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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24721 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025

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Lets talk about the amateur expose of the Somali day-care industry in Minnesota.

Here is the full 42 minutes of my crew and I exposing Minnesota fraud, this might be my most important work yet.

This video and associated clips have been taking the right-wing internet by storm. The format is new and interesting; a charismatic zoomer social media influencer teamed up with an angry obsessive boomer autist. Their idea was to show up in person to various government-subsidized "child care centers" to see if there was any meaningful economic activity going on. The results are certainly interesting if nothing else.

The most notable finding is the complete absense of evidence of child activity at all but one of the facilities. I'm not sure how definitive this is that fraud is occuring (especially since we don't know what time of day or week these visits were made), but it is certainly suggestive. I wouldn't be eager to display my entrusted children to a group of strange men who seem oddly interested in seeing them either.

One might get the impression that these facilities are completely unregulated and uninspected. This appears to be wrong. You can look up the licenses of Hennepin County child care centers and find annual inspection results, usually with violations! The laundry list of violations found with each annual inspection did not seem to prevent these facilities from recieving 7 figures annually in taxpayer funds.

I’d like to write a larger post on this but the fraud in American minority populations is fundamentally the result of a sociobiological assymetry between the immigrant population and the native population, because the native population has neutered their natural instincts through culture and biological adaptions. Culturally, White Americans are presented with trauma-inducing and phobia-inducing stories and lessons at an early age to reduce their natural in-group affiliation, much like a dog that has been punished not to naturally bark; biologically, Northern Europeans like the Swedes in Minnessota have the highest rate of OXTR rs53576 G/G expression which is a unique evolutionary adaption that allows them to see racial others as part of the same “tribe”; for those carrying A/A, no amount of in-group allegiance is sufficient to make them to see racial others as part of the same tribe. The Swedes in Minnessota have maximal cultural and genetic pressure to see the Somalians as simply an ailing faction of their own in-group, thus deserving special treatment, like a sick or mentally handicapped member of the tribe; the Somalis in Minnessota have maximal pressure toward the exact opposite: piracy, tribal supremacism, and the clearest friend-enemy distinction you could possibly develop on this planet, due to their culture + history + religion + biology.

The sociobiological asymmetry is the most important thing because it’s a motivational asymmetry. To use a quote from Conan the Barbarian, there is literally no pleasure greater to a young man than to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women. This pleasure is so great that when a teenage boy in America has any free time, it is quite literally all they want to do and think about. They want to raid a stranger’s base in Rust that took them weeks to build; they want to track down a secret base in Minecraft that took years to build and light it on fire; they want to hop on Fortnite with their männerbund and ruin the fun of a rival gang of men; they want to raid Orgrimmar and kill an enemy race’s chief; if they play football, they want to exert dominance over a man they just tackled and flex at the other side’s cheerleaders; if they are some sociopathic looksmaxxer, they want to steal someone’s date or girlfriend while live-streaming; in chess, they want to lay a trap that see’s their enemy’s Queen captured; and so on. When I would play Call of Duty with the boys, the funniest moments were always a direct similitude of the Conan-Genghis principle, when the rival team had someone’s girlfriend playing: we kill the members of a group (usually through trickery, sometimes through gratuitous torture), steal their precious belongings, and then hear the lamentation of their woman (rather annoyed yells) as she is the last one alive. This always made us laugh hysterically, it’s just innate. Stealing things from the alien group in a game is even a popular YouTube topic and the basis of the popular game Sea of Thieves. Secretly backstabbing someone that you are pretending to be allied with is the whole basis of Among Us, maybe the most popular game of this decade, a game popular solely because of that mechanic.

The joy that men get from fulfilling these natural instincts is intended to be set against defectors and foreign invaders; that is why humans have this instinct. But American education has made them phobic about this truth at a young age, and modern Christian theology erroneously leads them believe that it is evil. But the Somali, with his rich history of piracy and tribalism, and his religion which celebrates war against the Kafir, is not confused by any of these illusions. The scamming is fun in itself. It is one of life’s greatest joys. They would do it even if they only make out with a single dollar, just as American men do it for free in virtual pretend worlds. They are laughing, dancing, and singing after stealing the Swede’s money, because it represents a victory over an alien race in their midst. They consider if a victory because it really is a victory, while the Swedish Minnesotan is looking at pixels rejoicing over something retarded like winning a match of Clash of Clans. The Somali male has the same motivation to commit a scam as an American male has to play a round of CounterStrike or Escape from Tarkov. This is the fundamental reason the scams are all over the place.

I don't necessarily disagree but the simpler explanation of 'there is money and they see they can easily take it' works better. They wouldn't take money from Somalis, they can distinguish between gradations of friends and enemies. And in Minnesota, they have this magic wand of 'racism' they can wave and get people to bend over backwards to ignore their tricks.

Truly, Somalis in Minnesota is the reductio ad absurdum of antiracism. Who seriously thinks that it's a good idea to bring in Somalis? Did they ever invent anything or create anything? Somalia isn't exactly in good shape either, a very poor country of nomadic herders.

Low-value people.

Somalians can and do rob from each other in their home country. The difference is that in the West there's enough to steal that pilfering from their kin is no longer worth their time.

Somalians can and do rob eachother but they also have nationalism and a sense of group identity. You see these Somali-American politicians going on about how they want to help Somalia, help Somalians.

I assume this is right, I don't see a community note. Former Somali Prime Minister Khaire at MN rally for Ilhan Omar, speaking some Somali language: 'The interests of Ilhan are not Ilhans, it's not the interests of Minnesota, it's not the interests of the American people, it's the interest of Somalians and Somalia'

https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/2005502209530937659

Very simply reducible to "I am against my brother, my brother and I are against my cousin, my cousin and I are against the stranger."

Looking at the allele frequencies of rs53576:

Population A allele freq G allele freq
AFR (African) 0.19 0.81
AMR (Admixed American) 0.36 0.64
EAS (East Asian) 0.65 0.35
EUR (European) 0.35 0.65
SAS (South Asian) 0.45 0.55
Global 0.39 0.61

It's true that Europeans have a relatively high frequency of G, but it looks like Africans have them beat.

Maybe the aggregation here is obscuring subgroup heterogeneity, and Somalians don't share the well-known cosmopolitan universalism of Bantu cattle herders.

No. Young men are aggressive, belligerent, proud and honor-conscious, and seek glory. But not all men are natural despoilers who live for nothing more than to wreck what others have built, to ruin others' works.

This is the philosophy of the ant, mindless raider and reaver who is incapable of seeing anything other than an Other to be killed.

This is the philosophy of the thug, violent, of short-time preference and low impulse control, devoid of vision or higher purpose.

This is the philosophy of the petty and the small, who enjoys the misery of other people more than anyone's happiness or anything ennobling for himself.

This is the philosophy of the sociopath, who sees others as only prey, who cannot see other people as anything other than potential resources to be exploited or rivals to be eliminated.

This is the philosophy of the psychopath, who loves only violence for the sake of violence, and writes alt-historical pseudo-political screeds to justify a desire to pillage, rape, and kill, and reduce all of humanity to war to the knife.

As best, this is the philosophy of an insecure and callow youth who soothes himself with words like "männerbund" to tell himself he is embarking on glorious viking with his warband, and not simply seeking group security to go bully others in a game because he's not brave enough to gangbang.

This "joy" you speak of is a joy that everyone feels from time to time when our monkey-brains trigger, whether it's imagining hunting down a horrible criminal you saw on the news, beating the crap out of the guy who pushed your buttons on the Internet, or running down that motherfucker who cut you off on the highway. It's a joy you might temporarily feel when your fight-or-flight activates "fight" and you win... until the consequences arrive. But there is a reason we regulate and channel and try to restrain violent young men, especially those who seem to have no higher aspirations than to tear down what others have built, to kick sand in the faces of those weaker than them, to wax rhapsodical about the joy of hurting other people and laughing at their pain.

It is not a philosophy for men. At least, not men we want to share a society with. Not men capable of building a society. Certainly not men who speak of shared values and community and building a greater civilization than a mere tribe with spears all pointed outward from their very tight and insular circle.

It's fascinating how you breathe this "joy" of rapine in one post and extoll Christianity in the next. No amount of Biblical exegesis can rationalize a Jesus who says yes, it is right and good to crush your enemies and hear the lamentations of their women and take joy in it.

Though it is amusing to watch KulakRevolt go off on how Christians are cucked puss-pusses who sold out white Europe, and his outraged Christian followers, like you, try to describe a "Based Jesus" who totally says it's good to hate and kill and wallow in the infliction of your enemies' well-deserved suffering.

According to the revealed preference of their favorite leisure activity, men really love raiding enemies and aliens. Your counter-hypothesis needs evidence, and it will have a difficult time explaining why men pay for the opportunity to recreate what they did in the past. And why men loved to do it in the Napoleonic Era, or during the 1527 Sack of Rome, or the 1850 sacking of the Summer Palace. Or during any of the completely normal raiding activities during the Age of Sail. And why it comprises the subject of the most popular “guy movie”, Master & Commander, which is literally just about a hierarchical männerbund seizing a trophy ship through trickery. Is it okay because the authority says it is okay? This would not be a very masculine take, as the King himself was established through men simply willing it.

No amount of Biblical exegesis can rationalize a Jesus who says yes, it is right and good to crush your enemies and hear the lamentations of their women and take joy in it.

The Psalms which were inspired by God are filled with curses of destruction for enemies, so the eseigesis isn’t completely impossible. But you don’t have to do exegesis, you simply have to understand that very devout Christians have always engaged in the joy of taking from enemies. If this is a sin, okay, it is probably less of a sin than the one your critic is engaged in, so they can be quiet and criticize themselves + repent for seeing a speck in his brother’s eye, which is a much worse sin.

According to the revealed preference of their favorite leisure activity, men really love raiding enemies and aliens.

I already addressed that - yes, men like the idea of fighting and winning glory. You have provided no evidence that this means we all deep down enjoy causing pain and suffering and wrecking what other people have built. Like all your just-so stories, it's just something you spun out with deepity words.

I think if you actually read journals of people fighting in the Napoleonic era who were not Napoleon, you will find that as in most wars, most of the men fighting it did not actually enjoy it, even if they have fond memories of the camaraderie afterwards. They justified it with pride, with self-defense, with national interest, but not "'Cause it's fun to destroy what other people have." Master and Commander is not about guys enjoying destruction and pillage. The whole point of the movie is that they are trying to defend their homeland; Aubrey's rousing speech to his crew is all about preventing the French from taking over England.

