Immigration

Eric S. Raymond: How elites are blind about immigration

One of the major forces currently poisoning our politics is a breakdown in trust between people like you and me – the cognitive elites – and the rest of America. Deplorables. Flyover country. Brexit, and Trump’s election, slapped me upside the head. I’ve been forced to confront some uncomfortable truths.

They think we’ve betrayed and abandoned them for a mess of virtue signaling and glib ideologizing. On the left: identity politics, PC, and open borders justified on multiculturalist grounds. On the right: free trade and open borders justified on laissez-faire principle.

They have a point. I’m seeing that now.

I mean, I might still think free trade is a good idea and have lots of arguments for it. But my arguments don’t mean [f***]-all to a Rust-Belt steelworker who’s watched his livelihood get exported and the community around him wither and has nothing left but a cheap high on opioids. Nor to an unskilled black or legal-immigrant urbanite who can’t get a job because the restaurants can hire illegals for cheaper.

We owe these people more than we have given them. What we owe can’t mainly be paid in money. It’s compassion; a fair hearing. Respect. Not dismissing them as trash or troglodytes because they don’t love the brave new globalized world that gives us options but – too often – closes off theirs.

Like esr, I would normally be for open immigration, but we don’t live in normal times. Before more open immigration becomes practical, we need to dial back government welfare and get rid of so-called “multiculturalism”, which is really just anti-Americanism. Our country could tolerate a lot of immigration when there was an expectation that the immigrants would work hard and try to assimilate to our values, but with so many high-prestige institutions trying to prevent assimilation too much immigration will lead to balkanization and ethnic strife.

High School

The more I think about it, the more High School strikes me as a bad idea.

A while back I saw something that went like this:

Q: “Why are novels set in totalitarian dystopias [e.g., Hunger Games or Divergent] so popular with High School students?”

A: “Because High School is a totalitarian dystopia, so they can relate.”

If someone put me in charge of all American High Schools, I’d let the kids get together for band and choir and athletics, but I’d have them do individualized, online courses for their academic subjects. And once they turned 16, I’d try to get them all paying internships so they could learn what it’s like to be economically productive. (If this worked out, I’d try to lower the age for internships to 14 or even 12.) If kids had some feeling of being useful, I doubt we’d see many school shootings.

A couple of notes

This would be funny, if they weren’t using it as an excuse to imprison, torture, and kill people: West sent lizards as nuclear spies, claims Iran defense official.

I was reading this article about Apple’s audio labs, and it reminded me how cool anechoic chambers are. If you ever get a chance to go inside one, don’t pass it up.

 

People vs. ideology

I recently finished reading Re-reading Job: Understanding the Ancient World’s Greatest Poem by Michael Austin. (It was a Christmas present. Thanks, Sam!) It was a good book, and I want to highlight something from the concluding chapter, where he’s listing some aphorisms that would apply to the different characters in the poem. One of the ones for Job’s Comforters says:

• Sometimes being a good friend means doing things that will make you religiously or ideologically uncomfortable. Be a good friend anyway.

I hear more and more about people ending relationships over ideological disagreements. This is very unfortunate; we should value people and relationships over beliefs and ideologies. When it goes the other way we end up with things like the New York Times’ infamous obituary for Pres. Thomas S. Monson. Here was a man who spent his entire, long life visiting widows and the sick and over and over again teaching, by precept and example, the importance of caring for one another, yet for the Times this was all overshadowed by his failure to sign on for their political priorities.

So even if you disagree with me, I’d still like to be friends.

The dream lives

When I was a kid, I hoped that some of my children would be born on the Moon or on Mars. As we started having kids, I hoped that maybe some of my grandchildren would be. Even that dream has faded, but today it got a boost: the Falcon Heavy had a successful test flight.

Jesus and politics

I frequently see people implying or outright stating that Christians should support some political position or another, often with an appeal to something Jesus said. These kinds of statements come roughly equally from the left and from the right. They’re wrong, though.

Jesus had a lot to say about how we should treat each other, but pretty much nothing to say about how we should organize ourselves politically. He said, “My kingdom is not of this world.” Whenever someone came to him with a question that had political implications, he reframed or redirected the question; for example, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,” or “He who is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone.”

Jesus taught us to care for the poor and disadvantaged, but he never said to do it by taxing the rich and setting up massive government bureaucracies. He never said not to do it that way, either. Two people can support the same goal, but honestly disagree about the most appropriate way to accomplish that goal. In most cases, Jesus set the goals for us, but didn’t lay out the plan to implement those goals.

Our current culture encourages us to substitute political opinions for religious beliefs, but if we’re really going to be Christians we need to be careful not to confuse the two.