In fascist rhetoric the enemy is always both weak and strong. It’s a real easy indicator that you’re hearing propaganda.
Not being political here, just thinking logically. Isn’t it possible for a subgroup of a large group to do X while another subgroup of the same large group does Y?
I’m not sure if these options are mutually exclusive when it comes to large sets of individuals.
This is just logical thinking, I have no statistics and this is not a political stance.
That was my first thought as well. Assuming a large enough amount of immigrants, they could be overwhelming both the welfare system and the job market. A sufficiently large group of additional people would overwhelm every system, and depending on the preexisting conditions, that group might not need to be all that big
It’s kinda hard to overwhelm the job market tho, at least if the economy is growing. In that case, more workers would likely facilitate growth, since the growing workforce will also have money to spend and create demand. If the market was already very competitive, things would be different, but developed countries are usually hungry for skilled workers. Demographics dictate this will only become more true as time passes
It’s a pretty complex situation, I really have no position. I just think I’ve seen some funny things like:
- “low-skill jobs is a myth created by the rich to justify low wages”
and then others saying:
- “Illegal immigration doesn’t affect the average wage of Americans because immigrants go for the low-skill market while Americans go for the high-skill market”
So which is it. It seems like people just say things that defend their views. Being certain is pretty hard.
They do a great job of hiding the fallacy by placing a single individual in the photo and saying “immigrant” instead of “immigrants”.
I’m not sure about American law, but something tells me that it’s even possible for an individual to do both things.
I guess that explains how republicans are incompetent but also easily destroy the country during 4 years in power
I found it hilarious when many California farmers (e.g. fruits) voted for Trump, then got angry when he immediately started cutting back on immigration - like what the hell did you think he meant when he talked about that EVERY SINGLE TIME!? That man isn’t exactly known for using “metaphors” or having the slightest degree of “subtlety” - e.g. when he talks about grabbing pussy, he doesn’t mean getting to know someone intimately, he means to GRAB someone’s ACTUAL genitalia, which simply being within arms reach seems to imply automatically giving consent, and if not then you can take it up with his team of lawyers.
After that, people started dying, and other things happened like infants were literally ripped right out of their mothers’ arms and I suddenly found it less funny:-(.
I guess arguably it could be funny to think how liberals get mad when the Democrats they vote for do not do what they promised, yet Trump supporters got mad at him when he did - if that situation were not so fucking tragic for us all:-(.
Edit:
It’s okay, presidential immunity allows grabbing pussies.
/s but no joke
Take my angry upvote!
They should feel privileged that he deigned to notice them, I guess. He big-um strong “man”, they being weak tiny women-folk and all. (this one yes \s)
I would be only half surprised if he or one of his follows became the world’s first man to get a surgery to graft on a second (no… ah… FIVE!) penises, just to prove how “masculine” he is.
Then he could show them off at every rally, by peeing on all the attendants. They would thank him for his service! :-P (extremely unfortunately, no \s on this one…)
We just played the anti-immigrant game in Florida. Harsh legislation passed, they ran away, and fuck me, crops are rotting in the fields.
There were a couple of business owners brave enough to say it out loud on video. “Well, yeah, we wanted this legislation, but just to kinda scare 'em. We didn’t think we’d actually lose our workers! Maybe we gotta rethink this whole thing.”
Props to those few self-aware SeaWolves. Some are getting it.
If you want slave labor, you gotta put up with slaves living on the plantation.
Yup. They are playing a dangerous game of Russian Roulette, hoping it won’t be them that actually gets the blast. Or maybe “chicken” is a better phrasing - which side will blink first? The one who cares least about losing is the one that “wins”, except can you call that winning, REALLY?
Like, hey I have an idea, let’s beat up all the nerds, who actually like… think and stuff… and junk. THAT will surely turn out alright? :-(
It reminds me of how Kansas lowered taxes, then went bankrupt, then did it again, then wanted to do it AGAIN!? (then other states wanted to follow suit - it really is a repeating pattern, where nobody ever learns the lessons of even just a handful of years prior) There, they stuck microphones in the farmers faces (farmers would have been the top benefactors of lowering taxes in that state) and asked them what they would do if taxes were lowered - would they “create jobs”? Their answers were absolutely priceless. “No… (looks with disgust on their faces) why (the fuck) WOULD we!?” They even went into detail - there is only so much crop out there, you can’t simply hire more workers and somehow magically get more profits. Plus Americans don’t want to work those jobs anyway, plus they already manage to get the tasks done as it is, what possible reason would they want to hire on more people for, especially stable jobs, for American citizens? So then the reporters would ask what they would do with all that extra money. “I dunno… prolly put it in the bank, I guess?”
