I Want a New Left

Denial and Global Warming

The other day I observed that the issue of global warming is such that both sides think the other side is in denial (though whether the warmists know that that is what we believe about them is doubtful). The warmists think we skeptics are in denial because they think we are in denial about the science. Here are a bunch of ways the warmists are in denial:

1. They are in denial about the way they have politicized just about everything, including science. It’s true that some scientific topics have no political consequences, like the mass of an electron, and so can’t be politicized, but global warming certainly can be. This isn’t a claim that can be settled simply by doing a laboratory experiment. It requires massive amounts of data about weather conditions now, and it requires us to figure out what the conditions were hundreds of years ago, which can be quite controversial. There are rumors of data being changed, of data not being supplied to outsiders, and so on. So, it is easily politicized.

2. They are in denial about all the failed predications they have made, including the pause in warming. Despite these failures, they still think we ought to heed their warnings.

3. They are in denial about the relevance of the claims in the 1970s that there was global cooling. What they are implying with their current claims is that the scientists back then were way, way wrong. (Why? Why did they screw up so badly? This hasn’t been explained.) And if they were wrong then, why not now as well?

4. The elites are in denial about their own actions, which suggest they don’t really believe that it’s happening. If they did, they would live different lifestyles. For example, Obama could have skyped into the various climate conferences, but he jetted there instead, as did all the other attendees. No skeptic found this persuasive.

5. They are in denial about alternative sources of energy. Wind and solar are nowhere near able to replace fossil fuels, but nuclear could. However, they are in denial about this, too. If global warming is such a severe threat, then lesser threats become tolerable, like the threat from the waste resulting from nuclear power. Yet, environmentalists continue to think we should avoid nuclear power, even though it would reduce our carbon footprint enormously.

6. They are in denial about how their advocacy for the remedies they are proposing tends to compromise their advocacy of the “science.” That is, it’s not as though they are saying, “We hate these remedies, but we will all just have to put up with them.” No, they want these remedies, whether there is warming or not. And that makes their pushing for the science just a little suspect.

7. They are in denial about their own anti-science stances. While leftists insist that the right’s general refusal to accept global warming shows they are anti-science, the left’s refusal to accept what IQ scores say about race shows they can be anti-science, too.

8. They are in denial about the way that science works. It’s unlikely that science this complicated is going to be settled anytime soon, plus a “consensus” isn’t the way that science works.

9. They are in denial about the Climategate scandal, which if it had happened to conservative scientists, they would have accepted.

10. They are in denial about the money. It is their side that has the money, not the skeptic’s side. No mere corporation or even a group of them can compete with all the money flowing to climate researchers from governments.

11. They are in denial about their characterizations of skeptics. They insist that they are in the pay of the oil companies, which isn’t true, and which even if it were true in some cases, still isn’t true in most. This is nothing but stereotyping, which leftists claim to hate.

12. They are in denial about the way they use events to “prove” global warming is happening. They use unusual events like hurricanes or a hot spell to show it’s happening, whereas a cold spell or the lack of hurricanes they just discount as mere weather that is not to be confused with climate. Or worse, they take it all to mean that there is warming, though logically it all could just as well show that there is cooling.

13. They are in denial about peer review, which is much less reliable than they imagine. They are listening to no one but the elites on this point, even though they say they like to listen to people at the bottom.

14. They are in denial, as leftists, about what leftists in the humanities are saying. The postmodernists are denying that there is objective truth, which means that they implicitly deny that global warming is an objective fact. As far as I know, the warmists have never taken the postmodernists to task for spreading a message that makes people less willing to trust science.

Short Items

What Leftists Should Be Doing about White Supremacists

The genuine white supremacists – and I don’t mean those who voted for Trump for economic reasons, but are now called such by leftists – make a big deal out of what they see as blacks’ low intelligence. I think what they are seeing is something different, namely the bitter fruits of the bad decision that American blacks made when I was young to eschew doing well in school because it was “acting white.” After all, if you don’t do well in school, what are your options? You can do low-level work (like being a janitor) or engage in crime (and if you are female, you can have a baby very early and go on welfare). These are not exactly helping blacks get off the bottom rung.

