We Should Live - Ben Bateman

John Derbyshire’s latest audio commentary is one of his best, because he’s talking about a subject with which he’s very familiar: immigration. Derbyshire was born in England, took a Chinese bride, entered the US as a ‘temporary’ worker, and both are now US citizens. His best points are:

• If we were to grant entry to every person in the world who wanted to move to the United States, then our nation of 300 million would gain several hundred million more people, if not one or two billion. This would change our country beyond all recognition.
• We already have a guest worker program. In fact, we have six. Why would a seventh fix everything?

Ann Coulter’s column is titled “Importing a Slave Class“:

Apparently, my position on immigration is that we must deport all 12 million illegal aliens immediately, inasmuch as this is billed as the only alternative to immediate amnesty. The jejune fact that we “can’t deport them all” is supposed to lead ineluctably to the conclusion that we must grant amnesty to illegal aliens — and fast!

I’m astounded that debate has sunk so low that I need to type the following words, but: No law is ever enforced 100 percent.

We can’t catch all rapists, so why not grant amnesty to rapists? Surely no one wants thousands of rapists living in the shadows! How about discrimination laws? Insider trading laws? Do you expect Bush to round up everyone who goes over the speed limit? Of course we can’t do that. We can’t even catch all murderers. What we need is “comprehensive murder reform.” It’s not “amnesty” — we’ll ask them to pay a small fine.

If it’s “impossible” to deport illegal aliens, how did we come to have so much specific information about them? I keep hearing they are Catholic, pro-life, hardworking, just dying to become American citizens, and will take jobs other Americans won’t. Someone must have talked to them to gather all this information. Let’s find that guy — he must know where they are!

How do we even know there are 12 million of them? Why not 3 million, or 40 million? Maybe we should put the guy who counted them in charge of deporting them.

And she makes a familiar point:

The great bounty of cheap labor by unskilled immigrants isn’t going to hardworking Americans who hang drywall or clean hotel rooms — and who are having trouble getting jobs, now that they’re forced to compete with the vast influx of unskilled workers who don’t pay taxes.

The people who make arguments about “jobs Americans won’t do” are never in a line of work where unskilled immigrants can compete with them. Liberals love to strike generous, humanitarian poses with other people’s lives.

Something tells me the immigration debate would be different if we were importing millions of politicians or Hollywood agents. You lose your job, while I keep my job at the Endeavor agency, my Senate seat, my professorship, my editorial position or my presidency. (And I get a maid!)

The only beneficiaries of these famed hardworking immigrants — unlike you lazy Americans — are the wealthy, who want the cheap labor while making the rest of us chip in for the immigrants’ schooling, food and health care.

These great lovers of the downtrodden — the downtrodden trimming their hedges — pretend to believe that their gardeners’ children will be graduating from Harvard and curing cancer someday, but (1) they don’t believe that; and (2) if it happened, they’d lose their gardeners.

Michelle Malkin points out what appears to be widespread anti-American hatred in Mexico, or at least some very ugly incidents about which no one seems upset:

Do you remember what happened in Guadalajara in 2004 during an Olympics qualification soccer match between the U.S. and Mexico? Let me remind you:

The boos nearly drowned out “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and a few dozen fans chanted “Osama! Osama!” as the United States was eliminated by Mexico in Olympic men’s soccer qualifying.A loud anti-American crowd hollered as Mexico beat the United States 4-0 Tuesday night in the under-23 tournament, claiming a berth in the Athens Olympics. Mexico had already eliminated the U.S. baseball team from Olympic contention.

As U.S. players left the stadium for their bus, several fans — some clutching beers — chanted “Osama! Osama!” in reference to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Police in riot gear had to protect the American players. Bags of urine were tossed at the US team.

Just a tiny minority of America-haters, right? Wrong. Throughout the week-long festivities leading up to the Miss Universe pageant last night, Miss USA, Rachel Smith, was booed and heckled.

. . . (more…)

From The Smoking Gun:

MAY 24–In a recent raid on an al-Qaeda safe house in Iraq, U.S. military officials recovered an assortment of crude drawings depicting torture methods like “blowtorch to the skin” and “eye removal.” Along with the images, which you’ll find on the following pages, soldiers seized various torture implements, like meat cleavers, whips, and wire cutters.

