“America doesn’t need more proficiency in Harvard’s Postmodern Nihilist indoctrination. What America needs are thousands of Neo-Enlightenment Revolutionaries.”
From a friend of mine called Steve on Facebook, writing about the US Supreme Court decision about Affirmative Action and its application to university admissions. He is pleased at the ruling, but of course hopes the students who are now able to get into university on merit, rather than via quotas, study subjects that are rather more intellectually rigrous than of late. (See Ilya Somin, who writes about these issues frequently, via Reason.)
Glenn Reynolds, who needs no introduction here, has related thoughts on his substack.
It is going to be bemusing to see the social justice crowd try and argue that Asian-Americans somehow “don’t count” in terms of the grievance bingo game that has been played recently. Popcorn is going to be in demand.
Of course, it would be even better if we stopped the whole hypenated-American thing at all, and treated people as individuals. How wild and crazy is that?
Among Asian-American voters in “blue” states, and those with children trying to get into higher education, this could have an interesting impact on how they vote in 2024.
Nearly all American universities (there are a handful of exceptions) accept government backed “student loans” and other subsidies – and it is the mess of “loans” and other government subsidies that have so inflated university tuition fees.
These are not private entities excising their “right to be racist” – they are subsidised by the taxpayers. Nor are they honest about their racism – on the contrary, they are sickeningly dishonest about their racism. They pretend that their racism is “anti racism” and call it “positive discrimination” or “affirmative action” – and they have been playing this fraud, this dishonest campaign, this con game, for almost 60 years.
How will Asian Americans tend to vote? I do not know – after all Asian Americans, like Jewish Americans, tend to vote AGAINST their own interests – voting for Democrats who will impose high taxes upon them, and allow their stores to be robbed and burned to the ground.
But one can not make judgments on the basis of “will it get people to vote Republican” – but rather on “let justice be done”.
Asian Americans, and others, have been discriminated against by universities such as Harvard, which always have their hand in the pockets of the taxpayers – not being satisfied with the sweetheart tax treatment that Harvard and other abominations get for their “endowments”.
These “anti racist” universities have been exposed as the sickening racists they actually are.
My only doubt is that how horrible it is that one has to go to such a university to get the “good job” in the government or corporate bureaucracy.
That is a sick society.
What seems to be completely lost in this debate is the welfare of black people. There is no particular reason why black people should not be meritoriously accepted to college in the same was as asian people. The difference though comes from several problems:
1. The utterly reprehensible public schools that many black kids are marshalled in to
2. The unbelievable rate of fatherlessness and lack of father involvement (and the secondary consequence of mother’s working so hard as to not have much time to parent their children.)
3. The simple fact that asian families put a very high emphasis and apply lots of parental pressure to make their kids work hard at their schoolwork.
4. The fact that the above is a spiral, each generation reinforcing the failures of successes of previous generations.
Despite what Michelle Obama say, the lack of tutors or school resources has very little to do with it. The solution? It isn’t hard. First of all the government needs to provide parents choices and competition among schools. If they do that problem 1 will quickly be solved. When problem 1 is solved it will enable the breakdown of problem 3, because people who think things are hopeless very rarely work toward goals. Giving parents and kids hope that they CAN get a good education will, in time, build a culture of emphasizing the importance of working hard at it. (You can see this in sports – for many poor black kids sports is their way out, and there is little doubt that many of them work extraordinarily hard at honing their sports skills.)
Then as education improves among the community problem 4 will begin to be solved over time, and once that is solved we will see problem 2 being solved both as men are pulled out of nihilism when they see a future possible in the world of work, and women will gain the education to both demand their men treat them better, and also be able to work in more productive jobs, allowing them the resources and time to better parent their children.
The starting point is competition in the school system. And that is the one thing the government will not allow.
It is also worth questioning if they even WANT to solve the problem. Governments gain their power from a promise to alleviate the consequences of societal problems. If we go about solving them then we need government a lot less. And that is that last thing these politicians and civil servants want.
