Immigration and Refugee Matters

The issue is not compassion versus hatred, hard-heartedness, and so on.  The issue that the above covers up is the real reasons for governments allowing immigration.  The correct, scientific, and rational way to proceed is also the compassionate way.  This is similar to doing "compassionate" things -- like "feeding kids" -- in order to avoid doing what needs to be done -- making hunger obsolete by redistributing power in society.

As for refugees, a "genuine refugee" (a person that the Canadian government cares a lot about) is a person who is persecuted by a government, that is, usually some kind of activist.  Removing such a person from the context of their activism amounts to that person's political death, and helps to weaken the opposition.  This may explain why Western liberal governments are so pro-human-rights, and so eager to remove refugees from politically volatile situations abroad.

Figurative Speech and Civilization

In rock videos, everything is literal -- and not only in rock videos.  The reason that Jag Bhaduria, the Canadian Member of Parliament who was accused of having misrepresented his educational background, got into trouble was that he appeared to have done something that looked like what people look like they are doing when they are presented as crooks.  A Reform Party MP was criticized for having a quote from Hitler in his literature, although the quote was clearly not meant to imply his support for Hitler -- if anything, just the opposite, for it was meant to warn people of individuals like Hitler.  But, as in other similar cases, all that mattered was the appearance.  The state of the language itself is another ominous indication.  Idioms are lost -- no-one seems to know, for example, what "begging the question" means anymore.  At "best," they imagine it means requesting to be questioned!  Attention is limited to appearances and surfaces, without any apparent comprehension of what may lie beneath them, or even that anything might lie beneath them.

But culture and civilization begin where appearances end -- though this statement itself is probably incomprehensible to a modern audience.  Postmodernism as a self-fulfilling prophecy?

There were reports recently that "repressive governments" have substituted executions and disappearances in many cases for imprisonment, due to Amnesty International's activities.  AI can hardly mount campaigns for release of dead or "disappeared" people.

The whole concept of AI is wrong, a fact that is brought out again by the above.  AI is based on two illusions:

(1) That a country's ruling class can be shamed into becoming decent.

(2) That the ruling class of country A can be made to oppose actions of that of country B, independently of their own (and their common) class interests.

That point, and the link between (1) and (2), is that the ruling classes of both "good" and "bad" countries act for non-moral reasons, and they cannot be made to act according to moral reasons.  So, if you try to mobilize opinion against them, they, and their cohorts in other countries, will simply find less visible, but equally (if nor more) immoral means to pursue their aims -- helped all along by "good" governments.

The good is rational

Banks generously give billions of dollars to Ted Rogers for a merger that will destroy thousands of jobs, but are stingy with small and medium-sized businesses -- which are the biggest job creators.

Our fear was what it would be like in a world where decisions were made by computers; also we feared the marginalization of ordinary, non-elite, people -- we would become totally dispensable and dispensed with.

The fear was that computers will replace people.  But in a rationally computerized society, run on a basis other than greed, computers can serve and enhance people's lives by allocating resources in a rational manner.

At some point in the future, the logic of the machine may radically contradict the logic of the socioeconomic system.  At that time, company presidents and executives better watch out, because they may be the ones who will be judged obsolete, and dispensed with.

From the point of view of workers' interests, computerization may be the best thing that ever happened.  In the computer, the rational animal may finally meet himself, and rejoice in the reunion.