You can see the drawings for yourself if you want, though I don’t recommend it if you plan to eat soon. The artwork is very crude. The TSG presentation includes captions, though I’m guessing that the book itself had no words at all; it was just a picture book for terrorists. Here are the TGS’s captions, from which you can easily infer the drawing:

• Drilling Hands
• Severing Limbs
• Dragging Victims Behind Cars
• Eye Removal
• Blowtorch to the Skin
• Suspended from Ceiling & Electrocuted
• Breaking Limbs & Restricting Breath
• Binding & Beating
• Suspending & Whipping
• Clothes Iron to Skin
• Victim’s Head in a Vice

TSG includes a photo of some tools that were found along with the drawings, along with a photo of an Al Qaeda torture chamber and several of rescued torture victims.

And of course this isn’t unique to Al Qaeda, nor is it exceptional. If you have a really strong stomach, here are some videos of what Saddam’s boys would do for fun.

I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to look at this stuff, for not wanting to confront evil. It’s ugly, and rough men work hard every day to ensure that we don’t have to see it. But as we enjoy that extraordinary comfort, we must remember that it weakens us. It leaves us less able to comprehend and stand firm against evil, simply because we are unfamiliar with it.

So if you can’t bear to look at those pictures or watch those videos, that doesn’t make you a bad person. But it does disqualify you from having a meaningful opinion about Iraq. If you don’t want to understand what life is like outside the United States, then just keep quiet when the conversation turns to foreign policy. There are thousands of vicious men out there who if given the chance would hang you from a ceiling by your wrists, extinguish their cigarettes on your skin, and laugh as you screamed in agony. That’s not metaphor, and that’s not hyperbole. They would do it if they could.

Via Fox News:

WOODSTOCK, Ill. —  A pair of 16-year-old girls face hate crime charges after they allegedly handed out anti-gay fliers targeting a classmate at their northern Illinois high school.

The girls were arrested May 11 after handing out fliers in the parking lot of Crystal Lake South High School that depict a male student kissing another boy and contain hateful language about gays.

Officials say the fliers targeted a male classmate, who is also a neighbor of the girls. The two girls had apparently been feuding with the boy.

But wait!  I thought that hate crimes weren’t really thought crimes, they were just punishment adjustments for existing crimes.  But the prosecutor here apparently isn’t familiar with that subtle legal distinction, so one of the girls had to hire a lawyer to explain it:

Two separate trials are to be held — the first girl’s trial is set to begin next week while the second girl’s trial could be far off. Her lawyer has filed to dismiss the charges.

“I believe it more attacks the speech, and at this point, they haven’t shown what conduct was truly disorderly,” her attorney, Charles McKenney, told the Herald. “The issue should be her conduct, not the content of the flier.

If found guilty, the girls could face up to 30 days in juvenile detention, probation or an unspecified sentence with the Illinois Department of Corrections’ youth division.

The obvious intent of hate-crime laws is to criminalize the expression of ideas and points of view of which the elites disapprove.  It should surprise no one that a prosecutor would be willing to overlook the legal fiction that a hate crime requires an underlying crime.

And it is perfectly natural for homo sapiens to act this way.  We have a powerful instinctual desire to spread our ideas, just as we have a desire to spread our genes.  So on a global and historical view, we shouldn’t be surprised when a government criminalizes the expression of ideas that it dislikes.  The trickier questions are: Why doesn’t our country have a tradition of thought-crime legislation, and what has changed?

I’m sorry to be so predictable, but the answer to both is Christianity, the theology of which leads naturally (though not inevitably) to the idea of free speech.  If God alone is truth and we’re all sinners, then it makes sense for us to hesitate before imposing our will on others.  Besides, paradise isn’t available on Earth anyway, so there’s no point going to extremes to force people to see the truth.  Like Buddhism, Christianity grew and spread mostly through persuasion, not conquest.  Those specific systems of thought managed to suppress human nature and allow some measure of free speech.

