The Death of Civility

Remember the calls for increased civility following the 2011 shooting in Tucson where Congresswoman Giffords was wounded and 18 others were shot?  Obama called for "a new era of civility." The University of Arizona (Tucson) opened a new "National Institute for Civil Discourse."  "Political Civility" was the new buzzword - and, of course, all of the incivility came from those troglodytes on the Right.  In an early example of "fake news," the shooting was blamed on "right-wing rhetoric" because Sarah Palin "targeted" Giffords in campaign literature. Never mind that the shooter was mentally ill, politically to the Left, and absolutely not a Palin supporter.

Well, there's been a lot of the same rhetoric recently.  But why now?

Because Tough History is Coming.

In 2002 Charles Krauthammer defined the political divide this way:

To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.

Thomas Sowell, who refers to the movers and shakers in the "progressive" movement as "the Anointed" stated in his book Intellectuals and Society:

Because the vision of the anointed is a vision of themselves as well as a vision of the world, when they are defending that vision they are not simply defending a set of hypotheses about external events, they are in a sense defending their very souls - and the zeal and even ruthlessness with which they defend their visions are not surprising under these circumstances. But for people with opposing views, who may for example believe that most things work out for the better if left to free markets, traditions, families, etc., these are just a set of hypotheses about external events and there is no huge personal ego stake in whether those hypotheses are confirmed by empirical evidence. Obviously everyone would prefer to be proved right rather than proved wrong, but the point here is that there is no such comparable ego stakes involved among believers in the tragic vision. (That would be those of us on the putative "right." - Ed.)

This difference may help explain a striking pattern that goes back at least two centuries - the greater tendency of those with the vision of the anointed to see those they disagree with as enemies who are morally lacking. While there are individual variations in this, as with most things, there are nevertheless general patterns, which many have noticed, both in our times and in earlier centuries. For example, a contemporary account has noted:

Disagree with someone on the right and he is likely to think you obtuse, wrong, foolish, a dope. Disagree with someone on the left and he is more likely to think you selfish, a sell-out, insensitive, possibly evil.

Psychologist and blogger Robert Godwin once wrote:

The philosopher Michael Polanyi pointed out that what distinguishes leftism in all its forms is the dangerous combination of a ruthless contempt for traditional moral values with an unbounded moral passion for utopian perfection. The first step in this process is a complete skepticism that rejects traditional ideals of moral authority and transcendent moral obligation--a complete materialistic skepticism combined with a boundless, utopian moral fervor to transform mankind.

David Horowitz spoke in 2013 at The Heritage Foundation.  For those unfamiliar with Mr. Horowitz, he was a "red diaper baby" - his parents were card-carrying Communists in the 50's - though he says they only referred to themselves as "Progressives" - and until he had his own epiphany in the 70's he himself was a committed Leftist.  No longer.  Here's a pertinent excerpt from that speech:

Progressives are focused on the future, and what's the chief characteristic of the future? It's imaginary! The future they are focused on never existed in human history, and as conservatives we understand it can never exist. It's an impossible dream and a very, very destructive one, as we know from the history of Progressive movements in the 20th Century which killed a hundred million people in peacetime.

--

It is, as I've said in many places, a crypto-religion. "The world is a Fallen place, and we're gonna save it."

This is what makes them so dangerous. They see themselves as Savior. A decent - I would say "authentic" religion says that the world is a really screwed up place and human beings are incapable of unscrewing it.

--

People who believe that Redemption will take place in this life, and they're going to be part of it, that's the Hitlers, that's the Lenins, that's the Maos. And unfortunately it's the ideology, moderated of course, but the ideology - moderated for the American framework - of the Democratic Party and the Progressive Left:  'If we have the power, we can do it.'

So if you believe that social institutions can change things by getting enough power, then when you look at your opponents, who are the people who are not going along with the program? You see yourself as the army of the Saints. Who are they? They are, YOU are the party of Satan!

If you want to understand a so-called liberal, just think of a hellfire and damnation preacher and his mentality. That's what it is. That's why they're rude, they're always interrupting, that's why it doesn't bother them in the least that there are no conservatives on their faculty. Because conservatives are evil, they're spreading ideas that are evil, that are keeping people from enjoying this paradise on Earth that they're going to bring about.

And, from the post A Thumbnail History of the Twentieth Century at the now-defunct blog Canus Iratus, this piece I've quoted repeatedly:

The rise and fall of the Marxist ideal is rather neatly contained in the Twentieth Century, and comprises its central political phenomenon. Fascism and democratic defeatism are its sun-dogs. The common theme is politics as a theology of salvation, with a heroic transformation of the human condition (nothing less) promised to those who will agitate for it. Political activity becomes the highest human vocation. The various socialisms are only the most prominent manifestation of this delusion, which our future historian calls "politicism". In all its forms, it defines human beings as exclusively political animals, based on characteristics which are largely or entirely beyond human control: ethnicity, nationality, gender, and social class. It claims universal relevance, and so divides the entire human race into heroes and enemies. To be on the correct side of this equation is considered full moral justification in and of itself, while no courtesy or concession can be afforded to those on the other. Therefore, politicism has no conscience whatsoever, no charity, and no mercy.

David Horowitz would disagree with the assertion that "the rise and fall of the Marxist ideal is rather neatly contained in the Twentieth Century," but other than that, I cannot disagree with Glen Wishard's analysis of "politicism."  Neither does Jonah Goldberg.

Why was the Tea Party so reviled?  Because a lot of them figured this out.  Goldberg in his 2008 book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change said:

Progressivism, liberalism, or whatever you want to call it has become an ideology of power. So long as liberals hold it, principles don't matter. It also highlights the real fascist legacy of World War I and the New Deal: the notion that government action in the name of "good things" under the direction of "our people" is always and everywhere justified. Dissent by the right people is the highest form of patriotism. Dissent by the wrong people is troubling evidence of incipient fascism.

