Dictatorship, The Duc de Saint-Simon, and Kim Kardashian
Daniel Pipes’ superb 1997 book Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From dissects the phenomenon in Communist and Arab dictatorships. What does that have to do, though, with the absurd Ms. Kardashian? On the surface, the behavior of paranoids, who see significance in random and unrelated facts, is identical to the consumers of gossip, who also see significance in random and unrelated facts. Courtiers at Versailles, or bureaucrats in a dictatorship, are functionally paranoid, whatever their inner mental state, because Stalin as well as the Sun-King created a dystopia in which there is a great deal about which to be paranoid.
Here, I think, is the secret of Ms. Kardashian’s celebrity: In today’s America, rewards and punishments seem almost as arbitrary as they did in the Bourbon court. Unlike the 1950s and 1960s, when millions of star-struck kids set off to study science — the world recaptured nostalgically in the 1999 film October Sky -- the vast majority of Americans stare uncomprehending at the number nerds who build software companies or trade at hedge funds. Quantitative faculties at top universities would shut down if Chinese and Indian students stayed at home. Whether the success story involves a popular figure like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, or hated figures from Wall Street, most people simply cannot imagine themselves doing what they do, the way the coal miners’ kids of the 1950s could imagine themselves as rocket scientists.
By the same token, Americans do not understand why they have been afflicted with falling home equity and poorer job prospects. The gap between winners and losers yawns wide. It doesn’t help to explain that America’s $6 trillion imports of capital between 1998 and 2007 pumped air into the housing bubble, and that the people in effect created their own Ponzi scheme. Americans do not understand their own unpreparedness to confront a global market in which America’s monopoly on markets and talent is fraying.
Nonetheless people need a success story with which to identify, and the arbitrary elevation of undistinguished individuals provides a proxy. Very few people can imagine themselves founding a biotech company that applies quantum mechanics to molecular processes, but anyone can imagine becoming a celebrity who is famous for being famous. The definitive celebrity who is famous for being famous, of course, is Barack Obama, the one-term senator from Illinois without a single accomplishment to his name — not an article in a law review, not a piece of legislation — who levered himself into the presidency.
I don’t mean to imply that all is lost. America remains the world’s greatest country with vast resources of energy and creativity. But we are losing time. A physics professor at MIT told me the other day that the Chinese students at MIT now have a better chance of obtaining a six-figure salary on graduation if they go home to China than if they stay in the United States. Restoring entrepreneurship — the chance for ordinary people to succeed on their work and talent — is the answer. We have time, but not all the time in the world. If we fail (and if the celebrity-in-chief is re-elected next year), we may become a different kind of country.
We are destroying your currency and economy. We are setting the stages for a New World Order and One World Government. The nation-state no longer exists. Patriotism and nationalism is dead. There will some pain for some people. Adjustments will have to be made. It will require a whole new mindset. Don’t think of yourself as an American citizen. Think of yourself as a global citizen, a citizen of the world. We are entering a new era in the history of mankind. Those who refuse to join us will cause themselves unnecessary pain and suffering. A New World Order and One World Government is inevitable, just a matter of time. Those who resist will be dealt with… I hope none of you are foolish enough to attempt to resist. Resistance is futile.
Under the guise of free trade we are destroying your manufacturing base, your economy, your currency, and ultimately your sovereignty. Under the guise of all these free trade deals we are erasing your borders, your national identity, your loyalty, we are outsourcing all your manufacturing jobs and destroying the middle class. Your economy is based on nothing. You produce no real wealth. Your economy is a deck of cards which we will collapse when the time is right. We control both political parties. You are peons. You have no power. We control the media, the financial institutions, Wall Street, the corporations, the entertainment industry etc. You are so Balkanized and divided, you will never be able to stand up to us.
The world is changing. Very soon an independent “America” will cease to exist. Get it through your heads. The nation-state is dead. Borders are obsolete. Nationalism is dead. You are not an American citizen. You are a global citizen, a citizen of the world. There is no American economy. There is a global economy. Your system of government is obsolete, irrelevant and inefficient. It will be replaced. Initially, there will be some pain for some people/countries. They will have to adjust to the new way things are done. But long-term things will be much better, much smoother, much more efficient. The world faces many problems, and the only solution is a New World Order and One World Government. We are entering a new period of human history. Those who are stubborn and refuse to join us will cause themselves unnecessary pain and suffering. A New World Order and One World Government is inevitable, just a matter of time. Those who resist will end up in the dustbin of history. Get with the program. Don’t waste your time trying to bring back the olden days. Those days are long gone. That is a good thing.
