Talk to a real estate agent, who deals in mid-sized suburban properties, and they will tell you that the local schools sit atop their client’s list of concerns. A great house in a bad neighborhood usually means bad schools and no one will choose that on purpose. Instead, families will pay extra for a not so nice house in a great neighborhood because that means good schools. You can fix up your house, but you cannot make the local school better, if it is full of misbehaving knuckleheads or headed that way because of the neighborhood.
People instinctively understand a basic truth about education. That is, the quality of product coming in dictates the quality of product coming out. Despite generations of lectures from our betters, we still know that the apple does not fall far from the tree. If the parents are low-IQ losers, the kids are most likely going to be low-IQ losers. The schools are not correcting this. In fact, it is the opposite, because the other old saying about apples is also true. One bad apple can spoil the whole bunch.
Everyone, including our hypothetical real estate agent, is too polite and too afraid to say what this means as a practical matter. For instance, I knew someone who lived in a mostly Jewish suburban neighborhood of starter homes. These were townhouses and ranchers. A black family moved in next door and they got along well with everyone. Then another black family moved in, but it was ghetto time, with parties into the late hours. Suddenly, the neighborhood sprouted “for sale” signs and the demographics changed within one summer.
In a prior age, this problem was mostly solved through free association, home owner associations and covenants. People in that neighborhood would have prevented the threat to their property values by prohibiting the sale of houses to people who did not belong. It was not entirely fair, of course, but it allowed people to protect their property rights without having to resort to lying. As is always the case, there were trade-offs, but at least their was a natural way for people to guard their rights as property owners and citizens.
Similarly, in a prior age the neighborhood association would have cracked down on the troublemakers. Even the “progressive” neighborhoods policed their ranks and used the rules to enforce standards. A couple generations of myth making have convinced everyone that these rules were used strictly by racists, and they often were, but they were more often used to maintain public order without having the government send in the police. With enforced diversity came the police state and that is not a coincidence.
Free association is illegal now. If a real estate agent is too obvious in how they handle these things, they face disciplinary action from the real estate board. A homeowner, who refuses to sell or rent to whoever shows up, can easily find themselves in front of a judge. Freedom of association is no longer a right in America. Everyone has to seek permission from the state before they can make these decisions. That means finding a place to live has become a game of cat and mouse for middle-class families.
It’s yet another example of the worthlessness of modern conservatism. They rolled over for this stuff long ago, accepting the Left’s assertions that discrimination was the vilest of sins and therefore required an extraordinary remedy. Once you accept that people don’t have a right to say with whom they will associate, addressing things like crime and the schools means begging the Left to make exceptions to their moral code in order to enforce anything resembling civic order. That’s where school choice and voucher programs come in. They are an appeal to the Left for an exception.
Of course, the Left hates the middle-class so any appeal on their behalf is denied. Instead, these appeals have to be decorated in such a way that appeals to the vanity of the Left and allows them to benefit. So-called charter schools that are for the “gifted and talented” are marketed to Lefty as a way to cull from the ghetto, all of those bright and creative minds, otherwise left to be raised by their parents. In realty it means those self-righteous progressive women get to send their kids to schools that are not so diverse.
School voucher programs attempt to expand on this by playing the Magic Dirt game. “If only those poor mothers can get their kids off that tragic dirt and onto the magic dirt.” They muster statistics and education studies to buttress the claims. It’s all nonsense, but it is the only way modern conservatism can frame the issue. They are begging the Left for an exception to the moral code. No one is fooled by it, which is why school voucher programs have gone nowhere. The Left will not tolerate them.
Freedom of association is not just forbidden. You’re not even allowed to talk about it anymore. Imagine what would happen if someone went on TV and said they don’t want to live next to Koreans or Somalis. They would have their life ruined. It’s why all those principled conservatives we keep hearing about were nowhere to be found when the queers started attacking bakers. Even libertarians sprint from the room when the topic of free association is raised. It’s the result of conceding the moral high ground to the Left.
It’s why the so-called Right is in a panic over Trump’s immigration talk. If it is acceptable for Americans to say “no” to Muslims on the grounds that we don’t want any more Muslims, then we’re back to discussing the limits, if there are any, to the freedom of association. Put another way, if we don’t need a reason to say “no” to Mohamed, then we don’t need to ask for permission in order to say “no” to diversity. That’s not a fight, or even a discussion, the so-called conservatives want to have with the Left.
It’s also why the hand-wringing over free speech on campus is a pointless distraction. You cannot have free speech without freedom of association. That’s the obvious lesson from the confines of the academy. Put a bunch of people in close quarters and you have to police what they say and where they go. Otherwise, you have violence. The same is true of all other rights. All natural rights are premised on freedom of people to live apart from those they do not wish to associate. Self-segregation requires little policing.
Bring back freedom of association and all the other rights follow.
