I Want a New Left

The “Guardian” Vote: Resistance!

Britain’s Guardian newspaper conducted a poll of readers to see whom it should nominate as person of the year. J.K. Rowling was winning so badly that they quietly shut down the poll and presumably will not have a person of the year, or if they do, it won’t be the result of a reader’s poll. See here.

Elites should face up to the fact that they jumped the gun on trannies before everything was resolved. In particular, how to deal with trannies in women’s sports and how to deal with them in women’s bathrooms and other safe spaces for women (like women’s prisons) are problems that simply haven’t been dealt with adequately. Not all voices have been heard, and the whole business looks rushed.

It is odd having Rowling as an ally against the elites, but the elites have so much power that one cannot choose one’s allies as one wishes. Let’s just celebrate the resistance and use it as a prod to them to stop abusing power.

The Roman Empire Didn’t Exist, Apparently

See here. This is a video by a guy debunking the arguments of a woman who claims that the Roman empire didn’t exist. I haven’t watched any of her videos directly because I don’t want to get too deeply into such deranged thinking, but it seems that she is using really bad arguments. Some of them accuse male scholars of sexism, after which she dismisses their claims. What is disturbing is how confidently she talks and how she insults those who disagree with her. I am sure she will find imitators. So, while her focus is on showing that the Roman empire didn’t exist, which seems rather idiosyncratic, I assume her methods will spread far and wide. It just shows how an authoritative manner together with knowledge of a smattering of facts can be highly influential, sadly. Here is a debunking by a historian; notice that he never mentions her, but people in the comments know that that is who he is responding to.

Get ready for all of history to be re-written.

Truthfulness and CRT

Proponents of critical race theory keep insisting that they are standing for something truthful, implying that their opponents are engaged in promoting falsehoods. The truth that they want taught to children is our racist past, which they believe their opponents want to suppress.

It has to be said that people who insist that math is racist and that there can be more than one right answer in math and that students can intuit answers without doing the work aren’t exactly in the strongest position to say they are on the side of truth. Similarly, insisting that this business about 1619 is the truth when it has been treated with scorn by scholars isn't helpful, either. And of course, a doctrine (that is, CRT) that accuses anyone who questions it of being racist is automatically suspect.

But the real problem here is that this emphasis on the truthful misses the focus of the anger of parents about CRT, which is that white children are being taught that they are hopelessly racist and are therefore disgusting people.

The pattern of school shootings has been of shooters targeting children. Expect that some day that will change and shooters will target teachers and administrators.

Faucism and Fascism Differ by Only a Single Letter

I'm pretty sure someone has already said this, but it definitely needs to be said as often as possible. Let's end the mandates and get back to normal life.

An Idea to Stop the Madness about Covid

What we need is for lots of businesses, especially in certain industries, to insist that it stop. I’m thinking of airlines, hotels, restaurants, theaters, and any other industry that has been affected negatively by the madness. Maybe they could start offering discounts to anyone wearing a button saying something like “I Reject the Panic about Covid” or “Let’s Get Back to Normal” or something else indicating that they are tired of the lunatics running the asylum and are not completely bonkers about the virus.

Keep in mind that those who are panicking probably don’t know the facts (see here to see what I mean). They insist on thinking of this as smallpox when it is just a harsh flu or cold. They want children to be vaccinated, even though they are the least affected. They got hysterical over the omicron variant, even though those who announced it to the world insisted it was milder than earlier variants. They can’t accept that the vaccine isn’t doing much, no matter how many of the vaccinated get sick. They believe ... too many crazy things to list.

Anyway, I suspect that the Dems whipped up hysteria about this as a way to defeat Trump, and I thought things would slowly get back to normal once Trump was out of office, but it’s out of their control now, and so it just keeps going and going and going.

Enough already.

Quotes of the Day

Serious Quote of the Day

From a commenter named Travis at this Steve Sailer post:

The problem with Democrats is their policies do not work. Shutting down pipelines, banning drilling and raising taxes only makes Americans less wealthy. Their entire agenda is doomed to fail. Decriminalizing crime will increase crime and lower our living standards. Eliminating education standards and eliminating tracking in our schools will not close the gaps. Teaching “Critical Race Theory” (blaming whites for all the problems of the world) will not improve the lives of Blacks. Keeping the borders open and allowing millions of migrants to enter the US will reduce our standard of living. Just as wearing masks does not stop the spread of aerosolized viruses, but does great psychological harm to society and our children. Yet Democrats insist on mandating that people wear worthless masks even in states in which 90% of adults are vaccinated. Every executive order and bill signed by Biden has harmed America. It is not events but the actions of the Biden administration and the Democrats who control congress which have resulted in a lower standard of living in America, higher inflation and less freedom.

