Ohio
oats_son
9mo ago
I want a vice presidential debate top level post.
So JD Vance sounded pretty good here overall. If you ask me, both speakers were miles ahead of their presidential candidate counterparts, which is sad. There is probably a lot that can be read from the debate, but I did want to discuss a couple moments making waves on other social media. First I will mention I was surprised to hear JD Vance support nuclear energy, and I will also mention a lot of people were probably unhappy with how he handled the gun control/mass shooting question. But back to the two I wanted to mention
The first such moment originated from a fact check:
JD VANCE: ...Now, Governor Walz brought up the community of Springfield, and he's very worried about the things that I've said in Springfield. Look, in Springfield, Ohio and in communities all across this country, you've got schools that are overwhelmed, you've got hospitals that are overwhelmed, you have got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes...
Tim Walz responds to his statement, and then a debate moderator comes in with this:
MB: Thank you, Governor. And just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status. Temporary protected status. Norah.
DV: Well, Margaret, Margaret, I think it's important because…
MB: Thank you, senator. We have so much to get to.
NO: We're going to turn out of the economy. Thank you.
JDV: Margaret. The rules were that you guys weren't going to fact check, and since you're fact checking me, I think it's important to say what's actually going on. So there's an application called the CBP One app where you can go on as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand. That is not a person coming in, applying for a green card and waiting for ten years.
MB: Thank you, Senator.
JDV: That is the facilitation of illegal immigration, Margaret, by our own leadership. And Kamala Harris opened up that pathway.
MB: Thank you, Senator, for describing the legal process. We have so much to get to.
TW: Those laws have been in the book since 1990... a few more exchanges continue before mics get cut
I will cut it off there to not balloon this post. You can read the transcript here.
It seems many blue tribers saw him complaining about a fact check and seeing a win. Why would you complain about fact checking other than if you were lying? This is another example going back to Scott's post about the media rarely lying. Hey, they're temporary asylum seekers, so since they were allowed in with little hindrances to speak of, they're legal. Fact checked. This is an example of why I tend to dislike fact checking in a debate. It introduces an opportunity to use unfavorable framing on an opponent with lawyerspeak on technically true things. Let the candidates do it themselves if they want.
Next up, the January 6th and failure to concede the election:
TW: January 6th was not Facebook ads. And I think a revisionist history on this. Look, I don't understand how we got to this point, but the issue was that happened. Donald Trump can even do it. And all of us say there's no place for this. It has massive repercussions. This idea that there's censorship to stop people from doing, threatening to kill someone, threatening to do something, that's not censorship. Censorship is book banning. We've seen that. We've seen that brought up. I just think for everyone tonight, and I'm going to thank Senator Vance. I think this is the conversation they want to hear, and I think there's a lot of agreement. But this is one that we are miles apart on. This was a threat to our democracy in a way that we had not seen. And it manifested itself because of Donald Trump's inability to say, he is still saying he didn't lose the election. I would just ask that. Did he lose the 2020 election?
JDV: Tim, I'm focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation?
TW: That is a damning. That is a damning non answer.
Once again, there is more to this exchange than that. I said earlier that they had good performances, and I'll go further here and say that JD Vance had a pretty great night. I'd never heard him speak before and he sounded very well spoken, very well informed, and brought up many issues that I so dearly wished that Donald Trump would have brought up, like specifically naming the asylum system and mentioning the partial birth abortions allowed in Minnesota (I noticed Tim Walz's denial was not fact checked). That is to say, JD Vance is competent and might have won against Kamala Harris, representing a return to civil debates and "normal" politicians, despite the "weird" allegations.