It is a done deal. We have destroyed America. Soon we will have a New World Order and One World Government — with us in control. It will be impossible for you to fight back. You are so Balkanized and divided, you will never be able to stand up to us. You are on the wrong side of history. You will be swept aside like the detritus you are. Resistance is futile. It’s a done deal. If you’re gonna get raped, you may as well enjoy it…
…and we’re putting something in the water that makes you paranoid. Congressman Paul, is that you — again?
It isn’t paranoia when “they” actually are out to get you. It’s better to be safe than sorry; Ron Paul is the most consistent candidate we have, the polar opposite of Obama. He is also the only electable opposition, due to strong independent and crossover support. Diehard neocons will finish what they started with Bush II, and destroy this country by handing the 2012 election to Obama. That’s what will happen if a mediocre moderate is nominated.
Mr. Goldman:
Actually, my initial reaction was that the “Londonistan guy” has found himself a new pseudonym.
..it isn’t Paul, he didn’t mention the FED.
Bored with the London caliphascist shtick eh?
La Raza, is that you again?
“The nation-state no longer exists. Patriotism and nationalism is dead.”
I’ve spent a lot of time in China over the past two decades and I don’t think word of this has reached them yet. Only westerners, living off inherited institutions and wealth can engage in borderless-world fantasies.
Similarly, you can rest assured our competitors aren’t feminzing their boys and dosing them with Ritalin. Or encouraging young women to become wards of the state through single motherhood. Or deliberately subsidizing and celebrating all manner of mediocrity and destructive behavior. Or otherwise dismantling the institutions upon which all previous great societies have been built.
These are all indulgences made possible by the design margin of our society provided to us by our ancestors. A design margin which is rapidly disappearing.
Odd, I’m reading the Saint-Simon’s memoirs now. I know nothing about “Kim” but the parallel between our economic crisis today and the response of the Versailles court to the severe winter and famine of 1708 is astonishing: so many people did so many of the wrong things, all to remain exercising arbitrary power and preserve their status quo rather than yield power to the marketplace and free trade.
It is indeed difficult for highly-trained scientists and engineers to become entrepreneurs in America. The U.S. is a highly-regulated environment; one must comply with environmental standards, follow good accounting practices, and learn management skills. I’ve met deans who oppose this approach to educating engineering students, saying this is the proper function of the business school. Too many American students think it’s enough to just make good grades; some of the Chinese students do see that that is not enough and spend time boning up on B-school course material, even if they can’t take the course itself. Then they can go to China and can simply bribe their way ahead, not worrying about little things like pollution, 401-Ks, or medical insurance, just keeping the best possible quality of food in the company cafeteria.
Oh, and I can’t help thinking that 18th-century France would have been better off with a good commodity futures exchange. That would have stabilized prices and supply/demand a good deal.
Shouldn’t your last paragraph start “I don’t mean to imply that all is lost.”?
The mania for taxing accomplished Americans in pursuit of redistributionist goals will end precisely when the American upper middle class realizes that the Chinese upper middle class has become more affluent than they are, and so can afford substantially better houses and more expensive toys and vacations.
Quixotic redistributionism is a luxury good in a status-conscious world. As such it’s an essential if you are untouchably at the top of the global income-level heap, and instantly dispensable as soon as you are not. It’s an intellectual vanity ‘hood ornament’, desirable only if it identifies you as one of the few who can afford it.
What you describe never happened in Europe vs USA, why do you expect it to happen with USA vs China?
Europeans clearly have a lower standard of living that has slowly drifted further and further behind the USA, and yet instead of calling for reforms they call for more borrowing and taxing to sustain the redistribution of “wealth”.
I can’t speak for Neville, but for my own part, I guess I have hope that we’re different than Europe. Granted, we’re both having what amounts to riots by the bread-and-circus crowd…but Europe didn’t have large-scale protests on the burden of the welfare state, either. After going to those tea parties, it’s hard for me to see myself as ever being alone again.
The Europeans gossip about their royalty. They tend to have less of our instant royalty because they know their place.
All the Europeans have had, for a long time now already, is their vanity projects and associated posturing so no, they won’t be giving those up any time soon. The US is still, as Elena suggests, exceptional. One of the ways this is true is that the US can still deliver the world’s highest living standards any time we decide we want to do that, rather than snarling at each other like a pack of deranged dogs. The more we focus on getting upset about what some other American has, the more we ensure that the people who ‘have it all’ in future won’t be Americans.
