Shannon Love

I Await a Lavish Apology

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So, Bill Ayers himself admits that Obama began his political career in Ayers’s living room.

Some people owe me an apology.

Ayers, you may recall, is the leftist intellectual’s Timothy McVeigh (without McVeigh’s murderous competence). The comparison to McVeigh is not hyperbole. The psychology of political terrorists has been well studied by many people in many different countries. All studies conclude that such terrorists are megalomaniacal sociopaths who latch on to the most visible political movement of their time and location and then use that movement’s ideology to justify their crimes. They don’t actually care about the good the ideology purports to accomplish.

Instead, they care about exploiting the ideology to advance their own interest. The ideology merely justifies their sociopathic vainglory.  The strategy behind both Ayers’s and McVeigh’s terrorism was to trigger a broad-based political upheaval that would leave individuals such as Ayers and McVeigh on top of society. They rationalized that by killing they could make themselves the pebble that starts the political avalanche. They desperately convinced themselves that they could murder their way to the top like Lenin or Mao.

Ayers never cared about all the things that contemporary leftists care about, and he never will. He doesn’t care about anybody or anything other than himself (although, like all sociopaths, he is very good at convincing people he does). Ayers isn’t a basically good person who went too far in advancing a good cause, he’s just evil. In another era, he would have killed for right-wing causes just as readily.

This makes the contemporary Left’s continuing embrace of Ayers, Dorn and other Weatherman sociopaths even more disturbing. They simply don’t care what these sociopaths did nor what they continue to profess. (Ayers has never recanted his terrorism and even let himself be photographed trampling an American flag in a grimy alley for a NY Times story published on 9/11.)  Neither are leftists concerned in the least that such an individual moved in the same small political circle and continually interacted with the person who is currently the President of the United States. Neither are they concerned that Ayers et al all heartily approve of Obama.

Worst of all, they are utterly unconcerned that Ayers is a prominent national educator with significant influence on the K-12 education of America’s children. In the video where he makes his admission, he is speaking to a group of teachers unionists and urging them to corruptly use their positions of trust as educators of children to advance Ayers’s political agenda. The audience has no problem with doing just that.

I really think that someone in the Chicago area needs to crowd source the tracking of Ayers and to publicly link him to every group or policy he adopts. The hardcore Left doesn’t care about Ayers’s sociopathy and murderous megalomania but I imagine others will.

Thanksgiving 2011: What I’m Thankful For

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What am I thankful for?

I’m thankful that I can crush my enemies and see them flee before me, that I can take their horses and belongings and hear the lamentations of their women.

Okay, I’m not thankful for that today but 1,000 years ago I probably would have been. Today, I am thankful that we do not have to repeat the mistakes and evils of our ancestors but that we can go forth to make our own, hopefully lesser, mistakes.

What else?

I thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.

If it is sad that good people do not live forever, it is joyful that evil ones do not as well. I think Shakespeare’s Anthony was wrong and it is the evil that men do that is (eventually) interred with their bones. The good we leave behind accumulates over the generations. This would not happen if everything lived forever. So, I am thankful that nothing lasts forever and that things and people change. I am thankful even when that change is death.

I am thankful that the preacher of Ecclesiastes was literally wrong and that there are new things under the sun and that each day brings some new wonder to explore. I am thankful that, even if he was correct in his metaphor that human nature never changes, then at least we can change how we act on the impulses that come from that nature.

I am thankful that I live in America, where each morning is the beginning of the great tomorrow promised yesterday. I am thankful that I have the right to strive, to experiment and to improve. I am thankful I have the right to fail, to fall and get back up again.

Most of all, I am thankful that I know to be thankful for these things.

How Do You Know You Have Been “Educated”?

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Following on my previous post on the “We are the 99%” people who seem to view education as more ritual than the acquisition of practical skills or knowledge, it occurred to me that many of these young people may not understand that they aren’t really, despite the time and money spent, actually educated.

