A Repeat

From October 26, 2019, the Quote of the Day, possibly more valid now than it was then.  I went looking for the Codevilla part of the quote, and forgot about the rest of it.  If you are unfamiliar with Professor Angelo Codevilla, please read his supremely important July 2010 essay America's Ruling Class--And the Perils of Revolution. Please do give it, and the link, a read:

From Interview with Angelo Codevilla, a two-fer - one from the interviewer, David Samuels:

...there is no such thing as America anymore. In place of the America that is described in history books, where Henry Clay forged his compromises, and Walt Whitman wrote poetry, and Herman Melville contemplated the whale, and Ida Tarbell did her muckraking, and Thomas Alva Edison invented movies and the light bulb, and so forth, has arisen something new and vast and yet distinctly un-American that for lack of a better term is often called the American Empire, which in turn calls to mind the division of Roman history (and the Roman character) into two parts: the Republican, and the Imperial. While containing the ghosts of the American past, the American Empire is clearly a very different kind of entity than the American Republic was—starting with the fact that the vast majority of its inhabitants aren’t Americans. Ancient American ideas about individual rights and liberties, the pursuit of happiness, and so forth, may still be inspiring to mainland American citizens or not, but they are foreign to the peoples that Americans conquered. To those people, America is an empire, or the shadow of an empire, under which seemingly endless wars are fought, a symbol of their own continuing powerlessness and cultural failure. Meanwhile, at home, the American ruling elites prattle on endlessly about their deeply held ideals of whatever that must be applied to Hondurans today, and Kurds tomorrow, in fits of frantic-seeming generosity in between courses of farm-to-table fare. Once the class bond has been firmly established, everyone can relax and exchange notes about their kids, who are off being credentialed at the same “meritocratic” but now hugely more expensive private schools that their parents attended, whose social purpose is no longer to teach basic math or a common history but to indoctrinate teenagers in the cultish mumbo-jumbo that serves as a kind of in-group glue that binds ruling class initiates (she/he/they/ze) together and usefully distinguishes them from townies during summer vacations by the seashore. The understanding of America as an empire is as foreign to most Americans as is the idea that the specific country that they live in is run by a class of people who may number themselves among the elect but weren’t in fact elected by anyone. Under whatever professional job titles, the people who populate the institutions that exercise direct power over nearly all aspects of American life from birth to death are bureaucrats—university bureaucrats, corporate bureaucrats, local, state and federal bureaucrats, law enforcement bureaucrats, health bureaucrats, knowledge bureaucrats, spy agency bureaucrats. At each layer of specific institutional authority, bureaucrats coordinate their understandings and practices with bureaucrats in parallel institutions through lawyers, in language that is designed to be impenetrable, or nearly so, by outsiders. Their authority is pervasive, undemocratic, and increasingly not susceptible in practice to legal checks and balances. All those people together comprise a class.

And one from Prof. Codevilla:

(T)he Democrats (are) the senior partners in the ruling class. The Republicans are the junior partners. The reason being that the American ruling class was built by or under the Democratic Party. First, under Woodrow Wilson and then later under Franklin Roosevelt. It was a ruling class that prized above all its intellectual superiority over the ruled. And that saw itself as the natural carriers of scientific knowledge, as the class that was naturally best able to run society and was therefore entitled to run society. The Republican members of the ruling class aspire to that sort of intellectual status or reputation. And they have shared a taste of this ruling class. But they are not part of the same party, and as such, are constantly trying to get closer to the senior partners. As the junior members of the ruling class, they are not nearly as tied to government as the Democrats are. And therefore, their elite prerogatives are not safe.

