Press Freedom: President of Columbia University Full of Caca

The president of Columbia University, a Dr Bollinger, has a big piece in the WSJ of 7/14/10 entitled: “Journalism Needs Government Help.” It was just like this; I am not making this up.

I read it attentively, looking for a sign that the piece was tongue-in-cheek. It wasn’t. The man is dead serious. He does not seem very smart. For one thing, he does not know English well. He does not understand what the verb “to decimate” means. His article begins with the words, “ We have entered a momentous period….” No shit, as if there were others!

The president makes all the familiar liberal arguments to the effect that when something does not work, the government should take it over and support it so it can continue not working. In this case, though the president is not talking about a single company, such as GM, but about hundreds of companies. His band of reference is a slew of newspaper companies that have proven, are proving over and over again, that the paying public desires less and less what they peddle. After all, a daily newspaper is until now one of the cheapest deals around. It’s still cheaper than a cup of mediocre coffee, in most places. Of course, retail prices would be higher if the newspapers were not also supported by advertisers. Dr Bollinger: People don’t want to spend 75 cents, or a dollar for what newspaper organizations put out. Advertisers have no confidence either.

Why would I pay with my tax dollars for an option for my neighbors that my neighbors don’t want?

In a half-page article, Dr Bollinger, the university president, fails to do what all scholars are trained to do: Look for exceptions to his broad generalizations. Yes, the printed press is generally in trouble all over America, but not all of it. It turns out, that the Wall Street Journal does not have the chronic financial problems of its main rival, the New York Times. No one at the WSJ is asking for a government hand-out. It turns out, for an other example, that the libertarian-conservative Weekly Standard is flourishing while another weekly, Newsweek, is bankrupt. Are those facts irrelevant, Dr Bollinger or is it possible you are not even aware of them?

Dr Bollinger has the common decency to address the idea that federal government financial support of the press raises severe First Amendment issues. Can the freedom of the press the First Amendment guarantees survive a situation where journalists get their paycheck from President Obama, or from President Palin, for that matter? To my huge surprise, Dr Bollinger answers in the affirmative.

No problem, he says, look at previous examples such as the undeniably useful Voice of America (a small government networks broadcasting overseas that liberals have done their best to eviscerate). Here, the President of Columbia University commits a big error that this former teacher would have roundly condemned if it had come from a college sophomore. Yet, it’s a mistake that’s not surprising emanating from an adult liberal because these people have not thought anything new for years. They operate from dogma alone.

Here is the mistake: Dr Bollinger confuses the need of ordinary Americans to be informed, with the American government’s need to inform some categories of people, including foreigners. The president does not understand the difference between free information, which has to be varied and, of necessity chaotic, and orderly government propaganda (again, of the kind I approve in the examples he choses ). Dr Bollinger is a dunce, a dangerous one because of the position he occupies! Pass it on.

I am wondering whether the Wall Street journal did not publish Dr Bollinger’s demonstration of gross ignorance out of sheer viciousness, to expose this kind of non-thinking to the cruel lights of a good periodical.

Dr Bollinger: Much of the printed press is dying because it deserves to die. It had failed to adapt to new circumstances such as the Internet – which have not been really new for more than ten years, by the way. It’s a dinosaur. It’s not even an honest dinosaur. It dishes out boring propaganda at intervals that are not even regular. Occasionally, the best of its numbers engages in outright and persistent fraud. (If this sounds extremist, look up “New York Times – Jason Blair.”) I don’t want to pay for my neighbors’ fantasy life, if I have such neighbors. I probably don’t have such neighbors. Most people are like me: They get their news from sources they trust including some they are happy to pay for. (I spend about ½ of 1% of my moderate net income on information providers of all kinds. I could easily do with less but it’s money well spent.)

Many journalists will become unemployed, it’s true. So are many other Americans unemployed. Some of the unemployed will start their own media ventures. They will be more honest than the current tottering giants. Others will no doubt join the ranks of government employees since the federal government is the only creator of jobs right now. At least, as direct government bureaucrats they will be rendered comparatively impotent, unable to do as much harm as they would as government-supported so-called “journalists.” You can hire a few of the remainder to teach Journalism at Columbia University’s vaunted school of journalism. As a former colleague, I advise you that the school could create a few new courses, such as: “Dead Journalism,” and “The Print Press: The Passing of an Empire.” Also, read this blog it’s more informative than many still-existing newspapers. I am not bragging; the standards are really low.

