Reality, What a Concept
As Steyn wrote in After America, James Cameron’s class warfare-inspired revisionism notwithstanding, the men on the Titanic a century ago in 1912 “had barely an hour to kiss their wives goodbye, watch them clamber into the lifeboats, and sail off without them. The social norm of ‘women and children first’ held up under pressure.” Flash-forward to the present day:
Today, in what Harvey Mansfield calls our “gender-neutral society,” there are no social norms. Eight decades after the Titanic, a German-built ferry en route from Estonia to Sweden sank in the Baltic Sea. Of the 1,051 passengers, only 139 lived to tell the tale. But the distribution of the survivors was very different from that of the Titanic. Women and children first? No female under fifteen or over sixty-five made it. Only 5 percent of all women passengers lived. The bulk of the survivors were young men. Forty-three percent of men aged 20 to 24 made it.
No two ship disasters are the same, but the testimony from the MV Estonia provides a snapshot of our new world: according to the Finnish Accident Investigation Board’s official report, several survivors reported that “everyone was only looking out for himself.” According to a Swedish passenger, Kent Harstedt, “A woman had broken her legs and begged others to give her a life jacket, but it was the law of the jungle.” “Some old people had already given up hope and were just sitting there crying,” said Andrus Maidre, a 19-year-old Estonian. “I stepped over children who were wailing and holding onto the railing.”
You “stepped over” children en route to making your own escape? There wasn’t a lot of that on the Titanic. “There is no law that says women and children first,” Roger Kohen of the International Maritime Organization told Time magazine. “That is something from the age of chivalry.”
If, by “the age of chivalry,” you mean the early twentieth century.
Only a few decades later, unreality began to assert itself. In 2004, UCLA reported, “FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate.” That didn’t stop liberal politicians calling for precisely those policies in May of 2008, even before the economy tanked that fall (a confluence of events that included liberal energy and housing policies), which is why even Paul Krugman is forced to praise the economic benefits of World War II to justify Keynesianism. (And even that assumption is likely unwarranted, some less epistemically closed economists argue.)
Only through repeated election losses have liberals begun to back off from their 1970s through 1990s efforts at gun control. Environmentalism began in the early 1970s as an attempt to create a Soviet-style false consciousness among the middle class, only to collapse into Al Gore’s world of unhealthy twisty bulbs and Obama’s failed venture socialism.
And decades after disastrous experimentation with free love, as Stacy McCain recently quipped, “Young folks have discovered a kinky new sexual phenomenon: If a man places his penis inside a woman’s vagina, she can have a baby.”
In Roger Kimball’s new book The Fortunes of Permanence, he quotes Jean-François Revel (1924-2006), French journalist and philosopher:
The history of philosophy can be divided into two different periods. During the first, philosophers sought the truth; during the second, they fought against it.
In May, even the Washington Post admitted, “20 years later, it turns out Dan Quayle was right about Murphy Brown and unmarried moms.”
Is that timeline typical? In any case, I wonder if we can estimate how long it typically takes after a new left-wing meme takes hold before reality reasserts itself.
Related: Michael Graham on Boston Mayor Thomas Menino’s Catch-22 — attack Chick-fil-A on their stance on gay marriage, even while supporting his local multimillion-dollar mega-mosque and imam, who advocates that every infidel must get stoned. “If I had to send an angry, outraged letter to either Chick-Fil-A (we don’t support gay marriage) or the Islamic Society of Boston (we support stoning gay people), I think I’d make a different choice than Mayor Menino did.”
But then, as Michael Walsh writes in his PJ Media column, “When the Fairness & Tolerance crowd drops the mask, it’s never a pretty sight.”
* Though I must say, Glenn’s even newer book sounds particularly tasty…
“…as communities become more ethnically diverse they in fact become socially frayed”
Define “diverse.” Real “diversity” is the classic American melting pot, where immigrants leave behind the Old World and join the American culture, blend together, and add their own multitude of contributions which improve it. My mother’s side of the family immigrated from Italy in the thirties, and they learned English and raised their children as Americans, who then married other non-Italian Americans. I have a “diverse” ethnic background, but in reality I am about as Italian as your average Korean.
