I Want a New Left

Race, Class, and Gender – Not!

I’ve often pointed out here and elsewhere that the group of topics that dominate our colleges isn’t the trio of race, class, and gender, but is instead the quartet of race, gender, sexual orientation, and the environment. Class is either never discussed, or else is talked about in a way that is years out of date (since lower-class people – whites, anyway – no longer see the left as their savior).

Now some college students who come from modest backgrounds are stressing the same thing, according to an article in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education. (Here, though it requires a subscription.) While they are talking about class in their own way, here are some of my own observations on class and our universities today:

• The job market for professors in the 1960s was wonderful, but things changed in the 1970s. The market got much tighter, and that meant that colleges and universities could afford to hire the “best,” meaning people who had gone to the “best” schools. Such people are usually rich, and so our schools are now populated by professors who seldom come from poor backgrounds. Their concern with class issues is either non-existent, or else not informed by actual experience.

• In addition, the 1960s turned people’s attention away from class to other things.

• The result is a lot of cluelessness about class in our colleges and universities. The biggest buzzword of our era, diversity, does not mean diversity in terms of class. People who are poor, especially white males, are not thought of as contributing any diversity to a campus.

• Moreover, leftism from the 1960s has meant that a large number of administrators have to be hired. These are the affirmative-action officers, the environmental overseers, and the diversity experts that now crowd our colleges and universities. While all these administrators are there to make the modern university more progressives, what leftists don’t say is that the money used to pay these people come from the pockets of the students, which in turn means that poor people have a harder time affording college than they did forty years ago.

• Professors and administrators are adamant that there be affirmative action for minorities and women, but are much less excited about affirmative action for poor people.

• Statistics telling students that college is worth it, based on salaries comparing those who went to college with those who didn’t, ignore the possibility that none of this matters to poor people since the statistics don’t compare future salaries among classes. That is, it could very well be that for poorer people there is only a slight advantage, since the jobs they are likely to get aren’t that much better than the jobs they would get without a college degree.

Several years ago I began urging professors who didn’t like the atmosphere on campus and who came from modest backgrounds to begin speaking up about class. One did and reported that the “usual suspects” touting the PC line got rather nervous about what he was saying. I wish he had kept it up.

Still, the fact that there are now students bringing up this topic is a welcome sign. I know that for conservatives, this is going to look like an internal fight on the left, but anything is better than allowing the current powers-that-be to rule unchallenged.

Crime and Rich People’s Leftism

The other day, some thugs broke into a house in Houston and, in the process of ransacking the place, locked the owner into a closet. The closet had guns, and the owner broke out and managed to shoot one of the thugs. (Here.) Sarah Hoyt talks about one of the comments on this story, to the effect that the thug – somehow, their number gets reduced to one in the commenter’s mind – might not have been armed and might have been a poor father who was desperate for food for his starving family; therefore, one ought not to shoot any person who invades one's house. (Here.) Ms. Hoyt gives an argument whose conclusion is that it’s not very likely that people who break into one’s home are like this, that they have other options. Most people would beg on the street, for example, instead of breaking into a home, and there are soup kitchens. In addition, one could, if one decided to steal, mug someone or do identity theft. Breaking into a home, after all, requires know-how, and the people who do it never raid the freezer; they are always stealing the goods, which means that they know a fence. In other words, they are very unlikely to be the mythical starving father. (Hoyt doesn’t mention what to me is the obvious, which is shoplifting some food at a grocery store.)

Anyway, what she said got me thinking. This idea from the commenter is part of what I’ve been calling Rich People’s Leftism (RPL). RPL is always soft on crime, and part of that is getting people to imagine that people who break into your house aren’t the bullying kind, but are really just like you and me, except that they are down on their luck. RPL has even managed to get some criminal-justice systems to arrest the homeowner who uses a gun on these bullies, even though they broke the law first and the homeowner was merely protecting himself (and perhaps his family as well). The larger idea of RPL is that criminals are in effect revolutionaries against our immoral financial system and are helping bring nearer the day when capitalism will be smashed.

What I am calling Poor People’s Leftism takes a different position: that criminals are generally thugs, that they generally go after the poor and not the rich, and that therefore the state needs to be hard on crime and soft on homeowners who retaliate, for the sake of protecting the poor.

