Commenting on the chaos on college campuses in recent weeks, our reader ‘Whitewall’ asks:
“…may [there] be cracks forming in one of the supports of The Cathedral?”
I don’t see it that way. Keep in mind that what we call the “Cathedral” is a large complex of distinct components: thousands of academic, media and political institutions. Even though, as Moldbug puts it, “Cthulhu only swims left”, it is difficult to maintain perfect Gleischaltung between the myriad moving parts of this great organism, and some of them will occasionally get out in front of the others.
In fact, there is an even better analogy, I think, for the locomotion of the Left through our institutions than the swimming Cthulhu (in which metaphor the institutions themselves are mere remoras attached to a great and unseen Leviathan that swims relentlessly left). Think of the way an amoeba moves: it extends a part of itself as a bulging “bleb”, and then once this salient has established itself in the new position, the amoeba pours the rest of itself into it. Already we see this happening with regard to the Mizzou pseudopod.
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Anybody out in Waka-Land a Geometrician?
I need a Flow-Chart.
(And don’t nobody tell me what I already found out. The Pentagon is busy.)
http://www.duffelblog.com/2014/02/complex-flow-chart/
Malcolm I see what you mean. Maybe I am rushing too fast or hoping too much, but I do sense that the more this amoeba oozes itself to another function within the institution-athletes- the more-over time — it will reach a state of diminishing return. Then it seems to me, all the little functions begin to turn on each other within the institution because there is no more space to inhabit. Hopefully I’m not being too overly optimistic.
By the way, last night I was doing some reading within the realm of Neo-Reaction trying to understand a bit better, when I came across sites that ranged from super critical of it to down right foaming at the mouth hostile toward N-R. I figure if mere thoughts within Neo-Reaction can reduce some people to that state of mind so easily, there must be more to NR that speaks well for it. I shall investigate further.
Robert,
The returns do diminish, as we can see in, say, Detroit or the former Soviet Union, or anywhere else that Leftism triumphs — but that isn’t necessarily enough to reverse its “progress”.
There is more hope in the idea that when the pathogen has assaulted enough of the body’s tissues and vital organs, it will at last provoke a powerful immune reaction.
The alternative is a slow and wasting death. Place your bets.
@ Whitewall h/t Malcolm (acknowlegement),
Whitewall, some years ago but quite before I ever was aware of NR even conceptually (I almost used the words our host above but I think not appropriate now) Malcolm led me to a way I’d not thought of thinking about a subject I had long considered, years as a matter of fact.
I’d suggest WW, hit Malcolm’s “Search” with the word Virus.
Conservatives love to point to Detroit as the synecdoche of purportedly failed leftist policies, but never mention that much of its problem is due to its weird geography (and not just because its Southern neighbor is Canada). The areas around Detroit — where Ford and Chrysler are located, as well as most of the automotive suppliers — are quite prosperous, and the Detroit metro area is in decent shape. The city of Detroit itself is far too large, with far too few residents, to be economically viable. It’s like saying that New York City is impoverished because the Bronx is poor.
What conservatives will never tell you is that the two cities with the highest per capita GDP (by far) are the liberal meccas of San Francisco and San Jose; that nine of the ten highest income states are blue (the tenth is Alaska, whose wealth comes largely from oil royalties which pay each resident roughly $2000 per year); that nearly all of the congressional districts with the highest per capita income are blue; and that if the left wing paradise of California were a country, it would have the seventh highest GDP in the world.
Conservatives also will never tell you that the two states which recently aligned their economic policies with the right wing playbook — Kansas and Louisiana — are disasters, with huge deficits, decreased social services, and economic stagnation.
Faced with actual facts, conservatives simply deny them, as we saw from this week’s Republican debate:
BAKER: In seven years under President Obama, the U.S. has added an average of 107,000 jobs a month. Under President Clinton, the economy added about 240,000 jobs a month. Under George W. Bush, it was only 13,000 a month. If you win the nomination, you’ll probably be facing a Democrat named Clinton. How are you going to respond to the claim that Democratic presidents are better at creating jobs than Republicans?
FIORINA: Well, first of all, I must say as I think about that question, I think about a woman I met the other day. Yes, problems have gotten much worse under Democrats.
