The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Immigration: Fallacies and Logic

Posted on | November 23, 2020 | Comments Off on Immigration: Fallacies and Logic

What’s wrong with open borders? Or, to be more specific, what’s wrong with “conservatives” who don’t see what’s wrong with open borders?

For more than 20 years, I have been mystified by those on “our” side who seem oblivious to the consequences of our broken immigration policy which is, in fact, so broken that it’s not actually a coherent policy but a confusing accumulation of blunders that have been piling up since Ted Kennedy pushed the 1965 “reform” bill through the Senate.

Peter Brimelow did arguably the best job of examining this in his 1995 book Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster, which became a bestseller, and also the occasion of Brimelow being purged from National Review. The fact that Bill Buckley evidently deemed it “racist” to express concern about U.S. immigration policy points to the depth of this problem. Among the several possible explanations for the open-borders “conservative” problem, many have long suspected that the answer is as simple as “follow the money.” Various funders of Conservatism, Inc., benefit directly from a steady supply of cheap foreign labor, and this Chamber of Commerce mentality is the most obvious explanation for why so many “conservatives” are such enthusiastic boosters of amnesty for illegals, etc.

A couple of years ago, Spencer Morrison wrote an excellent article directed at a particular open-borders advocate (Alex Nowrasteh) in which he made points that strike me as widely applicable:

Nowrasteh’s most important rhetorical trick is to shift the burden. That is, he makes claims requiring justification and demands that his opponent justify his opposite conclusions. . . .
Nowrasteh makes the radical claim that America should dissolve its border, and then has the gall to say the burden is on his opponent to show why this is bad. That’s not how logic works. The burden rests on the interlocutor proposing the change to show why it is beneficial. Doing otherwise violates the precautionary principle, which is deeply rooted in both our biology and empirical evidence.
Biological evolution is largely governed by one question: approach or avoid? Approaching something novel may yield a lucrative new food source or reproductive partner, but it might also kill you. In fact, death, maiming, or disease is usually the more likely outcome. For this reason, human populations evolved a genetic predisposition for neophobia (risk aversion) while only a small minority of humanity carries the , which predisposes one for novelty-seeking behavior.
Logic also favors the status quo. Consider the Lindy Effect, which implies that what survives is likely to continue surviving because of its proven utility. Meanwhile, most of what is new doesn’t last very long—time separates the weak from the strong. This explains why most new ideas don’t last, while classics have sticking-power.

Read the whole thing. Many intellectuals seem to have idea that any concern about immigration can be dismissed simply labelling such concerns “nativism” or “racism,” and the kind of rhetorical tricks employed by Nowrasteh are too often used as a substitute for sound argument. Another problem — certainly not limited to the immigration issue — is that most people are incapable of contemplating the secondary and tertiary consequences of policy. You see this in debates around healthcare, where mandating insurance coverage for “pre-existing conditions” is considered imperative by liberals who can’t seem to understand that such mandates will either (a) cause an increase in insurance premiums, or (b) cause employers to evade the mandate by hiring fewer fulltime workers, or (c) some combination of (a) and (b). In other words, a policy that changes one factor in a complex social or economic system will produce consequences that policy-makers have not contemplated, and these consequences may do more harm than good to the people the policy was intended to benefit.

This is true in immigration policy, as well. When the 1965 bill was being debated, Ted Kennedy specifically and repeatedly denied that the measure would have certain consequences that opponents of the measure warned against. Within a decade of this debate, it was apparent that the opponents were right and Kennedy was wrong. Rather than repealing the 1965 bill and returning to the status quo ante, however, instead Congress repeatedly passed “reform” bills that were promised to fix the country’s immigration problems, but which instead tended generally to make the problems worse. At no point in this long sad history of immigration “reform” were Republicans really more conservative on the issue than Democrats, because the open-borders lobby is bipartisan, a two-headed monster that no one has ever been able to slay.




 

 

Category: Immigration

Rule 5 Monday: Julie London

Posted on | November 23, 2020 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Somehow I have managed to get through over ten years of these posts without once featuring singer, actress, and pinup model Julie London, but today I correct that unfortunate omission. Probably best known to us as nurse Dixie McCall on the hit TV series Emergency!, produced by her ex-husband Jack Webb and co-starring her real-life husband Bobby Troup, Julie had a long career as a torch singer preceding that and roles in over two dozen films opposite stars like Rock Hudson, Gary Cooper, and Robert Mitchum. Quite the lady. Big hat tip to EBL for reminding me of this amazing singer & actress.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

Ladies and gentlemen, Julie London.

