Race – Page 17 – Maverick Philosopher

Saul Alinksy Lives in Ferguson

A lIttle collateral reading to help along the wonderful 'conversation about race' we've been having.

Is There Such a Thing as Racial Profiling?

One of the tactics of leftists is to manipulate and misuse language for their own purposes. Thus they make up words and phrases and hijack existing ones. 'Islamophobe' is an example of the former, 'disenfranchise' an example of the latter. 'Racial profiling' is a second example of the former. It is a meaningless phrase apart from its use as a semantic bludgeon. Race is an element in a profile; it cannot be a profile. A profile cannot consist of just one characteristic. I can profile you, but it makes no sense racially to profile you. Apparel is an element in a profile; it cannot be a profile. I can profile you, but it makes no sense sartorially to profile you.

Let's think about this.

I profile you if I subsume you under a profile. A profile is a list of several descriptors. You fit the profile if you satisfy all or most of the descriptors. Here is an example of a profile:

1. Race: black
2. Age: 16-21 years
3. Sex: male
4. Apparel: wearing a hoodie, with the hood pulled up over the head
5. Demeanor: sullen, alienated
6. Behavior: walking aimlessly, trespassing, cutting across yards, looking into windows and garages, hostile and disrespectful when questioned; uses racial epithets such as 'creepy-assed cracker.'
7. Physical condition: robust, muscular
8. Location: place where numerous burglaries and home invasions had occurred, the perpetrators being black
9. Resident status: not a resident.

Now suppose I spot someone who fits the above profile. Would I have reason to be suspicious of him? Of course. As suspicious as if the fellow were of Italian extraction but fit the profile mutatis mutandis. But that's not my point. My point is that I have not racially profiled the individual; I have profiled him, with race being one element in the profile.

Blacks are more criminally prone than whites.* But that fact means little by itself. It becomes important only in conjunction with the other characteristics. An 80-year-old black female is no threat to anyone. But someone who fits all or most of the above descriptors is someone I am justified in being suspicious of.

There is no such thing as racial profiling. The phrase is pure obfuscation manufactured by liberals to forward their destructive agenda. The leftist script requires that race be injected into everything. Hence 'profiling' becomes 'racial profiling.' If you are a conservative and you use the phrase, you are foolish, as foolish as if you were to use the phrase 'social justice.' Social justice is not justice. But that's a separate post.

I wrote and posted the above in July of last year. This morning I find in The New Yorker a piece entitled No Such Thing as Racial Profiling. It is just awful and shows the level to which our elite publications are sinking. It is not worth my time to rebut, but I will direct my readers to the author's comments on the R. Giuliani quotation. Get out your logical scalpels.

Addendum. There is also the liberal-left tendency to drop qualifiers. Thus 'male' in 'male chauvinism' is dropped, and 'chauvinism' comes to mean male chauvinism, which is precisely what it doesn't mean. So one can expect the following to happen. 'Racial' in 'racial profiling' will be dropped, and 'profiling' will come to mean racial profiling, which, in reality, means nothing.

___________________

* See here:

Any candid debate on race and criminality in this country would have to start with the fact that blacks commit an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes. African-Americans constitute about 13% of the population, yet between 1976 and 2005 blacks committed more than half of all murders in the U.S. The black arrest rate for most offenses—including robbery, aggravated assault and property crimes—is typically two to three times their representation in the population. [. . .]

"High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination," wrote the late Harvard Law professor William Stuntz in "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice." "The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans—and of African American control of city governments."

Nihilism: The Telos of the Liberal Mind

Here, by Steven Hayward, with a tip of the hat to an old friend, Ingvar Odegaard. My comment:

Whites who speak of 'white privilege' would do well to reflect as well on 'black privilege.' One of the 'privileges' of blacks these days, apparently, is the right to riot and loot when a decision of the criminal justice system goes against their prejudices.

Related: Some Questions About White Privilege. It begins:

There is a lot of talk these days about white privilege. I don't believe I have discussed this topic before.

1. White privilege is presumably a type of privilege. What is a privilege? This is the logically prior question. To know what white privilege is we must first know what privilege is. Let's consider some definitions.

D1. A privilege is a special entitlement or immunity granted to a particular person or group of persons by the government or some other corporate entity such as a university or a church on a conditional basis.

Driving on public roads is a privilege by this definition. It is not a right one has just in virtue of being a human being or a citizen. It is a privilege the state grants on condition that one satisfy and continue to satisfy certain requirements pertaining to age, eyesight, driving skill, etc. Being a privilege, the license to drive can be revoked. By contrast, the right to life and the right to free speech are neither conditional nor granted by the government. They can't be revoked. Please don't confuse a constitutionally protected right such as the right to free speech with a right granted by the government.

Faculty members have various privileges, a franking privilege, a library privilege, along with such perquisites as an office, a carrel, secretarial help, access to an an exclusive dining facility, etc. Immunities are also privileges, e.g., the immunity to prosecution granted to a miscreant who agrees to inform on his cohorts.

Now if (D1) captures what we mean by 'privilege,' then it it is hard to see how there could be white privilege. Are there certain special entitlements and immunities that all and only whites have in virtue of being white, entitlements and immunities granted on a conditional basis by the government and revocable by said government? No. But there is black privilege by (D1). It is called affirmative action.

