RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/afghanistan-withdrawal-lost-harvard-rotc-military-training-ivy-league-elites-patriotism-11632152914?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Postmortems on Afghanistan are still focused on failures of the U.S. military and government, but before moving on, we should explore the more fundamental causes of this debacle.

Maybe because I have spent my life in education, I have always valued the observation, attributed to the Duke of Wellington, that “the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.” The qualities developed in those British schoolboys produced the soldiering that defeated Napoleon’s forces. Since armies are typically made up of young people who go straight from school to the battlefield, the traits and habits necessary for winning wars must be already ingrained in those we expect to fight them. Afghanistan was lost in the halls of Harvard.

Harvard was the first college to bring the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, or ROTC, to campus in 1916. ROTC was established by the U.S. National Defense Act, signed by President Woodrow Wilson. Its purpose, then as now, was to encourage college students to undergo military training as potential officers. Many campus plaques honor Harvard students who fought for their country, but ROTC came under attack in 1968 as part of opposition to the Vietnam War, the draft and the “military-industrial complex.” As the war became unpopular, antagonism toward the military on campus grew.

Both the draft and American involvement in Vietnam ended in 1973. One might have expected the voluntary ROTC to flourish, given that the U.S. still had plenty of enemies, some with dangerous weaponry and aims. Instead, rather than encourage outstanding students to undertake military training as part of their civic responsibility, faculty at Harvard and elsewhere took the lead in banishing ROTC from campus.

By the time I arrived at Harvard to teach in 1993, the ostensible justification for keeping ROTC off campus had shifted from objections to its educational function to rejection of the Clinton-era policy toward gay soldiers. Rather than legitimately opposing “don’t ask, don’t tell” through the political process, faculty used it as moral camouflage for their continuing war on military service.

The finer students saw through it. I fondly recall a student forum in 1999 where a self-described “gay libertarian” mocked the university’s policy, saying that the next pretext would be that recruits were not allowed freedom of speech.

But student conscience and conscientiousness were no match for opposition from the small number of faculty ideologues in the humanities and social sciences—the ones who determine a university’s political agenda because the rest of us are too indifferent or weak to stop them.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/society/2021/09/the-left-and-the-decline-of-the-moral-community/

With the emergence of permissive liberalism in the West during the 1960s – much encouraged by the Left – immoral and then amoral conduct became more and more socially acceptable. The abandonment of moral norms in favour of more licentious behaviour is a consequence of widespread public acceptance of the degeneration of society into amorality. This could not happen without the failure of influence of the idea of a moral community of like-minded people, people who see it as their role to perpetuate standards of good conduct that are in danger of being undermined or abandoned altogether. But now, fifty years after the Swinging Sixties, we can see where this has all led. The sexual revolution contributed to the weakening of family ties, as the norm of the extended family gave way to the nuclear family, which then gave way to the single-parent family.3

And now we have the transgender movement seeking to remove from parents any right to object to their child’s manipulation by political activists advocating irreversible life-changing interventions in the name of transgender ‘rights’, promoted and carried out by physicians and counsellors whose role as therapists is deliberately put to serving political ends.4 These activists have abrogated their professional obligation to do no harm, and their ethics have been distorted and eroded such that they now accommodate the doing of irreversible harm to vulnerable children, even against the objections of the parent(s). This is a new form of amorality and barbarism, and it betrays how corrupted the public discourse on moral probity has become.

At root this all comes down to an issue of fundamental moral values, principles, conscience, and character. These are not words you hear or read much in the mainstream media these days, at least not in any meaningful sense. The same applies in education, and in public life. The rhetoric is still occasionally used, but often it rings hollow, lacking meaningful content if the words are used carelessly, as if everyone should know what they mean and so further discussion is unnecessary. 

https://dianebederman.com/medically-assisted-suicide-and-abortion-and-the-sanctity-of-life/

My friend of 50 years died on Tuesday, August 17 at 8:15 AM. It wasn’t a surprise. We were told that she had requested that her life end. Medically assisted suicide. Death with dignity.

I am not against MAID, medically assisted suicide, or abortion, but I fear the slippery slope that we saw with abortion will come to assisted suicide. Almost 7,600 Canadians received medical assistance to end their lives last year, continuing a trend of steady annual increases in cases since the procedure was legalized in 2016.

If we lived in a world where we honoured the sanctity and dignity of all life, perhaps I would not be so fearful. But we don’t live there. Too many have attacked the Judeo/Christian ethic that underpins our way of life. We live in a world that separates essential people from the non-essential in order to permit the destruction of some lives over others. That not only allowed, but commanded, that some people do not have the right to earn a living, to be with loved ones who are dying (talk about death with dignity), to celebrate life. We allowed others to dictate whose businesses will survive and whose could not. We set such restrictions that we allowed opioid overdose to reach all-time highs because too many people lost hope and faith in living. No dignity in those deaths.

