RexFavilla

It's not about being bad, it's about incentives. If you give in to the moral panic and outrage and excoriate ICE for 'bad training' or whatever, you are doing exactly what the people who are the ultimate cause of the disorder and violence want, thus rewarding their actions, which are far more insidious and damaging than two agents making bad split-second decisions.

I'm not saying it's realistic for things to never be handled badly. Planes crash, cars get into accidents, etc. I'm just saying this particular shooting was unjustified. At the very least it should be acknowledged. Yeah Alex Pretti did some bad things, but he's already paid for his crimes many times over. I think people are more focused on making sure the remaining guilty parties are tried and that this doesn't set a bad precedent.

The dangerous precedent has already been set, and it's being studiously ignored in favor of histrionics over these shootings. The dangerous precedent is opposition politicians urging their citizens to confront and harass federal officers who have been deployed to enforce federal law. This shooting is the painfully predictable outcome of such statements - and because I don't believe that high-level politicians are stupid, it is the desired outcome. The intent behind making such statements is to sow chaos with the perfect understanding that it will result in violence and lives lost. Those lives lost can then be martyrized and instrumentalized against their political enemies.

It's heartening to see that some on the right understand now how this dirty game is played and are refusing to focus on the media-spotlighted shooting as if it happened in a vacuum, and is some tragedy brought about by a single ICE agent exercising bad judgement. If George Wallace had told people to fight and resist the federal agents deployed to Birmingham, the same violence and chaos would have taken place, and it would have been on his head. He did the mature, responsible thing and bent to federal law. The current Democratic leadership, in Minnesota in particular and nationally in general, are intentionally fanning the flames of confrontation. They are doing this because immigration enforcement is the exclusive purview of the federal government, yet even though they lost a slate of federal elections they think they should still be able to determine immigration enforcement policy.

I also think the argument over the gun is retarded. It's completely irrelevant and people are allowed to carry firearms, including at protests.

There's always going to be disproportionate responses. It takes two to tango, and I think its a lot less of an ask to tell civilians to not behave like aggressive retards towards federal officers than to expect thousands of officers to all make 100% perfect split state decisions in response to every altercation. In other words, its easier to reduce the number of altercations than to reduce the mistake rate in responding to them to zero. Out of how many countless altercations, we've had what? Two deaths? It seems like the death rate isn't the problem, it's a volume issue.

I was speaking about him placing himself in between the woman and the officer. As a civilian, that is a hostile move. It's saying that you are going to fight the officer to prevent him from continuing. That's why he got thrown to the ground. If an officer is misbehaving, record them. Don't act like you're a marvel superhero, because you arent.

It's also important to remember that officers dont have compound eyes like insects that are wired to the smartphone of every person in attendance. When these altercations happen, they aren't viewing the situation from every angle, they're only viewing it from one. They aren't sitting around, rewinding and rewatching every clip to see if the person does have their tires pointed this way or that way, or if they're reaching for a gun or to scratch their ass. They have seconds to react to one angle, one perspective- theirs. So footage showing what was going on behind the person has zero bearing on weather force was justified - there's no way for the officer to know that in the moment, and a person can't be expected to incorporate knowledge that they don't have into decision making.

This is why sane people when encountering cops or other agents of the federal government follow instructions and dont make sudden movements - hands on your head, stand still. If both these victims had simply done that, they would be alive today. The argument about whether they 'deserved' to die is retarded. They weren't executed after an agent or agency deemed them worthy of death. They failed to behave in a way which allows a civilized justice system to function in a smooth, nonviolent way, and died because of their own idiocy.

When you don't comply with basic orders from figures of authority, you are putting yourself under the law of the jungle. You are basically staging an insurrection against the established order. Unless you plan to stage an effective revolution against the powers that be, this is basically suicide and incredibly stupid.

"The West has returned, and one might say that the work of Saladin was plainly undone.

Now the future is as hidden from us as it was from those fathers of ours who, barely three lifetimes ago, still feared the further advance of the East. But when we consider the major forces at work before our eyes, though we cannot conclude upon their results we can at least estimate their immediate proportion and value. The comparatively recent domination of western Europeans, English and French, over Mohammedan lands, is due to causes mainly material and therefore ephemeral. One must always look to moral (or, more accurately, to spiritual) causes for the understanding of human movements and political change. Of these causes, by far the most important is the philosophy adopted by the community, whether that philosophy can be fully expressed as a religion, or taken for granted without overt definition.

