Mystery

the bond of blood exacts in price,
its own kind drawn from other types,
man too must take his pay in kind,
and pray relief from the divine.

Or so it was, not long ago,
but now men’s bellies all are full,
blood and bonds are history,
entombed with Guilt and Mystery.

no blood no burden,
thus no Divine,
pray forgiveness, in such a time?
our hands are clean our minds are pure,
but can we be so very sure?
for
he that suffers away unseen,
bears that burden, for you, and me

President Trump, the ultimate political outsider, is a far better politician than executive.

He may be hopelessly ineffective, he may be abandoning patriotic immigration reform, he may be selling out to the neocons out of exhaustion or stupidity, but his trolling remains on point.

After immigration the issue most responsible for his election was law and order. It’s hard to imagine his election to president without Obama’s second term of racial demagogy and rioting. Support for police was a popular theme.

The crime bill makes political if not moral sense. The political utility of the bill was almost certainly a leading factor in Trump’s embrace of it. It’s politically clever, but morally disastrous. He accepts the very premises upon which Obama-era demagogy is based. This is a little case study in democratic corruption and the limits of political trolling–to win election Trump adopts the Democrats’ most corrosive and dishonest narratives, the lie of a legal system biased against blacks. He helps, incidentally, the progressives in their effort to establish a sort of privilege for blacks in the criminal justice system.

Politicians hate him because he’s not one of them. But Donald Trump has spent his life campaigning, on behalf of Donald Trump. He was born a politician.

James Damore’s firing, the recent brave missive from a Google engineer complaining the company’s “outrage mobs will hunt down any conservative, any Christian, and any independent free thinker at Google who does not bow down to their agenda”, cases of these same “mobs” lobbying already activist CEOs for even more censorship of “hate” and “fake news”, Jack Dorsey says conservatives don’t feel safe at Twitter; the socials and higher education are microcosms of the world they have planned for us. A world where right-wing, conservative or nationalist sentiment isn’t possible because expression of it is swiftly suppressed by a diligent community–what Steve Sailer calls the “voluntary auxiliary thought police”. The socials are home of that force’s elite corps.

Something like the dynamic of the university–indoctrinated students organizing to demand of indoctrinating institutions more indoctrination–plays out in the socials, where even an outright activist CEO like Tim Cook or Jack Dorsey isn’t safe from the mob. Profit still reigns, but it has to pay off social justice. Increasingly, where matters of social justice intrude, no one is quite in charge. Mob rules, but the mob is just being a stickler regarding the rules of the respectable.

A tiny subset of the population contrives their own drama and its resolution determines the course of society. “Me too” was spawned in the universities in the early nineties with the first wave of “rape culture” propaganda.

Elite and mob are in perverse harmony. It’s hard to tell where power ends and popular resentment begins. Look how little it took to get a British rail service to take down advertisements for Morrissey’s latest record

Adverts for the new album by the former Smiths singer have been taken down on the Merseyrail network.

Morrissey has previously expressed support for the far-right For Britain party and earlier this month wore a badge with its logo on during a TV show, but he denies he is a racist.

Merseyrail apologised and said the posters did not reflect its “values”. 

The adverts, which contain no political message, were removed after a traveller on a Southport service to Moorfields contacted the company to ask if it agreed with Morrissey’s opinions.

The man, who asked not to be named, told the BBC he was not “offended” by the posters and did not demand they were taken down.

He said he just questioned the company on whether they were appropriate.  

No one actually did anything. Nothing really happened. Someone asked a ridiculous question and down came the offending adverts that no one seemed to be offended by.

Honk honk went the train.

Lost internet connection explains my absence from the stream at the end. I was not raptured after all.
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Rumors of Barack Obama’s brilliance appear to have been greatly exaggerated. As for the legendary eloquence I saw no signs of it; so many others testify to it I have to concede it’s there.

His speech at the Democratic National Convention should be noted for its dishonesty, a paean to unity from the future president of Black Lives Matter rioting and deliberate ethnic “transformation”. As it is, no one seems to remember a word of it, especially those who praise its brilliance.

