I Want a New Left

Why It’s Important That Everyone Can Be Accused of Racism

See here. This post refers to an incident that involved a series of remarks on Facebook between a black female, who is a professor and who insists that she can’t be racist because she’s black, and a white female who was raped years ago and who took offense at what the black female was saying. The black female responded with sneers at the white woman’s claims to victimhood.

I talked about this business of hijacking the word “racism” and insisting it can’t be applied to blacks the other day (here). I believe that had the black woman been taught that no one should be racist, she would not have gotten herself in trouble. I hope she gets booted out of her job, but that is probably too much to expect.

Incidentally, if the left insisted that there be mutual respect between and among all Muslims and all non-Muslims, I doubt that there would be a need for the Counter-Jihad here in the West and that there would be as much violence in the Middle East as there now is. Instead, the left wants to play favorites and allow Muslims to be violent and intolerant.

Bill de Blasio: Rich People’s Leftist

Rich People’s Leftism – and for those new to this blog, see here to understand what I’m talking about – focuses on looking like it is about helping the poor, while not being too interested in actually helping the poor. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (in consultation with some other progressives) has come up with a progressive contract with America (here) that nicely illustrates Rich People’s Leftism.

The big contrast, as far as taxes are concerned, between Rich People’s Leftism and a hypothetical Poor People’s Leftism is that Rich People’s Leftism focuses on raising taxes on the rich, while Poor People’s Leftism wants to lower taxes on the poor. De Blasio’s contract illustrates this with a section called “tax fairness” in which three of the four proposals go after rich people’s money. (The fourth penalizes corporations.) In a different section, called “support working families,” there is a proposal to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit. That is all they are suggesting in terms of lowering taxes on the poor. It is not enough.

The rest of the proposals, such as national paid sick leave or raising the minimum wage, are completely unnecessary, as far as Poor People’s Leftism is concerned. Moreover, they may backfire since they can cause job destruction that hurts the poor more than either would help. Here is what Poor People’s Leftism would propose:

1. Encourage as much job creation as possible.
2. Cut costs for poor people.

There. That is all that is needed. If there is plenty of job creation, poor people won’t need a higher minimum wage because wages will go up automatically. They won’t need national paid sick leave, since with job creation, there will be competition among employers so that they may offer it anyway. Ditto for most of the other proposals. Likewise, by cutting costs, one automatically gives the poor more money. The obvious cut is in taxes. As I have pointed out many times, the lowest tax rate is 10%, and it is a rate that affects lots of people in the bottom half. Cut it down to 2%. Another cut is in energy costs, whether it is gasoline, natural gas, or electricity. Work to make them all cheaper, and the poor will benefit. Unfortunately, the left insists on making them more expensive because of their exaggerated fears about the environment.

One other point. Those who favor Rich People’s Leftism get so involved with hurting the rich with higher taxes that they don’t notice that raising taxes on the rich often means that taxes for the poor will be raised as well (as a careful examination of this site will show). That really says it all.

A Couple Items on Race

The Ethnicity of Ancient Egyptians

This interesting post speculates on the ethnicity of the ancient Egyptians. The author cautiously suggests that they were neither like northern Europeans nor like black Africans. I would agree. I assume that Egyptians living in Egypt today are mostly like those from ancient times, and when I was in Egypt I was surprised to see men who reminded me somehow of the mask of King Tut. I thought of them as white, but they were also unlike all other whites I have seen. (And when I went to Brazil, I saw whites who resembled no other whites I had seen before.)

The commenters who thought the question of ancient Egyptian ethnicity was pointless are wrong. It mattered (in a bad way) that some people once insisted that they were Aryan, and it matters in a bad way that others are now saying they were black. Since the evidence is not clear-cut, I don’t think young people should be taught, as a matter of political correctness, that they are black. We in Greek philosophy heard this nonsense about Socrates, and it was despicable. It is perhaps closer to being true with the Egyptians, but that is different from saying it is true. Let us not lie or invent stories for young people when the truth can be told.


Racism and Chauvinism

The woman quoted in this newspaper article is someone who organized an event to which white men are not allowed to attend. She insists she is not racist or sexist because:

I, an ethnic minority woman, cannot be racist or sexist towards white men, because racism and sexism describes structures of privilege based on race and gender. And therefore women of colour and minority genders cannot be racist or sexist because we do not stand to benefit from such a system. In order for our actions to be deemed racist or sexist, the current system would have to be one that enables only people of colour and women to benefit economically and socially on such a large scale and to the systematic exclusion of white people and men, who for the past 400 years would have to have been subjected to block colonisation.

The proper response to this nonsense is to say, “No, you’re wrong. Racism and sexism do not describe structures of privilege based on race and gender. They simply refer to people who think that their race or gender is superior to other races or the other gender. And that is all it means.” But if these arrogant language imperialists want to insist that they get to define what the word “racism” means and that the rest of us just have to go along, fine. We still have the word "chauvinism."

So, I say to this woman, “Lady, you’re a chauvinist, and that makes you morally inferior to those of us who are not chauvinists.”

Yet Another Bad Machine Translation

Google translated the first word, faqada, as "has," but that is almost the exact opposite of what it means. It means to lose something. Plus, this translation ignores a word meaning "type." So, it should go, "Moroccan fighter plane of the type F-16 is missing in Yemen."

At first when translating this, I could not figure out what the Arabic word eef meant, until I realized it was just a transliteration of the letter F. Heh.

The Anguish of Muslims

The NY Times has opined that it is wrong to cause deliberate anguish to millions of Muslims by drawing Muhammad (here):

Some of those who draw cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad may earnestly believe that they are striking a blow for freedom of expression, though it is hard to see how that goal is advanced by inflicting deliberate anguish on millions of devout Muslims who have nothing to do with terrorism.

Won’t I be causing deliberate anguish on those Muslims simply by declaring I will never convert? What would these people be saying to Galileo? “You have caused so much anguish among devout Christians, Galileo, for going against the doctrine of the Church.” Isn’t that about what we would expect them to say?

And don’t let that word “deliberate” fool you. I am pretty sure Salman Rushdie didn’t set out to cause deliberate anguish among millions of devout Muslims, but he got a fatwa put on his head all the same.

Lying Scumbags!

Seymour Hersh, whom I don’t like, has accused Obama, whom I don’t like, of lying about the killing of Osama bin Laden. See here. Hmm. Whom should I trust? Decisions.

On Hersh’s telling, the burial at sea was pure fiction, a claim I’m inclined to agree with. Beyond that, though, he insists that the Navy Seals killed a man who was ill and who put up no fight. In other words, we murdered him. He insists that torturing people didn’t lead to the intelligence that led to bin Laden, that it came from someone who just walked in hoping to get the reward money. One of the last sentences in the article – “[Obama’s] principled stand on behalf of the proposed nuclear agreement with Iran says much” – is one of the reasons I don’t like him. Hersh is another useful idiot who insists that Iran is not one of the most disgusting regimes in the world, but is just misunderstood. No, we understand Iran all too well, and Hersh is the one who doesn’t understand.

Islam and the Left

I don’t know what I can say on this topic that I haven’t already said, but the topic keeps coming up, so let me post some random thoughts.

• Does anyone on the other side actually have the least glimmer of an idea of what I and many others are concerned about? It is hard to believe that even though there have been plenty of us who have been trying to educate the left since 9/11, our efforts have been a complete waste of time. There are still many people living in a bubble who seem to understand nothing. Check out this post to see what I mean. It concerns a number of writers who objected to a prize to be given to the murdered Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, but some of them just could not stomach such business, and so they wrote letters of protest. What they are saying shows that they understand nothing.

One of them said, “All this is complicated by PEN’s seeming blindness to the cultural arrogance of the French nation, which does not recognize its moral obligation to a large and disempowered segment of their population.” This person neglects to add that many of these “disempowered” people are horribly reactionary and, as such, maybe deserve to be disempowered. Isn’t it just possible that the blindness is on his side and not on ours?

• Does Pam Geller hate all Muslims? How about Bassam Tibi (see here)? Prove to me that she hates him. As I’ve said before, the anti-Muslim bigotry that allegedly exists among conservatives is hatred of the Muslim right. I don’t see it extending to the Muslim left, except in a philosophical way. That is, they question whether such people are genuinely Muslim since they aren’t interested in killing non-believers. Anyway, the left should hate the Muslim right, too, not because they are Muslims but because they are on the far right.

