Tuesday, February 4, 2025

Why Democrts Lost

It is not just that the Democratic Party lost a few elections last November. Its grandees are incapable of drawing any lesson from their defeats. 

Recently, at a gathering of party leaders  all of them concluded that Kamala Harris had lost because of racism and misogyny.That she was an incompetent buffoon seems not to have mattered. That the public repudiated her because they found the Biden administration to have been a failure did not register.


The Democratic party failed at the ballot box because it had failed to govern. Now, it is getting worse. The more people see President Trump engaged in the task of governance, the more they become aware of the fact that the Biden administration was incapable of doing the same.


The Democratic Party was all about identity politics. Its leaders imagined that the public would vote for Kamala because she was a minority female. It was a bad joke, and it systematically ignored the issues that mattered to people. 


The New York Times explained:


Many Americans say they do not believe the Democratic Party is focused on the economic issues that matter most to them and is instead placing too much emphasis on social issues that they consider less urgent.


Asked to identify the Democratic Party’s most important priorities, Americans most often listed abortion, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and climate change, according to a poll from The New York Times and Ipsos conducted from Jan. 2 to 10.


The issues that people cited as most important to them personally were the economy and inflation, health care and immigration, the poll found. The kinds of social causes that progressive activists have championed in recent years ranked much lower.


The issues that people cited as most important to them personally were the economy and inflation, health care and immigration, the poll found. The kinds of social causes that progressive activists have championed in recent years ranked much lower. [emphasis added]


The Democratic Party has failed at governance because it does not care to govern. It does not think that it needs to. It has a more lofty goal. It wants to own your mind. It wants to dictate what you think, how you feel and what you believe. It imagines that once you become a true believer in leftist ideology you will naturally vote the right way.


Its leaders aspire to become a priesthood promoting a dogma. That includes journalists, bureaucrats, academics and religious leaders. It excludes business leaders, soldiers, and builders.


On the contrary, President Trump has surrounded himself with people who notably get things done. Tycoons and tech bros-- this group, beginning with Elon Musk, are notable for functioning within the economy. They build things, and do not sit around whining about why they can’t get anything done.


The presence of such leaders provides a legitimacy that the Democrat Party now lacks. Many were formerly Democrats. When they found their status diminished, for not being sufficiently intellectual, they decamped for the other party. They preferred to be in the company of tech tycoons than subliterate reformed courtesans and tenured academics.


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Monday, February 3, 2025

Returning to Socrates

In her new book philosopher Agnes Callard wants to introduce us to Socrtaes. Perhaps she is writing for college students who have never read any philosophy, but if she is not, her presentation is banal.

After all, Socrates and his student Plato are the godfather of philosopher idealism. This strain of philosophy has been around and has been accepted for millennia now.The most important of the Church Fathers, Augustine himself, declared that Plato was a near-Chrisitan. This ensured that his thinking would always have pride of place in the Christian West.


The empiricism of Aristotle did not receive the same treatment.  It was not until the late Middle Ages that Aristotle became respectable, thanks largely to Thomas Aquinas and his Dominican brethren.


Callard ends up saying that Socrtes taught us the art of conversation. This is an interesting idea, even if it is largely inaccurate.


Socratic dialogue is a trick. The ugly old philosopher encounters a young dupe and proceeds to teach him philosophy.Or so it would seem.


Through a series of questions Socrates persuades the dupe to think what he wants him to thinK. Better yet, he persuades him that he always thought the same thing, only awaiting the midwifery of Socrtes to bring it into the light of consciousness


Socrates does not teach the young person how to think. It teaches him what he must think.But he allows him to think that he has not been influenced by an authority figure, a Socrates, but has merely discovered what he himself has always been thinking.


So, Socrates makes young people think what he wants them to think. His ruse is to persuade them that they are not being influenced by an authority, but are merely geting in touch with what they always knew.


For a philosophy professor, this is a potent ruse.You can help students overcome their ability to respect authority, all the while making them subservient to your authority.


Sunday, February 2, 2025

Sundaze

With a warm welcome to new subscribers. 

We have experienced a second week of the new Trump presidency and many of us are pleasantly surprised. For once we have someone who is taking charge. And for the first time in ages we have someone who is an unabashed patriot.


As for how you can celebrate this event, I recommend that you make a donation to this blog. 


If you would like to donate please make use of the Paypal button on this page. If you prefer, you can mail a check to 310 East 46th St. 24H. New York, NY 10017.


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Thank  you in advance.