Justice Clarence Thomas made several good points in his concurring opinion (of which i read excerpts); but this stands out:
Clarence Thomas clearly has a more solid grasp of reality than any American “liberal/progressive” — but it seems to me that he also has a more solid grasp of reality than the vast majority of American conservatives and/or libertarians.
Some schools are broadcasting to the world that they will find new ways to produce the same results.
They’re going to learn why the legal phrase “disparate impact” became so hated (by some.)
(“Disparate impact doctrine” means that you can’t hide your motivations and still produce illegally discriminatory results. Even if you “prove” you’re not discriminating against, say, Asians, the lack of Asians admitted will be the proof of discrimination. “Disparate impact” has provided untold joy to people trying to prove that blacks are discriminated against by the police, by simply reciting arrest stats without context. If Asians aren’t admitted in proportion to their population frequency, that will constitute proof of discrimination. A true Petard moment.)
Ah, but you see… This is a self-correcting problem. Harsh reality has a vote, and that vote is an ugly one.
There are parallels to all this, when you bother to notice them. Once’t upon a time, they didn’t like the commonplace terms for the mentally-deficient (itself a term of euphemism), so they put new words into clinical use: Idiot, Imbecile, and Moron.
Note well the outcome: The terms, once clinical and without offensive weight, became offensive because they were used to describe the actual article, the “feeble-minded”. After long enough, association with the actual article of idiocy and imbecility, the “feeble-minded” turned these once clinical terms into insulting invectives.
Why’d that happen? Because they described an unavoidable truth about those people.
It’s like with the various terms that, what do they like to call themselves, these days? Blacks? African-Americans? Colored People?… Use to describe themselves. It’s only neutral and inoffensive until enough people are exposed to the actual article labeled, and begin using that term as a descriptor.
The root here? The actual idiocy and imbecility that’s described. The people who’re described as such find it insulting that their rank stupidity and mental dysfunction is labeled as such. Same with the racial “epithets”, which exist mostly in the mind of the beholder. The weight of freight the terms carries exists only in the minds of the beholders; the actual issue at hand is the mental deficiencies and stereotypical behaviors, which they really want to obfuscate as much as possible by objecting to the terms used to describe them.
If the conduct of young black males was worthy of emulation, uplifting, and in general a positive thing in the world, then the “N-word” would be freighted in totally different connotations. It’s because of the behavior that the term is pejorative; at the root, if the people being called such things were exemplary saints of rectitude and forebearance, then the term would carry totally different weight today. On the other hand, if young Quakers gained a reputation for criminality and bestial behavior, then calling them what they are, Quakers, would be an insult.
See how that works? No matter what blacks today choose to call themselves tomorrow, just like the idiots and imbeciles of days past, then that term will soon bear the weight of their actual conduct and reputation.
This is inescapable. It’s a fact of life; you can’t change the behavior by changing the symbol to cover it up. You can only influence the connotations of the terms by setting a new and better example.
Now… You ask where the hell I am going with this. Well, ’tis simple: The value of a college education is only that which we ascribe to it. If your college produces actual scholars who have valuable things to contribute to fields of human knowledge, then you’ve got something that will retain the original reputation and value of the conferred degree…
If, on the other hand, you’re churning out thousands of woke, indoctrinated fools who contribute nothing to society, granting them the same diplomas that were of real meaning and value a generation or two ago… What happens to the value of that piece of paper?
It goes away. Just like the clinical meaning of the words used to describe mental deficiencies gradually take on the pejorative weight that represents the actual factual article they’re describing.
When enough people recognize what academia has turned their product into, which is valueless drivel that doesn’t work in the real world, then society will take note, and route around. You’re already seeing the beginnings of it, when there are people who’re entirely unwilling to hire the once-vaunted “Ivy League” diploma-bearer.
The process will continue until it reaches the point of ridiculousness, and then the loss of value will be clear to everyone. And, nobody will bother going to colleges. At. All.
No idea what will replace them, but replaced they shall be, because the root problem here is the actual intrinsic value behind the symbol. A college diploma that was produced under today’s conditions? Worth a hell of a lot less than one earned back in “the good old days” before we chose to turn academia into a credential service.
