Month: March 2023

Of Wokery and Merit

Destructive, anti-civilizational wokesters are not just against merit, they are positively for anti-merit, dysfunction, incompetence, stupidity, corruption, malevolence, and more. Qualifications don't matter; 'wokifications' matter: being black, female, lesbian, cognitively impaired, truth-insensitive, reality-denying, physically feeble, morally corrupt.  Mayorkas, Fetterman, Buttigieg, practically the whole of the Biden administration.  After watching this C-SPAN video will you tell me that Phil Washington is qualified to head the Federal Aviation Administration? Qualified or 'wokified'? Is being 'woke' and 'diverse' a qualification? 

Suppose you question whether John Fetterman is qualified to be a U. S. Senator given his mental and physical impairment. You will be called an 'ableist.' What's next? 'Qualificationist?' "You're a white-spremacist qualificationist! You believe people need to be qualified for the positions they apply for!"

You will never understand the Left until you understand that they reliably take the side of losers, underdogs, and criminals, who comprise their clientele and path to power.  And with lefties it is always about power, first and forever.

Here we read about a 78-year-old Englishman who, in defending himself against a screwdriver-wielding home invader, caused the miscreant's death and is now facing a murder charge.

Dear old England, the mother country. It is sad to see your mother, senile and decrepit, go down the toilet, having lost all her moral sense and the will to live.

Once again one sees the justification for my political burden of proof:

As contemporary 'liberals' become ever more extreme, they increasingly assume what I call the political burden of proof.  The onus is now on them to defeat the presumption that they are so  morally and intellectually obtuse as not to be worth talking to.

Actually, that is far too mild a statement. Perhaps tomorrow I will tell you what I really think.

UPDATE (3/17).  I say above that leftists reliably take the side of criminals. More proof, as if more proof is needed:

THE AGE OF REASON?

I wrote here about Hennepin County, Minnesota’s left-wing prosecutor who let off two juveniles (the older aged 17) who murdered a woman in the course of a home invasion. This was part of her stated rationale:

[County Attorney Mary] Moriarty has said she is simply “following the science,” which she says is conclusive about adolescent brain development. According to Moriarty, the human brain is not fully developed until 25 years old.

Which is why, according to Moriarty, “we need to treat kids like kids.” As opposed to treating murderers like murderers.

Read it all. Why is 'Minnesnowta' such a hot-bed of anti-civilizational wokeassery? Does the cold clime freeze their brains unto willful self-enstupidation?

A Five-Second Test to See Whether You’re Aging Well

Here’s how it works:

  • Start in a standing position with 10 points
  • Sit down into a cross-legged position on the floor
  • Rise back up into a standing position

Simple, right? Only for each time you used a hand, knee or forearm to accomplish the task, you have to subtract a point. If you sat down and stood back up using only your core and leg strength, that’s a perfect 10. The goal is to land around eight points or better.

Your humble correspondent is 73 years of age.  He used his right hand twice: once to get onto the floor, and once to get up off the floor. So his score is eight points. Now you tell us your age and your score.

The Purpose of Schooling

According to Anthony Esolen,

The purpose of schooling—which is not the same as education—is to encourage people to express confident platitudes, which they are pleased to call their opinions, about things they know nothing of. This is far worse than ignorance. 

Esolen is (usually) a good writer and a clear thinker who often communicates important truths. So why does he begin his essay so irresponsibly? Journalistic responsibility requires that the writer not tamper with the established meanings of words and phrases. (See Merriam-Webster.) That's what wokesters do, as witness their hijacking  of the word 'equity.' (See Merriam-Webster.)

Has Esolen suffered a reverse-metanoia? I rather doubt it.  Am I being overly punctilious? I don't think so.

Once again, language matters!  (587 entries and counting) Dismounting my high horse, I now return to ruminating over modal collapse arguments against the doctrine of divine simplicity.

Do You Really Want to Teach at a University?

