What I call the Lucky Jim Effect is based on Kingsley Amis's observation that there's no end to the way nice things are nicer than nasty things.
From the Daily Caller:
After a college speech, ‘I can usually tell what the average SAT scores are,’ says CoulterBy Alexa Williams 12:02 AM 06/08/2011
... “I can usually tell after a speech what the average SAT scores are, because contrary to my prejudice, at the good colleges they do not heckle, they do not throw food, they usually do not have stupid signs outside; they want to beat you in question and answer,” Coulter said.
... The attacks Coulter and other conservatives face on some college campuses are not generally physical, but include chants and disrespectful behavior at speeches. And it is at the lesser schools that these behaviors are generally exhibited, Coulter has realized. ...
“It is at the third-tier bush-league schools where you really need double body guard duty. Weirdly, the Jesuit schools – very bad, very, very, very, bad. ...
At the “good” colleges, they “wait for question and answer and they’re often very good questions; they’re actually listening to the speech, they’ve read what you’ve written.”
... In 2006, when Jim Gilchrist of the Minuteman Project spoke at Columbia University, students drove the speakers from the stage, the tables were turned over and mics grabbed from the speaker’s hands. “I think if they were Columbia students, they were probably affirmative action students.
“Because that really is unusual behavior at an Ivy League school or its equivalents. You can tell the SAT scores from how the kids behave in an audience and it’s the dumb ones who are the most susceptible to being jimmied up by other morons like Ward Churchill,” said Coulter.
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33 comments:
Jesuits are often left-wing fanatics, e.g. Ignacio Ellacuria.
In the novel FEAR AND TREMBLING--Amelie Nothomb--, the president of the company is so kind and gentle while his underlings are harsh and brutal.
Hirohito and top military brass were civil and well-mannered, but lower officers and the Japanese military were nasty brutes.
Kings and noblemen of Europe had good manners and spoke kindly but their henchmen could be mighty vicious.
In the Deep South, the gentry didn't act vulgar and use a lot of nwords. But they employed a lot of redneck thugs who did to keep the order.
In PATHS OF GLORY, the top brass act so civilized by ordering their men to do all the dirty work.
Liberal Jews work in fancy law firms but they fund organizations like NAACP and LA RAZA to cause havoc all over.
Bush and Obama act moderate and cool, but they order their military to drop bombs all over.
For the upper guys to keep their hands clean, lower-level guys have to sling the mud. Though kids at Harvard may be nicer, they not only tolerate but support the bullying tactics of the thug-left at lower colleges.
Most forms of niceness at the top are buffered by nastiness below. For the Corleones to act like legit businessmen at the top, they gotta employ a lot of murderous 'buffers'.
Why did Obama not soil his hands in politics as much as Blago did? Because a lot of people who pulled all sorts of dirty stunts and became very rich showered him with money so that he could maintain his highfaluting composure.
Niceness is, more often than not, phony. It is the 'speaking softly' at the top made possible by the 'big stick' below.
Yeah, the clever ones wait until they get into politics or the media before they get to work.
It's known as the 'Naomi Wolf/Cass Sunstein' method of leftist activism.
Yeah, but then the high IQ guys at the "good schools" graduate, going into areas such as law and politics where they say and do the stupidest of things. I wouldn't care if what they said or did had no effect on me, but that's not the case.
How many Podunk State College grads have ever f--ked up my society or the lives of my family and me?
I was at Reed in the mid-1960's when it had the second highest SAT's among liberal arts colleges and I can testify they greeted William Buckley with heckles, rallying behind a 3rd rate left-wing faculty member who engaged him in a debate. Saw a similar thing at Columbia when Dinesh D'Souza tried to speak.
Coulter (for whom I have no repect btw :)) is trying to game the Ivies and flatter the Texas A&M's by stating as a fact what she knows to be false. Lying has always been her modus operandi as far as I can tell.
The Ivies are not exactly filled with smart people. As Steve noted, the schools like Caltech and Harvey Mudd offer little AA because non-qualified Black and Hispanic students cannot simply change majors to say, Chicano Studies and make grades that way. So out of cognitive ability, those schools do score higher even if they don't have the social network of T. Coddington Vorhees VI, Mohammed-el Jihad, and Barack Obama Jr.
As for Obama dropping bombs on people, what do you expect? His magical-ness will simply calm the savage Muslim breast? Obama is playing zap-a-jihadi in Yemen and elsewhere so they don't blow up a lot of commuters or airliners on his watch. A compliant Media ignores Obama doing what they hated in GWB (zapping Jihadis left and right). Libya of course is just Obama being stupid, and Sarko desperately trying to prevent "cultural enrichment" of Camp of the Saints on his shores. Either go into Libya to shape events to your liking (a stable, pro-American dictator handing out oil drilling permits like candy) or avoid it entirely. But that's Obama, the "reverse Machiavelli."
