I Want a New Left

Open Borders and the Homophobia of Foreigners

I’ve occasionally mentioned on this blog the practice Mexican soccer fans have of chanting a homophobic slur at the opposing goalie when he takes a goal kick. Now I learn that this is done in Panama and Honduras as well. (The link is in a soccer publication that is behind a paywall, so I’m not bothering to include it.) FIFA, the international soccer organization, is trying to stamp this out in World Cup qualifying games by not allowing fans into the stadia during selected games. But I have to wonder why. When those of us opposed to the entry of Muslims into the West pointed out their homophobia as a reason to prevent their entry, we were sometimes told that it was their culture, so we shouldn’t be judging. When does something count as someone’s culture that we shouldn’t be judging as opposed to a practice we should be condemning and doing our best to wipe out? I presume our elites have no real answer to this question.

Anyway, my basic point is that those who favor open borders seem to think that these people are just like the Americans they hang around with, but they seem to have no evidence for believing this. They will denounce you as a racist if you don’t believe it, however.

Obviously, I Chose the Wrong Career

See here. According to this article, crane operators at our ports (or at least the port in Los Angeles) can make up to $250,000 a year. I can't think of any other blue-collar type job that rakes in that much money, or anything even close to that. Plus, the operators can be lazy if they like without getting fired. In fact, they can fire managers whom they don't like, something I've never heard of before in managerial-labor relations.

Education in NY City: The Left Screws Up Again

Leftists have managed to close down an elite public school in New York City because it is “segregated.” See here. Of course, it is not segregated in the old sense that blacks were excluded from it simply on the basis of the color of their skin. No, they are excluded because they don’t do well on the admissions test. Now as I have pointed out many times before, blacks in this country when I was young decided that studying hard was “acting white,” so they rebelled and decided not to do it. Those blacks who reject this act of self-destruction get bullied. Never once have our elites condemned this sort of attitude and behavior. Then they get angry when schools with admissions test “segregate.”

This is yet another reason why right-wing egalitarianism is superior to the left-wing variety. The disparity in test schools between blacks on the one hand and whites and Asians on the other is wholly due to their stupid policy of not correcting blacks when they engage in self-destructive behavior. The correct decision in this case is not to close down these schools, but to encourage blacks to be studious. And if blacks become studious and still can’t do well on the admissions tests, then we will deal with that problem when we come to it. Right now, we need to stop the self-destructive behavior.

The Chicago Art Museum’s Big Mistake

Recently, in the latest act of wokesters’ throwing out the baby with the bathwater, the Art Institute of Chicago fired all its docents (here). These are generally older women who are white and wealthy who have to spend a couple years being trained to do what they do, and presumably it will take awhile for their replacements to get up to speed. Also, the docents were volunteers, while the replacements will get paid. They were dumped because their group wasn’t diverse enough, although not many have the time and inclination to do this sort of thing.

Worst of all, these docents are generally donors who give big chunks of money to the museum. Expect some of them to stop giving. Expect some visitors to stop coming.

The Elites Should Admit That No One Knows Anything about the Virus

My impression is that our elites have gone through a number of cycles of smugly thinking they know what is going on and how to deal with the virus, only to have something come along that surprises them and doesn't conform to their narrative. They then move on to a new “wisdom” which they insist is correct, only to have the cycle repeat. It’s time for them to stop this nonsense and simply admit defeat so we can all carry on with our lives as we did before.

They began by protesting Trump’s closing of the borders to flights from China, which they thought was racist and unnecessary, and they responded by saying, “Hug a Chinese.” Well, that was very admirable, except that it was hopelessly wrong in terms of fighting the virus. They eventually moved on to the next cycle.

When Trump announced a team of experts to deal with the outbreak, they complained that it wasn’t diverse enough. Obviously, they weren’t taking it seriously at that point, but eventually they had to take it seriously.

Then they said masks wouldn’t work, only to reverse that later on.

Then they said we would have a lockdown to flatten the curve, but our elites decided that we needed them indefinitely to get to zero cases.

