I Want a New Left

Addendum on Adjuncts

The other day (here), I responded to an academic who insisted that tenured leftists were not to blame for the adjunct situation. He made it seem as though professors, together with the left generally, have no power whatsoever to change things. This is sheer nonsense, and let me give an example of change that was forced by liberals and leftists. This happened in the early 1970s, when feminists and blacks began complaining about the "old boy network" used for hiring and how that network excluded women and blacks. That system worked like this. The chair of a department at some outlying college who needed a new faculty member would call up his advisor from grad school and ask if they had any promising grad students they could recommend. The lucky one, generally a white male, would travel to the college and be chosen, or rejected, without a lot of the fuss that people now have to go through. In order to break the power of white males, the new system required nationwide searches on the part of the employers, which in turn required both employers and job seekers to meet at a big national conference. This in turn meant that job seekers had to prepare formal applications, gather letters of recommendation from their mentors, etc. So, yes, change can happen from within, and it can be implemented by enough professors demanding a change. Tenured leftists could have demanded changes in the way adjuncts are paid, though since that might have required that they (together with many administrators) take pay cuts, we can easily see why it didn’t happen.

Soccer: Not Getting to Host the World Cup Is Not a Tragedy

Despite what some soccer fans (and players) are saying, no, Trump’s travel ban is not a terrible tragedy, and not getting to host the World Cup in the next decade is not a tragedy, either. There are plenty of other, worthier countries that still haven’t hosted the World Cup. Why not let them do so first before we get a second chance? We are currently ranked 30th in the world by FIFA, and of the twenty-nine nations ahead of us in the rankings, nineteen of these countries have never hosted a World Cup. (Of the ten that have, Italy, France, Germany, Mexico, and Brazil have done so twice.) So, let’s give countries like Holland, Colombia, Portugal, and Poland a chance before we greedily try to host it a second time.

Lynne Stewart: Another Clueless Pre-Islamist

Presumably, most of my readers have heard about the recent death of Lynne Stewart, the leftist lawyer who was assigned to defend a Muslim terrorist mastermind, the blind sheik Abdel Rahman, but who ended up in jail herself after having helped him. I have to admit that for a long time I thought of her as a clueless leftist who actually believed that the most sexist and patriarchal men in the world were going to be her allies in defeating patriarchy here in the West. After reading the NY Times obituary for her (here), I realize that that isn’t quite the case, but she is still a clueless leftist. Here is part of what the obit said about her:

In that interview, Ms. Stewart acknowledged that some of her leftist colleagues had questioned whether she should have taken Mr. Abdel Rahman’s case. They told her, she said, that as an Islamic fundamentalist he had long sought the overthrow of the Egyptian government in favor of a religious, authoritarian state that would quickly crush left-wing dissenters like her.

But she agreed to represent him, she said, because she believed that he was “being framed because of his political and religious teachings.” Moreover, she said, she sympathized with Egyptians seeking to end an oppressive government and saw the fundamentalist government as “the only hope for change there.”

Ok, so there actually were people who had pointed out to her that the person she was supporting was an enemy of the left, but she still supported him anyway. Notice that she didn’t simply represent him, but she also supported him. It’s one thing to represent someone if you think they’ve been framed, but it’s quite another to support their cause, which Stewart definitely did. At least, that’s what she said at this time. Later, she said something a little different:

At her own trial a decade later, though, Ms. Stewart testified that she did not endorse the Islamic holy war that Mr. Abdel Rahman had preached, and that she had not intended to help his followers in Egypt.

Right. She both saw a fundamentalist government in Egypt as their only hope, but she insisted that she had not intended to help the blind sheik’s followers in Egypt to set up such a government. Maybe there is a way to reconcile these statements, but even if that is possible, she seems quite confused.

She first of all seemed quite complacent about the plight of women (and gays and secularists) in Egypt as a result of the establishment of a fundamentalist government. Yes, it is sad that there was (and still is) an oppressive government in Egypt, but helping religious fundamentalists who will set up another oppressive government that will kill leftists isn’t exactly the most sensible course of action. Why not help Egypt’s leftists? Sure, they aren’t a lot of them, and they don’t have a ghost of a chance of gaining power (or retaining rule even they did manage to gain power), but one should still support them rather than reactionary theocrats.

