Category Archives: Culture & Society

Cryin’ Lyin’ Zion

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I see the Somali woman who has somehow become a US Congresswoman is once again fending off accusations of antisemitism following a series of tweets which suggested American politicians defend Israel because lobbyists pay them to.

This prompted a Twitter thread by a British contributor to The Economist on the practice of disguising antisemitism as anti-Zionism, and the similarities between its adoption by hard-left American politicians and what we’ve seen in the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn. It’s actually not a bad thread, but here’s how it ends:


It seems a lot of Jews in the media are incapable of speaking about antisemitism without an obligatory swipe at Trump and other right wing politicians who hold unapproved views. I’ve written about this before; it’s a common phenomenon. Trump is the most pro-Jewish president America has ever had; he had absolutely no problem with his daughter converting to Judaism and marrying her Jewish boyfriend, who Trump fully embraced. He’s also the most pro-Israeli American president for a long time, motivated by such concerns as security and sovereignty. This ought to have Jews on both sides of the Atlantic turning cartwheels in celebration, but it appears their concerns over antisemitism are outweighed by a desire to remain popular in left wing, liberal circles and keep those dinner party invites flowing.

Trump is racist only by the insane definition of metropolitan newsrooms and western academia. What Orban is supposed to have done that is not part of Israel’s founding policy I don’t know. And I bet this Pfeffer chap took his views on Bolsonaro from an article some know-nothing, idiot journalist wrote from an office in London. Hell, it was probably a colleague at The Economist with a pencil neck and an English degree from Oxford hanging over his desk. Ilhan Omar, on the other hand, really is racist and the same goes for a good portion of those allowed to settle in the UK under successive governments. If the likes of Pfeffer can’t bring himself to differentiate between them and Trump, is the problem as grave as he makes out? Personally I think it is, but if Jewish journalists aren’t going to take it seriously, why should I? He should be looking to recruit allies and build bridges with those (like me) who have no skin in the game. Ordinarily I’d side with British and American Jews over racist Somalis, but if their spokesmen are going to spend time bashing Hungarian and Brazilian politicians and virtue-signalling about how much they despise Trump, maybe I’ll just sit on the sidelines and say nothing. What’s my incentive to get involved?

I’ve written recently about how American Jews are going to have to decide whether they want to join the ranks of white deplorables or continue to stoke the fires of identity politics which enable those who truly detest them. British Jews are similarly going to have to decide whether they want to enlist the help of ordinary, decent people in opposing antisemitism or continue to paint themselves into a corner because maintaining their social status is more important than ensuring their safety.

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Food for Thought

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Consider this tweet by Israeli journalist Lahav Harkov, who is sound on a lot of issues:


Now I know there’s a whole swathe of the alt-right who believe women should never leave the kitchen, and I know the expectation that a woman is obliged to cook for her husband every night is old-fashioned. But that said, if a woman does cook for her husband that will go some way to defining her worth, both in his eyes and those of outsiders. Imagine the roles were switched, and Harry was cooking for Meghan every night: his stock would soar in the eyes of most women.

I know a lot of men my age and younger who can cook, and part of this is because feminists told recent generations of women they ought not to learn. “If he wants dinner he can cook it himself,” was the prevailing attitude. Well, that’s what they did and I know several families in which the man is the main cook (and enjoys doing it). The problem with that is it removes a valuable tool women of my mother’s and grandmother’s generations used to attract and retain a husband. Men of that era couldn’t boil an egg, so it was a huge incentive to settle down with someone if you wanted to eat properly the rest of your life. The phrase “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach” isn’t repeated across languages and cultures for nothing. Of course it placed a burden on the woman, but having a stable job (that was often dangerous) placed a burden on the man. A marriage is a partnership in which mutually beneficial tasks are divided between the couple, each doing what they’re best at. If women decide they don’t want to cook, the man will either find someone who can or learn to feed himself. He isn’t going to starve. The standard feminist response to this would be: “Well, if all he wants me for is to be his slave, he can get stuffed.” And quite right too. But as I’ve just said, a relationship is a partnership. If she’s not cooking, what is she offering? Sex? That’s not enough, especially in the Tinder age. Sassy feminism? No thanks.

