Noticing this parallel and spelling it out is very nice indeed – thx. – – !

He’s sort of a real life Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces.

(This (ok – in parts: great! – – -it is much too long – sigh) witty novel could not be published in a major publishing house today – and would be loathed in the mainstream from A-Z if it would).

He couldn’t say that racial, national or ethnic diversity is no strength in any situation.

He could have just sent them Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assemblywomen

Women haven’t changed in 2,500 years, well except that some of them are men.

Meanwhile at delta airlines.

https://rense.com/general97/woke-delta-airlines.php

Gee whiz: all that verbiage, and he doesn’t once mention proper theology and geometry.

From his new professional position, the good professor added, “Would you like fries with that?”

Plagiarism. Smelly little orthodoxies is a phrase lifted directly from George Orwell’s essay on Charles Dickens.

His reply was much better than one Ignatius would have written. It contained no lamentations about the failures of DIE regarding theology and geometry.

For an academic, he is a Mensch.

Now let’s see the reaction.

Slightly off-topic: why is A Confederacy of Dunces regarded as a comic masterpiece? I read it as a teenager and wasn’t impressed. Then, because Steve Sailer had lauded it, I re-read it in my forties: still meh. Could someone please explain what’s so special about it?

As a minor aside, Drew Faust’s second husband was not the head of HER history department. I believe he was head of the history of science department.

OT- this is too long…

https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-b10a97b599fe1b1a33c8e1bfadfbf238

The “diversity is our strength” philosophy has really taken over in the Department of Defense, where I work on the civilian side. This has resulted in hiring minorities who can’t speak English, stay awake on the job or even show up for work. When they don’t show up it does not make any difference because most of their work has been shifted elsewhere. This goes all the way to the top. Recently affirmative action hire DoD head Lloyd Austin disappeared for a week before anyone even noticed he was gone. This is someone whose whole career has consisted of getting one promotion after another that he did not deserve.

The result of this push for diversity in the DoD is Whites avoiding careers with it. On the military side, there are not enough minorities interested to make up for the Whites no longer enlisting. This means recruitment goals can’t be met. Younger more intelligent Whites really are starting to “go Galt”.

Well, *someone’s* got 25x expenses.

Yeah, he’s Ignatius Reilly, plus about 60 IQ points and an actual sense of self discipline and ethics. He’s who Reilly thinks he is and secretly wishes he were-an educated student and exponent of the Western tradition. Look at him dropping references to Washington and Ptolemy I, dropping in a reference to the Islamic world for good measure, and actually attacking the argument-he’s what you thought a college professor was 50 years ago.

My best guess is the guy is old enough to not care and figures he’ll go out with a bang. All in all, we shall not look upon his like again.

Number one tell of a hack fraud “I consulted AI”

As Ignatius might have said, “veneration of diversity is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate.”

Great letter from the professor.

Also, for some reason this sentence, which appears later in the letter, appears as its own, marooned paragraphed right before he dives into Equity:

Many people who have come to this country in the last four hundred years came precisely because in America they could escape racist or class prejudice and be treated as equals.

I don’t think he believes that to be true.

> Smelly little orthodoxies is a phrase lifted directly from George Orwell’s essay on Charles Dickens.

Plagiarism my ass. That’s an Easter Egg.

> • LOL: ic1000

Jonathan Mason, am I laughing with you or at you? Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

Ptolemy lavishly promoted a new syncretic deity, Serapis, who could be worshipped by both the Greek conquest elite and by its Egyptian subjects.

Only now does it occur to me that if you write DEI so that you’re not shouting at everyone (a big ask I realize), it means “of God.” Coincidence?

“Doctor Faust’s brilliant career in academia was launched by her divorcing her first husband, a medical student, and marrying her second husband, the chairman of her history department.”

Diversity, Inclusion, Equality, Belonging… and Hypergamy, bitches!

“But I think you can read between the lines. ”

Mr. Hankins is assuming too much here.

Pretty entertaining read – it takes cojones to say that these days, and hopefully public displays of courage give others the spine to do the same. I do think that resistance to DIE is increasing with whites who are reasonably successful, but it still is very strong with the high credential but middling income white person who feels they are underpaid and undervalued and want more social standing.

Like a lot of leftwing politics – and as Steve has noted on other issues – it’s really about people who feel like losers demanding an inversion of our social order to put them on top of the underserving current winners.

Doctor Hankins still features prominently on the Bruni Wikipedia page, how long before the censors descend?

Yeah, he’s Ignatius Reilly, plus about 60 IQ points and an actual sense of self discipline and ethics.

Negative. He’s an academic Rip Van Winkle and an erudite Boomer-poster. His missive here reads like the AOL chain emails I used to get from grandmother back in the ’90s. “Did you know that the bottom of a doorway is called the “threshold” because in the Middle Ages, people used to throw straw on the floor of their houses to soak up the animal urine, and they needed something to keep it from blowing out the door? Thus, thresh-hold! Get it?”—you know, that kind of shit.

But the strange thing is, in the current environment, I think it’s going to work. This lame-ass, solipsistic, 20-years-too-late piece of tripe is actually going to work, because the dim kernel of truth within it happened to collide with just the right combination of circumstances needed to bring it to the fore and make it effective, that being the laziness and sheer incompetence of the DIE crowd finally catching up with them. It is a testament to the fact that every dog has his day, and it redounds to the glory of God that He makes even the stupidest efforts bear fruit once in a while.

There’s a plain and a simple answer to each and every quest
From every quiet dancer who might be a special guest
In a movie made for TV or a late-night interview
You might even find them on the young and the restless too.

Hankins is playing the fool by pretending to take the word “diversity” at face value.

Everyone knows, (but never says out loud) that “diversity” doesn’t actually mean “diversity”. Diversity is just another euphemism for “African”, like its predecessors, colored, Negro, Black, etc. Whenever something is negative, euphemisms arise for it but in time the new euphemism itself becomes equally negative and so has to be replaced again and again. Crippled becomes handicapped, handicapped becomes “differently abled”, moron becomes retarded, retarded becomes “developmentally delayed”, etc. “Diversity” has, I suspect, just about worn out its welcome as the baggage has accumulated and soon there will be a new word.

Diversity (too lazy to do the N-gram) become a euphemism for African as a result of what Justice Powell wrote in the Bakke affirmative action decision. He was casting about for a legal rationale to permit discrimination against white people, which is clearly forbidden by the Constitution as are all forms of racial discrimination. And he (or whoever wrote the amicus briefs) hit upon the idea that white people themselves would actually BENEFIT from having “diverse” Magic Negroes sitting next to them in class even if these “diverse” people were maybe a little less qualified than white applicants. This kind of gaslighting ( slaves actually ENJOYED being slaves!) has been going on for centuries. What was new was that it was white people’s turn to be subjected to such official mind f*cks.

Thus the word “diverse” became but the latest euphemism for African. The Office of Admitting More Black People was rechristened as the Office of Diversity.

Actual diversity, as in diversity of thought, is the LAST thing that Harvard wants. If the office was honestly named, it would be the Office of Strictly Enforced Conformity with the Officially Approved Viewpoint in Favor of Admitting More Underqualified Black People , not the Office of Diversity.

But we live in dishonest times where our language has been corrupted – rather than an aid to clear thinking, it is intentionally remade into an IMPEDIMENT to clear thinking. Orwell would approve.

These “diversity” people are no different than Soviet political commissars. There were plenty of brilliant professors in Soviet universities, but they all had 85-IQ party functionaries monitoring their every word and if they didn’t want to end up as a zek in a labor camp they toed the party line.

The only reason Hankins can shoot his mouth off like that is because he is tenured and probably very close to retirement and DGAF any more. But you can bet the farm that any young PhD in 2024 looking for his first job is not going to be as forthright unless he wants to spend the rest of his life as a manual laborer making $15 an hour.

The diversity nonsense is race and gender communism, plain and simple. When Hankins retires, they will probably hire some 300 pound, fat, sassy sheboon with purple hair to replace him and lecture on how blacks created the Renaissance or some such outrageous bullshit. Bank on it.

For those who want to get a feel for the cut of the man’s jib, here is an hour-long conversation with the witty and charming Bill Kristol.

Dr Hankins should get Amy Wax’s attorney on retainer.

As with all academic writing, he makes good points but could’ve done so in a tenth the words. Bravo for speaking up at all; but would be more effective to more succinctly demonstrate how these statements are a sham.

At least Africa is diverse.

Hankins is playing the fool by pretending to take the word “diversity” at face value.

Maybe he is playing the fool, but maybe in a sort Rules for Radicals # 4 way: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”

Like, Okay, you say diversity is a strength? How is it a strength?

Sort of a Goodfellas meets Ignatius J. Reilly meets old school Harvard.

There is a statue of Ignatius Reilly in New Orleans under the clock at what used to be Holmes that Antifa has not yet seen fit to tear down as a symbol of white supremacy.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/ignatius-j-reilly-statue

Diversity is a code word for anti white and white replacement. So too is the word multiculturalism.

He is indeed. Since the reaction will likely not be favorable I pray that he is tenured.

All Our Boy needs is a parrot.

pleasant young women

These are the Mean White Ladies, all of them viciously anti-White, all of them abusive little tyrants. You find them in every HR department and every school starting in kindergarten. Generally, they prefer to abuse children but some of them deal with adults.

were still exempt from taking loyalty oaths

Yeah, this is a religion and should be kept out of the gov’t and the workplace. This isn’t new by the way, political correctness was around by the late 1980s, it’s simply gotten more raw.

All that’s missing is the parrot.

you expect me to read all that?

View post on imgur.com

on second thought, this could be a good defense mechanism. just have AI write you a 10 page diabtribe that not even the DEI people want to go thru.

A true martyr! He’s gonna get nuked from orbit for this.

Bakke (much like Hopwood, Gratz, and Fisher) dealt as much with Hispanic than with African-American. It is the media that reduces all issues involving diversity. affirmative action, quotas, etc to the white/black paradigm. If one does back to Gratz, the University of Michigan gave as big a boost to Hispanics as too blacks. In Fisher, the concern with admitting students outside of the top ten percent was more about Hispanic students from upper middle class public schools as blacks.

Also, part of the diversity push is to help keep programs such as visual arts, performing arts, and parts of the liberal arts and social sciences going. As UT-Austin learned, if one fills up a freshman class with only students from the top 10% of their high school class, no one is going to be majoring in subjects like music, art, or humanities.

Shape Rotators create Good Times…
Good Times create Wordcels…
Wordcels create Bad Times…
Bad Times create Shape Rotators…

forced DEI statements, the logical conclusion of Rule by Wordcel.

Not quite sure I get the Ignatius J. Reilly thing beyond the looks and the autism over antiquity. Does he also pleasure himself with a latex glove or something?

Sorry for the throw-away comment; needed to get this browser recognized as me again so I can go hit agree to above posts.

If you want them to leave you alone, this works really well. Bureaucratic assholes batten down the hatches in a panic when they get this. You can even torment them by actively helping them comply.

“I acknowledge a moral and legal imperative to defend ICCPR Article 2§1, supreme law of the land per 175 U.S. 677 (1900), with which law at all levels of government must come into conformity, and which is to be protected in all civil society organizations. I share this responsibility with Harvard University, to the end of fulfilling inter alia UDHR Article 22, state and federal common law per 175 U.S. 677 (1900). I am available to assist Harvard in complying with its legal obligations.”

