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Lord Ratner

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Everything posted by Lord Ratner

  1. Bro, I got enough going on in my life that I don't need to also be contemplating my desire to fuck a bunch of cartoon Japanese/American hybrids wearing Bavarian attire. Anyways... Dibs on the redhead.
  2. I'm not sure I can describe this as well typing it out, but when I was in Afghanistan we got a tour of one of the Soviet knockoff c-130s, and I asked about takeoff data. The guy laughed and pretended like he was holding the yolk of the aircraft, pulling it back momentarily before returning to the neutral position and saying "not yet." He did it multiple times, then on the last time held the imaginary yoke back to his lap: "Not yet..... Not yet... Not yet... Not yet... Rotate!" I kid you not, there were pine needles jammed into the wingtips, and an empty bottle of vodka next to a bare mattress in the navigators pod in the front. Different type of flying.
  3. This is 110% exactly what I refer to when I say the globalization experiment failed. It just took 30-40 years to realize it. Cheap TVs were not worth the non-monetary price.
  4. No, you just failed to comprehend what you are reading. Where did I say 6 million was too many? I'll give you a hint: nowhere. I did the math before posting it, obviously. I threw 2% growth out there as a target because it represents a high-water mark for American growth in the modern era. I also said: Now if the only way to get 6 million (immigrants + natural growth) is to import all low-skilled labor, then no, we wouldn't do that. Your nonsense about 6 million brain surgeons shows how you are not being a good-faith participant in the conversation. The world is not comprised of only poor Mexicans and brain surgeons. As I said: The balance of our population is equally important to it's growth. If growth was the only factor that mattered, South America and Africa wouldn't be a dumpster fire. I'd rather not adopt that model, thanks. Most likely the late 90's, when communication technology allowed immigrants to focus their efforts on reaching very specific locations where there were high densities of immigrants from their homelands. You also have a huge shift away from geographic growth, where decades ago the construction of the interstate highways moved millions of people to new parts of the country, and the immigrants were often the first to move. Now they are concentrating in major population centers or states where they have high density, such as the Somalis in Minnesota. So yeah, once again, things change. Adapt or die. And once again, when the Asians you reference came a hundred years ago there was a tremendous need for physical labor, such as building the railroads. Pretty much all construction was done with manual labor back then. Didn't need an education, and you didn't need to speak English. Yes, as compared to the high-school dropout native who will have a negative net impact. Could it be that employing immigrants for highschool-dropout-jobs is reducing the demand for highschool-dropout-natives? Obviously it is, by the tens of millions. That study shows how expensive the uneducated native population is becoming, because they aren't working. Interestingly, it also shows that the financial benefit expires after the first generation of immigrant. Their kids become a negative proposition. We can have a conversation about eliminating most Welfare programs for everyone, which I support, but it's a different topic. We can't just get rid of our unskilled native-born citizens. Redirecting their potential employment to cheaper, illegal (or legal) immigrants only makes the problem worse.
  5. Just so we're clear, my proposal blocks out 90+ percent of the people illegally immigrating into the country right now. So the "landmines, shoot-on-sight, indefinite internment, light them on fire, whatever makes you happy and deters others" would be directed towards the unskilled immigrants coming from south of our border, who would realistically have no legal method of getting to the USA. Sorry, but there are more unskilled, uneducated people who wish to move here than we have room for (economically, not physically), and latin americans aren't the only poor people in the world. The millions of immigrants would have to be spread over a wide variety of countries and cultures, to ensure the disproportionate importation of one specific culture does not allow for creating critical-mass communities that are able to escape the forces of assimilation. The vast majority of those who wish to be here will simply never get to. That's what I thought. You are advocating for unlimited immigration with this statement. See above. Once again, comparing the social, political, and economic conditions of 1910 to 2024 is silly. Its a different world, and more importantly, a different USA with different needs. We weren't $34T in debt back then, and bringing in a bunch of low-income immigrants will not help that. And we don't need a bunch of raw labor. Your 20% additional income tax would bring them up to... 20%, since those making less than $40k pay no net federal taxes: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/18/who-pays-and-doesnt-pay-federal-income-taxes-in-the-us/ Even the additional 20%, which you know will never happen, would not do anything to fix our budget. So aside from not being able to effectively join the American community if you can't speak to Americans, you will never see meaningful numbers of immigrants make enough money to make their admission to the country worthwhile if they can't speak English.
