1969: UCLA and the High Potential program, and Cornell

The New Neo Posted on by

1969 was a very big and tumultuous year, and I was paying attention to a lot of things.

But I didn’t catch everything, and I don’t remember this story. In the annals of the follies of higher education in this country in the 60s and beyond, it’s one of the grimmer tales. Now it’s the 50th anniversary of the incident:

The tiny “High Potential Program” was UCLA’s early, experimental form of affirmative action. Unlike today’s affirmative action programs, which primarily benefit middle- and upper-middle-class students, this was a real effort to benefit young people born on the wrong side of the tracks. As one might expect, UCLA relaxed the academic qualifications for this project. One of the founders of the program put it this way: “A high school diploma was not a requisite. We recruited people who were active in their community and who had the ability to lead.”

Here’s the crazy part: In practice, the leadership requirement meant that UCLA wanted—and actively recruited–leaders of street gangs, especially those involved in black nationalism. A history of violence was no barrier to admission.

Not a lot of learning went on in the special classes conducted for the program. Linda Chavez, a UCLA grad student at the time, wrote about her experiences in teaching classes for Chicano High Potential students in An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal. I won’t spoil her story here. Suffice it to say it wasn’t pretty.

Among the students recruited for the program was Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter. Carter was the former leader of the Slauson gang, a mega-gang in South Central Los Angeles, and was known as “Mayor of the Ghetto.” Shortly before registering at UCLA he had spent four years in Soledad prison for armed robbery, where he had become a disciple of Malcolm X. In 1967, after meeting Black Panther Minister of Defense Huey Newton, he formed the Southern California chapter of the Black Panther Party, mostly out of members of the Slauson gang.

This does seem crazy—deluded, idealistic, dangerous. It culminated in a gang shootout on campus in which two of the students were killed (Carter was one of them), and the program was ended. A fitting 60s story.

Here’s a fact that caught my attention:

Shortly before the gun battle, student activists pressured UCLA Chancellor Charles Young to create a Center for African American Studies—complete with an executive director and staff, office space and a generous budget.

This immediately reminded me of the brouhaha at Cornell that occurred the same year (although later) and was brilliantly described by Allan Bloom (who had been a Cornell professor at the time) in his book The Closing of the American Mind. I’ve written many posts about the Cornell situation: please see this and this, for example.

A little background:

…[Cornell] professors and administrators there proved that they were pushovers more interested in PC thought and placating student pressure (including, in the case of Cornell, the threat of violence by armed students) than in defending any principle they had supposedly held dear.

The issues were somewhat different back then. In Cornell it was race, and the establishment of a Black Studies department, as well as threatening a black student (Alan Keyes, as it turns out) who had disagreed with the protesters…

…Cornell was already slated to get an Afro-American Studies Center [one of the student demands], but that wasn’t good enough for the demonstrators, who said they wanted it to be autonomous.

I had always figured that the black students at Cornell in 1969 had come there as part of some sort of affirmative action or outreach program to get more black students at Cornell in an era when they were ordinarily few and far between.

More:

On Sunday afternoon, following negotiations with Cornell officials, the AAS students emerged from the Straight carrying rifles and wearing bandoleers. Their image, captured by Associated Press photographer Steve Starr, in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo, appeared in newspapers across the country and on the cover of Newsweek magazine under the headline, “Universities Under the Gun.”

Although physical disaster was averted, deep psychological scars burned into the minds of many on campus. Four decades later, feelings in some quarters are still raw. The university as a bastion of reasoned argument, thoughtful debate and academic freedom seemed to be under siege. Relationships among faculty members were destroyed. Students were torn. An atmosphere of pervasive fear and anxiety gripped the campus and the nation. The AAS students were not punished, outraging some faculty members, students and alumni.