Considering the DoD is the enforcement arm of Liberalism, and the rot goes back generations, this is a good thing.

US civilian and military leaders being disempowered and thwarted and discredited and demoralized is good for civilization.

LOL, well-played!

Seriously, if you do a search for ‘country by IQ’ you will get a list of 185 of the 192 countries in the world. The bottom 55 are African (or similar) countries, >95% Black. The average IQ for these bottom 55 Black countries is 77. Diversity would be a great thing for these countries.

If you look at the top 15 countries, 14 are >95% Asian (no epicanthic fold kind of Asian). IQ 107 or higher. Diversity would be an awful thing for these countries. Some questions, to use on those pesky people who argue/accuse…

1) Tokyo is the largest (14 million) developed city in the world, yet has practically no crime. What does Tokyo NOT have, that western cities DO have?
2) What is the benefit to the U.S. to allow millions of uneducated people illiterate in two languages into the country? (Get past ‘food and music’ and you are home-free). Even Mexicans prefer Taco Bell and Budweiser to their provincial cuisine.
3) Take away ‘government employment’ and what kind of workplace success do our Magic Americans enjoy?
4) Is ‘Mexican’ a bad word?
5) Do the U.S. new arrivals want to be American? Or do they just want the ‘free stuff?’

Imagine complaining that the German occupation of France was inconvenient. DIE needs to be called out as malignant and fraudulent, a way for inferior people who do not rate university to receive, not only a university education, but a massively overcompensated university job and a role in presuming to set policy. DIE would never matter if it was just an equivalent to what corporations had already been doing for decades, letting a token minority hold a highly visible low-level job (in which they actually acquitted themselves well anyway). People (who matter) are still not seeing DIE as the death of university legitimacy. Ackman thinks he won. Maybe he did: maybe his goal was to not effect change.

————
OT — Another fine column by Mary Williams Walsh, this time about our out-of-control and out-of-options post-lockdown debt crisis. World war looms. Israel has all but announced that they’re going to re-invade Lebanon. Bai Dien has admitted that bombing the Houthis achieved nothing (but says it will continue, per that one unscientific misdefinition of mental illness). The Ukraine scam is so embattled that Bai Dien is willing to talk about border security to keep the money (to himself) flowing. There will be a false flag. Remember, after the false flag, that the real enemy is our leadership. These people are so stupid and so evil that the only way they know to deal with a major economic crisis is abandoning freedom and resorting to mass murder.

We should all be rejoicing at the news that fewer white male marks are agreeing to kill for the government.

But all we usually get is lamentation.

Why should white men be joining the GD military?

Really? Africa? The three ivy presidents under fire for fostering a climate of anti-Semitism, or whatever, were ‘African’? They all have a shared biology but it isn’t ‘African’. From what I’ve seen, women, and more particularly women of a non-African ethnicity, have been the tip of the spear when it comes to academic degeneracy. See the case of Avital Ronell as one especially egregious example.

Jack, if your clever idea is true, then why are most of the beneficiaries of diversity white women and not blacks?

Someone at Harvard needs to have the nerve to say, “Look, we’re Harvard, and we only take the cream of the crop, period. Diversity is not our primary goal, but brains and originality.”

Harvard will soon become Podunk U under diversity jihadis. Normal elites don’t like to mingle with radicals, so they will stop sending their kids there. They will make some other place the Country Club university.

The smart leftist mobbers have figured out tenured Ivy professors without admin jobs are extremely hard targets.

They still haven’t got Amy Wax who has provoked them twenty times more aggressively (Wax’s repeated and blunt black IQ and crime realism versus this guy’s boomer anti-PC jokes.)

“The university, according to you, espouses an absolute commitment to a set of words that seems to generate positive feelings in your office, and perhaps among administrators generally…”

That’s it.

Words = sounds = Pavlov’s bell = anticipated reward = salivation = lights up pleasure centers in the brain = shared pleasure = membership = companionship = belonging = Us vs. Them.

So, if you are lacking in the positive response to the sound stimulus then the whole chain doesn’t fire. You are not Wired. If you are not wired, you are an outsider. Outsiders are shunned by the community. The EDIB community is intolerant of diversity.

Repeatably, in my discussions with liberals, I have realized that words are for them, mere sounds. If you say, “nigger was a derogatory term for Negros”, they hear nothing but the sound bigger but with an n at the beginning. From that point on, their thinking goes into a programmed loop. You have uttered the impermissible “N” word. The meaning of what you said doesn’t matter, just their programmed reaction to a sign-stimulus.

They are Robots, but flushed with emotion and capable of inflicting harm without remorse.

If Mr O’Toole had not made a carbon copy that was read by Walker Percy’s widow, Ignatious would never have “existed”.

“This is someone whose whole career has consisted of getting one promotion after another that he did not deserve.”

But this IS WORK for a black person. They’re so tired because it’s hard work looking for and then getting hired to positions that offer both high reward and low expectations. On top of all that, you have to sustain the illusion that you’re doing something useful. Exhausting.

It might take a while, but they or their children would eventually fit in. In the meantime, they could start a business, practice their religion, and educate their children without anyone requiring them to hold particular political beliefs. I think our university should imitate America’s best traditions in this respect and make everybody welcome too.

If diversity is not a strength, why is it good for America to permit this (the practice by these migrants of their own religion)?

Plagiarism

……No , he just expects his reader to know Orwell and Dickens ………OK OK that’s asking too much of a DEI apparatchik.

True enough, but “diversity” has expanded to mean anyone but a White male.

This is not, however, the way your office likes to understand the term Equity. In EDIB-speak, it means “equality of outcomes.”

Perhaps the biggest mistake made by getting Obama elected president is that it demonstrated to blacks that whites can make anything happen just by agreeing to do it. All those requirements about tested ability, and performance, and excellence, and training, and experience, and so forth – just some kind of window dressing that whites like for some weird cultural reason.

This is why blacks believe that the only thing keeping at least 15% of pilots, doctors, CEOs, engineers, full professors, governors, Fields medalists, Nobel prize-winners from being black is that whites are unwilling to just make it so.

Well, he’s certainly opened up his valve.

67% of Americans aged 18-24 think Jews are “oppressors”

Something has gone horribly wrong with our universities pic.twitter.com/h0pE2rqark

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) January 20, 2024

Conservatives really need to stop calling it DEI. That acronym is used to treat their fruity cult as Holy or godlike. Instead, it should be referred to only as DIE, as in DIE WHITEY DIE

When I see some Chris Rufo type continue to use the language of the enemy — gender-affirming care instead of sex change operation (or genital mutilation), or MAID instead of assisted suicide, I physically cringe. Accepting your enemy’s terminology is as good as admitting defeat. Conservatives are unable to break the paradigm of the left, so they unwittingly end up affirming all of the semantic framing of the left. I know we harp on controlled opposition here a lot, but Rufo et al really do embody it when they accept every premise of leftists. Steve, please consider removing DEI from your vocabulary for good. People still know what it is if you call it DIE, though I prefer the terms antiwhite theology or Floydianity.

“Doctor Faust’s brilliant career in academia was launched by her divorcing her first husband, a medical student, and marrying her second husband, the chairman of her history department.”

Don’t forget she wrote a path-breaking historical study, “This Republic of Suffering,” revealing that a lot of southerners died in the Civil War.

“Doctor Faust’s brilliant career in academia was launched by her divorcing her first husband, a medical student, and marrying her second husband, the chairman of her history department.”

Don’t forget she wrote a path-breaking historical study, “This Republic of Suffering,” revealing that a lot of southerners died in the Civil War. And that had effects.

Bookmarked this bad boy.

I don’t see a link to the article, so here it is.

That’s delicious, Steve. Twelve Inches of Paradise. Thank you for serving it up here on your vending cart.

My best guess is the guy is old enough to not care and figures he’ll go out with a bang. All in all, we shall not look upon his like again.

He was born in 1955 so he’s past 65.

My sister and I were just discussing the other day how fortunate that we were too old for the DIE trend we’re seeing nowadays. Both of us retired before it started.

It reminds me of old time Communism where people were forced to repeat the regime talking points.

A truly dreadful development.

When they don’t show up it does not make any difference because most of their work has been shifted elsewhere. This goes all the way to the top. Recently affirmative action hire DoD head Lloyd Austin disappeared for a week before anyone even noticed he was gone.

Pete Buttigieg just called, and said Austin is taking liberties!

Oh, apologies: I hit the “disagree” button when I meant to hit the “agree” button really hard.

OT:

The ‘Hot Houthi’ Timothee Chalamet lookalike who says he’s ‘longing for martyrdom’: As 19-year-old ‘pirate’ goes viral, how he has warned US and UK they face ‘their end’… and hates his comparison to Wonka star | Daily Mail Online
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12977753/Hot-Houthi-Timothee-Chalamet-lookalike-says-hes-longing-martyrdom.html

‘Timhouthi Chalamet’ Doesn’t Like That He Went Viral for His Looks
https://www.businessinsider.com/timhouthi-chalamet-yemen-red-sea-focus-looks-comparison-al-haddad-2024-1

Partially but most of what we believe are fictional, including money and social divisions. In the end of day, it’s not a social classe struggle but personality types.

Sometimes you can fix it — I’ve accidentally hit “troll” but was allowed to correct it by quickly hitting “agree.”

———
OT — Ellis Items makes a film rec. French courtroom drama, Anatomy of a Fall. I criticize American law a lot but everything I have seen confirms that our current legal system (which is really only criticizable now because its bad officers abandon their good posts) is head and shoulders above what British law has become, and each of those are massively better than what the Frogs have been up to since the Terror, and all three are better than whatever the hell the gowned and jewelry-sporting Italians call “law.”

Actually, what’s even funnier about your reasoning is, well before DIE, my generation and the following knew we would not be able to retire.

Computer, I need fifty thousand images of confused anime girls with question marks over their heads.
Sometimes you can infer what the 4chan shills are about, like months later when they publish “research” about “internet extremists,” describe their methodology (shilling and then analyzing the reactions — it turns out that people don’t like shills, whoda thunkit?)? And you recognize some of the spamposts (“does this image make you mad?” etc). A recent one unintentionally brought up by Buzz was of the generation-division, excuse to gripe type, serving two purposes — demoralization and checking perceptions of prosperity. It described a guy who saved money by living off the famous Costco hot dog. Whether there actually was such a guy or not, you can see how this story’s propaganda purpose is to demoralize and/or inspire griping.

In Austin TX diversity meant block the door open with a black face, and then pack as many Hispanics into the space made
Diversity is a well used term by La Raza and their mestizo ilk in TX

Coming to you soon as they overwhelm new places…

would harvard’ve hired hankins if he didn’t have a gay moustache?

i doubt it.

sad.

You can change it.

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing as I was reading it.

A great read. But obviously, Harvard doesn’t want “diversity.” It wants uniformity. Of the strictest, most orthodox nature.

But maybe he had a trick up his sleeve. Maybe he intended deliberately to remind the Harvard administrators of the real meaning of diversity–which would entail, say, matriculating white supremacist students in the interest of fleshing out the right side of the diversity pool.

It will be interesting to see how Harvard respond to this. Will they go after him for what he said, which was expressed so reasonably, or will they get him on something else, like getting Al Capone for tax evasion, or perhaps just won’t be able to ‘guarantee his safety’?

