Posted on 01/14/2010 7:15:09 AM PST by Tolik
Ping !
Let me know if you want in or out. Links:
FR Index of his articles: http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/victordavishanson/index NRO archive: http://author.nationalreview.com/?q=MjI1MQ== Pajamasmedia: http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/ His website: http://victorhanson.com/
Just a partial list: http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/victordavishanson/index:
Just a partial list. Much more at the link: http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/victordavishanson/index
Re: Ivy League - I will take a Service Academy graduate or a Land Grant School graduate ANY DAY over an Ivy Leaguer.
7. mikemcdaniel:Dr. Hanson: Fine and insightful post, as always, and please allow me to thank you for the opportunity to participate in an informed, but practical and common sense commentary community.
I see an interesting thread running through your five issues: Merit, and the liberal hatred of it. In order to buy socialism, which is above all an unshakeable belief in the necessity of equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity, one must utterly ignore individual merit, and where it cannot be ignored, it must be attacked in every possible venue. America, a capitalism democracy was actually built on individual merit, and whenever we have, as individuals, businesses, schools, institutions, a people and a government, tried to ignore it, unpleasantness has occurred.
Illegal Immigration: We cannot even call illegal immigrants illegal immigrants, but “undocumented this or that.” Because everyone must have the same outcome–American citizenship and all its benefits–liberals cannot consider merit, even as the elite of the elite push the idea that American citizenship is absolutely nothing special. Thus an illiterate former drug runner with no marketable skills should receive the same immigration consideration as a college educated engineer. That America is reaching the point California long ago reached–that there are no longer enough meritorious, productive citizens to provide unlimited equality of opportunity (endless entitlements) for those without merit–is never considered by liberals because acknowledging it would undermine their entire belief system.
War/Heroism: Heroes–and there have been many in the last decade- plus, including at last count, two women who have won the Silver Star, the only two since WWII–are the epitome of merit, but they must be studiously ignored lest the virtue of merit become obvious. As a high school teacher, I’ve discovered that my students cannot name a single decorated military hero of their lifetime (something I endeavor to remedy), though most are pretty much on top of the most recent American Idol contenders. On the positive side, they don’t know who John Kerry, the military, pseudo-hero poster boy of the left, is either. In the same way, America’s success in war cannot be lauded, because, again, this inescapably reveals skill and incredible martial merit, and America, as our post-American president has made clear, is just another of the many nations, without particular merit in any way. To remedy this, I tell my students of the battle of 73 Easting. Perhaps the Haitians will have a different view of the relative merit of our military in the days to come, though I doubt our president will.
Affirmative Action: This issue is all about merit, and the tacit admission by the proponents of affirmative action that those they seek to advance are not smart and capable enough to succeed on their own, and with affirmative action, they need expend no effort to become such. They will always lack that which must never be spoken. Thus has the Obama Justice Department filed suit against the New Jersey State Police because they require a written test for promotion to Sgt. on the laws they must enforce. Too many whites are being promoted, you see, so the test must, ipso facto, be discriminatory. Merit can never enter into such equations. Presumably society would like to employ police supervisors who actually know and can discourse at some length on the laws they are charged with enforcing and teaching to their subordinates, but then, that would require that merit be considered. Left to its own devices, New Jersey would prefer to do that. Our DOJ disagrees. Oh yes, let’s keep in mind that many liberals absolutely hate the police in general, considering them only slightly above frozen lobster on the relative intelligence and morality scale, yet they labor to lower the level of the general police intelligence pool. Being forced to ignore human nature and merit has all kinds of interesting contradictions and consequences.
Elite Schools: The confluence of all of these issues is in our elite schools where lunatic speech codes reign supreme and political orthodoxy rather than merit is the primary, indeed, even the sole, hiring and tenure granting criteria. Liberals scorn Gov. Sarah Palin because she graduated from some little school in Idaho and actually attended several schools before graduating. As she pointed out in her book, she and her contemporaries often had to take a semester off to work to earn enough money to continue, yet did continue, and left college with a degree and without crushing debt. This is, to most Americans who are free to consider the reality of such things, meritorious, but of course, cannot be taken into account as merit does not exist in the liberal worldview, thus we end up with Cornel West, Ward Churchill, Michael Mann and similar hucksters. My undergraduate degree transcript includes credits from four separate institutions, and I too worked while attending school. I suspect this is not at all unusual in most colleges, but may well be in the Ivy League. The fact that I earned that degree in 2.5 years and made the dean’s list every semester would be meaningless because I did not graduate from an elite school, and anyone who did, though they majored in beer and barely passed, would be considered my superior in every way. And of course, affirmative action ensures that far too many people will attend college, people who are simply not ready and/or intellectually capable of genuine college level work, and who will quickly drop out, or worse, will eventually be granted a degree in the name of equality of outcome rather than individual merit. Society is schizophrenic in this. We dare not suggest that some are not capable of college level work, that some people are just smarter than others, but we don’t bat an eyelash over the reality that only a select few will inhabit the ranks of the varsity football team. Sports–which many liberals scorn–seems to be our sole exception to the practiced ignorance of merit.
