Think “redistributing” discipline in schools along racial lines — as a sort of “racial justice” — will lead necessarily to either a softening of overall school discipline or else the unwarranted disciplining of non-Blacks for trumped-up offenses intended solely to meet new Orwellian government quotas (I ask you, which is more likely from members of the teacher’s unions, that they look to protect themselves or worry about the permanent records of a few unlikely whites or Asians, eg?)?
Racist.
Think aliens, simply be declaring themselves high school grads, or noting that they served in the military, etc., means they shouldn’t be released from charges related to domestic violence, hindering the reporting of a crime, and assault on a law enforcement official? — something that no actual citizen could get away with?
Racist who is against Dreamers — the very noble and best of the human race, striving to be free, willing to do the dirty jobs no spoiled American cocksucker will do, and regular whizzes at roofing!
Frankly, I’m ready to accept all such charges leveled against me — I also hate clean air, clean water, the autistic, the elderly, women, children, Muslims, etc. — be they from cynical leftists or cowardly GOP mouthpieces decrying the outrageous Visigothery of those who unhelpfully notice how this country is collapsing into a progressive-run shit heap animated by emotionalism and policed through political correctness and shame, and get on with my racist persecution of obvious race-based behavioral policies and an unconstitutional (that’s right, I don’t much care what John Roberts says on the matter, because I can read, as well) open border policy that leaves this country and its people vulnerable to attack or economic ruin.
Every governor should be prepared from here on out to resist the federal government in order to ensure the well-being of the citizens of the state, and in order to uphold the Constitution, under which we are all to be treated equally under the law.
Anyone who won’t do so needs to be voted out of office; those who promote such a takeover of the states by the federal government should be tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail.
It’s coming. I predicted it years ago — a soft civil war punctuated by demographic realignment and state civil disobedience — and for my troubles I was run out of polite company, both by liberal professors and left-leaning academics and of late, by “thinking Republicans” who pretend to embrace a conservatism that, properly understood, they find at best occasionally useful and at worst, inconvenient, constraining, and worthy of scorn.
And yet it approaches nevertheless.
You can blame me if you’d like. Sorry.
No one knows what it’s like
To feel these feelings
Like I do
And I blame YOU!
The eidos of punishment is socialist government. All punishments are One Punishment, all subjects equally treated when living under the socialists’ universal caning.
(Well, equally treated except for the punishers, but we ought not speak of them, out of a scrupulous determination to remain civil.)
By the way, this “discipline redistribution” idea fits quite nicely with what I take to be the thesis of Stanley Kurtz’s forthcoming book — though obviously I can only form this judgment by basing it on what little I’ve heard or seen in the way of general reviews and comments on that book: Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities
Jeff: I vaguely remember reading your long-ago forecasts referenced in the above post. Would love to read them again if you can update with links. Thanks in advance.
The Levin Effect
I’ll see if I can find them. I think I referenced them in the Kiteley posts, so if you were to do a search for “Kiteley” you can probably get to them from there.
Here you go. And there was a follow-up, referenced here, the two of which combined created a lot of discussion. Back in the days when I was linked.
Probably a lot of the real meat took place in the comment threads.
Hope that helps.
Here’s a Kitely one. And here’s the link within it. And (one of) the earlier link(s) within that.
Thanks, sdferr. I just put up a new post with the full quote.
Actually, it’s just a new iteration of a post I put up in 2010 with the full quote.
I tire of figuring out new ways to be shunned. Figure it’s best to just stick with the classics.
This utopian thing sure is complicated. I wonder how they will work out little Timmy’s punishment formula when it’s found his black mother’s father is white, and his Japanese father’s mother was native American?
I don’t know, Lee, the one-drop rule was good enough for Copperheads back in the day….
This idea has been around for a while – I remember reading about it last year.
My initial thought is that inner city schools are going to be AWESOME once the problem kids cannot be suspended, etc, because they’ve already met their monthly ceiling/quota for offenses.
begin tl;dr
Where is the realistic alternative to Upton Sinclair’s paranoid fantasy It Can’t Happen Here? Literature is littered with left-wing projections of dystopian societies… all naturally designed to look like the stepchildren of
classical liberalismnasty, evil, greedy conservatives and right-wingers. (They dare not admit the classical liberalism that led an enlightened way out of medieval feudalism is the ancestor of conservatism, as it is known nowadays.)It can happen here, and it won’t look like blond haired supermen in jackboots dragging you off to prison. It won’t even look like the dystopia I manufactured in 1984, although as a disillusioned leftist I understood enough to call my Leviathan “Ingsoc,” English Socialism.