Saturday Miscelany

First, the biggest dupes must be those American student leftists who have rallied to the Hamas cause. They want to Free Palestine, even though the region that Hamas inhabits does not have any democratic governments.

Anyway, Drew Pavlou remarks the following:


Hamas boasts on Telegram that they are now going through the Gaza Strip with death lists and executing Palestinian dissidents. Western leftists will take to the streets to protest this I’m sure. Because they care so deeply about Palestinian lives.


Second, now President Trump has declared his preference. The Palestinians in Gaza should become part of Egypt and the Palestinians in the West Bank should become Jordanians.


Both of these countries have protested mightily against this solution. Time will tell whether or not they accede to the Donald’s request.


Third, I do not know why the American Airlines plane crashed into a Blackhawk helicopter over the Potomac the other day. For now, it appears that no one else knows either.


And yet, the question has arisen-- how much did DEI policies play into the tragedy.


Fox News reports the FAA policy, on January 24:


The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is actively recruiting workers who suffer "severe intellectual" disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website. 


"Targeted disabilities are those disabilities that the Federal government, as a matter of policy, has identified for special emphasis in recruitment and hiring," the FAA’s website states. "They include hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism."


The initiative is part of the FAA’s "Diversity and Inclusion" hiring plan, which says "diversity is integral to achieving FAA's mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel across our nation and beyond." The FAA’s website shows the agency’s guidelines on diversity hiring were last updated on March 23, 2022.


You wonder why there have not been more accidents.


Fourth, since one of the pilots in the helicopter was female, Peachy Keenan offers this comment: 


Feminism means getting to fly a Black Hawk because you’re a girl and if something goes wrong the men in charge will reveal the names of everyone but you and will keep your name and identity secret, because you’re a girl


Fifth,  the war against woke proceeds apace. Now, federal employees have been instructed to keep their pronouns to themselves:


Employees at multiple federal agencies were ordered to remove pronouns from their email signatures by 5pm today.


Sixth, Abigail Shrier feels vindicated, sorta. The author of a book called Irreversible Damage, a scathing critique of transmania, should be feeling good to see President Trump put an end to all forms of government recognition of this delusional belief system.


The problem, she explains in a Free Press essay, was always the spell. It was as though someone had cast a spell on otherwise sane and rational people, and induced them to join a cult to a mania.


In her words:


But that order does break the spell—and the spell was always our biggest problem. Parents who allowed their children to transition are often caricatured as Hollywood eccentrics, the sort who bequeath their estates to teacup Chihuahuas. The parents I spoke to—even those who allowed their children to transition—are nothing like that.


Many are conscientious and loving and afraid, if a little naive. They believed medical science was above politics and beyond question. They had wandered into a Truman Show, an all-consuming simulacrum, designed to convince them to abandon their protective instincts. If the parents still weren’t convinced, therapists coerced them into allowing their daughters to undergo gender transition with this thinly veiled threat: “Would you rather a live son or a dead daughter?”


If it seems, suddenly, that only a fool would fall for this, then it is worth pointing out that millions of us were fools for a while. This social contagion spread far beyond teenage girls. It touched corporate executives who rushed to put pronouns in their profiles, pastors who raised the transgender Pride flag at their churches, and school administrators that actively deceived parents about the new gender identities they had selected for the parents’ children.


A lot of bad actors—pediatricians, surgeons, endocrinologists, therapists, teachers, even clergy—took advantage. No reason to let them off the hook: The science is, and always was, shoddy. When I published Irreversible Damage in 2020 and became, overnight, socially radioactive even among many conservatives, the medical risks were as plain to the experts then as they are today. One only needed to take an interest.


Desperate parents who transitioned their own children during this period, against their better judgment, made an understandable, if devastating, error. Harmonizing one’s views with the powerful reflects the oldest social survival instinct. We are engineered to stay within the herd and get along.

Disagreeable contrarians who resisted gender fever are the real oddballs. Some combination of personality quirk and conviction that occasionally makes us obnoxious employees and intolerable cocktail-party guests also inoculated us against gender madness. There is no reforming us.


But we served a vital function: Together, a ragtag crew of truculent journalists and outcast researchers stopped the entire herd from running off the cliff. None of us ever expected to be welcomed back into the same elite circles that, only recently, had cheered or looked away as a generation of tormented girls took themselves apart.


It is, dare we say, frightening. People were convinced that they were in accord with the latest in science. People believed that they were defending the rights of the transgendered.

