I Want a New Left

Hurray for the U. of Texas!

According to this post, a book that was to be published by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas that contained stories from both Arab and Israeli women about their lives was threatened when one of the Arab authors said she was withdrawing her story after she learned that Israelis were going to be in it. She then persuaded a bunch of others to do the same. The University of Texas decided to cancel the project rather than to publish their essays anyway, have just the Israelis, or just the Arabs. As one of the commenters put it, these people are so filled with hate they’d rather engage in this nonsense than get their story published.

You Brought Your Bicycle Where?

This article in Britain’s Daily Mail tells of all the people scrambling to get to the top of Mount Everest recently, and apparently one of them had taken his bike along. It seems pretty loony, to say the least.

I have zero interest in mountain climbing, though I’ve gotten intrigued with reading about it. From what I’ve been able to gather, climbing Mt. Everest brings one into conditions so severe that it takes all of one’s resources to survive. That entails that no one who gets into trouble can reasonably expect anyone else to save them. And that further entails that people will die there fairly frequently. Moreover, it’s expensive to climb Everest, and so people who are doing it just this once have an incentive to keep going when weather conditions suggest they quit, which simply adds to the numbers of those killed. Too bad, but at least it’s their choice.

In the comments to the article, one woman says she is disgusted by people who refrain from rescuing someone because they want to get to the top, though if I recall correctly, the problem is more likely to occur when coming down and one is simply trying to get to a more reasonable elevation as fast as possible. Under those circumstances, it seems to me that no one can expect anyone else to help them.

More on Rochdale: Multiculturalism Rears Its Ugly Head Again

I reported on the Rochdale sex slavery case here, but now this report presents some of the whiney excuses from the multiculturalists:

Faith Matters, a pro-Muslim “inter-faith think tank” which established a helpline called Tell Mama to monitor “Islamophobia” when the Liverpool trial began in February, said the “Islamophobic hatred” prompted by the case has added to the “poison” against Muslims.

Fiyaz Mughal, a spokesman for Faith Matters, said: “This is dangerous for community relations. There’s lots of discussion about “Muslim paedos,” like saying the prophet Mohammed married a young girl. All of this disgusting talk is adding to the poison against Muslims.”

On the other hand, there’s this encouraging development:

Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, Britain’s most senior Muslim politician, told the London Evening Standard that there are “Pakistani men who believe that white girls are fair game. And we have to be prepared to say that. You can only start solving a problem if you acknowledge it first.”

Warsi said the color of the victims’ skin, as well as their vulnerability, helped to make them a target. She also said that some Pakistani men “see women as second class citizens and white women probably as third class citizens” and that these men “are to be spoken out against.”

Warsi called on British authorities to stop being squeamish about investigating allegations involving Muslims. “Cultural sensitivity should never be a bar to applying the law,” she said.

Then there is the incident of a Sikh woman being sexually assaulted by a Muslim man, which has led to protests by the Sikhs. See here and especially here. (Hat tip: Mark Spahn.) This is reminiscent of the riots in Birmingham in the fall of 2005, when a similar complaint was made by black immigrants from the Caribbean. At that time, there was little comment I could find from leftists, but of two leftists I found who did comment on it, both supported Muslims over blacks. One of them said something to the effect that Islamophobes were always accusing Muslims of rape, the implication being that the charges were seldom true.

The challenge for the multiculturalists remains: how do you protect Muslims at the same time as you try to protect your other favorite groups, namely women, gays, and secularists? Simply whining about Islamophobia isn’t enough. There has to be an acknowledgment, as Warsi says, that there is a problem and that it needs to be addressed. In fact, continuing to reach for the Islamophobia card may make the problem worse, at least from a leftist point of view. As more and more people see that severe problems aren’t being addressed by leftist politicians, or even centrist or near-right politicians, they turn to the far right.

Is this what the left wants? Of course not. Naturally, they don’t blame this on themselves and their own stubbornness, but on others.

Egypt’s Election and the Failure of Its Liberal Revolution

Over a year ago, there were high hopes about Egypt’s revolution. At least, there were high hopes in some naive quarters. Many of us thought it wouldn’t amount to much, given the realities of opinion in Egypt. After all, we saw what happened to liberal hopes in the Iranian revolution, and now we cynics have been proved right: Egypt faces either a return of another Mubarak or else something worse, an Islamist. Take your pick.

