I Want a New Left

The Left Is Leaving Feminism Behind

I talked about this a bit yesterday, but I want to expand on it today. The impetus for this observation is seeing how feminists dealt with the revelations about New Year’s Eve in Cologne. Instead of recoiling in horror and admitting that they had been wrong not to have warned women about immigrant men, they seem to be sticking with an “anti-racist” stance rather than a pro-women stance. Now it could be that masses of feminists are angry about the events of that night, but their voices aren’t being heard. However, so far the voices seem to be against women.

Accordingly, the left is leaving feminism behind. (Oddly enough, feminists are either leading the charge or are gung ho about the change.) What I mean by this is that it is less and less true that feminism’s issues will get any traction with the average leftist. I don’t pretend to know when this process first began, but it is well underway now. When I think back to the strident feminism I encountered as an undergraduate in the late 1960s, which got even more strident by the time I was in grad school, it’s clear that something went wrong. Feminists back then thought they were declaring timeless truths on how women should be treated, but instead there are all kinds of leftist barriers that have been set up that get in the way. Here, for example, is an article about two doctors who are trying to bridge the gap between ordinary American culture and the North African practice of female genital mutilation. They are doing this because they believe that simply condemning female genital mutilation is “culturally insensitive.” At this point, all feminists should be saying, “So what” followed by, “Drop dead.” But we now know that it is very likely that some feminists will endorse it. And during the 1990s, we saw feminists look the other way in connection with Bill Clinton’s sexual assaults.

Now let me observe that feminists are not the first to have the left leave them behind. Here are two other groups:

Working-class white males. In 1960, the main focus of the left was on the working class, and it was assumed that this meant white males. Yes, there were also women and blacks who were part of this group, but white males were the bulk of the workers on whom the left focused. By 1980, a mere twenty years later, every white male was considered privileged. Today the left thinks that poor people are either minorities or single women; apparently, they have never heard of coal miners in West Virginia.

Jews. Jews had a brief time in the leftist sun. They were mostly ignored, as far as I know, before the Holocaust, but ever since the Six Day War of 1967, they have been vilified. Most liberal Jews actually go along with this.

Then there are Asians. Have they ever been darlings of the left? They certainly are now not regarded as victims, even though they are discriminated against in admissions at elite Eastern schools. They are simply too successful for the left to bother with.

Now this article suggests that blacks’ position, as far as the left is concerned, may be in decline and that “in 30 years, it very well may be the case that African Americans are no more of a significant interest group than Vietnamese Americans or Norwegian Americans.” This is partly because there are now so many different ethnic groups in America that blacks are just one among many. It is also because immigration from African countries like Nigeria “complicates the meaning of ‘African American’ as a concept, in that these communities are likely to maintain a certain distinctiveness that renders ‘black’ devoid of clear meaning.” Incidentally, there was a riot in Birmingham, England, back in 2005 between blacks from the Caribbean and Pakistanis (here). Not many leftists commented on it, but two who did sided with the Pakistanis.

Apparently, no one’s place in the left is secure, no matter what one might think. The current agenda can be replaced by a different one.

Odds and Ends

Today I heard a liberal talk rather wistfully about George Bush’s presidency, the reason being that the possibility of a Trump presidency scares her to death. Last year sometime I heard a different liberal hope that the Republicans would nominate Trump because he thought it would be a sure winner for the Democrats. But be careful what you wish for. If nominated, Trump may actually win.

So, why did the liberal media give Trump so much coverage last year? Sarah Hoyt (here) suggests that it was because he was basically part of the media. I’m not so sure. I thought it was because they thought he was so far out, so obviously politically incorrect that they would have a jolly good time destroying him. Instead, their coverage seemed to fan the flames and drew in lots of new supporters. Commentators keep expecting him to self-destruct, but it hasn’t happened so far.

Meanwhile, I was hoping that feminists would eventually come to their senses and demand a change in the Islamophilia of the left. But so far that hasn’t happened. It is entirely possible, then, that we are seeing the left to some extent ditch feminism. And it isn’t just due to the issue of Muslims. Think about the way that Germaine Greer was treated recently regarding trannies. Then there is this essay by a woman describing herself as a rape survivor, who complains about transgender bathrooms. There was a time when feminists would do anything for rape survivors, but that isn’t necessarily the case anymore (and that changed in the 1990s, thanks to their devotion to Bill Clinton). See this, also.

