Category: ideological culture

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education and schooling ideological culture

Totalitarians Gloat

The Odyssey, Ulysses

For generations, even millennia, boys read The Iliad with admiration for Achilles, and men referenced the clever Odysseus from that other Homeric epic, The Odyssey. 

By my day, neither were required reading. If I’ve read The Odyssey, it was the same version the Coen Brothers referenced when concocting their terrific film, O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) — the Classic Comics version.

Nowadays, teachers gloat, online, about expunging the poem from the canon.

Rod Dreher, in “Cancel Cult Comes For Homer,” explains the context for this latter development: the politically correct “intersectionalism” of public school teachers in the “#DisruptTexts” movement. “‘Be like Odysseus and embrace the long haul to liberation (and then take the Odyssey out of your curriculum because it’s trash),’ tweeted Shea Martin in June. ‘Hahaha,’ replied Heather Levine, an English teacher at Lawrence (Mass.) High School. ‘Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year!’”

Why? All that ancient racism and sexism.

Expelling the classics from schooling is absurd, of course, exposure to a diversity of ideas and historical achievements being what we used to call a “liberal education.” But today’s canon controllers are not liberal activists. They are, Dreher insists, totalitarian ones.

And they are quite emboldened — their ground-up, crowdsourced movement gets the usual pat approval by tax-funded educational institutions. It’s not a conspiracy if they boast about it on Twitter.

Here is a fun fact about The Odyssey: Samuel Butler, author of Erewhon (1872) and The Way of All Flesh (1903), conjectured that the real author of the poem was a woman. Yes, an “authoress.”

Nevertheless, that would not likely convince woke cultists to put The Odyssey back on your kids’ reading lists.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment ideological culture

The Portland Chaos

Portland, autonomous zone, protest

“As a lifelong Portlander,” Alan Grinnell writes to the editor of The Oregonian, “I am shocked at what our city has become.”

Responding to a Steve Duin column about Portland, the “broken city,” Grinnell asks, rhetorically, “Who would have thought that our downtown would become a wasteland, that there would be homeless camps everywhere in the city, and that gangs of armed thugs on all sides of the political spectrum would run out our police?”

Duin defined the problem as one of “mob rule,” lamenting that “just about everyone I spoke to was terrified they might be the next random target of the mob.”

After months of riots and property destruction following the killing of George Floyd by police in distant Minneapolis, Minnesota, the focus of recent police and community attention turned to a house on Mississippi Street from which so-called “sovereign citizens” — the Kinney family (who are black and indigenous) — were evicted for not paying their mortgage (since 2017). Now the house is being occupied by “activists,” who have turned the area into a sort of autonomous zone — as was done for weeks this summer, dangerously, in the Capitol Hill area of Seattle.

“[I]f you live or tend shop on North Mississippi, and fear for your own safety around the local ‘security’ forces,” inquired the columnist, “what do you make of the cops’ retreat from the neighborhood?” 

While many appear sympathetic with the Kinneys’ plight, the takeover by the terrorists, er, activists, is another matter entirely. One black man on reddit calls it “one big scam,” suggesting folks “ignore these loons.”

But ignoring willful lawbreakers appears to be the problem, not the solution.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Needed Theft

Seattle, Capitol Hill, crime, law, theft

Some Seattle city council members want to legalize theft when the thief is thereby meeting an “immediate basic need.”

A KOMO News reporter elaborates: “If someone . . . steals power tools with the intent of reselling them online in order to pay for a basic need like food or rent, the city of Seattle may be OK with that.”

This “principle” discards the principle that individuals have rights, including property rights, which it is wrong to violate by, for example, stealing. With the principle discarded, no line can be drawn to limit the amount of stealing one may do or the means of doing so. The needs of the person being robbed are somehow deemed irrelevant.

The Seattle plan might have spared Hugo’s Jean Valjean decades of being pursued by Javert. But the injustice there wasn’t that Valjean was punished for stealing a loaf of bread but that his punishment — 19 years as a galley slave — was so disproportionate.

Food is a continuing cost. Rent is. The immediacy keeps recurring. What if you have a $2,500 monthly rent?

Well, just gotta steal lots of power tools, and do so regularly. According to the babblers on the Seattle city council, “need” trumps the rights and lives of the innocent. So it’s okay to terrify somebody in a dark alley and grab their stuff even if the victim has an immediate basic need to be left alone.

Seattle has an immediate basic need for a new government that respects lives and property. Until then, let’s hope the “city limit” signs are well marked.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture individual achievement

The Individualist Economist

Walter Williams, obituary

Walter Williams died today. Or, by the time you read this, yesterday. 