The Kardashian phenomenon is just easy emotional porn. Like actual porn it is just much easier to get now with modern media and the internet.
I dont know if I really think it relates to cultural and economic change but apparently when skirts get shorter and an NFL team wins the superbowl it is time to buy more stock so what the heck do I know about how the universe works.
I like the term “sim-ply”, meaning to imply with over simplflication? Word of the day!
I can’t be the only person who thinks it’s asinine to write a book about good gossip and bad gossip, right? And I always thought famous-for-being-famous was simply the result of being very beautiful (without much going on between the ears, preferably) or being connected to someone famous for actually doing something: a combination of simple nepotism and the admiration of beauty, both of which are value-free.
Also, October Sky is one of the few movies better than the book, since the production team accurately gauged what made the book good was the story about science (inspirational!), rather than the love story, which they accordingly deemphasized.
October Sky was wonderful, EXCEPT for the men’s haircuts being all wrong for the period. This is my official Trivial Pet Peeve: In movies set in the forties to early sixties, none of the men have the expected buzz cuts! Damn fool vain actors. Captain America had a terrific forties vibe going – but a whole movie full of soldiers fighting the Big One, and not a proper military cut in the lot! Almost ruined the whole thing.
Thank you for entertaining my hobbyhorse. We now return you to your regularly scheduled intelligent discussion…
A Chinese physicist can make more by going back to China because China doesn’t flood its labor market with foreign physicists. As much as young Americans are exorted to get technical education, there is little reason to. There is no money or job security in it, and not even any respect. You will work with a lot of Asians (east or south) who didn’t get the memo we are all one big happy family and try to push you out in favor of their own ethnic group.
“You will work with a lot of Asians (east or south) who didn’t get the memo we are all one big happy family and try to push you out in favor of their own ethnic group.”
I have seen this happen. And as the writer implies, it is not a united front: for example, the Han Chinese will try to shut out the Cantonese and Koreans.
Other issues biasing the system: affirmative action, which works against white males and in favor of Asians (citizenship is not counted), universities which collect greater overhead fees from sponsors of foreign students than from Americans, and the habits of the students themselves who have been brought up with the credo that stealing intellectual property from another student or even a professor isn’t stealing unless something physical was swiped.
Taken together you can see that while such students may be clever and smart and survive to graduate, they won’t necessarily make the best engineers, nor even effective scientists.
Except that “Asians” are not always separated from whites when it comes to AA anymore. Things are changing.
Spot on – this is the world I live in. The author illustrates the lack of respect by calling technical people “nerds” in this very article. I’ve had asian coworkers ask me what the term means. I think that says a lot.
Paul isn’t all in on the one world government thing, David. He doesn’t have to be.
“the Chinese students at MIT now have a better chance of obtaining a six-figure salary on graduation if they go home to China than if they stay in the United States.” If Skolkovo succeeds in luring billions in foreign investment the same will be true for Russian U.S. grads returning home to Russia. The ‘we suck less than everyone else, at least’ complacency of the Anglo-American elite is disgusting. I’d take living in the worst neighborhood in Moscow over the worst ‘hood in New York or London anyday.
“Bored with the London caliphascist shtick eh?” I kind of wonder why Spengler’s blog of all the PJM blogs attracts this type. Anyway, I expect the massive influx of robotic anti-Ron Paul bots to swarm PJM shortly after Ron Paul wins Iowa.
It doesn’t; check out “La Raza”‘s comments on El Emparedado‘s articles. Whether an actual human being, a spambot, or a liberal, it just has a rant template into which a few marginally-relevant keywords (“gringo”, “dhimmi”, “American citizen”) are inserted.
Having long hoped for a grand unified theory of the glorification of mediocrity, I must confess being arrested by the concept of gossip as a primary factor in the general loss of what has long been the hallmark of this great nation, namely a strong statistical correlation between merit and success. But when all the available kudosses can be masterfully re-directed to magically land in the lap of the helpless and the undeserving, can there be anything left for the earnest to glean, and anything great evermore for the rest of us to look forward to?
