If only we could help people to connect, let's say, the complete hypocrisy of the way the upper crust in Martha's Vineyard "welcomed" the illegals and the complete lawlessness of allowing 730k illegals to enter our country since October.
I'm still having a hard time with that amongst my liberal friends/colleagues.
If only we could help people to connect, let's say, the complete hypocrisy of the way the upper crust in Martha's Vineyard "welcomed" the illegals and the complete lawlessness of allowing 730k illegals to enter our country since October.
I'm still having a hard time with that amongst my liberal friends/colleagues.
I always suggest a sponsorship program whereby open-borders people take in 5 illegal immigrants and are responsible for their housing, food, clothing, education, and healthcare, and are also liable for any crimes they might commit. People balk at that for some reason.
I suggested something like that to a psychiatrist my wife knows from her earlier career, when we attended a fancy function over a decade ago.
"So when you sign off on a pedophile being safe to release into society, I think he should go live with the one signing him out for a year first."
I honestly thought he'd try to jump me then and there, he was that outraged over me "Making a mockery of the confidence people should have in his profession" (in swedish the "should" would be an imperative, mind).
They used to force butchers and bakers eat their own product in olden days, whenver there was doubt about the product. We need to bring that kind of rules, laws and thinking back I think.
OK, but what do you say to those of us who support open borders in libertarian, not leftist, terms? That is, what about the argument that Adam Smith's "invisible hand" or Friedrich Hayek's "spontaneous order" can be trusted to guide the voluntary movement of human beings across borders as well as the voluntary acts of buyers and sellers in a free market?
Nobody can know how many is too many, just as nobody can know better than a free market how to distribute resources. The Smithian-Hayekian argument is essentially a call for intellectual humility on that point, and a call for trust in the self-regulation of complex systems. Republicans in the Reagan era were better at holding to that small-government principle on the subject of immigration than Republicans in the Trump era are.
Mass-migration via open borders means extinction and genocide for peoples like mine.
There are about 8 500 000 swedes on planet Earth.
There are hundreds of millions of arabs. There's over one and a half billion of black africans.
Guess what free movement does to smaller people letting more proliferate groups into their territory.
Your Smiths and Hayeks didn't talk about race and culture; all their arguments apply solely to "white" cultures and peoples of the time of writing, which is why they cannot be applied universally. You cannot discount race/kultur.
I don't think you mean that your libertarian principles trumps our right to our ancestral territory, culture and very lives.
the problem with free migration is that's it's free.
It should cost a lot to enter a decent country!
They trillions spent in historical infrastructure.
The enormous social wealth from a high trust reciprocal culture.
Not costing for these is an effective subsidy and that's collected by the establishment via increased rents and lower wage bill. Which is why stopping the obvious harm of mass low quality migrants is much harder than it should be.
Are we talking about not vetting people who cross into our country? That they should be able to come and go without us knowing who they are?
We're a sovereign nation and get to decide who comes in. If there's a check in place, then I'm leaning your way. I'd also want us to be able to set limits on how many come in. We, as a sovereign nation, get to decide how many is too many.
If I understand correctly, passports were not even a thing until as recently as the First World War. If people freely crossed borders until that recently, why shouldn't they do so now?
As for "How many is too many?", please see my reply to Ryan Gardner when he asked the same question.
People didn't move freely across border pre WW1. In most places you actually needed internal passports and/or visible means of support, letters of recommendation, and so on to be allowed to leave in the first place, let alone be allowed to settle in a new region or nation.
Identity-papers of some kind was most definitely a "thing" back then. Check up on Ellis Island procedures for europeans coming to the US - the vetting there would be called extreme today, and everyone who came there had been pre-vetted by the shipping company transporting them across the Atlantic.
Oh the sponsor should also top up the migrants tax to an average wage as low wages harm productivity and boost rents. So those negatives also need to be priced into the migrant costs.
Ohhhh yes! That one I've used when talking about prison, early release and such.
"How many times do I get to steal your car?" was the version I used.
My colleagues went perfectly rabid at the very idea that you should talk about crime as a real thing affecting a real person in a real way, not just an abstracted far-away political issue decided on principles.
