HandyHandle

Before 1964 or so U.S immigration law was enforced. To deport illegal aliens now is just to return to that time. There’s much to complain about the presidents before 1964 but I wouldn’t call any of them the hard names you call Donald Trump.

Trump is flawed but at the very least he will buy us time. I think all the talk about him being a fascist is absurd. If you want fascism vote for Hillary. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, is very upset over Trump, or rather, over his supporters – he says it’s scary that Trump is so popular. Google ... yaron trump scary crony ... and you’ll find some of his remarks. He doesn’t say very much about Hillary, but of course what he does say is entirely negative. Still, the impression he gives is that Trump is worse. Again, I cannot follow this.

Racism in the sense of preference is the official Objectivist's version of Original Sin. See "ARI Watch".

Some things are obvious, period. That TEW is not a theory is obvious with a little thought.

happiness, Your first post is correct. There was virtually no immigration from the Revolutionary War to the 1830s. During that time America grew by natural increase. And there was very little immigration (except for slaves) from the end of that period until about 1870. Many of the immigrants after that agitated for welfare policies. That was part of the motivation behind the immigration restriction movement , which culminated in very restrictive immigration laws early in the 20th century, especially the one in 1924. The restrictions were more or less affirmed and a bit repealed in the early 1950s, and completely repealed in the late 1960s. Hence the demographic change, ongoing, that we see today.

Trump’s success shows that either (1) most Republicans would violate rights wholesale, or (2) foreigners have no right to enter the U.S., and citizens have no right to import them. Dos restricting immigration violate anyone’s individual rights; is giving the border meaning a legitimate purpose of government? Yes or no – that’s the bone of contention. It’s a pragmatic kind of question but what will America be like when more than 90% of the population is African, Asian, or Amerindian and whites are a tiny minority? Or are we not supposed to notice what’s happening? America will break up long before 90%.

The Trump phenomenon is indeed fascinating. Perhaps people ignore his flaws because immigration is an issue that blows away all others. The clock is ticking. Much further Third World immigration and America is through. The Trump - Windrip comparison doesn’t go very far. See a recent thread here.

By all means read the discussion on Amy’s blog, a widening crack in the dike of rationalism Brook, Binswanger et al erected against common sense.

I haven’t seen the History Channel series and don’t intend to, but I wanted to comment on the following by Repairman: First though, a brief comment on what I left out under the ellipsis: “the most amazing man of the age:”. I haven’t thought about who I’d nominate for that position but it wouldn’t be Tesla, amazing though he undoubtedly was. Speaking of Edison, he would be even more amazing. There are other candidates too, but let it pass. OK, was Edison, desperately or otherwise, trying to undermine any of Tesla’s innovations? “Undermine” meaning some negative action against. Well, what was going on? Before Edison, the only electric lights were carbon arc lights. They worked over only short distances from the power source. These lights operated at high current / low voltage. Edison was the first man of anyone working in the electrical field to realize that that was relevant to the problem of distributing power, and that in order to transfer power by wire over a long distance required the reverse: low current / high voltage and of course a new type of lamp that worked with it. Compared to even geniuses like Kelvin in England he more clearly understood the concepts of current, voltage, and resistance and the consequences of Ohm’s Law regarding power. He understood that the power loss before the current got to the device went as current squared times the wire resistance. He invented a high voltage / low current system, which included the Edison light bulb that worked at high voltage / low current. It was a three wire system (plus, ground, minus) and he patented it. Now about the voltage source, the generator. Basically a generator consists of loops of wire rotating in a magnetic field. The result is alternating current. You might say that alternating current is natural current. Edison knew that such current, even at fairly low voltage, is very dangerous. So he added a commutator to his generator to convert it to direct current. (He also much improved existing generator design.) His three wire system worked with either alternating or direct current. His preference for direct current and his taking the trouble to convert to it was due to his concern for the safety of the end users. (Most people who get electrocuted in their homes today would not have been had the current been direct.) Enter Tesla. He saw the value of Edison’s idea of using high voltage / low current. If high / low is good, higher / lower is even better. That is, you could send power over even longer distances. He added a transformer (discovered by Faraday) right after the generator to step up the voltage and reduce the current, and generator not far from the user to reverse the change. However, transformers (the simple ones of those days anyway) work only with alternating current, so direct current was out. He took his idea to Westinghouse. Westinghouse hired Tesla to design this system, but he did not contract with Edison to use his three wire system on which it was based. Westinghouse was a thief in that regard. I gather Tesla didn’t concern himself with the business end of it. Edison, or rather the Edison company (by then – I think – he had lost control of his company to the financiers), sued Westinghouse and won in court. Westinghouse then contracted to use Edison’s system. The Edison company started a propaganda campaign against alternating current emphasizing its dangers. It was true propaganda but in the end the economic advantage of longer distances between generator and user outweighed considerations of safety. Also some devices (some invented by Tesla, e.g. the alternating current motor) require alternating current. By the way, the electric distribution system has come full circle. For very long distances today direct current is again used. It minimizes resistance losses due to self-inductance. This direct current is then converted to alternating current before being put through a transformer. This corrects some of the misinformation constantly being spread about Edison and the pioneering days of electric power distribution.

