Author: Bill Vallicella
The Ideology of Illegal Immigration
An outstanding column by VDH. Excerpts:
The entire vocabulary of illegal immigration has become Orwellian. Once descriptive nouns and adjectives such as “alien” and “illegal” have melted into “undocumented” and “immigrant” and then into just “migrant,” ostensibly to mask the reality of both legal status and the fact that migrants go in one direction — and there is an existential difference between immigrants and emigrants.
Excellent point about 'migrant.' The term blurs the distinction between those who emigrate and those who immigrate as if there is no difference. But as Hanson says, the difference is "existential." What could that mean? Well, no emigrants but some immigrants pose an existential threat to us, not so much to our physical existence, though I wouldn't point this out to the parents of Kate Steinle, but to our way of life, which is more important.
Here, then, is another example of what mendacious scum 'liberals' or 'progressives' are. Instead of addressing the issues in an honest and forthright way, they commit acts of linguistic hijacking.
Remember: he who controls the terms of the debate controls the debate.
Once someone makes a decision to enter a country illegally — his first decision as an incoming alien — and thus breaks a U.S. law with impunity, then most subsequent decisions are naturally shaped by the idea of exemption. Zealots argue that entering the U.S. illegally is merely a civil infraction. But the IRS in 2017 identified some 1.2 million identity-theft cases, in which illegal aliens had employed illegitimate or inconsistent social-security numbers to file tax returns — and implicitly thereby cause innumerable problems for the U.S. tax system.
Professor Hanson should have pointed out that illegal immigrants are subject to criminal penalties. Improper entry comes under the criminal code. While improper entry is a crime, unlawful presence is not a crime. One can be unlawfully present in the U. S. without having entered improperly, and thus without having committed a crime.
If a foreign national enters the country on a valid travel or work visa, but overstays his visa, failing to exit before the expiration date, then he is in violation of federal immigration law. But this comes under the civil code, not the criminal code. Such a person is subject to civil penalties such as deportation.
So there are two main ways for an alien to be illegal. He can be illegal in virtue of violating the criminal code or illegal in virtue of violating the civil code.
Those who oppose strict enforcement of national borders show their contempt for the rule of law and their willingness to tolerate criminal behavior, not just illegal behavior.
So much of the discussion of illegal immigration is predicated not just on fantasy, but on Soviet-style censorship, and not just of speech, but of our very thoughts. Taboo are suggestions that illegal immigration could be a prime reason that California now has the highest basket of income, sales, and gas taxes in the nation; the highest number of welfare recipients (one of three in the United States), with a fifth of the state living below the poverty level; and now a fourth of all hospital admittances found to be suffering from diabetes or prediabetes; or that national rankings of infrastructure quality place the state nearly last in the country.
Talk of race has approached something like Lewis Carol’s Through the Looking Glass, in which everything is upside down. “La Raza” — until recently the nomenclature of the nation’s largest Hispanic advocacy organization — has supposedly nothing to do with race, while others who would never have an odious desire to use its odious English equivalent, “The Race,” are deemed racists for their objections to La Raza terminology.
Residency is deliberately conflated with citizenship, as if the two are legally and morally equivalent. But again, nowhere else in the world is this true, and certainly not in Mexico. I have lived abroad for over two years. As a guest in Athens, I followed Greek politics closely. I paid steep Greek sales taxes and assorted fees and tariffs as a legal resident alien. But at no time did I imagine that taxes or my physical presence as a lawful guest on Greek soil allowed me to interfere with the politics of my host, much less to issue demands on Athens, or to give me de facto the same legal rights as Greek citizens. As a legal alien, I surely did not think I could vote. I knew better than to tell Greeks that their country was not to my taste. And I knew fellow aliens who overstayed visas, worked without permits, and did not register as foreign residents. At least before the days of the latest incarnations of the European Union, the resulting fines were stiff, and expulsions were uncontested.
Once again one sees what utter misological filth these leftists are. They will engage in any kind of obfuscation to win while we waste time being polite.
I have made the point recently that the constant yapping about 'democracy' aids and abets the conflation of residency with citizenship. Leftists just love that word. When you hear it from their mouths know that nasty obfuscation and sophistry is on the way.
