THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

NO, IT'S NOT DR. WHITAKER | 1999-07-10

In a radio interview a couple of weeks ago, I was referred to as a Ph.D. Southern Events referred to me as "Dr. Whitaker." For the record, it isn't true.

I am one of the legions of people who went through all the course work for the Ph.D., passed the comprehensive examinations for the doctorate, went off to teach in college, and never finished the degree. It is probably the best thing that ever happened to me.

It was not the best thing that ever happened to the University of Virginia, where I took all that graduate work. The reason it was bad for the University was not because I didn't get MY degree. It was because of the REASON I didn't get it.

Like about forty percent of the other people who do all the course work and go off to teach in college, I never finished my doctoral dissertation, or "thesis," as it is it often miscalled (a thesis is for a master's degree). The dissertation is a piece of original research or theory, usually a hundred pages or so long. All my graduate courses had been taken and my comprehensive exams had been passed with some to spare.

Even the hard part of my dissertation was over. I had presented my topic to the graduate seminar, where all the professors and graduate students heard my topic and cross-examined me on it. I had written a major part of it.

The last obstacle had been breached: I had gotten my first and second readers. These are the two graduate professors who are your sponsors. They accept your topic and sign off on the dissertation after it is finished. Both my readers were part of an independently funded section of the economics department called The Center for Public Choice.

While I was away teaching, a political science professor became Dean of Arts and Sciences. His first action as the new dean was to kick The Center for Public Choice out of the University of Virginia! So my dissertation was kaput. A better man might have gone back and started again. I was too lazy.

I was, in fact, notoriously lazy. In graduate school, we had almost no regular textbooks. Instead, each class was given a thick list of the latest academic articles to read for discussion in class. The year after I left the University of Virginia, one of the graduate professors was handing out his list of articles to read for the course, and some students complained about how long it was.

The professor said he knew of one student -- meaning me -- who had made it all the way through all the course work and comprehensive examinations without reading one single article in any of his courses. He told the class they were welcome to try not reading any articles, if they thought they could get away with it. As I say, I was not only lazy, I was famous for it. There was no way I was going to go back and start my dissertation over again.

But in the end, I cannot blame others for my failure to finish my degree. The simple fact is that I did not want it badly enough.

In any case, this situation cost the University of Virginia far more than it cost me. My second reader later won a Nobel Prize in Economics! If he had been at the University of Virginia at the time he won that Nobel Prize, it would have been one of those huge boosts for the school that universities dream about.

And, since The Center for Public Choice had its own grant money, the University would have had a Nobel Laureate without even having to pay his salary!

Public Choice finally won acceptance, but not because academia ever grew up enough to accept it. Public Choice became legitimate because those who DID get their PhDs in the field were enormous successes. One of them, James Miller, succeeded David Stockman as Director of OMB. Another was for many years editor of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Several Nobel Prizes were awarded in Public Choice, two of them to former professors of mine. One was kicked out of the University, as I said. Another had left earlier on his own. If he lived to see it, the dean who booted The Center for Public Choice out of the University of Virginia was humiliated.

I could say that this experience soured me on academia. Unfortunately, the record shows that I had never been sweet on it in the first place. The professors who got me my fellowship and brought me to the University of Virginia were openly contemptuous of regular academic opinion.

They probably felt that my main qualification for graduate work with them was the fact that I had always been down on the academic bureaucracy. I gave academia hell while I was in college.

Academia likes to think of itself as a collection of true intellectuals. But our society has allowed social science professors to create a completely inbred bureaucracy. In the real world, it would be astonishing if social scientists had turned out to be anything BUT an inbred bureaucracy.

If a physics professor has a theory that doesn't work, experiments will soon show him up. If engineering professors are allowed to push idiotic ideas, bridges fall down or planes crash. In the real sciences, there are practical limitations on silliness.

But in the social sciences, Political Correctness rules. Nothing a social scientist says has to work. His only job is to please other social scientists. In the social sciences, experts choose other experts, and the only thing anyone has to satisfy is fashionable opinion. The result is an inbred bureaucracy. How could it be anything else?

Social science professors are the only people who decide who will become a social science professor. There is no outside control, because nothing they propose ever has to WORK.

Every group of humans which is given money and power, and is subject to no outside control whatsoever, has always turned into a self-serving bureaucracy. Those who insist that social scientists are "intellectuals" have never explained why this same degeneration should not have occurred among them.

The big problem here is that the study of bureaucracy is part of the social sciences. A student of bureaucracy who was also an intellectual would ask, first of all, whether he himself had become a bureaucrat. But, precisely because it IS an inbred bureaucracy, the social science establishment will never ask that question.

I AM NOT YOUR AVERAGE BRAGGART | 2006-01-12

If you will look carefully at the articles below, you will find I am doing a lot more than mere bragging.

I am saying that I am so truly educated that people who make a point of "education" are so low that I am desperate to disassociate myself from them.

I am saying that I am so truly sophisticated that people who make a point of "sophisticated" are so low that I am desperate to disassociate myself from them.

And so forth.

I am saying that, in order for me to accept you as an intellectual equal, you have to share my complete contempt for what passed as respectability and education and sophistication.

This is one hell of requirement.

It would astonish a working man who has spent his entire life being put down by people with degrees that he has already passed all these tests after a few minutes of conversation with me.

Does this strike anybody as modesty?

IN MY OPINION anybody I encourage to comment should recognize that he has received a compliment that is unavilable anywhere else.

So now let me explain again the best compliments I ever received.

I had organized a joint march in Washington, DC against the education establishment of those protesting racial busing in South Boston and Louisville and other places and those protesting offensive textbooks in West Virginia. THOUSANDS of WORKING people had chartered buses AT THEIR OWN EXPENSE to come to Washington to join the march.

