Near perfect communication

Communication is a tricky thing.  Sometimes the connection is derailed because people use the same words to mean different things or common usage changes for some people but not others.  Even when word confusion is not a problem, differences in life experiences and intellectual background can lead to different perspectives.  Differences in temperament, individual personality and worldview can also present communication problems.  But there are rare instances when you can express an idea in terms that are so clear that the other person exhibits unmistakable and immediate recognition of your point.

I have now had several chances to tell the following story.  Every time the response has been a look of total recognition of the point accompanied by an affirming nod of the head:

Earlier this year I was reading about an instance where the president was clearly not acting in the broad interest of the public.  I blurted out a comment along those lines.  Let me mention that my wife is one of the least political people that you will ever meet.  She is all about family and friends.  Of course, if you step on her toes by telling her what she can and cannot do you might get some pushback.  Because she does not have a strong interest in politics I generally make political comments on rare occasion only.  When she started to respond to my comment I was expecting a question asking for further clarification of what I had said.  Instead, she really surprised me by asking, “do you think the president loves the country?”  I didn’t want to give a knee-jerk response.  But after a long pause and thought I simply replied, “no.”  She shrugged and that was that.  A few months ago, the same thing happened, I commented and she questioned.  This time my response was a little different.  I said, “honey, I love you, now I want to fundamentally transform you.”  Then she shot me a look of totally knowing that I was right, that the president doesn’t love the country.  No further questions needed.

As I said earlier, everyone seems to get this instantly.  The exceptions will be few.

Disclaimer:  Not responsible for any person who gets clobbered while reproducing this communication experiment.

Parents and Education

I've never once censored what my two daughters watched or read. That I never had to was based on my attitude and one single gamble. At the age of three, my older daughter wanted to watch a movie (I can't even remember which one it was now) that was definitely inappropriate for her age but that I decided probably wouldn't cause any long term emotional damage. I said, "well, you can watch it if you want, but I think you'll find it very scary, so I strongly suggest that you don't watch it until you're older." She ignored me and chose to watch it. Sure enough, she found it very scary and disturbing. After that, if I simply suggested that something was going to be well beyond her comfort zone, she would not watch or read it. She also let her younger sister know that listening to Dad on such matters was a really good idea. They're both grown now, so my days of potentially restricting content are definitely over.

On the other hand, I'm not claiming for even a nanosecond that such an approach will work for every parent, every child, or every parent/child combination. I stumbled into it and it happened to work for my family. Other parents may find it critically important to heavily restrict what their children are exposed to and they absolutely need to have the right to do that.

I think that right also applies to education. Ultimately, I think it should always be up to the parents what schools should and (especially) should not teach.

For example, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is being banned by a growing list of school districts:

Today, Mark Twain's classic - about a boy who flees his abusive father and travels down the Mississippi River with an escaped slave - is still sometimes challenged in American schools, but for nearly the opposite reason: its liberal use of the N-word and perceived racist portrayals of black characters.

A colleague of mine who's a teacher is displeased because of the book's alleged importance:

Huckleberry Finn is a significant work for several reasons:• It transformed the American novel as a literary form, using the lingua franca rather than The King's English• It documented, in novel form, rather definitively, as did other, later works, the state of American race relations, class issues, slavery, growing up, and the capacity (and incapacity) of America to accept change.• It is an engaging story.

He further thinks that teachers should be "entrusted to choose materials for their classes (perhaps in consultation with department leaders, perhaps not)." Note that parents are nowhere in his equation.

I think that's wrong. While I have a copy of Huck Finn on my bookshelves and I believe that both my daughters have read it, if parents think the book inappropriate for their children (even their high-school age children), then no, teachers shouldn't be able to override that and be able to force it down the students' throats. Especially, if multiple parents think the book should not be part of a class.

Teachers and educators are experts and should certainly provide advice and guidance as to what should be taught. Indeed, what they suggest should be taught by default. But nobody knows an individual child better than his or her parents and they should get to make the final decision on what their child is taught.

