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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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What is going on in Springfield, Ohio? 20,000 Haitian arrivals into a town of 60,000 seems insane, but the New York Times seems to back it up. I definitely don’t trust the NYT to give an honest portrayal of what the situation is like on the ground, but I don’t really trust a lot of the rumors going around Twitter either. I am seeing reports of Haitians killing the ducks at the park and eating them. There are even secondhand reports of Haitians eating pet cats.

What I am not seeing however is geolocated footage or images. How hard can it be to send a guy to the park to see if there are any ducks left? I am legitimately confused. None of this seems to make sense.

Trump Jr. posted a 911 call from August 26th which specifically identified Haitians driving away with Geese. Also includes a police report. I haven't seen any receipts w.r.t pet cats, but the whole geese/duck thing seems pretty well-supported at this point.

Well, according to a local, there were numerous specifically white Pekin ducks in the park in Springfield, Ohio. These are a flightless domestic breed, which explains how Haitians were able to steal them.

They do fly but can't do it very well, so you get the idea.

I tried looking it up, and easily found some wild ducks with what appears to be a single pekin duck.

Springfield has a number of parks, almost all small and without water. Doling park and Close memorial park could hold a large amount of ducks, especially the latter. No ducks on Google Earth, but then the pictures are from august of '14 and it looks hot. No idea what ducks do in hot weather but sitting in the open on water is not optimal. There's one more park that has water in it, but it's a small stream.

Doling Park? Close Memorial Park? Your second link goes to the Springfield in Missouri, not Ohio.

Springfield in Missouri, not Ohio.

Lmao. Embarrasing.

I swear I clicked on Illinois one. It even looks similar, though the creek going through the middle seems to be going east to west, not west to east.

Rotherham has desensitized me and now all I can think about this story is "how quaint". If only this was as bad as it got.

Isn’t there an obvious explanation?

You’re looking at second- or third-hand sources with an explicit agenda. Of course they’re going to show the spiciest takes, whether or not they can provide any more details.

Put a number to it. What percentage of those 20,000 do you think are slaughtering ducks in the park?

Put a number to it. What percentage of those 20,000 do you think are slaughtering ducks in the park?

It seems plausible to me that they are rate limited by the number of ducks in the park available to slaughter. Assuming they have three or four ponds, each with 10 or so ducks, it might only take five or six guys to go through the entire population in a year. As we have seen with shoplifting statistics, these things tend to be dominated by the tails.

Nobody has gone to the park to check! Springfield isn’t in the middle of nowhere. There are big cities nearby. This entire tempest in a teapot is happening online with approximately no input from base-level reality.

I'm... very skeptical that anyone providing either pictures of a Springfield park (or drainage ditch) with a few ducks, or without a duck, would change anyone's minds, here. Even the photo of a guy (tbf, with unknown immigration status) with some geese on their way to be spatchcocked (tbf, in Columbus, OH, about an hour and a half drive away) just gets the twitterati suggesting who knows where it could have come from.

Isn’t there an obvious explanation?

I thought that they obviously made a mistake: the immigrants were supposed to be distributed, but all of the immigrants assigned to the few dozen different Springfield's throughout the US somehow all got sent to the same one.

“We swear we aren’t racist, but all these towns look the same to us.”

I don't see architecture

Just like I don’t see local color.

This is such a stupid objection. First of all it takes a very small percentage to make a big difference when the total number is big. 20k is big. 20k is astronomical when you're starting pop is 60k.

If 2 Billion Martians landed on earth, and killed 20 million people, I'm not taking solice in the fact that that's only about a 1% murder rate.

Second, again the insane rapid influx of complete cultural and national foreigners is itself massive damage to a local human ecosystem. If I lived in a town of 60k and 20k people almost exactly like me, moved here from across the country without my town's consent in a matter of years, I would still consider it extremely destructive to my town's character.

If I lived in a town of 60k and 20k people almost exactly like me, moved here from across the country without my town's consent in a matter of years, I would still consider it extremely destructive to my town's character.

Arguably the town's character had already been degraded though. It's a Rust Belt town, that lost 30% of its population and had one of the worst drops in median income in the US (almost 30%) and a crime rate that was increasing, along with drug problems. It's like so many Rust belt towns hollowed out and dying, you either let it die (bad for the people there) or you inject fresh blood (arguably also bad for the people there). There is no non-destructive outcome at this point most likely. It's just picking your poison.

Notably the local government believes it was a network of local companies that coordinated to attract the influx as they wanted to take advantage of very cheap real estate but there were not enough workers in the city.

"Springfield officials were in the dark about the possibility of a large immigrant relocation to the area, Mayor Rob Rue said at the recent Springfield City Commission meeting, but a “network of businesses knew what was coming.”

Investigation by the city’s Immigrant Accountability Response Team formed in October of 2023 has revealed the possibility “there were companies that knew they were going to make an effort to bring in individuals who were crossing the border based on federal regulations that they could do that,” Rue said. "

People left the rust belt because there were no jobs in the first place. What were these companies desperate for cheap labor? We keep hearing about them in the abstract, but what actual companies had 20,000 positions to fill?

Again, how many of these Haitians are actually working? They get more "cash assistance" than someone working for $10/hr anyway!

There's a pro open borders story being spun in every article by being very flexible with the truth.

No idea, but it is what the mayor seems to think. Who is hardly happy about the situation, so it seems unlikely he is too pro-open borders.

Until or unless the city publishes the report of the investigation, we just have the fairly vague public statements. But they presumably have access to more information than we do.

Its possible property is cheap given the town shrank so much, so companies were able to buy up commercially useful space cheaply and just need a greater workforce. But i wouldn't have that on its own would get you 10,000 plus specifically Haitians moving in. Maybe the companies are owned by a Haitian or something. Its unclear.

Maybe the companies are owned by a Haitian or something

Voodoo R Us is hiring I heard

Am I missing a joke here?

well yeah, Haiti is known for voodoo and zombies, so a company owned by a Haitian being voodoo related and tangentially named after a toys store sort of fits into the joke. I thought the joke was pretty obvious :(

Just be very careful not to damage the merchandise!

Notably the local government believes it was a network of local companies that coordinated to attract the influx as they wanted to take advantage of very cheap real estate but there were not enough workers in the city.

I still don't really get it. Was it like

<businesses> government! we need a bunch of cheap workers to run our factories in Springfield. Maybe we can put together an incentive program or something to attract people back to the town? Fix issues with high cost of housing? New initiatives on reducing crime?

<government guy> mmmm, ... how many do you need again?

<businesses> oh, like 20,000

* government guy looks at clipboard of refugee camp populations in Texas

<government guy> they'll be there on Monday

No idea, but the government may not have been involved at all. Other than to put them on the refugee scheme in the first place. They aren't living in camps or anything as far as it appears.

We just don't have enough info to know how these busineses did whatever it is the mayor is accusing them of. Some kind of contract agency? Reaching out to pro immigrant organizations? Direct approaches to Haitian community groups? The Feds as you suggest? No idea.

As an aside, the federal government possessing the ability to drop tens of thousands of migrants on your town seems like a surprisingly powerful instrument of coercion. Remembering the Washington Bridge Fort Lee lane closure scandal, I do wonder if this is over something as petty as the mayor calling the wrong person a cocksucker on a phone call, or whatever.

