When They Came For Us, We Had Already Done The Job For Them

  Perhaps it's just me, but the answer to online  censorship is not tucking tail and running, but rather the "Hail Hydra" approach. Every account shut down should be met with seven new accounts opening up. What exactly is the benefit in saying "Oh, they might stop me from speaking, so I am going to preemptively shut up"?

  I have been quite flabbergasted at the "Imma gonna quit" crowd. THIS, boys and girls, is why conservatives are losing.  We can't keep our voices if we leave at the first sign of any push back.


 I have a serious problem with a media platform, in an election year, silencing opposition voices. I have an even bigger problem with conservative voices volunteering to pack up and leave.

 We were told that conservative voices weren't wanted in schools.

 So we left.

 We were told conservative voices weren't wanted in Hollywood.

 So we left.

 We were told conservative voices weren't wanted in media.

 So we left

 We were told that conservative voices were not wanted in government

 So we left

 We were told that conservative voices were not wanted on social media.

So

we

left

 Holy crap people,  does NO ONE have to come for us, we just simply, show ourselves out.  How is THAT a strategy for winning?

 In life, the old adage still holds true, "The squeaky wheel gets the grease".  One has to be the squeakiest wheel in this game. And conservatives are still playing "Thank you Sir, can I have another", with shuffling feet and downturned eyes. Yet, we we have the audacity to complain when our congressmen represent us to a T.

 Look, for example, at the fight for a defining core conservative principle, The Right to Life, versus the core defining liberal principle, Abortion on Demand. In the public square we have screeching liberal women vehemently, unabashedly, marching with vagina hand puppets, even full body costumes, to protest state governments defunding Planned Parenthood being praised as good, wholesome, unobjectionable, righteous even.

 On the other side, women marching solemnly, prayerfully, with actual pictures of aborted babies, being vilified as gross, disgusting, objectionable, inflammatory, accusatory, evil, mean. Do we indeed have the courage of our convictions? Are we still watching, supporting the network that brought us this?  Yes, we are. We politely eat what is put on our plate, and wonder why we keep getting fed garbage.

 College campuses are another ground that we have lost, without a proverbial shot fired. Due process for men accused of heinous crimes are being trampled upon with impunity. We have even had presidential candidates praise this nonsense. Any voice that criticizes is met with accusations of being a rape apologist or worse, an actual rapist. Those words, just like the readily bandied "racist" are effective at melting conservatives like water on a witch. "What a world" indeed. Perhaps there is some merit after all, in the SJW claim that words are violence, when the threat of being called names keeps people from speaking their minds.

 If our principles are not important enough for us to stand for them, how to we expect to win hearts and minds? Especially when we have hogtied and gagged ourselves voluntarily. We can not afford to hover outside the window, moping like sad vampires of old, waiting to be invited in. We must boldly go in, as it were, and be ready to verbally stand and defend our hills. Waving a white flag and walking off of them surely is a strategy for a loss.

Tools and power tools

Justice Antonin Scalia has been excoriated of late because of remarks he made in a recent supreme court case regarding affirmative action in college admissions. Justice Scalia stated that black students might be better off attending schools other than top-tier universities.  An example of the commentary unleashed on Justice Scalia can be found here.

As a general observation made in the 21st century, Scalia's comments should be, admittedly, troubling.  There is no reason that students of any race, sex, or religion should be expected to perform better or worse than their peers based purely on those identifiers.  The problem is, as Scalia alluded to, the admission process, which, driven by the over-riding need for "diversity", may be preferentially admitting minority students...and Scalia is right, that is a problem.

Here is the thing...I grew up a middle class, suburban white boy...went to a state university and did well enough there that I got a scholarship under the National Science Foundation's Manpower Development Program to go to a small Eastern technical school with a reputation for being very good in science and engineering.  I went.  Some of my classmates were also there on scholarships, some had parents well off enough that they just paid the tuition...didn't matter. Small Eastern Technical School was not the type of place that attracted dilettantes and frat boy partiers.  We were all hardcore nerds, geeks, and gearheads.  We called ourselves "tools" and the geekiest among us were "power tools".  We lived and breathed science.  We attended class, filled reams of paper with notes, compared notes after class, and tried to trip up our professor on esoteric points of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, or whatever the subject du jour was. I would wake up thinking about my lab work. I would work in my lab until all hours of the night, which frequently meant until the next day.  Fun was drinking - SETS conveniently had two bars on campus - and "hacking", our word for what would now be called "pranks".  Graffiti in not-easily-accessible places was popular...I'll take credit for "Free the DC-10" in the steam tunnel between Building 54 and Building 10, thank you very much.  Another popular "hack" was pitching a refrigerator off the tallest building on campus onto the courtyard below - I can't say why.  For obvious reasons this was not popular with the school administration and they began escalating security to prevent these hi-jinks.  I became involved in a number of these refrigerator drops as my talent for picking lock proved useful in some cases.

