We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
Our youth are being disarmed in the continuing, indeed, never ending, conflict of civilizations that is currently being waged by both progressivism (in all its various marxist inspired flavors), and islamic fascism against the central tenets of classical liberal western culture.
Instead of a thorough and coherent education in the many ideas and artistic visions, both religious and secular, that have shaped western culture, our children are being misinformed and mis-educated with a formless mush of disjointed bits and pieces of our social history, always with the interpretation that whatever was thought or done was part of an ongoing moral wrong against nearly everyone.
One of the most fundamental, indeed critical, tasks a parent now has is to innoculate their children against the collectivist virus with which their children will be repeatedly dosed as they go through school, and, even more importantly, to take action in every possible way to reform education and regain its intellectual and moral content.
A recent article in a collegiate centered journal I ran across a few weeks ago, written by a distinguished professor, started out with the observation that his students, while pleasant and polite, knew almost nothing of any substance, and could not answer even the most basic questions regarding their culture and history.
We are facing a critical challenge in the coming years, and in the coming generations, of remaking our educational structures into something which actually educates instead of indoctrinates.
In order to appreciate the scale and depth of the danger we face, imagine if you found out that your doctor, and your local hospital, along with many others, were dispensing poison instead of medicine, injecting deadly bacteria instead of penicillin, and implanting cancerous cells during surgery instead of removing them.
Such a bizarre situation, even in the insane cultural carnival we now find ourselves in, would be the makings of an enormous scandal, and provide the impetus for a comprehensive remaking of the medical system, both theory and practice.
I regret to say the current state of our educational monstrosity is not much different than that imaginary medical system, except the poison our prevailing educational philosophy is injecting is much slower, and disguised, than any physical poison would be.
But causing the death of the human mind, and spirit, is every bit as much a form of homicide as any intentionally caused physical death, and every bit as evil.
But causing the death of the human mind, and spirit, is every bit as much a form of homicide as any intentionally caused physical death, and every bit as evil.
Well put.
Dorothy Sayers and Ayn Rand both said much the same thing.
Miss Sayers, more-or-less:
“When we learn to value the mind as much as the body, we will have a revolution of quite another sort.” Gaudy Night.
But watching the Yale one, at the William F. Buckley Conference “back in 1974,” “Yale is the place to think the unthinkable and challenge the unchallengeable.
But that, of course, is exactly what these young rebels without a cause are doing. Or think they are, anyway.
The whole idea is horsefeathers.
Yale (and her sisters) is the place to go, not to deal out challenges as a means of the adrenaline thrill of acting up (as a toddler “acts up”), but to learn what has happened throughout Man’s history, and try to parse out why; to find out what ideas were afloat where and when, and hope to find out clues to which were helpful and which harmful; to learn to deal properly with difficulte questions as to what we are equipped to and should do for ourselves, as well as for others. To learn whatever light is shed by the arts on our history as well as, in another sense, on our own lives. To learn that happiness is valuable; we disrespect it at our peril, and to work to break the happiness of others is obscene. And to understand that happiness does not mean hedonism.
To learn proper logic, to gain knowledge of the scientific and technical disciplines … to learn to conduct our own investigations … to learn what ideas are good for us (healthy to each human entity) and which are bad, if taken seriously and put into actual practice.
As a Viz reading Geordie I have a taste for cacophony and deeply vulgar language.
Here’s one for you, “It’s neither fair nor right like the darkie’s left tit”.
Try that on at UCL SU and they’ll fucking kill you. Guess where I got that from? My Gran (1917-1999).
I’m not especially concerned with free speech (I am though) but I just like swearing for the fucking sake of it. I also like Palestrina. I’m a bit various. But not in a hipster way. There is a lot of them round Manchester and not enough canals to fill.
VR,
A UK University degree in the ’90s (my era) was 360 credits. I did 10 Philosophy (Descartes), 40 maths and 310 physics (The later inc. what was essentially maths and computing including playing with LEGO robots which was much more fun than Descartes). I did an MSc at QM, London and that was all astrofizz. I really didn’t see this arseholery. I learnt things like Maxwell’s Equations and The Disturbing Function. Karl Marx never entered the building. I learnt maths, physics and computing, built robots and a magnetometer, dated girls, smoked dope, got pissed, played footie on the downs, fenced, played Badminton and went to the Irish Social Club and danced to Britpop. And the theatre but even that didn’t seem political as such. Perhaps folks only see what they wanna see?
