Updated: On Bloggerel

Barely A Blog, IlanaMercer.com, Internet, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

I resisted blogging with all my might. In August 2002, I wrote this in “The Importance of Boundaries”:

“Virginia Postrel appears to confer the web-diary with a mystic, cosmic rhythm, calling it ‘one of the most interesting new spontaneous orders in the world of the Web.’ … The fact that millions of people are moved to mouth daily on the web is no more significant than the fact that billions of humans have a bowel movement every day.”

“Chances are that if you are blogging, a part of you believes that your impromptu daily thoughts ought to be public. Chances are you are not terribly concerned that, of the cyberspace ejaculate you emit, stuff will come back to haunt you like a nasty paternity suit.”

Unfortunately, I was in no position to let this expression of spontaneous disorder pass me by. Ann Coulter is in that position; I’m not. Probably never will be. So here I am. (Still, this blogger “speaks” only “when she has something to say,” to comport with my daughter’s description of her mom years back. Which is why this is Barely a Blog.)

Thomas Fleming has had a similar experience. Here are his impressions of the blogosphere and its intellectually disemboweling effects:

“… answering the blog-responders is like arguing with a retarded child who thinks breaking wind is a witty response.”

“I described the blogger mentality as a form of Narcissism, but even that is a compliment. Narcissus was so handsome that he fell in love with his own reflection. The proper parallel would be the writers and political intellectuals who are so brilliant and clever that they have fallen in love with their own voices, but bloggers are like a hideously ugly person who looks in the mirror and says: ‘The rat’s looking good.’ [Note, I have to check the quotation from the recent film of Charlotte’s Web, which I watched on a flight to Rome.]”

“… if we took the trouble to start a conversation, the blogospheroids would jump in, agreeing or disagreeing–it hardly matters–with opinions by the truckload. This might not be so bad, if the truck were not a garbage truck.”

The post is “Silly Chickens and Rotten Eggs.” As with all Dr. Fleming’s writing, it’s well-worth the read.

Update (March 22): This is not to say that there aren’t good blogs; I’d hope BAB is one. Rather, the objection here is to the meta-process the web diary stands for–the loose, let-it-all-hang out, diarrheic process of diarizing in public, as I said in the essay, has broken down boundaries between the private and public:

“The upshot of populism in punditry, at least, is that bad commentary is promiscuously outed. Few and far between are the commentators and conversationalists who have honed their craft.”

How Black South Africans 'Deal' With Illegal Immigrants

Africa, IMMIGRATION, Race, Racism, South-Africa

Blacks, who now rule the South African roost, “deal” with illegal immigrants and foreigners, shall we say differently to the way Americans do. And white South Africans did. Under minority rule this cruelty did not occur. Neither did illegal immigrants dare brave the ferocious Afrikaner border guards and their assistants: four-legged predators. Yep, Africa moves in mysterious ways. (But the Minute Men are maligned much more than these killers of newcomers!!)

I’ve ventured into the township of Alexandra, in which some of the killings are now underway. It’s about 3 kilometers from the once-magnificent, very wealthy suburbs of Sandton and Morningside, where my father had a synagogue. Shopping in Sandton City used to be out of this world.

Notice how Goodly Helen, like most members of the liberal media, resorts to the passive voice to catalogue the rioters’ crimes: Helen says the “unrest has killed” all those illegals; no, Helen, the killers killed them.

Over to Helen Long of Reuters:

“May 19 – A wave of xenophobic attacks escalated in South Africa’s seething townships, with mobs beating and murdering foreigners.

The unrest has killed more than 20 people since it began last week and increased political instability at a time South Africa is struggling with dire power shortages, rising inflation and growing disaffection among the poor over President Thabo Mbeki’s pro-business policies. Police fired rubber bullets at rioters in communities around Johannesburg and in the central business district, where scores of foreigners live. High levels of poverty, crime and unemployment have fuelled resentment toward foreigners. Since the end of apartheid South Africa has become a magnet for millions of African immigrants escaping poverty and persecution.”

