Turf War
Lifted from the comments, more progressive intellectualism at Middlebury College, where female staff get assaulted by students wearing masks, and elderly scholars get chased off campus:
College public safety officers managed to get Professor Allison Stanger and Charles Murray into the administrator’s car. “The protestors then violently set upon the car, rocking it, pounding on it, jumping on and trying to prevent it from leaving campus,” said Bill Burger, the college’s vice president for communications and marketing. “At one point a large traffic sign was thrown in front of the car. Public Safety officers were able, finally, to clear the way to allow the vehicle to leave campus,” said Burger. “During this confrontation, one of the demonstrators pulled Professor Stanger’s hair and twisted her neck,” Burger continued. “She was attended to at Porter Hospital later and is wearing a neck brace.”
Note that the rather animated protestors don’t seem too familiar with Dr Murray’s research and commentary, and as one of Middlebury’s sociology professors noted, “few, if any” of the protestors had ever read Murray’s books. Evidently, he’s nonetheless someone to be ‘othered’ and to whom the students can attach the usual out-group labels – denouncing him as “sexist,” “racist,” “anti-gay” and a “white nationalist.” (As even the briefest use of Google would reveal, Murray married a Thai woman while in the Peace Corps, has mixed-race children, has tutored inner-city black children for free, and was an early advocate of gay marriage – hardly the most obvious markers of a supposedly anti-gay white nationalist.)
Regular readers will no doubt register the irony that, if you wanted to witness some overt racial zealotry, you’d be much more likely to find it among supposedly ‘progressive’ students – say, the ones assaulting their peers or obstructing their path and making them walk through mud for the sin of being white, or grabbing women’s hair and yanking really hard.
I see no reason to suppose that the mob delinquency illustrated above, examples of which seem to be escalating in frequency and vehemence, will spontaneously improve or cease to be fashionable without some quite significant external pressure. Those directly responsible, and their faculty cheerleaders, show no sign of becoming ashamed any time soon. If their behaviour and assumptions are to change, I suspect it will have to cost them, dearly. And whether there are arrests and/or expulsions following this latest thuggish farce will tell us quite a bit about academia’s ongoing decay.
Update:
And here’s an extract from Dr Murray’s own account of what happened at Middlebury:
We walked out the door and into the middle of a mob. I have read that they numbered about twenty. It seemed like a lot more than that to me, maybe fifty or so, but I was not in a position to get a good count. I registered that several of them were wearing ski masks. That was disquieting.
I had expected that they would shout expletives at us but no more. So I was nonplussed when I realised that a big man with a sign was standing right in front of us and wasn’t going to let us pass. I instinctively thought, we’ll go around him. But that wasn’t possible. We’d just get blocked by the others who were joining him. So we walked straight into him, one of our security guys pushed him aside, and that’s the way it went from then on: Allison and Bill each holding one of my elbows, the three of us ploughing ahead, the security guys clearing our way, and lots of pushing and shoving from all sides.
I didn’t see it happen, but someone grabbed Allison’s hair just as someone else shoved her from another direction, damaging muscles, tendons, and fascia in her neck. I was stumbling because of the shoving. If it hadn’t been for Allison and Bill keeping hold of me and the security guards pulling people off me, I would have been pushed to the ground…
The three of us got to the car, with the security guards keeping protesters away while we closed and locked the doors. Then we found that the evening wasn’t over. So many protesters surrounded the car, banging on the sides and the windows and rocking the car, climbing onto the hood, that Bill had to inch forward lest he run over them. At the time, I wouldn’t have objected. Bill must have a longer time horizon than I do.
Extricating ourselves took a few blocks and several minutes. When we had done so and were finally satisfied that no cars were tailing us, we drove to the dinner venue. Allison and I went in and started chatting with the gathered students and faculty members. Suddenly Bill reappeared and said abruptly, “We’re leaving. Now.” The protesters had discovered where the dinner was being held and were on their way. So it was the three of us in the car again.
Remember, Dr Murray is 74 years old, and the students trying to push him to the ground imagine themselves as leftist intellectuals. Our betters.
Update 2:
And in news that will shock no-one:
Which is why it will happen again.
Heh.
Witch burners don’t care about the details of the witch. They just know that they need a witch to burn.
And volunteers are ever so hard to come by,
Oh, and the habitually self-satisfied Matt Yglesias compared Murray to Hitler, as you do. At least if you haven’t actually read the things you’re tweeting about.
It’s perhaps worth noting that the worst of the thuggery occurred after the disruption of his talk, with all the screaming, pulled fire alarms, and being forced to relocate to another lecture hall, etc. Things got truly alarming after the students had achieved their goal and as Murray was trying to leave the campus. With ‘protestors’ shaking the car, blocking its path and generally trying to terrorise the occupants. Apparently, it’s not enough to use mob coercion to suppress free speech and thwart other students who wanted to hear Murray being interviewed. Murray – and anyone with him – also had to be punished for the sin of thinking differently and daring to venture on their turf.
Why the hell is it left to campus security? Where were the REAL cops?
“With ‘protestors’ shaking the car, blocking its path and generally trying to terrorise the occupants. Apparently, it’s not enough to use mob coercion to suppress free speech and thwart other students who wanted to hear Murray being interviewed. Murray – and anyone with him – also had to be punished for the sin of thinking differently and daring to venture on their turf.”
I’m reminded of a troupe of lower primates chasing a rival troupe off their territory. Without the poo-flinging and sexual dominance displays, thankfully.
It’s almost as if the want to re-create the Cultural Revolution – complete with struggle sessions.
Without the poo-flinging and sexual dominance displays, thankfully.
