a scratch pad for half-formed thoughts by a liberal political junkie who's nobody special. ''Hard Heads, Soft Hearts'' is the title of a book by Princeton economist Alan Blinder, and tends to be a favorite motto of neoliberals, especially liberal economists.
mobile
email

 
Big Talk:

Who Are The People Who Have Been Hurt, And How Can They Be Made Whole?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/magazine/naturalized-citizenship-immigration-trump.html

Odette Dureland, Haitian-American living in the US since the nineties, green card since 2002, citizen since 2012, with a child in air force training, punished in 2017 and 2018 for an application she may have filled out in 1997, by mistake, and then never followed up on. If this is ok, what is not ok?

What makes the Dureland family's story so horrible are the cascading failures and cruelties: Because of one terrible decision to prosecute the most featherweight of "crimes", an offense which a judge deemed worthy of 5 months in prison, she pays, and her family pays, not just for 5 months, but possibly forever.

http://www.michiganradio.org/post/out-limelight-cindy-garcia-keeps-fighting-immigrant-family-reunification

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2018/02/04/jorge-garcias-mexico/1081266001/

https://www.freep.com/story/news/2018/06/07/jorge-garcia-cindy-garcia-fox-news/677437002/

Perhaps because Jorge Garcia is the same age as me, this tragedy seems impossible to accept. There is no reason for this family to be separated, and re-uniting the Garcia family is one of the political issues I most care about.

There are two sources of illegal immigration, border crossings and visa overstays. It seems to me that visa overstays should be enforced in the same way that bar tabs are enforced. It seems to me that border crossings should be enforced in the same way that the most benign, forgivable forms of trespassing are enforced, with moderate penalties, and most importantly, with a statute of limitations.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/13/AR2005061301460.html

This story, where the trespassers are somewhat sympathetic, and the trespassee is somewhat unsympathetic, seems to me to provide a useful intuition pump as to how the most benign, forgivable forms of trespassing should be enforced:

https://www.theinertia.com/environment/this-is-the-arrest-that-caused-a-giant-lawsuit-to-blow-up-in-a-billionaires-face/

Whatever you think was the appropriate punishment for the Martin's 5, seems to me like the upper bound of the appropriate punishment for border crossers.

One falsehood I see floating around is the assertion that Obama was the "Deporter-In-Chief", with the implication that there is no significant difference between immigration enforcement under Obama and immigration enforcement under Trump. In reality, Obama's immigration enforcement was significantly less cruel than under George W. Bush, which in turn was significantly less cruel than under Trump.

https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-obama-deportations-20140402-story.htm

. . .But the portrait of a steadily increasing number of deportations rests on statistics that conceal almost as much as they disclose. A closer examination shows that immigrants living illegally in most of the continental U.S. are less likely to be deported today than before Obama came to office, according to immigration data.

Expulsions of people who are settled and working in the United States have fallen steadily since his first year in office, and are down more than 40% since 2009.

On the other side of the ledger, the number of people deported at or near the border has gone up — primarily as a result of changing who gets counted in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency's deportation statistics.

The vast majority of those border crossers would not have been treated as formal deportations under most previous administrations. If all removals were tallied, the total sent back to Mexico each year would have been far higher under those previous administrations than it is now. . .

The Spirit of '68

I am one of those people who had a possibly foolish enthusiasm for the 50th anniversary of 1968, and the possibly foolish idea that the Democratic party, 50 years on, is in fundamentally the same place: locked in an intense 3-way between squares, hardhats and hippies, between the people who write the laws, the people who enforce the laws, and the people who protest the laws.

I don't really know how Democrats should appeal to squares or hardhats, but I do think there are a few obvious appeals that Democrats can make to the protestor class:

1. A simple acknowledgement of the legitimacy and importance of protest and dissent. A nation without protestors is a nation that will go to war in order to destroy weapons that do not exist, or to protect delusory dominoes that are in no danger of toppling. The greatest Americans of our time are the ones who protested the Iraq war (I was not one of them). For a citizen of a free country, it is not enough to work hard and play by the rules. A citizen of a free country has a duty to use their god-given common sense, to make sure that the rules are not stupid or evil, to make sure that the work is good.

2. More concretely, I think the Democrats should promise more lenient treatment for Edward Snowden, Reality Winner and other dissenters. There seems to me a lot of scope for political moderation, mercy and peace-making, between the protestor view that Snowden and Winner are heroes, and the extreme establishment/enforcer view that they are traitors.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/12/who-is-reality-winner.html

3. It is now getting on 18 months since Chelsea Manning was released from prison. . .and the world has not stopped spinning on its axis. How many other people could be released from prison, without disturbing the earth's rotation?

4. Support for people like Colin Kaepernick, who has been treated unfairly, for minor offenses. At one point, I actually thought Kaepernick's career arc might follow Steve Young's: a great athlete who became a great QB in the second half of his career. But he never got the chance.

https://theathletic.com/571334/2018/10/08/qa-with-chris-borland-on-the-future-of-football-brain-injuries-and-colin-kaepernick/

https://theathletic.com/89431/2017/08/26/guest-column-the-true-colin-kaepernick-from-someone-who-has-been-there-and-calls-him-a-friend/

note: I removed the reference to Marc Lamont Hill, because I decided that I did not know what he believes, or why he believes it. However, he still deserves fairness, and may not have received it.


Yimbymbap

Back when I had Korean colleagues, I tried to explain the concept of NIMBYism to them, and asked whether Seoul / Korea had a similar phenomenon. They said no, that people in Seoul were happy when there was new construction/development near their property. I wonder if this is true, and why their attitude might be so different from people in the Bay Area?



Jamal Khashoggi

I don't agree with the criticism of disproportionate outrage over Jamal Khashoggi's murder. Turning on a regime because they murdered your friend seems to me to be just about one of the best reasons in the world for turning on a regime. The duty of a progressive is not to dampen the possibly inordinate desire to be loyal to a murdered friend, but to increase the number and kinds of people we feel friendly toward. Perhaps starting with the victims of the Yemen war.


http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/

http://welcomebacktopottersville.blogspot.com/


Little Talk:

Note on avoiding apathy and indifference: Have a minimum amount of active media time, time where you not only read the news, but try to respond as appropriately as you can.

Note on avoiding panic: Have a maximum amount of passive media time, time where you merely consume the news, without trying to respond.

Dorothy L Sayers essay, partly on the difference between ghosted and unghosted effort:

http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/dlsayers/mindofmaker/mind.10.htm

George MacDonald on choosing your neighbor:

http://lib.ru/LEWISCL/mcdonalds_antology.txt

[ 48 ] My Neighbor 

A man must not choose his neighbor:  he must take the neighbor that God sends  him. . .The neighbor is just the man who is next to you at the moment, the man with whom any business has brought you into contact.

Even in homogeneous 19th century Scotland, there must have been no shortage of people confident in their ability to create utopia, just as long as they were allowed to exclude the right people.


Two GIFs

Lawrence and Ali:

https://giphy.com/gifs/aftermath-lawrence-of-arabia-no-prisoners-5C2dVYoWThFx57NhMJ

Bobby Lee:

https://giphy.com/gifs/w9lUjPMB1WX7dtwqjl


Squashing the beef like Drake and Yeezy

https://vimeo.com/39114507

Miller, Bannon and Trump: brutal in peace & cowardly in war.

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justin-taylor/c-s-lewis-three-kinds-of-men/

C.S. Lewis - Kipling's World

. . .There is nothing Kipling describes with more relish than the process whereby the trade-spirit licks some raw cub into shape. . . 

. . .If we all need “licking into shape” and if, while undergoing the process, we must not guard our rights, then it is all the more important that someone else should guard them for us. What has Kipling to say on this subject?. . .

 . . .In His Private Honour the old soldiers educate the recruits by continued bullying. But Kipling seems quite unaware that bullying is an activity which human beings enjoy. We are given to understand that the old soldiers are wholly immune to this temptation; they threaten, mock, and thrash the recruits only from the highest possible motives. Is this naïvety in the author? Can he really be so ignorant? Or does he not care? . . . 

. . .Whatever corruptions there may be at the top, the work must go on; frontiers must be protected, epidemics fought, bridges built, marshes drained, famine relief administered. Protest, however well grounded, about injustice, and schemes of reform, will never bring a ship into harbour or a train into the station or sow a field of oats or quell a riot; and “the unforgiving minute” is upon us fourteen hundred and forty times a day. This is the truest and finest element in Kipling; his version of Carlyle’s gospel of work. It has affinities with Piers Plowman’s insistence on ploughing his half-acre. But there are important differences.

The more Kipling convinces us that no plea for justice or happiness must be allowed to interfere with the job, the more anxious we become for a reassurance that the work is really worthy of all the human sacrifices it demands. “The game,” he says, “is more than the player of the game.” But perhaps some games are and some aren’t. “And the ship is more than the crew”—but one would like to know where the ship was going and why. Was its voyage really useful—or even innocent? We want, in fact, a doctrine of Ends. Langland could supply one. He knows how Do Well is connected with Do Bet and Do Best; the ploughing of the half acre is placed in a cosmic context and that context would enable Langland, in principle, to tell us whether any given job in the whole universe was true worship or miserable idolatry;  it is here that Kipling speaks with an uncertain voice. . .

. . .I have a disquieting feeling that Kipling’s actual respect for the journalist and contempt for the schoolmaster has no thought-out doctrine of ends behind it, but results from the accident that he himself worked for a newspaper and not for a school. And now, at last, I begin to suspect that we are finding a clue to that suffocating sensation which overtakes me if I read Kipling too long. Is the Kipling world really monstrous in the sense of being misshaped? How if this doctrine of work and discipline, which is so clear and earnest and dogmatic at the periphery, hides at the centre a terrible vagueness, a frivolity or scepticism? 

next post: 9-19-19

Update: Postponing the next post to 12/19/2019.


posted by KR at 6:33 PM