Dropping a literal biblical plague of retards on your political opponents should be classified as a war crime. We need a new Hague.

Citation 1: Average Hattian IQ is 67

Citation 2: An IQ below 70 is considered retarded

I'm not joking, I'm not being snide. That is the literal, object level thing that was done to a once functional community. How is that not a crime against humanity?

No, you're not joking or being snide, you're just being as inflammatory as you can so you can bitch at us about how you can't even call an entire country "retards." Posting "But technically they are retards!" links is not much better than your ChatGPT stunt.

Let's suppose your links are accurate and the average Haitian does indeed have an IQ that low. Do you think if every time people referred to Haitians they called them "retards" that would invite reasonable discussion? You could have expressed your point without calling every Haitian a "literal Biblical plague of retards" but that wouldn't have been so satisfyingly vicious, would it?

Be honest, you knew you were going to get modded for this, and I'm sure you have your whine about it already locked and loaded.

Lately you are about 50/50 AAQCs and venom-spewing shit-takes, and I recently told someone else, posting AAQCs gives you a little slack, but your long record of being incapable of controlling yourself and devoting much of your considerable cleverness to seeing how nasty a one-liner you can get off is eroding that slack. Unlike some of our shit-tier posters, you are capable of doing better, more often, and I wish you would.

Yes, i did know id get modded for saying a true thing and citing my sources like you tell me to. It says more about you than it does me.

Edit: You know what, this is getting under my skin. You always tell me if I'm going to say something inflammatory, I need to have citations. I include citations, and you lump actually having the citations you told me to have along with my other "stunts". You told me to include citations. Don't use that against me when you mod me.

Furthermore, you act like they aren't even real. Like they don't even count, without any basis. Just "Nope, you don't get to use citations for that." We doing hate facts now here?

Then you go on to act like I've spent the last day calling Haitians retards all over. "if every time people referred to Haitians they called them 'retards'". Well it's a good thing I only did it once then, isn't it? And came with citations to show the majority of Haitians meet the clinical definition of retard.

You are capable of doing better, more often, and I wish you would.

Furthermore, you act like they aren't even real. Like they don't even count, without any basis. Just "Nope, you don't get to use citations for that." We doing hate facts now here?

You cited Bing searches; those aren't sources of information but notoriously-unreliable aggregators. I'm pretty sure I rated your earlier comment either "Bad" or "Deserves a warning" on the volunteer page, and part of it was because the only motive I could come up with for citing Bing searches (given that a Bing search is not going to convince anybody) was that you were hoping people would take the existence of the link as evidence without actually checking what the link was.

If you'd dug a bit deeper to provide actual sources, I'd have been much more positively disposed toward your post and I imagine Amadan would too.

Most Asian, Eastern European, and Latin American countries would consider it an act of war if you dropped 20,000 Haitians into one of their towns (and rightfully so), yet the US government is voluntarily and enthusiastically subjecting its own people to it.

they just need bodies buying and consuming shit to boost GDP, I'm doubtful they care about anything else while living inside their gated communities.

Time out. Why do you keep calling them "Hattians"? You know the country is called "Haiti", right? And that actual Hattians lived in Anatolia? Is this some new meme?

Autocorrect strikes again.

Dropping a literal biblical plague of retards on your political opponents should be classified as a war crime. We need a new Hague.

I've been saying the same thing for years, but Anime Con keeps happening and nobody puts the organizers on trial for crimes against humanity.

Did the Federal government have anything to do with it? (Other than the refugee scheme itself of course). With free movement inside the US, anyone can drop migrants on you, right? See the various governors bussing/flying migrants to New York or whatever. And in this case assuming businesses organized it, all you need is money or the offer of employment.

Oh, fair, it could be state governments or even heads of non-profits acting out of spite. It certainly seems at least coordinated. Why would it be overwhelmingly one ethnic group moving there if it was simply an artifact of free movement?

As noted the mayor seems to believe, after investigation it was a group of businesses that coordinated somehow, in order to bring workers to the city. It seems unlikely (though not impossible) they would be doing it out of spite as their businesses are presumably trying to make a profit there.

It's better than seeing one data point and jumping to (preexisting) conclusions.

Yes, 33% is a lot by any measure. Yes, I'm willing to believe at least one immigrant did the duck thing.

I also believe a sufficiently motivated NIMBY could find something equally bad for any population. That includes your hypothetical 20k and it includes the local 60k. Follow the sex offender registry or hang around under enough bridges, and you can find someone who proves that Something Ought To Be Done.

So I asked OP how many people he thinks are doing the alarming thing. Then we can judge whether that's actually a lot. Whether it's actually worth Doing Something, and what sort of Something might be productive. I'd much prefer that to more chattering about how much NGOs hate white rural Trump voters.

The emphasis on the cats and ducks has a strong potential to backfire, it can be dismissed with questions like yours. The better approach would be to focus on the human element. Maybe the woman in that clip is a secret Alt-Righter with an explicit agenda.

By the way, the only reason we are talking about this is because Elon Musk bought Twitter. The clip I just linked has 11M views. Without Musk allowing this discourse on Twitter the only indication of this all happening would be through the lens of the Corporate Press.

It looks like it is backfiring.

right now, the most common claims on the issue are turning out to be false

And frankly, it should backfire. When most prominent stories that conservatives are sharing are false, then why should I not be skeptical of the whole thing? You'd think the onus would be on them to come up with the most easily-verifiable, most rock-solid claim.

Because there is plenty of evidence for the most important reasons you should be opposed to the mass resettlement of Haitians into your community? Like an 11 year old boy who was killed by a Haitian immigrant in that community?

"The Kitten thing was a Twitter meme, so now I'm not sure there's at all a problem with flooding a town with Haitians" is going to be the response by people like you.

JD Vance's office reports direct eyewitness testimony of residents from local wildlife being abducted by Haitian immigrants. Beleeb witnesses. Although, that's not even a significant reason to oppose this compared to the other reasons.

Do you know what's confirmed? That a child was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here. That local health services have been overwhelmed. That communicable diseases--like TB and HIV--have been on the rise. That local schools have struggled to keep up with newcomers who don't know English. That rents have risen so fast that many Springfield families can't afford to put a roof over their head.

Are there really ~20k new Haitian immigrants in Springfield though? If so, I didn't know this before, and probably neither did you.

So it's not backfiring.

You don't need to spread fake news in order to get people to be aware of the new Haitian immigrants in that city.

You don't need to get on a plane to get to New York City either, but it's certainly convenient and effective.

That'd be nice if true, but I'm not sure if it is. Vance gave a speech mentioning the immigration itself in early July, and Moreno was not long behind him. Right-wing and especially local media have been focused on it for at least two months.

It's not even the first version of the 'big jump in immigrants compared to local population', if somewhat higher in size, nor the first time it isn't happening turned into its happening and good. It's just that normally the path is local media covers it at all, Red Tribe media talks up some of the actual issues, and then Blue Tribe media has a nice whitewash, no one actually cares except if they're stuck listening to NPR while driving.