Update on Climate Change and Science Fraud; Peer Review Explained.

The mainstream press is losing its last shreds of credibility by maintaining a blackout on a major international fraud concerning climate change. Here is the story, from a very personal angle.

“Hacked” emails demonstrate that climate change advocates have eliminated data that contradict their position. What’s more, the emails prove that they conspired actively with one another, across oceans and across continents, to hide the facts.

I wonder if anyone is going to jail? I hope someone will, a least for a while. I feel strongly about this as a scholar and as a citizen.

Last statement first. A single scientist faking results is in a position to cause billions of dollars of harm, taken from citizens, and by sabotaging economic growth, to ward off an imaginary evil. That’s much worse than anything the Mafia can do. In the meantime, young men are in jail for stealing $1,000, or on minor drug-dealing charges. Al Gore, the jet-setting half-Nobel Prize winner has made millions trafficking in imaginary carbon credits. I wonder how old Al would fare in the federal penitentiary.

As a scholar, I hate what this fraud and conspiracy does to the reputation of science. Let me explain, based on my own experience.

Science never relied on individual consciences. It’s mostly a set of community safeguards to protect against individual bias, precisely. Squarely in the middle of this set are : Double blind refereeing, “peer review,” and replicability of findings. Replicability, first. If something is real, another well trained researcher (or research team), with the same data, should be able to obtain the same results:Whether a dropped ball falls down or shoots up into the stratosphere does not depend on the inclination, or personality, or sex, of the thrower. If it fails to fall a single time, the Theory of Gravity needs major reforming. It might even be junked altogether because of that single contrary instance. Replication requires access to data (information). If the relevant data are a unique set, or expensive to gather, denial of access to data, or their destruction, guarantee that replication will not be performed. If you don’t want to be caught committing scientific fraud, suppressing such data is a must. There is no other reason really to suppress data.

Next, peer review, really reviewing/refereeing. It’s not well understood by the big media, including Rush Limbaugh. I have a long personal experience in being a reviewer for scholarly journals as well as in having my own work reviewed. First a reminder: A basic rule of science is that anything that is not published in refereed (peer-reviewed) journal barely exists or does not exist at all. Hence one’s position in the scientific community depends mostly, almost exclusively, on being published in such a journal. (If you are curious, follow the link on this blog to my vita that will tell you how well I did at this game.)

Here is how it works: I labor, sometimes for years, on a specific scientific problem in the hope of getting a 25-page article published in a journal. When he receives my submission, the journal editor sends it to three reviewers, or referees, he knows to be knowledgeable about the issues in my submission. They don’t know who I am and, in most cases, they don’t know who they are. I also don’t know who they are, which saves me from the temptation to retaliate in the future if things don’t go my way. It’s called “double-blind refereeing; should be called,”triple-blind,” in fact. Then, the editor decides what to do based on all three reviews. At the end, all are advised of the decision and all reviews are shared, still anonymously. Each reviewer is thus in a position to pass judgment on the fairness of the editor’s decision. Reviewers are not remunerated, nor are published authors. Editors may receive small advantages from their university for their service, one course off per year, for example.

It’s all a brutally competitive process: The probability of simply being accepted nears zero. Being told to “revise and resubmit” is considered a very favorable outcome. In good journals, more than 90% of submissions are rejected outright.

In a discipline I know well, the average life-time publications per scholar is under three.

The system is devised to root out both fraud and incompetence by minimizing prejudice and bias. To put it in perspective, when I was actively engaged in research, I was always aware of some tribal favoritism: Assigning a well-disposed reviewer, editors lowering the bar slightly for a friend or, more frequently, for a student; using their small margin of editorial discretion to re-consider a decision not to publish that was on the cusp to begin with. There is, however, well-known, widespread favoritism toward scholars from prestigious universities. It’s unfair to individual scholars but justified overall because, on the average, the quality of submissions from such universities is superior. Their scholars tend not to waste editors’ or reviewers’ time. Submissions from second-tier schools are often a waste of time, in my experience. This is an elite game.

