Monthly Archives: May 2018

News

New study: faculty ratio of registered Democrats to Republicans is 12 to 1

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The Daily Wire reports on the political convictions of the people who are being paid tens of thousands of dollars to “educate” our children.

Excerpt:

An extensive study of 8,688 tenure-track professors at 51 of the 66 top-ranked liberal arts colleges in the U.S. published by the National Association of Scholars found that the ratio of faculty members registered as Democrats compared to those registered Republican is now a stunning 10.4 to 1. If two military colleges that are technically described as “liberal arts colleges” are removed from the calculations, the ratio is 12.7 to 1.

The researcher, Mitchell Langbert, Associate Professor of Business at Brooklyn College, found that nearly 40% of the colleges in the study had zero faculty members who were registered Republican. Not a single one. Nearly 80% of the 51 colleges had so few Republican faculty members that they were statistically insignificant.

There is virtually zero ideological diversity, and that’s how the university administrators want it. They know that young people are peer-driven and eager to conform to their elders, and they want to be sure that the environment at university produces little progressives. Critical thinking isn’t a concern, ideological purity and adherence to dogma is their overriding concern. And they achieve their goal by discriminating against conservative students and faculty and Christian students and faculty. This is the REAL discrimination that open-minded, tolerant people should be concerned about. But since it’s discrimination by progressives, no one is concerned about it. Not even the taxpayers paying the salaries of these overgrown children.

Now, on this blog, I have repeatedly told people two things. First of all, it’s important that you don’t go to university unless you are going into a STEM field. Anything else is just a waste of money. Second, you can save money by doing the first two years at a community college and then transferring.

Starting and Mid-Career salaries by profession (click for larger image)
Starting and Mid-Career salaries by profession (click for larger image)

The first rule is there not just because the highest paying jobs are in STEM, but because STEM is also the least dominated by progressive dogma, inside and outside the university.

More:

When Langbert broke down the political affiliations by field, he found some clear and rather unsurprising trends: by far the highest imbalance is found in the more ideological fields, in particular the social sciences and humanities:

The STEM subjects, such as chemistry, economics, mathematics, and physics, have lower D:R ratios than the social sciences and humanities. The highest D:R ratio of all is for the most ideological field: interdisciplinary studies. I could not find a single Republican with an exclusive appointment to fields like gender studies, Africana studies, and peace studies. As Fabio Rojas describes with respect to Africana or Black studies, these fields had their roots in ideologically motivated political movements that crystallized in the 1960s and 1970s.

Langbert found the following ratio of Democrats to Republicans in the key academic fields (ordered from most biased to most balanced):

  • Communications – 108 to 0 (no registered Republicans)
  • Anthropology – 56 to 0 (no registered Republicans)
  • Religion – 70:1
  • English – 48.3:1
  • Sociology – 43.8:1
  • Art – 40.3:1
  • Music – 32.8:1
  • Theater – 29.5:1
  • Classics – 27.3:1
  • Geoscience – 27:1
  • Environmental – 25.3:1
  • Language – 21.1:1
  • Biology – 20.8:1
  • Philosophy – 17.5:1
  • History – 17.4:1
  • Psychology – 16.8:1
  • Poli Sci – 8.2:1
  • Computers – 6.3:1
  • Physics – 6.2:1
  • Mathematics – 5.6:1
  • Professional – 5.5:1
  • Economics – 5.5:1
  • Chemistry – 5.2:1
  • Engineering – 1.6:1

It’s very important that we learn something from this list: Democrats don’t likely to test their ideas against reality. The fields that are dominated by Democrats are the ones that involve the least hard work, the least thinking, the least testing of reality, the least production of goods and services that others will want to buy. Democrats go into these fields precisely because it allows them to paint a picture of themselves as good people using words, but without having to do any work that would allow them to sell something to others that has value. I.e. – they want to talk about how great they are, but they don’t want to have to do anything that anyone else would pay for in a competitive free market.

And this is only going to stop when we cut off subsidies for higher education, which is largely given to far-left administrators and far-left non-STEM professors.

Polemics

Two black economists explain how to not be poor in America

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Economist Walter Williams
Economist Walter Williams

Walter Wiliams is one of my two favorite economists, the other being Thomas Sowell.

Here is his article on wealth and poverty on Creators written by Dr. Williams.

First, real poverty is not common in America:

There is no material poverty in the U.S. Here are a few facts about people whom the Census Bureau labels as poor. Dr. Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield, in their study “Understanding Poverty in the United States: Surprising Facts About America’s Poor”, report that 80 percent of poor households have air conditioning; nearly three-quarters have a car or truck, and 31 percent have two or more. Two-thirds have cable or satellite TV. Half have one or more computers. Forty-two percent own their homes. Poor Americans have more living space than the typical non-poor person in Sweden, France or the U.K. What we have in our nation are dependency and poverty of the spirit, with people making unwise choices and leading pathological lives aided and abetted by the welfare state.

