Ben Shapiro's would-be toughguy rhetoric is meant to do one thing and one thing only: distract from the fact that he kneels before anti-Semites and neo-Nazis because he's too weak, cowardly and afraid to stand up to them.
I look at Ben Shapiro, and my thought is "Karma will find you, little boy...because she always does". A few years ago, Ben Shapiro said younger voters found Donald Trump "mean and nasty", and that would ultimately turn them away. Turns out, he was right. In a delicious irony, Shapiro himself has turned "mean and nasty"...and it is really not going to age well. Ben Shapiro puts out a lot of nastiness and negativity--the Lizzo episode (he showed he may have a certain level of bias against African Americans)...the nastiness he spews at Americans of a gay persuasion...I could go on, but I won't. All I will say is that he should check his karmic balance, since the lady got in some wicked responses over the years--Terry Dolan and how he paid for his years of gay bashing in right wing politics...Rush Limbaugh, who spent decades spewing noxious gas, only to ultimately die from noxious gas...I could go on, but I won't.
Since Ben Shapiro seems to like clichés, here's one for him--"You reap what you sow, b*tch"...
On immigration- the GOP clearly wants the problem vastly more than they want the solution. In my industry we need 133K vet techs in the next 8 or so years. In 8 years, statistically, we will ALSO have 100% turnover. If we don't have the kids of the folks crossing the borders coming to work in our vet hospitals at all levels 75MM pets will go unseen. Given that most of the agents of bioterrorism are diseases with an animal host...this is an issue.
Human health is just as bad.
But solving this would require governing. To do that, the GOP would need to go back to pretending to care.
Corporations are soulless entities that do whatever they think is best for this quarter and (maybe) the next quarter... far thinking corporations look ahead maybe a year. They respond to market pressures--expressed either through sales or through public media (be it social or other).
Moreso than any other human or human entity, they act out of rationalized self-interest, based upon the data available to them (not always well or competently, of course).
While they do a lot to try and shape public perception of themselves (branding, marketing, etc), like most institutions that are dependent upon people choosing to pay them money, they are slaves to the market.
They are neither woke nor reactionary.. nor actually much of anything politically (other than pro-policies that will benefit them--and they don't care which side they come from).
Disney is in the entertainment business, which is even more fickle and public dependent than a lot of other businesses. Buying Disney is purely elective. It isn't like buying food or gas or physical products that you need to live or work. Entertainment tends to be far more aware of and far more concerned with pleasing the largest and most profitable market segments--and that is NOT the people living in the Villages, or in Outer Podunk Montana.
Entertainment (and the arts, in general) also has a history of attracting and employing people who are, for lack of a better term, non-traditional culturally and socially--and so there is an interest in protecting that, as well.
The GoP is engaged in trying to hold back a tsunami with stacked rolls of toilet paper. They will see some short term successes in places, but this will only exacerbate the situation in the larger context and is highly likely to generate downstream consequences that they are not equipped to deal with. While they are a reactionary party, reaction begets a reaction of its own.
Shadenfreude is the word I think we are looking for here. Spite is their only policy. If they get that, then even if they die of covid-19 or fentanyl addiction, they'll pass on with the knowledge that, boy! Did they ever own the libs!
I think Disney's response had less to do with political correctness and more to do with signaling to one of their major consumer groups that they still want their business and so do not discriminate. Duh!
Being a politician who knows nothing about supply and demand and free capitalism, DeSantis had no idea why Disney would not join him in gay bashing.
Maybe, just maybe folks should do a read of the Third Reich in Germany and exactly how they came into power. It was a well thought out plan over several years.
I have no problem seeing Ron DeSantis wearing a Brownshirt,
Is it any wonder that the New Republicans want to talk personality instead of policy? Red meat for them now apparently is a word salad of “woke,” “drag queen,” and “immigrants,” meanwhile avoiding the crux of the governing philosophy which is solidly authoritarian dressed to resemble libertarianism. DeSantis is just hoeing the row that was laid out even before TFG.
Considering Abbot et al's anemic long-term response to that little winter power outage they had down there in the Lone Star a while back, his lack of concern for the warmth and welfare of a bus load of non-citizens is of no surprise and to be completely expected, since he has little of that even for the American citizens of the Great State of Texas.
