Classic expression of “implicit bias” as translated into a modern political movement.
The following post is a comment to “Psychology Professors Argue Against Groupthink in Their Field”, George Leef, The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, 2/7/2018, https://www.jamesgmartin.center/…/psychology-professors-ar…/.
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“Back in 2000, a pair of psychologists [Banaji and Greenwald] announced that they had devised a test for implicit bias and stated that their results showed that more than 90 percent of Americans have a problem of unconscious prejudice.” (Leef from the above article) This questionable assertion is used to justify a host of crusades from Black Lives Matter to a campaign to address the paucity of female coders at Google.
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I say:
“Implicit bias” has a striking similarity to the “hidden structures of oppression” in much of the left’s revolution-mongering of the last couple of centuries. Marx relies on a vast set of social arrangements in market economies that work to oppress the “masses”. Generalities run rampant. The “men of commerce” are reduced to hated “capitalists” in order to more easily encapsulate the enemy, while labor is compressed into the “proletariat” as the sympathetic victim. Then, an all-encompassing revolution is necessary to upturn the very bases of life in the march to the better world.
Soviet post from 1917 depicting the “autocratic system” of oppression. The illusions throughout are of the oppressed who are chained and exploited for the benefit of the rich and powerful.
Today, Marx’s general outline is replicated in regards to other broad classes of the “oppressed”. “Implicit bias” is the same old gambit dressed up to embrace our fashionable victims’ groups.
International Women’s Day march in front of the White House, 3/9/2017.
What’s up with millennials? Why do many appear to be enthralled with socialism? Recently, these questions have been raised more than a few times. Some polls seem to support the charge. I tepidly weigh into the accusation knowing the limits of cloaking an entire generation in the same linen. No doubt, at least publicly, socialism is experiencing a revival with new fans among late teens and twenty-somethings.
Generalizations, Generalizations, Generalizations
Right away, let’s draw back a bit by recognizing that assigning a trait to a large group of people is fraught with imprecision. Of late, we’ve been into “generationism” since the heyday of the baby-boomers. We stamp all the people of a given age – usually in ten year increments – with the same cookie-cutter traits. It’s what you do when you want to boost your own opinions with extra peer company, or turn life into a cartoon.
The Boomers (born between ’46 and ’64) are forever associated with hippies (counterculture), peace (anti-War), free love (sexual license), rock n’ roll, and mind expansion (drugs). A label was applied that has only been made more deeply affixed by Hollywood types like Steven Spielberg as they rise up the ladder of cultural influencers.
Most recently, out he comes with The Post with a favorite bromide of today’s Boomers-of-influence: Nixon-hate and crusading journalists as the angels of truth. Are we to be endlessly inundated with stories of Nixon in the same company with the Boston Strangler? Are we to be forever afflicted with communication majors channeling Woodward and Bernstein? I’m a boomer and find it quite tiring.
Scene from the The Post by Steven Spielberg.
That’s the thing with this form of simplism on parade. Once the image gets implanted, and reinforced thereafter, we get impressionable and educationally debased youth in subsequent years (dare I say “generations”) attracted to, and try living up to, a fabrication. The boomer Left may have been trounced in ’72 when they championed McGovern, but they succeeded in occupying the cultural commanding heights to define for everybody the period and everyone in it.
We’er in stereotype territory now. For now, all Boomers are crammed into and onto John Kesey’s bus, the quintessence of the myth.
John Kesey’s bus, Further, and his Merry Band of Pranksters, around 1964. It was the rolling quintessence of 60’s hippiedom.
The story about this birth cohort is more complicated than the Lefty-brewed legend. Today, boomers are more likely to be conservative than liberal according to a 2015 Gallup survey. (3) Who would have thunk it? From DeadHeads to Reagan Republicans? Some certainly made a transition. Others didn’t have to move. Remember, George W. Bush and Donald Trump are boomers.
A similar story is probably true with the millennials. There exists a conservative streak within them. Indeed, some studies show them to be more conservative than previous contingents when in high school and college. (4) Could it be that the media-saavy Lefty element within the cohort hijacked the power to etch everyone in it? It’s something worth pondering.
Socialism and the millennials
Still, two glaring stats stare in the face: millennials overwhelmingly support gay marriage (74%) and pot legalization (71%). (4) Apparently, buggery as the conjugal act for marriage and a mom strolling an infant through a park with engulfing pot smoke aren’t disturbing scenarios for three-quarters in the poll.
Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised since being young carries with it a near biological imperative to incessantly ask the question, “Why not?” It’s the universal adolescent response to the parental “No”.
By so doing, they push the bounds of acceptability to the next level. Some of it survives as greater sexual license and pot legalization, while other excesses wait for another day. Another day will arrive that further inches out the limits. The process then continues. And it all stems from the adolescent predilection for “Why not?”
Adolescents don’t get it, human nature that is. If the reasoning requires more than 2 sentences, they huff and roll their eyes. They haven’t been around long enough for the grind of personal experience to wear on them. As such, the concept of human nature – if it occurs to them at all – is about as understood as retirement planning. How can they appreciate something [human nature] if they can’t acknowledge its existence? Holes like this in their understanding makes it easy to embrace inanities – such as 40 or so genders or marriage encompassing same-sex carnal affection. After all, why not?
The stats, coupled with the naiveté, might be a troubling sign of an enthusiasm for the refashioning of social mores to the dictates of juvenile reasoning, while extending it into early adulthood and the Bernie campaign. The old morality is an impediment and socialism and Bernie provide the wrecking ball. There’s ample room in the juvenile vision for embellishing the powers of the state to blast through the last vestiges of the parental “no”.
The psychological tic for a kinder-and-gentler socialism gets the reinforcement of the lefty myth-making machine redolent in their media and the 12-16 years of their schooling’s curriculum.
Shane Smith, cofounder and CEO of Vice Media.
I risk generalizing an anecdote but the parallel is too obvious. According to Forbes (7/27/2017 issue), Shane Smith’s Vice Media website is popular among millennials. It’s online offerings include such juicy tidbits as a story that includes masturbation as one way to juice up your life while taking the “Dry January” sobriety pledge. The home page includes other offerings such as “Can a Gay Veteran Latina Sheriff Get Texas to Vote?”, “Vinny from ‘Jersey Shore’ is a secret climate change nerd”, and “Anti-Muslim bomb plotters can’t stack jury with Trump voters, judge rules”. I don’t know about Vinny’s acumen for meteorology, but I suspect the large number of millennial clicks shows Vice hitting the ideological sweet spot of a sizable base of twenty-somethings … while Vinny is caught up in facile, chic thought. (13)
The cultural messaging is compounded by the same boomer mandarins of pop culture, like Spielberg and a good chunk of the teaching profession. An underlying and unspoken theme throughout is the view of the state as the guarantor of a person’s highest “potential” – presently “potential” being synonymous with “license”. It’s the core premise of progressivism from its 19th century birth to the present day, and an unspoken lefty assumption in discussions weightier than Facebook gossip.