When presented with quantifiable and verifiable fact, Carly Fiorina simply denied it and asserted the opposite. Needless to say, the powder puff moderators of Fox and the Wall Street Journal didn’t question her obvious falsehood, just as they didn’t question Ted Cruz when he claimed that the Fed caused the 2008 economic collapse by raising interest rates that year (they decreased rates four times in 2007 and seven times in 2008, bringing them to historic lows); didn’t challenge Dr. Ben Carson about the numerous falsehoods in his biography (“people who know me know that I’m honest” — well, that settles it!); and didn’t ask Marco Rubio how he could claim that his parents fled Castro when they left Cuba years before Castro came to power. No reason to let reality intrude on the hermetic opacity of the right wing bubble.
But hey: if you believe that the economic failure of the metropolitan area of greater Detroit is proof of parlous liberal economics, you’ll believe anything.
I better ratchet up my duplicate-bridge quest before the Left outlaws all forms of enjoyable competition (in order to make our decline and fall even more boring). There is nothing more satisfying for the Left than ubiquitous misery.
Holy Shit Batman. It’s time for a Geography lesson!
Except for what inconveniencies parts as those “otherwises would have it.”
http://www.detroitnews.com/article/99999999/SPECIAL01/120606001
Yup. “Weird Geography.”
(Like. I totally like, you know what I mean, hmmm … what was is the President keeps repeating, hmmm, uh, … uh, hmmm … uh … “Oh yeah like Geography for instance and uhm … uhm … what izzit with this teleprompter. Cannot possibly be Climate Change … oh yeah … Poverty.”
“If you are looking for a Good Green Bicycle Path,” declares President Obama, “Be sure to check out Poverty Point!”)
http://www.propertyshark.com/Real-Estate-Reports/2015/02/17/top-20-most-expensive-zip-codes-in-silicon-valley-by-sale-price/
***
http://geometrx.com/free-demos-by-zip/
(That’d be ‘Resident Demographics’ by Zipcode. Which – We can surely rest assured “Friend One-Eye” will be providing us a ‘skitterish’ ~% by race make-up [excluding groundskeepers] in a proximate zipcode.)
In the tradition of a stopped clock, Peter has it right:
“But hey: if you believe that the economic failure of the metropolitan area of greater Detroit is proof of parlous liberal economics, you’ll believe anything.”
The economic failure of Detroit is due to blacks running the place. The policies didn’t matter. Other black run metro areas such as Philly, Atlanta, and Kansas City, MO (to name a few) are similar if not as ruined.
Regarding Kansas, Libs love to spend partisan rage on Kansas, in part because it used to be a progressive paradise but isn’t now, partly because they cannot comprehend why the rubes don’t vote the way they do.
Detroit used to be one of the greatest, and wealthiest, cities of the world. Today it is, quite literally, in ruins. To suggest that this is due, somehow, to “geography”, given that it is a fabulously situated port city with every imaginable geographic advantage, and given that it prospered continuously for 250 years, from its founding until the Great Society got hold of it and it began a half-century of black and Democratic rule (but I repeat myself), is the purest propaganda.
The idea that prosperous places like San Francisco are prosperous because of left-wing rule, rather than in spite of it, is nothing more than a comforting fantasy for liberals. (And we might look at the contrasting fortunes of New York City under Democrats and then Republicans in recent decades for some helpful data-points.) But name a formerly prosperous city now in shambles, anywhere in the country, and look at the party that runs it. It will be the Democrats. (And, yes, look at the demographics, too; it will almost certainly be majority black or Hispanic, as are any areas with the highest crime rates and the lowest quality of life.) The Democratic way of doing things — subsidizing social dysfunction in an ever-expanding underclass while building up huge, unsustainable public-sector workforces with unpayable pensions and benefits, and then installing people like Kwame Kilpatrick to slurp at the trough (or Ray Nagin, or Hugh Addonizio, or Angelo Errichetti, or Sharpe James, or Walter Tucker, etc., etc., almost without end) — tells you all you need to know. It is democracy at its toxic worst: transient politicians raping the future to pay for unsustainable hedonism and personal profit, while keeping the masses broken and dependent in their ghettoes, fanning the flames of grievance and resentment just enough to keep them voting you back in. It’s despicable. It takes already-difficult demographic situations and makes them worse, and worse, and worse — until, finally, you get Detroit. Or Camden. Or Baltimore. And so on. It’s what the Mafia calls a “bust-out” — which is, according to Wikipedia, “a common tactic in the organized crime world, wherein a business’ assets and lines of credit are exploited and exhausted to the point of bankruptcy.”
You mention job growth. What you don’t mention, for some reason, is that if you subtract job growth in one state from the U.S. total, you find job growth in the rest of the country from 2007 until 2015 to have been effectively zero. Zero.