Can you imagine American culture without pizza and spaghetti? Or without whiskey, ale, or vodka? Or how about Chinese take-out, or an Indian buffet?
I think a better term would be “balkanization.” People understand “diversity” only as their differences from one another, and see themselves as something apart from the general culture and in opposition to one another. I blame academia for pushing the idea of “celebrating our differences” (an actual sign I saw on the outdoor announcement board of a local elementary school) and fostering separatism.
I would take it further, take a lesson from this article about “reality,” and say that diversity is diversity. America and England in 1960, arguably had as diverse cultures as anywhere in the world, simply based on individual eccentricity.
When I started traveling around the Third World many years ago, I was surprised at the conformity, not societally, but in terms of individual expression, interests. A single block in my home city probably had more oddball people who’d taken hobbies and interests to absurd lengths than all of Guatemala City.
On a very trivial note, I used to go to banks in the Third World when changing money and ask for brand new currency notes and told them it was cuz I collected them. They just didn’t get that and couldn’t seem to imagine why I’d do such a thing.
Meanwhile, back home, people didn’t just read a comic or science fiction novel, they wrote to each other, made fanzines, and organized conventions. We have beer can conventions for crying out loud.
The word conformity doesn’t exist in a vacuum – conformity compared to what? The ’50s and ’60s counter-culture made a big deal of our conformity without, I think, quite grasping the fact that even in 1950 we were eccentric non-conformists to a surprising degree.
The counter-culture did in fact have things against which to push but they kept fighting long after the battle was won and kept creating things to fight, windmills to tilt lances at. Go into a community college or YWCA and look at the bulletin boards; you’d think they were in Bosnia sheltering refugees from a war.
Ethnic diversity is a crock. It’s a self-contradictory proposition that says at the same time that race doesn’t matter and that it does. If skin conveys no innate quality, as argue the anti-racists, then it conveys no innate quality. You can’t have this argument both ways, but you can destroy America making it by wholesale transfer of populations from the Third World who simply can’t match our bright creativity and intellectual energies.
They fail, become an underclass, and then the theories about racism come out to explain away reality and the faith of liberals and billboards about “white privilege in Duluth come out accompanied by articles on blogs saying white men have the easy road in life. The rest in history; see: Anaheim today – riots.
Bravo
Yep , I’m with you. So before we were diverse and multi-cultural like when I was growing up in the 50s 60s what were we? non-diverse? anti multi-culti? a land of bigots living in our own little bigot communities? I don’t re-call hating Italians, Poles, Blacks, Asians or even Swedes for that matter in my youth or maybe I did and didn’t know it. I don’t re-call a lot of this nonsense that the new diversity crowd whines endlessly about and wants to fix. Perhaps I and my friends were just to sheltered in our lower middle class life. And one more thing for crying out loud, for the love of pete and for petesake I get called out by my children, nephews, nieces when I use these terms, geez o pete.
Thanks
your observation on lack of diversity in other countries i will disagree with. Hobbies are in general not for the working class, because of the time spent in just getting by. On the other hand the people with the means develop hobbies and have real pets not the ones for eating. My other observation that you must live in ac country to get to see it, This means most tourist do not see the people who live in the country they just get an impression. More often than not an incorrect impression not really based on reality. My experience tells me that it takes from three months to a year to get an accurate impression. Some cultures in Asia hide behind the smile, you can say anything if you smile.
I have lived in Asia for about 14 years. I speak one language other than English very well and understand two others. I in general no longer tell Americans about the realities of Asia as they can not really accept the truth. I can tell you one thing for sure they envied their friends whom have gone to America and done very well due to a strong work ethic.
