Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law

This also has yet another definition of wokeness, but this won't stop left wingers continuing to pretend that none of its critics can define wokeness.

Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law

"Liberals control institutions because they care more about politics, a disparity that grew larger around 2016. This makes attempts to use government (i.e., bureaucracy!) to take back the culture unlikely to succeed, at least in the short term.

What should conservatives do, then? I’m talking about the anti-woke portion of conservatism, which increasingly seems to be the most animated part of the movement. This post is not meant to be advice for gun people, abortion people, or low tax people; those parts of the right have figured out how to have influence and are doing relatively well.

The good news is that there can be an anti-wokeness agenda, just as easily as there is a low tax agenda and a pro-gun rights agenda. 

People have generally misunderstood wokeness as a purely cultural phenomenon. It does have a cultural component, of course, but it is important to also understand wokeness as something that has been law in the United States for the last half century.  

The triumph of this ideology over the last 10 years in public discourse is simply culture catching up to law...

I sympathize with critiques of “cancel culture” (or “PC” or “Cultural Marxism” or “wokeness” or whatever you want to call it). Yet it’s clear to me that the political movement devoted to fighting this ideological matrix is quite short on policy ideas.

This critique has been made mostly by leftists, with one amusing chart showing that, while the Democrats were passing the biggest stimulus bill in history, Fox News gave more airtime to the emasculation of Mr. Potato Head. The “cancelling” of Dr. Seuss led to a similarly hysterical reaction. 

If the left is going on about healthcare, for example, it’s usually because they want some new bill or policy. But it was difficult to see what those talking about Dr. Seuss or Mr. Potato Head actually wanted...

You have a liberal pundit asking a conservative pundit whether those on his side have any plans or ideas regarding how to deal with the animating issue in their party. The conservative pundit responds “no, we really don’t have any ideas, and when I asked a Republican Senator whether he actually knew what to do, he admitted that he really doesn't. And it makes sense because his voters don’t really care either but want someone to say the right words.” 

Before proceeding, it is important to clarify what wokeness actually is. I’d argue it has 3 components:

1) A belief that any disparities in outcomes favoring whites over non-whites or men over women are caused by discrimination (Sometimes wokeness cares about other disparities too, like fat/nonfat, but those are given less attention. I’m putting aside LGBT issues, which seem to be at an earlier stage of wokeness in which the left is still mostly fighting battles regarding explicit differences in treatment rather than disparate outcomes, although the latter does get attention sometimes.) 

2) The speech of those who would argue against 1 needs to be restricted in the interest of overcoming such disparities, and the safety and emotional well-being of the victimized group in question.  

3) Bureaucracies are needed that reflect the beliefs in 1 and 2, working to overcome disparities and managing speech and social relations.Each of these things can be traced to law. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned discrimination based on race and gender. While most at the time thought this would simply remove explicit discrimination, and many of the proponents of the bill made that promise, courts and regulators expanded the concept of “non-discrimination” to mean almost anything that advantages one group over another. An important watershed was the decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), in which the Supreme Court ruled that intelligence tests, because they were not shown to be directly related to job performance, could not be used in hiring since blacks scored lower on them, and it did not matter whether there was any intent to discriminate. People act as if “standardized tests are racist if they show disparities” is some kind of new idea, but it’s basically been the law in the United States for 50 years, albeit inconsistently enforced. 

Standardized tests aren’t the only target of the doctrine of disparate impact. In 2019 (under Trump), the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) settled a suit brought against Dollar General for $6 million for doing criminal background checks that disproportionately prevented blacks from being hired. The Obama administration went after schools for disciplining black and white students at different rates, with predictably disastrous results. Police departments, fire departments, and other institutions use “gender normed” tests to stop the EEOC and private applicants from suing them for gender discrimination.  This is of course completely insane; criminals can’t be relied on to go easier on female cops on account of their sex, but somehow we’ve all come to accept affirmative action policing and firefighting (in 2014, a guy who jumped the White House fence overpowered a female Secret Service agent and made it all the way to the East Room).

As the government invented new standards for what counts as “discrimination,” it was forcing more aggressive action on the part of the private sector. Executive Order 11246, signed by President Johnson, required all government contractors and subcontractors who did over $10,000 in government business to "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, color, religion, sex or national origin." The category of “sex” was added in 1967. In 1969, Richard Nixon signed EO 11478, which forced affirmative action onto the federal government itself. 

Across the federal government and among contractors, affirmative action assumed that “but for discrimination, statistical parity among racial and ethnic groups would be the norm.” 

Government interpretation of the Civil Rights Act also invented the concept of the “hostile work environment.” UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh has written about how this has been used to restrict free speech...

harassment law potentially burdens any workplace speech that's offensive to at least one person in the workplace based on [protected characteristics] … even when the speech is political and even when it’s not severe or pervasive enough to itself be actionable.

The rise of HR departments can be directly traced to the federal government’s race and gender policies, which involve direct control of the federal bureaucracy, the “carrot” of government contracts, and the “sticks” of EEOC enforcement and lawsuit threats.  

As Harvard sociologist Frank Dobbin wrote in Inventing Equal Opportunity, it was civil rights law that revolutionized the American workplace. Corporations started to hire full time staff in order to keep track of government mandates, which were vague and could change at any moment. There was a sense of “keeping up with the Joneses,” in which every company and institution had to be more anti-racist and anti-sexist than the next one, leading to more and more absurd diversity trainings and other programs.

To decide whether an institution had discriminated against a protected group, courts and regulators would often use a “best practices” approach, meaning that if your competitors adopted the latest fad coming out of academia or the HR world, you felt the need to do the same. As I discussed in my podcast with Jesse Singal, this could help explain the success of the now-discredited Implicit Association Test, along with more modern innovations like Critical Race Theory-based training...

The authors questioned 279 public, for-profit, and non-profit organizations on what kind of offices they had. One can see the growth of bureaucracy meant to keep up with government regulations over time.   

While fewer than 30% of organizations had an HR office in 1955, by 1985 that number had grown to 70%. Although no organization in the study had an Equal Employment or Affirmative Action Office/r in 1967, 40% did in 1985. Later, the terminology shifted away from “affirmative action” to “diversity and inclusion,” but the ideas are largely the same. 

Here’s a striking chart from Dobbin’s book showing the growth of personnel management, and the feminization of the profession over time. 

Dobbin and Sutton argue that this is a general feature of American law, where the state is selective in enforcement and gives vague guidance that is subject to interpretation, like improving “safety” or fighting “discrimination.” They compare the US to France, where the government is more inclined to just issue direct mandates to businesses, who spend a lot less time and effort on private sector bureaucracy to keep up with how regulators and courts are thinking. The creation of bureaucracy means that it eventually gains its own power base and becomes able to advocate for its own interests. Ironically, if the US had just mandated gender and racial quotas, compliance would’ve been simpler and there would’ve been no need for permanent bureaucracies within each organization with an open-ended mission to stamp out all forms of “discrimination.” 

