If you are frustrated with the national "debate" on immigration, I invite you to list to this episode of "The Jury is Out," a podcast I co-host along with John Simon and Tim Cronin of the Simon Law Firm. Our guest for Episode 427 is Javad Khazaeli, a St. Louis attorney who has practiced in the field of Immigration law for years. He offers many stories about our massively dysfunctional immigration system, some of them jaw dropping. I guarantee that you won't be disappointed, no matter what you think you know about immigration. This is Part I of a two-part series, the second episode on immigration will drop soon.
Bonus: Watch and listen to Ronald Reagan and George Bush debate Immigration in a 1980 Presidential Debate. If you think you already know the kinds of things they will say, you are probably very wrong.
If you enjoyed this episode of "The Jury is Out," feel free to subscribe and listen to our show wherever you get your podcasts.
A love letter written with a typewriter today would be considered a romantic gesture, however in 1906 they were called the most “cold-blooded, mechanical, unromantic production imaginable" by one writer.
Chesterton's Fence is a principle that says change should not be made until the reasoning behind the current state of affairs is understood. It says the rash move, upon coming across a fence, would be to tear it down without understanding why it was put up.
Peter McCullough, M.D. was censored during COVID and he has since been proven correct on many of his positions. Yet he didn't become bitter (at least that I could see in public). Rather, he keep trying to communicate where we, as a society, have lost our way. McCullough keeps trying to shed light on the problems he detects, but I detect an ominous undertone in his writings, a sense that we are sustaining too much damage as a society and that we might no longer have the tools, as a society, to repair the damage. I increasingly detect that same feelings in myself. In a recent article, McCullough writes:
Once the belief in a country and institution has been lost, it is very difficult to rejuvenate it. This is the principle reason why most conservative commentators often come off as sounding staid and uninspiring to the young. It’s as though the spirit has departed from the body that no amount of edifying rhetoric can reanimate. As Hegel pointed out in the preface to his Elements of the Philosophy of Law:
Philosophy always arrives too late to teach the world how it should be. As the thought of the world, philosophy appears only in the period after reality has been achieved and has completed its formative process. This lesson, also taught by history, is that only in the late stage of reality does the ideal appear in opposition to this reality, grasping it in the form of an intellectual construct.
When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then a form of life has grown old, and cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized; the Owl of Minerva takes flight only as the dusk begins to fall.
That feeling that we might have crossed the event horizon has increasingly been expressed by people who inspire me, including (now deceased) George Carlin and Jonathan Haidt.
"'I am now very pessimistic,' Haidt said. 'I think there is a very good chance American democracy will fail, that in the next 30 years we will have a catastrophic failure of our democracy.'"
We might have fucked things up too much to ever fix them. George Carlin gets the last word here.:
Haidt says, “we’ve messed up the word liberal and we’ve used it to just mean ‘left.’ I’ve always thought of myself as a liberal, in the John Stuart Mill sense. I believe in a society that is structured to give individuals the maximum freedom to construct lives that they want to live. We use a minimum of constraint, we value openness, creativity, individual rights. We try hard to maximize religious liberty, economic liberty, liberty of conscience, freedom of speech. That’s my ideal of a society, and that’s why I call myself a liberal.”
But on the left, Haidt said, “there’s been a movement that has made something else sacred, that has not focused on liberty, but that is focused instead on oppression and victimhood and victimization. And once you get into a framework of seeing your fellow citizens as good versus evil based on their group, it’s kind of a mirror image of the authoritarian populism on the right. Any movement that is assigning moral value to people just by looking at them is a movement I want no part of.”
Haidt went on: “I think this is a very important point for us to all keep in mind, that left and right in this country are not necessarily liberal and conservative anymore. On the left, it’s really clear that there are elements that many of us consider to be very illiberal; and on the right, it’s hard to see how Trump and many of his supporters are conservatives who have any link whatsoever to Edmund Burke. It’s very hard for me to see that. You know, I would love to live in a country with true liberals and true conservatives that engage with each other. That, I think, is a very productive disagreement. But it’s the illiberalism on each side that is making our politics so ugly, I believe.”
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