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User ID: 3534
But two-thirds of the state live in the Twin Cities metro, so the flip you’re hoping for can only occur in our suburbs, and shooting white women doesn’t go over well, there.
The FBI hammering Somali fraud was already the right track. This ICE escalation is politically moronic. It is the Trump administration putting on a show for the rest of the country, and his personal grudge against Walz from the last campaign, not working to turn Minnesota red. That’s done for this election cycle. Won’t happen.
Things were bad enough that earlier this week Walz had to drop his reelection bid for governor because of the fraud.
Klobuchar (governor) and Craig (senate) are done deals, now. Worse, Walz’s much more woke Lt. Governor Flannigan, who might have been kept out of office due to taint from the fraud scandal, will likely be appointed to backfill Klobuchar’s spot in the senate, unless the DFL primary voters are foolish enough to pick her over the comperably-moderate married ELCA lesbian Craig in the upcoming primary, with the latter already having flipped an exurban-to-rural house district from red to blue.
Also, Trump has recently stopped just short of endorsing ex-coke fiend turned crackpot Jesus-freak Mike Lindell. Demuth had a very, very real chance of beating Walz coming into this week and becoming the first Republican governor in decades. But the Republican Party being just a cult of personality for a narcissistic sociopath, it completely lacks the discipline needed for a winning strategy in Minnesota.
Favorability ratings and trust for the FBI/federal investigations are much higher than those for ICE and right wing social media influencers boosted by the POTUS and the VP. The slow boil of expanding indictments playing out across multiple news cycles between now and Election Day was already prompting come to Jesus meetings among local DFL leaders. Things were going great for Minnesota Republicans. Key word: were.
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2d ago
Except the Somalis aren’t a cohesive voting block. The Somalis are clannish, and don’t all vote with one another.
In the last mayoral election the Hawiye clan went for the Jewish incumbent, Frey, while the Daarood went for the Somali Fateh.
Observers note that this election may have lasting implications for Somali-American political dynamics in Minnesota. Members of the Hawiye community, who form a significant portion of the Somali population in Minneapolis — originally from Mogadishu, Galmudug, Hirshabelle, South West, and Jubbaland regions — have been emboldened by Frey’s win and are now vowing to reshape future elections, including the next Congressional race involving Ilhan Omar.
One viral TikTok video captured the mood perfectly:
"This is just the beginning — next time, Ilhan Omar will lose too,” declared one of Hersi’s supporters during a live celebration.
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3d ago
I’m a little bit more worried about having for a president a guy who possibly conspired to have his own son disposed of because the boy had birth defects, and fathered seven secret children with three women in Germany in the 1950s, two of the women being sisters. I think there’s reason to suspect his sympathies for staying out of the war went beyond isolationism.
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3d ago
One small tangent I remember in particular was the media debate over the ethics of military drone usage. Set aside they’re cheap and effective so they were inevitable. But that it was growth of automated warfare that some worried would make the U.S. military more likely to engage in conflict, as there’s no bodies-of-downed-pilot video that can result in a nasty PR blowback with drones shot down — that debate largely ended when Obama succeeded Bush the Younger, and in spite of Obama significantly ramping up drone usage.
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3d ago
There have been 70+ individuals indicted and narry a single non-citizen. I can’t disprove a negative that 100-percent of the fraudsters aren’t non-citizens, but I’ve yet to see any evidence they are. And again, at the barest of minimums upwards of 96% of Minnesotan Somali’s are citizens.
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4d ago
Mostly joking but that might be apt. Given the influence of Northern European culture, a Cadillac is a bit garish by Minnesotan standards. We’ve a disproportionate number of Fortune 500 companies in the Twin Cities metro and a good standard of living. You can spend all the money you wish on a Volvo, BMW or Mercedes provided your model of choice is in a muted color and has four doors. But a Cadillac is ugly new-money.
