Mosaic Law Was Not Meant For A Pack Of Baboons Or Charlie Mansons

Judaism & Jews, Law, Morality, Private Property

Myron Pauli shares thoughts on the Torah portion “Mishpatim” (about common law in the Book of Exodus), on the occasion of the anniversary of the birth of his late, beloved wife Linda Plotnick and the death of father Felix Pauli

The Torah can be divided into laws specifying the interaction between mankind and God such as prohibiting idol worship, and the interaction between mankind with mankind. Mishpatim contains much of the civil/common/secular laws. I will make some general observations rather than focus on specific laws:

FIRST: The laws should have a moral basis. Thus, laws should not be passed because the city council needs to refurbish the carpet or because a well-heeled businessman pays lawmakers to put his rivals out of business.

SECOND: The laws should be universal – hence they apply for all time and for all people. This is expressed in our own Declaration of Independence that all are equal in their God-given rights. It does not mean that I can slam-dunk equally with LeBron James – it is that we are equal under the law. This is the essence of the Rule of Law. The opposite is the “Law of Rule,” where the Czar or Pharaoh applies harsh laws to his enemies and no restrictions on his friends, or invents new laws or suspends old laws by his own whim.

THIRD: There are roughly 365 negative mitzvot and many of them deal with idolatry and the like. The number of civil-secular ones is smaller, perhaps around 200. Somehow, 200 prohibitions were enough for the ancient Israelites to function and thrive. This is distinct from America in 2015 which has over 80,000 pages in the Federal Register. Presumably some believe that 80,000 pages of laws make us more moral than the ancient Israelites, but I am skeptical.

FOURTH: I would like to consider 3 different philosophical views of property – those of Marx, Rosenbaum, and Moses. Karl Marx believed in communal property – hence, there could be no theft or coveting since everything was commonly owned. Individual property and individual responsibility were replaced by the commune and individual incentives to produce were replaced by communist coercion. Sadly, many people prefer to give up their individual responsibility to the communist whip although this concept of property has caused misery everywhere it has been tried.

Alisa Rosenbaum, better known as Ayn Rand, considered property sacrosanct and even above life itself. Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not covet, and thou shalt not give thy property away – that is, compassion and altruism were dubious in her view. What you produced is yours and what I produced is mine. This was the perfect world for perfect people. Those who are too young to produce – children – were parasites with no place in her world. Nor did those who were too old, sick, stupid, or lazy. And without either compassion or children, it was a rather cold world with no means of sustainment.

Moses’ Torah recognizes the obligation to have and raise children and for children to love their parents and is thus self-sustaining. It also recognizes property rights and if one plants and cultivate an apple orchard, that orchard belongs to the producer. And those who are moral will be rewarded with rains and abundance. The owner owns all the apples on the trees, but if there is a surplus and apples fall on the ground, they belong to those in need. There is an incentive to own the trees rather than scavenge the leftovers, but there is also provision for the needy. So perhaps those 3000 year old ideas work better than the more modern proposed “improvements.”

FINALLY: I will temporary digress by departing from Mount Sinai for Philadelphia and quote Benjamin Franklin on the day the Constitution was adopted: “I agree to this Constitution … what may be a blessing to the people if well administered …. (however he noted that it) can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”

John Adams said that our government was made only for a moral people. Thus it is true with any set of laws that they can only be as good as the people who abide by them. The Torah was not meant for a pack of baboons or Charlie Mansons. Throughout the Torah, Moses admonishes the people that good will happen to them when they follow the word of God and evil will happen when they disobey.

Thus, the needs of a civil society consist of a moral set of laws and a moral people to follow them.

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Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.

UPDATED: Coulter On Immigrant Crime

Ann Coulter, Crime, IMMIGRATION, Pseudoscience

Ann Coulter points to the iffy nature of the “studies”—all two of them—showing “that immigrants commit LESS crime than the native population.”

… Reason magazine boasts, for example, that El Paso, Texas, has a large Hispanic population and yet El Paso “is among the safest big cities in America.”