What do a few food dishes have to do with “culture”? Is that what you think culture as all about? Balkanization is not a process. It simply describes what happens any/every time more than one racial group occupy the same territory. This is an un-natural situation; inherently unstable until one group establishes total dominance. Being a member of one of the subordinate groups is not something you want to experience, although US whites are already getting a good whiff of second-class citizenship. Americans are a defined group of peoples who founded America in the 18th and early 19th Centuries. English, Germans, Hollanders, Swedes (Germanic peoples), and Scots, Irish, and English from North and West of England (Celtic). Basically, Americans are NW Europeans. Other NW Europeans have integrated easily with their American brothers — same people. As immigrants came from other areas of Europe, and were less similar to Americans, the assimilation became slower and less complete. Forget different races assimilating — that’s unknown in human history. All human life revolves around family, clan, tribe, nation, race. One definition of a subordinate race would simply be those people who do not understand this. They are going to lose the race-war by default, because it doesn’t take two to fight — one can always surrender. Conservatives who imagine the Hispanic or black vote is up for grabs are insane. The Dems have explicitly undertaken to represent the interests of these groups against the interests of whites. Jews, sexual perverts, criminals, the insane, and general societal misfits are other Dem interest-groups. The interesting item here is the missing group. Nobody claims to stand with white people. Even to suggest that whites have interests incompatible with those of other races is beyond the PC Pale. Why, only a Klansman would even suggest that whites reading vacancy announcements from their Federal Government plainly stating that only women and minorities need apply have nothing to comlain about. Contract set-asides based on race? College admissions that are race-based? What right do crackers have to gripe? The dynamic here is well-known to anyone having read any pre-50s history. As whites are subjected to harsher and harsher subordination with no right of appeal, they will get more desperate. Their only allies will be radicals (in the true sense of the word) willing to defend themselves and their people, just as the Founders did (“men speak of ‘peace, peace’ but there is no peace.”) against the English king and his allies — the merciless Indian savages (read: New Black Panther Party). Can’t predict how it’ll end, but when we get down to it, ‘we’ do have The Bomb and Fort Dietrich…
“One definition of a subordinate race would simply be those people who do not understand this.”
Terrific stuff, sir, but please… shorter paragraphs. So we may all understand you more easily. Thanks for commenting.
America is not a nation, but an ideal. We have interests compatible with all who love liberty, and don’t you dare deny it. And different races assimilating is not unknown in human history, for it is known by the Church: catholicity is one the fundamental characteristics of the Church, as in “every people, tongue, kindred and nation.”
Real “diversity” is the classic American melting pot, where immigrants leave behind the Old World and join the American culture, blend together, and add their own multitude of contributions which improve it.
You do know, don’t you, that until recently, immigrants coming to America would often live their entire lives in neighborhoods where their own nationalities concentrated, seldom even venturing outisde those boundaries.
True, but their children and grand-children, for the most part, would not. These would move on, move out, move up. What made/makes America great!
what you referring to is the language barrier. This prevents assimilation. An example of this is things printed in Spanish promote this barrier of language preventing assimilation. The trend towards division by language is not really beneficial to anyone in the community long term.
Another way is that the left’s version of diversity is diversity of difference. And they preach it as a sort of new national identity. The new “American” is the one who is a hyphenated American. There is no acceptable American culture for the left because that would give commonality and knit us together. Instead, American is nothing more than a place tag signifying where we live. So, an African-American is an “African” who lives in America. A Muslim-American is a muslim who lives in America. There is no American-American, and those of us who are just Americans are missing the boat and will be left behind when the victim train leaves the station.
It seems to me that while some Americans recognize the value of acquiring elements of other cultures others practice a form of xenophobia that also contributes to balkanization. Diversity is a hoax designed to “divide and conquer.” One good example of that practice is bilingual education. The student is taught in a foreign language and ends up being a cultural misfit: not here nor there. “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? Our nation turns it lonely eyes to you…” Teach us to be American again like in the days when every boy everywhere in the world wanted to be an American cowboy. How long are we going to wander in the darkness of Liberalism?
“How long are we going to wander in the darkness of Liberalism?”
Until the bill comes fully due and full payment is demanded.
As evidenced by Europe, we have a ways to go – our budget will continue to be in the red, as taxes are raised and defense is gutted to European levels. The result over decades will be anemic economic growth and weakening world influence. Until finally, the country faces an existential threat (internal or external) – at that point the US will either succumb to the threat and pass into the history books or rise to the challenge and in the aftermath of the crisis return to many of the “mean” conservative values as the population recognizes that the immediate costs of those conservative values is less than the deferred costs of liberal values.
