It never fails. If I write something about immigration or charity or anything related to helping someone else and dissent from the general leftists chorus of “We must have more government help”and “government must distribute the wealth” I’m held to be mean, evil, selfish, and just about the worst person in the world.
Part of this is because the same as calling anything that dissents from leftist belief “racist” (even if they have to believe they can read minds to justify it) they’ve been taught to think there’s only one way to care for your fellow man, and that’s to equalize everyone’s wealth, to divest those who have more and give to those who have less, preferably with the power of law behind it.
The problem is that this is not how the world works. You know the old saw, give a man a fish and he’ll have a meal, teach a man to fish and he’ll have food for the rest of his life.
It ignores the fact that if you give a man a fish everyday, not only will he never learn to fish, he’ll come to resent you for giving him a fish. He might even come to believe he’s incapable of learning to fish, and that you can only fish because of some invisible “privilege” that allows you to learn that stuff. At the same time you will believe that he’s inferior to you, unable to make his own decisions, and that you must decide and set everything for him or he’ll die. You might not admit it, ever, but you’ll come to believe that he’s a burden. Subconsciously you’ll hate being beholden to him. You’ll come up with all sorts of schemes, from aborting his children to enabling his drug addiction to facilitating his euthanasia just to be rid of the intolerable burden. And it’s no surprise because your “charity” is increasingly met with resentment, envy and outright anger.
Why? Well, because that’s the way humans work. The human being was born to strive. Being handed things just makes them both dependent and resentful of that dependence. This paradise that the very well fed and clothed imagine, where the government just magically dispenses everything everyone might want is no such thing. If it were possible to implement it without stealing this stuff from others (it’s not. The government produces nothing.) it would make humanity extinct in two generations. It would also create the crime wave to end all crime waves.
We clever monkeys don’t like stuff handed to us. We like to improve it, to work at it, to make it better. When it becomes impossible, we’re reduced to the level of pets, and humans don’t do well with being pets. No, it’s not even like the perfect childhood, in which you’re handed all you need. First of all no one had that perfect a childhood, and even the best parents don’t always know what you need (let alone want.) Second, childhood is a time of growing and learning, sometimes quite painful learning, as growing up is a painful process of leaving behind habits and cherished modes of life. Third, even children in happy families chomp at the bit to leave and be adults. It’s just the way we’re built.
Removing someone’s reason to strive is not a charity.
No, I don’t believe we should let people in occasional and terrible binds go unhelped. About 1/3 of our income has always gone out, often not to recognized charities, but just to a friend who was temporarily ill, going through a nasty divorce (in that case you need to be a very close friend indeed, as I try not to get in the middle of those) or has had some disaster befall them that would mean destruction should they have no help.
But note the “temporary help for unforeseen circumstances.” I’ve learned, and dearly too, that just helping every time and letting the person know the help will be there, not so much a safety net but a hammock, will ruin not just your friendship, but the person as well.
I don’t know and cannot speak to our welfare system, but recently a close friend explained to me how difficult the system is to leave once you’re in it, and that once you leave and are tentatively standing on your own they will bill you. I’m not sure what they bill you for as I had no time to ask, but what she had to go through to STOP receiving assistance was mind boggling. And while receiving assistance there’s all sorts of things you can’t do. Like work over a certain time, because they’ll cut your benefits by more than you’re making, etc. That’s not even a hammock. That’s a spider web that catches the unwary and will never let them fly free.
Which brings us to immigration. Do let’s talk about immigration.
First of all this is not a matter of “I got mine” as some idiot tried to say. I don’t precisely know what he thinks I got except the privilege to strive to be the best American I can, but that’s fine. Let’s discuss this.
I’m sick and tired of hearing the left whine that we can’t close our doors to the needy of the world.
Now, America has a well deserved reputation for extreme generosity, but does that generosity involve opening our doors to all the needy in the world?
Let’s imagine it does. Let’s imagine we put out a call that if you’re in any sort of distress or need you should come to America.
You could say we did that at various times, the latest one being under president Obama, when leaflets detailing the welfare benefits to be received in the US (for the asking) were distributed in Mexico and probably countries South of that.
Whenever we did that, our follow through was — at best — spotty.
Someone on Facebook was nattering on about how 12 million came through Ellis Island and were Americans the next day.
Part of this is something I’m used to. Most Americans who never dealt with immigration have clue zero how this works. I suspect most leftists agitating for voting rights for non-citizens don’t understand they’re NOT citizens or that there is a difference.
Except for those who walked into the country and got recruited into the Union armies during the civil war, or perhaps other irregular/brief periods, no one has ever walked onto American soil and become American.
What you become instead is a permanent resident, entitled to live here and PERHAPS to work. In my day I got permission to live here a year before I had permission to work, (my case being different, since I married a citizen. I had to apply separately for permission to work.)
And I no longer remember how long I had to wait to even apply for citizenship. I think it was three years, but I waited five, because I wanted to be sure.
You see, citizenship, belonging in a country is not merely a matter of being in the country. Every country has arrangements for “foreigners living among us.” And some which are very blood-based can give you only second-class citizenship the equivalent of “guy who wants to be of us and is the closest he can be.”
In the US citizenship is becoming an American. It is subscribing to the founding principles and taking on the project of living ever closer to them. It is a matter of “Your people shall be my people. Wherever thou goest, I shall go.” So I took as long as I needed to be sure. I took as long as I needed to acculturate.
Acculturation isn’t an easy process. I’ve mentioned to you guys that it hurts and feels like going insane. It unmoors the pinnings of your personality, some of which you weren’t aware of, before you had to pull them off by the roots. No one who has not transitioned between cultures knows how powerful and ingrained culture is. Race means nothing. Culture means everything. And changing cultures is really difficult, even for an isolated individual. We know it’s possible — ish — for a family, but it takes longer. If you immigrate as a family, it’s like traveling as a group. You’re insulated from what’s really going on around you. You interpret everything through the filter of your culture of origin. Even if you’re trying to fit-in, it’s hard and you’ll pass weird things on to your kids and grandkids. The grandkids, usually, are integrated in the receiving culture. Bigger groups than that? Forget about it. Escaping that insular culture will be as hard as immigrating all over again.
Two other things: I found this out when I was an exchange student: HUMANS ARE TRIBAL. Humans are tribal to an extent we like to disguise and forget. But you can see it if you take a group of high school students and drop them into a NYC university campus with hundreds of people from all over the world.
First, people cling together with the group they came in with. That’s a given. But even if you have two groups from the same country, that never met/are from different areas of the country, they’ll cling together. And if forced to extend they’ll go — bizarrely and fascinatingly — by “historical relationship” or “cultural connection” sometimes going back centuries. So Portuguese will agglutinate to Brazilians first, and people from the former colonies in Africa next. After that, Spaniards or Spanish speakers. Failing those, Italians and Greeks. In desperation, Arabs. And each of these groups, as it forms, creates a “barrier” to the outside. I found to my shock that among exchange students who had undergone a strenuous process to get here at all, there was a sudden group imperative to look down on Americans and refuse to do things “the American way.” (BTW this disgusted me so much my best friends were English and Japanese.)
Now, let’s go to that imaginary world where we not only invite the dispossessed of the world in, but actually open our doors to them (more on that later.) Let’s forget the “overpopulation” idiocy. There’s plenty of room. Anyone who’s driven through Wyoming, as we have recently, will tell you that. Let them all in. As in the early twentieth century when entire Italian villages immigrated, what do you think will happen?
Well… mostly they’ll cling together. And maybe deal with close-ish cultures. Certainly not with Americans, against whom a barrier must be formed, because a) they’re strangers. b) we’re in their land and they might resent it. (Even if they don’t.)
So, it would be the colonization of America by some of the most dysfunctional elements of the most dysfunctional cultures in the world. We’ve done that experiment before. To do it now en masse and indiscriminately would achieve nothing, except the dissolution of America into a bunch of tiny, warring enclaves, incapable of self government and no better off than they were in their own countries.
But Sarah, you’ll say, we did that before. In the beginning of the 20th century, we took in masses of people — as you said — entire villages from Italy and Ireland. And those people are now Americans.
Yes, those people are now Americans. MOST of them. But please note, even that was not mass immigration from ALL THE WORLD by all the dispossessed.
First travel was more expensive, more arduous and tended to be one way. Second, there was a selection at the border, and many were turned back. Third… It was the beginning of the 20th century and our tech was different. There was work — a lot of it — for people who knew neither the language nor any particular trade. The push on the mass-production phase of the industrial revolution required a lot of warm bodies and willingness to work. That was it.
So all those multitudes that came in could find work. And though they initially formed profoundly segregated enclaves that adhered to the rules of the “home country” and despised or suspected everything American, eventually the ranks broke. They were right here, in the middle of the US, at a time when the place was hopping with opportunities for the unschooled. It was almost impossible to prevent the young ones from moving away to find a job elsewhere. And when they did well it filtered back home. Even then it took probably three to four generations. And to find out how bad it was initially read police reports of the time. It wasn’t all prejudice. (Though a lot of it was.) People really brought in their most dysfunctional habits. And had to acculturate before they became Americans. Which was difficult at that rate of immigration.
Imagine how much more difficult it would be if we now brought in double our population, and form the most wretched places of the Earth.
On top of which, consider two things:
First, we live in a high tech age. The left, who worries obsessively that some Americans might be too stupid to integrate in the new age (they’re wrong. We’re all clever monkeys. let them have a chance) and therefore foresees welfare and make work for them, at the same time wants to import people from cultures barely above the stone age, on the basis that “they need it.”
Look, yes, we have a lot of illiterate third world illegal immigrants working construction and other trades. But most of them work under the table, and only because they’re very cheap. I’m sure there’s skilled workers coming here, but let’s face it, skilled workers do pretty well in their own countries. There is a reason we joke about “Manuel labor.” It adds up to “You get what you pay for.”
I’m not saying they’re not willing. I’m not saying a lot of them aren’t hard workers. I do happen to know, because of where my friends work, that we’re getting any number of entitled “racist America despoiled my people and owes me” instant welfare cases. However, yes, we’re also getting people who want to work.
The question is: can they work? Most of the trades they might be trained for are unionized, and probably won’t recognize foreign credentials. Stuff like making and selling food is regulated till your head hurts. Anything else?
Well, I was trained in languages, but the US has a lot less call for translation. I had a teaching certificate, but the teacher’s union doesn’t want competition from foreigners, so I wasn’t even allowed to take the certification test, unless I went back to college (and no, I didn’t want it that badly.) I did some scientific translation, but there wasn’t enough of it. S I was standing outside the parking lot of a home depot, and editors drove by saying “I need someone to write novels”. I jumped in the back of the truck, and…
Seriously. Can we be serious for a moment? Yes, we import skilled workers. Whether we should it’s something else again, and some companies are singularly evil in the management of such work-visa workers.
That’s a separate argument from giving asylum to everyone who is poor and dispossessed and struggling. Most of those people, like 99% of them are not trained for anything. A vast majority of them knows no English and might be illiterate even in their native language.
Do you see big public works, big factories requiring line work, any other type of work that requires only willingness and a pair of hands? No? Neither do I. So we’re letting them in, for what? To become instant charity cases in our own land?
Go up to that metaphor of the man and the fish. We import vast numbers of foreigners, which, being humans are tribal and will cling together, reflexively protect the culture of origin, and run us down. On top of that we make them recipients of our charity, unable to fend for themselves. Yeah, I don’t see HOW they could be anything but resentful.
But, you’ll say, their kids could integrate.
Sure. Theoretically. Just like a girl from Portugal could come over in her twenties and so thoroughly immerse herself in English she could write fiction for Native speakers.
Do you think — as the idiot who periodically tries to break into comments thinks — that’s so common as to be a “stereotype”? Or do you think one needs to be fairly broken to begin with to undergo that cultural change? Because from the inside here, I can tell you it’s not normal.
So let’s talk generational integration: the bigger the enclave, and the more resentful, the more the children will be raised to HYPER identify with the country of origin. Look, any linguist can back me up on this: you find three cities from an unknown culture. How do you know which is the mother and which the colonies? The colonies are MORE conservative as to language and tradition than the mother land. It’s that defensive “clinging to” that tribal humans do. And large migration groups are FUNCTIONALLY colonies, whether their aim is to get citizenship in the new land or not.
So each successive generation, raised in the enclave, will have a harder time leaving to join the main culture.
And then there is the main culture. Americans aren’t prejudiced. That’s great. It’s also recent. Americans were always prejudiced in various degrees of anyone who stuck out. Even relatively recent immigrants, once they acculturated would look with suspicion on immigrants and people who “talked funny.” That’s human.
However, we’ve had that beat out of us. The left has extended racism to anything that sticks out. And because the US culture, truly, disapproves of racism, it has gone by degrees to hyper approving of the strange and the foreign.
Me, with my accent I’m 99% more likely — even in semi-rural environments — to be told that the place I came from must be wonderful, and what can we teach the US than to be told to go back where I came from. And that’s a problem.
Why is it a problem?
Oh, not for me personally. But it’s a problem for integration.
One of the great mechanisms of cultural integration and the reason those little Italys eventually opened to the world is public schooling. People were told they would speak English, they were taught American history unapologetically, ad they were left with the decided impression that if they didn’t fit in they should fuck off.
As the mother of half-Portuguese kids going through public schooling, here’s what I got: My kids were told that they should learn more about THEIR culture, i.e. Latin culture. Even though, btw, their father is Anglo-Irish-German-whatever fell into the pot, from Connecticut. The strange and exotic must rule, and they should be brought up to think of PORTUGAL as the “homeland.” (In which they have been maybe a commulative total of 3 months in their lifetime.) I was guilted and shamed for not teaching them Portuguese FIRST. They were repeatedly put in SPANISH classes to “learn about their culture.” They were also repeatedly put in ESL classes, until I went in and visited righteous fury on the schools. The youngest son’s PHYSICAL speech issues went untreated because they assumed it was an accent. (In fact, they refused to treat them, so we had to pay (and it was tough at the time) for speech pathologist and other treatment out of our own pockets.)