I’m being unfair. There are many women who bring plenty to the table, if you excuse the pun, without cooking for her partner every day. But on the other hand I keep reading articles on how hard it is for modern, middle class women to find a decent man who sticks around. Apparently, they’re only interested in Tinder hookups these days, and many don’t want relationships. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that if these women had cooking skills in their armoury along with a willingness to deploy them regularly, they’d find men a lot less keen to skedaddle as soon as the first ray of sunlight touches her bedroom window on a Sunday morning. I base this on the fact that, if a woman meets a man who can cook well and likes doing it, she brags to all her friends and spends more time at his gaff than her own.

My point is, to find a decent partner you need to maximise what you bring to the relationship, and focus on those skills they might lack. You would be amazed at the degree to which my relationships have been based on an ability to unblock sinks, take down heavy boxes from the top of wardrobes, fit insulation strips to ill-fitting windows, and bleed radiators. Having someone who is willing to cook is a huge asset in a relationship, regardless of who is doing it. Being able to share the duties is even better. But modern feminism has taught women that being able to cook should not contribute to their worth in a relationship, and they ought not to even bother learning. Stripped of one of the most valuable skills they can bring to a relationship, they’re now howling at the lack of men who are interested in one.

As I’m fond of asking: whose fault is that, then?

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A Product of Dumb Luck

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When I arrived in my MBA program last October I had to spend a bit of time preparing my backstory. All my classmates are in their twenties and have yet to start their careers, whereas on some measures I’ve done quite well for myself already. I had to come up with a way to explain it without my coming across as a complete d-head. During a car trip to Bern with a fellow student, I emphasised the importance dumb luck played in me achieving a relatively comfortable standard of living, rather than my sheer brilliance.

First off, I chose my parents carefully and was born with above average intellect into a stable, middle class family. These two alone are the markers of probably around 80% of life outcomes, unless your parents smoke crack pipes in the living room (mine didn’t). I was fortunate enough that my dad earned enough money to send me to a school which, for all its faults, got me the grades to get into a decent university. Secondly, I happened to stumble into the oil industry during the biggest boom it had ever seen, complete with skyrocketing salaries which were sustained for more than a decade. Sure, I made stuff happen by making a few smart decisions, working (when absolutely necessary), and taking opportunities when they arose, but without those two things I’d be nothing.

Thanks to my being a well-educated, white collar professional who enjoyed a lucrative career, most of my social circle is the same. From those who rode the oil boom with me, particularly those who got in early, most are millionaires (asset-wise) with multiple properties, international marriages, children in expensive private schools, and who enjoy luxury foreign family holidays at least once per year. Turning up at my school, I found this describes many of my professors, too. Often when I’m introduced to people in my social circle, I find them to be very intelligent, successful, and staggeringly rich by the standards of even the last generation.

The trouble is, I’ve detected a severe lack of self-awareness among what I can accurately describe as my social peers. It takes the form of a sneering, dismissive attitude towards anyone they deem “uneducated”, which means they hold views they disagree with. It appears to be the policy in my business school that lecturers make a random, disparaging remark about Trump once per session, without stopping for a single second to put themselves in the shoes of those who voted for him. If challenged to do so, they’re dismissed as uneducated racists who were manipulated by his fearmongering lies. Similarly, those who voted for Britain to leave the European Union are routinely insulted by phenomenally wealthy people in my social group who’ve done extraordinarily well from the status quo, and blithely assume anyone who hasn’t is stupid or lazy. Unfortunately, thanks to my membership of Facebook, I have to see this every day from people who really ought to – what’s that term? – check their privilege.

There is nothing uglier in a person than a lack of self-awareness, particularly an inability to appreciate that there by the grace of God go I. Yes, we all worked to get where we are, some of us damned hard, but sheer luck played a large part as well. Too many of my social peers are trapped in a self-delusional bubble which is, quite frankly, turning otherwise decent people into a-holes. A lengthy career in an international oil major, where sneering down your nose at the lower ranks is actively encouraged, can scarcely help with that. When I moved to France I gradually started mixing with people who weren’t oil industry professionals or expatriates, and nowadays my social circles are made up of many such people. Some of them earn less in a year than my oil industry colleagues spend on the education of a single child in the same period. I’ve noticed you don’t hear them airily dismiss whole swathes of society as readily as those in my more natural social circle. Indeed, they tend not to mention politics at all. These days, voting is a middle class hobby; for those lower down, nothing changes no matter who gets in. I have friends who express opinions which would make my other friends choke on their organic veggie burgers. I don’t necessarily agree with them, but given who they are and where they come from, I can see why they think that way.

