Category: Higher Education

Cuba, A Failed State?

President Biden insists that Cuba is a failed state.

Nope.

They have the best education system in Latin America.

The highest rate of physicians to population on Earth.

A medical system so good that extremely rightwing anti-Communist fanatics all over Latin America gave been flying there for years. A lot of people now fly there for medical tourism, but the state charges them.

Cuba is a world leader in the medical technology field, and it competes well against capitalist corporations.

They still make the best cigars on Earth.

A very high

This tiny island with noting under a total blockade just marketed an excellent Coronavirus vaccine, and it has four more in the pipeline.

Its COVID rate and death rate is the lowest in Latin America.

It has the highest number of agronomists per capita on Earth.

Some people are making good money with their small restaurants, especially the ones they set up in their homes or as bed and breakfasts. There are parts that are so prosperous you would think you were in Europe.

They’ve eliminated rural poverty.

And best of all, Cuba is beating the US in life expectancy and infant mortality! Pathetic! Cubans live longer and have less important mortality than we do, a country that is nine times wealthier!

Tell me again how great US capitalism is. We are an order of magnitude wealthier, and they’re beating us in essential health figures. US capitalism is pathetic! We’re getting our butt kicked by some tiny, impoverished, blockaded island! If our system is so great, why can’t we beat Cuba?

Alt Left: Cornel West Is a Great Man

The 90 IQ Person

I know that your average White person attending a Trump rally had an IQ of 90 though. That’s within the normal range of course, but it’s in the Low Normal rather than the High Normal range. But as I note, even people in the Low Normal range can seriously kick ass in life. Check out James Oglivy, IQ 94.

Portrait of a 90 IQ Person – the Mexican-American or Hispanic American

It’s also right hanging on the bear edge of normal. To give you an idea of what a 90 IQ person acts like, your average Hispanic in the US has a 90 IQ. So picture your average Mexican or Mexican-American in the US, and there you have it. That’s 10 points lower than US Whites, and those 10 points are glaringly obvious when you spend a lot of time around them. I often characterize Hispanics as “not stupid at all, but not that smart either.” They’re not “dumb.” Your average Black is actually dumb or appears that way. Your average Hispanic instead seems “not dumb, but not that smart either.”

People did remark on the average 90 IQ of Trump rally goers. Honestly, that 90 IQ is probably absolutely normal for your average working class White person, so it all adds up. They probably have IQ’s around that level.

Limitations of a 90 IQ

A 90 IQ can limit you in life. You are going to have one Hell of a time getting a university degree at that IQ, and indeed, most people in that range do not have a BA. But quite a few have qualified for shorter 1 or 2 year trade degrees and credentials, which are generally easier than a BA. Just forget about a Masters or a Doctorate. Forget about being a physician or attorney, or anything that requires a doctorate (dentist, pharmacist, veterinarian). But many other fields are wide open to someone like that.

Guess What? Criminals Are Stupid! Duh.

On the other hand, your average White American has an IQ of 100.

Incarcerated Whites have IQ’s 10 points below the average at 90. This is mirrored in other races. The average Black IQ is 87, but the average incarcerated Black has an IQ of 77. That’s pretty damn low.

This just goes to show you that not only are criminals basically stupid, the very idea of being a criminal in the first place (and especially a lousy enough one to get caught) is pretty damn stupid.

Even a lot of serial killers are not very smart.

The Pig Farm Killer in Canada has an IQ of 81. The famous duo of Henry Lucas and Otis Toole, who killed far fewer victims than they claimed (Lucas claimed hundreds of victims) were none too smart. This is apparent in any interview with them.

I doubt if the very prolific Black serials just caught have high IQ’s. Samuel Little comes to mind, along with Coral Watts. I think Watts had a 73 IQ.But he killed ~100 women and got away with it for a very long time.

Sure, there are smart crooks, but it’s exaggerated. White collar fraudsters also tend to be intelligent. In general, smarter criminals tend to get away with their crimes a lot longer, and quite a few had long criminal careers uncaught during which they piled up a lot of victims. Ted Bundy, IQ 135, is a good example. Edmund Kemper, the matricide killer in Santa Cruz, has a 145 IQ. There are videos of him on the Net. You can watch them and see how a 145 IQ  person comes across. He seems pretty damn smart and especially, he’s very fast with a rapid brain.

Alt Left: America Is Now an Exact Replica of a Latin American Rightwing Authoritarian State

The US is now a Latin American country. This is the perfect model of a Latin American extreme rightwing regime. The only thing missing is the death squads. I’m sure they’ll be coming along soon enough now.

Otherwise it’s a complete replication, all the way down to a very White rightwing ruling class who lord it over the browner proles.

Corrupt/stolen elections? Check.

Corrupt judiciary? Check.

Culture of lies? Check.

Culture of extreme militarism? Check.

Culture of violent anti-Communist fanaticism? Check.

Both an armed Left (leftwing guerrillas = antifa) and right (death squads/brownshirts/guarimbas = Proud Boys) engaging in violence against each other? Check.

Bread and circuses in the ruling class controlled media? Check.

Distracting the workers with fake divisive issues like abortion? Check.

Threats of rightwing coups, military or otherwise? Check.

A rightwing that literally believes that the Left has no right to rule? Check.

Frequent street violence and rioting? Check.

Sense of living in an alternate reality of nothing but lies? Check.

State rule by big capitalists? Check.

Increasingly militant, radical, and even armed Left? Check.

Increasingly radical and even militant educational sector, especially at the university level? Check.

Fake leftwing parties that only mask the rightwing authoritarian state = Democrats? Check.

Politicized, very rightwing military? Check.

Increasingly incendiary political discourse on both sides? Check.

Economic war waged against left governments in order to destroy the economy? Check.

Extreme and irrational conspiracy mindset on the part of the Right? Check.

Extreme rightwing that pretends to be populist and pro-worker in order to get elected? Check.

Frequent death threats against politicians? Check.

Belligerent, pro-imperialist foreign policy? Check.

Police/surveillance state? Check.

Absence of legal leftwing newspapers, newsmagazines, TV/radio stations? Check.

Alt Left: Sadism and Creativity in Society Are Related to Economic and Societal Structure

Another interesting post from commenter Brian. He ties societal sadism and Social Darwinism into economic changes and ties societal creativity into societal structure, in particular its degree of flexibility.

I completely agree that there is a sadistic tendency in people that is expressed toward those deemed socially inferior. I’ve seen it and, having been in foster homes for a time growing up, experienced it.

I’ve often wondered at what seems to be a mean-spiritedness of the culture in general during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and if this mean-spirited character was linked to industrialization and to the growth of severe inequalities in society, both class and race based.

Those inequalities existed before the industrial revolution, but industrialization marked a new level of complexity in social organization, and the rise of many “new men” as elites. In the transformation of a society toward a new economic system and set of social relations, old inequalities are exacerbated, and the new elites who have risen to the top seem eager to shore up their position by waging a reactionary crackdown on dissent and calls to moderate their avarice.

The Social Darwinist, let-the-undeserving-poor-rot, bootstrap mentality of the upper class was encouraged in the general population by those who had risen to the top as a way to justify their behavior, and it had the effect of drawing out the worst tendencies in human nature in society at large. It was a bully’s ideology and encouraged ordinary people to let out their inner sadism, which ordinarily – without authoritative encouragement – would have been more repressed.

This is how you get gleeful lynchings, the hanging of elephants from a giant chain, the proliferation of freak shows where people can satisfy their inner monster by laughing at folks with severe genetic deformities.

I wonder if this witches’ brew of inhumanity cooked up by the propagandists of the new robber baron class was a factor precipitating World War I. Indeed the displacements of industrialization along with repression of the working class by disconnected and haughty elites and the whole toxic culture this gave rise to poisoned Europe just as badly as it had the United States.

The periods of the cruelest treatment of ordinary people tend to coincide with episodes of great economic expansion, the rise of new men and new families to positions nearer the top of society, and the complexification of society in general.

Another example is a century earlier in Britain, around the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was the very beginning of the industrial revolution – or the first industrial revolution, as opposed to the second which I was referring to above – and began with the Enclosure Acts that forced peasants off the common lands so they could become the new urban class of industrial laborers.

During this time the Bloody Code reached its bloodiest extreme and more than two hundred crimes could be punished by death, even as a number of minors were executed for rather petty crimes. These were the classic Dickensian times, and they are marked by great new opportunities for moneymaking that attracted a class of people willing to subject other humans to appalling degradations for their own profit.

When we think of the medieval period, we often think of brutal tortures. But in fact such tortures, while they occurred in the medieval period, were used far more extensively in the Renaissance and early modern times than in the medieval period as was the death penalty in general.

Once again, what we find at that time is a transformation in the socioeconomic system, specifically moving away from feudalism in Western Europe and the rise of a new middle merchant class across much of Europe, starting in Italy. Perhaps the use of such punishments is meant to break the spirits of those who suffer most during such transitional periods so they are less of a threat to the elites, especially the new and very insecure/paranoid elites.

I suspect that what we see today, with the mean-spirited attitude of the neoliberal age – the expansions of the prison system going back to the 70s and 80s (the very dawn of the neoliberal age) and the electronics and digital boom – is another such period of social complexification, economic transformation, dispossession of whole sections of society and even of regions in general like the rust belt, and the rise of many new men (and women now) into the ranks of the ruling class.

For around forty years I’ve been seeing among the upper middle classes and above is an increase in callousness, selfishness towards and even dehumanization of various groups of people, from Blacks to working class (now often poor) Whites and anyone who isn’t at least upper middle class.

To address the idea that such periods help to breed out criminal genes from a population, I do not doubt this is true. These phases of societal transformation seem to yield a more docile population on the other end of them. But I think this process will eventually eliminate the spark of genius in our population and in the West in general.

It largely has eliminated this spark already. At least in the realm of the social sciences of fundamental thought like philosophy, modern European philosophy having seen its best days some two to three centuries ago. Other fields that are downstream of basic thought have been able to flourish since then, but they will stagnate, and some are stagnating already.

Going back to civilizational and race theory, the difference between White civilization and Asian seems to be that White civilization has been far more creative for centuries now, despite Asians having higher average IQ’s. The spark of genius requires a high IQ but also creativity and originality, which mostly comes from people who are off-kilter and don’t easily fit into a very conventional, static society that looks down on new ideas or unusual behavior.

You, Robert, have mentioned before that many very intelligent and interesting people work in odd jobs and have little to show for their talents. I think such people have struggled in any society, but they struggle more as society becomes more closed-minded and starts distrusting anyone who isn’t stable, conventional, and predictable; in other words, someone who fits ready social expectations.

A lot of academics are very bright, but few have that special spark of brilliance in them, and if anything, having that is a detriment for someone in academia today.

As our society stiffens we will likely become less creative, whereas in the past few centuries, we’ve seemed to be able to accept originality even if many geniuses are not exactly paragons of stability. I am not saying that Asians are without creativity or the spark of genius, just that as their populations became more controlled and regimented, they exhibited fewer instances of real inspiration.

We are moving towards greater control and the consequent heavy formalization of life which sucks the naturalness out of life. We should probably expect relative cultural stagnation, at least compared to what we’ve been experiencing for centuries in the West.

The problem with African peoples and societies is an excess of naturalness or primal behavior, which, while it is energetic and creative, lacks the mental and social channels to develop it.

Higher intelligence on the other hand takes that same primal energy the Africans have in excess and focus that energy into socially accepted interests and goals. The problem with Asian societies is there is a serious lack of primal behavior, though I suspect some genetic potential for creativity remains in their populations and could be freed up if they loosened up a bit.

As to our current period of neoliberalism in the West, I think whatever good it did in juicing the development of the new electronic and digital economy is already finished and have been since probably 2008. At this point neoliberalism’s effects on society are very detrimental and could even touch off serious convulsions across Western society if it isn’t moderated.

Continuing on this path can only benefit a small handful of elites and only if they are able to maintain control. But they are gamblers, so they will try, and they seem unlikely to concede much to the population for the sake of reconciliation.

Alt Left: Against Affirmative Action and Lowering of Standards

I absolutely oppose all mandated affirmative action by the state and and all lowering of standards on testing to let more non-Whites in.

I’ve had to take tests all my life. Had to take an SAT test. Had to take tests to graduate college with a BA. Had to take tests to get into grad school. Had to take more tests to get into education grad school. Had to take more tests to get a teaching job. Went back to grad school. Had take tests to even get through the program. Had to take a truly murderous test to get my Master’s Degree.

I don’t think people realize how significant those tests are. I had to pass them. If I didn’t pass them, I flunked. I wasn’t admitted to the program. I didn’t get the degree. There was no coddling, no “Oh Bob is disadvantaged and part of some dumb race of people, so we have to lower standards for him.” Hell no. I don’t pass and I’m gone. It’s do or die. Pass or fail. And I passed, without anybody lowering one damned standard to let me through. If I had to go through all that crap, the rest of  you have to go through the exact same thing.

I never got a break or a lower barrier to jump over. Why the Hell should you? Because you’re dumb? Bad answer. Because you’re part of a dumb race of humans? Bad answer. You’re not all dumb.

I see smart Blacks – Black attorneys and physicians, Blacks doing every high level job Whites do, every time I turn on my TV. In my recent courtroom adventures, I saw four Black attorneys, two men and two women. They graduated law school. And they passed the damn bar. If they can do it, maybe you can do it. If you can’t do it, don’t cop out and blame racism. Go into some field where you can do well. It’s not that hard. Come on, people.

Another Republican Lie: The War on Poverty Failed, Made Blacks Poorer, and Much Worse Behaved

Doug: Jason, the compassion comes after we see facts clearly. I’ve mentioned countless times that we need vocation schools at the high school level to train those kids that are not college-bound in some kind of useful profession.

