I Want a New Left

Of What Use Will Unions Be To Exploited Adjuncts?

No use whatsoever. This article from The Nation talks about how adjuncts at Loyola University in Chicago want a union, but realistically, if liberal institutions haven’t treated adjuncts well by now, they never will, and the administrators, together with support from tenured leftists, will thwart them. And even if they don’t, it shouldn’t take a union to get liberal institutions to pay people what they deserve.

The key points about the exploitation of adjuncts are:

1. The exploitation is happening in non-profits.

2. It is happening in liberal and leftist institutions.

3. Those institutions have acted just as callously as corporations have.

4. Tenured leftists have been almost completely indifferent to the plight of adjuncts.

As I’ve said on other occasions, the left is giving the right a great gift. Please use it!

Corroboration! And from the NY Times!

In a recent post, I presented a graph showing what I thought the average Muslim in the world is like politically, and I suggested that the average Muslim was way to the right of the average Republican. This article from the NY Times is a rare look by them at some of the problems that immigrants bring with them to Europe, in particular rapes and honor killings. The article actually acknowledges what I have been trying to persuade leftists of for years, that Muslims countries are “more conservative” than Western countries (and that therefore leftists need to be wary of importing citizens of those countries into the West). The article goes on to detail just how conservative those societies are in terms of their treatment of women; the men from those societies believe that they can take any woman at any time, especially if she isn’t dressed in a burqa, and their expectation is that the police won’t do anything.

Has the West ever been that conservative? Of course not. Like I said, these people are way over on the right.

Anyway, the article talks about how some believe that immigrants need to get training in Western norms; in other words, they need sensitivity training. This is something I’ve wanted ever since the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, though my worries were about religious violence and not rape. It was only after 9/11 that I became aware of the rape problem. Notice that while the article talks about sensitivity training in Norway, Denmark, and Germany, nothing is said about Sweden, the alleged rape capital of Europe. Notice also that when a Norwegian woman who was with the police, Hanne Kristin Rohde, tried to talk about the problem a few years back, she “ran into a wall of hostility.”

Notice that we don’t get to hear who this wall of hostility consisted of. Watch out, conservatives. If the left ever manages to figure out that it needs a lot of sensitivity training for these immigrants, they will write history saying that this wall of hostility consisted of you and not leftists.

A New Law in Illinois

I’m sure my best friend from high school, Chris Drew, would hate this new law, which makes it a felony to film the police. Unfortunately, he’s no longer around.

Update: A reader has informed me that this "new" law is actually from a year ago. Sorry.

Trump and ISIS

Hillary Clinton has accused Donald Trump of helping out ISIS with their recruiting with his inflammatory remarks about preventing Muslims from coming here. Maybe this is true, but this is the sort of thing that liberals and leftists always say when whenever someone says something about the Muslim problem that might be effective. Notice that they never say this about their own attacks on racism or sexism. They never say that maybe they are going too far in attacking racism, that their attacks on racism might actually bring on more racism. But why not?

Anyway, what is disturbing is that ISIS is already doing a great job of recruiting. This doesn’t seem to bother leftists, but it should. We can point to a couple leftist themes that help the recruiting along. The first is cultural relativism. If no culture is superior to another, then there’s nothing wrong with ISIS, despite all their beheadings, throwing gays off of buildings, and selling of captured women into sex slavery. The second is that it is the West that is morally degraded and inferior to the rest of the world. If you’ve been told that all your life, then you won’t be fazed by what ISIS is doing since you will assume the West is doing something worse.

Imagine if in 1936 lots of young people, having heard lots of leftist propaganda, had nevertheless gone to fight in Spain, but for and not against the fascists. That’s what we are looking at today. There are plenty of young people running off to join ISIS, but hardly any running off to fight against them. This has nothing to do with Donald Trump, and everything to do with flawed leftist rhetoric.

Flying Update

I still haven’t soloed yet, partly because so many of my lessons in the last month have been canceled because of bad weather, but also because it seems that although I’m approaching the level of skill needed to solo, I never quite get there (like Zeno's paradox). It’s frustrating.

Sinistralization

Consider the following process. Organizations and institutions that were politically neutral or mildly politicized one way or the other back in the 1950s and 1960s are now way over on the left. Once they have been pushed to the left, leftists insist that the respect that they once deserved still needs to be shown. Call this process “sinistralization.”