I’ll wrap this up by saying I have a good friend who has done very well for himself as an international banker, and is very well-educated and wealthy by any standards. But he remains extremely down to earth, and can rub along with anyone. Why? A child immigrant, he grew up in his parents’ restaurant in the (almost) Deep South. As he put it:

“If you’ve grown up scrubbing pots in a kitchen full of Mexicans, it’s hard to get too far ahead of yourself.”

Indeed. I didn’t have a hard life, and most difficulties were self-inflicted out of pure masochism. I got lucky. If I didn’t make the effort, I might not know how the other side live. I’m glad I did, and I do. I wish more of my peers did.

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Ranks Defiled

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A common response to stories demonstrating the moral corruption infesting the British police forces is that the attitudes of the leadership do not reflect those of the rank and file. While I am sure this is true in many cases, I’ve seen enough large organisations to know that corrupt leaders quickly find willing enablers among the workforce, who take to their new-found duties with enthusiasm. Before long anyone who isn’t on board with management directives is threatened, demoted, or ostracised while the quislings advance their careers in positions of ever-increasing importance.

Supporting this theory are examples of British citizens who have encountered rank and file policemen and discovered they’re less dealing with Dixon of Dock Green than state apparatchiks of middling intelligence burdened with a childlike vanity. Back in March I wrote about this story:

A van driver was arrested by a group of police officers after challenging them because they were parked on a double yellow line. Andy Mayfield, 53, was held in custody for 12 hours and strip searched under anti-terror laws after he started filming the cops, who were parked illegally outside their own police station in Ashton-on-Ribble, Lancashire in January. He was detained under the Terrorism Act and submitted to a rigorous questioning at the Newton Heath terrorism centre in Manchester before eventually being released.

Yesterday I read this one:

Mr Warner was charged with an offence under section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986, namely that he used threatening or abusive words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress as a result. This is a summary offence, which can only be dealt with in the Magistrates’ Court, and the maximum penalty is a fine not exceeding level 3 on the standard scale (currently £1,000).

The charge arose from an incident that took place outside the school where Mr Warner was picking up his young daughter. There appeared to be some confusion over where his daughter actually was, which understandably caused him to become agitated.

A nearby police officer, who could see Mr Warner’s agitation, approached to enquire what the problem was. During the conversation the police officer said “I can see you’re angry”, to which the concerned father replied “no sh*t I’m angry”. It is important to stress that the comment was a response directed at the police officer. Nobody else expressed any concern about the casual remark at the time.

Mr Warner’s daughter was located and he left the scene thinking nothing more about it.

Three weeks later the 45 year-old received a letter from the same police officer, inviting him to attend the police station to discuss an alleged public order offence.

…

At the recent trial the police officer recounted events exactly as described above, including the “no sh*t I’m angry” comment. When questioned about whether anyone else had been offended by the comment the officer suggested that members of the public had voiced their concerns, but the prosecution had offered no evidence to that effect.

It is quite clear that in many instances, should certain, non-protected members of the public fail to adopt the correct stance of cowed submission and deference before a police officer, they will have you arrested. Given the process is the punishment, it matters little to them that you may not be found guilty (as this man was) should you choose to contest the charges and it goes to court: you will have a file, your DNA will be on record, and you will have to declare the arrest on job application and visa forms for the rest of your days. While your life is being turned upside down through court appearances and lawyer’s fees, the officers concerned carry on with theirs as normal. They rarely face any penalty, even for lying in court.

That the British police should behave in this way is not surprising; this is how the police behave in much of the world. This is why in most countries you avoid the police at all costs, do not engage them in conversation, and most certainly do not view them as people who are on your side. As I’ve said on many occasions, the quicker the British public realise the police are not their friends and are best avoided, the better off they’ll be.

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Straight Flush

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Regular readers will know I like to watch games of victimhood poker being played out in the wild. We already established that being homosexual beats being a black man. But what beats being gay? Ah:

Andrew Moffat MBE, assistant headteacher at Parkfield Community School in Saltley, has been criticised by parents for piloting No Outsiders – a programme run alongside sex and relationship education (SRE) lessons.

Its ethos promotes LGBT equality and challenges homophobia in primary schools.