Middle East: Merit applies here again, for the Israelis have done something that no people who live in that part of the world (with the very limited possible exceptions of the Lebanese and the Jordanians) have done: Made the desert bloom. Not only that, they’ve established a modern, thriving, technologically advanced society that rivals any in a region that is, for the most part, still living in the 7th century. Note the contortions, the blatant lies that must be advanced to ignore the merit of Israel and her citizens. So caught up is the world, and these days, our government, that America seems willing to allow a second Holocaust rather than admit that merit matters, that Israel has it, and that her enemies are essentially 7th century barbarians with modern weapons who would be only to happy to murder us when they’re done with the Jews. People who produce nothing, who build nothing, who live only to destroy, are lauded by the elite, the intellectual, the nuanced, when the Israelis, who seek only to live in peace, and failing that, preserve their lives, are scorned.
There are hopeful signs, however. Having been exposed to Obama and his functionaries, more and more Americans are coming home to the idea that merit matters and that not everyone, for example, should live in their own home because they just can’t afford it. Most Americans understand that this is why we have apartments and do not look down on those who live in them. Still, in the understanding and acceptance of the importance of merit, lies at least part of our salvation. Now if only the congressional Republicans would believe it and act on it rather than behaving like slightly more civilized versions of liberals…
Wow! One of VDH’s most incisive and all-encompassing essays ever.
An obvious candidate for beneficial cognitive diversity./s
VDH bump.
How about a graduate from the Cornell Univ School of Agriculture (an original Land Grant College)?
More Taboo:
6) Global Warming is unproven
7) Social Security is a dinosaur that needs to be retired
8) Obama has not yet proven his eligibility
Oh isn’t he wonderful?
The political problem with Iraq is it became toxic from 2005-2007 when things were going bad and Bush kept on saying they were going good. Sure, Bush finally under a democrat controlled congress employed the surge and fixed what looked to be a coming disaster. But by that point the popular conventional political wisdom was “Bush lied to get us into war. He lied to us and lied to democrats”. (Not saying this was the case.)
The fact is it was Bush, Cheney and Condi out on national TV every day promoting the need for the invasion(Mushroom clouds, WMDs, Iraq pay for it's reconstruction, greeted as liberators, ...) . And they alone made the decision.
There was no amount of explaining or playing of CSPAN tapes on talk radio that could remove those images of Bush responsible.
bump
He means "hamstringed."
Umm...because Germans usually blow other people up when taking back lost lands...they're really good at that, but it's been a problem for them...
One Freeper even put forth a reasonable argument that these two were among the poorer presidents and certainly the worst of their era.
I also find Hanson's following statement amusing: cf. the con of mostly white candidates claiming some sort of Native American ancestry . . .
The actual probability of a white person being able to claim some Native American ancestry is quite high if they can trace their ancestry in this country back to the 18th century. It becomes even higher (close to 75%) if they can trace it back to the 17th century. The reason is simple math-- the number of direct ancestors doubles every generation and the pool of available people shrinks.
Yeah, I know, we're talking 1/32nd or, in the more common cases, 1/64th or even 1/128th (or less) Native American blood. But it is based on facts, however small. And it is a trend likely to continue as long as special rights are conferred on certain minorities.
Excellent piece....and I agree those are five things that need to be discussed, but is too PC (even for the going-liberal Fox News).
One more to add.....
The Failure of Free Trade, and how so-called conservatives agree with George Soros, Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, and other far-lefties....agree on Free Trade....and the refusal to discuss its outright failure
I think Hanson is wrong here. It is quite conceivable that any given student going to St. John's instead of Yale would come out with a better education than if he had chosen the Ivy, but the talent pool that Yale gets to pick from "did better" on average in high school and they are likely to continue doing so after they get their four year degree.
ML/NJ
Actually, he means hamstrung. It is the correct word.
Unfortunately my maxim about Service Academy graduates doesn’t hold true for presidents. Carter and Grant were graduates of Annapolis and West Point respectively. Grant was a brilliant general but a poor president.
Bump
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