Iconochasm
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Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
2yr ago
So Massachusetts isn't willing to help refugees? Because they're not legal migrants? It's a novel form of fraud, tricking someone into receiving a valuable service for free with no strings attached or expectations. And it's fraud because MA lawyers and politicians are hilarious hypocrites about illegal immigrants to Texas vs illegal immigrants to MA?
Fun fact, "Defrauding someone to travel somewhere" appears to be a newly coined phrase. Google has no record of it ever appearing anywhere on the internet before.
Iconochasm
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2yr ago
Oh no! So help the people you've lured through 4000 miles of death traps and cartels to work through the process and qualify! Again, it is insanely rich logic to throw a hissy fit over a single plane load of refugees who don't meet a strict set of requirements when they're illegal immigrants falsely claiming asylum as cover for economic migration in the first place. The sheer audacity to try that line! Should we start charging the NGOs and immigration lawyers who are coaching people on what to say on asylum applications with human trafficking, too?
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2yr ago
arbitrarily seized and transported by agents of the state?Offered a free plane ticket to a rich sanctuary city.
Your phrasing here is histrionic to the point of derangement.
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2yr ago
Massachusetts Refugee Resettlement Program
One of the qualifiers is "Asylees".
An asylee is a person who meets the definition of refugee and is already present in the United States or is seeking admission at a port of entry.
So, were they falsely applying for asylum, or do they count?
"They used all direct quotes from our official government resources, but put it together into their own pamphlet so we'll pretend I just proved they lied" is some absolutely amazing logic. Here, try this one:
Another qualifier is "victims of human trafficking", which means that even if DeSantis criminally trafficked them, that makes them such victims, which post-facto justifies the claims!
Seriously, just take the L on this one.
Iconochasm
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2yr ago
I will lodge the prediction that this will prove to be a self-own. The optics here are already horrendous. 53 migrants dead in the back of a truck is a statistic, 50 getting a free vacation to Martha's Vineyard is a human rights violation. Whose rights? Why, the right of rich, progressive Sanctuary Citizens to not have to look at poor brown people, of course.
And now they're keeping this disaster in the news for months to come with the prospect of bilking thousands of billable hours from leftist billionaires and money laundered NGOs to engage in blatant lawfare over a free plane ticket to a sanctuary city, after refusing to pay for a single hotel room for a single migrant? The "Democrats want illegals to have more rights than you, and then charge you for making them look at a poor person" ads practically write themselves. This is "Umbridge as a comic book villain" territory.
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2yr ago
I wonder how the parallel would go. Make a profile with pics of some hot woman with huge breasts, and a profile all about how she lost her kids for vile neglect, and loves cutting off cocks of her dates.
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2yr ago
Those migrants made their 4K mile trek on the promise of steady work in Texas or California, not a full-size snickers.
Right, and who is making that promise? If people were met at the border with a wall, and told to go back home, very quickly no one would be risking a 4000 mile death trek. If you are encouraging people to make the trek, you deserve some blame for people making the trek. If you didn't know the trek was dangerous, you deserve scorn for being ignorant about your own policies.
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2yr ago
The Biden administration has been doing exactly this for years.
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2yr ago
I think there’s a bailey of “the world is pretty much meritocratic nowadays and any attempt to correct disparities is an unjust overreaction”.
I don't think this line works because the age effect is a meritocratic difference. The kid who is 8 months older than their peer isn't the beneficiary of unfair favoritism, or subtle preference effects. They actually are bigger, stronger. They actually have had more time to develop their coordination. Their brain actually is more developed, and was for the entire process of schooling.
Iconochasm
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2yr ago
What, exactly, would you have considered the appropriate response?
Pool some of the massive amount of wealth available. Put them up in hotels for a week. Give them (and the MA authorities) an actual chance to figure out a real plan for them moving forward.
Honestly, I can even imagine a version of that article that didn't offend me so much. But the actual article reeked of poverty/suffering porn and self-satisfied fart-huffing over what is objectively extremely minor amounts of aid.
So "Republican governors" can organize a plan to ship them cross-country. And red states can pay tax dollars for the travel. And DeSantis can bluster and make political hay and otherwise ensure that it gets massive news coverage...and you're blaming the residents?