Cornell was fortunate that there was no bloodshed. If you want to know more about what happened, here’s a source:

But despite the efforts of the president and faculty to attract and integrate them, many black students at Cornell felt alienated from the student body and hostile to the administration. In 1966, a group of black students created the Afro-American Society. Strongly influenced by the national Black Power movement, the AAS sought to increase black students’ autonomy and change Cornell’s curriculum to suit its views, rather than pursue integration. A typical AAS statement, in the form of a letter to the Cornell Daily Sun, read as follows:

“If Blacks do not define the type of program set up within an institution that will be relevant to them, it will be worthless. Moreover, the Blacks must have the right to define the role of white students in the program, even to the point of their restriction, if it is to be valid for Blacks or whites. We do not expect whites to understand because their perception is dimmed by the racism they admit they possess.”…

In 1968, a group of AAS members disrupted the class of Father Michael McPhelin, a visiting economics professor from the Philippines who had criticized the economic-development policies of a number of African nations. Without addressing McPhelin’s criticism on the merits, the AAS tried to intimidate him into recanting. The students first tried to read a letter criticizing him in class—without showing it to him first—but he refused to allow it. Then they attempted to take over the class, and he resisted. McPhelin complained to the chairman of the economics department, who, instead of punishing the offending students, praised them for their activism. By the end of the year, McPhelin had left Cornell and, as Tarcov saw it, a pattern had been established…

The pattern continues to this day, is adopted by all leftist activist groups, and has become extremely commonplace. As universities capitulate more and more, the demands escalate rather than subside.

More about Cornell that will sound very very familiar:

On April 18, students at Wari, a cooperative for black women, reported a burning cross on their lawn and blamed racist whites for the incident. The cross burners were never caught, and Ithaca police suspected, but could never prove, that AAS members themselves had burned the cross, trying to create a pretext for further protest. Stephen Goodwin, a Cornell student at the time who served as the AAS treasurer, later called the cross burning “a set-up. It was just to bring in more media and more attention to the whole thing.”

Whether it was a set-up or not, the incident set the stage for a massive escalation…

In carrying out the takeover, AAS students crossed the line between incivility and life-threatening violence. The invading students ran through the building shouting “Fire!,” sending 30 confused parents outside without even a chance to gather their luggage. A number of parents had the presence of mind to call the university’s department of public safety and ask for help, but they were advised, “There’s nothing we can do; do what they tell you.”…

According to Allan Sindler, chairman of the government department at the time, black students then brought rifles to Straight’s loading dock for use by AAS members, and campus police, acting on orders from the administration, did nothing to stop them. Once armed, AAS leader Eric Evans, a senior majoring in communications, demonstrated a proclivity for his chosen field when he shouted through a megaphone, “If any more white students come in, you’re gonna die here.”

The occupiers demanded the nullification of campus judicial action against the students who had overturned vending machines the previous year, the commencement of housing negotiations between the administration and the AAS, and a complete investigation of the Wari cross-burning. They spent Saturday night smuggling in more rifles and preparing for another day of antics. On Sunday, they negotiated with a special committee of faculty members and administration officials appointed to manage the crisis.

That afternoon, the AAS and the administration came to an agreement, and 110 black students left Straight and marched to the Africana Studies and Research Center to sign the deal. Even the exodus took place in a manner embarrassing to the university…

I’ll stop there. You get the picture.

[NOTE: I’m wondering—although I haven’t been able to locate the information so far—whether Cornell’s program that recruited these students was anything like that at UCLA, or whether it more closely resembled the admissions process of today. If anyone finds any information on this please post it in the comments.

Also, that book by Linda Chavez sounds like a very interesting changer story.]

Nancy Pelosi must really be annoyed with all those memes that mocked her after she gave a rebuttal to Trump’s wall speech

The New Neo Posted on by

[Scroll down for UPDATE.]

She doesn’t want a repetition, apparently, because she’s now saying “No” to Trump giving a State of the Union address before Congress.

Pelosi must think this move of hers will play well with the public:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she has cancelled the president’s state of the union address until the government is re-opened. After rejecting invitations earlier in the week from the White House to negotiate on funding for border security, Pelosi sent a letter to the president implying he would not be welcome to address the American people.

In her letter sent on Wednesday, Pelosi cited security concerns as the reason for the delay. She lamented that Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security “have not been funded for 26 days now – with critical departments hamstrung by furloughs.”

Fascinating, actually. Although we can’t be sure she’ll follow through on the cancellation, her threat—and the stated reason for it—has an ironic twist. Security? Isn’t that what funding the wall is about? The Democratic line says otherwise, of course, but I think a lot of people, and not just those on the right, would agree that the wall is about security.

What’s more, her statement about the Secret Service is apparently a lie. But it must be one she thinks sounds good and won’t be fact-checked by the partisan fact-checkers in the MSM:

But the Secret Service called bull crap on Pelosi’s claim, not only are they ready to defend the President during the SOTU, but no Democrat asked them before Nancy Pelosi sent her letter.