But he is really dragged down on this issue. It's lame he has to defend election denial claims in the first place, and leave room for challenging more later. I know many of you have strong feelings on the truthfulness of the claims. I will say this: if someone goes and makes those claims, they shouldn't run again. That is very powerful ammo for the other side. And it's far from the only ammo. I am very disappointed with the rhetoric Trump throws around. His lashing out against Taylor Swift reads as totally pathetic. And it is sad to see someone with as much talent as JD Vance have to try to slip around all this crap coming at him, from both Tim Walz, the debate moderator, and untold amounts of unhappy people on Twitter.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
But the lying part is where you impart a false belief into an audience. And Lawyer lying does much the same in a much more insidious way. Telling people that people in Ohio are having their pets or geese or whatever is obviously on its face false. But the reverse, that the integration of 20K Haitians into a town of 40K is going just fine, actually is also false and based on cherry-picked good reports (for example the factory owner saying that the Haitians are hard workers, which likely elides labor issues like wages and working conditions that the natives didn’t like) or the lack of reporting of things like crime, education strain (this town likely needs a whole lot of resources because they suddenly need to educate a bunch of ESL students who speak French) traffic congestion and accidents. Sure you can say that these aren’t serious problems and if you cherry-pick just right, you can get “Fact Check: True”. but you’re spinning the situation in a dishonest way to get people to believe what you want them to believe. Trumps lies are less sophisticated, but I contend that both are lies, and it doesn’t stop being a lie just because you happen to be using manipulated facts and statistics to tell the narrative you want people to believe in.
This is why I tend to be much more skeptical of the second sort of narrative than the first. Make no mistake, both are ultimately lies and meant to deceive an audience. But for all the faults Trump’s style of lying has, it’s easy enough to detect and therefore ultimately less harmful to the body politic than the kind of lying where it’s manipulated facts and thus hard to attack and debunk. That means the damage done will be harder to undo (especially since doing so is “racist conspiracy theories,” and thus impossible to bring up in polite society.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9mo ago
In this case it's "'they're eating the dogs' is a statement intended to induce the false belief in listeners" that is a false statement intended to induce the false belief in listeners, and this is precisely why people have had it with "lying like a lawyer" types.
You take a sentence I posted out of context (I go on to point out that bullshit is a better framework for this type of statement than lies), and respond with a bunch of barely-parseable word salad that looks like (and is, when finally parsed) an allegation of dishonesty, and you accuse me of lying like a lawyer?
Trump said that immigrants in Ohio were eating dogs and cats. As a result of him saying this, some of his target audience of low-information swing voters now believe that immigrants in Ohio are eating dogs and cats, and are therefore more likely to cast an anti-immigration vote at the election in November. Generating this change in belief was a major purpose of making the statement. Given background that motteposters know and the debate audience probably didn't, the fact that Trump said "dogs" and not "cats" may reveal interesting information about his thought processes that I hope to elaborate on in a later effortpost.
I am making the conjunction of the above claims, with the intention that they be taken seriously and literally. If you disagree with me about the facts, the spirit of this board is that you should identify the claim you disagree with rather than spewing insinuations.
Even if the rumours Trump based the claim on had been true, they were about cats, not dogs.
Oh, come on!
- Did you hear about the Haitians eating people's dogs in Ohio?
- Don't say that! This is a completely false statement, spread by bigots!
- Oh shit! Sorry, I didn't know.
- Yeah... everybody knows they're eating cats, not dogs.
In this case it's "'they're eating the dogs' is a statement intended to induce the false belief in listeners" that is a false statement intended to induce the false belief in listeners, and this is precisely why people have had it with "lying like a lawyer" types.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
9mo ago
You'd expect a media campaign to make something "heard of".
I was thinking more from the perspective of an average Ohioan, prior to the media campaign.
And sure enough, the next time someone sees their Haitian neighbour grilling meat, are they going to put it into the "business as usual" bin or into "could be someone's cat" bin?
So you are again saying this doesn't actually happen to any greater extent than it happens with any other person, right?
Firstly, after looking into Haitian cuisine and religious practices and noticing the size of the denominator, it seems unlikely that it isn't happening. Moreover, waiting for evidence isn't all that important, since whether the allegations are true or not, the probability of strong evidence being found and then fairly distributed is quite low. The nature of the act is just not easy to prove.
