1) Any system which results in “disparate impact” across certain groups is racist.
…I think point 1) is terrible definition of racism, but it’s the operative one in our society.
…A few decades ago, racism may have been about treating everyone equal, but that ship has long since sailed. If you follow this logic correctly, you’ll see that all non-progressive systems of government are racist.
Yglesias: (emphasis added)
Did you know that women are CEOs of zero of the top ten companies on the Fortune 500 list?
Or that over 80 percent of the richest people in America are men?
Or that there seem to be only two publicly traded companies in the whole country where women are a majority of the board?
When I was tweeting about this yesterday, Ross Douthat asked me to consider the possibility that there are reasons for this other than discrimination. And I’m happy to entertain that hypothesis. But whatever you think the cause of men’s utter domination of the commanding heights of the American economy is, the domination is a fact of life. Men are controlling all the big companies and the big pools of money in this country. That’s your patriarchy right there.
Disparate Impact, or any variation from absolute equal representation, regardless of discrimination or unequal treatment (or lack thereof) – is now the operative definition of all archies and isms we must struggle against – using the coercive power of the government to achieve that equality – whatever distortions of natural social or market tendencies are necessary to accomplish that result.
Absolutist Egalitarianism Armed.
Handle's Haus 
It’s a pure redefinition of terms, which tells us whose side Orwell would be on if he were alive today. It casts into a negative light what was once understood as such a natural state as to not need a name. It makes a ‘construct’ out of a natural order, thus creating a pre-text for changing that order through massive top-down intervention.
Let’s play this game some more:
That men can reproduce at an older age than women can: That’s your fertilism right there, you fertilist.
That 90% of basketball players are a foot taller than the average: That’s your heightism right there, you heightist.
One is either a progressive or an “unfair -advantage -ist “. Or just “advantagist ” because all advantages are unfair. There is still some room for “deserved success above the norm” individually, but it cant derive from what God, nature, or your parents gave you, or what privileges your society granted you, because those are unearned gifts. The only legitimate success is some kind of moral success, because all of us have an equal opportunity to choose to be good or work hard. If that’s not crypto -Calvinism, I don’t know what is.
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Yglesias takes statistics pertaining to a vanishingly small proportion of the population, so as to tarnish the entire male gender.
99.9% of men are not Fortune 500 CEOs/billionaires/ etc. and, based on my life experience, the fortune of the few does not rub off on the many based on sharing a common chromosome.
Well, control over the majority of organizations, wealth, and the means of production is limited to what Charles Murray calls ‘the narrow elite’ – and 0.1% of the population would still be over 300,000 people, which is more-or-less in the same ballpark or order of magnitude.
But your point is of course correct and well taken. As Sailer and Khan and Summers and everybody else around these parts says, over and over, is that if you take any two bell curves, even those that look like they overlap and with only tiny differences in the mean and variance, the ratio will look like 1:1 for the entire area around the mean, but – analogous to tiny differences in interest rates which compound over time – as you move further and further out to the right, the ratio can become dramatically larger. So much so that even tiny aggregate differences can allow a much smaller group to overwhelm a much larger group in representation at the elite level. Think Chinese Filipino businessmen or Black Athletes.
The point is – it’s the extreme right of the curve where elite competition occurs. So, for elite representation in any field, one should expect to see all sorts of strange ratios departing far from parity.
Progressives are often obsessed with representation among elites because that’s where the money, power, fame, status, etc. are. They couldn’t care less about the parity that exists for most of the population.
That ubiquitous parity, the lack of discriminatory treatment, and the cultural rejection of any ideology of ‘patriarchy’ make such usage of the term when focusing on gender representation in the narrow elite an absurd joke. The average man is not a patriarch and is not even allowed to admit in public that he believes he ought to be one.
The narrow-elite CEO couldn’t care less about the subject, and certainly there is no secret cabal or conspiracy at the commanding heights of the society and economy – some masonic order holding all the strings and captivated by an ideology which teaches that only men ought to have money and power – and which ensures, against the more social-welfare-efficient gender-parity solution, that it is so distributed.
All Yglesias & Co. want is more of those government contractor or Euro-style board set-asides so that parity at the top is mandated by law. If he has to call the lesser number of women ‘patriarchy’ whatever its origin, to muster support, so be it.
But remember, achieving parity at the narrow elite level can only benefit a relatively very small number of elite women (and harm an equal number of men). That’s a less-than-zero-sum-game because of deadweight loss. Coteries of talented lesbians around the country rejoiced, but most women will never see a dime of that largesse.
It’s almost as if the elite women in this country are manipulating the rules for their own benefit even if demolishes the lives and happiness of the vast majority of the rest of their sex.
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