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The “civil rights” legislation of the 60’s was typical government perversion. They went from forcing people apart (Jim Crow) to forcing them together (anti-discrimination). It is force that is the problem, not discrimination. The parasites called government don’t ever care about justice, only power, and the two are mutually exclusive.
“The “civil rights” legislation of the 60’s was typical government perversion. They went from forcing people apart (Jim Crow) to forcing them together (anti-discrimination)”
The difference between Jim Crow and the “civil rights” legislation was that Jim Crow was a State government issue (and was desired by the White citizens of the States, as intended by the Founders) and the uncivil rights legislation was a Federal government overreach in violation of the original Constitution.
Yes, it’s a difference, but not a significant moral difference. Government at any level is evil. Force is their moral error.
“Government at any level is evil. Force is their moral error.”
So, what do you suggest? Anarchy?
“Yes, it’s a difference, but not a significant moral difference”
The difference is that the original intent of the Constitution, the contract under which all the States accepted to become part of the united (note the small u) States of America, is served by one, but not the other. The contract under which the citizens of the States choose to exist under recognized the sovereignty of the citizens of the States. The States were the entities which decided who could vote, who could be a citizen, and everything else that was not delineated as being a Federal function by the contract, the Constitution. The moral difference, which you seem to be unaware of, is that the citizens of the States via their representatives, accepted entry into a union with other States willingly and by choice. The War of Northern Aggression ended this contract by military force. Subsequent Amendments to the Constitution were ratified under martial law. Be sure and do an internet search for the illegality of the 14th and 15th Amendments. The 14th Amendment assigned a new type of citizenship which never existed under the original Constitution. A Federal citizenship. True citizens are citizens of the States. Federal citizens are aliens that have been granted privileges by the non-lawful federal entity, the de facto government of the USA.
In your lengthy reply above, you claim the constitution is a contract. It is not. You then lump together everyone who approved of the constitution with all those who did not, using the collectivist fraud of “representation”.
There is no such thing as “the people” – there are only individuals. A representative cannot represent two individuals who don’t agree.
Your moral distinction is nothing but word-gaming. Government is the use of force by a group of individuals to rob and rule their neighbors. Your government-school rewording does not change that fact, nor its moral significance.
Are you out of high school yet? You might want to look up the definition of a contract.
This term includes every description of agreement, or obligation, whereby one party becomes bound to another to pay a sum of money, or to do or omit to do a certain act; or, a contract is an act which contains a perfect obligation. In its more confined sense, it is an agreement between two or more persons, concerning something to be, done, whereby both parties are hound to each other, *or one is bound to the other. 1 Pow. Contr. 6; Civ. Code of Lo. art. 1754; Code Civ. 1101; Poth. Oblig. pt. i. c. 1, S. 1, Sec. 1; Blackstone, (2 Comm. 442,) defines it to be an agreement, upon a sufficient consideration, to do or not to do a particular thing.
Now, look up social “contract”:
1. the voluntary agreement among individuals by which, according to any of various theories, as of Hobbes, Locke, or Rousseau, organized society is brought into being and invested with the right to secure mutual protection and welfare or to regulate the relations among its members.
2. an agreement for mutual benefit between an individual or group and the government or community as a whole.
And yes, there is such thing as “the people”. The Preamble to the Constitution state, “WE THE PEOPLE of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Speaking of word games, did you get your opinions from your gay poly sci teacher or from your stoned friends sitting around pontificating about things you don’t understand? Words have meanings. Claiming that a zebra is a tiger doesn’t make it one. Yes, government is force. So? Anarchy is too. A much more brutish one. Please do not try to claim some moral superiority based on ignorance and immaturity.
It is not “freedom of association”. It is freedom of disassociation. The Founders saw no distinction between the 2. But, contemporary society has too many social justice warriors that will kill the goose that laid the golden egg just so they can signal everyone how virtuous they are. Plus, the loudest voices are either still in the day care centers of college, in gated communities, or in areas that no riffraff could ever afford to live in. I have debated on line with several pixie dust believers and point out how in a free country you can choose not to associate with trash. You should be able to quarantine the virus of lesser groups or move to another area and choose to exclude those that will bring destruction. I always get a response something along the line of, “Go ahead! Leave! No one is stopping you!” When I point out to them that White Flight was freedom of association and that those that already exist in one area should have the right to exclude those of different backgrounds from destroying what they worked to create is when I get the self-rightlousness. “Racist! Hater! Fill-in-the-blank”. Just like with illegal immigrants. Somehow, these groups that do not exist in an area/country and had nothing to do with creating it have more rights than those that already live there. Even though they outnumber the parasites by huge margins. This is freedom of association? For the SJW’s out there: Whenever someone moves away from something, don’t allow the destroyers to follow them. Let them stand or fall based on their capabilities. Or lack thereof.
