> All they care about is the "Mexicans", abortion, guns, which bathroom a tiny number of people use, etc.,
You understand that people on both sides of the fence were acting hysterically about these things?
Just like the right lets their imagination run wild about the threat of terrorism, the left lets their imagination run wild about the threat of assault rifles. Both are negligible but highly visible. Almost all voters are silly; to me, it doesn't seem to follow American party lines much.
> The same exact things were said of the Italians, Jews, Poles, Irish and many others that poured into the US.
First off, they were right about all these groups in one way or another. Italians were responsible for a huge and disproportionate fraction of east coast crime for decades, Jews are represented in politics at around an order of magnitude higher than their fraction of the population, polish communities (just like Poland) have huge problems with crime and drug abuse, and Irish communities are still getting over problems with poverty, alcoholism, and church abuses. The complaints levied against these groups were entirely correct, and these groups did culturally subsume large areas, as predicted. I say this as a descendent of 3 of those 4 groups.
Second off, you can't really compare hyper-indoctrinated muslims to the Italians. Catholicism is positively benign compared to any of the popular Islamic sects. Just because something vaguely similar happened before doesn't mean it's going to happen exactly the same way again.
> Entirely inexplicably, the country thrived and continues to do so.
Compared to what? I suspect if the Irish hadn't shitted up the east coast for decades America could be a lot farther ahead. (Again, saying this as someone who is substantially Irish.) Yes, we turned out OK, and the shitty culture that Irish and Polish people brought over with them has mostly been diluted to impotency, but who knows what the damage was, or how it's going to go down with an even shittier and more viral culture. At least the Irish didn't make a habit of stoning people to death.
This is a good example of how relatively small populations can have huge cultural effects.
Another example is how migrants from Islamic countries can carry out terrorist attacks and completely change European and American culture for the worse. The loss of American travel culture post 9/11 is tragic, and I can't think of a better word to describe it than "erasure".
Paris is now building a wall around the Eiffel Tower, thanks entirely to recent massacres committed by strongly religious immigrants for religious reasons.
Heavily Muslim neighborhoods in the U.K. have volunteer "sharia police" that harass women for dressing "immodestly".
Swedish officials removed traditional Christmas displays from Muslim areas, and then blamed the structural integrity of lamp posts (yes, really) when asked why.
Cultural erasure doesn't take a huge influx of people; it just takes a small population with aggressively viral cultural memes and a host culture with insufficient memetic defenses.
But, of course, I must be a racist for preferring European culture over throwing gays off buildings, women being unable to drive or show their faces, etc. etc.
Because Europe is liberal, secular, literate, and (consequently) scientifically, technologically, and economically advanced. Africa is none of those things. Whatever your ideals about equality are, you cannot deny that there is something about Africans, whether it's their cultures or their religions or their DNA or some other factor. (In case you reflexively want to accuse me of racism for that last possible cause, if you'd like I can break out the list of high-quality scientific publications demonstrating that intelligence and certain measurable behaviors have been demonstrated to be strongly heritable and that those genes differ substantially across geographically separated populations.)
No matter the cause, Europe can not hope to sustain its preeminence in these matters if it gets blasted full of people who are culturally antithetical to them. You can't hope to have a functioning scientific community if certain ascientific beliefs are legally mandated, for example.
The simplest explanation for why America is successful in the exact same way as Europe is that all the people who colonized North America come from Europe, and share whatever European je ne sais quoi is conducive to that success, whether it's cultural, religious, genetic, or any other heritable condition.
I'm fairly sure this post will be shocking to you and you'll react angrily to it, but I ask you to just take a moment to consider where you think my argument falls apart factually rather than just automatically labelling it as "colonialist" or "xenophobic" or something and then completely ignoring its contents. The fact of the matter is that Africa really sucks and is really backwards, whereas Europe doesn't and isn't, and when people move somewhere they take a little bit of where they came from with them. Do you really think America would be the same, in any respect, as it is today if it was never settled by Europeans?
No, which is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. "Free movement", to me, means that you are free to travel wherever you'd like on your own dime. It doesn't mean that you get to show up somewhere and demand citizenship, housing, medical care, or other free stuff. But obviously some people conflate these things.
I am, by most metrics, an ardent globalist; I advocate absolute free trade and absolute free movement. However, it's not very hard to recognize that many people's definition of globalism effectively includes such things as forced immigration, cultural erasure, and overburdening of welfare states, which are conducive to increased conflict rather than increased cooperation.
I can't imagine how people have such an incorrect view of how insurance works.
No, car insurance is not you subsidizing other people. Car insurance is you paying in proportion to your own estimated risk. That means if your expected costs are 5x higher (nicer car, young driver, etc.) you pay 5x more.
Medical insurance in the US emphatically does not work this way. More expensive people don't pay proportionately more than cheap people, meaning that the expensive people are being subsizidized. You should be alarmed at the fact that you apparently fundamentally misunderstood the way insurance works in an open market, or what the ACA is. The only part of the ACA that is even reminiscent of car insurance is the individual mandate, which is actually way worse than car insurance because you don't need to buy car insurance just for being alive. You only need car insurance if you drive on public roads.
