One of the weirder aspects of the Cult of Modern Liberalism is the mysticism that underlies so much of it. It’s subtle, but pervasive. You see it here in this bizarre op-ed written by the president of the University of Maryland.
In the early morning hours of Saturday, May 20, a young man was murdered on the University of Maryland College Park campus, a senseless and unprovoked act. Richard Collins III, a student at Bowie State University, had just been commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant in the U.S. Army and was within days of his graduation. A promising life was ended all too soon, leaving families and communities to mourn.
The suspect is a UMD student. The state’s attorney of Prince George’s County is overseeing the investigation and prosecution of the suspect, supported by the county police, the UMD Police Department and the FBI. They will examine whether racial hatred was a motive, given the suspect’s association with an online white supremacist group; the victim was black.
National polls show that most Americans believe that expressions of hate are increasing and going mainstream. Sadly, such incidents have affected our campus before.
The point of the op-ed is virtue signalling. This guy is a hard thumping Prog, which is the only way someone can become the president of a university these days. Our colleges and universities are indoctrination centers for the Cult. Practical education is not on the priority list. So much so that students may actually get dumber as they go through their undergraduate training. A guy like Wallace Loh has spent his life proving he is completely given over to the one true faith. He does that by writing op-ed pieces like the one above.
That’s easy to see, but what gets lost in all of this is creepy voodoo that supports the whole thing. The good professor is warning us about “hate” as he believes that could have been the reason for the murder. In this context, he is claiming that “hate” has agency and exists outside of human beings. Replace the word “hate” with “the devil” and you have someone from Colonial New England demanding the witch be burned in order to rid the community of the evil spirit causing people to sin.
The professor is not a random nut-job with goofy ideas in his head. The Prog media is littered with references to evil spirits and dark practices. Racism used to mean acting against someone based on their race. Today, racism is a mystical force that undermines the efforts of the good-thinkers. Just look at his concluding paragraph.
These are fraught times on our campus, across the nation and around the world. It is on all of us to stand up and fight racism, extremism and hate. They are cancers in our body politic.
Prog mysticism is so pervasive that no one bothers to notice the use of words like “extremism” anymore. We just accept that it means whatever is currently vexing the Progs. No one bothers to explain what it means, because it is not really a thing. It is the cause of an emotional state in the same way a demon causes the little girl to vomit pea soup and spin her head around. It is so mysterious, that no one ever says how they will fight it, just that it is their holy mission to fight it.
There’s a tendency to assign logical motivations to the Progs. This piece in the American Conservative where I spotted the Loh op-ed does exactly that. It just assumes the good professor is using this tragedy as an excuse to crack down on dissent, as if any exists on the college campus. The headline even accepts the Prog mysticism about “:hate” being a lesser demon that walks among us, looking for a suitable host. The reality is, the Cult of Modern Liberalism is a mystery cult now. It is a religion.
The other day, Al Gore claimed he was told by God to fight global warming, and make a billion dollars doing it. It is tempting to write it off as a cynical ploy, but all the facts in support of his claim have been there for a while. Climate change is an apocalyptic nature cult. Al Gore had a nervous breakdown during, or soon after, the 2000 election and came back from it believing he was a prophet sent to redeem mankind. He’s not the first guy to snap and develop a messiah complex. He’s now the Ezekiel of climate change.
Human beings are believing machines. It is not inaccurate to say we are designed for the task. In fact, ancient people just assumed that humans were created to worship the gods. It seemed obvious to them. Our modern rulers may have abandoned the old gods, but they still have a desire to believe. They still have a need to think their lives have purpose and their exalted status is for a reason. Even though Christianity may have died out in the ruling classes, they still need a religion, one that provides them authority to rule.
What’s happened over the last few generations is the civic religion of American Liberalism has evolved into an esoteric and syncretic adaptation of Biblical mysticism. They have the old concepts, just re-purposed to exclude explicit references to the supernatural. Instead of God, they have the right side of history. Instead of the devil, they have a collection of evil forces like extremism and hate. They may not know who sent them on the mission, but they know they were sent to fight racism, extremism and hate.
“The point of the op-ed” was to demonize a killable enemy while agitating fear and loathing of an evil spirit, “racial hatred”. Any signaling of alleged virtue was a means to these ends, and maybe to bring in some revenue from alumni who happened to be visiting the campus.