But you don’t have to do exegesis, you simply have to understand that very devout Christians have always engaged in the joy of taking from enemies.

Very devout Christians have always enjoyed fraud to get rich and consorting with whores, too. You are still just making up what you want the Bible to endorse.

It’s very normal in video game culture to say things like “you ruined his night”, “he will cry himself to sleep tonight”, “you made him uninstall” after vanquishing your foe. Why do you believe boys and men say this? Or are these just evil people in your mind? Usually when you make the enemy quit the game, this makes the male player happy. You would have to explain why this occurs, if not for causing misfortune and pain upon your enemy.

They justified it with pride, with self-defense, with national interest, but not "Cause it's fun to destroy what other people have”

Do you really think the soldiers did not enjoy the prospect of taking things from their enemy? Then why did all of Napoleon’s soldiers loot? Why did the British loot the Chinese? Why did the Catholics loot the Byzantines? Why did Rome loot their enemies? It’s possible you have an atypical mind a la typical mind fallacy. Hell, I know a guy who proudly showed of Saddam’s execution sword, which of course he looted in Iraq while in the army. And again, male leisure activity involves looting mechanics for precisely this reason — video games are fun for a reason and the reason relates back to our innate psychology. We like to play the assassin who kills enemies and loots their bodies because deep down we have some kernel of an instinct which comes from prehistory, though of course moral compunction overrides this. What boy didn’t want to be a ninja in his adolescence? Why do people play GTA and not “give out compliments simulator”?

The whole point of the movie is that they are trying to defend their homeland

That’s just a speech to give them a just cause on top of their mannerbunding; Britain had declared war first and the ship was off the coast of Brazil. No one is watching the movie because they sympathize with the cause of the King, instead they see themselves in the männerbund who are singularly interested in destroying their enemy through trickery.

, instead they see themselves in the männerbund who are singularly interested in destroying their enemy through trickery.

No, they are empathizing with defending your home and family.

That’s only two brief sentences in the whole movie. I don’t think they ever really talk about home apart from that. The whole film, the viewer follows the men plotting and fighting against the Acheron. They spend more time romanticizing about the ship and Lord Nelson than their homes and wives. That’s what makes it such a good movie: there’s none of that sentimentalslop that guys don’t actually care to watch.

The whole mafia genre is another case of this. Why do guys love mafia movies? It is not because of the subtle sociopolitical commentary and ironies of the Sopranos.

You have a habit of dissecting things into discrete components that you can fit together into your thesis, and ignoring vast swathes of context and nuance. You are also very guilty of typical-minding what you apparently feel.

You've built your entire hypothesis that "Actually, all men enjoy looting and raping" on the edifice of "We like competitive sports and violent video games." Numerous people have offered you other interpretations with examples, and you reject them because looting and raping sounds like a good time to you and therefore it must be natural to all men.

That’s what makes it such a good movie: there’s none of that sentimentalslop that guys don’t actually care to watch.

There was a lot of sentiment in Master and Commander. It was very male-oriented, yes, but the idea that men don't like or feel sentimental about things like home, family, nation, faith, is a stunning declaration.

The whole mafia genre is another case of this. Why do guys love mafia movies? It is not because of the subtle sociopolitical commentary and ironies of the Sopranos.

In fact men did enjoy the sociopolitical commentary and ironies of the Sopranos. That's why it was an award-winning show. The Sopranos was in many ways a deconstruction of the Mafia glamor, and yet it had a very large male audience. Men like Mafia movies in general for the same reason we like all kinds of power fantasies, but most men want the money and the chicks but not to actually go around beating whores and shooting shopkeepers. Apparently you don't understand this. It may be that you are a more typical man and it may be that I am, but I know which way I would wager.

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What is your explanation for the fact that armies need to teach men to kill, and that most men display considerable resistance to it, and require intensive training? The Grossman argument, in On Killing, is exaggerated, but as far as I'm aware it is nonetheless true that using lethal force - or even just maiming force - on another human being is psychologically difficult for most people, and they have to psych themselves up for it. That's one reason why armies need pre-battle rituals, communal bonding rituals, etc., to prepare soldiers to use lethal force.

It's true that boys and men often enjoy dominance or victory to some extent. For that matter, as far as I can tell women have competitive instincts as well. But it is a big leap from "boys enjoy winning" or "games for boys often involve simulated violence" to "all men yearn to destroy and rape and pillage".

I think that study’s theory is likely bunk as this was never a concern in premodernity. Like, I doubt there is a passage from an ancient writer (most of them familiar with war) claiming that men are afraid to kill, though many would certainly be cowards. Then you have the normative duelling culture among nobles for a long stretch of time, eg

Between 1798 and the Civil War, the U.S. Navy lost two-thirds as many officers to dueling as it did in combat at sea, including naval hero Stephen Decatur

and it is estimated that between 1685 and 1716, French officers fought 10,000 duels

which strongly suggests that men, at an insult of honor, would be willing to kill or maim a member of even the same tribe. This is a defensible ritual IMO because it rids your upper class of cowards, though it also has a bad dysgenic effect. The optimal dueling culture would probably involve less accurate pistols so that you still filter out the cowardly and overly-pacifistic while retaining the genes of the nobility.

It’s a leap to ”all men yearn to destroy and pillage”

The really crucial bit is their enemies. In the games they play, men aren’t typically attacking innocent parties, but only enemies. And I do think this is real. It’s just as real in the “civilized pacifist” who wants to levy high taxes on only his political enemies or who wants BLM rioters to target a specific part of a city. I remember how happy the online “pacifist liberal” was to see a police station or a gas station set on fire during BLM.

If the Minnesotan wants any chance of solving a Somali scam epidemic, then they likely must activate the instincts God gave them for solving such things. That means treating them as an enemy, so that every uncovered scam comes with a feeling of victory and pride; it means rallying men around pursuing justice, with rituals and celebrations; it means retribution in some judicial or approximate way; etc. If they don’t activate these instincts then they will never find the energy to actually fix it.

Well, I'd argue that naval officers are firstly already people who've been through military training, and secondly are already selected for martial intent. Pointing out that certain classes of people historically have been willing to use violence doesn't seem like enough, to me, to establish that all or most men throughout history have had high tolerance for lethal violence, and that modern men are uniquely wussy. Is it not just as likely that historical warrior classes were intensely socialised for violence? That seems like, well, an integral part of having a warrior class in the first place.

As regards games, I would tend to agree that men in general (and in fact people in general) have competitive instincts, where they enjoy defeating simulated opponents. I am skeptical that this generalises to real violence, given that simulated violence in video games is firstly fictional and secondly usually extremely sanitised. I think that if I gave the average gamer who enjoys shooting people in Call of Duty a real rifle and invited them to shoot real human beings (and let's say I guaranteed them immunity from reprisal, prosecution, etc.), even human beings belonging to outgroups, that gamer would hesitate.

I'm not moved by high-flown rhetoric about "the instincts God gave them", and I don't need a call to action. I think that kind of preaching is actually against the Motte's rules. Let's try to stay focused.

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I think you're the one typical-minding. If your mindset is that it's fun to hurt people and take their stuff, I can see why you'd project that onto others and even construct justifications for it under your religious frame, but I do not think that is in fact the natural default psychology of most men. Most men want to be respected, to achieve things, and to defend the people and things they care about. War is a means to an end and we sing songs about it, but it's not the end. It's not our reason for being.

Your philosophy, like KulakRevolt's, is that everything else is all just a veneer over our desire to rape and kill. If that's true we'd never become a species capable of epic poetry, of grand architecture, of space travel. You and Kulak would have us never evolving beyond chimp behavior. Yes, we all have a bit of the chimp in us. That's why we teach boys that you shouldn't hit people because they hurt your feelings, and that fighting should be a last resort, not your first recourse. People like Kulak who say no, violence is the first and only answer, and people like you who say, but violence is fun and everyone wants to do it, cannot be trusted to build and maintain the very societies whose decline you bemoan.

goose_chasing_man.jpg

"What was the epic poetry about?"

War. Why do you think this is a gotcha?

War is a means to an end and we sing songs about it, but

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You’re not coming up with any direct or circumstantial evidence to forward your theory, though. Your worldview lacks explanatory power.

Your philosophy, like KulakRevolt's, is that everything else is all just a veneer over our desire to rape and kill

This is a poor misreading. My theory is that men have an instinct to dominate alien or defecting groups and thus find it gratifying. American men waste this instinct on video games and have been wrongly taught that they can’t express it politically. Somalis express it politically, which is why they are stealing the Swedes’ resources and replacing them in Minnesota. The Somali allows himself to feel joy at his victories, just like the Puritans felt joy upon vanquishing their enemies, but the modern American male is only told to feel such joy in worthless video games.

You’re not coming up with any direct or circumstantial evidence to forward your theory, though.

And yours is just "My feels."

I think you have no idea what either the average Swede or the average Somali feels, only just- so stories to flatter your preconceived notions. You just make stuff up, throw it at the wall, and pontificate about "explanatory power" when you're just starting at a desirable conclusion and working backwards to construct a theory.

It's fascinating how you breathe this "joy" of rapine in one post and extoll Christianity in the next. No amount of Biblical exegesis can rationalize a Jesus who says yes, it is right and good to crush your enemies and hear the lamentations of their women and take joy in it.

coffee_enjoyer is constantly getting Christianity wrong. I'm not sure why that is, but I long ago learned to collapse any post he makes about Christianity because it'll be chock full of inaccuracies about what the faith says about things.

Scamming and stealing is definitely fun in and of itself for a lot of people. It’s why some bored housewives with money shoplift trivial value merchandise they can easily afford is a thing. Every few years here in England there is a story about some wealthy City banker using fake (or no) tickets on a commuter train and getting caught for years of fare evasion. Sure, even for the moderately wealthy that’s thousands of dollars, but it’s not about the money, it’s about the thrill. On Extreme Couponing many of the participants had money and treated it as a hobby.

However, the reason why the Somalis in Minnesota are stealing billions from the government instead of playing Fortnite isn’t just because they want to. It’s because they can, and the system isn’t really set up to catch them. They exist outside the complex web of North Western European social interaction which exists everywhere above the lowest dregs of that region’s indigenous underclass (Marius Hoiby types), and in which you would probably face some social shame or tut-tutting for ripping the government off for billions (interestingly I think this instinct is less developed in England, where the native working class have a reputation for cheating the state, both at the bottom on welfare (“benefits”) and at the top (see Michelle Mone’s PPE case)).

