Academentia in excelsis

It is fitting that a demented man should 'preside' over the decline and fall of our republic and in particular over the decline and fall of its once-great universities.  No one other than Joey B among American pols could better represent a nation in steep decline by every measure, a nation that has lost the will to defend its borders both on the ground and above it — I allude to the Chinese spy balloons — and to maintain domestic order within its borders. 

Here:

The Ohio State University is currently seeking a professor of “Philosophy of Race,” an area of expertise that includes “the epistemological significance of race or racism” and “race in the philosophy of science.” Its Department of Physics seeks a professor whose main focus is “issues relevant to educational equity.” And its Department of Anthropology recently sought an archaeologist whose work emphasizes “decolonization, feminist theory, queer theory, critical race theory, and/or Indigenous ontologies.”

The sheer destructive lunacy of the DEI agenda reaches its apogee in the Physics Department's quest for a professor whose main focus (!) is on educational equity.  'Equity' is Wokespeak for equality of outcome or result. So the search is on for a candidate who will dumb down physics to the extent necessary to insure that each student, regardless of race or ethnicity gets the same grade, presumably an 'A.' For of course any other result would be — wait for it — racist! We are all equal in every respect, hence any inequality of outcome as between, say, Asians as a group and blacks as a group, can only be explained by the Original Sin of systemic, institutional racism visited upon us by the Founders.  (This is why the monuments to them must of course be destroyed.) 

And so physics, the least ideological of the natural sciences, must be ideologized, politicized, and racialized.

The insanity of this is evident. But what explains it?  We like to think of university faculty and administrators as intelligent and sane people.  So what's the explanation? Perhaps it is like this.

There is a hard-core of committed, strong-willed leftists who are positively evil and bent on destroying the USA and the West in general.  They enlist and manipulate a huge cadre of useful idiots and fellow-travelers who are not evil but are moral mediocrities who go along with the revolutionary vanguard for one or a combination of the following reasons: fear of losing their jobs and perquisites; laziness and inattention; a strong need to be liked and accepted; conformism; inability to think critically; misplaced white guilt; absorption in private life. 

Essential to my explanation is the conservative conviction that evil is a reality with deep metaphysical roots, and that some of our fellow mortals are, in the main, agents of evil.  They are few in number but very powerful due to their ability to manipulate half-way decent, timorous and ovine, moral mediocrities. The latter are the useful idiots and fellow-travelers, latter-day 'pinkos' if you will. 

Do you have a better explanation?  If so, I'd like to hear it.

On ‘Illegal Alien’ and ‘Illegal Immigrant’

Substack latest.

The Republic is probably beyond saving at this late date. So why do I bother to write pieces that underscore what really ought to be obvious? One reason is selfish: I like to write and then re-read what I have written. But having taken the time to write something clean, coherent, and sensible, why should I hide my light  under a bushel? It is not impossible that a half-dozen readers will actually read what I have written and be led to think a bit more clearly and act a little more responsibly.  

A Good Insight into the CIA

Here:

A right-wing reflex, albeit one attenuated by each new betrayal, has been to trust the “patriots” in the intelligence community working tirelessly to protect us from foreign threats. But future presidents must remember that the CIA was born in the era when the modern American administrative state was being built and beginning to feel its powers. This may have been a necessary evil in the face of the challenge posed by the highly centralized and bureaucratic Soviet intelligence services. Nevertheless, any capable and public-spirited leader must always remember that America’s foreign intelligence apparatus has an innate prejudice in favor of its own corporate and partisan interests as well as the ever-leftward trajectory of the American administrative state as a whole.

Is it Still Tweedledum and Tweedledee?

The good Baron proffers a depressing YesGates of Vienna and MavPhil have been sphere-mates for a good long time, going on 20 years. The Baron's wife Dymphna was a regular reader of MavPhil back in the early days and an e-mail correspondent of mine. It has been some years since she quit the sublunary. My very belated condolences to the Baron.

resist, Resist, RESIST!

Seemingly, no day without a 'woke' outrage.  See below. Beneath refutation. There's no point in trying to engage these clowns on the plane of reason. Mock, deride, resist, and above all: ignore the A.P.'s  asinine recommendations.  By the way, 'asinine' is spelled exactly as I just spelled it, and not 'assinine' despite the fact that L. asinus mean ass or donkey. So if  I call you a wokeass, I am saying inter alia that you are donkey-dumb, the ass being the totemic animal of the Democrat Party. 

