A very unfair perspective.

Saturday, 26 October, Year 5 d.Tr. | Author: Mircea Popescu

Consider first these two quotes (stolen from vdare.com) :

"[University training] is the education which gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophistical, and to discard what is irrelevant."

~ John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, 1852.

"Citizens capable of contributing to the development of a sustainable society must first develop empathy. This empathy will be developed through an advanced awareness of oppression and inequity that exists at a local and national level. Students will become aware of inequities, examine why these inequities exist, understand the concept of institutionalized privilege, and recognize systematized oppression (e.g. individual, institutional, and societal). Students will also examine forms of oppression related to specific social identities (e.g. race, ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, SES, religion, and age) and will recognize the benefits of dismantling systems that support this oppression. By having this knowledge, students can then learn how to change these systems and other systems which impact equity of resources."

~University of Delaware, Residence Life: Competencies: Narritive [sic] 2, 2007.

Obviously, this is a very unfair comparison. The reason it is an unfair comparison is that it confronts some anonymous, faceless, witless bureaucrat of 2007 with Cardinal Newman. A more uneven contest could scarcely be devised, it's like organising a competition between a moonbeam and an earthworm to see which, if applied upon the hair, face and breast of your favourite concubine yields the best effect. What's the earthworm supposed to do, glare ?

Nevertheless, fair or unfair a contest, it shall be judged. Life isn't fair, and the one thing the universe most definitely lacks is empathy. It contains symmetry and agony, bankruptcy and gallantry, fallacy and family and all sortsy and mannery of thingy, but definitely no empathy. None at all.

Consequently : the first piece is a gem. It discusses its subject matter with the full, round elegance and the pleasant ease of self-aware mastery. Nothing could be removed to a benefit of expression nor could anything be added to an improvement of meaning. It's good enough to stand as the permanent definition of its subject in English, I'm certain that should I ever need to quote a definition of it I will use this and to be perfectly honest the entire reason I am even writing this article is that it seduced me.

The second piece is a butchered fetus with spina bifida mauled by a wolverine trapped inside the body of a bear. Its title is misspelled and each of its five sentences is factually incorrect. Let's go into detail :

As to Sentence 1,

  • Citizenry is a concept of the state. The sentence otherwise discusses society, not statality. The author is ignorant of the difference.
  • The structure of the sentence is incorrect with respect to its intended meaning. It really should read "Citizens must develop empathy in order to become capable of contributing to the development of a sustainable society.", inasmuch as we don't normally say "Deer in order to be eaten must first be hunted."
  • A "sustainable society" is nonsense. Consider the following definition, (proposed by sustainablesocietyusa.com) : "A sustainable society is one that can progress without catastrophic setbacks in the foreseeable future." Such a thing is then a round cube in perpetual motion.
  • Inasmuch as empathy is concerned with emotions, in has no place in any discussion of citizenship or society, as emotions are strictly private affairs whereas society and state are strictly public affairs specifically forbidden from touching on the private sphere in any way as a condition required for the allowing of their continued existence.
  • The substitution of "must" for the the proper verb in context (should) is offensive.

As to Sentence 2,

  • "This empathy" is stylistically awkward and formally incorrect, as it promises but fails to introduce a subset of empathy.
  • Inasmuch as the sentence is a proposition as to the future, it is out of place in this discussion ; inasmuch as the will auxiliary is intended as yet another substitute should, the sentence is stylistically awkward and perhaps unintentionally gives away the hesitant footing of its author. This would be the exact opposite of elegance.
  • The construction is dependent on externalities (inequity and oppression), with complex requirements placed on their presentation (must exist locally and universally). This makes it ironically unsustainable. Due to the conflict with Sentence 1 this would be also the exact opposite of elegance.
  • Lots and lots and lots of buzzwords heaped upon wooden language (constructions such as "at the local and national level") are yet another exact opposite of elegance.

As to Sentence 3,

  • Examples are promised but not delivered. Should one wish to clarify what they mean by "afafaclacas" through examples, it'd be unwise to then offer the examples of upper afafaclacas, lower afafaclacas and lateral afafaclacas. A much better example would have been something like "forcing university students to examine particular topics whether they're interested in them or not". The very definition is in fact its very own topic of study, neatly mirroring the universal tendency of socialism to create the very crises it supposedly is in the business of resolving.
  • The sentence leaves the unpleasant impression that the later curricula fail to include a discussion of "because people like the teacher could not find employment otherwise" under the topic of "why do these proposed problems exist", and that students are not encouraged to make up their own minds but instead are required to conform to logically shoddy and intellectually shallow prefabricated answers, much in the manner of Trivial Pursuit. This is dishonest and disqualifies the proponents from participation in Academia.