So if we adopt (D1) we get the curious result that there is no white privilege, but there is black privilege! Those who speak of white privilege as of something real and something to be aware of and opposed must therefore have a different definition of privilege in mind, perhaps the following:

Obama, Holder, and the Racializing of Crime

You can rely on liberals to politicize race and racialize politics. But they also excel at the racialization of crime. Victor Davis Hanson has their number in Crimes of Exactly What? He discusses a number of examples besides Ferguson. Excerpts:

Racializing crime is a serious business, because it breaks society apart along tribal lines. It is all the more dangerous when elected officials like the president and attorney general are sometimes the worst offenders, given their racialist slurs like “nation of cowards,” “punish our enemies,” and “typical white person” and cheap editorializing in the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown cases. So on their cue, are we to look at lurid fatal crimes in the news and see them not as matters of individual evil acts, but rather as collective tokens of larger racial hatred? And are we to detect some sort of state culpability that suggests shared guilt for the violence?

[. . .]

If we were to embrace the abjectly racist worldview of Eric Holder or Al Sharpton, where would the racialization of crime end? Who would decide which interracial crimes illustrated premeditated racial hatred — or criminal laxity on the part of the state — and deserved national attention? Which adjudicator could or would declare that one interracial incident was idiosyncratic without transcendent significance, but the other typical and thus representative of collective pathology?

What exactly has this country stooped to, when our officials and public figures traffic in politicizing the end of human lives? We are becoming not just a sick country, but an amoral one as well. What Ferguson wrought will not end well.

Friday Cat Blogging! Is Your Cat Racist?

Did you know that "Tom and Jerry" is now deemed racist? Yikes!

Is there any limit to liberal-left foolishness? Here are three more recent examples.

Andrea Tantaros of Fox News attacked for using the perfectly acceptable phrase 'witch doctor.'

Australian opera company bans Carmen for smoking.

Swing sets banned in two school districts in Washington State.

The Narrative: The Origins of Political Correctness

William Voegli claims that the phrase 'political correctness' first entered the American vocabulary in 1991. I don't know about that, but I do know that the concept is much older: PC derives from the CP, as I explain in Dorothy Healey on Political Correctness.

I now refer you to what Bill Whittle has to say about the leftist narrative and political correctness. (HT: Monterey Tom)

Whittle refers to a man I blogged about on 30 August 2009:

The Gun-Totin' Obama Protester Was Black!

If a black man exercises his Second Amendment rights, is he really black? For liberals, the answer, apparently, is in the negative. For them, apparently, the only real black is a liberal black. Take a gander at this video clip. You will see an Obama protester with a semi-automatic rifle slung over his shoulder, a pistol on his hip, and an ammo mag in his pocket. But the shot has been edited so that we cannot see that he is black. And you liberals have the chutzpah to tell me that the MSM does not tilt to the Left? To depict the man's color would not fit in with the leftist party line that opposition to Obama's policies has its origin in racism. Apparently, a black man who does not fit the leftist 'narrative' is not black, but a 'traitor to his race.' And the same goes, mutatis mutandis, for women who do not toe the party line.

In this clip you can see that the man is indeed black.

Here are two points that need to be made again and again in opposition to the willful moral and intellectual obtuseness of liberals and leftists.

1. Dissent is not hate. To dissent from a person's ideas and policies is not to hate the person.

2. As a corollary to #1, to dissent from the ideas and policies of a black man is not to hate the man. A fortiori, it is not to hate the man because he is black.

O. J. Simpson: Trial of the Century?

It was on this date in 1995 that the verdict in the O. J. Simpson murder trial came down: not guilty! To refer to this proceeding as the trial of the century ought to offend anyone with a modicum of historical sense and a concern for the English language. It is on a par with Tom Brokaw's silly reference to the World War II generation of Americans as the "greatest generation." Here is an example of what I am opposing:

We always hear phrases like "Fight of the Century" and "Trial of the Century" … well, this really was the Trial of the Century. A Pro Football Hall of Fame running back might or might not have killed his wife and one of her male friends. All evidence pointed to him. No other suspects. No alibi. A disturbing history of domestic abuse. A motive. Blood splattered everywhere, including back at the suspect's house.

Nonsense! Irresponsible journalism of Brokavian proportions. If the Simpson double homicide trial was the Trial of the Century, then what were the following?

Sacco-Vanzetti (1921)
Leopold-Loeb (1924)
Scopes "Monkey" Trial (1925)
Nuremberg Trials (1945-49)
Alger Hiss (1949-50)
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (1951)
Adolf Eichmann (1961)
Clinton Impeachment (1999)

Most of the above were far more significant than the Simpson trial.

Who was Simpson? A guy who was uncommonly good at chasing a piece of pigskin around a field who one night gave vent to his murderous rage in a brutal double homicide. The only thing significant about that trial was that it exposed the tribalism among so many blacks, their incapacity to abstract from their racial identity and evaluate evidence rationally and objectively. This tribalism was again on clear display recently in the Trayvon Martin case. Except for a few black conservatives, black commentators on the trial displayed a depressing level of delusional thinking. Yes, you are delusional if you think there is a meaningful comparison between the Emmett Till case (1955) and the Martin-Zimmerman proceeding. Either that or you are contemptibly mendacious.