Anon 336:
The kids at Harvard have zero control over what the kids at UC Irvine or Kennesaw State do, so it makes no sense to make them into the Harvard kids' henchmen.
I have my doubts about Ann Coulter's reliability as a witness here. But I also think the best way to understand this kind of protest is to understand how the Overton window works in different communities. The Overton window is basically the range of acceptable positions on a given issue. As you get further and further outside the window, you get more and more labeled as either crazy or evil. And this window is quite different in an Ivy League school than in a small town in the midwest.
If you mistreat someone for saying things outside the Overton window, people will object to the extent that the want to protect the right of people to say crazy or stupid or evil things, which means you'll get some support and some opposition. If you mistreat people for saying things inside the Overton window, you're thuggishly trying to cut off debate or win arguments by cheating, and you will get little support.
Much of what Charles Murray or Arthur Jensen have written and said is outside the Overton window on an Ivy League campus. So the people who dump water on them or heckle them or sound fire alarms aren't seen as suppressing debate so much as shouting down crazy or evil or stupid people.
"The kids at Harvard have zero control over what the kids at UC Irvine or Kennesaw State do, so it makes no sense to make them into the Harvard kids' henchmen."
You're missing the point. The ideas prevailing among dumber colleges originated among the elites in top colleges.
Also, kids going to Harvard become the news editors, top lawyers, Hollywood execs, music industry exec peddling rap music, and etc and they turn a blind eye to leftist and black violence while they throw a fit over 'white racist violence'.
Compare the coverage of Knoxville Massacre and Duke Lacrosse in the media. Who controls big media? People who graduated from top colleges or from dummy colleges, the kind I went to? We graddies of dumb colleges control nuttin.
No, Harvard kids don't call up dummy kids and tell them what to do, but Harvard kids control the brain centers in America that have a profound ripple effect on the mental attitudes of all Americans, even dummies at community colleges.
Students at second-rate universities behaving like childish buffoons? Stop the presses!
This isn't some Harvard plot to get kids at lower universities to do their dirty work.
The nationwide push to encourage EVERYONE to go to college, OR ELSE, has pushed massive numbers of really, really dumb people into college.
My experience attending a pretty good law school is that, as long as you are polite and thoughtful (funny helps too), you can generally say the most politically incorrect things and not get railroaded. Really intelligent people aren't willing to give up on PC, but, as with anything as retarded as that, it can be really annoying to anyone with half a brain to have to think that stuff all the time. They need to blow off steam and being their enabler can actually give you a certain amount of popularity. Of course, it is a bit of a balancing act.
" The Ivies are not exactly filled with smart people."
Noooo and the Jews don't run Hollywood anymore either.
Coutler doesn't criticize Israel. If she did, she would face the entire range of reactions at the good schools. She'd get physical attacks, rude boorish non-physical attacks, and complex questions.
whiskey said, "Obama is playing zap-a-jihadi in Yemen and elsewhere so they don't blow up a lot of commuters or airliners on his watch."
Whiskey, you are sounding too much like John McCain. We have to get them over there so we won't have to fight them over here. If you really believe this, why don't you push against muslim immigration and the diversity visa lotto?
Also, you seem to enjoy hanging around sites like isteve and mangan and attacking our positions against foreign intervention. Do you also hang around neocon blogs and attack their position on immigration? If not, why not?
"No, Harvard kids don't call up dummy kids and tell them what to do, but Harvard kids control the brain centers in America that have a profound ripple effect on the mental attitudes of all Americans, even dummies at community colleges."
What about this scenario: students of students of students of someone who went to an Ivy? The student turned teacher's interpretation combined with the comprehension level of a class at a 2nd rate university or community college. The professor may well have it right but fail to adapt the material to the background or ability level of students.
The original Ivy League prof's and students are too embarrassed to recognize the fact that not all students are as prepared for abstract reasoning as they were be this due to IQ or quality of previous schooling. I could be wrong though. Maybe it's a deliberate strategy for generating Marxist revolution.
Is any of Amis' other work as funny as Lucky Jim? It has some of the funniest writing I've ever read.
I guess some of the early Flashman stories also had some honest-to-goodness laugh-out-loud parts.
"Coulter (for whom I have no repect btw :)) is trying to game the Ivies and flatter the Texas A&M's by stating as a fact what she knows to be false. Lying has always been her modus operandi as far as I can tell."