Apparently “JOBS” is a magical 4-letter word that if you lower taxes on the wealthy, somehow just magically materializes. Meanwhile the actual job creators are saying… not so much. Companies like Garmin in Kansas want a nice workplace for their workforce - they want hospitals, roads, bridges, and the like. If they wanted to live in Mississippi or Florida, then they would move there, but they do not. i.e., they WANT to pay taxes, or at least benefit from a place where taxes have been paid into, in the past.
So Republicans in Kansas lowered taxes, supposedly for the sake of the farmers, except even the majority of farmers did not want that, and then the entire state went bankrupt, AGAIN.
But by all means, let’s try it still yet again, on the scale of the entire nation this time, and against the will of the majority of voters - surely that will end well once more? :-( (to clarify, I mean that it will work out well for Putin, and really if you stop to think about it, that is all that matters… right? RIGHT!?)
he immediately started cutting back on immigration
Except he didn’t, really. The fucking wall was a joke, not something that would ever actually stop illegal immigrants. If conservatives really wanted to stop illegal immigration, they would go after the employers who hire them - something we will never see.
Whether or not his administration managed to cut back on illegal crossings (mainly ICE raids I would guess), he definitely and dramatically did cut back on legal visas offered. Thus farmers, who relied heavily upon those with temporary work visas, panicked there during the first year of his administration, e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/us/california-farmers-backed-trump-but-now-fear-losing-field-workers.html.
If conservatives really wanted to stop illegal immigration, they would go after the employers who hire them
Conservatives never really want to accomplish most of their stated goals - it’s like a dog chasing after a car, they wouldn’t know what to do if they ever caught it. The catch is that Trump isn’t actually conservative, he simply used those talking points, too dumb to realize that he wasn’t supposed to mean any of it:-P.
He also wasn’t Republican either, although there he won, since he hollowed out the Republican party, laid his eggs inside its brain and now he controls the corpse. I think McCarthy was the last vestige of a Tea Party style fiscal conservative, and now the Alt Right has taken complete control, even as they already have started eating their own and demolishing that from the inside with an even more hardcore line, where e.g. the infamously extreme Fox News is no longer extreme enough.
But anyway, yeah if they truly wanted to stop immigration that is what would need to be done, but they don’t be it’s such an easy talking point that they’ve invested so much effort into, they can’t afford to lose out on it now by actually solving the damn thing!:-P
No space in the square brackets
I did like his debate with Hillary though. He completely burried her with the taxes thing, Soros and all that. He may be an ass, but he was dead on about that. Everyone uses the system, even the democrats.
Surely there are things that he says that I would even agree with - though I more often question how he says them (that is not me down-voting you though to be clear).
e.g. I agreed with Hillary Clinton on the “ninth-month abortion” topic - there are only less than a handful of those all across the country, and at that point there is 0% chance that they are from irresponsible loose women forgetting to take a pill (or whatever the thinking is there) and 100% chance that it is a huge medical complication. Her answer there was “politicians should not be dictating such matters - that is a subject best left up to the experts and the patient to decide together”. She may be corrupt as sin and her answers were all focus-tested prior to delivery but… nevertheless she was right about that, imho.
Whereas his answer was “baby killer” - as if this literally heart-rending occurrence where the life of the mother is at stake and the loss of the fetus is virtually a foregone conclusion at that point was all besides the point.
