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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29604 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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Haitians in Springfield eating cats appears to be at least a little more than just a wild rumor. A woman filed a police report on August 28th after her cat went missing and she found meat/gore in her Haitian neighbors' yard that she believed to be her cat's:

https://x.com/nicksortor/status/1836159326861562275

No information on if the police ever investigated further to confirm or deny this report.

For those of you who didn't believe the story, does this new evidence change your view, and in what direction? I was already leaning towards it being likely due to my prior knowledge of Haitian cuisine including cats, and the police call recording from Springfield about Haitians stealing geese from the park.

Having seen racions tear apart a cat and leave a mess, I would have to see more persuasive evidence.

Somewhat symmetrically, does the WSJ follow-up with woman where she states the cat returned alive and well after this report was made change your view?

Got a link? Is it actually for the same woman?

Not saying this proves anything one way or the other, but have you ever skimmed through the call logs of your local police department? I think they're all public record. I used to work at a community newspaper and we would get the logs once a week and look for potential stories. There is some crazy shit and I would guess at least 25% of the logs I used to read were the rantings of people who were not mentally well and should not be taken at face value.

Just like the American Office is a much more popular adaptation of the British original, the Haitians eating cats thing is really just a rip-off of Bangladeshis eating serving cats in their curry houses.

Or maybe it was gypsies eating swans.

I think it’s worth noting that while the locals don’t seem to disbelieve the cats story, their primary complaint is about bad driving. This serves as evidence that if the Haitians do eat an occasional pet, it’s pretty uncommon.

This serves as evidence that if the Haitians do eat an occasional pet, it’s pretty uncommon.

This sounds like the slow pace from "this doesn't happen" to "it doesn't matter of it does" on the glorious way to "it's a good thing that it does". If it really doesn't matter because it's so rare, people could stop freaking out over Trump/Vance dropping these claims. Would it kill progressives to say "Bro, they literally got off the plane after dodging cannibal gangs. Give them some time to adapt"? Oh yeah, we can't acknowledge any friction coming from immigration, because one day people might start asking if the trade-off is worth it.

I’ve said before, if Haitians showed up in my neighborhood I would call my state elected officials demanding that el transportador ship them to Martha’s Vineyard. But ‘bad driving’ is more likely to be the reason than them eating cats.

If it really doesn't matter because it's so rare, people could stop freaking out over Trump/Vance dropping these claims.

This makes zero sense. If it doesn't matter, then I don't want Trump dropping claims like it matters. He'd be misrepresenting truth. Lying, as the saying goes.

This makes zero sense.

Same to you, bro. If you lie about something that doesn't matter to me, it's not going to matter to me. I can't wrap my head around getting worked up about it.

Do you really not care about the impact of mass media lies on the society around you, or are you unaware of it?

I think it's more that I tend to care about the things they lie about.

When you say it doesn't matter, do you mean:

  • the few cases of animal eating are blown out of proportion
  • even if Trump blows this out of proportion it won't lead to consequences
  • you don't care about the consequences to the migrants and adjacent people?

The first one. And my issue here is that instead of saying that, we started off from "it doesn't happen". Likewise, if progressives wanted to say any of the latter two, they should literally say that, instead of pivoting to them, after their initial claim becomes less defensible.

More comments

Of course.

The cats thing is just a good way to highlight the real issues of incompatibility. We also have the murder and the rape, and notably the high rates of DUI among the Biden wave of migrants.

Almost no one wants to talk about cats, but apparently large media aside from Twitter doesn't want to talk about rape and murder, so we get stuck talking about cats.

Have you ever tried to eat a live cat while driving? It's not easy. Accidents are bound to happen.

Too be fair, doing anything with a live cat while driving is pretty dangerous. And god help you if it sees a flashing light.

Wow, a story based on one dude on Twitter has been corroborated by…one dude on Twitter. I suppose I could suggest that the account is lying, the police report is fake, or its author was mistaken, but I’ll assume for the sake of argument that it’s perfectly true.

Consider the following statements:

  1. Humans occasionally eat weird things.
  2. At least one of the Springfield Haitians has eaten a weird thing.
  3. The Springfield Haitians are more likely to eat weird things than Springfield’s other residents.
  4. Haitians in general are more likely to eat weird things
  5. Haitians have an overwhelming reason to eat weird things such that it should be expected.

This tweet is evidence for 1 and 2. It says little about 3, less about 4, and almost nothing about 5. Unfortunately, almost everyone agrees on 1 and 2. That makes tweets like this pretty useless as wedges.

