Politicized science inevitably tends toward pseudoscience - "not only is patriarchy quite common in pre-capitalist societies (feudal societies, tribal societies, traditional farming villages etc.), but we have lots of evidence of ways that capitalism weakens patriarchy over the long run. This is one of the key findings of Claudia Goldin, who won the Econ Nobel this year. One big reason is that capitalism tends to make less of women’s labor “invisible” — exactly the reverse of the arrow on this chart. In contrast, academic arguments that capitalism weakens feminism tend to be primarily theoretical. Another example is the set of arrows from “slavery” to “cheap labor” to “capitalism”. There is a (probably wrong) theory out there that slavery facilitated the development of capitalism, but it’s undeniable that capitalism has seen its greatest flourishing after the widespread banning of slavery... the chart is pseudoscientific. If the claims made in a chart like this are not concrete, they’re not testable. Testability is at the core of science; otherwise, theory becomes unmoored from physical reality. (In fact, some defenders of this might even argue that testability itself is a western/colonialist value that should be rejected. This would be like when Stephen Colbert says “We know every word of the Bible is true because the Bible says that the Bible is true, and if you remember from earlier in this sentence, every word in the Bible is true.”)... Jenny Bulstrode is a lecturer at University College London, who has an appointment in both the Department of Science and Technology Studies and the Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences (yes, the British pluralize the word “math” into “maths”, sigh). In 2021 she wrote a paper called “Black metallurgists and the making of the industrial revolution”. In this paper she claimed that the British metallurgist Henry Cort, who famously invented the process for turning scrap iron into bar iron, actually got that technique from some Black metallurgists in Jamaica. Specifically, she speculates that Jamaican workers got the idea of passing scrap iron through grooved rollers — which is one part of Cort’s process — from the grooved rollers used to grind sugar cane. In July, the historian Anton Howes wrote a blog post in which he lays out Bulstrode’s evidence in a concise format, and explains why this evidence is totally insufficient to support the conclusion that Henry Cort got his ideas from Jamaica... Howes noted a 2023 paper by a history graduate student named Oliver Jelf, which goes over the sources Bulstrode uses and finds that they’re generally inconsistent with her narrative... The idea that Black labor and ingenuity “built” the U.S. and other Western countries was very popular in the 2010s, as was the concept of cultural appropriation. The story of a White capitalist appropriating the inventions of enslaved Black workers is thus appealing from a political standpoint, at least if you are in a heavily left-leaning field like history. That probably explains why Bulstrode’s paper, even before the controversy, was far and away the most well-read thing that the journal History and Technology has ever published...
'We by no means hold that ‘fiction’ is a meaningless category – dishonesty and fabrication in academic scholarship are ethically unacceptable. But we do believe that what counts as accountability to our historical subjects, our readers and our own communities is not singular or to be dictated prior to engaging in historical study. If we are to confront the anti-Blackness of EuroAmerican intellectual traditions, as those have been explicated over the last century by DuBois, Fanon, and scholars of the subsequent generations we must grasp that what is experienced by dominant actors in EuroAmerican cultures as ‘empiricism’ is deeply conditioned by the predicating logics of colonialism and racial capitalism. To do otherwise is to reinstate older forms of profoundly selective historicism that support white domination.'
