Month: December 2012

Be that as it may, let’s discuss education. Couple facts:

1) Within the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development,
which includes all of Europe, North American, Japan, South Korea, and a
few others, we spend the most per student K-12.

2) We perform poorly internationally on standardized tests which measure knowledge needed to succeed in an information economy.

3) A very high percentage of our spending does not go to teachers.
One example, for the school district of Los Angeles. Their budget was
3.6 billion dollars. One third was spent on people who never see kids,
and only $83 million was spent on textbooks.

4) The National Education Association (which won’t release hard
numbers) appears to spend roughly one lobbying dollar in ten in
elections. 98% of it goes to Democrats.

5) We are getting dumber. One measure: in 1972 116,630 Americans
scored 600 or higher on the verbal part of the SAT. In 1992, even
though many more kids took the test, the number has shrunk to 75,243.
The company that administered the test did the only thing they could:
they reworked the test, so that with new scoring we are back to where we
were, approximately, with the obvious caveat that all that has really
happened is the test has been diluted.

6) It is virtually impossible to administer discipline in most
schools without fear of a lawsuit. This is the logical and foreseeable
result of two Supreme Court decisions with which most of you are likely
unfamiliar.

1969: Tinker versus Des Moines School District. Kids wore armbands
protesting the Vietnam War to school. The Administration told them to
take them off. They sued, and the liberal Supreme Court–the members of
which no doubt privately supported such protests–ruled that school
children had a Constitutional right to free speech.

1975: Goss v. Lopez. Kids rioted in a cafeteria. They were
suspended for ten days. They filed suit to protest their suspensions,
and another liberal Supreme Court found they had a Constitutional Right
to Due Process. This, of course, made it between difficult and
impossible to get persistent trouble makers out of the schools.

There’s more. The Democrat’s Individuals with Disabilities Act,
which was intended, publicly, to make sure that kids with disabilities
were provided for, included a provision making kids with emotional
disturbances covered under the Act.

The provision stated that virtually no matter what kids did, if the
school couldn’t prove it wasn’t related to their “disability”, they
couldn’t be removed from “normal” classrooms. They caught two kids with
guns, for example, in Connecticut. The kid who wasn’t “classified” got
a one year suspension. The other kid, equally guilty, got a 45 day
suspension, and special, individualized services.

Here is the simple reality: other nations outperform us with larger
classes, and less money spent for the simple reason that they maintain
order, and non-negotiable expectations in the classrooms. They have no
interest in talking about feelings, beyond normal personal interactions,
but insist that minimal standards MUST be met. They standards include
behaving properly.

Even in our own country, Catholic schools teaching non-Catholics,
with ethnic diversity proportionate to those of local public schools in
the same areas, consistently post MUCH better results.

In New York City, a councilor challenged the Catholics to take the
bottom 5% of the cities students to see what they could do. They
accepted the offer. Before they could do the experiment, the people in
office changed, and the idea was quietly dropped.

Multiculturalists seem to believe that our political system appeared
from nowhere, and that the ideas-and men who thought them–upon which it
is based are irrelevant. They act as if this system will run itself
forever flawlessly, if we just trust the “people”, with the people
understood as everyone but white males.

This is, in my view, a form of bigotry. It shows a profound lack of
gratitude and appreciation both for the work and sacrifice that went
into forming our system, and the on-going sacrifices of those who
continue to believe in it.

A Constitutional Republic is like a complex machine, full of gears
and levers, steam boilers, and gauges. The operating manual is
contained in foundational works, all of which were written by dead white
men. The possibility of uttering that phrase with contempt began with
those very same men.

This Republic need not last forever. At the rate we are decaying
morally and intellectually, I honestly doubt we will last another 50
years. Even that is almost certainly a stretch. If I were our enemy, I
would have a 10 and 20 year plan. If it were me in the drivers seat, I
think I could pull it off.

I have never been as pessimistic about the future of our country as I
have been these past weeks. I don’t have a problem that we elected a
black man for President. Race doesn’t matter to me.

