Cultural Division

 Posted by  Immigration, Poverty, Racism, The Media  No Responses »
Nov 202007
 

In his New York Times editorial today, David Brooks argues that American society has become increasingly splintered along racial and ethnic lines. The bulk of his evidence comes from the world of music. He notes that the artists and audience for rock bands is increasingly white-only, and that as a result modern rock bands don’t have the mass appeal that the great bands from previous generations had. He ends by noting the following:

We live in an age in which the technological and commercial momentum drives fragmentation. It’s going to be necessary to set up countervailing forces — institutions that span social, class and ethnic lines.

Of course anyone who has actually turned on VH1 (in the middle of the night when they are showing actual videos–hey, insomnia happens…) or read the production sheet on a pop music album lately understands that Mr. Brooks is 100% wrong. But in this case, why Mr. Brooks is wrong says quite a lot about white America.

Continue reading »

Motivating to Hate

 Posted by  Immigration  2 Responses »
Oct 252007
 

It’s shockingly easy to motivate racial hatred. Remind people what their problems are: unemployment, taxes, wars, crime, drugs, etc. Tell them that those problems result from a competition for scarce resources. Whatever your problems are, they result from a lack of enough money, jobs, women, etc. to go around. Tell people that a whole lot of people they don’t even know are having the same problems for the same reasons. And then tell people that a whole lot of people who aren’t like them are doing much better, because they are better organized, or the government helps them more, or because they have some “unfair” advantage. Hitler used this basic strategy to motivate Germans to hate Jews. The KKK used it to motivate southerner whites to hate blacks. The Hutu Power movement in Rwanda used it to motivate Hutus to hate Tutsis.

Continue reading »

What Fred Said

 Posted by  2008 Election, Immigration  No Responses »
Sep 072007
 

Fred Thompson officially entered the presidential race.  More importantly, he now has an official campaign website that has actual policy information on it.  The caveat, of course, is that there isn’t a whole lot of information on his site yet.  Basically he discusses two issues at length: federalism and immigration reform.

Continue reading »

Small Town Bigotry

 Posted by  Immigration, Judicial System  7 Responses »
Jul 272007
 

A federal district court ruled yesterday that the city of Hazelton, PA has no right to pass anti-illegal immigration ordinances.  At issue were two laws.  One would have fined landlords who did not require proof of citizenship or visa when renting to immigrants.  The other made English the official language of the city, even to the point of forbidding city employees from providing translated documents without permission.  The judge ruled that these ordinances violated state law, federal law, and were unconstitutional for reasons of due process and for infringing on Congress’ constitutional right to regulate immigration.  You can read the full text of the decision here.  It was the right decision, and I applaud Judge James Munley for making it.

Also I should note that this decision likely invalidates similar laws in hundreds of communities nationwide.  Those laws, like Hazelton’s, were predicated on the notion that illegal immigrants are bad for a community, and therefore the community has every right to evict them.  Of course, there is a lot of bigotry behind those statements.  But what really baffles me is that almost every time those kinds of statements have been made, they are accompanied by what is surely a demonstrably false assertion: that illegal immigrants are a drain on public coffers.

Continue reading »

Conservative Irony

 Posted by  Crime, Immigration, Legal Philosophy, Legal Reform  No Responses »
Jul 202007
 

One of the great ironies of the Scooter Libby trial was that the same conservatives who have for years fought for high mandatory minimum sentences–and against allowing judicial discretion to reduce those sentences–ended up complaining that the sentence given to Mr. Libby based on those sentencing guidelines was too harsh.  Now we have the second verse of that song, although this time the “overly harsh” sentence is being doled out to two dirty border patrol agents.

There is a lot of debate about what happened.  The story told by conservative talk-radio, not to mention Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, WorldNetDaily, etc. starts with two of our heroic border patrol agents who see a suspicious van near the border just outside of El Paso–a van that is currently being used to smuggle hundreds of pounds of marijuana across the border.  As they approach, the smuggler gets out of the van and runs away.  At some point, the story goes, he reaches behind himself and half-turns, as if to point a weapon back at the heroic border patrol agents.  This makes sense, because we all know that drug smugglers are well-armed, for the most part.  The agents open fire, but the man keeps running and manages to get back across the border.  Shortly thereafter, the Mexican government demands that the border patrol agents be brought up on charges for shooting an unarmed man.  The US attorney, Johnny Sutton, bows to that pressure, and throws the book at the heroic border agents.  He misleads the jury into convicting them, and goes out of his way to fight for the maximum sentence possible by charging them with the use of a gun to perpetrate a felony–a charge that carries a mandatory 10 year minimum sentence.  He also gives the drug smuggler “victim” immunity from the original drug charge, and gives him a visa to be able to come to the trial–which the drug smuggler uses to smuggle marijuana once more.  Of course, given this storyline, conservatives are demanding a pardon and/or reinstatement for the border patrol agents (who were “just doing their jobs”), and are bucking to have Mr. Sutton fired.

Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries
© 2012 leftfielder.org login Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha