You bring up many points in this post. I'd like to touch on one of them. In my opinion, the place for preference in education is at the primary school level, where disadvantaged students experience significant segregation from their more affluent, and predominantly Caucasian counterparts. Here, schools in historically minority populated school districts deal with issues that students in more affluent school districts do not. As a society, we benefit from the best young minds succeeding. I agree with your viewpoint that this should not be happening at the more elective university level. But, if we really want the best young minds to succeed, we must consider the possibility of evening the playing field so that the disadvantaged are not left behind, before ever applying for entrance at the university level. I feel that this (and not at the post-secondary level) is where we are failing. By the time student reach post-secondary education, the cake has been baked, so to speak.
Thanks. I certainly agree with you that primary education is where the cake is baked. But this article is after all a book review and one about the tertiary sector.
Hoping you will find enough merit in my writing to subscribe anyway Robert?
Funny thing about the girl who claimed rape and carried around the mattress as performance art, she created a video reenactment that clearly showed she willfully engaged in consensual rough sex.
Her beef, as she openly states, was that the sex didnt end fast enough when, in the middle of it, she decided she wanted it to.
I'm not sure the proper distinction here and the guy was likely an asshole, but society needs to focus on solving the issue of fully non-consensual sex and I don't think she's helping.
I was only commenting on the woman who came up in the piece. I don't think I wrote anything that questioned the context of the piece itself. I would say my comments add to what you wrote about her.
Thanks for all these comments Kelly. Since you like this essay, why not subscribe free to: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/ and get future essays (I post one per month) which you may also find interesting.
May this note find us all ever closer to God, and His Peace.
Modern Western womanhood exist in a state of Loveless and Sickening lawlessness, there are so many Crimes against themselves, us all, and society, nation, etc. that are now legally, socially, and self-imprudently allowed, and sometimes rewarded, where once there was at least Shame - there is now unLoving Hateful destructive support.
Here are some examples; ..
.
Parental Fraud. In the UK there is a law that fatherhood tests of a child can only be done with mother's permission - giving her the time to false-witness threatening or abuse claim against him, restraining order, divorce-rape, and State supported torture and torment of him and the children.
Perhaps you do not consider this common or potentially common (if male were informed), but you would be wrong. That I have seen a study of 90,000 sample of child-mother-father examination of blood-type for Parental Fraud using national blood back, where 30,000 of them showed the Father-of-Record was not in fact the father, showing many significant other things such-as that the average woman will live a life-crippling life-killing lie she tells to her husband, real-father & lover, her children, her extended family, society, State, medical system, and others.
.. and I found that reference to that study was censored from an article I used to reference the location on web, and also from Google, that our medical system, and many Professionals we trusted and that have a contractual and ethic requirement to inform us are not, that most are actively hiding it.
Another study (this one was referenced on FBI site until recently removed) on police reported False Rape accusations, and found near 80% were false.
This indicated that those women that profess to love us or we trust (with reason such as Professionals) will tell us life-destroying lies, And that women who we do not know or barely now or we courting will lie and act to destroy our lives - prison for 20 years of other prisoners & guards rape and torture of us as a 'sexual predator', or even when proven false-accused or women recants - the reputation destruction and continued social-family-professional-social stigma and punishment will be life-long, and often name is put of gov list that effects housing, carear, services from Gov and corporate, exposes us to violence from others, and more evils Sick modern womanhood now spreads, Lies, Suffering, violence, abuse, death and Hell.
.. and very few women face any punishment when found to be false-witnessing and spreading evil destruction on so many levels of all our lives, that sometimes or often they are rewarded in the victim-status Class we now congratulate and encourage.
Recall - this is that was the women that go to police, when many times that number spread such lies on the secrete Witch-Whisper-Web and if follows him and results in attacks of many forms that confuses and damages him in many ways - him, family, dependents, employers, ...
A triggering meme that drew my thoughts related to this was 'Islam is correct about women', and in some societies women's testimony value is 1/3 of a man's value, and this is in a society where real risk of stoning-to-death of False Witnessers exists, and some women have seen or heard about that really happening.
.. and so why is this or some significant punishment for those people that False Witness exist in the West, and since women are rewarded and often or never punished for such a crime, what should be the general woman's Testimony value - 1/10th? And should it be adjusted based on last 5-year occurrence of Parental Fraud and False-Rape accusations?
I do have a bit of a beef. I was on campus when "Take Back the Night" was a thing.
I was raped on that campus, and there was a strong rape culture amongst the boys. They wanted to get it any way they could, and they were away from home, with no consequences. Who would believe me?
Rape culture on campus is/was a thing - it sounds like they diversified it. Sheesh.
I am so sorry for what happened to you. I can't imagine what that is like.
I agree that rape been a major issue - I am a man but have close friends who had close calls. It is terrible. I am just saying I think that smearing the edges into things that might not best be called rape *hurts* the goal of protecting women from predation. There's enough rape and need to defeat rape culture that it's better to focus on real cases.
Yes, I've tried to imagine what it is like in this "culture of consent," where - as if it wasn't awkward enough when we were young, one has to ask at every step, "can I do this? would you like that?" - it's a wonderful concept in theory, but I'm not sure that humans are mature enough yet.
I'm pretty sure that the confused interactions of human sexual relations don't easily conform to the notional ideals of progressive white suburbanites.
Leveling is a poorly designed goal. (The playing field cannot be perfectly leveled, unless all the kids are taken away from their parents and placed in the custody of the State.) The problem is not that many kids get worse educations. The problem is that many kids get bad educations. Stop focusing on the gap. Start focusing on the absolute height of the lowest point.
I agree there is white bias in SATs (for example). I agree that inner city schools struggle with metrics that are imperceivable to the suburban schools. But at the University level, it should be completely colour/diversity blind, and excellence graded in performance alone.
It's not levelling the playing field - so much as possibly elevating the underprivileged, to open opportunities for that excellent performance. Harm reduction. But that's been tried with Headstart, school breakfasts, etc. It needs to happen at the local, grass roots level, not top-down.
