Heather Mac Donald reported in the Wall Street Journal that one lawyer supporting HUD’s position argued that if the Berkeley residents’ protest letters resulted in the “denial of housing to a protected class of people, it ceases to be protected speech and becomes proscribed conduct.” This is classic Hegelian-Marxist thinking — actions (including free speech) that “objectively” harm people in a subordinate class are unjust (and should be outlawed). Eventually, hud withdrew its investigation. Nevertheless, the Berkeley residents brought suit against the HUD officials and won.

It is not just the kids, Book.

Recently, a similarly divided Supreme Court has offered divergent rulings on homosexual rights. In June 2000 the court overturned the New Jersey State Supreme Court and ruled 5-4 in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale that the Boy Scouts did not have to employ an openly gay scoutmaster. The majority’s reasoning was quintessentially Tocquevillian — the First Amendment right of “freedom of association.” Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Rehnquist declared that “judicial disapproval” of a private organization’s values “does not justify the State’s effort to compel the organization to accept members where such acceptance” would change the organization’s message. The law, Rehnquist continued, “is not free to interfere with speech for no better reason than promoting an approved message or discouraging a disfavored one, however enlightened either purpose may strike the government.”

Kors states that at an academic conference sponsored by the University of Nebraska, the attendees articulated the view that “White students desperately need formal ‘training’ in racial and cultural awareness. The moral goal of such training should override white notions of privacy and individualism.” One of the leading “diversity experts” providing scores of “training programs” in universities, corporations, and government bureaucracies is Hugh Vasquez of the Todos Institute of Oakland, California. Vasquez’s study guide for a Ford Foundation-funded diversity film, Skin Deep, explains the meaning of “white privilege” and “internalized oppression” for the trainees. It also explains the concept of an “ally,” as an individual from the “dominant group” who rejects his “unmerited privilege” and becomes an advocate for the position of the subordinate groups. This concept of the “ally,” of course, is Gramscian to the core; it is exactly representative of the notion that subordinate groups struggling for power must try to “conquer ideologically” the traditional intellectuals or activist cadres normally associated with the dominant group.

http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/3484376.html

Helen would naturally be an Ally, then. Someone that has been “converted” to the new realm.

Bookworm, Can’t fight group think: Several years ago, I read one of Natan Sharansky’s books in which he described his life as a refusenik in the former Soviet Union.  One of the points he made that struck me with……

A People become soft when times are very good for a long time. I’d say we’ve had two generations of good times since the recovery began in 1982. (The recovery from the disastrous Carter policies…) 9-11 wasn’t a good time, and it woke SOME of us up, but not very many.

I think we are in for a struggle over the next decade, and quite a few more people are going to face hard times. All these surface opinions and bleatings about irrelevant things will recede as hard choices have to be made. We’re already seeing some of this with Iran, Syria, and Hamas. As Iran edges ever closer to completing their nuclear annihilation program, more and more people are examining it and becoming VERY worried. Hard times have a way of making people realize that there are consequences for silly, Jimmy Carter-like decisions and his eccentric-at-best, evil-at-worst manner of coddling dictators, coddling terrorists, his utterly bizzare filter on his world-view.

My attitude is one of quiet resignation and a personal scramble to figure out how I plan to survive this mess. I once asked a Nicaraguan refugee how the Nicaraguan people could “elect” the communists back into power after what they had been through. His response: people quickly forget. There is nothing that you and I can do to change peoples’ perceptions…yet – only circumstances can do that.

We’ve passed from an Age of Reason to an Age of Emotion. A good part of it is the failure in the education system (you can’t argue “facts” with people who can’t reason), but a good part (I believe) is that people have managed to succeed very well in recent economic times without having to think. As Marshall McLuhan aptly prophesied, the medium became the message and people became free to turn their brains off without (they believed) the fear of consequences (just consider what the MSM media provides as daily fare). People could also turn off their character without fear of consequences. Just look at the type of people our august citizenry vote into power – the circus we refer to as the Senate as Exhibit #1.

Well, the next few years should provide quite a plethora of consequences for people to contemplate. Maybe it will jolt them from their video-inspired alternate universes and get them to start thinking again instead of emoting. Until then, our bleats will echo with Cassandrian futility. Don’t waste your time or breath…think ahead, plan and check your six. Time and circumstances have a way of changing things. We want to be ready.

Back in 1973, I was working for Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Geological Observatory as a Satellite Navigator on its Research Vessel Vema. As part of President Nixon’s detante with the USSR, we were working with oceanographers from Murmansk, off the coasts of Iceland, showing them how to use the equipment they were going to receive. After the project, we sailed to Murmansk for some R&R and shore work.

Among the amenities, the Commies provided while we were ashore, was an old school bus to squire us about the town. One day, they wanted to show us the monument that had been erected to honor the sailors and merchant mariners who had been lost during World War II. To get to the monument, we had to drive past the harbor area where there were a large number of large billboards showing what appeared to be some kind of statistics about their fishing fleet. One of our crew members asked our guide, a Russian oceanographer, what they were all about.

“Propaganda,” he replied.

“With fearful menace the state demands that the individual give up his friends, abandon his lovers, renounce his beliefs and assume new, prescribed ones. He must use a new form of greeting, eat and drink in ways he does not fancy, employ his leisure in occupations he abhors, make himself available for activities he despises, and deny his past and his individuality. For all this, he must constantly express extreme enthusiasm and gratitude.

The individual is opposed to all of that, but he is ill-prepared for the onslaught. He was not born a hero, still less a martyr. He is just an ordinary man, with many weaknesses, having grown up in vulnerable times.”

I believe he still thinks that, no matter the personal inconvenience, the schools did do a good and “thorough” job on the kids. He knows what they are being taught, I presume, and he doesn’t mind and perhaps even approves. He may not approve of the personal inconvenience, but when has personal inconvenience ever stopped a proponent of Democrat policies?

It ain’t till people suffer that things get beyond “personal inconvenience”.