Warm welcomes
In what one commentator at Maggie's Farm correctly identifies as "the therapeutic approach to evil," NPR ran radio interviews this morning with Cambridge deep-thinkers explaining that "this is what happens when we're not welcoming enough to immigrants." As another commenter mused, it's interesting to imagine what would have happened if the MSM had been able to fulfill their fond dreams of pinning this thing on a Tea Partier. "This is what happens when we're not welcoming enough to conservatives?"
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12 comments:
Markos 'death to mercenaries' of the Daily Kos wrote a book about how conservatives were the American Taliban. The odd thing is how little they are willing to condemn the actual Taliban -- or Islamic radicalism in general, which is far more attached to all the things they hate about conservative Americans except the Bible.
The kid on the run was at one of the finest public schools in America. He was well known to his high school friends, was a star on their wrestling team and got a $2500 scholarship from the city. What more would people have be done?
I'm taking this personally. When I was a student there I had a few ... interactions ... with the MIT Police. I found them professional, and while they took their jobs seriously they did not take themselves too seriously to let their egos get in the way of their jobs. Note, too, that if I can still read a map this convenience store was NOT on MIT property. He could have left this to the Cambridge Police. Sean Collier was 29, single, and joined the MIT force in 2012 after having previously served in the Somerville PD. He was active in the MIT Outing Club (think rock climbing, hiking, etc.) and was well liked by the students.
I'm hearing interviews now about how the surviving bomber was a regular kid. He was of course not "assimilated" in several ways that should be very important to us. But he certainly was assimilated in the sense that many of his (likely) views wouldn't have stood out in a modern liberal community: America is evil, war is the real terrorism, morality is a power play by the haves against the have-nots, no justice no peace, and so on.
Either way, as someone at Ace said, he and his brother are going to fit in nicely soon--six feet under.
As another commenter over there said, "Lived here ten years but only radicalized in the last year after extended contact with Cambridge? That's just crazy talk!" I'm sure the real explanation is the crushing weight of memories from the Bush administration.
Indeed, they are welcome to as much of America as the Saxons were ready to give Harald Hardrada: even seven feet, if they need it. Why be stingy?
A neighbor of the brothers was interviewed on Fox News today. From her description--they used to sit around, among other interactions, discussing Dostoevsky and Anna Karenina--the younger brother was a fundamentally good kid who worshipped his older brother and so was led astray by him.
To the extent that's true, it's too bad. I don't see this kid being recoverable, even were he to be found alive and surrender.
Eric Hines
We have no system for recovering people in any event. Though we call our system "rehabilitation," it has very limited success at that. Putting an already-dangerous bomber in a prison with the kind of people he would encounter there would not make for a happier future America; and sticking him in a superMAX would be more inhumane than killing him.
I'm not sure "we" call it rehab. There is an ongoing, low-key debate concerning whether our prison system rehabilitates, and whether it ought to try to rehabilitate. That debate exists, though, in acknowledgment that our prison system does a really bad job of rehab.
I wouldn't object to rehab in prison, but we'd have, as a society, make a deliberate commitment to the effort. I also have no objection to prison as pure punishment (punishment is a part of rehab, in any event), but unfortunately, we do a terrible job of that, too.
Comes from not having decided what we want imprisonment to do.
Eric Hines
Maybe we shouldn't want it at all. It's an innovation, of sorts: we didn't used to punish people this way. We fined them, or put them to service or transportation for a while, or whipped them, or cropped their ears, or hung them. The idea that we should imprison them -- caring for their food and medical care, and hiring guards at our expense to watch them and keep them safe -- that's a relatively new idea. I'm not sure it's a good one.
Well, we don't do banishment very often at all, anymore. I'm not sure we should, either; that would just be sending our problems off for someone else to hassle with.
But there are some crimes, and some criminals who do them serially, that don't warrant execution--the serial commitment would seem to want sequestration for the doer away from the society on which he insists on praying.
Humaneness suggest that, given jail, we don't just chain him to a wall and toss him a bowl of gruel sometimes. But that means we need to figure out how we ought do the jailing.
Eric Hines
We're not WELCOMING?
Reports are circulating that the USA was warned by "a foreign Gummint" about older brother terrorist--after which he journeyed to Moscow and returned--and AGAIN was green-lighted by FBI/DHS (2010, the Obama Regime.)
Not only did we "welcome" them as political refugees in the first place; we welcomed one of them again when we had good reason to toss his ass into Gitmo!
How can we welcome them to American culture when all the left wants us to do is be 'diverse'. What American culture? That's your problem right there. Well, that and radical Islam.
The left does not think that America has a culture worthy of assimilating into. As far as they are concerned American culture is based on greed and racism. Why, looking across the world, they think that these things do not dominate every other culture out there is beyond me. But they don't want to preserve American culture, they want to destroy it. They don't want newcomers to assimilate into American culture - they want them to change it and destroy it.
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