I was going to make some quip about the students flinging their theses, but in fact they were remarkably ignorant of Murray’s work and didn’t have any rebuttal beyond the usual generic chanted smears. Someone was even holding a sign implying that Murray is in favour of eugenics, which, given his actual writing, is about as perverse as you can get.
Incidentally, if anyone has trouble with comments not appearing, email me and I’ll take a shoe to the spam filter.
the usual generic chanted smears
*fights urge to slap row of idiots*
*fights urge to slap row of idiots*
Well, they were lined up conveniently. And that is what they are. They’re vain, attention-seeking mediocrities who can’t be arsed to do even the most elementary research, and haven’t even read the books they claim to find so offensive, but are nonetheless determined to stop anyone else listening to the author or asking him questions.
*fights urge to slap row of idiots*
Some urges should not be fought.
They’re the brave little warriors of the non-consensual left. Whether you like it or not, they’ll fuck you over.
And here, written anonymously, is the students’ justification for their thuggery. Note again the absurd characterisation of Dr Murray as a “white nationalist” and even a “eugenicist,” and his mere presence as “an intense act of aggression,” and then the inevitable, ludicrous attempt to portray themselves – the instigators of the harassment and violence – as the real victims.
How many times does it have to be said?
Purge these arseholes.
Sack the Professors/Teachers/”Educators” without a cent/penny of compo. Confiscate their pensions.
Automatic expulsion for the student yobs. Surcharge their student loans 10x and collect the money aggressively so the twats will have to win the Lottery to get a penny ahead their entire lives. There are plenty of poor people in that boat. Let these middle-class Marxist pukes have a taste–or better still a life-time of it.
Hit back FFS.
In a saner world, these vain little shits would be expelled as unfit for university.
In a saner world they sent the 101st Airborne was sent in to enforce a Supreme Court decision when the local police couldn’t be trusted, for whatever reasons, to do their jobs. Perhaps we need the same to protect the First Amendment.
The leftist thugs get away with it because the university authorities are dominated by leftists who don’t really want to stop them, and who ensure that the campus security guards understand that they are not supposed to intervene. But each time the thugs succeed in driving a non-leftist off the campus the more bold they become. So the violence will continue to escalate until the degenerate cult indoctrination centres – they can hardly be called “universities” any more – are forced to reform by external pressure.
Unfortunately, I suspect that we won’t reach the tipping-point at which public anger forces politicians to take radical action until somebody is actually killed. You may recall the images of an Islamist mob carrying the body of Ambassador Stevens after they murdered him in Benghazi. I fear it’s just a matter of time before we see similar images of a leftist mob screaming about tolerance as they parade the body of a conservative that they’ve just murdered around the campus.
“It’s almost as if the want to re-create the Cultural Revolution”
Exactly what sprung to my mind, too. The denouncement of one of their own with the list of bogeymen-du-jour is all too familiar.
But Mr. Ecks and David are right. I’ve said this before, but by concentrating on “higher education”, treating them as glorified high-schools, we’ve lost sight of what universities really are: quasi-monastic repositories of learning. These hoologans need to be told that their behaviour is entirely incompatible with the intellectual life and that they are therefore unfit for membership of the university (i.e., to recieve a degree).
You can either be a part of a rioting mob, or you can be an intellectual. Not both.
I have a cure for this.
Needs grapeshot.
…without some quite significant external pressure.
That phrase is doing a lot of work. An example of the blessed “British Understatement.”
Someone was even holding a sign implying that Murray is in favour of eugenics, which, given his actual writing, is about as perverse as you can get.
From the 10th anniversary edition of Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980.
Please excuse the length of this quote, but I do believe it’s worth the effort to read (even – perhaps especially – for those who might disagree with him).
To sustain [social] mobility, the United States has depended on the willingness of the poor to make investments – of time, energy, psychic commitment, and money [ … ] The investments are made in the hopes of long-term gains. But the ultimate payoff is remote. To sustain the effort over what may be a protracted period, the system must also offer incentives and rewards before the prize is attained.
The principal ongoing incentives has been faith that investments do pay off, based on what has happened to other people [ … ] Role models have to exist of whom the youth can credibly say, “if he (she) could do it, it is possible that I can do it, too.” [ … ]
The principal ongoing reward has been praise for trying. This regard has been especially important for the largest single class of poor “investors,” students who make present sacrifices to get an advanced education. Under the traditional model [ … ] his parents are proud of him, he is used as a model by other parents in the neighbourhood, his classmates vote him most likely to succeed, and – an important plus – he knows that society itself applauds [ … ] The incentive (“It is possible to succeed”) and the reward (“People admire me for trying”) were both gutted.
The black ghetto again forms the archetypal example of characteristics found (not only in America, but world-wide) wherever some members of society have been segregated and told they are inferior. Virtually every commentator on what it is like to grow up black in America, whether novelist or sociologist or memoirist, has reflected on the devastating effects of racism on self-confidence [ … ]
This debilitating aspect of black socialisation is not a recent creation. The problem is that post-1964 social policy fed it. Every assumption that a young black in the ghetto might make about his inability to compete with whites was nourished by a social policy telling him, through the way it treated him day to day, that he was an un-responsible victim. Society’s actions were at odds with society’s rhetoric telling him to be proud and to believe in himself.
Day to day, going to a typical inner-city high school, such a young person saw that most of the special programs were directed at the most conspicuous failures. There were likely to be special programs for the mentally retarded, for the learning-disabled, and for the emotionally disturbed. The rules of school conduct placated the trouble-makers.
