Category Archives: morality

Europe’s Immigration Problem

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A European Union proposal to resettle tens of thousands of refugees from Syria and Eritrea across Europe met with strong resistance from some governments, raising doubt about its prospects.

At the same time, another EU plan for dealing with its refugee crisis—a naval operation in the Mediterranean Sea to destroy the vessels that smuggling gangs use to transport migrants—came in for criticism from United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Never mind that both of these approaches are counterproductive, although not in the way that “some government” or Ban seem to think.

Rewarding these refugees for fleeing, desperate though their plight might be, does exactly nothing to solve their problem—or the problem of their fellows and future refugees in northern Africa. Instead, it only allows the problem to grow worse, and it makes the growing flood an even greater humanitarian problem and an even greater problem for the nations of Europe.

Ban made manifest the general misunderstanding of national responsibilities in this regard.

I encourage EU member states to show compassion as they consider this important proposal to share their resettlement responsibilities. This can enable the European Union to address the dramatically increasing flows of people while setting an example for other regions of the world facing similar challenges[.]

No nation, including no European nation, has a “resettlement” responsibility here. No nation is obligated to allow people—or peoples—who are not citizens to cross its border and enter without permission. And no nation has any obligation to grant that permission—such an obligation would destroy the very concept of borders. Which in turn would destroy the very concept of private property and of ownership, whether private or national.

The effort, money, energy, and other resources committed to “resettlement” (reservations? The US has some experience with the failure of that sort of thing) or to sinking boats (which won’t stem the flow in the slightest; boats like the ones refugees or their African coyotes are using are easy to cobble together) would be better spent, would be more morally spent, working the problems in the refugees’ home countries so there would be far fewer refugees in the first place.

Of course political solutions are preferable, but even with its high up front cost (while potentially being far cheaper in the long run), an included option for working the problems at the source is military intervention. Just War Theory allows for humanitarian military intervention; all that’s necessary is for the intervening country(s) to do it like they mean it.

Besides that, there’s a utilitarian reason to intervene rather than merely to absorb refugees. The refugees are not looking for a place in which to better their lives; they’re looking for a place in which to stay alive. The countries from which the refugees are flooding will only become the more violent as time passes and peaceable people leave. And those countries will become increasing threats to the peace and safety of the European nations just across the Med.

Local Charity

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There doesn’t seem to be such a concept at PS 120 in Flushing, NY. The grade school held a carnival for its kindergarten through fifth grade classes, around 900 of its students were allowed to go—and an additional 100 were kept cooped up in the school’s auditorium, instead, with the shouts of fun from the carnival just outside plainly audible to them.

The price of attendance was $10, and those 100 were poor students whose parents couldn’t afford the $10; not having paid, those kids were barred from the carnival. Contributing to the thing is the fact that many of those parents are Chinese immigrants who, perhaps, missed the fact that a fee was charged. Let’s discount that, though; there did seem to be adequate notice of the fee.

The rationale for singling out some kids and denying them their fun at the carnival? Principle Joan Monroe, according to Frank Chow, president of the parents association, said,

It’s not fair to the kids’ parents who paid.

The purpose of the fund-raising carnival? Pre-K, kindergarten, and fifth-grade moving-up parties—it’s all for partying. The carnival made two-three thousand dollars in profit, which will make for some pretty rich grade school parties. The money isn’t even going toward school supplies, school equipment, or its physical plant, apparently. Just partying, with no lasting results.

Not fair to the ones who paid? Will the kids whose parents didn’t contribute to the graduation party money be barred from those graduation parties, too?

Never mind that $1,000 of those profits would have covered the kids whose parents didn’t, regardless of the reason, pay.

Fairness depends on how the payments and the purpose of the monies were advertised. And it would have been an interesting experiment: how much money would have been collected with a different purpose presented? Could all the kids have attended on the funds raised?

This is the sort of thing local charity is about.

A Fundamental Misunderstanding

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Jeffrey Goldberg drew it out of President Barack Obama in Goldberg’s interview with Obama for a piece in The Atlantic. Unfortunately, Goldberg didn’t pursue it, perhaps because he has the same misconceived notion. The misunderstanding is about Iran; here is the core of the exchange that demonstrates Obama’s error.

Goldberg: Stay with Iran for one more moment. I just want you to help me square something. So you’ve argued, quite eloquently in fact, that the Iranian regime has at its highest levels been infected by a kind of anti-Semitic worldview. …you’ve argued that people who subscribe to an anti-Semitic worldview, who explain the world through the prism of anti-Semitic ideology, are not rational, are not built for success, are not grounded in a reality that you and I might understand. And yet, you’ve also argued that the regime in Tehran—a regime you’ve described as anti-Semitic, among other problems that they have—is practical, and is responsive to incentive, and shows signs of rationality. So I don’t understand how these things fit together in your mind.

Obama: Well the fact that you are anti-Semitic, or racist, doesn’t preclude you from being interested in survival. It doesn’t preclude you from being rational about the need to keep your economy afloat; it doesn’t preclude you from making strategic decisions about how you stay in power; and so the fact that the supreme leader is anti-Semitic doesn’t mean that this overrides all of his other considerations.

There is Obama’s error in all its glory. The “you” here aren’t the Iranian people, they’re the Iranian government leadership, men such as Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani. The concerns of the Iranian people related to survival or keeping an economy afloat don’t matter. Nor does any concern for power on the part of the Iranian people.