Now, it is true that on the spiritual side Islam had declined in one factor, wherein we of the West had not declined, and that was the factor of energy allied to, and productive of, tenacity and continuity of conduct. But on the other hand, in the major thing of all, Religion, we have fallen back and Islam has in the main preserved its soul. Modern Europe and particularly western Europe has progressively lost its religion, and especially that united religious doctrine permeating the whole community, which unity gives spiritual strength to that community.

There is with us a complete chaos in religious doctrine, where religious doctrine is still held, and even in that part of the European population where the united doctrine and definition of Catholicism survives, it survives as something to which the individual is attached rather than the community. As nations we worship ourselves, we worship the nation; or we worship (some few of us) a particular economic arrangement believed by us to be the satisfaction of social justice. Those who direct us, and from whom the tone of our policy is taken, have no major spiritual interest. Their major personal interest is private gain, and this mood is reflected in the outer forms of government, by the establishment of plutocracy.

Islam has not suffered this spiritual decline; and in the contrast between the religious certitudes still strong throughout the Mohommadan world - as lively in India as in Morocco, active throughout North Africa and Egypt, even inflamed through contrast and the feeling of repression in Syria (more particularly in Palestine) - lies our peril.

We have returned to the Levant, we have returned apparently more as masters than ever we were during the struggle of the Crusades-but we have returned bankrupt in that spiritual wealth which was the glory of the Crusades. The Holy Sepulchre has become a petty adjunct, its very site doubtful in the eyes of the uninstructed mass of Christians. Bethlehem and Nazareth are held, but they are not held because they were each the cradle of Divinity. Damascus is held, but it is not held as the key of a Christian dominion, nor is the Levant held as one whole, but divided between separate nations to whom the unity of Europe has ceased to be sacred. We are divided in the face of a Mohommadan world, divided in every way-divided by separate independent national rivalries, by the warring interests of possessors and dispossessed-and that division cannot be remedied because the cement which once held our civilization together, the Christian cement, has crumbled.

These lines are written in the month of January, 1937; perhaps before they appear in print the rapidly developing situation in the Near East will have marked some notable change. Perhaps that change will be deferred, but change there will be, continuous and great. Nor does it seem probable that at the end of such a change, especially if the process be prolonged, Islam will be the loser."

Aint no way I’m gonna let you drop this incredibly spicy take and then refuse to elaborate further. Please tell us

I just don't think the official story adds up. The gun being found in the woods by the FBI after that patch of woods had been swept by dogs trained to detect gunpowder traces and turned up nothing. The gun itself having a very small chance of producing the sort of damage that eventually killed Kirk. TPUSA and his wife completely lying about weird things - the text messages saying he was thinking of drawing back form the Israeli cause, the fact that he was suspicious of finances. The meeting that just leaked where she was talking giddily about hat sales a couple weeks after her husband was killed, coupled with her wearing hot pants and hugging JD Vance while standing on her husband's coffin, and then having her ex-boyfriend talking at events (an ex that she lied about ever having when talking to Bari Weiss, just claiming that she wasn't dating in NYC for a five year period or drinking when there are videos of her dating multiple guys and sipping Champagne during that interval). The internet searches on bizarre details of the event before it happened - the doctor, the hospital they brought him too, the suspects, often around the time of the infamous Tucker speech which incensed donors. The fact that TPUSA lied about Charlie telling Tucker to give that speech and then Megyn Kelly producing video proving that it happened. The weird plane that tracked Erika's location so frequently that the probability of it being random coincidence is astronomically low.

Like any of these things you could make an argument that, you know, it's not likely but there are alternate explanations that explain why they aren't suspicious. Maybe the bullet had a 1 in 500 chance of weirdly deflecting and not causing an exit wound. Maybe Erika lied about her past repeatedly just to keep up the facade of an innocent Christian girl for business reasons. Maybe planes flagged to the Egyptian military following her is just someone keeping watch on her that she's unaware of or maybe it's someone in a billion random coincidence that people are picking up on. Maybe TPUSA has been caught lying because people just keep being incompetent. Maybe all of those weird google searches that were happening in DC, FBI field offices, and Israel and nowhere else in the world months before the event on details that nobody would know about prior are just three guys in those locations who are really, really interested in random people in a Utah town who just happened to later be involved in the assassination. There comes a point where it becomes more logical to entertain the possibility of some kind of conspiracy than it does to continue to believe in a large number of unlikely coincidences.