Northwestern Europe, especially the nordics, and so especially Minnesota, were just uniquely high trust. Singapore is also a very rich, safe and peaceful country with high quality of life, but because the state expects that whatever incentives they offer will be ruthlessly exploited by the very intelligent and cunning populace this is factored into planning. If someone is making tens of millions in China by exploiting a government program then someone in the government is corruptly in on it and local CCP management on a regional / sector level is either getting paid to look away or is being cut in. In Minnesota, I doubt there are any Jorgensens or Lunds who have made a billion off of this scam, they just let it happen.

In Minnesota, I doubt there are any Jorgensens or Lunds who have made a billion off of this scam, they just let it happen.

I have no specific evidence for this, but my hunch would be that if we could trace a complete genealogy of the phenomenon, somewhere at the inception is a (blue haired?) social worker or NGO volunteer excitedly explaining to recently-arrived refugees that if they just fill out a couple of forms, everything will be okay. "You're babysitting your uncle's kids, and your sister's kids, and your cousin's friend's kids? You know, if you just fill out these forms, the government will pay you to do that!"

Compare e.g. the Arizona "ESA" where homeschooling families are now getting money from the government to do what they were already doing... only now, with more Lego! (And books, and tech, and...) One might reasonably argue that this is ensuring educational tax dollars follow actual children rather than serving purely as a jobs program for low ambition and intellectually mediocre adults. But eventually little Billy and Susie (and your uncle's kids, and your sister's kids) grow up and move on, and actually attracting new, unrelated customers is hard, especially since it seems like now everyone on your block is running a government-subsidized "daycare." But since no one ever comes to actually check on your business, well, maybe you can just put down some plausible-looking numbers...

(And if you happen to have moved to Utah in the past year, but you still have relatives in Arizona who will let you use their mailing address, why would you bother to inform the state of Arizona that you no longer qualify for the money? Of course, you might get caught. But if you're a refugee with nothing to lose, what do you have to fear from a fraud charge?)

In other words, while it certainly appears that there is massive grift occurring in Minnesota, I think it is unlikely that it started in quite that way. One needn't have Jorgensens or Lunds who have made a billion off of this scam for Jordensens or Lunds to be involved, not just in letting it happen, but in making it happen--not for their own financial benefit, but for the benefit of their suicidally xenophilic political consciences. Hannah Dugan is not an outlier, Hannah Dugan is an archetype.

Was there "pre-modern Christian theology" that celebrated tribal predation, deception, and out-group domination as virtues?

Even in Christian Europe it was only in the Middle Ages with the rise of chivalric ideals that "cunning" ceased to be considered one of the manly virtues appropriate for a leader. Robert Guiscard is the last one I can remember to really make it his brand (many Crusaders, merchants, etc. after that, including Guiscard's descendants, but they're treated as much more morally grey). While the chivalric virtues that superseded "trick your enemies and take their gold" can be gotten out of Christianity, they were built into the Church as part of a semi-secular project to build centralized power structures and make the military aristocracy somewhat more controllable.

Vikings/Romans? Though I'm sure they didn't have the memeplex to conceptualize it so crystally clear, it was about getting resources and providing for you and yours.

The Christians who founded America excluded those outside the fold, not just from obtaining something of a resource but even from stepping foot in their towns; they happily executed anyone who tried to step outside their social value ecosystem (eg witches); they were happy to kill the Indians who tried to kill them. But more to the point, the particular saying regarding enemies was never intended to be literal, because it exists squarely in the middle of sayings which we know for sure were never taken literally (“If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away” … “when you pray, go into your room and shut the door”). It was a mistake to ever interpret this rule as some invincible principle of all affairs, and indeed no Christian country ever did in civic matters. It’s simply a jolting reminder that we should make up with the brothers whom we think are our enemies, so that the collective is stronger and thus better able to solve in-group / out-group problems.

Loving your enemies does not mean prayers for the successes they desire, or assisting them in folly, often it's enough to pray they find Christ and repent.

You don't think

But whenever you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you. (Mat 6:6)

Could be taken literally? I'll happily agree that it also works with "inner room" as the heart itself. It's clearly about the 'why' not the 'where'.

Martin Luther describes a physical space, using the where to get to the correct why.

Therefore Christ begins by teaching them how to pray aright, and shows how they are to go about it, namely, that they should not stand and pray openly upon the streets, but should pray at home, alone, in their chamber, in secret, etc.: that is, that they should first of all lay aside the false desire to pray for the sake of the appearance and reputation, or anything of that kind. Not that we are forbidden to pray upon the street or openly; for a Christian is not bound to any place, and may pray anywhere, upon the street, in the field, or in church; but merely, that it must not be done with reference to the people, to get honor and profit from it, just as he forbids sounding a trumpet or bells at alms-giving — not for that reason, but he rebukes the addition and the false motive with these words: that they may be seen of men.

Plucking out your eye in the context of adultery of the 2 precededing verses is better understood that If you find yourself looking at a woman with lustful desire, then tear out that "eye" - but it's the eye of the heart he's talking about, not the physical organ. Lust originates in the heart, not the eyeball. So if you remove the evil desire from your heart, the physical eye won't sin or cause you to stumble anymore. You'll still see the same woman with the same two eyes you've always had, but now without the desire. It will be as if you hadn't even noticed her. The "eye" Christ is commanding you to tear out - the eye of lust - will be gone, even though your bodily eye remains perfectly intact.

Ahistorical nonsense. "Witches" existed far more often in popular retellings than any actual trials, and yes, they killed Indians with whom they were at war but contrary to the propaganda we're relentlessly bombarded with now, not every white European wanted to exterminate the Indians from the beginning. Many, from the first settlers, were perfectly willing to coexistence (and many of the Indians were too). There were just too many points of collision, too much cultural friction, and too many defectors on both sides.

The philosophy of the first colonists was certainly imperialistic by modern standards, but most of them weren't seeking to genocide the natives as an end in itself (you'd certainly hear people saying that, well into the 19th century, but even generals who breathed fire about pacifying the Indians would generally tone it down in practice if the Indians were pacified), and the early settlers' hostility towards outsiders was the typical hostility of people living in small precarious communities with little room for slack and few resources to spare. Note that they wanted trade and exchange (of news, technology, people) with the network of communities around them, not to gather in warbands and go out and conquer them.

None of this has much to do with Christianity, but your Kulak-like revisionism in which the founding fathers loved violence for its own sake annoys me more than your attempts to "base" Christianity in bloodlust, because I actually care about American history.

The puritans did kill 21 people in Salem over witchcraft.

Recently?

There are arguably too few prosecutions and convictions for witchcraft given its open and flagrant practice in current year.

Yes, I'm aware.

The question is what the Christian colonists would have done against a community of Muslims which were continually stealing from them. What do you think they would have done, and do you think they would do it joyfully? “Commit unorganized violence all the time” is a strawman of my position.

I did not say Christians don't endorse defending themselves against bad actors.

The Puritans also engaged in missionary efforts, e.g. the praying towns and Algonquian Bible translation of John Eliot. That seems more like trying to bring Native Americans into the fold than genociding them.

After lighting their wigwams on fire resulting in the death of hundreds, the Puritan preacher of the Christian army made the following sermon:

https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/pequot-war

But God was above them, who laughed his enemies and the enemies of his people to scorn, making them as a fiery oven. Thus were the stout-hearted spoiled, having slept their last sleep.... Thus did the Lord judge among the heathen, filling the place with dead bodies.

Or elsewhere:

Thus was God seen in the Mount, Crushing his proud Enemies and the Enemies of his People: They who were ere while a Terror to all that were round about them, who resolved to Destroy all the English and to Root their very Name out of this Country, should by such weak Means, even Seventy seven (there being no more at the Fort) bring the Mischief they plotted, and the Violence they offered and exercised, upon their own Heads in a Moment: burning them up in the fire of his Wrath, and dunging the Ground with their Flesh: It was the Lord's Doings, and it is marvellous in our Eyes! It is He that hath made his Work wonderful, and therefore ought to be remembred.

Thus the Lord was pleased to smite our enemies in the hinder parts and to give us their land for an inheritance; who remembered us in our low estate, and redeemed us out of our enemies’ hands. Let us therefore praise the Lord for his goodness and his wonderful works to the Children of men!

I lost this comment the first time I made it and I'm already tired of discussing this video so I don't feel like bothering with a bunch of images/links again.

At one location there is a sign at a theatre that says Tue and 44°F. His phone says around 1PM.

Inside a different building there is a digital map that says December, 2:33 PM and 43°F.

You can see probably 3-5" of snow in places, but it doesn't look like it snowed in the last day.

Looking up recent weather the only day that is consistent with all of that is December 16th.

I had no idea that day cares received subsides for enrolling low income families. I send my kids to a fairly expensive one and am surprised by how many hippie star children that clearly don't have normal jobs can send their kids also. I just assumed they were blowing an inheritance or something.

What's the search filter for excluding these?

Search for one that doesn't proudly advertise its commitment to diversity, are there even any like that?

Look for day cares that are attached to other organizations that filter their members. You'll probably have decent luck looking for ones connected to a local church you approve of. Hopefully it's restricted to members in good standing of the church.

I mean, you can just hire a nanny and have her take the kids to do stuff with the SAHM kids. Daycares prefer the government paying the bills to other non-nanny affording parents because the government always pays; there might be a few that don’t, but the government is the best client there ever was or will be.

A lot of states will mandate accepting these funds. So you are probably looking for expulsions and the reasons for them.

I'm not so much tapping the sign as open palm slapping it like a goddamn Conga Drum.

Tapping the sign doesn't really do much. What you're dealing with is parasitism, and you don't get rid of parasites by saying "Wow, look at all the parasites!" or putting a sign up that says "PARASITES" and slapping it ´til your hand is raw. Even calling the parasites parasites to their face won't do anything. They don't give a fuck lol

And to double-down on the metaphor, this is not merely typical roaches-wandering-into-the-kitchen problem. You have a malicious-party-actively-collecting-roaches-and-dumping-them-into-the-kitchen problem.

I don't want to be accused of mincing words or hiding my intentions, but I also want to respect the rules of the forum which clearly state that you can't advocate for violence, so... I'll say it this way: the solution to this is violence, and yes, following the rules means you are incapable of enacting any realistic solutions. So, to square the circle and avoid advocating for this solution, I'll say course of action I advocate is to flee Sodom and Gomorrah before the rains of destruction fall. It won't save anyone else, but it will at least save yourself.