Books now being read by pupils at Parkfield Community School include Mommy, Mama and Me and King & King – stories about same-sex relationships and marriages.

But Mr Moffat and the No Outsiders programme have come under fire from some Muslim parents who condemn such teachings, as homosexuality is strictly forbidden in Islam.

Mr Moffat, who is openly gay, and the school have defended the programme, which they said had been fully explained to parents. They added: “No Outsiders allows us to raise awareness of these differences so that children are able to tolerate and accept differences in our society.”

But outraged mum Fatima Shah, who has taken her 10-year-old daughter out of the school, told BirminghamLive: “It’s inappropriate, totally wrong.

“Children are being told it’s OK to be gay yet 98 per cent of children at this school are Muslim. It’s a Muslim community.

Personally I think the protesters have a point – primary school children should not be indoctrinated with sexual identity politics – but if anyone who wasn’t a member of a top-ranking protected class brought this complaint they’d be hounded from public life and likely facing criminal prosecution for hate crimes. As for Mr Moffat, he should have read the rulebook he himself helped write.

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Bugger thy neighbour

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Kristian Niemietz is a German chap working for the Institute of Economic Affairs, and he is worth listening to on matters such as housing and health policy. My guess is if you wanted someone to draw up a white paper on how to best allocate scarce resources in a particular field, he’s your man.

He’s also a good example of why technocrats don’t make good politicians or leaders. Look at this tweet:


Niemetz has a PhD in Political Economy (King’s College London) & MSc in Economics (Humboldt University Berlin). He seems to have spent his entire adult life living in capital cities mixing with white-collar professionals and academics. My guess is every apartment he’s lived in, including his current gaff, has shared a wall with someone much like him whether he realises it or not. He says he doesn’t identify with his next door neighbour only because he’s yet to experience living next door to someone he really doesn’t identify with. For example, I bet he and his neighbour place considerable value on getting a good night’s sleep.

The trouble with well-educated, international people like Niemetz is they fall into the trap of meeting foreigners who are much like them except for the accent and assume cultural differences stop there. Of course, if you hang out with academics and white-collar professionals it doesn’t matter if you’re in Berlin, London, Singapore, or Rio de Janeiro, it’s all the same. But if you live beside someone who has no reason to get up in the morning and decides to play music at full blast until 5am, or deals drugs in the stairwell of your apartment block, or uses it as a toilet, or keys your car on a regular basis, all of a sudden you realise the character of your neighbour becomes central to your quality of life. The only reason Niemetz doesn’t know his neighbour is because the latter is culturally conditioned to be considerate, and to get up at 7am each morning to go to work. If he wasn’t, I suspect Niemetz would know him intimately.

If you start dispensing with old-fashioned ideas like sovereignty and believe a neighbour is no different from a Brussels bureaucrat, you’re going to be in a for a rude awakening when diversity and vibrancy moves in next door. Of course, those who advocate such policies rarely have to live with the consequences.

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Corporate Punishment

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About 18 months ago, some lonely voices on the dissident right in the US began warning of the worrying antics of large tech and financial organisations with respect to political wrongthinkers. The ZMan was particularly vociferous on this, citing the case of some obscure neo-Nazi website having its domain name yanked without any transparency or due process. Within months of that we saw alt-right figures being denied hosting and other web-based services such as Cloudflare, which prevents DOS attacks. These actions at the time appeared to be the result of Antifa mobs piling pressure on the service providers and finding sympathetic (or scared) managers within who would do their bidding. As usual, the traditional right did nothing except help the enemy by holding aloft their principles; I’ll come onto that in a minute.

Pretty quickly Antifa worked out they could get anyone from the alt-right booted from social media and their contracts with web service companies cancelled, and that’s precisely what they did. As I wrote here, I thought Antifa would overreach and put people in a position where they had little recourse but to violence:

Ordinary people suddenly found a handy source of income has been cut off simply because the tech giants were unable or unwilling to stand up to a gaggle of hard-left thugs. It’s only a matter of time before ordinary Americans find themselves denied access to the website or payment processing platform their livelihoods depend on, without ever knowing the reason why. If that happens, people will start throwing their support behind whichever outfit professes to be on their side and against the people responsible, regardless of how nasty and thuggish they are.

