Friday, March 29, AD 2024 4:28am

Mandarins

Truth:

Angelo Codevilla, professor emeritus at Boston University, noted that “America is now ruled by a uniformly educated class of persons that occupies the commanding heights of the bureaucracy, of the judiciary, education, the media, and of large corporations, and that wields political power through the Democratic Party. Its control of access to prestige, power, privilege, and wealth exerts a gravitational pull that has made the Republican Party’s elites into its satellites.”

Indeed, rabidly anti-Trump Republicans shared Democrats’ disdain for Trump supporters. Kevin Williamson of National Review wrote, “The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.”

From there, it was a short walk to Hillary’s Clinton’s description of half of Trump supporters as “deplorables.”

What you’re seeing now, played out every night on the news, is class warfare.

America’s privileged elites refuse to accept Trump as president and support any effort, no matter how absurd, to bring him down. (Impeach him! He’s a Russian spy!)

Trump may be a New York billionaire, but to the elites, he’s a man of Queens—the Queens of working-class history and Archie Bunker stereotype—rather than a sophisticated Manhattanite, who would be fit for the presidency.

Worse, he is a stand-in for his supporters. Too many of them are the kind of folks who work on farms or in factories or on construction projects. Too many are the sort who take showers after they get home from work rather than before they leave for work.

It’s a pattern repeated throughout history: Members of one group—say, the British aristocracy, or the Bourbon planter class in the South—come to dominate members of another group—the peasantry, or poor African-Americans and white farmers. In the minds of the elites, the advantages they experience must be the result of their innate superiority; they are more moral, more sophisticated, more intelligent than the lower classes. They’re just better.

Go here to read the rest.  Throughout my life I have been very good at taking written tests and getting top scores.  Probably due to my upbringing, I have never confused that ability with wisdom or that getting good grades was a substitute for the experience and knowledge that other people less adept at tests could bring to the table in all walks of life.  Too many people in government are only good at taking tests and mistake glibness for knowledge and saying something with doing something.

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T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Sunday, March 11, AD 2018 6:57am

The elites, bureaucrats, and liberals hate us and our way of life. Even worse, “Government is where bad ideas go to achieve immortality.” Stephen Green @Instapundit

Roger Simon, ““Can the Deep State co-exist with an awakened populace, even a partially awakened one? Increasingly, beneath all the leaks and counter-leaks, the missing emails and accusations, what we are looking at is a sclerotic system that has become increasingly built on self-preservation and not on the people’s will, in fact is largely disinterested in and disconnected from that will.”

Guy McClung
Admin
Sunday, March 11, AD 2018 8:25am

It is worse in the Catholic Church. The “elites” in the Church are either: 1. practicing homosexualist perverts and predators; or 2. their effeminate, personally wealthy prelates, episcopoi supporters and enablers. This is, it seems, true now in almost every diocese in the Western world. And the faithful, sucker sheep, pay for their luxury lifestyles, cocaine, male prostitutes, orgies in Vatican apartments, gaycations in Naples, as well as the deals to pay off the victims when they sue – records sealed to protect the SINOs who pay out the money of the faithful, and who then shuttle the pederasts, pedophiles, and perverts to the diocese of another SINO. The American social and political elites are shaking – the people get to vote. The faithful Catholics get no such vote – all they have is God Almighty fighting for them. Let us see how this turns out for the SINOs. Guy McClung

SINO – hireling, some turned wolf, shepherds in name only

Dave Griffey
Dave Griffey
Sunday, March 11, AD 2018 8:42am

“mistake glibness for knowledge and saying something with doing something.”

I immediately thought of Obama. Paint me a crank, but I never thought Obama was The Greatest Communicator. Far from it. In his early days he could give a rousing speech. But that passed with the burdens of leadership. In terms of impromptu speaking, he was at times atrocious. In fact, GW Bush, as terrible at speeches as he was, could be better on the fly than Obama, at least IMHO, and as one who spent the first part of my life in public speaking. Obama could also be ‘glib’ to the max, often – to my ears at least – coming off as a haughty frat boy in college, leaning on zingers and one liners and even open contempt as a substitute for real substance. And yet, people on all sides said he was one of the most brilliant, articulate leaders in world history.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Sunday, March 11, AD 2018 10:27am

Not only od the “mandarins: hate us, they are idiots.

The term “Obama-worshiping imbecile” comes to mind. That would include all the nitwits that didn’t break into hilarious guffaws on hearing, “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”–

Art Deco
Art Deco
Sunday, March 11, AD 2018 1:14pm

Obama’s general intelligence is adequate. (If I’m not mistaken, his magna cum laude was earned with performance on blindly-graded examinations). His problem is that he’s not interested in much of anything and has little vocational focus. Sad for him (and more for his wife) is that people were willing to shower them with opportunities and handsome salaries for going through the motions, so neither developed an authentic vocation. He’s hired as a law lecturer (some contend through a short-circuiting of the faculty hiring process), teaches 40% time for 12 years, and publishes not one scholarly article. Nada. We have it on the authority of Richard Epstein that he did no committee work and did not attend general faculty meetings at the law school. If I’m not mistaken, he taught electives, not any foundational law courses. He spends 12 years in legislatures, but isn’t a known authority on any segment of public policy. He completes a JD with honors, never obtains a clerkship, and isn’t hired by any firm for two years. When he does land a job, it’s as an associate with a 12 person firm. He’s never offered a partnership and he is shunted off to ‘of counsel’ status after three years. As for his wife, what did she do all day for 17 years? It seems to have had something to do with the diversity racket. She was eventually paid $300,000 a year for her trouble. Sweet deal for a dropout lawyer. They both have had a simulacrum of a vocational life, not the real thing.

