I Want a New Left

My Final Post

For various reasons, I have decided to quit blogging. For one thing, my numbers are down to a level that it doesn’t seem worth it to continue, though let me offer my thanks to those who have stayed around! I’m not going to bother enumerating all of my other reasons. I’ll just say that to some extent, I am moving in a new direction and refraining from blogging allows me more time for other things I want to do.

I’ll leave the blog up for a while, maybe indefinitely, but I won’t be doing any more posts.

So long.

Elites Abusing Power: The Politicization of Finance

I used to think of financial institutions as conservative or at worst politically neutral. No more. They have been politicized, and of course, given trends these days, they have been politicized to the left.

The first I heard of this was a few years back. There were financial institutions that were punishing the National Rifle Association, though I can’t remember the details. Also, there was the guy running Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer, who got into trouble with MasterCard for being a “hater” (of Muslims). That one made me pretty uneasy, and I remember suggesting to someone talking about how the right would whip the left if it ever came to a civil war that they could simply cancel our bank accounts and credit cards, and we would be forced to stop. He had nothing to say in reply.

Then came news that people owning index funds were forcing companies to follow environmentalist strictures, simply because they owned enough stock to be able to do this.

And finally, we’ve got the saga of the truckers in Canada. As far as I can tell, not a single elite in the West complained about what happened to them, with only some in Eastern Europe doing so.

Basically, this means the end of free speech. Of what use is it to theoretically have free speech if the powers-that-be can steal yours savings? There’s no need to set up a gulag because they can make your life completely miserable in other ways (though the gulag has been set up anyway, as the Jan. 6th “insurrectionists” know).

Consider J.K. Rowling. She may think she’s a multimillionaire, but the powers-that-be in Britain can simply take any money she has in banks or stocks or bonds. Even if she has money in foreign banks, so long as they are in the West, they can direct any other Western elites to do the same. She would need to have money stashed in banks in China or maybe Turkey, and even then that money might be hard to access. (Maybe if she has it in crypto or gold she’ll be safe.) And she is vulnerable because she is known as a transphobic. Who would complain on her behalf if this were to happen? No other elite would, because they would fear having their own meager funds confiscated. She herself probably said nothing against Trudeau when he stole the truckers’ money, so she will have no cause to complain when it happens to her.

Thirty years ago this couldn’t have happened since enough liberals would have spoken up and said something, but the liberals have gone silent or have (like Bari Weiss) moved toward the right, thus discrediting themselves. To put it differently, the adults aren’t in the room anymore, so everything happening is as juvenile as one can imagine. Looking back, I can’t think of any moment that was the point-of-no-return moment. Yet, here we are.

The sad fact is that we have no checks and balances anymore. Our elites can do anything they like to us, if they get the mind to do it. Generally, though not always, they get their way.

Look at it this way. If epidemiologists at Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford can be called “fringe epidemiologists” by Fauci and his team, there is not much hope for the rest of us to defy the elites.

How do we fight back? I don’t think elections will change much. We can boycott groups hostile to us, but sadly, most on the right will not abandon twitter or facebook.

The result is that free speech, for many of us, is dead.

Elites Abusing Power: Demanding that Women Cyclists Accept Trannies, or Else

See here and here. British Cycling, which is “the lead governing body for cyclists” in the UK, is demanding that women cyclists “accept all participants in the gender they present.” So, who came up with this policy? Was there a discussion, or was it forced upon everyone, whether they wanted it or not? Wasn’t it a top-down rather than a bottom-up decision? How is that fair or democratic? How were obvious difficulties dealt with? Won’t this sort of thing lead to the end of most women’s sports?

John Derbyshire in a recent column (here) about swimming suggested that feminists have been silent because they’re afraid:

They know that anyone who speaks up will suffer consequences. Other swimmers will of course lose their place on competition teams; but non-swimmers too will meet the wrath of the CultMarx Establishment. You could lose your Twitter account, your job, even your bank account. You could be branded for all time on the social-media databases as a hateful hater filled with hate.

Well, the time to have spoken up was ages ago, and they didn’t. It’s too late now. Not even voting Republican will change much. And of course there are those feminists who side with the opposition (here).

Cue the quote from Martin Niemöller (generally quoted as “first they came for the Jews”).

At Last, Some Sense from the Travel Industry

See here. The CEOs of a bunch of airlines are complaining about the mask mandates. I suggested a while ago that the CEOs of not just the airlines, but of every industry affected by the ridiculous rules of the virus should give permanent discounts to anyone willing to wear a t-shirt saying something like “let’s get back to normal.” That was a few months ago, but they are now finally beginning to act together and to make demands. I won’t fly again till I don’t have to wear a mask.

The Taliban’s Promise: Ha, Ha, Ha

The Taliban promised that older girls would get to go to school, but now they are reneging on that promise. This is no surprise to anyone who knows what they are like. See here (and see the fable about the frog and the scorpion). The international community (though I would put that term in quotes because it really means the West) is very disappointed. But what did they expect? Maybe the leaders made such promises, but it’s very hard to change people who have lived in a certain way for centuries and who believe that religion is on their side. And need I add that the international community has never in the last few decades condemned that religion? Let me ask again, what did they expect?

Soccer: Congratulations to ... Um, North Macedonia?!

For beating Italy and thus preventing them from qualifying for the next World Cup. North Macedonia still has to beat Portugal to qualify.

Why Riding the Bus Isn’t the Solution

No, riding the bus is not the answer to inflation. Here’s why relying on buses is a bad idea:

1. Inflation hits bus fares, too. Why would anyone, except elites who don’t know any better, think that bus fares are somehow immune to inflation? They go up as inflation goes up. I know, because I rode buses for years.

2. Every now and then the workers go on strike, and then you have to depend on cars, if not your own car, then on other people's cars.

3. Buses don’t go where we want them to go, nor as often as we’d like. People want to go lots of places that buses don’t go to, and even when the buses do go where we want, we sometimes needs to take two or three buses to get there. Plus, they seldom go as often as we’d like. In bitterly cold weather in Minneapolis, it was common for the buses to be late, just when you’d want them to be on time. Only in Rio de Janeiro, a densely populated city, did the buses come by so frequently that I never bothered with a schedule. But most of America is not densely populated.

4. As a rider, one has no input on where the buses go nor how often they come. Those things are decided by the elites.

5. It is impossible to haul things on the bus. In a poorer area of Minneapolis, I would see blacks taking taxis from grocery stores, because taking a bus with several bags of groceries was out of the question.

6. Right now there are many parts of the country – rural areas and towns – where bus service is non-existent.

7. Attempts to get people to ride the bus often backfire. When I was in Taiwan, the elites had tried this, with the result that many took to riding motorcycles.

Buses and other forms of public transport are a supplement to the main type of transportation, which is cars. And that is all they can ever be. Telling people to take the bus is better than telling them to buy a Prius (a statement that is the twenty-first century version of “let them eat cake”), but it’s not much better.

What’s Happening at the “Times?”

When people, groups, and institutions wield an enormous amount of power and think that they are morally right and their powerless opponents are deplorable, it’s pretty unusual for them to give up some power. Yet, that is what has happened at the NY Times twice in recent days. The first was the admission that the Hunter Biden laptop story that the New York Post had written about in October of 2020 was in fact correct. The second was their editorial complaining about cancel culture, an editorial which has the far left screaming. See here. The first has led to speculation that the Deep State is about to dump Biden and Harris – see here – but together with the second, that seems less likely. All of this is even more unusual when one takes into account the fact that the Times is not only on the left, but drifting even further to the left, as the incident with Donald G. McNeil shows. Recall that he was fired because he had lost the support of the rest of the reporters for having used the “N” word, although in fact he was not the one who had brought up the topic in the incident in question and anyway had not used it but had merely mentioned it. But it was pretty clear from his firing, together with the resignation of Bari Weiss, that a younger generation was taking over and that they were as woke as woke can be.

So, what’s going on? Has the reality of how bad the Biden administration has turned out to be shocked them into thinking that there might be permanent damage to the progressive movement? Has the war in Ukraine shamed some of them for not only not having military training but also for disparaging what they call toxic masculinity, thus making them question the direction in which the country is going? Has the fact that what used to be the remote possibility of nuclear war is now much less remote made them re-think these absurd negotiations with Iran? Have the bad polls suggested that maybe they should try to curry favor with the likely winners in the next election? Has the fact that their spin doesn’t seem to be working very well anymore shown them that they are losing influence the further left they go? Did one of them have a bad near-death experience, as the philosopher A.J. Ayer is supposed to have had, that made them see that they weren’t the wonderful defenders of “our” democracy that they thought they were but were in fact one of its destroyers?

Or was it all nothing but a weird and random pair of events?

A Couple of Interesting and Maybe Even Informative Videos

Here and here. The first is on the sad fate of those who have volunteered to fight in Ukraine, and the second is on dealing with the disturbing fact that governments in the West seem bent on confiscating the money of people they think are fascists or Nazis or white supremacists or whoever is against whatever they think it is important to support at the moment.

Lexical Distance Between European Languages

See here. This gives the “lexical distance” between various European languages. What it gets right are the language groups, but the details are a little odd. For example, it seems hard to believe that Spanish and Basque, which aren’t a bit related, are closer than Hungarian and Estonian, which are somewhat related. Likewise, it says that Spanish and Basque are more related than Swedish and Finnish, which aren’t a bit related, either. Why then is the Spanish-Basque distance 70, while the Swedish-Finnish distance is 90? I’m also pretty sure that Spanish and Portuguese should be closer, except that there’s a slight problem with those two because I think it’s easier for Portuguese speakers to understand Spanish than vice versa.

Then there’s English. English isn’t close to much of anything, except Frysian, which we never hear. Listen to this video and see how well you do. I only picked up the words “and” and “that is.” I say this as an American with a Midwest accent. It seems that some people from Britain do a lot better, based on their accents. But then I have a hard time understanding those accents; in fact, our friends and I basically turn on the subtitles (if we can) when we watch British movies or television shows. So, not only are there no other languages that are close to English, English is so varied that some accents can be difficult to understand.

And finally, there are the slavic languages. A friend who was a native speaker of Polish was able to understand some Russian he heard on the television series The Big Bang Theory, simply from knowing Polish. Yet, the chart has Polish and Russian as more separated than English and German. I doubt if I would understand much of anything in German if I hadn’t studied it a bit. Anyway, my impression based on several sources is that the slavic languages are much closer than this chart suggests.

Anyone?