Archive for March 26th, 2007
Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
Posted by Bob in History, How Things Work on 03/26/2007
People find it confusing that, even after it became anti-Israel, Jews kept backing the USSR. No one but me seems to remember the desperate all-out fight against the Strategic Defense Initiative, Kennedy’s “Star Wars,” that was waged by the entire political left just before the USSR collapsed.
Of course SDI was a fake. It was a strategic fake at the time, because it called the USSR’s bluff. For the entire forty years of the Cold War, people were convinced that the USSR and the US were neck-and-neck in science. Meanwhile, the Soviets had almost nothing they didn’t get via spies. The most astounding accomplishment of the USSR was that in seventy years, it did not come up with ONE SINGLE consumer good anybody outside their prison WANTED. Over two hundred million white people, and not one thing!
SDI was accompanied by some unknown security measures. The USSR, strained to the limit, simply could not compete with the West on breakthrough like this, any more than they could ever send a man to the moon. The legitimacy of the whole image of the USSR was threatened, and that image meant everything to the left.
What the left wanted was a world divided into a left and a far left. It was a well-known strategy called “Two Steps Forward, One Step Back.” The left would make huge demands and then settle for half in a compromise with moderate Republicans. They did not distinguish between foreign and domestic policy.
The left wanted all pressure to come from the left. That was the function the USSR served. If we didn’t appeal to the third world, the Soviets would. Each foreign policy initiative on the let, each domestic policy, had some reference to the Soviets. They used the USSR in the opposite way that they used Hitler.
This was not a world that the Birchers were capable of understanding. I had many a Mr. Webb to deal with then, too.
Evil, Wrong, and Temporary
None of the self-styled Realists understood why Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech caused such an uproar. Something that is less noted is the titanic boost it gave to opponents of the regime in the Soviet Empire.
Let me first talk about the Realist Uncle. Those who worked in the samizdat movement would often say that their worst enemy was not the regime, but their Realist Uncle. On television you would often see a Soviet family sitting around the dinner table talking. We used to do that. We would sit at the dinner table for an hour or two and talk before going tot he other rooms.
What we did not know was that in Russia, there WERE no other rooms. You sat at the table until you moved it and went to bed. So here you were, risking imprisonment with a tiny illegal publication. If you were caught, your Realist Uncle would, at best, lose his permit to live in Moscow. His not reporting you was a felony.
And your Realist Uncle was an old man, who thought he represented Wisdom and, of course, Realism. You listened to him attack you as a day-dreamer for the entire evening around the table, pointing out Soviet Power.
Reagan was exactly what your Realist Uncle was NOT. He proclaimed the Soviet Empire was Evil, which meant that it was not a natural thing, but a blot on the face of the earth. The term “Evil Empire” made the USSR mortal. It was no longer one of the two natural superpowers that EVERY, and I mean EVERY “Realist” said would coexist forever with the West. Countries that routinely killed people trying to escape from them were Evil. Reagan had to put “Mr. Gorbeczev, tear down this Wall!” into his Berlin speech THREE TIMES when his staff marked it out.
The Realists on his staff took it out.
Where in the hell have these “realists” BEEN the last forty years?
What the Future WON’T Be
Before the last AR Conference I attended, arguably the most prestigious MAINLINE psychology journal in America had a LEAD article by Arthur Jensen and Philippe Rushton spoke at the AR meeting.
Recently the New York Times had a lead article about Shockley, the inventor of the transistor and someone I knew, and it talked about his taking Jensen’s side on the race-IQ issue. It is hard to do a hit piece on the man who undeniably invented the transistor, but the NYT did it. They had to strain to do it.
The NYT made an astonishing admission, “The hereditarian view is now far more acceptable than it was in the 1970s when Shockley championed it.” No pessimist would ever notice that sentence. His eyes are too full of tears. I would never have IMAGINED it could appear in the NYT. But I also never imagined that one of my articles would ever be published in Pravda. So I live in a much different, and realer, world than the ones who call themselves “Realists.”
The NYT went on to quote JENSEN to prove their point.
“Realists” forget what Jensen’s reception was when he did an issue of the Harvard Psychology Review (?). He had assumed, like everybody else, that “modern anthropologists had proven that the races were equal in innate abilities.” He was to do an article on this. Then he found that there was NO evidence AT ALL of this. The fact that EVERYBODY believed it is shown by the fact that he devoted the entire issue 200-page issue of the journal to this subject.