As to Sentence 4,

  • The absence of the drawbacks to go with the benefits makes the structure unsteady.
  • It would be extraordinary that processes or phenomena (it's unclear from the text which kind this "oppression" is intended to be) attach to specific social identities. A comparable notion would be that there's an illumination process for spheres and another for cubes. While this may be the case in computerised simulations of reality it nevertheless isn't the case in reality, and one would hope this deranged view of the world is limited to some sort of Metaphysics programme.

As to Sentence 5,

  • "By having this knowledge" is atrociously awkward an expression, betraying a very uneasy relation between the author and reflection.
  • There can't be such a thing as "equity of resources" any more than there can be an "agreement of glass". Equity is a property of phenomena (when they in any way impact at least two agents), and not of things. This taking the most favourable construction of equity, otherwise the word principally works as a noun in both law and finance, rendering the construction completely nonsensical.
  • The proposition that learning how to change systems is not a subset of system design, but some sort of secret alchemy stemming from ethical considerations is so barbarous as to, again, exclude the proponent from Academia. Might as well learn how to turn walking sticks into snakes if anyone says Jahveh wrongfully.

Sad, isn't it. Well, time for a short

(: ~ Intermission ~ :)

So, about fifty years ago there existed somewhere towards the tip of Africa a small country called Rhodesia. This small country was a British possession, inhabited by about ninety-six black people for each four white people. Rhodesia of the time had a yearly income per capita of about a thousand dollars, practically no voting or land ownership rights for the black people and a roughly stable government.

That Rhodesia no longer exists, but you know the same place today under the name of Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwe of today is an independent, democratic state with ample rights for black people, including the right to vote and to own land, as well as to rape and murder (if they're friends with the president) or else the right to enjoy being raped and murdered (if they aren't). The right to vote doesn't work very well in practice, in the sense that the last time the opposition won, announcing the election results was delayed by five weeks and the winners soundly beaten up by the army-police thing they have.

The economy also doesn't work very well in practice, as you've probably heard about their one gazillion bills and whatnot. Moreover, the average income is about five hundred dollars per capita, so half what it was fifty years ago. With the caveat, of course, that $500 in 2013 could perhaps buy as much as about $70 fifty years ago, so the economy was rather cut in 13, not just in two. And of course the US GDP grew about 25x in the interval, and the US is a developed country which by that fact grows slower than developing countries which are well managed. So we could say that the economic difference between Zimbabwe as it stands today and a Rhodesia as it could have been today is about 500 : 1. Instead of growing 30x or so, it shrunk 13x.

How did all this happen ? Well... this is where it all gets very unfair. So, fifty years ago the Brits decided they're granting independence to their old colonies in Africa, but they didn't want to grant Rhodesia independence unless it introduces a democratic system. Rhodesia didn't want to introduce a democratic system, figuring that its undemocratic, strictly white representative bodies are doing well enough and certainly better than any alternative. You know, just like Churchill's democracy. A decade with this, until eventually the Rhodesians had enough waiting and declared their independence unilaterally.

This had two effects. On one hand, at the hands of the British and foreign black lobby, the independence was not recognised, and moreover the UN imposed sanctions upon Rhodesia, making it really difficult for their trade. On the other hand, armed mercenaries started pouring in through the North border, to try and la revolucion hasta y per siempre. Two local socialist insurgencies also formed. The white government, still enjoying the support of the tribal chiefs, as well as the population generally fought the would-be revolutionaries and kept them at bay for about a decade. Eventually it got so bad that the average citizen would spend six weeks campaigning and then six weeks on his farm. You know, sort of like how the Jews in Israel have been faring for the past... oh, fifty years.