With Greg and his buds, no reminder is needed that the cruelty is the point, at least when it comes to folks who come from points south of his border. But I'm not sure what the point is in his lack of concern for the southerners living in his own state. Oh. Wait. It would cost serious $$ for Texas utilities to become really dependable in severe winter storms, and they'd have to give up a bit of their "energy independence" to do it. And maybe spending those $$ might mean less $$ for them to contribute to Greg and his crew? And hey, those kind of things... they don't really come along all that often, do they? And they really aren't all that bad. That last little blow...what was it called...Uri? It only cost, what, about 150 or 160 lives? Not much of a price to pay for those utilities' help with keeping the lights on in his administration, eh?
I'd like to say here that the point is that Abbot and his kind are...well I can't say it, not with the words that would be appropriate. Charlie and the B are pretty tolerant about language here. But even they have their limits.
I was thinking yesterday that since Trump I find myself thinking, and even using, what I consider gutter language. Add one more item to his list of trashing every norm in American society.
Perhaps the only thing in this story more disturbing than DeSantis' vengeance/revenge/payback-based political system is the fact that so many ordinary voters, who consider themselves pro-democracy and pro-rule of law, see no problem with it.
Read any tweet that calls out DeSantis' retaliation against businesses, cities, and individuals that open their mouths against his policies as the proto-authoritarianism it is, and you'll see a torrent of comments below them--not all of them from Republicans--either pooh-poohing the notion, or making vaguely menacing taunts toward the tweeter as to what a "President DeSantis" will do to them (and of course, the tweeter will "deserve" it).
There's a couple things going on here.
One--Although voters have more or less gotten over Donald Trump, a critical number of them haven't stopped despising the other party enough to latch onto somebody (anybody) who promises to smite them and make their voters cry.
That person, for the time being, is DeSantis--and until he proves to be an election-loser, they will justify any fool thing he does, up to and including open tyranny. (As opposed to the soft, Orbanist quasi-tyranny he appears to be attempting to build in Florida.)
Two--Although Donald Trump is likely an indicted man walking, he has awakened and underlined a zeitgeist of vengeance/revenge/payback among the populace. To a substantial chunk of America, vengeance, retalitation, gloating over the ruined cities of your enemies (etc.) is all that matters in politics.
You see it in behavior beyond mere politics, from Elon Musk to celebrity nonsense. Too many of us are too bored and narcissistic not to fall into it.
I understand that ideological labels are always oversimplifications, but the word "populist" has a long and honorable pedigree in American politics. We should never forget that there are really "left populists" and "right populists" today. Granted, the historic populist movement had elements of both, but that's always the case with political parties in our constitutional democracy. The two labels are much more clearly distinguished at present. Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro are right populists; Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are left populists. Let's not confuse the two camps.
Great piece by Mona on immigration -- again. She's right on so many points. In a sense, she's stating the obvious: immigration policy isn't rocket science, other countries have solved it and we're the laggards. But it all bears repeating until the responsible -- and even more, the irresponsible -- people in Washington start listening.
Prediction: The more our future "elected leaders" behave and look like Trump, DeSantis, Lake & Co., the more likely the preferred course of regime change will be sudden death. They've brought it on themselves, in large part thanks to the dissemination of so many military-style weapons as though they were so much bubblegum. That, and they're innate hatred of "others."
As a modest student of history, I keep wondering how many people in Texas (including Mr. Abbott) who complain about their location, and the number of migrants there, realize that we took Texas away from Mexico (see: Annexation of Texas, 1845). Maybe the migrants have a justification to come to where the land once was rightfully theirs. Sending them elsewhere and claiming that our own territorial expansion remains inviolable seems at least a wee tad contradictory in that light.
Most of today's migrants apparently aren't from Mexico. Even if they were, your argument misses a fundamental question: Why do they all want so much to be on the U.S. side of the border and not on the Mexican side? It isn't just a geographical region they're seeking. They want to live under one government rather than another -- a plain fact routinely ignored by the people who say that borders are artificial and that enforcing them is unjust.