What’s that state? Texas.
(Meanwhile, almost all American job growth for a very long while now has been gobbled up by immigrants — yet the Democrats, along with mainstream Republicans, want to keep the immigration firehose pumping at full blast.)
Why didn’t Carly Fiorina mention this simple and important fact? I don’t know. Have I endorsed her? No. Do I come over to your house and start braying like a jackass, with no apparent context, about all the stupid, false, and dishonest things Democrat political candidates have said? Lord knows, it would be like shooting fish in a barrel, especially with Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton running for office (and that’s not to mention Barack Obama, whose disregard for the truth is exceeded only by his contempt for the traditional American nation, for the rule of law, and for the Constitution he swore an oath to uphold) — but the answer is, no, I do not. So why must you do so here?
Speaking of Kansas: Kansas City, Missouri was the site of one of the most spectacular failures of liberal rainbow-chasing in history: the KC school debacle.
This would also be funny, if it didn’t reveal that an old friend is caught in the grip of a toxic and hallucinatory ideology:
What an unfortunate coincidence that every single person who could afford bus-fare out of town has fled this once-magnificent city. If not for that, the place would be doing fine! How do these things happen?
One Eyed may need that second eye more than he knows. Conflating the inferred “Republican” with “conservative” illustrates a severe misunderstanding of our political spectrum. More importantly, he does not grasp that the Republican critique of the Democratic administration of Detroit, like that of other major cities, is equally recognized by conservatives as both opportunistic and cynical. But the reasons for this are as distant as any could ever be. For the conservative, the mealy-mouthed pabulum of “enterprise zones” and “lower taxes”; “underfunded pensions”, “patronage” and “poor administration” rings as equally hollow as it does for the Progressive, from “Most Livable”, but highly unionized and Democratic Pittsburgh, to Seattle and Portland and San Francisco. It is race, though, that divides these poles. If Pittsburgh is livable, with a geography hardly more propitious than Detroit’s, and Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cleveland and Camden far less livable but far better located, what, then, explains their state of despair? If the Republican is cowed to mere “dog whistling” past the political graveyard of race, the conservative, now far removed from the political sphere, is less hesitant to note what the eye cannot deny. To what, then, does the Progressive ascribe the downfall of these once grand cities? To the ether of an “economy” without human agency? If Detroit was eviscerated by the downfall of the American automobile and free trade, was not Pittsburgh equally disembowled by the same forces?
Conservatives do not lend the failure of Detroit to Democratic policy; policy merely greased the rails for a demographic train that had reached dangerous speeds.
Conservatives? No, we only exist here in the ether, unseen and unheard, except by the occasional lost traveler.
Epicaric:
Bad policy, as you say, hastens the exodus of those who have the resources to get out. They take their money, their jobs, and their genes with them. This applies across all races; it hastens the boiling-off and concentration of the black or Hispanic underclass just as much as it does “white flight”.
Maybe there is hope for sanity on college campuses someday…http://www.mediaite.com/tv/alan-dershowitz-goes-off-on-pc-college-culture-the-fog-of-fascism-is-descending/
One other point that needs to be made:
The culpability (and outright mendacity) of the Left far outstrips the Right in this regard. Particularly egregious examples include the persistent rejection of the realities of statistical differences among human groups in IQ and other qualities (which is one of the most consistently repeatable results in all of science); denial of the pause in global warming, which is now approaching 19 years, as well as consistent repetition of the “97% consensus” canard, alarmist nonsense about sea-level-rise and even military threats due to “climate change” (for example, John Kerry just announced that droughts due to climate change were responsible for the rise of Boko Haram, when the region has been wetter than usual for more than a decade); egregious nonsense about sex issues, such as bogus rape statistics and the thoroughly discredited “77 cents on the dollar” flim-flam; unsupported claims about the benefits of universal pre-school, and so forth. I could go on and on.
The statistician Jason Richwine, himself a victim of the Left’s oppression of those who dare to utter truths that don’t fit the “progressive” story-line, has written about the ways the Left abuses science. One is to pretend that weak or unrepeatable evidence is strong; another is to leap from flimsy or non-existent science to sweeping policy prescriptions. Their continuing reliance on simplistic computer models that have failed without exception accurately to predict climatic trends is a good example of the latter.
The abuse of “science” by Democrats has risen in recent years almost to the level of Lysenkoism — which of course is simply another example of the Left’s cynical relationship with Truth.