← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Walter Yannis
Thread ID: 18441 | Posts: 6 | Started: 2005-05-29
2005-05-29 10:15 | User Profile
Have the NYT discovered The Bell Curve?
Walter
[URL=http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/29/opinion/29brooks.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print]New York Times[/URL] May 29, 2005 Karl's New Manifesto By DAVID BROOKS I was in the library reading room when suddenly a strange specter of a man appeared above me. He was a ragged fellow with a bushy beard, dressed in the clothes of another century. He clutched news clippings on class in America, and atop the pile was a manifesto in his own hand. He was gone in an instant, but Karl's manifesto on modern America remained. This is what it said:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle. Freeman and slave, lord and serf, capitalist and proletariat, in a word oppressor and oppressed, stand in opposition to each other and carry on a constant fight. In the information age, in which knowledge is power and money, the class struggle is fought between the educated elite and the undereducated masses.
The information age elite exercises artful dominion of the means of production, the education system. The median family income of a Harvard student is $150,000. According to the Educational Testing Service, only 3 percent of freshmen at the top 146 colleges come from the poorest quarter of the population. The educated class ostentatiously offers financial aid to poor students who attend these colleges and then rigs the admission criteria to ensure that only a small, co-optable portion of them can get in.
The educated class reaps the benefits of the modern economy - seizing for itself most of the income gains of the past decades - and then ruthlessly exploits its position to ensure the continued dominance of its class.
The educated class has torn away from the family its sentimental veil and reduced it to a mere factory for the production of little meritocrats. Members of the educated elites are more and more likely to marry each other, which the experts call assortative mating, but which is really a ceaseless effort to refortify class solidarity and magnify social isolation. Children are turned into workaholic knowledge workers - trained, tutored, tested and prepped to strengthen class dominance.
The educated elites are the first elites in all of history to work longer hours per year than the exploited masses, so voracious is their greed for second homes. They congregate in exclusive communities walled in by the invisible fence of real estate prices, then congratulate themselves for sending their children to public schools. They parade their enlightened racial attitudes by supporting immigration policies that guarantee inexpensive lawn care. They send their children off to Penn, Wisconsin and Berkeley, bastions of privilege for the children of the professional class, where they are given the social and other skills to extend class hegemony.
The information society is the only society in which false consciousness is at the top. For it is an iron rule of any university that the higher the tuition and more exclusive the admissions, the more loudly the denizens profess their solidarity with the oppressed. The more they objectively serve the right, the more they articulate the views of the left.
Periodically members of this oppressor class hold mock elections. The Yale-educated scion of the Bush family may face the Yale-educated scion of the Winthrop family. They divide into Republicans and Democrats and argue over everything except the source of their power: the intellectual stratification of society achieved through the means of education.
More than the Roman emperors, more than the industrial robber barons, the malefactors of the educated class seek not only to dominate the working class, but to decimate it. For 30 years they have presided over failing schools without fundamentally transforming them. They have imposed a public morality that affords maximum sexual opportunity for themselves and guarantees maximum domestic chaos for those lower down.
In 1960 there were not big structural differences between rich and poor families. In 1960, three-quarters of poor families were headed by married couples. Now only a third are. While the rates of single parenting have barely changed for the educated elite, family structures have disintegrated for the oppressed masses.
Poor children are less likely to live with both biological parents, hence, less likely to graduate from high school, get a job and be in a position to challenge the hegemony of the privileged class. Family inequality produces income inequality from generation to generation.
Undereducated workers of the world, unite! Let the ruling educated class tremble! You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to win!
I don't agree with everything in Karl's manifesto, because I don't believe in incessant class struggle, but you have to admit, he makes some good points.
2005-05-30 12:42 | User Profile
More Allegations Of Rape Against 71-Year-Old Pastor
EATONVILLE, Fla. -- Eyewitness News has discovered several more victims have come forward claiming a prominent Central Florida pastor raped them.
The list of potential victims continues to grow. Five people, so far, have accused bishop Lura Williams of sex crimes, including one woman who says he raped her over and over when she was only 11 years old.
In the tiny town of Eatonville, this stunning case has grown even more disturbing. A man of the cloth is accused of unspeakable acts and at least one alleged victim wasn't even in her teens.
The woman, now 41, told investigators Williams would take her into wooded areas in Sanford and have his way. She has only come forward now after watching the story on Channel 9.
Williams is in jail with no bond, accused of raping a congregant just last month. Monday, police impounded the RV where the woman says the 71-year-old pastor attacked her on April 26. She said Williams invited her over to talk church business, but instead forced her to have sex.
It's a similar story, police said, now told by as many as five woman. And, since Williams has been preaching at the Worldwide Revival Center since 1969, they fear they've just begun to scratch the surface of an outrageous case.
In fact, because Eatonville is such a small police department and victims are spread out as far as Seminole and Lake counties, they're asking the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to help with the investigation.
