I Want a New Left

Is There Any Reason to Believe This?

Here is an article by Brendan O’Neill, who tries to be even-handed between the left and right about Sweden. That is something to cheer about, but I’m going to nitpick here. He claims that “there aren’t more rapes in Sweden than in any other European nation: it’s just that Sweden does more to encourage women to report all sexual assaults.” Sorry, but it is liberals and leftists pushing this line, and they were in denial about Rotherham until the news broke. (I read an account a few months ago – I can’t remember where – of someone in Britain being told about trafficking in Rotherham and being shown something published by people allied with Nigel Farage. He said he was immediately scornful, but then a few months later the story finally appeared in the Times and the Guardian.) Also, we know that the authorities in Cologne initially didn’t want to report on all the assaults that happened there on New Year’s Eve of 2015, until social media forced them to.

My point is that the authorities and the mainstream media are not to be trusted because they will cover things up (in order to prevent the rise of Islamophobia, but the greater effect is keeping liberals and leftists ignorant). This book is mostly about Norway, but presents a much darker picture than O’Neill does. And it is all the more believable because it comes from a woman who is clearly a feminist.

Resistance!

I’ve occasionally called the Counter-Jihad the Resistance. Now leftists are calling their opposition to Trump the Resistance. But here is an article discussing a different sort of leftist Resistance: artists who are trying to digitally reconstruct artwork destroyed by ISIS. (And check out the video at this site.) I heard some undergraduates discussing this topic the other day, and while they hated Trump (or at least one did), they all knew that Turkey was not a country that one ought to visit these days. Good for them, but I will continue to think of leftists as ISIS supporters (see here) unless they make it clear that they are not.

Adjuncts

I keep meaning to write about adjuncts, and I keep putting it off. Ok, it’s time to get down to business. The reason I haven’t written about it is that nothing is going to change.

1. Nothing is going to change in terms of the adjunct situation. Colleges and universities will continue to use them, that is, to exploit them. I say this even though the Chronicle of Higher Education recently published an essay condemning the situation. Why does this mean nothing? Because twenty years ago a book was written by a leftist, Cary Nelson, deploring the situation, and nothing changed then, so why should anything change now?

2. Nothing will change as far as the adjuncts’ perception of the situation goes. These are loyal leftists, and this is a problem for which the left is to blame, so don’t expect much insight here. Adjuncts haven’t been trained to blame the left and instead have been trained to blame everyone else. Accordingly, they have and will continue to blame all sorts of people, organizations, and groups that have nothing to do with the situation. The average taxpayer isn’t to blame. Corporations are not to blame. The military is not to blame. And even if they were, the horrendous indifference of tenured-left faculty members concerning their plight, which is blameworthy in its own right, should be condemned; but it won’t be. Moreover, those aging faculty members who keep teaching – thus taking up a professorial slot that could be used to hire an adjunct – because they like teaching should be chastised, but they won’t be. No, this is an internal problem of academia, which is dominated by the left. It has nothing to do with outsiders, but is solely a matter of how money in academia is distributed. A look at the endowments of the richest colleges should prove to anyone that there is plenty of money sloshing around in academia. How it is distributed is the key, and any leftist should, though today for some reason they cannot, see that it is maldistributed.

3. Nothing will change as far as conservatives are concerned. Despite the fact that the adjunct situation is the best gift the left has ever given to the right, conservatives will fail to exploit it. It is true that Glenn Reynolds recently wrote an essay on the topic in USA Today (see here), and that is all to the good. But those on the right should be doing this constantly. Think about all the wonderful lessons that can be gleaned from this situation.

• Exploitation can take place in non-profits just as much as in for-profit enterprises.

• Those on the left are just as bad at redistribution as those on the right.

• Those on the left can be callous about the exploited.

• Accordingly, capitalism isn’t to blame for exploitation, and talk of greedy capitalists can be tossed into the rubbish heap of history.

The adjunct situation could have been brought up during the last election as a way to show voters how worthless leftist thinking is, but it wasn’t.

Probably, then, nothing will change.

Hurray for Marine Le Pen!

She was in Lebanon and refused to wear a headscarf when she went to meet the Grand Mufti, so the meeting was canceled. See here. Good for you, Ms. Le Pen. Unlike those feminists who want to wear a headscarf as a show of solidarity for Muslim women, you have stood up for your values. And to those pathetic feminists, I say that you’re only showing solidarity with conservative Muslim women. Are you sure you want to do that?

Cut Their Funding from the Federal Government Now

At the University of Washington in Tacoma, the writing center has declared that American grammar is racist. See here. First of all, this doesn’t help the student who wants to learn to write. I am against any politicizing in writing courses, whether it’s from the left or the right. Such courses should be teaching writing and nothing else, and politicizing them interferes with the teaching of writing. And teaching them that the rules are arbitrary constructs set down by white racists is even worse. But second, it’s just white bashing. Every language has its rules, and that applies to languages developed by black Africans as much as those developed by whites. One may say that white bashing doesn’t hurt whites since they are already too privileged to be hurt, but it creates an atmosphere in which race relations are soured. Blacks come to see everything around them as racist, and white racists get angry and justify their racism by the reverse racism that they see “egalitarians” practicing. It’s counter-productive.

The Saddest Thing about Human Existence

What is the saddest thing about human existence? This was a question posed on Quora Digest (here), but before I get to the answers, let me suggest some.

1. The poor will always be with us (from Jesus).

2. Life is, among other things, nasty, brutish, and short (from Thomas Hobbes).

3. Life’s a bitch and then you die (a silly saying I first heard a couple decades ago).

4. We’re here for punishment (my own version of the previous one; see here).

5. All causes are lost causes since any win is probably temporary, given that there is no guarantee that future generations will value the win or have the strength to preserve it (just ask Obama).

