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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.
Now be getting passed on those undivided country roads while going above the limit.... Texas, man.
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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.
The exact same way you are. You're not addressing the fraud, you're going on about "stop blaming Somalis! stop being racist!" If this was an allegation against a network of Christian day cares in Texas, would you be stepping up to defend them on the grounds "stop being sectarian about Southern Baptists!" or would you be gloating over "everyone knows those so-called Christians are hypocrites and liars, more worried about persecuting the gays and trans than doing good"?
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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.
Trevor Milton [1] committed upwards of $20 billion worth of securities fraud (all the Somalis in America aren’t worth one Mormon), and [2] hired the U.S. attorney general’s brother as his lawyer in order to secure a pardon.
By the above logic, his pardon is still terrible, because Milton hasn’t ever done anything for the cause, and is unlikely to ever be able to do much of anything significant for the cause, as he has no real resources, either financial or in terms of social capital. Trump is way, way too cheap of a date.
When SPACs became popular, it was a matter of time before some fraudster used one to cash in on taking a bogus company public while avoiding the due diligence process required during standard IPOs. Who was the first person to do the aforementioned is the trivia question to which Milton is the answer.
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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.
Somalians are objectively terrible people to add to the body politic. They are low IQ, extremely tribal with strong in group bias, happy to engage in piracy, and don’t have a history of any success. You call it racism to oppose adding Somalians to our body politic (or attempts to remove them). If so, then you’ll find a lot of people are racist.
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This is pure whattaboutism. The topic of discussion is Somali welfare fraud. The President has nothing to do with it. If the President was a clone of Adolf Hitler he would still have nothing to do with it. There is no level of racism in the heart of the President of the United States that would change the ethical calculus to make welfare fraud okay.
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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.
Rov_Scam was talking about race; you are talking about religions and cultures. While it would be constitutionally more difficult to institute official restrictions on Muslims qua Muslims than to reintroduce a concept of race into law, I think it would be much more justifiable on a moral level. You can stop being Muslim, but you can't (in the ethnic sense) stop being Somali.
Yeah but this is diluted by people on the Left trying to invent concepts like 'Islamophobia' as if being an inherent of Islam was a unalterable biological fact of certain people that we just all have to try to work around as a society, instead of a choice.
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I'm in camp "Irish and Italians aren't White" but yeah there's a lot of conflation happening here.
Meanwhile, I'm in camp "Yes rationality, punctuality, hard work etc... are in fact "White Supremecy". As such Clarence Thomas is clearly "white".
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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.
Something can be both racist and true.
There is a sub-population of white people in my country, called Travellers (other names were used in the past and, via the euphemism treadmill, are now considered slurs). They do have a worse life than settled people. They are victims of discrimination. They do have a reputation as criminals, scammers, and the likes. This is unfair because indeed not all Travellers, and judging someone solely on their ethnic/racial/outcast background means you can condemn someone who is not guilty.
But at the same time, it is true that Irish Travellers do engage in welfare fraud, theft, petty and large-scale crime, both here in Ireland and in countries where they've immigrated. Construction fraud is an old reliable (they'll turn up, often to the homes of the elderly, and through a mixture of persuasion and coercion get them to agree to unwanted home renovations, spend lots of money on this, and when they've got as much as they can squeeze out, then decamp leaving shoddy work and often need of proper rebuilding behind).
That latter scam happened to a family member of mine. I've got war stories from a job about Traveller scams.
At the same time, I have known since childhood respectable Travellers, many of them settled.
So yeah: it's unfair to judge all Somali-Americans as scammers and low-IQ thieves, but at the same time, scams and crime are likely to happen in the Somali-American communities. Any group which is set apart from the mainstream of society will develop a "them and us" mindset where 'we' are the only real people, and it's perfectly fine and indeed our right to pluck the pigeons among 'them' who we owe nothing to at all.
The key thing to understand is that it really can be any group. I went to a prestigious school and one of the biggest pieces of culture shock for me when I got there was just how endemic cheating, fraud, and petty theft were. If you weren't trying to game the system in innumerable little ways you were viewed as a rube or a mug. If you called out a fellow student for shoplifting from the corner store or rifling through an unattended bag you'd get a reputation as a scold. I was actually told once by a TA that I was "hurting myself" by trying to do my classwork honestly instead of taking advantage of available "opportunities".
In my experience "it's perfectly fine and indeed our right to pluck the pigeons among 'them' who we owe nothing to at all." describes the attitude our elite just as much as it does our underclass.
For a different perspective, I went to a similar school and university (in the UK), and the attitude was completely different. I never heard of anybody cheating, let alone petty theft. Occasionally at university we got email ads from essay mills but the prevailing attitude among the students was 'how absolutely doomed and pathetic must you be before something like this starts to look like a good option?'. Actually admitting to your friends that you'd used one would get you cast out into the outer darkness.
I honestly want to thank you because what you're suggesting is that not all is lost and maybe I have allowed myself to become too "black-pilled".
However, at the same time, if what you are saying is true, I feel like it only reinforces the lesson that I ultimately took away from that experience. An understanding that the trappings of nobility and "elite human capital" are more often than not orthogonal to nobility of the soul. Credentials do not make a man worthy of respect, choices do.
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Shades of the Gibson's Bakery case? Where we got the full-blown "Dat's Rayciss!" response from some faculty members as well?
No, the students in question were overwhelmingly white and middle eastern, while the local population was substantially black.
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Fun fact: I frequently see low level welfare fraud and manipulation. The only time I've seen a white person do it, he was a "Traveller". Just openly admitted it to me, too.
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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?
Suppose it's a political motive instead? I don't like political witch hunts, even when they turn up dirt, because it was never about finding and solving problems and crimes, it's about hurting the outgroup. I don't like the blatant lawfare against Trump; i don't like lawfare done against anyonr else, either, even if it turns out to have been justified after the fact.
The problem with this thinking is that it creates a terribly perverse incentive. You can get away with any degree of bad behavior as long as you're willing to bad faith scream "politicized witch hunt".
At the end of the day, the only stable equilibrium is to consider actual evidence, and not overly much give a fuck about witch hunt bitching.
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