The ZMan took it one step further, and said these tactics were endorsed by the ruling classes, happy to allow Antifa mobs and social media companies to enforce the censorship they are forbidden by law from imposing directly. He was one of the earliest voices to warn that political censorship and punishment was being meted out via compliant social media giants and other corporations, and it appears he was absolutely right. Look how quickly we’ve gone from Antifa mobs getting Nazi websites shut down to this:

Facebook and PayPal accounts used to organise “yellow vest” protests that have seen MPs verbally abused in Westminster have been deleted.

Organiser James Goddard’s Facebook profile disappeared amid calls for police to prevent the group from “harassing” politicians, journalists and pro-EU protesters.

His PayPal account was disabled a short time later on Tuesday afternoon.

The reason this chap’s PayPal account has been deleted is because he upset Anne Soubry, and someone made a call to PayPal to tell them to inflict the standard punishment. If it were you or I being abused, or even knifed on a London street, nobody would be interested. But attack a member of the ruling class and suddenly services on which you depend are cancelled without warning. Where’s the transparency here? Where’s the due process? And where’s the consistency? When Nigel Farage was attacked by a mob in a pub, the media classes thought it highly amusing. Plod didn’t seem much interested either, simply because their masters don’t like Farage very much.

Now the conservative right have thus far defended the actions of the likes of PayPal and Facebook on the grounds private companies should have the right to do business with whomever they please. I have two problems with this: firstly, businesses don’t have a right to do business with whomever they please as whole rafts of anti-discrimination legislation attest. There’s not much point in defending a principle which hasn’t been upheld in these lands since flares were in fashion, unless as part of a philosophical discussion. Secondly, whereas it may be reasonable for a restaurateur to refuse service to someone who can eat next door, how does this work with PayPal? And where does it stop? Credit card providers, banks and insurance companies are already coming under pressure in the US to refuse service to those who own guns or wish to buy one. How long before Mastercard (who’s politics are evident) decides it’s going to cut people off without warning? Well, you just switch to Visa, right?

Not quite: as we saw when three or four social media companies all banned Alex Jones within hours of one another, these actions are coordinated. If one company bans a wrongthinker, it’s almost certain their peers will follow suit. There are many restaurants in town, but only a few credit card companies. If they collectively decide to blacklist you, you’re screwed. Now the dimmer free-market fundamentalists will say “If you don’t like it, start your own service, market forces, innit?” Which again is a great topic for discussion in an Ayn Rand convention down the local pub, but the average person is not in a position to start their own bank. And where does this stop? There used to be a principle that utility companies such as electricity, phone, and water providers had to supply all customers regardless of who they were. Nowadays people are just as dependent on credit card, banking, and insurance services yet they appear to be allowed, thanks to a few lines of font 4 text in 18 pages of terms and conditions, to just immediately halt services without warning and without explanation. “Don’t like it?” say the free marketeers. “Well, start your own insurance company, then!” If the right can’t come up with a better response than this, they deserve the left’s foot on their necks for the foreseeable future.

Note what’s interesting in this latest incident is the ruling classes don’t even need the Antifa mob any more. No, all it took was 50 MPs writing to Plod and PayPal got the message loud and clear. The Antifa mobs were useful in terms of testing the water, seeing if these companies would knuckle under and do as they’re told, but now they’re surplus to requirements. Bear in mind all his has happened in less than two years, and try to imagine where we’ll be in another two. We’re rapidly heading into a situation where the ruling classes can effectively cut you off from services on which you depend as punishment for stepping out of line. People are making lots of noise about China’s social credit system, but at least the CPC is open about it. Our ruling classes are doing the same thing while claiming it’s nothing to do with them because we live in a free society. Free for whom, exactly?

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Should societies be pleasant or durable?

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Ilhan Omar was born in Mogadishu, Somalia before coming to the United States as a refugee aged 14. Last November she became the first Somali to be elected to the United States Congress, and one of the first Muslim women. She has yet to even take her seat in Congress, but she’s already decided American society needs a radical overhaul:


I have written before about how I don’t think new citizens to a country should be given the vote: if you want a say in how you are governed, feel free to stay at home. I might be persuaded those who have lived 20 years in a country should have the right to vote, but I also don’t see their being denied as a fundamental injustice. The views of those who were born in a country ought to prevail over those of newcomers who chose to relocate, but people are so wedded to the idea of universal suffrage this idea sits well outside the Overton window in the west. The trouble is, universal suffrage is about 100 years old at best, which in historical terms makes it very much still in the experimental stage.

