Tag: Culture Wars

Civilization vs. Barbarians

Wealth-Envious Bullshit

Business

Apparently, some financial “experts” in Britishland have taken exception to the massive bonus paid out to a company’s executive chairman:

One of Britain best-paid female bosses has been slammed by critics over a £29million bonus.
Avril Palmer-Baunack runs British Car Auctions, which owns We Buy Any Car, the car-buying website known for its catchy jingles.
On top of the £29 million bonus, which is linked to an increase in the share price, she also got an eight per cent increase to her basic salary to £525,000. The company defended it by saying it needed to pay a ‘competitive’ rate.
But in a report to investors, influential advisory firm Glass Lewis called the £29 million payout to Palmer-Baunack ‘exceptionally disproportionate’.

…and needless to say, the politicians want to get in the game:

Last year, Theresa May announced plans to censure stock market-listed firms who drew exceptional levels of complaints from shareholders over bosses’ pay.

There is just one problem with all of this outrage:  it’s total bullshit.  Here’s why (from the article itself):

The vast sum, 59 times her normal salary, is the result of an incentive plan drawn up four years ago to grow the firm.

In other words, four years ago the board of directors told the CEO that if she managed to grow the company’s value by x, she would be paid y.  (And I should also point out that this incentive plan would have required a formal agreement from the shareholders — the same shareholders who are now bitching about the thing — before being implemented.)

Well, that’s exactly what our Avril did, so she has to get paid the bonus.  (The size of the bonus is irrelevant, because it was obviously based on a sliding percentage driven by the amount of growth.)

Of course, the trolls at Glass Lewis don’t see it that way, because (and once again from the article):

[Glass Lewis] said the increase in the value of BCA may have been boosted by broader swings in stock market prices ‘rather than company or management performance’.

Well, guess what?  “Broader swings” in the stock market are a result of shareholder confidence in the market’s activities and results — and if the company and its boss benefit from that, it’s called “good luck”.  I should point out once again that if the market is tanking and it takes a company down with it — through no fault of the company boss, mind you — the boss may well get fired anyway because at the end (and please note this, because it’s important), executive management is responsible for one thing, and one thing only:  growth in the value of the shareholders’ investment.  How it gets there is irrelevant (except in the Land Of Wealth Envy).  When they say, “The buck stops here”, that’s precisely what it means:  the ultimate responsibility for shareholder value lies with the executive manager, and with this comes either termination or reward, as agreed by the shareholders.

All the other guff about Palmer-Baunack being a female executive, incidentally, is just smoke — her sex is completely irrelevant, as it should be.  Then there’s this:

The vote on the pay report is only advisory so, if Palmer-Baunack feels able to shrug off criticism, she will be allowed to keep the lot.

Let’s hope the woman has an iron nerve (which she seems to have, by the way), and tells all the wailers to fuck off.

Palmer-Baunack, who has a grown-up son and daughter and is married to a German executive at Volkswagen, previously defended her £7.1 million pay packet for 2015 by saying: ‘Anyone who says they don’t want money is talking bullshit. We all want to earn money for our family.’
The Edinburgh-born executive, 54, has been vocal about women in the workplace in the past. She once said she was ‘very cynical’ about the existence of ‘glass ceilings’ – the term used to describe the limits on the career opportunities for women in big corporations.

Considering that she started off as an agent for a car rental company, I think she’s proved her point.

And if the wailing gets too much, she should really tell them all to get stuffed by taking her £29million bonus and going off to live in Switzerland, Monaco or the Caymans, beyond the reach of the would-be wealth confiscators.

Good luck to her, say I.

Yes, Of Course

Culture, Deep Thoughts

From Myron Magnet at City Journal (on another topic):

“Don’t you think the whole effort of modernism—in architecture, in literature, in music, in painting—might have been a huge dead end, from which Western culture will painfully have to extricate itself?”

Longtime Readers of my fevered scribblings and rants will know that I am an implacable enemy of Modernism (and its bastard child, Postmodernism), so to me, Magnet’s question should really be a statement, with no conditional verbs.

Modernism has been a spiritual dead end, in its subjugation of beauty and form into soulless utilitarianism and the inscrutable abstract, and wherever its proponents (Le Corbusier, Duchamps, Von Der Rohe, Kandinsky and all the other charlatans) might be today, I hope the temperature is set to “BROIL”.