Thanks for these comments JC. Since you like this essay, why not subscribe free to: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/ and get future essays (I post one per month) which you may also find interesting.
Done, since you promised not to overwhelm my inbox. Many substack authors write faster than I can read! It amazes me, because it's high quality product/writing/research - and they pump them out like firehoses!
May this note find us all ever closer to God, and His Peace.
Not everyone should go to college or beyond simple goals that can allow the skills to self learn, bootstrapping, I am over 60+ and still daily searching and researching new things - or filling-out what I already know but not as well as I want. Web is wonderful source, if Google is not suppressing it as they do now. And push what is false, but you should believe the mind-rapers think.
I would have been better off financially had I gone directly into electrical training, especially if school finished at 14 yo - on job training, and likely have own business by 20 yo & married with 2 kids, house, instead of salary wage-suppressed doing the job of 3 people (no kidding they needed 3 to fill my responsibilities when I left one job) and out-straight 6-days a week.
Public schools should end at 8th grade, focus on basics, and then trade-school or University .. if the immature seeming 14 year olds we see in collage now, then a 9th grader should do fine.
Also sex-segregated - not possible to learn for a young man when attractive girl in yoga-pants with camel-toe, and younger boys can get to run-around more instead of drugged-up only because the women teachers are ignorant or lied-to about male & think they should be girls.
Men teachers need to return to earlier child education to help the fatherless by being engaged with men mentors, and to guard the children from the mostly male-hating mind-raping psycho women-pedo teachers that mutilate their minds and get-off at crippling their lives, sex-mutilations they talk them into.
Also, some children are not and will never perform at average level, no matter what is done - some temp. improvement but not lasting is what the research reports last I knew. Poverty and lower IQ has good (or bad) correlation, and as I have argued about helping those in poverty, when people with above avg IQ are struggling with the complexities, how is the man with IQ too low to join military (IQ 84) going to do?
Homeless and suffering - but IQ is a topic that you can get punished for bringing-up, labeled names, etc. The vicious psychos are so cruel that their twisted fun at kicking gonads - is better than finding better solutions.
There is no singular issue. But there are several important ones: 1) funding is lower in non-affluent school districts; 2) attracting good teachers is difficult in these districts; 3) parent participation (both at home and in-school) is lower; 4) student attendence is typically lower; 5) student nutrition is poorer in these districts
The funding issue is bandied about a lot, but is simply untrue. Accordingly to Federal Reserve data, the average black and average white students are funded at lost exactly the same rate, see link below.
Every other issue you mention is cultural. In short, African-American kids have poor educational attainment because African-American culture does not value education. The state cannot fix this by spending more money.
I think you failed to (fully) read your own source. While it is true to federal funding is essential independent of race, there are multiple sources of funding that contribute to the total expenditures for primary education. From your own source: "However, when examining sources of funding, the racial gaps are starker. The average White student attends a district where 47% of funding is from local sources and 7% is from federal sources. In contrast, the average Black student attends a district where 44% of funding is from local sources and 10% is from federal sources. The share of funding from state sources is very similar at 46%. Because federal funding often comes as grants or for specific programs, school districts that serve predominantly Black student bodies may have less control over how these funds are spent." And then look at Figure 2 in your own source. It is VERY clear that school districts with low percentages of minority students very often have much, much higher levels of per student spending -- sometimes an order of magnitude higher. Your own source makes this statement in regard to Figure 2: "shows the relationship between the expenditures on current instruction per student and the share of the student body that is Black. There is a small but statistically significant negative relationship; on average, schools with a 10-percentage-point higher share of Black students spend $140 less per student on instruction. The data on total expenditures are similar; schools with a 10% higher share of Black students spend $160 less per student. " And then, there is the conclusion in your own source which states: "Despite many efforts by policymakers, there remains a large racial gap in key educational outcomes such as high school graduation rates and college attainment.1 In this essay, we examine whether school expenditures differ by race. Average expenditures are very similar for the average Black and average White student, though sources of funding differ, with Black students receiving more federal funds and White students more local funds. Despite this, there is still a negative correlation between expenditures and the share of students who are Black. This outcome is driven by small, predominantly White schools with high expenditures that do not educate a large share of the student body nationally." Sometimes it helps to read more than just the first paragraph.
Great review, Graham, and I agree with most of much of what you say. Heather MacDonald is a great writer and I always appreciate her take even if I don't always agree with it.
My one little quibble echoes one that someone else made on another comment just now.
> I suspect that, in the unlikely event of The Diversity Delusion being read by anyone on the Left, they too would mentally airbrush the evidence away.
I think it's a mistake to assume that The Left is a monolith. It makes it harder for you to hear and address our arguments. The domain of The Left includes more than just racial politics, identity politics and gender politics. I am a lifelong leftie and I have read and agree with a lot of Heather MacDonald's observations. Identity politics is corrosive and should be opposed but identity politics does not define the left any more than free-market capitalism or immigrant-bashing defines the right.
No the Left is not a monolith. All political creeds are spectrum in nature. And the rhetorical kind of journalism that I write always has a degree of approximation - otherwise it risks becoming unreadably dense. Through our conversations, I have come to know something of the kind of lefty you are and it's a kind I can respect. Would you not agree though that, in the last 50 years or so, the dominant strain has shifted quite radically - from an essentially economic/working -class/fairness one to an essentially middle-class obsession with an identity -based kind of competitive victimhood?
I agree that there has been a big shift. I think there's a case to be made that the surge in identity politics is largely a reaction to the disappointment that having a black president didn't fix everything in America. This has been amplified by a generation that grew up with social media and their parochial concerns get more airtime than they would have got in the 1960s.
But I disagree that it's the dominant strain on the left. I think it's all too easy to 'nutpick' weirdos and extremists and claim that they represent the left. It's unfortunate that identity politics gets so much airtime but I think the primary goal of the left is still fairness — as it ever was.
May this note find us all ever closer to God, and His Peace.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s black communities were tight in many places, with very low out-of-wedlock babies, high employment, church involvement, black owned businesses, Stable healthy for children, strict discipline and limits, and I wonder if that was better for the children's education.