Andrew Breitbart certainly understood it, and was the target of so much hatred they made a documentary about it.  (Recommended, by the way.  Strongly.)  Alaska had an invasion of "investigative reporters and scandal-chasers" when Sarah Palin was announced as McCain's pick for Veep, according to MotherJones in September, 2008.  Politico noted at about the same time:

The Palin sleuthing in and around Wasilla is getting a little ridiculous, said T.C. Mitchell, an Anchorage Daily News reporter who covers Wasilla and Palmer and was waiting in the Palmer courthouse clerk’s office to make copies of the Richters' file. He had been there earlier in the day and inspected the most pertinent parts, but wanted to make sure he didn’t miss a peripheral detail and get scooped by the suddenly ubiquitous national press.

Mitchell said the Daily News received a call from a media outlet seeking the rules of the Miss Wasilla Pageant, presumably to determine whether Palin cheated when she won it in 1984.

There’s a growing backlash in and around Wasilla to the prying of the national media into the life of their native daughter and her family.

As journalists from ABC News — and, of course, Politico — on Wednesday leafed through bound copies of the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman at the local newspaper’s Wasilla office looking for a 1996 story detailing then-Mayor Palin’s conversations with the local librarian about censorship, Frontiersman reporter Michael Rovito said he was not going to write about the pregnancy of Palin's 17-year-old daughter Bristol.

As a commenter at the Columbia Journalism Review said at the time:

.... now if someone would start digging though some garbage cans in Chicago. Silly me!

Yes, silly him.

So the American public was told everything the muckraking media could dig up (or invent) about Palin during the race, yet just a few days prior to the election, former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw commented during an interview with PBS talking-head Charlie Rose that "we don't know much about Obama."  He was speaking about Obama's foreign policy positions, but Charlie Rose later said:  "I don't know what Barack Obama's worldview is."  Brokaw responded, "No, no.  I don't either."


We knew everything there was to know about Sarah Palin, though much of it was wrong - "fake news," but no one could be bothered to talk to anyone about Obama's relationships with Bill Ayers or Rev. Wright, much less find out about his college admissions, transcripts or anything he'd ever written for the Harvard Law Review.  Mitt Romney and the 2012 election?  He put his dog on the roof of his car, and he didn't pay his taxes.  Oh, and he had "binders of women," the sexist.

Albert Gore wrote in a 2010 New York Times op-ed:

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.

Human redemption. The deliverance of humans from sin. By use of Rule of Law. Yeah, no gulags implicit in that.

The thought chills, and he said it in perfect seriousness.

Two years prior to that, Barack Obama stated, after winning the Democrat primary race:

...I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth.

I can't help but think he was talking only about the Progressives.

Now we have President-elect Donald J. Trump, largely elected by the people who made up the Tea Party and who were contemptuously rejected by the Republican establishment, not to mention reviled by the Progressive Left.  And the Left is going batsh!t.  The source of today's QotD delves further into this Church of Progressivism theme.  A further excerpt from that piece:

The Blue Church is panicking because they've just witnessed the birth of a new Red Religion. Not the tired old Christian cliches they defeated back in the '60s, but a new faith based on cultural identity and outright rejection of the Blue Faith.

For the first time in decades, voters explicitly rejected the Blue Church, defying hours of daily cultural programming, years of indoctrination from the schools, and dozens of explicit warnings from HR.

We've been trained since childhood to obey the pretty people on TV, but for the first time in decades, that didn't work.

Donald Trump won because flyover America wants their culture back, and Blue Team has not been rejected like that before.

The younger ones have grown up in an environment where Blue Faith assumptions cannot even be questioned, except anonymously by the bad kids on Twitter.

But now the bad kids are getting bolder, posting funny memes that make you laugh even though John Oliver would not approve, like passing crude dirty pictures under the table in Sunday School.

Meryl Streep is panicking because for the first time voters have rejected HER, and everything her faith has taught her to believe.

There is a new faith rising on the right, not an explicit religious faith like old-school Christianity, but a wicked kind of counterculture movement. We laughed at the hippies in 1968, but by 1978 they were teaching in classrooms and sitting behind school administrator desks.

Where will the hippies of 2016 be sitting after eight years of Trump? How many of the shitposting Twitter bad boys will start up alternative media outlets, until one of them becomes the new Saturday Night Live?

Sam Hyde tried it on Adult Swim, but that was just the early prototype, like Mad Magazine was for the left. There will be many others after him, and they won't be stopped by network filters. They'll come "out of nowhere" on the web, from the secret places that the inquisitors at Google can't shut down.

And that's what Meryl Streep is really scared of. She's not truly aware of it, just like fluttering housewives couldn't really understand the counterculture threat in 1968. But they feel that something is changing in their safe little world, and they know they have to fight it, because this threat isn't just passing pointless budget resolutions and selling pointless platitudes about family values - these guys mean business, and they're fighting on her turf.

And once again "political civility" is on the tongues of the media talking heads, and the waves of incivility are being blamed on Trump's supposed legions of hatey-hatemonger racist homo-xeno-gender-phobes in a renewed " 'Shut up,' they explained" campaign. Never mind the actual evidence.

But we won't shut up anymore.  We're now in a war of religions, Red vs. Blue, and we know how "civil" those are.

It's going to be an interesting four years.

Make the Rubble Bounce

I have stated from very early in the history of this blog that America's public education system is responsible for the mess we're in right now, and that it cannot be "reformed."  (See the posts on the left sidebar under "Education.")  The phrase I've used is "Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure."