What bothers me is we elected Obama BECAUSE he is a black man. He is
not even remotely qualified for the office. Not even close. The
biggest organization he’s ever run is a Senate subcommittee, and he
hasn’t spent much time at that.

Even if he isn’t a radical, there were half a dozen red flags that
should have been presented by the media. For example, the career of
Obama’s political Godfather, Saul Alinsky.

The only virtue that is taught in our schools is tolerance. But tolerance is not a virtue that enables societies to survive.

The best way to put this is if I parachute a group of people with
limited supplies onto a desert island, and tell them to survive for 20
years, and build a community, tolerance will not be the top on the list
of virtues. Work ethic, persistence, ingenuity, discipline–those top
the list. Tolerance helps to grease the wheels, but it won’t feed
anybody. If somebody wants to go sit on a stump somewhere and be
tolerant, he will die of hunger.

And I think it is misusing the term to say that tolerance implies
blanket acceptance of all behaviors of certain groups simply because of
their minority status. Tolerance is looking individuals in the eyes,
and seeing who they really are. Seeing them as fellow human beings,
with all the problems, uncertainties, doubts, and hopes as anyone else.

Being color blind, in other words.

This is the sort of activity, the sort of thinking, that studying the liberal traditions of our culture leads to.

Nothing in Locke, or Hamilton, or Jefferson, or Madison, or Adams–etc.–is intended to support cultural suicide.

That impulse comes from the radical Left. The divergence of my own
views from those of many of the people around me has never been more
stark to me. It is almost like half of the people around me suddenly
disappeared mentally into the Twilight Zone. Very few people seem to
realize the profound moral danger we are in, which will not change even
if Obama turns out to be a decent, moderate President.

Our culture is collapsing, and it is collapsing because we stopped
feeding it 30-40 years ago. We did this to improve the world, but
unless I am sorely mistaken, it will end–absent a successful
counteroffensive by those who still believe there is a difference
between right and wrong, and that the question is not a trick
question–with more misery than all but a few of you can imagine.

These Great Books would be an antidote, but what schools are going to pick them up?

One idea I had that I will pass along to avoid ending in abject
bleakness, is what I propose to call Patriot Clubs. This would be a
debating society that gets together once a month or so, in which members
read two books on a topic, one by a liberal, and one by a conservative.
They then debate them, and the group discussed the debate in a
structured way afterwards.

As a conservative, I can imagine no better way to convert people than
placing them in the position of defending their own views. I can also
imagine no better way of coming to understand your enemy than by taking
his place in the order of rhetorical battle.

I don’t fear alternative views, for the simple reason that I have
exposed my own to constant and withering contempt and ridicule for a
number of years now, and they have held their ground admirably.

That’s enough for now. It’s interesting to me that the St. John’s
crowd speaks English and is capable of thinking in paragraphs devoid of
slogans. If only Harvard and Yale could produce people like that.

Posted same day, 2008.

You know, every defeat is a call for improvement. I have been called
every name imaginable, been kicked off of boards, threatened, and
overall been punished, to the extent of the ingenuity available to my
opponents, for expressing coherently views in favor of my own position,
that they cannot counter with respect to support for their own
positions.

The single most cogent argument for free speech is simply this:
arguments that endure through debate that is conducted using facts and
logic, have greater claim to approximating Truth than those which do
not. For that reason, even supposed sacred cows should not be
protected.

However, this presumes good faith. This is much too high a demand
for most leftists. Moderate Democrats I have no problem with. No doubt
there have been times when Robber Barons truly did terrorize–with the
power of law–the already downtrodden. We have reached a point, though,
where the F word is trotted out the moment anyone says no to any idle
indulgence that is demanded.

Sometimes, you have to go back to basics. Looking back, one book
that had enormous influence on me was Jacques Ellul’s excellent book
“Propaganda”. He is French, and so he is hard to read in any language,
but his points are very good.

One of the most salient points, that comes back to me now, is his
incisive analysis of the history of public opinion with respect to the
Vietnam War. What he shows is that our supposed “thought elite”, our
graduates of top flight universities, invariably conform to the
information that is presented to them by mass media. When Walter
Kronkite supported the Vietnam War, so did most of the non-Marxist
intellectuals. When he came out against it, so did they. ALL of them
thought that, now, the balance of facts had changed. But they hadn’t.