  6. And here is your strawman. Who here doesn't want this? It's never been the issue. The issue is "how many." You will n.e.v.e.r. see a democrat (or for that matter, any conventional republican) come within 1,000 miles of that question, yet it is the single most important question in any discussion about immigration. How many, and who? I will submit that the answer should be something like: How many --> (2% - (Natural population growth rate)). So if Americans are having enough kids to give us 2% or more annual population growth, then no immigration. Otherwise, fill in the shortfall. Population growth needs to be high enough to keep the economy growing, but stable enough to avoid huge swings in generational size. You can't have absolute control over that, but immigration can be used as a buffering force. Adjust the 2% number to better fit desired growth patterns. Who --> Look at what skill class and income strata is trailing, and target that. We have a huge surplus of low-skilled Americans (and illegals already here). So the 50,000 lottery and family allowance is more than enough right now, as I said: Nonsense. This is another strawman. It was a swell idea when the American economy was overwhelmingly labor based, in addition to the realities of welfare and medical benefits that are free to anyone who exists within out borders. But we are now a services economy, and the need for young, uneducated, unskilled men is much, much lower than it was in the past. The easy answer to that is to only import immigrants with high-skill backgrounds, but as I asked before, what does that do to the countries we, the global police, want to advance into the modern world? They need doctors and engineers more than we do. Same as before, this is a throwaway question. How many, and who? We absolutely do not. "Crappy job" is a function of (Pay) / (Suck factor). Importing a metric shit ton of low skilled labor artificially depresses the wages of high-suck-factor jobs. The problem is that we have plenty of Americans who are only really capable of performing those jobs. If they are undercut by illegal immigrants, they simply don't work, and since we are a welfare-supportive country, that's another ward of the state we all get to pay for. If you can't find enough people willing to pick strawberries or build fences, you either need to pay more for the work or develop technology that eliminates the need for human labor. Digging ditches, for example; now a single excavator can do the work of hundreds of men with shovels. Using desperate Mexicans to do the work just distorts the usual economic pressures. When we have near-zero able-bodied Americans without jobs (voluntarily or involuntarily), then we can start importing unskilled labor en masse, because there will be a real, not an artificial need. All of this is economic based. This also ignores the reality that we should not allow anyone who can't speak English to immigrate in (unless they are a familial import). We can not build an integrated society if the new citizens are incapable of communicating with the "legacy Americans." It is bad socially, and it is bad functionally, when you have to waste resources on translation services at nearly every level of government. I don't want to pile on you specifically, because I find most people on both sides are making completely hollow arguments. But you have demonstrated quite well why the issue goes nowhere. You injected a ton of righteous morality into your responses, yet you have proposed nothing actionable. Your preferred solution is not clear from your posts, but it sounds like you want to simply formalize the in-processing of the people who are currently coming in illegally. That does zero to address the actual problem.
  7. Let's start with Emergency Medicaid. Also school meal programs. Pregnant women and young kids get WIC access. Free room and board in certain cities. You think a mother living in Haiti is more worried about rapists and murderers in Mexico than the rapists and murders she has to endure if she stays in Haiti? States seems to be struggling: https://wpde.com/news/nation-world/denver-hospital-system-may-collapse-due-to-migrant-crisis-we-are-turning-down-patients-southern-border-trump-biden-colorado-denver-health-post-donna-lynne-immigrants-illegal-migrants-asylum-seekers-resources What country do you live in that you think this is anything like the 1950s? And if the burden of illegal immigration is so low, why are the Blue Cities in the north melting down over 5-digit inflows of aliens being sent to them by Florida and Texas? What demand? There was demand for dirt cheap consumer goods from China, and that 30 year experiment decimated the American middle class and industrial base. The short term price suppression of cheap foreign labor is not worth the long term disruption to the economic balance of the society. And through all of this everyone ignores the effect on the originating country. What hope do these countries have of pulling out of the 3rd-world death spiral if their hardest workers and strongest men all flee to the US? Is cheaper lettuce and construction labor really worth the long term impact of having an entire continent of heavily populated, unstable countries perpetually feeding low/no skill workers to our southern border? Do you believe that the United States can handle the addition of... 100,000,000 low-skill immigrants? Because there are far more who wish to be here. Exactly how does that play out?
  8. Shack. If we're ready to go back to letting people die of starvation and sickness if they have no money, consider me an open-borders supporter. Until then, zero low skilled immigration. We will get all the low-skilled immigrants we need from the families of the high-skilled workers we grant citizenship to, and the 20-30 million we have already let in.
