I Want a New Left

The Left's Sketchy Views on Free Speech

Leftists both

1. Insist that hate speech is prohibited under the concept of free speech (or possibly that it is legally prohibited), and

2. Insist that restrictions that don’t involve restricting someone’s speech in fact are restrictions on speech.

In other words, they want to both restrict it and expand it, for their own purposes, of course. See here for Glenn Reynolds’ response to the first point (assuming it is a legal matter). An example of the second point is when the academic Steven Solaita received a job at the University of Illinois that was later rescinded because of remarks he had made on social media against Israel. Leftists thought this was a restriction on his right to free speech, while those not in the grip of the left’s ideology thought that his free speech had not been restricted at all. Rather, it was a restriction on his free speech together with his hopes of getting a certain job, which is different.

Incidentally, even if leftists are correct to think that free speech should be curtailed for those with power who engage in hate speech, who determines who has power? The left’s views on who has power are way out of date. Look at any leftist discourse on black powerlessness, and the obvious item missing is affirmative action. That poor blacks get to use affirmative action while poor whites don’t is part of the issue of who has power and who doesn’t, but it is ignored by SJWs who want to restrict the rights of whites to say whatever they want.

Is the Academic Job Market Getting Better?

Decidedly not. My wife’s department (art history) is running a search. It is late in the academic year to run a search, the job is just a one-year job rather than tenure-track, and it involves teaching four introductory classes with just one extra class of their choosing. And let’s face it, rural Ohio might as well be in the middle of nowhere. Nevertheless, fifty people have applied. Some have loads of experience and come from elite schools. Sadly, one has to make brutal choices in this situation. Anyone who doesn’t have a Ph.D. is dropped off the list. So is anyone who is not in art history. So is anyone who screwed up in some minor way (as did one candidate who previously taught here for a year). The person who gets the job will be someone who is no better than many who didn’t get the job. They just happened to fit in with the personalities of the people already here.

And just for your amusement, one candidate described herself as a “proud woman of color.” But her photo on a web page doesn’t bear this out. It seems she is saying this only because she is of Arab descent.

Machine Translation and the “Economist” Magazine

In the past I would occasionally highlight a bad translation from Google Translate of something in Arabic. I look at bbcarabic.com a couple times a day to translate the headlines, just to keep in practice with my Arabic, and I will often run it through Google Translate to test how I did. I haven’t noticed anything horrible lately, but I hadn’t really kept track. According to the latest Economist, it’s because they are using better programs for their translations. Actually, the bad translations I’ve run into lately are mostly due to names cropping up – like “assad,” which both means lion and is the name of Syria’s leader – rather than to getting the basic grammar wrong.

Nevertheless, their article on this topic begins with an odd paragraph:

Arab newspapers have a reputation, partly deserved, for tamely taking the official line. On any given day, for example, you might read that “a source close to the Iranian Foreign Ministry told Al-Hayat that ‘Tehran will continue to abide by the terms of the nuclear agreement as long as the other side does the same.’” But the exceptional thing about this unexceptional story is that, thanks to Google, English-speaking readers can now read this in the Arab papers themselves.

If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought that Al-Hayat was an Iranian newspaper and that because it was in Arabic, therefore the language of Iran must be Arabic rather than Persian. Instead, Al-Hayat seems to come from London (see here), and the article could just as well have quoted from the Chinese Foreign Ministry rather than the Iranian one. It’s somewhat confusing.

Soccer: Harry Kane’s Superb Penalty Kick

Tottenham’s Harry Kane shows the world how to take a penalty kick (here starting at about 2:30, especially from 2:40). It was low and in a corner. It nearly skimmed the post on the way in. This should be an easy thing to do for players at this level of the game, yet one hardly ever sees it done. Usually, the ball is nowhere near the corner, and if it goes in, it’s because the goalie has guessed wrong. Admittedly, that happens fairly frequently, but why not put the whole business beyond doubt by simply aiming it accurately into a corner?

