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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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An article just came out about the government supported grocery store in Kansas: https://archive.is/lNlvD . But the store is currently a total disaster:

Taylor, 68, has supported the KC Sun Fresh since it opened just blocks from her home. But that solitary tomato was almost too much to bear.

Sales were okay at first, but after the pandemic, crime rose and sales began to plummet. Police data show assaults, robberies and shoplifting in the immediate vicinity have been on an upward trend since 2020. Shoplifting cases have nearly tripled.

KC Sun Fresh lost $885,000 last year and now has only about 4,000 shoppers a week. That’s down from 14,000 a few years ago, according to Emmet Pierson Jr., who leads Community Builders of Kansas City, the nonprofit that leases the site from the city. Despite a recent $750,000 cash infusion from the city, the shelves are almost bare.

This seems to be a hit piece targeting the NYC mayor favorite Zhoran who wants to bring government run grocery stores to NYC

Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City, has attracted attention for his campaign pledge to combat “out-of-control” prices by establishing five city-owned supermarkets that he says will pass savings onto customers by operating “without a profit motive.”

But it's unclear whether the failure of the store is due to mismanagement or criminals establishing a base nearby:

Part of the problem is the city’s lack of a jail, Young said. The left-leaning council closed the previous facility in 2009 as a cost-saving measure — a move the Kansas City Star has called a “$250 million mistake” — people arrested for minor crimes are quickly released instead of being held in rural counties miles away. That allows them to hop on the local bus system — free since the pandemic — and head back to the same location, Young said. “We typically have the same group of offenders every week that are recognizable by face and by name, just loitering and hanging out,” he said. “A small percentage of people are ruining it for the rest of the community that deserves to go to their grocery store and their library.”

It also may simply be that there are too many grocery stores for that area:

Data bears out both points. A USDA analysis showed the area around the store is low income but not low access. And a Washington Post analysis of the adjacent Zip codes show the area has steadily lost population since 2020. The council member who represents the area, Melissa Patterson Hazley, estimates there are more than 200 vacant lots in her district.

... the neighborhood has other options because of a nearby Aldi store and the independent Happy Foods Center.

But there's also more to the story - and a bit of misrepresentation but not outright lie slipped in by the WP reporter. Sun Fresh market isn't government run and never was. Sun Fresh market was actually a successful independent grocery store for over 25 years. The city does own the strip mall itself, and it seems that the store moved to this location in 2018, probably after getting some generous incentives from the city. After the Lipari guy called it quits, this nonprofit got their hands on the store (probably in a move set up by the city itself). But the city doesn't actually run the store.

Community Builders of Kansas City, the nonprofit that leases the site from the city.

So there are a lot of threads going on with this article, but my take on this is that the store was probably doing okay before 2020, but then Fentanyl Floyd's crime wave absolutely decimated the area. Seeing the situation, the store owner bailed out, but the city, not wanting to see their strip mall project go bust, gave a nonprofit millions in cash to keep the store afloat. On the other hand, it seems that the other stores in the strip mall are doing ok according to google maps, so it could just be that the nonprofit currently running the store is wildly incompetent.

Overall I think there's not enough here to get a good read on what might happen with Zohran, but my bias is still that government incompetence has no bounds. Aldi is less than 1 mile away and they are doing ok according to google. And even though the city isn't running the store directly they are throwing millions into it without figuring out how to get out of the hole.

I mean, as I said

Depends on your diagnosis of the problem. If you believe, as I increasingly do, that most of our societal ills with corruption and collapse of state capacity revolve around the mass importation of high time preference demographics incapable at a genetic level of pursuing generational projects, deporting them is not only a solution, but the only solution. Because with that anchor tied to your feet, no state project, be it reinvigorating capitalism, monopoly busting or state run grocery stores can possibly succeed. If the labor market is flooded with lazy scammers who shameless loot the till, it's not going to matter if the grocery store is a coop, state run, unionized or anything.

I can nearly promise you, with that much state money being dumped into the project and with that little food on shelves, there is a "community organizer" driving around in a brand new BMW involved somewhere.

From my perspective, America has outperformed its economic peers in Europe and Asia over the last forty years despite this supposed "anchor".

Being the best of a bad bunch isn't good enough (and it isn't as if the EU and commonwealth don't also have tons of immigrants, so we can't blame nativists for their poor performance). Unless I'm missing something, real GDP growth in the US was worse in the 2000s (and far too much of that growth went to the healthcare sector) than it was in the 80s and 90s and has been thoroughly mediocre since. Aside from the post-covid rebound in 2021 the average Millennial has never seen real GDP growth exceed 3% during their working lives.

