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Because they're not paying the tariffs.

Foreigners don't pay tariffs, they're an import TAX

Interesting thread though, very predictable consequence lol

I don’t think farming is grunt work

It is, whether you think so or not, which is why historically when people got the chance they fled the farms for horrible factory jobs.

I don't see any reason it would be "innoble" or "beneath human dignity", but it's backbreaking.

AOC at least used to have a large group she spoke for, but if AOC and Nancy Pelosi disagreed, you certainly couldn't say AOC spoke for the left as a whole.

If Trump announced some kind of amnesty for farm workers, that would be MAGA.

No, in fact, MAGA got upset when it seemed he might and Trump backed off. Also note that MAGA was COVID-vaccine-skeptical and Trump was the opposite. That MAGA won't immediately dump Trump if he deviates from what they want doesn't mean MAGA is what Trump says it is.

But the "dissident right" just isn't MAGA in the first place.

Ha. Right.

I’ve got a text document open. I’ve had it open for the last week. The actual contents are still…well, nonexistent. It’s always, always easier to browse the thread or clear out the mod queue than to actually draft the thing.

Let’s see if I can get it together for Monday. If not, I’ll officially relinquish my spot in shame. Sound good?

the wages for agriculture go up

Americans famously love when the price of consumer goods go up

Also Japan imports 60% of its calories

we could send them back to Honduras or Oaxaca or wherever to enjoy their pay in a much lower cost of living locale when the season is over

We make up for it by importing infinitely Indian """students""" but in Canada we actually do a great job at this with migrant harvest workers

They're actually super dialled, farmers will compete to hire back the most productive squads of Ecuadorian peach harvesters, etc. They basically noodle around NA/SA following the various harvest seasons.

I feel like this discussion is the missing ingredient to lots of the topics du jour. Let's take the leftward drift of young women- well social conservatism today seems to have, uh, not discussed what other people owe to them, only what they owe to other people.

Eh, I see this discussion a lot. One common line is that what other people (specifically, men, specifically, husbands) owed them -- mostly financial support and physical protection -- is something that they can now either provide for themselves or will be provided by the state, so they no longer need to offer anything.

But in general social conservatism is hierarchical, not reciprocal. Duties are owed to those higher up; parents, church, community. Even those things owed to another person of similar rank or lower down are not owed to them per se, but owed to them because it is ones duty to society to provide it. This is one of the reasons social conservatism is so stifling, especially to the young (who are low in the hierarchy).

Picking fruit is so Edenic that it’s the first recorded activity of humanity

Brother if this is your imagination of piecework farm labor you should go on YouTube and see what it's like

"don't party on your own supply, and never front on a front" is common knowledge -- sounds like this guy was doing both.

You've got the point, Tattoos are nothing but a fashion trend. Nothing more, but also nothing less. So

If all the cops, SEALs and BJJ guys have tattoos, what might you surmise about the ones that have resisted the trend and don't have any?

That they don't like tattoos. That's it. We're not morally superior beings.

Anything else is cope. Like most of the stories told about fashion trends.

Except, of course, for the ones I tell about why boat shoes and OCBDs are the proper way for an American man to dress.

against those who want to make it great?

Rhetorical question, if someone kept saying they wanted to be a good runner, but then repeatedly shot themselves in their foot with a gun (this is a fun mixed metaphor) despite insisting they were going to crush a marathon, what would you think about them?

Head-to-toe tattoos and piercings signal massive nonconformity with social norms and a willingness to lose out on a large number of job prospects for the sake of personal expression, which naturally gets people's guards up because if someone does not conform to social norms to that extent, you have to evaluate them closely instead of just treating them as a generic person, before figuring out if they are trustworthy or not. It activates a basic "possible danger" heuristic. Massive nonconformity to social norms straddles two ends of the bell curve - it can be a sign of courage and genius, in some cases, but in probably even more cases it is a sign of things like mental illness, antisociality, narcissism, and so on. Sometimes it's both of those ends of the bell curve at the same time (I know that stretches the metaphor really far, but you know what I mean). If you meet some random person covered head-to-toe in tattoos, it is probably more likely that they are a potentially dangerous weirdo than that they are a misunderstood artist.

