I Want a New Left

Law in Canada and France: What Am I Missing Here?

This article tells of a tiff between Canada and France over a French election. France has divided the world into 11 electoral districts, one of which is North America. This district includes both Canada and the U.S., and there is a French citizen, Julien Balkany, living here in the U.S. who is campaigning in Canada for a seat in France’s national assembly. If he wins, he will represent all the French citizens living in North America (which is about 200,000 people). But Canada is complaining. (The article doesn’t say if we are complaining, also.) They insist that they want to uphold “Canadian sovereignty” and to reduce “foreign interference in Canadian domestic affairs.”

This seems pretty harmless to me. It seems that it would allow French citizens living abroad a voice in what is happening back home. How this works out to be foreign interference in Canadian domestic affairs is beyond me. Mr. Balkany presumably has the right to free speech, so he has the right to talk to other French citizens in Canada and to solicit their votes.

I could see where it might be a problem if these French citizens had immigrated to Canada and become Canadian citizens, because presumably Canadians would want them to devote themselves to Canada, but since Canada allows for dual citizenship, that means they have no good reason for demanding that they also give up their devotion to France.

On the other hand, a lot of these French citizens are presumably in North America for business or as students. Exactly why is it Canada’s business if they want to vote in a French election? Many of the people commenting thought it was some kind of assault on Canadian sovereignty. Then why allow them in to begin with?

I’m mystified. One of the commenters expressed my thoughts by saying that French citizens in Canada can go to a consulate if they have a complaint and that this election is a somewhat more direct way for them to speak to their government. That is all that it is.

Two More Cuban Athletes Defect to the U.S.

This article tells of two women soccer players from Cuba playing in a tournament in Vancouver who slipped out of their hotel and took a cab to the U.S. border in order to defect.

A Proposal for Mass Transit

Lots of our leftist elites love the idea of mass transit, but it appears that few of them actually use it. See this column (which links to this amusing item from The Onion). The basic point of Tim Cavanaugh’s column is that riders need more buses and not better central planning or more pleasing aesthetics.

But in the background is another point which he doesn’t quite articulate: why are people who don’t use mass transit the ones who get to plan how it works? Let’s get the elites out of the picture and let the actual users make the decisions! Naturally, those elites who love central planning will be outraged.

Incidentally, the fact that so many who advocate mass transit don’t themselves use it proves something important about the left, namely that while leftists want to help poor people, they also want them to stay in their place at the bottom.

The New Way To Get a Job in Academia

Fifteen years ago, people who wanted a job in academia began by paying a fee to their professional organization so they could see a list of job openings. They then printed up a bunch of vitae (resumes to the outside world) and mailed them to the departments they were interested in. If a department was interested in them, the department would call the applicant and invite them to a large meeting of the professional organization, where they would be interviewed along with a few other likely candidates.

After this, two or three would be chosen to be flown in for on-campus interviews, after which a choice would be made and an offer extended.

What’s interesting is that new technology has changed everything mentioned in the first paragraph. No longer does one need to belong to a professional organization to get a list of job openings, because they are often mentioned on email lists. Vitae can be sent by email. And now one can skip the professional meeting by using Skype for an initial interview.

The winners in all these changes are poor people, and the losers are those elites who insist that professional organizations need to have power and that they need to cater to the wealthy. It costs money to join a professional organization. (I’ll admit that the American Philosophical Association adjusted the fees by one’s income, but not all professional organizations do that.) It costs money to photocopy one’s vitae (and other materials) and mail a bunch of job applications. It costs money to fly to a big conference and to stay in the fancy hotels where they are held. (And what do you do if you've only got one interview? Do you even bother going?) It costs money to eat at these hotels, which are usually located far from cheap restaurants.

All of this is welcome news for applicants who are poor. Let me add that none of these changes is the result of leftists in academia agitating to make life fairer for poor people. Instead, they are all the result of new technologies, and leftist academics had nothing to do with any of these changes. And they will resist changes. My wife’s department is doing a search, and she told me that when one of the other professors in her department – someone who comes from a wealthy family, let me add – heard that there were candidates who said they wanted to use Skype for an interview because they were too poor to go to the conference, she said they couldn’t be serious about wanting the job, because otherwise they would go to the conference.

