I Want a New Left

Some Short Items

Zimbabwe Down To Its Last Nickel, Almost

Ever since Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe confiscated the land of some white farmers, Zimbabwe’s economy has been going down hill. The latest news is that it has about $200 left in its treasury. See here.

It’s too bad this happened, but it was obviously inspired by leftist rhetoric, which sounds wonderful in theory but gets things horribly wrong in reality. The idea was that of course the rich – in this case, not just rich, but white – are evil and things need to be redistributed to the poor. I don’t know if any actual redistribution to the poor ever happened, but as the article mentions, that act dismantled the country’s agricultural industry.

There was a better way to do things. Point out to the international community that there were many blacks in Zimbabwe who wanted a better life, but who couldn’t have one because of the stranglehold on the economy by those whites who owned those farms. If outsiders in the West were to donate, then poorer blacks could offer to buy parts of those farms, or if the owners wouldn’t sell, they could start their own businesses. Either way, things would have worked out better than they have.

And would Westerners have donated? Absolutely. People in the West have donated plenty of money to Africa. Whether it has done any good is doubtful, but they are always willing to give. And such a solution would have been better than the outright theft perpetrated by Mugabe.


The Turks May Be Right

Since this blog promotes self-critical leftism, then it behooves me to admit that the Turks may be right about the assassination of the three Kurdish women in Paris that I mentioned here. The Turks suspected that this was an internal feud among Kurds, and since the only suspect so far is the driver of one of the three women, that seems about right. There may still be involvement by other parties, but at the very least, a Kurd was almost certainly involved.


Bicycles in a Post-Apocalyptic World

Megan McArdle in this post wonders why in post-apocalyptic fiction, bicycles are seldom present and people seem to spend their time walking or else in trucks. My question is a little different. It’s not about fiction, but reality, namely if the rural county I live in were suddenly cut off from the rest of the world, what mode of transportation would we be using a century from now? I assume it would be the horse. Cars are out since, even though there is some oil in my county, I doubt if there’s enough to keep all the cars in the county going for very long, especially since we don’t have a refinery. Plus, cars are breaking down all the time, and eventually we would run out of new parts. Bicycles would last longer, since they don’t use fuel, but most won’t last more than a few decades, and they can’t be replaced. They can’t be replaced because they are very sophisticated machines requiring lots of parts and materials from a variety of places; the result is that no one makes a bike from scratch, at least not very easily. Finally, bikes aren't very good at hauling heavy loads. Horses, on the other hand, are easy to replace since they reproduce themselves. They need to be fed, but there are plenty of fields in my county where they can, and in fact do, graze. Nor do the roads need to be kept as smooth for horses as they need to be for cars and often for bikes, too. The horse is the obvious answer.


Jane Austen Again

This article from the BBC was linked to by Instapundit. I read all the comments, and since comments are closed there, I’ll have to make my own here.

One fellow points out that people should have pity on him because he was forced to read Jane Austen in school and hated having to do it. I myself never read her till I was thirty, when I happened to pick up Pride and Prejudice in an idle moment. It was a good age for me to do it because I was old enough to appreciate it. It was wonderful, and funny as well. The father is especially funny. However, both Dickens and Shakespeare were forced on me in school, and I never want to have anything to do with either of them again.

The main masculine character is Fitzwilliam Darcy, yet some of the commenters called him D’Arcy. Why? This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this spelling. It doesn’t appear in the original edition, so where does it come from?

As for so many Americans being fans, I don’t think there are more fans here, in terms of percentage of the population, than there are in Britain or Australia.

Lots of people insisted that she didn’t discuss the poverty of the day, but she touches on it in various places, such as the section on Portsmouth in Mansfield Park. One commenter also suggests that we aren’t told where Darcy got his money and concludes it must have been from the slave trade. But there’s no need to reach such a conclusion. Darcy gets his money from the land he owns in the form of rents from tenant farmers. Exactly how his family got that land is unclear, but it may go back generations, or it may be that an ancestor got it the way Mr. Bingley’s father got his money, namely via trade. There is no need to invoke slavery here since the trade was likely to have been trade within England and not something international.


A Puzzle about the Cape Verde Islands

Since I’ve been watching the African Nations Cup, and since Cape Verde advanced to the second round, I got curious about it. These islands were discovered by the Portuguese, Portuguese is the main language, yet our pronunciation of the name is French. Why? At the very least, it could be Spanish. Incidentally, the name of its capital is Praia, which means “beach” in Portuguese.

