House of Eratosthenes

College campus idiots — and that includes faculty members and administrators — call for the celebration of and respect for all cultures. In their eyes, it’s racist Eurocentrism to think that Western values and culture are superior to others. But that’s the height of stupidity. Ask your campus multiculturalist who believes in cultural equivalency: Is forcible female genital mutilation, as practiced in nearly 30 sub-Saharan African and Middle Eastern countries, a morally equivalent cultural value? Slavery is practiced in Sudan and Niger; is that a cultural equivalent? In most of the Middle East, there are numerous limits on women — such as prohibitions on driving, employment, voting and education. Under Islamic law, in some countries, female adulterers face death by stoning, and thieves face the punishment of having their hand severed. Some multiculturalists are members of campus LGBT groups. Ask them to what extent the Muslim culture would tolerate their lifestyle.

At the very heart of multiculturalism is an attack on Christianity. Much of that attack has its roots among hypocrites in the intellectual elite. For example, Duke University sponsored Muslim calls to prayer in the name of promoting “religious pluralism,” until external pressures forced it to cancel the practice. Earlier, Duke administrators removed Chick-fil-A as a campus vendor because of CEO Dan Cathy’s comments regarding his religious opposition to homosexual marriage. So much for religious pluralism, tolerance and free speech.

Some public school boards have attempted to ban songs containing references to Santa Claus, Jesus or religious Christmas symbols. One school district banned a teacher from using excerpts from historical documents in his classroom because they contained references to God and Christianity. The documents in question were the Declaration of Independence and “The Rights of the Colonists,” by Samuel Adams.

Hat tip to Bird Dog at Maggie’s Farm.

It is a usurpation, one that is as successful as it is only because it exists outside of our conventional understanding of what usurpation can be. There is no one single radical-Islamic group that has elected or planted 51 percent of the membership of a board of regents or directors anywhere; no corporate takeover, no sale of stock made this happen, no transfer of debt. And yet, a switch has been flipped. Just a few years ago, in our most heated presidential elections it was the left-of-center candidate, ultimately victorious, who declared that marriage was the union between a man and a woman. That President has been evolving and if He had been doing this evolution in isolation, there wouldn’t be anything scary about it at all, that would be the basis of independent thinking. But of course that’s not what’s happening; we have one guy who wakes up in the morning, mulls over whatever is in His noggin, God only knows how, then communicates the latest “evolution” down through the layers of the organizational hierarchy like the Captain of a ship who’s received new orders from the Admiralty.

And that is not the basis of independent thinking. It is directly contrary to it.

We don’t understand this sort of usurpation, because there is no one individual, organization or faction that is making it happen. The usurpation is one of ideas, or to be even more precise about it, characteristics of ideas. Quoting myself yet again,

Our “civilization” at the moment…is embroiled in a cold civil war…between people who refuse to define things, and people who MUST see to it that things are strongly defined before they can do what they do.

“This and that culture are morally equivalent” is a statement that shuns, not embraces, definitions — nevermind whether it is true or false, we can’t even make it that far because the statement lacks the characteristic of testability. Morally equivalent in what way? How do we replicate the experiment? You can’t, because there wasn’t one. The whole thought process is backward.

Institutions have changed their thinking because people have changed their thinking. It is not a desire for the enhancement or expansion of freedom for others that has motivated this new kind of thinking; it is a desire for the self to get along with large groups of others. And, there’s a little bit of “and fuck everybody else” mixed in there too. We might as well face it, if the primary motivator is good-standing membership in a crowd, that’s going to be rather meaningless if someone else isn’t excluded from the crowd.

But we’re left with, what is this crowd if there is no puppet master, no one single kingmaker or cabal working the controls, buying up majority shares of stock, encroaching on the membership of a board somewhere? What then is changing? It is a shift that comes from changing incentives. The evil itself is within us, has always been within us, it’s the different climate that is bringing it out of too many of us. So it’s rather like asking “how did the maggots get in the coffin if it’s sealed so tightly?” They were brought in, of course, with the cadaver. Embalmed or not, before and after the moment of demise, “he” always had them.

But let’s go for a metaphor that involves a little less “eww.” We’re rather like the statue in the town square that changes appearance as the shadows shift with the passing of the day. This part of the face is not changing, nor that part, face, arms, legs, et al; the rays of light that are acting on the object, are what’s changing. That’s how the thing about definitions becomes relevant. Just a few decades ago, people had to make life and death decisions based on definitions of things. We made a point of knowing what those decisions were, before we decided. Now, we don’t. We may still make the decisions, but all too often if you try to get something defined, the details are kept hidden from you. The most common outcome now is for the consumer to decide it’s just not worth the effort, and after one or two attempts to educate himself much more casually, roll the dice and hope for the best.