But that doesn’t matter if one can move the goalposts! Democrats say “no evidence,” which means they’re denying 2, which means this owns them with FACTS and LOGIC. Republicans complaint about squatting and driving and geese, which means they’re building consensus for 4, which means they’re GROSS and RACIST.

We did it! We scored the points! The goalposts are over there, but that’s okay: we’re BOUND FOR STREET.

Firstly, after looking into Haitian cuisine and religious practices and noticing the size of the denominator, it seems unlikely that it isn't happening. Moreover, waiting for evidence isn't all that important, since whether the allegations are true or not, the probability of strong evidence being found and then fairly distributed is quite low. The nature of the act is just not easy to prove.

Secondly, I think more people should be eating the local wildlife. We have severe overpopulationa of deer, rabbits, and other prey species across most if the US. Humans have displaced predators, but they have not taken up their responsibility to fulfil the ecological function predation serves. This has been highly destructive to local ecosystems. Wild cats and outdoor cats are almost as much of a problem because they destroy bird populations. Frankly, the Haitians are probably doing an ecological service while also getting a free meal, so it's a win-win scenario.

Thirdly, if it was my goal to create ethnic and racial conflict, then I could hardly think of a better way than to dump thousands of Haitians on to small town Ohio. These allegations, the suspicions, the resentments, the prejudices, etc., whether true or false, are all obvious consequences of throwing radically different people together while also encouraging a system of racial identity and spoils. This is just what happens when people don't speak the same language and have radically different cultures and values. It's not an historical anomaly--this is what usually happens. It's not even irrational, since these groups really are different, their interests do not align, and they're being pitted against one another. If the Haitians had power, then they'd almost certainly be behaving far worse toward their outgroup.

The real enemy is clearly the NGOs, politicians, and bureaucrats who made this happen.

Tangential rebuttal to the idea that we should be eating the local wildlife: I'd like to not get prion diseases. This is admittedly more specific to deer, and I can get behind an "eat more rabbits from your backyard" proposal. But the prevalence of CWD, the difficulty of killing and butchering a deer without damaging and blood-mixing any part of the nervous system, and the fact that the harmful protein remains a stable environmental contaminant in the soil for years, compels me toward lower-risk culling of deer.

Lots of people eat venison. We’re fine.

For now...

CWD cases have rapidly expanded from a handful of states a few years ago to more than half of the US and most of Canada. Overpopulation, indirect contact transmission in deer, and durable environmental contamination are going to mix in a nasty way for the next few decades. Several states already have incidence rates in double digit percentages of the statewide deer populations.

And there's moderately compelling evidence of venison-to-human transmission.

Whether or not the venison-eating population is fine today, I personally don't like the odds, and it doesn't look better in 10 or 20 years. Even if transmissibility between deer and humans is poor, nobody knows for sure. I don't want to take the risk with a guaranteed-fatal deadly disease affecting single- or double-digit percentages of the North American deer population, that can't be reliably detected without a lab examination, for which the trigger is a protein that is stable below 1000°F and is unaffected by stomach acid.

does this new evidence change your view

Not even a little.

A Vance spokesperson on Tuesday provided The Wall Street Journal with a police report in which a resident had claimed her pet might have been taken by Haitian neighbors. But when a reporter went to Anna Kilgore’s house Tuesday evening, she said her cat Miss Sassy, which went missing in late August, had actually returned a few days later—found safe in her own basement.

Folk epistemology really does boil down to literal witch hunts and blood libel if it festers long enough. I’m not sure what to do with this information. Go back to mainstream institutions controlling national discourse?

What about this is blood libel?

What about this is blood libel?

If you wade into the X threads where the Cats thing got started, there are now nascent claims of voodoo and, yes, cannibalism.

Voodoo and cannibalism are real things practiced in Haiti. That's not blood libel, that's anthropology. It happens in Africa too.

The part where a few migrants catching ducks and geese at the park turns into a nationwide panic over Haitans eating other people’s housepets. People are already talking about Haitian voodoo and cannibalism. It’s not hard to see where this would go in the absence of constraints.

Towards truth? Voodoo and cannabalism are part of Hatian culture.

Deporting illegal migrants and not letting in new ones?

It’s not hard to see where this would go in the absence of constraints.

Nationwide riots and a guy getting burned to death in his shop? A neighborhood declaring itself an independent territory, resulting in several unsolved murders?