Look, when I seize power as the Supreme Warlord of the Southeastern United States, elevated to victory on a strong anti-corruption, pro-free enterprise, pro-free association, pro-free speech platform (and tons of organized violence)...

And I start executing Bureaucrats by firing them out of a battleship cannon into the sea (Re-commissioning the USS Alabama for the task)... I want there to be an established history people can point to so as to explain exactly when I snapped and my motivating impetus for the campaign.

That said, I think that Bukele and Milei have shown that it is possible to reverse certain declines without going on all-out cleansing campaigns, dragging people out of bed and gunning down dissidents in the street.

But I am, yes, increasingly convinced that unless the Government is willing to apply the death penalty, and ideally make the executions public, for aggressive criminal activity that directly betrays U.S. interests in favor of foreigners, that they simply can't be serious about solving things.

You cite Bukele, but Bukele for all practical purposes suspended the law and went full fash: the algorithm was "if you look like a criminal and smell like a criminal, you're a criminal." They were not spending months carefully dissecting each bit of evidence to make sure Fernando really is the perpetrator of the exact incidents we're charging him with. Luckily for everyone, once Bukele arrested all the duck-typed criminals, he relaxed and everyone now lives in sunshine and rainbows.

Now, granted, the US does not have a homicide rate on the scale of what El Salvador used to. But if you consider mass illegal/dubiously-legal immigration a serious problem and intend to resolve it, then yeah, it is at that scale. Even larger, actually. The idea that doing this is going to solve anything is delusional. It's pissing into a hurricane.

Similarly, for fraud of the sort in the recent video the top-level comment is discussing, I don't think carefully investigating every incident is realistic. How much human effort do you estimate it takes for a scam ring to setup a new fake daycare (or god knows what else)? If it takes them less resources to produce the scam than it does for you to fight the scam, you're losing.

Luckily for everyone, once Bukele arrested all the duck-typed criminals, he relaxed and everyone now lives in sunshine and rainbows.

Is the relaxing part happening? My read of the data (which Bukele is trying to obfuscate) is that the prison population of El Salvador is continuing to increase even after the murder rate stabilised at a low level. If you want to lock up the most criminal-looking 5% of each cohort as they enter the peak crime-committing years, you either need to start letting them out in large numbers (which Bukele has promised not to do) or you end up with 5% of the population in prison, which is probably unsustainable.

The US didn't scale back mass incarceration because of soft-on-crime Democrats, they scaled it back because Republicans stopped wanting to pay taxes to pay for prisons once crime dropped in the noughties. Despite the calls for longer sentences on the populist right, there still seems to be a consensus within the MAGA movement that the Trump tariff revenue and DOGE savings should be used for tax cuts, not prison building.

Is the relaxing part happening?

Huh, I thought he ended the state of emergency after they'd finished the gang crackdown. But apparently it's still in effect (after having been "extended" multiple times)!

I guess that's some good PR on their part.

they scaled it back because Republicans stopped wanting to pay taxes to pay for prisons once crime dropped in the noughties

Surely someone at the Heritage Foundation can do some clever accounting to factor in the cost of crimes committed by unincarcerated criminals. When a 20 year old is killed, that's 40 years of tax revenue you lose! It's not even dishonest math, that's actually how this should be accounted.

If you want to lock up the most criminal-looking 5% of each cohort as they enter the peak crime-committing years, you either need to start letting them out in large numbers (which Bukele has promised not to do) or you end up with 5% of the population in prison, which is probably unsustainable.

In the long run, they simply have to be executed. Keeping them locked up is unsustainable (and runs the risk that some later administration will release them, like a sealed evil from a fantasy novel), exile is infeasible, and the state no longer allows private individuals to dispose of them through e.g. lynching.

In the long run, they simply have to be executed. Keeping them locked up is unsustainable

Surely they can earn their keep with a bit of forced labour?

Is the relaxing part happening? My read of the data (which Bukele is trying to obfuscate) is that the prison population of El Salvador is continuing to increase even after the murder rate stabilised at a low level.

That's a bit misleading. We are not seeing the same kind of increase as we did earlier, so we do definitely see relaxation. We are also quite definitely observing the rest of the population living under sunshine and rainbows.

Despite the calls for longer sentences on the populist right, there still seems to be a consensus within the MAGA movement that the Trump tariff revenue and DOGE savings should be used for tax cuts, not prison building.

The average person's views on taxation and spending are incoherent, and that's true no matter whether you're talking about the left or the right. Either way, if you want to imply that the DOGE-enjoyers want to cut spending on prison, maybe you can provide a link to an example or two.

That's a bit misleading. We are not seeing the same kind of increase as we did earlier, so we do definitely see relaxation. We are also quite definitely observing the rest of the population living under sunshine and rainbows.

Given that the level of imprisonment in El Salvador is not something where there is trustworthy data, I am not going to get into an argument about the second derivative.

Sure, they're about as untrustworthy as any western institution. Though in this case, since they are already yes_chadding the highest incarceration rate in the world, I don't quite see the point in lying about it.

If it takes them less resources to produce the scam than it does for you to fight the scam, you're losing.

Not quite. If by prosecuting fraud you deter more future fraud, you can win, indeed.

You cite Bukele, but Bukele for all practical purposes suspended the law and went full fash:

if you suspend the law and instate a relatively friendly version of fascism, and then get re-elected by obscene margins, what's that tell you about people's regard for the state of the law?

I think all the judges trying to hamstring Trump with national injunctions are basically BEGGING for people to stop caring about the sanctity of the Judicial system. All the more so when the Dems keep calling the Supreme Court illegitimate.

Where else could we possibly be heading?

Not quite. If by prosecuting fraud you deter more future fraud, you can win, indeed.

Fraud is only deterred if the expected consequence outweighs the expected gain. In a Western world where fines for wrongdoing often are smaller than the money gained by the wrongdoing - fraud is simply never deterred. Especially among those who have few other options!

The solution is excessive punishment, potentially including executions as so many posters have mentioned, but this of course runs counter to Western instincts and our legal tradition. We don't have a solution to this problem.

people's regard for the state of the law?

The state of the law varies by time and place. Crime in El Salvador shortly before Bukele was elected was an order of magnitude worse than it ever got in America. At some point (which the 2020s US has not reached, except in the deluded minds of a small number of San Francisco leftists) there are more people with a friend or relative unfairly imprisoned than there are crime victims. I think the US would hit that point if you locked up an additional 1% of the population Bukele-style - i.e. without explicitly targetting proven repeat offenders.

I think there's a lot of demand for this, especially among under-40s.

Amazing news.

I just checked and the largest guns on the USS Alabama are its 16-inchers, and the width of the average male at the shoulders is... 16 inches. Most Bureaucrats should thus fit snugly in the cannons with minimal modification, and there are three batteries with three cannons in each battery, so we can really get efficient with it.

And for severely overweight bureaucrats I am happy to supply GLP-1s while they're in custody.

ChatGPT got really uppity when I started inquiring about the feasibility of this plan.

For the Judge currently hearing this read into the record at my trial, this post is a joke.

A 16 inch gun uses hundreds of kilos of propellant, you're not launching anything, you're just vaporizing people inside a tube. Ironically, I think this would be much more humane as an execution method than the 'give him a lethal injection that makes him writhe around in pain' model.

Beheading is quick, tried and true, at least if you use the French innovation rather than messing about with trained headmen. Hanging is even more traditional, a little harder to get right but not THAT much harder. All this faffing around with electricity was just because Edison wanted to score on Westinghouse; there's no real need for it. And medicalizing it was even dumber.

Yeah IMO a suitably hydraulic-powered guillotine is impossible to fuck up.

Hispanic cultures have their own equivalent of hanging, the garrote. But, personally, I'd prefer a firing squad. It's simple and dignified.

I was thinking firing squads would be reserved for military executions.

Injection is for the benefit of the public, not the criminal. At some point we got squeamish about visibly physical punishment, and injection sweeps all of that under the rug, making execution a bloodless, bureaucratic affair.

Yes, but as far as I'm concerned that's all a loss. Execution is brutal and should appear brutal. The question for jurors when prosecuting someone for a capital crime should indeed be something like "Am I OK with the state cutting this guy's head off". Similarly, for the execution to provide sufficient substitute for the private retribution it replaces, it should be brutal if the brutality is justified.

And more fun for spectators.

Sell tickets we might even turn a profit.

Bukele and Milei seem like good counterexamples at first, but...are they? What would a Bukele or Milei look like, in the US, or in a given European country? Like Trump at best, and like so much deep state roadkill otherwise, is my guess. Those are smaller countries with serious problems, to be sure, but I guess that the smaller size and lesser complexity of those countries is what makes the chainsaw approach possible in the first place.

Argentina is big and seemed to have an entrenched deep state. It's poor, sure, but that's not a structural difference.

The fact that DOGE hit such a hard roadbloack is showing that it isn't trivial to just AFUERA large swaths of the government.

But Bukele's advice on this point seems relevant. Actually impeach and remove Judges who are otherwise obstructing valid processes or seizing power for themselves. Find some incentive to get the Legislature to actually cooperate.

And ultimately, because I believe in localism, my hope is not so much for sweeping changes from the top down. Rather, I think the quickest gains will come from state level action, or even municipal action, where the scale of the task is more comprehensible, and your enemies are more likely a handful of individuals rather than a vast, faceless institution.

If Trump and Co. can just keep the Feds from intervening, state-level actors will be better able to start cleaning out issues in their individual governments. Much like is happening with Minnesota, it seems.

Hence my ambition is only to be "Supreme Warlord of the Southeastern United States." In reality I'd be happy to be Supreme Warlord of Florida. In practice the best I can probably achieve is Supreme Warlord of my tricounty area. And my actual target would be Supreme Warlord of the city council.

Start small and with what you can actually control, then scale up or help others repeat as needed. Easier to coordinate violence at that level, too.

Local change seems critical, but the issue is that 99% of the attention of politically-interested people seems to be at the federal/culture war level, now. A debate about whether a road should be converted into a park becomes a debate of whether the pro-road people are crypto-Trump supporters. City supervisors spend hours debating whether they should pass a resolution supporting the Palestinians. Questions about how to best educate students during COVID get supplanted by questions about naming schools in a progressive way. And these abstract/cultural signifier questions are what people actually vote on even for local elections, instead of focusing on the concrete issues at hand.