.. then gov. employees visited mothers when fathers were at work, welfare started the destruction by paying mothers to get rid of fathers, .., unemployment, CIA supplied Heroine from Vietnam, crime, unmarried mothers, .., they were the testing ground for the destruction of white middle-Class.
"I think the primary goal of the left is still fairness" - welfare 'helped' them, and to be fair the Leftie-communists did it to middle-Class. Leftists like 'devouring mothers' fem-nazis helping us to death, society to ash.
Obama increased race tension for political power, anti-white false-resentment and hate with increased hate-crimes by blacks to whites & police, blaming others for failures, etc. And people wondered if Black Woman Harris would do same plus feminist poison and horrors, since she refused to release men from private prison when time-served to keep them working - slavery, if she do that to those under her power, what would she do if President?
On a whim, I just googled for a definition of left-wing politics just to make sure I wasn't fooling myself. Here's what Wikipedia had to say:
> Left-wing politics typically involve a concern for those in society whom its adherents perceive as disadvantaged relative to others as well as a belief that there are unjustified inequalities that need to be reduced or abolished*
Yes. That's me. It's a good, succinct summary of my political outlook.
* The article goes on to say that some on the left advocate radical solutions (I don't) and that the hard left supports movements like communism and anarchism (I don't). It doesn't mention identity politics at all.
Wikipedia is great for many things and I use it a lot but it's not much use for defining something as open to interpretation as 'Left wing politics'. I could probably go into it myself and alter that defintion if I was determined enough. Also who is this notional enquirer who has no idea what 'Left wing politics' means? A better way is to look at what has been done in its name in recent times: what is taught in its name about race and gender in schools and universities; what legislation about identity has been enacted by its politicians. Etc.
May this note find us all ever closer to God, and His Peace.
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Too bad the Left is too incompetent, mind-broken, Or destructively evil to not help society by; stop Poisoning the now Sicken Womanhood, stop allowing her to false-witness unpunished, Parent-fraud, to divorce on whim (woman initiates 80%, with over 50% reports the poisonous family father children destroying back-stabbing woman is '..not happy'), ..
.. Also to stop making work & other environments Toxic to men and decent women, and to stop calling police because 'feel unsafe' when two men are talking & laughing freely on public bench (it happened to me a few times, vile Witched using police to Joy-murder us), stop voting to take our earned money in taxes for bigger Gov. decreased liberty more women power to destroy to kill our babies, etc.
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About Wikipedia. When I first learned of this service, I was so excited as I imagined that world-wide educators would assign students to add content in relation to subject(s) studied, as well as Professionals, devoted amateurs, others of all subjects.
.. instead, the mass-media pushed teachers - mostly women - that soiled the concept and the service with suggestions that it was against education, bad for students, their employers, society, future.
At the time, I was still evil-Blinded. So thought them only as lazy, uncreative, child-crippling meritless and virtueless mind-crippling professional. Instead of the hand-picked student-retarding teachers and-or paid performers pretending to be teachers working with media to grass-roots objection to Wikipedia, because perhaps the easier good info at our hands the harder to control us, or to genocide-Poison inject us.
Yet, if you assume political and other topics are lies, that some people often smeared falsely, keep to STEM and other subjects Satan's minions are uninterested in, then it still has value.
Today I tracked down psychological terms mentioned in Papal letters, and YouTube Seminary course I am following.
.. Yesterday I was Deep into one those recursive rabbit-holes that we do when researching and learning using Wikipedia (so sad it was Soros Foundation twisted into mind-raping tool like Google became - so so much Promise, twisted towards evil) which started when - in one of my Catholic Science-Apologetics mode, I was considering Plato's 'Forms', and if Adam, Eve, and each of those original animals were near exact mirrors of their Forms, and how when I once Programmed in C++, that I could have created Templates near-Forms where their accidence and variation as well as functionalities could be encapsulated, where the minor 'evolutionally' controlled internal variations were possible from Original Moth-Form, such as that Moth in Britian that changed it's color because the coal exhaust of trains near tracks stuck to trees and colored them gray.
I do agree a huge amount with what you say to be honest. I’m of the pessimistic view wokery is a form of radicalisation; I guess what I’m trying to do is stop the rot with a new positive alternative to intersectionality (the woke doctrine) before we can get back to the timeless good ideas that create rather than destroy. Baby steps
Very interesting stuff Graham, thanks for the recommendation. I created my sub stack to take on some of the delusions of our time by tacking the (anti) intellectual idea or application of intersectionality’s which is as the heart of this stuff. I posit a more positive and accurate alternative in ‘indiesectionality’. I’d like to stress-test this idea so be keen to know your thoughts. Just 5 pages so not War & Peace
I read your '5 Pages' with interest and I think our analyses of 'wokeness' have much in common. But I suspect I am more of a pessimist than you. I do not subscribe to the 'culture war' meme; I see our recent history more in terms of 'culture surrender'. I see civilisations (all civilisations) as tragic - as in they follow a trajectory; they rise and fall; their end is in their beginning; they carry the seeds of their eventual ruination. I fear that Western civilisation's halcyon days are behind it.
I very much share your valuing of 'individual agency' (what I would also call personal responsibility) but, as I see it, the West's very strengths - it's wealth creation and it's great liberalism - have eroded this and encouraged, in its stead, a kind of passive/aggressive rampant narcissism (wokeness). I see this current wokeness as the extrapolation of a long gestation (100 years+ long) and I do not think it will end well. (hope you will still want to FREE subscribe though!)
"Chapter 14 takes a more optimistic look at evidence of a healthy appetite for learning about the West’s cultural treasures continuing to exist in the real world outside of universities."
Those works are fine to study but there is so much to learn outside of them.
I mean, I can agree that this behavior is silly and harmful, but it's not like there is no valid underlying point, that there are not legitimate grievances. And if we're criticizing people's gameplay, there's no shortage of buffoonery and delusion among literally any organization that is composed of humans. Throwing stones *is easy*, defending against them is not so easy, especially when thrown by someone who has studied your culture's techniques.