That said, I find some of the signalling from the right on tattoos to be very funny. Not saying that you're a right-winger, it's just that your post gives me an opportunity to mention this. About 30% of Americans have at least one tattoo. Tattoos are completely mainstream now, what isn't mainstream is full body tattoos or facial tattoos. I often see right-wingers online virtue signalling about women with tattoos. They'll see a photo of a hot woman who has tattoos and start posting stuff like "eww disgusting" or "why did she ruin her body with that". I am convinced that 99% of these guys would fuck the hot woman without any hesitation if they had a chance, tattoos or not. It's just a big virtue signalling LARP to pretend to other guys that they care more about tattoos than they actually do.

Virtue signalling on the right is an under-discussed topic, in my opinion. Highly online right-wingers virtue signal every bit as much as highly online left-wingers do.

Then farmers will get some Made-in-America machine to scoop the tomatoes out of the ground.

If these existed then farmers would already be using them. Unless the argument is "illegals are so cheap no one bothers to invent them" but then why doesn't any other nation without infinite underpaid Guatemalans invent one?

And then if the logic is "american kids will be so expensive to hire it'll incentivise someone to invent a tomato scooping machine" 1) why hasn't anyone else already done this where labor is expensive and 2) is the price of food going up due to large wage increases just being handwaved away as "worth it"

Also my autism demands I point out that tomato's do not grow in the ground (sorry)

You should invite her here to do one of those user viewpoint series

I'm not still in touch with her. But @netstack how's your user viewpoint focus coming along?

I grew up in an actually socially conservative bubble, in the hardcore twenty percent or so of Americans(so this would be the hardcore 10-15 percent or so of working age native whites, even in the Bush era). Going to church every Sunday was the right thing to do; Mohammedans and atheists were inherently untrustworthy. The blacks are racist too, and responsible for the problems in their community(I was of course warned not to repeat this in public). Fornication is bad, actually, but it happens and needs to be dealt with- and if an eligible man was known to be sexually active with a woman he had to marry her, even if she wasn't his preference or he had other plans. Homosexuals are (mental and sexually transmitted)disease ridden perverts. Gender roles and real and not optional. Women shouldn't be in the military. Marijuana is an evil drug, much worse than alcohol. The 'liberal elite' pushes bad values on purpose; I remember much bellyaching about how they had recently succeeded in making bikinis the overwhelming default, and when I was a bit older about themes in Harry Potter and Twilight. Better be spanked as a child than hanged as an adult(and few, if any, of the people around me had sympathy for criminals). A woman's father had the right- and in many cases, the responsibility- to veto a marriage, and maybe even a dating relationship. Ideally the woman should stay home with her kids, unless she was a teacher, but in either case the man was responsible for the bills. Society was going to collapse because the government uses our tax dollars to push bad morals which make people unproductive; that's why people are dumber, less virtuous, and grow up slower than in the fifties. You can't get a divorce just for falling out of love- the man has to be violent or not holding down a job, or the woman has to be an awful mental case, or somebody has to be addicted to drugs, or something.

I don't say these things so the motte can litigate them. I say them to point to the sine qua non which made the worldview work- different people have different roles in society, mostly due to their membership in various classes(age, gender, social class, maybe sometimes race). As a male youth it was my duty to protect my sister if we went to a social event together, and it was more important that my schooling focus on getting me into a good job which would one day pay the bills for a family. My sister had more household chores(well, in the conventional sense- I had to mow the lawn etc but lots of people don't count yardwork as housework) because it was important that she learn how to do ironing and baking and stuff that I wouldn't need. I was told in no uncertain terms that if I got a girl pregnant or lived with her I would have to marry her, even if I was in love with someone else or had other plans(and my male cousins have pretty much all followed this rule when they took concubines)- although the ideal was obviously a white wedding. And of course being that we were basically middle class I would have to provide a basically middle class standard of living- homeownership and stable employment and going places in cars and the like. My parents threatened to kick me out when I expressed my desire not to go to university, and only relented when I found an HVAC apprenticeship- because it was my job as a middle-class man to have a career, not just a job. These are of course an illustration.