Substack latest. Do you want to feed the unhungry in a leftist seminary?

Comments and replies:

Tony: One of the best, and certainly the most concise, essays on the problem. The mild criticism when I was at NYU was that the universities were offering "higher skilling." Higher infantilization was right around the corner. 

Bill: Thanks, Tony. One could go on to mention what a lousy deal a college degree is these days: as the quality goes down, the price goes up.  And then the trifecta of corruption: overpaid do-nothing administrators pushing the destructive DEI agenda; federally insured loans without oversight; stupid students and their parents who go into deep debt for something of little or no value. One absurdity leads to another: bad financial decisions are then to be rewarded by student loan forgiveness! Let the waitresses and the truck drivers pick up the tab. The law, unmoored from morality, and positively promotive of immorality, becomes a mere power tool for the advancing of the interests of amoral if not immoral elites. Talk about moral hazard!

Tony: Which connects to the inherently fraudulent banking system and the Ponzi scheme called Social Security. A perfect storm of moral hazards.

Bill: I agree. But permit me a quibble. Ponzi schemes are set up with fraudulent intent.  The SS system was not so set up. Initially, at least, it was reasonable and well-intentioned: to keep workers from ending up in the gutter, subsisting on cat food. It was insurance against destitution, and like all insurance, the premiums were relatively small. Of course, it soon enough transmogrified into an ultimately unsustainable retirement program.  My main point at the moment, however, is the pedantic one that SS is not a Ponzi scheme strictly speaking.  But it may be more than pedantic inasmuch as lefties could take it as a smear against SS as opposed to a legitimate criticism. Or as I put it about a dozen years ago, though not in a reply to Tony Flood:

Language matters.  Precision matters.  And if not here, where?  If you say what you know to be false for rhetorical effect, then you undermine your credibility among those whom you need to persuade.  Conservatives don't need to persuade conservatives, and they will not be able to persuade leftists.  They must pitch their message to the undecided who, if rational, will be put off by sloppy rhetoric and exaggeration.

I note that W. James Antle, III, the author of the linked article, refers to the SS system as "the liberals' Ponzi scheme."  But of course it is not a Ponzi scheme.  A Ponzi scheme, by definition, is a scheme set up with the intention of defrauding people for the benefit of those running the scheme.  But there is nothing fraudulent about the SS system: the intentions behind it were good ones!  The SS system is no doubt in dire need of reform if not outright elimination.  But no good purpose is achieved by calling it a Ponzi scheme.  That's either a lie or an exaggeration.  Not good, either way.  The most you can say is that it is like a Ponzi scheme in being fiscally unsustainable as currently structured. Why not make the point accurately without a distracting rhetorical smear? Conservative exaggeration is politically foolish.  Is it not folly to give ammo to the enemy?  Is it not folly to choose a means (exaggeration and distortion) that is not conducive  to the end (garnering support among the presently uncommitted)?

Tony:  I take your point about imputing ill-intent, but the passive voice of the "SS system was not so set up" (as a Ponzi scheme) obscures agency and its motives (which you were not writing an essay about). Before the Social Security Act of 1935 there was the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which was not hatched overnight. The conspiracy to nationalize US banks was at least a decade in the making. The propaganda seeding the mass media (as today, post-SVB collapse) was that there's nothing worse than a bank run or "panic" (or is it a "threat to public health"?). That line served those who wanted to bring banking under governmental control (with the bankers overseeing the government). The easy money of the '20s led to the crash that engendered the destitution you referenced. Intelligent people engineered the FRA, and equally intelligent, educated, sober, well-meaning people came up with the SSA (and other agencies) to address the former's unforeseen consequences. Their ideological heirs now prevent the inevitable insolvency of SS with easy money: the central bank writes a check to itself with "our" money (denominated in federal reserve notes), postponing the day of reckoning. My issue is moral hazard, and one seems to engender another. As Tucker reminded us last night, the bankers effed up, but none went to prison. The government moved heaven and earth to shore up the same morally hazardous system because, as all the right people know, "there's no alternative." As I wrote in Christ, Capital & Liberty:

