When I was younger I wanted to be a professor like Lewis and Tolkein. It wasn't until much later and after much effort and debt that I realized that not only was that life no longer possible, but that institutions like the ones they served actively hated me. It would have been far worse if I had actually gotten some tenured position; having to hide my thoughts every day, parrot opinions I despise, etc. The sad part is, and perhaps others might relate to this, they'll never know how much I would have given. I would have endured poverty, obscurity, toil, all that, to be a university scholar. But in the end, it has forced me to become creative, to make my own way. I teach at the secondary level and do adjunct work, but my real efforts at scholarship are online. Discovering communities like the ones on Substack is a great blessing. For some, I suspect (bearing in mind the sad statistics you note in your article) such outlets are a lifesaver.
John C. Calhoun thought that Jefferson's paean to equality in the Declaration of Independence was fatuous nonsense. He noted that men are born rather than created, and of the only two created beings, one was immediately made subordinate to the other. That men are born means they enter an existing world in different places and with different personal characteristics which are the legacy of their forebears. There is no way to get around this; it is the natural and supernatural order, and efforts to legislate equality will always amount, in the end, to worse oppression than they were meant to remedy.
What galls most people is that the existing order so manifestly rewards mediocrity. People would more readily accept social inequality if the people at the top weren't demonstrably vicious and incompetent. Our society has been peaceful for so long that our elites have been literally able to paper over their weaknesses. That time is coming to an end.
This is exactly what's happening. Everyone is still pretending that academics are intellectually relevant, but the game of make believe is getting very difficult to sustain.
The Renaissance comparison is so true and something I’ve often thought about. The university as the home of the liberal arts was a creation of the Renaissance; Medieval colleges were about training literate clerics and civil servants, like now. I’d be happy to be the new Marsilio Ficino. I just need to find a Medici.
I’ll be writing about it at some point soon, but one thing I’ve thought a lot about is a gap in the education world, also noted by Aaron Renn, that there are a great number of Classically educated homeschoolers with nowhere to go for tertiary education. There are also a lot of underemployed adjuncts, especially in RW spaces. There is a need waiting to be filled.
I have a naive dream that the coming years will see a renewed interest in the classics. Maybe after the collapse of our current civilization people will become interested in where everything came from in the first place.
Your experience is sadly all too common these days. Glad you found an outlet for your talents, but society is obviously worse off than it would be if people like you were teaching these subjects instead of diversity-hire Marxcissist midwits.
That only really works so long as going people don't essentially have to go to university before going into professional life. As long as they do, conceding that territory means the lunatics get a crack at indoctrinating them, with the results that we see around us
Since the universities cannot be reclaimed, they must be destroyed.
I’ve come to the same conclusion about how higher ed institutions feel about me. It’s a bitter pill to swallow after so many years of study and so much debt accrued.
Respect for a brilliant and fast take. Down with the demoralized DIEvy League! Of course affirmative action justices and VP dissented. If Hillary won, the court would have a permanent majority of affirmative action supporters. Meritocracy lives on for now, let’s breathe new life into it.
It isn’t only the incompetents that are hosing up the system. Untold Billions are spent on make work jobs for people with useless degrees to make the numbers work. This is money that isn’t used to improve education or medicine or invest in growth and innovation. It is just burned.
“My Race is My Story” (on the sign the useful idiot is holding) is reminiscent of the ideological stomping grounds of 20th century men in sheets and hoods.
Jun 29, 2023·edited Jun 29, 2023Liked by John Carter
The real irony here, is that all this woke participation awards is a subversion of the Ayn Rand individualism and libertarianism. Where the individual takes precedence over society. Though rather than their abilities to be lord and master over all the lessor folk, it is all that personal feelings matter more than anything.
How are people to be judged competent? In terms of their contributions to a better society. What are the criteria for a better society? If it's that things work, the crapification of manufacturing and production isn't due to diversity hiring, but treating money as the lord and god of society, where quality loses precedence to profitability.
Yes, our world is turning into a festering sewer, but the reasons are as much the monetization of everything, as the social Ebola virus of neutering culture. We are pods in the Matrix and the ones sucking the blood like it that we blame each other and ignore the forces at work.
It wasn't diversity hiring that shipped most manufacturing overseas.
Obama might have been a diversity hire, but it was still Goldman Sachs pulling the strings.
I read a long time ago, Bob Dylan commenting on how Jim Crow laws were specifically designed to keep poor whites and blacks from identifying along class lines.
Not that I have anything against normal rich people, I'm related to enough of them, but when they parasite on society, it's no different than anyone else parasitizing on society.
What we need to understand is that angels and assholes come in all classes, creeds and colors and understand people for what they are, not just what boxes they check.
