If your culture believes, as an article of faith, that the gods control the weather, you will always assume the gods are behind the changes in the weather. If it rains, it is because the gods want it to rain. Naturally, you will want the right weather at the right time. For example, you will want rain in the spring, but not too much rain. You will want just enough to have a good planting season, so you and your people will come up with ways to please the gods. Maybe that is some sort of offering or a certain ceremony held at a special place.
If you do all the rituals and make all the right sacrifices, but the weather sucks, you will naturally assume the gods are angry, meaning something is wrong. Maybe the rituals were not done properly or maybe someone in the village has been secretly committing some sin that is angering the gods. After all, what else could it be? The gods make the weather so if the weather is bad, the gods must be angry. Therefore, someone or something must be making them angry. The solution is to find the witch!
Modern people tend to laugh at the rubes from the past, who believed such things, but the people in charge of our modern world pretty much believe the same sorts of oogily-boogily. This story from Florida is a good example.
Duval School Board Chairman Ashley Smith Juarez issued an “open letter” to Superintendent Nikolai Vitti on Tuesday that lays out the reasons she asked him to resign last week.
She has also called a special meeting of the School Board on the district’s future this Friday.
Vitti, in a news interview, made it clear that he wants to continue working with the School Board on the issues she brought up, though he does not know and wouldn’t predict if he will get that chance Friday.
“I just hope it doesn’t end,” Vitti said. “There’s a lot of work still to do, and we’ve gone too far to stop now. We’re at a significant place where stopping doesn’t make sense.”
Smith Juarez’s letter says her reasons for seeking Vitti’s resignation lie in strategic plan targets Vitti recently proposed for the school district at recent board meetings and in the growing achievement gaps between minority and non-minority students.
Smith Juarez likened the continued acceptance of an achievement gap between minorities and their white peers to racism.
“All students deserve a high quality and equitable education; these results do not meet that standard,” she wrote. “To accept these results is to accept the racism that has plagued our district for decades; that is unacceptable.”
How is blaming racism for the test scores any different than blaming the gods or evil spirits? In all of those cases, the cause is some mysterious force that you just have to accept on faith. In this case, the article of faith is not that the gods cause weather. It is that all people are born with the exact same abilities. Even though no one can point to actual racist acts, racism has to be the reason for why the black kids score below the white kids. After all, what else could it be? The kids are the same so it must be the school!
It is is not irrational for this airhead school board woman to say these things. This is the inevitable end of the blank slate egalitarianism preached by our elites. If everyone is born the same, capable of everything everyone is able to do, then the differing outcomes must be due to the process. What else could it be? Further, if the black kids are always scoring at the bottom, then the schools must be unfairly shortchanging the black kids and that’s racism. Again, it is all perfectly logical as long as you believe the magic in the premise.
It is, to no small degree, the root of the war on white males, particularly in the schools. Despite all the efforts to get girls into STEM fields, for example, males and particularly white males seem to take up most of the spots. Yeah, Asians do well too, but they do so despite the lynch mobs chasing them down the streets of San Francisco. No one is chasing the honky boys, so they must be cheating and the only way to remedy that is to give them a penalty. Again, it is not crazy, as long as you accept the madness of the premise.
It is this lack of doubt, the unwillingness to accept any doubt, that led the commies to murder so many people. After all, their system was the model of perfection. The reason it failed was the people, so the logical solution was to get rid of the people gumming up the works. The evangelical egalitarians that rule over us are heading down the same path as the old commies. Instead of murdering the enemies of the revolution, they just destroy their careers and reputations. Whether or not we end up in a place imagined by Kurt Vonnegut in Harrison Bergeron is doubtful, but they will try anyway.
Tocqueville–We encounter in the hearts of men a degenerate taste for equality which reduces men to prefer equality in a state of slavery to inequality in a state of freedom. Philosophic systems that destroy human individuality will have secret attractions for men who live in a democracy.
Right he was james.
“Equality” is the diktat of the lowest common denominator.
“Equality” is dress rehearsal for civil race war.
You can have cultural marxism racist “cultural revolution” and all it implies or you can have civilization.
You only get to pick one.
I copied this from an anonymous comment on Diplomad some time ago. (Wish I could claim it for my own) It sums up the whole progressive argument very succinctly: All men are equal, -> All cultures are of equal worth -> All societies should be equally successful -> Some societies are not as successful as other societies -> Less successful societies are less successful due to the exploitation or interference by the more successful -> More successful societies thus owe a debt to the less successful ones -> This debt will remain until the less successful societies are at least… Read more »
It’s cargo cult mentality. Like electing a guy president who nobody knows for sure where he came from or what his real name is, (never mind his true identity and his purpose as a usurper). It isn’t even clear what his genetic racial make up is. But he had to be suitable, he looks like a black guy, and we all know that bestowed a racial caveat of perfection upon his eminence.
