Yes, that’s exactly how it was explained to us in the USSR. I’ve been in that “same place” that the Soviet Union constructed for us and can report that it really sucks.
The idea that equal outcomes are either possible or desirable is so obviously stupid and so many people have been sacrificed to this unreachable lunacy that it beggars belief the US presidential candidate is still prattling about it cheerfully.
It’s impossible. But we’ll beat our heads against a wall, trying to engineer away human nature like it hasn’t been tried a million times already, always with the same catastrophic result.
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Good point. People who know they didn’t achieve much on pure merit need to keep these mechanisms of merit suppression in place to cling on to power.
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“it beggars belief the US presidential candidate is still prattling about it cheerfully.”
But of course she doesn’t really believe any of it, it’s a virtue-signalling sop to supporters of the new dogma, in particular the wide array of armchair revolutionaries littering academia and the no less objectionable black-clad purveyors of street violence: the brains and the brawn of “the revolution”. Let there br equitable outcomes for others, as long as she and those who pull her strings are covered, she’s fine with it.
I’m always left to wonder how such useful idiots as Harris seem so often to find themselves at the right time and the right place to benefit from other people’s catastrophes; how do they pull it off? Or is it just sheer luck?
What I don’t get is why people are listening to this and not feeling scared. I tried this on my 8yo, without naming Harris or making it political. She told me immediately that it’s impossible to get everybody to the same place “because everybody is different, Mommy. I don’t like soccer and I’m not good at it, so I’ll never be a great player like Liam. But he’ll never draw as well as I do.”
A small child can understand that it’s a terrible plan to massage everybody into a similar outcome. Yet people listen and act like it’s profound wisdom. This narrative about equal outcomes is mega popular in academia where people really should know better. We teach, so we have a chance to observe every day that intellectual capacity varies sharply in people. Why are so many academics seemingly oblivious to this?
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“why people are listening to this and not feeling scared”
They don’t believe that she really believes it or will do anything to try to put it in practice.
There’s a bunch of technocrats who do believe that something like it can be achieved and have tried some baby steps in that direction (to be met with huge failure which does not discourage them at all…..).
No one looks at Harris and thinks “That’s a person who really believes what they are saying”.
Because you have to remember one of our biggest failures. The educational system was never purged of the communists and their sympathizers. Instead they were allowed to infest the educational system and expand.
So your wondering why people listen and act like its profound wisdom. Well simple enough, the people teaching them have been teaching them how wonderful it is and how it just hasn’t been tried right. For something close to two decades straight per each generation.
Typically people are educated by 3 groups. Your family, immediate, extended, and close family friends (aunts and uncles who aren’t actually blood kin, but are very close friends.) Second by the churches. And lastly by whatever educational system is available.
This has gone badly wrong over on the millennials and below generation-wise. I’m not sure about gen X, though I suspect it also effected some of the younger members of their gen.
The Church has been effectively neutered. If you go back throughout history, the church has almost always been at the forefront of education, with the exception of the Dark Ages and the Catholics at the time. Yet somehow despite all this at some point I’m not sure when, but as always I blame the 1960s. It was as if it all stopped. I have actually heard pastors and church leaders say that it is not the job of the church to do anything but bring people to Jesus. And while that is the primary job and focus of the church, it also ignores all the other issues. For instance without the get to-gathers that used to happen it has become much more difficult for christian men to meet christian women to date and marry. Without the support network of the old church ladies, Lord only knows how many people have slipped through the cracks and ended up in bad places and in bad ways. Not to mention boys require, not need, they require a strong masculine influence to teach them to be proper men. And with families scattered and schools run by either women or a handful of mostly weak men. That more and more boys have no role models other than what they see on tv.
This brings me to the families. Most people up tend to learn their morality, their politics, and their baseline skills from their family. Or they did. In the past families would stay roughly together, you would always have a branch move away occasionally, but for the most part you would grow up near your cousins, and your kin. Today families are scattered into the winds, the parents are always away working and so the kids are growing up on the tv, video games, and the tablets.
While this didn’t come out as clearly as I wished, they point I’m trying to make is that people are taught things from their family, their church, and their teachers as they grow up. In the US for effectively almost a half century now, the only ones still teaching the youth and effecting them are the teachers in schools.
So yea of course the youth believe in Communism, it quite literally has been the only system taught to them for almost twenty years straight with no opposition from family or church.