In addition:

The official also noted that no one from Democratic congressional leadership reached out to the Secret Service to ask if the agency was able to secure the State of the Union address.

Another senior DHS official told Fox News that “there are no security concerns with the State of the Union.”

So Pelosi never even asked them. When you’re putting out propaganda, you don’t need to check.

The title I gave this post was an attempt at humor, but it has an element of seriousness, too. I think that Pelosi was indeed stung by the mockery she and Schumer received after the president’s short wall speech, and the fact that he was allowed to look “presidential” and sound coherent. She doesn’t want the optics of him addressing a joint session of Congress and telling the country how well it’s been doing. She also wants to continue pinning the “shutdown” on him and the GOP, and making the situation seem as bad as possible. She sees the shutdown’s continuation as very good for the Democrats, and wants to perpetuate and highlight it as much as possible, as well as pressuring Trump and the right to fold.

I have no idea whether there will be a State of the Union address before Congress this year. But if there is, I would guess that the Democrats will stage some sort of show, perhaps walking out en masse. Something they think will embarrass the president, anyway.

UPDATE 3:45 PM

Two can play, and in this game of political chess, Trump makes a move:

Thursday, Trump wrote a letter to Speaker Pelosi informing her that her upcoming trip abroad was postponed.

The letter reads:

“Due to the Shutdown, I am sorry to inform you that your trip to Brussels, Egypt, and Afghanistan has been postponed. We will reschedule this seven-day excursion when the Shutdown is over. In light of the 800,000 great American workers not receiving pay, I am sure you would agree that postponing this public relations event is totally appropriate. I also feel that, during this period, it would be better if you were in Washington negotiating with me and joining the Strong Border Security movement to end the Shutdown. Obviously, if you would like to make your journey by flying commercial, that would certainly be your prerogative.”

Sabotaging Brexit?

The New Neo Posted on by

Theresa May’s Brexit deal was voted down decisively, and there is speculation that the plan all along has been to have another referendum and make sure Brexit loses this time. The “elites” vs. the people?:

“The EU should prepare for the worst,” declared the German weekly Der Spiegel, “One should have no illusions: a segment of British lawmakers are fundamentalists, who are pursuing the Brexit almost with religious fervor.” The magazine complained that “the majority of the MPs, who are actually Brexit-skeptics, cannot come together without splitting their own parties and risking the anger of the voters incited by the [pro-]Brexit press.”

“Perhaps, Britain must undergo the catastrophe of a no-deal Brexit in order to come to its senses,” Der Spiegel concluded…

Given Brussels’ track record, one can not rule [out] an intrigue to keep Britian in the EU at this stage. According to the former UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, the British government is setting the stage for a second referendum. “I think and I fear we are headed on a path towards delays and probably a second vote,” he told Sky News. “I fear we will get an extension of Article 50 and what you will hear is voices in Westminster pushing for a second referendum.”

Stay tuned.

May has survived a no confidence vote today (just barely; the margin was 19 votes out of over 600). She is now saying that Brexit will occur whether a deal is reached or not:

…[A] no-deal Brexit will not be taken off the table, despite Corbyn’s insistence it was a prerequisite for talks, he added.

The spokesman said: “The prime minister has been very clear that the British public voted to leave the European Union.

“We want to leave with a deal but she is determined to deliver on the verdict of the British public and that is to leave the EU on 29 March this year.”

A Number 10 source told the Press Association: “What we are talking about tonight is party leader-level talks between the prime minister and her opposite numbers in other parties, should they wish to accept that.”

Although the subject matter is different, in one way this seems to resemble our own budget standoff. Both sides have an enormous amount at stake and are digging in.

For May, it’s not clear that she is committed to Brexit, as Farage discusses. But her political life probably depends on her at the very least appearing to be committed to it.

I don’t know nearly enough about May to know which it is. But I don’t see either side caving any time soon. The Brexit opposition apparently feels that if a referendum were held today, Brexit would lose, and they are determined to get to that point.

Stuff and more stuff: downsizing with Marie Kondo

The New Neo Posted on by

This is a Thing, I guess:

In the [Netflix] show, Kondo acts as a tiny garbage fairy for messy people, alighting on their houses and the piles of stuff therein to share the wisdom of the “KonMari” method.

This method, which has been fairly popular for a few years thanks to Kondo’s book, is simple in theory but can be endlessly complex in practice.

