On the list of things you will never hear someone say is “Be careful with those gold bars. They are valuable.” The reason for that, one reason at least, is that everyone knows gold is valuable. It does not have to be explained to people that gold is valuable. It’s obvious.
That’s true of most things. If a thing has universal value, everyone knows it. That’s why they are valuable. Enough people want the thing, so its value rises compared to things that are less desirable. The exceptions are those oddities or specialty items that few know much about, but there are exceptions to everything.
The same is true of people. Anyone who has sat through a “down-sizing” session knows how it works. You look at the employee list and come up with a rule for cutting jobs that keeps the valuable people. Maybe you shuffle the deck so that those valuable people are moved to some new position in order to keep them. If it takes a long explanation as to why someone should be spared, they are not going to be missed.
That always comes to mind when stories like this one get my attention. If black lives really mattered, no one would need to say it. It would just be another item on the list of things everyone knows. Instead, we have this organization financed by a foreign criminal (why is he still alive?) desperately trying to prove to the rest of us that black lives matter.
To make matters worse, these protests are so futile that the activists feel it necessary to assault people in at their school, place of work or on public streets. Back in the summer these idiots were showing up at breakfast joints in SWPLville desperately trying to get people, who should be sympathetic, to pay attention. Instead, they just called the cops and added security.
If your argument needs this nonsense to have a chance of convincing anyone, it’s pretty safe to assume your argument is without merit. In this case that means black lives really don’t matter very much. In my neighborhood that’s obviously true as blacks shoot one another over sneakers all the time. They abandon their children, beat their women, and spend all of their time bringing shame to the black race. In the ghetto, black lives are worthless.
That’s fundamentally the problem with the black lives matters stuff. Instead of helping black people in some way, it just reminds everyone else how screwed up things are with black people. Here we have a library where students give a damn about their lives and, presumably, have enough self-respect to take their schooling seriously. They are stopped from being productive by a bunch of black people trying hard to be a burden on the rest of the campus.
This turns out to be the one time where campus life resembles the real world.
I’m no fan of inter-generational guilt or collective responsibility. You are responsible for you. You cannot pass onto your children the guilt of your deeds so that means your ancestors could not have done that to you. Holding white people in America responsible for the deeds of white people located here 200 years ago is madness. White people owe black people nothing more than they owe themselves as citizens.
But that’s the thing. Like it or not, black, white, red, brown, and yellow are here and we all have to get along as best as possible. As citizens, we have a duty to one another to work in concert so that all of us have a chance to make the most of what nature has given us. If that means special accommodations like affirmative action, well maybe that’s what’s best. I can live with it as it is a small price to pay for peace, assuming that’s what results.
There’s the problem and it is clear in that Black Lives Matter protest. Here we have unqualified blacks on the campus of Dartmouth, displacing better qualified Jews and Asians who would relish a chance at an Ivy League education. Instead of being grateful for the opportunity, these blacks are bitching and moaning, making a nuisance of themselves. Worse yet, they are interfering with the work of others.
Sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless er, Black Lives Matter activist!
In the end, this Black Lives Matter movement is going to be a disaster. More than a few white people I know have had enough of this stuff. People who would never say anything racist are suddenly sounding like John Derbyshire after one too many chardonnays. My bet is most of America is damned sick and tired of Black America sounding like ungrateful children. If black people want to find out their value, keep pissing off the rest of the people with this nonsense.
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alzaebo: Not to be pedantic, but it’s ‘Dagger John” Hughes, and he was eventually an archbishop. Great article, though. Supposedly it was George Orwell who said something like “some things are so stupid you have to be an intellectual to believe them.” Well, some things are so stupid that you have to be a professional educator to believe them. Heterogeneous grouping is one- it seems to be the only thing’hetero’ that the left likes. It is guaranteed to disrupt the education of those who wish to learn. Our elite institutions are now effectively heterogeneously grouped- with hilarious results. I’m just disappointed that a lax or hockey player didn’t punch somebody out. I guess they were out checking their white privilege. As a side note- how many of the protesters at Amherst have a clue as to who Jeffrey Amherst really was? Darned few, I’d guess. I’m sure this will all end well.
