America Surrenders

Brian Kennedy, of the Claremont Institute, asks a salient question. What if the Biden surrender of Afghanistan was not merely a blunder? What if it did not signal the incompetence of a senile old fool? What if it was intentional?

Intentionally what, you may ask. Well, consider this, Kennedy writes, what if the Biden administration was simply acting on a premise that America is a bad country, led by bad people, an organized criminal conspiracy led by white supremacists? What if the Biden administration and its satraps in the government bureaucracy believe that America needs to be punished for being such a bad country? What if the Biden administration is wedded to the hate-America rhetoric of people like AOC, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar?

If such were the case, then the actions of the Biden administration become perfectly rational. They represent a strain of anti-Americanism that the radical left has foisted on a brain dead Democratic Party. We are watching it play itself out in Afghanistan, in real time.

After all, no one is even trying to explain how the botched exit from Afghanistan is in America’s national interest. The people running the country have no use for such outmoded ideas. They are, as they have so thoroughly explained, fighting the good fight against white supremacy, and, oh yes, against the weather.

Kennedy explains the situation thusly:

The notion that there was a single incompetent decision made to abandon Afghanistan defies both logic and common sense. It was a matter of high government policy that the United States depart Afghanistan, abandon military equipment, and leave both Americans and our allies to the tender mercies of the radical Islamic Taliban.

Kennedy continues that our exit from Afghanistan represents an abandonment of even the pretext of being a world leader. This suggests that the current administration does not want to be a world leader, in any sense of the word. It is retreating behind the walls of fortress America, but it has failed to notice, for example, that it is leaving a massive amount of lithium in the hands of the Taliban and of the country that controls most of the rare earth minerals supply. That would be China.

What does the surrender of Afghanistan mean? Well, Kennedy argues that it means that the sacrifices have been in vain, that the war on Islamist terror was illegitimate and that American civilization is not worth defending:

The exit from Afghanistan, then, appears designed to accomplish two things: first, to demoralize the American military and the American people. Over 22,000 American service personnel have been killed or injured in Afghanistan. Every American knows someone who served there. Knowing full well that the Afghan military would not defend the country, there could be little doubt that the United States was turning the country over to the Taliban. Moreover, the US did so with the appearance of being run out of the country in shame and defeat. One can only assume this was meant to demonstrate to American servicemen that their sacrifice had been in vain, and to the American people that our cause of defending America from the scourge of radical Islam was not just.

America is weak and resistance to Islam is futile. That is the lesson the Biden Administration has made possible. It is one for which radicals such as Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar have signaled their approval throughout their tenure in Congress.

Worse yet, the Biden administration has shown no concern whatever for the credibility, the integrity or the prestige of the country. People rail when you suggest that the American left has no real sense of patriotism and that many of them hate the country, but what other rational conclusion can you draw from the Afghanistan surrender:

Even the most serious isolationist would not have left Afghanistan the way we have. A minimum requirement would be to preserve the prestige and credibility of the United States with our allies and to ensure that our enemies would not be emboldened by our fecklessness.

One remarks, almost as a sidelight, that a nation lacking in pride will also be producing a great deal of clinical depression. And that people who are depressed will most likely not be motivated to work to advance themselves or their country.

We are operating under conditions that are more characteristic of group therapy than of effective policy. We want to feel empathy for the grievances of the oppressed of the world. We imagine that they will all like us more. In place of patriotism we have become a great mother state:

There is a new world order and America has chosen a new place in it. Whereas we were comfortable “leading from behind” during the Obama administration, today the United States is merely one of many other nations doing our best to cooperate in what some have termed a Great Reset. Defending human freedom may have been fine for earlier generations, but what matters today is understanding the grievances and ambitions of other peoples, be it the Islamic world and their deeply held religious convictions or the Communist Chinese and their struggles to find their place atop the world order.

So, we have overcome all concerns about the national interest. Witness the abandonment of the Bagram Air Base. Kennedy continues:

Political leanings aside, what of self-interest? There is no clearer evidence of this rejection than the abandonment of Bagram Air Base. Right now, if it were adequately fortified, the United States could have an expeditionary force poised to strike at anyone in the region who meant the US harm. Claremont Institute scholars Mark Helprin and Angelo Codevilla argued for something like this nearly two decades ago, as opposed to the nation-building efforts that proved so painfully misguided. Such a base of operations would not be part of some “forever war,” but rather a forward outpost of US military power capable of defending the American homeland. No nation building, no lectures on LGBTQ rights, just straight national defense.

Leaving Bagram Air Base, and the billions in advanced equipment that was there, with the Afghan military will be seen rightly as an act of submission by the Biden Administration to a global order headed by Communist China. Certainly China, and apparently also Biden, would prefer an America in retreat and withdrawal from the world stage. What better way to demonstrate America’s intentions to the PRC than withdrawing from the region and allowing our most advanced armaments to be taken by America’s enemies?

