I Want a New Left

The Attacks Keep Coming

The terrorist attack today in London is a reminder that the Islamists show no sign of letting up. Here is a comment on Yahoo about how to end terrorism:

You wanna end “terrorism?” Then ask WHY they hate our govts. Destabilizing their govts and societies by supporting dictators, regime change operations, interventionism, invasions & occupations, raids & drone strikes killing civilians and bombingthechit outta their countries for 25 years might have something to do with it.

They don’t just hate our governments. They also hate individuals, like Salman Rushdie and Theo van Gogh. What did they have to do with any of these actions? Nothing, of course. So long as we have idiots like this who believe the attacks are all about grievances, and so long as such people wield so much veto power over any sensible analysis and policy on terrorism, we will continue to have terrorism.

Can’t Sleep Because of the New President? I’m Not Impressed

This article in Yahoo tells of how lots of liberals are so worried about democracy in America that they can’t sleep at night. I only read a few paragraphs, but to them I say, I haven’t slept very well since 9/11, thanks to your pathetic reaction to that horrible event and thanks to your abjectly sick and suicidal love affair with ultra-conservative Muslims. Plus, I'm worried not just about America, but the entire Western world. So, I just don’t care about your inability to sleep.

Pages, Please, Rather than “Load More” or “Load More Comments”

One of the annoying things about the Internet these days is the way that certain sites don't show all comments at once. Ok, maybe that is cumbersome, but the practice used to be (and still is on some sites) to put them on separate pages. Then, if you wanted to find a comment again, and you knew it was on page 20, you could find it fairly easily because the pages would be listed and you could just click on page 20. Now many sites say something like "Load More" or "Load More Comments." If the comment you were interested in didn't appear until after you had clicked on "Load More" for six times, say, then to find it again you have to click it again six times. What a bother. The same thing can happen if you happen to click away from the site because a commenter has posted a URL of something interesting; going back to the original site can mean clicking a bunch of times on "Load More" until you get back to where you were.

Also annoying is the practice of showing not the oldest comments first, but the newest ones. However, the newest ones are responding to other comments, so it is pointless to look at them until you've seen the older comments.

Are the people designing these features actually users? That is, do they themselves actually look at people's comments when they surf the Internet, or are they just guessing about what people want? I'd be interested in hearing why they've made the choices they've made.

The State of the Humanities Today

I recently received the schedule of talks for the upcoming International Congress on Medieval Studies, to be held at Western Michigan University (in Kalamazoo) on May 11-14. There are 574 sessions, generally with three papers to be read in each session. I didn’t look at the titles of the papers, but I did look at the titles of the sessions. There were 32 that were in some way or another feminist, 27 that smacked of postmodernism, three on gay-related topics, two on race, and another 12 on general leftist topics. This makes 76 total, which is 13% of all the sessions. Keep in mind that these are just the sessions I am talking about and not the individual papers. A leftist theme can be introduced into any of the papers at a session, so 13% is probably a severe understatement of how much leftism has permeated academia. In addition, there are probably severe penalties for anyone suggesting that the West is best or that Muslims are anything but oppressed. For example, the title of one session is “Remembering the Crusades,” which seems innocuous enough, but the subtitle is “A Representation of Otherness.” In other words, the West is evil because it didn’t respect the “Other,” never mind that Muslims are hardly models as respecters of the “Other.”

Actually, I was rather surprised at how few of the sessions dealt with race and homosexuality as I think the numbers were higher in previous years, but I wasn’t counting before this year, so I don’t know. Then again, there are very few blacks who show up at this conference, while there are quite a few women, so it’s not surprising that feminist themes are so prominent. One of the few blacks who did show up – and I haven’t seen him in a while – is from Africa. (I met him in a pick-up soccer game.) This, too, is in keeping with trends because academia is hungry for blacks, but not many blacks in America value education at all, much less an advanced degree, so there is a higher percentage of foreign blacks in academia than you might expect. Foreign blacks have not been afflicted by the idea that studying hard is “acting white,” so some of them do have the degrees necessary to be successful in academia.