I enjoy thinking of it as an example of "The sins of the Father being visited upon the sons" - the chickens are coming home to roost, Westerners, in the form of your own culture turning against your crimes, both historic and current. And it is a *beautiful* thing to watch, history in the making!
Big questions you flag here...... too big really to answer in a little comment thread (although I flatter myself that I make a good stab at it in the totality of all my essays here when taken together). Two things (necessarily simplistic):
1) the typical 'grievances' of students in privileged Western universities are largely performative, self absorbed, narcissistic and shallow.
2) if they really wanted to confront evil and grievance they would focus their moral outrage and their protesting on some of the horrific things endured by people living under the yoke of ugly regimes outside of the liberal West
> if they really wanted to confront evil and grievance they would focus their moral outrage and their protesting on some of the horrific things endured by people living under the yoke of ugly regimes outside of the liberal West
While I agree with most of what you have written, this statement seems perverse to me. Just as one is advised to remove the beam from one's own eye before attempting to fish out the mote in one's neighbor's, so too one's concern to police against injustice is best directed to one's own society, which one best understands and in which one has a stake. It's all too easy for a criminal elite in control of the organs of propaganda to point the finger abroad and initiate a real moral and humanitarian catastrophe in their own interests by encouraging the public to think ill of people and places they know nothing about.
Yes but my point was that I don't think student 'radicalism' is really about confronting injustice anywhere... although it does manage to delude itself with such vanities. As in my 1) I see it as primarily shallow performative self-importance.
Agreed; that can often be the case. My thought is that the reduction of politics to shallow performative self-importance becomes easier if it is not tied to the world of experience. Remoteness and abstraction both tend to sever that tie.
Very much agree..... and I have written elsewhere on this as an aspect of the mass media age. Perhaps the corollary - in the case of the student politico - is that they have become so cosseted and self-absorbed as to be abstracted even from their own Western culture.
May this note find us all ever closer to God, and His Peace.
Protesting University students should not be encouraged to protest, as most are ignorant of world and deeper root causes, too willing to believe lies and be used as destructive tool, and other reasons.
Functional retards, believing corp-media and other gossip, and acting before the situation can be understood, and so serving the will of those that would laugh at your deaths.
About understanding different cultures .. like Afghanistan were the father, husband, oldest son is responsible to support the children and women in family, and women earnings she can keep while family starves, so when resources like education and jobs are limited, males must take first place.
The attempted CIA color revolution in Iran where women was arrested because not covering hair, disrespecting society norms and men, and in police station while in a waiting room with others she falls down dead, and video looked like one of those sudden-deaths from covid-19 Poison-injections deaths.
Yet people protested believing corp-CIA-media statements that she was beaten to death.
.. As some unJustly protest about poor Afghan women, when the men in her life are enslaved by law to provide for them.
The lies that will not die of George Flowd's death, it was OD because he ate all the drugs he carrying when police approaching, full policeman's camera video - which was locked away by a Soros Black Prosecutor - to not discourage the riots by informing useful idiots and tools - George was seen on video saying constantly the he could not breath while breathing fine, his girlfriend he called 'mom', the policeman was very respectful for a long time before the restraint was needed and applied, the policeman used trained restrain in manual correctly, and so on.
.. same with 'unarmed black man killed by police' which sometimes he is threatening police with car, combative and grabbing gun, and so one.
Evergreen collage, or violence against Charles Murry that studies IQ and the truths he wrote about go against VagFeelies, ..
.. and rarely something like israel's Gaza Genocide that is cut & dry evil horror, but perhaps be vocal about solutions like after 75+ years of terrorism and genocide and international crimes that the UN should remove Nationhood and give everything standing and land back to Palestinians, the '1-State Solution' before it became Satan's Anus on the world spewing evil & poison world-wide with Jewish Supremacy and belief they can kill anyone - including you & me and worse the WWII Nazis.
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And the Oct7th you know of did not happen. No beheaded babies, no rapes, .., most of the non-military dead were from israel military killing own to prevent them captured to use as hostage for freeing the 1000s of Palestinians taken off street and through in jail and raped - as on video - and torture (some to death) by israel guards. Sick F-ing bastards, as 90% of israeli population support such Satanic evil.
> the typical 'grievances' of students in privileged Western universities are largely performative, self absorbed, narcissistic and shallow.
You have a valid point! However....as a fan of logical nuances of the English language (and culture), I am endlessly fascinated by how easy it is to write sentences that are technically correct (also known as: True, "the" reality, etc), but misleading/misinformative to an unknown degree (perhaps lots), and in a variety of ways. I wonder if anyone is as good at it as us Westerners!
> if they really wanted to confront evil and grievance they would focus their moral outrage and their protesting on some of the horrific things endured by people living under the yoke of ugly regimes outside of the liberal West
This I cannot even gracefully label as technically true, as it implicitly asserts that their motives/grievances are "to confront evil and grievance" and "horrific things endured by people living under the yoke of ugly regimes". That *is* a fantastic story though, it is exactly the type of thing I would utilize if I was interested in persuading people to think in certain ways and believe certain things. Even better, I would establish it as a cultural standard, through a variety of means.
Of course this is all a bit unfair to you I fully concede, but at the same time it's kind of funny, eh?
You bring up many points in this post. I'd like to touch on one of them. In my opinion, the place for preference in education is at the primary school level, where disadvantaged students experience significant segregation from their more affluent, and predominantly Caucasian counterparts. Here, schools in historically minority populated school districts deal with issues that students in more affluent school districts do not. As a society, we benefit from the best young minds succeeding. I agree with your viewpoint that this should not be happening at the more elective university level. But, if we really want the best young minds to succeed, we must consider the possibility of evening the playing field so that the disadvantaged are not left behind, before ever applying for entrance at the university level. I feel that this (and not at the post-secondary level) is where we are failing. By the time student reach post-secondary education, the cake has been baked, so to speak.
