Commands in German

Republican Party finance chairman and casino magnate Steve Wynn has been outed by the Wall Street Journal for systematically sexually abusing women on a Weinstein scale. But one of the creepier details of the story (from Kevin Drum’s quote, since the WSJ article is paywalled):

Some said that feeling was heightened at times by the presence in a confined office space of one or more of his German shepherds, trained to respond to commands in German.

I remember talking many years ago with a German colleague, who felt it was unreasonable that Germany still, after fifty years as a stable democracy, still was expected to be specially on guard against any hint of fascist or racist tendencies. I pointed out that, no matter what the Germans themselves may think, fascists and racists the world over look to Germany for inspiration. I don’t really want to think about what it means that the Jewish Wynn, leading ally of the white nationalist president, has been living out Nazi stormtrooper sexual fantasies.

(Just to be clear. I can’t see any signs in Wynn’s wikipedia entry that he otherwise has links to German culture or language. The article also says that Wynn’s original name was Weinberg. This isn’t a pattern I’m comfortable following up. It makes me think of a perverted form of the old Cold War era joke about a State Department conversation about plans for an upcoming cultural exchange. “The Soviets are sending over two Jewish violinists from Odessa. And in return, we’re sending them two of our Jewish violinists from Odessa.”)

Male nurses and politically incorrect comments on gender

I was just reading this article by journalist Conor Friedersdorf, complaining about how Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson is being unfairly treated by journalists, who try to twist his subtle anti-feminist arguments into crude anti-feminist slurs. He certainly has a point. But then one comes to comments like this

[Interviewer]: Is gender equality desirable?

Peterson: If it means equality of outcome then it is almost certainly undesirable. That’s already been demonstrated in Scandinavia. Men and women won’t sort themselves into the same categories if you leave them to do it of their own accord. It’s 20 to 1 female nurses to male, something like that. And approximately the same male engineers to female engineers. That’s a consequence of the free choice of men and women in the societies that have gone farther than any other societies to make gender equality the purpose of the law. Those are ineradicable differences––you can eradicate them with tremendous social pressure, and tyranny, but if you leave men and women to make their own choices you will not get equal outcomes.

20 to 1? That seems really high. For nurses and for engineers. So I decided to do something rude, and check the numbers. For nurses, I found these statistics. There’s a lot of variation in Scandinavia. In Denmark it seems like about 20:1 female to male. But in Norway it’s 9:1. In Iceland it’s 100:1. Looking further afield, in Israel and Italy 20% of nurses are male. And in the Netherlands nearly 25%. This does not look like an ineradicable difference to me. It looks like path dependence and social context.

What about engineers? Here Peterson is, to use the technical term, talking out of his ass. There is no country in the EU with such an extreme gender imbalance for engineers: The most extreme is the UK, with about a 10:1 male to female ratio. In Sweden it’s 3:1, in Norway 4:1, and in Denmark 5:1. In Latvia the fraction of female engineers is up to 30%.

I think, if you want to make provocative “I’m just trying to be rational here” public arguments, you kind of have an obligation not to make up your supporting facts.

Brush up your Plato, start quoting him now

… at least, if you want to get recognised as religiously persecuted for your humanism.

This looks like a parody of English pseudo-education mixed with English xenophobia:

A Pakistani man who renounced his Muslim faith and became a humanist has had his application for asylum in the UK rejected after failing to correctly answer questions about ancient Greek philosophers.

The Home Office said Hamza bin Walayat’s failure to identify Plato and Aristotle as humanist philosophers indicated his knowledge of humanism was “rudimentary at best”.

My guess is that he wanted to say he was an atheist, but recognised that that would subject him to discrimination here as well as in Pakistan, so he resorted to the more erudite-sounding term “humanist”, only to run into the buzzsaw of a classicist manqué.