I've been challenged on that, asked "What do we replace it with?"  I think this guy has figured it out.  Worth your 20 minutes.


Edited to add:

Here Dr. Mitra talks about what he did with the TED prize money:


Also worth your time.

Civilizational Suicide

Over on Facebook, Firehand linked to an excellent essay by Patrick Deneen, "David A. Potenziani Memorial Associate Professor of Constitutional Studies at Notre Dame."  Professor Deneen begins his piece How a Generation Lost Its Common Culture:

My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.

I would argue that many have been taught to actively hate their own culture, but the majority?  As Elie Wiesel once observed:

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.

I strongly recommend you read Professor Deneen's entire essay, but here's the money shot:

Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts — whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about — have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctable outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide.

(Bold emphasis mine.)  Which is why I've been saying for years that the only thing that can save education is to take off and nuke the current system from orbit until the rubble bounces.

But I'm pretty sure it's too late for that.

The USP - University Shaped Place

Reader Bram left a comment to my last post, The "Education" System from a Primary Source with a link to a short piece by Fred Reed of "Fred on Everything" fame.  The title of this post comes from that piece, College Then and Now: Letter to a Bright Young Woman.  I urge you to read it in its entirety.

The only thing I would add to it is the observation that the public school system producing the incoming Freshmen has also declined dramatically since "The Sixties," so that ten to twenty percent of college-prepared students is now probably less than 5% compared to a few decades ago.

The "Education" System from a Primary Source

If you're interested in the current status of public education and what's entering our colleges and universities today, spend an hour watching to this interview of Dr. Duke Pesta (Professor of English, University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh) by Stefan Molyneux:


Pay particular attention at 14:45.

I started giving quizzes to my juniors and seniors before I even passed out the attendance sheet the first day or the syllabus. I gave them a 10-question American history quiz and we started - even though I'm an English professor not an American historian - just to see where they are. And this has been true for seven consecutive years - the vast majority of my students, I'm talking like nine out of ten in every single class, 28, 29 out of 30 kids - they have no idea that slavery existed anywhere in the world before the United States. And I've got Christian kids, I've got Jewish kids. Moses, Pharoh, none of that. They have none of it. They are a hundred percent convinced that slavery is a uniquely American  invention and that with the Emancipation Proclamation slavery ended worldwide. They're convinced of this. How do you give an adequate view of history and culture to kids when that's what they think of their own country? That America invented slavery and and the whole Black Lives Matter movement, which is taught as absolute history in English classes and philosophy classes, in sociology classes and biology classes and race identity classes, that's the new narrative, right?  That even though slavery ended in America it's still with us in the way we oppressed minorities and so that's all they know. They know nothing else.

Sounds pretty familiar, doesn't it?

They've Done Their Job Too Well

Ran across this on Facebook:


I have news for you, son: The last several elections have been insults to our intelligence.

Back in 2000 when I was just really getting started on this internet thing, I wrote a post at a now-defunct site, Theamstream, that got picked up by somebody over at KeepandBearArms.com. (It was the post that eventually got me banned from my time at Democratic Underground for being Not Of The Body.) It was about the 2000 Bush v. Gore Florida fuckball. I titled it "An Uncomfortable Conclusion." Here it is in its entirety:

With the continuing legal maneuvers in the Florida election debacle, I have been forced to a conclusion that I may have been unconsciously fending off. The Democratic party thinks we're stupid. Not "amiable uncle Joe" stupid, but DANGEROUSLY stupid. Lead-by-the-hand-no-sharp-objects-don't-put-that-in-your-mouth stupid. And they don't think that just Republicans and independents are stupid, no no! They think ANYBODY not in the Democratic power elite is, by definition, a drooling idiot. A muttering moron. Pinheads barely capable of dressing ourselves.

Take, for example, the position under which the Gore election machine petitioned for a recount - that only supporters of the Democratic candidate for President lacked the skills necessary to vote properly, and that through a manual recount those erroneously marked ballots could be "properly" counted in Mr. Gore's favor. They did this in open court and on national television, and with a straight face.

So, it is with some regret that I can no longer hold that uncomfortable conclusion at bay:

They're right. We are.

Not all of us, of course, but enough. Those of us still capable of intelligent, logical, independent thought have been overwhelmed by the public school system production lines that have been cranking out large quantities of substandard product for the last thirty-five years or so. The majority of three or four generations have managed to make it into the working world with no knowledge of history, no understanding of the Constitution or civics, no awareness of geography, no ability to do even mildly complex mathematics, no comprehension of science, and realistically little to no ability to read with comprehension, or write with clarity. And we seem to have developed attention spans roughly equivalent to that of your average small bird.

After all, about half the public accepted the Democratic premise that we were too stupid to vote correctly because their guy didn't win by a landslide, didn't they? And the other half was outraged, not that they made such a ludicrous argument, but that they didn't want to play fair and by the rules that no one seems to understand or to be able to explain.

The other majority party isn't blameless in this; they like an ignorant electorate too. It's easier to lead people who can't or won't think for themselves. It took both parties and many years of active bipartisan meddling to make the education system into an international laughingstock.

However, the end result of this downward spiral has been an electorate ignorant in the simple foundations of this country and its government. Most especially the foundation of a rule of law in which EVERYONE is equal under the laws of the land. The Democrats have taken advantage of this general ignorance to its logical extreme. President Clinton, when testifying under oath, debates the meaning of the word "is", and essentially gets away with it. Vice President Gore, when shown to be in direct violation of campaign finance law states that there was no "controlling legal authority".