Williams was a major figure in economics education, instrumental in building an economics program at George Mason University. Plus, he popularized economics for a wider audience with books, columns, and regular guest radio appearances on Rush Limbaugh’s show.

Dinesh D’Souza, in his video tribute, called Williams “an economist, an individualist, and an African-American conservative” when such people were rare. Especially the African-American variety.

Now, Williams’ main themes were not so much conservative as libertarian, citing Frédéric Bastiat a whole lot more than Edmund Burke. But D’Souza no doubt indicates that when he calls Williams an individualist. Consider it a euphemism for libertarian. 

And Williams certainly was an Individual — an individualist in more than just the political sense — though, we saw his resistance to mob pressure and groupthink most clearly in the realm of ideology. 

He could certainly have gotten wider praise had he stuck closer to the culturally dominant notion of what an African-American intellectual’s role was supposed to be. But instead of pushing “discrimination” as the major factor in differences of wealth and health outcomes in ethnic and racial groups in America, he insisted that actions have consequences, constantly reiterating the major themes of the classical liberal economists Adam Smith and Milton Friedman: people provide greater benefit to the general welfare when they marshal their own resources in a private property/free trade framework than when they pretentiously talk about the “public good” through special government programs. 

When two people trade, both gain. 

In politics, it’s too often about taking from some to give to others.

By being himself, going his own way, Walter Williams himself provided a great example of how to serve the common good. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights ideological culture

Cry No More

Jordan Peterson, censorship

And the children sing: “you can’t always get what you want.”

It’s a Rolling Stone song, and its album version does actually feature a children’s chorus (over adult singers).

I mention it not because I’ve just listened to the non-choral version put up in April by the famous rock group, a special pandemic recording. Though I just did. And perhaps it’s on my mind because the song was used by Donald Trump on his way to the White House, and at the present moment it sure doesn’t look like he’s going to get a second term.

“No, you can’t always get what you want want./ But if you try sometime, you just might find/ You get what you need.”

A silver lining for Trump voters?

No. It just came to mind when I learned that employees at Penguin broke down in tears when they learned that the huge publishing company was going to publish Jordan Peterson’s follow-up to his 2018 best-seller, 12 Rules for Life.

There was weeping, and it wasn’t for joy.

You see, the young people in the company said that Peterson is “an icon of hate speech and transphobia.” Oh, and he’s also “an icon of white supremacy,” and the lamenter admitted that “regardless of the content of his book, I’m not proud to work for a company that publishes him.”

It is really hard to sympathize. A major publishing company in an open society must be expected to publish a wide variety of material. So, buck up, as Peterson likes to say. Unless you own the place, you can’t always publish what you want.

More importantly, note that word: icon. That’s an image that stands for something by looking like that something.

How does Peterson look like a white supremacist or transphobe? 

By imputation. By ignoring his arguments. And by treating his fans as wholly other and as a unified mass.

Who can be hated and denied ever getting what they want. 

But such desired censorship is certainly not what we need.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling ideological culture

Disparate Outcomes, Desperate Logic

race, racism, education, testing, quota

“Virginia AG’s office finds elite Loudoun STEM school discriminates against Black, Hispanic students,” declared The Washington Post headline. 

Falsely. 

On Friday, Attorney General Mark Herring — another blackface-wearing state government leader — issued a 61-page report, saying “the Office of Attorney General Division of Human Rights finds there is reasonable cause to believe that Loudoun County Public Schools’ administration of the Academies of Loudoun program resulted in a discriminatory disparate impact on Black/African-American and Latinx/Hispanic students.” 

Though the investigation found the admission process to be “facially-neutral,” The Post informs that the program “in fact barred from admission qualified Black and Hispanic students who applied during the fall 2018 cycle.”

Yet blacks and Latinos were not barred. 

This year, 7 percent of black applicants were accepted and 11 percent of Hispanics. True, the acceptance rate for Asians was 13 percent and 15 percent for whites. But this gets tricky. Given their percentage of the overall student body, Asians were 42 percent overrepresented in the applicant pool, while blacks were 4 percent underrepresented, Latinos 6 percent, and whites underrepresented by a whopping 23 percent. 

“We request that Loudoun County Public Schools eliminate its discriminatory practices,” the report concludes. But . . . it did not stipulate any specific form of discrimination. Rather, it instructed the school district to work with the Loudoun County NAACP “to begin developing revised policies within 60 days.”

What sort of revisions are likely? 

Lower the entry requirements, reduce testing and “take into consideration the principle of geography/socio-economic equity.” 

You see, the problem they’re trying to fix isn’t racism, but the lack thereof.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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