I Remember Talk of These in the Sixties

That is, cars that didn't use wheels but which floated on air: here. They would be great in terms of certain winter conditions because you would never lose control on ice or get stuck in snow, but I’m not sure about windy conditions.

Comments on the Book of Yet Another Useful Idiot

The book in question is The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims, by Nathan Lean with a foreward by John L. Esposito. It is similar to the book I read last year by Martha Nussbaum on the new “religious intolerance.” This time, instead of buying it, I took it out of the library. Why waste money on such nonsense?

To begin with, a sentence on the last page pretty much sums up the starting point for Mr. Lean’s book: “Muslims and Islam are not to be feared, nor are blacks, Jews, Catholics, or any other group that faces systematic discrimination" (184). He never argues for this, but assumes it throughout his book. Accordingly, he gives no answer to my basic challenge to liberals and leftists on Muslims, which is how they plan to protect other groups they like (such as women, gays, and secularists) from Muslims. Since Lean doesn’t think Muslims are to be feared, he naturally also thinks there is no plan needed to protect such groups.

It’s hard to imagine if there’s any common ground between us. I just can’t think of anything.

Anyway, having started from that initial premise, Lean decides that not only are there people on the right who are anti-Muslim, there is in fact an entire little industry that manufacturers Islamophobia. Here let me point out that one would think that given that the whole focus of his book is on Islamophobia, he would have defined it somewhere, but he didn’t. As a result, it’s impossible to tell if various people count as Islamophobes who are willing to admit that there are good and decent Muslims. I am thinking of people like Bruce Bawer, Paul Berman, Nick Cohen, Phyllis Chesler, maybe Christopher Hitchens, and Wole Soyinka (whose book I talked about here and who blames the sectarian violence in his native Nigeria on Muslims). And in light of recent events, we can add the socialist president of France, Francois Hollande. Lean never discusses any of these people, so it’s impossible to tell if he thinks they are part of the “industry” or not.

To continue, his thesis is that Islamophobia would be nowhere near as prevalent and vicious as it is without a small number of right-wingers who are engaged in manufacturing it. Let me observe that this is completely loony and is reminiscent of what we protesters against the Vietnam War heard about ourselves, namely that our actions were basically under the control of Moscow when in fact we would have engaged in protests no matter what Moscow was saying or doing. Likewise, the small number of “manufacturers” of Islamophobia – he singles out people like Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller – have much less influence than Lean thinks. Those of us who are “Islamophobes” are governed more by what we see as the failure of our society to deal with a dangerous problem than by any small group of bloggers.

Running through the book is the assumption that while there is nothing to fear about Muslims, there are always plenty of people who will whip up fears over nothing. However, he completely ignores the opposite problem, that of dismissing fears that need to be taken seriously. That there are three attitudes to fearful things – legitimate, overly fearful, and overly dismissive – goes back to Aristotle at least, but it never seems to occur to Lean that he ought to prove that he’s not engaging in the exact opposite of fearmongering. I claim in fact that his whole book is nothing but the illegitimate dismissal of fears that should be taken seriously. And let me also point out that people who have dismissed fears that are legitimate don’t usually look so good in retrospect. Saying that the Titanic was unsinkable was morally wrong, since any ship can sink. The government of Martinique back in 1902 dismissed fears that the island’s volcano would erupt, with the result that many more people died than should have. (See here and scroll down to the 1902 section.) In the 1990s, many leftist “experts” on terrorism dismissed fears that terrorism was a problem. And so on.

Let me observe that I’m not talking about people who painstakingly argue that certain prevalent fears in fact are groundless. Lean doesn’t argue at all for his claim that Muslims are harmless. He ignores all kinds of horrible things that Muslims have done, both in Muslim countries and outside of them. He doesn’t talk about the butchering of liberals and leftists in Iran in the wake of the revolution there. He doesn’t talk about the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. He doesn’t talk about the murder of Theo van Gogh. He doesn’t talk about rapes in Scandinavia. He doesn’t talk about female genital mutilation. He doesn’t talk about honor killings. He doesn’t talk about the killing of apostates. He doesn’t mention the statement by Bruce Bawer that Pat Robertson merely wants to prevent him as a gay from getting married, but the imams of Europe want to kill him.

