Hurricane Harvey Notes

We made a donation today to relief for victims of Hurricane Harvey. We picked the Samaritan’s Purse organization, but there are various good choices out there such as the Red Cross. I hope many people will make donations.   I would suggest avoiding any organization controlled by Sylvester Turner or any other politicians or officials in Houston’s city government for the obvious reasons that hack  politicians usually cannot be trusted with money in amounts larger than thirty cents.

As was predictable some have tried to find political advantage in the disaster.  Devotees of the green religion in the media and politics have painted the hurricane as a dire result of global warming, ignoring the both the fact that hurricanes have occurred  in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico as long has people have kept records and the fact that there has been recent lull in hurricanes hitting the US.  One leftist cartoonist managed to ridicule Christians, Texans, libertarians, and conservatives all at once with a vulgar cartoon of a buffoonish Texan with a “secede” placard  being rescued from a flood and attributing his good fortune to divine providence when it is actually due to his omni-benevolent (except for Trump) federal government.  After being criticized the cartoonist waffled and claimed he was really only wanting to insult secessionists and not Texans in general. Well, one can wait and see if he produces something similar featuring a Calexit favoring leftist the next time that state has a natural disaster. That’s probably not the way to bet.

Of course conservatives made their political points as well. One on the radio, noting the large number of black people getting rescued, wondered why the Black Lives Matter crowd was nowhere to be seen in a situation where others of all races were pitching in to help their fellow Americans and suggested that actual black lives in themselves may not matter too much to BLM. It was a rude observation but not an unreasonable one.  

The dumbest comments came from some in the traditional media who, while not disputing  the substantive  things the administration is doing, fretted that Trump was not emotional and schmaltzy enough and did not deliver a sufficient amount of made-for-TV  “empathy”.  I don’t know for sure, but I would guess that most victims would prefer ten cents of actual assistance to fifty bucks worth of a politician's empathy any day. In their position, I certainly would. 

New Book from Peikoff

Discovering Great Plays: As Literature and as Philosophy is a collaboration of  an unusual sort between Leonard Peikoff and Marlene Trollope.  The book is based on transcripts of  lectures he gave in the 1990s, but, as he emphasizes in a preface,  was edited and put together by her with no input from him.   There are eight lectures – one each on Antigone, Othello, Le Cid, Don Carlos, An Enemy of the People, Saint Joan, Monna Vanna, and Cyrano de Bergerac  - from a man who passionately loves the theater and appreciates good writing.  They are well organized, thoughtful, clear, and decisive as to viewpoint. It is easy to tell where he stands  and why. His methods and standards are the usual “official” objectivist ones familiar from Rand’s essays on aesthetics, and many of the results, such as his following her in a gross misreading of Shakespeare , are predictable.  However some of the conclusions and insights are surprising, particularly in the treatment of Antigone. 

All in all it is a book to be read critically and skeptically but also enjoyably. His passion for these plays is infectious and appealing. Also he (and/or she; I don’t know how closely the book follows the transcripts or how much cleaning up and revising she did) is talking seriously about important and interesting subjects worth contemplating.  One can disagree with much  of what he says and still find that something to appreciate.  It surely beats following the news on TV.  

Diversity = Conformity?

The Alphabet Corporation should be ashamed.  An employee of Google posted an essay questioning some of the company’s policies on affirmative action and  its disdain for people with other than leftist political opinions and suggesting that men on average  might be better suited to doing technical work than women on average.  While such opinions may be controversial, they are not inflammatory, outrageous, or outside the bounds of rational discourse.  (There are valid reasons for believing hiring for ability and commitment to work is fairer and  more honest and leads to better results than hiring based on quotas for race, sex, or religion.  It probably is bad business for a company to  snub and offend millions of its customers and shareholders.  There are more men than women working in technical jobs, though that fact say nothing about any intrinsic difference in aptitude between the sexes.)

The most sensible thing for the  bosses at Google to have done about the essay would have been to ignore it.  An acceptable response would have been to issue a press release stating that Google’s managers disagree with the essay’s content in regard to both fact and opinion and will continue to follow their preferred policies. Instead the company first had its  diversity czarina issue a screed attacking the essay as evil and suggesting its writer might be in trouble with the law over it and then hunted the author down and fired him. 

 Apart from  the general absurdity and blatant hypocrisy of siccing  a diversity honcho onto someone  and firing him for the crime of holding and expressing  opinions  that bring diversity to various topics of corporate practices, the company’s actions have provided evidence to support some of the man’s arguments. There does seem to be an atmosphere of enforced conformity at the company.   Google really does seem not to tolerate employees  having  private opinions deviating from its generally leftist party line.  The existence of a hypocritical double standard does  seem fairly clear. (For example, an essay by a devout Muslim employee suggesting the company would be better off requiring female employees to be veiled and to work in sexually segregated offices very likely would not have caused its author any trouble or sent the diversity squad into action.)

I hope the poor guy finds a good job somewhere.  I also hope Alphabet catches holy hell for this in public opinion. It deserves to. An outfit which touts diversity while demanding total conformity is not only a far piece away from doing the right thing. It is a purveyor of Newspeak.  I say this as one of their frequent and generally happy customers. 

Admission to Colleges

This week at the White House a reporter asked the press secretary if people in the administration thought affirmative action policies at colleges discriminated against white students in a manner suggesting holding such an opinion would be at least a hideous breach of etiquette and probably something far worse.  (The question was probably inspired by  information leaked  to the New York Times about  Department of Justice hiring lawyers to look into the question of discrimination in admissions to colleges and by the reactions to it of  various Democratic politicians and their friends.  It turned out that the investigation apparently will deal with claims of discrimination against Asian students. The Times missed that, whether carelessly or perhaps on the premise that its audience would appreciate the evil of the thing more readily if the possible beneficiaries were white.)

The accepted  hypocrisies and taboos  of a society require that certain things not be publicly mentioned or considered even if they are not only  true but  obviously so.  Affirmative action in college admissions is a good example. Admission policies  which set lower standards   for black and Hispanic applicants than for white and Asian ones discriminate against the latter two. By excluding them from admission, these policies harm all white and Asian applicants  whose qualifications are below the white/Asian acceptance point(s)  but above the black/Hispanic one(s).   It is possible to argue honestly (though I think wrongly) that such discrimination is a good thing, but it is not possible to argue honestly that the discrimination does not exist.  If person A has higher overall qualifications for admission  than person B before  the race of either is considered  but is rejected while B is accepted once  the race of each is considered, then A has been discriminated against on the basis of race.

The dust up this week illustrates how well accepted the hypocrisy and taboo on this issue are. It also indicates more than a little fear among those who favor something they may not be able to defend.