This may explain something else I’ve always wondered about. The US seems to elect some of the most conservative politicians in the Western world, but has perhaps the wokest institutions. Civil rights law makes all major institutions subject to the will of left-wing bureaucrats, activists, and judges at the expense of normal citizens. 

Thus, we see that every one of the main pillars of wokeness can be traced to new standards created by regulators and courts, mostly in the 1960s and 1970s but updated over time. 

1) The idea that disparities mean discrimination is simply disparate impact.

2) Speech restriction is a hostile work environment.

3) The HR bureaucracy was created to enforce (1) and (2), in a world of vague and consistently shifting government standards to root out discrimination. 

Recent controversy over Critical Race Theory training, like the debate about whether standardized tests are racist, misses the larger point that the entire concept of a full-time bureaucracy having to micromanage people’s work lives is a creation of government. 

In September 2020, Coinbase released a statement saying that it did not want its employees engaging in politics on the job. The media lost its mind, and soon afterwards The New York Times ran a series of articles with the tone of “It’s a nice company you got there, would be a shame if something happened to it.” On November 27, they published a story titled “‘Tokenized’: Inside Black Workers’ Struggles at the King of Crypto Start-Ups.” The piece included accusations like managers “excluded her from meetings and conversations, making her feel invisible” and “managers spoke down to her and her Black colleagues.”

The next month, someone leaked an employee salary database to the NYT showing that women and blacks were paid less at the company. There was no actual evidence of discrimination, as the article admitted, just the “gaps” that often appear significant until they disappear when you control for a few relevant factors. The author went on to encourage regulators and lawyers to go after Coinbase for its “racism” and “sexism.”...

In other words, the NYT found that Coinbase’s pay gaps “looked worse” than those for other companies, while acknowledging that those companies controlled for other factors, making the accusations against Coinbase completely worthless. Nonetheless, they published the story, and brought out the lawyers to tell the company that it might be in deep trouble. 

Before the story on black employees, Coinbase released a statement saying “We don’t care what The New York Times thinks.” Admirable sentiment, but it has to care what the EEOC, judges, and lawyers think, and they get their information from The New York Times! 

Instead of reforming Google, conservatives might think about how to construct an environment in which places that want to be like Coinbase are free to create their own cultures that are politically neutral, or even God forbid, conservative, without fear of government interference. 

The strange thing about disparate impact is that gaps exist almost everywhere. Practically any criterion or test one develops is going to have gaps between racial groups and the two sexes. In a world where everyone has standards that create a disparate impact, government bureaucrats have a lot of discretion in who they go after. A corporation that stakes out a position as unwoke–or even tries to stake out a neutral position, like Coinbase did–paints a target on its back. Even if you make a real effort to treat women and blacks fairly, under current law you’re always dependent on liberal judges and regulators seeing things your way. 

The “Great Awokening” has been traced to the early 2010s. Since there was no major law passed at the time that coincided with the shift, people have tended to see wokeness as purely cultural. Yet by the time of the Great Awokening, the federal government had been enforcing an extreme form of anti-discrimination law for two generations. Young people have never lived in a world in which every major institution that they interacted with was not assigning them oppressor or victim status and making decisions on that basis. 

If you doubt government can have that much of an effect on culture, consider how we classify people by race. Take the category of “Asian American Pacific Islander.” I don’t think anyone seriously believes that such a thing would exist without federal government race classifications. Yet culturally, it took a while for the concept to take off. Here’s Google Books tracking of the use of the term over time.

Hugh Davis Graham’s book Collision Course discusses how the government came up with its racial classification system. “AAPI” was created in 1977 by the Small Business Administration. Up until 1972, no book in the English language had ever used the term “Asian American Pacific Islander.” There was a slight uptick around the late 1970s, before falling again, with the concept really starting to take off around 1989. We thus see government adopting a term that was practically non-existent, and a slight delay before it comes to have cultural relevance.    

The data end in 2019, but I would bet we’ve seen a major spike in the last year or so. There’s now AAPI Heritage Month (May apparently), and an organization called “Stop AAPI Hate,” which seems to have taken over the media somehow. 

In the book Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American, UC Berkeley sociologist G. Cristina Mora writes that, before government classification, there had been a “consistent empirical finding” that “Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans overwhelmingly considered themselves to be separate groups. They ‘didn’t really identify’ with one another, and they ‘didn’t really know what Hispanic meant!’” While the categories of white, black, and Native American make sense in the context of US history, later arriving groups have had their “official identities” constructed in Washington.   

This demonstrates two points. First, the power of government to shape culture is quite extensive if it can create identities out of thin air. AAPI is a reductio ad absurdum of this idea; I still can’t believe anyone can utter the phrase with a straight face, much less emotionally identify with the category. Second, there can be a delay between a time a policy is enacted and when its cultural influence is felt in full. Like Scott Alexander, I think it’s clear that the proximate cause of the Great Awokening is the rise of the internet and social media. Yet the ground had been set by generations of government bureaucracy making sure that almost every major institution was subject to the rules of disparate impact, hostile work environment, and the HR revolution...

The anti-woke seem unaware that the things they care about have much to do with policy. They treat every cultural outrage as an isolated event, as just another instance of elites deciding to be “woke,” without such decisions being connected to anything government has ever done.   

Getting rid of disparate impact and narrowly defining what “hostile work environment” means or even eliminating the concept entirely will not change the culture overnight. Things have already gone too far, and it took about half a century to go from the color blind ideals most Americans thought they were signing up for with the Civil Rights Act to a world of “birthing parents” and “white fragility.” 

Constantine converted to Christianity, which helped spread the religion across the Roman Empire. Yet the reign of Julian the Pagan couldn’t undo Christianization; just because government helped create or spread a cultural phenomenon does not mean that government can likewise rewind the tape to an earlier point in history. Dobbin points out that when the Reagan administration tried to roll back civil rights enforcement, the business community fought back, as many large corporations had come to be staffed by true believers.  

The hope would be that, just as the original creation of concepts like “disparate impact” and “AAPI” had eventual consequences few would have imagined at the time, reversing past policies could likewise shape the culture in the long term. 

The punchline of all this is that an anti-wokeness agenda would involve, at the very least,

1) Eliminating disparate impact, making the law require evidence of intentional discrimination.

2) Getting rid of the concept of hostile work environment, or defining it in extremely narrow and explicit terms, making sure that it does not restrict political or religious speech.

3) Repealing the executive orders that created and expanded affirmative action among government contractors and the federal workforce.

One reason to be optimistic is that much of this work can be done without having to pass laws, which is almost impossible to do on controversial issues in the current environment, but through the executive branch and the courts. Republican administrations have tried similar things in the past, though usually without making anti-wokeness a real priority.  