• Suppose Pamela Geller is the most bigoted person ever. It still remains true that she is opposing people who tend to be very reactionary.

• Having spent so much effort to create a secular society, do these people understand that they are now dismantling it?

• I’ve been re-reading Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, and it strikes me that he described a parallel phenomenon there: a few people with little influence who understood that a big collapse was coming against a large number of other, more established people who were in denial about it. In that case, it was a financial collapse, whereas in this case it is a cultural collapse. One woman quoted in the book said it was easy to foresee the bursting of the bubble, but hard to know when it would occur (footnote on p. 95). With respect to an Islamist deluge, we not only don’t know when it will occur, but also the extent of the damage. Will it be confined to certain regions in the West (for example, Bradford in England) or to inner cities? Or will all of society succumb? Or will our elites figure out what is going on and change course in time?

• Supporting the Muslim right is the stupidest thing the left has ever done. As many have pointed out, if the Muslim right gains power, leftists themselves will be killed. The Nazi-Soviet pact was stupid for a similar reason, but it has been justified as giving the Soviet Union time to build up its forces before entering the fray of World War II. I doubt that that was its purpose, but what can possibly be said in favor of the left’s current policy?

• Insisting that the Constitution doesn’t protect “hate” speech against Muslims, because it is likely to incite them, is simply giving a green light to Christians and other groups to act the same way.

• There is nothing to stop Muslims from going further, from threatening people merely for resisting conversion to Islam. Then what will the appeasers do?

• In her book Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here, Karima Bennoune quotes a liberal Muslim who says that it is up to God to deal with people who insult Islam (p. 98). Isn’t that the attitude that we should be rewarding? Isn’t that the way that liberal Christians would react to insults to Christianity?

• For that matter, when leftists tell us that the cartoonists insulted the religion of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims, isn’t that a stereotype? Isn’t it a stereotype to think that all of them felt insulted and would approve of the killers? And isn’t it likely that those who were most insulted are also on the far right and are sexist and homophobic as well?

• No one in America should like the regime in Iran. Most Americans won’t like it because of the takeover of the American embassy and the hostage situation that lasted until Ronald Reagan became president. And leftists shouldn’t like Iran because the new regime killed many leftists and because it turned way to the right on social issues. Yet, leftists persist in liking Iran, in seeing it as some kind of victim that deserves respect. Why should anyone respect this position? Leftists think of themselves as smart, but this is just plain stupid.

• The anti-Israeli movement within academia keeps making the news, but is there any movement within academia that is anti-ISIS? It seems that there isn't, but isn’t that in itself repugnant?

• Norway has dumped its anti-blasphemy law (here), though whether this means anything as far as the Counter-Jihad is concerned remains to be seen.

• At the beginning of World War I someone said that the lamps were going out all across Europe and wouldn’t be re-lit in his lifetime. Presumably, he meant that Western civilization was headed toward another Dark Ages. It would be a time of little learning, barbaric and violent power struggles, and just plain general upheaval. Well, I say he was an optimist. Things weren’t quite so bad, though they were bad enough, but a century later, we can say that Western civilization is still around. However, we are now looking at not just a return of the Dark Ages, but an invading force that will impose alien values on us. We are looking at the loss of our culture, and if we lose it, we will never get it back. Our opponents never talk about this. Do they understand that that is what worries us?

Rich People’s Leftism: Grammar Edition

This item about a professor of English composition at a community college who didn’t want to mark down on grammar because it is the language of the rich and powerful is typical of Rich People’s Leftism. They say they want to help the poor, but they also want them to know their place, namely at the bottom. Because that is what refusing to teach good grammar to poor people will do for them. It will keep them at the bottom.

Let me add that while the person at the link talking about this thought it would “blow your mind” with its stupidity, in fact this idea has been around for quite a while. It is talked about in Christina Hoff Sommers' book Who Stole Feminism?

Elizabeth Fay, a feminist writing instructor at the University of Massachusetts, tells about a student she calls Minnie, a young working-class woman from Puerto Rico who lived with her divorced mother. Minnie sat sullenly through her classes, occasionally asking angry questions and being “confrontational” in conference sessions. When the course was over, Minnie filed a complaint that she had not learned any writing skills in the course.