Now imagine this done to the children of the enclave where they are banding together to preserve their culture. Integrate? Oh, hell no.
I’m not surprised we have Jihadists going to Middle East to fight against America who were born and raised in America. I’m surprised not all second or third generations go.
Now, do I advocate for draconian prejudice against the newly arrived? For official English as our language, for making people give up ancestral foods and clothing, and naming conventions?
As always, the choice is NOT cake or death. Of the two, unyielding prejudice against the newly arrived MIGHT be the more merciful choice. Yes, I can explain that, but first, that’s not what ANYONE is talking about for acculturation. Acculturation is being “American first.” If you want to wear your native outfit on your days off, I don’t think anyone cares. People at the office might look at you funny, though, so in deference to not distracting others, you probably should not wear a Viking helmet (yes, I know they’re not authentic. It’s a joke) to Casual Friday. And certainly not outside Casual Friday. If you want to name your kid Ballallu or whatever, I don’t think anyone cares. They’ll probably think it’s a “creative”name. The things hippies and maleducated hipsters name their kids is weirder than any foreign culture. Food? Americans will eat anything once. You’re more likely to be asked for the recipe for the dish you brought to the potluck than to be required to give it up. And provided it doesn’t contain either insects or offal (and even then, depends) you’ll find your co-workers enthusiastically working up variations of it. Trust me, I KNOW. Also, food is the hardest and the last thing immigrants give up. And the most likely to permeate the larger culture. Which is good, because the English cuisine the US started out with is a byword for boring.
No. The acculturation needed and the more difficult one is to adapt to BEING an American. To thinking of America — not the other country — as home. To learn to adapt and conform to American laws and American ways of being in the world, particularly that thing of “equal before the law” and “Life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.” The devil of those in the details, but they deny a lot of the most cherished home traditions of dysfunctional cultures. (Oh, women as chattel, to name one.)
So, being incredibly kind and refusing to enforce this, in fact, making people feel their home country MUST be honored, must be better, and their culture must be clung to, leads to what?
Well, it leads to the generations of dispossessed that the left wants to bring in REMAINING dispossessed charity cases. People who must be cared for, who cannot strive outward and upward like true Americans. Who cannot integrate. And who, generationally, start resenting us and hating us for our “privilege” which amounts to our ability to move in the society and improve ourselves and our children’s chances.
The crazy idiocy of providing services in whatever native language, including and up to Citizenship tests is not a CHARITABLE or well intentioned thing. It’s a shackles, burdening generations of incomers with second class status.
Oh and “open borders” particularly “open borders if you bring a child” is NOT charitable or kind, either. It encourages people to steal, buy or otherwise acquire children to drag on a horrible trek and risk death. And don’t tell me “they must be very desperate…”
Sure, maybe. Doesn’t mean they’re under clear and present danger. Humans are a striving animal. If they’re promised cake everyday for no effort in another land, they’ll go there. Only suffer and get trapped there because the cake is always a lie.
Those children who die and/or are mistreated on the trek are the fault of the open-borders crowd who enticed people to drag them here. These people should look up the concept of “attractive nuisance.”
Anyway, if all you’re dragging them here for is to live in enclaves that are more cohesive than the culture in the homeland, refuse to integrate, can’t do anything useful in the main culture, and are here SIMPLY to be recipients of charity, it’s cheaper and kinder to keep them in their homeland and support them there.
Economic hardship is no reason to immigrate, if you have NO skills that are looked for in the land you’re coming into, and do not wish to/will be prevented from acquiring those skills. We are no longer a land with unending demand for manual labor. All most incomers can do is get stuck and resent us.
Mind you there are problems with helping them in their own countries too, and charity should be carefully done. I prefer charities that educate children or give women money to start small businesses. They probably cause distortions, but not as bad as the charity of handouts.
And anyone who wants to molly coddle and cater to the most wretched of the most wretched cultures on Earth is an evil, despotic bastard who refuses to admit to himself/herself/xyr/xer/mouseself. They are people who think they’re better than the rest of humanity and that some number of humanity NEEDS them to survive. Forever.
Down that path lies the kind of upheaval in which the dispossessed kill everyone else. Unlike the Marxist fairytale our friends think they’re living, this doesn’t mean perfect communism, or even that leftist intellectuals end up on top.
Usually it means it provides the cataclysm that jolts the dysfunctional culture into another shape. Sometimes, rarely, a more functional one. And in which people have to learn to survive again.
I just don’t want this to happen here and now, not to me or my immediate descendants, or my friends. Honestly, no one sane would.
Is my view harsh? Perhaps. But it’s neither as harsh or as genocidal as that of the “would be do gooders” who create unending misery for everyone who comes under their purview. And who would destroy the last, best hope of mankind given a chance.
Is “Fit in or f*ck off” a nasty thing to tell immigrants? Sure it is. But it’s not as deceitful as “You can keep all your dysfunctional culture and America will magically transform you.” And it’s not as EVIL as that. Because THAT will keep you trapped in forever.
Life is pain, princess. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something. In this case the something is eternal dependence and impotence.
I wouldn’t buy that at any price.
According To Hoyt 
Waaaayyyyyy back in my college days I had a friend* whose “solution” to a “bad trip” was to increase the amount of LSD he had ingested. The arguments against this strategy never seemed to make much impression.
I often relive the experience of those arguments when debating the role of government in charity.
*It should be noted that, years onward, I ran into the guy again and learned he had gotten involved in Narcotics Anonymous, so there’s that.
“Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.”
― Frederic Bastiat, The Law
The more things change.
The thing is, the Socialists MUST do this; they don’t have an argument for The State doing these things better than voluntary accusations. And they can’t give up their Socialist dress without admitting to themselves that they are truly insignificant little twits.
Beat me to this.
I don’t know — the tune is a bit staid. I prefer you beat me eight to the bar.
I’m betting a number of people in here are saying, “Commander Cody OMG! I’ve not listened to him in Years!”
Meanwhile, others are saying, “Those hippies aren’t bad, but I still prefer the Andrews Sisters’ cover.” and some are saying, “I thought that was Asleep at the Wheel’s song.”
This is just what I needed after a trying morning.
Fun comes best eight to the bar.
Sometimes we seem to be sleep walking and fail to see the traps in front of us.
Isabel Paterson, in her classic libertarian work *The God of the Machine*, gave us the phrase “The Humanitarian with the Guillotine”. Which seems apt here.
As for America stepping up to help the rest of the world, there’s the “America the Good Neighbor editorial by Canadian Gordon Sinclair:
America: The Good Neighbor.
Widespread but only partial news coverage was given recently to a remarkable editorial broadcast from Toronto by Gordon Sinclair, a Canadian television commentator. What follows is the full text of his trenchant remarks as printed in the Congressional Record:
“This Canadian thinks it is time to speak up for the Americans as the most generous and possibly the least appreciated people on all the earth.
Germany, Japan and, to a lesser extent, Britain and Italy were lifted out of the debris of war by the Americans who poured in billions of dollars and forgave other billions in debts. None of these countries is today paying even the interest on its remaining debts to the United States.
When France was in danger of collapsing in 1956, it was the Americans who propped it up, and their reward was to be insulted and swindled on the streets of Paris. I was there. I saw it.
When earthquakes hit distant cities, it is the United States that hurries in to help. This spring, 59 American communities were flattened by tornadoes.
Nobody helped.
The Marshall Plan and the Truman Policy pumped billions of dollars into discouraged countries. Now newspapers in those countries are writing about the decadent, warmongering Americans.
I’d like to see just one of those countries that is gloating over the erosion of the United States dollar build its own airplane. Does any other country in the world have a plane to equal the Boeing Jumbo Jet, the Lockheed Tri-Star, or the Douglas DC10? If so, why don’t they fly them? Why do all the International lines except Russia fly American Planes?
Why does no other land on earth even consider putting a man or woman on the moon? You talk about Japanese technocracy, and you get radios. You talk about German technocracy, and you get automobiles.
You talk about American technocracy, and you find men on the moon – not once, but several times – and safely home again.
You talk about scandals, and the Americans put theirs right in the store window for everybody to look at. Even their draft-dodgers are not pursued and hounded. They are here on our streets, and most of them, unless they are breaking Canadian laws, are getting American dollars from ma and pa at home to spend here.
When the railways of France, Germany and India were breaking down through age, it was the Americans who rebuilt them. When the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central went broke, nobody loaned them an old caboose. Both are still broke.
I can name you 5000 times when the Americans raced to the help of other people in trouble. Can you name me even one time when someone else raced to the Americans in trouble? I don’t think there was outside help even during the San Francisco earthquake.
Our neighbors have faced it alone, and I’m one Canadian who is damned tired of hearing them get kicked around. They will come out of this thing with their flag high. And when they do, they are entitled to thumb their nose at the lands that are gloating over their present troubles. I hope Canada is not one of those.”
I think I cried the first time I heard that.
Tearing up now, even.
Yeah, me too.
And unlike you I haven’t been out doing the business end of the helping.
Oh, Dangit!
I was okay until you said that!
Where’s a tissue?
IIRC Some of those caravans had posters of “Trump is Hitler” or of “swastika on a US Flag”.
What kind of idiots want to take “refuge” in “Nazi America”? [Puzzled]
Asking that question is probably racist.
People who don’t understand the symbols they’re carrying (some) and people who assume that if they show up, we have to let them in and give them what they want, because Reasons. That would be my starting guess. And I’m going to pretend the people aiding, abetting, organizing, and managing the caravans are not there and are not getting paid to do this.
Idiots who’ve been told they are redeeming by the power of tan. (Rolls eyes.) And who know they’re not going to be hurt. And who think they piss us off by coming in. Which is true, but not for the reasons they think. We couldn’t care less that they tan. I tan too. I care that they have no skills and are coming in to become an undigested dependent class.
One of the bits of hilarity over the last year and a half or so was a woman from south of the border who posted on Twitter about how she’d showed the right-wing Trump-lovers by becoming a US citizen.
The post apparently caught someone’s attention, and she was quickly deluged with congratulatory tweets from people who praised her willingness to follow the immigration laws.
They’re not coming here to seek refuge, but to participate in the “revolution” and overthrow their imaginary “American hegemony”.
One simply cannot take these people at face value; instead, you have to examine the antecedent thinking that motivates their ideological gurus, the majority of which are steeped in Central American Marxist revolutionary ideology. Go look at who’s sponsoring this crap, who’s enabling it, and you’re going to find that the vast majority are about as humanitarian as Pol Pot. This enterprise is, at the root, an external Cloward-Piven plan cooked up by the revolutionaries of Central America. They want to crash the system, and are using their own poor as weapons to do it.
Forget staying in Central America and fixing their own countries; they want to reduce us all to their level.
This. The Dirty Little Secret of Central America is that they hate us. Canada, too, but the United States is the Great Embarrassment. Because we show people just what can be done.
Liberals in Canada definitely hate you. They live in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver. The rest of us with more than a single functioning neuron, not so much.
I do meet Canadians who holiday in Cuba and tell me how lovely the hotel was, and so inexpensive too. I ask them if they left the hotel at all, and they say no, there was nothing else to see and their “guide” said it wasn’t safe. These tend to be the same morons who hate the USA.
Most “cosmopolitans” have experienced nothing in other countries except the best five-star resorts they have to offer.
THIS.
The same “logic” that says all pro-2A people are bloodthirsty killers….. on your University profile or e-mailed from your work e-mail.
If you believed your own bull you wouldn’t DARE type that.
Were we a tenth as bloodthirsty as they claim, well they would no longer be around to say so now would they?
If we place the marker at 1968 and ignore the NFA, gun owners have been placed under endless social and cultural abuse for 51 years.
I have not dug around to do the proper comparison, but I’ll bet that the abuse comes at least to the level of any of the Great Civil Rights Crimes that we are supposed to flagellate ourselves for (despite not having been born yet).
And the response has been almost nothing. Tim McVeigh, maybe, depending on what you believe about that. Even when it reached the level of the government butchering people on live TV there was still a sizable fraction looking for excuses to blame the victims. A few mildly harsh words behind closed doors doesn’t count as a “response”.
I assert that American Gun Owners should all be sainted for being some of the most long suffering people in the history of the world.
If we were within a thousand light-years of the violence and quickness to anger that the grabbers insist we have, there would be a Killdozer incident Every. Single. Week. And frankly; the targets would deserve it.
But that isn’t how things work: the grabbers preach from the housetops, and the only consequences they expect is a little soreness from being patted on the back a little too much.
And even both hands tied, both legs tied, a blindfold, and some ear plugs….. we’re still winning the fight.
“What kind of idiots want to take “refuge” in “Nazi America”?”
Useful idiots, Paul, useful idiots.
Useful idiots being encouraged to come to the USA by idiots in Congress. AOC’s latest expression of hatred for the USA was made today and she once again affirms that she clearly thinks the Soviets were the good guys in the Cold War. She and her fellow “squad” members have no clue as to what genuine oppression is like. See linked Breitbart piece for AOC’s latest idiocy:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/07/17/pollak-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-offers-pessimistic-view-of-america/
This was really interesting with regard to the dynamics inside the Sod Squad (and is about what I’d already observed):
I was already of the opinion that a lot of their garbage is fueled by the Muslim Brotherhood, and there ya go, look which ones are in charge… and who =want= to see REAL oppression, such as of the dhimmi paying jizya to certain unassimilatable migrants.