Harvard tried to get all the copies back and burned the ones they did get back.
Book burning. Openly.
Many a time I was told that the hereditarian idea was hopeless. Now the pessimist side, and it DOES seem to be a SIDE, screams that no one can know it.
In the early 1960s I was in grad school in economics. One of my professors was Warren Nutter, one of the top specialists in Soviet economics. The CIA and academia agreed on one thing: the USSR was catching up with the US in production. If you were the CIA and your budget depended on the Soviet threat, would you have called it a paper tiger?
Long before the USSR fell, pretty well everybody was on board with Nutter. As one fellow-student used to say to pro-Communists, “You mean you want the whole ECONOMY run like the United States Post Office?”
No, contrary to what the New York Times will tell you and pessimists will swear to, Nutter did not win this alone, nor did Jensen.
In the long run, in the real world, “Realists” are always wrong. Like futurologists, they play for the market NOW. Their tummy hurts so all is lost. Futurologists say what will get them grants in Futurology NOW.
I base my futurology on the futures I remember living through.
http://www.nationalsalvation.net/
Bob is not Gospel, This is a SEMINAR
Posted by Bob in Bob, Coaching Session on 03/26/2007
Mr. Webb says that people who read and comment here are the ones who find Bob’s ideas interesting and, in general, correct. He finds this highly offensive and a sign that we are not up to the high standrads of the “new ideas” — unspecified — that he has.
Outside of academia, monopolies, or other authoritarian systems, people will be found where they feel that what is presented is correct and interesting. So if you go to Bob’s Blog, you will find people who agree that Bob is interesting and generally right. If Mr. Webb finds this intolerable, he is in fr a very grim time in this world.
On Planet Earth, if you just jump in and insult the person who is conducting a blog and say everything he says is crap, it would be very strange indeed if those who choose that blog didn’t overwhelmingly criticize you. You see this as a conspiracy.
But then again, you see EVERYTHING as a conspiracy, don’t you?
This is a seminar, not a dictatorship. I would be a bit concerned if Mr. Webb DID get any power in the media, because he does not seem to understand the concepts of free discussion and open competition.
I said that Al Parker was not thinking in his last post. But for Al that is just a correction of someone I know CAN think. I do not know whether Mr. Webb really understgands how the world works at all.
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Come in, World!
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session, Comment Responses on 03/26/2007
I left off answering Mr. Webb because I didn’t think it was necessary. Then, when I did, Papillon said that she was tearfully glad I did.
I am not doing a very good job here.
When someone comes on with nothing but defeatism and personal insults and you take it seriously, I have failed. Some of my commenters did defend me, which is what one does for a friend when he is insulted, but the fact that this crap impressed someone disappoints me to the extreme.
AFKAN just came up with a list of the great power Jews have, and says that proves they are THE Enemy on whom we must concentrate. Mr. Webb kept talking abut how powerful the media were, and how hopeless it is to come up against them.
I seem to be the only person here who lived through the 1980s. The power that AFKAN ascribes to the Jews in the United States was paltry compared to the power the Soviet Empire had inside its borders. ALL criticism of government was banned, and the name of the tiny publications put out by starving Russians were called samizdat — “self-publications” — which were by definition illegal.
Now here is the important point: EVERY SINGLE professional Sovietologist absolutely agreed with AFKAN and Mr. Webb on this. NOT ONE of the people we paid even hinted that the Soviet Empire would collapse in the last century. Even Science Fiction books by anti-Communists, like The Mote in God’s Eye, predicted a permanent USSR.
PLEASE don’t tell about that college professor you heard abut who predicted that collapse. He doesn’t EXIST. If you discussed any internal collapse, every single expert would do what AFKAN and Webb do; they would just point at the power of Moscow and shout you off the stage.
That happened within my lifetime. That happened LESS than twenty years ago. In 1992, if Perot had not been a nutcase, the polls showed that he was out front and gaining. That was less than fifteen years ago.
So here we are again. The Knowledgeable Ones are explaining to me, AGAIN, that one group is very, very powerful, so “Resistance is Useless!”
And some bloggers STILL listen to them!
I’ve fought alone a long time. At least I now have SOME people with me.
http://www.nationalsalvation.net/
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