Of course, thanks to the fact that federal spending has grown far faster than the economy during the last 25 years, VA-7 is doing better than most.

Of course, this is mostly population aging. Old people don't grow the economy.

Do immigrants help? IDK.

You may have had much more negative experiences with immigrants.

To put it bluntly, yes.

I've written about it here and there. I'll try to give a concise summary of my grief and sense of loss. Of late I've been stuck on the "Anger" step, and I question whether I'll ever move beyond it and find "Acceptance".

I was born in the 80's. In the late 90's for reasons that are utterly baffling to me, my Virginia town began to get flooded with illegal immigrants. The first impact this had on my life was when two Mexicans with mustaches were put in my middle school classroom. They beat the shit out of us, were totally uncontrollable, and were there about 2 weeks. It was weird. Very weird. It foreshadowed much of what was to come.

By highschool my town was getting a bit of a reputation. Illegals were renting properties, and then cramming them with insane numbers of people who utterly destroyed them. Lower class white areas became even worse ghettos over the course of a few years. Gang activity increased. A curfew on teenagers was instituted county wide. It became dangerous to drive through town. The most common scenario was some unregistered beater an illegal bought second hand would slam into you going the wrong way down a one way street, or blowing through a red light. A half dozen day laborers would flee the vehicle and vanish into the ether, and your car would be totaled. A buddy of mine had a worse experience, and a gang of illegals tried to pull him out of his vehicle at a stop light. As he tells it, he gouged out one of their eyes and sped through the light as quick as he could. He worked as a bouncer at the time, I can believe it.

At some point my town passed some Arizona style immigration crackdown laws, but the courts denied us them. The decision was basically only the feds can enforce immigration law, and if they wanted my town to become a lawless foreign colony, it would. And it did.

I moved away, I started working. A coworker of mine's family (Brother's wife and daughter) were raped and killed by an illegal immigrant house painter when he was left alone with them. I regularly encountered drunk Mexicans in the middle of the road at night, trying to visit friends or just do some late night shopping. They'd just be stumbling down the middle of the damned road on a blind turn, 45 mph speed zone, trying to make a vehicular manslaughterer out of me.

I moved again. Things were OK for a while. The massive unchecked immigration continued. I found my wife, though we weren't married yet. We started finding bullets along the walking trails, and there were increasing reports of B&E's and shots being fired into random homes for gang initiations. One family found their daughter's bedroom window had been shot through, and her pillow had been hit. Luckily she hadn't been in her bed at the time. At some point there was a hostage situation in the house behind us that ended when the retard lit fire to his own home and then charged the police with a knife.

I moved again. Things were OK for a while. Then they got weird again. The gas station on the corner I always filled up at in the morning started getting robbed with some regularity. People started stopping me in the street, yelling at me for money. The last straw was when someone was shot in my town home parking lot, shooter on the loose, and me with a 3 month old baby at home. I arrived home from work to police positively swarming the block, and my wife terrified.

I moved again. Things are OK so far. But my nation is dead and rotting. I know the rot will follow me again. I don't know what to do or where to go to give my children a future anymore. I went back to my home town for a parade at some point. When you have kids anything to do sounds good. The museum to the accomplishments and hardships of my ancestors had been "renovated". It now celebrated the fictitious diversity my town has always had. The paving stones with names of donors, including my grandfather, had been unceremoniously torn up and sent to the dump. The compact with generations past that they would be remembered sent to the dump along with them. So it goes to be conquered.

One thing that needs to be kept in mind on this topic is selection effects. If you're an upper class professional in rich Northern Virginia, the average immigrant you encounter is likely very heavily selected for intelligence, education, and familiarity with American culture.

Lucky.

Since we're dropping anecdotes, I'll share mine as someone who has much more experience with the lower class side of things - quite possibly more than everyone else on the site combined.

My first meaningful experience was working as a laborer in high school for contractor family members. There was a period of time when we were willing to work for Indian small business owners and a reason that is no longer the case. The pattern would go like this: we would get a call about a problem, go to check it out. Give a rough quote, get an agreement, then do the work. Think minor to moderate repair jobs taking 1-3 man-days of work.

At that point we would present an invoice, and the Indian man who owned the place would interpret that as "time to start haggling", with the added bonus that the work was already done, so he had huge leverage to be a totally obstinant asshole. There was just nothing about their approach that my culture would recognize as fair dealing or good faith. On several occasions, family members did go back and destroy the repair work instead of taking an insulting low-ball offer out of sheer, outraged spite.

