Excellent addition to Hammer's already excellent piece! When I was a kid, I had my tonsils removed because they became vectors for constant strep infections. The university system, and the administrators of those universities, are the tonsils of America and Canada. Every new moral panic that sabotages real progress, undermines social cohesion, wastes resources, and exacerbates cultural rot can be traced back to the academy, and especially the liberal arts programs. Every. Single. Time.
I say raze the university system to the foundations, smash the rubble to dust, and salt the earth. But failing that, let's follow your counsel and cap administration at 5% of budget and manpower and put these DEI commissars out on their whiny woke asses. If they're going to prostitute themselves for money, there are plenty of street corners and plenty of pimps to give them jobs in the private sector.
Jan 17, 2023·edited Jan 17, 2023Liked by John Carter
I hate to be the asshole here (sorry, I have a toothache), or act like I know better than our host, but cmon, how worried was Mao about the Red Guard budget? No one is pinching pennies when they're engaged in an existential ideological struggle to exterminate their class enemies and seize total power. Our Corporate Social Justice overlords wouldn't care if it was $15 billion or trillion (hey it aint their $ anyway), the proles will continue to be battered with re-education, rectification and struggle sessions until the rule of the progressive oligarchy is locked in.
The New Left has been plotting and scheming for 50 years (!) for this moment, when they at last get to take a sledgehammer to the evil European capitalist patriarchy and cement their status as the regime's ruthless commissariat, and now they are fully funded and have the total backing of the state, the corporations and every cultural megaphone.
The Cultural Revolution is here, it's real, and there is no cavalry coming to save us.
(But luckily for me the dentist prescribed Tyenol w Codeine)
I don't disagree at all. Our reptilian overlords are quite happy to spend us into penury as they beat us to death with the giant dildo funded by our own taxes.
And the only cavalry out there is us.
However, if John Q Taxpayer can be made to see that, and how much he's paying for it, maybe he raises a stink, pushes back, and gets the wokeites on their back foot for a moment. They've managed to make themselves extremely unpopular, and while they do have the institutional high ground for now, they took a beating over the last year.
In any case, I don't do despair, and if one of my bros throws a punch I will support that every time and all the way.
Of course their whole project will crash and burn, mostly because the secret sauce of Leftism is that it can only ever destroy but it can never ever build (their signature product is called Deconstruction after all), I guess the only question is how long their reign will last, how it will end and how much will be left standing, and if we will get to experience the gratifying sight of seeing some pink-haired heads on pikes.
Nailed it. The only way out of this is collapse and a return to Hobbes's state of nature. This time, we don't follow his political advice (he's the father of liberalism), though, and end up in the same spot.
Jan 17, 2023·edited Jan 17, 2023Liked by John Carter
Yarvin is doing market research...testing responses. Musk or Thiel are not caesars, nothing remotely like it. They are the public face or agent of the Future Augustans of America faction within the US which remains hidden from public view.
Caesar was autonomous and willfull, the prototype of the great man in his age.
In our era no-one remotely like Caesar is possible. In the past power was personal, today it is distributed and operates like a current running through a grid.
The next regime will not be any kind of monarchy, either Red or Blue. It will be a reconstituted oligarchy fronted by a figure who may use an abundance of executive power for PR purposes, but even this is likely to be collegial.
Putin's extremely collegial and legalistic approach (he is extremely inclusive and is no micromanager) is probably closer to what is in store for the coming August and stage. State capitalism with an agenda of ethnic and social peace. My hunch is the US will get a lower case caesarian collegial project (as opposd to a true Caesar) which may well be far more Purple than Red. The legacy of social engineering in North America is too powerful to be swept away.
Jan 17, 2023·edited Jan 17, 2023Liked by John Carter
Most likely the Neo-Augustan moment will resemble THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE without gas chambers: corporate fascism, Trad propaganda and a historical mission to establish an Hispanicized Yankee Reich across much of the Western hemisphere.