The Left will never allow it because those schools would be about 1/2 Brown/Black and 1/2 White kids…in other words, too much for them to admit. Instead we keep denying the obvious. Teacher’s unions, a pillar of the Left, would also not allow it either. They literally don’t want any choice for kids–from charter schools to vocational schools.

Another rich example of compassion would be to admit that Johnson’s $21 trillion “War on Poverty” has not only failed but it’s INCREASED poverty amongst Black persons. At least 30

There’s TANF, Section 8 housing, Food stamps, Medicaid, AFDC, Head Start, hiring quotas, set-asides, and sharply lowered standards in police and fire departments and colleges and grad schools. “Free money” student loans that will never be repaid. We have free breakfasts for Black children and even free lunches.

Taken together, US Blacks live in a state of “custodial care” by Whites because they can’t take care of themselves.

Nothing has worked. Nothing ever will. This money is paid to the most unworthy people in the world by the most worthy people in the world. Until people take responsibility for themselves, families, and communities, nothing will ever work.

All this because our society cannot admit that Black intelligence is too low, they have a bad attitude, and have too little logic. Black criminality is far too high to support any higher level of civilization.

But what’s worse is that all this money and it’s perverse incentives (to break up marriages) has worsened Black life in America since 1964 and we can’t admit that either!

Since the start of the War on Poverty, black kids are not doing better in school, housing projects built for ghetto blacks are all slums (a complete lack of personal responsibility), drugs, gun violence, incarcerations, STD infections, and abortions remain at epidemic levels. Black high school completion rates are about the same as ever, ie., <50

Black culture is actually much worse now. Black culture is in virtual collapse with 72

“Reparations” has help cause a complete and utter Black cultural collapse.

The result of the cultural collapse is evident from appalling crime statistics, 70

You can throw all the money in the world at social programs, but laziness, addiction, bad attitudes and decisions, low intelligence, little impulse control, and high levels of violence, they will override any and all social programs. Of course the Left never wants to hear about personal responsibility when they are the most irresponsible. They want to blame our economic system and take more and more of your tax dollars and piss that money away on programs that aren’t working.

Black kids will never be hired when they often can’t speak or dress right and have no self-respect, no discipline and no education. This is the problem today, and it was the problem yesterday and 50 years ago. No amount of money or bureaucracy can fix this. Why don’t we admit that we’ve failed?

Instead, you get 100

First, the parts where I agree with you.

hiring quotas, set-asides, sharply lowered standards in police and fire departments. Sharply lowered standards for college and grad school admissions. “Free money” student loans that will never be repaid. We have free breakfasts for black children and even free lunches.

There aren’t any hiring quotas or set-asides. They’re mostly illegal. I know Affirmative Action is banned for the federal government. I also know it is banned here in California, the most liberal state in the country. Some private businesses and corporations have their own goals or whatever, but no one is forcing them, and all evidence indicates that this has not caused a lot of problems for US businesses. If it did they would stop doing it.

Standards have not been lowered for much of anything, although they are still being lowered for Blacks and Browns to get into elite universities. Standards have been lowered for the Bar Exam in California, but that applies to everyone. Most tests to get a police or fireman job are still pretty hard.

But I absolutely oppose all mandated affirmative action by the state and and all lowering of standards on testing to let more non-Whites in. I’ve had to take tests all my life. Had to take an SAT test. Had to take tests to graduate college with a BA. Had to take tests to get into grad school. Had to take more tests to get into education grad school. Then I had to take more tests to get a teaching job. Then I went back to grad school. I had take tests to even get through the program. Then I had to take a truly murderous test to get my Master’s Degree.

I don’t think people realize how significant those tests are. I had to pass them. If I didn’t pass them, I flunked. I wasn’t admitted to the program. I didn’t get the degree. There was no coddling, no, oh Bob is disadvanted and part of some dumb race of people so we have to lower standards for him. Hell no. I don’t pass and I’m gone. It’s do or die. Pass or fail. And I passed, without anybody lowering one damned standard to let me through. If I had to go through all that crap, the rest of  you have to go through the exact same thing. I never got a break or a lower barrier to jump over.

Why the Hell should you? Because you’re dumb? Bad answer. Because you’re part of a dumb race of humans? Bad answer. You’re not all dumb. I see smart Blacks, Black attorneys, physicians, Blacks doing every high level job Whites do, every time I turn on my TV. In my recent courtroom adventures, I saw four Black attorneys, two male and two female. They graduated law school. And they passed the damn bar. If they can do it, maybe you can do it. If you don’t do it, don’t cop out and blame racism. Go into some field where you can do well. It’s not that hard.

I’ve mentioned countless times that we need vocation schools at the high school level to train those kids that are not college-bound toward some kind of useful profession.

The Left will never allow it because those schools would be about 1/2 brown/ black and 1/2 white kids…in other words, too much for them to admit.

I definitely agree with you here, but I have no solution to this whatsoever.

Teacher’s unions, a pillar of the Left, would also not allow it either. They literally don’t want any choice for kids–from charter schools to vocational schools.

Charter schools don’t work. That’s now conclusively proven. The idea is that with charter schools, we get rid of the teacher’s unions, and then the kids will perform so much better. In other words, somehow teacher’s unions cause kids to fail in school!

It didn’t work because getting rid of teachers’ unions and presumably cutting their pay and benefits doesn’t make teachers work harder (Shocking!), and getting rid of teachers’ unions doesn’t make students perform better (Duh!). Teachers’ unions could care less about vocational classes. I taught school for many years. I met many vocational teachers. No one cares about them and their classes. Nobody wants to get rid of them.

Since the start of the war on poverty, black kids are not doing better in school…

A lot of falsehoods here. Black achievement has skyrocketed since the War on Poverty. Blacks have closed 1/3 of the achievement gap. Black Computer Science students saw their scores improve every year through the 2010’s. Black IQ’s skyrocketed since the War on Poverty. Their IQ’s are now 16.5 points higher than they were in 1965. Incredible!

Now we have “flash mob robberies” and “knockout assaults” that are overwhelmingly black crimes.

Anti-White flash mobs and the knockout game are not going on much anymore that I know of. That seems to have been a few years ago.

There are two groups of Blacks. One is ghetto culture, maybe 1/2 of Blacks. Obviously this culture is failed in all sorts of ways, but I can’t see any way to improve things. Surely cutting off all their money and making them vastly poorer won’t help a thing.

The other group is middle class Blacks, which may be up to 50

Black culture is actually much worse now. Black culture is in virtual collapse, with 72

Why did the single parenthood rate skyrocket? Because this is how Black people act in a free society. You want them to act better? Ok, put them in chains again like under Jim Crow. That’s literally how you do it. The single parenthood rate supposedly rocketed up due to “welfare,” but Blacks already had welfare since 1935. The Great Society didn’t increase welfare payments one nickel.

There were food stamps, Section 8, and Medicaid in the Great Society. So Black parenthood collapsed because now Black mothers could afford enough food to eat, to rent an apartment and to go to the doctor? Well, that’s just terrible! How dare they get all those things necessary for them to survive!

Black crime has collapsed. Sex crimes are 63

Section 8 housing

Section 8 rentals are not slums. They’re tearing down the housing projects. Now Section 8 is just a voucher that you take around to any renter who will take it. In this complex, a certain number of apartments are Section 8. I don’t know which they are or who rents them, but there are not many Blacks in this complex (thank God). It’s mostly Hispanics, a very few Whites, and yes, there are a few Blacks here and there and they’re at least a bit Ghetto too.

This is a beautiful complex, looks brand new, very well kept up. And there are Section 8 people here. The landlord does not tolerate any crap from anyone, and any tenants who act bad are quickly tossed.

The result of the cultural collapse is evident from appalling crime statistics, the fact that 70

AIDS cases are mostly Black? Well, those are mostly Black gay men I assume. Please tell me how the War on Poverty made Black gay men catch way more AIDS than non-Black men. By letting them survive? So if you let Black homosexuals survive, then they turn suicidal, go get fucked up the ass by a hundred guys, and get AIDS. Right? Just checking on your logic here.

STD rates are high among Blacks everywhere on Earth. A lot of Black people screw anything that moves, and they probably don’t take many precautions to keep from getting an STD. They also don’t go to the doctor like they ought to. This behavior is typical amongst the Ghetto Blacks. I’m not sure middle class Blacks are sexually any different from the rest of we White sluts and manwhores.

STD rates are extremely high in the Caribbean. They’re off the charts in Africa, where no Black gets a dime of social spending.

Fine. Take all the money away from social programs for Blacks and yell at them to take responsibility for themselves. Like millions of Bill Cosby’s like me haven’t been yelling at Black people every day for years to get their shit together? Is it working? I don’t think so. So your project to pull all that evil survival money away from Blacks so they have no money, no food, no place to live, and no way to go to the doctor.

And this will make them act better.

Yeah right.

And then you will holler at them, “We took all your free money away, now you’re on your own, and you have to get your shit together!” And Black people are suddenly going to act way better and get their shit together.

This is the Republican fantasy about Blacks, and it’s about as insane as the Left’s fantasies about Blacks seen via Critical Race Theory.

The Great Society was never intended to turn Black people into White people. All it was intended to do was to allow people of all races to survive at a basic subsistence level. Do you know what it is like to live on one of those programs? Or even be to poor enough to qualify for them. You never have any money. Life blows, every day, forever. You are living in a world of shit in a sense. Why the most pathetic people on Earth are the subject of all this vitriol is something I will never understand.

Head Start

Head Start is preschool. That’s all it is. It’s preschool for poor people. I know a guy who drove a bus in Eastern Pennsylvania. Part of his route was taking the kids to and from Head Start. 100

Also, if Head Start doesn’t work (false), then preschool doesn’t work. Then why on Earth are all these White parents so insistent on preschool for their kids? Are they are all stupid? What about all the studies showing how preschool benefits kids? They’re bad science? If preschool doesn’t work, a lot of Whites are wasting their money.

And it’s not true that Head Start doesn’t work. The intention was never to turn Black people into Norwegians and Japanese. That’s not going to happen (though my co-blogger is about as deferential and polite as a Japanese woman). You can’t turn Blacks into Whites, not with our present tools. The only thing we can do is try to turn Black people into the best versions of themselves that we can.

Let’s try another one. Head Start works great for White people, but it doesn’t work for niggers for “whatever X reasons.” Why doesn’t it work for them? And they are different species? Are they all born with an anti-preschool gene? Come on. What works for Whites works for Blacks too because Blacks are humans. What works for one group of humans works for another group of humans.

Head start works. Not only that but it’s cost effective. Blacks who go through Head Start are less likely to drop out of high school, be incarcerated, go on welfare, or have an IQ below 70 (so it even lifts IQ’s at the low end). It seems like what Head Start does is lift up the group of Blacks that fall on the tail end intellectually and behaviorally. It lifts up the bottom. And as I said, it even pays for itself.

TANF

Welfare (TANF) pays $300/month. You trying to tell me that women actually don’t keep men around because it’s so easy to live on $300/month? You’re crazy. Tell you what. You Republicans say it’s easy to live on $300/month. Cool. So you do it. Live on $300/month for a while and then get back to us and let us know how it went, ok?

A lot of White people use all these programs. The lie is that this is White people’s tax money going to a bunch of no-good niggers and beaners. However, lots of Whites are on all of these programs. 39

The biggest lie of all is that the War on Poverty failed. I’m sure people on food stamps are eating a lot better than they were. I am sure that people on Medicaid are getting more and better medical care than they were. I am sure that people on Section 8 are happy to be able to rent a place rather than being homeless. I am sure that women’s little kids on WIC are eating a lot better than they would.

None of these programs were intended to solve any basic problem with Black people or with any race of people. We weren’t throwing money at any problem. The programs were intended to give some very poor people a basic, very low, no-fun level of existence so they could survive.

There were some problems that got solved.

Food stamps was because a lot of people didn’t have enough money for food. Now they do. Problem solved.

Section 8 was for people too poor to even rent an apartment. Now they have a roof over their heads. Problem solved.

Welfare (which was started in 1935, not by the Great Society but anyway) was based on the idea that all children must be supported. By taking welfare away you are saying that kids have no right to be supported and they should just die if their mother is poor. It’s not about the mother at all. It’s all about the kids. Problem solved, basically.

Welfare didn’t cause single parenthood. We’ve had welfare since 1935 and there were no problems. It’s not some new thing that the Great Society started.

Medicaid was for people who could not afford to go to the doctor at all. Now they can. Problem solved.

WIC was initiated because a lot of women were so poor that their kids were not eating right. So it enabled them to buy food to feed their little kids. Problem solved.

All you people who object to WIC, I’ve got a question for you. You got a problem with little kids getting enough food to eat?

Not one nickel has been thrown at the education system to try to lift up Blacks and turn them into White people. All schools get the same amount of federal dollars. They are funded by local property taxes. If any money was spent it was simply to support schools in Black and Brown areas at a level similar to that of White areas , in other words, to provide Blacks and Browns with a basic low level education. What’s wrong with that?

“Welfare” hasn’t caused any of those problems you described. Let’s look at welfare, now TANF. We got rid of it. Yay! That was cool, man! Why didn’t I think of that! The idea was just like above, take the free money away from those damned niggers and yell at them that now they’re on their own and they have to get their shit together or else. That’ll show em! That’ll make em get their shit together!

Guess what? It didn’t work. At all.

It didn’t improve any social pathology factors, not even one. There were no societal benefits at all. The only thing that happened was that those women (and their kids!) got even more poor. A lot of them went homeless along with their kids. It was a huge failure.