That's not a normative thing -- if these claims are false, that is bad! -- but it points to some Bad Incentives. And I'm not sure they can be meaningfully shown to be false, even if they are.

I’m willing to believe that woman. I believed the original speaker. I just take their conclusions, their assessment of the scope, with a grain of salt.

If I were running a partisan Twitter account, I’d be cherry-picking a different set of clips and photos. Maybe show you kids in cages or quoting Rebekah Jones.

“This discourse” sucks. It reflects more about the accounts one follows than about reality. Twitter delenda est.

“This discourse” sucks. It reflects more about the accounts one follows than about reality. Twitter delenda est.

Yup, you would prefer if the Corporate Media were the gatekeeper of the narrative surrounding all of this, as it has been for demographic replacement going back decades.

Anyone who wants to convince me otherwise ought to try harder instead of whipping out their one data point.

I’ll give you credit for bothering to provide a second.

The emphasis on the cats and ducks has a strong potential to backfire

Not at all. It's a brilliant psy-op. Why do you think Musk is posting images like this?

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1833220440254513243/photo/1

Is it because Elon Musk is actually a moron? Does he think that Haitians are raiding back yards to eat cats? Of course not. This is the Streisand Effect in action. Every time someone "debunks" this, the story only grows.

Let's say you are a normie, just trying to grill. You read this: "Actually, no the 20,000 Haitians who moved into the small town in 4 years are not hunting and eating cats".

What is your reaction? Do you think, "haha dumb Republicans". Or do you think, "Holy shit, this town just got taken over by Haitian immigrants. Is my town next? Why does the person who wrote this article think this is totally normal?"

This is a winning issue for Republicans. The Democratic position on immigration is lunacy. Anything that brings this to the forefront is good for Trump. There is nothing good or okay about what happened to Springfield, cats or no.

Let's say you are a normie, just trying to grill. You read this: "Actually, no the 20,000 Haitians who moved into the small town in 4 years are not hunting and eating cats". What is your reaction? Do you think, "haha dumb Republicans". Or do you think, "Holy shit, this town just got taken over by Haitian immigrants. Is my town next? Why does the person who wrote this article think this is totally normal?"

I am sure that normies would find it weird that a town's population would increase by 50% because of Haitian refugees, but I don't think they'd see it as bad. They'd complain if it meant that the people living in the town now have to leave, but they'd have no reason to suspect that that's the case. They'd just see it as a harmless population increase.

There is nothing good or okay about what happened to Springfield, cats or no.

Why would this be the case from a normie perspective?

Haitians are raiding back yards to eat cats?

They have some cat-eating custom apparently ...

I am legitimately confused. None of this seems to make sense.

On the contrary, it makes perfects sense. If you take people from a chaotic and poor country, and not the best people and send them to a place that's not poor and not chaotic and just let them loose, without close supervision, they're going to behave in a chaotic manner.

They, or a substantial part of them were apparently relocated there as a part of a scheme to provide cheap workforce, but I find it doubtful that most of them even work. We know the statistics, we know they don't know the language and have low ability on average. So low that profitably employing them is a challenge.

Haiti is one of the poorest countries on Earth. You surely know of the observations Scott Alexander made and then deleted off the internet out of fear?.

I was reading Scott's review of Hive Mind recently. The part that stands out to me is this:

The best guess is that the cognitive skill of elites really does matter more than the nation’s average score. When it comes to institutional quality, Potrafke and I found that the cognitive skills of the top 5 percent did the better job of predicting property-rights friendly institutions, although the nation’s average score also did a reasonably good job as a predictor…for the time being it’s reasonable to start with the belief that a nation’s top performers matter more for the economy than a nation’s average performers.

A decent manager would probably be able to find something productive to do with the functionally illiterate office worker Scott mentions in your link. The problem becomes compounded when that person's boss is also an idiot, and so on and so on.

If there really were 20,000 unemployable retards wandering the streets of Springfield, we would be seeing video clips, not second and third-hand rumors. So I am tentatively willing to believe that they are employed. Is there really that much demand for cheap low-skill labor? That is one of the things I am confused about.

A decent manager would probably be able to find something productive to do with the functionally illiterate office worker Scott mentions in your link.

Sure. If there isn't a welfare state to tempt him away from working in the first place. And if there isn't a minimum wage law to prevent him from working at his natural wage. And if the overseer is allowed to give him a stiff beating when he catches him stealing on the job. And if...

I'm not so sure the manager can actually find something useful for the illiterate worker to do within the constrains of 21st century America.

If the hypothetical manager of company A cannot, then said hypothetical manager is replaced by hypothetical manager of company B, unless you believe there are no industries that can find use for low-skill labor in 21st century America.

There are no uses for low-skill, high priced, lazy, dishonest labor in 21st century America. The supply and demand curves for sufficiently low-skill labor would meet below the current minimum wage if it wasn't in place; add in laziness and dishonesty and it probably doesn't clear at all (that is, there's no demand at any positive price, because the worker does more damage than work)

The UAW is still going strong... Clearly someone has a use for low-skill, high priced, lazy, dishonest labor. Just maybe not the people required to hire them.

In any case, I think "lack of English language comprehension" is the real nail in the coffin. We can get away with Spanish since it's basically the unofficial second language of the USA, but I don't see too many government forms translated into Creole.

Bosses of low skilled labor, and white men entering those fields on a management track, expect to need to speak (imperfect)Spanish as a job skill. On the contrary I’m not sure that learning creole is even possible except by exposure; you don’t have classes on it at the local community college.

Edit: I'm not actually sure that there is something called 'creole' which can be learned- it seems like it's multiple dialects which are never written down, not all of which are mutually intelligible. At least with Spanish Mexico city is the prestige dialect for people who actually come here(not a lot of Argentines walking to the border) and is mutually intelligible with eg Noreste Spanish, Centraco Spanish, etc pretty easily.

Depending on the minimum wage laws it absolutely can be the case. Not to mention that the big problem isn't just being low skill - we have some black market work for those, even if it isn't ideal - it's unreliability. If you can't depend on a person to at least show up on time, stay for the agreed-upon time, do the work, and not opportunistically steal from the company, than a person can easily be worth negative money for a company. If you read up Haiti and more generally african countries, it's this unreliability that drives most of the dysfunction, not just merely being low-skill.

Is voting low skill labor?

Is there really that much demand for cheap low-skill labor? That is one of the things I am confused about.

Yes. In a rapidly aging community like that, yes there is.

I was looking for that exact link just now, thank you.
It would be perfect evidence for the "a 70iq country can't possibly exist" people, not that it would do anything except make them switch the argument to "well IQ isn't real and you're weird for having evidence"

I'd peg this as more like 80 than 70. You've got to take into account the social compounding, where information is not passed on accurately.

I'm still amazed he didn't realise that the Haitians were just trying to get free medicine that they could later sell.

Putting 20k foreigners into your town of 60k is a literal invasion. That community to the extent it exists has been conquered.

I am shocked it hasn’t come to violence.

How do the leaders and police officers sleep at night knowing they’ve cooperated with a complete surrender and probably gotten paid for it too

Why does the mere pressence of foreigners constitute an invasion? They don't control the place. They're not doing anything to the locals.

