Vilageidiotx

Whoaaaaaaaaaa we're halfway there, WHOAAAA

i don't think you got the joke m8

@Taaj

oh no, i kno you guys are singing, i just wanted to tell that story

Whoaaaaaaaaaa we're halfway there, WHOAAAA

i once saw an old dog with arthritis fall down the stairs.

The Unpopular Opinions Thread.

I think you misunderstood me. I'm not saying fucking Nazi Germany. You say you want to "stem the flow" of immigrants. That's all I'm saying. I never said anything about stopping it completely. And as for integration, I'm just talking about mandatory language/culture classes, and maybe restrictions on how much non-American/non-English media is allowed to be produced by one body of people. There wouldn't need to be any roadblocks, door-to-door knocking, or any other Left-wing paranoid fever-dreams, because the government already has a record of information on everyone who legally immigrates to the country. No need to search, they're right there.

This just sounds like the same old left-wing propaganda machine, screaming "police state" and "racist", every time someone suggests even the mildest vetting process for immigration/naturalized-citizenship applications.

@Jotunn Draugr

It sounds like Nazi-accusation because we already do the other things for the most part. We don't have an open border policy, there is actually a pretty hefty system in place for flow-stemming (Cit: Born in East L.A. Dir. Cheech Marin). Which is why people suspect police-state ideas when this gets bandied about: because the plans are always suspiciously vague, or involve ideas that recall police-state imagery like walls and shit.

And I'd actually be pretty cool with mandatory English classes. I feel we might have tried that before though... but I can't be certain. Because here is the thing about mandatory: for something this huge, it suggests a probationary structure in place that can locate and track the immigrants and make sure they take their classes. But if we actually had a structure of that magnitude in place, we wouldn't have an immigration issue. It reminds me way back when I was doing work study in college in the computer lab of a subsidized housing project. They wanted to do mandatory computer classes, so they just sort of called them mandatory for anybody who wanted to use the computers and sent out the fliers. Nobody showed. So I suggested they give out free bus passes to anybody that shows up. And that worked, they had a decent handful come in. You can't just call something required. Gotta incentivize. Make sure English language classes are fucking easy to get into. Free classes in community colleges, maybe even government even foots the bill for bus rides to and from community colleges. That sort of thing. Hell, maybe pay people to take the classes. Whatever gets them in the door. It sounds expensive, but it'd be cheaper to do it that way then to create a hit-and-miss probationary system to handle it.

Yes, both parties have been in a position to crack down on it, and haven't, because their wealthy campaign contributors demand the cheap exploitable labour. Saying that something is illegal, and therefor we're already doing as much as we can, is just inaccurate. Smoking pot and jaywalking are both illegal in Canada, but neither are enforced. No one goes to jail for either. Meanwhile, illegal immigrants, who sneak into the country over and over again, and even are caught stealing and trespassing, are just caught and released like fish. If you actually build a blockade solid enough that Mexicans can't get across it so easily, and then establish a REAL punishment for illegal entry, you'll start to see this problem go away.

I honestly don't think the cheap labor lobby is really the reason it isn't being handled. That sounds a whole lot like a political line of its own (remember, Trump is a political snake-oil salesman too, don't drink the election-time kool-aide). Because the cheap labor being exploited is primarily being exploited by local contractors and shit like that. They aren't they heavy hitters economically speaking, because immigrants mostly get stuck with unskilled labor, which is already easy to exploit as it is. You don't need illegal immigrants to keep Wal-Mart wages poor. When I think of all the busts I have ever heard about personally, it has always been shit like tree farms and construction sites.

If you want to handle the exploitative part, you gotta ask who you go after: the exploited, or the exploiters? There are a whole lot of ways to do this. Now, if I were made dictator of the United States and got to just decide, I'd give free citizenship to any illegal immigrant who could show his boss was breaking labor laws (beside just hiring an illegal I guess), and then the person or persons found guilty of the exploitation would get life in prison and all their property confiscated automatically. That's impractical for several legal reasons too, albeit it is far more practical than the alternatives. Still, more symbolic of where my political tendencies lay.