Tell you what. Let’s try an experiment! Let’s look at places like the Caribbean and Africa where there are none of these evil social programs at all. There’s nothing, no social programs, zero. No money, you don’t eat, and then you die.

Ok, Blacks should be free of pathology right? Nope! They act way worse! The fewer social programs they get, the worse they act.

Let’s look at Blacks in Brazil. Few social programs. They act far worse than they do here.

Let’s look at Blacks in Europe. Especially those from Africa act at least as bad as our Blacks and probably even worse.

Fact: Black people have these pathologies you describe everywhere they exist on this planet.

Now why that is is up for grabs. Maybe it’s genes, maybe it’s environment, maybe it’s something in the air. I don’t know. That’s for the social scientists, if there are any honest ones left, to untangle. Not my job.

I figure these social programs are sort of “buy off” programs to buy off Black people who would ordinarily act pretty bad. The more we support them at basic levels, the less poor they are, and they happier they are. If you take away these programs, they would probably act far, far worse and they might even riot so much that they wreck the country. We are buying them off, giving them money with the caveat that they need to act better now, and it seems to work.

Alt Left: Repost: “Why Growing Up in India Makes You a Nasty, Cruel, Desensitzed Faux-nationalistic Gold-digger,” by Novusipsum

An older article that has aged quite well. It’s as true today and the day it was printed fully eight years ago. Not even one thing has changed even one bit. I hate to talk like this but I really think that India is hopeless. I hope I’m wrong but I gave up on this Dystopia of Damnation some time ago.

This is a great piece by an Indian blogger that he left on my blog as a comment. The original is here. It’s very good, and it’s actually quite well written. He takes on his country in a way that is not often seen in Indian writers.

I particularly enjoyed the bit about Kashmir because it rings so true. Almost every Indian I know goes nuts when I mention Kashmir. They raise their voice and start pounding on the table as their faces gets red. They tell me that the problem is 100

However, when I tell them that most Kashmiris hate India and that many Kashmiris have taken up arms against India, they insist that I am wrong. Most every Indian I met was exactly like this. They are like drones, utterly indoctrinated by some Borg. They are brainwashed on this subject as bad as a North Korean.

Most of these folks are what you might call middle class or upper middle class educated people. A number of them had university degrees and were quite intelligent. One man used to be a university professor.

Why Growing Up in India Makes You a Nasty, Cruel, Desensitized, Faux-nationalistic Gold-digger

1. School

While people remark on shortage of functional schools in India, I say the kids who don’t go to school have it good. The national curriculum is odious and objectionable, seeing as it is designed for kids who bow down before all authority and the various empty suits regardless of whether they make any sense at all. You cannot contest your teacher. At all. Ever. Such behavior is simply unacceptable. Put another way, the system is a hundred percent authoritarian.

School kills all your creativity. Creativity, especially of the extroverted kind, is not encouraged. There are tried and tested methods to break the will of those who are too free. The system is based on rote-memorization. You must bend your mind a certain way to do that: it means all the rules are already laid out and decided for you. You do not need to think. Your brain must function in a certain way. Any challenge to the established order will make you a pariah.

Kids learn how to secretly and openly hate each other over the grades they are given for breaking their own will and doing pointless mind-numbing work that will be of no use to them at any point in their later life. The focus is on merit – on who is better at following rules. No wonder India has not produced a single India-based world-class scientist, technician, engineer. Science, technology, and engineering after all,re fields where your ability to think is highly valuable.

Barack Obama does not need to worry about Indian kids out-smarting American kids. If they do, it will be by doing hours of grinding and rioting, and when they do, the rest of the world need to start worrying.

This system is evil!

2. Parents, Teachers, Peers

All these people are the product of evil Indian schools and other cramming establishments and will force you to succeed in a way that they deem appropriate. You must resist this but you can’t. They are everywhere.

Your peers will pressure you to bow down, submit, and ‘teach you the value of money’. In other words, how to be a vicious gold-digger. Money is nice but being a nasty, evil, little scummy gold-digger is a degeneration of your soul that even Indian’s ascetic scat-munchers do not attain.

Indian people are therefore nasty and selfish to the extreme. It is of no surprise, seeing their upbringing and their environment.

3. The environment

Your average Indian city, town, village is a primitive clusterfuck without running water or proper sewage disposal. Casteism is rampant; stupid people need little motivation to be proud of what is after all a genetic accident. They think their bloodline is ‘pure’ and grind the ‘lower’ caste people down into the dirt. Respect for human life and dignity in India has to be the lowest in human civilization.

The streets are narrow and dirty, usually overflowing with broken sewage and water lines (which frequently mix), and the garbage the average Indian household does not feel ashamed of throwing on the streets. Any kind of social grace is completely absent, people shove and push each other, vehicles honk incessantly and without reason, and the local temple’s loudspeakers blare out shitty religious hymns.

Living and growing up here, you will learn little by little to let go of your humanity. You will get desensitized to the beggars and lepers in the street: emancipated, poor and trodden down. You will see old men and women driven out of their homes by their sons, eyes pleading for mercy and trying to make sense of the plethora of people around them who ignore their plight and pass right by.

Your average Indian will not even notice the squalor on the street or the helpless human beings on the street. He will simply accept these things as a part of life, which is why things never improve. He is the selfish product of a callous, heartless, and evil system. He will never change, and western democracies should not allow such people into their homelands. Not even for a ‘visit’.

4. The Media

Catering to a large middle class that pretends to be educated, some people have taken the initiative to bring them these people latest news of the world. These people are funded by rich business interests with their own agenda as well as Hindu nationalists. They make the usual salutary noises about bad governance and bloated bureaucracy, things that are so odious that it even permeates the thick bourgeois skull. This is why the middle class types buy newspapers and watch news—they can relate to it.

But the most vicious thing the media does is to fill the average Indian with a sense of pride and nationalism, something that certainly goes against all basic logic and sanity. What people would be proud of a country like this? Only brain-washed, selfish jerks that the education system produces and the media maintains.

The average Indian is full to the brim with national pride that he has no logical reason to feel. His ideas on casteism and the workings of the society are reinforced by editors of the national dailies and the news channels.

His stance on Kashmir, a truly beautiful place inhabited by beautiful people, has been drilled into him incessantly. The parable of Pakistan exporting its terrorists (not that it doesn’t – and it turns out the Americans knew about it all along) to India and that the Kashmiris love India (Huh?) has been in print for thirty years now. Of course, India is always the poor, helpless victim.

5. College

Most people in India never even graduate from their high schools, let alone college. And I say good for them. Because the system feels the need to grind out all kind of potential competition it may get from any future thinkers.

If school doesn’t manage to turn you into a humanoid selfish fuck, your college certainly will. India’s unemployment problem is vast. Of the colleges that ‘guarantee’ any jobs such as professional degree mills like IIT, NIT, AIIM, etc., it is interesting to note that only Indians think these places are good. An independent peer review ranked the ‘best’ IIT at around 350th at world level. Yet the middle-class scramble for securing a seat there so intense it simply has to be seen to be believed.

Millions (you heard that right, millions) of middle-class Indians right now are rioting, grinding, and chewing equations, formulas, and facts for entrance exams that maybe a hundred of them really understand. These people aspire to be ‘engineers’ and ‘doctors’.

The workload is so immense that you can’t find time at age 16 and 17 to ogle girls (or boys), party, learn how to drink beer without making a face, or hang out with your friends. But what am I saying? Hell, most Indian people don’t find time to do that ever in their lives anyway.

College itself is a turdfest -professors with massive egos, an anal-retentive and callous administration, and overall awkward social interaction between the sexes. Girls hanging out with boys are labeled ‘hookers’ and ‘sluts’. Massive sexual repression is the hallmark of this point in your life, and given the pressure to rote more equations and secure a job, you’d be lucky escaping the place without a drug habit or a drinking problem.

Is there anything good about India at all? With fertile plains to the north, large iron ore deposits to the south, the biggest aluminum stores in the world and 30

The only thing wrong with India is Indians.

Alt Left: Complete Deterioration of Literary Criticism in the Last 40 Years

I like to read literary criticism sometimes because it’s some of the hardest stuff out there to understand, at least for me. Forget philosophy. Don’t even go there. Lit Crit is different. With Lit Crit it’s hard as hell to understand and it’s incredibly smart and dense, but you can pretty much understand most if not all of it, so it’s worth it. I call it giving my brain a workout, and to me it’s similar to going to the gym for your body.

I recently read a couple of Hemingway’s best short stories. Then I found and read two Lit Crit articles about them. Lit Crit is very useful this way. If you haven’t already read the work, I’m not quite sure how useful it is or how much you would get out it. But if you’ve read it, Crit is often great for explicating the work and explaining deeper meanings, themes, etc. hidden in the text.

One was in a journal called Journal of College Literature from 1980. It was remarkably down to earth for a Lit Crit journal, especially the issues around published around that time. So I started going through a few decades worth of the journal.

I noticed that the Lit Crit from ~40 years ago was much different and frankly much superior to the gobbledygook out nowadays. It then focused on individual books and was fairly straightforward, simply looking for explications of the events, characters, plots, and themes in the book.

As I moved forward a couple of decades, everything changed. Now it was all postmodernism. Lit Crit about individual works were less common. The crit became ridiculously politicized with SJW and PC Leftist slants towards everything. Now I am a Leftist myself (albeit a weird one) but for the life of me, I do not understand why we need to litter our Lit Crit with Leftist political theory.

In addition to Marxism, there was also inordinate focus on women (feminism, mostly a joke field called Women’s Studies), gays and lesbians (from the lens of a ridiculous and bizarre field called Queer Studies), Blacks, Hispanics, Asians and other non-Whites (same thing- focus on non-fields like Black and Hispanic Studies), on and on.

Pretty much all they wrote about were these “oppressed minorities.” Cringey Queer Studies essays searched for and discovering non-existing homosexuality in perfectly straight stories (Did you know Moby Dick is a gay novel?) and secret homosexuality in completely straight authors (Did you know Shakespeare was gay?). It’s weird and stupid.

There was also a strange attempt to find some silly “woman angle” in novels where women were not particularly important to the story. There was also a focus on older books written by women and minorities which are apparently good books merely because they were written by a minority or woman and not for any other reason.

Why Lit Crit has to be all about oppressed minorities is beyond me. Fine, some minorities are oppressed. We need a politics to address that. But why trash up Lit Crit with leftwing obsessions with minority groups? Last time I checked, straights, Whites, and men also existed. Can we maybe keep the politics out of our Crit and just talk about the books without turning everything into a political rally?

Another worse problem went along with this. The essays became dominated by postmodernism and were much harder to understand. There were references to philosophy scattered all through everything (particularly unintelligible Continentals like Sartre, Derrida, Lacan, Cixous, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Foucalt, Frankfurt School, DeLueze and Guattari).

That’s all fine and dandy but why can’t we keep unintelligible philosophers out of our Lit Crit? What do incomprehensible Frenchmen spouting nonsense have to do with the novels we read?

It is true that the essays became much more demanding, but there was also a lot of silly talk about things like the Body (?), the Male Gaze (!?), the Text, the Author, the Reader (Barthes), on and on with weird, silly postmodern concepts.

In addition, somehow they became strangely repetitive in that they obsessed over the same postmodernist tropes and views in essay after essay. After a while, it seemed like I was reading the same essay again and again and learning little about the actual books being discussed. Finally, it became quite boring as a result of this repetition.

tl/dr: Lit Crit has completely deteriorated over the past 40 years. It’s now a swamp of barely comprehensible postmodernism and obsessions with women, gays and minorities. Leftist politics and incoherent Continental philosophers litter every essay, turning it from a brain workout into muddy slow trod up a mountain in the rain without boots or a poncho.

He Wanted a Twin, Or Worse, a Reflection in the Mirror

My mother and father went to UCLA. My Mom for a mere year, my father til graduation. And came back later for a Masters in Counseling, after which he set about for the entire time I knew him demonstrating that he had learned almost nothing from those pounding years of hard core psychology classes. And the books in the world can’t penetrate a brick wall in the head.

I was supposed to go to UCLA, but I was as huge disappointment. I couldn’t pass Algebra 2, even with this Grade-A IQ of mine. Disappointment all around.

Why was I supposed to go there? He went there. What was I supposed to major in? History? Why? That’s what he majored in! What was I supposed to do afterwards? Teach school. Why? That’s what he did! Starting to get the picture? He didn’t want a son. He wanted a junior twin. Worse, an exact replica cutout from the mirror, 35 years too late.

Why do parents do this shameless bullshit? Yeah, I resented it. I’m not your toy or your reflection in the mirror, pal! I’m actually a real human being, separate from you. You know, a separate person, with my very own thoughts, feelings, desires, values, girlfriends, orgasms, bong hits, parties to go to, you name it, guy. I think people like that have an Object Relations problem. A lot of people have this.

Borderlines are notorious. The Borderline cannot see you as an individual person with your own feelings, thoughts, desires, sleep patterns, favorite foods, quirks and gifts, home runs and strikeouts. A lot of personality disorders share this.

This is one of the most important lessons you can learn in life – that others are completely separate from you. It’s painful in a way because we really want others, especially those we love, to be a part of us in a sense – to agree and disagree with us on everything, but it just doesn’t work that way, and thank God for that.

Alt Left: Janet Fiamengo, “Feminists Play Fast and Loose with Data Again”

Feminist messing with rape data and blowing the rape rate far higher than it actually is. The latest fake feminist study.

Ever heard the figure that 20

So how many women really get raped at university? Try 2.3

Ever seen the figure of how many women get raped over a lifetime? I forget the figure but it’s more fakery. What’s the real figure? Try 16

How many rape claims are false? Feminist claim it is 2-8

You hear crazy figures like out of every 1,000 rape cases, only 6 result in a conviction and incarceration.

