I Want a New Left

Zulus

I know nothing about Zulus. In the late 1970s, I had a chance to get the autograph of a Minnesota Kicks soccer player, Ace Ntsoelengoe. See here. He was from South Africa, and I didn’t actually care about his autograph, but I wanted to chat with him. I asked him to pronounce his last name, which he did. His name was always anglicized by television announcers to Netsolenkway, but he seemed to pronounce it as oonzolengu. But I also asked him about a former teammate, whom someone had told me had a click in his name. I wanted to hear Ace pronounce the click, which he did. He then said that that player was a Zulu. And he gave me a meaningful look.

Exactly what I was supposed to infer from that look mystifies me. I have no idea what he was getting at. And it’s too late to ask him about it now because he died a number of years ago. Anyway, I bring it up because of the recent troubles in South Africa, which seem to involve Zulus. Maybe some day I will learn what Ace was getting at.

A Plan for Student Loan Debt

Instead of cancelling the debt, as the Dems (mostly) want to do, we should have a special tax on those overpaid college administrators, who are surely part of the problem. Then the money collected would be redistributed to those students struggling to pay off their student loans. (As far as I know, there is not a lot of overlap between these two groups.) After all, it was hiring all those administrators that helped cause tuition to rise.

This is one redistribution of wealth I can get behind!

I do have to congratulate Nancy Pelosi for balking at cancelling the loans entirely. See here. She insists that the prez doesn’t have the power to cancel loans, which she thinks Congress should be doing, and that it’s unfair to those who refrained from going to college because of the cost but now must help other students pay off their loans. Hmm. That almost sounds like she’s borrowing ideas from the Republicans!

Violence in Chicago: You Need To Do a Lot More Than That, Mayor Lightfoot

Here is an article about Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot’s plan to deal with violence in Chicago. It is of course ridiculous, with plenty of buzzwords that add up to nothing. (Empowering perpetrators? They already have too much power. Reclaiming neighborhoods ... by directing resources...? That’s just throwing money at the problem, which has already been done.) And here is a comment from someone at Instapundit named BillyS:

It sucks to be those kids [in the inner city], but you cannot fix the current system without a major upheaval and no one is ready for that now.

Exactly. We need a major upheaval to deal with the situation of blacks killing blacks, but the sort of upheaval we’d need is not at all what people like Lightfoot might imagine. Everything liberals and leftists want to help the situation – like defunding the police – is the exact opposite of what is needed. Basically, we need our elites to discourage blacks from engaging in criminal behavior, and this, of course, is never going to happen. Wanting the underclass to be criminals is what leftists push for, until (of course) they themselves are victimized by it (and sometimes not even then). They think that criminals are striking a blow against the system, when instead they are simply degrading and destroying their own neighborhoods.

Britain, as I understand it, eventually dealt with the soccer hooligan problem by threatening ten-year jail sentences for those arrested for such behavior. It soon enough dried up. The same could be done in Chicago. Simply say that anyone committing a crime with a gun gets an automatic ten-year jail sentence. My understanding is that the Dems don’t want this. (In particular, attorneys general in Democratic-run cities don’t want this; they want to be able to release these criminals back onto the streets as fast as they can.) They somehow think that gun-control laws would help the situation, even though Chicago already has them, yet gun violence still happens.

But regardless of whether my suggestion about ten-year jail sentences would work, discouraging criminal behavior is crucial. We know this will work because it works for Asian-Americans. But there is no Dem who wants to urge such a thing.

BLM and the Elites: Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha!!!

See here. Some BLM group in Dallas (called Dallas Justice Now) sent a message to whites living in a wealthy part of that area telling them not to send their kids to elite schools. Heh. This is so perfect I can’t help but think it is really from some white supremacist group or a white supremacist infiltrator. This is because so far the BLM activities have not really impacted elite whites very much. Sure, they have to pretend that George Floyd’s death really matters, that Derek Chauvin wasn’t railroaded, that statues being pulled down don’t really matter, and that crazy and hateful ideas being taught in our schools will have no effect, but that doesn’t seem to bother them. What mattered was getting Trump out of office and oppressing the deplorables. But not being allowed to have their children go to elite schools when they have been planning for this right from the time their child was born? Uh-oh. How does that hurt the Trump supporters?

Well, BLM did say they wanted to burn down everything. Maybe the elites didn’t take this seriously, but a cynical observer (like me) heard that pronouncement and immediately began thinking of things they were not going to burn down. Basketball arenas? No way. The welfare office? No way. Elite schools? No way. But it seems that even though elite schools won’t be burned down literally, they will be burned down figuratively. They will be taken over by those who resent the wealthy whites who send their kids there, even if those whites are Democrats.

