Education

Are you Tariffied?

Mark Noonan10 Comments

I brought this up on X yesterday but I want to do to a bit more on explaining my tariff views – and, indeed, my overall economic views. So, here goes:

You’ve seen this picture of some variation of it, probably many times: the driving of the last spike in the Transcontinental Railroad. This was a major development in the growth of the United States – tying together the East and West and ensuring rapid settlement of the Great Plains. But what most people don’t know is that the rails used to build that railroad and the tires (wheels) on the trains in this picture were probably made in Germany, by Krupp. Here’s the logo of that company:

De drie ringen – the three rings. After the World Wars a lot of foreigners thought the three rings stood for Krupp cannon as Krupp was the premier gun maker for both the German Empire and Nazi Germany…but the truth is much more prosaic. Alfred Krupp was the first major German steel manufacturer and his firm struggled mightily early on. He did, indeed, realize his steel would be excellent for cannons and rifles but the military establishment of Prussia (his homeland) and the rest of Europe was skeptical of the newfangled thing, preferring to retain their cast-iron muskets and bronze cannon as tried and true (it was only after the astonishing performance of Krupp cannon in the 1870 Franco-Prussian war that everyone was sold on steel guns). What allowed Krupp to take off was two things: the exceptional quality of their steel and their invention of a new method of making steel railroad tires which produced a product superior to everyone else. The Krupp firm made so much money off the tires that Alfred Krupp decided to make three railroad tires his company logo – de drie ringen. Krupp’s rails and tires were so good that we Americans bought them in huge quantities. Krupp-steel was used to crisscross our continent with railroads.

But during all this time, we lived under a Protectionist trade policy. Sure, everyone loved the quality of Krupp products but they were expensive, as such, and then you had to pay the tariff to import them to the USA. Modern Free Trade nimrods would say we should have lowered the barriers to allow more Krupp steel in…but what happened was that the high tariffs induced American manufacturers to get into the game…by the 1890’s American-made railroad tires and tracks were only slightly less good than Krupp’s and being made at home and not subject to tariffs, were a lot cheaper. Boom: American railroads started buying American products. Here’s the key thing to remember: had we not had Protection, the American industries created to make railroad tracks and tires would have not come into existence. German labor costs were lower than American. The German product was better than we could produce out the gate. No tariffs would mean the German product would not only be better than we could ever make, but cheaper.

Now, think about this: had we not developed domestic railroad suppliers, what would have happened to us during the two World Wars when German imports were no longer available? We would have been in one heck of a bad situation…at a time when American rolling stock would be massively used, we would lack the domestic means to maintain and expand our rail system. Absolute catastrophe. Thanks to tariffs, we didn’t need German products. The loss of Germany as a trade partner meant absolutely nothing to us.

The economy, my friends, is not something to make your stock portfolio grow. It is what we do for a living – how we get our daily bread. Just think of all the things you use every week – by and large, everything you use should be made domestically if at all possible. We’re not talking luxury goods like an excellent French wine or some delicate silk fabric from the storied East…we’re talking about the bread and butter in your pantry, the pipes that bring water to your home and carry away waste, the gasoline in your car, the power lines that carry electricity to your house, the shoes on your feet, the shirt on your back. These are the things we need to do for ourselves…because in a crisis, nobody is going to do it for us. Point blank: the more dependent we are upon foreign suppliers for our basic necessities the more advantage foreign enemies have over us. And here’s another thing to consider – the US dollar is the global currency and nobody is going to want to dispense with it mostly because nobody trusts any other nation to hold assets…this has worked out well for us because we can print as many dollars as we like and buy cheap foreign goods with them…but in a real crisis, your wealth isn’t your money: it is what you can make, mine and grow.

Money was invented so that I don’t have to exchange a sack of potatoes for a bushel of wheat. It is a convenience – something standing in the place of me exchanging goods for goods because much easier to hand money to someone instead of the tedious transactions of a barter economy. But behind that money, you’d better have something someone wants. We used to back our money with gold, silver and copper…now we back it with “full faith and credit” which is meaningless support for a myth. If foreigners ever perceive that having US dollars isn’t the way to go – like, say, if we’re at war with China and not doing well – then they’re going to essentially demand goods for goods. Perhaps still denominated in dollars, but there better be something behind that slip of paper. And if we don’t make, mine and grow things? What then backs up our currency?

To have wealth, we must make – and to be safe, we must supply as much of our needs domestically as we can. This isn’t to say that trade isn’t beneficial. It is, in fact, one of the most beneficial of human actions. It is trading nations who always do best. If you ever wonder why Africa – where humans originated – never developed a high sub-Saharan civilization then look no further than Africa’s geography: outside the Nile, none of Africa’s major rivers are navigable year-round at distance. The African coast has hardly any natural harbors. Basically, deserts and oceans isolated sub-Saharan Africa from the main cross-currents of human development and so when Europeans first went into central and southern Africa starting in the 16th century, they found people who simply could not withstand superior European technology and organization. Had Africa been able to trade as readily as Europe, it probably would have developed similar to Europe. Lack of trade is a society-killer.

But Free Trade between nations is a myth – it has never happened and never can happen. If you brought together the two most honest nations and negotiated the most fair and square free trade deal, you still wouldn’t have free trade because each nation is working under a different tax and regulatory system. Each nation will also almost certainly have developmental differences which means they might be better at this, worse at that and so on back and forth between them. So even with the most honest approach, you still won’t have free trade – the internal differences between the trade partners will work out that one of them gains an advantage over the other. And here’s the spoiler: outside suckers like the USA (and Britain in the 19th century when they became the first nation to try Free Trade), nobody is honest. Everyone is lying, cheating and stealing to the largest extent possible. Bribes, subsidies, secret tariffs and bizarre regulatory mazes are designed to wring every last advantage for their side. Back in the 1980’s when we were all upset about Japanese car imports hardly anyone noticed that the reason the Japanese were able to dump their products in the USA was because their market was protected…not officially but through a maze of regulations and social constructs which essentially kept American automobiles out of Japan (in spite of Japanese loving every last bit of American pop culture and thus being primed to buy a Chevy). On and on it goes like that – Trump is right: they have been ripping us off.

But, as noted, even if they weren’t stealing, free trade is still a blind. Because even if a foreigner can make something for us better, faster and cheaper that isn’t the only consideration. Our people need to work. Our people need to have dignified jobs and lives. Our nation needs to be safe in a crisis. We need to be able to do things.

The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore was partially collapsed in March of 2024 – officials now say they hope to have a replacement bridge up by the end of 2028. More than four years later! And if you really think a bunch of Democrats in Baltimore will meet that time line then I’ve got a collapsed bridge to sell you. It took less time to build the entire Golden Gate which is a bigger bridge. We’re currently constructing the USS Enterprise (CVN-80) which is a replacement for USS Enterprise (CVN-65) and the newer ship is going to take twice as long to build as the older even though there is no significant difference in tonnage or layout. We see things everywhere taking longer and longer and costing more and more – and, sure, taxes and regulations are playing their huge role here but it is also that we simply don’t make as much stuff as we used to so we’re dependent upon unreliable foreign suppliers and we’re increasingly using cheap, illegal labor which is totally unskilled (some of the new home construction done by illegals is atrociously bad). Suppose we got into a big war and needed to build lots of things very fast – as we had to in World War Two? Right now, we simply can’t do it – we lack the physical plant and the domestic skills.