The fact is, what makes life worth living, is doing the best with what you get, even if it wasn't what you wanted, or thought you deserved. And yes, lots of people do get screwed over. Much of it has never been pretty. But you should still follow the light.
The rule of money is certainly an element, but affirmative action pushing large numbers of incompetent people into roles they have no business occupying is also very obviously a big contributing factor. Both things can be true.
Very true, but it's still arguing over deck chairs on the Titanic, where the rip in the side is the financialization of the economy.
Yes, these people are delusional. Puberty is a fascist plot. But rationality is not what is going to bring them down. Crashing the system will and since it has been a work in progress for decades, might as well hurry it up.
Admittedly in my own profession, farming and horse racing, the increasing lack of competent workers isn't diversity, but that no one, other than the Mexicans, wants to do real work anymore.
Farming is definitely a profession in which financialization has destroyed competence by removing the financial incentive to learn the trade. Why bother when it's so much easier to make money trading bonds or whatever, while most farmers break their backs to stay one step ahead of bankruptcy?
Bankers screwing over farmers goes to the dawn of history. Crops fail and they get the land. It was where it began. Hunter gatherers didn't need loans.
Though there are quite a few getting rich off government subsidies.
My father was a dairy auctioneer, Guernseys. Back in the 70's, they built up these enormous milk price supports. There were warehouse of "government cheese." During the early Reagan years, they started handing it out as part of welfare programs. Then in 86, they pulled all the price supports and half the dairy cattle in the country went to the butcher. Mostly the high butterfat breeds, like Guernseys and Jerseys, because of all the fuss over butterfat as unhealthy. Leaving mostly Holsteins as the primary dairy cows.
So my father retired and went to his side hustle, race horses. At one point, in the 80's, our percentage of winners to foals was 11th in the country.
Negative feedback loops. That's when you have to get out of the box.
In nature, it's what's necrotic.
Stick to what's healthy. Vibes, not boxes. Much more life there.
Even if you like the crowd, take their groupthink with a grain of salt. They do tend to spiral into the rabbit holes and the psychos lead the way.
As Twain said, don't argue with idiots. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.
I think what lessons we will come away with, as the West goes the way of the Soviet Union, is that we can't have public government, without public banking. The banks are having their, "Let them eat cake." moment.
The positive backlash is that much of the rest of the world is finding ways to network, that they never would have, if we hadn't tried pushing the entire rest of the world into a corner. Eventually we will come to realize that we too are just one of the nodes in the network.
Then we can send some neocons to be tried by a tribunal of Ukrainian mothers and widows. They will be lucky to just get a stoning.
I strongly suspect that Big Money is cynically using DIE to engage in market shaping. With their agents planted in every board and their capricious allocation of ESG scores, they can effectively move businesses about like chess pieces and profit from the stock manipulation this facilitates.
The elites clearly don't practice what they preach - I don't see Larry Fink surrounding himself with day-glo haired, freakazoid, land whales, with swarms of pronouns buzzing around them like angry hornets. Unlike Hunter and Joe (and the universities) they are not snorting their own stash...
Could be a RICO case in the making. Odds are the statistics are very damning.
Everyone hates the banks. But everyone keeps taking on debt for cheap plastic crap they don’t need and giving the banks their money in the form of interest payments.
Everyone hates the rich, but a poor person never built a hospital.
Envy- one of the seven deadly sins. The sorrows of this world are typically caused by people who don’t want to play the hand they were dealt.
Or as the Buddhists would say, “Desire is the cause of all suffering.”
The problem is that wealth and power leveraging more wealth and power is a feedback loop. When we engineer a system, we build in circuit breakers to keep the feedback loops from spiraling out of control, melting the wiring and burning up all the furniture. Unfortunately we have a linear, goal oriented culture that naturally overrides such devices.
The Ancients developed debt jubilees three thousand years ago, as such a circuit breaker, but here we are, caught in the same doom loop.
This time around it's the death match between the markets/banks and the dollar and the markets have more lobbyists. The dollar just has that drug dealer, the Fed.
When they blow up the dollar, states and regions will have to start issuing local currencies, then foreign policy is between Texas and California, etc.
Basically it was a political necessity, because free landowners made much more inspired soldiers, defending their land, than a bunch of half starved serfs.
You shall count off seven Sabbaths of years, seven times seven years; and there shall be to you the days of seven Sabbaths of years, even forty-nine years. Then you shall sound the loud trumpet on the tenth day of the seventh month. On the Day of Atonement you shall sound the trumpet throughout all your land. You shall make the fiftieth year holy, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee to you; and each of you shall return to his own property, and each of you shall return to his family. That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee to you. In it you shall not sow, neither reap that which grows of itself, nor gather from the undressed vines. For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy to you. You shall eat of its increase out of the field. In this Year of Jubilee each of you shall return to his property. (WEB)
Fluctuation is a pretty basic physical process. Positive feedback loops turn negative at the crest of the wave. We can't turn them off, just recognize how far they might spin and what we can afford to bet.
