Shakes
2d ago
I mean, it is if you tax them and redistribute the money.
We can do the same thing with tariffs. And then we don't have neighborhoods full of foreigners who will hide the Bataclan bombers after they make their getaway.
Accordingly this is, as it says in the name, a religious, not ethnic, exemption. In other words, to not have it would infringe upon the religious freedom of Britons of any race by foreclosing the possibility for a white Englishman of converting to Sikhism if he wants to.
I don't agree with it, but the English have adopted weapons bans as a virtue. They also have religious freedom as a virtue. In accommodating immigrant Sikh values, they now have to accommodate exceptions in their weapons bans. These are two contradictory virtues. They can't actually coexist meaningfully. This is a conflict caused by immigration. Your proposed solution, essentially, is to jettison arms control in favor of religious freedom, i.e., that English society should change even more in order to accommodate the Sikh. It can be perfectly English to be Sikh! Well, it wasn't 50 years ago, and it wasn't even common until extremely recently. If the challenges of integrating migrants are to be solved by England changing to accommodate them, what's the argument in favor of accepting migrants? Trade deal: You change your society and culture and values, and we give you welfare consumers, a housing shortage, and endless supply of accusations of racism, and occasional stabbings. We will integrate on our terms, not yours, and maybe, just maybe, statistically, we'll perform better on some made-up statistical measures. Oh and you don't have a choice and this downgrade is permanent.
Shakes
2d ago
If an Irish man used a religious exemption to acquire a weapon to murder somebody and his Irish friends and family closed ranks to help him hide the weapon and spin up bogus anti-Irish racism charges, I would not consider that proof of integration.
You put "building a parallel society" in quotes and I'm not sure if I should read that as scare quotes. But to be clear, there are absolutely Muslim, ethnic, and immigrant neighborhoods in major cities in Britain and across Europe that function as parallel societies. There are parts of London where it is not safe to be gay. There are parts of Marseilles where it is not safe to be white. Would it make a difference to you if those areas had lower reported crime stats? It doesn't to me.
Shakes
2d ago
Is that a realistic outcome? I could say that Communists winning could mean nuclear bombs in space and sun death and the blow-up of the entire galaxy. Maybe Communists winning means all our consciousnesses stuck in eternity in a hell simulator, plus one.
Shakes
2d ago
The pieds-noirs didn't want to go back to France either and the majority who did were impoverished by the change. But it was better than staying.
Shakes
2d ago
To whitepillers: is there an argument for why I'm wrong that doesn't boil down to "you don't get it, chud, it's the New Economy! The Singularity is just around the corner! All the rules are obsolete!"? This argument is verboten, because this is pretty much what people say with every bubble.
Trump admin is engineering a massive restructuring of global capital with the intent of making America richer. It runs a spectrum from factories and reshoring to taking the oil from Venezuela. DEI Disparate Impact theories are being unwound so that productive talent that was locked up by politics will no longer be locked up. Welfare migrants are being deported and America's balance sheet is shifting toward productive economic activity again.
The global future looks very mixed as population decline will hit the entire world. Fewer people means less capital to spend and fewer things to spend capital on. Bad news if you're China or Russia or Europe or Brazil. But this will make America even more attractive for capital and investment, relative to everywhere else. We will have factories, oil, gas, tech, services, military strength, capital, youth, growth, everything.
The market is already starting to price in this future. AI and datacenters are the headline boom feeding a lot of optimism, and it might come crashing down. But the underlying economic picture is very potentially strong because the fundamentals of the American economy are stable, and getting stronger. And, to my mind, AI unlocks so many economic opportunities that it will find a purpose eventually. If it does come crashing down it will be more like the dot-com bubble than full 2008. Because a technology that transforms electricity into intellectual work is enormously productive in real terms, not just fake email job terms. The dot-com bubble killed billions of dollars of imagined wealth locked up in companies like Pets.com. But, fundamentally, there was nothing Pets.com was doing that isn't being done today. They were just ahead of the curve.