My goodness, we can imagine almost anything could happen at all!

Edit: 'Pet discourse' is incredibly stupid. Vagueing about where it might go in the absence of constraints is only somewhat less so, since anything happening requires much more than mere absence of constraints.

There's also this tweet of a Springfield city manager saying he bas received complaints about people losing their lets:

https://x.com/GrageDustin/status/1836178999178866766

Is it gauche to refer to my own post https://www.themotte.org/post/1160/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/249419?context=8#context

Where I specifically said that there would be a race between 'HAH THEY ARE EATING CATS' and 'can we please stop talking about cats' conservatives?

JD Vance folded, said that he was making things up to get the conversation going. Trump hasn't mentioned it once more. Any unearthing of proximate evidence is burning sacrifices to a dead god. The point was fumbled, and memory holing is the best strategy. Repeatedly digging up this corpse to pretend it can still tapdance is not really helping advance the cause.

JD Vance folded, said that he was making things up to get the conversation going.

This is a gross misrepresentation of what JD Vance said. Yes, his exact words were "If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do". IMHO though, in the full context of the back and forth he said that, "stories" is analogous to "headline" not "fiction". If some journalist, and he's arguing with a journalist, was having a conversation where they said they created or wrote a story, you wouldn't not assume they meant they were passing off their own fiction as news. "News story" is a colloquial phrase. Almost every news outlet brags about having "top stories". Vance is clearly talking about creating a news cycle, not making shit up.

Who says "if I have to do [X thing] to bring about [good thing], I will" if X is good or neutral? This is transparently self-justifying talk, which creates the context for "story" meaning "lie", not "headline".

Very stupid way for a seasoned political operative to put it then.

Yeah, it was so stupid of JD Vance to use the exact same language his opponents use, ignorant to the fact that they can redefine language at their whim. Just so stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

The game isn't fair and the points are made up. When you have to be twice as good to get half as far, a lot hinges on that "twice as good" bit.

What he said might have been smart, but the fact that I misinterpreted it proves that it was actually dumb.

JD Vance is actually speaking to the public as an adult instead of giving empty word salad platitude answers.

What he said might have been smart, but the fact that I misinterpreted it proves that it was actually dumb.

Unironically. There are more dumb people than smart people (or just people who aren't paying that much attention). Vance's 3D chess playing audience is outnumbered by people like me.

I for one prefer politicians who talk like adults to smooth-talking bullshitters. He's not even saying anything complicated.

I'm sure it's a total coincidence that not a single conservative politician has even been a seasoned enough political operative to avoid having some sentence somewhere reframed dishonestly in ways that a) every mainstream news organization repeats and b) no mainstream news organization corects.

It's not a coincidence, obviously. They'll find something.

It's preferable they find "binders full of women" than you saying what Vance said. All you can do is minimize.

There's an argument for some Trump-style disagreeableness on important things. But I'd be making this argument if a Democrat spoke this way. This is not the sort of thing you want a paragraph-long explainer on. Waste of time.

Harris died in 2020 because she couldn't walk back her stupid defund rhetoric, and Biden eclipsed her totally on the campaign trail, with literally zero support for Defund The Police from Biden, not a single sanewashing soundbite. If you fuck up your point by saying something stupid, you power through and cede it so your efforts go somewhere productive.

Trump and Vance can still point to immigrant salvadorans and hondurans fucking up NYC. They don't do so because urbanites suffering hubris is a desired outcome for Trump, Trumps existing supporters and the remaining centrists who dislike far left open border crazies. Trying to tie the migrant threat to soccer mom suburbanites failed, and I'm not sure there is time to reload the chamber even if another bullet existed.

It's preferable they find "binders full of women" than you saying what Vance said.

Genuinely not sure about that. "I will do what I have to do, because this is important," may play quite well even among floating voters. It signifies strength and commitment (dishonesty, but pointed in a good direction). The "binders full of women" thing just came across as kind of sad, even for people who knew it had been misquoted. "I have binders full of people I want to promote to positions they weren't able to obtain under their own power" isn't exactly heartening.

I’m tapping the sign right now.

Journos Delenda est

*delendi sunt

Yeah, fair enough.

JD Vance folded, said that he was making things up to get the conversation going.

That's not exactly what he said.

Trump hasn't mentioned it once more.

So what? Trump is a busy guy. He isn't exactly backing off. He just had to deal with the fallout of a second assassin. Then he gives appearances and interviews. I could post a 20-minute monologue Trump just made connecting Tariffs, the Afghanistan pullout, China selling weapons, and the destiny of Michigan and its auto industry to be even greager than it has ever been.

