I Want a New Left

Self-Critical Leftism and Rep. Anthony Weiner

I just spent an hour looking at this site in order to see what liberals and leftists were saying about the twitter scandal of Rep. Anthony Weiner. This was basically a waste of time. (It would be like reading about the reasons why so many people in France think that Dominique Strauss-Kahn was set up.) The right’s argument that something scandalous happened comes down to two suspicious facts: Weiner was following a young college student on twitter (and less than 200 other people, even though he is followed by 45,000 people), and he claims he was hacked but he hasn’t yet reported it to the authorities and has instead hired a lawyer.

Almost no one on this site attempted to explain these suspicious facts. And let me say that I’m not saying that they can’t be explained adequately. Maybe they can, but then why not do so? One of the few to attempt to do so says that no one bothers to report that they’ve been hacked. I don’t know why not. If, as so many seem to assume, it’s a right-wing plot, then reporting it would be the first step one would take.

Then there’s this strange comment:

Friends, the next time you’re caught red-handed with the evidence of your own misdeeds, why worry? Just take a page out of the Rethuglican playbook and yell, “Why didn’t you call the police on me SOONER! This is highly suspicious!”

Life is too short to spend shooting this down, but if it weren’t for the word “Rethuglican,” I would have thought it was from someone on the right. (After all, the person does talk about being caught red-handed, which given the context implies that they think Weiner did it.)

Most of the comments from liberals and leftists raised their own suspicious points and so concluded that this must be part of a smear campaign. And maybe it was. However, one is still better off explaining the two suspicious facts above rather than raising one’s own suspicious facts. If the best you can do is to raise your own suspicious facts, that doesn’t do much for those who are undecided. Some of these suspicious facts are that, it’s easy to hack into twitter, that no one as savvy as Weiner would use twitter to do this, or else they wouldn’t be so stupid as to send it publicly instead of only to the person it was intended. Plus, they’ve pointed out that only one person received the photo in question and that it is a person who has been bothering Weiner for some time. Further afield are those who have simply noted that Weiner was recently going after Clarence Thomas, so therefore the whole business must be a right-wing smear campaign. As I said, none of this is convincing unless one actually explains the two facts above. (Likewise, the left’s embarrassing facts, unless answered by those on the right, don’t help the right, either. Right now, I think the right has the more embarrassing facts than the left does, though.)

A couple people tried to deflate the scandal, one by saying that it involves two consenting adults and the other by saying that Weiner didn’t run on a family-values campaign. Still, a recently married man sending such a photo to a young college student is going to get one in trouble with the feminists, one would think.

Then there’s this off-the-wall comment: “Weiner is outspoken and the New York media hates that.”

Let me assume that Weiner did actually send the photo to this young college student and by accident sent it publicly. As we know from Watergate, the cover-up often ends up being worse than the crime, and it’s better to come clean as fast as possible. Is it hard to do this? Yes, but then that is part of what being a self-critical leftist is about. Not only should he come clean, he should offer to resign as well. This actually isn’t as risky for him as it sounds since, given that he’s a New York Democrat, I’m sure that most in his district will forgive him and urge him to stay on.

I suspect we haven’t heard the last of this scandal.

A Memorial Day Tribute

Yesterday, I linked to some children’s tribute to their father, a veteran of WWII. Today, I’ll do my own tribute. Now both of my parents served during WWII, but neither was sent overseas, so I’ll talk about my father-in-law instead, for his story is awfully impressive. Boris Blick, 1924-2005, fought at Omaha Beach and later on in the Battle of the Bulge. After V-E day, he was shipped to the Philippines, but fortunately for him, the war ended before he had to do any fighting in the Pacific. Subsequently, he went to college on the GI Bill and went on to get a Ph.D. in history. He taught history, including military history, at the University of Akron for many years.

So, having survived Omaha Beach, he went to see Saving Private Ryan and declared that the real thing was much worse. That night he had a nightmare. And what was it about? Not Omaha Beach, but grad school. Make of that what you will.

Boris, we miss you.

Just Right for Memorial Day Weekend

While searching on YouTube for Glenn Miller's "Sweeter than the Sweetest," I ran across this video:

 

I don't know who this gentleman is, but this is a fine tribute to him.

A Passage to Ponder ...

... or maybe sneer at. This comes from Stephen Prothero’s God Is Not One, a book whose main thesis (that religions are not different paths to the same God, but are trying to solve different problems and so are distinctly different) is one I agree with. Nevertheless, I find this passage on Yoruba religion ... startling, to say the least:

There is an intriguing debate about the niche religion occupies in human psychology and society. Is religion’s primary purpose to ward off the chill of death? Many believe this is the case – that religions rise and fall largely on how well they address the problem of mortality. But perhaps death and the afterlife are largely male concerns. After all, it is men who have done most of the killing in human history. Might it be that religion’s primary purpose is to make sense not of death but of birth, not of destruction but of creation? After all, the Jewish and Christian Bibles begin not with the deaths of Abraham and Jesus but with the creation of the world. Perhaps where religions really compete is on the question of how to flourish.

In this debate, Yoruba religion comes down squarely on the side of human flourishing....

I’ve italicized one sentence, a sentence in which I think the male author goes way too far in trying to avoid a male point of view. My wife agrees with me. Anyone else care to weigh in?