Secondly, I think more people should be eating the local wildlife. We have severe overpopulationa of deer, rabbits, and other prey species across most if the US. Humans have displaced predators, but they have not taken up their responsibility to fulfil the ecological function predation serves. This has been highly destructive to local ecosystems. Wild cats and outdoor cats are almost as much of a problem because they destroy bird populations. Frankly, the Haitians are probably doing an ecological service while also getting a free meal, so it's a win-win scenario.
Thirdly, if it was my goal to create ethnic and racial conflict, then I could hardly think of a better way than to dump thousands of Haitians on to small town Ohio. These allegations, the suspicions, the resentments, the prejudices, etc., whether true or false, are all obvious consequences of throwing radically different people together while also encouraging a system of racial identity and spoils. This is just what happens when people don't speak the same language and have radically different cultures and values. It's not an historical anomaly--this is what usually happens. It's not even irrational, since these groups really are different, their interests do not align, and they're being pitted against one another. If the Haitians had power, then they'd almost certainly be behaving far worse toward their outgroup.
The real enemy is clearly the NGOs, politicians, and bureaucrats who made this happen.
I don't fall for these kinds of traps usually because I also understand there are potentially second order effects to consider, and thus its not a pure linear tradeoff, even if we design the policy on that basis.
Maybe the population of dogs, despite killing kids, was also curbing some additional threat where, if the dogs were removed, would mostly replace the dogs as the primary threat to child livelihood.
In fact we have a very topical analogy for this, in the real world! WOLF REINTRODUCTION!
Ranchers killed off wolves because they were a threat to cattle herds, but this also allows the local deer, elk, etc. population to explode, which means overforaging of vegetation and other potential environmental harms, which is ALSO bad for the cattle on top of all else!
So they've brought back wolves in certain areas and the argument is that now the herbivore population is back into a 'natural' balance checked by the predators which is better for the local flora, which is better for the ecosystem as a whole.
Similarly, imagine we get rid of guns and criminal psychopaths with knives are suddenly springing up everywhere, stabbing children, unchecked by their natural predators.
So the Buridan point for being in favor of mass dog euthanasia is going to be relatively high, for me, and I would certainly explore other policy options before committing to it.
The Republicans looking for corroboration are treating the search space as "any dark-skinned immigrant, anywhere in Ohio, eating any kind of unusual meat". The meme went viral after an ADOS black woman was convicted of eating a cat in Canton, and we have seen African immigrants eating roadkill in Dayton cited as proof that the meme is "directionally correct". So the denominator is a lot larger than 20,000.
That said, if this police report is real, then it is the real thing and we have (noting that the date of the police report predates the meme) the source of the original game of telephone that led to the first "a friend of a friend thinks Haitians are eating cats" Facebook post. Note that most of the cat was not, in fact, eaten - even if the mystery meat is cat meat, stealing a cat and leaving chopped-up bits in the owner's back garden is what gangsters do to intimidate people, not something Mrs Lovett types do. It would be closely related to the "Sicilian immigrants are eating our horses" meme as featured in The Godfather.
50% that the police report is real (noting that the local PD said no such report existed), Conditional on the police report being real:
- 20% that it turns out the cat is still alive and has been reunited with its owner
- 40% that the cat was indeed murdered
- 15% that the cat was indeed murdered by the Haitian neighbour the owner suspects.
- 10% that the rest of the cat was eaten by a human.
- 30% that there was no cat and the person who filed the police report is crazy
I also note that ex ante the search space for this kind of thing was "any immigrant, legal or illegal, anywhere in America, eats a housepet or does something similarly outrageous" Given the complete inability of Republicans to come up with anything good after a frantic search for "dark-skinned immigrant eats housepet" across right-wing social media, this looks like a single incident blown up into a national story by a combination of media crime blotter logic and conservative propaganda. If it really was the case that "they're eating our pets" was a thing, we would have found more than one questionable case by now. If it turns out that the police report is real, the cat is real, and the cat did indeed disappear under suspicious circumstances then the Republicans will have lucked out on this one. Turning a single incident into a nationwide viral meme is good politics and good tabloid journalism, even if it is bad epistemics.