BLM’s bill is coming due. How will the elites react? I imagine a lot of people who are not part of the elite and whose kids barely got into those schools will resent the whole business, and will say so out loud. But then the message isn’t aimed at them (even though they may be affected by it). It’s aimed at elites who simply assume their children will get in, with the only question being which elite school will their children choose or get chosen by. How will these elites react? If they had any sense, they will start quietly backing away from BLM. Any actual justification they attempt for the presence of their children and not poor black children will quickly spiral out of control. The last thing these elites want is for anyone to raise the question: “Why do we need elite schools in an egalitarian society?” The answer is so obviously that we don’t need them that anyone truly committed to equity has to agree not to send their kids to them. And that is so obviously repugnant to our elites that they will never allow the question to be raised (at least not by anyone with access to the Megaphone).

So, expect that in a few months, all of this business about BLM, CRT, math being racist, and so on will quietly fade away.

Computer Problems

It may be a few days before I am up and running again. Sorry.

Chinese Soldiers versus Indian Soldiers

I’ve been hearing rumors that Chinese soldiers did not perform well in their last clash with Indian soldiers, and I’ve been trying to track down anything about this topic. Here is a video about it. If this is true, then it confirms what I initially heard. The Chinese don’t fight like mountain lions, the narrator says, but run away like mountain goats. Heh. Their problem is that they haven’t been battle-tested the way that the Indians have (in clashes with Pakistan). This, by the way, is the same problem they had in their clash with Vietnam back in 1979 (or whenever it was). Vietnamese soldiers had been fighting for decades, while the Chinese hadn’t.

I remember the first person from China I ever met (not counting those from Taiwan and other places). At some point I asked him what he thought of the Vietnam War. He looked slightly uncomfortable, but then began to talk in terms I found incomprehensible until I finally figured out he was talking about their Vietnam War and not ours. Sheesh.

Quote of the Day

From this YouTube video (at about 18:40):

... a lot of our media class do not represent the average family-oriented individual, and therefore they write about weird, obscure problems, like gendered signage on port-a-potties in New York or whatever, instead of massive medical and psychological problems like miscarriages and fertility crises that more people than you think are struggling with.

Our elites, who are steeped in the culture of the faculty lounge, have pushed our entire culture down some crazy and irrelevant path while ignoring problems that represent what the mainstream is experiencing.

Women’s Soccer: The American and Swedish Teams Are Both Nuts

Sweden thrashed the U.S. women’s team in soccer by 3-0 early this morning. I have to say that the American team has gotten so annoyingly political that this doesn’t bother me one bit. Both teams made statements about the importance of social justice and how they needed to show their support for it. See here. What was nuts for the American team was a statement to the effect that black and brown people had been prevented by racism from getting onto the team. Name these people, please. And be specific about which racist infrastructure prevented black or brown people from making the team. Is the idea supposed to be that great black or brown American female soccer players were left off the team, or is it that people who could have been great never even bothered to develop their skills in the first place? Either way it is nuts. My understanding is that everyone gets watched, so there just are not any hidden gems out there who went unnoticed. As for the second alternative, it is pure speculation to say that someone could have been great if they had actually ever played soccer. And it surely isn’t racism that prevented them from doing so, is it? How could racism prevent someone from playing soccer? Be specific, please. Soccer is cheap, so anyone who wants to play it should be able to do so.

Finally, which of the white women on the team – and nearly all of them are white – are going to give up their spots so that a brown or black woman can take their places? None, I’ll bet.

As for Sweden, their entire team consists of ethnic Swedes. Where are the immigrants? Of course, they are absent because these immigrants are viciously patriarchal and wouldn’t let their daughters play soccer, but none of the Swedish players want to admit that, so they make meaningless statements about supporting human rights.

It is all nothing but virtue-signaling.

Soccer: Qatar’s National Team

Although Qatar is an Arab country, it has several blacks on the team. How strange! I tried to find the latest picture of the national team, but the Internet failed me for once. But judging by what I saw in their game tonight (against Honduras), more than one player is black. I would have thought they’d all be Arab.

The “Math Is Racist” Battle

This is a battle no one should have to fight because it is so stupid. Math is not inherently racist, or if it is, that is bad news for black people because that means that reality itself is against them and not just white supremacists. But even the idea that the teaching of math is racist is ridiculous because the left has had fifty years to eliminate all racism in teaching. How is it that racism is still there? And why is it that Asians aren’t affected by it?

The battle against “math is racist” seems most intense in California, where it seems that we have won a temporary victory. See here. The decision to “demathematize math,” as the critics rightly describe it, has been put off for ten months.

All of this, if they win, will simply dumb down math instruction. Not teaching calculus because those who can’t learn it in high school will experience “fragility” and a tendency to racial animosity is nothing compared to what they will experience when the bridges they drive across tumble down because the engineers who designed it were poorly trained.

No, we need as much math taught as possible. And not only should math not be dumbed down to help blacks pass math class, but finance should be added to school curriculums. Too many people make dumb financial decisions, and I’m sure that not knowing math isn’t going to help this situation any.

I’m also sure that those who hope to make a quick buck off of people who don’t know math have been licking their chops at the thought of having so many idiots to fleece. Do we really want this to happen?