Anyway, after a decade of war, with the situation at the borders deteriorating, Ian Smith agreed to switch to a democratic system. This started cordially enough, and so in 1980 Rhodesia-Zimbabwe seemed poised to recoup the time lost, rebuild and come out a great nation. And this is where things get really very unfair. Democracy didn't work out for Rhodesia. After thirty years of being ruled by black people for black people, Rhodesia is in much worse a shape than it was at the begining. It's not that it stagnated, it's that it collapsed. In point of fact, thirty years of Mugabe, supported by the international community and with peaceful borders have been worse for Rhodesia than twenty years of Smith, isolated by the international community and with foreign mercenaries pouring over the borders. Not a little worse. Much, much worse.

Consider the situation for yourself. Imagine that tomorrow, your country is no longer allowed to import anything, or export anything. Anyone that you know working in an industry that exports has a chance to lose his job. Any item you buy that's not produced locally will no longer be available. And the day after that, people with guns start coming in over the border to shoot shit up. Yo man, where's the party! And not one, or two, or ten. Let's say a hundred a year if your country is the size of Cyprus, a million or so strong. If not, scale up. And this state of affairs goes on for a decade or so. These aren't trivial problems, incidentally. Just one lone shooter can cause a lot of trouble in otherwise very advanced, rich and powerful countries, as you've probably seen on the news. Slight changes in international trade send whole cabinets into disaray.

And now imagine that after all this, peace is signed. The country can export again, it can import again, and there's no more pillagers with heavy automatic rifles pouring in, on the contrary, you get international support. The only caveat is that the country is to be run by democratic institutions. And the net result of thirty years of democratic institutions is that you're in much, much worse shape than you were after the war and embargo. You haven't stagnated, you've collapsed. This is the story of Rhodesia.

How does the story of Rhodesia sound to you ? Does it sound plausible or implausible ? This is important, because as implausible as it may sound, the story of Rhodesia is quite factual.

Now let's move on :

Untold thousands of people have their careers invested in this gibberish: not only outright babbling lunatics like Dr. Shakti Butler, but bland, cheerful middle-class careerists—pod people, whose nervous systems have been taken over by alien intelligences.

And don't think this is just once incident at one university. There are entire professional organizations with thousands of members building careers on this poisonous filth: N.A.S.P.A., for example, and A.C.P.A. They see themselves at the real educators of our young people.

They're not going away; they're not going to disappear; they're certainly not going to abandon the careers in "diversity" they have staked so much on and switch to more honest and socially-healthful lines of work—devising computer viruses, say, or running confidence scams on elderly widows, or selling crack cocaine to minors.

The question we never asked, but should have asked, is what exactly motivated those foreign mercenary fighters to come in and attack the Rhodesian government ? If you ask them, they will of course speak of principle. A desire for a better world, an earnest belief in "equity" as misunderstood by the nameless bureaucrat earlier, good stuff like that. Sustainable societies, an opposition to oppression, an end to evil.

These are however mere words, sprouted by people with very low literacy quotients. These words, while they may on occasion end up arranged so as to sound well (rarely, really), are meaningless to them. What drives these people is what drives primitive man since forever : a lust to rape and pillage. A desire to take for himself. An appetite for life. Good things, really, but sorely misplaced in the hearts and hairy arms of inferior degenerates. Inferior degenerates, such as the racist millitants attacking a peaceful country because they didn't like the skin color of its leaders. Inferior degenerates, such as the racist bureaucrats attacking intelligent people because they don't feel at ease in the company of intelligent people, because intelligent people contradicti their misplaced expectation of being equal with the world.

Obviously the educational system of the United States won't fare any better than the poor country of Rhodesia did. Once the career leeches have found a trickle of blood they're not about to give it up under any circumstance. This was in fact the justification for the very violent response after the September 11 attacks. The US suddenly saw itself about to become a sort of Rhodesia, and imagined for a brief decade that perhaps striking some mighty blows will discourage the vermin from ever trying again.

The decade is just about up, and by the looks of things it didn't work. The reason it didn't work, and the reason it will never work is contained in the “Why I am not a white nationalist” article :

And as to the “crime” angle, the question before each and everyone is, “how many criminals have you shot in the act”. If the answer is zero, you’re not one of the people discussing crime, you’re one of the people aspiring to be on TV. Get a gun, learn how to use it, shoot whoever attacks you and there you go, complete solution for the actual problem. What’s next, hanging around the tolerant Internets whining about how these whores of women prefer forward men who actually say something instead of gazing through your weird garb and repugnant affectation to see deep into your soul all about how you’d love her and cherish her ? The world belongs to the active, not to the thoughtful.