Thank you nonetheless for the reminder about Proggie mysticism. Remember, however, that anyone who describes a leftist as liberal deserves to be trampled by a mob of frenzied illiberals who are practicing their mystical religion of secular totalitarianism.
Cultural insanity revealed in current events. Right now in NYC there is street theater openly advocating the assassination of a sitting President, and it’s playing to wild ovations and rave reviews. Methinks the tipping point may not be too far off now.
The more exploitative and evil an institution become, the more it will push the SJW nonsense.
I have had three accounts at the Guardian web-site, under different noms-de-plume, “disabled”, meaning I am no longer allowed to comment.
In each case it was for commenting that their belief in climate change was a religion. No bad language, no insults or invective other than the simple statement that what I was reading was religion.
The lefties who write for and hang around the Guardian will tolerate no blasphemy.
Pros must be defeated, or people in the future will drive around with little statues of Hillary Clinton on their dashboards
Some progs and never Trumpers already have this cute dashboard accessories. She will soon challenge fuzzy dice for supremacy.
What’s a University President to do? I guess they feel compelled to say something lest be accused of indifference. What if he said this? “in these trying times it’s important for all of us to learn how to identify potentially violent loonies and report them to the indifferent authorities”.
“the Ezekiel of climate change.” I don’t know how you keep coming up with these flashes of inspiration, but keep them coming.
First of all, the murder of Richard Collins should be condemned, and that is common ground for us all. Second, using the example of his tragic death as a mascot for political ends is a far greater horror because it both demeans him and then compounds that damage by inflicting false blame on a ill-defined cohort of society (the wrong thinkers). The latter is institutional bigotry on steroids, and history has shown that it is this sort of conduct that leads to gulags and gas chambers. Tyranny grows best in the fertile soil of hive mentality, and that is the diploma being conferred at most universities today.
“as if any [dissent] exists on the college campus.” Can confirm. The College Republicans are five dateless wonders in the same World of Warcraft guild; throw in the Campus Libertarians and you still don’t have enough to field a softball team. I believe that, hormones aside, the reason undergrads drink themselves comatose every night is that there’s honestly nothing left to do. I can teach you everything you need to know to ace any Liberal Arts class, anywhere in America, in about a half hour. And since you can’t do anything — on or off campus — that won’t offend somebody, about the only thing left to do is power drink (hard to commit thoughtcrime when you’re passed out).
That was my experience back in 1980. The ability to reasonably employ the English language, along with the capacity to regurgitate the high points of the classroom sermons, was all I needed. Overpriced textbooks, I just skipped them.
I read the books instead of enrolling.
Never learned how the real world works, and missed all the fun and improvement.
It used to be that the purpose of college was to learn how to learn. Now it’s just the opposite.
Outside of STEM the amount of knowledge passed on in college is minimal, the critical thinking skills minimus.
College degrees appeal to the type of mind that needs everything spelled out in indelible black and white: a degree in book-learning of one type or another is positive, state-sanctioned, unequivocal prima facie proof that one KNOWS. With an immense and imposing scholarly tradition borne of long ages of erudition behind it, a formal education bestows upon its possessor a soothing sense of intellectual correctness, a feeling that his thinking is safely in line with that of other proven sages whose sanctification has been made secure by the passage of time.
Such knowledge, once acquired at great trouble and expense, must of course be safeguarded and cherished. It is a precious item, a treasure-trove to be defended and made safe against all attacks. All questioning of the accepted wisdom, however academic, must be put down; the Citadel must be defended and the heretics at the gates put to flight. The occasional anarchist within the sacred order must of course be heard; should his innovations prove disquietingly plausible they are made digestible through an enzymatic process of denaturization called “peer review” and stirred into the slurry of orthodoxy by majority vote, by “consensus”. Critical questioning from outside the order, however, is immediately rejected without consideration, to be freeze-dried and blown to the four winds with an exquisitely articulated broadside of lofty and withering contempt.
This chartered academic mind, filled with the wisdom wrested from books (many of them quite old) and inured with a presumption of infallibility, is of a kind with the religious mind which holds its books, those holy ones, to be proof that one is GODLY. The Will of God was decided upon and fixed for all eternity by the priesthood in toto and sub rosa, following the same processes described above, and their methods serve as the template for the hierarchy of academia; in truth the insular world of academic endeavor is simply an outgrowth of the ancient priesthood, with unquestioning faith in their own collective intellects substituting for the old faith in God.