Besides, despite all evidence to the contrary, the government has learned from some of its mistakes, and I don't think they'll repeat the dot-com bubble fiasco. Washing and Bessent and DOD and Trump will funnel billions of dollars in government contracts to the AI companies, and that will keep everybody afloat. The consequences will be an entirely new set of problems relating to economic management out of Washington central offices as the greatest economic change in the means of production since the Managerial Revolution plays out. It won't even be entirely a good set of changes. But they will probably fuel a lot of medium-term growth in the terms we're talking about here, and the negative consequences will be something we will spend the rest of our lives disentangling.
Shakes
2d ago
Nobody has run the numbers, but given the reputation of Sikhs in the UK** it is likely that kirpans prevent more crime than they cause (much like guns carried by CCW permit holders in the US).
What difference does it make? They're building a parallel society. If you give them a street and they commit less crime it's still not yours to live on. If you give them a city and they make it rich it's still not your money to spend. If you give them your country it's not yours anymore, it's theirs.
Unless they were integrating. Are the Sikhs integrating? Apparently they have their own rituals we have to grant them religious exemptions for. And they don't behave like White Britons -- by your own argument they don't commit crime at the same rate. Presumably they are different.
(Not that I would assume they commit crime at lower rates anyways. Basically every immigrant group commits more crime than native Brits with the exception of other European groups and the Japanese. It's possible the Sikh are genuinely exceptional and I know they are different from standard Indians / Muslims / Arabs / etc. But if a random Sikh murders a kid and his family helps him cover up the crime I'm going to assume that they're actually not exceptional: I've never heard of a Japanese immigrant family doing that.)
Shakes
2d ago
15% of the population of Algeria was French in 1962, approaching 60% in some of the cities, after a hundred years of settlement. Gone now.
Maybe it will maybe it won't. It's very plausible that mass migration will leave deeper scars than that and that remigration won't happen or that these situations are just too different to compare. But when you proclaim that the battle is lost, history only goes a certain way, and the future can be easily extrapolated from the past, I think you are misunderstanding history. It can swerve.
Shakes
2d ago
Europeans democratically vote for politicians who pursue pro-immigration policies.
When the EU was up for a vote, it lost many times across many countries. They kept having votes until it won.
Shakes
3d ago
No it’s the same logic. I think straight OF stars have more of the boyfriend-girlfriend porn but the stablehorse “fresh meat” sex with strangers logic still applies.
Shakes
4d ago
I'm reading your post as half tongue-in-cheek but I want to reply at length anyways (although perhaps this is all obvious):
I would say the most common and successful genre is OnlyFans "performers" who "collaborate" with other performers. It's a big world out there and people will pay for a lot of things and you can make it doing solo "content" or "chat". But even a lot of that is buttressed on an ecosystem of OnlyFans performers collaborating with other performers.
Basically it works like this: OnlyFans stars are all messaging each other or networking in groupchats to figure out who they're going to fuck next. There's a lot of gossip about who's good to work with and lots of rumors about bad experiences with particular stars. Most of this content is amateur, by which I mean, it's not produced by big porn studios. A lot of OnlyFans content now does rely on hiring professional cameramen who film the content to look as if it were amateur. Lots of it is still done with just "ring lights" and some strategically-placed phones on record. Big porn studios have moved upmarket into really emphasizing higher-quality cameras and photography, logistics, and elaborate scenes. A lot of performers will also do a mix of OnlyFans and studio porn, depending on what their mood is.
There are a lot of advantages to constantly "collaborating" with other performers:
- Every performer you work with potentially brings in a new audience.
- Audiences get tired of watching the same sex scenes between the same performers.