AndrewZ (March 23, 2017 at 10:08 pm) provides an excellent glossary, and I can see myself using some of it, but I recommend further work on one term. Remember Thomas Sowell’s wise warning: if you make a mis-phrasing that can be construed against you in an otherwise deadly and irrefutable critique, your left-wing opponent will gladly focus on that point to avoid engaging with the rest. In speech, never mind this too much, but in written work one can polish away any obvious opening. With that in mind, I suggest review of
“CULTURAL APPROPRIATION: Arbitrary punishment for your ancestors’ imaginary crimes.”
Firstly, the definition isn’t actually related to cultural appropriation, which says you must respect other cultures but on no account aspire to them; imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery but a terrible crime. Other cultures may borrow tons from yours without comment, but you must show your immense respect for them by not borrowing anything from them. It has no direct connection with ancestral deeds, just the general connection that all the rest has.
Secondly, micro aggressions are perfectly defined as imaginary crimes. However, statistically, a few of us will have an ancestor somewhere within a large family trees who once did something considered quite normal in the appropriated culture that was also normal in western culture at that time. By Sowell’s rule, this will be the sole point noticed by any SJW who sees the list.
I offer the following as a first contribution
MICRO-AGGRESSION: imaginary crime needing mega-punlishment of accused non-SJW
NANO-AGGRESSION: SJW-staged crime needing giga-punishment of some non-SJWs who chanced to be nearby
PICO-AGGRESSION: abstract ideological argument requiring concrete tera-punishment of all non-SJWs
CULTURAL APPROPRIATION: showing admiration of another culture in a non-SJW-approved way; also, showing admiration of another culture while not being a registered SJW
or
CULTURAL APPROPRIATION: not being deeply ashamed that deeds normal in the appropriated culture were once done by a distant ancestor of yours
I welcome any better alternatives that anyone can come up with.
As far as cultural appropriation. Chuck Berry died not long since. White musicians such as Elvis Presley “appropriated” black music. I would prefer to say they were “inspired” by it. I’ve been to Graceland and to suggest Presley was racist is absurd. On the same trip (we put 2,500 miles on that Honda) I visited the MLK eternal flame in Atlanta. I took photos of a black couple from Texas on their camera at their request. Me a white English male! But I do know my f/stops. We had a nice chat as well (mainly about how cold it was). Me two black Christian Texans and a Georgian (ATlanta, not Tblisi) Jew. Just a pair of couples who met by chance outside Ebenezer Baptist Church. That very obliquely refs JRRT.
The problem is these people will get hired: most will go to work for the government.
As for corporations? Well, these days most of them will be hiring these idiots as well. They’re far more concerned with the “process” and “behaviours” and woolly shite like “diversity” than getting the job done, and whole internal bureaucracies have sprouted in areas like “compliance” to ensure the company doesn’t fall foul of the latest government directive on transgender toilets.
If there is any difference between the hiring policies of a modern large corporation and a dysfunctional government bureaucracy, I’m not aware of it.
Nick M, Universities have changed greatly since the 90s. Even in the last 3 years there’s been big changes. It’s harder to escape this stuff even in the hard sciences.
If there is any difference between the hiring policies of a modern large corporation and a dysfunctional government bureaucracy, I’m not aware of it.
Er, having worked for a very large UK bank with a tartan twist and the Inland Revenue, I can say that the government was more likely to have been looking for the more responsive, innovative individuals.
It’s surely not so much the debasement of institutions, as The Long March through the Institutions, as invented by Gramsci and popularised – if that is the word – by Dutschke. These bastards did their work well, and it’s nearly complete.
I have often thought that if Mrs. Thatcher (pbuh) had ignored the unions and instead concentrated on destroying the education blob, she might in the long term have done more good.
I just wonder what the end game is. The March through the Institutions is pretty much complete. They have the media, they have the acadamy, they have much of science, they have the money, (not just in the form of the likes of Soros, but through control of almost all of the big, private US foundations), and they have much of the civil service as well as most of the political power.