That fact would also tend to support the idea of extending the U.S. border farther south.
Your point is exactly why people argue that borders are artificial and unjust.
No one chooses their country of birth. What moral right do we have to deny people life in a better society? What moral right does Mexico have to force people to live under their government without consent?
I'm not saying that people should be forced to remain where they were born. But the "borders are artificial " argument tends to assume that the people living on one side of the border did nothing to make it a better place -- that it's all entirely down to the luck of geography.
It also assumes that the other side of the border is permanently a worse place and cannot possibly be made a better place -- and therefore the only solution is that everyone should go to the places that are now better places. But the places that are now better places simply cannot accommodate all the people who want to live there.
Just a quick comment about the claim that borders are artificial, I recall some documentary about the US before the Civil War, someone recounting how they crossed over the Ohio River from Cincinatti to Kentucky and how different it felt to be in a slave state, after being in a free state. The land isn't much different. It's the governance the people live under that made it different. Same with San Diego County and Tia Juana.
Well, then the question becomes: how far south should we feel the need to go? Perhaps east or west as well? (We'll leave Canada alone. They seem to do just fine without us.) The immigration issue is neither black nor white by definition. One can be in favor of a better system but also more humanity in the process.
I see it less as a matter of governance or geography -- our system is dysfunctional enough now to scare off anyone, especially with the possibility of Trump II out there -- and more to do with the eternal quest for freedom and opportunity. Think of what it takes to choose to leave one's own homeland, where family and friends are, where all of one's accumulated possessions and life accomplishments are. And then risking that life on mere hope that the future elsewhere will be better or safer -- no promises, no guarantees. It is a hell of a thing to vote with your feet, or feel the need to do so. It is not for the faint of heart.
I'll stand on my observation that there is no small amount of hypocrisy in those who complain the loudest about the immigration issue often being those whose forefathers took for them the land that they now proudly call their own. Texas is merely one good example thereof. Once we've come to terms with that, Indian tribes would like our attention as well.
You're right about the hypocrisy. But it's odd that some of the people who say it was a terrible crime for the U.S. to take that land from Mexico actually want to live under the U.S. government and not the Mexican government.
Mexican citizens in the lands of the Mexican Cession had the right to choose which citizenship they wanted under the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo.
Our obligation to treat living people here and now with respect and compassion and to fix our broken immigration system is unquestionable on its own merits, and it's neither strengthened nor weakened by tendentious arguments about historical events, although they can provide a welcome distraction for the people who want to do nothing.
I see it being less about an agenda and more about acknowledging the precedents that history sets for the future. The citizenship issue you cite doesn't apply to those who don't get to make the same choices now. But maybe there are some useful ideas in there for those who seek both to improve the system and establish a more humane way of dealing with fellow human beings.
History matters, but mostly on its own terms, not adulterated by the views and ideologies of later times projected back onto it.
From the dawn of human civilization until the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, Right of Conquest was accepted as a legitimate method to change borders under International Law. Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Turkey may have taken issue with my calling 1919 the end date, but my response would be that those border changes were approved multilaterally by the Paris Peace Conference, as all internationally recognized frontier changes have been ever since. International Law changed permanently (we hope) in 1919, and neither the Mexican War nor any other war prior to the First World War has anything to teach us about modern war (including the current one in Ukraine), let alone a subject as unconnected as immigration policy. Immigration policy can stand on its own.
Thx for the info on international law. I didn't know the "right of conquest" was delegtimized at Versailles. So now borders are approved by a multilateral conference?
[neither the Mexican War nor any other war prior to the First World War has anything to teach us about modern war (including the current one in Ukraine)]
I can't go along with that. There are plenty of historical conflicts we can still draw lessons from. Our own civil war, where the larger nation with more men and a bigger economy eventually ground down a smaller nation with better generals and many early battlefield victories comes to mind. Fortunately we in the west seem to be heeding that lesson as we do much more to support Ukraine and weaken Russia than anyone external did in the Civil War for the South (a good thing, too).
I would dispute that the the Confederacy had better generals. Better tacticians, perhaps, but strategically, Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Meade, and their immediate subordinates didn't just overwhelm Lee and company -- they outgeneraled them, too.