Good share.
Look, those crazy communist gringos who organized the caravan and paid for the trucks, they handed out the banners and flags – of course the poor photogenic rural folks they recruited are going to hold those banners up and wave the flags. Whatever it takes to get to the border, just on the slimmest off chance they manage to get through.
Sure, the Arabs and Asians hiding in the center of the trucks are almost certainly trouble, but the peasants are smart enough to know they should edge away from those types at the border crossing – and those will likely slip off and cross elsewhere anyway so their bulky backpacks that they never open don’t get searched.
And the worst that happens is they get sent home.
And those arguing “Ellis Island” don’t like to recall that there was no government safety net in 1875-1925. So people came here knowing that yes, things were better than in the Old Country (no pogroms! No Kulturkampf! Land!) but they’d still have to work or starve (or live off the charity of family and fellow culture members.) That’s a pretty big difference in mindset.
Or what W.O.P. means or how it became a derogatory term
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wop#False_etymologies
I have seen photos of folks waiting to clear things up with a sign that said W.O.P. and for what ever reason it isn’t the source of the term.
My 1970ish Webster’s triple-doorstop agrees with Wiki, for once:
I run through the old insults and ask the kids if they find any of them especially offensive. They just blink at me, but gasp at “the N word.” It is a good opening to Second Wave Immigration (1870-1914, more or less).
Kike, Dago, Bridgit, Mick, Spic, Ski…
Try giving your students a simple word association test :
https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/word-association/n8615
What about limeys, frogs, and krauts?
I was focusing on ones used before WWI, and that have fallen out of common speech.
I knew limey had to do with the anti-scurvy treatment, but it was originally “Lime-juicer”, circa 1857. Got shortened later, around 1880.
Kraut makes sense from sauerkraut. No idea where “frog” came in.
cause they eat frog legs?
Yup. “Frog-eating Frenchmen” was a standard insult in Napoleonic times.
Probably why the French equivalent is “rosbif.”
Bifes (pronounced beefs) in Portuguese.
The formerly-French southern states must’ve spread the practice through Dixie. I haven’t had a decent mess of frog legs since forever.
My husband tells the story of watching “Full Metal Jacket” in high school and needing to look up kikes, wops, and greasers in R Lee Emory’s introductory speech.
“…You are not even human fucking beings. You are nothing but unorganized grabastic pieces of amphibian shit! Because I am hard, you will not like me. But the more you hate me, the more you will learn. I am hard but I am fair. There is no racial bigotry here. I do not look down on niggers, kikes, wops or greasers. Here you are all equally worthless. And my orders are to weed out all non-hackers who do not pack the gear to serve in my beloved Corps. Do you maggots understand that?”
Fifth wave.
If you look at American history, there has been a background level of immigration, but also six distinct waves, some of which have sub-waves. These are:
Wave 1: 1630-1665. English. Three sub-waves, consisting of religious refugees (founded MA and MD), political Royalist refugees (went to MD, VA, and the Carolinas), and more religious refugees (went to PA).
Wave 2: 1690-1720. Scots-Irish. One wave. Went inland to the Appalachian foothills.
Wave 3: 1750-~1790. Mix of Germans, Scottish refugees from the Highland Clearances, and some English. Many of the latter two groups evacuate to Canada after the American Revolution.
Wave 4: 1830-1865. Two sub-waves. Germans 1830-1850, Irish 1850-1865. The Germans went inland to the Midwest, the Irish settled where they got off the boat (and displaced Wave 1 descendants, who went West).
Wave 5: 1890-1925. This was a mix of South Europeans (particularly Italians), Poles, and Eastern European Jews. Plus some more Irish. This was the Ellis Island crowd. Tended to settle in ethnic enclaves in the major cities of the Northeast.
Wave 6: 1960-present. Latin American, particularly Mexican. Politically, a strong case can be made to consider African-Americans to be Wave 6 immigrants.
Major points:
With the exception of Wave 6, there was a fairly steady 60-year cycle of high and low immigration.
This cycle tends to “tamp down” prior waves of immigrants, who start to think of themselves as natives.
Having a frontier made assimilation easier. Although there were “Little foreign-land” enclaves (go see how many Germanic town names there are in the Midwest), intermarriage was rapid.
Wave 5 presented major problems, and only a very aggressive assimilation effort managed to integrate them into our society. Requiring them to settle in dispersed locations would probably have been wise.
Wave 6 presents even more problems. The old “melting pot” was turned off, and ethnic divisions encouraged.
Note that the food fight we are watching today in the Democrat Party is a conflict between the descendants of Wave 5 immigrants and Wave 6. Not merely a generational conflict.
*wags paw* A lot of the college textbooks, and HS, don’t count the pre-1790 waves. They have your fourth as the first wave (“predominately Northern European”) and then second wave (“more Southern and Eastern European”). After WWII… all bets are off, although most seem to imply that it is a continuation of their Second Wave until the changes in 1965-69.
You have to get away from textbooks to get finer detail, like what you cite.
This is why you have to study the older history. The last century or so will NOT give you correct answers unless you know the background. I had a Russian history course in college that covered from the origins of Kievan Rus to Catherine the Great. And it was shocking to realize just how much of modern Russian politics was a reverberation of things that happened centuries earlier.
Yep. The more I dig into the “longue duree” (to use the French academic term), the more patterns and echos I see.
The students ask me if Russia is European or Asian. I shrug and say it’s Russia, and we’ll see why. (I have to add a special lecture on Russia, because otherwise they get one paragraph on Ivan III and then jump to Peter the Great.)
TXRed, have you read Mark Schrad’s book “Vodka Politics”? It’s a fantastic history of Russian politics. Autocracy and vodka. I use it in my Russian politics class.
No, not yet. I’ve gotten up the Catherine the Great in terms of detailed reading. Since I had to start with Kieven Rus in order to fill in holes… SIGH.
I’ll add that one to my list. Thanks for the suggestions!
1898 Great Grandpa Kalisek left Czech lands, went to Hamburg and ended up here (and aquired the H in our name). Forgot to ask what year the Great Grand Smiths made their way here from England. The Apts were here a bit longer than the DuRoys, and Gagnons (though they were here in North America longer, just not the US), but none came to the USA until just after the Civil War iirc
Dad has it all in a family tree program
Similar story – ~1875 The Jerabek & Nemec & Pulkrabek (not together but all in my mother’s family tree) families immigrated from Czechoslovakia traveled through Germany to get passage to America and settled in Minnesota.
They were Hussite Christians – a sect that was seriously oppressed by the authorities in the Bohemia/Czech region at that time. A lot of American Christian Congregational churches were founded by those Hussites who fled here.
Father’s side is split between the early waves – don’t have the details but some were certainly in the colonies pre-revolution.
Have you ever gotten to visit Tabor? It is well worth it – great Hussite museum and lovely town.
A good chunk of my ancestry is first wave.
Second wave, here. Mom’s traced my maiden name to a man born in either TN or VA who married a Bruce. Only record of him I know of is that marriage record, and atm I don’t tightly recall if the marriage was 1692 or the birth.
Where do you put the west coast Chinese ? Sometime between the Mexican war and the continental railway, is my guess.
Background immigration. Immigration was never zero, but there were distinct high-immigration periods.
Yeah. A decent number of them came over. But I don’t think it was ever enough to make a big dent in the overall immigration numbers. You had your Chinatowns in Los Angeles and San Francisco (and maybe New York?), but that was about it.
Plus, iirc, there was a fairly big backlash against Chinese before long. My recollection is that Chinese immigration was restricted quite heavily from early on due to “yellow peril” hysteria. And immigration from the other Asian countries was essentially non-existent in any appreciable numbers. For instance, Nisei numbers in the US were just big enough to get recruits for one single regimental combat team (though it was a very well-decorated regimental combat team!), and recruits pretty much exclusively came from Hawaii and California.
The German chunk in mine was wave 4, the Hungarian was wave 5, and then there’s the English and assorted suchlike all the way back to New Amsterdam Colony residents before the Brits took over and renamed the place.
All in the same woodpile.
This should cover most of them….
Where I grew up, it was mostly South Slavs in “the trades.” A good friend of my father’s was the President of the local UMW.
When the bosses in NYC sent out a new contract negotiator (and it was almost always a new one), the first thing he would tell them as he sat down was “Just so you know, you are negotiating with a real son of a Vich.”
It was said that he would sometimes also mention that he dealt with turkeys on a daily basis, not just every three years (he raised them on the side, which was good for my family then, who usually had a couple dozen people for Thanksgiving – and you did not find 32 pound turkeys in the local Safeway).
Let it be noted that just about every “Vich” household in the area typically had two or three blue stars in their windows – those that didn’t have gold.
JAP…
The interesting thing about that last one is that it also works well as an abbreviation for an entirely different ethnic group, and I’ve seen some arguments break out over whether or not it’s appropriate when used for individuals whose ancestry traces back to the Japanese Islands.
And all the while, the people arguing are completely clueless that there’s a much older anti-semitic connotation attached to it.
*raises paw* I grew up hearing Jewish American Princess jokes from my Jewish friends. I suspect a lot of them went over our heads.
Even Ellis Island rejected some immigrants, based on disease or apparent mental incompetence. The term “the isle of tears” was sometimes applied to it.
They don’t like realizing that the people who DO immigrate here legally tend to … well, like America. Like these folks.
And … if they were sick when they arrived at Ellis Island, they stayed there until recovered, or were sent back to their country of origin … funny how that seems to have been forgotten…
“they stayed there until recovered, or were sent back to their country of origin”
Or died.
I teach math in high school. I teach illegal immigrants and I know this, not because I ask but because they tell me. I try to instill independence but it is hard to fight freebies. You only own what is in your head. Lord help us all.
Then there’s this graphic explanation of why immigration as a “solution” to poverty elsewhere in the world doesn’t work.
Mind you, it doesn’t mean that it is our job to “solve” other countries’ economic woes, but if someone wants to help it’s just plain more efficient to help them there than to bring folk here to “help.”
Bring everyone in, register them to vote, and farm the votes in a huge harvest to ensure you remain in power.
That is the goal. Any improvement to these people’s lives is mearly incidental
I’m not so sure about that, to be quite honest. I’m sure that sort of thinking informs some of what “they” are doing, but I suspect that there’s rather more “destroy America” to the whole thing than most of us would credit. They haven’t thought that far ahead, TBH. Nor do they really care–It’s all about striking back at the normies and Daddy.
I knew a guy who was a fairly active Democrat, back in the early ’90s. Precinct captain, all of that. Interesting guy–A real “Scoop Jackson” Democrat, all-American, all-patriot.
Early part of the Clinton interregnum, he went off to some sort of Democratic Party symposium/convention for the anointed back East. Came back, gradually started distancing himself from the Democrats, disengaged from the work he was doing with them, and generally totally changed his formerly politically active stance. I’m out on the range, one day, got to BS’ing with him, and one thing led to another–He never specified exactly what he’d seen or observed while he was “back East”, but whatever it was, it destroyed his belief in the Democratic Party and killed any desire to be active in its ranks. A telling comment to me, about all that…? “They’re gonna be hunting Democrats through the streets with dogs, one of these days… And, they’re gonna be right to do it, too….”.
By the time he died around the end of the Clinton era, he was totally disengaged from politics, and really anti-Democrat. His wife mentioned to me that he’d thrown some area canvassers off his property when they identified themselves as Democrats, which she’d taken as a sign he’d gone senile. Me, I think it stemmed from whatever the hell he’d experienced “back East”, more than mere senility.
Can’t destroy it unless you had power over it. Scoop and JFK would be Giuliani Republicans today, or like Chet Edwards, good only to maintain a majority, and ignored otherwise.
Hell, JFK was Donald Trump, with better press and less brainpower.
JFK was Donald Trump, with more drugs and bigger lies.
Because if these people really wanted to be Americans, get smart, aculturate, etc the left woulda think they’d likely vote Republican and build a wall so fast they would likely pay out of their own pockets to get it done.
In the Northeast, a friend of my parents bought into the Democratic rhetoric and took a job with the local party early in her adulthood. She worked in their office for several years. Then many of the faces she’d seen visiting the office started showing up on the evening news, being perp-walked by the FBI. This was the outcome of a major organized crime crackdown. Her faith in the Democrats did not long survive that experience.
I’d say that improvement is a negative in these cases. Keep em underfoot and needy and you’ve got leverage. Let em get too high and they might start thinking of things like responsibility or independence.
> The crazy idiocy of providing services in whatever native language, including and up to Citizenship tests
—
How long until someone demands the citizenship test be administered in Klingon?
Though, given their penchant for slipping the mickey to the Feds, I bet some Dineh have already demanded tests in Navajo…
“We clever monkeys don’t like stuff handed to us.”
It was once common knowledge amongst youth worldwide that skived watermelon was sweetest.
Which is why smart gardeners planted a little extra to accommodate shrinkage.
My granddaddy Yarborough wasn’t nearly that nice….. Rows 1 through x closest to the fence line were enhanced with the active ingredient in Ex-Lax. He knew what the marker was….. even his grandkids didn’t know.
Word quickly got around that “stealin’s Mr Jap’s watermelons” was fraught with peril even if he wasn’t out with the shotgun…….
* I have no idea where he got that nickname; he never went any closer to the Pacific than the Texas border.
Those children who die and/or are mistreated on the trek are the fault of the open-borders crowd who enticed people to drag them here.
Yes.
The adults involved are responsible for their actions– but the activists are setting up these deaths, were WARNED about it, and apparently don’t care.
Damn straight.
