Skibboleth
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
7mo ago
Otherwise, "we're a sanctuary city so long as none of the alleged refugees turn up on our doorstep" is just virtue signalling.
What share of illegal immigrant/asylum seekers/etc... do you think wind up in California? (Spoilers: it's a lot, considerably more than Texas)
LA and the state of CA have perfectly adequate reasons to oppose migrant busing without exposing themselves as secretly anti-immigrant hypocrites:
- lack of coordination from TX government
- Denying precedent for the principle that TX can shuttle indigents or undesirables to CA in lieu of handling them itself
- Ideological belief that shuttling migrants around is unethical.
The preponderance of evidence suggests this is an exercise in lib-owning, so it really shouldn't be surprising that liberal governing bodies are opposed to it.
Skibboleth
27d ago
His Excellency Joe Biden
I believe you mean Generalissimo Biden.
Thoughts?
I'm not a theologist, but I'm pretty sure this means that until next Easter only trans people get into heaven.
No, seriously. You yourself note that this is a coincidence. I do find it to be a humorous example of how Republicans will complain about grievance politics while being its most prominent practitioners.
Skibboleth
6mo ago
The Robert E Lee statue from Charlottesville has been destroyed. Liquidated, actually, and slated to be replaced with some statue for black people, which is striking symbolism of how Americans are being liquidated to be replaced by foreigners.
I can't imagine why African Americans occasionally feel unwelcome in the country of their birth.
Skibboleth
4mo ago
And nobody is arguing that this was disrupted.
I am. I'm arguing it. Obama nominated a candidate and McConnell sat on it for a year.
it was the usual escalation that can be traced back to Bork, at the very least
Bork always gets wheeled out as the excuse, but it's total bullshit. Bork was rejected (unusual but far from unprecedented) and replaced with... another Reagan nominee. Who was confirmed. In other words, what we'd expect to happen. If McConnell had specific issues with Garland as a nominee, he should have held a hearing and voiced them. Of course, he didn't, because he didn't have a problem with Merrick Garland. He openly declared he wasn't going to consider any nominee.
You still haven't answered the question. To whom does the stolen seat belong?
The seat doesn't 'belong' to anyone because it's not a piece of property, but by long-standing American political norms it was Obama's prerogative to fill the seat. Word games and playing dumb about idiomatic use of the word 'stole' can't duck the GOP's flagrant breach of trust.
Except it was the Republicans who finally Noticed, and truly defected rather than be played for chumps.
That would imply that the Republicans weren't defecting constantly, when in fact that was pretty the standard playbook since the end of the cold war.
Skibboleth
1mo ago
Declare yourself trans/queer and you'll have affinity groups supporting you at high-status jobs.
Trans individuals earn significantly less than their non-trans peers and are more likely to work low-status jobs in food service or retail.
Skibboleth
3mo ago
Why are so many Americans committed to sneering at and impugning the traditions of their warrior class?
White Southerners are not the American warrior class. Enlisting at a somewhat higher rate doesn't overcome the weight of demographics.
Skibboleth
3mo ago
Except states set their own curricula and Southern states aren't exactly known for their wholehearted embrace of Anti-Racist memes.
Skibboleth
4mo ago
Every degenerate tendency in US Con. politics has originated directly from the South's special position as a rebellious territory that was allowed to maintain it's cultural legitimacy, or second order effect from it
If I'm in a bad mood, I'll say the key failing was insufficiently humiliating the South, but the real failing was giving Southern elites a pass for trying to destroy the country. Within a few decades, the Southern aristocracy was back with its power and status only slightly attenuated.
It's easy to dump on the hillbillies and rednecks, but every corner of the earth has people like them. Somehow, it hasn't been a problem for the Midwest.
Skibboleth
4mo ago
Stole from whom, exactly?