Whatever became of Marcia Clark, the lead prosecutor in the Simpson trial? Her story here.

The Trial of Orenthal James Simpson

Malcolm Pollack on Diversity and Immigration

Herein are enunciated a number of important truths that few these days have the courage to express. Mr. Pollack concludes:

These commonsense truths are the basis of the widely accepted idea that indigenous societies have a fundamental right to defend and preserve the cultural and demographic integrity of their homelands. Nobody in the liberal West imagines, for example, that the forcible settlement of Han Chinese in Tibet, and the ongoing displacement of traditional Tibetan culture, is conducive to the happiness of the Tibetans.

There is a curious blindness, however, on the part of the educated elites of the liberal West to acknowledge that these obvious principles, the generality of which should be entirely and uncontroversially self-evident to anyone of sound mind, might in fact apply to Western peoples and homelands. Can any person not a child or an imbecile look at, for example, Britain, Sweden, France, or the Netherlands and seriously imagine that the native people of these countries are happier (or freer) now, after decades of mass immigration of Muslims and other non-Europeans, than they were when the populations of these nations were almost exclusively British, Swedish, French, and Dutch? Can anyone even begin to think such a thing is actually true?

More Mass Race Delusion: The Ted Robinson Incident

Via Malcolm Pollack's recent entry commenting on the Rotherham, England sex slave scandal, here are a couple of formulations of Lawrence Auster's First Law of Majority-Minority Relations in a Liberal Society:

The more egregiously any non-Western or non-white group behaves, the more evil whites are made to appear for noticing and drawing rational conclusions about that group’s bad behavior. (source)

The more troublesome, unassimilable, or dangerous a designated minority or non-Western group actually is, the more favorably it is treated. This undeserved favorable treatment of a troublesome or misbehaving group can take numerous forms, including celebrating the group, giving the group greater rights and privileges, covering up the group’s crimes and dysfunctions, attacking the group’s critics as racists, and blaming the group’s bad behavior on white racism.

For clarity and generality I would rewrite the first formulation as follows:

The more egregiously any non-Western or non-white group or individual behaves, the more whites are made to appear evil for noticing and drawing rational conclusions about that group’s or individual's bad behavior.

At Auster's site you will find many examples in illustration of his First Law. The recent Ted Robinson incident is another. The story is here:

The 49ers have suspended radio broadcaster Ted Robinson two games for comments he made regarding domestic violence on KNBR on Monday afternoon.

In discussing the controversy regarding former Ravens running back Ray Rice, Robinson said the victim, Rice’s wife, Janay, bore some of the responsibility for not speaking up after she was knocked unconscious by her then-fiancee.

“That, to me, is the saddest part of it,” Robinson said.

Robinson also said her decision to marry Rice after she was assaulted was “pathetic.”

Robinson was punished for "noticing and drawing rational conclusions" about this case. Obviously, you are pathetic if you marry a man who has knocked you unconscious. You are pathetic, foolish, and uninterested in your own long-term happiness. A man who has the power to kill you with one blow and has revealed his character by landing such a blow is obviously not a good marital prospect. As I have said many times, if you want to gamble, go right ahead and gamble with money you can afford to lose; but you are a fool if you gamble with your happiness. Besides, if you reward such a man by marrying him, you set a bad example for other women and encourage the man to do it again. One has a moral obligation not to aid and abet criminal behavior.

Suppose what I said is obvious is not obvious to you. That doesn't change the fact that Robinson has a right to express his opinion. If you have any common sense you will agree that what Robinson said is correct. Correct or not, he has a right to state his view. After all, he is a broadcaster and a commentator. (Of course, this right is not a First Amendment right; what sort of right it is would make for an interesting discussion.)

Was there anything 'racist' about what Robinson said? Obviously not. Race doesn't come into it at all. It is foolish to marry a man who pounds on you. That's true for white couples, black couples, and interracial couples. Remember Nicole Brown Simpson? O. J. pounded on her, but she stood by her man until she couldn't stand any more because she was lying in a pool of blood.

So what we have here in the Robinson incident is one more of many instances of mass race delusion.

Janay would have been well-advised to shop around.

Attacked as ‘Racist’ By a White, Defended as Courageous by a Black Professor

It is a funny world. A man who claims to be white called me a racist because of my post, Self-Control and Respect for Authority. I ignored him, my policy being that scurrilous attacks from unknowns are ignored (and they are read only up to the point where the scurrilousness manifests itself). Scurrilous attacks from known cyberpunks like Brian Leiter, the academic gossip-monger, however, cannot go unanswered.

