I Want a New Left

Are You Sure You’re a Libertarian?

On the cruise we took recently, we were accompanied by my sister and her family. Her husband is a philosophy professor, and he is a staunch libertarian. He has even written a book against the welfare state that was published by Cambridge University Press. Yet, I learned on this trip that his views on global warming and the Islamification of the West were standard-issue liberalism that could have come straight from Obama. Sheesh. I thought every libertarian was like Glenn Reynolds and Sarah Hoyt.

What If 2016...

Was the last year in which the word “racism” actually had a lot of power? I remember the way the right bandied about the word “communist,” and it was quite powerful when I was young. It has to be noted, though, that while at the beginning of the 1960s, it still had enormous power, by the end of that decade it had lost quite a bit of power, and on college campuses it had no power whatsoever.

The same trajectory may happen with the word “racist.” It has been overused in the extreme, and leftists keep pushing its boundaries to include perfectly innocuous behavior and speech. Maybe the moment its proponents overreached themselves was when it was declared that “all lives matter” was racist.

Now people have occasionally warned leftists about overusing the word “racist,” but they have paid no attention. They just kept using it because it was effective. But it wasn’t very effective against Donald Trump. Nor was it effective against his supporters, for despite the fact that lots of powerful people pointed out to poor whites that it would be racist for them to vote for Trump, they voted for him anyway. And there are rumblings of a revival of white supremacism and white nationalism. I myself have gotten tired of all the white bashing and all the demands to check one’s white privilege. Such demands seem to come from rich whites and get directed at poor whites, so it comes across as extremely callous and disgusting. They should be checking their class privilege instead of bashing the poor people whom they encounter for what is for them a theoretical privilege.

Anyway, if it’s true that 2016 was a big turning point, then the election of Donald Trump has far more consequences than I imagined. No wonder leftists are so upset. Heh. On the other hand, there have been lots of years in the past when we were supposedly seeing a giant turning point which, in retrospect, was just a little blip in the otherwise ordinary course of events.

Advice for Progressives

Actually, I have no advice. Back in 2004, I gave progressives plenty of advice, saying they needed to be more interested in class issues. I persuaded no one. I ran up against, for example, feminists who believed that not only did they deserve everything government was giving them, and not only did they in fact deserve even more, but also that they didn’t think poor white males deserved anything. Then there is the sci-fi author, John Scalzi (I think), who insisted that because the poor can become rich, while blacks cannot become white and women (without expensive surgery) can’t become men, there is an enormous difference between those who are poor, on the one hand, and those who are female or black on the other; therefore, the left should ignore class differences.

These are people who stole the left from the workers, and their attitudes have solidified to such an extent that the progressive movement will spend at least a decade turning their “ship of ideology” around. And what will turn it around, if it does get turned around, won’t be any of these people’s minds being changed, but rather people more to the center who change or young people coming into the party with fresh ideas or maybe even some of them just dying off.

The people whom I tried to persuade are not susceptible to accepting advice, so I won’t give it.

The Istanbul Attack: Right, Center, or Left?

I have been categorizing attacks by jihadists as to whether their targets are on the right or or the center or the left, and one of my arguments against the left’s Islamophilia has been that the jihadists are willing to attack leftist targets. Sometimes they attack targets on the right, sometimes they attack targets in the center, and sometimes they attack targets on the left. If, as leftists believe, the attacks are about “grievances,” then attacks on the left would never happen, since the “grievances” from the right vastly outweigh the “grievances” from the left. Why go after some cartoonists when there are so many right-wing targets to choose from?

I can’t tell whether the attack on the nightclub in Istanbul was an attack on the right, the center, or the left. It seems to have been an ordinary nightclub, so pending further information, I will categorize it as an attack on the center.

Anyway, any attack on the military or the police can be deemed an attack on the right, and ditto for any attack on symbols of capitalism. So, 9/11, with its attacks on symbols of capitalism as well as the Pentagon, was an attack on the right (though with a qualification noted below).

Also, it could be added that attacks on churches are attacks on Christianity, but I can’t think of any in the West that have been attacked. The attack on the Christmas markets in Berlin seems more of an attack on capitalism than on Christianity, or perhaps it’s just an attack on the center.

More obvious attacks on the center would include the bombings in London on 7/7 and the attack on the Spanish train in March of 2004. Both of these were said to have been motivated by grievances regarding military action, but instead of attacking obvious military targets, they chose ordinary people. Likewise, those on the hijacked planes of 9/11 were ordinary people, so that part of the attack was an attack on the center.

Attacks on the left include the murder of Theo van Gogh, the massacre of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, and the attack on the gay nightclub in Orlando.

More on the Cruise

This is a photo of, from left to right, my wife Sarah, me, and our niece Genevieve. We are all riding underwater scooters, called BOSS (Breathing Observation Submersible Scooter), which I talked about yesterday.

The strangest thing on cruise ships is art auctions. They are a big scam. I would never think to look for a valuable work of art on a cruise ship. If you are rich and want to buy some good art, you attend an auction at a place like Christie’s or you go to some gallery or an antiques store. If you have a good eye, you might find something valuable at a garage sale or an estate sale. But going on a cruise for the sake of buying art seems like a strange procedure. I can see why ships like art auctions. They already have shops where one can buy jewelry, so why not art as well? And auctioning off the art makes it more exciting so that for the customer it is part shopping and part entertainment.

