Redhead from the videos here to clear something up!
byu/throwawayspot8 inbaltimore

This seems up your alley. Liberal Baltimore rag seemingly defames some nice SJW chick during the initial violence. She has her purse stolen and is seemingly set up for a photo op by the 2 journalists, who then go on to publish pictures and a story about she “incited” all those otherwise peaceful protestors to violence.

Random internet strangers help prove her side of the story.

Actually, the traditionally assigned role of Oxford and Cambridge was as engines for the reproduction of the Church of England.

I laugh whenever I read pampered university students act as though they’re fighting a battle against the establishment. They ARE the establishment. They reflect ideas that are pretty much held up as the established norm in the Western establishment. Whether that’s a good thing varies depending on your point of view.

The only difference is that it’s been infested by the Marxist need to constantly be “against” something.

redefine political radicalism as something that, say, coal mine organizer Keir Hardie wouldn’t recognize as radicalism

Keir Hardie
Keir Hardie, in his evidence to the 1899 House of Commons Select Committee on emigration and immigration, argued that the Scots resented immigrants greatly and that they would want a total immigration ban. When it was pointed out to him that more people left Scotland than entered it, he replied:

‘It would be much better for Scotland if those 1,500 were compelled to remain there and let the foreigners be kept out… Dr Johnson said God made Scotland for Scotchmen, and I would keep it so.’ According to Hardie, the Lithuanian migrant workers in the mining industry had “filthy habits”, they lived off “garlic and oil”, and they were carriers of “the Black Death”.

More than a century later Lithuanian immigration to Scotland in the 19th century seems to have worked out pretty well overall. And no Lithuanian immigration would have meant no Matt Busby.

How much radicalism really exists on today’s campuses?

Apart from a small minority, I’d say that students are overwhelmingly careerist and view the university experience as a stepping stone to entering a high-earning profession. This is particularly true on elite university campuses, which have many Asian and Indian students (both domestic and international).

There are actually plenty of conservative students, but they spend their time either in the fraternity/sorority scene or focusing on their academics (engineering, business, pre-med, economics). They don’t have much interest in leading protests or “speaking truth to the power.” The typical conservative values success and knows speaking politically incorrect sentiments can screw up a career rise. So they stay silent, get into medical school, get married, buy a house in the suburbs, have 3 kids, and vote Republican.

There is plenty of ethnic activism on major campuses, but most of it happens for traditional tribal reasons. It has nothing to do with post-racial liberalism.

Lots of young people are very conformist and just want to fit in, be popular, and (after they graduate) make money. The radicalized students are a small group and tend to be socially maladjusted. Perhaps their embrace of radicalism is their way of giving the middle finger to a society they don’t fit in with very well. Most campus radicals have always struck me as being a bit off.

As for college professors, most of them are fairly careerist too. The majority of them are focused on getting tenure, research grants, and department politicking. The activist professor is much less common than many believe.

I think college campuses became associated with radicalism due to the large-scale anti-war protests in the 1960s and 1970s. I think what people don’t understand is that students back then were anti-war not because they were embracing liberalism, but because they feared being drafted. The abolishing of the draft is why students have been so indifferent to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

What about Berkeley in the Vietnam era? They were, supposedly, very counter-culture, getting into shouting matches with Governor Reagan, demanding free love and peace etc Very eloi, but that’s not the point.

Keep in mind that I don’t have much against privilege, other than that I wish I, personally, had more of it.

And if you have more of it, you don’t need less of it.

“But we have seen no evidence to support the idea that social science fields with more politically diverse workforces generally produce better research.”

Wait a minute. You’re saying diversity is not such a great idea and doesn’t produce better results? Hmmmm….

There are actually plenty of conservative students

Perhaps you and I have different conceptions of conservatism, but the vast majority of students on elite campuses are politically apathetic and not particularly principled. So like so many sheep, they are easily led by a small cadre of radicals, who have a near-complete immunity to do whatever pleases them (burning student newspaper, occupying buildings, etc.).

Lots of young people are very conformist and just want to fit in, be popular, and (after they graduate) make money.

Yes, period.

It seems to me that elite universities have always been the refuge of political radicalism. But I think what is different now (and perhaps since the late 1960’s) is the utter disappearance of noblesse oblige (and its corollary, patriotism).

Once it was very common for Ivy Leaguers (or Oxbridge types) to obtain commissions and fight for their countries as leaders of men when war broke out (even the rather effete elite men in “Brideshead Revisited” mostly become officers near the end of the book). By the Grace of God, fate had granted them a life of privilege and learning, and they repaid that with their blood and flesh in their nation’s conflicts.

That is nearly all gone now. Those Ivy League or Oxbridge men who become officers of their countries’ armed forces during wartime are now seen as crazy or at least a little bizarre. I agree with David Brooks on this: one significant problem with “meritocracy” is that those who become elites feel that they “earned” their status and do not feel a real sense of obligation toward the society at large.

The authors are thus calling for major changes in policy and practice based on sheer speculation. The authors cite some evidence of the benefits of “viewpoint diversity” in collaboration, but there is a scale mismatch between these studies (of small groups) and the field-level generalizations the authors make.

If only everything else in social psychology were subject to this kind of scrutiny! This is exactly how the field is used to propagate highly politicized faddish concepts like “stereotype threat”. Schools, employers, and other institutions will blithely ignore a century’s worth of firmly established results and instead seize upon a few studies performed under very narrow conditions that don’t relate much to the real world in order to justify all kinds of nonsense regardless of the fact that they can’t be replicated, and then they use them in contexts the original studies never applied to anyway. (I’ve recently started to hear stereotype threat used as the latest argument for affirmative action, not to adjust for inferior past performance, but because if a demographic is underrepresented in an educational or professional setting it will supposedly remind them of negative stereotypes about their group, which will lead them to underperform. This is a huge stretch from the claims in the actual research.)

So I don’t even think a more politically diverse research community would necessarily lead to more politically diverse results. I’m sure there are plenty of social psychology researchers do a fine job following the truth wherever it leads. But no matter how dispassionate their work, their societal function is the same as that of climate scientists: to produce a body of ideas for others to appropriate as political ammunition, reasoning backward from agenda to science.

The “radicalism” that does exist is careerist radicalism, kids go into some movement so they can get a leadership position and later get a soros-etc-funded job in the same movement, or put on their law school application in hopes of going T14/biglaw.

Yes, this is very iSteve-y. Examine this photo: http://i.imgur.com/1OZOn1H.jpg. It’s been all over the news. The woman in glasses is named “Caitlin Goldblatt”. She is a contributor to some Baltimore news outlet. Astonishingly, this idiot reported on social media

The drunk redhead was trying to grab that guy’s bag, we were trying to pull her back.

Well, how very heroic of this Goldblatt person.
But video has emerged completely demolishing this claim and Ms. Goldblatt’s news organization seems to have spit out a bitter apology for this and several other ludicrous errors of reporting.

What I cannot understand is how this Goldblatt person could possibly be so clueless and thoroughly mind bent that she would personally witness these events and think this redheaded lady goes around snatching bags from rioting black men. If her mind were functioning within the normal range, she would assign a vanishingly small prior probability to such an event. And she has the utter gaul to reduce the victim to the dehumanizing phrase “the drunk redhead” for all to read on social media. I am trying mightily to maintain equanimity, but I think there’s pretty good evidence that this Goldblatt person’s mind is so far gone that the world would be better off without this snake.

Universities used to be the transmitters and preservers of our culture. Now they are its enemies. Most oxbridgers in the 1890’s would have believed in preserving Britain for the British and in the basic principles of western civilisation. Now they hate the Anglo saxons, are leading the way for the colonisation of Britain by African and Muslim hordes and openly work to undermine the western heritage of the UK.

I sometimes think half the problems on the western world could be solved by burning down Oxbridge and the Ivy League.

Pretty well said. I went to a lesser Ivy around the turn of the millennium, and there were plenty of activist-y types, but most people were interested in their careers.

That said, we heard liberal things, but never conservative things, from the faculty. But…they still opposed the unionization of their graduate students… 😉

we have seen no evidence that social science fields with more politically diverse workforces have higher evidentiary standards, are better able to avoid replication failures, or generally produce better research.

The argument from ignorance is never less compelling than when it comes from those whose profession is supposed to entail a fervent curiosity toward the truth.

Putting aside the factual question of whether universities have always been bastions of leftism, I disagree with his basic premise that it’s alright for universities and the press to be leftist because the military and businessmen are conservative. That’s neither here nor there. Universities and the press are the unique institutions that are supposed to be providing us with unbiased (and even “scientific” = gospel true) data about the world. If we are seeing the world only thru pink lenses, we are not going to get an accurate picture.

Likewise, universities are otherwise supposed to be “diverse” according to liberal doctrine. They are supposed to reflect the society around them in terms of race, gender, sexual preference, etc. Somehow the only kind of diversity that is really important in an institute of knowledge (diversity of point of view) is the one that is not important at all. If a conservative said, “it’s OK for engineers to be all male because you women have elementary school teaching all wrapped up”, what would the reaction be?

First, though, I have to say that universities in America and England don’t look like centers of political radicalism.

This, exactly this. Same goes for the advertising pages in such hotbeds of unrest as the NYT, et. al.

Here is video of the black guy attempting to snatch the redhead’s purse: http://gfycat.com/JadedWigglyFly You can clearly see Ms. Goldblatt looking directly at the fracas. She is with her news media colleague, Gianna DeCarlo. The black guy yanks at the redhead’s purse, pulling her violently toward this Goldblatt person and DeCarlo. After these events, it boggles the mind how this Goldblatt person could get on social media and write

The drunk redhead was trying to grab that guy’s bag, we were trying to pull her back.

There be hatred in this Goldblatt person. For the redhead, in this case.

In the domain of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world,
and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.

–Arthur Schopenhauer

I’d have had three votes in the forthcoming General Election if not for that change of law in 1950. The chances of my finding three candidates worth voting for would not have been high.

More recently Mr Blair changed the laws on postal voting, with the aim of giving Some People multiple votes in practice, if not in theory. This was probably the most racist change in British law in the last few decades. And I’ve seen no one comment on that aspect of it.

Perhaps you and I have different conceptions of conservatism, but the vast majority of students on elite campuses are politically apathetic and not particularly principled.

I agree. The vast majority of students want to get a degree and then make money. I think quite a few of them have values, if not politics, that fit in with conservativism. They just don’t express themselves because we live in an age of political correctness and it can be dangerous to one’s career to dissent. I also think that conservative-inclined students are more likely to value harmony in social settings, so they don’t really want to argue. You tend to find these students in departments like business, engineering, and the sciences (pre-med, pre-pharm, pre-dent). Many join fraternities/sororities or play NCAA sports.

So like so many sheep, they are easily led by a small cadre of radicals, who have a near-complete immunity to do whatever pleases them (burning student newspaper, occupying buildings, etc.).

I wouldn’t say that they are easily led. I’d say that they’re too focused on socialization and academics to care what the radicals are doing. The silent majority regard the radicals as fools who’d rather waste time than focus on their careers. It’s the equivalent of you seeing a crazy homeless guy screaming on a street corner, but ignoring him and going about your day.

Really, the radicals are nothing more than an occasional comical diversion. University life tends to revolve around major sports programs, star professors, research grants, politicking in academia, admissions to prestigious departments (ie medicine, MBA, law), and the Greek social scene.

The idea of a conservative university is a gay fantasy.

Those posts are amazing! No wonder the traditional media types hate the Internet! Average joe types were able to prove the paper was completely lying with social media and YouTube videos.

Hilarious now the Baltimore paper thought they could claim a 100 lb redhead was trying to steal a pink purse from a young black man, but I guess that shows the insanity of the SJW. After being caught dead in a lie, they have issued a ridiculous half ass retraction that claims this whole thing is a “dumb distraction” and that phrases like “sjw” are conservatives trolling.

I guess this was the Baltimore version of the Rolling Stone article, but just on a smaller scale.

I think you have to distinguish between the students, who are fairly diverse politically (though they appear to lean left in their voting patterns at least until they have 2 kids and a mortgage) and the faculty, who are overwhelmingly liberal, and not just in the social “sciences” but across the board. If you look at the studies – for example, the publicly available campaign donation records of Ivy League faculty, 96% of those donating donated to Obama. That doesn’t seem very “diverse” to me.