The goal is ambitious and requires a reformulation of America’s traditional social and political organization. Many founding ideas were seen as obstacles to be skirted along the way to an empowered state plowing a path to personal actualization. Josh Lerner, Harvard Econ professor, put it aptly when he recently wrote,
“They [progressives] thought that the state should not be constrained by republican measures to prevent too much action, but rather be guided by the best of modern science (natural and social) and capable of acting in whatever ways were necessary.” (5)
Their’s is not a limited-government vision, or one firmly planted in popular sovereignty. It’s the elevation of a new aristocracy, not one fixed to family of birth but to the possession of paper credentials. The credentialing is in the form of diplomas, degrees, and certificates that are distributed through the K-16 schools.
It is there that we find the implantation of the hidden notion of state-sponsored personal actualization. The outlook of the 19th century progressives is the unspoken assumption in our schools’ History texts. It’s the stuff of teachers’ training and education. It’s the thing lurking in the mental background of most people, let alone many millennials.
John Dewey at Columbia University saw the public schools as the vehicle for the creation of the new progressive citizen.
The compatibility of progressivism with socialism was immediately acknowledged by many of its early purveyors. John Dewey, the renowned progressive education philosopher, could move seamlessly from the American Socialist Party to the Progressive Party. While rigid class dialectics and violent revolution would repel him and others from the communism of Karl Marx, the rejection of classical individualism and natural law would leave them swimming in the same political soup with their more violent brethren. These early practitioners knew, and lived, the inherent amity between the two.
The cognitive ground has been prepared for many of a generation to unthinkingly express fondness for something only vaguely understood. To them, socialism is synonymous with “cooperation”. Cooperation is the antidote to an allegedly toxic individualism.
It’s ironic, though, that the individualism of self-reliance is derided while the individualism of expansive moral license gets pride-of-place. Square that circle.
The outlook isn’t leavened by personal experience of government evils or of overpowering international events bringing to light socialism’s failures – the Cold War being another topic to snooze though in History class – or of the consequences of vice. It’s easy for socialism to occupy that space in the mind where warm and fuzzy “togetherness” is located and faces no competition from anything more real.
Pop media and curriculum as accomplices
Socialism’s identification with “togetherness” had the schools as an accomplice for about 4 decades. Furthermore, the schools as accomplice also had an accomplice in the popular media. In this way, the whole crowd of adolescents-to-teens is covered, from valedictorian to dropout.
Those that remained at their desk through the 12-year gauntlet were shaped by the curriculum with media reinforcement. Parents moved into the realm of background noise. Those voluntarily or involuntarily exiting prior to commencement at least got the banalities through pop media spin.
It’s a form of comprehensive mind-shaping. The pop culture molding is found in more than tv shows like TheBig Bang, and even the older Sex in the City, Friends, etc. It’s the DNA of modern commercials. One prominent theme can be summarized as girls, girls, girls, and more girls: girls as John Wayne wannabes, girls as Einstein, girls as Thomas Edison, girls as John Nash (of A Beautiful Mind fame), girls as Bruce Lee, girls as Richard Petty.
A Nissan commercial: the girl as soon-to-be car jock and speed demean, with mom proudly looking on.Another Nissan effort: the girl as teen driver and, of course, outer space fighter pilot.GE gets into the act with the free-wheeling girl as math whiz, inventive mechanical genius, and adult engineer par excellence.
The NFL and MLB are equally enthused about casting girls into their sponsored activities.
The NFL can’t wait to get into the inclusiveness game. Here they are advertising girls in the punt, pass, and kick competition.MLB is not one to be left behind. Girls are prominently displayed in youth fitness campaigns and youth baseball lineups.
What’s with all the girl-mania? Well, honestly, all I have is a suspicion. I reckon that it has much to do with the incessant equation of “disparity” with “oppression”. A statistical difference between the sexes is presumed to be prima facie evidence of “prejudice”. Fewer girls as race car drivers must be due to the heavy foot of misogynistic social pressure. A weak hypothesis to be sure, but it certainly and instantly is transformed into fact in minds weaned on nothing else. For the young, the message’s constant drumbeat must be proof of a “reality” that demands vast cultural reversal. Thus we have all the pop media brandishing of girl-mania as the corrective.
Repeat the story often enough and a view of reality begins to anchor. Prior to the crusade, physical and athletic roles were assigned to men and boys, reflecting the understanding that estrogen isn’t an athletic enhancing substance. Testosterone works better. Don’t let the fact that boys have more of it stand in the way of the brave new world of unrelenting equality. Ours is an age of make-believe, but not realized as make-believe. For the poor millennial, it’s the only storyline they’ve ever known. Nurture trumps nature anytime in the deep synapses of their brains.
The stage is set for the resurrection of socialism. Once our hypothetical social contrivances are blamed, no better opportunity for state aggrandizement can be evinced than to turn over preexistant disparities to the civil courts, law enforcement, and innumerable taxpayer-funded programs and their administrators.
Not be outdone in the zeitgeist category, the private sector jumps in with both feet.
What the media-industrial-complex has accomplished, the schools bolster with teachers, curriculum, and textbooks. The classroom becomes the place for taking the hasty supposition and enveloping it with a facade of reasonableness. Girls and women are injected wherever possible, even if it means a displacement of eminent men. Out goes Henry Bessemer to make room for Mary Wollstonecraft in World History texts.
History and Civics instruction makes it easy for the under-aged to dispense with obstacles to the disparity-free nirvana, such as the Constitution. Let’s just have the thing “evolve”. It’s meaning must be allowed to change with the times, thus placing a premium on mixing interpretation with social engineering. The old framework is effectively interpreted out of existence.
The treatment is common in many widely used Civics and History texts. For instance, one of the hot sellers in McDougal Littel’s stable of textbooks for high school U.S. History classes is The Americans.
It devotes an entire chapter to the “The Living Constitution”. You know, “living” as in “organism” as in “evolution”. The authors play up the Constitution not for its steadfast adherence to universal truths. Universal truths be damned. The document’s virtue, they insist, lies in its ability to meander with contemporary fads of thought.
I’m not certain if that is a virtue or a vice. Hitler’s dictatorship relied on an “evolving” interpretation of the emergency provisions of the Weimar Constitution (Article 48). No need to waste time and effort writing another one; just clear the path to the better world by interpreting the present one out of the way. Instantaneously, a constitution becomes a non-constitution. Problem solved.