In Reagan’s second term, repealing affirmative action requirements for contractors was apparently on the table, but the administration backed down in the face of congressional resistance (see also this). More recently, a Washington Post story reporting that the Trump Administration was thinking about undoing disparate impact was dated January 5, 2021 (yes, “January 5, 2021” as in the day before January 6, 2021). Politics is about priorities, and the Trump administration clearly cared little about this issue, despite the president’s voters being animated by concerns about PC.

In other policy areas over which it had control, the Trump administration largely delivered for its supporters: tougher sanctions on Iran to please the war hawks, lower refugee caps for immigration restrictionists, and undoing Obama era gun regulations.

Yet the disparate impact issue was not even being considered until weeks before Trump left office. The Executive Order banning critical race theory training, similarly coming late in the administration, was only signed because Chris Rufo got on Tucker. Conservatives celebrated, without any of them seeming to notice that Trump could’ve literally signed an EO at any time in his presidency to end affirmative action within the federal government and among all government contractors, not just the most absurd form of “anti-racism training” that exists (ironically, during the 2016 primaries Jeb! bragged about ending affirmative action by EO while governor of Florida, though he was hated by the most strident anti-wokes in his party).

Taking apart disparate impact and repealing affirmative action executive orders should be litmus tests for Republican presidential candidates in the same way taxes and abortion are. 

Why hasn’t this happened already? Probably because the payoff to fighting wokeness is more long term. People seek immediate gratification; you can change the tax rate or how many immigrants you let in immediately, while it’s hard to convince people to have a political fight today in the hopes of having an uncertain effect on culture years or even decades down the line. Moreover, it’s hard work to go to war with an entrenched bureaucracy that has the media completely on its side, especially if you haven’t explained to your voters why doing so is necessary. Nonetheless, I’m convinced there is no short-cut to changing the culture. 

Understanding that wokeness is law may be able to help us get at the question of why conservatives are less motivated to be politically engaged than liberals. It’s not an exaggeration to say that conservative views on race and gender are often of questionable legality in the workplace. Even if conservatives cared as much as liberals, the state is always there with its thumb on the scale, having helped construct bureaucracies inside and outside government that create incentives against expressing certain beliefs or building institutions that are managed in ways that offend left wing officials and activists.

The result has been a kind of learned helplessness. Not only do conservatives feel like they can’t influence institutions, but Republican leaders haven’t even made the argument that they can ever actually change things...

This is one reason I believe QAnon took off. People need to believe victory is possible to be motivated to act. “Trump is secretly controlling everything and will soon execute the all-powerful pedophiles” is at least a theory. For conservatives not crazy enough to believe that, all they get from their leaders is a never ending list of woke outrages without any plausible case of how things might get better."

Links - 21st September 2024 (1 - Left Wing Economics [including Honduras Libertarian Charter City])

Garrison Lovely on X - "Seems like more people should be talking about how a libertarian charter city startup funded by Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, and Peter Thiel is trying to bankrupt Honduras. Próspera is suing Honduras to the tune of $11B (GDP is $32B) and is expected to win, per the NYT 🧵"

TracingWoodgrains on X - "This mindset is as alien to me as it is frustrating.
Situation: some libertarians want to live in line with their ideals. They go to immense trouble to buy some virtually unused plots of land, put in years of effort with the government of a developing country to get permission to build on it, and get to work.
A new "center-left" socialist government comes in. It breaks the contract, aiming to destroy their ability to build a city on property nobody else had cared to use, undoing years of work. What Lovely frames as a city trying to bankrupt Honduras is a group of people doing everything they can to play by the rules, to find a way within the system to live according to their ideals, only to see the rules change ex post facto.   There is an incredibly simple route for the Honduras socialists to avoid losing the lawsuit: they can honor their contract.  Even if you are opposed to the ideals of the people working to build the charter city, you should welcome experimentation. If they fail, they burned their own time, effort, and money to try something, and you get an example of their failure to point to forever after. And if they succeed? You don't have to visit, work with, or pay any attention to their city. Meanwhile, they can provide opportunity to, and investment in, a struggling area.  In the name of anti-colonialism, socialists want the entire world to live by their ideals. In the name of democracy, they want to shut down experiments run by people they disagree with. In the name of fairness, they want to break promises, then cry foul when people try to hold them to those promises.
In a sense, I agree with Lovely here: Interested people should be talking about how socialists in Honduras are trying to shut down a promising experiment ex post facto, and how the charter city is aiming to persist regardless. I'm just not convinced the narrative is anywhere near as flattering for those socialists as he would hope.   Let people experiment. Let them work to build and live in line with their ideals. Let them try.  And for heaven's sake, don't hit them, then cry foul when they hit back."
Governments don't need to honour contracts (at least when the left approves), because power relations means unfavourable agreements can be torn up

Scott Alexander on X - "You can read some of my previous writing about this case at https://astralcodexten.com/p/model-city-monday-9423… , but my impression is you're uncritically buying the Honduran socialists' propaganda version of this conflict.
A more pro-Prospera/balanced version: investment courts are a useful vehicle to prevent countries from inviting international investment, then stealing it as soon as it materializes. Countries voluntarily sign on to these courts to allow them to credibly commit to protecting investors, should those investors pour money into the country.    In 2009, the socialist president was couped by the military after he refused to comply with a Supreme Court order not to try to overstay his term limits. In the process, he had tried to fire the rest of the government when they resigned in protest or wouldn't carry out his orders. The Supreme Court ordered his arrest, and the military couped in sympathy with this. Coups are bad in general but in this case I think just saying "it was a coup so they're evil" is extremely deceptive. Democratic elections were then held (which the socialists boycotted), producing the government that approved Prospera. 78% of Congress approved the law to create charter cities with an explicit guarantee that they would protect it for fifty years. They enshrined this in various bilateral treaties with developed countries doing the investment, and within international investment law, because investors wouldn't invest without this.  Prospera wasn't directly involved in these negotiations, but *after* Honduras had made all these guarantees to other people, they got together and invested about $100 million in building a new city on a greenfield site in Honduras, at the government's invitation. After a few years, the wife of the socialist who got couped was elected, and her government tried to seize the city without compensation. Prospera sued in the exact international court that the agreement which created them said they should sue in. This was one of several (I think 9, but might be wrong) different suits that different people lodged against the socialist government for trying to nationalize their infrastructure projects in Honduras without compensation.  Prospera doesn't actually want the $11 billion, it wants for the socialists to stop trying to seize their stuff and leave them in peace. I believe it has said many times that the second the socialists agree to leave them in peace, they will drop their suit (and I would be disappointed in them if this wasn't true). The socialists have instead announced that they have no obligation to follow any treaties or international law, and they will continue seizing these 9 projects (including Prospera). They refused to send a lawyer to defend themselves in international arbitration, and so the arbitration court ruled against them.  The arbitrators can't actually seize the budget of Honduras, but countries that follow the international treaties that established the international court will now be allowed to take whatever Honduran government money is in their countries in order to pay back their investors.  There are a bunch of people who hate charter cities because they feel "colonialist" and they would rather these countries languish in poverty than touch "polluted" first world market structures. They have dominated the news coverage on these issues. You can reach out to anyone at Prospera and they would be happy to tell you their own side.   Otherwise, I'm not sure what you want - for international investment law not to exist? A world where countries can woo investors by saying "please build infrastructure within our borders, we promise we won't steal it" and then immediately turn around and steal it? Where it's illegal in the court of public opinion to even attempt to create institutions to get around this problem? All this does is ensure that nobody will ever invest in developing countries ever again.  There *are* things in the general vicinity of this that are moral gray areas. If some corrupt dictator promises a foreign country all of his country's oil for cheap, costing the country its most valuable resource, can later governments go back on this? I think international law (and the broader court of public opinion) include some mechanisms for dealing with this, but I admit that if those mechanisms fail it's a really hard problem. But this isn't one of those problems. Prospera hasn't taken any resource except a few hundred acres of previously unoccupied land (which they bought at market price from previous owners). This is the easiest, most slam dunk version of this generally-difficult-sort-of-question you could imagine."