Of course, the same applies to other topics as well including things like the Theory of Evolution. If a lot of parents don't want that taught at a given school, it shouldn't be taught. It's not like the other parents can't expose their children to the topics that the school doesn't teach. They can borrow the book from the library or find a free online course.

I think this conclusion sums it up best: "We have all come to the conclusion that the community costs of reading this book [Huck Finn] in 11th grade outweigh the literary benefits." And that's rightfully the decision of the parents comprising the community and should not be completely left to the teachers and educators.

Preserving Humanity

Let's say that we knew for a fact that in 200 years a large meteor or other heavenly object was going to strike Earth and blow it to smithereens and that there was nothing we could do to prevent the impact and that all life on Earth would die, including all humans on the planet.

What action should we, collectively, take if faced with this information?

My answer: we should collectively take no action at all.

I seem to be in a tiny minority who thinks that. Most others, it seems from my observations, would want to deploy a substantial part of humanity's resources to colonizing other planets (via Instapundit) in order to preserve humanity.

Why? I don't get it, being a "Dust in the Wind" kinda guy.



What is so important about the survival of this DNA based creature call homo sapiens? It seems that we're kinda nasty, brutish, and some of us are short. All currently living people will already be dead at the time of impact. Why should they make sacrifices for those unknown in the future? Does it objectively matter if we go extinct in 200 years or 200 million years? If so, why?

Smackdown

Phony moral posturing is such a mainstay of SJWs.  Dinesh D'Souza schools a student at Amherst College.  Worth the time.

The Math of Muslim Mass Murders

A few months after the 9/11 terrorist attack, a group of friends and I went to see a comedian named Ahmed Ahmed (he said he's the only guy on the no-fly-list ... twice!). He noted that in a poll shortly after the 9/11 attack that muslims were the 3rd (or maybe 4th - I can't remember) most hated group in the United States. Given that the carnage on 9/11 didn't do it, he wondered what on earth muslims had to do to be number 1!

Well, it looks like muslims may get a shot at Ahmed-squared's coveted top spot of being hated given the recent suggestion that muslim immigration to the United States be restricted. Yet, to me, the recent attacks seem incredibly lame compared to 9/11.

Here are some numbers: in the United States, around 7,500 people die each day (all causes); approximately 30 of those die from gun based homicides (less than 1/2%); about 1% of murders are from mass shootings; a tiny fraction of mass shootings are bona-fide muslim terrorist attacks.

We never hear about the vast majority of the approximately 30 people who are murdered by guns each day. 30 people is simply not newsworthy in a country of more than 300,000,000 people. We don't really care, nor should we - it's simply too unlikely to happen to you or those you know to be bothered with and it's too small of an impact on the day-to-day lives of Americans to put more energy into worrying about it.

On the other hand, we can probably all name quite a few mass shootings even though 2 orders of magnitude fewer people die in those than in plain-vanilla gun homicides. It seems to be an inherent innumeracy of the human psyche to be oh-so-ho-hum about 30 gun homicides a day but be terrified, terrified I tell you, of the much rarer mass murder like the recent one in San Bernadino. And if that mass murder is of the even rarer type perpetrated by someone of a different tribe (for example a muslim), then it is all the more terrifying.

I would hope that terror doesn't overwhelm all reason though, for example when it comes to reasons for restricting immigration. On the topic of terror, religious freedom, and immigration, in a recent post by Scott Adams (the author of the Dilbert comic strip), he wrote:

But if the risk is more than tiny, can you put a price on your love of religious tolerance? In other words, how many dead Americans are you willing to accept? I’ll go first. 

Personally, I would accept up to 1,000 dead Americans, over a ten-year period, to allow Muslim non-citizens to enter this country. My calculation assumes we are better off accepting some degree of tragedy in the name of freedom.

One-hundred dead Americans a year? When 30 are already murdered using guns each day? A no-brainer, in my opinion, being less than 1% increase.