The president gets to nominate SC justices. Customarily (see @guesswho's remark about trust), the Senate almost always accepts them, even when the president is from an opposing party. It has rejected them on occasion (or nominees have been withdrawn when it was clear they were headed for rejection). Garland was neither rejected nor withdraw. McConnell simply refused to hold a hearing or consider the nomination.
Yes, in theory, the Senate can do whatever it wants. In reality, what McConnell did was extremely unusual, compounded by the handling of ACB's nomination making it clear that his arguments with respect to Garland were unambiguously in bad faith. If you keep mashing the defect button, don't be surprised when your opposition starts Noticing.
This seems like a willful misreading. Do you think "dominate" means "conquer by force of arms"? Because it's not as if the EU has been putting up vigorous opposition to Russian hegemony absent US spinal prosthetics.
Skibboleth
1mo ago
The electoral reality in the US is that many states have a history of very overtly disenfranchising certain kinds of voter. This colors basically everything about electoral reform in the US.
voter ID is a ridiculously low bar that the GOP should be able to hammer home, but the fact that they cant speaks volumes to their weakness/idiocy.
Anyone who deeply cares about mandatory voter ID and is really worried about vote fraud is already a die-hard conservative.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
the theological ground of these ads is spurious
Does this actually matter to anyone? Religion as practiced by most adherents is a loose collection of rituals and superstitions that serves chiefly as a tribal identifier; to the extent that such people follow their own religious doctrines, they tend to pick and choose what already fits their values while selectively ignoring anything that doesn't. This is why, for example, you can have an explicitly pacifist faith that decries the accumulation of wealth serve as the official religion for a bunch of bling-obsessed warrior aristocrats without everyone's head exploding or decamping to a better aligned belief system.
In the last iteration of the thread, someone articulated the point that right now Christianity is very heavily right-coded and enjoys a fairly poor reputation with young people (not unrelated). These commercials seem best understood as attempts to challenge both of those perceptions. It may not be true to some platonic ideal of Christian theology, but you can say that about most Actually Existing Christianity (it's only relatively recently that they mostly chileld.
I think you're severely overestimating the popularity of the Coatesian 'white supremacy' anti-racist paradigm versus normie lib 'don't be a dick' anti-racist paradigm.
(I suspect you also underestimate the prevalence of racism, which leads to further confusion)
I kept thinking to myself who are these white supremacists that they think run the country? If this country was run by white supremacists, they would be doing a terrible job.
Your confusion arises from semantic differences. When someone like Coates or Kendi talks about "white supremacy", they don't (just) mean mask-off segregationists or white nationalists. They don't even mean closeted white racists. They mean the whole accumulation of things which collectively acts to keep white people at the top of the socio-economic heap*. You can probably find a direct quote from one of the above that articulates this without my paraphrasing, but it's late and I'm on my phone, so I'm leaving that as an exercise for the reader.
Crucially, in this paradigm, it is entirely possible for society to be white supremacist despite the fact that everyone including racist white people profess to oppose racism and look at efforts to form explicitly white organizations with intense suspicion. Disparate impact and outcomes are the key indicators.
*though they'll also be quick to note that the US also has a pretty long history of explicitly giving preferential treatment to whites.
Skibboleth
4mo ago
This is very different from "a major party is not allowed to contest X position, opponent wins by default".
That's not what is on the table. It perhaps feels that way to Trumpists, because Trumpism is populist movement and thus first and foremost a cult of personality.
Most of the time, even senior party figures are largely replaceable. If a couple of senior senators got disqualified from either party, people would care infinitely more about the replacement process than the people ejected (they're not even necessarily unpopular - as has often been noted, Congress has terrible approval but people like their guys - but their supporters just aren't attached enough to stand by them if they got into real hot water). In the case of Trump, his followers regard him as irreplaceable and are hostile to even considering alternatives. As such, the possibility that he performed some disqualifying act feels like total disenfranchisement even though the GOP still gets a nominee (who probably fares better) (plus the Supreme Court, ~half of Congress, half the state governments, etc...).