Now Christianity is declining, and the ideas replacing it are an inconsistent mishmash of justifications for people doing whatever they want, as long as the harm falls on those who can’t defend themselves, or if the harm is diffuse enough that people can pretend not to see it.  We don’t really have morality in the sense of principles that dictate behavior.  Instead we have desires and arguments justifying those desires.

No one argues, for example, that homosexuality is a good thing.  (And if they do, I’ll ask: Is it such a good thing that everyone should do it?)  Instead, the starting premise is that people have a desire for these particular activities, those people have amassed social and political clout, and therefore no one should stand in their way.  What passes for moral argument on the subject really just amounts to threats and the use of raw power—as those girls from Illinois discovered.

No one will seriously attempt to persuade those girls that saying nasty things about homosexuality is immoral.  No such argument is possible, because the sole basis for moral argument is desire.  The girls had a desire to make those statements, and the authorities had a desire that they not be said.  But the authorities command the uniformed men with clubs and guns, while the girls do not.  Therefore the girls are morally wrong and the authorities are morally right, QED.

In case you missed the news, the Republicans, Democrats, and GW Bush have all ganged up to betray the voters on immigration.  It has all been scripted: a massive bill, written in secret and impossible to understand, will be forced to the floor for an immediate vote before any of the voters and most of the senators have any idea what the bill contains.  That’s the script; time will tell whether it succeeds.

The issues here aren’t very complicated: Right now we have immigration laws on the books, but they aren’t enforced.  Our border with Mexico is essentially a speed bump.  This allows labor intensive businesses to benefit from cheap labor without suffering any of the related costs, such as health care, welfare, and crime.  So the businesses think that this is a great deal: They get all the gravy, and the taxpayers have to pay the costs.

The Democratic leadership also sees this as a wonderful situation for their party, long-term.  Their historical strategy has for at least a century been to buy votes with tax dollars.  That’s always bad for the country long-term, but it keeps Democrats in office.  The strategy’s main weakness is that it requires lots of poor people who are more interested in receiving a few welfare dollars than in their country’s long-term future.  Our economy has been doing very well over the past few decades, which means that the Democrats are now worried about finding enough poor people to buy votes from.

The current immigration bill is just like last year’s bill, which was just like the 1986 bill, which was just like the 1965 immigration bill.  The plan is to leave in place some laws that on their face purport to limit immigration to those people whom the government has approved.  But the bureaucracy charged with enforcing those laws is understaffed, underfunded, and essentially instructed not to enforce the law.  So in reality, we don’t have any immigration laws, which is exactly what businesses and Democrat leaders want.

But they have to “fix” the system every so often, because the illegal immigrants build up steadily to the point that they can’t be ignored.  The solution is amnesty: Just declare that all the illegals are suddenly legal, put on some window dressing to dupe the voters into thinking that we have some immigration laws, and return to the status quo.  That’s what they did in 1965, that’s what they did in 1986, and that’s what they want to do now. (more…)

My stomach hurts right now. It just decides every few months that it will clamp shut and refuse to pass any more food to my small intestine. The trapped food then sours and rots, producing horrible-smelling gas and lots of cramping. It’s quite painful, but not dangerous.

The proper remedy would be ipecac or mustard in water, to produce vomiting. But I hate to vomit. And besides, I find this pain interesting.

Pain makes us ask whether life is worth living. Each of us has some level of pain at which we will answer in the negative and surrender to death. But pain short of that level usually makes us better appreciate life, which is why I’m postponing tonight’s inevitable crawl to the toilet.

Near-death experiences do this even more effectively, or so I’ve heard. People who are exposed to a high risk of imminent death often emerge with a renewed sense of life and clearer priorities for their remaining time on Earth. The rest get PTSD.

I envy those rare people who know exactly what they want from life. I think that most people know what they don’t want — pain, discomfort, embarrassment, etc. — but spend little time pursuing definite goals. In their jobs, for example, most people try to avoid being fired; few actively seek self-improvement and promotion. They may wish for it, of course, but they rarely do anything about it.

It sounds easy in the abstract to pick some goals, write them down, plan out some sub-goals, look in the mirror and do some self-affirmations — and all the other standard motivational-speaker stuff. The trouble is that you can’t just pick a major goal for your life the way that you can pick which shirt to wear. In fact, I think that you don’t really pick a major goal so much as discover it. The goal has to fit with all the facets of your life; it has to meet your needs without exceeding your abilities. So there’s usually only a handful of good answers, and your job is to find one of them. (more…)

A recent Spengler column explores humanism in the context of art and creativity:  Why you pretend to like modern art.

You pretend to like modern art because you want to be creative. In fact, you are not creative, not in the least. In all of human history we know of only a few hundred truly creative men and women. It saddens me to break the news, but you aren’t one of them. By insisting that you are not creative, you think I am saying that you are not important. I do not mean that, but will have to return to the topic later.

You have your heart set on being creative because you want to worship yourself, your children, or some pretentious impostor, rather than the god of the Bible. Absence of faith has not made you more rational. On the contrary, it has made you ridiculous in your adoration of clownish little deities, of whom the silliest is yourself. G K Chesterton said that if you stop believing in God, you will believe in anything.

For quite some time, conservative critics have attacked the conceit that every nursery-school child should be expected to be creative. Professor Allan Bloom observed 20 years ago in The Closing of the American Mind that creativity until quite recently referred to an attribute of God, not of humans. To demand the attribute of creativity for every human being is the same as saying that everyone should be a little god.

. . .

Bach inscribed each of his works with the motto, “Glory belongs only to God,” and insisted (wrongly) that anyone who worked as hard as he did could have achieved results just as good. He was content to be a diligent craftsman in the service of God, and did not seek to be a genius; he simply was one. That is the starting point of the man of faith. One does not set out to be a genius, but rather to be of service; extraordinary gifts are responsibility to be borne with humility. The search for genius began when the service of God no longer interested the artists and scientists.

Friedrich Nietzsche announced the death of God, and the arrival of the artist as hero, taking as his model Richard Wagner, about whose artistic merits we can argue on a different equation. Whether Wagner was a genius is debatable, but it is beyond doubt that the devotees of Nietzsche were no Wagners, let alone Bachs. To be free of convention was to create one’s own artistic world, in Nietzsche’s vision, but very few artists are capable of creating their own artistic world. That puts everyone else in an unpleasant position.

To accommodate the ambitions of the artists, the 20th century turned the invention of artistic worlds into a mass-manufacturing business. In place of the humble craftsmanship of Bach’s world, the artistic world split into movements. To be taken seriously during the 20th century, artists had to invent their own style and their own language. Critics heaped contempt on artists who simply reproduced the sort of products that had characterized the past, and praised the founders of schools: Impressionism, Cubism, Primitivism, Abstract Expressionism, and so forth.

. . .

To be an important person in this perverse scheme means to shake one’s fist at God and define one’s own little world, however dull, tawdry and pathetic it might be. To lack creativity is to despair. Hence the attraction of the myriad ideological movements in art that gives the despairing artists the illusion of creativity. If God is the Creator, then imitation of God is emulation of creation. But that is not quite true, for the Judeo-Christian god is more than a creator; God is a creator who loves his creatures.

. . .

In their urge toward self-worship, the artists of the 20th century descended to extreme levels of artlessness to persuade themselves that they were in fact creative. In their compulsion to worship themselves in the absence of God, they produced ideas far more ridiculous, and certainly a great deal uglier, than revealed religion in all its weaknesses ever contrived. The modern cult of individual self-expression is a poor substitute for the religion it strove to replace, and the delusion of personal creativity an even worse substitute for redemption.

Go on, read the whole thing.  I love the way this guy thinks.

The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) sponsored the 11th annual Day of Silence last April 18. The event’s premise is that lebians, gays, bisexuals and transgendereds (LGBT) who attend middle schools, high schools, and colleges suffer from pervasive discrimination and harassment. This effectively silences them and their allies. So on the day of silence, everyone participating in the event refuses to speak for an entire day, to dramatize their oppression.