I bring that up to “Look at the suffering!” people and they either ignore it or- of course- blame the US. And I’m damned sick of it.
Throw in finding out that children are being trafficked among these assholes to make it easier to get in…
Ted Cruz has been good with the reply (paraphrased)”Yes, conditions are bad. Why do the Dems block legislation to fix the problem?”
What horrifies me is folks misreading the “30% of those tested weren’t related to the kids” stat.
Yeah, they only tested folks they suspected.
But they also only tested those who, when told “We’re going to test you,” didn’t go “k, yeah, it’s a fair cop– they’re not my kid.”
Yep.
The cynic in me says that they want them. Big pictures of dead children across the news, proving that there’s something to flee from and tugging on the folks leashed to feelings.
I have to cut the newsies some slack on the pics of dead kids thing. If they wanted those, there are plenty of bodies in the Arizona desert running from brand-new-fresh-today to year old jerky. Men, women, children, babies. Every. Damn. Week.
Some of them even die of natural causes.
There’s so many bodies that the Tucson morgue is renting a livestock freezer. Yes, really, there used to be dead cows in there. Now its full of dead people.
So if the journos want those pictures, all they need to do is go for a walk through the desert outside Nogales. New pic every week.
Let’s freeze them and fire them back at Mexico over the border till the invasion stops.
And waste all that perfectly good gunpowder?
The heads should be mounted on spikes on top of the new border wall as a warning.
The warning is that human traffickers are liable to kill you, rape your dead body and leave it in the desert for the vultures. Or rape you first and then kill you, they seem to go both ways on that.
Dear Liberals and camels, and Kat Goodwin (can’t forget Kat, she’s special) a decent southern border wall would probably save 100 lives every month, and prevent a thousand rapes every month.
I expect I’m way, way low on the rapes, and probably low on the murders too.
Just not making our country an attractive nuisance would help
That’s the solution to the whole thing, really. Just deny public services to illegals. No welfare, no free school, no free medical. You want services, you -buy- those services.
That’s what CANADIANS do in the US, after all. We pay for our own stuff. I did not get free school, let me tell you. I paid a lot.
90% of illegals would be gone in 6 months. They’d go home on their own. No muss, no fuss.
The 10% that stayed, you can work with that. Run them through the newly streamlined and functional immigration process. Deport the criminals, let the rest work for what they get like the rest of us do.
You’re going to see that happen in Italy really soon, I bet. They don’t have the money to be dealing with the migrants they’ve got.
Read somewhere that those rape trees sometimes don’t just have adult women’s underwear draped on them. Some are small, with cartoon characters printed on them…
Yeah, I didn’t want to mention, because there are some things that are done to injure bystanders. Why give the bastards a free click, you know?
Still, it is nice sometimes to rub the camel’s nose in it, so to speak, and let them understand exactly what they’re supporting. Rape trees. Kid underwear. Dead kids having their limbs scattered by wild dogs and vultures. Dozens of them.
You know its stuff like that which will eventually lead to old white men lying on mountain tops with a gun, a radio and a telescope looking for “coyotes”. It probably happens now on a small scale, where ranchers obey the Three S’s. I’m talking about a large scale of thousands. Because if the government refuses to stop the rape trees, the locals absolutely will.
Gee, wouldn’t a decent fence probably be a better option? Ya think?!
That’s what trebuckets are for.
Medieval warfare, hurling the bodies of the enemy back over the wall…
I approve of this plan, sir. As long as the heads are properly mounted in the traditional fashion, hurling engines are an appropriate response.
Just think of the vapors that would be had by all the SJWs at the announcement of the Trebuchet Initiative.
And waste all that perfectly good gunpowder?
Pfft. For really good range, rail guns.
Many are descendants of the Comanches who raided haciendas in Mexico every fall. Now they are peóns to serve the Spanish rulers there, according to Carlyle Raht in The Romance of the Davis Mountains and Big Bend Country.
“So if the journos want those pictures, all they need to do is go for a walk ”
Walk!?? Sir! These journos are College Graduates! They are Professionals! Walking is not part of their professional toolbox. They are highly trained at accepting pr handouts and repeating them; they do not (shudder) gather news! (You never know where it came from.)
My favored charity?
Enabling those who produce stuff to defend themselves.
If a few more warlords ate an RPG when they go to collect the harvest (and any females that catch their eye), the world would be a better place.
My favored charity?
I wish I could (honestly) say it is instructing women and minorities in handgun usage and maintenance and helping them get their concealed carry permits.
I’ve said it before – the best solution to warlords is to flood the villages with small arms and trainers.
We need to restart the Liberator project.
Once we have air dropped enough FP-2045s on HI, NY, CA, and a few other states to cover every square inch of ground we can start helping other countries.
Even penetrating air defenses and the diplomatic fallout of doing the air drops would probably still be cheaper than the other ways of implementing TAWP.
Why not STENs?
Good point.
I suppose it depends on how many guns you need to drop and how much ammunition you need for the loadout.
Just send Glocks.
On further consideration, we’ve actually got quite a few of those – just send normal cap Glock mags and ammo.
Regards, The Glorious Peoples Bear Flag Republic
Do you want giggle switches with that?
Not for the Glocks. Suppressors might be appropriate.
Amen.
This is always a mixed blessing.
Yeah, it makes things a bit more difficult for the current crop of local warlords. But the problem is that after the warlord problem has been dealt with, you’ve still got a village full of ornery armed individuals who often feel empowered enough to go ahead and raise up their own warlord.
The problem throughout many of those areas isn’t the lack of weapons. AKs are easy enough to build and maintain that anyone who wants one in those parts probably has one. The problem is maintaining a militia that can be relied upon to beat back the bad guys, stick it out when the bad guys come back looking for examples to make, and then not become bad guys themselves once things have settled down a bit.
Actually, the problem is building a culture that is interested in more than simply “self-determination”. Because, yes, that just brings another warlord.
Once you’ve combined the ability for self-determination with liberty/law/morals/education, THEN you can actually make progress.
I’ve always said that the solution to the Middle East is just give every female over 16 years old a .38 S&W revolver and six rounds. Grrrl power!
“no one has ever walked onto American soil and become American.”
Minor exception, I recall learning of a few — but it was before Social Security numbers and other identification were required to work. The NY Times editor* who fought to keep the reporting free of editorializing in the 1980s was the son of such a “walk-in American” and he therefore refused, as beneficiary of it, to condemn illegal immigration.
*Cannot recall his name, dammit
Don’t you hate late-night recollections?
The Times editor in question was A. M. “Abe” Rosenthal, the storied executive editor of The Times, whose gravestone (supposedly) reads “He kept the paper straight.” His family immigrated (without benefit of permission) around 1925 from Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.
“the bigger the enclave, and the more resentful, the more the children will be raised to HYPER identify with the country of origin.”
One thing: they will have no knowledge of what a sh*thole their home country was, as parents’ and grandparents’ memories will tend to focus on idealized pasts. It generally takes Eastern European levels of bad memories to prevent that romanticization.
Yep. This.
“Eastern Europeran levels of bad memories” is wonderfully apt. Our family uses the less elegant (but heartfelt) motto : “Thank G-d Grandpa got on the boat”.
“As always, the choice is NOT cake or death.”
For one thing, cake is death. It is empty calories, high carbs otherwise lacking nutrition. Far better for them to eat steak although the cow has a voice in that so having steak requires work.
Cake is just a bread variant. What people seem to get their knickers twisted over is sugar frosting, which is a garnish, not part of the cake itself. I’ve seen people put frosting on celery; that doesn’t make it cake…
I will take real cake over the atrocities that are being put up by vegans pretending to be cake.
[whipcrack!]
“But it’s GOOD for you!”
[/whipcrack!]
*defiantly puts her last bite of chocolate cake with cream cheese buttercream frosting into her mouth*
*chew*
^_~
“So, being incredibly kind and refusing to enforce this, in fact, making people feel their home country MUST be honored, must be better, and their culture must be clung to, leads to what?”
We already know the answer to that.
“Mind you there are problems with helping them in their own countries too, and charity should be carefully done.”
Because charity funds transmitted government to government often go no farther than the government recipients (or, rather, their Cayman and Swiss bank accounts.)
Usually a chunk of it comes back to the US to pay lobbyists to keep the US government sending aid. I recently saw a news article that stated 20% of the US aid received by one country is spent on US lobbyists.
Or, if we send material aid it rots in a warehouse somewhere while the same governmental a-hole who is keeping the aid from being distributed, is making a lot of political hay out of calling the US out for being stingy and not sending aid.
Frankly, I think when that happens, we should stop the gravy train, until those governmental a-holes are punted out of office. You want aid from the US? Clean house!
Or if it’s distributed — see clothes, in Africa — it finishes native industry in that sector. As in forever. Who can compete with free?
PFUI.
Which actually opens up an interesting foreign aid option. GIVE nothing. If we spend money, spend it BUYING stuff from the locals. Even if its mercenary troops (ask the government of Botswana about this, they’ve hired their army out for decades).
But then the people running those aid programs would just be businessmen, they wouldn’t be valiant knights swooping in to save the benighted souls that cry out for help.
Which is why nobody should be allowed to work for a charity or aid agency until they can explain the difference between compassion and idiot compassion.
Ten years ago this was already the norm.
There’s a disaster? After the Navy finishes cleaning it up, they get shore leave…
Because that’s a lot of dollars that just flooded your area.
Our carrier group pulled into Thailand during some political tension about 10 years ago, I don’t remember what the issues were about but I do remember the brief about getting the hell out of dodge if you saw large groups of red or yellow shirts. The day we pulled out shooting started. I’m pretty sure the leaders of the groups made sure that a lid was kept on everything until the thousands of US Sailors had spent their money.
I recently read a, I think short-sighted, article by some retired Army dude (A General or something, sorry, can’t find it now) talking about how the day of the Carrier is done and gone and the whole idea should be scrapped.
While his argument rested on the idea that hyper-sonic missiles and stealth tech will soon make it impossible to protect carriers, I think he missed the point. Even IF carriers would be sitting ducks if a war broke out, there are a LOT of uses for a carrier group in peace time that we would miss terribly. One, a carrier group pulling up in near-by international waters is a HUGE deterrent for anyone but the larger countries. Sure, Russia, or China wouldn’t be intimidated, but in spite of the bravado, Iran has to be S#!tting bricks about now. Second, As mentioned a carrier group makes for an incredible disaster aid platform. The reactor on the carrier can provide power. Planes and helos on the ship can provide search and rescue, as well as transportation of aid supplies (the helos anyway… I can’t see delivering materials in an F/A-18 or an F-35… oh wait… I can… LOL!!! LOOKOUT BELOW!!!).
I can’t even help you find that, because it’s a perennial favorite.
At least every five years, for most of my life, some high ranking ground-pounder or zoom-zoom boy has announced we don’t need carriers.
There have been several times in the last few years that an Iowa-class BB would have been quite useful.
There have been pundits saying that since the end of WW2 . Back in 1946 it was thee atomic bomb making them obsolete…..
The DDG-1000 (aka Zumwalt) class of destroyers was originally supposed to fill the BB classes bombardment capacities with a high rate of fire, long (70+ mile) range set of guns. Yes its a destroyer but it is nearly as big as a WW2 BC with 1/3 the crew. Unfortunately it became a political football and everything on it was late and over budget just to add insult to injury. Instead of 17 they built/are building 3 and we have no clue what to do with them as the extended range shells (rocket bosted/ GPS guided) never got built other than in single digit test quantities, the radar got massively downgraded and truthfully its allegedly just not that stealthy.
The rocket boosted shells are still under development, but instead of an entirely new program they are just adopting a new version of the ones that the Army uses. Was in a story on Military.com a month or two ago.
Didn’t the guy who wanted to fire-bomb Japan say it, too?
I can’t remember his name, he gets pulled out every year as someone who said the bombs were “unnecessary” because he had a plan to starve and bomb the country to bits. (The folks doing the calling always skip what he actually proposed.)
Curtis LeMay? George Wallace’s running-mate did fire bomb Japan. IIRC, the character George C Scott played in Dr. Strangelove was modeled* on LeMay.
*To the extent any right-wing caricature can be said to have been modeled. LeMay was a brilliant military tactician, so of course the Left parodied him mercilessly.
Oh, blast it, RES, must you make me go down the rabbit hole?
*digs*
Aaand thanks to the joys of a helpful upgrade, I’ve just lost my computer because the Princess needs to do lessons.
I seem to recall carriers playing prominent roles following the tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004, and it was damned welcome after Katrina and other hurricane incursions.
We need to not consider them mobile death dealing platforms and instead think of them as mobile hospitals and aid stations, capable of dealing death and destruction.
We don’t need 12 multi billion dollar nuclear hospital ships. Once they can’t do their job scrap them. And their job is to bust things up so the other guy cries uncle (or no longer can cry uncle). Admittedly they’re definitely more vulnerable against near peers, but for now they’re still great at gunboat diplomacy with any lesser nation states.
I like the format of “highly mobile cities full of young, healthy workers.”
They say hypersonic missiles and stealth fighters, i counter with networked radars and laser cannons.
Orbiting particle beams and tungsten telephone poles in space. Big retro-rocket to deorbit and Ka-POW! No more air base for the stealth fighters to fly home to.
Phantom, I’m referring to stuff that is operational now.
The flying telephone pole in orbit was a plan from the 1960s (or ’70s, can’t remember exactly) called THOR. The beauty of it is you can’t shoot it down. Its a metal rod.
Ka-pow!
yes, i know, except a sufficiently fast solid object could deflect it… so, shoot it down with a railgun. SLAP.
Dr Pournelle came up with it, and the other advantage is there is no radioactivity. Pure kinetic.