The liberal arts of today are those fields with little or no empiricism. In other words, if the field doesn’t have a lot of math, the information it deals with is subjective and untestable. Even supposed “soft” sciences in the liberal arts like sociology or psychology lack true scientific rigor. Given that, how do liberal-arts graduates know that they’ve really been taught something worthwhile? How do they know they haven’t been loaded up with gibberish?

For example, I don’t know much about music, so someday I want to take some courses about music. How would I know whether any particular instructor was teaching me anything valid? Since I have no real knowledge about music, how would I know if I was paying someone to fill my head with nonsense?

Some music education would teach concrete skills, e.g., reading music or learning to play an instrument, so I could evaluate whether I had been educated by my ability to read music or play an instrument.

However, what if I spend $50,000 being taught “Music Theory” or “The Sociology of Music“.

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College As Ritual

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I’ve been reading through the “We Are the 99 Percent” and other related web sites. A constant refrain is that young adults went tens of thousands of dollars into debt for degrees and now they can’t find even minimum wage jobs. I don’t think they really understand the purpose of education.

This one complains that, “I have a Magna Cum Laude BA, and not even the grocery store will hire me.” This one says, “I’m over $100k in student loan debt and my career isn’t even in the field I went into copious amounts of debt over.”  This one says, ‘My husband and I both went to college like we were “supposed” to do.’  This one says, “I am 25 yrs old and months away from a master’s degree. My bachelor’s is in literature/9-12 education…Well over $30K in student loan debt.”

Carefully missing from most of the complaints is the type of degree they got, but I think it’s fairly clear that most of these people got liberal-arts degrees. Moreover, there is no evidence that they pursued these degrees with any eye towards practical economic returns for their considerable financial investment.

I really get the sense that many of these people simply don’t understand that an education is supposed to equip you with skills that make you valuable to other people. Instead, I think these kids have somehow got the idea that college is more of a ritual you have to go through, a kind of right of passage, that entitles you to a middle-class or better life-style while pursuing a job you find interesting and emotionally fulfilling.

They’re just shocked and amazed that they’ve gone through all the rituals, got the degrees and the accolades of their professors and nobody out in the real world gives a damn.

We need to think long and hard how so many young people simply don’t understand the purpose of education. Where did they get the idea that a liberal-arts degree automatically entitled them to a middle-class income that could easily pay off tens of thousands in student loans?

I don’t think it was Wall Street.

Herman Cain and the Hyper-Sexual Black Male Sterotype

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Is it just coincidence that Herman Cain is now facing the same charges of sexual impropriety as Clarence Thomas? Of all the charges to level, why have both of the most prominent black conservatives of the past 20 years been targeted by sexual allegation? Why don’t white conservatives get similarly accused? Why does the Left seem to find such charges against black conservatives so credible? Why do charges of sexual impropriety against conservative black men”stick” so readily in the minds of the Left?

I think that the Left has fallen into a psychological rut worn deep in our collective cultural conscience by a century of scientific racism. I think they are all primed to see black men as sexually impulsive. That is why they instantly think such charges as credible.

Classical racism (pre-WWII) held that non-white races were less evolved away from animals than whites and therefore had more animalistic natures. Under the non-Darwinian concept of evolution ascendent at the time,  the “scientific consensus” held that natural forces were pushing all living things along a predetermined development towards some “higher” or “perfected” state. In humans, that meant our brains grew larger, increasing intellect and emotional control but at the same time weakening the body.

Non-whites were believed to be less evolved and therefore mentally and emotionally inferior but with the relative strength and stamina of animals. In a time when most men still performed manual labor for a living, the era’s progressives argued that the “lesser” races had an unfair advantage in the free-market when it came to competing for manual labor jobs so the government had to step in. Most Jim Crow laws, unions and immigration restrictions on Asian were supported by the era’s progressives with the argument that “greedy” business owners would hire non-whites because they could do the job better without paying attention to the “socially responsible” need to maintain white supremacy.

One side effect of seeing non-whites, particularly black people, as more animalistic, was that they were also seen as being more sexually virile.  

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