At this stage we’re fortunate he’s a bit of a fraud–a higher energy Obama would be truly dangerous. As it is he seems to have lapsed quickly into irrelevance after having had a successful two-term presidency, like George W. Bush before him. Both got the big initiatives they wanted; both failed to produce “comprehensive immigration reform” against the gale force headwinds of popular rejection. Aside from whether or not they were good for the country, they were good for their respective factional alliances.

If Bush proved knowledge and intelligence weren’t necessary for a successful administration Obama proved engagement wasn’t necessary either. Barack Obama behaved as if he was deigning to lead an unworthy nation–a nation that declared him worthy just for showing up. I suspect those are related somehow. It’s almost as if Obama disdains the nation because he knows better. He occasionally showed the good sense to tamp down the groupie-like expectations of his Democratic fan base.

But like Bush it’s remarkable how little influence he seems to have after leaving office. American presidents tend to fade out quickly once we’re done with them; still, Obama’s relative youth, activist origins and the phenomenon around him were supposed to make him different. But a post-presidency career doesn’t run itself for the most part like the executive office. One has to be creative. After telling his personal story–which really isn’t that interesting after all–and repeating progressive platitudes, the man doesn’t have much to say.

Even leftists sometimes wondered if he wasn’t something of a low energy guy.  Gawker in 2011:

Barack Obama is at the nadir of his political popularity and effectiveness. He has been maneuvered into an economic corner of 9%-plus unemployment by a relentlessly nihilistic Congress. His achievements—killing bin Laden, saving the auto industry at negligible cost—are written off as flukes. Plus all this 9/11 anniversary stuff! We hear the New York Times is looking into whether it’s all starting to get to him—like, clinically.

We’re told by a source inside the Times that the paper is preparing a story arguing that Obama no longer finds joy in the political back-and-forth, has seemed increasingly listless to associates, and is generally exhibiting the litany of signs that late-night cable commercials will tell you add up to depression. Or maybe Low T.

Either way, the investigation was described to us as taking seriously the notion that Obama may be suffering from a depressive episode. Of course, absent a telltale Wellbutrin prescription or testimony from the man himself, it’s really impossible to achieve a reliable diagnosis. And a story like “Obama Appears to Suffer From Depression” can be easily downgraded to “Political Travails Begin to Take Personal Toll on Obama.” So the story in question, if it ever comes out, may not end up supporting the depression thesis. But rest assured: There are people at the Times who, based on the paper’s reporting, believe Obama is depressed—the kind of depression where, if he weren’t the president of the United States, he wouldn’t be getting out of bed in the morning.

The Democrats have a Barack Obama problem: there is not much there:

Of course, before any serious endorsement conversation can commence, Obama has to finish his book (between rounds of golf and raising millions for his foundation). The writing has been going more slowly than he’d expected, and according to several people who have spoken with him, the 44th president is feeling competitive with his wife, whose own book, Becoming, was the biggest release of 2018 and is on track to be the best-selling memoir in history.

This all suggests Obama has no control over Michelle Obama’s camp.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, like others in this story, these sources note he’ll occasionally point out in conversation that he’s writing this book himself, while Michelle used a ghostwriter. He’s also trying to balance the historical and political needs of a project that will be up to his standards as a writer, and not 1,000 pages long. Obama’s research process has been intense and convoluted, and it’s still very much ongoing, from the legal pads he had shipped to Marlon Brando’s old island in French Polynesia, where he spent a month in March 2017, to the interviews that aides have been conducting with former members of his administration to jog and build out memories.

“Remind me what happened again?” Pity the editors. Remarkable that this man sold as a great communicator actually tends toward reticence. The words have to be dragged out of him.

As with Becoming, this book will have more than a standard release. Aides expect Obama to go on tour, with a rush of interviews in which he’ll be expected to talk not just about what he’s written, but about Trump and whatever political news is unfolding that day. When that conversation has come up internally, according to people involved in the discussions, he often says simply, “I can handle it.”

Can he?

Napoleon said “what is history but a fable agreed upon?” So is social justice. More famously Churchill said “history is written by the victors.” Victorious social justice does history’s victors one better: it writes the present. Now it wants to write the future.