I believe she said the exact opposite, LL. And I'm pretty certain what you call lying is often an attempt at generating counter memes. Whether you agree with her agenda vs whatever agenda the dems or environmentalists or whomever are putting forth is another matter. Overall you at least get presented with alternative points of view. Ideally we as a nation would winnow these viewpoints into workable, rational choices which hasn't happened yet as far as I can tell.
if you can win by arguing, you can win by shouting. That's smart.
gfs:
How does generating countermemes work? Does it look a lot like BSing, making stuff up, or stretching the truth?
I know Coulter only from reading a few of her columns, so I don't really know the answer. What I've read from her has left me unimpressed, but that's generally true of pundits. Even Thomas Sowell, whose books are quite deep and impressive, gets lazy and sloppy in his columns.
Reading various widely seen newspaper columnists, and then reading high quality blogs, is like moving from high school to college. The best blogs are so much higher quality, and the best ones have comments sections that keep the writer honest. This is one bit of the old MSM monopoly that is going away and won't be much missed. (Unlike paid reporters doing day to day information collection, or long investigative pieces.)
gfs:
I remember a speech by Noam Chomsky where he made a really good point about political talk show formats, which is also true of once a week newspaper columns. Basically, when you have a short column or three minutes of airtime to make your case, you almost cant make a case for anything far off what your audience expects to hear. In three or four minutes, you can't explain the difference between a distribution and people drawn from it, or the difference between knowing the middle and the tails of the distribution. If your audience mostly "knows" a bunch of stuff that ain't so, there's not enough time to show people theyve been misled on much of that stuff. What you can do is mostly rephrase existing arguments for conventional views with some slogans or examples thrown in.
I think this is one reason blogs can be so much better. All the posts are together, they can link to longer pieces and outside references. Over time, you can build up a coherent picture of the world, as Steve had done here, even when a lot of the underlying ideas are complicated and unfamiliar.
A very useful quote Steve. I will use this on a number of global warming alarmist sites, from Realclimate down since those in control must have very low SATs
I can think of no more painful situation parents can experience than paying tuition and fees to subsidize the ill prepared in the name of racial justice.
The gate keepers at Columbia University appear subscribe to this philosophy more than any other Ivy. I'm very thankful my children attend a UC school.
Conservatives are not using the Weiner scandal to prove their moral superiority. Republican politicians have had to quit or avoid running for reelection when faced with a sex scandal but democrat politicians caught in sex scandals refuse to resign. Republican constituents hold their elected representatives to a higher moral standard. The democrat party is the bearer of decadent values such as homosexual marriage. Consequently democrat party leaders and democrat pary constituents are unable to force the resignation of perverted and corrupt democrat politicians.
"Republican politicians have had to quit or avoid running for reelection when faced with a sex scandal but democrat politicians caught in sex scandals refuse to resign."
Republicans resign because they CHOOSE to resign. There is no law that says that a politician caught in a sex scandal must resign.
Republican constituents hold their elected representatives to a higher moral standard."
If that were the case, they wouldn't have elected half of those wierdoes.
The democrat party is the bearer of decadent values such as homosexual marriage.
Homosexual MARRIAGE. Many Republican lawmakers seem to have not problem with homosexuality outside of marriage.
"Consequently democrat party leaders and democrat pary constituents are unable to force the resignation of perverted and corrupt democrat politicians."
Let you in on a little secret here, Timbo:
practically all national politicians are corrupt or perverted. The Bush family is without a doubt the greatest criminal enterprise in the history of the US, and guess what, there are always things that get left out of the narrative when your overlords, otherwise known as "the media" choose it that way:
http://www.opednews.com/thoreau1103bush_rape_suicide.htm
There is a very good reason that men, and women are given millions of dollars by large corporations to run for these posts: The Eliteists have something on each and every one on them which they can use to take them down, should they so choose.
The idea that smart students are 'nice' and stupid ones 'nasty' doesn't really fit with my experience. IME students at elite universities tend to be much more politicised, eg the recent student anti-government demonstrations here in London seemed dominated by students from the Russell Group elite universities. Most of the Muslim terrorist students detected have been at top Universities, not lower-tier ones. And so on. Students at lower-tier Universities like mine seem more interested in getting a job than in changing the world. I do encounter the occasional 'lumpen intelligentsia' future Equalities Officer type who combines a mediocre IQ with far-left views, but that's a small minority* at least in my experience.
*Obviously many or most Muslim students have views inimical to Western Enlightenment Civilisation, death to Danish cartoonists and such, but that's not necessarily 'political', it's ingrained religious-cultural.