Unfortunately, I suspect the indirect deaths alone will be far higher. While Obama and others push for gun control after each of these incidents, a large number of people rush to gun stores and buy weapons and ammo. After all, they're terrified and want to defend themselves and I don't blame them. But there are already several hundred accidental firearm deaths annually. More guns may or may not mean less crime but they almost certainly mean more accidents and more accidental deaths. My guess is that each terror attack will cause more Americans to die because of increased gun accidents than die in the incidents themselves. That's not inherently bad. I can understand the argument that it is better to die defending oneself or even just preparing to defend oneself or in the process of preparing to defend oneself than to live in fear. I think the numbers say we shouldn't be living in fear anyway, at least not yet, but that's clearly just my subjective opinion.

Will (muslim) immigration increase the number of terror attacks? Well, it certainly won't decrease them. That's why I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to have a debate about restricting immigration of muslims, even though my vote (at this point) is to not have such restrictions.

Obama's Muslim Cat and Other Irrationalities

I was having an interesting discussion with someone about perspectives on other people's religious affiliation (or lack thereof). I'd like to share and pontificate on that discussion.

The easiest starting point is the question: am I jewish? The answer is that it depends who you ask.

Let's start with my opinion. On one hand, my mother is jewish and in jewish culture, if you're mother's jewish, at minimum, you start out being jewish. On the other hand, I never had a bar mitvah, I wasn't really brought up to be jewish, I don't believe in god and the related dogma of the religion, and rarely attend services. On the third hand, I enjoy jewish holidays (Chappy Chanukkah all!), have a jewish extended family, have more jewish friends than statistically random, and while the kids were interested in the religion thing, we took them to jewish services and enrolled them in a jewish Sunday school. Waving all those hands, my internal perspective is that I'm non-religious but culturally somewhat jewish. I feel comfortable in jewish settings, have a bit of natural affinity for jewish events and gatherings, and sort of feel a slight attachment to jewish history and myth.

But it doesn't matter what I think when it comes to others' perspectives. Some of my family and friends think I'm jewish; some think I'm not. Some have bothered to ask what I think, but, in general, what I think doesn't seem to much matter to them as far as whether or not they think I'm jewish.

It's sorta like Schrodinger's cat. I'm simultaneously jewish and not-jewish until somebody observes me. However, my observed state of jewishness is completely dependent on the perspective of the observer and not really tied to any objective or quantum reality.

Now let's switch topics a bit.

Is Obama muslim? Some say yes, most say no (including Obama). Many who say no say that those who say yes are delusional but I think that's inaccurate. Each person observes and then forms a belief based on those observations and his or her perspective. Just because our beliefs are wrong doesn't mean they're delusional.

My observations lead me to believe that it's exceedingly unlikely that Obama is muslim. However, I won't say it's certain that he's not a muslim. Why? Because I don't trust anything he says and I can't get inside his head and heart so I can't completely eliminate the possibility that he is somehow a secret muslim by some definition of muslim. Extremely unlikely, but not absolutely, positively impossible. Therefore, it's almost, but not quite absolutely provable that Obama is not a muslim.

But who cares, anyway? Well, the person I was having the discussion with certainly cared. It's only a small exaggeration to say she considers it a great evil that some people think Obama is muslim because, in her opinion, irrational beliefs like that can lead to great atrocities (like the holocaust, for example). I think it's a bit of a leap from believing that Obama is muslim to a genocide event, but hey, what do I know?

She's an atheist (self-described). So I asked, "which belief is more evil, belief in god or belief that Obama is a muslim?" She wasn't sure and said she would think about it. I'll let you know if she gets back to me on the matter.

I think that if great atrocities occur even a small fraction of the time a group of people has an irrational belief then we wouldn't've made it this far. That's because each and everyone of us is full of irrational beliefs all the time, even if we're unaware of those beliefs. And that's ignoring the fact that rational beliefs sometimes cause us to do atrocious things as well.

Inequality and Danger

I recently wrote in a comment that "the three most dangerous types of people, in my opinion, are those with extensive resources, fanatics and those with little or nothing left to lose." The last two groups don't mind and perhaps even welcome death making them difficult to deter. In addition, they can be organized in a fighting and/or terrorist force to the detriment of civilization.