BTW does anyone know the baseline rate of cat butchery in America?
Went over Noah's recent twitter posts and he's as bad as I remember. Recounted here:
https://www.themotte.org/post/1160/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/250998?context=8#context
He's just all over the place. He wants to comment on cyberwarfare capabilities in China, but I doubt he has knowledge in that area.
Then on U.S. energy production policy.
Then on Haitian migrants in Ohio.
But makes glaring errors in each comment, and that's just the ones I semi-randomly picked as examples.
This is the stuff you GENERALLY don't get from Zeihan, Silver, or Scott, they wouldn't make STRONG claims well outside their area of expertise and then fail to back up any of it.
Yud, well, his whole thing is that AGI is likely to kill off humanity and he's seeing more and more signs he feared might arise and yet few people seeming to care, it must be a bit of a living nightmare for the guy.
His book is a good example, where it's stated as a prediction rather than a highly unlikely worst-case scenario. Funnily enough, Noah had the same critique as I did.
I also read Zeihan's book and skimming that review I'm not even sure Noah understand the arguments. He makes the following statement:
There’s also the strong possibility that China — the only state capable of overthrowing U.S. power by force — will choose to cooperate with the U.S. to keep the sea lanes open, simply because of the catastrophic consequences to China of not doing so (which Zeihan vividly describes). Ultimately, Zeihan’s predictions of global anarchy rely on countries collectively making decisions that are utterly disastrous for themselves.
But he earlier grants that "The first of these [demographic collapse] is probably unavoidable." So he's accepting the premise that Zeihan uses there!
And Zeihan's whole point is that China is in such rapid, terminal demographic decline that they will collapse entirely on their own, with or without U.S. keeping the sea lanes open, so unless you can explain why a Chinese collapse WON'T happen, then 'U.S.-Chinese Cooperation' is not a viable solution because there won't be any China to cooperate with.
I don't know how a guy can miss or ignore points this badly without it being intentional. the reason countries will collectively make decisions that are disastrous for themselves is that they won't have much choice once the demographics collapse forces their hand!
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
So, after she arrived at the hospital, do you think they should have operated sooner or no? Or do you think we don't have enough information to make a determination?
I'm not a physician, so it's not clear to me whether the article gives enough information on this particular choice or not. The committee (which I assume includes some medical personnel, but which apparently does not consist exclusively of physicians) seems to think the operation should have occurred sooner, and that doesn't seem obviously wrong to me:
After reviewing Thurman’s case, the committee highlighted Piedmont’s “lack of policies/procedures in place to evacuate uterus immediately” and recommended all hospitals implement policies “to treat a septic abortion on an ongoing basis.”
The claim that Georgia's abortion law is specifically responsible for the "lack of policies/procedures" in question does not appear justified by the evidence available. Nobody in a position to know ever said, "we delayed this critical operation because of the law," and the article always stops just short of actually making that assertion. The whole essay is an exercise in suggesting a certain interpretation of events. From a purely technical standpoint, it's well-crafted propaganda. Ultimately, the story doesn't hold up, but in order to do the work it appears intended to do, the story doesn't have to hold up. It just needs the approximate "truthiness" of statements like "Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating cats."
Corroborating evidence from Canada:
Canada's labour market is much slacker than the United States. Coming out of the pandemic, immigration to the U.S. increased (especially illegal immigration best as we can tell), but in Canada there was an enormous surge in immigration to keep wages low and slow inflation. We brought in 3 million people in 3 years and our unemployment rate is now 6.6% compared with 4.2% in the U.S. In some parts of the country about 25% of the 20-29 age cohort is Indian temporary workers now, which is a story for another time. Think Springfield Ohio, but literally everywhere.
