Category Archives: culture

Assimilation

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…of one culture into another.  This is the problem being experienced by eastern Germany since reunification.

Twenty-seven years after Germany’s reunification, the country’s political institutions are still struggling to break down what Germans sometimes call “the Wall in the head,” according to the leader of Germany’s Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb).

“The domination of West Germans in the elites is still felt as cultural colonialism,” Thomas Krüger, the only former East German to head a government department not directly associated with East German affairs[.]

So much is true, but more importantly, it’s indicative of the long-term damage done by authoritarian governments.  The dominated culture develops an ingrained disdain for authority in general, which isn’t all bad for any people, but the individuals of that culture also have lost their initiative—their willingness, even their ability, to act on their distrust and to make their own decisions and then act on those decisions.  They’re still too used to being dominated.

It’s a generational damage, and it’ll take generations to overcome.  Eastern Germany has been free for only a bit over one generation after three or more generations of domination, first by the Nazis and then by the Soviets.

The Democratic National Committee

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On a different matter, this time, from information in Donna Brazile’s piece in Politico.  Brazile’s article is centered on the control Hillary Clinton and her 2016 campaign organization exercised over the DNC and how they got that control, and the article is worth reading in that light.

But there’s another matter that Brazile only mentions in support of her description of Clinton’s seizure but that wants a bit more emphasis.  First, the allegation:

Debbie [Wasserman Schultz] was not a good manager. She hadn’t been very interested in controlling the party—she let Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn do as it desired so she didn’t have to inform the party officers how bad the situation was.

Then an event, typical of the DNC’s financial machinations and illustrative of DNC leadership:

On the phone Gary [Gensler, Chief Financial Officer of Hillary’s campaign] told me the DNC had needed a $2 million loan, which the campaign had arranged.

“No! That can’t be true!” I [Brazile] said. “The party cannot take out a loan without the unanimous agreement of all of the officers.”

“Gary, how did they do this without me knowing?” I asked.

And

She [Wasserman Schultz] seemed to make decisions on her own and let us know at the last minute what she had decided….

And

I kept asking the party lawyers and the DNC staff to show me the agreements that the party had made for sharing the money they raised, but there was a lot of shuffling of feet and looking the other way.

The outcome:

…in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.

This arrangement was agreed a year before Clinton had “won” the Progressive-Democratic Party nomination.  In other words, the DNC remade itself into a satrap of the Clinton machine, and done so well in advance of serious campaigning.

The Party chair not being overly involved?  The management team quietly letting the chair make decisions in a vacuum, including those that required team input?  Her replacement being stonewalled by the Party’s—her—management team?  It boggles the credulity to think these grown, highly experienced and talented men and women atop the Party didn’t understand what they were doing, or were in any way forced into doing it.  No, they all knew what they were doing.  All along, the Party’s leadership was in the tank for Clinton and did not want an honest, balanced primary contest.

It’s rich, too, that all of this is decried by the woman who herself was so far into the tank for Clinton that she fed Clinton debate questions before primary debates.

This is the level of integrity we can expect out of the Progressive-Democratic Party and so of any of its nominees unless and until there is a complete turnover of all of the Party’s leadership on down into the middle management ranks.  Every single one of them.

YGTBSM

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Another in the annals of.

The Louisiana court system, all the way up to the State’s Supreme Court, has upheld police denial of a (black) defendant’s demand for a lawyer during a police interrogation.  At one point during the interrogation, the suspect said, quite clearly IMNSHO,

If y’all, this is how I feel, if y’all think I did it, I know that I didn’t do it so why don’t you just give me a lawyer dog ’cause this is not what’s up.

The Supreme Court said the suspect’s statement was too ambiguous to constitute a demand for a lawyer.  Justice Scott Chrichton, in concurring, actually wrote in all seriousness,

In my view, the defendant’s ambiguous and equivocal reference to a “lawyer dog” does not constitute an invocation of counsel that warrants termination of the interview….

Elie Mystal, in his article at the link, generously attributed the ruling to an inaccurate transcript—”lawyer dog” vice the defendant’s clearly stated “lawyer, dawg,” even as he, rightly, decried the blatant racism in denying the suspect his lawyer.  Over that “ambiguity.”

I’m not so inclined.  Even without the comma, “lawyer dog” is a pretty clear slang phrase identifying the object of the suspect’s call.

Dawg.

The Democratic National Committee

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Have I mentioned the racist bigotry of the Left and its Progressive-Democratic Party?  Here’s an example of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s openly direct sexist bigotry, via Power Line (click on the image to get a larger version).

The emphasized line (emphasis by Power Line)—the money line—says I personally would prefer that you not forward to cisgender straight white males, since they’re already in the majority.  The line gains yet more significance coming on the heels of the first paragraph of Madeleine Leader’s (DNC Data Services Manager) missive.  After saying the DNC needs to rebuild its Technology Team into a capability for “tackling all elections,” she emphasized [emphasis added]

What’s more important is that we are focused on hiring and maintaining a staff of diverse voices and life experiences….

The Progressive-Democratic Party’s sexism, masqueraded as virtue signaling, is more important than merit—except that they define merit on the basis of gender and racial diversity, not on actual capability.

This is the gang that would rule our nation.  What damage would they do in the name of a diversity that favors Party-chosen groups?

College Entrance Criteria

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In an op-ed nominally centered on the failure of affirmative action in college admissions, John Katzman (o Noodle CEO and Princeton Review and 2U founder) and Steve Cohen (co-author of Getting In! The Zinch Guide to College Admissions & Financial Aid in the Digital Age) wrote this.

But the work of admissions officers is more complicated than finding the highest test scores. …. They want to put together an incoming freshman class that has aspiring journalists for the school newspaper, great athletes for all the teams, debaters, musicians, actors, dancers, legacies, and development prospects.

No, the work of admissions officers isn’t more complicated than finding the highest test scores. The added “goals” are just artificial complexification for the purpose of justifying admissions officers’ jobs and high salaries. Even the the authors’ jibe of “finding the highest test scores” is a cynical distortion. The task for quality schools is to find the the most academically capable entering freshmen and the freshmen with the best academic fit for the school’s expertise.

The school’s admissions goals most assuredly are not to fill a quota for the school paper or marching band or the semi-pro sports team or whatever else makes the deans feel good.