shmups.system11.org

What?

iron is money in this allegory.

Wealthiest country in the world "can't find" money for border wall between Mexico and America... declares Mexican national residing in America. The sheer absurdity of his input on immigration got old at least a calendar ago. Lack of money is not the problem. If lack of money was a problem we wouldn't be able to take care of millions of Latin Americans who can't or won't take care of themselves.

Well, money or not, there's all that space without wall, two years and counting.

I'll just flat out ask you now, Rob... what do you have against us latinos? I myself can't get any sort of aid like food stamps, or unemployment until I accrue 40 quarters (10 years) of work history despite having entered legally, so I wonder where you get all that info that somehow we're sucking the nation dry, which you've yet to demonstrate despite my repeated requests. No, benefits going to citizen children of illegal aliens don't count.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... t-all-cost

Like poetry.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wash ... households

The US Census, for starters.

Quash, again you're answering a question I made to Rob.

Again, you seem to collate "immigrant" and "foreigner" with "illegal", or make it sound as if it was sacrilege for a green card holder to use any of those benefits, despite qualifying. (I mean, seriously: If those benefits are only "set up to help poor and ailing Americans", how can they qualify?)

Again, I ask you, what is the defining factor between use and abuse? Nationality? Is it abuse and drainage when a latino green card holder uses one of those programs? (Which I must remind you, they don't qualify until they accrue 40 quarters of contribution. I know this by experience, and not from some biased publication like the ones you always quote.) And it's not abuse or draining when it's a native citizen, if I am to understand your "logic" here, correct? Please, I invite you to clarify just like I did with the other post you replied to with a similar premise.

And again, you failed to read from the articles you link to:



And yet again, I tell you: "That the citizen child of an immigrant, legal or otherwise, receives a benefit they qualify for, does not equal "illegal immigrants are getting welfare".

Seriously, does it personally trouble, ache, irritate, itch, bother, anger, tick or otherwise rub you the wrong way that citizen children of foreigners receive state or federal aid, that you keep on hammering the same tired rhetoric over and over?

Because you are, again, getting overly defensive and trying to obfuscate what everyone already knows.



I am not collating anything. It's difficult to find data on exactly what goes on in regards to illegal immigrants receiving benefits, in large part because much of it is done by proxy. Which, according to you, doesn't count. To anyone who isn't deeply invested in maintaining the status quo, though, it's clear as day what the end result of our welfare policies is.



Obviously they qualify because our laws have changed to accommodate legal immigrants.

Something of note from an official government source: https://www.nysenate.gov/newsroom/artic ... ns-receive



By the New York state government's own admission, there are people illegally collecting welfare that has been illegally granted to them. It then goes on to explain one of the ways it happens.



So, there you have it. I don't want to hear anymore about how illegal immigrants don't get things they don't qualify for because they clearly do.



Never getting off of it, for starters. Also, using the money to support illegally residing friends and family. I could go on.



Don't worry, there's plenty of government defrauding to go around. That's kinda why we don't need people from other countries doing it for us.



Am I back in 2016? Why are we still saying this? Two different people can read the same thing and reach different conclusions.



Technically, no. Practically, it absolutely does. Let's not even get into the legality of that child being a citizen to begin with, because I have a strong hunch that our insane birthright citizenship policy is going to come to an end within our lifetimes.



Yes, it absolutely does. Because when perfectly capable people who were born and raised in this country by citizens who paid taxes their entire lives are being pushed to the side for children of people who didn't contribute nearly as much, if at all, you're stretching (at best) the limits of the social contract between citizens and government. If not for the relentless propagandizing on this issue for over half a century, few would even question what I'm saying here. Most sane nations do not offer birthright citizenship for exactly this reason.