In order to maintain the irreducible minimum of required capacity, we’re going to have to Protect certain industries and trades from foreign competition, even if that competition is superior (usually it isn’t, though; just compare your garbage Chinese-made drill with that American-made one that you’ve had in your garage for 40 years). In food, we must not import any of soybeans, corn, wheat, beef, pork, poultry and dairy products. In industry we must make all our own steel and aluminum, all our own lumber, all our own trucks, trains, planes, all our own power lines and associated equipment…we must as far as possible drill, baby drill for oil and natural gas and build sufficient nuke plants to ensure a glut of electrical production capacity. And we must do this even if it ends up more expensive – but it won’t because here is the dirty, little secret the Free Traders don’t want to tell you…prices in the USA fell continuously from the end of the War of 1812 until the creation of the Fed in 1913. The reason we need to import cheap consumer goods is because the deliberate use of inflation to sustain the banking system has priced us out of our own economy. If we go to sound money (I’d prefer the Gold Standard, but lets go baby-steps here) and try to eliminate inflation (rather than keep to the Fed’s ruinous and insane policy of ensuring at least 2% annual inflation) then we will see prices drop year over year as increased capacity and productivity drive down prices at the consumer level. We can start getting actually rich again.

And as we produce again, we can really trade again – it isn’t trade if I send a billion dollars I printed up for Chinese goods. That is just robbery. Trade is when I send China a billion dollars worth of goods and I buy a billion dollars worth of Chinese goods. Trade reciprocity…actual trade. I get this, you get that. Not I get your substandard consumer good and you get my money which you use to buy bonds and political influence over my Ruling Class. The exchange of goods and services is trade…not slips of paper. And it would be honest trade – and if China won’t buy from us because they demand I allow myself to be ripped off, then they are simply barred from my market…which they can’t survive, so they’ll actually have to be honest about it. Sucks to be them. I don’t care.

And here’s something to consider – once you think about it, this all makes sense. Certainly makes more sense than blaming tariffs for the Great Depression when you’re completely ignoring the massive financial, social and material dislocations in the period 1914 forward by war, disease and revolutionary overthrow of long-established nations and relationships. Tariffs certainly didn’t cause the Depression – if they played a role in extending it then this was secondary to all the massive government spending which misallocated resources from economic need to political favor. We’ve been living in an economic dream world since FDR…and in a Free Trade nightmare since Bretton Woods in 1944. Our economy is hollowed out, our technical abilities are atrophied, our people have fallen into welfare dependency and drug addiction…while a certain class is happy to sit back and watch as long as their stocks go up 7% per year. Enough of this. Back to the real world. As Trump said, the operation has been a success…the patient is on the mend. It is going to hurt – but healing from terrible illness and injury always does…but we’re restoring ourselves to health.

The Rich, Lazy West Needs a Challenge

Mark Noonan25 Comments

Earlier today I came across yet another one of those stories of the horrific effects of gender mutilation of children. This story was told by the sister of one such boy who’s life was pretty much wrecked by it: the usual thing – kid is depressed and out of sorts, diagnosed after cursory examination as “gender dysphoria” and we’re off to the races. Puberty blockers, dress like a girl, change your pronouns…in this case, it was fortunate that the poor boy held back from “bottom surgery” (you know, where they cut off a child’s genitalia) but the final result was still a completely messed up life. Now out in the world – his sister doesn’t know where – living his life as a gay man.

You can’t, you know?, unblock puberty. Once you mess with that natural development of the human body you can’t have a do-over on it. It either happens in the natural course of events, or it is prevented from happening and so never occurs. And you need to really consider it. Puberty is not just the development of sexual capability. You don’t just grow a beard or breasts depending…your whole body changes and your brain becomes a mature, adult brain. You stop that from happening and you will never be what you were supposed to be. This is why de-transitioners still report massive problems. Relieved that they no longer have to go through the hormones and such, but still permanently mentally and physically crippled by the process. But one thing really struck me: at the end of her story, the lady was still saying that her brother’s “gender dysphoria” wasn’t properly treated. That is the whole problem.

There is no such thing as “gender dysphoria”.

Oh, I know: any Lefty or such who comes across this will reject that statement in fury and refer me to The Science. There are studies! Yeah, whatever. I don’t care. It doesn’t exist. Nobody is born in the wrong body. Nobody is unsure of what their gender is. To me, it isn’t even a psychological problem: it is just stupid. Something bored rich people do.

Do keep in mind that everyone in the West – even the poorest Westerners – are bored, rich people. Bored, rich people who don’t know anything…and so are easily convinced that you can change your gender like changing your socks.

The other day I came across this Tik Tok video of a young lady – maybe 20 to 25 years old – who was having a meltdown over having to work a 40 hour week and pay for her apartment and doing everything for herself (you know: cooking, cleaning). There were, naturally, a lot of “suck it up, sunshine” comments on it and that is a correct enough attitude as far as it goes. But it really didn’t address the source of the lady’s problem: life is nearly effortless and she was upset that it wasn’t completely effortless. She really wasn’t putting all that much effort into it. So, why can’t she just live and not have to put any effort into it? Why wont someone just take care of her so she can just do her thing?

But then you think about it: what would be her thing? Probably some mix of going out to eat, shopping, texting, posting on social media, going to a show. In other words: nothing. She doesn’t have a thing. She doesn’t have a life. She’s a bored rich person who lacks any conception of higher things. That combined with the story of the ruined boy’s life came together and struck me with great force: the real crisis of our time is a rising generation of people who know nothing, can do nothing, have no real imagination but are bored. Very, very bored.

A few years back one of the social media jokesters – observing a story of kids graduating high school when illiterate – observed that if you spend 12 years learning something, you shouldn’t just be able to read, you should be Batman. That really did cut to the chase: we’re sending kids to 12 years of school – and as they want to make pre-K to Graduate School free, the demand is that we send kids to school for 20 years – and we’re really not getting much of a product out of the effort. Over the past few weeks college kids at elite universities have been out in force chanting “from the river to the sea” and, when asked, they can’t identify which river or which sea. College kids. Elite universities. They don’t know basic facts about geography. We’ve all seen this for years. Getting a degree doesn’t require effort; it just requires being there. This is why people are paying $250,000.00 per kid for coaches to help them check off the boxes demanded for Ivy League admission. These coaches are not helping kids master knowledge…they’re telling them what to say and do, what social activities to engage in. In other words, they’re teaching the kids to fake it until they make it.

Now, imagine a world where the kids were actually challenged from Day One. Instead of just letting them slide – because that is easier for the adults – we made them work? Think about it: we’re a very rich society. In 2019 – the most recent year full numbers are available for – we spent a total of $752.3 billion on K-12 education. We had 48 million kids in school that year. That’s $15,600.00 per kid. A teacher with 25 kids in her class represents $390,000.00 in expenditure…and we’re not even getting literacy out of it!

Educating kids isn’t hard. I know teachers like to say it is, but it isn’t. Kids are freaking sponges for knowledge. They want to know. They want to get better at it. They may buck fiercely against the more boring, drudge-like aspects of it (like learning multiplication and such) but they still want to master it. For their own self esteem. To shine among peers. To figure it out. They are, in fact, learning all the time: someone is giving them an education every minute they are awake. It is just that these days, since the adults who are supposed to care have abdicated, it is social media, gaming and Tik Tok influencers who are teaching them…so, they hate Israel without knowing why, are sure that the Climate God is angry and, hey, maybe I’m not a boy after all? That purple-haired xir on Instagram gets 10,000 likes per post and xi say xir not a boy! And that is how it goes. Rich kids, knowing nothing and without anything to do, simply find something to do…something which for a completely uneducated mind seems to offer an explanation of life.

