200,000 enemy soldiers on you rear flank

I recently finished Shadows in the Jungle by Larry Alexander. From the blurb:

Determined to retake the Philippines ever since his ignominious flight from the islands in 1942, General Douglas MacArthur needed a first-rate intelligence-gathering unit. Out of thousands, only 138 men were chosen. They were the best, toughest, and fittest men the Army had to offer. They were the Alamo Scouts.

Larry Alexander follows the footsteps of the men who made up the elite reconnaissance unit that served as General MacArthur’s eyes and ears in the Pacific War. Drawing from personal interviews and testimonies from Scout veterans, Alexander weaves together the tales of the individual Scouts, who often spent weeks behind enemy lines to complete their missions. Now, more than sixty years after the war, the story of the Alamo Scouts will finally be told.

Well paced and interesting.

I came away with a realization of how much my understanding of the Pacific War has been Navy (and Marines) biased. I have read a handful of books about the Burma Theater of War, and I have significantly more than a handful on the island hopping campaign, the carrier war, and the naval battles. On the land campaign, I have only read a couple of books on the New Guinea campaign and both those were from the Australian perspective, and one on the Bougainville campaign, also from an Australian perspective.

I knew elements of the American Army campaign in New Guinea and Philippines, but that is where I am weakest and what this book really highlighted.

I was struck by this reality which I had never particularly focused on:

Although operations in New Guinea were nearing an end, so far as MacArthur and the top brass were concerned, there were still some 200,000 Japanese stranded on the big island and on the smaller isles off-shore in bypassed pockets of resistance. In several of these pockets the enemy held hostages, mostly Dutch, Melanesian, and Australian, usually serving as laborers for the emperor.

200,000 - that is an amazing number of enemy to have remaining on your rear flank.

Just as in Burma, their fighting capacity was shattered and the 200,000 would have been starving and with little shelter, clothing or arms. Still, 200,000 is 200,000.

I was broadly familiar with the Philippines campaign as well but again, the magnitude of the numbers haven't ever really registered. 530,000 Japanese soldiers defending the archipelago, of whom 430,000 died, mostly from starvation.

I knew that the Pearl of the Orient, Manila, was devastated by fighting but did not know the context. General Tomoyuki Yamashita was the Japanese general in charge of the overall campaign in the Philippines.

Yamashita was a pragmatist. With the fall of Leyte, he knew he had no hope of stopping an American landing on Luzon and little chance of defeating them once they were ashore. He had lost half of his ship-ping and thousands of men trying to reinforce Leyte. His naval force now consisted of two submarine chasers, nineteen patrol boats, ten midget subs, and 180 one-man suicide boats, mostly in the Manila Bay area. Perhaps worse, all but about two hundred planes of his air force had been shot down or destroyed on the ground, and by the time the Americans actually came ashore, that number would be reduced to a few dozen.

Luzon is 340 miles long and 130 miles across at its widest. To defend it, Yamashita had six infantry and one armored division, or about 275,000 men, to draw on, but this number was deceptive. Many of his men were not frontline caliber, including convalescing sick and wounded, and most were poorly armed and equipped. There were also about 16,000 naval personnel around Manila, mostly sailors whose ships had been sunk in Leyte Gulf in October, under the command of Adm. Sanji Iwabuchi. But interservice rivalry meant Yamashita had little authority over him.

Unable to prevent a landing. Yamashita ordered that the beaches would not be defended. Instead, he would fight a battle in-depth, making the Americans pay in blood for every yard and to deny for as long as possible the Americans' use of Luzon as an air base to strike at the Japanese homeland. To accomplish this, he broke his defending force into three math elements. His main force of about 152,000 men, called the Shobu Group, were sent into the mountainous regions to the north with orders to tie down the Americans for as long as possible. This would also allow the Japanese to control one of the island's main food-producing areas in the Cagayan Valley. Yamashita remained in command of this unit, setting up his CP in the village of Baguio, a summer mountain resort five thousand feet above sea level.

