Will China Become the Last Refuge of Western Culture?

head east, young man

Western classics alive and well in the east

BY DAVID P. GOLDMAN MAY 31, 2021 9:11 PM ET

No, this isn’t a joke.

Edward Luttwak, the distinguished Israeli-American strategist and public intellectual, tweeted the following this morning:

11 Chinese universities teach Greek and Latin. Another 20 seek staff to so as well. Back in the US, the Princeton CLASSICS department has just eliminated the Latin or Greek requirement “to address systemic racism”. Truly racist say I. Why not just end it ? Jobs await in 中国

The Chinese characters at the end mean “Middle Kingdom.”

Princeton created an uproar by ditching the requirement for classics majors to learn Greek or Latin. That shouldn’t be a surprise: In 2017 Harvard eliminated the music theory requirement for music majors. Music theory is to music what grammar and vocabulary are to language.

In China, meanwhile, up to 100 million children study piano, not counting orchestral instruments. Classical music thrives in Japan and South Korea as well as China, where aspiring youngsters and their parents have embraced the most characteristically Western art form. As Luttwak observes, it isn’t just music: Chinese universities are building up their classics departments.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing is China’s enormous interest in Western philosophy. Peking University is China’s Harvard, and its undergraduate philosophy syllabus puts every American university to shame. There are two courses on Aristotle, three on Plato, four on Kant and five on Hegel, three on Nietzsche, two on set theory, and twenty-two (no typo) on logic. Of course, there are also courses on Chinese philosophy, and a bunch on Marxism (my guess is that the Marx courses aren’t well attended).

China offers its undergraduates a deep dive into the Western mind–Greek, Latin, and Continental European (although there also are a couple of offerings on John Rawls). Why? China appreciates Western creativity and wants to learn the trick. China’s hierarchical society doesn’t foster creativity (that is, tolerate the eccentrics and oddballs who discover things like General Relativity) as well as the West, to be sure. But learning the philosophy and music of the West is the next best thing.

Under Mao Zedong, China had a “cultural revolution” that destroyed its universities and sent academics (and many others) into exile to “learn from the peasants” in remote villages). Now WE are having our own cultural revolution, as a Chinese acquaintance taunted me, complete with “struggle sessions” and “criticism and self-criticism” over supposed systemic racism.

… As we burn down our own culture, China may become the last refuge of classical philology, Western philosophy, and classical music.

Mind you, the classics professors in western universities brought this on themselves. See this article, with links, blaming Trump and, of course, white elitism for their demise and demanding that courses be watered down and “made relevant”.

I haven't seen an Anti-Asian Hate parade since March, when videos of the perpetrators began to appear

Yet another Asian slammed in the face by yet another black man

March 17, 2021 — so yesterday

Random thoughts on this gloomy Memorial Day

NYT: To increase the diversity of orchestras, eliminate blind auditions

U.S. orchestras switched to blind auditions in the 70s and 80s to rid the process of possible prejudice against women. In theory, women musicians’ lower numbers in orchestras were due, not to lesser merit, but because of gender discrimination. That was the theory, but it wasn’t borne out: blind auditions made no statistical difference.

Make of that you will, but at least orchestras were trying to hire on merit; the new demand is to eliminate merit as a consideration and hire by quota instead.

This really won’t matter shortly, because “they” are working to eliminate classical music entirely: it’s sexist, elitist, and misogynist, and must go.

Hip hop and rap concerts can easily replace symphonies and concerts, and they surely will. They’re certainly more popular among a certain set; witness this weekend’s “Urban Beach Week, a/k/a Black Beach Week” in Miami: 300,000 attendees, with only 2 shot dead and 20 wounded – that’s as “mostly peaceful” as a riot in Minneapolis. Concerts will still draw audiences, they’ll just be more diverse, and won’t include white oppressors. Good!