I don't know if this problem is unique to your locale out what, but I'm currently working on a project with my city council and can assure you they don't give a hoot about Palestine. The only reason they or anyone would care about culture war issues is if that pressure is applied from above.

Yep.

And of course there are trillions of dollars tied up in Federal Funding. THAT'S why everyone fights at that level, the rewards are much, much greater, and the avenues for grift are numerous.

But I still think there are some gains that can be achieved. San Fransisco is a poorly-governed quagmire, but if someone could unify a few tech giants towards the goal of reforming their local governments, fund it, and act decisively, they can probably make some headway.

At scale, principal-agent problems, coordination problems, and perverse incentives mean you can't just throw money at a problem.

But a focused institution set up with one particular goal in mind (and designed to dissolve once that goal is achieved, to avoid being skinsuited) to replace enough local officials to immediately implement a particularized agenda CAN work. There was a time in 2022 where MAGA candidates ran for school board positions and were able to get elected in most cases. Holding that victory is another matter.

The real failure mode here is that Dems/Socialists are pretty damn good at coordinating their local-level efforts with their national party, so it often ends up with you not just fighting the local party machine, but well-funded national groups, or allied entities in other states.

Hence my only real hope is Trump and Co. can keep the FedGov from backstopping their favored local candidates.

You think there will be rains of destruction?

All I see in the future of the west is Who By Very Slow Decay.

The rains of destruction aren't brought on by any action against the Somali fraudsters. They're brought on when the parasites sufficiently damage the host and the destruction comes as an inevitable consequence. Look at many large American cities in the 70s and 80s, or much of Detroit and Baltimore today, to see what happens.

That...looks like very slow decay. Well, maybe not all that slow. But still decidedly decay, not destruction.

Very much "not slow" decay, and punctuated by bouts of destruction (the race riots, mostly in the '60s but some later).

I believe that the conflict between people with "skin in the game" and people without will be the defining conflict of this generation. I believe that a lot of the drama surrounding MAGA and the various European populists movements (EG. Marine Le Pen in France) can be explained in the context of this conflict. Finally I do not expect this conflict it to go well for a lot of posters here as IMO statements like "meritocracy is pointless" are luxury beliefs afforded to people who are not being tested on a regular basis.

True, and the increasing decoupling of the laptop economy between labor and actual measurable productivity/outcomes just exacerbates the fall

Coinbase is finding how hard it can be to maintain accountability with a workforce that is 8000 miles away from your headquarters.

annual inspection results, usually with violations! The laundry list of violations found with each annual inspection did not seem to prevent these facilities from recieving 7 figures annually in taxpayer funds.

Every daycare out there has a ton of violations. Even the bougie ones in the whitest areas. In fact the presence of violations makes me more inclined to believe that these are actual daycares instead of pure fronts for fraud and embezzlement.

Especially when some of the violations are for having more kids than the staff allows for.

I've been ignoring this for one huge reason: This video was posted on December 26th. If anyone approached my children's preschool today, they would find 0 children there. Not 0 people, because it's also a Lutheran church and there's always some kind of social happening somewhere. But 0 preschool-aged children. They're all home for winter break.

If a stranger tried to go to my child's preschool during a business day, they would not be let into any classroom. They can call the office or send an email to schedule a walkthough. But if you don't have the phone app for parents or an appointment, you're not getting through the double doors.

The fact that it's a 23 year old doing this "investigative journalism" makes my eyes roll so hard. He has no idea what "normal" would look like in the first place. I'm very tired of this genre of "Watch me make unreasonable demands of people and watch as they're weirdly defensive for no reason."

I'll admit the misspelled "learing center" was a nice touch . I'm not going to make the positive claim that these institutions are all above board and the victim of selective editing. There's enough journalism indicating that this kind of fraud is rampant. I'm just perpetually annoyed that this is what makes people pay attention and become outraged, when this sort of thing has been reported on for a while now across America:

https://journalistsresource.org/home/how-they-did-it-minneapolis-kare-11-team-uncovers-medicaid-fraud-in-peer-recovery-services/

https://kstp.com/tracking-your-tax-dollars/whistleblower-minnesotas-child-care-assistance-program-has-fraud-cases-dating-back-12-years/

https://minnesotareformer.com/2024/09/17/a-former-autism-center-employee-tried-to-report-fraud-to-the-state-nobody-responded/

Were you aware that this youtuber has been going around anywhere & everywhere relevant for at least a year now? He went to greenland, panama, LA, portland, DC, utah, etc., and posted his man-on-the-street interviews & footage from it all (often livestreamed before editing down to the relevant punchy parts). This wasn't like a james o'keefe style designed hit out of nowhere. Most of your comments seem to make more sense if you're missing the context of this guy's stuff.

Didn't he go to the Ukraine and say there wasn't a war?

No, I'm not familiar with this guy. I don't know why you're negatively comparing James O'Keefe, who actually bothers to do stings that would prove something.

O'Keefe's thing:

Disguised guy: "Hey, will you do crazy illegal thing with me?"

Mark: "Sure!"

Disguised guy: "Sooo, do you ever do crazy illegal thing with anyone else?"

Mark; "Yeah, all the time! No one ever catches us, don't worry!"

Admittedly, after getting kicked out of Project Veritas there's a lot more hearsay instead of actual stings. But the original Project Veritas stuff was good quality.

This man on the street thing doesn't prove anything. It relies on priming you ahead of time to expect that anything short of seeing a kid on camera outside this facility in this 2 minutes he's there is evidence that no kids are there at all. When really that's a crazy leap in logic.

Well the point is that I don't think O'Keefe ever posted anything if it didn't further his political aims. If he didn't successfully get anyone to drunkenly try to brag about doing something politically untoward, we just wouldn't hear about it. Nick Shirley apparently just goes everywhere following whatever is in the recent news, and adds some ground-level footage of it, regardless of what anyone had to say, rather than creating the story itself. I watched his greenland, panama, LA/portland ICE, and no kings protests videos, which were fairly boring but seemed to give a pretty real perspective.

I just think there's a huge difference between "fbi to investigate further after viral video by nick shirley" vs "fbi to investigate further after viral video by james o'keefe". Which is that the former is like "duh, that's what you could have known the whole time", while the latter is more like a laura loomer style politically-targeted push.

But I would forgive anyone for not knowing the context of any of these people. As for you being a fan of O'Keefe's style and actually knowing more about Shirley than me (didn't know of him going to ukraine over a year ago), I guess I just totally misread your angle here.

I think the real story is that many dozens of less flashy whistleblowers, like the older man in the video, have been investigating this stuff for years. Many of the people involved have already been charged with crimes since months ago, and the fraud centers shut down. Nick Shirley didn't really uncover anything, he just made a fun video demonstrating it to the general public. I agree that some of his presentation is a bit deceptive, but it's directionally correct in that it shows how blatant and widespread the fraud was, in a short punchy format that regular people can watch.

I believe the video was shot a week or two before the post which whilst late in the year also isn't a public holiday. Plus I'd expect the Somali diaspora to not all be big people of Yule

If so, that's good. A lot of the people responding to the video are saying, "I'm going to go out right now and investigate my nearby publicly-subsidzied daycare today!" Which is just dumb.

I can't remember the post but I saw somebody on Twitter posting screenshots suggesting it was 16/12 that atleast some of the visits took place on.

"learing center" was a nice touch

I've seen some of the online right try to dunk on the Somali immigrants for that, but the irony of it is that the daycare owners are making an obvious Shakespeare reference the online right is just too bigoted and uneducated to get. King Lear illustrates the importance of empathy and social justice (values that the right lacks), which children can learn—errr, acquire understanding of—at that childcare center.

This video was posted on December 26th.

Do you think it was filmed the day it was released?

I'll admit the misspelled "learing center" was a nice touch

Yeah, misspelling your school's name on it's front door is a 'nice touch'.

I'm not going to make the positive claim that these institutions are all above board and the victim of selective editing.

So what are you claiming? You seem to just be swatting lazily enough to not have to think any harder about it. Come on out with a prediction here. Of course Nick Shirly, a 23 year old youtuber isn't going to be a button up investigator, which makes it all the more damning if he's the one to whistle blow massive fraud.

So massive fraud or not?

There's probably massive fraud involved, but a twenty three year old man knocking on the door of a daycare asking to see the children will have the police called on him, and not see any kids(they will be locked down). This video doesn't show anything at all.

not see any kids(they will be locked down)

The kids of course are being stored in a bunker far below sea level, handled by elite security personel.

I've done a lot of childcare tours/pickups if one is even somewhat active you'll be able to hear it. Even if these are all a unique form of windowless secure child storage the lack of even stroller parking is pretty indicative.

I don't know what stroller parking is, but in this video you can clearly see kids get dropped off at one of the locations: https://x.com/i/status/2005779133947650471

They will be kept in their classrooms with the doors locked and the windowshades drawn.

They will be kept in their classrooms with the doors locked and the windowshades drawn.

They don't lock down the entire place, with the kids huddling in such utter silence that no one can tell they exist, every time a car pulls up. What emotional need are people fulfilling by posting this kind of thing?

It does feel like Occam’s Butterknife.

To me the best explanation as to why no children were seen or heard is because there were no children present.

Perhaps its true; it would certainly partially explain falling fertility rates. Who would want to have kids when it's necessary to expose them to that?

At all times? Have you ever been near a child?

I'd agree if it were an active shooter drill but you're saying the random childcare workers are immediately going on DEFCON7 every time somebody pulls up in the driveway?

At bare minimum a functional childcare would have some sort of outdoor play area as is literally state-mandated, generally I'd expect to see stroller parking and the building being noisy and active.

The higher the defcon, the less the concern (or defcon 1 is the highest risk; defcon 5 the least).

And the red tribe/blue tribe split shows itself again.

When I lived among the blues... honestly some childcare institutions were this paranoid, deranged as it seems. Loudoun County Schools called the police on a father who showed up to collect his raped daughter because he was a little too upset that his daughter was raped. I believe they didn't even allow him in the building, locked down classrooms, and sent out an email that a parent had caused a disturbance.

I don't live among the blues anymore. That level of neuroticism and inverted priorities is just too cruel for me to live under. But though you may scoff and think he's exaggerating, depressingly he may be describing how childcare institutions actually behave around him.

They really are completely different from us.

I live in a low population red-tribe town surrounded by farms and our elementary school and preschool are locked and no unauthorized adults are allowed in. If one tried to force their way in it would be treated seriously.