Every kid around the world? Think you can find one NYC Jewish kid who has the slightest interest in becoming an American cowboy? Or an explicitly-American anything? Many have never set foot in America, and some have ever met an American. NYC is more anti-American than Rome or Riga. Look at the voting records!!!
90% of people want to be with people who are similar to them. We want to be with people who are generally in the same boat. Young mothers seek each other’s company instead of chumming around with 70 year old single men. We seek people who are on the same intellectual, social, and material plain. If you are living in California and you are from Chicago and meet others from Chicago you are drawn to them (they know where you’re coming from). Immigrants from Europe initially stayed close to each other for support and comfort. Given to our own devices we choose people like us and we don’t want to be forced to be with anyone. If the diversity crowd really wanted diversity they would stop classifying everyone by Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Age and Sexual preference. Perhaps the Supreme Court will one day rule that we are humans period. As for these Diversity Professors, we don’t often see them hanging out with field workers to broaden their own horizons. It is good for thee, but not for me.
I don’t think the creation of a false consciousness via environmentalism has collapsed at all. What pretends to be about national content standards financed by the 2009 Stimulus Act and called Common Core is really all about creating new minds and values and an economy centered around a utopian concept of sustainability. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/blending-sustainability-and-education-to-gain-arational-nonlinear-minds-and-new-behaviors/ is the most recent post on the issue.
The National Research Council is putting out reports almost weekly on the initiatives being implemented to gain this new economy. Laying out the education components.
And a government using our tax money (and also encouraging the accreditation agencies they have given monopolies of enforcement to) to mandate these new minds that are intended to be unable to think sequentially and abstractly is Totalitarian in its aspirations.
This goes beyond dirigiste and central planning. But there’s a reason that 2+2=5 picture is so apt again. We’re back to what Isabel Paterson recognized as political ideology trumping reality and objective science again.
“FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate.” That didn’t stop liberal politicians calling for precisely those policies in May of 2008, even before the economy tanked that fall (a confluence of events that included liberal energy and housing policies), which is why even Paul Krugman is forced to praise the economic benefits of World War II to justify Keynesianism. (And even that assumption is likely unwarranted, some less epistemically closed economists argue.)”
What always amazes me is that none of the Keynesian policies ever worked, yet so many liberals and people on the far left always want to repeat them. This goes well beyond stubbornness. This just proves that these people have no desire for the economy to ever get better. They only want to spend money to perpetuate a socialist state, and that’s it. Keynesianism has nothing to do with making a capitalist system better, but it has everything to do with tearing it down and insuring that socialism succeeds. And THAT is what is so hateful about Obama. He knows that his policies would never succeed, yet he did them anyway to grow a socialist government in Washington. That sort of deviousness is only to be hated. But I really feel that most Americans are getting wise to Obama’s plans and will put a stop to them in November. If not, Keynesianism will still fail, but socialism will prevail in Washington. And we can’t allow that to stand.
Outstanding!!
This was a super column, but I would have named it “Diversity, what a concept”.
Global warming redux, wherein the ‘smart’ open-minded, modern liberal community decides on the truth and then declares all other data contradicting their beliefs illegitimate, and anyone who believes in even continuing to study the issue without the proper predetermined conclusion as a person to be written out of the discussion via Alinsky-like tactics.
The problem is that multiculturalism has been elevated to a privileged position and ‘Being American’ has been marginalized and reduced to irrelevance. So people have been encouraged to, subsidized to, publicly urged to…identify first with their ‘origin’. This origin, which besides being country also considered ethnicity and religion, is deemed more basic and essential than Being American.
A major first such step was the hyphen. Hyphenization of black people who were not identified as ‘American’ but as having a basic common identity that was not American. African-American. Not fully and wholly and just: American. Then, we moved on to other origin-group identification: Hispanic-American; and began to remove the identity tag of “American’ by always, always, adding some essentialist tag, a tag that was deemed more primal, more basic, more essential than Being American. We added religion. Not Christianity which was deemed too amorphous to be essential, but Evangelical. Then, Muslim, Jew and so on.
Being American has been reduced to a tag, an added-on word to the essentialist, basic, original primal identity. Almost like a hat that you can throw away, while your primal nature is never allowed to wither.