A post-Western imperial state for a post-Anglo republic. It will be corrupt, it will be cruel, but you will be able to dance to the music and the streets will be reasonably safe. The rich will have enclaves, the poor will have a better class of favela than the norm and the middle classes will be alternately indulged or constrained/milched. The blue-haired will have only their resentment and whatever they can scrounge from a marginally more efficient rat-race than the present system.
All along, I've been thinking of Charles Haywood, and considering asking if you are aware of him. Glad to see you know something of him and his philosophy of Foundationalism.
Came across Haywood several months ago, and while I'm not 100% on board with him I like almost everything he's got to say - he had me at Space, really. Then again he doesn't expect 100% agreement, and Foundationalism explicitly builds in room for that kind of ambiguity, which is one of the traits that renders it potentially very robust.
No, I will track it down. Sounds very interesting.
Voltaire said that we should not make the perfect a rival to the good. I think we have to take that advice.
If you have not heard of it, you may enjoy Bob Dylan's movie MASKED AND ANONYMOUS...it is about a post- collapse USA. The humour is not for everyone, but it is cheeky and, I think, full of grim insight and foreboding. Contrary to the legend, Dylan was never a hippie or a political radical.
Good point. Costs are a problem for the regime only if they fall on the regime's own core constituencies. Resources wasted on DEI are considered very well-spent indeed if the costs are transferred to the disregarded or disfavoured classes while financing a class of the regime's clients. Furthermore, the cost of rising tuition guarantees student debt, thereby entrenching debt peonage and fortifying the constituency for occasional debt-relief.
The rot goes back many decades. The core problem is that the federal government is THE main customer for nearly all universities, thanks to the combination of research grant money and federally issued/guaranteed student loans. A university which fails to meet DIE targets is at risk of losing EVERYTHING. Ergo, meeting DIE targets is more important than providing an education. You get what you pay for.
My forthcoming solution will be: take the entire gross federal student aid/loan budget and just divvy it up to all natural born citizens when they come of age. Call it a Universal Inheritance. No more whining about what happened to your ancestors. And it puts teeth into the concept of Equality of Opportunity.
Now, universities have to compete against other uses of said unconditional grant money: buying a starter home, starting a business, going to trade school, or buying a bitchin sports car. Right wing ninnies will whine about those sports cars. Guess what? Blowing your wad on luxuries early in life is 100x more educational than getting a degree in excuse making. And it gives the rest of us license to say "You dumbass" to perpetual whiners.
The grant does not have to be enough to provide a complete fancy four year degree. Let universities issue loans for the balance using their endowment funds. Invest in promising students instead of the stock market. Subject the loans to the usual bankruptcy rules, and university administrators will have a huge incentive to avoid handing out bogus degrees.
Interesting suggestion. Personally I'd prefer eliminating the income tax and the student loan system entirely. Deprived of that largesse, large administrations would be a luxury universities could not afford. Furthermore, the student body would decrease, enabling universities to focus on providing quality education to those with genuine talent and intellectual hunger. The average taxpayer could spend the money they get from income taxes as they see fit.
With over 30 terabucks of debt, the income tax isn't going away.
I would like to make the income tax more progressive than it is now. But that's a HUGE subject. Simply jacking up the top rates is indeed a bad idea. But the super duper rich have loopholes so large you can drive a Town Car through them.
---
We have a general moral crisis that starting a family while young has become unaffordable. This makes a period of screwing around the norm instead of the immoral exception. Some startup capital would help the situation.
What we have today is a system that demands that young adults pay into the retirement system and subsidize the healthcare of older adults.
Just insane - a phrase I’m so overusing these past few years it has lost all impact - I need a more visceral lexicon 🙄 - anyway, thanks for the review - fully expected it to be a wickedly high price for all this damnation - imagine the total cost over the whole public and private sectors!
Consider it freely given...good ideas are common property for those who bother to think.
'Dys' or 'dus' is the antonym of 'eu': the opposite of 'well' and invariably means 'bad', 'unlucky' or 'hard'. It destroys the good sense of a word or amplifies the bad. It is the equivalent of the English prefixes 'un' or 'mis'. [Just checked the Liddell and Scott lexicon, the canonical English/Greek dictionary.]