She also apparently never considered the possibility that the blind sheik wasn’t just trying to rid the Middle East of American influence, but that he wanted to impose Islamic law here in America. This was the lesson of the destruction of the left in Iran in 1979, together with the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. It was the lesson of the murder of Theo van Gogh, of the cartoonists who were threatened or murdered outright, and of the attack on the gay nightclub in Orlando. It has been a lesson that almost no leftists have learned. The plan of the Islamists is to impose shari’a on us, and sadly the left has responded with appeasement rather than resistance.

Regarding why Stewart decided to support religious conservatives, I have no clue. But more important is that I’ve been calling people like Lynne Stewart the pre-Islamists. Pre-Islamists are those liberals and leftists who are paving the way for a fundamentalist Islamic takeover of the West. The harder versions of the pre-Islamists deliberately and publicly support conservative Muslims instead of liberal Muslims, while the softer versions merely weaken the West with their constant criticisms of it (together with their silence about the flaws of other cultures). Stewart may have been the first hard pre-Islamist to have gained public notice; that is, she seems to have been the first leftist in the West to have supported a conservative Muslim. A perfect flood of hard pre-Islamists emerged on the left after 9/11, with nary a dissenting voice. If she had been the only one, I would greet her death with a sigh of relief, but there are now tens of millions of such people in the West, and my mood is one of gloom rather than relief.

Erdogan’s Opera House

See here. I’m not sure what to make of a guy who is pushing Turkey into a more Islamist direction, and thus presumably away from Western influences, who also wants to build Europe’s largest opera house.

What Leftists Used to be Like

See here for the website of a leftist organization that wants to stop immigration in order to help the environment and the poor. This organization is a holdover from an earlier era, but unlike the other leftists it hasn’t changed its stance on immigration. It was vilified recently by the Southern Poverty Law Center, according to this post by Steve Sailer (hat tip: Mark Spahn). I usually remember changes the left has gone through, but I had forgotten about this one. See also this essay by Ron Unz that was published nearly twenty years ago. It seems that, at least in California, right and left back then were switched around on the topic of immigration, with the right supporting the new immigrants because they saw them as on the right (opposed to abortion, etc.), while the left saw them as destroying their attempts at slow growth.

The left’s support for immigrants, whether from Mexico or the Middle East, is in a way insane because it means either a lot of conservative Catholics or a lot of conservative Muslims will be allowed entry into our country. The left, apparently, loves conservatives, as long as they are foreign. Is this because they expect them to turn into leftists? Well, no, because it would be racist to force them to assimilate, and without any pressure, there is no reason for them to change, so they will stay conservative. Presumably, the day will come when the left realizes it has made a big mistake.

No, Republicans Are Not To Blame for the Adjunct Situation

I pointed out the other day (here) that someone had published an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education complaining about the plight of adjuncts. I suggested that nothing would change, and sure enough, they published another essay from a tenured leftist, who complained that tenured leftists were not to blame and that it was America, and Republicans in particular, that was to blame. The professor in question whined about the decline of unions, etc. (See here for a summary of this argument and here for the actual essay from the Chronicle.) The number of misconceptions that this professor has about what he calls the “levers of power” is large, and time is limited, so I’m not going to bother trying to correct all of them. But here is my basic point. No matter what is going on in society at large, I say colleges and universities are basically run by liberals and leftists, so if adjuncts are exploited, those liberals and leftists are the ones who are primarily responsible. (Saying that people further away from the situation are really responsible is like blaming the exploitation of the workers that Marx complained about on, say, the King of Siam.) No one in Congress or anywhere else is dictating to these institutions regarding how to pay adjuncts (and if I’m wrong about that, then there was plenty of time back in 2008 to 2010 for that to be changed by Democrats), so the blame cannot be shifted to anyone outside of academia. No, institutions of higher learning have made up their own rules about these things, and liberals and leftists have never complained about them or tried to change them.