Not only is it a new world in academia in terms of applying for a job, but I’m told there are new online journals popping up all the time. Running a journal used to require a lot of money, so starting a new one was beyond the means of the average academic department, but now it is very easy for an individual to start one. And once again, this is welcome news for poor people, but also once again, the left had nothing to do with it, and to some extent have resisted it.

Multiculturalism and Philosophy of Science

The multiculturalist movement, together with cultural relativism, goes too far in applying the idea of open-mindedness. It can be compared with the strange doctrine of Paul Feyerabend in the philosophy of science, who argued against the use of any method.

Now the scientific method ideally eliminates biases in scientific research based on tradition, authority figures, and so on. Ideally, it treats all theories with an open mind, and theories that fail an experimental test can be chucked out. It may seem like the next step in open-mindedness to treat all methods equally, but it isn’t. Treating all methods equally just means bringing back into use all the methods previously used that are now suspect (and they are suspect because they aren’t open-minded about theories): citing tradition, relying on authority figures, using crystal balls, and so on. Being open-minded about methods doesn’t get us any further in our quest for knowledge, and the Australian philosopher David Stove claims that Feyerabend was an afficionado of Carlos Castaneda (The Plato Cult, p. 11). See here on Castaneda.

Likewise, multiculturalism presumably began with the idea that some people were being judged on the color of their skin, but then gravitated beyond that to the idea that some people were being judged on their cultural background. It may seem like the next step in open-mindedness to try to avoid doing this, but it doesn’t work very well.

Just as being open-minded about method opens the door to all the old methods that hindered scientific progress, so being open-minded about cultures opens the door to a lot of old prejudices that we should be trying to stamp out. Lots of non-Western cultures are very reactionary, as I’ve been saying for years about traditional Muslim culture, and to treat it with respect simply means ignoring all the prejudices of that culture. For example, when I was in Cairo four years ago, I was told in an orientation session at my school that Egyptians acknowledged just three religions: Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. They didn’t acknowledge atheism or agnosticism or, presumably, Hinduism or Buddhism and so on. Open-minded people of the past would have been appalled at this situation, but under the influence of multiculturalism, they think they are being open-minded when they have respect for this culture. (See here for an example of multiculturalists refusing to judge the Taliban.)

The sooner we see multiculturalism die, the better.

Global Cooling

If the solar scientists mentioned in this article are right, then all of the fuss about global warming was completely unnecessary, as many of us have suspected for years. (And even if they should turn out to be wrong, their views show that the science is far from being settled.)

When the news of global warming was first announced in 1988, the reaction should have been something like this: “That’s interesting. Get back to us in thirty or forty years and tell us if your projections still seem valid.” Instead, our media immediately went into gear, as did our schools. We were told that things needed to be done to prevent a terrible catastrophe. We were told that the science was settled. People claimed that those of us who were skeptics were the equivalent of flat-earthers or else Holocaust deniers.

Just for the record, neither of these is a fair analogy. Anyone these days who believes in a flat earth can be shown the error of their ways by taking them on a trip around the world and letting them see that the world is round with their own eyes. There is nothing comparable for global warming because there is nothing we can be taken to see, or since we are taking about warming, feel. It’s not as though high temperatures in the summer have gotten so high that records get set every other day. The supposed warming is so slight that we instead have to trust a group of people who crunch a large quantity of data and who seem increasingly untrustworthy.

As for the analogy of Holocaust denial, the Holocaust was an event in the past whereas the global catastrophe that is being predicted in connection with global warming will happen in the future, if it happens at all. A more accurate analogy would be to Holocaust deniers before the Holocaust happened, but since there was still plenty of doubt then as to whether it would happen, this doesn’t achieve what the believers in global warming want it to achieve (namely that we skeptics are loathsome people).

Incidentally, as someone who hates cold weather, I’m not thrilled with the predictions of some that we are entering a period of miserable cold weather. On the other hand, if it shuts up the global warming crowd, it may be worth it.

