Month: April 2010

Right and Wrong Order

Right Order: Finish your schooling; find a job that promises to be satisfying over the long haul and stick with it; eliminate debts and save money; get married after due consultation with both heads,   especially the big one; have children.

Wrong Order: Have children; get married; take any job to stay alive; get some schooling to avoid working in a car wash for the rest of your life.

More on Arizona Senate Bill 1070

Joseph A.  e-mails:

I greatly admire Victor Reppert for a number of reasons – I think the Argument from Reason is pretty amazing and effective when formulated and defended well, and Victor remains one of the most soft-spoken and polite bloggers around.

Agreed.

But a number of thoughts occurred to me when reading his and your post.

Victor shows some deep distrust of law enforcement officials – he mentions how there's plenty of Mark Fuhrmans on the police force, and basically asserts that he doesn't trust them to enforce laws like this appropriately.

Continue reading “More on Arizona Senate Bill 1070”

On Exercise in Nature

There is the beauty, the silence, the peace, the nonsocial reality of nature, but there is also the shift away from the mind back to the sweating, toiling body on earth. Exercise in an artificial environment is not the same, nor is 'windshield tourism.' You should take your Nature straight, in a direct encounter, boots to the trail, not mediated through glass.

Arizona Senate Bill 1070

Arizona Senate Bill 1070 "requires a reasonable attempt to be made to determine the immigration status of a person during any legitimate contact made by an official or agency of the state or a county, city, town . . . if reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the U.S."  See here and here for the full text.

That illegal aliens and those who profit from them should object to this legislation comes as no surprise.  But it does come as a bit of surprise to find native Arizonan Victor Reppert, who to my knowledge neither employs, nor defends in courts of law, nor otherwise profits from illegal aliens, saying this at his blog:

Police in our state have now been given the authority to demand papers on anyone of whom they have a reasonable suspicion that they are illegal aliens. The trouble is, about the only reason for suspicion that I can think of that someone is in the country illegally is if they have brown skin, or speak Spanish instead of English, or English with an Mexican accent.

I'm afraid Victor isn't thinking very hard.  He left out the bit about " during any legitimate contact made by an official . . . ."  Suppose a cop pulls over a motorist who has a tail light out. He asks to see the motorist's driver's license.  The driver doesn't have one.  That fact, by itself, does not prove that the motorist is an illegal alien; but together with other facts (no registration, no proof of insurance, speaks no English . . .) could justify an inquiry into the motorist's immigration status.  Hundreds of examples like this are generable ad libitum.

S. B. 1070 is a reasonable response  to the Federal government's failure to enforce U. S. immigration law.  Border control is a legitimate, constitutionally-grounded function of government. (See Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution.)  When the Feds fail to uphold the rule of law, the states, counties, etc. must do so.  If you don't understand why we need border control, I refer you to my longer piece, Immigration Legal and Illegal.

According to one 'argument,' Arizona Senate Bill 1070 disproportionately targets Hispanics and is objectionable for that reason.  That's like arguing that the RICO statutes disproportionately target Italians.  I don't know whether people of Italian extraction are disproportionately involved in organized crime, but if they are, then that is surely no valid objection to the RICO statutes.  The reason Hispanics will be disproportionately affected is because they disproportionately break the immigration laws.    The quota mentality is behind this 'argument.'

Whitehead on Education and Information

Whitehead Alfred North Whitehead's The Aims of Education and Other Essays (Macmillan, 1929) begins with this paragraph:

Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth. What we should aim at producing is men who possess both culture and expert knowledge in some special direction. Their expert knowledge will give them the ground to start from, and their culture will lead them as deep as philosophy and as high as art. We have to remember that the valuable intellectual development is self-development, and that it mostly takes place between the ages of sixteen and thirty. As to training, the most important part is given by mothers before the age of twelve. A saying due to Archbishop Temple illustrates my meaning. Surprise was expressed at the success in after-life of a man, who as a boy at Rugby had been somewhat undistinguished. He answered, "It is not what they are at eighteen, it is what they become afterwards that matters."