What would leftism be like if feminism were to be ditched by the left? Feminists would become like the white working class, that is, people to sneer at, but to appeal to when elections come around only to be forgotten right afterward. Well, it’s a little hard to imagine this, simply given that academia is a solid part of leftism these days, and given that so many people in academia are feminists. But who knows what leftism will be like in thirty or forty years?

And let me close with a bit of nonsense. A friend who teaches at a somewhat less than stellar college tells me that he has a student who is majoring in journalism who never reads the newspapers or watches news on television. She watched her first newscast the other night as a result of an assignment he gave her. Isn’t this rather strange, or is it that she gets all her news from the Internet?

Pathetic Penalty Kick

Here. Instead of doing the simple thing, which is to blast it into a corner so fast that the goalie can’t reach it, the player (from Zimbabwe) taps it to a teammate, who unfortunately is so surrounded by opponents that he messes up the kick.

By the way, the goalie was already out from the goal by at least a yard before the kick was taken, so the referee should have insisted that it be done again.

Another Victory

Professor Click at the University of Missouri has been fired. See here. Of course, she has the right to appeal, so who knows what will happen? Anyway, my big question is, What made her think she could act the way she did? Well, the way people behave at our college campuses made her think she could. I know someone who after we went into Iraq in 2003 gave his students an assignment that was very partisan against the war. Some of the students complained, and he was forced to cancel the assignment, but that he thought he was allowed to do it is the important thing. Likewise for Prof. Click. She thought she was allowed to do what she did.

A Way to Annoy the Islamophiles

Listen to “oriental” music. I’m thinking of classical music that was composed for the sake of evoking in the listener the Muslim world (also other non-Western parts of the world, but ignore those). Here are some:

In a Persian Market

Bacchanale

Turkish March

Maybe also this and this.

And you could add this and this, even though they are rock and not classical.

The idea is that the Islamophiles think this kind of music is racist. See here as an example of what I mean. Here is a quote:

The first type of musical Orientalism was the Turkish Style which, according to Jonathan Bellman, “evolved from a sort of battle music played by Turkish military bands outside the walls of Vienna during the siege of that city in 1683.” He remarks that few had heard it and virtually no-one remembered it, and that “what became understood as Turkish Style was thus almost entirely the product of the European imagination.” It clearly gave pleasure, but also a sense of superiority over the Turks. Why did the Turkish Style arrive as the first example of Orientalism in music? Was it because the Turks had dared to try to conquer the West? The successful lifting of the Siege of Vienna ended Turkish expansionism.

Notice that the author talks as though, from the standpoint of the Europeans, the Turks had “dared” to try to conquer the West. This is sheer anachronistic fantasy on the part of the author, who obviously knows nothing of the history of Islamic conquering and its attempts to conquer the West. But it is typical of the Islamophile. The West is always in the position of the conqueror and never of the conquered. Tell that to the Spanish for 800 years up till 1492. Tell it to the Hungarians, who were subjected to Turkish rule for over a century. Tell it to the Byzantines.

If Europeans had not ever had Turks or Muslims try to conquer them, it is true that they might have thought, “How dare they try to conquer us.” The reality is that Muslims frequently tried and several times succeeded in conquering Europeans. Accordingly, I doubt that any European in 1683 was thinking, “How dare they conquer us superior Europeans.” It would be more along the lines of, “Here they come again” or “When will we shake off these pagans?”

Notice also that what the Islamophiles find reprehensible is not the siege of Vienna, but that Europeans misrepresented Turkish music, and in doing so, probably wanted to use the music to give them a sense of superiority over the Turks.

Anyway, one can go on and on about the sins of the Islamophiles. They ignore the Muslim world’s misrepresentations of us, they ignore Islamic imperialism and slave-trading, they ignore the sexism and homophobia of the Muslim world, etc. My point is to listen to this music as a way of getting back at the Islamophiles, of refusing to accept their nonsense of how awful we Westerners are and how wonderful Muslims are. So what if the music does not represent actual Middle Eastern music? What’s ironic is that the representation that the Islamophiles have of Muslims in no way is a correct representation, either, and if they actually had to live among them, would soon enough come to hate them.