OT:

No mention of Palestinians in this rant. I’m so glad this guy has lots of power, influence and espionage tools:

Palantir CEO Alex Karp: The most important issue of our time is war and peace

They’ve been doing some variant of anti-white discrimination, always under some euphemistic verbal contortion (“diversity”) or novel, anodyne acronym (“DEI”, etc.) for longer than I’ve been alive, and I am no longer young. (The nebulous “they” here are the HR departments of most major corporations, the hiring boards of most academic institutions, and the admissions committees of nearly all educational institutions.)

It’s only when this anti-white ideology is revealed to have tangible negative consequences for Zionism that “brave” “conservative” outlets like Law and Liberty allow their staff writers to finally type a column against “diversity”. Never mind the fact that what animates most of their readership is the blatant anti-white bias built into the institutions they are forced to interact with every day. (As Steve himself might suggest doing, crtl+f that article for “white” and you’ll only get one hit, and that hit has nothing to do with accusing DEI of being anti-white.)

We live in an anti-white society. We have a Zionism problem. The two things are not unrelated. It’s time to talk about it.

It reminds me of old time Communism where people were forced to repeat the regime talking points.

I’m going to use that every time someone tries to corner me into reciting their preferred mantra.

“Diversity is Our Strength!” is perhaps the dumbest slogan that any civilization has ever had.

Obviously, false. Contrary to any reading of history. Contrary to basic logic and common sense. Unity is strength. Diversity is a “cost”–a cause of contention, something a society has to work to accommodate and can often be fatal.

Congrats to Professor Hankins for solid quick drill down and debunking:

Since most societies have usually been at war or under the threat of war for most of history, public sentiment has ordinarily preferred unity to diversity. Prudent and humane governments have usually tolerated a degree of pluralism in order to reduce social discord, but pluralism as such has not been celebrated as a positive feature of society until quite recently. In fact, diversity is a luxury good that can be enjoyed only in secure, peaceful societies. Even in such societies, it has to be weighed against other goods (like meritocracy) that will have to be sacrificed if it is pursued as an absolute good. An indiscriminate commitment to “diversity,” bereft of any loyalty to unifying principles, is the mark of a weak or collapsing society.

When a nation parrots and promotes an ideology so obviously dumb and so at odds with maintaining itself and maintaining civilization one wonders how long it can survive.

Right. I changed Agree> Thanks. Tho’, I don’t know if it works after some time. I’ll see …

He couldn’t say that racial, national or ethnic diversity is no strength in any situation.

Point being?

OT – Why are so many military officials in the West now warning of (advocating?) WWIII?

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/senior-nato-official-says-there-will-be-hot-war-russia

The Swedish government joins NATO and then instantly starts issuing warnings about the country being invaded. Yeah, that made them a lot more secure! Of course the government of Sweden seems to be largely indifferent to the fact that the country already has been invaded, by people who will change the fundamental character of Sweden in ways that even a war with Russia probably wouldn’t do.

When a nation parrots and promotes an ideology so obviously dumb and so at odds with maintaining itself and maintaining civilization one wonders how long it can survive.

One may still wonder about the “how long” part, but I no longer wonder about the “can survive” part.

Congrats to Professor Hankins for solid quick drill down and debunking:

I don’t know if these words mean what you think they mean:

“Since most societies have usually been at war or under the threat of war for most of history, public sentiment has ordinarily preferred unity to diversity. Prudent and humane governments have usually tolerated a degree of pluralism in order to reduce social discord, but pluralism as such has not been celebrated as a positive feature of society until quite recently. In fact, diversity is a luxury good that can be enjoyed only in secure, peaceful societies. Even in such societies, it has to be weighed against other goods (like meritocracy) that will have to be sacrificed if it is pursued as an absolute good. An indiscriminate commitment to “diversity,” bereft of any loyalty to unifying principles, is the mark of a weak or collapsing society.”

So, diversity is not always good, sometimes it is not good.

Sounds like a State Department eunuch defending Israeli war crimes. “Sometimes mistakes are made, and we are sometimes looking into it, somewhat,”

How much is he paid for dispensing this wisdom?

Of course, people who believe that “Diversity is always and everywhere in all ways good” are idiots, but he is hardly “proving” or “asserting” that “diversity is bad tout court.”

So, as the immortal college president Emil Faber said, “Knowledge is Good.”

Someone at Harvard needs to have the nerve to say, “Look, we’re Harvard, and we only take the cream of the crop, period. Diversity is not our primary goal, but brains and originality.”

You are really pulling for Harvard. Why? What has Harvard ever done for us?

so they unwittingly end up affirming all of the semantic framing of the left.

Define “semantic framing.”

I know we harp on controlled opposition here a lot, but Rufo et al really do embody it when they accept every premise of leftists.

But we have Rufo to thank for removing Gay and thereby making Harvard stronger! Thanks Rufo!

What an own-goal.

“On the prow of the wagon, in an attempt to attract business among the Quarterites, Ignatius taped a sheet of Big Chief paper on which he had printed in crayon: TWELVE INCHES (12) OF PARADISE. So far no one had responded to its message.”

― From A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole

Good. Just this one bit of pettiness probably does more for White nationalism than David Duke and Richard Spencer combined.

Good guy. I think they’ll leave him alone. They know when they’re outclassed.

It’s probably funnier if your personality is such that you can relate to Ignatius somewhat–a crankish misfit who views his own mundane existence through a grandiose framing of his own creation. But basically, funny things happen to him/are done by him, and he perceives/reacts to these things in likewise funny ways. Also, funny dialogue/descriptions.

[…] but he is hardly “proving” or “asserting” that “diversity is bad tout court.”

He seems to have not written that because he doesn’t believe it. He’s right not to do so. Saying that diversity is always a weakness is stupid and unfalsifiable. Historically most people have lived with or near another ethnicity, nationality or tribe.

Diversity happens. Someone came up with the the team-building phrase “diversity is our strength” and then a bunch of civilisational saboteurs drove a bus through it. That doesn’t mean diversity is always a curse.

The prose is lively and engaging, the characters and plot are entertaining, and Ignatius was something a newly minted archetype: a well-read reactionary with delusions of grandeur who still lives with his mother. Many such cases nowadays.

I also just found it hilarious. The humor might not be up your alley. People may have a harder time agreeing on what constitutes great comic literature vs regular old great literature. For instance I’ve never found Tom Wolfe all that funny (the guy needed a ruthless editor, IMO), whereas I thought Portnoy’s Complaint was hysterical (probably Roth’s best novel, frankly; his latter work got so tendentious, but that’s a different convo). I’ve known some very Ignatius J. Reilly-esque characters in my life, so there was a lot of “laughter of recognition” for me.

Of course there’s also the whole backstory where the author of Confederacy killed himself before it got published. I’m sure that’s part of its ongoing appeal.

Maybe they are apathetic because of wealth. Affluence creates soft, detached, and isolated individuals. Struggle builds character, body, and communities. We know how to succeed, just not how to maintain it.

— Ugly_Cassanova (@UglyCassanova) January 20, 2024

If you want to understand what someone means by what they write, you shouldn’t ignore context. Hankins is writing for an audience of liberal high-IQ college types who do value diversity (or at least think that they do.) If you read the whole piece, it’s clearly quite harsh on “diversity” as it is understood in this environment.

Professor James Hankins holds a collection of books from the I Tatti Renaissance Library

The idea was initially conceived by Walter Kaiser, former professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard and director of the Villa I Tatti.

For almost sixty years Villa I Tatti was the home of Bernard Berenson

Berenson was a major figure in the attribution of Old Masters

Berenson’s esteem for Harvard dated from his youth. He arrived in Boston at age ten as a poor Jewish immigrant

Recent scholarship has established that Berenson’s secret agreements with Duveen resulted in substantial profits to himself, as much as 25% of the proceeds, making him a wealthy man.

Joseph Duveen was British by birth, the eldest of thirteen children of Rosetta (Barnett) and Sir Joseph Joel Duveen, a Dutch-Jewish immigrant who had set up a prosperous import business in Hull.

but wikipedia is notoriously anti-semitic.

Hankins is playing the fool

Come now , this is a Harvard prof. we are talking about , what do you expect ,full Stormfront? ……admit it , the letter ain’t too shabby.

Also, part of the diversity push is to help keep programs such as visual arts, performing arts, and parts of the liberal arts and social sciences going. As UT-Austin learned, if one fills up a freshman class with only students from the top 10% of their high school class, no one is going to be majoring in subjects like music, art, or humanities.

You don’t need to be that smart to get a diploma in these fields, but plenty of very smart kids are interested in these fields and major in them, at least at the selective schools I’ve been around.

Ok, Sheldon.

Sit down in your spot and I will explain it to you without sarcasm.

Yeah. It’s like The Great Gatsby or Catcher in the Rye or On the Road. Sort of like Zsa Zsa Gabor who was famous for being famous.

They’ve been doing some variant of anti-white discrimination, always under some euphemistic verbal contortion (“diversity”) or novel, anodyne acronym (“DEI”, etc.) for longer than I’ve been alive, and I am no longer young. (The nebulous “they” here are the HR departments of most major corporations, the hiring boards of most academic institutions, and the admissions committees of nearly all educational institutions.)

Thank you for clarifying that “they” did not refer to Jews. Too many people on this blog associate Jews with diversity initiatives. But the opposite is true. Jews are no friends to “diversity.” In fact, while we in genteel fashion exchange posts here, Jews are fighting valiantly alongside the US military to beat back the Muslim hordes in the Middle East, and to safeguard the land of Israel from “diversity.”

I’m hearing that too. My niece doesn’t know she will be able to retire. In her case it’s related to the very high cost of housing, either to rent or buy.

It’s become insane here in Canada because of Trudeau’s immigration policy. Apparently these legal immigrants have money to spend and it’s now a talking point. Still the opposition parties aren’t saying much. Don’t want to offend the newcomers.

On the contrary, if the only ones who fought were ethnic Swede men and all their women starting leaving and hooking up with Germans or whatever, as has happened with Ukraine, then it very much could change things for the worse.

You could argue that it was kind of ‘cucked’ for Ukrainian men for letting the women leave the country when the war started. And if Slavic men can be that naively trusting of their womenfolk then surely Swedish men would too.

Diversity is our strength

This statement was uttered by one J. Danforth Quayle in response to Japan’s hypothesis about the cause of the L.A. riots in 1992. No one ever questioned who was right in the actual debate, but it was obviously the Japanese. Yet we have taken Quayle’s words as gospel.

“Diversity” becomes “DEI” becomes “EDIB.” I wonder what’s next?

Let me guess: The same demographic that gave us WTF is surely working their way towards “IDIOCY.” It’s catchy and easy to remember. It just needs some words to flesh-it-out.

Yeah, read it twice many years separated. Same reaction, just don’t get it.

They still haven’t got Amy Wax who has provoked them twenty times more aggressively (Wax’s repeated and blunt black IQ and crime realism

Lets see her criticize Israel and her fellow Jews and see if she survives so easily.

I see, I hadn’t gotten around to reading it. And a reference to a Big Chief tablet, too!

In former times, I was able to avoid these sessions by pleading that I had a subsequent engagement.