They’re already tying themselves in knots trying to say “How are African-Amercians going to get into Harvard” without mentioning the Rightwing dog whistle about African-Americans having lower than average IQ.
Whilst I agree that choice (ideally in the form of transferable school vouchers) is best, I don’t think that it will solve the problem of inner city schools becoming ethnic sinks mostly for poor African-Americans.
They tried to fix this problem with busing, but all that happened was that formerly public schools became private fee-paying institutions and where that didn’t happen, white flight did.
“Even if you “prove” you’re not discriminating against, say, Asians, the lack of Asians admitted will be the proof of discrimination. “Disparate impact” has provided untold joy to people trying to prove that blacks are discriminated against by the police, by simply reciting arrest stats without context. If Asians aren’t admitted in proportion to their population frequency, that will constitute proof of discrimination. A true Petard moment.”
Are Asians are currently under-represented in US universities vs their proportion of the population? I thought it was the case that at the moment their uni representation is being suppressed, but it is similar to their population proportion, and under a ‘free market’ (ie one based purely on SAT scores) they would be over-represented. If that were to come to pass, and African Americans became under-represented, would not that the latter fact then be used as ‘proof’ of racial discrimination against AAs?
The data I can find suggest Asians are about 6% of the population (https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045222) and the same percentage of university students (https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/diversity-in-higher-education-facts-statistics/)
Incidentally the above suggests that the whole issue may only be relevant to the most elite colleges, where Asians would probably make up a large proportion of students, under an unbiased selection process. I can’t imagine that an Asian candidate rejected by Harvard on racial grounds then doesn’t go to a Uni at all. Surely he or she must end up in the university system somewhere?
Jim: Disparate impact has typically been used in its raw form – e.g., “blacks make up X% of the population, but make up (X+Y)% of arrests, thus proving discrimination” – ignoring pertinent context.
But the argument’s logic works just as well if you make the argument with the various contextual information included. (“Asians score high on SAT tests and so should be admitted in numbers higher than their X% (proportion of population), and if they are not, discrimination is proved.”)
It’s a doctrine well suited to massaging to get the results you want. Should each side present their own version of that argument in one court setting, the court would then need to decide which is more compelling.
Or, which is more amenable to their own tribe’s desires, of course. Judges are human.
In any event, should the proportion of Asians admitted to colleges not rise with this new ruling, and the proportion of blacks not drop, there will be fertile ground for such an argument. Which, after seeing our police hobbled because they were arresting actual lawbreakers, will be fun and entertaining to watch.
First of all the government needs to provide parents choices and competition among schools. If they do that problem 1 will quickly be solved.
On paper, sure. But in reality we’re seeing those some problems afflicting inner city schools following those students to charter schools or schools where a voucher system is in place.
It’s looking less and less like a school environmental problem as much as the students themselves.
@Fraser Orr,
There is an elephant in the room you’ve built that needs addressing. Where you say:
You are missing the key and essential point: Those “utterly reprehensible schools” in the inner city are what they are not because they’ve been somehow “imposed” on the denizens, they’re what they are because the people there want them that way.
This is the whole of the problem: You, and a lot of other people, frame this as something that is somehow being “done” to those people. News flash, bud: They want it like that. They don’t see “schooling” as a net good, something to improve their lives. They see “schooling” and education as something that “the man” is making them do, that they don’t want to.
I’ve actually, y’know… Known people that taught in those schools, and lived near them. I also recruited on the borders of that environment, and I know whereof I speak. The real problem isn’t that blacks somehow have the “misfortune” to “suffer from bad schools”, but that they themselves largely make those schools what they are through indiscipline, lack of parental involvement, and an utter disregard for scholarship.
Bluntly put, if blacks in the inner city wanted good schools, they’d have them. They don’t value them, so they don’t.
Examine the history of the attempts at reforming Kansas City’s abysmal schools. They pumped, at court order, over two billion dollars into that system, building out the most elaborate facilities you could imagine. Most of which are now destroyed.