We soon stopped taking their calls. But when I see certain elements speak negatively of the subcontinent as a culture that celebrates being dishonest scammers and grifters, well...

I also worked alongside a fair number of illegal Hispanics during this time. I don't have particular personal complaints about them, but neither are they precious compared to the median American laborer. There are definitely standouts (Gregorio was double my age and put my ass to shame), but it's more that the far left of their bell curve in drive just never leaves the old country. Their market niche is a willingness to ignore labor laws, OSHA, and building codes. If you want to take a libertarian stance on that, maybe attack the other angle there, instead of importing a class of deliberate lawbreakers.

And in my current job, I deal with tons and tons of immigrants. Dozens every day, from all continents save Antartica. It's hard to give examples without doxing myself, but speaking in very broad generalities...

Imagine being forced to keep an even demeanor while you spend twenty minutes trying (and failing) to explain to a grown woman, using multiple forms of translation software because she does not speak any English, that a circle is different from a square, while she just looks at you sadly and says "no comprendo...". And you never actually get the idea through, you just finally manage to beg her to call a middle-schooler to put on speaker phone, and something the child says in Spanish makes her stop bothering you on that topic.

Then she asks you to help her commit welfare fraud.

That's a bit worse than the median, but it's far from an unrepresentative example. There are better ones, of course, but for every African immigrant who is just respectably middle-class with an accent, there is one who is a paranoid schizophrenic that's invisible to NoVa office workers. Many varieties of Asians seem to be more prone to demanding and Karen-ish behavior than white women - again, while being nearly incomprehensible about it. If the average immigrant you deal with just has a bit of an accent and can quote from The Office, consider that you are experiencing a large selection effect and there are tens of millions of others who cause much more severe cultural friction. Imagine if YOU, Highly Educated Theater Kid, had to deal with cast members from Duck Dynasty every day.

And I have to mention the medical side of things. Having a doctor you struggle to understand is actually extremely stressful. I had to take a kid to a specialist who ended up being Nigerian. The thing is, I genuinely liked the guy. He was charismatic and made a sincere effort to give me thorough explanations. I appreciated the effort. It was mostly wasted though, because I was struggling to make out two words in three.

On another occasion I was assigned to a GP who was an Indian woman. I went in for one physical and it was one of the most demeaning experiences of my life. Refused to make contact, would barely look at me. She ignored my concerns and fixated on a single skin thing that she immediately referred to an associated specialist for a 10 minute outpatient procedure that billed my insurance as a "surgery". I'm sure she is very good at gaming the system to make number go up, but I'm never booking another appointment with someone who considers me an untouchable, and if I could press a button to have her denaturalized and deported I'd hit it twice.

But on the other hand, I don't have terrible stories of violence and drunk driving. I've dealt with plenty of second generation Hispanics and Asians who seem to have assimilated fine (and others who were disasters, but disasters within the expected bounds for mid-00s emo girls).

What I really want is for the cultural friction to go down. I want fewer people I struggle to communicate with. I want fewer people with alien, unpleasant mores. There's this thing I've been seeing a lot of lately from completely unassimilated South/Central American young women. When you ask them a question in English, they don't say "Que?", they do this thing where they jerk their head forwards and jaw upwards at you while making a sound that I can only describe as an "angrily inquisitive grunt". And I'm sure it's just a cultural quirk, but I can't stop my lizard brain from going. I want fewer people with alien ethnic ingroup preferences. Nara said something down thread about opposing identitarianism from the left AND the right, but the identitarianism from the right was "American". Of course things get unpleasant when that's no longer enough to answer the question.

My hometown was a very less egregious version of this. Well, sort of hometown. We moved there from an adjacent town when I was in 5th grade. By the time I got to HS the immigrant population had jumped pretty significantly such that about 15% of freshman struggled with English. Violence was not a problem at school, we had a sufficient supply of jocks and racists that made it clear to them (at the time) that there would be reprisals. I recall one such when a 15 y/o illegal grabbed a girl's tits, and the football team broke his leg and his bike. This influence kept them mostly sidelined from the time I was there. By my youngest sibling's graduation though, it was more like 25% and it was becoming a real problem. And like you said, DUI is actually the biggest problem. It is out of control, no DL, no INS, 15 modelos in the back seat. They then just don't come to court and go to some other town, or just hide till hopefully (for them) the SOL runs out or the cop retires and wont be able to come back from Florida for a class A misdemeanor or CL4 felony (depending on what was actually charged).

