shoeonfoot
10hr ago
Buddha statues you can put into your garden
Note that is frowned upon by most genuine Buddhists.
Trump was able to win over a lot more Catholics than he did in 2016 and 2020. In fact, a majority Catholics voted for Clinton and Biden, but then swung like +10 in favor of Trump. I'm not sure what effect this had on Trump winning as many states as he did, but if it was relevant, a Republican will have a harder time winning in 2028 if the Catholic vote swings back to D.
I'm curious to see if organized Christianity adopts a more hardline position on immigration. What I'm increasingly seeing among the Online Right, especially after Epstein, is that the only thing that will salvage the Trump administration is mass deportations, and their attempt to synthesize Christianity with this goal.
shoeonfoot
1d ago
My girlfriend, whom I love and trust more than anyone
Marry her.
shoeonfoot
2d ago
I'm also currently banned from both places.
With respect, this means you should understand why you're being modded in this place. I want to, gently, repeat my request that you drop the sardonicism, snark, and drive-by insults because I think this place would be worse off without someone like you. Also, I am much closer to your side than the other side, so I'd hate you see you banned.
Don't get too caught up on coffee_enjoyer; he's a unique breed. He's like a BAPist – prone to philosophical musings – but with a relatively benign dose of anti-Semitism thrown in.
shoeonfoot
2d ago
Thanks. I was going off my vague recollection of these kinds of articles:
In a 2021 interview about their book Trump's Democrats, Stephanie Muravchik and Jon A. Shields noted that many Obama–Trump voters likewise voted for Trump in the 2020 election, in some counties in even larger numbers than in 2016. Muravchik and Shields assessed that these "flipped" Democrats would continue to be a key factor in future elections.
Have you listened to MartyrMade's series on Epstein? I used to like his stuff a lot, but he's gone off the deep end recently when it comes to Israel and Jews.
shoeonfoot
3d ago
Are you raising your kids in the same socially conservative manner you were raised in? Would it bother you if your daughter had children of her own but was also a working professional?
shoeonfoot
3d ago
No, in fact, MAGA got upset when it seemed he might and Trump backed off.
I'm not sure. I think it was actually almost entirely Stephen Miller:
In White House meetings, Miller took the lead in dialing back the president from moving toward anything that could be branded an "amnesty" program.
One idea that was shot down: a "touchback" program under which laborers illegally in the U.S. would have go back to their nation of origin, get a U.S. work visa there and be able to return here.
"Stephen is so hardcore that the president almost jokes about it, saying that, 'You could have a person who has been here for 20 years and has a clean record and everyone loves them, and Stephen will say deport them,' " according to one person who heard Trump's remarks.
Were it not for Miller, we might have something like an amnesty, or at least the policy of not arresting farmworkers would have continued.
Look at the other issues. MAGA was almost entirely united against bombing Iran, and Trump did it anyway. MAGA had a meltdown over Epstein, and Trump dismissed it. I'm skeptical that Trump cares very much about what the Online Right portion of MAGA (which as you say, isn't really MAGA) thinks.
shoeonfoot
3d ago
If you polled a white person, maybe 50% white, 30% black, 20% everyone else.
If you polled a black person, maybe 80% white, 10% black, 10% everyone else.
shoeonfoot
3d ago
Further, these people mostly aren't the MAGA right, and the Trump Administration cannot be said to speak for them.
Yeah, that's exactly the crux of the issue. Lots of these people have claimed that some Trump move - bombing Iran, not releasing the Epstein client list, granting amnesty to farmers - will irrevocably sunder the Trump coalition and that their position is the true MAGA position and anything else would be a betrayal to the voters, but I think MAGA is whatever Trump says it is.
If Trump announced some kind of amnesty for farm workers, that would be MAGA. If Trump announced that "mass deportations" never meant every single illegal, that would also be MAGA.
shoeonfoot
3d ago
Is "online racialist Right" an endonym? Who are these people?
Turok has a public Twitter account. Many of the people he responds to and interacts with on Twitter would be part of the "online racialist Right". If you're familiar with the term "dissident right", it's basically the same group of people. The primary dividing line between members of this group is the degree to which Jews should be blamed for societies various ills. I don't think that's an unfair characterization and if requested, I can try to put in the effort to cite to these various people and their statements.
shoeonfoot
3d ago
Reality check: Generally, unauthorized farmworkers have had a de facto type of amnesty from immigration officials, who are hesitant to conduct raids on a labor force that supplies food across the nation.
There have been some farm raids under Trump (including a high-profile operation Thursday in California against a marijuana farm), but he mostly backed off widespread farm raids after June 12, when he took to Truth Social and lamented the loss of farm, leisure and hotel-sector labor.
"That was the bat signal to ICE: Leave the farmers alone," one Trump adviser said.
The intrigue: Trump's post that day was made after lobbying by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins.
But it caught three crucial administration players flatfooted: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump's aggressive immigration policies.
"Every [Cabinet] secretary can't do that: Go rogue and call the president like this, without any sort of appreciation for competing conversations or ideology," another senior official said.
Inside the room: In White House meetings, Miller took the lead in dialing back the president from moving toward anything that could be branded an "amnesty" program.
