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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25977 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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Nobody is willing to countenance just shooting them.

If you’re correct that other non-violent measures are exorbitantly expensive and/or ineffective, I am in fact willing to countenance just shooting them. You wouldn’t have to shoot very many before the rest of them would stop coming. (Or would start openly acting like proper invaders, in which case a lot more people would start being okay with shooting a lot more of them.)

I agree with you but when you look at the fact that the Europeans let in millions of Syrians because of a single picture of a Kurdish kid washed up on a beach you realize pretty quickly that gunning down migrants doesn’t have majority support.

Enough terror attacks in Europe and I can see the Europeans hardening to the point that they do it, but the thing about Guatemalans is that they’re Christians and they don’t practice the same overt cultural and religious hostility to Europeans that many migrants from the Islamic world do, so the public is unlikely ever to have enough contempt to resort to those tactics in the US.

Fear is what leads to policy like that, and while Europeans are increasingly scared of large scale MENA immigration (see Houellebecq, Zemmour, etc), Americans aren’t very scared of Central American immigration even if they oppose it.

The first time CBP mows down a family of six, public support would evaporate in an instant (though the odds of such a policy ever making it to implementation are basically zero, since it would be comically unpopular and probably unconstitutional to boot).

Or would start openly acting like proper invaders

How many people do you think will continue buying "invader" rhetoric when the bodies of children are being paraded around on every media outlet in the world?

The overwhelming majority of the people currently streaming across the border are military-age men. If shooting broke out, the odds of a family of children getting smoked is far lower than the odds of some brazen young men.

Whether "mostly military-age men" it is or isn't true, it would be astronomically unlikely there wouldn't be at least one adorable family among the body count. All one has to do then is find them, take a bunch of pictures of the bodies, and distribute them widely, while completely ignoring the rest, and your work is done.

Even if there are literally zero adorable families naturally coming over, the cartels running the operation on the other side aren't stupid. Surely they would be willing to ensure there are a few like that and make sure they get covered.

In the name of equity and inclusion, I’d be more than okay to go without age- and gender-discrimination when it comes to distributing bullets for border enforcement.

In which case:

You wouldn’t have to shoot very many before the rest of them would stop coming.

Would apply even moreso, as military-age men are presumably the most risk-tolerant group.

Source? This does not look like the overwhelming majority are men, especially once you ignore the more action-laden pictures of fence climbing and violent clashes. Are you sure you are not just instinctively copying points from the European migrant crisis?

This could be a result of selective reporting on the part of either right-wing media, left-wing media, or both. I have seen tons of video of migrant caravans, and of migrants camped out near border checkpoints or in front of migrant processing centers, and it’s always at least 75% young men. Now, again, this could be due to the narrative being pushed by the sources of media that I consume. And, similarly, I’m sure you can acknowledge that The Atlantic is strongly pro-migrant and would at least be tempted to selectively display the most sympathetic images possible.

There are some attempts at statistics, claiming 46% female. You could of course choose to extend your argument by saying that these too are fake, but at that point, what would be sufficient evidence to persuade you?

I recently looked up the numbers after @Steffieri called me out on the same assumption. Women are in the majority among legal migrants, and make up 45-47% of illegal migrants depending on survey. It's not overwhelmingly male, but it's not majority families either.

It's tough to get numbers for different kinds of illegal immigration, though. "Streaming across the southern border" isn't even the most common form of illegal immigration most years.

Easy - kill the men, deport the women and children.

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