Phronesis is simply the act of thinking. Schizophrenia means broken thinking.
Dysphronesis or dysphrenia would mean thinking done poorly or badly.
Pleo (from pleon) just means 'more' or 'greater'.
Dysphrennia and pleodysphrenia (an abundance of bad thinking) are both neologisms. In this case, freshly minted ones. And not found in any extant literature that I know of. Perfect for a substack essay. As Mahler said, tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.
We need to burn the world and can do it by recuperating our heritage, however defamed or disparaged.
We need new words because the old ones no longer fit and the habitual use of exhausted lingo risks making us lazy. We are faced with very strange developments that no one ever properly anticipated, though H.G.Welles and the Huxley's were pretty close.
Love it! Cthulhuland now in my lexicon - and I guess we can have Cthulhucraftians (in honour of Lovecraft) who are instigators of Cthulhulandian pleodysphromorphic madness.
$15 mil was VA. Times 50 approaches a billion. America is a wealthy country, and like all wealthy people, we waste a lot. The problem isn't the wasted dollars, it's the wasted minds. We need to work on restoring rational values.
And you're 100% right, although those wasted dollars have a big impact. First in opportunity cost - we could have used it for something useful. Second in that those dollars are used to fund the woke war machine.
The problem is how we convince our neighbors. My favorite movie line is from the great epic tale, Spaced Invaders, where the hero said of the aliens, they're not bad, just stupid. Our neighbors can be convinced. It's a marketing problem. We have a toehold with Twitter. Its ironic that heroic Elon came all the way from Africa to save America. That should be inspiration for other African Americans as well as aspiring people everywhere. There are heroes here on substack. Taibbi, Greenwald, McCollough, many others, who are arming millions to be courageous and spread the word. We have a toehold in the American congress. Many of them are unreliable, and need our vigorous encouragement to put their tenuous power to good use. Our salvation is at hand. It's up to us to keep it moving.
Worst of all they displace or discourage those who could benefit from higher education, while sabotaging the intellectual formation of emerging generations. They help transform education into a parody of inquiry and wear the tradtions of the past as a skin-suit.
There is always an abundance of resources for crap...never anything for a worthwhile idea. The money wasted on DEI could have laid the foundation for another Renaissance if the funds had been spent on quality tuition on maths or the rigorous study of languages with significant literatures.
Don't even get me started on the NSF funding that's been redirected from scientific research and technological development towards DIE initiatives in the guise of science.
The money is one thing...it is the spectacle of watching people abase themselves in the humiliation ritual of taking the b.s. seriously that makes me sick. Also frightened. Barbarians extracting treasure at least had the right of conquest...we pay danegeld for the good opinion of fools and grifters who figured out that it was all theirs for the taking, tastefully packed and delivered by their intellectual betters.
They are not conquerors...more like an opportunistic infection in a body weakened and demoralised by a century of destructive interstate conflict. They are dangerous only if we accept mass invalidity as our enduring fate.
Is there another example in history of a civilization hating itself? Plenty of *people* hate themselves individually, but have the elites of any other civilization ever actively encouraged hating their own civilization’s foundational values? I can’t think of a single parallel.
Loathsome as they are, the administrative tapeworm in higher education serves a vital purpose: managing the servitors camouflaged as n radicals who award the credentials and directing the selection and formation of white-collar drones.
The DEI admin people help with training those who need to do the 'emotional work' in selected areas of an economy with a grossly oversized service economy.
One way to improve things is to re-focus everyone's attention on demonstrated skills in STEM at an individual level. This is the Achilles heel. Physiognomy does not lie...neither does IQ. They hate the IQ issue the way vampires hate the sun.
That's why I proposed setting up an extra-academic standardized testing system, which lends itself well to STEM skills. An objective evaluation of knowledge and ability across a range of useful subjects would knock the universities onto their back foot, if employers came to see it as a more reliable metric than possession of a degree. That would eat the prestige of the academies for lunch and leave the wokepolit presiding over a kingdom of ashes.
".... taxpayers are lavishing an incredible $1.35 billion on these fattened leeches..."
One especially nauseating way to think about this stat is that it is Cantillon money, taken from productive people and distributed to Leftists by our Leftist government regulator overlords.
This is the primary function of government in the managerial state. See also: high European taxes being used to subsidize replacement immigration and family formation amongst the new arrivals, with the indigenous population being left without the resources necessary to have children of their own.
"....with the indigenous population being left without the resources necessary to have children of their own."
Never thought about that. Excellent point, especially on a day when the news came out that the population of Communist China has actually decreased. Leftism is a nihilistic, misanthropic system.
China, and Japan and Korea for that matter, are interesting cases. Strongly suggestive that industrial civilization is incompatible with replacement reproductive rates. It could be they're betting this is solvable, while Western leaders threw up their hands and said fuck it, it isn't, so they're just replacing the native stock to keep the system going.
Jan 17, 2023·edited Jan 17, 2023Liked by John Carter
What gets me about US education admins is that they think education is a zero-sum game, because places like Harvard only have so many spots. Admins fundamentally fail to grasp that education is about making smart people who can do good, such as finding new cures to a disease. From their zero-sum attitude they justify horrible policies like "reducing the achievement gap", i.e. dumbing down the smart kids.
It's cargo cult thinking. Midwits are fundamentally incapable of grasping what the system is for, why it works (or did), and why it became prestigious. They only see the spoils, think they just fell from the sky, and want to grab them for themselves.
The DIE bloat is one aspect of administrative bloat that has been underway for decades, as veterans of the higher ed wars know. DIE ideology would exist even without the overall administrative bloat, but fewer deanlets would mean fewer people to take part in the current mischief. One way to cull their ranks would be to relieve teaching faculty of external pressure to publish and let them use their liberated hours to return to their traditional work of advising and counseling their students. Then send the supernumerary deanlets off to law school or something.
Publication pressure is insidious in other ways, especially by drowning the literature in papers written for no other reason than to publish a paper. A more laconic ideal, in which it is incentived to speak only when one has something important to say, would improve the quality of the literature and, as you say, allow those academics whose strength is not original thought or research to focus on their real calling of pedagogy.
DIE ideology would certainly exist without admin, but the same is true of any ideology or religion. We need DIE being rammed down our throats about as much as we need Zoroastrianism. Actually Zoroastrianism would probably be a lot better.
The DIE bloat is one aspect of administrative bloat that has been underway for decades, as veterans of the higher ed wars know. DIE ideology would exist even without the overall administrative bloat, but fewer deanlets would mean fewer people to take part in the current mischief. One way to cull their ranks would be to relieve teaching faculty of external pressure to publish and let them use their liberated hours to return to their traditional work of advising and counseling their students. Then send the supernumerary deanlets off to law school or something.
Excellent addition to Hammer's already excellent piece! When I was a kid, I had my tonsils removed because they became vectors for constant strep infections. The university system, and the administrators of those universities, are the tonsils of America and Canada. Every new moral panic that sabotages real progress, undermines social cohesion, wastes resources, and exacerbates cultural rot can be traced back to the academy, and especially the liberal arts programs. Every. Single. Time.
I say raze the university system to the foundations, smash the rubble to dust, and salt the earth. But failing that, let's follow your counsel and cap administration at 5% of budget and manpower and put these DEI commissars out on their whiny woke asses. If they're going to prostitute themselves for money, there are plenty of street corners and plenty of pimps to give them jobs in the private sector.
So say we all.
Salt the earth? You are not trying. I'd finance a ticket to the Libyan slave markets. If there is currently no market for eunuchs, create one!
You first one reverses the fear porn. You only need one. The rest will run.