Pure Propaganda from the Left

This piece from Cosmopolitan would have it that the people from the right who are protesting the recent blitz from the media celebrating Chelsea Clinton are all men. I haven’t been following this business very closely, but it didn’t take me long to find a female pundit on the right who had weighed in, despite what liberals and leftists think. Here is an essay from Michelle Malkin on Chelsea Clinton. Hey, leftists, it’s not just men.

Actually, the left has never really figured out what to say about women on the right other than that they are basically trampled on by the men and that any who become pundits must take their marching orders from the men. Anyone who has ever taken the time to read people on the right, without blinders, knows perfectly well that this is wrong. (Try Sarah Hoyt’s blog, for example.) Perhaps this explains the horrible way that they treated Sarah Palin. It was perfectly obvious that she didn’t fit into their narrative about women on the right, so she had to be destroyed fast.

More broadly, I would recommend that the left not lie about what the right is like because then when people actually take the time to see what the right is like and they find something different from what the left has said, they are not likely to trust leftists again.

Hope for Philosophy Majors

Mossad is hiring, and they are looking for people with liberal arts degrees. Philosophy is the first major listed. See here.

Some Short Items

The Pope in Cairo

What an idiot! He’s not going to have any special security there. See here. This is like those female members of our news crews who went there during the Arab Spring with heads uncovered, as though they were going to London or Paris. Sure enough, one of them got assaulted.

On the other hand, if the Pope gets assassinated, maybe the next one will have more sense when it comes to Muslims.

Mass Transit and Mass Crime

With the news that a large group of assailants jumped over turnstiles in the BART system in Oakland, California, and robbed lots of people, I have to ask why liberals and leftists think that using mass transit is so wonderful.

More on Reputations

Here. Samantha Power and Obama could have condemned the Armenian massacre, but they didn’t. And the liberal media didn’t blame him for it. See here for my earlier post on reputations.

Give Credit To Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren

They both insisted that Ann Coulter should be allowed to speak at Berkeley. Good for them.

The Death of Robert Pirsig

Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, has died. Although he made those of us who are scholars in Greek philosophy look bad for denigrating the sophists, I still enjoyed his book.

More on Turkey

In the spirit of being self-critical, I want to discuss some objections to what I wrote about Mark Steyn and Turkey earlier today (here). I have been thinking of Turkey as another casualty in the phenomenon that I call the rise of the Islamic right. That rise began quite a while ago, but certainly it was obvious once Ayatollah Khomeini took over in Iran. And because the left, which dominates here in the West, has no interest in opposing the Islamic right and even tries to help it, Turkey’s drift toward Islamic fundamentalism is another sign that things are not going well.

Anyway, let me give voice to some dissenting opinions. These come from the comments of this column, which itself was inspired by the same Mark Steyn column that inspired me to write the post previously mentioned. Oddly enough, I assume these are people on the right. Here goes (and I am paraphrasing some of the objections):

1. “The results of the referendum hardly suggest that the Islamic right in Turkey is outbreeding the secularists.” This is a good point since the results were much closer than I expected (given how much power Erdogan has), and I have no answer for it. And as another commenter noted, the birth rate even among the pious has fallen off a cliff. Still, as I pointed out in my own post, the birth rate was high enough so that Turkey outbred the main countries in Western Europe. So, that may have been enough to win the election or at least to make it seem as if the election had been won.

2. “Kemalist Turkey was never very progressive.” I for one certainly never thought it was, but it did offer secularists a chance to thrive. Also, the switch from the Arabic to the Latin alphabet was eminently sensible since the Arabic alphabet is geared to the Arabic language, whose emphasis is on consonants, while Turkish has scads of vowels. Even the Latin alphabet couldn’t accommodate them all, and they had to invent a new letter, the undotted i, to get by (here).

3. “This suppression of pious Muslims had to be finished and the situation of the ‘flyover’ country and its rural population had to be improved.” In a secular democracy, everyone has the right to choose whichever faith they like. Of course, that may mean that some highly religious people are going to be frustrated because they can’t impose their will on everyone else (for example, restaurants will stay open during the day during the month of Ramadan), but the upside is that if the pious change their minds, they will greatly appreciate the freedom to choose something different.

