Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Two Stories

The big story is, of course, Yokel Haram seizing a federal building in Oregon. The guys of VanillaISIS have basically taken all the language of white grievance and turned it into a lesson of white privilege.  As many have said, imagine if these guys were Black Panthers.

This morning, on my wife's NPR, they were interviewing an immigration activist protesting the rounding up on Central Americans for deportation.  These immigrants had been given a certain amount of time to justify why they should be allowed to stay, and having failed to do so, are being deported.  The immigration activist called this police state tactics and tyranny.

Which is exactly the language that the Yall Qaeda yahoos are using.

In an age of a la carte television, Uber apps and Amazon overnight shipping, we have increasingly frayed the edges of the shared experience of community.  We no longer think of the whole, but rather our individual place and privilege.  This is reflected in the naked selfishness of those who oppose Obamacare but love Medicare as well as those college activists who want to strip away names and history because an ancient name carries ancient sins that upset these individuals.

What this means in terms of Malheur and immigration is that there is no longer an even basic respect for the rule of law.  And that's really troubling.

Yes, the federal land bureaucracy is maddeningly lodge in inertial stasis.  Yes, it's sad that we can't accept these families fleeing the violence of Central America.  But there are laws, people.  And those laws apply to all of us.  We don't get to pick which laws we abide by.  That's not part of the deal.

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