Ninety Miles From Tyranny: Hot Pick of the Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #1176, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns.

Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Great Unifier Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL: Tuppence Middleton, Don Carlo, Diane Lane, Faust, Gabrielle Aplin, Rusalka, Jennifer Newsome, La Traviata, “November Twilight”, Dialogues des Carmelites, Juliana Hatfield, Turandot, Wozzeck, and MAGA Saturday.

A View From The Beach: Pia Zadora, A Sad Fish Pic Friday, Election 2020: The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia, Tattoo Thursday, Miss. Miss USA Bitterly Clings to Trump, God and Guns, Tuesday Tanlines, Your Monday Morning Stimulant, Palm Sunday and Gone Fishin!

Proof Positive: Barbara Bouchet

Red Pilled Jew: Women Wearing Stars Of David

Thanks to everyone for the luscious linkagery!

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Category: Rule 5

FMJRA 2.0: Sandman

Posted on | November 23, 2020 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.

Rule 5 Sunday: Paulina Porizkova
Animal Magnetism
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

‘Properly Evolved’: How Pseudo-Eugenic Tropes Foretold Bob Chipman’s Doom
Bacon Time
Pushing Rubber Downhill
How Deep Is The Rabbit Hole?
EBL

Biden’s #DAMP Victory
EBL

The Devil Went Down to Georgia
Dark Brightness
EBL

BLM/Antifa Attack Trump Supporters
357 Magnum
EBL

FMJRA 2.0: Good Times Roll
A View From The Beach
EBL

Bob Chipman’s Kiwi Farms Fan Club
EBL

In The Mailbox: 11.16.20
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
Proof Positive
EBL

Convicted Sex Offender Charged in Attack on Trump Supporters at D.C. Event
Bacon Time
357 Magnum
Proof Positive
EBL

In The Mailbox: 11.17.20
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
Proof Positive
EBL

Dopehead Biker Dies of ‘White Privilege’ and Blunt-Force Trauma, But Mainly…
357 Magnum
EBL

Send Ben Sasse to Afghanistan
357 Magnum
EBL

Oh, Please, Give Me Another Unnecessary Lecture About Classical Liberalism
EBL

Crazy People Are Dangerous: Florida Kook Murdered by Deranged ‘QAnon Mom’
357 Magnum
EBL

In The Mailbox: 11.19.20 (Afternoon Edition)
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
Proof Positive
EBL

Kenosha: Joseph ‘JoJo’ Rosenbaum and the Problem of White Trash America
EBL

In The Mailbox: 11.20.20 (Morning Edition)
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
Proof Positive
EBL

In The Mailbox: 11.20.20 (Evening Edition)
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
Proof Positive
EBL

Top linkers for the week ending November 20:

  1.  EBL (18)
  2.  357 Magnum (10)
  3.  (tied) A View From The Beach & Proof Positive (7)

Thanks to everyone for all the linkagery!

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Category: FMJRA Award

The True Story of a Teenage Patriot

Posted on | November 22, 2020 | 4 Comments

Abraham Isham Bolt was just 16 years old in 1780 when he joined the South Carolina militia. The Patriot cause had suffered its worst defeat of the war when Charleston surrendered in May 1780. The British planned to use Charleston as a base of operations from which to open a new front in the war against the American rebellion. It was believed the rebellion was more popular in New England, while Tories were more numerous in the South. If the British could recruit Tory (or “Loyalist”) forces to suppress the rebellion in the South, this would divide the colonies, and draw Washington’s army away from the mid-Atlantic theater.

In an ironic twist of history, early British success in South Carolina led directly to Cornwallis’s final defeat in the war, and I am proud that my ancestor Abraham Bolt was part of that history. You’ve seen the movie The Patriot? Yeah, that’s what the South Carolina militia did.

Of course, Hollywood took liberties with the story. There are no portraits of Abraham Bolt, so he may have been as handsome as Heath Ledger, but it’s highly unlikely the South Carolina militia wore such spiffy uniforms. Nevertheless, there was a real war in South Carolina — a savage guerrilla campaign, with massacres and reprisals, ending in a stunning Patriot victory — and my teenage ancestor was there when it happened, in two crucial battles of the campaign. There is on file in the South Carolina archives a record of Abraham Bolt’s pay for his militia service, precisely enumerated in pounds and shillings — £12, 17 shillings, 1½ pence.