Without the ups and downs, it's a flatline anyway.
It's all relational, between equilibrium and infinity.
Jun 29, 2023·edited Jun 29, 2023Liked by John Carter
None of this crap came from Ayn Rand or libertarianism which are individualist where race and gender are collectivist. It comes from "liberals" (as they are falsely called in the USA), postmodernist Marxists, and human-hating environmental types. Rand was all about individual merit. I also blame the breakdown of civil institutions as they have been replaced by the state. Conservatives can take *some* of the blame for that.
Like I said, it's a subversion, where it's about individual feelings. Yes it's collective, but as a group shriek of people who prefer not to grow up.
As to merit, how and what determines merit? Do the Sackler's normalizing opiate addiction qualify as merit based? They certainly made a fortune off of it, enough to buy up quite a few doctors and politicians.
Was shipping much of the manufacturing base to third world countries, because the labor was cheaper and it undercut labor in this country, merit based? It certainly made a lot people quite rich.
How about the merit of curing business cycles with ever cheaper money?
I think we need to look a lot deeper into our collections of groupthink ideas, both of the left and right. Though it's not likely, until much of our current economy crashes and that mother of all reality checks arrives.
At this point I hope these universities burn through what little cultural capital they have left. They destroyed any shred of respect or credibility they had remaining with Covid vaccine mandates and other requirements on students. Alternatives need to be built up the quicker the better!
Amen. Your essay is spot fucking on. If Affirmative-Action Americans think they're owed a place at the top because the West's success was built on their backs, and if they think their mere presence as the "diversity" really does add so much strength to our civilization, then they should have no problem emigrating to their respective motherlands and building something amazing there. But for some strange reason, that never happens, and the flow of migrants just keeps going the other way. Wonder why that is.
Remarkable, isn't it? Also incredible that somehow their amazing productive capacities did not result in shining civilizations in their home countries.
This reminds me of the chapter on affirmative action in Timur Kuran’s Public Lies, Private Truths. I feel like this is a tipping point in preference falsification by the general populace. Also - the universities have to change, or else we will destroy ourselves. And I say that as an Australian, where the problem is much less acute.
Lucky you. If anything, the problem is far more acute in Canada. Here there are job ads at our universities that explicitly bar white males from consideration.
Yep. Competence, justice, and fairness. The right people in the right jobs, and not living in a society where it's a choice between climbing to the top of the greasy pole and poverty.
When the USSR finally croaked, life-expectancy plummeted in Russia. Then, it bounced back and nativity rose again.
Why? Because they returned to the center: being russian. Racially, ethnically, culutrally, morally, whatever-you-like-to-call-itly.
The US and the rest of the West cannot do that, because of feminism, multuracialism, and the rights&equality-conditioning, as none of those things in their post WW2-iterations have anything to do with racial/cultural/et c heritage.
Small wonder american boys and men are converting to islam in growing numbers.
Rolo has a very different take, he believes russians are being killed off by an oligarch mafia who do not like them very much. Sounds kind of familiar...
I think it's not so much a case of not liking, as it is not caring and being very callous about lives not your own; look at russian history. Only the chinese and the arabs trump the russians in expending lives as were they a disposable asset.
Perfect example is how Soviet troops cleare mines during the Winter War. The finns mined the frozen lakes with all kinds of nastiness, and the difficult terrain forced Societ vehicles, including tanks, out onto the ice. Kaboom, splash, rat-at-at-at and a little "Hakkaa Päälle" equals no tanks and no supply-vehicles.
So the kommissars and the commanders ordered soldiers to march across the ice in front of the vehicles, arm in arm and unarmed, to clear away the mines.
Of course, the ideas of "not liking" vs. "not caring" aren't mutually excluding in any way.
We blame lefties for the DIEversity but there is a case to be made that it is actually an impulse driven by late-stage capitalism. By that I mean the extractive/rentier kind of capitalism that produces nothing but exploits and feeds off of everything.
We blame the lefties in Britain for mass migration and, while they have been gaslit into supporting it, the most influential organisation that has been consistently lobbying for mass migration for decades is the CBI - the Confederation of British Industry which is the equivalent of the US Chamber of Commerce.
The British ruling/managerial class is shot through with utter contempt for the native British and their messianic belief in a borderless world ruled by the requirements of global capital. It is the ruling class that is funding, supporting and often manning the plethora of "refugee rights" NGOs which use lawfare to keep the government from barring or deporting any illegal immigrants. Only yesterday, the Appeal Court in London ruled that the government's plan to send all illegal immigrants to Rwanda is illegal because, allegedly, Rwanda is not a 'safe destination'. So, we're stuck with them forever now.