I used to think that they wished to impose collectivism; that they had some mad idea that they could make the world ‘fairer’; that, despite the evidence of the twentieth century, maybe this time they could get it right and utopia would ensue. Heaven on earth.
But that’s not what they want. Oh, some of the lower level useful idiots may still believe, but the guys at the top seem to want to destroy Western Civilisation just to watch it burn. They may have some vague idea of imposing a feudal order on what’s left of us once the dust settles, or maybe some Gaia worshiping religion with them as the priests and popes, but the way they act just seems to be destruction for the sake of it with no coherent end game apparant.
Of course this is conspiracy theory stuff with it’s talk of some shadowy ‘they’ seeking to rule the world, but the way it’s all shaping up at the moment I’m finding it harder than ever to think otherwise.
I graduated from high school in ’75, college in ’79. Spent all of junior high and high school as a long-haired semi-anarchist railing against the war in Vietnam and Pres Nixon. Did my share of yelling foul imprecations against authority, got busted pushing back against cops at our local University, started our local chapter of SDS, and probably sounded just as asinine to those of my parents’ generation as all of the little snowflakes sound to me now.
I knew without doubt that I was right and just and correct, and that all that I opposed was evil and foul and venal. I knew that there was no moral compulsion on me to play by the rules when it came to opposing such evil – anything I could do was fair game, because I opposed ignorance and hate, and you ought not give ignorance and hate a fair chance.
It took about twenty years to figure out that I had been wrong, and a horse’s ass about it.
Now I’ll aim my fury and disgust at the people who ought to know better – the schools’ faculty, the adults who have no excuse not to know better – and I’ll try to find ways to bring actual knowledge about the world to the students the way some people helped bring it to me.
So the end game is, we need to educate these people before they do lasting damage. My generation almost accomplished lasting damage, but the war ended and Nixon resigned and we lost interest with the lesser evils and it all petered out. The louts who are misleading this new generation have found “evils” to attack that might be more durable, and thus allow their misled charges to be ignorantly harmful for a longer time and do real lasting damage.
I think those who are part of (a very disorganised and not communicating with itself) long march through the institutions may be wondering the same thing. They might have the institutions, but the institutions do not give them power.
Students are mainly not indocrinated (the student protesters are almost entirely the ones with those views when they arrive at university). The press may be controlled by certain ideologies, but the ideologies themselves are unstable and can’t be used as their proponents wish because they have ended up prioritising the subjects of the ideology, not the controllers. Plus the media are hardly trusted.
And they don’t have the science, because they can’t. They have the science communication.
And they don’t have the political seats of power because we’re democracies and the people aren’t buying it. So they have a strategic victory and nowhere to go with it. Sad really.
Was it not attributed to Lenin “We must teach the children to hate.“?
If so, the prophet was way ahead of him. The primary difference between Islam and the west is that we seek to mitigate a child’s natural tribalism, Islam seeks to accentuate it.
Kevin B,
The left is an alliance of runners up and second raters who resent the chaps who can get things done. They support anything that infuriates those chaps. Hence their apparently contradictory support for both feminism and Islam etc. Viewed from this perspective I find it all makes horrible sense.
bobby b, I’m about 5 years older than you and came at this from the opposite direction. I was young and stupid (weren’t we all?) and opposed all those “semi-anarchist” things you and all those long-haired hippies were doing. I supported our government, because it was virtuous, and bought into the idea that we needed to contain the Evil Communists at every point. I enlisted in the army in 1970 (at the height of Vietnam, although I never went there) in part because I hadn’t anything better to do but also in solidarity with what I naively believed to be the forces of good. I supported Nixon. And like you, it took me about 20 years to figure out just how wrong I had been. I may not have been a horse’s ass about it, but that didn’t make me any less wrong. Your tactics may have been wrong but your position was not; I was just the opposite. (And I suspect that we were both arrogant little snots!)
But at least my side wasn’t trying to destroy the culture (although, truthfully, neither was yours at the time; that came later). The problem is that so many of the people with whom you were marching and demonstrating haven’t made the transition you did. They’re still the same holier-than-though, arrogant horse’s asses that they were then; they have learned little and matured less. And they are now in positions of power, where they can do (and are doing) significant harm.