As I said, it is a funny world. The day before the attack by the unknown, Professor Laurence Thomas, Professor in the Department of Philosophy and in the Department of Political Science in the Maxwell School, Syracuse University, sent me this:

Dear Dr. Vallicella:

I write to thank you for having the courage to be ever so forthright. That is trait that I so very much admire. I do not claim that I agree with all that you say. But I do claim that I have learnt so very much as a result of reflecting upon your ideas. There is profound agreement between us is with respect to the following remarks by you:

There is no decency on the Left, no wisdom, and, increasingly, no sanity. For example, the crazy comparison of Trayvon Martin with Emmett Till. But perhaps I should put the point disjunctively: you are either crazy if you make that comparison, or moral scum. You are moral scum if you wittingly make a statement that is highly inflammatory and yet absurdly false.

Indeed, the two cases are quite unalike even if one holds that a wrong was done in each instance—a view that I unequivocally do not hold. Indeed, when I looked up the Emmett Till case, upon hearing that the Martin case was analogous to it, my very first thought was that there is simply no comparison between the two cases. And that is exactly where I continue to stand. Holding that the two cases are analogous bespeaks a horrendous level of moral depravity. There is simply no way in which the killing of Till can be characterized as self-defense by those who killed him; whereas it is manifestly obvious that it was out of self- defense that Zimmerman drew his gun and shot Martin. And the rush to characterize Zimmerman as a racist was simply stupefying given his very rich history of blacks. [Prof. Thomas is referring to Zimmerman's black ancestry. See here.]

People have noted that Zimmerman’s behavior has been more than a little erratic since the court ruling in his favor. It is stunning to me that people cannot make sense of why that is so, given the horrendous attitude of so many people who claim to be ever so committed to justice. A former student of mine recently brought to my attention your essay “Self-Control and Respect for Authority”. And once again, I wholeheartedly agree with you. Whenever I approach a police officer while I am walking, I display a simple measure of deference. That is how I behave regardless of the ethnicity of the officer. And never in my life has any police officer made the
presumption that I might have committed a wrongdoing, although given my physical features there can no doubt whatsoever that I am a black person.

So I bear witness to the reality that being black is not at all a sufficient condition to raise a policeman’s concern about one’s behavior even if the police officer is white. Am I servile? Absolutely not. But having a deep, deep sense of self-respect is perfectly compatible with showing all sorts of people, including police officers a measure of respect, just as giving one’s seat to a pregnant woman who boards a crowded metro train is perfectly compatible with having a deep sense of self-respect. There is no incompatibility at all between have full measure of self-respect and yet showing others respect, be they law officers or “ordinary” citizens. I typically refer to myself as a radical conservative. Quite simply, my radical view is that acting responsibly is a gift that we give to ourselves. What is more, I hold that we should act responsibly even if we have been the victims of wrongful behavior in the past. It is utterly horrendous to hold that having been the object of wrongdoing constitutes an excuse to do what undermines one’s own sense of worth. I have gone on long enough. I wanted to thank you for your thoughtful remarks over the years. And while I have not left academia, I can indeed understand why you have done so. Be well and flourish, sir.

Most Cordially,
Laurence Thomas

Mass Race Delusion: Bruce Levenson’s ‘Racist’ E-Mail

Recently I have been pinching myself a lot, figuratively speaking, to see if I am awake and not dreaming all the delusional race nonsense I keep hearing about. Herewith, a very recent example.

Bruce Levenson, owner of the Atlanta Hawks, sold his controlling interest in the NBA franchise because of this piece of 'racist' e-mail that he very foolishly sent in naive ignorance of the climate of the country. I excerpt the 'offensive' part, bad writing, bad punctuation and all. Emphasis added.

Regarding game ops [operations?], i need to start with some background. for the first couple of years we owned the team, i didn't much focus on game ops. then one day a light bulb went off [went on?]. when digging into why our season ticket base is so small, i was told it is because we can't get 35-55 white males and corporations to buy season tixs [tickets] and they are the primary demo [demographic] for season tickets around the league. when i pushed further, folks generally shrugged their shoulders. then i start looking around our arena during games and notice the following:

— it's 70 pct black
— the cheerleaders are black
— the music is hip hop
— at the bars it's 90 pct black
— there are few fathers and sons at the games
— we are doing after game concerts to attract more fans and the concerts are either hip hop or gospel.

Then i start looking around at other arenas. It is completely different. Even DC with its affluent black community never has more than 15 pct black audience.

Before we bought the hawks and for those couple years immediately after in an effort to make the arena look full (at the nba's urging) thousands and thousands of tickets were being giving away, predominantly in the black community, adding to the overwhelming black audience.

My theory is that the black crowd scared away the whites and there are simply not enough affluent black fans to build a signficant season ticket base. Please dont get me wrong. There was nothing threatening going on in the arean [arena] back then. i never felt uncomfortable, but i think southern whites simply were not comfortable being in an arena or at a bar where they were in the minority. On fan sites i would read comments about how dangerous it is around philips yet in our 9 years, i don't know of a mugging or even a pick pocket incident. This was just racist garbage. When I hear some people saying the arena is in the wrong place I think it is code for there are too many blacks at the games.

Now could any reasonable person, as opposed to a person in the grip of a delusion, take offence at any of this? Of course not. Levenson is a business man who is offering an explanation of why ticket sales are low. His explanation is two-fold. First, the black crowd scares away the southern whites who are uncomfortable with being in a minority and who do not enjoy black entertainment (hip hop, all black cheerleaders) and do not want to be in a family-unfriendly environment (few fathers with sons). Second, there is a lack of affluent black fans.

