People who cannot discern context or degrees of wrong are no better than ICE agents. Love you

It’s a fruitful discussion here, and I agree the comic is reductive. Notwithstanding the incomplete representation of the circumstance, the point the comic is trying to make is that there is inequity/injustice in the distribution of costs and benefits produced even in the complete picture from beginning to end.

The debate eventually gets to difficult conflicts in ethical values around concepts of property/ownership, labor, individual/society, rights, and meaningful living.

What the comic aims to illustrate is a symptom of a system that maximizes the opportunities to live freely for a minority at the expense of a majority who see their opportunities to live freely minimized, suggesting that the symptom indicates the system is unjust.

I don’t think the comic is that successful in doing so, there are many ways to poke holes in it. However, the degree of successful communication by the comic is a different thing from the argument it points to.

Genomics can help to delineate the boundaries of ethnicities. This is useful because people of different races in a shared/neighbouring ethnic regions such as around the Mediterranean often share far more genetic similarity than they do with people of the same race in northern Europe or sub-Saharan Africa. The concept of race has always first and foremost served privileged groups and oppressed groups, often along ethnic lines, but not always. A great example is how pasty ass Irish people were once not considered “white”. The genetic argument is typically cherry-picked to reinforce these power structures.

But I have so many white friends!

Depends, are you in Ibiza?

My argument wasn’t against the implication about the “vast majority exploiting”, not even the article you posted suggested the vast majority of Somali immigrants were “exploiting”. I was arguing against the suggestion that the problem of “a large proportion of Somali immigrants in Minnesota live in/near poverty and remain so over 10 years resulting in a net draw on tax funding” is generalizable to immigrant populations across the country.

Why would you say people (presumably you mean in general) be tired of seeing it if you weren’t suggesting it was also a pervasive problem? If the situation of the Somali immigrants was statistically uncommon across the country, then the explanation of “people are tired of seeing it” would be a poor one.

I wasn’t suggesting that nobody else does this at all. I’m saying that the proportion matters, the statistics both in subpopulations and overall tell the complete story. What you’re suggesting is like saying a state like Alaska or California alone is representative of the entire country.

Yikes, those outcomes are rough and not an easy problem to address. But we were talking about immigrants in general, not a particular subgroup of immigrants. I could carve out a sub-population of US-born people, like fentanyl addicts and show they’re a net drain on tax-payers too. Or entire states like West Virginia or Alabama for that matter.

I understand feelings around struggle and how they get directed. Ive looked at broader statistics around immigration and economics, but not specifically around tax receipt vs contribution over time, so I’m genuinely curious about the statistics on immigrants becoming net tax recipients.

Curious about the statistics on this. Which ones are you looking at?

Yes, I got the joke. And I was suggesting that Americans have always been on about other Americans not assimilating into their American culture. I also just find jokes about fascists being hypocritical or contradictory are no longer funny when the assumption that it’s an indication of foolish lack of self-awareness no longer holds because double-think is the active goal.

The USA is not a monolith. The lines and features have probably shifted, but the idea of Colin Woodward’s “American Nations” rings quite true today.

Yes, the guide is Volume 2, after what you’ve been clearly reading in Volume 1: How to be unappealing as a white man in every way imaginable and then some.

I think we have a misunderstanding. I was trying to deacribe a system/social environment that people are born into, not the character of those people. What did you think I was saying they’re like?

Jesus, someone replace Jensen with an AI already. The bots could generate much more nuanced and empathetic responses. /SARCASM

He doesn’t get a pass on his past, but if it moves the needle on his followers, good. Better this than even more bootlicking. It’s a crisis/war right now. Accounting can happen after.

Typically, reference to whiteness is a reference to white privilege, which is the product of a social power structure that benefits white people through the systematic oppression of non-white people, i.e. a racist power structure. So referring to someone as benefiting from a racist power structure is not racist.

It’s somewhat, though not entirely, like how people born into generational wealth have privileges over people born into poverty. In this situation, it is indeed rather classist to refer to impoverished people as “the poors”, but not classist to refer to the most wealthy as “the 1%”… Because the term calls out the priveleged group in the oppressive system.

You bet there were. There were many that also just said shot/shooting. Many non-US western outlets are using killed/killing in the headline. US outlets use a mixture of language even within the same outlet, or won’t have it in the outline but will have it in the text. Here’s a title from CBS https://youtu.be/HSKaceREFlQ

I’m not saying there isn’t an overall bias towards distancing law enforcement from killings from words that carry negative connotations–there is. I was adding context to how “murder” is used in media and now I’m suggesting that some major outlets see what’s going on and are calling it what it is directly within the bounds of good journalism.

We say murder and it’s understood as people talking about what happened. When a news outlet says murder it’s considered reporting a legal conviction. There are good reasons why these conventions exist. And it’s the same as why headlines weren’t saying Luigi Mangionr murdered Brian Thompson.

That’s giving some all lives matter energy. We can talk about why everyone is so closed off in general, but this thread clearly focuses on a particular men’s issue under that umbrella issue. So no, we should talk about the topic, not hijack it for “a larger issue”.

I’m a thread about the wage gap between men and women (10-15%), you don’t say “We should be talking about why the economy is struggling instead”

In a thread about the incarceration gap between blacks and whites, you don’t say “We should be talking about why crime is up overall instead”

You make a great point about society needing to change, and a particular men’s issue doesn’t mean only men need to change, it actually does speak to how broader society considers what it is to be a man. How men decide that for themselves, are socialized by their environment into it, and how they’re treated by other genders. Just as women’s issues are human issues, men’s issues are human issues too.