Buzz Windrip was the villain of Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here. His hick-like appearance – back-slapping and humble-sounding – concealed the master villain Lee Sarason who controlled him. Windrip wins the presidency by making speeches larded with patriotic bromides. Then, with Sarason’s help, he proceeds to crown himself dictator of the country! Trump is no hick, he’s as humble as a fireworks display, and it’s rather doubtful he’s another man’s puppet. There’s no evidence he would set up a dictatorship if elected. He’s not perfect but Windrip he’s not. About NAFTA and other such trade agreements, American labor shouldn’t have to compete with partial slave labor on their terms, even if doing so increases the U.S. GNP – for obvious moral reasons and also because generally American labor doesn’t partake of the increase, almost all of which goes to the suits. A nationalistic foreign policy, as in the Monroe Doctrine, means keeping out of other countries’ business unless genuinely provoked. Sounds good to me. But NAFTA and the Monroe Doctrine are minor points, the main issue is our immigration disaster. SoftwareNerd says that I ... make no argument for the causation that makes US born people better in some way than third world folk, so it comes across as basically racist. In other words, Third Worlders – considering any characteristic (intelligence, criminal tendency, ability, thrift, honesty, industry, etc.) – are on average just as good or better than native Americans. To say otherwise is racist. I must be a racist. To borrow a line from Hans-Hermann Hoppe, when you say Italians eat more Spaghetti than Germans you don’t mean every Italian eats more Spaghetti than every German. You mean that on average Italians eat more Spaghetti than Germans. Third World immigrants commit much more “stranger violent crime” – the kind of crime you worry about – than native Americans do, especially whites. Likewise they are more likely to take advantage of welfare, SNAP, EITC, affirmative action, housing non-discrimination laws, etc. They are less intelligent. Whether working or not they vote socialist. Again, on average. These are just facts. The facts are racist. We can look at individuals too. But when it comes to mass immigration averages do matter. Take one characteristic, intelligence. Suppose a country’s average IQ dropped 15 points. Would it change the country’s character? Of course it would. What if immigrants came with truth-in-labeling stickers and the stupid (dishonest, criminal, etc.) could be filtered out. Then ask yourself this question: “Do I want to be surrounded by Nigerians, Guatemalans, Vietnamese, etc, whenever I leave my house, no matter how honest and intelligent they are?” It would take a high order of self-abnegation to reply: “Yes, that’s just what I want!” Yet that’s where we’re headed. Take the state of Virginia. It’s not the most desired destination for migrants yet even there the demographic has changed drastically over the years. In 1970 only one in a hundred people were foreign-born, by 2012 one in nine, almost all the additions from the Third World. Considering both Third World immigrants and their children, the number is much more than one in nine. Tell me they are capitalists! See “New California: Mass Immigration Turning Virginia Blue,” blue meaning Democrat. A preference isn’t racist in the bad sense. If it were, a white man’s preference for marrying a white woman would make him evil. Merely having a preference doesn’t mean you think the non-preferred is immoral, stupid, or any other negative thing. It’s just your personal preference. You have a natural right (since 1964 violated by federal law) to discriminate and associate as you please. Many Objectivists have lost sight of that simple truth.