Special tracks for the gifted were attacked as elitist. Where programs for the gifted (or just the hardest-working) did exist, they fell into the magnet-schools trap – to avoid trouble, the course materials were watered down and the demands (and sense of reward) were low. The ambitious and hard-working students were passed along with A’s and with the teachers’ gratitude for not contributing to the discipline problem, but without an education that enabled them to compete in a good university.
Outside of school, the rules of the game argued against the proposition that hard work pays off. The network of social service agencies – the most visible (legitimate) resource bank – existed to help the least provident and least able. The most conspicuous local success stories were drug dealers, pimps, and fences. Friends who were arrested by the police went free or were assigned to educational or counselling programs for which the youth who went straight was not eligible. And when the hard-working student did get into a government-sponsored job program, his first lessons were the ones who did no work were treated exactly the same as he was, except that he was likely to come under attack from his coworkers for threatening to get the others into trouble.
This experience contained only one kind of lesson: In the day-to-day experience of a youth growing up in a black ghetto, there was no evidence whatsoever that working within the system paid off. The way to get something from the system was to be sufficiently a failure to qualify for help, or to con the system. What a racially segregated society once taught the young black about living with his inferiority was now taught by a benevolent social welfare system. The difference was that in an earlier age, a black parent could fight the competing influences. The parent could drum into the child’s head the belief that he could make it – that the people who said otherwise were racists who obviously wanted him to fail. How did a parent in the aftermath of the reform period compete with a system that proclaimed its devotion to equality, but whose purpose was to minister to a black population that it tacitly assumed had proved its inability to compete in the straight, white system?
Let us once again do some role-playing. Let us say that I am an adolescent who has grown up surrounded by longstanding influences that make me doubt my ability to compete in the larger society. I look around and find evidence that others like me are unable to compete. I am told by spokesmen – white and black alike – that it is not my fault, that I am a victim of forces beyond my control. If I expect to fail, it is extremely useful to believe what I am told. In fact, it is essential. If I observe a peer who is studying hard, I am threatened. Such a peer is asserting one of two things, either of which is unacceptable. One assertion is that he is better than I (and is therefore free of the forces that excuse me for failing). The other assertion is even more threatening: that he is not better than I, but rather I am wrong in excusing myself for failing. Either way, I have a motive to discourage such behaviour by my fellow students [ … ]
The situation varies [ … ] but the norm in inner-city schools during the 1970s was that the hard-working student was said to be “acting white” and was subjected to severe criticism, isolation, even physical assaults. There was no “praise for trying”; instead there was social ostracism, which, for the typical adolescent, is perhaps the worst of punishments [ … ] My hypothesis is that white poor communities [ … ] will exhibit the same attitudes among their youth and the same [social] immobility …
No wonder they want to burn him – he’s a heretic.
“In a saner world, these vain little shits would be expelled as unfit for university.”
Make that unfit for society.
“I’ll take a shoe to the spam filter.”
Would that be sabotage?
Nik, thanks for the quote, length be damned.
When one subsidizes, encourages, and incentivizes a behavior, one gets more of that behavior. Of course, the opposite is true, as every “well-meaning” politician who has advocated for increased sin taxes will tell you. Sadly, those simple lessons of economics are lost upon the same politicians when they advocate for ever more expensive programs and hand-outs for those they deem “disadvantaged,” i.e. the poor sods who are cursed by Darwin with being incapable of anything better.
Of course, the above presupposes mere ignorance on the part of the worthies in charge instead of active malice deployed in the never ending quest for more power.
No wonder they want to burn him – he’s a heretic.
The determined attempt to paint him as some bigoted monster is perverse to a degree that’s hard to verbalise, and inexcusable. Murray is a contender for the most polite man on Earth, and is both measured and rigorous – in contrast with so many of the people who smear him out of hand, usually in ignorance. Including, incidentally, one Barack Obama, who, in 1994, dismissed Murray’s book The Bell Curve as “good old-fashioned racism” and something to be “denounced,” while publicly admitting that he hadn’t even read it and wasn’t too familiar with its content. Great role model, Barry. And so statistical analysis is now apparently “hate speech,” a pointedly conscientious book is now deemed beyond the pale, and its remaining author is to be physically harassed and literally chased off campus. By preening morons.
“will spontaneously improve or cease to be fashionable without some quite significant external pressure.”
Recall how the Berkeley police stood by and did nothing as the regressives rioted in response to Milo trying to give a speech. That lack of action on the part of the police has only encouraged the regressives to riot more (again in Berkeley yesterday, at the March 4 Trump”
If it weren’t actually happening, widely, in real life, it might almost be funny. Mentally uniform narcissists holding signs boasting of their “resistance” to imaginary oppression in one of the most cossetting environments in human history, and insisting that, being so heroic, they will tolerate “no hate here,” while freely indulging their own vindictiveness and delight in mob coercion. But this is what happens when you encourage teenagers to gorge on self-righteousness, all but daily, for years, unopposed by facts, realism or any substantive disagreement. It might tempt the best of us. And these clowns are far from that.
My hypothesis is that white poor communities [ … ] will exhibit the same attitudes among their youth and the same [social] immobility …
Having a vacation/retirement home in lower Appalachia, I have definitely seen similar. Remember, LBJ’s anti-poverty crusades got some of its support by publicizing Appalachian poverty. I’ve seen the same memes, the distrust of outsiders, the lazy work ethic, the reinforcement of “poor, poor, me” even in the churches, the free handouts that result in ongoing dependency. Meth is the redneck’s crack. Not that a good number of rednecks aren’t into crack. It’s sickening. But we dare not speak of it.