In the mid-summer of 2020, liberals were telling me that cases were rising in my county so there were sure to be lots of deaths soon, but there weren’t.

While Trump was still president, they were saying that they weren’t going to get vaccinated, but now of course they are demanding that everyone get vaccinated, even though it’s the same vaccine.

Up until about May of this year, we were told that the vaccine would protect you indefinitely, but then we began hearing about “breakthrough” cases. At first, we were told that these were rare, but not many are still saying that. They are now saying we will need booster shots, something they didn’t tell us about at first.

A few weeks ago, a liberal friend who is a perfect echo of what the ruling-class media is saying was chortling about cases rising in Texas, but the next day I saw a chart (here – scroll down) showing they were rising in Hawaii, too, even though Hawaii was doing things “right.”

And now it seems that states with the highest rates of vaccination are having surges of cases. See here. Meanwhile, in many other states it is in decline (here).

Please, elites, figure things out. You’ve been wrong so many times, you need to stop being smug and just admit that no one knows anything.

We Need To Have a National Conversation about the Dangers of the Vaccine!

Heh.

More seriously, all the liberals and leftists I know are extremely angry at those who won’t get vaccinated. Occasionally, I remind them that it’s not just Trump supporters who are refusing the jab, that high percentages of blacks and Latinos haven’t gotten it, either. It has no effect. What they should be asking is whether they themselves will still be alive in five years and not dead from some unanticipated side effect of a vaccine that was rushed through the testing process. See here for a good essay on this subject.

The problem for many of us is that we are not medical specialists, and we must get our information from people who are. Medical opinion, as far as I can tell, is not unified about anything connected with the virus, but that isn’t the impression that our media gives. They insist that there is Science, which must not be questioned. Now liberals and leftists have absolute trust in the media. I do not. To give just one reason for mistrust, the episode concerning the virus’s origins shows this. The Science came from on high to tell us that the virus had originated from a bat, and so every other opinion was nothing but an evil conspiracy theory that must be prevented from being read or heard. Eventually, though, enough brave scientists questioned the Science so that the elites had to back down.

Let me digress a moment to point out that the liberals and leftists who are so much in the clutches of the media that they will not question it if their lives depended on it – and their lives may depend on it – are the sort who wore “Question Authority” t-shirts a few decades back.

Anyway, the result is that liberals and leftists have been manipulated into hating poor whites who won’t get vaccinated instead of asking whether they themselves are in danger from it.

To conclude, notice that at the link the commenter Just Another Serf says the following: “The most obvious sign of the fraud is the insistence that those who have had the infection must be vaccinated.” Exactly.

The Latest Terror Attack in Afghanistan

So, it seems that a suicide bomber who was a Uighur blew up a Shi’ite mosque because he was angry at the Taliban, who are Sunni, for agreeing with China to expel all militant Uighurs from Afghanistan. Yup, that makes sense. Why not blow up a mosque associated with the Taliban?

A Dogma about Education in America

It is a dogma about education here in America that teachers in primary and secondary schools need to be certified and that that requires a college education with a specialization in education at the least. Oddly enough, no one who insists upon this certification is a bit bothered that college teachers do not require any kind of certification (though some people when hiring professors prefer those with some experience). I myself when I became a teaching assistant was given no training whatsoever, though it happened that I was generally good at it. My wife says that the only training she got as an art historian was with how to deal with problems with the slide projectors.

I unthinkingly accepted this ridiculous situation until a friend in grad school who was from Trinidad mentioned that after graduating from high school, he was allowed to teach French (if I remember correctly), even though he only had a high school diploma. I was somewhat shocked. Didn’t he have to be certified? Apparently not! I myself was a substitute in Arabic at the college level, though I had had only three semesters of it plus a month of instruction in Egypt.

Throughout almost all of human history, people have learned things from their parents or other older relatives and friends. (Jane Austen mostly learned from her father.) There wasn’t much formal schooling, and when that started, there certainly wasn’t any official certification for it. No, that is a very recent development. Anyone could start up a school if they liked, though that doesn’t mean that everyone was successful at it. (The Bronte sisters started a school, but attracted no students.)