These kind of results could only be achieved if there was very careful selection going on and anyone showing the slightest hit of conservative sympathy had his or her career torpedoed. The best that could be said is that this is an “unconscious” process by faculty (although “unconscious” racism or microagressions are not considered any more forgivable by them for not being intentional) but I think it is quite intentional – in settings where they think they are “safe”, liberals are quite willing to air their view that conservatives are subhuman – it is not hidden very far beneath the surface if it is hidden at all. In a classic case of projection, all of the bad characteristics that they ascribe to “racists” , they themselves possess in mirror image.

When Jonathan Haidt talks about conservative versus liberal he is referring to varying sensitivity to the 6 moral taste receptors: Care/harm, Fairness/cheating, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, Sanctity/degradation, and Liberty/oppression. Liberals care a lot about Care/harm, a bit about Liberty/oppression and not at all about the others. Conservative care about all of them. This can be tested and has been.

That having competent critics with competing points of view improves communal reasoning is both obvious and demonstrable. If universities’ dismiss the possibility they are insensitive to what ordinary people consider sacrosanct and morally necessary, it’s the clearest possible proof of their blindness.

J.S. Mill once said about Jeremy Bentham that he was so blind to the passions that drive most people he wasn’t fit to be a moral philosopher, for example.

Town-gown riots in the Middle Ages were serious business–in the 1355 Battle of St. Scholastica Day, Oxford townsmen brought out the biggest firepower of that age–Welsh longbows–against the students. Dozens dead on both side, although the spark was a bar tab dispute rather than ideology per se. The 1229 University of Paris riot was also pretty bloody, and the students were the “radicals” of the day.

The American Civil War definitely had some campus strife involved: at Harvard, the student body was (largely) of the same Unionist mindset as the townies in Boston/Cambridge, but at Yale…man oh man was there bad blood between the good Republican townspeople of New Haven and the large contingent of rebel sympathizers among the kids (a lot of Dixie planter elites in those days tended to send their sons to Yale instead of the other Ivies, if they sent their sons north for school at all). Town-gown relations in New Haven were really poisoned for decades, and a lot of people think they never really recovered until well into the 20th century, at which point other issues came up.

All Gelman is saying is that when it come to diversity of race, gender, or sexual orientation, the benefits are self-evident and don’t need to be proved, but when it come to diversity of political viewpoint in predominantly leftist institutions, the benefits of diversity must be proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, by rigorous peer-reviewed research, no matter how much common sense might suggest the advantages of such diverse viewpoints.

In other words, diversity for thee but not for me. Also, see Jewish attitudes towards immigration with regard to Israel and the U.S.

I know that Gelman is a liberal, but I had thought that he had more integrity than this. What a buffoon.

Primogeniture and all that back in the day also had an influence. Eldest gets title, younger ones to army or church.

Or in Brooks’ case, the obligation appears to be to other societies

Re: “major changes in policy and practice based on sheer speculation”

Gelman and Gross’ argument amounts to major changes for thee, but not for me.

Who-Whom, dressed up in Social Psychological Science jargon.

These doughty One-Percenters are valiantly fighting the good fight on behalf of the truly oppressed. Which somehow maps to the retention and strengthening of their own privilege.

Funny how that works.

I don’t think ideological diversity necessarily helps in many fields.

Will literature department improve if it included Hitlerites, Maoists, Stalinists, Pol Potists, Gueveara-ists, Nation of Islamites, etc?

It will just have closed-minded fools of other stripes.
Instead of one kind of PC, it will have different kinds of PC.

Will biology be helped by including creationists? Or leftists like Gould the dirty liar?

Hard truth isn’t diverse.

A department that allows 2 + 2 = 5 and 2 + 2 = 6 as well as 2 + 2 = 4 is not better. There is only one truth, which is 2 + 2 = 4.

That said, hard sciences and math are diff from social sciences.

But when it comes to humanities, history, and social sciences, truth is stranger cuz there are so many ways these subjects can be approached. So, one could argue for more diversity in ideology.
But that still misses the point. If there’s more ideological diversity, but the prevailing attitude is still illiberal, it will just have more kinds of illiberalism.

American social sciences are not liberal. They are Liberal, which is to say they are PC, dogmatic, and closed-minded.

What universities need is more genuine liberalism.
Furthermore, most Conservatives are just as much liars as Liberals are.
They lie about MLK, Israel, Palestinians, Iranians, Russians, etc.
Terry Teachout and Walter Russell Mead are running dogs of AIPAC. Charles Murray has been brave on some issues but a complete toady in his worship of Jews and now homos.
More ideological Conservatives in college for the most part will mean more shills for Israel. It will not mean more people like Sailer, Gottfried, or Derbyshire.
That is the real reason why the Jewish Haidt wants more Cons. He’s worried that the ideological Libs are becoming a bit too warm to Palestinians.
I doubt if Haidt would say there are too many Jews in the academia, so we need more Arab-Americans and Palestinian-Americans in history and poly-sci departments to balance things out.

Colleges need to uphold the principle that academics should at strive for as much objectivity as possible. In social sciences, history, and humanities, total objectivity is impossible, but they are not only about perspectives and positions but about assessment of the world based on factual evidence. So, all things must be connected to available facts.
It is that standard that has gone missing.

Perhaps, one could argue that since humans can’t help being biased no matter how hard they try, the only practical option is to allow different voices/positions so that there will be some degree of checks and balances and contentious discussion. Maybe, but then it also lead to polarization of positions as college departments turn into opposing camps of ‘us vs them’ that may make ideological blindness even more hardheaded.

Btw, if the military has been conservative, has it been improved by introduction of more women, open homos in military, and now even talk of trannies?
Libs seem to think so. Therefore, on that basis, I suppose one could argue that social sciences will be improved by forcing more Cons into them.
But I don’t think the military has been improved by more women and this homo crap.

And I don’t think colleges will be improved by having more Cons if those Cons are mostly shills for AIPAC-dominated GOP. Most Cons are like whores of Neoconism created by AEI and the like. Cons for Israel.

But then, will social sciences necessarily improve with far right types? They may offer some interesting counter-perspectives, but like Stalinists and Maoists, they will offer more ways to be blind than the proper way to see.

What the academia needs is more courageous individualists who can distinguish subjectivity and objectivity.
Today, we have respect for neither subjectivity nor objectivity in the academia. Not even subjectivity since most academics surrendered their minds to the hive-mind-set. They buzz like bees. They are cheerleaders going through the same motions. It’s about orthodoxy.

What intellectual life needs to foster in the arts, culture, and social sciences is individuality/subjectivity and truthfulness/objectivity. Without a strong individual will and subjective passion, academics and intellectuals will lack courage. They will just go with the orthodoxy herd mentality.
But without a powerful commitment to truth and objectivity, strong individualities will just stoke their own egos and obsessions.

Ideally and paradoxically, the powerful subjectivity and powerful objectivity feed one another. For one thing, a powerful subjective personality doesn’t like to be hemmed in by any kind of orthodoxy.
Sontag, Kael, and Paglia, for all their faults and biases, made for interesting reading because their powerful egos resisted the orthodoxy of the left as well as that of the right..
They weren’t all that good on objectivity, but at the very least they weren’t mindless mouthpieces of the orthodoxy.

Such individualities are gone from America culture. There are no more Roykos either.

Objectivity isn’t enough because one needs courage to make a stand against orthodoxy, and those with the guts tend to be strong individualists.
Now, we mustn’t fall into the fallacy of individualism = objectivism. That was Ayn Rand’s looniness.

But to the extent that intellectualism needs courage, it has to begin with the individual who will to stand firm like Howard Roark of Fountainhead.
And on that basis, if the individual has the integrity and courage to choose truth over personal bias, a meaningful intellectual culture can arise.

The answer is yes and no. Take Russia, for example. Universities there were not centers of radicalism for a few hundred years. But then, as the Jewish quota on admissions was relaxed, they did very much become centers of radicalism in the late 19th-eary 20th centuries.

The ideology shoveled at universities doesn’t matter: the sophomorism of the inexperienced is the real danger, it just happens that leftist delusions are dependent on sophomorism. You can have right-wing delusions (like Hispanic family values). The only way I can imagine curing that naivete is killing the “university for everybody” religion and scheduling what university does survive after some sort of cold-water wake up, like national service, or Peace Corps work in the Third World.

Conservatives in general show good judgment about planning and running successful lives.

“In future there will be no need for transgender students to cross-dress to avoid being confronted by invigilators…”

Great term! Invigilator: [One who watches] students who are taking an examination.

On my way to work in Baltimore this morning, I passed a dozen protest-invigilators. They are profiled in this Army Times article.

From the same Wikipedia article:

He also campaigned for self-rule for India and an end to segregation in South Africa

The picture clearly shows the black has a grip on the woman’s purse strap. It’s obviously her purse and he’s trying to grab it away. What kind of lying scum is this Goldblatt person? Talk about gall, saying up is down, it’d be beyond belief if one didn’t see it for themselves. Boy, there’s a world of lying out there.

Well, I’ve been in the armed services, the academy, and business, and I would say they are all rather conformist and conservative. How could it be otherwise, you can’t have any kind of institutional continuity if you are truly radical. And any social structure tends to be inhibiting.

Gelman’s remarks should be taken as the intellectual self-stroking that it is: He is a hero in his own mind. Radical politics — in terms of words — tends to burgeon in academia, mainly because you have a lot of young people with no ties and no obligations, and also a lot of young people who who believe in the uniqueness of their cohort and their ability to see what others have not seen. It has been ever thus, among a fraction of the students. Radical professors have always been rare, and even here you have to distinguish between those who talked the talk (once they got tenure) and who actually walked the walk.

Most “radicalism” since the 1960’s has been primarily of the “Cultural Marxist” or now I suppose you could call it “Sexual Marxist” POV; it basically concerns things which, by definition, are epiphenomenal, superstructural, and have nothing to do with the price of eggs. The closest thing to something radical would be the politics implied by Climate Change, but even here there is no foundation in the real world so it’s just more words.

Academia is a business and the “knowledge industry” is also a business, churning out the egghead equivalent of hot pink hula hoops or Superballs or Pet Rocks. That’s why if you are really interested in learning things, look to the past and tradition, first, rather than to whatever is hot and being written up in the NYRB or the other intelligentsia equivalents to Entertainment Tonight.

I enjoyed the academy, but the main thing it offers is peace and quiet and free time. And you can get those anywhere. But now that I have seen yet again someone compare the Baltimore riot to the plight of the huddled masses in Les Miserables, I am going to have to leave this train of thought and re-read Hugo’s novel, which I last read in 1967. Apparently I forgot the part where the hero snatches a purse so as to complete his transition to Jane Valjane, as well as the part where he steals a roll of toilet paper to feed his hungry anus.

Hillsdale? Brigham Young? Biola?

Truth is subjective in the social sciences and humanities. It’s not like physics where you can measure the gravitational constant. Is Europe better than America? Depends who you ask.

. . . and its sensitivity to political threats to social science funding . . .

Highest marks, Mr. Sailer! You’ve once again excerpted wisely. These ten words are the key to understanding what’s going on here. How’s that for reductionism?

This identifies the problem, and Institutions tend to be pretty good at identifying threats. And, if you’re looking to neutralize a threat, and actually succeed in doing so, it’s best to accurately identify who and what are threatening you. Ergo, the salve for Political Threats is Political . . .

“Okay folks, we’ve made progress. Let’s break for lunch. After lunch we’ll figure out the rest.”

. . .

“Diversity, as in Political Diversity. As in, we can neutralize Political Threats by increasing our Political Diversity! . . . Whatever that means.”

Diversity is a good banner to fly under these days, whatever your objective(s) and however you’re pursuing it. It’s a label. Kinda like Operation Infinite Justice. Scratch that. Operation Enduring Freedom.(1) Bingo! Or, “Blankfein Says He’s Just Doing ‘God’s Work’”

All the rest is just filling in the blanks, post-hoc.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Enduring_Freedom

2. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/goldman-chief-says-he-is-just-doing-gods-work/?_r=0

“the part where he steals a roll of toilet paper to feed his hungry anus”

This had me in stitches. +1

I agree with you on the idiotic comparisons. You have to be either dumb, superficial or intentionally dishonest to claim that your protest/cause/whatever is the same as some much more noble or justified thing in the past, whose glory you seek to cover yourself with. I think those who really admire the world of ideas should be the most proactive in denouncing intellectual con-men.

