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Whether the evidence is sufficient is entirely dependent on whether you think Somalis are Bad People and deserve to have the Feds descend on them and investigate all their wheelings and dealings with an eye towards making heads roll. Of someone goes out next week and produces a similar video involving church based daycares in suburban Dallas, I'm skeptical that the Trump administration would respond with similar vigor, and I suspect we'd hear about how Christians were being railroaded for political purposes.
Can you point to anything in the history of Somalia that indicates they are good people? Because they deserve their reputation.
Black Hawk Down was tame in comparison to reality. So why would your prior be anything but: Somalia is a country whose quality reflects its people?
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In the same way that the Dutch are tall people, sure.
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"Dat's Raciss" is the easy, stop-gap answer. I hate to bring up Rotherham in this context, but that was exactly what stymied investigation in part: when eventually the pieces started coming together that no, this wasn't just a few, isolated cases of underclass girls gone wild, people in charge put blockages in the way because "oh no, investigating this would seem to blame the Muslim community and that would be racist/racists would use it as a weapon".
"But they wouldn't do it to Christians" - well, if Christian church groups are engaging in this kind of fraud, they damn well should do it to them.
Also, there seems to be a general fraud problem going back years in Minnesota, if allegations of $9 billion going down the Swanee are correct. Governor Tim says it's only $1 billion but that may just be "cases known about for this specific scam":
As an aside, is there anything Kamala touched for her presidential campaign that hasn't come back to bite her? Timmy boy here was her hand-picked choice because he was biddable, and now here's the track record of This Could Have Been Your VP come out to haunt him.
If nothing else, I can agree with you on that one. If the FBI finds significant prosecutable fraud, it will be nothing short of an embarrassment for the entire Democratic Party that the governor wasn't aware that millions or even billions was being stolen from right under his nose. He'd done a pretty good job of catching other Somali fraudsters but there's still no excuse for not catching these ones earlier. The only thing worse would be if it wasn't Somalis (necessarily) but people in DHS itself, people he worked with and trusted who were doing the stealing. It would look especially bad if he publicly praised those who were the masterminds of the crime for getting people off the welfare rolls, when what they were really doing is funneling money that should have gone to the poor to wealthy celebrities, pro athletes, and pet projects. It would look even worse if he claimed he had no idea what was going on and then text messages came out that at least insinuated that he probably had an inkling. And it wouldn't do him any favors if his response to this was to sue the reporter who broke the story for defamation and ask the court to hold her in contempt if she doesn't reveal her sources, creating the distinct possibility that the person who uncovered the scandal would also be the first person to go to jail. Yeah, that would make him look really bad. So bad that I don't know how anyone could vote Democrat after that. Then again, Phil Bryant keeps getting appointed to Trump Administration committees like the FEMA Review Council and the National Assessment of Education Progress, so maybe it wouldn't turn out so bad for him or the party.
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The defense of “only 1b” is quite the shitty defense
"This scam was only $1b. The other scams, well, we have to wait for the figures".
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I'm not sure how to define "Bad People," but here's an analogy: In the United States, driving at 75 miles per hour on the highway is against the law, but normally it's not thought of as an immoral act. If you get away with it, none of your neighbors will think any less of you over it.
For people from certain subcultures, engaging in massive fraud against the government is perceived the same way. It sucks if you get caught, but otherwise it's nothing to be ashamed of.
If "Bad People" includes "people who don't see anything fundamentally wrong with engaging in massive fraud against the government," then yeah, generally speaking Somali-Americans are Bad People. (Hopefully the next generation will see things differently, and prosecutions and jail time will hopefully change their views.)
Pretty clearly someone in this situation is a brazen fraudster -- either this Youtuber Nick Shirley or the Somalis he was investigating. Given my prior probability assessment that Somalis are "Bad People" as you put it, I am pretty sure it's the Somali day care center operators.
There exists no shortage of 75mph speed limit signs in my neck of the woods. Not usually inside cities, but plenty on interstates in rural areas. Texas even has a few spots with 85mph signs.
Yeah, I kinda misspoke based my regional mindset. I should have said "driving 15-20 miles per hour above the speed limit"
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This seems like an East/West divide. Having lived in Montana during the reasonable and prudent era, my reaction was well you are kind of an ass for only going 75, bit it's legal, just stay in the right lane please.
Yeah, most Western interstates are 75, but I felt a bit concerned about some of the undivided county roads in Texas that were also 75.
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Those subcultures evidently include the president. He has no problem pardoning fraudsters like Joe Milton, George Santos, and others, relieving them of even the obligation to pay the money back. And when he inevitably pardons the DiBiase brothers a few months from now, exactly zero people will be surprised. But I doubt Nick Shirley or anyone else cares about this, because they're less concerned about fraud than they are the fact that Somalis may be the ones doing it.
Assuming for the sake of discussion that this is true, it doesn't really affect my argument at all:
We are evaluating evidence which seems on its surface to be pretty strong but is possibly unreliable or even fake. Thus, we need to start with the underlying claim, i.e. the claim that a lot of Somali-Americans are engaged in massive fraud against the government.