The problem ain’t the schools, my friend. It’s the students. Their parents. Their culture.
You can’t lead a horse to water and make it drink if it ain’t thirsty. Urban black populations don’t want education; they don’t want to work their way out of poverty. They want free handouts, the more the better. That’s the behavior we’ve managed to inculcate, because of the environment we set up. Affirmative action was just a part of it, rewarding those without merit for things that they never bothered to acquire for themselves, and teaching them that merit was meaningless, that the only thing that mattered was the color of their skin.
That’s the real inequity of the system we have: We’ve managed to institutionalize failure as a cultural feature. Young blacks believe that they’re failures, without potential, because that’s all they’ve ever been told. They have to have a “leg up” to be able to compete, because they’re incapable of doing it on their own. Success is a gift of the white man, undeserved, and they’ll only ever be as successful as the white man lets them, because he who gives the gift can withhold it. They’ve never been taught or indoctrinated that they succeed or fail on their own merits.
That’s the biggest problem, and the one you’re not going to fix by throwing money at inner-city schools. Until you see American black families valuing education and hard work the way that Asians or black immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean do, you’re never fixing this problem.
To be honest, brutally so? I think we made a massive mistake with the Emancipation Proclamation. You don’t give valuable things away, because it’s just like your kid with a new bike: The one he buys with his own money, his own effort? That, he values; the one you gave him for Christmas? Not so much; that one gets left out in the rain.
What we probably should have done, at the end of the Civil War, was take every single living slave into Federal custody and ownership. All of them. We should have let the South collapse without its labor force if it wasn’t willing to pay the Feds the due monies those laborers earned them. Then, we should have taken that money and actually paid the slaves what they were due, and allowed them to buy their own freedom. If they didn’t want it, then they could drink their money away as perpetual wards of the state. Freedom should never have been a “gift”; it should have been something that they sweated for, bled for. They’d have valued it a hell of a lot more. The Federals could have offered schooling and other things for them to do, that would have enabled them to better themselves.
The problem we have with a lot of black culture is that they resent everything the “do-gooders” try to do. Why? Because it’s a gift, from a superior to an inferior. That’s demeaning; that’s incredibly ineffective. What you do to fix it? I don’t know; the cultural patterns are deeply engrained at this point. When you have blacks looking at other blacks that “act white” as being traitors to their kind? Yeah; you ain’t fixing that with some nice schools they’ll tear up and won’t attend.
Blacks who’re in poverty these days? The sad fact is, they’re mostly there because of their own choices and their own dysfunctions. Ain’t nobody keeping them there; they want what they have, and they’ll likely still want it when the Hispanic waves wash over their little self-made sh*thole ghettoes and wipe them out.
Sad, but true. The “liberal white man (and, woman…)” has been the worst enemy of black success in the history of the country. Their mealy-mouthed words and actions have proven to be far more destructive of the black people than anything else they’ve experienced. The black family survived slave-taking, slavery, and only met its match with single-mother welfare and the welfare state. All of which were things done to them by Democrats and their ilk.
Kirk
This is the whole of the problem: You, and a lot of other people, frame this as something that is somehow being “done” to those people. News flash, bud: They want it like that. They don’t see “schooling” as a net good, something to improve their lives. They see “schooling” and education as something that “the man” is making them do, that they don’t want to.
You are confusing school with education. It is not surprising that many “urban youth” don’t appreciate schooling, because the schools they go to, and the ones their parents and grandparents went to, are terrible. Is motivation to learn in these schools very low? Well yes of course, because the opportunity to learn is very low. Hope frustrated is worse than no hope at all. If schooling doesn’t improve your life, and hasn’t improved the life of your parents or the big sister or your uncle, it makes no logical sense at all to put forth any efforts in schooling.
You then point out that they have thrown money at the problem and it didn’t improve things — because that is what governments do. But the problem is not at all a lack of money, it is a lack of parental control, a lack of accountability, a lack of doing things effectively, a lack of making schools about kids not unions or leftist power and propaganda. Many inner city schools have lots of money. I didn’t suggest giving more money, I suggested letting the existing money travel with the kid to a school of their parents’ (or more likely parent’s) choice. We know this works because it has been tried in charter schools where they have great results and massive waiting lists.
No doubt you are right there is a culture of “education is for whitey”, but that is a consequence of the terrible schools and is why, as I said in my OP it is a long project with big initial wins, and then slowly allowing the transformation of a culture that has been destroyed from years of government mismanagement and incompetence.
I don’t even know where to start on your reprehensible ideas about post civil war reconstruction. Freedom is not a gift, it is a right, and insofar as we have a government Jefferson rightly said: “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men”. It is also worth pointing out that the cultural nihilism and rage that pervades a lot of “urban youth” is a new thing that really started in the 1960s when the government started to “help them”. Before the sixties — when black people suffered quite horrendous discrimination and disadvantage, they were not, as a group at all like that. They were, on average, church going, honest, hard working and very much valuing education even though their access to education was pretty limited.
You seem to think I am suggesting that white ladies with furrowed brows and nothing better to do with their time should go help the poor black babies. Nothing could be further from the truth. Black people are perfectly capable of making their way in life if they are not hobbled with the anti-education that they get and are forced into in the dreadful schools in much of urban American. Rather, give parents a choice where to educate their children and they will very much improve the opportunities for all of the black community going forward.
The plague of fatherlessness is another major problem, but as I said in my OP this is also a longer term side effect of the dreadful schools.
Reprehensible, is it, to point out the truth of failure?
Anyone that looks at the current state of things in the US vis-a-vis race relations and the issues of dysfunction within the black sub-culture, while saying that “We did it right…” during Reconstruction is in a state of denial. What we did manifestly did not work for a huge swathe of the freed slaves; it was the equivalent of taking wild animals, raising them as pets in zoos and suchlike, then getting all moral and returning them to the wild, absent any effort to prepare them for being on their own.
What they did after the Civil War was just plain stupid. If you look back on it, and look at the results today? If you can say “Yeah, that was the right way to do it…”, you’re insane. And, I include a whole bunch of my Abolitionist ancestors who were entirely delusional about what was going to happen for the slaves they so magnanimously freed.
And, then, mostly forgot about. They’d done their good deed, see? That’s all that mattered; they did the “right thing”, and didn’t ever bother to think about how well a bunch of people whose primary experience of modern civilization was, at best, barely Iron Age-tribal or as slaves under an essentially Medieval manorial system of serfdom.
Oh, yeah… Let’s be all surprised that didn’t work out, why don’t we?
Ya wonder why the problems are what they are? You object to me pointing them out, terming that “reprehensible”? You’re of a piece with the people that created the problem.
I don’t know what the “best practices” solution should have been. I just know that what we did wasn’t it; I suggest alternatives, which would have amounted to a half-way house between what the majority of American blacks had for culture, which sure as hell wasn’t adapted for industrial-age modern America, and what they were forced to live within.
I also love how you deny the issues with the schools. Buddy, let me tell you what: If they wanted good schools, they’d have them. They don’t; they see the modern education system as an extension of the plantation, so they don’t. You can’t impose an education on someone, not without draconian effort.
My immediate ancestors valued schooling, and wanted good schools. To such an extant that they actually banded together, built a school, pooled funds to bring in a teacher, and then kept that teacher in whatever she needed to produce literate adults. My grandmother was one of those teachers; I know for a fact that none of the parents of the students she taught would have tolerated their children doing any of the feral things you find happening each and every day in urban classrooms of today. Do you know how I know that? Because one of the “young men” who smarted off to one of her predecessors got himself horsewhipped for doing so. By his father. In front of the school, as an object lesson. Students and family were still talking about it years later, when my grandmother began her term there.
Urban black dysfunctionals don’t care to be schooled; they don’t want it, they don’t want good schools. If they did, they’d build the damn things themselves, and ensure order was kept in them. They don’t care; school is something inflicted on them by “the man”, and never you mind whether or not the students gain either literacy, numeracy, or any form of education at all.