Notice that this payment wasn’t issued until May 1786, meaning that it took more than five years for South Carolina to pay its militia for their service during the war, and the state’s “currency” had been so devalued by inflation that £90 pounds in South Carolina paper money was worth less than £13, the actual coin amount paid to Abraham Bolt.

Until Saturday, I had no idea who Abraham Bolt was. What happened was that I was doing some research related to a post about Lena Dunham, seeking to show how large families were prevalent in America’s past. So I went to the genealogical records of my own family, and in the process of that research went back through the family tree, starting with my great-grandfather, Winston Wood Bolt (b. Jan. 5, 1839, Walton County, Georgia). His father, Benjamin Berryman Bolt (b. Nov. 23, 1806, Laurens County, South Carolina), was the son of James Robert Bolt (b. Jan. 14, 1783) whose father was Abraham Isham Bolt (b. Aug. 24, 1764, Fauquier County, Virginia). Abraham Bolt, the heroic teenage Patriot, was my great-grandfather’s great-grandfather. Read more

Category: History, South Carolina

‘A Year Without Christmas’

Posted on | November 22, 2020 | 2 Comments

Democrats everywhere are using COVID-19 as a pretext to shut down business. Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney is playing the Grinch:

The City of Philadelphia imposed new business restrictions on Monday that will go into effect at the end of the week. Sectors of the local economy will be required to shut down or severely curtail operations until at least Jan. 1.
“For millions of people, this could be the year without a Christmas,” said Stephen Mullin, principal at Econsult Solutions and a former city director of commerce during the Rendell administration. “We’ll see unemployment bouncing up significantly again.”
The poor will be hit disproportionately as minimum wage jobs in retail, hospitality, and restaurants disappear, he predicted. The next six weeks will be tougher than in the spring and will probably endure into the new year. And businesses are pushing back and taking their complaints directly to City Hall.

Dana Pico comments bitterly: “With a salary of $218,000, Mr Kenney isn’t worried that COVID-19 shutdowns will put him in the poorhouse; that’s reserved for the working class people.”

No matter what the media say, there is no “science” that justifies this. If lockdowns could stop the virus, we wouldn’t need more lockdowns. The original logic — first “two weeks to slow the spread,” in March, then “30 days to flatten the curve” in April — were that these measures were necessary to prevent an emergency that would overwhelm the health care system. That succeeded. The shrieking from Andrew Cuomo about a potential ventilator shortage proved to be a false alarm.

Despite what is being said about a “surge” of cases now, hospitals are not being inundated with COVID-19 patients. Doctors have developed effective therapeutic treatments; we have learned that almost no one under age 70 is at risk of dying from the disease. Why are the media and politicians inciting panic and trying to destroy the economy?




 

 

Category: Health Care, Pennsylvania

DNA of the Doomed

Posted on | November 21, 2020 | 4 Comments

Let’s think about the word misbegotten. Originally, it implied bastardy — “a misbegotten child” was illegitimate — but attained also a connotation of deformed or defective, and the word was generalized to apply to anything “having a disreputable or improper origin.”

“Misbegotten” comes to mind whenever I think of Lena Dunham, the weirdly shaped potato-looking person who soared to celebrity status on the basis of the six-season run of the HBO series Girls. This series was sometimes described as a “comedy,” but after trying to watch a few episodes, I can tell you that this description was a lie. Anyone who found Girls to be funny is almost certainly suffering from mental illness and — oh, by the way — did I mention that Dunham suffers from mental illness? She was addicted to the anti-anxiety drug Klonopin, of all things. Like, if you’re going to be an addict, wouldn’t it be better to become addicted to something fun? Nobody ever took Klonopin for fun.

Lena Dunham made herself infamous in 2014, when she deliberately smeared a former Oberlin College student as a rapist. This heinous lie involved using the first name (“Barry”) of a student who was a conservative activist at Oberlin during Dunham’s years on campus, claiming in her memoir that this Republican student raped her. After John Nolte of Breitbart proved this to be false — the aforesaid “Barry” didn’t know Dunham at all, and she only knew him by reputation — Dunham apologized. What happened next was that a reporter from Gawker did a close reading of the draft proposal for her memoir and noted that the description she gave matched another Oberlin student, a Jewish Democrat who happened to be the son of a former NPR host. Because we have no way of verifying Dunham’s accusation against this former classmate (or anyone else, for that matter) it is simply impossible to know if Dunham was ever raped at Oberlin and, on balance, there are many reasons to surmise the whole tale was a lie from start to finish.