Well, I know a cop. He told me that in his city, they throw out 90

There are also some fairly valid reasons why the rest of rape cases that are actually filed – 100 out of 1,000 – eventually filter down to 6 out of 1,000.

Actually most rapists are not particularly dangerous. The truly dangerous rapists are the sadistic rapists. Feminists will say all rapists are sadistic, but really only 5-10

There are other rapists, two categories having to do with power. One is called power reassurance. This man feels he is inadequate and rapes to make himself feel like a man again. These are often the “gentleman rapist” types. They really exist. They won’t hurt you and they often apologize to the woman after it’s over.

There is the power-anger rapist. This man is angry at women for whatever reason, which could be due to all sorts of things. He hates women or at least is very angry with them. They usually don’t kill but they can, especially if the woman puts up a fight.

In those cases, he can indeed hurt the woman and sometimes even kill her. If he kills her, he feels bad about and leaves soon afterwards. They often do hurt women though because roughness, beatings, etc. may accompany the rape due to his rage at women.

Alt Left: “Some in Hong Kong Feel Frustrated as Their City Loses to Mainland China,” by Andre Vltchek

I am sure most of you have heard of the riots convulsing Hong Kong. The Western media is only providing one point of view about these riots – heroic rioters fighting evil Communist dictatorship for freedom and democracy and sugar and spice and everything nice.

I urge you to think again. I don’t support these rioters. There’s really nothing to support. Further, as I hope to show in future pieces, the rioters absolutely do not have majority support. If you go against them, they beat you with clubs, fists and boots. They are destroying public property all over Hong Kong for no particularly good reason.

These are the children of the rich and the upper middle classes. The working class of Hong Kong, the poor, and older people are nowhere to be seen. Go talk to some of them and they will all tell you that they oppose these destructive riots.

If there was a referendum tomorrow on what the rioters want, it would lose. The rioters represent a significant group, but they are not a majority. They only have 35-40

Your average working class, poor, or older Hong Konger is a fairly conservative person. These silly riots go against traditional Chinese values. Sure, China is revolutionary, and that involves chaos and destruction, but since when are contras revolutionaries? Contras are never revolutionaries.

The young rioters think they are citizens of something called Hong Kong that is not a part of China. The silent majority with their more conservative values are proud to be what they have always considered themselves to be: citizens of China and heirs to its great civilization.

The rioters don’t get it. Hong Kong is not some separate thing. Hong Kong is part of China. It always was part of China. Sure, the British stole it for a while (during the Opium Wars to boot), but it was still part of China even then.

Hong Kong is now back to China where it has always been. The rioters are citizens of China, not some fake thing called Hong Kong. They obviously lack majority support in China proper, where recent polls show ~86

The CP runs China. Almost everyone in China supports the CP. I hate to tell people to love it or leave it, but if these kids don’t want to be part of China, perhaps they might wish to leave. Macao is right next door. And then there’s Taiwan. Or just calm down and quit being tools of the West.

I would like to add that a century of extreme anti-Communist propaganda is also driving these riots. Most Hong Kongers are extremely anti-Communist. Except now they live in a Communist country. Maybe it’s time they made some adjustments. You can only push a rock uphill for so long. At some point, even Sisyphus wears out and becomes just one more victim of the Law of Gravity. Maybe some causes are doomed from the start.

Some in Hong Kong Feel Frustrated, as Their City Is Losing to Mainland China

By Andre Vltchek
Global Research, October 11, 2019

Hong Kong is losing to Mainland China. Its poverty rates are high; it suffers from corruption and savage capitalism. It is now the most expensive city on earth. People are frustrated, but paradoxically, they are blaming socialist Beijing for their problems instead of the legacy of British colonialism. ‘Across the line’, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing, Xiang and other cities are leaving Hong Kong behind in almost all fields.

When my dear friend and great concert pianist from Beijing, Yuan Sheng, used to live in New York, recording, giving concerts, and teaching at prestigious Manhattan School of Music, he told me that he used to cry at night:

“In the United States, they smear China. I felt hurt, defenseless.”

He returned to Beijing, gave back his Green Card and began teaching at Beijing Conservatory. He never regretted his decision. “Beijing is much more exciting than New York these days”, he told me.

It is obvious that Beijing is booming: intellectually, artistically; in fact, in all fields of life.

Yuan’s friend, who returned from London and became a curator at the iconic “Big Egg” (the biggest opera house on earth), shared her thoughts with me:

“I used to sit in London, frustrated, dreaming about all those great musicians all over the world. Now they come to me. All of them want to perform in Beijing. This city can make you or break you. Without being hyperbolic, this is now one of the most important places on earth.

Just under one roof, in one single night, we can have a Russian opera company performing in our big halls, in another there is a Chinese opera, and there is a Bolivian folklore ensemble in the recital hall. And ours is only one of Beijing’s theatres.”

When Chinese artists and thinkers are fighting for the prime venues with their Western counterparts, it is usually Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen ‘against’ London, Paris, and New York. Hong Kong is ‘somewhere there’, behind, suddenly a backwater.

While Hong Kong University and the City University of Hong Kong used to be the best in China, many mainland institutions of higher learning, including Peking University and Tsinghua, are now producing many more cutting-edge creative thinkers.

I spoke at all of these schools and can confirm that the young people in Beijing and Shanghai are extremely hardworking and endlessly curious, while in Hong Kong, there is always that mildly arrogant air of exceptionalism and a lack of discipline.

It used to be that the so-called “Sea Turtles” (students who went abroad or to Hong Kong and then returned to Mainland China), were treated like celebrities, but now, it is much easier to get a job with Mainland China’s diplomas.

Recently, while filming the riots in Hong Kong, I was told by a receptionist at one of the major shopping plazas:

“We do not treat visitors from Mainland China well. And they lost interest in Hong Kong. Before, they used to come here to admire out wealth. Now, most of them are avoiding this place. What we have, they have too, and often better. If they travel, they’d rather go to Bangkok or Paris.”

These days, the contrast between Xiang, Shanghai, Beijing, and Hong Kong is shocking. Mainland infrastructure is incomparably better. Public areas are vast, and cultural life much more advanced than in the former British colony.

While the Mainland Chinese cities have almost no extreme poverty (and by the end of 2020 will have zero), in Hong Kong, at least 20

Hong Kong is the most expensive place on earth. Just to park a car in the city could easily cost over US $700 per month, and that’s just for working hours. Tiny apartments cost over a $1 million. Yet Salaries in Hong Kong are not higher than those in London, Paris, or Tokyo.

The city is run by an extreme capitalist system ‘planned’ by corrupt tycoons/developers. The obsolete British legal system here is clearly geared to protect the rich, not the majority. That was essentially why the “Extradition Bill” was proposed: to protect Hong Kong inhabitants from the unbridled, untouchable, as well as unelected de facto rulers. But after months of riots sponsored by the West, the Hong Kong administration scrambled the bill.

But there is also this ‘deal’ negotiated before Hong Kong was returned where it belongs – to China: “One Country, Two Systems”. It is an excellent contract for the turbo-capitalist magnates and for the pro-Western “activists”. And it is an extremely bad one for the average people of Hong Kong.

Young hooligans know very little about their city. I talked to them extensively during their first anti-Beijing riots in 2014, the so-called “Umbrella Revolution”.

Correctly, then and now, they have been frustrated about the declining standard of living and the difficulties of getting well-paid jobs and finding affordable housing. They told me there was no future for them and that their lives were going nowhere.

But quickly, their logic would collapse. While realizing what tremendous progress, optimism, and zeal could be observed in the People’s Republic of China under the leadership of the Communist Party, they still demanded more capitalism, the very thing which was actually ruining their territory. In 2014 and now, they are readily smeared the Communist Party.

Being raised on the shallow values of selfishness and egotism, they have now betrayed their own country, and have begun treasonous campaigns, urging foreign powers, including US and UK, to “liberate them”. All for a fleeting moment of fame, for a “selfie uprising”.

To liberate them from whom? China does not (unfortunately for Hong Kong) interfere in Hong Kong’s economic and social affairs. If anything, it builds new infrastructure, like the enormous bridge now connecting Hong Kong with Macau (a former Portuguese colony) and a high-speed train system linking Hong Kong with several cities in Mainland China.

Huanzhou high-speed train station, one of the biggest in the world

The more restraint Beijing shows, the more it gets condemned by the rioters and Western media for ‘brutality’. As more subway stations and public property get destroyed by rioters, more sympathy flows for them from the German, US, and British right-wing politicians.

For decades, the British colonialists humiliated  the people of Hong Kong while simultaneously turning their city into a brutal and by the Asian standards ruthless and fully business-oriented megalopolis. Now people are confused and frustrated. Many are asking, “Who am I?”

For Hong Kong, this is a difficult moment of soul-searching.

Even those who want to “go back to the UK” can hardly speak English. When asked why they were rioting, they mumble something about the democracy and freedom of the West, plus the evilness of Beijing. Brochures from obscure, extremist Japanese religious cults are distributed amongst the rioters.

It’s pure intellectual chaos. Rioters know nothing about Syria, Afghanistan, Venezuela, and other countries which are being ruined by the West.

Leaders like Joshua Wong proudly collude with the Western embassies. To praise Chinese socialism publicly is now dangerous – people get beaten by the “pro-democracy” rioters, for such “crimes”.

Highly educated and overly-polite Singapore is literally sucking out hundreds of foreign companies from Hong Kong. Its people speak both English and Mandarin. In Hong Kong, the great majority speaks only Cantonese.

Many foreigners in Hong Kong are also relocating to Shanghai. Not only big businessmen: Shanghai is now full of European waiters.

Even tourism is down in Hong Kong, by 40

Absurdly, the rioters want precisely what the Communist Party of China is providing: a real struggle against corruption, a determined attempt to solve housing crises, the creation of new jobs, and the provision of more public services. They want better education and generally a better life. They want “Shanghai or Beijing”, but they also say that they want to be a colony of the UK or a dependency of the USA.

They loosely define communist goals, and then they shout that they are against Communism. In short, politically speaking, they are very confused.

HNKChina is now ready to celebrate its 70th Anniversary of the Founding of The People’s Republic of China.

Clearly, the West is using Hong Kong to spoil this great moment.

After leaving Hong Kong, in Shanghai, I visited a brilliant socialist realism exhibition at the iconic, monumental China Art Museum. The country under the leadership of President Xi is once again confident, revolutionary, and increasingly socialist, to horror of declining West.

It is a proud nation with great, elegant cities constructed by the people, for the people, and with a progressively ecological countryside. Its scientific, intellectual ,and social achievements speak louder than words.

China Art Museum, Shanghai.

The contrast between Hong Kong and Shanghai is tremendous and growing.

But do not get me wrong: I like Hong Kong. I have  more than 20 years of history with that old, neurotic, and spoiled lady. I can feel her pulse. I love old trams and ferries and out-of-the-way islands.

But Hong Kong’s charm lies in its decay.

Mainland China’s beauty is fresh. China is one of the oldest cultures on earth and one of the deepest. But it feels crisp, full of hope, and positive energy. Together with its closest ally, Russia, it is now working and fighting for the entire world; it is not selfish.

Hong Kong is fighting only for its vaguely defined uniqueness. Actually, it is not Hong Kong that is fighting, as most of people there want to be where they truly belong – in their beloved nation – China. It is a gang of kids with their face masks that is fighting. In brief: a relatively big group of pro-Western extremists whose leaders are putting their fame above the interests of the people.

Hong Kong has no “Big Egg”: no famous theatre where the greatest musicians are stunning the world. Its only art museum has been closed for reconstruction for years and will re-open only at the end of 2019. Its cultural life is shallow, even laughable, especially pathetic for the place that is branding itself “Asia’s World City”. There are no great discoveries made here. It is all business. Big, big business. And creeping decay.

Beijing could ‘liberate’ Hong Kong easily to give it purpose, pride, and future.

But young hooligans want to be liberated by Washington instead. They want to be recolonized by London. And they have not consulted their fellow citizens. That clearly reflects their idea about ‘democracy’. Not the “rule of the people” but the “rule of the West”.

Not only do they feel spite for their country, but they also scorn and intimidate their fellow citizens who only want to live meaningful lives based on Chinese values.

Andre Vltchek is philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He’s a creator of Vltchek’s World in Word and Images, and a writer that penned a number of books, including China and Ecological Civilization. He writes especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. 

The original source of this article is Global Research.
Copyright © Andre Vltchek, Global Research, 2019

PUA/Game: The Young, Rich College Coeds I Met at USC 1982-1983

SHI: I found the girls from the wealthy group superficial, flaky, and snobbish. No shit, that’s how they were raised. Their parents were assholes too.

Jason: But they are of course in massive denial of this. Well, I did get one to admit he was an ass – sort of.

Yeah, who knows? Who knows what those people think?

SHI is correct for rich Indian women, no doubt. But American rich women seem a lot different.

Although I went to USC and I met a lot of young women from wealthy families. I was in a teaching program, and those are full of women with only a few men. Stud’s paradise. The few guys around are often lame, cucked, repressed or autists.

I was friends with this Japanese dude who was almost too Beta to even get laid, though he had a girlfriend who wanted to fuck him obviously. But he was too scared – nerdy = autistic – to do it, and he would make an excuse and turn her down. He was nice but very conventional.

He was also a writer. I spent a lot of time over at this guy’s house in Torrance. I was “Duude.” That was actually my name to him. He thought I was a crazy, offensive, super-asshole, which is of course true. He just thought I was an outrageous “funny asshole.” He rather liked me.

There were also these aide types around in the administration of the teaching program. Almost all women, one dyke, a lot of the rest single, one man in the whole program, decent enough guy. I think he ran the thing.