Laws don't MEAN anything to them. A law is an inconvenient bit of wording that just has to be "interpreted" properly to achieve their ends. When they file suit, they must shop for the proper judge, or they might not be able to get the "spin" they want. Like the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, words mean just what they want them to mean, no more no less. And that meaning can change at any time.

What has this election proven? The system is broken beyond a shadow of a doubt. Humpty-Dumpty is smashed. Regardless of who wins the recount in Florida, we have a system that has abandoned the rule of law because the populace let it, not knowing any better. Everything is up for interpretation. We don't live in the United States of America anymore, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. We live in `Merica, land of the free to do whatever we please, with no adverse consequences to our actions because that just wouldn't be "fair". Ain't Democracy wunnerful? Let's just vote ourselves bread and circuses and wait for the Barbarians to come over the walls. Bet that'll get more than 49% of the vote, huh?

Here's another appropriate Facebook meme:

Quote of the Day - Thomas Sowell Edition

None of this is rocket science. But you do have to stop and think -- and that is what too many of our schools and colleges are failing to teach their students to do. - Socialism for the Uninformed

And that's by design.

I Was Wrong

Actually, I've been wrong on a number of occasions about a variety of topics. You live and learn, or you don't live long. But on this particular topic I have to admit I should have seen it coming long before now.

Back shortly after I started this blog, I wrote a series of posts on the Right to Arms (left sidebar there under "The Right to Arms Essays"). In the one entitled Those Without Swords Can Still Die Upon Them, I concluded with this:

Individual, private possession of firearms isn't the only thing that permits individual liberty, but it is one of the essential components in a society that intends to stay free. An armed, informed, reasoning people cannot be subjugated.

So what do you do if you want to fetter a free people?

1) Remove their ability to reason.

2) Constrain their ability to access and exchange information.

3) Relieve them of the means with which to defend themselves and their property.

Which of these seems easiest, and how would it be best accomplished? And best resisted?

That was written in 2004 - almost twelve years ago. Obviously I thought at the time that the third option would be the one most vigorously attacked.

Boy, was I wrong, and I really should have seen it before now. After all, throughout the nearly thirteen-year life of this blog I have railed against the public education system and what has been done to higher education. (See the "Education" posts on the left sidebar, and all the other pieces throughout the blog tagged "Education.")

I knew we were boned as a nation when a majority of voters picked Obama for a second term, but now? It's looking more and more like our "choices" will be between Hillary and Trump with a possible third-party option of Bloomberg. It's like the joke says, choosing between this lot is like picking which venereal disease is right for me.

Obviously #1 was the plan all along, and they've finally succeeded.

Debate? DEBATE?!?

No, it's performance art.

Watch this:


Those were the winners of the Cross Examination Debate Association's 2014 national championship.

What debate took place here?

From the Wikipedia entry:

In the 2013 tournament, the winning team from Emporia State University was criticized for using personal memoirs and rap music to criticize white privilege during the debate. Opponents to this form of debate argue that rhetorical tools utilized by recent championship teams violated the anti-harassment policies of CEDA and the National Debate Tournament, and common sense. CEDA President Paul Mabrey points to the value of limited actual formal rules in CEDA debate and the ways that a variety of forms of debate raise the educational value of the activity and call these objections "nothing other than thinly-veiled racism."

In the 2014 tournament, the CEDA came under fire for crowning a championship debate team whose arguments critics described as incomprehensible, off topic and refused to abide by time limits and moderation. Going so far as to make a fart sound as a rebuttal. Despite winning the tournament, the winning team from Towson University was criticized by these observers for referencing racial slurs. In the wake of this controversy, CEDA President Mabrey stated in an official CEDA video that the accusations of poor preparation and incomprehensibility "These stories represent the worst of our human bigotry. These attacks on Towson, Oklahoma, and others in our debate community are motivated by racism."

"President Mabrey" is Paul Mabrey, a professor of communication at James Madison(!) University.  One more example of why you should go ahead and stick a fork in Western Civ.  We're done.

I'm pretty sure James Madison is whirling in his grave.

Quote of the Day - Quora Edition

Someone over at Quora asked "Why do conservatives oppose progressive politics?"  A gentleman by the name of Charles Tips left an epic answer.  Unfortunately, those who need to read it, won't.  Today's QotD comes from that answer:

The implementation of our public schools supplanted our liberal “Little Red Schoolhouse” model that was firmly entrenched in civil society and has resulted in our children having their butts passively parked in desks for increasing terms of hours per day and years of their lives spent hermetically sealed from the real world, as, in progressive minds, the proper way to prepare them for the real world. The goal of J. G. Fichte in designing the Volkschule, which serves barely changed as the model for our public schools, was “workers who will not strike, citizens who will not revolt, soldiers who will not disobey orders.” It was designed as an indoctrination scheme to prevent the children of the non-aristocratic classes from becoming able to operate independently of state control. It is no way to produce rowdy, curious, can-do Americans, and statist Republicans clearly revere the scheme every bit as much as do progressives, just to slightly different ends. Our schools continuously disappoint, and the progressive cry in response is always, "More money! More teachers! More Admins!"

If you've read my posts on education you'll note that this QotD is echoed by the writings of John Taylor Gatto and numerous others.  It's a mini-überpost, spanning a lot more than just education.  By all means please read the whole thing.

Yes, This Is a Perfect Representation of Modern Edumacashun

This does explain the recent actions at Yale and the University of Missouri.

Tough history coming, indeed.

Idiocracy

Bill Whittle on education:


Billy Beck calls it the Endarkenment.  I'm convinced that 115 years of public education has accomplished The Great Unlearning, and it has been deliberate.