One idea that was shot down: a "touchback" program under which laborers illegally in the U.S. would have go back to their nation of origin, get a U.S. work visa there and be able to return here.
For some workers, that would require an exception to current law, which bars re-entry into the U.S. for those who immigrate here illegally and stay for six months or more.
"Stephen is so hardcore that the president almost jokes about it, saying that, 'You could have a person who has been here for 20 years and has a clean record and everyone loves them, and Stephen will say deport them,' " according to one person who heard Trump's remarks.
shoeonfoot
3d ago
They do not speak for the "woke right" (which itself is just a snarl term).
What is your preferred term to describe the type of people that James Lindsay characterizes as "woke right"? I don't like the term either, but there is a generally identifiable group of people who @TheAntipopulist labelled "racialist Right" who are pretty much the same people Lindsay labels "woke right".
The arbitrary filtering of one of the largest religious groups is silly.
Why? You're the one who filtered down to "college-educated White males" after Turok claimed that high-income whites are moving away from the Republicans, and I'm pointing out that college-educated white men are not only almost evenly split between D and R, but also that more granular data shows divisions among white men based on religious affiliation + level of education, which is relevant for determining how white men are going to vote in the future.
I'm not denying that women are more likely to be leftist in the present era (not historically), but you were wrong when you said women shifted "a lot" towards Harris.
The average has no idea that the country plans to import so many Indians. The average voter has no idea about the statistics related to yearly immigration, like, at all.
I have found that the same people who argue that the United States has been transformed demographically to the point that even small towns are no longer recognizable also say that Americans are ignorant about the scope of immigration.
I don't buy that. I think anyone with a pair of eyes and ears is aware that the U.S. is more linguistically, religiously, ethnically, and racially diverse than it has ever been. So yeah, the Gallup poll and every other immigration-related poll is asking people about "vibes", and the "vibes" are that the average voter is cool with the continuing diversification of America.
The average has no idea that the country plans to import so many Indians.
Sure, but this probably doesn't help your argument because the average person likely overestimates how many Indians there:
When people’s average perceptions of group sizes are compared to actual population estimates, an intriguing pattern emerges: Americans tend to vastly overestimate the size of minority groups. This holds for sexual minorities, including the proportion of gays and lesbians (estimate: 30%, true: 3%), bisexuals (estimate: 29%, true: 4%), and people who are transgender (estimate: 21%, true: 0.6%).
It also applies to religious minorities, such as Muslim Americans (estimate: 27%, true: 1%) and Jewish Americans (estimate: 30%, true: 2%). And we find the same sorts of overestimates for racial and ethnic minorities, such as Native Americans (estimate: 27%, true: 1%), Asian Americans (estimate: 29%, true: 6%), and Black Americans (estimate: 41%, true: 12%).
White Americans probably think there are way more Indians than there are and they're still going to elect Vivek Ramaswamy as the next governor of Ohio.
shoeonfoot
3d ago
What you're underappreciating is that @AlexanderTurok is basically getting modded for being annoying.
Which is the right thing to do. Turok knows what he's doing; he's obviously a smart guy and would otherwise be a valuable contributor were it not for the needless sardonicism.
You are right that there are users here, notably @WhiningCoil, who consistently adopt the most uncharitable framing of their opponents' arguments, but they do it in a less annoying way.
are willing to do genuinely difficult farming for long hours when the social conditions are right.
WWOOFing is just the domestic equivalent of the Peace Corps. Americans are willing to travel to dangerous third world countries to do backbreaking work for a year or longer, with the understanding that they're going to return to America and resume their normal lives. The vast majority of WWOOFers and Peace Corps volunteers are not going to pick strawberries or build houses in Guatemala as a career.
I am saying that agricultural work will look more like WWOOFing in the absence of semi slave labor.
I doubt it, mostly because WWOOFing is in no way a substitute for the large-scale industrial farming necessary to feed a wealthy nation of 300,000,000 people. It'll be mostly legal Hispanics and Asians, and hopefully some white and black people as well, who take over the jobs from the illegals.
shoeonfoot
3d ago
Only places I've ever been around where the white and black Americans stick together in contrast to the other groups have been meatpacking plants.
Construction sites as well, at least where I live.
shoeonfoot
3d ago
Thanks for the acronym, but you have not demonstrated that wide-scale WWOOFing (we gotta come up with a better name, right?) is a sufficient replacement for the food needs of 300,000,000 Americans.
I have some observations and questions after browsing the WWOOF website.
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How long does the average WWOOFer WWOOF for? Are they willing to settle down on a farm for 20+ years?
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It looks like WWOOFers work on small organic farms. Can WWOOFing really be scaled to meet the needs of a giant industrial nation?
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The average WWOOFer looks like a gender studies major from a liberal arts college. Most of the people who sign up for this type of thing would almost certainly be against mass deportations.
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From most of the testimonials I've been reading, WWOOFing seems more like interning on a homestead than working on a for-profit farm. The farms that WWOOFers volunteer on are producing food just for themselves, not the community.
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"Lots of the scions of high human capital humans do it." Lots of leftist women, it looks like. Which is fine, but your original comment made this sound like something different, at least to me.
