[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hx9iDDkZ9d4]
Category: Uncategorized
Quote of the Day – James Lileks Edition
I need to start reading The Bleat regularly again. Today’s gem comes from today’s post:
My favorite term is “free-dumbs,” which marks the latest continuation of the word “freedom” as a signifier of idiocy. At some point “liberty” fell into disfavor with these people, because the wrong people were insisting that it applied to them as well.
“Anti-Intellectualism”
Those of us on the putative “Right” are often – and loudly – accused of “anti-intellectualism.” One of their favorite memes is this one:
This was most recently illustrated on CNN’s Tonight program when two of his guests, well, watch it yourself:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Puwn-DNGj9g]
Now, I’m not going to say that there aren’t such people on the right side of the divide, but the Left paints us ALL with a brush that should be reserved for a tiny minority. The theme of “anti-intellectualism!!” is wound through their worldview, and I believe it is part and parcel of the Leftist belief that it is they who should be leading us all into a Utopia, if only we’d just stop RESISTING them, and the only reason we resist is because we’re too stupid to see that they’re right.
Robert Heinlein posited what has been called “The Expert Syndrome.” It goes like this:
Expertise in one area does not impart expertise in other areas, though experts often think so. The narrower their area of expertise, the more likely they are to think so.
I’m reminded of an old joke:
A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him.
The driver, a young man in an Armani suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the shepherd, “If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?”
The shepherd looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answers, “Sure. Why not?”
The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his cell phone, surfs to a NASA page on the internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. The young man then opens the digital photo in Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, he receives an email that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of complex formulas. He uploads all of this data and, after a few minutes, receives a answer.
Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized portable printer and finally turns to the shepherd and says, “You have exactly 1,586 sheep.”
“That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my sheep.” says the shepherd. He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.
Then the shepherd says to the young man, “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my sheep? “
The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, “Okay, why not?”
“You’re a consultant.” says the shepherd.
“Wow! That’s correct,” says the yuppie, “but how did you guess that?”
“No guessing required.” answered the shepherd. “You showed up here even though nobody called you, you want to get paid for an answer I already knew to a question I never asked, and you don’t know crap about my business…”
“…Now give me back my dog!”
Mike Rowe talks a lot about our severe and growing “skills gap,” described as a distinct lack of skilled labor, caused by decades of telling our children that their only path to a good career is a four-year college degree. The “intellectual” life. And in doing so, the plumbers, carpenters, electricians, A/C technicians, welder, machinists, pipe-fitters, and on and on get older and retire, and too few follow them into what are necessary and decent-paying careers.
Because we need to work smarter, not harder.
Mike illustrates the difference between office-bound “experts” and someone who actually does the job for a living in a twenty-minute presentation. Please indulge me and give it a watch:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-udsIV4Hmc]
The “experts” tell Mike the “proper” way to castrate a lamb. The guy who actually raises sheep shows him the better way to do it. It’s an epiphany for Mike. The people who are out there actually doing things understand the real world. They know how things work. The people in the high-rise office buildings, capitol buildings or university campus offices know how things OUGHT to work, and we should listen to THEM. They’re EXPERTS.
And if you don’t, you’re an “anti-intellectual.”
On top of that, the intellectuals haven’t exactly wrapped themselves in glory, but then they seldom (if ever) pay a price for being wrong. University professors don’t lose tenure, cabinet members keep their jobs, or end up as consultants making more money, etc. Those of us who follow their lead (willingly or not) are the ones who suffer the consequences when they err.
We would trust the intellectuals more if they had to live with those consequences along with the rest of us. Or if they acted like there was a crisis when they tell us there’s a crisis. Until that happens, I guess we’ll remain “anti-intellectuals.”
UPDATE 5/9: Rev. Donald Sensing points to this piece – The Fallen State of Experts:
Excerpt:
If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you’re not paying attention to the experts. Epidemiologists tell us that if we do not hide in our houses with the door securely locked, hundreds of thousands will surely perish. Economists tell us that if we do not return immediately to work, civilisation will collapse. Good luck figuring out which expert has the better advice. Is it any wonder a harried Michael Gove blurted out, “I think the people in this country have had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms saying they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.”