I just told my oldest today, without even thinking about it, that if
you read your local paper assiduously every day, read mainstream
magazines like Time and Newsweek cover to cover every week, and
religiously watch the evening news, or even McNeil-Lehrer (or whatever
it is called today; I obviously have not watched it for many years),
your opinions will be in virtual lock-step with everyone around you.

Intellectuals are BY FAR more vulnerable to propaganda than people
who just look around them, or who operate off of common sense
principles.

What is interesting, is they will look down on anyone who doesn’t
think like them as being somehow duped by someone else’s propaganda.

If you think you are thinking your own thoughts, that you have
nowhere been seduced into patterns of perception chosen by others, then
it is likely virtually everything you believe is unoriginal, your own
conceits notwithstanding.

The only real solution to this is critical thinking exposed to
ideological diversity, and defended honestly. This need never happen
for anyone who has found a congenial ideological backwater, which is
what the internet has provided in spades.

That is why this site is so shocking to so many, and why I keep coming here. I want opposition.

I posted this on Election Day, 2008, on CrossFit.com.  Nothing has changed, other than that Obama did not raise taxes.  He will this time around.  Count on it, over and above Obamacare.

With respect to the article, I find it unnecessary as anything other
than an encouragement to conservatives to vote. As a group, we always
show up at the polls in much higher proportions than Democrats. People
who don’t like to work, don’t like to vote. Rainy days ALWAYS favor
Republicans. Regrettably, weather is good around here.

More generally, I have come recently around to the gradual
realization that what we are seeing this year is very literally the
flowering of 30 years of silent work by the radicals of the 60’s.

What is the point of Political Correctness? Generating consistent
and reflexive responses to any number of questions. What is the value
of that? Pavlovian voting. Obama is black. Surely he deserves our
vote, and anyone who claims otherwise is racist.

For that reason, anyone who is concerned that he seems to have had
warm relations with a man–Bill Ayers–who plotted to overthrow our
government, implement concentration camps, and murder in cold blood 25
million Americans, is a racist.

It is racist to point out that he sat in the front rows of a racist church for 20 years.

It is racist to point out that one of the primary formative
influences in his life–Frank Davis–was a Communist and admitted child
molester.

It is racist to point out that his entire campaign is nothing other
than the principles of Saul “The Red” Alinsky’s book “Rules for
Radicals” writ large. I’ve read the book. This is absolutely by the
book. Alinsky was a Marxist.

It is racist to point out that raising taxes by the amount he wants
to is going to be economically damaging in the extreme. This is
absolutely the wrong time to attack the rich.

And what is the point of moral relativism? It is to prevent
rational, principle based discussions. We cannot claim moral
superiority to ANY nation in the world. Our values are not worth
defending. We should, in fact, apologize to the world for EVER acting
as if any of our ideas of liberty or human rights were in any way
superior to the tribal autocracies and empires that otherwise describe
the entire history of the human race, outside of White Male Europe.

The end goal of the left–that of creating a nation of zombies who
NEED to be led, who DEMAND to be led–has been realized. When nothing
is right or wrong, when the code of conduct is based solely on a
conformist desire not to give offense, someone has to provide the
synchronizing signals. That man is Obama. As a literal
African-American, who has lived overseas as a Muslim, he embodies
diversity, and will thus be a fitting focus of a cult of personality.

My only hope is that our democracy survives four years, so we can
ride him out on a pole, following he inevitable debacle his ill-founded
ideological dogmatism will foster.

For those who assume our democracy is perennial, and uncorruptiblel, I
would encourage you first to read some history–say of the rise of any
totalitarian regime in Europe–then read “Deep Survival”, by Lawrence
Gonzalez. He points out that most great failures begin with the idea
that patterns remain constant, and that what has always been, need
always be.