Most political discussions come down to a need for more specific data when we get into the details. Just 5 years ago it was common for pro immigration groups to admit that illegal immigrants cost more in public assistance than they add to GDP. Their main argument was that these peoples' children, the next generation, should in theory add more to GDP than they cost the state. Until we have real statistics on that specific issue it is hard to have a broad conversation about the net benefits of illegal immigration.

Immigration groups have become less honest in response to increased anger and rhetoric from the right. This is polarization at work and it's a trap we don't want to fall into. As both sides start to shy away from the middle we see nuanced arguments disappear. When you can't rely on finer details you start filling in the blanks in an act of frustration. This happens to both sides of any argument when polarization comes into play.

There is no such thing as "a middle", only people who don't give a crap about a particular subject.

It's a liberal decorum fantasy that there ever was "less polarization". They used to fucking set people on fire in the street for trying to vote while being black, or even helping them register them to vote, just 60 years ago. Houses were set on fire when women tried to get the vote.

Things are tepid and calm compared to the past.

Well, if you kindly dispensed with the scapegoating and painting all of us migrants with the "Dey took er nashun!" brush, maybe there wouldn't be counterpoints being raised to the twisted rhetoric that resonates with your feelings. I see your information gathered from the echo chambers you like to frequent, and I raise you my own experience. Once more, I wanted to know Rob's answer, because yours is the same every time.




Ah, the classic "I totally didn't mean what I totally meant to say when I said it" backpedaling. If it's not clear, then stop speculating. Does it happen? Yes. Does everyone do it? No. ("But I'm not speculating; I'm only making a statement based on uncertain information that seems to be in line with my feelings" )




From that same article: They can get emergency medical care, ability to obtain a permit to hunt and fish (which dissuades poaching and requires proof of having hunted before), immunizations and labor standard laws so that no one is treated like a slave; while being barred from unemployment insurance, continued medical care and tuition assistance programs; Medicaid requires proof of citizenship. Sounds actually fair, you know, considering all this has been reviewed by authorities and people who know and enforce the law. Doesn't seem like that would deprive a Purple Heart veteran from receiving tuition help to get his Master's degree.



And here's the sentence following that quote: Under federal law, any alien who is not a "qualified" alien is ineligible for state and local public benefits. To be qualified one has to be here under asylum, admitted for permanent residence, or fit another limited federal category. Boom, baby. Checks and balances, who would have thought it? What was that thing about obfuscating, again?





Oh, what a very clever way of wording it: "Social services employees cannot check for immigration status, therefore illegal aliens must be getting benefits!" Except that pretty much any of those agencies requires documents to be shown to prove elegibility, even if they aren't authorized to check immigration status. Sorry, but you can't tell me that I can simply walk into an office and request unemployment, food stamps or SSI by showing my Mexican passport. My counterpoints above (especially the ones from the source you listed) and all the documents that my sister in law (A DACA recipient) had to show, and the strict process required so that my citizen nephews could get WIC benefits say otherwise. My experience > your cherry-picked info. Also, an immigrant getting emergency medical help is the same as theft? What the hell, dude?



Then don't go on. If you see something, report it. But again: Not all of them do it, and there are penalties in place for that.



Same response as the prior one.




That's a good point to ponder, because there's the chance your cherry-picked arguments can be proven wrong.




Don't get your hopes too high; it takes more than an executive order to amend the constitution. You know, the same constitution that grants you benefits and protections solely for having being born here.




Newsflash: You have paid less taxes than someone else in this country, and I've paid more taxes than someone else, so let's hope that scenario where citizenship should be proportional to the amount of taxes paid by someone's parents, never comes to happen. Also, since I've demonstrated above that you only post the part of the arguments that support your allegations (because surely an immigrant getting a fishing license is robbing a Purple Heart veteran from the therapy they need, ohnoes.), please show me who are these citizens being pushed aside by these "undeserving" children and how. Now, you may not like hearing this, but those children are as much citizens as you are, and deserve the same rights and protections you got without having done anything but simply be birthed here.

