domain:thezvi.wordpress.com
Alex is definitely here reading all the comments, yet the only time he ever responds is a 1 sentence dig at what he believes is a mistake a commenter made.
To the dozens of high effort well researched posts, it's radio silence for every single one. Alex has not made a single substantiative response downthread in this thread or any other thread he started.
I'm not sure whether only responding to the very weakest of your opponents counts as a strawman, but it's certainly infuriating.
shoeonfoot
8m ago
Reality check: Generally, unauthorized farmworkers have had a de facto type of amnesty from immigration officials, who are hesitant to conduct raids on a labor force that supplies food across the nation.
There have been some farm raids under Trump (including a high-profile operation Thursday in California against a marijuana farm), but he mostly backed off widespread farm raids after June 12, when he took to Truth Social and lamented the loss of farm, leisure and hotel-sector labor.
"That was the bat signal to ICE: Leave the farmers alone," one Trump adviser said.
The intrigue: Trump's post that day was made after lobbying by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins.
But it caught three crucial administration players flatfooted: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump's aggressive immigration policies.
"Every [Cabinet] secretary can't do that: Go rogue and call the president like this, without any sort of appreciation for competing conversations or ideology," another senior official said.
Inside the room: In White House meetings, Miller took the lead in dialing back the president from moving toward anything that could be branded an "amnesty" program.
One idea that was shot down: a "touchback" program under which laborers illegally in the U.S. would have go back to their nation of origin, get a U.S. work visa there and be able to return here.
For some workers, that would require an exception to current law, which bars re-entry into the U.S. for those who immigrate here illegally and stay for six months or more.
"Stephen is so hardcore that the president almost jokes about it, saying that, 'You could have a person who has been here for 20 years and has a clean record and everyone loves them, and Stephen will say deport them,' " according to one person who heard Trump's remarks.
zeke5123a
11m ago
If we are talking about the “Maryland Dad” then yeah the guy just coincidentally hung out with MS-13 gangbangers and the tat just looked like an MS-13 tat by happenstance.
shoeonfoot
13m ago
They do not speak for the "woke right" (which itself is just a snarl term).
What is your preferred term to describe the type of people that James Lindsay characterizes as "woke right"? I don't like the term either, but there is a generally identifiable group of people who @TheAntipopulist labelled "racialist Right" who are pretty much the same people Lindsay labels "woke right".
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
14m ago
So your answer to the question of how White Americans can compete with semi-slave illegal workers is
-
Go ask around a Waffle House
-
Look around on Craigslist for illegal housing
-
(Ignore remittance payments)
-
(Ignore cultural and early life influences involving manual labor, eg that some of these Hondurans have been doing it since 12)
-
(Ignore crucial cultural factors related to social wellbeing like finding a wife)
quiet_NaN
16m ago
Relevant mod comment. If you want to say "these are the views of the Trump administration", then say "these are the views of the Trump administration".
Also, what do you mean by the adjective "racialist"? WN defines it as:
A believer or advocate of racialism, the ideology of racial nationalism.
(UK, dated) A racist.
Is "online racialist Right" an endonym? Who are these people? Do they want a white ethnostate in the US? Are they HBD-believers who want to restrict immigration based on what they see as genetic group differences? Did you just want to call them straightforward racist, but knew that this would generate a backslash, so you picked a rare word which strongly implies racism without saying the r-word outright?
On the object level, I think I share most of your opinions about Trump's immigration policy, which I detest. But I do not think you are doing a good job of accurately representing the beliefs of the Right, which is a prerequisite to honestly criticizing them.
I don't think that the Right has a great answer to what will happen to the fruit prices once the migrants who are willing to pick them in shitty conditions for low wages because they can feed their family in their country of origin with these wages are all deported. I think that a significant fraction of the MAGA base imagine that Trump, being a stable genius deal-maker, will simply pull the US into a golden age of prosperity and nobody will worry about fruit prices. The more realistic Trump voters might concede that prices of fruits might skyrocket if the pickers are US citizens earning a competitive wage, but simply see this as a price worth paying to kick the illegal immigrants out. Your framing which includes White druggies kicking their habit getting of their asses and start to pick fruits seems to me to be a minority viewpoint on the Right, to put it charitably.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
18m ago
Then consider Japan, which only employs 50k migrants in its agricultural and forestry sector.