But suppose we spent that $390,000.00 per classroom actually challenging the kiddies? Making them do the work? They will respond to it, just as kids always have. Even if the response was not exactly what the teacher demanded. Churchill’s teachers forcefully demanded that he learn Latin and Greek…he stubbornly refused, even in the face of severe corporeal punishment. Some kids are like that. But he also went and read English literature of the highest order and learned the structure of the English language in order to show his teachers what he could do: his act of defiance was to learn something else and better than any one teacher could have done. “We shall fight them in the fields” had its origin in an 8 year old boy who simply refused to learn Latin.

But the main thing is that he was challenged. He wasn’t allowed to do nothing. His teachers and his parents insisted that he get on and get the work done, even though he was a child of privilege (the grandson of a Duke, after all) and would, in the nature of things, likely be able to take a Ruling Class sinecure. They still pushed. Because you have to push kids. They desperately want to know, but being immature they also always want the shortcut and would prefer to skate. For the past 40 years or so, we’ve been all shortcut and skating – and now we’ve got anti-Semite college students who would make Streicher blush and kids sure that God and Nature placed them in the wrong body. We do have to reverse this.

We need first and foremost to dispense with the current education regime. It is so corrupt and useless that it cannot be reformed. We can’t abolish it right now because too many people are making money off it, but we must start to build a parallel education system which will eventually replace it. In our Red States we should be seeking to create schools that will really challenge the kids. Make them learn. Wash them out if they refuse to learn – for a while there’s still going to be the regular public school system where we can put the precious child mommy doesn’t want challenged in. But parents who have some grit and kids who will accept some discipline…lets have at it. Let us teach an 8 year old Latin. And get them outdoors and exercising. And learning to shoot and otherwise handle weapons. Fix a car, build a fence. Can you imagine a future world, just 20 years from now, where we have a cadre of kids who are deeply instructed, physically fit and armed? How safe and stable will that world be? We won’t have exactly created a generation of Batman…but compared to the sorry specimens that will come out of public schools, we may as well have.

The future can’t be ours. As always, the future belongs to who is there. Right now, what’s going to be there is a kid unsure of gender but certain The Jews are bad. This doesn’t sound too good to me. But we have the power to place in that future – competing with the purple haired ignoramuses – a group of kids who both know and can do.

I think we should do it.

South Africa’s Failed Promise: A Warning for the USA

Mark Noonan1 Comment

How are things in South Africa? Not too well:

The peace of a normally tranquil suburban road near South Africa’s capital, Pretoria, is being shattered by the sound of drilling.

These are not prospectors looking for a new source of the country’s mineral wealth, but workers digging for an arguably more precious resource: water.

Private boreholes – like this one being excavated in Garsfontein – are springing up across the wealthier neighbourhoods in the country’s economic heartland, where taps have been running dry.

Why have they been running dry? Not for lack of water – it is for lack of power to keep the pumps running:

South Africa’s state power utility Eskom may have to increase power cuts to an unprecedented level this winter, a company executive said on Thursday, as the country grapples with its worst power crisis on record.

This is leading to some interesting, new experiences of South Africans (aside from having to drill their own wells):

The death toll from a cholera outbreak in South Africa has climbed to 26 in recent days, with dozens more hospitalized while frustration mounts over the government’s response to the disease, which is common in several areas of Africa but rarely spreads in this country…

…Analysts point to chronic power outages that have left economically impoverished areas of South Africa without electricity for up to 12 hours a day as winter takes hold in the Southern Hemisphere.

The South African government response? Blame (and punish) whitey:

Newly-drafted regulations in South Africa are sparking anger over water usage for white people. The nation continues to grapple with the idea of race quota politics aimed at addressing the inequalities caused by apartheid.

Last month, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) government published draft regulations that would implement race quotas for the allocation of water use licenses for businesses.

South Africa is a civilization in collapse. And it is rather sad – I had some hope early on that they’d avoid what the rest of Africa went through when it transitioned to majority black rule. Mandela, especially, impressed as he did speak strongly for racial reconciliation and then, most incredibly, voluntarily left power when he could have easily set himself up as yet another African “President for life”. I figured that after a while of trying Socialism (the ANC emerged out of Communism, of course) wiser heads would prevail and they’d get to work building the wealth necessary to raise the black majority up to First World economic standards. South Africa is a very large country (doesn’t look like it on the map, but its more than 471,000 square miles) which is just slopping over with natural resources. It also inherited a functioning, First World economic system and infrastructure. All it would have taken was work – lots and lots of hard work. And time: at least a century to fully complete the process.

But who wants to work and take all that time?

After Mandela, the ANC opted for favoritism and graft. They took the wealth of South Africa and spent it on themselves and their cronies. This did have the benefit of keeping the ANC in power against its weak and divided opposition but that money was supposed to be spent extending the economic system and infrastructure to black South Africa. It wasn’t spent on that – and over the last decade or so, they didn’t even allocate enough money to maintain the infrastructure they inherited…and so the power and water crisis. And as that crisis deepens the ANC is opting for ever more strident racial politics – it is all whitey’s fault! The legacy of Apartheid! Aside from their proposal to dole out water based on race there is also a growing movement to confiscate white-owned farms (white South Africans do own most of South Africa’s agricultural land) – this is a page out of Zimbabwe.

And it is useful to recall what happened in Zimbabwe. As the post-white government there floundered deeper into corruption and economic decline, they confiscated almost all the white-owned farm land and passed it out to cronies. The drawback here (aside from the injustice) is that these people had no idea how to run a modern, cash-economy farm. Most native African farmers are still subsistence farmers – that means they grow enough for themselves with a small amount leftover to sell for the goods they can’t make themselves. There is a huge difference between subsistence and market agriculture and you can’t just willy-nilly switch from one to the other. You have to learn how to modern farm – and it takes time to do so.

In the end, those confiscated farms (which used to be a breadbasket for Africa) collapsed under mismanagement. The white farmers mostly left but some stayed…on the small plots they were able to keep these (mostly older) white farmers set to work, and taught young black Zimbabweans how to farm. In a few years, these small farms were doing great and while still white-owned, the now very aged white farmers were pretty much retired while the black farm workers were doing well. The Zimbabwe government had a response for all this: confiscate the farms and kick out not just the few remaining white farmers, but also the skilled black farmers working the land. These farms then, too, collapsed under mismanagement.

This is what many in South Africa are proposing to repeat.

And it all comes down to racism, though not as the Global Racial Narrative holds. It isn’t whitey keeping people down. Sure, under Apartheid (and Jim Crow here in the USA) that was the case…but once Apartheid (and Jim Crow) are gone the whole thing becomes a matter of learning and working.

The learning is rather crucial. You don’t just know how to do things. Everything you know was taught to you. You were instructed, even if you don’t remember it. Everyone has to learn.

The economic system and structure of South Africa on the glad morn when Apartheid ended was the product of Dutch and English knowledge applied to South African conditions over a period of centuries. It didn’t just happen – and it wasn’t stolen from anyone. When the Boers showed up in what became Orange Free State there simply wasn’t much there. They reached agreement with some local chiefs about where they could settle but other chiefs were marauding through the area and the Boers had to fight them to secure their lands. That done, they just set to work. It wasn’t easy. They were pioneers in what was mostly a howling wilderness; they had to learn how to farm and work the land to best effect. And they did so.

Make no mistake about it – from the get-go the Boers considered black Africans inferior and would not admit them into Boer society outside a subservient role. They did treat blacks unfairly. You can’t forget that nor undo what happened. But what is crucial to understand is that the Boers worked – they built up out of nothing a modern, functioning society. Around the edges of this society lived black Africans…who also started to learn. But the learning curve was steep and the Boers were exclusionary so there was no full imparting of knowledge from Boer to black African. But there was some and over time black Africans started to enter the modern society the Boers (and, later, the British) were building in South Africa. But most did not; weren’t interested, didn’t like the whites (for good reason) and so kept to their immemorial ways.

