I Want a New Left

Colin Firth Is New?

In today’s Wall Street Journal, an essay by Peter Bart, a vice president and editorial director of Variety, talks about the decline of movie stars (“Is the Movie Star Extinct?”). In it he says, “Natalie Portman and Colin Firth both emerged as important new stars because of extraordinary performances that triggered the success of [“Black Swan” and “The King’s Speech].” Colin Firth is not a new star. Many of us were introduced to him way back in the mid-1990s when he played Mr. Darcy in the BBC miniseries Pride and Prejudice. (See here.) A few of us Americans are even aware that he played the crazed Arsenal fan in Fever Pitch. (See here. This is the original British version and not the American remake, of course.) No, Colin Firth is not a new star.

Working Someone To Death

Earlier today Instapundit linked to a story (here) about a woman who was being worked so hard at her law firm that she had a heart attack and died. A while back I noted that a friend had died, and she too may have been worked to death. I was reminded of this while at a party this evening when one of her colleagues talked about her death and how angry it made him that a certain person, whom he didn’t name but whom we knew to be her boss, had made life so hard for our friend during the last week of her life. The last time I talked to our friend, which was a couple days before she died, she was bitterly complaining about this boss. It’s true that our friend had heart problems, very severe problems, but she was scheduled to have an operation this summer that would have cleared them up. It would have been nice if she had been able to count on gentler treatment prior to that operation, but she couldn’t.

The reason I’m bringing all this up on this blog is that this blog is dedicated to self-critical leftism, and the boss in question is a radical leftist. One would expect that a boss who is a leftist would treat subordinates kindly, but that wasn’t true in this case, especially during the last week of her life. What’s worse is that it doesn’t seem to have occurred to this woman that several of us think she was a contributing factor in our friend’s death (or if not that, then that she behaved very badly), because she hasn’t altered her annoying and demanding behavior one bit. There seems to have been no soul-searching on her part, no critical reflections on her own behavior. She has simply continued on with her manipulations as though nothing had happened. I expect better of leftists than this.

More on the Left and Elite Schools

Yesterday, I quoted from a graduate of an elite school who had come to see that there was something elitist about such places, in spite of a lot of liberal rhetoric. There’s more today. First, there’s this column, in which we learn what Harvard did with all the money it had a few years ago. The author notes that “in a fantastic public-relations coup, Harvard announced that it was spending a small fraction of its endowment on making the university more affordable for the upper-middle class. For that, it was praised to the skies for its commitment to opportunity and the egalitarian ideal.” In other words, more welfare for the rich (or in this case, upper-middle class) liberal. “Harvard could have used its great fortune to create more spots for deserving low-income students and hire people to fan out across the world and find them. Instead, it spent a little bit of what it had a lot of — money — while jealously hoarding its real store of value.”

Whenever liberals and leftists start complaining about all the money in corporate America, I change the subject and start talking about all the money in academia, which of course is dominated by liberals and leftists.

Liberals and leftists often want to make college free, which is what they have in Europe, but this may be nothing but more welfare for the rich liberal. In Monday’s Wall Street Journal, there was an article about education in Germany (“In Search of a New Course”) which noted the following:

After four years of primary school in most German regions, the smartest go on to Gymnasien, top-level high schools for university-bound students, while average students are directed to Realschulen, a path usually to white-collar or technical trades. Those with the lowest grades go to Hauptschulen, schools traditionally meant to prepare students for mid- to lower-level vocational training....

The article goes on to note the class basis in who ends up on which track. “Even with similar grades, children with college-educated parents are at least three times more likely to go on to Gymnasien than those from working-class families....” So if college is free, it is also basically reserved for the wealthy.

Now it’s true that the article says that Germany is one of the few countries in Europe with a system like this, and an accompanying chart suggests that Germany lags behind other European countries in the percentage of adults aged 30 to 34 who have a college degree. The U.K., for example, has a percentage of 43 while Germany is only at 29.8. Now if most of Europe is letting poor people go to college for free, that is admirable, but let’s see if that is a practice that they can continue in the face of the current economic troubles.