When Jerry Brown or Nancy Pelosi lectures the state on its illiberality, or on the immigration sins of Donald Trump, or the advantages of nullification and a sanctuary state, we assume that these are just the penultimate chest poundings and virtue signals of rich septuagenarians about to go into apartheid retirements in Napa or Grass Valley.
In that context, all of their legacies above make perfect sense.
Indeed, they do. These ancient knuckleheads will depart the scene with their virtue intact while leaving behind a crap hole for others to live in. I can't bring myself to believe that these two clowns are animated by evil intentions; the consequences of their folly, however, are evil in excelsis. Pelosi in particular is not so much evil as just plain stupid. It says a lot about the electorate that she should have had so much power for so long.
Barbara Ehrenreich Gives Up on Preventative Care
Very interesting, and not irrational given her age:
In the last few years I have given up on the many medical measures—cancer screenings, annual exams, Pap smears, for example—expected of a responsible person with health insurance. This was not based on any suicidal impulse.
Younger than Ehrenreich, I will continue to exercise what is called 'due diligence.'
Via Rod Dreher who adds his commentary.
Dreher has become a daily read for me. But I have to wonder: how can so prolific a writer and family man have any time left over for the practices of the Ben Op? I mean meditation, prayer, spiritual reading, and the rest. It's easy to get sucked in, Rod. Be careful. This world's a vanishing quantity, not that you don't believe it.
Those who aspire to live well must learn to curtail their consumption of mass communication media.
Meditation on the Third Commandment
A 1941 article by C. S. Lewis. (HT: Victor Reppert)
The Third Commandment in the ordering preferred by Protestants of Lewis' stripe is the one about taking the Lord's name in vain:
Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.
Lewis meditates on the difficulties that must beset attempts to form a political party animated by Christian principles.
Christians may be expected to agree on the general ends of good government, but that agreement does not suffice for a political party. What one needs for a political party, which by its very nature is oriented toward concrete actions in the here and now, is the championship of very specific means. But then bitter contention over these means is unavoidable and our incipient Christian party breaks apart into competing factions.
The cynosure of Lewis' disapprobation, I take it, is the invocation of God to justify one's very specific political means. One who does that takes the name of the Lord in vain.
One is put in mind of Dylan's With God On Its Side.
Kevin Williamson and John Derbyshire
The Atlantic's firing of Kevin Williamson elicited howls of protest from National Review writers. But then I remembered Derbyshire's Defenestration of a few years ago.
Methinks there should be less howling and more examination of conscience among the boy-tie boys.
The Left is inimical to free speech and open inquiry. They are deeply and diversely destructive as I document on a daily basis. The pushback of establishment conservatives, however, is a weak and timorous thing.
But who can blame them? They have a good thing going and they are eager to protect their privileges and perquisites. They want to be liked and they want to be respected. So they self-censor. They need to be more manly and martial and less conciliatory.
But courage is the hardest of the virtues. Its display can cost you your friends, your livelihood, and your life.
Thinking about this, I guessed that others have engaged the topic in greater detail than I care to. I guessed right. Here is one such effort.
Fallacious Liberal-Left ‘Reasoning’ about Race
The GAO [General Accounting Office] found that black students get suspended at nearly three times the rate of white students nationally, a finding consistent with previous analyses. The Obama Education and Justice Departments viewed that disproportion as proof of teacher and principal bias. Administration officials used litigation and the threatened loss of federal funding to force schools to reduce suspensions and expulsions radically in order to eliminate racial disparities in discipline.
The argument is essentially this:
1) Black students get suspended at a higher rate than white students.
Therefore
2) Teachers and principals are biased against black students.
Clearly, this is a howling non sequitur. (Non sequitur is Latin for it does not follow.) To make the above into a valid argument one would have to add something like the following premise:
0) Black and white students are behaviorally equal: equally well-behaved or equally ill-behaved.
In the presence of (0), the conclusion follows.