But they’re not stopping at classical music. Just this week, Princeton announced that it was dropping Latin and Greek requirements from its Classical Studies program “to combat racism”. And again, it will soon make no difference. The school accepted only 129 white male students into the class of 2021 — 14% of the 1,940 successful applicants. Surely there’s no need to study the evolution of Western thought over the past 2,500 years, and only a white racist would want to, so out it all goes. Our young tigers can instead study the greatest (and only) philosopher to come out of Africa, the Egyptian Vizier, Ptahhotep, 2500 B.C., who is famous for advising his peers on proper table manners and a book of maxims to guide social discourse. Does Princeton still have eating clubs? If so, perhaps the students can order up bibs and placemats printed with Ptahhotep’s etiquette tips; those, and an Ivy degree will be all that’s necessary for them to succeed in the new Babylon, Washington, D.C.

Everything that’s formed our culture is either under attack or already gone: religion; the family; the arts, including literature, music, painting, and sculpture; education; the military; free speech, free elections; history; the rule of law; the right to own property and make a living; the military; even the right to be left alone by officious, oppressive “betters”. Have I left anything out? If so, add your own.

It’s sad this Memorial Day to see that the values the people we honor today fought and died for to preserve are going, with barely a squawk from we who have so benefitted from their sacrifice.

Worse, and unlike Joni Mitchell’s lament, the mob won’t know what they had when it’s gone.

Air Force splinters into 8 separate groups (plus white wimmin and white cisgenders, so, 10) Furries by next Memorial Day

Missing Person Formation — Navy’s Blue Angels salute former service branch

The Air Force has determined that group unity is detrimental to a fully functional force, and is doing something about it.

Hence, the creation of all the following groups:

Black/African American Employment Strategy TeamDisability Action TeamHispanic Empowerment and Action TeamIndigenous Nations Equality TeamLGBTQ Initiative TeamPacific Islander/Asian American Community TeamWomen’s Initiatives Team

That’ll do it.

Circling Back: Crenshaw, Cotton, fight back against the entire military’s wokeness campaign

Gooder and harder

“we’ll just have to call my mom”

Uber drivers are missing in Boston

As the newly vaccinated masses venture out into the world again, they have found readily available Ubers and Lyfts to be a pre-pandemic memory. Local riders and drivers alike agree that current demand far outpaces supply…

Nowhere is the problem more acute than in Boston. The average wait time for an Uber in Boston this spring is 40 percent longer than in Philadelphia and 147 percent longer than in New York City, according to a company spokesman. Lyft did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

But not all cities are being impacted equally. New York City is far larger than the two I just mentioned and the average wait times there are one-third what’s being seen in Boston. So what’s the real explanation for the problem?

The Globe starts by pointing to the obvious and it’s a simple question of math. There just aren’t enough drivers logging on to the app to keep up with the number of rides being requested. Uber reports that in the first three months of this year, the average number of drivers logging in to work in the United States was down 37.5 percent from the same period in 2020. Lyft is doing even worse, with a 42.3% drop in available drivers.

That much should have been obvious, but the real mystery is why the drivers aren’t logging on. One factor is almost certainly the pandemic. Not everyone is ready to reemerge from isolation yet, or at least not until a lot more people are vaccinated. Older people are still the most at risk from the novel coronavirus and a large percentage of Uber’s drivers are retired people who are driving to supplement their retirement income. 

But there’s another factor at play here and it has more to do with government regulations than the plague. Boston is one of the cities that passed a law banning what’s known as “surge pricing” among gig-economy companies. That allows ride-share rates to be raised during high-demand hours. It’s a good system because it provides a greater incentive for drivers to log on, reducing wait times while allowing the drivers to earn more than they normally would.

But Boston outlawed that, so some of the drivers are asking why they should bother working during the worst traffic conditions if there’s nothing extra in it for them. One driver told the Globe that he’s been making one-third less during peak hours since the law went into effect. The City Council originally claimed that they were passing the law to protect consumers from “outrageous” prices during peak demand hours. But in reality, as we’ve seen in so many other cities run by Democrats, they were doing whatever they could get away with to damage Uber’s business model. This was done on behalf of the traditional taxi companies and their unions who provide plenty of donations to primarily Democratic political campaigns.

At least in Boston, that strategy seems to be paying off. If they can’t shut down Uber completely, they’ll settle for making it harder and harder for the drivers to earn a living that way. The same goes for all of the Uber-busting laws passed in California, and similar effects are already being seen there.