4. “France changed from a parliamentary-centered to a presidial democracy, so why not Turkey?” France is officially secular, while Turkey is heading in the direction of a theocracy.

5. “This was done not for the sake of a theocracy, but for the sake of dealing with the Kurds.” Here’s an actual quote:

I mean imagine if Scotland had about 30% of the population of the UK and growing. And they were feeling their oats and all the kids were wearing kilts, painting their faces blue, and talking about William Wallace all the time. And oh yeah, Ireland proper is growing just as fast and they want to be reunited with their brothers in Scotland as one people in one nation.

Someone else responded that the Kurds are a convenient enemy that Erdogan can use to oppress everyone else.

6. “Personally I have no objection to Muslim countries being run by Muslims.” So long as they stay in their own countries, I am not too bothered. It’s that so many have left the Muslim world in order to come to the West, where they make a lot of trouble. There were, after all, big pro-Erdogan demonstrations in Europe among Turkish immigrants.

Most of these don’t bother me, but the first one is rather puzzling. I don’t know what to make of it.

Public Relations and the Right

The other day I suggested (here) that Israel is terrible at public relations. What should be a great selling point for them – that they treat women and gays well – is something that everyone on the left ignores, and now someone is even accusing them of doing so only for the public-relations benefits it offers. In fact, the right itself here in the West isn’t very good at public relations (or marketing, whichever you want to call it), either. In a previous post (here), for example, I asked readers about where to find a careful refutation of the left’s insistence that the workingman was exploited during the Industrial Revolution. I was offered a good suggestion, but my larger point is that what should be found nearly everywhere can be found almost nowhere. That is, everyone knows what the left’s view of the Industrial Revolution is. It is that at the moment when capitalism got started, it exploited the workers (and therefore capitalism is evil). What is the right’s view? I’ve been reading right-wing books, articles, and blogs for twenty years, and I still don’t know. Is it that:

A. The workers were exploited, but it wasn’t capitalism’s fault.

B. The workers weren’t exploited; that is just a myth promoted not by the workers (who had no voice), but by rich aristocrats who were against the new rich who made their money by running factories.

C. There isn’t enough evidence to say one way or the other whether the workers were exploited, but capitalism had started long before then anyway.

D. Better to be exploited than to be unemployed.

Take your pick. Or suggest something else. The point is this: I don’t know what the standard answer is. I don’t even know if conservatives and libertarians have different answers. Keep in mind that the left’s view is basically a founding myth of leftism. It is what Marx reacted against, and even though identity politics has left Marx behind to some extent, he still gets invoked by many on the left. Accordingly, you’d think that people on the right would want to counter this as strongly as possible, but apparently they don’t.

The same is true for the supposedly imperialistic relations America has with Latin America. While it is not as important as the left’s views on the Industrial Revolution, it is rather important for those of us in this country because it shows how tainted our capitalism is. Well, I can’t even make any suggestions here about answers. Anyone? What is the standard right-wing answer?

That the left is controlled by the rich and not the poor is another fact that the right should be emphasizing. I had to figure it out for myself because I never saw it argued for – or even stated – by those on the right anywhere.

Another example was the Iran deal. I had hoped that some right-wing pundit who was nationally known would have mentioned the facts that (1) the current regime destroyed the left there back in 1979 and (2) murdered a lot of leftists in the process, so why would any leftist want to make a deal with them? Hauling them in front of an international criminal court would be a more sensible response. But alas, no one on the right mentioned such things.

Then there is the failure to take advantage of the adjunct situation. The adjuncts are exploited in academia, even though academia these days is run by the left. Doesn’t that show that exploitation is really independent of capitalism? That’s the obvious conclusion, yet almost no one on the right is pushing this as a way to promote capitalism.

Contemporary Art

I rather enjoy this art, despite what I said several days ago about contemporary art (here).