domain:alexberenson.substack.com
2rafa
14m ago
Marjorie Taylor Greene
The biography From Prostitute To President: An American Tale will be worth it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16m ago
You want me to believe you can defeat the Federal government? I'll believe it the day you've actually done it. You want to convince me we can win a civil war? I'll buy it when you've actually fought and won it.
And until then, you'll insist that we shouldn't try, no? Every time we face a fight, you'll argue we should surrender rather than commit to it. Every time we win a fight, you'll argue we should surrender rather than capitalize on it. How is your position distinguishable from an argument that Reds can't coordinate, and that is a good thing? You are fully committed to the position that Reds can't coordinate, and that we shouldn't coordinate, and you've precommitted to that position regardless of any evidence short of absolute victory.
And what will need to come to pass, to convince you that escalation will fail?
Nothing. I believe that escalation against tyranny is self-justifying, regardless of outcome. If our fate is destruction, that is acceptable; we should fight for what is right regardless. If that fight provokes greater reprisals on the part of the tyrants, that is all the more reason to fight harder. Their tyranny is fundamentally illegitimate, and it is axiomatically good to fight them. Nor is it obvious why your preferred plan of suicide would be preferable; we're dead either way, aren't we? In that eventuality, if we're dead listening to you and dead listening to me, at least my way we go down fighting, which seems deeply preferable. If you think otherwise, you are free to follow your own counsel, but it's worth pointing out that there is no rational reason to prefer your policy, even if you are correct in how things will go.
Until you actually go to war, I'll keep on saying you're all talk, and it's all empty saber-rattling.
"there is no point where you'll actually go to war" is a reasonable prediction, and it's true that the only way to disprove it is to actually go to war. I do not think proving you wrong in an internet debate is a victory worth killing and dying over, so I'll refrain for now, and your prediction will continue to be plausible.
What is not plausible is your prediction that Red Tribe can't coordinate defiance short of violence, when it is in fact, observably, coordinating defiance short of violence, and at considerable scale. You and @The_Nybbler have been proven wrong on that score. You can retreat to the prediction that defiance won't work, to which I reply that time will tell.
2rafa
18m ago
breeze right through the process to a "legal" path to permanent residency and citizenship.
The bill hands Democrats exactly what they want, and enshrines a permanent increase in "legal" unrestricted immigration forever. Doing nothing at least leaves all these people in limbo, with no path to legal status forever, and the possibility of eventual deportation
Again, you do realize all these people’s kids get passports anyway, right? Birthright citizenship renders ambiguous status, doing nothing, limbo blah blah arguments complete bullshit. Any of their children born on US soil are 100% unquestionable Americans under the law. Whether their parents do or don’t get a green card means nothing, these people (quite rightly) care about their descendants more than whether their lives in the US might be slightly easier or not.
What this bill did was allow a future GOP president to create a little more friction. It didn’t make things any easier or harder for the Dems, who can already (and have) left the fence open anyway. But it improves the selection of options a Republican might have.
hanikrummihundursvin
20m ago
The rest of the 'Alt Right', which was then the TRS sphere and the odd adjacent social media person, did not remain loyal to Trump. The split came down to who could sustain without Trump and who could not. Which is why you ended up with a small vacuum on the 'far right' for guys like Fuentes to grow. Since they kept up the pretense of supporting Trump and being involved with mainstream GOP politics when the rest dropped it.
Well this is just dead wrong.
Then why don't you reply to what is written? I still don't think you want to get immigration under control any more than someone in the 'Alt Right'. In fact, considering your second paragraph, bringing up the 'Alt Right' makes very little sense outside of the context of you trying to frame your views in a positive light with regards to "mainstream media morality".
SteveKirk
22m ago
I haven't had more, but that one I got a few weeks ago knocked me flat on my back.
It's not just me aging either, because a few elderly guys who got it did much better. Suspect there's something going around they were once exposed to that we've never had before.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
27m ago
Last year or so I've it seems like I've had more bronchitis than I've ever had in my life combined, but I also know I'm not alone among my friends, family, and coworkers on this, so I think it's just something going around. And around and around.
2rafa
29m ago
One, illegally allow in tens of millions of people into the United States; two, trick the (hopefully) absolute morons in the GOP to pass a "compromise bill" which allows a hostile administration to staff a army of bureaucrats which can more quickly adjudicate asylum claims under a "more strict" standard (it's really not) than one which could be adopted by executive fiat and then quickly stamp "approved" on large percentages of the illegally released people who now get automatic work permits. And it would have worked if it wasn't for that stupid Trump who is just so bad, doesn't care about immigration or the country, and opposes it because he just doesn't want Biden to get a win. And thank God for that
Literally none of this matters.
-
Almost all illegals are eventually released or make it into the interior. That was true even with Trump’s remain-in-Mexico policy because there is no wall and Trump is no closer to getting Congress to build one than he was this time in 2016. That is to say even migrants turned back eventually make it into the interior, where they’re never deported unless they commit serious violent crime and ICE arrests and deports them which of course only happens to a tiny minority of illegals migrants, and even in those cases most return illegally.
