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An Inevitable Disaster?
A long time ago, Ben Stein wrote a funny, insightful book (The View from Sunset Boulevard) about the collective mindset of those who make movies and TV shows. It explained why the Puerto Rican kid arrested in the first 15 minutes of a Kojak episode was innocent because it was really the rich white stockbroker who murdered the prostitute with a heart of gold. He described the industry’s view of America as a few urban oases in an otherwise dangerous hinterland filled with dangerous racist troglodytes patiently waiting for the appearance of their Führer to give the order to arise. Forty-five years later, the book is still surprisingly applicable.
It turns out that there really is a dangerous mass of malformed intellects in America awaiting a spark or orders to arise but it was not the Red State working class. It was our grossly miseducated, deformed upscale youth.
I propose that the sincerity of the expressions of sympathy for Gazans are about as real, deep, and substantive as is the protestors’ grasp of history, law, religion, geography, and almost everything else that previous generations knew by the completion of elementary school. Gaza was possibly just the long-awaited spark, an event onto which the cartoon concepts of “colonialism” and “white supremacy” could be applied by skillful manipulators to trigger the cognitively impaired masses. The angry youths only know what they have been trained to hate so a focused hatred of Jews as a particularly malignant subset of those possessed of “whiteness” came surprisingly naturally, especially in the absence of any awareness of even fairly recent rather significant historical events.
The ideological context for the elimination of Israel in the name of Dar al Islam is indistinguishable from the outlook of the 9/11 mass murders, the Taliban, or the malignant nutballs who control Iran. Nevertheless, for our malformed hordes, the enemy of my parents, my pastor, and my most annoying high school teachers is my friend.
Blockbuster, 8-track players, Woolworth’s, and now Columbia University were all built to serve markets that suddenly no longer exist. Columbia et al have dispensed with the pleasant anachronism that the ivies turn out well-formed minds, steeped in the best wisdom, methods, and morality of our civilization and replaced it with plush living spaces and a flow of unchallenging trendy Marxist ideological pablum, a product that is both wildly over-priced and highly toxic.
What else should we have expected?
Published in General
This speaks volumes, in every way. The ideas they’ve collected are nonsense and simply untrue, and they’ve let themselves be controlled by their elite. How sad.
I’m trying to remember a single-panel cartoon I once saw of a mob in Revolutionary French garb, and one of the torch-wavers is saying, “Storm the Bastille! Liberte, Egalite, and… uh, how did the rest of that go again?”
An elite created but does not control the monster.
The weird alliance of very wealthy perverts, career government/policy types, and tenured academia sees the middle-class normals as their natural political rival and ultimate enemy. Turning the normals’ own kids against them was a powerful strategic move.
However, most of the intellectuals and organizers behind both the French and Russian revolutions ended up getting executed, kinda like “open-minded” university administrators and faculty who may well wind up unemployed.
Youths stunted morally and intellectually and cut off from the formative influence of their own culture are not going to happily settle for the vision an Obama-like vision of a benevolent administrative one-party state that socializes life for the lower and middle classes, guarantees the good life for tenured intellectuals and leaves the ultra-rich alone. The currently de rigueur keffiyehs are interchangeable with the pseudo-tough guy ninja ANTIFA costume. It is a matter of visionless raw opposition. And likely to fail precisely because there is no positive endpoint offered. No communist nirvana, no socialist paradise. Just a tantrum against the status quo.
The good news is that the campus disease does not appear to be popular. And the normals don’t yet appear to feel personally threatened enough to resort to violence or support of repressive government measures–the healthy good humor of the UNC flag-rescuing frat boys is a very positive response and probably reflective of the majority view.
[This is not a response to comment 3. Old Bathos and I posted at the same moment. :) :) ]
In a Google search box this week, I plunked in an Ask Jeeves-style query: “What has Israel done to save and protect the Gazan children during the current war?” That is a very specifically worded query designed to elicit a certain type of information. Since the days that Google bought the Ask Jeeves query technology, it’s a query style that has always worked very well for me. But not this time. I suggest everyone do this and just scan the results that come back. You don’t need to open any of them. You may be shocked at what you see on your screen for results. I was.