I just wanted to say ka-pow again. ~:D
The problem with the “carrier killer missiles” is that even if you manage to hit the carrier (which is a bigger problem than people like to admit) unless that missile is carrying a nuke, one strike, or even a half dozen strikes isn’t likely to sink a carrier.
You might get a mission kill, but if the ship’s damage control teams are up to snuff you might not even get that.
The last U.S. Fleet Carrier to actually be sunk in action was USS Hornet during the Battle of Santa Cruz. Yes, the Japanese did manage to get some light and escort carriers after that, but no other fleet carriers, not even the Franklin was an actual loss, if the war had continued she would have been refitted and sent back out.
Back in the Oughts, when it came time to decommission USS America she was used for live fire tests; despite not having active damage control parties aboard, which did not sink her and the navy had to denote scuttling charges to finally put her beneath the waves.
The only reliable way to sink a carrier is to hit it with a nuke, and how insane would you have to be to start shooting nukes at the US?
Carriers these days have much more armor than the WW2 Essex carriers did.
The other problem is that the Navy is already deploying countermeasures for the hypersonic missiles… even tho no one has deployed hypersonic ship-killers yet. Hypersonic ship-killers are a solution to a 1980s countermeasure… (Phalanx guns) and are assuming target acquisition and designation capabilities from Block I units, apparently. Its like they expect us to be using 1980s computers still…
Hornet was a Yorktown class carrier not an Essex. None of the Essexs were sunk by enemy action, whereas The Big E was the only Yorkie that survived the war.
People who think that the days of the carrier are done are generally people who have never been out to sea. Yes, aircraft carriers are huge ships. But the ocean is much, much larger. Since it can sail at 30+ knots pretty much indefinitely, it’s trivial to hide an aircraft carrier in the vastness of the sea. It’s a skill that the US Navy regularly practices.
Don’t forget that the death of the aircraft carrier has been predicted before. First it was bomber-carried nuclear weapons, then it was nuclear cruise missiles, then it was supersonic sea-skimming missiles. In all cases the defensive armament of the carrier group was upgraded to blunt the threat.
From the days after the Boxing Day Tsunami:
And they’ve continued until that charitable impulse has been beaten out of a good number of Americans. Frankly, I’m one of them.
I only have two cheeks to turn, and I’ve exceeded Christ’s count of forgiveness of one’s brother seventy times seven squared,
Then the corruption revolves around who gets the contracts.
Which is also part of why the local industries are so fragile.
Example of how foreign aid should be done: Several of the local Jewish Men’s Clubs in this area made a micro loan (around $2000) to the women of a village in Uganda. I don’t know how the village was chosen, predates my living here. The women bought a couple of knitting machines and a supply of yarn, and started making yarmukas – Jewish skullcaps. The members of the men’s clubs bought them, and arraigned for local Jewish bookstores to carry them. Very nice products, and reasonable price. The women at this point have paid back the loan, installed a tube well for safe reliable water, a solar cell and generator system so the children can have internet school. Because the farms have reliable water, and the commerce is helping get better roads, the local farmers are prospering. A vituous cycle has started, and nobody got a handout.
There is a “bank” that specializes in that type of loan. Less personal aid in placing the product, but just as good. And maybe associations such as that should start to uplift the third world through commerce.
Are you kidding? That could encourage them to practice Free Market Capitalism, eventually inducing them to rape the Earth.
That is impressive.
Usually, the cycle goes “so they used the profits, improved things, someone else came along and killed the goose, they were back where they started.”
I would guess that ability of the area to protect their investment was involved in choosing the target of their charity. Intelligent.
Giving the Devil Her due department: Hillary actually talked up such “micro-loan” projects. It would be invidious to speculate as to with what restrictions and vigorish she’d have entailed those loans.
No vigorish. Just she’d get $100000 and make one loan (maybe) of $1000. The rest would be eaten for overhead. C.F. the Clinton foundation and Haiti for how this all works. Hey HC’s favorite bromide is that charity starts at home :-).
Problem, that assumes a standard of competition which is…not the norm.
The current state, without aid, is kids going around naked even if it’s too cold or the sun burns them.
The local cloth industry, such as it is, is already exporting stuff– because hand-crafted is actually in demand, here. But it costs too much in time and effort to be in reach of the actual poor, there.
And clothes, as my extensive collection of rag rugs testifies, are just materials.
*****
If someone’s worried about local textile production, they should look into buying it for export. Not prevent it being undercut when it cannot even fill basic demand for low-end consumers.
Like the old comment about mechanically knit leggings– it didn’t make it so the duchess had a dozen pairs, it made it so shopgirls could have one.
Actually people are buying it for export: Chinese. At ridiculously low prices.
*Rubs hands together* Sounds like that is the issue, then. Not excessive resources provided for free.
Time to introduce some /competition/ for hand-made textiles…..
In fairness, a lot of Federal aid to our own states and territories is missed — mis-directed, mis-allocated, mis-handled and mis-appropriated. Look up any natural disaster — Puerto Rico (okay, Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico), Sandy, Katrina, the LA Riots (pick any one) — and you will find ample (if unreported in the GLM) incidence of corruption (more commonly in Liberal polities, not simply because it comes more naturally to them but primarily because the Gas Light Media is inclined to ignore it.)
For example (emphasis added):
‘Ricky resign!’: Calls heat up for Puerto Rico governor to resign over leaked chats
Puerto Rican Gov. Ricardo Rosselló is facing strong calls for his resignation after leaked documents revealed the governor had made disparaging and controversial remarks in private chats. Protesters on Sunday shouted, “We will kick you out!” and “Ricky resign!”
The leaked chats, provided by the Center for Investigative Journalism, revealed several incendiary remarks made by the governor to his inner circle in over 900 pages of recorded conversation. Rosselló wrote of the federal board responsible for overseeing the Puerto Rican financial crisis, “Dear Oversight Board, Go F*** Yourself.” The pages also include derogatory remarks about women and a homophobic mention of pop star Ricky Martin.
In one chat, Puerto Rican official Christian Sobrino Vega jokingly suggested to Rosselló that he should shoot the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz. The governor reportedly responded, “You’d be doing me a grand favor.”
Sobrino Vega and Secretary of State Luis Rivera Marín, who also participated in the chat, both resigned in the wake of the leaked pages. Rosselló asserted that he will not resign, saying, “Despite the difficulties that we have internal and external, the work will continue and the agenda will be completed in all areas, social, educational, safety, health, infrastructure, recovery and everything related to the financial situation that is a high priority among others. You do not give up on work already started, and today, more than ever, a lot of people are counting on my commitment to do so.”
Those calling for Rosselló’s resignation assert that his chats, which include insinuations of violence against journalists and suggest turning political opponents over to the police, reveal that he is corrupt and violated the trust of citizens by what he said.
I’ve no idea what else is going on down there but if there’s not actual graft or corruption, a private conversation that is vulgar or inappropriate seems like a stupid thing to worry about. Is Carmen Yulin Cruz a saint trying to do a good job or is she a corrupt thorn in the side preventing reform?
It makes a difference.
Show me the graft (which it seems they’re investigating) but complaining about “disparaging or controversial remarks” seems like people not wanting people to look at what matters, which is who’s pockets get lined and who gets paid off.
If memory serves, she’s the showboat that was having press conferences as to how there was no aid coming when the hurricane hit.
The conversations are merely amusing as revelatory of who are the actual racists, but in combination with the wasted time, graft and incompetence it conveys an impression of a general cultural issue.
Also, it was the most recent item about Puerto Rican government I turned up. 😉
There are known problems with Puerto Rico’s government. For instance, it’s known that aid arrived after the hurricane, and then got ignored and left to rot, all while the local politicians were screaming at the top of their lungs about how Trump had abandoned them. This latest stuff is just the cherry on top of the sundae. And given how the Progressives often react, it’s the one thing that might actually draw fire from the American Left.
“got ignored and left to rot, all while the local politicians were screaming at the top of their lungs about how Trump had abandoned them.”
Does anybody doubt that the DNC, Chuck and Nancy’s staffers (got to maintain plausible deniability for the bosses) and the MSM were encouraging that? Does anyone think the phrase “Scream about how Trump is heartless and we’ll see you’re taken care of” was never uttered?
For that matter, the remarkable thing is that any was left to rot in warehouses rather than getting sold on the black market.
After Katrina, I came up with the Katrina Policy.
In the event of a natural disaster that has overwhelmed the local government, go there. Find the three highest-ranked Democrats in the government. Shoot them out of hand.
This will result in an immediate improvement in performance, usually dramatic.
Oh, you mean Puerto Rico?
There is a fantastic documentary called “Poverty, Inc.” that I highly recommend. A student of mine turned me on to it. It’s available on Amazon Prime and on DVD. I use it in my intro comparative politics class when we talk about global development and poverty. It’s eye-opening for everybody. It discusses the exact problem of giving fish vs. teaching how to fish in the global South.
“People who must be cared for, who cannot strive outward and upward like true Americans. Who cannot integrate.”
AKA, serfs. And you can’t be a feudal lord – which is what all Progressives want to be in their heart of hearts – without serfs to lord it over.
I actually think that we should make English the official language. The fact is that you cannot be successful – anywhere in the world, but especially in the US – if you don’t know English. By making English the official language we make it clear to immigrants and those who want to help immigrants that learning English is a necessary thing, which will help with their economic success and acculturation.
Of course, I’m the kind of guy who thinks that citizenship shouldn’t be automatic, even to those born here and descended from the passengers on the Mayflower.
“Of course, I’m the kind of guy who thinks that citizenship shouldn’t be automatic, even to those born here and descended from the passengers on the Mayflower.”
Same. Every citizen should have to pass the immigrant citizenship test to be eligible to vote, run for office, or sit on a jury. And then use the Star Empire of Manticore method to restrict citizenship even further: you do your taxes. If you paid one cent more in taxes than you received in government benefits, you get the perquisites of citizenship.
The welfare queens have blue hair and they will bankrupt us soon.
I tend to be harder-nosed. If you run the numbers, the Federal Government takes in approximately $6,000 per year in income tax from each adult. I would make voting contingent on paying a Share…100 Points of Equity in the last two years. One day of paid active military service = $100 in Federal income tax = 4 hours of unpaid voluntary labor service. Do your part, pay or work your Share, and you can cast a vote.
Eh, don’t like it. The average blue hair gets $17,064 of SS and another $10,986 of Medicare a year. Under a Manticorean voting scheme, they would have to earn $28050.01 to be able to vote themselves bigger entitlements from the government. Under your scheme, they’d only have to do 240 hours of volunteer work to vote themselves entitlements, which most of them could do over the course of a year because they’re being paid not to work.
If people want to be wards of the state to get entitlements, okay. But the whole point of being a ward is that you don’t get a vote.
No, they would have to work 400 hours…which I suspect would prove a lot less popular than people think.
Another option would be to let everybody vote…but have a minimum income tax rate. Say 10% of gross income. The United States has the most unfair tax code in the developed world, and the Dirty Little Secret is that the Truly Rich don’t pay the highest rates. It’s the professionals, skilled craftsmen, and small businessmen – the Payer Class – who bear th burdens.
Self employed. I write at least a book a year for the government.
Fuck that, I saw what they did with mandatory volunteering in high school.
And I experienced what they did with mandatory volunteer service in highschool. I would not recommend that on the national level. Nope. No sir. I’ll do things for love, and I’ll do other things for money. Mandatory volunteer stuff is NEITHER.
Mandatory Volunteer was easy for our kid. Just took all his volunteer hours for scouting and applied it to his school record. (Hey they never said that couldn’t be done!) Scouting, it was never “mandatory”. Sure, needed a few for rank advancement, but advancement isn’t required to actually participate at the unit or council level, ever. Encouraged, sure. Required, no. Sure Eagle requires Service Project, which implies hours. But specific number of hours is not required, just document them. Big difference. Also, again. Earning Eagle isn’t required. Just a goal that is encouraged.
What do you want to bet that Federal Mandatory Volunteering would throw out that loop hole. Sorry, your XYZ organization volunteers and raises funds for Diabetic Research. Or YMCA group volunteers to foster and train dogs for adoption … sorry, no, those don’t qualify. Here is the list of “worthy” qualified groups you can volunteer for.
Nope. Mandatory is not volunteering. It is unpaid work. No matter how worthy the cause.
If it’s mandatory,. it’s not volunteer.
If it’s during school hours, it’s using schoolkids for forced labor. That’s a “Hell, no!”
If it’s outside school hours, that’s “and the horse you rode in on.”
THIS. I am SO GLAD I managed to get out before that nonsense spread to where I was. I suspect I’d had that very reaction, and Pa would have backed me up on. And if they threatened “then no graduate” the response would have been, “Oh, I’ll just take that GED *NOW* a couple years early, and make you look like the fools you are. (As it was, there was some consideration of doing that anyway.)
Pa was told by his folks, “no driving.” His response was, eventually, “No senior (or whatever) photos until I have my license.” I suspect that grandpa gave in because otherwise grandma would never let him hear the end of it.
I volunteered at the local library because I wanted to, had been for years.
I was prepared for a showdown.
Magically, volunteering at the library became acceptable. Without any paperwork, either.
Yes. And so many colleges now insist that you show proof of “community engagement and volunteerism.” I detested it when I was in college, and just pointed to the eight+ hours a week restoring aircraft for a 501(c)3.
And the Salvation Army won’t count.
It’s not during school hours, but yes, it is involuntary servitude.
too easily gamed for removing voting rights from disabled veterans, and then from people in the military.
Point 1: This would require a complete rewriting of the Constitution to my liking, which is about as likely to happen as a second Virgin Birth. So please forgive me if I don’t have full set of builder’s specs for my castle in the clouds.