But the thing about old ways is that they can’t compete with modern ways. As South Africa went ever higher, more and more black Africans wanted a piece of that pie. The Boers, though, didn’t want to give them a piece and so developed Apartheid. They did want black labor, but not blacks as social equals. Part of this was, of course, sheer malevolent racism…but they also knew that to turn over the country to black Africans would be a disaster. Black Africans wouldn’t know how to run it – just in a practical, day to day sense. It takes time for a people to integrate into new ways of doing things. The Romans governed Britain for more than 350 years – bringing all sorts of social and material advancement to what had been a very backwards people. When the Romans pulled out, the British people forgot how to make bricks.

Bricks. You know: simple rectangular things anyone can make.

Except not everyone can make them. You need the skills – and you also need the settled, regular economic and political system which allows people to take the time to make things like bricks. When the Romans exited they took the skills and the system with them. At the end of Apartheid the black majority simply wasn’t ready to do things like maintain and expand a modern, electrical production and distribution system. White South Africans knew how – and the post-Apartheid government should have had these whites instruct. Instead, they systemically fired the white workers and replaced them with blacks who didn’t have the first clue and only got the job because they were cronies of some ANC power broker.

We’re not supposed to say that, don’t you know? That is, we can’t say that a population of black people is incapable. But it is what it is. Certainly, part of the reason they were incapable was white refusal to teach them over a period of decades. That was grossly unjust – but once again, it is what it is. For whatever bad or good reasons, the black majority simply didn’t know what needed to be done. To get them to the level of the white South Africans was going to take a long time. But nobody can campaign on a promise that you grandchildren will be doing great. The political reality of the sudden transition to black majority rule was always going to be: “vote for me and everything will be perfect”…soon to be followed, after inevitable failure, by “that wicked minority has sabotaged us.”

And it is racism – now just directed at the white minority instead of the black majority. The only way the ANC can fix South Africa’s problems is to enact policies which will eventually lead to ANC political defeat. Can’t have that, right? Much easier (if you’re rich, juiced in and have a government-supplied power generator) to just keep with the current system behind your walled and privately-guarded neighborhood while everything outside goes to hell in a handbasket (yes, Ruling Classes are that cruel and indifferent: they really don’t care how much suffering there is as long as they stay rich – not for nothing did Our Lord say the love of money is the root of all evil). I can easily see the ANC eventually going for anti-white pogroms…which will lead to lots of death and destruction and increased poverty for poor blacks, especially. But what of it? As long as the bosses keep theirs…and as long as the Global Elite looks the other way because the last thing the Global Elite wants is for everyone to pay attention to what is going on in South Africa.

Here’s the bad news – they are bringing this to the USA. Via affirmative action placement in all our institutions and an increasingly brazen racial spoils system the physical infrastructure of the USA collapses in pace with the social collapse as racial animosity increases because people are perceiving that there is a double standard (almost Apartheid-like double standard) in how people are treated by the system. Just as in South Africa, it is unsustainable. Eventually you either have to have people who know what they’re doing, or the infrastructure falls apart (you know; like with bridge collapses and train derailments)…and as the racial divide becomes more stark in how people are treated, social cohesion collapses as people break up into warring tribes, each just looking to loot a bit more than the other tribes.

If we want this to stop then we simply have to stop it. All racial considerations must be dropped. In fact, probably best if we made racial categorization illegal; that is, explicitly forbidding people to take race (or gender, religion, orientation, etc) into consideration on any decision. Merit must be the absolute dictator – from kindergarten to the heights of economic and political power. Anyone who can’t cut it…well, they can’t cut it. Maybe the reason they can’t cut it is because of some injustice in the past. Doesn’t matter. Either you can, or you can’t. If you can’t, then the world still needs ditch diggers…be a good ditch digger and maybe your kid will go to college and be one of those who can cut it higher up the ladder. Sorry that life can suck at times – but all work is honorable and we’re trying to build for the future, not make you feel better today.

What we certainly can’t do is go on as we are – because if we do then in 10 years we’ll have “load shedding” for electricity use as cholera spreads…and while a corrupt Ruling Class steals the last nickel we have. Better for a time a of reality – where we simply call things as they are, and build up from where we are, not where we wished we were.

How Did We Get Black Nazis?

Mark Noonan15 Comments

Kanye West pretty much ended his career today by speaking up for Hitler. Pro tip: not a good idea. But we shouldn’t just condemn Kanye and move on. This needs to be thought about.

Why would any person – especially a black person – in 2022 have the least kind thing to say about Hitler?

Ignorance.

But not just like we might think of it – for a long while, we all figured that it was just ignorant fools who kept the Nazi flame alive. But I’ve been looking into it and pondering it for a while now and it isn’t just that simple.

The origins of this particular problem – pro-Nazi attitudes – stems from the immediate aftermath of World War Two. Hitler was dead and his movement banned and most Germans, having the utter shock of the exceptionally violent (and cruel, on the part of the Russians and French) invasion of Germany in mind, dropped Nazism like a bad habit. This is why almost every Kraut you talked to in 1945 would say he wasn’t a Nazi. Of course, most of them were – from worker to nobleman, most of them had signed on for the ride, especially by the summer of 1940 when Hitler reached his pinnacle. It was, as I have noted before, a pagan carnival – as long as you obeyed, things were great for you…and even as the war ground on and defeat loomed, most retained their faith until an American or Russian boot kicked the door in. But even in that spring of ruin in 1945, there were those who kept the faith.

People like the Belgian Leon Degrelle, Luftwaffe pilot Hans-Ulrich Rudel, Waffen-SS General Paul Hausser never stopped being Nazis. Of course, law and public opinion kept them from overtly being Nazi. What they did was far more subtle: playing on popular sympathy for combat veterans, they first latched themselves on to Wehrmacht generals trying to get pensions for German soldiers and with this sympathy, they started to whitewash the Waffen-SS. It was just a multinational military force against Communism! The War Crimes either didn’t happen, or where it was incontrovertible, that was carried out by Himmler’s people, not the Waffen-SS! And it was all BS from start to finish – the Waffen-SS were beasts in human skin who carried out massacres all over German-occupied Europe. But, it worked – especially as the Cold War came in and we felt we had to make nice with the Krauts, this drivel about the Waffen-SS being somehow apart from the SS gained purchase. This effort, along with later developing efforts to first downplay and then deny the Holocaust suckered lots of people in – the Germans in WWII weren’t that bad and the Holocaust was exaggerated if not false.

This, in turn, was seized upon by various Muslim organizations which had an interest in delegitimizing Israel. They broadcast these concepts far and wide – and also attached them to anti-Imperialism…the Germans fought France and Britain, after all: the colonial overlords of most of the Muslim world prior to WWII. And now this is where it gets interesting.

Because while these lies were gaining purchase around the world the teaching of history ceased in any meaningful sense. Sure, the kiddies these days probably have a lesson plan where they are told Nazis were bad people but I highly doubt they fully explain why the Nazis were bad or who did the most to stop them. A recent poll showed that only about one in five British youth have a favorable opinion of Churchill, the prime scourge of Nazis from the moment they rose out of the gutter. Churchill, you see?, was just a racist imperialist. But you can’t teach that Churchill was a racist imperialist unless you downplay or ignore Nazism. There is no real upside for the modern Left to talk about the Nazis in detail – because if you do, you eventually have to get around to pointing out that a bunch of straight, white, male Christians played the primary role in putting them down. Talking about them in general – calling them White Supremacists, for instance – is very useful because that fits with the Narrative. If you started pointing out that they were German-supremacists it starts to get complicated and doesn’t fit the Narrative.

