The persistence of bourgeois radicalism
I don’t blame most Muslims for terrorism in the West but rather our own turkey foreign policy coming home to roost, but good point about the SWPL left, or Che was a murderous coward so your T-shirt/poster is not cool (or like LBJ to his grandson I’ll give you $100 to get a haircut and some grown-up mid-century-style clothes). While individual Muslims ought to be free and thus welcome here, I’ll concede that you don’t want to live under Muslim rule (from dhimmitude to so-called honour killings) and, if Islam really is incompatible with individual liberty, then it’s not welcome (your freedom of religion ends where my liberty begins).

According to classical Marxist theory, I, as the son of an automobile-production engineer thrown out of work by Thatcher’s economic restructuring, should have been the most radical of students. Yet there I was in the varsity library reading all the dust-covered tomes that the leftist academics who taught our courses had left off the reading lists for the last 30 years. There I was, propping up the student union bar telling the usual gaggle of plummy-voiced Marxists that the state wasn’t going to wither away with money becoming redundant while we all went around happily doing odd jobs for each other. Perhaps preserving a modicum of economic reality against the bourgeois Bolshies’ meditative myopia was my little way of fighting the class war.

What would work, however, would be to change university education from the three-year radicalization holiday it has become to something more like vocational night school. Those who wish to better their prospects or who simply have an unquenchable thirst for esoteric knowledge could do courses in the evenings or on weekends after they have finished their real job. The best cure for student radicalism is a normal working life.

From Taki.