A sine qua non for the modern liberal ideologue is a flair for living comfortably in a state of cognitive dissonance. This is made necessary by the internal contradictions of his worldview, and by its frequent, and calamitous, collisions with the social, political, economic, cultural, mathematical, and biological realities of the actual world. The California legislature has now given us an excellent example of this, in which two features of a recently passed bill stand in direct and obvious contravention to one another.
The new law, Assembly Bill 60, stipulates that illegal aliens may now acquire driver’s licenses. It requires journeyman cognitive dissonance merely to think this a good idea in the first place (as opposed to an unfolding of the consequences of prior bad ideas), but what takes real virtuosity is to reconcile the two provisions stipulating, on the one hand, that the new licenses will carry distinguishing markings indicating the bearer’s “undocumented” status, and on the other, that prospective employers must not use these markings as a basis for discrimination when hiring.
Consider:
A) Illegal aliens do not have Social Security numbers, which an employer needs for tax compliance.
B) If a job applicant presents one of these new licenses to a prospective employer, it establishes, then, with legal certainty, that any Social Security number the applicant may give will be fraudulent.
The law thus requires that the employer keep these propositions well apart from one another at all times — an easy thing, perhaps, for a left-wing Assemblyman to manage, but a formidable challenge for a normally functioning mind.
For employers in California, there is no avoiding one or the other prongs of this fork. When presented, by a job applicant, with one of these new illegal-alien licenses, they must either hire the fellow knowing that they become complicit in a Social Security fraud, or discriminate — which is, as we know, the Omega point of evil in the modern world. Both are illegal.
We hear often lately of “anarcho-tyranny“, in which those who comply with the law are brought under stricter and stricter control, gradually squeezed dry, and finally ground to dust, while those who simply ignore it are at greater and greater liberty. Just today I heard a splendid example on the radio.
“Have you been foreclosed on recently?” the announcer asked. “If so, then your mortgage may have been satisfied in full! Just call this number…”
The idea appears to be that, some people having been foreclosed on too aggressively, a class-action suit had been brought forward, with the result that the mortgages in question have been dismissed. Meanwhile, however, those chumps who just ground along at their dreary job, or jobs, dutifully making their payments every month, are in just as deep as ever.
On the other hand the applicant, who violates our national sovereignty by his mere presence, enjoys the blithe protection of the very state whose laws he disregards. One party, the job-creating citizen, is coerced into criminality, as he tries in good faith to comply with the suffocating web of obligations the State ensnares him with; the other, the alien infiltrator, violates the law of his own free choice, and is rewarded for it.
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I so want a Tesla Model S. It would be so cool to have one. Not just because Consumer Reports said that it is the best car they ever tested. Because they are sleek, elegant, blindingly fast, and the best looking cars on the road, except for the old E-type Jaguars you see once in a while. Nothing is cooler than a Model S, except maybe a Morgan. However, it’s hard to get behind a car which was perfected in 1929 and basically left alone since then. So I’ll go with the Tesla.
However, if some ass hits my S, I want to be able to sue the crap out of him, so I can return the exquisite burgundy exterior to showroom condition. Therefore, I want to be sure that every other motorist has a driver’s license and insurance.
The Senate passed a bill which goes a long way towards fixing the immigration mess. Regrettably, we have a House of Representatives which can’t do a thing. They couldn’t find their ass with both hands, even if you gave them a few tries to do so. They have long ago given up governance in favor of political theater, and can’t do anything besides pass a bill every once in a while showing the world how much they hate hate hate Obamacare. They’re useless. It’s enough to make a grown man cry. As the Weeper of the House might say, it’s my Party and I’ll cry if I want to.
If they were rational people, we could work this all out. However, they’re not rational people, they are House Republicans. This leaves places like California in a quandary regarding how to protect its drivers, whether they have the exalted Tesla Model S or the lowly AMC Pacer. So what do we do? We make sure that people on the road can pass a test, are registered with the state, and can get insurance. We can’t fix the mess in Washington, but we can make things better here.
1 nye,
You do liberal caricature well enough to almost seem believable.
Your next pantomime performance should be to parse that prior parody…go fallacy by fallacy ending with the backslapper about mexicans forming queues in their eagerness to pay for liability insurance.