So yes, it's difficult to fix, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling something.

Hahaha. Oh gawd, I seriously hope your joking. "The culinary health of the nation". Are you actually employed by Hillary Clinton?

Is that like her line or something? "Hillary Clinton supports good tamales?" Because if liking burritos makes me a Blue Dog, then god help me i'm a Blue Dog. And if Hillary Clinton wants to pay me to like burritos, then fuck it, I'll sell out. One thing I like better than burritos is paychecks. (seriously hillary, pm me pls. sorry i voted for bernie.)

Mexico recently announced plans for their own border wall, with Guatemala, to keep those filthy illegal south-american immigrants out. Hmmmm, starting to sound like maybe a wall is a good idea.

We going to start taking advice from Mexico on how to govern a country? Also, how much wall are they going to build when they don't even have a handle on half their border with Guatemala? I'd think being able to govern more than half of your country would take priority to building a wall in the middle of the rainforest. Shit, theirs sounds like a much worse idea than ours. Trump's is just a waste of money to make us look bad, the Mexican one is completely nonsensical.

I've known a couple Turks. They were wonderful, western people, looking to make their mark on the Canadian business-world. Likewise, the Russians I've known were just normal Canadian rednecks, who occasionally spoke to each other in Russian.

And alright, that's interesting that there's an Eastern Bloc Market in Missouri, of all places (one day I'd love to go there, and see what I can find), but nonetheless the eastern bloc isn't contributing to a crime/drug epidemic, an explosion of completely non-English material, the formation of eastern bloc ghettos, and isn't openly aggressive to American citizens passing through. Did the people at the shops, for example, speak intelligible English, and were they welcoming enough that you were able to complete your purchases without trouble? If you had a conversation with one, did they seem knowledgeable of American pop-culture? Was the place tolerably sanitary? Did they have functioning bathrooms? Did anyone try to sell you hard drugs, or accost you for money?

Well no, but I've also not had those experiences in the Mexican parts of any of the places I live either (gotta go down there to get the real chorizo). I have no doubt that East LA is a fucking nightmare, but not every Hispanic neighborhood looks like that automatically. If I want to get accosted about hard drugs, I don't even have to go downtown, there is a good white trash meth-head neighborhood just a mile from here. The sort you don't pull into driveways because some nervous fuck might hop out of his trailer with a shot gun to protect his lab.

Which is not to disparage my own people, but rather to point out that my experiences do not mesh with this particular "The Immigrants did it" line of easy-fixism. Shit's not that simple. I believe Trump can fix the immigration problem just as much as I believe Hillary Clinton can fix poverty.

The Unpopular Opinions Thread.

To be clear, I don't identify as Right-wing, nor do I think the Left will cause any kind of Communist uprising or some batshit nonsense like that. All I'm saying is that society functions better when its citizens are roughly homogeneous, so that you don't get violent, racist in-group/out-group divides inside your own damn country. And, unfortunately, the Left (for whatever fearful reason) is now in open opposition to the notion of limiting immigration, and forcing immigrants to integrate, which is only going to cause the country more harm down the line.

Yeh, for the most part people are identifying their own fixes to the same problems. Shit on the ground for working class Americans right now is tough, myself saying this from the trenches of that same world.

Largely I think immigration reform is a big red herring. First, because it is a recurrent problem for us (fun-fact: Prohibition started out with an anti-immigrant aspect, since the immigrants at that time were the Irish and Germans) Second, the right's plan is mostly an impractical populism. We'd have to go full on Iron curtain to pull it off, and I cannot imagine that being worth it. We've never had a homogeneous society; this immigration issue is one of our oldest, predating the Civil War. We won't get rid of it without losing ourselves in the process. Saying we'll force the immigrants to integrate is like saying we'll force the drug dealers to stop dealing. To do either you'll need a full fledged police-state to pull it off. The United States as it operates now, within the delicate borders of public opinion and constitutional law (in theory), is somewhat limited in how they can prosecute a war on Hispanics. Do we... go door to door checking papers like the Gestapo? Road blocks in East LA? Police profiling? We can build a wall, and then what? That'll up the premium for Coyotes to do their work, all the while we spend shit loads of cash on a massive back-drop for folk singers to use in politically conscious music videos.

