Bye-Bye To Chile, The Most Peaceful, Prosperous Country In Latin America

Crime, Government, IMMIGRATION, Multiculturalism, Nationhood

In 2010, the blog “Chile Is No Haiti” noted how that country had coped with what was “one of the most powerful earthquakes in history”:

If to judge by the number of opprobrious pieces the malfunctioning media, activist Anderson Cooper in the lead, ran about the little looting there was in Chile—they have been hoping that Chile, who’s been subjected to aftershocks as strong as Haiti’s main event, would fare as poorly as did the Africa of the Western Hemisphere.

 

Contrary to the thesis presented in “What Makes A Country, People Or Place?,” Chilean leaders have decided that their people are not their strength.

Wall Street Journal:

As the Trump administration aims to curb immigration, one of Latin America’s richest and safest countries has opened its doors to some of the region’s poorest migrants in record numbers. Tens of thousands of Venezuelans have fled their crime-ridden country in recent years for Chile, which has a history of receiving Bolivian, Peruvian and Colombian migrants.
But the most dramatic surge has come from Haiti. Last year, almost 105,000 Haitians entered Chile, compared with about 49,000 in 2016 and just a handful a decade ago, according to federal police that oversee border crossings.

MORE.

RELATED: “Can Freedom Lovers Chill In Chile?

Why Aren’t Dumb Republicans Calling Out Democrats For Devotion To DACA, Not America?

Debt, Democrats, Government, IMMIGRATION, libertarianism, Republicans

From the libertarian perspective, we want the Federal Government to shut down and not to open. Even a temporary shutdown, an exercise repeated annually to the same hysteria, will make little difference.

What never fails to surprise is the irredeemable stupidity of the Republicans—even though it, too, is as inevitable as water spiraling down a plughole. Tactically speaking, Republicans need to be shouting from the rooftops that Democrats are fighting, not for the American people, but for illegal aliens. What kind of party got to bat for non-citizens? A political party must represent its countrymen.

NEW COLUMN: ‘Shithole Countries’: What Makes A County? The Place Or The People?

Africa, Donald Trump, Human Accomplishment, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Race

“‘Shithole Countries’: What Makes A County? Place Or People?” is the current column, now on The Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine. An excerpt:

President Trump’s questioning of immigration into the United States from what he crudely called “shithole” countries masks a more vexing question:

What makes a country, the place or the people? Does “the country” create the man or does the man make the country?

To listen to the deformed logic of the president’s detractors, it’s the former: the “country” makes the person. No sooner does an African or Haitian immigrant wash up on American shores—courtesy of random quotas, lotteries and other government grants of privilege and protection—than the process of cultural and philosophical osmosis begins. American probity and productivity soon become his own.

As an African libertarian—an ex-South African, to be precise—I took the liberty of addressing the matter in the book “Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” in which a Cameroonian scholar, Daniel Etounga-Manguelle, among others, is extensively cited.

Easily one of the most controversial thinkers on the causes of underdevelopment in Africa, Etounga-Manguelle, a former adviser to the World Bank, contends that “What Africans are doing to one another defies credulity. Genocide, bloody civil wars, and rampant violent crime suggest African societies at all social levels are to some extent cannibalistic.” Why? In part, because of the inveterate values held by so many Africans.

Etounga-Manguelle and scholars like him, cited in “Into The Cannibal’s Pot,” are responding to an “explanatory vacuum” that has opened up among honest academics.

All have been willing to admit that constructs like racism, discrimination, and colonialism no longer serve as credible causal factors in divining underdevelopment and delinquency.

None has been called upon to enlighten the greater public.

In such intellectually candid circles, the intellectual “vacuum” is being filled with reference to culture, namely the “values, attitudes, beliefs, orientations, and underlying assumptions prevalent among people in a society.” …

…  Human behavior is, indubitably, mediated by values. Nevertheless, we’d be intellectually remiss to deny that the cultural argument affords a circular, rather than a causal, elegance: people do the things they do because they are who they are and have a history of being that way.

What precisely, then, accounts for the unequal “civilizing potential,” as James Burnham called it, that groups display? Why have some people produced Confucian and Anglo-Protestant ethics—with their mutual emphasis on graft and delayed gratification—while others have midwifed Islamic and animistic values, emphasizing conformity, consensus, and control?

Why have certain patterns of thought and action come to typify certain people in the first place?

Such an investigation, however, is verboten …

READ THE REST. The essay, “‘Shithole Countries’: What Makes A County? Place Or People?” is the current column, now on The Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine.

UPDATED (1/19): “Lindsey Grahamnesty” And His Republican, Chicken-Little Amigos

Conflict, IMMIGRATION, Neoconservatism, Republicans

“Lindsey Grahamnesty” and “Lindsey Gomez” are good nicknames for the odious senator from South Carolina. He said so himself.

Why is it that Graham, popularity with Deplorables 0 percent when he dropped out of the presidential race (12/2015), is speaking for Deplorables on immigration? Why has this traitor anointed himself the pointman for the GOP on immigration, and is being interviewed not once, not twice, but non-stop on the idiot’s lantern? Why is a lawmaker so unpopular with those who count, so popular with kingmakers?

And why do the Republican quislings in Congress keep intoning that “the DACA challenge” is the most urgent thing for Congress to solve? Why is DACA so urgent? Because lawmakers like the Flake-Durbin-Graham amigos tell you something—it doesn’t mean you must accept it as Bible from Sinai. Don’t be a Chicken Little. The sky is not falling.

Let the benefits to illegals expire. So what!

UPDATE II (1/19): Graham has complained that he wants the “Tuesday Trump” back, the Trump who was ready for a DACA giveaway. Deplorables want the Monday, Tuesday, Wed., Thurs, Friday, Sat. Sunday Graham GONE.