Are all these NGOs, judges and captains of industry 'lefties'? I don't think so. They certainly seem to have no problem with profit-making.
You're not wrong. The ideologies of late stage leftism are for the most part the opportunistic products of the financial system, which desires expensive real estate, consumers, credit peons, and cheap labor. In that context, affirmative action might be seen either as wishful thinking - that one human is interchangeable with another, therefore humans from one group can be substituted with any other - or perhaps as a way of controlling native populations by introducing insecure and capricious employment.
This is why I maintain that communism and free-market capitalism are not polar opposites but actually mirror each other. Both ideologies posit a purely propertarian/economic solution to the human condition and view actual people as merely interchangeable units of consumption or production. They only real difference lies in who gets the surplus.
If that is what you believe then it follows that you can have communities of, say, Swedes mixed in with Bantus and Pashtuns and expect they will all rub along building the economy and buying stuff.
What a bunch of over privileged idiots those pictures show. I wonder how many of the brown faces are legal? Let's tackle that issue also. True equality not Animal Farm equality
MIT has gone back to requiring SATs (albeit self-reported and verified upon enrollment). Caltech doesn't consider them anymore. How will that play out?
They will do anything they can to get around it, they have no respect for political precedent, court precedent, or constitutional norms. They simply do whatever they want.
Diversity has sunken every empire it was introduced to. Rome, Greece, Phoenicia, and hence that’s why it is the chosen mechanism of Northwest Asia Minor’s Chosen People.
May I say that I feel a long moment of schadenfreude coming on? Seeing the Left have to admit some minorities cannot compete is delightful. Nothing will change but one has to take the W when one can. Now if we can get some explicit admission of child grooming, I'll go roast marshmallows.
I will admit that the doublespeak and Marxist word wrangling is almost impressive but still nauseating. My favorites are the parents showing up at a School Board meeting and reading a selection from a middle school library only to get shut down under decorum rules. I work around Fort McHenry and see a lot of field trip groups. Every single one seems to have a teacher or parent wearing the f*g flag in some form. It's sad for me to see how far the home of the Star Spangled Banner has fallen.
Sadly true. Some blocks that I drive through have Pride and Ukrainian flags vying for attention while not a single "stars and stripes" is present. This won't end well.
The soviet union was the most pseudo intellectual, virtue signalling fart huffing empire in human history... until the GAE came along to take the crown. The red banner has been replaced by the rainbow
When I was younger I wanted to be a professor like Lewis and Tolkein. It wasn't until much later and after much effort and debt that I realized that not only was that life no longer possible, but that institutions like the ones they served actively hated me. It would have been far worse if I had actually gotten some tenured position; having to hide my thoughts every day, parrot opinions I despise, etc. The sad part is, and perhaps others might relate to this, they'll never know how much I would have given. I would have endured poverty, obscurity, toil, all that, to be a university scholar. But in the end, it has forced me to become creative, to make my own way. I teach at the secondary level and do adjunct work, but my real efforts at scholarship are online. Discovering communities like the ones on Substack is a great blessing. For some, I suspect (bearing in mind the sad statistics you note in your article) such outlets are a lifesaver.
John C. Calhoun thought that Jefferson's paean to equality in the Declaration of Independence was fatuous nonsense. He noted that men are born rather than created, and of the only two created beings, one was immediately made subordinate to the other. That men are born means they enter an existing world in different places and with different personal characteristics which are the legacy of their forebears. There is no way to get around this; it is the natural and supernatural order, and efforts to legislate equality will always amount, in the end, to worse oppression than they were meant to remedy.
What galls most people is that the existing order so manifestly rewards mediocrity. People would more readily accept social inequality if the people at the top weren't demonstrably vicious and incompetent. Our society has been peaceful for so long that our elites have been literally able to paper over their weaknesses. That time is coming to an end.
Excellent and pin-worthy comment.
I can relate with great intensity to your remarks about the scholarly world, and you're bang on about everything else.
Have you ever read Jude the Obscure? Thomas Hardy gets it.
I think we're witnessing the twilight of academic institutions. The independent scholar of the early Renaissance will be the new model.
This is exactly what's happening. Everyone is still pretending that academics are intellectually relevant, but the game of make believe is getting very difficult to sustain.
I have not read that particular book, but I am familiar with the plot. Perhaps I will look into it. John Williams’ Stoner covers similar themes.
One of my favorite non-fiction takes is a piece from some years back in City Journal called “The Classics in the Slums.” It’s a great take on working-class autodidacticism. https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-classics-in-the-slums
The Renaissance comparison is so true and something I’ve often thought about. The university as the home of the liberal arts was a creation of the Renaissance; Medieval colleges were about training literate clerics and civil servants, like now. I’d be happy to be the new Marsilio Ficino. I just need to find a Medici.