But I believe what this hides is that this is a rather recent development. I believe the figure for the U.K. when I was a child was more like 20%, while the U.S. was much higher.

It’s a paradox that capitalistic America has throughout most of my lifetime been more interested in getting people to college than socialistic Europe, and I do have to wonder if with my lower-middle-class background I would have gone to college if I had been born in Europe rather than America.

This Is What I’ve Been Complaining About For Many Years

This article nails it. It’s what I’ve been complaining about for years. Even though it seems to have come out during the Bush administration, that doesn’t affect its validity since nothing in academia has changed since then. Here are some of the article’s points:

1. The students at elite schools are almost exclusively wealthy.

Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely — indeed increasingly — homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals.

There may be a diversity of races, but so what, if the poor are excluded?

2. People coming out of such schools think those who didn’t go to such schools aren’t smart.

[In college] I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class.

Exactly, which is why I’ve complained that my articles were judged not on what I was saying, but on where I had gone to school, which was a place other than an Ivy League. If you get editors who come out of the Ivies (or perhaps editors who are worried about what such people will think), then anyone who doesn’t come out of the Ivies will be dismissed as not having anything worth saying.

3. The rich in academia get richer.

[At institutions like Cleveland State] there are also few, if any, of the kind of special funds that, at places like Yale, are available in profusion: travel stipends, research fellowships, performance grants. Each year, my department at Yale awards dozens of cash prizes for everything from freshman essays to senior projects. This year, those awards came to more than $90,000—in just one department.

This is why I call academia welfare for the rich liberal. And no rich liberal, no matter how dedicated they are to helping the poor, is going to try to change the structure of this system.

4. People coming out of such schools are trained for the best jobs, while people going to other schools, because they aren’t smart enough, are trained for lower jobs.

In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out. At schools like Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or another. They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity—lives of subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. At places like Yale, of course, it’s the reverse.

As I’ve mentioned before, I used to hate wealthy conservatives because I thought they didn’t pay their fair share of taxes, but now I hate wealthy liberals, because they hog all the best jobs.

5. It’s not exactly a meritocracy.

The elite like to think of themselves as belonging to a meritocracy, but that’s true only up to a point. Getting through the gate is very difficult, but once you’re in, there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked out. Not the most abject academic failure, not the most heinous act of plagiarism, not even threatening a fellow student with bodily harm — I’ve heard of all three — will get you expelled. The feeling is that, by gosh, it just wouldn’t be fair — in other words, the self-protectiveness of the old-boy network, even if it now includes girls. Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls “entitled mediocrity.”

Actually, there are plenty of people who could get in but won’t simply because they lack the resources to get in. In addition, to paraphrase what Jane Austen says on the first page of Mansfield Park, there just aren’t enough slots in elite schools for all the bright but poorer students to be admitted into them.

What it all means is that while these people are often liberals, they have reactionary attitudes on class.

A Victory for Self-Critical Leftism

This report about the abandonment of multiculturalism in Holland is welcome news and a victory for self-critical leftism. It’s a victory for leftism, despite what leftists think, because multiculturalism means, like it or not, that we must allow reactionary cultures to thrive in our midst. How anti-leftist can one get! Yet, this sort of thinking now dominates the left, so it’s a victory for self-critical leftism that the Dutch are turning away from this nonsense. It is sad for leftism that it is being implemented against their wishes, but I hope that someday they will wake up to what is perhaps the stupidest leftist policy ever.

It’s true that there is a soft version of multiculturalism, of which I approve. Soft multiculturalism says that one ought to be initially open to the customs, traditions, and practices of other cultures. But being open doesn’t mean that one has to accept them or allow them into one’s country. One first considers if they conform to leftist values, and if not, then they are rejected. Accordingly, the soft multiculturalist will be open to foreign sports like soccer and perhaps also cricket and rugby, but will give a firm no to bullfighting, and also to honor killings, female genital mutilation, the killing of apostates, and so on. The hard multiculturalist, by contrast, is committed to allowing all foreign customs and practices here in the United States.

