Utopia, you are standing in it!

Writing in the New York Times this past Thursday, Anthony Tomassini called for ending blind auditions for orchestras, because the orchestras are not coming out diverse enough. What strikes me as odd about this is that the whole reason for blind auditions is to encourage diversity, by eliminating unconscious bias. The argument would go something like this: the orchestra is all white men, it’s highly unlikely that no women or POC are talented enough to play enough in the orchestra, therefore it’s probable that there’s bias in the selection process, but if we hold blind auditions, no one will know the gender or ethnicity of the candidate. And sure enough, while women made up around 6% of orchestras in 1970, today “women make up a third of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and they are half the New York Philharmonic.” However, black and Latino artists hover around 2%. So Tomassini suggests…

Although I’ve heard from friends who have visited Washington, D. C.’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) that it’s a fantastic place, its online presence suffered from the adoption and proselytizing of Critical Race Theory (CRT), at least on this page about “Whiteness.”

Yesterday I posted two posters from that page about the nature of white culture, which you can see at the preceding link. The posters gave a ridiculous stereotype of white culture, were pretty close to being racist, and, in fact, if you saw the posters as an implicit contrast with black culture, it would be extremely racist towards blacks as well.  Since yesterday, those posters have disappeared. Clearly the pushback against them was strong—and rightly so. I doubt that my own criticism had any influence on this, though I haven’t trawled the Internet to see who discussed those graphics. (This incident has already…

This will be the last I write about the Google memo for a while, as I suspect we’re getting weary of the fracas. But readers recommended two pieces, and they’re worth reading. The first is a summary of research on gender differences published at the Heterodox Academy, and I’ve put it (and its summary) as an addendum at the top of the last post.  The second is a piece at Quillette by Heather Heying (an Evergreen State biology professor, wife of Bret Weinstein, and currently demonized along with him); it’s about the evolutionary psychology of gender differences with respect to the Google memo, and it’s called “Should we ‘stop equating science with truth‘”. Heather’s answer is “no!”

I’ll add two pieces here. The first is by renowned moral philosopher Peter Singer, in New York’s Daily News, of all places. Singer has been an advocate for affirmative action…

The Big Think seems obsessed with the relationship between science and religion.  I can’t think of how many posts I’ve done about their interviewees discussing this issue. The 14-minute video below features a number of prominent people weighing in on the question, “Has science made religion useless?” That’s a question different from, “Is there a clash between science and religion?” Religion can still be falsified by science, as it has been, and still be “useful,” though I agree with Sam Harris that finding something useful that’s palpably false is not a good way to live.

The discussants include Frans van de Waal, Reza Aslan, Francis Collins, Robert Sapolsky, Alain de Botton, Penn Jillette, Bill Nye, Rob Bell, and Pete Holmes (I didn’t know Holmes, but guessed he was a believer from his remarks below. It turns out he’s a comedian who not only makes jokes about god and religion, but…

Seventeen of the Prime Ministers to take office since 1900 left office for reasons other than defeat at a general election. In this blogpost, RodneyBrazier, author of the recently published Choosing a Prime Minister, reflects on how those Prime Ministers have secured and surrendered the keys to Number 10, and the Queen’s role in their appointment.

It’s unlikely that Boris Johnson spends much time thinking about the next election. Thanks largely to him the government obtained an 80-seat Commons majority at the polls just over six months ago, and each member of his Cabinet gave pledges of personal loyalty before getting their jobs. What could possibly go wrong? But if any of his close advisers were to read my book Choosing a Prime Ministerthen brows might furrow. The book notes that 17 of the two-dozen individuals who have occupied Number 10 since 1900 were forced to…

California ‘dreaming’ ….

Let renewable energy zealots and rent seekers anywhere near your power system and prepare for deadly chaos.

Wind and solar ‘powered’ South Australians know what it is to do without power for days on end. Having experienced plenty of load shedding lasting for 5 hours or more, South Australians got a real taste of the dark ages in September 2016, when the whole State went black.

A sudden collapse in wind power output during a vigourous spring storm (wind turbines automatically shut down in high winds) delivered what’s known as a ‘system black’.

The response was to set up 276 MW worth of diesel-fuelled jet engines that cost taxpayers a cool $550m. When the sun sets and calm weather sets in, that part of SA’s ‘inevitable transition’ to wind and solar chew up 80,000 litres of diesel every hour, pumping out an extra 216 tonnes of…

In 1836 the House of Commons published a series of reports of the new prison inspectors appointed under an Act of Parliament passed the year before. The 1835 Act, one of several interventionist initiatives of the whig government elected in 1832, was designed to drive up standards in the locally-run prison system. That the inspectors’ report was generally available, rather than hidden in decent obscurity, as the result of another praiseworthy new initiative – a decision by the House of Commons in 1835 to allow all of its publications to be sold to the public through agents. The inspectors’ remark concerning a book with explicit plates of human reproductive organs that was found in the possession of one of the prisoners in Newgate jail set off a chain of unintended consequences that led to a series of law suits that are collectively referred to as Stockdale v. Hansard, a…

After two black musicians accused the New York Philharmonic in 1969 of racial discrimination, the Philharmonic, and many other American orchestras, began auditioning prospective members behind a screen, so that neither the race nor the sex of the individual could be discerned. All that mattered was musical quality. (As I recall, women were told not to wear high heels so their sex couldn’t be sussed out by the clack-clack they made as they walked across the stage.)