The “success” of Girls was also a lie from start to finish. Nobody ever subscribed to HBO because they wanted to watch Dunham’s lousy show. No, the reason Dunham and Girls got so much publicity was not because of the size of the show’s audience (its ratings were never impressive), but because the show had a special appeal to the Manhattan media elite, reflecting their peculiar sensibilities. Before he died in 2015 at age 58, New York Times columnist David Carr was credited with making Lena Dunham a celebrity because of his glowing 1,000-word feature review of Dunham’s 2010 film Tiny Furniture.

Carr’s name came to mind the other day because of something Ed Driscoll linked about Ta-Nehisi Coates, who considered Carr a mentor. If you follow back through some of Ed’s links — he is custodian of the institutional memory of the blogosphere — you will eventually arrive at a 2011 episode of Bill Maher’s program in which David Carr said:

“If it’s Kansas, Missouri, no big deal. You know, that’s the dance of the low-sloping foreheads. The middle places, right? …Did I just say that aloud?”

This phrase, “the dance of the low-sloping foreheads,” is one that Carr used repeatedly to describe Middle America, and this contemptuous disdain is a problem among our cultural elite that has drawn critical attention from the leftist journal In These Times. The idea that Americans in “flyover country” are inferior, so that their beliefs, aspirations and lifestyle deserve to be mocked and ridiculed, is so prevalent in the institutions controlled by the Democratic Party — including academia and the entertainment industry — that it is never even questioned, but rather taken as a self-evident fact. Our elite routinely disparage the intelligence of people in Middle America in a way that they would never disparage any other group, and why? Because the people in Middle America vote Republican. But I digress . . . Read more

Category: Celebrities, Contraceptive Culture

The ‘Sovereign Citizen’ Movement Is Dangerous, and Yet Often Hilarious

Posted on | November 21, 2020 | 2 Comments

If you never heard of the “sovereign citizen” movement, these are a species of kook who are, in fact, the domestic terrorist movement that most concerns law enforcement officers, because cops have to deal with these idiots who imagine themselves exempt from the law.

The “sovereign citizen” claims to be in possession of “rights” that have no basis in law, as for example they routinely claim that they don’t need drivers licenses and don’t have to comply with orders from the police. Here I could digress to deliver a brief lecture on the origins of law — including laws requiring that motorists carry a license and provide it to police when asked — and the obvious fact that law has no meaning or purpose if the government has no means of enforcing the law. The police are sworn to uphold the law, and their actions are governed by the law, and if you don’t like being required to show your license to the cops when they ask for it, perhaps you should take this up with your state legislature. The “consent of the governed” being the ultimate foundation of law, you could conceivably elect people to the legislature who would say, “Licenses? We don’t need no licenses!” And then the roads would be full of lunatics driving any which way they want, because democracy!

The fact that every state requires licenses to drive can be interpreted as a loud and unanimous “HELL, NO” to such a proposition, but these “sovereign citizen” types don’t seem to get this point. Every time they get pulled over by the cops, they initiate a futile confrontation, lecturing the cop about how their “rights” are being violated, etc. One of their classic questions is, “Am I being detained?” The minute a cop hears this, he knows he’s probably dealing with a kook who will next demand that the officer call his supervisor. When the kook’s non-compliance leads to his arrest — because refusing to show your license is itself a crime — it sometimes requires three or four officers to wrestle the kook out of his car and put him in cuffs. Let’s play “Sovereign Citizen Bingo”:

 

Notice that in this case, the police were more interested in the male passenger than in the female driver. My guess — and it’s only a guess — is that the passenger had warrants for his arrest. This is a common situation in traffic stops that “go bad.” If you’re not doing anything wrong, why would you refuse to show the cops your ID? But if you’ve got warrants, or if you’ve got weed or a gun in the car, or if you’re violating the terms of your probation, that’s when you start causing trouble. In such cases, the “sovereign citizen” rant is just a convenient pretext for non-compliance, rather than an abstract philosophical discourse.