Biden recently took credit for lowering the price of gasoline by increasing the supply from our reserves…yet escapes blame for reducing the actual supply of oil by his executive orders which blocked pipelines and drilling.

It would be very nice if we could easily calculate which policies will make us poorer and which wealthier.

Strange Quote of the Day

From commenter 74v56ruthiyj at this Steve Sailer post:

I used to live near Caltech. My neighbor, a grad student, told me that the undergrads made their own LSD. “There’s a lot of sickness on that campus,” he said.

I once did some work on campus, welding steel grillwork for the second stories of the dorms. It seems that too many students were falling out the windows. Not a place I’d send my kid to.

Hmm. That’s a little different from the perspective of Caltech we get from other sources.

Amusing Quote of the Day

From some commenter on some YouTube video that I’m not going to try and track down. The subject was stupid beliefs that Americans have about foreigners, and it went something like this:

According to Americans, an Australian emperor started World War I, and Hitler was Australian.

I am Austrian, and this works for me.

Heh.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Joan Didion, the Attack on 9/11, and What She Should Have Said

Joan Didion is in the news, having died at age 87. She means nothing to me except another elite who didn’t get what was happening. Maybe a few weeks or months after 9/11, someone recommended her as a writer who had good insights and who was a contrarian thinker, so I took a look at what she said about that dreadful event, but what I found was nothing other than what other elites were saying. “It’s all our fault.” “Why do you think they hate us?” Etc. At least, that’s my memory. Andrew Sullivan was more insightful. Sheesh.

Anyway, here is what I wish she would have said:

There are two kinds of Muslim immigrants, and we need to find a way to distinguish them. One kind likes the West and is coming here to escape oppressive conditions. The other kind hates the West and wants to impose oppressive conditions on us. We should allow the first kind in, but we absolutely must keep the second kind out. The second kind hates democracy, which they view as merely rule by humans, while they view Islamic law as rule by Allah. (Any secularist should be able to smash that kind of thinking to smithereens.) Like I said, we need to keep this latter kind out, for obvious reasons.

Unfortunately, I never saw anyone among our elites say anything like this. The idea that any Muslim wanted to destroy our democracy was simply something they never imagined. No, those poor Muslims were nothing but helpless victims of American imperialism.

Getting back to Joan Didion, I see that she seems to be most regarded for things she wrote about America in the 60s and 70s, so maybe I’m being too harsh on her, but I don’t think she knew much about foreigners, especially in the Muslim world.

What If the Nazis Had Come from the Third World?

How would this have affected the judgment of the enlightened? We already know and have known for a long time: they would have made judgments on them that would be very different from the actual judgments that they make, judgments that would be much less condemning. This might seem wrong, at first. The anti-Nazi rhetoric is so strong among the enlightened that one might think that this just cannot be right. Nazis are Nazis, right? It shouldn’t matter where they come from. But it does matter. It matters very much.

Think about it. The Nazis were known for concentration camps, and during the past few years we have heard about concentration camps for Uighurs in China. How have the enlightened reacted? Their outrage is barely perceptible, which is quite astonishing given that the Uighurs are Muslims and given that during the past twenty years we have seen the enlightened bend over backwards to condemn any expression by people like me of hostility toward Muslims. So, while if I speak out against Muslims, I am condemned as an Islamophobe, the Chinese can throw them in concentration camps and never get called that. In fact, Americans have gotten into trouble for calling the virus the “Wuhan” virus, despite the fact that it is perfectly normal to talk about viruses in terms of their origin. So solicitous are the enlightened when it comes to sparing the feelings of the Chinese that they almost completely ignore the fact that they run these concentration camps. And have you heard of any demonstrations outside of Chinese embassies by the enlightened? I haven’t. One would have expected a fifty-million person strong march on it from those who are constantly condemning the Nazis, but somehow they couldn’t be bothered.

Likewise, when ISIS emerged with reports of them selling people into slavery, we heard nothing much from the enlightened. I never once heard of a demonstration against them. And more recently when we heard about the horrors of the Taliban, the enlightened went so far as to declare that Trump supporters were just as bad.