So the office was full of these horny single woman staffers. Like 10-20 years older than me. I chased them too because I’m an asshole, and I don’t care. This one hottie I befriended. She seemed really uptight. Lived alone. But obviously liked cock.

I used to have breakfast and lunch with her. One time we were talking about gay men, and I mentioned that people say they hate women, but really they don’t. Most women think this is a thoughtful conversational topic. And then I said, “But I think to truly hate the opposite sex, you really would have to be a heterosexual!”

She fell out of her chair, and every woman I used this line with loved it. Because straight women sort of hate and love men, and straight men sort of hate and love women.

We are wonderful and horrible to each other. Men hurt women badly and vice versa. Both sides accumulate battle wounds and bitterness over time. Everyone knows this but if you mention it, the defenses like Denial come out fast. But women think that statement hits it on the head.

We used to go out to the movies. I was an alcoholic at that time, drinking 10 beers a day and doing student teaching. I was also a mental mess and was going insane. She lived alone near Beverly Hills and slept alone on a pad in the living room. I made out with her pretty good at the door but she stopped short of that and would not let me come in.

She wanted to fuck me but stopped herself because “she had been married and traveled all over and I had not,” so we had nothing in common. So no sex. No pussy. Plus she was 15-20 years older than me. Mommy type. Mommy-son dynamic. Weird but fun. Maybe.

I actually dated quite a few of those USC coeds. If anything, they were a bit uptight and not real loose sexually. It wasn’t real easy to fuck them. They were sort of inexperienced/prudish, but not in a bad way. Others were living with a boyfriend.

I became good friends with one, and I used to hang out at her house. She was Jewish. We never had sex but we used to talk about porn, and she knew the names of female porn stars. But I don’t think she was an easy fuck, or at least she never fucked me.

I met another one, totally hot, Sandra, who drove a late model Mercedes and lived in her own expensive house  in Pasadena. She was well known for being a slut ,and the other women hated her. She was nice and actually I probably could have fucked her as she gave off vibes like that, one day in particular, but I blew it.

I made friends with an extremely uptight Black woman named Betty. I guess she liked me but she was ugly and ultra-uptight. She eventually decided I was an asshole after blowing her off for many months.

There were other Black women in the program.  They lived in South LA but they were extremely civilized, nice girl, often really religious types.

I used to hang out with one in the library. One day she laughed at me and asked, “Boooob. Are you shyyyyy?” I never went out with her, but I probably  could have. But as she was a church girl, she probably didn’t put out. But she sure was nice. And in a Black people sort of way, she was rather hot.

I dated a Venezuelan woman but it never went beyond lunch dates. She wasn’t exactly an easy fuck either.

I dated a repressed Black woman who lived in Marina del Rey whose father was a physician.

We were working as aides at an elementary school, and we would meet at 8 AM and all have breakfast in the lounge.

I guess the Black woman liked me. One day we were talking about the football game, and she looked at me and said, “Damn I sure wish someone would take me to the football game!” And then she repeated that a few times looking right at me. Not being a total idiot, I got her number, and we made plans.

We went to a football game, and a bunch of White conservatives saw me with a Black chick and laughed at me in a very racist way, like sneering Southern rednecks treating me like an object of derision and hilarity.

Back then it was like if a White guy was with a Black chick, he was a fucktard because that meant he couldn’t get a White woman, so he had to resort to Black chicks. Because obviously they are bottom of the barrel, right?

I went out with her again at her apartment where she lived with her physician father, who I met. She lived in the Marina. I forget what happened but we went to some disco and went out dancing. Nothing happened in this relationship, not even a kiss. She was insanely uptight and apparently inexperienced sexually.

Later she hated me. Some weird guy was calling her up all the time saying sexual things and threatening her. She was convinced that this was somehow me. She also thought I was the biggest fucktard idiot total loser of a man on the face of the Earth. I have no idea why she thought that because she never acted like that on dates.

She was basically out of her mind. She told everyone that I was doing this to her, and I think even tried to get authorities involved. Just another land mine in the minefield called Women.

Women are dangerous.

There was this other very proper White woman who nevertheless usually spent the night at her boyfriend’s house. She ate breakfast with us every morning. So she was getting fucked all the time. Most of the others were not. Seemed like she and maybe a few of the others were the only women having any sex.

She actually seemed like she really liked me too.

Almost all those women had parents who were dentists, lawyers, or physicians. I carpooled with this super uptight women who was going to Dentistry School.

She was sexually repressed and uptight, and sitting next to her in the passenger seat, she would look at me and nervously touching her pussy while she drove. Like her pussy was all backed up, female equivalent of blue balls. Which actually exists. She wasn’t getting laid at all obviously and she probably was very inexperienced.

I have seen other young women who were not getting any sex and probably not masturbating either. They also seemed “backed up” with female equivalent of blue balls and touched their pussies a lot nervously.

There was also some older couple in the car with us, no idea, maybe her parents. I managed to piss all these uptight, conventional, extreme Normie people off by being my usual offensive asshole self.

That woman really hated me, and her parents thought I was pure scum, which is sort of true. I didn’t really care because they were just typical Normie White people fucktards, completely uptight, conventional, critical, with 1 million prohibitions and what you can say or do and be appropriate.

She seemed like she was interested in me sexually though, even though she hated me. Which is pretty typical for a woman anyway.

There was a seriously hot Black woman with a physician father. She was in one of my night classes, and she and I became quite close, had all sorts of great conversations, and spent time together. She was my best friend!

She was very, very nice and absolutely gorgeous, but rather uptight and seemed like she was sexually repressed or possibly just inexperienced. I simply blew it with her because I was completely insane at that point in my life, and it was sort of clear to anyone who studied me a bit. So like a fucktard I never asked her out. She sure liked me though. I mean a lot. A lot a lot a lot a lot.

There was also this Korean woman whose parents were doctors. She was also in the night class with the Black woman and she was also in one of my day classes with the blond sorority cunt.

She was the sweet, kind, loving, super-friendly, knockout gorgeous Asian woman of your dreams, straight out of all the stereotypes you ever heard about these women. She embodied them all, literally an animated and mortal human stereotype in flesh and bone.

She seemed like she really liked me. I mean like really really really really liked me, but like a moron, I never asked her out.

To tell the truth, she also seemed very sexually inexperienced, but not uptight or prudish, more in that strange Asian woman way where they aren’t getting any but it’s not due to being prudish because they’re not. Instead they are sort of normal and ok with it as this is what an unmarried woman is supposed to be like in their society.

I probably could have easily dated half the women in the program, but I simply blew it with a lot of them. And I did  date quite a few of them anyway. They were mostly repressed, uptight, and sexually inexperienced. But most were very sweet and nice.

Also keep in mind that I was at the peak of my looks, and women said I looked like Tom Cruise and Rick Springfield. I got offers to be a male model, which I turned down due to homophobia. In retrospect maybe I should have braved the fags and taken the jobs.

So maybe these women were just really nice to me because I was Chad. Had I not Chad’s looks, perhaps my experience would have been very different.

I also had good Game even then, so maybe that too. But I needed the Looks.

You got the Looks? Fine. Add the Game on top of the Looks, and now woo woo you’ve got a killer machine. It’ll teach you ev-ry thing.

No Looks? Add Casanova’s Game and it might just be worthless, or worse, creepy and dangerous.

YMMV.

What Are the Differences Between IQ’s of 120, 125, and 130

Rahul: Lindsay, how the hell are you!? It’s been a while. In your experiences, what is the difference between somebody with a 120 IQ and a 130 IQ, or the different between a 120 and a 125 IQ?

In many to most cases, practically nothing! Honestly.

Let’s look at the scores of some of our co and authors here:

  • Brian 135.
  • Petra (friend) ~130. But she has no interest in brainy stuff. She read my Turkic paper and she kept asking me, “Why would anyone even write a paper like that? What for? What’s the point?” But smart women are not into the airy world of abstract ideas.
  • My father 129. My father had some issues with highly abstract thinking. He just couldn’t seem to get his mind around certain things. I think I was explaining one of those weighed voting schemes to him and he never got it. Zen Buddhism made no sense to him. He kept pounding the table and asking, “What’s the point? What’s the point?” He was very stubborn-minded and closed-minded and rigid, and that can make you seem stupid about some things because you won’t open your mind enough to explore new subjects. Instead you reject them out of hand, say it makes no sense or you can’t understand it or whatever. But he read way faster than I do (he gobbled up a book a day), and although he did not display his ultra-intellect too often, when he did, he was extremely intelligent, especially in things like History and Political Science.
  • Shi 125.
  • Alan 123.
  • Wade 123.
  • Tulio 121.
  • My best female friend S. ~120. S. was not quite as intellectual as the rest, but she was also a heavy pot smoker and basically an alcoholic. One time I told her about some abstract concept I was thinking of (relating to the underlying mechanisms behind life on Earth or some insane crap) and said she probably wouldn’t understand it. She said, “Try me!” and I explained it to her, and she got it right away.
  • Phil 118.
  • Alpha ~115-121? She’s never told me and she probably won’t tell us, so this is strictly as WAG, and I could be way off, but in the conversations I’ve had with her on this, I am thinking it might be around this level. She was a graduate student in one of this country’s top universities. And whatever he # is, I assure you, Alpha is just as smart as I am.
  • Dota 117.
  • Matt 115. Very insecure about his score, but he’s as smart as I am.
  • Phil (friend) 115.
  • Betty (friend) 115. She originally got 107, but she retook the test and got 115 and recently took another one and got 140 on 1/2 of the test and a lower score on the other half. She always seemed to be just as smart as I am although she was much younger.
  • J.(ex-gf) 115. She was maybe not quite as intellectual as the others but she is a brilliant artist, actually a great artist. And I was definitely smarter than she was, but she was no dummy, and she was a very eager and attentive student to my professor role. I mean she deserves the term. She sells her stuff on the market for big money.
  • Forget his name former commenter 106. But he was just as smart as anyone listed above. I know, it’s crazy.

Most of those people above are about as smart as each other, and from what I can tell, they are just as smart as I am, and my score is 12-32 points higher than most of theirs. That’s 1-2 full standard deviations, and here on the ground, you can’t see much of anything at all.

For degrees, jobs, and prizes, you need these minimum IQ*’s, with averages in quotes:

BA  105 (average 115)
MA  108 (average 118)
PhD 115 (average 125)
MD  125 (average 130)
University professor 135 (average 145)
Congressman 135 (average 145)
Nobel Prize 150 (average 160)

*You can get those degrees, jobs and awards with lower IQ’s than the minimum, but it might require a lot of work. You’d have to work your rear end off, and you are going to struggle at least somewhat.

Alt Left: Language Rights in the USSR and Russia

James Schipper: On the other hand, it can’t be denied that there was some linguistic imperialism within the Soviet Union. There was no systematic attempt to Russify the entire country, but there was an encroachment of the Russian language on the others.

Yes, there were 14 that broke away. Those were republics. The Soviet Constitution was radically progressive in that it gave any republic the right to self-determination and independence if they so chose. That’s why they were allowed to break away, although the first to separate (Azerbaijan) were attacked. But the state soon gave up, and Gorbachev let them all go one by one when they voted to go out.

While the USSR initially started out as radically progressive in terms of mother tongue education and state support for all of the languages of the country (even some very small ones), that soon faded with Stalin’s paranoid crackdown on regional nationalism in the 1930’s, when state support was withdrawn from many of the smaller languages. Language rights retracted further under Khrushchev.

The main areas where there was an attempt at linguistic imperialism were in the Baltics, and even there, they failed pretty badly. The native languages in the Baltics are doing very well. I’m not aware of much linguistic imperialism anywhere else.

Keep in mind that every one of those republics had their non-Russian language as an official language. Government documents, books, newspapers, magazines, and journals were published and radio and TV was broadcasted in those languages.

You could elect to send your kid to school from K-12 in the non-Russian language, and in quite a few of those republics, there was university education in the native language also. Of course you had to learn Russian too, and everyone had to take Russian in grades 1-12.

Look around the world. Look at the US. Who are we to talk about linguistic imperialism? Would we ever allow any non-English language the same extreme rights here in the US? You see any public schools in the US where you get to go to school from K-12 in your non-English language? I don’t see any.

Even with some linguistic imperialism under Khrushchev, the USSR was still radically progressive compared to the rest of the world as far as language rights go.

And to this day, all throughout Russia, there are many official languages other than Russia in titular republics. In fact, almost all titular republics where another language is spoken widely have that language as an official language. In many of those republics, you can still get K-12 education in your native language. There are non-Russian language schools all over Russia.

The only exception is Karelia where for some reason, the Karelian Republic has refused to make Karelian an official language, though there are still ~50,000 speakers of the various Karelian tongues.

And many of the republics that split away to form their own nations have kept their Soviet-era policies, even savage Soviet/Russia-haters like Ukraine, where you can get an education in 5-10 different languages depending on what you speak at home.

Can You Tell if Someone Has Been to College or Not?

I understand that quite a few companies, nonprofits, and perhaps even government enterprises still advertise for “a degree in anything and will train.”

I believe they are doing this less than when I was job-hunting around 1981, when you saw that sort of thing all the time. In fact, I got a job as quality control in a factory and the man who hired me at the interview said, “We are so happy you have a college degree!” And he repeated that several times, “But you have that degree!” that sort of thing.

Keep in mind that this job I am quite sure did not require a degree because the three women who worked the other shifts – two older women, one White and one Hispanic, and one young Black woman – could not possibly have had university degrees based on my contact with them. They were perfectly nice human beings, but no way on Earth had did they have a degree. Just forget it.

And yes, you can tell people who could not possibly have a university degree.  Among other things, they’re just not very smart or educated. So it should be quite clear in a lot of cases who absolutely could not possibly have a university degree.

