Posted on 11/23/2014 12:37:58 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Preparing for the soon expected grand jury verdict in Ferguson, Missouri, students at the University of Pennsylvania held a ceremonial funeral on Friday afternoon for black and brown bodies oppressed by the evils of capitalism and the racism of police officers.
Known as the Students Organizing for Unity and Liberation (SOUL), the multicultural student group founded in 2012 has held a litany of stunts on the Philadelphia campus to create a more conscious and active community at UPenn and in Philadelphia, according to the groups Facebook page.
Since the beginning of the school year, SOUL has deemed Friday #FergusonFriday, a day when members wrap-up the work week with symbolic graveyards, performances featuring blood-drenched bodies and most recently a mock funeral to demonstrate against the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson.
Judicial system + capitalism + police brutality = representing the systemic oppression that has contributed to the genocide of black and brown bodies. Indict, convict, send those killer cops to jail. The WHOLE damn system is guilty as hell, warned one Facbook post from earlier this month........
In addition to eulogizing Michael Brown, the couple dozen members or supporters of SOUL circled around the ceremonial coffin on Friday, pleaded desperate words on immigration reform, and even how the American public is misinformed about the true story of the Civil War. Once these justice seekers finished lamenting the state of the horribly racist world in which they live, group members grabbed and hugged-out their feelings. The hugs were described as solemn, according to Campus Reform.
The ceremony wrapped up with the students walking single-file to the casket, where they poured water into a bucket, an African tradition.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailycaller.com ...
April 2001 - The Perils of Designer Tribalism by Roger Kimball -On the bane of Third Worldism and Roger Sandall's book The Culture Cult.
A generalized tolerance will be best achieved if we leave undisturbed whatever it is which constitutes the special character of particular individuals and peoples, whilst at the same time we retain the conviction that the distinctive worth of anything with true merit lies in its belonging to all humanity. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
[A] life without piety, including piety to the past, courts grief and does damage to the life of the living individual.Edward Shils
They are very gentle, and know nothing of evil. Christopher Columbus
In 1983, the French writer Pascal Bruckner published Le sanglot de lhomme blanc, an astringent, intelligently disabused attack on recent European efforts to sentimentalize the Third World. Duly translated into English a few years later as The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt (Free Press, 1986), the book excited a brief spark of interest among conservatives and then sank without trace into the tenebrous limbo of the out-of-print.
It was an unfortunate, and undeserved, fate. Bruckners book is a vigorous indictment of Third Worldismthe odious species of romance that glorifies everything foreign, exotic, and primitive while simultaneously railing against civilization, science, and modernity. (That other social philosopher, W. S. Gilbert, was right to save a place on his famous list for the idiot who praises with enthusiastic tone/ All centuries but this and every country but his own.)
The very power of Bruckners indictment helps to explain its neglect. The message he brought was distinctly unwelcome music to the ears of politically correct intellectuals, whose smugness and sense of moral superiority, then as now, was inextricably bound up with the mendacities of Third Worldism and kindred specimens of emotional blackmail. (Just listen to Susan Sontag on Kosovo or Michael Ignatieff on Rwanda.) Solidarity with oppressed peoples, Bruckner wrote,
is above all a gigantic weapon aimed at the West. The logic of aggression is at work in Third World solidarity, and this has made it a continuation of the Cold War by other means. Being non-European is enough to put one on the side of right. Being European or being supported by a European power is enough to make one suspect. The bloody messes in banana republics, and butchery of political opposition and the dictatorial lunacy by their petty chieftains are all brushed aside. Such trifles will not restrain the progress of these peoples toward socialism. What seems criminal in Cuba, Angola, and Guinea has the real purpose of washing away the far greater crime of colonialism.
Clearly, Bruckners message is as pertinent today as it was in the 1980smore so, perhaps, since the attitudes it chronicles, if often less histrionic, are today more thoroughly institutionalized, more thoroughly absorbed into established opinion.
It is worth pointing out that, unlike many Third Worldists, Bruckner had firsthand knowledge of the problems about which he wrote. Having worked as a member of the International Action Against Hunger, he animated compassion with deeds. If this tempered his romanticism, it also sharpened his vision. Bruckner did not march arm-in-arm with Jean-Paul Sartre. He was not a beneficiary of UNESCOs extortionist escapades. He did not rail against Western oppression. He did not curse the evils of colonialism. On the contrary, he understood that the Wests real crime was not pursuing but rather abandoning its responsibilities as a colonial power.