I do think you have had a uniquely bad experience. I'd maybe have similar views if my experience was at all like yours.

I've generally had a very different experience, and I'll share since you did.

Lived in the suburbs of St Louis for a while where inner city bussing policies made sure that there was at least one or two black kids in each class that were uncontrollable by the teachers and would mercilessly bully everyone else.

At the time I lived in a neighborhood with few kids my age, they were at youngest two years older like my brother, so he had a bunch of friends. I only managed to make friends in school with a nice Indian boy and his immigrant parents had me over for sleepovers.

We then moved to Charlottesville. And I went to a school that was semi infamous for being one of the last holdouts on segregation. That was decades before. By the time I was there it was still mainly two types of people liberals that had left a city and wanted a 'quiet' life in the country. Or rednecks that had been there for dozen generations and couldn't throw a rock on the playground without hitting someone they were related to.

Some of the rednecks bullied me. I made friends with the nerdy liberal's kids. The worst bully that I remember took his dad's gun in middle school and blew his own brains out.

When I was in middle school things didn't change much except I went to the school that was in the suburbs rather than the one that served the rural areas. So the bullies switched to being white jocks and rednecks were a minority, but I'd learned how to have friends at that point and I was no longer the one being bullied. One kid I remember getting bullied was a happy Mexican boy that lived next door in one of the apartment complexes. He eventually punched one of the kids in the nose after the kid took his backpack and that seemed to resolve things.

There were ESL classes in all of my elementary/middle/high schools and they were full and I never knew a single one of these kids.

Most of my friends in middle and highschool were white, because that was about 80-90% of the population. I was on friendly terms with the very few Muslims, Indians, and East Asians that were actually in our school. I teamed up with an Asian kid to represent the libertarians at a school wide political debate.

When I got to college things became way more diverse. I went to George Mason University because they had a reputation for a libertarian friendly economics department. My best friend became a 2nd generation Indian Immigrant. For two years my roommate was a Hispanic of some kind. I made a habit of intentionally forgetting and confusing him with Mexican origins because it annoyed him. He might have been Cuban. His parents were doctors, he eventually became a doctor too.

I graduated college and went to work at a company founded by an Indian entrepreneur. Met my white wife there and we have three beautiful blue eyed daughters.

I still live in Northern Virginia. I live in a predominantly white neighborhood my main encounters with immigrants is when they come to mow my lawn. There has been a homeless problem in the area lately, the worst of them look like drugged out old white people.


Overall my life has been awesome and not filled with much tragedy. My encounters with immigrants have been almost entirely positive. The race and ethnicity of people I've known has rarely provided me much insight into whether I will like them, get along with them, or find them totally odious. Usually the people that like or dislike me for my race are the people I get along with the least well.

I'm not ashamed of my race or heritage, I'm currently serving on a board for a family heritage organization. They've been here since the 1620's. We often field requests from people looking for more information on slaves that my ancestors once owned.

Overall my life has been awesome and not filled with much tragedy.

That's the part of it that is hard to communicate. At no part in my story was I the direct victim in any of this, beyond getting beat up by the illegals many years older than me who were placed in a middle school classroom likely based on education level, the county not yet having an ESL program. A mistake that was relatively quickly corrected. This might have been 1996? According to some census data I found the county was only 7% Hispanic then, compared to it's 25% now. Whites declined from 75% to 35%.

The problem isn't personally having illegals hit and run you personally on the road (that was several friends of mine), or murder your family (that was my coworker's brother), or take hostages and burn your house down (that was a row of houses or two behind mine). It's how it feels to see civilization fraying at the edges all around you, chaos growing stronger every day, and the high trust society you grew up in collapsing into a low trust hell hole of all against all. You came from a world where things like this didn't happen, period. A 40 point swing in demographics later, and suddenly it's normal. It's like that "First they came for the..." poem, only instead of methodical Nazi's eliminating problematic groups, it's just raw 3rd world barbarism and high time preference imposing it's consequences all around you, and occasionally picking off someone around you. And for whatever reason, people just keep their head in the sand. They roll to disbelieve, or they pretend this is fine. To notice at all places you on the fringe.

As the other commentor pointed out even the nearby tragedy doesn't have any kind of particular flavor. The bully that committed suicide is something I already mentioned.

The other nearby tragedies don't have a flavor other than "random".

A classmate killed on her way to SATs by a truck driver running a red light.

An older swim team friend dying in a car accident.