- New "collaborations" offer performers the opportunity to show off "different skills"
- Well-established performers have networks of referrals and advertisers that are attractive to new performers
- OnlyFans stars enjoy having sex with strangers and traveling to have sex with strangers
My friend, for example: His largest audience comes from Instagram, where he creates fairly tame videos / reels meant to advertise himself to a general audience. (Maybe he does a quick video of himself telling a story about something that happened to him today in his car, maybe he does a clip with a flirty caption where his ass looks good as he does pull-over rows at the gym.) You click through to his twitter, and he obviously has an OnlyFans, although he mostly hints at the truly hardcore stuff and you have to pay to see it. (Lots of performers post sex clips right there out in full, some approaching such length you wonder why anyone would bother to pay for the full version at all.) My friend has told me he's very cynical about how he produces content: he aims to film one new "collaboration" a month, and he spins a few clips from one video into enough advertisements to make enough tweets about it for a full month. He tells me that the kind of men he has sex with on camera aren't really the kinds of men he likes to have sex with off camera, although it looks to me like he has a good time. His fiance is pilled on all of this and doesn't seem to mind. My friend, in fact, rarely mentions his fiance at all, to the point that unless you very devotedly followed his content you would probably assume he were single and maybe even dating around.
I'll add for color a few details that are particular to gay world.
In gay world, everybody knows who the big porn stars are. They are minor celebrities. Some are celebrities. If you go to enough gay clubs in big cities you'll run into them. Everybody knows who they are. They are not really excluded in any social scenes, usually quite the opposite. Imagine if you went to a friend's large 100+ birthday party and Bonnie Blue was there. You go out to your local bar and Mia Khalifa is there. You go dancing and there's Elon Musk cavorting with Aella. What I mean is that there is no separation where porn is relegated to a seedier subworld you have to seek out to access. It is simply the default. If I went clubbing with my friend, people would recognize him.
Which is to say, if you're fantasizing about this life at all, you have to really enjoy sex with strangers. And with any success with becoming a celebrity. With very few exceptions. I have yet to hear someone recommend it whole-heartedly at all. Mostly, the ones who come to like it come to feel as though they've learned something about human nature the rest of us can't know. It's actually ironically very similar to the attitude I pick up from DC politicos who think they "know how the sausage is 'really' made". They think they have special access to some knowledge about the human condition. And it makes them a little jaded in all ways.
I'll add, as a final thought, pardon me if this is Too Much Information, that sex with porn stars is not something I would recommend either. It's very mechanical and lifeless. And in person many of them look way more fake blond and spray-on suntanned and gussied up than you would think from the pictures. The act itself is very mechanical. I've had this argument with some friends before, and some of them have told me I'm crazy. But for anyone here who feels like they're missing out I would say in strong terms that, from what I've experienced, you're not really missing out on anything you should feel jealous about. Unless you really, really like having lots of sex with strangers.
Shakes
4d ago
Anyway, all of this recent discourse combined is making me feel more and more like a retarded schmuck for working a 'real job,' as opposed to just leeching off the government, doing some sort of NGO/media grift, or even just getting a random remote job and going to live cheap in Thailand or some other extremely cheap country. And this is someone who has a pretty chill office job where I don't have to work too hard, and get to work from home a few days a week. I can't imagine how people who actually bust their asses in physical labor and make less than me feel!
I have known one of the women this article is describing. (I don't know if she's actually named in the article, I couldn't get past the paywall at my office. But she's aella's set, so the exact sort being described.)
You do not want the lives of these women. In one sense it's sexy to be a porn star or an escort, especially today when people pay you lots of money, you go to parties all over the world, the food is nice and the views are beautiful, etc. But it's not really worth it. As someone who's been blessed to travel a lot after enough of it the locations all blur together and the food is overrated anyways. (Nobody cooks as well as my mother, or my aunts for that matter. My father grilled a better steak than any I've ever had out.) What you're left with at the end of the day is yourself. Wherever you blow, there you are.
The woman I'm thinking of had a lot of problems. She had unnecessary plastic surgery and nose jobs to make herself more beautiful, when she was quite beautiful already. She fucked men for favors and started fights and then found herself without friends. She felt powerful being taken out by powerful and wealthy men who strung her along with fantasies of marriage or introductions that never came. And she didn't need the money because she came from money already. The people who knew her best talked of overwhelming loneliness. Whoever you know, there they are.
