THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

KNOW-HOW IS HARDER TO TEACH | 2007-05-16

Today a seminar is just another course. You read the stuff, you say something about it to prove you did, and then Mommy Professor tells you what you SHOULD have said about it at the end of the session, while you take notes.

At the end of the course, Mommy Professor tells you he is proud of what Independent Thought came out under his leadership, and then you take a test on what he told you to say about the readings.

In other words, a "seminar" in grad school is really just another course where your job is to swallow and regurgitate the Party Line.

This makes it hard to explain what a REAL seminar used to be and what makes this about the only real seminar still extant?

Back when there were real seminars, original thought, even eccentricity, was the hallmark of an "absent-minded professor." Today if you are absent minded you get the same treatment in academia that you do in any other bureaucracy. You dress according to code. The code sometimes specifies that you be "with it" by wearing a coat and tie with jeans or even a hippie outfit, but the lines are as clearly drawn as they are in the Marine Corps.

Go to a convention of professors and you will people who look exactly like those in any other bureaucracy. They produce a standardized product, like any other bureaucracy. Our seminar is a throwback.

A real seminar is entirely different from a course. Being "allowed to participate in," not "take," a seminar used to mark when you were on your way to being a thinker YOURSELF, not just someone taking notes and regurgitating what you heard. In other words a seminar was that transition period between when you were a student and you became a professor with orignial ideas. Few professors today could conduct a real seminar, and those who could keep it to themselves if they want tenure and promotion.

When I do this seminar, as I keep emphasizing, I am not just giving you knowledge. I do not have a Whitakerism where you just memorize my book like The Thoughts of Chairman Mao and chant them back.

A seminar doesn't teach you how to REACH my level. It teaches you how to START AT MY LEVEL. The course is successful when someone BUILDS on my thinking, as Al Parker did with his "One True Way man!" comment below.

In a world where real seminars no longer exist, it is a major job just to explain what one IS.

SIEGECRAFT: THE NEW IDEA CHAIN | nationalsalvation.net

About 1900 the British Admiralty refused to develop submarines with an ironic comment:

"The British Navy is not in the business of developing ships that sink."

Cute.

And COSTLY.

France got smashed by Germany in 1870, 1914 and 1940, each time in the exact same way. Today it is hard to believe how dumb the French were in each case. In each case the Germans invented a new way to move so fast they reached Paris before the French Army could.

In each case France was fighting the last war.

One of history's cruelest jokes was what happened when the French built the Ultimate, Updated World War One Trench and called it the Maginot Line.

Dave explains the new technology of the fight brought on by the Internet. Tim sums it up brilliantly: "BUGS has no currency in the past."

For decades I worked with the old idea chain. I could trace the Latest Thing from New England campuses to the Boston Globe to the New York Times to the Atlanta Journal. Then Europeans would pick up the Latest Thing and then the colonies, the English language press in Australia and South Africa, would pick it up.

It ran like a Mussolini train schedule, perfectly predictable and right on time. This was useful to me, because I knew what "new" ideas people would come up with out where I was ahead of time. But I did not realize until now how exactly like a train it was. It depended on enormous initial investment in an established track made up of iron rails.

As Dave points out, the old idea train was the ONLY means of transporting ideas. If you had told people in 1908 that autos and trucks and suchlike playthings would reduce the importance of railroads, you would be laughed at.

But at NBC and CBS they are not laughing.

We can worry about their Maginot Line or we can concentrate on developing our Blitzkrieg.

TEMPORAL PROVINCIALISM AGAIN | 2009-01-09

Everything here relates. I have written before about how everyone is shocked if I know some detail of the latest news everybody is talking about, but they are equally shocked if I remember the same detail a month later. By then, they've forgotten all about THAT Big News Story.

The same is true of history. It is grudgingly admitted that the coded language in Revelations might have something to do with Nero. Which is exactly like saying that a Christian document written in a world ruled by Stalin might have some reference to Uncle Joe.

But I have had people tell me in earnest in the 1960s that John was actually talking not about Nero, but about the Cuban Missile Crisis, while in 2001 he was referring to the Twin Towers.

In all but intent, this is the Big Lie technique. The big difference is that these people are lying to THEMSELVES. As I said before, most people can't remember what news they were obsessed with six months ago. You can tell about what year a history book was written, which means is not a good history. A historian can either get published or discuss real history.

It is the same with past, present, and future. I keep repeating that it matters not [at] all whether a futurologist predicts correctly. He is getting published NOW. He is an official futurologist because he is getting grants NOW. The more provincially NOW he is the better.

Which is why [some] of the most entertaining humor you will ever read consist[s] of the confident predictions of Experts. Historians are the same about yesterday. News commentators forget everything before they comment. They have to have something for TONIGHT, and everything in history and all in future has to be related to NOW.

You cannot understand history or the future if you do not keep Temporal Provincialism firmly in mind at all times. If you do, it gives you a huge understanding denied the "professionals."

Almost everybody who has known me for a while considers my predictions correct to the point of being creepy, even ones I had forgotten until they mentioned them. But the secret is simple: Look at history as if you were in THAT time. Look at the future not in terms of what might seem plausible now, but beyond the welter of Latest News.

THE PREAMBLE PARTY AND THE WHITE RACE | 2006-09-13

I cannot FIND my RECENT Blogs, though someone once found out for me where they were.

So I cannot give credit tot he commenter who gave me the site for The White People's Party.

But there is a section of their platform I wnt to steal outright for the Preamble Party:

"ENDANGERED SPECIES"

"The White Race qualifies under existing law to be placed on the endangered species list Per Sec 4 of the 1973 Endangered species act (Determining Endangered Species) paragraph D which states (D) "the inadequacy of existing regulatory mechanisms;" to protect the habitat, is cause for a species to be added to the list. Clearly, all relevant laws are working against the continued existence of Whites."

ALSO:

I would also add Bob's Mantra. Since so many of "We the People of the United States and our posterity" are white, and that Preamble was written to refer ONLY to whites and "Indians ... taxed," we have a special obligation to prevent genocide against my race.