You divide all the stuff in your house — all of it — into several categories, and then examine each item — all of them — to see if it sparks joy. If it does, you keep it. If it doesn’t, you thank it, as if it were a past lover, and neatly discard it.

I’m a bit stumped by that last line—do people usually thank past lovers? But I digress.

I haven’t seen the program, but I assume you don’t have to love your broom and dustpan in order to keep them. Or your can of Comet. I assume we’re talking about things like clothing or books, although I’m not sure what love’s got to do with it.

I don’t live in a huge place and I had to get rid of a lot of stuff long ago. Nevertheless, I’ve accumulated more and would always like to lighten the load a bit. But I do that periodically anyway. I suppose a lot of people—who are not technically hoarders—with bigger homes probably have a lot more that they could jettison without feeling anything but relief:

“Tidying Up” is a gentle, soothing program. It’s not about rubbernecking at other people’s pain or shortcomings, as in a show like “Hoarders.” Kondo doesn’t judge her subjects for filling their homes with useless objects. (“I love mess!” she exclaims at one point, and you almost believe her.) In a recent BuzzFeed story, Anne Helen Petersen wrote about the condition of millennial burnout, the kind of anxious overextension that can make today’s young adults feel that even minor household chores are insurmountable. The promise of the Kondo method is that getting rid of physical clutter might clear mental and spiritual clutter as well.

There is no question that in general people these days have a great many more possessions than they did even when I was growing up, which is a long time ago but not all that long ago. For example, the closets in the very nice home in which I grew up were smaller than closets today, and we didn’t feel the least bit deprived.

How many choices of sneakers (the word we used; I’m from NY, remember) existed when I was growing up? Very, very few. That’s emblematic of the way it was.

This doesn’t even seem humanly possible

The New Neo Posted on by

In this makeover, she says she doesn’t even recognize herself, and I believe her.

I knew when I saw her “before” that neither of her two original haircolors (gray and brown) were good for her coloring, so I knew the makeover would have to go in this general direction. But still, the transformation is simply astounding:

Radar creep

The New Neo Posted on by

This is a description of the insidious tightening of the state’s grip on France via radar on the roads. The process is a goodly part of what the yellow vests are protesting.

Things like this often start with something that may seem innocuous, maybe even beneficial. And then they escalate.

And escalate:

The first radars were installed in 2003 under President Jacques Chirac and his interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy and, in the beginning, drivers were always warned by a road sign when a radar could be expected ahead (which brought about exactly what allegedly was the desired goal, to get cars to slow down)…

Eventually—in spite of the insistent promises of then-interior minister Sarkozy—new radars were installed without road signs announcing their presence.

The schemes to make the rules harsher have at times been so far-fetched and outrageous that push-back was inevitable and led to their demise. For instance, the ludicrous attempt to have cyclists who break the law (running a red light, for instance) lose points on their driver’s licenses; or the plan to require all vehicles in the nation to be equipped with a breathalyzer. (Not surprisingly, it emerged that a breathalyzer manufacturer who, naturally, was a close friend of a number of politicians, was behind the bill.)

Recently came the news of mobile radars, as mentioned above, meaning unmarked cars loaded with a radar-installed contraption driven by gendarmes dressed in civilian clothes.

Meanwhile, crony capitalism has given rise to a side economy whose only purpose revolves around the punishment of citizens with cars or motorcycles—not least with thriving law firms specialized in little else but road infractions and blossoming (and very expensive) driving schools for drivers to recoup at least some of the points they have lost on their driver’s licenses (again, for violations of a rather arbitrary malum prohibitum rule), taking off a day from work in the process. If and when they have lost all their points (the driver’s license starts out with 12 points) and are thus down to 0, they are barred from returning to the schools and they lose the license itself for a year or more—the licenses of some two million Frenchmen are currently suspended—which leads in turn to job losses for some 80,000 drivers every year, since they can no longer commute.

Much much more at the link. Part of it involves listing the creative schemes people employ to get around the law. The government has responded with various ways to thwart this;

The ingenuous solutions, in turn, lead the deep state to respond—this is standard Milton Friedman—by creating even more laws, such as saying that a car owner claiming not to have been behind the wheel must denounce the person who was allegedly driving the car with his address and license number; making it compulsory to contest a ticket by registered mail only; or creating EU-wide laws making sure that tickets from foreign cars get sent to the driver, French or foreign. Most devious of all, it has become almost impossible to contest a ticket in a French court unless you hire a lawyer, which, given the amount of a ticket versus the price for hiring an attorney, guarantees that most fines will not be challenged (it happens mainly in extreme distress, when a driver is on the verge of losing all his or her points).