I’ll be writing about it at some point soon, but one thing I’ve thought a lot about is a gap in the education world, also noted by Aaron Renn, that there are a great number of Classically educated homeschoolers with nowhere to go for tertiary education. There are also a lot of underemployed adjuncts, especially in RW spaces. There is a need waiting to be filled.
I have a naive dream that the coming years will see a renewed interest in the classics. Maybe after the collapse of our current civilization people will become interested in where everything came from in the first place.
I think this is already happening, at least on the dissident right.
Your experience is sadly all too common these days. Glad you found an outlet for your talents, but society is obviously worse off than it would be if people like you were teaching these subjects instead of diversity-hire Marxcissist midwits.
That only really works so long as going people don't essentially have to go to university before going into professional life. As long as they do, conceding that territory means the lunatics get a crack at indoctrinating them, with the results that we see around us
Since the universities cannot be reclaimed, they must be destroyed.
I’ve come to the same conclusion about how higher ed institutions feel about me. It’s a bitter pill to swallow after so many years of study and so much debt accrued.
I hope things have worked out for you despite that. Always remember that you have chosen a noble path and no one can take that from you.
Thank you, what a very kind comment.
Extra points for quoting that great Democrat Senator from South Carolina. He would recognize today’s Democrat party ways.
Sadly, the University is a nearly dead institution with only a few small exceptions. Ideas and vigorous debate are not welcome.
"People would more readily accept social inequality if the people at the top weren't demonstrably vicious and incompetent. "
This is why they push it so hard, to deflect blame from themselves and to get people to accept that they're incompetent.
Respect for a brilliant and fast take. Down with the demoralized DIEvy League! Of course affirmative action justices and VP dissented. If Hillary won, the court would have a permanent majority of affirmative action supporters. Meritocracy lives on for now, let’s breathe new life into it.
Respect for coming up with DIEvy League. That was a neologism highly worthy of stealing.
It isn’t only the incompetents that are hosing up the system. Untold Billions are spent on make work jobs for people with useless degrees to make the numbers work. This is money that isn’t used to improve education or medicine or invest in growth and innovation. It is just burned.
Bingo. That's the incompetocracy right there. The tyranny of useless parasites.
“My Race is My Story” (on the sign the useful idiot is holding) is reminiscent of the ideological stomping grounds of 20th century men in sheets and hoods.
The "imagine if the sides were reversed" memes write themselves on that one.
The real irony here, is that all this woke participation awards is a subversion of the Ayn Rand individualism and libertarianism. Where the individual takes precedence over society. Though rather than their abilities to be lord and master over all the lessor folk, it is all that personal feelings matter more than anything.
How are people to be judged competent? In terms of their contributions to a better society. What are the criteria for a better society? If it's that things work, the crapification of manufacturing and production isn't due to diversity hiring, but treating money as the lord and god of society, where quality loses precedence to profitability.
Yes, our world is turning into a festering sewer, but the reasons are as much the monetization of everything, as the social Ebola virus of neutering culture. We are pods in the Matrix and the ones sucking the blood like it that we blame each other and ignore the forces at work.
It wasn't diversity hiring that shipped most manufacturing overseas.
Obama might have been a diversity hire, but it was still Goldman Sachs pulling the strings.
I read a long time ago, Bob Dylan commenting on how Jim Crow laws were specifically designed to keep poor whites and blacks from identifying along class lines.
Not that I have anything against normal rich people, I'm related to enough of them, but when they parasite on society, it's no different than anyone else parasitizing on society.
What we need to understand is that angels and assholes come in all classes, creeds and colors and understand people for what they are, not just what boxes they check.
The fact is, what makes life worth living, is doing the best with what you get, even if it wasn't what you wanted, or thought you deserved. And yes, lots of people do get screwed over. Much of it has never been pretty. But you should still follow the light.
The rule of money is certainly an element, but affirmative action pushing large numbers of incompetent people into roles they have no business occupying is also very obviously a big contributing factor. Both things can be true.
Very true, but it's still arguing over deck chairs on the Titanic, where the rip in the side is the financialization of the economy.
Yes, these people are delusional. Puberty is a fascist plot. But rationality is not what is going to bring them down. Crashing the system will and since it has been a work in progress for decades, might as well hurry it up.
Admittedly in my own profession, farming and horse racing, the increasing lack of competent workers isn't diversity, but that no one, other than the Mexicans, wants to do real work anymore.
Farming is definitely a profession in which financialization has destroyed competence by removing the financial incentive to learn the trade. Why bother when it's so much easier to make money trading bonds or whatever, while most farmers break their backs to stay one step ahead of bankruptcy?
