From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:

Mark Cuban: The Bumptious Billionaire
Steve Sailer

January 10, 2024

It’s a striking aspect of how out-of-fashion Diversity-Inclusion-Equity has suddenly become in the wake of Claudine Gay’s ouster as the president of Harvard that the most prominent person to take to Twitter to defend DIE has been Mark Cuban:

DEI does not mean you dont hire on merit. Of course you hire based on merit

Diversity—means you expand the possible pool of candidates as widely as you can. Once you have identified the candidates, you HIRE THE PERSON YOU BELIEVE IS THE BEST.

I was going to analyze a trove of data to falsify Cuban’s contentions. But then I realized that was like breaking a butterfly upon a wheel. Cuban is not a major intellectual in the human sciences.

Instead, that bumptious billionaire is more or less the center-left equivalent of the center-right Donald Trump, with whom he has long carried on a public envy-resentment feud. For example, just as Trump appeared on World Wrestling Entertainment, throwing WWE CEO Vince McMahon (with the Trump Administration eventually becoming the most memorable spin-off of the WWE Extended Universe),

a couple of years later Cuban wrestled Sheamus. But because Cuban by nature strikes people as a heel, the WWE writers decided to have him tossed through a table.

… This is not to say that blacks are untalented. Historically, they’ve done very well in fields emphasizing improvisation, such as jazz and running with the football. Thus, in the 2012 move Flight, in perhaps his greatest performance in the Transportation Disaster subgenre, Denzel Washington portrays an airline pilot who awakens from an alcoholic stupor to save his malfunctioning aircraft by improvising a barrel roll at 300 feet.

Why?

Because it looks cool.

In reality, of course, pilots don’t succeed by making up maneuvers on the fly, but by carefully executing their playbooks.

Read the whole thing there.

[Comment at Unz.com]