Keep in mind that there are IQ limits. You really need a 105 IQ to get a university degree. Your average person with a BA has an IQ of 115. You can get a degree with a 100 IQ, but you will have to work very hard for it, it won’t be fun at all, and you will not truly understand much of the material. So if you can figure out the IQ’s of the people who talk to, you can more or less figure out if they went to university or not.

Now, can you tell who definitely has a degree? Not necessarily because many very smart young people do not have a university degree, especially young men in their 20’s. There are lots of quite intelligent young folks who do not have a degree. Most of them prioritized work or relationships over schooling. I am not sure if there are humans who seem so brainy and sophisticated that they must obviously be degreed, unless you know their job, which isn’t a fair way of determining this.

We have a commenter on here saying, “Why not just hire someone without a degree?” Well, would you rather hire someone smart and educated who knows how to think (a degreed person) or a person who is not intelligent or educated and has a dubious ability to think? To me, that’s a no-brainer.

Alt Left: People Who Shouldn’t Be at University

Degrees are not a dime a dozen, as people like to say. However, 30

I knew a number of people at university who were not college material. One was one of my best roommates. Almost everyone I knew like that dropped out. And they tended to get C’s.

If you have an IQ  below 100, you probably should not even be at university. Even a 100 IQ is going to be a problem.

I also knew quite a few people who had moved out, worked quite a bit and were also at university. Almost every  single person I knew who was working significant hours on a job while going to university subsequently dropped out.

Our stupid culture idolizes no-fun workaholics who go to school full-time and work full-time and engage in similar types of self-abuse, but the truth is that statistically, the more hours you work while you are at university, the lower your grades are and the more likely you are to drop out. I think people at university could maybe work up to 20 hours a  week and that’s it.

If you’re going to work a lot of hours while going to university full-time, you probably should not even be at university, as odds are you are going to drop out.

Alt Left: The “Worthless Degree” Narrative Is a Rightwing Meme

People pushing the “worthless degree” narrative so popular nowadays might like to know that this is a rightwing meme.

Rightwingers absolutely hate university education period (or at least want to make it all private or nonprofit so only the rich could get a university education) and beyond that, they hate more than anything else the schools of Humanities which they regard as hotbeds of liberalism, Leftism, and Communism who brainwash the young.

Just pointing out that the liberals taking this point of view are pushing a rightwing meme. Not that that means it’s invalid, but to me it implies that it needs looking at.

I mentioned earlier that Japan was thinking of phasing out all Humanities degrees. Japanese are natural-born STEM nerds anyway, so I can see why they feel this way. This was actually a directive that was issued by the government in 2015.

Perhaps due to criticism, the government subsequently withdrew this policy and issued a statement that said in our modern era, Humanities degrees were absolutely beneficial, but not before ~25

Alt Left: A Person with a “Worthless Degree” Will Be a Better Employee Than One with No Degree

Jason Y:

Well, I guess a person could work themselves up to management – but they could have just hired someone with no degree.

It’s not worthless. Because the person theoretically now is a well-educated citizen (important to society) and has the ability to think critically (important to society, to himself, and to his employers).

You would be much better off hiring someone with a degree for any position that requires any sort of brains.

Look below:

           IQ   CT   Grit DG   R    WH   TT

Degree     115  Yes  Yes  Yes  Yes  Yes  Yes 
No Degree  ~95? ?/N  ?/N  ?/N  ?/N  ?/No ?/No

CT = critical thinking DG = Delay gratification R = Responsible W = Works Hard TT= Tried and Tested

If you take 1,000 people with a university degree and 1,000 people without a university degree, the degreed people with have a much higher IQ (20 points!), would have better critical thinking skills, would show more ability to delay gratification, would be more responsible, would work hard, and would be tried and tested.

For those who did not get the degree, sure, some might be able to think critically, perhaps if they were autodidacts. Some would have a good ability to delay gratification. Some would be quite responsible. Some would work very hard. And some might be tried and tested in some other way.

But it’s a crapshoot. With the degreed people, you know that they can think critically, can delay gratification, are responsible, will work hard, and have been tried and tested at university.

With the undegreed people, you really have no idea. Maybe they will have these qualities, and maybe they will not, and you don’t have much of a way of knowing these things.

If you’re a betting man or an employer, the degreed person is a much better bet for any position that requires any sort of brains. In fact, I might even prefer degreed people as baristas at my coffee shop or as clerks in my retail outlet. You show me two applications, one with a degree and one without, I will hire the degreed person.

But not necessarily to drive a truck, work construction, pick crops, be an ironworker, lay concrete, or be a welder. People in those jobs typically never had degrees and for all we can tell, they never needed them. In fact, a university-educated man might not fit in well in the macho environment of a workplace like that.

But for anything else, sure. Statistically speaking, the degreed person is going to be a better bet.

Alt Left: The Main Reason to Go to College: To Learn Critical Thinking Skills

They’re supposed to get critical thinking skills if they graduated. If they couldn’t get them, they’re likely to drop out before they graduate. I went to university and I saw all sorts of folks dropping out of college at all stages of the game, with many more dropping out at the four year level.

A university education is supposed to teach you critical thinking skills. That’s part of the whole idea of it. I guess you could graduate without learning those skills, but you either got lucky, or the university was not doing its job.

Is It Time for an Experiment?

I would wager that if you took groups of 1,000 university grads and 1,000 non university grads and compared them, the uni grads would have much higher critical thinking skills. Of course IQ could mask that.

Even better match the uni grads and non-uni grads on IQ or factor out IQ, and then test to see if there was an effect for a university education alone or if the higher critical thinking skills rate was just an artifact of a higher IQ in the first place.

Or take two groups at age 18, test for critical thinking skills, then test the same two groups ten years later after uni graduation for one part of the group and then compare for critical thinking skills again. Once again factor out IQ. This would tell us if the college grads already had critical thinking skills before university and uni had no effect on those skills or if their skills improved with uni education.

Alt Left: Critical Thinking Skills as a Value of a University Education: College Teaches You How to Think

Alpha writes:

As for “hiring people with a bachelor’s degree and will train,” I’ve heard that for years. I understand the reasoning behind it. You won’t get any argument from me. The only thing I might differ on is your idea that people with bachelor’s degrees have definitely learned critical thinking in college. This is questionable.

Well, it’s just fine if people want to get the most bang for their buck. But I think that people who don’t care about that or don’t think it is relevant should still be free to get ahead and get a social science degree with their money.

Or with society’s money on the basis that we are at least creating an educated citizen with good critical thinking skills and basic knowledge, both of which are important for a functioning society and as an employee skill. They can try to get one of those “Bachelors degree and will train” jobs, or they can teach themselves new skills easier or we can just settle for the notion that educated, critical thinking people are good for society.

When people say that I am not using my degrees, I beg to differ. I did get a degree in Journalism and I am a Freelance Journalist. A broke one but nevertheless one that has put out a lot of output. You could argue that I don’t use my Linguistics degree. However, I do publish in peer reviewed Linguistics journals, which makes me a Linguist, and I am now a Published Author in the field. I’m a broke linguist but so what?

Another thing I would like to point out is that all those years of education and getting that advanced degree taught me how to think. I am so much smarter with all those years of education behind. Of course I am an autodidact too but the university education really helped. And I am so smart now that I can actually teach myself whole new skills that I have no degrees in or just learn whole new skills and jobs simply by getting a bunch of books like “How to Be a ‘Whatever'”.

I knew nothing about field linguistics or writing an alphabet, dictionary or phrase book of a language. I simply went out and got a bunch of books on how to do those things and read them.  Then I called up expert linguists all over the country and asked them how to do it.

I got some books on how to write a dictionary. And then I got some more books on how to write a phrase book, and I got some phrase books to use as examples. Then I did a lot of work on a basic dictionary, and I got halfway through a phrasebook.

For the phrasebook, I actually designed the book itself as a Book Designer, writing mock-ups of every page including what text would go on it and what illustrations would go where. I simply got some books on how to design a book and then I did it. I’d never had a course in such a thing, and I was never trained in layout in my years of journalism.

In the course of the book chapter I published, I did a lot of work with a graphics artist with maps and putting various languages on the maps and mapping the territories where they were spoken. Basically working as a Map Designer.

The work was exceedingly difficult as we had several sources, including several maps, of some or all of these languages. And the maps and sources were all wrong in one way or another and they were all wrong in different ways.

I was first of all able to figure out that they were all wrong in the first place, and then I was able to figure out how each map was wrong, and based on that was able to figure out the best place to draw in the best speaker area for these languages. I’ve never done any Map Design before.

My Graphic Artist drew the maps, but I worked with him and told him where exactly to put each language on the maps and how to fix the maps that were wrong. I had had one Geography course 35 years prior.

At the same time they needed an ethnology or cultural history of their tribe.  So I read through the ethnologies currently available, of which they were a few, including a full blown doctoral dissertation, the author of which I spoke to.

Then I got a number of books on “How to Be an Anthropologist.” And then I started doing a lot of  anthropological work with the tribe and was given a secondary job title of Cultural Anthropologist. I had had only one class in anthropology in college, and that was 20 years before.

Decades ago, a friend of my Mom’s said there was an opening for a paralegal at her legal office. So I went in and applied for it, and the guy hired me on the spot. Many people take paralegal courses and get paralegal certificates, but I just asked the lawyer what he wanted done and went in and did it.

I wasn’t even trained on the job. I simply taught myself how to do this sort of paralegal work (mostly digesting depositions and summarizing documents, both of which were murderously hard).

It is illegal to call myself one, but I basically work as a Therapist or Life Coach now. I have to call myself peer counselor for legal reasons, but for all intents and purposes I am doing psychotherapy, or at least Life Coaching or mentoring if you will.

I had nearly enough Psychology courses for a Minor in Psychology at university. Then I ended up studying psychology and psychiatry on my own. I studied psychology for 40 years and psychiatry for 20 years. I spent years reading peer reviewed journals in both fields at a university library. And I had 30 years of off and on psychotherapy myself, in addition to being on psychiatric drugs for decades, for the most part antidepressants.

And now I do peer counseling, working with one particular disorder.  And I am so good that psychiatrists have described me as an expert on this condition. Let’s say there are 500, 1,000 or X number of experts on this disorder in the US. I would be among that number.

I’m not as good as some of those people who charge up to $350/hour, but at less than 10

I knew nothing about Cryptozoology but I quickly became a top expert on Sasquatch and broke a number of important stories on this phenomenon. I got interviewed on the radio a few times and had a few offers to be on TV due to this expertise. I never took a single course (such as Wildlife Biology) to learn how to be a cryptozoologist. All self-taught.

I recently got paid to do some work in Conflict Resolution between a client and graphic artist. I did some reading on how to do it, and then I just did it.

I did a bit of work as an Agent for a Graphics Artist though I had no training in that.

I had a Graphic Arts, programming, and web design business for a while. We didn’t make much money but we did make a bit. I simply hired out people to do that work, although I never had any training in any of those things. I even fixed a program that didn’t work myself although I knew little about computer programming, could not program myself, and never took a course in it.

I just studied the code and figured out that it was a rules-based language system like the Linguistics I had been trained in. All human languages are rules-based language systems also. Once I figured out the “syntax” of the program, after a while, I figured out what was wrong and was able to fix the program so it worked. And this was a problem that had baffled my programmer.

I set up and ran a forum dealing with True Crime or Criminology although I never had one course in the subject. We did excellent work and I made thousands of dollars. I got to be such an expert on one famous crime that I had an offer to be on Inside Edition.

I recently founded a whole new political movement though I never had a Political Science course. I’ve just been reading about politics for decades now, and that’s all it took to be a Political Activist.

Now perhaps this is all an artifact of a stratospheric IQ. But I would also like to believe that all those years of education taught me how to think.

And ideally once you learn how to think very well, you can do all sorts of jobs that require little more than being smart or very smart. You simply get some books and teach yourself how to do it. You don’t need courses, degrees, certificates, or licenses, though for some jobs, you are breaking the law if you are working unlicensed.

Alt Left: “A Bachelor’s Degree in Anything and Will Train on the Job”: What Is Wrong with This Older Model of Hiring Workers?

Sigh.

Color me exasperated.

In response to this article, a couple of commenters (actually the two people who much to my gratitude help me run this site) left a bunch of comments that didn’t even deal with the premise of the post and instead gave the appearance of not reading the post. To which I say:

Did you all even read the article?

I was talking about not too long ago when many corporations and perhaps even government agencies used to ask for “A bachelor’s degree in anything.” Because most jobs, especially in government and business, don’t really need a degree. Most jobs are pretty much trainable on the job. So they hired people with “a degree in anything” and then trained them on the job and moved them up the ladder if they prospered in their positions.

Unfortunately, corporations and perhaps even governments have gotten away from this, and have started demanding all sorts of silly more or less nonsensical degrees in all sorts of joke fields in order to do some job that doesn’t even need a degree in the first place because it’s trainable on the job.

My statement was that this worked for many years. “A Bachelor’s Degree in anything” and then train you on the job. Somehow we have gotten away from this. Believe it or not even back then people talked all the time about worthless social science degrees that wouldn’t get you a job anywhere.

The reason corporations and governments did this was because “a Bachelor’s degree in anything” showed that you probably had an IQ of ~115, which is in the top 20

So you’re smarter than 80

Instead of acknowledging that “a Bachelor’s degree in anything and then train” was a good model that we might want to get back to, I got a bunch of tone-deaf comments about “worthless social science degrees.” The implication being that the commenters did not read the degree.

I don’t mean to insult my esteemed colleagues here, but it might be nice to hear their views on the premise of the article. If you all don’t wish to discuss the premise of the piece, fine, but please don’t derail into things that imply you didn’t read the piece.