I hate to be the asshole here (sorry, I have a toothache), or act like I know better than our host, but cmon, how worried was Mao about the Red Guard budget? No one is pinching pennies when they're engaged in an existential ideological struggle to exterminate their class enemies and seize total power. Our Corporate Social Justice overlords wouldn't care if it was $15 billion or trillion (hey it aint their $ anyway), the proles will continue to be battered with re-education, rectification and struggle sessions until the rule of the progressive oligarchy is locked in.
The New Left has been plotting and scheming for 50 years (!) for this moment, when they at last get to take a sledgehammer to the evil European capitalist patriarchy and cement their status as the regime's ruthless commissariat, and now they are fully funded and have the total backing of the state, the corporations and every cultural megaphone.
The Cultural Revolution is here, it's real, and there is no cavalry coming to save us.
(But luckily for me the dentist prescribed Tyenol w Codeine)
I don't disagree at all. Our reptilian overlords are quite happy to spend us into penury as they beat us to death with the giant dildo funded by our own taxes.
And the only cavalry out there is us.
However, if John Q Taxpayer can be made to see that, and how much he's paying for it, maybe he raises a stink, pushes back, and gets the wokeites on their back foot for a moment. They've managed to make themselves extremely unpopular, and while they do have the institutional high ground for now, they took a beating over the last year.
In any case, I don't do despair, and if one of my bros throws a punch I will support that every time and all the way.
Of course their whole project will crash and burn, mostly because the secret sauce of Leftism is that it can only ever destroy but it can never ever build (their signature product is called Deconstruction after all), I guess the only question is how long their reign will last, how it will end and how much will be left standing, and if we will get to experience the gratifying sight of seeing some pink-haired heads on pikes.
That is exactly the question.
Nailed it. The only way out of this is collapse and a return to Hobbes's state of nature. This time, we don't follow his political advice (he's the father of liberalism), though, and end up in the same spot.
or Curtis Yarvin seizes power and crowns himself Augustus Caesar ;)
Yarvin is the court philosopher, not the Caesar.
Caesar is more likely a Musk or a Thiel ;)
Yarvin is doing market research...testing responses. Musk or Thiel are not caesars, nothing remotely like it. They are the public face or agent of the Future Augustans of America faction within the US which remains hidden from public view.
Caesar was autonomous and willfull, the prototype of the great man in his age.
In our era no-one remotely like Caesar is possible. In the past power was personal, today it is distributed and operates like a current running through a grid.
The next regime will not be any kind of monarchy, either Red or Blue. It will be a reconstituted oligarchy fronted by a figure who may use an abundance of executive power for PR purposes, but even this is likely to be collegial.
Putin's extremely collegial and legalistic approach (he is extremely inclusive and is no micromanager) is probably closer to what is in store for the coming August and stage. State capitalism with an agenda of ethnic and social peace. My hunch is the US will get a lower case caesarian collegial project (as opposd to a true Caesar) which may well be far more Purple than Red. The legacy of social engineering in North America is too powerful to be swept away.
Most likely the Neo-Augustan moment will resemble THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE without gas chambers: corporate fascism, Trad propaganda and a historical mission to establish an Hispanicized Yankee Reich across much of the Western hemisphere.
A post-Western imperial state for a post-Anglo republic. It will be corrupt, it will be cruel, but you will be able to dance to the music and the streets will be reasonably safe. The rich will have enclaves, the poor will have a better class of favela than the norm and the middle classes will be alternately indulged or constrained/milched. The blue-haired will have only their resentment and whatever they can scrounge from a marginally more efficient rat-race than the present system.
Have you read Charles Haywood's essays on the American Caesar?
Because your description sounds a lot like his, which isn't really a bad thing (in the sense of, better than we have now).
All along, I've been thinking of Charles Haywood, and considering asking if you are aware of him. Glad to see you know something of him and his philosophy of Foundationalism.
Came across Haywood several months ago, and while I'm not 100% on board with him I like almost everything he's got to say - he had me at Space, really. Then again he doesn't expect 100% agreement, and Foundationalism explicitly builds in room for that kind of ambiguity, which is one of the traits that renders it potentially very robust.
