Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
11d ago
Understood. Sorry for not reading the room. Lol.
Supah_Schmendrick
11d ago
Then I guess I'm confused about who Fuentes is talking about....because a lot of the most obnoxious pro-Israel activists, even to me, a Zionist-sympathetic secular half-Jew, either have dual citizenship themselves or have close family who does who they talk about incessantly. I'm thinking of chattering class people like John Podhoretz, etc. I didn't realize that Iger, Altman, etc. were viewed as being particularly Zionist.
Supah_Schmendrick
11d ago
The best the left can produce is Hasan Piker
Zohran Mamdani got elected Mayor of New York on a DSA/third-worldist platform. Hasan is just modern-day left wing Bill O'Reilly. AOC, KBJ, Randi Weingarten, Brandon Johnson - all of these people hold significant office and/or policy influence.
Supah_Schmendrick
11d ago
There are tens of millions of illegals in the United States, especially if one counts those present on legal but dubious pretense (previous amnesties, asylum, birth to an illegal migrant, etc.), which seems to be the bailey. A campaign to expel them all would be a monumental geopolitical undertaking, dwarfing anything in recent US memory (e.g., the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan). It would be a challenge even for Stalin.
Maybe, but there are a lot of potentially-billion-dollar-bills laying on the sidewalk which the US political system won't pick up for various reasons.
- highly taxing/regulating remittances
- vigorous enforcement of H1B and other educational/employment visa requirements
- ramp up of enforcement of existing Orders of Removal / hiring more IJs to help clear the case backlog
- increasing workplace audits/lawsuits against bad actors in immigrant-heavy employment sectors (agriculture, food processing, construction, hospitality).
Or take the Jewish oligarchy Fuentes loves to complain about. What exactly is the proposal? Nationalise Oracle Corporation and boot Larry Ellison off to Israel? Make all the Jews wear gold stars so everybody knows to stop doing business with them?
Moving against dual-citizenship would seem to be effective, as well as just a general grass-roots push against the more obnoxiously-obsequious Israel focus. Barring that, just wait a generation - most of the well-assimilated liberal ashkenazi will just die off or fully submerge into the general population through intermarriage without any/many kids in a generation or two anyway.
Supah_Schmendrick
15d ago
Survivorship bias. There were lots of ugly buildings in the past as well; they just didn't survive because people didn't like them.
Supah_Schmendrick
19d ago
I knew a guy who worked at a specialist firm which almost exclusively dealt with gas station franchising and environmental cleanup/compliance work. Didn't make BigLaw money, but did a lot better than $50k/yr. There's lots of weird niches of law you can get into and pick up specialist work without stressing about billables. Not saying that having craptastic time management will be a good thing, but it won't be as automatically fatal as it would be in BigLaw, Insurance Defense, etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
19d ago
As a lawyer, there's plenty of smaller niches lawyers can fall into that don't go bonkers over billables in the same way the big firms do. For example, plaintiff's-side firms doing most of their work on contingency, or in-house regulatory compliance practice work.
Supah_Schmendrick
20d ago
Except that they lack any form of legitimacy other than raw force...
Supah_Schmendrick
21d ago
What concessions are drug smugglers aiming for
Political power, in many cases; protection rackets, economic domination of various industries and ability to exclude personal enemies or rivals in many others. In still others, there are out-and-out ideological motivations, often some derivation of Marxist (e.g. Sendero Luminoso in Peru, and FARC in Colombia).
what are the violent acts [the narco-smugglers engage in]
Murder both of competitors, politicians, and law enforcement, as well as of alleged collaborators, opponents, and personal rivals/enemies. Human smuggling, sex slavery/prostitution, kidnapping for ransom, and other major crimes, up to and including active armed insurrection against local governments.
what civilian population do they instill fear in?
Anyone who isn't actively on-board with them.
I would have thought that drug smugglers simply smuggle drugs because they want to earn money.
This is incorrect. Business always involves some form of politics, especially when crossing international borders and on the scale of narco-cartels. Also, there's whole subcultures that have developed around the cartels. These aren't homo economicus any more than the Sicilian Mafia is.
If the US government blew up the getaway car of supermarket thieves, and then methodically shot the survivors around the crash site dead, this would also result in an outcry.
We did use to hang horse thieves, and shooting a fleeing felon was entirely legal in the US under longstanding anglo-american common law principles until iirc SCOTUS decided to prune it back in the 1985 case Tennessee v. Garner. You're right nowadays, but it's a comparatively recent development.
Supah_Schmendrick
24d ago
I worry that this will lead to each administration basically cancelling everything that the previous one did
This is already happening with regularity.
I've argued since at least 2015 that the US government should invest, on the behalf of its citizens, in AI and automation companies.
You don't want a government that can do this. There is no incentive for politicians to do a good job with the investments, and every incentive for them to channel these investments to favored constituencies. You would get stakes in Solyndra, not Nvidia.
And it would help unify US citizens, who would feel pride of ownership in their country rather than a beggar for handouts.
What about modern politics gives you the impression that something as simple as objective truth can cut through partisan affect?
Supah_Schmendrick
29d ago
One thing he told me was that the very hard and industrious working Mongolians frequently emigrate out of the country leaving the more complacent and indolent workers who are content to sit around and do whatever their thing is from within the country. He never told me where they ones who moved often went to, but a preferential policy of selecting for and seeking the best and brightest who are willing to work should at the very least be given priority in that regard.
This is absolutely not a significant numerical draw, but for a while Mongolians have been absolutely killing it in Japanese Sumo.
Not really; they took place before the great deracination of "white ethnics" - to say someone was Polish, or Irish, or Italian, etc. really meant something then. Additionally the 70's Days of Rage took place before the replacement of religion by politics as the self-described centerpiece of people's lives.
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