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When I lived among the blues... honestly some childcare institutions were this paranoid, deranged as it seems. Loudoun County Schools called the police on a father who showed up to collect his raped daughter because he was a little too upset that his daughter was raped. I believe they didn't even allow him in the building, locked down classrooms, and sent out an email that a parent had caused a disturbance.

I'm not saying people can't lockdown a childcare center, my point is more that an active childcare center tends to be quite obvious on account of the accoutrements and noise of children. Unless the presupposition is that they immediately shuffled everybody into the bunker as soon as these guys got out of the car.

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Yes, massive fraud. No, this video isn't proof of it. This video is just outrage bait.

Was this filmed the day it was released? No, could have been filmed... December 25th? December 24th? It clearly wasn't filmed in the Summer. It's not like this was a culmination of years of investigation.

There's enough CONFIRMED fraud going on in the Somali community that your priors that this sort of business is fraudulent, at least to some large degree, should be high enough to make an educated guess rather than outright dismissal.

Plus, the Boomer guy straight up says he's been paying attention to this for years.

So in a sense, yes, yes it is a culmination of years of investigation.

See my comment here: https://www.themotte.org/post/3430/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/395401?context=8#context

There's a pretty simple argument to suggest that fraud, if it can be proven to exist at all, is probably pretty rampant in Somali communities.

Premises:

  1. The Somali community in Minnesota is probably tight-knit and interconnected, moreso than most other groups in the state. Lots of communication channels amongst them and between different circles of them.

  2. The Somali community would thus likely be aware that there's a bunch of sketchy daycare business operated in their area, and these receive federal/state funds.

  3. Nobody notable in the Somali community has raised an alarm as to this practice, and I've not heard a single word of condemnation from any of them. Quite the opposite.

What might we conclude about the Somali community?

Do we conclude that they are harsh and intolerant of fraudulent behavior in their midst? That they are quite honest and rule-following on average?

Or is the obvious implication the precise opposite, that the majority of them are probably cool with fraud going on (maybe they don't even see it as immoral) even if they're not participating, and good many of them are participating?

Or which premise do you take issue with?

Are Somalis NOT tight knit in this area? Do they somehow NOT know that their family and neighbors run these sketchy daycares? Or are they actually coming forward and reporting on fraud all the time, but they're ignored?

Which premise fails?

Your analogy falls apart the second you notice that Christians are constantly calling each other out and even condemning each other for preaching falsehoods (as they see it) and are not prone to covering for each other merely because of shared theological beliefs.

Famously, individual denominations take massive issue of tiny disagreements in interpretation and are quite happy to make their disagreements known, and distance themselves from 'heretical' street preachers and the like.

Or which premise do you take issue with?

What exactly do you think I am saying here. I take issue with 0 of the premises. I also hate this video. What is being misunderstood?

My analogy to a Christian street preacher does not fall apart because the whole point is that it's not all that weird to call out arguments you hate that are on your side! I am against fraud and against Somalis that don't assimilate remaining in America. I also hate that the video is what got people interested in the problem. Just like I would be alarmed if a video of a street preacher acting crazy was getting attention as the one true proof of Christ's divinity.

I am against fraud and against Somalis that don't assimilate remaining in America. I also hate that the video is what got people interested in the problem.

This is complete "Who gives a shit?" territory and the only reason people are responding is because they think you're making a larger point than you are. Nobody thinks there isn't fraud, including you apparently, and nobody is going to stop noticing because some youtuber didn't follow your preferred protocols.

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Guess I misunderstood the thrust of your point.

Me, I have accepted that you don't get to choose how certain issues make it to mainstream prominence.

(I've been aware of the Epstein situation for like twenty years, and I'm just happy that people at least notice it now)

Of course it’s not proof. It’s a spotlight, and a question begger about what’s going on and why it took him to highlight it

“well of course there’s fraud, a this guy is pointing to it, but see he’s pointing wrong, so can be dismissed or agreed with where convenient”

It’s just cake-eat-having commentary.

It's like being a Christian and suddenly a street preacher video is blowing up online. The preacher's argumentation isn't sound and he's weirdly confrontational towards a handful of people just going about their day (and yeah, those people are sinners, but it's still confrontational.)

Wouldn't it be kind of frustrating for this to be the thing that takes off as proof of Christianity, and not all the actual scholarship? If I were to say I wasn't a fan, but I still was a Christian, would that be having and eating cake?

The video's author could personally come to my dwelling and fart loudly in my face, cheeks spread wide open and splattering me with the fecal remnants of his last shit and his observation would still be valid: the daycares that don't admit new children and conspiciously don't have any sounds of children (they are not quiet, let me tell you) are frauds and you should be ashamed that you are even defending this position.

Anyone who goes 'he's right, but he didn't say it in GOOD FAITH' should be shot by a firing squad.

I don't know where you get the idea that a daycare center can't sound quiet from the outside? If the kids aren't out in the playground I don't hear them. Our preschool is actually insulated on account of the very cold winters here.

My argument is not, "he's right, but he didn't say it in Good Faith." My argument is the evidence in the video is not sufficient to support his claims. He didn't systematically eliminate other possibilities. It's going to backfire, because it's easy to just show children getting dropped off in these places and Voila! debunked.

Dropping children off in these places after a major expose doesn't debunk. The lack of children despite parents being in on it was the easily visible indicator of fraud that- having been explicitly identified- is easily rectified afterwards to obfuscate follow-on attention and allow motivated individuals to claim that children were always there.

The sort of motivated people who believe this sort of video 'debunks' are also the sort of people who wouldn't be persuaded by 'systematically eliminating other possibilities,' since motivated reason is under no obligation to conceed that other possibilities were properly eliminated based on whatever trivial grounds they have. They could even invent their own grounds of dismissal, like claiming that the videos were made on holidays or weekends where there would be no children.

It's not like such motivated reasoning against anti-progressive activist exposes are unknown. I'm sure you remember when the planned parenthood videos were dismissed as bad faith and misleading for editing techniques that many of the media organizations critiquing it were using, even as the activists posted the full videos which the media organizations rarely do and went out of their way to ignore in order to insinuate deception without, you know, showing the deception.

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In a hopeful-ish development, there appears to be an actual constituency and awareness within the left for the proposition that "allowing fraud undermines the support for the social programs we like".

That's always existed. The problem is their preferred policy to deal with this is to bury the fraud and accuse anyone of pointing it out, no matter how outlandishly excessive it becomes, of -isms. And that hasn't changed.

Minnesota cannot vote their way out of being looted as extensively as they are. They've been conquered by figurative, as well as literal, pirates. You can't vote conquerors out.

This is not an endorsement of any particular acts. Just a bare statement of fact. I know pointing out the reality in front of our very eyes sounds more and more like fed posting. But that's not my fault.

Of course. But that preferred policy can break down when enough culturally significant folks take notice and acknowledge the mountain of evidence. Then everyone else on the left is allowed to notice and acknowledge the facts.

And I very much doubt that there aren't enough normies left in MN to vote Walz out -- he only won 52-45.

And I very much doubt that there aren't enough normies left in MN to vote Walz out -- he only won 52-45.

Now he'll win by more, because of the improved quality of his enemies.

Not sure I follow.

It's a reference the the aphorism (often attributed to Oscar Wilde) that you can judge a man by the quality of his enemies. The idea is that if this fraud upsets right-wing people, Tim Walz will gain as a result, because for most of the voters of Minnesota, having those people as enemies is a positive good.

Sure. In isolation, some few people will be able to grasp the problem. But at some point, if you actually want to change anything, you have to look at cause and effect. And once that happens, I predict that the overwhelming consensus position will be that infinity fraud is preferable to giving Trump an anti-immigration news cycle.

Or, frankly, telling a brown person "no". After all, the progressives in Tim Walz' government have been getting whistleblower reports about this for years and actively quashing them.

I think that works as long as they are quashed.

Sorry, just to clarify, but you mean quashing the whistleblower reports?

I suppose that does "work", for a certain sense of problem resolution.

I meant work instrumentally -- that works for Walz (et al) only for as long as the only people reporting it are whistleblowers and racists on the internet. Now that it's on the NYT, it no longer works for him to just ignore it or continue to try to quash the story.

A business acquaintance of mine told me a story once. He dabbles in analytics, and once did some analysis for a certain gov agency and discovered strong indicators of widespread welfare fraud. When he brought this up, he was told that fraud detection wasn't a priority, and that "The money was getting to the community (through fraudsters), so is it even a problem?"

The people running these programs view their job as giving out as much money as possible. They are Good People for doing this. Things like means testing and whatever regulations that get in the way of giving out more money - which is infinite, obviously - is just racism and evil penny pinching. The fraudsters are their ally in defeating this awful system that gets in the way of their true calling of giving out as much money as possible - which is their primary metric of success as well.

It's a little difficult to comment with confidence yet, just because there's something like (im)plausible deniability for at least some of the locations, still. Especially near the holidays you'd expect a child care business to be very feast-or-famine, it's not always obvious how closely a given 'business' is tied to a specific number of hours, and a number of violations during an inspection can 'just' point to a small and new business. Even the multitude of businesses with a shared address could mean that the owners are operating out of their homes and have an office park PO box to handle mail -- that's not even particularly unusual for actually-legit service-oriented small businesses.

But there's a lot of stuff that stinks to high heaven. At minimum, compliance had to have completely skipped most of the steps and processes that a normal child care agency had to go through. Even where it's 'real' in the sense that they're doing child care, some of it's probably not real in the sense of paying the claimed fees that justify the various grants and subsidies, and most of it's almost certainly not 'real' in the sense of complying with the long array of standards and regulations.

There's a non-zero chance Shirley ends up facing charges, here, which will be one of the funniest possible endings. ((Of course he's serious, and stop calling him Surely.)) There's a lot of rules about creeps filming kids, with reason.

There's also a >95% chance that there's some org or orgs has been actively farming these businesses or 'businesses' up in exchange for a cut, and is totally within the bounds of the law. Probably has extensive documentation that they cleanly and clearly described each and every regulatory requirement (to people who didn't understand them). The really fun question is how many of them are making political donations. But at best a bunch of particularly shameless small fry might fry; none of the people in the government who should have noticed that Line Went Up will lose their jobs.

My main question is how the hell did they pull this off? I work in a childcare service that receives government funding (along with charging parents fees) and it is one massive pain in the backside keeping track of all the paperwork (needing to be filed online through the national service provider portal for Early Years Programmes) to receive said funding.