No, I will track it down. Sounds very interesting.
Voltaire said that we should not make the perfect a rival to the good. I think we have to take that advice.
If you have not heard of it, you may enjoy Bob Dylan's movie MASKED AND ANONYMOUS...it is about a post- collapse USA. The humour is not for everyone, but it is cheeky and, I think, full of grim insight and foreboding. Contrary to the legend, Dylan was never a hippie or a political radical.
https://youtu.be/tpMRGBa2Hlk
Here's one of his essays on the subject:
https://theworthyhouse.com/2022/08/26/reprise-what-to-do-when-caesar-comes/
Movie looks interesting, thanks for sharing.
Fat chance.
Good point. Costs are a problem for the regime only if they fall on the regime's own core constituencies. Resources wasted on DEI are considered very well-spent indeed if the costs are transferred to the disregarded or disfavoured classes while financing a class of the regime's clients. Furthermore, the cost of rising tuition guarantees student debt, thereby entrenching debt peonage and fortifying the constituency for occasional debt-relief.
Good luck with the toothache.
But they are gutless cowards, one at a time. So that is how we take them down.
The rot goes back many decades. The core problem is that the federal government is THE main customer for nearly all universities, thanks to the combination of research grant money and federally issued/guaranteed student loans. A university which fails to meet DIE targets is at risk of losing EVERYTHING. Ergo, meeting DIE targets is more important than providing an education. You get what you pay for.
My forthcoming solution will be: take the entire gross federal student aid/loan budget and just divvy it up to all natural born citizens when they come of age. Call it a Universal Inheritance. No more whining about what happened to your ancestors. And it puts teeth into the concept of Equality of Opportunity.
Now, universities have to compete against other uses of said unconditional grant money: buying a starter home, starting a business, going to trade school, or buying a bitchin sports car. Right wing ninnies will whine about those sports cars. Guess what? Blowing your wad on luxuries early in life is 100x more educational than getting a degree in excuse making. And it gives the rest of us license to say "You dumbass" to perpetual whiners.
The grant does not have to be enough to provide a complete fancy four year degree. Let universities issue loans for the balance using their endowment funds. Invest in promising students instead of the stock market. Subject the loans to the usual bankruptcy rules, and university administrators will have a huge incentive to avoid handing out bogus degrees.
Interesting suggestion. Personally I'd prefer eliminating the income tax and the student loan system entirely. Deprived of that largesse, large administrations would be a luxury universities could not afford. Furthermore, the student body would decrease, enabling universities to focus on providing quality education to those with genuine talent and intellectual hunger. The average taxpayer could spend the money they get from income taxes as they see fit.
With over 30 terabucks of debt, the income tax isn't going away.
I would like to make the income tax more progressive than it is now. But that's a HUGE subject. Simply jacking up the top rates is indeed a bad idea. But the super duper rich have loopholes so large you can drive a Town Car through them.
---
We have a general moral crisis that starting a family while young has become unaffordable. This makes a period of screwing around the norm instead of the immoral exception. Some startup capital would help the situation.
What we have today is a system that demands that young adults pay into the retirement system and subsidize the healthcare of older adults.
And we wonder why the youth are pissed.
Just insane - a phrase I’m so overusing these past few years it has lost all impact - I need a more visceral lexicon 🙄 - anyway, thanks for the review - fully expected it to be a wickedly high price for all this damnation - imagine the total cost over the whole public and private sectors!
Insane? We are witnessing de-socialisation on a scale unseen in recorded history coupled with full-spectrum regime sponsored dysfunction.
Dissociation and dysphoria are becoming normalised.
In place of mere insanity (which no longer does justice to everyday experience in Cthulhuland) I'd suggest dysphronesis or even pleodysphronesis.
I'm stealing Cthululand.
Care to define dysphronesis? Had to look that one up, but zero hits.
Consider it freely given...good ideas are common property for those who bother to think.