At this point I ask, 'cui bono' and it's largely the Israeli/Evangelical nexus who can take control to the TPUSA machine and don't have to deal with its leader going rogue and turning against them - something that would be a disaster for them at a critical juncture. We now have ample hard evidence of donors coming down hard on Charlie before his death, of Bibi offering the famous 'trip' to Israel which Charlie declined. They just spent billions buying Paramount and Tiktok, an assassination is chump change compared to that. And with the Trump admin utterly beholden to them, they know that there will be no real chance of them being exposed by any government inquiries.

That hasn't been demonstrated. Voters know what Republicans tend to do and what Democrats tend to do and vote accordingly. We got the tariffs because Trump was elected. We got Obamacare because Obama was elected. They both ran on those things.

Obamacare was not what Obama ran on, though - he ran on a public option. Obamacare originated as a Republican plan in Massachusetts and was rebranded. Both candidates ran on change, but Obama's entire cabinet was given to him in an email from Citibank and Trump's administration was immediately filled with swamp creatures who once vociferously opposed him - he then proceeded to turn against many of his most loyal supporters. Trump also implemented tariffs through executive fiat, he never would have gotten them through Congress - him actually delivering on that promise is an example of the collapse of norms and separations of power allowing decisive action to be taken. It shows that people who vote for a strongman who constantly tests the limits of his power will be rewarded for it while those who insist on following norms will not.

This is the study which pretty much demonstrated this pattern: Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens | Perspectives on Politics | Cambridge Core

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

Reforms have happened, they've just been gradual because the people protesting all want different things. I'm not sure how violence=reforms when the people cheering the violence can't even agree on what reforms they want. If they could all agree on that and were all willing to accept the consequences of those reforms, politicians would implement them to get more votes. If you overthrow a democracy, what are you going to replace it with? Another democracy? With the same voting base voting for the same things? Trump's "concepts of a plan" got him elected, because apparently that's what voters want right now.

This isn't true - it's been demonstrated that public support for a particular reform has no positive correlation with it being adopted into law. Politicians ape at reform but usually just use it as an excuse to create more sinecures and regulate their buddies' competition out of existence. So this isn't a question of just waiting for the right reforms or protecting a democracy - when the bureaucracy and legislature are so irrevocably captured by moneyed interest that legislation has no correlation to public opinion, you don't have a democracy, you have an oligarchy. Oligarchs aren't voted out of power. They're removed by other means. All governments eventually reach this state of dysfunction and widespread discontent. They either reform internally, become so inefficient they are destroyed by an outside, competing force, or are overthrown by their own people. The third choice is preferable to the second, though the first is best.

As an oligarchy is overthrown there is almost always an authoritarian strongman who takes power of the unruly, anarchic mobs - this has been recognized since Polybius's anacyclosis.

I think you fundamentally misunderstood what I meant when I said the ICE vigilantes are more like Brownshirts than John Brown.

John Brown didn't target slave catchers because it would have hardened the system. He targeted the Armory to speed up the Civil War, because that was the systemic source of the problem; the Federal Force allowing slavery to continue. No systemic politician supported Brown on either side.

I think this fundamentally misunderstands the causes of the Civil War. Slavery was already in a tenuous position; there was no iron-clad consensus that it continue. This is because as new states were added, there were fights over them being slave states or free states. These fights weren't about the morality of slavery, except on the fringes. The opponents of slavery largely framed it as the new states being for free white men, who didn't want a black slave class imported to compete with them. That side was largely winning out, and had the backing of business interests in the north who profited from this model, as opposed to the slave-driven agricultural model which was supported by slaveholding interests in the south who wished to expand their servile model into the new territory so that they could extract wealth from it.

There was a very real conflict between two competing, extractive economic models and their ruling classes which were mutually exclusive. Free white men could never compete against a slave caste, and managing a slave caste was something that the southerners were capable of, not the northern industrialists. John Brown's actions were at first seized upon by the south as a moral bludgeon to hit the north with, claiming that they were insane, violent ideologues. As tensions escalated, the north eventually seized upon the moral dimension to use in war propaganda, and, in that sense, John Brown became lionized. This culminated in the Union battle march 'John Brown's Body', whose bawdy lyrics were eventually sanitized into 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic' while keeping the same tune.