I'd stand by the point that wars prior to WWI have relatively little to teach us too, but that's irrelevant to my main point: that the Mexican War has NOTHING to teach us about immigration policy.
Fair point. I'm just noting that the people who seem to complain the loudest about the "immigrant invasion" there are, from my experience, almost always those of immigrant heritage themselves, whose white forefathers took advantage of the American annexation. We'll leave for another day the debate about how many among those forefathers came into the United States from European countries, via Ellis Island and elsewhere, not necessarily with appropriate documentation.
To DeSantis' anti-capitalist actions you can add his imperial edict that companies cannot require employees or customers to have been vaccinated. Competition is supposed to be at the heart of free enterprise. Companies that require vaccinations should be able to compete against companies that don't. Both types of companies would appeal to some customers. That's competition.
You got it right with your last two word. More than Trump, who is an anarchist at heart, DeSantis is a fascist. He overrules the legislature. He only wants certain people to vote. He is against a diverse society, especially the LGBTQ community. He wants education to be taught his way, lies, from kindergarten through college. If he is the Republican Party's next man up then they will be demonstrating how they really don't care much for democracy
It is also a clear violation of the first amendment. Makes me wonder what damages a company might be able to sue Florida for. Companies after all do these training classes for a reason, and at the end of the day, that reason is money. Attracting and retaining talent, keeping customers happy, etc. Prevented from doing so by an unconstitutional state law...damages.
That Ben Shapiro doesn’t know that in this instance “politics” is plural (a certain set of beliefs) means he’s even dumber than I thought.
Ben Shapiro's would-be toughguy rhetoric is meant to do one thing and one thing only: distract from the fact that he kneels before anti-Semites and neo-Nazis because he's too weak, cowardly and afraid to stand up to them.
I look at Ben Shapiro, and my thought is "Karma will find you, little boy...because she always does". A few years ago, Ben Shapiro said younger voters found Donald Trump "mean and nasty", and that would ultimately turn them away. Turns out, he was right. In a delicious irony, Shapiro himself has turned "mean and nasty"...and it is really not going to age well. Ben Shapiro puts out a lot of nastiness and negativity--the Lizzo episode (he showed he may have a certain level of bias against African Americans)...the nastiness he spews at Americans of a gay persuasion...I could go on, but I won't. All I will say is that he should check his karmic balance, since the lady got in some wicked responses over the years--Terry Dolan and how he paid for his years of gay bashing in right wing politics...Rush Limbaugh, who spent decades spewing noxious gas, only to ultimately die from noxious gas...I could go on, but I won't.
Since Ben Shapiro seems to like clichés, here's one for him--"You reap what you sow, b*tch"...
On immigration- the GOP clearly wants the problem vastly more than they want the solution. In my industry we need 133K vet techs in the next 8 or so years. In 8 years, statistically, we will ALSO have 100% turnover. If we don't have the kids of the folks crossing the borders coming to work in our vet hospitals at all levels 75MM pets will go unseen. Given that most of the agents of bioterrorism are diseases with an animal host...this is an issue.
Human health is just as bad.
But solving this would require governing. To do that, the GOP would need to go back to pretending to care.
Corporations are soulless entities that do whatever they think is best for this quarter and (maybe) the next quarter... far thinking corporations look ahead maybe a year. They respond to market pressures--expressed either through sales or through public media (be it social or other).
Moreso than any other human or human entity, they act out of rationalized self-interest, based upon the data available to them (not always well or competently, of course).
While they do a lot to try and shape public perception of themselves (branding, marketing, etc), like most institutions that are dependent upon people choosing to pay them money, they are slaves to the market.
They are neither woke nor reactionary.. nor actually much of anything politically (other than pro-policies that will benefit them--and they don't care which side they come from).
Disney is in the entertainment business, which is even more fickle and public dependent than a lot of other businesses. Buying Disney is purely elective. It isn't like buying food or gas or physical products that you need to live or work. Entertainment tends to be far more aware of and far more concerned with pleasing the largest and most profitable market segments--and that is NOT the people living in the Villages, or in Outer Podunk Montana.
