2. This is higher education. Boise State having handed this man a diploma, hired him to each core courses to undergraduates. So where’s the evidence he has any schooling in mathematics and statistics, philosophy, or history?
Nice windowbox. Looks like Amurican weathered wood.
Walk away is likely not realistic. But “Aslan is on the move”, people are making decisions and all options are being explored by the various individuals.
I was pleased to see PDJT address the problem of the several hundred conservative political prisoners, many being held without bail, under dubious charges.
Yes, the game is bigger than we may think.
_______________________________________
The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.
–John 3:8
@Art+Deco – I live in Boise Idaho, where BSU is located. I am a rare thing in this city, a born native. There is so much more to this story than meets the eye. The person you linked to was not born here and has none of its values, and lives like a parasite on the culture he is helping to transform. BSU was essentially forced by cultural pressure and required diversity representatives to hire him.
In our city and BSU’s defense, BSU has canceled all the insane ‘diversity’ courses due to their insane bias. Our city is not quite gone off the map yet. But it’s on a bad course.
Let me tell you, if Idaho goes, all of it goes. We are one of the last sane states in the Union. As highly functional as an old style American society ever was. Now being swarmed by Californians.
BSU was essentially forced by cultural pressure and required diversity representatives to hire him.
No, they weren’t. The faculty hire no one they don’t care to. If they’re facing ‘pressure’, it’s from the provost. The provost was either picked from among the faculty or was lateral import from some other faculty.
Does anyone have any doubt that his handlers are juicing “President” Biden?
Watch the news conference… actually, just the first few minutes and the last few. Notice his eyes. In the beginning, they’re the wide-eyed look of youth; by the end, he’s back to his old man squint. He quickly removed himself at 70 minutes as he became aware (or someone signalled) that the uppers were wearing off.
That wide-eyed almost-stare is common in meth-heads and coke users right after the hit.
I doubt if it’s coke, the high from that shit is a rocket trip; up fast and down just as fast. He didn’t appear semi-spastic enough for meth. It was probably one of the amphetamines that the military has developed. Keeps a fit 30 year old alert for hours. Inject a 150% standard dose into Sloe Jow and it speeds him up to near normal for an hour or so.
May G_d have mercy on this country. We need it.
Again, someone from Boise ID being told what actually happened by someone thousands of miles away, who may have worked in a university setting at some time in the past. The interweb is an awesome powerful thing.
“Let me tell you, if Idaho goes, all of it goes. We are one of the last sane states in the Union. As highly functional as an old style American society ever was. Now being swarmed by Californians.”
Cue Neo’s later post today. That’s what happened to most of the conservative states, once any of them attracted Democrat deliberate nest-foulers (think San Francisco and its ilk) & adjacent folk (the mostly decent party members who just don’t make the connection between the policies they vote for, and the practices they end up with).
Again, someone from Boise ID being told what actually happened
Unless that particular institution is quite peculiar and he’s actually on hiring committees, he’s not telling you ‘what actually happened’.
In re Hubert’s link: “Nobody voted for this.” – Codevilla.
With all due respect to the author, whose work I greatly admire: yes, they did.
They voted for noble-sounding goals, and ignored the means taken to reach the alleged ends, which mysteriously never are achieved.
They voted for people whose major talent is bait-and-switch, and then re-elected them even after that was known.
They voted against the “mean” people who insisted on responsibility and accountability (if any could even be found to run for office).
They voted for people of demonstrated character failings, over and over again, for reasons I cannot begin to fathom.
(Cue Neo’s post later today on Good Old Joe, but he isn’t the only one.)
They voted for people who lie, as a matter of course, and are surprised when they are the ones betrayed.
Of course, I totally agree with the rest of his essay.
Though that dominance seems at hand, the general population’s compliance with it is not. That is because isolating and alienating anybody, let alone half the country, is the proverbial two-edged sword. Anytime you isolate and alienate someone else, you do the same to yourself. The boundaries that the oligarchs have drawn, are drawing, separate them from the American people’s vast majority, whose consciousness of powerlessness and defenselessness clarifies their choice between utter subjection and doing whatever it might take to exit a system that no longer seems to allow for the prospect of republican self-government.
Codevilla develops that major premise.
