We are always entitled to insist on behavior that suits our system of civilization. We should naturally guard against the temptation to attribute bad behavior to people who have not actually demonstrated it individually, merely because it requires less effort to categorize them by ethnicity than to judge their individual behavior fairly. In arresting or prosecuting people who behave badly, we have to be careful not to apply different standards of evidence or justice on the basis of their ethnicity than we would apply to ourselves. But we should be blind to arguments predicated on disparate effect, if the effect stems from differences in behavior that happen to be embraced by many or most members of an ethnicity.

It makes sense to cut people some slack when they show up without money, jobs, or language skills. Pretty quickly, though, we should expect overt signs of serious effort coupled with improvement.

I don’t think our elites have that much moral clarity and perception of reality. While they gaslight us about the blessings of immigration, I think they are high on their own supply. I think they think they are doing us good and that we’re children who don’t want to take our medicine.

In my academic days I met a lot of people from around the world, and all those people traveled quite a bit. But they were always going from one academic milieu to another. They weren’t really meeting different kinds of people. They were meeting people who are well above average, compared to their own countries, in intelligence and in ability to at least outwardly conform to Western norms. Why would they object to more such people here?

Of course there are two problems with it: the outward appearance of Western norms is not necessarily how they actually are, and those people don’t come by themselves but enable a chain of relatives to come after them who may be very different from ones that were sought out.

I think our elites appreciate more ethnic restaurants and lower payroll expenses. They insulate themselves from the negative consequences of their policies very well. To them, immigration presents a purely hypothetical set of drawbacks which would only bother low-class people, and to take those kinds of opinions seriously would be social and career death.

These elites may even consider the immiseration and terrorizing of their middle/working classes a benefit.

Or so it seems to me.

They were going to exhibit their virtue to the world, and that was it.

No one here is saying that it will. But ethnic cleansing goes well beyond “defense”. And if it is going to be done without a lot of killing, what’s that going to look like? How many Israelis are going to die trying to accomplish it, since we’re working from the assumption that Gazans are killbots?

The people assuming this can be done peacefully are assuming that there is something you can offer Gazans that they will put ahead of killing Jews, which is the opposite of the premise used to justify the ethnic cleansing in the first place.