They BOTH played the game in their respective ways there. And while I may not have liked her, I did like her answers, while his to that question was so incredibly juvenile that I could hardly believe my ears and eyes, seeing it from the leading candidate of an actual Presidential race. (btw funny video about it - she goes first but don’t worry, after the first minute he comes with some really great jabs:-P)
I would encourage you to remember though that even if you enjoyed his performance in the debate: he is so dumb that other people ended up pulling most of his strings after he got into office, and he never even realized how much he was being manipulated - in fact he still does not, years after-the-fact. Trump is not “conservative”, nor even quite “Republican” so much as a mad bull tearing through the china shop breaking everything that he
pleasestouches. A vote for him is a vote for anarchy, which sounds fun only to those who have neither experienced it nor studied history to realize what it truly means. imho at least, ofc take with a grain of salt (i.e. be properly skeptical), except it also happens to be shared by most people who study most matters all across thenationworld. When the experts (almost) all agree on something, it is either the largest conspiracy of all time ever, or else it just might be true!I agree that everyone uses the system… but not equally. She would have been a horrible President - more than half the nation agreed with you on that so hard that they outright handed the election to him (with deeds, not merely words) - but that does not in turn mean that he was a good one, and especially that he would be again.
Her answer there was “politicians should not be dictating such matters - that is a subject best left up to the experts and the patient to decide together”. She may be corrupt as sin and her answers were all focus-tested prior to delivery but… nevertheless she was right about that, imho.
Yep, do agree, she was right about that.
Though I also think she kinda did it to avoid answering… it’s a delicate subject, people get emotional, and she may lose votes if she doesn’t pass the hot potato.
(btw funny video about it - she goes first but don’t worry, after the first minute he comes with some really great jabs:-P)
Love those guys 😂. My favorite was with Stalin, Lennin and Yelcin 😂. Too bad they stopped doing them… at least I think they did 🤔.
I would encourage you to remember though that even if you enjoyed his performance in the debate: he is so dumb that other people ended up pulling most of his strings after he got into office, and he never even realized how much he was being manipulated - in fact he still does not, years after-the-fact. Trump is not “conservative”, nor even quite “Republican” so much as a mad bull tearing through the china shop breaking everything that he
pleasestouches. A vote for him is a vote for anarchy, which sounds fun only to those who have neither experienced it nor studied history to realize what it truly means. imho at least, ofc take with a grain of salt (i.e. be properly skeptical), except it also happens to be shared by most people who study most matters all across thenationworld. When the experts (almost) all agree on something, it is either the largest conspiracy of all time ever, or else it just might be true!Yep, I do agree about everything, he’s really just stupid.
But, you have to hand it to him. He just straight up answers, no beating around the bush. To (low IQ) people, that says “aaah, he’s honest”. The truth is, he’s a liar as well (what politician isn’t, lol 😂), but he’s a “truthful liar”. He answers like he doesn’t give AF, alfa male through and through attitude, f you attitude as well and… well, you gotta hand it to him, that wins low IQ hearts 😂. The trouble is, they have just as much right to vote as the rest of us 😂.
I think it is more complicated than that but… yeah - she is a soulless robot who would do, and say, ANYTHING to win. For instance, does anyone at all think that she actually carries around hot sauce in her purse everywhere that she goes? She said that, but she did not mean it. She is a politician and she LIED.
Also, Trump was not a politician, but he LIED too - remember when he said, before the primary, that if he won it then he would change the rules? However, immediately after that he said “why should I bother - I WON!?” Also, I seem to recall some chant of “lock her up”, but then immediately after that he was all like “why would do that? she’s nice people - she came to my wedding” Also, the Bob Woodward interview where he told him that he was going to lie in the future, saying that covid was not transmissable by air, and yet it was. Also… well, there’s a lot of examples, just like with her. So Hillary does not have a monopoly on lying.
Even so, her actions do tend to back up what she said: she tended to listen to experts, and the pandemic would have killed far fewer people if she had been in charge. She lies so often that sometimes she even tells the truth, just by accident? :-P So I think she would have followed up on that topic just as she said - not b/c she cared but just b/c it would be most politically expedient to have done so.