So, the Biden administration feels good about itself for its efforts to fight climate change. It feels good about itself for fighting the coronavirus pandemic. It feels good about itself for making Americans feel guilty about their prosperity and their successes. It feels good about itself for fighting white supremacy. A philosophy that appeared to be an outlier, that appeared to be a deviant set of opinions held by a few crackpots and cranks is now American policy.

As for the real question: who is really in charge? We suspect that Joe Biden is a Trojan horse, an empty vessel filled with social justice warriors. Or perhaps he is a marionette. For now we are not so clear about who is pulling the strings. 

The End of Meritocracy

It comes to us from The Economist, in particular from senior editor and writer Adrian Wooldridge. His new book, The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World, is undoubtedly a serious book. Reviewing it in the City Journal, Kay Hymowitz treats it thusly.

I have not read the book, but I have read the Hymowitz review. It has given me and perhaps even you a few ideas. Given the current rage against meritocracy, it is worthwhile to examine some of the lame arguments that have been marshaled against it. Primary among them is that meritocratic admissions standards to major universities do not produce a sufficiently multicolored undergraduate cohort. 

Precisely why it should, we have no idea. Judging reality against some will-o-the-wisp ideal that you conjured in your basement seems like a bad way to develop policy. An idealist, by definition, never finds fault with his ideas. He always finds fault with reality.

Besides, college admissions, the kinds that give preferences to children whose parents have donated the science lab or the athletic complex, are not really meritocratic. Once you decide to privilege the children of the very rich and to downgrade the superb academic achievements of Asian children you are not running a meritocracy.

A strict meritocracy, evidenced in Asia and in New York high schools like Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Tech, offers entry solely on the basis of standardized tests. The results, as you know, have been heavily Asian, with a smattering of whites. The test-based admissions system has for now not included very large numbers of minority children. Rather than work to increase the achievement level of minority children, today’s social justice warriors want to tear down the system.

One suspects that those who want to do so did not earn their way on the basis of their own merit. They were promoted regardless of merit, in order to fulfill diversity quotas. Such quotas are the opposite of merit. They offer admissions, job opportunities and advancement on the basis of skin color and ethnicity. If anything, they seem to be a throwback to the times when aristocratic privilege and blood line determined social status and advancement. As the French say, the more things change, the more the stay the same.

Surely, as Heather Mac Donald has been at pains to point out, children who do better on standardized admissions tests tend to do better in school and better on the job than do children who are admitted on the basis of aristocratic or ethnic privilege.

Of course, the argument against meritocracy implies that academic skill has nothing to do with inherited talents or inherited intelligence. Fair enough, in some situations we find the children of handymen to have more natural talent than the children of computer scientists, but we should not imagine that talent is distributed equally among everyone, as though every human were born a blank slate.

And of course, different children in different neighborhoods have learned different work ethics. They are brought up in different cultural environments. Some cultures enhance and value academic achievement. Among the advantages that charter schools provide their students and parents is a new cultural environment, one where academic excellence is valued ahead of well-roundedness. Some do not. Malcolm Gladwell reported on this in his book Outliers.

One notes with some chagrin that these analyses, however intelligent and well-meant, often turn into a theoretical muddle. For example, beyond the question of who gets hired and for what reason, lies the ultimate arbiter-- the marketplace.

In principle the market does not know your race, gender or ethnicity. It does not even now how you like to have sex. Whatever reasons got you the job, for better or for worse, you still have to do the job. Promoting someone on the basis of bloodline or race will only work if the person can do the job. Apparently, promotion by aristocratic pedigree failed because the aristocracy started producing too many deadbeats and failed to hold them to account, failed to allow them to be judged by the market. Besides people who inherited their positions are less likely to command the same respect as someone who worked his way up the ladder. Thus, they will have more difficulty exercising executive authority.

Still, someone who has learned leadership skills from a parent who is a leader will be more adept at leading than will someone who did not. Culture matters, and it should be an integral part of education. Obviously, the current rage in favor of social justice will teach precisely the wrong leadership lessons and will produce a generational cohort that is both mentally inept and social incompetent. It will look and feel like an aristocracy, where promotion is based on blood line, not merit. That means, it will not feel earned and will not be respected.

Moreover, when you are thinking in terms of executive talent, for example, it takes more than surpassing intelligence. Such leadership requires a high level of social skills. Leadership is not innate, but it is not completely detached from innate talent. Obviously, it can be taught, as our service academies do, and as our ivy league schools most likely do not.