So why do I think that those with extensive resources (i.e. those that are very "rich") are dangerous? They are able to do several things that others cannot including the following:

• They can build and maintain a network of thugs to do their bidding;
• They can provide substantial bribes to law enforcement and key witnesses to find them not guilty;
• They can hire excellent defense attorneys to eloquently argue their case and find every legal loophole; and
• They can affect the political system, for example getting pardons for their crimes, using their resources.

Even the non-rich can do some of these things to some extent, but there's no doubt in my mind that with greater resources the richer someone is, the better able he is to do those sorts of things.

That's not to say that I think that every or even many rich folk have bands of roving thugs going around murdering people or performing otherwise heinous crimes. I'm only claiming that they can do such things and that makes them relatively dangerous. Just like using fire is dangerous but people rarely get burned by it even though they do occasionally.

So reducing inequality, even it if created even more people with little or nothing left to lose, might reduce the number of dangerous rich people.

Despotism of the collectivists

George Will shares his thoughts on the distortions created by the administrative state:

As the administrative state distorts the United States’ constitutional architecture, Clarence Thomas becomes America’s indispensable constitutionalist. Now in his 25th year on the Supreme Court, he is urging the judicial branch to limit the legislative branch’s practice of delegating its power to the executive branch.… 

Particularly, it should prevent Congress from delegating to executive agencies the essentially legislative power of formulating “generally applicable rules of private conduct.” Such delegation, Thomas says, erases the distinction between “the making of law, and putting it into effect.” This occurs when Congress — hyperactive, overextended and too busy for specificity — delegates “policy determinations” that “effectively permit the President to define some or all of the content” of a rule of conduct.

This delegation of power to administrative agencies transfers power to unelected officials.  The linkage to accountability of the elected executive is much weaker than ever intended in our constitutional order. Experience with and knowledge of the problems emanating from such an approach exists.

This ties in nicely to the problem of soft despotism and more specifically the relevant thoughts of Walter Lippmann as expressed in Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift by Paul Rahe:

The progressives expressed great admiration for Abraham Lincoln, and they tended to justify their endeavor with an appeal to the American Founding Fathers and to speak of their aim as the achievement of Jeffersonian ends by Hamiltonian means.  But the truth is that Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann  ... John Dewey, and their associates aimed at the foundation of a new political regime, distinct from and, in certain critical respects, opposed to the one that had gradually taken shape in the period stretching from 1776 to 1789, which Lincoln later strove so mightily to defend.  To this end, they abandoned not only Jefferson but Hamilton and Lincoln as well, dismissing as outdated the concern with individual, natural rights that the three men shared; rejecting as wrongheaded and outmoded Jefferson’s argument for the virtues of political jealousy and his insistence that vigorous local self-government is essential to the maintenance of liberty; and substituting for Hamilton’s notion of statesmanship and for that of Lincoln an account—grounded in Hegel’s confidence in the inevitability of human progress, owing a great deal to his discussion of the civil service as a “universal class” in his Philosophy of Right, and informed by a truncated reading of Rousseau’s Social Contract – which was incompatible with the principle of limited government and closely akin in its practical aspects to the vision of rational administration once projected in France by Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot any by the Physiocrats.  To America from Germany, the progressives brought an especially virulent strain of the French disease.  (pp. 245-6)


… “The old ‘rights of personal competency,’” valued by Jefferson, “the right to read, to think, to speak, to choose, and live a mode of life must be respected at all hazards,” but “property rights” would have to give way, for, he (TR) proudly announced, “the day of enlightened administration has come.” 