Now these commenters are both quite intelligent, and one is very intelligent. Hence I might be interested to hear their views on this interesting topic that never gets discussed:

Please debate the following: In the past many jobs advocated “a Bachelor’s degree in anything and will train on the job beyond that.” We have now gotten away from that. The fact that this was policy in many enterprises for decades showed that for a long period in this country, those degrees were not worthless at all.

Discuss.

Alt Left: An Argument for the Utility of a Four Year College Degree, in Anything, Yes, Anything at All

I would like to make an argument for the utility of a four year college degree in absolutely anything at all with possibly a few lightweight exceptions.

Here it is:

I majored in General Ed in junior college. I have a Masters Degree and a genius level IQ (over 140). 😉

Most of the work coming out of Studies departments nowadays is quite poor. Sociology, Anthropology, and Pedagogy are badly corrupted by PC. My own field, Linguistics, is a PC hellhole. Even Psychology is becoming badly corrupted.

You would be surprised that Criminal Justice is actually a very liberal field of study. Generally considered part of Sociology. All of the social sciences are very leftwing, History included. Also a notorious black hole of theory, as no one really knows what causes crime or makes it go up or down.

I suppose you do need to write well even in a Studies field. I have met some people with “Studies” majors, one a feminist with a Gender Studies degree. They were often very intelligent. Not sure what good the degree is.

You know, 30-40 years ago, many entry level jobs said “a Bachelors degree in anything.” This was intelligent as these folks felt that getting a BA in most things is not easy at all, and the person probably has at least a 105 and probably a 115 IQ. They probably don’t have a 100 IQ.

On top of that, the BA should have at least taught them the critical thinking so necessary in the workplace. I still believe that a degree in anything shows that this person has been taught the critical thinking skills necessary for higher level work in our society. So those junk degrees are at least valuable in that sense.

Alt Left: About Those “Worthless Social Science Degrees”

The argument that social science degrees are absolutely worthless for getting a job in modern society has been coming up for decades, but it has grown louder in the last ten years.

Supposedly these degrees are absolutely useless in terms of finding a job, so they are a  waste of money. Further, they are a waste of society’s money.

This argument mostly comes from conservatives, but some liberals have taken it up too. I’d like to point out that the roots of this argument lie in laissez faire free market neoliberal capitalism. So all of you making this argument are in bed with Milton Friedman. I hope you’re happy.

This is so because the only degrees that are said to be worthwhile are those degrees that are useful in a sociopathic hyper-individualistic anything goes free market economy such as we are blighted with here in the US.

The only degrees that are worthwhile are those that will get Bill Gates,  Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump, Betsy DeVos, Howard Schmidt, Jeffrey Epstein, Steve Jobs,  or other semi-sociopathic heartless maniac billionaires to hire you for whatever capitalist scam they are cooking up at the moment.

And everything else, everything that doesn’t allow you to be a cog in a lying, cheating, thieving corporate world, is completely and utterly useless. Because the Market is everything and everything is the Market.

In such a society it should not be surprising that conservatives, mostly conservative males, say that anything other than a math, science, tech, business or management degree is utterly worthless.

Japan is thinking of phasing out all of its social sciences in the next decade or two. There have been many calls to reduce or eliminate social science programs at US universities. These calls go right along with the total commodification of life that we are experiencing.

Furthermore, they display a contempt for knowledge and the scholarship needed to obtain it as a core value of human existence. Why are we here anyway? How about to learn? That would be one of my arguments. Not that most folks have any use for much learning, but the species as a whole does. It’s a value. No you can’t slap a dollar sticker on it and it often has little or no monetary value.  In modern society that means it is utterly worthless. Why? Because it doesn’t make a buck.

The Lie of the Incompetent Black Affirmative Action Professional

The racist argument – which I just saw again on Niggermania today (as I said you need to know what your enemies believe) – is that due to affirmative action and whatnot (which is a racist White Whale that barely exists anymore anyway), Blacks are held to a lower standard.

Well, they’re Black, so we don’t expect much of them, so we will pass them with lower grades than the Whites, and we won’t expect as much of them at work, we will not expect them to do as much work. and we will let them get away with more bad behavior.

I have no idea how true this is. Yes, some law schools do lower standards for Blacks at admission, but there’s no evidence that they grade Blacks at a different standards than Whites. Even if they can fudge a bit to get them in, Blacks in professional schools still have to do just as good as Whites to pass in class. No one’s cutting them any slack on law or med schools, at least not yet. And if the Blacks really can’t cut it because they slid in on lowered affirmative action standards, they will flunk out anyway, especially at a place like Berkeley. So the lowered standards in a sense are a non-problem. A lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing if you will. And even if they somehow do not flunk out, they still have to pass the bar. If a Black gets admitted to law school and graduates and then somehow passes the damned bar, they’re competent. It doesn’t matter whether standards got lowered for them to get in or not. The Bar doesn’t believe in affirmative action, at least not yet. Medical school is the same thing. Ok, they lower standards of admittance, but 35 Tests like the Bar and the Medical Boards are the Great Equalizers. If a Black person can get through law or medical school and pass the bar or their boards, Jesus Christ, how bad of an attorney or physician could they possibly be? The Bar and the Boards are so difficult that they make it so that anyone who miraculously passes them is absolutely qualified at a minimal level to practice law or medicine. So the idea of all these incompetent Black  professionals everywhere that the racists bring up doesn’t pass the smell test. There simply cannot be lots of incompetent Black professionals as long as they have to pass murderous tests to get the job, and the workplace holds them to high standards. The notion of the incompetent Black professional affirmative action hire lies in the dust.

Alt Left: The Failure of the American "Try Hard" Hypothesis of Human Intelligence and Achievement

In the US, no one is smarter than anyone else. Most think there is no such thing as human intelligence and no one is smarter or dumber than anyone else. And anyway, there’s no way to measure human intelligence. All methods are flawed. So why don’t you invent another one? Doesn’t matter. All efforts to measure human intelligence are doomed forever to failure. I guess measuring human intelligence is like measuring quarks. As soon as you think you’ve pinned it down, it’s already scooted out of view again. This “Try Hard” BS is a lie. My Mom worked for a clinical psychologist who gave standardized tests for employers. He gave IQ tests all the time. He tested me and he had to go back and check the score a few times because he couldn’t believe it was so high. He told my Mom that in thirty years of giving IQ tests, he had only had 10-15 people score as high as I did. And that was after the drugs and the resulting brain fry had long since set in. He told my mother that when he started, he was agnostic on the IQ question. But after a while, over and over, he found that Asians scored higher than Whites, and Whites scored higher than Hispanics and Blacks. He scratched his head for a while and wondered if he was onto something. He thought maybe people scored better because they tried harder, so he found Asians who had breezed through university with straight A’s. He assumed they got that way by trying harder, so he asked them if they studied a lot. He was shocked that they almost always said that they hardly studied at all. “Maybe a little bit a day or two before the test,” they would say. The people scoring the best at university were hardly trying at all! So much for the Try Hard Hypothesis. Then he found people who scored lower on IQ tests and had struggled through university with C’s. He asked them if they had studied hard in college, assuming that they had slacked off and drank their way through college. Most of them said that they had studied very hard but that the material was just too hard for them. Try Hard Hypothesis failed again. I printed out a paper with Richard Lynn’s paper in IQ variations among races and my mother, now a liberal Democrat (but always a race realist), had given it to him. He read it and was fascinated. He said that he had always suspected that something  like this was going on. He was a good liberal or even Leftist Democrat, so he always believed that there were no differences between the races because this was the liberal line he got taught, but he always suspected that it might be wrong. He eventually became a liberal race realist like my Mom.

Alt Left: Feminism in Academia and Social Work

Rod Fleming: The trouble is, they’ve infested academia, and the schools of education and social work were the very first to fall. Essentially, all teachers now are Postmodern, ‘intersectional’ feminists and all social workers believe the nuclear family is an abomination and the State is the only body capable of raising children. In other words, that they know better than parents do, how to bring up their own kids. This is not new; the creeping infestation has been going on for decades. It’s just that the reaction to Trump’s election threw it at the fan and the secret is out. Google the Orkney child-abuse scandal.

Yes, they have infested the academy. They are mostly in the Women’s Studies program, although my field of Linguistics got taken over by the worst SJW’s a long time. Really all of the social sciences have gone SJW, and all universities are hotbeds of SJWism. However, I am acquaintances with two university professors, one in the US and one in Europe. Both of them hate modern SJWism. The American professor is so famous that he has a Wikipedia entry. They both act like they have to be very quiet about this or they might lose their jobs though. Wait, Rod. Your Reaction gets in the way of a lot of your otherwise decent theory. 3rd wave intersectional feminists do not want to get rid of the nuclear family. Some 2nd wave radical and other feminists talked about that. These were usually coming from a Hard Left Marxist POV. You would be hard-pressed to find an “abolish the nuclear family feminist” anywhere now. They don’t exist anymore. And I don’t know anyone, no matter how leftwing, who thinks the state does a better job of raising kids than the family does. They didn’t even believe that in the USSR. If you work in mental health though, you better be on board with modern feminism. If you’re not and your views get out, the feminists will try to get your license pulled. I could not believe how hard my male therapists sucked up to women. It was actually rather disgusting.  I want a therapist who’s a man, not some cuck.

Alt Left: Feminist Cancer Strikes Oxford, Soon Goes Malignant

Feminist poison strikes Oxford, turns many female students into man-scared and man-hating dykes or shut-ins, turns men into terrified incels.  This is leftwing progress! The Modern Left is pathetic! [By Damian Thomson, from The Spectator, 13 June 2015] Oxford’s New Feminist Hit Squad: Cute Tumblr. Scary Politics. “We’re at the tail end of Trinity term at Oxford, when the university finally begins to look like the ‘city of dreaming spires’ depicted in the postcards. The dismal weather cheers up; the quadrangles are soaked in sunlight; and the students — just about to leave for the summer — grab these precious few weeks to do Oxfordy things like punting and slurping Pimm’s. Even the swots and the lefties are filled with the spirit of Brideshead. Parties spring up on every available lawn; the chatter of gossip and teasing grows louder and louder until the sun goes down, people start throwing up and the college authorities herd the revellers on to the street. But this year a group of undergraduates — mostly women — will be shunning all this. They will be staying in their college rooms, fingers flying across their keyboards as they scowl at the screen. They are the hard core of a feminist cult that has gripped Oxford and makes life miserable for hundreds of undergraduates across the university. The cult uses Facebook to snoop on students who aren’t ‘proper’ feminists. It tries to force young women to use its extreme rhetoric and denounces them if they don’t. Its digital tirades can poison college life. One young woman told me that new friends she’d made at Oxford suddenly shunned her in the dining hall after the word went out that she held ‘incorrect’ views on women’s rights. (She was so worried about repercussions that she asked me not to mention which area of women’s rights she felt strongly about.) I’m going to call the cult ‘Country Living’. That’s not quite accurate: it’s actually spelled without the ‘o’, a gynecological pun that’s the only evidence of a sense of humor you’ll find among its leaders. I reckon calling it Country Living will make them cross. Which, to be fair, is not difficult. These lasses are very, very cross all the time. If there was an Oxford blue for taking offence, they’d be champions. Country Living is an internet cult that polices behavior both online and offline. Its manifesto can be read by anyone who visits its page on the blogging platform Tumblr, which is mocked up to look like a 1970’s student magazine. Here we learn that anyone can become a C-word, which is a badge of honor, not a term of abuse. Those four letters have been ‘reclaimed’ by the group. (Like feminists everywhere, Country Living does a lot of reclaiming.) But to earn this honor you must pass tests as severe as the binge-drinking initiation rituals of an all-male Oxford dining society. You must promise to ‘accept that gender is a social construction and embrace its fluidity’. You must ‘recognize your place and privilege within intersectionality’. And if you fail to do these things, Country Living wants to know. It has spies all over Oxford. They’re not necessarily ‘members’ of the group — as with many religious cults, it’s not clear who is and isn’t a member, and fellow-travelers are often the most snoopy zealots. A student can be chatting with friends in the Missing Bean, an espresso bar in quaint Turl Street, and say something ‘problematic’ — the Country Living buzzword, meaning anything that deviates from its rigid feminist doctrine, obsessed with transsexual rights. The Country ladies are ferocious earwiggers, and if the student is on the cult’s radar, the remark will find its way back to HQ. Which, bizarrely, is not an office but a Facebook group. This is where Country Living rules on the correct ideological approach to any current issue. Its Facebook pages are designed as a ‘safe space’ for feminists — meaning an unsafe space for anyone who deviates from the line. As with many sectarian outfits, the smaller the deviation, the bigger the hissy fit. ‘The ultimate crime is not being a Tory man, but being the wrong sort of feminist,’ explains one woman student who, like everyone I talked to, asked not to be named. The Country set love shutting down debates on their pages. Just after the general election, whose result came as a nasty shock to them, their Facebook administrator Shaina Yang announced that ‘I can’t allow these discussions [about the Tory victory] to continue until we release a clarified statement of what CL rules say is okay and isn’t okay on this topic.’ No wonder that, according to a survey by the Oxford Tab newspaper, a third of Country Living Facebook members were ‘too nervous’ to post in the group. Such nervousness isn’t confined to Facebook. ‘The influence of CL goes way beyond its membership,’ says one male undergraduate. ‘Girls who come up to Oxford as mild feminists pick up the message that they have to take offence at anything that might be considered misogynistic. So boys have to monitor their own language, pretend to be worked up about trans issues, if they’re to stand any chance of getting laid.’ Something similar happened during the early Seventies heyday of old-style feminism, when guys would denounce patriarchy in order to get laid. But they didn’t have an internet Stasi to worry about. Adds another student: ‘You see members of the college rugby club glancing around anxiously to see if there are any women present before they can tell a joke. Ironically, they’re the ones who need a safe space.’ I ask him how he can tell the difference between Country sympathizers and the hard core. ‘Weirdly dyed hair is one clue,’ he says. ‘But a better one is “problematic”. The hard core insert it into practically every sentence.’ All this is Oxford at its worst. The university has always been a playground for egomaniacs and control freaks, unlike milder, more studious Cambridge. Although there are Country members in other universities, its origins are no accident. ‘We insist that grammar and spelling are elitist and don’t matter because of a hundred years of linguistic study showing that. When people who insist on hyper-patriotism get language wrong, we use the errors in their language to suggest they aren’t qualified to judge complex matters.’ That’s a comment by one Alyson Cruise on a financial website, bearing the same photograph as the Country Facebook admin Alyson Cruise, a trans woman at St Catherine’s College (who didn’t respond when I contacted her). If they’re the same person, then it’s bit rich of Cruise to judge errors in language, since her own grasp of syntax on Facebook is pretty rudimentary. But the urge to correct the grammar of the lower orders is very Oxonian. No other university is so intellectually snobbish. Even the Bullingdon Club is at times — look at the proportion of Firsts and future power brokers among its members. Country Living would hate the comparison, but they and the Bullers are both elitist, secretive and enjoy ridiculing people on the basis of linguistic clues. Among the Oxford social elite, letting slip a lower-middle-class word such as ‘lounge’ is what the hyper-feminists would call ‘problematic’. ‘I’d love to see a fights between CL and the Bullingdon,’ muses a student. ‘The feminists would scratch their eyes out before they’d thrown their first chair.’ Unlike the 235-year-old Bullingdon, however, Country Living is unlikely to become a venerable Oxford institution. A backlash is under way. Louisa Manning, an ex-member, has broken ranks to denounce its ‘patronizing, self-righteous tone’ — and revealed that as a mixed-race woman, she had been instructed by the group ‘to identify as white when talking to people of color’. She also accused the administrators of ‘Facebook-stalking members’ profiles’ to determine whether they were ‘legit feminists’. She also accused the group of spreading a version of politically correct racism. People of mixed race — like herself — felt they were being ‘erased’ because they didn’t fit neatly into an ethnic category. She wrote: ‘Being half Latino, whenever I’ve become involved with threads discussing race, I’ve been accused of “passing privilege” and have been instructed to identify as white when talking to people of color.’ Imagine if allegations of racial bullying were made against a Tory drinking club. The Oxford University authorities would investigate immediately. But Country Living is left-wing, so it is left alone. Fortunately the group is unstable and beginning to divide into factions. Ordinary undergraduates are finally summoning up the nerve to tease them. The chances are that Country Living — like thousands of cults throughout history — will tear itself apart in an orgy of name-calling, finger-pointing and accusations of heresy. But not before its fanatics have succeeded in spoiling university life for other students — and themselves.”