"How does generating countermemes work? Does it look a lot like BSing, making stuff up, or stretching the truth?
I know Coulter only from reading a few of her columns, so I don't really know the answer. What I've read from her has left me unimpressed, but that's generally true of pundits. Even Thomas Sowell, whose books are quite deep and impressive, gets lazy and sloppy in his columns."
Steve does a good job of creating counter-memes that actually get defended against. When a belief, idea or theory has been discredited, simply writing or saying it goes a long way. Coulter's strength is in appearing invincible. I don't watch her often but have never seen her rattled after making controversial assertions. I don't agree with some of it but her strategies are effective. She's quite intimidating.
As annoying as Steve can be, I do recognize what a task it is to present a worldview that has been suppressed because it isn't politically expedient.
Coulter's data set may be off. Kids who invite/listen to her are conservative. Some of them may put challenging questions but all are polite. The intelligent kids who are liberal probably attend someone else's presentation instead.
The hecklers and thugs may be morons of all political persuasions. Or rather, among morons there are no such persuasions, only factions of shouters playing the rebel. I can well picture a "Republican" moron shouting at Coulter for "racism" and because his hormones are up. I can well picture students with no serious political views raising hell for the hell of it.
>Liberal Jews work in fancy law firms but they fund organizations like NAACP and LA RAZA to cause havoc all over.<
Knew a sweet-acting psychologist who received public awards for her wonderful work with pre-school children...her best friend was a judge and they spoke by phone almost every day...the invariant topic: what calculated psych arguments to use to get various "youtful" murderers and rapists off.
If we call this corollary to the Lucky Jim rule the Coulter rule, then I'd like to add a corollary to the Coulter rule (I'll dub it the Deckin rule): The better the students (and, hence, the better the school), the more professor evaluations you'll find online. Good students care about their education and care who's delivering it. Thus they like who they like more and they dislike those they dislike more--and are confident and savvy enough to express those sentiments widely.
Stupid kids are too stupid to even formulate their dislike (to say nothing of like) coherently, nor do they care that much about their education.
So, if you want to skip all the US News ratings, just go to the numbers of evaluations on RateMyProfessor and work off of that.
Anyone (Inductivist?) who actually wants to work this out, all I ask is that you credit me with the original hypothesis.
Just for the record, I saw Ann Coulter speak at my Jesuit school and we behaved quite well.
Whiskey is wrong as usual. Average SAT scores at the Ivies are quite high, even if they aren't as high as some nerd-exclusive schools.
Truth, dissapointed you are giving any credibility to that op-ed news story. Here's a quote from it:
"To be sure, Schoedinger's accusations - which include being drugged and sexually assaulted numerous times by Bush and other men purporting to be FBI agents - are bizarre and hard for most people to believe. But her story fits in with those told by a growing number of people who say they were used as guinea pigs or whatever by members of the CIA or another U.S. agency who wanted to test out the latest mind-controlling drug or just have a strange form of release".
"Truth, dissapointed you are giving any credibility to that op-ed news story."
Well, TGGP, it's much easier to get away with a large lie than a small one, because the hoi-polloi work under the general assumption that "that's so ridiculous he has to be making it up." There is actually a long loooooooonnng litany of women accusing higher-up globalist types of rape and murder.
There is actually a small, yet fairly vocal minority of "people in the know" who say that our elites are basically a step above devil worshipers in their "proclvities" The constant arrests and outings we are seeing now are making me wonder how true it is.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGbTaDuRyPw&feature=related
"Niceness is, more often than not, phony. It is the 'speaking softly' at the top made possible by the 'big stick' below."
OK. But what you say above and, in fact, your entire comment, would apply to any cultural or political opinion that is common among various class levels; I'd think your point would be more relevant if could cite instances were there was documentable coordination and inciting among various classes within a given mode of dissent.
Otherwise, you're basically defining and providing examples of how political factions and coalitions form and manifest.
Harvard is little better than Columbia. However, my experience at Harvard indicates while they do not attempt to bludgeon speakers from the podium, they do engage in taking the Constitution into their own hands...something far worse than taking the law into one's own hands.
After two speaking appearances at Harvard, the Minuteman Project (especially me, personally) was arbitrarily banned by a pre-law, non-intellectual named Kyle De Beausset. His gripe: I engaged in hate speech and I am probably a liar.
The Harvard student body is no different than any other closed-minded, uneducated, delerious ranting street urchin...you know, typical witch-hunters.
Jim Gilchrist, Founder and President, The Minuteman Project
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