No one saw the consequences as clearly as did Walter Lippmann, for no one was as well-positioned as he.  Lippmann had been a leading progressive.  At Harvard College, he had dabbled in socialism.  Some four years after his graduation, he had joined Herbert Croly and Walter Weyl in founding The New Republic, and in 1914, he had published the influential progressive tract Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest.  For a brief time, during the First World War, Lippmann had been an advisor to Woodrow Wilson.  After the war, in which he witnessed the effectiveness of propaganda, Lippmann began to harbor doubts about the progressive conviction that popular sovereignty and governance by experts can easily be reconciled.  In Public Opinion, published in 1922, he called into question the capacity of ordinary citizens to discern what was going on; and in The Phantom Public, published five years later, he expressed doubts as to whether it made any sense at all to speak of the public interest in the manner in which the progressives did: as something radically distinct from and in tension with individual rights and the diverse private interests of the citizens. 

In 1932, thinking that there was no alternative, Lippmann voted for Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  But by 1937 he had come to entertain grave misgivings.  He had noticed that, while, the partisans who are now fighting for the mastery of the modern world wear shirts of different colors, their weapons are drawn from the same armory, their doctrines are variations of the same theme, and they go forth to battle singing the same tune with slightly different words… 

Throughout the world, in the name of progress, men who call themselves communists, socialists, fascists, nationalists, progressives, and even liberals, are unanimous in holding that government with its instruments of coercion must by commanding the people how they shall live, direct the course of civilization and fix the shape of things to come… The premises of authoritarian collectivism have become the working beliefs, the self-evident assumptions, the unquestioned axioms, not only of all the revolutionary regimes, but of nearly every effort which lays claim to being enlightened, humane, and progressive. 

So universal is the dominion of this dogma over the minds of contemporary men that no one is taken seriously as a statesman or a theorist who does not come forward with proposals to magnify the power of public officials and to extend and multiply their intervention in human affairs.  Unless he is authoritarian and collectivist, he is mossback, a reactionary, at best an amiable eccentric swimming hopelessly against the tide.  It is a strong tide.  Though despotism is no novelty in human affairs, it is probably true that at no time in twenty-five hundred years has any western government claimed for itself a jurisdiction over men’s lives comparable with that which is officially attempted in totalitarian states… 

But it is even more significant that in other lands where men shrink from the ruthless policy of these regimes, it is commonly assumed that the movement of events must be in the direction.  Nearly everywhere the mark of a progressive is that he relies at last upon the increased power of officials to improve the condition of men.


What worried Lippmann the most – what had worried Coolidge, and what should worry us still – was the failure of those who considered themselves progressives to “remember how much of what they cherish as progressives has come by emancipation from political dominion, by the limitation of power, by the release of personal energy from authority and collective coercion.”  He cited “the whole long struggle to extricate conscience, intellect, labor, and personality from the bondage of prerogative, privilege, monopoly, authority.”  It was, he said, “the gigantic heresy of an apostate generation” to suppose that “there has come into the world during this generation some new element which makes it necessary for us to undo the work of emancipation, to retrace the steps men have taken to limit the power of rulers, which compels us to believe that the way of enlightenment in affairs is now to be found by intensifying authority and enlarging its scope.”
…
Americans were used to managing their own affairs by way of local and state governments; they had forged political parties for this purpose, and they were instinctively reluctant to cede control to a centralized administration dominated by a distant and patronizing intellectual elite. 

In fits and starts, however, under the influence of progressive political science, the administrative state began to take shape in the last decades of the nineteenth century and in the first two decades of the twentieth century – at first, locally, and, then, at the national level.   (pp. 253-5)

…
Our new masters have it in their power to deepen the economic crisis and worsen our distress in the manner of Hoover and the younger Roosevelt.  By instituting a second New Deal, as they very much like to do – by sharply raising taxes on fossil fuels, dividends, and capital gains; by targeting the earnings of the well-to-do; by pursuing protectionism, expanding the regime of programmatic rights, and forcing workers into labor unions – they can discourage investment, curb entrepreneurship, reduce foreign trade, and decisively slow economic growth, or even bring it to a lasting halt, while offering to those consigned to the dole thereby a dependence upon the generosity of an all—encompassing state.  Just how ruthless they will prove to be on this occasion, just how far they intend to hustle us down the path we tread, remains as yet undetermined. 