Life at SETS was intense, probably the most intense four years of my life.  There were women and blacks among my classmates.  All there for "diversity" I don't doubt, because even back then it was important.  Some were in the right place. Others were not. Which were which became obvious after a few minutes in a group discussion about a particular problem set.  Those who had something to contribute were included in future study sessions, invited to have beers, and contributing to the next hack.  Those who couldn't contribute were ignored.  Let me point out here that this same decision process was also applied to white male graduate students.  It was an extremely competitive environment, but not in a hostile way.  I made many friends during my time there and still keep in touch with them, but we were all focused on graduating and getting a job and anyone who couldn't help with that was kicked to the curb. Survival of the fittest.

Back to Scalia's statements...if you are a minority - define the word as you like - and are admitted to a "top-tier university", I would advise that you think long and hard about accepting that offer.  Ask yourself, "Am I that good? Can I do this, or am I just being accepted because I am <INSERT MINORITY STATUS HERE>?".  If you truly believe you're that good, go for it.  It will be an experience.  But keep in mind, that "top tier" university will make a big deal about the number of "minority" students they admit to show how "diverse" they are.  They could give a crap whether you graduate or not.  If you step back and attend a "slower track" (Scalia's words, not mine) university, I will throw this out there:  After you graduate, a few years down the road, out in the real world of private enterprise, you will enter the "What have you done for me lately?" zone.  No one will care where your degree came from.  If you are doing your job, being productive, and contributing to "shareholder value"..great.  If not, your degree from a "top-tier" university won't mean shit.

Sex, lies, and nerds

Over on Facebook a few days back, a link to this story in Forbes about sexual harassment in the astronomy community was posted in a private group.  Alison Paige made the following, fairly astute, observation:

Astronomy, physics, computer science, engineering. Is anyone surprised that white males who love science so much that they participated in science fairs willingly and gym class only because it was required and played chess or D&D instead of attending the prom are really bad at communicating with women? These are the men who were bullied by teacher-coaches and fellow classmates repeatedly all through their grade school and HS years. They have no social interaction skills.

As a white male who voluntarily participated in science fairs, hated gym class, and played on my high school chess team - this was pre-Dungeons & Dragons - and then went on to get an advanced degree in materials science, I can affirm that there is a lot of truth to this.  People who go into the hard sciences, in general, don't come equipped with a full set of social graces.  Put these socially inept men on today's college campuses where even complimenting a woman's appearance is construed as an act of overt male aggression tantamount to rape and, well...yeah, sexual harassment charges will fly, regardless of whether the alleged act of harassment was real or committed with the most innocent of intentions.

I'll throw something else into this mix:  Hard science academicians past a certain age, i.e., those that were hired before political correctness and diversity became the driving principles for higher education,  are more likely to be conservative politically than their soft science and liberal arts colleagues.  As a consequence, all of their actions are going to be viewed through a liberal political lens that places them under far more scrutiny than, say, the politically correct English literature professor who may be staging Lolita reenactments in his classroom to bring Nabakov's writing "alive".

Having said all this, the reality of higher education in America is that heterosexual white male professors are indeed dinosaurs and are being replaced by a more "diverse" faculty.  Whether or not these professors are forced out by charges of sexual harassment, real or imagined, or simply retire, the end result is the same:  A faculty selected to be culturally diverse and politically homogeneous. This is not to say that these new faculty are not talented and, in some cases, extremely talented, but when a significant basis for their hiring is their sexual identification and/or race and political views, they are not required to be.

I could go on and on about all the reasons I believe that higher education is dying in America, but I'll save that commentary for another day and end this bit of Saturday morning amusement by making a prediction:  At present, American universities are net importers of foreign graduate students, mostly from China and India.  With ten year - fifteen, at the outside, this trend will reverse and serious American hard science students will be learning Mandarin and heading to China to learn their trade.