It’s about numbers and percentages. A handful of foreigners in your town does not represent an invasion. When they begin to comprise a plurality or even a majority of the population of the town, it must be treated as an invasion, even if they haven’t done anything sinister yet, simply because their capacity to assert their will and preferences has now become equal to (or superior to) that of the former majority.

I have to admit that if the numbers are correct then I am surprised it's not worse. Listening to some of the comments at the town hall it certainly sounds unpleasant, but there wasn't much in the way of actual crimes and shit (no, no one actually cares about the sanctity of the migratory bird treaty act). Lots of "get your government hands off my medicaid" type stuff regarding lines at the welfare office.

Violence will only make it worse in the current political situation. Bearing through it might be the right move.

The whole thing started with a Haitian driving without a license killing an 11yo coming home from school.
A common feature of all these CHNV groups is they have absolute immunity to basic law enforcement. They drive without plates, they drive drunk, they don't have licenses and they certainly don't know how to drive.

All shit people like you and me would go to prison for. basic anarcho-tyranny.

What is "CHNV"?

The migrant flights from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, where anyone could get a plane ticket to the US paid for by a refugee resettlement agency. It was paused in July due to massive fraud (tens of thousands of fake or dead sponsors), but recently reopened once the heat died down.

It's one of at least two programs that flew migrants directly into the country instead of having them cross the border.

So far it has flown at least half a million people from the worst countries in the world into the US, with zero screening. That Venezuelan gang arrested in Colorado came in that way, iirc. Others have murdered here and it turned out were already wanted for rape and murder in their home countries.

Thank you.

The guy who did that was sentenced to 9 years in prison.. You would expect one or two traffic fatalities a year from a population of 20,000.

You would not go to prison for driving without a license or without plates either. These are minor offenses.

I would absolutely not get away with driving without a license or plates. I know this because I have friends who have spent time in the county jail for it.

I also know who around here does get away with ignoring almost all laws, from licensing to fire codes to food handling.

He should be deported.

If you hit a kid walking home from school and drove off, there's a pretty good chance you'd get away with it. These people's relative immunity from the law is downstream of their willingness to ignore it.

Not if you've registered your car. You only get away with this if you get away with paper plates and no insurance for long periods of time.

Even worthless fuckhead cops will spend 60 minutes looking at traffic cameras to try and spot a license plate after you murder a kid.

Demoralization propaganda. Resisting is literally unthinkable to anybody who lives there, even the people complaining about it. They'd never dream of arming up, organizing, planning a date, and taking back their civilization. They most they'll do is meekly complain that the federal government should provide more assistance. Even deportation is probably going too far for most of them.

Demoralization is saying the community has been destroyed and the place is conquered. That is only so if you believe it is so.

Community in America barely exist because commercial businesses and government has taken over all the functions of community. As government is failing, if you put put people under enough pressure due to lack of security and it's going to form in the absence of active disruption by state agents.

Even deportation is probably going too far for most of them.

The people in the city meetings were desperate. Removing the Haitians somewhere else isn't "too far".

Demoralization is saying the community has been destroyed and the place is conquered. That is only so if you believe it is so.

This is silly and relies on the firm beleif that nothing is real. If you live ANYWHERE and your population increase by 33% in a couple of years, from ANY sort of transplant, than any local culture, landscape, services, infrastructure has been irrevocably changed. Maybe one wants to argue that this is a good change and in many cases it is.

But if the dramatic change comes from outside and against the will of the people, wihtout their explicit consultation and approval, they've been 'invaded' so to speak. At least, when it's gentrification, the people who stick around get a better, safer city out of it, and it's generally from their fellow Americans. When it's by true foreigners, it's ridiculous to pretend anything else but invasion.

You can't just absorb a 1/3 population surplus from a completely different country.

You can't just absorb a 1/3 population surplus from a completely different country.

I'm not saying it's not happening, but you're saying it's final. It's not final at all.

They can always go back. This has been done plenty of times in history. Germans went west by the million despite centuries long habitation. Bhutan repatriated iirc hundreds of thousands of Nepalese. Fiji repatriated a lot of Indians, enough to secure a comfortable majority for their natives.

And so on.

What do you think would happen to Haitians in the event of a civil war and breakdown? Do you think they'd be nice and considerate suddenly ?

What do you think is going to happen there if there's a serious economic crisis? That that'd improve relations ?

No this isn't going to end well, and it certainly isn't going to end with Haitians happily inhabiting rustbelt by the million, being even worse for the budget than black Americans. It's going to end in tears. America is going to see some bad times and that never helps with diversity.

Why are these Haitians being admitted to the US when there's a neighbor conveniently next door to them called the Dominican Republic that they can move to? They share an island together, in fact, no need to get on a plane or boat.

On average, Dominicanos are not as self-hating or oblivious as to the negative value-add of black(er) Haitian invaders compared to the self-hatred, obliviousness, and negrolatry of EEUU blancos or blanco-adjacent.

Crappy comment expressed crappily. As I seem to have to be telling several people, if you want to condemn an entire population as invasive retards, you need to put more work into it than a Twitter-tier hot-take. You have a poor record of comments like this; next time will likely be a ban.

Por que los Dominicanos tienen una historia de preguntar a dicer 'parejil'.

how cute, they have their own Vesper story

Interestingly, the Dominicans started construction of a border wall last year.

I was waiting for the part of the article where they'd go from the Trulijio dictatorship massacres to explaining how things got to be this way, but sadly they never do.

Dominicans have the Boer problem: their neighbor keeps trying to seize their land and enslave them but because they're white and Christian, somehow it never seems to count as colonization.

Now I won't be so naive as to claim there isn't fault on the Dominican side, but you'd think not wanting to associate with people who are your declared ennemies would at the very least be justified.

I kind of feel bad, because I shared the article merely because of the silly headline. Apologies for making you read it.

It's extremely hard to find anything (at least in English language media) that represents the position of proponents of the wall. Presumably there are some: a majority of DR citizens support it. But most articles are just about how it's racist and inhumane and escalating tensions.

Dominicans are white?

Hispanics, like Jews, are Schrodinger's whites depending on whether or not it serves The Narrative. See also: George Zimmerman.

Strange that they are Hispanic - they’re more black than Spanish

The word Hispanic really doesn’t have anything to do with someone’s racial background

Strange that they are Hispanic - they’re more black than Spanish

They're literally from the island of Hispañola, you can't get any more Hispanic. (of course the Haitians are too).

The most surprising thing to me here is the amount of white ancestry in Haiti and Jamaica

They're Spaniards mixed with Afro-Carribeans. Make of that what you will.

They are lighter skinned than Haitians so in the grand unified anglo theory of colonial struggle that the linked article uses, that makes them the whites here. I don't make the rules.

Because the Dominican Republic has actual immigration enforcement.

Not a joke. Obviously it's not practical to guard every inch of the border (which is quite mountainous). But they have checkpoints all throughout the country with soldiers checking cars for Haitians. They deported a quarter of a million Haitians in 2023.

Dominicans are openly racist towards Haitians, they do not want Haitians in their country, and they commit serious resources to keeping them out.

Also, they murdered the fuck out of the expats back in the 30s.

And more recently, stripped people of Haitian descent of their Dominican citizenship.