Quote of the Day - (Lack of) Education Edition

From an interview with David Gelernter via a link from Clayton Cramer's blog

GELERNTER: I’m a teacher of college students. I’m lucky to be at one of the best colleges in the world, at Yale. Our students are as smart as any in the world. They work very hard to get here. They are eager, they’re likable. My generation is getting a chip on its shoulder, we always thought we knew everything about every topic, our professors were morons, and we were the ones who were building the world.

My students today are much less obnoxious. Much more likable than I and my friends used to be, but they are so ignorant that it’s hard to accept how ignorant they are. You tell yourself stories; it’s very hard to grasp that the person you’re talking to, who is bright, articulate, advisable, interested, and doesn’t know who Beethoven is. Had no view looking back at the history of the 20th century – just sees a fog. A blank. Has the vaguest idea of who Winston Churchill was or why he mattered. And maybe has no image of Teddy Roosevelt, let’s say, at all. I mean, these are people who – We have failed.

--

(H)ow did we get to this point today when my students know nothing?

They know nothing about art. They know nothing about history. They know nothing about philosophy. And because they have been raised as not even atheists, they don’t rise to the level of atheists, insofar as they’ve never thought about the existence or nonexistence of God. It has never occurred to them. They know nothing about the Bible. They’ve never opened it. They’ve been taught it’s some sort of weird toxic thing, especially the Hebrew Bible, full of all sorts of terrible, murderous, prejudiced, bigoted. They’ve never read it. They have no concept.

It used to be, if I turned back to the 1960s to my childhood, that at least people have heard of Isaiah. People had heard of the Psalms. They had some notion of Hebrew poetry, having created the poetry of the Western world. They had some notion of the great prophets having created our notions of justice and honesty and fairness in society

But these children not only ignorant of everything in the intellectual realm, they have been raised ignorant in the spiritual world. They don’t go to church. They don’t go to synagogue. They have no contact – the Americans. Some of the Asians are different. Some of the Asians – and, of course, the Asians play a larger and larger role. But I think, from what I can tell, the Asians are moving in an American direction, and they’re pulling up their own religious roots.

But when I see a bright, young Yale student who has been reared not as Jew, not as a Christian, outside of any religious tradition, why should he tell the truth? Why should he not lie? Why should he be fair and straightforward in his dealings with his fellow students? He has sort of an idea that’s the way he should be, but why? If you challenge him, he doesn’t know. And he’ll say, “Well, it’s just my view.” And I mean, after all everybody has his own view.

KRISTOL: So we began in the 50s, and now we’re 60 years later. How did this, what were the big break points in your judgment from “Serious America” to America-Lite?

GELERNTER: It seems to me something happened. There was a historical event, which needs to be understood and recognized more clearly than it is. The cultural revolution in the United States, which people take for granted. If I tell people there was a cultural revolution, yeah sure, there were a lot of changes in the 60s. But it’s more than that. It’s a double change.

Colleges and universities. Let’s look at the generation after the Second World War. This is a cultural revolution, it seems to me to extend roughly from 1945 to 1970. So in 1970 everything is different. Things are radically different. And what happened during those 25 years? Colleges and universities became vastly, vastly more influential on American culture.

Remember the words of John Taylor Gatto:

In the first decades of the twentieth century, a small group of soon-to-be-famous academics, symbolically led by John Dewey and Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College, Ellwood P. Cubberley of Stanford, G. Stanley Hall of Clark, and an ambitious handful of others, energized and financed by major corporate and financial allies like Morgan, Astor, Whitney, Carnegie, and Rockefeller, decided to bend government schooling to the service of business and the political state—as it had been done a century before in Prussia.

Cubberley delicately voiced what was happening this way: "The nature of the national need must determine the character of the education provided." National need, of course, depends upon point of view. The NEA in 1930 sharpened our understanding by specifying in a resolution of its Department of Superintendence that what school served was an "effective use of capital" through which our "unprecedented wealth-producing power has been gained." When you look beyond the rhetoric of Left and Right, pronouncements like this mark the degree to which the organs of schooling had been transplanted into the corporate body of the new economy.

It’s important to keep in mind that no harm was meant by any designers or managers of this great project. It was only the law of nature as they perceived it, working progressively as capitalism itself did for the ultimate good of all. The real force behind school effort came from true believers of many persuasions, linked together mainly by their belief that family and church were retrograde institutions standing in the way of progress. Far beyond the myriad practical details and economic considerations there existed a kind of grail-quest, an idea capable of catching the imagination of dreamers and firing the blood of zealots.

and

At the start of WWII millions of men showed up at registration offices to take low-level academic tests before being inducted. The years of maximum mobilization were 1942 to1944; the fighting force had been mostly schooled in the 1930s, both those inducted and those turned away. Of the 18 million men were tested, 17,280,000 of them were judged to have the minimum competence in reading required to be a soldier, a 96 percent literacy rate. Although this was a 2 percent fall-off from the 98 percent rate among voluntary military applicants ten years earlier, the dip was so small it didn’t worry anybody.

WWII was over in 1945. Six years later another war began in Korea. Several million men were tested for military service but this time 600,000 were rejected. Literacy in the draft pool had dropped to 81 percent, even though all that was needed to classify a soldier as literate was fourth- grade reading proficiency. In the few short years from the beginning of WWII to Korea, a terrifying problem of adult illiteracy had appeared. The Korean War group received most of its schooling in the 1940s, and it had more years in school with more professionally trained personnel and more scientifically selected textbooks than the WWII men, yet it could not read, write, count, speak, or think as well as the earlier, less-schooled contingent.