Just as advances in technology decreased the fear of “getting caught” consuming pornography, so did the central bank in the financial markets decreased the fear of suffering losses for making bad loans. As Peter Schiff put it regarding the 2008-2009 Meltdown:

Just as prices in a free market are set by supply and demand, financial and real estate markets are governed by the opposing tension between greed and fear. Everyone wants to make money, but everyone is also afraid of losing what he has. Although few would ascribe their desire for prosperity to greed, it is simply a rose by another name. Greed is the elemental motivation for the economic risk-taking and hard work that are essential to a vibrant economy. [Peter Schiff, “Don’t Blame Capitalism,” The Washington Post, October 16, 2008.www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/15/AR2008101503166.html

But over the past generation, government has removed the necessary counterbalance of fear from the equation. Policies enacted by the Federal Reserve, the Federal Housing Admini­stration, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (which were always government entities in disguise), and others created advantages for home-buying and -selling and removed disincentives for lending and borrowing. The result was a credit and real estate bubble that could only grow—until it could grow no more. [CCL 126-127]

I'll stop here before I write an essay!

Bill: And I'll leave you with the last word. You make substantive points of more importance than my linguistic one, although I retain my conviction that language matters: any toleration of linguistic slovenliness spills over into a toleration of sloppy thinking. 
 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Ramblin’ Charles Adnopoz

At a book giveaway hereabouts the other day I did snag me a copy of Dave van Ronk's memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street. I'll have to dig into it one of these Saturday nights and pull out some tunes that you've never heard before.  In memory of the Mayor, here is his version of Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now." And here is his "Hang Me, Oh Hang Me."

David Dalton, Who is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan, Hyperion, 2012, p. 65:

As Dave van Ronk pointed out in his autobiography, many of the people involved in the first folk revival of the 1930s and '40s were Jewish — as were the folkies of the '60s. Van Ronk reasoned that for Jews, belonging to a movement centered on American traditional music was a form of belonging and assimilation.

[. . .]

"The revelation that Jack [Elliot] was Jewish was vouchsafed unto Bobby one afternoon at the Figaro," Van Ronk recalled.  "We were sitting around shooting the bull with Barry Kornfeld and maybe a couple of other people and somehow it came out that Jack had grown up in Ocean Parkway and was named Elliot Adnopoz.  Bobby literally fell off his chair; he was rolling around on the floor, and it took him a couple of minutes to pull himself together and get up again.  Then Barry, who can be diabolical in things like this, leaned over to him and just whispered the word 'Adnopoz' and back he went under the table."

Ramblin JackLacking as it does the proper American cowboy resonance, 'Elliot Charles Adnopoz' was ditched by its bearer who came to call himself 'Ramblin' Jack Elliot.'  Born in 1931 in Brooklyn to Jewish parents who wanted him to become a doctor, young Adnopoz rebelled, ran away, and became a protege of Woody Guthrie.  If it weren't for Ramblin' Jack, Guthrie would be nowhere near as well-known as he is today. 

 

Pretty Boy Floyd.  "As through this life you ramble, as through this life you roam/You'll never see an outlaw drive a family from their home."  No?  An example of the  tendency of lefties invariably to  take the side of the underdog regardless of whether right or wrong.  

Ramblin' Jack does a haunting version of Dylan's Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues.  It grows on you. Give it a chance. Here is a Dylan version with a good video. See if you can spot Phil Ochs.

Cigarettes and Whisky and Wild Women.  Take a lesson, kiddies.

Soul of a Man. 

Dylan's unforgettable,  Don't Think Twice. 

Here is Jack with Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, Buffy Sainte Marie singing the beautiful, Passing Through.

At 1:41 Baez starts a great Dylan imitation.

Dylan on Baez. 