One example of this is that of the U.N. When it was first created, it commanded a fair amount of respect, and it was during this period that it gave the ok for the state of Israel to begin its existence. But by the late 1970s, it was so far to the left that it had declared Zionism to be racist. I remember a friend saying that since it was from the U.N., we really had to accept it.

Another example is that of nearly every humanities department in our universities. They have all, with the exception of philosophy, been pushed way over to the left. In fact, our universities generally have been pushed over to the left, as everyone knows. Nevertheless, we are still supposed to respect them, as though they were places where objectivity reigns.

But while sinistralization has mostly affected the humanities in our universities, it has also affected the social sciences, too, as this quote shows:

Jussim explained that within the field [social psychology], those on the left outnumbered those on the right by a ratio of about 10:1. So it meant that even if left-leaning and right-leaning scientists were equal in their bias, there would be at least ten times more research biased towards validating left-wing narratives than conservative narratives. Adding in the apparent double standards in the peer review process (where studies validating left-wing narratives seemed to be easier to publish) then the bias within the field could vastly exceed the ratio of 10:1. In other words, research was becoming an exercise in groupthink. (here)

But to some extent sinistralization has even affected the physical sciences. Now some aspects of science, like looking for the Higgs boson, are completely unaffected by politics. But with nutrition and climate science, where there are many factors that need to be considered, it is a different matter. Those who are interested in getting a particular result can simply ignore important factors; or maybe their study is so expensive it is unlikely that anyone else will try to replicate it, so the temptation to manipulate things to get the results one wants will be high.

Climate science was apolitical when I was young, but it became politicized by the environmentalists, who are predisposed to believe that humans are ruining the earth. Their insistence that global warming is occurring and that humans are responsible is less a scientific result and more a sign of things gone wrong because of leftist bias. It is very doubtful, for example, that the scientific “results” would have been obtained if everything had remained neutral or even if academia had been pushed over to the right.

But here’s the strange thing: leftists actually believe it. Yes, even though at some level they must know that they have perverted the scientific method, at the same time they believe in the results of politicized science. When leftist academics speak among themselves, for example, they don’t talk as though global warming is just a useful fiction for getting other things they want. They talk as though it is actually occurring. It's going to be tough for them when it is finally revealed that it was all lies.

Bacon!

In my last post, I observed that we in the Counter-Jihad needed a symbol for ourselves. I constructed one and suggested another. Charles N. Steele has suggested that we should use an image of a strip of bacon which serves to cross out a crescent moon. I decided that a strip of bacon alone would do the trick.

An image of a strip of bacon has several advantages to it. The first is that few except the enlightened will understand what it means, since having an image of a strip of bacon on your car bumper or t-shirt could just be about bacon, so that any cries of “racist” will be rare, and should they occur, the obvious response is, “I just like bacon.” The second is that it goes after the extremists. One thing that bothered me about the symbol I constructed was that it targeted all Muslims, but a strip of bacon is better since those most likely to be offended are the extremists, who are the ones I want to target, while the moderates won’t care. For all I know, the moderate Muslims are like various liberal Jews I know who like bacon and have no qualms about eating it. The third is, well, it’s bacon. While it’s not my favorite food, I will eat it, especially if it’s crispy.

One disadvantage is that in Britain, bacon looks different than it does here because they don’t cut it into thin strips the way we do. Sigh. I don’t know what it looks like in Continental Europe.

Anyway, I opt for bacon! The Brits (and anyone else who doesn’t cut bacon the way it’s supposed to be cut) will just have to live with it.

Some Short Items

We Need a Symbol for the Counter-Jihad

Or the Resistance, as I sometimes call it. Some idiots at a college in San Diego have taken to wearing Jewish yellow stars, modified slightly by inserting a crescent moon and the word “Muslim” on the inside, in order to protest “Islamophobia” (here). But we need our own symbol, maybe something like this:

Or an x on a crescent moon, which I tried to create but don’t have the necessary skill. Anyway, we need something.

Regarding the Left’s Islamophilia, What Could I Have Done Differently Back in the 1960s?

