Gumballs and Open Borders

A FaceBook friend of mine pointed to the video Immigration, World Poverty, and Gumballs.

Looking for it later by search engine, I see I am not the only one who saw holes in the reasoning. I'm going to ignore what everyone else has to say and just talk about it from my perspective as a US citizen expatriate (not ex-patriot) married to a Japanese citizen, with children who are effected by the Japanese no-dual-citizenship policies.

The borders of the US have been effectively closed since before I got married. I had to prove that the woman I intended to marry would not become a dependent on the state with all sorts of financial info and family affidavits, etc., just to get her into the states for our marriage and my last year of college.

(What finances? I was a struggling student trying to do what Linus Torvalds was doing at about the same time. I had no finances.)

She got her green card, but it cost me time spent at the local immigrations office that could have been better spent on my studies, at bare minimum. And it didn't exactly give her an image of a country willing to accept her, which was no small part of her motivation to return to her country.

In order to even consider having the family move back to the states where there is much more profitable work available for someone like me, I would have to prove things I can't prove about my own financial stability.

Or we would have to go in for some other purpose than staying, then stay anyway and apply from there.

No, just because the kids would have been free to come and go until they were twenty does not mean that their mother would have been free to come and go.

The borders aren't tight closed against me, but they are effectively closed.
This is not a new situation. The borders have been closed for over twenty years.

Okay. Back to the gumballs.

People are not gumballs. Representing even a million people with one gumball robs the argument of significant meaning.

That said, I will acknowledge that Roy Beck's conclusive proposal to help the impoverished people of the world where they are has some merit -- conditionally. I'll mention some of the conditions a few paragraphs down.

The question of open borders is not strictly an immigration question.

Many of the gumballs people coming into the country do not simply move to the US and stay. They send money back home, which helps their relatives and friends where they are.

Yeah. Where they are.

And not a few get training and experience in living in (relative) freedom in the US and take that training, and a lot of basic technical expertise, back with them when they return to their homelands.

Which helps them where they are.

And this is not largess given from above. This is people using their freedom to find creative solutions to the problems back home. This is the best way to help people where they are, in the same way teaching a man to fish is more help than giving him a fish.

If you want people to be dependent on you, give them fish. If you want them to be friends, but independent, take them fishing, show them how you do it, have fun with them. Give them feel-good experiences that will lead them away from trying to overfish the rivers, away from the tendency to try to take control of the market in fish.

People are not gumballs.

With that introduction, here is what I see has to happen if we really want to help people where they are.

We have to first recognize that the things we do in the States are not all appropriate things to teach other people to do. We export a lot of our cultural baggage, and that just weighs the people in poverty down even further.

I want to be specific about that, to give concrete examples, but many of the examples are hot-button topics in the current US.

Let's just admit that young children under ten feeding themselves by selling their bodies may not be what we intended to export, but that's how our indiscriminate use of money and our sexual revolution is hitting the dirt over there.

(There is nothing unusual about this. Japan also saw some of the same things happening, in the early 1900s. You can see it when you read the works of some of the prominent Japanese novelists of that period, for instance, in a novel called Sound of the Mountain -- 山の音、 Yama no Oto -- by Yasunari Kawabata, the main character talks about seeing a young Japanese boy on the train traveling in the company of an older foreign gentleman, and about his feelings when he assumes the worst.)

Helping people where they are means such things as going over there yourself, living for years as they live. Sharing things you know, sure, but also learning from them.

It does not mean giving them money with expectations. If you want to invest or give them grants, find out what they want to do. Get people who know the country and the culture to help you figure out if it's something you want to support them in. If it is, some conditions about the purpose of the money may be in order, but trying to tell them how to accomplish their plans is questionable help at best. Expectations such as making a certain amount of profit by a certain time are definitely out of order.

Then, after you have invested, keep your hands off, but keep in touch. If they tell you they are having problems, ask how what kind of help they need. Always avoid imposing your solutions on them, even when they think they want you to. Get them to tell you what they need.

And always be ready and willing to learn from them what you can. Letting them tell you what they are doing helps them understand what they are doing. Letting them tell you what their problems are helps them understand those problems. Letting them tell you the solutions they've considered helps them understand the solutions well enough to pick the ones that will work.

Sometimes, it requires bringing them to the States for a few months or years to experience a different way of doing things. If you are really going to help them where they are, you need this option, and it doesn't work if you have to wait six months or two years from the time you decide it's a good idea until the time you can bring them to the States to do the work that they need the experience with. Well, six months may not be too bad, but two years (or more) definitely defeats the purpose.

It's not the money or the ideas or the technology that ultimately helps. It's the opportunity to use their own creativity, and the experience they gain doing so.

Now, back to the question of borders.

