The Authoritarians

[WiseOne]

Returning to a previous topic (but don't let me sidetrack you from the Israel/Palestine debate):

There appears to be a double standard among Western countries as regards illegal immigration/asylum seekers policies. I think these two can indeed be conflated, because they are actually indistinguishable until you get some evidence of persecution of an individual or individual's immediate community - which requires a legal process. An asylum-seeker from Syria, for example, is not a refugee if they didn't come from a city that's been directly attacked, or if their city is occupied but their neighborhood has not been directly affected.

Anyway, my perception is that the double standard is largely self-inflicted. There's one for the US and Europe, and an entirely different one for Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Chile, and all the other economically stable countries. Canada, for example, has only about 100K illegal immigrants, because they detain/deport and have effectively zero tolerance for it. And, here is an interesting description of Australia's approach, and the effects on incursions onto their shores:

https://ricochet.com/archives/how-austr ... migration/

It is kind of amazing that those in the US who simply want to do what Australia and Canada are already doing are being excoriated as "racist" and "xenophobic". No amount of political science textbook-speak is going to rationalize that away. (And I did take one poli sci course in college...hated it.)

[clacy]

Returning to a previous topic (but don't let me sidetrack you from the Israel/Palestine debate):

There appears to be a double standard among Western countries as regards illegal immigration/asylum seekers policies. I think these two can indeed be conflated, because they are actually indistinguishable until you get some evidence of persecution of an individual or individual's immediate community - which requires a legal process. An asylum-seeker from Syria, for example, is not a refugee if they didn't come from a city that's been directly attacked, or if their city is occupied but their neighborhood has not been directly affected.

Anyway, my perception is that the double standard is largely self-inflicted. There's one for the US and Europe, and an entirely different one for Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Chile, and all the other economically stable countries. Canada, for example, has only about 100K illegal immigrants, because they detain/deport and have effectively zero tolerance for it. And, here is an interesting description of Australia's approach, and the effects on incursions onto their shores:

https://ricochet.com/archives/how-austr ... migration/

It is kind of amazing that those in the US who simply want to do what Australia and Canada are already doing are being excoriated as "racist" and "xenophobic". No amount of political science textbook-speak is going to rationalize that away. (And I did take one poli sci course in college...hated it.)

Totally agree there is a double standard. If the US or EU practice immigration control, they are labeled racists xenophobes.

[MachineGhost]

I don't mean to come at you sideways. But when I say "removing 11 million people seems unworkable, cruel, and will cause all sorts of other bad consequences and violence," responding "yeah but the rule of law," is a bit weak. We're all breaking the law, daily. Law =/= morality nor strategy.

They would say the same about smoking pot or other victimless crimes. There are always deeper meanings than just the facile "rule of law". Follow the tentacles to their logical conclusion and eventually you will wind up at the rotten "alt right" core.

However, for someone like Maddy, I suspect she views "rule of law" as a moral standard. The lack of "rule of law", i.e. illegal immigration enforcement, acts as a magnet for illegal immigation. So does the lack of a guest worker program. Why don't we have the latter kind of common sense? Because the "alt right" decided to do away with it in the 1960's. They're born and bred racists not compassionate pragmatists.

Unfortunately, we're now into that territory of guilt by association if you espouse anything that can be traced back to the "alt right". I don't see how we get out of this one, hence MultiCultural Globalists vs Nativist Nationalists seems very much on the mark about the coming political divide.

And BTW, people complaining about "multi-culturalism" here in the USA don't realize we have a highly successful assimilation program like the Borg do. It is Europe that failed to embrace assimilation in favor of multi-culturalism and that is why the whole place is a serious hellhole of second class non-citizens; proponents project that dysfunction to the USA as inevitable without looking at the hard data. Nonetheless, that gives me small comfort about RIFFFF's and Sharia Law.

[Maddy]

There are always deeper meanings than just the facile "rule of law". Follow the tentacles to their logical conclusion and eventually you will wind up at the rotten "alt right" core.

However, for someone like Maddy, I suspect she views "rule of law" as a moral standard.

To the contrary, I view the rule of law quite pragmatically. Having spent the majority of my career in civil litigation and appeals, I experienced first hand the slow--then rapidly accelerating--decay of the rule of law and have seen what happens when you replace well-considered legal principles with a system of arbitrary, self-referential, "justice."

I'm not talking so much about constitutional law, which has always been a very murky area, but rather the routine, common law principles that govern property rights, contractual transactions, family relations, etc. There has never been anything particularly murky about that--at least until cowboy trial court judges and their court of appeals counterparts decided that it was okay to resolve cases not based upon what the law requires, but upon what they think the result should be. It's no longer unusual to find two appellate cases presenting an identical legal principle, and resolved only a few months apart, that decide the issue entirely differently based upon entirely tangential, nonmaterial facts that happen to have socially or politically resonant overtones.

Not that long ago, you could assure a client, with a reasonable degree of certainty, of how his case would probably be resolved based upon what the law required the outcome to be. That's no longer true. Nor can you confidently counsel a client about how to structure his life and business transactions to avoid problems in the future. It's one big wheel of fortune.

The law is supposed to provide an enduring framework for applying a set of rules consistently and evenhandedly. We're just now seeing what happens to a society when its members lose faith that this basic framework is there to protect them. I'd suggest that it is this realization--coupled with the shift in political power, that is the reason why some many "progressives" are in existential melt-down.

[MachineGhost]

The law is supposed to provide an enduring framework for applying a set of rules consistently and evenhandedly. We're just now seeing what happens to a society when its members lose faith that this basic framework is there to protect them. I'd suggest that it is this realization--coupled with the shift in political power, that is the reason why some many "progressives" are in existential melt-down.

Could you elaborate more on that? Isn't is the liberals that overwhelmingly like to be abdicationists in not following the rule of law or engaging in arbitrary political subjectiveness?

[Maddy]

The law is supposed to provide an enduring framework for applying a set of rules consistently and evenhandedly. We're just now seeing what happens to a society when its members lose faith that this basic framework is there to protect them. I'd suggest that it is this realization--coupled with the shift in political power, that is the reason why some many "progressives" are in existential melt-down.

Could you elaborate more on that? Isn't is the liberals that overwhelmingly like to be abdicationists in not following the rule of law or engaging in arbitrary political subjectiveness?

Yes--exactly. They did so with the apparent belief that the "good results" promised by their ideal society justified whatever damage they inflicted upon the rule of law, and with the false confidence that they had nothing to fear from an arbitrary system of justice because the political winds were at their backs. They were so caught up in being right, and so used to having things their way, that they apparently never considered that the political tide could change and that THEY would be the ones in need of the law's protection. All the crying and shreeking about feeling "unsafe"-- well, no shit.

[I Shrugged]

The title of the thread amuses me.

Because apparently, the ruling left has not been authoritarian!
OK then....