In my 30-year career, I must have refereed more than a hundred papers, submitted to several journals. I only found outright fraud once. It was in a single authored-paper; fraud is harder to commit with an accomplice, obviously. What I found in abundance was lack of clarity, confusion, self-indulgence, laziness, and outright incompetence. Active conspiracies to suppress findings and to make up data are news to me.

My assessment is that the scholarly refereeing process (peer review) works well as long as it’s based on individual assessments, as described above. Once there is a conscious conspiracy, all bets are off. Anything at all could masquerade as scientific findings, at least for a while. The worst of it is that any cheating undermines confidence in the process and encourages the cynicism common among those unfamiliar with the process. It also discourages the multitudes of scholars who are completely honest: It feels bad to spend a life-time playing basketball only to discover that some players were wearing springs in their shoes all along. That’s why I surmise that the so-called “hacking” was an inside job by a proponent of climate change who became disgusted with his colleagues’ criminal actions.

The irony of this story of fraud, and also its main significance, is that it seems as of now that only ten or twelve years of measurements are involved in the data suppression Such a short counter-trend should make no difference for a model purporting to account for two hundred years or more of climate change. That is, they should make little scientific difference. The bastards were not cheating to advance a particular scientific theory but in support of a political agenda, an agenda of collectivization, to be precise. The cheats probably thought that it would look bad in Copenhagen if the great unwashed masses were aware of global cooling over that short recent period.

My first reaction was that the so-called “scientists” involved in the fraud were whores. I hesitate to use the word now because it’s unfair to whores. Whores make their living honestly at least and they do precious little harm.

Here is the long and the short of it: If you have to lie for your cause, it’s a bad cause. If you have to enlist accomplices in the lie, it’s a worse cause. There is probably no long-term trend of global warming that is both man-made and dangerous.

PS Polar bears are thriving, eating people every chance they get and shitting on the pure white ice, bless their big hearts!

PS2 Last minute: The University of East Anglia, of the hacked emails, has forced the director of its climate studies institute, Phil Jones. to step down pending furher investigation.

update 12/04/09

The University of East Anglia conspiracy to commit fraud does not prove that there is no global warming. It just obligates global warming advocates to adopt the scientific humility they should have had all along. And it should return the burden of proof where it belongs: You think that something alarming is happening that requires drastic measures? Show me lots of untainted, high-quality  evidence or shut-up.

Myself, I don’t believe there is a man-made, trend of rising temperature that we should worry about right now. It’s not because the liars were caught in the act though. Please, see my  several postings on the subject and the link to the site where I get much of my serious info. It’s on the front page of this blog under “climate change.” Also, there was  an excellent explanatory article summarizing our collective scientific understanding of climate change in the Wall Street Journal on 12/01/09. It’s by brave Professor of Meteorology Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute  of Technology. I call him “brave” because no one wants to sit with him at the MIT Faculty Club. Most of his colleagues think he has cooties or they are too cowardly to be seen conversing with him.

A young liberal friend of mine I believe to be personally honest tells me that the emails about tweaking graphs and losing important data  can be explained. I keep arguing that we are dealing here with a religious cult. I say this in frustration because I don’t know what to do about deeply felt irrational religious beliefs.

I can’t get away from the question of how the fraud-enriched Al Gore would fare in federal prison. A homosexual friend of mine assures me that Al is still quite a handsome man. (OK, that was the bitch in me talking; I can’t help myself.) By the way. I haven’t heard a word from Al on the subject of Climate Gate. How about you?

Fascism Explained

Note: Posted earlier. I think this piece needs a new airing. (I added some remarks at the end, following the President’s speech in Cairo.) Besides, I am busy trying to concoct a posting in French. Doing the accents on my keyboard is a bitch!

The aim of fascism as a political movement is to substitute for individual self-confidence based on skills and achievements uncritical trust in a leader or in an organization. Fascism as a form of government has no objective. Invariably, it ends either in misery or in a catastrophe.

The word “fascist” has been so overused – entirely by Left-leaning people, – that is has become an empty insult. I am guessing that most Americans alive today only know the term as a nasty epithet, perhaps with vague references to Italy’s Mussolini. This is too bad because fascism is a real socio-political phenomenon that took over a fair number of developed societies in the middle-part of the twentieth century. Fascism is also alive, under other names, in and out of power, in the semi-advanced but chronically stagnant societies of Latin America. I think that the fascist temptation is always, forever present in the background of modern societies, including democratic societies. (There are more discussions of contemporary fascism further down in this essay.)