The point was fumbled, and memory holing is the best strategy.

What point was fumbled? The Biden-Harris is bringing in millions of illegals under TPS and dumping them in small towns. They drive down wages and are a strain on basic social services. They kill people with reckless driving. Landlords use them to drive out tenants for more money. And some of them are even eating pets.

The biggest thing that's bugging me about it is the continued use of "no evidence" when people mean "weak evidence" and are using "no evidence" as an attack on the credibility of their opponents in a way that makes me think of Russell Conjugation. Consider, for a moment, how the accusations Christine Blasey Ford were treated - the key word that stands out in my mind was the phrasing that she made "credible allegations". The actual evidence for her claims is reasonably on par with the Springfield allegations, which is to say that it's physically possible, not proven false by established facts, and not so improbable in a Bayesian sense to discard altogether. When someone wants to believe something, a piece of evidence like that police report makes it a "credible allegation"; when they don't want to believe something, eyewitness or firsthand testimony shifts from being weak evidence to being "no evidence".

I make credible allegations, you offer unproven claims, he asserts without evidence.

The first thing that came to my mind was that animal killing may be part of some Vodun/Voodoo or other magical ritual. I tried to google it now and it seems that the internet was already scraped. You can easily avoid it by limiting the google search to before August 2024. Here are some articles. National Geographic in 2004

These disembodied spirits are believed to become tired and worn down—and rely on humans to "feed" them in periodic rituals, including sacrifices. "It's not the killing of the animals that matters," Corbett said. "It's the transfer of life energy back to the Loa."

Another one from Slate in 2013 describing sacrifice of goat

The life energy of the animal is for the Lwa. Often the blood is collected in a calabash bowl and later placed on the Poto Mitan, which represents the center of the universe and access to the spirit world.

Another article from New York Times that mentions that 90% of Haitians practice some form of voodoo and has this to say about animal sacrifice:

I talk about sacrifice a lot. That is usually the first order of questioning. People find themselves offended by it. And then I usually ask, 'Do you eat chicken? Do you eat meat? How do you think the animal was killed? Do you feel any responsibility for it?'

And then we usually move on from there. The imagery surrounding blood sacrifice is much exaggerated. After the food is presented to the spirits as a gift, it is given back to the people by the spirits. It is all cooked and eaten, so none of it is wasted.

Here is an article about dog torture in West Africa. Just do your own research. It may not necessary be the issue of hungry people eating cats or dogs - although it definitely can happen - but it is also about tradition.

Here is an article about dog torture in West Africa.

The first sentence of that article literally reads:

Countless Countries Worldwide that are involved in the Dog and Cat Meat Trade are also heavily involved in the Barbaric Demonic Voodoo Animal Sacrifices, where they are using various methods of torture such as Beating Hanging, Setting Fire to Animals whilst they are still alive, Mutilation, Stabbing ,Tearing Animals apart with their Bare Hands and Eating them while they are still Alive.

I would give you 20% odds that this is a parody site, with The random Capitalization Thing going On.

While I am hardly the expert, Haitian Vodou and West African Vudun have diverged a few 100 years ago. So even if the most common sacrifice in contemporary Vudun are in fact dogs (which I concede by no means), concluding from that fact that Haitian Vodou also sacrifices dogs is a bit like observing that contemporary Roman Catholic priests have a tendency to fuck altar boys at higher than base rate and conclude from that that that Calvinist pastor is the prime suspect in your child rape case. Or indeed concluding that your Haitian is, because Catholicism is also a key ingredient of Vodou.

From my understanding, the animals most likely to being sacrificed in Vodou are exactly the same animals which Americans put on their barbecue, and Wikipedia claims the same:

Species used for sacrifice include chickens, goats, and bulls, with pigs often favored for Petwo lwa.

I am not saying that Haitian Vodou does not have its problems, it certainly does not seem to be as capable of fostering the creation of a functional state as various branches of Christianity are, but blaming it for missing cats in a country where you can simply buy a more traditional sacrifice like a chicken for a few bucks seems implausible.

I keep trying to draw some sort of second-order conclusions from the Haitians eating cats thing. Is it supposed to sway people who were on the fence about border controls? Like, if it is true - then what? I imagine the leftist response to this story being absolutely confirmed would be:

0.) Continue to deny it anyway.
1.) When they have learned our country's norms they'll stop, it's not really their fault.
2.) Even if it's true, it's their culture and we should respect it, not try to change them to be like us.
3.) Either way the good they bring outweighs the bad.