The only thing that is crystal clear is the direction of our drift and the nature of the threat we face.  Walter Lippmann’s warning is as apt today as it was in 1937 – for “the premises of authoritarian collectivism” are once again, as they were then, “the working beliefs, the self-evident assumptions, the unquestioned axioms” behind “nearly every effort which lays claim to being enlightened, humane, and progressive,” and hardly anyone today “is taken seriously as a statesman or a theorist who does not come forward with proposals to magnify the power of public officials and to extend and multiply their intervention in human affairs.”  Like the younger Roosevelt, our new leader poses as a secular Messiah; his minions believe, as did the progressives of an earlier time, that there has recently come into the world “some new element which makes it necessary for us to undo the work of emancipation” achieved by our forebears and “to retrace the steps men have taken to limit the power of rulers”; and in the ranks of our compatriots they will find many prepared to sacrifice self-reliance and personal independence for a promise of security no government can keep.  The hour is, indeed, late. 

To those caught up in the maelstrom, recent developments may well seem dramatic, but, in truth, they serve merely to highlight the plight that we have been in for more than three quarters of a century.    (pp. 269-270)

Those of us who despise hard tyranny might want to consider the importance of resisting and even rolling back soft tyranny as well, lest it lead us someplace we have no wish to go.

"Serf"-in' USA

At some point in the last decade, I went from feeling like a citizen of the United States with a sense of belonging to a person who feels completely disenfranchized, with no control and no influence over my political destiny and subject to the arbitrary whims of countless politicians and bureaucrats.

I've gone from citizen to serf. I've gone from consenting to be governed to being governed because of the state's monopoly on violence.

Oh sure, it's a very comfortable serfdom. I have (more than) enough to eat, a place to live, clothes, a car and enough money for gas, and there're books and movies and whatever. Because it's so comfortable, as long as I don't dwell on it too much, it's tolerable, and while I won't lift a finger to support this country (other than what I'm forced to do), I have no reason to damage it either.

Because it's so comfortable, I certainly understand why people roll their eyes, shake their heads, sigh, or otherwise think I'm a ridiculous fool. I seem ridiculous to me some of the time too. But being bribed by bread and circuses doesn't cause citizenship. Serfs can also be bribed to lay down their pitchforks.

I rather thought I was one of very few people who felt this lack of belonging. But apparently, it's quite widespread:

According to the Reuters survey, 58 percent Americans say they “don’t identify with what America has become.” While Republicans and Independents are the most likely to agree with this statement, even 45 percent of Democrats share this feeling. 

More than half of Americans, 53 percent, say they “feel like a stranger” in their own country. A minority of Americans feel “comfortable as myself” in the country.

That potentially seems like a very large problem. At his first inaugural address, John F. Kennedy admonished americans to "ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country," but for those who "feel like a stranger in their own country," it would be pointless for them to ask what they can do for their country because it's not really their country.

Without the support and consent of a solid majority of the governed, can a nation survive? Without the leadership of the United States can the world thrive?

We may find out the hard way.

Oh well.

Cultural insensitivity

Lacking in a reasonable level of cultural confidence, many western nations have made little to no effort to assimilate immigrants in the last few decades.  The failure to address the resulting behaviors has promoted an escalation of these behaviors.  This Bill Whittle video he explains that contrary to conventional wisdom, failure to deal forcefully with the radical islamists is a provocative weakness that also elicits added support from more moderates.

In the U.S. there is no sign that this approach will change.  The president seems to approach his job with something potentially worse than benign neglect:

"I have talked to people who have worked in the Obama administration who firmly believe he has made up his mind, I would say closed his mind, they say, to the intelligence they try to bring him about various groups he does not consider terrorists even if they're on the U.S. list of designated terrorists," Attkisson said. "I don't know the reasoning for it -- I’ve only been told by those who have allegedly attempted to present him, or been in the circle that has attempted to present him, with certain intelligence that they said he doesn’t want it, he said he doesn't want it or he won't read it in some instances."

