Third World Immigration and Islam

IMMIGRATION, Islam

France’s Nicolas Sarkozy had better start flexing his muscles. “The darling buds of France—her raging Muslim youths” are at it again, and this time they want to taste blood.

Here’s a refresher of the last bloody outbreak. Nothing has changed since, in “Rah-Rah For Rioters,” I detailed the “reasons” for the fury:

“What have the French ever done for “les beurs,” now rioting in 300 French cities and towns, having destroyed more than 6,000 cars, burned busses, businesses, shops, schools, police stations, libraries; beaten bystanders, and snuffed out at least one life?

They’ve replaced the mud huts of their ancestors with subsidized housing and modern plumbing, given them schools, job-training institutes, cradle-to-crypt welfare, and, my personal favorite, the Musée du Louvre.

To listen to their enablers among the media, however, not much. Whether the mediacrats are applying their cerebral sinew to individual or group-orchestrated crime; to psychological or sociological “causal factors,” bad deeds are invariably caused—never committed. And they are caused by factors outside the perpetrators. …

…French Muslims endure untold oppression. France’s holidays are largely saints’ days. School cafeterias serve fish on Fridays. Restaurants still serve wine and pork, and souvenir shops peddle porcelain pigs. As the Times Literary Supplement recently complained, “Nuns do not have to remove their headscarves for passport or driver’s license photographs; Muslim women do.” Oh the indignities! My favorite newsman (and co-religionist) Jon Stewart, added his invaluable perspective as an “alienated” minority: “Do you know what it’s like to be sent to a Christian school every Passover with a hardboiled egg?” (Italians would have similar stories of “survival.”)

By the way, this will eventually unfold at a theatre near you. We Americans love to delude ourselves to the contrary, but it is a matter of time.

Repulsive Republican ‘Panderfest’

Elections 2008, English, IMMIGRATION, Republicans

VDARE.com’s Allan Wall sums up the reprehensible spectacle of the GOP presidential candidates appearing on the “Spanish-language network Univision.”
Wall lauds Tom Tancredo for being the only one to have refused to partake in the Hispanic, special interests circus. How right he is. And how un-presidential the seven dwarfs looked, baffled faces strained in an effort to comprehend the language:
[OPEN QUOTES]
“The fact that only Tancredo understood that pandering was a bad idea tells us more about the state of the GOP than it does about Tom Tancredo. As he explained the day before the forum:
‘It is the law that to become a naturalized citizen of this country you must have knowledge and understanding of English, including a basic ability to read, write, and speak the language. So what may I ask are our presidential candidates doing participating in a Spanish speaking debate? Bilingualism is a great asset for any individual, but it has perilous consequences for a nation. As such, a Spanish debate has no place in a presidential campaign.’ [Tancredo: GOP Candidates ‘Pandering’ At Spanish-Language Debate The Denver Channel.Com Dec. 8th, 2007]
The questions were loaded, of course. The first was about ‘declining support among Hispanics for Republicans.’
Mike Huckabee blamed Republicans for not pandering enough:
‘If the Republicans only got 30 percent of the vote, somehow we didn’t do a very good job of communicating that that’s what we would provide in terms of opportunity and fairness.’
McCain blamed ‘the rhetoric that many Hispanics hear about illegal immigration’ which ‘makes some of them believe that we are not in favor nor seek the support of the Hispanic citizens in this country.’
Candidates were also asked if they were ‘taking a risk’ by appearing at the forum. That’s funny, it took more guts for Tancredo to stay away from the event than for them to attend it.
Mitt Romney called for pandering: ‘Republicans are going to come and speak to Hispanic Americans in the language they understand best, so we can get their votes and they can understand that we are the party of strength and the party of freedom.’
Rudy Giuliani said that ‘Hispanic Americans are Americans, just as much as all other Americans. They have the same values, the same interests.’
(Well, if that’s true, why pander to them? Why have a special forum for them, translated into a foreign language?)
Then Huckabee got going again, and said that if he had refused to appear on stage ‘It would insult every voter in the country.’
Huh?
The Huckster even thanked his hosts for allowing him to grovel: ‘And I want to say thanks for letting us have this audience on Univision.’
On the question of Official English, McCain said he wanted English used by all Americans.
(So why was he at this Spanish language forum then?)
Ron Paul said all federal business should be in English, but made a weird pop psychology diagnosis: ‘I sometimes think that those who attack bilingualism sometimes are jealous, and we feel inferior, because we’re not capable.’
(Why did he say that?)
The GOP candidates were asked what should be done with the illegal aliens in the country.
Giuliani said we should first get control of the border, then get a tamper-proof ID for the illegals who are in the country (amnesty, in other words). The only people Giuliani would kick out would be the people who don’t show up to claim their amnesty!
Huckabee too, though he denied it, seems to support a form of amnesty as long as the illegals go home first. And he wants a guest worker program which is fast and easy to get into. The former Arkansas governor drew applause when he trotted out a totally irrelevant credit card analogy:
‘If you can get an American Express card in two weeks, it shouldn’t take seven years to get a work permit to come to this country in order to work on a farm. So if our government is incapable of making that process in that length of time, then we should do it in a way to outsource it.’
‘Outsource it’? To whom? To the government of Mexico—for whom Huckabee arranged the installation of a Mexican consulate in Little Rock?
Then Huckabee lapsed into a ‘compassion’ riff inevitably leading to Big Government solutions:
‘When people come to this country, they shouldn’t fear. They shouldn’t live in hiding. They ought to have their heads up, because the one thing about being an American is, we believe every person ought to have his or her head up and proud, and nobody should have to be in hiding because they’re illegal when our government ought to make it so that people can reasonably come here in a legal fashion.’
Increasingly, this guy reminds me of George W. Bush back in 2000.
Which is not good.
Why not just legalize the illegal aliens, Thompson and Romney were asked and both pointed out that it was unfair to immigrants who had gone through the legal process. Duncan Hunter correctly stated that an amnesty would encourage more illegal immigration. McCain tried to cover all the bases, talking about border security, Hispanic anchor baby soldiers in Iraq, and love and compassion. Mitt Romney’s hiring of a company that used illegal workers was brought up, and the former Massachusetts governor used it to call for an employment verification system.
Anchor babies were brought up. Thompson was asked the loaded question: “Do these children have the right not to be separated from their parents?”
Thompson could have responded that every day American citizen children are separated from their citizen parents, due to work, business, travel, incarceration and military service abroad. So why do we hear more sob stories about the illegal alien deportees and their children?”
[SNIP]
There’s more from this pukefest, interspersed with Wall’s excellent acerbic commentary. Read it.

Values Vulgarizers

Foreign Policy, Individual Rights, Neoconservatism, Objectivism, The West

One of our regular contributors here on Barely a Blog makes an uncharacteristically incoherent comment on his own blog:

“…on the subject of the war against civilization …Mercer gets it (she just wants us to fight it Marquis of Queensbury rules with our foot in a bucket.)”

Can he be serious? Apparently. Wait for this: Accolades for offering a strident defense of the West go to the prototypical open-borders Objectivist, whose positions are generally indistinguishable from those of the neoconservatives.

Philosophical incoherence at its best.

But it’s predictable. In my commentary over the years—cultural and political—I’ve mounted a systematic defense of Western values as I see them. This includes—gasp!—defending the distinctly Western character of the US (and the West), something the neocons and the Objectivists who ape them daren’t do.

The neocons and their Objectivist friends, on the other hand, have cheered the unprovoked bloodletting in Iraq and have deceptively framed as individual rights the “values” the US is planting in that country’s blood-soaked soil.

Because of their incremental convergence over the decades with the liberal left, this axis has, to all intents and purposes, embraced “equality” as a value for which they’re prepared to drag the country kicking and screaming to war.

Iraq is a colossal bit of social engineering. To the fact that the US is not defending individual rights in Iraq—not by any stretch of the imagination—add the matter of jurisdiction. A constitutional American government has no right to use the property of Americans to free people around the world. The Iraqi people, moreover, did not sanction the American government’s faith-based democratic initiative. These are the fictions for which neocons and their Objectivist tagalongs are willing to kill and have others killed.
Nation building and assorted mindless meddling have also found a place within this “philosophy.”

So what is my apparently constricting prescription? First, bring the armed forces home, so they can protect this country, not Kosovo, Korea, and Kurdistan. Next, scale back mass immigration, legal and illegal. Defending negative liberties at home is more effective and less violative than waging aimless, unwinnable, rights-sundering wars.

As anyone who’s followed my writing over the years knows, I most certainly support fighting and winning just wars. (The position I deride in this post equates unjust war with a defense of the civilization—a position too dumb and evil for words.) My stance is congruent with individual and national sovereignty, constitutional principles, and just war ethics.

Again, the prototypical warring Objectivist our misguided friend praises is indistinguishable from a neoconservative. He is tough on crime, in general (a good thing), big on war crimes (a bad thing), and even bigger on the idea of inviting the Third Word to our shores. All of which the left supports. There’s a reason the media has grown fond of the neocon/Objectivist/Catoite hybrid.

In the age of unreason, violence-for-values verbiage defeats my own coherent defense of the West. Atavism trumps reason, because it appeals to primitive emotions.
This is the vulgarization of values.

Updated: Are Objectivists Cultural Philistines?

Democracy, Music, Objectivism, Technology, The West, The Zeitgeist

When it comes to culture, too many Objectivists display quite a bit of philistinism. For example, from their publications one is led to believe that the Superman/Spider-man genre of film is somehow the pinnacle of Western cinematic accomplishment, philosophically and stylistically. Or at least, this is the impression they give, perhaps unintentionally.

In her appreciation of music, Ayn Rand was undeniably very limited. She took mainly to Rachmaninoff. So what? Her imperfections are not the point. Ayn Rand was enough of an innovator to have her eccentricities. The point, rather, is the cult-like conduct of her acolytes—to religiously assimilate the peculiarities and tics of another is to relinquish one’s judgment, and learning curve, to say nothing of one’s individuality. Monkeys mimic.

Nevertheless, Objectivists fetishize Rachmaninoff, and try and make the case that classical music’s worth hinges on one representative of Russian Romanticism, rather than on very many giants from other places and periods.

Objectivist publications often feature large, glossy photos of tall American buildings. This rather hackneyed, crude imagery is meant to capture man’s heroic mastery of his environment. I’m an enthusiastic champion of man as master of the universe. But these displays are just too outsized, clunky and out-of-date.

Patriotism is all well and good, moreover, but realism, at least to this writer, is paramount. If Objectivists—and Americans in general—tuned into the world, they’d recognize that our once-great cities are looking rather shabby and old. I am told that America is no longer the place for the latest in architecture (that goes for free-market capitalism too. Here are more amazing buildings).

Sean, who’s at the pinnacle of the electrical engineering profession, always chuckles at the shiny technology shots in said publications—these are supposed to stand for innovation. The projects depicted are often statist rather than private. But even odder—and off—are the “heroic” images of the microchip assembly line. Don’t Objectivists understand that the assembly line is where the product designed by industry innovators is put together by factory workers?

An emphasis on the values of equality and representative mass society is increasingly central to the more militant among Objectivists and certainly to the neocons—values that are also America’s main export. Perhaps celebrating those low on the creativity ladder comports with this philosophical tenet.