So who's really the softie on the subject of illegal immigration? As with all things in America the answer will be found in the alternate reality you prefer and not necessarily the one in which 'is' means 'is.' Being elitists (because some of them are rich) the party of the working man is usually accused of being "soft on immigration" although what that means is hard to tell, but I'm taking the words of the other side for it, because they and their corporate sponsors can't have all that money and be wrong.
Those corporate sponsors however are pouring large sums of money into Republican candidates who may be expected as quid pro quo to go along with their requests that immigration quotas be substantially increased or dropped entirely. Sponsors such as --you guessed it -- Rupert Murdoch who according to the propaganda from the party he gives millions to and those who believe it, isn't a Republican or an elitist. Then there are the Barons from Marriott, Texas Instruments, Hilton, and Intel and many, many, others who want to bring in more immigrants too. Some might be persuaded by the fact that they're universally Republicans who donate to the GOP and to their think tanks and own propaganda outlets for Republican viewpoints that they are Republicans. Welcome to America. Here we do not address such things as facts -- we take polls and the polls, even when they contradict each other tell us Rupert Murdoch is not a Republican or an elitist.
To be sure and to try to keep in touch with sanity as much as possible, I have to say that Republicans differ on the issue of quotas and there is resistance in those quarters to the idea of increasing them. Both skilled and unskilled workers in sufficient quantity will depress wages and more surely because the idea of a minimum wage is also under attack from the same parties that want to open the gates further. Owning all the money and wanting much more at the expense of the struggling classes hardly makes them elitists though, nor is it class warfare -- not if the polls say otherwise.
I guess that favoring the welfare of the corporations at the expense of workers isn't considered elitist any more, while advocating a decent minimum wage is, but that being true, the word becomes awfully hard to define unless those tiny curled up dimensions mathematicians like Calabi and Yao assure us probably exist, come into play here. Reality is a very complex thing. After all if a particle can be both wave and solid and if as Dr. Feynman said, with a nod to Messrs. Bose, Einstein and Heisenberg, that photon has been everywhere in the universe along it's path from the sun to you, perhaps one can be an elitist regardless of one's position as long as one other disagrees with him. Then too, things are relative as Einstein proved, Jewish elite liberal that he was. If you skipped school like Ms. O'Donnell, it's probably just as much a myth as evolution and who is to say she's wrong? That would be elitist which is much worse than being right.
Certainly being for 'smaller government' means being in favor of more agencies and more employees and more interference with private matters and morals while covering it up with Orwellian equivalences. Wasn't a farleftliberal and potential antichrist president the only one to actually shrink government amidst overwhelming protest from the small government howler monkeys? By the way, if they evolved into Obamahaters, are they still doing it? I don't know for sure, perhaps Eisenhower did too, that lefty, but as Reagan and Cheney, amongst others, said: Debt doesn't matter and perhaps as has been demonstrated with photons, there is no unique history. Everyone's right, left, liberal, conservative and yes, elitist depending on your framework. The same goes for smart. Even the suggestion that the guy with Doctorates makes a better doctor than someone not quite qualified to be a Union plumber is elitist although the perception is that being elite themselves, the smartest guys in the room have the least credibility. ( are you getting all this, camera guy?) That makes everybody else the real smart people, doesn't it? People like Christine O'Donnell and Sarah Palin and the host of Tea Party "experts" on history, economics, paleontology and nearly any other discipline that is supplied by matriculating through a night at a Holiday Inn Express. They must be the real smarties because the polls say so.
In the history that seems apparent from my viewpoint, the people with the most and most expensive lobbyists and creative propagandists want more green cards issued and want to pay the lowest wages possible. I should probably state that the other way around because that's the way the vector of causation points, from my elitist point of view. One might be expected to think that the guys ( and most of them are guys) with the lion's share of the nation's wealth would be elitists and likely to view the "masses" as little more than customers to be milked and the labor they use as a commodity to be bought as cheaply as possible. One does know that they view having to pay more in taxes as a result of the privileges that allowed them the power to get so rich is Communism although Adam Smith advocated it and Marx did not. That doesn't make them elite though, since the less than scrupulously washed sign carriers out in the street who just had their taxes cut are demanding even lower levels for Mr. Marriott and Mr. Murdoch, so again, we can't really assign an absolute value or definition to the term, leaving it to be used ad libidum and as it appears in the vernacular, it simply means anyone you're jealous of. Republicans tend to be a jealous lot. They struggled for everything they have, you know, while others had it handed to them: lazy shiftless others - and elitists.