The ruling class—Wall Street, K Street, Washington grifters, the educational establishment, the media, and the corporations—saw the alienation that Trump embodied as the mortal threat that it is to their own power and positions. Unable and unwilling to change their way of governing, or the system of heavily bureaucratized crony capitalism from which they so massively benefit, these people resolved to secure the votes of Blacks, Hispanics, women, and the young by encouraging them to make war on whites, men, and conservatives. “Hate thy neighbor and stick with us!” was their program. Hence the four-year campaign leading up to the 2020 election was all about hating Trump and beating down his voters on the basis of race, sex, the Russians—anything to divert from what the rampant oligarchy was doing to the rest of the country.
And about those “baseless” claims of election fraud —
Ordinary credulity was never enough for swallowing the narrative that universal vote by mail, coupled with drop boxes for ballots and ballot harvesting by self-proclaimed civic groups, plus the reduction or elimination of verification of signatures, would do anything other than transfer electoral power from those who cast votes to those who count them—that is, to the oligarchy and its party.
…
The oligarchy sealed the victory as brazenly as they gained it: by meeting demands for transparency with ad hominem accusations backed by threats of social ostracism and enforced by control, which itself was attained in part by issuing naked threats backed by legislative and bureaucratic power—all over partisan, monopoly digital platforms which eventually participated in censorship.
The oligarchy’s power over American institutions public and private, however, does not change the fact that it rests on near universal voluntary compliance. The irrevocable alienation of and from at least half of Americans has canceled much of the oligarchs’ moral legitimacy and left them obliged to rule by further alienating and punishing—to rule a house that they divided against itself. Hence, the unprecedented power it gathered will prove less significant than the manner in which it did the gathering.
That is true of almost every civil society, and once the Ruling Class makes voluntary compliance untenable, they must resort to involuntary servitude. Consult Hayek, among others.
This is not an opening gambit, but an end game —
the republic’s substance withered over a century, and its husk collapsed over the past five years.
In our time, millions of people have grown up or been educated no longer to want or be able to live as citizens of what had been the American republic. Partisans in mind, heart, and habit, their support of the oligarchy’s partisan rule has left the United States with two peoples of opposing character, aspirations, and tastes within its national borders. The government bureaucracies are led by persons selected and habituated against the deplorables. The same can be said of the educational establishment and corporate boardrooms. What sort of dictatorial power would it take to purge them? Were the deplorables to struggle for the partisan power to oppress the others, they would guarantee dysfunction at best, war at worst. That is why it makes most sense for them to assert their own freedom.
…
Our American exodus won’t be led by a Moses. The Republican Party, with the exception of a few national-level personages, may be as useless as ever. But politics is a collective activity, and the lack of top-down leadership notwithstanding, our exodus is already in progress, thanks to Americans’ legal structures and traditions of state and local autonomy, as well as our Tocquevillian taste for organizing ourselves into ad hoc groups for the common benefit.
Already in the winter of 2021, 33 states, pressed by their voters, are introducing bills to prevent the kind of executive and judicial manipulation of election procedures that occurred in 2020. Ordinary citizens who are oppressed by COVID-inspired overregulation have also organized themselves to take advantage of the fact that safety in numbers is the first rule of civil disobedience.
Thus, hundreds of California restauranteurs jointly defied the governor’s order to keep them closed, and sued him. Joint action is also the key to transforming what the authorities want to treat as disciplinary or criminal matters into political ones.
…
Nullification has been a fact of U.S public life since Colorado and California rewrote drug laws. There is no reason why it should or can stop there.
It is no less necessary for Americans to subtract themselves from big companies that exercise public powers with private discretion. Stricter application of antitrust laws and ones upholding privacy can help. So can organized boycotts. Sometimes, action does not have to be organized at all. When the Gillette company aired an ad on toxic masculinity, nobody had to tell millions of its customers to shave with other razors.
…
Because contending notions of legitimacy are at stake, actions undertaken to such ends must be accompanied, at local and national levels, by relentless explanation about facts, truth and lies, right and wrong.
Once a majority of Americans understand that Google, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, the Times, and Gannett are partisan instruments—that they use lies, censorship, and insults to subjugate us to a form of oligarchical totalitarianism—a substantial portion of their customers will begin to patronize alternatives, and their power over information will cease. That is because their power depends on the public accepting the pretense of objectivity and neutrality that these platforms still see fit on occasion to wear after sucking the life out of 20th-century American media. Stripping them of this borrowed pretense, and highlighting their overtly manipulative partisanship, must be every action’s proximate objective.
I think he is a bit optimistic about some things he’s saying there.
Leave aside that pretenses of expertise prove hollow as often as not. Even if those who pretend to rule on behalf of “science” had earned their status by examinations as rigorous and competitive as those of France’s Third Republic bureaucrats, their expertise would not negate the inalienable interest that the rest of us have in living our lives as we see fit—in our own freedom, pursuing our own interests, according to our own lights. “Who the hell do they think they are?” is the core of every Smithian complaint, and republican government’s bedrock argument.
Not all of Americans share it. Some really believe that controlling the Earth’s climate, and facilitating every manner of sexual gratification while exacting racial vengeance, must trump the freedoms of whomever objects. For them, rule by groups, each upholding its ideological and material stake and bargaining behind closed doors—that is, oligarchy—is fine.
But behold the exodus from public schools, even by the Elite Enablers.
Though school choice is irrelevant to quality in principle, it frees each set of Smiths to rise or fall to the educational level they choose for their children. Let parents who care about intensively educating their children in science and math or the Greek and Roman classics or the Hebrew Bible to reap the consequences, good and bad, of their own choices. Let parents who want to teach their children that there are an infinite number of genders or that skin color is the all-powerful determining force in their lives or that biology is a human invention bear similar responsibility, without imposing their own beliefs on others.
…
How come the public-private oligarchy was able to use the COVID challenge to crush independent business, thus transferring massive wealth to itself? Because its various parts are staffed by interconnected people who, whatever their differences, instinctively trump the Smiths’ priorities with those of their own class.
Of all the oligarchy’s parts, the educational establishment’s power most depends on prestige. But under the academic regalia, it has no more clothes than the proverbial emperor. The humble Smiths can cut the problem off at the roots simply by ceasing to credit the sources of prestige. The moment that the Smiths cease to think of Harvard and Stanford products as “smart,” and instead think “pretentious,” they deprive the oligarchy of much of its legitimacy.
The shrewdest thing ever said about education was by the Man behind the Curtain:
“They have no more brains than you do, but they have something you don’t have – a diploma.” And thereupon he awarded to the Scarecrow a piece of paper having just as much significance as the current credentials of our Elite Universities.
The oligarchy’s cancellation of most ordinary people out of its desired America leaves the latter with the choice between helotry and exodus. But since submission to inconstant, inept masters is impossible, common sense suggests counter-canceling: limiting involvement with the oligarchy to minimizing its interference on individuals who don’t share its aims and preferences.
…
Like married couples who have lost or given up what had united them, trying to work through irreconcilable differences only drives Americans’ domestic quarrels toward more violence.
That is why going one’s own way, while paying no more attention to the woke than is absolutely necessary, should be the agenda of the country party, which in this case includes all of those who still feel an attachment to the ideals of republican citizenship that we once shared in common as Americans.
However, as we have seen in recent news reports about the persecution of Trump’s supporters by means of the DOJ Sedition Hoax, just because you aren’t interested in the Woke Elite doesn’t meant they aren’t interested in you.
It’s a subtle detail, yet a prime example of what sounds good in theory but becomes problematical in practice.
The enlightened oligarchy and its elite servant classes follow Woodrow Wilson’s progressive dogma: “If you will think about what you ought to do for other people, your character will take care of itself.”
And C. S. Lewis, of course, nailed it a long time ago.
Then, after considering all of his warnings, replace Woodrow Wilson’s charitable “do for other people” with the much more prevalent interpretation – “do to” them.
This is a even more subtle twist on the Golden Rule, perhaps, but we have seen recent, blatant, examples of how our Anointed Ones have no expectation that what they Do Unto Others will be Done Unto Them.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
— C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology (Making of Modern Theology)
In the following, he means “small d” democrat, which we would call a classical liberal, and Theology should apply to Socialism and its new incarnation, the Ideology of Wokism. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/C._S._Lewis
I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over others. And the higher the pretensions of such power, the more dangerous I think it both to the rulers and to the subjects. Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated, and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations. And since Theocracy is the worst, the nearer any government approaches to Theocracy the worse it will be. A metaphysic, held by the rulers with the force of a religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them, like the inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents, it abrogates the ordinary rules of morality, and it gives a seemingly high, super-personal sanction to all the very ordinary human passions by which, like other men, the rulers will frequently be actuated. In other words, it forbids wholesome doubt. […]
This false certainty comes out in Professor Haldane’s article. […] It is breaking Aristotle’s canon—to demand in every enquiry that degree of certainty which the subject matter allows. And not on your life to pretend that you see further than you do.
Being a democrat, I am opposed to all very drastic and sudden changes of society (in whatever direction) because they never in fact take place except by a particular technique. That technique involves the seizure of power by a small, highly disciplined group of people; the terror and the secret police follow, it would seem, automatically. I do not think any group good enough to have such power. They are men of like passions with ourselves. The secrecy and discipline of their organisation will have already inflamed in them that passion for the inner ring which I think at least as corrupting as avarice; and their high ideological pretensions will have lent all their passions the dangerous prestige of the Cause. Hence, in whatever direction the change is made, it is for me damned by its modus operandi. The worst of all public dangers is the committee of public safety.
“A Reply to Professor Haldane” (1946), published posthumously in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1966)
Those excerpts provide the perennially popular quotes often found on rightish blogs, along with Sir Thomas More’s warning not to cut down all the laws to get at the devil (which, it appears, a lot of conservatives are getting ready to ignore, despite believing he was correct about the dire consequences).
“Newton’s First Law of Thermodynamic Liberalism: Each and every Liberal action has an equal and opposite result.
Newton’s Second Law; Truth is equal and opposite to whatever a Liberal utters.”
There is another version of the second Lewis quote, the substance of which was used by him on several occasions. The Robber Baron apparently made appearances as occasion warranted (never let a good metaphor go to waste).
Andrew Sullivan, who seems to be somewhat distressed at the growing (or at least now-open) tyranny of the “big D” Democrats, in one of his posts from long ago, before the Left he used to belong to cancelled him for sometimes being an actual liberal, implicitly observed that Lewis predicted the current situation.
“I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over others.
…
And since Theocracy is the worst, the nearer any government approaches to Theocracy the worse it will be. A metaphysic held by the rulers with the force of a religion, is a bad sign.
…
In a word, it forbids wholesome doubt. A political programme can never in reality be more than probably right. We never know all the facts about the present and we can only guess the future. To attach to a party programme — whose highest claim is to reasonable prudence — the sort of assent which we should reserve for demonstrable theorems, is a kind of intoxication,” – C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, ch. 3.
Sullivan could have been referring to either or both Parties at the time, although most likely the Republicans.
Here, he’s a bit more direct and looking the other direction.
The media is supposed to subject easy, convenient rush-to-judgment narratives to ruthless empirical testing. Now, for purely ideological reasons, they are rushing to promote ready-made narratives, which actually point away from the empirical facts. To run sixteen separate pieces on anti-Asian white supremacist misogynist hate based on one possibly completely unrelated incident is not journalism. It’s fanning irrational fear in the cause of ideological indoctrination. And it appears to be where all elite media is headed.
However, his Substack archive still has plenty of posts lambasting Trump and the Republicans, so he is at best an unwilling critic of his own side.
Very nice picture neo.
I was a young boy when first I saw pictures of Austria’s window boxes. Then and now I consider them the perfect window dressing.
Some other country’s towns may rival Austria’s love of flowers but in America, only Carmel, California has evoked a similar admiration for me.
I suspect its the climate in those regions.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided.” Abraham Lincoln, June 16, 1858
Geoffrey. I cannot speak for Carmel but the weather in the Austrian alpine regions consists of rather long and cold winters. I think it is based more on the people’s love of beauty and a deep desire for orderliness. I had the good fortune to frequently travel to Tyrolian and Bavarian villages many times. No matter how turbulent things were in the outside world I always had the sense that all was fine in the world when I was there. Very comforting during these crazy times.
The only answer to all the above is limited government. The USA is the first entity to actually do it successfully in human history. The opening words of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law” were a simple and profound departure from centuries of theocracy and the rule of royalty.
Fortunately we have the successful example of Constitutional Restraint at the core of our historical experience.
Anyone on this thread who has not read “Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World” by Daniel Hannan should read it as soon as possible. It is also available in Audible. I have been giving this book away ever since I encountered it. There are significant differences between the Anglosphere and the rest of Western Civilization and IMO this book is the best at describing them.