I'm obviously talking about the incredibly dangerous hike of 4000 perilous miles, not the last thousand traversed in a commercial, first world airplane. I am positing that people who support lax (or non-existent) border security bear some moral responsibility for the suffering endured, and the 2/3s who died along the way. Every "In this house" sign is a marginal incentive for people to risk their lives.
The calculus changes if your roommate calls your friends, coworkers, and pastor and hints that you're going to lose your shit. Might you feel a little...constrained? A little incentivized to prove him wrong in front of your social circles?
I would probably let him stay for more than 44 hours, in that case. And the calculus changes yet again if I've been openly championing "Unhoused Persons Rights", and supporting my city accepting homeless people from other areas. If the best I could do to "prove him wrong" was a single night before I had the homeless guy escorted out by the police, while I wailed for the reporters about how deeply I was moved by the experience, I would fully expect to be slammed for being a huge hypocrite.
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2yr ago
What exactly would the crime be? And why wouldn't it apply to every NGO, congressional staffer and lawyer doing similar things to get people to and over the border in the first place?
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2yr ago
'They enriched us.' Migrants' 44-hour visit leaves indelible mark on Martha's Vineyard
I encourage people to read the article before reading my impressions.
Incidentally, this article made me really wish for the Bare Links Repository back.
There is so much about this article that is just amazing to me. I don't know how to describe it. Maybe "witlessly mask off"?
First, I want to note the tic where every time the author notes an age, he specifies that the migrant in question looks younger. It's just so artlessly manipulative.
Second, the people patting themselves on the back for the casual, mild, one-off generosity. Wow, a Martha's Vineyard homeowner reached into his wallet and gave a migrant a $100 bill. Then there's the guy who spent $100 on candy for the kids, which is extra Wholesome 100 because he lives in his car because the rent is too damn high. It's like Ray Sanchez crammed an entire scathing allegory about life and housing in the blue zones into a sentence and didn't even notice.
Third, I'd really like to see the argument for how offering people a plane ride to a rich resort town is a human rights violation.
But the thing that really gets me is the detailed, yet uselessly vague, descriptions of the incredible dangers the migrants had to overcome to get to the US. Murderous mud and murderous cartels, and floods and cliffs. Coming from Venezuela, it's 2,684 miles by plane. Map software can't even calculate a route by land, I'm guessing it's something more like 4,000 miles, going through at least seven other countries. The article quotes the migrants clearly describing themselves as economic migrants, but repeatedly calls them asylum seekers. No one seems to notice that these people trekked, apparently on foot, halfway across the hemisphere, losing something like 2/3rds of their number to the assorted lethal dangers for exactly the storied rewards they want these people to get, quoting the article, "access to services including legal, health care, food, hygiene kits, and crisis counseling" along with housing.
The MV people celebrating themselves in this article seem to bear a large portion of moral blame for creating the exact incentive for people to take these risks and find themselves in these situations. Imagine if some billionaire was offering people a large sum of money to take their children and hike across a deadly desert. I think there would be mass outcry at how incredibly fucked up that was. And the few people who reached the other end are instead greeted with a king size Snickers bar and a crisp Benjamin to fuck off. Do you want people dying to get to you or not?! How many dead kids is worth a few hours of cultural enrichment?
I'm at a loss for how to categorize this, but it all just strikes me as appalling. This is the most cruelly champagne socialist shit I've ever read, and it's being presenting as flattery by CNN!
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2yr ago
Journalists think of their audience like a grandmother who doesn’t trust that the grandkids will understand that the flying monkeys and Wicked Witch are the villains. They have absolutely zero respect for your ability to understand anything, so they have to dumb it down into the simplest good/bad dichotomy and drill it into your idiot head by rote repetition.
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2yr ago
11% of the country, which is 37 million people, were living below poverty in 2020
Key qualifier there being "on paper", which often involves income off the books to maintain access to transfer programs. That also glosses over what poverty means in America - a place to live, often a car, amenities like AC and modern appliances, a new-ish smart phone and far too many calories. Poverty in an objective, global sense is non-existent outside extreme addiction and/or mental illness.
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2yr ago
I love the swamp. So freaking dangerous at first. The first time I found it was a disaster. Got caught in a little bay on a sand bar between a pack of skeletons and a troll, died and lost the boat, too. Then I came in much more carefully, slipped gently in, and the first mob I encountered was a 2 star draugur archer. That was a spicy corpse run. All that to explore a Chile-shaped swamp that did not have a single crypt.