It is not as simple as "hello, yes, we have 200 kids attending 5 days a week for 5 hours each at $30 per hour, this is our bank account number, kthxbai". We get inspected by a couple of different bodies. We get surprise inspected/mini-audited and we damn well better have all our ducks in a row. If it turned out "why no, there aren't 200 kids attending 5 days a week for 5 hours each", we'd be slapped down in a hot minute, the excess funding would be clawed back, and we might get shut down for good measure.

There must be more to the story than this. Otherwise it sounds like a counterpart to Rotherham: people had suspicions stuff was going on, but some people higher up the food chain shut down any awkward questions because that would sound like racism.

Doesn't reflect well on Governor Tim either, the man put forward as part of the Dream Team to save the nation from Orange Man Bad, much lauded for being the progressive governor of a well-run state.

While this was outright fraud, the fact is that there is lots of "legitimate" subsidized childcare that is also horrible. DCFS of every state will have hundreds of places on file that are allegedly childcare facilities that are just the basement of a minority woman's apartment building where she gets high all day and collects government bucks while her friends get high elsewhere.

How these schemes normally hit the radar of authorities is when the boyfriend of the woman whos allegedly running this childcare facility starts molesting the children and one finally outcries in a legible way to someone who actually cares. Which is rare.

From my POV, the fact that these childcare centers appear almost completely fraudulent is almost a happy scenario. If children were actually enrolled they would almost certainly be being sex trafficked.

If its as bad as it looks, I have to imagine it started off at relatively small scale. Register a few extra kids who aren't actually there, have enough kids around to look legitimate. And if that passes muster, or you notice that the inspectors are lax or nonexistent, scale it up. After a year you have a hundred kids registered and you don't even bother to have them show up.

THEN, you tell your friends about it, and they also try the scam, and it presumably works for them, so they scale it up. And now there's a repeatable business model that can be transmitted easily.

Now its basically organized crime.

Which, I've pointed out before, is a feature of pretty much every group that immigrates here en masse. The Irish, the Italians (obviously), Russian, on and on. Thankfully this isn't a particularly violent mafia, but its the same flavor of "insular community develops a criminal element that springs up from their communities" type development.

Italian organized crime didn't rely on tribal loyalty among Italians (or even Sicilians) to keep things under wraps; it relied on that old standard of violence towards anyone who opened their mouth.

Presumably quite a bit of both.

Al Capone was famously very charitable and generous in his community.

My main question is how the hell did they pull this off?

If regulators are willing to turn a blind eye (potentially because of some greased palms) it's incredibly easy. My goto example is a green energy scandal. A company was (on paper) the second largest producer of biodiesel in the US. They were producing 0 gallons and just making numbers up in a spreadsheet to sell to other companies as green energy credits. The EPA had actually inspected their facilities and saw it was obvious they were producing nothing and did... precisely jack shit about it.

The only reason they were caught is because they were parking their sports cars all over their neighborhood, pissing off local families. The local families thought they were a drug dealer, and this triggered an investigation by local LEO that ended up blowing the whole thing up:

https://www.justice.gov/usao-md/pr/owner-clean-green-fuel-sentenced-over-12-years-scheme-violate-epa-regulations-and-sell-9

An episode of the TV series American Greed covers the scandal in detail.

It is not as simple as "hello, yes, we have 200 kids attending 5 days a week for 5 hours each at $30 per hour, this is our bank account number, kthxbai". We get inspected by a couple of different bodies. We get surprise inspected/mini-audited and we damn well better have all our ducks in a row. If it turned out "why no, there aren't 200 kids attending 5 days a week for 5 hours each", we'd be slapped down in a hot minute, the excess funding would be clawed back, and we might get shut down for good measure.

I was wondering about this, thanks. I only found one license that didn't have a record of a violation. There also appears to be an increase in recorded violations the past two years compared to 2022-2023, although that's a glancing judgment. The licenses suggest they receive regular inspections if one doesn't think they are fraudlent. MN DHS claims it has categories of violations with different severity, and one could infer this from the descriptions of the violations on the licenses. It does appear like inspectors are liberal in documenting violations, but individual remedies are possibly unverified and consequences lax.

The public part of these inspections look like they are as well documented or better than food safety inspections. That doesn't mean they are taken seriously. It would make sense to me that the inspectors are cover your ass on the documentation, but lax on enforcement until a problem becomes a risk. I did not see a "center is registered for 90 kids and only 3 are present" violation.

As @hydroacetylene says this is the normalized, machine politics type of fraud. Yeah, if you really really want to you can technically call this fraud, but this is the cost of doing business. There might be more licensed daycare slots in Somali run childcare businesses than there are small Somali children in the Twin Cities* area. Maybe that could be improved, but mostly it is perceived as a good thing.

I should clarify that I'm in Ireland, not America, but I do find it hard to believe that American community services getting government (be that local or national) funding don't have to comply with broadly the same checks we do.

If you really can set up a "childcare centre" with no kids and get $$$$$ for it from the grateful local government, we are definitely all in the wrong lines of work.

There's no health and safety issue with children not being present in a facility.

But on the 26th December I would expect the entire place to be closed down for the Christmas break, so the investigator guy would have been faced with a locked door. As mentioned, probably this was filmed beforehand and since we don't know how long before, the general expectation would be to keep the kids as near as possible to the closing date (because parents often need/want the kids in daycare since they're still at work themselves).

I have seen some online comment to the effect "this guy is a shitty right-winger racist but a more credible source does mention something funny is going on" so there does seem to be an indication that the story is not baseless.

Ok, American education(which daycare regards itself as) does not prioritize the needs of the parents in any way shape or form. They probably have a generous winter break, because the 'educators' who work there prefer it.

It was a major policy priority in Minnesota to help families financially by increasing access to childcare. If it turns out that certain demographics prefer to recieve that help in the form of kickbacks for locking their kids in a shitty warehouse every day, well, who are we to say that the policy is not working as intended?

IIRC there was a Michigan scandal where a low income daycare scheme got shut down because some native blacks were just registering each others children and collecting paychecks. It happens pretty regularly in the US and the answer is often ‘corrupt machine politics’.

What boggles my mind about this is the numbers. Minnesota only has about 90,000 Somalis, less than 2% of the state's population. And yet they've seemingly managed to embezzle at least $8 billion. Somalia's GDP is only $12 billion. If we assume that all the fraud was done by Somalis, that's $880,000 dollars per person. Just absolutely industrial levels of fraud.

My favorite line from this rolling development comes from one of the earlier stories. To wit:

"The Largest Funder of Al-Shabaab Is the Minnesota Taxpayer"

Electoral Math. Sure, they might be only 2% of the state's population. But they can act as a solid block to deliver their votes en masse to whichever candidate curries their favor. And the politicians know that they can do that, especially Ilhan Omar and other Somali politicians. If you work really, really hard to win the white vote in Minnesota, you might win them 51-49, with roughly 1/3 of that wasted on republican candidates who can never win. Your opponent can make up the difference by winning 100% of that 2% Somali vote. That gives them incredible levels of political influence.

There is a bit of talking up the Somalian community into a single monolith going on in this thread.

A member of the diaspora just finished second in the Minneapolis mayoral race, but grew up in Washington D.C. and not the City of Lakes.

The Somalis are clannish, and don’t all vote for one another.

The Hawiye clan went for the incumbent, Frey, while the Daarood went for Fateh.

https://sunatimes.com/articles/6442/Somali-Clan-Divisions-Surface-as-Jacob-Frey-Wins-Third-Term-in-Minneapolis-Mayoral-Race

Observers note that this election may have lasting implications for Somali-American political dynamics in Minnesota. Members of the Hawiye community, who form a significant portion of the Somali population in Minneapolis — originally from Mogadishu, Galmudug, Hirshabelle, South West, and Jubbaland regions — have been emboldened by Frey’s win and are now vowing to reshape future elections, including the next Congressional race involving Ilhan Omar.

One viral TikTok video captured the mood perfectly:

"This is just the beginning — next time, Ilhan Omar will lose too,” declared one of Hersi’s supporters during a live celebration.

Minneapolis came incredibly close to electing Somali mayor in November—Omar Fateh got 47% of the vote against the Incumbent (and this was after stealing the endorsement from the state Democratic Party at our Primary in the summer, in some remarkably brazen fraud, so outrageous that they revoked his win afterwards and placed the party on probation, preventing them from endorsing ANYONE for two years).

So yeah. They’re a serious bloc here—particularly since they have no qualms about fraud!

Let it never be said that American immigrants aren't productive at least...

America, the land of opportunity, where anyone can make it big!

The most depressing part is realizing this will make no difference. Everyone who mattered was aware this was going on and was fine with it, and that will remain true.

I know it feels good to blackpill, but it does look like roughly 90 people from multiple states are facing charges so far.

You can argue that those 90 people don't matter because the Democrats/Illuminati/Jews/WEF/Rosthschilds/Saurian Aliens from Zeta Reticuli aren't catching a RICO rap, but I'll take whatever wins I can get right now.

While you hang those 90 pickpockets, are another 900 working the crowd watching the executions?

Would you prefer 990 and no show?

Are such investigations downstream of DOGE etc. querying of government spending? That is, would they be happening if Trump wasn't in office and it was President Kamala and VP Tim?

I have a depressing notion this is so, and I would like to be proven wrong (honestly!)

I've seen Elon Musk making some noises that it is downstream of DOGE investigations, but the man is unashamed about self-aggrandizement.

Assuming a judge doesn't simply throw out their convictions. It does however seem to be a stake through the heart of the "fraud is so miniscule it's not worth enforcing" argument that's been made about all kinds of welfare programs.

That's what is so astounding about this, because generally fraud is miniscule; when you get into cases of (say) social welfare fraud in my country, it's often genuine mistakes. Certainly there are also cases of deliberate fraud and the amount mounts up over the years, but this is €24 million out of a total budget of €27 billion, so around 0.09% which is not great but which is not huge huge either.

Something this big going on for years is amazing, and it seems to be all kinds of schemes, so $250 million for Covid child nutrition programme, other Covid support programmes, this childcare scam - allegedly $9 billion in total? That's serious money sloshing around.

Minnesota budget spending in 2025 was $59 billion, so if we spread $9 billion over 5 years, that's roughly $1.8 billion per year, which comes to 3% of annual budget for 2025. Not a huge amount relatively speaking, but not nothing either. And if we leave it as $9 billion out of $59 billion, that's 15% which is getting up into respectable figures.