(again in Berkeley yesterday, at the March 4 Trump”
…it might also be funny
If I live to be 100… this list is growing so fast I must be several hundred years old by now, but … and dare I mention this as I will be presented with worse by our increasingly absurd society…protesters toting hammer and cycle flags mocking supporters of a GOP president about HIS ties to Russia. Based on far less evidence than McCarthy ever had. Were Kafka alive today…
Until the government stops financing the droogs with guaranteed student loans there will be no cessation, the violence will continue to escalate. Turning off the money machine would be the game-changer.
“I was going to make some quip about the students flinging their theses”
But you decided to go through the motions instead.
“Turning off the money machine would be the game-changer.”
It would also put a halt to rapidly rising tuition rates, which are rising at 3 to 5 times the rate of inflation (in the USA).
I feel so sorry for Dr Murray, an erudite and intelligent man whose writings and lifestyle demonstrate the breadth of his humanity.
I’d been hoping that the campus lunacy was reaching a point where the kickback was inevitable. Of course, it would also require that enough of the tenured staff banded together and raised their voices in protest. And, there, we hit the stumbling block: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” As someone else said, it may need a death to force a re-assessment of the status quo. But, should that death be of a ‘righteous’ protester, it would only exacerbate the current trend!
I’ve been sharing snippets of this unfolding drama with two of my African friends (real friends, of more than 30 years’ standing), because I wondered how they might view it. Both had fled their home country’s civil wars and, eventually, acquired the nationality of the European countries that granted them refugee status. Neither has a University degree. Both worked hard in their adopted country (and, yes, there was often blatant discrimination). Today, each of them owns their own home/car. They were both offended at the notion that Uni. standards should be adjusted for students of ‘colour’. For them, it was more important to be accepted on an equal footing with everyone else.
Via Ed at Instapundit, here’s Peter Robinson interviewing Charles Murray in 2012.
Remember, LBJ’s anti-poverty crusades got some of its support by publicizing Appalachian poverty.
The Longest Mile by Rena Gazaway documents the extreme social pathology and dysfunction to be found in an isolated hollow in Kentucky during the 1960s. It is horrifying and fascinating in equal measure, and the author’s commitment to both her fieldwork and her subjects is remarkable. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
extreme social pathology and dysfunction to be found in an isolated hollow in Kentucky
I’ve heard some horror stories that, granted from rumor mill but also locals who should know, and given stories I’ve heard that were corroborated by the legal system and local news, justify the “banjo pickers” stereotype. It’s a sick world out there beyond, and even surrounded by, civilization and that sick world is much closer than we want to believe.
Turf War indeed. Queering Outer Space
we need to pre-emptively Occupy Mars […] and de-colonize Mars in the process.
Go. Now. Do not wait for the tainting influence of blood-soaked capitalist oxygen. I think you will find it very easy to both “occupy” and “de-colonize” Mars in that order, and with very short delay.
In response, we need to pre-emptively Occupy Mars while taking one of the many important lessons offered by indigenous people to the Occupy movement, and de-colonize Mars in the process. Which means injecting all of our queer and indigenous selves into the discussions about “settling” and “colonizing” Mars, into these plans to fundamentally change the surface of another planet, to reproduce Earth there.
Wait, what??? [ blinks ]
[ facepalm.gif ]
Start building the B Ark, it’s long past overdue!
Ya know…Post up thread I was going to make reference to feeling like Zaphod Beeblebrox shaking both my heads but said no, too far out there.
The leftists always pull the fire alarms. You’d think there would be video once in a while. Maybe the organizers could keep an eye on them and be ready to videotape?
In David’s 13:24 comment, the link is to a self-serving justification. “ Professor Stanger’s hair was not intentionally pulled but was inadvertently caught in the chaos that Public Safety incited.” brings to mind the 1956 movie Forbidden Planet with the Krell’s underground complex capable of manifesting thought. The collective mind’s Id seems to take the blame for the mysterious yanking of Professor Stanger’s hair, as the article denies that any protester willfully did so.
but was inadvertently caught in the chaos
But officer, he just accidentally ran into my fist.
brings to mind the 1956 movie Forbidden Planet with the Krell’s underground complex capable of manifesting thought.
Heh. Absolutely. “Monsters, John. Monsters from the Id!”
Or perhaps the car was rendered inexplicably magnetic and then, due to their belt buckles and piercings, dragged the poor students towards it, and on top of it, repeatedly, quite violently.
Or maybe it’s just the convenient moral anonymity of the mob, and the fact that the people who do these things tend to be liars and cowards.
The Tooner suggested “Needs grapeshot”. The more I read about these idiot bigots and their thuggery, the more Kent State comes to mind. I am also reminded of a leftist demonstration in 1970 at an Australian University I attended when a female protester hit an engineering student over the head from behind with a sign on a pole. The engineer swung and hooked her in one movement and she went to sleep. It was beautiful to watch. The engineers, as a group, were definitely conservatives who lived in the real world; the Leftists backed off when faced by them.
. . . Including, incidentally, one Barack Obama, who, in 1994, dismissed Murray’s book The Bell Curve as “good old-fashioned racism” and something to be “denounced,” while publicly admitting that he hadn’t even read it and wasn’t too familiar with its content.
Um. That does seem odd. There are reports of a transcript, where the book gets commented on by Obama. There is a quote of Murray regarding that commentary:
So, noting that commenting on a unknown text is surreal, is there any proof the book never got read by Obama, or is that just being a tenet of alternative faith?
Perhaps instead the reality is that Obama did read the book, and subsequently merely disagreed with the content. If so, one can definitely grant that for someone of the right wing faith, to acknowledge that a lawyer and constitutional scholar such as Obama would have done such elementary research is just not enough fun . . .