In fact, however, El Paso’s “safe city” ranking is based on an outdated FBI crime index that includes only eight crime categories, excluding such crimes as drunk driving, narcotics offenses and weapons violations. When the FBI’s more complete crime index is used, El Paso has a higher crime rate than the national average. … The two researchers whose work is cited over and over again for the proposition that immigrants are less criminal than Americans are Alex Piquero, criminology professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, and Bianca Bersani, sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Pew cites their studies — and everyone in the media cites Pew, leading to headlines like these:

“UT Dallas prof finds immigrant kids less likely to commit serious crimes, re-offend” — The Dallas Morning News

“UMass Boston Prof: Stereotype of ‘Criminal Immigrant’ Doesn’t Hold Up” — Targeted News Service

“Surprise! Donald Trump is wrong about immigrants and crime” — The Washington Post

Curiously, we are never shown the actual studies, but simply told — with some heat — “studies show!”

I looked up some of these alleged studies this weekend. They’re all hidden behind ridiculous Internet paywalls. I was often only the sixth person to read them.

It turns out that neither Piquero nor Bersani compared immigrant crime to “the overall population” — as the British Guardian recently claimed in an article purporting to prove Donald Trump wrong. Rather, they compare immigrants’ crime rate to the crime rate of America’s most criminally inclined subgroups.

Thus, for example, once you get past the paywall, you will find that Piquero and Bersani’s joint study, “Comparing Patterns and Predictors of Immigrant Offending Among a Sample of Adjudicated Youth,” used as its base group “adolescents who were found guilty of a serious offense.”

THAT’S NOT A REPRESENTATIVE SAMPLE OF AMERICANS! It’s a representative sample of teenagers who are convicted criminals.

Similarly, professor Bersani’s oft-cited, but never-read study, “An Examination of First and Second Generation Immigrant Offending Trajectories,” looked at a population group that included “an over-sample of Hispanic and African-American youth.”

Instead of immigrants who are less crime-prone than our native blacks and Hispanics, we were hoping for immigrants less criminal than our Norwegians.

True, as Bersani explains, “because many immigrants initially settle in disadvantaged environments and are exposed to a number of crime-inducing risk factors, their experiences may be similar to many native-born minorities — particularly the African-American population.”

But here’s an idea: How about NOT taking in immigrants who are poor, uneducated, come from dysfunctional families and settle in disadvantaged environments? …

The rest.

Isn’t It Obvious? Time To Increase Muslim Immigration

Christianity, IMMIGRATION, Islam

With Muslim terrorism in the US on the rise; and at a time of unprecedented persecution of Christians in the Middle East and Africa—the US is admitting 100,000 Muslim immigrants a year. And leading Republicans are pushing to expand that number.

The population of US Muslims, reports Breitbart.com, is expected to swell “from 2.6 million in 2010 to 6.2 million in 2030. This demographic change is entirely the product of legal admissions–that is, it is a formal policy of the federal government adopted by Congress.”

Another major source of Middle Eastern immigration into the United States is done through our nation’s refugee program. Every year the United Stated admits 70,000 asylees and refugees. Arabic is the most common language spoken by refugees, and 91.4 percent of refugees from the Middle East are on food stamps.

MORE.

Rachel Dolezal: A Racially Abused Girl—Really

Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Race, Racism, The Zeitgeist

“Rachel Dolezal: A Racially Abused Girl—Really” is the current column. An excerpt:

… Poor Rachel [Dolezal] painted her face orange, gave herself a Sideshow Bob hairdo, and adopted the ideology of the eternally oppressed. Big deal. Most of America’s authentic poseurs are phonies who’ve never been oppressed.

Unlike most blacks, Dolezal—by the admission of the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Washington-State chapter—had done “quality work” to “elevate the issues of civil rights.”

“I just want to feel beautiful, and this is how I feel beautiful,” the woman said rather plaintively. Yes, Dolezal is the white face of parental and societal displacement. Why am I the only one to find her pitiful, even deserving of pity?

In America, black is beautiful.

To be black is to be more righteous, nobler; carry the heaviest historic baggage—heavier than the Holocaust—and be encouraged to perpetually and publicly pick at those suppurating sores.

To be black is to have an unwritten, implicit social contract with wider, whiter society.

To be black it to be born with an IOY (I Owe You); it is to be owed apologies, obsequiousness, education, and auto-exculpation for any wrongdoing.

Why can’t Rachel have some of that?

Was not Ms. Dolezal displaced for real in her parents’ affections? Rachel’s story should begin with parents Larry and Ruthanne Dolezal, who adopted four children, “three of whom were African-American while the other was from Haiti.”

Does this fashionable adoption not send a message to a vulnerable girl that she and her biological brother are too pale for their pious parents? …

Read the rest. “Rachel Dolezal: A Racially Abused Girl—Really” is now on The Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine.