I Want a New Left

Elites Abusing Power: Misusing Funds in Pittsburgh

The story on the bridge in Pittsburgh that fell is that funds were set aside for it to be updated, but the elites then used the money on bike lanes and other silly projects instead of the bridge. (See here.) Then when it fell, they blamed the Republicans for not wanting to fund infrastructure projects. Luckily, no one has died from their malfeasance.

The Insanity of Open Borders: Legal Edition

One of many objections to open borders is that people in other countries can do things that are unthinkable here, and the problem becomes what do we do when they do those unthinkable things here. In other countries, men can have more than one wife, men can rape any women who is “inappropriately” dressed, people can send their underage daughters back to the old country and force her to marry some distant cousin (who then gets to come to America as her husband), men can murder female relatives who are dishonoring the family, and people can murder anyone who is an apostate from Islam.

How do we deal with these crimes? Basically, we have gone after the murderers and to a lesser extent the rapists, but the others we allow.

Here is a column pointing out that in Italy a girl who was going to be taken back to Bangladesh for a forced marriage ran away to the police and is actually being protected. I assume this is because she actually went to the police. But what if she had been forced into the marriage and brought back to Italy? Who would have protected her? No one. For some reason, a lot of low-level functionaries have never seen it as their job to alert the higher-ups to what has been happening, even though they would do so if an ordinary Westerner were to do such a thing. And so it keeps happening.

The author also mentions the case of a Mexican man who got his twelve-year-old girl pregnant, but when he took her to the hospital to give birth, he was arrested. The age of consent back where he lived in Mexico made his actions perfectly legal there.

I’m not going to comment on the author’s take on the whole situation. My take is that as immigration from other countries ramped up after the laws were changed in 1965, we needed to have discussions about how to deal with these situations. Unfortunately, we never have, and so there has been this crazy situation in which immigrants can break our laws and often enough will not be punished. “The guy has two wives? So what? That’s his culture.” Except that it isn’t our culture, and so he really should not have been allowed to come here. This is just one more issue that feminists should be screaming about, since many of the victims are female, but they never have. They have just gone along with all the immigration without saying much of anything.

They have a lot to answer for.

Elites Abusing Power: Once Again Going Maskless But Expecting the Little People To Be Masked

Here. The culprits are administrators at Northern Illinois University, who attended social events maskless, but who expect the students to be masked.

Wordle

Is anyone else hooked on Wordle? It usually takes me three tries to get the answer. Here, if you're interested.

Interesting, But Bizarre, Quote of the Day

From commenter Todd Nelson on this essay:

In 2012 several of Putin’s astrophysicists told him the earth would start cooling by 2018-2019. (It actually started in 2016, and continues.) One does not tell Putin anything that is not a fact. Climate Change Joe is so overtaken by the largest fraud in history, that he refuses to see the facts. The earth is cooling because the sun “went to sleep.” Putin wants Ukraine for the same reason that Katherine the Great conquered it in 1783, the cold. Average global temperatures dropped by an astounding 0.5 degree from 2016-2018. The last time the temperature dropped this much in this short a time was 1640 at the beginning of the last mini ice age. If average global temperatures go down that much again, Russia will lose almost 40% of its food-growing capacity. Like Katherine the Great, Putin knows he needs Ukraine, because it is slightly south of Russia, to feed his people. That is why Putin will have power over Ukraine, in some way, by April 1. He would have done this sooner except he was worried about what President Trump would have done. With Surrender Joe, Putin can do as he pleases, but more importantly, can do as he needs.

The morning low here was -5 (Fahrenheit), so I am willing to believe in global cooling.

Names

Turkey has changed its name to Türkiye. See here. This apparently is how the Turks refer to it, and now they want everyone else to do so. At least they’re not demanding that we use Arabic script to do so, although having an umlaut is slightly annoying.

In other news, the James Webb telescope has reached L2, the second Lagrange point. These points are named after Joseph-Louis Lagrange, a mathematician of French and Italian descent, who calculated where they are. I’m sure that since he is a dead white male, some annoying woke person will insist upon those points being renamed something like “points of stability.” It will turn out that he owned slaves (by owning property in the West Indies), or supported slavery, or met someone who owned slaves and didn’t denounce them, or wasn’t sufficiently against slavery, or something or other along these lines that the woke will find offensive, after which they will begin a campaign to erase him from history. And they will probably succeed.

Academia: Principled, For a Change

Here is a story about how Syracuse University punished a female student for asking a man at a party if it was true that he was a registered sex offender. Her offense was that she caused him mental harm. Having come up with such a boneheaded rule, I’m glad they actually were principled enough to stick with it. It’s not often that college women get punished for anything they do to college men.

On the other hand, it is so odd that I can’t help but wonder if the man was black. I've seen colleges do this before when white females and black males have unpleasant encounters.

And along similar lines, here is an essay that tells of an interesting incident in 2018. A feminist talking to a group of about 100 black men happened to mention the Brett Kavanaugh episode. She was expecting anger at the fact that the Republicans had been victorious, but instead found that they sided with Kavanaugh.

Identity politics doesn't always work for feminists.

Elites, Society, and the Role of the Public Schools

Here is an interesting essay with a number of quotes about the role of the public schools and the role of the parents in deciding what should be taught. There are a number of very arrogant people demanding that parents butt out of what is being taught. They would, of course, never say that if the schools were engaged in Nazi propaganda, but somehow they never seem to think of that possibility. One person is generous enough to say that parents can opt out at their own expense, apparently unaware of what a classist sentiment that is. Of course, rich people have long had this opportunity. When will poor people?