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So true. A lot of historical black districts with nice row homes and brownstones now have to tolerate whites coming into the neighborhood and owners and renters. These new comers never come to meld in, they also come to conquer and try and change everything with no regards to the existing community culture.
And there is nothing any of the long time residents can say or do because the realtors say its against federal law to refuse to sell or rent ti whites on the basis of race. This is contributing to all the “gentrification”.
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Several thoughts come to mind. One, regarding Property rights. It brings to mind Pearl S. Buck’s novel, “The Good Earth”. where the protagonist cherished owning his own property,because it brought him not just prosperity, but autonomy, privacy, and roots. Then he is betrayed on the last page, when as a old man dying, his sons lie to him that they will not sell the family property while nodding to each other over his head, despite his efforts to stress to them that property–The earth he farmed on all his life–means freedom and security.
The second one as mention by others is the hypocrisy the progressives who live in gated communities, Martha’s Vineyard and other prime real estate that wring their hands over this issue. Which tells me all I need to know that their concern is not about equality, but destruction of the middle class that they despise. The only equality they want is everyone poor, miserable and subservient to them. They want to bring back feudalism.
“Has good schools!” = code for “Has no coloreds!”
I think we’ll re-trace our steps to the pre-Westphalian way of doing things. Back then, there were few police and schooling was done by the church. Society had to maintain what order it could around institutions like clan and church. And local strongmen.
I think, until we reach a consensus on full-blown South African style enclaving, we’re going to have to decide whether public schools are simply a lost cause. I send my kids to one, but am in an area with “good schools.” Every year I weigh sending them to a local Christian school.
I wonder if the alternative to blockbusting isn’t simply for neighbors to engage in informal enforcement of community standards. Wild parties and sullen yoof? Would a pellet gun and a hunting blind solve some of these problems? What about a fast-acting fungus that eats section-8 stucco?
The alternative is the endless cycle of endless buying, selling, and fleeing, to enrich the FIRE people, which is no alternative.
Perceptive as usual, Z. Perhaps now’s the time to employ the Left’s Alinskyite tactic of using an opponent’s own moral code against himself. Maybe in the form of finding ways (through the courts, of course) to severely limit the Left’s own freedoms of association. Tats for tits.
ZedMan, I quibble at you sometimes, but you banged it out of the park with this one.
It’s looking like the Civil Rights acts were all about freedom of association for every except white people.
This is going to have to change.
Everyone except white people. Stupid autocorrect.
You cannot treat the gentleman and the savage as equals without consequences.
That includes pavement apes, muzlimes and illegal aliens from South of the border.
It also includes 85% of democrats, *all* AntiFa-types and every sort of irrational ShitLib (.org and to the person) like Lutheran Services or Catholic Charities who suck off the ,gov tit to settle these hoards in our homeland.
They cannot be engaged with reason, nor are they willing.
Build the wall. Resist with everything you have against Sec 8 housing anywhere within 100 miles of you. No more Rapeugees of any sort into our country,
Read this for just a snapshot:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/03/08/ann-coulter-immigrant-privilege-drives-child-rape-epidemic/
If we don’t have the right and the freedom to say “NO” then we have no rights nor freedoms whatsoever.
Once again:
*You cannot treat the gentleman and the savage as equals without consequences.*
We import OR tolerate the savage we get what we deserve.
Oh, and BTW, fuck wyminnis’ day right in the ass.
(Can anyone imagine what an international Men’s day strike would be like? Civilization would grind to a halt.)
James Delingpole:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/03/08/delingpole-handbags-chocolates-housework-tips-happy-womens-day/
Heh.
Now bring me a fucking beer, bitch.
(Oh, and the bathroom needs cleaning as well. And do my damn
laundry.)
The death of the right to free association began in earnest with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That single piece of legislation, and the legal consequences thereof, acted as the thin end of the wedge that eventually
separated Americans from their rights of association. Senator Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act – despite being one of the earliest conservatives in favor of desegregation. He saw, correctly and quite presciently, the danger the act would pose to this most-fundamental of human rights.
I’d push it back even further, back to the mid-1950s, including Brown-v.-Board, which also took down States’ rights, because Sociologist rag–doll theory and Swedish thinking about the “American Dilemma” were so much more important than a mere Constitutional Law. Once we were forced to agree that private businesses were actually public, everything else could be twisted into anything else.
A lot of things, including the erosion of the freedom of association, have been accelerated by the globalists over the past (at least) 22 years. The reason I bring this up is that I just watched the 1995 James Bond film Goldeneye again. Found myself rooting for the bad guys this time. 🙂
Virtually all of the 1% send their children to private school. Ditto for many politicians. These people have the means to purchase freedom of association. For everyone else, freedom of association is more limited if not non-existent. This is perpetuating and widening class differences in the U.S.