Basically, Slaton and Suravia assert that while you shouldn’t be allowed to fabricate sources, any speculation should be regarded as scholarship, no matter how scant the evidence, as long as that speculation supports their preferred political aims. Note that this is far from the only place I’ve seen arguments like this in recent years. Here’s an essay in American Anthropologist, rejecting the idea of an “objective past” in favor of “counter-myths that emphasize the contingent and political nature of archaeological praxis”. Personally, I fail to see any salient difference between insisting that we believe in fabricated sources and insisting that we believe in speculations that have nothing to do with the existing sources. Both seem, to me, like clear examples of fiction. And when fiction is treated as fact, that is pseudoscience... society might suffer. Human consensus can’t change the laws of the Universe; nature always gets a vote. And if humans collectively decide to embrace pseudoscience in the natural sciences, it can lead to widespread suffering. A classic example is the one at the top of this post — Trofim Lysenko, a Soviet scientist who led a politically motivated crusade against the science of genetics. The results were disastrous:... 'Widespread crop failure and famine resulted'... If the U.S. allows leftist politics to…er, colonize the field of medicine, we could see widespread negative health effects from politically motivated pseudoscientific treatments or diagnoses. Politically motivated pseudoscience in criminology could lead to defunding of police, and thus to increased death and victimization rates for Black people"
Basically, if you don't allow blacks to lie, this is racist
Universities Are Not on the Level - "public confidence in colleges has fallen significantly across all ideological groups since 2015. Though Republicans’ confidence cratered the most, Gallup found that it fell by 16 points among independents and 9 points among Democrats. Often, when an issue becomes polarized, you’ll see thermostatic effects in public opinion, as when Democrats became more liberal on immigration in response to Donald Trump’s histrionic attacks on immigrants. But while liberal figures on campus like to talk about themselves as a vanguard in a fight against conservative know-nothings who would take down knowledge and expertise, there is no pro-college backlash among liberals that is apparent in the polls. So it would behoove the champions of knowledge and research and expertise and truth at our nation’s elite universities to be a little less entitled and whiny, and a little more introspective about why everyone seems to like them less than they used to. I personally have also developed a more negative view of colleges and universities over the last decade, and my reason is simple: I increasingly find these institutions to be dishonest. A lot of the research coming out of them does not aim at truth, whether because it is politicized or for more venal reasons. The social justice messaging they wrap themselves in is often insincere. Their public accountings of the reasons for their internal actions are often implausible. They lie about the role that race plays in their admissions and hiring practices. And sometimes, especially at the graduate level, they confer degrees whose value they know will not justify the time and money that students invest to get them. The most recent debacle at Harvard, in which large swathes of academia seem to have conveniently forgotten what the term “plagiarism” means so they don’t have to admit that Claudine Gay engaged in it, is only the latest example of the lying that is endemic on campus. For me, the problem starts with the replication crisis... Universities’ level of interest in addressing widespread research dishonesty in behavioral science has been… mixed... Harvard Business School, to its credit, aggressively investigated data-fraud allegations against Prof. Francesca Gino that Data Colada first raised, ultimately suspending her last year and thus enduring a lawsuit and the de rigueur allegation that taking action against her was sexist. But if the Data Colada team hadn’t done this sleuthing in their spare time, neither HBS nor the journals that published Gino’s research would ever have noticed that they’d been helping to perpetuate a fraud... But research dishonesty in universities goes beyond the social sciences. In the humanities, it has taken a different form — postmodern research that aims at “my truth” instead of truth... see, for example, the theme of the 2024 American Anthropological Association annual meeting, which declares an intention to “reimagine” anthropology in a way that breaks down the barrier between theory and practice to make more room for more social activism, so that anthropology better serves as a tool to respond to “systemic oppression.” People (including me) look at papers and statements like this and conclude that a lot of what’s happening at universities isn’t really research — it’s social activism dressed up as research, which need not be of good quality so long as it has the right ideological goals... Because it’s illegal to use racial quotas in hiring, universities can’t explicitly admit to setting positions aside for candidates from underrepresented minorities. So, instead they use ideological screens and DEI statement reviews as a proxy for race... when the COVID pandemic hit: subject-matter specialists using the guise of expertise in an effort to impose their values and policy preferences on the public... several years of hearing “Science Says” prior to claims that weren’t science as such, but rather were applications of scientific claims through a very specific value framework I didn’t share — part-communitarian, part-neurotic, part-left wing — made me feel more negatively about experts, including those at universities, and I’m far from alone in that sentiment. The dishonesty at universities extends beyond their research output. Let’s talk about admissions. Harvard has had a longstanding practice of using race as a factor in college admissions, producing a class that is less Asian and more black and Hispanic than it would be if they did not consider race. And they also have a longstanding practice of lying about it... Anyone who went to college knows you’re not allowed to [plagiarise]. It’s not just a rule — it’s a rule that universities are obsessed with and borderline sanctimonious about. They beat into students’ heads that they must correctly attribute their sources. If I copied like Gay did when I was a Harvard student, and if I got caught, I would have expected the university to require me to withdraw. And that’s why it’s been so jarring over the past month to watch some academics and journalists announce a new, laxer standard on plagiarism that was unknown to us when we were students. What seems to be happening here is they are suffering from Chris Rufo Derangement Syndrome. That is, they know conservative activist Chris Rufo is a bad guy, and therefore the only way they can analyze a question on which he has opined is by assuming that the opposite of whatever he said was true... In addition to being a terrible approach to learning the truth, this mental model endows Rufo with tremendous power: If you have Rufo Derangement Syndrome, all Chris Rufo has to do to make you look like a total idiot is be right about something, once... that Harvard’s first instinct was to lie and obfuscate — to say there was nothing to see here — is reflective of the university’s overall posture of dishonesty and non-transparency. In fairness to the members of the Corporation, they usually do get away with it."
