There is a delicious piece in Taki mag today about how liberal race politics is hoist with its own petard.
According to David Cole, in the LA school system a high school loses extra bennies if the white percentage of students goes above 30 percent. I know: can you spell racism.
But there is a problem! Some of the Hispanic parents are reporting their children as white, because Trump and deportation. So the white student numbers at Hamilton High School are about 50 students above the 30 percent limit.
Guess what! Tearful white moms are deciding to re-identify their kids as Hispanic!
Then there is the delicious irony of millionaire black NFL players "taking a knee" during the national anthem because racism, or something. I understand their concern, but I tell you, fellas, the heavy lifting on marching and protesting was done in the 1950s and 1960s. Your present efforts amount to nothing more than nostalgia and posturing.
And that says nothing about the pathetic effort at colleges to "do something" about sexual harassment on campus, which is a direct consequence of the sexual revolution that dumped the traditional rules about courting with a complete free-for-all. Although, it is clear that the kiddies have retained a certain instinctive reluctance to hop in bed at the first opportunity, since nice middle-class kids seem to need to get blind drunk before they do the dirty. I figure that the truth is that women want to be protected from male aggression, but we can't go back to the old rules because that would be too humiliating for liberals.
And that is to say nothing of the effort to erase history by removing statues of colonial conquerors and southern rebel generals. Really, you lefty idiots. We need the statues so that we have the record of our history out there, the good the bad and the ugly.
What really is going on here, anyway? I will tell you.
Liberals are running up against the fact that you cannot solve everything in this world with politics and government. An example of this is the reporting on the Nobel Economics prize for Richard Thaler, who made the obvious point that humans do not necessarily act as rational actors. They tend, for instance, to "have an outsized fear of losses." But then the writer goes a step too far.
In my view, a big problem with economics is that it has encouraged politicians and moralists to believe they can use government to manipulate the culture, the politics, and the economy. Because science. But the trouble is that political actors do not use knowledge to calm the waters and apply science in an even-handed way. They use economic knowledge to manipulate things in their quest for power.
Maybe we should just leave the "nudging" and manipulating to the moral/cultural folks, religious leaders and what-not. You, see, that was the big idea in the First Amendment prohibition of an establishment of religion. You didn't want one religious sect in control of legislating morality.
But our liberal friends are utterly blind to the fact that their movement, the progressive movement in all its facets from Communism to socialism to Social Gospel, is a movement that amounts to promoting an establishment of religion. Only progressive values will be allowed in the public square; only progressive will inform government policy. All other ideas are "hate speech."
The argument against a state establishment of religion in the First Amendment came partly from the fear of New England Puritanism in the non-New England states, and partly from the bitter lesson of the Reformation and the Thirty Years War over Germany in 1618-48, what we now call "religious wars." The Founders understood that religion needed to be a step removed from government. (Yes, but where is the liberal that understands that World War II and the Cold War were also religious wars, as in democracy against fascism, and democracy against communism.)
In my view the whole liberal culture war will eventually collapse in contradiction and stupidity, in part because ordinary people cannot be flogged and kept at ideological fever pitch forever, as Crane Brinton argues in The Anatomy of Revolution. Eventually everyone goes back to wiving and thriving.
The problem is that lots of people, maybe millions, will have their lives ruined in the process. And where will we see the statues of the liberal idiots that failed to see where their idiotic politics would lead?
According to David Cole, in the LA school system a high school loses extra bennies if the white percentage of students goes above 30 percent. I know: can you spell racism.
But there is a problem! Some of the Hispanic parents are reporting their children as white, because Trump and deportation. So the white student numbers at Hamilton High School are about 50 students above the 30 percent limit.
Guess what! Tearful white moms are deciding to re-identify their kids as Hispanic!
Then there is the delicious irony of millionaire black NFL players "taking a knee" during the national anthem because racism, or something. I understand their concern, but I tell you, fellas, the heavy lifting on marching and protesting was done in the 1950s and 1960s. Your present efforts amount to nothing more than nostalgia and posturing.
And that says nothing about the pathetic effort at colleges to "do something" about sexual harassment on campus, which is a direct consequence of the sexual revolution that dumped the traditional rules about courting with a complete free-for-all. Although, it is clear that the kiddies have retained a certain instinctive reluctance to hop in bed at the first opportunity, since nice middle-class kids seem to need to get blind drunk before they do the dirty. I figure that the truth is that women want to be protected from male aggression, but we can't go back to the old rules because that would be too humiliating for liberals.
And that is to say nothing of the effort to erase history by removing statues of colonial conquerors and southern rebel generals. Really, you lefty idiots. We need the statues so that we have the record of our history out there, the good the bad and the ugly.
What really is going on here, anyway? I will tell you.
Liberals are running up against the fact that you cannot solve everything in this world with politics and government. An example of this is the reporting on the Nobel Economics prize for Richard Thaler, who made the obvious point that humans do not necessarily act as rational actors. They tend, for instance, to "have an outsized fear of losses." But then the writer goes a step too far.
More recently, thanks to the efforts of Thaler and his collaborators, companies and governments around the world have tried to use them for people's benefit. They've looked for ways to "nudge" people to save more for retirement, drive safely, go to better colleges and participate in free school-lunch programs.Oh really. So we -- the ruling class -- are going to use Richard Thaler's insights to manipulate people into doing the right thing, as we wise heads have determined. But what if our "nudges" are affected by our own ruling-class instinct to have "an outsized fear off losses" to ruling-class power?
In my view, a big problem with economics is that it has encouraged politicians and moralists to believe they can use government to manipulate the culture, the politics, and the economy. Because science. But the trouble is that political actors do not use knowledge to calm the waters and apply science in an even-handed way. They use economic knowledge to manipulate things in their quest for power.
Maybe we should just leave the "nudging" and manipulating to the moral/cultural folks, religious leaders and what-not. You, see, that was the big idea in the First Amendment prohibition of an establishment of religion. You didn't want one religious sect in control of legislating morality.
But our liberal friends are utterly blind to the fact that their movement, the progressive movement in all its facets from Communism to socialism to Social Gospel, is a movement that amounts to promoting an establishment of religion. Only progressive values will be allowed in the public square; only progressive will inform government policy. All other ideas are "hate speech."
The argument against a state establishment of religion in the First Amendment came partly from the fear of New England Puritanism in the non-New England states, and partly from the bitter lesson of the Reformation and the Thirty Years War over Germany in 1618-48, what we now call "religious wars." The Founders understood that religion needed to be a step removed from government. (Yes, but where is the liberal that understands that World War II and the Cold War were also religious wars, as in democracy against fascism, and democracy against communism.)
In my view the whole liberal culture war will eventually collapse in contradiction and stupidity, in part because ordinary people cannot be flogged and kept at ideological fever pitch forever, as Crane Brinton argues in The Anatomy of Revolution. Eventually everyone goes back to wiving and thriving.
The problem is that lots of people, maybe millions, will have their lives ruined in the process. And where will we see the statues of the liberal idiots that failed to see where their idiotic politics would lead?
No comments:
Post a Comment