Is this the meaning of “education” that comes from patronizing pundits and self-satisfied millennials as they applaud themselves for being the “most educated generation in history”? Pew Research backs up the assertion … in a superficial sense. More millennials – men and woman – are getting bachelor’s degrees than ever before. (7)
“Education” connotes improvement is some sense. Where’s the improvement? For some college graduates, they got it. For many others, maybe the bulk, I’m not so certain.
It appears that millennials are good at getting credentials, but what does the paper represent? It represents a society that values paper, even though the paper may not reflect superior knowledge, wisdom, or skill. It might be more indicative of perseverance in hoop-jumping, and along the way getting some partisan rhetoric deeply ingrained, K through PhD.
Looking at the college end of the education track, fields that might not lend themselves to ideological infection – most majors outside of the humanities and the Social Sciences – are popular among millennials. Don’t be so sanguine with this happenstance. The general ed requirements for all students have gone through a metamorphosis. For instance, the Western Civilization course is no longer a centerpiece. Even History majors can avoid the course, or its equivalent, entirely. (10)
Instead, balkanized and hyper-opinionated offerings by theme, region, and period populate the course catalog. The old Western Civ 2-semester survey course is eligible for the endangered species list. There’s few avenues for a comprehensive, serious treatment of the civilizational basis for the international order. Without Adam Smith and Blackstone, where would GATT and Interpol be? For the modern professoriate, the question is shrugged off with the admonition, “All cultures are alike”. For the college millennial, they won’t know any better because many don’t know anything else.
Education? What education?
Once in the grip of an identity- and oppression-laced curriculum, not much will be expected of the matriculant. College is easier to slide through than ever before. The more-than-average student devotes less time in preparation for class and less is assigned once in class. College isn’t what it used to be. (11)
The preconditions are present for the younger tranche of the population to cuddle with the notion of the omnicompetent state. The ubiquity and intensity of a singular message takes its toll.
And there’s more.
Modern life
The allies in the mind-shaping effort are manic interconnectivity, re-urbanization, and a media octopus (maybe a centipede is a more appropriate metaphor) of many venues but homogeneous in outlook, at least for the young enthusiast in pop fashion. The nexus is a womb of mind formation.
The cellphone is a wondrous thing. About the size of a modern voltmeter, it connects you to the universe of friends, friends, and more friends, and an ocean of info/entertainment. The possibilities are endless. Why need a wife if a holographic projection of a sex kitten will do the trick?
Frivolity begins to replace deep thought. The scene of being alone in a study with a great book is swamped by Facebook strategies to keep you glued to the screen. Old email can’t keep up. Add Twitter and Instagram to Facebook and you have the nuclear triad of avant-garde social engagement. They are instantaneous, awesome, and addictive. Who has time for old Aristotle, Augustine, or Nietzsche? Who has any interest in such things when Mary and Jim’s cavorting in Soho nightclubs awaits?
Pop thought goes viral with interconnectivity as the accelerant. But beyond the dabbling in gossip and personal lives, there’s no there there. All that remains of anything resembling serious thought is the fuzzy progressive platitudes from an incoherent public school education. But who cares? Aren’t we having fun?
All the digital linkages work best in the cities. It’s there, in its density of cell towers, that a car with a dashboard-turned-tablet works best. Furthermore, who needs a pickup for hedge clippings for residences without landscaping? Cement doesn’t need trimming. The whole transportation thing can be boiled down to the occasional use of a Prius, or anything that can scoot in a bike lane.
Electric vehicles in Ontario, Canada.
For the professional and single millennial, the college dorm life can be simulated in the gentrified neighborhoods of our inner cities. It can be communal, while according easy access to choice seats for Miranda’s “Hamilton”. Professional millennials and hangers-on are congregating in these precincts in increasing numbers. (12)
Renting a brownstone in a gentrified neighborhood with your buds has an appeal for a youth weaned on The Big Bang.
So long as the city maintains a protective cocoon of cops, firemen, EMT’s, parks, jogging/biking paths, roads, and abundant entertainment and utilities, who cares about the Second Amendment, self-reliance, debates about the role of government, and any thought of the government’s immense capacity to eviscerate the soul? They’re comfortable with the government as a surrogate mommy and daddy. Combined with little understanding of its ability to do harm, urban lifestyles reinforce a coddling view of government. The hardy individualist of the farm and suburban diy’er is replaced by the weekend hiker and wine soirée enthusiast.
Backyard soirée in a gentrified portion of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant.
For these people, why not socialism? If “socialism” seems too provocative of a word, wait, Democratic Party talking points will provide a soothing palliative.
The Embrace of a New Faith – Environmentalism
One of those palliatives is encapsulated in two words: “the environment”. It has a special meaning beyond the simple natural surroundings. In the hands of our lefty partisans, the word is defined by a worship of nature, the singular purpose of preservation, economics as human malevolence, and man-caused apocalyptic climate change. The definition cries out for state-empowered social engineering. Now we’re into the wheelhouse of the Elizabeth Warrens and Bernie Sanderses of the world.
The millennial was raised in the spectral glow of Earth Day. The chief organ of propaganda was the schools, with an assist from Hollywood. Every April these kids were subjected to almost anything labeled “sustainable”: solar powered cookie-baking, solar-powered everything, and recycling, recycling, and more recycling.
Tumwater School District elementary classroom on Earth Day. Olympia, Washington State.
After the kids leave the classroom, they can head over to the multiplex for further reinforcement with warm and fuzzy cartoon characters.
It’s not a well-balanced approach to a serious subject. The treatment pre-ordains a bias that these kids will carry into adulthood. Complications and consequences are skipped in favor of immediate activism.
As a veteran teacher of a high school and college classroom (29 years), students are frequently left speechless when confronted with a few basic queries about their recycling activities. Almost every year a student from the recycling club will approach me with the request to place a recycling box in my room. Here’s a typical exchange:
Student: Mr. Graf, can we put a box in your classroom?
Teacher: Yes, if you can answer a few basic questions. First, why recycle paper (or cans, whatever)?
S: It’ll help clean up the earth and reduce the need for dumps.
T: How much does it cost to recycle the stuff?
S: Uh, I don’t know.
T: How much energy and resources like chemicals are required? Are you creating another environmental problem by having to dispose of new industrial chemicals?
S: Uh, I don’t know. But the paper will break down into the water table if we throw the stuff into the dump.
T: How do you know that it beaks down like that? Can dumps be designed to prevent it? Is the real danger from stuff that doesn’t break down or stuff that does?
S: I don’t know how to answer those questions.
T: If you can’t answer those questions, why are you asking me to do it?
S: Okay Mr. Graf, we’ll go to the next classroom.
The same interrogatory would be at work if a person was asked to buy solar panels. While at a Lowe’s in California a few years ago, I met a solar panel salesman (a millennial) at a table. He told me of all the government-financed incentives for the things. I responded with a few questions.
How long do the things last before they have to be replaced?