  9. Yeah, between that and his defense of Israel I suspect there are a lot of (even more) unhappy progressives.
  10. I actually mentioned that to my wife. I know it's normal that each era has a tone and inflection that all public speakers adopt, which is why all the radio people from the twenties and thirties sounded so hilarious, but I really hate this current era of shouting with frequent, inappropriately placed pauses. It makes it sound like the people speaking are idiots who don't believe what they're saying, which is pretty fitting. The
  11. I know exactly what they want. Meaning and money. They spent decades fighting the good fight, and the cause was righteous. Problem is, eventually they ran out of victims. Now the people who made their living as professional activists when activists were needed (Al Sharpton, Gloria Steinem, etc) are facing economic doom if the battle is over, and the younger progressives grew up believing they would carry the torch, only to reach adulthood prepared for a war that already ended. It benefits both groups to "find" victims, mentally and financially, so that's exactly what they do. But the only people you can inaccurately cast as victims are the mentally broken, and so we see the "homeless" drug addicts, those with gender dysmorphia, women who confabulate ridiculous fantasies of sexual abuse (e.g. the Kavanaugh accuser), men who are attracted to children, all become the oppressed. It's not because any of these activists actually care about these "victims;" they want fame and money and found a way to get it.
  12. Yeah except for fundamentally there's a key difference. The universities are teaching the citizenship that they themselves are the enemy of the cause. The third Reich did not teach that german-born German citizens were the fundamental roadblock to Utopia. They picked a minority internal demographic, and larger external demographics to villainize. The force of the modern progressive movement in America, for better or worse, is fueled by well-off white liberals. They will happily preach and post about an ideology that paints themselves as victimizers, oppressors, and tyrants, so long is nothing actually comes of it. "Virtue signaling" is the most appropriate term. However if that glorious day comes that the progressive movement is ready to act on their nonsense, it will require the sacrifice of it's largest support base. Not going to happen. All those upper middle class, well-to-do white ladies are Republicans the day the revolution starts. And half of their husbands who provide for their privileged lives by exploiting the evils of capitalisms are already silent conservatives; they just have no inclination to scream about politics with their ignorant partners.
  13. Are we just talking about the random people who make these movies and shows? I think overwhelmingly the people involved with these movements are not true believers, they're just regular people, slightly below average in intellect and well below average on the assertiveness scale, who just look for a movement or ideal to attach to and do so. They were never "social justice warriors" when it was risky or uncomfortable to be one (pre-1960), but now you get all sorts of "likes" and back-patting for changing your profile picture to a black square, so that's what some of the sheep are doing now, including writing shitty TV episodes that are "woke." The right has them too. They are very conservative now that conservatism means nothing in the Big-R Republican party. Cut spending? Yeah sure, but not any of the spending people are actually used to (SS, Medicare, Medicaid, military). Pro police? Hell yeah! But don't raise my taxes to fund them. Get rid of the homeless? Finally! But I'm not going to support government funded mental asylums to house them... It's also why I don't see a real civil war in the US anytime remotely soon. Most of the most vocal partisans will vaporize the moment their beliefs and positions put them at risk. I was seduced into the ideology. I didn't realize what "the leaders" really meant! *I'm* the victim of a cult. I never really believed that in the first place! More likely we will be pulled into a World War of sorts, and the deaths of our young will have a focusing effect on the population. After the first couple judges or politicians or activists are beaten to death in the street for saying something stupid, the rest will fall in line quickly and without protest. That's just what sheep do. I'm not looking forward to it, but there will be some silver linings.
  14. Yeah humans don't look like that, no matter how much muscle milk you drink 🤣😂
  15. Amazing what happens when you have a director who respects and adores the source material.
  16. The new speaker, who has accomplished exactly nothing and is passing a clean CR that McCarthy was annihilated for suggesting. Gaetz is a preening hack. I like the new speaker, but he has no business doing that job and anyone who thinks he belongs there has no idea what that job actually entails. You want a principled conservative, look to Chip Roy. Both nothing more that actors, just playing different roles. Interesting comparison. No worries. I did like his grilling of Austin, it's just the only thing he provides, and he fucks up other things. It's going to take a war. A bad one. Something to refocus the population and provide a new batch of heroes to vote for.
  17. That's all well and good, but that skill set is a dime a dozen, and he did far more damage with his McCarthy stunt than his theatrics can offset. He is, however, just another useless politician in an ocean of unaccomplished amateur actors pretending to be competent and in control. I can't fault a sociopath for finding a position to exploit.