There isn't, nor is there going to be a way, manner, instrument or device through which to protect the passive from the active. If you're not prepared and absolutely willing to spend any amount of time up to the entire rest of your life seeking out and butchering leeches with only the satifaction of well applied, excruciating cruelty as your reward, you're not made for this world and you won't long have a place in it. This can't be delegated, it's a personal thing. Like citizenship. Like nationality. The only nation immune to the fate of Rhodesia is a nation of that kind of people, living in that kind of world.

Definitely a very unfair perspective.

———
  1. Often enough involuntarily, which is why all the "privilege" hogwash was invented. If you're reasonably healthy, you don't need to do anything in particular to attract the envy of the ftizic hunchback. Your health is your privilege, n'est pas ? []
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40 Responses

  1. Citizenry is a concept of the state

  2. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    2
    Mircea Popescu 
    Thursday, 7 August 2014

    Yeeeees ?

  1. [...] right thing to do” because “everyone deserves a chance”. Obviously. [↩]See Rhodesia as pe Trilema [↩]See Kipling’s poem entitled “White Man’s Burden“ [↩]Perhaps [...]

  2. [...] and “feelings.” This is exactly why democracy cannot and should not survive. This is a very unfair perspective: Inasmuch as empathy is concerned with emotions, in has no place in any discussion of citizenship [...]

  3. [...] the bureaucrat leech who you do not take care to butcher into pieces is just another layer on top of your unwillingness to be truly human. If you do not take the steps [...]

  4. [...] be taken appears motivated by a desire to prevent the commons from once again fucking up Brexit. After parliament receives a new "Queens Speech" October 14th they will have a full 15 [...]

  5. [...] the very amusing circumstance that the subset of leeches specialised in exploiting sexuality for political profit have managed to stereotype people who [...]

  6. [...] I stole from someone, but I don't remember whom. Anyway, this is also why the insistence on empathy. It's not really a moral imperative, as presented. It's ontological fear. They figure empathy, if [...]

  7. [...] have been in either case had sanity been observed throughout. Much like in the case of, you know, Rhodesia, yet another place where money was immorally employed to further an imbecile's worldview. What is [...]

  8. [...] The system brings out the power dynamics between the two groups (call them what you will). This should in principle be very educational, for both. Having others depend on your arbitrary use of power denied to them is the first lesson of leadership, and the deep reason those born to rule are taken riding and hunting by their ruling parents. Having the limits of your ability and power presented neatly before your eyes is the first lesson of self improvement, and while conceivably many will shy away from it like a slug avoids salt, nevertheless the observation that in their case there was very little basis to improve upon in the first place will be difficult to dispel. Moreover, as the entire process is to occur publicly and collegially should limit harm to everyone involved. Not exactly a yeshiva in this respect, more like a college, from the old days when people still ate in the hall and a university degree actually meant something. Something great. [...]

  9. [...] excuse retired old waitresses from falling for such miserable tricks, one'd certainly expect any college graduate to be able to disentangle a skein of thought and detect what is sophistical enough to not fall for [...]

  10. [...] Because why ? Who in his fucking right mind would believe such a thing, and why would they ? I said earlier There isn’t, nor is there going to be a way, manner, instrument or device through which to [...]

  11. [...] on, after all : if it's involuntary, if the prickly is passive, then the other party is active, and to the active goes the agency. Too much agency for a monkey. asciilifeform Sometimes this situation evolves in interesting [...]

  12. [...] and What the WoT is for, how it works and how to use it. It's all there. [↩]Reference being the sad story of Rhodesia. [↩]Cheaper than you'd think, too. It is a shockingly unvariant truth across the endless seas [...]

  13. [...] nonsense, right ? Ok, so how would the audience be ? Mean male chauvinist pigs, racists with no empathy, right ? Hobgoblins that only exist in your head, and only exist even there because of how [...]

  14. [...] any in the past 20-30 years. Certainly Argentina was better before Peron than it is after. [See the discussion of Rhodesia to grasp what this actually means.]" [↩]This particular communist-ism is still fashionable [...]

  15. [...] as it finds itself meets the harsh reality of life in a country that's been going to look for Rhodesia down the drain in slow [...]

  16. [...] of its own Andorra, and London will be left as a city state, except of the sand bar variety. From a Rhodesian perspective this is deliciously poetic justice, by the way. The very people who crushed, for absolutely no [...]