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4d ago
The subset of Mottizens willing to sacrifice our metro area to the cause of their accelerationism are surely already known.
On the contrary, I would like intelligent, and better-focused government action to resolve known problems.
Apologies if missed elsewhere, I have read through a fair number of the comments on this thread.
One tangential thought I have that I didn’t see posted, is that in the Rube Goldberg machine of tragedy that unfolded, Trump’s own culture-warring belligerence has played a part. Throat clearing, I think others have made a compelling case that the shooting was justified, and I think it’s idiotic to drive around looking to pick up an obstruction charge using your SUV.
Local news has confirmed ICE we’re looking for a Somali suspect, and this big push of ICE agents being deployed to Minnesota is downstream of Nick Shirley’s viral video that has the Trumo admin fired up.
But! This is all less than intelligent because Minnesota’s problems with the Somali community are numerous, but simultaneously, aren’t to do with illegal immigration. A majority of Minnesotans from the Somali diaspora are natural born U.S. Citizens, and the best stats I can find are that 87% of foreign born are also U.S. Citizens. This shouldn’t be unexpected; the civil war that led to the 1991 collapse of Siad Barre's regime is decades old news, and various charities and international aid organizations helped resettle refugees from the resulting crisis.
Also, Somalia is dirt poor and an ocean away. There’s no significant number of Somalis crossing the southern border and throwing up bogus asylum claims to secure economic migration under a false pretense and being released into the States to await an immigration court date in several months.
Of the 100,000 Somalis in Minnesota, upwards of 94% are U.S. Citizens, with varying immigration statuses among the remaining. Conversely, as of 2023 estimates there were an estimated 14 million illegal immigrants in the States.
Does the Trump administration have the right to send ICE where it wants to pursue any illegal immigrant? Of course. Is sending 3,000 agents into Minnesota to target Somalis an intelligent use of iCE? Not even if sending a message to the community so some members self-deport is the goal, no. There simply aren’t many illegal immigrants among the Somali community, especially when placed in context with the scale of the problem.
And now there’s a big partisan media shitstorm roiling.
What Minnesota needed to deal with its Somali problems, and was already getting, was feds running down fraudsters. Not a showy, aggressive ICE push.
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8d ago
I guess it is true that real socialism has never been tried. (At least by any nation state.)
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8d ago
Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public is insightful and an entertaining read.
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8d ago
I played in one locally popular band in college, and another that was better but didn’t draw. The trick to getting gigs is drawing a respectable audience relative to the size of the venue. I sincerely don’t mean to come off as dismissive by stating the obvious, but most people that manage bars don’t prioritize art over selling drinks.
There was one kind of venue that was particularly fun, and we played two of these — find a music venue in a nearby, small college town that is open just on Saturday nights. There’s not much to do in those towns so they were always full shows, and you didn’t even need to promote yourself.
There are some nonprofit cultural centers that will host all ages shows. If you go this route you’ll likely need to fill out the bill with other bands, yourself.
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8d ago
Could a synthesis of this be that those who now grab the reigns of the criminal, crony-patronage machine built by Chavez and inherited by Maduro could still make more money playing ball with American oil companies?
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9d ago
Islam, in rejecting alcohol, had trouble spreading beyond areas that weren’t already using other mild recreational drugs.
Polytheistic Norse: [eying Christ and Mohammed to see which might be more powerful]
Volga Bulgars and the Khazar Khaganate: …and one last thing, it’s haram to get drunk.
Polythestic Norse: Buddy, if you think I’m wintering in Uppåkra without mead…
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9d ago
Germanic-associated street food must be the secret. I agree in general with your high esteem of the German-American burger. But perhaps the collision of the Ottomans and Gerries presents a challenger in the döner sandwich.
Kebab slices stuffed inside a pita cut open on one side with sauces and a healthier mix of raw vegetables — now the go-to snack for urban krauts headed to a soccer game or stumbling home from the bar — didn’t take its current form until the 1970s in (West) Berlin. One to watch in terms of growth. And I’m personally happy to have seen a döner stand open in my metro area here in the States.