  18. No. I am applying the legal sense. There's not a court in the world that will convict that cop for shooting Babbit, applying the reasonable expectation. That's why no one is in jail for her death, aside from the obvious political bias in DC. You said it yourself. Beyond a "reasonable" doubt. You don't enter a locked door. It's locked. You break it down, or at a minimum defeat the locking mechanism. Those are proactive steps to violate a space. If you do not have a right to the space, which citizens do not have an unfettered right to occupy government buildings, you can not defeat the barrier mechanisms innocently. And if you do it as part of a rioting mob, as she did, I don't expect a cop to wait to find out, with his life, if they are just there for hugs. Trespass at your own peril. Rioting ≠ Protesting. It didn't for the George Floyd riots, it didn't for the Jan 6th riots. If things get so bad that I feel the need to riot, I expect for people to die. Sometimes blood is the price. Possibly even mine if I feel strongly enough about it. Breaking Windows, no unless there were people behind those windows that could be hit by the bricks. Lighting fires, if there was any reasonable possibility that innocent people were in the vehicles or structures at risk of being set on fire, open fire, and shoot to kill.
  19. I don't think I implied anywhere that Iraq made sense. It didn't. To your second point, yes.
  20. Sorry dude, but you're being willfully obtuse if you can't see how a crowd of people trying to force their way into *any* structure that is being defended by law enforcement, knowing full well that their presence in that building is not welcome, and that their numbers require the use of lethal force to satisfy the concept of proportionality, would be setting themselves up for a fatal interaction. Our system doesn't work if it has to be designed for the dumbest people amongst us. This concept is why we have such a litigious society now, where you can sue McDonald's because you didn't realize your cup of coffee was too hot. If it is unreasonable to assume that breaking through a window and crawling through with a literal rioting crowd behind you into the line of fire of a sole police officer will get you shot, then the word "reasonable" has no meaning. If the police tell you not to go somewhere, and you go there anyways, and especially if you have to use force to literally break your way into that location, you should know that the potential for getting shot is high. That is a reasonable expectation. People defending January 6th have gone from reasonable to unreasonable, because everything must be black or white now.
  21. If they (let's say France) only kill Russian soldiers in Ukraine, then Russia has no basis to attack France. If France launches attacks into Russia, then it's game on for Russia to attack France, but NATO should not have to join in.
  22. But it is Europe's fight, yes? So France and Poland have an interest and right to participate as they see fit? Or does NATO membership mean the US dictates everything? I don't want it, but I'm much more sanguine about it. WWIII is inevitable. The details are flexible but the catastrophic nature is not. I would rather get it over with while we are morally weak but physically strong, rather than both morally and physically weak. Another decade or two of "peace" and I think we will look much more like the European countries do today. I don't want to give China any more advantage than they already have. Interventionism doesn't have a bad track record, weak commitment does. Our intervening in world war II led to a pretty incredible period of prosperity and calm. South Korea, Japan, Germany, Italy, Israel, and even Taiwan are evidence. Righteous intervention can yield good results. Fucking around in the Middle East without a goal or real leadership is proof that mindless intervention can be catastrophic. Let's not forget that the Western governments had no interest in intervening in Ukraine with military support. It was only when the populations expressed shocking and very loud support for the Ukrainian cause that the politicians jumped on board. Everybody assumed that after 20 years of pointless wars the citizenship would be permanently biased against any form of intervention, but the cartoonishly evil nature of the Russian invasion hit a part of the human psyche that we forgot we had. Before world war II the youth of that generation were all hot and bothered over the Oxford pledge, yet when the actual war came, that generation became the "GI generation" and then the "greatest generation" and formed a sense of community that they rode to the grave.
  23. You absolutely will, always, have a reasonable expectation of dying if you are trying to force your way through a locked door with law enforcement behind it. That doesn't make it right. But it is absolutely a reasonable expectation. You have to be fucking delusional to think otherwise.
  24. Being right about covid is like being right against a flat earther. Not a very high bar. So now your argument is that because the European countries are a part of NATO, they are not allowed to engage in military conflict outside of the alliance without the permission of the US? Or of all NATO countries combined? So basically the existence of NATO means, non-nato countries are expressly excluded from any form of direct military support from NATO countries, because that would, in your opinion, necessitate the intervention of NATO as a whole, including the US. What a fantastically interesting argument, and then why wouldn't Russia want other countries excluded from joining NATO? Not only are they not part of the alliance that Russia overtly hates, but they are now fair game for conquest because NATO countries cannot defend non-nato countries by your logic, regardless of their regional interests in the war. Now, if you want to make an argument that the United States should declare ahead of time that they will not invoke Article 5 if NATO ground forces participating *in* Ukraine are attacked *on* Ukrainian soil, that's a more reasonable position. But your arguments is the best advertisement I've heard yet for other countries joining NATO. If you don't join NATO, there are literally no circumstances under which friendly NATO countries will intervene on your behalf. You're on your own, good luck. You're just arguing for pure isolationism. That doesn't have an impressive track record.
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