That said, she didn’t seem to genuinely care for anything but her own fame & glory (hey, remember when the Supreme Court told her to send over all of her emails, and she told them to take a hike? well, more precisely she told them that she’d do it when she felt like it, but only AFTER she removed all the ones that she didn’t want them to see - THAT IS WHAT SHE ACTUALLY SAID!?!?!?!). Though again, how was Trump any different? They are both shitty people, it’s just that Americans knew more about her than we did him, hence why the vote wasn’t so much “pro-Trump” as it was “anti-Hillary”, and we basically just rolled the dice to see whatever anti-Hillary would end up doing. It did not work out well, though it may not have worked well under her either - Congress would still have been flat-out broken either way, and neither would have helped heal the divide in this nation. Both sides need to stop putting up these jokers and put up someone who MAKES SENSE! :-(
Yes, he does answer questions more simply - if that were the only criteria for someone to be President then he should have won, in fact it’s a large part of why he did. And she answers questions with more weasly-worded phrases that mean nothing so as to let the medium-IQ people delude themselves into thinking that they are high-IQ ones (“hey, she said the thing that I wanted!? I’m so smart to have figured that out” - uh… no she didn’t, in fact if you pay attention, she ended up saying nothing at all). But if the question is “what is 1+1?”, then the answer is neither -1000000000000 (Democrats) nor “ur stUpId” (Republicans), so I firmly believe that neither side is working in our bests interests. On the other hand, one side is ready to literally overthrow the Constitution of the United States of America, even while claiming to do it out of love for that very document (which many admit to never having read in the first place).
I’m going to say something possibly controversial: not only do dumb people have just as much right to vote as smart ones, but smart people are not better people. That said, I am not looking to have a beer with the President of the United States, I want them for their role as a LEADER, for which yes a minimum level of intelligence should be required. Like in a football game, a certain minimum level of athletic prowess should be mandatory? So why look out into the audience and choose one of them, ignoring the ones who have trained for many years to become great at it? The only answer I can come up with is that people hated Hillary THAT MUCH - hence why she is the one who put him in office, arguably much more than he did. He was just trying to promote his latest reality TV show:-P.
Hey, I have heard that phrase “honest liar” before - here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWfQCDaAa6s. Enjoy!:-P
Both sides need to stop putting up these jokers and put up someone who MAKES SENSE! :-(
I don’t think that will happen any time soon. If anyone with half a brain and not easily controllable comes in, you know what happens to those people… it’s a sad world we live in unfortunatelly…
And she answers questions with more weasly-worded phrases that mean nothing so as to let the medium-IQ people delude themselves into thinking that they are high-IQ ones (“hey, she said the thing that I wanted!? I’m so smart to have figured that out” - uh… no she didn’t, in fact if you pay attention, she ended up saying nothing at all).
Exactly, I’ve seen it 1000 times from different politicians. You hear what he’s/she’s saying and I’m like “uuuummm… am I stupid or did he/she didn’t answer anything 🤨?”. I’ve even rewond on cable to hear the conversation again… and the anchor is like “mhm, mhm, yeah… moving on…”… like how the fuck was that an answer 🤨. You just pulled out a lot of fancy words and said nothing.
But if the question is “what is 1+1?”, then the answer is neither -1000000000000 (Democrats) nor “ur stUpId” (Republicans), so I firmly believe that neither side is working in our bests interests.
Oh yeah, I’m way past that 😂. There was a time that I believed that at least some of the time they’re working in our interest. Not at all 😂. It just so happens that their business interests for that particular thing allign with the interests for the greater good 😂. And everyone praises them and they do press bullshit and whatnot… if people knew the reality, they’d be discuisted.
I’m going to say something possibly controversial: not only do dumb people have just as much right to vote as smart ones, but smart people are not better people.
Meeh, would agree. If you’re smart that doesn’t mean your moral compass is working correctly.
The only answer I can come up with is that people hated Hillary THAT MUCH - hence why she is the one who put him in office, arguably much more than he did.
I think it was a stunt in order to ensure Trump wins. But it had to be believable, so they couldn’t put a dummy out, so they pulled her out. Everyone hates her, everyone knows she’s a liar, smart, but a liar… my 2 cents.
Hey, I have heard that phrase “honest liar” before - here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWfQCDaAa6s. Enjoy!:-P
Damn, I love Dave Chappelle 😂. Liberals started hating him, but I think he just does what he does and just doesn’t give AF. Sure, he was a lot less into politics and life lessons and bitching about other people back in the day, but people fail to understand that he is way older now. Back then he used to be young, and well, when you’re young, you just don’t have life experience and don’t fully grasp what’s going on in the world, so you make jokes about weed and drinking and hoes, etc. But, as you get older, you see things just repeat in circles, things don’t get solved, yet politicians promise they will eventually get solved, and you start wondering, why don’t they get solved 🤔. And then you start looking deeper into things and after a while realize that the idea is for those things to stay as they are. If they change, we’d have to actually star working and caring about the people’s best interests, not our own, so why do that.