I submitted post #2 to Gus Van Horn’s blog. He replied beginning with a question: “... you regard someone who didn't use the state to steal someone else's property only because a court stopped him as not anticapitalist AND fit to serve as chief executive?” Only? Of course not. Trump is not a consistent advocate of capitalism but there is more to him than two failed attempts to use eminent domain in the 1990’s. They’re a stain on his record but don’t brand him an all around anti-capitalist. By now his enemies have done a lot of digging and these two items are all they’ve uncovered in a career spanning over three decades. They push this stain and ignore everything else because they hate his stand on immigration. Trump isn’t running his campaign on a platform of eminent domain. He’s focused on three issues: the immigration disaster, NAFTA-like trade deals and foreign policy. Because he dares speak the truth about the most important issue of our day, immigration, his popularity has soared. Among Republican primary voters, in six weeks it rose to 19% while Jeb Bush’s sank from 22 to 14%. And who wants Jeb Bush. Suppose, contrary to fact, Trump were a thorough-going statist. The U.S. eventually could recover from him if its people remained Western at heart. If the U.S. were made up of the Americans of yesteryear the door to Mussolini could be gone through both ways. Today the demographic is changing. The door to conquest by Third World migrants is a trap door, one way only. Horn concludes his brief reply with: “... I disagree with his [Trump’s] anti-immigration views and regard a third party (even if he somehow managed to attract pro-capitalists) as an impediment to the cause of liberty.” For explanation Horn provides links to two of his earlier articles, under the words “disagree” and “impediment.” Before I get to them, first a comment on his parenthetical claim that Trump cannot attract pro-capitalists. Given Trump’s meteoric rise in the polls, just who does GVH think he *is* attracting? Who is more likely to choose Trump over Bernie Sanders: Marxists or Capitalists, welfare/grant recipients or people who work for a living without benefit of SNAP, EITC or affirmative action? GVH’s first article is “Treat the Cause, Not the Symptom: Welfare State Is Draw for Illegals” (30 April 2010). At the time of publication the governor of Arizona had just signed law SB 1070 under which Arizona would identify, prosecute and deport illegal migrants by enforcing federal law. Horn disapproves of such laws. He argues as follows. Taking advantage of welfare (public services etc.) is the only thing wrong with those illegal migrants who take advantage of it. Therefore do not fight illegal immigration, fight welfare. Then, he concludes, “the lazy and shiftless will stay home.” I’m not making this up. His is a recipe for the suicide of the West. We ought to fight both welfare *and* illegal immigration *and* legal immigration from the Third World. Otherwise the U.S. will reach a point where it becomes a total welfare state no matter what we do. Ultimately culture, not laws, determines the nature of government. We’ll end up like Haiti forever if our immigration disaster continues much longer. Mr. Horn’s second article is titled “‘Indeed’ Indeed” (21 January 2008). Somehow he makes a distinction between a politician and the ideas he stands for. Horn claims that if you support a man’s candidacy you support the man, that is, everything about him. By supporting his candidacy he no longer has a reason to obey your wishes; he can and will do anything he wants. Horn’s argument is hard to follow. In fact Trump’s candidacy is not divorced from the issues he brings up. People support his fight against the immigration disaster, they don’t support some abstract person. So far Trump is the best candidate who is really in the immigration fight. That we can’t support everything he does and says, or has ever done and said, is too bad, but not something that should automatically make us reject what is all in all a good thing. Our situation is desperate and help has come from an unlikely quarter.

Gus van Horn, Do you think there’s some truth in this?