If you met her you would think she was beautiful and smart and funny and kind. Maybe this is cope, maybe it's straightforwardly good to be beautiful and wear beautiful clothes and eat beautiful things. Maybe I didn't really know her in any meaningful sense and it's rude to even profile her in the third person. I think she had a lot of fun having sex. I think she did a lot of nice things for a friend one time at some social expense to her own reputation.
I think she hated me because I was gay. I think she was the type of woman who loves exercising power over men, and there was nothing she could exercise over me. I think I saw a glimpse of something that made me feel profoundly sad. I think she would say that she doesn't think about me at all.
I think it all ended rather badly for everyone involved.
I've known lots of other successful and interesting people and I would say generally that the ones who are happiest are extremely productive or extremely devoted to their families.
Thinking some more, I've known some guys who do OnlyFans. One of them is a real sweetheart, pure soul, I have nothing bad to say about him. I think, though, if you wanted to fantasize about the life, at least with respect to professional sex, you would have to really, really enjoy having lots of sex with strangers.
Maybe we're underestimating how sexy sex work has yet to get. Maybe AI and social media have only just begun. Maybe it's like bitcoin when it was $100, and you think, this thing has peaked, we missed our chance, it's too late to buy in. And it still had a few orders of magnitude to go. Sex is after all the oldest profession. Porn stars are famous now, they have a lot of status, it might probably become even more popular. Laid-off email job guys are going to have more time to jerk off right? But I can't think of anybody who got into porn and aged out and is enthusiastically promoting how good it was and how they have no regrets about anything they did. Mostly the opposite.
Shakes
5d ago
Please explain how ballots get harvested after election day
I have described it many times. Ballot harvesting is legal in California. This is how your elections are run.
Shakes
5d ago
No, the point is that obviously late-breaking ballots are for Raman because they are being harvested. California has implemented mass legalized fraud. They print millions of ballots and then ballot harvesters are allowed to chase them. Those chased ballots are blessed by briefly touching the hand of a registered voter, who may not even be a citizen. Sometimes this blessing is not even needed. If a ballot is not postmarked or signed correctly, it goes into a pile to be cured.
This is the basic reality of the system California has set up. It’s good that you approve of it, although not necessary because you have not been consulted: were you to vote in a way contradicting the wishes of California’s political machines, they would simply harvest ballots until yours was obsoleted.
What’s your objection exactly? An irrelevant question about the post office? A truism about math? If someone at the post office wanted to forge ballot postmarks it would not take a vast conspiracy of the entirety of USPS. It only takes a couple of guys making small changes. That’s the entire point of California’s election system, they have created a process where the political machine has total authority.
It is, in fact, possible to dislike the result without throwing my toys across the room.
Look, I’ve been polite, if you want to preen as if your opinion makes you a more mature person than me, you’ve picked the right forum in which I can’t respond in kind. I guess that’s your only consolation prize when you defend a system in which your opinion is not consulted and does not matter. They’ll rob your pocket book to build trains to nowhere for union jobs that donate back to the machine, they’ll burn your house down if it fills someone’s pension to leave your fire hydrants empty. And when you try to vote against it (if you ever do), you’ll accept the explanation that votes delivered at 4:00pm under a full moon in Aquarius always break for the fifth-place Democratic candidate at the exact rate he needs to win. You’re too mature to throw your toys across the room, right? So keep playing with them.
Shakes
5d ago
Results changing with more ballots coming in is not evidence of fraud. Sorry, that just makes no sense.
Raman was in 3rd place until after Election Day. She was 3rd place in mail-in ballots, she was 3rd place in in-person voting. Until magically she’s winning close to 40% in some of these ballot drops. Come on, that’s obviously evidence of fraud. That’s literally how it works, you make more ballots to change the outcome. The way California conducts elections is categorically different from the mathematical idea that ballots would be distributed randomly that you allude to.