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9d ago
Sweden is most assuredly not like Venezuela and has been undergoing a steady economic liberalization for decades. That it has single-payer healthcare and a high tax rate is not a refutation of the former. They are in no way “as socialist as Venezuela”.
England: 69 million people, 55 billionaires
France: 66 million people, 52 billionaires
Sweden: 10 million people, 45 billionaires
For the latter, those aren’t oligarchs and cronies. They mostly come from retail (H&M) and tech (Spotify), etc. Please show me the Venezuelan equivalents.
Under Chavez/Maduro, Venezuela nationalized the steel industry (SIDOR), agriculture, banking (including Banco de Venezuela), gold mining, telecommunications, electricity, fertilizer production (e.g., Fertinitro), cement, and transportation. There were agricultural land reforms and redistribution of that land. And more recently food and agribusiness supply chains, supermarkets, construction, and petrochemicals were moved under state control.
Please show me an equivalent wave of nationalizations that occurred in Sweden.
An obvious but clumsy parallel would be perhaps Norway’s Oljefondet and its oil and gas industry. But not being run by a pair of tinpot socialists, they’ve never done anything as retarded as pegging their currency to the price of crude or firing all the petrochemical engineers not sufficiently loyal to the governing party.
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10d ago
Is the driver of whether or not people fall in love their position on the socioeconomic ladder?
No, that would be mistaking a second-order effect for a first. The requisite is proximity, which itself is heavily influenced by position on the socioeconomic ladder.
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11d ago
This and the way the quantification of criteria became memetic. Most women do generally prefer a man taller than they are. But as most women aren’t 5’10” or 6’0”, the arbitrary thresholds of 6’0” or 6’2” work against them in finding a fulfilling love life. In person courtship is better suited to producing happy relationships, as the metrics used are less needlessly-precise.
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11d ago
Lutheran Charities helped settle war-refugee Somalians in Minnesota and their aim was charity, not to displace heritage Americans. Whether or not you, I or anyone agree on whether this was beneficial, the “express purpose” was objectively not some plot of displacement.
For my own view, the collective lack of gratitude in response to that charity is the indictment.
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11d ago
In Whit Stillman’s brilliant indie debut, Metropolitan, Taylor Nichols’ commedically-pessimistic Charlie Black is convinced that the entire preppy class is doomed, fated, to suffer downward social mobility.
Late in the film, Charlie engages a man in a bar, a member of the preppy class perhaps a decade his senior, looking for confirmation of his theory. Man at Bar, played by Roger W. Kirby in his lone acting role (who in real life would go on to co-found the law firm of Kirby McInerney), tells Charlie, resignedly, that he is going to have to accept that many of his peers will indeed be successful.
I’ll set aside elite, as I am not sure exactly how that would be defined, but most college educated Americans still get married. And, like Charlie Black, commedically-pessimistic single men need to accept that the upper two quintiles of Americans are still mostly getting married, and for reasons beyond and exempting ensnarement. Things like love, support, companionship, respect and admiration shared between two imperfect people looking to build a life together.
I will grant that one could want high marriage rates solely for their cumulative societal impact. And structural changes have reduced that rate, but much moreso the lower one travels down the socioeconomic ladder. And all the same, when I see getting someone “on the hook” errantly proffered as the driver of marriage in, say, the top two quintiles based on income, I want to tell the speaker to rejoice at the institution’s decline.
For every black- or red-pilled unwed man I encounter online that has reduced women’s motivations down to a hypergamous id — wicked daughters of Eve, all! — I hope they realize they have been set free. From experience, the overwhelming supermajority of a marriage is spent outside of scratching one another’s physiological itches, and as such, any man that does not particularly like women would be wise to avoid marrying one. You almost-invariably wind up cohabitating and spending time in each other’s company.