Jeremy Kauffman 🦔 on X - "Lefty journalist: long viral thread on how evil American libertarian billionaires are trying to bankrupt Honduras
Scott Alexander: *incredibly detailed rebuttal of how that's not true*
Journo: I don't have time to respond to this rn"

Scott Alexander on X - "- Re 1: see my last paragraph. I agree that this is a flaw in the concept of contracts. But not allowing someone to make binding contracts is crippling them pretty hard - see the story of Parfit's Hitchhiker. As I understand it, international arbitration law (the system Prospera sued in) already has provisions that "our country only agreed to that deal because of corruption" is a defense against having to honor a deal. AFAIK Honduras did not try to argue that these provisions applied in the arbitration case we're discussing. I don't know enough about international law to know how good or fair or comprehensive these provisions are. If I were designing a system from the ground up, I would have some group that declares countries too corrupt to deal with beforehand, so that investors can avoid any country sanctioned in this way (and be confident that they could deal in good faith with non-sanctioned countries). I don't know to what degree there are already rules like this. But as I said in my last paragraph, I feel like whatever we think about edge cases, this isn't one of them - since Honduras isn't giving Prospera a scarce resource, but rather letting them build something entirely new.
- Re court packing: yes, AFAICT the court was packed. This wasn't done because of charter cities, it was done because of a police reform law, although it later benefitted charter cities too. Court packing is bad and I am against it. But IIUC, this is the third Honduran court packing in twenty years (possibly second, I can't tell if the 1998 and 2001 ones were parts of the same process), and this isn't even counting the socialists' decision to simply ignore the Supreme Court without even bothering to pack it. Nobody cared about any of this until it resulted in charter cities, at which point they decided that this court packing (but not any of the others, and certainly not the currently-in-power socialist party's defiance of their own inconvenient Supreme Court rulings) was outrageous enough to invalidate the charter cities law (but not any other policy by the relevant court?). To put this in proportion, none of the three Honduran court packings even made it into this recent NPR article on court packing trends in Latin America https://npr.org/2024/08/12/nx-s1-5069716/opinion-supreme-court-packing-latin-america . I'm not trying to excuse court packing, but I think a policy of "you can break your word if there was a packed court somewhere upstream of the decision" means that half of Latin American countries can go back on any policy they've made over the past few decades (and maybe the US can break all international commitments it's made post FDR?)
- I don't know who you mean by the other charter city people who are skeptical of Prospera. I know Mark Lutter from CCI was a bit skeptical, because he believes charter cities need to be based around some sort of very convincing economic thesis (eg a port, or a mine, or something else that will bring them profit right away) and can't just coast on a policy of "well, we'll be safer and less corrupt and have better rule-of-law, and if we build it eventually businesses will come". I'm mostly on his side here, but part of why I'm so upset about attempts to appropriate Prospera is that even though they are trying to do things on Hard Mode, they've succeeded surprisingly well and a lot of people and businesses *have* come to them. I still think there are structural obstacles that will prevent them becoming the Singapore v. 2.0 that Mark wants, but the team is good people and they've done good work and they don't deserve this kind of treatment...
I think the economic consensus is mostly reflecting this idea of "high quality investment good, low quality investment neutral to bad".  So is Prospera high quality investment? I think so! The whole point of the charter city is to make a region where it's easier to start businesses without one million different types of corruption and theft that prevent people from starting or hosting businesses in Honduras. I don't think you can argue this corruption and theft doesn't exist - our whole discussion is about the Honduras government trying to steal a business without compensation, in the context of a court case where they're doing this to eight other businesses. This has already caused universities, hospitals, factories, etc to pledge to relocate to Honduras (some of them might have reneged after the socialists started threatening Prospera, I'm not sure, and one university wimped out for PR reasons after journalists wrote too many hit pieces, but there are still a couple of pledges like this). This is totally different from a casino or some extractive oil thing where they're going to send the oil back to the First World and pay the locals pennies on the dollar. But also, I feel like we're missing the point here even defending it at this level. Yes, you can find a couple of fringe economists who say maybe investment isn't good for the economy. Okay, I can find a couple of fringe economists who say maybe health care spending isn't good for health (I had a debate with one a few months ago... imagine that Honduras paid a US pharma company for drugs and vaccines, and then the US pharma company stole the money and refused to provide the treatments. It is not exculpatory AT ALL to say "Well, a few fringe economists believe health care doesn't work, so if you believe them then in some sense I never really hurt anyone". It's not even exculpatory to say "Well, yes, this kind of theft means nobody will ever provide health care to developing countries again, but in some sense if you believe fringe economists, then that's good, because health care spending doesn't work, so we're actually just saving them time and trouble." It's the right of the people making the buying decisions to decide for themselves whether to bet their people's lives on those fringe economists, not the right of other people to use a fringe position to justify thefts that make it impossible for anyone to try acting according to the consensus position ever again!
- I think talking to Prospera would be helpful... Erick Brimen, their CEO, is a pretty compelling guy. He's from Venezuela, he saw what happened there (the socialists ruling Honduras now are allied with Venezuela's Maduro) and he just has a really principled commitment to trying to save other people/countries from the same fate. I think it's hard to listen to his story and still think that the socialists and hit piece writers here are on the side of the angels...
there's a HUGE difference between accepting the risk - or even accepting the risk and not feeling sorry for the victims - versus actively carrying water for the dictators and supporting what they're doing and trying to justify it to your audience."