If you understood reality, which nobody but Ole Bob does, there has never been anything like it except the Million Man March.

The Million Man March was also done at the personal expense of the black men who participated in it. I will never quite forgive myself for having criticized it at the time. I of all people should have known what it meant to the people in it.

Compared to these phenomena, my march and the Million Man March, all the other Washington demonstration were nothing.

Bored college students or liberal blacks descending on Washington by the hundreds of thousands is no great surprise. They have plenty of time and plenty of money is provided for them.

In the two demonstrations I describe, every single person made a real personal sacrfice for something that was routine on campus, a political protest, but is outside the ken of people who work for a living.

Not to mention the time I got independent truck drivers to stop all the traffic in Washington, DC and a few other incidents.

I call myself a redneck from Pontiac, South Carolina, but my modesty is a bit limited.

I'm just so subtle you never notice it.

So I expect you to take my compliments very, very seriously.

How do the words, "They are sinking in a swamp and we are looking down on them from a tower" strike you as being subtle.

That is the reality.

As to what I gloried in as compliments, during the joint march against the education establishment described above, I happened to be walking up just as a couple of West Virginia coal miners who had paid their way to the march were talking to lady from South Boston.

The South Boston anti-busing movement was huge. So there was a lot of debate about who would speak for them at the press conference I had arranged.

As I walked up, nobody noticed me. One of the coal miners said, "Well, Whitaker speaks for us and he's not even a hick."

Coal miners are not the most trusting of people. For him to say offhand that it never occurred to him that anybody but Whitaker would speak for his crowd was a compliment I cannot replicate.

In top secret clearances, one of the incidents I have had to explain was when a Ku Klux Klan put thousands of dollars into my checking account about 1961.

That caused me a LOT of trouble, but I do remember one moment when I wished it hadn't happened.

Before Joe lynches me for too long an article, I'll end this one and explain the entire situation in another.

To wind up my point here, one should judge compliments by quality not quantity.

I am not free with them, and I hope some of you value the one I give you here.

DAVE ON BUGS AND POISE | 2008-06-28

There is a facet of poise (that Robert Whitaker excels at) that is of critical importance, and that is noticing what others do not.There are other facets of poise (excellent performance under pressure) that can be taught, but only with hard training supplemented by real world experience. This is the focus of America's elite combat teams such as the Navy Seals.

Also, any fire fighter who has not learned poise is going to end up getting burnt. And any police officer that has not learned poise is going to end up involved in unnecessary violence.

But the core of poise, the real essence of it, is noticing what others do not.

It is a special kind of capability that focuses on mental and visual acuity and it goes beyond racial politics and its effective response. Instead, it is almost a "marital art".

For what is Asia's absurd obsession with badges of status other than a form of ignorance masking a society in a low state of development and a people who lack poise?

And what is Political Correctness, if it is not that very same ignorance and low state of development?

No one ever tells our school children that being intelligent is a requirement, not an elective, and it is a requirement not of the academic credit granting authority, but of the larger nature surrounding us, a nature that punishes ignorance and stupidity without fail and without mercy.

Learning this special kind of poise is what BUGS is all about, and focusing on it will furnish white nationalism its competitive advantage.

Accordingly, it is what white nationalism should strive to develop and organize itself around.

-- Dave

This is a very acute observation.

Consider Dave's general term poise and look at disciplining oneself to use the Mantra. If you do not have poise, you will go chasing off into any subject the other side brings up that interests or might make you look good with all your knowledge of it.

If you can be lured off that way, you are like any person who can be conned. There's one born every minute.

Someone who is not a sucker has two questions about any product: "How much does it cost, and what can it do that I want done?"

And the most important word a person seeking poise can add:

PERIOD.

When you think of a person who has poise, you think of someone who has no "pressure of speech." A poised person is not uncomfortable insisting on a reply. If you keep insisting on keeping talking off the subject, he is perfectly comfortable answering your nothing with silence. The ONLY reply a poised person will give is to remind the bullshitter of what the question was.

Poise is an EXCELLENT term for our approach.

Thanks, Dave!

INDUSTRIAL THINKING | 2013-08-28

Comment to [email protected]

This could have been called "Porch Talk," but I don't want to get those discussions mixed up with whatever appears here.

Porch Talk was for you.   This is for me.

No one questions you when you say you want to take a walk.

So I am taking a talk.

What really makes this different is that I am not taking a talk, I'm WRITING.

You might say that writing began as an industry.  It was an especially learned skill, part of a profession or by the head of family.

"It is written" meant it was important.

In the Evil White Man's World, illiteracy, like starvation, is a thing of the past for anyone anywhere near normal.   You can still starve to death in hospital room, in fact, that is the only place anyone still does starve in the Evil White Man's world.   Illiteracy has gone the same way.

You can only starve in a hospital because that is where we put people whose bodies are failing to process the nourishment they need.    There are tens of billions of dollars waiting to be spent on anyone who is illiterate, so the case has to be pathological for one to be unable to read.

Mommy Professor is a lot like the medical profession until a couple of centuries ago.   His ridiculous theories not only make the case worse, all the official thinking goes into the modern version of bleeding and using astrology, so that Mommy Professor today, like his  medical counterparts in earlier days, is a brick wall against any constructive approach.

This has happened to all to all thinking.  With the general spread of literacy, writing, like Mommy Professor's Intellectualism, has become the property of of those who ordain each other as Intellectuals.

The spread of writing has lead to the restriction of writing to a bureaucracy, an industry.

Actually, set of different industries, each of which is largely  a product of personal contacts rather than any originality on the part of the professionals.

In fact if you want to write for a bureaucracy, originality is a death sentence.

OK. Bob's Meanderings is now a go and no longer needs to go on the main page.