Another eighty thousand men, called the Shimbu Group, under the command of Lt. Gen. Shizuo Yokoyama, were sent to the south to hold the high ground east of Manila and thus control the city's water sup-ply. The remaining thirty thousand troops, the Kembu Group, under Maj. Gen. Rikichi Tsukada, were to hold the Caraballo Mountains and the west side of the Agno-Pampanga Valley, where the former U.S. bases of Clark Field and Fort Stotsenburg were located, and stretch south to Bataan. They were to hold as long as possible, then retreat to the Zambales mountain range and fight a delaying action. Manila was indefensible, Yamashita decided, so he ordered his men out except for a small detachment to protect supply routes and blow the highway bridges leading from the city. Iwabuchi decided other-wise and commanded his sixteen thousand sailors to hold the city, which would soon be turned into a charnel house of death and destruction.

[snip]

As January dragged into February, the battle for Luzon intensified. Fighting at Manila had been especially ferocious as Adm. Sanji Iwabuchi, in defiance of General Yamashita's wishes, ordered his sixteen thousand men to stand fast and defend the city. Fighting in and around Manila lasted from February 4 to March 4, and devastated large sections of the once-exotic city, especially in the Intramuros district, the Walled City, an old Spanish fortress near the port, where many government buildings stood.

When the fighting ended, nearly all of Iwabuchi's men were dead, and so were as many as 100,000 Filipino civilians,
caught in the murderous cross fire.

That is another thing Shadows in the Jungle does a good job of, restoring perspective. We, America, lost some 115,000 dead in the Pacific in World War II. But we weren't the only ones involved of course.

The Philippines Army lost some 57,000 killed. Civilian deaths during the occupation and reconquest were close to a million.

The Dutch East Indies had some 4,000,000 civilian deaths during the Japanese occupation. China, 18,000,000. Burma, 250,000. Horrendous.

Shadows in the Jungle covers only a very small aspect of that great conflict but it does give a broader perspective.

Ennui and enervation are a greater threat than fanaticism. . . perhaps

It is a frequent claim but I think this asks the wrong question. From Are Liberals Dying Out? by Hrishikesh Joshi and Jonny Anomaly. The claim is that Liberals in the modern American sense of Democrats are characterized by low rates of family formation and even when they do form, have low rates of fertility. Therefore, the argument proceeds, liberals will eventually be outproduced by conservatives.

Like all bad ideas, there is a core element that is true. Democrats indeed do have lower family formation rates and lower fertility rates.

Beyond that, there are all sorts of problems. The biggest is definitional. What is a liberal? I consider myself a classical liberal with libertarian tendencies: I take much inspiration from Locke, Smith, Hume, Hayek. That scarcely qualifies me as a liberal in terms of today's nomenclature. You can see this evolution of terminology in other countries such as Australia where the conservative party is the Liberal Party who contest elections against the Labour Party.

Today's British Conservative Party, in terms of policies, looks a lot like the American Democratic Party circa 1980.

So names don't really tell us much. The author's acknowledge the problem of definitions but try to skirt around it. They make a feint at trying to rescue their position by alluding to the psychological trait of Authoritarianism but they fail to tie that to either end of the spectrum in terms of evidence. Indeed, in the US right now, the groups with the most overt manifestation of authoritarianism by far are clustered at the liberal end of the spectrum - BLM, Antifa, Postmodern critical theorists on university campuses and in the media, etc.

So definitions is the biggest rock on which this founders. But it is not a single rock reef. Where are Democrats concentrated? In cities. Might that be the reason that Democrats have a somewhat lower fertility rate? Occam's Razor would suggest so.

I suspect the real question of interest is not whether Liberals are being outbred.

I think there are two behavioral attributes that are negative and it would be interesting to know whether we are seeing a decline in those behaviors.

My first question would be "Is self-destructive fanaticism dying out?" It is fanatics, not liberals, who are garnering all the negative headlines. BLM rioters, Antifa brawlers, postmodernist obstructionists, hecklers and authoritarians, ISIS, Taliban, Al Qaeda, etc.