Part of what makes The Tears of the White Man such an important book is Bruckners sensitivity to the aerodynamics of liberal guilt. He understands what launches it, what keeps it aloft, and how we might lure it safely back to earth. He understands that the entire phenomenon of Third Worldism is fueled by the moral ecstasy of overbred guilt. Bruckner is an articulate anatomist of such guilt and its attendant deceptions and mystifications. An overblown conscience, he points out, is an empty conscience.
Compassion ceases if there is nothing but compassion, and revulsion turns to insensitivity. Our soft pity, as Stefan Zweig calls it, is stimulated, because guilt is a convenient substitute for action where action is impossible. Without the power to do anything, sensitivity becomes our main aim, the aim is not so much to do anything, as to be judged. Salvation lies in the verdict that declares us to be wrong.
The universalizationwhich is to say the utter trivializationof compassion is one side of Third Worldism. Another side is the inversion of traditional moral and intellectual values. Europe once sought to bring enlightenmentliteracy, civil society, modern technologyto benighted parts of the world. It did so in the name of progress and civilization. The ethic of Third Worldism dictates that yesterdays enlightenment be rebaptized as todays imperialistic oppression. For the committed Third Worldist, Bruckner points out,
salvation consists not only in a futile exchange of influences, but in the recognition of the superiority of foreign thought, in the study of their doctrines, and in conversion to their dogma. We must take on our former slaves as our models. . . . It is the duty and in the interest of the West to be made prisoner by its own barbarians.
Whatever the current object of adulation the wisdom of the East, tribal Africa, Aboriginal Australia, pre-Columbian America the message is the same: the absolute superiority of Otherness. The Third Worldist looks to the orient, to the tribal, to the primitive not for what they really are but for their evocative distance from the reality of modern European society and values.
It is all part of what Bruckner calls the enchanting music of departure. Its siren call is seductive but also supremely mendacious. Indeed, the messy reality of the primitive worldits squalor and poverty, its penchant for cannibalism, slavery, gratuitous cruelty, and superstitionare carefully edited out of the picture. In their place we find a species of Rousseauvian sentimentality. Rousseau is the patron saint of Third Worldism. Ignoring the real human race entirely, Rousseau wrote in a passage Bruckner quotes from the Confessions, I imagined perfect beings, with heavenly virtue and beauty, so sure in their friendship, so tender and faithful, that I could never find anyone like them in the real world. The beings with whom Rousseau populated his fantasy life are exported to exotic lands by the Third Worldist. As Rousseau discovered, the unreality of the scenario, far from being an impediment to moral smugness, was an invaluable asset. Reality, after all, has a way of impinging upon fantasy, clipping its wings, limiting its exuberance. So much the worse, then, for reality. As Bruckner notes, in this romance adepts were not looking for a real world but the negation of their own. . . . An eternal vision is projected on these nations that has nothing to do with their real history.
The Australian anthropologist Roger Sandall does not mention The Tears of the White Man in The Culture Cult, his [1] new collection of essays. But his discussion is everywhere informed by the same spirit of salutary impatience. What Bruckner criticizes as Third Worldism, Sandall castigates as romantic primitivism and (marvelous phrase) designer tribalism. What is romantic primitivism? In the words of Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, it is the unending revolt of the civilized against civilization. Sandall begins with a small but telling contemporary example. In 1996, the actress Lauren Hutton took her two young boys to Africa to witness a bunch of Masai warriors and their witch doctor perform a tribal dance, slaughter a cow, and drink some warm blood straight from the carcass. The whole spectacle was captured for the television audience by Ted Turners minions. Miss Hutton loved it: according to Sandall, Wow! was her frequent refrain. But her young children, one of whom burst into tears, were terrified. Quite right, too. The purpose of the television show was to show that Masai culture is just as good as Western civilization, if not better. Miss Huttons enthusiasm was sparked by the display of authentic tribal passion. But her children saw the episode for what it was: a glimpse into the heart of darkness, the abyss of uncivilized barbarism.