Point 2: There’s no real help from the source material, as in the Honorverse we don’t see any disabled veterans. The medical technology is sufficiently advanced that most people either die or make a full recovery. The one disabled person we see is a civilian and so rich it doesn’t matter anyway.
Point 3: If I had to give an answer to that concern, it would be something along the lines of disability treatments and payments count as payments for services rendered and thus countable income, not an assistance benefit.
Given the trends in obstetric medicines I expect in the next twenty years there will be not only a second Virgin Birth but one in which both sets of chromosomes come from the mother.
Wouldn’t that be a clone of the mother?
Are we about to see something like Brin’s ‘Glory Season’?
No not necessarily if the things used as source were zygotes (i.e. eggs) or produced by some kind of forced meiosis. This mixes the genes up just as if there were two separate humans involved. Of course no phenotypical males possible as no Y chromosomes. Maybe you could mangle an X? Though odds on that ain’t gonna work and will end in a miscarriage or something worse. And if you’ve got a recessive of some sort (e.g. M1CR, red hair) ALL descendants will have it, poor choice of reproduction method for say someone with various genetic diseases
Yes. Recessive genes was my first thought.
Clones would be better.
Which is why every fictional and non-fictional approach even in the same galaxy as science assumes a level of genetic knowledge and therapy capability that allows for both identification of recessives that are “bad” at some point in the process and the ability to correct recessives via gene surgery.
The identification capability is even more critical than the correction, because that level of id means you can avoid the problem (Heinlein in Time Enough for Love proposing that couples whose gene charts were going to result in bad reinforcement being forbidden by custom and / or law from ever having children, or just the usual practice (Heinlein, Weber, etc.) of flushing any potential problems).
That’s also going to lead to eugenics practices Margaret Sanger would endorse, with predictable bad results. See Mesan Alignment, Khan Noonian Singh, etc.
I’ve been toying with the idea of a voter bond. You put up $10,000 and you get a voter ID that allows you to vote. At any time you can surrender your ID and get the money, plus treasury bond interest, back.
Personally, if you receive “benefits” (outside disability payments – though I think those should be privatized, as well), you cannot vote for the amount of time you receive them, nor for a period equal to half the time you received them afterward. (This is to prevent Dems playing games with dumping everyone off welfare on Oct 31 so they can go vote for more welfare.)
“Receiving benefits” is defined as any payment from the gov’t which is not received in exchange for goods or services rendered, a return of monies owed, nor a payment made under the auspices of ‘insurance’ (unemployment, for example – which, again, I would love to see privatized).
The restriction applies to the level at which funds are received, and the source of the funds. So, if you get city welfare, you can’t vote in a city election, but can vote in state/federal. If you get state welfare, then you can’t vote in state elections. But… since state welfare coffers are funded by the
federalnational gov’t, you couldn’t vote in federal elections, either.So, you get state welfare checks for 6 months. You can’t vote for 9 months, starting with the first check, at either state or federal levels.
This becomes truly powerful if you institute a simplified income tax (without a lot of incentivized loopholes).
(I wonder if you can throw in here some version of the Can’t Vote Yourself A Raise bit, too. So, any revenue or payout votes don’t take effect until the next appropriate election.)
And i *thoroughly* disagree. Too easy to be gamed once the opposite party is in power.
As someone receiving most of their income from VA ‘Pension’ (what used to be called ‘non-service-connected disability’) you’re literally talking, again, about disenfranchising me.
There is no such thing as ‘city welfare’. Welfare is administered by the county or city, paid by the state, and funded by the Federal gov’t according to standards they set. Additional state standards are common.
See, THIS is the kind of mindset you need to have when ‘fixing’ things.
Can a jackass genie weaponize it easily?
Yup. English is the WORLD’S second language.
Toured an Agricultural & Trade school in Micronesia, with students from all over the Pacific Rim. One of the other tourists asked our young student guide if they could all talk with each other. He replied, “Sure, if we speak English.”
@Sarah
>> “we’re reduced to the level of pets, and humans don’t do well with pets.”
I assume you mean we don’t do well AS pets. Otherwise, PETA and I have some questions about how you’re treating those cats of yours…
Also, “The cake is a lie?” Why do I suddenly want to see you try your hand at Let’s Plays?
with being pets.
Sorry. I sat down to write a quick post and THIS emerged.
I got “The cake is a lie” from my kids years ago.
I figured it was something like that, in both cases. And no apology needed.
But I’m STILL wondering how you’d do as a Let’s Player now. :p
Mass Effect: Sarah vs. Sovereign. I want to see this now.
we’ll make great pets.
I am unsure if I should be amused (by the idea), disturbed (by the idea), or disappointed (that I’ve not had such). As it is I am… bewildered.
My cat’s think we make at best tolerable pets and darn poor slave labor.
Fwiw, I finally just finished reading (what there is so far of) “Humans Do Not Make Good Pets.” Whoever suggested that, thank you.
And even in less strangely fragile Universe, I would presume the title to be true, though the discovery how so would differ considerably.
Those single nationality enclaves of immigrants from the last century from northern Europe might have held strongly to their own culture but their children, the first generation born here (and many of their parents as well, at least for their children if not themselves) pushed acculturation and language *strongly*. The first group born here would learn the old language and English, but teach their children only English. (The old languages were for discussing secrets, such as Christmas presents.)
A generation after that many were sorry to be mono-lingual and then add a huge portion of Shame for being American and Mono-lingual, and we end up unwilling today to insist that people acculturate at all.
Look at the Hispanic enclaves today. They are Large and getting larger. The people in them do not need to speak English or use English. The US Government speaks to them in their language. How do they assimilate, how do their children assimilate?
In Florida they had a man run for the House, he could not speak English!
If you don’t speak English HOW can you function as a citizen??
In 1982 I went to USSR (Baylor in Russia program). We visited the University of Georgia and talked with the President of the University.
He did NOT speak Russian well enough to talk to our Intourist guide. They had to have a Georgian – Russian translator and then the guide acted as the Russian – English translator. The USSR had 2 different school systems ONE was a Native Language system with Russian as Secondary and the Other was a Russian with the Native Language as secondary. We were told that many that went to the Native Language NEVER learned Russian well.
IS THAT what the Progressives WANT??? 2 school systems one English and one the student’s Native Language??
Is that what progressives want?
Well, it’s a darned good way to keep people dependent, isn’t it?
When I lived in California out church decided to offer English tutoring. They thought that Spanish speakers would show up but (and maybe it was just the wrong neighborhood, silicon valley and all) everyone was Vietnamese. They had “good” jobs in the tech industry with supervisors who were also Vietnamese. The supervisors spoke English. The non-English speakers were trapped in the jobs. They wanted out and they couldn’t get out until they spoke English. What concerned me more is that it sure sounded like labor violations were going on.
That’s what happens when people don’t have options. They’re shut out from alternatives, from any sort of free job market, and closed off from legal protections that they’re less able to access.
Anyone who tries to facilitate people in the US *not* learning English is not a good person. They simply aren’t.
Well, it’s a darned good way to keep people dependent, isn’t it?
*thin smile* Ask the guys who were outraged that the gov’t taught their tribes’ kids to speak English.
Put the translators out of a job.
Tended to put them out of life, too, once the guys they’d been translating for could read what the contracts said, vs what the translator had claimed they said…..
Hrmm.. given how technology is progressing and how nasty things could get.. language-specific voice-activated bombs would not surprise me. The problem would be that English has all those other-language words in it, and has no qualms adding more. We’ll know things have gone well past too far should be an ‘Anglophone Summit’ to deal with language ‘purity’.
I’m not surprised that they had a lot of Vietnamese in Silicon Valley. When the boat people came over, they were usually brought in through San Francisco and then shuttled to various agricultural areas (as a low skill threshold job source for folk who literally had nothing.) Before it was Silicon Valley, San Jose and the south Bay were a big agricultural area, and that provides an anchor base for future groups to at least see something familiar.
A lot of Vietnamese folk came to Sacramento and became strawberry farmers. A lot of their kids are dentists—high skill mobile job. Refugee trauma has interesting effects on later generations.
I think that these were mostly direct immigrants. Their bi-lingual supervisors would have been the children of field workers.
I meant they would have come to the area knowing that there was a community to step into.
Have… have they not shouted it from a high enough rooftop yet?
Actually they wouldn’t want that. Teaching English as a secondary language is probably Cultural Imperialism or some such bollocks.
Because they confuse culture with race, and because frankly immersion language teaching in schools doesn’t work (a) it’s not full immersion. can’t be. b) even full immersion needs grammar classes, or what you learn is a pidgin) they’ve convinced themselves you can’t REALLY learn a language you have no racial antecedents for. So demanding they learn English is cruel and evil RACISM. Head>desk.
even full immersion needs grammar classes, or what you learn is a pidgin
————————
Oh so much this. The Rosetta Stone software works through immersion, and is pretty neat. But I found things much easier to grasp once I switched over to a mobile app that included notes explaining how the grammatical stuff worked for the language in question.
Agree. I discovered that I really, really need grammar texts to back up “hear-and-say.”
Austin started court ordered busing when our daughters were in first and second grade. I never really knew how much bilingual education they got, but the PTA meetings were mostly in Spanish. So we moved 10 miles up I-35 to Round Rock. Not white flight, really, just avoid an hour each way on the bus flight. Then to Portugal where they had my wife’s teacher
I am convinced they want to abolish use of English entirely as a “racist imperialist language and reminder of colonial oppression” because they really have gone that insane.
I have had the same thought of late.
The people running the school system are either terrified that the Republicans will hold them accountable for their level of incompetence or terrified that they will be ostracized for not repeating back the number of lights they have been told. In other words, they are basically listening to people higher in the machine or deeper in the party.
Those people are obsessed with a holy war with what is basically the US. They have also been deeply disappointed with white English speakers as being the promised footsoldiers that will hand them victory.
Populations speaking different languages naturally fall into conflict. Or more precisely have much greater difficulty sustaining peace.
If they can ensure that racial minorities do not speak English, they can ensure racial war. Which condition they take as ensuring victory in their holy war. Bunch of nutters.
“IS THAT what the Progressives WANT??? 2 school systems one English and one the student’s Native Language??”
To quote Democrat 2000 presidential nominee Al Gore, “We can build a collective civic space large enough for all our separate identities, that we can be e pluribus unum – out of one, many.” — January 1994
c4c
Please vote. We have a three-way tie.
https://www.goodreads.com/poll/show/190212-what-work-about-strange-and-unusual-schools-shall-we-read-in-august
Right now I’m thinking of people who come into the place I work part-time who either speak no English or pretend not to, expect you to know Spanish and accomodate them, and use Mexican ID.
Some of them I know have been in the US for years, but try to learn our language? Shit. They don’t bother. And the leftists tell them we SHOULD accommodate them.
The Mexicans I worked with in Texas had kids with no accent at all (and the kids that were Mexican as well became citizens, eventually).
We had 3 from one family (Dad, 2 sons) and one guy married to an American, as well as a Chemist whos parents brought here here when she was a babe in arms, and she was married to a Tejano. The 2 sons and the chemist had no big accents, just the hangover of parents who chatted at home in Spanish, but were more EFL than ESL.
I was told in high school by the guidance counselor that I would never be employable, because I didn’t speak Spanish. That all the jobs were going to be in Spanish. As if the *language* was what was being desired not the cheap labor, especially without legal restrictions.
Me, too.
Guess how well that meshed with the Spanish teacher explaining that Mexican Spanish wasn’t the same as A, B, C, D, E…. Spanish….
I know enough Mexican to give someone the stink-eye when they think they’re being rude without my knowing it, and thanks to an unrequited love of Latin I can actually follow radio Mexican fairly well. I ain’t speakin’ it, and for heaven’s sake don’t mumble at me.
LOL! I was mainly stubborn. I refused to take Spanish as the school removed German and demanded everyone take Spanish instead. I wanted German, darn it! I have an ear for Germanic, not Romance languages.
I honestly tried, because I’m an idiot, but I mangle Spanish so badly that previously “no se habla” folks spontaneously discover a skill with English.
My kids!
Used to be able to read Spanish, been decades since I’ve tried. Can’t speak it, not at any speed. Even with classes in HS that required speaking Spanish the minute you walked into class, until you walked out at the end of class. Sitting quietly in class was not an option. Class taught the difference between European Castilian and Mexican/South American Spanish.
But then I’m a equal opportunity word mangler, language doesn’t matter. Certain words do not come from my brain out my mouth properly. Period.
Mexican Spanish is very easy to understand. Andaluz dialect is much more difficult.
My (never particularly high) opinion of guidance counselors took a fatal blow on learning that Jay Leno’s high school guidance counselor praised the joys of asking, “Would you like fries with that?”. Said counselor was convinced that Leno’s grades and in class behaviour forever precluded him from higher ambition. Forget his career as a comedian, even before that the guy was apparently legendary for his skills as a mechanic, forever earning the friendship of fellow aspiring comics by providing automotive assistance in a variety of ways, from buying used to keeping the crates running.
When I worked in the justice system, I’d run into people in the court house who’d start speaking to me in Spanish. If I told them I didn’t speak Spanish in Spanish, they’d keep talking, if I told them I didn’t speak Spanish in English, they’d keep talking but maybe a little slower. If I said: Я не говорю по испански, 私はスペイン語を話しません, or Je ne parle pas espagnol, they’d walk away slowly and leave me alone.
One characteristic of the Progressive Left is that they are determined to take up the White Man’s Burden, even if it’s not needed or desired. And loosening their grip on this burden requires the application of high explosives.
Virtue signaling is *that* important.