If everyone’s productive potential was fully materialized, there would be any gossip flowing around anymore, because gossip is method by which the idle give themselves a sense of utility. This period of economic distress must therefore also be a time of spectacular blossoming of gossip, for which the evidence also abounds:
For instance, we hear from the AJ himself that the most deserving of the right to vote are precisely those who cannot produce an ID. Wow! World class gossip, don’t you think? And so on and so forth… So, yes, I like the theory very much. The devil being in the details, let’s hope that some of the misdirected kudosses nevertheless accidentally reach their just destinations, and that the earnests among us will not dwell in the gulch for too long.
I don’t agree with you that Americans “cannot imagine themselves doing what they [quants] do.” I was accepted at a prestigious MSEE program in the early 90′s. When I went to check it out, I found that nearly everyone in the classes and hallways was a non-native English speaker, including the person assigned to be my faculty advisor. It wasn’t that I couldn’t imagine myself as an engineer (I already was one). I just couldn’t see myself spending two or three years in a program where there was no one I could go out for a beer with or talk sports and current events — an utter outsider. I never enrolled and eventually drifted into the business side of things and got along famously with engineers of all ethnicities. I still use statistics, algebra, and calculus in my personal and professional lives.
You know better than anyone that demographics has a tipping point. In many top-tier engineering and science programs, I suspect that point was reached over two decades ago.
Of course there are Americans who excel at MSEE — there are far too few of them. As the bar rises, fewer get over it.
Spengler, have you totally missed the fact that all those Indian and Chinese quants are working for peanuts, getting the jobs because Americans expect both more of a middle-class wage, and also more justice in receiving a piece of the value they achieve?
Smart American kids avoid the STEM degrees now because they can earn more money by dropping out of college and opening up a sandwich shop. American business imports cheap labor and lives with the results. You can chalk up our current economic meltdown both to the management attitudes and the indifferent quality of that cheap imported labor.
You write about abitrary rewards and punishments, and miss this?
Josh, as I wrote earlier, the Indian and Chinese quants who worked for me weren’t earning peanuts. They were earning a solid six figures, some of them mid six figures. But they were top of the line — Indians from the Technology Institutes (where the application to acceptance rate is 500:1) and equivalents.
David – totally with you on the entrepreneurship, but I think you are taking the wrong lesson from Kim Kardashian. Her social ‘success’ doesn’t show that rewards are granted arbitrarily, it shows that rewards are collected more and more in our country based on who you know not what you know. Another example is Chelsea Clinton being given a plumb job at NBC news without even an internship at a lower level of the TV business.
People will imitate success and if success is gained through connections rather than hard work, its a better idea to work on your connections rather than your work skills.
Every time I try I just can not get the full “first video” of Kim; So it is really hard to comment on her intellect. Can some one help me out with a “free” viewing of said video??
Globalist, re: “It is a done deal. We have destroyed America. Soon we will have a New World Order and One World Government — with us in control. It will be impossible for you to fight back.” Did I just stumble into an old episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” or something, because your post reads like something the Borg would write if they actually existed and wrote internet commentary.
Re: “A Chinese physicist can make more by going back to China because China doesn’t flood its labor market with foreign physicists. As much as young Americans are exorted to get technical education, there is little reason to. There is no money or job security in it, and not even any respect.”
Bingo, Thrasymachus, you’ve hit the bulls-eye. As one of those hard science-engineering grads myself, I saw firsthand years ago how U.S. companies lay off scientific talent during the first hint of a downturn in the economy, but all of those finance majors got promoted into the corner offices instead, even though not one of them could last five minutes in a lab or R&D workshop, and not one of them could design or invent a product that would make the company money or improve our world. The biggest companies have made it quite clear who they value, by whom they promote and whom they do not, whom they keep and whom they do not. You get more of what you subsidize, in this case finance majors and MBAs. If our nation is truly serious about having more home grown STEM talent, then we’d better stop killing off the seed corn.
Nerds are slower to get promoted in our culture. The majority of people in this country have never left High School.
And the discrimination works both ways. A majority white organization will squeeze out the orientals first. This has happened to my best friend. Half-white and half-Korean, born and raised here, completely culturally American, incredibly smart and hard-working, and it took him a long time to get promoted, despite his numerous patents. When the downturn came, he was out and the whites remained. The workers were appalled, since he was the best manager in the company.
But hey, he was a nerd. He knew nothing of football and beer. Of course, it was an engineering company. You would think that wouldn’t matter so much, right? Shyahright.
If it were an oriental-dominated company, the criteria would be different, but the criteria would still be wrong, because orientals are human, too.