What Sandall describes as the culture cult dreams of a new simplicity: a mode of existence that is somehow less encumbered, less rent by conflicting obligations than life in a modern industrialized democracy. It is a vain endeavor. The romanticization of the primitive only emphasizes ones distance from its simplicities. Romanticism in all its forms is an autumnal, retrospective phenomenon: the more fervent it is, the more it underscores the loss it laments. It is time, Sandall writes, to stop dreaming about going back to the land or revisiting the social arrangements of the past. Miss Huttons happy ejaculations were prompted by such dreams. What she heard among those Masai savages as they danced about and drank blood was Pascal Bruckners enchanting music of departure. But it is, alas, a departure to nowhere. As Sandall observes, life is about ever-extending complexity. To deny that is to neglect the Big Ditch (Ernest Gellners term) that separates the modern world from its primitive sources. On one side of the ditch is the rule of law, near universal literacy, modern technology, and the whole panoply of liberal democratic largess. On the other side is what? Most traditional cultures, Sandall writes, feature domestic repression, economic backwardness, endemic disease, religious fanaticism, and severe artistic constraints. If you want to live a full life and die in your bed, then civilizationnot romantic ethnicitydeserves your thoughtful vote.
The Culture Cult is partly a brief for the Enlightenment values of universal culture and scientific rationality, partly an attack of the various atavisms that Sandall sees impeding the growth of those values. Its method is not systematic but exemplary. Sandall proceeds through a number of illustrative case studies. There are not many heroes in this book. One finds kind words for Ernest Gellner and for Karl Poppers book The Open Society and Its Enemies, written in the 1940s when Popper was in New Zealand. For the most part, however, The Culture Cult is a tour through an intellectual and moral rogues gallery. There are suitably wry bits about anthropological fantasists like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, anti-industrialist utopians like Robert Owen (founder of the New Harmony commune), and randy utopians like John Humphrey Noyes (founder of the Oneida Community). Sandall also devotes whole chapters to Isaiah Berlin and to the bizarre anti-free-market rantings of Karl Polanyi. It is useful to be reminded that Polanyi, writing in 1960, believed that West Africa would lead the world and that record-keeping with pebbles and rafia bags in eighteenth-century Dahomey rivaled the achievements of IBM.
Most of the figures Sandall deals with are familiar. Like Bruckner and many others before him, he singles out Rousseau and the eighteenth-century German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder as the spiritual grandparents of romantic primitivism. Rousseau contributed the hothouse emotional sentimentality, Herder the völkisch celebration of cultural identity at the expense of assimilation and a recognition of universal humanity. (As the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut observed, from the time of Plato until that of Voltaire, human diversity had come before the tribunal of universal values; with Herder the eternal values were condemned by the court of diversity.)
Sandall's real target is the assumptioncommon coin among anthropologiststhat culture is a value-neutral term and that, as Claude Lévi-Strauss put it in 1951, one had to fight against ranking cultural differences hierarchically. In his book The Savage Mindwhich argues that there is no such thing as the savage, as distinct from the civilized, mindLévi-Strauss spoke blithely of the so-called primitive. (It is significant that Lévi-Strauss should have idolized Rousseau: our master and our brother, of all the philosophes, [the one who] came nearest to being an anthropologist.) One of Sandalls main tasks in The Culture Cult is to convince us that what Lévi-Strauss dismissed as so-called is really well-called. Sandall does not mention William Henrys In Defense of Elitism (1994)another unfairly neglected bookbut his argument in The Culture Cult reinforces Henrys accurate, if politically incorrect, observation that
the simple fact [is] that some people are better than otherssmarter, harder working, more learned, more productive, harder to replace. Some ideas are better than others, some values more enduring, some works of art more universal. Some cultures, though we dare not say it, are more accomplished than others and therefore more worthy of study. Every corner of the human race may have something to contribute. That does not mean that all contributions are equal. . . . It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose.
Henrys quip about the bone in the nose elicited the expected quota of outrage from culture-cultists. But the outrage missed the serious and, ultimately, the deeply humane point of the observation. What Sandall calls romantic primitivism puts a premium on quaintness, which it then embroiders with the rhetoric of authenticity. There are two casualties of this process. One is an intellectual casualty: it becomes increasingly difficult to tell the truth about the achievements and liabilities of other cultures. The other casualty is a moral, social, and political one. Who suffers from the expression of romantic primitivism? Not the Lauren Huttons and Claude Lévi-Strausses of the world. On the contrary, the people who suffer are the objects of the romantic primitives compassion, respect, and pretended emulation. Sandall asks:
Should American Indians and New Zealand Maoris and Australian Aborigines be urged to preserve their traditional cultures at all costs? Should they be told that assimilation is wrong? And is it wise to leave them entirely to their own devices?