I get all the moral implications of vigilanteism, I am just asking if you think the intended and collateral American lives lost due to vigilantes are worth the societal cost of chaos. Shooting a healthcare CEO didn't really change your system. In fact, most of your Congress doubled down on subsidizing the very companies that CEO worked for with increased corporate subsidies. The system absorbed the shock, hardened, and moved on. That is what large bureaucratic systems do: they outlast individuals. Will killing ICE and others who are misidentified as ICE really change anything?

The vigilantes are clearly targeting the wrong people if the goal is to stop the system, which makes me believe they are more like Brownshirts than John Brown.

The system hardening in response to Luigi is an unforced strategical error, just like the slave states hardening in response to Brown's Harpers Ferry raid was a strategical error in the long term. They originally successfully framed him as a madman, but the underlying reasons slavery was opposed (not the ideologically pure if naive feelings of Brown, incidentally - the actual reasons were racism and naked economic self-interest) continued to exert pressure. It was only the underlying reasons that mattered in the end, and Brown was eventually lionized as a hero, becoming a figurehead in a deepening divide that eventually ruptured.

The ICE people I would not classify as vigilantes, as they are as you said targeting the wrong people. It's impotent violence directed at a basic function of the state, just grist in the mill. A random drug addict resisting arrest is not a vigilante. Kirk I'd say was an assassination by his own 'side' but that's a discussion for another day.

Well, only if the voters recognize the flooding as bad and vote to fix the system, but in this case they seem to be celebrating it. If anything it has made people complacent, since they think they are "fighting back" when they have accomplished very little toward actually fixing the underlying problems. Most discussion around healthcare, for example, now revolves around Luigi's cult of personality, not actual feasible reforms. Also I don't think the issue is lack of motivation, it's that people have conflicting interests and healthcare is not an easy thing to solve with simplistic slogans.

Vigilantism happens when people realize that voting will never fix the problem, because they've tried that for years. It happens when non-violent means of addressing the issue are exhausted. The violence will continue to escalate until reforms are made - that's what the cult of Luigi is all about. It's gearing up for that escalation. I think things will get increasingly ugly, and eventually someone looking to accrue personal power might see that violent movement as a vehicle to said power and will gladly cut off the leeches to earn their loyalty, as the naked power to be gained by such a move will be far more lucrative than the original graft - the thing which caused the backlash in the first place. Trump is basically doing this with immigration right now - people are incensed about it, the negative consequences are being ignored because wealthy people profit from it, nobody voted for it, it's perennially unpopular. By positioning himself as the man who will cut the Gordian knot and solve the problem, he's able to bend and hammer away at norms and laws that would otherwise constrain him.

Also when people are fired up, they don't tend to act rationally. Radicals celebrating Kirk's death just helped Trump get away with more bad things, but of course they did it anyway.

There often comes a point where you have to act irrationally to win - rationality can make you predictable. After all, if every soldier in an army was personally rational, they would get absolutely folded. It's more effective to have a rational leader with long vision and irrational masses.

There's a big difference between saying vigilantism is a result of corruption and saying it is good for society. Copycat shootings are a real thing, and the next ten assassins might have a very different idea from you about which people deserve the bullet.

Didn't say it was good for society in itself - what is best for society is an uncorrupt, competent, and efficient justice/governing apparatus which operates within strict legal bounds. But that's something that easily falls apart and is hard to maintain for long stretches of time. When it falls apart to the point where people start to suffer heavily under it, vigilantism and other anarchic violence is the result.

You don't fix the problem by stopping the vigilantism, you fix the problem by fixing the justice system and governing apparatus. It's like saying that flooding is bad for society - undoubtedly true, but you respond to it by fixing the dams and levees and better controlling stormwater, not by trying to bulldoze water back up the river.

The flooding in a way is also good in the grand scheme of things: it's so horrible that it prompts investment in infrastructure that has other benefits to society like irrigation, recreation, and power generation. Similarly, vigilantism and frontier chaos can be so scary that it often frightens corrupt institutions into reforming and become more efficient and fair - this leads to better results in all other areas of society as well.