That’s a sadly observable fact, one reported to me by people who have actually taught in these schools, to include some extremely dedicated blacks. I know about Kansas City because one of the young and extremely naive teachers they hired straight out of college to be a part of that whole thing wound up throwing in the towel after her second attempted rape experience, and decided she’d much rather pay off her student debt by enlisting in the Army… Which was where I met her. She was a decidedly changed young woman from the one who’d started that first year at those pristine, squeaky-clean schools there in Kansas City. She was also fairly racist against other blacks, mostly based on their origin and economic class. Another “benefit of experience”, I suppose.
Raw fact is demonstrable before us, a veritable “elephant in the room” with us, as a matter of fact. What we did? Did not work, for a huge swathe of the population. We’re still dealing with the after-effects, and operating in denial of those facts won’t fix a damn thing.
@Kirk, just because what they did didn’t work well (something that was largely down to the assassination of Lincoln who I think would have handled the situation very differently, but we will never know) doesn’t mean any other approach is better. And, as I said above, many of the present problems in the black community are nothing to do with slavery (to plantation owners anyway) but rather to government’s deeply destructive attempts to “help” them in the 1960s. But your idea? To effectively nationalize slavery — take it out of private hands and make all the black slaves to be effectively slaves of the state. Then let them earn their freedom through some sort of work — yeah, reprehensible is indeed the word. If someone stole your car and the government took possession of it and told you you could have it back as long as you did 100 hours of community service I think you’d join me in thinking such a policy reprehensible. How much more is that true of taking someone’s freedom in such a manner?
All I can say is that I am glad you don’t write under your own name since a expressing a view like that in public could get you unable to get a job ever again in your life. So I suggest you stay anonymous.
And as to your comments on schooling and education you can write a wall of text if you like, it is a free country, but you didn’t address a single thing I said. “If they wanted good schools they’d have them?” Tell that to the mothers desperately trying to get their kids into the only alternative they have — charter schools — where there are many, many applicants for every spot and the kids are chosen by lottery like a kid’s future is decided by the flip of a coin. It is horrific. Plus, of course, all the other points I made that you didn’t address.
What works is self evident. Giving people freedom, choices, and personal, individual responsibility for their choices. This works irrespective of the color of your skin. And that is the one thing the government seems to never want to do.
They did such a good job at things, throwing the majority of the former slaves back into the same situation they’d come out of. No responsibility taken; it was as if the SPCA took over someone’s illegal roadside zoo, shut it down, and then just released the animals into the wild with zero attempt at rehabilitation. That was the irresponsible, inhumane thing that was actually done. Few of the freed slaves were equipped to manage their lives, and they fell right back into what amounted to slavery again, as debt-peon sharecroppers.
You say that was superior to having the Feds intercede as their managers, while they learned how to function as free citizens? Hmmmm… Sounds rather to me like enabling more of the same, with even less responsibility for the well-being of the former slaves by their former masters. It’s like you want them to be exploited, or something… You sound like a Democrat, TBH. All they really did was enable slavery under a different name, with even less care for the well-being of the workers. Hell, freed of the responsibilities of feeding and caring for their workers, more than a few of those plantations made rather more money after the Civil War than they did before it…
I also like how you vaguely threaten me for expressing an opinion. You are part and parcel of the very things you claim to decry elsewhere, suggesting I be canceled for my opinion, because you don’t like it.
Which is typical of your ilk. You’re all full of good ideas and good intentions, with you being the arbiter of “good”, but you refuse to accept the fact and implications of those ideas failing. One of which was your kind’s delusional idea that “freedom” could just be assigned, like they believe gender can be today. Raw fact is, you have to have an entire underlying set of cultural equipages to even function as a citizen in a “free society” like ours, and we did not take the responsibility to make sure that the liberated slaves got that set of things. Which leads directly into the dysfunctions of today…
Something your lot refuses to see or acknowledge. The roots of what is happening in the inner cities of America go deep, back to the slave shacks of the Old South. We didn’t break the mental shackles when we broke the physical ones, and that should have been done, just like you have to rehabilitate kept animals before you set them loose in the wild. You wonder why urban blacks don’t value education and the “white” values that get their peers that immigrated from Africa and the Caribbean ahead? It’s precisely because of this factor; mentally and culturally, they’re still on the plantation, waiting for the owner to take care of them.