Thank God nothing like this happens in the Unis in my country. Disadvantaged minorities (like gypsies) have a token number of seats set aside, so they’re outside the normal entrance process. It’s seen as a source of amusement that the poor engineering students have few females (the ones they do have are hardcore though) and they have to come to other places to beg for dates (like Econ, Political Studies, Med, Law). We who are surrounded by females are either spoiled or effeminate by engineering standards. It’s all good fun and un-PC. Must be why I see so many Western types, even though they can wipe their asses with the degrees. The Unis just suck a bit and have no money for grand research. But there’s no PC and Diversity bullshit, only the never-ending battles between the faculty for the best parking spots. They do feed at the trough of grants and I have yet to see any result from it. But now I see it could be worse.

Universities are teaching two very basic things today’s students will need to succeed in a diverse environment, the ability to not notice anything sensitive and the discipline to keep their mouths shut. The vast majority of today’s college students learn quickly if they already did not know, what to say and not to say. Getting them to not notice is harder. These are exactly the skills a small ideological clique needs to keep control. By 1930, Soviet Citizens knew not to interfere or inquire when the NKVD showed up to their neighbors house and whisked them away. Much of the left used to complain noisily that schools had become a training ground for corporate clones but now I think it is more for gatekeepers and government apparatchiks.

Does anybody remember, I’m in Disgrace by the Kinks?

I know…the pages of fur storage (now), haute couture, Rolexes, Manhattan real estate, exotic vacations, BMW’s…such a joke. I think elite U’s (the admissions staff and administration – not professors, the territorial critters who must fight to stay relevant & keep their offices) feel guilty that on today’s campuses, there are so many callow, wealthy, and over-protected children who are not becoming the “trailblazers” of the past. Most want to work for the financial services industry and large corporations in general (Google is now the “dream job”), instead of a lifetime of perhaps, meaningful socially-conscious work which pays poorly…all those student loans are a drag preventing you from ever getting your Rolex, the duplex, the Gucci bag…

From all the campus visits, brochures, information sessions these past few years, I definitely get the vibe that elite U’s are worried that their students are not the magnanimous and learned individuals of integrity that they keep insisting they are accepting. So, this latest obsession with “fairness” over gender seems so trivial when U’s and students should be focused on existential threats to human life right now. Four years is a very short time to try to persuade students to care about something other than themselves. Elite U’s do not seem to like realizing that they, are in fact, just reproducing a new elite class of 1%’s.

A side issue: lately, some of the Ivies are very quick to state that they have accepted “exceptional” students from the rural back-country of the midwest, rust-belt, and west. It had gotten embarrassing that low-income but high academic performing students from rural areas were “under-represented” at Yale & such. Some are now bragging about how many “Possee” students they are accepting (war vets from Iraq & Afghanistan)…I guess to appear that they are not anti-soldier/war/young people who serve the country. It all seems so phony.

The followup to this story has been excellent and makes clear that neither Soderberg nor Goldblatt know what they are talking about.

Also, the video makes clear that the black guy in the light gray hoodie not only attempted to steal the redhead’s purse (and dragged her several feet into the street while attempting to do so), but he also: (a) emptied a trash can and its contents before throwing it at the crowd, (b) threw punches at a patron on the sidwalk, (c) stealing liquor and apparently another shopping bag, all this before attempting to steal the redhead’s purse. He makes his first appearance center frame at 40 seconds and gets into it at 55 seconds, and you will note has nothing on him at the time.

“Wait a minute. You’re saying diversity is not such a great idea and doesn’t produce better results? Hmmmm….”

heh! yes, i had the same thought. talk about mixed messages!

“Under the old laws on academic clothing – known as subfusc – male students were required to wear a dark suit and socks, black shoes, a white bow tie and a plain white shirt and collar under their black gowns.”

Oh, the horror! Couldn’t they have worn panties and a pretty lace camisole under their dark suit and white shirt to make themselves feel less stressed? Who would have known, especially with their black gown to cover them up?

Actually if one judged Keir Hardie by today’s GOP/FoxNews standards, his views would place him in the radical Leftist/anti-globalist spectrum. Rush and Hannity would be demanding his head on a platter.

But of course what is important to the Ivies will not be the same things that motivated Hardie or some engineer today who loses his job to off-shorting or forced to train his H1-B replacement while he heads to permanent unemployement. The Ivies are on the upper end of the economic spectrum with guaranteed cushy jobs waiting for most when they graduate. So it’s the feel good social issues they gravitate to that won’t upset the applecart. In short it’s cheap theatrics for the upper classes.

I enjoy reading your comments. I have a soft spot for “In my country . . .” stuff. Especially if the place is Romania, and that primarily Because Gypsies.

A bad Draw of the Cards that was. (1)

The Gypsies do seem Sui Generis. Though the “I need to tell you about the Jews” crowd likes to say otherwise. Like a Chevy salesman explaining how a Mercedes is like a Trabant (2)

(1) http://www.metrolyrics.com/draw-of-the-cards-lyrics-kim-carnes.html

(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant

So you’ve actually forced those douchebags to take in rural and ex-military Americans? I’d actually call that a victory, albeit a small one.

As for transgender rights to excuse their shilling for Goldman Sachs and Google: remember medieval indulgences for nobles? Plus ca change…

A lot of this depends on how you define radicalism. For instance nominalism was the radicalism of its day and universities were definitely a hot bed of nominalism in the Middle Ages.

I think Oxford and Cambridge are probally complete outliers when it comes to modern radicalism because England didn’t really have a bourgeoise radicalism. It had Chartism for workers and it had bourgeoise leftism but the bourgeoise leftist movements were very genteel. Beatrice Webb and Virgina Woolf don’t really emerge from genuinely radical environments. The LSE is a good example of this. Hard to think of a university more predestined to radicalism, but which was ultimately rather staid. Instead of bourgeois radicalism England had Bohemianism which was fairly rampant at both Oxford and Cambridge.

On the continent and even in Russia the Naploeonic Wars unleashed in their early stages a kind of radical idealism that engulfed most major universities. This was especially true in Germany. I’d be interested to know what French universires were like during the Revolution if they even remained open. But then again French universires seem comparatively unimportant in the development of their nation than do other European universities at least once you get to the modern era. .

It seems like what really turbo-charges universiry radicalism is when foreign ideas are injected into the university system- this is what happened to the German universities during the French Revolution and Russian universities following Alexander’s reforms when students galvinized by German philosophy became increasingly radicalized. England as a culture has been surprisingly resistive to foreign ideas.

As for militaries as generally conservative institutions, consider the range of (at least nominally) socialist, radical, or left-leaning regimes established through military coups…Nasser, Gaddafi, Assad, the Iraqi Ba’athists, the Derg, the Young Turks, Hugo Chavez (failed attempts in 1992), Thomas Sankara and the Communist Officers’ Group in Burkina Faso, the Saur Revolution communist overthrow of the Afghan monarchy, the leftist-led Carnation Revolution in Portugal, Juan Velasco Alvarado in Peru, Houari Boumedienne in Algeria, Batista in Cuba (who entered power as a populist progressive before becoming the reviled reactionary), too many to count in Africa…

If you run a Third World country, especially in the Cold War, watch out for those junior officers. They tend to get funny ideas.

http://www.studentbeans.com/mag/en/news/university-political-allegiances

Oxford is a lefty institution now. Ironically my alma mater LSE, founded by Fabian Socialists, is a hotbed of right wingery.

we have seen no evidence to support the idea that social science fields with more politically diverse workforces generally produce better research

Whereas the proposition that *racial* diversity generates creativity, spurs competitiveness and whitens teeth is so self-evidently true it requires no proof and lies beyond the very possibility of criticism.

“Is Europe better than America? Depends who you ask.”

The argument still has to be buttressed by facts & data and must intellectually consider counter-arguments and facts & data.

Social sciences aren’t just about personal biases. If so, I, as social scientist, can say “WWII didn’t happen, moon landing didn’t happen, etc.” If I offer such revisionisms, I have to offer up facts and evidence.

If someone says Europe is better than America, we need ask in what way, by what measure, according to which values, and according to which data?

So, facts and data do matter in social sciences. It’s just that certain kinds of data are disapproved, and even if they are tolerated, certain conclusions are disapproved.
If Charles Murray offered up charts showing that white IQ is higher than black IQ, that might be okay. But if he said, in conclusion, ‘white IQ seems to be higher than black IQ’, then he’d get in trouble.
It’s like there are plenty of data in academia to show that, at tail ends, there are more male geniuses than female ones, but if one makes a statement to that effect, he gets in trouble like Larry Summers.

In social sciences, there has to be more honest talk, and for there to be honest talk, honest terminology must be favored over bogus terminology. Bad terminology leads to bad thinking.
Take ‘homophobia’. It doesn’t exist–except in the rare cases where people might actually flip out in front of homos. But because the term is used, there’s a lot of messed-up thinking about homos. And ‘racism’ is a bad word. Why should race + ism mean racial supremacy?
And antisemitism is a bad word and usually misused to attack anyone who notices Jewish power.

Conservatives should have challenged terms like ‘homophobia’. Instead, they accept the terminology of PC and merely say, “I am not homophobic.” But once you’ve decided to play by the rules of the other side, you’ve lost the argument. It’s like a capitalist should NOT argue economics according to Marxist or Maoist terminology.

If more conservatives had shown interest in intellectualism and if more of them had courage, we wouldn’t be in this mess. But the ones who tended to be tough and courageous often had nutty ideas–like the Birchers–, and ones who tended to be amiable and nice often tended to be cowards and toadies.

PS. How about this? Maybe all freedom lovers should create a Counter-University-of-Freedom. Its only subject would be freedom. It would offer no degrees or whatever. Just grounds for free speech for all groups and of all persuasions. Anyone could go there and offer free lectures on whatever from far left to far right. This university would NOT need rich endowments and all such since it wouldn’t exist to teach students to succeed in the world. It would just be a place of free speech. FREE SPEECH CAMPUS.

We should all pool our resources, buy up some property in some state–few acres–and set up this FREE SPEECH CAMPUS where PC is the only thing that wouldn’t be allowed.

And we could hook up all the lectures, debates, and conferences there to the internet for all the world to see. That way, the hell with lack of free speech on campuses. There would be one place, the FREE SPEECH CAMPUS, where anything can be said.

There is plenty of ethnic activism on major campuses, but most of it happens for traditional tribal reasons. It has nothing to do with post-racial liberalism.

Sure, but it is the tribal aspect of POC politics that grants it such power.Regardless of personal political philosophy, POC activists are united in their hatred of White Anglos. And that hatred makes them operationally Leftist.

Universities are a function of who attends. State Colleges and Universities draw in the White middle class, and various talented but over all less competitive NAMs, and a smattering to majority of Asians. Take for example, University of California, Irvine.

You won’t find too many trust fund radicals there, no Bill Ayers or Bernadine Dohrns, no Marxism radicalism to suppress working class and middle class rivals. Instead the radical politics is comprised of Latino, African (from Africa), Malaysian students. It was these students who sought to ban the American Flag from campus at UCI. What was missing: striving Chinese students, who mostly did not care. A nearby college, Cal State Fullerton, is far more White. But you will see the same campus activism.

To sum up: Harvard, other elite universities, have rich trust fund babies embracing radicalism to suppress upwardly mobile claimants because their wealth is not based on land but a trust fund and social connections. Radicalism is a means to limit access to social networks.

Other lower tier universities and colleges have White/Chinese students who get no real benefit from radicalism (exclusion of competitors to their own social networks) and radicalism there is a means to overthrow the White/Asian meritocracy and install non-competitive NAMs as top dogs.

“Sure, but it is the tribal aspect of POC politics that grants it such power. Regardless of personal political philosophy, POC activists are united in their hatred of White Anglos. And that hatred makes them operationally Leftist.”

POC politics was not created by and is not controlled by POC. POC idiots are just sheeple being led by PC controlled by Jews and white Libs.
Most non-white nations are not pro ‘gay marriage’, but most POC idiots are. How is that? ‘Gay marriage’ is a white western ‘value’, but POC fools have sucked it up.