Now whether or not Levenson's explanation is correct, it is surely plausible. But the main thing is that there is nothing racist about it. To report that certain whites are scared by certain blacks is to report a fact about the way those whites feel. It is not to imply that the whites are justified in feeling the way they do. Maybe they are and maybe they aren't.

The mistake that liberals (whether white or black) make is to confuse a racial explanation with a racist explanation.

It is a special case of the confusion of a racial statement (a statement whose subject-matter is race) with a racist statement. For example, the statement that blacks are 13-14% of the U. S. population is a racial statement, but not a racist statement. Capiche?

Suppose I state that men, on average, are taller than women, on average. Is that a hateful thing to say? Is it sexist or 'tallist'? Does it express a 'bias' that I need to overcome? Of course not, it is true.

Now here is another distinction that is probably wasted on a liberal. It is the distinction beween the content of an assertion and the asserting of that content. I see a man with no legs. His name is Joe Blow. I assert within earshot of Joe Blow, Joe Blow has no legs! The content of my assertion is true and unobjectionable. But my asserting of it in this context is morally objectionable and for obvious reasons. But in other contexts both the content and my asserting of it would be unobjectionable.

What is going on here? How do we explain the mass race delusion of liberals? Some possibilities:

Liberals are in general very stupid people who cannot think but only emote and associate.
Liberals are not, on average, any dumber than conservatives, but on certain topics they stupefy, or perhaps I should say enstupidate themselves consciously and willfully and in a way that makes them the just recipients of moral censure.
Liberals are not, on average, any dumber than conservatives, but on certain topics they stupefy, or perhaps I should say enstupidate themselves unconsciously — they are infected with a PeeCee virus but are unaware of being infected.

UPDATE: A reader comments:

I don’t know if you saw it, but after the remarks came out Levenson stated that he’s not worthy of owning an NBA franchise. Now, I assume you know about the recent kerfuffle about Donald Sterling, the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers (another NBA team). He made some racial comments in a private conversation that were leaked to the broader world, and as a result was forced to sell his team.

That’s the background, and now a theory: Levenson did all of this as a trick to be forced to sell his team as profitably as possible. Because the league is forcing him to sell, they have to assure him of getting the price that an auditor deems it to be worth rather than what it would get in the real world. In other words, it may just a cynical trick to make more money/divest himself of what he perceives to be a bad investment.

The reader may have something here. Levenson's grovelling is suspicious. Businessmen in a position to buy a controlling interest in an NBA franchise tend to have big egos. One expects them to fight and not act the part of a pussy, especially when the accusations made against him are so palpably absurd.

On Legal and Illegal Immigration

A reader from Down Under poses this question:

America is experiencing immigration problems somewhat like Australia's. The idea of 'multiculturalism' some would say is beginning to show its flaws. Who do you believe should be allowed to enter your country? Please feel free to be as politically incorrect as you like.

1. First of all, one must insist on a distinction that many on the Left willfully ignore, that between legal and illegal immigration. (Libertarians also typically elide the distinction.) Legal and illegal immigration are separate, logically independent, issues. To oppose illegal immigration, as any right-thinking person must, is not to oppose legal immigration. So, to answer one of the reader's questions, no one should be allowed to enter illegally. But why exactly? What's wrong with illegal immigration? Aren't those who oppose it racists and xenophobes and nativists? Doesn't everyone have a right to migrate wherever he wants?

2. The most general reason for not allowing illegal immigration is precisely because it is illegal. If the rule of law is to be upheld, then reasonable laws cannot be allowed to be violated with impunity simply because they are difficult to enforce or are being violated by huge numbers of people. Someone who questions the value of the rule of law is not someone it is wise to waste time debating.

3. There are several sound specific reasons for demanding that the Federal government exercise its legitimate, constitutionally grounded (see Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. constitution) function of securing the national borders, and none of these reasons has anything to do with racism or xenophobia or nativism or any other derogatory epithet that slanderous leftists and libertarians want to attach to those of us who can think clearly about this issue.

There are reasons having to do with national security in an age of terrorism. There are reasons having to do with assimilation, national identity, and comity. How likely is it that illegals will assimilate, and how likely is social harmony among citizens and unassimilated illegals? There are considerations of fairness in respect of those who have entered the country legally by satisfying the requirements of so doing. Is it fair that they should be put through a lengthy process when others are allowed in illegally.

There are reasons having to do with the importation of contraband substances into the country. There are reasons having to do with increased crime. Last but not least, there are reasons pertaining to public health. With the concern over avian influenza, tuberculosis, ebola, and all sorts of tropical diseases, we have all the more reason to demand border control.

Borders are a body politic's immune system. Unregulated borders are deficient immune systems. Diseases that were once thought to have been eradicated have made a comeback north of the Rio Grande due to the unregulated influx of population. These diseases include tuberculosis, Chagas disease, leprosy, Dengue fever, polio, and malaria.