The anti-Israel propaganda that the mainstream media and NGOs are pushing right now is wild. It is way worse than I expected. Thank God for Fox News. I mean that as a sincere prayer of thanks. From what I can tell, it is the only news outlet speaking the truth about Israel and the war right now. The only one!
I’ve seen these kinds of disturbingly distorted search results on any topic related to Donald Trump, but I was shocked to see the same kinds of distortions leveled at Israel.
Also, one afternoon this past week, I was going somewhere with my husband, and he was listening to, I think, Don Bongino (?–I am not entirely sure who it was but I thought it was Bongino–I had dozed off a little bit). He was talking to a guest on his show who conveyed the troubling results of a new poll. The guest said that 80 or 85 percent of the respondents who were over the age of 50 or 60 (I can’t remember which) had favorable responses on questions about Israel. Only 40 percent of the respondents under 40 years old did so. The numbers were shocking. When we got home, I attempted to follow up. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the exact poll he was talking about. However, it’s the kind of poll Pew Research does, so I looked there. I found one that is close to what the guest reported, but the poll was taken in 2022 so it is not war related:
Obviously, this generational difference was in play long before the war started. When we boomers die off, there will be big problems.
Put that existing negative attitude together with the skewed war reporting by the mass media and the NGOs–it’s no wonder the campuses blew up.
The Axis of Goodness–United States, Great Britain, and Israel–is in deep trouble. We need a public relations offensive, but I don’t think it is possible to accomplish it given the radical leanings of the boards of directors of the mass media companies.
I would love to have someone do a poll in the “encampments” to see how many can identify the river and name the sea they keep chanting about.
That then is their epitaph.
When we human beings evaluate incoming negative information about someone (or some organization or some group), we sort it out this way:
(a) “I know this guy. He’s always had problems. This news does not surprise me. It’s probably true.”
or
(b) “I know this guy. He’s a good guy. This news couldn’t possibly be true as it is being stated. The news story is missing something.”
The only anti-Israel people I’ve ever known I have gotten to know on Ricochet. There are about three or four of them.
Their view of Israel is the kind reasoning one sees in group a.
I always take approach b because I trust Israel to be like me in how we relate to the world around us. I would be as comfortable in Israel as I am on Cape Cod.
There are far more people in group a than I realized before the war. I knew academia had gone nuts–I saw it during the ugly divestiture movement in the late nineties. But these campus riots have been eye-opening for me.
I blame the Democrats completely for this, especially the Ted Kennedy, Al Gore, John Kerry groups. They created this monster. I watched it happen.
On the bright side, the left is pi$$ing away the brand’s image of goodness, enlightenment, and progress. There will be a growing opening for a better offering–who knows, old truths and values may soon have the benefit of novelty. Young women turned off by Women’s Liberation devolving into hookup culture, young white men tired of being disparaged, minorities wising up to the exploitation inherent in the left’s vested interest in their lack of basic education and genuine opportunity… there is a heck of a lot of potentially exploitable buyer’s remorse out there.
I am seeing those glimmers too. :) Over the past year, I’ve been in a couple of groups of youngish Democrats who are completely fed up with all of the above. :) :)
All right. I will return to hope. :) :)
But they thought they would be able to. The mad scientist always does.
My favorite snippet of the whole “encampment” episode thus far was some entitled child demanding that the university feed the occupants behind the barricades. Perhaps the geniuses should have thought this through a bit more? Reminded me…
”Amateurs talk tactics, Pros talk logistics.”
I guess “an army marches on its stomach” never comes up in history class any more?
I guess they don’t read Frankenstein any more.
Obviously, we need to give
freetaxpayer-funded college to everyone, so we can have more of this.Exactly right. And those whose job it is to convince these morons that they are victims are right alongside them, continuing to drip poison in their ears. Almost half of protestors arrested on New York campuses have no connection with the university.
I don’t recall what the triggering event was, but I do remember my father exclaiming at some point in the 1980s “Israel’s the only country left in this world that has any guts!”.
This is the same man who told me a day or two before he died in 1995 that he was glad he was getting out when he did – “I was born just before the depression, saw my country rise to be the #1 power in the world, and now I’m leaving before we can decline.”