But (0) is manifestly false. For support of this claim, see Mac Donald's article:
According to federal data, black male teenagers between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at nearly 10 times the rate of white male teenagers of the same age (the category “white” in this homicide data includes most Hispanics; if Hispanics were removed from the white category, the homicide disparity between blacks and whites would be much higher). That higher black homicide rate indicates a failure of socialization; teen murderers of any race lack impulse control and anger-management skills. Lesser types of juvenile crime also show large racial disparities. It is fanciful to think that the lack of socialization that produces such elevated rates of criminal violence would not also affect classroom behavior. While the number of black teens committing murder is relatively small compared with their numbers at large, a very high percentage of black children—71 percent—come from the stressed-out, single-parent homes that result in elevated rates of crime.
The same pattern of invalid argumentation is found across the Left. Leftists regularly assume that different groups are empirically equal. They then incorrectly take the fact that there is no equality of outcome as proof that something nefarious was at work whether racism or sexism or ageism.
But what explains the eagerness of leftists to adopt such an obviously false assumption?
I proffer an explanation in The Secularization of the Judeo-Christian Equality Axiom.
Questioning Bobby Fischer
Good writing, paragraph one:
There is no place on earth more (less?) ideal than Jerusalem for pondering the mysteries of existence, and for a not-insignificant number of people mysteries don’t get more engrossing than the self-exile of chess prodigy Bobby Fischer. The all-time great retreated into obscurity—and, later, derangement—at the age of 32, shortly after refusing to defend his 1972 world championship, which he captured against Soviet grandmaster Boris Spassky. Fischer played tantalizingly little high-level chess after 1972, joined a cult for a time, and then became a full-blown anti-American and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist. Having died in 2008, he is no longer alive to explain himself, but dwelling on the irrevocable and insoluble past is of course part of the reason to come to Jerusalem in the first place.
Related:
Sunday Morning Sermon: Moral Struggle
We must struggle against our moral and other limitations, but we must also accept that we cannot make much headway with them on our own. Fail we will, and often. We shouldn't let this fact bother us too much. Prosecute the moral struggle with equanimity and detachment from the outcome. Learn humility from moral failure.
Buddhism
We are told not to become attached to the usual objects of desire such as name and fame, pleasure and pelf, land and stand. Why not? Because they are impermanent (anicca), insubstantial (anatta), and do not ultimately satisfy (dukkha).
So there is something permanent, substantial, and finally satisfying?
No! Nothing is!
Well then, you have no basis to devalue ordinary objects of desire! If nothing is or can be permanent, then it is no argument against anything to point out its impermanence. And similarly for the other two marks.
Buddhism in its root (radical) Pali form issues in nihilism. If everything bears the three marks, then nothing is worthy of pursuit or avoidance. The quest for Transcendence voids itself.
The mistake is to think that desire as such is the root of woe when it is misdirected desire.
These ideas are presented in rigorous and scholarly fashion in my No Self? A Look at a Buddhist Argument, International Philosophical Quarterly 42 (4):453-466 (2002).
This here is but a bloggity-blog summary.
The Age of Celebrity
The Age of Celebrity helps explain the ascendancy of a political outsider like Donald J. Trump, but also the mindless focus on the man as opposed to his policies.
But it is entertaining to watch the knuckleheaded pseudo-journalists of CNN and MSNBC make fools of themselves as they dig up dirt and avoid ideas. Andrew Klavan is enjoying himself immensely.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Sitting and Chairs
Mississippi Sheiks, Sitting on Top of the World
Phil Upchurch Combo, You Can't Sit Down
Mose Allison, (I'm sittin' over here on) Parchman Farm
Mississippi Fred McDowell, I Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down
George Jones, I Don't Need Your Rockin' Chair. Clever lyrics.
Eric Clapton, Rocking Chair. The old Hoagy Carmichael tune from the '20s.
I've saved the best for last, The Band, Rockin' Chair. Lyrics included. Read 'em.
UPDATE (4/8)
Drawing upon his vast store of musical erudition, London Ed writes:
I enjoyed your Saturday night special as always. (Except for Eric Clapton, but I forgive you).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lH6FgtG8Ck Muskrat Ramble by Benny Goodman and his Boys 1929.
My question to you is whether the chorus beginning at 0:17 sounds familiar. It should be.