I completely get his POV, he’s not right, he’s not left, he’s homophobic (hey, no one’s perfect 🤷), but he’s a good comedian, and I believe a good person. He might say shit, but he will help you out if you need help.
Some people say that Biden has half a brain… and I think they are right!
Oddly enough, I don’t care - he seems to be doing… I cannot say “well”, but given what he faced when he first came in, definitely a far better job than I expected. At this point even if he were a robot puppet animated by people feeding his lines to him, I no longer care b/c it would be those handlers that we would be voting for. And yet would Kamala jump to the same tune as he does, or like Trump ignore the briefings and strike out on her own? So once again, we devolve to a “Hillary vs. Trump”, now “Kamala vs. Trump” standoff, each side trying to play chicken, daring the other side to back off. The truly heart-breaking tragic part of it is that in such a game, it is no guarantee that either side will “win”, and at some point it becomes quite likely that BOTH will lose.
I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to understand the weasel-wording, and what I came up with is this: anytime politicians say ANYTHING at all, they get judged for it, by some nutjobs somewhere. God exists, God does not exist, God exists and he loves people, God may or may not exist and he hates people, God yes/no exists and yes/no whatever whatever people, except he loves/hates YOU in particular, and so on. So the trick is to please the highest number of people by… saying nothing at all. Except that is too easily detected, hence the weasel wording, where they talk… but do not communicate. Then to complicate matters 1000x further, you are supposed to ignore all of that, and just focus on their voting record. Yes, ALL of those debates, the ENTIRE reason for their existence, is the profit of the media companies trying to sell them. They don’t “decide” anything, except for the tiniest, slimmest, barest sliver of people in the absolute middle who haven’t already made up their minds who they are going to vote for. Which might not even be 1% of the nation, though b/c of how polarized we are right now, might just swing the tide anyway?
So think of it like car salesmen: oh you are so smart, wow you have such a good eye, you know most people do not think to ask such insightful questions - BULLSHIT! And yet… you need a car anyway, right? It is extremely distasteful to anyone that prefers Truth over LIES, but what other way is there, than to engage in politics, or not engage and just watch the world burn? (This is fine meme)
And no I think Hillary literally thought that she would win - she managed to bully just about everyone on her own side from even so much as running (except Bernie Sanders who didn’t give a shit, and one other guy that nobody had heard of on the national scale), and then one of the various email leaks about her showed her illegal collusion with the DNC (e.g. she was given the questions that would be asked during the debate in advance, whereas he was not - giving her an enormous advantage). So “legally” (ha!) or not, she was going to push past all obstacles and take what she wanted by force. Arguably Trump may even have been put there to help HER win, but she seems to have underestimated just how much people HATED her, passionately even. Oopsie.
I mean, why would Trump want to take a huge pay cut to run the WH? Simply reading a teleprompter in front of a TV screen was a much sweeter gig - far less effort, plus far less grief too. Though once she lost, ahem I mean he “won”, his ego would not let him turn it down. Remember how he wanted to try and do both - be President and still do that TV show that he had previously signed a contract for!? :-P
I don’t think Dave Chappelle is homophobic, though he’s definitely transphobic, and there’s really something to that, as he explains: other people have a right to do whatever they want, but when YOU start telling ME what to do (i.e. in terms of mandatory pronoun usage), that’s the line that should not be crossed. Your rights (should) end where mine begin, and all that. And yeah, I do think he’d be friends with a trans person even - you don’t have to agree with someone 100% to enjoy one another’s company.:-D Though he’s tired of bending over backwards to all the woke BS, and so he draws the line in the sand - this far but no further. Bill Maher has switched to doing that now also - I used to not be able to stand that pretentious asshole, but now I see how often he’s right and thus he’s grown on me in spite of that.
BTW, if you want to watch a fairly short video that could literally change your view of politics forever - hey, I genuinely am not kidding on that! - here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs. I have re-watched it many times over the last several years and still cannot wrap my head around it. It uses LOGIC and FACTS but… I don’t wanna follow where it leads:-(.