It is easy to get lost in the headlines and the availability bias. Things do seem to be falling apart, the center does not appear as if it can hold. But The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker makes a solid case that in fact violence and fanaticism are declining. Sure, it pops up here and there. More to the point, elevated fanaticism is more prevalent in some regions than others. But overall it is declining.

My second question is more challenging. "Is existentially destructive ennui increasing?" A question to which I do not have a good answer.

You can have a falling population because of increasing violence but you can also have a falling population because of enervation and ennui. That is what we are seeing in western Europe and Japan. Populations no longer seem to have as great a commitment to the great chain of being, to a future beyond their own life span.

This could be due to an all pervasive consumerism where children take away your opportunity to consume. It could be owing to a loss of religious faith with its commitment to an ongoing future through children and a sense of intergenerational commitment. It could be due to some combination of any number of things.

I suspect that self-destructive fanaticism is indeed self-destructing and Darwin Award-like, removing itself from the future gene pool and therefore reducing the behavioral propensity towards fanaticism in the future.

Ennui and enervation is modern western classically liberal societies may actually be the more serious threat to existential destruction. I don't think it is inevitable but I think that is the issue to focus on.

Do not feel absolutely certain of anything

From The Best Answer to Fanaticism--Liberalism; Its calm search for truth, viewed as dangerous in many places, remains the hope of humanity. by Bertrand Russell.

Perhaps the essence of the Liberal outlook could be summed up in a new decalogue, not intended to replace the old one but only to supplement it. The Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows:

1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.

2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.

3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.

4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.

5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.

6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.

9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.

10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

Stay Proud versus Stay Angry

From A Sense of Belonging by E.D. Hirsch, Jr. I respect Hirsch's courage and originality. I cannot agree with all in his essay. The fact that he uses the Broadway production Hamilton and Junger's Tribe as the foundations for his piece is revealing. Neither would be identifiable to many outside the Acela Cabal and probably only a small percent would have experience of either or both these texts. No matter. I think Hirsch has his hands a single critical issue that warrants attention.

With our long sustained postmodernist critical theory march through educational institutions, nationalism and patriotism have fallen from favor. This is complementary to the postmodernist critique which seeks to foster a fragmentation of the nation into identity groups of various degrees of victimhood. If postmodernist critical theory was really a Gramscian strategy of the old Soviet Union, it has paid handsome dividends in sowing dissension and discord within the nation. If we do not see ourselves as equal citizens with a shared interest in one another and perspective of the world, then a retreat into vying sections makes sense.

Hirsch is arguing that we should once again expect our education system to build a foundation of knowledge about and pride in the classical liberal achievements of our nation. I agree. The American communitarianism is the not the same as the postmodernist communism and collectivism. You can have a shared respect for both individualism and the value of communalism.

We need a reinvigorated understanding of ourselves as a community of equal individual citizens and understand that that is not an endorsement of either communism and collectivism. We need to excise the group focus of postmodernism in order to rebuild our communal trust.

Over the past six decades, changes in the early grades of schooling have contributed to the decline of communal sentiment. Under the banner of “Teach the child not the subject!” and with a stress on skills rather than content, the decline in shared, school-imparted knowledge has caused reading comprehension scores of high school students to decline. Between the 1960s and 1980s, scores dropped half a standard deviation and have never come back. In addition, school neglect of factual knowledge, including American history and its civic principles, joined with a general de-emphasis of “rote learning” and “mere fact,” induced a decline in widely shared factual knowledge among Americans. This not only weakened their ability to read and communicate; it has left them with weaker patriotic sentiments, and with a diminished feeling that they are in the same boat with Americans of other races, ethnicities, and political outlooks.

My calling attention to these educational outcomes is something one might expect from a political conservative who is complaining about political correctness and a decline of patriotism. But my intended primary target audience is my fellow liberals. Ever since the war protests of the Vietnam era, in which I joined, the left has been leery of overt patriotism and boosterism. But as Richard Rorty presciently observed in a New York Times op-ed in 1997, a high-minded, unpatriotic left will not manage to get much done, and will be despised by other Americans for its lack of simple civic sentiment. Rorty distinguished between the old union-led left that he and I shared, and that achieved practical improvements, with the new, academic left that tries to “stay as angry as possible.”