Nevertheless, the whole thing is a scam. The purchaser doesn’t get to take home the work of art; instead, the outfit will ship it to you. That means you have no control over exactly what you have purchased. You think you are getting what you saw on display, and instead you are probably getting a copy. The object you saw will be used again on the next cruise. Moreover, the prices are inflated. The descriptions may be misleading, unless you read very carefully what it is that is being sold. My wife read their whole statement very carefully, and they are very upfront about what they are doing. They are generally selling copies of whatever they have on display and not the exact item you saw. But since most people don’t read their statement, they think they are getting something special.

Don't be fooled!

We’re Back!

Yes, we’re back from our cruise and most especially we are back to reliable Internet connections. The cruise ship started in Tampa and sailed to Honduras, Belize, and Costa Maya and Cozumel, Mexico. We saw a lot of Mayan ruins. We saw monkeys and a couple crocodiles and an iguana. The most adventurous thing we did was riding on underwater scooters in the water off Honduras. See this video to understand what I am talking about. We hoped to see lots of underwater creatures, but other than a school of fish and an occasional lone fish swimming by, we didn’t see anything. Plus, we were totally focused on simply controlling our scooters. There was a button to push to go forward, and there was a yoke with limited steering capabilities (it was difficult to get it to go straight ahead). If my scooter started ascending, I would push the yoke forward because, based on my flying lessons I was expecting the scooter to descend, but it didn’t work that way.

It’s good to be back, though I enjoyed the weather on the cruise more than the weather here in central Ohio. Anyway, I can now spend some time catching up on what has been happening in the world that I’ve missed.

LIght Blogging Alert

We are going on a cruise in a couple of days, and I can't guarantee I'll be doing any blogging till the new year, so Merry Christmas!

Berlin: The Attacks Keep Coming

In spite of the view of leftists that 9/11 was just an unimportant outlier that will be forgotten in fifty years, terrorist attacks keep happening. The latest was the attack in Berlin using a truck to ram people, a method that gun control would not have stopped, incidentally.

Now we can ask if this attack was aimed at the right, the center, or the left. Some terrorist attacks, such as any attack on the military, are definitely attacks on the right. Examples include the attack on the Pentagon on 9/11 and the attack on the USS Cole about a year earlier. Others are attacks on the center, such as the attack on the Boston Marathon. It was directed against ordinary people, and there seemed to be nothing about the marathon that was suggestive of either the right or the left. But some attacks are directed against the left, such as the attack on the Orlando gay nightclub or the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists.

My first inclination was to say that an attack on Christmas markets was an attack on the right. However, this essay by a leftist suggests otherwise. The writer talks of Berlin as wonderfully leftist and also rejects the idea that Christmas markets are Christian. So, it’s possible this was an attack on the left rather than the right, or maybe it was an attack on both.

Let me note that if Muslim terrorists were truly bothered by grievances of the sort that leftists impute to them, then they would focus on right-wing targets only and would ignore left-wing targets. After all, conservatives are much more hostile to Muslims than leftists are, plus they are the one who want to wage wars in the Middle East. Why, then, kill some cartoonists or gays at a nightclub when there are so many conservatives in the West one could target?

I Believe These People

The people in question are a retired electrician and his wife. The electrician had worked on Pablo Picasso’s place in the last years of his life, and according to the electrician, Picasso’s wife had given him some paintings after Picasso’s death in appreciation for the work he had done. The couple put them in their garage and ignored them until recently, when they decided to have them appraised. Picasso’s heirs heard about this and brought them to court to reclaim the artwork for the family, and the court ruled in the family’s favor. It ruled that the couple had illicitly procured these artworks and gave them a suspended sentence. See here.

First, it would be ridiculous to assume that this couple did this for gain since they did nothing with them for forty years. People steal artwork because (1) they want to resell it and make a lot of money, or (2) they actually like the artwork in question, so they intend to display it in their home where they can look at it as often as possible. This couple waited forty years before trying to resell them, and they didn’t display the works, either. Probably, then, the works were given to them out of gratitude, and the couple had no real interest in them. Also, it’s probable that after he retired, they may have been short on money, so they thought about selling off the artworks to help pay some expenses. Instead, the whole business blew up in their faces.

Second, let me point out that artwork is often given away, and there is no certificate given along with the object proving that the recipient has received the object in good faith. Here are two stories of this sort of thing.

The first was told by my father-in-law, Boris. Boris had a nasty war, as the saying goes. He was at Omaha Beach, but survived, and helped liberate Paris. While at a restaurant, a waitress asked him and his buddies if they wanted to go see an artist’s studio. No one else was interested, but Boris persuaded them all to take this excursion. They were brought to a second-story room where there was a little old man chain-smoking surrounded by a lot of what Boris thought were bad paintings. When the old man saw the soldiers, he asked if any had any cigarettes, and Boris, who didn’t smoke, gave him not just a cigarette or even a pack, but a whole carton. The artist was so overcome by this generosity that he offered Boris two paintings, which he declined. (He was more interested in impressing the waitress than anything else.) Later on he realized that the artist was Picasso.