Since no one has mentioned it, I guess I must; Diversity + Proximity = War.
Friend just sold his house recently. He said he sold it in 3 days for more than he asked for. He said that they are looking for houses in two school districts in the area. The other district is the one our house is in, which makes us hopeful we can sell it quickly as soon as we can get it on the market.
I really am getting to the point where I don’t want Muslims in this country. They may be good people, but they don’t belong here.
And generally, they aren’t good people. There is a reason that muslim countries are culturally- and economically-retarded shit holes. Judge the tree by its fruits.
I regularly tell my prog ‘friends’ that all anti-discrimination laws are unconstitutional and immoral, and I clearly and concisely explain why.
But they can’t hear my explanation. Because they are busy trying to see if I have a 3rd eye in my forehead or something.
The rare proggie that does comprehend the argument *always* has the same reaction : “but that’s not FAAIIR!”. Which of course is true.
And I remind them that letting people negotiate their unfairness issues on their own often tends to work out better than sticking ingnoramuses with guns and rulebooks in the middle of the situation.
I’m surprised to see HOAs portrayed as bastions of freedom.
Want to fly a U.S. (or Confederate!) flag? Be prepared to fight your HOA. Want to erect a small workshop in your back yard? Be prepared to fight your HOA. Chickens or goats, or even a small garden? Be prepared to fight your HOA.
Anyone remember the rash of HOAs ambushing soldiers while they were away on an extended tour of duty, only to come back and discover that they’d gotten hit with some BS fine (eg crack in the driveway) 11 months back, resulting in late fees and interest, resulting a lein on their property, resulting in a foreclosure?
Ok so maybe you decide HOAs are not so grand after all. Now you’re sick of your HOA, and want nothing to do with them anymore? TFB. You have no right to disassociate yourself from them. You own the liabilities associated with your home, but they own many of the rights and privileges associated with it.
One could advance the argument that if one doesn’t want to associate with HOAs, one shouldn’t have made that decision in the first place. Does that same argument then apply to statehood and questions of secession? Do we wish to enforce relationships which may never be dissolved for all eternity? What will the world look like in another 500 years when it is covered by a thick web of such irrevocable covenants and associations?
I respectfully disagree that HOAs are anything but a weapon of those who wish to control others and who have nothing better to do than attend sleep-inducing meetings and climb their way through embedded power structures upon which the other 99% of us don’t have that kind of time to fritter away.
#OREGON HOBO#
Ordered Liberty != Anarchy
HOAs (at least here in CA) can fine you for nonpayment of monthly fees or violations of their edicts, and then foreclose on and sell your property out from under you.
Why did you choose to live in an HOA, Dutch?
They come with the territory around here, and they are everywhere. They have an upside, but you must watch your p’s and q’s around them. We did manage to avoid the Mello-Roos fees in a new neighborhood, so we got one out of two.
I was chatting with a buddy who lived in Las Vegas about HOAs. I was surprised when he went on about how great they are. I came from the same place as you where I saw them as a general nuisance.
According to him though, if you don’t live in a neighborhood with an HOA, the place will quickly turn into a seedy ghetto. The HOA serves a genuine purpose in places like Vegas to enforce a level of propriety in a given neighborhood.
“Oath of Fealty” by Niven and Pournelle takes the concept to its logical conclusion.
It’s been rumored in these parts, that folks who live in HOA beehives cannot kill their neighbor [even if they NEED killin’]
because it is agin’ the HOA rules……say it ain’t so……..
See, I done told ya them thar city folk ain’t got a lick o’ sense.
The interesting thing is that outside the cities, no one really seems to care. If Mennonites start buying up farms locally, no one gets up in arms. In the old mill towns, the blacks stay in their ten square block neighborhood and as long as they don’t start trouble, everyone leaves them be. The SoCal high desert is full of compounds. I worked briefly with a clan that lived in one and if I can extrapolate, some mighty strange shit is going on in those places. Jerry Brown and the rest of his CA Ministry of Love seem unconcerned.
I am becoming convinced that the problem isn’t modern civilization. It is modern urban civilization.
So maybe the wall we need to be building is around the cities. Guarantee delivery of power, clean water and food to well-guarded gates. Hell, we can even offer to treat their sewage. But nothing comes out. No people and no ideas. After all, what gets made in cities anymore (ignoring the final assembly and prep that qualifies as “light manufacturing,” these days)? The last urban factories shut down a generation ago. All that comes out of cities is deviance, bad policy, and toxic culture. Every one of them is an income sink, not a source. If we wall them off, they are still net consumers of resources , but we control the spending and we don’t have to deal with the culturally toxic externalities.
Plus if someone gets out of line, you can always threaten to exile them to the city.
Take him to Detroit!
Escape From New York!
Well said, John Smith! Kentucky Fried Movie is criminally underappreciated by the current generation.