What should be done? As Mark Steyn points out in this column [here for the first page], “A century ago, the West exported its values,” but “today, we decline to export values.” I myself have mentioned this before when pointing out that the slow re-appearance of scarves on Egyptian women over the last few decades coincides with our abandonment of pushing our values on the Third World.

So what can be done about it? The liberals and leftists in Egypt need to get through to liberals and leftists here in the West and tell them to stop being such relativists and to start condemning people who would be beyond the pale if they lived here in the West. How likely is this to happen? Not very.

Beaming Power From Space? Maybe

This article mentions developments that would allow us to collect solar power in space and then beam it to earth via microwaves or lasers.

I first heard about beaming solar power from space about 1976. It was declared to be the solution to all our energy needs, and they made it seem like it was just a couple decades away. I’m still waiting for this development. One obvious problem not mentioned in the comments: meteors. Even if they’re little and cause just little holes, the damage they do will add up to a lot over time.

Short Items

Memorial Day

We went to our town’s Memorial Day parade this morning. Having grown up in a big city, it still astounds me when I go to these parades and notice that some of the people in the parade know the people I’m sitting near. Occasionally, I even know people in the parade. That would almost never happen to me in a big city. Plus, one of the floats was of WWII veterans. I told my mother that if she lived here, she could have been in the parade. (She served in the Navy in WWII.) That would never happen in Minneapolis, where she lives now.


Learning the Language Jesus Spoke

See here. The language is called Aramaic, though a dialect is called Syriac and another is called Assyrian. And see here for an alphabet song. Also, this video is a little documentary on an Aramaic-speaking village in Syria. At 3:56 they interview a Christian shepherd about his language, and at 4:58 they tell about how Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is his favorite movie, except that he declares the Aramaic in it to be broken compared with his and his fellow villagers' own fluent speech.


A New Type of Truther

There are some who still believe that former Representative Anthony Weiner was not guilty. See here:

A group of liberal bloggers believe that Anthony Weiner was blackmailed by Andrew Breitbart into a false confession, and are carrying out a lonely Twitter crusade to spread their theory — in spite of the fact that Weiner himself has never claimed this to be the case.

They claim that he “confessed” in order to make the whole incident go away to spare his family.

At this point, we need to invoke William Clifford’s saying that “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” Specifically, if Weiner was being blackmailed, that means he was vulnerable in some way, and if he was vulnerable in some way, then even if the specifics of Weinergate are wrong, he was hiding something big enough to force him to resign. End of story. That’s assuming, of course, that this is an accurate characterization of these people, and about that I can’t claim to know anything. It would make more sense if they were saying that he was somehow framed, but I leave it to others to investigate.

Lady Gaga Loses to the Islamists

A couple weeks ago, I posted about a woman who had written a book claiming that Indonesia, although Muslim, was a mild place, only to find that the Islamists there were all too happy to run her out of the country. In that post, I linked to this article, which predicted that Lady Gaga would run into trouble with an upcoming concert, and sure enough, she has run into trouble. See here.

Many of us have been warning people that the Muslim world has been getting more conservative in recent years, but of course they haven’t wanted to believe it.

Greedy Relatives and Taxing the Rich

Today, my wife and I heard the sad tale of a woman whose mother died a few months ago. What is sad, beyond the fact of her mother's death, is that this woman began cleaning out her mother’s house, only to be verbally abused by a niece who thought she had the right to go through all of her grandmother’s possessions first. It’s quite presumptuous for a granddaughter to claim more rights than a daughter, but the unintended consequence, as far as the niece is concerned, is that the woman has decided she will now cut off contact with the niece, will no longer give her gifts, and will cut her out of her will. Since the woman’s mother owned nothing special, while the woman in question has some moderately expensive antiques, this looks like a stupid move on the niece’s part.

This is like us when we talk about taxing the rich. We forget that people react to the things we do instead of passively accepting them. The niece seems to think she will come out ahead by acting in the way she has been acting, but she won’t, simply because her aunt isn’t going to accept her verbal abuse passively but will react to it. We think the rich will simply passively accept higher taxes, when in fact they usually don’t. They put money out of reach of the government, or in a worst-case scenario, they simply bring in less money. The result is that those expecting higher tax revenues are disappointed and then must either tax those who aren’t quite so rich, or else they must give up their dreams of taxing just the rich.