The Humanities Have Sown the Seeds of Their Own Destruction - The Atlantic - "If the humanities have become more political over the past decade, it is largely in response to coercion from administrators and market forces that prompt disciplines to prove that they are “useful.” In this sense, the growing identitarian drift of the humanities is rightly understood as a survival strategy: an attempt to stay afloat in a university landscape where departments compete for scarce resources, student attention, and prestige... If we have any hope of resuscitating fields like English and history, we must rescue the humanities from the utilitarian appraisals that both their champions and their critics subject them to. We need to recognize that the conservatives are right, albeit not in the way they think: The humanities are useless in many senses of the term. But that doesn’t mean they’re without value... Administrators, not professors, usually approve hiring decisions, and these administrators are under intense external and internal pressure to diversify the faculty and curricula. Diversifying the faculty is a noble goal—I’m a beneficiary of these initiatives—but universities have looked for clumsy shortcuts. The reigning assumption is that scholars of color are disproportionately represented in activism-oriented fields such as “decolonial theory,” which means that deans—always seeking more brown faces to put on university websites—are more likely to approve new tenure lines in ideologically supercharged, diversity-rich disciplines. It is often faculty who are trying to safeguard their fields from the progressive machinations of their bureaucratic overlords. But faced with a choice between watching their departments shrink or agreeing to hire in areas that help realize the personnel-engineering schemes of their bosses, departments tend to choose the latter. Outside observers mock job ads looking for scholars working on “anti-racist Shakespeare,” and these listings are frequently tortured and ridiculous. However, such ads do not always reflect the scholarly priorities of the professors on the hiring committees. Rather, they’re often a product of the plotting of superiors who care more about their university’s public-facing diversity data than they do the intellectual needs of the English department, the interests of its students, or the health of the discipline more broadly... Humanists today need to reckon with the fact that the only thing our politicking is accomplishing is hastening our own demise—and the effects are not borne evenly. Perversely, humanities departments at wealthy private universities are the ones responsible for the most inflammatory rhetoric, yet under-resourced public ones clearly bear the brunt of the backlash... Instead of trying to prove that the humanities are more economically useful than other majors—a tricky proposition—humanists have taken to justifying their continued existence within the academy by insisting that they are uniquely socially and politically useful. The emergent sales pitch is not that the humanities produce and transmit important knowledge, but rather that studying the humanities promotes nebulous but nice-sounding values, such as empathy and critical thinking, that are allegedly vital to the cause of moral uplift in a multicultural democracy. If the arc of the universe bends toward justice, some would have you believe that it is humanities departments that do the bending. It should have been evident to anyone possessed of a modicum of foresight that, in a highly polarized country, the ivory tower could not get away with shameless progressive politicking indefinitely... Guillory observes that literary criticism today is all too often understood by its practitioners as a mode of what he calls “surrogational politics.” Novels become the site of a “proxy war”: Critiquing the power relations or the depictions of race or gender in a literary text becomes a surrogate for critiquing those same phenomena in the real world. Reading and interpretation are redefined as a kind of activism, and thus as an endeavor like policy work or criminal defense. Guillory also points out that the political efficacy of the humanities is invariably “justified by faith”; that is, there is little evidence in the ledger proving that literature actually realizes a transformative social good."
This assumes that "diversity" and anti-woke "research" are useful, i.e. it ignores the forces pushing wokeness, and ignores the institutional power of the left (not just in universities)
Nate Silver on X - "Hypothesis: An underrated cause of the current state of academia is increasing returns to STEM skills in careers in tech and finance, which selects out "just leave me alone and let me do my research" left-brained types for more politics-conscious right-brained types."
James Lindsay, anti-Fascist on X - "Communists (and all totalitarians) think education is a form of brainwashing, so they construct education to be a form of brainwashing. They position it as "better" by virtue of it being the "right" brainwashing from their perspective."
