Building Idiocracy

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/090406_graduate_school.htm What is particularly shocking is that we allow incapables to become doctors and dentists. Dead patients and squandered resources result. For the rest, it's certainly inefficient to promote less intelligent individuals into the professions when more intelligent people are available and could perform the work more effectively. Part of the waste is borne by the affirmative action beneficiarcies themselves. Note the estimate that half of blacks who enter law school never become lawyers. This is hardly surprising given the two hurdles they face: 3 years of law school, then the bar exam (which does not give racial credits). I would imagine that black medical school graduates face similar challenges. In the end, affirmative action is a crude form of covert welfare for those minorities who suffer from cognitive and cultural deficits. But, these deficits are not the excuse provided by the policy's apologists: they claim discrimination pervades our society (including the design of all standardized and IQ tests) and can only be sufficiently redressed by recourse to legally-mandated racism against those races who manifest higher intelligence and higher rates of economic success. Of course, one obvious irony here is that the Jews in America have faced uninterrupted racism throughout the last century (the form of the racism evolved from being in favor of whites initially, then in favor of blacks and hispanics), and rose to power in spite of it. Are the supposed benefits affirmative action contributes to social cohesion in this country worth the economic, social, and psychological costs of this transparent lie? And, if diversity is of such monumental importance that it overrides considerations of intellect and diligence, why doesn't Harvard admit lazy, half-witted whites to complement the diversity provided by all the lazy, half-witted blacks and Mexicans it admits? The implicit premise underlying these admissions policies is that certain races cannot engage in intellectual competition on an equal footing with whites and Asians--and, if this is the case, the choice faced by decision-makers would be whether to lower the standards for the intellectually sub-standard races or to exclude them from those educational institutions which confer the most power upon their graduates. Unfortunately, the imperative of lower standards seems to extend to the top of our government: witness Justice Clarence Thomas, who has been the least competent Justice on the Supreme Court since his confirmation, and Judge Sotomayor, who will finally offer Thomas some competition for this sad distinction.  So we witness the continuous corrupt degradation of the fine old ideal of individual merit, the ideal to which we owe most of the Western world's achievements and global leadership, the ideal that raised the moral value of the individual to a Judeo-Christian plane profoundly superior to the nihilistic oriental fantasy of the preemptive value of the group.

Macro-Speculations

A perspective on European socialism and the psychology that underlies it (warning, contains not-nice truths and a high order of political incorrectness the offensiveness of which is compounded by a flagrant display of intelligence):

 

http://www.halfsigma.com/2009/05/if-it-didnt-suck-to-be-poor-why-europe-is-different.html

I tend to agree that socialism is more odoriferous in a society with differenct races, most particularly when those races manifest differences that make a difference (eg, IQ and propensity to violence). Perhaps, on this line of reasoning, the partial Islamization of Europe will provoke it to a renewed appreciation of competition and virility--a renaissance of the higher orders, a reclamation of powers once renounced.

We, however, we Americans, who have pursued the tenebrous temptation so far, find ourselves on the brink of some unknown threshold by pressure of mere numbers, by gross failure to understand the fundaments of demographic fate--in the newest generation, America is already a white minority nation. But, the meaning of this is unknown, especially since the non-whites races possess such different characteristics that their numbers vis-a-vis each other may come to matter even more than the degree of white decline. The tremendous socialist momentum from the New Deal to the Great Society and its Nixonian aftershocks, a revolutionary 40 years, has largely dissipated over the last 40 years. And this latter period happened to coincide with the dramatic demographic eclipse of white Americans. An accident of history, no doubt.

The Scorched Earth Strategy

Bush and the republican sheep who followed him have put the party into such a hole that nationalized health care may be unstoppable this time. Bush and Greenspan also managed to severely damage the reputation of capitalism. From the beginning, even before he was elected, I wondered who was behind Bush, who the real power and brains could possibly be--I could never conceive of Bush being anything other than a puppet. But, I still wonder, who are the puppetmasters? Cui bono? It's too depressing to believe the straight story, that the entire Bush era was a succession of stupidities and accidents.

Bureaucracies' Intelligence

Some of the conservative establishment fear waterboarding scandals may damage our human "intelligence" agencies. I can't say that I think too much of the CIA or the FBI--it seems as though whenever they're put to the test, they fail. They sometimes even manage to fail against incompetent enemies. They are bureaucrats and, like all bureaucrats, their greatest fear is that some day they may actually be held accountable for their activities. They've arranged their organizational structures with that fear first in mind.
 

OSS/CIA let the Soviets steal the bomb, the invasion of Korea was a complete surprise, the CIA told Truman the Chinese would not intervene in Korea, the CIA conceived, planned and executed the Bay of Pigs operation (at least on this occasion Kennedy inflicted some accountability, taking out the top CIA leaders), the CIA failed in multiple assassination attempts on Castro, the CIA did not know of the Soviet's massive bioweapons program, the Soviet Union's collapse "surprised" the CIA, the CIA/FBI could not prevent 9/11--and that's just off the top of my head and in the public domain. If such a miserable succession of failures hasn't demoralized this ossified, scleroticized, bureaucratized pair of dinosaurs (is it really true they're not union-run?)--I hardly think a bit of "waterboard" publicity will. But, if it does--good. Maybe we can get some new blood in there and introduce some competence.