And then there is another nagging question. If we examine the mess that our meritocratic elites have made, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, surely this will shake our faith in merit. And yet, there is merit and there is merit. The fault with the best and the brightest who were running the war in Vietnam was simply that they knew very little to nothing about running wars. They were Ivy League deans, people who had advanced on the basis of a certain kind of abstract intelligence that has far less value on the battlefield. People who made careers in the academy, at a time when the academy was all-in for meritocracy, were more like members of an aristocratic elite, people who did not want to get their hands dirty, but who preferred to opine to the winds about whatever. They were true philosopher kings but they were congenitally unsuited to the world of competition, be it the battlefield or the marketplace.

One does better not to confuse the best and the brightest who tried to impose their capacious intelligence on the real world, and who saw their arrogance come a cropper when faced with real world challenges, with the semi-Asperger’s cohort that runs Silicon Valley. Or better, that does not run it as much as provide the brainpower that is necessary to make our techno gadgets effective and efficient. 

Say what you will about them, but they are not the same group as the best and the brightest who gave us our failing military efforts. It is useful to differentiate different kinds of intelligence.

According to Hymowitz, Wooldridge  declares that the advent of a merit based system in the modern West had something to do with the Protestant Reformation and the development of a new work ethic. Whereas traditional systems of merit, those that began with the standardized exams in China a millennium ago, aimed to enhance the quality of mind in the courtier class, the mandarins who ran the country, today’s meritocracy is designed to produce people who can compete in the free enterprise system

Importantly, Wooldridge suggests that a free enterprise economy required far more active and intelligent people than did the government bureaucracy.

Of course, the key to the meritocrat system is fair competition. If you refuse to compete or if you refuse to accept the results of fair competition you have exited the world of meritocracy and have returned to a world of privilege, determined by bloodline.

Hymowitz explained:

Understood in the context of this tenacious history, meritocracy was a genuinely radical idea. It took bloody revolutions, religious wars, and centuries of dispute to undo the old system of lineage and shift toward modern thinking about merit. The Protestant Reformation played a role in this process by releasing individual conscience from the all-powerful word of priests and kings. Calvinism moved individual hard work to the center of moral and religious life. Enlightenment philosophers harped on the corruption and mediocrity of titled aristocrats of their day. The philosophes began the nature–nurture debate that continues today: were the talented just born that way—“natural aristocrats”—or were their gifts the result of training and education? In either case, the individual was to be judged and rewarded according to his merit, not family ties.

In truth, if we want to have a more perfect meritocracy we should give more weight to test scores and less weight to blood line. We are obviously not doing so. Instead, we have instituted a new counter-meritocracy and have filled our academic institutions, as well as our media and business world with people who lack the requisite skills, whether mental or social, but who possess the correct blood line.

What Happened to America?

It began with post-mortems for the Biden-produced debacle in Afghanistan. The ongoing critique of American policy has now, almost magically, morphed into a deep analysis of what is wrong with America. The only real problem with these studies is that we will not soon run out of material.

Much is wrong with America. A country led by a Scarecrow, backed up by a band of fools, is not about to reassert world leadership. As Miss Giggles herself, Vice President Kamala Harris, hops around Southeast Asia claiming that America is a reliable ally, the prime minister of Singapore managed to challenge her assertion-- to her face.

When Asian leaders fail to respect your face, it means that they no longer respect you. They are treating you like a clown because you have been acting like a clown. It was a strange moment indeed.

So, among the analyses of America’s current failed state, we have this from one Peter Savodnik. Normally, he writes for Vanity Fair. This time, his essay has appeared on the Bari Weiss Substack. Again, hats off to Weiss for landing on her feet after unceremoniously ditching the New York Times. 

Many people are talking about the Savodnik essay, so here are a few excerpts, with comments. After sharing some domestic scenes-- why do writers feel they have to share such personal details?-- he opens with his theme-- failure.

It is tonic:

Then, we failed. We failed over and over and over. In Iraq. In Afghanistan. But also — and this was harder at first to see — at home.

We kept electing commanders-in-chief who had never served, who had credentials but had never built anything, whose success resided atop the more substantive success of more serious people. The post-Cold-War president could make you feel all kinds of things, but he was always a little out of his depth because he had very little to begin with. He made promises he did not really understand. We won’t just pummel Afghanistan into glass. We’ll turn it into a Jeffersonian republic. We’ll make these people into a people they have never been, even though no one — the Brits, the Soviets, the Persians — has ever attempted as much, let alone achieved it. We will do it because we’re Americans.

It wasn’t just our presidents. It was that the whole machinery of American government seemed less capable of doing big things: mopping up New Orleans; quashing the subprime meltdown; making sure Big Pharma didn’t kill us with painkillers.

One might rejoin that Donald Trump did actually build things, but he had a devilishly difficult time getting the government to do much of anything. When he did, the results were often positive, but Savodnik’s larger point resonates.