A huge percentage of covid stimulus was passed out as more-or-less universally acknowledged fraud(google 'shaniqua llc' if you'd like). There's tons of anecdata that lots of the covid institutional support was completely wasted as well. 'Fraud prevention' for this particular set of programs was not only not a priority it was literally not considered at all- it was intended as plausibly deniable handouts.

The autism and childcare scams almost certainly had a votes for political cover quid pro quo going on.

I think the most depressing part is knowing that your TOTAL lifetime tax liability is around $1M.

These people stole the LIFETIME tax output of around 10,000 people.

Taxes are a huge burden on people. They’re one of the major things our politics are decided on. If I don’t pay these, or even if I mess them up, I’ll go to jail. CPAs are an entire, large, industry.

We’re all paying these things, and 10,000 peoples lifetime of burden to the government just gets robbed.

I pay taxes (a LOT of taxes), I obey the laws, drive the speed limit etc. and then I turn on the internet and see stuff like this, people just openly robbing stores and filming themselves do it, see violent criminals released into my neighborhood etc.

Kindof hard to stomach honestly.

even if I mess them up, I’ll go to jail.

Nitpick. But this isn't true unless you're just being repeatedly careless with corporate taxes. If there isn't a clear intent to not pay or to avoid tax, the IRS wants you to pay far more than they want to prosecute you.

Where you are 1000% correct, however, is that if you mess them up because of a totally indecipherable tax code, you may have to pay all sorts of penalties, which does seem, to me, to be outrageous.

It really makes you wonder about televised public executions as I think deterrence works on reasonably high impulse control people capable of organised white collar crime.

If there are no consequences for the people doing this, we are all mugs for working law abiding jobs and paying our taxes when grafting is an easier way to provide for ourselves and our posterity.

On one hand, I can see the desire for clemency from other white-collar workers: we don't want being Catch-22'd to be a death sentence because of stupid bureaucrats/senior management- something we are threatened with/reminded of every single day in some form or another, so naturally we are concerned that making it a death sentence for others will instead ultimately expand into a death sentence for these kinds of things (and turn into a not-death-sentence for others because anarcho-tyranny).

On the other hand, the price of choosing to negotiate with obvious anti-social elements instead of mercilessly deleting them is not zero. Compare "insurance premiums go up to cover loss", but in the linked case, you get the message that crime will not be tolerated while the [steelman of the] Blue Tribe way of just ignoring it does not yield such a benefit.

On the gripping hand, I think that if we start by punishing bureaucrats that produce codes that can't be compiled and judges that intentionally fail to judge this way (and someone already tapped the sign that calls for this) then maybe society will return to being compatible with the idea once again.

we don't want being Catch-22'd to be a death sentence because of stupid bureaucrats/senior management

My favorite recent prominent example of this is the president himself catching a felony because he didn't use campaign funds to pay hush money to a mistress. I realize this isn't an exact description of what happened in that case, but it's close enough for government work.

I commit the same "falsification of business records" every damn week because retarded tax laws around software development require me to precisely track exactly how much time I spend on development of new features vs. maintaining existing applications and I can confidently say that absolutely 0 software devs are accurately reporting how their time is divided between these things.

Cases like Trump's definitely put a "3 felonies a day" sort of fear in me if I ever piss off the wrong DA politically.

This never happens. If it does, it occurs only in insignificant amounts. Even if the amounts are significant, why do you care so much about what a small fraction of Somali immigrants are doing when billionaires steal more from all of us everyday?

I pay taxes (a LOT of taxes), I obey the laws, drive the speed limit etc.

It’s called Doing the Bare Minimum in holding up your end of the Social Contract. Paying a lot of taxes just means you’re privileged enough to exploit societal inequities.

I think the most depressing part is knowing that your TOTAL lifetime tax liability is around $1M. These people stole the LIFETIME tax output of around 10,000 people.

Something to cheer you up! The average American’s lifetime taxes paid is $525K, in which case the $8B would be more than the lifetime tax output of at least 15,000 people. MN is a bit higher but still under $600K per person. Highest by state is NJ at almost $1M. *grumpy @The_Nybbler noises*

when billionaires steal more from all of us everyday?

This is a reddit level trope.

Please, please, please tell me, specifically, how billionaires are committing massive theft every day. My opinion and prediction is that you can't because you don't actually mean what you've written. What you mean is that "billionaires make lots of money, I don't, and that's bad." Which, if you want to say it, is actually an argument you could make!

But instead we get to this righteous indignation based on personal emotion and now, suddenly, billionaires are repeat mega felons. Come on.

You're posting a number of sarcastic comments in which you fail to speak plainly. Stop it.

Not alone that, this is money supposedly going to the needy, and this means the needy are left unserved and in want, while some people are enriching themselves hand over fist. It's screwing everybody over - the taxpayers, the honest people working in these fields, the people who really do need and deserve the services.

I like the government to fund some welfare services, and I generally dislike bureaucracy. I am also fine with some immigration.

Anyone who turns a blind eye to welfare fraud is effectively steering us towards an equilibrium with less welfare spending and more red tape. (And yes, red tape can very much prevent welfare from reaching the needy, because the needy often are not great at jumping through the hoops of bureaucracy.) If the perps are immigrants, it will also foster an anti-immigrant sentiment as surely as thunder follows lightning.

I wish I could blame some Ayn Rand fans who were working as moles to achieve that outcome, but in all likelihood the officials who turned a blind eye were probably SJ people who failed to think of the consequences. After all, Uncle Sam has plenty of money, and if the Somali skim a bit to keep their relatives from starvation, what is the harm?

Except that the taxpayers and voters feel very differently (I imagine). And sending money to a failed state through intransparent channels is not necessarily net positive.

In short, lawfulness is (at least) instrumentally useful. Even if you feel your cause is good, breaking laws to further it will generally generate a backslash. I imagine SBF did not donate a lot of money to EA in 2025.

Anyone who turns a blind eye to welfare fraud is effectively steering us towards an equilibrium with less welfare spending and more red tape.

Only if there's anyone with the power to add the red tape to attempt to stop the fraud. If not, money given to fraudsters simply increases without bounds, as with SSI/SSDI fraud.

One thing that’s important to remember, and that I feel a lot of people don’t remember, is that governments don’t fund anything - they direct funds towards other people. Taxpayers fund things.

You don’t want the government to spend money on social welfare - you want your fellow Americans to do so. Unfortunately, a large portion of your fellow taxpayers feel like they are footing the bill for the destruction of their lifestyles. They feel that the spending is both excessive and directly against their interests.

Social welfare has always been something the right wishes to reduce - mostly because social welfare is too indiscriminate towards those it helps. Many taxpayers don’t want to spend money helping an unrepentant fuckup, but would be fine donating it to someone who is down on their luck. The government being in charge of distribution removes this discretion, and (considering both this story and the story of FEMA workers refusing to assist Trump voters) actively works against their intuition of who needs help.

social welfare is too indiscriminate towards those it helps

On the contrary, it's too discriminate. Lots of people are in genuine need for help, but the government allocates funds on the basis of proximity to officials and how useful the recipients are to politicians, forming a toxic positive feedback loop. This money would have done more social good if someone drove through the streets throwing bags of it off the back of a truck.

The sad truth is that scammers often are much better at navigating the hoops, and way more willing to play the game for social workers etc. (e.g. one example from the job of "I am a poor single mother in fear of domestic violence from my partner" who prevailed with this on the social worker to get the guy kicked out, when it was he doing the childcare and she was drinking, betting on the horses, and negligent of the kids*. Mommy's rationale? if she could present herself to the housing department, and public sympathy, with this story then she would get preferential treatment for 'I want that new build house and if you don't give it to me I'll go public with my sob story') than honest people who are genuinely in need.

As a government low-level minion, you may suspect the hell out of "this is a scam" but unless you have rock-solid undeniable evidence and proof that will stand up in court before a bleeding-heart judge who believes it is the responsibility of the local/national government to hand out money and goodies to the needy, you can't do a thing about refusing to process the application, because any whiff of anything that can be deemed to be used in a court case for discrimination by an ambulance-chaser lawyer will get you, the department, and everyone in trouble.

So the incentive is there, even if you're not a bleeding-heart yourself, to just tick the boxes and go along with the CYA process.

  • Ireland being a small country, one of my colleagues** came from the same village as this woman and her mother and sisters, who were the local terrors, so she knew the real facts behind the 'boo-hoo I am only a poor single mother trying to do the best for my kids' story this woman went on local radio to tell about how the housing department were all heartless red-tape bureaucrats denying her and her kids their rights.

**Even funnier, her dad owned the local bookmakers, so she knew what she was talking about when she said 'this woman and her maternal family spend all day drinking in the pub and betting on the horses'. But of course, all this is only hearsay so it can't go down on the official files. And of course, nobody from the office can go on the radio with "this story is a heap of bullshit and she's a lying bitch", so these sob-stories get into the media and are believed uncritically by the public who don't know any better, who get served this by a journalist all too eager for a good human interest story that will grab headlines and attention. If you ever hear/read "We contacted Department/Office Z about this and they refused to comment", this does not mean "yeah the story is all true and they have no defence", it means "legally they can't say a word because bound by confidentiality".

I'll agree to that.

This money would have done more social good if someone drove through the streets throwing bags of it off the back of a truck.

I disagree, for the same reason the government does.

The intended recipients of the social program budget are the social workers; the point of these programs is to employ them. It's UBI, basically- that's the social good the government is buying, and abating starvation in the poorest cross-section of the proletariat is secondary. After all, it's not them who'll be revolting if their meal ticket were revoked (if they were capable of this they wouldn't need the aid, obviously); and "but if you axe these programs then children will die" [cue Sarah McLachlan] has for the overwhelming fraction of modernity been a nearly unbeatable campaign slogan so it continues.

That's why fraud really is small potatoes here- the stated goal of "making sure the disadvantaged get the money" is a propaganda line to make the UBI-receivers think they're doing good (and to keep the low-information voters in line), much like "making sure children get educated" is for the education system.

For maximum cynicism, you can class all UBI-receivers as the intended recipients- "fraud" is just a way of asserting that you're smart enough, and assertive enough, to be a threat to the government's social project (whatever that happens to be and why remains an exercise for the reader), and should have bags of money thrown at you to mollify you just like the natives do. If you are not, it's a signal you'll act in other anti-social ways that are more obviously identifiable as such (especially in male-coded ways that associate would-be-only-fraudsters with imminent security threats [i.e. eating the neighborhood pets], which make the other UBI-receivers nervous thus risking they do things that result in more votes for the other guy).

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