It's too bad that your friend has a disease, but I'd rather have them pay for it than pass the bill off to a bunch of innocent people who aren't sick. If you choose to have tunnel vision and focus on health alone, it's worth noting that the second-order effects of making other people's lives more expensive will also include worsened health from poorer nutrition, increased stress, less frequent medical consultation, etc.
While I think health insurance shouldn't be attached to employers, I don't really have an objection to insurance companies using genetic testing. This is certainly an unpopular opinion here, but as someone who believes that medical care is a service, not a right: I think it's unfair to force people to subsidize the healthcare of other people, regardless of the mechanism used.
When you have car insurance, the insurance companies are allowed to use statistical techniques to predict how much you are going to cost them. Competition between insurance companies involves treading the line between beating the price of other insurance companies while charging slightly more than the customer is expected to cost.
If we let health insurance companies do this, then yes, healthcare would get substantially more expensive for very risky/unhealthy people. Of course, it would also get drastically less expensive for healthy people. From a moral perspective, I think this is preferable, but obviously not everyone will agree.
Now, from a utilitarian perspective, these two possibilities seem roughly equivalent at first glance. However, I'd argue that the latter (where insurance companies are allowed to set prices like car insurance) has a number of (significant) positive side effects.
The largest side effect is that it incentivizes customer health improvement. A lot of health risks, including at least the top 6 causes of death worldwide (heart disease, stroke, lung infections, COPD, respiratory cancers, diabetes) can be substantially mitigated by personal choices such as diet and exercise. If you had to pay an extra $200/mo to your insurance company because you were morbidly obese, one would expect that this would encourage a lot of people to start eating better. Let the market do the heavy lifting! This is exactly the sort of thing that the market excels at. Society benefits from healthier people, but in almost all countries rich enough to have insurance (including the US and nations with socialized healthcare), there is no mechanism to incentivize this! An actual insurance market would do the job.
Many would argue that IP itself is inherently anti-capitalistic, because it imposes artificial scarcity where it would not otherwise exist and, relatedly, because IP "theft" doesn't actually deprive the "victim" of a scarce resource they created or purchased. Ideas have (effectively) zero marginal reproduction cost.
That's not to say there aren't some good arguments for IP, but they sort of inherently have a planned-economy bent.
I recommend that everyone use an extended-length PIN for your phone. Both Android and iPhone support it. Mine is 12 digits; a bit of extra time, but vastly more difficult to brute-force or shoulder-surf.
You realize there's actually a severe gender imbalance in who chooses to go into STEM fields in college, right?
Privige has nothing to do with it; for whatever reasons, women don't actually want to study tech fields. I actually find it pretty ridiculous and patronizing that people like you insist that there's something wrong with the world because women don't make the career choices you think they ought to.
This approach may work (I say "may" because most of the time it's not actually backed up by hard evidence free of confounding variables), but it's also lazy; there are vastly more accurate predictors of a priori success rate than race or gender. It's especially lazy for organizations that have access to those more accurate predictors, like universities, to use race and gender instead.
More accurate predictors include parental education, family wealth, social connections, etc. Mostly what people would describe as social class.
It's interesting that in certain subcultures, including a large portion of the tech community, things that are non-racial are now considered racist. Not only do you have to be "racially aware", as they say, but you have to be racially aware in the right way. Being "colorblind" isn't enough anymore. Even the emoticons have to express race!
Perhaps predictably, this has backfired and will continue to backfire quite spectacularly; it turns out that when you force people to start thinking along racial lines, they might not end up with the exact same ideas about race that you have. I suspect this may be a large contributing factor behind the recent resurgence of ethno-nationalism (see the Alt Right et al.).
The ADA is an example of a regulation that's entirely well-intentioned, but has tremendous second-order costs to society that very plausibly outweigh any benefit it's ever provided.
Hopefully this serves as a lesson. Next time we hear a "common sense" law proposed, take a few minutes to think about how people are going to abuse it, or what market mechanisms it's going to break, or how much it's actually going to cost society when you multiply the cost it introduces by the number of people it hurts.
Now, thanks to excessively litigious hard of hearing people at Gaulladet University and the ADA, society is objectively worse off. No one has benefitted from this action, except perhaps a few spiteful people with the attitude "If I can't have it, no one can." It truly disgusts me.
Stating that Germany only exists for the sake of Israel is controversial, however. (At least, I hope it is! I hope most Germans have enough self-interest to dislike the idea of being a vassal state.)
> Claiming that European politicians give a shit (his words) about their citizens is not 'criticizing' anything. It's just hate speech against politicians
This is probably the strongest invocation of Poe's law I've seen in the last few years.
The whole "if you support Europe in any respect, you must be a white supremacist" meme is one of the most inane things I've heard in a long time. Europe isn't all white, and hundreds of millions of white people aren't in Europe. You've made a lazy attack that doesn't actually address what I said.
You understand that people on both sides of the fence were acting hysterically about these things?
Just like the right lets their imagination run wild about the threat of terrorism, the left lets their imagination run wild about the threat of assault rifles. Both are negligible but highly visible. Almost all voters are silly; to me, it doesn't seem to follow American party lines much.