A swim team coach dying of a sudden heart attack on deck at a swim meet.

A student a few years older burned himself alive outside the school due to bullying.

A friend in his mid thirties dying of a sudden heart attack.

A cousin losing their boyfriend to cancer.

Tragedy has been around, but it's not very violent. And it's definitely not anyone's fault.

I have heard of the civilizational fraying, but I haven't really personally seen it. I don't even disbelieve you or anything. It's just accepting some of your conclusions or policy advice would run heavily counter to my own personal experiences. I don't even have a good way of resolving this dissonance. 5 years ago pre COVID I might have suggested trusting expert opinion and statistics on the topic. Now I'm pretty doubtful on the usefulness of that approach.

The problem isn't personally having illegals hit and run you personally on the road (that was several friends of mine), or murder your family (that was my coworker's brother), or take hostages and burn your house down (that was a row of houses or two behind mine)

I think this still counts as things happening to you "personally". A series of mishaps and disasters affected your friends and family and coworkers and neighbors, and this gave you a subjective sense that civilization was falling apart blah blah blah. @cjet79 can correct me if I'm wrong, but I parsed "Overall my life has been awesome and not filled with much tragedy" as very much including "my friends and relatives and neighbors have rarely if ever suffered life-ruining events of the kind you described as having affected your family, neighbors, etc.".

Yeah that's a good description. Tragedy hasn't impacted me or the people around me.

I find this unlikely.

I spent some time in Virginia, Maryland, and South Central PA about 20 years ago.

I can absolutely corroborate the profound weirdness of the crimes that started occurring as the illegal immigrant population increased in a given area.

We always had a lot of bar fights, domestics, and drunk driving arrests, but as the area started getting flooded with migrant labor, the profile of the crimes started changing.

There were not one, not two, but three distinct men who were arrested for stabbing women in the ass in stores. Specifically women, specifically in the ass, and specifically in stores.

We had another rash of complaints about a serial truck bed shitter.

Later, we had a rash of cattle mutilations that turned out to be... I guess you'd call it poaching? Rustling? Either way, it was illegal immigrant orchard workers cutting their own steaks from the local dairy cows.

Don't even get me started on the cock fighting and dog fighting operations.

Believe me when I say that the character of a place does change once the illegal immigrant laborer population reaches a certain critical mass.

I can believe that illegal farm workers are poaching, maybe stealing small stock, but they'd butcher a cow and there wouldn't be a 'carcass' left(Hispanics are actually very fond of animal parts not normally eaten in anglo-american culture; poor unassimilated Hispanics[which farm laborers would be] are actually known for not liking steak very much in comparison). I can believe there were cockfighting and maybe dogfighting rings set up by illegals but the rash of ass stabbin's doesn't sound realistic to me- do you have a news article? Obviously I have no trouble buying a one off floridaman-type serial offender, but you'll forgive me if just this one guy shitting in truck beds doesn't sound like the sort of thing to paint with a broad brush over.

I can believe that illegal farm workers are poaching, maybe stealing small stock, but they'd butcher a cow and there wouldn't be a 'carcass' left(Hispanics are actually very fond of animal parts not normally eaten in anglo-american culture; poor unassimilated Hispanics[which farm laborers would be] are actually known for not liking steak very much in comparison).

Cow heart kebab is the bee's knees, even if it upsets my stomach. I've never cared much for cow lung, but I'll eat it if there's nothing else. Organ meat is good for you; that's where all the nutrients are.

Amusingly, I've slowly assimilated into the American taste for steak. When I was younger I would only eat it well done, because I thought bloody meat was gross, and consequently I did not enjoy steak any more than I did chicken, and I found it distinctly inferior to fatty pork, despite being more expensive. But after years of getting bombarded by the medium rare meme, I broadened my horizons, and now I realize that the gringos were onto something with this whole steak thing.

because I thought bloody meat was gross, and consequently I did not enjoy steak any more than I did chicken

Dunno about that "consequently". I prefer my steak well done, and a nice well-done steak is one of my favorite foods.

It goes both ways- Lengua and Chicharron have developed a following among Gringos. We still mostly think tripa is gross, and menudo is restricted to being a folk cure.

Gringas mostly still think it's all gross.

Also for @Amadan, who asked in another thread.

https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/fairfax-county-butt-slasher-to-be-sentenced-friday/1924072/

Pimentel was arrested near a shopping mall in Peru, in January 2012. He was extradited to the United States in December.