Benny Goodman’s boys formed the nucleus for a number of musicians who become famous as Dixieland jazz developed into swing in the 1930s. These included Glenn Miller, though not featured here, Goodman himself, Jimmy Dorsey and (I think) Tommy Dorsey. The less known Wingy Manone was also one of them. He composed Tar Paper Stomp which later transmogrified into the famous but much derided In the Mood.
They also played with Miff Mole in the wonderfully titled ‘Miff Mole and his little Molers’.
Well, as the Preacher saith in Ecclesiastes 1:9 (KJV):
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
The Tar Paper Stomp begat In the Mood, and, to answer Ed's question, the chorus beginning at 0:17 of "Muskrat Ramble" begat Country Joe and Fish's I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag from 1965.
Well, it's one, two, three
What are we fightin' for?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn
Next stop is Viet Nam.
Why Clapton rather than Carmichael? Because I like Clapton, and to irritate Ed who, for some reason, has a 'thing' against his countryman.
Private and Public Morality Again
Elliot submits the following and I add comments in blue:
After reading Machiavelli, Arendt, and the Important Difference between Private and Public Morality, I thought you might be interested in J. P. Moreland’s A Biblical Case For Limited Government.
His position seems similar to yours (and mine) is several respects. Here are some relevant quotations.
— “In my view, the more secular a society becomes, the more its citizens turn to government to give them a sense of transcendence.”
I agree. As Schopenhauer said, "Man is a metaphysical animal." He is not content with a merely physical existence and the petty meanings and purposes of ordinary life. Those no longer able to take religion seriously seek a substitute in political activism. They seek transcendence where it cannot be found, in the immanent sphere of the political.
— “As naturalism and postmodernism gain ascendency, [ascendancy] the idea of individual, responsible agency vanishes, and therapeutic justice and a culture of victimization take its place. Now those that advocate free will and responsible agency tend to want government to be small and off people’s backs. By contrast, those who eschew such agency tend to want government to provide care for various victims of the natural lottery.”
Agreed.
— “… the state cannot show compassion. As an individual, a representative of the state can have compassion in his heart as he gives to the poor; but this compassion is exhibited by him qua individual and not qua representative of the state.”
Right.
— “Jesus held that the church and state had separate callings and spheres of authority.”
Render unto Caesar . . . Matthew 22:20-22
— “It is widely agreed that two features are at the core of Jesus’s ethical teaching—virtue ethics and the love commands… I am among a growing number of thinkers who believe that Jesus was primarily a virtue ethicist.”
— “In a biblical ethic, helping the poor by the coercive power of the state is of little ethical value.”
I should think that this holds for any ethic worth its salt.
“Such actions count for very little in God’s eyes because they do not reflect the features of Jesus’s ethic identified above.”
– “…when it comes to caring for the poor, which is clearly a moral duty placed on believers, Jesus never intended such action to be forced on people by the state. Such acts were to be voluntary and from a freely given heart of compassion.”
Some thoughts of mine with which J. P. may or may not agree.
The state is coercive by its very nature. Now either that coercion is morally justifiable or it is not. If it is justifiable, and the state takes money from me for a good cause, then, while I have not been morally violated, my contribution has no moral value.
If, on the other hand, the coercion essential to the state is not morally justifiable, and the state takes money from me for a good cause, then it is the case both that I am been morally violated and that my contribution has no moral value. Money has been stolen from me to benefit someone else. That is not what is going on in the first case. If the state and its coercion are morally justified, and the state takes my money via taxation for a legitimate function of government such as the securing of the nation's borders, then that money has not been stolen from even even though it has been taken by force.
Other questions arise concerning the state's coercive taking of money from citizens to fund what many consider to be evil enterprises such as abortion providers.
