Saturday Miscellany

 First, a few words from Ben Rubenstein-- I have never heard of him, for good reason:

I am a Jewish American and I do not recognize Israel's "right to exist.

As though what he thinks matters. He is obviously full of himself and should avoid making grandiose public pronouncements about matters he does not understand.

Second, Wesley Yang responds to Ben and clarifies the rights issue:

No state exists because of some airy notion of right. All states exist because a distinct people joins in a pact of blood to defend a territory with their lives with force greater than any and all opposing forces.

A useful clarification. 

Third, some notes about my comments about the weird sisters, two days ago. Unable to declare calls to murder Jews to be unacceptable speech, said sisters are currently in some serious trouble. 

As for what is and what is not acceptable speech, Bret Stephens tallies up some speech that these same universities have declared to be unacceptable. Call this the hypocrisy watch.

Colleges and universities that for years have been notably censorious when it comes to free speech seem to have suddenly discovered its virtues only now, when the speech in question tends to be especially hurtful to Jews.

Representative Tim Walberg, a Michigan Republican, observed that Carole Hooven, an evolutionary biologist, had been hounded out of Harvard (though not fired outright) for her views on sex categories. “In what world,” Walberg asked, “is a call for violence against Jews protected speech but a belief that sex is biological and binary isn’t?”

At Yale, the law professor Amy Chua was relieved of some teaching duties and ostracized by students and the administration on blatantly pretextual grounds while her original sin, as The Times reported in 2021, was her praise for Brett Kavanaugh. Yet when Zareena Grewal, an associate professor of American studies at Yale, tweeted on Oct. 7 that Israeli “is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle,” Yale defended her by saying Grewal’s comments “represent her own views.”

Fourth, you probably remember Sam Altman of OpenAI fame. Regarding anti-Semitism, he said this his Twitter account:

for a long time i said that antisemitism, particularly on the american left, was not as bad as people claimed. i'd like to just state that i was totally wrong. i still don't understand it, really. or know what to do about it. but it is so fucked.

Fifth, a point that I have often noted, now raised by Roger Kimball in his takedown of the weird sisters of American higher education. From the Spectator:

Attentive readers will have noticed that I have emphasized that these three university presidents are ladies. I did so because the “feminization” of higher education we having been hearing so much about recently is very much in the background of this event. (Not, I hasten to add, that feminized males — I believe the preferred argot is “cucks” — like Peter Salovey at Yale or Christopher Eisgruber at Princeton wouldn’t have given similar non-answers: they surely would have.)

The feminization of higher ed — and of American society as a whole — is a large topic. Here I want simply to note that the repellent jelly of moral confusion that united all three responses was saturated by that feminization. None of those women could give a direct answer to a direct question about a matter of grave moral moment. Instead, they temporized, equivocated, dodged and parried.

Well stated. It was not for nothing that I called them the weird sisters.

Sixth, as for the horror that is the trans movement, professionals tell parents that if they do not allow their children to transition, the children will commit suicide.

To which Leor Sapir writes:

I’m glad this thread is getting a second wind. The claim that “trans kids” will commit suicide if not given hormones and surgeries is used to emotionally blackmail parents into agreeing to sterilize their own children, and there’s no evidence for it.

Evidently, anyone who uses emotional blackmail to cause parents to allow their children to be mutilated should be in jail.

Seventh, aside from the fact that it wants to become a world leader in assisted suicide-- it is cheaper than treatment, Canada is telling gay children that they are really trans.

An account called Transgender Trend writes this:

We are seeing almost an epidemic of young gay children being told they are trans and being put on a medical pathway...we are not going to run away from this issue any longer.

Does the word homophobia mean anything any more.

Mia, of the CryMiaRiver Twitter responds:

I long for the day that a Canadian MP has the courage and decency to stand up for all the gay and lesbian teenagers who are undergoing conversion therapy in Canada's gender clinic.

Eighth, if you want your children to be more healthy, mentally, the solution is to be more conservative. Not so much in the political sense, but in the sense of exercising authority.

The Carolina Journal explains:

Conservative and very conservative parents are more likely to raise mentally healthy teens compared to liberal parents, according to a new study from the Institute for Family Studies and Gallup.

The results drop amid a nationwide mental youth crisis among youth, stemming partly from the aftershocks of the COVID-19 pandemic. A report released in February by the NC Child Fatality Task Force found that the youth suicide rate has nearly tripled in two decades. North Carolina lawmakers included additional funding for mental health services in the new state budget.

The IFS/Gallup report found that “the most important factor in the mental health of adolescent children is the quality of the relationship with their caregivers.” The key driver is parents who have an “authoritative” style that combines “affection and attentiveness to children’s needs with structure and requirements for pro-social, responsible behavior.”

In contrast, liberal parents are more likely to have a permissive parenting style and “are the least likely to successfully discipline their children.”

Vindication for Prof. Amy Chua, aka the Tiger Mom.

Ninth, Democrat Steven Rattner wrote in the New York Times that if people are pessimistic about their economic futures, they are not hallucinating. Obviously, if you read Paul Krugman you would think that the general opinion about how bad the economy is shows nothing but delusional thinking.

Obviously, Rattner has some integrity. Krugman is a propagandist.

Rattner points out that, statistics notwithstanding, inflation is running rampant, and that young people have good reason to believe that their lives will be more difficult than were those of their parents.

So, numbers matter. And yet, there is more to life than numbers.

And yet, we might consider this. If young people are pessimistic about America’s future, it might be because of the quality of America’s leaders. If the best that America can do is a senile doddering old fool, backed up by a certifiable imbecile, then perhaps we should not be overly optimistic.

And, add to that the appalling academic underperformance of American schoolchildren, and you might be even more pessimistic.

Finally, the flood of migrants who lack basic academic skills, coupled with the corruption of universities through the admission of large numbers of students who cannot do the work-- adds more icing to the cake.

Tenth, America’s universities have become an international embarrassment. Andrew Sullivan has the solution:

End DEI in its entirety. Fire all the administrators whose only job is to enforce its toxic orthodoxy. Admit students on academi merit alone. Save standardized testing-- which in fact helps minorities…. Restore grading so that it actually means something again. Expel students who shut down speech or deplatform speakers. Pay no attention to the race or sex or orientation or gender identity of your students,and see them as free human beings with open minds.

Eleventh, you have surely been asking yourself: where’s the beef. As the climate confab in Dub ends with a banquet where beef is conspicuously present, the San Francisco Gate reports that famous vegetable palaces on the West Coasts have discovered that they cannot survive financially by banning beef.

California has been at the forefront of healthful eating and plant-based cuisine for decades, from restaurants like Chez Panisse in Berkeley to Michael’s in greater Los Angeles. But despite decades of offering meatless this or gluten-free that, some Southern California restaurants have recently decided that going entirely vegan is not a recipe for long-term financial success.

After years of being vegan, some very well-known LA restaurants are adding meat, dairy or both to their menus to appeal to a larger audience.

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