One of the more hubristic characteristics of modern political commentators and activists is they believe their preferred policies mark the end of history, that the societal conditions they have largely imposed on others will be here forever. Few stop to think that the Ottoman empire lasted 600 years before disappearing altogether, so perhaps the jury is still out on 5 years of gay marriage and 40 years of wimmin’s rights. Now it may well be that a society in which religion plays no major role, gays get married, and legislation ensures gender parity in the upper management of big companies is very pleasant and all who live in it enjoy long, healthy, fulfilling lives. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the society will survive more than a generation or two. It rarely occurs to people that pleasant societies might not make durable societies, whereas history certainly suggests that societies built on harsh conditions can prove remarkably enduring.

My point is that any society which allows rank outsiders to enter and immediately set about agitating for radical change probably won’t last very long. Any society which allows foreigners to take part in their national political process such that they attempt to overturn parts of the constitution, suppress free speech, and denounce the population as racist is engaged in a suicide pact. The Founding Fathers stipulated that the US president must be an American; had it occurred to them that Somalis would be running for Congress and seeking to radically change America, they might well have imposed similar criteria for all holders of elected office. Serious countries do not allow their political systems to be infiltrated in this manner: Britain banned Catholics from holding public office for two hundred years, believing them to be a fifth column. Somehow, America has gone from a country which insisted newcomers adopt their values to celebrating those who don’t.

I’m sure there are lots of very good, principled arguments for allowing Ilhan Omar to run for Congress and then denounce Americans as white supremacists, just as I am sure there are sound reasons for allowing known jihadists to roam free in European capitals. But the question is, can a society which tolerates this survive? And if so, how long before it is unrecognisable? This won’t end well.

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Pink beats black

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The BBC brings news of an interesting play in the great game of victimhood poker:

US comedian and actor Kevin Hart says he has stepped down from hosting the 2019 Oscars following a controversy over homophobic tweets.

Kevin Hart is a straight black male, and if he’s being fired over homophobic tweets it suggests sexual minorities trump ethnic minorities.

The choice of Hart for host was only announced on Tuesday.

But tweets from a decade ago emerged of apparent anti-gay slurs, sparking calls for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to drop him.

Rummaging through decades-worth of social media postings in the hope of unearthing something to be outraged about seems to have become a popular hobby for some. As far as I can tell, this is the offending tweet (which isn’t a decade old, BTW):

My guess is if he’d made a joke about a gay white man he’d have got away with it, but having denigrated all gays his skin colour wasn’t enough to save him. Not if the lily-white, ultra-woke Oscars committee are the ones making the decision, anyway.

In 2015, by which time his profile had risen significantly, Hart addressed the comments in an interview with Rolling Stone.

“I wouldn’t tell that joke today, because when I said it, the times weren’t as sensitive as they are now,” he said.

Too late fella, there’s no unringing that bell. What’s amusing is, generally speaking, the only people interested in LGBTQ rights are white people living in the developed world. I’m not sure American blacks were ever on board with homosexuality, hence their rap lyrics and Obama disavowing gay marriage until his second term in order not to upset black, church-going conservatives, yet progressives always seem surprised to discover this. And are Asians, and those people wandering over the border from Mexico, strong proponents of gay rights? Those Somalis in Minnesota? I doubt it.

So the organisers of the Oscars have signalled their non-racist credentials by hiring a black guy to host them, only to find he uttered 2018 wrongthink in 2011. They consulted with Twitter and found, under the ever-shifting rules of victimhood poker, his hand lost and he has to go. As contemporary culture becomes increasingly dominated by conflicting and overlapping tribes of lunatics each seeking to be more oppressed than the other, we’re going to see more of this. I confess, as a spectator sport it’s quite entertaining.

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For every action there’s a reaction

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A couple of weeks back, in the context of a professor who’d been reprimanded over a lame joke in a lift which upset a vinegar-drinking feminist, I said this:

If this keeps up, segregated workplaces will look like an increasingly attractive proposition. At the very least, sensible men will avoid certain women at all costs – and certain companies.

A few days ago, several readers alerted me to this article:

Call it the Pence Effect, after U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, who has said he avoids dining alone with any woman other than his wife. In finance, the overarching impact can be, in essence, gender segregation.