Machiavelli, Arendt, and the Important Difference between Private and Public Morality
Reader R. B. writes:
I have been enjoying your posts about immigration because they are insightful. I'm on the border (haha) about the issue for the most part. I work with illegals from Mexico (in a restaurant) so you can imagine how that plays into my thinking. The problem as I see it is this: it is extremely difficult to gain citizenship in America and extremely expensive; most immigrants do not have the money and are trying to escape their shitty situation in Mexico. They are left with a nasty choice of returning to Mexico or purchasing an illegal visa (which the majority of the time is a scam for a large amount of their money). I am a Christian so I think it's important to think about how God treats the other–the outcast, the poor, and the immigrant.A professor friend has written an interesting paper on the subject, entitled "Love and Borders." If you have time let me know what you think.
My overall view is as follows. Maybe later I'll discuss the details of the paper in question.
Christian precepts such as "Turn the other cheek" and "Welcome the stranger" make sense and are salutary only within communities of the like-minded and morally decent; they make no sense and are positively harmful in the public sphere, and, a fortiori, in the international sphere. The monastery is not the wide world. What is conducive unto salvation in the former will get you killed in the latter. And we know what totalitarians, whether Communists or Islamists, do when they get power: they destroy the churches, synagogues, monasteries, ashrams, and zendos. And with them are destroyed the means of transmitting the dharma, the kerygma, the law and the prophets.
An important but troubling thought is conveyed in a recent NYT op-ed (emphasis added):
Machiavelli teaches that in a world where so many are not good, you must learn to be able to not be good. The virtues taught in our secular and religious schools are incompatible with the virtues one must practice to safeguard those same institutions. The power of the lion and the cleverness of the fox: These are the qualities a leader must harness to preserve the republic.
The problem referenced in the bolded sentence is very serious but may have no solution. That's the aporetician in me speaking.
The problem as I see it is that (i) the pacific virtues the practice of which makes life worth living within families, between friends, and in such institutions of civil society as churches and fraternal organizations are essentially private and cannot be extended outward as if we are all brothers and sisters belonging to a global community. Talk of global community is blather. The institutions of civil society can survive and flourish only if protected by warriors and statesmen whose virtues are of the manly and martial, not of the womanish and pacific, sort. And yet (ii) if no extension beyond the private of the pacific virtues is possible then humanity would seem to be doomed in an age of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Besides, it is unsatisfactory that there be two moralities, one private, the other public.
Consider the Christian virtues preached by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. They include humility, meekness, love of righteousness, mercy, purity of heart, love of peace and of reconciliation. Everyone who must live uncloistered in the world understands that these pacific and essentially womanish virtues have but limited application there. Indeed, their practice can get you killed. (I am not using 'womanish' as a derogatory qualifier.)
You may love peace, but unless you are prepared to make war upon your enemies and show them no mercy, you may not be long for this world. Turning the other cheek makes sense within a loving family, but no sense in the wider world. (Would the Pope turn the other cheek if the Vatican came under attack by Muslim terrorists or would he call upon the armed might of the Italian state?) My point is perfectly obvious in the case of states: they are in the state (condition) of nature with respect to each other. Each state secures by blood and iron a civilized space within which art and music and science and scholarship can flourish and wherein, ideally, blood does not flow; but these states and their civilizations battle each other in the state (condition) of nature red in tooth and claw. Talk of world government or United Nations is globalist blather that hides the will to power of those who would seize control of the world government. United under which umbrella of values and principles and presuppositions?
What values do we share with the Muslim world?
The Allies would not have been long for this world had they not been merciless in their treatment of the Axis Powers.
Israel would have ceased to exist long ago had Israelis not been ruthless in their dealing with Muslim terrorists bent on her destruction.
This is also true of individuals once they move beyond their families and friends and genuine communities and sally forth into the wider world.
The problem is well understood by Hannah Arendt ("Truth and Politics" in Between Past and Future, Penguin 1968, p. 245):
The disastrous consequences for any community that began in all
earnest to follow ethical precepts derived from man in the singular
— be they Socratic or Platonic or Christian — have been
frequently pointed out. Long before Machiavelli recommended
protecting the political realm against the undiluted principles of
the Christian faith (those who refuse to resist evil permit the
wicked "to do as much evil as they please"), Aristotle warned
against giving philosophers any say in political matters. (Men who
for professional reasons must be so unconcerned with "what is good
for themselves" cannot very well be trusted with what is good for
others, and least of all with the "common good," the down-to-earth
interests of the community.) [Arendt cites the Nicomachean Ethics,
Book VI, and in particular 1140b9 and 1141b4.]