Simon on X - "That line about the land being "usurped" is insane lmao. It wasn't even a forced sale. They just went on the market and bought a bunch of land as a private party"
TracingWoodgrains on X - "Right. They didn't usurp anything. They bought land, spent years working through governmental red tape to use it in a creative way, and began using it. Bizarre framing."

theficouple on X - "Unpopular opinion: If you make $150,000 a year but still live paycheck to paycheck? You might have a spending problem, not an income problem. Do you agree?"

united states - Does the average income in the US drop by $9,500 if you exclude the ten richest Americans? - Skeptics Stack Exchange - "A leftist friend of mine shared this meme:
Averages are tricky like that
The average income in the United States is 74,500$.
Excluding the top 10 Americans, it's only 65,000.
Excluding the top 50, it drops to 48,000$.
Excluding the top 1,000, it drops to just 35,500$
It alleges that the average income in the United States drops by $9,500 if you exclude the ten richest Americans, $25,000 if you exclude the 50 richest, and $39,000 if you exclude the 1,000 richest. Is this true?"
"This is false because the "starting" value used by the meme is the median value, not the mean, of household income in the United States (as seen in this chart Real Median Household Income in the United States, showing $74,580 for 2022)  The reductions are made as though that value was an average, not a median. While excluding outliers can change an average substantially, it affects the median only very slightly.  It also appears that the ostensible reductions from excluding the "top" earners are based on counting total wealth, not yearly income-- which is itself at least an order-of-magnitude error. The 10 highest income Americans do not average $95,000,000,000 in annual income.  From the chart Mean Family Income in the United States you can see that mean family income (as opposed to median) is actually 126,500. This is income and not wealth, but even if we are as generous as possible to the original graphic and assume we can just deduct total wealth of the top X, we see that excluding the top 10 reduces the mean to $116,000, and reducing the top 1,000 reduces to $87,000. As percentage reductions, these are much less dramatic-- and the resulting mean is still higher than the (all but unchanged) median. But remember, even these values are comparing apples (income) to oranges (total wealth)-- the total share of annual income going to the very wealthiest is much smaller."
Left wingers don't understand the difference between net worth and income, and mean and median. That's why they're poor

CHARLEBOIS: These are Canada's 'Hunger Games' - "In 2023, while 13.5% of Americans households grappled with food insecurity— characterized by low or very low food security (USDA-ERS, 2024) — the rate in Canada was significantly higher at 22.9% (Proof Toronto, 2024). This suggests that food insecurity in Canada is a staggering 69.6% more prevalent than in the United States — a deeply unsettling statistic. The challenge of affording food in Canada is exacerbated by anemic food sales, particularly stark when compared to the United States, where grocery store sales increased by 1.8% in the last 12 months, according to the Federal Reserve Economic Data. In stark contrast, Canadian grocery store sales have plummeted by a worrying 3.2%, according to Statistics Canada ( see graph on retail sales ). One plausible explanation for this disparity lies in the higher interest rates in Canada, which likely impose a heavier burden on Canadian households than on their American counterparts, given that the average debt per household is considerably higher in Canada. The Bank of Canada’s pathway to achieving a more stable inflation rate without detrimentally affecting Canadians appears much narrower than that of the U.S. Federal Reserve, evidenced by the harsh reality of 10 consecutive rate hikes last year, compelling Canadians to economize particularly on food expenditures. It is becoming increasingly apparent that Canada’s per capita economy is contracting, devoid of the wealth creation observed in the United States. Notably, according to World Bank Data, in 2002, the United States’ GDP per capita was 56.6% higher than Canada’s — a record high during the tenure of another Liberal prime minister, Jean Chrétien. The current gap, at 53.07%, is perilously close to this historical peak ( see GDP Per Capita graph ). The primary drivers of GDP growth in Canada are currently immigration and public spending, with the government undertaking the bulk of economic heavy lifting. The situation is indeed dire. Moreover, the enthusiasm once held for the economic greening championed by the Trudeau administration is showing signs of significant fatigue. The carbon tax, Trudeau’s principal policy for fostering an eco-friendly economy, is increasingly losing traction due to the prevailing economic challenges... The failures of the carbon tax are emblematic of a broader trend in recent policymaking endeavours: The implementation of populist policies devoid of rigorous metrics for evaluating their success over time, all while constructing an expansive communications strategy designed to convince Canadians of the policy’s merits. The federal carbon tax is set to escalate to $95 per tonne by April 2025, marching inexorably towards the 2030 goal of $170 per tonne. Despite the mounting pressure, the Trudeau government has neglected to assess whether the policy meaningfully impacts our climate and emissions or to evaluate how the policy might influence the economy over time, with a particular focus on the ramifications for the agri-food sector — from farm to plate. The design of the rebate system ostensibly allows Canadians to overlook the real costs of this poorly-conceived policy. However, administering this massive program is not only costly, but also fails to leverage the Canadian economy effectively. It is imperative to devise policies that genuinely foster both economic and environmental sustainability for the nation."
Given all the fear-mongering about the US, this is ironic. Presumably Canadian companies and landlords are "greedier" than American ones. But this won't stop left wingers from continuing to demonise the US
This won't stop left wingers from pushing de-growth, since they will continue to claim that the problem is how a shrinking pie is cut, rather than the pie becoming smaller