But what this boils down to is that you have a couple generations by now rising to adulthood with no real knowledge of the Nazis but who can easily access on line the white-wash drivel about the Nazis. This is how a black man, just as well as anyone else, can be suckered in.

I’m sure West in his wanderings came across various sites where all or part of the Nazi whitewash is available. And more often than not, probably also tied to anti-Israel websites which will hold to the seemingly reasonable “we just want to stop the Israeli occupation” position…without, unless you deep dive, telling you that they consider all of Israel to be “occupied territory” and that the dream is to push the Jews into the sea. But at places where you can learn about how horrible the Israeli “occupation” is you’re going to be exposed to people who will downplay the Holocaust, assert that while there are good Jews, look at how many of them are in banking and entertainment…and doesn’t it seem funny that we give money to Israel? Laced with a bit of “hey, I’m no anti-Semite, but I am anti-Zionist”.

Additionally, West and his generation likely were never taught much about the Abolition movement. Nor given any instruction on just what Madison and Jefferson were up to besides being slave owners. What they have been given is a two-dimensional, cartoonish view of America where white Christians are always wrong and anything worthwhile was done by non-whites/non-Christians in spite of oppression. They are primed for drivel – it just so happens that the particular drivel that West latched on to was pro-Nazi. But other kids are out there banging the Maoist drum as if the Cultural Revolution never happened – which, for them, it never did because they were never told about it.

It is a huge problem. It is fixable – and in just a few years if we gain control of school boards and force them to so much as teach some basics. But regardless of what we do going forward, we’re going to have some millions of people who will always be open to lies beause they were never told anything true. People like West are navigating through lies traveling at warp speed with no underlying knowledge to bounce against those lies. So look for more people to come out and earnestly assert bizarre falsehoods.

The Death of Thought

Mark Noonan31 Comments

Saw a Tweet by Tom Nichols – you know, The Expert who deplores how we stupid people just don’t get it – bemoaning that America is being burned to the ground by people like Trump because the Elite never accepted them. Now, to be sure, there would be a bit to that – even when everyone officially loved Trump, he was considered a boor. A flashy, crude bull in the Ruling Class china shop. His family was rich, but still very nouveau; the Trump family started to pick up some money with Donald’s grandfather, but it was dad Fred Trump who got them rich. Basically, the Trump’s haven’t had their money long enough for it to have the stench of work removed.

Nichols isn’t rich – he does well enough, but he’s not one of the rich people who probably despised Trump all along. But while not rich, he is of the class. That is, the Ruling Class. He’s got his degrees and he’s got his positions in the Establishment and, dammit, he’s mad at us for not doing as we’re told – just as the upper class of New York City couldn’t stand Trump for not trying to be like them. But what got me thinking was how Nichols is claiming that Trump, et al are trying to burn it all down. In a flash it came to me what Nichols’ real problem is: he’s never once thought about things.

If you get an engineering or medical degree then, at the end of the day, you had to show you could do some engineering or medicine before you got it. There’s just no other way to do it. On the other hand, if your degree is in history or philosophy or such like, you don’t have to show the faintest thought about the subject: to get the degree, all you must do is repeat back what the professor told you. This doesn’t mean a person with a liberal arts degree can’t think, but it does mean that such a person doesn’t have to think in order to get the degree. And, these days with all the dumbing down, you can get all the way to doctorate without showing the least spark of original thought. My bet, actually, is that most degree programs in the so-called liberal arts these day are designed to discourage thought: they want people who regurgitate information but they don’t want anyone questioning the facts or drawing an unapproved conclusion from the facts as presented.

Man has no alternative, except between being influenced by thought that has been thought out and being influenced by thought that has not been thought out. — G.K. Chesterton

Chesterton there was discussing specifically why we study philosophy, which he admitted can be a bit of a bore. But do keep in mind that in Chesterton’s day, he was talking about the educated people in this matter. He wasn’t expecting the store clerk to take the time to learn Aristotle and Descartes. Be ok if he did, of course, but Chesterton knew that most common people don’t have the time nor inclination for such things. But society, as a whole, is going to be ruled by one or the other – thought that has been thought out, or thought that hasn’t been. It was and remains the duty of those who rule us – by fate, inheritance or transient political victory – to be those who have thought their thought out. Because if we are ruled by people who haven’t thought things out then you’ll get…well, you’ll get what we’ve got.

Over in New York, governor Hochul is in some trouble – may even get beaten on the 8th. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Even in a GOP wave year, New York – really New York City – is so reliably Democrat that the particular conditions wouldn’t matter. There would be so many Democrat votes that the Democrat will win. But there’s a problem and it is particular, especially, to New York City. Crime is rampant. Now, the MSM tries to tell us that because the murder rate is still lower than the peak about 30 years ago, this complaint about crime is just a GOP psy-op designed to fool people into voting for them. It is another example of the MSM’s willingness to say things not only divorced from reality, but from the reality the reporters know from personal experience. The regime propagandists of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia weren’t this compliant! The MSMers know. They live in NYC. They can see it with their own eyes: people waltzing into stores to rob/trash them. Goods in stores increasingly locked up to prevent wholesale looting. The feeling of being unsafe on the streets and the subways. Everyone in NYC feels it. They know it. And while the MSMers are going to loyally carry that water, the voters of NYC are under no such obligation. To be sure, if Hochul is booted on Tuesday it won’t be because NYC went red – but it could because a lot of Blue NYC just stayed home rather than ratify the homeless bum pissing on the curb outside.

And the problem in NYC stems from the imposition of certain policies: most notably the end of cash bail. If you haven’t paid attention to it, you should, because ending cash bail has become the mark of Leftist justice reform. They’ve put it on mute the past six months for political reasons but make no mistake about it: ending cash bail is something they are determined to do. The theory behind this is that cash bail unfairly burdens poor people who are disproportionately minority. This is absolutely true. I mean, no duh: the poor person, whether criminal or just some poor schmuck who got picked up, doesn’t have the money for bail nor for good lawyers who can get bail lowered or removed. Obviously, any system of bail is going to hit against the poor vastly more than against any rich person.

But the solution – ending cash bail – is obviously something which was not thought out. I can totally dig trying to find some way to lower the burden on the poor, but blanket removal of bail requirement was going to have that effect: petty criminals would feel invincible. They wouldn’t even have to spend the night in jail. And people of low moral character would be encouraged to start engaging in crime – especially theft – for that same reason: no real sanction. They can figure: how likely is my trial for stealing $500.00 worth of stuff from CVS even going to happen? And that is if they even bother making an arrest. After all, what cop is going to bother arresting someone – taking that risk and that extra work – just to see the guy walk out of the precinct before the cop has even written up the complaint?

On and on like that, all across the nation and in every aspect of our lives we are burdened by the results of policies imposed by people who are sure they are right, but clearly never thought about what they believe. Sowell has been writing about this for decades. I’ve read those books but only just now am I fully understanding what his main complaint was and is: nobody is thinking. It is all very mindless what goes on. All of our problems – our lack of industrial capacity, or lack of energy production, our food shortages, our crumbling infrastructure, our crime rate, our collapsing education system, our drug addiction, our homelessness, our open border…all if it, every last bit, the result of the ruthless imposition of policies nobody thought about. Nobody sat down and said, “so, what will happen if we do this? It was all just done.