There are some sessions that are probably leftist-free, like those on military themes (and possibly also those on technology themes). One intriguing session is titled “Occult Capitals of Islam,” but I have a feeling that it will be denounced as encapsulating those pernicious ideas of Orientalism since it seems to represent the Muslim world as exotic, and that is evil.

But one topic was of course missing from all the sessions, namely the plight of the poor. Academic leftists no longer have much interest in the poor, since many of them come from wealthy backgrounds. Poverty just means nothing to them. Four years ago I reported (here) on how a big name had condemned this gap in people’s interests, but nothing has changed since then.

If I were young today, I doubt I would go into the humanities. It isn’t very interesting, it’s filled with all kinds of things you can’t say (even though they are true), and it is so dominated by leftists that any perspective other than one approved by the left will be condemned. Who needs it?

A Sad Truth about America Today

Tonight I heard that even among conservative Christians who homeschool their children, there is pressure on young girls to go into a STEM field. The parents I talked to didn't like it because they felt their daughters should be free to follow their interests. But our culture has been encouraging girls to go into math and the other STEM subjects for several decades now, and it isn't working very well. On the other hand, lots of young women major in art history, while few young men do. These are the result of free choices, and no one should care, except that feminists are bothered by one of these and not the other. And why are they bothered? Perhaps they think that there are still barriers to women who want to go into math, but those ended ages ago. And if they still exist, they certainly don't exist for young women in very expensive liberal arts colleges. Yet there too there are few women majoring in math. Maybe feminists fear that if young women and young men make different choices, then people will conclude that women and men are basically different, which they do, and therefore the overthrow of patriarchy is doomed, which it isn't. Patriarchy in the West was basically destroyed some while ago, and indeed one could argue that it is matriarchy that rules our colleges. The insistence that women who claim rape must be believed and that no other evidence need be looked at is one piece of evidence for that claim, and there is a lot more evidence that could be produced (though I won't bother at this time).

Anyway, if you can't get girls interested in math after several decades of prodding them into doing so, it's probably a lost cause.

How Do You Pronounce Hitler’s Father’s First Name

His name was Alois, and I’ve never known how to pronounce it. A look at this site suggests that maybe others don’t know how to pronounce it either, since one person pronounces it with two syllables, the last of which puts the two vowels together with the sound we make in boy or toy, and the others pronounce it with three syllables: a-loo-ees. Other sites aren’t any more helpful, so I still don’t know.

Being Anti-Islamist Without Being Anti-Islamic

This report on Bulgaria tells an interesting story about how the Bulgarians, including those who are Muslim, don’t want Muslim immigrants coming into their country, because they see them as forcing a particular type of Islam onto everyone. Yes, exactly.

Omar Abdel Rahman: Maybe He Wasn’t So Bad After All

This report in Wikipedia says that he planned to bomb, among other New York City targets, the headquarters of the United Nations. Heh. I hadn’t known. If only we could get the Islamists to believe that their real enemy is the UN and not the U.S.

This Is a Little Unfair to Obama

Yes, he once said we couldn’t drill our way to lower oil prices, but I’m sure he didn’t come up with that crazy idea on his own. (See here.) I remember back around then a liberal friend who believes in the peak oil nonsense repeating what an “expert” had said about fracking, namely that it would lower the price of oil by 25 cents a decade hence. In fact, it did a lot more than that, but that "analysis" is what liberals and leftists were relying on when Obama made his silly statement.

English Soccer and English Literature

I had never heard of anyone named Shakespeare before other than the famous playwright, but the new manager of Leicester City is named Craig Shakespeare. I had never heard of anyone named Wickham other than the George Wickham in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, but Crystal Palace has a player named Connor Wickham. I had never heard the name Cattermole before except as the name of a very minor character in Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night, but Sunderland now has a player by that name. How strange!