I don’t remember how many times I saw Kentucky Fried Movie in high school, at the drive-ins. Don’t remember a thing about it, we would always get too many beers in by the end of the opening credits. Guess I should revisit it someday.
In our HOA here in conservative AZ, we have rules, and we enforce them against everyone.AZ is the land that time forgot, LOL…. Back in Chicago, however, the situation is exactly as you describe, Z-man, so the segregation is exclusively economic. The result is that the Chicago area is one of the most racially divided in the country, and the upper middle class is found exclusively in expensive communities along the northern lakefront, and those communities are protected by the Democratic politicians.
Z Man;
While your main argument is clearly correct, we need to choose a specific point of attack to regain freedom of association. I would vote for education because it is both vital and vulnerable due to the demonstrated incompetence and inefficiency of Big Ed. Plus it is a large spring of slush fund money in the Cloud ecosystem. And it can be justified in Prog. Speak.
For almost all of history up to ~200 years ago, education was a private affair. Scions of the elite got a classical education paid for by their parents’ networks, often via private tutors, so as to be able to compete for the few elite posts. Middle class kids got a practical education via entering Dad’s business as a gofer to learn to compete in commerce. Tradespeople’s kids got a practical education via apprenticeships where they paid for it themselves via their unpaid labor until they could hope to join the guild. Peasants just worked on the land.
Then education got industrialized just as work got industrialized (although there are a myriad other, related factors such as the desire for Biblical literacy). The two went hand in hand. The Prussians wished to be able to punch above their weight in European politics so they introduced state-funded education, which our ‘reformers’ held up as the example. Indeed Bismark’s Germany was the model for US higher ed. as well.
So now it’s time to privatize and de-industrialize education (power to the people, yada, yada). Time to return education to private hands (democratize opportunities regardless of means or location, yada, yada). The means for this are at hand via the internet, etc., and home-schoolers have created the materials as a means to escape the secular swamp that is Big Ed.
One big move would be to create lower level certification credentials at the federal level so that if your kid can pass the basic tests at 14 (or even 12) via internet learning of the basic 3 R’s, they can save 4 years of vibrant dominated incarceration in HS. And if they can pass the college level exams in, say 4-6 subjects they can save $ 1/4 mil in potential debt and start positive cash flow at, say, age 18.
The appeal to pragmatic Progs (if indeed there are any) is that they get to keep some of their tax base because hipster’s with children don’t have to move out to the ickky burbs any more (the hidden motive for magnet schools).
The other issue in this debate – property taxes. I pay $1k a month for the the privilege of owning my house and land. Most of that goes to fund our fairly good K-8 local school and shitty regional high school.
I’ve exercised my freedom of association by paying to send my kids to other high schools. Here in NJ, the liberal machine politicians will ever let people spend their education money as they please.
Controlling your own education money would make who moves into the neighborhood less important.
Jersey, where you pay two mortgages- one for the house and one for the property taxes.
Yes – about 15 years ago we looked at a nice 4-bedroom house in Randolph or Roxbury in our price range. Then saw the property taxes: $19k a year back then, We promptly exited the scene and looked elsewhere,
Part of this explains expensive homes/suburbs. They are expensive, as to keep out the folks they can’t say they don’t want to live around. High price, BUT they have great schools and IF a minority moves in, it’s one that doesn’t want to be around other minorities, no?
So lower middle class get stuck living next to sec 8 housing or rental neighborhoods, etc. The schools deteriorate, cycle, rinse repeat until everything settles to ninth-ward territory… and everyone in the upper middle class and higher are completely ok with it b/c they’ve found a way to buy their way (go into great debt) out of the dynamic. What to do with folks, of any race, that “use” things till exhausted; they never improve their lot, never improve their house/car/etc. They just use, and if that means to the point of detritus- houses like in Detroit, so be it. They live day to day and check to check… usually Govt assistance. 50 years of war on poverty and civil rights has produced perverse incentives… and not American really.
As an upper-middle-class who fled the neighborhood of my upbringing and went into big debt to get something better for my family, I can tell you that I am not happy with how the old school district and city handle things. But I am not about to sacrifice my own family in the name of “fairness”. The system is set up against the old-school nuclear family, and flight is the best I can do, at the micro level. Call me a chicken or a sell-out, but it works for me, it is the best choice I could have made.
This goes to the argument of loyalty to the biological and cultural clan, and I completely subscribe to such a thing. I am not about to live amongst my cultural, political, and social enemies. I have been blessed with the opportunity to flee all of that, and you better believe I took the opportunity when it was offered to me. I knew exactly what I was doing and why I was doing it.