I appreciated that nod to The Picture of Dorian Gray, when Lord Henry says, “I have promised to dine at White’s, but it is only with an old friend, so I can send him a wire to say that I am ill, or that I am prevented from coming in consequence of a subsequent engagement. I think that would be a rather nice excuse: it would have all the surprise of candor.”

Thanks. For those (like me) who would find the annotated version helpful.

“I acknowledge a moral and legal imperative to defend ICCPR Article 2§1, supreme law of the land per 175 U.S. 677 (1900), with which law at all levels of government must come into conformity, and which is to be protected in all civil society organizations. I share this responsibility with Harvard University, to the end of fulfilling inter alia UDHR Article 22, state and federal common law per 175 U.S. 677 (1900). I am available to assist Harvard in complying with its legal obligations.”

ICCPR Article 2§1
https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/international-covenant-civil-and-political-rights

Each State Party to the present Covenant undertakes to respect and to ensure to all individuals within its territory and subject to its jurisdiction the rights recognized in the present Covenant, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

ICCPR was ratified by the US in 1992.
https://www.aclu.org/documents/faq-covenant-civil-political-rights-iccpr

175 U.S. 677 (1900)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paquete_Habana

The Paquete Habana; The Lola, 175 U.S. 677 (1900), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court concerning the applicability and recognition of international law by the United States. The Court held that the capture of fishing vessels as prizes of war violated customary international law, which is integrated with U.S. law and binding as such.[1] Paquete Habana influenced subsequent court decisions that incorporated international law regarding other matters.[2]

UDHR Article 22
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights

Article 22
Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.

I assume the US is equally committed to the UDHR at home.
https://br.usembassy.gov/united-states-remains-committed-to-universal-declaration-of-human-rights/

Though the exact legal status of UDHR seems less certain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights

While there is a wide consensus that the declaration itself is non-binding and not part of customary international law, there is also a consensus that many of its provisions are binding and have passed into customary social law,[9][10] although courts in some nations have been more restrictive on its legal effect.[11][12]

In addition, I kind of like ICCPR Articles 18 and 19. Though there are some pretty vague exceptions included.

Article 18
1. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right shall include freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice, and freedom, either individually or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in worship, observance, practice and teaching.

2. No one shall be subject to coercion which would impair his freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice.

3. Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.

4. The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions.

Article 19
1. Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference.

2. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.

3. The exercise of the rights provided for in paragraph 2 of this article carries with it special duties and responsibilities. It may therefore be subject to certain restrictions, but these shall only be such as are provided by law and are necessary:

(a) For respect of the rights or reputations of others;

(b) For the protection of national security or of public order (ordre public), or of public health or morals.

Also UDHR Articles 18 and 19.

Article 18
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Article 19
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Enumerating the numerous ways in which the woke orthodoxy departs from these is left as an exercise for the reader.

P.S. Any examples of this being used in practice and what happened?

What’s interesting is that both Polievre and Trudeau have had to move from their positions in favour of nearly unlimited immigration. They seem to feel the need to do that now, especially when speaking in French while in Quebec. We’d be a lot worse off if we didn’t have Quebec to put some breaks on the Anglo globalism that reigns everywhere else.

This video allows you to auto-generate English subtitles:

He specifically pointed out some examples where it is a strength. So, your statement here is not true. Rather, it can be either a strength or a weakness depending on the context.

Not only is it not very good, it has probably done quite a bit to prevent classical concepts from reentering the mainstream (where they are desperately needed) because nobody wants to be associated with that weirdo Ignatius guy.

Unfortunately, A Confederacy of Dunces has done for Aristotelian-Thomism what Sister Act did for the religious life, what Chocolat did for Lenten observance, and what The Da Vinci Code did for contemplative artwork—it stopped it from being taken seriously.

A Confederacy of Dunces has it’s moments, but as a comic masterpiece it’s no Catch 22.

I am skeptical of that poll. I bet most of the “opressor” respondents were specifically thinking of Gaza. And responding in knee jerk fashion to that association.

An article about that poll.
https://reason.com/volokh/2023/12/17/dont-put-too-much-stock-in-survey-finding-that-67-of-18-24-year-olds-say-jews-are-oppressors

Here are more complete poll results.
https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/HHP_Dec23_KeyResults.pdf

Here is a good one. 64% the former with roughly U shaped variation by age.
“Do you think that identity politics based on race has come to dominate at our elite universities, or do they operate primarily on the basis of merit and accomplishments without regard to race?”

Another. 79% of those 18-24 support this!
“There is an ideology that white people are oppressors and nonwhite people and people of certain groups have been oppressed and as a result should be favored today at universities and for employment. Do you support or oppose this ideology?”

Your graphic is on page 57 following that.

Crosstabs are available here.
https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/HHP_Dec23_Crosstab.pdf

Very good statement but I happen to disagree. The European white tribe has to prevail because no matter what anybody says we all should be tribal.

The only other man that had a better required statement on diversity was Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize winner in physics. I could not find a quote but it was essentially: “I will not discriminate on the basis of race or religion.” He’s one of the few that could get away with that.

Steve’s 2018 article about that.
https://www.takimag.com/article/the-wisdom-of-dan-quayle/

Longer form of the Dan Quayle quote.

I was asked many times in Japan about the recent events in Los Angeles. From the perspective of many Japanese, the ethnic diversity of our culture is a weakness compared to their homogeneous society. I begged to differ with my hosts. I explained that our diversity is our strength.

P.S. I think it is time to start responding to any invocation of “diversity is our strength” with some variation of: “I did not know you appreciated what a visionary leader Dan Quayle was.”

I laughed so hard at the drivel comment my alarmed dog rushed in to check on me. Good post.

“I did not know you appreciated what a visionary leader Dan Quayle was.”

Real Quaylism has never been tried.

“God” in Spanish is “Dios”.
DIOS: Diversity Is Our Strength.
Like in that movie, Cidade de Dios!
Nah, that was in Portugese. (Cidade de Deus)
In Spanish it would be “Ciudad de Dios”)

He couldn’t say that racial, national or ethnic diversity is no strength in any situation.

Agree, he could have made a better statement. Specifically: Diversity means difference and is a source of contention and conflict in a society and often what rips it a society apart.

But his statement is still pretty good. He explains that societies have prized unity–implying the it makes them stronger and more resilient. And that diversity is a cost–a “luxury good”–that can be tolerated when times are good. Note the word “tolerated”.

Not ideal, but all and all, it’s a pretty good statement and pretty good push back against the minoritarian diversity pablum of our age.

it takes cojones to say that these days

You need to be a Nobel prize winner like Steven Weinberg these days to get away with it.

Steve also once told me that, when he (like other UT faculty) was required to write a statement about what he would do to advance Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, he submitted just a single sentence: “I will seek the best candidates, without regard to race or sex.” I remarked that he might be one of the only academics who could get away with that.

https://vdare.com/posts/steven-weinberg-rip

Donald J. Trump.

Best president ever.

The magnitude and enormity of this achievement all but defies description. This post should be shared far and wide, as a public service.

— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) January 20, 2024

Perhaps the book on “diversity” has already been written, by Peter Wyatt Wood. Here’s Derb’s review: https://www.johnderbyshire.com/Reviews/HumanSciences/diversity.html

Here’s the author talking about it: https://www.c-span.org/video/?175127-1/diversity-invention-concept

Professor Peter Wood discussed his book, Diversity: The Invention of a Concept, published by Encounter Books. In the book, Professor Wood traced the evolution of the concept of “diversity,” beginning with the opinion expressed by Supreme Court Justice Louis Powell in the 1978 case of the University of California Regents v. Bakke. Allen Bakke was a white male who was twice refused admission to the University of California – Davis after allegedly being displaced by less qualified minority students. According to Professor Wood, diversity was at odds with America’s basic ideals of liberty and equality. Further, the concept of diversity had been distorted to insure prearranged statistical outcomes in terms of racial and ethnic makeup. Therefore, he concluded, diversity undermines the country’s attempts to overcome racial division.

After reading that missive, I think this fellow might bear a far more striking resemblance to porcine yet brave rebel Porkins:

LOL

I read it forty-three years ago in my log cabin, by the light of a kerosine lantern, in a rocking chair next to a wood-burning stove when I was twenty, and I liked it. The word “masterpiece” gets thrown around so much that I am not even sure what it means. I think appreciation of A Confederacy of Dunces depends on one’s outlook and experience. I think it’s great.

11. Croatia 5,357 (-2.2%)
12. Serbia 5,127 (+1.1%)
13. Russia 4,122 (-11.7%)
14. Bosnia-Her. 3,876 (-0.1%)
15. Greece 3,300 (-6.9%)
16. N.Macedonia 3,196 (+11.0%)
17. India 2,892 (+3.3%)
18. Nigeria 2,645 (-12.2%)
19. Albania 2,626 (+15.5%)
20. Hungary 2,583 (-9.5%)

— Mærstemgau-Rübe (@AR_Demografie) January 17, 2024

Germany births in 2022 by citizenship of mother (change to 2021):
Total: 738,819 (-7.1%)
German: 547,254 (-9.6%)
Foreign: 191,565 (+0.9%)
The share of foreign births stands at 25.9% up from 23.9% in 2021.
https://destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoelkerung/Geburten/Publikationen/Downloads-Geburten/statistischer-bericht-geburten-5126104227005.xlsx?__blob=publicationFile

Most common countries
1. Syria: 20,201 (-0.6%)
2. Turkey: 16,806 (-6.9%)
3. Romania: 14,945 (-4.5%)
4. Poland: 8,899 (-12.5%)
5. Ukraine: 8,049 (+190.9%)
6. Kosovo: 7,671 (+8.4%)
7.Bulgaria: 6,562 (+0.7%)
8.Italy: 6,371 (-5.7%)
9.Afghanistan: 5,963 (+36.7%)
10.Iraq: 5,608 (-0.2%)
11. Croatia 5,357 (-2.2%)
12. Serbia 5,127 (+1.1%)
13. Russia 4,122 (-11.7%)
14. Bosnia-Her. 3,876 (-0.1%)
15. Greece 3,300 (-6.9%)
16. N.Macedonia 3,196 (+11.0%)
17. India 2,892 (+3.3%)
18. Nigeria 2,645 (-12.2%)
19. Albania 2,626 (+15.5%)
20. Hungary 2,583 (-9.5%)
21. Morroco 2,505 (-2.5%)
22. Vietnam 2,374 (-5.9%)
23. US 2,331 (-8.3%)
24. Eritrea 2,259 (-3.5%)
25. Spain 1,928 (-8.3%)
26. Pakistan 1,889 (+11.6%)
27. Somalia 1,694 (+0.7%)
28. China 1,639 (-16.5%)
29. Moldova 1,492 (+26.2%)
30. Ghana 1,443 (+7.0%)

Everyone knows, (but never says out loud) that “diversity” doesn’t actually mean “diversity”. Diversity is just another euphemism for “African”, like its predecessors, colored, Negro, Black, etc.

Oh please. Even you don’t believe that spin.

“Diversity” is just the handy all-inclusive for the idea that’s at the heart of Jewish minoritarianism. That mulit-ethnic diversity is better than unified one-people nations. That the before America was a terrible hell-hole of stale pale gentile penis people’s racist sexist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic oppression. Then the Jews showed up and “opened up” America to the tolerant rainbow–blacks, Jews, women, immigrants … homosexuals, trannies.