Alt Left: How the Feminist Cult Brainwashes Its Adherents

Absolutely superb article by a woman showing exactly what feminism has become – a cult no different from Scientology or the rest of them that brainwashes its members into believing a whole stack of lies and seeing the world in a brand new bizarre way. Women leaving feminism nearly need deprogramming to undo the brainwashing that feminism did to them. And incidentally, being a Gender Egalitarian is a great thing to be. The problem I have with women calling themselves feminists is that feminism is all about women. It’s not about us men at all. In fact, many feminists say they could care less what happens to any of us men. So the feminist cult member ends up walking around the world constantly asking, “What about the women? What about the women?” But that’s no way to look at life. That’s no different from the White nationalists running around saying, “What about the Whites? What about the Whites?” White nationalists are always going on about Black crime against Whites, especially White women. After a while, I realized that this was very offensive. Why should I only care about Whites or White women victimized by Black criminals? Why should I care more if a White woman is attacked by a Black criminal than if a Black woman was attacked by the same type of person. I thought about this a while. Of course it should not matter who to me who got violated by the Black criminal. It was incredibly offensive that I should only care about the White victim and not about the Black victim. The victimization of either was equally bad!  We’re all human, dammit. The only sensible way a concerned and progressive person should look at the world is, “What about the humans? What about the humans?” [From Spiked, 10 February 2016, by Catherine Johnson, writer and student] Originally published in Spiked as How I Became a Feminist Victim. An Oxford Student Explains Why Feminism Fails Women.

How I Became a Feminist Victim: An Oxford Student Explains Why Feminism Fails Women

As a female student in a nightclub, I expected to get some unwanted attention. What I didn’t expect was for feminism to turn me into someone so terrified of unwanted attention I stopped going out. In the past, someone groping me would only annoy me for a minute – that would be the extent of it. If they were being really pushy, I’d go to my male friends and stay with them because they’d enjoy making it clear that the guy’s attentions were unwelcome. And yes, other men were more likely to listen to my tall, imposing male friends than me – a shy, skinny 18-year-old. You could call it male privilege, I’d call it the benefit of self-confidence. And that was all fine. No harm, no foul. That was, until I discovered the (now-infamous) Oxford feminist group Cuntry Living. It was a big thing in Oxford; everyone was talking about it and, curious, I joined. I read the posts, I contributed, and I engaged in discussion about everything from rape culture to misogyny in our curriculum. I learned a lot, and slowly, I transitioned from a nervous, desperate-to-please ‘gender egalitarian’ to a proud, full-blown feminist. Along with all of this, my view of women changed. I stopped thinking about empowerment and started to see women as vulnerable, mistreated victims. I came to see women as physically fragile, delicate, butterfly-like creatures struggling in the cruel net of patriarchy. I began to see male entitlement everywhere. The experience also changed my attitude to going out. I would dress more cautiously and opt to stick with female friends in clubs. And, if the usual creeps started bothering me, I became positively terrified. I saw them, not as drunk men with a poor grasp of boundaries and certainly not as misguided optimists who might have misread my behavior but as aggressive probable rapists. If I was groped by someone, I didn’t give them a scathing look or slap away their hand, and I certainly didn’t tell them to fuck off. Instead, I was scared into inaction. How could I countenance such a violation? How could I possibly process something so awful? After the event, I would go outside and cry. And then I would leave – feeling traumatized. I saw the incident, not as some idiot being a bit too handsy, but as sexual assault – something scarring to dwell upon. It was something to whisper to friends in a small, hushed voice – something to preface with a trigger warning. And the appropriate action of friends, upon hearing this, was never to question how upsetting the incident had really been. It was to sympathize, express shock and horror, and say things like ‘I don’t know how you coped’. Not support, but pity – anything else would be tantamount to victim-blaming. Any suggestion that such incidents weren’t really that big a deal (and shouldn’t be treated as trauma) was repellent to me. Victim feminism taught me to see my body as inviolable – any action visited upon it was violence. Eventually, I stopped going out. It wasn’t worth the risk. It took me a long time to realize what had happened. Feminism had not empowered me to take on the world – it had not made me stronger, fiercer or tougher. Irony of ironies, it had turned me into someone who wore long skirts and stayed at home with her girlfriends. Even leaving the house became a minefield. What if a man whistled at me? What if someone looked me up and down? How was I supposed to deal with that? This fearmongering had turned me into a timid, stay-at-home, emotionally fragile bore. Thankfully, I learned a lot from the experience. Teaching women that we exist as probable victims (to the probable attacks of men) is not freeing or empowering. Modern feminism trains us to see sexism and victimhood in everything – it makes us weaker. It is also anathema to gender equality. How are we to reconcile with our male ‘oppressors’ when we view them as primitive, aggressive beasts? How are we to advance female agency when everything from dancing to dating is deemed traumatic? The answer to the problems we face as women is not to submit to the embrace of victim feminism but to stand up for ourselves. We must throw off the soft, damp blanket of Safe Space culture and face the world bravely. If we do not do so now, we will consign any prospect of real equality to the ash heap of history. Catherine Johnson is a student at the University of Oxford.  

Alt Left: On Brett Kavanaugh, "Gang Rape," and High School Girls Pulling Trains in the 1970's

Regarding the sexual misconduct charges detailed against Brett Kavanaugh below, I am proud to say I’ve never done anything of these things or anything close to them. I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life, but I have never raped a female or even come close to doing it. I like to sleep well at night, and I have to look myself in the mirror every morning. This horrible man is now facing a third sexual misconduct charge. The first one involves a charge by a woman, 15 years old at the time, that the then 17 year old Kavanaugh and his creepy friend Mike Judge corralled her into a bedroom at a party while Kavanaugh tried to rape her. Brett threw her down on the bed, tried to rip her clothes off, and put his hand over her mouth to muffle her screams. His buddy Judge was laughing the whole time. She literally fought Brett off and thereby prevented herself from getting raped. This was an actual crime called 2nd Degree Sexual Assault, a misdemeanor that calls for 1-3 years in prison. The statute of limitations ran out three years after the crime. I would be inclined to let him off on this considering he was a minor, but I hate him so much that I don’t care what sort of BS they use to hang him from his own petard with. The second charge, which just came out, is from his time at Yale. Brett was a hard-partying guy, a member of a fraternity subsequently discovered to be a very creepy and rapey organization. This fraternity has been accused of so many sexual assaults that they were actually banned by the university at one point. Brett was said to be rather shy but could get quite aggressive when drunk. These men are called “mean drunks,” and it is a known type. I have known men who were very nice when sober but quite mean when drunk. A woman who was a classmate of his at Yale charges that in 1982 there was a drinking party in a dorm. She was there with several young men. I am going to say right now that she was a damned idiot for going to a drinking party with just herself and five or six sketchy, rowdy college boys. What did she think is going to happen? At least bring a girlfriend along, for Chrissake. Anyway, these boys started whipping out their penises and pointing them in her face and daring her to touch them. The antics also involved the use of a fake penis at one point. The woman was a good Catholic girl at the time, and she said she had never touched a penis before. Well, there’s no time like now, baby! Ah, just kidding, sorry. Anyway she tried not to touch them, but they kept shoving them in her face. They grabbed her hand and put it on their penises. One of the men who did this to her was Brett Kavanaugh. The woman was traumatized by this and confided in some of her friends. This is legally sexual assault, but no DA will prosecute on a BS charge like this. It is a dick move though, and dick moves deserve a punch in the face in Man World. The latest charge is that Brett, Judge, and a group of other boys threw regular parties when they were in high school that involved targeting a girl, feeding her enough drinks to get her completely wasted, and then getting her to pull a train or do a gangbang. These are being called gang rapes, but that’s not the way I remember them. I was around back then. This happened at parties all the time when I was in high school. You would hear this at parties, “She’s pulling a train!” Or they would point to some girl and say she pulled a train at this party last weekend. It was a pretty regular occurrence. My understanding was that all of the girls pulling these trains were drinking of their own free will. I was at many parties like this, and I never once saw boys or men feeding these girls booze. They didn’t need to. The girls went there with the expressed intention of getting wasted on alcohol. I never participated in one of these trains. The idea was always frightening to me, and I didn’t have much sexual experience in those days. Plus I had performance anxieties. A high school girl would get drunk off her ass, then get in bed with some guy. I guess they would ask her if she wanted other guys. These were high school girls who wanted to get gangbanged, so they would get drunk in order to have an excuse to do this without being called sluts. Other guys would come in, and the girl would say, “Bring it on!” I never heard that one of these trains was non-consensual or that they were anything resembling gang rape. I heard that if you went in there at your turn in the train, you would find some ravenous cum-drunk high school in there, her vagina soaked down to her knees along her inner thighs, panting like a dog in summer heat, and flopping around on the bed like a possessed Jodie Foster in The Exorcist. She would be saying something like, “More! More! More cock! More cock! I want more cock!” If you got on top of her, she would look up at you and ask, “A new one?” And then, “Fuck me! Fuck me! Fuck me dammit!”. Females who are this sexually crazed are obviously getting raped, right? Oh, Hell no. No female acts like that unless the sex is consensual. Back in those days, just because some horny as Hell high school was pulling a train in some bedroom, that didn’t necessarily mean crap. In no way was it synonymous with gang rape. It was just some high school girl living out her fantasy of getting gangbanged. Now if Kavanaugh was actually targeting certain girls and deliberately feeding them drinks in order to gangbang them, that was sleazy. But that’s not rape either. No male ever goes down on rape for sex with a drunken female. No DA ever files on a bullshit charge like that. It’s only rape if she’s passing in and out of consciousness, and even then, it’s hardly ever prosecuted. One case that was prosecuted recently was the Steubensville case with a high school girl which was videotaped. The only reason those boys went down was due to the videotape. If she is so drunk she is literally passed out, yes, it is rape, but hardly anyone goes down on that either because there’s usually no evidence. Sadly, this bullshit happens all the time. Girls and women! Don’t drink yourself black out drunk or even worse passed out drunk. You may well get raped and you have no one but yourself to blame for that. This is what the college athlete Brock Turner went down on. 95 Also it was sexual assault, not rape, due to digital penetration. That woman was another idiot who got herself black out and passed out drunk and then got assaulted. She was with Brock at the party for a long time before they left, and people said she was all over him, practically having sex with him in the main room in front of everyone. When they left and went outside, same thing, she was practically raping him. I’m just saying that at least in Brock Turner’s case, there is sometimes a lot less to some of these cases than meets the eye. On the other hand, Kavanaugh and his buddies definitely did what I would call a dick move by feeding these girls drinks and then frankly preying on them when they were wasted. It’s a dick move, not rape. The punishment for dick moves like that in Man World is a punch in the face. That’s exactly what this creep and his friends deserve for pulling this stunt.

error

Enjoy this blog? Please spread the word :)