No one actually gave any of these answers. Instead, some could not resist injecting their politics into it. One person gave a long answer that basically amounted to the claim that humans, if they aren’t dirt poor, spoil the earth and should die. This reminds of the fellow who gave a TED talk on elephants (his name is Allan Savory, I think). He and some other greens had convinced themselves that in a certain part of Africa, the environment could not sustain all the elephants that were there, so they began killing some of them off. But the environment then deteriorated, so they had to kill even more off. After a large number of elephants had been killed, they finally figured out that the environment was perfectly capable of sustaining lots of elephants, that the environment and elephants had had a symbiotic relationship with one another that had worked just fine until these perverse idiots had come along.

The same thing can be said about this greenie. Despite what he says, there is no suffering if we mine rocks or even chop down trees, though there may be plenty if we don’t do those things. Environmentalism has become a religion, and those of us who are “secularists” with respect to it look on in amazement at what these people believe.

More on Harrison Ford

A video has now been released of the Harrison Ford incident (see here). There are three views of it. The first doesn’t show enough to show any evasive action he may have taken, and the third is too blurry to tell much of anything. The second, however, shows that from about 12 seconds to 20 seconds he has either slowed or stopped his rate of descent because he sees the jet. This is what anyone would do, and this is why I said (here) if you had a hundred incidents like this, only one would have resulted in an actual crash. And even if he had crashed into the plane, it looks like the pilots would have been most at risk and not the passengers, especially the ones in the back.

WSJ: What the ...?

Today’s Wall Street Journal tells us that some states are raising gas taxes to raise more money. They have a chart showing which states have the highest and which the lowest gas taxes. The taxes are expressed this way: ¢23. Hey, people, the cent sign comes after the number. Like this: 23¢. Sheesh. Maybe you’re confusing it with the dollar sign, which comes before the number?

Edward Said’s Unintended Advice: Don’t Be a Multiculturalist

I’ve long been puzzled by Edward Said’s book Orientalism. It attacks the most enlightened Europeans of the past couple centuries as though they were horrible people. He praises them not at all for taking the baby steps toward multiculturalism that allowed so many today to become much more enlightened multiculturalists. But Said talked as though they were nothing but Nazis. Think about the Spanish conquistadors. They killed a lot of Indians, enslaved some of them, destroyed their religions, and burned a lot of their books. That was pre-Enlightenment. When the European imperialists of the nineteenth century came along, they were much kinder by comparison (though a lot of us today wish they had destroyed Islam). And the artists and writers and scholars who took an interest in the Orient (which we call the Middle East) were quite enlightened by the standards of previous centuries. Presumably, they were also more enlightened than the average citizen of their countries, who probably had zero interest in the heathen lands. But none of this cuts any ice with Said. Why?

Let me give an analogy here. Say that you lived in England in about the year, say, 1700 and that everyone around you hated the French. You, on the contrary, rather liked them. You traveled to France, you learned French, you enjoyed meeting French people, you wanted to live in Paris, etc. For this, you were scorned by most other Englishmen. (A phrase invented later to describe their xenophobia is that “the wogs start at Calais.”) Now imagine that long after your death, some French writer decides that you were nothing but a terribly smug Englishman who did his best to ruin France. Furthermore, this writer does not talk about all the English people you knew who hated the French. Instead, he singles out you and others like you for his hatred. This is the perverse project that Said set himself, except that he talked about the Middle East rather than France. And I could never figure out why he was so upset at the Europeans who were the most enlightened of their era.

But now a glimmering of light has appeared in the form of this essay by Steve Sailer. There are plenty of interesting insights in this essay, but for me, its main value is in explaining why Said hated them so much. Sailer sees Said as basically a conservative – indeed, a redneck – whose catchword is, “Don’t come around here no more.” He resented the knowledge that the Orientalists had gathered about the Middle East, for he followed Michel Foucault in believing that knowledge is power. He believed that the knowledge of the Orientalists “made possible the Western political ascendancy over his homeland (which had culminated in the Zionist confiscation of his family’s house in Jerusalem).” He resented the fact that they made the Arab and Muslim worlds seem rather alluring so that they engaged in sexual escapades while traveling there. Accordingly, he did his best to make the West dumber about the Middle East so that they couldn’t dominate it. In that he probably succeeded. And of course he paid no attention to the actual racists in Europe because they had no real interest in it, in being a part of it, in participating in any sexual tourism, etc.

But Said also inadvertently offered advice to anyone who was paying attention, which is simply, “Don’t be a multiculturalist.” After all, why be a multiculturalist if someone a century from now, living in the area for which you are doing your best to show respect, is going to impugn your motives in the harshest possible terms? (It’s easy enough to imagine a Yazidi writing a book condemning today’s multiculturalists.) Better to stay home, to refrain from learning foreign languages, to squelch your curiosity about others, and so on. Because this is the way most people in the Middle East regard Europe: they have no curiosity about it (or so I’ve been told).

Of course, today’s multiculturalists think that a different lesson was to be learned from Said: be as sensitive as possible to people from the Middle East, don’t judge them by our standards, remember that they have been oppressed by us Westerners, never ask them to adhere to our mores but rather demand that we accommodate ourselves to them, etc. The damage done by this man (or rather by his legions of Western admirers) is already severe and will unfortunately continue to grow in the future.

Go East, Young Man

Hungary’s government has announced that it is willing to accept immigrants from Western Europe who are fleeing its liberal policies (see here). I’d go myself if I were young and unattached.