Sandall is right that the answers, respectively, are No, No, and No: The best chance of a good life for indigenes is the same as for you and me: full fluency and literacy in English, as much math as we can handle, and a job.
This is a truth that was broadly recognized at least through the 1950s. With the failure of colonialism, however, came a gigantic failure of nerve. (It might be said, in fact, that the failure of colonialism was a gigantic failure of nerve.) More and more, confusion replaced confidence, and with confusion came the pathologies of guilt.
Since the folly of locking up native peoples in their old-time cultures is obvious, but it is tactless to say so, governments have everywhere resorted to the rhetoric of reconciliation. This pretends that the problem is psychological and moral: rejig the public mind, ask leading political figures to adopt a contrite demeanor and apologize for the sins of history, and all will be well. Underlying this is the assumption that we are all on the same plain of social development, divided only by misunderstanding.
But this assumption, Sandall emphasizes, is false. And it was recognized as false by governments everywhere until quite recently. Around 1970, the big change set in. Then, instead of attempting to help primitives enter the modern world, we were enjoined to admire them and their (suitably idealized) way of life. As Sandall observes, the effect on indigenes of romanticizing their past has been devastating.
If your traditonal way of life has no alphabet, no writing, no books, and no libraries, and yet you are continually told that you have a culture which is rich, complex, and sophisticated, how can you realistically see your place in the scheme of things? If all such hyperbole were true, who would need books or writing? Why not hang up a Gone Fishing sign and head for the beach? I might do that myself. In Australia, policies inspired by the Culture Cult have brought the illiterization of thousands of Aborigines whose grandparents could read and write.
The statistics are grim. Between 1965 and 1975, Sandall reports, Aborigines arrived at one college with sixth-grade reading levels; in 1990, after primary education had been handed over to local Aboriginal communities, that had fallen to third grade. Today most Aborigines arrive at the college in question almost completely illiterate.
This social disaster was the result of specific political policies. But the policies themselves were the result of a moral attitude, one that many anthropologists have actively nurtured. In part, the attitude is a reflection of the Lévi-Straussian non-hierarchical view of culture: the view which denies that there are important distinctions to be made between la pensée sauvage and the mind, for example, of Claude Lévi-Strauss. In part, what we might call the anthropological attitude is a coefficient of the ideaalso fostered by Lévi-Strauss, among many othersthat culture is at bottom a narrative, a product of social construction. And the results of that developmentcorrosive skepticism, blasé nihilism, irresponsible relativismhave helped to place anthropology in the intellectual slum wherein it now molders. For more than twenty years, Sandall writes, anthropologists have written about constructing reality as if the world and everything in it were mere artifact, about building identity as if any old self-glamourizing fiction will do, about creating the past as an enterprise more exciting than history, about inventing tradition as if traditions were as changeable as store windows. As if, indeed. Sandall is very good on all this, and I only wish that he had devoted more space to discussing the work of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who is mentioned only in passing. He is one of the most influential and oleaginous proponents of the all-is-narrative, all-cultures-are-equal position now writing. He is a real postmodern culture-cultist who would have benefitedwell, we would have benefitedfrom a closer look.
It is part of the ethos of designer tribalism to foist all of ones own attitudes and longings onto the apparently blank canvas of whatever primitive populace happens to be in vogue at the moment. To some extent, this is simply a matter of ignorance, as illustrated, for example, by Christopher Columbuss report that the people he discovered are very gentle, and know nothing of evil. But the culture cultist supplements ignorance with heavy helpings of ideology and idealization. He looks at an exotic culture and, lo and behold, he finds himself looking into a flattering mirror. This is one reason that natives always seem to be non-smoking, vegetarian, sex-worshipping, drug-taking, eco-conscious, progressive-thinking pacifistsaccording, anyway, to the press releases distributed by the culture cultists.
Sandall speaks in this context of anthropologys tendency to normalize the primitive while treating civilization as aberrant. Consider the Maoris. In contemporary New Zealand, Sandall notes, one finds a miscellaneous army of teachers, academics, government servants, clergy, radical lawyers, progressive judges, journalists, and numerous other bien pensants promot[ing] the revival of traditional Maori culture even more fanatically than the Maori do themselves. He cites an Anglican priest who rails against the monocultural grip on all our institutions that British colonialism supposedly still exerts (if only!), and cites various teachers who wish to return the education of Maori children to the tribes. In the background is a rose-tinted view of the Maoris as a peace-loving, ecologically conscious, spiritually delicate people who have been abused for two centuries by hard-bitten, materialistic Europeans.
