I Want a New Left

Our Conformist Era

One of the themes of the left is that the 1950s were thoroughly conformist, and that was a bad thing. But what the left is doing these days is pressuring everyone to hold certain views, because if they don’t they will be “canceled.” That makes our era as conformist as the 1950s, and maybe even more conformist.

Think about it, leftists!

Why, Despite All the Cultural Power of the Left, Is Opinion Shifting on Abortion?

1. The snowflakes are squeamish and don’t like even thinking about such things.

2. There is less sex among young people, as they spend most of their time on their phones anyway, so they don’t have to think about it very much.

3. The pressure to be “woke” hasn’t included pressure to be pro-abortion. The issue of abortion has generally fallen by the wayside and has been replaced by other issues. So, a lot of young people aren’t as doctrinaire on the issue as they are on other issues.

4. All the immigrants are much more opposed to abortion than their liberal and leftist champions imagined.

5. Pro-abortion people have fewer children than anti-abortion people do. The result is that society becomes filled with people whose parents are anti-abortion, and they adopt their parents' position.

I don’t suppose many share my view, which is that if the pro-abortion side insists on supporting an anti-abortion regime like Iran’s, why should I bother being pro-abortion?

On Being out of Step, Sort of

I now realize that I spent an entire decade, the 1980s, as a leftist who (1) hung around with other leftists, (2) had a leftist roommate, (3) had a few left-of-center girlfriends, (4) never hung around with conservatives if I could help it (except for get-togethers with my relatives), (5) subscribed to leftist magazines and read liberal newspapers and books and never looked at right-wing anything (except Robert Nozick), and (6) was in a mostly leftist political economy discussion group, yet during that entire time it turns out that while I hated the Iranian regime, virtually all the other liberals and leftists supported it. I never realized it at the time because the subject never came up. We talked about Reagan, the Soviet Union, Cuba, El Salvador, socialism and communism, feminism, gay rights, and this, that, and the other. But never Iran. Never Muslims. Occasionally, the Third World, but mostly it was Latin America or Africa. Maybe Israel and the Palestinians, but never Iran. And so, I never knew how everyone but me supported that awful regime.

But when I consider leftists outside of the West, it appears that they share my hatred of not only the Iranian regime, but of any fundamentalist Islamic regime. Here is an article about the rule of Erdogan in Turkey in which one person who is quoted is described as a “left-wing theologian and a fierce critic of Erdogan.” This I find completely sensible. Likewise, the commies in China throwing Muslims into camps I find completely sensible. And an Algerian journalist quoted in Karima Bennoune’s book Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here said that he has to explain to Western leftists that “the Muslim fundamentalists are our extreme right” (p. 24). Again, I find this completely sensible.

At the end of the 1980s, I got a hint of how others felt with the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. I thought people would march in the street to support him, but the support was very muted and diffuse. By that time, I was teaching philosophy in a small college and had lost contact with almost all of my old leftist friends. And my two colleagues in philosophy were a conservative and a libertarian. They were upset by the fatwa, so I assumed that leftists would be even more upset. But it turns out that they were not very upset.

And in the 1990s, I occasionally saw letters to the editor from people who seemed to be liberal who supported Iran. But I myself was moving rapidly to the right, so I was less enchanted with hanging around with leftists to see what they believed.

It wasn’t until 9/11 that I finally came to realize that most leftists here in the West had basically fallen in love with Muslims. As long-time readers of this blog know, I have spent an awful lot of time trying to understand this, and it still eludes me.

Why support people who want to kill you? (See here on the dangers of liking the Iranian regime.) It’s psychotic.

Pronouncing “Betelgeuse”

With the star Betelgeuse in the news (due to its unexpected dimming), the question is being raised of how to pronounce its name. I was taught back in the late 1950s that it was beetle juice, and that is how I’ve pronounced it ever since. Wikipedia gives four common pronunciations, depending on whether one takes the word to end in an s sound or a z sound, and also whether one makes the first syllable long or short. So, beetle juice is one of these four possibilities.

Nevertheless, there are language snobs out there who insist that it is not pronounced like that. So, let me examine this by looking at the ancient version of the word, which turns out to be in Arabic and which means “armpit of Orion.” It is as follows:

ibT al-jauza’ [And see here for some more information.]

The capital T at the end of the first word represents a sort of lisped version of our t, and the apostrophe at the end of the second word represents a glottal stop. My natural inclination from looking at the Arabic script is to emphasize that very last syllable (though whether that is correct or not, I don’t know). But notice that to get our versions, you have to make some changes. The letters i and b get interchanged, the i becomes an e (whether long or short), the Arabic t becomes our t, the au becomes an oo sound, the z sometimes becomes an s, and the last syllable drops out entirely. Of course, if you really want to be a snob, you’ll pronounce it ibT al-jauza’, though no one will know what you’re talking about.

It looks like the best way to pronounce it which still shows some respect for the various versions we already have would be bitteljauz. Again, no one would know what you’re talking about. So, which of the four versions (if any) is right? It seems that there’s no standard way of representing Arabic words or names in English. In the Middle Ages, Ibn Rushd became Averroes, Ibn Sina became Avicenna, Musa Ibn Maymun became Moses Maimonides, etc. Accordingly, I don’t think there’s one right way of representing the Arabic name, so any of the four versions in Wikipedia should be considered right. (Strangely enough, Arabs today call Betelgeuse mankib al-jauza’, which means “shoulder of Orion.”)