There is no such thing as a simple fix. Immigration is with the US, like or not, so long as we remain a legalistic society. All we can do is work within reason to stem the flow, and focus our attention to integration not so much by force (heh, put a gun to a kids head and force him to watch Oprah or whatever), but by doing our best to increase the resources available to bring people who want out of the ghettos out of the ghettos. The weird half-system we have now, where we paint abuellas with the same brush we do drug-peddlers, is only increasing the tension and pushing out the divide. You either suspend the constitution or you work with people, but trying to run a self-hating police state is impractical.

But I don't really have to say it is impractical, because being empty populism, nobody will go very far with it. This specific round of know-nothingism has been around for at least as long as I have, though it could very well be longer (I guess when the Unions stopped blaming the Japanese for taking our jobs? I don't know, I always remember the Mexican immigration problem being bandied about. I can remember as a kid my grandma saying how she really wants to go to the border and help shoot Mexicans. Going back the the entire "The left is worried about a pogrom" thing, well, that concern didn't pop up out of thin air.) Republicans have been in a position to deal with it in the past and they haven't, and I suspect it's the same reason Dems won't do anything about it, and why Trumps answer is so shallow. It isn't something they can answer because the laws are already in place (hence it being illegal immigration), but the problem isn't some easy fix.

Also, for the record, I think illegal immigration is important for the culinary health of the nation. Best Mexican joints are the ones where only one employee kinda speaks english, and serves as the liaison for the rest of the employees.

Are you telling me Turks and Russians aren't largely integrated into Anglophonic society? I don't know what part of the world your from, but in my experience, you don't tend to have a problem with segregated Russian ghettos forming, where people only speak Russian, businesses only hire Russians, the signs are in Russian, and they lash out with violence at non-Russians. Likewise with Turks. I could be wrong, but these aren't things I've seen.

Meanwhile, there are larger sections of America (mainly California and New Mexico), where you can't so much as get a job if you can't speak Spanish, where there are entire cities and districts forming around Mexican culture, populated only by Mexicans, where non-Mexicans suffer violence and theft when attempting to pass through.

When was the last time you turned on Russiavision, an America-based TV station that broadcasts only in Russian, by Russians, for Russians, or went to Russiatown, to get some Russian food at the Russian market?

And Native Americans have largely chosen to segregate themselves from Western civilization, remaining on reserves. They intentionally attempt to avoid integration, and yet unevenly consume elements of Western production and culture, like alcohol, leading to severe self-harm and social problems. Others, that integrate into society, often remain resentful of most Americans/Canadians, for perceived historical injustices, and attempt to flaunt their different culture when able. Not all, of course, but you can't deny that the trend exists.

Ooooh. I thought you were arguing that Russia and Turkey were anglicized, as in the countries had slipped into Englishness.

I think this is more of a numbers game. Not enough Russians and Turks coming into the country to coalesce into noticeable groups. There are places in the US where Russians hang out amongst themselves, in those little European enclaves that pop up in more vaguely defined areas that I think most people probably can locate if they live in a major enough city. I know a New Yorker with a very Italian mom who's mother complained their old neighborhood was overrun with Russians, for instance. But this is small. I suspect if Mexicans stayed more along the border, like you were only seeing Mexicans piling up in Texas and California, it wouldn't be as noticeable. Case in point, the Germans and Irish did the same thing back in the 19th century. They immigrated in large enough numbers to freak the neighbors out and you ended up with the "Know-Nothing" movement.

Mexicans, however, are a massive migratory group. They had been there before, and a lot of those places in the southwest have been Mexican-cultured since we took them from Mexico (at least those clinging to the border), which makes it easier for those Hispanic immigrants to jump the border without jumping the culture.