What’s the alternative explanation? It’s legal for activists to go harvesting ballots after the election? Everything is the result of legal ballot harvesting? This is not in any meaningful sense a democratic system, this is just an elaborate charade over a one-party state. Maybe you get what you wanted. Trains that never get built and homeless shelters in the streets. The money is being siphoned off by a political machine that thinks of California as a paypig, although they will spend a little on you come election time to convince you that late-arriving ballots always break for a one-party state. The later the ballots arrive, the more they demand whatever outcome produces a one-party state.
Shakes
6d ago
I don’t think it’s impossible that a batch of ~10k mail-in votes, especially if they came from the same neighborhood, could have zero for the republican. Unlikely, yes, but not impossible. A 1% chance isn’t zero chance.
You’re overestimating the odds by a few orders of magnitude. Even in North Korea the ruling party only gets 99.93% of the vote — they “lose” 7/10,000. Cuba’s ruling party gets 80%. In Laos the ruling party gets 98%. In Vietnam they just got 99.96%.
If Democratic precincts are hitting one-party state margins, it’s at least a little plausible to wonder what else they might have in common?
Edit: to be clear I’m willing to accept the explanation that this is a reporting artifact, with the understanding that reporting votes this way is awfully convenient for masking fraud.
Shakes
6d ago
People were voting in person and by mail all through Election Day which produced 1. Bass 2. Pratt 3. Raman. After Election Day suddenly the ballots start surging for Raman, so that she might pass Pratt, but they don’t start surging for Pratt.
There’s no good explanation for this that isn’t just an ex-post facto. And you cannot prove that these ballots are legitimate because California deliberately implemented a system that made this impossible.
A unique identifier on the ballot compromises secrecy. I'm not aware of any state in the union which does this.
That’s not what chain of custody means.
To be clear - you are claiming that the post office is falsifying postmarks?
That’s a completely different sentence.
Shakes
6d ago
Let me ask you a question. Do you live in a state with vote by mail? Do you vote by mail? Do your Republican friends?
I live in Virginia, where we do have vote by mail. I vote in person, where they at least check my ID, in a district that routinely votes 90% Dem. Among my Republican friends, those less-connected to official party politics they are least likely to vote. I would estimate 50% of my friends who are Republicans and regularly opine about politics actually vote. I vote in every election but not out of any principled reason. And I don’t think my vote counts for much. But when I meet so many Virginia and DC Republicans who are in politics, I much prefer truthfully saying I voted to lying or inventing a complicated explanation for why I don’t. My local precinct is cute and it’s a pleasant drive. My boss has never given me a problem about taking an hour to vote. I think there’s a charge code for it but I’ve never asked.
I hear all sorts of interesting things from my friends in Virginia politics. A friend who would know swears that Jason Miyares was presented with evidence of Democrats committing election fraud and he balked, saying that allegations like that are exactly what he had to protect Virginia from. Not the activities alleged, the allegations themselves. Obviously this isn’t any kind of proof that amounts to anything, let alone proving anything in a discussion here. I’m just adding this for color.
I know a lot of people with different views about the possibility of mail-in ballot voter fraud. I think most people assume some is happening, but probably not “a lot”. I think that Democrats would keep winning elections without it, especially in California. But I also think that they’re certainly doing some, because it helps them keep their grip on power. It’s the same tendency as unions taking a cut of their members’ wages and donating it to Democrats, who get elected and give the unions sweetheart pensions and deals. It’s been going on a long time. It’s part of Tammany Hall and Ellis Island. It’s how part of Truman and LBJ became VP.
The more of this you allow, the weaker your Democracy gets. California in a meaningful sense is ceasing to be a Democracy. The idea of Democracy is that the people choose in fair and free elections who is supposed to govern them. This is increasingly not how elections are conducted. When you allow ballot harvesting, the edge goes to whoever can spin up the largest political machine. The machine is always present in Democracy when it gets larger than the size of a few thousand Athenians raising hands on the public forum. But when we confuse elections with the ballots cast in those elections, the balance tilts toward the machine. We, informed citizens debating what kind of society we should live in, lose power to whoever can stake out the nursing homes, homeless shelters, welfare ghettos, and immigrant slums. The fraud is just a stalking horse. Democracy is already in trouble before it gets that far.