Bankers screwing over farmers goes to the dawn of history. Crops fail and they get the land. It was where it began. Hunter gatherers didn't need loans.
Though there are quite a few getting rich off government subsidies.
My father was a dairy auctioneer, Guernseys. Back in the 70's, they built up these enormous milk price supports. There were warehouse of "government cheese." During the early Reagan years, they started handing it out as part of welfare programs. Then in 86, they pulled all the price supports and half the dairy cattle in the country went to the butcher. Mostly the high butterfat breeds, like Guernseys and Jerseys, because of all the fuss over butterfat as unhealthy. Leaving mostly Holsteins as the primary dairy cows.
So my father retired and went to his side hustle, race horses. At one point, in the 80's, our percentage of winners to foals was 11th in the country.
Babylonian money magic witching farmers out of their land is almost as venerable as debt jubilees. Turns out bankers can't feed armies, who knew.
Congrats on the success with the horses, that's something to be proud of.
Thanks. Have to admit, I'm part of the trickle down economy. Even the estates still need to be farmed.
Bad money pushes out good, bad ideas push out good also. The good people stop participating.
Gresham's Law of organizations, indeed.
Negative feedback loops. That's when you have to get out of the box.
In nature, it's what's necrotic.
Stick to what's healthy. Vibes, not boxes. Much more life there.
Even if you like the crowd, take their groupthink with a grain of salt. They do tend to spiral into the rabbit holes and the psychos lead the way.
As Twain said, don't argue with idiots. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.
I think what lessons we will come away with, as the West goes the way of the Soviet Union, is that we can't have public government, without public banking. The banks are having their, "Let them eat cake." moment.
The positive backlash is that much of the rest of the world is finding ways to network, that they never would have, if we hadn't tried pushing the entire rest of the world into a corner. Eventually we will come to realize that we too are just one of the nodes in the network.
Then we can send some neocons to be tried by a tribunal of Ukrainian mothers and widows. They will be lucky to just get a stoning.
I strongly suspect that Big Money is cynically using DIE to engage in market shaping. With their agents planted in every board and their capricious allocation of ESG scores, they can effectively move businesses about like chess pieces and profit from the stock manipulation this facilitates.
The elites clearly don't practice what they preach - I don't see Larry Fink surrounding himself with day-glo haired, freakazoid, land whales, with swarms of pronouns buzzing around them like angry hornets. Unlike Hunter and Joe (and the universities) they are not snorting their own stash...
Could be a RICO case in the making. Odds are the statistics are very damning.
Everyone hates the banks. But everyone keeps taking on debt for cheap plastic crap they don’t need and giving the banks their money in the form of interest payments.
Everyone hates the rich, but a poor person never built a hospital.
Envy- one of the seven deadly sins. The sorrows of this world are typically caused by people who don’t want to play the hand they were dealt.
Or as the Buddhists would say, “Desire is the cause of all suffering.”
The problem is that wealth and power leveraging more wealth and power is a feedback loop. When we engineer a system, we build in circuit breakers to keep the feedback loops from spiraling out of control, melting the wiring and burning up all the furniture. Unfortunately we have a linear, goal oriented culture that naturally overrides such devices.
The Ancients developed debt jubilees three thousand years ago, as such a circuit breaker, but here we are, caught in the same doom loop.
Debt jubilees are a nuclear policy weapon lying on the table for whatever populist Caesar has the balls to pick it up and make himself king.
This time around it's the death match between the markets/banks and the dollar and the markets have more lobbyists. The dollar just has that drug dealer, the Fed.
When they blow up the dollar, states and regions will have to start issuing local currencies, then foreign policy is between Texas and California, etc.
Smaug would not be pleased
Institutions can be engineered, but the raw relations of life, politics, food-chains, and ecosystems have circuit breakers only by accident if at all.
I wonder who actually called those debt jubilees.
Think in terms of lots of little fires as the circuit breakers to the really big fires, when the little ones keep getting put out.
Giantism tends to run up against environmental limits.
Michael Hudson has been coming out with a series of books on it;
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/04/the-delphic-oracle-was-their-davos-a-four-part-interview-with-michael-hudson-about-his-forthcoming-book-the-collapse-of-antiquity-part-1.html
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/04/michael-hudson-debt-and-the-collapse-of-antiquity-part-2.html
Basically it was a political necessity, because free landowners made much more inspired soldiers, defending their land, than a bunch of half starved serfs.