Small wonder that academics, like priests, are convinced that their advanced and esoteric knowledge, obtained from other like themselves, justifies them in enforcing their ideas on the rest of us…
Also, Progress is God’s Will.
Wait a minute. I thought running over innocent people on bridges was God’s Will. It’s so hard to keep up these days.
Maybe running over innocents on bridges is progress. That’s why we can’t criticize the culture that produces such things, but the criticism itself is a criminal act. Progress, all for the children, it must be pursued.
More cultivation. If it works, it works.
Odd how rioting potato farmers in Russia were able to create a hyper-sophisticated industry of subversion in a few short years after their traditional nation had been destroyed. Almost as if they were taught by mentors with centuries of experience.
Wait, wait! Nationalists were merely a slightly different shade of Communist, right? They both had government programs!
PS- I rebel against the Newspeak.
Terms such as communism, capitalism, socialism were invented or redefined to muddy the waters. Camouflage and misdirection.
A corollary would be Trotsky’s term, ‘racism’, when he really meant, ‘patriotism’.
Harvard was founded as a Seminary. It’s still a seminary. The underlying religion has just evolved a bit.
Sorry to pimp Moldbug again, but this deal was one of his central thesis:
https://unqualifiedreservations.wordpress.com/2007/09/26/how-dawkins-got-pwned-part-1/
Wow. So much weird yet insightful writing. Too bad that he can’t be more concise. But I guess he comes as a package. Oh, and _the_ most annoying pop-in ads ever.
It would be both on topic and interesting to see a Tl;Dr but the thread is old.
Moldbug was onto something when he wrote his series on Dawkins being pwn’d. Leftism definitely operates like a religion, and it operates similar to Puritan strains of Christianity. But as Tim said in the comments here, it has the marking of the faith, but none of the virtues.
Bring on the Inquisition and the restoration of the True Faith.
I bet that the Calvinist Prots were cultivated in the same way Islam was, and for the same reasons.
War on the Roman Christians- who had also absorbed malign influence. Cultural Marxism was refined millenia before Marx.
The strategy was explained by today’s Spengler, David Goldman. Quite the fan of Angleton and Cardinal Richlieu, he is.
Peace comes when 1/3 of two generations- fathers then sons- are killed. That is victory.
So much better then when one uses proxies, better yet when one gets one’s enemies to kill each other.
The 30 and 100 Years Wars, World War l and ll come strongly to mind.
(The war between Osiris and Set in ancient Egypt, as well.)
We’re seeing the strategy of a minority.
Always outnumbered, they must use other tactics. Proxy armies, narrative scripts, war loans, command-and-control are some.
I also see the Puritans as allies of a specific minority. Newport, Rhode Island, was the largest slave auction port of the time, as was Timbuktoo in Mali. That money built specific schools and temples.
And the Anointed shall enlighten us with Awareness! Awareness campaigns and tent revivals, scolding the sinners, unto the final Victory!
Yet somehow, just somehow, I had never heard of the Bush Wars in southern Africa until yesterday. Hat tip teapartydoc.
The usual suspects, stirring sh*t up between peoples that they might seize the mineral rights. 90 years earlier, the same bunch used alcohol concessions to make Cecil Rhodes a minority interest in the country named after him.
(I had a brother there as a special advisor.
He walked after Carter started changing targets, and then handed it over to Mugabe.
Another friend told me the story; post-Independence became a family feud between royal cousins. He had gone to school with Idi Amin’s sons.
Plus chats with the Ghanans and Togo Ewe in Baltimore and Beltway Rockville.)
So much depth in this posting.
Mystery religions, authority to rule, repurposing apocrypha.
Another 5-star winner, your audience appreciates the living sh*t outta you.
Sorry, Mystery Cults. The distinction is important.
The West commonly equates religion with monotheism. Religion doesn’t need a Diety, or a Beginning and End.
The East still uses Bronze age polytheism, eternal cycles and reincarnation, and pharoahnic emperors.
True religion is Identity. An affinity with a People. A Greek, for instance, doesn’t need a writing to know he is Greek.
Religion is a cultural expression of the demographic.