Even my liberal dad admitted, he would feel concern about having 20,000 Haitians added to his community all at once. My impression as a private citizen has been that this reinforces something already true about America: the only way you can control who lives near you is to make more money. You have to continually move up the housing ladder so that you can live only near people who can afford to do the same thing; this is the only way to ensure you live near pro-social people. The poor people who were not able to leave Springfield when its industries crashed - they are "suffering what they must."

If it was true, then of course we have never denied it and you are racist for not respecting their cultural traditions. (OTOH, woke people really prefer dogs to pigs to some unreasonable degree, so perhaps it goes 'we have never denied it and anyway it is just a few isolated incidents and does not matter, why would you even talk about that anyhow')

That being said, I think it is very likely that it is either a complete fabrication or that it will never be proven beyond reasonable doubt. I just don't think that Trump operates the way that he would only make such an outrageous claim if he had ironclad proof, instead, he likely read the claim on twitter somewhere and that is close enough to the truth for him.

I think that the culture war playbook of the left here is solid. By focusing on one outrageous claim from Trump, they can reframe the whole discussion about what the benefits and downsides of suddenly having 20k refugees from the third world in your town, which is not an argument where the left is likely to win, into an argument if Haitians eat cats, which they can be reasonably certain to win.

You have to continually move up the housing ladder so that you can live only near people who can afford to do the same thing; this is the only way to ensure you live near pro-social people.

I think one of the key selling points of woke ideology over traditional left-wing ideologies is that it goes so well with economic inequality. A Marxist paying ten times the rent a member of the working class makes might have to face the cognitive dissonance of himself qualifying as an enemy of the working class.

In the woke mindset, economic disadvantage is an effect, not a cause. You are poor because you are black or female in a bigoted society, not because your parents were poor. (I guess if you are a poor white male, you are probably poor because you are either lazy or terrible racist and sexist.) This frees you to discriminate against poor people in a way which a traditional leftist would fine shameful. If you manage to keep the poor out of your neighborhood, you are basically all set, that black lawyer or immigrant doctor who can afford to live in your suburb are very unlikely to be involved in violent crime, hence any claims that a culture celebrating crime festers in any minorities are just racist libel.

I am finding the open way this is being handled really interesting.

  1. Assert a provocative claim you heard on TV.
  2. Later admit you were just creating a story to help get the word out about something else. (The story may prove to be a lie, but maybe lying to lead people to other truths can be a noble pursuit.)
  3. Try to find evidence for the claim anyway.
  4. If it was true on some level in some instance, act vindicated. Quietly thank the lord that your story turned out to have some basis. (To do this, you should really need to find multiple dogs and cats eaten in Springfield, but a single example across the whole nation also counts as vindication because you don't need the original claim to be true, you just need it to seem slightly less ridiculous.)
  5. If no adequate evidence can be found, keep investigating. (You still have the hope a news story will surface that backs the original claim, or that a crazy person will fake evidence good enough to move you to 4.)
  6. If no adequate evidence comes along, maybe try accusing others of using distraction techniques. How dare they go on about eating cats and dogs when the future of the country is at stake?

This level of information hygiene is so unhealthy for everyone exposed to it.

I still think that overall, mentioning the cat eating thing was a mistake by Trump, because it allowed the Democrats to reframe the debate in a way which is very advantageous for them.

The best argument I can find for it being a good move on Trumps part is not that he expects that some evidence will be found, but that he knows that 'Trump lies' is already common knowledge. The median Trump voter will not say "What? He lied on national TV? Now I can't vote for him". They know that he lies about everything from the size of his inauguration crowd to his affairs to random stuff he picked up on twitter or Fox News to (possibly) his golf scores. They vote for him regardless. Him being a liar is already priced in. Fighting Trump with fact checks is like trying to attack Lenin for not being very Christian.

So an easily disproved falsehood is him throwing a stick for the media to play fetch with, distracting them in a way unlikely to damage him.

Of course, the other side is also mostly post fact. Who cares if he is factually correct about the US having paid for gender transition surgery for some aliens, images of the Alien (1979) monsters in high heels are trending all over imgur not because Trump is wrong but because his point if found ridiculous.