I live in that general area, and none of this sounds remotely familiar or believable. Are there a lot of illegals, and crime (especially in the Baltimore -DC corridor)? Of course. But all these tall tales about one town after another being "invaded" by mustachioed Mexicans beating up the high school students, roads swarming with drunken gangsters, museums literally being torn up like an SNL sketch of Great Replacement Theory?

Obviously asking for places and news articles would be tantamount to asking someone to dox themselves, so happily, no one will ever be required to prove any of this and people will believe it or not according to what they already believed.

museums literally being torn up like an SNL sketch of Great Replacement Theory

Most of this sounds wild to me too, but I have no difficulty believing that bit. I don't think it's got much to do with immigration - even a connection to wokeness-writ-large seems strained - but memorials to otherwise-non-historically-relevant individuals being lost to renovations because nobody gave a shit is a story I've heard many times. My old college absolutely broke a sweet old nonagenarian's heart when they reorganized which departments got what buildings, and, in the process, failed to carry over the naming of one of the humanities dept.'s main lecture halls after his long-dead wife, who'd been a lecturer there herself. It wasn't anything to do with her being cancelled, it wasn't anything personal at all. There was just no procedure for carrying the tributes over, and no one cared enough to make one even with the old guy protesting to anyone who'd listen.

even a connection to wokeness-writ-large seems strained

No, I think it’s very easy to place the blame squarely on wokism, especially given this detail:

The museum to the accomplishments and hardships of my ancestors had been "renovated". It now celebrated the fictitious diversity my town has always had.

Museum curators are 94% Democratic, and the newer generation seems quite gung-ho on inserting racial diversity everywhere. The New York Tenement Museum made the news a few years ago when it altered its core principles to change its focus from the Italian and Jewish families who actually lived there to celebrate a black Black family who didn’t. The Art Institute of Chicago made headlines around the same time for firing its entire staff of unpaid, highly educated volunteer docents because they were too white and hiring (and paying) a younger, more diverse crowd in their place (something several other museums also did, but without the attendant fanfare). In the city closest to my own hometown, the history museum has started replacing its old displays on the history of the area. With the changes, a first time visitor could be forgiven for thinking that the area’s history went 1) Native Americans, 2) Genocide, 3) Civil Rights, and 4) Immigration (2000–present), without anything of note in between. It’s a deliberate assault on the heritage of the people who actually built the city and made the area what it is today, and it’s entirely due to the wokeness of the museum staff.

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especially in the Baltimore -DC corridor

That might be a big part of the distinction here.

articles would be tantamount to asking someone to dox themselves,

I'll give some location details anyway. I'm not talking about Chevy Chase and Darnestown. I'm talking about Rocky Ridge and Harney. These were poor, fucked up areas that only got more fucked up. The people living between the beltways just assumed it was rednecks doing redneck shit and never looked any deeper. Given the age of the events and the crap sack quality of the local newspapers, I doubt that I could find anything without going to microfiche at a local library. Since I'd rather set myself on fire than go back there, you can retain your sense of disbelief.

None of these statements sound like believable or normal behavior for poor unassimilated Hispanic migrant workers. Public urination, drunk driving, catcalling getting a bit younger than gringos would go, bar fights, poaching, cockfighting- all sounds like the sort of thing that might happen(and which is just generally a hazard of importing male-skewed unskilled laborers in large numbers). But these stories never confine themselves to the plausible.

But these stories never confine themselves to the plausible.

Neither does reality.

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Serial butt stabber sought in Fairfax County

They did get him, he indeed was an immigrant

I don't know about there being two more.

Sure, I believe an immigrant once went around stabbing people in the butt. I even heard about that one at the time. Because it was quite newsworthy.

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One was in the York/Dover area, and one was around Frederick.

One would have been around 2005, and one would have been around 2008-2009. I had already left the area, so I don't have firsthand information.

Assassins in the ass in stores.

Believe me. After we got over the initial shock, the topic was the butt of our jokes for weeks.

Thanks for that. I actually got a dark chuckle out of it.

I was thinking since last night if I wanted to address that comment. Would it be worth my time? Would anyone even read it and contemplate what it's like to have had those experiences repeatedly? Can I even write it without getting worked up and using a no-no word or a turn of phrase that will get me perma banned? I wrote it over and over probably 3 or 4 times, deleting and thinking it's not worth the effort or it's too risky. But when I finally sacked up and had a version of the post I thought would pass, in the back of my mind I wondered if anyone would even read it, or would it just be dismissed out of hand. Fitting that the first comment, so hot on it's heels, is just rank "I don't believe you".