Hence the time-tested adage that a liberal is simply a conservative who hasn't yet been mugged. The Leftoids don't care about the catastrophic rise is crime, even violent crime, so long as the victims are white and not anyone they know or are related to. Crime being nature's way of offsetting all those decades of White Privilege and all.
Consider how many of the "defunders" who have recently been carjacked and are now suddenly calling for more police. "But it happened to *me*!!!!"
Jesus. Imagine a crazed White person screaming "I want all Black people dead", then stabbing two random Black teens? It would be the summer of St. George all over again.
'"Any time you have incidents in these high-profile locations it sends the feeling of people don't feel safe and that's why we have to zero in and make the arrest as soon as possible and make sure we get those repeated offenders off our streets," Adams said.'
Right. Make an arrest as soon a possible, just so my bro' Alvin can put him back on the street in an hour.
Maybe the Biff Tannen-method could get through? Hell-ooo! McFly? Anybody home?
There's a wonderful scene in Starship Troopers (the book) where Rico is asked "how many" in the context of POWs. How many POWs in concentration camps is one too many?
Acknowledging a reality you don't want to be true creates a feeling of you having a responsibility to try and fix it; if you also feel yourself unable to affect things even in your own life, you will instead of trying to fix things opt for rationalisation and symbolic action (magical thinking) like wearing cloth masks to protect against an airborne virus.
Voting for someone who reinforces your personal narrative about things and your rationalisations helps you defer the sense of responsibility/guilt onto others.
"Ask not what you yourself can actually do about something: demand someone else does it for you" to make a travesty of the well-known phrase.
I do, and have, taken personal responsibility to try to change things, and have done so for quite a long time. It's taught me that most people are not interested in change or even hearing things that might challenge their beliefs.
I believe you are reading too much into why we vote. Are you suggesting I run for office to assuage my guilt? I'm not sure how you get from voting to rationalizing ones own guilt.
No, I was unclear - what I wrote is meant as a general answer (on of several possible factors) as to why people vote the way they do.
It's the same problem here: people complain about X, then they vote for the guys who not only cause X but who keeps doing it.
"...most people are not interested in change or even hearing things that might challenge their beliefs." Yes, and I share that experience. It is at the core of the problems we're having all throughout the western nations.
Voting, consciously, is taking responsibility in some small way for what gets decided and acted upon - from piddling stuff to the huge issues. It also creates the dual feeling of helplessness and guilt/anger at feeling impotent that needs be assuaged - f.e. by voting for someone you logically shouldn't vote for if it was viewed as a matter of concrete issues and recorded fact, not abstract principles and values espoused via posturing.
I absolutely didn't mean you - Bob - didn't/doesn't take any responsibility.
A friend at work was going on about Trump's "banning Muslims" back in the day. "Why are y'all afraid of women and children?" I said, "We could relocate them to Laurel, Maryland, where you live." "Wait a minute..." and he abruptly ended the convo.
No. I just don't have a choice. Some are family as well.
I'm still close enough with a few of my friends in college to give them shit. But I've also lost several friends during covid. They could not handle the truth:
Anyone who has dared to question the official narratives has lost friends and family recently. Consider it a favor from them to you to no longer be burdening you with their fantasy worldview. Life is too short and too precious to be wasted arguing with Kool Aid drinkers.
Yeah. I hear you.
If only we could help people to connect, let's say, the complete hypocrisy of the way the upper crust in Martha's Vineyard "welcomed" the illegals and the complete lawlessness of allowing 730k illegals to enter our country since October.
I'm still having a hard time with that amongst my liberal friends/colleagues.
Asking: "So how many of them are you willing to put up and pay for?" really drives it home.
Kills the mood, of course. Will get you hateful glares and baleful stares.
I always suggest a sponsorship program whereby open-borders people take in 5 illegal immigrants and are responsible for their housing, food, clothing, education, and healthcare, and are also liable for any crimes they might commit. People balk at that for some reason.
I suggested something like that to a psychiatrist my wife knows from her earlier career, when we attended a fancy function over a decade ago.
"So when you sign off on a pedophile being safe to release into society, I think he should go live with the one signing him out for a year first."
I honestly thought he'd try to jump me then and there, he was that outraged over me "Making a mockery of the confidence people should have in his profession" (in swedish the "should" would be an imperative, mind).