Skibboleth
11mo ago
Either we’ll force through a knee-jerk bill with symbolic limits on firearms, or we’ll (correctly) dismiss that as posturing and (incorrectly) do abso-fucking-lutely nothing.
Practically speaking, what measures will gun rights advocates actually tolerate? It seems like the only thing they can countenance is more guns.
It seems to me that there are many ways we could 'reformat' our conception of gun ownership in a way that would preserve the ability of 'the people' to bear arms while making them less available for use in crime or mass shootings (or suicide), but I find it incredibly unlikely that the current American gun culture would find it at all tolerable.
Meanwhile, I guess the best I can do is pick up some CCW training and a good holster. Fuck.
The best you can do is probably something like move to New Hampshire. The most reasonable thing you can do is nothing.
The odds of concealed carry protecting you from victimization of any kind, let alone a mass shooting, is incredibly low, if for no other reason than because a middle class defense contractor is already extremely unlikely to be victimized and the efficacy of concealed carry in stopping mass shootings is... mixed. It's a psychological prop more than anything.
Mass shootings are, frankly, more analogous to terrorism than ordinary crime. Terrorism doesn't kill very many people, but it does scare people and make them feel powerless because it is outside the 'normal' sociology of murder. Nevertheless, carrying a gun because you might get jumped by terrorists is hard to justify.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
It seems like an incredibly pedantic distinction to say that Donald Trump expanding US involvement in Middle Eastern and African conflicts doesn't count because the US was technically already involved. It doesn't support the notion of Trump the peacemonger.
Skibboleth
3mo ago
The Romans never would have let millions of migrants enter their territory and use their resources.
...they did.
In any event, it's not really clear why we should consider the Romans a model for behavior.
So often a debate does come down to the definition of a word.
"Invasion" rhetoric is classic Motte-and-Bailey equivocation. Nativists want to borrow the alarming connotations of the word to hype up support for radical measures, then, when their critics point out that there's a slight difference between people making dodgy asylum claims and an armed force sacking El Paso, fall back on "invasion has other meanings". If Latinos are "invading" like Japanese tourists, the claim becomes a lot less exciting.
Skibboleth
3mo ago
OP's post is similar in quality to other top level posts here, save for whose sacred cows it brings to the slaughter.
Skibboleth
9mo ago
Again and again, why do people keep on jumping to race as the most accurate way to filter for being able to integrate?
If someone keeps preferring racial discrimination to other methods of filtering, the most parsimonious explanation is that they are racist. If filtering by wealth or education leads to disparate impacts, that might be racist but it also might just be a preference for rich, educated immigrants and the disparate impact on people from the Middle East or Africa is too bad. If they say "I prefer Whites to Asians and Asians to Africans", it requires a lot of mental gymnastics to explain how that's not just racism.
Skibboleth
1mo ago
Trump was genuinely pro-oil and gas, thus US oil production reached record highs under Biden due to delayed-action investment.
That's not at all evident in the data. It looks like we need to thank Obama for the upward trend in US oil production. That or people are overcrediting their favorite president for trends that are mostly driven by things other than US executive policy.
Cottagecore and associated cultural trends are 95% LARP. Obviously, there are a few people who really are into it, but my observation so far has been that this is far more likely to mean "I moved to an exurb and picked up a horticulture hobby" than anything remotely resembling actual rural or off-the-grid living. Actually, 95% LARP might be being overly generous; I'm going to guess the conversion rate on people taking the Stardew Valleypill is extremely low. Most people entertaining sanitized fantasies of tradrural lifestyle aren't even going to get as far as the exurban house and gardening hobby.
All of which is to say: I don't think this is a real trend. To the extent that it is a real trend, it is mostly the product of backflow from young professionals crowding into major cities, enabled by the rise of remote work. Social media may be having a corrosive effect on social cohesion, but it's not making people yearn for the pines.