People who have the option to be laborers in cities will prefer that to being agricultural laborers
And if there is an absence of agricultural workers, the wages for agriculture go up, meaning the conditions become as desirable as WWOOFing, meaning people return to work in agriculture.
shoeonfoot
19m ago
The arbitrary filtering of one of the largest religious groups is silly.
Why? You're the one who filtered down to "college-educated White males" after Turok claimed that high-income whites are moving away from the Republicans, and I'm pointing out that college-educated white men are not only almost evenly split between D and R, but also that more granular data shows divisions among white men based on religious affiliation + level of education, which is relevant for determining how white men are going to vote in the future.
I'm not denying that women are more likely to be leftist in the present era (not historically), but you were wrong when you said women shifted "a lot" towards Harris.
The average has no idea that the country plans to import so many Indians. The average voter has no idea about the statistics related to yearly immigration, like, at all.
I have found that the same people who argue that the United States have been transformed demographically to the point that even small towns are no longer recognizable also say that Americans are ignorant about the scope of immigration.
I don't buy that. I think anyone with a pair of eyes and ears is aware that the U.S. is more linguistically, religiously, ethnically, and racially diverse than it has ever been. So yeah, the Gallop poll and every other immigration-related poll is asking people about "vibes", and the "vibes" are that the average voter is cool with the continuing diversification of America.
The average has no idea that the country plans to import so many Indians.
Sure, but this probably doesn't help your argument because the average person likely overestimates how many Indians there:
When people’s average perceptions of group sizes are compared to actual population estimates, an intriguing pattern emerges: Americans tend to vastly overestimate the size of minority groups. This holds for sexual minorities, including the proportion of gays and lesbians (estimate: 30%, true: 3%), bisexuals (estimate: 29%, true: 4%), and people who are transgender (estimate: 21%, true: 0.6%).
It also applies to religious minorities, such as Muslim Americans (estimate: 27%, true: 1%) and Jewish Americans (estimate: 30%, true: 2%). And we find the same sorts of overestimates for racial and ethnic minorities, such as Native Americans (estimate: 27%, true: 1%), Asian Americans (estimate: 29%, true: 6%), and Black Americans (estimate: 41%, true: 12%).
White Americans probably think there are way more Indians than there are and they're still going to elect Vivek Ramaswamy as the next governor of Ohio.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
22m ago
Not only would Liz Cheney not agree, Elon Musk wouldn't either, so I don't believe this.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
23m ago
And the Japanese? How about the Japanese in the 80s?
Dean
Flairless
28m ago
She's a member of the United States Cabinet!
Which is a collection of individuals with distinct and often contrasting opinions, not a hive mind, or an avatar summoned from the collective unconscious of parts of the electorate.
hydroacetylene
28m ago
Yes, you can charm white liberal arts major women into doing farming for a few months at a time, and there will always be guys showing up to agglomerations of naive and easy women. But if hippie communes were able to compete with migrant worker driven industrial agriculture they'd be doing it; there's certainly enough market for organic goods.
celluloid_dream
30m ago
Ok, Samurai Champloo and Bebop, I get. These are essentially, perfect YA comfort food cartoons, oozing with character, atmosphere, unique soundtrack, etc. etc. They are perfect for non-anime watchers because they're crossover western-style stories done up in anime styling.
But Elfen Lied? Are we thinking of the same show? The one with the body horror? The creepy "magical" girls, the harem protagonist, etc.? I don't understand how that's even in the same category. I would recommend someone looking for "anime for non-anime watchers" never, ever, ever watch that. It will just reinforce every bad stereotype about the genre while having a perfectly "meh" plot.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
30m ago
Whether "woke right" exists or doesn't, "The Right" surely does, and this US administration does rather effectively speak for the Right in the American context.
hydroacetylene
35m ago
Loaning money to the underclass/drug users is almost always a bad decision on the individual level, but there's plenty of legitimate businesses which make it their business model- payday loans, online gambling, etc. That's basically what's fueling doordash. It's probably a net advantage for a drug dealer.
hydroacetylene
39m ago
Some of this is mental illness from childhood trauma, often combined with main character syndrome. I once knew a woman who was sobbing because her boyfriend's family didn't like her- ok, reasonable enough, except the family in this case was his wife and teenaged daughter that she'd insisted on meeting. Poor theory of mind, narcissism, some garden variety mental illness...