What leftists should be doing is insisting that blacks stop thinking that doing well in school is acting white. First, that’s just shooting oneself in the foot, and second, it’s not even especially true since it is Asians who are the ones who do well in school. Just destroy that education-hating subculture that blacks have created for themselves, and leftists will go a long way toward undercutting the white supremacists.

 

The NBA and Privilege

A coach in the National Basketball Association, which is dominated by blacks, has complained about white privilege (here). Of course, the coach himself is white, so why doesn’t he resign so a black coach could take over? But there is a different point I want to make, one that is not usually made. This is a league that seeks out those who are not just athletically gifted, but also those with height privilege, a privilege I lack. (In most countries of the world, basketball is very much a second-class sport behind soccer, a sport that allows shorter people to thrive.) I refuse to feel guilty about a privilege I have when asked to do so by people who have a privilege I don’t have.

 

Philosophy Hiring at Hamilton College

Reader Mark Spahn brought this item to my notice about a philosophy job at Hamilton College. Whoever is hired must ensure that one’s students “gain an understanding of structural and institutional hierarchies based on one or more of the social categories of race, class, gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexuality, age, and abilities/disabilities.” In other words, leftists only, please, as the Powerline blog puts it.

The window of opportunity here is that they mentioned class. Class these days is the poor stepsister in identity politics. It is mostly ignored. One could go a long way toward making all the leftists in academia feel uncomfortable simply by noting how little diversity there is in academia in terms of class background and how pathetic most liberals and leftists are these days in terms of being sensitive to poor people.

As for academia generally, I went to a panel discussion today at Kenyon College (where my wife teaches and where I have on occasion taught), and one of the panelists was Eugene Volokh, a law professor who has strongly defended the first amendment against the idea that it contains exceptions for hate speech. The reason it is possible to invite such speakers is because of the strong presence of right-wingers in the political science department. It’s true that they are Straussians, and I think their views on Plato are way behind the times, but I still enjoy having them on campus. So, not all is lost in academia. Yet.

 

Women Given Permission to Drive in Saudi Arabia

Let’s give credit where it’s due. Maybe the ultra-conservative wave of Islam that is sweeping the world – helped astonishingly enough by the West’s leftists – will give up its ultra-conservatism on its own. Realistically, I don’t expect much more than this, and changes like this happen much slower than changes here in the West going the other direction.

 

Political Hypochondria

I once saw an article in a newspaper (which I wish I had saved) about hypochondria. It was written by a hypochondriac who got medical people to list the worst possible outcome for trivial symptoms. I can’t remember exactly, but I think for sniffles it was prions eating your brain. It was actually a hilarious article because these were one in a million possibilities that they were talking about.

We need a similar concept for politics. Again and again, we are assured by leftists that the latest Republican president is a Hitler, only to find out afterwards that he wasn’t anywhere close. The left actually seems to believe that all Trump supporters were motivated by racism, that America is crawling with white supremacists, etc.

 

Open Borders, the Zeroth Amendment, and Rational Debate

The so-called zeroth is based on a saying carved into the Statue of Liberty about how America welcomes poor people who have been oppressed and are yearning to be free. Since all Americans either are immigrants or are descended from immigrants – I’m including even those Indians who insist that Indians have been here all along, because science says they are wrong – we are all committed to the zeroth amendment. The devil, though, is in the details. Those of us here should be allowed to have control over those details, but those in favor of open borders simply call us racist, thus shutting down all rational debate. But when there are lots of poor people here without jobs, why bring in more poor people? When some potential immigrants clearly want to destroy everyone else’s freedom, why should we let them in? When people are coming in illegally so that the situation is out of control, we do we need to accept this? These are the questions that can be asked about the zeroth amendment, though again, rational debate with many people on this subject is impossible.

Let me add that I generally like foreigners and immigrants. I draw the line at people who plan to kill me or stick a gun to my head demanding that I convert to their religion. I don’t think that makes me a xenophobe or a racist.

