UnopenedEnvilope
No bio...
User ID: 3534
UnopenedEnvilope
4d ago
Went to Home Depot for some drywall. Have you even seen any Hmong involved in the protests, here? These aren’t postmodern woke progressives. Both of my wife’s kids coworkers were released the next morning. But still, it’s all exceedingly un-intelligent.
UnopenedEnvilope
4d ago
No. They’re not. At All.
The Hmong have clan-based surnames. If the surname isn’t Vang, Yang, Xiong, Her, Thao, Lee, Moua, Lor, Hang, Khang, Kue, Vue, Fang, Chue, Cheng, Cha, Kong, and Pha, then you can pretty quickly rule out with almost total accuracy they’re not Hmong.
That perp’s name is Sriudorn Phaivan.
I largely agree with your points, and think integration is important. But also, living in the Twin Cities and watching how ICE is harassing a lot of our Hmong neighbors (my wife’s native-born coworker’s native-born children were detained) underscores just how stupid and racist the kind of Trump supporters that would seek to move through the get-50-days-of-training-and-join-ICE-on-street-rips-in-Minnesota are.
The Hmong fought with us in Vietnam and there was some danger posed to them after our withdrawal. Many got refugee status, but did so decades ago. A bunch settled here in Minnesota. A few are still anamist, but most have converted to Christianity. They like hunting and fishing. The growth of the local Hmong middle class has resulted in more Minnesotans, unhyphenated, owning bass boats. We’re on the third and fourth generations born here in the States. The previous generation owned pho and bahn mi restaurants. The current attend the U of M and have middle class corporate jobs.
There is no significant ongoing illegal immigration issue related to our Hmong community. But the ICE agents being bussed in to our metro from red tribe America genuinely have zero conception of any of this. If they’re at all representative of MAGA, I promise you they also believe in hyphenated Americans.
UnopenedEnvilope
7d ago
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.
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.
UnopenedEnvilope
8d 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.
UnopenedEnvilope
9d 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.
UnopenedEnvilope
9d 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.
UnopenedEnvilope
10d 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.
UnopenedEnvilope
10d 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.
UnopenedEnvilope
10d 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.
UnopenedEnvilope
14d ago
I guess it is true that real socialism has never been tried. (At least by any nation state.)
UnopenedEnvilope
15d ago
Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public is insightful and an entertaining read.
UnopenedEnvilope
15d 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.
UnopenedEnvilope
15d 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?
UnopenedEnvilope
15d 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…
UnopenedEnvilope
15d 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.
UnopenedEnvilope
15d 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.
UnopenedEnvilope
17d 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.
UnopenedEnvilope
17d 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.
UnopenedEnvilope
17d 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.
UnopenedEnvilope
17d 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.
UnopenedEnvilope
17d 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.
So there’s five guys, but not the really nasty one, and we’ve got 3,000 ICE agents with more on the way and they’re shaking down Hmong citizens born here whose parents were born here who have never even been to Asia, for just being Hmong, for the reason they already knew about a specific half-dozen people they intended to rightfully arrest and deport and could have do so with just a few agents? A better test would be, “Are your street rips actually uncovering any previously-unknown illegal Hmong immigrants?” Given what’s being fed to the right wing press contains none of that: no.
It’s good they’re going after known offenders. It’s bad they’re harassing people because they’re Hmong. Which in my addressing OP’s point, it is not just the left that insists upon hyphenated Americans.
More options
Context Copy link