Touching the touchiest subject. Begone. The rise of the mid-wits.
20230213
Glenn Greenwald writes in defense of Joe Rogan, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. They are accused of anti-Semitism by a powerful group of lobbyists. Greenwald expands on Rogan’s quote:
Joe Rogan: Sitting next to Ilhan Omar, where she's apologizing for talking about “it's all about the Benjamins”, which is just about money she's talking about. Shouldn't have apologized. I mean, that's some anti-Semitic statement. I don't think that. It's about Benjamins or money. You know, the idea that Jewish people are not into money is ridiculous. Listen, that's like saying Italians aren't into pizza.
I love guys who have the power to speak the unadorned truth. The sad thing about this age is that it is so rare. I’ll forgive Greenwald for being wrong about Russia. Asking whether this war is in America’s interest is an appropriate question. I think he has the wrong answer, but intelligent people can disagree.
IMHO the Jewish lobby’s overuse of naked power to shut people up fosters Anti-Semitism. Like any kind of political correctness, it stokes repressed resentment. The Jews’ history is all too full of instances of such resentment leading to tragedy when it boils to the surface. Jews such as Norman Finkelstein, David Cole, Jonathan Cook and Greenwald himself are wise enough to counsel that when somebody has a beef about them, they should pay attention.
On that note, an email group that included me on its periphery just excluded me with the snippy request “Graham, Email protocol suggests that you do not reply all when you are BCC’d. To the rest of you, I apologize.”
I had not noticed that whereas the fifteen others were CC’d, I had been BCC’d. My sin? My concluding paragraph “Therefore I rather reluctantly, but almost entirely agree with what is written here [by Thomas Friedman, NYT]. In my mind this is the end of Russia as a great power. Hence the beginning of the end of NATO - we don't need it after Russia.”
The chorus booed, saying that the fall of the USSR had not ended NATO and neither should the fall of Russia. They note as well that I had been consistently wrong about, among other things, the Covid vaccinations, which they still consider wonderful.
They do not want to read anything written by this misinformed Goy. This is a sad but apt commentary on the divisions within our society today. It won’t hurt my feelings to be dropped from this email list, but I’ll be damned if I’ll remain as a second-class citizen, fit only to be silently treated to the opinions of a superior, chosen group of people. Resent them? No. Remember? Yes I will.
Here’s a note to Jack Tiscione. You ask me several times to unsubscribe you. I have a strong desire to do that, but there is no subscriber email address with your name. While there were several new subscriber emails about the end of January, the timeframe in which you showed up, I do not wish to bother readers who are not involved in your issues. Here is what I recommend:
At the bottom of each mailing you will find the following text:
Please, please take advantage of it. Follow the link and begone.
Here is an interesting graph from an article in the Unz Review entitled “Average IQ of College Undergrads and Graduate Degree Holders by Decade.” It corroborates Ed Dutton’s point that our society is being run by mid-wits. The decline is due in parts to the facts that more people now go to college, overall declining intelligence, and the fact that white men are increasingly discouraged from attending.
That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where Oksana is off to another all-day musical course and I will once again take the kids shopping. As the temperature has risen to the high 20s, I think we’ll walk to the farmer’s market.
Just got a totally predictable email accusing me of being an anti-Semite. For supporting Greenwald, Cook, David Cole, Finkelstein etc. To which we could add Steve Kirsch, Harvey Risch, Jessica Rose, Stephen Pinker....and the 200 or so Jews I have reviewed favorably on Amazon. Go figure.
Calling me names isn't going to make me change. It detracts from your credibility. It muddies the waters, complicating useful dialog. In short, it is pretty dumb. You who style yourselves so smart, please stop acting so stupid!
I think the lower IQ scores in the graph suggest that more people are attending college these days, collecting a pretty piece of paper that you need in order to get a job. When you include a larger segment of society, you tend to revert to the mean. That idiot, Obama, wanted everybody to get a degree, but college is not for everybody. Somebody's got to fix the plumbing or keep on the lights. Not everything can be done on a computer screen. I think they have dumbed down the populace with shoddy education, the purpose of which is to raise slaves, or better even, robots. Robots are superior because they don't gripe, don't slack, and don't get sick. They only break down from time to time. You don't have to pay them sick leave or provide maternity care.
I think people are equally intelligent today as they were yesterday, but most of them don't know the things that "educated" people are supposed to know. There is a standard of what is considered educated, and at the turn of the Century it was Latin, Greek, and the like, while today many kids can't find the US on a map, but they know about the Kardashians. It's still knowledge but not exactly the knowledge that is considered important.
If you want to know what is considered to be educated today, watch the British TV program called University Challenge. The questions there establish the standard of what is considered knowledge.
Let's not forget that Shakespeare never went to college and neither did Chaucer, the two greatest writers in the English language. Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Sophocles, and Euripides didn't get a degree. George Washington didn't have a formal education, neither did Thomas Jefferson. They were home schooled, and we should be grateful for that. They didn't have to sing God Save the King in class every day. Today, public schools teach conformity and the important values of the day, like Gender dysphoria and Global Warming and the repression of the poor by the World Bank, not anything useful. In Berlin, they let kids out of school one day a year so they can protest and be little copies of Greta Thunberg, the champion of climate stupidity.
Just listening this morning to a podcast by Tulsi Gabbard who was home schooled. She's very sharp, very articulate, even if I disagree with her about the war in Ukraine. She was interviewing a guy named Matt Beaudreau who was a teacher and now runs alternative education programs. I don't want to call them schools. He says that a motivated kid can learn everything that is taught in 12 years of schooling in 2-3 years. I have said that a kid like me needs only one year to get all the education taught in our public schools.
He calls it industrial education and he's right. It's ground into students until they hate school and everything to do with school, except their friends. In Germany where modern education was established, like modern medicine, I might add, they intended to teach the peons to operate the machinery. They needed factory workers for the modern industrial world and they are still teaching the same way today. For the brightest kids in German schools, the curriculum is there to make engineers, not human beings who are happy and fulfilled by life, who are doing what gives them joy. There is no joy in the German school system. There is no joy in Germany for that matter. Germans are very serious about school.
The first rule is you will follow the rules. There is no second rule.
When a bird has been sitting in a cage for a long time, the other birds that fly by the cage look insane. No sane bird flies. Right?