Immorally speaking

Jon sent over this article on 4chan. Quite interesting. Here's another article on the topic. I'm always the last guy to hear about this stuff.

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And how about that travel ban? You read this one at HuffPo?

There have been zero fatal terror attacks on U.S. soil since 1975 by immigrants from the seven Muslim-majority countries President Donald Trump targeted with immigration bans on Friday, further highlighting the needlessness and cruelty of the president’s executive order.
Between 1975 and 2015, foreign nationals from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen killed exactly zero Americans on U.S. soil, according to an analysis of terror attacks by the Cato Institute.   
Moreover, a report released this week shows that Muslim Americans with family backgrounds in those seven countries have killed no Americans over the last 15 years.

Cato is a right wing libertarian institute so spare me the "fake liberal news" bullshit if you will. Here's a good paragraph:

In addition to the visa restrictions above, Trump’s executive order further cuts the refugee program to 50,000 annually, indefinitely blocks all refugees from Syria, and suspends all refugee admissions for 120 days.  This is a response to a phantom menace.  From 1975 to the end of 2015, 20 refugees have been convicted of attempting or committing terrorism on U.S. soil, and only three Americans have been killed in attacks committed by refugees—all in the 1970s.  Zero Americans have been killed by Syrian refugees in a terrorist attack on U.S. soil.  The annual chance of an American dying in a terrorist attack committed by a refugee is one in 3.6 billion.  The other 17 convictions have mainly been for aiding or attempting to join foreign terrorists. President Trump tweeted earlier this week that executive orders were intended to improve national security by reducing the terrorist threat.  However, a rational evaluation of national security threats is not the basis for Trump’s orders, as the risk is fairly small but the cost is great. The measures taken here will have virtually no effect on improving U.S. national security. 

The fact is that the native born are far more likely to commit a crime than are refugees. Don't believe me, look it up.

Fairness vs. Sacredness. I was talking to my right wing conservative friend at length this week and we figured out that the whole thing boiled down to one issue for he and I, we were on opposite sides of abortion, me being pro-choice and he pro life. That is the current demarcation line it all revolves around and I don't think it is just us two people.

Social and cultural psychologists have long posited that conservatives tend to favor moral arguments of a sacred nature while liberals look at the underlying issues of fairness. This has been codified as the Moral Foundations Theory. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago came up with a study that suggests that the two sides occasionally flip positions.

“This study suggests that liberals and conservatives are more alike in their moral functioning than previously thought,” says Matt Motyl, UIC assistant professor of psychology and corresponding author on the study, which was published Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy.
Moral justification can be divided into five different categories, according to previous research: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Liberals tend to rely more on fairness arguments, while conservatives tend to rely more on sanctity.
In these studies, researchers found that liberals supported same-sex marriage due to concerns about fairness, while conservatives opposed it due to concerns about violating the sanctity of marriage. But when it came to the oil pipeline, liberals felt it violated the sacredness of nature, while conservatives considered it a matter of fairness in business. (Neither side used explicitly sacred language in describing the pipeline issue, but a data analysis of responses showed that liberals were most concerned about the pipeline desecrating nature.)
“The [findings] are the first, to our knowledge, to show that liberals can base their moral opinions on sanctity more than conservatives do when voicing opinions about culture-war issues,” according to the study’s authors.

I took the moral foundations test today and was shocked to find out that I was even farther left than the average liberal. Egads.

I spent a weekend or two recently reading the Book of Numbers in my hotel. I was bored. God at one point told the Hebrews to kill every last  Midianite or Amalekite, I forget now, even the male children, but to spare the young virgin women. When god speaks you are supposed to listen or face all sorts or wrath. Hey Abraham almost killed his own kid. Not me, man.

I would go to hell. I couldn't kill a young kid. Because it seems real unfair. No matter what the big guy supposedly said. But people slavishly dedicated to the sacred law could probably pull the trigger. So I think this is not any new divide that we are facing.

Are you beholden to what you perceive in your head as a law or to what you feel in your heart?

Jung would probably see the whole conundrum as a battle between the patriarchal and matriarchal archetype. Mother Earth or Father Sun.

Someone posted this on Google+ today. A bit harsh but certainly thought provoking.