They were. Shrier suggested, bewitched. An excellent analysis, if my view.


Undoing the institutional forces that embraced and got rich by treating disturbed young people is one thing. Ridding their minds of the garbage that they were induced to believe is quite another.


Friday, January 31, 2025

Dumbing Down American Children

We all want jobs to return to America. We want companies to build factories and even industries within our borders. And we are happy to see the government develop policies to encourage the move.

And yet, these noble sentiments ignore an obvious fact. Our educational system is not producing workers who can do the jobs. Thanks to the covid lockdowns and woke learning, America’s schoolchildren have been dumbed down, to the point of being incapable of doing tomorrow’s high tech jobs. And not ust high tech jobs.


Worse yet, while children from more affluent neighborhoods are now catching up, children from poor neighborhoods are still falling behind.


Newsmax has the story:


Given every two years to a sample of America's children, the National Assessment of Educational Progress is considered one of the best gauges of the academic progress of the U.S. school system. The most recent exam was administered in early 2024 in every state, testing fourth- and eighth-grade students on math and reading.


"The news is not good," said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which oversees the assessment. "We are not seeing the progress we need to regain the ground our students lost during the pandemic."


More specifically,


The average math score for eighth grade students was unchanged from 2022, while reading scores fell 2 points at both grade levels. One-third of eighth grade students scored below "basic" in reading, more than ever in the history of the assessment.


Pupils who are below basic level barely know how to read and write:


Students are considered below basic if they are missing fundamental skills. For example, eighth grade students who scored below basic in reading were typically unable to make a simple inference about a character's motivation after reading a short story, and some were unable to identify that the word "industrious" means "to be hard working."


The failures were mostly occurring at the lower end of the income spectrum:


Especially alarming to officials was the divide between higher- and lower-performing students, which has grown wider than ever. Students with the highest scores outperformed their peers from two years ago, making up some ground lost during the pandemic. But the lowest performers are scoring even lower, falling further behind.


It was most pronounced in eighth grade math: While the top 10% of students saw their scores increased by 3 points, the lowest 10% decreased by 6 points.


The obvious point needs to be restated, When the teachers’ unions force schools to shut down, affluent parents figured out ways to continue to educate their children. Poor parents, less so. 


Thus, an increasing wide gap in performance between rich and poor, engineered by people who rail against inequality.


The New York Post reports on the disparity:


The gap between high and lower performing students also showed signs of trouble by widening across most subjects in 2024 – with the best students doing better than those from 2022, and the worst scoring lower than those from 2022.


That gap was most starkly shown in eighth-grade math scores – where the top 10% of students saw a three-point increase, and the lowest ten saw a six-point decline.


We are going to arrive at a point where the only way to provide the human capital for the new factories and industries will be to import it from overseas. You do not think that it is an accident or an anomaly that the tech staffs of Silicon Valley high tech firms largely comes from China. 


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Thursday, January 30, 2025

The Day the Country Died

 Within certain segments of the population the election of Donald Trump has produced various forms of mental agony. Certain groups of people are suffering mentally because they cannot accept that the nation rejected them, rejected what they stand for, and rejected an administration that represents their values.

Those who have pointed out that the Trump presidency has been good for the therapy business rarely point out that the crybaby left is contorting itself into agony because it is incapable of accepting that its great hero Joe Biden was a dud and that Kamala was a subliterate reformed courtesan. They ought to ask themselves how it happened that such an incompetent fool was the best they could find.


If you read through the Salon.com article about the mental health disaster that has befallen the crybaby caucus you will note that its members are in the latter stages of agony over what might happen under Trump. They are refusing to consider that the nation repudiated them because they had failed. The notion of failure does not appear in their mental space. 


This latter administration systematically lied about the mental fitness of the president. And yet, no one cared. No one understood that lying to the people does not make you a great leader. While whining in their herbal tea about the misinformation and disinformation that they see in the Trump administration, they fail to notice that the public rejected them because they were lying about the most salient fact-- the condition of Joe Biden’s brain.


So, the crybaby caucus is aghast at the way the Trump administration has turned back their great cause-- transgender rights. And it is horrified that so many fine lawless criminals are being deported. When Barack Obama did the same, they did not utter a peep.


They are bitterly mourning the loss of democracy, though they fail to recognize that the nation has repudiated them and embraced Trump-- democratically.


It’s not that they fear the loss of democracy. They fear the judgment of the people, especially when applied to their ability to govern. And they refuse to accept that the electorate has rejected their wondrous value system.


