Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
17d ago
I will grant you that there are illegals for whom going back would not be a matter of life and death, but 'merely' an inconvenience.
79% of refugees in Sweden have gone on holiday back to their home country. In the US, almost all illegals are economic migrants. I get trying to pick the most tendentious phrasing possible for a statement which is technically true, but you've got to ask which one is actually the edge case you imply.
Bartender_Venator
17d ago
iprayiam3 is right that, in the rhetorical context, it's a distraction, but the real point is that it's a poison pill. Don't get me wrong, I don't think that restrictionists have truly won until we see Big Ag CEOs getting perp walked, but you can't do that in six months. The opponents of immigration enforcement have picked it up from the radical populists because it's appealing but unrealistic. Too much of the economy relies on cheap (often fraudulently taxpayer-subsidized) illegal labor to do this overnight without causing a crash. These things will take time to unwind, and are inherently very thorny problems - for instance, if we do need migrant labor in some areas, how to have a legal and regulated guest-worker program that the next Democratic administration won't instantly transmogrify into a vote bank - but I think Trump's actions are concordant with the administration understanding that. Go after the criminals now, make it clear that illegal immigration will not be tolerated forever, and give the economy time to adjust.
Bartender_Venator
17d ago
It's about as honest as this week's newfound enthusiasm for the Second Amendment. But it can be fun to debate here as an intellectual exercise.
Bartender_Venator
17d ago
Whatever was his debut novel, and Elementary Particles was the refined second try. It makes total sense that one is a worse version of the other.
Bartender_Venator
18d ago
I remember the first time I went out canvassing for a political party. Knocked on the door of a council flat and a middle-aged lesbian with a glass eye opened it. Asked her who she was planning to vote for in the next election, to which she asked which party would be best for her financially. I was too shocked to even respond properly, had to get the candidate to come answer (you were supposed to do this if people asked political questions, anyway). But, with the wisdom of some more age, that's obviously the sensible question for her to be asking. Why should she care about the Iraq withdrawal, or carbon credits, or devolution? She knows what matters in her life and doesn't pretend to care about the virtuous distractions of the chattering classes.
Bartender_Venator
18d ago
My experience of American thermostats is that 65 degrees is too cold and 80 degrees is too hot. Yet somehow 72 degrees is also too hot and 74 degrees too cold, while 68 degrees is too cold and 67 too hot. Weather's weird here.
Bartender_Venator
18d ago
I've heard this a million times from Americans, but you can just remember what C number means what outdoors (0 is freezing, under 10 is time to wear a proper coat, 20 is the beginning of tshirt weather, 30 is the start of too hot, and 40 is time to get out of Texas), and the only thing I actually need precision in degrees for is cooking/baking, where chemical reactions really do matter. I don't believe for a second that Americans actually use it as a % scale rather than finding their own personal breakpoints just as one does with Celsius (I suppose some do, some people also don't have internal monologues). If you can actually distinguish degrees of 1F, it may be that Irish thermostats are much better than American ones.
Bartender_Venator
19d ago
Certainly true for your frequent fliers. A Hispanic guy wearing the wrong clothing for the weather? That sounds like a classic case of "No entiendo, Senor". The people who made the choice for him were the ones who brought him here without mentioning or particularly caring that the US gets real cold compared to Guatemala.
Bartender_Venator
19d ago
From the tone around here lately, I was half-expecting it to end with "I decided 'Fuck this guy, one less illegal is a good thing.'"
And they say being the resident mod bad cop brainbroke Hlynka.
Bartender_Venator
19d ago
Americans are going to use Fahrenheit, that's just the way of the world. It's probably a better measurement system in many ways but I will never bother to learn it.
Bartender_Venator
20d ago
They've gotten reasonably popular now but I've always been a fan of Mezcal Last Words (also often called "Final Word" by menus).
Bartender_Venator
20d ago
You're not going to the right parties. I recommend NatalCon. (Though sadly many of them go for the tradwife look)
Bartender_Venator
22d ago
Yeah, I think it's one part a reaction to American Main Character Energy, and one part that Europe is starting to feel the hard edges of objective decline and is figuring out how to respond psychologically to that. This is truer of the UK and Germany than of France, and not true of the former Eastern Bloc, but national decline is a very painful thing and people come up with a lot of different copes for it (I always liked James Burnham's argument that much of progressive liberalism is one big cope for the loss of the West's global hegemony). The Yookay is a sad place these days, so getting excitable about a good war is a lovely distraction for media and political classes there.
Bartender_Venator
22d ago
You can actually check https://ismetroburning.com/ to see if it's currently on fire. Looks like no fires today!
Bartender_Venator
22d ago
This is why I find the term "genocide" pointless outside of very central cases (basically the Holocaust and anything that looks a lot like it), because any discussion is literal rules-lawyering. Genocide needs to be intentional to be genocide, there's a whole Genocide Convention which says that. We can say that the Spanish were highly murderous without using the G-word (though I would assume there were cases where the Spanish intentionally slaughtered entire tribes, which one could reasonably call small genocides).
