Friends, some of you know that I recently returned from a fascinating journey through the touristic hot spots of Peru. More on that soon, but I even more recently returned from a trip to Delaware: the "First State", the "Diamond State", the "Blue Hen State", and, even more importantly, Joe Biden's stomping grounds. The second picture, in fact, is Biden's beach house in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. Pretty swanky, huh? Have I ever mentioned how much I admire our 46th president? Some people say he's a fossil, but I say he's firing on all cylinders! I mean, can you think of any politician who's been more adept at monetizing his political influence, not only for himself, but for his entire extended family? Okay okay -- the Obamas are setting new records, I suppose, but Sleepy Joe is in the mix! Don't underestimate him...and his penchant for payola! While in Delaware, I also had occasion to visit the Air Mobility Command Museum at Dover Air Force Base, the Delaware State Police Museum, the Biggs Museum of American Art, the statehouse, and the beautiful Nemours Estate, home of a branch of the DuPont family. I highly recommend Delaware! It's a charming "jewel" in the Mid-Atlantic region.
In other news, Western Civilization is collapsing -- at least it had a good run -- and we who work in the education sector get a front row seat! Pressure to enforce standards is dropping away, while pressure to "retain" and graduate everyone is rising. Check out this article, which explains the reverse racism at the heart of the enterprise.
RAY TO DR. WADDY
ReplyDeleteI'm unimpressed with Biden's home at the beach, seriously. I thought it would be much bigger. I think it's really your getaway in Delaware, and you are pretending it's his place to make him look bad. Get a life Nick!
Dr, Waddy from Jack: "grading for 'equity' "but prolongs the obvious lie of the powerfully and consistently dictated "truth" that educational underachievement by minority members is caused only by imposed injustice. That it is the result of compelling cultural norms, particular to minority dominated settings and the "Ivory Tower", embodying the certainty that for minority members to conform to positive, constructive standards is disgraceful and futile because it affords only false promise and wasted effort: that conclusion is reflexively rejected by all but the most courageously objective of observers. Why? Because it empowers those who advance it out of ignorant bigotry or from self seeking for material advantage from the forceful assertion of these views . And they are viciously vindictive toward any insolent enough to doubt them.
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy from Jack: The concept of "the end of history" got alot of attention relatively recently. As I understoodd it, it held that the "liberal" democracy( that is, the formerly understood meaning of "liberal" free of leftist connotation), free enterprise , personal liberty and the unprecedented well being manifested by western civilization signified the lasting culmination of human organization. But now we may have reason to believe that our civilization contains the seeds of its own destruction and that they are bearing fruit. Perhaps only this can explain the continually increasing power of counterintuitive , reflexively iconoclastic, historically condemned doctrines like marxism together with the atavisticly subhuman antipathy of antisemitism, all advanced with ruthless determination. The detestable anarchy embodied in these "pro Hamas, kill Jews and Israel" demonstrations may be fully exemplary of this structural rot and of the new Dark Ages which may in some future be perceived as the predictable end of our civilization.
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy from Jack: On "grading for equity" I should add that there are people who support such measures plausibly and with good intent; though they are mistaken, I think. Also, "equity" has become a full blown member of the antiamerican left's pantheon of terms it has appropriated. Being subjective and unlimited, a quest for "equity" can be a permanent automatic justification for poorly conceived political, social, legal and economic change. "Equality": that was getting unfashionable.
ReplyDeleteRAY TO DR. WADDY
ReplyDeleteWhen I taught Western Civilization part time at a local Community College, almost all of my students were White, with very few Blacks at any time, and then almost always from Africa.
The main problem was LAZINESS. I would have open book tests and half the class would flunk. That's right, you got it. OPEN BOOK! Minimal reading, but they never read the text, because they thought if the test was open book, no problem. Most of them could not write a simple paper, much less deliver it properly. These were basically decent young people, but they were lazy, lazy, lazy! The only students who could deliver anything were people from the nearby Catholic town of St. Marys, Kansas, BECAUSE they had a really good education right up through high school. Now, they have their own accredited college (not a seminary) and don't have to put up with the bullshit, and scourge of laziness, laziness, laziness.