Second, the “poverty” is not caused by racism, but by poor choices:

The Census Bureau pegs the poverty rate among blacks at 35 percent and among whites at 13 percent. The illegitimacy rate among blacks is 72 percent, and among whites it’s 30 percent. A statistic that one doesn’t hear much about is that the poverty rate among black married families has been in the single digits for more than two decades, currently at 8 percent. For married white families, it’s 5 percent. Now the politically incorrect questions: Whose fault is it to have children without the benefit of marriage and risk a life of dependency? Do people have free will, or are they governed by instincts?

There may be some pinhead sociologists who blame the weak black family structure on racial discrimination. But why was the black illegitimacy rate only 14 percent in 1940, and why, as Dr. Thomas Sowell reports, do we find that census data “going back a hundred years, when blacks were just one generation out of slavery … showed that a slightly higher percentage of black adults had married than white adults. This fact remained true in every census from 1890 to 1940”? Is anyone willing to advance the argument that the reason the illegitimacy rate among blacks was lower and marriage rates higher in earlier periods was there was less racial discrimination and greater opportunity?

Third, avoiding poverty is the result of good choices:

No one can blame a person if he starts out in life poor, because how one starts out is not his fault.

If he stays poor, he is to blame because it is his fault. Avoiding long-term poverty is not rocket science. First, graduate from high school. Second, get married before you have children, and stay married. Third, work at any kind of job, even one that starts out paying the minimum wage. And finally, avoid engaging in criminal behavior. It turns out that a married couple, each earning the minimum wage, would earn an annual combined income of $30,000. The Census Bureau poverty line for a family of two is $15,500, and for a family of four, it’s $23,000. By the way, no adult who starts out earning the minimum wage does so for very long.

Fourth, what stops people from making good choices is big government:

Since President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty, the nation has spent about $18 trillion at the federal, state and local levels of government on programs justified by the “need” to deal with some aspect of poverty. In a column of mine in 1995, I pointed out that at that time, the nation had spent $5.4 trillion on the War on Poverty, and with that princely sum, “you could purchase every U.S. factory, all manufacturing equipment, and every office building. With what’s left over, one could buy every airline, trucking company and our commercial maritime fleet. If you’re still in the shopping mood, you could also buy every television, radio and power company, plus every retail and wholesale store in the entire nation”. Today’s total of $18 trillion spent on poverty means you could purchase everything produced in our country each year and then some.

Regarding those last two points, here is Thomas Sowell:

Economist Thomas Sowell blames welfare for killing the black family
Economist Thomas Sowell blames welfare for killing the black family

To illustrate this point, I stole a graph from the Twitter feed of a famous man-blaming sociology professor who shall not be named (although his name rhymes with Vlad FillBox).

Black women were more likely to be married before welfare programs
Black women were more likely to be married before welfare programs

In fact, there is a whole video featuring Thomas Sowell to go with this graph:

And an article to go with it:

If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks stood a hundred years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state. In other words, we could compare hard evidence on “the legacy of slavery” with hard evidence on the legacy of liberals.

Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the civil rights laws and “war on poverty” programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began.

Over the next 20 years, the poverty rate among blacks fell another 18 percentage points, compared to the 40-point drop in the previous 20 years. This was the continuation of a previous economic trend, at a slower rate of progress, not the economic grand deliverance proclaimed by liberals and self-serving black “leaders.”

Ending the Jim Crow laws was a landmark achievement. But, despite the great proliferation of black political and other “leaders” that resulted from the laws and policies of the 1960s, nothing comparable happened economically. And there were serious retrogressions socially.

Nearly a hundred years of the supposed “legacy of slavery” found most black children being raised in two-parent families in 1960. But thirty years after the liberal welfare state found the great majority of black children being raised by a single parent.

The rest of the article points out how even crime rates among blacks were caused by the implementation of soft law enforcement policies by progressives. Just look at the big cities if you want to know what it is like for blacks to be ruled by Democrats. It sucks!

You might have heard about Thomas Sowell because some celebrity I don’t know anything about has been tweeting all kinds of stuff by Dr. Sowell:

Now this celebrity is tweeting my favorite economist Thomas Sowell
Now this celebrity is tweeting my favorite economist Thomas Sowell

If everybody started to read more Thomas Sowell books, we would be much better off as a country! Only good things happen when people stop watching TV and listening to music and watching movies, and instead settle down in a chair with a Thomas Sowell book. I recommended a bunch of them in this previous post.

News

Radical feminism changes men’s perceptions of women in the workplace

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Radical feminists complain a lot about sexism, but damage is self-inflicted
Radical feminists complain a lot about sexism, but damage is self-inflicted

Lately, we’ve seen an outburst of radical feminism as more women have been equating actual rape and sexual assault with sexist comments or clumsy passes. How does this change how women are perceived in the workplace?

Here’s an article from Medium (H/T Tracy) by an anonymous male feminist.

The first point is about how women handle disagreement, compared to men:

When James Damore was asked for feedback from his supervisor and internally circulated his google memo, it got leaked, he got fired and women stayed at home the next Day because “for emotional reasons”

A ten page summary of data and analysis from Damore was enough to “emotional distress” the women at the company.