As far as Chinese going home to big salaries, I am highly skeptical. Too few available women. The hip, sweet, free, hot pu*** is here, not in China. They are not leaving that behind for a bit better salary.
Fortune 500 companies run on the usual American locker room culture. On Wall Street, the Chinese math PhD’s crunched numbers in the back room while the jock salesman types made several times the money. But an entrepreneurial nerd who can start a new company will run rings around the corporate types.
It has long been obvious that the path to success in any tech company required knowledge and experience in both the technology and the business of the enterprise. The people who advanced in the good old days came in with an engineering ticket and got their MBA at night school. I can’t imagine that the paradigm has changed, but probably the credential expectations have adapted to the ubiquity of bachelor’s degrees. What are today’s expectations?
Another change that may have affected the number and competence of technical training in the USA was the move to an all-volunteer, professional military. Maintenance of military hardware used to require a cadre of skilled field technicians, and turnover was high because training was excellent and veterans’ skills and discipline were valuable to private enterprise. Military pay was low and personnel numbers were high because retention was not as essential when enlistment after high school was more the rule than the exception. There’s lots of room for elaboration on this topic, but you get the drift.
Now the finance majors are in oversupply. My friends at top-tier B-schools tell me it’s better to have an electrical engineering degree today than an MBA.
Being a former physics major myself – one of the other problems is that most of the grad students that teach are Chinese or Indian, and have thick accents that are difficult to understand. The courses are hard enough already, it’s not helped when you can’t understand a word the “teacher” is saying.
We used to avoid this by picking math teachers with American/English last names, which would sometimes backfire.
Not all, mind you. Some speak excellent English. But it’s a problem that won’t really get brought up in this day and age.
Well, that’s what we get when Americans avoid the tough quant programs, and foreign students fill their places. My point is that we can’t go on that way without becoming poorer.
How many fully qualified American applicants are denied admittance to American engineering programs?
I’m not sure it’s that bad – anecdotally I know a lot of Americans getting advanced STEM degrees, but but they don’t teach, they work. I don’t blame; given the choice, I wouldn’t want to teach college either.
But truthfully, I never found accents to be a real impediment to teaching. Pedagogy is the real killer, and if you don’t have a good tracer, you need to be damn good at learning from a book, or otherwise have a really good basic education. I never had the inclination (or honestly, the aptitude) to be an engineer, but I took my university’s quant track for economics (it’s ok, everyone can laugh if they want), so we were all in the same basic math courses/elective econ courses for a number of years. The upper-level stats classes were pretty ordinary, courtesy of a gifted high school teacher, and calculus, while more difficult, was surmountable by some lecturers and TAs who were actually good at explaining concepts. I managed to muddle through multi-variable based on just that background, but god knows I still have nightmares about infinite series. I couldn’t get over the hump on my own; what little knowledge I amassed is due to a very kind TA in my game theory class. As bad as it was for me, at least I manage to get through it; it cut each graduating class in economics in half between sophomore and junior year; let’s just say I saw a lot of the people who stuck around at Hillel or elective language clubs on campus, if you know what I mean.
I honestly attribute that to better primary and secondary education. I don’t think Jews and Asians are any smarter or study any longer or harder than my fellow students, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to pass an advanced math course if you had a good algebra and trig teacher in high school, let alone someone who was able to really ingrain basic math concepts in primary school. They were ignorant in the kindest sense of the word: they didn’t know what they didn’t know.
I have many dear friends who have their own businesses, as do I. Some have made it…barely. Some have spent the last ten years trying to get some sort of government employment, say as building inspectors, because business has become too dangerous to pursue, and without great profit, there never will be a pension. Although one guy has been building luxury homes for 40 years, he’s not qualified, yet some shmoe he fired for incompetance years ago, somehow is. It helped that his cousin was the personnel guy for the town.
I’m not sure if we’ve become 1700 France or 1917 Russia, but either way, it sure sucks.
Sorry to have taken so long to approve some posts — I was on a long plane flight.
October Sky is the best movie ever!
Bruce,
A retired well-to-do electrical/computer engineer.
It is certainly the kind of movie we want our kids to see, and IMHO the diametrical opposite of the celebrity obsession.
Kim is my hero(in). She is making a living out of being alive and having a big rear end! She made a profit on her own wedding, which for most of us is big expense. That is what won my admiration.
Too bad she can’t have her divorce on Reality TV also. Or sell tickets.