One of the central tenets of education used to be — though for some reason long forgotten in the unthinking rush to be ‘fair’ and ‘equal’ — is that no one at a school or college should disrupt the learning of others. My wife and I have different views about a lot of things but she is in education and as soon as I mentioned the story of the disruption by ‘students’ protesting in the library at Dartmouth she immediately said the same thing: no one should disrupt the learning others are undertaking.
It’s bad enough that people don’t want to learn, but worse that they don’t want anyone else to learn as well.
Back in the 60s and 70s in the UK various socialists dreamed up ‘comprehensive’ education where the less able would, in the glorious dreams of the lefties, be encouraged to do better by putting them in with brighter students. Good schools were thus closed down and the children from those sent to mix with the ‘underprivileged.’ These underprivilegeds soon learned to beat up the bright kids because they were ‘swots’ and to be despised for wanting to learn, so the thugs could rule the roost without having to learn themselves. The result was no one much fancied learning anything.
I would say that, on balance, putting ‘students’ who don’t want to learn in with those who do tends to make mess of the concept of education. But then, I have no doubt the experts, if they have worked that out already, have learned too stay quiet about it for fear of being seen as unfair.
You are absolutely correct. My wife, a thirty year Urban Educator has stated many times that it is about 2 to 3 % of the urban youths who disrupt the education system for all. They usurp a disproportionate amount of educational resource and act as a barrier to the students who want to learn or are at least not disruptive. It is the same percentage as the criminals in our midst ( I did not say mist), that account for an exceedingly high percentage of crime after leaving school. These individuals can be identified and harsh, corrective measures are required to solve this problem. The needs of the many……… Some “child”s need to be left behind.
Oh and a note to Z, you have been on fire for the last month or two. Good work.
The demonstators, the campus kids- they aren’t crazy.
They are political interns practicing for the 2016 elections.
Organizing For America alone has 10,000 activist trainers, who have trained up a reported 200,000 demonstrators.
That’s why the instigators and spokeskiddies of the campus protests
are often quite well-to-do. Their families are socially ambitious and Connected.
Political theater is a large, growing shadow industry backed by wealthy interests, such as Democracy Alliance, Silicon Valley, media, law groups, government agencies, and murky public private coalitions.
Corporate lobby groups have a long history coordinating daisy chained groups to achieve a regulatory result.
Consumer capitalist economics only measures a part of our system.
It cannot account for the Industry of influence, patronage, and maneuver.
Thus, we think we’re seeing a bizarre or failing cultural event.
No, what we’re witnessing is community organizing- think union organizing, but applied to the strange economics of public-private.
The Industry is doing street theater with BLM.
For example, the unions bussed in people for 10 states around to carry on the long protest against Wisconsin’s Scott Walker.
Huge volumes of money are in play here.
Trillions ride on the next election.
Correction- 2 million, not 200,000, for OFA.
There are millions of non-profits and NGOs.
It’s the post-capitalist economy, and it’s beyond borders.
What is the cost-of-goods sold for campaign managers?
The P&L for spooks?
The balance sheet for social marketers?
Post-capitalism is unpredictable, and is wrecking all the benchmarks.
It’s like black holes or dark matter, wrenching the visible world out of true; we keep getting blindsided.
Plus, BLM is our Administration re-using the 60s radical playbook- it’s all new to younger people.
Just as 30s radicalism was all new in 1968.
Forgive my overposting- American Digest brought me here with the fabulous “The Mind of the Moonbat”, now you’re a top 5 fave.
Excellent quality of thought.
I just wanted to mention an uplifting article over at City Journal, about Father “Dagger Joe” Hughes.
He was the priest responsible for turning around the Irish in America.
Brutalized by oppression and famine, they were considered literally subhuman due to their violence, squalor, and drunkenness.
In two short generations, he made them the backbone of society. Quite an optimistic example applicable to black society..
Black America was on the same upward path in the 20s, but was derailed by white Leftist money and a couple of unfortunate events.
Since I was raised in a black-brown ghetto, and have been in such neighborhoods all over the country, I found Dagger Joe’s example to be quite do-able. Don’t give up on them yet.
Diversity shattered blacks first, long before it began to ruin white institutions.
Bussing closed down black schools, causing already low property values to plummet. Black America lost half their savings there. I remember the riots.