Is solar power cost effective without the subsidies? Is there a limit to the amount of energy that can extracted from the sun?
If I Iower my utility bill with them, how is that paid for? Who must pay for me to get a cheaper electricity bill? Is the system like a Ponzi scheme that will crash if everyone did it?
Would we be better off building more nuclear power plants, investing in clean coal, or designing better fossil fuel plants? Are we making these more realistic options unlikely by forcing and bribing scarce resources into what might be a dead end?
As before, few credible answers were forthcoming. What happened to the hippie ideal of “question authority” as these notions were implanted in their young minds? Is something like a healthy skepticism so alien to them, other than the proverbial hostility to the parental “no”? It might be too much to ask in the case of people who don’t know enough to be able to ask hard questions. With Bambi rolling around in your head, disturbing thoughts of consequences and trade-offs won’t arise.
As older consumers and entrepreneurs, they’ll frequent the “sustainable” craft brewery and try to power their enterprises with windmills and the sun. The customer base for the Prius isn’t a rancher or construction worker.
Corporate America tailors their messaging to the perceived interests of the upcoming band of consumers, people who were nurtured on world citizenship and greenie causes. Believe me, businesses have heavily invested in market research. They know how to sell to millennials by knowing what appeals. In their case, togetherness and environmental purity work well.
New Belgium brewery’s ad expressing their fealty to the cause of dam removal.
In the end, we have more horsepower in the drive for an expansive and coddling state. The average millennial might be more open to the government molding a “better” human being.
But I leave this topic with another question: How can better human beings be created by other human beings who aren’t better? The occupant of a government office isn’t a person free of our failings. All too often, it’s just another human being with another set of biases and unfounded assumptions, but with the power to make us live a certain way.
So, What are We Left With?
The average millennial is a river fed by many tributaries. Nothing unique here. Only this generation has too many tributaries [influences] that push them into the arms of the Democratic Party and lefty causes. Their media and schooling bias their judgments. The lifestyle reinforces the predilections.
To be a conservative, defender of traditional marriage, opponent of pot legalization, while possessing a healthy apprehension about environmentalism, a millennial must be willing to stand upwind in a cultural gale. There are such millennials, which causes me to draw back against over generalization. Yet, signs are abundant of a lean away from scripture, tradition, limited government, as they entertain a tolerance of more moral license.
Anybody mindful of the trend will have their work cut out for them. Well, life might do the trick. Settling down, having kids, mortgage payments, and the approach of the peak earning years may do more to prove the foolishness of those prior decades. Kids will do a lot to dispel the earlier fantasies. It might even push many of them into a pew.
Let’s pray for life.
RogerG
Bibliography and references:
“This Is Why Millennials Favor Socialism: They realized that the ‘trickle-down economics’ theory didn’t work.”, Sean Vazquez, HuffPost, 4/17/2017, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/this-is-why-millennials-favor-socialism_us_58ed0feae4b0145a227cb8d3
“Why So Many Millennials Are Socialists”, Emily Elkins and Joy Pullman, The Federalist, 2/15/2016, http://thefederalist.com/2016/02/15/why-so-many-millennials-are-socialists/
“U.S. Baby Boomers More Likely to Identify as Conservative”, Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup News, 1/29/2015, http://news.gallup.com/poll/181325/baby-boomers-likely-identify-conservative.aspx
“The Conservative Millennial: No Longer a Myth”, Chase Paulson, Capital Research Center, 10/25/2017, https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-conservative-millennial-no-longer-a-myth/
“Understanding The Progressives: And the Transformation of the American Political System”, Josh Lerner, Counterpoint, University of Chicago, http://counterpoint.uchicago.edu/archives/winter2011/progressives.html
“Education or Indoctrination? The Accuracy of Introductory
Psychology Textbooks in Covering Controversial Topics
and Urban Legends About Psychology”, Christopher J. Ferguson, Jeffrey M. Brown, and Amanda V. Torres, Current Psychology, ISSN 1046-1310, 2016.
“Millennials On Track to be the Most Educated Generation to Date”, Pew Research Center, 3/17/2015, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/03/19/how-millennials-compare-with-their-grandparents/ft_millennials-education_031715/
“Bachelor’s degrees conferred by postsecondary institutions, by field of study: Selected years, 1970-71 through 2014-15”, National Center for Education Statistics, 2016, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_322.10.asp?current=yes
“Decline of ‘Western Civ’?”, Kevin Kiley, Inside Higher Ed, 5/19/2011, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/05/19/national_association_of_scholars_report_finds_no_mandatory_western_civilization_courses_at_top_universities
“THE VANISHING WEST: 1964 – 2010: The Disappearance of Western Civilization from the American Undergraduate Curriculum”,
Media
National Association of Scholars, May 2011, https://www.nas.org/images/documents/TheVanishingWest.pdf
“A Lack Of Rigor Leaves Students ‘Adrift’ In College”, NPR staff, NPR, 2/9/2011, https://www.npr.org/2011/02/09/133310978/in-college-a-lack-of-rigor-leaves-students-adrift
“Why So Many Americans Are Saying Goodbye to Cities”, Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, 4/4/2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/04/why-is-everyone-leaving-the-city/521844/
“I Tried Out a Bunch of Natural Highs to Make Dry January Less Boring: From floating to masturbation to self-flagellation—there’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t contain alcohol and allegedly gets you high”, Justin Caffeir, 1/18/2018, Vice, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/paqw8b/i-tried-out-a-bunch-of-natural-highs-to-make-dry-january-less-boring. For the website’s homepage, just strip away the article portion of the address.
“America’s Shrinking Middle Class: A Close Look at Changes Within Metropolitan Areas”, Pew Research Center, 5/11/2016, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/05/11/americas-shrinking-middle-class-a-close-look-at-changes-within-metropolitan-areas/
A month ago, Rep. Pelosi screeched that the Republican tax cut bill would bring about “Armageddon”.
The IRS has released the modified withholding schedules for 2018, as per the recently passed Republican tax bill. Conclusion: rates were cut across the board except for the super rich. The “Armageddon” apparently won’t reach her staff. They, like most everyone else, will experience more take home pay. It’ll also show in their end-of-the-year tax filling.
Patricia Ross, policy advisor to Democratic minority leader Nancy Pelosi.
Take for instance Patti Ross, a Pelosi policy advisor. I don’t know of her personal background other than she is receiving a $69,750 annual salary. Plugging in the same numbers for the 2017 and 2018 tax years – “Head of Household”, $5,000 in deductions, 2 kids, and no other adjustments for retirement investments, etc. – her tax liability falls from $7,565 in 2017 to $4,938, a savings of $2,627. Her effective tax rate declines from 10.8% in 2017 to 7.1% in 2018.
Mrs. Pelosi has to explain to her staff how a fatter paycheck is “Armageddon”.