Monotheism is an idealized archetype; the values of a society, the will of the King, is shown in the nature of that king.
The hajnal Whites’ exaggerated tendency- their mutation, if you will- is empathy.
This allows for high trust cooperation; their King and values are benevolence, sympathy, and self-sacrifice.
This mutation, being recent, has taken hold or is reinforced in much, but not all, of the population. Many will sellout, many will turn.
Han Chinese are intelligent, but lack as much empathy.
They cheat each other like devils, and require an Emperor to rule them by threat of violence.
Semitics have split into two factions.
One, a permanent minority, uses camouflage- common in nature- infiltration, and takeover to repurpose powerful, valuable institutions. Like having a Mafia nephew on the board or in the council.
They and their archetype, Abraham, emphasize cooperation within; literate competence and narrative for quiet conquest without.
They cultivate livestock, sometimes providing hay, sometimes stampeding the herd.
The other faction are mercenaries formed by rape psychosis. Forced breeding of soldiers leads them to wax and wane, emphasizing physical territory and slaves.
The Semitic demographic, being close cousins, use each other in degrees.
Their religions are expressed, not determined, by a Book.
Their true religion is Identity.
Many operate regardless of the Book- it’s considered more of a guideline.
I believe we are seeing demography in action. In 200 years, liberals will have their own language. In 400, they’ll have their own ethnicity. Who will be their King?
My brother-in-law from Mali claims that there are so many countries in Africa, because each powerful family there needs to be in charge of something.
I agree! Maybe that’s one reason why there are 200 to 400 languages per country, large cities often have their own seperate language (not a dialect.)
I heard it three ways:
1. Each government, from the President to the security guards, is one tribe. That tribe controls the most important assets, and rapes the country.
The other tribes desire to sieze the government, so they can hold the assets, and rape the country.
(Sierra Leonan)
2. After Independence, they went to French university and learned socialism.
Then they came home and abolished private property.
(UN translator, spoke Nya and Zee)
3. No, no problems! All is good!
(Malian- one month before Benghazi spread weapons to the Tuareg)
(Ghanan- one month before they fired the white English president and installed their first Black president.)
The problem with this new religion is that it has all of the vices of the old religions but few of the virtues.
If one is a student of human nature, it is an interesting time to be alive. We are all living in the middle of a human existential convulsion. To watch what is going on today is to witness collective insanity, which MacKay long ago labeled as “extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds”.
Camus-
The modern mind is in complete disarray, knowledge has stretched itself to the point to where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.
As the Z-Man has noted several times, the new religion has none of the restraints religions like Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism contain.
The Left and Islam recognise each other because they have the same creators.
They are tools of conquest and supremacy, not of semantics or metaphysics.
If killer whales have a religion, I’m sure it will prove that they are the best cetaceans of all.
That’s it, right there.
A friend tried to get me to watch Bill Maher’s “Religulous.” I could only bear a few minutes. The Left are dogs sniffing each others’ butts. Barking just because.
Hitchens once snarled at Maher’s audience and told then they were trained seals clapping on command.
Then he flipped them off. Why?
He said they were trained to laugh at the words “Bush is stupid”, and as he said the phrase, they laughed on cue.
So he flipped them off as they were laughing. So trained. So bizarre, really.
norman mailer performed a similar “trick” with a howling audience of lefties: Mailer invited “all the feminists in the audience to please hiss.” When a satisfying number obliged, he commented: “Obedient little bitches.”
The guy that wrote this https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100_Most_Influential_Books_Ever_Written&ved=0ahUKEwictZHmrrjUAhUn9YMKHeMMD1oQFgiOATAR&usg=AFQjCNHUJ3up1DO22HoKZxU8812mMxowRw&sig2=LZaGy4tLllysaQ7Bb-loQw comes right out with admitting his kabbalistic mysticism and sheer hatred of anything to the right of him. Martin Seymor-Smith is the name. After I read it I did something I’m not sure I’ve ever done before. Threw the book in the trash and thanked God he was dead. I’ve gotten to like myself as a hater, but I’m not sure I could live up to this bastard’s standards. Getting there seems to be what this is all about.
Good grief,Seymour-Smith was an Astrologer,too? In the words of Dorothy Parker, “This is not a book to be tossed lightly aside. It should be thrown with great force.”