Rich people seldom have their homes burgled since they can afford sophisticated protection systems or else homes in gated communities, so burglars prefer homes that are more easily accessible. What this means is that the rich people who formulated this nonsense are very unlikely to be victims of criminals themselves; it is the poor they are supposedly helping who are the victims. In addition, rich people tend to have wealth that is not easily stolen in a burglary since it is stashed away in banks and brokerages and real estate, while poor people’s assets are in their homes or apartments where it is easily stolen. In other words, not only are poor people more likely to be victims, they will lose more when they are victims than rich people would.

No matter what RPL thinks, being soft on crime doesn’t help the poor at all.

KFC and Egypt

See here for a photo of some Kentucky Fried Chicken being smuggled from Egypt to Gaza in a tunnel. When I was in Egypt, I was surprised at how big KFC was there, even bigger than McDonald’s. One of the two big soccer teams of Cairo, Zamalek, for awhile had the Colonel plastered on their jerseys (here, 11 seconds in). And there’s a video showing the Sphinx with the camera panning around 180 degrees to show a KFC nearby (here). I guess chickens are cheaper than cattle.

The New Pope Does Something Good

See here:

Pope Francis has proclaimed his first Roman Catholic saints, including hundreds of Italians who were beheaded for refusing to convert to Islam in the 15th century.

I generally pay little attention to what happens in the Catholic Church, but this one caught my eye. Go for it, Francis!

Advice to Outsiders on Tornadoes

Parts of Oklahoma City have been devastated by a large tornado, and lots of people are chiming in with stupid comments and advice. See here for coverage from Britain’s Daily Mail. First, let me point out to those who think people living in tornado alley ought to relocate that the state of Oklahoma is larger than England and Wales combined. Add in Texas, Kansas, and all the other states that are likely to get tornadoes, and you have an awfully large area for the comparatively small number of tornadoes that come through each year. The chances of even seeing a tornado are small, much less having one’s home damaged by one. This isn’t like living in an area that frequently floods; in such an area, it probably is a good idea to relocate. But as one of the commenters at the link points out, there are towns in tornado alley that have gone a hundred years without having a tornado.

As for those those who think that homes should be built better in this area, they should keep in mind that not much is going to withstand winds that get up over 200 mph. However, I will say that it seems that the school that was hit didn’t have an underground shelter. Why not?

Finally, despite the fact that Moore, OK, got hit a few years back, that doesn’t make it a tornado magnet. There is nothing that is a tornado magnet. However, it may be safer to be within the innermost part of a city since the heat is supposed to dissipate tornadoes before they get there (which may be the only good argument against suburban sprawl). Still, even that isn’t an ironclad rule. A tornado went through Minneapolis back in 1981, and the reason it didn’t dissipate was because of heavy rains the previous two nights that canceled the “heat island” effect.

Oh, by the way, regarding this quote from the link:

Several terrifying twisters were spotted on Saturday evening near Rozel, a sparsely populated area in central Kansas. They were also reported to the south in parts of Oklahoma and Iowa.

Iowa is further north than Kansas.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Our Grievances against the Muslims

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has an essay on the process of becoming a U.S. citizen and how it might be improved to detect people like the Tsarnaev brothers, one of whom (the younger) had become a citizen just a few months ago and the other of whom was in the process of becoming one. She points out that during the time she was going through this process, she was asked on two different occasions if she had ever been a member of the Communist Party; she asks that this be updated since there is not much of a threat of communism these days, while there is the very real threat from what she calls political Islam. And that is a good suggestion.

However, this is only part of the problem. Another problem is the rhetoric in our schools, which as far as I can tell constantly tells our students about the awful things we have done to Muslims and others, while mentioning none of the awful things Muslims have done to us. Here are just a few of the grievances we in the West have against Muslims, grievances that cannot be explained away as payback on the Muslims' part:

1. The Muslim conquest of Spain. What had Spaniards done to deserve this? Nor is it justified by the supposedly wonderful multiculturalism of Islamic Spain, since no Jew or Christian today would put up with the second-class citizenship that that entails. (That is, it wasn’t so wonderful.) Or if it was, then British imperialism in India was justified (as Ibn Warraq has in fact argued) since it gave benefits to Indians.