 

Leftists Are Now as Stupid as Christian Fundamentalists

Reader Mark Spahn just now sent me this item, from which we learn that leftists believe that Islamophobia is white supremacy (or as I would say it, white supremacist). They said this at a protest against an Iranian who is an ex-Muslim. How an Iranian counts as a white supremacist is beyond me.

I remember the days in my twenties and thirties when I would get together with atheist, agnostic, or secularist friends, and we would chortle away at the stupidity of the things Christian fundamentalists believed. Those days are gone, never to return. I just can’t do it anymore because of the stupidity that I see on the left (which I used to think of as smart). Lots of us have been re-thinking our earlier judgments against fundamentalist Christians (and even worse people, like white nationalists), not necessarily in terms of accepting their beliefs, but in terms of accepting them as political allies. The other day Mark Steyn wrote the following (here):

Last year I spoke to dozens of women who had either been sexually assaulted themselves (in Cologne and elsewhere) or had their daughters assaulted (in public swimming baths) by “refugees.” None were “right-wing”; almost all were liberal and thought of themselves as such. Yet a significant proportion told me they were considering voting AfD because every other party denied there was any issue here, and were insistent, as are the likes of Herr Gabriel, that you can't even talk about it.

AfD is Germany’s “far-right” party. One has to wonder why the near-right isn’t addressing their concerns. But anyway, this stupidity on the left can’t last. Either so many women and gays will abandon the left that they will be forced to change if they want to retain any credibility with women and gays, or the left will just sort of dwindle away into nothingness as either the far-right or Muslims take over.

My Summer Vacation!

Heh. I couldn’t resist that title. As my most loyal readers know, I took the summer off, my idea being that rational argument is not getting very far these days, so I wanted to try and get a handle on (among others) the topics of denial and unconscious desires for suicide. (See here.) I was not trained in psychology, so I didn’t get very far. I found a few things on denial, but as far as I can tell, none of what I read concerns objective evidence. It’s all subjective. It’s not as though there are, say, five surefire signs of someone’s being in denial. No, it’s nothing other than someone’s saying someone else is in denial. But what if (to raise one problem for this business) two groups each say the other is in denial? As far as I know, the specialists have nothing to say about such a situation and how to decide which side is right, yet that is what is happening with the issue of global warming. (The warmists say that the skeptics are ignoring the science, while the skeptics say that the warmists are ignoring the politicization of science by the left.) It’s all subjective.

For example, take this book. Nearly all of the examples that the author gives of people being in denial I agreed with, but there was one I didn’t: the dispute between Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. The author thought of Anita Hill as the one who genuinely exposed Clarence Thomas as a harasser, but there are lots of people who disagree. Let me relate an anecdote, and while of course anecdotes aren’t data, I’ll explain in a bit why I think it’s important. At the time of that dispute, my wife worked two part-time jobs, one in a museum and one in a restaurant. The museum was filled with well-educated white women many of whom were from wealthy backgrounds, while the restaurant had a much more diverse group: both men and women and people of various races whose only thing in common was that they were poorer. At the museum everyone believed Anita Hill, and at the restaurant, everyone believed Clarence Thomas. Why do I say this anecdote is important? It’s because it’s very likely that the author is plugged into what well-educated white women believe and not what lower-class nobodies believe. Ditto for the media. So, as far as I’m concerned, this one is still up for dispute, and it may never get resolved.

Are there scientific studies of denial? I didn’t find any, though I didn’t look too hard for them, either. If anyone knows of any, let me know.

Meanwhile, it just seems that rational argument has gone out the window. As a liberal writer has noted (here), his students say things like “as an X....” No one can challenge that rationally, except possibly another person who is an X. Let me digress and note that in a democracy, people who “argue” like this can end up severely disappointed by elections because they think they are winning so many debates with people, only to find that those people were not convinced at all.