Andrew McCarthy provides additional insight while dissecting the recruitment tool canard:

Obviously, jihad does not erupt out of thin air. The American public, which remains widely uninformed about Islam, realizes something must cause the violence, and that the violence will continue unless that something is overcome. For Leftists, this presents a golden opportunity: They understand that our deeply ingrained tradition of religious liberty – a tradition the Left generally abhors – makes the public resistant to the notion that a religion can cause violence, and thus receptive to the assurance that Islam does not. 

So if Islam, in the Left’s telling, has nothing to do with the savagery jihadists commit, what is the cause? Obama and his cohort fill in this blank with … the principles and policies they oppose: robust national defense, American leadership in the world, free speech, sovereignty, economic liberty, income inequality, Christianity, Israel’s character as a Jewish state, Guantanamo Bay, military commissions, … even climate change. 

Yes, this is preposterous if you’ve familiarized yourself with Islamic supremacism and classical sharia. But, alas, much of America has not despite a generation of jihad from Tehran to Manhattan to Paris. What a powerful rhetorical weapon it is for the Left to claim that what it opposes is not just wrong but the cause of mass-murder attacks. 

In the real world, however, it is the sharia supremacist interpretation of Islam that causes jihadist terror. With that as the foundation, jihadist recruitment has little or nothing to do with the pretexts conveniently conjured by the Left. To the contrary, recruitment is driven by one thing: the perception that jihadists will win. As Osama bin Laden recognized, people are drawn to the strong horse and shun the weak horse. 

That is why I cannot think of a more potent recruitment tool for ISIS than … Barack Obama.

(read the whole article)

By acting in what is ultimately a provocative manner, leaders risk increasing the chances that future leaders will be forced to open a giant sized can of whoopass and everything that goes with such an action.

Immigration clarification

A serious matter like immigration should get more serious consideration and less posturing.  I want to present corrections of some mistaken notions that are being repeated in discussion of the matter.

Ian Tuttle explains why Syrian refugees aren't 1939's jews:

Among politicians and their clingers-on, journalists, nothing takes hold like a bad historical analogy. 

...the failure of the analogy becomes clear. 

The first, and most obvious, difference: There was no international conspiracy of German Jews in the 1930s attempting to carry out daily attacks on civilians on several continents. No self-identifying Jews in the early 20th century were randomly massacring European citizens in magazine offices and concert halls, and there was no “Jewish State” establishing sovereignty over tens of thousands of square miles of territory, and publicly slaughtering anyone who opposed its advance. Among Syrian Muslims, there is. The vast majority of Syrian Muslims are not party to these strains of radicalism and violence, but it would be dangerous to suggest that they do not exist, or that our refugee-resettlement program need not take account of them. 

...A non-trivial minority of refugees who support a murderous, metastatic caliphate is a reason for serious concern. No 13 percent of Jews looked favorably upon the Nazi party. 

Third, European Jews in the early 20th century were more amenable to assimilation than are Syrian Muslims in the early 21st. By the time of the rise of Nazism, Jews had participated in the intellectual and cultural life of Germany for a century and a half — a life that, despite regional particularities, indisputably fell under the broad banner of Western civilization, in which America participated, too. 

Sloppy thinking and bad analogies don't contribute anything positive.

Andrew McCarthy clarifies the question of a religious test:

Under federal law, the executive branch is expressly required to take religion into account in determining who is granted asylum. Under the provision governing asylum (section 1158 of Title 8, U.S. Code), an alien applying for admission  

must establish that … religion [among other things] … was or will be at least one central reason for persecuting the applicant. 

 Moreover, to qualify for asylum in the United States, the applicant must be a “refugee” as defined by federal law. That definition (set forth in Section 1101(a)(42)(A) of Title , U.S. Code) also requires the executive branch to take account of the alien’s religion: 

The term “refugee” means (A) any person who is outside any country of such person’s nationality … and who is unable or unwilling to return to … that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of … religion [among other things] …[.] 

The law requires a “religious test.” And the reason for that is obvious. Asylum law is not a reflection of the incumbent president’s personal (and rather eccentric) sense of compassion. Asylum is a discretionary national act of compassion that is directed, by law not whim, to address persecution.