In Harrison Bergeron, Vonnegut, an uber liberal, was going after the Republicans and traditional Americans of the 1950’s, who he saw in 1961 as the cultural fascists of his day. The story made him a hero of the left, who are now going into contortions to argue that it doesn’t apply to today’s leftist fascism: http://betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/liberals-must-reclaim-harrison-bergeron/
The wheel does turn.
What? But the reverse seems so obvious now.
Ah. Here’s the pitch:
“So here’s a way to read “Harrison Bergeron” in a way that does justice to Harrison’s liberating dance: ask yourself what it would take, not to bring everyone down to the same level, but to release their true potential. Insuring that everyone has access to health care is a good start.”
They never change. How to tell projectors that they are the ones projecting?
They’ll accuse you of projecting!
p.s.- perhaps we could tell the author that we do indeed have universal access to car repair, or groceries, or electricity, or health care, or….
I agree, dialogue is futile, which is fine with me. Who in his right mind would want to dialogue or have a conversation about issues with Mao or Stalin?
Sometimes authors tell the truth by mistake. Once published words assume their own lives and can come back to bite the authors in the butt.
I think that also happened to Thomas Jefferson, whose entire life demonstrated he meant only “equality under law, and that only for civilized Europeans, not at all for Berbers, Turks, or Red Indians, or stone age Africans. Even uneducated and unpropertied Whites, particularly the recently indentured didn’t merit full voting privileges.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” — Thomas Jefferson This is the great leveling force of democracy, in which everyone’s vote is of equal worth to everyone else’s, everyone’s opinion is equally valid, and if everyone isn’t equally successful, it simply must be because “all men” don’t yet have Equal Rights™: Women’s Rights, Civil Rights, and of course the Unalienable Right of Anyone and Everyone on Earth to Move to America.… Read more »
@ King George III – Europeans have a long tradition of throwing away human life in an effort to expand our respective empires or to solve our political problems. It took the horrors of WW2 to put and end to it. Even today our lands have ancient reminders; the Limes Germanicus here in Germany and Hadrian’s Wall in the UK are over 2,000 years old. School children visit them on regular outings as part of their history lessons If you drive throughout France, you will find memorialized Sherman tanks scattered through the countryside – often with an 88-mm hole somewhere… Read more »
I visited the ossuary in the nineties. Creepy place. The whole Verdun thing was very interesting for me because my paternal Opa had been machine gunned there in WWI. I am 1st generation Canadian and when I visited him as an adult he told me that it was Canadian troops that had shot him, but he forgave me. However, he was a cheerful old BS artist so it may or may not be true. But he had two large divots in his chest and a missing bicep, so he had the right to tell any fairy stories he wanted. But… Read more »
@ Fred_Z – I meant the end of war in Europe, not the world. So your Opa was German, yes?
Ja, die ganze Familie ist aus Paderborn und Umgebung.
I highly recommend the documentary by Curtis Bowers – Agenda – Grinding America Down. Well done and explains how we got here. There is a sequel out as well – Agenda 2 Masters of Deceit.
This didn’t happen over night and it didn’t happen by chance. That we are so far along now makes those who would destroy Western values and us in the process weep with disbelief and joy that the plan is now working so well.
I’ve bought many copies of both videos and handed them out but I think it’s free on Vimeo now.
@ Meema. Thank you for the recommendation on the documentary. It wasn’t bad, but I think some of the commentary was a bit misleading and I have to take exception with few points. “Socialism creates the conditions for a Stalin or a Hitler to come to power.” In Germany, the Weimar Republic failed because it tried to live up to the Versailles Treaty. When that happened and the depression set in, Germany began to collapse. Socialism simply stepped into the political vacuum of a failed Republic and a devastated economy and then blamed Germany’s problems on the Jews and Communists.… Read more »
A major part of Germany’s problems were the Jews. Hitler put everyone back to work. “… I see the corporations and banks as the biggest threat to western values, and America – along with the politicians they own and manipulate who in turn create the laws that have directly affected the American working class…” Exactly and who owns these groups? Same people that screwed the Germans over. No I’m not a Hitler worshiper but a lot of things he did in the economy worked. His big mistake was attacking Poland. The British have always balanced the powers on the continent… Read more »
@ Sam J – First off, Hitter’s economic plan did nothing to improve the condition of the average German by growing business and economic prosperity. But it did everything to grow the German version of the military industrial complex which only benefited a few major corporations like Krupp, Siemens, Bayer, BMW, Opel, etc. Don’t kid yourself about the Jews ruining the country. J.D. Rockefeller had directly funded the Nazi before the war. Henry Ford helped to produce around 30% of all truck production for the German Army. In 1946, General Electric was fined by the US government for it’s wartime… Read more »
Thanks Karl. One small experience of mine sums corporate greed in the UK for me. A number of years ago I trained people to use computer programs, and one client was a woman who wanted a career change. No surprise perhaps as her existing job was about to end: her final task was about to be the person who turned the lights off in the British based business where once 300 people worked. She was literally the last person out of the door. This company had switched all their operations, even customer care, overseas to places where few were able… Read more »
I recently asked a salesman where a certain brand of washing machine was built. He confirmed the one I was interested buying was built in China and re-imported to Germany. But he argued the quality was just as good as when the machines were built in Germany. I asked him if it cost less to make it in China, why was the price the same as competitive brands built in Germany and could I expect the difference in the sale price. Do you know the expression “Deer in the headlights” ? It perfectly describes his response.
