I Want a New Left

The Real Systemic Racism

Ann Coulter tells it like it is here, with a column pointing out that the people who are discriminated against in college admissions are white people. Denying this and insisting that there is some systemic or structural or hidden racism against blacks is just to ignore this elephant in the room. It’s one of the crazy quirks of the elites of our era. Another is never even considering whether academia has class barriers. Whatever our elites think, I am pretty sure I ran up against such barriers.

Is the Muslim Threat Fading?

Until the recent terrorist attack in London (with another possible terrorist attack in The Hague), it may have seemed like the Muslim threat was fading. But now we are back where we started, with yet another obvious terrorist who was treated gently by the authorities who nevertheless went on to kill some people in an attack that was clearly preventable.

So, where do we stand with the Muslim threat? Daniel Pipes in a recent article has claimed that the Islamists are losing power and so are fading. Should we accept this? Let me consider his evidence and respond. He says the following:

Several factors account for this [that is, the fading of Islamism]: a fear of wild-eyed fanatics like Boko Haram, Shabaab, ISIS, and the Taliban; the dismal experience of Muslim peoples who have lived under Islamist rule (e.g., Egypt in 2012-13); and the fracturing of Islamists (e.g., in Syria) into competing and hostile factions. What might come after Islamism is unclear, but after a century of failure with it and other extremist ideologies (including fascism and communism), an era of anti-ideology might lie ahead.

Pipes is focused on the Middle East, but I will be talking about the West. But let me add one point to the list that Pipes gives, which is that clearly the Islamists have met their match with the Chinese. I always suspected that the Chinese just were not going to react like our pathetic elites when dealing with terrorists who want to take over the world, that they were just going to hammer them as hard as they could. And that is exactly what they have been doing. To what extent this has caused any Islamists to rethink their goals and philosophy is unclear.

Anyway, it seems to me that the Muslim threat comes from three sources, one of which (sadly) is our own elites, who persist in believing there is no problem from Muslims and who support the most extreme Muslims over the liberal Muslims. The second source is these various organizations of Islamists, who organize terrorist activities. They represent the threat of a top-down imposition of Islamic law. The third source is a bottom-up threat, that the sheer numbers of rather violent and unenlightened people that our elites have allowed into our realm will cause problems. So, even if the second source is fading, we still have the third, supplemented by the first.

And so we have been hearing these dreadful stories from Sweden of shootings and bombings and rapes, which our elites almost never wish to acknowledge. It’s true that these incidents may be restricted to certain parts of certain cities, and maybe that will always be the case, but why take a chance? Why spoil a reasonably pleasant culture by taking in people who will destroy it?

There is still every reason to fear that the West will be destroyed by Muslim immigrants.

What Is Your Image of a White Telling Another White To Check Their White Privilege?

My image is that it is generally a richer white telling a poorer white to check their white privilege, or perhaps whites of roughly equal wealth status, because a poorer white who wanted to get a richer white to check their privilege would talk about how privileged they were in terms of their wealth and not their race.

Accordingly, telling whites to check their privilege is often a way for richer whites to bash poorer whites. Moreover, this impulse comes from the left, something which I am certain that leftists from a century ago would be horrified by.

Trump Derangement Syndrome

I know a liberal man who secretly voted for Trump. When fellow liberals talk to him about Trump, he says he tells them he thinks Trump will win the next election. They are horrified by this. “No!” they will scream. It’s as though he announced that he supports Trump. “He’s so unpopular,” one of them said. Well, maybe in that person's bubble, but not in mine.

Are we Trump supporters deluded, or are they? In Erica Jong’s book Fear of Flying, an older German took her aside at some point and told her, “We Germans loved Hitler.” Is it the same with Trump supporters? Will we years from now be embarrassed to have supported such a loathsome individual? Well, the supposedly awful things he has done, such as separating children from parents at the border, was also done by Obama. (And the funny story of the week about that is the news outlets that wanted to report on the study that talked about how awful we treated these people, until they realized that the study was dated 2015, after which they all withdrew their reports. See here.) And the truly awful things right now are happening elsewhere. I’m still waiting for the massive demonstrations against the Chinese for their treatment of the Uighurs. I don’t think they are ever going to happen.

Getting back to the liberal man, he was also asked which candidate he supported, meaning which Democrat. He said he stumbled a bit before finally saying Warren. But what if he had said Tulsi Gabbard? Wouldn’t the reaction have been about the same as if he had said Trump?