I have been saying for decades now that leftist thought is a religion. I thought this thread was a very cogent and logical examination of this. But, you preach to the choir here. No one that has taken part in the sacrament of PC diversity will even accept that you are referring to them. It is like trying to tell an atheist that their belief system is just another religion. “You idiot! I don’t believe in God. It is impossible for me to be religious!” They cannot acknowledge that their belief in something they cannot see and is impossible to measure is just another manifestation of the need to accept some sort of structure for reality. Same as it is for leftists. It is amazing to me that we have been exhorted to “Know Thyself” since ancient Greece and Rome but so few people actually are able to look at themselves objectively.
Even Comte tried to free the world of metaphysics and ended up starting a new religion. I think the absence of the religious impulse is a form of autism. In some people it is genuinely absent, but it is not normal, nor can it be taught. Those who think they have that lack in a genuine way and are not autistic in that sense have merely adopted a replacement religion. You’ll be able to see this in action in some of the replies to this if there are any.
Terrific observation, doc. It explains something I essentially knew and yet hadn’t teased out of the fog. Hayek vs Keynes comes right to mind. Both were non-believers, but one was an evangelist.
Me too. It takes tremendous more faith to believe that socialism is going to work this time, that we are making it warmer (just not noticing a change in the actual weather), and all the other articles of the Leftist dogma. Way harder to believe that than your basic Christianity.
“Better Ten simple rules than an encyclopedia of regulations.”
Still chewing doc’s meaty comment over. A juicy puzzle for the hungry.
(Patience, good blog, I’m only overcommenting because of time off.
Such a broken drum.
Zman.com is absolutely ruining my schedule.)
Lately, a lot of people are saying “leftist thought is a religion”; but previously & elsewhere people have said “leftist thought is a mental disease”..
Which is it?
is it a floor wax or a dessert topping?
Maybe it’s both.
It’s both in the same way Islam is both, which is why they have found each other.
Everyone seems to need to believe that they have some sort of special insight or meaning for their lives. I guess propagating the species now and again, and then allowing yourself to be pushed out to sea on a piece of floe ice when your propagative capacity has been reached, isn’t going to cut it. There has to be “more to it”.
The whole idea that to face reality results in suicide might have something to it. To spend one’s brief time on this Earth inflicting pain and hardship on others, all in the name of some higher calling, gives a bunch of people something to do with their days.
It is amazing to me that we have been exhorted to “Know Thyself” since ancient Greece and Rome but so few people actually are able to look at themselves objectively.
Yeah, well, if you have any close familiarity with “academic think” these days, one of the most striking features is how “critical thinking” is applied only to those disliked by the academic left. Somehow, that sort of analysis is never applied to themselves and to those they like. Funny that.
https://twitter.com/HappyHectares
A blast, an absolute blast.
I finally looked up the phrase “critical thinking” and found it listed under:
1. Lawyers
2. Bludgeons, unsharpened saw-toothed weapons
3. An assassin’s stiletto
In the mid-80’s my college got a new President. He was a retired white businessman and I couldn’t have guessed his politics. He made a few deals, got the campus fixed up and expanded, and generally did a good job. Classes, dorms, and meals were $13,500 annually at a highly ranked private college that got next to nothing in public funds.
Now the tuition is a multiple of that number, while the curriculum has deteriorated.
I’m not sure if it’s fortunate or unfortunate that the Cult of Liberalism required incompetence – but there sure seems to be an unbreakable relationship.
In the business world, whenever the gals from HR have taken over, it usually means the smart money has left the building. There’s still money to be made, but the SJW’s are on their way to destroying the enterprise. I suspect the same is true of higher ed. It’s a different game, but we are at the point where the ROI is negative for many colleges. The financial side of it seems unsustainable, but I could be wrong on that. I never thought we’d see a trillion plus in outstanding school debt.
The difference is that in business, the P&L feedback loop is immediate and hard to hide. In education, the losses can stack up for years and irretrievably before any institutional notice is taken. This is because education is “for the children”. Totalitarians always cite the children as a rationale for their deeds. Al Gore is doing his thing “for the children”.
I got my first taste of the educational paradigm at a Penn State sports camp. We were walking through the giant freshman dorm and came to a big wall full of pictures of people with fancy titles and educational credentials.