Yes, this is America, so obviously blacks are the outstanding pain point. Jews–not being idiots–pushed the black experience, slavery, Jim Crow, poverty, in their minoritarian attack on America. (If they’d pushed Harvard quotas and the Golfocaust as their oppression propaganda, they’d have been laughed out of the park–however much those nothingburgers excite ethnocentric Jews.) But “diversity” ideology is precisely “diversity”–not “blacks”–because the whole idea was to crack open America and have a broad multi-ethnic united front of the oppressed against white gentiles.

And it operates that way. But diversity bennies are contingent. A white woman lawyer might have been “diverse” in 1970, but not so much anymore. A white woman is no longer “diverse” as a job candidate in publishing or the English department, but is still “diverse” as a candidate for the Physics faculty or the cockpit at United Airlines. Asians are no longer diverse in college admissions or tech job, but they also probably are for airline pilots. (Not sure, but that would be my guess.) Hispanics are still “diverse” pretty much everywhere. Muslims are diverse. Immigrants are diverse. Queers are diverse. And now trannies are fashionably diverse.

The thing with blacks is that they
a) are America’s historic oppressed minority and
b) underperform in pretty much everything outside rap and NBA player.
So blacks are “diverse” everywhere. Blacks are like O- blood type, universal diversity donors. And yes, in the wake of Saint George’s OD, blacks–i.e. Blacks–have been pushed as the ultimate diversity elixir–muscling aside lesser diversity. You just can’t have enough black, black, black. So yeah–I’ll give you that bit–in the last three years “diverse” has gotten blacker.

But still, even if some people no longer get the diversity boost as hires in certain industries and jobs, they still count as “diversity”. Diversity is non-white–and especially non-white maleness.

~~

This architecture has been demonstrated by recent events. Since the Hamas terror raid and Israel’s “rubble don’t make trouble” response Jews have found–to their horror!–that lots of the more colorfully diverse just see Jews as privileged oppressive white people. While Jews think–hey it was the whole point of minoritarianism!–that they are diverse and oppressed–the world’s greatest victims (TM)–and the oppressors are white gentiles–and no one better forget it.

A few Jews are waking up to the problem and starting to think the whole DIE thing needs to be dialed back. But still those Jews praise “diversity”. They just want the Goldilocks situation–America suitably “opened up”–multi-ethnic and balkanized–but then free competition where the Jews grab their outsized share.

But the general Jewish response–like that hilarious Hollyweird letter–is standard issue: “diversity” is great and everyone diverse–i.e. everyone but white gentiles–needs their piece of the pie. But everyone needs to remember that Jews are diverse too, and in fact the world’s great victims.

Diversity isn’t just about blacks. Diversity is about America not being a white nation. Diversity is anti-white.

Thomas Sowell was interviewed by Charlie Rose in 1995. https://charlierose.com/videos/16711

Thomas Sowell: I’m, I’m fascinated with the extent to which words– we are– we’ve conditioned to react like Pavlov’s dogs to words. I hear ”diversity”– Someone was asking me–
Charlie Rose: Don’t make me look bad, professor.
Thomas Sowell: Someone today, who’s a, who’s a trustee of a college was saying that they were going to– picking a new college professor. I said, what you should do is have a stopwatch there–
Charlie Rose: Yeah.
Thomas Sowell: –and just count how long it is till each of the contestants says the word ”diversity.’‘ And the guy who says it, you know– he’s 35 minutes into the interview, and the other guy who says it, you know, the first sentence, the guy who sa– who takes 35 minutes should be at the top of the list. The guy who said it in the first sentence should be at the bottom. Because the question–
Charlie Rose: Well, what’s wrong with diversity. I don’t get the point.
Thomas Sowell: My point is that this is a word that has become magic. What does it mean. It’s anything. Are you saying to me that all black people are alike; therefore, you’ve got to mix and match by race, that it is not diverse unless it is diverse along these–
Charlie Rose: No, I’ll–
Thomas Sowell: –dimensions?

Divide and rule.
Diversity means division.
The “our” in “our strength” is not all-inclusive. Similar to their “Our Democracy”.

-“Diversity is our strength.”
-“Yes indeed, diversity is your strength.”

I think it is time to start responding to any invocation of “diversity is our strength” with some variation of: “I did not know you appreciated what a visionary leader Dan Quayle was.”

I’ve been doing that for years.

Meanwhile, in Amerika, carry a Tikki torch and…

Italy’s high court has ruled that fascist salutes are legal at rallies unless they threaten public order or risk reviving the country’s outlawed fascist party. pic.twitter.com/iBVxBNOwBF

— Clash Report (@clashreport) January 20, 2024

US Sitting Ducks.

The MIM-104 “Patriot” Surface-to-Air Missile Battery at Al-Asad Air Base in Western Iraq was reportedly Overwhelmed today during the Rocket and/or Ballistic Missile Attack by Iranian-Backed Forces, with the Battery claimed to have launched at least 15 of its PAC-2 Missiles… pic.twitter.com/VKwuO5vwIR

— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) January 20, 2024

This is a very curious footage. An Ukrainian drone was observing a Russian “9K330 Tor” when the Russian air defense system was firing and missing the drone. Then the hunter became the prey and the drone came for the air defense vehicle and apparently hit it.

Source:… pic.twitter.com/dkCnZumxz8

— (((Tendar))) (@Tendar) January 20, 2024

“Excellent” makes an excellent euphemism.

Lets see her criticize Israel and her fellow Jews and see if she survives so easily.

Exactly!

In other words, let’s see her criticize the people who made up all of this DIE crap and see if she survives. Of course she won’t. Which is why it was made up in the first place.

Diversity is anti-white.

Yes.

It is.

Thank you.

I usually eschew personal things, but- your Jewish obsessions are tiresome. Now & then, there was an element of a healthy criticism of that ethnicity’s, in Jungspeak, “shadow”. But now it is a cheerless example of a completely uninteresting magical thinking which is not even funny, as if you have decided to kill us all with mammoth chunks of boredom in comparison with which, as George Steiner describes in his superb book on Heidegger, six big German post-WW1 decisive works seem like a hilarious & relaxing romp.

Of this discourse sprang a constellation of books unlike any others produced in the history of Western thought and feeling: Between 1918 and 1927, within nine short years, there appear in German half a dozen books that are more than books in their dimensions and manner of extremity. The first edition of Ernst Bloch’s Geist der Utopie is dated 1918. So is volume one of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. The initial version of Karl Barth’s Commentary on Romans, of Barth’s reading of St. Paul, is dated 1919. Franz Rosenzweig’s Stern der Erlösung follows in 1921. Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit is published in 1927. The question of whether the sixth title forms part of this configuration, and, if so, in what ways, is among the most difficult. Mein Kampf appears in its two volumes between 1925 and 1927.

Roughly perceived, what have these works in common? They are voluminous. This is no accident. It tells of an imperative endeavor toward totality (after Hegel), of an attempt to provide, even where the point of departure is of a specialized historical or philosophic order, a summa of all available insight. It was as if the urgent prolixity of these writers sought to build a capacious house of words where that of German cultural and imperial hegemony had collapsed. These are prophetic texts, at once Utopian — the Utopia of promise is as manifest in Bloch as is that of twilight, of a nunc dimittis from the burdens of history in Spengler — and, as is all authentic prophecy, retrospective, commemorative of a lost ideal. The climate of 1918 is such as to compel and permit a more or less enhanced remembrance of the civilities, of the cultural stabilities, of the pre-1914 world. (The abyss of 1933–45 cut off such remembrance.)

These works are, in a sense which is also technical, apocalyptic. They address themselves to “the last things.” Again, the apocalyptic prevision can be salutary, as in Rosenzweig’s movement toward redemption or Ernst Bloch’s blueprint for secular, though nevertheless messianic, emancipation; or it can be a figuration of catastrophe. In this respect, Barth’s teaching of the utter incommensurability between God and man, between the infinity of the divine and the unalterable constraints of human perception, is darkly ambiguous. It tells of the necessity of hopes which are, in essence, illusory. We know of the dread foresight, of the contract with apocalypse in Mein Kampf. Like their leviathan counterpart in Austria, Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Humanity, these writings out of the German ruin are, indeed, meant to be read either by men and women doomed to decay, as in Spengler, or by men and women destined to undergo some fundamental renovation, some agonizing rebirth out of the ash of a dead past. This is Bloch’s message, Rosenzweig’s, and, in a perspective of eternal untimeliness, that of Barth. It is Hitler’s promise to the Volk.

Massive scale, a prophetic tenor, and the invocation of the apocalyptic make for a specific violence. These are violent books. There is no more violent dictum in theological literature than Karl Barth’s: “God speaks His eternal No to the world.” In Rosenzweig, the violence is one of exaltation. The light of God’s immediacy breaks almost unbearably upon human consciousness. Ernst Bloch sings and preaches revolution, the overthrow of the existing order within man’s psyche and society. The Spirit of Utopia will lead directly to Bloch’s fiery celebration of Thomas Münzer and the sixteenth-century insurrections of peasant-saints and millennarians. The baroque violence, the rhetorical satisfaction in disaster — literally “the falling of the stars” — in Spengler’s magnum have often been noted. And there is no need to detail the raucous inhumanity in the eloquence of Herr Hitler.

This violence is, inevitably, stylistic. Though intensely pertinent, the criteria of Expressionism are too broad. These are writings which interact decisively with the aesthetics, with the rhetoric of Expressionist literature, art, and music. Certain premonitory voices, those of Jakob Böhme, of Kierkegaard, and of Nietzsche, sound throughout Expressionism as they do in these six books. The ambience of apocalyptic extremity is pervasive. But that which I am trying to identify in Barth or Heidegger or Bloch is of a particular kind. It would be rewarding to probe closely the uses of negation in the thought and grammar of the Commentary on Romans, of Rosenzweig’s analysis of mundanity, or of the strategies of annulment, of exorcism through annihilation in My Struggle. Here is no Hegelian negation, with its dialectical yield of positivity. The terms now so cardinal to our study of Heidegger—“nothing,” “nothingness,” nichten, untranslatable as the verb “to nothing” — have their analogue throughout the set. Barth’s God is “the Judge of the Nichtsein [the non-being, the being-nothing] of the world.” It is out of the “not-thereness” of the divine in classical and rational ontologies that Rosenzweig derives his program for salvation. No less lyrically than James Joyce’s Molly Bloom, Ernst Bloch strives to enforce an overwhelming, life-saving Yes as against the Nichtigkeit, the “nothingness” and the denial (Verneinen) spoken upon history and human hopes by the madness of world war.

Having read most-not all -of them, I think I’d find them an entertaining re-reading in comparison with your Boredsponsa.

Very good statement but I happen to disagree. The European white tribe has to prevail because no matter what anybody says we all should be tribal.

What do you mean by this?

Diversity: people of substandard ability and low-level competence, despite their deficiencies, should be given undeserved, unearned high-level positions of power and prestige, merely because their skin is the same color as human sh!t.

Equity: Wow, you guys sure have a lot of cool stuff; we want to have cool stuff too, but we have no idea how to make cool stuff ourselves. Therefore, give us all your stuff. We deserve it, not you, simply because our skin is the same color as human sh!t.