Comments on "The Chronicle of Education" and the Ideas of the Unabomber

Twenty years ago, I read an article in the newspaper about a ten-year-old girl who had been deaf all her life who was finally able to hear as a result of a cochlear implant, which I had never heard of before and which I believe was a new development. (See here, also.) It was a heartwarming story, and her descriptions of her new world, which she found to be noisier than she had previously thought, were quite interesting. Nearly three years ago I had heart surgery to repair a valve. When I was a child, such surgeries weren’t done, and without them, I probably would now be living the life of a semi-invalid. Instead, I’ve been able to run around and live my life pretty much as I was living before. A couple years ago, a friend was diagnosed with a brain tumor. It sounded extremely serious to me, but it was no big deal. The tumor was in such a position that a new technique using gamma rays could be used to kill the tumor. They didn’t even need to cut into him, and he was home in a few hours. Finally, today we have something else that we didn’t have when I was a child: motorized wheelchairs. Yes, now those who can’t walk can get around without a lot of trouble.

Who would wish to deny us all these new developments? The Unabomber, that’s who. He is anti-technology, and there are other people who agree with him. The latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education contains an essay about a philosophy professor, David Skrbina of the University of Michigan at Dearborn, who believes that while the Unabomber’s actions are beyond the pale, his ideas are valid and need to be considered independently of his actions. (See here.) The essay isn’t very specific about what the problem is with technology, other than saying that we give up our freedom because of it, it’s dehumanizing, and that it’s ruining the planet.

As far as I can tell – and right now I don’t think it’s worth the effort to delve into this in more depth – the sort of freedom that we give up by adopting technology is rather abstract. This site gives as an example restrictions on walking as a result of advancing technology. We used to be able to walk wherever we wanted, but now roads are dangerous, we are governed by stop lights that are really meant for cars, and a culture of cars means that we are almost forced to use cars if we want to survive. These and other restrictions on our freedom are supposed to be bad for us.

The goal of the Unabomber (Ted Kaczynski) is to get us to go back to a primitive lifestyle without any or much technology. But would such a lifestyle give us more freedom or make us happier? The Bible gives us a good look at people living without much technology, and there is nothing in it to suggest that our lives would be better without technology. People back then could easily be enslaved, were likely to die at a younger age, had very little understanding of the world around them, had few career choices open to them, didn’t have representative government, and so on.

How We Get the News These Days

According to this link, 61% of us get at least some of our news online, versus 54% for radio and only 50% for newspapers. Television isn’t mentioned, but I assume it probably still outranks online sources. This is of course bad news for newspapers, but then they haven’t tried to reach out to all people. Most of them have one group as their target: baby-boomer liberals. That is a large group, but the group of religious traditionalists is probably larger, yet they are mostly ignored. Moreover, the people most committed to newspapers are older, so the future of the newspaper is not good. That is, younger people don’t seem to be interested, and if their lack of interest continues as they grow older, newspapers will die.

One wonderful thing about the Internet is the wide variety of news sources one can tap from around the world, even though most people don’t seem to be too interested in doing this. I myself use a variety of news sources, including newspapers that I read on the Internet. I don’t think it’s wise to rely on any one source, simply because it almost certainly has blind spots. Plus, I think it’s important to get foreign news from foreigners because:

1. The amount of news is in effect infinite, and no domestic source can possibly cover everything that is happening overseas. There will always be foreign news that they won’t cover. This is true even of the NY Times. Important things might be happening in other countries that we need to know about which aren’t being covered.

2. I don’t trust the “gatekeepers.” The gatekeepers are the people in the media who give us our foreign news, and they choose what we will be given. I simply don’t trust them. They have an agenda, which is telling us that the rest of the world hates us, that the people who hate us are reasonably intelligent and not total wack-jobs, that we and we alone are doing awful things, and so on. Anyone who looks at foreign media, as well as foreign bloggers, over a long period of time will see that all of these are false.

3. Even if I did trust our gatekeepers, I would still be interested in getting a foreign slant on news. It’s worth it just to get a glimpse of how they understand the world and how they see us.

Let me add that one would think with all the multicultural rhetoric that is always being imposed on us, the multiculturalists would be urging us to look at foreign media, but they seldom do. It’s just one of many reasons why I think the multicultural movement is a farce.