Are Canadian ready for airport privatization? - "London City has spent tens of millions of pounds to build new aircraft berths and a parallel taxiway, and completed a major upgrade of its departure lounge, boosting its capacity by 30 per cent. In 2021, it replaced its aging 30-year-old analogue air traffic control tower with a fully remote digital tower, a first for a significant international airport. And the adoption of new scanning technology has reduced line-up times for passengers by 50 per cent on average, with the airport boasting in an April 2024 news release that it can get business and leisure passengers “from the entrance to the gate in 10 minutes.” While the airport has clashed with nearby residents and local governments over some of its expansion plans, it has racked up accolades from travellers, including being named the best airport in the United Kingdom by Conde Nast Traveller readers and the Daily Telegraph in 2022... “The highlight of the airport is the seamless security system,” she said, adding that travellers no longer have to remove liquids or laptops from their bags or take off their shoes like they do at other large airports around the world. London City is not the only airport Canadian pensions have taken stakes in over the years. From Sydney to Copenhagen, airports are an investment opportunity they desire, but one they have been unable to replicate in their home market, where a unique not-for-profit ownership model and fears of a public-to-private shift would be a losing political move have stymied previous talks about privatizing... The allure of airports for the pensions is twofold. On one hand, there are the healthy fees collected each time an airplane takes off and lands, not to mention a surrounding near-monopoly constellation of amenities — such as parking and rental cars — that offer steady earnings potential and growth opportunities. They also help the retirement funds satisfy long-term obligations to pensioners. Airports are infrastructure investments, an asset class whose steady returns keep up with inflation and help pensions match their liabilities over the long term. One industry veteran said airport investments are like souped-up real return bonds (RRBs), an asset class gobbled up by pension funds specifically because it matches liabilities — what’s owed to future pensioners — that are indexed to inflation... Canadian pensions are far from the only institutional investors to spot the opportunity. Nearly 20 per cent of airports worldwide are now privately owned and more than 100 of those are owned by private equity infrastructure investors, according to a 2023 study published by the United States National Bureau of Economic Research. None are in Canada, and there is only one — Missouri’s Branson Airport — in the U.S. Most airports in the U.S. remain in state or local government hands, a situation often attributed to the unique tax-exempt treatment of bonds issued to finance public airports. Tae Hoon Oum, a retired professor at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business who helped create an international database to track airport performance and cost competitiveness, said Canada is late to the party when it comes to recognizing the benefits of privatizing airport operations. “The world has moved to a much better model. People who know airports, how it works in the airport industry, they know that we are falling behind,” he said, noting that airports in Australia were privatized by the early 2000s and that governments in Europe and the U.K. privatized airport operations as far back as the late 1980s and 1990s... Michael Weisbach, a finance professor at Ohio State University and co-author of the National Bureau of Economic Research study that found that airport volumes, efficiency and quality improve substantially under private equity ownership, said resistance to privatization is nevertheless a common response. “When you first hear about privatizing airports, your first reaction is, ‘Oh, my god, they’re going to fire a lot of workers, they’re going to compromise on safety,’” he said. “We looked as hard as we could to see whether there was any increase in safety violations or increase in accidents, or whether there were fewer employees, and we didn’t find any evidence of any of that.” Moreover, the study concluded that the net effect of a private equity acquisition of an airport is a rough doubling of operating income, mostly due to higher revenues collected from airlines and retailers in the terminal rather than cost-cutting. Other things that improved under new private equity management included better compensation for managers and more investments in new capacity and technology. “The facts are that the number of routes and the number of passengers go up, the profitability goes up, the passenger experience goes up,” Weisbach said, adding that “the cancellation rate goes down (and) safety is unaffected.”... Earlier studies have produced mixed results, but the National Bureau of Economic Research study, which used a database of 2,444 unique airports in 217 countries and had rare access to some private equity financial data, found stark differences in passenger traffic patterns, which increased more under private ownership than at government-owned airports. Private equity owners far outperformed even other forms of privatization on this measure. Satellite images showed that private equity owners tend to increase terminal size and the number of gates. Investments in such physical capacity mean an airport can bring in more passengers, who, in turn, spend more money in retail establishments and restaurants and on parking and rental cars. The study’s authors also noted that private equity owners tend to push for deregulation of government limits on fees... the Liberal Party has had a history of objecting to private interests in Canada’s airports. In the early 1990s, Jean Chrétien, while in opposition, called a Conservative government’s attempt to push through a long-term plan to involve private interests in the redevelopment of two terminals at Pearson airport — just ahead of an election —“indecent” and “immoral,” and he threatened to overturn it if he was elected."
Weird. Left wingers keep claiming privatisation always leads to higher costs and worse services. Trusting the science is only when it aids the left wing agenda

All Clear for Takeoff: Evidence from Airports on the Effects of Infrastructure Privatization - "Infrastructure assets have undergone substantial privatization around the world in recent decades. How do these assets perform post-privatization? This paper examines global airports. Our central finding is that the type of ownership matters: Volume, efficiency, and quality improve substantially under private equity (PE) ownership—both following privatization and in subsequent transactions—but there is little evidence of improvement under non-PE private ownership. This remains the case for airports sold in auctions in which PE and non-PE firms bid, mitigating concerns about selection. PE owners invest in new physical capacity and appear to negotiate more effectively with airlines, especially in the presence of a state-owned flag carrier. Higher prices and more retail revenue increase net income, with no evidence of cost reductions or layoffs. We find that improvements are concentrated when there is a competing airport nearby, under longer-term leases, and when the local government is less corrupt. One explanation for the failure of non-PE private firms to outperform government ownership is that they tend to target more corrupt locations."
Weird. I thought private equity just loots and runs

Tackling food insecurity needs more than charity — governments must also act
Naturally, the "solution" is free money and an expansion of government rather than axing policies like that carbon tax that increase the cost of food, or increasing competition in the grocery sector

Links - 20th September 2024 (2 - Women)

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Treating Adults and Children Differently

“When a child hits a child, we call it aggression.
When a child hits an adult, we call it hostility.
When an adult hits an adult, we call it assault.
When an adult hits a child, we call it discipline.”

— Haim Ginott, Child Psychologist and Psychotherapist

"When a child doesn't let another child leave his house, we call it bullying.
When a child doesn't let an adult leave his house, we call the adult meek.
When an adult doesn't let an adult leave his house, we call it wrongful restraint.
When an adult doesn't let his kid leave his house, we call it proper parenting."

—  Me

Links - 20th September 2024 (1 - Haitian Migrants in the US)

Lucky on X - "This factory owner in Springfield, Ohio is the face of evil. Throughout the interview, he shits on locals, mocks their drug addictions, and hopes for even more Haitians to flood the town."
Creme Egg Nationalist on X - "Weird that he can't find the other 30 Haitian employees he says he'd like to have, considering the government airdropped him a pool of 20k to pick from 🤔"

Meme - Vagrant of Rhodes 🗡️🕯️ @vagrantwires: "The same people who scream "How dare you insult Haitians, we must respect all cultures even cannibals" are also the first people to happily insult Americans "Yea I hate Americans, they all have drug problems, let's replace them all with foreigners." The banality of evil"
"JAMIE MCGREGOR: I wish I had 30 more. Our Haitian associates come to work every day. They don't have a drug problem. They will stay at their machine. They will achieve their numbers. They are here to work. And so, in general, that's a stark difference from what were used to in our community."

Meme - Lucky @TheMagaHulk: "It looks like the Americans didn't like being overworked and underpaid so McGregor replaced them with Haitians."
RealJeffGfetus @RealJeffGfetus: "The Americans complained too much:"
Carla Pennington: "They say they are a family oriented company but literally could care less. They make their employees work 6-7 days a week with no time for family."
John Diehl: "They don't care about their employees only care that you work 6-7 days a week and have no interest in your work or personal life and any complaints fall on"

Springfield, Ohio, man reported Haitian migrants snatching geese - "A Springfield, Ohio, resident on his way to work called 911 to report spotting four Haitian migrants snatching geese near a city park just two weeks ago, according to a newly revealed recording... “I’m sitting here, I’m riding on the trail, I’m going to my orientation for my job today, and I see a group of Haitian people, there was about four of them, they all had geese in their hand,” the caller told a dispatcher.  He said the group — two men and two women — were each clutching one of the birds when they took off in a gray Toyota Tacoma truck. The caller gave a portion of their license plate he was able to make out...   Critics have said the claims are racist against the black Haitian migrants."

Exclusive: Police Audio Confirms Haitian Goose Hunting In Ohio - "According to a police report reviewed by The Federalist, the call was placed on Aug. 26, before the Columbus suburb located roughly 50 miles from the state capital became nationally known this week for epitomizing the nation’s migrant crisis. The caller told the dispatcher he saw four migrants in total, two men and two women, each carrying a single goose."