In fact, the ecological record of the Maoris would not win any plaudits from the Sierra Club. Shortly after paddling up to New Zealand in their canoes eight-hundred years ago, the Maori indiscriminately burned huge swathes of forest. They also decimated the wildlife. Actually, decimate is far too weak a word. Within a short time, Sandall notes, some 30 percent of the bird life on New Zealand had become extinct thanks to the depredations of the Maoris. All twelve species of moa, for example, a large, flightless bird without natural predators before the Maori arrived, became extinct some six-hundred years ago. According to Sandall, it was perhaps the fastest megafaunal extinction ever recorded. Not that the Maori were particular about where they got their protein. Divided into numerous tribes, they were incessantly at war. Prisoners were routinely baked and eaten. But all of this is papered over. And even as the Maori past is systematically distorted and rewritten, so their future is jeopardized by government policies that, in the name of bi-culturalism and preserving tribal customs, dooms its beneficiaries to a life of second-class citizenship.
Sandall is at his best when puncturing over-inflated reputations. Many of his subjects, it is true, have been repeatedly punctured before. Somehow, though, the gas keeps seeping back in, so new puncturings are always in order. For example, it is pretty well known today that Margaret Meads book Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) should be filed under fiction, not anthropology. Mead herself acknowledged that in populating the South Seas with sexual libertines she was pushing speculation to the limit of acceptability. But Meads book, along with Ruth Benedicts investigation of the pueblo life of the Zuni in Patterns of Culture (1934, another work of what Sandall calls didactic semifiction), was immensely influential. Both were part of the tsunami that legitimized the bohemian counterculture of Greenwich Village, first in the universities and then in the 1960s in the culture at large. We cannot be too frequently reminded that what was presented as anthropology is really a species of fantasy.
The Culture Cult is a valuable addition to the literature of common sense. It goes some distance in doing for the discipline of anthropology what Keith Windschuttles book The Killing of History did for the discipline of history. That is to say, it exposes the reign of ideology and mystificationin an academic pursuit, first of all, but also as it has spilled over into the culture at large. If Sandalls book is finally less effective than The Killing of History, that is largely for two reasons. In the first place, it is more miscellaneous. The chapter on Isaiah Berlin, for example, contains some valuable observationsanything that lets a bit of air out of that inflated reputation is welcomebut it offers a discussion that is a tangent to Sandalls discussion of the culture cult.
It must also be said that The Culture Cult does not operate at the same intellectual level as The Killing of History. One of the things that distinguishes Windschuttles book is its patient trek through the historical record. If Michel Foucault said something silly about asylums in the Middle Ages, Windschuttle went to the trouble of reading through Foucault and then through a number of independent sources in order to establish what actually happened. Sandalls discussion tends to be much more second-hand. His treatment of Rousseau, which relies heavily on Paul Johnsons discussion in Intellectuals, is a case in point. I have an appropriately low opinion of Rousseaus character and believe there can be no doubt that his influence on politics and education has been almost wholly malign. But Rousseau was more than the sum of his failings, more than an interesting madman (as one of his mistresses described him), and his writings about the state of nature, however preposterous, were more than an expression of his paranoia and resentment against Paris.
I agree wholeheartedly with Sandall that cultures differ profoundly, and these differences have profound effects. I also share his judgment that the future, if we are lucky, belongs to the values that made Europe the economic, political, scientific leader of the world. Sandall is right also to contrast the wealth-producing cultures of Western Europe and the poverty-producing traditional cultures admired by romantic primitivism. Nevertheless, his simple opposition of culture versus civilization needs to be taken with a grain of salt. For one thing, his hunt for romantic primitives turns up some distinctly unlikely candidates. For example, in Civilization and Its Malcontents, Sandall tells us that T. S. Eliot and Ludwig Wittgenstein were drawn to the all-inclusive anthropological concept of culture, something which is the antithesis of High Culture, and which would undermine its status and fatally weaken its defense. Ill leave Wittgenstein to one side, except to say that anyone who can dismiss the author of Philosophical Investigations as endorsing a world of groupthink, grouptalk, group action, all cozily packaged in a Gemeinschaft world is not a reliable guide to the philosophers work.
