Day: November 30, 2004

🙂

Needed to add this comment, again from Pournelle:

“Jane Jacobs points out that a Dark Age isn’t when you have forgotten how to do things. It is when you have forgotten that you ever could. French peasants in 650 AD were entirely unaware that Roman farmers could get yields of 10 bushels harvest for 1 bushel planted: they thought it a gift of God if they could get 3 bushels from each bushel planted, and generally didn’t get more than 2. And American educators have apparently forgotten that there was a time when 96% of the people who finished 4th grade could read; we now have 100% attendance at schools and a literacy rate somewhat lower than Iraq’s. But all will be well and No Child Will Be Left Behind, so long as we can juggle the tests and get increasing test scores. The purpose of the education system is no longer to educate but to produce people with certain credentials. Hurrah for the educational reforms of the past three decades.”

And so it goes. Another axe in the hands of the barbarians vigorously hacking away at the roots of Western Civilization…

The MMPA, the LLMB and their partners in crime must thank god for government schools (they do that only while looking in the mirror, you know, since that is where they see their god… ).

Well, as you may have discerned by now, “The Essay” concerning the conspiracy to murder Western Civilization, etc., is going to be even longer in coming… Nevertheless, I’ll probably be posting snippets concerning the signs of that “conspiracy” from time to time. Here is one such snippet, from Jerry E. Pournelle:

“In every college classroom in the nation nothing is taught that is inconsistent with the view that within every oppressed human lurks a burning desire for freedom. In my view in every human heart beats a desire, sometimes burning sometimes not to rob his neighbor and possess his wife: it was once known as the doctrine of original sin.

Chesterton once said that anyone who didn’t believe in original sin could not possibly be reading the newspapers.”

While this may be a slight exaggeration (I suspect there may be as many as two classrooms in a Bible College somewhere in a hick “red state” that still teach about original sin and man’s depravity), it is close enough to the mark. And it is symptomatic of one of the axes weilded at the roots of Western Civilization by the barbarians in academia, in the ranks of the Mass Media Podpeoples’ Army and the Loony Left Moonbat Brigade. That, of course, is the current preconceptual bias against the concept of right and wrong. The concept that there is anything that is clearly always, immutably right and thus there are behaviors that are always clearly immutably wrong is the only “always wrong” concept to the barbarians in academia, in the ranks of the Mass Media Podpeoples’ Army and the Loony Left Moonbat Brigade. To them right and wrong are opinions, and that is the only correct opinion about right and wrong.

Try to have a civilization where “every man [does] what is right in his own eyes”. Go ahead. Try it.

Meanwhile, I need to clean this keyboard… (tired of re-typing every blasted “d”).