Now, if it troubles you so much, I would sincerely encourage you to do something about it besides simply repeating the same song Tancredo and Co have been playing for years. Just keep one or two things in mind: We're not all like that. We're not evil. We're not thieves. The vast majority of us are too damn proud and stubborn to debase ourselves into becoming dependent on the government, because our work is our pride and our life.

More accurately, it's that our government is giving our nation away. I think I've made it clear by now that I don't blame the guys crossing the border, but the guys here who are incentivizing it.



Come the mother fuck on. If this is the case, I can anecdotally recall times I've personally witnessed illegals receive benefits they aren't entitled to. But you wouldn't believe it even if I had proof of it, so where does that leave us?



There are statistics from government sources that suggest that it is going on, but the scale is not entirely understood due to the, well, illegal nature of it.

"If it's not clear, stop speculating"? Tell that to your doctor if you ever come down with a terminal illness.



I'm glad we agree on something, at least.



Sounds fair, if you don't have a vested interest in the system. Who pays for that emergency medical care?

That, and when there are solutions outside of the state available for things like tuition assistance, it renders the fact that the state does its job in one area a moot point. I'd like to think that these organizations don't have any ties to government, but knowing how our government operates with plausible deniability in other arenas (particularly in tech/surveillance), I'm not sure that's a fair assumption to make.



Where did I say that? I said that it's unfair to people born and raised in this country by others who were born and raised in this country to be paying for the children of people who just happened to cross the border as they were about to give birth. Even if the parents of those children are literal billionaires who paid property taxes, I still wouldn't want their children to receive state benefits simply because they were born here. It's exploitive and wrong, and again, we are on a short list of insane countries that allows this kind of fraud to occur.



And you say I'm the one misrepresenting.



I'll raise my hand and give you my personal experience, which is apparently fair game now. I was one of a select few students in my middle school English class that was reading at a level equal to or greater than my grade level. The ones behind the curve? Mostly the sons and daughters of illegal immigrants, some of them being illegal themselves. It's not like most of them did any better in other subjects, either. I'll never forget when a friend of mine from Mexico (whose family immigrated legally, I might add) told me she couldn't even understand most of the Spanish being spoken at school.

How did this affect me? Well, for starters, we were graded according to our individual reading ability, not a standard cirriculum. Sounds great, until you realize that the kids reading Dr. Seuss in middle school are getting equal or better grades than the kids reading Tom Clancy. Grades that affect placement in high school, which affects the high school's performance on standardized tests, which affects a whole hell of a lot of things. Starting to see the issue?



Only because the currently prevailing interpretation of the law says so, but again, expect that to change within our lifetimes, especially if another SCOTUS seat opens up while Trump is in office.



Believe me, I've seen both ends of the immigrant spectrum and every gradient in between. I'm not out to make villains of people who don't deserve it. At the same time, however...



This is unfortunately a bald faced lie.

Polarization is worse than it used to be in the voting population. It is dumbing down arguments to their most basic form. A historical lack of civil rights is not relevant to the current issue of public discourse getting less detailed instead of more detailed. These are two different trends that may run parallel or overlap... but do not reflect directly on each other at all times. Trying to fuse these two trends is exactly the reductionism I'm talking about.

At the end of the day people really derive pleasure from emotionally vindicating political opinions. It's a fun intellectual shortcut that eventually becomes a habit. Emotions should play a role in our goals (and the rules we live by) but not every detail on how we achieve those goals.

In my home state of Wisconsin, the public voted to replace the Republican Governor and Attorney General with Democrats. The lame-duck Republican legislature responded by spending all last night passing sweeping laws restricting the power of the incoming Governor and the Attorney General, as well as restricting voting rights.

The vote was scheduled for 11am Tuesday, but didn't happen until around 5am Wednesday. What was the delay? They had to remove a provision that would provide health insurance protections for Wisconsinites with pre-existing conditions. Protecting pre-existing conditions was a big campaign promise of Scott Walker, he's expected to sign the bill without batting an eye.