I don't see this mentality from, shall we say, 'converts' to social conservatism. I see a lot of bemoaning about how someone else used to do better from e-trads. And I think this is a lynchpin that's missing which makes a bunch of it 'larping' or 'cargoculting' or whatever; the motte likes to talk about it from time to time. But y'know, social conservatism works off of 'who you are makes x,y,z your job and not doing it even when you don't want to makes you a bad person'. Lots of people like to talk about this- positively or negatively- about women's domestic or familial expectations. I don't think focusing on 'a man's role' or whatever is the missing piece I think you just... can't talk about it without talking about it intersectionally. 'How does everyone fit into society' is a question that needs to be answered and if you've already decided personal characteristics are the way to go about it, well...

I feel like this discussion is the missing ingredient to lots of the topics du jour. Let's take the leftward drift of young women- well social conservatism today seems to have, uh, not discussed what other people owe to them, only what they owe to other people. Is it any wonder that the victimhood narrative from runaway woke is more appealing? Or the disagreements over immigration; we no longer have a class of people whose obligation is to do manual agricultural labor(and most of the historical people who did this did it as an obligation, not a job; serfdom and the corvee is the historical norm). The modern American right seems to simply lack the actual difference between itself and progressivism; it differs only in accidentals(I'm pretty open about voting republican because they protect my right to be socially conservative, and not because they'll push social conservatism). I don't think this mentality can come back from the government, but only from intermediating institutions that democrats would like to punish for doing their job and pushing this. But this is the key difference; most adults have probably worked it out for themselves but nobody ever says it out loud.

It's only obvious to you because you aren't blessed with the worldliness of a mushroom.

I think it really just turns on what you consider "diversity". Obviously and famously past Americans considered Germans and Irish and such as contextually diverse in all four of those senses, while today we would probably not say the same of their descendants. I'm sure you could take a stab at some rough numbers about what it might have been over time if you used diversity "in context" for contemporaries, but that would probably be pretty difficult and subjective. Still, I like the instinct here, because it does always annoy me when we hear the similar idea about "division" being the worst it's ever been when the country literally fought a civil war before.

Linguistic and religious diversity might be exceptions, though. This article has a few stats for language that implies it was higher even (or especially) at the Founding, although also worth a side-note that the voting percentages would have been different to some extent. In terms of religious diversity that's also tricky - how do you count "religiously unaffiliated" and its various flavors? I don't really think a fair historical comparison is possible, and I guess you could try, but I won't.

A lot of the current angst in the left is that a table with one communist and nine people remains a table with one communist and nine people, which drives them crazy.

Obviously the market is distorted by access to illegal labor, as much as a market would be distorted if people were allowed to own slaves.

This reminds me of the "libertarian" on Twitter who thought "the government opening the border" was "statism."

The Middle Class already does crappy work for a living. I don’t think farming is grunt work — if I had a choice I would sooner enslave the financiers than the farmers. I would rather import Chinese and Indians to take the jobs of White financiers than the farmers, because that is truly innoble work. The Western Christian legacy is considering this work as innoble, as beneath human dignity. Even programming demeans humanity more than “picking fruit”. Look at how they write on Twitter. They are halfways to the singularity and I pray that their wishes come sooner and they become fully machine.

a few Oaxacans and Hondurans

Right, it’s obviously an incredibly larger amount than this which can easily make the White population dwindle to 5% by the end of the millenia.

better for everyone

Not at all. Actually, there’s a good argument to be made that deportations could increase all the wages of the lower middle class. But if we’re really basing things off of “better for everyone” we need to talk about waste among the .1% income level.