A third American war began in the mid-1960s. By its end in 1973 the number of men found noninductible by reason of inability to read safety instructions, interpret road signs, decipher orders, and so on—in other words, the number found illiterate—had reached 27 percent of the total pool. Vietnam-era young men had been schooled in the 1950s and the 1960s—much better schooled than either of the two earlier groups—but the 4 percent illiteracy of 1941 which had transmuted into the 19 percent illiteracy of 1952 had now had grown into the 27 percent illiteracy of 1970. Not only had the fraction of competent readers dropped to 73 percent but a substantial chunk of even those were only barely adequate; they could not keep abreast of developments by reading a newspaper, they could not read for pleasure, they could not sustain a thought or an argument, they could not write well enough to manage their own affairs without assistance.

Consider how much more compelling this steady progression of intellectual blindness is when we track it through army admissions tests rather than college admissions scores and standardized reading tests, which inflate apparent proficiency by frequently changing the way the tests are scored.
--

Back in 1952 the Army quietly began hiring hundreds of psychologists to find out how 600,000 high school graduates had successfully faked illiteracy. Regna Wood sums up the episode this way:

After the psychologists told the officers that the graduates weren’t faking, Defense Department administrators knew that something terrible had happened in grade school reading instruction. And they knew it had started in the thirties. Why they remained silent, no one knows. The switch back to reading instruction that worked for everyone should have been made then. But it wasn’t.

In 1882, fifth graders read these authors in their Appleton School Reader: William Shakespeare, Henry Thoreau, George Washington, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Bunyan, Daniel Webster, Samuel Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others like them. In 1995, a student teacher of fifth graders in Minneapolis wrote to the local newspaper, "I was told children are not to be expected to spell the following words correctly: back, big, call, came, can, day, did, dog, down, get, good, have, he, home, if, in, is, it, like, little, man, morning, mother, my, night, off, out, over, people, play, ran, said, saw, she, some, soon, their, them, there, time, two, too, up, us, very, water, we, went, where, when, will, would, etc. Is this nuts?"

and

Exactly what John Dewey heralded at the onset of the twentieth century has indeed happened. Our once highly individualized nation has evolved into a centrally managed village, an agora made up of huge special interests which regard individual voices as irrelevant. The masquerade is managed by having collective agencies speak through particular human beings. Dewey said this would mark a great advance in human affairs, but the net effect is to reduce men and women to the status of functions in whatever subsystem they are placed. Public opinion is turned on and off in laboratory fashion. All this in the name of social efficiency, one of the two main goals of forced schooling.

In related news:

The top student in a high school’s graduating class used to earn the honor of being the valedictorian, and traditionally that one student delivered a commencement speech that helped send his or her classmates out into the adult world.

But at Arlington's Washington-Lee High School this year, there were 117 valedictorians out of a class of 457. At Long Beach Polytechnic in California, there were 30. And at some schools — including North Hills High outside of Pittsburgh and high schools in Miami — there were none.

--

"Education's not a game. It's not about 'I finished first and you finished second,'" said North Hills Superintendent Patrick J. Mannarino, who was the North Hills High principal when the school got rid of the valedictorian designation in 2009. "That high school diploma declares you all winners."

Apparently not.

RTWT.

Why Thomas Sowell is so Popular with Conservatives

Worth 50 minutes of your time:


Quote of the Day, from the end of the interview:

Peter Robinson: How’s my generation’s project of holding on to liberty coming along?

Thomas Sowell: Not well. One of the reasons I’m glad to be as old as I am is that it means I may be spared seeing what’s going to happen to this country, either internally or as the result of international complications.

Robinson: You think that America’s greatest days are gone? Full stop? That it’s irreversible?

Sowell: Nothing is irreversible. But I think that we’re like a team that is coming to bat in the bottom of the ninth, five runs behind. We can win it, but this is not… I wouldn’t bet the rent money on it.

Robinson: Last question. What would you say – talking about Milton (Friedman) talking to my generation – what would you say to the next generation, to your grandchildren’s generation about the America for which they should be preparing themselves?

Sowell: Since I don’t know what that America is going to be, I don’t want to say anything to them. By the time they get here I think the issue will have been settled one way or the other.

Robinson: By then it will be irreversible.

Sowell: Either we will have pulled out of the dive, as it were, or else it will be all over.

Quote of the Day - Education Edition

My students do know — because they have been taught this — that America is run by all-powerful racists who will never let them win. My students know — because they have been drilled in this — that the only way they can get ahead is to locate and cultivate those few white liberals who will pity them and scatter crumbs on their supplicant, bowed heads and into their outstretched palms. My students have learned to focus on the worst thing that ever happened to them, assume that it happened because America is unjust, and to recite that story, dirge-like, to whomever is in charge, from the welfare board to college professors, and to await receipt of largesse.

- Danusha V. Goska, 10 Reasons I Am No Longer a Leftist

Read the whole thing.

I am reminded of this 2011 "Truth in Fiction" excerpt from the science fiction novel The Road to Damascus:

(The party) is composed of two tiers. The lower tier produces many outspoken members who make their demands known to the upper tier. The lower tier is derived from the inner-city population that serves as the base of the party. The lower tier's members are generally educated in public school systems and if they aspire to advanced training, they are educated in facilities provided by the state. This wing constitutes the majority of (the party's) membership, but contributes little or nothing to party theory or platform. It votes the party line and is rewarded with cash payments, subsidized housing, subsidized education, and occasional preferential employment in government positions. The lower tier provides only a handful of clearly token individuals allowed to serve in high offices.

The upper tier, which includes most of the party's management, virtually all the appointed and elected government officials, and all of the party's decision-makers, is drawn exclusively from suburban areas where wealth is a fundamental criterion for admittance as a resident. These party members are generally educated at private schools and attend private colleges. They are not affected by food-rationing schemes, income caps or taxation laws, as the legislation drafted and passed by members of their social group inevitably contains loopholes that effectively shelter their income and render them immune from unpleasant statues that restrict the lives of lower-tier party members and all nonparty citizens.