What matters is what matters to those men of the Iranian government—Khamenei, Rouhani, et al. And those men don’t care about the Iranian economy beyond getting the wherewithal to build nuclear weapons. Those men don’t care particularly about their survival or staying in power beyond using those nuclear weapons. Those men have only one goal, and it’s been their goal and that of their predecessors for over 35 years: destroy Israel. And, hopefully, destroy us. It is the men of the Iranian government who say Israel must be wiped from the map; it is Khamenei who demands the destruction of Israel and chants, during negotiations over their nuclear weapons program, “Of course yes, death to America….”

It’s also these men who likely will die in a nuclear attack on Israel and the response to that mass murder, along with too many of the Iranian people. But that’s an outcome devoutly to be wished from Khamenei’s and Rouhani’s perspective: that’s martyrdom and the path to Heavenly glory. Yes, those men are entirely rational, and every move they’ve made has been consistent with attaining their primary goal. A goal and a cost of which Obama has not the first minim of a clue.

It’s going to be a long and dangerous year and a half. And the Democrats’ proposed replacement for after those 18 months has already failed to answer her own three am phone call.

The Iraqi “Army”

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Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter said, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Iraqi’s pseudo-defense of Ramadi, that the Iraqi army hasn’t the will to fight.

The Iraqi forces just showed no will to fight. They were not outnumbered. In fact they vastly outnumbered the opposing force and yet they failed to fight and withdrew from the site… We can give them training, we can give them equipment. We obviously can’t give them the will to fight.

They cut and ran, abandoning that American-supplied equipment, small arms and vehicles among it, to the Daesh and abandoning the city and its remaining residents to those terrorists.

Hakim al Zamili, of the Iraqi Parliament’s Sadrist movement (you remember al Sadr) and chairman of the Security and Defense Committee, objected to that characterization.

The Iraqi army and police did have the will to fight [the] IS group in Ramadi, but these forces lack good equipment, weapons, and aerial support.

No, Hakim, Carter was being generous. Your Iraqi “army” is an insult to armies everywhere; in Ramadi they were stinking cowards who ran away. They wouldn’t fight to defend themselves, or their fellow soldiers, not even their families somewhere else. Here was the fight, and they shrank from it.

The reason they lacked “good equipment, weapons” is because they, once again, abandoned them and left them for the Daesh. Air support? As an American general said in an earlier war, they don’t need air support; they need to fight. The Daesh had no air support, they needed no air support for their inferior numbers to run your “army” out of the city.

No, it’s time for the US to stop using the Iraq Army Transfer Facility to arm and equip Daesh. We should, instead, arm and train—directly—the Kurds and the Sunni and Shiite militias. These are the ones who have the heart to fight, these are the ones who have the skill to fight, these are the ones who have an actual track record of success against the Daesh.

Redirecting our arms and training also would give us an opportunity to turn the Shiite militias away from Iran.

Special Snowflakes

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…gotta be part of the blizzard. That’s the opening lament of a collection of graduate pupils in the University of California’s Master of Arts program in Art and Design. These Magnificent Seven, an entire class of the program and who have completed a year of it, wrote a letter explaining their decision to withdraw en masse from the program and posted it on the Art&Education Web site.

Some high points of their letter follow.

We are a group of seven artists who have been forced by the school’s dismantling of each of these elements to dissolve our MFA candidacies.

No, Dears. No one, including USC, stuck a gun in your ears. You made this decision all by yourselves.

We were fully aware of the scarcity of, and the paucity of compensation for, most teaching jobs…. However, a different funding model was presented to us by the Roski administration upon our acceptance to the program: we would receive a scholarship for some of our first-year tuition; and for the entirety of our second year we would have a teaching assistantship with fully-funded tuition, a stipend, and benefits, upon completion of our first-year coursework. We, the incoming class of 2014, were the first students since 2011 to take on debt to attend Roski, and the first students since 2006 to gain no teaching experience during our first-year in the program.

So, before you signed accepting Art and Design’s appointments of you to their program, you knew the funding parameters which would apply to you, and you knew the nature of the changes made from the status quo ante. And you knew a priori the limited employment opportunities following graduation. Now you’re complaining because after a three year (three whole years) interregnum, reality intruded into the program and the monies available to support it, and you can’t get a free ride for both years—you only get benefits and a “fully-funded tuition, a stipend” for the second year, assuming your scholarship was enough up to snuff for the school to continue you.

Oh! The impermanence of Life! How will you get on in the real world, where change is reality, plans don’t match the world forever, or even for very long?

In a slew of unproductive, confounding, and contradictory meetings with the dean and other assorted members of the Roski administration in early 2015, we were told that we would now have to apply for, and compete with a larger pool of students for, the same TAships promised to us during recruitment.

Having to mingle with the unwashed, actually to compete with those not as good as you for scarce resources? The ignominy of it. Whatever to do? Oh, wait—you’ve decided that. Quit, and run away.

We will continue to hold crits ourselves and be involved in each other’s work. We will be staging a series of readings, talks, shows, and events at multiple sites throughout the next year, and will follow with seven weeks of “thesis” shows beginning in April of 2016. Our collective and interdependent force….

That’s what initiative is all about. That’s what you should have been doing right along during your year in the program. You shouldn’t need—as you’re belatedly discovering—to wait on someone else to tell you what you should do; faculty in a graduate program guides and critiques, they don’t tell or spoon-feed like a first grade teacher must.

RTWT. It’s sad and a tired, played out complaint.