You can't do this kind of help when your own borders are closed.  It just doesn't work.

Help is a two-way street, one gumball person at a time, and closed borders prevent that.

Global Climate Change

Warming?

Well, yeah.

Cooling?

That too. Change.

Man-made causes?

Definitely. 

Atmospheric carbon?

Yeah, but not all by itself.

Sequestering?

What on earth do they think they are into, here? We need that carbon, we just don't need to be spewing it into the air in that form, at the rate we are now.

Every argument becomes a reason to assert somebody's right to tell everyone else what to do.

Lose the debate over who gets to tell whom what to do. It's just another proxy for war, and, like all proxies for war, gets bloody if we can't leave it alone.

Pollution? Are we polluting the environment?

Most definitely. Now we're getting closer to the problems. But it's not just the physical environment.

We have to quit polluting.

What are we doing that pollutes?

Finally, we're getting to the real questions, the real problems.

• Too much driving places we don't need to drive in cars that use too much energy of one form or another.
• Too much shipping things places they don't need to go and then shipping them other places they don't need to go until we just end up shipping them to the landfills. 
• Too much pushing information around on the 'net that doesn't need to be pushed around, especially pictures and promises of pictures of naked people, promises of easy money, promises of miracle cures, and other fraud.
• Too much manufacturing things that don't need to be manufactured.
• Too much fighting each other about what the other guy should be doing.
• Too much fighting each other, not just with weapons of blades and explosives, but with money, products, presentations, advertising, words, regulations, laws, intellectual property, ...
• Too much meaningless competition.
• Too much trying to control the other guy.
• Too much.

We have to learn how to help each other not do too much.

We have to learn how to help each other make a living without polluting.

How do we do that? More rules?

Since when does making more rules help anybody do anything?

More machines?

Actually, more machines, if we weren't so busy controlling what the other guy is doing with them, could help.

What are the underlying causes of the doing too much? Why, for example, does Intel waste so much of our global semiconductor resources manufacturing CPUs, memory devices, etc., for more energy inefficient devices that people really don't want?

What did I just say?

What do you see when you go to the electronics store to look at consumer information/computing devices?

More MSWindows/Intel devices. Intel and Microsoft are really pushing hard to keep their effective near-monopoly that allows them to control the market so they can claim (among other things) that they are too big to brought to account for their illegal and immoral activities -- too big to be shut down. (We've heard that before, too.)

What do people really want?

iOS devices that use mostly non-Intel parts and non-Microsoft software.

If not that, Android devices that, again, run perfectly fine without either Intel or Microsoft.

After that? MacOS devices that, if it were not for a "switch" that Apple pulled to get Intel out of their hair about ten years ago, never needed anything Intel at all.

And after that? Open software devices that are perfectly fine for most people's workstation needs, that, again, unless you invoke constrained and fraudulent Intellectual Property arguments, are completely independent of Intel and Microsoft technology.

No, Intel CPUs are not and have never been faster than the PowerPC devices that IBM and Motorola offered to allow pretty much anyone to make. Nor will they ever be more efficient than the ARM devices that pretty much anyone can make now.

That switch that Apple pulled wasn't about speed or efficiency at all. It was about fraudulent intellectual property claims that Intel was, and still is using to keep other companies from making competing products.

And now it is about the NSA insisting that all information/computing devices have to have backdoors so they can eavesdrop on your and my conversations, so that they can send the black ops guys around to tell you and me we are doing something they don't want us to do. So we have to be given a reason to dump our perfectly good information/computing device (smartphones included) and buy something that has been manufactured in the last few years by Intel or someone licensed to use the Intel backdoors.

Who is that "they" that doesn't want you to do something that really isn't anyone's business but your own and your neighbor's and God's?

"They" are the invisible competition, the invisible bad guys, the demons in the rich guys minds, the excuse for the people with all the money to keep having to work overtime making other people work overtime to produce product that nobody needs or really wants so that "they" can win the race that nobody needs to be running.

Boston was fun to listen to when I was younger. Not so much now, but

I understand about indecision,
I don't care if I get [left] behind,
People living in competition,
All I want is to have my peace of mind.

(And "they" want to give us "their" piece of their mind.)

Look in the mirror. Why are you running so hard to go places you don't need to go?

You could at least be running just for exercise, instead ...

... if you can't figure out a good reason to go to places real people actually need you to go at a pace that doesn't wear you and everybody else out.

You and I and the people near us deciding to slow down a little would do a whole lot to reduce the excessive use of energy in our local environment.

And if that started happening all over the world, we could have a little more time and energy for getting food and clothes and other necessities to people who need them, so that they quit feeling like they have to bring the wars to our doorsteps to get the necessities we have too much of and they have too little of.