Enough with the goddamn tisk-tisking about polarization. Republicans are the anti-democracy party, chipping away at the ability to vote and the effect of your vote like a diligent colony of termites. It's clear, written in ink, and part of the public record. As much as the Democratic party has its problems, there is no parallel voter-suppression effort by the Dems.

Your emotions are deluding you into "both sides" thinking because it's upsetting to consider that your country could succumb to fascism so quickly and easily. Well content yourself that this by no means started with Donald Trump, we're just seeing the final steps in a plan laid out decades ago.

But at least this is all to benefit a class of superhuman job creators who will lead us all to utopian prosperity! Like this guy!

A few things:

I don't think the right will last in this country as it exists now. There is a generational shift happening and I applaud it. I have always leaned left. I give conservatives the benefit of a doubt with an emphasis on doubt most of the time.

I believe the media is overstating the threat of voter suppression but I don't know this for sure. Not enough data. Voter suppression is a response to what the right considers voter manipulation on part of the left. I don't take a side on this because I don't know enough. What you describe in Wisconsin sounds terrible.

Voter manipulation is as much a part of fascism as voter suppression.. but academics don't want to push that fact.

I believe the media and academics are definitely overstating the threat of fascism in the US. I do not take off the cuff comments from a "President" who knows less than a High School civics student that seriously. The only explicitly totalitarian statements in mainstream US politics are from DSA leaders. Their end goal is for every business to eventually become a worker owned coop in which everyone gets the same vote on every aspect of the company. I want to encourage these business models (as an experiment) but I do not want to force them on the population. The DSA leadership explicitly wants the latter. I am not talking about Bernie and Ocasio-Cortez... they are probably more reasonable than the DSA inner circle.

The fringe on the right are Ayn Randian free market crazies. The fringe on the left are true socialists who want MUCH more than nice normal things like universal healthcare. Both sides are not made up of well adjusted people.

> Banks own most of the surplus value of our labor.

> Banks own the politicians that control the government. Therefore controlling the government themselves by proxy.

> The preference of the average voter has 0 impact on enacted policies and legislation. And is always explicitly overturned by the legislature anytime a referendum passes that tries to even slightly reduce the amount of bribery we have that's intrinsic to our system.

Nothing totalitarian about this~



What are you talking about?

Politics is a war of material circumstances between opposed interest groups. If there are periods of times where it ever seemed "calmer", that just means that no one is being political.

Nothing that is happening is new or novel.

Beyond Trump forcing narcissistic comfortable people to think about politics for the first time in their lives. By his beautiful, obnoxious violation of the all-important decorum. It's nice that people are actually talking to each other now, instead of ignoring one another.



You might have overlooked the word democratic in their name, and the concept they espouse called "democracy".

They want people to choose, for themselves, to democratically decide to acquire 100% of the value of their own labor. There are no guillotines or firing squads involved.

Your attempt at dividing Sanders and Cortez from them to conjure up a straw man and a division where little exists. Sanders and Cortez are democratic socialists. If you don't like that they seem to be actual, fairly popular human beings that are representing that interest bloc, you should figure out why.

Actually holding power requires running on what's possible today - we call this incrementalism (the real kind, not the fake kind the social liberals always use as an excuse to not do anything).



"People who want things are messed up in the head. Not like me, who doesn't want anything."

Then why didn't you report it if it pisses you off so much and have evidence? I'm all for not punishing the innocent along with the guilty, but just shaking one's head and tsk-tsk-ing does nothing.



Apples and oranges. Don't dodge the point.




Not sure, but please let's not start weighing the value of a human life against the cost of saving it in an emergency. Please don't use that to vilify your "target".



So at least now it's clear that Juan, Pedro and Manuel don't simply go to a benefits office, show their Illegal Immigrants Club card and walk out with welfare money to spend on their trucks, right? Good.