I’m Skeptical

This article from Britain’s Guardian newspaper reports that a number of adults, including women, formed a ring in order to abuse children. (This is a story from a year ago, by the way, but it was just linked to by Instapundit.) In particular:

On some occasions, the adults threw parties and played card games to decide who would abuse which child.... In interviews the victims described how they were abused in front of one another and other adults. Some of the abuse involved children’s toys, including Barbie dolls.

Didn’t we hear about this kind of thing back in the 1980s in this country, and didn’t the stories all turn out to be false? I am willing to believe in the occasional story about a woman who sexually abuses children. I once knew a woman who said her own mother had abused her (and she said this at a time when no one was accusing mothers of abuse, just fathers). But a ring of abusers that includes a number of women? When has there ever been such a ring? I would like to know about how the testimony of the children was obtained.

The Oscars, Ha!

According to this article, 62% of Americans don’t give a rip about the Oscars. Recall that a few weeks ago as news seeped out of how blacks were excluded from the nominations, I announced that I was boycotting them, but then added that I always boycotted them. Apparently, I’m in good company if a majority of Americans don’t care about them at all. I always found them tedious, plus the idea that a prize needs to be given out every year is suspect. What if all the entries for a given year are just plain weak? Academic departments get themselves in this kind of mess when they give out similar prizes each year (best beginning Spanish student, for example). Instead, they could give out prizes only when appropriate (outstanding beginning Spanish student); that is, they would be given out only when certain very high standards had been met. Prizes like that would have more meaning.

Philosophers, Finance, and Skepticism

“[Philosophers] are professionally employed in the business of questioning what we take for granted; they are trained to argue about the existence of god(s), the definition of truth, the redness of red, the meaning of meaning, the difference between the semantic theories of truth, conceptual and nonconceptual representations ... Yet they believe blindly in the stock market, and in the abilities of their pension plan manager.” From Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (p. 290; ellipsis his)

Iranian Communists Who Fled Iran

I keep harping on what happened to the left in Iran after the Shah was evicted because no one else wants to mention it. The left has for no obvious reason forgotten it, and the right for no obvious reason does not want to bring it up, not even when doing so last summer might have scuttled that ridiculous treaty our president got us into. But here is a brief reminder from William A. Jacobson, who runs Legal Insurrection. His essay is about being in the Soviet Union when the U.S. beat the Soviet Union in the 1980 Olympics. But he was there because he was studying Russian at a language school:

The Pushkin Institute was almost all third-world students from communist or almost-communist countries. Lots of East Europeans, Vietnamese, Africans, and even some Iranian communists who fled the Islamic revolution in fear of their lives. [my emphasis]

Yup. Exactly. Say it often, please. The Iranian Revolution was a total disaster for the Iranian left. It destroyed it. It destroyed feminism in particular.

In addition, there is no guarantee that the left here in the West won’t be destroyed someday by all the Muslim immigrants. And that includes feminism and gay liberation. Any leftist who isn’t thinking about how to prevent this from happening is an idiot. See here for an essay I consider to be normal leftist thinking. The writer, a gay man, talked about having a lover from Morocco who fled to the West because of the conditions there and “the last thing he wanted was Islam following him to Europe.” Exactly.

Some Short Items

Wicked!

The cartoon at this site shows Bernie complaining to Hillary that he had earned those delegates that were awarded to her by winning in New Hampshire, and she replies, “It’s called socialism, Bernie.” Of course, he could reply that socialism isn’t designed to help out the more powerful (in this case, Hillary), but the weaker. But I would argue that that is exactly what it does. Once the government gets its hands on your money, there is no telling where it will go, and since most bureaucrats who get to have a say in where the money will go come from wealthy backgrounds, they can easily steer that money to themselves and their friends. This in fact is what happens to government grants to academics and artists. So, this cartoon is true to life.

An Imam Who Is Against ISIS

This article reports on an imam in Malaysia who is concerned that the propaganda of ISIS is infecting Muslims in Malaysia, and he wants the government to do something about it by setting up a “Counter Narrative Ideology Centre.” Apparently, countries in the Persian Gulf already have these sorts of centers. Yes, there actually can be moderate Muslims who work against the extremists.

The Science of Global Warming

This little essay pretty much expresses what I believe about the science of global warming, namely that our climate is way too complex for us to model it at the present time and expect accurate predictions. This hasn’t stopped the true believers from likening us skeptics to Holocaust deniers, insisting we are in the pay of the oil companies (I wish!), and even demanding jail sentences for us. Not even a pause in the warming of more than a decade has stopped this nonsense.