Over to Maggie’s Farm they made a cogent observation about how that equality works:
From somewhere, re oppression in Charlotte:
There’s a Black President
There’s a Black Congressman
There’s a Black Chief of Police
There’s a Black District Attorney
There’s a Black Mayor until 2014 (Jailed)
There’s a Black Officer who pulled a trigger
There’s a Black Man Dead of that gunshot wound
(Me, maybe they have a diversity problem?)
The road to “Equality” is like coming to a faustian toll booth at the fork in the road. You have to pay in blood of your forebears, and your blood later when you find it is a cultural dead end. “Equality”, “Civil Rights”, “Diversity”, is dress rehearsal for civil war. It is all one big lie, a ruze that is cultural marxism writ large. And we all been sucked in to some degree, many took the bait hook line and sinker. Where in all of Christianity and our primal freedoms is there any concept of “civil rights”? There is no… Read more »
Charter school person reporting in… An underreported outcome of the kind of thinking implied here – we churn through principals of majority black schools and promote principals of majority hispanic schools. As we all know obviously innate ability is the same across races so student performance is only a function of school performance… mysteriously all our superstar principals seems to end up being hired in hispanic schools and all our underperforming principals hired in black schools. (We have basically no whites, asians, or jews) There is no such thing as succeeding given the limitations of your demographic and there is… Read more »
Sounds like you’re teaching in Los Angeles. A long time ago I came out of “School of Education” and went to work teaching high school in LA. I was pumped full of “All teachers can teach, and all students can learn.” It doesn’t take very long to realize that your classroom is full of dull and stupid kids. Some are great kids, but they’re still 80 watt brains in a hundred watt world. Everyone in the system knows this, except the race hustlers. And the race hustlers are always the ones who get out of the classroom and get into… Read more »
JWM: when I did my bit of teaching, I realised I was basically there to child-mind (except they were young adults, not physically children whatever their mental age). It could be called a success if the same number of ‘students’ left the classroom at the end of the lesson as had entered. Even better if they actually learned something while there, but that wasn’t priority. The priority at my college was making them stay long enough to ‘complete’ the course and thus the college would get paid by the government. You dreaded even the most useless of them quitting as… Read more »
Those old-time rubes can teach us a lot about the human brain – specifically, how piss-poor we are with causality. If it’s not “strike match see flame”-level obvious and *immediate*, we basically say “must be magic.” And then it gets interesting, because then the wannabe-intellectuals get ahold of it. E.g. I’m currently making my way through the old Malleus Malificarum (Sauron’s Lazy Eye, tr. and ed.) and it’s fascinating. Do witches themselves have the power to do X and Y? No, they only do it with demonic assistance. Do demons themselves inherently have this power? No, but God permits it… Read more »
“Yeah, Asians do well too….” Do well? Damn bastards made me have to actually crack the books to maintain my High Honors “status” in math and chem, instead of resting on my laurels and cruising down the comfortable right hand side of “the curve”. Now, that was only in elite private New England Prep school. Once I got to formerly woman’s college (10% male, with half of those gay) , where “class attendance” was apparently deemed important, and subsequently went to a “specialized” SUNY college where the “graduate” program students came to ME for “help”, I realized “These folks have… Read more »
Sorry Z. When I got to the “R” word, I ‘blacked’ out.
Oh, don’t worry. They’ll get to the mass murdering soon enough. They always do.