I think the media on both sides is mostly preaching to the choir. While mobilizing the people firmly on your side is sound strategy, I think both sides fail to put themselves into the mind of a voter who is still uncertain which of the options is the lesser evil. That voter is likely not so strongly anti-trans that he would get enraged by the US paying for some transition surgery more than he would be by the US generally paying for health care. He also would not care that Trump is lying on TV.

I still think that overall, mentioning the cat eating thing was a mistake by Trump, because it allowed the Democrats to reframe the debate in a way which is very advantageous for them.

Can you point to a statement offered or an issue raised by a Republican that has not allowed Democrats to reframe the debate in a way that is very advantageous to them?

... This seems to be smuggling a few assumptions in here.

There's a 0., where several politicians were repeating claims made by locals in Springfield. [The original writer has since retracted, albeit under media scrutiny that's... close to wrestling gif levels of coercion.]

And then there's a -1., where Vance specifically, the guy who first brought it to national attention, had also spent over a month highlighting other problems with Springfield's ability to handle the migrant influx of this scale, while being a Senator for the state. Ie, being very likely to get direct calls from people who complained to him.

[I don't think this is epistemically healthy, even if most conservatives aren't echoing Trump's mention of dogs. But on the other hand...]

I've been thinking all evening of what to say to this, and I just can't. How do you even see the responses to this and come to this conclusion? How do you watch lib journalists deny the Haitians even exist, falling back to more and more desperate lies as the truth comes out, and still turn this into "lying Republicans pounce"

Yglesias literally posted a rant about how it doesn't matter if it's true because Republicans "want to destroy Medicare", so people should lie or ignore it for Harris's sake.

Yglesias literally posted a rant about how it doesn't matter if it's true because Republicans "want to destroy Medicare", so people should lie or ignore it for Harris's sake.

Which rant was this?

I'm compiling a list of screenshots and links on my laptop to do an effort post on this. Will need to get a password reset or something so I can log in on there (don't know my motte password, just permanently logged in on phone)

But if you want to find it first it should be the most recent post where he mentions both cats and Medicare. Think twitter search still works for that, unless they've changed it again.

Technically Medicaid, but here:

The dishonesty of this shell game is so self-evident that it’s not worth dwelling on. The point is that they want to ban abortion, bankrupt social security, and toss people off Medicaid and dissembling is how they want to do it.

But it's not exactly subtle why he wants that framing, and it's the same game as always.

It doesn't seem to me that he is acknowledging that Haitians are eating cats. It's more like he's claiming that Haitians are not eating cats. Also, Medicaid.

I completely agree, but I also have a hard time caring when the other side isn't much better, but simply has better PR.

See the "trans surgery on illegal aliens" bit from the same debate, which was roundly mocked on twitter and in the media; Not only did most people not bother looking it up but basically just assumed it has to be made up bc it sounds so ridiculous, when others then showed articles on Kamala talking about precisely this they turned to flat-out lying that "this is just the headline, but her real words were about medically necessary treatment". Except that it's trivial to look up that it was explicitly stated that medically necessary as judged by mental health experts was sufficient. Which in practice includes, among many other things, trans surgery based on suicide risk. They even explicitly mention "gender transition surgery"!

Or now that I think about it, as naraburns pointed out this is pretty much 100% what they are doing for "abortion denial deaths", except with the added irony that any alleged example they have found so far is more accurately described as just "abortion death".

I'd be more interested in knowing if they caught and ate any geese or not.

When I saw the reddit post of the black dude with the canadian goose, I had two thoughts:

a) theres gonna be an INCREDIBLY stupid point about immigration being made about this

b) that fucking goose had it coming

Wild animals are not cute pets just waiting for a human to show it love before it becomes a golden retriever. Animals are smelly pissing shitting scavenging shitpiles who scream their desire to fuck in their barbarian language and autistically attack anything that strays into their self declared territory. Waterfowl are the most guilty of this because we humans think these graceful birds look cute but they are vicious shitting squaking fucks who go out of the water specifically to fuck you in particular if you so much as glanced in their general direction.

If haitians are brave enough fuckers to clear out pests, then they should be given the hoglands to settle. Tell them they are forbidden from any trade except killing wild hogs with spears. Go all obelix on wild boars. Just give them fresh water and hexamine tablets to ensure the underbrush isnt set ablaze trying to make heat and you've got the workings of a feasible hog management solution.

Id like to hunt a goose. I'd get 10 years if I did.

Your post is just pure soft bigotry of low expectations.

Bit hunting/killing wild geese without a loicense is technically a federal crime, aint't it?