The DR is surprisingly well run, they wouldn't stand for this shit. Last time I was down there they had prop fighter planes patrolling the border ready to gun down crossers.

I would definitely not say that DR is well run. Corruption is endemic, crime is high, and basic services like electricity are unreliable.

But they are serious about keeping Haitians out.

As far as the specific function of keeping out Haitians goes, they seem to be doing a much better job than the Americans.

The situations aren't comparable. The DR shares a land border with Haiti (which has a similar population), and is very poor itself. They're a heck of a lot more motivated to take positive steps to keep Haitians out than the US is.

Sharing a land border and being poor should make the job harder. But you're right - it's a question of motivation.

The DR may not be well run, but it's a fuckton better run than Haiti. Make that a kilofuckton.

No argument there, it's a stretch to say that Haiti is run at all.

I mean, he did say 'surprisingly well run'. For Latin America, I don't think it's that bad.

I had a girlfriend who worked for a resettlement agency and they did have to deal with cases of goats being killed and butchered at apartment complexes. I could buy killing a few geese/ducks but I highly doubt cats. If the populations of duck/geese are similar to parks in my area there no way they depopulated a park. The picture going around of a black man with a goose appears to be from Columbus could very possibly be fresh road kill. I've seen white people dressing a road kill deer on the side of the road, 100% legal in my state.

but I highly doubt cats

Local law enforcement says it happened.

https://www.wowt.com/2024/08/21/woman-arrested-allegedly-killing-cat-eating-it-front-neighbors/

That's probably what started the cat thing, but it's a different town and I doubt that woman is a recent Haitian immigrant. The duck thing, on the other hand, was supposedly a complaint made at a council meeting.

Hell, my great grandfather's brother used to listen to police scanners for news of animal strikes so he could head over for some free fresh meat. I'm sure it's reasonably common in a lot of rural/rural-adjacent areas.

I had a family member hit a deer and before a tow truck arrived, some guy walked up to ask if he wanted the carcass. This was maybe five years ago?

In Texas, he would be arrested for poaching. Lots of other states allow it though.

RFK posts on The Motte. You heard it here first.

I thought RFK Jr.'s story was about throwing a dead bear into Central Park. You don't have to go too far outside a city to find people harvesting roadkill deer.

Yeah this wasn’t (isn’t?) uncommon in my very white hometown.

Username checks out.

Personally I'm in favor of people eating Canada geese. If we can just break the Haitians up into smaller groups and relocate them near areas with problem geese, then move them around as the goose population "somehow" drops, we can make good use of these refugees.

Local news seems to say that there's no reports of pets being eaten: https://www.springfieldnewssun.com/news/springfield-police-say-no-reports-of-pets-stolen-after-viral-social-media-post/3WSIZQNHQVE4NP4TS5BVHBB2PY/

I don't know about the ducks. There's an image on twitter of a black guy carrying a duck but I don't know what the provenance is.

Litigating the truthiness of this is great.

It's like people talking about how George Floyd was a drug addict and a criminal who resisted arrest. All true, but you don't kill a fire with oxygen.

Well, if it isn't true, I don't think it's that great that we need litigation. Polluting the epistemic commons is bad, actually (inb4 "but my outgroup also does it!").

I'd be curious to know where the claims of pet eating originated.

There's this video of an African man peacefully trying to cook what's purportedly a cat on a fire on the sidewalk in Italy while an elderly Italian woman is yelling at him...

Well, if it isn't true, I don't think it's that great that we need litigation. Polluting the epistemic commons is bad, actually

Not being able to ask if something is true, because it might turn out it isn't, seems badder.

(inb4 "but my outgroup also does it!").

Well, if you truly believe this is bad, I'd say we have far bigger problems then this. We have entire institutions doing it on a mass scale, it's odd you'd dismiss it with a snarky quip.

Not being able to asks if something is true, because it might turn out it isn't, seems badder.

It's not asking if it's true that pollutes the commons, it's uncritical repetition of seemingly baseless claims.

Well, if you truly believe this is bad, I'd say we have far bigger problems then this. We have entire institutions doing it on a mass scale, it's odd you'd dismiss it with a snarky quip.

I'm hardly dismissing concerns about the outgroup doing it. I'm dismissing using that as a justification for the in-group doing it.

It's not asking if it's true that pollutes the commons, it's uncritical repetition of seemingly baseless claims.

But you were responding to OP, not JD Vance?

I'll be honest with you, I didn't really understand what OP meant.

I'm not sure what he meant by killing fire with oxygen, but the rest seems pretty clear. He thinks litigating the "truthiness" if controversial claims is good. Floyd's drug habits are given as an example of an inflammatory claim that could be neither confirmed or denied at the time, but we eventually learned the truth of.

Actually, I'll take a stab at interpretation. Perhaps what he meant was that the controversy itself was essential to us finding the correct information? If you "killed the fire" we'd never know the truth, but it was kept alive with "oxygen"/controversy, and so we eventually did, because people were invested in winning old internet spats.

Polluting the epistemic commons is bad, actually (inb4 "but my outgroup also does it!").

Agree in principle with the caveat that it's a Paradox of Toleration problem. If only one side tells outrageous lies (Trump wants to ban abortion nationwide!) and media is partisan and complicit, then the side that lies wins, and the principled libertarians wail and gnash teeth in the outer darkness.

Or, put another way, once the epistemic commons are polluted, they are really hard to unpollute. Probably we need to start with the universities.

I'd be curious to know where the claims of pet eating originated.

To the best I can tell there was a crazy woman in Ohio who ate a cat. She wasn't an immigrant and she didn't live in Springfield.

If only one side tells outrageous lies (Trump wants to ban abortion nationwide!) and media is partisan and complicit, then the side that lies wins, and the principled libertarians wail and gnash teeth in the outer darkness.

The problem I'm seeing is that trumpeting nonsense claims is a shortcut to getting dismissed by normies. People I know are sending me articles from the MSM dunking on Vance for repeating the pet thing. The whole issue has been settled as much ado over nothing in their minds, and any actual problems are swept under the rug with prejudice.

Is it unfair that the MSM can make shit up with impunity but Vance can't? Yes, but Republicans best get used to it because that's the state of play right now.

None of this seems to make sense.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. It seems perfectly sensible: anti-immigration activists are repeating a rumor that supports their preferences. It might be true, it might be exaggerated, it might be a complete lie. Why bother checking? After all, even if it's not true, the fact that I could believe it really says something about society.

  • -17

No offense, but the willingness of any individual to believe in something always reflects on the individual. It is in fact, your responsibility to use your brain.

Not always. When the target is a group disliked by the establishment, we call it "Poe's Law" and we laugh at how those people made satire indistinguishable from reality. It's only when the establishment itself becomes the target of an absurd rumor, that believing it reflects on the believer. When the rumor turns out to be true (like it did in this very case), that doesn't matter at all. You're still a backwards ignorant hick for thinking it could be true, before it was proven to be true.

After all, even if it's not true, the fact that I could believe it really says something about society.

I appreciate your sarcasm, so I'm just going to jump in to say that that's a line of argument I loathe. It's lazy, masturbatory, and ultimately boils down to "I wanted to be right, so that's just as valid as having been right!"