Dutch, I don’t blame you a bit. I have friends that have done same. My attempt was to say, since freedom of association is verboten regarding housing, it was accomplished by money. It works for those that have money or go into great debt, but the downside is forcing (otherwise good )folks who can’t afford to, into bad schools, bad neighborhoods…. they become doomed by lack of money into a cycle of bad apples tearing everything down in one area, and others removed from it. It’s always been like this to an extent, but seems worse or more pronounced now… and a greater divide between social classes.
I am a supporter of vouchers/charters not because the student outcomes will be much better overall (early results from Detroit and New Orleans suggest that student test scores only marginally improve–but that is a whole ‘nother can of worms–what do test scores signify, anyway?), but that the parents and families have some measure of a way out of their educational circumstances, even if they are not fortunate enough to buy their way out with lots of their own money.
Forgive me, but I’m not.
One ugly anecdote was enough. I was told by someone with a child in a Detroit-suburb school district that the vouchered students from these low income areas reduced that school to unmanageable chaos. I daresay that the people who were paying a rather high rate of property taxes to send their children to that district were less than pleased. His younger child attended a private school, which he of course paid for out of his own pocket.
I have sympathy for kids who were stuck in lousy schools- I was one of them- but as an adult I have grown viscerally weary of being expected to solve the problems of other people and their children at bottomless cost to myself and my children.
If the inhabitants of low income areas are incapable of organizing decent schools, too damned bad. From everything I’ve ever read, they have been given incredible amounts of money to do so. Just do it.
Or not. But don’t destroy my local school because you can’t.
“Furthering Fair Schooling”, I see.
I remember the desegregation/bussing riots.
As a result of bussing, Black America lost half it’s savings, invested in houses.
Their kids couldn’t walk to school anymore; that and feeling more comfortable around their own is why they bought homes in the first place.
but, but, but… magic dirt theory!!
Here in Southern California, the “extreme” high-middle home pricing keeps the riff-raff out. Exactly the sort of thing Obama planned his section 8 housing (Furthering Fair Housing) to destroy.
It is interesting to me that the Libs are anxious to move into the upper-middle, expensive, and somewhat conservative neighborhoods around here, especially because of the schools, and they then set out to change the political complexion of things. Not so far as to invite in the riff-raff, but so far as to introduce the usual Lib thinking about them–how unfair things are, and so on–from a certain geographical distance, of course.
The only potential problem in California is the 3.6% down FHA loans. But sellers are somewhat leery of them, from the experience of one of my kids looking to buy in LA.
At the end of the day, it really all comes down to property rights. Property rights are the ultimate well-spring of free market economics and all other freedoms like freedom of association. Individual property rights ensure the corollary to freedom of association – which is the freedom NOT to associate.
My aunt and uncle live in what was once a prosperous, middle class, neighborhood in the Philadelphia suburbs. The area is almost unlivable now, as HUD had decided inner city housing projects place undesirables too close to their urban gentrified liberal voters. So, they’re buying houses in the burbs, and moving the undesirables out of the cities. This has destroyed whole communities. My relatives can’t sell their house for anything resembling fair market value because the area has tanked. Government has been happily destroying wealth for years now. And people wonder why Trump won…
A point about education, since this is the field in which I work. Education is the thing for which people will spend the most money, but with the lowest expectations of receiving anything of value. It’s unbelievable the lengths to which people will spend money on it, but get little out of it. Those nice schools in the nice neighborhoods that market to upscale, white, suburban, soccer moms? They’re not very good either. They’re safer, by and large, and aren’t surrounded by tall fences and concertina wire. But in terms of what the kids are actually LEARNING, parents are frequently shocked when I tell them their choice of public/charter school is “the least worst option”. Chances are still excellent, even at Glimmering Charter School Academy for the Gifted and Talented, that little Suzie and little Johnny will be counting on their fingers to add above 15 even in the 9th grade. These schools still cater to the top 5% of students in terms of the best teachers, best classes, and best prospects. Everybody else is still “cattle car’d” through the system. The parents of the other 95% are mainly just glad their child didn’t get shot, assaulted, etc., and are hoping some of the 5% rubs off on their kid.
One of my prog. customers was thrilled that her daughter tested into “TAG” (talented and gifted). That earned the child a spot in a tony “outdoor education” school where the kids learn how to read, write, and do math by talking about trees and nature. It validates the parents as “good parents”, gets their daughter OUT of a crappy local school, and let’s just say the diversity thing isn’t such a big deal.
Anyway, the child has been in this tony school all year, and the parents came to me recently to say that her reading scores are dropping, and they might need help with that.
Irony burns.
Our daughter went through the public schools here. The local one has a great reputation, and a huge influx of Asian families keeps the expectations fairly high. She never thought her high school was very good (her BS detector is highly sensitive), but now that she is coming out of a hard-core STEM program at the University of California, she realizes her high school was actually not too bad. She is shocked at the lack of discipline and preparation of her “highly capable” peers in the UC program. So I suppose all of this “good-not good” education is relative. Imagine if a truly hard core high school education was widely introduced, what it could do for those students, and for all of us, indirectly.