So, this policy and mindset actually promotes, first, group identification. You don’t exist and function as an individual, an individual American. You exist and function only as a member of a primal genetic group. You can’t get out of this group and you can’t really move into it – as you can with your American citizenship. You can’t be an individual, unique in yourself.
This reduction of the individual to a group membership then requires that identification be by the group. This requires differences between groups and this leads to adversarial perspectives of ‘we are better’, we are not like you’ and so on.
So yes, diversity, when it rejects the individual as diverse and instead dissolves the individual into a homogeneous group – which group must differentiate itself from other groups – is indeed a cause of hatreds, racism and balkanization.
I know I sound like a broken record, but as yet I have not heard anyone tell me why it is that “diversity” only matters when held against and forced to be practiced by white, non-elite Americans? How is it that diversity stops at the front door of the WH press corpse (sarc/on), MSM anchors, publishers, editors and reporters, prog 527s, Democrap staffs and college/uniersity staff, boards and professors.
I recently sent this to the UM-Duluth:
Dear Chancelor Black,
I applaud your efforts to demonstrate the levels of privelege that white Americans have used and abused in their efforts to attain success at the expense of people’s of color.
I think though that just supporting and making a video is not enough. You, your administration and the school should also demonstrate their support.
First, you should ask for the resignations of a third of your faculty, staff and professors. And in their place, hire only minorities and protected groups of individuals-not including white women.
Second, you should ask for the resignations of half of the board and governing body and again replace them with minorities.
Third, you should stop the recruitment of white students from in-state and out-of-state until the student population is one-third minority.
Lastly, you, yourself should resign and ask that the board replace you with a minority or protected-class of individual.
Then and only then will you and your university truly support the idea of being against white privelege. Otherwise you are just a hypocrit and are just making yourself look foolish.
I remember, some time around 6th grade, a teacher telling me that America should be a “salad” rather than a melting pot. I also recall having a visceral reaction to that statement, that it was wrong. Diversity should not be a goal. Rather, it has always been (until relatively recently,) the result of people from all around the world coming to America, and assimilating into our way of life. People came to America because it was America. Now, more and more, they come here because we are one of the few places left on Earth that affords opportunity to live free and proud, but insisting on bringing the baggage of the “old country” with them, eschewing the responsibilities of being part of America, rather, just taking advantage of what was built by their predecessors. The whole idea of America the salad has had the result of turning our country into just so much available land for occupation, split up into enclaves of those who would remain foreign. That may be suitable to a World’s Fair or a Disney World attraction, but it is no way to maintain the greatest country in history.
I’ve heard it also termed “salad bowl” instead of melting pot. This is totally different than when I came here in the 70s. America was my destination as well as many of my friends if we ever got a chance to move abroad. When I did move here, the one thing I wanted to do first was to quickly learn to speak “American” complete with slangs. I wanted to be an American and tell my friends back in my native county. I can still remember telling my mom the moment I could converse in English with my classmates in school. Now I noticed many immigrants would not have anything to do with their host country. It’s really sad because I thought one of the reasons they wanted to come here was to get away from whatever hell hole they came from. However, I noticed many want to turn the US into a hell hole they got away from.
I use the “salad bowl” vs “melting pot” analogy in my World Geography classroom. I use it as an illustration of the failure of assimilation that is now accepted as a positive outcome to immigration.
Melting Pot or GTFO, thanks.
Well said!
I’m on the fringe of this, I haven’t read Regnerus’ study, but the biggest lot of opposition to his study I have seen have been critiques, not of his point or his choice of research, which have been generally accepted as valid, but of his methodology, and particularly his assignment of labels. Apparently, he’s been much more discerning in his labelling of the “straight” couples than of the “gay” couples – and if that is true, then his study is flawed and deserves the opprobrium it is receiving. Poor science SHOULD be ridiculed.
However, in answer to your initial question, the irrational will never come to their senses. Look at evolution – over a hundred years after Darwin, with evidence coming out of our ears in support, we still have an entire subculture dedicated to denying reality. The stupid never quit.
The Titanic wasn’t really women and children first. On one side, the crew was putting families together into the boats while on the other the officer in charge dithered and finally began to load the boats with women and children first and breaking up families in the process. Simply put, on one side the officers kept families intact while on the other, the women and children had to watch husbands and fathers being left behind. Of course, a more orderly evacuation and not sending off boats half filled would have helped some.