Now suppose Boris had accepted those two paintings. I’m pretty sure that Picasso wasn’t going to give him a certificate stating he had the right to own those paintings. It was just a spur-of-the-moment gesture. Giving away paintings is what is sometimes done in the world of art, and it seems entirely plausible that the gift of Picasso’s artwork to the electrician and his wife was entirely legitimate.

Here is the second example. When my wife was a grad student at the University of Kansas, there was a moderately famous Chinese artist (Wan Qing Li) there since he had decided he wanted to be a scholar as well as an artist. See here. One day he asked my wife to do him a favor. He needed a fast translation into English of an essay he had written in Chinese because he was too busy to do it and it was scheduled for publication soon. He asked a Chinese student there to do a rough translation, and he asked my wife to polish it. I helped as well. He promised us a painting, which he gave us and which I am displaying below. Of course, we never got any certificate with it. It’s just our word against anyone else’s that the story I’ve told is what actually happened.

Some Short Items

Where is the global warming?

The last few days have been bitterly cold, and although today was supposed to be warm (about 48 degrees F or 9 degrees C), it stayed at about freezing for many hours. It was also raining, so we had freezing rain. What a bother! I would like to know when the globe will get warm enough so I don’t have to see any more snow.

One Ivy League Degree, One Vote

This essay by Nassim Taleb suggests that our elites like the idea of one Ivy-League degree, one vote. Yes, that seems about right. It does seem as though that is the way those people think. It’s strange that so many who are lower down on the intellectual spectrum put up with this, but they do. I’m talking about all the people who get their degrees from something other than an Ivy-League college. There are masses of such people, and yet many of them support the elites, who look down on them. See this essay, also. But why has this happened? Leftists didn't seem to be like this when I was younger. It seems that going back to the Sixties, colleges became the locus of a lot of leftist activity. But back then, professors came from a lot of different institutions. What changed was that the academic job market dried up, and colleges could afford to hire only those who had Ivy-League degrees. More and more, the spokesmen for the left were college professors (not labor leaders or ordinary teachers) who had gone to elite schools. And they looked down on anyone who wasn't part of their elite circle. Those leftists whom they scorned never quite noticed this change because it was so gradual.

Universities as Leftist Seminaries

Leftist seminaries is what Maverick Philosopher, in this essay, has suggested that we think of our colleges and universities. [Hat tip: Mark Spahn] Great idea. Especially when you find intellectual sludge like this:

Losing Steam After Marx and Freud: on entropy as the horizon of the community to come

Karyn Ball, University of Alberta

Abstract:

This essay undertakes a critique of recent trends in affect theory from the standpoint of the “human motor”: a trope that presupposes a thermodynamic psychophysiology distended between energy conservation and entropy. In the course of reanimating thermodynamic motifs in Marx’s labor power metabolics and Freud’s trauma energetics, the essay broaches entropics as a poetics of depletion that offsets affect theories promoting open-system metaphors. Open-system affect theory sometimes amalgamates emancipatory post-humanist gestures inherited from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari with neuroscientific terms. In the course of “liberating” affect from subject-oriented topoi, this “liberation-scientistic” admixture expropriates organic matter’s degeneration over time. An “entropical” perspective also challenges Antonio Negri’s Spinozaist affect conceived as a capacitating power that encounters obstacles but never limits. Both “liberation scientism” and “capacitation rhetoric” mimic capital’s abstraction in infinitely expanding its potential to extract surplus value from finitely embodied labor. With enervation and deterioration at its crux, entropics illuminates how people might feel individuated by their respective struggles to safeguard scarce energy and forestall “heat death” while navigating simultaneous demands. The question is whether or not open-system motifs in affect theory can effectively register the political force of this struggle with depletion and present or imminent debilitation as its common ground.

[here; and another hat tip to Mark Spahn]

By the way, I sent this to a physicist friend, who initially thought I had written it. Perish the thought!

At some point, I argued that people like this shouldn’t be called “postmodernists,” but rather “pre-Islamists.” They are engaged in attacking the West, while doing nothing to prevent ultraconservative theocrats from taking over. In fact, they often defend such people by complaining that anyone who resists them is an Islamophobe.

What Should We Call the Destruction of the Left in Iran?

Back in 1979, the left in Iran was destroyed by Muslims. As far as I know, this event does not have a name. I thought that something like the Holocaust and the Holodomor would do, like the Hologauchiste. (“Gauchiste” was the only word for “leftist” of various languages I investigated that sounded good in this context.) I was surprised to learn that the word “Holodomor” isn’t a bit related to the word “Holocaust,” even though they share the first four letters. “Holocaust” splits into “holo” and “caust,” while “Holodomor” splits into “holod” and “mor,” both of them Ukrainian words.

Another possibility is “Sinistralocaust.” I’m not thrilled with either of these, but I can’t think of anything else. But it would be nice to have a word to use when talking about it with leftists, most of whom seem ignorant of this event.