This is no small event. This site lists over 1300 participating high schools nationwide. And in at least some of those schools, the event enjoys full official support. With official tax-funded muscle behind it, the event apparently becomes a celebration of the GLSEN agenda.

Some students don’t like the Day of Silence. They object to being force-fed GLSEN propaganda. So they push back. In 2004, a student attending a San Diego-area high school wore a protest shirt on the day after the Day of Silence. On the front it read: “I will not accept what God has condemned” and “Be ashamed, our school embraced what God has condemned.” The back read: “Homosexuality is shameful, ‘Romans 1:27.’” After repeated demands that he take off the shirt, he was removed from class for the day.

The student sued, alleging that the school had infringed his freedom of speech. The school had endorsed a pro-homosexual message the day before, but would not tolerate a contrary viewpoint. The Ninth Circuit sided with the school district, in an opinion that still raises my blood pressure after the second or third reading. (Summary here, full text here, dissent here.) The US Supreme Court vacated that opinion just two months ago, meaning that it has no legal effect.

Now the Pacific Legal Foundation reports that dozens of students have been suspended from Sacramento Area schools over the 2007 Day of Silence. The report estimates that three to four thousand students chose to stay home to avoid the day’s pro-homosexual propaganda. Two of the schools have agreed to drop the suspensions and eliminate any stain on the students’ records; a third school hasn’t yet responded to PJI pressure.

It’s a very confusing issue if you approach it as religion vs. non-religion. But present it as a conflict between religions, and I think it all makes perfect sense. One side believes that sexual restraint is a virtue; the other believes that it is an evil. The fact that one side believes in a God while the other doesn’t is completely irrelevant.

(Via Clayton Cramer.)

In case there were any question that environmentalism is a suicide cult, here’s a story hot off the digital presses: Children ‘bad for planet’:

HAVING large families should be frowned upon as an environmental misdemeanour in the same way as frequent long-haul flights, driving a big car and failing to reuse plastic bags, says a report to be published today by a green think tank.

The paper by the Optimum Population Trust will say that if couples had two children instead of three they could cut their family’s carbon dioxide output by the equivalent of 620 return flights a year between London and New York.

John Guillebaud, co-chairman of OPT and emeritus professor of family planning at University College London, said: “The effect on the planet of having one child less is an order of magnitude greater than all these other things we might do, such as switching off lights.

“The greatest thing anyone in Britain could do to help the future of the planet would be to have one less child.”

In his latest comments, the academic says that when couples are planning a family they should be encouraged to think about the environmental consequences.

“The decision to have children should be seen as a very big one and one that should take the environment into account,” he added.

Professor Guillebaud says that, as a general guideline, couples should produce no more than two offspring.

The world’s population is expected to increase by 2.5 billion to 9.2 billion by 2050. Almost all the growth will take place in developing countries.

They’re not telling you what to do, see.  Just ‘take into account’ that Mother Gaia weeps every time you procreate.

If you still aren’t comfortable with calling environmentalism a religion, ask yourself: How else you would describe a group that publicly suggests that we under-breed ourselves into extinction, or at best into tiny minority status?  These people don’t want us to live.  That isn’t a scientific position.  It isn’t based on data.  It’s a moral or theological foundation of self-hatred, and it’s easy to see where that cult will inevitably lead its followers.

I promise to eventually write about something other than theology, but the timing here was too good to pass up. Columnist Mike S. Adams reports on the Ebenezer Lutheran Church of San Franciso, which is working hard to make feminism a full-fledged religion. It won’t survive, of course. Each person is free to make up whatever religion he wants, but only a few have any staying power.

There’s no sport in making fun of kooky pseudo-Christian cults. What grabbed my attention was how clearly this church’s rhetoric has moved away from Christianity and towards humanism. Recall my working definition of humanism, in which the basic concept of self moves away from “I am a child of God” and towards “I am God”. The “I am God” claim is startling at first. It sounds like hyperbole. But consider this Lutheran church’s new version of The Lord’s Prayer:

Our Mother who is within us
we celebrate your many names.
Your wisdom come.
Your will be done,
unfolding from the depths within us.
Each day you give us all that we need.
You remind us of our limits
and we let go.
You support us in our power
and we act with courage.
For you are the dwelling place within us
the empowerment around us
and the celebration among us
now and for ever. Amen

The prayer is very specific on this point of theology. This church believes that their goddess is within them, unfolding from the depths within them, and is the dwelling place within them. The point is so important that it must be repeated three times in fourteen lines.