The professor replied as follows:

Minnie’s complaints rested on three main points: she was given no model essays to emulate; she was not given directive commentary that would have shown her how to rewrite; she was given no formulae for each particular essay genre. In other words, she was denied constraint, she was asked to think on her own, and she was given the opportunity to give and receive peer feedback without an intruding master voice.

Sommers continues:

Professor Fay’s analysis of Minnie’s grievance is complacently self-serving. It “silences” Minnie by treating her as someone who prefers “constraint” and a “master voice” to liberation. Professor Fay, who is not listening to Minnie, accuses Minnie of refusing to listen: “She made it clear that notions of multiple voices and visions, notions of gender politics, notions of student empowerment did not touch her need for the proper style, the proper accent, the Doolittle makeover she had signed up for.”

But Minnie hadn’t signed up for voices, visions, and gender politics; she had signed up for a course in English composition. She wanted her essays corrected because she wanted to learn to write better English. That is not an unreasonable expectation for a writing course. [p. 101]

Sommers' book was published in 1994, so this nonsense has been going on for quite awhile, but this episode is all the more remarkable because the hostile student is an “Other,” someone from the Third World who actually didn’t buy into the leftist rhetoric, but who simply wanted to learn how to write.

I have complained on other occasions (here) about English composition classes. Maybe it would be a good idea at big universities if there were writing classes in the sciences or in business school which everyone could take to satisfy the writing requirement. Presumably, instructors in those divisions would not waste students’ time with this nonsense and would simply teach students how to write.

More on Sleeper Cells

I talked about them the other day (here). And now it seems that there may be potentially hundreds or thousands of recruits for ISIS (here). Does anyone on the left want to acknowledge this, or do they feel so guilty about the sins of the West that they don’t care if it is destroyed?

The Poor, the Left, and False Consciousness

The other day, I pointed out that Bernie Sanders was going to betray poor people if he followed his environmental instincts and pushed for gas prices to rise. A liberal critic said I was naive and insisted that the conflicting goals I perceive Sanders to be caught in (between helping the poor and helping the environment) isn’t even an issue in environmental circles. The implication was that I am way off base, but my suggestion was that environmentalism is pushed by rich people who have no knowledge of what poor people go through with respect to transportation.

I expected him to come back and say that plenty of poor people support higher gas prices, but he didn’t. Let’s say that there are such people, though. What would this prove? It would prove nothing other than that they are wallowing in false consciousness.

False consciousness was a concept invented by Marxists to describe those poor people who refused to accept Marxism, the idea being that they weren’t willing to push for what was in their own best interests. Now that the Soviet Union is dead, this argument looks awfully weak, but the concept certainly has merit on its own independent of its Marxist roots.

Here is an example of false consciousness. In my isolated part of rural Ohio, I know plenty of liberal and leftist professors who complain about the lack of good restaurants in our neck of the woods. It hasn’t occurred to them that they have pushed for regulation of business, that small businesses find regulations much tougher to deal with than big businesses do, and that restaurants are generally small businesses. There is a reason why we mostly have franchises of the big chains, since they are better able to deal with all the regulations that these professors have demanded.

Here is another example. I have frequently complained about the adjunct situation in academia and how it reflects badly on tenured leftists. However, this isn’t the way that most adjuncts feel. They seem to feel that the situation is someone else’s fault entirely. It’s the fault of right-wing administrators, for example, despite the fact that most administrators come from the ranks of academia and are on the left. Or it’s corporate America’s fault, though why they are to blame is not exactly explained. It has even been blamed on the war in Iraq, the reason being that all that money could have been going to them. It will be impossible to get through to them that if it hadn’t gone to the war in Iraq, it is very unlikely that taxpayers would have given it to them. The truth is that these people simply don’t want to point the finger of blame at tenured leftists, because they were taught not to do that. And it would never occur to them to say that the many billions piled up by the likes of Harvard and Yale should go to them. No, somehow corporations should be willing to cough up some money. Or else taxpayers.

To get back to my point, poor people who want the price of gas raised, thus hurting themselves, are exhibiting false consciousness. If you disagree, explain why not. Saying that false consciousness applies only to poor people who don’t accept Marxism is petty since I will just say that no matter what you want to call it, they are acting against their own best interests.