Why? I've been confused by this. My neighborhoods have been plagued by an overpopulation of rabbits, deer and geese with at least the former two caused by what I presume is a complete absence of natural predators. I've often wished it were socially acceptable for me to trap and eat the rabbits that are wrecking my garden or the geese who poop all over my athletic fields and bike paths.

What is wrong with trapping rabbits? Just make sure you cook them with butter and have some vegetables to go with them- rabbit starvation is a real thing.

You're in rare form today hydro, no modern human needs to worry about 'rabbit starvation', plus you can just eat the brains, everyone knows. Mal de caribou... it isn't just rabbits, you need to eat some organs if you're not eating fruit and veg. Get with the times! the last person to die of rabbit starvation was probably born in 1800.

Well, apparently your neighbors will rat you out and presidential candidates will complain about immigrants like me savaging the pets and local wildlife of ($town). Especially if I'm Elmer Fudding around with a shotgun in my tiny suburban backyard, as fun as that might be.

Then there's the possibility of heavy metal contamination. I'm probably willing to risk it given that I don't like in some crazy repurposed industrial zone, but still.

Otherwise nothing wrong beyond being ostracized by my neighbors.

I mean, shooting rabbits is legitimately dangerous in populated areas for all the usual ‘don’t shoot your guns off like yosemite Sam’ reasons, but why can’t you just set out some traps?

They sound like (distant) screaming children, either when you're trying to move a live trap, or when any but the most humane kill trap goes off, which especially since they're most active at dawn and dusk can be an Interesting way to get a reputation. But they are prone enough to overpopulation that sometimes it's necessary.

I mean yeah, that’s true. But shouldn’t we have rules regarding how the animal control is done?

This kinda mirrors the immigration debate as a whole. Whatever you want the level of immigration to be, we should have a system. It shouldn’t just be a free for all like it has been under Biden.

But shouldn’t we have rules regarding how the animal control is done?

Why does castle doctrine only apply to people, when my property is invaded by rabbits on a daily basis?

More seriously, sure. At the risk of having been silent in the first round of discussions and popping up now to defend a second set of goalposts, I just don't see the outrage over people eating local rabbits/geese/deer. Obviously pets are a different story.

This kinda mirrors the immigration debate as a whole. Whatever you want the level of immigration to be, we should have a system. It shouldn’t just be a free for all like it has been under Biden.

Republicans seem to have won this debate, as they largely seem to have won the debate on China. One way or another, some kind of immigration bill is likely to pass after the election.

I just don't see the outrage over people eating local rabbits/geese/deer.

Many years ago the State (the Crown at the time I guess) decided that all non-privately owned animals are its exclusive property, and if the serfs citizens want to eat them they need to ask permission first. (which may be costly and/or not forthcoming)

The hunting community no longer quite thinks that hanging/transportation to Australia is the appropriate penalty for poaching, but it's not far off -- the modal law abiding hunter probably thinks something between 'I have to follow all the dumb rules or I go to jail, so should the Haitians' and 'they are literally stealing state/common property' on this.

Non-hunters probably don't care, but are probably even less keen on watching people kill geese in the park than they are on watching them smoke crack -- even legal hunting/trapping is perhaps best kept out of sight of the general public for this reason.

That's a good way to frame it, thank you.

(I still want to kill the rabbits on my property).

If there had been some day-one arguments about how the geese deserved it, I'd absolutely agree, perhaps with some quibbling about unequal treatment of the law given how obnoxious hunting (and nuisance) permits can be.

In practice, though, we had people here wanting to make bet money about a thing Not Happening.

Totally agree. We have so many annoying cats that, frankly, only a bigot would be against eating a few of them, dont you think?

What, do you live in Istanbul or something? Why does your neighborhood have so many feral cats?

I didn't really believe the story initially just on base rates of wild twitter claims that end up being true. I thought it was plausible, though - rural cultures separated from ours could easily not view cats as a 'cute cuddly pet' but as more of an edible or farm animal, and there are almost a million Haitians in the united states, so I think that it's significantly more likely than not that one Haitian has killed someone's pet, and very plausible that some have eaten pets. (Of course, this means the cat-eating tells us precisely nothing about how problematic Haitians are as immigrants). And in the rufo video, I'm pretty sure that's not a store-bought whole chicken, because that's just not what they look like, although it probably wasn't a cat either. I feel like this in particular doesn't change my views much, in that I think something like that probably/plausibly happened depending on details but any individual case probably didn't. "no bones or fur around the meat", only evidence being cat going missing and her suspicion, and other context clues feel to me like this is fake, but dunno.