You would think he was talking about a group as harmless as the Amish.

Now maybe someone who talked about all these things could persuade me that there is nothing to worry about with Muslims in the West, but when someone doesn’t talk about them, it just strikes me that they either don’t know what’s going on, which almost certainly doesn’t apply to either Nussbaum or Lean, or that they are deliberately deceiving people for political purposes.

This brings up another point. Lean never really explains the violence of 9/11, but Esposito, the person who wrote the foreward to his book, does. It’s all contextual. The context is the American policy of intervention and dominance, Western support for authoritarian regimes, and the support for Israel against the Palestinians, which made the terrorists itch for revenge. But fair is fair; if Lean and Esposito can bring up contexts that excuse the violence of Muslims, why can’t we bring up contexts that excuse the rise of Islamophobia? And one part of that context is the behavior of the left.

For example, one way that leftists encourage Islamophobia is by repeating things no one could possibly believe, such as that Islam is the religion of peace. They also make claims that are easily seen through, one such being the claim that “jihad” refers to an inner spiritual struggle. Ditto for the claim that 9/11 is nothing but blowback for things we Americans did in the Middle East. As I’ve pointed out many times before, anyone who looks at all of Muslim violence will see that plenty of people are targeted who have nothing to do with us or the support of Israel. Americans and Westerners have been targeted, but non-Westerners have been targeted, too (the most recent being the Japanese workers at the In Amenas plant in Algeria). In fact, people who hate the West have been targeted, such as the liberals and leftists of Iran. Likewise, both non-Muslims and Muslims have been targeted. The best explanation of all the violence is the willingness on the part of the Islamists to attack anyone who doesn’t share their vision of imposing shari‘a on the entire world.

Another way that leftists encourage Islamophobia is the extreme confusion they’ve engendered by their absolute support for Muslims. This has caused confusion because people really have no idea where the left stands on various issues where that support clashes with other causes they have supported in the past; the result is that people, fearful of the violence they see, turn to others who are making clearer statements about what they support, such as the English Defense League.

Here is an example of the confusion. Does Lean think that female genital mutilation, to pick out just one issue, is wrong? And it’s impossible to tell from his book. However, a reasonable answer is no. The only time the phrase “female genital mutilation” appears in his book is when he is discussing a film produced by Geert Wilders (175), who obviously disapproves of it. Since Lean disapproves of Wilders, does that mean that he approves of female genital mutilation? That is a reasonable conclusion, and one that a more careful writer would be quick to correct. Lean never does. Plus, he criticizes those European governments that have institutionalized “racist government policies,” such as the Swiss government’s ban on minarets or the French government’s ban on burqas (171). But would it also be racist to ban female genital mutilation? Since he never says no, I think it’s reasonable to say he would think it’s racist. Yet, that would seem to go against feminism, a strong component of leftism.

This is the sort of confusion that has helped stoke the rise of “Islamophobia.” People see this behavior and think, if leftists aren’t willing to champion young girls, what are they going to do to protect me? If they aren’t willing to get angry about the murder of Theo van Gogh, what are they going to do to protect me? If they are demanding so strongly that we accept Muslims, can the day be far off when they demand that we convert to Islam? The answers they produce encourage them to look to the right or even the far right for protection.

There’s a lot more I could say about details in this book, but it’s just not worth it. Maybe someday an Islamophile will actually talk about the murder of Theo van Gogh and all the other ills that sensible people have been worrying about, but Mr. Lean is not that person.

A Few Short Items

Burning Manuscripts in Timbuktu

True to form, the retreating Islamists in Mali burned a library filled with important ancient manuscripts in Timbuktu. See here. Remember how liberals and leftists were whining about the theft of artifacts from the Baghdad Museum a few years back when we entered the city? I can’t imagine them saying a word about this tragedy.


McDonald’s Good for Something, Apparently

While progressives complain about fast-food restaurants, it turns out that they help the poor in at least one respect. Poor people can go there and get onto the Internet for those times when libraries aren’t open. See here.


French People Support War in Mali

At least according to this USA Today report. Weren’t these the same people who were so against our entry into Iraq?


Soccer: Congrats to Mali and Cape Verde Islands

Despite the war in their country, Mali managed to advance to the next round of the African Nations Cup. So did the Cape Verde Islands with their tiny population of about half a million.

Two Hundred Years Ago Today!