As you know, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The corollary is that mundane claims require mundane evidence. The claim that lots of Somali-Americans are engaged in massive fraud against the government is NOT an extraordinary claim. By analogy, if someone showed me a video which purported to show an Alabama redneck driving down the highway at 85 miles per hour, I would think that the video is probably accurate.
It's difficult to see how this is relevant to my argument. It looks to me like you are just trying to change the subject with some whataboutism.
But to answer your point, yeah, if someone claimed to me that Trump, Biden, or any other recent president had abused his power by pardoning someone who really didn't deserve it in order to get some kind of political advantage, I would not require extraordinary evidence.
So yeah, presidents abusing their pardon power is analogous to Somalis engaging in social services fraud.
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Maybe Patronage networks are fundamentally effective in politics. And the GOP having their unconditionally loyal people because you saved them is a good thing if are alt-right like myself.
Personally I am far more concerned with illegal immigration that corruption is just a tax to be paid now. I’m fine with having our network of thieves that are loyal if they get things done. The old way does not seem to work and in my opinion the left already defected on having a high trust society.
I am fairly happy if someone like Fuentes doesn’t have to worry about being canceled and can do his thing knowing we have slush funds to take care of him if he needs it.
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Are you less concerned about the fraud then the possibility that people might be racist?
No. I think that the president's racism and the racism of most of his supporters is beyond a mere possibility at this point. I'm concerned that, guilty or not, in a free society we shouldn't be targeting criminal investigations based on race, especially when we've already shown a willingness to excuse the exact same behavior when it's done by someone we like.
I'd agree with you of the foreign born population were under 10% instead of over 15%, and if those foreigners were of compatible people instead of Muslims and Hindus. The Italians and Irish were bad enough, and they still haven't naturalized enough over a hundred years later.
America is for Americans, and if that's racist then racism is good. I don't want Muslims in my home, I don't want Hindus in my home, I don't want to be inundated with foreigners because of slavery or white guilt or whatever excuse you care to proffer.
Enough. No more. By any means necessary.
Never mind how you propose to build a free society out of Muslims. I don't think there are many examples, and I don't see any reason to think it possible.
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I can see the discomfort around this particular case since it feels far enough out on a tree branch and blatant enough that it might actually move the Overton Window back to allowing for explicit judgement of immigrants on race/country of origin.
Also a decent chunk of the discomfort/reaction here seems to be along the lines of shock at how blatant, stupid and low-grade this fraud is. An organized sophisticated fraudster is one thing, but this feels like essentially willful ignorance in the favor of people who don't even present a real bull case for why they're in the country.
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You said "no", but the following text looks a lot like "yes".
If a racist motive leads to uncovering genuine fraud, should that fraud then be ignored or tolerated so as not to embolden racists?
How many 0's worth of underaged British girls should we tolerate being gang-raped to avoid the appearance of saying that Pakistanis are gang-rapists?
Have we?
So, I actually read all of that meandering, incoherent, emotionally manipulative PBS article you linked earlier. It has a single mention of Phil Bryant that makes nothing remotely resembling an effort to justify your take on the topic. His wiki article does mention that he was a potential target of investigation, though no charges were filed. It also notes that he purportedly reported the misuse of funds himself. That's just the man's word, but given Wikipedia's general high level of partisanship, I would consider that decent evidence in his favor.
Following the link to the original source (because, contra-Hanania, I actually read), I see that we're talking about the misuse of $77 million, and the Pulitzer-prize winning reporting on the topic. And I see that the indictments were brought by another one of Bryant's appointees.
Which is good, as far as it goes. Bryant's personal culpability over the pharma company looks like he's either an utter idiot or the indictments luckily hit right before he could sign off on real corruption. That behavior is very bad, and also very endemic to our political class in general.
The Minnesota fraud case looks to be something in the ballpark of a hundred times worse.
Are you excusing that behavior because condemning it would hamper people you like and embolden people you dislike?
How would you respond to someone blithely dismissing the entire Mississippi scandal as you just being an irrational bigoted monster who hates the Packers for no reason except that you're evil?
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First of all, go ahead and produce such evidence of those circumstances and let's see if you're right.
Second of all, sincerely, I beseech you to really pause and think about your blindspot here. I refuse to believe you're dense enough not to understand a little bit more once you slow down. Do you truly, honestly not see the difference between an unassimilated ethnic group imported from the other side of the planet who then starts defrauding the institutions your taxes go to, and the same being done by people whose grandparents were born here?
But ya, if to get any changes at all you insist that we must first declare groups Bad People, guess what's going to start happening?
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I'm sure there's some amount of truth to what you're suggesting, but not for the reasons you're implying. If Christian churches run by Heritage American citizens were committing similar kinds of fraud, most people wouldn't consider it as big of a deal because Heritage Americans would likely be committing such fraud at significantly lower rates (using racial crime rates as the baseline) and because we didn't intentionally import those scammers into the country for the express purpose of disrupting and replacing Heritage Americans.
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