 Kandinsky: Garden of Love II

As for Magnet’s primary thesis (that of the imperilment of free speech), I think I’ve covered it already in my recent “Kicking Down Fences” post, but that shouldn’t stop you from reading Magnet’s greatly-superior take on the topic.

Kicking Down Fences

Modernism, Politics

I read this article via Insty a few days back, and it’s stayed with me ever since because it’s becoming an increasingly-familiar feeling:

Would you feel comfortable wearing a MAGA hat? Or would you worry you might get assaulted?
…
The Democrats are now embracing “democratic socialism.” Their activists are dressing up in hoods and masks and terrorizing citizens.
…
But we’re not supposed to complain about it. It’s getting dangerous to speak your mind. Dangerous to your career, and even to your safety.
…
I worry about how free America still will be in six years because the Democrats… they’ve got an agenda. They want to narrow the range of acceptable opinions. To cow us, restrict us, make us scared to speak. From day to day, Americans are getting bullied, browbeaten, and herded like sheep. The Democrats are driving us into the narrow, reeking pen of political correctness. Its fences are constantly moving, and in only one direction. They are closing in on us.

Here’s what worries me about this.  I don’t worry about being assaulted for wearing some kind of “offensive” clothing.  I don’t worry that my car will be keyed because I have an NRA/TSRA decal on the back window.  I don’t worry about being screamed at or spat upon because of [insert Lefty outrage here].

I don’t worry about any of that.  I worry about how I’ll react to any of the above.

I don’t want to beat the shit out of some snotty punk screaming insults into my face, or break someone’s hand when they’ve just keyed my car.  And if some Pantifa asswipe comes at me with a bike lock or pickax handle, I sure as hell don’t want to shoot the little prick in the face.

But I might well do any or all of that — and then have to face the legal consequences.

It’s all very well to say, “Oh, but you were in the right:  you were justified in responding to [whatever just happened to you].”  I might be in the right, but there will still be a mountain of legal crap to be endured, lawyer’s fees and all that nonsense.  It’s like having a car accident when the other guy ran the red light:  he’s in the wrong, but you’re still the one with a wrecked car.

That said:  I think these little Lefty shits need to face up to something:  it’s all very well to play these little games, but I don’t think they realize that our patience may be great, but it’s not limitless.

It’s only a question of time.

But in the meantime, I find excuses not to go to Austin, even though I have close friends there I want to visit, because Austin TX is Loony Lefty Central.  I sometimes worry about that NRA sticker getting me a bad Uber review from a passenger (I’m a  “five-star” driver, which has its privileges).  I worry about some SJW waiter spitting in my food after overhearing my dinner-table conversation.  And those are just the things that trouble me off the top of my head.

As the linked article suggests, they and all the other little micro-terrorisms are all fences.  And I’m starting to resent them.  Greatly.

Asked And Answered

Seen On Campus

Question:

“Interestingly, this very segment [White men] produces by far the most of our engineers, and judging by what we have accomplished, they have done a damn good job,” he said. “Why do these ideologues want to run them down?”

Answer:  It is precisely because White men have produced this long, storied list of achievements, and the social justice warriors haven’t (and can’t), is the reason why they seek to run us down.

It’s the politics of envy, pure and simple — pulling the outstanding back into the herd — and there’s no accommodating or reasoning with this mindset.  The sooner we all recognize this — and crush these pathetic fuckers wherever we can — the happier and more successful we all will be.

At Last, Some Sanity

Behind Enemy Lines, Gummint, Seen On Campus

…even if it’s coming from the French, surely one of the loopiest nations on Earth.

Smartphones and tablets have been banned from all French schools ahead of the academic year, after a new law was voted through Parliament yesterday.  The phone ban will apply to all pupils in France up to the age of 15, as of the start of the new term in September.

I’ve always thought that giving kids smartphones was a recipe for disaster — similar to letting them go play all day and night in a mall, unsupervised.  And I don’t want to hear whines of “What about their securityyyy?” either.  If that’s so important to Mumsy (or actually, Madamesy), she can buy little Francine or Jacques a flip (dumb) phone.  Calls and texts only (and only a few of those, too).

Perhaps — and I know this is a radical thought — the schools can actually keep a closer eye on the little dears for a change.

And if the kids go all whiney at the indignity and the oppressive injustice of it all, we can call it a cheap life lesson.