Turns out that they were all glorified RA’s and hall monitors – which were Juniors and Seniors who got a slight break on their board charge when we were in college. Now it’s full-time professional administrators. Guesstimating the expense of paying these useless people made my head spin and went a long way towards explaining how tuition at Penn State got so far out of control.
I have a better understanding of university budgets than most (for my own Sauronic reasons), and for a long time I’ve been trying to figure out why they’ve exploded so much of the past few decades. Contrary to the opinion of many people, the cause isn’t the salaries of the academic staff (which have pretty much kept pace with inflation overall).
Partly, the explanation has to be that there’s a lot elasticity of demand. Basically, they raise the tuition beyond the rate of inflation because it turns out they can. In the US, this must be at least partly explained via the ready availability of student loans combined with a perceived value in getting a degree (plus a confused sense of time preference for money via loans among the young).
And this access to “free cash” has lead to hypertrophy of “add ons” in the form of amenities like fancy gym facilities and student lounges that don’t have much to do with actual education.
There’s also been a lot of growth in non-academic staff. Some of this is necessary due to all sorts of modern government mandates (accounting services and emergency management, that sort of HR thing), but I imagine that the admin types just like hiring people because it expands their empires at somebody else’s expense.
Ultimately, it seems to be like the situation with car insurance, which likewise costs a lot more than it used to. I’ve had three fairly big experiences with repair shops because of accidents (none our fault), and I was sort of taken aback by the “we’ll restore this to pristine splendor so nobody will every know the damage happened” attitude. If I’d had to pay for it directly, I could have done a lot less perfection, but it wasn’t up to me. The fancy repair work was already built into the price of the insurance, which had decided that this was the way it would be, without any “okay, why don’t go the ‘good enough for government work’ route?” option on the table.
Universities seem to work the same way. There’s perceived value in a degree and not much cost push-back from consumers. So the institutions keep expanding in needless ways and the price keeps expanding.
Maybe there is some limit to this, but the “education bubble” that the Libertarian types keep predicting doesn’t appear to be here yet.
“Inelasticity of demand”, perhaps? Or does the elasticity of demand result in ever more lipstick on the pig? I’m honestly not sure which case you are making.
Yeah, my bad. “inelasticity”.
Figured it out, “lot” equals “low” (of course, context is all!). What I cannot square up, viewing my daughter’s resort style, semi-off campus palace, is why the campuses need to lay out so much money to create such a Disneyland? Is there just too much free money around, or are the schools actually in a competition, where demand for sheepskins is inelastic, but the choice of school is highly competitive, based on the dorm life? Haven’t quite pinned that one down yet.
i’ll give you a hint: no one gives two shits about the students; all the grandiosity is for the permanent staff who actually run the campuses.
Uni’s real business is selling loans, not providing adult skillsets. Lemons or Cadillacs, as long as they can push that loan.
A few comments.
1) Administrative salaries may have remained steady, but the number of administrators has exploded. It’s not the same in every system or school, but in some state systems, the number of admins per undergrads have quadrupled over the last few decades. Those extra people need extra offices and that means an explosion in the infrastructure spending. Every college campus I’ve been on over the last decade has at least one construction crane on it.
2) State subsidies have declined and there’s no denying it, but this is just a form of cost shifting. It’s not like taxes declined proportionately. Those monies just went to pay the salaries of state employees, who are often working in education bureaucracies. This is another way is staying the first point. State government now manages some of the task that used to be done by the school.
3) The curse of third party payments. The reason health care costs rise multiples of retail inflation is that there is no market mechanism. The buyer never see the price and the seller never has to compete over price. Therefore, the normal feedback loop is broken. The same holds for colleges. The seller (the school) has no idea what the buyers want so they keep offering more and more stuff the sellers want. This drives up prices, but the buyer never see the price because that’s kicked down the road via student loans.
Administrative salaries may have remained steady, but the number of administrators has exploded.
No, I never said anything about administrators. I said academics’ salaries have stayed pretty constant. The money for the people who run the joint (mostly academics who’ve gone over to the dark side) is pretty good. (Though in their defense it has to be admitted that the compensation for, say, a university president, not to mention lesser cherubim and seraphim, is pretty low compared to a business in the private sector that has a similar income. Apples and oranges, maybe.)
From what I have seen – you’re accurate in your assessment on the rising costs of college level education.