“Educate himself more casually” is typically something to do with asking advice from someone who’s made a similar decision. But that only works as well as the honesty of the other person, combined with how similar the two situations may be. Either way though, we’re not thriving on definitions to do our thing anymore; too many among us, the most vocal among us, do absolutely nothing that relies on them. Passing an exam in college is the closest they ever come, and passing exams is, boiled down to its raw essentials, reaching “success” in agreeing with someone unseen about the answers. Or at least most of them.

And there’s your problem; consensus is displacing correctness. A agrees with B, that means whatever it is must be correct. It looks and feels so much like real validation. But what if we go beyond B, and there are more people in the room — what if everyone agrees except one guy? You may look at that as an opportunity for an exchange of ideas. Or, you may look at that as one ostracism away from consensus, and if consensus equals truth, then it’s only obvious what has to happen next.

So the multi-culti nonsense, like so many other cancers being left largely unchecked, is an offshoot of this new-age thinking. The culprit is technology. It’s done wonderful things for us and we owe it a great deal, but it’s created generations of people who don’t actually know how to think. There hasn’t been any reason to. They don’t face tests in life, other than the test of “getting along” with others, and so they say risible, damaging things that are already being said by others. When these things turn out to be wrong and there are consequences, the people who repeated after each other to make it look like the correct thing when it wasn’t, aren’t around anywhere to deal with or bear those consequences.

Four days out of the week, I agree with you completely on this. On the other three, well…. Theodore Dalrymple has an oft-quoted bit on propaganda:

In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is…in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

On the left, the emasculation is entirely self-inflicted. No leftist I know — and I am the lone conservative in a sea of Pink — ever believed, for one single second, that Obama thought marriage was between a man and a woman. Nor did they believe, for one single second, that He is a Christian in any sense most American Christians would recognize. Nor, really, did they pretend to believe Him — if they did, there would’ve been howls of outrage from the campus Rainbow Coalition (trust me, no LGTBQWhatever organization I’m aware of — and, again, I live near campus — looked at Obama’s election as anything but a smashing victory).

Not only do they tolerate lies, in other words, but they are completely ok with the lies, and accept the tactical necessity for the lies, and then actively — thuggishly — police the lies as if they were the truth. As you say, the culprit is technology, but not in the “eroding our capacity to think” sense; rather, in the sense of “enabling digital Brownshirts and Kommissars.”
- Severian | 02/26/2015 @ 07:21
Well I’m not making any attempt to get into what Obama believes in the core of His being. That would have to get into what His goals truly are, and how habitual liars view truth, then we’d have to ponder Harry Frankfurt’s differentiation between the liar and the bullshitter. Which is a bit fascinating, but once we start probing deeply into how truth is seen by those who see no purpose of it other than pliable potter’s clay, well, my give-a-damn sort of wanders out the door.

Whether Obama flip-flopped in His famously ever-evolving moral compass, He certainly flip-flopped in His verbiage, and that is my point: The weather vane that is public sentiment, swiveled. It’s an important example because it was such a sudden yanking, even a violent one. And it’s not about fairness or equality. If you’re closing down people’s businesses and threatening them with fines and jail terms because they have different beliefs, that’s not fairness-n-equality.

I link it to technology, through this eroded capacity to think, because a capacity must erode if it is not being used. And people who use their thinking capacity only to figure out where the consensus is going, aren’t really thinking. Maybe we shouldn’t call it an “eroded capacity.” One alternate phrasing that might be more precise and accurate would be, an atrophied proclivity.
- mkfreeberg | 02/26/2015 @ 07:30
The weather vane that is public sentiment, swiveled. It’s an important example because it was such a sudden yanking, even a violent one.

Did it, though? Admittedly this is anecdotal, but I’ve got a lot of anecdotes, and I don’t know anybody — left or right — who believed Obama defended “traditional marriage.” Every single person I know, of any political persuasion, thought he was a big fan of “gay marriage,” and was just trotting out the “between a man and a woman” stuff to fool the rubes.

I guess the question(s) then becomes: How many of the rubes believed it? Was there some large percentage of the voting public who would’ve sworn on a stack of Bibles in 2008 that Obama believed marriage was between a man and a woman? And did that population somehow miss all of his other lies, 2008-present, and is now shocked that he lied about marriage? I’m thinking that particular Venn diagram isn’t very big, though it seems you’re arguing otherwise.

If that’s true, I don’t know if that’s better or worse, re: the decay of thought. Which is worse, that a whole bunch of people believed a fairly obvious lie in 2008, or that at least that many people pretended to believe both the lie, and the evolution of the lie?
- Severian | 02/26/2015 @ 12:32
Did it, though? Admittedly this is anecdotal, but I’ve got a lot of anecdotes, and I don’t know anybody — left or right — who believed Obama defended “traditional marriage.”