No…the White Man’s Burden involves going to distant, exotic, low-rent places and working your backside off (at substantial risk to life and limb) for ungrateful natives. The Left doesn’t do that, except in a sham-show.
Take up the White Prog’s Burden, send forth the worst ye breed . . .
Alas, you have to take them back, when the locals discover their quality!
(Okay, it doesn’t really rhyme, but I’m not Kipling!)
We’ll boot them back to Mamma, according to their need.
Correct! There’s absolutely no understanding of the difference between resident and citizen! I ran into this over and over as I tried workshopping a short. None reading it could grasp the necessary concept of what citizenship meant! Every progressive *hated* the story with a burning passion, saying it made no sense.
Even more crazy, I had more than one female on learning the transhuman transition that removed citizenship, would keep them thin, became gleefully ecstatic about giving it up just TO BE THIN!!! Who cared about voting or owning property! All I could do is blink at them and wonder how pampered they were to NOT understand ALL the ramifications!
One additional note on becoming American: As I understand it, large numbers of folks picked up and went back to Mexico, and crossings nearly dried up, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Those who call another country home had no interest in being in a country at war, at least until it became clear that there were quotes around that “W” word as it was implemented by the W administration, who told people to contribute to the effort by gong to the mall. But at least for a while it was very difficult for the agricultural and construction industries out here to find enough workers.
If they bail when it looks to be getting difficult, they’re certainly not Americans.
You nailed it.
Sometimes getting new cultures moving into an area provides lots of new and interesting opportunities. German beer festivals! Norwegian entertainment festivals serving lefse! Gyros from the middle east!
Sometimes you get people who can’t quite understand why selling your 13 year old daughter off to another family as a “bride” is frowned upon. Or why they are getting arrested for whipping their wives (yes, multiple) with lamp cords and then tying them up while they go work an 8 hour shift at the meat packing plant. Or why the neighbors are bitching about the blood running out from under the garage door at the apartment complex because it’s time to sacrifice lamb for your celebration.
Livestock “slaughtered” in university housing… Yeeeeaaaahhhh, the administrators sure didn’t talk that little story up when they bragged about the International Student Association.
Sounds like a case of cultural imperialism to me. Probably don’t allow cock fights, either. How intolerant!!!
The teeny weeny mosque down the road got some good advice. They did just like the Polish-American Country Club and the Czechs and the Sons of Italy, and bought themselves a little picnic ground out in a county rural area. And that is where they do all their sacrificial activities. (Convenient for sacrificial picnic feasts afterward.)
Henceforth and Forever the Freshman Democrat ‘Squad’ shall be known to all as The Mean Girls’ Table. We all knew them in high school, we don’t need them in Congress. So Let It Be Written, So Let It Be! Selah!
I thought The Mean Girl Squid
I incline towards the Gang of Four, with all that implies.
I favor “The Four Would-be Congresswomen of the Apocalypse.”
I figure AOC is Famine, but I’m not sure about the others.
I want to call it The Squid Squad, but am afraid of the meanings of Squid, other than Cthulhu.
I think, when referring to persons of vaginatude, it is probably prudent to eschew terms redolent of fish or things that smell like fish.
OTOH, there is a squid-like way in which, when attacked, they spew vast clouds of obscuring ink.
Now you mention it, they do seem like horses’ patooties.
I felt the Clod Squad seemed appropriate given their amazing foot in mouth skills.
I recommend “Life At The Bottom”, by Dalrymple. It is written by a British doctor and psychiatrist and describes the life of the British underclass.
Dalrymple argues that the current welfare state creates “passive, helpless victims”. The book is basically a collection of anecdotes and shows more vividly than any statistics could the human price of well-meaning but misguided policies.
One of our little friends out there is making shit up about our esteemed hostess. I’m going to do the same thing to him he did to Sarah from her piece yesterday, post one line out of his whole blather. camel does not get a link, I will not contribute to his traffic.
“In this case, attacking undisputedly American citizens as somehow being un-genuine, demonstrates exactly how the rhetoric against “illegals” is the thin of a wedge of political oppression.”
For a camel who prides himself on logic, he consistently fails to make logical distinctions between things like legitimate immigrants and ILLEGAL migrants. People like myself and Sarah who legally enter the USA, pay taxes and follow every INS rule, no matter how idiotic or odious, vs. the people who sneak in across the border, then steal from social programs intended for use by Americans. You can see how one of those things is not like the other.
The camel maintains it is “dangerous” and “oppressive” to oppose the Gang of Four and their open-borders rhetoric and Hate America political platform.
No word on the camel’s opinion about NAZI!!!! Richard Spencer being on his side now, and being on CNN as well.
Kat Goodwin in the camel comments was particularly inspired: “Libertarians are for oligarchy of property owners with indentured serf labor.”
Yeah Kat. Sure they are. Were you dropped on your head as a child?
Now, all this lying and insanity could have been avoided if Kat and camel actually read the Trump tweets and understood what they said. But if they had done that they wouldn’t have a leg to stand on, so instead they chose to lie and fling poo. Just like every other fucker on the Left this week.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how we get more Trump.
yawn. A) he’s Australian. B) he has like six readers and twelve sock puppets. c) he’s a camel. His brain is addled from being mounted by Arabs.
A) Hilariously he’s an ex-patriot Brit and an IMMIGRANT in Australia.
B) Six? Naw, two of those are Chinese bots on loan from Mike. Gotta be.
C) He’s probably mental from being lonely because there’s no Arabs in the Australian desert. Hard to tell though, because camel.
Yes, and one of them is our old “pal” and well-documented stalker/misogynist/general creep, Yamamanama.
I mean, he goes through our comments. He knows that Yama has stalked R K Modena online for over a decade. He knows that the guy has said and done despicable things to Drow and others. He knows this . . . and lets the guy post on his blog anyhow.
The camel is back doing that again? One of his bots must have quit, needs more traffic. Any word on the sudden rehabilitation of Richard Spencer? I’m guessing no.
Little Andrew yoremama is invited any time to visit my Soapbox blog and get deleted by the Iron Finger. It hungers for troll hide.
ROFL!
“he consistently fails to make logical distinctions between things like legitimate immigrants and ILLEGAL migrants. ”
Best illustration of this difference I’ve come across goes something like this:
Suppose the young man living with your daughter in her upstairs bedroom is her husband.
Now suppose that he is not.
Alternatively, suppose your daughter’s husband asks you for a loan of $5,000 to start a business. Now suppose the guy shacking up with your daughter asks for that loan.
Legal immigrants are like people whom I invite into my home through the front door, during the day, for dinner and drinks and camaraderie.
Illegal immigrants are like people who break in through a window in the middle of the night, raid your fridge, don’t flush the toilet, and leave cockroaches, bedbugs, and lice everywhere.
Excuse me. I meant Illegal Aliens.
Objection! Assumes object not in evidence: One (1) Head.
Ugh, time to buy more popcorn futures. I’ve already cornered the market for three star systems for the next century. HEY! DUMBASSES ON THE LEFT! You’ve got to stop this or I’ll be the only person with any popcorn!
Beloved Spouse & I watched an hour or so of Trump’s rally in Greenville, NC this evening and paid particular attention to how he was employing rhetoric. Absolutely brilliant. A classic Lincoln/Douglas style of argument won’t work with today’s audience, conditioned to absorb info in short bursts, so Trump makes a few points, (seems like he) wanders off and then circles back to reinforce the earlier points, building an array of impressions that a modern audience can absorb. Sort of like watering a plant: first you wet the soils, give it time to become absorbent then add more water, give that time to be absorbed and add more, repeat until saturated.
He is clearly painting the Democrats, who as yet have no presidential standard-bearer, with the taint of the Mean Squid, highlighting the contradictions between their professed positions and their behaviour. He’s making a Mean Squid sandwich which he will force every Dem candidate to eat. And he is sowing the MSM field with complete distrust of how they are going to try to spin his statements, not just rendering them useless but making their attacks work to his benefit.
Once you stop projecting on him the idea that he is erratic, unhinged, racist and all those other mean words it is clear how he is playing the Left’s biases like Clapton plays guitar.
I’m not saying Trump is playing 4-D chess, but he’s making them play Yosemite Sam to his Bugs.
Your objection is noted, but I’m sure Kat Goodwin has a head. She’s wearing her pants on it.
Well her pants are over her head but her fundament is not her head. Her head is deeply implanted in her lower colon… the entrance to which is in her pants.
*points to cart with tip of tail* We have plain, plain with salt, butter no salt, caramel, kettle corn, hot cinnamon, caramel with nuts, three cheese, white cheddar…
In my moderately anti-social moments I fantasize about rounding up all the registered Democrats, stripping them of their citizenship, and giving them a one-way ticket to the left-wing nation of their choice. The way the world is set up there isn’t a Democrat out there who can’t find a country between Canada and North Korea that matches their particular political philosophy. It would be far better for everyone involved if they would just move there instead of trying to make America like some other country, because us Americans don’t have anywhere to go (yet. Musk needs to get cracking on that Mars base). Which is why it’s better for everyone involved. Americans tend to react…poorly to having failed political philosophies shoved down their throats.
As an additional benefit, it would make room in this country for all those Americans like our hostess who were born with the wrong passports.
Please do not send any DemocRats to Canada. We already have more than enough home-grown idiots here.
Indeed, not to Canada, or really, most places in the Americas at all. Don’t want the risk of them being able to simply WALK back.
Send them to Guam. Have them all stand on one side and when it tips over ( 🙂 ) Voila problem solved.
A friend who has taught K-2 for something like forty years votes straight-Republican but is a registered Dem because when she started her teaching career it was essentially required you register as a Dem. Probably a more important qualification than a teaching degree or certification.
So there is that problem with your proposal.
I’m of the opinion that public schools could be (mostly) fixed by de-unionizing public employees. One little change, and the whole thing would straighten right out.
Nobody -needs- to be a teacher, so if they didn’t like the pay they could all quit. Just like in the private sector.
Added bonus, my taxes would drop by about half.
In Canada our biggest problem is corruption. Same as Mexico really, just better hidden here. Ending public sector unions would go a long way to reducing corruption.
I really hate the way we do unions in the US (I imagine that Canada is similar). They’re nothing more than monopolies on the labor market. I’d really like to see the end of exclusive bargaining unit clauses in labor contracts. Let workers bargain collectively, but the employer has no obligation to bargain with any given group of workers.
I’m refering exclusively to -public- sector unions. The employer is the government. The government has no fiduciary pressure to negotiate a decent deal with the union, because they CAN’T GO OUT OF BUSINESS. The -taxpayer- pays the bills, the taxpayer pays the cost of the union, and the TAXPAYER is not at the table.
Thing is, the exclusive right to sell labor for unions also removes the seller– the guys who want to work AREN’T ALLOWED to sell their labor at a deal they like, they’re required to sell it to the union who the employer is required to buy from.
That’s not as bad as gov’t unions, but it sucks.
FDR agreed with you long before you said it. If you want somebody to blame for the power wielded by public employee unions, blame JFK and Executive Order 10988
according to Wiki. Yet one more reason it takes a long long time to fully evaluate any president’s legacy. I don’t know whether anybody has attempted to calculate the total cost of pay and pensions accumulated by federal employee unions, but I doubt there are enough pennies for each dollar of incurred cost.
According to something I read in passing on Drudge yesterday, the people of Chicago are on the hook for something like $140,000 each to cover city/state worker pensions. Can’t remember where it was, but I’ve seen similar numbers coming out of California.
The costs are absolutely stunning.
One of the reasons US Steel had to get permission from the Canadian government to buy the Steel Company of Canada was STELCO pensions. The amount the company had to cover was ridiculous, billions of dollars. That’s what put them in receivership in the first place. The management kept kicking the can down the road until it ate them.
So, when Stelco finally was sold, all those pensions were ended. Kaput. There were an awful lot of long-faced NDPee voters around here, let me tell you.
It’s not a proposal, just a fantasy. But I do think some kind of a purge of the anti-american elements in our polity is coming, and it’s more likely to be based on something tangible but inaccurate like party as a proxy for belief.
Sigh. I’m afraid it will be based on color and/or place of origin. Which will suck for me and mine.
Y’all just need to make it clear to the authorities as to which group you identify with, and demand they respect your right to do so.
I for example, although an unquestioned wallaby, also identify as a member of the Lollipop Guild and insist on all the privileges and appurtenances thereunto. Any official denying those rights is just begging for not only a lawsuit but such a Social media scolding as you would not believe.
I would start with a purge of Schools of Education and Teacher Certification committees, Accreditation agencies and state school boards/Ed Dept.s … with special attention to those blankety-blanks running the SAT and AP programs. Require Teachers’ Unions to recertify annually, with “opt out” the default for all members. Any misrepresentations in union appeals to members carry triple-penalty liability: refund of collected dues (including pension and insurance premiums at four-times the contributed amount.
Also a complete, top-to-bottom revision of the curriculum.
And every morning, a large FBI agent arrives at Bill Ayers’ home and punches his face.
Just one of my fantasies, of course. i ain’t proposing nuthin’.
But I don’t want to have to become an FBI agent….
They issue him gloves. In case he might get some on him, y’know.
I am willing to entertain a discussion of publicly auctioning off the opportunity for each morning’s scheduled retribution. The details might require some working out, though. Should factor in a weight allowance, for example? One 300-lb person hitting him being equivalent to two 150-lb people? (Probably need to do that by weight class, as in boxing and wrestling?) Do we have to distinguish between height of each day’s puncher? Hardly seems fair to charge the same for a person 5’2″ as one who is 6’4″?
“No word on the camel’s opinion about NAZI!!!! Richard Spencer being on his side now, and being on CNN as well. ”
KKK David Duke also.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/mar/7/david-duke-praises-rep-ilhan-omar/
“… he’ll come to resent you for giving him a fish.”
