House of Eratosthenes

Now that it’s late enough in the year that we can play Christmas carols, we’re thinking an awful lot about environments. You probably are, too. This is the season for, among other things, guesting and hosting; if you’re hosting, you’re constructing an environment, and if you’re a guest you’re going to be venturing into one. If you are neither a guest nor a host, your environment is certainly changing. Stores and streets are getting decorated. There’s a whole different genre of music being played wherever you go. Environments change people. That’s why we change our environments. It is, when you get right down to it, a method of communication. It is messaging.

We also tend to think a lot, this time of year, about material needs and wants, placing emphasis on filling them and relaxing the concerns we would usually have about how the resources are being depleted. We think a bit more about poverty, and we focus on curing it in the here-and-now, not thinking too much about whether it will stay cured in the new year, or what caused it in the first place. For the conservative mindset, this is a seasonal change of pace. It might be a bit uncomfortable to some of us. And, given that it’s a bit under a month out of the year, it might be a healthy thing. We’ve been working our butts off to try to increase the savings, or at least not reduce them, and pay down the credit card balances — all year. We can go a tiny bit in the other direction for a week or two, right? For good causes: Charity, fellowship, happiness.

Swimsuit 1 I don’t know what liberals do about Christmas. There is so much required & expected paradigm shift, anywhere on the outside, that within their stately pleasure-dome is just business as usual. They think about spending, and neglect long-term consequences, all the time. They “cure” poverty, without a care in the world about whether it’ll stay cured, using other people’s money — all year long. No wonder they have a tough time getting into the spirit.

And getting back to that thing about environments: They think about that all of the time, too. That’s what these Yale and Mizzou protests were all about, right? “Safe spaces” and what-not. Lefties love to complain, even when there’s no substance to the complaint — when things are already being done the way they want…

By my rough count, Yale offers 26 courses on African-American studies, 64 courses on “Ethnicity, Race and Migration, and 41 courses under the heading of “Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.” I am probably low-balling the real numbers (they don’t include independent study) and the extent of the indoctrination, since you can be sure that many seemingly conventional courses are chock-a-block with left-wing treacle. How many courses are there on the Constitution? Well, from what I can tell: two…

As for safe spaces, there is already an Afro-American Cultural Center, a Native American Cultural Center, an Asian American Cultural Center, La Casa Latino Cultural Center, and the Office of LGBTQ Resources. Included among the 80 or so official student organizations:

– A Learning and Interactive Vietnamese Experience
– Asian American Students Alliance
– Asian American Studies Task Force
– Association of Native Americans at Yale, Undergraduate Organization
– India at Yale
– IvyQ (as in “Queer”)
– Japanese Undergraduate Students at Yale
– Latina Women at Yale
– Liberal Party
– Reproductive Rights Action League at Yale
– Sex and Sexuality Week Planning Board…
:
And the response from the activists? A loaded-diaper tantrum about how Yale is a hotbed of bigotry against people of color and women.

There is justice in this. As Bret Stephens wrote in the Wall Street Journal,

For almost 50 years universities have adopted racialist policies in the name of equality, repressive speech codes in the name of tolerance, ideological orthodoxy in the name of intellectual freedom. Sooner or later, Orwellian methods will lead to Orwellian outcomes. Those coddled, bullying undergrads shouting their demands for safer spaces, easier classes, and additional racial set-asides are exactly what the campus faculty and administrators deserve.

Not a very festive thought. But then again, universities are supposed to — are entrusted to — build a better world of tomorrow, to benefit their students along with all of society. And they’re hardly fulfilling the promise by working according to Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.

Swimsuit 2 Amid these thoughts of Schadenfreude, and the self-inflicted knuckle-rapping that arrives right afterward given how unfitting it is for this time of year, it’s easy to lose sight of another point. That The Left actually deserves credit, on no small scale, for taking the initiative. They understand the very first point I made, up top, that an environment has a powerful effect on the people in it. This is another thing conservatives just begin to understand, and exercise on a regular basis this time of year, but as a novelty — whereas the liberals understand the same thing, and do the same thing for the same reasons, all year long. And year after year it works that way, too.

Consequently, our environments are liberal. If you’re unfortunate enough to sit in family court, you sit in a liberal environment. Even if you don’t, you probably have to go to work. Surely that must be a conservative environment, since liberals don’t work…right? Wrong. Unless your “office” is someplace outside, and you have to wear heavy gloves on your hands to do what you do, and you get dirty doing it, it’s safe to say you work in an environment liberals have created for you. And furthermore, they did that because they know it has an effect on you, what you think about, how you behave. And furthermore, although you don’t want to admit it, it’s probably working.