Apparently, being from the Third World is like having something like the “get out of jail free” card that one can use in the game of Monopoly. In this instance, it would be more accurately described as an “avoid all moral condemnation” card, and if you have such a card, you can pretty much do any heinous thing you like, and the enlightened here in the West will never protest. In fact, they might even do everything they can to empower you. We’ve seen this again and again with respect to how Muslims are treated by the enlightened. Things that ought to engender enormous amounts of condemnatory verbiage, such as throwing homosexuals off of tall buildings or trafficking non-Muslim girls in towns in northern England, instead generate ... crickets. Similarly, one might expect that the enlightened would side with the more enlightened Muslims against the less enlightened ones, but they actually seem to prefer the latter to the former. A few years back, for example, a liberal Muslim had to sue the Southern Poverty Law Center for declaring him Islamophobic (here).

For a long time I found this extremely confusing. I treat Nazis as Nazis wherever they are found. Ditto for fascists and reactionaries. Likewise, the communists of old (at least during my lifetime) treated any anti-communist as beyond the pale, even if they were black and from the Third World. But the vast numbers of enlightened people in our society have a completely different mindset, it seems. They will treat people here in the West who are to the right of them as Nazis (such as every Republican president since Nixon at least), despite their having no evidence for such claims, while ignoring the much stronger Nazi-like tendencies of some people in the Third World, despite their being aware of evidence for these tendencies from their own preferred media sources.

And of course we see the same tendencies among the enlightened here with respect to blacks. “They’re black, they’re dealing with racism, so we should go easy on them when they commit crimes. In fact, they should be allowed to steal things.” This ridiculous attitude is causing chaos in our more liberal cities to the point that even some liberals are complaining.

Finally, there was even a small movement in France that had similar inclinations toward the actual Nazis back in the 1930s. See here where I quoted a remarkable passage describing this episode from Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism. Some leftists in France at that time wanted to be conciliatory toward the Nazis since it was felt that they had some legitimate gripes. Had they prevailed, we would be in a very different world, one much less enlightened and one much less inclined to accept the “Other.” Whatever the enlightened thought in such a world wouldn’t matter much because their numbers would be so small.

Let me just say that no matter how much it may seem that the enlightened view the Nazis as a sort of absolute in terms of moral evil, their views on the matter are much less settled than they’d like to think. Of course, that is to be expected from people who flirt with moral relativism.

Laugh of the Day, or Maybe Our Entire Era

A professor of music at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga put directions for finding some money ($50) in his syllabus. Not a single student read it, apparently, because by the end of the term it was still there unclaimed. See here. And the title of the post at the link is misleading: he didn’t put clues in the syllabus, but some explicit directions.

My wife, too, has noticed that students don’t read the syllabus, even though there are all kinds of highly-paid administrators demanding that professors put things in there (such as acknowledging that the land on which the campus sits once belonged to others) that are as woke as can be. And they entirely useless since the students don’t look at them. Heh!

“Fringe” Epidemiologists, and Why Whites Shouldn’t Support CRT

The powers-that-be have declared any epidemiologist who doesn’t toe their line to be a “fringe” epidemiologist. This includes someone at Harvard. See here. If an expert at Harvard can be declared to be part of a “fringe,” then no one is safe from their authoritarian tendencies. Then there is this sentence from the article:

Gonsalves’s grievance was that by interviewing Kulldorff, Jacobin had broken the lockdown “solidarity” of other far-left websites including the Nation and the Boston Review.

Solidarity? I hadn’t known that that was the way that science was run. Our era is as conformist as anything from the 1950s. They just don’t want to admit it.

And then there is this:

Multiple sources ... have noted that Fauci ... seldom reads the scientific literature on Covid-19 himself....

Is anyone surprised?

Meanwhile, this post from Legal Insurrection about a George Will column in the Washington Post debunking the 1619 nonsense shows that the powers-that-be can re-write history so that your support for some idealistic cause didn’t occur or that you supported the exact opposite. Will writes that colonists in the North were interested in abolitionism at the time of the Revolutionary War, something I hadn’t known and which I certainly would not have learned from our progressives, yet progressives talk as though they were interested in preserving and not abolishing slavery. For that matter, I recall that progressives decades ago impugned the motives of Civil War soldiers who fought for the North, refusing to believe that any of them were actually fighting to destroy slavery. No, it had to be some baser feelings that motivated them.

Why support any idealistic cause if later generations are going to lie about you and say you supported the exact opposite?