Kettle logic on Fox News

Most Republican leaders, in their concern to defend the president from accusations of racist over his terming African nations and Haiti “shithole countries” and saying “get them out”, have resorted to one of two strategies:

  1. Fake news. He didn’t say it, and it’s outrageous to suggest that he did.
  2. Harsh but true. He did say it, and it shows how forthright and unconcerned he is with liberal pieties.

Neither is entirely satisfactory. It is natural, then, that a Fox News correspondent, in the spirit of Freud’s “kettle logic“, combines the two:

I think it’s either fake news or if it’s true, this is how the forgotten men and women in America talk at the bar.

The bar is the new locker room. It’s kind of weird, though, when the best defense for the president’s behaviour is, he’s talking in the formal setting of a negotiation with senators the way even average uneducated Americans would only talk in a private setting when somewhat inebriated.

Post-Brexit UK to maintain world-leading position as platitude exporter

From the Guardian:

I commented before about the strange role of clichés in British politics. Finding a use for the banalest of banalities counts in Westminster as the very essence of statesmanship. So now, the British position, after 18 months of intensive internal analysis of its policy and extensive diplomatic soundings on relations with Europe is — It takes two to tango.

Showing the cards

The UK government thinks it’s playing poker with the EU. And it thinks it’s particularly good at it. “We can’t show our cards” is their standard argument for why they refuse to formulate a coherent negotiating position. Most recently, it was the argument for why Brexit minister David Davies couldn’t share with Parliament the voluminous economic impact assessments that were guiding the Brexit planning, though when threatened with citation for contempt of Parliament he admitted that they didn’t exist. (Has any schoolchild ever tried that? “I did my homework, but it would be unwise for me to show my cards right now by letting you see it.”)

Two important points:

  1. If you publicly announce that your position would be fatally undermined were the other side to see your cards, then that fatally undermines your position. If you secretly have strong cards, then the only thing you could be afraid of would be that the other side will concede too quickly. Which, I feel comfortable asserting, does not seem to be a significant problem for Britain in these negotiations.
  2. There are no hidden cards in this game. Or, at least, very few. If we are going to persist in the poker analogy, the game is five-card stud, so four of the five cards are face up. And Britain has a 2, 3, 7, 9 (of different suits). And they’re betting big, despite the fact that all 27 other players at the table already know that their cards are shit. But they have a brilliant secret strategy, consisting entirely of keeping their brilliant strategy secret. And pretending that they don’t know that their cards are shit.

Why is Britain being expelled from the EU?

Chris Grey, Professor of Social Organisation at Royal Holloway University, writes a blog about Brexit. In his most recent post he finds a formulation that captures some of the baffling features of the Tory approach to Brexit:

Observing Brexiters’ behaviour now, the thing that strikes me most forcibly is that almost all the time they act and talk not as if Britain had chosen to leave the EU but exactly as if Britain was being expelled by the EU…

Brexiters bemoan the failure of remainers to ‘get behind’ Brexit but they themselves seem singularly lacking in any big, coherent, optimistic, strategic or even enjoyable vision of Brexit. Given that (as they constantly say) they won the vote and are now enacting their dream policy you might expect such a vision, and if it existed many of the current problems would fall away. They would happily be saying ‘sure, we will meet our pre-existing financial commitments, these are of little importance given the exciting new opportunities Brexit brings’.

The post is well worth reading in its entirety, and it is spot on, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t explain why the Tories — and, by proxy, the nation — would put itself in such a position.

As near as I can come to an explanation that makes sense is to think of it — since everyone is talking divorce — in terms of the psychology of an abusive relationship, the relationship in this case being colonialism. Britain has the habit of dominance, acquired over many centuries. It is very common in such a relationship for the abuser to push off the blame onto the partner. “I don’t want to hurt you, but you’ve forced me into it.” The thing is, that is usually the action of the one who feels himself powerful and in control, not the one who is going to be hurt. Britain has overestimated its power, the inferior Continentals — and even the Irish — are asserting themselves, and the British government is reduced to wheedling and whining that Europe is mean and spiteful.