Anti-white-ism is rife in the POC community because most POC idiots get their learning and entertainment from schools and Hollywood dominated by Jews and white Libs.
Besides, even white Cons worship MLK, praise Jews, say ‘racism’ is the worstest things in the universe, and yammer about the cult of ‘diversity’.

Also, most of POC isn’t really anti-white. Hispanic leaders are mostly white. And there is a lot of amity and intermarriage between whites and Hispanics. Also, most yellow girls, even those bitching about ‘white privilege’, dream of the privilege of having half-white kids.

Though POC may pose as anti-white, they are useful because they serve as buffer between whites and blacks. So, even as POC rhetoric is seemingly anti-‘white privilege’, most of non-black POC are really economically and socially united with whites against blacks. How many POC are dying to go live in Detroit?

… England didn’t really have a bourgeoise radicalism. It had Chartism for workers and it had bourgeoise leftism but the bourgeoise leftist movements were very genteel. Beatrice Webb and Virgina Woolf don’t really emerge from genuinely radical environments. The LSE is a good example of this. Hard to think of a university more predestined to radicalism, but which was ultimately rather staid. ….

They only appear staid because they used their indoor voices and just got on with making themselves the real Institutionalized Revolutionary Party; far more than the Mexican ruling party of that name. The LSE, Fabian Society, Rockefeller Foundation types know the trick is to keep the crown on the government letterhead but change absolutely everything else. At universities, they keep the gowns and old buildings but teach permanent revolution. They’re iconoclasts who are careful not to smash any of the icons that give themselves power and status and sooth their conservative enemies. They’re crypto-Trotskyites in corduroy and tweed. It’s the academic version of “dress British, think Yiddish” but it comes just as much from the tradition of Oliver Cromwell as it does Trotsky.

Have Universities “Been Centers of Political Radicalism for Centuries?”

Yes, but not necessarily leftist radicalism. Many German universities were hotbeds of rightist radicalism and radical antisemitism.

So, I guess the author had a point… but then, of course he meant radicalism as only leftist radicalism. But there were plenty of rightist radicals in Europe and America before WWII and liberal Jewish takeover of everything.

Weren’t the college protests of the 1960s just a big draft-protest?

I assume that for someone out there some personal insight from another country might prove entertaining or enlightening. At least you won’t feel like you’re in an echo chamber of frustrated Americans. Though anecdotes are just that, not statistics. But you’re off on the Trabants, they were a German thing mostly. If you’re a Romanian, your father lusted after this baby:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacia_1300

It’s said the initial models didn’t even have heating, because Ceausescu asked “what do the morons need heating for?”

“Radical politics — in terms of words — tends to burgeon in academia, mainly because you have a lot of young people with no ties and no obligations, and also a lot of young people who who believe in the uniqueness of their cohort and their ability to see what others have not seen. It has been ever thus, among a fraction of the students. “

Have a look at the UK New Left Project’s “About” page. Not exactly horny-handed sons of toil.

http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/about/

“Town-gown riots in the Middle Ages were serious business…”

True. (Does 5371 ever get anything right?) The friction was exacerbated by the fact that universities were typically ecclesiastical institutions and therefore out of reach of civil authorities.

OT: The cartoonist at Charlie Hebdo who did the Mohammed cartoon for the cover says he’s not going to draw the Prophet anymore:

​Charlie Hebdo cartoonist: ‘I will no longer draw Mohammed’
http://rt.com/news/254317-charlie-hebdo-mohammed-cartoonist/

He says he’s bored of it now. It’s not the massacre earlier this year, it’s that it bores him as an artist. I guess the same way Hitler, as a performance artist, was bored of the Soviet Union 70yrs ago this month: bored to death of the whole thing.

I guess it’s all about communicating concerns and setting boundaries. The Muslims got their message heard at Charlie Hebdo, it just took a little effort.

“Cambridge University’s MPs were, of course, slightly to the left of Oxford, but only slightly.”

An Oxonian friend of mine commented about Cambridge: “Second to Oxford in all things, save treason” (referring of course to the Blunt/Philby/Burgess, etc., spy ring).

Cambridge was historically the more strongly Calvinistically inclined of the two universities; Oxford more sympathetic to high-church Anglicanism. This is the reason why the seat of Harvard University (founded by Puritans) was named Cambridge. It must be borne in mind that Calvinism and Puritanism represent the “left wing” of Christianity, and it is from the New England Puritans of the seventeenth century that the New England Unitarians of the early nineteenth century, and the secular humanists of the twentieth century, intellectually descend.

The willingness of the present American political and cultural left to turn a blind eye towards misbehavior on the part of its leadership, as long as they espouse politically correct views, seems to me to descend in like fashion from the sort of post-Calvinist antinomianism parodied to great effect in James Hogg’s “Confessions of a Justified Sinner.” Obama and the Clintons strike me as latter-day Wringhims.

Universities there were not centers of radicalism for a few hundred years. But then, as the Jewish quota on admissions was relaxed, they did very much become centers of radicalism in the late 19th-eary 20th centuries.

Russian universities really didn’t exist for “a few hundred years” before relaxation of the Jewish quota. The oldest universities in Russia are Moscow State University (founded 1755) and St. Petersburg State University (founded 1819, though it claims to be successor to a university founded in 1719).

“Actually, the traditionally assigned role of Oxford and Cambridge was as engines for the reproduction of the Church of England.”

No, that would be Catholicism, not the Church of England. Oxford and Cambridge were both over three centuries old before the CoE was created.

Jews are loving it.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/oct/20/idaho-citys-ordinance-tells-pastors-to-marry-gays-/

Not to disagree with your general point, but you mentioned Isaac Newton…

Isaac Newton was a Whig!

He played a small role in the Glorious Revolution. You can’t get more Whiggish than that, not in his lifetime. Of course, his complaint was that the King was trampling the ancient privileges of the universities…

There’s nothing wrong with the buildings or charter, they’ve just got the wrong people in them. Don’t be an institutional taliban, destroying old things you don’t like. That’s not conservative.

Seems like the royal family has members of each generation who serve. I don’t know if this is some token thing or what but at least they keep up appearances.

Do look up the difference between “traditionally” and “originally”. Then familiarise yourself with the claim of the Church of England to be a branch of the Catholic Church.
Also, see a psychiatrist who might help you deal more constructively with the humiliation you suffered at my hands. Frankly, I don’t think taking revenge for it is within your powers.

The power of the left on campuses stems from having a critical mass in the humanities and social science subjects. This has allowed them to club together and take over the political life of most universities. In the business and science subjects nearly everyone spends most of their time either studying, working or partying, and few have any interests in activism. There also tend to be a lot of minority activists in law, as law is the subject that ambitious NAMs can use to promote their tribal interests.

Reactionaries, or others with a political or intellectual bend, don’t have a large enough presence in any particular subject to be able to club together and provide a political counter weight. Probably the best tactic would be to join one of the fun-loving “frat boy” type organisations and use that as cover to network with other reactionaries.

I went to a university in New Zealand and the only visible opposition to political correctness came from the engineering students, who liked to poke fun at the more self-righteous aspects of university life. In retrospect I would have tagged along to some of their orienteering events and tried to network with some of the more intellectual ones.

There be hatred in this Goldblatt person. For the redhead, in this case.

She may not have seen the purse. Of course, even so, you have to be awfully deranged to think a White woman office worker in heels would commit robbery without a weapon against a young Black man who is in the process of rioting and looting.

A couple years teaching in ghetto schools seems to have some beneficial effect.

I wouldn’t say that they are easily led. I’d say that they’re too focused on socialization and academics to care what the radicals are doing.

I agree with most of your observations. According to Wikipedia, only 10-15% of students at public and 15-20% of students at private American universities bother to vote in campus elections. Sports, volunteer work, clubs, and Greek life offer alternative ways to gain leadership experience without taking radical positions or pretending to actually influence big off-campus issues.

I still think serving in student government can be a valuable experience and student representation can have a positive impact on the way colleges are run. However, the low participation rates mean that campus poitics are easily distorted by politically strident self-promotors, out of touch with the scope of their actual powers. These people often claim to channel student sentiments as if they had some sort of mandate when in fact most of the student body never voted for them and may not even know who they are.

Oxford is a lefty institution now. Ironically my alma mater LSE, founded by Fabian Socialists, is a hotbed of right wingery.

I’m just guessing you don’t mean right wing in the sense that the LSE is full of “God, King & Country’ types, Francisco Franco types or even Mussolini types? I’m guessing you mean globalists of the Financial Times variety rather than the Guardian variety? The types who’d like to sell the world a Coke rather than buy it one?

Your assumption is correct, I enjoy your comments.

. . . because Ceausescu asked “what do the morons need heating for?”

Yeah, that Odd Duck wasn’t big on the whole heating thing:

(see “Energy Usage here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s_austerity_policy_in_Romania)

Our exchange has motivated me to do a little reading about Gypsies under the Communist Regime. Whatever their delusions, my suspicion is the Communists had a better understanding of the Gypsies than the EU does.

The situation with the Baltimore City paper is a good example of how the media’s lying version of events is being overturned by camera phones and the internet. In the past Mr Soderberg’s version would be the only version people saw whereas with all the videos on youtube you can see his version is a crock of lies.

Basically, some jewish local alt-journalist was trying very hard to create the illusion that white baseball fans were the real spark to this riot.

Allegedly groups of drunken whites began launching bottles and racial epithets at innocent blacks, and contrary to what you may have seen or heard this is what actually sparked all the trouble (!)

These people are *insane* literally. They can lie in the most outrageous manner, and it doesn’t bother them in the least… I think they may actually believe the lie they created. It’s really a bizarre phenomenon.

There are sub sectors of the jewish/gay communities that HATE whites so much they will do almost anything to slander and harm them.

They’ve actually got some power now days too, so it’s more important to be aware of these people and hold them to account for their actions.

I don’t think people are going to let this gentleman off the hook so easily. (The one lady he specifically accused of agitating the riots is threatening legal action)

National University of Ireland: 0/1 right of center: Sinn Fein won here, so we have a radical MP? Or just an anti-British one?

The Sinn Fein in those days could really be described as deeply conservative radicals in the real sense of those words: ie. calling for change all the way down to the roots by returning Ireland to its ancestral ways. They were really so conservative then that they made Winston Churchill look like a rootless cosmopolitan.

Deranged…or a reporter looking for a politically correct story that can raise her profile and, hence, her career.

Sure…but the military also has the advantage that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun (or the blade of a sword in earlier eras).

Let it go, Ron. You did not come off very well in that exchange.

By the way, thanks for the rest of your lengthy comment, which I missed the first time by neglecting to hit the “More” button.

An incisive primer. Though I do wish you wouldn’t refrain from commenting on the Gypsies (further). Are you aware that, like me, Sailer is fascinated by Gypsies? Alas, I can’t see how currying favor with him is going to get you anything. But that certainly is one way to do it.

What intellectual life needs to foster in the arts, culture, and social sciences is individuality/subjectivity and truthfulness/objectivity. Without a strong individual will and subjective passion, academics and intellectuals will lack courage. They will just go with the orthodoxy herd mentality.
But without a powerful commitment to truth and objectivity, strong individualities will just stoke their own egos and obsessions.

Yes, there’s a need for original thinkers who are open-minded enough to challenge and change their ideas when the evidence contradicts them.

That’s because in real communist regimes, the government is the sole employer and has to marshal the country’s resources, chief among them labor, for industrial production. Whereas the EU and other contemporary regimes can just leech off the private sector and don’t actually have to do anything.

off-topic so apologies for going on about it but the Baltimore thing is such a clear cut case of the media blatantly lying to push “The Narrative” and getting caught out.

media version

http://www.citypaper.com/bcpnews-how-drunk-sports-fans-helped-spark-saturday-nights-violence-20150428,0,75331.story

true version

http://imgur.com/gallery/QVh32

Thank you. I’m not terribly informed on this issue, because I was born a short time before the Revolution and it is the way of that particular generation to look ever forward and forget the dusty past, with its bad hair, mustaches and angry miners. I do remember bread lines in the years after, when Romania’s industry (lots of the heavy type that the commies preferred) tanked so hard that we started receiving carbon offset certificates under the Kyoto protocol for minimizing carbon emissions. Could have made a mint on them.