We, as a society have shown how easily we will give up the rights of others to protect our own. That is not honouring the sanctity of life.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/19/the-afghanistization-of-america/

The United States should be at its pinnacle of strength. It still produces more goods and services than any other nation—China included, which has a population over four times as large. Its fuel and food industries are globally preeminent, as are its graduate science, computer, engineering, medical, and technology university programs. Its constitution is the oldest of current free nations. And the U.S. military is by far the best funded in the world. And yet something has gone terribly wrong within America, from the southern border to Afghanistan. 

The inexplicable in Afghanistan—surrendering Bagram Air Base in the middle of the night, abandoning tens of billions of dollars of military equipment to the Taliban, and forsaking both trapped Americans and loyalist Afghans—has now become the new Biden model of inattention and incompetence. 

Or to put it another way, when we seek to implant our culture abroad, do we instead come to emulate what we are trying to change?

COVID Chaos

Take COVID-19. Joe Biden in 2020 (along with Kamala Harris) trashed Trump’s impending Operation Warp Speed vaccinations. Then, after inauguration, Biden falsely claimed no one had been vaccinated until his ascension (in fact, 1million a day were being vaccinated before he assumed office). Then again, Biden claimed ad nauseam that he didn’t believe in mandates to force the new and largely experimental vaccinations on the public. Then, once more, he promised that they were so effective and so many Americans had received vaccines that by July 4 the country would return to a virtual pre-COVID normality. 

Then came the delta variant and his self-created disaster in Afghanistan. 

To divert his attention away from the Afghan morass, Biden weirdly focused on an equally confused new presidential COVID-19 mandate, seeking to subject federal employees, soldiers, and employees of larger firms to mandatory vaccinations—right as the contagious delta variant seemed to be slowly tapering off, given the millions who have either been vaxxed, have developed natural immunity, or both.

Consider other paradoxes. American citizens must be vaccinated, but not the forecasted 2 million noncitizens expected to cross the southern border illegally into the United States over the current fiscal year. Soldiers who bravely helped more than 100,000 Afghan refugees escape must be vaccinated, but not the unvetted foreign nationals from a premodern country? 

Scientists now are convinced naturally acquired COVID-19 immunity from a previous infection likely provides longer and better protection than does any of the current vaccinations. 

Yet those who suffered COVID-19, and now have antibodies and other natural defenses, must likewise be vaccinated. That anomaly raises the obvious logical absurdities: will those with vaccinations—in reciprocal fashion—be forced to be exposed to the virus to obtain additional and superior natural immunity, given the Biden logic of the need for both acquired and vaccinated immunity? 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/believing-what-no-one-has-ever-believed-robert-curry/

It is not the sort of thing we expect from a Harvard professor. That makes it all the more amazing. True, he was standing at the edge of a kind of precipice. America’s long fall away from the way of thinking that had made America stretched out before him. In any event, he somehow managed to see far, far into America’s future.

Over a century ago, a Harvard professor of philosophy coined the phrase that describes our time. In his book Present Philosophical Tendencies (1912), Professor Ralph Barton Perry foresaw a time when people would too easily believe “what no one has ever believed before.”

Today, we are inundated with examples of people believing—or at least claiming to believe—what no one has ever believed before. There is the belief that a man who “identifies” as a woman must be allowed access to facilities which have always been reserved for women and girls. There is the belief that a man can have a “wife” who is a man. We are told we must stop designating a newborn as either male or female; a child must be allowed to discover which of the ever-increasing number of “genders” (67 when I last looked and surely more by now) it identifies with. The list of examples goes on and on. 

Perry knew that American thinkers in his time were in the process of abandoning common sense. By pondering that fact, he came to understand what abandoning common sense was going to do to America.

America has been called the common sense nation. American thinkers abandoning common sense was going to be a big deal because common sense had always been at the core of the American idea. In his book The Enlightenment in America, Professor Henry F. May wrote that before the American Revolution, “increasingly after it, and with growing volume through at least the first half of the nineteenth century, a specific kind of…thought acquired a massive influence in America.  This was the philosophy of common sense…” Allen Guelzo agrees: “Before the Civil War, every major [American] collegiate intellectual was a disciple” of the philosophy of common sense. According to Arthur Herman, the philosophy of common sense “was virtually the official creed of the American Republic.”