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Notes -
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:
This seems to be a hit piece targeting the NYC mayor favorite Zhoran who wants to bring government run grocery stores to NYC
But it's unclear whether the failure of the store is due to mismanagement or criminals establishing a base nearby:
It also may simply be that there are too many grocery stores for that area:
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.
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
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.
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.
Are you Indian? Or did she just take you for a lower class person from another race and hate you for it?
That was partially poetic, partially literal. I don't know exactly what she thought of me. But I've never, not once, had another medical professional clearly uncomfortable with literally just touching a patient during an examination.
I've seen a couple of doctors over the years who were so clearly not people-persons that they acted similarly. I think some of them might be autists and/or just status and money chasers who don't deign to view the patient as a human.
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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).
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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.
Why are you assuming that he 've had a uniquely bad experience? I'm not from the US but to me what he's describing seem to be the usual consequences of Mexican or Central American underclass immigrants forming criminal gangs in a town/city where their numbers reach a critical mass. I don't assume that is a unique development, especially not in Virginia which probably attracts a disproportionate number of immigrants due to the vicinity of the Beltway region.
I think bad luck on his part. Or maybe he is just predisposed to noticing a particular type of bad thing in his life.
It's not been my experience or the experience of most people I know.
In other words, he's a racist.
Not what I said and not what I meant. Don't put words in my mouth.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
Dunno about that "consequently". I prefer my steak well done, and a nice well-done steak is one of my favorite foods.
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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.
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Also for @Amadan, who asked in another thread.
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/fairfax-county-butt-slasher-to-be-sentenced-friday/1924072/
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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.
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.
No, I think it’s very easy to place the blame squarely on wokism, especially given this detail:
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
blackBlack 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.More options
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That might be a big part of the distinction here.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.)
What does it not convince you of, I might ask? (I know it's sort of a meaningless question as the original comment it is a reply to was moderated already, but still.) The necessity to control the borders?
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FWIW I thought it was quite interesting and a useful window into the impact of immigration on American towns outside the most affluent.
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