In any case, my sense was that, on the gipsy issue, whatever understanding or insight they had amounted to nothing, because the communists did not use their extreme power to regiment the gypsies and crush the whole parallel society they had going on. I even read that, during the chaos of the Revolution, many of them were scared that the army would simply do an ethnic cleansing of the lot of them. Nothing of the sort ever happened. They destroyed the Paris of the East neighborhoods, herded country folk into grim and claustrophobic apartment buildings to work in the new factories (Bucharest grew 6 times in like 40 years). It was a very glaring omission that they turned a nation of peasants into engineers (in the wrong industries, but whatever) and actually achieved equality of opportunity between men and women (even had mandatory military service, separately but still), but they couldn’t be bothered to do anything about the fringe community except police them harshly. Maybe they felt the country would have lost some of its vibrancy, I don’t know. You can’t argue with their musical talent. Or maybe they were concerned about the image abroad, clashing with the new socialist man and content masses vibe they wanted to project.

Do you want to hear a joke? It’s the 1990s. A very good gypsy musician comes back to his wife, sweating profusely and cursing his fate. The “piranda” asks him what happened and he tells about his gig at some nouveau riche bastard’s wedding. Some guy with lots of factories and land. Lots of money was changing hands (paying the singers is a ritual in itself at wild parties), everybody was having a swell time, then the guests get drunk and start grilling the gypsy. “Tigane, tell us, did you play for the Party leaders way back when?”. His wife is livid. “What did you say?” ‘I admitted I did, plenty of times” “You’ve killed us, you stupid bastard. At best, we’ll be poor, at worst, we’ll be in jail”. She starts wailing and moaning. Her husband continues. “Then they asked me if I played for the Communist Youth Union” “What did you say?” “I said yes, plenty of times. Then they asked me if I played for the guys in the Securitate at their parties?” The woman’s face is drained of blood. “What did you say?” “I said, yes, sure, many times”. And he goes on and on, explaining how he was asked about playing for the SovRom company parties (the Soviet-Romanian mixed companies), for the exporters, for the heads of the collective farms.
“WHY IN GOD’S NAME WOULD YOU ADMIT TO ALL OF THAT?”
The gypsy is annoyed so he gets defensive. “Why do you think, woman? I couldn’t lie. All of the bastards were there!”

Wow. Excellent comment.

The mention of the old Sinn Fein at the time of Irish independence made me look up both the candidate who won the National University of Ireland seat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eoin_MacNeill
.. and also a fellow academic who went on to be the first President of Ireland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Hyde

It’s worth having a look at their biographies simply because they were both academics, both radicals in a way but I’m sure neither of them are what Andrew Gelman had in mind as his sort of radical academic.

I disagree with his basic premise that it’s alright for universities and the press to be leftist because the military and businessmen are conservative. That’s neither here nor there. Universities and the press are the unique institutions that are supposed to be providing us with unbiased (and even “scientific” = gospel true) data about the world.

My sentiments exactly. And what makes businessmen conservative? Businessmen mostly care about what’s good for their specific business. If you run an agribusiness, you’ll want free trade. If you run a steel mill, you’ll want tariffs. And if you own a factory, you’ll probably favor publicly-financed job training while at the same time opposing further labor laws. The politics of business can fall on either side of the same coin because the main focus is making money; and to do that it helps to be politically pragmatic or to stake out ideological positions that aren’t critical to your company’s success.

That is true, but by and large leftists are for income redistribution, and businessmen obviously don’t want that because they have lots of money.

Social issues like LGBTCBY rights they couldn’t care less about, which is why you see them coming out in favor of it to get gay people’s money.

“Whereas the proposition that *racial* diversity generates creativity, spurs competitiveness and whitens teeth is so self-evidently true it requires no proof and lies beyond the very possibility of criticism.”

That’s pretty good.

Consider certain sectors of the economy:

Social liberalism is destructive to the organic coerced bonds that we call “society”, divorce for example results in more spending on consumption of appliances, housing, lawyers, etc.

A society that had stable marriages would mean higher wages to male providers, something that the Chamber doesn’t want.

I don’t mean to sound like Rod Dreher or an inked anti-consumerist, but “alienation” isn’t just a Marxist pseud0-claim. Apple is our Church, rather than the Church. Tim Cook is Pope, not Francis.

Those Ivy League or Oxbridge men who become officers of their countries’ armed forces during wartime are now seen as crazy or at least a little bizarre.

Guess who is in Harvard ROTC? Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld. I suspect a career in politics awaits.

Chua-Rubenfeld interview

Wikipedia has an interesting article outlining the advantages of the opposite system: allowing the purchase of officer commissions as formerly practiced in some parts of the British Army.

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

. . . but they couldn’t be bothered to do anything about the fringe community except police them harshly.

I don’t think I’ve ever considered such a thing, but maybe the Communists were less susceptible to Hubris, at least insofar as the Gypsies were concerned.

Absolutely Steve. once Napoleon invaded Germany Ficthe et al made quick work of converting radicalism into nationalism.

It’s hard to get so much wrong in only a couple of sentences. Aside from the fact that Russia didn’t have universities “for a few hundred years” before the 19th century as Seamus points out, it also didn’t have many Jews until the dissolution of Poland (1795), when Russia suddenly acquired a large Jewish population. In the beginning, the Russian government actually encouraged Jews to receive modern educations and the Jewish community resisted, feeling that such education would alienate Jewish youth from their own traditions and community. When Jews did begin enrolling in significant numbers due to assimilation in the late 19th century, the result was not the relaxation of (previously non-existent) quotas but rather the imposition of such quotas. This resulted in a brain drain as Jewish students went west (especially to Germany, which at that time was a world leader, esp. in the sciences) for their educations. One such refugee, Chaim Weizmann, helped the British to win WWI by his invention of a method of producing one of the key ingredients in smokeless gunpowder by bacterial fermentation.

Apple is our Church, rather than the Church. Tim Cook is Pope, not Francis.

Depends on the issue of the week. Ta-Nehisi Coates is Pope for this one.

Having abandoned the Gospel and way of life that grew from it, we’ve forgotten how to scratch the itch of conscience that that abandonment was supposed to eliminate altogether. Cook, TNH, et. al. are happy to continue cashing the blank checks those vestigial consciences seem determined to keep writing.

British Army officers were famously non-progressive, but that was intentional because Britain was an island and didn’t need much of an army.

Churchill’s biography of his ancestor Marlborough is a rip-roaring read about that army’s escapades at the Sun King’s expense. Also, Agincourt, Wellington, Kitchener, Clive. Not sure non-progressive quite captures it.

I’m almost took a junior year abroad, 1978-79, from Rice U. to go to the London School of Economics.

I took it (Georgia Tech, Manchester U., 1989/1990) and got to take in a spring break month of Eastern European revolutions and a piece of the Berlin Wall as well. The Guardian, Independent, Telegraph, and Economist were all dramatically better papers then. I fine way to start the day. Good times.

Isaac Newton was a Whig!

A bit tangential, but Isaac Newton had an extensive, prominent, and active government career as Warden of the Mint. Friends in high places got him the job, probably assuming he was worthy of some form of government support, but perhaps also hoping that he would be able to contribute to attacking the “coin clipping” problem that was subverting the currency. He did, among other things I’ve heard he invented those ridges on the sides of quarters (to detect clipping silver from the edges of coins).

“…For the last half of Newton’s adult life, 30 years, he was warden of the Royal Mint as well as Master of the Mint.

Newton got his appointment because of his renown as a scientist and because he supported the winning side in the Glorious Revolution. …

…Newton’s chemical and mathematical knowledge proved of great use in carrying out this Great Recoinage of 1696…

…Newton conducted more than 100 cross-examinations of witnesses, informers, and suspects between June 1698 and Christmas 1699. He himself gathered much of the evidence he needed to successfully prosecuted 28 coiners.”

“The oldest universities in Russia are Moscow State University (founded 1755) and St. Petersburg State University (founded 1819, though it claims to be successor to a university founded in 1719).”

The famous Russian mathematician, Nikolai Lobachevsky, attended Kazan Imperial University, founded in 1804. That sticks in my mind because one of his professors had been a colleague of Gauss, and Kazan is a long way from Göttingen.

Kazan university is where Lenin went to school. After the 1918 revolution Kazan was the capital of a Tatar soviet state and was also once occupied by the Czechoslovak Legion (allied troops, but not Soviet, after the revolution trying to evacuate east to Vladivostok and fighting against the Reds). The Legion “…won several important victories, including the capture of Kazan and a state gold reserve on 5 August 1918…”

Woo-hoo! That makes at least four of us.
Don’t know what happened to Ex-Submarine Officer and the other one.
I’m in Kansai.

British Army officers were famously non-progressive

Although the RAF, and its predecessor the Royal Flying Corps, is the oldest air force in the world. After an early attempt at making a joint Army-Navy corps, the RFC seems to have been an Army organization until the RAF was formed toward the end of WWI:

“…on 13 April 1912 King George V signed a royal warrant establishing the Royal Flying Corps. …

The RFC’s first fatal crash was on 5 July 1912 near Stonehenge…

…On 13 August 1914, 2, 3, and 4 Squadrons, comprising 60 machines, departed from Dover for the British Expeditionary Force in France and 5 Squadron joined them a few days later. The aircraft took a route across the English Channel from Dover to Boulogne”

That must have been an interesting sight, 60 1914-era machines flying the channel.

The British Army also has the stereotype (who knows how true it really is) of having some unconventional officers from upper class backgrounds who might be completely batty, but are very effective militarily. People like Wingate come to mind.

It would be interesting to go through every field/department offered at university and track which major innovations were done inside or outside the university. For example…

Classics/antiquities… Was Schliemann an academic? (I don’t know.)
Music… Was Wagner an academic? (I don’t know.)

Maybe this would not be fruitful, but it would be interesting. People who overturned the contemporary view in their fields. It might show the increasing isolation of the university system if there were a trend line.

One constant over several hundred years of European cultural history is that a lot of affluent sons get sent to study law, and a few of them turn out to be great composers or whatever.

Jean Calvin also comes to mind.

Smaller family sizes = less sons to turn out to be great whatevers.

Some Latin American universities seem to have been centers of political radicalism for a long time. I knew a grad student from Venezuela who described how the weekly riot worked. It did seem to largely be about the universities being legally off-limits to the police and the normal judicial system. So the kids could riot without much result, as long as they stayed safe behind the line. Sounded like a short throwing contest.

It would be interesting to compare radicalism in universities with protection of church law.

In the British army from around 1700 to 1945, the troops seemed to be better than the officers, and the non-commissioned officers seemed to be ones holding everything together. Even when the officers made bad tactical judgments, or their opponents had superior firepower, the troop rarely panicked and at least were able to full back in an organised fashion.

In contrast, the France army has talented officers, especially in the artillery, but much more erratic troops and non-commissioned officers. Hence, its likely the French army was more progressive but was less fussy about picking infantrymen as it had a lot more positions to fill

In the 1940 collapse, the best worst French troops were right in the middle of the German onslaught, while the best troops were engaged in marginal operations in Norway and the border with Italy. Hence it was hardly surprisingly there was a chaotic collapse in the centre which quicky compromised the entire allied position.

Had the French put their best troops in the centre of the battle, the Germans would have been held up for a while, and their fast moving but lightly armed tank units would have been exposed on the flanks or forced to launch Kursk-style frontal attacks against the French artillery and heavy tank units.

Let’s just say, Gelman took the high road.

In both the WWI and WII eras, German universities were largely supportive of the, mmm, other brand of radicalism. WWII Example: big name philosopher Martin Heidegger. I can’t think of any names right now, but the German professoriat mostly supported the German aggression in 1914-18.

And one of the agenda items of the National Socialist movement was to abolish the Junkers’ hereditary class military privilege, which had some similarities to the old British class-based officer selection system. Supplanting Junker officers was one of the reasons for creating the SS.

And what about the English Civil War of 1642-1649? Were the Cromwellians progressives or anti-progressive? Intellectuals or anti-… ?

Similar remarks apply to the Thirty Years’ War in Middle Europe.

Haven’t white peepuls’ universities and degree credentialism taken the place of the Medieval Church and the selling of indulgences?

If you want to get away with doing something politically incorrect on campus as a white male its probably worthwhile claiming to be gay or transgendered ( perhaps by wearing the odd pink T-shirt or visiting the women’s toilet once a month).