Attorney General Dave Yost on X - "There’s a recorded police call from a witness who saw immigrants capturing geese for food in Springfield. Citizens testified to City Council. These people would be competent witnesses in court. Why does the media find a carefully worded City Hall press release better evidence?"
Clearly, the Ohio Attorney General is a far right conspiracy theorist who needs to be fired

Meme - Lucky @TheMagaHulk: "Reddit has weighed in on the stories about Haitians eating geese and pets in Springfield, Ohio.  The verdict: Geese are a pest so it's wonderful that Haitians are hunting and eating them.  And we're racist for noticing."
"Jesus, it's all racist fear mongering. They just want a better life for their families. They want a safer place to live where they can put food on their tables, a roof over their heads, and clothes on their backs. Sounds an awful lot like the story of millions of other immigrants to our country over hundreds of years. Our ancestors all came not knowing the language or culture and brought strange foods and ideas. They are no different than our ancestors. Instead of spreading nasty rumors about them on the internet it would be great if people would actually try to help find common ground between their culture and ours. I do believe the goose story is true. Geese are a common food source in many countries. I didn't even realize Canadian Geese were a protected species until that story started circulating, it's likely the person who was found to be hunting them in the park didn't know either. They're a nuisance and I'd happily see them on someone's table instead of filling our parks with so much poop you can't even walk in the grass. The real issue is racism, pure and simple. They didn't take jobs from white people, they took jobs white people weren't filling. They are here legally and have every right to be. Some things have been hard like the influx of kids on an already poorly run school district and the fact that our city council can only spend their meetings listening to racist complaints instead of actually conducting business. The sooner people concede to the fact that they're here to stay, the sooner we can move on to actually effectively solutions to the actual problems we're dealing with here."

PaintSandRepeat on X - "We can’t build a factory or infrastructure because of some spot eyed newt existing within 10 miles of a spot, but oh hey when the illegals start eating the wildlife? Sure thing, that’s just their culture"

Pete on X - "The average worker in Haiti is to too dumb to understand alphabetization, even after being taught. Government offices spend hours looking through every file (takes many hours) to find routine records."
Jeremy Kauffman 🦔 on X - "I've been reading Scott Alexander for more than a decade, so it's funny to see who's sharing his Haitian story these days."
Bringing medical care to Haiti
Previously shared

Jeremy Kauffman 🦔 on X - "Haiti has an average IQ of 67. Let's talk about what that means:
- With an IQ of 67 or below, the average Haitian -- over half the country -- would be considered too disabled to be eligible for the death penalty. Someone at this level will struggle to understand the cause-and-effect of basic things, as well as to participate in American society at all. Even filling out forms will be hard.
- At 1 standard deviation (SD) up from 67, we have an IQ of 82. Around 1 in 6 Haitians are intelligent enough to be a below average janitor. This is the level of intelligence of poor urban areas in America.
- At 2 SD, we're at 97, or roughly average intelligence in America. Around 2% of Haitians will be as intelligent as your average high school classmate and could be clerical workers or cooks.
- At 3 SD, we're at 112. This is approaching the territory where useful creative and STEM work can be done (e.g. engineering). This is about 1 out of 1000 Haitians.
- At 4 SD, we're at 127. These are the people who will come across as bright in your interactions with them, but still wouldn't be "gifted". They can perform almost all high status professions. There are only 440 Haitians in the entire country that are this intelligent, out of a population of 11 million.
- At 5 SD, we're at 142. We're in gifted and potentially genius territory. These are people who can invent, create, and contribute at the highest level. There are approximately 3 of them in the entire country of Haiti."
Naturally, there were a lot of ignorant people in the replies dissing IQ

Meme - James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames: ""trust government experts""
"Cuomo aide Melissa DeRosa admits they hid nursing home data so feds wouldn't find out"
Kevin @kevingwilkes: "So, when the city manager says and governor say it's not happening, it's not happening. Right?"

Christian Collins on X - "50 illegal aliens were flown to Martha's Vineyard, and Democrats threw a fit. 20,000 Haitian illegal aliens take over the small town of Springfield, Ohio, and Democrats are silent. Democrats don't care about average Americans."

Big Fish on X - "Reminder; wealthy liberals in Martha’s Vineyard shipped away 50 illegals in two days. They claimed they did not have the resources to keep them. This same class of people wants economically struggling central Ohio town to take 20,000 with open arms."

Auron MacIntyre on X - "When DeSantis shipped 50 illegal immigrants to Martha's Vineyard the National Guard was rounding them up within a day When the Biden admin drops 20,000 migrants on a small town in Ohio that's just the new normal"

‘Illegal Haitian immigrants stealing ducks, cats and eating them’: Ohio residents - "Recently, Springfield residents slammed the local City Council for the large influx of Haitian immigrants stating that they have become the occupiers and have been replacing the native population in Springfield. Notably, Springfield, Ohio is a small city in the USA with a population of less than 60,000. However, it has been overwhelmed by roughly 20,000 Haitian immigrants in the last three to four years.   While the US media and concerned officials say that the Haitians have come to the US legally for jobs, locals have alleged corruption in allowing illegal immigration. According to them, ‘Illegal Haitians’ have been harassing them, occupying their properties, forcing them out of their houses, and eating their pets and wildlife adding that they “can’t take it anymore”.   Several videos of Springfield residents testifying before the Council meeting are doing rounds on social media. In many of these viral videos, they have stated that ‘Illegal Haitian’ immigrants have been stealing ducks, geese, and other pet animals including cats. According to them, after decapitating them, the Haitian immigrants eat these local livestock.   It is pertinent to note that while the Haitian population has been increasing rapidly in the last few years, tensions erupted last year after an immigrant driver from Haiti killed an 11-year-old boy and injured 23 others... A resident named Glenda Bailey told the city committee, “They have become the occupiers. What they’ve done is they’ve replaced the population in Springfield.” She also warned that they would soon become the majority and kick everyone else out.  A frail woman lamented that the Haitian immigrants ‘squat’ on their lawns and had driven them out of the house in which they had been living for over 45 years. She recounted that she did all she could and made concessions with them and “tried to help” them but they “squat” on her property.   With a trembling voice, she said, “I’m done with what I’m seeing. It is so unsafe in my neighbourhood anymore.”... Fearing for their safety, she revealed that her elderly husband had decided that they would leave their home of 45 years"
The reality of lived experience is only important when it pushes the left wing agenda

Collin Rugg on X - "NEW: Springfield, Ohio man says Haitian illegals are decap*tating ducks from parks & eating them, accuses commission members of getting paid off for allowing it.  “They're in the park grabbing up ducks by their neck and cutting their head off and walking off with 'em and eating them.”  “Who is getting paid? Like how much money is y'all really getting paid? Like to bring them over here, like I know it's deeper than them.”  Springfield is a town of about 60,000 people and has received about 20,000 illegals in the last four years."

Collin Rugg on X - "Springfield, Ohio woman says homeless Haitians are trying to camp out on her front yard, says she “wants out of this town.”  “I have men that cannot speak English in my front yard, screaming at me, throwing mattresses in my front yard.”  “Look at me, I weigh 95 pounds. I couldn't defend myself if I had to. My husband is elderly.”  “I don't understand what you expect of us as citizens. I understand they're here under temporary protected status and you're protecting them, and I understand that our city services are overwhelmed and understaffed, but who's protecting us?”  “Who's protecting me? I want out of this town. I am sorry. Please give me a reason to stay.”"