Ah, ah, ah! See below:



This says: more taxes paid by mom and dad=more citizenship. Two different statements; don't backpedal.



And you are. That comes from the article you quoted claiming that illegals and immigrants get benefits willy-nilly, while concealing which ones in specific. Remember I posted more info from that same article to clarify they can't get continued medical care, tuition assistance and others.



While truly unfair, should then generations born waaaaaaay after that time be disenfranchised by depriving them of citizenship? If anything, it would make them more into the same foreigners/outsiders that caused that problem to begin with. I'm sincerely sorry that it affected you in such a way back then, but that solution sounds more like trying to make the future children pay for the sins of yesteryear's fathers, without addressing the immediate cause of the problem which was the way evaluations were conducted.



So, revenge on tomorrow's kids for what happened to you in Elementary or Junior High. That is what all your rhetoric, posts, quoting, mis-quoting and motivation boil down to, right?

I wonder how you'd feel if birthright citizenship had been abolished right before you were delivered and it affected you, then.




See above.



Of course. It has to be, because otherwise it would imply that your perception is not 100% accurate. But hey, what do I know? I was only raised in that culture and instilled with those values myself.

You're explaining the surplus value of labor, but all he hears is this.

See: Ross Douthat's stupid puff piece for "the failing NYT" claiming that when the WASPs were in charge everything was good, and we all miss those days. Heh heh. Good and bad points of the Bush Presidency aside, it is easy to be a gentle patrician leader when you have inherited the levers of power - not to mention the fruits of genocide, slavery, race riots and Jim Crow, and the Southern Strategy. Us whites have always wanted to keep power on our own terms.

And yet even Bush wanted to call out an outright fraud. His opposition to "voodoo economics" won him the distrust of the supply-siders and Newt Gingrich, along with a loss in the '92 election.

I think there are two things going on, though - on the one hand you have a lot of people who are naturally pissed about shitty things going on, but I also think that a lot of the political discussion is just sick and uselessly toxic. I mean, there isn't much of a good explanation for why quash is so triggered here (beyond the Russian Troll Farm theory) except that it is a primitive response to complex social phenomena overloading formerly adaptive emotional responses. Too mad to think straight, too disillusioned to go form a union or do something productive.

@ OdiusTrident: I don't think that universal healthcare - just keeping body and soul together for people who are already working in society - is equivalent to the utopian fantasy of Randian followers. Universal healthcare would be an agreement to allow people to win some fruits of their own work - a tough sell with people always looking to steal the resources, but compare that with the large number of unwritten rules that would need to be adhered to in order to make a Randian society stable.

We currently live in a country where you can arrange your business leadership anyway you want. I once heard around 15000 people are employed by worker coops. Sanders and Cortez agree with this type of freedom. DSA leaders do not agree. Giving the CEO and receptionist the same vote on the same issues is not just a rejection of leadership but also of meritocracy as a concept. The DSA has published their intentions many times but the media isn't publicizing it.

Bernie uses the word socialist but he really advocates for economies you would see in Norway or Sweden. These countries are not socialist by definition of the word. Giving employees total ownership / control of their companies is not the same as universal healthcare, tuition free universities or profit sharing. The last 3 ideas are progressive... the first one is true socialism.

Banks do not run the world. No one does despite many trying. Everything is much more chaotic and complex behind the scenes. The entire theory of labor you're espousing is reductionism with good intentions. We have an academic brainwashing that has been largely successful because it simplifies the world into stories that make people feel good about themselves.

Why would we not want to maintain control of our own nation? Who should be in power if we are not in power? How have things been going for the white minority in South Africa?


California Becomes First State to Mandate Female Board Directors

That's socialism

Huh?

I was a kid? I was told that it was fine and normal? It wouldn't have done anything anyways?



What is your point?



It's not them I'm aiming for, you just happen to be hiding behind them.