I have been to a Russian market by the way, or at least Eastern Bloc Market, because a big chunk of the stuff was in Cyrillic with English stickers stuck over the nutritional info. If they are in Missouri they are surely elsewhere. I found a Kinder Surprise there, which is interesting because they are one of those things famously illegal in the US for some reason, so I bough a bunch of them to give out to people.

As for Turks... you know, I don't think I've met a Turk. Or if I did, they didn't identify openly. Though from what I have seen of Turks online, meeting one that didn't identify openly would seem unlikely.

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

<Snipped quote by Shyri>

That's really cool. I hope you guys manage to finish it. I assume it's just a change to the countries, leaders and political parties, no adjustment to gameplay or anything like that?

I mean, vanilla national focuses would be very strange in a PoW context, so I guess you would either have to change those or give everyone the generic ones to make sense.

@Mihndar

I believe I saw a screenshot of renamed tech tree thing from them, though I could be mistaken

The Unpopular Opinions Thread.

<Snipped quote by Vilageidiotx>

Yah it's just the older sects of Christianity that tend to be really dry. I come from a Pentecostal community, so Sunday morning is basically a free rock concert, with a power-sermon after. The crowds are actually very young, and youth ministries are flourishing among evangelicals. I'm not a fan of Catholics at all. They come from a time where they used to be unified with the government, and it shows. People go there out of obligation, more than anything.

As Christianity needs to reinvent itself, it does. Look at Joel Olsteen. His new motivation brand of Christianity has exploded so much, that he's now a mainstream figure. And then there's the Ann Coulter Christians, where faith and politics go hand-in-hand, and really help keep it from getting stale.

And don't get me wrong. I've been to China and France, and love both countries deeply. I love different cultures (especially East Asian ones), in all their aspects, but an individual civilization only functions when its citizenry shares certain principles and unifying factors, and this trend of cultural self-hatred on the Progressive Left is extremely destructive. There's a reason Black Lives Matter is burning cities and shutting down airports (even in the UK, where blacks are actually treated BETTER than whites, by the police), while Muslim gangs kill gays and Jews in the streets of London, while Chinese nationalists kill Falun Gong followers and assault Japanese immigrants, while rogue USSR restorationists have taken over entire cities in the Ukraine, while there are entire communities in Canada where they don't speak a word of English, while the Turks and Syrians continue their genocide of Kurds in their own countries, and so on. Multiculturalism, without forced cultural integration, just leads to conflict, and stokes the fires of racism. The Left's refusal to promote their own culture, in their own country, is only going to lead to more destruction, more poverty, more racism, and more death.

@Jotunn Draugr

I think a lot of this is misinterpreted for political reasons. The amount of leftists who actually hate their own culture is, I'd suspect, negligible at best. My interpretation of the movement you are catching onto isn't that of self-hatred as it is typically misrepresented to be, but rather a deep distrust of traditional conservatism.

Not a distrust born simply out of politics either. I think most liberals are, deep down, simply moderates who are petrified, completely scared, that if they let the conservative elements in their country off their leash, the conservatives will go full fledged pogrom. Hence all the corny integrationalist stuff. It's not a hatred of their culture, it is a fear of an overzealous corner of their culture that has committed mass-murder in the name of the culture in the past, and that they assume is just itching to do so in the future. I have never personally met a leftist of any stripe who doesn't hate ISIS or Muslim terror, but they don't jump up and down about it because they are deathly afraid the conservative elements of their culture would use the opportunity to go full on Rwanda. Kill them all, burn their mosques, rape their dogs, the full monty. That's the thing. In the mind of a full-fledged liberal, every conservative is a secret SS Nazi just burning for the opportunity to get the ol' killing squad back together. And this also explains why liberals rarely ever push for meaningful reform, and by and large keep losing the working class to the right; they don't want to change things that much, they just want to keep back a murderous element they perceive on the right.