What, like the dude that shot the United Healthcare CEO? I support that. Vigilantism is often a release valve. The fact of the matter is that people are dying and can't afford medical care because our politicians are bought out by parasitic middlemen who suck off the system and then bribe our so-called representatives to keep themselves in place with their ill-gotten gains. People constantly vote for change on this front but just get more corruption on both sides of the aisle. I've often said that I hate mass shooters because they target innocent people who have nothing to do with the problems that our society faces, so it'd be hypocritical of me to poo-poo someone who capped a dude who, while not at the top of the pyramid, was pretty close to it. But I judge it on a case-by-case basis. There was also that hero in Arkansas who shot the local police chief who raped his thirteen-year-old daughter, got let out by a corrupt judge, and then tried to abduct his daughter again. The fact is that vigilantism happens when the justice system is lacking. Vigilantism certainly has its flaws, but the way to curtail it is to reduce corruption and execute the law fairly and justly, not to bitch and moan about vigilantes. It's also always going to be popular in the US just because of our history of frontier justice and rebellious streak.

I can't think of any examples of this, not that there are not examples.

It was learned during cancel culture, where people who apologized and tried to appease the left while condemning what they'd said that was 'wrong' were abandoned by their supporters as cowardly and unprincipled and were not forgiven or adopted by the left - instead they were often further castigated and attacked, only this time they were alone with no defenders. The people who doubled down kept their supporters and were better able to resist the attempted cancellation.

There are a bunch of articles on this phenomenon published a few years ago from both sides of the aisle:

https://financialpost.com/opinion/first-rule-being-cancelled-never-apologize

https://medium.com/publishous/cancel-culture-needs-a-clear-cut-path-to-redemption-c484b8cb7d46

I think the reaction is a combination of two things. First is the basic can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. If we assume that 1% of ICE is retarded (I know, being a bit generous here), all it takes is 100 retarded people who think life is a Disney movie throwing themselves at ICE for one to get ventilated. It was bound to happen just through statistics alone, just like if you have cops some idiot is going to try to run/assault them at some point and will end up dead. This is just blood lost due to the basic friction of having a society.

The second is the right basically learning from the left, this is why the case is so similar to Rittenhouse. The left has taught the right that apologizing or trying to be decent or trying to meet them halfway is seen as blood in the water and a sign to counterattack rather than a good faith attempt at reaching common ground. This has led to a mantra online of 'never apologize to the left'. This seems to now be seeping into the actual administration, which is taking a brazenly unapologetic approach to all accusations leveled against it. This eventually builds up into a kind of media bubble where all information inside is fed back in by people who have bought into this lionized self-conception. The exact same thing happened on the left with Rittenhouse, that's why it looks so similar. I think taking it to this level is a bit of a misstep - I know several left-leaning people who were a bit staggered to discover that all the people Rittenhouse had shot were white and it led to them questioning the media bubble that had left them with such a deluded impression. These media bubbles, while potent, come with their own strategic dangers in the long-term.

I have to disagree with this take for two reasons.

First, specific to Venezuela, this isn't a case of foreign companies gobbling up the oil rights back in the 1920s with the imprimatur of a tinpot dictator flanked at all times by g-men under the employ of an American banana conglomerate and then still being there 80 years later at the start of 2007. Rather, the democratically elected government of Venezuela, two decades after the 1975 nationalization, voluntarily invited the oil companies back in the 1990s because it thought this deal would be of economic benefit to the country. Venezuela entered into the contract of its own volition and then reneged on its end of the bargain.

This is an inherent problem with democracy. You can ink a multi-decade contract, but it is only ever worth the paper it was written on. If the people of that country decide they are getting a raw deal later on, they always have recourse to the barrel of a gun. Companies should invest in foreign markets with this always in the back of their mind. We also did the exact same thing to TikTok - forced a foreign company to divest ownership then sold it off to Israeli loyalists once to information being promulgated on that platform went against our government's (well, really a foreign government's) interests.

Governments also typically don't randomly break contracts and seize foreign assets. Usually there is an attempt to negotiate. This attempt was made before Chavez's nationalizations, and many oil companies balked and left. Chevron didn't, accepting a minority stake and agreeing to the government's terms. Now they are uniquely positioned to reap the rewards of a Venezuelan oil boom. I think they deserve to profit from playing the long game and that Exxon and Conoco were short-sighted and stupid for pulling out; they only have themselves to blame for failing to react nimbly to changing conditions.