Write and speak sentences like this: "The Germans are more rule-bound than the Italians." Not only does this sentence violate the A. P. recommendation, thereby resisting willful wokester self-enstupidation, it is also offensive to the wokeassed on the ground of its being a generic statement. "One must never generalize!"  But I just did, and so did you. The difference is that my generalization is true whereas yours is self-refuting. Try thinking for a change, and you just might think your way out of your wokeassery. Since I care about and you and your sanity, I recommend that you study my Substack article Generic Statements.  

AP's tweet lumping "the French" in with list of "dehumanizing" labels.

Homo Homini Lupus

Top o' the Stack. Opening paragraph:

A 28-year-old Gypsy girl from the Tene Bimbo crime family 'befriends' an 85 year-old single man, marries him, and then poisons him, causing his death, in an attempt to steal his assets.  The two were made for each other, the evil cunning of the woman finding its outlet in the utter foolishness of the man.  What lessons are to be learned from this?

……………………….

Joe Odegaard comments:

This is from Dante's Inferno, Canto 26:
 
"Consider your origin: you were not made to live like brutes, but to
follow virtue and knowledge."
 
Considerate la vostra semenza:
  fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
  ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.'
 
Some people don't try.

The Musket Canard, its F-15 Counterpart, the Need Canard, and 2A

Tony Flood commenting on my Substack entry ARs and Cattle Cars:

Excellent all around, Bill. Pithy opener and rises from there, especially the fixed meaning/variable application distinction. (Good biblical hermeneutics, too.) Will propagate. 

Besides the musket canard, there's its F-15 counterpart, which recently came out of Biden's mouth (I wonder who put it there): to take on the US government, you'd need fighter jets and maybe some nukes, not measly AR-15s. This invites patriots to rhetorically ask Brandon whether they should put such items on their wish list, if that's what it would take to neutralize a tyranny's threat (2A's raison d'être). Does might, after all, make right? Given a nuclear-armed George III, should Washington have thrown in the towel? I'm sure you could make the point I'm cornering more convincingly.
Thank you, Tony. Your comment raises a number of issues. I'll mention two here. I solicit your response.
 
1) I agree that the Second Amendment's raison d'être is to keep tyranny at bay.  Historically, that was why it came to be.  (If there is an historian in the house, I am open to correction.) Tactically, however, it might not be wise to harp on this point lest you provoke a Biden-type response.  There are other reasons for 2A.  One has to do with defense of self and of certain others (spouse, children, et al.)
 
I argue as follows. If I have the right to life, then I have the right to defend my life, and you (plural) have the correlative duty not to take my life. But if I have the right to life, then I have the right to acquire, keep, and bear instruments appropriate for the defense of my life.  What count as appropriate instruments will depend on circumstances, and circumstances change.  If the criminal element is armed with semi-automatic 9-mm pistols with 13-round magazines, then surely the law-abiding citizen must be allowed  to own such firearms. A fortiori given that the government, which is charged with the protection of life, liberty, and property, is in many (not all) places refusing to do its job and is instead empowering criminals by defunding the police, eliminating cash bail, emptying the prisons, opening the borders, and similar 'reforms.' (Note the woke-left's Orwellian use of 'reform.')
 
Besides keeping the government and the criminal element in check, there are two further reasons why the citizen's "right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." One is that guns are needed by some in pursuit of their legitimate occupations. Ranchers use AR-15s to thin out the predatory coyote population. (By 'coyote' I mean a species of canine.) A fourth reason is that firearms have legitimate sporting applications such as marksmanship competitions.
 
2) This brings me to the Need Canard

You can have a right to a thing whether or not you now have or will ever have a need for it. So the best response to the leftist who asks, "Why do you need a semi-automatic firearm?" is wrong question! Stop the pointless conversation right there. "The question is not whether I need one; the question is whether I have a right to one." Then explain that the right to appropriate means of self-defense follows from the right to self-defense which in turn follows from the right to life.

Depending on the sort of leftist you are dealing with you could then go on to explain why you do need a gun. But the wisest policy is not to debate leftists. Generally speaking and admitting exceptions, leftists need to be defeated, not debated. Debate is worthwhile only with open-minded truth seekers. Truth, however, is not a leftist value. At the apex of the leftist's value hierarchy stands POWER. That is not to say that a leftist will never speak the truth; he will sometimes, but only if it serves his agenda. 

Related: Floridians do not welcome home invaders.