Liberals live in cities,liberals love and use Uber, Liberals vote in these people and cheer when city councills pass laws “in the name of the people” . So walk, you dumb bastards.

You can’t argue with the Professor

take a Deep breath

Instapundit Nails It:

“I THINK THIS IS PRETTY ROUTINE IN CONGRESS:”

Breathing Through the Rectum Saves Oxygen-Starved Mice and Pigs.

The Babylon Bee: Tomorrow's News Today

I actually glanced up at my browser to make sure I was on the Bee

Back to today's "Cover Up" theme

How the “fact-checkers” deceived the public about the possibility of virus outbreak from Wuhan lab.

It’s not an accident that most Americans are just starting to hear about the lab leak theory of COVID-19 origin as a potential legitimate source for the global pandemic’s outbreak. It’s because the theory was suppressed for more than a year by corporate media fact-checkers and their allies in Big Tech.

The pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post have been filled with articles in recent weeks about the newfound potential legitimacy of the lab-leak theory. The theory posits that COVID-19 was accidentally released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, potentially after being genetically engineered as a part of “gain-of-function” research.

Evidence for the lab-leak theory has been publicly available but censored from the public on social media.

When the theory first began to surface in early 2020, fact-checkers far and wide decried it as a conspiracy theory. In September 2020, PolitiFact labeled the lab leak theory as a “pants-on-fire” lie that was “inaccurate and ridiculous.” The premature fact-check has now been retracted in May.

Furthermore, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting called it a “lunatic conspiracy theory.”

Republicans like Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and former President Donald Trump were chastised for wondering aloud if the pandemic could have originated in the Wuhan lab. Now, some members of the media are admitting that the story got buried for political purposes. (RELATED: Report: Biden Admin Shut Down Trump-Era Probe Into Coronavirus Lab Leak Theory)

Now, these very same fact-checkers that incorrectly labeled the theory false — before an alternative explanation was remotely close to being available — are declaring that the lab-leak hypothesis is “suddenly credible.” That just isn’t true. Reports began surfacing almost immediately after the pandemic began about a potential lab leak, and enterprising journalists in various corners of the discourse were talking about the theory long before the Glenn Kesslers of the world came around.

[A]lthough it may be too late to overcome the 15-month head-start given to Chinese authorities, who reportedly covered their tracks and withheld evidence.

Various pieces exploring the possibility of the lab-leak, with scientific evidence and legitimate sourcing included, were knocked off the platform. The New York Post had a column censored from Facebook in early 2020 that said not to believe China’s official story. Other pieces were labeled as “missing context.”

The fact-checkers played a key role in this. Facebook cited them as an authority when determining what to censor. A column from The Washington Times was labeled as a “false conspiracy theory” by shoddy fact-checkers in early 2020 and was flagged by Facebook as a result.

It’s possible, I suppose, that the establishment censored and hid this story purely because they suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, but it’s more likely that they were, and still are, in cahoots with their friends, the CCP.

fellow traveller

How much does Kampallawalla Ding Dong hate America? This much.

fooled ya!

Vice President Kamala Harris says the private sector has a significant role to play in creating jobs … in Central America

Nice to know that she believes that the private sector can still help lift people from poverty before she wipes out capitalism and brings justice and light to the world through communism, but is encouraging the outsourcing of American jobs part of her role as Vice President of the United States?

In the New World Order, it is.

Here's an interesting website

Lawliberty.org, which runs thoughtful essays on — and you won’t believe this — law and liberty. Like this one, “What Did the Three-Fifths Clause Really Mean? In a normal world, the author’s even-handed discussion of the history of the provision and its effects, good and bad, would be an ideal subject for an American history class, high school or college, that was studying “critical race theory”.

But this is not an ideal world.

I discovered this site by accident when my iPhone anticipated my typing and directed me there, even though it wasn’t my intended destination. It turns out to be a part of the Liberty Fund Network (not to be confused by the LibertyfundNYC, which bails out felons) and has been around since 1960. It is credited with getting Ronald Reagan elected, and Al Gore is on record as denouncing it, which is as good a recommendation as I need. I don’t know how I’ve missed its existence all this time.