Of course they are going to support these ideas. No one has ever sat them down with a book of photo-graphical evidence and went through the various times communism has been tried and how absolutely horribly wrong it went. You can tell them its bad all you want, but who are they going to trust. You, or the people who they have been told all their lives were supposed to teach them more or less everything. They certainly wouldn’t have lied to their students right?
Its unfortunate, but until the educational system’s back has been broken, and the teachers gone through and any communists and their sympathizers purged from their positions and banned from teaching. We will continue to have a never ending stream of youth supporting the rise of a new communist society.
That’s a very important comment, W. I keep thinking that, in many important ways, the US never won the Cold War. We now have a presidential candidate repeating the Communist Party slogans, and everybody accepts it as normal and desirable. If somebody suggested back in 1988 that this would happen, we’d consider him a lunatic.
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The family thing in particular hit genX hard. I’m on the younger end of that, and lucked out by growing up in a town that was perpetually 10 years behind the times. I didn’t fully understand until I was in my 30s, how exceptionally weird it was, and how lucky I’d been, to grow up embedded in a huge, local, extended family. Can’t imagine life without it.
I like to think schools weren’t that bad then, but… A) my parents kept us out of the public schools for a reason, and B) our town was ten years behind the times on that too.
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Reconsidering my previous comment, since I had read the X post but not watched the video clip. After doing so, I wonder whether she understands what she is saying.
I’m under the impression that she is giving a condensed version, repeating the main points, of a lesson that she had recently gone through with someone else.
PS I may be wrong; after all I’m not an American, and in the same way as I had never heard of a Col. Potter from the M*A*S*H* series which I had never seen, I might have misunderstood both tone and nuances in Ms Harris’s speech.
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I think one problem is that Harris is expressing the idea a bit imprecisely. There’s a diagram I remember in one of my DEI trainings where you have three kids trying to look at a ballgame over the fence. “Equality” is illustrated as each kid getting the same size box to stand on to look over the fence, but depending on the size of the kid, it doesn’t always work. “Equity” is represented as each kid getting the right size box for the distance needed to see over the fence. Looks like this:https://www.leadmn.org/EDI-series1
What I think Harris would say in describing that picture is that, “See, equity makes sure those kids end up in the same place!” It’s not literally a matter of ending their educational, personal, and professional journeys in the same place; it’s more a matter of getting the same place from which to start.
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The problem has always been, that you can’t start a 100IQ person and a 140IQ person at the same place. You can give the former a bunch of extra credit on tests, but in the end, *they can’t do the same job*. The only way to achieve real equity is to handicap the hell out of the 140.
We are already at a point in the US where minority racial status is not a handicap in jobs, as long as you are as smart/skilled as the next candidate… and in many cases it is an advantage because everybody’s so eager to hire more diversity.
So, from here, where we are at right now, how would equity actually be implemented. Clearly we are not talking about more of what we’re already doing now. If that’s a campaign platform, and still regarded as a target for action, that means… what? Because right now all the tall people are looking at that cartoon with the fence and the boxes, and thinking… we already did the box thing and now they want more. The next step is to chop off the tall guy at the knees.
Some people will always make a lot more money than others, have much more prestigious jobs, etc. We don’t start out equal. I read Dreiser at age 4 and wrote cursive in English at age 5. There’s nothing anybody can do to engineer this starting place for anybody else. It’s simply genetic.
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I’m being very specifically told at work that literally everybody can be successful in college and literally everybody can get a good grade in Calculus or Biology. And if that doesn’t happen, it’s racism. And that cartoon with boxes is always used to illustrate this idea.
We have sciences professors being publicly screamed at as racists because they can’t get everybody to a good grade. So no, it’s not Harris not knowing what she’s saying. This is exactly the goal.
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I am very sorry you’re being told that at work (and I know you’ve mentioned some pretty nightmare scenarios before). What you’re being told is sheer idiocy, by sheer idiots.
I don’t think there’s malice intended at first (I could be wrong). I think the malice comes with power, hierarchy, and “my version of equity is better than yours.”
I teach theatre history, and we get into “isms” and the cynicism of 1920s American theatre–the theme that it never matters how good the idea is at first, but human beings are scum (Eugene O’Neill, a former Industrial Worker of the World member, is a good example).
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These sheer idiots are the ones who are setting the standards in higher education. And they do that because it’s what the state and the federal government fund. I’m sure they are all well-meaning but so what? The result is still what it is.
