If ever there were a man who demonstrated the principle of Benefits from Genius it is Aristotle – Aristotle, the founder of three sciences and the Prime Mover in several others – Aristotle, the man from whom the ideas we now call “common sense” first sprung, back when sense was very far from common – Aristotle, from whose genius we still benefit more than two millennia later, but today would be treated by many as a … well, as Stuart Hayashi points out he would undoubtedly have bestowed upon him the labels gifted him by today’s identity politics:
Aristotle was an immigrant (the term was "metic"). Having grown up as a cultural Macedonian, he moved to the city-state of Athens, where he imbibed the wisdom of others and then disseminated his own. But because of violent attacks by Philip of Macedon on nearby city-states, Athenians came to distrust Macedonian immigrants in general, fretting that Macedonian immigrants were secretly violent subversives disloyal to Athens, getting ready to betray Athens for Philip . . . the sleeper agents and terrorists of their day. Anticipating what a prejudiced mob might do to him, Aristotle fled Athens to the island of Lesbos . . . a refugee.
Aristotle was an immigrant and refugee whom other people distrusted as possibly violent . . . feared even in what was, and should have remained, the freest society of his day.
The thing is, it’s not pity we need to direct towards immigrants, refugees and foreigners, but simply justice. The justice of treating them each as individuals, not as the average of some average.
Immigration is not about measuring averages. Nor is genius.
Here’s Christy Moore.
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7 comments:
Its not Aristotle we are worried about . He can come any time he likes.
This is all noble but back in Aristotle's day it was easier to distinguish between immigrants and invaders.
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Really? May I recommend reading some history.
I'm sure he'd be very pleased to hear you'd let him in.
But may I ask who died and made you gatekeeeper?
Yes it is easy to distinguish the Invaders from Westerners.
The invaders rape, kill and are barbarians.
The gate keepers will be about 200,000 New Zealand voters.
I will be at the back there somewhere.
You might see your friends General Brash and Lindsay at the front.
John Key could do one thing well, smell the wind change.
Aristotle's dad was the personal doctor to a king making him educated and rich. He was obviously highly intelligent. Furthermore as a Macedonian he was not culturally dissimilar to an Athenian. So "refugee" or not any country with a sane immigration policy would welcome an Aristotle doppelgänger.
I'm not sure what point you are trying to make about averages. Are you denying that if you took 10,000 immigrants (ie. a statistically large sample size) from a country you won't end up with a group that, on average, reflects the population of that country? And if that country happens to be poor, poorly educated, rife with bad ideas, and emotionally broken people that the immigrants you take won't reflect that?
Please take as many Aristotle's or near Aristotle's as you like. I care not where they come from or what hue their skin.
But until you are successful in dismantling the welfare state I would prefer not to be on the hook for an unlimited number of "average people" from the kind of states which happen to produce a lot of refugees.
Freedom lovers - the owners of the free society - ought to be the gatekeeper. If the free citizens are not the gatekeeper, then no one is. The Tom Palmer article states that many people are hostile to liberty. Having no gatekeeper and letting millions in who are hostile to liberty is no defence to liberty.
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