Just a random thought – did the left-wing distaste for our culture arise in general about the time our culture started to move away from one mainly based on work and locality (things that allowed for control) towards one based on consumption and individualism? If so, the attempts to support small counter-cultures (and remember, despite the media attention, things like modern feminism (I suspect most of us are feminists in the original meaning) or political Islam are small cults within small communities) make a lot more sense – it is a frustrated attempt to replace the unions and the now splintering local block-votes as a building block to support an ideology which seems increasingly only to attract leaders and not followers.
Iused to believe in the shadowy cabal, but now don’t. Having spent a few years working in a large company (retail, not that it matters) I’ve seen how a culture can change. In that company, it’s run by idiots because the idiots got in charge somehow and then only promote other idiots. Sensible management sensibly leave until only the idiots are left and the company is only propelled forward by inertia. The difference became even more apparent when I left to work for a much smaller company still largely run by the people who started it. I imagine he same basic process applies in other large institutions. Once there is some critical mass of world-burners or culture-destroyers in positions of power then they will naturally only promote people with their ideology. There isn’t a shadowy cabal because there doesn’t need to be one. Simple human nature suffices.
Maybe all this very evident nonsense that seems to be returning the US to a dysfunctional Age of Unreason, or something, is merely symptomatic of the general and progressive decline of that particular Empire.
Sure, the Left, or Marxists, or Soroses, or whatever may have created this with a view to forcing something they view as better for the greater good, or something, on the electorate, but in the end the stronger and more persistent/remorseless religio-political ideology will tend to prevail – e.g.(say) Islamism, or some other “-ism” – and if it’s not the old freedom/democracy/liberty/capitalism, then so what? It is a sea change.
Maybe it is impossible for the US to actually stay the way it was, if it had become (as arguably seems to have been the case, from history) already too much of a systemically corrupted thing.
Maybe that old culture is no longer sustainable.
Alternative points of view to, or attempts to debate “the one truth” simply will not be tolerated. End of.
I suspect that no relatively disinterested person, looking in from the outside, could look back over the last couple of years in the US and say that, without doubt, the US seems to have become a saner, more life-affirming place for all people to live in greater harmony, with happier and more fulfilling lives.
How could they, when the opposite condition glaringly seems to have been apparent? The US seems to have become more than a little sick and toxic – for itself and the rest of the world.
This is not a criticism, but an observation that might help to make sense of what is happening. In any event, we shall no doubt eventually see what will be made of the US, and it generally will probably have been the doing of the American people, through various acts of self-determination.
You’ve got to be taught
To hate and fear;
It’s got to be drummed
In your dear little ear —
You’ve got to be carefully taught!
— Thus sings John Kerr’s character (it was dubbed) while posted to Bali, in South Pacific.
And it never occurred to me at the time that that song might be intended to be applied to us. Nor do I know how Mr. Hammerstein felt about ItAll. It is conceivable, of course, that my natural paranoia has gotten all of a doo-dah from the darling videos above and my opinion of how certain people have turned our history against us, and made up their own versions of it where the real thing couldn’t be turned.
I never read the book, so I don’t know how near the movie conveyed Mr. Michener’s personal philosophy. I tend to suspect the worst. Does anybody know if Mr. M. was sound (to use Sir Arnold’ word)?
It was, however, a very good movie, bar that particular message — if in fact it was there. Well worth seeing for the music and choreography alone. And, of course, nurse Nellie Forbush. (A.k.a. Mitzi Gaynor.)
If this is our future ruling class, our nation is doomed.
Do they really think their “feelings” trump all other considerations? What about the feelings of those who question or disagree with them? Don’t they count?
Those who wish to see the practical effects of the beliefs that Yale pushes should examine the city of New Haven (where Yale is), which has been under Progressive rule since the early 1950s.
To steal a line from Christopher Wren “if you seek my monument – look around you”.
Those who think New Haven Connecticut is well governed should support the beliefs that the “education system” is pushing (at school level – not just university level) – and those who do not, should not.
The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa
Reminds me of Indoctrinate U, which documented the origins of the current state of affairs ten years back.
Quite so Perry.
For the benefit of students everywhere, here’s a quick glossary of all the “social justice” jargon you will need to learn:
EQUALITY: Special treatment for politically-favoured groups.
INEQUALITY: Treating politically-favoured groups like everybody else.
DIVERSITY: Conformity.