And people like Tom Nichols want us to stick with that. And for a long while I thought that it was, perhaps, pettiness or some other normal, human emotion preventing his like from seeing that Trump really isn’t all that bad (I mean, my goodness, compared to Joe Biden!) and that some good things come from ruthless rejection of Liberal/Left certainties. But then you see that Tweet and you remember that people like him are all-in on fighting Putin over Ukraine and then it really hits you: they’ve never thought about one darned thing.

We have to defend Ukraine!

Why?

To save Democracy!

If Ukraine falls I’ll lose my right to vote in the USA?

Putin stooge!

No matter what what way you ask about it, you won’t get an actual answer. We’re backing up Ukraine – at the risk of WWIII – to save Ukraine from Russia, or NATO from Russia, or Democracy from Russia…and blah, blah, blah. But no explanation of how, say, changing the Russian flag over Donetsk for a Ukrainian flag will actually benefit us. We just have to do it! Russia is bad, don’t you know! Don’t you remember Reagan!

Yeah. As I recall what Reagan wanted was to stop the USSR from expanding outside the USSR via proxy wars and, of course, to get a real nuclear arms reduction treaty with them. He got that. How is that similar to stopping Russia from taking over ethnic Russian territory governed from Moscow prior to 1991?

You’ll never get an answer to that. Nor to why we would, say, defend Germany from Russia rather than Russia from Germany. I mean, on the whole, the Germans are working against us in foreign affairs. They are also major economic competitors who don’t have to pay for an army because we’re there for them. Any chance we should reassess this situation?

No! You Putin Nazi Puppet!

Note that I’m not saying that defending Ukraine is wrong – I’m merely saying that no thought is happening behind our efforts and any attempt at thought is immediately shouted down. And the shouts are led by the people who supposedly have the superior education and thus can think things out better than us.

Until we clear all these people out – not just the politicians but the corporate bosses, the bureaucrats, the generals and admirals, the professors – everyone in charge, we’re not going to fix this. I would seriously expect better results at, say, Defense if I randomly selected some sergeant and made him Chief of Staff. I’d have some confidence, that is, that our four star sergeant might think about things before he made a decision…you know, like what might be the long-term effects of lowering physical requirements so that girls can be in combat outfits. Same with everything – put a plumber in charge of Harvard’s Department of Philosophy and there’s just that chance he’d crack open some of the books and think about whether or not what they’re saying is worth any human being knowing. They really do all have to go. I don’t care what they do, but they must leave. Anyways, might be fun to watch them try to tackle a job which requires results. But, more importantly, once they’re gone, we might be able to openly think about what we want.

What Are We Not Teaching Our Children?

Mark Noonan11 Comments

This article is an absolutely fascinating look into the world of transgenderism and de-transition. To nutshell it: the young lady was a confused teen (as we all were to one extent or another) and happened upon a series of Tumblr communities which led her to the path of becoming transgender. After some years in that world, she turned from it, de-transitioned and is now trying to put her life back together.

What caught my attention the most if the very cult-like atmosphere of the transgender community: how it is vigorously affirmed and rewarded in the transgender community and how our whole society is institutionally supportive of it. It is very much not something that comes to a person after careful, rational thought and weighing of risks and rewards, but as a fashion which, if you accept it, you’ll suddenly be changed from an oppressor-nobody into a hero-victim. It is a very toxic but very seductive thing.

After I read it and pondered it for a while, I recalled a passage. Of course it is from G K Chesterton:

Of course, the main fact about education is that there is no such thing. It does not exist, as theology or soldiering exist. Theology is a word like geology, soldiering is a word like soldering; these sciences may be healthy or no as hobbies; but they deal with stone and kettles, with definite things. But education is not a word like geology or kettles. Education is a word like “transmission” or “inheritance”; it is not an object, but a method. It must mean the conveying of certain facts, views or qualities, to the last baby born. They might be the most trivial facts or the most preposterous views or the most offensive qualities; but if they are handed on from one generation to another they are education. Education is not a thing like theology, it is not an inferior or superior thing; it is not a thing in the same category of terms. Theology and education are to each other like a love-letter to the General Post Office. Mr. Fagin was quite as educational as Dr. Strong; in practice probably more educational. It is giving something—perhaps poison. Education is tradition, and tradition (as its name implies) can be treason.

This first truth is frankly banal; but it is so perpetually ignored in our political prosing that it must be made plain. A little boy in a little house, son of a little tradesman, is taught to eat his breakfast, to take his medicine, to love his country, to say his prayers, and to wear his Sunday clothes. Obviously Fagin, if he found such a boy, would teach him to drink gin, to lie, to betray his country, to blaspheme and to wear false whiskers. But so also Mr. Salt the vegetarian would abolish the boy’s breakfast; Mrs. Eddy would throw away his medicine; Count Tolstoi would rebuke him for loving his country; Mr. Blatchford would stop his prayers, and Mr. Edward Carpenter would theoretically denounce Sunday clothes, and perhaps all clothes. I do not defend any of these advanced views, not even Fagin’s. But I do ask what, between the lot of them, has become of the abstract entity called education. It is not (as commonly supposed) that the tradesman teaches education plus Christianity; Mr. Salt, education plus vegetarianism; Fagin, education plus crime. The truth is, that there is nothing in common at all between these teachers, except that they teach. In short, the only thing they share is the one thing they profess to dislike: the general idea of authority. It is quaint that people talk of separating dogma from education. Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It is education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.

Children come in to the world as blank slates. Human children have a few very simple physical instincts but beyond that, everything they get into their heads was placed there by someone else. And it starts at the moment of birth (and maybe before). The infant human mind, provided it is physically healthy, absorbs gigantic amounts of information very rapidly. And we don’t even remember that exceptionally important part of our lives. I can dimly recall impressions of some things which happened when I was about 4. Prior to that: all blank. And my first connected memories – the first memories I could tell you a cohesive story about – are when I was about 7. And think of that: by the time I was 7 I could walk and talk, I could read and write a bit and do some basic sums. I was already well on my way to being what I was going to be.

But it wasn’t drawn out of me. There was nothing passive about it. Someone taught me. I was instructed on how to put on my pants. How to brush my teeth. How to hold a fork. I was entirely instructed in everything I knew until I grew old enough and knowledgeable enough to seek out information which was not being deliberately provided to me. And even then, I was merely taking information that someone else thought it would be good for people to know. I was not in any sense of the word a free agent. I could reason, especially as I got into my teens, but I wasn’t forging any new paths. I was still building knowledge.

Now, imagine if you will, as I sat there at the age of 14, all depressed because I wasn’t “cool” and I didn’t have the nice things others had and my parents were a bit off-kilter that I had found a community of people who told me I was depressed and felt alienated because I was actually X and if I would just join the X community, all my ills would be cured? At that age, I wasn’t remotely equipped to make such a decision. I was still a child. I had knowledge. I could reason. But I lacked the wisdom which can only come with age.

But that is precisely what happens to kids these days, as the linked article points out. The author found the community, learned its rules and then yearned for acceptance into it. Once she declared herself one of them, she received nothing but positive reinforcement for it and while her mother was dismayed, all official Authority told her that it was great and she was doing the right thing. There is only a very small chance a child can resist that. And this is especially true because in our modern world – especially over the past 20 to 30 years – even parents have refused to impart to their children the knowledge they have. The kids of the 21st century are rather cut adrift out there: no one says “it is thus, and so you must believe”. To do that is to be a dogmatic bigot, right? But as Chesterton points out, all education is the transmission of dogma. And if the parents of America won’t tell their children what is proper to believe, then somebody else will.