I seek to address those whose main political and social objectives include greater equality of education and income, and higher status for previously neglected or despised groups. I’m not chiefly addressing readers who equate American patriotism with flag waving and competitive forms of tribalism, but rather with those who subscribe to the best of our Enlightenment ideals that have made us in fact the greatest country in the world—as judged by, for instance, our effective assimilation of widely diverse persons, which Hamilton exemplifies.

My thesis is that our young people’s low opinion of their own country has been intensified by the current disrepute of nationalism in any form in our schools and universities. This anti-nationalism has been a big mistake, a self-inflicted wound on our individual and collective state of mind, as documented in Tribe. The political and psychological stakes are high. In an ambitious series on the disintegrating Middle East published by The New York Times, a major reason offered for the disintegration of the countries in that region is the “lack of an intrinsic sense of national identity.” Such lack of national identity in a modern nation leaves the field open to narrow ethnic enmities and political polarizations.

Communication as the lifeblood of complex projects

From Unrecognised simplicities of effective action #2(b): the Apollo programme, the Tory train wreck, and advice to spads starting work today by Dominic Cummings. Worth reading and following his links. He is focusing on the principles behind effective management of complex projects.

This is my edit of his summary - gives a sense of the material.

Organisation-wide orientation. Everybody in a large organisation must understand as much about the goals and plans as possible.

Integration. There must be an overall approach in which the most important elements fit together, including in policy, management, and communications. Failures in complex projects, from renovating your house to designing a new welfare system, often occur at interfaces between parts.

Extreme transparency and communication, horizontally as well as hierarchically. More, richer, deeper communication so that ‘all of us understand what was going on throughout the program.

‘Configuration management’. There must be a process whereby huge efforts go into the initial design of a complex system then there is a process whereby changes are made in a disciplined way such that a) interdependencies are tested where possible by relevant people before a change is agreed and b) then everybody relevant knows about the change. This ties together design, engineering, management, scheduling, cost, contracts, and allows the coordination of interdisciplinary teams. Test, learn, communicate results, change where needed, communicate

Physical and information structures should reinforce open communication.

Long-term budgets. Long-term budgets save money.

You need a complex mix of centralisation and decentralisation. While overall vision, goals, and strategy usually comes from the top, it is vital that extreme decentralisation dominates operationally so that decisions are fast and unbureaucratic. Information must be shared centrally and horizontally across the organisation — it is not either/or. Big complex projects must empower people throughout the network and cannot rely on issuing orders through a hierarchy.

Extreme focus on errors. Schriever had ‘Black Saturdays’ and Mueller had similar meetings focused not on ‘reporting progress’ but making clear the problems. Simple as it sounds this is very unusual.

Spending on redundancy to improve resilience.

Important knowledge is discovered but then the innovation is standardised and codified so it can be easily learned and used by others.

Systems management means lots of process and documentation but at its best it is fluid and purposeful — it is not process for ass-covering.

Saving time saves money.

The ‘systems’ approach is inherently interdisciplinary ‘because its function is to integrate the specialized separate pieces of a complex of apparatus and people — the system — into a harmonious ensemble that optimally achieves the desired end’ (Ramo).

The ‘matrix management’ system allowed coordination across different departments and different projects.

People and ideas were more important than technology.

The illimitable freedom of the human mind

Thomas Jefferson, December 27th, 1820.

This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. for here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.

Let's go, boys! We've got the damn Yankees on the run again!

I have been posting from The Rough Riders by Theodore Roosevelt. I haven't finished the book yet, but it is worth mentioning Major General Joseph Wheeler in command of the cavalry division to which Roosevelt and his rough riders belonged.

Wheeler had been a general in the Confederate Army in the Civil War. By the Spanish American War, he was 62 years old and while the fighting spirit was undiminished, his attention to details left something to be desired. From Wikipedia.