Xi Van Fleet on X - "A clip from a popular 1974 movie “Sparkling Red Star” which I watched countless times with millions of Chinese kids. It is about a brave child soldier of the Red Army who joined the Communist revolution and eventually single handily killed the evil landlord. Look at the hatred in his baby face before he killed the bad guy. We were taught to cultivate that kind of hatred towards the enemy of the people. Ring a bell?"
i/o on X - "Since starting @theretardindex I've spent more time following the crazies on X. Something I've noticed is that about 95% of the nuttiest 4chan-level rightwing accounts and 100% of the creepiest lefty accounts are strongly pro-Hamas. Hamas — or probably more accurately, Jew-hate — fills the gap between the heels of the horseshoe."
The Rabbit Hole on X - "My personal theory is that anti-semitism is sometimes a proxy for anti-success. Many of these people are not doing well in life and jealous of Jewish success. Jews succeeding takes away the historical trauma excuse which somewhat explains why some Blacks hate Jews."
i/o on X - "In tracking the loony fringe of Black Twitter, I've noticed that same dynamic now in operation against Asians."
‘I’m a black liberal’ - "Brandon Tatum is featured in the video and he tackles some of the biggest stereotypes about black liberals. Tatum is a conservative political commentator, author, and former police officer who hosts a national talk radio program, “The Officer Tatum Show.” Not quite as popular as Candace Owens, Tatum partnered with her to found Blexit, the group that persuades black Americans to exit the Democratic Party. “I’m a black liberal,” Tatum deadpans on the video. “Of course, I’m gonna vote for the Democrats — although they’ve done nothing for black people.” “I’m a black liberal, although I’m the CEO of a seven-figure company. Of course, I’m a victim,” he continues. “I’m a black liberal. I hate racism except it’s against the Jews. Free Palestine!”... “I’m a black liberal now. I know growing up in the hood that all the people selling drugs are black and all the crime is black-on-black violence. Of course, it’s the white man’s fault though,” he says in the under one-minute video. “I’m a black liberal. Although I’ve done my research and more white people are in poverty, more white people are on food stamps, more white people get killed by police — twice as many white people. But white privilege is definitely real.” “I’m a black liberal with no evidence whatsoever. Of course, I think the cops are gonna kill me for no reason,” he goes on. “I’m a black liberal, although I’m married to a white woman, of course, the white man is the enemy.”"
The Hyperpoliticization of Higher Ed: Trends in Faculty Political Ideology, 1969–Present - "Higher education has recently made a hard left turn—sixty percent of faculty now identify as “liberal” or “far left.” This left-leaning supermajority is responsible for rampant discrimination against non-left job seekers, both conservatives and moderates, and the trend is likely to worsen. This essay predicts that faculty who embrace this shift do so at their own peril, as they invite greater democratic oversight from a public which realizes higher education no longer aligns with its values and educational priorities."
i/o on X - "Liberalism among white people is strongly associated with both less net warmth toward one's own race and the existence of diagnosed mental health problems. A question: How much, if at all, does poor mental health drive hostility to one's own race?"