More on Small Attendances

The topic of the last post reminds me that twenty years ago, when the Jane Austen madness was at its height, a movie was made of one of her novels, Mansfield Park. This should have been a huge hit, but because it had a postmodernist take on Austen, it went nowhere. I refused to go, while my wife said it might have been a good movie if it was a stand-alone story and not supposed to be a Jane Austen novel. What a waste of effort, though. We talked to an English professor at the time, who said it was a valid interpretation of the novel, but I have to wonder if she would have said that there were interpretations that were not valid. (That is, I assume she would have said that any interpretation was valid.) But whether it was valid or not, most Janeites didn’t care, and it is seldom talked about today.

Men Are Only Half the Population, So Why Blame Them for the Small Attendance?

I’m referring to Charlie’s Angels director Elizabeth Banks, who blamed American men for not wanting to see women star in action movies. See here. But why not blame the women who should have shown up but didn't? Why is it up to men to help a movie about women succeed? It should be attracting women primarily.

This may be similar to why there are so few fans at women’s soccer games (except for certain special occasions or venues). The organizers think men should be showing up, while I (and I presume others) think women should be showing up.

Soccer: Flamengo!

The team Flamengo from Rio de Janeiro won an important victory recently in the Copa Libertadores (or in Portuguese, the Taça Libertadores) against River Plate by 2-1. This is the annual club championship in South America, and the last time Flamengo won was in 1981, which is when I was in Brazil. I attended the first leg against Cobreloa from Chile, which Flamengo won, and after a game in Chile won by Cobreloa, the third leg was in neutral Montevideo, Uruguay. After Flamengo won, there were spontaneous parades forming in front of the hotel where I was staying. It was a fun atmosphere! So, congratulations, Flamengo, for another win.

Hey, Greta, What About This?

I believe that the left is making two big mistakes these days, one of which is believing in global warming, and the other of which is believing that the average Muslim is like them and not, as I believe, much more anti-leftist than the average Republican. This has led them to invite millions of Muslims into the West, and although I and many others warned them about the dire consequences that would ensue, they paid no attention. Sweden is the country that has admitted the most Muslims (per capita), and so it has the greatest problems, although the elites generally refuse to acknowledge this. Instead, they focus on climate change, and we in the rest of the world have this annoying Greta person from Sweden bothering us about how we are destroying her future.

Ok, Greta, take a look at this site. Nearly four years ago a Swedish city wanted to turn off the lights at night to celebrate Earth Hour, but they didn’t dare do so because of all the rapes that would result. Why don’t you talk about how the future of Sweden as a pleasant place has been destroyed by people like your parents, who have insisted that anyone who bashes Muslims is a racist? In twelve years we still won’t have global warming, but in twelve years, Sweden will be destroyed.

Global Warming and the Global Cooling of the 1970s

Back in the 1970s, we were warned that we were heading for an ice age. My reaction was that there wasn’t anything I could do about it, so that was the end of the matter for me. And that apparently was nearly everyone’s reaction, since there was never the huge hullabaloo about global cooling that there has been about global warming. Why was that? I don’t know, and I am not going to speculate.

All I want to do here is to ask the true believers in global warming what exactly they think went wrong with science back in the 1970s that scientists thought that global warming was global cooling. That is to say, I think they got the science right and that cooling was happening, but no true believer can accept this because it severely undercuts their message if they acknowledge that just a few decades ago there was cooling so severe that it led scientists to claim we were heading toward an ice age. No, the true believers have to insist that at worst, there was a slight lessening of the warming. But that still leaves the question for them: What did scientists back then get wrong?

Assuming there was no actual cooling, then I can think of only three possibilities for error, but let me start with the two obvious ones: they measured temperatures incorrectly or they somehow assembled and evaluated all that data incorrectly. Neither is particularly likely. We had been measuring temperatures for at least a century at that point, and there is no particular reason to think we suddenly started messing up. As for assembling all of the information, that is even less likely. After all, if the majority of your readings throughout the world indicate a rise in temperature, then you ought to notice that something is wrong if your final result says that cooling is happening. So, neither of these makes any sense.

Then there is the third possibility, which is even more unlikely: they didn’t rely on temperature readings at all but on other things (such as the movements of animals, the number of hurricanes, and so on). But surely if most temperature readings throughout the world suggest that temperatures are rising, then that ought to make one very leery of saying we were heading for an ice age.

Ok, so pending some satisfactory explanation from the true believers, I think it is reasonable to say that back in the 1970s, there was cooling so severe that scientists thought we were heading for an ice age. And that suggests that the claims about global warming are overblown, since they depend on there having been constant warming for the past few centuries.

Any true believer is welcome to provide an answer.

On Being a Male Teacher These Days

If you are male and a teacher, and you want to teach only males, that would be considered sexist. But if you teach females, then you are guilty of mansplaining. This doesn't leave much room for being a male teacher, but such a result seems typical of the left, which pushes for the disenfranchisement of huge swathes of the American people.