Yes, I know people don't believe me. That's why I'm so angry all the time.

For what it's worth, speaking as one of the most left-wing people here: I found it very interesting, I believe you wrote it in good faith, and I have a lot of sympathy for you, so I'm glad you did go to the effort of writing it.

(Of course, it doesn't convince me. The impression I get is that the universe has played a cruel trick on you - that you've been tremendously unlucky over an extended period of time, Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers-style, and this has inevitably and understandably skewed your intuitions in a very deep way. If I had a chronic heart condition, and got "treated" by three or four of Scott's anecdotally-psychopathic cardiologists in a row through pure luck of the draw… yeah, I might wind up with a deep-seated intuition that there's got to be something to the inherent rottenness of the profession, no matter how eloquently people tried to talk me out of it. Confirmation bias giving undue salience in my eyes to the ordinary failings of ordinary cardiologists would do the rest.)

FWIW I thought it was quite interesting and a useful window into the impact of immigration on American towns outside the most affluent.

I see he's banned now lol.

For two weeks. He'll be back and probably get another chance before a permaban.

But now that I'm here, I'm curious to know if your perspective is the prevailing opinion here.

For this specific problem? Almost certainly graft by left-wing NGO's is the culprit in the eyes of most posters.

America has outperformed its economic peers in Europe and Asia over the last forty years despite this supposed "anchor".

Does anybody imagine that Europe and Asia are bastions of noble, honest public servants?

It's not uncommon to only indirectly hear about a place, or maybe even visit briefly (as a tourist) and see only the positive side of things. Negatives tend to be more stochastic and harder to evaluate on short time scales. I think plenty of folks have visited the Japan of high-speed public transit and anime, but not seen, say, the sky-high conviction rates of those that raise the ire of prosecutors, or the controversial shrines to WWII troops that committed war crimes. Or the UK, visiting all the Royal tourist spots, never getting harassed by police at odd hours over edgy Twitter posts. Or China, where they advertise clean, modern urban centers, just don't ask about what happened in 1989, or about Tibet or Xinjiang. Or Singapore, as long as you don't bring gum or spray paint.

I think at some level most places have skepticism of public servants. My typical interaction with (American) police is polite and professional, but I'll believe accounts that they're sometimes not.

the UK, visiting all the Royal tourist spots, never getting harassed by police at odd hours over edgy Twitter posts

This doesn't happen unless you openly call for physical violence, and even then only if you are stupid enough to put your real name to it.

  • -11

Was the Nazi-saluting pug guy calling for violence?

No, which is why he was only talked to by the police and warned, then booked for a magistrate's court hearing and fined rather than anything else.

If you want to see an example of a case where real punishment gets meted out by the Crown court see here from last week.

The defendent got 15 months in prison for his antics, but that was because he explicitly posted on Twitter "Go on Rotherham, burn any hotels wi them scruffy bastards in it" (talking about refugee hotels) and linked to far right materials very soon after the country was on edge due to the Southport murders (committed by a born British citizen).

Those actions could have potentially spurred on a real human tragedy costing an order of magnitude more lives than the Southport murders themselves.

the Southport murders (committed by a born British citizen)

Committed by Axel Rudakubana, child of two Rwandan immigrants, picture here.

I wouldn't normally make a point of it, but frankly Mr. Rudakabana is a very non-standard 'British citizen' and that is clearly and directly relevant to both the country being on edge and the Southport riots. The brackets here strike me as deliberately burying the lede.

He wasn't "harassed by police at odd hours". As is normal for people accused of minor offences, he was booked by appointment at a mutually convenient time, bailed immediately, prosecuted and fined £800. This is bullshit and shouldn't have happened, but if you are trying to describe it accurately it is a lot closer to a citation than "being locked up" or some such.

Ok, I trust you and concede that the guy was in fact harassed by police during normal working hours.

From my perspective, America has outperformed its economic peers in Europe and Asia over the last forty years despite this supposed "anchor"

Debatable. Over my life time America went from "the promised land" to "not sure if this is worth the bother of moving half way across the world" to "it's definitely not worth the bother, plus they lost their marbles culturally". Though this is somewhat complicated by the fact that Europe made no shortage of idiotic political/economic decisions during that time itself, including importing it's own set of anchors, as well as America's cultural trends.

If I had any intention of moving across the world, I'd probably be picking China, not the US.