Second, you act as though "introducing the technology" was a singular act that happened sometime in the early to mid 20th century. In fact, the Western oil industry continues to develop new technologies and export access to such abroad. For example, one bit of trivia about the current sanctions regime on Russia is that it's meant to block Russian access to tech that, in a few years, they'll need to drill deeper when shallower reserves are depleted. In a recent conversation with my dad, who worked on a rig in the Gulf of Mexico back in the '80s, he attested to how drastically less efficient the whole process was back then compared to today.

Yes, this can happen in multiple waves, and it did in Venezuela. I think this underlines rather than undermines my point.

This kind of endless bullshit is why I prefer a more nakedly colonialist justification for things like resource extraction. People aren't buying the old song-and-dance. When it comes right down to it, the argument from the American/European side is 'we have an advanced society, we developed these extraction technologies, therefore we own the resources extracted through them'. The argument from the third world economies is 'these resources are on our land, so we own them. You can get a cut for introducing your technological savoir-faire, but at some point ownership has to transition to the people who live in this country - otherwise our population is suffering from the externalities of extraction like pollution while all the profit flows to foreign investors'. At the end of the day, from a framework of 'everyone is equal' bullshit, the third world argument seems more reasonable, and all the international court decisions will simply be framed as an attack on non-American interests. America is trying to have its cake and eat it too - it's trying to appeal to these gauzy ideals of internationalism and economic development when at the end of the day these Western countries are only interested in sucking the smaller countries dry.

I think we have different social perceptions of white colonizers because the narrative for the past several centuries has been white colonists arrive, local populations suffer. If there was a different ethnicity that had done the same thing on the same scale, I'm sure we'd have different standards for them too. Not really about skin color inherently, just the power narratives we associate with skin color.

I'd argue that this same story has repeated itself constantly, over and over again, throughout human history, with one little difference: when white people did it, the indigenous populations survived. In the myriad other instances of one group subsuming another, the conquered group simply ceased to exist and was wiped out entirely. When you look at the genetics of the subcontinent, for example, Ancestral Indian DNA is overwhelmingly tied to mitochondrial DNA, the implicate being that the men were slaughtered and the women were all impregnated by invading Aryan-speaking steppe invaders.

This is an incredibly brutal way to invade and replace a population, and the ancient Iranian DNA of many subcontinental communities implied that this was a process that repeated itself throughout history. By contrast, when the British invaded they largely installed a colonial system of management, didn't genocide the natives, and largely improved the culture by eliminating practices like widow burning and the thugees. They even exported Indians to manage their African colonies, leading to resentment towards Indian people in Africa. This resulted in a surviving population which was alive to be filled with seething resentment towards their conquerors. So, in many ways this perspective is an example of survivorship bias - white colonizers are viewed with more ire because they were merciful enough to allow segments of the indigenous population to survive to resent them. Waves of incursion and conquest further back in the mists of time felt no such compunction, and merely massacred and replaced the indigenous populations, and people who are dead can't resent the foreigners building a new empire on their mass graves.

Okay, now I support invading Greenland. This is kino.

Trump as he watches the Nobel results, reaching for the phone to hold an emergency Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting:

Are Jews native to Europe?

The ones that have lived in a given region for hundreds of years, yes. Many jews tend to move around a lot on a grand historical scale so they have more of a transient, in-group loyalty and are not woven in to the local fabric of the population, so are kind of native to nowhere. I imagine in a century or two the Jews in Israel could be said to be native to Israel. Orthodox communities are also very rooted, so you could say places like Brooklyn in America have a native Jewish population. Obviously these communities were disrupted by the holocaust in Europe.

Are African Americans native to it now?

Absolutely. We even have distinct regional cultures in the deep South like the Gullah with their own languages and folklore.

Are South Asian and East Asian immigrants native after 3-4 generations deep immigrating to US or Europe?

No. I said something like twenty generations and unique culture. Japanese in Hawaii or San Francisco could be at that point. Also I feel like constant waves of new immigrants joining a community disrupts the formation of a new culture and constantly ties them back to the foreign culture. Thomas Jefferson ending the slave trade, for example, led to a sudden cutoff to the influx of people from Africa, and at that point there was a sharp cultural divergence, and now African immigrants arriving to the US have little in common with American blacks, with little love lost between the two groups. If immigration is never cut off the population will continue to frame itself as a foreign cohort, will be viewed that way by the natives, and will fail to assimilate long-term into the fabric of the host country.