The following is a comment to “‘We will prosecute’ employers who help immigration sweeps, California AG says”, Angela Hart, The Sacramento Bee, 1/19/2018, http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article195434409.html .
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State officials are not required to enforce federal immigration law. But California actions to not hold suspects of federal detainer requests, refuse to share information, and help facilitate violations of federal immigration law veer awfully close to nullification. Now, upping the ante further, the state’s attorney general threatens prosecution of any employer who adheres to the requests and instructions of federal authorities. Not participating has morphed into obstruction.
Employers in a state, first and foremost, are citizens of the U.S., but merely residents of a state. Patriotism applies to loyalty to the nation, not a state. Mr. Becerra is forcing patriotic employers of the state into obstructing federal authorities in the fulfillment of clear and unambiguous Constitutional powers – Article I, Section 8, clause 3. The state is forcing U.S. citizens within its borders into not cooperating with federal authorities.
Andrew Jackson and John C. Calhoun disagreed over South Carolina’s nullification of the tariff law. Asked if he had any regrets during his presidency, Jackson said, “[That] I didn’t shoot Henry Clay and I didn’t hang John C. Calhoun.”Andrew Jackson threatened to march into South Carolina and hang the state’s government in 1833 over its nullification of the tariff law. U.S. AG Jeff Sessions needs to indict and submit Mr. Becerra to a perp walk. If the rest of the brood in Sacramento continues to interfere, a criminal conspiracy is at work. Apply RICO.
The following is a reply to “Where are Americans Moving?”, 2017, https://www.northamerican.com/migration-map.
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The map says it all according to a report issued by North American Van Lines for 2017.
Coupling the data about moves with economic rankings for states, Hillary country in the last election is a scary place for people wishing to better themselves. Take a look at the charts in the previous article and the map in this article and a picture crystallizes of people fleeing the Dems’ poison. Long term Dem control of the state legislature is a sure signal to look elsewhere to live.
The following is a reply to “America’s top five inbound vs. top five outbound states” by Mark J. Perry of AEI, http://www.aei.org/publication/americas-top-five-inbound-vs-top-five-outbound-states-how-do-they-compare-on-a-variety-of-economic-business-conditions-and-political-measures/comment-page-1/#comment-191182.
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Below is a chart showing the states in the grip of the poison and those with the antidote.
I’ve been beating this drum for quite some time, and it deserves to be beaten, and beaten, and beaten. People know poison when they see it, at least those who can load up a U-Haul. The Dems are, at this juncture, the purveyors of poison, and it shows in moving stats.
Repetition may force the message to sink in as we approach the November 2018 elections. In spite of Trump’s Twitter flatulations, the Dems aren’t a choice to register discontent with presidential behavior. Slicing off your nose to spite your face isn’t sound medical advice.
If in power as of January 2019, the Dems will take California national. It’s their beau ideal.
Whichever way the electoral winds blow, I’m still vexed by the same question. How much do people understand of this state of affairs? Do they understand that poison isn’t a health food? Or, are they so deranged by Trump that they’ll take poison by voting to imbibe the California venom?
The above question comes to light in the form of two articles:
“Six Californias? Residents poised to vote on splitting up state”, CBS News, 7/15/2014, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/six-californias-residents-poised-to-vote-on-splitting-up-state/
“New California declares ‘independence’ from rest of state”, CBS News, 1/16/2018, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-california-declares-independence-from-rest-of-state/
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Fleeing the coop isn’t the only option for those disgruntled with the lefty coastal dominion over the whole of California.
First it was the north of the state petrified of the south stealing their water and turning them into another Owens Valley. Ex-state senator from Redding, Stan Statham (R), in the 70s and 80s, would introduce a bill at the start of each legislative session to split the state north from south. It’d go nowhere, of course.
Stan Statham from 1993 describing his plan to divide the state into three.
More recently, in light of the lefty state government’s delinquency on real infrastructure and the wild pursuit of the greenie utopia, the ol’ State of Jefferson was resurrected, a union of the northern counties of California with the southern counties of Oregon.
Earlier, in 2014, entrepreneur Tom Draper floated an initiative to break up the state six ways. See the above article.
And, again, more recently, is a proposal to amputate the lefty coast from the rest. “New California” would be free of the diseased part. See the above article.
Sure, the ideas will end up in the circular file. Nonetheless, they are a sign of desperation for people still anchored to the state but flabbergasted at the iron grip of the looney left on the state.
Maybe the best option – for the country but nor for the masses beyond the Coast Range – is the looney left’s drive for secession. I hope they succeed so the rest of us can receive the refugees and say goodbye to the experiment to make the world’s largest hippie commune.
The following is a reply to a report in the Washington Examiner for 1/17/2018, “Jeff Flake: Congress needs to denounce Trump’s lies or we will walk ‘a very dangerous path'”, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/jeff-flake-congress-needs-to-denounce-trumps-lies-or-we-will-walk-a-very-dangerous-path/article/2646169
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Senator Jeff Flake (r, Ariz.) in the well of the Senate.
Clearly Jeff Flake (R, Ariz.) has animus for Trump and Trump has animus for anyone who crosses swords with him. In that sense, they’re two peas in a pod. But the promiscuous use of the word “lie” is devaluing the term and causing endless and needless hyperventilation. Jeff isn’t clarifying anything, nor is he on the side of the angels. He has joined the alt-right, the Resistance, Trump, much of the professoriate, the college snow flakes, the Dem’s base/leadership, and almost anyone with access to the internet and facility for explosive hyperbole. Please, everyone, including Mr. Flake, take a breath.
First, let’s clear up this willful misuse of the word “lie” by accessing the dictionary. Here’s a classical definition for Mr. Flake and his comrades-in-arms: “an intentionally false statement”. Can a person be simply mistaken without the guilt of “lying”? Can a person be blinded by their own favoritism to believe an untruth to be a truth? Can a person just jump to a false conclusion without lying? Yes, of course. It happens all the time, particularly in Mr. Flake’s chosen profession, politician.
Anyway, an abundant power to divine the mind of a person is required to fulfill the “intentional” part of the definition. Ancient Greeks would read a flock of birds to access the will of the gods.
Etruscan wall painting from Tomba degli Auguri (c. 530 BC) showing two augurs practicing ornithomancy – divination through an examination of the actions of birds.
What do today’s politicians and activists use to see the unseen? I have no answer other than their own unchecked mendacity for their real or imagined opponents. Thus, any weakness of the mind can be contorted into the worst possible violations of the moral code.
Has Mr. Flake joined the ranks of the cranks and crazies? You know, the people occupying the Area 51 zone of the political space. If so, he’ll get more than he bargained for. He’ll get no restrained judges or a government with limits. He’ll end up like the czarist critic of 1917 finding himself in the company of the Bolshevik goons.
