Originally founded as the Knights of the Temple of Solomon to protect pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem, the Templars became the most powerful military order of the Crusades. But in addition they were economic trailblazers and banking pioneers during the 12th and 13th centuries. “I don’t think it’s facetious to say the Templars were an incredibly sophisticated organization with rudimentary business practices and financial methods that you would want any business to emulate,”
.. The Templars are known for the drama of their downfall or their role as medieval special forces. But they had a vast business and commercial empire, with lands generating agricultural produce and revenue all the way from Ireland to Cyprus and the Crusader states. They owned property in big cities which was rented out and chartered shipping in worldwide ports.
Then there was the banking side of things. It’s sometimes said the Templars were the world’s first bankers. There was a system of banking of deposits — King John of England deposited the crown jewels with the Templars in London when he was in trouble before the Magna Carta. But that doesn’t do them justice. They weren’t the first world’s bankers. They were providing the world’s first financial-services company.
.. They were paying royal officials there on behalf of the crown and running the books for the French King, his brothers and mother. They were collecting, on behalf of the Pope, the crusading taxes levied by the church in England, France, Hungary and parts of Spain and Italy.Their spread of properties all across Europe and presence in just about every kingdom made them unique. They crossed boundaries and weren’t subject to the authority or polices of any particular king. They were tax exempt in many jurisdictions across Europe. If you think about the deal between Google and the Irish government, the Templars had that times 20... Alfonso I, the King of Aragon, left them a third of his kingdom in his will and Queens and Kings gave them huge landed estates. They were also the recipients of popular donations, what today we would call crowdfunding. People left them in their wills a donkey or a little plot of land, tiny donations that when you added them up were massive and funded military operations.
.. If you were a young guy who wanted to go to war and fight for God, you could join the Templars. If you were an old guy who wanted to atone for a sinful life but was no good for fighting, you could join and run the books in a regional Templar house. If you didn’t wish to join but wanted to accrue the spiritual benefits of involvement, you could donate. They had what today in business terms would be called amazing international branding. The white mantle, the red cross. It’s the Nike swoosh, the McDonald’s arches, the Apple logo of the day.
.. They embraced diversity. Although they were a militant Christian organization, they were flexible and pragmatic like in the East where they hired as soldiers Turcapole Syrian cavalry, who happened to be Muslim, as they were much better at fighting in the conditions.
What if Steve Bannon Is Right?
In normal times, you could bank the bet that a man who was a Russian stooge, gave comfort to neo-Nazis and spent his first year in office trying to take health care from 22 million Americans was going to get destroyed when voters finally had a chance to send him a message.
Add to that an approval rating that hit 34 percent this week, and a poll from swing states showing one in five of people who voted for Donald Trump are now embarrassed by his presidency, and you’d think Democrats were in great shape for next year’s midterm elections.
.. But they obscure a dark doctrine from Bannon the Barbarian.
“The longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em,” he said of Democrats. “I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”
.. It turns out that racial resentment was the strongest predictor of whether a voter would flip from supporting a thoughtful, intelligent Democrat to a boorish, mentally unstable Republican. When you say Black Lives Matter, these white voters hear Kill a Cop. When you say diversity in the workplace, they hear special privileges for minorities at the expense of whites.
So, if you still wonder why Trump would give comfort to racists and Hitlerites, look at the reaction of his base this week. While the civilized world was appalled at his remarks after the hate parade in Charlottesville, Va., a majority of Republicans approved of Trump’s response. Approved.
.. Yes, there’s a genuine hate-cohort in the Republican Party — neo-Nazis, or “clowns and losers,” in Bannon’s terms — of about 10 percent, which is horrifyingly high.
.. Trump has said demonstrably racist things many a time, from his birther obsession to his taco bowl tweet. He still won, “on a straightforward platform of economic nationalism,” as Bannon noted... Democrats could grab the economic nationalism argument from Bannon, refine it along Bernie Sanders lines, and run with it. Health care for all is pro-American. Raising wages across the country is pro-worker. A moonshot infrastructure program would lift every community.
Donald Trump’s Identity Politics
Millions of white voters began to see themselves more openly not as white supremacists but as white identified.
It is no secret that the president has capitalized on the increasing salience of race and ethnicity in recent years. The furious reaction to many different historical and cultural developments — mass immigration; the success of the civil rights and women’s rights movements; the election and re-election of a black president; and the approaching end of white majority status in the United States — has created a political environment ripe for the growth of white identity politics.
The vast majority of white Americans who feel threatened by the country’s growing racial and ethnic diversity are not members of the KKK or neo-Nazis. They are much greater in number, and far more mainstream, than the white supremacists who protested in Virginia over the weekend.
.. total of 36 percent of whites described their racial identity as either “very important” (16 percent) or “extremely important” (20 percent), according to an American National Election Studies survey in January 2016. Another 25 percent said it was “moderately important.”
.. The survey, they write,
asked four questions that captured dimensions of white identity: the importance of white identity, how much whites are being discriminated against, the likelihood that whites are losing jobs to nonwhites, and the importance of whites working together to change laws unfair to whites. We combined those questions into a scale capturing the strength of white identity and found that it was strongly related to Republicans’ support for Donald Trump.
.. In a separate essay on the Post’s Monkey Cage site in March 2016, Tesler and Sides explained that
Both white racial identity and beliefs that whites are treated unfairly are powerful predictors of support for Donald Trump in the Republican primaries.
.. What are the views of “white identifiers”?
According to Jardina, these voters
are more likely to think that the growth of racial or ethnic groups in the United States that are not white is having a negative effect on American culture.