Brainwashingcultural/societal influence from all of the various sources like Hollywood movies and just flat crowd-think from talking to almost literally everybody has quite a strong effect, and I realize that I am still under its sway. So anyway, be warned: this video can fuck you up, bigly :-| - but it does have the benefit of being true.Hm… I think you may have a point about Trump being a scapegoat for Hilary’s win. Never saw it like that, but yeah, you do have a point. His I don’t give AF attitude, his lack of word filtering (than again, republicans are like that, lol 😂)… not something a presidential candidate should be proud of, lol. And he is proud of that, you could tell, lol 😂.
From his POV, I can understand running for president. I mean, the man’s accomplished in almost every other aspect in life. The only other thing he wasn’t really balls in deep was politics, so he probably thought, this is my chance, now or never.
And yeah, I do think he’d be friends with a trans person even - you don’t have to agree with someone 100% to enjoy one another’s company.:-D
He even was.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WfNn3q9F3_I
That’s why I can’t say anything bad about the guy, even if he is homphobic or transphobic or whatever. I mean, no one’s perfect, he is like he is, and that’s fine, main thing is, he’s not a bad person.
Regarding the video, I actually presumed as much. Still, it was a nice video, watched it till the end. Facts are facts 🤷.
But, did you notice what was the root of the problem? I have, just haven’t phrased it like that and haven’t analyzed the subject like the guy on that channel has - money. Always have been, always will be. It litelarly is the root of all evil and unfair. The more you have, the more you want. Actually, it’s not exactly money per say, it’s just that money manifests this human trait all too well. It’s greed.
I’ve thought about this long and hard and no matter how I try and salvage things, to be as much as they are now, I always end up with the same conclusion. Radical changes have to be made in order for us to survive as a species. Our economic and social structures, as well as what (currently) defines us as himan. Well, maybe not that last part (at least not extesively), but yes, we do have to evolve and completely drop, on a species level, some things that we hold on to so dearly. Trouble is, humans only unite when faced with grave danger on a global scale, so… this will probably never happen in our lifetime, but if we were to survive, it must happen.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
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Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=nWfQCDaAa6s
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=nWfQCDaAa6s
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Another thought that occurs is that it shows there is literally no path where they accept the immigrant - they’re upset if immigrants work, and they’re upset if they don’t. It literally just comes down to hating immigrants, and they work backwards from there to find reasons.
It literally just comes down to hat[e], and they work backwards from there to find reasons.
Literally every part of conservative ideology.
there is literally no path where they accept the immigrant
I have a coworker who hates undocumented immigrants because (among other reasons) she thinks they’re all unvaccinated and thus spreaders of disease. She is also ANTIVAX!
strange that a lot of the antivax crowd also happens to be nazis
I dunno, they’re both subsets of “selfish, irrational and cruel”.
You could accuse her of many things, but not of being smart.
What about stupid but dangerous?
Actually both happen: low paying jobs lead to being below the poverty line and therefore eligible for welfare.
It’s not great; especially when companies like Walmart cash in on this by paying less and telling employees to apply for welfare.
if a job can’t feed you, it should not exist…
If an employer can’t ‘afford’ to pay you properly he shouldn’t run a business.
While that’s a nice sentiment that I agree with, you need to remember that those low paying jobs illegal immigrants often take, still pay far more than they could ever hope to make back home. Add to the low to nonexistent job skills and language issues, they start from far, far behind the eightball.
Having worked with large number of illegals back in the day, I found the vast majority to be quite genuinely nice people and co-workers. And they were some of the hardest workin’ sumbitches you would ever be around.
What I found interesting was the friction between the second and younger generations of Tex/Mex families and the newly arrived Mexicans, (I use Mexican to denote the actual country of origin here - sad that I need to do so). The first generation immigrants were very religious and conservative. While the second generations often adopted the more liberal attitudes of the locals. It caused a lot of ill undercurrents between the two groups.
It’s always like that. Takes Jews for instance. They are inferior and the lesser race but at the same time somehow running the world from some secret society or something. They use the same arguments with blacks, women, gays, or whoever they want to hate that day.
They took our jobs!
Derkaderrrr!!!
Damn you JuanGPT and Manuel Diffusion
Der terk er jeeerbs!!!
There are different groups of people that respond to different sides of that message, and the people who broadcast either or both sides have differing motives as well. Countering it effectively requires understanding the problem.
