Anti-Americanism

What Year is This?–Updated

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…could someone please remind me?

Because based on the images and stories below, it seems like it might be 1932 in Germany, as Nazi street thugs work to complete the destruction of the Weimar Republic.

Or it might be 1928 in one of those American cities where the Ku Klux Klan is running rampant.

Here are reports and videos from some of the anti-Israel (and often openly anti-Semitic) demonstrations that have been held around the world since Israel launched its Gaza incursion:

San Francisco…also this

Melbourne, Australia

Anaheim

Fort Lauderdale

Chicago

Dublin, Ireland

Holland

Paris

New York City

UPDATE: Read hating Israel in Trafalgar square

Quote of the Day

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Conjuring images of the medieval church or the Kremlin persecuting dissidents is delicious, but it comes from times and places where very few people even had access to the information that the academy was exposed to. Those controlling authorities could actually hope to keep certain opinions from spreading by applying pressure at a very few places. That world has been disappearing for years. Anyone can get ahold of the ideas of Foucault, or Trotsky, or Derrida at the touch of a button now. Where unavailability is still a problem, ironically, are precisely those areas where those ideas are in ascendance.
 
This is why online learning and other consumer-driven postsecondary education is pushing them out. Prestigious universities are losing prestige, not because Americans are anti-intellectual, but because they are anti-intelligentsia, anti-academy. Even George Bush reads Camus nowadays. The figure of The Professor in comic books and Gilligan’s Island, a person who knows much about all important subjects, does not even work as comedy or stereotype anymore. People chuckled about the comedic exaggeration of Russell Johnson’s character then – now they would fail to find it funny at all, except as some sort of retro thing. People have access to the information themselves and know that humanities professors are often not all that smart. Smarter than average people, perhaps, and trained in particular specialties, but not dealing with subjects far beyond the ken of mortals. That is in fact why these disciplines have developed their own coded vocabularies, to identify outsiders rapidly. They can no longer rely on their superior knowledge to do that for them. It’s too easy for a talented amateur to join the conversation after a little work.
 
There is no need to censor the academy. They are making themselves increasingly irrelevant. The entrenched, government-funded educators at younger levels is more worrisome.

–Assistant Village Idiot

Why Most of Us No Longer Read The Economist

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I just received a press release promoting The Economist‘s new survey of academic economists about McCain’s and Obama’s respective economic programs. Here are the results:

What’s going on here?

This is a junk survey. Look at the data. Now look at the article.

Here’s The Economist‘s explanation of how they generated a survey sample:

Our survey is not, by any means, a scientific poll of all economists. We e-mailed a questionnaire to 683 research associates, all we could track down, of the National Bureau of Economic Research, America’s premier association of applied academic economists, though the NBER itself played no role in the survey. A total of 142 responded, of whom 46% identified themselves as Democrats, 10% as Republicans and 44% as neither. This skewed party breakdown may reflect academia’s Democratic tilt, or possibly Democrats’ greater propensity to respond. Still, even if we exclude respondents with a party identification, Mr Obama retains a strong edge—though the McCain campaign should be buoyed by the fact that 530 economists have signed a statement endorsing his plans.

The stuff about 683 research associates and the NBER is meaningless. What matters is that this was an Internet poll arbitrarily restricted to academic economists and with a self-selected sample. This is a problem because:

-Academic economists are likely to be more leftist than economists as a whole.

-Only 14 out of the 142 respondents identified themselves as Republicans.

-There is no way to know why only 10% or respondents identified as Republicans, but several possibilities implying gross sampling error are obvious. In other words, either most academic economists lean as far to the Left as do other academics, which seems unlikely and would impeach the survey results, or the sample is unrepresentative and impeaches the survey results.

-The labels “Democratic economist”, “Republican economist” and “unaffiliated economist” are self-selected and may be inaccurate. My guess is that most of the unaffiliateds usually vote for Democrats even if they are not registered Democrats. In this regard I am reminded of media people who claim to be independent even though everyone knows they vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.

So this is a worthless survey for research purposes. It is not, however, worthless, for business purposes, as I am sure it will generate a lot of discussion and outraged debunking by bloggers, and therefore a lot of traffic for The Economist‘s Web site. It may also help to get Obama elected, and perhaps that is part of the plan.

Where have we seen this kind of politically driven statistical analysis before?

UPDATE: The vagueness of the self-reported categorizations, “Republican”, “Democrat” and “independent” is obvious. One wonders why the survey did not also, or as an alternative, ask respondents to report for whom they voted in recent elections.

Art and the Left

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I am not an artist but I do try to appreciate art where I can find it. I visit museums and particularly like the Milwaukee Art Museum, with its famous rooftop “wings”. The site is almost as interesting as the art inside its walls.

Much art, however, is aimed at a strange insular world of elitists. The arbiters of taste for art are generally on the coasts and inevitably extremely liberal. To say that their tastes are out of the mainstream is a vast understatement.

This article, which I clipped from the Chicago Tribune book review about 6 months ago (sorry, it sat in my “blog folder” and I recently found it) inadvertently captures this elitist gap with a non-ironic subtitle:

“Photographer Gregory Crewdson’s America is filled with people and places that reflect life at its most hopeless”

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9/11 Plus Seven Years

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(This is basically a rerun of my post from this day in 2006. Some new links added this year are at the bottom of the post.)

I am increasingly worried about our prospects for success in the battle against those who would destroy our civilization. America and the other democracies possess great military, economic, and intellectual strengths–but severe internal divisions threaten our ability to use these resources effectively.

Within days of the collapse of the Towers, it started. “Progressive” demonstrators brought out the stilt-walkers, the Uncle Sam constumes, and the giant puppets of George Bush. They carried signs accusing America of planning “genocide” against the people of Afghanistan.

Professors and journalists preached about the sins of Western civilization, asserting that we had brought it all on ourselves. A well-known writer wrote of her unease when her daughter chose to buy and display an American flag. Some universities banned the display of American flags in dormitories, claiming that such display was “provocative.”

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