I too have heard the story of the US being a salad. I blame a lot of that on the liberal controlled government schools. Public schools long ago stopped teaching civics and replaced it with an “America is a terrible place” and racial identity curriculum. In other words they stopped teaching people to be Americans but instead to break down into racial or idealistic groups. Now, people will always prefer to associate with their own, but that in no way means they can’t be Americans first and whatever else second. It is just that the government schools have taught them to be something else and American barely enters into the picture.
Regnerus didn’t even establish a chain of causality, yet they shot the messenger anyway.
But why?! Here’s why:
http://unclevladdi.posterous.com/how-the-use-of-critical-thinking-logical-fall
Besides, “Multiculturalism” IS “Racism,” too!
Here’s how and why:
For instance, ALL the so-called islamic countries are at the exact BOTTOM of all the developmental indexes.
So, there’s only two possible explanations for this: it’s either nurture (‘culture’), or nature (genetics/’race’).
Yet the shallow liberals prefer to pretend that all indoctrinating cultures are equal, and so they all have the exact same effects on their respective populaces. Which leaves only race.
Then they further clinch their own prejudices, by blaming only the White, Western folks for “propping up” all the non-White genocidal dictators in the world (as if only White Westerners were INTELLIGENT enough to manipulate the poor innocent but mentally inferior savages) and as if, without Whites, there would be no non-White dictatorial madmen in the world.
But history and current events prove that all races ARE the same, and so of course the vast majority of dictatorial madmen in the world have been non-Whites (Muhammad, Ghenghis Khan, Attilla, Mao, Pol Pot, Taylor and Kony, Bobby Mugabe) – because their races outnumber Whites in exact proportion to their respective numbers of dictators, which (in all reality, and despite the liberals racism,) only leaves nurture or “culture” to explain islam’s failures.
And it’s quite simple, really: our “Western culture” is based on Confucius’ (wholly Eastern,) Chinese morality, on the Golden Rule of Law (basically: Do Not Attack First! and on “THOU SHALT NOT KILL!”) and so we enjoy trust, progress and civilization.
Islam, however, is based on the exact opposite – on the immoral, brazen rule of chaos, (basically: “It’s our holy right and duty to always attack all ‘the others’ first!” and on “THOU SHALT KILL!”) and so they suffer from distrust, stagnation, and barbarism.
And the racist Blacks are always clamoring for reparations for slavery, while joining islam, despite the fact that the ancestors of the Germans, French, British and Americans had really only lined their ships up along the African coast, and bought some of the moslem Arabs’ own Black slaves from them, at their millennia-old islamic slave-markets!
If they hadn’t temporarily got on board that entrenched moslem practice, then relatively quickly felt guilty and got over it, these Blacks today would still be living back in Africa, and would STILL be enslaved to some moslem Arabs!
So the liberals – including the “Revs.” Al & Jesse – should stop selling this evil, irresponsible and racist, us-versus-them victimology scenario which keeps their Black constituents angry, infantile and dependant on them for leadership.
Oh look, the jackpot making a self refuting argument that insanity isn’t real has more to say. Please go troll somewhere else.
Jackpot should be crackpot. autocorrect again.
“Insanity” is only the pretense you backwards, irrational and idolatrous liberals hold: that effects are their own causes. Other than that, it’s just another excuse to evade the fact that you have no facts to reason with – a critical-thinking logical fallacy.
Basically, I can sum up your “mental illness” meme:
“I didn’t do it – ONLY my BRAIN did it! Whee!”
Grow up and learn to take some personal responsibility for your self … and quit blaming your “autocorrect” for everything else, too; just turn the excuse generators OFF!
MCCONNELL’S TRIPLE TAXMAGEDDON DARE
http://www.humanevents.com/2012/07/25/mcconnells-triple-taxmageddon-dare/
Gallery: Stealth Drone’s First Flight By Noah Shachtman May 3, 2011
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/05/gallery-stealth-drones-first-flight/?utm_source=Contextly&utm_medium=RelatedLinks&utm_campaign=Previous