The old ways—warning people with signs—seemed to work pretty well, so why this ever-tightening grip? One goal is to raise revenue. Another is to discourage driving, one of the last bastions of liberty in France.

Excuse me, liberté.

[NOTE: I noticed a milder version of this last summer when I was in Italy. I hadn’t been to Europe in over ten years, and I hadn’t been in a car in Europe since 1993. Cars are now banned from the central parts of cities except for vehicles belonging to residents, and radar was everywhere to enforce this.]

Steve King’s crime, Steve King’s punishment, Steve King’s explanation

The New Neo Posted on by

You may have already heard about the punishment meted out yesterday by Republicans to Representative Steve King of Iowa:

House GOP leaders moved Monday to remove Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) from all of his committee assignments following a firestorm over remarks considered racist.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) told reporters after a meeting of the Republican Steering Committee that King would not receive any committee assignments for the new Congress.

The move by GOP leaders severely hamstrings King’s ability to wield influence as a member of Congress.

And you may have also heard about the alleged crime, occurring in an interview King gave with the NY Times. Here’s the quote from Steve King that the paper reported (and note the punctuation, in particular the placement of the dash):

“White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?”

Your reaction to that quote depends, of course, on whether you think that’s a permissible question to ask. In this day and age, it apparently isn’t. Your reaction also depends on whether you think the terms “white nationalist” and “white supremacist” are beyond the pale, so obviously racist and so obviously offensive that the question becomes an inherently offensive one.

Let’s just stipulate that “white nationalists” and “white supremacists” are in fact racists, and that asking the question—if that is what King was actually doing—implies that the questioner is insufficiently aware of the racist nature of such people.

However, is that actually what King was saying? Here is King’s explanation:

Mr. King remained defiant after losing his committee seats, releasing a long statement insisting that his comments in the Times article had been misunderstood. He said he had been referring only to “western civilization” when he asked “how did that language become offensive,” not “white nationalist” or “white supremacist.”

That’s a big difference, isn’t it? It all depends on the pause, and what the word “that” (in “how did that language…”) was meant to refer to.

And what of that “long statement” of King’s that the Times references? I can’t find anywhere they published the text, although perhaps I missed it. But here it is, and it’s not really all that long, either:

I have no way of knowing what King really meant by the controversial words. But I find his explanation quite plausible.

I’ll say one thing, though—if I were a Republican politician, I would make exceedingly sure I didn’t use any ambiguous words. No third-person pronouns if I could help it, for example; I’d repeat the name of the person I was talking about rather than say “he” or “she.” No words such as “that”—words that can mean any number of things. For example, if I were to utter King’s question, I’d be repeating the phrase “Western civilization,” as in “How and when did the term Western civilization become offensive?”

I’d make everything crystal clear, in other words (literally, in other words). Which is of course impossible, arduous, and not required of those on the left; only of those on the right. You can be sure that the Times is looking for slipups on the right, and hoping and trusting they will get them or can create them.

The Times chooses the punctuation, after all, in a spoken statement. What if the paper had quoted King as having said this, with the dash in a different place, and a bit more context (from King’s letter)?:

“White nationalist,” “white supremacist,”—“Western civilization,” how did that language become offensive? Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?…just to watch Western Civilization become a derogatory term in political discourse today.

The Times wouldn’t have done it that way, of course; what the paper did was no accident. But even if it had been published this alternate way, it probably still would have caused a brouhaha, too, since lately it seems that we’re not allowed to even suggest that Western civilization is a thing of which to be proud.

But at least it would have been better than sounding as though King was questioning what was offensive about white supremacy. Would this second version have ignited the same firestorm as the first? Perhaps, but perhaps not as intensely.

Understandably, the GOP wants to distance itself from even the hint of approving of white supremacy. Unfortunately, the left’s campaign to label the GOP as giving that approval has gotten very far in recent years, and I think the GOP is losing the battle and actions such as the ostracism of King won’t change things.

I can understand why the GOP is running from King, but I also believe the entire thing is a NY Times setup. King was foolish to have give an interview to the Times at all.

I’m not really familiar with King and his previous record, but a great many newspapers and pundits are alleging that this is really just the latest in a long line of racist comments he’s made. My guess is that the GOP has long considered him an embarrassing albatross who can’t keep his mouth shut.