Notice I’m not mentioning the conquest of the Byzantines as a grievance for the simple reason that some apologists have claimed that Islamic imperialism was justified as getting back at those who were always trying to conquer them. While that includes the Byzantine empire, it doesn’t include Spain. Nor does it include France, which the Muslims also tried to conquer.

2. The enslaving of Europeans and Americans. Lots of the propagandists in our schools don’t even know about this, although it claimed a famous author, Miguel Cervantes, as a victim, as well as some American sailors from our earliest years as a country. Our first foreign war was devoted to freeing those slaves. (There were also black Africans who were enslaved, but I leave it to them to talk about that since it’s not our grievance.)

3. The attempt to conquer Vienna and the conquering of Hungary. Again, what had these people done to deserve this? Nothing, of course.

This is just a start. Let’s try and set the record straight so that others’ sins are mentioned, too. Then young Americans might realize that becoming an anti-American terrorist isn’t such an obvious choice.

Bangladesh Factories and the Left

Because of the tragedy at a factory in Bangladesh, we are hearing from the left that the owners of third-world factories need to raise wages for their workers and to make working conditions safer. In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (here, though it’s mostly behind a subscription wall), a woman named Rubana Huq who manages such a factory pointed out that raising wages would mean raising prices and that raising prices could mean that the first-world buyers would choose some other country in which to locate their factories.

I know what the left will say to this: “Why aren’t you and the owners willing to take less pay so that the workers could have higher pay?”

And what I say to the rich leftists is this: “The factory owners are already doing these workers a favor by hiring them. It is true that they don’t give them a living wage, but why don’t you make up the difference? Why don’t you pitch in and donate some money to them so that their wage will become a living wage?”

In other words, I don’t see why it’s the responsibility of the particular factory owners employing these workers – who perhaps could avoid hiring anyone by using nothing but machines – to do even more for them than they have already done, when there are other rich people who could be asked to step in and help. In still other words, the role of the rich leftist up to now has not been to give up any of their own money, but to harass rich conservatives into giving up money. It's time for that to change. It's time for the rich leftist to start giving up some money.

My Big-Sized Plan for Today – Thwarted

Today is graduation day at Kenyon College, and the speaker is none other than New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. I had planned to stand with the fringes of the crowd at the back with a giant cup of soda in my hand and be photographed holding it high with Mr. Bloomberg in the background. Alas, because of the threat of rain, the affair got moved indoors, where this was much less feasible.

By the way, I had mentioned my plan to several liberals, all of whom thought it was funny.

The Left and Character

Forty years ago, many of us young leftists assumed that the troubles in the Republican Party were endemic to the right and that we on the left were immune to such troubles, simply because being on the left meant that we were good. But in fact, such troubles come from having weak character, a problem that runs through the entire political spectrum. We learned this, or rather we ought to have learned this, during the presidency of Bill Clinton, but now the left is having to learn it again because of a raft of problems that come down to just one thing: weak character.

Hillary Clinton ought to have told the truth when she could have, and her liberal and leftist allies made a big mistake when they praised her a few weeks ago when she dismissed what had happened at Benghazi with words suggesting that it didn’t matter. But it does matter, as people are now finding out. What she also ought to have done at the time was to have offered her resignation. Knowing Obama, he would have refused it, and then she could truthfully say that she had done the honorable thing.

In addition to all the other scandals, there is also the long-running scandal of global warming. The more honest researchers are now admitting that there hasn’t been any warming in a decade and a half. The best thing for the left to have done, when global warming was first announced, was to have been cautious about it, to treat it as though it were cold fusion (that is, something that might be overturned at any time). It is hard to know how much credibility the left has lost by latching onto something where, despite the pronouncements of politicians, the science was not settled.

Our Initiation into 3-d Printing: Awesome!

My wife befuddled everyone by ordering a 3-d printer for her college. Why was an art history professor ordering such a thing? She pointed out that images are great for showing the students what paintings look like, but not so great for showing them what three dimensional objects (sculpture, cathedrals) look like.

Today, we assembled the printer and ran it for the first time on a pattern included on their card to be used as a test. It worked! It was some chain links, and although the manual said it would take 15 minutes, it actually took only 11. The links are connected to each other, but are loose exactly as “store-bought” chain links are. I thought it might be one solid mass whose links couldn’t move independently.

We used this printer.

Now comes the hard part: actually trying to get it to print what she wants it to print. This, as we understand it, means using a CAD program, which we know nothing about.