Approaching Las Guasimas de Sevilla on June 24, American reports suggested the Spaniards were digging in with a field gun; however, Cuban scouts contradicted these, revealing the Spaniards were preparing to abandon their position. In fact, the Spanish troops at the position had received orders to fall back on Santiago. Wheeler requested the assistance of the attached Cuban forces in an immediate attack, but their commander, Col. Gonzales Clavel, refused. Wheeler decided to attack anyway, rushing his men forward with two guns to the front, with Colonel Young's brigade leading the advance against the Spanish columns in what came to be called the Battle of Las Guasimas, the first major engagement of the war.

During the excitement of the battle, Wheeler supposedly called out "Let's go, boys! We've got the damn Yankees on the run again!" Wheeler's forces moved to encircle the Spaniards' first battle line, assaulting its front and right flank, but were repulsed. During a pause in the fighting, both sides reinforced their positions. The Spaniards sent forward 2 companies of the San Fernando Battalion, along with the artillery. After midday the U.S. attack was renewed, but Spanish Comandante Andrés Alcañiz, leading the Provisional de Puerto Rico Battalion, once again checked the American assault.

What a putz.

Isaac Chotiner is an alum of The College Preparatory School in Oakland, California. It is ironic that the school motto is mens conscia recti, "a mind aware of what is right," a condition not apparent in Isaac Chotiner.

Ben Rhodes infamously described the mainstream media journalist:

"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing."

Chotiner is slightly older than that but otherwise he fits the mold.

Slate has a current article, “I’m Hearing You’re Really Angry” by Isaac Chotiner. Chotiner is interviewing Joan C. Williams.

In a new book, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America, Joan C. Williams argues that much of the analysis of this class has been misguided and condescending. So too is the general cultural attitude toward the white working class from society’s more fortunate members. The result, Williams says, is a white working class increasingly isolated from the Democratic Party, with dangerous consequences for our politics.

Williams is a professor of law at University of California Hastings College of the Law.

Williams sounds like she is on the right path. The white working class demographic is about half the electorate (70% of Americans are white and about 70% do not have a college degree = 49%). They have not been well-served by either establishment party. They first came to Republican attention with the Tea Party protests and insurgency. Establishment scalps were taken but the Party seemed only marginally responsive. Indeed, Republicans still seems only marginally aware of America's dissatisfaction with its political class.

The establishment Republican Party has remained sufficiently inattentive to the needs and interests of half the electorate that a novice, former Democrat, was not only able to seize the Republican nomination but to win the election on his own platform.

The establishment Democratic Party, with its labor and working class roots, seemed to believe that it was immune to the discord and disgruntlement. While they focused ever more energy on the most marginalized - African-Americans, Hispanics, LGBT, and big dollops of money for the elite constituencies in academia, entertainment and Wall Street, they didn't notice that they had become not just inattentive to the needs of the working class but unaware of them.

I think Obama's talent as a campaigner masked the problem. He spoke to at least some aspects of the white working class concerns but never delivered to them. The fact that the quintessential insider establishment candidate (Hillary Clinton) lost badly in 2008 to a novice outsider doesn't seem to have registered. The fact that she nearly lost the party nomination to a septuagenarian Socialist (and might have done so had the DNC not inappropriately put their thumb on the scale) doesn't seem to have registered. And the fact that she lost the election badly again in 2016, this time again to a political novice, also seems not to have registered yet.

Democrats are captive to their postmodernist critical theory wing, seeing everything in terms of race, gender, orientation, etc. Oddly, Republicans have fallen into the same nomenclature and lens. They don't believe in postmodern critical theory but they use its language. And both parties are wrong. Critical theory is wrong.

This is not an issue of whites and blacks and Hispanics. An agenda of policies that addresses the needs of the white working class will deliver just as good results for blacks and Hispanics. Whichever party ends up focusing on and delivering beneficial policies to the working class will have interracial support and will be winning elections for a while. It is not clear which party that will be.

Williams is one of the voices on the progressive left (as opposed to the postmodernist left) who has noticed and is calling for Democrats to pay attention to the gulf between the party and the half electorate of the electorate represented by white working class voters.