That's the law as it stands.  See for yourself.


David French has some thoughts on biblical arguments:

As a general matter, advocates of open borders often refer to Mosaic law requiring the Israelites to treat the “foreigner residing with you” as if foreigners were “native-born,” and to “Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” The laws of Israel, they point out, applied equally to the “foreigner” and the “native-born.” …
Putting aside that Mosaic Law would prohibit refugees from worshiping Allah, demand the death penalty for many of the core activities of the sexual revolution, and impose dietary restrictions that the latté Left might find a bit onerous, we can see that these critics are making a basic error: interpreting commands directed at individuals as mandates for national policy. 

He also has some thoughts from Walter Russell Mead.


Charles Cooke shares his thoughts including some history and context:

Listen for a few minutes to the raging debate over the fate of the Syrian refugees, and you will hear a familiar phrase rear its weary head: “The United States is a nation of immigrants.” This line has two purposes in modern American life. The first is to serve as a dry description of the period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Roaring Twenties, during which the United States accepted tens of millions of émigrés looking for a better life. The second is to act as a cudgel in our contemporary immigration debate. Over the past few years, President Obama has proven himself to be especially fond of the phrase. The United States, Obama submits, has “weaved a tradition of welcoming immigrants into the very fabric of who we are”; its people, he argues, “were strangers once, too,” and found good neighbors here; this is, above all else, “a nation of immigrants.” His conclusion? We should change our current system in exactly the way he desires. 

In a purely historical sense, the president and his parrots are correct: The United States does indeed have a long tradition of welcoming outsiders to its shores. But, in the immediate context, one must ask “So what?” The question currently before us is not “Should Americans ever accept new people into their midst?” or “Is immigration a good thing per se?” but “What policy should the United States adopt toward the Syrian refugee crisis?” It cannot be answered merely by appealing to general principles. 

Finally, Kevin Williamson shares his thoughts concluding:

When in doubt—and the doubts here are heavy—the wisest thing is to do is: nothing. Certainly it is prudent to proceed slowly and with extreme caution before we take any steps that are difficult or impossible to reverse.

A whole lot of nonsense to clear up.

Intelligence and Politicians

I'm on a group email list with a bunch of old MIT frat brothers. Many of them fancy themselves as quite intelligent, not just in their area of expertise, not just in STEM, but in all aspects of human endeavors. They definitely strongly disagree with Feynman's quote*:

"I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy."

So needless to say, some were horrified when I wrote:

I think intelligence is way, way overrated. The most successful politicians are highly intelligent sociopaths. The worst possible leaders are the highly intelligent sociopaths.

Debate developed, arguments were added, and hyperlinks were hyperactively heaved ho, supposedly proving my cynical and anti-human and otherwise horrible statement incorrect. I'm not sure what the latin is for argument by overwhelming (argumentum overwhelmem?), but I've learned in the past that being a lone individual hit by an onslaught of righteous argument is an untenable position; you lose whether or not you have some degree of truth on your side. And in this case, I just threw that statement out there to stir the pot (and I certainly succeeded at that!), I didn't know whether or not the empirical evidence would support me.

I picked the first link spewed at me from the onslaught: The impact of smart fractions, cognitive ability
of politicians and average competence of peoples on social development. I fully expected it to prove my statement unequivocally wrong. Instead, I found it almost supportive. First, from the abstract:

The intelligence of politicians was less important...

Oh? That doesn't sound like I'm so wrong. Here's the key table, in my opinion:

Having smart people is correlated with good things like high GDP, but having smart politicians isn't correlated with much of anything good at all, EXCEPT democracy. With democracy, my guess is that causality goes the other way. In a democracy, the politicians have to be intelligent enough to deceive the populous into voting for them. But their intelligence doesn't seem to help much of anything else.

Given that there's a high correlation between a country having smart people which helps things like GDP and having smart politicians which doesn't which doesn't have much impact on GDP, I think this may show that smart politicians are detrimental to a country and that the countries with smart people do well in spite of their political class.

*Thanks to Clovis for reminding me of this quote