A lot of her success stems from you, not the school. If you think the school is not too good, but make the most of the resources you have, you’ll do better at the next level. A lot of parents in the same school likely found out when their child went off to college that because of the way the system shakes out, a lot of the kids were unprepared. They might still be better off than the average at the college, and there really are good schools in America, but whether kids leave those schools prepared generally comes down to parenting effectiveness.
There was a report a few years ago out of the Cal-State school system that kids who were valedictorians from certain school districts were showing up at California colleges utterly incapable of college-level work. It was part of a study that got memory-holed which showed how USC (among others) was ethnically-segregating students in the dormatories because it was crushing the kids’ souls to show up at USC as a valedictorian, but needing tutors for every class because they could not read, write, or solve college-level material.
Just tragic. Wish I could find that report, but haven’t been able to. NRO had some commentary on it several years ago, but I’ve never been able to find it since.
I blame the genes, in her case. She claims she is borderline “Aspy” (and I probably am, too), and she makes her ability to laser focus on specific things and see things in her own wonky way work for her. One needs to use the tools God gives you.
Play to your strengths!
In the land of the blind the man with one eye is king.
I think what you describe is driving a lot of the SJW phenomenon. They get sunshine piped up their asses for four years in high school then get to a university and fail. To paraphrase an engineer friend:
lim
GPA -> 0 [pre med major] = [gender studies major]
I used to recruit for a college. I spent seven years mostly working with Hispanic high schools. It killed me every time I spoke to some kid with a 4.0, class president, captain of a team, etc. when we got to the SATs (I learned early on to always ask about those last). He or she would proudly (and that was very likely the highest SAT score in the high school) tell me that his score was 900 math + verbal and it was like a kick in the crotch every time. I mean it just sucked the life out of me for the rest of the evening.
We have a son we home schooled and never used any grades. We put together a family high school transcript without the grades and took him around to engineering schools. One of them accepted kids over a threshold Act or SAT score. He got an acceptance letter almost immediate our visit. He’s about to finish his second year in EE.
It has been demonstrated that, between public and private schools, there is but thirty to ninety minutes of actual educating per day. My now dim personal recollection of 19th century German education suggests thirty minutes at most. When Tocqueville described Americans as the “best educated people on earth” in 1831 he noted that this came through but a few years of formal schooling or, in the frontier, becoming literalte through the bible and the odd volume of Shakespeare, while constantly applying their literacy to the education of work from an early age. He pronounced the American mind to be Cartesian, to have an unusually practical eye for solving problems.
While they still existed into the second half of the 20th century the greatest statistical success in 1-8 was the one room schoolhouse, not because that model has advantages but because they were not laboring under the assumption that they had a good one.
Yup, I always encourage my customers to “clock ’em”…actually spend a day volunteering at the school, and keep a stopwatch that runs anytime the kids are in the hall walking from here to there, outside playing (very necessary, don’t get me wrong), “settling down”, eating lunch, getting ready to go home, etc.
I’d wager it’s more like 50% of the day, but it’s the NFL analogy…in a 3 hour game, there’s really only about 10-15 minutes of actual on-field action (plays being run).
Ditto when the parents tell me their kids have 2 hours of homework every night. I tell them “Make your kid do their work in the kitchen and time them. Chances are, it’s 20 minutes of homework that they procrastinate in their rooms into 2 hours.”
Angela Merkel herself has spoken out against multiculturalism and called it a sham. Of course, what she means is that she wants the exploding Muslims to abandon jihad and assimilate, but I still think this is significant because it reflects a much broader European skepticism of multiculturalism.
In the US, it’s considered unforgivably racist to think that immigrants should assimilate in any way. We’ve dropped the “melting pot” and picked up the “salad bowl.”
The alt-right should exploit this. With Europeans taking the lead, we should try to mainstream the idea that we need to get back to the melting pot because the salad bowl isn’t working. SJWs will have none of it. These are people who start screaming “racist!” if you suggest that Spanish speaking immigrants should try to learn English, even if it’s simply for their own benefit.
If the left steadfastly rejects a push to get back to the melting pot, and they would, it would redpill many average whites and from there, we could start talking about the need for freedom of association and how this whole diversity thing might not be as great as it once sounded.
Re: “Angela Merkel herself has spoken out against multiculturalism and called it a sham. Of course, what she means is that she wants the exploding Muslims to abandon jihad and assimilate, but I still think this is significant because it reflects a much broader European skepticism of multiculturalism.”
Don’t be misled by Merkel’s public statements, which are pro forma and so much political theater. The blunt fact remains that Germany is, de facto, being invaded and conquered by so-called Muslim “refugees” on the hegira – and it is occurring on her watch. The buck has to stop somewhere.