The upshot is the effective end of remote work and the squeezing of hybrid except, possibly, in the federal civil service. I'm back 4 days a week now as are all the people in my wider circle. Traffic is back to pre-pandemic levels.
Management has always hated remote work. Part of it is a skill issue around learning how to manage people remotely, but a key factor is this: remote work increases the variance of individual contributions. Some people are unaffected. Some people do more: they spend the time they would have spent commuting working and with fewer distractions their output goes up. Some people need the proximity of management to get them to do anything and spend their days at home cooking, cleaning, wasting time, etc.
Firms struggle to identify who that latter group is and even where they can see them, they can't bring themselves to fire these employees or disproportionately reward the people whose productivity increases. They can't accept the status quo for morale reasons. So instead everyone comes back.
Its such a shame because Canada, more than any other major western country, has had economic growth concentrated in its major cities over the past 20 years. You can see this in our real estate prices and for a young Canadian, the deal on offer is terrible: no jobs outside the big cities, no homes within them. Remote work offered a way through, but now its over.
jeroboam
9mo ago
NBC's Lester Holt: "Today's apparent assassination attempt comes amid increasingly fierce rhetoric on the campaign trail. Mr. Trump, his running mate JD Vance continue to make baseless claims about Haitian immigrants" in Springfield, Ohio, resulting in bomb threats.
This just hits so hard to me. I want Trump to win (even though he's a terrible person) because I want these people to lose so much.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9mo ago
Why is it surprising? It seemed obvious as soon as a candidate repeated an accusation that's at once all of outre, disgusting, racist, ultimately unprovable as either true or false, hate-inducing, and goofy; that was going to be a viral moment. People love hating the out-group, it feels great. This is true regardless of the truth value of the accusations. The race was on the moment he said it between right wing research efforts to turn up something close enough to true to say it was true, and left wing efforts to turn up a hate crime against the Haitian community. So far the right has turned up a couple rumors that almost kinda sound like it, and a bunch of pictures of people two towns over roasting what are obviously chickens or lamb on closer inspection; the left is in overdrive reporting "threats" but hasn't turned up anything concrete yet. The NY post meanwhile is reporting on car crashes in Ohio in which no one is injured as major news stories.
That said, I think the best meme of the election so far has been the Fight Fight Fight photo of Trump. Fifty years from now, when the 2020s retro look is back in, and it's all aesthetic and no politics, it'll be around. When my grandkids want to decorate their 2020s vintage basement in style, they'll put that picture on the wall, maybe in the form of a framed boardwalk T shirt from the Jersey Shore, as iconic of the time, without really knowing whether they agree with DJT's politics or not; in the same way that I have a velvet painting of JFK hanging in my '62 vintage basement.
Lizzardspawn
9mo ago
Is the They Eats Cats in Ohio the best meme so far in the election? The memes from the right are chuckle worthy which hasn't been in a long time and the left is in the (un)usual for them defensive mode since Kamala nomination to debunk.
The best I have seen so far: https://images7.memedroid.com/images/UPLOADED489/66e3727adde1f.jpeg (alf with a cat sandwich) https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GXcp_JCWQAA8gO8?format=jpg&name=medium (woman and cat arguing)
Lots of alf memes on the topic anyway. Also a lot of ai generated memes in which trump saves cats. I have seen a parody of the chick-fil-a ads, cats in combat fatigues getting deployed to ohio, tiktok trend with shocked dogs when trump says they eat pets in there.
All in all surprising memetic hit.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
9mo ago
You do accept that some people are incapable of functioning in an advanced society and we can't/shouldn't live together. Or I assume you do; that you're in favor of prisons and facilities for people with severe mental issues.
Sure, but those people exist among all demographics. We don't put put someone in prison because he comes from a high-crime demographic; we put him in prison because he committed a crime.