If the campus commissars pull out the R or S cards, then you can counter-attack by pulling out the T and G cards. Increasingly T seems to be trump card, and probably beats S, but it would be interesting to see it go up against R. It certainly wouldn’t be that hard to claim a lot of cisgendered Black males suffer from transhomophobia.

The sense I get, from my readings of German social history, is that German universities during their heyday (from the time of Immanuel Kant until the rise of Adolf Hitler) were also socially conservative and supportive of their ruling government.

I’ve read that Latin American universities employed a lot of leftist intellectual refugees from Franco’s Spain, and it left a big mark.

Have you read this critique?
https://sites.google.com/site/nuritbaytch/

The greatly varying NMS qualifying scores by state render the set of NMS semifinalists a flawed proxy for the pool of Harvard applicants, especially in light of the negative correlation between a state’s NMS qualifying score and its % of non-Jewish whites. Hence, the demographics of the national set of NMS semifinalists cannot be used to predict the expected ethnic/racial composition of Harvard. I will also discuss other respects in which comparing the demographics of NMS semifinalists to that of Harvard undergraduates is a flawed methodology to deduce bias: the average NMS semifinalist likely has a lower [P]SAT score than the average Harvard undergraduate;[10] the distribution of intended majors among National Merit Scholars is weighted more heavily toward science and engineering than among incoming Harvard freshmen; Harvard College students are disproportionately drawn from Harvard’s geographical region, the Northeast (which is considerably more Jewish than the US in general), just as Stanford and Caltech undergraduates are disproportionately drawn from the West Coast (which is disproportionately Asian). The Weyl Analysis results from Stanford’s public directory yielded the estimate that 3-5% of Stanford undergrads are Jewish, which no more proves that Stanford discriminates against Jews than the higher percentage of Jews at the Ivies proves that they discriminate in favor of Jews, as asserted by Unz.

The best French and British troops were in Belgium; they had rushed forward to meet the Germans as far into Belgium as possible so they could be in a better position to re-fight WWI, only to get wrong-footed by the panzer forces coming through the Ardennes. There were some second-rate French units holding the Meuse river crossings at the critical point where the German main effort could have been stopped or delayed. They panicked under air and ground assault, and after that the Allied forces were always at least a day or two behind events. (But, hey, so was the German leadership. Lower echelon leaders in the German army essentially ignored orders from above to stop and kept advancing.)

Norway was a sideshow–perhaps a division equivalent of mostly mountain troops.

Guess who is in Harvard ROTC? Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld. I suspect a career in politics awaits.

I said leaders of men, not some careerist checklist punching REMF. Still, I laud Miss Rubenfeld for giving it a go. If nothing else, it beats going to law school and then doing community organizing before launching into a political career.

Right, the British Army was intentionally anti-meritocratic via the system of rich young men purchasing officers’ ranks.

Note that commissions could be purchased only in the cavalry and the infantry, not in the technical arms and certainly not in the Royal Navy. So the British system was actually a mix of both nepotism and meritocracy, in which the nepotistic party was the dominant one.

But then the British Army was mostly not supposed to stage a military coup so it seemed wise to keep military power in the hands of the people who already owned Britain.

Yes, that was an important consideration, but so was guaranteeing good behavior, because the purchase served as a bond.

The downside was that the British Army’s officers weren’t all that good — they lucked out in getting Wellington just when they really needed a first-rate general

Don’t forget that Wellington was a “Sepoy General.” Napoleon meant it to be derisive, but I think the experience was instrumental for Wellington’s later victories in Europe.

I should also note that the British army’s highly nepotistic regimental system, though perhaps not conducive to producing men of brilliance and confusingly inefficient, was excellent at producing a high degree of cohesion amongst men as well as a strong bond between the officers and the men they commanded. Perhaps because of that, the British army was not exactly known for its elan, but rather for the steadiness of their ordinary men under the intense stress of combat and even devastating defeats (the favorite saying of the British for a long time was that in each war they lose every battle but last).

In that kind of a highly communal army (“primary social groups”), no one wants to go home to family and friends as a coward. As the saying goes, a brave man dies but once, but a coward dies many deaths.

In the 1940 collapse, the best worst French troops were right in the middle of the German onslaught, while the best troops were engaged in marginal operations in Norway and the border with Italy. Hence it was hardly surprisingly there was a chaotic collapse in the centre which quicky compromised the entire allied position.

When the war on the West started, the best and the most mobile part of the Franco-British forces advanced into Belgium, expecting a repeat of World War I, which was a reasonable assumption. And that was indeed the original German war plan – to advance into the Low Countries.

But the brilliant German general Erich von Manstein anticipated this and came up with an alternative plan to strike through the lightly defended Ardennes, which was previously considered impassable for mechanized units. This plan was accepted by Hitler over some objections and was carried out masterfully (with the exception of the loss of nerve among the high command generals, who forbade further advances to Panzer generals like Guderian when the channel ports were practically undefended and within the German grasp).

At the operational and tactical level, the Allies were in no position to oppose the Germans. They were still wedded to the idea of tanks and aircraft as mere force-multipliers to the infantry (or in the case of the British, as solitary operating forces). The Germans, on the other hand, put into practice, for that time, a very sophisticated combined-arms doctrine that allowed them to maintain a very high pace of advance and momentum against all sorts of obstacles and opposition. A key fort that commanded bridges (in particular Eben Emael)? Capture it by surprise with airborne troops. Infantry? Overrun it with tanks, assault guns, and motorized infantry. Powerful armored counterattack? Bring out the 8,8cm Flak guns. The whole force was continually supported by tactical air attacks, and communication was maintained wirelessly the entire time.

The Allies did not know what hit them and they were continuously out-paced (or “out-cycled” per John Boyd) by the Germans who created dislocation in the Allied command and maintained and spiraled it out until victory by never allowing the Allies to recuperate from the initial shock.

Under the circumstances, it was a miracle, perhaps Divine Providence, that most of the British Expeditionary Force and a substantial number of French troops could be evacuated safely. All the heavy equipment was abandoned, but the men were saved.

The sense I get, from my readings of German social history, is that German universities during their heyday (from the time of Immanuel Kant until the rise of Adolf Hitler) were also socially conservative and supportive of their ruling government.

Not so much “socially conservative” as nationalist and patriotic.

Harvard College students are disproportionately drawn from Harvard’s geographical region, the Northeast (which is considerably more Jewish than the US in general)

At my Ivy League alma mater, during my attendance, the top three source states for the incoming freshmen were New York, Massachusetts, and *California.* And there were LOTS of Jews from California (a sizable contingent from Harvard and Westlake, and later the merged Harvard-Westlake, for example), proportionally many more than Asians, at that time. So that objection is dubious at best.

It’s not that Harvard or other Ivies recruited in the heavily Jewish region, because they happened to be located there – rather they seem to go out of their way to find Jewish freshmen wherever they may be found.

Are you saying that what Ron’s saying isn’t helpful?

She is a trained journalist so she is trained to notice these things.

So the British system was actually a mix of both nepotism and meritocracy

I believe you’re confusing nepotism with simony, although not sure if simony applies outside the church.

Nepotism is preference for family.

If nothing else, it beats going to law school and then doing community organizing before launching into a political career

Well, no, it probably doesn’t if the latter path gets you the most powerful job in the world.

Wellington was also an oddity for having gone to the French Royal Academy of Equitation at Angers, the equivalent of staff college in those days. Another Irish general with a French education was Alanbrooke, who, as Chief of the Imperial General Staff during WW2, repeatedly saved Churchill from himself. It’s interesting how un-English two of the most important generals in British history were.

Can you explain a bit? Consider what? Just leaving the camps alone? A lot of the traveling caravans did just disappear, because work became steadier (and traditional work started drying up, like metal working) and housing was provided by the state, but the parallel society remained (as you can see from the hilariously Waughian tales of the Emperor and the King of the Gypsies). It seems weird to me, at least. Maybe the Gypsies had a very strongly rooted aversion for being remade into the socialist new man. There wasn’t much distance from the mean to revert to after 1989.

Speaking of Iraq…………….

What do you think were the true motives of the Iraq War architects? Advance Israeli interests? Oil? Allow the defense contractors to earn huge contracts? Generate a good 2004 reelection issue? Empower the military-industrial “Deep State”? Saudi interests?

Do you think there was any link between 9/11 and the Iraq War?

Just more rewriting of history to fit the Narrative.

“Do look up the difference between…”

Hmm, nicely played. To the point, and uncharacteristically coherent. It suits you much better than your pedophile humor — I’m guessing that’s what that “humiliation” thing was really referring to, before you flipped it around. Nice try, though. Anyway, keep it up.

Oh, and good call asking Unz to expunge your comment history. In your case, that makes a lot of sense.

top three source states for the incoming freshmen were New York, Massachusetts, and *California.* And there were LOTS of Jews from California

This suspiciously large California contingent, it couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that California has a large population, could it?

Are you saying that what Ron’s saying isn’t helpful?

It’s definitely not helpful to his reputation.

Regardless of Gelman’s ideological bias, the method you used to come to the conclusion that Jews are over represented in the Ivy League is simply wrong.

While your conclusion may be qualitatively correct despite your poor argument, it is not valid to use one method to (under) estimate the number of NMS semifinalists, then to take on faith Hillel’s (over) estimate of the percentage of Jews in the Ivy League — an estimate with nothing backing it — then to compare these incommensurate numbers.

Comparable numbers for Ivy League enrollment (Weyl analysis) are not too hard to calculate, as Nurit Baytch tried to show you. Your responses have not dealt with this, except to evade the point. This is a factual question not a political question, and can only be resolved by data rather than argument.

I commented a few days ago at Prof. Hsu’s “Information Processing” blog:

Unz seems a decent fellow most of the time, and I’d certainly like to believe his conclusions, but Charles Murray he ain’t. His critics on this matter don’t seem to be political axe-grinders (at least on this issue) but rather pointing out a methodological problem. It would have been better for Unz to recognize the problem and get better data and do better analysis, but he seems to be approaching the issue as political rather than factual.

Rather than relying on a chain of inferences based on poor data, the question could be much more accurately answered by a direct study asking the ethnic backgrounds of the grandparents of students at elite schools. This isn’t trivial, but it needn’t be that hard, either — a question or three could piggyback on the psych departments’ usual surveys.

(that’s the tail end of the comment — additional links and quotes precede it.)

You keep repeating your assertion of a measure of over-representation that relies on the Hillel estimate of Jewish students in the Ivy League even though that is precisely the point most in dispute. Your only defense of this number that I have seen is that many other people have relied on it, which is obviously irrelevant to judging its accuracy.

Your only reason offered that I have seen for not analyzing the numbers of Jews in the Ivy League using the same methodology as you use for the NMS data is that it would be laborious: ” … the total number of such names for the Ivies, the University of California campuses, and the various other schools I considered would run into the millions over just the few decades I considered. Counting the Jewish names among them all would be insanity.”

Obviously you don’t have to look at every student at all top universities over the past several decades. A statistical analysis by someone who affects not to be aware of statistical sampling is suspect at best. Getting better data and using valid analytical methods is the only way to strengthen your case; continuing to make unsupported allegations of mental problems and partisan advocacy against those offering valid criticisms just makes you appear to be projecting your own faults onto your intellectual betters.

I don’t think Ron Unz or Steve Sailer should allow this sort of demonstrable and malicious lie – they know that I never asked for my comment history to be expunged or anything else – to appear. If you read this, gentlemen, you may consider this a complaint.

She’s a huge hasbara troll on Twitter, too.

Your archives list 194 comments carrying dates between February 2010 and September 2004. That’s about 4 comments a month. She has her interests and Philip Giraldi has his.

She took your thesis apart. Get over it.

In that kind of a highly communal army (“primary social groups”), no one wants to go home to family and friends as a coward.

IIRC (from the “Iron Kingdom” book), this was the same justification that Frederick the Great gave for building his Prussian regiments around kinship and acquaintance during the Seven Years War. This system was probably abandoned after Jena though.