I haven’t done masses of googlemancy, but even the most basic bit of digging around rather seems to indicate that any claim the book never got read by Obama is fraudulent . . .
Roger Kimball on the Middlebury meltdown:
What’s wearying, I think, isn’t just the violence and thuggery, which is bad enough, but the display of widespread intellectual conformity, a kind of mental agoraphobia. Not just the students, whose intolerance and self-satisfied morony is a staple of these pages, but also Middlebury’s president, Laurie Patton, who seems determined to hide her ignorance of Murray’s work by airing random PC buzzwords. An ignorance that’s been mouthed by other university presidents and bureaucrats, including Tim Sands at Virginia Tech, whose distortions and outright lies prompted a pointed and well-deserved reply by Murray.
That Murray had to highlight this level of dimness and mendacity from a university president is quite a thing. But this is the new, politically corrected standard of academic enquiry. And this is why political correctness is so corrosive. In order to sustain the narrative, one has to become obstinately ignorant and/or dishonest. Which is to say, corrupted.
academically interrogating the military and corporate narratives of space “exploration”……..
I’m always bemused by this use of ‘interrogate’ from the Clown Quarter denizens . They must get quite the frisson from it instead of employing more detached words like ‘examine’ or ‘question’. It’s ever so much more muscular in intent.
I imagine that deep down our fearless academic pictures those evil military/corporate creatures tied to a chair in a cellar under a hot light while he(or she), clad in a leather trench coat mercilessly ‘interrogates’ them before consigning them to an oubliette.
Perhaps instead the reality is that Obama did read the book, and subsequently merely disagreed with the content.
The link I had for Obama’s admission, when asked, that he hadn’t read the book is ancient in internet terms and long deceased. But his construal of the book’s content and intent is so removed from reality, and ignores so many pointed qualifications in the book, and its scrupulously moderate, cautious tone, as to pretty much speak for itself.
I’m always bemused by this use of ‘interrogate’ from the Clown Quarter denizens
It’s a vanity, one of many.
And here’s an extract from Charles Murray’s own account of what happened at Middlebury:
Worth reading in full, I think. And remember, Dr Murray is 74 years old.
Remember, Dr Murray is 74 years old, and the students trying to push him to the ground imagine themselves as leftist intellectuals. Our betters.
When I come here I usually end up either laughing or angry. Today I’m not laughing.
I’m reminded of Moldbug’s line:
Perhaps a tank is overkill. On the other hand, quite a bit of escalation does seem to be in order against the embryonic Red Guards.
I always keep a crowbar in my car, in case I encounter a philosophy seminar unexpectedly.
How many times does it have to be said?
Purge these arseholes.
Sack the Professors/Teachers/”Educators” without a cent/penny of compo. Confiscate their pensions.
Why exactly will not the ostensible right divest all public funds from education, legally declare secular humanism a religion, and thusly reform the academy? What in the last hundred years has prevented it doing these things?
Is there some prohibition in lobbying representatives and passing laws? You’re not going to ‘purge these assholes’ in the least. You’re going to have to take a majority to the legislature. Why is this impossible?
Because in relatively short order it will be impossible.
And while science and technology take us to the edges of the solar system and beyond, venture capital is planning how they can terraform new worlds — a neoliberal, capitalist project which has, of course, already stolen the phrase “Occupy.” In response, we need to pre-emptively Occupy Mars while taking one of the many important lessons offered by indigenous people to the Occupy movement, and de-colonize Mars in the process. Which means injecting all of our queer and indigenous selves into the discussions about “settling” and “colonizing” Mars, into these plans to fundamentally change the surface of another planet, to reproduce Earth there.
Obliquely, ‘space exploration’, whatever that literally is, as a slogan is the right’s equivalent of the left’s Welfare State, only without as much assurance of success and with scads of fanciful federal Keynesian econ thrown in to justify it as free market enterprise. Although I’m told its pud-waving is a heck of a cold war tactic.
Apparently in space nobody can hear you abandoning all semblance of sane public policy on earth, and with that tacit wholesale capitulation done, turn your attention to, get this, establishing ‘colonies’ in airless irradiated lethal environments in order to never raise a crop in soil that doesn’t exist with water that’s not present.
This we call brave and economically viable while we sent screwballs on one-way trips financed by the public purse, either directly or by engaging the croniest capitalists among us with the billions they typically find themselves engaging for. If you make a bondoggle they will come.
All this, of course, we justify as part of our founding national contracts with some blather about The People, best interest, expanded borders, and a packet of terms gleaned from Larry Niven, followed by ‘faster please’.
This is the same ‘right’ that can’t reform so much as a collectivized ‘health care’ plan aimed at destroying health care, which it’s largely accomplished. This is the same ‘right’ that can’t prevent – or prosecute – masked thugs and hoodlums from violently assaulting private citizens.
But space; space is somehow the Final Frontier. I’d say it may very well be just that. Thankfully.
Is there some prohibition in lobbying representatives and passing laws? You’re not going to ‘purge these assholes’ in the least. You’re going to have to take a majority to the legislature. Why is this impossible?
For years, the rot existed more or less in secret, beyond the view of most citizens, for whom awareness of the goings-on at their state’s university consisted solely of knowing the score of Saturday’s football game. That is beginning to change albeit slowly. See, e.g. the reaction of the Missouri Legislature to Mizzou’s lunacy of last year and Melissa Click. It didn’t even take actual large reductions in funding. Rather, the mere credible threat to do so caused things to calm down and Professor Click to be gone. Mercifully, Mizzou has been out of the news.