I’m not especially attached to Democracy, but I think it’s probably a good idea and we should fight for it. I’m not going to lecture anybody about the importance of voting or counting every ballot. But I think that overall it works. The system pioneered in California and spreading to Illinois and Virginia and New York clearly does not work. It gets you corrupt officials who can’t even build a train because everything is looted for parts. Karen Bass is a Communist who was trained in Cuba who allowed a beautiful part of a beautiful city to burn, and she can’t even be voted out of office because Democracy has already degraded to a bureaucratized ritual of hand sanitizing.
To address a few of your other points quickly: signature verification is a joke because nobody knows half the time what a signature is supposed to look like and when a ballot is rejected it can be “cured”; chain of custody means that even after a ballot has been ripped apart so that the voter’s name isn’t attached to his vote, you can prove it started life as a legitimate ballot, and if it’s not done it makes a mockery of postmarking ballots, and it’s frequently never done; postmarking itself is not a sacred human institution, robots aren’t staffing the post office, it would be cheap to fake; and it remains extraordinarily convenient that, after all this, Karen Bass has the same vote share, but Spencer Pratt’s goes down and Raman’s goes up.
If a stack of ballots arrived today, nobody knows from where, and they looked official and had the right postmarks, they would be counted.
If the same thing happened with a stack of $100 bills, your local gas station or 7/11 might accept them. But the FBI would find you, because we’ve made it incredibly difficult to counterfeit. But not for ballots. Ballots are sacred.
Shakes
6d ago
That doesn’t explain why hundreds of thousands of those ballots wouldn’t be turned in until after the election. It’s very interesting that the 3rd place candidate starts winning the most votes days after the election. Must be one of those statistical correlations. That’s likelier than FRAUD
Shakes
6d ago
Let me try this a different way. Under California law, all of the following is completely legal:
California mails out millions of ballots to a list of voters that is not standardized or verified. You can get a ballot with a drivers license. You can get a drivers license without being a citizen. There is an unknown number of ballots in the ether that correspond to no legal voters. But if those ballots are received at a counting facility, they will be accepted as valid.
Activists and organizers are allowed to harvest ballots on behalf of voters. They can collect ballots and send them in the mail. If you can’t sign for your ballot, then those organizers are empowered to sign your ballot as a witness on a different box.
The only thing, the only thing that would be necessary to transform this into fraud is for some of these ballots to not touch the hands of unique voters. It would require a list of ballots that does not actually belong to likely voters, or access to legitimate ballots. Then you simply fill them out and mail them in. It would take a few people at best, in an environment where there are thousands of organizers whose activities look indistinguishable from fraud because ballot harvesting is legal.
Such election fraud is never investigated or even taken seriously, because that’s a right-wing conspiracy theory.
Really, they created a system that looks indistinguishable from fraud, on purpose, that consistently produces suspicious and convenient results, that nobody ever investigates, that produces conduct identical to that used to steal elections throughout history, that no other secure election system on earth uses. What’s the most parsimonious explanation?
I say it’s fraud!
But California Democrats don't need fraud to win by the margins they do.
If they were committing fraud, then, by definition, they would need fraud to win by the margins they do. It’s a tautology.
Shakes
6d ago
This is not an explanation. Late-leaning ballots lean Democratic because Democrats vote late — therefore it can’t be because of fraud. But that’s indistinguishable from election fraud! That’s exactly what it would look like if it were fraud. Fraudsters would harvest late ballots that lean Democratic because that’s how they’re cheating.
Is there any reason for California to accept ballots weeks after the election?
Is there any other state on earth that conducts their elections this way?