I was an undergrad at Berkeley during precisely that period.
I was a frat boy too, and, let me tell you, there was not one liberal in our house. Let me be brutally clear: the more hard line of us (myself included) were left unmoved by the assassination of MLK, and were positively whooping with joy when Bobby Kennedy was eliminated.
We were stupid, to be sure; both killings leading as they did to the canonisations of both, and, worse, to the uncritical adaptation of their noxious nostrums.
Most of us graduated with good degrees, and many are now (or were; we are retired these days) leaders in their respective fields.
But still we lost the cultural and political battles.
So those who go on about the “conservative” students at university today are missing the point. It just doesn’t matter what the intelligent, or the educated, or the reasonably well off think.
It is all Hollywood and the gnomes of Wall Street – and we know who they are.

Believe it or not, but at least two departments at Berkeley in the late ’60s were dominated by conservative Christians: history and English literature. I can remember when one particularly unpleasant assistant professor of Italian history was refused tenure. He was an open progressive of the continental Freemason type, who used his courses to indoctrinate his students about the iniquities of religion in general, and the popes in particular.. At the time this sort of behaviour was frowned upon mightily, and the man was sent packing. The amusing thing is that the most distinguished professor of Italian history there at the time was an open admirer of Mussolini. Everyone found him amusing rather than sinister, and they were right.
These men fought a rear guard action, a losing one. But they did fight, and they did inspire those students who were seeking knowledge rather than self assertion.
Of course there is precious little of that at Berkeley now, and it may have been an anomaly even at the time.
I suppose I was just lucky.

Brilliant, Cagey Beast, just brilliant; particularly that last sentence.

As for the late and much lamented Generalissimo: I embellished my picture window, which looked out from the ground floor over the inner courtyard of the apartment house I lived in that year, with the grandest, proudest, most arrogantly and unashamedly Fascistic portrait of the great man I could find.
Since everybody going in or out of that building had to walk by it I have often wondered why my window was never broken or daubed with indignant slogans.
I think the muscles I had at the time must have had something to do with it.
Leftists are cowards.

Well, CB, now I do have to pick a bone with you.
Just about anybody in English politics who called himself a Tory in the period before the second war was more conservative than the ratter (no, double ratter) Winston Churchill.
And, although not a rootless cosmopolitan himself, he sure was in the pay of one – ever heard of Bernard Baruch?

So does Handel.

And Wagner was the youngest of nine.

The transformation of Oxford and Cambridge from training grounds for the Church (first Roman Catholic, then Anglican) into holiday-centers/socialization nexuses for the aristocrats and the upwardly-mobile bourgeois before moving on to real life was a gradual process. It was certainly well-nigh complete by the time Sir Evelyn Waugh (and his alter-ego Charles Ryder), Alastair Graham, Hugh Patrick Lygon, Stephen Tennant and John Betjeman (who were melted together into the fictional Lord Sebastian Flyte, so shamelessly in fact that Waugh apparently mistakenly used “Alastair” in place of “Sebastian” several times in the first manuscript) began their studies in the early 1920s.

You must have meant 2001.

Ron’s account of that exchange (which I knew nothing about before this) is like when someone you don’t know very well starts telling you about a confrontation they recently had. They’re telling you because they think it was a triumph, but instead, as you listen, you’re coming to a very different conclusion — about the incident specifically, and about the raconteur generally.

“universities have been centers for political radicalism for centuries.”

This is possibly true, but not continuously and perhaps only intermittently.

I recall that the men who beheaded King Charles I ca. 1649, the majority of which were Cambridge alumni were considered radicals (regicides).

With that backdrop, David Hackett Fischer’s “Albion Seed” has some good commentary by contemporary Royalists attitude toward education in Virginia on pages 347-348. They basically considered colleges a source of radicalism.

This suspiciously large California contingent, it couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that California has a large population, could it?

Sure, but the claim in that passage is that Ivy League universities have an unusually high proportion of Jews because both the Ivy League and Jews are in the Northeast.

Also, Californian freshmen were also extremely disproportionately Jewish.

As I recall, the Saudis had been absolutely dead-set against the crazy Iraq War and lobbied strongly against it.

Naturally, all the liberal journalists said it was the “Oil Lobby.” But when the NYT sent a reporter to visit Houston’s Oil Club, none of the oil execs there thought it made any sense—they were totally puzzled…

War is often extremely destabilizing and is bad for most business (except war-related industries and services).

If access to Iraqi oil were the main policy imperative, instead of going to war against Saddam, the U.S. would have made peace and cut a deal. Saddam was certainly more than willing.

I believe you’re confusing nepotism with simony, although not sure if simony applies outside the church.

Nepotism is preference for family.

I am confusing nothing. The purchase of commissions in context of the regimental system were made possible by family wealth and aristocratic connections.

So, yes, nepotism.

Well, no, it probably doesn’t if the latter path gets you the most powerful job in the world.

Spoken like a toady without regard for principles. It’s not the job that matters; it’s what you do with the job.

President Obama knows nothing about the ethos of sacrificing the self for the group, something the military experience still instills. I’d rather our future overlords like Chua had some military experience rather than doing “community organizing” (because you are too incompetent or lazy for the private sector) prior to their political ascension.

This system was probably abandoned after Jena though.

Germans went with a hybrid system, part regimental as the Brits and part national recruitment as the U.S. did. Call it a modified regimental system. Men were often recruited along regional lines (remember that Germany was still a confederation of sorts), but officers were often assigned “meritocratically.”

It’s interesting how un-English two of the most important generals in British history were.

I wouldn’t go quite that far.

Both Wellington and Alanbrooke came from prominent Anglo-Irish families, meaning they were quite aristocratic in their own right, but also had to “prove” themselves to the English-English establishment. A bit of chip on the shoulder, if you will. Indeed, the Anglo-Irish, Anglo-Welsh, and Angl0-Scottish aristocracy tended to produce quite a few men of talent (a potent combination with their noble birth).

So they, more than the English-English, tended to follow a more meritocratic career trajectory. Wellington served in India. Alanbrooke was an artillerist, served with Canadians, and also maintained interest in new technologies like airplanes.

Let’s just say that they were quite English, but had unusual upbringing and experiences.

… repeatedly saved Churchill from himself.

Good grief, yes. For all the Churchill-worshipping among American conservatives, they seem woefully unaware of just how close to disaster Churchill was due to (rather like Hitler) his “will to power” fantasies that was completely unreflective of the reality at hand. Churchill is a classic case of the dictum that fortune favors the bold. Like Donald Trump, he succeeded despite himself because of the restraining influence the saner around him exerted.

Still a towering figure in modern English and world history, but not nearly the resolute genius of the popular imagination.

By the way, his writings are quite beautiful, but the substance is frequently not factual.

Let’s just say that they were quite English, but had unusual upbringing and experiences.

Jeez, Americans on the web seem to be totally incapable of getting beyond the idea that Catholic Irish are somehow the Negroes to the Protestant Irish Whites. People can be told dozens of times that’s not the case but there’s no moving them. I guess you’re guessing the Irish officers had a chip on their shoulder because they were the British Isles equivalent of mulattoes and quadroons while Englishmen were the real deal? I give up.

“I don’t think Ron Unz or Steve Sailer should allow this sort of demonstrable and malicious lie…”

This is what I noted as having being expunged:

https://www.unz.com/comments/commenter/5371/

Given the fine print, do you really think my inference was an unreasonable one? If you had nothing to do with that, fine; consider it duly noted — there’s no reason to get twisted up about it. I do find it surprising that it was apparently the last line of my post that bothered you most, but whatever.

Americans on the web seem to be totally incapable of getting beyond the idea that Catholic Irish are somehow the Negroes to the Protestant Irish Whites.

You’ve read quite a lot into his post that wasn’t there.

As I recall, the Saudis had been absolutely dead-set against the crazy Iraq War and lobbied strongly against it.

Naturally, all the liberal journalists said it was the “Oil Lobby.” But when the NYT sent a reporter to visit Houston’s Oil Club, none of the oil execs there thought it made any sense—they were totally puzzled

Like the National Review crowd, the liberal left has been mailing it in for decades.

No, it’s just that I’ve read this routine online before. There seem to be no shortage of internet Americans who think Irishmen all wear trackpants and Celtics jackets and act like characters in The Departed. Because they can’t imagine Wellington, or Generals Alanbrooke, Alexander, Dill, French etc, or W.B. Yeats. Samuel Beckett or Edmund Burke doing that then they conclude they must have been Englishmen instead. I cannot help such people.

You’ve read quite a lot into his post that wasn’t there.

Yup.

I guess you’re guessing the Irish officers had a chip on their shoulder because they were the British Isles equivalent of mulattoes and quadroons while Englishmen were the real deal? I give up.

The Anglo-Irish were mixed English and Irish and were usually Church of Ireland, not Catholic. Their supremacy in Ireland derived from their noble origins (on both sides) and also because they were able retain their property by converting from Catholicism. It has nothing to do with some silly black-white racial paradigm, but a complex intermixture of ethnicity, religion, class, and wealth.

A common refrain about them was that they were English in Ireland and Irish in England.

Well, you know, it’s not like people from the same sort of background as Alanbrooke, Alexander et al are a long lost people like the Hittites or Babylonians. You might even be conversing with one right now? I might actually be able to tell you how my own little ethnicity or social group sees itself and saw itself at various times in the last few centuries?

Here you go – Ascendancy to Oblivion: The Story of the Anglo-Irish

A common refrain about them was that they were English in Ireland and Irish in England.

“A Catholic without a Pope” as some Ulstermen said.

…or as one famous Irish Catholic said “an Irishman with a horse”.

I hadn’t heard that one before but it’s got a lot of truth to it. In practice it’s actually a comfortable spot to be in. One gets to be the ultimate cafeteria Catholic. Funny thing is I’m probably more conservative than a lot of real RCs. I follow several of the SSPX clergy in France online, which is kind of weird for a Protestant, I guess.

Thanks for the response. Yeah, she’s part of a weird little clique of ultra Zionists on twitter. At first read some of her points seemed reasonable as it regards Jewish vs non-Jewish whites, but yeah, Asians are most definitely getting the shaft in Ivy league admissions and no amount of verbiage or obfuscation can cover that up.

I found her points disputing that Jews received preference over non-Jewish whites to be the most plausible, Asians are obviously getting screwed.

It’s not the job that matters; it’s what you do with the job.

Who’s done a good job with the job?

President Obama knows nothing about the ethos of sacrificing the self for the group, something the military experience still instills.

Oh and to what selfless “military hero” president are we referring here, Mr. Smith?

“Boy George”, who used his family connections to get out of Vietnam gruntwork into the Arkansas National Guard?

“Big Daddy Yale”, who got fabulously, incredibly wealthy from the war he started with Saddam Hussein?

“Dutch”, who was educated through an Army “home study” course (yes, that happened back then) and spent his Army “service” in California making PR films?

“Tricky Dick” who’s selfless work ethic earned him the one-and-only distinction of resigning the presidency in order to avoid a jail sentence?

Or maybe you are referring to one of those human traffickers who served as President a hundred years before you were born, as a model of “self sacrifice?”

Theodore Dalrymple wrote about this phenomenon. “In effect, the postal vote deprives Muslim women of the franchise and gives Muslim males more than one vote”.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_04_19_05td.html

I seriously expected the present government to restrict postal voting; but they haven’t.

Oxford and Cambridge have typically served their traditionally assigned roles as engines for the reproduction of privilege.

Seriously, the British elite educational system has for hundreds of years been oriented to appeal to boys who like to play dress up, and to the kind of men who like those kind of boys.

“Brideshead” casts a long shadow over public perceptions of Oxbridge – even in this article. There are still wealthy or titled students who might have been invented by Waugh, but they are a minority, and if you don’t seek them out you won’t meet them. When I was there nearly 40 years ago, student publications used to gently mock “Northern chemists in anoraks”, which was a fairly accurate description of my circle of friends. Believe it or not, it is possible to go to Oxbridge to work hard and learn.

Then you might elaborate on the said views instead of constructing a cheap straw man to punch.

In fact, in “Brideshead Revisited,” I believe the protagonist’s first year friend/roommate asks him why he abandoned “the smart set” (and became one of the “aesthetes”). So Waugh made it clear that he depicted a certain set.

I have the advantage of having worked part time at the admissions office of my Ivy League alma mater. The admissions officers, most of who were Jews, made no secret of not wanting more East Asians (South Asians were not despised generally) and rural non-Jewish whites in casual conversations. The sense I got was that they really did not want to take any more than they absolutely had to in order to maintain a certain level of academic rigor.