The point is that He certainly didn’t run on attacking it, and wouldn’t have been able to get in if His position back then was what it is now.

Part of the reason there is so much outrage, but only within “conservative echo chambers,” about Mozilla ousting Brendan Eich from the CEO spot, was that the bone of contention was a $1,000 donation Eich made in support of Proposition 8 back in 2008. Which was only made public in 2012. Kinda like passing judgment on an English or French monarch for torturing people back in the 12th century, or a cowboy from 150 years ago for smoking a hand-rolled cigarette.

So yeah, those were gradual swiveling motions of the outrage-weather-vane. This is a violent yanking by comparison, in 2008 it was impossible to run for President supporting gay marriage, now it’s impossible to run for President opposing it, and gay marriage in all fifty states is something that “will definitely happen” I’m told over & over again. I haven’t any reason to doubt it.

I see it as a sort of blood lust. A lot of people who talk up their great love for freedom, actually, if only on a subconscious level, despise it. At at that subconscious level they’re seeing this is a good way to attack peoples’ freedoms. Or at least, a chance to waggle their fingers and how good they are compared to someone else. That’s my opinion. I just can’t bring myself to accept that each and every single one of them knows of several gay couples, waiting in futility at the courthouse steps, crying that the marriage licenses are unavailable to them because of their special, oppressed status. That’s little better than outright fraud.

But again, I don’t purport to understand what Obama finds “right” or “wrong.” I can’t understand what someone else thinks any better than they themselves understand it, and I doubt Emperor Selfie Stick has even put too much thought into it.
- mkfreeberg | 02/26/2015 @ 18:04
Ah, I see what you’re saying. And I agree. For me, the most telling bit of evidence in support is a lack of a certain kind of evidence — nobody’s spiking the gay marriage football and doing a touchdown dance.

It’s “legal” by judicial fiat in, what, half a dozen states now? And yet the New York Times and/or Washington Post have never seen fit to publish a multi-part thumbsucker about Adam and Steve and their wonderful matrimonial bliss. That seems… rather odd. Liberals have never passed on any other opportunity to rub it in. Conclusion: They don’t give a shit about actual gays and their actual marriages; making a conservative judge and/or wedding cake baker say the words “gay marriage” was the only point.

Does that tie in with your larger point, then? That nobody, right or left, ever seems to follow up on this stuff?
- Severian | 02/26/2015 @ 20:29
Yeah, and I think we’re seeing an example of the public being told what to think. We have a lot of people who “think” without defining anything at all, which means they have to either 1) “conclude” whatever they decided their opinion was going to be at the very outset, or 2) look around and see what everybody else is doing, acting purely on bandwagon fallacy. The gay marriage thing is a great example of the second of those two, because a lot of people are holding, very passionately, a view 180 degrees off from what those same people thought about the issue five-or-so years ago.

So the way I see it BHO is not marching off on His own direction here. I don’t think He even gives a rip. The pancake-flip move is representative of the pancake-flip move a lot of other people have made at exactly the same time. It’s just what’s in style.

Just like feminists suddenly “discovering” that the oh-so-loathed men actually appreciate the look of a short miniskirt, and so pipe it through the various layers of their hierarchy that henceforth the “I am woman hear me roar” uniform is ragged jeans, the frumpier the better. Except, that took roughly twice as long, maybe longer. The gay marriage turnabout, at its most rapid, was begun-and-over-with in the space of about eighteen months IIRC. And the eighteen months is from: Oh that may happen someday, but we’re just not ready for it, it’s like legalizing polygamous marriages, bestiality, incest…to…you’d better get on board with this or you might lose your home and your business. In addition to being uncool.

Public sentiment has been reversed before, with similar ramifications. But I believe the gay-marriage thing holds a record for speed. At least it does in my lifetime, to the best I can see. People who are too concerned with what “everybody” else is thinking, are just too easy to control.
- mkfreeberg | 02/27/2015 @ 06:43
Therein lies the hope for pushback, though. As with #GamerGate, the same people who use these “shut up and go with the herd” tactics are themselves especially vulnerable to them, especially when backed with facts. They scream and moan that “GamerGate is all about misogyny!”, and the GamerGate folks just publish the record of their thug tactics… along with the stone cold fact that, oh yeah, that chick was fucking guys for good reviews of her shitty games.

That doesn’t address the underlying issue — the decay of thought — but it’s a start. Perhaps when the go-along-with-the-crowd folks have been whipsawed 900 degrees in 5 days, the fact that it’s all a tactic might start to sink in….
- Severian | 02/27/2015 @ 07:05
[…] last, but not least, House Of Eratosthenes covers the cancer of […]
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The Cancer of MulticulturalismThursday, February 26th, 2015

The Cancer of Multiculturalism
Thursday, February 26th, 2015