I Want a New Left

Uh-Oh: I Agree with Nikole Hannah-Jones

See here. She is basically saying what I said in my last post. Of course, there’s a lot of garbage in there, too, plus her whole attitude can be summed up this way: “Hey, you stopped looking at me.” After all, it’s still black history month, so who cares about some whites fighting on the other side of the world?

Why Is the Left So Supportive of the Victims of THIS Attack? Racism?

The left didn’t care at all when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait back in August of 1990, yet they are horrified by Putin’s attack on Ukraine and are accusing anyone who isn’t supporting Ukraine of being a traitor to America. Isn’t it just that they couldn’t identify with Kuwaitis because, even though I would call them white, leftists didn’t think of them as white and therefore didn’t care? Later on when I halfway supported Bush’s war to liberate Kuwait, I was accused of racism for not caring about Iraqis and for not being anti-war. This was absurd since I was against Saddam Hussein’s war and I did care about Kuwaitis, who ethnically are similar to Iraqis, but the left just didn’t care what happened to the Kuwaitis and weren’t against Saddam Hussein’s war. Only victims of American imperialism deserved support, and leftists were against our war only. I stopped being friends with the worst accusers and basically haven’t talked to them since. Years later I heard a leftist describe Kuwait as Iraq’s nineteenth province. Sheesh.

And what happens when China invades Taiwan? Will they be as supportive? I suspect not. These are people, after all, who get upset when right-wing students complain about the current Chinese regime. That is somehow racist in their eyes and should not be tolerated. So don't expect much support from them for the people of Taiwan.

Elites Being Stupid: Blaming Trump for the Attack on Ukraine

This is what our elites do: they blame others for their own failures. Trump had nothing to do with this. Putin caused problems in Ukraine when Obama was president, did nothing when Trump took over, and is now causing problems now that Biden has taken over. This doesn’t look like it was Trump’s fault. Moreover, he was a dealmaker, and I’m sure he would have thought of some way to have made a deal with Putin that would have averted the conflict. And as many have pointed out, Biden enriched Putin by putting so many restrictions on our energy production, so we now must import oil from Russia. Yet, it’s somehow Trump’s fault.

But even supposing that Trump is somehow to blame, keep in mind that it was our elites who have spent the last fifty years weakening America to the point where our army worries more about pronouns and climate change and dumping good soldiers who haven’t been vaccinated than they do about being combat-ready. The world notices this sort of thing and makes plans accordingly.

And who actually believes this despicable rhetoric? Ukranians? Are Ukranians right now thinking about how wonderful it is that the "adults are back in charge" and that Biden is America’s president rather than Trump? How about people in Taiwan? How about women in Afghanistan under the Taliban? How about all the Europeans who were angry at Biden’s botched pullout from there? This rhetoric won't age well.

The Beginning of the End of America’s Empire, But Leftists (Strangely Enough) Aren’t Happy

For fifty plus years leftists have whined about American imperialism and what they call America’s Empire. (See here, for example.) The rest of us, if we think about it at all, call it Pax Americana. But now that it’s pretty clear that it’s the beginning of the end for this empire, one would think they would be dancing in the streets, but no, they are complaining bitterly and blaming Trump and his supporters. See here. Actually, not just Trump and his supporters, but also white supremacists, toxic masculinity, and anything similar they can think of. Maybe that racist subject, math, is to blame, too.

Of course, this isn’t what they were expecting. They thought the end of America’s empire meant peace for a thousand years. Most non-leftists thought they were crazy, but it was impossible to talk them out of their nonsense. But even worse than war is that it is being waged by a guy who is not woke. How terrible. He doesn’t think that masculinity is toxic, he doesn’t like gays, and so on. Yes, wokesters, learn to deal with it. The world isn’t interested in your wokeness, which they think leads to weakness (as some wit suggested recently; I wish I could claim to have been that wit, but I can’t). They think it makes us sitting ducks. And if they were in control, you wouldn’t have the freedom to be woke.

Ok, I admit that I blew it on Putin and Ukraine. I thought he was bluffing, but that was because we’ve seen these troop build-ups before which ended in nothing and because Ukraine’s president kept suggesting that things weren’t as dire as Biden was saying, and he’s closer to the scene than Biden is. I also thought that if Putin attacked, it would be on a day when China attacked Taiwan and Iran (via Hezbollah) attacked Israel. That didn’t happen, though those other two events still could, and they would be a huge headache for the Dems.

Elites Abusing Power: Hiding Information

I’m sure everyone has heard about how CDC (the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) has loads of information that it is not sharing. See here. Back when I was young, it was the right that tried to hide data, but now it’s the left. I’m talking about America only; leftists in countries they controlled were always hiding things, but in America the left didn’t have much power, so there was nothing much to hide. Now it’s different. The left has loads of power, and just like the right back then, it feels the need to hide it.

