The MOH award has no relation to their university, they were at the right place at the wrong time and did the right thing that someone recognized and nominated them for. Yes I am including every person associated with the club. They are a existential threat to the republic, deny all you want but they infest the SES in our government and have become a shadow and shadowy government.
I would include Georgetown in this group of Universities. Duke,, well most are shitbirds but they do produce good engineers. The Ivy League,,, not so much. I grew up next to Princeton, your definition of conservative needs calibrating.
https://www.socialmatter.net/2018/06/19/reactionary-case-dennis-rodman/
Be careful Jerry, these are words typed by one of the unthinking subverts...
Thank you for the clarification. And I especially thank you for the opinion piece. It distills down the essence of many thousands of people, all thrown into a neatly labeled box ready to be chained with a cannonball and thrown overboard. When the article speaks about specific people it, for the most part, makes sense to me. But when it steps back and swings wide to scoop up a huge group of people, making solid use of the word "they", based on where they went to school, it looses me completely.
This is for two reasons, the first of which is that I am not part of the various groups it says that I must be associated with, none of the reading list has ever fouled my eyesight and the political beliefs categorically ascribed to every single person in that box are antithetical to my own. He leaves no more wiggle room than you do. The second reason is that the premise of the article and its entire construction is reminiscent of my experience while enrolled class on political geography. It was my first real encounter with the far left and it was a bit jarring.
Whatever that author thinks I read, my childhood reading list was more along the lines of Jack London and Jack O'Connor. In college, outside of technical stuff, it was the classics. Since 2011 I have quoted them here on the Hide probably a thousand times. The record of what my influences are is pretty easy to ferret out. The author cannot reconcile this, but I will just a few paragraphs forward.
As for the references to hedonistic behavior, I have to admit that this is not unfamiliar. Coming from New Orleans this is saying something. Most of my friends went to big southern schools like LSU, MS State, Ole Miss, 'Bama, Florida, and the like. During breaks from school we would convene at a house in Bay St Louis MS to get hammered on cheap beer and share stories. I learned that hedonism was enjoyed on lots of campuses, and the world seemed a more interesting place for it. I cannot imagine either apologizing for or rationalizing this behavior.
As for my little campus, two of the biggest influences amongst my classmates were a pair of baseball players from TX. They discovered that I too was a hunter and loved muscle cars (and had actual experience building them). After a careful vetting process they invited me to their room to share Schaeffer beer from a freezer. The tops of the beer were frozen over and I quickly found out that you had to finish the beer before it got warm enough to taste because it tasted like shit. During one conversation we were bemoaning the fact that our guns had to be kept off campus, which made it sometimes difficult to make a morning hunt, stash the guns, and still make whatever campus event on time. More than once this meant showing up in camo and maybe a few duck feathers stuck to clothing. I'm not sure if this too, is pinko commie behavior. But I hold on to these fond memories.
That political geography class... in short, as we traced shifting borders across the globe the conversation often turned to the relative morality of victor and loser. There was plenty of healthy disagreement until we got to the United States. A very vocal part of the class suddenly lost their shit and called various events out for their supposed imperialistic and evil aims. There was the side of the class I was on that, at first, chose to just offer counter points. That went OK until someone on my side, I don't remember who, used the word "patriotism". The first to explode was a girl who, although a little chunky, I had always thought was pretty hot. This made what followed more disappointing than it otherwise would have been.
In spite of my dad's strict adherence to the democratic party, something that I observed to be an almost religious aspect of labor union dogma, I didn't give much thought to politics until I was forced to. When I found people screaming in my face about my faulty point of view I found convictions I didn't know I had flowing out of my mouth. I was a bit of a follower of William F Buckley Jr and Ronald Reagan. The overarching reason for this was not because what they had to say rung true to me (there were gobs of people who filled that role) but because they did so with great wit. When forced into a corner my natural inclination is to make a run at mockery rather than reaching for the verbal flame thrower. And that is what I did to the pretty girl with the wonderful ass who was busy clawing at her desk while telling me what a barbarian I was. I stood up and made fun of
everyone who spoke, including the thoughtful and mild mannered professor who, with his west TX drawl, tried to calm things down.
We were talking about war and my view was shaped by the elders in my family who had actually fought in wars. What lessons I took from them did not exactly agree with what an Army ROTC guy had to say about things like the Geneva convention. Suddenly my group was split and instead of one collective target, the left now had two to scream at, one even more deplorable than the original. This caused confusion in their ranks. The screaming did not abate until I went low, bringing forth the worst insults I could muster. Relatively clean examples of this can be found here on the Hide in a thread started by The German. Some of y'all took part in it. The professor finally called an end to the hostilities. I don't recall if I was more disappointed in letting Professor Johnson down by my actions or in knowing that my chances with that girl were ruined forever. Even socialists can have truly delicious thighs.
Jerry, the reason the author of that article must lump everyone he doesn't agree with into a neat little box is the same reason that socialist group couldn't assail more than one point of view and is the same reason Obama lumped small town residents across all of the Midwest into a little bucket of those who "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them...". They are both arrogant and lazy. Ideologues always are. The reasons why are irrelevant to me.
And so goes the weekly lineups of the damned and the saved, though it is sometimes hard to tell which is which. From Simone de Beauvoir we may find an anthropological truth
“
No group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over against itself. If three travelers chance to occupy the same compartment, that is enough to make vaguely hostile ‘Others’ out of all the rest of the passengers on the train.”
There is no escape from identity politics. Off the train or on campus, any grouping of human race, creed, color, nationality, bloodline, net worth, zip code, alma mater or hat size serves to distinguish a We from a They. Identity politics, it seems, comes not from just the self's need of adherence to a group (there's a Maslow joke in there somewhere) but from qualities ascribed by others.
I once worked for a firm that one day found it important to protect itself from vulgarities hidden in emails. "Intelligent" software was installed to protect sensitive sensibilities. One morning several financial analysts were complaining that their email was not working. That spread to all of finance, accounting, the legal group. By end of day much of the company could not even access the company website. Turns out that hidden in the signature lines of the analysts was the word
anal. This software followed that word as it spread its foul electronic dust from one computer to the next and neutered each offending machine as the cancer spread.
That is no dumber than what the author of that article did. Are we better than that, or do we just go with it and fuck it?