'Dys' or 'dus' is the antonym of 'eu': the opposite of 'well' and invariably means 'bad', 'unlucky' or 'hard'. It destroys the good sense of a word or amplifies the bad. It is the equivalent of the English prefixes 'un' or 'mis'. [Just checked the Liddell and Scott lexicon, the canonical English/Greek dictionary.]
Phronesis is simply the act of thinking. Schizophrenia means broken thinking.
Dysphronesis or dysphrenia would mean thinking done poorly or badly.
Pleo (from pleon) just means 'more' or 'greater'.
Dysphrennia and pleodysphrenia (an abundance of bad thinking) are both neologisms. In this case, freshly minted ones. And not found in any extant literature that I know of. Perfect for a substack essay. As Mahler said, tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.
We need to burn the world and can do it by recuperating our heritage, however defamed or disparaged.
I was wondering if those were neologisms. Well done, those are useful words.
We need new words because the old ones no longer fit and the habitual use of exhausted lingo risks making us lazy. We are faced with very strange developments that no one ever properly anticipated, though H.G.Welles and the Huxley's were pretty close.
Love it! Cthulhuland now in my lexicon - and I guess we can have Cthulhucraftians (in honour of Lovecraft) who are instigators of Cthulhulandian pleodysphromorphic madness.
Actually I think I just destroyed the meaning of pleodysphronesis - should I say pleodysphronetic?
$15 mil was VA. Times 50 approaches a billion. America is a wealthy country, and like all wealthy people, we waste a lot. The problem isn't the wasted dollars, it's the wasted minds. We need to work on restoring rational values.
Yep. I did that math in the post.
And you're 100% right, although those wasted dollars have a big impact. First in opportunity cost - we could have used it for something useful. Second in that those dollars are used to fund the woke war machine.
The problem is how we convince our neighbors. My favorite movie line is from the great epic tale, Spaced Invaders, where the hero said of the aliens, they're not bad, just stupid. Our neighbors can be convinced. It's a marketing problem. We have a toehold with Twitter. Its ironic that heroic Elon came all the way from Africa to save America. That should be inspiration for other African Americans as well as aspiring people everywhere. There are heroes here on substack. Taibbi, Greenwald, McCollough, many others, who are arming millions to be courageous and spread the word. We have a toehold in the American congress. Many of them are unreliable, and need our vigorous encouragement to put their tenuous power to good use. Our salvation is at hand. It's up to us to keep it moving.
Well said.
Worst of all they displace or discourage those who could benefit from higher education, while sabotaging the intellectual formation of emerging generations. They help transform education into a parody of inquiry and wear the tradtions of the past as a skin-suit.
There is always an abundance of resources for crap...never anything for a worthwhile idea. The money wasted on DEI could have laid the foundation for another Renaissance if the funds had been spent on quality tuition on maths or the rigorous study of languages with significant literatures.
On point.
Don't even get me started on the NSF funding that's been redirected from scientific research and technological development towards DIE initiatives in the guise of science.
The money is one thing...it is the spectacle of watching people abase themselves in the humiliation ritual of taking the b.s. seriously that makes me sick. Also frightened. Barbarians extracting treasure at least had the right of conquest...we pay danegeld for the good opinion of fools and grifters who figured out that it was all theirs for the taking, tastefully packed and delivered by their intellectual betters.
You've gotta admit, trying to conquer an entire civilization with mean words is a bold strategy.
They are not conquerors...more like an opportunistic infection in a body weakened and demoralised by a century of destructive interstate conflict. They are dangerous only if we accept mass invalidity as our enduring fate.
Is there another example in history of a civilization hating itself? Plenty of *people* hate themselves individually, but have the elites of any other civilization ever actively encouraged hating their own civilization’s foundational values? I can’t think of a single parallel.
DIE will be a marvel to future generations.
Nope. There have been self-effacing ethnies before, e.g. the Austrians under the Hapsburgs, but I believe this situation really is a novelty.
Loathsome as they are, the administrative tapeworm in higher education serves a vital purpose: managing the servitors camouflaged as n radicals who award the credentials and directing the selection and formation of white-collar drones.