How Black South Africans ‘Deal’ With Illegal Immigrants

Africa, IMMIGRATION, Race, Racism, South-Africa

Blacks, who now rule the South African roost, “deal” with illegal immigrants and foreigners, shall we say differently to the way Americans do. And white South Africans did. Under minority rule this cruelty did not occur. Neither did illegal immigrants dare brave the ferocious Afrikaner border guards and their assistants: four-legged predators. Yep, Africa moves in mysterious ways. (But the Minute Men are maligned much more than these killers of newcomers!!)

I’ve ventured into the township of Alexandra, in which some of the killings are now underway. It’s about 3 kilometers from the once-magnificent, very wealthy suburbs of Sandton and Morningside, where my father had a synagogue. Shopping in Sandton City used to be out of this world.

Notice how Goodly Helen, like most members of the liberal media, resorts to the passive voice to catalogue the rioters’ crimes: Helen says the “unrest has killed” all those illegals; no, Helen, the killers killed them.

Over to Helen Long of Reuters:

“May 19 – A wave of xenophobic attacks escalated in South Africa’s seething townships, with mobs beating and murdering foreigners.

The unrest has killed more than 20 people since it began last week and increased political instability at a time South Africa is struggling with dire power shortages, rising inflation and growing disaffection among the poor over President Thabo Mbeki’s pro-business policies. Police fired rubber bullets at rioters in communities around Johannesburg and in the central business district, where scores of foreigners live. High levels of poverty, crime and unemployment have fuelled resentment toward foreigners. Since the end of apartheid South Africa has become a magnet for millions of African immigrants escaping poverty and persecution.”

Update 2: History Of Traditional Levels Of US Immigration

Conspiracy, IMMIGRATION, Politics

Courtesy of Numbers USA, here is the exponential, unsustainable increase in immigration into the US since the 1965 and 1990 Immigration Acts. The trend is quantitavely and qualitatively different from decades past.

This is top-down central planning that swamps the local, founding peoples (Anglo, Afro, and Indian-American). I’m surprised at those who’ve shrugged it off as an inevitable natural phenomenon.

Update 1 (May 20): A few of our valued contributors seem unfamiliar with the term “central planning.” They confuse it with conspiracy thinking. I’m not a conspiracy thinker. I’ve written about the flaws of that kind of thinking in “On Conspiracy Thinking.”

Applied to immigration policy, my critique of conspiracy means that “the state presides over the disintegration of civil society, but it does so reflexively, rather than as a matter of collusion and conspiracy. … most of what the behemoth does nowadays [is] contrary to the good of the individual, and aimed reflexively at increasing its own power and size.”

In other words, immigration central planners began with good intentions and dollops of the usual stupidity and hubris never in short supply among the political class. Progressively, as with any sphere that has been brought under government control—and not as a matter of collusion and conspiracy—immigration policy evolved into an industry, with stakeholders, powerful vested interests, and power-conferring constituencies.

This is politics, not conspiracy. This is also why you want to keep these natural-born social engineers away from as many spheres as possible—an impossibility in contemporary America.

I can’t locate the reference I once made in a column to Samuel P. Huntington’s conclusion that the “denationalized elites” of the American state are unique in the modern political landscape in acting entirely against the interests of a “patriotic public.” (Maybe a reader can find this citation. Larry located it; thanks.)

Update 2: And this is also why I wrote in “Bush Answers Kennedy’s Calling” that,

“[A]ll immigration policy by definition amounts to top-down, statist, central planning. But the least invasive policy is one that respects a nation’s historical and cultural complexion and the property rights of its taxpayers. Bush’s batch of soon-to-be amnestied illegal aliens are voracious tax consumers, who will cost more in social services than they pay in taxes over a lifetime. By contrast, immigrants who arrived between 1870 and 1920, during the Great Migration, although poor, did not constitute a burden, because the Welfare State as we know it did not exist.”

“Moreover, what Bush in his dotage termed ‘the great American tradition of the melting pot’ is no more. In previous decades immigrants assimilated. In the spirit of the times, they are now encouraged to acculturate to the politics of petulance. As a result, too many seem to harbor a vestigial resentment toward the host society and to cling to an almost-militant distinctiveness.”

“Clearly, unfettered immigration and the interventionist state, as Ludwig von Mises noted, cannot coexist.”