Middlebury is a private college. however. Unless parents and students vote with their feet, the problems will continue. Sadly, like at UC-Berkeley, the sort of parents who let their kids borrow tens of thousands of federally guaranteed money to attend places like Middlebury or Oberlin are the types who tacitly agree with the Leftist positions.
Sadly, like at UC-Berkeley, the sort of parents who let their kids borrow tens of thousands of federally guaranteed money to attend places like Middlebury or Oberlin are the types who tacitly agree with the Leftist positions.
Another irony being that such parents generally belong to one of increasingly insulated demographics that Murray writes about, with some concern, in Coming Apart and The Bell Curve.
The solution is to remove the federal guarantee from future U.S. student debt. I would go further and prevent the state from lending money to would-be students. Not only would this concentrate their minds on the worth of their degrees, but it would make the universities compete. Courses would become cheaper; tuition in intrinsically pointless, nonsensical or politically motivated subjects would wither through lack of demand, and the academics involved would be out of a job.
The remaining rump of academics, having had a taste of the market and the real world, would quickly disassociate themselves from the sort of people who attacked Dr Murray. More: they would expel them for fear of reputational damage.
Via Instapundit, Jenna Lifhits, a graduate of Middlebury, has more:
And again, remember – because, God knows, it’s easy to forget – we’re talking about students and faculty at a prestigious and cripplingly expensive place of higher learning.
This bit too –
The brightest and best…
R. Sherman:
For years, the rot existed more or less in secret, beyond the view of most citizens, for whom awareness of the goings-on at their state’s university consisted solely of knowing the score of Saturday’s football game.
Thomas Fuller:
The solution is to remove the federal guarantee from future U.S. student debt. I would go further and prevent the state from lending money to would-be students.
True and true again.
But my complaint is with the right and its eternal sloth. It never protested, in any meaningful way, the passage of the social federal collective, and having capitulated as wholly and convincingly as that, today finds itself in such a precarious position that its very cultural life is probably being extinguished before its eyes. Still it does virtually nothing.
The stunning thing is that any reasonable reading of the founding contract – or in the Isles, perhaps common law – already prevents the taxpayer being a subject. Prevents him being a religious outcast in his own land. Prevents him being trampled and his culture and life removed from the world by official, typically globalist masters.
The question isn’t how fast or how thoroughly a real victim class rises up in redress. It’s not even in what limited stop-gaps it may be able to finagle into being. The question is how it so thoroughly squandered a birthright specifically intended to prevent it ever having to do so were it only to see to it’s succession, an outcome only as far away as a pen, a stamp, and the dedication to use them.
The brightest and best…
It’s extraordinary. From what I can make out, the entire basis, or rather excuse, for the ‘protest’ – and the thuggery and assaults – is a single, warped and libellous characterisation of Murray by the Southern Poverty Law Centre. But evidently, the students and professors were much more interested in a chance for some shoving and harassment – and thereby signalling their in-group pieties – than in actually checking that their ‘protest’ was remotely justifiable, even on their own terms. Imagine the arrogance and vanity required.
The solution is to remove the federal guarantee from future U.S. student debt.
And to put colleges on the hook for a large percentage of defaulted loans.
Aside: One often hears Leftists in the U.S. demanding a “European Solution” to college finance wherein the state funds “free” post-secondary education for everyone. My response to say, I’d love to see the German system my wife endured during the ’80s. Specifically, at age ten, she had to compete to get into a “college prep” program, i.e. a Gymnasium, which then required her to have high test scores in all her subjects including three languages other than German. At the conclusion of that, she had to take an examination, the score of which determined whether she qualified for a university billet. Even then, she could not major in those subjects she preferred, i.e. English and French, because there were no jobs available for graduates with that combination. Thus, her undergraduate degrees were in English and Physical Education, for which she had to yet two more tests to get a job.
That’s when one gets a lot of blank stares from Leftists. Heaven forbid we should tie government subsidies to actual achievement.
Obliquely, ‘space exploration’, whatever that literally is, as a slogan is the right’s equivalent of the left’s Welfare State, only without as much assurance of success and with scads of fanciful federal Keynesian econ thrown in to justify it as free market enterprise. Although I’m told its pud-waving is a heck of a cold war tactic.
Yep. Seen it from the inside.
@Ten
But my complaint is with the right and its eternal sloth.
In the comments to one of David’s prior posts, there was discussion regarding the Left’s “Long March” through the institutions. The answer to your question is that a substantial portion of “The Right” was long ago seduced by Progressive values, which combined with human propensity to accumulate power for its own sake caused the leadership on the right to compromise their own nominal core principles. There is/was never a hill to die on. Better to leave an issue as a rallying cry for a future election.
The answer is Power. Power is greater than principle and the proles be damned, as long as those inside the Beltway keep getting invited to the right parties and have occasional appearances on “Meet The Press.”
WARNING: LESS THAN FULLY SERIOUS COMMENT FOLLOWS. Treat with due contempt for its nonsense.
@Ten
Hot take: The right is doing so little because it’s been practically wiped out. It mostly died gradually between 1517 and 1918. We’re all leftists now, just blue leftists and red leftists. In a few words, rightism was monarchy, hierarchy, church, property, nation (as opposed to state), and birth role. Of those, a modern American “rightist” believes perhaps in most of property and maybe half of church – but not in a church with the power to impose tax (tithe), or to punish heretics. He believes in a democratic republic, egalitarianism, a proposition ‘nation’ of immigrants, and self-defining individualism.