And they are
much more likely to rank illegal immigration the most important issue facing the U.S. today, relative to the budget deficit, health care, the economy, unemployment, outsourcing of jobs to other countries, abortion, same-sex marriage, education, gun control, the environment or terrorism.
.. Perhaps most important, Jardina found that white identifiers are
an aggrieved group. They are more likely to agree that American society owes white people a better chance in life than they currently have. And white identifiers would like many of the same benefits of identity politics that they believe other groups enjoy.
In other words, most — though by no means all — white identifiers appear to be driven as much by anger at their sense of lost status as by their animosity toward other groups, although these two feelings are clearly linked.
Tesler argued last November, after the election, that the
Trump effect combined with eight years of racialized politics under President Obama, means that racial attitudes are now more closely aligned with white Americans’ partisan preferences than they have been at any time in the history of polling.
.. Podhoretz recognizes Trump’s adamant refusal to alienate his most dogged backers:
If there’s one thing politicians can feel in their marrow, even a non-pol pol like Trump, it’s who is in their base and what it is that binds the base to them
.. He did so, Podhoretz argues, by capitalizing on media and organizational tools disdained by the establishment: Alex Jones’s Infowars; the American Media supermarket tabloids, including The National Enquirer, Star and the Globe; the WWE professional wrestling network where “Trump intermittently served as a kind of Special Guest Villain.”
.. 43 percent of Republicans said there is a lot of discrimination against whites, compared to 27 percent of Republicans who said that there is a lot of discrimination against blacks.
.. Direct and indirect references to threats to white identity continue to shape Trump’s rhetoric. In his ongoing drive to demonize the media, Trump declared during his rally in Phoenix on Tuesday that “they are trying to take away our history and our heritage.”
his supporters think that whites and Christians are the most oppressed groups of people in the country.
.. No one doubts that it has been unsettling for many Americans to adapt to an increasingly interconnected world. Still, history has not been kind to those who have unequivocally yielded to racial grievance — to our local agitators, the David Dukes and the Father Coughlins, as well as to the even more poisonous propagators of racial hatred overseas. As Trump abandons his campaign promises
- to end endless war,
- to provide “beautiful” health care,
- to protect Medicaid,
- to restore American industry, jobs and mines,
- to make Mexico pay for a border wall,
he has kept his partially veiled promise to focus on white racial essentialism, to make race divisive again. He has gone where other politicians dared not venture and he has taken the Republican Party with him.
Jeff Atwood: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
Most startups, statistically speaking, are going to fail.
And they will fail regardless of whether they hired “the best” due to circumstances largely beyond their control. So in that context does maximizing for the best possible hires really make sense?
Given the risks, I think maybe “hire the nuttiest risk junkie adrenaline addicted has-ideas-so-crazy-they-will-never-work people you can find” might actually be more practical startup advice.
.. If your hiring attitude is that it’s better to be possibly wrong a hundred times so you can be absolutely right one time, you’re going to be primed to throw away a lot of candidates on pretty thin evidence.
.. Perhaps worst of all, if the interview process is predicated on zero doubt, total confidence … maybe this candidate doesn’t feel right because they don’t look like you, dress like you, think like you, speak like you, or come from a similar background as you? Are you accidentally maximizing for hidden bias?.. One of the best programmers I ever worked with was Susan Warren, an ex-Microsoft engineer who taught me about the People Like Us problem, way back in 2004:
I think there is a real issue around diversity in technology (and most other places in life). I tend to think of it as the PLU problem. Folk (including MVPs) tend to connect best with folks most like them (“People Like Us”). In this case, male MVPs pick other men to become MVPs. It’s just human nature.
- .. Using screens to hide the identity of auditioning musicians increased women’s probability of advancing from preliminary orchestra auditions by fifty percent.
- Denver police officers and community members were shown rapidly displayed photos of black and white men, some holding guns, some holding harmless objects like wallets, and asked to press either the “Shoot” or “Don’t Shoot” button as fast as they could for each image. Both the police and community members were three times more likely to shoot black men.
.. It’s not intentional, it’s never intentional. That’s the problem. I think our industry needs to shed this old idea that it’s OK, even encouraged to turn away technical candidates for anything less than absolute 100% confidence at every step of the interview process. Because when you do, you are accidentally optimizing for implicit bias. Even as a white guy who probably fulfills every stereotype you can think of about programmers, and who is in fact wearing an “I Rock at Basic” t-shirt while writing this very blog post*, that’s what has always bothered me about it, more than the strictness. If you care at all about diversity in programming and tech, on any level, this hiring approach is not doing anyone any favors, and hasn’t been. For years.
.. I would argue, quite strongly and at some length, that if you want better diversity in the field, perhaps a good starting point is not demanding that all your employees live within a tiny 30 mile radius of San Francisco or Palo Alto. There’s a whole wide world of Internet out there, full of amazing programmers at every level of talent and ability. Maybe broaden your horizons a little, even stretch said horizons outside the United States, if you can imagine such a thing.
.. The most significant shift we’ve made is requiring every final candidate to work with us for three to eight weeks on a contract basis. Candidates do real tasks alongside the people they would actually be working with if they had the job. They can work at night or on weekends, so they don’t have to leave their current jobs; most spend 10 to 20 hours a week working with Automattic, although that’s flexible. (Some people take a week’s vacation in order to focus on the tryout, which is another viable option.) The goal is not to have them finish a product or do a set amount of work; it’s to allow us to quickly and efficiently assess whether this would be a mutually beneficial relationship