You will have noticed how liberals want to transform into public health issues problems that are manifestly not public but matters of private concern, obesity for example. But here we have an issue that is clearly a public health issue, one concerning which Federal involvement is justified, and what do our dear liberals do? They ignore it. Of course, the problem cannot be blamed solely on the Democrat Party. Republicans like Bush and McCain are just as guilty. On immigration, Bush was clearly no conservative; he was a libertarian on this issue. A libertarian on some issues, a liberal on others, and a conservative on far too few.

4. Many liberals think that opposition to illegal immigration is anti-Hispanic. Not so. It is true that most of those who violate the nation's borders are Hispanic. But the opposition is not to Hispanics but to illegal entrants whether Hispanic or not. It is a contingent fact that Mexico is to the south of the U.S. If Turkey or Iran or Italy were to the south, the issue would be the same. And if Iran were to the south, and there were an influx of illegals, then then leftists would speak of anti-Persian bias.

A salient feature of liberals and leftists — there isn't much difference nowadays — is their willingness to 'play the race card,' to inject race into every issue. The issue of illegal immigration has nothing to do with race since illegal immigrants do not constitute a race. There is no such race as the race of 'llegal aliens.' Opposition to them, therefore, cannot be racist. Suppose England were to the south of the U. S. and Englishmen were streaming north. Would they be opposed because they are white? No, because they are illegal aliens.

"But aren't some of those who oppose illegal immigration racists?" That may be so, but it is irrelevant. That one takes the right stance for the wrong reason does not negate the fact that one has taken the right stance. One only wishes they would take the right stance for the right reasons. Even if everyone who opposed illegal immigration were a foaming-at-the-mouth redneck of a racist, that would not detract one iota of cogency from the cogent arguments against allowing illegal immigration. To think otherwise is to embrace the Genetic Fallacy. Not good.

5. The rule of law is a precious thing. It is one of the supports of a civilized life. The toleration of mass breaking of reasonable and just laws undermines the rule of law.

6. Part of the problem is that we let liberals get away with obfuscatory rhetoric, such as 'undocumented worker.' The term does not have the same extension as 'illegal alien.' I discuss this in a separate post. But having written thousands of posts, I don't quite know where it is.

7. How long can a welfare state survive with open borders? Think about it. The trend in the USA for a long time now has been towards bigger and bigger government, more and more 'entitlements.' It is obviously impossible for purely fiscal reasons to provide cradle-to-grave security for everyone who wants to come here. So something has to give. Either you strip the government down to its essential functions or you control the borders. The first has no real chance of happening. Quixotic is the quest of strict constructionists and libertarians who call for it. Rather than tilting at windmills, they should work with reasonable conservatives to limit and eventually stop the expansion of government. Think of what a roll-back to a government in accordance with a strictly construed constitution would look like. For one thing, the social security system would have to be eliminated. That won't happen. Libertarians are 'losertarian' dreamers. They should wake up and realize that politics is a practical business and should aim at the possible. By the way, the pursuit of impossible dreams is common to both libertarians and leftists.

8. Even though contemporary liberals show little or no understanding for the above arguments, there are actually what might be called 'liberal' arguments for controlling the borders:

A. The Labor Argument. To give credit where credit is due, it was not the conservatives of old who championed the working man, agitated for the 40 hour work week, demanded safe working conditions, etc., but the liberals of those days. They can be proud of this. But it is not only consistent with their concern for workers that they oppose illegal immigration, but demanded by their concern. For when the labor market is flooded with people who will work for low wages, the bargaining power of the U.S. worker is diminished. Liberals should therefore oppose the unregulated influx of cheap labor, and they should oppose it precisely because of their concern for U. S. workers.

By the way, it is simply false to say, as Bush, McCain and other pandering politicians have said, that U.S. workers will not pick lettuce, clean hotel rooms, and the like. Of course they will if they are paid a decent wage. People who won't work for $5 an hour will work for $20. But they won't be able to command $20 if there is a limitless supply of indigentes who will accept $5-10.

B. The Environmental Argument. Although there are 'green' conservatives, concern for the natural environment, and its preservation and protection from industrial exploitation, is more a liberal than a conservative issue. (By the way, I'm a 'green' conservative.) So liberals ought to be concerned about the environmental degradation caused by hordes of illegals crossing the border. It is not just that they degrade the lands they physically cross, it is that people whose main concern is economic survival are not likely to be concerned about environmental protection. They are unlikely to become Sierra Club members or to make contributions to the Nature Conservancy. Love of nature comes more easily to middle class white collar workers for whom nature is a scene of recreation than for those who must wrest a livelihood from it by hard toil.

C. The Population Argument. This is closely related to, but distinct from, the Environmental Argument. To the extent that liberals are concerned about the negative effects of explosive population increase, they should worry about an unchecked influx of people whose women have a high birth-rate.

D. The Social Services Argument. Liberals believe in a vast panoply of social services provided by government and thus funded by taxation. But the quality of these services must degrade as the number of people who demand them rises. To take but one example, laws requiring hospitals to treat those in dire need whether or not they have a means of paying are reasonable and humane — or at least that can be argued with some show of plausibility. But such laws are reasonably enacted and reasonably enforced only in a context of social order. Without border control, not only will the burden placed on hospitals become unbearable, but the justification for the federal government's imposition of these laws on hospitals will evaporate. According to one source, California hospitals are closing their doors. "Anchor babies" born to illegal aliens instantly qualify as citizens for welfare benefits and have caused enormous rises in Medicaid costs and stipends under Supplemental Security Income and Disability Income.