Meanwhile, there is this post from Maverick Philosopher (hat tip to Mark Spahn; I ought to read Maverick Philosopher a lot more than I do, but I get too wrapped up in other things). His argument is that sometimes, when one’s opponents are giving nothing but bad arguments, it is reasonable to question or impugn their motives. This reminds me of a discussion I had about a year ago (here). I had suggested I would vote for Hillary if someone could explain why her supporters hated the religious right but thought things would go well by allowing in immigrants who were ten times worse than the religious right. One person took up my challenge, and during the ensuing exchange of comments, I had to educate that person (as I usually do) on what Muslims had done to the left in Iran back in 1979 (namely, that they destroyed it while killing tens of thousands of leftists in the process). My opponent’s response was:

Was there no action by any leftists to attack or drive out the Muslims? Were the hands of the leftists entirely clean and free of blame for the attack against them?

I responded to this in a rational way – pointing out that I had not heard of anything that leftists had done to provoke Muslims and that in any case the Muslims had murdered people from many other groups (like the Kurds) besides leftists.

When I look back on it now, I realize this was a mistake. I don’t know if I ought to have questioned his motives, but I should have said something like the following: “You’re sick, and you need to see someone about this.” Or, “You’re like a battered wife who is always defending her man, no matter how much he beats her.” Or maybe, “What did Malala do to provoke some Muslim to shoot her?” What the question showed, I think, was that my opponent regarded the proposition that Muslims are never in the wrong as so basic and obvious (or alternately that its negation was so abhorrent) that any evidence to the contrary must be tainted somehow. Most leftists already accept this proposition when it comes to disputes between Muslims and Westerners, but I never expected a leftist to accept it when the dispute concerned non-Western leftists and Muslims. After giving one of the responses suggested above, I should have then said I was ending the conversation because it was obvious that there was no evidence that I or anyone else could present that would change his or her mind.

Anyway, I was not trained for non-rational debates, yet that apparently is what it takes these days when dealing with leftists, especially those who are Islamophiles. It will take a while for me to adjust to this new world, if I ever do.

The New Ignorance, Again

Nearly a year ago, I wrote this post on what I call the new ignorance. According to the people infected with this malady, slavery was invented in America, Islam is a religion of peace (and in fact the very name Islam means peace), freedom of speech includes the concept of restrictions on hate speech, etc. A few others have occurred to me lately. For example, it is believed by these people that saying certain things in itself counts as violence. This then allows groups like Antifa to use violence “in return.” Needless to say, under this type of reasoning, Antifa’s own speech does not count as violence.

Another example is the insistence that there is “systemic” racism in America against blacks. This is ridiculous. If there is any “systemic” racism, it is against whites and even Asians (or maybe especially Asians), in the form of affirmative action. Along with this view is the view that America is teeming with white supremacists, although the definition of white supremacist being used seems to be nothing other than "voted for Donald Trump."

Sci-fi writer Sarah A. Hoyt suggested a new one yesterday (here), that roads get built only under socialist or socialist-leaning governments. She doesn’t say so, but what seems to underlie this view is that libertarianism is a system that is identical to anarchy, or if not that, that it degenerates to anarchy very quickly (and of course such a view would also require believing that roads won't be built when anarchy prevails).

Let me add that this new ignorance flows not from illiterate parents to their children, but rather (as far as I can tell) from our schools. Lots of professors and teachers present their ideas on how the world works, and those ideas have not gone through anything like genuine “peer review” that includes a broad and diverse (in terms of opinions) segment of the population. Instead, it’s a comparatively small group that makes pronouncements on these topics, which then get disseminated to the rest of us via the MSM. By that time, it is too late to demand that these “truths” be debated.

The Left, Root Causes, and White Supremacists

As Republicans have often pointed out, there is a lot of black-on-black crime in our inner cities, but leftists aren’t that interested in dealing with it because they believe that its “root causes” are poverty and racism, and those must be dealt with first. But for the problem of white supremacism, it is somehow different: we must smash it immediately. There is no need to look at root causes, apparently.

Let me suggest that this doesn’t make any sense. White supremacism has sprung up out of nothing. Twenty years ago, it was unknown, so what has happened in the meantime? One answer is that nothing has happened and that the “problem” of white supremacism isn’t even a problem because the numbers are exactly what they were twenty years ago.