A Golden Oldie

Back in April, 2006 I wrote a piece titled RCOB™.  It was a fisking of an op-ed by a writer named Nina Burleigh, who I later discovered was the bint who (in)famously said that she'd orally service Bill Clinton "just to thank him for keeping abortion legal."  Ms. Burleigh is an alumnus of the University of Chicago - aka "Mordor on the Lake," and is an adjunct professor of journalism at Columbia University, home of the Frankfurt School.  She is also National Politics Correspondent for Newsweek.  And, of course, she's not above making it up as she goes, since a 2019 piece she wrote for the Daily Mail had to be retracted and "substantial damages" paid to the person she slandered - Melania Trump.  That was her second retraction.  In 2018 a piece she wrote for Newsweek was retracted when the editors belatedly concluded they couldn't support her allegations that "Russian bots" were responsible for Sen. Al Franken's downfall.

So we have a woman, given her history, who is anti-theist, ultra-feminist, educated at one college with a reputation for neo-marxism, and teaching at another, yet lives in New York City with a second home in upstate New York.  Must be nice.

Let me give you a taste of that older post:

Glenn Reynolds linked to a Salon.com piece by Nina Burleigh:

"I cringed as my young son recited the Pledge of Allegiance. But who was I to question his innocent trust in a nation I long ago lost faith in?"

Who, indeed? Reader Wagner James Au, who sent the link, writes: "My question is, why do anti-war liberals get so offended when people question their patriotism, when they spend so much time questioning it themselves?"

I read her piece, Country Boy, and my response to it was, almost literally, a RCOB.

Ms. Burleigh and I have worldviews so divergent that we might as well be of different species. There is no common ground upon which we could even begin to attempt rapprochement. And what bothers me most of all is that I see the land that we both live in becoming more and more divided between people like her, and people like me.

Let me fisk, for it is about the only thing I can do to purge myself of the emotions her piece inspired in me:

If you've got a few minutes, go read it.  See if it gives you the same symptoms it gave me.  This is the Left today.  Fourteen years later there are possibly fewer of them, but they are a lot crazier.

Yes, Virgina, There is a Deep State

From Arthur Chrenkoff:

The media and the left (but I repeat myself) have spent the past three years ridiculing the concept of the “Deep State” and those who subscribe to its existence. We have been told it’s a crazy right-wing conspiracy theory to believe that some public servants, mostly in the fields of intelligence, law enforcement and diplomacy, might cooperate in informal cabals to pursue their preferred policies regardless of who is in power and to protect their fiefdoms from oversight, interference and the executive, legislative and judicial control. To wonder whether some influential people in the federal bureaucracy, connected through a revolving door with the progressive establishment, might have contemplated preventing the election of their bete noire and his removal from office once their initial efforts proved unsuccessful invited accusation of delusion and paranoia.

This narrative is now officially old and busted. The new and hot one: the Deep State exists and it’s good.

RTWT on this one, too.

I'm reminded of a previous QotD from Stephen Green:

Once you’ve convinced yourself that your job is to protect the proles from themselves, any foul action you take becomes excusable, or even noble. That’s progressivism in a nutshell.

Today is Milton Friedman's Birthday

He would have been 107 today.

On May 13, 2010 at the Cato Institute's Milton Friedman Prize dinner, pundit George F. Will gave the keynote speech.  I transcribed it back then.  I recommend you read it (or watch it) if you haven't before.  Hell, if you have, I recommend you do it again.  It's every bit as valid today, if not more, than it was then.

It's entitled Learned Feudalism.

Civil War

America will never be destroyed from the outside.  If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. - Abraham Lincoln

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Peace - the word evokes the simplest and most cherished dream of humanity.  Peace is, and has always been, the ultimate human aspiration.  And yet our history overwhelmingly shows that while we speak incessantly of peace, our actions tell a very different story. - Javier Perez de Cuellar

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Conflict, like poverty, is the normal condition of Man.  Instead of seeking the causes of conflict, one would be better off studying the causes of peace and the prosperity it makes possible. - Anonymous

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We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace. - Jeane Kirkpatrick

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Revolution, n. - In politics, an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment. - Ambrose Bierce

A recent Pew poll indicates that a majority of the population believes that political violence is imminent.  A February 2019 column from the BBC asked Are We On the Road to Civilization Collapse? Sara Hoyt wrote in March a piece entitled We Are Dancing on a Powder Keg.