On that note: unpopular opinion: Time for some nationalistic profiling!!!:

Cultures who, from what I know of them, successfully integrated into the English-speaking world, and have benefitted the civilization as a result:
-Italians
-Irish
-Jews
-Scots
-Germans
-Dutch
-Danes
-Finns
-Norwegians
-Swedes
-Russians/Slavs
-Egyptians
-European Spanish
-French
-Japanese
-South Africans
-Cubans
-Koreans
-Greeks
-Some Pols
-Turks

Cultures who generally haven't:
-Mandarin Chinese
-Some Cantonese Chinese
-Mexicans
-Indians
-Arabs
-Sub-Saharan Africans, excluding South Africa
-North Africans, excluding Egypt
-Some Pols
-Native Americans
-Jamaicans
-Hutterites

@Jotunn Draugr

I just have to say, this is a bizarre list. The Turks and Russians have integrated into the Anglo-Saxon world, but the Mexicans and Native Americans haven't? Wat? I feel like you rolled dice to put this one together.

The Unpopular Opinions Thread.

<Snipped quote by Vilageidiotx>

Haha I think it must really depend on what part of the world you're in. There are no Wiccans in my area. The only Wiccans I've ever met were in America. Canada is full of Hindu's, Hare Krishna's, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Muslims. There's a giant gated Muslim compound in the middle of the city here, where they "educate" them from childhood, through high school, until adulthood.

That said, so long as this diversity-phile mental cancer, that has taken over the West, doesn't spread to the rest of the world, Christianity will continue to flourish. China, for example, is having a huge explosion of Christianity, completely unrecognized by government statistics.

@Jotunn Draugr

I suspect the interest in religious diversity is more a symptom of how Christianity in the west has gone rather rigid. It's not a new phenomena, ancient pagan states went through a similar process. Hell, the rigidity of the Roman religion was part of the reason Christianity came about. I think you can even put the out of place political moralism aside (though homophobia and creationism has done them no favors), the big thing is that most churches come off as social clubs for retirees. Though, I will say, I don't think this rigidity is completely true everywhere. You don't see it in Mormonism, or in black churches. Those seem very much alive.

Christianity in Asia isn't rigid. I've met a few who came from it (the Korean batch at least. My parents are Methodists and the Methodists are heavy into Korea). It's very revivalistic, but it's also picked up quite a bit of Asianness too. Essentially the thing is still alive there, moving with the current of the population rather than despite it like in the west. I think, personally, we could see a revivalist movement in the west sometime this century that revitalizes Christianity, but like all revivalist movements, the Christianity that comes from it reborn will be different then what came before.

But so long as so many churches remain places where old people tell other old people the story of Noah the two-thousand-umpteenth time right before having an egg casserole potluck, Christianity will lose ground in most of the western world. And let them. You only deserve as much attention as you earn.

...I do confess I am a diversity-phile myself, but I think I come by it honestly. It's not so much a liberal open-mindedness thing for me as it is a natural attraction to novelty. I like weird shit. I'm the type of dude that tries the alligator on a stick. So the idea of religious diversity sounds fun for no other reason but it might buy me a few weird conversations (You actually worship the Egyptian gods? Holy fuck, what's that like?)

Spam Starvation Games - School Slaughter edition.

bump

I JUST HAD SEEEEEEEEEEX... AND IT FELT SO GOOD!!!!

dont li; nobody on the internet has seen a sex

The Unpopular Opinions Thread.

<Snipped quote by Rogue Colm>

Given that Christians are on the decline, I'm going to state what is becoming an unpopular opinion, in the spirit of this thread:

Beliefs like yours are a cancer upon humanity, and are going to lead to the collapse of civilization.

@Jotunn Draugr

Probably end up more like "Meet the new Jesus, same as the old Jesus." Put the Wiccans in power and eventually even they'd become rigid and bureaucratic too. You might even get the traditional "God and Goddess" Wiccans purging the "I bought a spellbook at Barnes and Noble" Wiccans and the "I really like Magic: The Gathering" Wiccans. And really, is there any other religion you see regularly? I think I've seen Krishna's a total of once, Muslims are around but largely stay to themselves, and most Buddhists tend to just be pacifists with no other interest in the religion. But Wiccans? Shit, they are all over the place. I would even venture to say I know about as many Wiccans as I do practicing Catholics.