Yeah, this specific report reads to me like either a literal crazy woman, or just kind of an idiot whose cat went missing that concocted a ridiculous tale about it. The chain of events that would need to happen for the putative cat butchering to result in there being meat, just meat, in her backyard seems much more improbable than the base rate of a neighbor killing and eating an apparently stray animal.

a million Haitians in the united states

The appropriate denominator is the 5-20 thousand (depending what sources you trust) that moved into Springfield recently, since that's where the search for corroborating evidence has been focused, prompted by many other, less dubious grievances about the Haitians' misconduct and failure to integrate.

The Republicans looking for corroboration are treating the search space as "any dark-skinned immigrant, anywhere in Ohio, eating any kind of unusual meat". The meme went viral after an ADOS black woman was convicted of eating a cat in Canton, and we have seen African immigrants eating roadkill in Dayton cited as proof that the meme is "directionally correct". So the denominator is a lot larger than 20,000.

That said, if this police report is real, then it is the real thing and we have (noting that the date of the police report predates the meme) the source of the original game of telephone that led to the first "a friend of a friend thinks Haitians are eating cats" Facebook post. Note that most of the cat was not, in fact, eaten - even if the mystery meat is cat meat, stealing a cat and leaving chopped-up bits in the owner's back garden is what gangsters do to intimidate people, not something Mrs Lovett types do. It would be closely related to the "Sicilian immigrants are eating our horses" meme as featured in The Godfather.

50% that the police report is real (noting that the local PD said no such report existed), Conditional on the police report being real:

  • 20% that it turns out the cat is still alive and has been reunited with its owner
  • 40% that the cat was indeed murdered
  • 15% that the cat was indeed murdered by the Haitian neighbour the owner suspects.
  • 10% that the rest of the cat was eaten by a human.
  • 30% that there was no cat and the person who filed the police report is crazy

I also note that ex ante the search space for this kind of thing was "any immigrant, legal or illegal, anywhere in America, eats a housepet or does something similarly outrageous" Given the complete inability of Republicans to come up with anything good after a frantic search for "dark-skinned immigrant eats housepet" across right-wing social media, this looks like a single incident blown up into a national story by a combination of media crime blotter logic and conservative propaganda. If it really was the case that "they're eating our pets" was a thing, we would have found more than one questionable case by now. If it turns out that the police report is real, the cat is real, and the cat did indeed disappear under suspicious circumstances then the Republicans will have lucked out on this one. Turning a single incident into a nationwide viral meme is good politics and good tabloid journalism, even if it is bad epistemics.

BTW does anyone know the baseline rate of cat butchery in America?

And per @Quantumfreakonomics, the WSJ has found the cat (which, let us remember, is the only actual cat implicated in the whole sorry saga) alive and well. I will happily concede ln(5) calibration points for finding this outcome less likely than I should have done, and I suggest that the people who uncritically signal-boosted this shit do some soul-searching as well. This soul-searching should ideally be of the literal variety, because unrepentant Sowers of Discord end up quite remarkably close to the Fire and the eyewitness account of how they are treated is not pretty.

It would be closely related to the "Sicilian immigrants are eating our horses" meme as featured in The Godfather.

Uh, what? I think a re-watch might be in order.

In one of the early scenes, the Corleone Family tries to intimidate a film director into giving Jonny Fontane a part by killing his prize horse and leaving the head in his bed. What happened to the rest of the horse is not specified in the book or film, but horsemeat is a completely normal part of traditional working-class Sicilian cuisine. (The taboo against eating horse is an anglosphere thing - almost every other European cuisine uses it, although in may countries including France it is mildly stigmatised as only for poors.)

I've noted before that in suburban America rumors of ritual animal torture have been a semiannual tradition. There's always a rumor going around about it.

When I bussed at Canal St we would get smartasses asking if we were serving cat. The chef would always get some FOB masters student to sotto voce ask if they REALLY wanted cat just go fuck with them.

The FOB I got close to said that he would actually do it, but there were no stray cats in New York to serve. He was convinced the rats ate all kittens and puppies, and 'only filipinos eat rats'.

I looked askance the next time I ate lumpia, then decided if it smelled this good I didn't care.

Can't say I've ever seen a stray in Manhattan but I'll bet there's plenty in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. A sack of cats wouldn't be the oddest thing brought on the Staten Island ferry I bet.

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