Why Would Anyone Need an AR-15?

In this hyperkinetic age of 'twitterized' attention spans, the culture warrior has to be quick on the trigger with pithy punch-back against our political enemies.  So if anyone asks the above question, shoot back with three words:

Ask the Ukrainians!

For open-minded people interested in a serious conversation, however, you must have at the ready calm, detailed, logically sound, fact-based, invective-free arguments. You will find some in my Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms category together with a certain amount of invective, mockery, and contumely.  The caress of sweet reason works with some, but others respond only to the hard fist of unreason. Different strokes for different folks. Tailor your discourse to your audience. And your actions too.  And now I must quit you for a time and mount the mountain bike.

Naomi Wolf on Tucker Carlson’s J6 Revelations

A rich Substack article that ends thusly:

The gatekeepers who lie to the public about the most consequential events of our time — and who thus damage our nation, distort our history, and deprive half of our citizenry of their right to speak, champion and choose, without being tarred as would-be violent traitors – deserve our disgust.

I am sorry the nation was damaged by so much untruth issued by those with whom I identified at the time.

I am sorry my former “tribe” is angry at a journalist for engaging in — journalism.

I am sorry I believed so much nonsense.

Though it is no doubt too little, too late —

Conservatives, Republicans, MAGA:

I am so sorry.

DIE: ‘Equity’ Can Get You Killed

Here:

America’s top medical schools, worried [that] they have too few minority students, are doing something about it. They are lowering academic standards for admission and trying to hide the evidence. Columbia, Harvard, the University of Chicago, Stanford, Mount Sinai, and the University of Pennsylvania have already done so. The list already tops forty, and more are sure to follow.

A 'progressive' would call that progress. I suggest that you never use 'equity' or 'progressive' without the sneer quotes. 

Question for the syntactically punctilious: In the sentence immediately preceding, are the inverted commas being used to mention, to sneer, or both?

'Equity' is an obfuscatory woke-left coinage the purpose of which is to elide the distinction between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome.  The tactic is to promote the confusion of equality of opportunity — which everyone is for — with equality of outcome. The latter would be good if it naturally came about. Unfortunately, the various hierarchies of life make that impossible without massive governmental interference.  For it is a plain fact that individuals and groups are not equal by any empirical measure. (People are loathe to admit this because the admission sounds 'racist,' 'sexist,' 'ageist,' 'ableist,' etc., and being fearful, they fear being tagged with these pejoratives. But in a contest between a smear word and Reality, the latter wins in the end.) 

The achievement of equality of outcome requires equalizing agencies with vast power centered in a Sino-styled Sicherheitsstaat, a security or police state with social credit scores and omni-intrusive surveillance. But note that even then you would not have 'equity,' i.e., equality of outcome, because the equalizers would not be equal in power, position, pelf, and perquisites to the equalized. Would-be socializers, equalizers, and top-down planners typically imagine themselves ending up among the socializers, equalizers, and planners and not among the socialized, equalized, and planned.  More importantly, history shows that outcome-equalization from the top down leads to inanition as in the good old USSR the menus of whose restaurants listed many a dish only one of which was available: borscht. Yum!

Leftists are semantic smugglers. They are trying in this instance and in others to pass off something destructive under cover of something appealing.  Equality of opportunity, equality of political rights, equality before the law, etc. appeal to almost all of us. So what the stealth-ideological leftist does is to use this attractive wrapping to smuggle into uncritical heads the pseud0-value, or disvalue, 'equity,' understood as governmentally enforced equality of outcome or result.

Now my dear friends: if we we don't punch back hard against this destructive nonsense we are 'screwed,' all of us, even the wokesters themselves, and their usefully-idiotic fellow travellers, though their evil and cooperation with evil disallows their cognizance of the fact.  

If you haven't had enough of this delightful topic, here is an exchange between Bill Maher and Bernie Sanders in which B. S. demonstrates what a clueless and/or mendacious specimen he is.