Furthermore, there is a lot of money in academia (as a glance at Harvard’s endowment should prove), but the problem is that it’s maldistributed (or rather, it’s maldistributed if you are an egalitarian, which many tenured professors claim to be but which few actually are). Once again, there is no reason to blame anyone outside of academia for the plight of the adjuncts.

The professor’s response is that individual professors could not have done much to change anything. This is true, but irrelevant, since professors acting together could have changed things. They could have changed the rules for pay for professors, which after all aren’t written in stone. But they didn’t. Either those rules are just, which doesn’t seem a bit likely, or they are unjust, in which case these professors (who are far more activist than professors from the 1950s) should have agitated for change. But they did nothing.

Mostly, what they didn’t do was to talk about the situation. Even if they couldn’t, either individually or collectively, change anything, it would have been nice to have heard them talking about the situation. But I heard nothing. When it first became clear in the early 1990s that no, there was not going to be the predicted professor shortage that we had been hearing about back in the 1980s and that instead, because of an increase in grad students as a result of those predictions, academia was faced with a massive oversupply of potential professors, I expected a lot of talk about how to deal with the situation. I expected this to be a topic of papers in conferences, of articles in journals, of entire sessions in conferences, and entire issues of journals. Instead, crickets. There was silence. Everyone just went on with their usual academic work, or if they talked about anything else, it was the usual leftist politics with complaints about the plight of women and blacks and the despicable character of America’s foreign policy. (Today, of course, we now have complaints from them about the Islamophobia of the average American.) So, yes, we can blame tenured leftists for not talking about the situation and not concocting solutions (other than telling their undergrads not to go to grad school).

Blaming America or the Republicans or corporation or the military (as one adjunct was foolish enough to do a few years back) is not going to work. That’s because the obvious source of the problem is within academia, and the obvious solution is a redistribution of wealth within academia, but that would be unpalatable for the tenured radical. As I said in my previous post, these are people who are not used to blaming themselves or the left for anything, so even when it stares them in the face, they just can’t manage to do it. Expect, then, that this professor’s answer will be sufficient for all the other tenured leftists.

Will They Protest Against ISIS’s Treatment of Women?

Of course not. I’m referring to those women who are participating in this nonsensical “day without women.” See here for an essay on the subject by Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

And while I’m talking about ISIS, let me repeat my suggestion (here) to call liberals and leftists ISIS supporters, until they do have a march against ISIS. I’m tired of them calling us Nazis, and the tit-for-tat strategy suggests calling them something equally vile. I’ve chosen “ISIS supporter” as the best way to attack them.

Leave America, Megan Rapinoe

Just go away. If you don’t like it here in America, you can go to some other country where you will be happier. (For readers who don't know what I'm talking about, see here and here.) But wherever you go, Megan, watch out for those FATCA rules (see here).

We Will Be Under Shari’a by the End of This Century

As I keep saying. The only question is whether the Sunnis or the Shi’ites will prevail. This item shows how pathetic young people are on this matter. At Georgetown University, an Egyptian woman was invited to speak about how awful shari’a was, and students protested that her opinion amounted to hate speech. (Of course, there was also the confusion, which sadly is usual for today, that free speech somehow does not include hate speech.) If you can’t criticize shari’a, then there is nothing to stop it from becoming the law of the land.

So far, what I am seeing is the left pushing shari’a on us, whether they know it or not, while the right is resisting. Where are the leftists who are resisting?

What Do You Call This Type of Person?

The person in question is a person who puts you into a morally impossible situation. For example, leftists today, if you criticize Islam’s treatment of women, will accuse you of hate speech, but if you do not criticize it, will accuse you of sexism. (Well, actually, no one is doing this so far, though they could, given their principles). Moral squeezer? A contradictorily principled person? Let me note that the word “hypocrite” isn’t right since we usually reserve that term for someone who promotes a principle in words, but not in deeds.

This isn’t the only morally impossible situation the left puts people in. With respect to global warming, if you don’t believe it, you are a denier and are morally on par with Holocaust deniers. But if you do believe it, there are those on the left who, since you accept objective facts, think you are sexist, racist, homophobic, etc.

Needless to say, it is immoral to put people into morally impossible situations.