And Eliot? Sandall quotes (but cites the wrong page) Eliots statement, from the appendix of Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, that by culture he means first of all what the anthropologists mean. But to think on that account that Eliot endorses the non-hierarchical, all-cultures-are-equal view that Sandall attacks is to completely mistake Eliots purpose. On the very same page as the passage Sandall quotes, Eliot observed that there are of course higher cultures and lower cultures, and the higher cultures in general are distinguished by differentiation of function. Reflecting on his work at The Criterion, Eliot spoke of his colleagues common concern for the highest standards of both thought and expression, . . . a common curiosity and openness of mind to new ideas and our common responsibility . . . to preserve our common culture uncontaminated by political influences. Sandalls discription of Eliots somnambulistic ruminations is itself a piece of somnambulism, coaxed into action, perhaps, by too rigid and superficial a distinction between culture and civilization. The sociologist Edward Shils was certainly no enemy of what Sandall champions as civilization. But in his book Tradition (dedicated, incidentally, to the spirits of Max Weber and Eliot), Shils observed that a mistake of great historical significance has been made in modern times in the construction of a doctrine which treated traditions as the detritus of the forward movement of society. If romantic primitivism is an enemy of civilization, so too is the view that piety toward the past is always an impediment to progress. [end]
Communists Hand Out Leaflets at SLU: TAKE AMERIKKKA IF THE MURDERING PIG WALKS
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3229661/posts
Darren Wilson and the status quo (Up is down, night is day, etc.)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-backroom/3229458/posts
Rioters To Target Whites: You Will Never Be Safe
Not You, Not Your Children
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3229394/posts
Obama Met With Ferguson Activists Said Hes Concerned They Stay on Course
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3227764/posts
STOOL: Students obsessed with the obliteration of logic.
Underlying this is the assumption that we are all on the same plain of social development, divided only by misunderstanding...
instead of attempting to help primitives enter the modern world, we were enjoined to admire them and their (suitably idealized) way of life. As Sandall observes, the effect on indigenes of romanticizing their past has been devastating. If your traditonal way of life has no alphabet, no writing, no books, and no libraries, and yet you are continually told that you have a culture which is rich, complex, and sophisticated, how can you realistically see your place in the scheme of things?
This is the teacher: Cheryl [Abbate] is a PhD student and philosophy instructor at Marquette University and holds a MA in philosophy from Colorado State University. She specializes in applied ethics, specifically nonhuman animal ethics, military ethics, environmental ethics, bioethics, and feminist philosophy. In addition to working in philosophy.
[A full look at the published topics will give you a good idea of what people are paying through the nose for; what is being (has been) taught to "minds full of mush" (and it isn't just in ivy league schools; this twisted philosophy and activism is being taught from the first day that little Johnny and little Susie head off to school).
Marquette University graduate students: Graduate Student Publications and Conference Presentations Conference Presentations:
"Cheryl Abbate - 2014. Assuming Risk: A Critical Analysis of a Soldiers Duty to Prevent Collateral Damage. Journal of Military Ethics 13(1), pp. 70-93."....
Cops didn’t kill this kid. Thug culture killed him. He was dead long before he hit the ground.
were the Pro-life students not welcomed? Millions of black and brown babies are aborted every year by the racist Planned Parenthood.
yeah--the best way to achieve "unity" is by leaving out and blaming an entire race... white people have been victims of police brutality too... it was Conservatives who first pointed out the militarization of law enforcement... nobody cared or listened--just chalked it up to Conservatives being anti-government...
I am sick and tired of hearing about Ferguson, but the Old Media keeps pushing and pushing it. And the people who live and work in that town want to let it go.
Let’s face it: Michael Brown was a hoodlim, a dumb gangsta wannabe who made a terrible mistake and paid for it with his life. Happens every single day, to every race of Americans, all over the country. People get gunned down by the cops all the time for acting stupid and threatening, and it never makes the news.
The people who want to riot in Ferguson are not even locals. They’re street trash that have been paid and imported from somewhere else by well-heeled communist agitators.
Do you really think that the residents who live and work in Ferguson want to get out there in the middle of a Missouri blizzard and riot, just because the poverty pimps and that snake in the White House told them to? Just how dumb do the liberals and the Old Media think black people are?
Perhaps it is time to start closing schools of hate; such places serve no purpose except to foment chaos. Let the communists finance the schools.
I seriously doubt that SOUL is capable of imagining being attacked by a deranged, drug addled 285 lb monster; the funeral would be for them, while the monster lives to attack again. Where is the money coming from to support such nonsense?