Regarding the cost of car insurance though: I don’t think you’ve got a good analogy going. At least here in MA – the cost of car insurance rose quite a bit because of the obscene amounts of fraud coming out of places like Lawrence. Injury payments cost far more than repairing auto body damage.
And as far as the quality of work : well if somebody else piles into my car and damages it – I don’t see why THEY should get to decide whether or not they’re going to fix MY property to a less than the pristine condition it may have been in before. You screwed up – guess what – you’re going to pay for that screw up.
You must also factor in that the level of professionalism and quality of work expected out of the body repair industry has increased quite a bit over the last few decades. Back in the 80’s when I first started driving – and experienced needing body work done – the state of the industry was not much changed since the dawn of the automotive age.
Since then – the equipment has gotten better , cars fit together better – paint matching is computerized, body panels often bolt on whereas before they would we welded on – etc.
There are multiple things going on here that have affected that much improved you have seen out of auto body repair work.
At least here in MA – the cost of car insurance rose quite a bit because of the obscene amounts of fraud coming out of places like Lawrence.
Oh, ha ha, the MA insurance system. When I went got a teeny apartment in the Back Bay, I had to convert my IL plate to MA. And my rate went from $125 per year to $600+!
I don’t see why THEY should get to decide whether or not they’re going to fix MY property to a less than the pristine condition it may have been in before.
Well, *they* don’t pay for it. Everybody does through higher insurance rates. And myself, I’d rather have it done well enough for a lesser amount and have reduced rates than have the insurance company happily hand over an excessive amount to the repair place at my expense through the higher rates.
You must also factor in that the level of professionalism and quality of work expected out of the body repair industry has increased quite a bit over the last few decades.
Yeah, that’s exactly the point (and it applies to university costs too). Everybody wants the absolute tip-top quality, and it’s easy to let the costs escalate when somebody else picks up the tab (or at least the immediate cost is unclear to the consumer, who in any case has no control over what’s done or what it costs).
Well “they” do actually pay – probably not the full amount of their mistake – but in MA if you are deemed at fault in an accident – you get whacked with surcharges. So you don’t get away just paying the same rate a good driver pays.
I have not had an accident in longer than I can remember – I currently have two automobiles and two motorcycles insured – and the overall rate is not that bad.
Last year somebody decided to take a baseball bat to my car – breaking out the windshield and beating the hell out of the hood. The insurance company replaced the windshield – and sent me a check to get the hood repaired. I pocketed that check and the hood still has not gotten fixed. So yes – I have taken the hit on the reduced value of the car (my property). Did “somebody else” pay for that ? I guess you could claim that – except for the fact that over the years I have MORE THAN paid for those repairs in my insurance premiums.
I have paid enough in fact that I could have brought a pretty nice new car – and drove it into a tree and been money ahead.
It’s not the “others” that are paying for me – I AM PAYING FOR THEM. And the problem isn’t insurance – it’s the fact that the government REQUIRES you to have it. Which is the same issue with Obamacare – you want health insurance? Fine – PAY FOR IT.
But don’t FORCE me to buy “insurance” which is not insurance – to fund the exceedingly unhealthy lifestyles of a good part of this country’s populace.
I refer to our HR gals as ‘zampolits’ which is essentially what they are. It’s a constant stream of Prog and Big Government propoganda from them.
Chesterton’s observation about non believers still holds.
“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.
This craziness is always going to manifest itself in more harmful and weird ways.
That quote always drove me crazy.
Who is it that believes in, ahem, anything?
I botched it before, but let me restate-
So, What, exactly, is God?
‘God’ is social probability modeling.
A neurolinguistic framework, an operating system, a worldview. Most of our partition space is used running social scenarios; we even do it while asleep.
Such an operating system doesn’t take in everyone. It’s not universal, thus it’s limitations. A kidney? Now that’s universal.
Works the same way in everyone.
I do mean ‘God’ as it is most commonly used in daily parlance. I also am fond of such expressions as the Divine or the Hand, most pleasant to the ear.
As Z says, it’s the claim to authority- by the god or by f*king Science- that the real fight is about.
The “choose” part is what I don’t like.
That’s like Pascal’s Folly: either you see it, or you don’t. What, you’re gonna lie your way in? He’ll fall for it, you fooled Him? Everybody gonna think like you?
Now if by ‘God’, you mean your People, your kultur- I will kneel and kiss the Cross, if I may unsheath a sword and charge the mosque. That I will choose.