It’s easy to become annoyed at the ham-fisted feminism, but I don’t think that feminism is really the point. Humanists have used a variety of ways to divide people into groups and foment hatred. The most successful has been rich vs. poor, but they’ve also had plenty of success with pitting racial groups against each other, encouraging discord between the sexes, and of course now anyone with an inclination toward sexual perversion is encouraged to see himself as a victim and nurse a grudge.

A humanist must believe that there is nothing higher than himself, except perhaps the state.  To maintain that belief, the humanist must shrink the scope of his thoughts.  He must keep his mind small, to combat the natural sense of wonder that all people feel, such as when they gaze up into a starry night sky.  That sense of wonder leads to the idea that the universe contains some power or purpose greater than human knowledge, and that idea is heresy.

Humanists have been working for decades on ways to keep their minds small.  Orwell’s 1984 gives a vivid picture of such a world.  (This chapter shows the sort of trap that even the most ardent humanist can slip into if he lets his thoughts slip away from him.)  The short story Harrison Bergeron makes the point even more dramatically in a world where people prone to excessive thought must wear ear radios designed specifically to correct the problem.

But real humanists don’t need ear radios.  The most effective way to keep someone small is to keep him angry.  A seed of anger, properly planted and nourished in a receptive mind, can sustain itself indefinitely.  And if it fails to take root, then it can be planted again at very little cost.   Ordinary hatreds extinguish themselves in time with the death of whoever or whatever is hated.  But a really skillfully manufactured hatred ensures its own survival by choosing an object that can’t be destroyed.  Someone will always be wealthier than someone else, which is why class warfare is such a perennial favorite.  And eliminating all males from the planet presents some logistical problems, so feminism will probably be with us for quite some time.  (Note that the racial hatreds are eventually resolvable through means such as through intermarriage or genocide, and so they aren’t quite as durable.)

This is why I say that the feminism isn’t really the point.  It’s just another way to get people hating each other, or hating themselves.  It would work the same way if they could generate anger over right-handers vs left-handers, or blondes vs brunettes.  The real point is to keep their minds small, focus their gaze inward, keep them thinking about themselves.  The end result of humanism taken seriously is to turn people into animals.  And a man who thinks only about himself, who never gazes up at the stars in wonder, is already halfway there.

Jeff Jacoby reports on the steady incremental success of the Left’s campaign to abolish all sexual morals:

Back in 2003, as the Supreme Court was preparing to rule in Lawrence v. Texas, a case challenging the constitutionality of laws criminalizing homosexual sodomy, then-Senator Santorum caught holy hell for warning that if the law were struck down, there would be no avoiding the slippery slope.

“If the Supreme Court says you have the right to consensual sex within your home,” he told a reporter, “then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything.”

It was a commonsensical observation, though you wouldn’t have known it from the nail-spitting it triggered in some quarters. When the justices, voting 6-3, did in fact declare it unconstitutional for any state to punish consensual gay sex, the dissenters echoed Santorum’s point. “State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are . . . called into question by today’s decision,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the minority. That opinion too was scorned by the politically correct. But now Time magazine acknowledges: “It turns out the critics were right.”

The focus on legalized adult incest comes from the case of Patrick and Susan Stubing, a German brother and sister who live together and have had four children together. Incest is a crime in Germany, and they have been convicted and imprisoned. They have asked Germany’s highest court to abolish the law under which they were convicted. Their arguments are entirely predictable:

“Many people see it as a crime, but we’ve done nothing wrong,” Patrick told the BBC. “We are like normal lovers. We want to have a family.” They dismiss the conventional argument that incest should be banned because the children of close relatives have a higher risk of genetic defects. After all, they point out, other couples with known genetic risks aren’t punished for having sex. In any event, Patrick has had himself sterilized so that he cannot father any more children. (more…)