Thanks. I certainly agree with you that primary education is where the cake is baked. But this article is after all a book review and one about the tertiary sector.
Hoping you will find enough merit in my writing to subscribe anyway Robert?
Funny thing about the girl who claimed rape and carried around the mattress as performance art, she created a video reenactment that clearly showed she willfully engaged in consensual rough sex.
Her beef, as she openly states, was that the sex didnt end fast enough when, in the middle of it, she decided she wanted it to.
I'm not sure the proper distinction here and the guy was likely an asshole, but society needs to focus on solving the issue of fully non-consensual sex and I don't think she's helping.
You surely don't think that I was suggesting she WAS helping?!
I was only commenting on the woman who came up in the piece. I don't think I wrote anything that questioned the context of the piece itself. I would say my comments add to what you wrote about her.
Thanks for all these comments Kelly. Since you like this essay, why not subscribe free to: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/ and get future essays (I post one per month) which you may also find interesting.
Thank you
May this note find us all ever closer to God, and His Peace.
Modern Western womanhood exist in a state of Loveless and Sickening lawlessness, there are so many Crimes against themselves, us all, and society, nation, etc. that are now legally, socially, and self-imprudently allowed, and sometimes rewarded, where once there was at least Shame - there is now unLoving Hateful destructive support.
Here are some examples; ..
.
Parental Fraud. In the UK there is a law that fatherhood tests of a child can only be done with mother's permission - giving her the time to false-witness threatening or abuse claim against him, restraining order, divorce-rape, and State supported torture and torment of him and the children.
Perhaps you do not consider this common or potentially common (if male were informed), but you would be wrong. That I have seen a study of 90,000 sample of child-mother-father examination of blood-type for Parental Fraud using national blood back, where 30,000 of them showed the Father-of-Record was not in fact the father, showing many significant other things such-as that the average woman will live a life-crippling life-killing lie she tells to her husband, real-father & lover, her children, her extended family, society, State, medical system, and others.
.. and I found that reference to that study was censored from an article I used to reference the location on web, and also from Google, that our medical system, and many Professionals we trusted and that have a contractual and ethic requirement to inform us are not, that most are actively hiding it.
Another study (this one was referenced on FBI site until recently removed) on police reported False Rape accusations, and found near 80% were false.
This indicated that those women that profess to love us or we trust (with reason such as Professionals) will tell us life-destroying lies, And that women who we do not know or barely now or we courting will lie and act to destroy our lives - prison for 20 years of other prisoners & guards rape and torture of us as a 'sexual predator', or even when proven false-accused or women recants - the reputation destruction and continued social-family-professional-social stigma and punishment will be life-long, and often name is put of gov list that effects housing, carear, services from Gov and corporate, exposes us to violence from others, and more evils Sick modern womanhood now spreads, Lies, Suffering, violence, abuse, death and Hell.
.. and very few women face any punishment when found to be false-witnessing and spreading evil destruction on so many levels of all our lives, that sometimes or often they are rewarded in the victim-status Class we now congratulate and encourage.
Recall - this is that was the women that go to police, when many times that number spread such lies on the secrete Witch-Whisper-Web and if follows him and results in attacks of many forms that confuses and damages him in many ways - him, family, dependents, employers, ...
A triggering meme that drew my thoughts related to this was 'Islam is correct about women', and in some societies women's testimony value is 1/3 of a man's value, and this is in a society where real risk of stoning-to-death of False Witnessers exists, and some women have seen or heard about that really happening.
.. and so why is this or some significant punishment for those people that False Witness exist in the West, and since women are rewarded and often or never punished for such a crime, what should be the general woman's Testimony value - 1/10th? And should it be adjusted based on last 5-year occurrence of Parental Fraud and False-Rape accusations?
.
Somethings to consider.
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God Bless., Steve
I do have a bit of a beef. I was on campus when "Take Back the Night" was a thing.
I was raped on that campus, and there was a strong rape culture amongst the boys. They wanted to get it any way they could, and they were away from home, with no consequences. Who would believe me?
Rape culture on campus is/was a thing - it sounds like they diversified it. Sheesh.
I am so sorry for what happened to you. I can't imagine what that is like.
I agree that rape been a major issue - I am a man but have close friends who had close calls. It is terrible. I am just saying I think that smearing the edges into things that might not best be called rape *hurts* the goal of protecting women from predation. There's enough rape and need to defeat rape culture that it's better to focus on real cases.
Yes, I've tried to imagine what it is like in this "culture of consent," where - as if it wasn't awkward enough when we were young, one has to ask at every step, "can I do this? would you like that?" - it's a wonderful concept in theory, but I'm not sure that humans are mature enough yet.
I'm pretty sure that the confused interactions of human sexual relations don't easily conform to the notional ideals of progressive white suburbanites.
Leveling is a poorly designed goal. (The playing field cannot be perfectly leveled, unless all the kids are taken away from their parents and placed in the custody of the State.) The problem is not that many kids get worse educations. The problem is that many kids get bad educations. Stop focusing on the gap. Start focusing on the absolute height of the lowest point.
I agree there is white bias in SATs (for example). I agree that inner city schools struggle with metrics that are imperceivable to the suburban schools. But at the University level, it should be completely colour/diversity blind, and excellence graded in performance alone.
It's not levelling the playing field - so much as possibly elevating the underprivileged, to open opportunities for that excellent performance. Harm reduction. But that's been tried with Headstart, school breakfasts, etc. It needs to happen at the local, grass roots level, not top-down.
Thanks for these comments JC. Since you like this essay, why not subscribe free to: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/ and get future essays (I post one per month) which you may also find interesting.
Done, since you promised not to overwhelm my inbox. Many substack authors write faster than I can read! It amazes me, because it's high quality product/writing/research - and they pump them out like firehoses!
Thank you....and I've pressed the 'follow you' button (although I'm never quite sure what that does.)
:D
IKR? Maybe someday I'll feel compelled to write sommat here. Maybe then "follow" will mean something? LOL
May this note find us all ever closer to God, and His Peace.