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Well, we have to distinguish between “opportunity” and “ability.” Again, the idea behind equity isn’t (or, at least, shouldn’t be) penalizing anyone. It’s more like, here’s an equitable opportunity for you. Now, what’s the best thing for you to do with it? 100IQ person? What do you like, what are your skill sets, and where can you excel? It’s going to be at a different “intellectual” level than 140IQ person, but it’s the same set of ideas–likes, skill sets, where can you excel?
The thing about “equity” is you’re never done. It’s not a matter of wanting more, it’s a matter of, let’s keep up the box thing. And it might work. In some cases, it does. And it might not. It’s like any idea. That’s why “ideas” usually don’t scare me much–it’s always the imperfect people who try to implement the ideas.
Now, the guy giving a news conference at Mar-a-Lago going on about the size of his January 6 crowd bigger than Martin Luther King Jr.’s? That mofo is scary.
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We are very specifically prohibited from saying the word “ability” at work because it’s racist and fascist.
We are FORCED to give passing grades in math, biology, engineering, etc to students who aren’t qualified to pass and don’t have the knowledge. What gives you the certainty that tomorrow you or your family member will not meet such an utterly unqualified doctor in an ER or drive on a bridge such an unqualified engineer designed? We had exactly that in the USSR, and it wasn’t pretty.
I have absolutely no idea how the wholesale destruction of standards in every field of knowledge across the country is less scary than what Trump said about some crowd or whatever. I will never understand what posseses people to care about their standard of living, their healthcare, their safety so much less than some words somebody said somewhere. It’s just words! They can’t hurt you. An unqualified nurse can.
So it sounds like your college shouldn’t exist. It keeps operating by admitting almost anyone and graduating them.
I know academia and the industry are very different, but maybe this is a case of needing to change jobs (colleges you teach at).
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That’s pretty much every state college right now. Are you in favor of eliminating the entire public higher ed?
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Nicer, shmicer. If anything, I would say I’m generally nice and respectful to folks as long as I feel they deserve my niceness, and when I feel they don’t, I start metaphorically farting in their metaphorical elevators. But that’s not the main point.
What my (smallish, second-tier, state) school uses DEI training, workshops, and seminars for is an extension of our Center for Teaching Excellence–and it’s literally exactly how it sounds; we’re all interested in being more excellent teachers. Now, if I’ve been had, or snookered, by… I don’t know, the Elders of Equity? Well, I think trying to connect with students’ stories, voices, and experiences just makes sense. I think that it’s satisfying professionally, personally, and spiritually (I go to church, and talk to The Big Guy every day). So I can live with being had if that’s where it’s led me.
This issue comes up in the thread about Tim Walz, but I would say my fears (or priorities of my fears) work this way: a cornered poisonous snake about to bite you gets more of my attention than, say, a nebulous worry about… “the wholesale destruction of standards in every field of knowledge across the country…” I mean, wow. That’s something that, even if I were really scared of that happening (I’m not so much), it just barely clears the bar for “is there anything I can do about this?” I can make my own classroom the best within my capabilities; I can show support for my colleagues. But it’s not related to anything Kamala is saying unless you twist it to the most sinister ends possible, and I just don’t have the energy or imagination to do so. Trump and his sentient chatbot running mate are thoroughly bad in the here and now. He’s guilty of everything for which he’s been indicted, and our fair republic is in real danger because of him. That’s my priority.
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Fair enough. It sounds like you got lucky in having an administration wise enough to de-fang that stuff.
I’m deeply concerned about it myself, because I have a child (white, male) who’ll likely be headed off to college in a few years, no matter what I have to say about it. Inherited the family math/science/engineering bent.
Will there be any affordable schools that haven’t DEI’d their engineering programs into the grave by then?
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I sincerely hope all goes well with your child if and when it’s time for college. And I would guess due diligence for engineering programs would pretty much be the usual–get a sense of the professors, check with alumni, and see if, how, and where DEI programs in the university culture become a big problem.
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Fudge. Col. Potter again.
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Current strategy: use the 16-18 years (not there yet!), to complete a 2yr technical program in a related field (electrical, airframe…) so that he finishes out high school with all the licensing he needs for a job that will both support him and be related to his academic interests… and grill all the engineers we know about school options.
Sounds very wise.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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