And she does it all I would say in a nice enough way. I mean, what do you want from people? Rather see her on TV than Alec Baldwin.
http://catholicismpure.wordpress.com/2011/12/14/has-europe-lost-its-soul-chief-rabbi-lectures-at-the-pontifical-gregorian-university/
Rabbi Sacks speech about Europe’s future — lots to digest here, and he even paraphrases Jesus, “What will it profit Europe to gain the whole world but forfeit its soul?”
“and the habits of the students themselves who have been brought up with the credo that stealing intellectual property from another student or even a professor isn’t stealing unless something physical was swiped.” Yes, and Sun Tzu would probably heartily agree that one should never waste time creating what one can copy.
The role of H-1B helotry in discouraging the native born from sticking with the grueling comp science and advanced STEM trades is well documented — see comments by Belmont Club resident Josh. Senor Equis himself once visited the Microsoft campus in Redmond late on a Thursday afternoon. The only non-Asian face he came across was a Frenchman or Belgian, judging by his accent. And there were still hundreds of people there. It was like the Bangalore Volleyball league, I swear. David may be slightly less sanguine about China’s rise when he finds out how much of their new stealth fighter was stolen Israeli/U.S. tech.
And while I tip my hat to China’s status as the most innovative civilization in the world until the 16th century, the fact is they’ve been playing catch up since, and their rapid modernization has been done in conscious imitation of Japan and Korea’s copying of the West and doing one better in strategic exporting industries with the State playing a role much larger than any laissez faire Republican would care to admit. Of course, such an industrial policy like METI may no longer work very well in the 21st century, given the current Administration’s spectacular success at picking green energy companies for large Energy Dept. loans.
Personally, I would like to see the H-1B abolished in favor of allowing J-student visa holders to stick around long enough to actually start companies here rather than take their Stanford and MIT educations back to Shanghai and Mumbai. The downside though in our current age of Higher Ed Bubble Bursting is obvious — universities dominated by high achieving foreign students (or at least foreign students with successful chinovnik/bureaucrat parents back in Beijing) and the native born admitted on an affirmative action basis, including plenty of whites. Perhaps the Israelis would have some ideas for us?
The role of H-1B helotry [Sic], I meant indentured servitude. Any visa that requires you to leave the country within 72 hours of being dismissed or quitting your employer should be abolished. Hell, they don’t even do that in Russia now since Medvedev’s ‘Skolkovo’ foreigner (read: Russian Israelis who may want to come back for a stint) friendly visa reforms.
There are a lot of reasons to criticize American immigration and visa policy, including the H-1B visa, but the fact that the visa is tied to employment is IMHO, not one of them. That’s the norm through-out most of the world, and generally, America is pretty liberal about capital investment and start-ups made by foreigners. Granted, the regulatory environment isn’t great now, but it could really be much worse.
But I will grant that Eastern Europe as a whole has really open visa policies. The EU is pretty much murder, though.
Good article. The thing that disturbs me most about Obama, and gov in general (since Bush and Clinton were also guilry to a lesser extent) is the cronyism. If you are a business that is a dem contributor, or has connections to dem interest groups, you are lavished with subsidies, and favorable mandates and regulations (Solyndra and many others). If your business does not have connsections to the right gov people, you are crushed by capricious regulation (Gibson guitar, Boeing, and all the energy industry that is not considered green). It is a plotline straight out of Atlass Shrugged, but today it is real, not fiction.
The tipping point, where there will be no recovery, will occur when most businesses and talented individuals conclude that gov connections are a more reliable way of making profits, than making a good product. We are perilously close to that point now.
“……“and the habits of the students themselves who have been brought up with the credo that stealing intellectual property from another student or even a professor isn’t stealing unless something physical was swiped.” Yes, and Sun Tzu would probably heartily agree that one should never waste time creating what one can copy……..”
In the West we sorta make a fetish out of intellectual property rights. It’s like we want to set up a peerage, living and collecting rents on the dignity of a bright idea they either thunk up themselves or bought from somebody else……
That it isn’t stealing unless something physical was swiped is rather self-serving, but when the claim of absolute privilege to a concept, development or process becomes strained, I think that should be questioned…….
One quibble: Obama didn’t lever himself into the presidency. George Soros, David Axelrod, and the MSM put him there. Obama is too stupid to find his own way out of a paper bag.
“Severing reward from accomplishment is just as important to autocrats as separating punishment from crime.” Yes. Genuine gratitude is warped into cravenness, and envy into resentment.
Thanks for your ever-thought-provoking work.