Of course this is a populist, mob motivated culture, isn't it? Polls determine what is true and truth is opinion -- even if the opinions of that mob correlate more heavily to the opinions they're required to have to expedite their oppression and build the wealth of Marriotts and Murdochs, friends to the common man. So if the mob believes that the Democrats are "elitist" by dint of having just as much money and perhaps a less tenuous connection with education, so it is. It's a relativistic world. It's a quantum world. the history and nature of what we call reality will always have been what it needs to have been to maximize power and wealth. If the Republicans win the presidency again, it will always have been some other way. The uprising of the oppressed masses will be both Marxist and Free Market fundamentalism, the underdog the elitist, the Czar and the peasant indistinguishable; hard and soft, yin and yang: it all blends together in some uncertain, cimmerian mist and quantum foam.
Actually, immigration is a non issue.
ReplyDeleteIf you do away with minimum wage and unemployment insurance then before you know it American citizens will either be prostituting their kids and or robbing banks or...
They will work for whatever they get.
It gets better when you lower taxes and do away with social security and medicare.
"American citizens will either be prostituting their kids and or robbing banks or..."
ReplyDeleteOr doing what they did before them pesky Liberals tried to make sure it wouldn't happen again: abandoning their families and riding the rails, jumping out windows. . . The history of the Great Depression is a prime example. It's now Roosevelt's fault and the tax cuts and lack of banking and securities regulations had nothing to do with it. The huge government spending, financed by higher taxes had nothing to do with ending it either.
What is truth? asked Pilate.
The flip side of too much specialization in highly advanced cultures is the evolution of a highly specialized form of ignorance.
ReplyDeleteCompare the lot of today's technocrat with the life of a hunter gatherer. Hunter gatherers retain a rich vocabulary (thousands of words) to describe plants and animals in the wild that are useful for survival. Modern highly specialized technocrats have lost this knowledge. Inevitably, technocrats will pick the poisonous mushrooms in the forest; whereas hunter gatherers are a lot more clever.
Technocrats should think about ancient knowledge that has been lost before they yammer about how great and superior they are (which they are not). If anything, technocrats manufacture ignorance in greater abundance than microchips.
"Technocrats should think about ancient knowledge that has been lost"
ReplyDeleteMost ancient knowledge seems to be the result of eating those wrong mushrooms.
I never liked the word 'microchip' and I think that, like 'spacewalk' it's the result of journalists trying to make you think they know what they're writing about. Everything from an SMD to a printed circuit RFID to a resistor is a "Chip" to them. Science didn't manufacture that ignorance, it was there from the beginning.
But --- the above was a tongue in cheek romp through Quantum mechanics and the uncertainty of political reality and the unbearable blurriness of political thought, with a bit of bullshit chutney on top. It's not supposed to make sense.
Technocracy? As far as I knew that's a strange Utopian proposal from the 1920's about replacing money with 'energy credits' I don't know what else a technocrat might be.
To be succinct, as with the indeterminability of the position of a particle over time showing that it's history is infinitely flexible, so it is with political history, political definitions and Republican politics. Our fixed points of reference can't actually be referenced or fixed. Delta X times Delta P being greater than or equal to Plank's constant over two - and Tyler too. Da steh ich nun, ich armer Tor! und bin so klug als wie zuvor.
But, but, but, Captain! I am merely preparing the troops for the End Time ... when it is time to dust off those field and stream survival manuals and return to our edible roots. Think how happier you will be not having the TV on 24/7 or having Glenn Beck and Apocalips Palin to annoy you.
ReplyDeleteI've even started a garden.
I'm afraid the end time already occurred in a nearby alternate universe -- last Thursday, I believe. This one seems to be stuck on wide open throttle like one of those "Star Safety System" Toyotas with little chance of slowing it down.
ReplyDelete