We failed these people, and we’re failing them still. Giving them things doesn’t work; the evidence of that is clear before us. You want to “fix” them? You have to go and look at what is actually causing the problem, and that’s mostly inside their heads and the culture which comes out of that.
There are reasons that immigrant Nigerians look down on the average American ghetto black, along with everyone else. It’s got nothing to do with superiority or virtue, and a lot more to do with mentality and ethos. The majority of the dysfunctional black Americans are still mentally living in the same slave shack their ancestors were freed from, and that’s the telling feature of it all.
You can’t make someone value education and the things that get them ahead in this current world of ours. You can’t give them the outward trappings, and expect them to somehow get the necessary internal values and mores via osmosis. That’s magical thinking; you don’t get excellence in education by taking uncaring apathetic students and putting them into exquisitely constructed expensive facilities; they’ll just do to them what they did to the nice ones that the courts mandated for Kansas City, which was to destroy them.
You keep right on giving gifts, to assuage your conscience. I’ll keep pointing out the failure of your fantasy life, when enacted in the real world. Just like I’d happily point out the failures to my Abolitionist ancestors, who had not a damn clue what they were doing with their grandiose ideas about how the mere act of ending slavery would fix everything. Which it did not.
And, note carefully: I never, ever suggested that slavery should continue. What I said was that the Feds should have come in as honest labor brokers, and ensured that the former slaves got fair compensation, and did something to make them feel like they freed themselves. That crap of just giving something like that away? It’s delusional; you don’t “give” freedom to anything; they have to make it their own, and if you want them to succeed “in the wild”, you have to fix the problems created by their having been kept things, creatures of someone else’s will. That’s as true of wildlife rehabilitation as it is of people; we don’t have a lot of success just freeing long-term prisoners, now do we? And, what are we doing, if we want them to stay out of jail? Why… Precisely what I suggest should have happened with the former slaves, rather than just loosing them to be exploited yet again by their former masters.
I think that whole “one and done” solution mentality was actually what resulted in a lot of the angst and animosity; yeah, the North done freed the slaves, but they let them fall right back into being sharecroppers for even less real benefit. Some of those poor bastards made statements after it was all over that they’d have been better off remaining slaves, and that was sadly the truth of the matter.
Unfortunate, unpleasant facts, those. But ones that are nonetheless true.
I was going to let this drop, but you make one statement in here that demands an answer.
@Kirk
I also like how you vaguely threaten me for expressing an opinion. You are part and parcel of the very things you claim to decry elsewhere, suggesting I be canceled for my opinion, because you don’t like it.
I did no such thing. I stated that you are better off anonymous since expressing opinions like that it today’s climate is dangerous. It is like yelling “Hey get out of the way” when I see a truck bearing down on you, and then being accused of being the one driving the truck.
There is no-one more of an advocate of free speech, and hardly anyone more strident in their repudiation of the cancel culture. I favor free speech because it is an intrinsically good thing, even when people I find vile are the speakers. But you? I mostly agree with you on many things, though occasionally (as here) strongly disagree with you. I have found many of the points you have made elsewhere illuminating, interesting and educational, so you can be sure you are not a person I’d want to censor, even if I wanted to censor anyone at all. Which I don’t.
Which is typical of your ilk. You’re all full of good ideas and good intentions, with you being the arbiter of “good”, but you refuse to accept the fact and implications of those ideas failing.
I’m not sure who my “ilk” are, but if they are people who advocate freedom I stand guilty as charged. I’m not the arbiter of good, I merely measure ideas against the key benchmark of freedom and liberty for all. Yes, even including former slaves. When you set people free, when you give them choices, when you hold them accountable according to an objective standard, you give them wings. Some will fall flat on their face, others will build the amazing, rich world we live in, and hopefully an even better world for tomorrow. I make no apologies for advocating freedom for all.