Look, they’ve created a system where:
- Millions of ballots get mailed out to voter rolls that are never purged
- Any returned and filled ballots are presumed to be legitimate a priori
- The ballots are counted by unions run as one-party organizations
- Once counted it is impossible to disentangle chains of custody to even investigate whether any ballots were cast fraudulently
All it would take to steal an election is a political machine to harvest ballots, fill them out, and send them in the mail.it would take a few dozen people. This is literally legal in California because ballot harvesting is explicitly legal and there are rules about it. Ballot harvesters exist. They even have rules about “curing” ballots where you can chase down invalid ballots and have them fixed Ie the organization you would need to commit fraud already exists. This isn’t a conspiracy, it’s the literal law. We simply trust, without evidence, that every ballot filled out actually touched the hand of a unique voter.
Come on! This doesn’t bother you at all? You don’t have any explanation at all, except that Democrats happen to prefer voting by mail? Which is exactly how it would look if democrats are using mail to commit fraud.
Ballots break for Karen Bass, right up until the day after Election Day, when they start breaking for Raman. I guess the more left-wing you are the more likely you are to fill in a ballot late. It simply cannot be the case that when millions of ballots are floating around without any security at all that someone is stuffing a few ten thousand into mail boxes. That the results benefit one party the same way every time is a statistical artifact. That no other country on earth conducts elections this way is just a stylistic choice. That the same people who would benefit are the same people responsible is a coincidence. There is no evidence of fraud. Is that really what you believe?
Why? In this case late-arriving ballots aren’t just favoring Democrats but Raman specifically, which is very convenient!
Edit: and it’s the same for the governor’s race! Results have been called for Becerra at 26.72%. Hilton at 26.38% is uncalled although the next trailer Tom Steyer is at 21.03%. Apparently it’s possible that Tom Steyer will overcome the 300,000 ballot deficit he needs to claim 2nd place, but not the additional 20,000 he would need to claim 1st.
Shakes
6d ago
There's no need to postulate vote fraud
What’s your explanation for why it takes California a month to count votes and later-arriving votes always favor Democrats? Do you think it’s suspicious that late-arriving votes are favoring neither Bass nor Pratt but Raman, the exact outcome needed to knock Pratt out? And do what do you think is a better explanation than fraud for a system that combines no Voter ID with a willingness to mail out millions of unverified ballots?
Ok I see how you read what I wrote to connote something different than what you just wrote, but I mean that he "used a religious exemption to acquire a weapon" which was used "to murder somebody". Which I think is the same thing.
British society was changed in a small way to accommodate an immigrant. (A normal British man would not have needed a Sikh religious weapons exemption, even if a normal British man could have theoretically converted to Sikhism.) What did British society get for this? In this case, a murderer and his family. Maybe there is some other greater benefit that renders this a price worth paying? I'm not seeing it.
Yeah, and I'm not sure whether to read your quotation back to me of my own words as using scare quotes or not. I do not think it is controversial to say, however, that many immigrants to Britain are building a parallel society. This is why I am repeating my claim. I think it is evidenced, at a minimum, by the fact that a Sikh immigrant murdered someone and his Sikh family sheltered him and advised him on how to get out of it. They don't act like integrated citizens putting Britain's interests above their prior clannish loyalties. We could start looking at other examples if you like. But to me it's a claim so obviously in evidence that when you quote my words back to me in that form, and I can't read your tone of voice, it becomes unclear to me what is actually under dispute. If you are disputing the point that I find totally uncontroversial, then we have a really different disagreement than if you just want me to elaborate on a related or unrelated point.
Right, mass migration changed America permanent ways, many of them negative. Some American cities are still governed by the descendants of the political machines the Irish (and other immigrant groups) begot. Nobody today would claim (I would not claim) that the Irish aren't American. It basically worked out. But it was not an easy or painless process! In some sense we're still paying the cost today.
So if you want to tease out what it means to be integrated, that's one thing, but if you want to dispute the costs and benefits of mass migration, that's another. I think the case of the Irish proves my point in fact. Unless you're just trying to tease out what it means to be integrated. Which is why it matters whether I read your quotation of my own words back to me as a case of square quotes or not.
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