Dr. Waddy from Jack: In speaking above of the "seeds of our own destruction" I was suggesting that our civilization manifests integral and inherent faults which may be our undoing. Marxism is the product of philosophy which proceeded from our 17th and 18th century Enlightenment. In a well intended hesitation to take decisive action, for fear of working injustice ,we have suffered the cynical advantage always taken by the amoral in the absence of restraint. Our shameful tolerance of unfettered and often excused law breaking, even unto prioritizing the "rights" of savages over those of the law abiding, even unto making self defense a crime, is fully exemplary of this counterintuitive , self destructive misapprehension . We pusillanimously enable the compromise of many of our vital institutions ,
ReplyDeletesuch as education , law enforcement, punishment, welfare, etc,often by forcing the public to pay for it, by dreamy traitors fully devoted to the destruction of our country and its replacement by totalitarian dictate. Again, future historians (if our civilization's successor (s) practice objective history) may well conclude of us "their fall was inevitable".
RAY TO DR. WADDY
ReplyDeleteWith regard to our present dilemma in the world of higher education, I remember (vividly) talking to someone who got a degree and teacher certification at the same time in the 1960s , and spent a career teaching high school. He made it very clear that the beginning of the problem in education (call it early woke) started then, with the objective of teaching not to have the students learn anything much, but to make sure they were socialized. The professors who taught them were already in their 40s and 50s back then, so where the hell did those professors learn the shit they taught? Go figure. It is documented that after after the 1960s there was a radical change in public schools. Talked to a women who taught junior hight school from 1954 to 1974, who told me that during that time, teaching went from pure pleasure to pure hell. And this same women taught in a school populated mostly by middle class whites. Go figure.
Dr. Waddy from Jack: One more thought on the theme of our civilization's possible suicide: during Vietnam we shrank from putting traitors on trial for their very lives for the aid and comfort they afforded our communist enemy, which, so encouraged, took the very lives of our dutiful soldiers. No wonder ( and no end to the consequent shame accruing to those who allowed this) that so many veterans of that war were shattered .
ReplyDeleteRay from Jack: A civilization which allows its youth the leeway which should be afforded only to those tempered by age and experience (including intellectually objective and principled education, rather than rote indoctrination) is bound for intense dysfunction . No surprise there , the young are ignorant and unfit for leadership. There is no shame in that; it is inescapable fact. Would our military, our most necessarily practical institution ,put new recruits in charge? Imagine a Drill Sergeant constrained to say "we will learn together "to people he is preparing for combat. That would be reflexive "touchy feely" nonsense . In the '60s , faced with advent of an astonishingly multitudinous generation, we allowed them power they had not earned. Naturally they made a rare old mess of it and might even see, before they pass, the dread realization of their smoky dorm room dreams as the country succumbs to the misuse so many of them made of it. I experienced just a hint of what you described in our schools when I subbed a few years ago: I was reprimanded when I told a class full of disdainful brats that they were acting "stupidly". Oh horrors that I did so! If we refuse NOW to assure the vicious juveniles now plaguing our campuses that we will not tolerate their hatred of country , their disdain for law, their antisemitism and their willingness to be used by such as murderous Hamas, they will surely work unlimited , perhaps irreparable destruction of our civilization.
ReplyDeleteRAY TO JACK
ReplyDeleteThe message is that the U.S. has been going downhill for about 60 years now. Actually, I would go back further, and say that the rot set in even earlier, like during and right after WW 2. My granddad always said it set in after WW 1.
He was a veteran of WW 1 and 2, and he said the "shit hit the fan about 1918 and never stopped flying around".
Dr. Waddy from Jack: We almost got a President as venal as Biden: Agnew. He was comfortably corupt both in his Governorship and in his very Vice Presidency. Too bad he turned out to be so; he was skilled at confronting the New Left.
ReplyDeleteRay from Jack: One need only look at pictures of some womens' dress from 1912 and then from 1922. That had to be shocking and was understandably viewed, along with the dawning realization that the Great War had summarily ended the optimistic Edwardian age, as counterintuitive and intensely disturbing.