Why Merkel has allowed this to happen is a subject for conjecture (see some ideas below), but in the end, what matters is that this calamity has occurred on her watch and she has done virtually nothing to protect her countrymen from the scourge of the invaders.
One possibility is that Frau Merkel actually believes deeply in diversity and multiculturalism and has been brainwashed to that effect.
Another possibility is that she is being coerced in some manner into acting as she has done. Coerced by whom? The sheiks of the Sunni Arab world come to mind – who may have threatened in secret to cut off oil and natural gas shipments to Germany unless her nation admits these refugees-cum-invaders. Another candidate is President Erdogan of Turkey, a man known to be an Islamic supremacist and neo-Ottoman who favors the establishment of a new Sunni Islamic caliphate – an Islamic super-state, perhaps with him at its head as caliph. Perhaps Obama and Soros also have leaned on her in ways great and small.
A third possibility is that Merkel has secretly converted to Islam and/or reached some sort of modus vivendi with influential Muslims in the Middle East. This is certainly speculative but her actions are consistent with someone allied with Islam, not someone trying to protect her nation and people from it.
The leaders of Europe, excepting the leaders of the Visegrad Four, Geert Wilders in Holland, and a few others, show signs of being affected with some sort of psychosis related to Stockholm Syndrome or perhaps battered wife syndrome, in that they seem to sympathize with the “plight” (real or imagined) of Muslims more than the safety, security and well-being of their own nations and people.
A fourth possibility is that the some/many leaders of Europe are themselves in favor of mass migration of third-world immigrants into their nations – and are also, at some level, in favor of the mass influx of Muslims and the effects of the same. European reaction to the demographic invasion is breaking down such that nationalist leaders are on one side, and the globalists and their supporters are on the other. In the former camp, we have the nations of Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia and their leaders, as well as Geert Wilders in Holland, and Marine LePen in France. On the side of the globalists are numerous players as well – George Soros, the European Union leadership, Pope Francis, and various others.
The explanation for the invasion-by-immigration (hejira) of Europe – whatever it ends up being – must explain the role of the European ruling class – and its utter failure to protect the nations and their people from this onslaught. With the exception of those leaders who are already resisting (listed above), none of these European political leaders have prevented the chaos and violence being inflicted upon their societies – despite ample opportunities to do so.
A fifth possibility is, global elites profit from the chaos and violence that inevitably ensues from racial, ethnic, and religious conflict. Introducing African and middle-eastern Muslims into white, european, and (nominally) Christian countries is like hitting the trifecta of violent destabilization. How do the elites profit? Look at places like the former Yugoslavia: drug trafficking, sex trafficking, child trafficking, and organ harvesting and trafficking all thrived during the conflict years (and continue to thrive in places like Kosovo, which is literally run by a criminal gang under NATO and UN protection). Similar tactics have been used in Haiti, Central America, and all over the African continent. As the rest of the world becomes used up, the sick urges and insane appetites of the elite require them to bring the chaos and violence closer and closer to home.
Anyway that salad is for the cattle.
“Bring back freedom of association and all the other rights follow.”
This, a thousand times. There can be no Right worthy of the name in the US that does not defend this principle. Sell out on Freedom of Association, and Cuckservatism follows as closely as night follows day. Selling out on this issue was actually the original sin of the Buckleyites, and in the end, it doomed their kind of “conservatism”, all because they didn’t want to be called racist and be blackballed from Manhattan cocktail parties. This is yet one more reason that the Alt-Right has to flee “respectability” like the plague. The desire to win the approval of your enemies is the kiss of death.
The weird part is that the Founding Fathers took freedom of association as a given. It did not even occur to them that a society could systematically interfere with such a natural right…..This demonstrates the degree of lunacy afflicting American society.
In a world without mass transportation capable of conveying anyone and everyone you might want to exclude from your community into your community within hours or, at most, days, freedom of association would have been more or less a given.
Nice comment.
However, you sound an awful lot like some guys I read about a few years ago, Sion Trumble and Franz Paderbush.
Know them?
Always nice to find a fell JV fan.
This is SO true. We are in the process of preparing to sell here in a suburb of Boston that has one of the highest rated school systems in the state. We have been given access to the MLS listings at the broker level, and have been watching with awe houses selling the Monday after an open house weekend. One that sold this last Monday had 27 offers and went for $35,000 over listing price in a bidding war on a $400,000, 3 bedroom house that was listed on Thursday!! Our broker says everyone says the schools are the #1 reason to come to this town. Looking forward to the premium, as we are bailing out of this state (Warren was the last straw) and moving to our Florida home full time. I’ll be able to buy an even bigger boat. Our business is coming along as well. Bye, Mass!
Walking to freedom
There are indeed many “work arounds” for this issue. As a landlord I had to find them and employ for survival.
i agree. but for these work arounds the gentrification would have happened a decade ago