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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:
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.
Interesting comment...
From my perspective, America has outperformed its economic peers in Europe and Asia over the last forty years despite this supposed "anchor". It's not that I'm completely allergic to your argument, but I do think more evidence is required before, um, deporting everyone you think is genetically incapable of "pursuing generational projects".
I will admit to a bias here. I live in Northern Virginia in a HCOL area where I'm surrounded by immigrants. I grew up here and stayed to raise my family. 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. The neighborhoods are immaculate and the people are friendly, like they were when I was a kid. The generational project seems to be working pretty well from my perspective! You may have had much more negative experiences with immigrants.
As I said in my first post, I found this forum in a roundabout kind of way through via Alexander Turok's Twitter account. 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. That would be fine, of course! I need some ideological diversity in my media diet.
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.
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