I say 1517 because it’s when Luther gave one of the initial kicks to hierarchy, church and role, and 1918 as a last gasp of monarchy, though these are far from precise markers or endpoints. Anothing potential highlight might be 1648 for a blow to nation (Westphalian state), and both the American Insurrections were won by the leftists: the first when they established that “fuck you dad, just because you built this country from the wilderness doesn’t mean you can rule it” was grounds for independence, and the second when they decided that actually, letting people go their own way and declare independence wasn’t so cool any more if it was the wrong sort of people. (I sometimes needle people who support the colonies in the Revolution but not the South in the Civil War by asking if a South-like state elsewhere in the world might justifiably be annexed by America today on the same grounds.)
The capitulation you describe is the capitulation of right-flavored leftism to left-flavored leftism, the end of unprincipled exceptions, the taking of moral principles to their logical conclusions, applied to all areas of society. Old Right philosophers like Filmer (Patriarcha) will tell you all about how it is right for a king to be ruler and you to be subject, and he can maintain a self-consistent, stable stance, even if it’s one that’s bizarre and alien viewed externally. But once the new “right” of conservative-flavored individualist egalitarians starts agitating for the overthrow of kings, the levelling of political society, and the redistribution of power, they set the template for same arguments the left will then use to agitate for the overthrow of corporations, the levelling of economic society, and the redistribution of money. What is money, after all, but crystallized grains of power? The final progression of republic is communism: “No kings, no masters!” …except the President, whom we are told is merely a ‘civil servant’, and likewise except the administrative man who is only a secretary.
I don’t quite believe this myself. But I don’t have an intellectually satisfying way of dispatching the issue, either.
From what I can make out, the entire basis, or rather excuse, for the ‘protest’ – and the thuggery and assaults – is a single, warped and libellous characterisation of Murray by the Southern Poverty Law Centre.
Someone heard someone else say Charles Murray is a witch.
Someone heard someone else say Charles Murray is a witch.
Pretty much.
…a substantial portion of “The Right” was long ago seduced by Progressive values, which combined with human propensity to accumulate power for its own sake caused the leadership on the right to compromise their own nominal core principles.
With apologies to the host for the off-topic-going-ism, but if I may address this, the right’s problem is that it forgot itself. It forgot its purported original principles, and over time it’s become a slow motion leftism, complete with its eventually adopting nearly all the left’s psychotic ‘values’, such as they are, even if through the resultant bankrupt policies and programs that flowed from them.
Meanwhile it doesn’t bother to really look into things, events, or phenomenon, at least as a formula, tactic, strategy, or practice, and worse, its frequently replaced those missing elements with its own bizarre lifestyle and identity signalling, apparently in some passive attempt to shame the left about what the right only thinks are exclusively leftist quirks. Here the putative right wouldn’t be caught dead indulging in alternative medicine or diet, re-taking conservation to displace ‘environmentalism’, questioning patriotic militarism and expansionism, doubting the law-and-order incarceration state, expecting ‘free market’ Wall St to not operate in perpetual conflict-of-interest, insisting on its 4th Amendment rights as even mattering, et al.
Because getting on the ‘wrong’ side of any of that is downright leftism and because eat-more-bacon or something.
It’s just sloth. Sloth and self-importance. It’s the left’s Nation of Me, only in a slightly different lifestyle frame where, for example, Hollywood is righteously excoriated except when it puts out a quasi-libertarian superhero. That’s not conservatism – whatever conservatism is – that’s culturalism. That’s codependence.
A substantial portion of the right was indeed seduced by progressive values, but this combined with its own powerful statism – and the staggering selfishness and laziness to allow the accumulation of other power going on forever – directly caused the leadership on the right not to compromise core principles it only nominally had, but to create methods to remain in power on the sole basis of the proportions of constituent reaction to any one issue.
The right is doing so little because it’s been practically wiped out. It mostly died gradually between 1517 and 1918. We’re all leftists now, just blue leftists and red leftists. In a few words, rightism was monarchy, hierarchy, church, property, nation (as opposed to state), and birth role. Of those, a modern American “rightist” believes perhaps in most of property and maybe half of church – but not in a church with the power to impose tax (tithe), or to punish heretics. He believes in a democratic republic, egalitarianism, a proposition ‘nation’ of immigrants, and self-defining individualism.
This reminds me of master-slave morality and Nietzsche. Taken on its face it also reminds one of the historical inversion of right and left, where, for example, the ‘conservative’ Dutch erected the democratic Republic and saw to popular liberty.
We know more recently that if the a-liberal left valued democracy, that it’d be far more right. Likewise, if the right really valued the individual it would abolish its commercial super-state as being terribly conflicting.
It gets complicated and it goes beyond what I know is my scope, but I think it still bears repeating that in the very modern context alone, the right is deep into self-deception and has replaced any real semblance of structural success with this vague cultural identity thing it’s perpetually on about. Flag-waving and baseball and diesel trucks, while where politics go, it’s hanging Bush homage posters and promoting melting pot multi-cultural collectivism, where we find its retail image doesn’t exactly mirror history, controversially or not.
At any rate, in the immediate – and very easily-accessible – sense, the right needs to get itself completely cranked around and start reforming things, not least where the public academy goes. If it spent half the time on that it spends on complaining, well…
Someone seems to have a problem with the ‘March for Trump’. I’m not saying all leftists are insane but…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=32&v=_Ec8XZLAckA
“Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.”
― Robert A. Heinlein
Heinlein’s division could be rephrased: one is either a meddler or a meddlee. Meddlees just want to be left in peace. Meddlers want to change the world, whether anyone asked them to or not. I suspect they have psychological problems. This suspicion is somewhat confirmed when observing the most extreme form of meddler in Britain: the Prime Minister. During my lifetime each and every one of them has gone crazy in office – some more obviously than others (Brown, Blair, Wilson and Thatcher spring to mind, in approximately decreasing order of craziness).