Assuming that the numbers have gone up, though, what has happened? For one, ordinary politicians have done nothing to allay people’s fears about the Muslim problem, while white supremacists have promised to fix it. This is especially true in Europe. Here in America, it is less pronounced, but instead there has been an awful lot of white bashing recently, especially of poor whites.

Both of these decisions by liberals and leftists were entirely avoidable. There is no need for secular leftists to champion any religious people, and if they must champion Muslims, they ought to champion the liberals, who want to fit in here in the West, rather than the ultra-conservatives, who want to change things drastically.

As for the white-bashing, that too is entirely avoidable. Calling people “deplorable” was a dumb move on Hillary Clinton’s part, and it may have cost her the election. Likewise, saying that “all lives matter” is racist was dumb. It was said by one black person, and no one else needed to agree with it. Yet, the Democrats decided they needed to support it, and for all I know, it caused a surge in the number of white supremacists. Liberals and leftists have no one but themselves to blame, I am saying. But beyond that, it is ironic that they see no need to look at root causes in this case. Are they afraid of what they will find?

A Nice Essay on Socialism from the “Times” (of London)

Here.

Some Short Items

A Couple Good Articles

Here and here. The first is by a black immigrant from Jamaica who is grateful to be here in America. (I have only read about half of it, but what I’ve read has been enjoyable.) The second argues against the idea of there being such a thing as Islamophobia (hat tip: reader Charles Steele)

 

Why No Conservative Alternatives to Google and Facebook?

People on the right complain a lot about Google and Facebook, but why has no one created right-wing alternatives to them?

 

My Website Is for People Like Hillary

I haven’t read and won’t read Hillary Clinton’s new book explaining why she lost the election. By all accounts, she blames everyone but herself for her loss. (See here for a review that is as good as any.) She “accepts responsibility” for her mistakes, but still blames others for her loss, including Bernie Sanders and (incredibly enough) the media. If you are a self-critical leftist, then you will try to avoid pointing the finger of blame at others, but Clinton seems to point the finger at others at every opportunity.

By the way, if the left were as skittish about bashing poor whites are they are about bashing blacks, Hillary would have never used the word “deplorable” about them, and she actually might have won.

 

Title IX

My wife has observed that the only people who are complaining about revising the Title IX horrors for colleges are Title IX administrators. Heh. A friend who teaches at a small and conservative Christian college told about her Title IX indoctrination session, and it actually sounded worse than what my wife went through at her more liberal college. Our friend was told, for example, that one shouldn’t have nude art in one’s office “because art belongs in art museums.” Tell that to all the rich collectors down through the centuries, especially those who collected before art museums came along.

 

Thinking Without Using Language

This little article asks how we can think without using language. People seem to be divided into those who think this is impossible and those who do it so they know it is possible. I’m in the latter group. There are times when I make very quick and complicated deductions, and I am pretty sure I don’t use language in making these deductions because that would slow me down. Using language comes later when I try to recreate my reasoning.

Speaking Truth to Leftist Power, and Leftists as ISIS Supporters

This interview is with a moderate Muslim from Indonesia, who says that leftists here in the West are all wrong when they insist that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism and that they should stop calling people “Islamophobes” for opposing fundamentalist Islam. His response to the last question of the interviewer is great:

I would guess that you and I agree that there is a far right wing in Western societies that would reject even a moderate, contextualized Islam.

And there’s an extreme left wing whose adherents reflexively denounce any and all talk about the connections between traditional Islam, fundamentalism and violence as de facto proof of Islamophobia. This must end. A problem that is not acknowledged cannot be solved.

Perfect response.

On a related topic, I keep saying (originally here, and just the other day here) we need to call leftists “ISIS supporters,” and originally my idea was that this was the tit-for-tat strategy in response to their calling us racist and Nazis. But more and more it seems that they really are ISIS supporters. See here. Officials in Scandinavian countries want to give their citizens who are returning from the Middle East after having fought with ISIS not ten-year jail sentences, but rather the royal treatment in terms of housing and other benefits. They get to jump to the head of the line, while others have a long wait.