The point is that you can be a good liberal and oppose illegal immigration. You can oppose it even if you don't care about about increased crime, terrorism, drug smuggling, disease, national identity, national sovereignty, assimilation, the rule of law, or fairness to those who have immigrated legally. But a 'good liberal' who is not concerned with these things is a sorry human being.

I hope I have been politically incorrect enough for my reader's taste.

Why Privilege?

Our old friend Horace Jeffery Hodges checks his privilege.

Self-Control and Respect for Authority

If Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri fame had been properly brought up to have self-control and to respect authority he might be alive today. Police have the authority to issue commands in certain circumstances as when people are violating laws by, say, walking in the street. Cops are often rude and arrogant. No doubt about it. But you still must obey their lawful commands even if rudely barked. Here is where self-control and respect for authority come in. If Brown had possessed self control, he would have kept a lid on his feelings and would have refrained from stupidly initiating an altercation with an armed officer of the law. Apart from questions of morality and legality, fighting with cops is almost always a highly imprudent thing to do. And if Brown had been properly brought up, he would have known that in a situation like this he had a duty to submit to the cop's legitimate authority. What's more, it was imprudence on stilts for Brown to act as he did right after stealing from a convenience store and roughing up the proprietor.

Similar lessons may be gleaned from the fateful encounter of Trayvon Martin with George Zimmerman. The case is worth revisiting.

One 'take-away' is the importance of self-control. If Martin had been taught, or rather had learned, to control himself he would most likely be alive today. But he didn't control himself. He blew his cool when questioned about his trespassing in a gated community on a rainy night, cutting across lawns, looking into people's houses. He punched a man in the face and broke his nose, then jumped on him, pinned him down, and told him that he was going to die that night. So, naturally, the man defended himself against the deadly attack with deadly force. What George Zimmerman did was both morally and legally permissible. If some strapping youth is pounding your head into the pavement, you are about to suffer "grave bodily harm" if not death. What we have here is clearly a case of self-defense.

Does race enter into this? In one way it does. Blacks as a group have a rather more emotional nature than whites as a group. (If you deny this, you have never lived in a black neighborhood or worked with blacks, as I have.) So, while self-control is important for all, the early inculcation of self-control is even more important for blacks. Otherwise, the case has nothing to do with race. It has to do with a man's defending himself against a thuggish attack.

Hard looks, hateful looks, suspicious looks — we all get them from time to time, but they are not justifications for launching a physical assault on the looker. The same goes for harsh words.

If you want to be successful you must learn to control yourself. You must learn to control your thoughts, your words, and your behavior. You must learn to keep a tight rein on your feelings. Before leaving your house, you must remind yourself that you are likely to meet offensive people. Rehearse your Stoic and other maxims so that you will be ready should the vexatious and worse heave into view.

Unfortunately, too many liberals in positions of authority have abdicated when it comes to moral education. For example, they refuse to enforce discipline in classrooms. They refuse to teach morality. They tolerate bad behavior. They abdicate their authority when they refuse to teach respect for authority. So liberals, as usual, are part of the problem.

But that is to put it too mildly. There is no decency on the Left, no wisdom, and, increasingly, no sanity. For example, the crazy comparison of Trayvon Martin with Emmett Till. But perhaps I should put the point disjunctively: you are either crazy if you make that comparison, or moral scum. You are moral scum if you wittingly make a statement that is highly inflammatory and yet absurdly false.

Had enough yet? If not, read this and this.

Some Questions About White Privilege

There is a lot of talk these days about white privilege. I don't believe I have discussed this topic before.

1. White privilege is presumably a type of privilege. What is a privilege? This is the logically prior question. To know what white privilege is we must first know what privilege is. Let's consider some definitions.

D1. A privilege is a special entitlement or immunity granted to a particular person or group of persons by the government or some other corporate entity such as a university or a church on a conditional basis.

Driving on public roads is a privilege by this definition. It is not a right one has just in virtue of being a human being or a citizen. It is a privilege the state grants on condition that one satisfy and continue to satisfy certain requirements pertaining to age, eyesight, driving skill, etc. Being a privilege, the license to drive can be revoked. By contrast, the right to life and the right to free speech are neither conditional nor granted by the government. They can't be revoked. Please don't confuse a constitutionally protected right such as the right to free speech with a right granted by the government.

Faculty members have various privileges, a franking privilege, a library privilege, along with such perquisites as an office, a carrel, secretarial help, access to an an exclusive dining facility, etc. Immunities are also privileges, e.g., the immunity to prosecution granted to a miscreant who agrees to inform on his cohorts.

Now if (D1) captures what we mean by 'privilege,' then it it is hard to see how there could be white privilege. Are there certain special entitlements and immunities that all and only whites have in virtue of being white, entitlements and immunities granted on a conditional basis by the government and revocable by said government? No. But there is black privilege by (D1). It is called affirmative action.