In sum, WWOOFing seems exactly like the kind of thing that idealistic, liberal, young women do during college to feel "closer to nature" before they graduate and shop at Whole Foods for the rest of their lives.
I think it's much more likely that illegal Hispanics will be replaced with legal Hispanics if mass deportations actually happen.
shoeonfoot
4d ago
There’s a farm near me where people — college-educated, white, smart — sign up to plant and reap for free. Because in return they get free room and board, and most importantly a social environment filled with other young white people.
Are they willing to do it for a living, or is it just a fun summertime activity with friends? Is this something they do on the weekend outside of work? I assume they have other jobs, unless they're wealthy enough to have retired already, in which case they're extreme outliers.
I find it hard to believe that college-educated people, regardless of race, would cover even a small portion of the necessary workforce on Americans farms.
shoeonfoot
4d ago
I think it’s fair to say that nobody proposes that Americans are jumping at the chance to do the worst possible jobs.
There was a lot of noise on X about this article from last month. Specifically, a lot of anti-immigration people were quoting the first paragraph as proof that Americans were indeed eager to do the dirty jobs that illegals do now:
Every seat in the waiting area of Glenn Valley Foods was occupied with people filling out job applications early Thursday afternoon, two days after the meatpacking plant became the center of the largest worksite immigration raid in the state of Nebraska so far this year.
The second paragraph was not included:
Dozens of prospective employees, many of them Spanish speakers, had been coming in and out of the plant all day. Some were hoping to land a new job; others were coming in for training.
I assume that what's going to happen across the country is illegal Hispanics being replaced with legal Hispanics if mass deportations actually happen.
shoeonfoot
4d ago
College-educated White males lean toward Trump.
Education by gender among White voters
White college graduate men: Harris 48%, Trump 50%
It’s just women who shifted a lot toward Harris.
No, women shifted towards Trump compared to 2020, as did almost every group. In the 2016 and 2020 elections, white non-evangelicals with college degrees and even white non-evangelicals without college degrees supported Biden by a wide margin. These two groups, and notably Hispanics, shifted dramatically towards Trump in 2024 because of immigration + inflation. Had Biden not been so tremendously incompetent - and we can't dismiss that the incompetence, especially with respect to immigration, wasn't deliberate - the Democrats may have won.
Elections are very close affairs. Historical precedent suggests that the same voters flip flop every four years. Take immigration; less than 50% of Republicans are now in favor of decreasing immigration, down from 88% last year.
White Americans are an incredibly inviting people when it comes to immigration.
shoeonfoot
4d ago
there are plans to just get rid of Women's prison.
Isn't this just part of a broader movement towards "alternative" detention and punishment?
shoeonfoot
5d ago
The comment you linked is a good example for how much of the evidence cited of the Holocaust is not really responsive to the claims made by Revisionists. So according to Hannah Lewis, she and her family was deported to labor camps, her father escaped and joined the Partisans. Hannah almost died of Typhus but received treatment and survived the war- somehow; remember the claim is that the Germans were trying to kill all Jews so a Jewish girl getting sick of Typhus in a German camp and surviving is in itself incongruent with that claimed policy.
You ignored the part where she witnessed her mother shot by the Nazis in front of her. Her story, told in a bit more detail here:
In 1942 the Germans began rounding up the Jews of Włodawa to either nearby Sobibór extermination camp or various labour camps.
In 1943 Hannah and her family were rounded up and forcibly marched to a labour camp in a village called Adampol which was a few miles from Włodawa. Over time most of her family disappeared. Her father and his cousin managed to escape and joined the partisans. Only Hannah and her mother remained in Adampol.
One of the things that the partisans did in the area was to warn Jews in work camps and other places of imminent raids by German killing squads if they had discovered the information. In the last winter of the occupation, Hannah fell ill with a high temperature and suspected typhoid so her mother would not leave when her father came to warn them of the impending action the next day. The next morning the German police arrived and her mother with other people were taken and lined up round by the village well where she was shot. Hannah remained in the camp and survived as best she could. Hannah was finally liberated by a Soviet soldier who picked her out of a trench dirty and very hungry.
After the war her father found her and they lived in Łódź. Eventually in 1949 Hannah was brought on her own to Britain to live with her great aunt and uncle in London. In 1953 her father left Poland to go to Israel. Hannah now lives in London having married in 1961 and had four children and eight grandchildren. She has been sharing her experiences in schools and universities for several years so that young people today can seek to understand the impact the Holocaust has had on the contemporary world.
I'm sure she has provided more detail elsewhere, but the story is depressing enough as it is; I have no desire to listen to the poor woman talk at length about how most of her family died.
I don't see why her account is incongruous with extermination camps simultaneously existing. It can be true, and indeed it's probably more plausible, that some Jews were sent to work camps and other Jews were sent to extermination camps. The fact that not every single Jewish person was sent to an extermination camp is not evidence that the Nazis did not have a policy of exterminating Jews.
Sorry to resurrect this thread but I've only now gotten a chance to read this post and all the responses carefully. I'm curious what you make of this thread. I'll copy it below in case you don't want to click the link.
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