God bless America

Now this post may well annoy some of my more frequent regular readers but I feel obliged to air my great satisfaction at reading this article in the latest Daily Pennsylvanian. It's in response to a decision by the university to ask fast Mexican food restaurant Taco Bell to take over space which is currently empty but used to be inhabited by a bunch of horrendous little snack booths which nobody used and which lost money. The complaints against Taco Bell, from what I can understand, are that it's not healthy and that it doesn't pay its workers enough money, and that the university should take a stand against such disgusting evils.

Well, having been at university for four years, three of them amongst the tide of left-wing student politics in the UK, I am more than used to such self-righteous indignation. What is refreshing, however, is to see that there are people willing to speak out against its supposed assumed norms. In Britain you can sometimes feel like the heathen for daring to suggest the student body as a group has better things - like study - to do than to fight an ongoing and judgemental war against the latest 'cause celebre' of the student branch of the Socialist Worker Party. What we need in Britain is something of a more assertive stand against the assumed norms of the left, and it has done me such good to see that in the US. The fact is that those who object to the apparently horrendous standards of Taco Bell never have to eat there and can choose to put their money elsewhere. What's more, we have the extraordinary contradiction that one of the writers wants affordable food, but doesn't want the impacts of what affordable food means. For me, it's just another example of jumbled up left thinking.