An excellent debate is raging over on All Things Beautiful. Here are two excerpts from the COMMENTS section of yesterday's article Shut Up & Put Up.
Kenny Pierce says it all so eloquently:
Knowing Alexandra, I would imagine that she meant not, "We should shoot people who protest against suggestions that we should actually enforce the laws we have," but rather, "If people who are here illegally are going to march in the streets flaunting their illegal status, waving their foreign flags, screaming that since they and their fellow mestizos are the indigenous tribe to whom the entire continent rightfully belongs and therefore that the rest of us should go back to Europe, and just in general demanding that we raise our hands helplessly and let them stay until they have finished the coming tribalistic takeover about which they openly brag — why then we should deport them." Indeed, even the most moderately careful reader might note that the antecedent of "them" in Alexandra's sentence is those specific illegal aliens who engage in "sticking their finger up at us," i.e., people who are here illegally and defiantly hold our laws in contempt. This simple observation makes your immense leap to "keeping law-abiding citizens from expressing opinions publicly" a particularly absurd straw man. But then, of course, flaming "fascist" conservatives for the positions they hold in your fantasies of moral and intellectual supremacy is always much more fun and satisfyingly self-pleasuring than carefully reading, or honestly representing, their actual positions.
To put it in terms simple enough for you to understand with only a few minutes' uncharacteristic concentration: Alexandra is not proposing that we outlaw protests and free speech, only that if people who are here in defiance of our laws are going to flaunt the fact openly, then we should waste no time in starting the deportations with them. In an alternative formulation: since we can't deport all twelve million illegals right away, then we probably ought to start with the ones who express the most open contempt for our laws. Or as a third formulation: if we are going to have immigration laws at all and have any position more restrictive than "anybody who wants to can come on in," then high on the priority list of people we don't let in, and kick out if we catch them after they sneak in, should be people who hate our country and hold our laws in contempt.
As a side note, having spent a great deal of time overseas and knowing a modicum of twentieth century history, it's a source of continuous amusement to me that Republicans think Democrats are "socialists" and Democrats think Republicans are "fascists" — each of which opinions makes patently clear the fact that the ill-educated person who holds it is a fatuously provincial American with no more idea than a cocker spaniel of what fascism and socialism actually look like when you get the real thing.
By the way, on this blog we have lots of discussions between people who have very different points of view, yet like each other and treat each other with respect. If you would like to play nice then we'll play nice back. Or you can keep calling people fascists on the basis of opinions they do not in fact hold, a practice that will be predictably inefficacious in raising our general opinion of Salon's readers. Your choice.
Also ditto to Jeff Durkin who tasks Ethan (the bashing commenter) with a little America 101:
From Ethan: "Once you begin down the road of not allowing protests and free speech, the next thing you know people will start being put in jail because of things like reactionary blogs."The problem with this line, Ethan, is that the people who are advocating citizenship for themselves are not guaranteed freedom of speech and assembly under the US Constitution. Those 'rights' are reserved for citizens of the US, not foreign nationals. We can extend a 'privilege' through the law for foreign nationals to be able to march or opine about their 'rights', but this is not the same thing and, therefore, restrictions on speech in any form for foreign nationals does not impact the rights of US citizens.
Read all the comments – there's excellent discourse going on over there. It's easy to spot the lefties – they just name-call. Everyone else is coherent. Like the Anchoress' hallmark, "…decent people can disagree and still be decent people…".
Following up redneckperil (Kenny Pierce) is Spot On on the Duke Lacrosse "rape"
Hypocricy is not saying that something is immoral even though you've done it yourself. Hypocricy is saying something is immoral and claiming you don't do it yourself, when in fact you secretly do. This would seem obvious, but Americans are master at missing the obvious, whenever missing the obvious makes it easier for them to excuse their own self-indulgent behavior.
At any rate, as I've tried over and over to make clear to the kids, doing something stupid doesn't make you deserve to be falsely accused — but life is not about what you deserve, and doing something stupid quite possibly can get you slandered. Doing something stupid doesn't make you deserve to get raped — but a stupid, slutty, sloppy-drunk, coked-up girl is a heckuva lot more likely to get raped than an intelligent, chaste, sober, drug-free girl, especially when there are lots of horny, amoral, sloppy-drunk male undergraduates in the vicinity. (You can get as upset with me as you want to get for my "judgmentalism" or whatever judgmentally condemnatory epither comes readily to your hand, but it won't change the fact that what I have just said is true, or the fact that if my daughter understands it and you don't bother to make sure your daughter does, you're a heckuva lot more likely than I am to get a devastating phone call late at night sometime during our respective daughters' first couple of years in college.)
News Flash: Christians are NOT rioting over Jesus Cartoons. Here's my answer.
