The Kemble Inn, located in Lenox, is just a mile or so down the road from Tanglewood. A classic New England Inn, it features spectacular views of the Berkshires and a decent restaurant where a very good Amarone will set you back something like $175. The parking lot is filled with Mercedes, BMW’s and Audis. There is not a Chevy in sight.
Around town the occasional “Bernie” bumper sticker can be spotted—usually on a Volvo or Subaru. If there are any Trump fans, a doubtful prospect, they are well hidden. Perhaps they have gone underground. We are, after all, in the heart of Resistance territory, at least in spirit.
A writer for the Berkshire Eagle, a local newspaper, best expresses the area zeitgeist in a column about that most pressing of issues—texting while driving. “What will it take” he writes, “for the State House of Representatives to approve legislation passed in the Senate …that would ban motorists from using handheld devices behind the wheel”? “Supporters …rightly point out that the new law would make roads safer and force behavioral changes in an era when people have become addicted to using cellphones, email….”
The Progressive mindset is a wonder to behold. So passing a law will “force behavioral change” among people who have become “addicted”. And how is that drug war working out I wonder? Nothing like 50 years of failure as evidence for the need to press on. Maybe tossing a couple of million people in jail for texting without a license would do the trick.
In the meantime we are treated to the spectacle of Google firing an engineer who had the temerity to say that men and women are…different. Not better or worse, mind you—different. In his memo, James Damore, the Google engineer, carefully distinguished between individual people and statistical populations. First he noted there was considerable overlap in the talents of men and women. Then he noted that on average, women are more likely than men to be empathetic and to be better with people. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to be competitive and status driven. These characteristics, he suggested, might account for the preponderance of men in tech senior management.
Needless to say, Google fired him.
Which Google is fully within its rights to do. But that doesn’t make it smart. And it doesn’t give Google or anybody else the right to slander him.
The memo the engineer wrote is routinely referred to as “a rant” and “a screed”. It is neither. The people who describe the memo that way either haven’t read it, or are unacquainted with the finer points of using a dictionary. But that is beside the point. The jackboots of the left mean to stomp to silence any and all challenges to the cultural hegemony they are busily crafting in the name of “diversity”. This is, of course, nothing more than subterfuge masquerading as “tolerance”.
Way back in 1965 Professor Herbert Marcuse, darling of the SDS, came up with the rationale for stomping on dissenting opinions, all in the name of “tolerance”. In “A Critique of Tolerance” he argued that fostering tolerance “…would include the withdrawal of tolerance of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care etc.…Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.”
Which is to say that for Progressive believers it is all about power, to be gotten by any means necessary. It always has been. Subverting the language to accomplish the goal is a standard part of the playbook.
So: for anyone who is actually interested in what the Google engineer had to say, the memo is reproduced in full by Gizmodo, and can be seen at this link.
JFB