Thanks looks like great content
The priests made it law.: Leviticus 25:8-13
You shall count off seven Sabbaths of years, seven times seven years; and there shall be to you the days of seven Sabbaths of years, even forty-nine years. Then you shall sound the loud trumpet on the tenth day of the seventh month. On the Day of Atonement you shall sound the trumpet throughout all your land. You shall make the fiftieth year holy, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee to you; and each of you shall return to his own property, and each of you shall return to his family. That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee to you. In it you shall not sow, neither reap that which grows of itself, nor gather from the undressed vines. For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy to you. You shall eat of its increase out of the field. In this Year of Jubilee each of you shall return to his property. (WEB)
Yeah exactly; it's not about envy, it's about inevitable mathematical processes which lead to a dysfunctional equilibrium.
Fluctuation is a pretty basic physical process. Positive feedback loops turn negative at the crest of the wave. We can't turn them off, just recognize how far they might spin and what we can afford to bet.
Without the ups and downs, it's a flatline anyway.
It's all relational, between equilibrium and infinity.
None of this crap came from Ayn Rand or libertarianism which are individualist where race and gender are collectivist. It comes from "liberals" (as they are falsely called in the USA), postmodernist Marxists, and human-hating environmental types. Rand was all about individual merit. I also blame the breakdown of civil institutions as they have been replaced by the state. Conservatives can take *some* of the blame for that.
Like I said, it's a subversion, where it's about individual feelings. Yes it's collective, but as a group shriek of people who prefer not to grow up.
As to merit, how and what determines merit? Do the Sackler's normalizing opiate addiction qualify as merit based? They certainly made a fortune off of it, enough to buy up quite a few doctors and politicians.
Was shipping much of the manufacturing base to third world countries, because the labor was cheaper and it undercut labor in this country, merit based? It certainly made a lot people quite rich.
How about the merit of curing business cycles with ever cheaper money?
I think we need to look a lot deeper into our collections of groupthink ideas, both of the left and right. Though it's not likely, until much of our current economy crashes and that mother of all reality checks arrives.
At this point I hope these universities burn through what little cultural capital they have left. They destroyed any shred of respect or credibility they had remaining with Covid vaccine mandates and other requirements on students. Alternatives need to be built up the quicker the better!
Yep. That was the straw that broke the back of many a camel, my own included.
Amen. Your essay is spot fucking on. If Affirmative-Action Americans think they're owed a place at the top because the West's success was built on their backs, and if they think their mere presence as the "diversity" really does add so much strength to our civilization, then they should have no problem emigrating to their respective motherlands and building something amazing there. But for some strange reason, that never happens, and the flow of migrants just keeps going the other way. Wonder why that is.
Remarkable, isn't it? Also incredible that somehow their amazing productive capacities did not result in shining civilizations in their home countries.
This reminds me of the chapter on affirmative action in Timur Kuran’s Public Lies, Private Truths. I feel like this is a tipping point in preference falsification by the general populace. Also - the universities have to change, or else we will destroy ourselves. And I say that as an Australian, where the problem is much less acute.
Lucky you. If anything, the problem is far more acute in Canada. Here there are job ads at our universities that explicitly bar white males from consideration.
I certainly don't want to get ahead of myself, as I've been disappointed many times before, but a preference cascade could be in the offing.
I hope it is, John. On a whole raft of issues, not just this one. I just want competence. I don’t care who does the job, as long as they can do it.
Yep. Competence, justice, and fairness. The right people in the right jobs, and not living in a society where it's a choice between climbing to the top of the greasy pole and poverty.
It's not a lot to ask for.
When the USSR finally croaked, life-expectancy plummeted in Russia. Then, it bounced back and nativity rose again.
Why? Because they returned to the center: being russian. Racially, ethnically, culutrally, morally, whatever-you-like-to-call-itly.
The US and the rest of the West cannot do that, because of feminism, multuracialism, and the rights&equality-conditioning, as none of those things in their post WW2-iterations have anything to do with racial/cultural/et c heritage.
Small wonder american boys and men are converting to islam in growing numbers.
Rolo has a very different take, he believes russians are being killed off by an oligarch mafia who do not like them very much. Sounds kind of familiar...
Isn't Rolo a brand of chocolates?
I think it's not so much a case of not liking, as it is not caring and being very callous about lives not your own; look at russian history. Only the chinese and the arabs trump the russians in expending lives as were they a disposable asset.
Perfect example is how Soviet troops cleare mines during the Winter War. The finns mined the frozen lakes with all kinds of nastiness, and the difficult terrain forced Societ vehicles, including tanks, out onto the ice. Kaboom, splash, rat-at-at-at and a little "Hakkaa Päälle" equals no tanks and no supply-vehicles.
So the kommissars and the commanders ordered soldiers to march across the ice in front of the vehicles, arm in arm and unarmed, to clear away the mines.
Of course, the ideas of "not liking" vs. "not caring" aren't mutually excluding in any way.