Bolshevik goons on patrol in Leningrad looking for policemen to brutalize, October 1917.Protestors run through the street before the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump January 20, 2017 in Washington, DC. Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States Friday — capping his improbable journey to the White House and beginning a four-year term that promises to shake up Washington and the world. / AFP / ZACH GIBSON (Photo credit should read ZACH GIBSON/AFP/Getty Images)
The following is my posted response to Kevin D. Williamson’s column in National Review Online, “From Sea to Shining Sea”, 1/7/2018, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455208/conservatives-have-abandoned-coasts-cities-bad-move.
KDW,
Okay, let’s make a play for New York and California, and the rest of the blue dots on the election map. Yes, Republicans and conservatives seem to have abandoned them. But the interrogatives pinch me awake, especially how, who, what, when. The land of B1 Bob Dornan (ex-R, Santa Ana/Anaheim) is as firmly Demland as almost any of the precincts around Harvard. “Anacrime” and “Stabba Ana” are more than putdowns. They’re signs of the state-of-play in formerly conservative strongholds in a state that is more reflective of Nancy Pelosi than Ronald Reagan.
Nancy Pelosi, D, CaliforniaA Santa Ana Crime Scene Investigator takes photographs after a male was shot while riding a bicycle in the 3900 block of West 5th Street around 11:40 p.m. Tuesday night in Santa Ana. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: KEVIN WARN, CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER – 05/19/15 – A man riding a bicycle was shot to death in Santa Ana, police said today around 11:40 p.m.. The unidentified victim was riding in the 3900 block of West 5th Street when police received reports of shots fired and a victim down, Santa Ana police Sgt. Matt Hermans said. The victim was pronounced dead at a hospital, Hermans said.Homeless encampment near freeway in Anaheim, Ca.
Napoleon was allegedly famous for having said, “When you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna.” He could afford to say that. At that point in his career, he was unrivaled on the battlefield. What advantages do Republicans possess in areas currently on the verge of secession after the near-nullification of federal immigration law? Certainly, Rudy Guiliani won a couple of terms as NYC mayor, but it was after the city had cemented a reputation as an open sewer and murder capital of the world. The lesson: Take Vienna after the plague has set in.
1970s NYC street scene.1970s NYC sqeegee boys. A form of aggressive pandhanding accosting motorists.Undercover cop arrests a mugger on a NYC subway. The city’s subway system averaged 250 felonies a week during the early 80s. By 1990, annual homicides in New York peaked at 2,245.Pictured, a woman exits the subway station at Grand Central among a score of sleeping homeless individuals sometime in the 1980s.The urban decay led to the mayoral victory of Rudy Giuliani (r) over David Dinkins (l) in 1993.
The rot will have to ravage a lot more before Republicans have a real shot on the lefty coasts. Heck, the Republicans couldn’t field a candidate in California’s last Senate race. It was a brawl between two Dems: Loretta Sanchez – the big cheese of B1 Bob’s old district – and the lefty attorney general, Kemala Harris, the eventual winner … and scourge.
Poison is popular in California, as it is in the rest of blue-world. Scan the list of the recent popular initiatives. It’s become the land of the perpetual high, tax rape, greenie everything, transgender everything, and a plethora of petty annoyances like expensive eggs, pricey gas, skirting the Heller decision with clamps on ammunition, empty plastic bag carousels at the grocery store, etc., etc.
The state legislature could be confused with the staff of the Resistance, Black Lives Matter, and the LGBTQ… lobby. The governor travels around as the independent potentate of his own personal satrap. It’s not much of an exaggeration to ask if they’re channeling Nicolas Maduro and his consiglieres.
It must be said, though, that the bi-coastal insanities mirror the national map. These states are really blue along the coast and a scattering of blue dots elsewhere. But the red areas are shrinking as the sober flee the asylums. Andrew Breitbart was famous for exclaiming, “Politics is downstream from culture”. A cliché to be true, but still accurate. The culture is frightening for a church-going anyone with a spouse and a couple of kids.
County-by-county breakdown for Prop. 67, the ban on free plastic shopping bags.
So, how do we [conservatives] make a play? Take resources from Erie County where we have a shot and give them to lonely opponents of the lefty kleptocracy in California? If you’re talking about seed money to keep the movement alive, then I’m with you, KDW. If you’re talking about an abrasion-free message, call me comrade. After that, the zero-sum game presents too big of a toll.
Pray for rot. To borrow from addiction therapy, hitting bottom may work wonders.
“If a fact comes in that doesn’t fit into our frame, you’ll either not notice it, or ignore it, or ridicule it, or be puzzled by it – or attack it if it’s threatening. ” — George Lakoff, cognitive linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, as quoted in National Geographic Magazine, June 2017 issue. (1)
One of my main reasons for maintaining a National Geographic Magazine subscription is to keep tabs on the animating infatuations in that part of America politically colored “blue”. The magazine seldom fails to disappoint, perhaps unwittingly and unknowingly. The infatuations are a product of a favoritism, encoded into blue-America’s urban and academic “betters”, arising from a pervasive mix of social tastes and a grand ideo-philosophy. It operates as a kind of mental impairment for its devotees.
Susan Goldberg, Editor in Chief, National Geographic Magazine.
The above quote from page p. 50 of the magazine was meant to describe others not so enlightened according to the author of the piece from which it was taken. It could just as easily apply to the author, editors, and staff of the magazine in their Washington, D.C., bubble.
“The pot calling the kettle black”: A phrase from at least the 1600s meant to convey hypocrisy. It would be better understood if we experienced life in a medieval kitchen.
On the “affective filter”
Are the publication’s content producers immune to the presence of half-baked assumptions and prejudices that they assign to others? I think not. The affective filter concept of learning theory comes to mind. The filter functions as an emotional Polaroid lens as we consciously try to attain new knowledge. Our emotions, the theory asserts, are said to make learning difficult, and, by implication, operates to facilitate passage of those stimuli and facts that comport with our previously entrenched hunches about how the world works. If true, it is universally operable beyond the “bitter clingers” of Pres. Obama’s famous characterization.
The affective filter theory was devised to explain student second language acquisition.
The magazine’s staff could benefit from a mirror.
There is a strong emotional attachment to our deep, unquestioned, and strongly held beliefs. While we may convince ourselves that we are paragons of scientific inquiry, the reality may be quite different.
On materialism
So, what are the basal beliefs pervading the upper reaches of the status hierarchy in our urban and academic clusters? One attachment is a broad conviction for the philosophy of materialism. No, I’m not referring to materialism as a synonym for greed. Alternatively, materialism as accepted wisdom attempts to explain everything as a product of matter and material forces. Modern practitioners of science could be weaned into this line of thought by the very nature of their preoccupation. Science is focused on the physical world. The temptation is to reduce wisdom to an understanding of matter, its forces and processes.
