Some useful thoughts from Jim Manzi.
Category Archives: Education
Good Riddance
It’s the end of an era for the University of Wisconsin’s TA union. As Ann notes, it was at the center of the thuggery in Madison earlier this year.
The Lies Of Rousseau’s Disciples
…have been laid bare in England:
The Left-liberal camp is in overdrive in its campaign to rewrite history (or, in its own vocabulary, to alter consciousness): you did not see thousands of jubilant thugs rampaging through the streets, destroying livelihoods and property for the sheer exultant joy of it. What you saw were society’s victims responding to any or all of the following: bankers’ bonuses, MPs cheating on their expenses, unemployment, government spending cuts, poverty, social inequality, etc, etc. Their crimes were simply part of the same package of callous selfishness displayed by (as one particularly bizarre equation had it) tabloid phone hackers.
What is not ludicrous and insulting to common sense in these propositions is contradictory in its own terms. There are indeed views of the human condition which hold that all species of wickedness are connected, because they are all rooted in the fact that man is a fallen creature. But somehow I doubt that the ardent liberal secularists who were piping up last week were believers in original sin or the machinations of the Devil.
The moral equivalence that they wanted to establish between looters and arsonists on the one hand, and the perpetrators of any other kind of bad behaviour you can think of on the other, was rooted in ideological, not theological, orthodoxy. The rioting gangs could not simply be what they seemed – what they so obviously were – because that would be a devastating victory for the judgment of popular opinion over the fantasies of liberalism.
There’s actually nothing “liberal” about it.
Want To See A Bubble?
Here’s a bubble.
And it’s about to pop, I think.
Our Innumerate Secretary Of Education
Apparently, Arne Duncan has been ignorantly channeling Paul Krugman. Derbyshire (and Iowahawk) take him to school.
[Update a few minutes later]
Speaking of the crazy economics professor, Ed Driscoll reviews his latest antics.
I should add (as I have before) that it’s important to understand just how and why WW II ended the Depression. The conventional wisdom from the Keynesians is that all of the federal spending grew the economy, but that didn’t really happen — wars are in fact ruinous for economies, even for those economies that win them. Much of the production that occurred during the war was consumed in the war, or scrapped afterward, while there was rationing of food and goods on the home front. The real reason that we recovered was that once the war was on, FDR was too distracted by it to continue to tinker with the economy, as he had during the thirties, keeping it continually sick (much like a medieval doctor continuing to bleed a patient). He had to get arms production up and could no longer afford all of his random pet nostrums. Beyond that, unemployment plunged because so many men were drafted, taking them off the rolls, and then the women were put to work in the factories.
Had Roosevelt lived, after the war, he probably would have returned to his damaging tinkering, and in fact Truman wanted to, but the new Republican Congress that came in in 1946 wouldn’t let him, and so finally, after a decade and a half of disastrous Democrat policies, the economy finally recovered, and even boomed. But it doesn’t mean that the solution is a war, or even the “moral equivalent” of one. It means that the solution is sane government. I hope that we’re less than a year and a half from that.
[Update a while later]
The leftists can’t make up their minds about it.
An Overdue Apology
Better late than never. “Never” is when I suspect we’ll get anything similar from much of the American left.
The Neglect Of Communist Crimes
It should be just as socially unacceptable to wear a hammer and sickle, or Mao jacket, or Che tee shirt, as it is to wear a swastika.
[Update a few minutes later]
Yes, I know the piece is a couple years old. It’s worth reposting, though, given the proximity of the fiftieth anniversary of the Wall being erected.
Will David Cameron Be Margaret Thatcher?
There appears to be a subtext in the piece: cometh the hour, cometh the man. But let us not forget that David Cameron’s first instinct, what he chose to promote to the first order of business in a recalled Parliament, was to blame social media, and moot the prospect of shutting down the country’s telecommunications systems at the first hint of a disturbance. Once again, the symptoms and not the causes are being addressed. This is because addressing causes is unpopular and difficult. It is depressing to note that the only prime minister since the Second World War who has had the honesty to candidly and repeatedly speak the truth about the consequences of our post-war welfare fetish was Margaret Thatcher: She pulled no punches, she did not dress up her sentiments or obscure the harshness of her message to such an extent that it lost its meaning, and she revelled in taking on who she saw as the enemies of liberty and of civilization (the socialists at home, the Soviet Union abroad). The result? The economy rallied and Britain was saved from what looked like terminal decline. Her reward? To be generally loathed for being “harsh,” even by many of those who would broadly agree with her.
Mrs. Thatcher’s great strength was that she did not particularly care about being popular — for which, let us not forget, she was rewarded with three election victories. And taking on the status quo is going to make the government unpopular. But David Cameron is no Mrs. Thatcher. The prime minister is not the man to stand up and say what needs to be said. He is still racked with guilt for his privilege and afflicted by that vacuous and peculiarly British concept of “One Nation” conservatism, which seeks to compromise between liberty and safety, and which has largely accepted the post-war settlement as being the foundation of a “civilized” society, despite mounting evidence to the contrary.
Still, we can hope.
“The Filthy Thing They Have Created”
Peter Hitchens pulls no punches:
As the polluted flood (it is not a tide; it will not go back down again) of spite, greed and violence washes on to their very doorsteps, well-off and influential Left-wingers at last meet the filthy thing they have created, and which they ignored when it did not affect them personally.
No doubt they will find ways to save themselves. But they will not save the country. Because even now they will not admit that all their ideas are wrong, and that the policies of the past 50 years – the policies they love – have been a terrible mistake. I have heard them in the past few days clinging to their old excuses of non-existent ‘poverty’ and ‘exclusion’.
Unfortunately, we have the same problem in this country. Fortunately, we’re not quite as far gone, at least in many states.
More (depressing) thoughts from Mark Steyn and Charles Crawford.
[Update a while later]
Thoughts on “liberal” psychoses.
What Has Happened To Obama?
…the question on every lip is—as the title of a much quoted article in the New York Times by Drew Westen of Emory University puts it— “What Happened to Obama?” Attacking from the left, Mr. Westin charges that President Obama has been conciliatory when he should have been aggressively pounding away at all the evildoers on the right.
Of course, unlike Mr. Westen, we villainous conservatives do not see Mr. Obama as conciliatory or as “a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his re-election.” On the contrary, we see him as a president who knows all too well what he believes. Furthermore, what Mr. Westen regards as an opportunistic appeal to the center we interpret as a tactic calculated to obfuscate his unshakable strategic objective, which is to turn this country into a European-style social democracy while diminishing the leading role it has played in the world since the end of World War II. The Democrats have persistently denied that these are Mr. Obama’s goals, but they have only been able to do so by ignoring or dismissing what Mr. Obama himself, in a rare moment of candor, promised at the tail end of his run for the presidency: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”
This statement, coming on top of his association with radicals like Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright and Rashid Khalidi, definitively revealed to all who were not wilfully blinding themselves that Mr. Obama was a genuine product of the political culture that had its birth among a marginal group of leftists in the early 1960s and that by the end of the decade had spread metastatically to the universities, the mainstream media, the mainline churches, and the entertainment industry. Like their communist ancestors of the 1930s, the leftist radicals of the ’60s were convinced that the United States was so rotten that only a revolution could save it.
And now they’re disappointed that they’re not getting one.
[Late evening update]
Sorry, went up to Lancaster to see the JetHawks lose big to San Jose (but we got a bobble-head doll of Fred Haise). There was a large contingent of XCORians who drove down from Mojave for the game.
Link was missing, but is there now.