Of course, as is often the case, C.S. Lewis put it into far better words:

Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, “Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that”, or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.

This is one of the worst kinds of post. You can't even clarify what "might be exaggerated" before you go on to imply that your enemies are lazy. Are there not 20,000k migrants? Yeah, whatever, let's talk about the real problem: some comment I read online somewhere.

After all, even if it's not true, the fact that I could believe it really says something about society.

Several people lately have decided it's clever to do a bit where they say something they imagine their opponents might say, with a straight face, with the intention of saying "Aha, gotcha!" when someone points out how ridiculous what they are saying is.

It's not clever; it's disingenuous and annoying. Make your point reasonably clear and plain.

I think my point is reasonably clear and plain: people are signal boosting rumors with a reckless disregard for the truth because they don't care about whether the particulars are true. Given the context of the rest of the not-very-long post, I'm not sure how someone would read some other meaning into that sentence.

Alternatively, they could “not care” whether the story is true because they believe that mainstream sources would never bother to check the story. Thus there’s no way to fact check the story at all from sources of record. So if the people telling those stories believe that the story is too political to deal with honestly, why “care” if it’s true. The media dug its grave a long time ago and is only worth reading if you want to know what the elites want you to think.

I think my point is reasonably clear and plain: people are signal boosting rumors with a reckless disregard for the truth because they don't care about whether the particulars are true.

Your point was clear enough, yes. Which part of my point did you not understand?

When it turns out to be true, will you commit to publicly acknowledging it?
Because every time in the past the strategy has been "you heard that on libs of tiktok and everyone knows she lies"

When it turns out to be true, will you commit to publicly acknowledging it?

Are all of the rest of you publicly committing to acknowledging it when it turns out that Skibboleth was right and it's all fake outrage? Or are you just trying to impose a double standard?

We have a solution for this around these parts, and it's called making a bet.

Now I doubt there's a prediction market for Haitian shenanigans, but surely we can come up with a level of evidence that would satisfy both sides and a time frame for it appearing.

Let's say if a police report/bodycam or local newspaper reports on physical evidence of someone poaching local birds or pets within Springfield within the next three months?

@Skibboleth, @SteveKirk are you guys willing to get some skin in the game? No pun intended. Come on guys, if it's obvious, it's free money.

Absolutely not, because I remember this exact same scenario playing out at least three times, and in two of those cases a bet would never have been adjudicated fairly.

First and most obviously, Jussie Smollett. It was like pulling teeth, but eventually the people defending him shifted their counter-attacks to "why are you so obsessed with hoaxes when they're so rare?"
IMO the only reason that one might have settled is that the main representative for the losing side was so overwhelmingly disliked he had no social cover. Already unpopular people facing social consequences isn't great evidence for fair and impartial systems.

Second, the Virginia school bathroom rape case. To my knowledge nobody on team "there were no gender neutral bathrooms, ok but you can't prove there was actually a rape, ok but he wasn't really gender fluid, anyway it's super rare why are you so obsessed TERF" ever admitted wrongdoing. And I'm pretty sure that one catholic girl was banned for pressing them on it at least once.

Third and most recently, the Sam Brinton case where it took three arrests for stealing women's clothing for the people litigating it to go from pretending it was a right wing conspiracy to pretending they'd never heard of the guy.

Who's going to judge the bet? Some of the mods are the people from those other cases.
Even if we do get the absolutely overwhelming evidence we got in those other cases (and I admit we might not see the same Haitian guy arrested three times with a skinned cat in a sack each time), the bets will do nothing.
And you'd better believe the media will be pulling out all the stops to play the exact same "no evidence acknowledged by Reliable Sources" game they played in all those cases, until everyone's internalized that it was just another case of Republicans Pouncing.

Absolutely not, because I remember this exact same scenario playing out at least three times, and in two of those cases a bet would never have been adjudicated fairly.

Really? Bets were made and stakes were put on the table? I don't remember this. People throw "Want to make a bet on it?" a lot, but I don't recall anyone ever trying to set up a formal wager.

And I'm pretty sure that one catholic girl was banned for pressing them on it at least once.

I wish she were still around to react to being called "that one catholic girl."

I don't know which specific ban you are talking about, but her repeated bans were never because she was saying things mods disagreed with or against someone who enjoyed the mods' favor, but because she had a problem saying things without being an antagonistic and personally insulting about it.

Who's going to judge the bet? Some of the mods are the people from those other cases.

Who? Name names and post links.

More comments

If you are willing to bet enough I'll fly out there and check. Flights aren't that expensive. I should be able to tell if there are 20k extra people from Haiti eating birds and whatnot. No one ever puts their money where their mouth is. Many people talk a lot, few are up for the moment. Round trip is only 200 bucks!

More comments

Springfield's city government estimated around 12-15k immigrants "in Clark County", on the FAQ, though it hasn't been updated in a while. Clark County as a whole has closer to 110k citizens, though a large portion of those not in Springfield proper are closer to Dayton or Columbus. 20k immigrants is a lot more plausible than you'd expect, especially if you start to include people who get dropped there and then migrate to other nearby towns, and given the extent that the Biden administration doesn't really care how disruptive it is.

Ohio wildfowl are a mess, both geese and ducks, not helped by the recent very dry conditions. You'd get in trouble with the feds for taking a baseball club to 'em, but you would be really hard pressed to run out, and at least no one credible is alleging that there's an entire army trying to depopulate the wildfowl rather than a few bad actors doing it.

The cat video going around is in reference to a (presumably not-mentally-well) lady in Canton, Ohio (aka Cleveland), about two hours drive northeast of Springfield. Her public defender suggests that she's not a recent immigrant and may even be a citizen, but not seeing a ton of confirmation on that.

Springfield's city government estimated around 12-15k immigrants "in Clark County", on the FAQ, though it hasn't been updated in a while. Clark County as a whole has closer to 110k citizens,

We're still talking about a relatively enormous influx then though.

Yes, and this is a lower-bound, both because it's older information and because it's almost certainly incomplete.

Conflating Canton with Cleveland is a misnomer, Canton is about an hour drive away and doesn't share any local government services with Cleveland . The likelihood of any significant cross pollination between impoverished Clevelanders and Cantoners(?) is pretty minimal unless Cleveland is buying a one-way bus ticket for the mentally ill.

Fair. It's a little closer than Dayton to Cincinnati, but there are distinct cultures from Cleveland to Akron to Canton.

Man, that Yahoo article really trips my trigger. JD Vance lied they say! What did he say?

On X, formerly Twitter, Vance amplified bogus “reports” that “people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.”

What's their refutation?

Springfield, Ohio, has been a hub for immigrants, and particularly Haitian immigrants, in recent years — contrary to Vance’s tweet, they are here legally — but there’s no evidence at all for these viral claims.

Whether they're here legally or not doesn't refute the claim that they shouldn't be in this country. Perhaps this is a genuine point of confusion, but I rather doubt it. There are many people that are here legally that I think should never have been allowed into the country in the first place. Their current legal status isn't even an attempt to rebut the claim that they shouldn't be here.

To be fair, a lot of people, including (especially) many reporters are pretty unfamiliar with the broader set of categories of immigration law and status, and Haiti is kinda in the nexus of a bunch of different things. But yeah, there's a lot of tendency for pro-immigration writers to conflate descriptive and normative statements.