Anyway, I want to focus on one quote in particular:

The purpose of a public education in a public school is not to teach kids only what parents want them to be taught. It is to teach them what society needs them to know. The client of the public school is not the parent, but the entire community, the public.

That is a nice sentiment, and I even to some extent agree with it. (For example, after Sputnik was launched, our elites back then very sensibly decided that what we needed to do was to focus a lot on teaching math, science, and technology.) It’s just that the people saying it (namely, the Michigan Democrats) don’t really believe it. What they believe is that kids should be taught what the elites think they should be taught. And what the elites think should be taught is wildly different from what society needs them to know.

Learning that math is racist is absolutely the wrong thing that society needs students to know. Ditto for the idea that masculinity is toxic, that America is infused with systemic racism, that there are a bunch of new pronouns that need to be used, etc. None of that is what society needs them to know.

To put all of this differently, if the client isn't the parent, but the entire community, does that mean that the entire community gets to decide on what should be taught? Do we as members of that community get to vote on it? Of course not. Only the elites get to decide what should be taught.

Elites Abusing Power: Unions Going Beyond Their Designated Roles

In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, there was an essay on the op-ed page by Avraham Goldstein, a professor of mathematics at City University of New York, complaining that the union he is part of supports the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. Being Jewish, he decided to quit the union, but they keep taking his dues out of his pay. So, this is two abuses of power. First, the union is supposed to represent workers, and that is its only role. That is why its members pay dues. It is not supposed to be getting involved in other causes. Second, they have continued taking his dues even after he resigned, which is theft.

Let me add that when I was young, unions never did anything other than represent their members concerning work-related issues. I’m pretty sure that those at the top who are going beyond what they should be restricted to doing would scream loudly if it were done to them for some cause they didn’t approve of.

War and Crime: Chickens Coming Home to Roost

For at least fifty years, leftists in America have done their best to weaken America so it wouldn’t be able to engage in wars abroad, because engaging in such wars has meant the killing of lots of innocent people. They protested against every war they could, they imposed ridiculous rules on the armed forces, and they slammed every American they could with rhetoric about how awful America was and is (imperialist, racist, etc.). They did all of this in the belief, apparently, that the world would be a much better place if America were simply taken out of the equation. That is, of course, ridiculous. Obviously, power-seeking foreigners were going to rush in to fill a power vacuum, but leftists never thought about that possibility.

But that day is pretty close to being here. In fact, plenty of people thought it arrived last summer with the hopelessly inept withdrawal from Afghanistan, and still others thought it happened earlier. But anyway, the point is that Russia is threatening Ukraine, and of course China is threatening Taiwan. And then there is Iran, which is always threatening Israel.

It would be Biden’s worst day possible if all three of those conflicts erupted on the same day. It would be only slightly less awful if they were all going on at the same time, even if they didn’t erupt on the same day.

Now regarding Ukraine, there has been a lot of discussion about what we should do, but the first question to be asked is whether we can actually do anything. Are our armed forces capable of doing much of anything other than worrying about the correct use of pronouns? We are a society, after all, that has declared masculinity toxic, thanks to our leftists, and since our armed forces are now under the control of the left, we can’t really expect them to perform the way they would have performed when none of this rot was infesting everything (back in the 1950s, say).

Not bothering to think about this, a majority of Democrats, it appears, wants to send troops to the Ukraine. I couldn’t find the latest poll, but here is one from last summer. So, the point is that people who have put so much effort into criticizing America and its use of power abroad are now willing to use that same power, which they have done their best to destroy, to stop someone against whom they have what is probably an imaginary grudge (though I don’t want to get into that).

I wish them luck, but they’ll probably fail miserably. Let me add that we likely now live in a more dangerous world, and the people who are most in danger are the woke. Not many outside of the West respect them, and if we come to be dominated by Putin, for example, they may find their days of dominance in America coming to an end.

As for crime, I’m sure the many people demanding that the police be defunded were never thinking that they themselves would be victims of the chaos that would obviously ensue. In my hometown of Minneapolis, even previously safe areas have now seen carjackings, and in fact even inner-ring suburbs have seen them. I grew up in Minneapolis across the street from Edina, and even it is no longer completely safe. Edina was for a long time considered the most prestigious of suburbs, even though there were other suburbs that were richer. (I had a friend who, whenever he said the name “Edina,” would tilt his head back, use a finger to push up the tip of his nose, and then utter the name “Edina” in a kind of strained whisper, as though he were a British aristocrat.) For Edina to now be at the mercy of carjackers is a very sad decline.

As for the rest of the country, I’m sure most have seen the depressing pictures showing trains in Los Angeles whose contents have been looted. It’s like something you’d see in Latin America or Africa, yet it has been allowed to happen here.

Now for the people who support this kind of thing, this is justified because it counts as reparations. However, it is no longer limited just to theft. In recent days, three women have been murdered by members of the privileged race, and two of the three were not white. One was Asian (the one who was pushed onto the subway tracks), and one was Hispanic (here). The third was white, but apparently supported defunding the police (here). So, all of them are likely to have been Dems who supported the Dems’ police-defunding policy. And it came back to destroy them.

Amazingly, there are still Dems who support these policies.