Some Short Items

They Could Replace Confederate Statues with a Statue of This Woman

I don’t give a rip about confederate statues, but I want them to stay up just because I fear what they will be replaced by. See this nonsense to see what I mean (even though it is about renaming a lake and not tearing down a statue). Anyway, here is a woman whom they could put up a statue of, but of course they won’t do it, even though she’s a feminist. Sarah Champion came out with a diatribe against the trafficking of girls in Britain by Muslim men, and predictably she was accused of racism and got fired for it.

 

Interesting Essay on a Fascist Philosopher

Here. I first saw this essay in an excerpt, so I had no idea whom they were talking about, so I guessed they meant Heidegger, but no, they meant someone else, someone I'd never heard of (Giovanni Gentile).

 

“Orthodox Jews Became Less Orthodox When They Came to America”

This reason was given to me several weeks ago as a reason for thinking that the immigration into the West of so many ultraconservative Muslims is benign. Like many things said by liberals and leftists these days, it just seems that they are living in a fantasy world. In particular, they are living in the past.

To begin with, as a result of the spread of Enlightenment ideas during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries throughout the Western world, many people became less traditional in their religious views, so it is no surprise that Orthodox Jews became less orthodox as well. I believe the same thing was happening to Jews in Europe. Moreover, there was immense pressure on immigrants to America in those days to give up the ways of the old country and to become American.

Neither of these two forces has much traction today. The spread of Enlightenment ideas among Muslims reached a peak several decades ago, and now the pendulum is swinging the other way. The Islamic right is rising (as I argued here), and is causing shock waves in many places, not just here in the West, but also in the Muslim world itself and in places like Myanmar and the Philippines. (The only counter-force I’ve heard of in the direction of enlightened values is that Saudi Arabia is considering allowing women to drive cars.) Anyone paying close attention to these things knows that the children of immigrants are even worse than their parents were in terms of wanting shari’a to be imposed here in the West, so it is ridiculous to imagine that somehow this tendency will go into reverse on its own.

Second, leftists have ensured that there is no pressure on immigrants to assimilate since they believe that would be racist, so immigrants are free to keep their values, even if they are antithetical to leftism itself. Moreover, immigrants today can easily keep up with what is happening in the old country, whereas that wasn’t so true a century ago. All in all, this comparison with immigrants Jews from many years ago is just naive.

No Matter What Leftists Think, Muslims Are a Threat to the Left

Let me count the incidents since 9/11:

• The murder of Theo van Gogh

• The death threats against and ultimately the murder of some cartoonists

• The shooting of Malala

• The assassination of Benazir Bhutto

• The trafficking of women in Rotherham and other cities in England, as well as gropings on New Year’s Eve a couple years ago in Cologne. These of course involved Western women. There are lots of women within the immigrant communities who have suffered honor killings or female genital mutilation or simply harassment for being "inappropriately dressed."

• The shooting in the gay nightclub in Orlando

• Countless other events that have occurred within the Muslim world that our media would never tell us about

On that horrible day sixteen years ago, I just never imagined that anyone on the left would be so stupid as to think the attack was about grievances when the perpetrators were clearly not at all progressive and had their own agenda (namely, imposing Islamic law on us). I never imagined that sixteen years later leftists would still be thinking this. And I never imagined that they would think that Muslims were their friends when there was already so much evidence against it. And since 9/11, Muslims have never hid their intentions; they have never hid the fact that they are against the progressive movement. No matter how much leftists try to minimize the threat, no matter how much leftists try to say that they are pals with Muslims, Muslims are a threat to their very existence. Recall that this seems to be true only of leftists here in the West (see here), and that the Chinese have a derogatory word for them (baizuo) because they are willing to tolerate backwards Islamic values for the sake of political correctness.

The left here in the West is suicidal (see here), and that is all there is to be said about their intentions. Naturally, I’ve said all this before, but it is worth saying again today in commemoration of those who died sixteen years ago.