I pulled out my copy of “Propagandas” (note: he mentions at the very outset that it should be plural, even though it wasn’t at least in my copy), and much of it is directly relevant to Obama’s reelection.  I think conservative thinkers need to get it, and study it carefully.  I was going to post some lengthy excerpts, but have chosen instead to conserve my energy for another project, that of figuring how NOT to be wound up.

Now I’m going to go read National Geographic simply because I enjoy the pictures.

Seriously, though: it’s all there.  Propaganda needs to be a word in regular use, because it IS in regular use. 

We have a President who seemingly has worn a ring dedicated to the Koran most of his adult life.

His father, according to our best guess, was a dedicated Communists revolutionary.

His advisor, Valerie Jarrett, is apparently even now telling the Iranians they can  have nukes, a decision reached with no Congressional consultation, or national security clearance for her.

All of this is only possible with long term effective political AND social propaganda.  Read the book.

I remember first hearing the Eurhythmics lyrics “like a new emotion” and wondering how that could be.  Surely we have all experienced everything?  But of course we haven’t.  We don’t even know what we don’t know.  We don’t know what is possible.  In my own life I have had whiffs–like a scent of a flower far away that drifts by just for a split second, but clearly–of deep, deep ecstacy.  And of course I have had moments where I understood why people kill themselves.  I have never been tempted–my will is much too strong for that–but I understood.

What I am going to try and focus on for the next few weeks–and success is far from certain–is feeling new things.  Virtually by definition, if I am typing here I am not living.  I am not “out there”.  I like to think my vocalized processing, my journal-notations here, are useful to some, and it seems likely.  At the same time, there is an Ayn Rand quote that has stuck in my mind: “I have seldom enjoyed anything concrete or in the present tense.  That locomotive ride was one of the very few times when I enjoyed a moment for its own sake.”

I have numerous essays planned, but I am going to put them off for the moment, and focus on retooling how I work.  I bought “Getting Things Done”, and it seems congruent with my own feelings on work.

On Ayn Rand, the basic argument I wanted to make, and will eventually, is that her mother was a narcissist, and that the entirety of her output is a combination of reaction to that fact, and to her experiences in Russia following the Bolshevik coup.  Her ideas, self evidently, warrant exploration as well in depth, but I am going to postpone all that for some period of time when I have learned to work non-spasmodically.

Knowing me, I won’t not post, but in some ways the reelection of Obama is a source of relaxation for me, a release.  There is no argument I can make that will be heard widely enough to matter.  So I can take some time off for reflection. It’s hard to know if I made ANY difference in any event, but I can say honestly I did what I could with what I had.

Posted here: http://www.city-journal.org/comments/index.php?story=8712&#comments

I doubt many are reading still, but I wanted to work through a basic intellectual exercise.  It’s one I’ve done many times, but still worth doing again from time to time from a slightly different angle.  I’m going to crosspost it on my blog, which I’ll link at the end.

It’s funny to see how many people here are claiming, in effect, “she’s just a baby Gramscian: we’re the real deal.”

I hate all Communists.  I want to put that out there.  They kill men, women and children outright, they starve them, they torture them physically and mentally, and they put people in prison for very long periods of time for the crime of speaking the truth.  It is a doctrine of sadistic cruelty and no one familiar with the history can claim otherwise.  If you are a Communist you are by this fact alone capable of accusing your next door neighbor of dissent, knowing that they will lock him him a little metal box he can’t sit or sleep in, and which barely provides enough air to breathe through its one little slit, as they did in Cuba, Nicaragua, and of course the Soviet Union and other choice hellholes around the planet.

But to the point here, let’s look at how, as an example, a fondness for Gramsci leads to intellectual incoherence.  How does he enable the sadism which pervades Marxist practice?

Gramsci had many ideas, but one of the most important and perduring is that of “cultural hegemony”.  The fact is that Marx was wrong, and the revolutions didn’t happen.  Anyone who wanted to support Marx’s claim to have presented a valid scientific hypothesis was compelled to modify the Master.