Students go into debt the size of a home mortgage to acquire skillsets only suitable for baristas and dog shampoo technicians. Taxpayers provide the liquidity and go on the hook as guarantors for this whole Ponzi scheme. And this is just to give universities cash they spend entirely on hiring more DEI and other admin staff. People have been committed to asylums for less irrational thinking than whatever produced this system.
A significant number of these people are simply anti-establishment types who will foment unrest on any pretext.
Nearly half of anti-Israel protesters arrested at Columbia, City College weren’t students: police
This raises the question, again, of how many people at the Jan 6 riot were there as provocateurs.
I heard someone, somewhere, interviewing a member of the mob (I think it was a mobette) a day or two ago. She explained that “from the river to the sea,” is just a metaphor (that’s my word, not hers; her explanation was much more incoherent, but I think “metaphor” is the concept she was grappling with) for the struggles of the oppressed, no matter who or where they find themselves. So, Gaza, Black Lives Matter, and the Lenni-Lenapes, the indigenous residents whose land was stolen from them by the colonialist oppressors who built Columbia University. Perhaps there were more examples; I don’t remember. There’s only so much goodness one can absorb at one time.
So, all you Objective Truthers out there: Get over yourselves. It could be any river or any sea. Stop trying to trip them up with inconvenient questions, because clearly, they are on the right side of history.
Back in the 1970s, in reference to the antiwar demonstrations, a wise man told me that we should not worry unless and until the physics and engineering students join the movement. Later, when I studied more history, I found that to be too facile an outlook.
Lenin got kicked out by the end of his first semester, Mao dropped in and out of several schools. I wonder if in those times and places all grades were A/A- and all student organizations (except conservatives and religious groups, of course) were OK then would those two guys have each got a useless degree, then stocked shelves and come home to a disgruntled wife and kids every night instead of screwing up the world. Is Columbia inadvertently preventing the next Mao or Lenin?
I read this morning that faculty and staff numbers now nearly equal the number of students. Somehow, that just doesn’t seem to make sense to me.
At Yale, the College Fix reports:
I haven’t heard that, but it’s pretty much that way same in healthcare, where I think the number of administrators and bureaucrats may actually exceed that of the clinical care teams from aides and technicians all the way to physicians.
Conversation with a student at University of San Diego. Video.
“Personnel is policy”, and importing a sufficient number of people with this woman’s attitudes will have a malign effect on American politics…indeed, it seems it already has. And at some point, the impact will be fatal.
How many are federal plants?
Gee, it does seem that the Feds should be investigating these schmoes, doesn’t it?
Anybody see Ray Epps there?
The Rural Purge conducted by the TV networks seems relevant to these trends.
That’s just it. Ask Stuttering Chris Wray if the FBI has its sights on the Columbia Clueless Brigade. If they have the manpower to be investigating Catholics, and “J6ers” and all the threats from the “far-right” (which is anybody to the right of Mittens), why aren’t they watching these twerps? And if he replies that they are watching them, the occupiers can spend their time waiting for their vegan, gluten-free pizzas to be delivered playing that age-old party game of “Spot the Fed.”
Non-fed investigators have seen a money trail from leftist groups. I gotta believe that the “outsiders” at these fiascoes include some of the usual suspects from BLM/ANTIFA adventures. But unless they attend a Tridentine mass or tweet pro-life content or express doubts about the 2020 election around the water cooler at work, they probably don’t show up on FBI radar.
This post is exactly what I expected. Defamation and lies aimed at those protesting the genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid policies of the Israeli government.
Equating idealistic youth with Nazis. Equating criticism of Israel with some fantasy about mindless hatred of Jews for no reason whatsoever.
This sort of distorted thinking leads one to support mass slaughter and mass starvation of women and children. It even allows one to believe that one stands on the moral high ground while doing so.
College kids are often clueless. On this issue, they understand the truth better than the older generations. The historic crimes of the state of Israel were concealed quite effectively, for decades. I didn’t know myself, until recently.
The truth is out there. I recommend Norman Finkelstein and Rashid Khalidi, as a start.