But even though there is no one right way to represent the Arabic, I think that one can say there are some wrong ones. For example, making the first syllable bayt is just wrong. The word is supposed to mean “armpit of Orion,” but using bayt makes it “house of Orion.” Turning the j into a hard g also sounds wrong (although Egyptian Arabic always does that with the letter j, so maybe it’s ok).

But this version takes the cake for the worst pronunciation of all. Bontoigoloise? Bointoigoloid? Incredible. Whatever it is, I have no idea where the guy gets that out of “Betelgeuse.”

Some Bad Science Writing

See here. The article is about a mysterious burst of gravitational waves. It contains the following two sentences:

“... but researchers don’t know where this burst came from.”

“Astronomers are now pointing their telescopes to that region to try to pinpoint the source of the waves.”

Which region are they pointing their telescopes to? The article doesn't say. In fact, it implies that astronomers have no idea where it came from, so how can anyone point their telescope at a specific region?

Two Centuries of Fighting Capitalism, and Losing

We’ve had nearly two centuries of fighting capitalism for the sake of helping the poor, and it has never worked. When capitalism was defeated, as in the Soviet Union and other communist countries, the poor were not helped. The way to help the poor, as I argued in my latest book, is by working with capitalism, by (among other things) creating as many jobs as possible for them. So, it was ludicrous of California to try to help the poor by restricting the employment of independent contractors with the idea that then “greedy” employers would be forced to give them full-time jobs. Instead, many of these contractors are now hurting. The ones we’ve heard from are mostly writers, and they are mostly on the left.

And to them, I say, “Please come and join me on the right as a right-wing egalitarian. You would not be in the mess you are now in if the left had figured out how futile fighting capitalism is.”

Switching from a “Can’t Do” to a “Can Do” Society

When I was young, America was a “can do” society. We did lots of things. We built things. We accomplished things. Before I came along there were amazing dams and bridges and subways that were built, as well as the electricity grid. When I was young the nationwide freeway system got built, and I have always liked it. I remember being driven places before it was built, and it was always a long slog, but that changed with freeways. We were slowly switching to nuclear power. Satellites, and then people, were sent into space, culminating in us getting to the moon in 1969.

After that, though, things started going downhill. This was thanks to the environmentalists, who began objecting to nearly everything. We sent a few more people to the moon, then the program was disbanded. I thought we’d have rocket planes by now, but we don’t. A lot of people complain that we don’t have flying cars (though I’ll settle for a two-hour transatlantic flight). Sure, the improvements in communications have been vast, with the arrival of the Internet and other things, but the improvements in transportation have been meager. Nuclear power has been on a slow burner at best for the last forty years. Plus, big projects take forever to get done or are abandoned. Maybe the height of this stupidity in our “can’t do” society was the attempt to build high-speed rail in California. This project was no doubt desired by the many environmentally-conscious citizens of that state. And California being run by the Democrats, who generally like mass transit and hate cars, meant that the opposition had little power to prevent it. So, it’s the sort of project that is absolutely suitable for a state like California. And yet they couldn’t manage to make much progress on it. It dragged on for years and years. Finally, enough sane heads had their opinions heard, and the project was canceled. (See here for another story of a project that never seems to get done.)

But with Donald Trump at the helm we are slowly turning our country back into a “can do” society. See here for a report on how he is having outdated environmental laws updated. Maybe, just maybe, we can get our nuclear industry going again.

Iranian Ironies

These ironies aren’t about Iranians themselves, but are rather mostly about leftists here in America:

• Leftists in America insist upon supporting an Iranian regime that has murdered many leftists.

• When I was a young leftist, I railed against right-wingers who supported right-wing dictatorships only because those dictatorships were anti-communist. Now I rail against leftists who support right-wing dictatorships only because they are anti-American.

• Leftists a few months ago decided that John McCain would have been a better president than Trump, even though if he were now president, we would be at war, which of course leftists do not at all want.

Once Again, Student Activists’ Demands Mean a Rise in Tuition

One of the more recent themes of this blog (see here, here, and here, for example) has been that student activism typically entails a rise in tuition, because the demands will cost money for the college or university which they attend. (And the administrators never confront the activists by asking who will pay for what they are demanding.) Demanding new departments, demanding professors of a certain race or gender, demanding safe spaces or special spaces for certain groups, demanding administrators for this or that – it all adds up to much higher tuition for future students since the university is NOT going to shift money it already has in order to pay for these new costs. That would mean a big fight with some faculty members who are expecting that money, and it is so much easier just to raise tuition, since students seldom organize to protest that.

The latest adventure in this area can be seen here. Yes, activists are demanding free chest binders for female students who want them (or maybe all will be forced to wear them?). I don’t know how much these cost, and maybe they are even cheap (though if so, why can’t students pay for them themselves?), but my point is that it is yet one more cost that poor students shouldn’t have to pay for through a raise in tuition (or fees or whatever).

Roger Scruton: Another Quote

This one is about him rather than from him:

His achievements were remarkable. He was a man who appeared to know about absolutely everything, producing books on architecture, philosophy, beauty, music, religion and much more. In many ways – as his former student Rabbi Sacks once said to me – he seemed bigger than the age. There appeared to be no area he had not mastered. In the mid-2000s we were at a dinner party at the house of our late friend Shusha Guppy with a group of eminent writers and journalists, all with egos of their own. I remember one of them asking Roger whether he would think about doing an updated version of his book The West and the Rest. With characteristic and by no means feigned humility he replied that he didn’t think so because he didn’t think his Farsi was any longer up to it. How beautiful it was to see every other writer in the room look as though they might just give up there and then.

From an essay by Douglas Murray here.