02/07/26
When a person is coming to a free country from non-free country, he must be given the benefit of the doubt, for he is starting his life anew. It doesn't matter what criminal activity he engaged in the country of origin. The new country has police, the means to identify criminals by objective means. If this migrant will be a criminal in the new country, it's up to police to catch him and the court to prosecute him.
Natan Sharansky spent nine year in USSR prison. So what? When he finally made it to Israel he was made a minister of internal affairs. Leo from We the Living was a criminal (speculator), and that's how everyone lived in USSR which I was born into in 1979, and where I grew up until 1990. Starnesville in Atlas Shrugged has turned good people into criminals. These statist regions are truly dog eat dog, or, as the Russian idiom goes: a man is a wolf to another man.
In the 70s USSR, some Jews were trying to hijack a plane in order to fly to Israel. My grandfather was affected, since one of the associated men visited his house (in Lvov, Ukraine). The KGB picked up my grandfather during a train work trip, and redirected him to Moscow for questioning. My grandfather did not know anything about the plot, so after questioning KGB let him go. The real plot was:
On Dec. 24, 1970, the Leningrad municipal court issued verdicts in the cases of 11 defendants in a case that would transform the Jewish world, the State of Israel, and the Soviet Union itself. The court sentenced two defendants, Mark Dymshits, age 43, a former military pilot, and Eduard Kuznetsov, age 30, a dissident who had already done seven years in the gulag, to death by firing squad. Seven defendants, ages 21 to 30, were sentenced to 10 to 15 years in labor camps, with two receiving shorter sentences. Their crime: attempting to hijack a Soviet airplane in order to escape to Israel. With two exceptions, all the defendants were Jews.
Still, my grandfather always was listening to Voice of America on the radio (when he could catch it), which was illegal, and my grandmother was concerned that he would be caught. In addition to this, like everyone else, he stole from state factories and operations: I was witness to him stealing rebar to build his cabin. He is now 97 years old, happy and cheerful as always, living in Israel. Among my proximate relatives he is the only male figure I respect and look up to, and I chose to carry his last name.
02/07/26
I didn't live in the 90s in USSR, I emigrated to Israel in 1990, at the age of 11. However, we did have USSR TV accessible in Israel, and we watched it more often than Israeli TV. One reason was that we couldn't understand Hebrew at the necessary level. There was also hatred towards Russian immigrants, and this was our only escape to something familiar. I remember the day when Russian TV was streaming the events of the Putsch.
Through this Russian TV I was aware about what is going in Russia, particularly from the TV series and also from pulp fiction books. A TV series showed a young man (the protagonist) join a racketeering gang, plundered people's houses and shot those unfortunate to be there at the time. In one such attack, after shooting a few people in the living room as a matter of course, in the next room the man finds a woman in he slept with recently, and lets her live. This TV series was typical low-brow junk that everybody watched; the name of it I don't remember and it's not worth knowing. But the show showed the reality of the day.
Another TV series, highly praised and watched by almost everyone in post USSR, was "Brigada" (brigade), a kind of "The Godfather" Russian style. The protagonist is a young man returning from the army, naive about how things run in the civilian world. He quickly goes head to head with some gang, and by being brave facing them, display lack of fear of death, remains alive. However, he himself becomes the head of a new gang, but as it is presented, a fair one. As the show progresses, we see that even this gang does questionable things. When he learns that his friend and right hand has possibly betrayed him, it is presented that by the rules of the day he must kill him, as a show of force. However, he stalls by asking the friend to give him a blood transfusion, and during this time new information is made known that absolves the friend. In another episode, he visits his former lover and threatens to rape her by overpowering her. After he does so, and she stops resisting, he leaves her alone (and does not rape her); however, he made his point that he could. (It's open to interpretation if she resisted only to test his resolve.) In another point in the TV series, the "fair" gang threatens to rape a woman to get some information out of her.
Ideas drive history, and they particularly drive the art that's produced and happily consumed by the populace, for these ideas they hold and want to see reflected in it. But I have examples not from art, but from the real world. Anyone who made any money through business in the nineties had to face the question if killing is morally acceptable. Of course, he would never have to do it himself, he would get hitmen to do it on his behalf. One could not have made money without being approached by racketeers who made an offer one could not refuse. (In the "Brigada" TV series the most trusted bodyguard, who appeared loyal for years, betrays the protagonist and attempts to kill him).
Those who didn't want to live in this kind of environment, being fearful for their children, wives and parents, emigrated leaving a lavish lifestyle and starting from scratch in a country where they could not speak the language and their skills were not relevant to find a job.
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigada
02/11/26
Airport screening to prevent a hijacked plane crashing into a building and killing tens of thousands is similar to other regulations that attempt to prevent disasters. Isn't FDA restriction on COVID vaccine of the same motivation?
Any food or drink manufacturer or distributor could introduce poison and kill a lot of people, especially if the poison has a slow-release function. Should the government screen all manufacturing and distribution? What happens in laissez-faire Capitalism, when water purification is privatized? A malevolent actor could poison a water source.
It starts with justification for airport screening, and ends on laissez-faire being ridiculed as naive.
If police has probable cause to suspect safety of flights, it should put undercover policemen on the planes. It can devise non-intrusive screening using cameras, and other devices as people walk through airport hallways and corridors. If air travel were fully privatized, this would happen, because private companies will go to lengths to satisfy both policing needs and the passengers' comfort.