Not everyone should go to college or beyond simple goals that can allow the skills to self learn, bootstrapping, I am over 60+ and still daily searching and researching new things - or filling-out what I already know but not as well as I want. Web is wonderful source, if Google is not suppressing it as they do now. And push what is false, but you should believe the mind-rapers think.
I would have been better off financially had I gone directly into electrical training, especially if school finished at 14 yo - on job training, and likely have own business by 20 yo & married with 2 kids, house, instead of salary wage-suppressed doing the job of 3 people (no kidding they needed 3 to fill my responsibilities when I left one job) and out-straight 6-days a week.
Public schools should end at 8th grade, focus on basics, and then trade-school or University .. if the immature seeming 14 year olds we see in collage now, then a 9th grader should do fine.
Also sex-segregated - not possible to learn for a young man when attractive girl in yoga-pants with camel-toe, and younger boys can get to run-around more instead of drugged-up only because the women teachers are ignorant or lied-to about male & think they should be girls.
Men teachers need to return to earlier child education to help the fatherless by being engaged with men mentors, and to guard the children from the mostly male-hating mind-raping psycho women-pedo teachers that mutilate their minds and get-off at crippling their lives, sex-mutilations they talk them into.
Also, some children are not and will never perform at average level, no matter what is done - some temp. improvement but not lasting is what the research reports last I knew. Poverty and lower IQ has good (or bad) correlation, and as I have argued about helping those in poverty, when people with above avg IQ are struggling with the complexities, how is the man with IQ too low to join military (IQ 84) going to do?
Homeless and suffering - but IQ is a topic that you can get punished for bringing-up, labeled names, etc. The vicious psychos are so cruel that their twisted fun at kicking gonads - is better than finding better solutions.
God Bless., Steve
"Here, schools in historically minority populated school districts deal with issues that students in more affluent school districts do not."
Which are the biggest issues holding them back?
There is no singular issue. But there are several important ones: 1) funding is lower in non-affluent school districts; 2) attracting good teachers is difficult in these districts; 3) parent participation (both at home and in-school) is lower; 4) student attendence is typically lower; 5) student nutrition is poorer in these districts
The funding issue is bandied about a lot, but is simply untrue. Accordingly to Federal Reserve data, the average black and average white students are funded at lost exactly the same rate, see link below.
Every other issue you mention is cultural. In short, African-American kids have poor educational attainment because African-American culture does not value education. The state cannot fix this by spending more money.
https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/economic-synopses/2022/02/16/school-district-expenditures-and-race#:~:text=Average%20Expenditures%20by%20Race&text=Overall%2C%20spending%20is%20remarkably%20similar,that%20spends%20%2414%2C263%20per%20student.
I think you failed to (fully) read your own source. While it is true to federal funding is essential independent of race, there are multiple sources of funding that contribute to the total expenditures for primary education. From your own source: "However, when examining sources of funding, the racial gaps are starker. The average White student attends a district where 47% of funding is from local sources and 7% is from federal sources. In contrast, the average Black student attends a district where 44% of funding is from local sources and 10% is from federal sources. The share of funding from state sources is very similar at 46%. Because federal funding often comes as grants or for specific programs, school districts that serve predominantly Black student bodies may have less control over how these funds are spent." And then look at Figure 2 in your own source. It is VERY clear that school districts with low percentages of minority students very often have much, much higher levels of per student spending -- sometimes an order of magnitude higher. Your own source makes this statement in regard to Figure 2: "shows the relationship between the expenditures on current instruction per student and the share of the student body that is Black. There is a small but statistically significant negative relationship; on average, schools with a 10-percentage-point higher share of Black students spend $140 less per student on instruction. The data on total expenditures are similar; schools with a 10% higher share of Black students spend $160 less per student. " And then, there is the conclusion in your own source which states: "Despite many efforts by policymakers, there remains a large racial gap in key educational outcomes such as high school graduation rates and college attainment.1 In this essay, we examine whether school expenditures differ by race. Average expenditures are very similar for the average Black and average White student, though sources of funding differ, with Black students receiving more federal funds and White students more local funds. Despite this, there is still a negative correlation between expenditures and the share of students who are Black. This outcome is driven by small, predominantly White schools with high expenditures that do not educate a large share of the student body nationally." Sometimes it helps to read more than just the first paragraph.
Great review, Graham, and I agree with most of much of what you say. Heather MacDonald is a great writer and I always appreciate her take even if I don't always agree with it.
My one little quibble echoes one that someone else made on another comment just now.
> I suspect that, in the unlikely event of The Diversity Delusion being read by anyone on the Left, they too would mentally airbrush the evidence away.
I think it's a mistake to assume that The Left is a monolith. It makes it harder for you to hear and address our arguments. The domain of The Left includes more than just racial politics, identity politics and gender politics. I am a lifelong leftie and I have read and agree with a lot of Heather MacDonald's observations. Identity politics is corrosive and should be opposed but identity politics does not define the left any more than free-market capitalism or immigrant-bashing defines the right.
No the Left is not a monolith. All political creeds are spectrum in nature. And the rhetorical kind of journalism that I write always has a degree of approximation - otherwise it risks becoming unreadably dense. Through our conversations, I have come to know something of the kind of lefty you are and it's a kind I can respect. Would you not agree though that, in the last 50 years or so, the dominant strain has shifted quite radically - from an essentially economic/working -class/fairness one to an essentially middle-class obsession with an identity -based kind of competitive victimhood?
I agree that there has been a big shift. I think there's a case to be made that the surge in identity politics is largely a reaction to the disappointment that having a black president didn't fix everything in America. This has been amplified by a generation that grew up with social media and their parochial concerns get more airtime than they would have got in the 1960s.
But I disagree that it's the dominant strain on the left. I think it's all too easy to 'nutpick' weirdos and extremists and claim that they represent the left. It's unfortunate that identity politics gets so much airtime but I think the primary goal of the left is still fairness — as it ever was.