Perhaps these “multiculturals will put on a presentation in Ferguson during the upcoming riots. That would be interesting to see.
[It's worth a read to get all the gems in this interview. Here's one to give you an idea [he basis his theories [the concepts of Hypocognition and Bi-conceptualism] on an idea he got from anthropologists researching suicide in Tahiti] ......note that this aligns with the essay in Post #1. ]
------------------
".....Another topic you addressmore prominently than I recall in the pastis the moral foundations explanation for the way that conservatives have organized themselves so successfully over the past several decades while progressives have not.
Actually, that was there as early as Moral Politics, back in the mid-90s. Its way back there in chapter 9but, its hidden in chapter 9, its not on page 1. Its something that I needed to say more prominently. In the strict father familyand by the way you see the strict father family in the Adrian Peterson case, right now, its so obvious, that even the district attorney that indicted him says in Texas, every family has a right to discipline their child any way they want, but there are limits that the community imposes. Its right there, straightforward in that case. There in the strict father family, the highest principle is the unquestioned authority of the father; we see it with Ray Rice, you know. Its right there. Unquestioned authority of the father.
What does that translate into, when you map it onto conservative politics? Its the unquestioned authority of conservatism itself. That is, the system cant be questioned, just as the family system cant be questioned, and the authority in it, so the authority in the system itself cant be questioned.
What that means is that if conservatives come up with some idea that might be useful to everybody, or at least better than other things that theyve had, and Obama comes out and says Okay, lets go with that idea, they will vote against it, and they will have to vote against it for moral reasons. And the moral reason is exactly that moral reasonnamely, to help Obama is to hurt conservatism. They cant do that, so theyll vote against it.
Right. And then the logic Obama is working under?
Obama is assuming he can bring people together, or he just has to use whatever authority he haswhich is probably true. He shouldve known better than to think that he could convince strong conservatives to abandon that fundamental principle of conservatism. What was happening before was that he had more moderates to work with.
What is a moderate? A moderate is a moderate Republican is somebody with partly progressive views on certain issues, and up until the Gingrich revolution you have lots of moderates. Starting with Gingrich, you had his idea to get rid of the moderates through elections and primaries, to have more conservative people out there, getting rid of moderates, and that has happened. They did it. And the result of that has been a disaster.
Now theres another major idea that is in this book, that wasnt in there in 2004, that has to do with the fact that you not only have two moral systems, but there is a test that shows that one moral system fits whats true about the world and the other does not. And thats a big deal. I hadnt really thought that through back in 2004, but one of the things that Obama particularly has said and that all progressives intuitively know, even if they dont say it, is that theres a difference in the view of democracy between conservatives and progressives.
Progressives see democracies as having citizens caring about each other, acting through their government, to provide public resources for everybody. Those public resources allow businesses to function; you cant function without sewers and roads, these days without computer scientists supported by the NSF, or satellite communications supported by the government and so on, all of these public resources that are out there, are absolutely necessary for business to function. And presumably, to have decent lives you need health care, you need clean air, you need water safe water, safe food, all these things. Thats what public resources are.
And the person who has best expressed that is Elizabeth Warren. Now when Obama tried to express it right after Elizabeth Warren was successful at it, he messed it up. He said, if you build a business you didnt do itYou didnt build thatand that was a mistake. He just didnt have a script. He just went off by himself, and he could have come back the next day and set it right, but he didnt. He didnt say it right; he abandoned the whole idea. What a terrible, terrible mistake that was. Because that idea is true and obvious and needs to be repeated all the time. And almost nobody aside from Elizabeth Warren ever says it. But its out there, its behind all the issues, and the point of it is that those public resources permit freedom, they allow you to be free to start a business, they allow you to be free to be healthy and have health carehealth care allows freedom; you have cancer and you dont have health care youre not free. Having safe food allows you to be free to eat, not worry constantly about whether youre going to be poisoned.
This is crucial in our society and its absolutely central, it needs to be said every day and thats the next mistake. The Democrats think they only have to worry about messaging during an election. Messaging is constant. Why? Because its what changes peoples brains. It is what gets those ideas out there. And it will only get out there if the right moral system is already in the brain. With bi-conceptualism, you strengthen something thats already there in your brain. And not only that, it has to be something that is true, that you can see. Thats the point of this. If you say these things, theres an obvious truth, right out there, that can be seen if theyre said over and over. If theyre obviously false, that people cant see, then they wont be accepted...."