I’m presuming that the data is being hidden because it goes against their narrative.

Scholarly Grants: Where Are the Rich Right-wingers?

According to my wife, most academic grants these days want the recipient to do something woke. Yuck. We need some rich right-wingers to establish grants that offer money to scholars who are non-woke and anti-woke.

Quote of the Day, from Elon Musk

Somehow I missed this (here):

At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful.

You nailed it, Elon. It’s also useless or worse. We eliminated systemic racism fifty years ago. This is shown by the fact that Asians are super-successful. If systemic racism still existed, they would be hurt by it just as much as blacks, yet they aren't. In fact, the best strategy for helping blacks is to suggest that they emulate Asians: be studious and eschew criminal activities.

A Possible Precursor to the Trucker Convoy?

Back in the 1990s as the situation in academia became increasingly dire for young scholars, some graduate students who were teaching assistants at Yale were so angry at their poor job prospects and the indifference of their professors that they joined a union and then went on strike by withholding grades in the classes they were helping to teach. The tenured leftists reacted with anger to what their students were doing, even though they had supported marginalized people, including those in unions, in the past. Here is how one leftist, who disapproved of their actions, described the situation:

Sara Suleri, a brilliant postcolonial critic whose work I have taught in my own classes, urged disciplinary action against one of her teaching assistants who joined [the grad student union’s] 1995 decision to withhold undergraduate grades until Yale’s administration agreed to negotiate. Nancy Cott, a widely admired labor historian, spoke out against the union, and David Brion Davis, a distinguished historian of slavery, sought college guards to bar his union-identified teaching assistant from entering the room where undergraduate final exams would be given.

This is from Cary Nelson’s Manifesto of a Tenured Radical, p. 143. Things did not go well for these TAs. As for the professors, I assume they did fine. Other than this passage in Nelson’s book, who else was going to go after them? A few years later, I showed this passage to a young professor to whom I was trying to explain why I had abandoned the left. She read it and shrieked, “Nancy Cott?!” However, I doubt that reading about someone she looked up to acting badly changed much of anything for her. It would take a lot more incidents like that to shake her out of her views. But my point is that this Nancy Cott’s reputation was still intact.

I mention all this because while I’ve enjoyed the audacity of the truckers, I never expected things to end well. The powers-that-be have way too much power, and they can excuse their despicable behavior because they imagine that their opponents are white supremacists, and no one in the bubble (like the media that they follow) will tell them otherwise, of course.

The Unexpected Examination and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

There is a paradox about an unexpected examination that goes like this. A professor announces that sometime next week there will be an unexpected examination and that the students should be prepared for it. The students reason that if by Thursday night, they haven’t had the exam, then it will have to be given on Friday. Since they know this, it won’t be unexpected, and so Friday is eliminated as a possible day for the exam. But on Wednesday night if they haven’t had the exam, they can reason that since Friday is already eliminated, it will have to be given on Thursday, but then it will be expected, so Thursday is also eliminated. By similar reasoning, they can eliminate Wednesday, Tuesday, and Monday as well. So, there can’t be an unexpected exam in the coming week. Or so they reason. The professor, of course, can still surprise them with an exam on Tuesday, and it will be unexpected since they had reasoned that it could not be given at all and will still be unexpected.

Anyway, I was reminded of this silly paradox by the talk of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. There are some differences. No one is saying the invasion will be unexpected, but that’s what we usually expect invasions to be, don’t we? And the people announcing the invasion (Westerners like Biden) are not the people doing the invasion (the Russians). Of course, we were told it was going to happen this past Wednesday, but it didn’t. And now we’re being told that it will happen next week, but it probably won’t.

Actually, the more I think about this, the more people like Biden resemble those religious cults who insist the world will end on a certain date, and when the date comes and goes without the end of the world, they then predict a date in the future when the world will really end.

But assuming the Russians will invade, maybe they will do so when our idiot elites stop making predictions. After all, it seems stupid to do it during any period when our elites say it’s likely to happen. If you know that your enemy expects you to invade on a certain day, then you know they will be ready for you on that day, so there is no point in invading when they are most ready for you.

The Big Fact That the Elites Can’t Accept

The marginalized used to be on the left, but now they can be found throughout the political spectrum. But since our elites can’t accept this fact, when they find themselves dealing with marginalized people on the right, they can’t help themselves and insist on calling them white supremacists, even when they aren’t white. Thinking of them as white supremacists, of course, justifies any response to them.

By the way, it’s interesting that the few actual white supremacists who are around continually accuse the regime in the Ukraine of being Nazis, while our elites never do. Make of that what you will.