RUTHFULLY YOURS

Does your workplace have too few black people in top jobs? It’s racist. Does the advanced math and science high school in your city have too many Asians? It’s racist. Does your local museum employ too many white women? It’s racist, too.

After the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, prestigious American institutions, from the medical profession to the fine arts, pleaded guilty to “systemic racism.” How else explain why blacks are overrepresented in prisons and underrepresented in C-suites and faculty lounges, their leaders asked?

The official answer for those disparities is “disparate impact,” a once obscure legal theory that is now transforming our world. Any traditional standard of behavior or achievement that impedes exact racial proportionality in any enterprise is now presumed racist. Medical school admissions tests, expectations of scientific accomplishment in the award of research grants, the enforcement of the criminal law—all are under assault, because they have a “disparate impact” on underrepresented minorities.

When Race Trumps Merit provides an alternative explanation for those racial disparities. It is large academic skills gaps that cause the lack of proportional representation in our most meritocratic organizations and large differences in criminal offending that account for the racially disproportionate prison population.

The need for such a corrective argument could not be more urgent. Federal science agencies now treat researchers’ skin color as a scientific qualification. Museums and orchestras choose which art and music to promote based on race. Police officers avoid making arrests and prosecutors decline to bring charges to avoid disparate impact on minority criminals.

When Race Trumps Merit breaks powerful taboos. But it is driven by a sense of alarm, supported by detailed case studies of how disparate-impact thinking is jeopardizing scientific progress, destroying public order, and poisoning the appreciation of art and culture. As long as alleged racism remains the only allowable explanation for racial differences, we will continue tearing down excellence and putting lives, as well as civilizational achievement, at risk.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/04/four_authors_to_read_before_the_woke_censors_come_after_them.html

Especially among conservative circles, it is easy to see how works published or written longer ago than the current year might come under harsh scrutiny from the editors of large publishing houses.  It is not the time to panic just yet.  However, with Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming becoming subject to rewrites and censorship as well as large retailers banning certain books from their platforms, it might be time to ponder what books you have been meaning to buy before you either cannot or it has been altered past the author’s intent.  Granted, while some of these books are politically controversial, it would be foolish to suppose that any such censorious instincts end at politics or the hot-button topic of the minute.

Therefore, with a focus on literature and entertainment, let’s dive in to four books I’d ask you to consider before to acquire while they are unmolested and purchasable.

Arthur Machen was a Welsh author who wrote some of the earliest entries of what evolved into the horror genre.  The collection here is the Oxford World Classics, which features the Great God Pan and others of his seminal works such as the White People and the Inmost Light.  Machen dabbled in esotericism and occultic studies, which seemingly scared him into a High Church Anglican, which lends his stories a definitive air of the sinister, with his Welsh background helping to inform the atmosphere of his works (often taking place in Wales).  Mr. Machen these days would not be in good company among modern authors and editors due to his reactionary views, his support of Francisco Franco, and the portrayals of women and the disabled (both physically and mentally).  These are works where once you have read them, you will see that not just a few writers in the mid twentieth-century borrowed or were heavily influenced by their author.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/03/the_persistent_horror_of_congos_exploitation.html

“The horror! The horror!” The enormities the colonials inflicted on the Congolese are condensed in those dying words of Kurtz, the depraved, power-mad ivory-procurer of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It was ivory then; it is cobalt now. But exploitation and slavery continue to this day in the benighted Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), long after most former colonies have prospered in freedom.

The DRC is the world’s biggest producer of cobalt, essential to the lithium-ion batteries that power cellphones, computers, EVs, and a host of devices. The silvery metal is stained with the blood of Congolese slaves, many of them children. Siddharth Kara, an expert on human trafficking and slavery, hopes to wake up the world to this 21st century horror with Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, his latest book, published in January.

Kara travelled extensively through militia-controlled mining areas to research his book. Enduring threats, environmental hazards, and multiple attempts to halt his investigation, he has brought unwelcome sunlight to the deplorable disregard for human suffering in this country of 60 million, ranked among the five poorest in the world. His research and fieldwork make for heart-breaking reading: instead of prosperity, the vast resources of the central African nation have only brought it untold exploitation for over five centuries.

Slave trade began in Congo, as across Africa, in the mid-15th century. By the 16th century, during the reign of King Alfonso of Portugal, slave raids and networks were systematized, and these operated well into the 19th century. At the 1884 Berlin Conference to discuss the carving up of Africa, European colonials authorized King Leopold II of Belgium’s personal ownership of, and sovereignty over, the Congo Free State. In a few years, the explorer Henry Morgan Stanley perpetrated a massive land grab for the king by securing several hundred treaties from unsuspecting, illiterate native tribes.

https://www.thefp.com/p/from-slavery-in-north-korea-to-jeff

Nothing I have ever read about the slave state of North Korea has affected me more than Yeonmi Park’s bestselling book, “In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom.” Her account makes it clear that that phrase—slave state—is not hyperbole.

Park grew up believing that Kim Jong-il was so powerful that he could read her mind. (“Even when you think you’re alone,” her mother warned her, “the birds and mice can hear you whisper.”) She survived a famine that killed nearly three million people. (She ate dragonflies to survive). At nine years old, Park witnessed the public execution of her friend’s mother. (The woman was put to death for the crime of watching a Hollywood movie.)

Almost no one escapes the Hermit Kingdom. Yeonmi Park did.

At 13, she fled to China with her mother. The two endured unspeakable things—rape by human traffickers; sexual servitude. Ultimately, they broke free again, crossing the freezing Gobi Desert at night to Mongolia, then onto South Korea and, finally, to America.

Last year, as she wrote in The Free Press, Park became a U.S. citizen.

Now, she has published a new book, “While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector’s Search for Freedom in America.” In the excerpt we are publishing below Park writes about her experience among America’s most celebrated, wealthy elites—and the moral corruption she found at their conferences and on their Gulfstreams.

Today’s columns are filled with the ridiculous “trigger” warnings of perceived offense which drive millennial and GenY brats to “safe spaces” after heckling dissidents and disparaging every effort at adult debate on the critical issues of our times.

In 2008  Diana West wrote: The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization

It was prescient long before the brats became  legislators and academics.rsk

“But, the grown-ups are all gone. The disease that killed them was incubated in the sixties to a rock-and-roll score, took hold in the seventies with the help of multicultralism and left us with a nation of eternal adolescents who can’t decide between “good” and “bad”, a generation who can’t say “no”.

With insightful wit, Diana West takes readers on an odyssey through culture and politics, from the rise of rock ‘n’ roll to the rise of multiculturalism, from the loss of identity to the discovery of “diversity,” from the emasculation of the heroic ideal to the “PC”-ing of “Mary Poppins,” all the while building a compelling case against the childishness that is subverting the struggle against jihadist Islam in a mixed-up, post-9/11 world.

https://rlo.acton.org/archives/124306-the-myth-of-american-inequality.html

The notion of rising income inequality has permeated modern American discourse and is assumed as inherent to our economic system such that any claim to the contrary is easily dismissed as ignorance or insincerity. Indeed, The Myth of American Inequality: How Government Biases Policy Debate is a rather jarring title. American inequality a myth? Yes, claim Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund, and John Early. To show we have been misled, the authors dive into the obscure world of bureaucratic statistics. In the process, they fearlessly confront the dominant narrative and demonstrate that government’s ambitious tax and transfer programs have substantially mitigated income inequality (properly measured) while incentivizing idleness.

All three economists bring impeccable credentials to the subject. Ekelund’s scholarly career has been especially prolific, while Gramm and Early contribute unique insights as a former U.S. senator and former assistant commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, respectively. Together they make a formidable team, capable of making sound methodological judgments, dissecting measurement challenges, and clarifying ambiguous terms. Their goal “is to start a debate, not to end one.” This is a great service, especially for those who wrongly assume that Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century was the last word on the subject.

The authors make several opening claims, which set the tone for the remaining chapters. Consider these three: government transfer payments have increased massively during the past half-century; the Census Bureau in 2017 counted a mere one-third of transfer payments as income for those who received them; and net income inequality has actually fallen by 3% since 1947. The first claim is perhaps unsurprising. The second pleads for further investigation—why not count subsidies? Yet the third claim gets to the heart of the book: Just what, exactly, do the reported inequality statistics actually measure? Are they measuring the income people are earning through work, or are they accounting for the net income they possess after taxes, transfers, and benefits?