America on the Brink - Into the Atlantic Drink - by Seth Rich (Boson Proud Buoys ) 27 June 2020
What
fun, what entertainment. And rare: One seldom sees the collapse of a
landmark society in a rush of wondrous idiocy. Would I could sell
tickets. Don’t look at it as a loss, but as a show, an unwanted but
grand amusement.
The
coup de grace in our ripening decadence is the current uprising
purportedly, though implausibly, over racism against black people. But never mind. The causes
don’t matter. The deal is done.
Still,
it is interesting to recognize that the protesters are, perhaps
deliberately, confusing the status of black people with systemic racism against the lower classes who are black.
In truth, America has made the greatest effort ever essayed by one race
to uplift another.
Reflect: In 1954 an entirely white Supreme Court
unanimously ended segregation. Later it found the use of IQ tests by
employers illegal because black people scored poorly, then found “affirmative
action,” racial discrimination against whites, legal (hardly oppression
of blacks, this). An overwhelmingly white Congress passed the Civil
Rights Act in 1964, the Voting Rights Act the next year. A white
President sent troops to Little Rock to enforce desegregation. There has
been an enormous flow of charity to black people: Section Eight Housing,
AFDC, Head Start, hiring quotas, set-asides, sharply lowered standards
in police and fire departments. We now have free breakfasts for black
children, then free lunches, in addition to outright welfare. In
aggregate they resemble a distributed guaranteed basic income. Which is
interesting.
These
measures sprang from the best of intentions. Most I think should
continue. I for one do not want to evict black people from public housing or
have their children go hungry. Yet none of these programs has had its
desired effect. The crucial academic gap has not closed, crime remains
horribly high, illegitimacy verges on universal. This is a great shame.
Black people are decent enough people, likable if they don’t hate you, and
phenomenally talented. But it hasn’t worked.
Nothing
has worked. There is no indication that anything will. The great heavily black
cities are in something approaching custodial care.
You
cannot solve a problem without knowing what it is. This we dare not
know. Democracies, however approximate, cannot deal with chronically
underperforming minorities.
They cannot even try. Anything that might help is politically impossible, and anything politically possible won’t help.
So, after the riots:
Social division will
worsen after the riots. Racial hostility toward white people, Asians, and Latinos from black people will not decrease
because their impoverished conditions will not change. The rioters are getting their
way now, and rule, but at the price of sowing hatred. At best we will
have many decades of ugly rancor. At worst, we are winding the spring
for another outburst.
Multiculturalism
has not worked, quite apart from race, and will not. White Americans
are not one people. The poor communications and bad roads that once
allowed them to live almost separately no longer exist. In its
writ-large form, trying to force West Virginia to accept the culture of
Massachusetts will produce only anger.
The
likelihood of amity between races is proportional to their agreement on
values important to them. For example, the Chinese share (what once
were) the white values of study, work, courtesy, and obedience to the
law. That they eat with chopsticks and celebrate New Year on the wrong
day doesn’t matter.
However,
again for example, a culture that believes in female genital mutilation
and utter subjection of women cannot live amicably with a culture that
abhors these things. Black ghetto culture and white are immiscible in so
many fundamental values that they will not live well together.
Some
cultures can assimilate, for example East Asian and American white,
Latino and American white. But, in addition to sharply different
cultures, too many black people live in sprawling, racially isolated urban
centers with almost no contact with the outside world other than
television or the internet.
Censorship will intensify, not just of communications and office chitchat but of books. Tom Sawyer
will be pulled from bookshelves or—Amazon being the continental
shelf—or bowderlized to remove the N Jim and Injun Joe The N of the Narcissus
may survive because none of the black people and few of the whites will ever
have heard of Conrad. At least for the foreseeable future, firings for
anything imaginably redolent of racism–saying “All lives matter,” for
example–will be snatched at in a mixture of passive aggression and
schadenfreude to result in firings. This is unlikely to have a happy
ending.
Schooling:
Watching great universities become sandboxes for unpleasantly righteous
dimwitted brats galls, or does if one lets it. I don’t. Most of the
protesters seem recently to have erupted from the drains of an
educational system that has been in sharp decline for decades They,
including the intelligent among them, appear historically not just
ignorant but carefully misinformed, culturally pathetic, and
intellectually laughable. (For example, a protestress interviewed by a
British reporter as to what she thought of Churchill said she couldn’t
really say because she hadn’t met him. How many in BLM can spell
“Confederacy”? A statue of Ulysses Grant was pulled down in the belief
that he was a Confederate general. May God preserve us.)
