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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12502 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 8, 2025

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Doublethink like this is endemic to conspiracy theorists of all stripes.

  • The movie JFK alternates between claiming Oswald was an innocent patsy framed for two murders he didn't commit, and a skilled assassin betrayed by his co-conspirators and killed because he knew too much.
  • Palestine sympathisers will swear up and down that Hamas and the broader Palestinian independence movement have the right to engage in violent resistance – but, conveniently, every single civilian killed on October 7th was killed by Israel under the Hannibal directive. Thank Christ for that!
  • Immigrants are taking our jobs, except when they're mooching off welfare. (You can make this not-doublethink by phrasing it as "either immigrants are taking our jobs, or they're mooching off welfare". But at that point the fig leaf has wilted and you might as well just admit that you don't have principled economic reasons to oppose immigration.)

Immigrants are taking our jobs, except when they're mooching off welfare. (You can make this not-doublethink by phrasing it as "either immigrants are taking our jobs, or they're mooching off welfare". But at that point the fig leaf has wilted and you might as well just admit that you don't have principled economic reasons to oppose immigration.)

...are you familiar with various techniques on how to conduct welfare fraud?

I for one am not.

On the immigrants thing, they can easily be doing both. Any immigrant with income below approximately the 60th percentile of income is a net negative to the taxpayer.

Then they are both taking our jobs and being net consumers of welfare.

I think there's an important distinction between "working hard, but also availing of public benefits (like healthcare etc.)" and "not working and availing of social welfare".

you don't have principled economic reasons to oppose immigration.

The principaled economic reason to oppose immigrating in this case is that you want immigrants to be net taxpayers, and also work in jobs complementary with (most) Americans rather than in competition with them.

For example, high skilled specialists we just don't have enough of. (Original use case of H1B, before it got exploited as a source of cheap accountants and php drones.)

Immigrants are taking our jobs, except when they're mooching off welfare.

People literally do this, you can get paid under the table in cash and then get various types of benefits that you shouldn’t actually be eligible for.

Super common. Every Latina immigrant receives visions of the exact cutoffs for Medicaid and other government benefits while gestating her first child, along with a MLM/cash business starter kit.

Immigrants are taking our jobs, except when they're mooching off welfare.

That’s not even a conspiracy theory, let alone a contradiction. Both of those things do indeed happen. (They don’t even need happen from the same immigrants, although that also happens.)

If you wanted a right-coded conspiracy to balance out your selection you could have just referenced Q.

I'm afraid I'm not sufficiently well-acquainted with Q to know what beliefs of theirs would qualify as doublethink.

Immigrants are taking our jobs, except when they're mooching off welfare. (You can make this not-doublethink by phrasing it as "either immigrants are taking our jobs, or they're mooching off welfare". But at that point the fig leaf has wilted and you might as well just admit that you don't have principled economic reasons to oppose immigration.)

That seems pretty different to me. It seems very possible to believe that a large number of immigrants have jobs where they are working for below market wages and undercutting native wages as a result (both illegal immigrants and H1B fall under this) and also that many more are not working at all and are mooching, and that only a small number have market rate jobs. This does not require believing that any single individual is doing both at once in a double think manner. It is even possible for a given immigrant to believe they have done both, say starting as a wage undercutting day laborer and then mooching off of welfare once he was able to get signed up for benefits, or that this individual with the wage undercutting job is ALSO getting food stamps or medicad supplementally or for their dependents. I don't think it requires believing the superposition of A and NOT A simultaneously the way the other examples do.

Furthermore, I think some immigrants get here with visas to take jobs (undercutting domestic labor), then import a bunch of family members who immediately start extracting resources from every government program they can.

But at that point the fig leaf has wilted and you might as well just admit that you don't have principled economic reasons to oppose immigration.)

@FtttG Bad form. >:|

Sorry bro.

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