If you'd include both, why wouldn't Americans who formed the colonies be native? Many descendants have been living in America for over 400 years - so many 'founding stock' modern Americans can trace their descent back to the Mayflower. The Thule cultures completed their arctic and subarctic conquests just around 500 years ago. Both groups originated in Siberia. In South Africa, the Bantu and Dutch arrived within a century of one another, the Dutch originating in Northern Europe, the Bantu in Central Africa, and the Afrikaans have been living in South Africa just a century less than the Thule-derived Inuit at the furthest reaches of their expansion. The Magyar/Hungarians and Turks both originate in Central Asia.

To me, native has two meanings. The first is 'has lived on a plot of earth since time immemorial'. This is exceedingly rare - the Khoisan of South Africa being one example. Even many Pacific Islanders murdered oldest indigenous populations as they expanded. The second would be something like 'has established a civilization in an area, a distinct culture, and has inhabited the area for something like twenty generations'.

Most people seem to operate on the same common-sense rules, UNLESS said population is white. Then a different set of rules apply if you're outside of Europe.

Greenland's native people were wiped out centuries ago. Unless you're talking about Scandinavians, who were the first to reach the southern tip of Greenland. It is kind of an insult to them, though the white people living there today are not their direct descendants. But any 'natives' in Greenland are the descendants of Thule cultures, who displaced both the Dorset and the Norse during the Middle Ages. By your crazy logic, they are immigrants.

If you don't like it don't read it.

As ever, it is the offended that creates the offence within themselves.

Ignorance is bliss, is a blissful truth.

This is a particuarly dumb argument, as it could be applied to someone spamming paragraph upon paragraph of softcore Super Mario porn to every comment on this site. At least that would be more entertaining to read than AI spam.

And be honest, did you ever bother to read much of it?

I don't read the shit people write on bathroom walls either. It's a waste of time. Only comprehensively incompetent people find AI summaries informative. If you have any level of competence in any field, and you read the ai summaries that pop up when you google something related to that field, it becomes readily apparent that it hallucinates bullshit or just pulls shit from random internet articles constantly.

You don't need to regulate medical transactions to get sane pricing. The market can do that on its own, that's one of the things it's fantastic at: setting prices.

The issue with insurance is that it obscures and muddles price signals. You pay a portion of employer-provided health insurance, your employer also pays a portion - which is factored into their calculation of how much it costs to employ you. Then the insurance companies pay the hospitals and doctors, who pay the medical device providers, staff, and drug companies. This system completely obfuscated price signals at several levels, so the consumer never conceives of the services with which they are being provided as a portion of their wage. This is a recipe for ballooning prices and rent-seeking behaviors in all steps of the supply chain involved in such a service. The insurance companies in particular are parasitic middlemen, as they are no longer functioning as insurance (something you pay to hedge against a low-frequency, high impact event) when they are paying for checkups and routine medical care. If your car insurance had to pay for tune-ups, oil changes, and tire rotations, and your work paid for a large portion of your car insurance, you would also see autoshops gouging you on prices at levels that would make their current already egregious chicanery pale in comparison.

This is just corrupt humans following predictable economic incentives. The system is horrible and so there is corruption at all levels siphoning off their cut, all of them bleeding you. After all, that huge slice of your paycheck that pays for insurance could have been wages going to you buy people often don't think about it like that. The system is set up to anesthetize us to the personal economic consequences of being bled to feed these industries.

Yeah, forums thrive on independent contributions and personalities. If I want to know what a random association of internet articles expresses about a topic I'll query AI myself. Spamming AI slop in every thread is completely pointless. I actually expressed a preference for leniency on this count in the moderation survey because I assumed no one would be retarded enough to do it to a disruptive degree. The last dregs of my optimism about human nature have come back to bite me again.

So why would 100k Americans want to go live in a freezer?

Want? We're building the libtard gulags there. 'Want' doesnt enter into it.

Rarely is the question asked: is our children learing?

The whole trans movement is a textbook case of a deranged advocacy group infiltrating political movements and academia and forcing such brazenly insane ideology into the mainstream that it may singlehandedly kill a major political party.

Which at this point is fine by me - their ability to pull off a U-turn on this issue is basically a test of whether the Democrats have the bare bones minimum political acumen to survive for another decade.