As a child of immigrants myself, I appreciate the liberal cosmopolitan attitude: many of the kindest and most considerate people I have met have been whites who took great pains to live up to the color-blind promise. And I do reciprocate those feelings. But many immigrant and children of immigrants do not feel as I do. You can pave over a lot of problems with prosperity and wealth, but when times are hard those attitudes will come to the fore.

many of the kindest and most considerate people I have met have been whites who took great pains to live up to the color-blind promise

I corroborate this. In fact I would say out of the top 10 people I know well who I could see as such, 8-9 were white. They were all liberal too.

The children of Asian and Hispanic immigrants seem to integrate just fine. Like sure there's activist exceptions but by and large second and third gen Hispanics and Orientals are just... Americans.

Full disclosure: I am of Asian descent, living in Canada. The problem is that the well-integrated ones aren't in charge of culture or policy: and you have the activist weirdos who gain positions of responsibility. And because in general liberal whites are kind of trusting, they take it on face value that they represent the communities they are from.

No dispute on that; but a policy of official actual colourblindness would go a long way towards marginalizing these people. The average Asian doesn't care about Stop Asian Hate one way or the other, an official policy of marginalizing it would not be made up for by popular support.

AADOS oppression olympics racebaiting activists have enough support from the communities that they will continue to exist as notable organizations regardless of official attitude; I don't think this is the case for Asian or Hispanic equivalents.

I see he's banned now lol. But now that I'm here, I'm curious to know if your perspective is the prevailing opinion here.

WhiningCoil is flirting with a permanent ban himself, actually.

"Deport them all" is certainly an opinion some people have here, but as loudly as it is sometimes expressed I would not bet that it is prevailing. It's not uncommon for people to make the libertarian argument for open borders, for example--Bryan Caplan has some cachet in the rationalsphere.

I think your circumstances are not unusual. But there is a potential rejoinder you might want to consider--

My eldest is going to enter the same public high school I went to. The children of the first generation immigrants I went to school with now have their own families and, like me, have stayed in the same county to raise their children. They're indistinguishable from my family in the ways that matter to me.

That's great--my classical liberal heart is warmed--but it would be interesting to know for certain whether you are indistinguishable from their family in the ways that matter to them. If one demographic says "we love everyone, we help everyone equally, this is how we all work together to make the world a better place," but the other demographic responds "thanks for the help, we're going to take everything that is given to us to help our ingroup and, if possible, to become the dominant power, at which point we will then suppress our outgroup." The quote from Frank Herbert's Dune books is--

When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.

I am not saying this is how your neighbors think! I hope it is not how they think. But that is the angle and the concern that tends to arise when people make arguments like the one you have made here.

WhiningCoil is flirting with a permanent ban himself, actually.

Yeah, about that, I sent a modmail about this accusation that I'm running alts, because it's bullshit, and I'd appreciate a response.

Yeah, about that, I sent a modmail about this accusation that I'm running alts, because it's bullshit, and I'd appreciate a response.

You should just make some alts. The trick is that the alts should say absolutely nothing the least bit controversial at least until the current main is kaput. They should just make obvious little comments and build up a few points until it's time for them to become the new main.

By the time your new main goes from "newbie with a clean record so far" to being someone the mods remember in their own right, your last account getting banned should be old news.

You also need to manage IP addresses and browser fingerprinting. It's quite frankly a lot of work to do well, especially at scale.

Oh, thanks for outing yourself. I already banned you for two weeks because you keep making shitty comments, but since you just admitted to being a very specific ban evader, I will make it permanent.

I don't get why you think this makes you clever, but whatever.

Hopefully you see my response. I am not aware of any accusations of you running alts. In the past year you have accumulated AAQCs, warnings, and bans in approximately equal proportion. These are always hard cases for us, because we can see that you're smart enough to understand and follow the rules, and you create excellent content for the community on a regular basis. So we actively resist banning you, but you blatantly violate the rules way too often for us to simply ignore. Your current balance is such that you really are flirting with a perma, or at least a very long term (90+ days) ban.

I see. Yeah, no, as far as I know that's just a reference to his reddit username, which is/was not "WhiningCoil." The mod team was discussing WhiningCoil's status just yesterday and no one made any mention of alt accounts at that time.

Yeah, no, as far as I know that's just a reference to his reddit username

I don't think so.

I know what your original account was on reddit (1). You switched to a new one (2), came here with yet another one (3), and I am pretty sure you went through a couple others (4+) along the way-I will admit I might be misremembering those (though I think I could name them). I do know you have been modded and banned pretty regularly under whichever alt you're using.

Numbering is mine. Amadan seems to think I've had at least 4 accounts and is holding this against me in his moderation decisions.

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