Amerika-in-Exile (the Tulio Baars Homepage)

Over at Quora , one poster tries to make sense of why ordinary people oppose immigration, and discovers something about countries: One aspect is that a policy may be potentially Pareto optimal - meaning that you cannot make anyone better off without making someone else worse off presuming that the winners were to compensate the losers - but that's of slim comfort to you, your family, town, county, or state if you lose and the winners don't actually compensate you as the welfare economics standard suggests would be possible. Well, wait a second... that sounds like zero-sum conditions, where no one can win without someone else losing. How can we explain this? Simply put, borders exist for a reason: for anyone in a society to have anyone else comes in means a loss of what they had before, which was an ethnically-consistent society in which their group had self-determination. Each person arriving gradually chips away at their culture, values, hierarchy, and future. The w...

This Memorial Day weekend, it seems everyone is staying at home. The sales at the stores are not great, nor does there seem to be much excitement, but a fair number of people seem to be buying alcohol. The cookouts that made this such an odd holiday are gone as well; no more groups of neighbors, watery overpriced beer in hand, standing around a smoking grille and talking as if they knew each other. We cannot claim to be surprised by this, really, since national holidays have sort of faded away over the past couple years. It started with Halloween, when the people from outside the neighborhood drove so many kids to get candy that our subdivision basically just turned on the sprinklers and turned off the lights. Then other holidays faded too. We had nothing in common, so why celebrate them? To your average "American" at this point, Memorial Day means a four-day weekend and nothing more. Soldiers who died fighting for -- well, what, really? Abstractions like freedom and de...