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice celebrates the bicentennial of its publication today. Yes, January 28, 1813, is when its publication was first announced in a London newspaper. Pride and Prejudice is supposed to be the most read novel in the English language. The British philosopher Gilbert Ryle allegedly replied, when asked if he ever read novels, “Yes, I re-read all six each year,” in a reference to Jane Austen’s novels. In recent years, there has been a little industry of spin-off books and movies and many other things produced in her honor. But while I’ve read a few of the books that have been spun off and seen most of the movies, I flatly refuse to see the postmodern version of Mansfield Park that was produced in 1999. An English professor once told me that it was a legitimate interpretation of the novel, though if changing the main character, a creepmouse like Fanny Price, into a confident extrovert (which is what I’m told happens) is legitimate, then any change whatsoever is legitimate.

Anyway, my wife and I were caught up in the excitement back in the 1990s when the BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice was released, and we subsequently, on trips to England, traveled to many places associated with Austen or her novels, like Chawton and Lyme Regis, that we would never have visited otherwise. We also began reading as much supplementary material as we could, to the point where I could pick out small factual errors in scholarly writings (no, she wasn’t the youngest child in the family; no, she had six brothers and not five; and no, the father in Mansfield Park is Sir Thomas Bertram and not Sir Walter Bertram).

Anyway, we learned a lot about this period in English history, such as the following:

• Housing was cheap back then, while food and clothing were relatively expensive, the exact opposite of the pattern today.

• Rectors for the Church of England were chosen not by the church itself but by wealthy landowners. It seems like a strange system.

• Commanders of naval vessels who captured a foreign naval vessel (generally French) were allowed to keep the booty and split it among their crews.

• Two of her brothers, Francis and Charles, were in the British navy, and both rose to the rank of admiral. That she had brothers in the navy allowed her to talk about it knowledgeably in Mansfield Park and Persuasion. One of them eventually became the top admiral (Admiral of the Fleet). I had originally thought this was due to his being thought better than the other admirals, but it seems that it had to do merely with his being the oldest living admiral of the top rank at the time.

• That brother, Francis Austen, was severely disappointed that he missed the Battle of Trafalgar because of the possibilities for booty that it represented. At the last minute, his ship was ordered to go to the Caribbean for some reason.

• Once a woman married, her husband had full control of any money she brought to the marriage, which is why it was so important for Mr. Darcy to prevent his sister from eloping with Mr. Wickham, for he would have squandered her £30,000 in no time.

• The period when the novel was published is called the Regency period, a name I had never heard of before. It’s the time when George III, our enemy in the Revolutionary War, went mad and his duties were taken over by his son as the Prince Regent.

• Although Mr. Darcy says that 50 miles of good road is nothing for a coach, the lanterns used weren’t good enough to light the way at night, so balls were usually held during the period of the full moon when its light would make safe night driving possible.

We also learned certain moral lessons – it had never occurred to either of us before that discretion is a virtue worth cultivating. And a lesson relating to our own time is that there are people in the world, like Mrs. Bennet, who think that rich people – and presumably rich nations like ours – can never exceed their income. Near the end of Pride and Prejudice when Jane Bennet gets engaged to rich Mr. Bingley, her father jokingly declares that the two of them are so generous they will always exceed their income, whereupon Mrs. Bennet chides him, saying, “Why, he has four or five thousand a-year, and very likely more.” In other words, Mr. Bingley and his wife can never exceed his income because he’s rich. Doesn’t this sound like many people, in fact an entire political party, that we know today?

One of the interesting things about Pride and Prejudice is the letter that Elizabeth Bennet receives from the hand of Mr. Darcy midway through the book. This letter provided her with new information about Mr. Darcy and Mr. Wickham, and the scene provides a fascinating study in evaluating new evidence in an open-minded way. There are lots of women who fancy themselves as Elizabeth Bennets, but how many women if handed a letter like that would have treated it the way she did? Lots of women, if handed such a letter, would rip it to shreds without reading it. Others would throw it in the fireplace when they arrived home, again without reading it. Still others would read it and instantly decide it was all false. Only a small number would actually be convinced, as Elizabeth was, that their former opinions were the result of prejudice.

I don’t want to pick on women here, because the idea of such a letter can be generalized to include any report of new evidence, and of course the recipient might be either a woman or a man.