Can you put a picture of Jordan Carver or Kate Upton on the wall, in all their swimsuit-wearing wonderfulness? No, you can’t? Well of course not. And why not? Because of the Yale/Mizzou issue, the “safe spaces.” This is a relatively new thing. It comes from Meritor Savings Bank vs. Vinson, Harris vs. Forklift Systems, Robinson vs. Jacksonville Shipyards…and other acts of judicial terrorism. Yes, terrorism. The word applies, accurately, perfectly.

[T]he use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes.

So an image of Kate Upton in a bathing suit where it can be seen…an image of your wife in a bathing suit where it can be seen…can end your career. As an extension of that, any visual reminder that you’re a straight male who appreciates the imagery of women in bathing suits, can end your career. Acting too much like a straight male can end your career. Liberal-looney-ville on steroids. And people tend to forget: We’re not talking about some geographic region, or family court, or traffic court, or some stuffy living room in the house of some loathed lefty-liberal sister-in-law or any sort of edge-case like those. We’re not even talking about government offices. Liberals know where to hurt us: We’re talking about all workplaces, anything potentially under the authority of the American judicial system.

Any vocation that is not overwhelmingly male-dominated, they’ve got men living in fear. They’ve even got men talking in pitches a whole octave, or more, above what’s natural for them.

We’re going to be on the road this Christmas, visiting; we plan to grab one household by the scruff of the neck, meld it with our household, and drag it to yet another household. That’s a net of three, which is quite the cocktail. As we put together the plans for what we might be doing and how we might be doing it, we have been constantly reminded that people have been spending all year long functioning in different environments, and so they have become acclimated to thinking differently. We’re not liberals, so this is a novelty for us. The rest of the year, we have goals, then there is an environment that might make some of the goals a bit more difficult, and we think of the environment as just an “oh, well.” Like driving through bad weather on your way to work, or trudging up a hill on your way to a corner grocery store: The environmental factors might make things a bit more challenging but they’re not going to stop us. That’s how conservatives think about environment. It isn’t something you try to control, or build, more like something you endure. It isn’t going to change what gets accomplished at the end, worst-case it will only slow it down a little tiny bit.

Swimsuit 3 Liberals are much smarter about this. They never stop thinking about environments. That’s because when you engage this messaging to your fellow humans by way of controlling the environment, it’s purely a monologue and not a dialogue. This is exactly the sort of conversation liberals like to have, and all the time. Purely one-way. Even when they call it a “dialogue,” that’s what they have in mind. So it is natural that they think about this all of the time, whereas to the conservatives, it’s a change of pace to be thinking about it at all.

The irony is that, to the leaders of the progressive movement, this is as easy as taking candy from the proverbial baby. Just keep walking through Alinsky’s rules, keep the resentments sharp, keep the jealousies high, do a lot of complaining, get others to do a lot of complaining. Everything is on your side — five justices on the Supreme Court rule your way, the very next day you can lose that five-vote majority and the decision is already locked in to the nation’s jurisprudence, for all practical purposes forever. The followers of the movement, on the other hand, never actually get what they want, because the people around them won’t be behaving the way liberal doctrine demands they behave. People don’t lose their fondness for an object because they are denied access to it by way of an artificially created shortage, nor do they acquire a new fondness for something because they are deluged with it by way of an artificially created abundance. That just isn’t the way the human condition works.

So when liberals take control of an environment to change human behavior — all year long — they are engaging a plan that works great for the leaders of their movement, but never can possibly work for any of the rest of them. A year later, or in two years, or ten, they’ll still be nursing exactly the same grudges about “society expects such-and-such” or “it objectifies me” or “shoving religion down my throat” or “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” Be that as it may, they do at least get the practice hours in at this, which keeps them smarter than their friends and relatives who are conservative. Or, not-liberal. To us normal people, it takes all of the time between Thanksgiving and Boxing Day to get adjusted to the idea that an environment is something we can affect. And we use up most of that time trying to adjust to the belated discovery that our extended-family relatives, having spent all year long in different environments, don’t think the same way, don’t cope with life the same way. It’s particularly challenging when we see this is as the root cause of some of the gaps in material wants and needs, that for the holiday season’s sake, we’re trying to cure. The festivities require that this train of thought be confined to the here-and-now, since it’s a drag to be thinking about January and onward. That’s challenging to the conservative mind, which when laboring to come up with a solution to a problem, tends to place undue emphasis on…yeah, it’s crazy-talk, I know…actually solving it, like, as in, for reals.

[…] Theory Environments Who’s Got the Database? “Republican Uncle” “Deserves to be Believed” […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 12/07/2015 @ 07:22
…and I was just going to ask, “How can I hide the images on this page so I can read this at work during break?”
- P_Ang | 12/07/2015 @ 12:18
[…] consider it a form of repatriation.” But of course six votes is not many, and there are many environments, some natural, some constructed artificially, in which it could go the other […]
- Bad Theory | H2o Positivo | 12/07/2015 @ 22:24

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EnvironmentsSaturday, December 5th, 2015

Environments
Saturday, December 5th, 2015