Would you want as neighbors an ethnic group where almost none of the members are particularly valuable, roughly half are basically decent people, roughly half are at best borderline-incapable of productive employment (and tend to ruin social institutions which were designed to expect higher-quality input), and maybe five percent are extraordinarily-prone to violence, crime, and so on? Those tails make a big difference.
As literal neighbors, living next to me? No. I feel sorry for the residents of Springfield, Ohio. That said, I would still want any individual Haitian to be judged as an individual.
This
"I for one welcome abandoning anything remotely conservative” and “I must be the most belligerent man to walk the face of earth if I want to be based”,
is just blatantly uncharitable.
And it isn't nice from your behalf to be calling right wingers who aren't abandoning anything remotely conservative being the most bellgerent men to walk the face of the earth, and so what you demand as right wingers to behave like, comes off as an attempt to control them.
The rationalist crowd is not substantially different from the Romney who was a BLM supporter, uniparty perspective. Nor are they, and associated figures like Hanania, and Yglesias above and beyond behaving rather uncivilly. There are people who fail to be nice honest and objective.
The reality is that liberals, including those who have been annoyed by some of the bad behavior of their side start from a conclusion that condemns the right, because they are against it an d want to control it. At such, the right will never be good enough.
In terms of the right, it isn't true that there isn't space in between. Rather what is happening is an inability and unwillingness to render to Ceasar what is Ceasar's and to admit the legitimate and good points made by rightists, because they are inherently against the points and the people making them.
Never will any political coalition even on the issues they are mostly correct on, will not avoid in focusing on areas that are more doubtful too, when making their points. Part of treating political discourse accurately would then be to not miss the forest of the trees, and prioritise things accurately.
This tweet makes some good points on this issue:
https://x.com/hpmcd1/status/1834339581220606449
My honest answer to this, which I hear a lot (not picking on Jesse), is that Trump bullshits—he exaggerates, or garbles details of, things that are basically true, and tends to “lie” mostly when it concerns his personal honor (crowd size, sleeping with the porn star, etc)
Harris, but the Dem apparatus more broadly (for which she’s only a cipher), tends instead to weave technically true statements together into a narrative that is not merely false but egregiously so, often approaching a near-perfect inversion of reality. The result is a hall of mirrors world in which Dem bullshit is laundered through and ratified by society’s sense-making institutions and becomes a sort of distributed knowledge or ‘common sense’ among elites such that no one person or node in the network ever has to bear personal responsibility for the falsehood—they didn’t come up with it, it was reported in the Times or put out by the CDC or American Association of Pediatrics or leaked by sources in the intelligence community, who “requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.”
However, Trump can be directionally wrong on some issues too and this tweet underestimates the dishonesty of Harris side on the migration and various debates.
In terms of what is happening in Springfield Ohio there isn't an equivalency between the two sides. The one that brought 20000+ Haitians, and funds it through NGO networks, and is trying to replace Americans, and the side that opposes it.
When Ed Yudkowsky for example agreed with an ex reddit admin that right wingers have been banned more so by reddit mods because they break the rules more, and not because they have been targeted for their ideology, he was engaging in dishonesty that gets more plausible deniability.
Another relevant issue in regards to the norms discussion and the behavior of lib/rationalist space is that righteous anger that is proportionate is also necessary and good in politics, while uncontrolled and irrational rage is bad as is irrational indifference. When I see angry relatives of a murdered son, wife, demanding justice, that is an example of indignation that leads to justice and much better than indifference, or excuses. So there is a problem with the righteous anger from the right being pathologized by people who are unrightfully hateful towards those having a proportionate response to genuine injustices at their expense. Another problem that goes along is n trying to censor them. And this being conflated with people who complain about fake injustices, and in doing so commit genuine injustices. It is actually good to be tolerant of people having legitimate gripes and be intolerant towards those who are promoting unreasonable bs, to screw over the first.
There are no centrist liberals/supposed moderates as a sizable faction who prioritize objectivity and being nice here to save people. That space doesn't exist as a sizable faction, and the faction that paints itself in such colors they have their obvious biases and hostility towards right wingers, on areas the rightists are correct about.