As you might guess, the writers at Salon do not care about accepting the results of a democratic election. They do not understand why the public turned against a political party that was offering them a new lease on sanity. The people voted for Trump because they are too stupid to understand the mental health stakes.


Many Americans, therefore, are reluctant or unable to consider how their experiences and personal challenges reflect larger dynamics and power relationships. They may instead internalize this stress and subsume the political into the personal in a manner that isolates them further, rather than bringing them together in a more healthy communitarian fashion with the goal of solving shared political and social problems.


But, Salon.com wants to lead us to more rational thought. It proposes that on November 5, the Democrats did not merely lose an election. Going all hyperbolic they insist that on that date the country died. No more and no less.


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Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Wednesday Potpourri

First, the story of the week concerns something called DeepSeek. It is the latest in artificial intelligence, Chinese style. The Free Press explained on Monday:

A small Chinese AI lab has released DeepSeek R1, a large language model it produced on a shoestring budget. The results have stunned the tech world. “Deepseek R1 is one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I’ve ever seen,” said Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. The model outperforms OpenAI on a number of AI benchmarks—in spite of U.S. sanctions on the sale of advanced chips to Chinese companies.


As it happens, more than a few detractors have stepped forward to explain that the Chinese have been cheating and that they did not tell the truth about the program.


In the meantime, the NASDAQ tanked on Monday, so some people have not dismissed the Chinese effort… at least not yet.


Second, Norway imposed a wealth tax. The result was, wealthy individuals fled the country. Their net worth-- $54 billion. 


The result, lost tax revenues of: $594,000,000. The tax was supposed to bring in around $146,000,000.


The difference is not a rounding error.


Third, Aaron Sibarium reports from UCLA med school. 


UCLA medical school hired a new dean of admissions, Jennifer Lucero, In 2020. Since then, the number of students failing their shelf exams—standardized tests taken after each clinical rotation—has exploded, rising as much as tenfold in some subjects.


Now that the Trump administration is hard at work undoing DEI programs, the UCLA example tells us that it’s not a minute too soon.


Fourth, back in the land of socialized medicine-- that would be Canada-- outcomes are not exactly encouraging:


Today, SecondStreet.org released government data showing an additional 15,474 patients in Canada died in 2023-24 before receiving various surgeries or diagnostic scans. However, that number is incomplete, as several governments provide either partial data, or simply do not track the problem.


SecondStreet.org collected the data by filing Freedom of Information (FOI) requests across Canada. When the data collected is extrapolated across jurisdictions which did not provide data, the number actually nearly doubles, to around 28,077. These figures cover everything from cancer treatment and heart operations to cataract surgery and MRI scans.


“Canadians pay really high taxes and yet our health care system is failing when compared to better-performing universal systems in Europe,” said Harrison Fleming, Legislative and Policy Director at SecondStreet.org. “Thousands of Canadians across the country find themselves on waitlists — in some cases for several years -— with too many tragically dying before ever getting treated, or even diagnosed.”


Fifth, we all thrill to the prospect of onshoring American manufacturing.  Would that it were that simple.


David Goldman explains in the Asia Times that we are still seriously dependant on foreign manufacturing:


But the big picture is that America’s foreign dependence is rising fast. Overall industrial output has been virtually unchanged during the past ten years, while imports of capital goods have nearly doubled. It will take more to re-shore American industry than hot air from an economics blog.


The important point is that, investments notwithstanding, we are not exactly flush with people who are capable of doing the jobs. Goldman remarks:


Yes, the United States shortly will produce more computer chips onshore, thanks to Taiwan’s TSMC, which built a plant in Arizona – staffed mainly by workers and technicians imported from Taiwan, because TSMC couldn’t find enough skilled labor in the United States. That’s the kind of success that makes failure seem attractive by comparison.


Sixth, Donald Trump issued an executive order banning so-called gender affirming care. Newsmax has the story:


President Donald Trump issued an executive order Tuesday banning child gender transition care, which the order refers to as the "chemical and surgical mutilation" of children.

"Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child's sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions," the order reads. "This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation's history, and it must end.


"Accordingly, it is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called 'transition' of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures," it states.


As for the damage already done, the Independent Women’s Forum has the numbers:


NO MORE: Over the last five years, 14,000 minors have undergone procedures, nearly 6,000 minors have had surgeries to remove and/or replace health body parts, more than 8,500 minors have received hormones and puberty blockers, and nearly 63,000 sex change prescriptions were written for minors. 


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