Logic and Immigration

Public service announcement.  The following argument is invalid:

1. The Bible says that immigrants in a country are to be treated with human dignity.
2. Therefore the U.S. has an obligation to take in all of the world's refugees, have open borders, and Trump is a Nazi.

The Return of the Clock Boy

Remember our old friend Ahmed Mohamed?  No, not that Ahmed Mohamed, or the other Ahmed Mohamed, or that other Ahmed Mohamed, this Ahmed Mohamed.  He lost his defamation lawsuit failing to provide any evidence that any of the accused said anything false about him.  Senior counsel for the accused concluded by saying:

“This lawsuit filed by Clock Boy’s father is yet another example of Islamist lawfare, which is a component of the Muslim Brotherhood’s civilization jihad.”

"The Islamists employ the progressive mainstream media to label any public criticism of a sharia-centric, jihad-driven Islam as "Islamophobic," and they add fear and financial ruin to the equation by utilizing the legal system to file SLAPP actions."

A Book I Just Read

Hard to put down.  If you have seen the excellent film Patton, you'll love the book.  It seems to me to follow the structure of the film (though I have no idea whether that was the intention) and expand upon it, though it treats Montgomery and Rommel equally with Patton.

Feser on Capital Punishment

Ed Feser's long awaited book is now available for pre-order.  Blurb:

The Catholic Church has in recent decades been associated with opposition to the death penalty. It was not always so. This timely work recovers, and calls for a revival of, the Catholic tradition of support for capital punishment. Drawing upon a wealth of philosophical, scriptural, theological, and social scientific arguments, the authors show that it is the perennial and irreformable teaching of the Church that capital punishment can in principle be legitimate -not only to protect society from immediate physical danger, but also for purposes such as retributive justice and deterrence. They show that the recent statements of churchmen in opposition to the death penalty are merely "prudential judgments" with which faithful Catholics are not obliged to agree. They also show that the prudential grounds for opposition to capital punishment offered by Catholics and others in recent years are without force.

There are some decent arguments against capital punishment, but that capital punishment "can in principle be legitimate" seems to me quite easy to show.  If one commits capital offenses, then one deserves capital punishment.  If one deserves capital punishment, it's permissible (and perhaps sometimes even obligatory) for that person to be put to death.  That some people have committed crimes warranting their own deaths is plainly obvious.