When it comes to the uniparty vs dissident right conflict, on various issues people like Romney who are nice to leftists but cruel to rightists, can have a more unhinged view. Take for example warmongering. Trump can also share this issue, like for example with his comments about the Democrats being insufficiently supportive of Israel, which is completely wrong, not just an exaggeration but a big lie directionally.
There are issues that right wingers are going to have both a correct and a nicer position that takes in consideration important values and facts disregarded by people who market themselves falsely as prioritizing, objectivity, or virtue. They can be politically incorrect and not nice towards sacred cows even if nicer in general, and step over hysterical demands to censor and gatekeep. To give an example,
The secret of much of politics is that people are on an article of faith acting as anti right wing oppositional force without evaluating things. They start from the conclusion and are unwilling to do things otherwise.
The liberal/"ex" liberal, con inc (though in practice not as ex as it potrays itself) space complaining about the genuine right is incapable and unwilling of recognizing these areas and separating reasonable from unreasonable which also exists. Too much resentment and hostility and seeing right wingers as the opposing tribe. Too much ideological hostility and having themselves unreasonable values they are unwilling to tolerate challenge. Some of them use the pretense of opposing tribalism as an excuse to censor and defame and narrow the intellectual space. Even edgier figures also get things right that liberals oppose. There are a few exceptions that also are atypical, like Michael Tracy and that space do manage to get some important things right on foreign policy of Trump and making critiques that deserve acknowledgement.
For the most part, the more moderate dissident rightists are among the few having some success at separating reasonable from unreasonable, and not purity spiraling. And they are hated too by the Gatekeepers who have failed themselves not to purity spiral. Ironically, not being constrained by the weights of the censorious and authoritarian liberal (including con inc, neocon, etc) gatekeepers is actually a necessity. Even though the bad faith censors pretend their censorship is for the greater good and the epitome of being nice and keeping bad culture warriors down. In actuality it is about stopping and defaming opposition and narrowing intellectual space, condemning what is correct and necessary.
Edited to add: https://x.com/realchrisrufo/status/1834926318883852543 https://christopherrufo.com/p/the-cat-eaters-of-ohio
Christopher Rufo brings evidence of African migrants eating cats in a neighboring town.
EXCLUSIVE: We have discovered that migrants are, in fact, eating cats in Ohio. We have verified, with multiple witnesses and visual cross-references, that African migrants in Dayton, the next city over from Springfield, barbecued these cats last summer.
This reinforces the perspective that plenty of people are inclined to jump to the gun to signal how rightists are getting things wrong, because of having a liberal oppositional anti-right wing ideology.
bolido_sentimental
9mo ago
My honest-to-God answer to this is that for daily use, I just buy simple, conservatively-styled Rockports, and replace them when they wear out. Like this. Yes, it's just a basic-ass black shoe; but it feels and performs very well, and it looks okay.
Real shoe connoisseurs will not be impressed by this, but the man on the street or the lady from Inside Sales might. And after all, I live in Ohio. People's expectations are easy to exceed here.
I do believe that durable, comfortable, good-looking true dress shoes exist, and I also think there are some Mottizens who will be happy to chime in with recommendations. I feel like I've seen them talking about it before.
I took his claim to mean that the Haitian immigrants coming to Springfield would lower the crime rate in Springfield. My enture point is it uses national rates, and cannot be used when debating local crime, so I don't see how his claim can be valid.
And seriously, how do you read this:
I mean, one should be able to look at the crime rate of Springfield, Ohio over the next few years and see if things shift that much. Of course, history shows that at least w/ the first generation of immigrants, crime is likely to go down.
As "across the US"??
Outlaw83
9mo ago
The thing is, and I say this as a dirty open borders social democrat, there are plenty of actual bad cases, as you'd expect in a nation of 350 million people to use for examples, and even with families who will support you using their case, as opposed to the poor kid in Springfield, Ohio, whose family is against Trump or anti-immigration folks using their child as a bludgeon against immigration.