(The party) leadership recognizes that in return for supporting a seemingly populist agenda, they can obtain all the votes they require to remain in power. Even the most cursory analysis of their actions and attitudes, however, indicates that they are not populists but, in fact, are strong antipopulists who actively despise their voting base. This....is proven by their efforts to reduce public educational systems to a level most grade-school children (in other countries) have surpassed, with the excuse that this curriculum is all that the students can handle. They have made the inner-city population base totally dependent on the government, which they control.

The Stupidity of the American Voter

Well, he's right.  I made the argument during what passed as "debate" over Obamacare (as did literally thousands of others) that you could not:

• add millions to the health insurance rolls
• add tens of thousands of IRS and other government agents to the federal payroll to regulate the Act
• not add any doctors or medical centers to the existing system
• eliminate lifetime payout caps
• remove limits of insurability for those with pre-existing conditions

and honestly promise a DECREASE in health insurance costs and an IMPROVEMENT in health care services.  Much less "If you like your Plan, you can keep your Plan.  If you like your Doctor, you can keep your Doctor."

Former Congressman Thad McCotter put it quite succinctly in March of 2010:

The Democratic Party believes that you can take an imperfect health-care system and fix it by putting it under the most dysfunctional and broken entity in the United States today: It's called the Federal Government.

That proposition is insane.

But that's how they sold it.  A lot of people bought the lies.  Even worse, a lot still do.

The Democrats depend on the stupidity of their supporters.  After all, it's served them remarkably well in the past.  In 2000 (long before I started this blog) I wrote a piece now archived at KeepandBearArms.com entitled An Uncomfortable Conclusion.  I will reproduce it here, as fourteen years later I wouldn't change a word:

With the continuing legal maneuvers in the Florida election debacle, I have been forced to a conclusion that I may have been unconsciously fending off. The Democratic party thinks we're stupid. Not "amiable uncle Joe" stupid, but DANGEROUSLY stupid. Lead-by-the-hand-no-sharp-objects-don't-put-that-in-your-mouth stupid. And they don't think that just Republicans and independents are stupid, no no! They think ANYBODY not in the Democratic power elite is, by definition, a drooling idiot. A muttering moron. Pinheads barely capable of dressing ourselves.

Take, for example, the position under which the Gore election machine petitioned for a recount - that only supporters of the Democratic candidate for President lacked the skills necessary to vote properly, and that through a manual recount those erroneously marked ballots could be "properly" counted in Mr. Gore's favor. They did this in open court and on national television, and with a straight face.

So, it is with some regret that I can no longer hold that uncomfortable conclusion at bay:

They're right. We are.

Not all of us, of course, but enough. Those of us still capable of intelligent, logical, independent thought have been overwhelmed by the public school system production lines that have been cranking out large quantities of substandard product for the last thirty-five years or so. The majority of three or four generations have managed to make it into the working world with no knowledge of history, no understanding of the Constitution or civics, no awareness of geography, no ability to do even mildly complex mathematics, no comprehension of science, and realistically little to no ability to read with comprehension, or write with clarity. And we seem to have developed attention spans roughly equivalent to that of your average small bird. (Ed. - Twitter didn't come along until 2006!)

After all, about half the public accepted the Democratic premise that we were too stupid to vote correctly because their guy didn't win by a landslide, didn't they? And the other half was outraged, not that they made such a ludicrous argument, but that they didn't want to play fair and by the rules that no one seems to understand or to be able to explain.

The other majority party isn't blameless in this; they like an ignorant electorate too. It's easier to lead people who can't or won't think for themselves. It took both parties and many years of active bipartisan meddling to make the education system into an international laughingstock.

However, the end result of this downward spiral has been an electorate ignorant in the simple foundations of this country and its government. Most especially the foundation of a rule of law in which EVERYONE is equal under the laws of the land. The Democrats have taken advantage of this general ignorance to its logical extreme. President Clinton, when testifying under oath, debates the meaning of the word "is," and essentially gets away with it. Vice President Gore, when shown to be in direct violation of campaign finance law states that there was no "controlling legal authority."

Laws don't MEAN anything to them. A law is an inconvenient bit of wording that just has to be "interpreted" properly to achieve their ends. When they file suit, they must shop for the proper judge, or they might not be able to get the "spin" they want. Like the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, words mean just what they want them to mean, no more no less. And that meaning can change at any time.

What has this election proven? The system is broken beyond a shadow of a doubt. Humpty-Dumpty is smashed. Regardless of who wins the recount in Florida, we have a system that has abandoned the rule of law because the populace let it, not knowing any better. Everything is up for interpretation. We don't live in the United States of America anymore, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. We live in `Merica, land of the free to do whatever we please, with no adverse consequences to our actions because that just wouldn't be "fair". Ain't Democracy wunnerful? Let's just vote ourselves bread and circuses and wait for the Barbarians to come over the walls. Bet that'll get more than 49% of the vote, huh?

(This is the piece that got me kicked off of Democratic Underground, BTW. Somebody had to Google my name to find it and then point a DU administrator at it.)

The Unkillable Zombie that is Communism

Recently at Quora.com, someone asked the question:

Why does communism get such a bad reputation?

Why is America so opposed to what I merely see as a different system of running things? I used to read Karl Marx as a senior in high school and his ideas don't seem all that "evil" to me. Am I missing something here. Why all the hate?