There will be a revival of understanding of the concepts of Constitutional Restraint as a reaction to Wokism.
I also see a rise of a new more self-aware Anglosphere around China as the beneficial outcome of the current Chinese situation. China is commercially surrounded from India down through Australia and up through Japan and South Korea. The ideas originating in the Common Law and the English and American experience underlie commerce and much of culture in the areas that the English and the US have conquered. These ideas of the Rule of Law and Constitutional Restraint are the solution to most human governmental problems.
@Dick Illyes:
In all those places you mention where the Common Law was once planted, Legislative Diarrhea, Administrative Fiat, and Rule by Black Robes are the orders of the day. You think you can go up against them with Blackstone and the Federalist Papers?
Were you perchance an Eagle Scout? Character and optimism are all well and good, but they’re not going to win this one.
I see the Chinese up close and personal. They have their blind spots and ideological blinkers but they are fundamentally SERIOUS people and even their ideological blinkers are more pro-social and pro-expansionary (for them) than our present dysfunctions could ever be.
The Indians: Nobody takes them seriously. They talk more than they do. Plus everything is smeared in shit. Don’t believe me? Go there. You’ll be popping the Imodium like candy after a fortnight.
Koreans hate the Japanese more than they fear the Chinese. Japanese I’m just not sure about. They could possibly wake up from their long post-war slumber and slide toward demographic death… but 15 nukes would finish them. So would conventional cruise missiles into a few power stations and cutting their shipping lanes.
Australia / NZ… Don’t make me laugh. Currently the entire political establishment in Australia is having a hysterical man-hating meltdown because some ruling party hack slut got drunk and got herself banged on a desk in parliament house a few years back.
These are not serious people. The USA is no longer ruled by serious people. Canada is not. Boris Johnson is a clown. It’s Clown World.
So much for ruling elites, and the media classes and the managerialist bugmen go-alongs.
Any upheaval and change will have to come from below. This will not be easy, nor will it be nice. We shall have to garotte people with their *bowties*… 😛
Koreans hate the Japanese more than they fear the Chinese.
Zaphod:
I once bought a used car from a Korean dealership in the Valley. I had a Japanese mechanic with me to check the car. Even I could sense the animosity. Both sides were professional but…
The USA is no longer ruled by serious people.
In a way the end of the Cold War was a disaster. The threat of world war kept the elites more focused on real issues. Once that threat was removed it was off to fantasy land.
Huxley: “In a way the end of the Cold War was a disaster.”
Agree. There were serious people in charge then. Once that threat was gone (and the WWII generation retired), the bozos emerged and took over. As a minor participant on the propaganda front in the later phase of the Cold War, I saw the transition take place. I remember thinking back in the late 1990s-early 2000s that we had succeeded in recreating the old Soviet nomenklatura: mediocre, stupid, incompetent, and very, very entitled. The moral of the story is that success–and the United States circa 1945-1990 was a successful concern, despite some serious and perhaps fatal missteps–inevitably attracts grifters. We lowered our grifter-shields.
Zaphod: there are still plenty of serious people in this country. Some of them even frequent this forum. You won’t find them in politics or at the top of the greasy pole. Being serious people, they prefer to focus on other things. There are signs that their attention has been piqued, however.
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Nice…..Austria?
Will the corrupt and broken R states clean themselves up, after the Great Steal?
I dont’t know. But Georgia might be in the lead to reform their broken election system.
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/georgia-state-house-representatives-passes-election-bill-party-line-vote
https://jonathanturley.org/2021/03/26/former-bsu-professor-arrested-for-defacing-lincoln-statue-with-feces-and-paint/#more-170966
And here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/exegesis
1. This is the Democratic Party
2. This is higher education. Boise State having handed this man a diploma, hired him to each core courses to undergraduates. So where’s the evidence he has any schooling in mathematics and statistics, philosophy, or history?
Nice windowbox. Looks like Amurican weathered wood.
Angelo Codevilla’s latest:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/american-exodus-angelo-codevilla-oligarchy
In a nutshell: walk away and form a new union.
Walk away is likely not realistic. But “Aslan is on the move”, people are making decisions and all options are being explored by the various individuals.