Nothing. Nothing comes to mind. I was a campus radical when I got to college in 1969, but what could I have done differently that would have changed things? And nothing comes to mind. First of all, I am just one person, and I would not have changed anyone’s mind on my own. I would have needed millions like me to have effected any change. Second, we never talked about Islam. The subject just never came up, and even if it had, it would have been thought irrelevant (which it was for that era). Third, even if we had talked about Islam, I’m sure all we would have said was something to the effect that we wanted Muslims around to counterbalance the influence of all the Christians. The possibility that the left might go so overboard that we’d need to support conservative Christians, or that some of those Muslims coming here might want to turn our country into a theocracy never occurred to any of us. Suppose, after all, I had asked the other radicals the following: “You want to reduce American power in the world. Have you thought about who will step into that power vacuum? How can you be sure that things won’t get a lot worse?” And they will have imagined that the Soviet Union or China will have stepped in, which for them would have been a vast improvement. Talking about the possibility that reactionary theocrats would be the ones to step in would have made no sense to them, since reactionary theocrats were nowhere to be seen at that point.

Fourth, it never occurred to me that leftists would fail to support someone like Salman Rushdie, until I actually lived through it and saw them fail to support him. It shocked me back then, and I still have problems grappling with it. Fifth, it never occurred to me that leftists, who talked of religion as the opiate of the people, would ever support any religious people, especially religious conservatives.

Finally, even if I had anticipated all of these things, I can’t think of anything that would have changed things. Suppose, for example, that I had somehow learned what was going to happen to the left, and so I decided to join the John Birch Society to counteract their future tendencies. What would this have done? Almost nothing. I can just imagine the conversations I might have had with leftists. “Why did you go over to the dark side?” “Because I saw the left’s future, and I didn’t like it. I don’t like leftists who support religious conservatives.” “Well, I for one will never support Billy Graham.” “It’s not Billy Graham you will support, but his Islamic equivalent, and I don’t want any part of it.” Whatever reply they might have at this point would not have made the slightest difference. Either they were already inclined way back then to support fundamentalist Muslims, in which case the rot had already set in, or they weren’t, which would mean nothing since so many on the left, no matter what their previous views, have been swept away by the Islamophilia.

But there are two groups whom I would not have supported in the slightest: feminists and gay activists. I would have told them that I knew what they would be doing in forty years, namely not supporting women and gays in the Muslim world, so I couldn’t see supporting them at all ever.

The European Left Was Stupid

According to this NY Times article, lots of people in Europe are now admitting, privately at least, that Hungary was right to close its borders. Heh. It’s not like they ever wanted to listen to those of us who objected. Their first impulse was to call us names instead listening to reasoned arguments, and that’s what made them stupid. Anyone can make a mistake, and I don’t fault them for their policy, but I do fault them for their resistance to listening to any objections. Nothing less would do than that those of us who objected must be Nazis.

Egypt and the Downed Russian Plane

Egypt is insisting that there is no evidence of terrorism in the crash of the downed Russian plane (here). There is nothing new about this. They maintained similar about EgyptAir 990, which crashed in October of 1999. See this article from The Atlantic. It was pretty clear from the cockpit recording that one of the pilots had decided to commit suicide (not apparently as a terrorist, but because of personal problems), but that wouldn’t make Egypt look good, so they suggested improbable scenario after improbable scenario that had to be investigated. Incidentally, the article says that the suicidal pilot repeated the same thing several times: Tawakkalt ‘ala Allah. They translate this as “I rely on God,” but it really should be the past tense: “I relied on God.” The present would be: itawakkal ‘ala Allah. And this probably makes more sense of what happened. The pilot had taken a risk of some sort, assuming that God would help him out, but when that hadn’t happened, he decided on suicide, saying as he did so, “I relied on God.”

However, although Egypt may have managed to win the encounter with our government regarding EgyptAir 990, it’s a different matter with this most recent crash. ISIS claimed responsibility, and various outside governments have already said the plane was likely destroyed by a bomb on board. So, Egypt’s insistence that there was no terrorism, which means it can’t be their fault, is completely ridiculous and won’t be believed by anyone except clueless multiculturalists.

Do Leftists Have Any Understanding of How Awful Mass Transit Can Be?

See this article , whose title, "City Subways Are a Pervert's Paradise." says it all. So, no, leftists have no idea how awful mass transit can be because the ones pushing mass transit have seldom had to use it themselves.