I Want a New Left

Some Short Items

Americans Make the Sensible Choice

According to this USA Today/Gallup poll, most Americans have as their biggest priority the creation of jobs. Taxing the wealthy was way down the list.

One oddity was that improving the nation’s public schools wasn’t very important for Romney supporters, but was much more important for Obama supporters. I thought the issue meant more to Romney supporters than this poll shows, but maybe that’s because they really prefer that all schools be private. Anyway, it was the Obama supporters who screwed up the schools in the first place.


The Weakness of Republican Rhetoric

A few weeks ago, I pointed out that the situation in Syria showed how pathetic the leftist view of the Middle East is. Specifically, I mentioned:

1. Progressives thought we ought to seek out Assad and not treat him as an enemy.
2. The right supported dictators like Mubarak, while the left supported dictators like Assad and Gadhafi. It’s pretty clear now who was more vicious.
3. What Assad is doing to his opponents makes what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians look like a slap on the wrist.
4. In no way can America (or Israel) be held to blame for this situation.
5. The left’s preferred method of dealing with situations, diplomacy, simply didn’t work.
6. The longer the massacres go on, the more the idea of never intervening looks ridiculous.

And let me add another:

7. The left’s hands-off policy regarding other cultures didn’t help with this situation one bit. Encouraging these countries to adopt Western values might have prevented the massacres.

In other words, Syria shows how dreadful and wrong the left’s foreign policy is. Nevertheless, although this is a wonderful opportunity for Republicans to emphasize a huge defect in leftist thinking, nearly everyone has been silent. A week ago, Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal wrote an editorial that went a step in the right direction, but he talked about the first item in my list only.

You can’t expect to win elections by fighting the other guy with one hand tied behind your back!


A Good Example of Rich People’s Leftism

Here. The situation is that some elites in LA want to destroy some neighborhoods and replace the existing houses with high rises so that there is more density. Naturally, those who are most in favor of this don’t want their own neighborhoods to suffer the same fate.

The Story of Two Academic Women

I was inspired to write this after reading this post. The post talks about how in philosophy, conferences still seem to be dominated by men, which has led two men to boycott those in which women aren’t involved.

Anyway, my story involves two academic women who both found themselves excluded at a conference. One was a recent Ph.D. recipient who found herself excluded from a dinner organized by her adviser for his male students; his female students were excluded. The other had spent a lot of time in Japan and had helped a number of other Americans who had come there after her with the difficulties of dealing with Japanese culture. Some of these people, as well as she herself, later went into academia and got Ph.D.s related to Japanese culture, but at a conference she found these people all on a big panel with herself excluded. And why had she been excluded? Because she had gone to an ordinary Midwestern state university instead of the elite schools where the other people had gone. Yes, even though she had helped these people when they got to Japan, they weren’t willing to return the favor and allow her to be on their panel.

The point of this is that the left today will rise up in anger at the first example of exclusion, but not the second. So when it turns out that philosophy conferences have speakers that are only male, I could argue that they probably have speakers who come from the “right” class background as well, but no one on the left will get into a fuss about that. Including people who have other class backgrounds would probably mean accepting people who aren’t so famous, but then the reason they aren’t so famous may just be that academia isn’t very welcoming of people from the lower classes.

Anyway, I haven’t been to a philosophy conference since the mid-1990s, and of course I never had any status in the field, so I can truthfully say that I am not to blame for this exclusion of women that the article talks about.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from the libertarians, it’s the power of doing things on your own. To women philosophers, I say, Why not organize your own conferences and your own panels? My wife has organized her own panels at the big Kalamazoo medieval conference, which is remarkably willing to allow people to do this (in a true egalitarian spirit that is rare in academia). Her events were often better attended than the ones organized by the elites.

And if your conference isn’t willing to allow you to organize your own event, organize your own conference. Don’t make it a conference just for women philosophers because it won’t then be a rival to the official ones. Make it for everyone, but make sure it is run the way you want it to be run. People may then decide to go to yours rather than the official one. Keep in mind that the official journal of the College Art Association, Art Bulletin, started off a century ago as nothing but a lowly newsletter for art historians in the state of Missouri.

Things that are important now don’t have to remain so, and things that are now unimportant can become more important later on.

Why Do Older People Still Have Mortgages?

This article talks about older people who have to give up their homes as a result of the recession. (Hat tip: John J. Ray) The article begins by talking about one Roy Johnson in Georgia who had to give up his home because he couldn’t afford the $1000 per month mortgage payment. He is 79 and has owned his house since 1963.