Hat tip: Keith Burgess-Jackson

Short Items

American Diplomacy: This Is Disappointing

This article tells of how the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Francis Ricciardone, in light of the French bill making the public denial of the Armenian genocide a crime, made no comment on that legislation but instead said that Turkey needed to face up to its past if it wants to become one of the world’s top economies. This will just needlessly rile up people over there. Leave that for the historians and cultural critics back home. Or bring it up only if they bring up what they see as our own misdeeds. Instead, he should have condemned the legislation as contrary to the spirit of free speech.


A Good Question on the Pipeline

I am in favor of the Keystone Pipeline, but here a letter writer to the Columbus Dispatch, George Kalbouss, wonders why we need a pipeline all the way down to Texas when we could build a refinery in North Dakota instead. Anyone?


The Islamification of Nigeria

See here for an interview in today’s Guardian with a member of an Islamist group called Boko Haram in northern Nigeria who wants to impose shari’a on all of Nigeria, and eventually the entire world. He claims that Christians would be a protected group, but what this probably means is that they would be reduced to being second-class citizens subject to higher taxes, at best. At worst, the protection wouldn’t mean much of anything and, like Egypt’s Copts these days, would live their lives dreading the whims of the Muslims among them.

And see here, also, for an editorial in the same paper. Many of the commenters seem to think like me. Is there a sea change about these things going on in Britain these days? This comment, mixed in with all the serious ones, was pretty silly:

“It is tragic when 60's pop groups go on the rampage.”


The Current Rushdie Affair

This is the sort of editorial I’d like to see from our leftists in that it condemns the politicians for caving in to the demands for banning people and their artwork. In particular, this sentence says it all:

The standard explanation of politicians - that these steps are unavoidable because the books and works of art hurt religious sentiments - is a throwback to the silencing of Galileo in 1633 because his claim that the earth moved round the sun offended orthodox Christians.

This is pretty much the way I’ve always thought of the issue of the Islamification of the West, that we are regressing. Unfortunately, there are too many in our media and our colleges and universities who think that their attitudes represent a step forward.


Obama and College Tuition

Obama wants to stop tuition hikes at our colleges and universities. Good for him. However, he appears to believe that the problem is because of a decrease in state funding. This is what I was always hearing during the 1980s and 1990s when I still subscribed to leftist magazines like The Nation and In These Times. Since such decreases would not affect private colleges, then their tuition ought not to have gone up, but it has.

The real reason, as most conservatives know, is the huge increase in the number of administrators, many of whom were given jobs because of a liberal left agenda (the affirmative-action officers, the environmental overseers, and so on). And this is why his efforts will probably fail. There is nothing he will do to stop that sort of increase, and even if he were motivated to do it, he would be opposed by powerful interests in his own party. So, don’t expect anything to change.

Multiculturalism: The Chickens Are Coming Home to Roost

With the rise of multiculturalism a few decades ago, our elites decided not to be judgmental about other cultures. This was a strange stance to take, given that just a few years earlier they had condemned the racist culture in our South. But leave that stunning confusion on their part aside. My interest right now is in the effect it had on the Middle East. Instead of promoting enlightened values, as they had been doing up until then, suddenly our elites took a hands-off approach to the cultures in those areas. They came down hard on external oppression, in the case of Israel, but internal oppression was mostly ignored, unless of course it could be turned into a way to slam U.S. foreign policy. But any sort of outrage was tolerated “because it’s their culture.” Pointing out that since they criticize our culture we should be allowed to criticize theirs usually fell on deaf ears, “because we’ve been imperialists.” And pointing out that some of them were imperialists, too, also fell on deaf ears because, either they deny the imperialism or say that it wasn’t as bad as ours or they give some other excuse.

But what has been the result? The result is that when the Arab Spring materialized, it was hard to know whom one should root for. The current regimes were thuggish, but their likely replacements were just as thuggish. See here for an article in today’s Guardian about the abuse of pro-Gadhafi supporters in Libya. (And see here for the latest outrage in Tunisia.)

