You can spend / waste a lot of time following some thread through the blogosphere. I actually followed this one backwards, but here it is presented forwards.
It starts with a long (9,500 words) extract from Fareed Zakaria’s new book, posted on Real Clear Politics here.
Sci-fi writer Jerry Pournelle passed some comments on the Zakaria piece here. Jerry notes that the article, while worthy and thought-provoking, is written from an overclass point of view, one in which the left-hand side of the beel curve basically does not exist, or else can, by some “fix” to our educational system, be brought over to the right-hand side. As preposterous as this sounds stated like that, it is an axiom of overclass thinking, and indeed of government policy-making. It is a fundmental premise of the No Child Left Behind Act. Everyone must go to law school! Ph.D.s for all!
“Hereditary Republican” blogger Matoko Kusanagi linked to Jerry’s critique, and also to one of his exchanges with geneticist Greg Cochran, where Jerry hits the same theme:
All of our elites are concerned only with the right hand side of the Bell Curve, and give no thought to what can or should happen to the left; they simply don’t care, and none of the political rhetoric indicates any understanding of the major problem facing the republic: how to integrate all of our citizens into the economy so that they are, and know they are, valuable members of the community. If we can’t do that, there is little hope for the republic, and the bread and circuses politics of Obama and the Clintons become fairly inevitable.
For that, Matoko got flamed as a closet eugenicist at Protein Wisdom. She flames right back, then wanders into some comments about Theocons having taken over the Republican Party, closing with: “I’m jumping ship.” To where, Matoko?
Just another day in the blogosphere.
[I was with her till the last bit. Political parties in open societies don’t do ideological purity, Matoko. Never have, never will.]