Gramsci’s big idea was that people were TRICKED into supporting a status quo that supported a power elite, and which covered up the unjust class structure of that society.  He claimed, in effect, that everything you had been taught about “right” and “wrong”, about duty and patriotism and family, was intended to keep the Man up, and you down.

So you had to reject the “bourgeois” moral narrative–that of the damned middle class that kept the workers from attacking and slitting the throats of rich people–in favor of something else.

But what is that something else?  That is the question, isn’t it?  Not ONCE, I suspect, did Gramsci specify just what his end aim was, in useful terms like “universal employment at reasonable wages in conditions of political liberty and equality before the law”.  Certainly, he had no PLAN to create anything like that, except in the grossest and most useless abstract terms. 

People who use class analysis BY THIS VERY FACT have rejected personal moral narratives, which is to say personal moral agency, which is to say the capacity for both individual moral judgement, and ACCOUNTABILITY.  They reject, in other words, individual moral GOODNESS, outside of conformity with the mob, as led by professional and undemocratic (propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding) leaders.  This is a necessary conclusion.

I have at times defined myself as a “thought worker”.  I don’t like the word “intellectual”.  It is for people I define as “cognitive aesthetes”: useless people who enjoy the process of thinking in the same way people like solving crossword puzzles, who delight in conversations that make them feel smart, who enjoy the grand passions made possible by thinking big thoughts, the danger associated with subversion; who, in other words, break what they touch, don’t realize it, don’t care, and who if we let them will destroy everything good in the world.  Narcissists.  Moral imbeciles.

Gramscian cultural analysis is what I call a “Tubaform”, for reasons I won’t get in to here.  It is a heuristic which, when applied, dissolves the whole world into coherent patterns for the thinker.

But does it generate happiness?  Does it produce anything worthwhile?  Gramsci was a founder of the Italian Communist Party, and got support from both Lenin and Stalin.  He was their kind of person.  Historically, this means that Gramsci was capable of more brutality than Mussolini.  The Italian Fascists, in particular, were pikers compared even to someone like Castro, and couldn’t hold a candle to the seas of concentration camps and dead bodies the Soviet Union created.

So you have thousands of pages of text, and my strong suspicion is that not once will you find a template for individual moral analysis.  Not once will you find him questioning how the general living conditions of ALL Italians can be improved. Not once will you find incisive meditations about the nature of human happiness and how best to achieve it.

People who study Gramsci in Graduate School are not asking how to IMPROVE the world.  They are asking how to UNDERSTAND the world.  This is a very different question.  And I don’t disagree that the world can be understood coherently in many ways.  Many aliens run the world.  Maybe the Illuminati or Freemasons.  Maybe the Jews. 

Maybe Freud is best: all violence is the result of a Death instinct, and we would best spend our time having sex.

Ultimately, the only thing that makes sense is tying the EFFECTS of ideas to their intents.  And by that simple criteria, Gramsci fails.  Communism is the most horrific, blood-soaked creed in human history.  There were some 3,000 lychings in the American South from the end of the Civil War until they stopped in the 1960’s or thereabouts.  There were AT LEAST 10,000 people murdered in cold blood in North Vietnam ALONE when Ho Chi Minh took over after the French left.  Ten times that AT LEAST when the North successfully invaded the South.

Sloppy thinking makes our society worse.  It is that simple.  You can read my own contributions to sanity on my website: http://www.goodnessmovement.com  My day to day blog is linked there.  If anyone wants to take issue with me, have at it.  I will caution you in advance, though, that your self conceits notwithstanding, you have likely never grappled with genuine, intelligent, and informed ideological “alterity”. Your deficits you will need to conceal quickly with silence, after your initial and futile attempts at misdirection and insult.

But you are brilliant?  All Conservatives are wrong?  Have at it. 

I will add, actually, a clarification: there is no such thing as “society”. There is no such thing as “class”.  They are heuristics, nothing more.  The ONLY possible root of moral decision is the individual, and this applies even if they use conformity for decision making, even if they CHOOSE not to choose.  This point is inescapable, the foundation of true Individualism, and our root problem is that we have forgotten this.

That will have to do for now.  I want to talk elsewhere about propaganda.