Congrats to Barca

For those of us who hate Manchester United, it was a splendid day at Wembley Stadium (unless of course you hate Barcelona even more). The “home” advantage for Man U didn’t help one bit as Barcelona demolished them 3-1 in the Champions League Final. For those used to the long passes of the English style, the Barcelona game will have been puzzling because it consisted of a zillion short passes. Since they do this extremely well, they dominated, but unlike Spain in the final of the last World Cup, which dominated but couldn’t manage to score a single goal during regular time, Barcelona had no trouble scoring.

Changing the subject just a little, I know I should be talking about the alleged scandals at FIFA, but I just haven’t had the time to delve into them. Sorry.

Hey, I’m Being Courted by Politicians!

According to this article (hat tip: John J. Ray here), those of us who are Scots-Irish are being courted by politicians. It's pretty unusual after being ignored by them most of the time, plus the article states that they aren't being very obvious about it. Actually, my mother calls it “Scotch-Irish,” and I have to admit that I never felt much connection with it, partly because all of my relatives except my grandfather lived a thousand miles away so I never really got to know them, and my grandfather died when I was young, so I didn’t get to know him very well, either.

But partly also because we don’t really fit the definition very well. They are supposed to have come from the Scottish Lowlands, but our family came from the Scottish Highlands. They were settled in Ireland in the seventeenth century and then migrated to America in the eighteenth century, while our family migrated to Ireland in the early nineteenth century and then migrated to America a generation or two later. Other than the Presbyterianism of my grandfather, there’s not much connection there, so I don’t even bother calling myself either Scots-Irish or Scotch-Irish, but prefer either Scottish or just plain Celtic (since there was an awful lot of movement back and forth between Ireland and Scotland down through the millennia). Anyway, I identify much more with the other parts of my background (German and Swedish).

Beannachd le.

Estonian Hostages in Lebanon

This post is about an event in the Middle East that doesn’t seem to be getting much attention here. On March 23, seven tourists from Estonia bicycling in the Beqaa‘ Valley in Lebanon were taken hostage by a previously unknown group called the Renewal and Reform Movement. Lebanese authorities have arrested several people, but this hasn’t helped to free the hostages. It’s suspected that they have been taken across the border to Syria.

See here and here for more information.

The (Academic) Rich Get Richer and the Poor Poorer

My wife, a professor in art history, just learned that she could apply for a grant for professors who want to change direction. This is the sort of grant that those of us who are adjuncts could use. I’d love to have some funds for retraining, but they don’t seem to be available. I chose to work on Arabic, but despite the comparatively large amount of money floating around to promote the learning of Arabic, none has come my way. Instead, it goes to people teaching Arabic (which is a strange way to promote learning Arabic) and to full-time students. I don’t want to be a full-time student. I just want to learn the Arabic language.

Anyway, my point is that there is always more money available for people at the top of the academic hierarchy compared with those of us at the bottom. And the left never complains.

Paying Students Not To Go To College?

This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education talks about a fellowship for entrepreneurs that would permit them to leave school to develop their entrepreneurial ideas. Naturally, some academics didn’t like this, but it makes sense.

Also, as part of what I have been calling Poor People’s Leftism, I’m in favor of creating more jobs, but I don’t see why this has to be done in any particular way. Why not have a contest sponsored by the government, or anyone else, in which people suggest business ideas, with the winner being the person whose idea is best in terms of feasibility, cheapness, and the potential for employing large numbers of people?

More Nonsense about Global Warming

In this Washington Post essay, Bill McKibben mentions a number of disparate and unusual weather phenomena from recent days and then chides those of us who refuse to jump on the global warming bandwagon. The list includes, of course, the latest tornados in Missouri, as well as flooding along the Mississippi.

For the record, in 1965 Minnesota had a record snowfall in March. I was in eighth grade back then, and I remember that it was the first time in twenty-five years that there was so much snow that the Minneapolis schools had to close. (Minneapolis has such a great system of snow-plowing that the schools rarely close for snow.) In April all that snow melted and caused flooding. President Johnson came to town to declare it a national disaster. Then one memorable evening in May, the Twin Cities got hit with a bunch of tornados. Fortunately, back then there weren’t a bunch of environmentalists around to tell us that all of this unusual weather was proof of global warming, and in fact the subsequent summer was rather cool.

So, what about the current unusual weather? When those of us who are skeptics point to a lot of phenomena that suggest that global warming isn’t happening, we are always told that no particular event or set of events will disprove it, but they always point to odd, record-breaking events as proof that it is happening. This sort of argumentation isn’t likely to convince us skeptics.

But what is really galling is that in McKibben's long list of unusual phenomena, he never mentions a single one that was predicted in advance. No one predicted, apparently, that this was going to be a bad year for tornados. (If they did, then we have to say that Bill McKibben is a very bad advocate for global warming, because why refrain from mentioning this? And we also have to say that the Post is being derelict in its duty by printing rubbish.) The best science is not that which has been affirmed by peer review. It is not that which gives good explanations of events that have already happened. It is that which makes good predictions. And so far the predictions of those believing in global warming haven’t been very good. See this column by Dennis Prager for the details.

Prager doesn’t even mention all the bad predictions by leftists that he could have. A decade ago we were being warned that we were on the verge of an epidemic of mad-cow disease, which was going to spread to humans. As I recall, leftists were warning us that the government was undercounting the number of cases, the government was lying to us (in order to protect the big corporations), the situation was dire, etc. Nothing came of it. This hasn’t stopped the fear-mongers, for here is what an article in Wikipedia says: “By October 2009, it had killed 166 people in the United Kingdom ... with the number expected to rise because of the disease's long incubation period.” Only 166 people dead in the UK – and I suspect most of those deaths happened years ago – yet they expect the number to rise.

McKibben should reread the fable about crying wolf.