I was pleased to see PDJT address the problem of the several hundred conservative political prisoners, many being held without bail, under dubious charges.
https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/04/a-family-on-trial-for-january-6/
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2021/03/24/prosecutors-now-backing-away-from-statements-and-charges-against-january-6th-protestors/
https://meaninginhistory.blogspot.com/2021/03/more-signs-that-dojs-sedition-hoax-is.html#more
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/trump-capitol-january-6-protests/2021/03/26/id/1015272/
Xylourgos:
New England.
“Aslan is on the move” — JimNorCal
Yes, the game is bigger than we may think.
_______________________________________
The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.
–John 3:8
@Art+Deco – I live in Boise Idaho, where BSU is located. I am a rare thing in this city, a born native. There is so much more to this story than meets the eye. The person you linked to was not born here and has none of its values, and lives like a parasite on the culture he is helping to transform. BSU was essentially forced by cultural pressure and required diversity representatives to hire him.
In our city and BSU’s defense, BSU has canceled all the insane ‘diversity’ courses due to their insane bias. Our city is not quite gone off the map yet. But it’s on a bad course.
https://www.kivitv.com/news/boise-state-cancels-50-plus-diversity-classes-after-claims-student-was-degraded-for-beliefs
Let me tell you, if Idaho goes, all of it goes. We are one of the last sane states in the Union. As highly functional as an old style American society ever was. Now being swarmed by Californians.
BSU was essentially forced by cultural pressure and required diversity representatives to hire him.
No, they weren’t. The faculty hire no one they don’t care to. If they’re facing ‘pressure’, it’s from the provost. The provost was either picked from among the faculty or was lateral import from some other faculty.
Does anyone have any doubt that his handlers are juicing “President” Biden?
Watch the news conference… actually, just the first few minutes and the last few. Notice his eyes. In the beginning, they’re the wide-eyed look of youth; by the end, he’s back to his old man squint. He quickly removed himself at 70 minutes as he became aware (or someone signalled) that the uppers were wearing off.
That wide-eyed almost-stare is common in meth-heads and coke users right after the hit.
I doubt if it’s coke, the high from that shit is a rocket trip; up fast and down just as fast. He didn’t appear semi-spastic enough for meth. It was probably one of the amphetamines that the military has developed. Keeps a fit 30 year old alert for hours. Inject a 150% standard dose into Sloe Jow and it speeds him up to near normal for an hour or so.
May G_d have mercy on this country. We need it.
Again, someone from Boise ID being told what actually happened by someone thousands of miles away, who may have worked in a university setting at some time in the past. The interweb is an awesome powerful thing.
“Let me tell you, if Idaho goes, all of it goes. We are one of the last sane states in the Union. As highly functional as an old style American society ever was. Now being swarmed by Californians.”
Cue Neo’s later post today. That’s what happened to most of the conservative states, once any of them attracted Democrat deliberate nest-foulers (think San Francisco and its ilk) & adjacent folk (the mostly decent party members who just don’t make the connection between the policies they vote for, and the practices they end up with).
https://www.thenewneo.com/2021/03/26/states-cant-enforce-boundaries-against-interstate-emigration/
No one does it like the Austrians.
https://www.countryliving.com/uk/wildlife/countryside/g22571392/window-box-flowers-austria/
Again, someone from Boise ID being told what actually happened
Unless that particular institution is quite peculiar and he’s actually on hiring committees, he’s not telling you ‘what actually happened’.
In re Hubert’s link: “Nobody voted for this.” – Codevilla.
With all due respect to the author, whose work I greatly admire: yes, they did.
They voted for noble-sounding goals, and ignored the means taken to reach the alleged ends, which mysteriously never are achieved.
They voted for people whose major talent is bait-and-switch, and then re-elected them even after that was known.
They voted against the “mean” people who insisted on responsibility and accountability (if any could even be found to run for office).
They voted for people of demonstrated character failings, over and over again, for reasons I cannot begin to fathom.
(Cue Neo’s post later today on Good Old Joe, but he isn’t the only one.)
They voted for people who lie, as a matter of course, and are surprised when they are the ones betrayed.
Of course, I totally agree with the rest of his essay.
Codevilla develops that major premise.
And about those “baseless” claims of election fraud —
That is true of almost every civil society, and once the Ruling Class makes voluntary compliance untenable, they must resort to involuntary servitude. Consult Hayek, among others.