The Chesterton observation is a lot less complicated than that.
Thanks- that actually helps me understand my ‘autism’, mentioned by doc, below.
I don’t see truth as Truth, that is, as an abstract. No bell ringing, no emotional resonance. Too undefined. Doesn’t satisfy.
I feel the term ‘God’ in the same way; I guess I’m a plain mechanist. Use me in the expendable front line, ok?
What Chesterton saw (in an the era which saw the forming of the Bloomsbury Group) was atheism forming it’s own religion. Mission accomplished That you are not a part of it makes you an exception, not the rule. Camus put it this way–I do not believe in God, but I am not an atheist. Camus was exceptional, as was Hoffer. These small distinctions are not hard to tease out if one is not first being offended.
Quick- both j.wilson’s simplicity and teadoc’s autism are more accurate than they realize.
Much gratitude to both, and, as ever to our brilliant host.
Now, must get over Donner Pass before it snows again. My thanks.
I see you have given this a lot of thought.
Mr. Loh is more shaman than priest, I think. You now almost never see actual apologetics for the progressive faith. It is ritual sacrifices, conjurings, and summonings.
Pagan and animist analogies will serve better.
It is way to disparage courageous leaders like Mr. Loh from your position of white privilrge. Try to see these events from your he perspective of a Person of Color and I think you will gain some empathy. For too long have white men hid behind free speech and free association in order to
Deny People of Color fair access
Leonard Pittts writes on this top C. Read him and you will see that America has a long way to go in I s quest for justice.
You spelled vengeance wrong.
Refugees from the thought desert flock to this oasis to quench their intellectual thirst. Trent’s doubt is the detour that brought him here.
Trent is a classic troll fan. You stay you, Trent, with your extraneous Ttts
Otherwise known as Tiny Duck at Sailers. The forced misspellings and grammatical errors.
He found his way over here, probably directly from Sailer’s comment section.
Thezman should consider banning because this guy’s schtick gets old real fast.
Aww, let him pee in the pool once in a while. He tries hard. As long as most of the discussion here is productive, the occasional reminder of how the other half lives is a useful reality check.
Nope if it is Tiny Duck he ruins and derails every single thread he jacks. Ban him.
It would be pretty funny if that is Tiny Duck. Over at Sailer’s, even after all of TD’s tiresome repetition, a lot of people still take him seriously. Just point-and-laugh. Or alternatively agree-and-amplify (as the PUA types say).
No harm in feeding the troll ducks, as long as the bread you give ’em is poisoned.
Not sure but that Trent-Tiny Duck is an alt-right troll, just having fun bringing discredit on the discredited. Still, no end point to trolling.
Nice ei!
Free association, along with white privilege, ended with the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
I will translate Trent for the uninitiated; We Waz Kangs…..and sheeeit!
Mr. Loh is the president of the University of Maryland, a position of real privilege which he has somehow managed to attain despite the doings of hate thinkers exerting their pernicious powers of metaphysical voodoo known as “white privilege.” Mr. Loh has been a well-compensated education bureaucrat his entire adult life, going from lucrative position to lucrative position – most of them at taxpayer funded institutions – a journey smoothed no doubt by a government sanctioned and enforced system of discrimination in favor of “Persons of Color” (I love the caps here, btw). So while Mr. Loh has been combating the nebulous but potent forces of white privilege during the course of his professional odyssey, he’s had the not so nebulous resources of legions of bureaucratic “diversity coordinators” and U.S. Department of Justice on his side. While the forces of white privilege arrayed against the courageous Mr. Loh are sinister indeed, they seem to resist definition in any concrete way. By contrast the language of 5 U.S. Code § 7201, 41 CFR Part 60 and its public and private imitators is written in black and white.
Cue up R.E.M.’s “Losing my religion.”
And so we see the beginning of another 30 year religious war. At this point the Prog/earth worshippers seem more passionate. It will be bloody.
Hate is fossilized anger, formed by years of suppression. We only hate people we knew and once loved who failed to live up to our expectations, but tend to transfer this larger than life rage to surrogate entities. It is perhaps the shiniest tool in Alinsky’s toolbox.
The blind devotion to this god of the mullahs of marx will lead to their destruction and that of their academic institutions, as the collection plates go dry.