Rolo Slavskiy, author of Slavland Chronicles here on Substack and one of the best Russia observers out there imo.
Aha! Thank you, will have to check him out then.
We blame lefties for the DIEversity but there is a case to be made that it is actually an impulse driven by late-stage capitalism. By that I mean the extractive/rentier kind of capitalism that produces nothing but exploits and feeds off of everything.
We blame the lefties in Britain for mass migration and, while they have been gaslit into supporting it, the most influential organisation that has been consistently lobbying for mass migration for decades is the CBI - the Confederation of British Industry which is the equivalent of the US Chamber of Commerce.
The British ruling/managerial class is shot through with utter contempt for the native British and their messianic belief in a borderless world ruled by the requirements of global capital. It is the ruling class that is funding, supporting and often manning the plethora of "refugee rights" NGOs which use lawfare to keep the government from barring or deporting any illegal immigrants. Only yesterday, the Appeal Court in London ruled that the government's plan to send all illegal immigrants to Rwanda is illegal because, allegedly, Rwanda is not a 'safe destination'. So, we're stuck with them forever now.
Are all these NGOs, judges and captains of industry 'lefties'? I don't think so. They certainly seem to have no problem with profit-making.
You're not wrong. The ideologies of late stage leftism are for the most part the opportunistic products of the financial system, which desires expensive real estate, consumers, credit peons, and cheap labor. In that context, affirmative action might be seen either as wishful thinking - that one human is interchangeable with another, therefore humans from one group can be substituted with any other - or perhaps as a way of controlling native populations by introducing insecure and capricious employment.
This is why I maintain that communism and free-market capitalism are not polar opposites but actually mirror each other. Both ideologies posit a purely propertarian/economic solution to the human condition and view actual people as merely interchangeable units of consumption or production. They only real difference lies in who gets the surplus.
If that is what you believe then it follows that you can have communities of, say, Swedes mixed in with Bantus and Pashtuns and expect they will all rub along building the economy and buying stuff.
Absolutely. In hindsight, the Cold War was merely a dispute between two sibling philosophies of economic absolutism, who merely differed as to method.
You can look at the development of our currency relative others an our PPP from 1976 to today to see how that oneplays out in reality.
1976, we were on par with and about to overtake Switzerland. Now, we're in a death-spiral.
What a bunch of over privileged idiots those pictures show. I wonder how many of the brown faces are legal? Let's tackle that issue also. True equality not Animal Farm equality
MIT has gone back to requiring SATs (albeit self-reported and verified upon enrollment). Caltech doesn't consider them anymore. How will that play out?
I guess we'll see, but it isn't hard to know which way to bet.
John, did you see this?
https://nitter.poast.org/JesseKellyDC/status/1674461337961869316#m
It looks like Harvard and the rest of them will just go right around it as you pointed out.
Nope, haven't seen it. I'm shocked. SHOCKED, I tell you.
They will do anything they can to get around it, they have no respect for political precedent, court precedent, or constitutional norms. They simply do whatever they want.
Yes. And it will destroy them.
Diversity has sunken every empire it was introduced to. Rome, Greece, Phoenicia, and hence that’s why it is the chosen mechanism of Northwest Asia Minor’s Chosen People.
This is a warm-up for what likely some elites realize needs to happen: The elimination of race as a consideration for employment.
Because without that, there's no possibility of preserving their investments in the USA.
I'm extremely skeptical that they're that rational.
DEIUS VULT
Most aren't, but some are. With any luck they'll replace them sooner than later, so we can get on with it....
May I say that I feel a long moment of schadenfreude coming on? Seeing the Left have to admit some minorities cannot compete is delightful. Nothing will change but one has to take the W when one can. Now if we can get some explicit admission of child grooming, I'll go roast marshmallows.
Child grooming, like everything the left does, isn't happening, and therefore it's great that it's happening.
I will admit that the doublespeak and Marxist word wrangling is almost impressive but still nauseating. My favorites are the parents showing up at a School Board meeting and reading a selection from a middle school library only to get shut down under decorum rules. I work around Fort McHenry and see a lot of field trip groups. Every single one seems to have a teacher or parent wearing the f*g flag in some form. It's sad for me to see how far the home of the Star Spangled Banner has fallen.
The prismatic pennant of pederasty is ubiquitous. A sign of the times.
Sadly true. Some blocks that I drive through have Pride and Ukrainian flags vying for attention while not a single "stars and stripes" is present. This won't end well.
screw the yankee imperial banner, we need stars and bars.
I totally missed this response. I absolutely agree. A new flag is needed and the Stars and Bars is a good start but we need something new.
The soviet union was the most pseudo intellectual, virtue signalling fart huffing empire in human history... until the GAE came along to take the crown. The red banner has been replaced by the rainbow