This is not an opening gambit, but an end game —
I think he is a bit optimistic about some things he’s saying there.
But behold the exodus from public schools, even by the Elite Enablers.
The shrewdest thing ever said about education was by the Man behind the Curtain:
“They have no more brains than you do, but they have something you don’t have – a diploma.” And thereupon he awarded to the Scarecrow a piece of paper having just as much significance as the current credentials of our Elite Universities.
However, as we have seen in recent news reports about the persecution of Trump’s supporters by means of the DOJ Sedition Hoax, just because you aren’t interested in the Woke Elite doesn’t meant they aren’t interested in you.
And to those crying Whataboutism in re counter-canceling:
https://www.dailywire.com/news/there-is-no-such-thing-as-reverse-cancel-culture?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
“There is No Such Thing as Reverse Cancel Culture
Yes, conservatives should vote with their feet and their credit cards. No, that doesn’t make us as bad as the Left.”
By Spencer Klavan Mar 24, 2021
Another excerpt from Codevilla’s post about the Elite class.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/american-exodus-angelo-codevilla-oligarchy
It’s a subtle detail, yet a prime example of what sounds good in theory but becomes problematical in practice.
And C. S. Lewis, of course, nailed it a long time ago.
Then, after considering all of his warnings, replace Woodrow Wilson’s charitable “do for other people” with the much more prevalent interpretation – “do to” them.
This is a even more subtle twist on the Golden Rule, perhaps, but we have seen recent, blatant, examples of how our Anointed Ones have no expectation that what they Do Unto Others will be Done Unto Them.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/526469-of-all-tyrannies-a-tyranny-sincerely-exercised-for-the-good
In the following, he means “small d” democrat, which we would call a classical liberal, and Theology should apply to Socialism and its new incarnation, the Ideology of Wokism.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/C._S._Lewis
Those excerpts provide the perennially popular quotes often found on rightish blogs, along with Sir Thomas More’s warning not to cut down all the laws to get at the devil (which, it appears, a lot of conservatives are getting ready to ignore, despite believing he was correct about the dire consequences).
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2019/05/17/its-not-a-magic-spell/#comment-600084
“If they get the opportunity to do things for your own good, it will become a capability to do things for someone else’s good, and eventually a way to do things to no good, to anyone, just because.”
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/07/11/with-trump-as-president-obama-ed-secy-arne-duncan-says-he-now-backs-local-controlwith-trump-as-president-obama-ed-secy-arne-duncan-says-he-now-backs-local-control/#comment-4988619285
“There ain’t no greater intolerant close-minded bigoted racist mendacious seditious corrupt double talking criminal hypocrite than an elite educated ‘benevolent’ ‘tolerant’ ‘openminded’ Democrat who wants to help you, for your own good of course…”
“Newton’s First Law of Thermodynamic Liberalism: Each and every Liberal action has an equal and opposite result.
Newton’s Second Law; Truth is equal and opposite to whatever a Liberal utters.”
https://www.thenewneo.com/2019/08/22/why-is-kamala-harris-fading/#comment-2452773
Mike K on August 23, 2019 at 12:18 pm said:
Warren is an example of those whom C.S. Lewis spoke; a moral busybody who will torment us for our own good and will do so without end for she does so with the approval of her own conscience.
There is another version of the second Lewis quote, the substance of which was used by him on several occasions. The Robber Baron apparently made appearances as occasion warranted (never let a good metaphor go to waste).
Andrew Sullivan, who seems to be somewhat distressed at the growing (or at least now-open) tyranny of the “big D” Democrats, in one of his posts from long ago, before the Left he used to belong to cancelled him for sometimes being an actual liberal, implicitly observed that Lewis predicted the current situation.
https://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2007/06/quote-for-the-day/227916/
Sullivan could have been referring to either or both Parties at the time, although most likely the Republicans.
Here, he’s a bit more direct and looking the other direction.
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/when-the-narrative-replaces-the-news-9ea
“How the media grotesquely distorted the Atlanta massacres” – March 19, 2021
However, his Substack archive still has plenty of posts lambasting Trump and the Republicans, so he is at best an unwilling critic of his own side.
Very nice picture neo.
I was a young boy when first I saw pictures of Austria’s window boxes. Then and now I consider them the perfect window dressing.