There are many thousands of contemporary documents in the historical archive at Auschwitz, which is why the complete lack of documentary corroboration for the existence of an extermination plan that killed over a million people at the camp is so conspicuous.

It was a fairly secretive operation. And there was a cover up.

Or do you deny there is evidence of the Nazis trying to cover something up at these camps?

Even the top-secret decodes intercepted by the British, which captured top-secret communication between Auschwitz and SS command, contains not a single iota of reference to an extermination plan,

Are there not certain reports of death counts? A famous telegram, I believe?

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-riegner-telegram

This one is a rehash, but highlights your mistake: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/aug/01/secondworldwar.jamiewilson

What were they discussing at the Wannsee Conference anyway?

At least try to deal with the evidence I'm providing.

as we discussed recently David Cole in 1992 exposed that the "gas chamber" shown to millions of tourists on the tour at Auschwitz was actually fabricated post-war in Soviet-occupied Poland and presented deceptively as an original structure.

You don't have to convince me not to trust the Soviets by default.

There's no backup- the entire narrative rests on the reliability of this tortured confession extracted under duress during a World War which has been proven to be extremely unreliable in key respects, like the description of the sequence of events that led to the creation of the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

You're ignoring his memoirs and remarks made long after the alleged torture session, which itself was reported in his memoir. If he were a compelled witness, this is a very strange way to go about it. It feels like you didn't even skim the resource I provided dealing with these concerns head on.

And even burning a body does not remove the evidence: if 1 million people were cremated at Auschwitz-Birkenau, according to Grok that would produce 2,5000 metric tons of 5.5 million lbs of cremated remains, or 3,000 cubic meters of human remains by volume. These remains, though, have never been found or identified. They are just gone.

Well where did the millions of intact pre-war Eastern European Jews go? Are they not "just gone"?

Also, using ashes for fertilizer, dumping them in rivers, or any number of reported ways to hide them would seemingly explain this problem away quite easily.

No, there was no gas chamber at Dachau.

So the evidence I submitted is simply fabricated? Not that it matters, in that the Mainstream acknowledges it wasn't used.

Does the fact the Mainstream can acknowledge that indicate, perhaps, it responds to evidence?

They did not excavate any graves at Treblinka II, they found a clay tile and misrepresented a manufacturer's logo as being a Star of David intended to lure Jews into the gas chamber with a false sense of security.

Interesting though, isn't it, that the buried tiles matched the accounts of eyewitness accounts? And, sure, it only looked like a Star of David, though it was merely the logo of a Polish ceramics factory. Seems like a pretty understandable mistake to me. If you think about it, the fact the excavation pulled out tiles that matched eyewitness accounts is a little too convenient, right? But BUT, as you pointed out, they actually got it wrong initially that it was a Star of David vs. the logo of a Polish ceramics factory. That's kind of exactly what one would expect from an authentic find.

Why did the Nazis destroy and bury the site if it had a routine purpose?

Do you accept Colls found mass graves and artifacts at Treblinka I?

The precursor to the CIA- the OSS was the progenitor of many of these claims from the West Allies in the first place.

Deflection. The analysis was based on aerial photography which Revisionists have to pretend was doctored.

There was COMINT that indicated the Final Solution was indeed "final" as previously indicated.

There is no historical precedent for the German "Extermination Camps", it stands out as an outlier among all of history.

Well we can agree on that. One might conclude that perhaps it's not such an incredible outlier at all because it's not merely a figment of propaganda.

If you consider the perspective of the Western Allies, finding a moral justification for the war was extremely important.