-
Because of 1 (a fundamental issue which, again, Trump has zero realistic plan to fix), the only difference between handing every migrant a green card (or, hell a passport) and not doing so is one generation. Every child of every single illegal migrant in the US born on US soil is a full citizen of the United States. That’s the trick with ‘amnesty’; it means nothing, because the demographic impact is guaranteed in any case. Birthright citizenship is the ultimate incentive for illegal immigration. Talk about “work permits” is hilarious; their sons and daughters have the same rights and privileges as you.
So, yeah. The only two things that would do “more” than this bill would be a meaningful end to most illegal inflows (impossible without transnational coast to coast impenetrable wall, and even then asylum seekers could just come legally and overstay visas if they could get them) and an end to birthright citizenship (almost certainly impossible without constitutional amendment). So this magic alternative to this bill (which again, would allow a GOP administration to take minor incremental steps to somewhat reduce inflows) does not exist. There is no plan, there never was, and Trump killed it because he didn’t want to give Biden what he felt was some kind of ‘win’, whatever the cost.
marinuso
29m ago
The only people it really makes sense to assassinate are the other side's Supreme Court Justices while your side is in power. Then your side gets to replace them, and if you then don't pick octogenarians they'll sit for decades. However, that doesn't seem to be a tactic that has seen any use at all, while the President has been assassinated multiple times.
Quantumfreakonomics
38m ago
The Justice Department. Jack Smith. Alvin Bragg. You know, the people currently prosecuting him for felonies.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
40m ago
Minnesota won, so it doesn't matter. If they lost, it would be a big deal, but they won, so it's ok.
I've told my wife that I have no real desire to be in the room during the birth. It feels like the ultimate nightmare version of standing around awkwardly around pretending I'm helping the plumber.
2rafa
45m ago
what part of the bill forces a hostile administration to reduce immigration at all? the bill may as well be a sieve with all the ways a hostile administration could legally ignore and excuse explicit limits; every single section of the bill which allegedly reduces immigration is actually not mandatory and is able to be set aside under vague, undefined language, like "operational circumstances"
this bill does nothing at all to force a reduction in immigration; it still relies entirely on a friendly executive to reduce immigration, but a friendly executive could already reduce immigration right now and they have for decades under status quo laws by simply enforcing them
So to reiterate, according to your own comment the bill makes things easier for a friendly executive but doesn’t make anything easier for a hostile executive, and the GOP voted against it because…? That a hostile Dem executive could still keep the doors open is the status quo. Nothing about this bill would make anything worse from a rightist anti-immigration perspective, it would just make things the same to easier for a conservative executive.
If the Republicans were willing to support a bill that made it harder for them to control the border while allowing a hypothetical Democratic presidency to print an unlimited number of extra green cards per year the Dems would be stupid not to vote for it.
jkf
47m ago
Are they the sort to stand around at the entrance to federal workplaces checking ID badges, though?
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
49m ago
I have no idea how you'd go about testing any of this.
You'd have to create an artificial metric for the importance of a news item, then measure for how many weeks it was front page news in a basket of prominent newspapers, then how long it was a prominent feature item, and how long until it disappeared entirely. How long did the Ukraine war stay on the front page every day in the WSJ and NYT and LA Times and Philadelphia Inquirer, vs how long did the Yugoslav wars stay on the front page. Various Israeli-Palestinian crises probably provide a relatively 1:1 comparison, as would mass shootings, or sex scandals.
But I suspect you wouldn't see stories stick around all that much longer. Rather, I think this perception might be the result of the multiplicity of content outlets that can be labeled "news" today. There's a long tail of websites putting out content every day, posting something, trying to get views. As a result there are always going to be dead-enders pursuing stories that have long dropped out of the mainstream news outlets.
There's also fewer actual reporters, fewer gumshoes knocking on doors and calling people on the phone and going to public meetings and digging into old files chasing actual stories. From the Times on down but especially below, newsrooms have died. Reporting new stories requires actual reporting, commenting on and remixing and reiterating old stories doesn't.
So you have content clickbait farms like Slate and Jezebel and TheAmericanConservative and a hundred websites that are even lower tier. And they've all got a dozen or more writers, and one of them might just have a hobby horse that he keeps putting out a shitty little article about every week or so, and that's a constant drumbeat of stuff about something everyone else has given up on.
So take a current Current Thing. The Kendrick Lamar vs Drake Rap Beef, and the associated accusations that Drake is a creep/pedo. Right now it's popular and fun, everyone is talking about it, the Dodgers are playing Not Like Us during batting practice, somebody shot at Drake's house, but two weeks from now it'll probably be out of the news. But you might have one writer who stays on the Drake is a Freaky Ass Nigga' beat, and just from sheer multiplicity of writers you can keep posting the same story over and over again, and it might feel like it stays "in the news" longer.
Yes, the educational system has failed. It has never delivered the results it was built to deliver. Increasingly, it cannot deliver even the lesser results it used to provide. Its funds have massively increased without any measurable improvement in outcomes, but with a massive increase in partisan benefits for Blue Tribe, who have used them to secure nakedly partisan political advantages, and to abuse people like me without recourse.
It looks like a large and increasing portion of my tax dollars being delivered to people who hate me, and who openly break the law seeking to harm me. I see no reason why that should be an acceptable state of affairs. You can happy-clap as much as you like, the culture war is real and continues to accelerate, and it will come for you soon enough no matter how far and fast you run.
More options
Context Copy link