Some other country’s towns may rival Austria’s love of flowers but in America, only Carmel, California has evoked a similar admiration for me.
I suspect its the climate in those regions.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided.” Abraham Lincoln, June 16, 1858
Geoffrey. I cannot speak for Carmel but the weather in the Austrian alpine regions consists of rather long and cold winters. I think it is based more on the people’s love of beauty and a deep desire for orderliness. I had the good fortune to frequently travel to Tyrolian and Bavarian villages many times. No matter how turbulent things were in the outside world I always had the sense that all was fine in the world when I was there. Very comforting during these crazy times.
The only answer to all the above is limited government. The USA is the first entity to actually do it successfully in human history. The opening words of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law” were a simple and profound departure from centuries of theocracy and the rule of royalty.
Fortunately we have the successful example of Constitutional Restraint at the core of our historical experience.
Anyone on this thread who has not read “Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World” by Daniel Hannan should read it as soon as possible. It is also available in Audible. I have been giving this book away ever since I encountered it. There are significant differences between the Anglosphere and the rest of Western Civilization and IMO this book is the best at describing them.
There will be a revival of understanding of the concepts of Constitutional Restraint as a reaction to Wokism.
I also see a rise of a new more self-aware Anglosphere around China as the beneficial outcome of the current Chinese situation. China is commercially surrounded from India down through Australia and up through Japan and South Korea. The ideas originating in the Common Law and the English and American experience underlie commerce and much of culture in the areas that the English and the US have conquered. These ideas of the Rule of Law and Constitutional Restraint are the solution to most human governmental problems.
@Dick Illyes:
In all those places you mention where the Common Law was once planted, Legislative Diarrhea, Administrative Fiat, and Rule by Black Robes are the orders of the day. You think you can go up against them with Blackstone and the Federalist Papers?
Were you perchance an Eagle Scout? Character and optimism are all well and good, but they’re not going to win this one.
I see the Chinese up close and personal. They have their blind spots and ideological blinkers but they are fundamentally SERIOUS people and even their ideological blinkers are more pro-social and pro-expansionary (for them) than our present dysfunctions could ever be.
The Indians: Nobody takes them seriously. They talk more than they do. Plus everything is smeared in shit. Don’t believe me? Go there. You’ll be popping the Imodium like candy after a fortnight.
Koreans hate the Japanese more than they fear the Chinese. Japanese I’m just not sure about. They could possibly wake up from their long post-war slumber and slide toward demographic death… but 15 nukes would finish them. So would conventional cruise missiles into a few power stations and cutting their shipping lanes.
Australia / NZ… Don’t make me laugh. Currently the entire political establishment in Australia is having a hysterical man-hating meltdown because some ruling party hack slut got drunk and got herself banged on a desk in parliament house a few years back.
These are not serious people. The USA is no longer ruled by serious people. Canada is not. Boris Johnson is a clown. It’s Clown World.
So much for ruling elites, and the media classes and the managerialist bugmen go-alongs.
Any upheaval and change will have to come from below. This will not be easy, nor will it be nice. We shall have to garotte people with their *bowties*… 😛
Koreans hate the Japanese more than they fear the Chinese.
Zaphod:
I once bought a used car from a Korean dealership in the Valley. I had a Japanese mechanic with me to check the car. Even I could sense the animosity. Both sides were professional but…
The USA is no longer ruled by serious people.
In a way the end of the Cold War was a disaster. The threat of world war kept the elites more focused on real issues. Once that threat was removed it was off to fantasy land.
Huxley: “In a way the end of the Cold War was a disaster.”
Agree. There were serious people in charge then. Once that threat was gone (and the WWII generation retired), the bozos emerged and took over. As a minor participant on the propaganda front in the later phase of the Cold War, I saw the transition take place. I remember thinking back in the late 1990s-early 2000s that we had succeeded in recreating the old Soviet nomenklatura: mediocre, stupid, incompetent, and very, very entitled. The moral of the story is that success–and the United States circa 1945-1990 was a successful concern, despite some serious and perhaps fatal missteps–inevitably attracts grifters. We lowered our grifter-shields.
Zaphod: there are still plenty of serious people in this country. Some of them even frequent this forum. You won’t find them in politics or at the top of the greasy pole. Being serious people, they prefer to focus on other things. There are signs that their attention has been piqued, however.