The Narrative proceeds as continuous real-time fable-making and up-to-the-minute historical revision. The progressive left casts the future as a utopia always receding on the horizon–it works like the promised return of a messiah. Nobody really wants it or knows what it means, but their faith in it is their bedrock, until it becomes no longer tenable. The utopia is now a problem for the powerful who rule by the mandate of “social justice”–like the messiah it isn’t coming and if it did it would mean the end of the game and a surrender of power.

But, thankfully, progressive utopia is laughable as a possibility and no one really wants it anyway. Not the various ethnic groups coalescing around “social justice”, certainly. They all have their respective visions of it–with them on top, or near as can be, and whitey on the bottom. It would be comic if it didn’t involve our demise.

No, the left now fears only the future. The present is in the bag, the past has been ritually killed, but the future looms outside control.

A bogus research non-profit calling itself AI Now is worried about AI:

RESEARCH FINDINGS 

There is a diversity crisis in the AI sector across gender and race. Recent studies found only 18% of authors at leading AI conferences are women, and more than 80% of AI professors are men. This disparity is extreme in the AI industry: women comprise only 15% of AI research staff at Facebook and 10% at Google. There is no public data on trans workers or other gender minorities. For black workers, the picture is even worse. For example, only 2.5% of Google’s workforce is black, while Facebook and Microsoft are each at 4%. Given decades of concern and investment to redress this imbalance, the current state of the field is alarming.  

One of the paper’s recommendations of course is more data “transparency” and progress reports. If activists have their way, of course, these become federal requirements. Boldface added: social justice is blind. Those “decades of concern and investment” aren’t the industry’s failure but social justice’s failure–if anyone was paying attention, this argument would be a laughable self-own.

The AI sector needs a profound shift in how it addresses the current diversity crisis. The AI industry needs to acknowledge the gravity of its diversity problem, and admit that existing methods have failed to contend with the uneven distribution of power, and the means by which AI can reinforce such inequality. Further, many researchers have shown that bias in AI systems reflects historical patterns of discrimination. These are two manifestations of the same problem, and they must be addressed together.  

The paper conflates two goals, diversifying the ranks of AI tech and, more importantly I suspect, beginning the groundwork for taking control of its content and direction; among its recommendations is AI that looks too threatening to dogma should be forbidden from the start.

The overwhelming focus on ‘women in tech’ is too narrow and likely to privilege white women over others. We need to acknowledge how the intersections of race, gender, and other identities and attributes shape people’s experiences with AI. The vast majority of AI studies assume gender is binary, and commonly assign people as ‘male’ or ‘female’ based on physical appearance and stereotypical assumptions, erasing all other forms of gender identity. 

The left simply couldn’t ease up on the transsexualism front if it wanted to, so their momentum and trajectory has them heading for direct conflict with basic science. Algorithms using what would have been non-controversial assumptions before–definitions of “man” and “woman”, say–are problems now–problems of the left’s own making in its trans enthusiasm.

Fixing the ‘pipeline’ won’t fix AI’s diversity problems. Despite many decades of ‘pipeline studies’ that assess the flow of diverse job candidates from school to industry, there has been no substantial progress in diversity in the AI industry. The focus on the pipeline has not addressed deeper issues with workplace cultures, power asymmetries, harassment, exclusionary hiring practices, unfair compensation, and tokenization that are causing people to leave or avoid working in the AI sector altogether.

In one breath he social justice industry bemoans a lack of minority achievement in higher education and in the next in condemns industry for its lack of diversity–as if the latter wouldn’t necessarily follow from the former. A compliant press allows them to get away with this and a lot worse, but the fact there was something called “pipeline studies” suggests someone over there understood the problem wasn’t hiring bias but minority ability–and they appear to have failed miserably. The paragraph above is a declaration there will be no more acknowledgement of this massive contradiction, not that there was.

The use of AI systems for the classification, detection, and prediction of race and gender is in urgent need of re-evaluation. The histories of ‘race science’ are a grim reminder that race and gender classification based on appearance is scientifically flawed and easily abused. Systems that use physical appearance as a proxy for character or interior states are deeply suspect, including AI tools that claim to detect sexuality from headshots, predict ‘criminality’ based on facial features, or assess worker competence via ‘micro-expressions.’ Such systems are replicating patterns of racial and gender bias in ways that can deepen and justify historical inequality. The commercial deployment of these tools is cause for deep concern.

The future looks bright–like a mushroom cloud on the horizon.

thumbnail: Look magazine cover (1/27/1970), featuring article title “Transsexuals: Male or Female?”

You say dysphoria, I say disorder, let’s call society off. Talking about transsexualism and profit with Holly and ecce lux.

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Incremental change means you have to stop sometimes and step back to appreciate just how insane things are. Ironically the one place you don’t want to look is in the psychiatric profession.

The American Psychiatric Association’s DSM still effectively lists transsexualism as a mental disorder–only now it’s “transgenderism” and it’s classified as “dysphoria”. The distinction is politically motivated and narrative-crucial: as far as I can tell, if you have a disorder you’re ill, nuts in old-speak, if you have dysphoria you’re just unhappy. In fact, you’re unhappy because society is ill, with its traditional gender roles. That’s implied in the DSM and shouted through the Megaphone.

But there remains a contradiction here for an opposition to exploit, should one develop.

Nantional Review interviewed a Canadian academic and trans heretic who worked on the DSM and was temporarily booted from Twitter for giving a clinically correct, politically incorrect opinion

Madeleine Kearns: You believe transsexualism and gender dysphoria to be a mental disorder. Am I correct in saying that’s how it appears in the DSM-5 [the current edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is the bible of psychiatry]?

Ray Blanchard: Yes. The diagnostic entity is called gender dysphoria in DSM-5. It was first introduced in DSM-III under the name transsexualism, and it was still called transsexualism or gender-identity disorder, I forget which, in DSM-IV, but in DSM-5 the name of the entity got changed to gender dysphoria. But the diagnostic criteria are fairly similar.

Kearns: Why was there a name change then? Was that to avoid the word “disorder”?

Blanchard: Yes, it was primarily to make patients and also trans activists and transsexual-activist groups feel happy or that they had been listened to, but I would say that the name change probably owed more to — or owed as much to politics as it did to any change in the science.

There’s more than keeping trannies happy here. As if pacifying the emotions of our growing class of drama queens on hormones isn’t one impossible task too many already. The APA’s adjustment means trans folk can have their cake and eat it too–specifically they can have their normal status and insurance coverage too

Kearns: Is it anything do with the fact that, obviously for insurance and medical providers, there would need to be a medical problem in order for it to justify treatment?

Blanchard: Absolutely. There has to be a diagnosis in order for third-party payment. Whether we are talking public or private insurance, there has to be a diagnosis of some disorder to pay for sex-reassignment surgeries or for people who have drug plans in order to pay for testosterone injections or estrogenic medications for biological males. So this is something that for the trans activists is a stumbling block. If there isn’t a disorder of some sort, then all individuals who wanted to have sex-reassignment surgery or exogenous hormones would be paying the whole cost themselves. 

Kearns: It seems to me that many activists hold two contradictory positions simultaneously. One is that transgenderism is not a mental disorder and the other is that gender dysphoria is a mental disorder. How does one make sense of that? 

Blanchard: I think it’s this kind of Talmudic reading of the DSM. It’s like, well, gender dysphoria is a mental disorder because that’s now listed in the DSM. But transsexualism isn’t a mental disorder because that’s no longer a word used in the DSM. It’s just this kind of weird, naïve outsiders’ literalist interpretation of how the DSM is written.

The battle next be over the extent to which we will be compelled to pay for the transsexual revolution. If we foot the bill we not only pay to perpetuate the problem we probably increase the ranks of the transsexual, already trending upward, encouraged by political propaganda romanticizing the individual transsexual as heroic and, of course, good old American commerce joining in.

If we could force everyone who wants such as gender reassignment surgery to pay for it, we’d probably get a lot less of it. If we can be forced to pay for it, we’ll get a lot more of it. Disturbingly, a lot of people stand to profit from this market.