And don’t think that this is kids coaching kids. Kids don’t have anything to provide: they are still in the learning process. No kid sat around one day and all on his own decided he was trans. It not only doesn’t happen that way, it can’t happen that way. Someone has to tell the kid about transgenderism. There is nothing in nature or in the normal run of human family life which so much as implies that a person can be other than their biological sex. Every kid out there – and we see so many of them these days – who says they are trans are saying something they were instructed to say. And, bet on it, it was an adult who told them. The author of the article notes that the community she entered was filled with kids just like her – in the sense of being depressed and alienated. But it is inconceivable that a kid, all on his or her own, got the ball rolling. No, that would have been an adult. Or whole groups of adults: setting up communities which lure in the kids, propagandize them and then wait for the results. In other words, groomers almost certainly set these things up: people who want a steady supply of kids who will become what the adults wish them to become. The old, Catholic, Baptist and Jewish families produced steady crops of Catholics, Baptists and Jews because that is what they wanted – as hardly anyone really imparts their own views to their children, what we now have is others stepping in to get what they want.

What we are getting in our society today is not what we want. Outside a few loons hungry for attention, nobody looks at their infant child and goes, “I hope he wants to be a she”. No: the normal parent wants a copy: someone just like them. They see their boy or girl and imagine them doing normal boy or girl things leading up to a successful life, love and marriage and the production of grandchildren. And there is nothing wrong with that. There is nothing wrong with producing people just like yourselves. There are exceptions to the rule, of course, but the overwhelming bulk of people being decent, hardworking, law abiding citizens, a carbon copy is a laudable thing. But a very large number of parents aren’t doing it. That is, they aren’t taking the effort to impart knowledge.

They contract it out to the schools, to the TV, to the internet, to popular culture. Not all parents, but very large numbers of them. The author of the article gives the impression of parents who were a bit disconnected: after all, she had hours every day to spend on Tumblr being relentlessly propagandized. I’m not saying her parents were bad: I’m saying they didn’t take a deep enough interest. I can see a contrast in my own granddaughter: her father does let her waste some time playing video games but then he will take her out – to the park, up to Mt Charleston…somewhere, anywhere that doesn’t have internet access and where she has to physically move and engage in human interaction. I can’t know how she’ll end up, but I have my strong doubts she’ll wind up a sucker for a scam over the internet (her father carefully imparts to her how many scams there are out there). This must change: the family must become the primary source of information and the schools must only teach what the parents approve.

I’ve talked about this before, but this part of being a citizen: taking personal responsibility for ourselves, our families and our local communities. No more contracting out: we, the people, must take charge. And, hey, if there’s a local community out there who wants their children to learn about being transgender, that’s their business. As long as it is their decision, who am I to complain? But my bet is that if parents were fully engaged and insisting upon control of what goes into their children, you’d not hear a peep about it. Who in heck wants their kids to learn about that? Can’t be more than 1 or 2 percent: overly woke urban upper class people (mostly white, it goes without saying).

Lives are being destroyed – not just by this, but by so many other things. And it all comes back to this failure on the part of the adults to take charge and insist. Until we, the people, decide what is to be taught and to whom, this is just going to get worse. It is time to take a stand and start teaching what we want taught.

A Small Note on Why We Have Stupid People

Mark Noonan16 Comments

If you ever wondered why we have stupid people in the United States, Robert Stacy McCain points out the reason:

…Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) don’t want to admit the real nature of their own irrational prejudices, and Republicans are too polite to call them out on it. Has anyone in the Republican Party asked, for example, how much federal aid to education goes to elite private schools like Swarthmore College (annual tuition $49,104), where students enroll in “Queering God: Feminist and Queer Theology”? Why should the devout Catholic or Baptist be taxed to support such nonsense? Where are the GOP senators and congressmen demanding to know what kind of “education” taxpayers are being required to subsidize?

Because the Republicans are too polite (or too stupid) to call attention to what’s going on in our taxpayer-funded schools, a generation of young people has been indoctrinated in the anti-American prejudices of the Democrats who control university campuses…

Its not just that stupid people teach stupid things to youngsters but, also, because we refuse to stop the stupidity! If we want to stop the stupid, the first step is to stop paying for it…or, if that seems unfair, then at least insist that right next to Queering God there be a course on the works of C. S. Lewis or G. K. Chesterton. I’m all for kids being challenged in their views…and I think that Lewis is far more challenging than anything you’re likely to find in a major college these days (and let’s not even get into St. Thomas, or even Martin Luther, for our Protestant friends…). With the massive amounts of federal dollars pouring into education year after year, we do have a great deal of leverage…because regardless of ideology, the most important thing College Administrators serve is the dollar. We’re paying the piper, we should call the tune. Start making the dollars dependent upon intellectual diversity (ie, hiring even just a couple of moderately conservative professors every now and again) will start to break the stranglehold the left holds on higher education. And as an added benefit, the kids will actually learn something. You know, not just get a credential, but some education to go along with it.

Insanity on Campus

Mark Noonan7 Comments

When was the last time a student flunked out of college? I’m not talking about someone who hit the bong so often they just stopped going and dropped out. I want to know when was the last time someone attended class faithfully, attempted to do the course work and was found so lacking in ability that they were forced to leave college due to poor grades. I’ll bet it has been a long time – and if it does happen at all these days, I’ll further bet that such events are very few and very far between.

All of the lunacy we’ve seen on campus of late I trace back to the fact that you don’t need to be hard working or intelligent to get into college: all you need is money; and Uncle Sam will back a loan for you, if you don’t have any of your own. This has flooded colleges with vast numbers of people who don’t know much but who believe they do know quite a bit (after all, they’re in college, right? College people are smart, aren’t they? The current crop, however, is living off the intellectual reputation of those who went to college 50 or more years ago) – and college administrations quake in fear of them. Partially because the administrators are liberal and thus share a great deal of both the ignorance and the certainty of the students, but also because if you try to bring a bit of discipline to campus, you risk the revenue stream (a kid expelled is one less tuition check next semester – and if that happens often enough, there won’t be as much money to pay high salaries to professors and administrators).

It is a toxic stew – can’t risk the money; professors who are aged liberals; students who know next to nothing…and all stirred up by people who either just want a fracas, or who want to game the system to their own advantage (after all, if you’re set to graduate with a worthless “studies” degree next year, it is in your interest to demand that the college hire more people just like you).

There are colleges out there which don’t accept federal money and are thus free from all this – you never hear the kids at Christendom College or Hillsdale College demanding a “safe space”. This is the model we should take as our conservative alternative to the current higher education system. Either that, or make the federal money no-strings-attached – essentially say that as long as it is being used to educate kids, we don’t care what particular sort of education goes on (this has risks, of course – you could get a lot of Kook Universities springing up out there). But one thing is certain is that as long as we keep the current system, the lunacy will only get worse.

UPDATE: One of the events triggering the Missouri dust up was the alleged scrawling of a swastika made of feces. One small problem: no one has any actual evidence that such a thing occurred. We’ll have to see if any does come up. I doubt that it will: we’ve seen plenty of these alleged racist incidents turn out false, or at least entirely uncorroborated.

UPDATE II: Robert Tracinski writes up his own reform proposal – burn the universities to the ground. This is way too extreme, of course: such fires might spread to nearby property, some of which may be owned by sane people. So, I think my proposal still works better.

Orwell Was Only Off by 31 Years

Mark Noonan27 Comments

Just wow – from The College Fix, which I am assured is not a satirical website:

“America is the land of opportunity,” “There is only one race, the human race” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” are among a long list of alleged microaggressions faculty leaders of the University of California system have been instructed not to say.

These so-called microaggressions – considered examples of subconscious racism – were presented at faculty leader training sessions held throughout the 2014-15 school year at nine of the 10 UC campuses. The sessions, an initiative of UC President Janet Napolitano, aim to teach how to avoid offending students and peers, as well as how to hire a more diverse faculty…

…Other sayings deemed unacceptable include:

● “Everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough.”