Entertainment (and the arts, in general) also has a history of attracting and employing people who are, for lack of a better term, non-traditional culturally and socially--and so there is an interest in protecting that, as well.
The GoP is engaged in trying to hold back a tsunami with stacked rolls of toilet paper. They will see some short term successes in places, but this will only exacerbate the situation in the larger context and is highly likely to generate downstream consequences that they are not equipped to deal with. While they are a reactionary party, reaction begets a reaction of its own.
Shadenfreude is the word I think we are looking for here. Spite is their only policy. If they get that, then even if they die of covid-19 or fentanyl addiction, they'll pass on with the knowledge that, boy! Did they ever own the libs!
I think Disney's response had less to do with political correctness and more to do with signaling to one of their major consumer groups that they still want their business and so do not discriminate. Duh!
Being a politician who knows nothing about supply and demand and free capitalism, DeSantis had no idea why Disney would not join him in gay bashing.
Maybe, just maybe folks should do a read of the Third Reich in Germany and exactly how they came into power. It was a well thought out plan over several years.
I have no problem seeing Ron DeSantis wearing a Brownshirt,
with his minions destroying the
Nation and government, one brick
of our Constitution at a time.
Is it any wonder that the New Republicans want to talk personality instead of policy? Red meat for them now apparently is a word salad of “woke,” “drag queen,” and “immigrants,” meanwhile avoiding the crux of the governing philosophy which is solidly authoritarian dressed to resemble libertarianism. DeSantis is just hoeing the row that was laid out even before TFG.
Considering Abbot et al's anemic long-term response to that little winter power outage they had down there in the Lone Star a while back, his lack of concern for the warmth and welfare of a bus load of non-citizens is of no surprise and to be completely expected, since he has little of that even for the American citizens of the Great State of Texas.
With Greg and his buds, no reminder is needed that the cruelty is the point, at least when it comes to folks who come from points south of his border. But I'm not sure what the point is in his lack of concern for the southerners living in his own state. Oh. Wait. It would cost serious $$ for Texas utilities to become really dependable in severe winter storms, and they'd have to give up a bit of their "energy independence" to do it. And maybe spending those $$ might mean less $$ for them to contribute to Greg and his crew? And hey, those kind of things... they don't really come along all that often, do they? And they really aren't all that bad. That last little blow...what was it called...Uri? It only cost, what, about 150 or 160 lives? Not much of a price to pay for those utilities' help with keeping the lights on in his administration, eh?
I'd like to say here that the point is that Abbot and his kind are...well I can't say it, not with the words that would be appropriate. Charlie and the B are pretty tolerant about language here. But even they have their limits.
To fix their grid, they would have to unfree themselves from their no state income taxes for individuals and corporations brand.
And that ain't happenin'. No matter how cold it gets.
I like it when Charlie gets angry enough to swear. It's like driving with my little sweet old greataunt when someone cuts her off in traffic. :D
😂 😂
I was thinking yesterday that since Trump I find myself thinking, and even using, what I consider gutter language. Add one more item to his list of trashing every norm in American society.
:-D !!
Perhaps the only thing in this story more disturbing than DeSantis' vengeance/revenge/payback-based political system is the fact that so many ordinary voters, who consider themselves pro-democracy and pro-rule of law, see no problem with it.
Read any tweet that calls out DeSantis' retaliation against businesses, cities, and individuals that open their mouths against his policies as the proto-authoritarianism it is, and you'll see a torrent of comments below them--not all of them from Republicans--either pooh-poohing the notion, or making vaguely menacing taunts toward the tweeter as to what a "President DeSantis" will do to them (and of course, the tweeter will "deserve" it).
There's a couple things going on here.
One--Although voters have more or less gotten over Donald Trump, a critical number of them haven't stopped despising the other party enough to latch onto somebody (anybody) who promises to smite them and make their voters cry.
That person, for the time being, is DeSantis--and until he proves to be an election-loser, they will justify any fool thing he does, up to and including open tyranny. (As opposed to the soft, Orbanist quasi-tyranny he appears to be attempting to build in Florida.)
Two--Although Donald Trump is likely an indicted man walking, he has awakened and underlined a zeitgeist of vengeance/revenge/payback among the populace. To a substantial chunk of America, vengeance, retalitation, gloating over the ruined cities of your enemies (etc.) is all that matters in politics.