And I also witnessed plenty of Jewish tribal networking in action to smooth the way for Jewish students in trouble, to which others (except very rich students whose families wrote fat donation checks, about whom I learned a great deal later working part time again at the development office) did not have access. In one particular case, even university regulations were simply ignored/contradicted to make way for a disgruntled Jewish student (a heavy drug-using trouble case) whose family had a friend among the administrative deans.

They were pretty blatant about it all, as if to say “Well, what are you going to do about it?”

I’m probably more conservative than a lot of real RCs.

Conservative how? Politically? Economically? Or theologically?

I follow several of the SSPX clergy in France online, which is kind of weird for a Protestant, I guess.

What do you mean by “follow”?

And both are heretical from an orthodox Catholic point of view.

Who’s done a good job with the job?

Not so much “good,” as “better.” Just about everyone in the last couple of decades except Carter and GWB. Although I give some recognition to the last one for the unprecedented event that completely altered both his presidency and the country’s history. Even Bill Clinton, despite his shameful conduct. The man he bested the first time wasn’t too shabby compared to the present occupant of the White House, and deserved to beat Clinton.

There used to be a saying that you shouldn’t run for a serious political office until you’ve raised a family, served in the military, and run a business. Now all it takes is an affirmative action degree and “community organizing.”

Conservative how? Politically? Economically? Or theologically?

Politically and socially more conservative.

What do you mean by “follow”?

I listen to the talks they give on political topics.

And both are heretical from an orthodox Catholic point of view.

That’s what’s cool about not being a real RC: I can listen to whatever.

That’s basically a more precise and detailed account of what I already said, and that division of crack mountain troops (which man for man for man out-fought the Germans in Norway) would have been very handy in the Ardenne.

If the French hadn’t advanced into Belgium (an illogical move for a defensive army) and the opposing tank armies meet head to head over a narrow front, the German casualties would been have been a lot higher.

The two big mistakes by the French were trying to fight a more expansive open battle with a slow moving army, and leaving the Ardenne poorly defended.

The Germans were extremely lucky they defeated the French so easily, mainly because the French played to the German strengths rather than their own.

Not saying the French were ever likely to win given their much inferior air force, but if the French had waited for the Germans to come to them, and used their tanks more like tank-destroyers, instead of trying to advance towards the more mobile and better organised Germans, the Germans wouldn’t have had such an easy time. It the one instance where there was a head to head battle between Panzers and French Su-35s more German tanks were destroyed than vice versa (according to Max Hastings anyhow).

You are a neocon, and hence incapable of uttering anything but lies. As long as your comments include the evidence of their own falsehood, so that readers can check it, I have no complaints. But you are not permitted to lie concerning blog-internal matters that are impossible for readers to check.

That’s what’s cool about not being a real RC: I can listen to whatever.

I am an orthodox Catholic. I can listen to “whatever.” I even have – gasp! – Martin Luther’s writings in my library as well as a beautiful old copy of the King James version of the Bible. Nothing wrong with all that, so long as I follow the books with the imprimatur on matters of religious doctrine and morality.

I have copies of Das Kapital and Mein Kampf too, for that matter.

It the one instance where there was a head to head battle between Panzers and French Su-35s more German tanks were destroyed than vice versa (according to Max Hastings anyhow).

During the Battle for France, the German army only had light tanks in the main and very few medium tanks. Their tank guns couldn’t stop a lot of Allied armor.

For example, during the BEF’s counterattack at Arras, the German armor could not stop the British Matilda tanks, because the latter had very thick armor for their day. Rommel’s men had to bring out the famed 8,8cm Flak gun to stop the Matildas. The more salient question is, how were the Germans able to “switch hit” so quickly? And why didn’t the British have the mental and command wherewithal to deal with the anti-tank guns quickly when their armor attack stalled?

The Germans were extremely lucky they defeated the French so easily

It wasn’t luck. It was superior strategy, better operational art, and more developed tactical skills of the Germans. Simply put, they had a far superior and more advanced doctrine that, when put into practice, allowed them to be faster than the Allies physically and mentally. To use a chess analogy, the Germans moved several pieces multiple times at once while the Allies thought and moved ponderously once. That allowed the Germans to overcome much of their material deficiencies vis-à-vis the Allies.

Not so much “good,” as “better.” Just about everyone in the last couple of decades except Carter and GWB.

So you’re saying that Barry is a better president than Boy George, did I read this correctly?

Never said the Germans weren’t more skilled or tactically smarter, or that they won because of luck, I said they were lucky they won so easily. When the French fell back into France they fought much better and inflicted more casualties, mainly because they were closer to their supply lines and could repair their tanks instead of abandoning them. Abandoning a Char B was as costly for the French as abandoning a Tiger was for the Germans in 1944.

If they fought as well as they did in the later stages of battle early on, the Germans would have suffered at least two to three as much in terms of casualties and loss of equipment.

So you’re saying that Barry is a better president than Boy George, did I read this correctly?

Well GWB was directly responsible for the rise of BHO. And I have not forgotten the OIF. I suppose it’s a bit like arguing about who was worse, Stalin or Hitler.

By the way, you need to learn elementary logic. If all but Carter and GWB were better presidents than BHO, that does not mean Carter and GWB were worse than BHO or that BHO is better than those two.

Do you understand? Or would you like me to explain further?

When the French fell back into France they fought much better and inflicted more casualties, mainly because they were closer to their supply lines and could repair their tanks instead of abandoning them.

I don’t think that’s why the French inflicted greater casualties once the BEF was Dunkirked.

There were probably several reasons. First, the German supply lines for the Panzer units were stretched and most of them were under-strength by this time due to rapid advances and combat. Second, the mobile warfare phase of the conflict was over and the infantry mop-up operations began (which almost always incur much heavier casualties than wide encirclement maneuvers by mechanized units). And third the French were desperate and fighting with no room for retreat by this stage. Many units just crumbled and disintegrated, but isolated pockets fought on doggedly.

division of crack mountain troops (which man for man for man out-fought the Germans in Norway) would have been very handy in the Ardenne.

And based on what previous military experience would the Allies have wasted “crack troops” on the Ardennes? In the industrial era, no one had seen the rates of advances the Germans achieved in the early years of World War II.

The traditional corridor of invasion ran both ways through the Low Countries for a reason – that’s where the roads were. Furthermore, the forested Ardennes was considered impassable to large scale mechanized units until then (and mind you, despite the memory of the 1940 Ardennes offensive, the Allies repeated their mistakes yet again in 1944 and allowed the Germans to achieve a surprise breakthrough via the Ardennes again).

You are saying this only and completely in *hindsight.*

If the French hadn’t advanced into Belgium (an illogical move for a defensive army) and the opposing tank armies meet head to head over a narrow front, the German casualties would been have been a lot higher.

The Allies, quite reasonably based on historical experience, expected the main force of the invasion would come through the Low Countries. And the Germans *nearly* followed that plan again in World War II. Given that, the advance into Belgium made perfect sense. Why let the Low Countries fall into German hands uncontested? Why not try to stop them where the Germans would have to go through populated urban areas? Why expose the industrial regions of France to invasion?

Furthermore, there were no “opposing tank armies” at the time. The Allies distributed most of their tanks as infantry support, and what independent armor units they had were quite small scale and unsupported by other arms. The German panzer divisions, in contrast, were *all-arms* divisions with mechanized or motorized infantry and artillery that followed the tanks closely and provided crucial support where the tanks ran into anti-tank opposition or where the terrain was unsuitable for armor operations.

The Allies were outwitted at every level during this conflict: strategically, operationally, and tactically. Their only advantages were material (more men, more tanks, etc.) and some technical (tanks with bigger guns and thicker armor, etc.).

Hence the qualifier; “did I read this correctly?”

The people on the Left who might have become radicals instead put their energy into defending minorities, women, and other “oppressed” groups. Not primarily in any practical way, but through PC. The main function of PC is to tell people on the Right (including any would-be radicals) that they are not wanted.

Perhaps the real purpose of diversity is to distract politically minded people from true radicalism. Neither the Right nor the Left will seriously challenge the status quo as long as World War T is raging, or another African-American criminal has been shot by the police. Attention is never allowed to focus for very long on issues that threaten the wealth of the 0.01%, or the companies that bankroll Presidential candidates.

For example, as Halliburton CEO prior to becoming VP, Cheney had spent years lobbying to have sanctions lifted on Iraq. Then he came into office, hired a bunch of neocon advisors, and did a 180.

It’s interesting that in the “reconstruction” of Iraq, $40 billion in no-bid contracts were awarded to Cheney’s former firm (KBR/Haliburton). It’s also interesting that a govt audit found that war contractors wasted or lost to fraud about $60 billion since 2001. If you ask me, that’s crony capitalism at its worst.

It’s expected that the long term cost of the Iraq war will exceed $5 trillion. My guess is that a few politicians and well-connected oligarchs will end up pocketing a huge fraction of that. I think the colossal waste and expenditure in Iraq was no accident. It was pre-planned to benefit our ruling class.

Not to say I disagree with you about the Israeli Lobby, but I think a desire to steal was definitely a major factor behind the Iraq War. Of course, you could argue that the Israeli-neoconservative manipulators used these war contracts as payoffs in order to get buy-in from powerful interests. It’s possible that people like Paul Wolfowitz persuaded Cheney (and many others) that if they supported this war, they could easily misappropriate large amounts of money under the banner of “national security” and the “fog of war.”

I find it absolutely remarkable that the long-term cost of the Iraq War (estimated by Professor Bilmes to be $5 trillion) receives so little public discussion.

As I recall, the Saudis had been absolutely dead-set against the crazy Iraq War and lobbied strongly against it.

Here’s an article that argues that Saudi Arabia deliberately encourages instability outside its borders. The article contends that Saudi Arabia encourages Islam radicalism in foreign nations, then persuades its more hot headed young male citizens to go fight in these conflicts. By sending off these young men, Saudi Arabia has a release valve for ridding itself of potential revolutionaries that could threaten the ruling family. Also, by spreading Wahabi Islamic ideology, Saudi Arabia gains ideological clout and influence.

http://pando.com/2013/12/19/the-war-nerd-saudis-syria-and-blowback/

Consider the intriguing historical case of Henry Wallace, FDR’s VP. As far as I know, he was a 100% loyal true-blue American patriot. But all of his advisors were Communist spies and traitors. If he hadn’t been replaced on the ticket or if FDR had died a year early, American history might have taken an interesting turn. Alger Hiss would have become Secretary of State, Harry Dexter White would have run Treasury, the Rosenbergs would have been put in charge of Los Alamos security, that sort of thing. Probably America would have spent the next twenty years tied down in a bloody military occupation of Mexico and all of Latin America aspart of our all-out crusade to save the world from the “International Trotskyite Menace”…

That would’ve definitely been interesting.

There’s so much that doesn’t make sense about everything that’s happened since 2001.

-The Bush administration’s failure to heed warnings about an imminent terrorist attack.
-Finding out that the terrorist mastermind was a former CIA operative and also apart of a family with close business relations with the president’s family.
-The dancing Israeli “students” who were arrested after they celebrated the planes hitting the buildings, which they filmed.
-Responding to 9/11 by attacking Iraq.
-Not finding any WMDs in Iraq or any evidence of 9/11-Iraq link.
-Getting duped by Ahmad Chalabi.
-The claim that the “yellowcake” forgery was done by Cheney’s office (reported by Ron Suskind and Philip Giraldi).
-The strange death and burial (at sea) of Bin laden, whose story keeps changing.
-The unwillingness to punish Pakistan for holding Bin Laden at their military base.
-The massive expenditure of resources on fighting just a few hundred terrorist operatives in Afghanistan and Iraq.
-The return of U.S. troops to Iraq.

There’s so much that doesn’t make sense, especially if you subscribe to the official narrative.

If we assume that a small number of individuals are actually controlling and manipulating our govt and media, then maybe that could explain what’s really happening.

There is nothing whatsoever in the teachings of the Society of St Pius X which is heretical. Indeed, they do not have any teaching of their own; they are Roman Catholics and nothing else.
The heresy is all on the other side.

The heresy is all on the other side.

“Lefebvrist” says it all, no?