This lack of resilience and self-control disrupts the workplace, and results in lost productivity. If it turns into a lawsuit, the costs are even higher. This is in addition to women having fewer STEM degrees than men, working fewer hours than men, and taking months leave for pregnancy. Not to mention affirmative action hiring and promoting in order to meet quotas of women.

Second point, is increased hostility to men.

Look at this tweet from a writer at Teen Vogue:

Emily Lindin, a mainstreatm writer with a degree in music history, tweets her hatred of men
Emily Lindin, a mainstream writer with a degree in music history, tweets her hatred of men

She has 23,000 followers on Twitter – this woman is mainstream. I looked into her background a bit. No mention of a father at home, and a self-confessed “slutty” lifestyle from her early teens onward. Her entire writing career seems to be to attack everyone who disagrees with her promiscuity.

Feminism, as an ideology, does not allow women to prefer men who exhibit traditional masculine characteristics: providing, protecting, moral and spiritual leadership, chastity, fidelity. That’s “sexist”. So what’s left? Get drunk and have sex with the hot bad boys, since evaluating a man’s character is “sexist”. Then promote false accusations and misandry to get revenge against the hot bad boys you freely chose. This will only get worse as more radical feminists waste their 20s on hot bad boys, and raise more fatherless girls when they become single mothers by choice, in their 30s.

Do men want to work with women who hate men and make false accusations with people they disagree with? I’m a conservative, Christian, pro-life virgin. I disagree with all premarital sex. If this woman worked with me and found out my views, she would almost certainly get me fired.

Another article from Medium (H/T Wes) makes a third point about how conservatives are treated by liberal women in the workplace. The article is written by a female senior software engineer, who promotes STEM to women and the elderly. She is a self-described “moderate conservative”.

Excerpt:

On September 27, 2017, I decided to attend the Atlanta Google Women Techmakers’ event “Idea Jam Session,” which was hosted at TechSquare Labs in Atlanta. At that time, I was still an active member of Women Who Code, the Atlanta GDG, and Google Women Techmakers and, perhaps naively, I just assumed that I had every right to attend the event like any other member of the group because I had not been banned.

Upon arriving at the event, Maggie immediately asked me to leave the room. At the door, she informed me that she would be extremely uncomfortable if I remained a member of the community because some of the views that I had expressed on Twitter are “very harmful to gender equality”. She then asked Daniel Sabeo, the event coordinator at TechSquare Labs, to escort me from the facility. I was deeply upset at being publicly humiliated, but left willingly without causing any disruption.

Two days later, I got an email from TechSquare Labs. Daniel had discussed the incident with Allen Nance, Paul Judge, and Rodney Sampson, the owners of the facility, and he informed me that they had collectively decided to ban me and my company from using their venue or attending any of their events because they were concerned about the “safety” of their members. I later learned from a fellow developer that Maggie had, in fact, told various people that I’d been stalking her.

[…]The following week, Martin Omander, GDG program manager for North America, formally banned me from the Google Developer Group and Google Women Techmakers and, again, declined to provide me with any details of the complaints against me or the rules that I’d allegedly violated.

How many women are likely to attack conservatives in the workplace?

Young, unmarried women voted 78% to 22% for Obama in 2008, according to exit polls.

Exit polls from the 2008 Obama vs McCain election
Exit polls from the 2008 Obama vs McCain election: unmarried women voters only

Obama was a radical feminist president who voted against banning infanticide multiple times as a state senator in Illinois. 78% of young, unmarried women voted for him anyway. Women who graduate from college in non-STEM fields are especially progressive. In my experience, young, unmarried women typically form their views by adapting to the dominant views of their community, which is overwhelmingly liberal on campus. In my experience, men are more likely to construct a worldview through reasoning and evaluating evidence.

I’ve personally never met a young, unmarried woman who could answer basic political questions, like naming prior terrorist attacks against the United States, US allies, or US assets abroad, or telling me the amount of the national debt. In my experience, young unmarried women are not concerned with the plight of women in Iran, Pakistan or Afghanistan. They’re not concerned with spending money today that will be paid back by generations of taxpayers not yet born.

Instead, I usually hear that they are progressive because they want taxpayer-funded abortions, taxpayer-funded contraception, no-fault divorce, single mother welfare, student-loan forgiveness, etc. They want taxpayer-funded bailouts for problems caused by their own free choices. They feel that if society is paying for something, then it’s “normal” and they don’t have feel guilty about making poor choices. Their primary concern about politics is being able to do what they feel like without anyone disapproving. Everything bad that happens is “unexpected”, and so society should have to pay for it. It wasn’t their fault that their “follow-your-heart” plan didn’t work out.

I don’t even speak to young, unmarried women about religion and politics in the workplace. It doesn’t matter if we have the same views or not. Feeling offended and going full totalitarian is just too widespread. The rational choice for men is to disengage. I can have conversations safely about religion and politics with men, even if they disagree with me.