I responded:

I understand that the rules of Quora state that I'm not allowed to answer a question only with a graphic, but this one pretty much says it all:


Karl Marx's failed attempt at economics and social engineering has been - directly or indirectly - responsible for the deaths of over 100,000,000 human beings - at the hands of their own governments. At the same time, capitalism has been responsible for lifting more people out of poverty than any other system ever attempted - to the point that Communist China (about half of that hundred million dead) has taken to it, albeit with strong restrictions.

If you don't "understand the hate" I suggest you read up on the history.

Today Bill Whittle has a better answer (naturally) in his latest Firewall:


Pullquote:

The Progressive utopia is the Loch Ness Monster of politics: a giant, air-breathing creature that never surfaces for air.

UPDATE: Eric S. Raymond expands on the subject.

You Just Can't Make This Stuff Up

So in the UK's Daily Mail comes a piece about a teacher.  An English teacher.

Who admits that she's illiterate.

Well, actually, she's not.  Apparently she's just really, really badly educated and doesn't know what the word "illiterate" means:

As a teacher with six years’ experience, you might imagine that I would have been in my element as I chatted about the eight-year-olds in my charge and offered their parents encouragement and advice.

Instead I was consumed with embarrassment. And no wonder. The father opposite me — a lawyer — was looking at me as if I was dirt under his shoe.

I had been telling him about the new drive to improve literacy standards in our school when he had interrupted me.

‘Can you repeat what you just said?’ he said. ‘I’m not sure I could possibly have heard you correctly.’

I had no idea why he was getting so agitated. To humour him, I repeated slowly: ‘I said that me and the headmistress are doing all we can to improve standards.’

I might as well have told him that we were planning to bring back the birch. Throwing his hands up in the air, he launched into a tirade that left me red hot with shame.

‘Me and the headmistress?’ he ranted. ‘Don’t you know it should be: “The headmistress and I”? How can you call yourself a teacher when your grammar is so poor?’

And a little later in the piece:

The stark truth is that most people educated in a state school in the Seventies and Eighties had little or no grounding in grammar. And many of us have become teachers. Scarred ourselves, we have passed the damage on.

I’m convinced the rot started in 1964 when Harold Wilson’s Labour government came to power and abolished the 11-plus in many areas. Parents were told this was to enable primary schools to develop a more informal, child-centred, progressive style of teaching, with the emphasis on learning by discovery.

As a teacher, I can see this is rubbish. The belief that grammar could be ignored was virtually all pervasive until 1988, when the Conservative government introduced the National Curriculum.

This observation dovetails nicely with the one made by former New York Teacher of the Year, John Taylor Gatto, when he wrote:

I lived through the great transformation which turned schools from often useful places (if never the essential ones school publicists claimed) into laboratories of state experimentation. When I began teaching in 1961, the social environment of Manhattan schools was a distant cousin of the western Pennsylvania schools I attended in the 1940s, as Darwin was a distant cousin of Malthus.

Discipline was the daily watchword on school corridors. A network of discipline referrals, graded into an elaborate catalogue of well-calibrated offenses, was etched into the classroom heart. At bottom, hard as it is to believe in today’s school climate, there was a common dedication to the intellectual part of the enterprise. I remember screaming (pompously) at an administrator who marked on my plan book that he would like to see evidence I was teaching "the whole child," that I didn’t teach children at all, I taught the discipline of the English language! Priggish as that sounds, it reflects an attitude not uncommon among teachers who grew up in the 1940s and before. Even with much slippage in practice, Monongahela and Manhattan had a family relationship. About schooling at least. Then suddenly in 1965 everything changed.

Whatever the event is that I’m actually referring to—and its full dimensions are still only partially clear to me—it was a nationwide phenomenon simultaneously arriving in all big cities coast to coast, penetrating the hinterlands afterwards. Whatever it was, it arrived all at once, the way we see national testing and other remote-control school matters like School-to-Work legislation appear in every state today at the same time. A plan was being orchestrated, the nature of which is unmasked in the upcoming chapters.

Think of this thing for the moment as a course of discipline dictated by coaches outside the perimeter of the visible school world. It constituted psychological restructuring of the institution’s mission, but traveled under the guise of a public emergency which (the public was told) dictated increasing the intellectual content of the business! Except for its nightmare aspect, it could have been a scene from farce, a swipe directly from Orwell’s 1984 and its fictional telly announcements that the chocolate ration was being raised every time it was being lowered. This reorientation did not arise from any democratic debate, or from any public clamor for such a peculiar initiative; the public was not consulted or informed. Best of all, those engineering the makeover denied it was happening.

1964 in the UK, 1965 in the U.S.  Coincidence? 

But I wrote all that so I could post this, the Quote of the Day, definitely the Week, possibly the Month and contender for Quote of the Year, by our "illiterate" teacher:

Thankfully, I had the good grace to quit teaching and take a job in the media.

I can't think of a more appropriate place for her!  Can you?

The Struggle for Stupidity

Bill Whittle's latest Firewall, on education this time:

So the LA School System is Going to Give Every Student a Laptop...

I covered that here a couple of weeks back.  Guess they can't learn from New Jersey.

“We had the money to buy them, but maybe not the best implementation,” said Mark Toback, the current superintendent of Hoboken School District.

Once again: 

When someone tries to use a strategy which is dictated by their ideology, and that strategy doesn't seem to work, then they are caught in something of a cognitive bind. If they acknowledge the failure of the strategy, then they would be forced to question their ideology. If questioning the ideology is unthinkable, then the only possible conclusion is that the strategy failed because it wasn't executed sufficiently well. They respond by turning up the power, rather than by considering alternatives. (This is sometimes referred to as "escalation of failure".) - Steven Den Beste

Oh, and by all means, read the comments!