What is startling in this interview is the gulf between the intelligence of Williams and the ignorance and lack of self-awareness of her interviewer, Chotiner. They are nominally of the same party but she is coming at the problem from a Classical Liberal mindset, one which intersects nicely with a good chunk of those who view themselves as conservative. She wants the data, she wants to recognize patterns in the data, she wants to figure out how to make things better.

For Chotiner, ad hominem bluster is the communication vehicle of choice. In an interview about how to treat the white working class with respect and dignity, his disdain and unwarranted arrogance are front and center. He can't seem to hear his own words. For example (Chotiner is in bold):

Why is it that when the condescension comes from someone like Donald Trump, who gets up at his rallies and says things like, “I don’t have to be here, I have better things to do,” who brags about how rich he is, who has his own products made overseas, none of that sticks? Trump embodies everything people claim to hate about the elite as much as anybody I can imagine.

I disagree.

He just completely bald-facedly lies to them as if they’re morons.

Chotiner sees things one way and is unable to acknowledge that there might be another way of seeing it. It isn't that he thinks the white working class is wrong. He thinks they are stupid.

Where Chotiner sees condescension, others see acknowledgement.

Where Chotiner sees bragging, others see accomplishment.

Where Chotiner sees hypocrisy, others see pragmatism.

Where Chotiner sees Trump as elite, other see Trump as an outsider.

Where Chotiner sees Trump as lying, others see Trump as telling truths others will not.

Where Chotiner sees the white working class as stupid, other see Trump as respecting them by speaking to them and their concerns.

The dissonance is deafening. After Chotiner posits that the white working class are morons for voting for Trump, he then has this exchange.

I think you and I both agree that the role of politicians is not to get up and call half the country stupid.

Yeah probably not a great idea.

If it is not a good idea, then don't do it. But Chotiner is already on record calling 49% of the electorate morons for having voted for Trump. Chotiner may not see his own inconsistency but others do.

Entering Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations territory, (see The Righteous Mind), Chotiner claims not only to be smarter than half the electorate but also more virtuous than them as well.

But as for people like us, we should have some commitment to honesty. What attitude should we be taking toward people who voted for a racist buffoon that is scamming them?

No need to beat this horse to death. Chotiner, in his unwarranted arrogance, his ignorance, his preening, his virtue signaling, his moral posturing, his bigotry, and his condescension to others with whom he disagrees represents everything that Williams is trying to bring to light. And he doesn't even realize this as he interviews her. What a putz.

The hurly-burly of a battle

From The Rough Riders by Theodore Roosevelt. Page 77. Roosevelt on the fog of war.

One of the brave fellows was soon afterward shot in the face. Lieutenant Davis's first sergeant, Clarence Gould, killed a Spanish soldier with his revolver, just as the Spaniard was aiming at one of my Rough Riders. At about the same time I also shot one. I was with Henry Bardshar, running up at the double, and two Spaniards leaped from the trenches and fired at us, not ten yards away. As they turned to run I closed in and fired twice, missing the first and killing the second. My revolver was from the sunken battle-ship Maine, and had been given me by my brother-in-law, Captain W. S. Cowles, of the Navy. At the time I did not know of Gould's exploit, and supposed my feat to be unique; and although Gould had killed his Spaniard in the trenches, not very far from me, I never learned of it until weeks after. It is astonishing what a limited area of vision and experience one has in the hurly-burly of a battle.

Modernism versus regressive postmodernism

A worthwhile article exploring the creeping corruption of postmodernism. From Evergreen State and the Battle for Modernity by Michael Aaron.

Last week, tiny public liberal arts college Evergreen State in Olympia, Washington became the focus of national attention when progressive biology professor Bret Weinstein attracted the ire of a student lynch mob for refusing to leave campus due to being white. I won’t delve into the full timeline, which can be readily found elsewhere, but basically the university has celebrated a long standing tradition starting in the 70s, called Day of Absence, in which black students consensually left campus in order to leave “those left to reflect on the meaning of their community without these essential members.” On this particular occasion, they requested that whites leave instead, and when Weinstein wrote an email protesting, describing the event as “a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself,” chaos shortly ensued. Online videos surfaced displaying student activists menacing, cursing, and chanting at white professors, even demanding that president George Bridges keep his hands to his side. Currently, news reports indicate that vigilante groups are roaming the campus with bats, seeking out Weinstein supporters (for what reason, you can use your imagination).