Now, as a critic in the New York Times argues, while this procedure has been wildly successful in increasing the representation of women in orchestras, the proportion of blacks and Hispanics remain low. The solution, offered in an opinion piece by Anthony Tommasini, the Times‘s head classical-music critic, is to ditch the blind auditions and go back to the way things were. This argument has put me in a bit of a…

Anne of Cleves (1515 – July 16, 1557) was queen consort of England from January 6, to July 9, 1540 as the fourth wife of King Henry VIII. Anne was born in 1515, on either 22 September, or more probably 28 June. She was born in Düsseldorf, the second daughter of Johann III of the House of La Marck, Duke of Jülich jure uxoris, Cleves, Berg jure uxoris, Count of Mark, also known as de la Marck and Ravensberg jure uxoris (often referred to as Duke of Cleves) who died in 1538, and his wife Maria, Duchess of Jülich-Berg (1491–1543). She grew up in Schloss Burg on the edge of Solingen.

Anne of Cleves

Not much is known about Anne before 1527, when she became betrothed to François, Duke of Bar, son and heir of Antoine, Duke of Lorraine, although their marriage did not proceed.

In March 1539, negotiations for…

We cannot be free of wokeness in college, nor while reading the liberal media. Now we encounter it in America’s national museums as well.

I learned of the site at hand from a tweet, and then checked it out for myself to ensure it was kosher. The page in question appears at the website of the National Museum of African American History & Culture, a museum in Washington, D.C. that’s part of the Smithsonian Institution. (I’ve long meant to visit it, but haven’t been back “home” in a long time.)

I applauded the museum when it was conceived and then opened, but I had no idea it would be used as a vehicle to purvey Critical Race Theory, along with its narrative of structural racism, white privilege, microaggressions, white fragility, intersectionality, and so on, to the public. There are even video lectures by Robin DiAngelo and bell hooks. It…

The New York Times has a new profile of Steve Pinker, with a photo that, while nice, doesn’t include his cowboy boots. It concentrates mostly on the letter signed by 550+ academics calling for the Linguistic Society of America to rescind Pinker’s “distinguished fellow” and “media expert” status. Since I’ve discussed that letter in detail, I won’t go over it here, but simply give my take on some of the statements in the NYT’s generally fair profile. I’ll just add, by way of self-aggrandizement, that you read about that here  (as well as the letter in Harper’s that Pinker signed) well before it appeared in the paper of record. And the NYT’s report adds little to what I said. Further, you can read me for free!

Click on the screenshot to read.

The Times comments are indented, while mine are flush left.

The linguists demanded that the society revoke…

Four decades after the dismissal of the Whitlam government, letters between the Palace and the Governor-General of Australia have been made public. Anne Twomey explains that they show the Queen acted properly, neither advising or encouraging the government’s dismissal, recommending simply that he obey the Australian Constitution.

For more than four decades, the question has been asked: did the Queen know the governor-general, Sir John Kerr, was about to dismiss the Whitlam government, and did she encourage or support that action? The release of the ‘palace letters’ between Kerr and the palace can now lay that question to rest. The answer was given, unequivocally, by the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Martin Charteris, in a letter to Kerr on November 17 1975. He said:

‘If I may say so with the greatest respect, I believe that in NOT informing The Queen what you intended to do before doing it, you acted…

Peter St. Onge writes at Mises Wire The COVID-19 Panic Shows Us Why Science Needs Skeptics Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.

The dumpster fire of COVID predictions has shown exactly why it’s important to sustain and nurture skeptics, lest we blunder into scientific monoculture and groupthink. And yet the explosion of “cancel culture” intolerance of any opinion that doesn’t fit a shrinking “3 x 5 card” of right-think risks destroying the very tolerance and science that sustains our civilization.

Since World War II, America has suffered two respiratory pandemics comparable to COVID-19: the 1958 “Asian flu,” then the 1969 “Hong Kong flu.” In neither case did we shut down the economy—people were simply more careful. Not all that careful, of course—Jimi Hendrix was playing at Woodstock in the middle of the 1969 pandemic, and social distancing wasn’t really a thing in the “Summer of Love.”

Yes, Ross Douthat is a conservative columnist, but does that mean he can be totally ignored? I don’t think so, at least not this week, when he devotes his New York Times space to a discussion of “cancel culture” (CC), and provides as good a definition of the phenomenon as I’ve seen. He also admits, in his list of “ten theses” about CC, that the Right does it too, but also that “a liberal society should theoretically cancel less frequently than its rivals.” I agree with most of what he says but strongly disagree with his thesis that the Right barely engages in creating CC at all.

Read it by clicking on the screenshot:

I’ve put Douthat’s “theses” in bold, and indented a few excerpts from his article. My own take on his points is flush left:

1. Cancellation, properly understood, refers to an attack on someone’s employment and reputation by…