You see it in behavior beyond mere politics, from Elon Musk to celebrity nonsense. Too many of us are too bored and narcissistic not to fall into it.
As Jesus said, " Do unto the 'others' as (you imagine) they have done unto you."
I understand that ideological labels are always oversimplifications, but the word "populist" has a long and honorable pedigree in American politics. We should never forget that there are really "left populists" and "right populists" today. Granted, the historic populist movement had elements of both, but that's always the case with political parties in our constitutional democracy. The two labels are much more clearly distinguished at present. Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro are right populists; Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are left populists. Let's not confuse the two camps.
Populist used to be an honorable word/pedigree. Like everything else he touched, Trump turned into something vile.
Great piece by Mona on immigration -- again. She's right on so many points. In a sense, she's stating the obvious: immigration policy isn't rocket science, other countries have solved it and we're the laggards. But it all bears repeating until the responsible -- and even more, the irresponsible -- people in Washington start listening.
Prediction: The more our future "elected leaders" behave and look like Trump, DeSantis, Lake & Co., the more likely the preferred course of regime change will be sudden death. They've brought it on themselves, in large part thanks to the dissemination of so many military-style weapons as though they were so much bubblegum. That, and they're innate hatred of "others."
As a modest student of history, I keep wondering how many people in Texas (including Mr. Abbott) who complain about their location, and the number of migrants there, realize that we took Texas away from Mexico (see: Annexation of Texas, 1845). Maybe the migrants have a justification to come to where the land once was rightfully theirs. Sending them elsewhere and claiming that our own territorial expansion remains inviolable seems at least a wee tad contradictory in that light.
Most of today's migrants apparently aren't from Mexico. Even if they were, your argument misses a fundamental question: Why do they all want so much to be on the U.S. side of the border and not on the Mexican side? It isn't just a geographical region they're seeking. They want to live under one government rather than another -- a plain fact routinely ignored by the people who say that borders are artificial and that enforcing them is unjust.
That fact would also tend to support the idea of extending the U.S. border farther south.
Your point is exactly why people argue that borders are artificial and unjust.
No one chooses their country of birth. What moral right do we have to deny people life in a better society? What moral right does Mexico have to force people to live under their government without consent?
I'm not saying that people should be forced to remain where they were born. But the "borders are artificial " argument tends to assume that the people living on one side of the border did nothing to make it a better place -- that it's all entirely down to the luck of geography.
It also assumes that the other side of the border is permanently a worse place and cannot possibly be made a better place -- and therefore the only solution is that everyone should go to the places that are now better places. But the places that are now better places simply cannot accommodate all the people who want to live there.
Just a quick comment about the claim that borders are artificial, I recall some documentary about the US before the Civil War, someone recounting how they crossed over the Ohio River from Cincinatti to Kentucky and how different it felt to be in a slave state, after being in a free state. The land isn't much different. It's the governance the people live under that made it different. Same with San Diego County and Tia Juana.
And when some of our government's policies (ex NAFTA) are what helped make their country a worse place, where and to whom do those immigrants turn?
Well, then the question becomes: how far south should we feel the need to go? Perhaps east or west as well? (We'll leave Canada alone. They seem to do just fine without us.) The immigration issue is neither black nor white by definition. One can be in favor of a better system but also more humanity in the process.
I see it less as a matter of governance or geography -- our system is dysfunctional enough now to scare off anyone, especially with the possibility of Trump II out there -- and more to do with the eternal quest for freedom and opportunity. Think of what it takes to choose to leave one's own homeland, where family and friends are, where all of one's accumulated possessions and life accomplishments are. And then risking that life on mere hope that the future elsewhere will be better or safer -- no promises, no guarantees. It is a hell of a thing to vote with your feet, or feel the need to do so. It is not for the faint of heart.
I'll stand on my observation that there is no small amount of hypocrisy in those who complain the loudest about the immigration issue often being those whose forefathers took for them the land that they now proudly call their own. Texas is merely one good example thereof. Once we've come to terms with that, Indian tribes would like our attention as well.
