Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Trump’s executive Order on immigration and refugees is causing angst, but not analysis. We need analysis.
For years, I’ve used the lifeboat analogy to discuss immigration. There’s only so much room in the lifeboat, only so many rations. There are 7,000,000,000 people in the world who want better lives which, for most of them, means coming to the United States. We can’t take them all: they’ll swamp the boat. See, for example, Europe today, and that was only a million immigrants.
Lately, it occurs to me the lifeboat is the wrong analogy. A lifeboat implies a temporary accommodation until help arrives. But the rest of the world is worse off than we are. Help will never arrive.
The United States is more like a medieval castle when invading armies arrive, everybody heads for the castle and they slam the gates shut. There’s a limited supply of water and food and limited space. Extra people endanger the survival of everyone already there. They close the gates every night, for that reason. Yes, the wolves may eat you, if you arrive late and the gates are already shut for the night; but the gates will not be opened for you in the dark when it’s possible for invaders to slip in.
In the intelligence world, it’s night right now. Governments collapsed, sources compromised, consulates sacked, refugees and raiders look alike. We can’t tell friend from foe so nobody gets in until daybreak when we can sort them out. Daybreak will arrive when the intel for background checks and deep vetting is strong enough to trust, however long that takes.
Even after our intel improves, we need to choose carefully who we let in because their kids become our new citizenry. Carlos and Maria might be ecstatic to get jobs as gardeners and hotel maids in America, but their kids will grow up watching MTV and wearing Nikes. They won’t be thrilled to take menial jobs. Second generation Somalis are the ones going on jihad, here and abroad. N-th generation Blacks are the ones insisting their lives matter. “Grateful” is not an inherited trait.
Western Civilization, and particularly our constitutional republican form of government as we know it in England and America, is a relatively recent development and a very small part of human history. If that’s what we’re trying to preserve in the castle until the Dark Age ends, we need to be very choosy indeed. We need the best, brightest, hardest working immigrants with morals and cultural values most compatible with our own. Reuniting Carols and Maria’s extended family of unskilled laborers is heartwarming, but more unskilled labor is not what the nation needs to prosper.
Trump temporarily halted immigration from countries that sponsor terrorism. I’d go further and impose a temporary moratorium on ALL immigration, ALL refugees, until we sort out our national priorities and institute procedures to ensure new arrivals don’t threaten our national survival. It’s not just for me – I’ve already lived most of my life in a clean, safe America – it’s for my grandkids. Do I want them to grow up in Minnesota or Mogadishu?
Joe Doakes
To many on the left, the fact that you worked and sacrificed enough to build a place worth fleeing to makes you unworthy of being there.
Well, they had a “transfer of power” that didn’t involve technicals and famine. That’s something.
We can debate whether that would have happened anyways, but certainly that’s a good start. We can then ask how much blood and treasure will not be squandered with a decent government in the Horn of Africa. If indeed sending people back helps, then we’ve got an argument for billions in expense, along with dozens of American lives, that would be spared–and would then be an acceptable cost to the program.
Emery, you seem to want to get into the weeds on this.
No problem.
But we need a starting point.
What, in your opinion, makes a person a Muslim or a Christian? If a person says “I am a Muslim.” what criteria would you use to say “Yes, this person is a Muslim.” or “no, this person is lying, he is not a Muslim”?
Emery, you seem to want to get into the weeds on this.
Dude, he is not just in the weeds, he is at the bottom of the swamp. Please don’t tell me you are going to bring up a concept of taqiyya. That will blow his head into a million little pieces.
Some truths really are simple, and sometimes brevity really is the soul of wit.
Some of them assimilate in five years, some in ten.Many who arrive in late middle age never culturally assimilate. But their children and grandchildren do. It is not easy to find communities of second and third generation immigrants in America who have resisted the basic norms of American life.
Seems to be pretty common among Somalis and only Somalis. What does that say about THEM? Maybe that they should all be givenice onew way tickets back to their homeland. Every single ISIS recruit was at least a second generation immigrant with all being US citizens. Every. Single. One.
I suspect that what Emery’s last fortune-cookie comment meant was that he had a difficult time explaining why so many mass killers have said that their murder sprees follow from their Islamic religion.
It’s one thing, when you are president, to say to a compliant press that Islamic killers followed a twisted version of their religion. It’s another thing entirely to try to reason yourself and others to that conclusion.
A former professor of mine kept a poster on his wall that said, “Any philosophy that can fit in a nutshell belongs there.” Words of wisdom.
After watching this vid, I think that MAGA may require banning Russians from the US, too:
https://youtu.be/EXcOOVxgpJc
Though they seem to stop their cars after an accident. That shows responsibility!
Maybe Trump can assign this mission to Lieutenant General Michael Flynn. It may help to keep Flynn occupied and prevent him from turning into Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North 2.0.
Every chance I get, Emery, I remind people that when Obama took office, Iraq was stable, Libya was stable, and there was no Syrian civil war nor was there an ISIS, Russian had not annexed Crimea and was at peace with Ukraine.
Obama made a shambles of US foreign policy. Ollie North, on the other hand, was responsible for the Reagan administration violating the Boland Amendment and killing a bunch of commies.
But in the end, the main issue will be what it has been–namely, the delusional, self-destructive ideological/strategic premises and preconceptions of the decision makers. Even if Flynn staffed the NSC with Eagle Scouts, that would still be the real problem.
4 non-sequitur comments and not even an effort to address the turd eTASS lobbed into the punch bowl and taken to task for. You are indeed worse than DG.
I have no intention of trying to deal with anyone who wants to diagram my sentences or outline my posts. One of us is never going to be happy here, and I think it should be you.
I am quite happy just having said my piece. I was curious if you had any rebuttal beyond name-calling. You have answered my question; thanks!
And there we have it. Proof positive in your own words that you admit to being the poo slinging, uncritical demagogue who will not, nay, cannot defend your point of view. Natch. Got it, DG. Jr.
It is hard to condemn violence when the founder of your religion ordered the massacre of 800 of the Banu Qurayza Jews.
Violence, committed against unbelievers and other Islamic sects, has always been an integral art of Islam. It is trickier trying to pin explicitly religious justification on Christians. The violence we sometimes associate with Christianity tends to have historical national and dynastic roots, rather than religious roots. Even the famed ‘witch persecutions’ of Christian Europe took place within a very narrow window of time (circa 1500-1700 AD).