From Scott Holleran’s article: “Trump ... brings nothing essential to the arena and should be dismissed as the clown or carnival barker many have said he is.” “a sideshow” “insane” Well, Trump does come with baggage. Everyone should remember his colluding with New Jersey’s state government in an attempt to steal someone’s home, so he could build another casino parking lot. Fortunately he lost in court. Though Trump is no Objectivist capitalist I wouldn’t call him anti-capitalist either, as Scott Holleran does at one point. If Trump is anti-capitalist what on earth are Hillary and the other candidates? As Scott Holleran says in a more temperate part of his article, Trump is a “mixed” economy type. But even if a president Trump made the U.S. more statist instead of less, and probably it would be less, eventually we could recover from the damage inflicted. The Pilgrims began their first year in America by imposing out-and-out communism, with the every man’s farm production owned by every other man. After the ensuing disaster they reversed course and became more capitalist than in their former country. They had one thing going for them. The Pilgrims were the same men before and after their experiment with communism, they hadn’t been overwhelmed by Haitians, Guatemalans, Vietnamese, Nigerians, etc. Today we could recover from statism if it were imposed by Americans on Americans, we will never recover from replacement by Third World migrants. Trump is the candidate most consistently opposed to unrestricted immigration. Bringing the issue front and center has made his support among grassroots Republicans soar. People are fed up with our immigration disaster. Despite the substantial Republican grassroot support, Republican leaders oppose his candidacy. They hate him for the very reason the grassroots loves him: his daring to point out what is obvious to everyone. Now they are trying to keep him out of the debates. If Trump must threaten to run as a third party candidate to get treated fairly the responsibility lies with the Republican machine. If it comes down to the Republican machine freezing out Trump we should welcome him as a third party candidate. The Republican machine would get what it deserves, complete destruction, then the third party would become the second. Without Trump there isn’t much difference between the Republicans and the Democrats. These days, to borrow a line, the parties are two wings of the same bird of prey. Voting for “the lesser of two evils” is getting monotonous.

Edison opposed using alternating current in homes because he knew such current is far more dangerous than direct current. Though Edison invented the idea of distributing power using high voltage, low current rather than the reverse, he didn't think the higher voltages enabled by using alternating current justified the decrease in safety. (He was wrong in that people were willing to put up with greater risk in order to get cheaper power.)

Nicky seems to think this thread is about me instead of the immigration disaster. No amount of sophistry will convince me that you would be freer living in Singapore or Hong Kong, China than in America. Yes, there is the race aspect too. Singapore might be OK to visit, but do you want to spend the rest of your life surrounded by Orientals? What’s wrong with wanting to avoid that? Whom does it harm? Assuming Nicky isn’t Black, does he live in a Black neighborhood? Is he happy living there? I wouldn’t be (brother, I’ve tried it). Again, whom does your preference harm? What right of Blacks does it violate? If that kind of racism is evil, why?

SoftwareNerd can do better than that cheap shot. Peter Brimelow is neither antisemitic (unless softwareNerd thinks every Jew is beyond criticism) nor neo-Nazi.

In hoping / gloating that it won’t Nicky sounds like Tim Wise in Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority. This is the second time Nicky has mentioned Hitler in an attempt to make me look bad. In reply consider this: There is a sense in which current immigration policy is Adolf Hitler’s posthumous revenge on America. The U.S. political elite emerged from the war passionately concerned to cleanse itself from all taints of racism and xenophobia. Eventually it enacted the epochal Immigration Reform Act of 1965. This triggered a mass immigration so huge and so different from anything that had gone before as to transform — and ultimately to destroy — the one unquestioned victor of World War II. — paraphrased from Alien Nation (Random House, 1995) by Peter Brimelow.

Nicky failed to name the top two free countries – free, that is, according to the Heritage Foundation – so here they are: 1. Hong Kong 2. Singapore Apparently the Heritage Foundation not only thinks that Singapore and Hong Kong (in fact a part of China) are free, they are the two freest countries on earth. This says more about the Heritage Foundation than it does about Hong Kong and Singapore. Nicky might reply that the Heritage Foundation only claims that these two countries are “economically” free. But in Objectivism there is no valid distinction between freedom and economic freedom. To be truly economically free you must be free. Neither Hong Kong nor Singapore is anywhere near as free as the U.S. About Hispanics, even if most were white: the immigration of Hispanics (and also Asians and Blacks) affects the U.S. adversely. White Hispanics may be better than the rest but most are Catholic and will tend to vote socialist for that reason. (Catholics – as a group, not just Hispanic – slightly favored Obama in the last two elections, and substantially favored Clinton in his two elections.) The point of my posts is this: An immigration moratorium – like we had before 1968 – will not just be good for us, it is necessary for our survival.

