Opinions, art, debate
This allegation was invented by a dude called Guy Sorman. He later took it back when presented with evidence that this was a rumor entirely of his making.
I suggest people Google Sorman before repeating his completely unverified claims. He’s a globalist fanatic who despised Foucault’s early opposition to neoliberalism.
Foucault was absolutely promiscuous with young Tunisian guys but this whole thing about him having sex in cemeteries with 8-year-olds came from one envious competitor.
This is a great illustration to Oakeshott’s point about general rules of conduct:
I could have made everybody’s life at work less pleasant by heating borscht in a shared microwave and eating pickled cabbage in the office. But I don’t do it, much as I love these foods.
It’s not about people not eating ethnic foods. Eat them, of course. We all love our ethnic foods. I’m positively crazy about mine. But we are all happier if we keep the particularly ethnic components away from shared spaces.
Friendship, says Oakeshott, can only exist in the absence of any desire to improve or change the friend. The tie between friends is that of familiarity, not usefulness. You are not going to drop a friend of 20 years and go chasing after a fresh, new one because the old friend is outdated. Or I hope you won’t. We all have a conservative disposition in friendship, says Oakeshott.
Another aspect of life in which we are all conservatively disposed are our tools. A surgeon doesn’t stop in the midst of surgery to design a new scalpel. His value (or mine, or yours) in the professional field is our permanence. Spending a long time doing the same thing makes you good at this thing. In parenting, it’s the same. Being there is what counts. It doesn’t matter what, how or if you play with a child. What matters is that you are around, available, interested, continuously present. In marriage, it’s not the special occasions or great birthday gifts but being present and interested every day that makes a marriage.
This is all obvious, of course, but here Oakeshott brings up an important point. One tool in common use, he reminds us, are general rules of conduct. Isn’t it easier to function in a collectivity, big or small, where everybody knows the rules and understands why they should be practiced?
Oakeshott believes that being conservative in politics isn’t about holding specific beliefs about the nature of existence or practicing any particular religion. He says that conservative politics is about one thing: maintaining our existing way of life by upholding the same general rules of conduct. We are, Oakeshott explains, a civilization of people that embraced as its guiding principle that everybody is an individual who holds all sorts of beliefs and pursues any kind of individually chosen goals. We tolerate monomaniacs, he says, and put in structures of government that
protect us against the nuisance of those who spend their energy and their wealth in service of some pet indignation.. by setting a limit to the amount of noise anyone might emit.
I believe this is beautifully put and can be applied to many of the things going on presently.
Pet indignation is such a great expression and can be used often.
People keep talking about the corporate university that is run like a business. But they are talking out of their ever-loving asses. It is a distant, impossible dream that my university would become corporate. We are the exact opposite, and that sucks.
The Dean no longer has a secretary or a receptionist. He’s paid the Dean’s salary to do extremely overpaid secretarial work. He’s sitting in his office preparing JCRs and answering the perennial question from a stream of students about where the room 3211 is located. He used to have a receptionist who’d answer the question but now it’s just him. While he’s spending his highly compensated time on explaining about room 3211, he’s not doing any of the actual Dean work. He has 22 departments in his college, most of which also don’t have a secretary. As a result, we are a bunch of mega overqualified and overpaid people doing low-skill work “to save money.” Which obviously saves no money.
It gets worse. A colleague’s class was cancelled because he was 2 students short of enrollment minimum. But he’s still paid the same. We just had to find a justification for the portion of the salary that was supposed to be paid for him teaching this class. He really wanted to teach it. But if he gets paid the same for doing nothing, then OK. He’s not going to say no. The class would still be very profitable with 2 students below minimum. But we threw out that tuition money to follow a very random rule.
I’m going to miss the meeting of the curriculum council next week because I’ll have to help students with the proficiency testing in the absence of a secretary. I’m fine with doing it. It’s extremely easy. But the curricular changes that only I can authorize won’t go through because I won’t be there. The Provost must be livid. But she can’t schedule a meeting to tell me about her annoyance because she doesn’t have a secretary either.
The Dean hasn’t done Chairs evaluation in a year. He hasn’t done the paperwork on my ASL minor, and we are losing tons of money because the program is in high demand and our students are getting poached by a neighboring college. But we saved money on the receptionist salary, so yay. Dude literally sits there alone, doing the JCRs which any office support person with a $48,000 salary could do. We have all turned into extremely overpaid secretaries and janitors. Because we also now have to empty our own trash cans. Which again, I don’t mind. It’s exercise. And it’s definitely a lot less demanding than poring over the curricular proposals. But is that great use of taxpayer money? Obviously, not.
This is not smart management. It’s not business-like. It’s wasteful and stupid, is what it is.
Oh, and I forgot. Klara’s current BFF is one of 8 children in her family. Parents are middle management and accounting.
The other friend is one of three. These are very wealthy people. Corporate, both have MBAs. The mom is the most career-loving person I’ve ever met. These people all have great marriages, very loving.
There’s a class war going on, and the losers are being phased out of existence without even noticing it.
The longest, most-stable marriages with the largest number of children are found among women with postgraduate degrees. The woman who was department Chair before me has four. The one that will be Chair after me has three. The woman who supervises our operations in IT has four. The secretary, on the other hand, is unmarried and childless. The secretary before her was divorced with one child. The one before was unmarried and childless. This is anecdotal but it’s supported by large-scale data.
Stable marriages and many children are becoming a class privilege. All of this dumb blethering over extremely marriageable waitresses sounds like a joke. I don’t care that the tweet is AI-generated because there’s not nearly enough conversation about how the low fertility rates in the West that justify mass migration actually came to be and who it is that’s pushed out of procreation.
Watch yesterday’s Matt Walsh, people. He discovered that the groups that harass ICE in Minnesota are funded by the state government. The state government is paying, in secret, through a series of non-profits, to organize mayhem in the streets. And the reason it pays is to keep more non-citizens in the state.
No matter how they feel about ICE, the citizens of the state should have a lot of questions to their state government about that.
We wouldn’t want our president to be kidnapped by another country, so why should we be able to kidnap Venezuela’s? Shouldn’t we treat others the way we want to be treated?
It’s not possible to set the principles governing a relationship unilaterally. Other countries aren’t kidnapping our president and dropping bombs on us not because they decided not to but because they can’t. That’s the only true reason. And the only way for us to avoid them becoming capable of it is to be preemptive and extremely strong.
Look at what happened to Ukraine, which by the way is the largest country in Europe. Thirty years of trying to be nice, crawling on their stomachs, looking kindly and imploringly into everybody’s faces. Thirty years of trying to ingratiate themselves. No, we don’t need borders, whatever you say. No, we don’t need nukes. No, we don’t need an army. Let us disarm to show our good will. Let us hire Russian citizens for every important position in defense and intelligence to show how sweet and open-minded we are. Let’s elect a president who promises to lick the Russians’ paws. Great results that brought Ukraine. Getting bombed into the ground is the reward for all that niceness.
Of course, in our private lives we should all follow the Christian principle of do unto others. But that only works on an individual level. You can turn your other cheek. But it’s not OK to turn the cheeks of millions of people. An administration that refuses to engage in an aggressivy pursued foreign policy turns the cheeks of its citizens.
This does not mean that every aggressive foreign action is justified. Neither does it mean that none are. There’s a sea of options between “let’s do nothing” and “let’s do everything.” These two options are exactly the ones taken respectively by Ukraine (until February 2022) and Russia. Don’t they both suck? I’d say they really do.
Obviously, I hate the Iranian regime. And I feel terrible for the protesters. And, as I said before, I know very little about the country.
So the reason why I think it’s a stupid idea for the US to bomb Iran might not be my most brilliant one. But I do think it’s valid, which is why I’ll express it.
Iranians are going to hate us for it. Every time we bomb somebody not of our civilization* to bring them freedom, they end up hating us. Even if they proceed to enjoy the freedom. Why do we need to antagonize Iranians “for their own benefit”? Let them figure it out. Absolutely any engagement will lead to them hating us and pouting for the next three million years.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I’m also very tired with the obsessive concentration on foreign policy when domestic issues are unsolved. I live here. I want things to get better here. That’s my #1 issue.
Input is welcome but I beg people to abstain from drawing parallels between Venezuela and Iran because that just makes me very sad.
*Example of somebody of our civilization who did manage to not hate us for bombing them is Germany.
I was asked in anonymous comments to provide reading suggestions for a newly formed readers’ club for people interested in conservatism. The club appeared in a very unexpected place, and I am very glad. I want to recommend this syllabus on conservatism in America, which is the only syllabus I have been able to find where conservatism is explored honestly and without hysterical name-calling.
If the syllabus is too much, I recommend starting with the books The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana by Russell Kirk and Towards a Conservative Left: Selected Writings of Jean-Claude Michéa.
If you are wondering whether you might be a conservative, you need to ask yourself a single question. When you look back at the history of humanity, do you believe that you are morally superior to the mass of people who came before you? If you can accept a possibility that the many many generations of the past were not complete idiots mired in a pile of rotting refuse of bigotry, if you can look at the past with love and pride, then you can be one of us. Welcome to the club!
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