May this note find us all ever closer to God, and His Peace.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s black communities were tight in many places, with very low out-of-wedlock babies, high employment, church involvement, black owned businesses, Stable healthy for children, strict discipline and limits, and I wonder if that was better for the children's education.
.. then gov. employees visited mothers when fathers were at work, welfare started the destruction by paying mothers to get rid of fathers, .., unemployment, CIA supplied Heroine from Vietnam, crime, unmarried mothers, .., they were the testing ground for the destruction of white middle-Class.
"I think the primary goal of the left is still fairness" - welfare 'helped' them, and to be fair the Leftie-communists did it to middle-Class. Leftists like 'devouring mothers' fem-nazis helping us to death, society to ash.
Obama increased race tension for political power, anti-white false-resentment and hate with increased hate-crimes by blacks to whites & police, blaming others for failures, etc. And people wondered if Black Woman Harris would do same plus feminist poison and horrors, since she refused to release men from private prison when time-served to keep them working - slavery, if she do that to those under her power, what would she do if President?
God Bless., Steve
On a whim, I just googled for a definition of left-wing politics just to make sure I wasn't fooling myself. Here's what Wikipedia had to say:
> Left-wing politics typically involve a concern for those in society whom its adherents perceive as disadvantaged relative to others as well as a belief that there are unjustified inequalities that need to be reduced or abolished*
Yes. That's me. It's a good, succinct summary of my political outlook.
* The article goes on to say that some on the left advocate radical solutions (I don't) and that the hard left supports movements like communism and anarchism (I don't). It doesn't mention identity politics at all.
Wikipedia is great for many things and I use it a lot but it's not much use for defining something as open to interpretation as 'Left wing politics'. I could probably go into it myself and alter that defintion if I was determined enough. Also who is this notional enquirer who has no idea what 'Left wing politics' means? A better way is to look at what has been done in its name in recent times: what is taught in its name about race and gender in schools and universities; what legislation about identity has been enacted by its politicians. Etc.
Wikipedia is woke. I use it for things like chemical formulas but not for anything remotely political or politicizable.
May this note find us all ever closer to God, and His Peace.
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Too bad the Left is too incompetent, mind-broken, Or destructively evil to not help society by; stop Poisoning the now Sicken Womanhood, stop allowing her to false-witness unpunished, Parent-fraud, to divorce on whim (woman initiates 80%, with over 50% reports the poisonous family father children destroying back-stabbing woman is '..not happy'), ..
.. Also to stop making work & other environments Toxic to men and decent women, and to stop calling police because 'feel unsafe' when two men are talking & laughing freely on public bench (it happened to me a few times, vile Witched using police to Joy-murder us), stop voting to take our earned money in taxes for bigger Gov. decreased liberty more women power to destroy to kill our babies, etc.
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About Wikipedia. When I first learned of this service, I was so excited as I imagined that world-wide educators would assign students to add content in relation to subject(s) studied, as well as Professionals, devoted amateurs, others of all subjects.
.. instead, the mass-media pushed teachers - mostly women - that soiled the concept and the service with suggestions that it was against education, bad for students, their employers, society, future.
At the time, I was still evil-Blinded. So thought them only as lazy, uncreative, child-crippling meritless and virtueless mind-crippling professional. Instead of the hand-picked student-retarding teachers and-or paid performers pretending to be teachers working with media to grass-roots objection to Wikipedia, because perhaps the easier good info at our hands the harder to control us, or to genocide-Poison inject us.
Yet, if you assume political and other topics are lies, that some people often smeared falsely, keep to STEM and other subjects Satan's minions are uninterested in, then it still has value.
Today I tracked down psychological terms mentioned in Papal letters, and YouTube Seminary course I am following.
.. Yesterday I was Deep into one those recursive rabbit-holes that we do when researching and learning using Wikipedia (so sad it was Soros Foundation twisted into mind-raping tool like Google became - so so much Promise, twisted towards evil) which started when - in one of my Catholic Science-Apologetics mode, I was considering Plato's 'Forms', and if Adam, Eve, and each of those original animals were near exact mirrors of their Forms, and how when I once Programmed in C++, that I could have created Templates near-Forms where their accidence and variation as well as functionalities could be encapsulated, where the minor 'evolutionally' controlled internal variations were possible from Original Moth-Form, such as that Moth in Britian that changed it's color because the coal exhaust of trains near tracks stuck to trees and colored them gray.
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God Bless., Steve
'Mac Donald' (yeah, I know).
Yes and I only noticed this yesterday! My text was correct (Mac Donald) but must have got altered by Substack's algorithm when I uploaded it
Thank you.
Great article. I will read this book. I recommend The War on the West by Douglas Murray, if you have not already read it.
I do agree a huge amount with what you say to be honest. I’m of the pessimistic view wokery is a form of radicalisation; I guess what I’m trying to do is stop the rot with a new positive alternative to intersectionality (the woke doctrine) before we can get back to the timeless good ideas that create rather than destroy. Baby steps
Very interesting stuff Graham, thanks for the recommendation. I created my sub stack to take on some of the delusions of our time by tacking the (anti) intellectual idea or application of intersectionality’s which is as the heart of this stuff. I posit a more positive and accurate alternative in ‘indiesectionality’. I’d like to stress-test this idea so be keen to know your thoughts. Just 5 pages so not War & Peace
I read your '5 Pages' with interest and I think our analyses of 'wokeness' have much in common. But I suspect I am more of a pessimist than you. I do not subscribe to the 'culture war' meme; I see our recent history more in terms of 'culture surrender'. I see civilisations (all civilisations) as tragic - as in they follow a trajectory; they rise and fall; their end is in their beginning; they carry the seeds of their eventual ruination. I fear that Western civilisation's halcyon days are behind it.
I very much share your valuing of 'individual agency' (what I would also call personal responsibility) but, as I see it, the West's very strengths - it's wealth creation and it's great liberalism - have eroded this and encouraged, in its stead, a kind of passive/aggressive rampant narcissism (wokeness). I see this current wokeness as the extrapolation of a long gestation (100 years+ long) and I do not think it will end well. (hope you will still want to FREE subscribe though!)
Interesting. Thank you!
Thank you. Any chance of you putting it on your Saturday Commentary & Review sometime?
I've bookmarked it and I'll look to slot it in at some point in the future.
Thank you....appreciate this.
"Chapter 14 takes a more optimistic look at evidence of a healthy appetite for learning about the West’s cultural treasures continuing to exist in the real world outside of universities."
Those works are fine to study but there is so much to learn outside of them.
I mean, I can agree that this behavior is silly and harmful, but it's not like there is no valid underlying point, that there are not legitimate grievances. And if we're criticizing people's gameplay, there's no shortage of buffoonery and delusion among literally any organization that is composed of humans. Throwing stones *is easy*, defending against them is not so easy, especially when thrown by someone who has studied your culture's techniques.
I enjoy thinking of it as an example of "The sins of the Father being visited upon the sons" - the chickens are coming home to roost, Westerners, in the form of your own culture turning against your crimes, both historic and current. And it is a *beautiful* thing to watch, history in the making!
Big questions you flag here...... too big really to answer in a little comment thread (although I flatter myself that I make a good stab at it in the totality of all my essays here when taken together). Two things (necessarily simplistic):
1) the typical 'grievances' of students in privileged Western universities are largely performative, self absorbed, narcissistic and shallow.
2) if they really wanted to confront evil and grievance they would focus their moral outrage and their protesting on some of the horrific things endured by people living under the yoke of ugly regimes outside of the liberal West
> if they really wanted to confront evil and grievance they would focus their moral outrage and their protesting on some of the horrific things endured by people living under the yoke of ugly regimes outside of the liberal West
While I agree with most of what you have written, this statement seems perverse to me. Just as one is advised to remove the beam from one's own eye before attempting to fish out the mote in one's neighbor's, so too one's concern to police against injustice is best directed to one's own society, which one best understands and in which one has a stake. It's all too easy for a criminal elite in control of the organs of propaganda to point the finger abroad and initiate a real moral and humanitarian catastrophe in their own interests by encouraging the public to think ill of people and places they know nothing about.
Yes but my point was that I don't think student 'radicalism' is really about confronting injustice anywhere... although it does manage to delude itself with such vanities. As in my 1) I see it as primarily shallow performative self-importance.
Agreed; that can often be the case. My thought is that the reduction of politics to shallow performative self-importance becomes easier if it is not tied to the world of experience. Remoteness and abstraction both tend to sever that tie.
Very much agree..... and I have written elsewhere on this as an aspect of the mass media age. Perhaps the corollary - in the case of the student politico - is that they have become so cosseted and self-absorbed as to be abstracted even from their own Western culture.
May this note find us all ever closer to God, and His Peace.
Protesting University students should not be encouraged to protest, as most are ignorant of world and deeper root causes, too willing to believe lies and be used as destructive tool, and other reasons.
Functional retards, believing corp-media and other gossip, and acting before the situation can be understood, and so serving the will of those that would laugh at your deaths.
About understanding different cultures .. like Afghanistan were the father, husband, oldest son is responsible to support the children and women in family, and women earnings she can keep while family starves, so when resources like education and jobs are limited, males must take first place.
The attempted CIA color revolution in Iran where women was arrested because not covering hair, disrespecting society norms and men, and in police station while in a waiting room with others she falls down dead, and video looked like one of those sudden-deaths from covid-19 Poison-injections deaths.
Yet people protested believing corp-CIA-media statements that she was beaten to death.
.. As some unJustly protest about poor Afghan women, when the men in her life are enslaved by law to provide for them.
The lies that will not die of George Flowd's death, it was OD because he ate all the drugs he carrying when police approaching, full policeman's camera video - which was locked away by a Soros Black Prosecutor - to not discourage the riots by informing useful idiots and tools - George was seen on video saying constantly the he could not breath while breathing fine, his girlfriend he called 'mom', the policeman was very respectful for a long time before the restraint was needed and applied, the policeman used trained restrain in manual correctly, and so on.
.. same with 'unarmed black man killed by police' which sometimes he is threatening police with car, combative and grabbing gun, and so one.
Evergreen collage, or violence against Charles Murry that studies IQ and the truths he wrote about go against VagFeelies, ..
.. and rarely something like israel's Gaza Genocide that is cut & dry evil horror, but perhaps be vocal about solutions like after 75+ years of terrorism and genocide and international crimes that the UN should remove Nationhood and give everything standing and land back to Palestinians, the '1-State Solution' before it became Satan's Anus on the world spewing evil & poison world-wide with Jewish Supremacy and belief they can kill anyone - including you & me and worse the WWII Nazis.
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And the Oct7th you know of did not happen. No beheaded babies, no rapes, .., most of the non-military dead were from israel military killing own to prevent them captured to use as hostage for freeing the 1000s of Palestinians taken off street and through in jail and raped - as on video - and torture (some to death) by israel guards. Sick F-ing bastards, as 90% of israeli population support such Satanic evil.
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God Bless., Steve
> the typical 'grievances' of students in privileged Western universities are largely performative, self absorbed, narcissistic and shallow.
You have a valid point! However....as a fan of logical nuances of the English language (and culture), I am endlessly fascinated by how easy it is to write sentences that are technically correct (also known as: True, "the" reality, etc), but misleading/misinformative to an unknown degree (perhaps lots), and in a variety of ways. I wonder if anyone is as good at it as us Westerners!
> if they really wanted to confront evil and grievance they would focus their moral outrage and their protesting on some of the horrific things endured by people living under the yoke of ugly regimes outside of the liberal West
This I cannot even gracefully label as technically true, as it implicitly asserts that their motives/grievances are "to confront evil and grievance" and "horrific things endured by people living under the yoke of ugly regimes". That *is* a fantastic story though, it is exactly the type of thing I would utilize if I was interested in persuading people to think in certain ways and believe certain things. Even better, I would establish it as a cultural standard, through a variety of means.
Of course this is all a bit unfair to you I fully concede, but at the same time it's kind of funny, eh?