That few today understand what education is is betrayed by the readiness of all too many to use 'educate' in place of 'inform.'  Suppose you tell me about some petty fact. You have not 'educated' me, you have given me a scrap of information. The educated person is not the one whose head is stuffed with information, but the one whose experientially-honed judgment is capable of making sense of information. To become well-informed is not difficult; to become well-educated is a task of self-development for a lifetime.

Life Without Questioning

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book One, Section Two (tr. Kaufmann):

. . . to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors [discordant concord of things: Horace, Epistles, I.12.19] and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even finding him faintly amusing — this is what I feel to be contemptible . . .

My sentiments exactly.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Originals and Covers

Some covers are as good as if not better than the originals.  Some examples, with the original first.  Thanks to our old friend 'williamofockham' for uploading the Morissette number as well as for suggesting the McLachlan and Simon covers.

Beatles, Blackbird.  Sarah McLachlan cover.  Carly Simon cover.

Sam Cooke, Wonderful World.  Simon-Garfunkel-Taylor cover. 

Bob Dylan, Blowing' in the Wind.  Alanis Morissette cover.

Jimmy Jones, Handy Man.  James Taylor cover.

Chantays, Pipeline.  Dick Dale and Stevie Ray Vaughan cover.  Blows the original clean out of the water!

Shirelles, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?  This version is untouchable, though covered by many, including Carole King, its composer (with Gerry Goffin).

Chiffons, One Fine Day.  Another untouchable oldie from 1963 penned by Goffin-King.  Carole King does a better job with this one.

James Kalb on Illegal Immigration

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has signed into law Arizona Senate Bill 1070.   Illegal aliens are of course up in arms over it.  But why do the ruling elites tend to tolerate mass illegal immigration?  Why are they not upholding the rule of law? James Kalb (The Tyranny of Liberalism, ISI Books, 2008, pp. 49-50) writes,

As to immigration, the people value the ties that make them a people and believe that the country should be run for their own benefit.  Ruling elites, by contrast, are concerned with the power and efficiency of  governing institutions, the status and security of those who run them, and maintenance of the liberal principles that support and justify their rule.  It is in their interest to expand the human resources available to them, even at the expense of those who are already citizens, and to weaken the mutual ties that make it possible for the people to resist rational management and to act somewhat independently.  In addition, any moderately self-seeking ruling class prefers cooperating with members of the ruling class in other countries to representing the interests of their constituents. The practical result of such influences has the suppression of immigration as an issue in the interest of an emerging borderless world order. Restrictionist arguments are scantily presented in the mainstream media, and concern with cultural coherence, national identity, or even the well-being of one's country's workers is routinely denigrated as ignorant and racist nativism.

Kalb's book is proving to be an insightful and stimulating read.

Mark Steyn on the Tea Party Bashers

Mark Steyn in his typical fine form:

Everybody knows that when you say "I'm becoming very concerned about unsustainable levels of federal spending" that that's old Jim Crow code for "Let's get up a lynching party and teach that uppity Negro a lesson." Frank Rich of The New York Times attempted to diversify the Tea Party racism into homophobia by arguing that Obamacare opponents were uncomfortable with Barney Frank's sexuality. I yield to no one in my discomfort with Barney Frank's sexuality but, with the best will in the world, I find it hard to blame it for more than the first four or five trillion dollars of federal overspending. Eschewing such cheap slurs, Time's Joe Klein said opposition to Obama was "seditious," because nothing says sedition like citing the U.S. Constitution and quoting Thomas Jefferson. Unfortunately for Klein, thanks to "educator" William Ayers' education reforms, nobody knows what "seditious" means anymore.

So enough with all the punch-pulling about seditious racist homophobes.

It was time to go for broke, and bring out Bill Clinton to explain why the Tea Party is the new front in the "war on terror." Don't worry about Iran's nuclear program, but , if you meet a Tea Party supporter waving some placard about the national debt, try not to catch his eye and back away slowly without making any sudden movements lest he put down his placard and light up his suicide belt.