I am addressing this brief description of fascism to my younger contemporaries, in the US and elsewhere, because fascism has become relevant to the current American situation. I am not trying to shout an alarm call as I would with a fast spreading forest fire, for example, just helping inform the curious and intelligent but justifiably ignorant as I always try to do on this blog. (I also do that on my radio program, every Sunday,on KSCO 1080 AM, Santa Cruz, 11AM-1PM.)

Much has been written about two aspects of the best known fascist movements and regimes. First, there have been many books about the most visible leaders of the most visible fascisms, especially about Hitler and Mussolini. These works have focused on the personalities, the families and the psychological antecedents of those leaders and, to a lesser extent, on the leaders’ inner psychology while they were in power. Second, there have been a number of notable studies of the immediate followers that is, on the large numbers of ordinary people who joined explicitly fascist organizations, such as the infamous SS in Germany. There is current resurgence of interest in the long-lived Spanish brand of fascism, under Francisco Franco. (Franco achieved his dictatorship after a bloody civil war. Yet he governed Spain peacefully for more than thirty years.)

To my knowledge, it’s difficult to find much about the more passive supporters of fascist movements, the great bulk of them. This is an important question because the foremost fascist party in history, the Nazi Party, came to power through largely constitutional means. Many ordinary Germans who were probably nice people supported it. It’s difficult to think about it because of so many movies but initially, supporters of fascism are sweet-faced and pure-hearted. It seems to me many Hitler and Mussolini supporters were hoodwinked, in part because they were too lazy to think of the consequences of their choices.

To make a long story short, the Nazis won the largest number of votes in a regular election, assumed government power and proceeded to eliminate democratic rule. Nazism was brought to power by the naivety of some and by the passivity of others. Mussolini’s Fascist Party seized power with considerable popular support. The short-lived but devastating French version of fascism, was formulated and led by a general and war hero to whom the democratically elected representatives of the Republic handed power willingly.

The less known, less flamboyant, but much longer-lasting Portuguese brand of fascism was invented by a mild-mannered professor of economics. Although he was installed after a military coup, he was for practical purposes, little opposed by Portuguese civil society for most of his rule. He led Portugal to the lowest economic rank in Europe, pretty much to Third World status. Similarly, Fascist movements came to power mostly peacefully in Hungary and in Romania in the late thirties and early forties. After WWII, General Perón of Argentina implemented a successful fascist program with the assent of the broad mass of Argentineans. He was even able to pull it off twice. He left the country in a shamble from which it has not recovered, thirty years later.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is a conventional fascist state installed originally by a broad mass movement. It has limited political representation. Economically, it conforms faithfully to the historical fascist experience of initial success followed by a continuous descent into poverty. This, in spite of massive oil revenues. Its apparatus of repression includes draconian laws, summary arrests, trials without protection for the accused, capital punishment for a broad range of non-homicidal offenses, and prison murders. It looks completely familiar though the repression is done in the name of religion.

So, let me correct a common mistake: Fascism is not a political ideology imposed by force from above. It’s a mass movement. It requires both mute consent from some and a high degree of enthusiasm from others.

All fascist regimes ended in blood and disaster or in whimpering economic disgrace because they showed themselves unable to provide more than the bare necessities of life. Given the dramatic ending of the more dramatic fascist regimes, again, such as Hitler’s and Mussolini, we tend to ignore this prosaic truth: Fascism is a recipe for prolonged poverty, at best. That’s when it does not end in total economic ruination as in Germany. The end of Spanish and of Portuguese fascism were negotiated affairs conducted under Army pressures. Spain’s and Portugal’s economies began taking off immediately after the transfers of power to democratically elected government that lacked any economic experience.

Fascist economic programs never work.

In power, fascist parties invariably attempt to concentrate the levers of the national economy in a few government hands. They do so either by nationalizing outright the means of production, or by forcing employers and employees into the same state-controlled organizations. Often, they cynically call these organizations “labor unions,” or “trade unions.” This mode of organizations is technically called “corporatism.” The word does not imply that corporations have power but the reverse: The government or its agents make the main decisions for corporations. Of course, corporatism is the complete negation of capitalism which requires all-around competition. That includes the competition of owners and controllers of capital with workers. All-around competition is inherently messy. It’s the converse of a well-trained army marching in lock-step, for example. Fascists hate disorder.

Technical note: Nationalization, the government take-over of a company owned by stockholders almost never requires a majority of the shares of ownership. Under current laws, in the US, the control of 15% of the shares is usually sufficient. Frequently, it takes much less than 15% ownership for a government to dictate a corporation’s policies. That’s because the stock is usually widely dispersed, with the largest stockholders owning a very small % of the total.

Fascists concentrate economic control in the name of orderliness.

Fascist governments and fascist movements detest capitalism.

A fascist movement always preaches national unity. Fascists begin by deploring unpleasant partisanship. In the name of national unity, fascist parties seek to weaken open discussion. They use words such as “bi-partisan,” and “overcoming our differences,” repeatedly and until they appear to describe what is obviously desirable. The American practice of democratic governance by contrast is based explicitly on confrontations followed by negotiations, one issue at a time, between often-changing coalitions. When it comes to power, the fascist party abolishes competing political parties. It may do so by absorbing them or by persecuting them and murdering their members. The same fascist government often practices both forms of elimination. Thus, the powerful German Communist Party pre-1933, ended up partly in Nazi concentration camps, partly in the Nazi SS guard.

Fascist politics require the elimination of competing voices.

Fascist movements are often headed by providential leader, one who presents himself a a savior from a grave crisis, real or imagined ( real or imagined, and sometimes made up). The best known fascist leaders such as Hitler, Mussolini, and Perón, have also been charismatic. This is not absolutely necessary, providential is enough. Salazar of Portugal, a rotund, short man, was as lacking in charisma as anyone. Franco was downright sinister, even to many of his followers. Yet, personal charisma certainly helps a fascist leader achieve power. It helps his credulous followers suspend their sense of criticality.

Fascist success requires the unchecked veneration of leadership.

Fascist movement are usually not content to suppress dissent. They demand the sincere submission of individual wills to the benefit of a greater collective good. That’s because only inner submissions guarantees a long, unchallenged rule. The fascist movement imposes this demand first on movement followers and then, on all citizens.

Fascism places the collective (real or not) much ahead of the individual.

The muzzling of the press, serves both to eliminate the voicing of dissent and to achieve the submission of individual wills. A society with no press though is not the most desirable goal of a fascist government. Fascism seeks to whip up mass enthusiasm. So, the best situation is one where the press speaks in a unified voice in support of the fascist party, or of its leader. What is true of the press narrowly defined, is true of other mass media as well. Thus, Hitler, actively encouraged the development of a German cinema entirely to its devotion. So did the French fascist regime between 1940 and 1944 (with active German Nazi help, by the way.) Enthusiasm helps ordinary people bear burdens and it helps them suppress their pangs of conscience when they witness immoral actions.

Fascism requires the uncritical enthusiasm of many to achieve power, and more so to keep it because of the progressive impoverishment it causes, and also to gain toleration for its bad actions.

In some important historical cases, there is not much muzzling to be done because much the bulk of the mainstream media is already supporting the providential leader, before he comes to power. That was the case in Germany in and, to a lesser extent in Italy. Mussolini himself was a journalist, presumably with ability to manipulate the press rather than suppress it. Having the movie industry endorsing unconditionally a fascist leader would prove invaluable in a contemporary society because of the superior ability of movies to engage the whole person’s emotions along with intellect. Also, it’s likely today that many more people watch movies than read newspapers. This is especially true of the young.

The intelligentsia, the educated class, or a large fraction of it, invariably plays a role in the ascent or legitimation of fascist ideas. Martin Heidegger, then and later, an important German philosopher, became an active Nazi directly upon Hitler’s accession to power. In the case I know second best, that of France, foremost novelists, such as Drieu la Rochelle, and Louis Ferdinand Céline, were early and ardent supporters of fascism. Marcel Déat, a noted philosophy professor with the best academic credentials turned politician, was one of the most effective collaborators in the Nazi occupation of France. (It’s also true that many more French intellectuals supported the totalitarianism of the Left, instead. So?)

Fascism gains intellectual respectability from the endorsement of conventional luminaries and professional intellectuals.