Oh yes. If you have ever given a loan to friends or family and had then not be able or willing to pay it back you know the truth in this. Common sense would have you think it should be the lender that gets angry over non-payment. But experience that’s not the way it ever works. It’s the delinquent borrower who typically decides to get all hostile at the lender as time drags by and he fails to repay.
Teach a man to fish, and you put him on the path to self-sufficiency. Give a man a fish, and you teach him to depend on you, thereby enhancing your own power and prestige.
Teach a man to fish, and you have a lifetime customer for bait, lures, fly-tying components, tackle, expensive poly-carbonate rods, waders, jackets, hats, sonar fish finders …
I’m still not convinced on the overpopulation issue. Is there space in Wyoming for all those immigrants? Sure there is. There’s enough space for the entire world population in the continental U.S. The problem isn’t so much the issue of space (well, there is, precisely because of that “tribal” issue we humans have), but of living resources (food, water, shelter, clothing, energy, infrastucture.) Wyoming doesn’t have the water resources for all of the people who want to come here, even with intense recycling. Certainly the state can’t produce enough food to feed them all, even with outsourcing to nearby states. And you still have the transportation of food issue to deal with for that many people. And as you say, what are they going to actually DO to earn those resources to fill their needs, assuming they even want to work?
Let’s touch on that tribal issue. Sure, lots of people live in cities. But cities are where there’s the highest amount of crime, violence, and murder. Lot’s of other people can’t abide cities. They go nuts when you force them to reside there. And I suspect it’s that “tribal programming” that’s the core problem. Here’s a simplification. We can associate with and remember maybe 10,000 people total at any one time. We can store memories of maybe 10 times that number of peple, but usually can’t recall them without triggers. But our real connection is with about 1000 people, a large tribe. Family connections to 100, and real friend connections to maybe 10. I live in a town of roughly 8 to 10 thousand. I know a couple hundred, the others? I could care less about, except when they’re trying to raise my taxes for junk I don’t need, but they want me to pay for. Most criminal gangs have the same attitude, only more so, without any cultural training of right or wrong. For them, everyone outside the gang is fair game.
So you could say that it’s an overpopulation issue; but it’s based on a cultural one, a difference in values that aren’t shared, and really aren’t reconcileable. Indeed, the overpopulation issue the Progressives complain about is based on control, and resources for them. We don’t want to be controlled, and we want to keep the resources we worked for. They see a pie that is rigid and unexpandable. You appear to see a very flexible pie easily expanded. I think the reality is more in the middle; the pie can expand, but doesn’t react as quickly as the population changes, and even then there’s no guarantee of a ‘comfortable’ solution. And we both know Progressives are all about comfort, at least for themselves.
Maybe I’m not putting this stuff together very well. I really need a large wall, with push pins and strings to tie all the clues together properly.
In the mean time, maybe I’ll wear a real Viking helmet to work. After all, I’m of both British and Germanic descent. I must have some of those terrible Northmen in my background somewhere.
Re. vikings. I avoid wearing slogan tee-shirts when I travel because I don’t want people pegging me for an American quite that easily. I might make an exception for Mad Mike Williamson’s “It takes a Viking to raze a village” shirt if I do go to York, England next spring. (I have his “Crazy Inar’s Seagoing Concern” already, bit that takes a while to read.)
The last three sloganish tee-shirts I had identified me as Odd. I had Abacus World Expo shirts from 2000 and 2001, and a Tubes Rock shirt, all relevant to the (defunct) After Y2K web comic. I haven’t been on that site in a long time but (looks up geekculture dot com), it’s still there. They were giving away copies of the TIE fighter technical manual from Haynes Publications. Now, *that’s* geeky! 🙂
What’s the point of a Tie Fighter technical manual? It all is bloody simple: Bow tie covers String tie, Necktie wraps Bow, String Tie binds Necktie.
Okay, if you’re going into the variations incorporating ascot, cravat, sailor and similar poncy frou-frou, maybe, maybe you need a technical manual — but maybe you need to get a life instead.
*rummages around* I know i have a taser around here somewhere… oh! its charging in the kitchen, brb
Lot’s of other people can’t abide cities. They go nuts when you force them to reside there
Thing is, why?
It’s different for different people, and an awful lot of folks flat stop thinking. They have a mental stop sign where they don’t even try to figure out what they don’t like.
I want to be able to yell without upsetting anybody; at one point, we didn’t like the neighbors because their pot habit made my husband miserable. (Allergies.) Maybe the ability to avoid aggressive extroverts is a big thing.
On the other hand, what are the things someone does want, such as ability to reach the library quickly?
It’s like that stupid rat experiment writ large– they assume that the habitat is perfectly designed, instead of actually freaking designing it with an eye to what people DO.
An awful lot of folks would be perfectly happy in a boarding house.
I and one of my introverted friends PREFER cities. Why? Because we can see people without interacting with them.
I’d hate a boarding house, but I’m perfectly okay with condos.
I have places to WALK TO like museums and zoos and see people without interacting.
If we could afford central Denver, that’s where we’d live. Eh.
And the rat experiment is apparently full of crazy, which is why it was never replicated.
Boarding houses would be…iffy… for me as a young single, unless it was very military style which would basically be closer to a hotel that has meals. LOTS of sound proofing, lots of public areas.
Cities are also great because if you see someone adn recognize them, they don’t get upset if you don’t also remember their name.
BLINK.
I had this brief image of Errol Flynn, Alan Hale and a bunch of scurvy knaves swinging onto the upper balconies of a house, calling out “Prepare for boarding!”
BLINK.
At least it wasn’t Johnny Depp and crew.
…which my mind instantly replaces with the Blue Elf of Nightcrawler, and just makes it awesome.
Awww, Fox has a sweet spot for Kurt Wagner.
I actually liked the early Nightcrawler. Then they got too weird.
*pulls out broadsword*
Up to the “he’s brainwashed because religion is evil and oh by the way the author is so insanely ignorant he doesn’t realize he is ignorant”, fight me!
And of course I have a sweets spot for Kurt, the guy I married is very similar to him.
Awesome is as awesome does.
Nightcrawler in the ’80s X-Men is 100% awesome. After about 1992, its a travesty. Just another reason I quit comics back then.
BAMF!
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/marveldatabase/images/b/b6/Bamf_%28Earth-5311%29_from_Nightcrawler_Vol_1_2_0001.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20060320180204
LOL 😆
Most of those “experiments” are bullshit and can’t be replicated. The Stanford Prison Experiment for example has been thoroughly debunked.
Fucking Piltdown Man for the sociology set.
“I really need a large wall…”
Indeed, a large wall running for a couple thousand miles, situated down near the border with Mexico, would help.
Send out a call for everyone man, woman, and child in the country to take the biggest rock (or block of concrete) they can carry, and bring it to the border to use to build the wall.
There’s a test for that now:
https://phantomsoapbox.blogspot.com/2019/07/what-white-people-really-are.html
Watch the video, and if you feel the monster push on the bars of its cage, you got that scary blood.
Cage? What cage?
“So we’re letting them in, for what? To become instant charity cases in our own land?”
It’s not about them, it’s about destroying the Middle Class because the Middle Class holds the power in this Country.
The importation of “Manuel Labor” drives down the labor cost all along the labor chain. If I have to pay more for entry level labor then I must pay my skilled labor more. By increasing the Supply with illegal labor I short-circuit your Demand for higher wages (and the same holds true for the alleged “skilled” labor that I import). The stagnant wages that most have seen over the past two decades correlate with the influx of the sainted illegal labor.
But that labor doesn’t come alone. It brings family that must be housed, fed, clothed, schooled and provided with medical care. We can’t have them in squalor so YOU must do more. They need public housing so your taxes increase; they need food so your taxes increase; the schools are overcrowded so your taxes increase; the ER is overwhelmed so your taxes increase.
Your costs increase but your wages don’t. You’re squeezed, squeezed and then squeezed some more as your standard of living spirals ever downward. Your only choices are (a) give up and go on public assistance; (b) flee to another tax jurisdiction before the next Venezuela fails (why does anyone still live in California?); or (c) vote for Donald Trump and accept being called a racist for looking out for you and yours. And you’re going to be called a racist anyway if you are a citizen or legal resident so why not cast the vote?
“you’re going to be called a racist anyway if you are a citizen or legal resident so why not cast the vote?”
Comes under. I’m dead your way. Here’s both hands, holding a specific finger. I’ll take my chances with someone who actually loves what this country is founded on.
Afraid not. My only visit to Czechia was a side trip during a stay in Germany. Spent about 6 hours in Prague then had to drive back.
The Jerabek family was from the Dalečín area – over two hours east of Tabor. If I ever get back to that part of the world that would be on the itinerary
An interesting finding at Rasmussen, picked up by Matt Margolis at PJ Media:
The 32% of Democrats who believe it racist to criticize a politician of color only apply that standard to authentic politicians of color. Ben Carson, Herman Cain, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott should not count on this protection.
Of course. Racism refers more to the color of your politics than the color of your skin. So if you are a conservative American with black skin and genuine slave ancestry, you are still a white supremacist, while if you are a white skinned southerner from Arkansas, you can still be the first black president.
According to Thomas Sowell in his 1980 book “Knowledge and Decisions” one common feature of totalitarian regimes (and, I would observe, wannabe totalitarians) is “political truth.” A thing is only true to the extent that it serves the regimes core ideology, neither more nor less.
A key method of enforcing that, when someone disputes the ideology is not to argue on the basis of objective reality–after all, objective reality is not bound to be in agreement with the ideology–but instead to attack the motive of the disputant. They’re arguing against your pure ideology because….
This is where the many “ists” and “phobics” come in. They divert the argument away from a factual basis into an argument about motives.
“Knowledge and Decisions” was published in 1980 and yet is proving scarily prescient of the tactics of the modern Left.
Jesus, woman! Learn to be brief. Your points are good, but I don’t have the time to invest in War and Peace columns to mine, extract, refine, melt and mold into ingots. I recall the correspondent’s apology for the length of a letter, because she hadn’t time to write a shorter. That is obviated by learning to think with greater pith.
Sure. I could learn to think with greater pith. IF THIS WERE MY JOB.
This is my hobby, and a lousy paying one at that.
My actual job is novelist, in which a lot of the work is done to build a believable background and make it present.
<shrug.
You gets what you pay for. And no, I don't have the time to be brief.
Also some subjects require more than 800 words. Deal.
if you don’t like her verbosity you are more than welcome to move your mouse to the upper right corner of their tab in your web browser and then proceed to click on the little X, I am exceedingly sure that will will save you from being subjected to further forced reading of her posts.
In short, pith off?
naah, the short version is “if you don’t like it close the tab.”
You want it briefer, then YOU go donate the time to edit it down.
I read fast enough that it wasn’t a bother.
You get what you pay for, kiddo.
Not that it matters, but that apology you reference — “I have already made this paper too long, for which I must crave pardon, not having now time to make it shorter.” — is variously attributed to the Roman orator Cicero, Blaise Pascal, Edmund Bohun, John Locke, George Tullie, William Cowper, Ben Franklin, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Woodrow Wilson, each of whom, I am confident, would have objected to being called “she.”
It requires very little time to perform such research and I encourage you to expend it if you wish to continue contributing comments here, lest you be advised to take a pith.
“That is obviated by learning to think with greater pith.”
You should be on Twitter then. All the wisdom that can be jammed into 128 characters.
Good catch.
I actually mentally edited that to the more sane idea that you can edit stuff down with time; the idea that you just need to “think with greater pith” is silly.
That would require having an established shorthand.
In other words, “shut up and say what I expect to hear.”
Hello, bathroom!
How’s it goin’?
Time I set my free thoughts flowin’.
I took some thought and drank some tea.
La la la la, feeling’ pithy!
give a man a fish and he’ll have a meal, teach a man to fish and…
You’ll never get him out of your damn koi pond.
Sort of off-topic (okay – we all know that i could set this up so that it was on-topic but we know how much of a strain such lifting can be …) this observation from Jim Geraghty seems a nice expression of something we’ve all noticed:
… I think it’s pretty clear that political correctness makes for boring storytelling, because it turns characters into symbols, and the PC worldview rarely allows much nuance when discussing those symbols. Characters aren’t allowed to be too flawed if they’re representing a minority, and villains almost always have to represent straight white male corporate patriarchy, or women/minorities who have sold out. A good protagonist is usually dealing with some sort of internal conflict that aligns with the external threat or challenges, and that means a protagonist has to have some flaws. You can have villains who are pure evil, but they’re usually less interesting than villains who have some sort of relatable emotion motivating them, like envy or hunger for revenge after some perceived injustice. Or maybe just hunger, like the shark in Jaws.
If your storytelling is too hemmed in by a political agenda, you can’t have a character like the X-Men’s Magneto, who’s obviously destructive, dangerous, and extremist, but you feel a bit of sympathy for him because his attitudes are shaped by surviving the Holocaust.
What’s worse is that an ironclad PC mindset taking root in Hollywood means that during the creative process, no one can look at the script, the acting, etc. and say, “you know, this isn’t working, it’s just not exciting or surprising enough, we should change it” because any criticism, internal or external, can be dismissed as homophobia, sexism, racism, etc.
like the X-Men’s Magneto, who’s obviously destructive, dangerous, and extremist, but you feel a bit of sympathy for him because his attitudes are shaped by surviving the Holocaust.
Worse, Magneto has a point— the mutants aren’t exactly the same as other “minority” groups. They’re, like, the inverse of kids with cancer– rare, out of the blue, but (here’s the opposite) way more powerful than normal humans.
His solution is just stupid.