Peter, I understand that this is the rationale behind the legislation, and I expected you would make this point. That’s why I wrote that this idea is simply the “unfolding of prior bad ideas”.
I agree with you that Washington has done an abysmal job on immigration policy (though we will disagree about what that policy ought to be). It won’t do to blame Washington, however — because California, with its sanctuary cities and lax enforcement, cozies right up to the awful idea of having so many illegal aliens at large in the first place. Illegal aliens who drive badly are simply turned loose to do it again; worse, a GAO audit found that the average illegal alien in the California prison system has had seven prior arrests.
There are two choices here: make clear that any illegal aliens caught driving without a license will be deported at once, or capitulate even further by granting them driver’s licenses. Both approaches would reduce the number of unlicensed drivers on the road. The former would, at the same time, exert a salubrious deterrent effect on illegal immigration generally, while the latter only rewards and encourages it.
Repeatedly to arrest and release people whose very presence within our borders is itself a violation of the law erodes the foundations of a free and civilized society. When the enforcement of the law becomes a mere caprice, a whim of the sovereign, we are well along the way to tyranny. For criminals to run free begets anarchy.
Do you think you could get a driver’s license in Mexico if you were in the country illegally? You couldn’t, of course — that nation’s immigration laws are far stricter than ours.
And when this low-skilled, low-wage, assigned-risk illegal alien plows into your Tesla, and you sue “the crap” out of him: who, ultimately, do you suppose will foot the bill?
But all of this is a digression from the purpose of this post, which was merely to point out the logical contradictions that naturally and necessarily accompany this sort of insanity — antinomies that “rational people” would find intolerable.
But, to paraphrase your remark above, these are not rational people: they are California liberals.
Anyone who would drive an S in the vicinity of the sanctuary city of San Francisco, which protects illegal-alien asses, is also an ass.
Shouldn’t that read “a flair for overlooking cognitive dissonance”?
Jeffery Hodges
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Well, for living comfortably in a state of cognitive dissonance. Or yes, not even noticing it, as you say.
I’ve amended the sentence (which, for those of you just getting here, originally said just “a flair for cognitive dissonance”).
I have never bought an American car. Until now, none of the cars built here have been as well-made or as fun to drive as my BMW’s (or the Alfa and Volvo P1800 which preceded them). I would be thrilled to buy a Tesla, which is not only designed and built in America, but is assembled in a factory twenty minutes from my home.
I’ve never bought a car with an automatic transmission. The ipad-on-wheels is such a great car that I would even give up my lifelong identity as a Stick Guy.
The Tesla factory is across the Dunbarton Bridge from facebook, which in turn is proximate to Apple, Cisco, Intel, Netflix, Oracle, eBay, and – further up Route 101 in San Francisco – Twitter.
In today’s New York Times, Thomas Friedman writes about the conflict between the excitement of American innovation and a Congress whose majority lives in the alternate universe of the Foxiverse:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/opinion/sunday/friedman-when-complexity-is-free.html?_r=0&adxnnl=1&ref=opinion&adxnnlx=1379265724-Bdp5gLSSDrCtwO3jbckzFg
They are certainly very nice cars.
Re that link: the sort of optimism Friedman describes is exactly what Singularity University (another Silicon Valley dynamo) is all about. (It is, indeed, infectious, albeit a bit sugared-up.)
The innovation-by-competition idea Friedman discusses comes from SU’s founder Peter Diamandis, who got the ball rolling with the X-Prize.
Re the “Foxiverse”: technological progress is all very exciting. It is not, however, incompatible with social disorder, economic and demographic collapse, and the failure of America to preserve its founding principles, culture, and liberties.
Anyone who would own and drive a “very nice car” in an area swarming with protected illegal-alien asses is either someone for whom the value of his very nice car is in the noise of his net worth, or someone who thinks he can recover his loss via insurance. The former is a jerk who flaunts his well-off status; the latter is a fool.
Pah. I’ve been in two car accidents, both long ago and far away.
In the first one – forty years ago – I skidded down a hill on some ice to hit a car which was inexplicably stopped in the middle of the road. Our gracious host was riding shotgun.
I felt awful that I smashed up my Dad’s car, but he greeted the news with perfect equanimity, because I was OK and the car “is just nuts and bolts.” Something I’ve never forgotten, and something I repeated to my daughter when she got her car.
Anecdotal irrelevance.