Inclusion: Thanks for building this amazing country, chock full of top-notch universities, hospitals, museums, highways, skyscrapers, airports, and a million other things we don’t know how to build for ourselves. We’ll take it from here… and I really do we mean, we’ll TAKE it from here. That is justice… because our skin is the same color as human sh!t.

What is different is that in addition to “giving a leg up” to students of underrepresented minorities, all faculty, staff and students are required to participate in struggle sessions, that is, training on implicit bias and microaggressions and so on.

More recently, not only are applicants for faculty positions and students applying to the university required to sign a loyalty oath, they are required to draft an original, or at least original according to current standard, loyalty document and have this document be subject to scrutiny according to an unspecified standard. This has the first-person-to-get-tired-of-clapping after one of Comrade Stalin’s speeches aspect.

The worst part of this is that we have defacto eliminated tenure for faculty as a means to resist this, which was a bright idea of Conservatives as legislators and governor.

I’d like to see something which worked out to either DIEYT or DEITY. Reg?

“why is A Confederacy of Dunces regarded as a comic masterpiece? I read it as a teenager and wasn’t impressed.”

Well, as the old punchline goes: some people can tell a joke, and some can’t. I suppose it’s also the case that some people can get a joke, and some can’t.

— filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs
— Journal of a Working Boy
— “Twelve Inches of Paradise”
— CRUSADE FOR MOORISH DIGNITY
— “I ain’t *touching* that thing.”
— signed, Zorro
— “your boy sure likes his cake”

There’s a gem like that on virtually every page.

Blacks are like O- blood type, universal diversity donors.

Does that make America like AB+ blood type, universal diversity recipient?

Good Times create Wordcels

What are ‘wordcels’? Are they the same as ‘verbalist shysters’?

Pretty much. This extended explanation might help. And I kind of like the concluding paragraph.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkpqzb/ok-wtf-are-wordcels-and-shape-rotators

So who is winning the war, the wordcels or the shape rotators? First, culture wars aren’t meant to be won but to be fought continuously. But let me ask you this: Why are they shape rotators and not, say, mathcels or STEMcels? The shape rotators, going against type, have won a victory just by naming their opponents wordcels.

“Diversity is Our Strength!” is perhaps the dumbest slogan that any civilization has ever had.

Obviously, false. Contrary to any reading of history. Contrary to basic logic and common sense. Unity is strength. Diversity is a “cost”–a cause of contention, something a society has to work to accommodate and can often be fatal.

No, it is clearly true, the basis of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, ie division of labor according to diversity of skill. But it is only true of real diversity of interest and ability, not a fake, superficial diversity of skin color or misplaced gender. This is the usual bait and switch of the wordcels, a trap you have fallen for. They define “freedom” as the freedom from working for a living or paying for your own healthcare, thus arguing for UBI or “universal” healthcare, thereby making you argue against “freedom.” Instead, reject the redefinition of the words that they’re using.

Getting into the weeds, the same arguments you’re using were employed by the WASPs against the “Papists” 150 years ago, the very same people you believe provide “unity” today. “Unity is strength” only in a time of war, hardly an endorsement given all the unjust wars we’ve been led into, and most times not something positive in a civil society. To be clear, none of these are unalloyed goods: you do need some unity and much more real diversity of skill in a well-functioning society.

The fundamental question is whether more diversity of national background, religion, race, and gender actually provides the true diversity we should all care about, that of interest and abilities. And the answer appears to be that sometimes it does- we would not have a South African immigrant running Tesla in the US if it doesn’t- but its benefits are greatly oversold, and certainly don’t deserve ramrodding down our institutions with DEI initiatives.

Tough for people like me to care though, as antiquated institutions like Harvard or the Federal Reserve have been obsoleted by new technology and are in the process of being completely replaced. Whether they die from within first or without hardly matters, they will be killed off in the 21st century no matter what.

I tend to agree. He’s in the twilight of his career and, although apparently at the top of his niche field, just another obscure eccentric professor in the grand scheme of things.

It will be an interesting case study. Do they double-down and go after him, as the left normally does, or just imply that he’s a sample size of one crotchety old bastard who can be left in his corner til he retires?

Of course there’s also the whole backstory where the author of Confederacy killed himself before it got published. I’m sure that’s part of its ongoing appeal.

This is the answer; if J.K. Toole didn’t off himself at 31, this novel would never have seen the light of day. As it was, he submitted it to Simon & Schuster in 1964 where it was rejected by the same guy who had accepted and edited Catch-22.

Dr. Faust’s second husband was also her dissertation adviser; for those wondering Faust was her first husband’s name

I was high ranking enough before I retired that I attended some of the same “briefings” as then Lieutenant General Austin. My general impression was that he rarely commented or even questioned a briefer. He was content to look authoritative and no one ever offered anything by total and complete deference and obsequiousness to the three star BLack general in the room. Obama was president . Everybody knew Austin was being groomed to run the whole shebang soon.

Here’s a great example of raw, unchecked diversity…

There’s a fellow who has a YouTube channel featuring himself busking on public pianos at London shopping malls. A group of Chinese people, waving their communist flags, approached and surrounded him. Then things started getting crazy. Since then, he’s already been receiving threats. He’s just a guy who busks on piano!

It’s a shame about London. It used to be a great city.

The party starts at the 9:00 minute mark…

https://youtube.com/live/65iwnI2hjAA?si=BzkeHy2HKdh9dh6L

Like a lot of leftwing politics – and as Steve has noted on other issues – it’s really about people who feel like losers demanding an inversion of our social order to put them on top of the underserving current winners.

Excellent typo, bro!

I’d love to hear how all these things are connected in your mind.

Similar to their “Our Democracy”.

What they are really saying is: ademocracy.

I am pretty sure that I read Confederacy of Dunces during the Clinton regime, some considerable time after becoming aware of the book’s existence.
It vastly exceeded my expectations and I found it quite funny.
But I did not at that time connect it much to any (or many) aspects of the current political zeitgeist.
I had a deep visceral sympathy for the protaganist, but this did not connect with my intellectual grasp of reality at the time.
Now I suspect some might find the whole thing a bit passe…

You know how many of us tell you that you are much too verbose? This is yet another exoneration of that assessment. All you needed to write was, “I am smarter than everyone, including Prof. Hankins.”

Everyone knows, (but never says out loud) that “diversity” doesn’t actually mean “diversity”. Diversity is just another euphemism for “African”

Yes, we all can tell you hate black people. After all, if it weren’t for them, Jews would be the undisputed Victimest People Ever.

That’s okay though, You still win, because there is still no slavery museum in DC, but there is a “United States Holocaust Memorial Museum”… in a country where none occurred.

Did Bill Kristol attend a University? He speaks like a trade school graduate. He, quite simply, doesn’t understand a word the large man says. Every time he chimes in he is off topic and the large man patiently reviews and restates what he had just said, the point he had just made.

Kristol is like a simple-minded child. His mind runs in a groove. Is this the Jewish perspective in general? Such that he cannot grasp Western history? Apparently, the Greeks and Romans are just so foreign to Judaism that Jews simply cannot use the terms—sorta like Sailer mentioning the Sapir Whorf hypothesis—cannot think the thoughts the big man uses as Western intellectual coin of the realm. Ignorance on display.

For the big man, following in the footsteps of Plato and Aristotle, Arete, or Excellence, is a moral habit which is the hub of the wheel. The superior man strives for excellence for its own sake as well as trying to instantiate what is good for all citizens.

Simply being smart about current social theories, mouthing platitudes about what he undoubtedly calls “democracy” and making money—Kristol’s Jewish values, apparently—are not the litmus test. He is floundering out of his depth, utterly unprepared to take part in this dialogue because he is, fundamentally, a cynic.

Jews simply cannot imagine that in the West (and China), thought and political leaders could have been motivated by unselfish, beneficial-for-all motives. This inability reveals a fundamental flaw in their character. Unable to do so themselves—at least with respect with Europeans—they cannot imagine that Europeans have that capacity themselves.

I’ve never seen anything quite like this. Kristol is like an African tribal black confronted with a jet engine. He doesn’t even know enough to ask pertinent questions. If this is an example of a Jewish intellectual, then Jews are frauds.

They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,
And the people there are good
people

People who
brought up in different circumstance would be exactly like us,
But they weren’t brought up in circumstance
like us.

People who would be us, but are not us,
from impoverished backgrounds We need to get along.
We need to forget and let go any social milieu
become Tony Robbins “wealth” people
Be the people we need to be,
to be someone to project a face of who I am
Be someone I’m expected to be
Do all the the things “society” (TV) demands of me

Be performative me

Fit the role that everyone expects but no one demanded
The worst thing is they say they never asked you for it
(but everyone knows they did)
After all, we’re all in this together,
right?

Once again, we don’t live in an anti-white world.

We live in an anti-straight white MALE world.

Why is this obvious distinction so difficult for so many Unz men to grok?

White women get affirmative action. They directly benefit from DEI.

So many of you are hidebound to an expired understanding of how the world works—it’s really remarkable.

Twinkie, the Smithsonian opened their African American History Museum in DC in 2003. I’ve never been inside it despite living in Northern Virginia but I’m sure a lot of the exhibits are about slavery. The Native American History Museum in DC opened in 2004. If you visit the holocaust museum too you can do the triple crown of White guilt in one day!!!

That was just about the same time I was living in our (self-made) teepee in the mountains above Santa Fe. Though we didn’t enjoy the luxury of a wood stove we stayed warm anyway because, properly designed and fitted out, teepees are surprising snug. Course, I spent half my waking hours grubbing up armloads of wood and splitting them with my axe, but, nonetheless….

I remember one evening, venturing out for wood in a blasting, stinging snowstorm. The wind literally ripped at my coat and pants. I thought to myself, “This damn wind is going to kill me. I’ll get disoriented and lost and freeze to death out here.” And my anger mounted till it overpowered my fear. At that point, it was personal. I wouldn’t let the malicious powers of Nature beat me.

And then it struck me that projecting human feelings into so-called-by-sophisticated-moderns “Impersonal Forces of Nature” served the useful purpose of rallying one’s personal troops and focusing one with all his/her might as can only be accomplished by facing a specific enemy. So, anthropomorphizing may have served a useful, evolutionarily-advantageous purpose after all. It wasn’t all mere superstition.

So much for the musings of the professor, safely ensconced in his easy chair in his centrally-heated office or home.

Layers within layers.

Yes, res, re 112, this text has served to stop arbitrary “Your papers!” demands for protected personal information in derogation of Article 17 privacy rights. The offending institution just said, “Oh, never mind, you don’t have to present government ID.” N.B., they didn’t change the policy, hoping Joe Blow would typically submit.

This text has also effectively protested “estate recovery” predation in derogation of indivisible human rights to health, housing, and livelihood. Estate recovery in this case is implemented by a hospital department for profit. The expropriation agency backed off, the petitioner got their human right to health without signing away the family’s right to future housing. Again, the practice is to back off the unlawful demand without changing the overall policy.

That Wikipedia article is telling. US policy is keeping human rights out of your reach with scurvy tricks like “non self-executing treaties,” ratification packages of legally-void reservations, and casuist nonsense in courts. Every four years the US government gets its head handed to it in binding review, but they conceal their fingers-crossed commitments and public failure from the subject population.