There is no way he was paying $1000 on his mortgage when he first got it in 1963 (it was probably more like $100). In fact, there is no way he should even still have a mortgage if he first got his house in 1963. It should have been paid off by now; it would have been paid off in 1993, if it was a 30-year mortgage. At that time, he would have been 60, which is a decent age to finish paying off your mortgage. The point is that after you retire, you shouldn't count on the big bucks that will help pay a mortgage. No, obviously he refinanced for one reason or another, and then got into trouble, but I can’t think of why it would be a good idea to have a mortgage after you retire. My wife’s aunt and uncle still have a mortgage, even though they are in their eighties and bought their house in 1964. I think they’re crazy.

Anyway, these examples show the inadequacy of financial education in our schools.

Soccer: Ryan Giggs Finally Gets His Day in the International Sun

Ryan Giggs is a great soccer player, but he’s never been able to shine at the World Cup because his country, Wales, never had enough other good players to manage to qualify. But now in the Olympics, he gets to play for Great Britain (which hasn’t had a team in the Olympics since 1960), and today he scored a goal against the United Arab Emirates. Giggs, incidentally, is 38; I first heard of him back in 1995.

Wow! It’s Not Just Academia

Check out the chart on health care at this link. I had no idea there were so many health-care administrators and that their numbers had been growing so fast.

By the way, I’m taking it on faith that this chart is accurate.

Intellectual Property for the Right and the Left

Some of the most annoying people in my universe are those academic leftists who publish articles and books against private property, but who obviously believe in intellectual property since their work is copyrighted and since they show not the slightest interest in any kind of change in academic publishing. Now it turns out that there are libertarians who are almost as annoying. Mark Spahn has sent me a link to an article by a libertarian, N. Stephan Kinsella, who explicitly argues against intellectual property (here). Naturally, his article is copyrighted. I suppose he could argue that it wasn’t his idea to get his article copyrighted but was instead the idea of the journal in which he published his article. However, he doesn’t say this (at least, I don’t think he does; I admit I mostly just skimmed his article).

Anyway, let me give a brief reconstruction of his argument. Tangible, material property deserves to have rights associated with it because of its scarcity, while intellectual property is not scarce so it doesn’t deserve to have rights associated with it. Moreover, allowing for intellectual property rights infringes on people’s property rights in material things; that is, because of patents and copyrights, I can’t legally make those things under patent protection with my own property or print those things under copyright protection with my own paper and ink. Finally, it’s debatable whether patents and copyrights actually promote innovation instead of, perhaps, actually stifling it.

No One Should Be Surprised At This

See here. No matter how often critics point out to the prevailing progressive ideologues that there is a big contradiction in their ideology – that is, condemning mainstream Americans who are homophobes while being accepting of Muslims who are even worse homophobes – nothing changes. None of them even seems to notice.

Israel’s Dangerous Tourism

See here. Some Israelis are heading to the border with Syria to watch the fighting.

What the ...?

My wife runs a journal. It’s a journal for the history of art and architecture, and its focus is the medieval period (here). Why, then, would someone submit an article to her journal on nanotechnology and how it can be used by architects to save money? Ok, the woman is from Iran and maybe her English isn’t so good. So she should submit it to an Iranian journal, then. Maybe she just saw the word “architecture” and figured that was good enough.

Academics are supposed to be smart, but sometimes I wonder.

Obama Has It Exactly Backwards

I assume everyone has heard about how Obama said to business owners that “you didn’t build that.” I made a snide remark about it (here) when it was first said, but I now want to say something more serious. The idea behind Obama’s remark is that business owners owe something to the rest of us, because they depended on the rest of us to build their businesses. Even if true, and even though it is an attitude that is typical of progressives, it is the wrong attitude to have. The right attitude should be more along the lines of “thanks for creating jobs and how can we help you create some more?” It’s the difference between those who favor redistributions, which I think are mostly welfare for the rich liberal, and those who favor job creation. Once one takes the latter attitude, one sees how many mistakes the Obamas of the world make in terms of killing jobs rather than creating them. Regulation piled upon regulation, a business-hating climate that makes future planning uncertain, listening to environmentalists rather than those who oppose them, it all adds up to fewer jobs created than there might have been.

The book I am working on right now (Poor People’s Leftism vs. Rich People’s Leftism) will make this clear, and I hope it will eventually send leftism as it now exists into the dustbin of history.