Let’s take a look at some of King’s previous comments. But first we have this:

While defending his remarks in the past, the Iowa Republican has claimed he is regularly misquoted and that he doesn’t trust most media outlets.

That’s what I mean—then why, oh why, is he giving interviews to the NY Times?

Back to those previous remarks of King’s. I’m not going to go through them one by one, but on reading them I can see why, in this PC age, the GOP has been eager to wash its hands of him. A few of the listed remarks do seem to border on the racist, such as this tweet of his:

Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.

There are two thoughts there. The first is about culture and Western civilization, which King has defended in the past (and which he also defends in the remarks that got him into trouble yesterday). I agree that Western Civilization—which has indeed become a dirty word—is something well worth defending and preserving. It has flaws, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a remarkable achievement. The left disagrees, and has been teaching children quite the opposite for some time, to the point that most people probably consider this a verboten topic.

However, King doesn’t stop there in that tweet. He adds “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” This suggests that there is something genetic in culture, and that non-white and/or non-Western people who come to Western cultures cannot be assimilated into Western values. I submit that King is wrong. They can indeed be assimilated, and we used to realize that this was the most important activity of all in preserving Western culture: to defend it and teach it properly. We used to do that, for the most part.

That’s what we’ve failed to do in recent years. Au contraire—we not only fail to defend and teach it to newcomers of other races, but we regularly teach all of our children—white, black, whatever color or national origin, or the children of people who came here hundreds of years ago—to despise it and be ashamed of it and to distance themselves from it.

That is the problem. It’s been going on for much of my lifetime, which is a long time, and it’s reached new heights (or depths) in the last couple of decades.

[NOTE: It’s also the case, of course, that the more people who come here at once from cultures that are antithetical to Western culture, the more difficult is the task of assimilation. But if we were still committed to assimilation as a goal, and to the preservation and defense of Western culture and its very positive values such as liberty, assimilation could be accomplished. Education is the key, but education has been taken over by the anti-Western left.]

Something’s going on in Europe

The New Neo Posted on by

Actually, a great many things are going on in Europe, but I’m referring to one particular thing that I’m going to call Trump-envy.

Brexit was part of it. I think that the yellow vests of France are at least somewhat connected with it:

Back in 2014, geographer Christopher Guilluy’s study of la France périphérique (peripheral France) caused a media sensation. It drew attention to the economic, cultural and political exclusion of the working classes, most of whom now live outside the major cities. It highlighted the conditions that would later give rise to the yellow-vest phenomenon…

[Guilluy]: Technically, our globalised economic model performs well. It produces a lot of wealth. But it doesn’t need the majority of the population to function. It has no real need for the manual workers, labourers and even small-business owners outside of the big cities. Paris creates enough wealth for the whole of France, and London does the same in Britain. But you cannot build a society around this. The gilets jaunes is a revolt of the working classes who live in these places…

What they all have in common is that they live in areas where there is hardly any work left. They know that even if they have a job today, they could lose it tomorrow and they won’t find anything else…

The cities themselves have become very unequal, too. The Parisian economy needs executives and qualified professionals. It also needs workers, predominantly immigrants, for the construction industry and catering et cetera. Business relies on this very specific demographic mix. The problem is that ‘the people’ outside of this still exist. In fact, ‘Peripheral France’ actually encompasses the majority of French people.

That urban combination of executives, professionals, and immigrants or others in the construction or service industries (plus the urban non-working poor) constitutes much of the liberal vote in the US. The second (peripheral) group contains many of the people who in this country voted for Trump. That’s an immense simplification and not entirely accurate, but it’s a summary that I think contains some general truth.

Here’s a related article about what’s going on in Europe:

…[W]hile the Western European political class and its allies love to sneer at Donald Trump, millions of ordinary citizens across the continent wish dearly that they had a Trump of their own.

Only last week, for example, a caller to Nigel Farage’s radio show in Britain expressed the desire that Trump, and not Theresa May, had negotiated Britain’s exit deal with the EU. Farage shared her sentiments. Then there’s the up-and-coming Dutch political leader Lennard van Mil, known in his country as a “gayservative” (short for “gay conservative”), who can be seen in many photographs online wearing a “Make America Great Again” cap.

