Reform

Making America Great Again: It Ain’t Easy

Mark Noonan8 Comments

Vivek Ramaswamy ignited a bit of a firestorm today on X.

Let’s start with the obvious: on November 5th we voted to secure the border and deport the illegals. Completely sealed: no more illegal entries. Total deportation: if you’re in illegally, you have to go back. But what we didn’t vote for was the termination of immigration. And so, Ramaswamy:

The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.

I think most of the anger over this is twofold:

  1. nobody likes to be told that their country sucks. To say that our culture doesn’t promote excellence is to say that our culture is substandard.
  2. the American people, on the whole, are not keen to import workers – not even good workers. This is on the basic truth that American jobs should by and large be filled by American workers.

Ramaswamy does not go on to say that we should just keep importing workers – I think some people are misunderstanding what he said, and some are likely deliberately misunderstanding it because, remember!, there are lots of people who’s whole existence is based on disliking Trump…and this includes a lot of people on the Right. The rest of Ramaswamy’s post is a call to arms, as it were: that we can make excellence our focus as part of that whole Make America Great Again thing.

We do have to acknowledge our flaws. If we can’t, then we’re doomed. Do you know why South Africa is heading towards a Third World collapse? Because the majority doesn’t want to be told that they suck and if they want to get ahead they’re going to have to ask the Boers for instruction. They’d rather wallow in memories of Apartheid as the excuse for all ills with confiscating whitey’s farms as the cure. The only way a person, an organization or a country gets its act together is by acknowledging what’s wrong and then setting about fixing it.

Ramaswamy correctly states that we have been praising the second rate, the unimportant…and I’ll add that we also laud the downright self-destructive. Think about the number of movies and shows that hold up some psycho as the hero. We can’t deny that Anthony Hopkins played the psycho killer excellently in Silence of the Lambs…but the coda of the movie with him heading off to eat the pretentious psychiatrist is hideous. So, too, the end of No Country for Old Men with the bad guy getting away…possibly after murdering a completely innocent woman. Yes, of course, the bad guys sometimes get away with it…but sanity requires that in our story telling they don’t. Lambs should have ended with Starling arresting or killing Lecter…just as Bell should have killed Chigurh to finish up Old Men. This is not to take away the skill or artistry of those involved in those productions…but The Wild Bunch ended up with the bad guys all dead and quite uselessly over nothing. That was the fitting end to violent criminals…and the sort of story that is useful for society.

We need to start holding up the good, the true and the beautiful – popular culture is never a social mirror…it is what you’re aspiring to. And if we’re aspiring to bad guys winning and psychos being cooler than sane people, then we’re going to have some problems. Like, for instance, all the problems we have right now.

In order to Make America Great Again our first order of business is to fix our problems. Deporting all the illegals won’t resolve the fact that about 70 million Americans used illegal drugs last year. That is 20 percent of us. One in five! This does not include those who booze it up too much nor does it really cover marijuana as that is legal in a lot of places these days. We still must deport all the illegals…but the American drug addicts are a huge problem. So, too, things like people having sex before marriage, getting divorced, adultery…with our pop culture pushing these pathologies as positively healthy. That has to stop. No, you can’t say “first amendment!” and call it a day…do you want broken families and drug addicts or do you want sober people in healthy families? You can’t have it both ways – you’re going to get what you insist upon and if you don’t insist upon sobriety you’ll get drunks.

We can’t leave people lying around in the streets. We must do something with them. We must demand that people perform or punish them. Do you realize how tough this is going to be? Kicking out Jose and not letting Patel have a visa isn’t going to Make America Great Again. Its going to take a bit more than that. Do you have the iron in your veins to get it done?

So, yes, I firmly believe that American jobs should be filled by Americans…and that companies should pay wages that Americans want, not what some guy who doesn’t want to live next to an open sewer in Mumbai is willing to take. But this does mean we need Americans who are fit for the task. That means sober, stable, dedicated people who know that life isn’t a free ride. Hindu immigrants to America are doing very well – overall they make more money than white Americans. And its because they are stable, sober and work their butts off. Do you want that? Well, guess what…

Open Thread

Mark Noonan12 Comments

One of the arguments made against term limits is that by thrusting inexperienced people into legislatures every few years, we’d really be turning over power to the un-elected legislative staffers. These staffers, with their years of legislative experience, would simply buffalo the legislator’s into voting for whatever the staff wanted. Ok, fair enough.

How is this different from what we have now?

Do you think any of the career politicians in Congress actually read and understand the bills they vote on?

What this thought has led me to is a wonder as to whether or not institutions actually work? Outside of dogmatic governed religious bodies (most notably, of course, the Catholic Church – though you’ll note various problems there), I don’t think they really do. The only one I can think of which had at least some long-term track record of success was the German General Staff. And it cost Germany two World Wars. But you do have to hand it to them – over those two World Wars they squeezed out the maximum amount of military power Germany could provide and applied it to Germany’s enemies in the most effective way possible – thus accounting for the rather lopsided Kraut to Non-Kraut casualty ratio (not counting Holocaust, it is like 5 non-Krauts killed for every Kraut they killed). But if that is our standard of “working”, I’d rather have more failures.

I’m not quite sure what we do here – but there has to be turnover, of that I am sure. As we can’t apply dogma to non-religious bodies (we have no one who would be universally respected to define dogma and thus heresy), the only defense mechanism I can think of is term limits. And to answer the charge that this would leave the permanent officials in charge – they have to have term limits, too.

It is one thing when a corporate bureaucracy becomes ossified, quite another when a government bureaucracy does. Because the government bureaucracy can jail and kill us; so, lots more serious. Just as we must find a means of ejecting politicians from office, so we’ll have to find a way to eject bureaucrats from office. Maybe we’ll eventually have to enact an amendment which says that you can’t serve, elected or appointed, in the federal government for more than 20 years?

Here’s a story saying that NYC cops may be opting for retirement at the first opportunity. I’ve seen other stories like this. Bottom line, if I was a cop in a blue jurisdiction, I’d be out, pension or no pension. You know for certain that the police and government officials will not back you up and if something you do winds up in a viral video then regardless of the facts of the case, you will be fired and very likely prosecuted. Just not worth it. And even if you think you’ll just turn a blind eye in certain areas of town (as is happening – in “George Floyd Square” in Minneapolis, it is getting very wild west), you still run the risk of having to make an arrest of someone non-white and each time you do that, you are at risk of being the next viral video. I can’t see any pension being worth that risk. And I don’t see a real way out of this – the blue city officials have staked out the position that BLM/Antifa are right and the cops are wrong. I don’t think you can re-cork that bottle and now say that the cops are right.

Joe’s first speech to Congress will be to empty seats. GOPers should place cardboard cutouts of themselves in the seats just to highlight the absurdity of this corrupt, senile, old fool being installed in the White House.

The children of Chernobyl aren’t showing any significant damage. Not really surprised – the radiation levels are probably set much higher than public safety really requires.

The Washington Post would like you to know that Senator Scott (R-SC) isn’t black enough.