SPEECH: Violence.
VIOLENCE: Speech.
HATE SPEECH: Heresy.
FASCIST: Unbeliever.
FEMINISM: Telling women they are helpless victims of men.
INTERSECTIONAL FEMINISM: Telling women they are helpless victims of everybody.
GENDER STUDIES: Hating men.
QUEER STUDIES: Hating straight people.
BLACK STUDIES: Hating white people.
WHITENESS STUDIES: White people hating white people.
MICRO-AGGRESSION: Arbitrary punishment for imaginary crimes.
CULTURAL APPROPRIATION: Arbitrary punishment for your ancestors’ imaginary crimes.
SOCIAL JUSTICE: A cult.
SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIOR: A cultist.
UNIVERSITY: Cult induction centre.
STUDENT: Sucker who pays a fortune to be brainwashed by lunatics. Oh wait, that’s you.
You are welcome 😛
Andrew Z,
QotY, but where is the definition of ‘JOB’? Oh, I see….
Our youth are being disarmed in the continuing, indeed, never ending, conflict of civilizations that is currently being waged by both progressivism (in all its various marxist inspired flavors), and islamic fascism against the central tenets of classical liberal western culture.
Instead of a thorough and coherent education in the many ideas and artistic visions, both religious and secular, that have shaped western culture, our children are being misinformed and mis-educated with a formless mush of disjointed bits and pieces of our social history, always with the interpretation that whatever was thought or done was part of an ongoing moral wrong against nearly everyone.
One of the most fundamental, indeed critical, tasks a parent now has is to innoculate their children against the collectivist virus with which their children will be repeatedly dosed as they go through school, and, even more importantly, to take action in every possible way to reform education and regain its intellectual and moral content.
A recent article in a collegiate centered journal I ran across a few weeks ago, written by a distinguished professor, started out with the observation that his students, while pleasant and polite, knew almost nothing of any substance, and could not answer even the most basic questions regarding their culture and history.
We are facing a critical challenge in the coming years, and in the coming generations, of remaking our educational structures into something which actually educates instead of indoctrinates.
In order to appreciate the scale and depth of the danger we face, imagine if you found out that your doctor, and your local hospital, along with many others, were dispensing poison instead of medicine, injecting deadly bacteria instead of penicillin, and implanting cancerous cells during surgery instead of removing them.
Such a bizarre situation, even in the insane cultural carnival we now find ourselves in, would be the makings of an enormous scandal, and provide the impetus for a comprehensive remaking of the medical system, both theory and practice.
I regret to say the current state of our educational monstrosity is not much different than that imaginary medical system, except the poison our prevailing educational philosophy is injecting is much slower, and disguised, than any physical poison would be.
But causing the death of the human mind, and spirit, is every bit as much a form of homicide as any intentionally caused physical death, and every bit as evil.
Very,
Well put.
Dorothy Sayers and Ayn Rand both said much the same thing.
Miss Sayers, more-or-less:
“When we learn to value the mind as much as the body, we will have a revolution of quite another sort.” Gaudy Night.
Utterly disgusting videos. Vile.
But watching the Yale one, at the William F. Buckley Conference “back in 1974,” “Yale is the place to think the unthinkable and challenge the unchallengeable.
But that, of course, is exactly what these young rebels without a cause are doing. Or think they are, anyway.
The whole idea is horsefeathers.
Yale (and her sisters) is the place to go, not to deal out challenges as a means of the adrenaline thrill of acting up (as a toddler “acts up”), but to learn what has happened throughout Man’s history, and try to parse out why; to find out what ideas were afloat where and when, and hope to find out clues to which were helpful and which harmful; to learn to deal properly with difficulte questions as to what we are equipped to and should do for ourselves, as well as for others. To learn whatever light is shed by the arts on our history as well as, in another sense, on our own lives. To learn that happiness is valuable; we disrespect it at our peril, and to work to break the happiness of others is obscene. And to understand that happiness does not mean hedonism.
To learn proper logic, to gain knowledge of the scientific and technical disciplines … to learn to conduct our own investigations … to learn what ideas are good for us (healthy to each human entity) and which are bad, if taken seriously and put into actual practice.
And more. Much, much more..
Or this Julie,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xmckWVPRaI
As a Viz reading Geordie I have a taste for cacophony and deeply vulgar language.
Here’s one for you, “It’s neither fair nor right like the darkie’s left tit”.
Try that on at UCL SU and they’ll fucking kill you. Guess where I got that from? My Gran (1917-1999).
I’m not especially concerned with free speech (I am though) but I just like swearing for the fucking sake of it. I also like Palestrina. I’m a bit various. But not in a hipster way. There is a lot of them round Manchester and not enough canals to fill.
Basically I’m just a cunt.
VR,
A UK University degree in the ’90s (my era) was 360 credits. I did 10 Philosophy (Descartes), 40 maths and 310 physics (The later inc. what was essentially maths and computing including playing with LEGO robots which was much more fun than Descartes). I did an MSc at QM, London and that was all astrofizz. I really didn’t see this arseholery. I learnt things like Maxwell’s Equations and The Disturbing Function. Karl Marx never entered the building. I learnt maths, physics and computing, built robots and a magnetometer, dated girls, smoked dope, got pissed, played footie on the downs, fenced, played Badminton and went to the Irish Social Club and danced to Britpop. And the theatre but even that didn’t seem political as such. Perhaps folks only see what they wanna see?
AndrewZ (March 23, 2017 at 10:08 pm) provides an excellent glossary, and I can see myself using some of it, but I recommend further work on one term. Remember Thomas Sowell’s wise warning: if you make a mis-phrasing that can be construed against you in an otherwise deadly and irrefutable critique, your left-wing opponent will gladly focus on that point to avoid engaging with the rest. In speech, never mind this too much, but in written work one can polish away any obvious opening. With that in mind, I suggest review of
Firstly, the definition isn’t actually related to cultural appropriation, which says you must respect other cultures but on no account aspire to them; imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery but a terrible crime. Other cultures may borrow tons from yours without comment, but you must show your immense respect for them by not borrowing anything from them. It has no direct connection with ancestral deeds, just the general connection that all the rest has.
Secondly, micro aggressions are perfectly defined as imaginary crimes. However, statistically, a few of us will have an ancestor somewhere within a large family trees who once did something considered quite normal in the appropriated culture that was also normal in western culture at that time. By Sowell’s rule, this will be the sole point noticed by any SJW who sees the list.
I offer the following as a first contribution
or
I welcome any better alternatives that anyone can come up with.
I’d say kill it before it lays eggs – but I’m afraid it already did… 👿
Was it not attributed to Lenin “We must teach the children to hate.“?
As far as cultural appropriation. Chuck Berry died not long since. White musicians such as Elvis Presley “appropriated” black music. I would prefer to say they were “inspired” by it. I’ve been to Graceland and to suggest Presley was racist is absurd. On the same trip (we put 2,500 miles on that Honda) I visited the MLK eternal flame in Atlanta. I took photos of a black couple from Texas on their camera at their request. Me a white English male! But I do know my f/stops. We had a nice chat as well (mainly about how cold it was). Me two black Christian Texans and a Georgian (ATlanta, not Tblisi) Jew. Just a pair of couples who met by chance outside Ebenezer Baptist Church. That very obliquely refs JRRT.
The problem is these people will get hired: most will go to work for the government.
As for corporations? Well, these days most of them will be hiring these idiots as well. They’re far more concerned with the “process” and “behaviours” and woolly shite like “diversity” than getting the job done, and whole internal bureaucracies have sprouted in areas like “compliance” to ensure the company doesn’t fall foul of the latest government directive on transgender toilets.
If there is any difference between the hiring policies of a modern large corporation and a dysfunctional government bureaucracy, I’m not aware of it.
Nick M, Universities have changed greatly since the 90s. Even in the last 3 years there’s been big changes. It’s harder to escape this stuff even in the hard sciences.
Er, having worked for a very large UK bank with a tartan twist and the Inland Revenue, I can say that the government was more likely to have been looking for the more responsive, innovative individuals.
It’s surely not so much the debasement of institutions, as The Long March through the Institutions, as invented by Gramsci and popularised – if that is the word – by Dutschke. These bastards did their work well, and it’s nearly complete.
I have often thought that if Mrs. Thatcher (pbuh) had ignored the unions and instead concentrated on destroying the education blob, she might in the long term have done more good.