Like most of our recent presidents, the people who have been running the country did not rise up through the ranks. They did not earn their way by ascending the ladder of political service. They were most often amateurs, propelled to the top by a combination of good looks and charisma.

Evidently, Savodnik is referring to one George W. Bush, a man who was largely in over his head-- as was his predecessor and as was his successor-- but who managed to glom on to the notion that we would build a democracy in Afghanistan. It was, dare we say, a fool’s errand, and certainly was a major contributing factor in our two decades long Afghanistan adventure. We might also ask who was advising Bush, but no one seems much to care.

People got seriously torqued when Tom Friedman suggested that as long as America could not complete a high-speed rail line it was not a serious country. And yet, from Tim Cook to Elon Musk to Marc Andreeson, people in the tech world have bemoaned the fact that American workers lack initiative and skills. A few days ago I reported an essay by a trio of serious mathematicians, to the effect that we were falling seriously behind the nations of the Far East because we had chosen to teach critical race theory, but not advanced math.

At this point, Savodnik makes a telling point. Our great tech companies do not create as much as they connect people. If you ask who is building the networks of 5G infrastructure throughout the world, the answer will not be America.

Worse yet, high tech companies have mostly served to produce spurious connections between people. One might say that the connections established over social media are more virtual than real. After all, Facebook serves no useful function in society. Its efforts to render itself useful by joining with Twitter in censoring voices it does not like has exposed it for the waste that it is.

The fastest-growing technology companies didn’t create so much as connect. They connected us with friends and drivers and places to eat and to stay. Uber was great, but no one was pitching apps to tackle joblessness, cancer, alienation.

The more we communicate online the less we communicate in person. We do not converse with other people any more. And thus, the social fabric is fraying, if not being shredded:

We talked with more people than ever. The number of acronyms and emojis we vomited out — voicelessly, by way of thumb — exploded. But the things we said were more trite, thinner. Which made everything faster, smoother, “smarter,” and exponentially lonelier.

We were stuck in the middle of this strange contradiction — the more and the less blended together. Which left everything feeling flat. Even those interactions that still took place IRL, which were always being interrupted by a ping or a vibration or someone glancing at a screen, wondering whether more interesting things were happening in this other invisible, parallel universe.

Social media seemed to make relationships with human beings obsolescent. They are, as a movie whose name I forgot showed clearly, addictive substances. Heck, even the president of China pronounced them to be like opium. Those who know Chinese history understand that that nation has very little tolerance for opiates sent into the country from the Anglosphere. Remember the Opium Wars?

Of course, once Xi Jinping started denouncing social media companies for their negative impact on children and even adults, good Americans rose up to defend social media and to denounce the authoritarian Chinese. It wasn't a sign of competent thinking.

Many Americans know that children are being serious damaged by their addictions to social media, but when the president of China decides that he is going to try to do something about it, we defend social media. Or better, we complain. It beats doing something to rein in the totalitarians who run Facebook and Twitter.

Savodnik seems to think that we should all be having difficult conversations. I would be happier to see people exchanging greetings politely. Difficult conversations tend to be divisive:

But we forgot that it was also impossible to get by without other human beings. We were relieved we no longer had to have difficult conversations — one could simply ghost or delete or block — but we started to think this might not be healthy. Difficult conversations, after all, were important and good, and they instilled character. They made us more real. We yearned for the days before high-speed and we talked endlessly about the importance of authenticity. The truth is, we just missed it.

Serious adults decided that they needed to learn how to use Tik-Tok-- whatever that is?-- but that they need not provide moral guidance to the young. It has been a major moral failing:

The people in charge stopped being adults, which meant they stopped upholding the values and standards of those who came before and they rationalized this abandonment by telling themselves that the Tik-Tokification of American discourse was harmless or forward-looking or a good way to “engage” Gen Z. They forgot that it was their job not to engage with the young but to teach them.

So, we have gotten confused. We are not concerned about getting things done, about building things, about leading adult lives. We think that it’s all about therapy and that if we rejigger our mindset then naturally all will be will. 

They were confused, and, in their confusion, they failed to distinguish between influencers — otherwise known as popular people with short shelf lives — and leaders, who were willing to harness and even sacrifice their popularity in the service of something bigger than themselves. Everyone in the land of this new, horizontal, non-elite elite, was a brand now, and they spoke the same stupid, happy lingo of the H.R. Department — relentlessly upbeat, irony-averse, disingenuous, parochial. They thought the worst thing in the world was to offend. They said amazing a lot.

Savodnik identifies someone called Benny Drama, an idiot influencer who appeared at the White House in order to encourage people to get vaccinated. So, the Biden administration was wallowing in stupidity while Afghanistan was burning:

They were disconnected from the gravity of the moment, because, like all adolescents, they hadn’t yet come into possession of themselves. They were silly and trite and self-important. They were conduits for social-media personalities. They thought bubble-gum phenoms like Benny Drama were clever.