A year and a half ago, for example, I saw a couple people (one man and one woman) fail what I think of as the Mr. Darcy’s Letter Test. Three people were vigorously claiming that a certain adjunct, being considered for another gig at a certain school, was a bad teacher. When the chair of the department requested the teaching evaluations from the adjunct’s previous teaching gig, they turned out to be no different from any other professor’s at the school, and maybe even better than some. Confronted with this new evidence, one of the three changed her mind, but the other two were adamant that the new evidence showed nothing.

It was a sorry spectacle.

Actually, each of us is confronted with new evidence and arguments every day. We are constantly being given new opinions about people we know or issues of the day, and how we deal with this new evidence shows whether we are open-minded and capable of evaluating evidence objectively.

Elizabeth Bennet had an advantage in that the letter she received referred to someone she trusted (Col. Fitwilliam) who would vouch for its claims. Most of us have no such advantage. Think of the way that the claim about anthropogenic global warming was advanced. It was reported in the media, and the people who were behind it were scientists, whom we all presumed were trustworthy. But we didn’t know them personally! It wasn’t until the Climategate emails were released that many people realized that maybe these people weren’t so trustworthy. But notice how many other people continued to believe, simply because they wanted to. It’s easy to look down on such people, though I’m sure all of us are guilty of failing to be objective at some point or another.

Poor Old Cairo

It was nearly five years ago that I spent a month in Cairo learning Egyptian Arabic. I studied at the International Language Institute (here), and I chose Cairo for the simple reason that every other school in the Arabic-speaking world that I could find had courses that lasted at least six weeks, if not an entire semester (with prices to match). Having a month-long class worked out just right for me (and also for my wife, because the first two weeks coincided with her spring break). There are ten levels of classes, and I studied hard ahead of time from any Egyptian Arabic materials I could find so I could avoid being placed into the beginning level class. I was tested and placed into level two. In my class, there were two of us from America, two from Britain, two from Germany, two from Italy, and one each from Switzerland, Denmark, Turkey, and Japan. While most were young, I wasn’t the only older student.

Some Honest Reporting from the LA Times

This article in the LA Times talks about how blacks in Compton, California, are being harassed, not by whites, but by Latinos. The article states that the town (which as far as I can tell from a map is basically a little enclave in Los Angeles) used to be mostly black, but over the years has gradually become dominated by Latinos. It tells of a councilwoman, who I’m assuming is black, who has noticed the gradual influx of Latinos; it says about her that “although she noted cultural differences between blacks and Latinos, she said she thought they were minor.” She now realizes that they aren’t.

For too long, the myth has been that whites are the problem, and by extension, America or the West generally, despite massive amounts of evidence to the contrary, so kudos to the LA Times for some honest reporting.

Hurray! Thank You, Karima Bennoune

Karima Bennoune, a professor of international law at UC Davis, has an essay in yesterday’s NY Times (here) condemning the Islamists of northern Mali and defending the French for intervening. The fact that it is in the NY Times is significant, since it has been so reluctant to acknowledge any sort of problem with Muslims anywhere that wasn’t just some kind of blowback from American intervention in the Muslim world.

She mentions many ugly facts about what the Islamists are doing, such as executing those who have been caught in adultery, sawing off people’s feet, etc.

Whether this will turn the tide of liberal thinking in this country remains to be seen.

See also this item, which reports that Egyptian protesters set fire to the Muslim Brotherhood’s headquarters in Ismailia. Yessss!!!!

Soccer: Another Terrible Penalty Kick

This penalty kick in Brazil was so poor and the ball so easily caught by the goalie that he added a completely unnecessary dive after catching the ball and taking a few steps, I guess in order to show that he was actually doing something.

More Thoughts on Japan and the Islamists

Yesterday, I linked to an article (here) talking about how upset the Japanese are about the deaths of some Japanese at In Amenas, Algeria. It turns out that more Japanese were killed than were foreigners from any other country. The article at that link mentioned that Japan had thought it had good relations with the Muslim world.

This simply goes to show that that means nothing as far as the Islamists are concerned. It’s just more evidence that the attack of 9/11 was in no way our fault, simply because the Islamists have attacked so many others who didn’t share our sins. What, after all, had liberals and leftists in Iran done that got them butchered after the downfall of the Shah thirty plus years ago? Their sin seems to have been that they didn’t share the same values as those butchering them.

All the Islamists really care about is their own brand of Islam and gaining control of everything.