Given their insistence on national unity, fascist movements must appear respectable to the political center, the main abode of respectability. The great American sociologist Martin Seymour Lipset famously called fascism, “the extremism of the (political) Center.” Hence, fascists cannot afford to suppress opposition openly by illegal means. Once they are in power, they change the laws so that anything they wish, including the mass murder of the mentally- ill and later, the attempted destruction of all Gypsies and all Jews within their reach, is made legal. Before they reach power however, they must appear civilized to avoid unnecessarily alarming ordinary middle-class citizens. In order to pursue both ends, fascist movement employ goons, organized extremists toughs whose actions they are able to condemn when expedient.

Fascist movement commonly employ goon associates to wreck democratic elections by putting unbearable pressure on electoral organs designed for a civil transfer of power. In a normal democracy, it often takes a small percentage of the votes cast to win an election. Thus, pressure tactics are often successful. Fascist movements sometimes sacrifice their goon wing once they are in power. Hence, Hitler liquidated his strong-arm SA guard in 1934. that is, after he had gained the chancellorship (more or less the presidency), when they had outlived their usefulness as a tool of street terror. Hitler may have had only a hundred or so SA leaders assassinated. The bulk of the SA rank and file learned to stay down. Many were incorporated into the other and rival strong-arm branch of the Nazi movement, the SS.

Fascists use extra-legal methods to gain political power, in addition to legal methods.

Fascist regimes are never conservative. They are revolutionary or radical reformists with an agenda of social justice. These words mean always and everywhere, “equalization.” There is some confusion in history books on this issue for several reasons. First, the head of Spanish fascism, General Franco had a Catholic agenda that looks culturally conservative on the surface. In fact, Franco tried to restore his own archaic version of Catholicism in a country where religious practice had gone down to near-zero levels among the men. Thus, Franco was not trying to conserve anything but to go back to a largely illusory, invented past.

An other source of confusion in that in several European countries and most dramatically, in Germany, big business circles eventually did lend their support to fascists governments. Two reasons for this. First big business leaders were then afraid of a Communism which had not yet demonstrated its incompetence as a solution to anything except the good life.

(More below on the relationship between fascism and communism.) Second, the owners and/or managers of large business enterprises are often natural collectivists. They tend to abhor real, unfettered competition and to prize workplace discipline. Fascist regimes protected them from the one and provided the other to perfection.

I believe that liberal scholars in the West have deliberately fostered the confusion, the idea that conservatism and fascism are two positions on the same axis. I don’t have the space to develop the bases of my belief here. Yet it’s a critical belief I developed during thirty years around liberal and left-wing scholars. Fascists and big business leaders love neatness above all. They detest the give-and-take and the frank competition of the market.

In summary: Fascism abhors the idea of the individual will of ordinary citizens. In this, it is the complete opposite of classical conservatism which recognizes only the individual. Fascism’s main achievement everywhere and in every epoch, is to make ordinary people poor, dependent and afraid. Fascism is not imposed by force. It wins through the support of the uncritically enthusiastic.

This is just and introduction. It’s easy to find good material to read on fascism. Or, you might just decide finally to read the great short book you pretended to have read in high school but never did get around to read first to last page: George Orwell’s “1984.”

On another posting: The relationship between historical fascism and communism. (Hint: Same damn thing!)

Addendum 6/11/09

Why are leftists and their friends so often anti-Semitic?

It was not just Hitler, Stalin also tried to deflect the problem of his country on to “the Jews.” That happened after the Nazi extermination camps had been discovered, largely by Russians soldiers.

Melanie Kirpatrick had a piece on Hugo Chavez’ persecution of Jews in Venezuela today.( “The Politics of Intimidation,” WSJ, 5/1/09). Hugo Chavez is one of the heroes of the Hollywood Left. In the same issue of the WSJ, an American Professor writes from Beirut, Lebanon about official Lebanese anti-Antisemitism. He reports that the television series, “The Nanny” is banned in Lebanon because the heroine Fran Drescher is Jewish! The real reason is that Lebanese have to appear as friends of the Palestinians (although they probably killed more Palestinians  over the years than Israelis did). The Palestinians are the other darlings of the Left. Anti-antisemitism is transitive! (Look up that word, knucklehead.)

I know, I know, most American Jews vote mostly on the Left. They espoused Obama as if he were the long-awaited Messiah. After the Cairo speech, they are not so sure. This does not tell me anything about the Left. It tells me about human folly and obduracy.