No True European Culture, amirite?
Let me bring back your initial statement: "Not controversial among whom? Europeans had been fine with genocide as "kill them all" until about 19th century when the "white man's burden" took over". I think it's fair to say that the Spanish actions being controversial at the time, chastised by the Church, the subject of heated debates in the metropole, and motivating policy actions from the Crown meant to put a leash on them means that they were at least "controversial" at the time and not a case of everybody being "fine with genocide".
Bartender_Venator
22d ago
It's just a joke about how a) for historical reasons, European political parties often have unusual names that don't tell an outsider all that much about their politics and b) European political systems often lead to unstable governing coalitions with strange bedfellows involved.
Bartender_Venator
22d ago
Ah, Las Casas, the Genocide Studies Program at Yale, abuses of the encomienda system, and it turns out it actually wasn't smallpox. The greatest hits. I don't consider the Wikipedia page probative at all (the ESL involved is amusing but also suspicious: "However, descendants of the Taíno continue to live and their disappearance from records was part of a fictional story created by the Spanish Empire with the intention of erasing them from history.") The Black Legend runs deep, even if it's passed from Anglo-Dutch propagandists to anti-colonial academics.
I think it's entirely possible that, between diseases, resource exploitation, and the Malthusian conditions of the New World, the Spanish wiped out entire populations of natives, including many cultures smaller than the Taino. But "genocide" is the intentional destruction of a people based on their identity. If aliens landed their starship and crushed Switzerland, that would not be the Swiss Genocide.
I'll make two further points: first, I would hold up Las Casas as evidence that this sort of thing was not sanctioned by European culture of the time. The Church and Crown consistently attempted to reign in the frontier warlords and planters. Secondly, I have no basis to claim this and have looked up zero evidence, but I would bet that if we were to look at genetic evidence from Taino graves and at modern Dominicans, we would find a nontrivial fraction of Taino genes in the Dominican Republic (Haiti, obviously, is a monoethnic state founded on actual genocide, but the DR is a more representative sample).
Bartender_Venator
22d ago
It's a Noah Smith quote, you should assume he's making up the history (and most of the other factoids) as he goes along.
Bartender_Venator
22d ago
Do Canadians have a cultural identity as strong as the Vietnamese, other than being Americans that also have Canadian passports?
It's mostly that Canadians are poisonous, rather than venomous. The Son of Heaven could reasonably want the Vietnamese as his subjects, but nobody outside of DNC electoral strategists could actually want Canadians to become Americans, not without some way of restricting their franchise, their rights to speech and association, some kind of punitive regime around deodorant, and possibly executing Margaret Atwood. Alberta and Quebec are alright, though.
Bartender_Venator
22d ago
I think it cuts both ways, as someone with a foot in both continents. Americans will pay very little attention to anything that doesn't push their personal, parochial buttons, but Europeans will instantly go to DEFCON: CHIMP over anything that mentions them as relevant to global discourse. There aren't that many discussions to be had in the inbetween space in the immediate time, because the likelihood is that this will be a nothingburger. It'll move some invisible ratchets in some directions that we can speculate about, but Trump is already announcing a big, beautiful deal that will likely end with all this passing out of the news cycle as smoothly as it entered.
Bartender_Venator
22d ago
Euros are about as good at understanding how and why Americans see them through the prism of US partisan politics as Americans are at understanding the nuances of why the Christian-Socialist-Democratic-Party/Liberal-Unionist-Secession-Party/Green coalition in [Euro country] is breaking down over the question of whether state pensions should cover ceiling fans.
Bartender_Venator
22d ago
No, Europeans weren't fine with genocide before that. If nothing else, the concept of "genocide" (as "kill them all" as opposed to "please stop being like that, here is a school") didn't exist before industrial states. The closest thing in the European world would be the sack of cities or the expulsion of defeated enemies like various Indian tribes, but that was always justified as some kind of defensive fair play. The idea of systematically exterminating a helpless population, who had committed no crime to warrant a temporary state of exception, was anathema to European Christian culture. In the colonial cases where pre-modern Europeans took tiny baby steps towards "genocide", it was condemned by clerics (and, usually, by bean-counters pointing out that it was a waste of perfectly good human resources). Even when Caesar commits genocide the Roman sources treat it as "damn you didn't have to do 'em like that, but I guess that's how larger-than-life you are".
Bartender_Venator
23d ago
This is fun. My only tension was:
Bartender_Venator
24d ago
Thanks, much appreciate having the specific verses.
If you hang in spaces with actual leftists, >90% of their personal insults to the right (i.e. outside political insults like "fascist") are based around sucking cock or some other accusation that the right-winger is actually a gay bottom in the given situation. What that says about gay/queer/etc. left-wingers' views of themselves is left as an exercise for the reader.
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