You can watch the US take a whuppin here:

The world world pushing this government to do its fucking job:
https://www.upr-info.org/en

The official record of US state derelictions:
https://www.ohchr.org/en/countries/united-states-america

Recorded, for the sarcasm and ass-kicking that gets cut from Conclusions and Recommendations:
https://webtv.un.org/en/search/categories/meetings-events/human-rights-treaty-bodies

We should all be talking about this, instead of bullshit statist news.

Joos, joos, joos. Joos under my bed.

I was giving you the actual history. They would have come up with a different name for the same thing but the reason that you hear about “diversity” is that Justice Powell used that as the legal excuse for race discrimination in Bakke. If he had written “multiplicity” it would be “multiplicity” instead. Before Bakke no one talked about “diversity”.

Were Jews part of the Orwellian Leftist apparatus that twisted our Constitution in a way that justified racial discrimination against white people? Sure, but so were plenty of non-Jews. Justice Powell wasn’t Jewish.

I don’t hate black people although I hate the way that some of them behave, mostly young lower class black men. Most of them are harmless working people. It would have been better if they hadn’t been dragged here in chains, but that’s water under the bridge.

The “diversity” apparatus, although it increasingly is fronted by blacks, especially black women like Claudine Gay, is not solely a black creation. Blacks are musically creative but when it comes to ideological stuff, they are pretty stupid. Nation of Islam is preposterous and even that wasn’t created by a black guy. Ta-Nehisi Coates is idiotic, right down to his faux African name. Even if they came up with the idea, by themselves they did have the political power to push it thru, at least not initially.

AD (and others) blame the creation of this apparatus on Jews. That’s not true either. Although Jews were not absent from this movement, they were not the only ones. Not all Leftists are Jews and not all Jews are Leftists, so blame Leftists, not Jews. Otherwise you are being both over and under inclusive – false positives and false negatives – this is what makes anti-Semitism dumb. I don’t “hate” anyone, but I do blame deluded Leftists for imposing their utopian and un-American schemes on us.

America is at its best when it is color-blind and religion blind, not when it elevates one race or religion above the others. Replacing the hierarchy where whites were on top with a new hierarchy where blacks are on top is not an improvement.

My feelings exactly. BTW, does anyone read Kurt Vonnegut, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon or Ken Kesey anymore? They were all ‘must reads’ when I was young.

Yes, Reilly was a lot funnier than this guy. Or maybe Hankins thought it best to hold back on the humor when writing this.

I have no idea who these “joos” are that you keep banging on about. But I do know that there exists in the US a group called “Jews”; and that, when one seriously contemplates the host of evils which presently afflict this country, these Jews have a whole conga-line of truckloads of stuff to answer for. More than any other group, even negroes.

PRO-TIP: If you want people to stop accusing you of hiding under their beds, then… stop hiding under the bed.

The verb usage alone kept me in stitches.

I wanted to find an actual example, but ended up reading the reviews at goodreads. It turns out that the reviewers, like the readers here, are split and either love it or hate it.

I think I’ll crib the take of one of those reviewers and say, if this book doesn’t have you LOL, even the third time through, we can’t be friends.

Here is a 6 minute clip of an interview from a Japanese media team with Jared Taylor, regarding the U.S. and race issues. Taylor was born-and-raised in Japan for his first 16 years. Very interesting and well-reasoned.

Elsewhere, the PRC Naval Militia trying the swarming intimidation thing.

I read “Confederacy” only a couple years ago and concluded that Toole was a man ahead of his time, As, in some ways, was “A Canticle for Liebowitz” author Walter Miller. It is sad that both went off the deep end.

A fascinating comparison – thanks for the link!

He could have just sent them Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen.

Excellent point Mr. Jones.

We’ve concentrated on the “diversity” nonsense, because that’s the core issue. Our problem is not fundamentally “the women problem”. Women are just more compliant than men, so dutifully parrot “the narrative” they are given–and they are now pickled in a toxic narrative. Why mass media in the hands of an outgroup is so destructive.

But all that said, I’ve yet to see any evidence that women in the academy has had any benefit. Beyond just educating the talented young, the benefit of the university is subjecting current knowledge/orthodoxies to empirical and logical test and coming up with new ideas, theories, knowledge. And neither empiricism, logic or new ideas are female human strengths.

Individual gals who want to come out and play–fine. (Freedom.) But turning universities into feminized institutions has been complete disaster.

BTW, you are always going on about the “one people” stuff but America was “”multi-ethnic” from the start with Anglo-Saxons and Africans. Long before any Jew ever set foot in America it was already “multi-ethnic”. Putting aside the anti-Semitic lies about how the Jews single handedly ran the slave trade (Farrakhan invented this) , it wasn’t Jews that made America “multi-ethnic”, it was Yankee sea captains with their slave ships . You painting an imaginary picture of an all Anglo “one people” America that never existed. Look closely at this actual painting from the 18th century – there are TWO people in it.

And blacks are what the whole “diversity” apparatus is all about – once AA got going then everyone and his brother wanted to get those nice AA bennies but AA was originally driven by (and STILL is driven by) the enormous IQ gap between blacks vs whites (and Asians), which is bigger than any other gap.

The best that can be said is that in the past, white Americans were able to suppress the blacks that they had brought over but in truth this was always a ticking time bomb – even Jefferson understood that having blacks in America was like having a wolf by the ear – you can neither hold on indefinitely nor let go. It’s not the Joos fault that YOU made America “multi-ethnic” and now we have to deal with it permanently. If anything, immigration has helped because without immigration America would be even blacker than it is now.

“…obviously, Harvard doesn’t want ‘diversity.’ It wants uniformity. Of the strictest, most orthodox nature.”

He himself says as much, if only implicitly:

Most religions in the last millennium have placed a premium on preserving the original vision of their founders. They have had to resist pressures to undermine (or diversify) that vision… They have had to fight against spiritual entrepreneurs, whom they disobligingly label heretics, who have been eager to diversify their doctrines.

DEI may not refer to a deity in the strictest sense, but it it is clearly a kind of religion.

Are you familiar with theories like these?
DNA and the Jewish Ancestry of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton
https://jlahnet.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/2.pdf

More papers by the same author mentioned here.
https://hiddenjewishancestry.com/english-crypto-jews

Maybe the way to rehabilitate Thomas Jefferson’s reputation is to prove he had part Jewish ancestry? ; )

“But turning universities into feminized institutions has been complete disaster.”

And a dysgenic sink!

Someone at Harvard needs to have the nerve to say, “Look, we’re Harvard, and we only take the cream of the crop, period. Diversity is not our primary goal, but brains and originality.”

Some professors believe and might even try to say that but they no longer control the institution. The administrative bureaucracy that actually does run Harvard wants as many “special interest” groups as possible because that creates more roles for administrators. Someone has to develop counselling programs for 1st generation lesbians of color and organize support events for LatinX transsexual engineering majors. Every “diverse” student means some multiplier of counseling, outreach and back office staff that need to be hired. Unfortunately Harvard’s endowment is so huge at this point the grift can go on for decades before the damage becomes truly obvious.

Talk about the Streisand Effect! By asking not to be seen on the internet they have now been seen and noticed by many times more people than if they hadn’t said anything.

Honestly I don’t understand what was going on there. Ordinary people in China are being filmed every second they are in a public place. These folks sounded very arrogant like they were little princelings (children of high party officials) who feel as if the rules are whatever they say that they are.

I` m not qualified to evaluate her DNA work but it sounds like a stretch to me.

However her politics are clearly the usual Leftist BS which causes me to question her results even more. She says:This calls into question the ideology of
White Protestant Supremacy and indicates that early American patriots were of more diverse ethnicity than
previously believed.

First of all, this is a strawman. And 2nd, having some small percentage of Jewish ancestry from hundreds of years ago doesn’t make you Jewish. Jews can neither take credit nor blame for what these men did, good or bad.

Many years ago, when the Internet was getting rolled out among the general population, I was involved in an online chat where someone on the “extreme right” asserted that Isaac Newton was Jewish. These people take the most venerated white men in history and try to claim they are Jewish. But if their claims are correct, then the Jews clearly are the master race and we should all bow down to them.

I don’t hate black people although I hate the way that some of them behave

The people you constantly accuse of antisemitism “don’t hate [the Jews] although they hate the way some of them behave.”

Not all Leftists are Jews and not all Jews are Leftists, so blame Leftists, not Jews.

Not all criminals are blacks and not all blacks are criminals, so blame criminals, not blacks. But that doesn’t stop you from banging on about blacks as a group, does it? And do the same with the Jews and its antisemitism, you dirty Nazi goyim!

America is at its best when it is color-blind and religion blind, not when it elevates one race or religion above the others.

A country, any country, works best when there is a core ethny and culture to which others cohere and, yes, assimilate. Singapore, for example, is one multiethnic country that works well. It’s highly meritocratic and people are equal in rights, but we all know who’s in charge and whose culture dominates.

it means “of God.” Coincidence?

Well they do have a religious zeal …..a secular humanist Opus Dei ?

Unfortunately, A Confederacy of Dunces has done for Aristotelian-Thomism what Sister Act did for the religious life, what Chocolat did for Lenten observance, and what The Da Vinci Code did for contemplative artwork—it stopped it from being taken seriously.

Well, I can only speak for myself, but I found the book LOL funny from first page to last – yet it in no way hindered my ever closer embrace of “Aristotelian-Thomism.”

Yes. At some point, if you choose to rule Egypt (and not genocide the Egpytians) you are obligated to tolerate diversity to that point. Thus, the question becomes how diverse do you plan your empire on being.

Not all Indians (dot) are unassimilable and not all unassimilables are Indians, so blame unassimilables, not Indians. But that doesn’t stop you from banging on about Indians as a group, does it?

“A country, any country, works best when there is a core ethny and culture to which others cohere and, yes, assimilate”

The problem here is that there is debate among on the Alt Right on who constitutes this core ethno, and who is capable of being assimilated.

Nativists then and now don’t want your kind around.

Weird. There must be some law in China that you can’t take people’s photos without their permission. Probably a result of pushback against the surveillance state.

A lot of mainland Chinese have difficulty understanding that their rules do not apply outside of China.

Also, it’s funny to hear a Chinese calling people racist. Of course, they probably believe it, as China always recycles the worst of anti-white Western propaganda and presents it to the Chinese audience. The most vile anti-white, anti-Christian films vomited forth by Hollywood regularly appeared on Chinese TV when I was there.

Not all Indians (dot) are unassimilable and not all unassimilables are Indians, so blame unassimilables, not Indians. But that doesn’t stop you from banging on about Indians as a group, does it?

Corvinus, you know you have low intelligence, so nothing you write is ever worth responding to, but I am going to make an exception for this one – for your edification.

My point was not that Jack D shouldn’t criticize blacks for their widespread social pathology. Rather, it was a critique of his hypocrisy (criticizing blacks = totally fine, criticizing Jews = dirty Nazism!). The point is, all should be critiqued and none should be immune from criticism. Jack D can and should criticize blacks for their issues. As well, others can and should do the same for Jews and, yes, Indians without the fear of being labeled as a racist.

But, as you well know, with Jack D, Jews can never do any wrong – it’s always some dirty Nazi goy’s fault.