We'd have a little more time and energy for doing things that really mean something.

And we could make friends in the process, and that would help us start solving some of the other social problems that people say we need to solve.

Build a Wall? -- Or Tear Walls Down?

This "build a wall" meme seems to be producing results.

Plastic Jesus's wall around the Donald's Hollywood star is a bright spot.

I was shining it all on, but the meme has entered the Japanese press. My wife was commenting on it while reading the Yomiuri Shinbun. And I looked it up to see how serious people are about it.

The Donald seems to be treating it seriously. I say "seems", because his whole campaign is at best a joke gone awry. (Either that or my assertion of Democrat Complicity is dead-on target. Probably both.)

Anyway, I looked up "wall around US" on the web, and found this url:

https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/pay-for-the-wall

(No I'm not making that into a link. If you want to go there, plug it into your browser yourself.)

But, if you play with the url, you find that the link

https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/

seems to be a cgi or other active web page that pushes you through a capcha and insists that you must be supporting the Donald if you are visiting it.

If you are really adventurous, or just curious, try

https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/stuff_yourself

It goes through the same "Thank you for your support!" page with the capcha check, although it naturally 404s out if you click the capcha.

Don't bother. I'm sure he'll never publish the number of clicks on sub-urls that insult him or question his politics.

He's a decoy, a 'bot. You can't talk to him.

If you elect him president, there may be a human in there somewhere. I don't want to find out.

Vote the third party candidate of your choice and let the party-hardy boys know they've jumped the shark.

Hmmm. There is the possibility that he is actually deliberately saying stupid things to get the people of the US to start questioning the factory-farmed politics that we are being fed. If he really is deliberately trying to provoke well thought-out conversation, I'd like to hear him say so before the election.

While reading some of the punditry (It's hard to think of a job I'd hate worse.), I wandered onto the news about Qandeel Baloch. "Honor killing." Her brother, out of the shame that he thought she brought on his family (meaning, on him, himself, I'm guessing) brought further shame on both himself and his family by trying to get rid of the problem through an act of deliberate, planned out homicide.

Hopefully, he'll figure out just what he let his pride, and his slavish acceptance of dogma, cost him.

Family should be family. Maybe you can't support what they do or say. But you love them anyway, because they are family.

If you love your sister, you set a good example for her.

Instead of letting your buddies bully you into violence against her because she has gone too far, you stand up to them. Tell them that what they are saying is as much against the scripture as anything she is doing, and if she deserves silencing, so do they.

And if they don't, neither did she.

Why do I wander off to the subject of "honor killing"?

It's the same kind of mentality as that which seriously considers building a wall between Mexico and the US as an attempt to fix the problems that everyone says is coming from across the border.

The problem is not that women want a voice in Pakistan. It is that too many men in Pakistan are willing to buy the cheap religion substitute of painted-over intolerance.

Here is what that false Islam preaches:

• Don't change yourself!
• It's too hard to be a better person, yourself! 
• Force the non-conformists to change, even your own family!
• If you can't get them to quit making your feel embarrassed about your own imperfections, get rid of them!
• They are the problem, not you! 

Here is what the false protectionism preaches:

• Don't change yourself!
• It's too hard to be a better person, yourself! 
• Force the non-conformists to change, even your own family!
• If you can't get them to quit making your feel embarrassed about your own imperfections, get rid of them!
• They are the problem, not you! 

Here is what the true Islam preaches:

• Change yourself! (This is the real Jihad: change others by changing yourself first.)
• It's not too hard to be a better person, yourself. In fact, life is better when you try to be a better person, yourself!
• Learn not to conform to false norms. Celebrate what is special about you and your family!
• Choose not to feel embarrassed when idiots make fun about what is special about you and your family. And love your idiot friends, anyway! (Okay, loving your idiot friends can be moderately difficult when they are trying to get you to get rid of what is special about you and your family. But it's better than hating them, in the end. Love doesn't mean going along with what they say.)
• Everyone has problems! Let's help each other instead of fighting each other!

Is there a true protectionism?

Well, that false protectionism that says "Build the wall!" does not protect anything. If you want to protect the "good" life you have, they only way is to share it. Sharing it rejuvenates the value of things. Turning stingy makes the value evaporate.

If you want the drugs, violence, and sexual immorality to go away, help make a world in which fewer people feel like they have to resort to drugs, violence, and sexual immorality.

Help make a world where even people south of the border can get a job if they want one, and even people north of the same border can live off the grid if they prefer.

Help make a world in which people can have fun without resorting to artificial stimulants.

Help make a world where people can love and be loved without the love substitute of fake sexuality.

Real happiness helps others be happy. If it doesn't really make you happy, leave it alone.

Tear down the walls. Let's all work together.