All ye need to know about today's anti-society

You all know about the three wise monkeys, eh. See no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil. Walt has referred to them [NOT "referenced them"! Ed.] six times, including today's post.

May I recommend, in particular, "How can we be silent in the face of Islamization of our country?" WWW 15/4/12.  Right... over 13 years ago. As I look back over the warnings that I and countless others have written over the first quarter of the 21st century, I do wonder: Is anyone reading? Is anyone listening? Is anyone talking about the threats to our society?

I really do think, sometimes, that the answer is NO! And I ask myself why. Could it be because we don't have a society, any more? What we have, IMHO, is an anti-society which can be summed up by the fourth monkey: He sees nobody, hears nobody, and speaks to nobody. No wonder our polity is in the disgusting, fetid, toxic mess that it is.

Further reading: "Liberal academic surprised and saddened by truth about diversity" WWW 2/12/17.

Liberal academic surprised and saddened by truth about diversity

Dr Robert D. Putnam could well be called the archetypal liberal academic. He is a social scientist, and Professor of Public Policy at Harvard. Until recently his best-known work was Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000).

The good doctor is, by his own admission, pro-diversity, one of the "useful idiots" who believe that immigration is good for us because, in the words of Canuck Prime Minister Junior Trudeau, "diversity makes us strong". (Ann Coulter is one of many who disagrees. See "Diversity does NOT make us strong, sez Ann Coulter", WWW 28/11/17.) For years after writing Bowling Alone, Dr Putnam studying the effect of ethnic diversity on a community's well-being, striving to prove that he was right and that "nativists" like Ann Coulter (and Walt!) are wrong.

In 2006, Dr Putnam won the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science, given by the eponymous foundation at Sweden's Uppsala University. His lecture at the award ceremony was entitled E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century. In his lecture Lecturethe good doctor had to admit that he was wrong, after all, and that diversity makes us weak, not strong. Contrary to his expectation -- and desire! -- his study showed that the greater the ethnic diversity, the less people trusted their neighbours, their local leaders, and even the news.

People in diverse communities gave less to charity voted less, had fewer friends, were more unhappy, and were more likely to describe television as "my most important form of entertainment". Dr Putnam did not find that people in diverse communities trusted people of their own ethnicity more, and other races less. They didn't trust anyone! The difference in neighbourliness between an ethnically homogeneous town, such as Bismarck ND, and a diverse one, such as Los Angeles, he said, is "roughly the same as" the difference in a town with a 7% poverty rate compared with a 23% poverty rate.

Most of the data on which Dr Putnam relied were collected around the same time he was doing the research for Bowling Alone. But he didn't publish his study right away, because he didn't like the results. As a "liberal academic whose own values put him squarely in the pro-diversity camp," said the New York Times, he had hoped to find some other explanation. He reran the numbers, accounting for differences in crime rates, age, income, marital status, home ownership, education language, mobility, and every other factor he could think of. But no matter how may variables he took into account, he kept getting the same result. Diversity damages social cohesion.

Further reading: E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century, The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture by Dr Robert D. Putnam, in its entirety (38 pages), published by the Nordic Political Science Association, 2007.

Credit where credit is due: Although I knew of Dr Putnam and Bowling Alone, which I've read and recommend, I wouldn't have known of his later work had I not read about it in Ann Coulter's Adios America!, from which this post was adapted.

@POTUS draws negative (even racist!) comments. Surprised?

Walt has never done Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or any of the other anti-social media. (I call them that because it seems most of the people posting on FB etc are so busy posting that they have no time to socialize with anyone in person. See Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, by Robert D. Putnam (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). But I digress...)

When I heard, earlier this week, that the Prez -- Barack Hussein Obama hisself -- had his very own Twitter account, @POTUS, I was sorely tempted to sign up. A White House aide said @POTUS would "serve as a new way for President Obama to engage directly with the American people, with tweets coming exclusively from him."

Since Mr. 0 never returns my phone calls, I figured I could send him a message on Twitter. Not that he'd read it personally, of course, but it would make me feel better for having sent it. Seems like hundreds of thousands of other people had the same idea. The New York Times reports today that it took only a few minutes for Mr. Obama’s account to attract "racist, hate-filled posts and replies". Gee! Whoda thunk it?!

Posts addressed him (the Times continues) with racial slurs, called him a monkey and one had an image of the President’s neck in a noose. The posts reflected the racial hostility toward the country’s first black President that has long been expressed in stark terms on the Internet, where conspiracy theories thrive and prejudices find ready outlets. But the racist tweets are different because now that Mr. Obama has his own Twitter account, the slurs are addressed directly to him, for all to see.

Within minutes of Mr. Obama’s first, cheerful tweet -- "Hello, Twitter! It’s Barack. Really!" -- Twitter users lashed out in sometimes profanity-laced replies that included exhortations for the President to kill himself and worse. One person posted a doctored image of Mr. Obama’s iconic campaign poster, instead showing the President with his head in a noose, his eyes closed and his neck appearing broken as if he had been lynched.
Instead of the word “HOPE” in capital letters as it appeared on the campaign poster, the doctored image had the word “ROPE.”

Another Twitter user responded to the president with just two words: “Black monkey,” a comparison that was not uncommon in the posts addressed to Mr. Obama. “Get back in your cage monkey,” another person wrote.

What Walt (and the Times) finds surprising is that anyone finds this surprising. The liberals claims that the election of Mr. 0 proves that American society is now "post-racial". The Prez hisself says so. Political correctness may restrain politicians, the meeja and just others who don't want to be called racists from saying what they really think, but when you open a Twitter account that gives people a forum for freedom of speech, look out! Let's see how long @POTUS lasts.