It all could have been different. If those left-of-center hadn’t gotten it into their heads to be nonjudgmental about other cultures, there would have been down through the years steady pressure on these cultures to adopt enlightened values. Those in such cultures who were already liberal would have found their ranks swelled by many others encouraged by the hope for a better life. There would have been strong and viable liberal parties in, for example, Egypt that would have overwhelmed the Islamists.

I know that leftist critics will bristle at all this, insisting that they have little leverage over these cultures. But they do. In fact, this is another part of the left’s message of guilt to us Westerners, that we are cultural imperialists. Of course, what they are thinking of when they say this is that we swamp them with McDonald’s and bad television shows, but they also get the views of our leftist elites. In addition, those elites can determine, to some extent, who gets aid, who gets support in our media, and so on. People like me who want those societies to become more enlightened can’t make our views known in that part of the world, but our leftist elites can.

The problem for the left is that they are so used to criticizing the West that they have lost all perspective on things. To invert Matthew 7:3, they can see the speck in the West’s eye, but not the log in the Muslim world’s eye.

It’s time for a change.

Common Ground between People Inside and Outside of the “Bubble”

Recently, Charles Murray has declared that, among whites, the upper class and the working poor live in different worlds with different values, and there’s an amusing test here that one can take to see how close one is to the poor. I owe this to Mark Spahn, and like him I got a score of 5 to 8 (meaning that I’m more in the bubble of the rich than I thought I’d be).

Anyway, one instance of common ground between the people inside and outside of the upper class’s “bubble” is the devotion that both groups have to the same team sports. Both groups like one or more of baseball, football, and basketball. When I first got involved in soccer in the 1970s, my naive view was that these upper class people, as well as those near the bottom aspiring to be part of their world, would be the first ones to move away from our sports to soccer since they seemed to be open-minded and internationally oriented, but that didn’t happen, and I instead found myself surrounded by a surprising mix of frat boys, sorority girls, people in the military, and suburban parents with small children. With the rise of soccer in our schools, there are now young people from both groups who are soccer fans, but the level of support for soccer is still very much below that of baseball, football, and basketball.

Let me make a few comments on the quiz.

It didn’t ask how one gets news. People in the bubble get their news from NPR, the NY Times, and the Nation. Those outside generally get it from the local newspaper or tv station, I guess.

People in the bubble hate Wal-Mart and McDonald’s and people outside generally like them.

People in the bubble sneer at the art of Thomas Kinkade, while those outside generally like his work.

People in the bubble either live on a coast or want to live on a coast. Those outside have no problem with living elsewhere.

There are more criticisms of the quiz in the comments here.

Let me note an oddity among those in the bubble. This was a young woman I met about a year ago who came from a very wealthy family. Her grandparents own lots of artwork and are on the board of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, plus she was majoring in art history at a high-priced college. She seemed like she must have had a very cosmopolitan upbringing. So, how did she spend her childhood? She said her family, in addition to their house in a big city, owned a ranch and she spent lots of time there in the summers learning how to ride horses and rope cattle. Roping cattle? It’s not exactly what I think of when I think of those in the bubble.

Update: See here for a better version of the quiz, one that has an explanation for why there was a range of scores on the other site.

I do have to complain about Murray's assertion that Chipotle is like Whole Foods. A Chipotle just opened up in my town, and it has been mobbed. The people there don't seem like the type to go to Whole Foods. Nor is it likely that a Whole Food would ever open up here.

The Bicentennial of the War of 1812

Today’s Wall Street Journal had an amusing article about the bicentennial of the War of 1812. Since some of the battles happened in Canada, the Canadians are also going to celebrate the bicentennial, except that not many know much about it. The article said that a Canadian poll of American visitors found that, of those Americans who had even heard of it, 74% couldn’t name a single event from it. This song should help, though. (But don’t pay any attention to the lyrics they post; Old Hitcreek, indeed.) Anyway, the article mentions that we burned Canada’s Parliament buildings. I hadn’t known about that. I knew a few other things: the burning of our capital, Francis Scott Key, and the fact that the Battle of New Orleans actually took place after the peace treaty, but before news of it could reach them. The name Winfield Scott comes floating back to me, but I can’t remember anything he did in that war. And that's about it.