What we are dealing with, really, is the consequence of a failed education system. If public schools teach nothing else, shouldn’t they at least teach respect for the law? What is the point of taxpayers spending billions of dollars annually to fund public schools, if these schools cannot even teach kids the most basic duties of citizenship? But I digress . . .

The “sovereign citizen” movement is a menace to public safety, and symptomatic of profound problems in our society. At the same time, however, it is vastly entertaining to watch these geniuses get completely wrecked by cops, which is how these confrontations typically end:

 

Something else about this: Why do these people imagine that a police officer will be impressed with their lectures about their “rights”?

This is where sentimental notions of “equality” have led us, to a society in which people refuse to recognize superior authority, because they have not been taught anything about the nature of authority — why does a cop have the power to arrest people? — and because they don’t even recognize the concept of superiority. If everybody is equal (as they have been taught) then the police officer cannot possibly be superior to anyone else in terms of, for example, his knowledge of law. The police officer or sheriff’s deputy has gone through a process of selection and training. The sheriff or police chief, as the executive of the department, bears responsibility if his officers do not do follow proper legal procedures. While there are “bad apples” among cops, and even a good cop may occasionally make a mistake, there is no reason to imagine that the police officer who pulls you over for a traffic violation is in need of a lecture about your “rights,” based on some nonsense you saw on Facebook.

 

Crazy People Are Dangerous.




 

Category: Crime

In The Mailbox: 11.20.20 (Evening Edition)

Posted on | November 20, 2020 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Usual deadlines for the usual weekend linkagery are in effect.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Some Predators Have Four Legs
Bacon Time: A New Holster
EBL: Space X Launch
Twitchy: GOP-Controlled Board Votes To Certify Results From Maricopa County AZ
Louder With Crowder: Lindsey Graham Tells The Squad Where To Stick Their Resignation Calls
Vox Popoli: We Will Not Back Down, also, At The Rubicon
According To Hoyt: HAS EVERYONE LOST THEIR MINDS?
Monster Hunter Nation: Monster Hunter Bloodlines Available For Pre-Order

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: The Urban Fantasy Of American Universities
American Greatness: Dominion Voting Systems Lawyers Up, Abruptly Backs Out Of PA State House Hearing, also, Emmy Award Recognizing “Leadership During COVID-19 Pandemic” Goes To…Governor Cuomo?
American Power: The GULAG Archipelago
American Thinker: The Left’s Utter Nonsense
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Great Unifier Friday
Babalu Blog: The Freedom Squad
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For November 20
Cafe Hayek: On The Logic Of Universal Free Trade
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Da Tech Guy: “Senator, If The Hair On My Head Knew My Plans, I Would Cut It Off”
Don Surber: Cucker Tarlson Sells Out
First Street Journal: It’s So Easy For State Governors To Order Other People To Lose Their Jobs
Fred On Everything: The Godding Of Dullards, The Death Of Math, & The Fall Of America’s Premier High School
The Geller Report: Why Is GA Shredding Election Documents At Cobb County Election HQ? also, Registered Democrat Arrested For Threatening To Kill DeSantis, Rubio, & Scott
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, Control of The House
Hollywood In Toto: George Clooney, The Incredible Shrinking Movie Star
JustOneMinute: Affidavit From The North Country
The Lid: Unhinged leftists’ New Grand Idea – Deprogramming Trump Supporters
Legal Insurrection: Megyn Kelly Pulls Her Kids out Of NYC Schools Over Leftist Indoctrination, also, Rising Democratic Star & Stockton Mayor Loses To Veteran
Nebraska Energy Observer: Friday Report
Power Line: A Vast International Leftist Conspiracy? also, Do Trump’s Lawyers Know What They Are Doing?
Shark Tank: Murphy Slams Congress For Inaction On COVID Relief
Shot In The Dark: Further Proof
The Political Hat: Antiracist Baby
This Ain’t Hell: LT Bobulinski’s Honorable Navy Career, also, Valor Friday
Victory Girls: Trump Voters Abandoned BY GOP?
Volokh Conspiracy: State Legislatures & Presidential Electors
Weasel Zippers: Kelly Ward Exposes Dominion Voting Scam, also, Fox & Friendless
The Federalist: Your Political Leaders hate You And Think You’re Stupid, also, Politicians Aren’t Canceling Their Celebrations & Gatherings, And Neither Am I
Mark Steyn: A Whale Of A Tale

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