It’s worth noting that the White House released that Benny Drama video — which was meant to encourage all of us to get our vaccinations — weeks after the State Department warned that Kabul was on the brink of falling to the Taliban and exactly one week before all those Afghans crammed themselves into the wheel well and climbed onto the wing of that C-17, hoping that, somehow, when they opened their eyes, they would be in America.

We are drowning in an ocean of inanity. A nice phrase.... We have failed to educate children and we want to cover up our failures by telling them that their mental drool makes them surpassingly intelligent. Just ask Benny Drama.

Our elites’ dereliction of duty, their forgetting — about who they were supposed to be and, just as important, what America was supposed to be — is mostly to blame for the ocean of inanity that has engulfed us. The multiplying stupidities. The mythologies we promulgate online unironically or strategically. The preeners. The pronoun displayers. The opportunists. Michael Moore with his mindless Instagram post about everyone having their own Taliban.

A genuine elite would know enough, be strong enough, to say: enough. To say: no. To say: that is nonsense.

A genuine elite would care little about how many followers it had. It would be steeped in its many responsibilities — to those who had come before and those who were yet to be born — and that sense of responsibility would be reflected in its nourishing and cultivation of the institutions of American life. It would ensure that those institutions remained tethered to their heritage while open to new voices. An ever-expanding, renewing worldview. Like America itself.

Savodnik explains that we are governed by weaklings. Take the blithering fool running the State Department, coupled with the woke crowd at the Pentagon-- we do not have to go very far to find evidence for his view:

Instead, we are governed by weaklings whose weakness has enabled all species of moral relativism. The identitarian left can no longer distinguish between its political foes and those who are truly evil. It cannot see that the “toxic masculinity” it decries extended the lifespans of Afghan women and shielded them from their would-be rapists and enabled their daughters to go to school. The identitarian right wonders aloud why America should absorb the Afghan interpreters who helped us prosecute a 20-year-war in their country. It cannot see that admitting these refugees is a matter not of immigration policy, but of honor and integrity and preserving these values that, it claims, are central to the American character. Both camps have been permanently alienated from their home. Both are incapable of charting a way forward, because they have forgotten, among all the many other things, where we are going. Our ignominious departure from Hamid Karzai International was presaged years ago by their ignorance and cravenness.

What now?

We have arrived at the second bookend: the Afghans falling from the sky.

Of course, it wasn’t really a bookend. “Bookend” implies symmetry. This wasn’t symmetrical. The first fall was horrifying, but it was the first. It signaled the start of something, and it signaled the hope that, soon, everything would be different.

Now we know that nothing will be different. That we have been returned to September 11, 2001, but that it is worse this time, because no one fears us and everyone knows we’re never going back. That nothing can be done. About Afghanistan and, really, America. There is a sense of inevitable decline.

He is not very optimistic about America. Then again, neither am I.

 

When You've Lost the New York Times....

This comes to us from The New York Times. Yes, that New York Times. It was printed on the front page and authored by Peter Baker, one of the better Times reporters. In truth, I have been reading Baker’s biography of his namesake, James Baker, co-authored with his wife, Susan Glasser. Its title is: The Man Who Ran Washington. I find it to be excellent and recommend it highly. 

Baker’s judgment of Biden’s Afghanistan policy does not mince words. Since I did not have to subscribe to the Times to find it, I quote the portion that I found on MRC Newsbusters.

As the saying goes, when you’ve lost the New York Times...

For most of the last week, in the fires of the worst foreign policy crisis of his young administration, the president who won the White House on a promise of competence and compassion has had trouble demonstrating much of either.

The chaos in Kabul and his own conflicting messages have left President Biden struggling to assert command over world events and seemingly more intent on washing his hands of Afghanistan than expressing concern over the humanitarian tragedy unfolding on the ground.

As he has all week, Mr. Biden made assertions seemingly at odds with reality. His description of a smoother evacuation contrasted with the continuing confusion at the Kabul airport, where flights were halted for hours on Friday until they resumed late in the day. His claim that there was “no question of our credibility” with NATO allies belied the deep frustration in European capitals. And while Mr. Biden hailed the “degree of precision” of the operation, he could not say how many Americans were still in danger.

Those comments came after other suspect statements earlier in the week….

At points, the president has evinced little sense of the human toll as the Taliban swept back to power. Asked about pictures of fleeing Afghans packed into planes and some even falling to their death after trying to sneak aboard, Mr. Biden interrupted. “That was four days ago, five days ago,” he said, when in fact it was two days earlier and hardly made less horrific by the passage of a couple of sunsets.

"Did Gender Studies Lose Afghanistan"

For those who love foreign policy and military policy and every manner of muscle flexing, a writer who dubbed himself Cockburn has written in the Spectator that we lost Afghanistan because we decided that it was a good place to plant our latest theories about gender.

