By Professor Doom
The Trump
election, a repudiation of a few of the lies which have been the foundation of
our recent culture, is certainly something…but it’s not a complete solution.
Our campuses in
particular seem bent on enforcing the lies; there are many reports that these
places are hotbeds of resistance to the “Trump repudiation,” and go so far as
to provide
coloring books and Play-Doh to the college students
“suffering” from being exposed to the idea that reality may not be as the safe
space of campus presents it.
The big reason for
this is the strong left-wing bias of administration. Administrators punish
conservative faculty, restrict
and harass conservative student groups, and keep
conservative speakers from presenting ideas on campus. This
prevents students from ever learning of any other way to think but one, the one
that is strongly encouraged on campus.
Socialism is
endlessly presented as the solution to all problems, and Northeastern University’s promotion
of Boston’s International Socialist Organization really
exemplifies the mindless support given here, as the latter has been allowed to
“provide” multiple events and workshops on campus…even as conservative options
are not allowed.
I don’t understand
how socialism can be taken seriously; to do so requires completely ignoring the
historical evidence, written in oceans of blood during the 20th
century, particularly a great war where the Nazis (National Socialists) lost to
the USSR (International Socialists, much like Boston’s Organization)…with the
USSR collapsing despite winning the biggest war in history, because a socialist
system simply doesn’t work. It’s funny, when the USSR collapsed, we learned
that parts of
Moscow’s phone system had been basically unchanged since the Bolshevik
revolution many decades earlier. While the rest of the non-socialist
world went through generations of phone technology, the USSR’s phones, like
most everything else, was incapable of advancing under socialism.
Not being exposed
to other ideas and ignoring historical evidence are only part of what’s
necessary to believe in socialism…you also need to not think about what
socialists are saying today, because they haven't changed.
Let’s take some examples of what this society
teaches our kids on campus, to exclusion of other points of view:
“Inequality is a law of capitalism.”
Turns out,
inequality is a law of reality. All one needs to do is go to the grocery store,
and pick up a bag of grapes and see it with your own eyes: not all the grapes
are equal in size and consistency. The closest we can come to equality in the
real world is an anthill, and again, we see how socialist inequality works:
most ants count for nothing, but the one at the top, the queen ant, gets
everything. There hasn’t been a socialist system yet that didn’t give
everything to the guy on top…but that doesn’t make inequality a law peculiar to
socialism, either.
Yes, I grant this
system seems to work quite well for ants but I just don’t think it’s a good
system for human beings. Time and again we’ve seen individual human beings do
amazing things, and these humans aren’t at the top of the heap. On the other
hand, outside of the queen, most every ant really is just like every other ant.
When I see a lone ant invent a written language or the like, I’ll reconsider my
opinion here.
Another tidbit of
socialist “wisdom”:
“In the United States, there are 400
billionaires. They are the reason why there are 47 million poor people,” an
event description asserts, contending that “you cannot have obscene, untold
wealth unless you have obscene, unimaginable poverty.”
Look, the socialists should be allowed to
speak, but not letting other sides present their point of view allows for
obvious foolishness, like the above.
Let’s take the socialist’s numbers at face
value. If we simply kill the 400 billionaires and distribute their wealth to
the 47 million poor people in the US, what would that change? The poor people
will get less than $9,000 apiece. They still won’t be able to get a car with
that money, much less pay for insurance and maintenance for the car. They won’t
be able to buy health insurance for their family for more than a year. They
won’t be able to pay a year’s tuition at most any US university. It’s not even
a year’s rent in most cities.
In short, the end result of killing off
the rich will be that the poor will remain poor. Basic math shows that the
existence of the rich is not, by itself, the reason there are poor. Of course,
basic math isn’t necessarily part of the college curriculum any more (and what
we call “advanced” math today has been dumbed down to the optional basic math you can find
on many campuses).
Indeed, the event description praises
Sanders’ candidacy as a confirmation of “what people struggling for a living
wage and against racism and police brutality have been saying for years:
Capitalist [sic] isn’t working for anyone but bankers and billionaires, and to
end our suffering we need an alternative.”
Hey, Sanders was at least attempting to
fix the very serious problems in our current economic system, and Sanders
should be allowed to present his ideas…even if I disagree, he should be allowed
to speak.
On the other hand, the “other side” of
economic thought should be allowed to be heard as well. It’s not capitalism per
se that’s causing the suffering…if anything, capitalism is what’s keeping it
from being much worse. The “other side” says our fiat monetary system is
causing suffering because any attempt to save inevitably just transfers wealth
to the “bankers and billionaires.” The “other side” says our current zero
interest rate policies are causing suffering because people can no longer
survive on the interest from their savings...even as the “bankers and
billionaires” get rich because they still collect interest on loans to the little
people. There’s the difference: while socialism attacks all the rich for being rich in a spasm of primal envy, the “other
side” addresses why some of the rich
are getting rich, and seeks solutions to the heart of the problem causing the
suffering. There’s room for open discussion here (none of these nonsocialist ideas,
incidentally, were even remotely mentioned to me in high school, where I was
trained to believe the fiat system was a great system).
There is supposed to be an exchange of
ideas here, but the only “alternative” presented is the socialist, failed,
“alternative.”
While the university informed Campus Reform that
it is unaware as to whether any student organizations are involved in the
event, the school’s Students for Justice in
Palestine chapter
is now listed as a co-sponsor, along with the International Socialist
Organization.
Campus
Reform has
yet to hear back from the school as to whether the student groups’ involvement
means that any university funds will help pay for the day-long event.
I won’t bother addressing the university’s
probable lie about not knowing about a student group co-sponsoring, but it’s
obvious university funds are paying for this, dare I say it, indoctrination.
I know, indoctrination is a strong word,
but as long as it’s forbidden to speak of any alternative to our current
problems besides socialism, what other word applies to forcing only one method
of thought down our students’ throats?
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