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11d ago
Maybe Patronage networks are fundamentally effective in politics. And the GOP having their unconditionally loyal people because you saved them is a good thing if are alt-right like myself.
Trevor Milton [1] committed upwards of $20 billion worth of securities fraud (all the Somalis in America aren’t worth one Mormon), and [2] hired the U.S. attorney general’s brother as his lawyer in order to secure a pardon.
By the above logic, his pardon is still terrible, because Milton hasn’t ever done anything for the cause, and is unlikely to ever be able to do much of anything significant for the cause, as he has no real resources, either financial or in terms of social capital. Trump is way, way too cheap of a date.
When SPACs became popular, it was a matter of time before some fraudster used one to cash in on taking a bogus company public while avoiding the due diligence process required during standard IPOs. Who was the first person to do the aforementioned is the trivia question to which Milton is the answer.
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11d ago
Suppose you are a junior reporter at the New York Times or CNN and you break this story. How do you think your colleagues will perceive you and/or react?
Utterly shocked that you travelled to Minneapolis prior to social media letting you know there was a potential story.
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11d ago
On a tangent I’d argue that most of the lipstick feminist complaints made in the mainstream media by middle-class women about men in general do usually boil down to the rather similar complaint that 34-37-year-old successful, well-paid, charismatic, tall, ambitious etc. urban men are in no rush to marry 31-34-year-old college-educated middle-class office worker women.
One point that bears noting is that this is a particular subset of women — if you’re hearing from them they are likely college educated — that are running out of time and are rather noisy about it. Three out of every five men in their 30s with college degrees are married.
My wife and I and our social circle are college educated, in shape, economically secure, and living in a large metro area (and not in the burbs of it). Assortative mating still has major pull. And, I and my wife are now in those respective age ranges you mentioned.
Our mid-to-late twenties were full of our peers’ weddings. So much so, that as custom now dictates bridesmaids buy whatever dress is chosen for them and women spend more on bachelorette activities than men do for bachelor parties, toward the end of that roughly five-to-six year run of constant weddings (we had to split up one weekend to attend different out of town nuptials), my wife’s response to receiving a save-the-date was mixed, to put it politely.
My wife has one chaotic mess of a friend who is unmarried, and, she missed the boat. Wedding season is over. All her/our friends have spouses and careers. Most of them have children. And, our social circle hardly includes any singles.
In the top-two-quintiles-of-income assortative mating market she’s shopping in, it’s not that a majority of guys in their late thirties are looking for twenty-somethings. It’s that a significant majority of those college educated late-30s guys are already married. The music has all but stopped and most of the chairs are taken.
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11d ago
Well, define defend. Opinion journalism is cheap. So it’s not really a budgetary concern to drop an op-ed endorsing this, that, them, it or anything. Even if cash strapped outfits offer the aforementioned, it isn’t a refutation of the impact the internet had in gutting all the things newspapers previously used to generate revenue that paid for actual reporting.
The St. Paul Pioneer Press is now PE owned, has one-fifth the staff of even the (formerly Minneapolis, now) Minnesota Star Tribune, and in a small but memorably (to me) depressing occurrence, was using AP wire reports with Chicago datelines to cover the Chauvin trial.
I’ve not seen either paper call the videographer a racist. I’ve seen general defenses of not painting all Somalian immigrants with the same brush. And in Minnesota’s largest paper, a recent op-ed demanding that the video in question be taken seriously:
https://www.startribune.com/somali-community-minnesota-day-care-video/601554742
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12d ago
Aw, thanks, man. This must be how Walther von Stolzing felt upon being given his laurel wreath.
I liked the most-recent The Batman. It’s not perfect, and given it’s the third or fourth iteration on film, its reputation undoubtedly suffers from fatigue. But it was an enjoyable, somewhat-smaller noir/detective story without an overpowered protagonist and any salvation by some fantastic tech, or a McGuffin or the like.
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