● “Where are you from or where were you born?”

● “Affirmative action is racist.”

● “When I look at you, I don’t see color.”

These phrases in particular are targeted because they promote the “myth of meritocracy” or represent “statements which assert that race or gender does not play a role in life successes.” Others are said to be color blind, apparently a bad thing that indicates “that a white person does not want to or need to acknowledge race,” according to the handout, “Tool: Recognizing Microaggressions and the Messages They Send.”

If you’re thinking of going to college, I suggest a career in plumbing or farming – something which doesn’t require a person to be immersed in a place which says that meritocracy is racist.

The good news is that this sort of nonsense just cannot stand for long – the people who are de-educated in such a setting will simply not be able to compete in the real world and so those who managed to get a real education will outplay them for life’s rewards…

A Liberal Professor is Afraid of His Liberal Students

Mark Noonan11 Comments

Very interesting:

I’m a professor at a midsize state school. I have been teaching college classes for nine years now. I have won (minor) teaching awards, studied pedagogy extensively, and almost always score highly on my student evaluations. I am not a world-class teacher by any means, but I am conscientious; I attempt to put teaching ahead of research, and I take a healthy emotional stake in the well-being and growth of my students.

Things have changed since I started teaching. The vibe is different. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes scare me — particularly the liberal ones…

So, what is happening? This:

I have intentionally adjusted my teaching materials as the political winds have shifted. (I also make sure all my remotely offensive or challenging opinions, such as this article, are expressed either anonymously or pseudonymously). Most of my colleagues who still have jobs have done the same. We’ve seen bad things happen to too many good teachers — adjuncts getting axed because their evaluations dipped below a 3.0, grad students being removed from classes after a single student complaint, and so on.

I once saw an adjunct not get his contract renewed after students complained that he exposed them to “offensive” texts written by Edward Said and Mark Twain. His response, that the texts were meant to be a little upsetting, only fueled the students’ ire and sealed his fate. That was enough to get me to comb through my syllabi and cut out anything I could see upsetting a coddled undergrad, texts ranging from Upton Sinclair to Maureen Tkacik — and I wasn’t the only one who made adjustments, either…

That is all very disturbing, but nothing that we on the right haven’t been aware of for quite some time. I don’t know how old the author is – and he’s using a pseudonym – but given that he says he started teaching in 2006, I’m guessing he’s in his 30’s, and thus went to college early in the 21st century and that means he was born maybe around 1980 or so. I point out the age thing because this means the professor wasn’t around when political correctness first started to rear its ugly head in the 1980’s. He was just a kid and, at all events, the Powers That Be in higher education were just getting rolling on it with speech codes and other things. But the warning was issued by those on the right – if we start trying to classify speech as “good” or “bad”, then it would be those who complain the most who will rule the roost. If a subjective judgement by an individual is all it takes to get a thing condemned, then those who are most sensitive – or who claim to be most sensitive – will have veto power over what everyone else says. Needless to say, it was also easily understood that it would be hard left fanatics who would take most advantage of this because we on the right are not at all interested in stopping someone from talking while our people on the left have always been in favor of blocking speech which disputes leftwing ideology.

Unfortunately for a good liberal like this professor, there isn’t much he can do about it. Later in his article – which is very much worth reading – he traps himself firmly by agreeing that the social status of a person does play a role in the worth of that person’s statements. This flies in the face of two basic, Judeo-Christian concepts:

1. The social status of a person is irrelevant in determining the moral worth of the person – or of what the person says.

2. Human beings are capable of exercising reason to determine what is true.

A beggar can get it right, a king can get it wrong – of course, they can both get it wrong or both get it right. As persons they are capable of finding the truth and, as well, capable of getting lost in the weeds and never figuring out the truth. If the king and the beggar tell us two different things, then it is up to the rest of us to try and figure out if either or both of them are right or wrong…and that takes free inquiry…to give the beggar, say, 50% more credibility on the theory that a beggar must be a morally better person than the king (or vice versa) is to sabotage our inquiry from the start. We just have to take what they say and apply our reason and any ascertainable facts to their statements and come to our best judgement about it.

Liberals, these days, reject this – even our frightened professor; and even though he sees right in front of him – risking his entire career – the results of rejecting the basic concept of inherent moral human equality, regardless of station, and the necessity of applying facts and reason to all disputes. The professors only defense is to subscribe to these concepts…because then when confronted with a student complaining about a “trigger” in his lecture, he could reasonably say, “I’m sorry that what I said made you uncomfortable – let us discuss it further and see which one of us was correct – me in making the statement, or you in feeling uncomfortable hearing it”. After all, not all feelings of discomfort are reasonable – and, in fact, some of them are downright irrational and based upon ignorance or unfair prejudice. But the professor can’t get there – first of all, because the system in place would probably ensure him being fired for trying, but most importantly because the professor, himself, agrees with the underlying basis of someone being able to assert moral superiority to shut down debate.

This is the tail end of 100 years of Progressive thought, now completely in control of our institutions of higher education. You can’t pursue truth – you can only repeat endlessly whatever is fashionable for the moment. If you step out of line, you’ll be hammered down into silence…and as we see in the article, the professor has been hammered down. He now teaches his class only what is fashionable. And if the fashion changes next week, he’ll go with that – the students will be denied the knowledge of anything which may offend any particular student at any time.

I’ll end with one last note – the professor in his article does permit himself one, small bit of venting…when he essentially says that the school administrators are always coming down on the side of the customers – the students. He’s a bit contemptuous of the fact that the college is a business selling products and you know what goes on in a business which sells products: the customer is always right. He’s right to be contemptuous of that – and of Administrators who, even if not full-on Progressive nitwits, refuse to back up the professors and keep the kids in their place (which is, allegedly, that of pupil – meaning, they are there to learn things; not tell the teachers what to teach). There is a great deal of truth in this because higher education has become a bit of a racket. The quality of the students isn’t at issue – it all appears to be about just getting as many of them in there as possible because bags of money are made off of each student duff sitting in a chair. And you don’t want to upset your customers! They might move on to the college down the street…better to just knuckle under. After all, if a professor has to tremble in fear and the kids aren’t really getting an education, that doesn’t matter nearly as much as whether or not the tuition checks are coming in.

I think we can pretty much write-off the existing higher education system – and I think that as conservatives, we need to start making a new one. Initially parallel to the current, but eventually to replace it. A system where there is genuine academic freedom; where education is kept to a low cost; but where admission to the college is governed entirely by ability and continued attendance is based upon educational achievement and proper deportment. Most kids won’t go for it, of course – but the best who aren’t currently going to elite schools will…especially kids from more modest economic backgrounds. And we’ll be turning about genuinely educated kids, who will blow out of the water the products of the current system (and, I think, even outdo those coming from the elite universities in the long run).

UPDATE: Ace gets a bit vigorous about this:

…there is no way to not get one’s ego invested in an idea one pushes. But the code of intellectual inquiry was that people who did so were committing an error, and could (and should) be derided for doing so. The actual capital-T Truth must always exist as an ideal outside of oneself — not just out of humility (can the Truth actually live inside a flawed human being?) but in order to make sure that the Truth could be argued about, without people–

Crying like little babies any time someone’s conception of the Truth disagreed with theirs.

This entire mode shifts the grounds from Intellect — where there are rules and codes and dispassionate standards — to the Emotion, to the Self.

There’s a reason the left wants to do that. Frankly, most of these people are rather dim, second-raters at best, and are accutely insecure about their place in the academic world, — as they should be.