Assuming that there are in fact not reports of Haitian immigrants eating cats, then I think it’s pretty fair to say Vance was lying.

Whether “people who shouldn’t be in this country” was intended to imply illegal immigrants or just immigrants generally is unclear, but it’s also secondary to the eating cats thing. That’s the main thrust of what Vance said and it doesn’t seem to be true.

It also doesn’t mean they are here legally. They may be judged to be here illegally in the end.

A large portion of Haitians are under Temporary Protected Status (TPS), with almost all recent immigrants under the humanitarian parole programs (either CHNV or HFRP), rather than asylum parole or parole-with-conditions programs, which makes things... complicated. There are a few ways for someone under these categories to be present illegally, either due to failing background checks or fraud on the part of their sponsors, but it's very unlikely that even a significant portion will be found here illegally.

((And even of those who were originally entered illegally, after ten years 1229(b) kicks in -- that was a big unspoken part of the recent Campos-Chaves v. Garland case.))

You'd get in trouble with the feds for taking a baseball club to 'em

You and I would, but apparently all it takes to ignore international treaties is to be form a shithole country while living in the Midwest. I pick up an eagle feather from my yard and I my conscience reminds me how there's zero-tolerance for feathers and it doesn't matter where you get them from because you're presumed to be guilty. I don't care about the geese, I care about the tyranny of the government with respect to Whites and anarachy with respect to blacks and other minorities. I care about how I was raised to follow rules and respect the law and I'm a fucking sucker for ever believing such bullshit, because Haitians just kill the geese and eat them, they're free.

I don't care about paper citizenship, so whether or not this woman was foreign doesn't rely on how long she's been living where, or which papers she had. She does look like she has significant european admixture, though, unlike goose man.

I once knew a white RN- so a respectable citizen- who would capture ducks from a public park and keep them in her backyard until they ran away, in the hopes that they would lay eggs for her to eat. The migratory bird act is mostly enforced against hunters, not anyone else, and this is due to apathy and/or law enforcement not thinking to look at random crazy people in the park. Like seriously this woman chased them on a kayak and the cops didn't do shit.

I can well believe that some migrants get away with grabbing geese out of the public park. The ducks are certainly free and you can take them home.

Also why my conscience is pinging on bald eagle feathers, not mallard, goose, or crow.

What's happening in Springfield Ohio is punishment for voting wrong. "Great Replacement Theory" might not be the most watertight explanation. But NGOs run by deranged partisans who viscerally hate white rural Trump voters, as can be plainly seen by most of their social media activity, are certainly executing on perhaps a "Minor Replacement" plan.

You know the deal—specific groups, specific people. Deranged partisans are a dime a dozen. Show us which NGO moved these Haitians. Show us where they gloated about it on social media.

There’s a legitimate case to be made, but you’ve gotta make it.

Just like Greg Abbott's buses...

Those are intended to punish people who voted FOR more immigration.

Well yes, both sides have done this- and in theory could do it again, although illegal migration has mostly shifted west of Texas due to razor wire and law enforcement operations.

There's something of a difference between sending migrant populations to places to punish them for voting against migration, and sending migrant populations to punish them for voting for migration. The latter has a bit of that poetic-justicy thing to it.

The numbers seem beyond belief so I wouldn't be surprised if the true number is much lower.

But I think that small towns with weak connections to centers of power will be the perfect dumping ground for the worst type of migrants. Think of what the last 50 years have done to the Rust Belt. It's clear that the powers-that-be are completely fine to throw this entire region into the trash bin for larger ends.

On the other hand, nicer areas seem to have the human capital to keep undesirables out. In Seattle, it's been said that when a tent appears in your local park, you need to go full Karen and get the first tent removed immediately. Because if you don't, a second tent will appear, then a third, and pretty soon it will be a real encampment with drugs, and rats, and murders. There are very few drug zombies in Magnolia, but the International District (ID) is crawling with them because the residents of the ID don't know how to organize and resist.

The same seems to be true with migrants. At some point, a non-profit or government agency must have started sending Haitians to Springfield. And they didn't have the human capital to resist. If the 20,000 number is accurate, I think it's fair to say the town is absolutely fucked and will be nearly 100% Haitian within 20 years.

I live nearby and can say, in support of your first point: Springfield, Ohio was already totally fucked, and therefore it's a great place to put migrants. It is a quintessential Rust Belt city that was hollowed out by deindustrialization; it is a satellite of Dayton, which is even worse off.

This is happening much more widely even than what is reported on. Down the street from me, the village of Lockland was gutted by the closure of the original Stearns & Foster mattress factory in the early 2000s (along with many industrial closures for decades prior, and even the closure of the original Miami & Erie Canal in the 1910s... Lockland is a hard-luck place); it is now being resettled by Mauritanians, with the enthusiastic support of local NGOs.

https://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/finding-solutions/you-only-have-hope-hundreds-of-mauritanians-seeking-asylum-find-refuge-within-lockland-bike-shop

I guess for the record, Mauritanians that I have met have been nice to me personally, and I am not aware of them making particular problems for everyone; but it is also true that they have concentrated in one neighborhood and turned it into Little Mauritania. I suppose it's better than the building sitting empty as they had done previously; but I wish that my own culture had simply stayed there and built new things after the factories closed, instead of decamping to distant commuter towns like Mason. Easy for me to say, I suppose.

Who are these nameless faceless NGOs carving up the ethnic map of middle America like post-war European diplomats? What is their motivation? Who is funding them? Why does nobody care? Is right-wing media too incompetent to weave a narrative more complicated than "Democrats open-borders bad"?

https://www.vicrc.org/

This is the one that provides the most support in the specific case of Lockland; the director, John Keuffer, is quoted fairly often in the local news here. And as another commenter notes downthread, Catholic Charities is heavily involved. I used to spend a lot of time with a girl who is now a fairly high-ranking leader in this region's Catholic Charities organization - we worked at the same previous job together, and she kept me posted during the application process for the job with CC.

The impression that I get is: there is a substantial amount of people for whom helping people who claim to be hungry and homeless is a Good Thing, full stop; and any downstream consequences of that are not important to them, are not actually even considered, compared to this higher priority. It's quite hard to argue against it, especially with highly empathetic people: the people who already live in Springfield or Lockland are not, currently, hungry or homeless to the same degree, so of course their needs are considered second.

They are not faceless, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society is one of the most important. You want a face? Here's a face.

HIAS @HIASrefugees map inside the Bajo Chiquito invader camp in Darien Gap, Panama is giving “migrants” instructions and maps on how to illegally enter the United States with printed instructions on how to reach each bus station, medic, and what the weather is going to be like on the way to the US.

While I was recording this video, there were thousands of invaders walking around inside the camp, waiting to be processed upon arriving from their jungle trek in the Darien Gap. I encountered invaders inside this camp from all over the world, including Afghanistan, Angola, Iran and Morocco.

There is so much irony in the fact that a JEWISH NGO (HIAS) is helping Muslims from terror tier countries and other places in Africa and the Middle East get to the United States illegally.