Non-white politics is not just slightly socialist, it is significantly, overwhelmingly, socialist. — more of the name-calling Nicky is known for. Amnesty for illegals right now, amnesty for American taxpayers sometime in the future (as in never) — is that a rationalization? About being a racist, in post #13 back on page 1 of this thread I wrote: If you’re a racist for not wanting your country swamped by the Third World you’ll just have to live with the designation. You’re a racist. Get used to it ringing in your ears. Personally I don’t mind it anymore. I am a racist. (Link to a talk by Paul Weston.) If you think that video is extreme, look up the Woolrich killing, which occurred not long after. Paul Weston mentions it in a later talk. I don’t know much about Paul Weston except that he is British and entered politics (now the Liberty GB party) because of concern about Britain’s immigration disaster. The British elite hate Britain as much as Obama and his backers hate America. On the subject of immigration it’s past time students of Objectivism started looking at the real world. Yaron Brook and the others at ARI are leading you down the garden path. Seeing Obama walking next to them arm in arm should give you pause.

Nicky’s question was loaded – as he well knows – and neither Yes nor No is an answer. Nicky might get to his point eventually, but don’t hold your breath.

Replying to softwareNerd ... How a state votes depends on all its voters, white and non-white. The non-whites could vote one way and the state another. The state vote by itself tells nothing about it’s non-white vote. SoftwareNerd left out an important detail about the Carter election. It was way back in 1976 – 38 years ago – when there were far fewer non-whites than today, especially in Texas and California. Another factor is that "Democrats = not-white party" is a fairly recent development. Years ago, especially in the South, it wasn’t true. It was whites writing and calling their Congressmen that got Rubio-Schumer defeated in the House. It was whites who recently defeated a proposal in Oregon that would have given drivers licenses to illegals. WASP is a slur designation for anglo-saxon Protestants. Franklin D. Roosevelt and his administration cannot be described as anglo-saxon Protestant. Harold Laski (British but he influenced the U.S. scene – he lectured at Harvard and Yale for example), on whom the character Ellsworth Toohey is based, was not an anglo-saxon Protestant. No major shift has come, especially among Blacks. We don’t have time for a couple more generations. As “the better Peikoff” said at the end of his podcast (see post #67 here) we need to buy time.

Nicky must know I never said that.

Not a fantasy but hyperbole. It's not that every white would vote Republican. However a significant percentage of whites really are very concerned about immigration and many of those voting Democrat who are not very committed to that party (and that’s a significant percentage) would change to Republican. Thus it would help the Republicans among white voters, which are still a large majority of voters. It would hurt Republicans among non-whites, still a minority. Admittedly the net help is hard to quantify. I don’t know of any polls asking the sort of questions necessary to make an estimate. Democrats seem to agree though. James Carville after the 2010 midterm election (for “demographics” read “immigration results”): “When you get into a presidential electorate, it decidedly favors Democrats, and every year it’s going to decidedly favor them more and more. ... Demographics don’t do anything but get better for Democrats. Every election becomes less white.” Howard Dean (chairman of DNC) in 2008: "... the demographic trends favor the Democrats. ... “If you look at folks of color, even women, they're more successful in the Democratic Party than they are in the white, uh, excuse me, in the [laughs] Republican Party."

About softwareNerd’s last post ... Among whites – though not intellectuals and media hacks – it’s to the Republican’s advantage to be seen as opposing open immigration. The sooner the GOP realizes this the better for them. At this point whites vainly expect Republican politicians to fight amnesty and immigration. If the GOP did indeed stand for this, strongly and consistently, Republicans would win among whites. And they would win elections, because at this point whites are still the majority. Yes, I know, it’s repugnant to be writing like this. The white vote, the Hispanic vote, the Black vote – it would be insane in 1950 when the country was over 90% white (not to mention had literacy tests for voting) and we could focus on fighting welfare. But today talking race is necessary, and the Immigration Act of 1965 made it necessary. It’s another reason to hate the scum behind that bill. They’ve made true what Leon Trotsky never said: You may not be interested in race, but race is interested in you.

That’s the half of it. The other half is that the government isn’t using it’s legitimate power to protect us. What we have now is approaching immigration anarchy. In Spiral Architect’s world there are no governments restricted to the populous of an individual country. Instead, each country’s government ministers to anyone on earth as long as they show up at its – rather fictitious – border. In a word, a kind of one world globalism. In that brave new world America gets swamped by Third World immigrants.