Our De Facto Antiwhite Apartheid - "the new apartheid is an odd beast because, unlike previous segregationist systems, unlike Jim Crow, unlike South Africa’s apartheid or Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws, this new American apartheid is de facto. It’s off the books. It’s built to breathe and function comfortably within the confines of our Constitution. It’s a 21st-century apartheid tailor-made for the internet age. We’ve already surrendered the “public square” of free speech to the private sector; you absolutely can be silenced online just for being white, while the “mainstream” media is totally within its rights to clog the airwaves and internet with antiwhite propaganda. This one-sided marketplace of ideas is completely constitutional. Scientists who make the mistake of accurately reporting findings that anger blacks are totally free to withdraw their papers. Nothing illegal about that! Dummies like Stalin used to have the state censor scientists. Good thing we have a Constitution, which ensures that scientists are free to self-censor once they “see the light.” In the Soviet Union, criticism of Lysenkoism was banned by government decree. The advantage of de facto over de jure is that with no formal ban, there’s nothing concrete to fight. Employment? An employer might not technically be able to fire you just for being white, but once the Twitter mob sets its sights on not just you but your place of employment, you can be let go because your presence is impeding the functioning of the company. You’re not being fired for your views, but for your baggage, which has become a “distraction.” This is a trick perfected by my old nemesis Irv Rubin of the Jewish Defense League. If a bunch of “antee-Semites” were holding a conference, Rubin knew that it wasn’t always possible to persuade the venue owner to evict the group based on the views of its members (public venues couldn’t exercise viewpoint discrimination, and private ones were afraid of being sued). So, just phone in a bomb threat. Now it’s a “safety” matter, and the venue can cancel for reasons other than viewpoint. Speaking of public gatherings, whites can totally be confined to their homes for “COVID lockdowns” while blacks get to rampage freely through the streets, because the BLM riots are not technically state-approved. We all know that mayors and governors have allowed the riots, but they retain the plausible deniability that they never officially “sanctioned” them... How can people fight back when there are no laws or official policies to challenge? That was always the fatal flaw with legally codified, racially tiered systems. Laws give people something to target. Sure, blacks can storm through white neighborhoods, terrorizing residents by marching around at 1 a.m. blasting music from bullhorns (as happened in my neighborhood last month). But hey—it’s the right of free assembly! Whites can do it too…in theory. But in reality, whites know that if they try to march through, say, South Central at 1 a.m. chanting like lunatics, they’ll get shot. And DAs would not seize those guns, even as they charged the white protesters with “hate crimes.” That’s why a monster like George Soros has targeted district attorneys in every state; that’s why he spends so much money to install his own people in that position. The law gives DAs prosecutorial discretion, and again, it’s perfectly legal. White couple paints over graffiti? Felony hate crime. Black thugs beat white child senseless? Misdemeanor assault... The closest thing whites have to an advocate with a major national platform is Tucker Carlson, and he won’t say the word “white”... According to McGeshick and Heidenreich, the epidemics that wiped out so many Indians physically wiped out the rest psychologically."
Multiculturalism is tearing Britain apart - "There was nothing on a par with 2022’s disorder in Leicester, when Hindu and Muslim youths fought street battles with each other over the course of several weeks. That eruption of inter-ethnic violence on to the streets of a British city ought to have been a moment for us to take a deep breath, and to work out how to bridge these divisions. Yet it seems that over the past 12 months, too many have been keen to brush this fracturing of community relations under the carpet. Even local politicians, such as Labour MP for Leicester West Liz Kendall, have continued to romanticise Leicester as some sort of paragon of multicultural harmony. Such complacency has left serious tensions unaddressed. A reminder of this arrived in September. In Peckham in south-east London, a middle-aged Asian shopkeeper was filmed violently restraining a young black woman in a row over a ‘no refunds’ policy on hair products. The footage went viral, prompting a campaign of intimidation and harassment towards the shopkeeper. Racially abusive messages were daubed on his shop front, including ‘Go to hell Patel’ and a call for ‘parasitic merchants’ to be rooted out of the local community. It echoed the racist rhetoric used by Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, who confiscated the businesses of Asian families before expelling them in the early 1970s. The Peckham incident should have been taken far more seriously. Among other things, it drew attention to long-standing tensions over the fact that largely British Pakistani-owned businesses are catering to black British communities... The impact of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on social cohesion has been far more difficult to ignore. It has drawn attention to and exacerbated the animosity of some British Muslims towards the Jewish community, evident most obviously in the overt anti-Semitism on display at ‘pro-Palestine’ protests. This distinctly Islamist anti-Semitism is a clear problem in the UK today. And it is flourishing amid the failure to integrate certain British Muslim communities. Anti-Jewish conspiracy theories are tragically prevalent among the most socially segregated British Muslims. Tensions between different ethnic and faith groups have undoubtedly grown over the past year. But instead of trying to strengthen communal bonds, and address our long-standing failure to integrate certain ethnic and faith groups, the British state has been doing the opposite – it has doubled down on cultivating a dangerous and divisive identity politics. In recent months, it has emerged that both the Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service have been developing formal relationships with divisive, self-appointed Muslim ‘community leaders’, several of whom have publicly endorsed Hamas or chanted anti-Semitic slogans. Elsewhere, the state has been allocating public funding to organisations that advance certain identity groups’ interests at the expense of others. There have even been cases of ‘anti-extremism’ funding being awarded to extremist groups. In February, the independent review into the government’s counter-terror Prevent programme – which aims to identify would-be extremists – found that it had funded a group led by an individual with pro-Taliban sympathies. Our politicians have not risen to the challenge of integration. Supposedly ‘hardline’ Tories, such as former home secretary Suella Braverman, may have criticised multiculturalism in a few headline-grabbing speeches. But the Conservative government has still done little to arrest the state’s descent into the identitarian quagmire. The problem is that the alternative – a Labour government – is likely to make things worse, deepening the grip of identity politics over the state. The Corbynista era may be over, but Labour remains a party in thrall to woke politics. It is simply not interested in binding a diverse society together on the basis of shared national values and mutual obligations. Many Labourites are disdainful of our history and traditions."
