* This is a good time to reflect on our extraordinary good fortune so far–we have a pretty large Muslim population that *hasn’t* become a permanent resentful underclass and a source for terrorist recruiting. This is presumably not because of our clever policies, but rather luck–France, Belgium, and the UK appear to have gotten a much worse grade of Muslim immigrants. There is not an obvious reason why this has to keep working out for us, either.
I wonder how much of this is due to getting more ambitious/smarter/harder working Muslim populations immigrating here, and how much is due to the resentful underclass niche already being mostly filled by blacks in the U.S.
* When I was a kid, I remember my dad always talking about pendulum swings in politics. And now I’m an old guy, and like half the big political issues look like pendulum swings to me. At some point in a fit of good-intentioned penal reform, we let too many bad people out of jail. Crime went up partly as a result of that and partly due to whatever weird social forces move crime rates. So we all got scared of criminals and passed laws to lock a whole bunch of them up again, and we overdid it–you can see that because we have an incredibly high incarceration rate relative to other countries. Pendulum swing.
I expect much of Europe is at a different place in their pendulum swing on this issue. Eventually they’ll expand their prison population to be able to lock up all the folks who badly need locking up, and most likely they’ll overshoot and end up locking up a lot of low-level nobodies who don’t really need long prison terms. And eventually, their pendulum will swing back on this issue, too.
* Blacks are black even though they’ve been in the USA for 400 years. Muslims are “European” if their parents arrived in Europe five seconds before they were born.
I guess whether Muslims are Muslim or “European” all depends on which answer makes (real) Europeans look bad.
* Is this what Europeans look like?
No. These are Europeans.
* This latest meme about the attackers being European, and thus completely unrelated to the immigration issue, is just proof that they have no intent on changing their views. Even some 2nd amendment supporters will agree that there are limits to gun ownership and will support a ban on fully automatic rifles. Or they will support more background checks of private gun sales. Some abortion supporters will agree there needs to be limits on late term abortions. But with immigration it appears there is no room for compromise. No matter what the results it must continue unabated.
Even with a Trump victory and similar positive elections in Europe, I doubt the minds of these open border supporters will change. They will probably use every legal trick in the book, including hearings in front of friendly justices, which will tie up Trump’s actions in courts of law.
I think the only way to change the majority of open border supporters’ views is to shift the paradigm of the issue. Currently the issue is seen as one in which the rich white nations are helping the poor third worlders by bringing them in. Additionally there is the bonus that it annoys the wrong type of whites, i.e. us. Instead if somehow these people could be made to see that immigration is robbing the third world of its talent and that bringing them here is akin to the old colonialists extracting resources from those far off places, it might begin to get the majority of the open borders crowd to reassess exactly why they support it. Additionally instead of playing up the white angst which makes them happy, we could play up the fact that these immigrants are being brought in to support whites in their retirement years. Are you kidding? That is akin to slavery, isn’t it?
Yes I know the real elite like open borders for cheap labor and such. But I am referring to the mass of voters we all know among our friends and relatives who dutifully reject any immigration restrictionist candidate and get squeamish even discussing the issue. These are the people who have been trained to fear the charge of racism and thus will go along with anything that is not racist. Therefore, changing the paradigm of immigration from the perspective that opposition to it equals racism to continued support of it equals racism is what is needed to flip this unfortunately large group.
* “Europe’s terrorist threat, while rising, has come overwhelmingly not from foreigners but from fellow Europeans. And terrorism experts say it’s Europeans who’ve traveled to fight with ISIS and are now coming home, not refugees or migrants, who pose the real threat.”
Terrorist threats from so-called “Europeans” who have names that sound like they came straight out of Aladdin.
It’s funny how these so-called “Europeans” who pledge allegiance to ISIS never have Western sounding names.
* I guess on the other end, if you accelerate immigration and displace the europeans, then your problem is also solved. you’ll have just another dysfunctional african or muslim country, except now it’s located in europe. It worked for Rhodesia and South Africa. During apartheid, South Africa was forever in the news as some kind of never-ending crisis, but once the whites were removed from power, all problems were ostensibly resolved. maybe whites just need to get tf out of the world and all problems will be resolved, right?
* Steve: could you write about the rise of the pro-immigrant meme in correlation with more women coming into western politics? Merkel’s nonsense probs has a nefarious and blackmail background to it, but can also be attributed to her being a woman (embrace the world), much as Thatcher’s hardness was overreaction due to her having to prove her manliness to the male political class. Basically the rise of female politicians means dissolution of western society, or something along those lines. What difference does it make whether a female pol has kids or not?
* My late grandmother was particularly fond of the truism “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”, which you don’t really hear much anymore, though I admit the metric version doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. My grandfather liked to say that common sense wasn’t all that common, and it seems Taub is trying her best to make it even less so.
A lot of 21st-century liberal writing seems to have the aim of convincing us that common sense/intuition is wrong. There are certainly cases where that’s true, but most of the examples that I can think of off the top of my head involve things that human beings only started thinking about very recently (evolution, quantum/relativistic physics, cardinalities of infinite sets, probability theory). In contrast, primates, being social animals, have been thinking about interactions with other primates for millions of years, so I feel like evolution has given most of us a pretty good cognitive tool set for evaluating our relationships with groups of other humans, particularly ones with a propensity for violence. I don’t know what evolutionary psychologists call this faculty(noticing?), but whatever it is, it’s gotten us this far, so why are progressives so bent on getting rid of it now?
* It’s extraordinarily culturally insensitive of us to police Muslims using principles designed for Europeans. We need to take multiculturalism to its logical conclusion and institute multicultural policing. This would include applying shariah law to Muslim criminals and communal violence for Muslim terror attacks. This wouldn’t be violence for its own sake, but violence specifically to facilitate intercultural understanding.
Torching a block or two of Molenbeek for example would translate to “Cut that shit out!”
* This quote by Aristotle should be stamped on the minds of every politician and journalist,
“Another cause of revolution is difference of races which do not at once acquire a common spirit; for a state is not the growth of a day, any more than it grows out of a multitude brought together by accident. Hence the reception of strangers in colonies, either at the time of their foundation or afterwards, has generally produced revolution…”
The term immigrant is a legal term without much meaning. Donald Trump is married to an immigrant woman but this is rarely brought up in his defense to show that he is pro-immigrant. What matters is what culture, race and civilization do you come from. Immigrants per se are not the problem; Muslims are the problem whether they be immigrants or not.
* Can you name a mainstream leftist propaganda outlet that is more noxious than VOX? I doubt it’s possible. Its staff writers are also overwhelmingly Jewish – surprisingly so even by left-wing NYC standards.
* I have a dream of the day when smack dealers are judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