The stage is set for a full-throated assault on anything seemingly not in tune with the current state of scientific understanding as presumed by some practitioners momentarily at the top of the science popularity pyramid.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, a popular pied-piper of science-as-wisdom.
A death sentence for tradition and rise of subjectivism
To no great surprise, nearly anything old – morals, traditions, institutions, established religion – will sooner or later fall under the crosshairs. If its antique, it can be explained away as something not worthy of our “enlightened” age. For these acolytes, it’s become like a reflex, as in the blinking of the eyes.
The old sexual morality is a victim of this popular turn of mind, a bent very popular in metropolitan and academic surroundings, and anywhere else under their sway – which means almost everywhere. Cohabitation is up; virginity is down; chaos in the home is up; and genital compatibility (heterosexuality) no longer necessary.
In fact, genital diversity (again, heterosexuality) is made irrelevant. Since an orgasm is the penultimate in this brave new world, sodomy is to be sanctified alongside the Church’s preferred option. Anything is okay if the desired end is achieved. Such is the logic of the mind unmoored from anything higher.
In these stunted minds, a belief in something higher is as expendable as a zipper that won’t zip. God? What god? Morality? Whose morality? These questions are regurgitated as readily as terns vomiting for their young.
“Nothing is written in stone.” — the quintessence of moral relativism when taken to an extreme.
The result, though, is a confusion of knowledge with wisdom. While we have the knowledge to expeditiously abort a late-term fetus, “ought” we? Even though we have the ability to euthanize the momentarily depressed, “ought” we? While we can treat people as livestock for their stem cells, “ought” we? Should we use our knowledge of genetics to manufacture custom-made human beings? Many of the most profound questions in life cannot be answered by a sole reliance on the knowledge of synapses and molecules. The reference point for such decisions must lie in something other than ourselves. Some would call it “wisdom”. A scientist may have the knowledge but be completely lacking in the wisdom.
The absence of anything higher, something outside of us, elevates each person into the the role of Creator of our own personal standards. The subjective, and relative, reigns supreme. The love of an unbounded individualism – the uninhibited self – lies here. The combination of science, materialism, and now subjectivism pushes the mind toward unlimited possibilities, a benign concept if kept abstract; a pernicious one if allowed to undermine limits.
On transgenderism, the gay agenda, and the uninhibited self
Seemingly, now even the physical limits of chromosomes can be discarded. We are in the age of transgenderism and 40 or so genders. We have come full circle when the individual as emperor of reality is liberated from science, chromosomes and all. Have we entered an epochal phase when subjectivism has put a gun to the head of science? If an idea or feeling gets locked into our head, even our physical bodies must be made to give way.
This heap of notions is so taken for granted in the confines of academia and among our self-styled cultural elites that counter-ideas are hubristically dismissed as ignorance. The 3,000 years of Judeo-Christianity and Greek philosophy must bend a knee to a new god and faith: the uninhibited self and its modern priesthood of shortsighted PhD’s and media mandarins.
The ladies of the View, 2017.
Their arrogance is astounding. They claim a monopoly ownership of science, while unintentionally dismantling it. In fact, it’s a semi-science that functions as a cover for their biases … or, more accurately, prejudices. For instance, National Geographic Magazine devoted its January 2017 issue to the “Gender Revolution” (as was covered in a previous blog post).
While reading the article, I was struck, when you cut through the excess verbiage, by the gullibility of a cluster of academics to accept a person’s claims in interviews as proof of the existence of a condition (gender dysphoria) on a par with schizophrenia and diabetes. When it involves children, the psuedo-diagnosis is very disturbing. Common adolescent confusion now can lead to permanent genital and bodily disfigurement. Efforts to less drastically treat the internal turmoil through therapy are made criminal acts in some jurisdictions.
In the same issue was a piece about female genital mutilation (FGM). The practice is resurrected in the West under the guise of “gender reassignment surgery”. Board certification and a scalpel doesn’t make the practice any less horrifying.
Is this the new wisdom?
Using their position at the commanding heights of contemporary culture, the socio-political nomenklatura seek to rub out opposing views on other subjects as well. A defense of traditional marriage – a viewpoint not very well articulated as of late – is pounded into submission by an alliance of our cultural aristocracy and the fashionable victims’ group du jour: the L-G-B-T-Q …. movement (The presence of 40 or so genders makes an acronym difficult).
One of their signature issues is gay marriage. Yet, we can only get to the idea of same-sex matrimonials if we skip over some obvious questions. Like, what is marriage? Is it simply a union of adults? Gayness, by its very nature, makes their unions only about the adults. It can be about nothing else. Last time I checked, sodomy can’t produce offspring. So, childbearing is out of the question. Yes, yes, gays can adopt, but the simple existence of those children is ipso facto proof of a heterosexual coupling. If marriage exists for the purpose of family formation, it’s incoherent to sanction as “marriage” a genus of union that can never do it (produce children).
What of the heterosexual unions who either can’t, or won’t, produce children? Are they marriages? Most emphatically … Yes! Heterosexuality is the essential condition, not the decision to have children. As for infertile couples, medical interventions are a tacit recognition of the absolute necessity of the very essence of heterosexuality: sperm meeting egg, in one way or another. Being childless doesn’t repeal the legitimacy of a marriage; and holding a ceremony and exchanging rings, by itself, can’t make one. Heterosexuality is written all over the institution.
Marriage as a mixing of the only 2 genders having any basis in chromosomes – leaving aside the unusual, but not unexpected, chromosomal abnormality – was remarkably obvious to our ancestors who lived at a time when they couldn’t be afflicted, as we are, with the hectoring of our cultural “betters”. The idea of marital bliss applying to 2 men was so outside the pale that it never came to mind to anyone coming before Justice Kennedy’s term on the Supreme Court. Marriage of the 2 genders is all that we find mentioned in the historical record. While scanning historical documents, I ran into this juicy bit from Emperor Justinian’s reforms of Roman law, Institutes, Title II, “Of The Law of Nature, the Law of Nations, and the Civil Law”:
“The law of nature is that which she has taught all animals; a law not peculiar to the human race, but shared by all living creatures, whether denizens of the air, the dry land, or the sea. Hence comes the union of male and female, which we call marriage; hence the procreation and rearing of children, for this is a law by the knowledge of which we see even the lower animals are distinguished.” (Emphasis added) (8)
Gay marriage is an inanity to logic and to our predecessors.
On Hegel, “progress”, and historicism
G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), rector and holder of the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin.
The growing acceptance of same-sex unions is a testament to the wrongheadedness of Hegel’s 19th century view of history as the unfolding of increasing rationality – i.e., “progress” (sometimes referred as “historicism”). We aren’t getting smarter, or more rational, or more contented. Instead, we’re proving that history has no arc. It’s filled with unexpected zigzags and stumbles, and chic journeys into nonsense.
In castigating historicism and any other form of determinism in the manipulation of history, the philosopher Karl Popper had it right when he said that there are no “inexorable laws of historical destiny”. (6,7) Marx/Engels (meaning the present converts of the pair), Obama, Hillary, Thomas Piketty, Robert Reich, and all self-styled Progressives please take note.
“Trend is not destiny”, Karl Popper. The old saying, “crap happens”, is the roadblock to any universal trend in history. It’s something Obama should keep in mind before he lectures us about being on the “right side of history”.
On “climate change”
For our brethren at the top of our urban and academic status pyramid, maybe the thought that they could be wrong never occurred to them. Maybe they’re blinded by their own arrogance. Well, sadly for us, their arrogance isn’t limited to the LGBTQ … wishlist. A favorite in their panoply of causes, when they aren’t yammering against homophobia, is “climate change”.
If left alone as a two-word phrase and without any of the ideological baggage that so often attends it, it’s rather innocuous and acceptable to most people. Though, our haughty “betters” couldn’t leave it alone. It’s freighted with “apocalyptic”, “catastrophic”, “solely anthropogenic”, and with sub-agenda terms like “green”, “sustainable”, etc., etc.
Al Gore as the climate change Jeremiah.
With their ever-present faith in “progress”, they’re fully on-board with upending the settled arrangements of a free people. Their confidence in politicized “experts” knows no bounds. Indubitably, government – with themselves at the helm, of course – is expected to have free reign to bring about the “green” world. The crusade has breathed new life into the disaster that is socialism. It also bequeathed to us the juiced-up social engineer.
The social engineer of the progressives’ imagination, appropriately papered with degrees and certificates, will be ensconced in administrative bureaus with sweeping and unconstitutional powers to legislate, execute, and adjudicate. It’s government by papal bull and czarist ukase. What would James Madison think?
If Madison was reanimated into today’s world, he might be struck by more than a sovereign people’s willingness to surrender their sovereignty over to Harvard’s graduating class. He’d be smacked with the glaring hypocrisy of the situation’s cheerleaders.
My blue-America barometer – National Geographic Magazine – unconsciously revels in the duplicity. Going back to the “Why We Lie” cover story (June 2017 issue), I found this gem:
“Researchers have shown that we are especially prone to accept lies that affirm our worldview. Memes that claim Obama was not born in the United States, deny climate change … and spread other ‘alternative facts’, as a Trump adviser called his Inauguration crowd claims, have thrived on the Internet and social media because of this vulnerability.”
“Deny climate change” as a lie? Is it a lie or simply a disagreement? “Lie” is used to cover a difference of opinion with our cultural suzerains. Grand prognostications in science, if its real science, should be met with a “Yes, but ….” or a “No, but ….”. Qualifiers abound in a field for which there is much unknown, and definitely so regarding those grand prognostications.
The resort to cocksure “lie” labeling is heartily exhibited by those with the least expertise in science. Al Gore is no scientist; he’s a politician/lawyer. Leonardo DiCaprio is an actor. The author of the NGM piece, Yudhijhit Bhattacharjee, is a “writer” according to the bio on his website. And since scientists, like everyone else, aren’t resistant to the surrounding cultural zeitgeist, and since politicized government largesse is widely available, today’s science can be easily hijacked by its celebrity and political non-practitioners possessing huge megaphones.
Leonardo DiCaprio as Democratic Party booster, from the 2004 campaign.
Here’s the hypocrisy: opposition to the crusade is fitted with the “liar” label while a concerted campaign in 2009 of lying was uncovered in spirited emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, Houston Control for the “climate change” enterprise. Maybe intimidation to suppress is more accurate. Still, the episode exposed the effort to misrepresent the truth. Do we dare call it “lying”? (9)
The scandal involved partisan scientists bound-and-determined to shoehorn data into a prefab outcome: climate change is apocalyptic . It included efforts at hiding data and methods from scrutiny outside a narrow, mutually reinforcing group. Further, the emails bring to light the attempts at manipulation of their models to produce their preferred results, and the frustration when they don’t. In addition to hiding and statistical messaging, intimidation and excommunication of critics from the field is plotted among the climate change clerisy’s brethren.
Putting the best face on the scandal would be to recognize the emails were taken out of context and only blunt expressions among close-knit colleagues. However, the exculpation is only limited. At a minimum, it illustrates the behavior of a highly partisan claque of scientists. It’s an example of what happens when science becomes a partisan movement and then a political industry.
Is any of this to be seriously considered – even if made aware – among the lords in their Hollywood/west Los Angeles/Manhattan/campus castles? I think that we now know the answer to that question.
Why even have a magazine issue devoted to “Why We Lie”? Why now? Why did the topic come up and demand so much of the magazine’s resources and time? I suspect a political motive. The subject of “lying” is a particular obsession in the hot nodes of lefty political activism. Blue-America’s most prominent inhabitants are busy trying to delegitimize the shocking result of the 2016 election.
I’m reminded of one of the historian Henry Adams’s witticisms from his book, The Education of Henry Adams.
“Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”
The organization of hatred can occur with or without a patina of science. Susan Goldberg, chief editor of National Geographic Magazine, please take note.
RogerG
Bibliography and references:
“Why We Lie”, Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, National Geographic Magazine, June 2017, pp. 30-51.
“Fox Says It Won’t Interfere With National Geographic’s Editorial Content”, Andrew Beaujon, Washingtonian, 9/9/2015, https://www.washingtonian.com/2015/09/09/fox-wont-interfere-with-national-geographic-editorial-content/
“The End of Identity Liberalism”, Mark Lilla, New York Times: Sunday Review, 11/18/2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html
“Input hypothesis”, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis. The affective filter concept arose from Stephen Krashen’s research into second language acquisition and is part of his broader “input hypothesis”, first published in 1977.
“Gender Revolution”, National Geographic Magazine, June 2017 issue.
A brief summary of Karl Popper’s critique of Hegel’s “historicism” can be found in wikipedia under the article “Historicism”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicism
A fuller description of Popper’s critique of historicism can be found here : “The Central Mistake of Historicism: Karl Popper on Why Trend is Not Destiny”, Farnam Street, https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2016/03/karl-popper-mistake-of-historicism/
As a pdf file: “Justinian, Institutes“, http://amesfoundation.law.harvard.edu/digital/CJCiv/JInst.pdf
An interesting op-ed about the U. of East Anglia email scandal can be found here: “Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation”, Christopher Booker, The Daily Telegraph, 11/28/2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6679082/Climate-change-this-is-the-worst-scientific-scandal-of-our-generation.html
The Education of Henry Adams, Chapter 1, Henry Brooks Adams, 1907.