Here are their migrant centers throughout South America where they assist illegal immigrants in entering the United States. But wait, there aren't any dots in Haiti, so we can't attribute this mass ressetlement of Haitians to this NGO right?

HIAS hand-picked Alejandro Mayorkas, who is also Jewish, as Secretary of DHS which is responsible for the mass resettlement of these Haitians as well as of course other border policy. The HIAS endorsement of Mayorkas noted "A Biden Appointee who Carries the Jewish Story Itself." Mayorkas served on the board of HIAS through 2020.

Our Secretary of DHS, the one responsible for these Haitians being resettled into the United States, literally served on the board of a Jewish NGO that aims to carve up the ethnic map of middle America explicitly.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement is responsible for awarding grant money to NGOs that resettle refugees in cities around the country.

acf.hhs.gov/orr

I looked up a random state using that link. It shows some NGO called IRC - International Rescue Committee. So I asked them to tell me who they are:

https://www.rescue.org/who-we-are

Says one “David Miliband” is their president. Who is that? What is his background? So I asked Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Miliband

Early life and family

Born in London, Miliband is the elder son of immigrant parents, Belgian-born Marxist sociologist Ralph Miliband and Polish-born Marion Kozak, both from Polish Jewish families.[1][7][8] The latter was a teacher before she became a homemaker. He was given the middle name of "Wright" after the American sociologist C. Wright Mills, a friend of his father.[9] He has said "I am the child of Jewish immigrants and that is a very important part of my identity."[7] Both his Polish Jewish paternal grandparents lived in the Jewish quarter of Warsaw. His paternal grandfather, Samuel, a trained leather worker, served in the Red Army in the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–1921 before moving to Belgium.

Oh.

Surely the more important point about David Miliband is that he was supposed to be the Leader of the Opposition in the UK after Labour lost the 2010 general election, but lost the leadership election to his more left-wing brother Ed and left for American in a huff.

The most important thing about International Rescue is that it is a secretive organisation based on Tracey Island which built a number of Elon-Musk-esque flying machines. The original agent on terra firma was Lady Penelope, but in this day and age a politician is needed rather than an aristocrat.

They're (often Catholic) 501(c)s getting billions of dollars through the federal government in ways that no one in Congress has the power to stop.
Got to CESglobal's financial page and see what $186,000,000 in government funding buys you. And that's just one drop in the bucket.

This is just the consequences of the total state falling into the hands of the left. Asking what you can do about it is as pointless as asking what you can do about Stalin's purges. The time to stop this was decades ago. Now there's nothing to do but suffer and try to find any way to stick a knife in your tormentors so they suffer some consequences for their evil.

I think if Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of congress they could withdraw from global refugee treaties and totally reform immigration law.

They won't, because they're cowards/idiots/grifters, but the problem is solvable in principle.

Same Catholics on here preaching away! This may be our first total agreement moment Steve. I'm 150% anti immigration.

Can this also be blamed on Vatican II?

Unlikely, as the theological foundations for the Catholic Church’s activism predate Vatican II by at least a decade. In 1952, Pius XII published Exsul Familia Nazarethana, which started off,

The émigré Holy Family of Nazareth, fleeing into Egypt, is the archetype of every refugee family. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, living in exile in Egypt to escape the fury of an evil king, are, for all times and all places, the models and protectors of every migrant, alien and refugee of whatever kind who, whether compelled by fear of persecution or by want, is forced to leave his native land, his beloved parents and relatives, his close friends, and to seek a foreign soil.

The church’s efforts were initially focused on providing priests, churches, seminaries, schools, hospitals, orphanages, etc., for Catholic populations that had already emigrated on their own to new places—all reasonable and positive efforts. However, political activism to encourage increased immigration started almost immediately after World War II, and increased dramatically in the wake of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Pius XII wrote the following to the American bishops on Dec. 24, 1948:

You know indeed how preoccupied we have been and with what anxiety we have followed those who have been forced by revolutions in their own countries, or by unemployment or hunger to leave their homes and live in foreign lands.

The natural law itself, no less than devotion to humanity, urges that ways of migration be opened to these people. For the Creator of the universe made all good things primarily for the good of all. Since land everywhere offers the possibility of supporting a large number of people, the sovereignty of the State, although it must be respected, cannot be exaggerated to the point that access to this land is, for inadequate or unjustified reasons, denied to needy and decent people from other nations, provided of course, that the public wealth, considered very carefully, does not forbid this.

Informed of our intentions, you recently strove for legislation to allow many refugees to enter your land. Through your persistence, a provident law was enacted, a law that we hope will be followed by others of broader scope. In addition, you have, with the aid of chosen men, cared for the emigrants as they left their homes and as they arrived in your land, thus admirably putting into practice the precept of priestly charity: “The priest is to injure no one; he will desire rather to aid all.” (St. Ambrose, “De Officiis ministrorum,” lib. 3, c. IX).

Even if the Catholics’ efforts hadn’t started off this way, it would only have been a matter of time before the Catholic refugee agencies started advocating for near unrestricted immigration, as the trajectory of the various Protestant churches’ refugee agencies demonstrates.

To give just one example, after WWI, the Lutheran churches in America established welfare agencies to provide aid to their coreligionists in Europe and to help resettle a small number of Lutherans in the United States. They did the same again after WWII, then began helping eastern Europeans (again, mostly Lutherans) who were fleeing persecution at the hands of the Soviets. Through the 1970s, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services (LIRS) shifted to hooking up anti-communist refugees from Cuba and Vietnam with local Lutheran congregations, so the latter could help them find housing, jobs, etc. After the end of the Cold War, many Lutherans kind of forgot that the organization existed, and evaporative cooling meant that die-hard immigration supporters were the only ones still invested enough to keep things running. With little financial support from congregations, they turned to the federal government for funding (made possible thanks to George Bush’s push for the government to partner with religious non-profits), and they used those funds to help bring in Africans, South and Central Americans, Afghanis, and others. In 2019, they hired a Hindu Democratic apparatchik (former Policy Director to First Lady Michelle Obama) as CEO, and earlier this year, with the skinsuiting of the organization complete, they eliminated “Lutheran” from their name and rebranded as “Global Refuge.”

All of which is to say, no matter how reasonable and uncontroversial these organizations’ actions may have been at the start, eventually they were all taken over by activists after their original mission had been accomplished. To prevent that, people need to learn to formally abolish organizations they are involved with once they have completed their original purpose, rather than step down from positions of leadership with the organization still intact.

Catholic Charities is the largest one. They contract with the fed gov and states to resettle people everywhere, if the local spot can handle it, great, if not, they don't give a shit. They plant people and move on, they get paid good money for it too.

At some point, a non-profit or government agency must have started sending Haitians to Springfield. And they didn't have the human capital to resist.

This is adjacent to the "they have homes, addresses, wives and children" meme. As in, commit violence against these people in retaliation for what they've done to you.

You mostly seem to come here and just offer hot takes. And "we should engage in violence" is too hot of a take. Antagonistic and culture warring. Ten day ban for now.

I don't know about the cat thing or the duck thing, but if they really are eating local wildlife (and why not, everyone knows the ducks at the park are free, right?), I would suggest they be transferred to places like Fairmount Park in Philadelphia that are plagued with nuisance geese.