So why make up stuff?
mdurak
9mo ago
Very well. That stat appears to come from the paper LAW-ABIDING IMMIGRANTS:
THE INCARCERATION GAP BETWEEN IMMIGRANTS AND THE US-BORN, 1870–2020. On page 24 of the PDF, the chart appears to show an incarceration rate of 1,200 per 100k first generation immigrants in 2020, versus 2,600 per 100k native born. (How the hell do you escape a tilde on this site?) The breakdown shows an incarceration rate of perhaps ~1,900 per 100k first generation Mexican and Central Americans (this would presumably be the closest category for Haitians).
According to this page, Springfield hasn't been very safe lately:
The 2022 crime rate in Springfield, OH is 573 (City-Data.com crime index), which is 2.3 times greater than the U.S. average. It was higher than in 97.9% U.S. cities.
Looking at the crime type breakdowns, assaults have gone way up since 2020, while rapes perhaps did a reversion to the mean. Other crimes don't appear to have meaningfully increased in volume.
Meanwhile, the demographics put it at 77% white and 1% Latino as of the 2020 population of 65k. Obviously, the demographics have changed quite a bit since then, with 15,000 Haitians settling there since 2020.
Overall, I don't know if we have enough data to do a proper apples-to-apples comparison. One specific type of crime rose from 2020 to 2022, but we don't know when most Haitians came in from 2020 - 2024, nor do we know the breakdown of those crimes by ethnicity over the years (it appears the town has had an economic downturn, so how would we know the crimes are because of the Haitians and not because of disgruntled native workers with nothing better to do?).
In any case:
High crime parts of the US drag the average up, and while it's technically true immigrants have a lower-than-average crime rate, that's small consolation for communities that aren't in that dragging-the-average-upwards cluster.
I don't see how this invalidates the statistic. Are immigrants settling disproportionately in formerly peaceful areas that now have more crime than before? That would seem surprising to me, given that I mostly see immigrants in the metropolitan cities rather than in the rural countryside, and big cities have much higher crime rates. But by all means, if you have evidence that shows that the statistic is misleading, please do show it.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9mo ago
God's own blessed centurions, the Kansas City Chiefs, will dismantle the heathens from South Ohio.
Josephus Burrow, the young blasphemous minor demon, will be made to understand the shining truth of THE LORD's light. Perhaps St. Jones will deliver the forceful sermon of sinew. Then again, the work of the blessed never ceases, and Brother Mahomes, with the aid of his deacons; Worthy, Pecheco, and Kelce, will, as always, preach the good word in front of the faithful at Arrow(God)head stadium.
Delivering peace to these sullied souls is often a brutal task. Yet, all those how know His divine word understand it is a necessary cleansing.
Deus Vult. Red Kingdom.
2rafa
9mo ago
Jean-Paul was a Haitian immigrant who worked at the best kitchens in Paris, but who was called back to Haiti to look after his ailing mother. Now a poor refugee in Ohio, he eventually wins over the at-first-hesitant locals by dazzling them with delicious dishes cooked with animals he hunts himself at night on excursions from his small (but tidy) tent at the edge of the park. At the end of the movie the mayor (a wealthy car dealership owner) becomes his business partner in a new brasserie, and all the residents turn out for opening night.
gattsuru
9mo ago
(Ohio) Canadian geese fear nothing, not even death.
They're really annoying.
faceh
9mo ago
Too bad for Trump virtually nobody does that, and most avenues silo you away from trying to.
I've already heard two independent reports that some person watching the debate heard the claim about eating cats and dogs and Googled it, thus finding out that there is some controversy over Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio and the disappearance of house pets. At that point, they aren't thinking "Trump lied to me!" they're thinking about the crazy story they hadn't heard of yet.
It does happen. Whether it makes a difference? I don't know.
I never said it was stolen by the Democrats.
It was the Ohio electronic voting machines that stole it for Bush.
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