This is really funny, because I actually went and read a bit of one of your recommended books--Debating the Holocaust--and that fine author pointed out at the end that the likes of Churchill and Eisenhower barely even mentioned the Jews in their war memoirs (and Churchill was quite philosemetic his whole life). The moral justification for the war is just fine if you pretend the Jews were never part of the equation, since Hitler was the aggressor, and the Allies didn't prioritize anything based on Jewish suffering. We nuked the Japs and they didn't even have any Jews to conduct medical experiments on or extract labor from.

Let's pretend, for the sake of argument, there were no mass gassings. Do you accept:

  • Europe has a long history of negative beliefs towards and violence against the Jews
  • Hitler wrote a popular book in 1925 that was highly critical of the Jews as significant problem
  • The Nazis in general were highly concerned with identifying and controlling Jews in both rhetoric and action, before and during WWII
  • Hitler "prophesied" a number of times about "the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe" and called them "enemies of the people"
  • Hitler gave a speech to his senior leaders in late 1941 that led Goebbels to record in his diary: "Regarding the Jewish question, the Führer has decided to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that, if they yet again brought about a world war, they would experience their own annihilation. That was not just a phrase. The world war is here, the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence."
  • The Nazis had a "Final Solution" for the Jewish Problem
  • The Nazis systematically rounded up a lot of Jews and put them into camps
  • There is clear evidence the Nazis tried to destroy/bury several of these camps, particularly towards the end of the war when the tide had turned
  • The pre-war and post-war Jewish population of Europe, particularly Poland, has a gap of several million Jews

No wonder people believe the Holocaust narrative so easily, right?

Was Hitler wrong about the Jews? Were the Nazis wrong to have focused on them so much? Were their utterances merely rhetoric? The ideology of no import when it came to action? But seriously though, how wrong was Hitler about the Jews? Was his rhetoric correct, but he failed to act on it? Just how big of a problem were the Jews, objectively? Like, were they just a minor problem, not a major one? Or what? (At least he was right about the commies.)

Are the Jews really so crafty that they convinced the Nazis to be the perfect evil villains years in advance of the Holocaust? Did they plant the documentation of the Wannsee Conference and Einsatzgruppen reports? The tattooed numbers are a nice touch, too.

Arguing, correctly in some (but definitely no all) cases, that the Holocaust is surrounded by less-than-perfect eyewitness accounts, unknowns, exaggerations, propaganda, and all manner of historical flaws does not remotely begin to overturn the core evidence and present a more plausible account of what evidence we have--since creating and maintaining a conspiracy to manufacture a Nazi conspiracy is even harder to prove, and for which you have provided no actual evidence. Even if you had significantly weakened the hypothesis of the conventional take on the Holocaust, you have neither overturned it nor provided a remotely plausible alternative that explains things better.

The Holocaust is very important in providing a post-hoc moral justification for the war which is essentially the foundational myth for American global empire and 20th-21st century morality.

I think even you can recognize this is a pretty delusional take since the exact same people most up in arms about "Nazis" and "fascism" are also the most likely to be claiming that Jews are privileged White People, that Israelis are settler colonialists committing genocide, and that globalizing the intifada is a good thing to do. From the river to the sea.

Furthermore, the Allies did very little to prevent or mitigate the Holocaust, even rejecting many refugees. The American "global empire" left Israel basically to its own devices for the first few decades of its existence, when it faced overwhelmingly numerically superior foes in several wars. (Good thing Arabs are bad at war.) One might imagine we have wanted to compensate for that guilt a bit as time went on.

Off topic, but I kind of wonder how the racial estimate question might change if you gave people a slider that forces all the percentages to sum to 100

Obviously the market is distorted by access to illegal labor, as much as a market would be distorted if people were allowed to own slaves. There is no inconsistency here. People want to compete in the legal framework of their country, under the same laws. An army of scabs willing to work for less in shittier conditions (that would be illegal for any citizen) would depress the labor market.

We should make national policy decisions based on the projected wellbeing of citizens. That would include the psychological theories of Csikszentmihalyi, which shows that certain occupational activities are more conducive to happiness.