Quote of the Day – Democrats Edition
From Jeff Greason, seen on Facebook:
There’s a scene in one of the Lord Darcy books, where Darcy uncovers the spy. They are discussing who might have turned traitor, and the other party discounts the suspects, because they have money, and so wouldn’t sell out. From this, Darcy correctly concludes the other party must *be* the traitor, and must *have* sold out for money, because he can’t think of any other motive for turning traitor.
For decades, the Left has talked about this or that adversary of the moment is to be feared, because they want power, crave power, would abuse power, and would not peacefully surrender power.
From this, you can correctly deduce what the Left dreams and obsesses about.
It’s called “Projection,” and the Left does it in 70mm IMAX with full Dolby sound.
This is What the Education Bureaucracy is Afraid Of
AITA for showing my 13 year old daughter footage of WW2 concentration camps? Excerpt:
Schools are shut, we’re in lockdown and I’m playing teacher. My daughter is 13 and doing a project on world war 2. It’s basically a critical thinking piece about why it is important to remember the atrocities with also room to argue that we should be able to forget about it and move on.
I feel incredibly strongly about remembering WW2, for a variety of logical reasons I won’t get into, but also I’m quite an emotional person who wants to remember. However for the purpose of this project I tried to stay unbiased.
My daughter who is generally a clever and kind person just wasn’t getting it. I looked at the reading material and it was all very… I don’t know. Dull I guess? Watered down? Far removed?
Later on she was in a video call with some school friends saying learning about ww2 was a waste of time. Essentially the gist was it’s boring, it’s in the past and we don’t have to deal with these sort of things nowadays. I heard one of her friends say “I don’t think it’s even as bad as the text books made it out to be”
In that moment I guess I decided to take a more hands on teaching approach.
RTWT.
I Had No Idea Canadians Were This Well Armed
The list of now-banned “assault-style weapons” has been released. I don’t have time to go through the whole list, but in part it includes actual missile launchers:
(z.11) Missile Launcher 9K111 Fagot;
(z.111) Missile Launcher 9K310 Igla-1;
(z.112) Missile Launcher 9K32 Strela-2;
(z.113) Missile Launcher 9K34 Strela-3;
(z.114) Missile Launcher 9K38 Igla;
(z.115) Missile Launcher BGM-71 TOW;
(z.116) Missile Launcher Eryx;
(z.117) Missile Launcher FGM-148 Javelin;
(z.118) Missile Launcher FIM-43 Redeye;
(z.119) Missile Launcher FIM-92 Stinger;
(z.12) Missile Launcher HN-5;
(z.121) Missile Launcher Ingwe;
(z.122) Missile Launcher M47 Dragon;
(z.123) Missile Launcher MILAN;
(z.124) Missile Launcher Saegheh;
(z.125) Missile Launcher Starstreak;
(z.126) Missile Launcher Toophan;
(z.127) Missile Launcher Type 79;
Hell, I’d like one of those Dragons, or a TOW. Maybe a Stinger. Where’s the NRA on this?!?
May Victims of Communism Day
Today is the 13th annual Victims of Communism Day, a day to remember the people murdered by their own governments in their quest to achieve a “worker’s paradise” where everyone is equal, where “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” is the beautiful dream lie. R.J. Rummel, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, calculated that the total number of victims of Communism – that is, the domestic victims of their own governments – in the USSR, China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cambodia is 98.4 million people. For all Communist governments during the 20th Century, he puts the estimate at approximately 110 million. And this wasn’t in warfare against other nations, this was what these governments did to their own people – “breaking eggs” for their utopian omelette that never gets made.
Six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, and another six million people the Nazis decided were “undesirable” went with them. “Never again” is the motto of the modern Jew, and many others just as dedicated. But “again and again and again” seems to be the rebuke of history.
The Communists are hardly alone in these crimes. Rummel estimates that the total number of people murdered by their own governments during the 20th Century is on the close order of 262 million, but the single biggest chunk of that truly frightening number is directly due to one pernicious idea: That we can make people better.