How come no one thought that we ought perhaps to teach the virtues of the free enterprise system? How come no one thought to open up mining operations in areas that contained massive concentrations of rare earth minerals? You can feel confident that the Chinese and the Russians will be doing same. We were imposing gender theory on people who had no sense of what it was. We did not care what these people thought or felt. We were imposing what we imagined to be a higher truth.

By Cockburn’s lights, gender studies lost Afghanistan. That means, the more the Afghans were exposed to dopey Western gender theorists the more they concluded that perhaps the Taliban was not so bad, after all.

So, alongside the billions for bombs went hundreds of millions for gender studies in Afghanistan. According to U.S. government reports, $787 million was spent on gender programs in Afghanistan, but that substantially understates the actual total, since gender goals were folded into practically every undertaking America made in the country.

Presumably, this suggests that we spent over a billion dollars on gender studies reeducation-- you know, the kind that we foist on American children every day.

Cockburn opens with an obvious point:

For starters, in both Dari and Pastho there are no words for “gender.” 

That makes sense, since the distinction between “sex” and “gender” was only invented by a sexually-abusive child psychiatrist in the 1960s, but evidently Americans were caught off-guard. Things didn’t improve from there. Under the US’s guidance, Afghanistan’s 2004 constitution sets a 27 per cent quota for women in the lower house — higher than the actual figure in America! A strategy that sometimes required having women represent provinces they had never actually been to. Remarkably, this experiment in “democracy” created a government few were willing to fight for, let alone die for.

Diversity quotas-- now that was what was missing in Afghanistan. And yet, Cockburn suggests that no one was willing to fight or die for gender diversity and inclusion. Fancy that.

He continues:

The initiatives piled up one after another. Do-gooders established a “National Masculinity Alliance”, so a few hundred Afghan men could talk about their “gender roles” and “examine male attitudes that are harmful to women.”

One recalls, to one’s chagrin, that in Sweden, a country now become the rape capital of the Western world, nearly all of the rapes are committed by individuals who belong to a specific religious grouping. One doe not want to say which one, becuase one does not want to hurt anyone's feelings.

One also recalls that the worst rapists, reportedly, the men who are the most abusive to women, are the Afghans. The reason, someone once opined, was that these men had received sensitivity training in Afghanistan, courtesy of the American government.

What else did gender studies bring to Afghanistan:

Police facilities included childcare facilities for working mothers, as though Afghanistan’s medieval culture had the same needs as 1980s Minneapolis. The army set a goal of 10 percent female participation, which might make sense in a Marvel movie, but didn’t to devout Muslims. 

Even as America built an Afghan army ended up collapsing in days, and a police force whose members frequently became highwaymen, it always made sure to execute its gender goals.

Could it be that the Afghan army, burdened with gender quotas, perfectly coedified, could not function? One might ask the same of the coedified American army, led by thoroughly modern Milley.

The ideological indoctrination produced by gender studies caused local people to rebel.

According to an USAID observer, the gender ideology included in American aid routinely caused rebellions out in the provinces, directly causing the instability America was supposedly fighting. To get Afghanistan’s parliament to endorse the women’s rights measures it wanted, America resorted to bribing them. Soon, bribery became the norm for getting anything done in the parliament.

One closes this post by recollecting the remarks made one Andrew Stiles, in jest, apparently, to the effect that the Biden Afghanistan policy reflected the awesome might of girlpower. My post linked here. After all, Stiles said, beyond the figureheads of Sullivan, Blinken, Austin and Biden, the rest of the team was filled with females. I refer you to my post on said subject.

Despite the fact that Stiles was proposing satire, the truth remains that, gender being fluid, the mindset that produced and is still producing the debacle and the appalling failure that is our current Afghanistan policy is decidedly female. It is more about emotion than about action.

Yesterday, Chris Wallace asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken-- a man thoroughly reviled by the late Sen. John McCain-- the following question:

Mr. Secretary, does the president not know what's going on?

Considering the dangerous ineptitude that Biden has been displaying of late, it was a fair question-- more than fair, if you will.

To this Blinken replied (emphasis mine):

“Chris, all I can tell you is what I’ve heard. And again, this is a powerful, emotional time for a lot of allies and partners, as it is for me, as it is for us,” Blinken responded. “But I’ve also heard of this, I’ve heard across the board, deep appreciation and thanks from allies and partners for everything that we’ve done to bring our allies and partners out of harm’s way.”

The boldfaced remark was a repetition of Blinken’s prior assertion that:

This is an incredibly emotional time for many of us.

Why does this matter? It matters because it is girl talk. How many men do you know or have you ever known who talk about how emotional it all is? If they do, it means that they have undergone gender diversity training and have learned how to talk like girls.

