https://defan752.wordpress.com/sword-art-online-volume-15-alicization-invading/
This will get you to the newest volume of SAO. There's no telling if the anime will ever reach this deeply into the light novel series, so you may as well read this book while you can. Like usual it's amazing, but like usual it ends on a cliffhanger and just leaves you waiting for more.
Volume 15 came out in August of 2014. So nine months later our fan translators have given birth to an english version. This would be far too slow for my tastes, but I can't really complain since the next volume of SAO hasn't been published yet, which means English readers are just as deep into the series now as native Japanese can be. No one has an advantage as we all wait restlessly for more.
The consensus position in America now is that we want a secure border and to stop further illegal immigration, but we also want amnesty for those who already got in. In addition, we want unrestricted legal immigration for anyone who wants to come here and find a job. This implies that far from overstepping their democratic bounds, the President and his colleagues are far more restrictionist on immigration than popular opinion is asking for. The consensus American position is a libertarian open-borders-but-no-welfare immigration policy. Neither the democrats nor the Republicans are remotely near that position. Both of them look like Iron Curtain members in comparison to that.
This means that calling for the US government to crack down on immigration and restrict it even further is not a vote winning proposition. It just makes you look mean spirited. People are fine with any neighbors so long as they're hard working. When you, on your own, turn around and say I don't want to have anything to do with these damn foreigners, you just end up looking like the cause of the friction and the fact is you should be removed from the country, not all these hard working foreign immigrants who just want to achieve the American dream and live and let live.
This is why zeroing in on criminal elements is a better strategy. Stay in line with public opinion and say that anyone who wants to come to America and contribute to it is welcome, but if you just want to join gangs, sell drugs, shoot places up, wage jihad, litter, play loud music, or otherwise just not act in a civilized and decent manner, sorry but our country's all full up.
If we can keep the riffraff from immigrating to America, America's average quality would improve even if an influx of a billion immigrants flooded in. We've got so much riffraff already here inside our borders, already reproducing daily, that non-riffraff-immigration couldn't help but improve the gene pool as a whole.
An amnesty for all the hard workers who have already come here and stayed out of trouble with the law for the last decade is a good start to prove you aren't just full of hatred for innocents. Pass the amnesty in exchange for securing the border, and then give clear, high standards for who can immigrate to America legally, with no strict numeric quota. As many billions of people who want to come here can come, so long as they are up to standard. This shows we have no intention of discriminating against or excluding anyone. They're all treated as separate individuals and as equals no matter what their origin story. Having a college degree and a job lined up for them ahead of time before coming here is a good proximate of what kind of immigrants America is looking for. This is what the national consensus wants to see from its immigrants.
If we're right and immigration is too relaxed, too many bad people are flooding in, etc, and it's destroying our country, this will become evident in time. It will not become apparent any time soon, though, so arguing this case just makes you look not only mean spirited and hateful towards 'the other,' but also paranoid, delusional, and stupid. This is because America is doing just fine in terms of low crime, low corruption, the strongest economy in the world, the strongest military in the world, excelling in the sciences, the arts, and world athletic competitions. There's been no sign that immigration is weakening America so far, and it's already been ongoing for 50 years. If immigration really were such a horrid idea, why hasn't anything bad happened already? If it's just marginally harmful to society, why not focus on more harmful things we can all agree on, like safer roads or curing cancer? Proving that immigration is bad is not the nail in the coffin. It has to be so bad that it takes priority over all other social concerns, like education, the economy, taxes, spending, deficits, the debt, corruption, crime, global warming, the environment, and on and on. Harping on and on about immigration if it isn't a big deal again just makes you look motivated by hatred for foreigners, not genuine concern about the problems caused by immigration.
If you mention in passing that immigration is hurting America, alongside many other things, and bring it up as relatively often as you do other things, then you sound like the voice of reason. If you zero in on immigration as the biggest problem in the world, despite it not seeming to be any problem at all in American history so far, you just end up looking like a doofus.
I say we should just let the experiment play out. Allow in unlimited immigrants, just like the American people say they want, and just see how things go. If we all hold hands and sing kumbayah, great. If it all goes to hell, that's great too. It means we can then come together a second time, admit that a melting pot of all peoples from all corners of the globe does not actually make for a good nation, and split up into smaller homogenous communities which will try the exact opposite strategy instead, now completely convinced that they were previously on the wrong course. Either way we win. The worst thing that could happen is we allow in a trickle of immigration, it slowly erodes the country, it's always harming us, but it's too small a factor to ever identify as the actual problem so we never fix it no matter how long the struggle continues.
Judo is all about using the enemy's momentum against them. In this case, we should allow all sorts of liberal pet causes. For instance, we should completely refrain from policing blacks in black neighborhoods. Just let it be an anarchy there. So long as you're in your hood, do as thou wilt is the whole of the law. They complain that police are arresting and jailing too many blacks? Fine, just leave them to their primordial jungle and let things play out as they prefer.
Likewise, all drugs should be legalized, since people complain that the drug war is the cause of all their woes. Legalize drugs and just see if the community flourishes or flounders. So long as we keep drugs illegal, they can blame everything on the drug war. But once we legalize drugs, they'll finally have to take responsibility for their own lives.
Likewise, not just gay marriage should be legalized, but all forms of marriage should be legalized. You should be able to marry multiple people, children, your own relatives, whatever. If love is all you need, why on Earth should gays alone be given this newfound freedom?
People will always vouch for liberty until they see the bad consequences of it. Obviously, if there are no bad consequences and people were correct that conservatives were just being paranoid, that's great. That's fine. Now we're all a little more free to pursue our happiness as best we can. If there are bad consequences though, that would provide empirical proof that doing things the liberal's way doesn't work and unlimited freedom is not the correct foundation for a civilization. So long as we don't experiment with the way they do things, we can never prove them wrong, which means we can never as a society agree on a basic foundational principle for our country or a basic moral code or even a basic law code.
Saying, 'if we do this there will be bad future consequences' is a weak argument. It rallies to your banners future legions of phantom events that prove you right in the present, without having to point to a single iota of evidence that currently actually exists and agrees with you. Anyone can say that. Until you actually do something and it actually has bad consequences, you're just fear mongering and being an annoying oppressive busybody. Russia survived the Soviet Union. France survived the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Experimenting isn't the end of the world. If in truth the bad consequences do occur, we can learn from them and improve as a people. If they don't, we can learn from that and expand our basic liberties. Only by doing nothing are we stuck in the same old ditch forever. We can afford to try out liberal ideas without committing to them fully for the next millennia. This isn't an all or nothing proposition. Give way on liberal demands, wait until they go belly up, then point out liberals have failed. This is an infinitely stronger argument that paranoid delusions and prophecies of doom. There's no reason why we can't try out other people's ideas for five or ten years, or however long is necessary to prove them right or wrong. The universe will last for billions of years more. There's time enough for every social policy plan imaginable to be implemented and discarded as society sees fit.
No comments:
Post a Comment