And he hasn’t an ounce of originality. All of his discrete quirks (the green energy shtick, the suck up to Iran, and the suck up to Cuba) all reek of someone who came of age at a particular point in time and imbibed the content of a discrete set of periodicals.

Foxfier
Admin
Sunday, March 11, AD 2018 1:22pm

On a specific sub-point-
Kevin Williamson of National Review
is an ignorant quasi-libertarian idealist twit who can’t be bothered to research any further than his initial impulse.
His reaction to people pointing out his grasp of water rights and the history of it– and proposed solution of confiscating those rights, to be redistributed in a scheme that seemed to confuse the water cycle with a city water company– was of a depth generally observed under a microscope left much to be desired. Primarily any sort of contact with reality.
He’s got contempt for anybody who doesn’t agree with him, no matter how pathetically ignorant his position is; his justifcation with water rights boiled down to “gosh, it’s complicated and I don’t want to bother with it, let’s ignore that and destroy it.” Then howling at anybody who pointed out issues with his notion.

I suspect a lot of the “elite condescension” is more akin to this than some sort of quasi-class thing. Pure liberal-type “you don’t agree with me, clearly you’re a moron. No matter how ill supported my claims are, or what the actual arguments may be.”

Reason umpty-zillion why I homeschool: logic classes. (They’re already getting the basics, starting the Princess on formal logic this summer, in place of math classes.)

Foxfier
Admin
Sunday, March 11, AD 2018 1:52pm

And yet, people on all sides said he was one of the most brilliant, articulate leaders in world history.

Anything else was handing the people who adore screeching “racist” a nice, big hammer to beat you over the head with. The better way to make the point was to challenge the first guy making the claim for examples.
And watch them stammer.

Foxfier
Admin
Sunday, March 11, AD 2018 1:57pm

Guy-
Seattle is, amazingly, pretty dang solid.

We’ve gotten more dumb political tricks since coming down to the El Paso area than we had up in Seattle*, although it’s not as bad as the Spokane one was when I was growing up.

It looks like the “Spirit” type priests are aging out of practice; our young priest is a very nice guy, I think Filipino, who very very carefully doesn’t say anything about illegal immigration. 🙂

* I kid you not, today’s sermon was that illegals are able to be pleasant people, in the format of the priest supposedly knowing a guy who “hated immigrants”, became friends with a co-worker and then had his life changed because the guy was an illegal who got reported, after he’d helped said “hateful” guy. Mother Angelica’s mobsters-building-a-shrine-with-their-bare-hands story was better, and didn’t have a poison teaching at the root.

Guy McClung
Admin
Sunday, March 11, AD 2018 8:02pm

Foxfier, Read my Mercy story-the priest is from ElPaso. Guy

Frank
Frank
Monday, March 12, AD 2018 7:12am

Art Deco:
“Obama’s general intelligence is adequate. (If I’m not mistaken, his magna cum laude was earned with performance on blindly-graded examinations)”

Call me cynical, but having attended a big Ivy-league law school in roughly the same era as Obama, I do not for one second believe any professor could not get behind the supposedly blind-grading structure if he or she wanted to. “Affirmative action” admissions programs were beginning to be challenged seriously at that time and I’ll be truly shocked if anyone can convince me that those big schools would not have played every trick in the book to make sure their GPA statistics “validated” their grotesquely unfair AA policies. Just saying.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Monday, March 12, AD 2018 8:59am

You think he cheated on the bar exam, too? You have your story and you’re sticking to it.

For anyone else, see the discussions of Wm. Dyer of his career at Harvard and Steven Sailer’s columns sussing out his LSAT scores. Neither Messrs. Dyer nor Sailer are Obama admirers.

Foxfier
Admin
Monday, March 12, AD 2018 10:01am

Guy-
I really don’t need depression right now. You wrote fine, it is just not a good time right now. Actually, the quality of the dialog is probably the problem.

GUY MCCLUNG
GUY MCCLUNG
Monday, March 12, AD 2018 2:32pm

Dear Foxfier-Sorry-did not think re the possible depression factor. Prayed for you at noon Mass. This will cheer you-about you: Each Person Is a Divine Revelation, Catholic Lane Nov 11, 2014

Each Person Is a Divine Revelation | Catholic Lane
http://www.catholiclane.com/each-person-is-a-divine-revelation/

Guy McClung, Texas

Frank
Frank
Tuesday, March 13, AD 2018 7:08am

Art Deco: “You think he cheated on the bar exam, too? You have your story and you’re sticking to it.”
There’s no need to be sarcastic. I never said he cheated on anything; you drew that inference. In fact, I didn’t say anything at all about Obama. All I said was the “blind grading” system ought not be assumed to be so blind, especially at schools where faculty are treated like deities and the school has major motivations to assure certain statistical outcomes. A general observation about “elite” law schools for a piece about how “elites” treat the rest of us. As for Obama and his wife, I agree with all you said about them.

Foxfier
Admin
Tuesday, March 13, AD 2018 7:24am

Thanks, Guy.
My black dog is a lot less bad than most of my mom’s family, but that doesn’t mean I don’t need to kick him in the head when I see him nosing around. An extra boot is always appreciated. 🙂

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