They used to force butchers and bakers eat their own product in olden days, whenver there was doubt about the product. We need to bring that kind of rules, laws and thinking back I think.
A Traditional Chinese Medicine friend of mine told me that, back in the day in China, you didn't pay the doctor UNLESS you got well.
Exactly.
You should pay for medicine via an escrow account.
only if you're alive in 5 years the pharma company gets your money.
What if you are very sick from big pharma's drugs but not dead?
https://baldmichael.substack.com/p/the-big-pharma-health-business-model
I avoid big pharma like the plague.
Similarly Judges should know that bail hostels and inmates released from prison should be housed near their families.
Brilliant
Exactly
OK, but what do you say to those of us who support open borders in libertarian, not leftist, terms? That is, what about the argument that Adam Smith's "invisible hand" or Friedrich Hayek's "spontaneous order" can be trusted to guide the voluntary movement of human beings across borders as well as the voluntary acts of buyers and sellers in a free market?
How many is too many?
I'm all about libertarian ideals, but not at the expense of the sovereignty of We The People.
Nobody can know how many is too many, just as nobody can know better than a free market how to distribute resources. The Smithian-Hayekian argument is essentially a call for intellectual humility on that point, and a call for trust in the self-regulation of complex systems. Republicans in the Reagan era were better at holding to that small-government principle on the subject of immigration than Republicans in the Trump era are.
Mass-migration via open borders means extinction and genocide for peoples like mine.
There are about 8 500 000 swedes on planet Earth.
There are hundreds of millions of arabs. There's over one and a half billion of black africans.
Guess what free movement does to smaller people letting more proliferate groups into their territory.
Your Smiths and Hayeks didn't talk about race and culture; all their arguments apply solely to "white" cultures and peoples of the time of writing, which is why they cannot be applied universally. You cannot discount race/kultur.
I don't think you mean that your libertarian principles trumps our right to our ancestral territory, culture and very lives.
the problem with free migration is that's it's free.
It should cost a lot to enter a decent country!
They trillions spent in historical infrastructure.
The enormous social wealth from a high trust reciprocal culture.
Not costing for these is an effective subsidy and that's collected by the establishment via increased rents and lower wage bill. Which is why stopping the obvious harm of mass low quality migrants is much harder than it should be.
"our" politicians are not ours.
Are we talking about not vetting people who cross into our country? That they should be able to come and go without us knowing who they are?
We're a sovereign nation and get to decide who comes in. If there's a check in place, then I'm leaning your way. I'd also want us to be able to set limits on how many come in. We, as a sovereign nation, get to decide how many is too many.
If I understand correctly, passports were not even a thing until as recently as the First World War. If people freely crossed borders until that recently, why shouldn't they do so now?
As for "How many is too many?", please see my reply to Ryan Gardner when he asked the same question.
People didn't move freely across border pre WW1. In most places you actually needed internal passports and/or visible means of support, letters of recommendation, and so on to be allowed to leave in the first place, let alone be allowed to settle in a new region or nation.
Identity-papers of some kind was most definitely a "thing" back then. Check up on Ellis Island procedures for europeans coming to the US - the vetting there would be called extreme today, and everyone who came there had been pre-vetted by the shipping company transporting them across the Atlantic.
Adam Smith was a "Georgist/GeoLibertarian" and as such would tax the land-title and not incomes.
This would tend to up the price of migration leading to less migration.
He was also a plagiarist who stole the pin factory anecdote from Persian medieval writers.
Oh the sponsor should also top up the migrants tax to an average wage as low wages harm productivity and boost rents. So those negatives also need to be priced into the migrant costs.
How many is too many? works as well
Ohhhh yes! That one I've used when talking about prison, early release and such.
"How many times do I get to steal your car?" was the version I used.
My colleagues went perfectly rabid at the very idea that you should talk about crime as a real thing affecting a real person in a real way, not just an abstracted far-away political issue decided on principles.
Hence the time-tested adage that a liberal is simply a conservative who hasn't yet been mugged. The Leftoids don't care about the catastrophic rise is crime, even violent crime, so long as the victims are white and not anyone they know or are related to. Crime being nature's way of offsetting all those decades of White Privilege and all.