These are not isolated examples, oh no:

It’s Time For Conservatives To Choose: Fight Back Or Surrender

The Battle Isn't Right vs. Left. It’s Statism vs. Individualism


Georgetown University poll: Nation at edge ‘of civil war,’ but voters reject compromise

The Civil War

America's Second Civil War Has Already Begun

Which way to the revolution

Democrat Congresswoman To Conservative Teen: “You’re Right To Be Afraid Of Us”

America’s Cold Civil War

Eric Holder: Democrats Should Consider Packing SCOTUS

America Is Over, But I Won’t See It Go Without An Epic Fight

That's an even dozen, and I didn't have to work hard to compile them.

The concept of the "meme" was coined by anti-theist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. It's not just those humorous images that make up a significant portion of Facebook postings, though they're an exhibit of the general concept. Merriam Webster defines a meme as "an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture." Dawkins himself said:

Memes (discrete units of knowledge, gossip, jokes and so on) are to culture what genes are to life. Just as biological evolution is driven by the survival of the fittest genes in the gene pool, cultural evolution may be driven by the most successful memes.

This is a mega-überpost, but if this interests you (or frightens you) get a snack and a beverage, get comfortable then please click below and continue. 

A Blast from the Past

From July 4, 2012, Walter Russell Mead's re-imagining of the "woke" Declaration of (In)Dependence:

The unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen Post-Colonial, Multi-Racial Societes of North America

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to strengthen the political bands which have connected them with the Global Community, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the cooperative and deferential station which a careful review of the relevant peer reviewed literature suggests is most appropriate for long term win-win outcomes, a decent and rigorously equal respect to the opinions of woman- and man- and transkind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the ever deeper union.

We hold these views to be consistent with the evolving cultural consensus, that all humans are equally obliged to the performance of certain Duties, that among these are the Participation in the Struggle against Racism, Economic Injustice, Genetically Modified Organisms, Homophobia, Nationalism and the Excessive Emission of Carbon Dioxide and Other Greenhouse Gasses. That to secure the performance of these Duties, Governments are instituted among humans, deriving their just powers from the considered Opinions of the Educated Classes, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Duty of the Enlightened and Credentialed Guardians of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect the Unquestioning Performance of their Duties by the Less Enlightened Members of the Public. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Change cannot come too quickly to suit the Convenience and the Predilections of an Enlightened Minority; Governments long established should be changed the Moment a Sufficient Number of Well Regarded Contributors to the New York Review of Books have determined that such Change is Morally Incumbent; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that intellectuals who have never run anything in their lives are the Fittest of all Living People to remedy virtually any evil by abolishing the forms of Government, Laws and Customs of Society to which the brutish and unreflective Common People are accustomed. And when a long train of abuses and usurpations pursuing invariably the same Failed Dogmas of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy evinces a design to allow said Common People to evade all obligations to the Global Community, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide New and Expanded Regulations for the future better restriction of the Lower Orders as they deem Meet for the Purpose.

Indoctrination

I came across this the other day - the syllabus for a University of Arizona "Honors" English class, English 109H - in fact, the syllabus states:

This is an honors class with work and credit equivalent to a year’s completion of ENGL 101 and 102. Expectations are high.

This is a class for incoming Honors freshmen, straight out of high school.

Shakespeare? Milton? (*shudder*) Conrad?

Nope:

English 109H: Fall 2017

DAMN, We Will Never Know: Kendrick Lamar’s and Kiese Laymon’s Hip Hop Literacies

Course Description

Morally, there has been no change at all, and a moral change is the only real one.
–James Baldwin
On April 14, 2017, twenty-nine year-old Kendrick Lamar, an American hip hop artist known for his pop protest music, released his fourth studio album, DAMN. Four years earlier, thirty-eight year-old Kiese Laymon, an American writer known for his work on Gawker and ESPN, published his series of autobiographical essays on American racism, masculinity, hip hop, and the deep South.