The Start of the Women’s World Cup

The Women’s World Cup has started in Germany, and for both of today’s games the losing teams (Nigeria and Canada) lost by a single goal. I’ve noticed that most of the time when a team loses by a single goal, they managed to blow one good chance to score a goal, which would have meant a tie (or at any rate, a different game). Today’s games were no exception. In the first half of the first game, one of the Nigerian forwards went in alone on goal, but shot wide, and in the second half one of the forwards needed only to get a foot on a cross to have put it in the net. Instead, the result was that Nigeria didn’t score at all, while France scored one goal, which was enough for a win.

In the other game, Canada's Christine Sinclair had a very good chance in the first few minutes but shot over the bar. This was an excellent time to score a goal because it would have really rattled Germany to have been scored on that early. Instead, Germany scored a few minutes later and, having settled their nerves, dominated most of the rest of the game. It wasn’t until near the end that Sinclair burned them with a great shot off a free kick.

An Analogy about Global Warming

The global warming controversy is the result of a lot of academics claiming that our climate is changing. These people are mostly liberal and leftist, and they are predisposed to believe that human beings are harming our planet, so their conclusion that we are causing global warming is in accord with their ideology. That alone ought to be enough to make one suspicious (just as people who believe in global warming are suspicious of the results of scientists in the pay of oil companies). Combined with other things, there is plenty of reason for skepticism. But let me make an analogy to make clear what I’m saying about predispositions.

Let’s say that academia was dominated by conservatives, and let’s say that conservative scientists claimed they had evidence that women who get abortions are unlikely to live past the age of fifty. (This is purely hypothetical.) When various people point out that they know plenty of women who got abortions who have lived past fifty and that there are some scientists who dissent from this view, the conservative scientists are unimpressed. They say first that their results have been peer reviewed, that there is a consensus, and that the science is settled. They also reply that a few counterexamples don’t refute their overall statistics, that there are still far too many women dying too young because they got an abortion when they were younger. Moreover, they point out that the scientists who dissent are all funded by abortion clinics. Eventually, an email scandal erupts in which it becomes clear that (1) there has been some fudging of data, and (2) the people at the top want to prevent those who have come up with contrary results from publishing (to redefine peer review if necessary). In addition, these scientists refuse to release their data.

This example, like that of global warming, is an example of scientists getting results that are in accord with their ideology. Would you trust these results, given that sort of accord? Keep in mind that in this example, as in the example of global warming, scientists with contrary views are vilified because of the source of their funding, while the scientists in question are supposedly doing pure research. But wouldn’t your basic instinct be to mistrust any result that fits in with a scientist’s ideological beliefs, unless there was an extraordinary amount of evidence backing it up?

Some other questions: Would you think that a “consensus” meant anything in this case? Would you think that the science was settled? Shouldn’t the refusal to release data set off alarm bells? If not, why not? Does peer review make a difference here? Isn’t it just people with similar beliefs reviewing each other’s work? Wouldn’t the statement about preventing certain people with contrary beliefs from publishing reflect negatively on the value of peer review? And wouldn’t any suggestion or hint that there was fudging of data make one mistrust everything they were saying? After all, most people won’t be experts in the area in question and they have to take experts’ statements on trust, so anything the experts say or do that is suspicious destroys that trust. So, shouldn’t one be suspicious if there is any hint of fudging of data.

I’m assuming that most liberals and leftists, if confronted with this situation, would be wholly against these conservative scientists and would be raising skeptical questions of the sort I have just raised. And that means that it is legitimate to be skeptical about global warming.

Homophobia and Africa

In this article from The New York Times, we learn that homophobia is rampant in Africa. The context of the article is women’s soccer teams, and of course the emphasis is on homophobia among Christians rather than Muslims, but it should be a reminder that in spite of all the America bashing from progressives, there really is something progressive about the West and that the idea that Western culture is no better and probably worse than other cultures is wrongheaded.

Hezbollah

As Glenn Reynolds would say, heh. They should be called Hezbadiddollah (party against God) instead of Hezbollah (party of God).

James Bulger Captured?

See here. I thought he had been murdered at age 2. See here.