Second run through, co-op with my son, I went nuts and built walking platforms in the sky through the entire swamp we cleared.
Third run through, going as slow and carefully as I want, I have just been using to hoe to flatten it all out. Just got back with my first karve full of iron, and have not died once so far.
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2yr ago
Abbott has been asking for help for years, and instead he gets furors over false allegations of horsemen whipping Haitians.
It’s my understanding that they moved them to a place they could be housed, because MV is just a little island and doesn’t have facilities to host a bunch of families who have no shelter.
They have thousands of newly empty summer homes and hotels.com is eager to help me compare the 1026 different hotel options. MV has a population of almost 90k. The idea that they can't settle 50 people is absurd.
They seemed to react kindly to the people, I didn’t really see anything of this “couldnt stand to see brown people” stuff.
They had them escorted off the island by the military within 36 hours. It's easy to put on a smile for a couple hours for a photo shoot. Why not welcome them to settle there and enhance the vibrancy of the community?
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2yr ago
If New York et al. had said no then the GOP governors would have a point.
NY et al can step up now. Have they?
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2yr ago
I saw the idea floated, possibly here, that they had just repackaged work done on a Dragon Age series.
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2yr ago
The 'public emergency' releases funds to take care of arrivals.
So these sanctuary cities have no existing protocols for dealing with illegal immigrants? Their only response is to tap into funds for natural disasters?
it was done with zero attempts to coordinate with local authorities. Which goes back to my point: Abbott/Desantis are not making a good faith effort to redistribute immigrants. Being as disruptive and disorganized as possible is the point, so they can talk about how owned the hypocritcal libs are.
This is still histrionic. It's not like border states get a coordinated heads-up. Where's the good faith from Bowser, Adams, and MV? Why haven't they been spending their own money to help illegal immigrants get there before now?
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2yr ago
So, less than 48 hours later, and the illegal immigrants have already been deported from Martha's Vineyard. The MA governor has activated the national guard, and sent 125 Guardsmen to escort the 50 immigrants in a purportedly voluntary relocation to somewhere out of sight of the rich progressives.
The level of hypocrisy on this one is just amazing. No one invited anyone into their home. They couldn't even stand the sight of brown people unburdened by lawncare equipment till the weekend. It reminds me of when Mac went pro-life to pick up chicks.
Also, the $12 Million seems to be for the entire relocation program. Given how shameless and stark the results are, this may end up being the best use of money in politics in years.
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2yr ago
Fair enough. It appears to me to be the sort of claim that people are happy to share off the record, in person. I was thinking more about public, on the record claims.
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2yr ago
Shadowrun has so much math and crunch that it effectively gatekeeps the worst of the complainer type. But Shadowrun also confronts that issue directly. Orks aren't just slightly dumber - they give birth in litters of 6-8, physically mature faster, and have shorter lifespans than humans, much less dwarves or elves. They're a Doyalist-designed underclass race, and it sucks and isn't fair, just like the rest of the dystopia. What are you going to do about it, chummer?
It also helps that Shadowrunners are mercenary terrorists who treat corporate security forces like D&D adventurers treat ogres. The average player is probably more likely to get along with the ork street gangers.
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2yr ago
And? By the logic of disparate impact, the residents of Martha's Vineyard (which includes the Obamas) are "openly white supremacist". It's a community founded in, steeped in, and projecting outwards colonial Whiteness. The residents should welcome their town of stolen land being aggressively decolonized by Latinx folx with indigenous ancestry.
Less schadenfreudenly, has anyone ever been happy with the claim of "I'm not racist, just classist"?
AIUI, the migrants were given cots in meeting room in a church for 1-2 evenings, then escorted off the island by the national guard to a military dormitory. At no point did any one of the compassionate, rich progressives offer to put someone up in a hotel room, much less let a family use an empty beach house for the weekend.
The aid given and compassion shown was more or less the absolute bare minimum needed to calmly make the poor brown people go away ASAP. Conversely, we've seen much more effort put into flattering themselves in the media, and launching furious legal and PR attacks back at DeSantis for making them look bad. When, remember, there are probably 5 figures worth of residents who could have each put the entire group up in a resort hotel for a week for pocket change.
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