As IF Times

It seems that people really don’t learn from history.  We’re not even referring to ancient history, ie: from more than 20 years ago, which to many people may count as ancient history.  Anyone who has watched Jay Leno on an episode of “Jay Walking” when he was still the host of the eponymous show ( which is itself ancient history)  will know just how vapid the average person is on knowledge of simple and widely known facts.

In large part, this explains the ease with which narratives become hard wired into a population via a zealous and coercive media.  Add some government money to the mix and you have a nation of zombies collectively jerking knees upon hearing the magic word, like a post hypnotic suggestion from a carnival hypnotist.

That people don’t learn from history is sad, but in most cases, many don’t even know it.  We’ve just come out of (hopefully) two full years of handwringing angst over a medical hysteria issue as overblown as teen acne, but on a much more grotesque scale.  We can never count the lives disrupted and lost, the businesses destroyed, the money spent and the social destruction that resulted from the narrative that was Covid.  The Orson Welle’s radio presentation of War Of The Worlds was recast in modern guise as a pandemic and it played worldwide with infinitely more impact than his fantasy play. At the peak of the hysteria, many malleable people were proud to announce their vaccine status as the new social badge of enlightenment.  Subsequent infection of the Covid flu didn’t diminish the faith in their virtue signaling.  Imagine how much worse it could have been if not for the 3 or 4 shots they received.  Phew.  Yet, they would make fun of people wearing garlic necklaces to ward off vampires.

The new subject of the virtue signaling mob is of course Russia.  On the heels of their invasion of the neighboring country of Ukraine, virtually every media outlet, western nation, corporation and Hollywood wanna be or has been are jumping on the cancel Russia narrative as if they were rushing for the last shrimp at the buffet table. In fact, I’d be willing to bet a year’s worth of shrimp consumption that the majority of these people are at least triple vaxxed and are looking to get to the head of the virtue signal line.  My previous post covered off the large multinational corporations distancing themselves from Russia, but since then, they’ve discovered new ways to ostracize anything Russian.

Russian artists and performers are being canceled from their engagements.  Russian tennis players have to publicly denounce Putin in order to play at Wimbledon.  A US based space fundraiser scrapped the name of Yuri Gagarin, the first man in history to go into space.  A figure of undeniable historic significance, deleted because he had the misfortune to be from the same nation as Putin…when Putin was probably still in short pants.  This is reminiscent of the childish means by which small children avoid bad things; they cover their eyes and hope it goes away.  This virtue signaling today on everything Russia is the same childish thing for the modern generation of immature knee jerkers.  They want to distance themselves in any way possible from anything Russia.  I guess a number of cocktails and at least one salad dressing will have to be re-named.   Perhaps they’ll cancel any and all achievements made by Russian personalities in history. The guy behind Alex Ovechkin just moved up in NHL rankings since Ovechkin may be ixnayed.  He’ll be the victim of re-written history.

Some may recall internment camps for all Japanese citizens during the last World war and the subsequent shame it brought to America in the aftermath.  The chest beating and sanctimonious virtue signaling at the time was supposed to set the barrier against this kind of stupidity ever happening again. Oh wait, that was ancient history.

We know that no one comes to these unfounded and often hysterical conclusions on their own without the enthusiastic prodding of popular media.  Unfortunately they are being led by the same people who marketed the last great disaster. By now, people should have figured out that the news business is about ratings and influence, not about news. Ask most people where either Russia or Ukraine is on a map and they’d be lucky to find the right continent. Even less likely is any real understanding of the dynamics and history of the conflict.

There’s that word again, history. For the benefit of the intellectually malleable, history is not just what happened yesterday.

Source: Prof lets students choose own grades for ‘stress reduction’

Image from Daily Mail

Now we’re getting to the root of all the vapidity that has infected society like cold sores after a party at the Playboy mansion.

The concept of education as a means of acquiring objective knowledge and enlightenment has given way to the new modern idea that it’s instead a journey of self awareness, perception and warm fuzzy feelings.   Sort of like intellectual yoga, but instead of the body being bent into unnatural shapes, it’s logic that comes out in pretzel form.

The classic joke goes that when you ask an accountant how much is the sum of 2 plus 2, a ‘good’ accountant would respond, “how much do you want it to be?”.  This idea seems to have been adopted as the model for much of today’s education as indicated in the attached link.  The notion that education is all about stress reduction and perfect rainbows is of course, personal choice.  With that being the case, the necessity of getting an education moves towards obsolescence since self actualization can be had by watching You Tube videos and segments of The View.  The problem is, these people wind up being able to vote; and when they vote in numbers, they impose their shrill and malleable fuzzy worldview upon others.

Unfortunately, the age at which people are the most impressionable are in their formative school years and during this time, the wackiest notions can be introduced as knowledge and this becomes hard wired into the students’ minds, possibly permanently.  Instead of confronting the realities of life in the search for knowledge through critical examination, a made up reality which is palatable to gentler sensibilities is instead pursued. Of course, this is a vicious cycle, because some of the newly enlightened graduates become teachers themselves; rinse and repeat.

We know instinctively that graduates from the schools of wishful thinking are likely to be only questionably competent at real life.  We can imagine the diagnoses offered by doctors educated in such a fashion.  “You are not ill sir, only bad people get ill.” Or  the work of engineers who want to build bridges spanning the Atlantic because, “it’s our right to cross the ocean by car.”  The absurdity of such examples is obvious, but the absurdity of the distortions of history are not.  There is no instant logic check on the absurdity of much of today’s worldviews as the re-writing of past events and the distortions of others attain truth status among the ‘educated’.  In fact, history is probably the most important of topics to be properly vetted because otherwise, as the saying goes, we are doomed to repeat it.

The events of the past few days in Charlottesville Virginia shows just how far down the road we are in that regard.  The entirety of the popular media has portrayed this incident as incitement by an odious racist element.  While this is notionally correct, the resulting conflagration came from bad actors on both sides of the issue.   It stretches credibility when the media characterizes the demonstrations as peaceful when attendees carried protest signs that looked remarkably like automatic weapons, bludgeons, bottles of urine, pepper spray and gas masks. Not exactly the tools of free speech.

The balkanization of society, especially by race, has been an easy target for political opportunists for a long time.  Objective studies of history will reveal this, including recent examples in Germany and China.  History tells us that statues and monuments are the beginning, not the end of cultural upheaval.  Books that aren’t in compliance with accepted thinking are the next target on the path to upending all established institutions.  When the mob supplants the rule of law, history tells us that the results are not good.  A legitimate education is supposed to move society away from those kinds of tragedies.  The kind of education that’s in vogue now only serves to produce more naïve stooges for the cultural mob.  If you listen to some of the Orwellian rhetoric coming from the product of today’s schools, you hear about immutable rights and freedoms…as long as it’s acceptable rights and freedoms.