I Want a New Left

Taking a Break

I'm taking a break from blogging for the next few weeks while I get caught up on other things.

"The Loved One"

I can't believe that, despite having at one time sought out every off-beat film I could manage to see, I had never even heard of this film. It came out in 1965 and is quite zany and hilarious.

Addendum to My Last Post (on Elizabeth Warren)

I claimed in my last post that it was perfectly reasonable to believe that Warren would not have been chosen by Harvard, unless she had been able to use something beyond her ordinary credentials, which in this case was her alleged Indian background. Here is an account from a Harvard student of that era who agrees. There were loud demands at that time that Harvard law needed to hire a woman of color, she claims.

“There Is No Evidence for That”

In connection with Elizabeth Warren’s having finally taken a DNA test, someone has made this claim. Warren’s DNA shows in the best case scenario 1/64 Indian blood and in the worst just 1/1,024. She had claimed 1/32. Anyway, some of us are saying that she used her supposed Indian background to get a job at Harvard, and we’ve been told there is no evidence for that. If the demand is that we produce documents, then it’s true that we don’t have evidence for such a claim, but there is circumstantial evidence, simply given the way that Harvard and other elite schools work. They would not have hired her, given her scholarly background. Naturally, those who are skeptics won’t accept this, but anyone who knows anything about academia knows it’s true.

Now, contrast this situation with that of Christine Blasey Ford. She insisted that Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her way back when. She couldn’t be sure of the exact year nor of many other details, but she was sure it was Kavanaugh. (This seems eminently mockable, by the way.) There was no corroborating evidence from friends or anyone else, and the only piece of evidence she could bring to bolster her story was that she took a polygraph test that said she wasn’t lying. However, it was later revealed that (1) only two questions were asked, (2) they were not asked by a neutral party, and (3) she herself had coached a friend on how to deal with polygraph tests. Anyway, it is entirely possible that she has come to believe in something that never actually happened, so the polygraph test means nothing by itself.

What I’m getting at is that the evidence that Elizabeth Warren used her supposed status as an Indian to get hired at Harvard is stronger than the evidence that Christine Blasey Ford was sexually assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh.

The Latest Academic Scandal

This has been written about in so many places that probably every reader knows all about it already. But see here if you haven’t yet heard (hat tip: Charles Steele). Three scholars wrote fake articles in the postmodernist mode and submitted them to journals. A number were accepted and published, while others were accepted and have publication pending. One of them was a re-write of a section of Hitler’s Mein Kampf using the language of intersectionality, while another talked about rape in dog parks. Only a few were rejected.

This recalls the trick that the physicist Alan Sokol played on the journal Social Text back in the 1990s, which did nothing to deter the postmodernists, who just kept churning out their bilge. We’ll see if this latest scandal changes anything. But some comments are in order:

• Is it an ideological or philosophical hazard of postmodernism that it can easily be faked? Once you call into question objective standards, anything goes, and that includes the fake articles of Sokol and the more recent fakers. By contrast, analytic philosophy has no fake articles (that I know of). Rigor is extremely important in analytic philosophy, so a fake would either have to be rigorous itself, in which case it would count as a genuine contribution despite what its author intended, or it would have to fake rigor, in which case it is strongly likely it would be rejected. And even if it were to be published, the average reader of the journal would complain immediately about the lack of rigor. So, fake articles are simply much more likely under the postmodernists than under analytic philosophers.

• It is also a likely scenario, given that so many professors lean left these days. With such a situation, important critical comments disappear, either because conservatives want to stay hidden or because those on the left who might make them don’t want to make waves.

• Someone somewhere pointed out that only a certain type of journal was susceptible to these fakes and that mainstream sociology journals were not among them. This may be true, but the social sciences have been having a general problem with reproducibility these days. As far as I know, that includes even the mainstream sociology journals.

• The lack of a truly critical atmosphere on the left means that, as I said above, anything goes. Anything that someone on the left says that seems reasonable to others of the same ilk immediately gets published and becomes (as far as they are concerned) part of our common wisdom. The rest of us are left saying, “Wait a minute.” The word “racist” is part of this process. For me and for many others, it means believing that people of a given race are inferior to those of another race, which entails that anyone could be racist. However, leftists insist that it means something like that but that power relations are also included, so that blacks could never count as racist under their use of the term since blacks lack power.

But we’ve just recently seen what “anything goes” in academia leads to when others pick up on it. The idea that women must be believed is very popular in academia, while not very popular elsewhere. Lots of critical questions need to be asked and answered before the rest of us accept this demand (such as whom do we believe if, as occasionally happens, a woman sexually assaults another woman). However, the atmosphere among feminists and their allies is such that to raise any critical questions is immediately to make one, in their eyes, a rape apologist. So, critical questioning immediately fades away, until we get a spectacle such as the one we had last week, in which the attempt to force that standard on the entire country was blocked.