But also, uh, they're looking for guys like their dads, who probably acted like that, because that's their model for how men are. She's probably never gotten to know an upstanding family man. She may not know they exist. I admit to having a poor theory of mind for why underclass women don't just avoid men(goodness knows they don't get much out of it). But empirically the instinct to stick close to a man is stronger.
ABigGuy4U
54m ago
It’s an undercut where the longer hair on the top is also permed. It’s not so much the haircut itself that annoys me as the insane conformity of it. Every zoomer male I have ever seen has had the exact same haircut. There have been trendy youth haircuts in the past but not like this.
hydroacetylene
54m ago
The point was you can get significantly below market(and priced to match) housing really easily. You don't need to be plugged into the wetback network, and roustabouts are not known for their robust network building anyways. Go ask around at waffle house. Look on craigslist. The white trash underclass lives in very similar conditions, after all. Non underclass whites don't do this, but that's because they don't want to.
There's this motte conceit that you can't live like the other half. Yeah, you can, and pretty easily too.
hydroacetylene
58m ago
China has many people who are far more desperate than America for similar reasons to Mexico(it's a middle income country with high income inequality), and also doesn't have full freedom of movement. People who have the option to be laborers in cities will prefer that to being agricultural laborers.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
59m ago
A cabinet secretary does in fact speak for the administration within their area of responsibility. They do not speak for the "woke right" (which itself is just a snarl term). That's like saying something Eric Adams says should be attributed to the progressive left (or to the Democratic Socialists of America, for a concrete group).
faceh
1hr ago
It was! Which may have been why people expected him to subvert it.
Yudkowsky said he thought it was blatantly obvious as soon as we found out that, e.g. Quirrell and Voldemort (by Quirrel's own admission!) were trained in the same martial arts dojo by the same teacher.
But I think many people (myself included, I guess) were expecting some kind of clever double-twist to be revealed later.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1hr ago
Wouldn't one expect a cabinet secretary to normally speak, at least to some degree, with the voice and the authority of the President? Different in that way from legislators (or someone lower in the departmental totem pole, like Brinton).
faceh
1hr ago
This thread is full of people saying that tattoos aren't attractive.
Not quite.
Its more that they're correlated with low social status in the larger scheme. This doesn't mean they isn't a local maxima where they make someone more attractive than they would otherwise be, even if it also makes them vastly less attractive to a certain segment of the population.
In fact, I've said it straight up that the 'cheat code' to getting more women interested in you is get tattoos, get subversive piercings and buy a motorcycle. This can lead to other negative effects, but the tradeoffs may be worth it! At least in the short term.
There's a dearth of people who hold positions of true wealth power who have tattoos, though. Thus, they remain a reliable class signifier.
When something is largely a lower-class phenomenon, just like enjoying MMA or light beer, the fact that a few upper class folks indulge doesn't really prove otherwise.
yet every cop and every Navy SEAL and every BJJ champ and every boxer I know has at least one tattoo visible in short sleeves.
Yes, which might explain why people who AREN'T tough want to mimic a signal that makes them seem tough, whether they are or are not. That's common enough in nature.
And if they do so, that degrades the strength of the signal. And makes counter-signalling more viable. 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?
I dunno, it reads like a social trend like any other. I lived through the era of tramp stamps, and those faded from popularity. I've seen dozens of fashion trends come and go. The only trick with tattoos is they're more costly to alter or remove.
Also, add in that there is researching indicating they can lead to health issues.
You’re missing the entire substance of the argument, which is that the reason the QoL of agriculture is too low for natives is because of the migrants. If you deport them all, ag needs workers, ag must increase QoL, it looks more like WOOFing which white people love doing.
If I could immediately hire foreign English-speakers as paralegals, importing them in and keeping them in cramp accommodations and ensure they are afraid of leaving the job because finding work as an illegal is tricky, the paralegal market in America would implode. There would be no American paralegals left. So the American paralegal cannot compete with the migrant worker driven paralegal industry.
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