I just wonder what the end game is. The March through the Institutions is pretty much complete. They have the media, they have the acadamy, they have much of science, they have the money, (not just in the form of the likes of Soros, but through control of almost all of the big, private US foundations), and they have much of the civil service as well as most of the political power.
I used to think that they wished to impose collectivism; that they had some mad idea that they could make the world ‘fairer’; that, despite the evidence of the twentieth century, maybe this time they could get it right and utopia would ensue. Heaven on earth.
But that’s not what they want. Oh, some of the lower level useful idiots may still believe, but the guys at the top seem to want to destroy Western Civilisation just to watch it burn. They may have some vague idea of imposing a feudal order on what’s left of us once the dust settles, or maybe some Gaia worshiping religion with them as the priests and popes, but the way they act just seems to be destruction for the sake of it with no coherent end game apparant.
Of course this is conspiracy theory stuff with it’s talk of some shadowy ‘they’ seeking to rule the world, but the way it’s all shaping up at the moment I’m finding it harder than ever to think otherwise.
Just for some perspective:
I graduated from high school in ’75, college in ’79. Spent all of junior high and high school as a long-haired semi-anarchist railing against the war in Vietnam and Pres Nixon. Did my share of yelling foul imprecations against authority, got busted pushing back against cops at our local University, started our local chapter of SDS, and probably sounded just as asinine to those of my parents’ generation as all of the little snowflakes sound to me now.
I knew without doubt that I was right and just and correct, and that all that I opposed was evil and foul and venal. I knew that there was no moral compulsion on me to play by the rules when it came to opposing such evil – anything I could do was fair game, because I opposed ignorance and hate, and you ought not give ignorance and hate a fair chance.
It took about twenty years to figure out that I had been wrong, and a horse’s ass about it.
Now I’ll aim my fury and disgust at the people who ought to know better – the schools’ faculty, the adults who have no excuse not to know better – and I’ll try to find ways to bring actual knowledge about the world to the students the way some people helped bring it to me.
So the end game is, we need to educate these people before they do lasting damage. My generation almost accomplished lasting damage, but the war ended and Nixon resigned and we lost interest with the lesser evils and it all petered out. The louts who are misleading this new generation have found “evils” to attack that might be more durable, and thus allow their misled charges to be ignorantly harmful for a longer time and do real lasting damage.
Kevin B,
I think those who are part of (a very disorganised and not communicating with itself) long march through the institutions may be wondering the same thing. They might have the institutions, but the institutions do not give them power.
Students are mainly not indocrinated (the student protesters are almost entirely the ones with those views when they arrive at university). The press may be controlled by certain ideologies, but the ideologies themselves are unstable and can’t be used as their proponents wish because they have ended up prioritising the subjects of the ideology, not the controllers. Plus the media are hardly trusted.
And they don’t have the science, because they can’t. They have the science communication.
And they don’t have the political seats of power because we’re democracies and the people aren’t buying it. So they have a strategic victory and nowhere to go with it. Sad really.
Mr. Ed,
If so, the prophet was way ahead of him. The primary difference between Islam and the west is that we seek to mitigate a child’s natural tribalism, Islam seeks to accentuate it.
Kevin B,
The left is an alliance of runners up and second raters who resent the chaps who can get things done. They support anything that infuriates those chaps. Hence their apparently contradictory support for both feminism and Islam etc. Viewed from this perspective I find it all makes horrible sense.
bobby b, I’m about 5 years older than you and came at this from the opposite direction. I was young and stupid (weren’t we all?) and opposed all those “semi-anarchist” things you and all those long-haired hippies were doing. I supported our government, because it was virtuous, and bought into the idea that we needed to contain the Evil Communists at every point. I enlisted in the army in 1970 (at the height of Vietnam, although I never went there) in part because I hadn’t anything better to do but also in solidarity with what I naively believed to be the forces of good. I supported Nixon. And like you, it took me about 20 years to figure out just how wrong I had been. I may not have been a horse’s ass about it, but that didn’t make me any less wrong. Your tactics may have been wrong but your position was not; I was just the opposite. (And I suspect that we were both arrogant little snots!)