No, because they do. And you continue to deny that in the face of all evidence that suggests they do. Maybe it doesn't work for you or others you know, but if you move to California you'll find it to be more than accommodating.



You know God damn well the context of what I meant by people who don't contribute much or at all. I'm talking about illegal immigrants and birth tourists.



The only concealment is coming from those who know they are breaking the law but don't want to be held accountable for it.

They don't get continued medical care covered, but anyone can not pay a medical bill. Citizens do this enough as it is, so what's to stop an illegally residing non-citizen from doing the same? And again, there are scholarships and other programs for them, so the fact that the state doesn't provide it is essentially a moot point besides the fact that maybe tax dollars aren't directly funding it.



What would the cause of the problem be? I'm curious.



Actually, I want revenge for the Alamo. Still salty about that.

No, really, it's not about me. It's about a country that is more than willing to help anyone but those who built it, and even vilify them.



I would've been fine, as both of my parents were citizens as were their parents before them. You realize that the way we implement birthright citizenship isn't the norm, right?

Among other things we do that aren't the norm, is impose income tax upon citizens living abroad. Land of the free indeed.



I don't know what your situation is, and maybe you and your family are an outlier, but statistically speaking the chances are low. Not that I doubt it, because you come across sincere enough, but realize that you are a minority and that it's not doing you any favors to defend those who are blatantly taking advantage of the system.

This may just be the most unintentionally funny thing I've ever read. Dehumanization, armchair psychology, and middle class ivory tower delusion all in one. Ben Garrison couldn't come up with a caricature this accurate.

The dollar store market has expanded immensely the past ~8 years, with 50% more Dollar General and Dollar Tree outlets added since 2011. With locations identified for more than another 50% increase. There are more dollar stores than there are Wal-Marts and McDonalds' combined. In some of the worse areas they've been enough to put the local grocers into the red and out of business.

Very well. Thanks for confirming my assessment, though.



That when faced with an argument that refutes your points, you pull out the Chewbacca Defense and a "lel, no". So, to clarify, drop the "There's a chance it could happen, therefore it must be happening all the time! "logic".



Not much you can do about them with your misquoting and half-baked "facts" anyway.



Sorry, but the evidence you keep on presenting consists of broad generalizations that I've debunked with further info from those very sources. Hunting licenses and emergency medical care doesn't equal "Illegals are living off our welfare!". All you do is present speculation from "think thanks" with zero statistical data. However, I'll try to verify how easy or hard it is do so in California for the sake of fairness, as soon as time and money allow it.




Sorry again, but it's very hard to take you at your word after half-quoted articles, claims of mind viruses, the deep state and links to searches from DuckDuckGo that point to the same "article" because the media and other search engines are "compromised". HOWEVER, because this sounds like an ad-hominem, I won't push it anymore.





See above. However, I'll try and investigate myself for the sake of fairness and get something straight out of the horse's mouth.




A broken evaluation system, as per your description.




The grass always seems greener on the other side of the fence.



Right, but let's pretend one of them wasn't, or for whatever reason you didn't qualify. Then what?



Well, on that I can agree. Especially if you are living abroad at the moment, which is the vibe I'm getting.




Well, let me gather some firsthand evidence that proves/debunks either of our arguments, and I'll follow up later.

https://youtu.be/dxE_UUrbMNA

Good ol' Prager U.

Macron's gas tax idea is typical capitalist cruelty - if there's a problem, make the poors pay to fix it. Nevermind the only reason these people need cars and gas is to serve the capitalists. Nevermind that demand for gas is as inelastic as it gets - most people don't like setting their money on fire for no reason. And of course, nevermind that to actually help solve the problem, you need to have an actual viable systematic alternative to gasoline for workers to consume.

Anyway this New York Times cover is like a parody of those apocalypse movies where they find an old newspaper with a foreboding "the world is ending soon!" in tiny text off to the side while some distracting horror or nonsense takes the main focus.