Maybe there’s a gene or two that makes a meddler; and maybe we can remove it from the genome.
Man who has read The Bell Curve meets man who only pretends to have read it but is nonetheless indignant.
Man who has read The Bell Curve meets man who only pretends to have read it but is nonetheless indignant.
🙂
Probable retort: “Did you read [points at mountain of ‘Critical Theory’ sophistry]? No? Then how can you criticize me?”
🙂
Given the wild mischaracterisation of the book, it does seem unlikely that Indignant Man has actually read it. Oddly, however, Indignant Man seems to feel a compulsion to let everyone know just how much he disapproves of it, this book he hasn’t read, and to thereby show everyone that he definitely isn’t racist or in any way prejudiced. Except, it seems, towards mild-mannered scholars whose books he hasn’t read.
Here’s Matt Yglesias ( one of the usual suspects) apparently defending the violence and comparing Murray to Hitler:
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a typically forthright view:
https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/838196983240216576
And then of course there’s this.
Because, apparently, the way to create “a better learning environment” is to pre-emptively ban any potentially controversial speaker. And this is said following a week in which an invited speaker and several members of staff were chased and physically menaced by a mob of students who couldn’t be bothered to read the book they were pretending to be offended by in order to look virtuous.
Is it time for this yet?
Is it time for this yet?
I’d say so.
An excellent piece about the affair and the left’s hypocrisy:
(Sorry for the block quote, but it’s deliciously ironic.)
Carolyn Rouse’s sister is Cecilia Rouse, one of the three members of Obama’s first Council of Economic Advisers, Dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, and a well-known economist of education. (Their dad was a physicist with a doctorate from CalTech, their mom was a psychologist, and their brother is a physicist, clearly disproving hereditarian theories of intelligence.)
Heh. Maximum points.
As I’ve been pointing out elsewhere, it is up to the anti-violence left (yes, they exist, Dr. Stanger among them) to get in the way of the pro-violence left, physically if necessary. “Peaceful protesters” letting bandana-wearing thugs do their dirty work for them isn’t going to cut it.
Failing that, this country does have a quiescent and piecemeal but nonetheless extant right-leaning militia movement. It rather seems that time is about to make them useful.
Failing that, this country does have a quiescent and piecemeal but nonetheless extant right-leaning militia movement. It rather seems that time is about to make them useful.
I give you Based Stick Man:
https://twitter.com/Lauren_Southern/status/838542575770415104
Naturally, for the hateful crime of self defence he’s been arrested.
Gateway Pundit has details
In related news, the movement entire behaves like someone with “High Conflict Personality Disorder.”
https://pjmedia.com/blog/social-justice-syndrome-rising-tide-of-personality-disorders-among-millenials/
sufferers from High Conflict disorders are often drawn to extreme beliefs and behaviors under the illusion that they are acting politically.
You writing under the name “Ewan Morrison,” David?
You writing under the name “Ewan Morrison,” David?
Particulars aside, I’m just glad other people have noticed that something… odd is happening. It was beginning to feel like an episode of Quatermass.
Particulars aside, I’m just glad other people have noticed that something… odd is happening. It was beginning to feel like an episode of Quatermass.
The conventional right will be wise to stop bagging on psychology and realize it has substantial utility categorizing poor behavior and connecting it to defective conditioning.
And therefore, leftists.
Not so incidentally, as many suspect, psychological impairment breeds the psychologically-impaired. While not a universal phenomenon*, this we recognize as positive feedback and then as inherently unstable.
*Significant numbers of Gen Y reject progressivism for purely practical reasons: When you’re raised in that misery you have the firsthand experience to consciously condemn it.
This should be developed.
I give you Based Stick Man:
That guy’s targeting is amazing.
I give you Based Stick Man
Will he develop an internet fan club like Epic Beard Man? That’d be great.
Of course, he’s facing off a dozen masked Black Bloc clowns and he’s the only one arrested. The “antifa” fascist black shirts can beat dozens of people, the police do not interfere. I’m beginning to suspect the Black Bloc would actually have to kill someone before the cops (or their political leadership) take them seriously.
From what I can make out, the entire basis, or rather excuse, for the ‘protest’ – and the thuggery and assaults – is a single, warped and libellous characterisation of Murray by the Southern Poverty Law Centre.
Someone heard someone else say Charles Murray is a witch.
That is the SPLC’s job.
Just as say, La Raza “launders” individuals from M.E.C.H.A. so they may slip into mainstream Democrat/lefty/archist politics, the SPLC receives its funding in exchange for labeling the same’s political enemies/threats to the Narrative as doubleplus ungood.
I’m beginning to suspect the Black Bloc would actually have to kill someone before the cops (or their political leadership) take them seriously.
Sounds like it’s time to cast grim lots for when the first blood is shed. My bet is on this year. Maybe in the first six months.
A glimmer of hope from India? http://quillette.com/2017/03/07/methods-behind-the-campus-madness/
I doubt laws can be passed against campus activism. But as others have proposed up-thread, certain types of funding can be retracted.
Placing a cap on administrator numbers as a percentage of the student body couldn’t hurt, either, in both higher ed as well as elementary and secondary education.
It shouldn’t be surprising that people would take a lesson from recent violence but it is a bit disturbing to hear people gleeful about stick man’s violence and Franklin’s consideration of armed militias not to quell widespread civil unrest but to deal with localized violence at a protest.