• This scandal makes me personally very angry. I sent out articles dozens of times over the years, but all I got were rejections. These were good solid articles that I had shown to friends and colleagues and in one case, had vetted the basic idea with one of the biggest names in the field. Yet they were all rejected, and I couldn’t help notice that as I got better and better, the rejections got more and more pathetic. I finally got one published through the “back door” (by winning a contest). Meanwhile, these people can write total garbage and get it published very easily. This is one of many reasons why I have no use for the SJWs. They really aren’t looking at all instances of social injustice in the world. It’s also why I don’t trust peer review and so am skeptical of climate science’s claims about global warming.

I could probably say more about these fake articles, but we are heading out of town later today, so this will have to do.

An Insightful Comment

From this post by Steve Sailer from a commenter named Almost Missouri:

There’s also been a strange case of “legacy creep” on the Supreme Court as it has become the left’s de facto legislature. First there was the Felix Frankfurter memorial Jewish seat on the court. Then there came the Thurgood Marshall memorial black seat on the court. I suppose Sotomayer’s judgeship will turn out to be the memorial Hispanic seat. But now there also is a kind of baked in assumption that the left is entitled to at least four hereditary seats and a swing vote on the court.

When Lion of the Right Scalia died, objections to Gorusch were somewhat muted since it was deemed to be a case of the right replacing one of it own. One of the big factors driving the left even more batsh*t crazy than usual with Kavanaugh was that Kennedy’s seat was supposed to be the “neutral” swing vote, not a reliably conservative one. When Ginsburg kicks it, expect Kav Kase-squared for hysterical shrieking from left if a birthright leftist seat is not going to a birthright leftist.

This kind of thinking is completely alien to me. It never would have occurred to me that my party got guaranteed seats on the Supreme Court. I thought it was a matter of whichever party was more successful at the polls when vacancies came up. But now that I think of it, I recall reading with astonishment after Ted Kennedy died that liberals in Massachusetts assumed that whoever won that seat ought to have views similar to Ted Kennedy, never mind what the voters wanted. Sheesh.

It’s Over, Finally!

Here are some random thoughts on the Kavanaugh episode:

• The purpose of this blog is to be hard on the left, because it’s in their own best interest to be self-critical. Had they been self-critical, they never would have been in this situation because they would not have lost the last election. Assuming they had lost anyway, self-critical people would not have acted as these people did. They would not have made public such a weak case because if you push a weak case like this and act as though it’s strong, it makes people question your judgement. It also makes people question your ethics. Did none of the participants on the Dems side ever imagine how they would have liked it if they had been on the receiving end of this kind of treatment? Or did they think that progressives have special privileges so that they are allowed to dish it out but should never be forced to take it? If that was their attitude, they deserved to lose.

• What should they have done? Since Republicans who have been chosen in the past have a history of shuffling to the left, the Democrats should have put up minimal resistance and, once he was confirmed, launched a subtle and quiet campaign to pull him over to their side.

• Not only were their tactics sleazy, but the use of sleazy tactics seems to have both united the right and drawn in people from the center. If true, then their tactics backfired. Maybe even Democrats have been drawn in. After all, why should black males buy into the campaign to accept a woman’s word when historically they were victims of white women lying about them?

• For me the best moment came when someone shut up Linda Sarsour, who whined about the process and claimed that black men never get the presumption of innocence (here). The response was, “What are you on about. Ford didn’t produce 4 male witnesses so under Sharia Law Kavanaugh is innocent.”

• Steve Sailer links to a column in the NY Times (here) in which a woman complains that the jocks always win and those who were marginalized in high school are still marginalized:

For those who lived at the margins during high school — and I was one of them, an adolescent made of nerve endings and giant hair and an outsize desire to ingratiate — this is a bitter pill to swallow.

No, it’s not a bitter pill to swallow. I, too, was marginalized in high school, so I went into academia where I thought I would be treated well. But I ended up being marginalized there, too. Yet, I am supposed to support people like Professor Christine Blasey Ford who are not marginalized in academia. And I ask, why should I? Just as she won’t support the jock Brett Kavanaugh, I don’t see why I should support Ford. Would she support me on anything? Of course not.

• Unfortunately, I don’t like beer. Sigh.

Taking Away Rights from Women? Please

A group of feminists has marched upon the Yale Club in Manhattan protesting Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court (here). They claim, among other things, that he is “a symbol of elite power that feels impunity ... to take away rights from women....” The entity that in my lifetime has taken away more rights (including abortion rights) from women than any other is the current Iranian regime. Why don’t they protest against them? They never do, and they never will (barring some huge cultural revolution that is nowhere in sight). But that is why I can’t dredge up any sympathy for their cause.

Elevator to Space? No

Despite a lot of giddy talk about this (here, for example), it sounds like a magnet for terrorists. Didn’t they learn anything from 9/11? Such a tower would need to be protected all along its length (which is 22,000 miles), and I just don’t see how that could be done. Forget it.

Hey, Manchester United, I’ve Got a Great Deal for You!

You’ve been losing a lot lately, but I can help. You see, I seem to be your lucky charm. Any time I watch one of your games, you are bound to win. And if I watch just a part of a game, you are very likely to score. For example, the other day I watched your game with West Ham United for a single minute only, but during that minute you managed to score your only goal of the game. Because I don’t like you, I generally refrain from watching, but if you were to make it worthwhile for me to watch, I will do so. How about $10K per game?