After all, while governments of Britain and France and even the Ukraine take action to save their citizens, the American government whines and complains about how little it can do. Does that sound very manly to you?

By now, it appears that the true face of the Biden administration is the giggling schoolgirl Kamala Harris.

Again, Andrew Stiles might have thought his report was satire, but he seems to have grasped one of the basic truths, one of the causes for our failure in Afghanistan-- we were not just selling democracy-- you know, the kind that barely even works here-- but we were selling woke cultural politics. We were selling a cultural aberration, a rank deformity, and trying to impose it on people who did not understand a word of it. Not only did Afghans not understand gender studies, but they thought that it was batshit crazy stuff. And that, of course, includes Afghan women.

What Matters?

 From Philosophy Matters:

Destroying American Math Education

Diversity is our strength. Our diverse and equitable and inclusive nation will naturally prevail against the authoritarian state that is China. You can see this thesis argued across the political spectrum. Unfortunately, it is rank nonsense, Prozac for the depressed American soul.

In truth, as most of us recognize, diversity quotas are destroying America. They are certainly destroying the minds of America’s schoolchildren. In the field of mathematics America is falling behind the world. The new mania about anti-racism training and social justice is going to make things worse, not better.

And, yes, I know that you have heard these basic ideas before, at times on this blog. And yet, I want to emphasize the importance of a Quillette article, written by three senior, and decorated mathematicians: Percy Deift, Svetlana Jitomirskaya, and Sergiu Klainerman.

They are sounding the alarm against critical race theory and the rest, especially as it has been dumbing down children’s ability to learn math. And as math goes, so goes science.

The authors remark that great achievements in math and science have sustained America’s past greatness. As it happens, many of the leaders in the field were immigrants from Europe, refugees from World War II and the Cold War.

To their minds, our dominance in math is now under siege:

Because mathematics is the basis of science—as well as virtually all major technological advances, including scientific computing, climate modelling, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and robotics—US leadership in math has supplied our country with an enormous strategic advantage. But for various reasons, three of which we set out below, the United States is now at risk of losing that dominant position.

Of course, the problem begins in elementary and high schools. Aside from the horrors visited on children by the teachers’ unions, we have the simple fact that teachers’ colleges are getting it all wrong. What other lesson could we have drawn from the kerfuffle over Jill Biden’s calling herself a doctor. Graduates of teachers’ colleges learn some pedagogical techniques, but while they are doing so they are not learning how to do math.

First, and most obvious, is the deplorable state of our K-12 math education system. Far too few American public-school children are prepared for careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). 

This leaves us increasingly dependent on a constant inflow of foreign talent, especially from mainland China, Taiwan, South Korea, and India. In a 2015 survey conducted by the Council of Graduate Schools and the Graduate Record Examinations Board, about 55 percent of all participating graduate students in mathematics, computer sciences, and engineering at US schools were found to be foreign nationals. In 2017, the National Foundation for American Policy estimated that international students accounted for 81 percent of full-time graduate students in electrical engineering at U.S. universities; and 79 percent of full-time graduate students in computer science.

A not-so-minor detail-- the best American college students in math are not exactly the products of America’s K-12 educational system. How many are Asian American, the products of a rigorous community culture? How many of them, being Asian immigrants, will graduate and return to their home countries, where they will not be burdened by empty-headed rants about critical race theory:

In our field, mathematics, we find that at most top departments in the United States, at least two-thirds of the faculty are foreign born. (And even among those faculty born in the United States, a large portion are first-generation Americans.) Similar patterns may be observed in other STEM disciplines.

Of course, the war on merit, now being conducted under the guise of reducing racial disparities is merely dumbing down the discipline, so that underachievers will not feel so bad.

The second reason for concern is that the nationwide effort to reduce racial disparities, however well-intentioned, has had the unfortunate effect of weakening the connection between merit and scholastic admission. It also has served (sometimes indirectly) to discriminate against certain groups—mainly Asian Americans. The social-justice rhetoric used to justify these diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs is often completely at odds with the reality one observes on campuses. The concept of fighting “white supremacy,” in particular, doesn’t apply to the math field, since American-born scholars of all races now collectively represent a small (and diminishing) minority of the country’s academic STEM specialists.

Now, a diverse America is having trouble competing with other countries for top talent. Many foreign students come here because the educational system is of higher quality than what they have at home. Now, however, the Chinese are doing everything in their power to improve their colleges and universities:

Third, other countries are now competing aggressively with the United States to recruit top talent, using the same policies that worked well for us in the past. Most notably, China, America’s main economic and strategic competitor, is in the midst of an extraordinary, mostly successful, effort to improve its universities and research institutions. As a result, it is now able to retain some of the best Chinese scientists and engineers, as well as attract elite recruits from the United States, Europe, and beyond.

