ECONOMIST Watch: Reading The Mouthpiece Of Anti-Trump Globalism So You Don’t Have To

By John Derbyshire

08/23/2017

The cover of the current (August 19th-25th) issue tells you all you need to know. Trump is bellowing into a megaphone drawn as a sideways-lying KKK hood.

The accompanying editorial is what you'd expect.

His unsteady response [i.e. to the riot engineered by state and city authorities in Charlottesville last week] contains a terrible message for Americans. Far from being the savior of the Republic, their President is politically inept, morally barren and temperamentally unfit for office.

White supremacists and neo-Nazis yearn for a society based on race, which America fought a world war to prevent.

And what a great many white Americans today yearn for is a society not based on race: one in which their own race is not constantly belittled and insulted by talk of "white privilege," one not riddled with preferences and favoritism on behalf of other races, one in which multicultural triumphalists do not crow over whites' impending replacement, and elites do not seem hell-bent on bringing about that replacement.

The Economist tells us that defending Confederate statues — a cause which, for 150 years, was not even present in the collective American consciousness because those statues were not threatened — is a rearguard action by the evil, bitter past against the Radiant Future.

Mr Trump’s seemingly heartfelt defence of those marching to defend Confederate statues spoke to the degree to which white grievance and angry, sour nostalgia is part of his world view.

If all this sneering and gloating were not sufficiently emetic, this issue gives over four full pages to grinding a boot heel into the face of James Damore, the programmer fired by Google on August 7th for his internal company memo on sex differentials in suitability for software work.

This was actually The Economist’s second attempt to break this particular butterfly on the wheel. Their previous edition (August 12th-18th) had run a 600-word editorial and a 1,000-word article in the Business Section both arguing that Google should not have fired Damore but that his arguments about women and men displaying different interests were wrong, wrong, wrong.

From the editorial:

An unbiased eye would light on social factors rather than innate differences as the reason why only a fifth of computer engineers are women … It would have been better for Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and the boss of Alphabet, its holding company, to write a ringing, detailed rebuttal of Mr Damore’s argument.

Many of the memo’s assertions were risible, such as the idea that women are not coders because they are less intrigued by "things" than men are.

And why is that latter assertion "risible" ("causing or capable of causing laughter; laughable; ludicrous")? It’s not preposterous; it’s in the category of things that might or might not be true. Whether it is true or not can be determined by careful empirical enquiry.

Assertions in that category are not "risible" unless you have a strong ideological determination to find them so. The claim that men have one less rib than women could fairly be called "risible" since it is so easily disproved. Damore’s claim, as stated, is of a different kind.

To the best of my knowledge, it has not been disproved: but even if it has been, it’s still not "risible," as the disproving would have involved painstaking research and lengthy debates in scholarly journals. To persons not current with all that specialized research, it is a thing that might be true.

Well, the four-page heel-grinding in this current issue is an attempt to write the "ringing, detailed rebuttal of Mr Damore’s argument" that The Economist recommended to Larry Page in last week’s editorial. It is a jeering, sneering specimen of equalist triumphalism.

Your interpretation is wrong. Your memo was a great example of what’s called “motivated reasoning” — seeking out only the information that supports what you already believe.

It was derogatory to women in our industry and elsewhere. Despite your stated support for diversity and fairness, it demonstrated profound prejudice.

Your chain of reasoning had so many missing links that it hardly mattered what your argument was based on. We try to hire people who are willing to follow where the facts lead, whatever their preconceptions. In your case we clearly made a mistake.

You don’t seem to understand what makes a great software engineer … You clearly don’t understand our company, and so fail to understand what we are trying to do when we hire.

I shouldn’t have had to write this: I’m busy and a little effort on your part would have made it unnecessary. But I know I have it easy. Women in our industry have to cope with this sort of nonsense all the time.

Yours,

Larry

But then, who’s this James Damore pest, anyway? How many billion is he worth? Feugh!

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