The anti-welfare shtick comes from the political donor class - the capitalists, ie billionaires. Lack of a safety net gives them more leverage to negotiate lower wages within the businesses they own, and less government spending results in lower interest rates on the loans they use to grow their industries. The narrative is often framed as concerns over sharing limited resources, but the true motive is the elimination of the safety net - if enough of the working class can be convinced that the system isn’t fair, that creates casus belli to delete the system.
The other side of the argument is about supply and demand of labor as a commodity. As supply goes up, the price goes down, resulting in lower wages. Its a fundamental weakness of unregulated markets operating in the context of uneven global development. Immigrants from the poorer parts of the world can accept below market rate salaries and still come out ahead, but they drive down wages of the local economy in the process. A “free” market gives the capitalists, ie billionaires, power akin to the divine right of kings - with enough capital, they can game the market to suppress competition, establish monopolies, and perpetually remain in positions of ultimate executive authority. Therefore, regulating the market to make it truly free isn’t in their interest, so instead the propaganda organs they own - CNN, Fox ‘News’, etc… - blame the immigrants for pursuing rational self-interest as if it were a moral failing, instilling hatred in part of the working class toward other working class people to garner political support for representatives who pay lip service to anti-immigration policy. Such policy isn’t actually passed - it would result in better wages and the capitalists don’t want that - but the lip service wins elections in some states while also preventing the conversation from shifting to possible regulation to solve the problem of low wages.
Damn that was a fine read.
blame the immigrants for pursuing rational self-interest as if it were a moral failing, instilling hatred in part of the working class toward other working class people to garner political support for representatives who pay lip service to anti-immigration policy
^ Tip of the spear right there. Gets votes!
But let’s talk real talk. Americans want slaves. I can provide 100 anecdotes, but they all come to the same observation, we want cheap labor. Immigrants provide it and we can’t do without it.
And it’s not just the “evil capitalists”. If a Mexican dude tells me his gang will refloor my living room for $5/hr. per man, I’m all in because I can’t afford to pay “real” labor prices. Either they make some money, or no one gets paid and my carpet is rotting.
OK, one anecdote. My wife is Filipina, not a US citizen. Her education in early childhood education is stunning. I’ve watched countless videos of her private school back home. And I’m screaming, “FFS! Why are we not teaching our children like this?! Why are our teachers not trained like this?!”
She had to quit her job teaching because the airport hotel pays far more. Philippinos are in demand because everyone knows they work hard, don’t bitch and are grateful for what they get. LOL, she was hired on the spot, just for walking in the door and asking.
Meanwhile, I make $80K for sitting and sleeping my ass off working for a software dev, from home.
Don’t know where I’m going with this. Guess when we Americans say we’re a “nation of immigrants”, we really mean, “a nation of immigrants who started as slaves and worked their way up the food chain over a generation or two”.
If a Mexican dude tells me his gang will refloor my living room for $5/hr. per man, I’m all in because I can’t afford to pay “real” labor prices.
IDK if that’s really the general case. Everyone in my social circles tips well and pays decent wages when they need help, even though we’re all kinda poor. I’m sure there are some people who feel differently, but I suspect the majority are decent folks who treat others the way they want to be treated themselves.
I love how the rhetoric is “dey turk our jerbs!” While lawmakers are lowering the work age requirements so that kids can be forced to fill those “jerbs”.
Also, throw massive temper tantrum about “crisis at the border,” but refuse to do anything about it. If anyone is wondering, the answer is no, the Republicans do not want to make a deal with Biden on border policy; it’s way too politically convenient for them to have it both ways.
They want to use it as a campaign talking point and as a political cudgel, while also refusing to do anything about it. Also they can’t give Biden anything that might look like a win, no matter how much the American people want it.
Unfortunately they have right wing media on their side so their constituents will never understand the two-faced game they’re playing.
The more recent racism: “they gave us covid because of eating bats!” While they chew on some prion infested venison while insisting mad cow isn’t real.
Covid is real and dangerous when they feel like justifying their racism.
Yet Covid “is no big deal” or even “is not real” like you say, as they threw one lazy selfish tantrum after another, refusing to mask up, abusing essential workers.