Lest you play the childish game of “You do the same for Asians,” let’s wind the tape and see what I wrote about Asians in 2014, nearly a decade ago: https://www.unz.com/isteve/why-not-just-ask-them/#comment-666152

Young Asian immigrants and Americans of Asian descent today are increasingly not of this mold. They have no idea about anti-communism. Except for a dedicated core of evangelical Protestants, they are largely atheistic. They do not revere the Anglo-American civic and political traditions and heritage as I do. They don’t have the same sense of gratitude I feel toward this country. They have been indoctrinated by SWPL apologist nonsense for decades now. For that matter, demographically, they are increasingly more South Asian/Indian (pagan or Muslim) or Chinese (atheist/Chinese nationalist) and less dissident Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Taiwanese, meaning they are less likely to respect and assimilate into the traditional Anglo-American culture.

Frankly, I am not optimistic that increased Asian immigration would benefit this country, even if Asians commit fewer crimes than whites and are academically more successful.

As for this:

Nativists then and now don’t want your kind around.

Yeah, all five of them. There are probably more people who believe the earth is flat than there are those who consider East Asians Untermenschen.

When Confederacy was first published, I was a high school kid commuting to school every morning on a packed IRT car. On any given morning, about 1/4 of the passengers were reading Confederacy.

I have never heard an entire crowded subway car convulsed and howling with laughter, before or since. It was perhaps the last truly unifying moment in American culture, the literary equivalent of the Beatles at Shea Stadium.

Thanks! I spent a lot of time splitting wood too. I had a dog, so I could just talk to him instead of getting mad at nature, LOL

There were hilariously long icicles hanging off the cabin in winter. That was of course because so much heat was leaking out and melting the snow on the roof.

I have a fire going right now, just for fun of course, and it’s basically removing warm air out through the chimney, so not much has changed…

BTW, you are always going on about the “one people” stuff but America was “”multi-ethnic” from the start with Anglo-Saxons and Africans. Long before any Jew ever set foot in America it was already “multi-ethnic”.

It was more Anglo-Saxon than the “Jewish State” is jewish. Not even when the jews seized land by force in 1948 did they have a majority. Nowadays, jews amount to barely half the population of Palestine. If you count the Gentile families that were forced to flee the territory as a consequence of jewish wars, the Gentiles have a clear majority.

So how do you define “Jewish State”?

PRO-TIP: If you want people to stop accusing you of hiding under their beds, then… stop hiding under the bed.

Here’s Jack D trying to pretend the anti-White, anti-American “The 1619 Project” isn’t a Jewish project:

https://www.unz.com/isteve/first-draft-of-claudine-gays-resignation-letter/#comment-6346157 (#93, etc.)

The DNA claims are only as valid as the DNA identifications and those have often changed. Having said that, Jefferson’s Randolph side was of British relative antiquity (King John) and had long been associated with English overseas affairs as had the Randolph’s closest associates in the New World. That crypto Jews would be overrepresented among the mercantile classes is not surprising and has been discussed for years in certain historical circles.

“say, “Look, we’re Harvard, and we only take the cream of the crop, period.”

Princeton takes the cream of the crop.

“America was “”multi-ethnic” from the start with Anglo-Saxons and Africans. Long before any Jew ever set foot in America it was already “multi-ethnic”. Putting aside the anti-Semitic lies about how the Jews single handedly ran the slave trade (Farrakhan invented this) , it wasn’t Jews that made America “multi-ethnic”, it was Yankee sea captains with their slave ships .”

Good God your knowledge of American history is superficial.

Jews came to North America with the Spanish. Maybe not the Polish Jews, still. Africans, in any significant numbers, arrived approximately 100 years after Jamestown. The 1619 stuff is intentionally misleading.

The crypto Jews who keep cropping up in parts of Spanish North America were here because the Spanish sovereigns made it advisable for them to come here.

for music, visutal arts, or drama, one has to have some level of talent. That usually does not translate to 1600 on the SAT or a great GPA. If a school basis its admission strictly on SAT and GPA, then many small or non-academic programs would die.

My fire is heating the house even as we speak. Not open but an old Vermont Castings wood stove. I just turn on the heat exchanger to keep things lubed up in there. I’ll use it every day in summer to keep things cool, though. I fell my own trees, buck em up, split and stack em.

Stay strong.

Putting aside the anti-Semitic lies about how the Jews single handedly ran the slave trade (Farrakhan invented this)

You need to go back and read the contemporaneous Atlantic Magazine article addressing this. The NOI’s claims were lifted from Jewish scholarship. Really, everyone should read this. It is balanced.

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/archives/1995/09/276-3/132669499.pdf

I think commenter Intelligent Dasein meant to disparage Prof. Hankins by tying him to Kristol (guilt by association, if you will), but clearly the intended effect didn’t take with you. 😉

It was perhaps the last truly unifying moment in American culture, the literary equivalent of the Beatles at Shea Stadium.

Considering it came out before the last episode of M*A*S*H, I think you are exaggerating a bit. I will take your word for it that it was the last piece of written fiction to captivate the nation at large, although I seem to remember Fifty Shades of Grey and the Harry Potter books doing the same. It is worth mentioning that those books are British rather than American.

Looking at the Pulitzer Prizes for fiction, the last author that I recognize is Philip Roth for American Pastoral in 1998. While the Game of Thrones series became popular because of the HBO show based on them, I don’t remember them being in the zeitgeist when the first one was published in August 1996. I admit that I generally don’t read fiction, so this might be out of my wheelhouse.

I’ve never seen anything quite like this.

What do you mean?

Don’t stop Corvy, he’s on a roll! 10,026 I believe.

https://www.unz.com/isteve/beverly-hills-rat/#comment-6372758

In the last few days I was wondering on this blog if Tommy Smothers was truly funny and if Jerry Lewis was truly funny. Perhaps A Confederacy of Dunces falls into the same category, where it is better known for being funny than for actually being funny. I do know that whenever they try to make a movie of it, something happens to derail it, with the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman being the final nail in the coffin. I hear Ron Swanson played I.J. Reilly on the stage, and I can see him in the role, so who knows?

My pyloric valve is tickled. A Confederacy of Dunces needs to be read by all.

And I can guar-on-tee that “C.D. Payne,” author of the immensely profitable Youth in Revolt was heavily influenced by that work.

Don’t get me wrong, I really loved Youth in Revolt as a novel. But after the sequels and Hollywood issued corruptions I grew tired.

John Kennedy Toole was an American type of the Czech Jaroslav Hasek.

Confederacy of Dunces is truly funny.

It’s likely best if no films attempt to capture it. And perhaps it’s a class and generational thing.

Agree but I just don’t see how Prof. Hankins was “tied” to Kristol. Kristol was off tempo, always on his back foot. He was at a loss when it came to discussing the nobility of our Western tradition; like a cynical teenager saying, “Sure, sure. Oh yes, you REALLY CARE about virtue and aiming for the highest intellectual and moral goals. Riiiight.”

From evidence which was presented to my own eyes, I am forced to conclude that for lack of having made any meaningful contribution to civilization, Jews—as Jews—resenting our titanic accomplishments, throw sand in the works.

Cue JackD. JD, it’s time for you to remind us that not all Jews are the same etc. etc.

Yes, just our point, Jack. When they act other than as Jews, then they may make useful and meaningful contributions to Western civilization. But in so far as they are acting as Jews, then they can make no useful contribution to Western civilization. And by the same token, if they are making a useful contribution to Western civilization, then they are not Jews acting as Jews.

Judaism is utterly incompatible with Greek and Roman civilization. The Emperors knew it. The leaders of the Jewish cult knew it.

So lay off the sophistry*; it’s not working.

Got it?

*Virtually every argument put forth by the Sophists depended on ambiguity for its confounding effect. Ambiguity meaning, of course, a word having more than one definition or one whose meaning shifts in the course of the argument.

“it came out before the last episode of M*A*S*H, … I seem to remember Fifty Shades of Grey and the Harry Potter books”

Um, I said “culture,” not kitsch, literary sex toys, or children’s babble.

“I admit that I generally don’t read fiction, so this might be out of my wheelhouse.”

If you mentioned Philip Roth approvingly, then it is about two galaxies out of your wheelhouse.

Confederacy, like Bonfire of the Vanities, is simply too large to make into an effective single movie, which casting aside, is part of why the Bonfire movie was such a disaster; an HBO miniseries would do the trick, maybe something the size of True Detective. Many comic novels have the same problem making them hard to adapt — what the author says about what is happening is often much funnier than what is actually happening. In Toole’s case, it takes the form of the many asides and eccentric descriptors. It’s kind of impossible to film the phrase “filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs.”

I don’t think Hollywood has yet coughed up an actor capable of doing justice to Ignatius — maybe Nathan Lane in his prime could have done it. They even tried Will Ferrell, and even that didn’t work. Maybe there’s some RADA Brit who’s been busy doing Falstaff on stage whom the rest of us haven’t heard of.

I’ve never read any of Roth’s work, but I have heard of him as he is an alumnus of nearby Weequahic HS in Newark, which still exists but is now 90 percent black and 8.4 percent Hispanic with literally 0 white students. Whatever you think of his work, he was an undeniably famous author.

I don’t think Hollywood has yet coughed up an actor capable of doing justice to Ignatius

I had mentioned in another post that Nick Offerman played Ignatius at the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston and I think he has the chops to do so on the screen. I can also see Rainn Wilson in the role.

like Bonfire of the Vanities, is simply too large to make into an effective single movie

I must be the only person who liked Bonfire, the movie. I’ve seen it a few times. Sure, it couldn’t replicate the book but I liked DePalma’s camera shots. And there was Reverend Bacon.

For my part I wish no one would even attempt to make a movie of Confederacy. As you explain, some of it is essentially un-filmable.

The novel, meanwhile, may just be one of those things that people either get, or don’t. In my case it may have helped that I spent formative years in the Crescent City.

My favorite place that I ever lived as a child! But that was in the Before Times. And even then you could tell what the problem was going to be.

In an article in the Atlantic, an anonymous English instructor at an open admission university noted that there is not one book, movie, song, TV show of anything that all of her students have seen/heard/read. The instructor said the closest was the movie “The Wizard of Oz.” Remember, more than 50% of Americans do not watch a minute of the Super Bowl and that is by far the most watched TV program.

In public life, an allegedly intelligent man so completely at sea, out of his element but trying gamely to turn the discussion back onto familiar territory i.e. contemporary, fashionable Jewish criticism of Western values and performance. Kristol had no tools with which to approach or handle the Greeks.

Jews have become lazy (maybe they always were). They confine their critique to Christianity, acting as though Christianity were the main event. It isn’t. Christianity is the bastard offspring of Greco/Roman civilization and Jewish millennialism. An “intellectual” like Kristol is lost when confronted with a scholar of Greek civilization. All he can do is reguritate the Jewish critique of contemporary Christian/American democratic capitalism—you can put quotes around those if that pleases you.

It’s as though Jews have fallen prey to their own trap. Thinking themselves clever for having depicted Whites as though they were all “Johnsons” in Blazing Saddles i.e. somewhat stalwart but ignorant proles, Jews now believe their own propaganda. Having drunk their own Kool-Aid, they fail to address the deeper roots of European people and so underestimate their opponent—a sure recipe for disaster. And the Jews will fail again, as they have done so many times before, catastrophically. And as they go down, they will do so with that customary, caustic, barbed remark on their lip, a put-down at Europe’s expense.