There is a tension between man qua philosopher/Christian and man qua citizen. As a philosopher raised in Christianity, I am concerned with my soul, with its integrity, purity, salvation. I take very seriously indeed the Socratic "Better to suffer wrong than to do it" and the Christian "Resist not the evildoer." But as a citizen I must be concerned not only with my own well-being but also with the public welfare. This is true a fortiori of public officials and people in a position to influence public opinion, people like Catholic bishops many of whom are woefully ignorant of the simple points Arendt makes in the passage quoted. So, as Arendt points out, the Socratic and Christian admonitions are not applicable in the public sphere.
What is applicable to me in the singular, as this existing individual concerned with the welfare of his immortal soul over that of his perishable body, is not applicable to me as citizen. As a citizen, I cannot "welcome the stranger" who violates the laws of my country, a stranger who may be a terrorist or a drug smuggler or a human trafficker or a carrier of a deadly disease or a person who has no respect for the traditions of the country he invades; I cannot aid and abet his law breaking. I must be concerned with public order. This order is among the very conditions that make the philosophical and Christian life possible in the first place. If I were to aid and abet the stranger's law breaking, I would not be "rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" as the New Testament enjoins us to do.
Indeed, the Caesar verse provides a scriptural basis for Church-State separation and indirectly exposes the fallacy of the Catholic bishops and others who confuse private and public morality.
The article referenced above is Thomas M. Crisp, Love and Borders.
The Maoist Left in the U. S.
Here:
Just a few years ago in France, Islamic radicals sympathetic to ISIS stormed the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a French satire magazine, and murdered the employees. Thankfully, in this country, the leftwing mob has not made the leap to taking the lives of those they disagree with. For now, at least, they are content just to ruin lives and businesses.
What we are seeing is an American Culture Revolution, unleashed by a narrow-minded group of leftists who have more in common with Mao than Washington. They have become dominant in the American media and have systematically purged conservative voices from the air and print. Conservative thought is more and more relegated to a ghetto and should any prominent conservative try to leave the ghetto, the leftwing mob will take action to destroy them. Liberals like Chris Cuomo can have a show on CNN attacking a variety of conjured conservative straw men under the veneer of objective news, while a conservative like Kevin Williamson cannot even write columns in The Atlantic.
The result will increasingly be that fringe ideas grab hold of people's imagination. The left has continually reduced the window of what topics are acceptable to those they agree with. Those ideas, in turn, change constantly depending on what group wakes up feeling oppressed on a particular day. They have exiled credible conservative voices, claiming that the most mainstream and innocuous are as racist and bigoted as the alt-right fringe. And if there is no difference between the two, more and more will gravitate to the truly extreme through emotional appeal. The left's insistence on determining who is reasonable on the right will only help bolster the most unreasonable voices on both sides.
Kevin Williamson is a NeverTrumper, which is never good, and Nick Gillespie lays into him effectively here, for failing to appreciate the libertarian accomplishments of Trump.
A sound conservatism incorporates some libertarian ideas even if the Libertarian Party is a 'losertarian' joke and the libertarian worldview taken in toto is a disaster. Open borders? Legalize drugs? Ron Johnson and the boys certainly do smoke a lot of dope.
Leftists Love Criminals
You will never understand the Left until you understand that they reliably take the side of losers, underdogs, and criminals, who comprise their clientele and path to power. And with lefties it is always about power, first and forever.
Here we read about a 78-year-old Englishman who, in defending himself against a screwdriver-wielding home invader, caused the miscreant's death and is now facing a murder charge.
Dear old England, the mother country. It is sad to see your mother, senile and decrepit, go down the toilet, having lost all her moral sense and the will to live.
Once again one sees the justification for my political burden of proof:
As contemporary 'liberals' become ever more extreme, they increasingly assume what I call the political burden of proof. The onus is now on them to defeat the presumption that they are so morally and intellectually obtuse as not to be worth talking to.
Actually, that is far too mild a statement. Perhaps tomorrow I will tell you what I really think.