The narrative of friends and family from the small town I grew up in and left, to rarely if ever revisit, reason that the immigrants work illegally for cash at meat packing plants, roofing, etc. This while drawing benefits, as unregistered/illegal immigrants. I don’t know how an undocumented person could collect benefits. Frankly I don’t know enough about any of it to say whether their narrative is accurate or not.
I have always held the opinion that even if their likely false narrative is true, those sound like extremely hard working folks being exploited and taken advantage of and points to an underlying problem that immigrants are not effectively integrated into our society through accessible legal procedures in a way that enables them to positively impact society to the greatest extent of their potential. I’d bet with living wages these folks would be filling up trade schools and all kinds of additional skilled labor roles that would be built upon and advanced generationally. I don’t understand why a country wouldn’t want injection of realized opportunity and advancement into its society, economics, and culture.
Legitimate question. Can anyone tell me how someone would go collecting welfare with no SSN or papers?
I work with people on a daily basis that collect some sort of welfare or disability… They are in perfect bodily health. They are also all U.S citizens.
I don’t believe I have come across an undocumented migrant that collects “disability payments”. I don’t believe it’s possible…
No idea how that would work. An undocumented person at my mom’s work was “borrowing” someone else’s identity to get paid. So they were contributing to social security with no way to ever collect on it.
Here’s a list of all federal benefits that undocumented immigrants are eligible to receive:
https://www.ncsl.org/immigration/federal-benefit-eligibility-for-unauthorized-immigrants
States may or may not have additional programs.
I literally know an elderly lady who is alienated from her family in Europe and lives in California without any papers, money, or a job, and she has her own apartment and makes due somehow.
No I’m not saying she oughta be deported or have her benefits cut or anything (she’s not living a particularly glorious lifestyle, believe me), just answering the question that was asked.
My fiancee works at the welfare office in downtown Pittsburgh, PA. I literally just asked her and she said, “They can potentially get approved for medical assistance if it’s an emergency, but they’re not going to be able to get something like food stamps as an illegal immigrant.” Other states might be different, but that’s at least PA.
It’s just code for racism in the end. Always is.
It’s the same with the enemies of fascism
A fascists enemies are weak, unhealthy and can easily be overtaken by the superior strength of fascists.
While at the same time the enemies of fascists are also overpowering them, slowly destroying them because they are too powerful.
The quiet part is that people in a country with abundant natural resources don’t want to have to share them with people from other places with fucked up situations. They want a walled garden because they think they can tend it well enough on their own to not be surrounded by extra burden. Who needs to compete when there’s enough to go around here?
If we were rational ourselves, we would bring our freedom to the countries who’s people are fleeing to us for refuge. Mexicans have it so bad that they’re running to us? Well clearly we’re doing it better than Mexico, so let’s clap their leadership and show them what’s good, right? I mean fuck. It’s better rationale for a war than trying to control some other place for is oil and pretending that’s not the case.
Are you trying to say there’s oil in Mexico and invading a sovereign state is justified if you think you run things better?
Idk if there’s oil in Mexico. The point I’m trying to make is that we’re ‘liberating’ under false pretenses and not doing it where that would at least make a little bit of sense.
I’m not american, don’t live in america and have nothing against imigration, specially people getting out of horrible situations but I saw a pitcure the other day with thousands of people crossing the whole central america on foot, with little babies, to reach the US and that was scary and very sad. At that point just take over the whole country and make it another american state. Crazy
Wait till you see the videos of mothers literally chucking their infants/toddlers over the wall, hoping that they will be found by someone on the other side and cared for… in a desert no less. Better dead than having to go back to where they came from, it would seem. Either way they are aware that they will never see them again.
And it gets even weirder when people keep finding literal child slaves, used for both their work product & sex it would seem, up in farms even as far north as Iowa. Oh, and supposedly 80% of the women & girls that cross over are raped as they do. So again, whatever they are running from must be THAT bad, that those mothers are willing to consign their children to that.
But you are right - the USA cannot solve the problems of literally the entire world. Unfortunately things like nuance, subtlety, or even factual information of pretty much any kind, have no place in USA politicking - instead people simply get their pictures taken at the border, then go back home, trying to ignore it as best they can. And then argue about whether or not we want to pay the bill for the things that we’ve already bought.
Both sides are incredibly messed up, yet not equally so, but fairly bad in their own ways, as such matters simply slip through the cracks, as “more important matters” take precedence, I guess.