You're right about the hypocrisy. But it's odd that some of the people who say it was a terrible crime for the U.S. to take that land from Mexico actually want to live under the U.S. government and not the Mexican government.
If we push far enough south, the border wall becomes a lot cheaper.
Mexican citizens in the lands of the Mexican Cession had the right to choose which citizenship they wanted under the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo.
Our obligation to treat living people here and now with respect and compassion and to fix our broken immigration system is unquestionable on its own merits, and it's neither strengthened nor weakened by tendentious arguments about historical events, although they can provide a welcome distraction for the people who want to do nothing.
I see it being less about an agenda and more about acknowledging the precedents that history sets for the future. The citizenship issue you cite doesn't apply to those who don't get to make the same choices now. But maybe there are some useful ideas in there for those who seek both to improve the system and establish a more humane way of dealing with fellow human beings.
History matters, but mostly on its own terms, not adulterated by the views and ideologies of later times projected back onto it.
From the dawn of human civilization until the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, Right of Conquest was accepted as a legitimate method to change borders under International Law. Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Turkey may have taken issue with my calling 1919 the end date, but my response would be that those border changes were approved multilaterally by the Paris Peace Conference, as all internationally recognized frontier changes have been ever since. International Law changed permanently (we hope) in 1919, and neither the Mexican War nor any other war prior to the First World War has anything to teach us about modern war (including the current one in Ukraine), let alone a subject as unconnected as immigration policy. Immigration policy can stand on its own.
Thx for the info on international law. I didn't know the "right of conquest" was delegtimized at Versailles. So now borders are approved by a multilateral conference?
[neither the Mexican War nor any other war prior to the First World War has anything to teach us about modern war (including the current one in Ukraine)]
I can't go along with that. There are plenty of historical conflicts we can still draw lessons from. Our own civil war, where the larger nation with more men and a bigger economy eventually ground down a smaller nation with better generals and many early battlefield victories comes to mind. Fortunately we in the west seem to be heeding that lesson as we do much more to support Ukraine and weaken Russia than anyone external did in the Civil War for the South (a good thing, too).
I would dispute that the the Confederacy had better generals. Better tacticians, perhaps, but strategically, Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Meade, and their immediate subordinates didn't just overwhelm Lee and company -- they outgeneraled them, too.
I'd stand by the point that wars prior to WWI have relatively little to teach us too, but that's irrelevant to my main point: that the Mexican War has NOTHING to teach us about immigration policy.
I should have said better generals at the start.
As for wars prior to WWI, I'm still not buying, but I'll definitely grant you the point about immigration policy.
Not sure we can just give Mexico 'rightfully' status on land ownership. Mexico 'rightfully' got it from Spain who 'rightfully' got it from...?
Tongue in cheek to an extent, but who should own what chunk of land is a rabbit hole with very few ends, and even fewer practical ramifications.
Agree. When I see the "You are on Indian land" signs, I want to say, "You are on woolly mammoth land."
Fair point. I'm just noting that the people who seem to complain the loudest about the "immigrant invasion" there are, from my experience, almost always those of immigrant heritage themselves, whose white forefathers took advantage of the American annexation. We'll leave for another day the debate about how many among those forefathers came into the United States from European countries, via Ellis Island and elsewhere, not necessarily with appropriate documentation.
To DeSantis' anti-capitalist actions you can add his imperial edict that companies cannot require employees or customers to have been vaccinated. Competition is supposed to be at the heart of free enterprise. Companies that require vaccinations should be able to compete against companies that don't. Both types of companies would appeal to some customers. That's competition.
You got it right with your last two word. More than Trump, who is an anarchist at heart, DeSantis is a fascist. He overrules the legislature. He only wants certain people to vote. He is against a diverse society, especially the LGBTQ community. He wants education to be taught his way, lies, from kindergarten through college. If he is the Republican Party's next man up then they will be demonstrating how they really don't care much for democracy
It is also a clear violation of the first amendment. Makes me wonder what damages a company might be able to sue Florida for. Companies after all do these training classes for a reason, and at the end of the day, that reason is money. Attracting and retaining talent, keeping customers happy, etc. Prevented from doing so by an unconstitutional state law...damages.