The DEI admin people help with training those who need to do the 'emotional work' in selected areas of an economy with a grossly oversized service economy.
One way to improve things is to re-focus everyone's attention on demonstrated skills in STEM at an individual level. This is the Achilles heel. Physiognomy does not lie...neither does IQ. They hate the IQ issue the way vampires hate the sun.
That's why I proposed setting up an extra-academic standardized testing system, which lends itself well to STEM skills. An objective evaluation of knowledge and ability across a range of useful subjects would knock the universities onto their back foot, if employers came to see it as a more reliable metric than possession of a degree. That would eat the prestige of the academies for lunch and leave the wokepolit presiding over a kingdom of ashes.
EXACTLY!!!!!!!!!!! Brilliant idea. The death of a thousand cuts....each one with a bucket of salt or chillis for good measure.
BFTP 'Peanuts' toon observes..
.needtoknow.news/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/cartoon-no-education-to-overthrow.jpg
=Text in image=
NO ONE IS GOING TO GVE YOU
THE EDUCATION YOU NEED
TO
OVERTHROW THEM.
".... taxpayers are lavishing an incredible $1.35 billion on these fattened leeches..."
One especially nauseating way to think about this stat is that it is Cantillon money, taken from productive people and distributed to Leftists by our Leftist government regulator overlords.
This is the primary function of government in the managerial state. See also: high European taxes being used to subsidize replacement immigration and family formation amongst the new arrivals, with the indigenous population being left without the resources necessary to have children of their own.
"....with the indigenous population being left without the resources necessary to have children of their own."
Never thought about that. Excellent point, especially on a day when the news came out that the population of Communist China has actually decreased. Leftism is a nihilistic, misanthropic system.
China, and Japan and Korea for that matter, are interesting cases. Strongly suggestive that industrial civilization is incompatible with replacement reproductive rates. It could be they're betting this is solvable, while Western leaders threw up their hands and said fuck it, it isn't, so they're just replacing the native stock to keep the system going.
What gets me about US education admins is that they think education is a zero-sum game, because places like Harvard only have so many spots. Admins fundamentally fail to grasp that education is about making smart people who can do good, such as finding new cures to a disease. From their zero-sum attitude they justify horrible policies like "reducing the achievement gap", i.e. dumbing down the smart kids.
It's cargo cult thinking. Midwits are fundamentally incapable of grasping what the system is for, why it works (or did), and why it became prestigious. They only see the spoils, think they just fell from the sky, and want to grab them for themselves.
The DIE bloat is one aspect of administrative bloat that has been underway for decades, as veterans of the higher ed wars know. DIE ideology would exist even without the overall administrative bloat, but fewer deanlets would mean fewer people to take part in the current mischief. One way to cull their ranks would be to relieve teaching faculty of external pressure to publish and let them use their liberated hours to return to their traditional work of advising and counseling their students. Then send the supernumerary deanlets off to law school or something.
Publication pressure is insidious in other ways, especially by drowning the literature in papers written for no other reason than to publish a paper. A more laconic ideal, in which it is incentived to speak only when one has something important to say, would improve the quality of the literature and, as you say, allow those academics whose strength is not original thought or research to focus on their real calling of pedagogy.
DIE ideology would certainly exist without admin, but the same is true of any ideology or religion. We need DIE being rammed down our throats about as much as we need Zoroastrianism. Actually Zoroastrianism would probably be a lot better.
'What price diversity, inclusion, and equity?'
why it's EduKayShun , eh, Prof John?
The DIE bloat is one aspect of administrative bloat that has been underway for decades, as veterans of the higher ed wars know. DIE ideology would exist even without the overall administrative bloat, but fewer deanlets would mean fewer people to take part in the current mischief. One way to cull their ranks would be to relieve teaching faculty of external pressure to publish and let them use their liberated hours to return to their traditional work of advising and counseling their students. Then send the supernumerary deanlets off to law school or something.