Using Laymon’s essays as a framework, we will study Kendrick Lamar’s body of music to events which boomed his controversy, including #BlackLivesMatter and ongoing police brutalities, especially those publicized by social media. By studying American values connected to what we call blackness and whiteness, we’ll explore conflict, contact, and coalition and ask: How does black American and white American social media allow for critiques of race, gender, sexuality, and violence? What does it mean for a genre of music and its accompanying culture that, by "tradition," enforces heterosexuality and masculinity—in the name of legal murders?

The goal of this course is to improve your ability to critically think and write. In addition to contextualizing and reshaping the Kendrick Lamar and Kiese Laymon conversations, you will conduct library and field research on your own controversy, which will be integrated into a semester-long project consisting of a research essay, public argument, and literacy narrative. If we can listen and read carefully enough, we can occupy other subjectivities; that is, to say, we can improve our writings and civic lives, which are connected to what happens outside the classroom. We will return to the same question at the end: Can we really act as witness to another voice, even for our studies of language and its adaptations?

Course Goals Goal 1: Rhetorical Awareness
Learn strategies for analyzing texts’ audiences, purposes, and contexts as a means of developing facility in reading and writing.

Goal 2: Critical Thinking and Composing
Use reading and writing for purposes of critical thinking, research, problem solving, action, and participation in conversations within and across different communities.

Goal 3: Reflection and Revision
Understand composing processes as flexible and collaborative, drawing upon multiple strategies and informed by reflection.

Goal 4: Conventions
Understand conventions as related to purpose, audience, and genre, including such areas as mechanics, usage, citation practices, as well as structure, style, graphics, and design.

Written Assignments

• In the first unit of the course, you will study and respond to various contexts according to different rhetorical lenses and write a Contextual Rhetorical Analysis of Public Protest Spaces reframing Black lives politics re-envisioned by music videos from Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. You may defend, depart from, or combine his arguments to develop your own inquiry.
• In the second unit, you will conduct both library and field research on an approved social justice controversy of your choice, which will culminate in an analysis of the issue, or a Rhetorical Analysis of a Controversy. An Annotated Bibliography, due before the big Essay 2, will complete the “Research Portfolio.” You will closely study U.S. state or Supreme court cases to develop your controversies.
• In the third unit, you will use this research to support an argument of public interest, called a Public Argument. You will create a video catered to a mobilized audience and present it to the class.
• For the final “exam,” you will write and curate your own literacy narrative, which you will publish on a class blog. The final project is semester-long and we will NOT spend time in class on it other than one session per month; you are expected to develop, collect, and write your materials throughout the course. Please start early and utilize the class resources and office hours.
• In addition to these larger projects, you will complete a series of in-class and out-of-class smaller assignments which build into the four major assignments. Homework (readings, journals, smaller pre-essay assignments and discussions), workshops, and participation are often the decisive suasion points for borderline grades. Do the work, come to class ready and willing to discuss and participate, and you will see that reflected in what you earn.

I'm not going to go through the rest of it, but here's an example of Kendrick Lamar's art from his album DAMN:


I'm reminded of this national championship debate performance.

Just saying.

Kiese Laymon's collection of essays How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America is a required textbook.

At least there's a textbook.  The title essay is still available at Gawker.  It's prose, but I'm unconvinced that what's being taught in this class is "critical thinking" or "structure, style, graphics and design."  And since when is the purpose of an English class "problem solving, action, and participation in conversations within and across different communities"?

Oh, and remember we're paying (a lot) for our kids to go to college for this.

The professor?  Sylvia Chan.

The Long March through the Institutions has been completed for a long, long time.

Oh, and read this QotD too.  It's pertinent.

Edited to add this I found at a linking site:

Recycling

From December 22, 2014, a topical repost in keeping with today's QotD:


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robinson: By then it will be irreversible.

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