The,
uh, redaction of culture will not stop with books. Classical music is
too white, the sciences too white, mathematics a tool of oppression
(meaning that blacks cannot understand it) and so on. We have created a
nation of pampered and imbecile peasants.
Schooling
will continue its plummet. Science departments probably will not be
abolished. However, because they are too white, schools will recruit
hopelessly unqualified black students and professors, standards will
fall yet more, and mathematics will be played down even in astrophysics
(this is being done). Extirpating racism will replace scholarship,
already degraded by the retirement or death of those professors who knew
what education meant. This will inevitably result in lowered American
technological competitiveness and prosperity. There is no hope of
preventing this.
The replacement
of learned professors by aging detritus from the Sixties antagonistic
to scholarship is not surprising. America has had strong
anti-intellectual undercurrent since its inception. The degradation will
not be noticed by the young as they have never lived in a world
different from their own, with Harry Potter and Toni Morrison thought to
be literature. A liberal education was once the mark of the cultivated,
being deep in languages, literature, philosophy, the sciences, history,
mathematics,. Universities once had, at least among the better
students, a love of open minded curiosity, thought, and debate. No more.
Future historians will notice the shift, but those within it will not.
We are left with a nation of morons who will not know they are morons.
This
too cannot be prevented. Jejune herdthink is now warmly espoused
throughout the academy with children in grade school being primed for
it.
The
most—I dare not say “entertaining” for fear of lynching, but, well,
perhaps “interesting” reforms will be those of the police, whether
abolition, defunding to shift money to youth outreach and rehab (which
don’t work) or replacement of police by warm and caring adults, will
result in increased crime. We need not concern ourselves with whether
and to what extent the police have been culpable in which cases. The
changes will come anyway.
An
intriguing question is what the nonviolent, non-racist, warm and fuzzy
pseudopolice will do when they encounter violent criminals. Counsel them
on social justice? I would love to watch.
Our
system of governments has proved itself weak, feckless, and unable to
govern. The chaotic response to the coronavirus is a prime example,
there being no national policy and the states being told to do as they
see fit. The other major example was the inability or unwillingness to
prevent looting and arson.The widespread destruction was unopposed,
protected by the media, and celebrated by the many corporations that
have fallen over themselves to truckle to the unwashed and to give them
money. If our rampaging anthropoids can loot once, there is no reason to
think they cannot do it again.
Many
cities are routinely out of control, with seven hundred homicides in
Chicago and three hundred in Baltimore every year. Increasingly
criminals are released without bail and small crimes, such as evading
subway fares, are ignored when committed by minorities. The hordes of
derelicts grow, the New York subways become a homeless shelter. These
are not problems seen in civilized countries. Which America no longer
is, to the astonishment and amusement of the world.
Perhaps
this was to be expected. The American practice of choosing its leaders
every two, four, or six years by popularity contest worked, after a
fashion anyway, in a sprawling continental country in which government
had very little local influence. In a world far more complex, with
little ability to plan when those in charge change with paralyzing
rapidity, and everything intensely regulated by people unfamiliar with
problems, results are poor. America’s competition with large countries
having intelligently authoritarian and stable governance will prove a
losing proposition proposition. The inevitable decline in standard of
living, already well underwater, will promote unrest. Here we go again.
We
have done what Marx couldn’t: Achieved communism, a true dictatorship of
the proletariat, of a rabble jacquerie of much noise and no wit, the
rule of the unfit. It is a rule only of the culture. The moneyed would
not grant it power over anything else. Yet rule it is. We shall hear
much of the authenticity of the illiterate, the purity of ghetto urges,
the wisdom of the people, the need to lay low the pretensions of the
mansion.
Yet
the catastrophe has its consolations. It is amusing for those amused by
the end of empires. The Soviet Union spoke of the dictatorship of the
proletariat, but lived under the dictatorship of a gray aristocracy.
America speaks of the rule of the people, a horrible idea, and seems to
be getting there.
Think
of it as the Cultural Revolution by suburban hobbyists. There are the
same raging untermenschen, the same desire to destroy anything they do
not know, or cannot understand, or be bothered to learn.
As a
philosophic emollient one may reflect that all empires and
civilizations must end, and ours is. America will remain as a place, a
military bastion, a large if declining economic force. It will never
again be, even by the low standards of humanity in such things, a
relatively free and vigorous society. The world will not again credit
its charades of moral leadership. The rot, the tens of thousands of
derelict people living on the sidewalks, the looting and fire setting,
the censorship, are now visible to the entire earth. Oh well. It was a
good thing while it lasted.
.............................
For Boson Proud Buoys
By Seth Rich - Witness Protection Program - Somewhere in Boson -
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