We are locked in with people we do not like 24/7, reading their crappy opinions, we can't just splinter off and make a new community
We can. It's not particularly hard to set up your own forum, and if you're willing to put in a little effort and tolerate some jankiness you don't even need to reply on a 3rd party service to do it. This reminds of third place discourse, where people talk about third places disappearing as if someone came and tore them down, as opposed to that people stopped going to them. You can very easily leave the major social media platforms. We just don't. The problem is
a) these algorithmically driven services may be inferior to organic, homegrown human interaction, but, crucially, they are free and offer a path-of-least-resistance option. You could start your own forum or even go outside and meet people, but Facebook is a click away. Whatever your community of interest is, it probably already exists on reddit.
b) network effects mean there's a lot of value lost in leaving the big platforms for a smaller one. Being the first person to break away from twitter gets you little but a massive improvement in mental health isolation. And, especially for people who view themselves as incumbents, the suggestion that they should leave because of what someone else is doing is deeply irritating - "why should I change, he's the one who sucks". So everyone stays on the big platforms and complains about the moderation policy but never leaves.
the extremist american patriot dream is to aquire assets that allow them to live independently from the country they "love" away from all society and culture on a metaphorical if not literal island
That's more a reflection of how a subset of hardcore American conservative low-key hate America and have despaired of reasserting control by force.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
Quite frankly, I hold the left to higher standards than the right, and I think that the left should be above such behavior.
Why? If you think the right shouldn't be expected to behave when they lose, why do you think they should be trusted with power?
Skibboleth
4mo ago
So maybe we'd stop following ruinous policies sooner.
Surely if progressive policies were so ruinous we'd expect to see anti-progressive strongholds like the Deep South substantially outperforming progressive strongholds like New England.
Skibboleth
6mo ago
In a reversal of traditional stereotypes, the GOP is wracked by infighting while the Dems are maintaining party discipline.
The GOP is wedged. It does appear that the largest segment of the GOP is willing to go along with whoever, but there are more than enough intransigents to scuttle any candidate. The right-wing extremists have fully embraced the far left attitude of "burn it down, we'll sort out the details later" and are nearly as happy to have no speaker as to have one of their own. Anything done to appease them alienates the moderates (such as they are), and vice versa. The far right can't strike a deal with the Dems for obvious reasons; neither can the moderates, both because they're mostly not actually that moderate and because their own primary voters will eat them alive if they do (another leftist meme the right has embraced is purity spirals, see also: "Tom Emmer's not a conservative"). And the majority is so slim you have to satisfy everyone.
Meanwhile, the Dems are, at least for now, content to say "not my monkeys, not my circus". They've made noises about being willing to make a deal, but they don't have much reason to save a GOP speaker without major concessions. They believe, probably correctly, that the spectacle of the GOP being held hostage by its right wing and the looming threat of a shutdown will make them look good by comparison.
Easy: the US does not have de facto open borders. "De facto open borders" is a mood expression of nativists who don't like current state of immigration enforcement. If we actually had de facto open borders, immigration would be unfathomably higher.
The people who "pull the strings" are wedged because there's no magic solutions to the material factors driving Latino migration. Nobody wants to spend the exorbitant sums it would require to actually physically secure the southern border. Nobody is willing to countenance just shooting them. Unfucking Latin America to the point where you don't have tens of millions of people who'd rather be an illegal or quasi-legal day laborer in a country where half the people hate them than stay where they are is a nontrivial exercise, and there isn't much support for that either (try and sell the guy who wants to deport all the Mexicans on spending trillions of dollars failing to develop Latin America). On top of that, the US is like most developed countries in that it has an aging native population that demands increasingly high standards of post-retirement living at the same time the retiree-worker ratio is getting worse, so it also just needs immigrant labor.
NY and other blue states already absorb the majority of immigrants, including illegal immigrants and asylum seekers. The central objection remains that the migrant bussing project is done in a maximally disruptive and uncooperative way.
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