Let us list the likely features of the coming hivemind Panopticon we will enjoy in a few decades unless a wave of cultural change prevents it. (Because the problem is so deep it is nearly beyond political redress.) Our society right now provides a “safety net” broad enough that anyone who refuses to work or is incapable of it may receive gratis, as a matter of political right, a few hundred square feet of shelter, stipends for food or entertainment (if carefully bartered), free medical care, even free contraception. What proportion of the population will consider this “good enough” when the alternative is to work at a menial job and end up with the same benefits?
http://bit.ly/QSrmVC
Add to our list the deliberate eradication of the meaning of “rights.” Do you ever notice how leftist frequently prattle about “expanding rights?” Usually they talk about creating more and more rights for separate victim or identity groups, but not always. And who other than an evil, greedy conservative would be against expanding rights? Yet how can a right be expanded or a new one created? You can do so only if your understanding of a “right” is not a restriction on what government or other people may do to you or demand from you, but instead is an entitlement… a prerogative to make someone else your slave. After all, the right to your own property or labor takes nothing from anyone. On the other hand, if you believe you have a right to medical care, that implies someone must be forced to give it to you. The right to a job? A “living wage?” How about a right to prevent “job discrimination?” In other words, a demand that society force someone who hires you to give up his freedom to choose whom he hires. This perversion of “rights” is many decades old.
Let us add one more feature, although you can surely identify many more. Increasingly the people no longer exercise control over our government. In rational thought, this is known as “tyranny,” but to say so is considered silly or paranoid. If so, then observe the size and scope of government and its titanic powers. Just have a look:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_federal_agencies
https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www2.census.gov/govs/apes/g10aspep.pdf
https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www2.census.gov/govs/apes/10fedfun.pdf
ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/suppl/empsit.compaes.txt
http://www.opm.gov/feddata/historicaltables/totalgovernmentsince1962.asp
State and local governments employed 19.6 million people as of March 2010
Survey data do not include contracted employees of governments.
The feds employ about 4.4 million including the military. Add that to state and local governments and you have nearly 25 million working for Leviathan. Compare this to March 2010 total private employees, about 107 million. Consider that nearly a quarter of the working population serves the part of society that can legally rob, imprison and even kill you. The point is not so much that 25 million people will not vote to shrink or impoverish their employer. The point is that:
Of the [Federal Register’s] 81,405 pages published in 2010, 46,758 were dedicated to rules or proposed rules. Another 34,306 pages contained notices of federal agency hearings, meetings, investigations, decisions and the like. And 611 pages were presidential documents – things like executive orders and presidential proclamations.
http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2011/jul/01/randy-forbes/rep-forbes-says-federal-registration-containing-re/
That is from a leftist site, politifact.com. It entirely misses the significance of Forbes criticism. Leaving aside the reams of laws of individual states, what do 46,758 pages of rules permit Leviathan and its bureaucracies to do? Nearly anything any of its bureaucracies want. Thanks to philosopher-king John Roberts, we now have several thousand pages of Obamacare written in stone… or to be trenchant, unwritten. Does anyone actually know what is in that law? Even the Democrats admit no one read the whole thing. The powers of the law are so vast that their concrete form remains unwritten to this day. What is the phrase that continually reappears in Obamacare? “The Secretary shall determine…” Which in practice means a tentacled web of bureaucrats will write law on their own, and rewrite it the next day if they so choose. The Secretary shall determine that he will delegate policy to an army of subordinate bureaucrats, unelected and unanswerable to the electorate. And they make up nearly a quarter of our workforce, a quarter of us vassals to the crown, tasked with micromanaging the peasants.
Now, this is not new. Mulitply this state of affairs over the alphabet soup of bureaucracies, federal or otherwise. EPA, OSHA, EEOC, USDA, FTC, FCC, HHS, on and on and on. The real power in this country is actually decentralized into bureaucratic redoubts. This helps to explain how, no matter which party takes office, the size and power of unelected bureaucrats only grows and grows. It is like a metastasized cancer. It has spread for decades, ever since Wilson decided that the Constitution was a weary, uninspiring document.
So. Put all of this together and you have a formula for transmuting the nation into an ant colony of clientelism and entrenched interest groups, where few have the will or desire to leave the cheaply gilded cage of government blandishments, leafed with pyrite and stocked with subsidized food pellets. Just hop on your exercise wheel, it’s patriotic. Besides, you need to generate electricity for the cage next to you, and that wheel won’t spin itself, comrade.
It could just be the Department of
ReEducation.Indeed. It’s not the laws that will do us in, even though there’s 100,000 pages of those written every year. But for every page of law some pointy-headed beadle writes another 100 pages of implementing regulations. The devil is indeed in the details and that’s one hell of a lot of details. And you’d be surprised — or not! — how often the implementing regulations simply require whatever said beadle wants, no matter how tenuous the connection to the intent of the law. They have their little fiefdoms and we’re the peasants.
Thanks, Jeff and sdferr for digging out those links. Since I no longer read the New York Times on Sunday morning, this will give me something to go with my coffee.
Jeff from what I’ve seen “polite company” among bloggers is an unofficial cartel based on channeling hits/views/clicks to sponsored friends and away from any competitor. No patron and no linking makes it much harder to get views hits or clicks. I’m not sure its entirely about rhetorical compatibility though. I think it’s more about maximizing revenue.
This thing went corporate and a lot f bloggers weren’t told so they faded away. Then those who made it into the corporate bosom got culled because the big earners wanted more money instead of more content.
I am almost convinced that elections don’t matter. The bureaucracy has achieved critical mass and follows its own inertia. Elected politicians are ornaments and distractions.
Fire and forget.