The elite are not a meritocracy [twitterage and quotage].

The elite in the West think they are a meritocracy: they are not. China, however, has always been one. Their brutal level of competition to get a university place does make for a useful export industry called tertiary education.

But only if you have universities in the top 250 in the world: the Chinese read rankings and take them seriously.

China is succeeding despite many problems (including authoritarian administration) because the Chinese are working very hard. The most important New York Times dispatch about China was the magazine item last week that reported on the cram schools that offer rural students a shot at admission to top universities. China now produces as many PhDs as the US, and twice as many STEM PhDs. Western commentators tend to dismiss Chinese as uncreative imitators, and there is some truth to the charge. China’s merciless meritocracy makes university admission entirely dependent on examination scores. It is a transparent, rules-based system that cannot be gamed. One can bribe a public official in China by covertly paying the college tuition for a child at an overseas university, but not at a university in China itself. Any transparent, rules-based system requires inflexible rules; inevitably, a great deal of effort is devoted to memorization. That is the secret of China’s social cohesion: not only have living standards soared, but even the rural kids portrayed in the Times cram school story have a chance to grab the brass ring. You can’t fund a new building at Peking University and get your kid accepted: it’s the raw exam score, and nothing else.

No matter: memorization also requires work. An economy doesn’t need a lot of creative people. It needs a few creative people and a great many people who are simply competent.

There are plenty of creative people in China, as it happens, for example Alibaba’s Jack Ma, the country’s wealthiest man, who has done more to transform commerce through the Web than anyone else in the world. And there are dozens of high-tech companies that are first in their league on a global basis. And they have an army of millions of highly competent people coming into the labor market.

They are being silly. We know they are being silly, and they know we know, and they can’t stand it. It isn’t quite how we repudiate the idea that the opposing party has any legitimacy at all. But we can’t stop giggling.

“Reductio ad absurdum” does not begin to characterize the utter silliness of liberals, whose governing dogma holds that everyone has a right to invent their own identity. God is dead and everything is permitted, Zarathustra warned; he should have added that everything is silly. When we abhor tradition, we become ridiculous, because we lack the qualifications to replace what generation upon generation of our ancestors built on a belief in revelation and centuries of trial and error. Conservatives know better. G.K. Chesterton said it well: “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”

The antics of the “small and arrogant oligarchy” that controls the temples of liberal orthodoxy have turned into comic material that Monty Python couldn’t have dreamed up a generation ago.

I started this yesterday: overnight the Charlie Hebdo attack occured, showing that at the end of this cycle, as it was two cycles ago (the Victorian imperial generations, not the long war) the elite were subject to terrorism. However, terrorism did not bring down the Imperial system: that took the charnel house of the Great War.

And the West is now angry.

That I’m shaken is of concern to no one; my emotions are not the point. The entire city is shaken. So much that even my cab driver — I had to catch one to get home; the streets were otherwise blocked off — didn’t even ask me to pay the fare. When I said I was a journalist, and in a rush to say what little I knew, his response was, “Forget about the money. Just hurry.”

The assailants are as yet at liberty. I hope they’ll be dead by the time you read this. But if not:. You want me too? Come get me. Because nothing short of killing me — and many more of my kind — will ever shut us up.

And if you don’t believe that now, you’ll believe it very soon. Because there are more of us willing to die for that freedom than those of you eager to take it from us. And soon you will find out that those of us willing to die for that freedom are also much better at killing than you.

So come and get me. Je suis Charlie.

It will take more than a hashtag to change. It will take breaking our post modern cone of silence. It will take talking the truth to each other. And if that reform occurs, these deaths are not in vain.

Though the voices of Charlie Hebdo are silent, others are not: and from conservative anti progressives like me to the left the message to such people is now simple. Adapt to us, or leave. We have had your demands for appeasement to the point of nausea. Go home, and take your noxious pedophilic religion with you.