But at least my side wasn’t trying to destroy the culture (although, truthfully, neither was yours at the time; that came later). The problem is that so many of the people with whom you were marching and demonstrating haven’t made the transition you did. They’re still the same holier-than-though, arrogant horse’s asses that they were then; they have learned little and matured less. And they are now in positions of power, where they can do (and are doing) significant harm.
Just a random thought – did the left-wing distaste for our culture arise in general about the time our culture started to move away from one mainly based on work and locality (things that allowed for control) towards one based on consumption and individualism? If so, the attempts to support small counter-cultures (and remember, despite the media attention, things like modern feminism (I suspect most of us are feminists in the original meaning) or political Islam are small cults within small communities) make a lot more sense – it is a frustrated attempt to replace the unions and the now splintering local block-votes as a building block to support an ideology which seems increasingly only to attract leaders and not followers.
Iused to believe in the shadowy cabal, but now don’t. Having spent a few years working in a large company (retail, not that it matters) I’ve seen how a culture can change. In that company, it’s run by idiots because the idiots got in charge somehow and then only promote other idiots. Sensible management sensibly leave until only the idiots are left and the company is only propelled forward by inertia. The difference became even more apparent when I left to work for a much smaller company still largely run by the people who started it. I imagine he same basic process applies in other large institutions. Once there is some critical mass of world-burners or culture-destroyers in positions of power then they will naturally only promote people with their ideology. There isn’t a shadowy cabal because there doesn’t need to be one. Simple human nature suffices.
Cal,
I think you are right.
Maybe all this very evident nonsense that seems to be returning the US to a dysfunctional Age of Unreason, or something, is merely symptomatic of the general and progressive decline of that particular Empire.
Sure, the Left, or Marxists, or Soroses, or whatever may have created this with a view to forcing something they view as better for the greater good, or something, on the electorate, but in the end the stronger and more persistent/remorseless religio-political ideology will tend to prevail – e.g.(say) Islamism, or some other “-ism” – and if it’s not the old freedom/democracy/liberty/capitalism, then so what? It is a sea change.
Maybe it is impossible for the US to actually stay the way it was, if it had become (as arguably seems to have been the case, from history) already too much of a systemically corrupted thing.
Maybe that old culture is no longer sustainable.
Alternative points of view to, or attempts to debate “the one truth” simply will not be tolerated. End of.
I suspect that no relatively disinterested person, looking in from the outside, could look back over the last couple of years in the US and say that, without doubt, the US seems to have become a saner, more life-affirming place for all people to live in greater harmony, with happier and more fulfilling lives.
How could they, when the opposite condition glaringly seems to have been apparent? The US seems to have become more than a little sick and toxic – for itself and the rest of the world.
This is not a criticism, but an observation that might help to make sense of what is happening. In any event, we shall no doubt eventually see what will be made of the US, and it generally will probably have been the doing of the American people, through various acts of self-determination.
You’ve got to be taught
To hate and fear;
It’s got to be drummed
In your dear little ear —
You’ve got to be carefully taught!
— Thus sings John Kerr’s character (it was dubbed) while posted to Bali, in South Pacific.
And it never occurred to me at the time that that song might be intended to be applied to us. Nor do I know how Mr. Hammerstein felt about ItAll. It is conceivable, of course, that my natural paranoia has gotten all of a doo-dah from the darling videos above and my opinion of how certain people have turned our history against us, and made up their own versions of it where the real thing couldn’t be turned.
I never read the book, so I don’t know how near the movie conveyed Mr. Michener’s personal philosophy. I tend to suspect the worst. Does anybody know if Mr. M. was sound (to use Sir Arnold’ word)?
It was, however, a very good movie, bar that particular message — if in fact it was there. Well worth seeing for the music and choreography alone. And, of course, nurse Nellie Forbush. (A.k.a. Mitzi Gaynor.)
If this is our future ruling class, our nation is doomed.
Do they really think their “feelings” trump all other considerations? What about the feelings of those who question or disagree with them? Don’t they count?
Those who wish to see the practical effects of the beliefs that Yale pushes should examine the city of New Haven (where Yale is), which has been under Progressive rule since the early 1950s.
To steal a line from Christopher Wren “if you seek my monument – look around you”.
Those who think New Haven Connecticut is well governed should support the beliefs that the “education system” is pushing (at school level – not just university level) – and those who do not, should not.