Why do I own guns? For a number of reasons, but one of them is this:
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? — Alexandr Solzhenitzyn, The Gulag Archipelago
—
The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed – where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once. — Judge Alex Kozinski, dissenting, Silveira v. Lockyer, denial to re-hear en banc, 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, 2003.
I intend to repeat this post each May 1 that I continue to run this blog.
Several years ago, Sipsey Street Irregulars had a post to go along with this one. STRONGLY RECOMMENDED.
In 2013 Not Clausewitz also made a worthy addition.
And for those who insist that “That wasn’t real Communism” –
Quote of the Day – Firehand Edition
In answer to a question I asked him on the Book of Face – What is the Chinese word for “Social Justice Warrior”?
Baizuo — 白左 literally, “white left” — is an internet term that came into being in the mid-2010s. It’s a derogatory word for liberal elites, specifically those who are educated and whose “obsession with political correctness” serves only to “satisfy their own feelings of moral superiority,” according to an article by political scientist Zhang Chenchen, which brought the term to light in the English-speaking world. It’s effectively the equivalent of the term “Social Justice Warrior.”
As I put it, “White people who take it upon themselves to be offended FOR people (who obviously just don’t understand how they’re being oppressed and need to have it explained.)”
“We Have to Have Our Abilities to Consume Reined In…”
In relation to my previous post, there’s a companion YouTube podcast of Michael Moore, Jeff Gibbs – the director of the film – and Ozzie Zehner who wrote the book The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism that inspired it. They discuss the reaction the film has been drawing. At the time I write this, there were eight comments, most of which were people OUTRAGED that they didn’t know this information.
I left this comment. I’m curious as to how long it will last before being deleted.
People like myself – I’m an electrical engineer – have been trying to point out that wind and solar are not viable alternatives to fossil fuels for literally decades, and the only reason they are implemented is the massive subsidies of taxpayer dollars. That electric cars are not “pollution-free” but instead move the pollution from the tailpipe to the smokestack of the power plant (not mentioning the pollution associated with battery manufacturing and disposal), which is usually located somewhere far away from the people who can afford electric vehicles. What have we received in return? Vitriol and hatred and accusations of being on the payroll of “Big Oil.” Well, as Mr. Gibbs discovered, we were right, and all that money WAS wasted. Now you want us to “rein in our ability to consume,” and control our population. Well, if you haven’t noticed, Europe isn’t reproducing at replacement rate. The only reason the US population is rising is immigration. But you’re telling the people living in the Third World, “We’ve got ours, you can’t have any. It’s for the Planet.” Who are you going to trust with the POWER to “rein in our ability to consume”? The same people you relied on in the Green movement?
“Less Must Be the New More.”
I strongly advise you to watch this film. It is a brutal indictment of the environmental movement as organizations run by cynics taking advantage of useful idiots and financed by corporate billions. It illustrates, with painstaking accuracy, the false promise of “green energy,” – wind, solar, biomass.
It is also an advertisement for the Voluntary Human Extinction movement. Quotes from speakers starting at about 46 minutes in:
There are too many human beings using too much, too fast.
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As a global community we really have got to start dealing with the issue of population.
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Population growth continues to be, not the elephant, but the herd of elephants in the room. We have to have our abilities to consume reined in, because we’re not good at reigning them in if there are seemingly unrestrained resources.
Just who is going to do the reining in? And how?
The filmmaker has a valid point – there are real problems that need to be addressed, and the environmental movement is just a “feel-good” effort that is in fact counterproductive. There is little to no incentive to actually address the problems, because no one wants to live like the Amish except the Amish, and I’m not certain about them.
But I did notice that the only comment made about nuclear energy was an aside jab at General Electric, which he notes makes both nuclear power plants and wind turbines.
Seriously, watch it. It’s worth your time. Meanwhile, I have to see my psychologist about my endorsement of a Michael Moore-backed documentary.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE]
UPDATE: 5/26/20 – “Planet of the Humans” has been yanked. One of the short sequences in the film was used without the permission of the creator of it, and he filed a Copyright takedown claim. Michael Moore is getting hammered by the Left for being RIGHT WING.