Consider how many of the "defunders" who have recently been carjacked and are now suddenly calling for more police. "But it happened to *me*!!!!"
Case in point:
https://www.foxnews.com/us/two-teenage-girls-stabbed-inside-grand-central-christmas-man-allegedly-wanted-white-people-dead
Jesus. Imagine a crazed White person screaming "I want all Black people dead", then stabbing two random Black teens? It would be the summer of St. George all over again.
'"Any time you have incidents in these high-profile locations it sends the feeling of people don't feel safe and that's why we have to zero in and make the arrest as soon as possible and make sure we get those repeated offenders off our streets," Adams said.'
Right. Make an arrest as soon a possible, just so my bro' Alvin can put him back on the street in an hour.
bro' Alvin!
Thx for that
And like the Energizer Bunny, he just keeps going.
https://nypost.com/2023/12/28/metro/accused-grand-central-stabber-slashes-fellow-inmate-at-rikers-island-police-sources/
edit: I thought they closed Rikers?
BLANK STARE...
Maybe the Biff Tannen-method could get through? Hell-ooo! McFly? Anybody home?
There's a wonderful scene in Starship Troopers (the book) where Rico is asked "how many" in the context of POWs. How many POWs in concentration camps is one too many?
Lol. I like
What I don't get is that if this is true - people getting dsick of the woke - then why don't recent election results reflect this?
I know. If I wasn't intentional about not letting it happen, apathy can creep in.
I've said it a lot, but it is crazy how the obvious has become illusory to these people
Yup. We've become a nation of mediocrity and mindless zombies. I remain less optimistic than el gato. Here's to me being wrong and he right!!!
Cheers Bob!
I have youngish children so I'm going to give it the college try.
I don't want my kids to grow up and face this crap as adults.
I feel like if there's no urgency that could easily happen.
Acknowledging a reality you don't want to be true creates a feeling of you having a responsibility to try and fix it; if you also feel yourself unable to affect things even in your own life, you will instead of trying to fix things opt for rationalisation and symbolic action (magical thinking) like wearing cloth masks to protect against an airborne virus.
Voting for someone who reinforces your personal narrative about things and your rationalisations helps you defer the sense of responsibility/guilt onto others.
"Ask not what you yourself can actually do about something: demand someone else does it for you" to make a travesty of the well-known phrase.
I do, and have, taken personal responsibility to try to change things, and have done so for quite a long time. It's taught me that most people are not interested in change or even hearing things that might challenge their beliefs.
I believe you are reading too much into why we vote. Are you suggesting I run for office to assuage my guilt? I'm not sure how you get from voting to rationalizing ones own guilt.
No, I was unclear - what I wrote is meant as a general answer (on of several possible factors) as to why people vote the way they do.
It's the same problem here: people complain about X, then they vote for the guys who not only cause X but who keeps doing it.
"...most people are not interested in change or even hearing things that might challenge their beliefs." Yes, and I share that experience. It is at the core of the problems we're having all throughout the western nations.
Voting, consciously, is taking responsibility in some small way for what gets decided and acted upon - from piddling stuff to the huge issues. It also creates the dual feeling of helplessness and guilt/anger at feeling impotent that needs be assuaged - f.e. by voting for someone you logically shouldn't vote for if it was viewed as a matter of concrete issues and recorded fact, not abstract principles and values espoused via posturing.
I absolutely didn't mean you - Bob - didn't/doesn't take any responsibility.
A friend at work was going on about Trump's "banning Muslims" back in the day. "Why are y'all afraid of women and children?" I said, "We could relocate them to Laurel, Maryland, where you live." "Wait a minute..." and he abruptly ended the convo.
He probably walked away in self-righteous indignation.
That's been my experience in similar situations
Ryan G, you dare speak of these things with the indoctrinated, wow! I am silent, too cowardly or more likely tired.
No. I just don't have a choice. Some are family as well.
I'm still close enough with a few of my friends in college to give them shit. But I've also lost several friends during covid. They could not handle the truth:
That what happened was WRONG.
oh well
Anyone who has dared to question the official narratives has lost friends and family recently. Consider it a favor from them to you to no longer be burdening you with their fantasy worldview. Life is too short and too precious to be wasted arguing with Kool Aid drinkers.
Exactly!
Agree. Burdened loosed