Bussing could not reverse the ruinous perverse incentives of welfare illegitimacy, heavily promoted to blacks, or the attendant AA hiring of blacks to fill the welfare bureaucracies.
Getting government out is a tough slog.
Don’t know if we can walk that cat back now. I do know that government targeting blacks, in order to solve previous government targeting of blacks, is a continuing disaster.
Individuals are Constitutionally free to discriminate however they wish.
Discrimination law is properly meant to apply to government, because government illegally violated equality of Constitutional law.
I’m a racist- because everyone is- but not malevolent. Public decency is the standard. “Racism” is human nature, and often serves both natural boundaries and as a social lubricant.
What’s next? Laws against jealousy or envy?
“Civil rights” was a runaround to violate Constitutional rights.
It is government that may not discriminate- because it was government that DID (and does) discriminate.
Individuals should be free to be as bigoted as they wish. That’s honest, and it’s a private social matter. Redress of force- demonstrable damage- is the only proper law.
It is an indisputable fact that 75% of Afericans do not believe black lives matter very much. Talk is cheap, commitment is not.
It’s a vicious thing to promote a person two levels beyond his level of competence. In education you are not only the dumbest guy in the room for the moment, you are likely to become even more lost at a level in which you do not belong, and then bitter. Or there is the African studies niche.
At work, you may be the employee everyone steps around, including the customers when their are any. If you are competent at your job, you will be promoted to fill other quotas until you find your level of incompetence.
I have personally seen innumerable examples where Mexicans don’t give a fig about equality. This is a disease which Progs have fanned in whites and blacks. Mexicans have their issues, but The Race is immune to that one.
I told my DH the other day that they’d made me into a racist (they, and the young clean-cut one who mugged me one day in a very public, unexpected place). I have no use for them now, no patience, no interest.
Years ago I was in a mixed school that was integrated before we even talked about such things (so it was better then). I had a black girl in my 4-girl 7th grade cooking class team, and I was the only white girl on a gym class basketball team (which left me sort of talking ghetto for the first hour after gym). One of the neatest guys in the school was a champion gymnast who went on to be a very high level officer in the Army and a member of several administrations. He was black. Nobody paid any attention. Including him. We were all kids: good kids, not so good kids. Color had nothing to do with it.
What a mess they’ve made of it…
Blacks have positive attributes that non-blacks have less. Blacks may lack brain power but have more body power. Accentuate the positive.
“People who would never say anything racist are suddenly sounding like John Derbyshire after one too many chardonnays.”
Ha ha ha! Z, sometimes you say such funny stuff in the middle of a serious essay.
Lord, what is to be done? I was raised to ignore any observed reality and to extol the equality of all peoples. The real world functions according to the laws of physics, mathematics, and human nature. In my dotage I no longer give anyone a “by” for such flimsy reasons as skin color or culture. Things are what they are.
A year ago, right before Thanksgiving, my college-aged son and I stopped at a Walmart to get a turkey baster. The store was getting ready for Black Friday sales, and there was a police cruiser pulled up in the fire lane out front. When we left, I observed to my son that we were almost the only white people in the store. He was mortified, and said so. I was just stating the obvious, but we are no longer supposed to observe human nature and draw obvious conclusions.
Thanks for the long run of spot-on essays.
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BLM is a political hate group composed of communists, anarchists, socialists and assorted hate-whitey folks. Basically, the black equivalent of the KKK or the Nazi Party.
They care about black lives as much as Lenin and Stalin cared about the “proletariat.”
Don’t forget, the only reason that most kids are at college in the first place is because so many middle-class jobs require a bachelor’s degree to even get in the door. And the reason they require them is because employers are legally forbidden from assessing job candidates based on more straightforward criteria, because those criteria inevitably cause racial disparities.
If I were a white kid at college these days, I’d be incredibly pissed off with all these protests; I’d be thinking, “I’m only here in the first place because I have to jump through these hoops to provide a legal fig-leaf for prospective employers. My grandpa got started on a decent middle class career at 18 with nothing more than a high school diploma. Me, I’m up to my eyeballs in debt, and will remain so until sometime in my 30s, all on account of needing to protect blacks from ‘discrimination.’ And you have the temerity to scream at me for being insufficiently enthusiastic?”
I foresee trouble ahead…