I mention all this because some devotee of this crazy system is angry at parents who want a say in their children’s education and likened it to a hypothetical situation in which the passengers on a plane want to take over because they don’t like the smug attitude of the pilots. See here. But flying a plane, especially a jet passenger plane, is a very complicated business, while I assume most parents could teach their children to read and write and do arithmetic. Anyway, parents aren’t angry at the techniques that teachers are using to teach their children (about which they might be ignorant compared with trained teachers), but at the content of that teaching. They find it morally reprehensible.

As with many stupid things that leftists say and do, all one has to do is to reverse the situation to get a completely different response from them. Imagine that what was being taught was that blacks were hopelessly inept academically. Would leftists then complain that parents had no right to question the teachers and administrators? Of course not. They would rightly call it fascist and racist and everything else they could think of.

Why Are Things Getting Worse?

The FBI will now be going after parents who are critical of school administrators, deeming them domestic terrorists. Derek Chauvin can’t get an attorney because no one wants the hassle of defending him. The NY Times is pushing the 1619 project, even though reputable historians claim it isn’t historically accurate. Math has been declared to be racist, and schools designed for high-achievers are basically being destroyed.

Why are things getting worse? Part of it is that the old-fashioned liberal has gone the way of the dinosaurs. Here, for example, is an article about Ira Glasser, former head of the American Civil Liberties Union. He was absolutely principled in connection with free speech, but was replaced by someone who has no such feelings. There were lots of people like Glasser around when I was younger. They were rational, willing to debate, and (as I now realize) helped keep things on a more or less even keel. They dominated newspapers and colleges and universities. But slowly they are disappearing and are being replaced by people who either don’t want to make waves or else are pushing absurd and dreadful policies. Sometimes reality slaps these people around, and they are forced to retreat (the policy of defunding the police is not as popular as it once was). But in other areas they keep pushing their stupidity.

I don’t expect things to turn around much, if at all. They will just continue to get worse.

The Campaign To Get Westerners To Accept the “Other” Is Caught in a Contradiction

This was inspired by this post in Steve Sailer’s blog. As is often the case with his blog, there is a link to an NY Times piece that condemns the EU for not wanting to accept refugees and instead building walls. But the simple but unavoidable facts are that the previous wave of immigrants in 2015 led to a lot of problems. In short, to accept the “Other” means accepting a variety of people some of whom reject the very idea of a general acceptance of the “Other.”

Let me back up, though. In the wake of the Holocaust in Europe and the legacy of slavery here in America which produced the Jim Crow laws, there was a push by leftist elites to get the average Westerner to accept the “Other.” Accordingly, there have been various liberation movements and, in addition, a massive push for allowing in immigrants from other parts of the world. But unfortunately, these various movements to gain acceptance of the “Other” just cannot all be realized simultaneously. Together, they are simply incoherent.

This was evident in Hillary Clinton’s charge that the deplorables were sexist, homophobic, and Islamophobic. What this means is that I am supposed to be accepting of women as the equals of men, homosexuals as the equals of heterosexuals, and finally, of Muslims as the equals of us Westerners, even though Muslims themselves generally reject feminism and gay liberation. The obvious thing to ask Hillary is, “Shouldn’t you be saying that Muslims are deplorable for being sexist and homophobic?” This is the big contradiction of the left today, that they want us to avoid being sexist and homophobic, but they also want us to ignore the sexism and homophobia of Muslims.

Leftists have a variety of responses to this, but most of them can be applied to the “deplorables” as well. For example, “not all Muslims are like that,” but then neither are all deplorables. And similarly for “it’s part of their culture.” The same thing can be said of deplorables. I admit that the claim that “Muslims have been oppressed by the West” is not something that we would ordinarily say of the deplorables, but on the other hand, it is naive since historically plenty of people, even some Westerners (like Cervantes), have been oppressed by Muslims.

No, it’s better just to acknowledge that we can’t have everything, that getting people to acknowledge most of those who count as the “Other” is good enough.