Thursday, January 14, 2010

Is Victor Davis Hanson the smartest man in America?

And I mean "smart", not "Smart", as he describes what's gone off at the core of leftist dogma. Some tidbits, to whet your appetite:
[Affirmative Action] requires the logic of the Old Confederacy to determine racial purity among the intermarried citizenry. Jet-black Punjabis get no preferences. Light-skinned Mexican-Americans of the fourth-generation claim privilege. Poor whites from Tulare don’t rank. The children of black dentists do. I see very little logic here.

...

But wait! If, in contrast, networks, influence-accumulation, and contacts are the objectives to ensure a child remains, or enters into, the elite class, then the [Ivy League University] investment in such undergraduate schools is very much worth it—but should be considered analogous to a debutante ball, the social register, or the Grand Tour.

...

Sorry—take away three things, and the Mideast “crisis” is relegated to Cypriote status. If there were no oil in the Arab Middle East; if there were no Islamic terrorists; and if there was no endemic global anti-Semitism, we would be as likely to have a “Mideast czar” as we would an “Ossetian Czar.”
As with all Hanson's articles, it's long. But you'll feel your IQ increasing as you read it.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Brilliant through and through, #3 in particular.

Jim

NotClauswitz said...

I loved reading that. The bit about the Chinese being discriminated against AGAIN - because they were successful is bitterly true.

TJP said...

Hmm, this is an awfully strange way of putting it:

"(b) The legislature....is inexperienced, captive to special interests, and increasingly incompetent."

That's like saying the air pressure outside my tire is steadily increasing relative to the pressure on the inside--where most folks would just say it has gone flat. Do we have any proof that the legislature is sliding toward incompetence? They're slowly becoming stupid? Have clinical psychiatrists looked into the issue?

I think it's a whole lot more clear to say that the responsibilities of the government are slowly growing and no human intellect is capable of competency in the face of those duties. And I think it's a point worth making, because simply voting for different people on a promise that they won't mismanage an unmanageable leviathan isn't going to change anything.


"The solution? Allow only legal immigration."

Presumably under the direction of a legislature that is increasingly incompetent. Isn't illegal immigration already illegal?

Come on, that doesn't make any sense.