As for Williams, he's charged so far in connection with only one victim. From jail he declined an on-camera interview.
Lura Williams has several other arrests on his record. In 1990, he was arrested for aggravated assault with a weapon and battery. In 1995, Williams was charged with exhibiting a dangerous weapon. Then, in 2002, he was charged with aggravated battery causing bodily harm. [right]. [/right]
[url="http://www.wftv.com/news/4491894/detail.html"]http://www.wftv.com/news/4491894/detail.html[/url]
2005-05-30 16:35 | User Profile
Ban " Stigmata "
[QUOTE=Exelsis_Deo]I've been away for months, but it's obvious that the sole purpose of this " Stigmata " character is to paste and post Anti-Catholic vitriols on all OD threads, regardless of their subject matter. He does a fine job of ruining the flow of the thread, I'm sure we all love that. See here for his other most recent attempt to demolish a thread, and my reply, which blasts him as nothing but a biased idiot. He doesn't check anything, he scours the net for anti-Catholic trash, and makes use of his copy and paste ability. [url]http://www.originaldissent.com/forums/showthread.php?p=115118#post115118[/url][/QUOTE] [QUOTE=Exelsis_Deo]I posted here on a board about Sam Francis, and about the suspended member " General Rommel " / but as always, this Stigmata dolt keep posting his anti-Catholic junk all over OD, he/she ruins the flow of the threads. I guess that's his only desire. I wish Ok would ban him/her. People like "Stigmata" have no class. He doesn't care about interrupting the flow of threads with long, unrelated junk, and won't stop unless forced to. If his activities keep up and do not change, I think we should group up and get him suspended from OD. He's nothing but a one-trick pony with a Copy and Paste fetish to bash Christianity and disturb the flow of everyone's other subjects. Anyone else agree ?[/QUOTE]
2005-05-30 17:28 | User Profile
David Brooks is terribly confused. Poor families, such as they are, are losing ground because government welfare has driven poor men away from their families.
There are no "educated elites," really. Anybody can get a baccalaureate these days, and the Ivy League teaches the same principles of accounting as Cal State. The Ivy League degree is more just the price of admission to the new elite of entrenched government bureaucrats, whose salaries alone are soaring past the $150,000 mark, Wall Street fund managers, and senior executives of publicly-traded companies. There is also the new, new elite of multi-millionaire plaintiff's attorneys.
2005-05-30 20:37 | User Profile
Jew Brooks does seem to be parroting The Bell Curve's non-racial points here, many of which I think are worth pondering. Naturally, he omits race and ethnicity and its juncture with the education stratification phenomenon.
The funny thing about The Bell Curve is that once you got beyond the low black IQ stuff, it had a sort of home and hearth, village and king-type message, which was in a sense very conservative (Burnham and Kirk-style), but also domestically liberal in the sense that it rejected the idea of a jet-setting raceless global elite.
Murray and Herrnstein made the point that once upon a time, every small town had a genius. Now, NYC and DC get all the geniuses, and everyone else drifts away. The old system of IQ distribution made for better localism because you had a few bright bulbs all over who would naturally rise and (beneficiently) rule. Now, those bright bulbs all abandon Guymon, Oklahoma and the like and cluster in Westchester, NY, where they are disconnected from the concerns of other people. The result is a skewed policy and a generally unhealthy arrangement.
2005-05-31 07:41 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Hugh Lincoln]The funny thing about The Bell Curve is that once you got beyond the low black IQ stuff, it had a sort of home and hearth, village and king-type message, which was in a sense very conservative (Burnham and Kirk-style), but also domestically liberal in the sense that it rejected the idea of a jet-setting raceless global elite.[/QUOTE]
That's very well put.
I read a review of the Bell Curve someplace that made much the same point, least about Charles Murray. This reviewer wrote that Murray and Hernstein actually wanted very different things.
Murray wanted to re-create the safety and security of the little town in the Midwest (Iowa?) where he grew up - a place where the far right side of the IQ spectrum taught in the local high shool or community college and attended church services and PTA meetings with folks well ensconsed on the right side of the IQ scale.
In contrast, Hernstein wanted to make the Ivy League accessible to smart people like him, regardless of race or creed (I think Hernstein was part of the first generation of young Jews who crashed the gates of the Ivy League WASP elite) and wind up teaching at Harvard and writing brilliant books for other smart people.
Hernstein embraced Dewey's vision of a pure, super-mobile intellectual meritocracy that was interested primarily in advancing its own interests. Murray wanted more Jefferson's vision of the natural aristocracy ruling locally and responsibly and to the benefit of all.
Viewed in that way, Murray and Hernstein were very much at odds with each other.
It's an interesting observation.
Like you, I prefer Murray's vision, although I must say that my life has really followed Hernstein's trajectory, as described in the Bell Curve, to a "T."
BTW, is Charles Murray Jewish? It's actually an Irish name, I think. He looks rather Jewish.