Weinstein promptly went to the media to present his concerns, appearing on classical liberal podcasts such as the Rubin Report and Joe Rogan. Beyond the fact that this incident represents just another example in a long line of despicable student behavior, from Yale (outrage over Halloween costumes) to the University of Missouri protests to the Berkeley riots over invited speakers. The most interesting aspect of this saga, however, was revealed when Weinstein, on Rogan’s show provided the following analysis of the student’s motivations, “The thought process that led to this was postmodernism.” Weinstein clarified his position in greater detail on Rubin’s podcast:

The real issue is, in the 60s and 70s, a new type of scholarship emerged around critical theory, and at the moment critical race theory at the front, it has reorganized the fundamental nature of the academy, because it is built from an incompatible set of assumptions from the sciences and other disciplines… and because of that the two can’t really be in terribly close contact, they have to be compartmentalized away from each other in a normal university setting, but that also means science is not in a position to check critical race theory, so critical race theory has reached some conclusions that I believe are not valid and it is now in such as strong political position to dictate those terms to the sciences that we are seeing a kind of reversal of fortune.

It is this dichotomy between postmodern and modern that is the most important takeaway from this entire affair. In many ways, the old left/right dichotomy no longer applies. Instead we are faced with a three-part distinction between postmodern/modern/traditional.

[snip]

Indeed, it is between the modernists and postmodernists where the future of society is being fought. Modernists are those who believe in human progress within a classical Western tradition. They believe that the world can continuously be improved through science, technology, and rationality. Unlike traditionalists, they seek progress rather than reversal, but what they share in common is an interest in preserving the basic structures of Western society. Most modernists could be classified as centrists (either left or right-leaning), classical liberals and libertarians.

Postmodernists, on the other hand, eschew any notion of objectivity, perceiving knowledge as a construct of power differentials rather than anything that could possibly be mutually agreed upon. Informed by such thinkers as Foucault and Derrida, science therefore becomes an instrument of Western oppression; indeed, all discourse is a power struggle between oppressors and oppressed. In this scheme, there is no Western civilization to preserve—as the more powerful force in the world, it automatically takes on the role of oppressor and therefore any form of equity must consequently then involve the overthrow of Western “hegemony.” These folks form the current Far Left, including those who would be described as communists, socialists, anarchists, Antifa, as well as social justice warriors (SJWs). These are all very different groups, but they all share a postmodernist ethos.

All of this matters because, whether people are overtly aware of it or not, their beliefs and actions are implicitly guided by one of these three world-views. A person may have never attended an Ivy League gender studies class, but if they belong to and agree with the ideas of a typical urban, liberal, hipster milieu, they are very likely subscribing to a postmodernist ideology, even if they’ve never cracked open Lyotard.

[snip]

In the end, the Weinstein/Evergreen State affair poses a significant crossroads to modern society, extending well beyond the conflict occurring on campus. Evergreen State represents the natural culmination of postmodern thought—roving mobs attempting to silence dissenting thought merely based on race, informed by far left theories that weaponize a victim status drawn solely from immutable, innate traits. Unfortunately, I cannot place full blame on the students either, as they have been indoctrinated with these ideas on the very campus that is now serving as the petri dish for applied postmodernism.

It is no coincidence that, while society outside the walls of campus looks on with disbelief, administrators to this point have been siding with the students. For if they were to repudiate the actions of the students, they would also need to repudiate the ideology with which they have been brainwashing them. In other words, taking a stand against the students would require administrators and professors to re-evaluate the meaning and value of the entire raison d’etre of their adult professional careers. Holding on to madness is a way of forestalling dealing with the grief that comes with the realization that one’s higher purpose has been a fraud. I am not sure of the final outcome, as this kind of process is long, difficult, and very, very painful.