So if we adopt (D1) we get the curious result that there is no white privilege, but there is black privilege! Those who speak of white privilege as of something real and something to be aware of and opposed must therefore have a different definition of privilege in mind, perhaps the following:

D2. A privilege is any unearned benefit or advantage that only some people have in virtue of their identity. It needn't be granted by any corporate entity, nor need it be conditional. Aspects of identity that can afford privilege in this sense include race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, class, wealth, ability, or citizenship status.

People who speak of white privilege probably have something like (D2) in mind. The idea is that there are certain unearned advantages that accrue to whites just in virtue of their race, advantages that do not accrue to members of other races.

One question arises right here. What justifies the broadening of the term 'privilege' to cover any unearned benefit? If the term is used strictly, there is no white privilege. To speak of white privlege one has to engage in a semantic stretch. What justifies this stretch? Is it a legitimate stretch or a example of linguistic distortion? And what is the agenda behind it?

One thing to note about (D2) is that it leads to a proliferation of privileges. There will be as many privileges as there are unearned benefits possessed by some but not all. For example, there will be the 'privilege' of being right-handed since this is a minor advantage — better to be right-handed than either left-handed or ambisinistrous — and it is unearned and not possessed by everyone. And the same goes for being ambidexterous. I lack the 'privilege' of ambidexterity, being right-handed only, and so I am disadvantaged relative to the ambidexterous. But I am not as disadvantaged relative to the ambidexterous as the ambisinistrous. They are the worst off when it comes to handedness. Should they receive something like reparations for nature's niggardliness?

Now clearly all of us enjoy all sorts of unearned benefits. Tall men, of whatever race, have an unearned advantage over short men, as long as they are not too tall. In the USA at least it is better to be 6'1" rather than 4'11". (D2) therefore implies that there is a tallness privilege in some cultures. Is this a problem? Does justice demand that heights be equalized? And who will appoint and equalize the Procrustean equalizers? Or are the equalizers exempt from equalization? If so, this would be an immunity, hence a 'privilege,' a leftist privilege.

Blacks born in the post-war USA have an unearned advantage over both whites and blacks born in some other parts of the world. Blacks born into two-parent homes in the USA have an unearned advantage over blacks born into single-parent homes in the USA. Blacks born without birth defects have an unearned advantage over blacks born with birth defects. Many blacks born without birth defects have an unearned advantage over some whites born with birth defects. And so on.

If there is an advantage to being white, is this an advantage enjoyed by all whites? And if it is not shared by all whites, why should this advantage be called white privilege? Do 'poor white trash' share in white privilege? Wouldn't it be better to be born into a solid, middle-class two-parent black or Hispanic family than to be born into a 'poor white trash' family? Do rednecks and Southerners generally share in white privilege? It didn't seem to help Paula Deen very much.

What is the relation between white privilege and majority privilege? I grant that, ceteris paribus, it is better to be white than black in the USA at the present time. But how much of this advantage is due to whites' being a majority? When Hispanics become a majority in California, say, will there be talk of Hispanic privilege? Should Hispanics then start feeling guilty about their unearned advantage?

Here is an important question. Am I not entitled to my unearned benefits despite the fact that I have done nothing to earn them? My being tall is not my own doing, and I don't do much of anything besides staying alive to keep myself tall. I don't work at it in the way I work at improving my mind and work at maintaining my physical and fiscal fitness.

Suppose you are a black male born in the post-war USA into a middle-class, two-parent, loving home. You have all sorts of unearned benefits. Do you feel guilty because you have unearned benefits that a lot of 'poor white trash' lack? Should you feel guilty? Change the example slightly: you were born in London and have the unearned benefit of a British accent. You come to the States and are hired by CNN or FOX News, beating out white competitors, in large part because of that beautiful and charming accent. Do you 'check' your privilege or feel guilty about it? Does it bother you that a Southern accent is a definite disadvantage?

So those are some questions that come to mind when I think about white privilege. I'll end with a bit of analysis of an interesting quotation (from second article below):

Those of us who are white and male in the U.S. were born with significantly more chips to play the poker game of life than were people of color or women. Although our white, male status is a biological reality, the unearned benefits that our race and gender identity provides us are a social construction, that is—they are special perks granted by a white patriarchal society.

The second sentence is gibberish. Males are on average taller than females. Being tall is an unearned benefit, but surely it is no social construction. The very notion of social construction is dubious by itself. What does the phrase mean? Care to define it? It smacks of the fallacy of hypostatization. There is this entity called 'society' that constructs things? I am not saying the phrase 'social construction' cannot be given a coherent meaning; I'm just saying that I would like to know what that meaning is. Define it or drop it.

Perk? Isn't that what the coffee does — or used to do back in the day? The word our 'professor' wants is 'perquisite.' As I suggested above, perquisites are privileges. So what the 'professor' is doing is conflating privileges with unearned benefits. That conflation needs to be either justified or dropped. We are told that these 'perks' are granted by a white patriarchal society? Smells like the fallacy of hypostatization again. Where can I find the group of people who collectvely decide to grant these special 'perks' to white people?

I could go on, but this is enough 'shovelling' for one day.