Trump’s allure is potent even in Scandinavia. In November 2016, on the day before the election in the U.S., the Norwegian alternative-news website Document.no ran a piece by Magne Reigstad headlined “Why We Need a Trump.” Reigstad spelled out the reasons. America isn’t the only Western country in which too much power accrues to self-seeking bureaucrats and lobbyists who don’t give a damn what ordinary citizens think or want or need. America’s not alone in being run by politicians who, preoccupied with short-term personal gains and political prospects at the expense of the long-term national interest, pursue disastrous policies that threaten to bring down Western civilization. And America isn’t the only country whose mainstream news media spread “fake news” about all the above, whitewashing dangerous alien cultures while showing insufficient concern for our own.

How far this will go in Europe, and what the ultimate result will be, I do not know.

The real problem with voting funds for the Wall

The New Neo Posted on by

Good point here:

The conservative consensus is that Democrats don’t want to fund President Trump’s wall because they hate him. Well, yes, Democrats do indeed hate President Trump, and yes, it’s a deep-seated hatred, a visceral, soul-rotting hatred, but that’s not the real reason they won’t fund the wall.

The biggest reason Democrats won’t even partially fund the wall is their absolute certainty that given the money, the president will actually build the thing.

President Trump’s not some out-of-the-loop politician who can be outmaneuvered by a Deep State whose embedded bureaucrats will tell him everything’s going swimmingly while they sabotage the project with cost overruns and endless delays. No, the president will know how much it should and will cost, how long it should and will take, and how to overcome government roadblocks. This is his wheelhouse. He’s done it his whole adult life.

And, since the wall is his signature issue, his personal passion, President Trump’s going to be all over the construction.

I think this is definitely the case.

Some more good points from a different article:

This would also be a good time for the administration to get its communications act together and correct several fallacies the opposition media have ingrained into the public’s consciousness – fallacies like that the wall is an exorbitant expense, when in reality it will save far more through reduced costs associated with illegal immigration, which currently costs the nation well over $150B each and every year. Heck, it will save money on the reduced need for border patrol personnel alone. Then there is the fallacy that a 2,000-mile border barrier is some major engineering challenge, when the U.S. has built over 46,000 miles of interstate highways, each mile of which required more complex engineering than setting a steel-bollard wall. And there is the self-obvious fallacy that agenda-driven politicians, open-borders advocates, and opposition media pundits know more about how to secure the border than border patrol agents who overwhelmingly are calling for a physical barrier.

Trump’s language, Trump’s thought

The New Neo Posted on by

John McWhorter has written an article for the Atlantic entitled: “Trump’s Typos Reveal His Lack of Fitness for the Presidency: They suggest not just inadequate manners or polish, but inadequate thought.”

Oh, really?

The conviction that grammar and/or spelling errors reflect deficits in thinking is something I’ve read before, usually stated by people who are in the business of writing and proud of it. McWhorter himself is full of expertise on that subject, and has much about which to be proud:

[He] is an American academic and linguist who is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he teaches linguistics, American studies, philosophy, and music history. He is the author of a number of books on language and on race relations. His research specializes on how creole languages form, and how language grammars change as the result of sociohistorical phenomena.

McWhorter writes:

The president of the United States has many faults, but let’s not ignore this one: He cannot write sentences. If a tree falls in a forrest and no one is there to hear it … wait: Pretty much all of you noticed that mistake, right? Yet Wednesday morning, the president did not; he released a tweet referring to “forrest fires” twice, as if these fires were set by Mr. Gump.

But that example McWhorter gives of Trump’s inability to write sentences is nothing of the sort. It’s a spelling error. And, not to get too nitpicky about it (oh, let’s), but someone who actually wanted to express the thought that forest fires were set by Forrest Gump would be capitalizing the word, as in “Forrest fires.”

McWhorter continues:

Trump’s serial misuse of public language is one of many shortcomings that betray his lack of fitness for the presidency.

McWhorter goes on to cite examples of Trump’s supposed “misuse” (whatever that means in this context) of “public language,” a misuse that goes beyond spelling errors into other areas of written and verbal expression. McWhorter contends these are examples of lack of fitness for the presidency. They typically seem to be instances in which Trump uses simple words and/or repetitive phrases to express thoughts that McWhorter would prefer were explained in more complex ways. Here’s an example [emphasis mine]:

For example, Trump is given to talking about “doing” things when most would choose a more specific verb. Last summer, Trump bragged of having told Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May “how to do Brexit.” “Do” it? Like “doing” Cats, or shots? Mere do does rather gracelessly drag the statement down to the cold, hard pavement. Trump also hopes he can “do” a wall in Mexico: “That’s 13,000 miles,” he said. “Here, we actually need 1,000 because we have natural barriers. So we need 1,000. We can do a wall. We’re going to have a big, fat, beautiful door right in the middle of the wall.”