ReplyDeleteRAY TO JACK
DeleteAs you know, before World War One, a map of Europe was real simple: The German Empire, The Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire, with all of their flaws. But after Hitler and Stalin got done, everyone realized what a paradise those monarchies had created. Had all of those empires decided to disregard the silly crap of a bunch of Balkan ethnic trash countries, things could have been very different. The year of 1914 marked the beginning of all sorts of horrors.
Ha! I suppose Biden's beach house is a tad bourgeois. The DuPonts, by contrast, really knew how to luxuriate in their wealth. Possibly Biden has to be discreet in order to maintain his "yeoman of Scranton" image?
ReplyDeleteGood point, Jack, that the assumption that people of color face insuperable obstacles in the form of discrimination is, in a very real sense, a self-fulfilling prophecy. No one succeeds when they don't believe they can.
Yes, no talk of the "end of history" now! We are coming to appreciate just how fragile the fruits of civilization and true "liberalism" are...
As best as I can tell, "equity" is just the newest moniker for equality of outcomes -- and the related assumption that anything BUT equality of outcomes is indicative of "structural racism". The American people overwhelmingly reject these ideas when they're not sugar-coated.
Ray, I agree that laziness is indeed a big problem among youngsters. They seem to expect that knowledge will be spoon-fed to them, that it will be "fun" to imbibe, and that, at any rate, if most of it ends up oozing down their chins they will get Bs just for showing up. And most of the time they're correct in most of these assumptions, too, which of course is the ultimate source of the problem.
Jack, alas, the fall of EVERY civilization is inevitable. We can only hope and pray that whatever civilization succeeds our own will be better, rather than worse.
Ray, the civilizational rot started long, long ago. One could easily trace it back to the Enlightenment, as Jack observed. A lot of it has to do with misplaced "humanitarian" impulses. The philosophes were trying to make the world a kinder and gentler place, and a more equitable one. And so are the Marxists, in a purely theoretical sense. Results vary, of course.
Interesting thought, Jack, that the young are inherently unfit to lead. I suppose there are exceptions, but EVERY society that I can think of is effectively led by the middle-aged and the elderly -- usually the latter. No doubt there's good reason for this. The young can still be "useful idiots", though, and I think most of our college-aged activists fall into this category. They are not the leaders even of their own movements. They are creatures of established interests, whether they realize it or not.
Quite right: the flappers did us in!!!
I agree: the pre-WWI order, for all its flaws, was far superior to what has succeeded it. Hindsight is 20/20.
RAY TO DR. WADDY
DeleteReal "Civilizational rot" actually started in The Garden of Eden, and has been progressing nicely ever since.
Dr. Waddy from Jack: The shockingly reflexive and open antisemitism now manifested on immeasurably disgraced heretofore elite campuses prompts the question: WHY!?Its historical intensity, its relentless survival over ages, its viciousness and its modern manifestations ranging from the Holocaust, to Israel's never ending fight for physical survival to the infamous subhuman expectoration today freely spewed in places once upon a time havens of learning - all of it - beggars belief; I have never fully understood it . Many creditable commentators hold that the far left thinks that humanity consists solely of the "oppressors and the oppressed". I would suggest an ancillary belief on their part: there are only the "haves" and the "have nots". The haves have only because they are fortunate and predatory. The "have nots "have not only because they are unfortunate and victimized.Consideration of positive and negative lifestyles as possible causes of such condition is despised by the far left. Some historians think that much of the virulent historical hostility to Jews stemmed from jealousy of their ability to prosper and of their tightly knit communities in which constructive standards were extolled. I think Jews today appear to many far leftists to be "oppressors" and "haves" simply and definitively because so often they live obviously positive lives resulting in material prosperity and high civilization. Perhaps this helps to explain the atavistic savagery of these detestable lowlifes and their sponsors, who are today engaged in such astonishingly presumptuous evil in settings
ReplyDeletethereby desecrated by them.
Jack, that is a plausible theory -- but becomes extra problematic when one considers that the wielders of this Manichean vision of "oppressors" and "oppressed", "haves" and "have nots", are privileged themselves, and therefore presumptively contemptible... But maybe this is not such a serious problem as all that, because self-loathing explains a greater share of human psychology than many of us care to admit.
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy from Jack: That's a good point! Its lost on these presumptuous young "sages" but they are lost anyway.
ReplyDelete