• 5 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • You can’t just pick up your factory, drop it in Kansas, and just slot people into the building to work it right away.

    This was demonstrated in Springfield, OH. That whole thing about Haitian immigrants? A large factory opened there, but they couldn’t find Americans who wanted to work there for wages that would make them profitable, so the mayor sent out a call welcoming Haitian immigrants to the town. They were invited specifically for this reason.

    What happens when immigration is halted and people are deported? Where do they expect to find Americans willing to work for wages that will have to be even lower to make up the costs the tariffs will cause?

    It takes only minutes of thought to realise how stupid and doomed trump’s plan is (which is obviously more than his supporters can manage).


  • It’s going to be interesting when climate refugees start overwhelming the habitable regions (like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin), driving housing costs even higher. People who think housing prices are high now will rudely awaken when the influx of people from the coastal regions – who have not only been displaced by climate disasters but have also lost their savings, and insurance will not bail them out – are competing for already limited affordable housing and local jobs.

    But of course more drilling will totally fix that, right?



  • To be fair, other countries want US citizens even less than the US wants* immigrants.

    Do people actually think that the US is alone in anti-immigration sentiment? Do they think it’s different because they’re American?

    The US is the one with a giant monument to immigration, at whose feet is a plaque that reads:

    Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

    And if they, of all people, are now against that, what makes Americans think anyone else will want them? It’s delusional.

    Many countries shut down immigration to Americans in 2016, after the first round of trump’s policies, and they haven’t opened back up yet, partly because there was a solid chance of this happening again.















  • Upper management deserves everything it gets. Middle management is often underpaid and expected to do all the jobs of their own plus their superiors.

    Some *organisational tasks will always be needed. Middle management does that plus fielding some amount of customer service, plus a lot of what upper management takes credit for.

    The system is fucked, but we shouldn’t let the people doing barely anything to earn their yachts turn us against those grinding their own bones to glue the grind-house together.

    (No, I’m not a middle-manager.)



  • One place to start is this article from the Stanford Encyclopaedia on Philosophy: Conservatism.

    It’s a lengthy read, but enlightening.

    One highlight from the summary:

    Most commentators regard conservatism as a modern political philosophy, even though it exhibits the standpoint of paternalism or authority, rather than freedom. As John Gray writes, while liberalism is the dominant political theory of the modern age, conservatism, despite appealing to tradition, is also a response to the challenges of modernity. The roots of all three standpoints “may be traced back to the crises of seventeenth-century England, but [they] crystallised into definite traditions of thought and practice only [after] the French Revolution” (Gray 1995: 78)

    I recommend reading the sources linked in that article, as well.

    eta: It’s worth noting that societies worldwide often see a resurgence in conservatism in response to social change, crises, and civil rights movements, which are without fail a fear response to threats to the social hierarchy. We can see this in real time.