Your vacuous “advocacy” does nothing for real results. You “want”, you “hope”, you “desire”, but when those things result in the outcomes that they deserve, which is nothing, you’ll raise not a finger to do anything other than offer “Hope and Prayers”.
I’m a pragmatist. I see failure, I want to analyze why it occurred, and then ensure it doesn’t reoccur. I also try to fix the failure, or at least, understand why it happened so as to ameliorate the effects.
And, we’ve got clear signs of failure in the urban black population, along with a growing chunk of the white sub-population that’s picking up on the same bad habits. Welfare does not ennoble; it ennervates and destroys in the end.
The raw fact is, unpleasantly, that “freedom” and “liberty” don’t spring forth from the brow of the “average man” like Athena. If there’s no underlying support, then that “average man” will blithely proceed into the darkness of subjection. Witness the ease with which the academy manufactures willing little Marxists and petty tyrants from the children of middle-class America, who were ever-so-carefully not taught the precepts of the American civil culture, having gone to really dumbed-down state-run schools. The parents bear some responsibility, of course, but the sad fact is that most of those parents trustingly handed their kids off to the educators, expecting a similar course of instruction to the one they got, which was itself dumbed down from that which was given the grandparents of today’s Marxist thuglings.
You bewail the state of things, and simultaneously deny the reality that causes it. And, I’m “reprehensible” for pointing out the most likely source, based on my observations and experiences.
You are, I fear, the very worst sort of wishful wistful thinker, wanting inchaoate things that you have no idea how to obtain. Quite of a piece with most moderns; your sort want zero pollution, but have zero education in engineering so as to have no more idea how to attain such a thing and maintain modern civilization. Yet, you want, you aspire, and you take ineffectual action that will likely leave all of us living in caves.
I have no use for your ilk, the aspirationals. You want things, but you refuse to examine why things are the way they are, and as a result, you do no more than express “hope and prayer” while decrying those who tell you the truth.
Which is 99.9% of the reason this country and most of Western civilization is in the state it is. Never mind reality; y’all want what you want, and will continue your ineffectual flailing away at things until it all comes crashing down. Mostly because of that very same ineffectual flailing away at everything but the actual root causes of the things that outrage you so much…
Your description of me is about as inaccurate as it is possible to make. But I guess you don’t know me, and you certainly don’t seem to read what I write particularly carefully — which of course is absolutely fine. However, one thing you said is absolutely correct: welfare does not ennoble. And that is why the root of the problems for many African American poor communities is precisely that — the introduction of welfare in the 1960s, not at all their liberation from slavery without the wise guiding hand of a supposedly benign overlord. As I said before, Black people were, before this, in many ways the better part of the American populace considering the dreadful persecution they suffered, both legal and illegal. It was the government trying to “fix” things that made it so terrible.
Which is why your idea of putting the government in charge of the freed slaves, which, putting aside moral judgements on this, is also not “pragmatic” to use your word. On the contrary — the government breaks things, it doesn’t fix things. Black people would be spectacularly worse off today if this is what had happened. We can argue whether that is true or not, but I’d say, if this blog has any theme then “governments break things, they don’t fix them” would be a pretty good approximation.
And, as a general rule, it is these top down fixes that you propose that are often the most destructive. Most of civilization is built on bottom up work — groups of people working together of their own volition bringing small innovations together to advance the whole of science and technology. I know this because, despite what you say, I am an engineer and I make things for a living. This is liberty in action.
Are you seriously trying to make the case, on this blog of all places, that we don’t have enough centralized government planning? Because that sure seems to be what you are saying. But perhaps I am misunderstanding you.
Regardless, I think that is all I have to say on the topic. No doubt we will discuss some other topic in the future. FWIW, as I said before, I usually agree with most of what you say, so hopefully next time it will be a bit less heated.