Well, yes. As I’ve mentioned before, the logical solution to the alleged problem that women are routinely sexually harassed at work by men is segregation of the sexes. And if men are placed in a situation whereby they can have their livelihoods ruined by a mere allegation from a woman, this segregation will be self-imposed.

Now, more than a year into the #MeToo movement — with its devastating revelations of harassment and abuse in Hollywood, Silicon Valley and beyond — Wall Street risks becoming more of a boy’s club, rather than less of one.

So women demanded to work alongside men, then complained about how men behaved around them, and are now complaining men are avoiding them. I’m beginning to think there’s a grain of truth in some of those stereotypes.

“Women are grasping for ideas on how to deal with it, because it is affecting our careers,” said Karen Elinski, president of the Financial Women’s Association and a senior vice president at Wells Fargo & Co. “It’s a real loss.”

Having allowed the issue of women in the workplace to be hijacked by lunatic feminists bent on poisoning relations between the sexes, ordinary women are now finding their careers are suffering. Maybe they should have policed their own ranks a little better?

There’s a danger, too, for companies that fail to squash the isolating backlash and don’t take steps to have top managers be open about the issue and make it safe for everyone to discuss it, said Stephen Zweig, an employment attorney with FordHarrison.

“If men avoid working or traveling with women alone, or stop mentoring women for fear of being accused of sexual harassment,” he said, “those men are going to back out of a sexual harassment complaint and right into a sex discrimination complaint.”

For the SJWs pushing this insanity, this is a feature not a bug. Their aim is to hold arbitrary power over men such that, no matter what they do or don’t do, their lives can be destroyed.

For obvious reasons, few will talk openly about the issue. Privately, though, many of the men interviewed acknowledged they’re channeling Pence, saying how uneasy they are about being alone with female colleagues, particularly youthful or attractive ones, fearful of the rumor mill or of, as one put it, the potential liability.

Men aren’t stupid, and they will create strategies which enable them to politely go through the motions with female colleagues just enough to avoid a discrimination suit, but otherwise keep their distance. Men are very good at doing this with men they don’t like, so it won’t be too hard to do it with women. For example:

A manager in infrastructure investing said he won’t meet with female employees in rooms without windows anymore; he also keeps his distance in elevators. A late-40-something in private equity said he has a new rule, established on the advice of his wife, an attorney: no business dinner with a woman 35 or younger.

The changes can be subtle but insidious, with a woman, say, excluded from casual after-work drinks, leaving male colleagues to bond, or having what should be a private meeting with a boss with the door left wide open.

…

There are as many or more men who are responding in quite different ways. One, an investment adviser who manages about 100 employees, said he briefly reconsidered having one-on-one meetings with junior women. He thought about leaving his office door open, or inviting a third person into the room.

This amused, however:

Finally, he landed on the solution: “Just try not to be an asshole.”

That’s pretty much the bottom line, said Ron Biscardi, chief executive officer of Context Capital Partners. “It’s really not that hard.”

Oh, you think being nice is going to protect you? Sure, not being an asshole will stand you in good stead with 99% of female employees, but as the article says:

“Some men have voiced concerns to me that a false accusation is what they fear,” said Zweig, the lawyer. “These men fear what they cannot control.”

So they’ll take back control. Instead of having formal events the men will just meet for drinks independently, inviting a few like-minded chaps from other firms around to dispel any charge they’re at a works function.

In this charged environment, the question is how the response to #MeToo might actually end up hurting women’s progress. Given the male dominance in Wall Street’s top jobs, one of the most pressing consequences for women is the loss of male mentors who can help them climb the ladder.

Oh dear. It turns out a movement accusing men of sexual harassment en masse has some drawbacks. Who would have thought?

“Advancement typically requires that someone at a senior level knows your work, gives you opportunities and is willing to champion you within the firm. It’s hard for a relationship like that to develop if the senior person is unwilling to spend one-on-one time with a more junior person.”

I brought this up in my latest podcast. In practice, career progression is made by one-on-one brown-nosing, which is often harder for women to do than men for precisely the reason it may be misconstrued. The answer is to stop using this as a method of personal advancement.

Men have to step up, she said, and “not let fear be a barrier.”

That ship sailed so long ago it’s circumnavigated the globe and is nudging us in the back. Over to you, ladies.

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