As for the numbers, American students are world class laggards:

In a 2018 report published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), China ranked first in mathematical proficiency among 15-year-olds, while the United States was in 25th place. And a recent large-scale study of adults’ cognitive abilities, conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, found that many Americans lack the basic skills in math and reading required for successful participation in the economy.

The authors show us how a state like California is dumbing down the teaching of math in school.

An even bigger problem, in our view, is that the educational establishment has an almost complete lock on the content taught in our schools, with little input from the university math community. This unusual feature of American policymaking has led to a constant stream of ill-advised and dumbed-down “reforms,” which have served to degrade the teaching of mathematics to such an extent that it has become difficult to distinguish a student who is capable from one who is not.

Those who find that last assertion difficult to accept should peruse the revised Mathematics Framework proposed by California’s Department of Education. If implemented, the California framework would do away with any tracking or differentiation of students up to the 11th grade. In order to achieve what the authors call “equity” in math education, the framework would effectively close the main pathway to calculus in high school to all students except those who take extra math outside school—which, in practice, means students from families that can afford enrichment programs (or those going to charter and private schools). California is just one state, of course. But as has been widely noted, when it comes to policymaking, what happens in California today often will come to other states tomorrow.

California proposes to dumb down math by making it a function of data science. Unfortunately, it eliminates most algebra courses, and this, the authors note, makes children unqualified to do most advanced STEM work.

The framework proposed for California’s 10,588 public schools and their six-million-plus students promotes “data science” as a preferred pathway, touting it as the mathematics of the 21st century. While this might sound like a promising idea, the actual “data-science” pathway described in the framework minimizes algebraic training to such an extent that it leaves students completely unprepared for most STEM undergraduate degrees. Algebra is essential to modern mathematics; and there is hardly any application of mathematics (including real data science) that is not based to a large extent on either algebra or calculus (with the latter being impossible to explain or implement without the former).

The authors write that “a fundamental aim of this framework is to respond to issues of inequity in mathematics learning”; that “we reject ideas of natural gifts and talents [and the] cult of the genius”; and that “active efforts in mathematics teaching are required in order to counter the cultural forces that have led to and continue to perpetuate current inequities.” 

And yet the research they cite to justify these claims has been demonstrated to be shallow, misleadingly applied, vigorously disputed, or just plainly wrong. Even the specific model lessons offered in the proposed framework fail to withstand basic mathematical scrutiny, as they muddle basic logic, present problems that can’t be solved by techniques described as being available to students, or list solutions without discussing the need for a proof (thus developing a false understanding of what it means to “solve” a problem—a misconception that university educators such as ourselves must struggle to undo).

Deift, Jitomirskaya, and Klainerman respond:

This trend, which reaches across many fields, is especially self-defeating in mathematics, because declining standards in K-12 math education are now feeding into a vicious cycle that threatens to affect all STEM disciplines. As already noted, low-quality K-12 public-school education produces students who exhibit sub-par math skills, with underprivileged minorities suffering the most. This in turn leads to large disparities in admissions at universities, graduate programs, faculty, and STEM industry positions. Those disparities are then, in turn, condemned as manifestations of systemic racism—which results in administrative measures aimed at lowering evaluation criteria. This lowering of standards leads to even worse outcomes and larger disparities, thus pushing the vicious cycle through another loop.

Since skin color is now all that matters, universities in California will be hiring for diversity, but not for merit.

And some universities, following the example of the University of California, are now implementing measures to evaluate candidates for faculty positions and promotions based not only on the quality of their research, teaching, and service, but also on their specifically articulated commitment to diversity metrics. Various institutions have even introduced pathways to tenure based on diversity activities alone. The potential damage such measures can bring to academic standards in STEM is immense. And the history of science is full of examples that show how performative adherence to a politically favored ideology, easily faked by opportunistic and mediocre scientists, can lead to the devaluation of entire academic fields.

Of course, China is taking their math training in an entirely different direction:

Needless to say, China pursues none of the equity programs that are sweeping the United States. Quite the contrary: It is building on the kind of accelerated, explicitly merit-based programs, centered on gifted students, that are being repudiated by American educators. Having learned its lesson from the Cultural Revolution, when science and merit-based education were all but obliterated in favor of ideological indoctrination, China is pursuing a far-sighted, long-term strategy to create a world-leading corps of elite STEM experts. In some strategically important fields, such as quantum computing, the country is arguably already ahead of the United States.

As visitors to these Chinese universities (including ourselves) can attest, the average math undergraduate is now performing at a much higher level than his or her counterpart at comparable US institutions.

The signs of American decline are manifest:

The drawbacks of American education policies are so pronounced that US schools are now losing their ability to attract elite scholars despite the fact that the United States offers these academics a freer and more democratic environment.

Have a nice day!