The next step after self pity is frequently violence. I suggested back when the referendum result was announced that the British would be shocked to discover how much the rest of Europe resents them, and how little leverage Britain actually has, and that there was a reasonable chance that they would then turn their fury against the enemy within, the resident foreigners. Nothing that has happened since then has made me more sanguine.

Overt public blackmail?

Just when you thought you’d reached the bottom of the we’re-being-governed-by-toddlers-who-missed-a-nap slough of despond, they manage to surprise you again. This time, it’s the Chancellor of the Exchequer  Philip Hammond, who decided to punish the NHS (and, by proxy, the entire English public) for the brazenness of its chief, Simon Stevens. Stevens gave a speech two weeks ago, saying the NHS is on the verge of financial collapse, and since the one thing that’s clear about the result of the Brexit referendum is that the public likes the idea of giving £350 million a week more to the NHS, maybe the government should just go ahead and do that. Instead,

Philip Hammond backtracked on plans to give the NHS more money than it eventually got in the budget after reacting with “fury” to its boss Simon Stevens’s public demand for an extra £4bn next year.

Since I am always particularly intrigued by political semantics, I was struck by this line:

Hammond and Treasury officials felt that the NHS England chief executive’s move meant that the chancellor could not be seen to be acceding to what they saw as “overt public blackmail”

What I wonder is, is there such a thing as “overt public blackmail”? Blackmail is when you make secret demands, with the threat to publicly embarrass the target by revealing hidden information. It’s not even any kind of extortion, which would mean issuing threats to force someone into a desired course of action. The only threat Stevens made is that without more money the NHS faces collapse. Warning someone of the potential consequences of their actions is neither extortion nor blackmail. And saying, we agree with the analysis, but since we don’t want to look like we’re agreeing with you, we’re going to do the opposite, is something so stupid that I don’t think  there is a specific name for it. (Maybe the Piranha Brothers used that technique?)

Now, what would be blackmail? How about telling the head of an independent government agency in private talks that his agency and the whole population are being throttled for his presumptuous public speech, not needing to say explicitly that a deferential turn might prevent future punishment — well, I guess that’s extortion.

Maybe someone should give him a cookie?

Naked Brexit

Arlene Foster is sad! So sad 😦 Why is Arlene sad?

The DUP leader, Arlene Foster, has accused the Irish government of hijacking the Brexit negotiations to promote a united Ireland… She said: “The Irish government are actually using the negotiations in Europe to put forward their views on what they believe the island of Ireland should look like in the future.”

The sacred Brexit negotiations are being misused to promote a nationalist cause! Outrageous!

This is Burroughs’s naked lunch, the “frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork”, is something Britain — a declining power treated with far more deference than its actual power warrants — should have tried to put off as long as possible. Now it’s Britain that’s on the end of the fork. And it’s their own fork. Continue reading “Naked Brexit”

Golfing VCs

Economist David Blanchflower wrote an article for The Guardian inviting us to pity the poor underpaid university vice chancellors with their paltry sub-million-pound salaries. In discussing what an awful job it is, and why you

A vice-chancellor’s schedule is set for them. The job has a huge effect on family life. There are few places to hide and find privacy. You are always on show, even on the golf course.

Even on the golf course! Have these vice-chancellor-oglers no shame?

Oddly enough, the analysis by this economist, which included the striking phrase “If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys” — the monkey here being everyone who is not a vice chancellor — omitted any evidence that universities do indeed prosper from having non-monkeys doing the job. I mean, there are all kinds of jobs that are hard and important, but there’s a limit to how much you’re willing to pay to get just a tiny bit of extra talent (assuming that you can even reliable recognise those distinctions in the course of the hiring process). The suggestion is that you need to pay huge sums just to get one of the exceptional rare individuals who is even minimally qualified not to run the university into the ground. “In the end, there are few qualified and willing applicants.” I’d like to see some working-out on that problem.