Multiculturalism is just masochistic nationalism - "It was George Orwell, in his 1945 essay Notes on Nationalism, who came up with the idea of the ‘negative nationalist’ – someone, that is, who is obsessed with hating his own national culture... In many ways, Orwell’s negative nationalist resembles today’s multiculturalist. To all intents and purposes the multiculturalist is a nationalist. It is just that his nationalism has been ‘transferred’ to a distant and exotic culture. He even talks of the same things that the positive nationalist does – roots, culture, history – and he does so with just as much sentimentality and romanticism as the positive nationalist... Think for example of Swedish politician Mona Sahlin, who damned Swedish culture as ‘ridiculous’ while calling Turkish culture ‘so much more refined and authentic’. This is still a form of nationalism... Of course, unlike avowed nationalists, negative nationalists, such as multiculturalists, will deny their nationalism. Instead, they will speak at great length about the dangers of nationalism and present themselves as internationalists – that is, as opponents of nationalism as a principle. But their words are betrayed by their continual elevation of other national cultures and the denigration of their own. They may have parted from classic nationalism, but they are no closer to true internationalism. Their entire political worldview expresses a mirror-image of old-style positive nationalism. Moreover, the flaming passion with which these transferred nationalists speak on behalf of exotic cultures makes you wonder whether we are not, in fact, witnessing nationalists of a particularly zealous bent. Fully aware that any expression of such national-romantic ecstasy at home would be tantamount to political suicide, they pack all their frustrated nationalism in a suitcase, before calmly unpacking it elsewhere, perhaps in an Islamic theocracy far away. And, once there, they can unleash reactionary ideas deemed politically poisonous at home, from religious violence to female submission. Hence negative nationalism often results in gross hypocrisy. The multiculturalist can claim that ‘my nationalist cult is adorable, but yours is fascism’. Transferred nationalists keep paying tribute to progressive values, while betraying them in practice. There is also a strong masochistic element to negative nationalism. Indeed, I would argue that, just as an individual masochist experiences sexual pleasure through self-abasement in a context of domination, so a masochist nationalist experiences political pleasure through self-hatred in a context of political domination. Orwell picked up on this masochistic element among English left-wing intellectuals during the Second World War: ‘[They] did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain.’... An acquaintance of mine, a Dutchman, works for the UN. He recently said to me: ‘Dutch politics! Oh, it’s so bloody boring!’ As far as he is concerned, politics is only interesting when a nation is in the grip of civil strife, perhaps even a state of emergency. Political life in Holland is therefore deemed uninteresting because it is uneventful. But is this necessarily a bad thing? Aren’t peace and political debate preferable to coups and violent conflict? Not for this UN official. He prefers nations tormented by civil conflict to the peace and prosperity promised by his home country. If you ask him why, he will proudly tell you that suffering does not go away just because one cannot see it. Why, he is asking, should we be free to live in peace if others are not? Yet the professional internationalist never really lives amid civil conflict himself. Instead, he spends his time surrounded by nannies, cooks and helpers in fortified compounds. And he socialises little, if at all, with the locals. His life abounds in contradictions. He frequently decries colonialism, while effectively living the life of an old colonialist. He hates Israel but, should he be hurt, would happily be air-lifted to Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Centre. ‘Iraq’, he might say softly, ‘this is where I belong!’, even though he does not speak the language or understand the culture. His fascination is a mark of his ignorance. He has left his own country without really arriving anywhere else. Like many others in international organisations, he is a masochistic nationalist. He likes to drag his national culture, with its ‘bloody boring’ politics, through the dirt because, as Orwell says, he gets ‘a kick out of it’. And he prefers social turmoil over there to the stability and development at home – perhaps an odd preference for someone who is hired to reduce poverty."
We are still told that liberals don't hate their countries