[Excerpt on Hypocognition:]
"....Hypocognition is a very big deal. There is an assumption that we have all the concepts we need. We can express anything we want, and this is there, officially, in a lot of Anglo-American philosophyit s called the principle of expressability. It says that we have all the concepts we need, because concepts are assumed to come right out of the world, in an Aristotelian fashion: The world gives us our concepts, we have all the concepts we need, and therefore we can express anything in natural language using those concepts, because words just express concepts.
All of thats false. Words dont express concepts that way, concepts arent like that, etc., and the principle of expressability isnt true. Whats important here is that we dont have all the ideas we need, and reflexivity is one of them. Hypocognition itself is an idea that we need.
I learned about it from anthropologists, that there was a study in Tahiti where an anthropologist who had studied clinical psych[ology] went there to do a dissertation, and decided to try to find out why there were so many suicides in Tahiti. What he discovered was that there was no concept of grief and no way to deal with grief virtually in any way. Instead, when people experienced grief, when a loved one died, or something horrible happened, people assumed that devils were after them, or they had an incurable disease, and they committed suicide. So this is important, that we have an understanding of who we are, and what our mental life is like, and our emotional life is like, and so onand how to deal with it. Thats extremely important right now. We need a better idea of what our political life is like, and how to deal with it.
So that better idea would include the sorts of things that youre talking aboutthe fact that politics is fundamentally moral, and so on. Right, and what those moral systems are......."
[Oh, here's a pertinent bit about Bi-conceptualism]
"....Bi-conceptualism is really important for changing of ideas. If you have those systems, you can strengthen one and weaken the other and it works by ordinary neural mechanisms. That is, once you realize that these are neural systems, that they are mutually inhibitory, that each inhibits the other, that strengthening one therefore weakens the other, you can then say something very important. If youre talking to somebody who is not a progressive, not a Democrat, who might be a moderate Republicansomebody who is a moderate, who is mostly conservative, but partly progressive, in certain wayswhat you want to do is strengthen those progressive views. The reason is this: When you strengthen one progressive viewor one conservative view, either waywhat you do is strengthen the moral system.
The reason for that is that in the brain, theres a hierarchy of frames, which is there in neural circuitry. When you strengthen something lower in the hierarchy that implies strengthening things up higher in the hierarchy, which is the way that neural system works. So that is why conservatism has come as far as it has in the last 30 years. The conservatives have been using their language, getting it out there on all the issues, and progresses have done the opposite.
The reason for this is really interesting, because progressives think that they have to speak to the other guy in the other guys language. Youve got to speak their language for them to understand it. Its exactly the wrong way. Because as soon as you use conservative language, it activates conservative frames, which activates the conservative moral system, which strengthens it, and weakens your own. That is four steps of causation, and that is one of the reasons why I start talking about systemic causation, because the brain is a neural system, just as an ecological system and financial systems are systems......"
Go to Uhfreakuh NOW! There wont' be any YT to bother you there.
I'm sure we can chip in for a bus ticket for you to get there!
They are cutting off thier nose in spite of thier face. If allowed to follow thier utopia they will be the vicitm of thier dream come true and they will be looking for protection and it will be where they are appreciated supported and encouraged
You see, this is why our status as a country is slipping. While Asians and Europeans are working like fiends to end up building fabulous resumes and transcripts, students in the US are participating in this garbage and wasting time. I think THIS is why there is a huge problem with young adult unemployment. They’re unskilled and have no clue about anything other than being fashionable. Meanwhile, even Arabs are going to school and learning practical things.
A quote linked in Post #13, from source below:
“......The reason for this is really interesting, because progressives think that they have to speak to the other guy in the other guys language. Youve got to speak their language for them to understand it. Its exactly the wrong way. Because as soon as you use conservative language, it activates conservative frames, which activates the conservative moral system, which strengthens it, and weakens your own. That is four steps of causation, and that is one of the reasons why I start talking about systemic causation, because the brain is a neural system, just as an ecological system and financial systems are systems......”
That quote is the nugget.
Rush Limbaugh was telling us this week that Progressives and their ideology don’t take a huge hit when they lose elections, they keep on spreading their message (MSM and Big Education) and growing their base. BUT the Left knows (and so MUST we) that when Conservatism is pushed (tell the electorate what you stand for), it wins the day!
I won't be sending flowers...
Isn't that precious? They're so cute when they grovel like that.
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