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Texas is freedom land
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User ID: 647
Maybe one data point shouldn’t really change your willingness to believe Internet strangers?
Sure, this guy probably isn’t astroturfed. That doesn’t mean he’s honest or correct. Social media would have picked him up either way.
Is gold behaving more reasonably? Been looking at some rings and I’m wondering if this is the worst possible time.
The U.S. military had (has??) great taste in coats.
Shout out to the Navy peacoats from the Korean War.
Come on, it should at least be one of the Reagan westerns.
My fiancee would say her liter canteen. She gets great mileage out of it.
Sloot, sarcasm is unbecoming.
@Quantumfreakonomics, that's not an excuse to start sneering...or to drag in other users.
@RococoBasilica, same goes for you, in turn.
I would take that bet if I could find any way to formalize it.
Immigrants Georg is an outlier who should not be counted.
Those import taxes were more like a combination of tariff policy and bailouts, propping up British tea and coffee growers using the American colonies. They were part of a broader pattern of extractive rule. Whether or not it was a good deal, British policy had a way of trampling the colonial ego.
I’m curious about those 1-2% numbers. Are they something like percent of household income? I think the impact was concentrated on shipping interests, which played a much larger part in the pre-industrial economy.
Do a partial exit strategy where you sell off any gains?
I’m saying this as someone who lacks such a hoard. I imagine I’d feel different in your position.
5% isn’t little. It’s 10x the prison population. It’s an entire state’s worth of taxpayers. Yeah, the IRS would lose its shit.
But that’s kind of beside the point. I really do believe there would be fewer and smaller protests if this wasn’t treated as a referendum on Donald Trump. People turn out to signal their tribal loyalty in a way they don’t do for abstract, bureaucratic causes. Every incident gets him a nice headline for his base and half a dozen headlines claiming he’s a fascist. That’s good for his personal brand, but it does nothing for effective governance.
Can’t speak for the OP, but this is more or less my position.
I would like government policy to align with its stated goals. I also prefer the stated goal, enforcing America’s borders, to most of the plausible alternatives. And I would most definitely like our law enforcement agencies to be “more lawful” in exercising their goals. Laws are what separate us from animals and dictators.
We ask the government to do all sorts of nasty things in service of a more perfect Union. Then we soften the blow by adding constraints. This turns imprisonment, conscription, taxation into routine and predictable processes. Border control ought to be routine and predictable, too.
Trump doesn’t play that game. Routines and constraints are means to an end. It makes him less effective, and it gives his enemies more ammunition. I wish he wouldn’t.
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It’s not a question of defamation. We are aware of SS’s opinions. It’s more about arguing to understand vs. arguing to win. Mocking a position as predictable tends towards the latter.
See the other responses to Sloot for how fast that goes off the rails.
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