If everyone is born the same, capable of everything everyone is able to do, then the differing outcomes must be due to the process. I actually don’t think their point of view is exactly that stupid. Now, I’m not defending it, but here’s how the Leftist position goes. Certain groups have been historically disadvantaged. With blacks, there’s not much doubt that “separate but equal” wasn’t actually equal. So, because of the systemic racism of the past, the current minority population doesn’t start out with the advantages available to whites because of the racism of their ancestors (going to the good… Read more »
Quite so. ‘Original sin’ or ‘karma’ (after the Brahmins altered it)- “You deserve whatever I do to you.”
(Bhudda, explaining that desire causes suffering, didn’t mean some 12 year old had been raped because she had lust in a previous life. The rapist’s desire is what caused her suffering.)
Ah, my old home-town! Once it went black, it never bounced back. Thanks, Corrine Brown, for nothing.
Sentience has truly been a terrible gift. It challenges us to be angels but almost always just makes us less perfect animals.
We have failed to appease the Gods. The solution is simple. It’s well known that more Whites are killed by Blacks percentage wise than the other way around. This is unbalanced and disturbs the Gods. Therefore we must sacrifice an equal number of Blacks to appease the Gods. We will then have equality.
Raw intelligence isn’t as important as the discipline with which it is applied. As with any tool, the successful outcome depends upon the task as well as the effort. Assembling nuts and bolts with a hammer will be as successful as driving railroad spikes with a screwdriver. We tend to assume that the more intelligent among us will readily adapt the tool to the job, and with proper training, the outcome will succeed. However, successfully driving 10 penny nails into Dad’s favorite catalpa tree isn’t likely to bring the reward sought for a job so well done. It is said… Read more »
Gents, we have let the German barbarians into Rome and they are useless – stupid, lazy, ignorant and vile. So, we must do what we must do, namely grind them down until they too are Romans, and hopefully our eventual assembly will be better than Rome.
Many of us will die, and many of the Germans, but it is too late for anything else.
History repeats, it is not a farce, it appears to be inevitable.
@ Fred_Z – This sounds like a Roman quotation. But I think you will find the Romans found our ancestors just the opposite, which is why we were their favorite mercenaries – at least until we turned the tables on them in the Teutoburg Forest.
Nah, I think our ancestors were mostly useless uncivilized barbarians good only for violence, and Teutoburger Wald was one minor victory. I firmly believe my ancestors also had too large a proportion of mindless, lazy, violent, numbskulls as do current American ghetto Blacks. The difference is we support them, give them welfare, support their vast numbers of even more vile bastards, none of which the Romans did. The Romans did an excellent job of culling the German herd. Unfortunately, I also believe that the white, black and Arab herds now needs some culling and that a very great painful cull… Read more »
@ Fred_Z – Fair point. But not just Germany, most of Europe would qualify under your definition, and rightly so. It only took us 2,000 years of wars, plagues and stupidity to get us where we are today. But give it time, I’m sure the culling you speak of will come soon enough. I would argue we’re overdue for a good one, at least by the historical calendar.
To my point of culling – Bill Gates explained his depopulation agenda (depopulation = culling) through the use of vaccines with this quote delivered to a TED audience in 2010: “The world today has 6.8 billion people… that’s headed up to about 9 billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.” Ted Turner publicly announced that he believes the population should be reduced by roughly 70% to the “two billion” level. The Nazi’s practiced eugenics and were held to war crimes.… Read more »
A depressing thread. I always worry that I and mine are suitable for the cull.
I’m blacked out, two days in a row. Heh. The ” it must be racism” is, as you’ve pointed out, central to the magic dirt policies too. Public policy basically being shaped by modern folks using old-tymie mysticismc boogiemen, and false assumptions… oh, but they are REALLY sure Christianity is totally made up. Heh. What goes around comes around or something. The inanity of mankind. Here’s hoping for the best. Something is afoot.. and it’s likely happened before in human civilization… what will it be… Fascinating time to be “aware” and paying attention.
Damned people! ( throws up hands, shrugs shoulders, rolls eyes to heaven ) What did God think He was doing? The dinosaurs were getting along just fine.
Dunno about that. Mallard Fillmore has observed several instances of dinosaurs experiencing the same angst and anxiety that infects liberals. Of course, his stuff is anecdotal, and I don’t think it’s been formally peer reviewed.
Great commentary. Harrison Bergeron, the movie.
Finally Equal
http://www.finallyequal.com/trailer.html
BTW, the strange avatars are back.
They are gone now. I was screwing around with the settings.
@ theZman – How does one go from ‘guest’ to ‘member’ and use a personal icon?
That is a good question. I think you need to register so then you can create a profile. When you register you can connect your profile here to your twitter, disqus,FaceBook or Google profile. That allows for single signon. But, the avatar is a mystery so perhaps the other guys can provide some insight as to how they do it.
Mine is my discus avatar. I don’t remember that it was hard to upload.