Trump’s love of “doing” might indicate his professed expertise in deal making. One does—colloquially, at least—“do” a deal, and Trump supposes that Brexit and the border wall will result from “dealing.” But this very assumption reflects an inability to grapple with the complexities of state matters. He simply cannot accept—cannot grasp—that international diplomacy could possibly require more subtlety than a real-estate transaction. His phrasing suggests someone taking in nothing from the urgent happenings around him, someone refusing to read his briefs or anything else.

In that passage, how does McWhorter comes to the conclusion I bolded? It’s quite a leap, and a completely unproven—and IMHO unjustified—one. All from the use of the word “do”? I would guess that McWhorter, for all his word-expertise, knows very little about both large real estate deals and “the complexities of state matters,” as well as the mind of Donald Trump. Let’s put it this way: I’d rather Trump were “doing” such deals than any professor of linguistics at Columbia or elsewhere.

McWhorter does concede that:

One must not automatically equate sloppy spelling with sloppy thinking. Quite a few admired writers are not great spellers before editing.

Not just writers, either. Actually, quite a few thinkers (see this), founders, and statesmen couldn’t spell. McWhorter tries to backtrack and say that well, it’s not so much Trump’s inability to spell as his refusal to correct his spelling before publishing to the world: “Such negligence is of a piece with Trump’s general disregard of norms, details, and accuracy.” McWhorter has made his own error there, because if he acknowledges that spelling errors themselves are not evidence of lack of thought, then why did he spend several previous paragraphs at least appearing to suggest that?

So, why does Trump put out so many tweets with misspellings and capitalizations and the like? My hunch is that he is actively trying to annoy academics and others who care about such niceties, and that this is a product of thought on Trump’s part. There is no question in my mind that he is quite aware of things such as spell check, and that he could use aides to proofread his work if he choose. But I don’t think he omits that step through carelessness; I think it’s a way for him to infuriate those he wishes to anger, and to say to the rest of the people hey, I’m a deplorable too.

Trump can speak quite differently, and not just in his prepared speeches. Anyone who listens to his press conferences or interviews can see him shifting back and forth between more simple and more complex speech. No, he never sounds eloquent (except in a Yogi Berra sort of way) or professorial, but why would that be a drawback? I don’t ask those things of a president (although I rather like them), nor do I value those things if what that president is saying so smoothly is either doubletalk or something with which I disagree.

Trump somehow manages to get his message across, loud and clear. McWhorter may not like the message; fine. Then criticize the message. Don’t draw unwarranted and unproven conclusions from the form the message takes.

[NOTE: Denver Dyslexia Awareness has a list of US presidents purported to have been dyslexic, and adds: “Although dyslexics may struggle with reading, writing, and/or spelling and even math, many dyslexics excel in their outside the box thinking, vision, leadership, and oral skills and ability to lead and inspire.”

Hmmm.]

The young-old—or is it the old-young?

The New Neo Posted on by

Did you ever notice that young people sometimes write and/or perform as though they’re old?

Some do it very successfully; the best example that comes to mind is T. S. Eliot—who perhaps was born old—who began writing his masterpiece “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” with its aura of disillusionment and ennui, a life not-quite-lived and all played out, at the ripe young age of 22.

It was published when he was about 27, and it was his first professionally published poem:

Prufrock laments his physical and intellectual inertia, the lost opportunities in his life and lack of spiritual progress, and he is haunted by reminders of unattained carnal love. With visceral feelings of weariness, regret, embarrassment, longing, emasculation, sexual frustration, a sense of decay, and an awareness of mortality, “Prufrock” has become one of the most recognised voices in modern literature.

Turning to a very different artist in a very different time with a very different message, I was shocked many years ago when I learned that singer Tom Waits had been all of 24 years old when the song “Ol’ 55,” one of my favorites, came out. He may have written it even earlier than that, but I don’t know if it was significantly earlier. At any rate, in this case it’s the sound that’s so old; Waits’ musical growl sounds like that of a grizzled old-timer (and it got even deeper as he got only a bit older):