  17. [...] to Singapore all the way back to Turkey and what have you. But collapse of this nature is entirely Rhodesian in its [...]

  18. [...] the advantage of four years ; but Tandala had over him the advantage of sharper eyes, sharpened by education, which might have, eventually, allowed him to catch up. That was a decade or so ago, at the [...]

  19. [...] into Rhodesia, submachinegun in hand? To fight for hallucinated rights and impossible freedoms, to save the country by burning it down ? Confused zebras, evidently out of place, and loud orangoutans to lead yet another revolution, to [...]

  20. [...] lazy to even attempt bridging Deepthroat into this hot mess. [↩]Named for the fellow for whom Rhodesia was also named, Cecil John Rhodes. [↩]Well, I had to pick someone, and it's really not my [...]

  21. [...] which is to say kidsi in their mid 20s to mid 30s who would like others to believe they have a University degree but in point of fact ate USG dole for a few years under the "student" rubric and ended up [...]

  22. [...] aside the intrinsic, inescapable hypocrisy of a well organized criminal group overtly attempting to Rhodesia Russia nevertheless complainingi about their agents being hung for a plainly evident conspiracy to [...]

  23. [...] yes, according to both me and J. H. Newman (and very likely Old Knock, too -- consider that his old master's evaluation of his own capacities [...]

  24. [...] the text reads as it stands, the Trump of Doom. [↩]Carribean, right. [↩]Somehow the Rhodesia of the 1800s is well forgotten now, and you wish to "donate for Haiti". Why the fuck would anyone! [...]

  25. [...] can be such a thing as her cunt, and that arbitrarily assigns the getting stuffed of her cunt to the passive element in that equation, will then proceed to give rules for my behaviour! Imagine that wonder, it is now [...]

  26. [...] they're racially dumb as fucking rocks, are we on the same page here yet ?! [↩]And was, back before blacks could vote. [↩]This article gets two fours, apparently. [↩]I suppose he means "each labia", though [...]

  27. [...] is the best they could come up with so that born and bred streetwalkers can at the same time pretend to a career while staying true to their hairdressers' worldview and limited interests as supported by [...]

  28. [...] that there is no loss. [↩]And how. [↩]More generally speaking, empathy is a solution in search of a problem. [↩]In fact, if there's one unifying thread of everything in the sad hole, it'd be a [...]

  29. [...] the boundary of the whole shape can trigger large changes to the medial axis. ↩And for a *very* unfair comparison, I'll quote here some modern production, on page 12 of Desmond Eustin van Wyk's 2008 vintage [...]

  30. [...] lifetime of simply getting in my way... Just end it already. [↩]As the man said, It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of [...]

  31. [...] way Romanian is strong ; obviously this means it doesn't have a direct equivalent in English, be it the Queen's or just some rando peripheral schmuck's. The producers have chosen a completely unrelated phrase [...]

  32. [...] a group ; cherry picked examples hence do not resolve the fundamental problem, namely that blacks ain't generally capable of subsistence on their owniii at any sort of level anyone'd deem [...]

  33. [...] esltard herd wants to believe they's got the drop on John Marshall for the obvious reason : they very well fucking don't, nor in another century or fifty thousand centuries ever could. Not at the rate they're going. [...]

  34. [...] college kids, with nothing better to do that evening but also with enough institutional training (college, yes ?) to know that "the sooner we converge the sooner we're out of here", past the cattle gate [...]

  35. [...] What follows is that he wouldn't have been a pimp who can't understand his life, or express it to the highest standard, no more. [↩]Enough, enough. [↩]Well yes, but Henry was a cuck. The same thing always [...]

  36. [...] was smart enough to see this coming, but 'we' have it under control", that'd eventually lead to a Mugabe style currency collapse. His hedge on this was and STILL is gold and companies in Europe and the Pacific [...]

  37. [...] can be such a thing as "an alternate gender". Numbers are either odd or even, genders are either passive or active, that's the end of the matter. [↩]Usually carried out through function and not substance, [...]

  38. [...] neoliberalism"v. Nor will a purely imagined -- and in the worst of ways, meaning, entirely without the first clue -- "Age of Reason humanism" resolve that problem for him. That Choderlos fellow ain't coming up [...]

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