Ohio woman ate cat in front of people after killing it, police say - "A woman in Ohio was arrested after police say she stomped a cat to death and ate it in front of multiple people.  A 27-year-old woman was charged Wednesday with cruelty to companion animals, according to Stark County court records.  Canton police arrested the woman on Aug. 16 after they say she killed and ate a cat in a "residential area in front of multiple people," according to an arrest report obtained by USA TODAY."
Weird. We're told that no one is eating cats (including by journalists, so it's not just random nobodies). The cope is that it's a black American but apparently black Americans aren't people

Meme - Nate Hochman @njhochman: "One of the equally admirable and frustrating things about Americans is how open-minded they are. Even when their town is literally getting invaded by Haitians, their first instinct is to try to patiently explain to the invaders why they need to behave themselves."
Haitian Community in Springfield Ohio: "Dear Non-citizens of Springfield.I writing to help communicate the gap between US citizens and Non-citizens. I have read about some of your countries and it was scary. I understand why you left.But there is a huge cultural difference. So if you want to be part of this great country then you need to understand and learn our culture. So here are some things you can do to make this better: Don't follow the women and children, it is highly offensive. Don't stare at us. Learn to drive respectfully and responsibility. Crashes in this town are way up due to non- citizens, causing responsible citizens insurance rates to go up. Walk on the sidewalks not the streets especially at night. Be polite, use words like excuse me and thank you. Don't go around yelling in the store, it is assumed an emergency situation. Don't open food in the store and start eating it, you are supposed to pay for it first and eat it at home. Don't play with the groceries in the store, especially the children. This is considered rude and unsanitary. Don't push people with your shopping carts, again this is very rude. When you go to a garage sale, you must pay for those items, they are not free. Just don't go walking off with items, that is stealing. Smile once and while be grateful , we don't owe you anything. This is only a parcel list. Go to church. start living a better way."

US Election: Explanation behind viral photo of man holding geese revealed - "The anonymous man who was snapped carrying the bodies of two birds earlier this week was removing them from the street after they were hit by a car, the Ohio Division of Wildlife confirmed... Weeks later, a Springfield resident called 911 to report spotting four Haitian migrants snatching geese near a city park."
There're still other reports of geese being eaten, though

malmesburyman on X - "Haitians, by far the worst people in the western hemisphere, becoming the face of mass migration is catastrophic for the left. Even they aren’t surprised the Haitians are stealing and eating pets. This people is the source of Zombie legend for a reason. Cannibalism isn’t far off."

GrumpyTiredLizard on X - "Because of course, only immigrants get in traffic accidents.   Christ you people are pathetic.  Not to even get into the small fact these Haitian migrants are almost all legal refugees who moved to Ohio for a job.  But I know facts are too much.  Thus the subject swapping"
Left wing logic: if I can find one instance of X happening in Group A and in Group B, we cannot say that X happens in Group A and Group B at different frequencies. Of course, they never apply this to, say, white men doing mass shootings or white people being shot by the police, but only when it pushes the left wing agenda
Apparently 20,000 Haitians got work visas to move to one city for jobs

John LeFevre on X - "The fact that Haitian immigrants are eating pets in Ohio isn't even the worst part.  The Biden-Harris administration has secretly flown in over 320,000 unvetted Haitian immigrants into the United States. Then, in June 2024, Mayorkas gave them special protective status to prevent them from being deported.  This represents an influx of people, sadly, from an inferior culture, and they are bringing their 3rd world values here:
- The average IQ in Haiti is ~78. (Context: An IQ of at least 75 is required to be considered competent in a court of law.)
- Haiti is by far the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, with a GDP per capita $1,748
- Haiti is the 20th most deadly country in the world, with 40.9 homicides per 100,000
- Haiti's education system is ranked 177th globally in terms of national spending on education, with a literacy rate of 61%
- Haiti has one of the highest prevalences of communicable diseases in the world, and the highest STD and tuberculosis rates in the Western Hemisphere
- Nearly 40% of Haitians practice some form of Voodoo, which involves witchcraft and animal sacrifice
- Haiti ranked lowest on the Human Development Index in the Region of the Americas
In no way does this make our country better; they don't even make street tacos."

Sarah Sansoni on X - "COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE  More from Springfield, Ohio  This town went from having a population of 60k to getting 20k Haitians in just a few years.  I’ve been watching this city council meeting on and off throughout the day.  This woman says the majority of the people going to get the “free services “ are Haitians.  You cannot have open borders and a welfare state. A separate article about this situation from The NY Times also mentioned that wait times at hospitals are going up and school teachers have said this is not sustainable."

Frank DeScushin on X - "I know several Haitian immigrants, and they're nice people. Immigration advocates play on such personal experiences so people don't focus on the big picture that mass migration changes communities and ultimately countries. People aren't wrong to oppose that.  My experiences with immigrants are skewed because the immigrants I know are largely white-collar professionals. The same is true for the politicians who support mass migration. Their experiences and mine aren't representative of people in communities throughout America dealing with a different class of migrants, yet politicians act as though they are.  Also note that the politicians who say you can't indict an entire immigrant group based on the actions of a few, are often the same politicians who indict the police or white people as racist based on a few people's actions."
You can't make negative "generalisations" about "minorities" based on many cases, but you can make positive generalisations about them based on a few cases. You can't make positive "generalisations" about "majorities" based on many cases, but you can make negative generalisations about them based on a few cases.

Circe on X - ">people getting pets instead of having kids
>fertility rates collapse
>import Haitians
>Haitians eat the pets
>people start having kids again to compensate
4D chess if you think about it"

Joey Mannarino on X - "My comment section is now full of liberals defending the rights of Haitian migrants in Ohio to eat pets. Just read through the comments on the video pinned to my profile. At this point, this country deserves what it gets. These people are beyond reaching."

The Cat Eaters of Ohio - "The establishment media was not amused. During the debate, ABC’s David Muir dismissed Trump’s rhetoric with his version of a fact check, citing the Springfield city manager’s statement that “there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured, or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.” Other publications went further, blasting the former president for spreading a “racist smear,” a “century-old stereotype,” and a “cat-eating conspiracy theory.”  So, is there any truth to the charge? We have conducted an exclusive investigation that reveals that, yes, in fact, some migrants in Ohio appear to have been “eating the cats,” though not exactly in the manner that Trump described. Our investigation begins in a run-down neighborhood of Dayton, Ohio, the closest major city to Springfield, about a half-hour’s drive away. We identified a social media post, dated August 25, 2023, with a short video depicting what appear to be two skinned cats on top of a blue barbeque. “Yoooo the Africans wildn on Parkwood,” reads the text, referring to Parkwood Drive. The video then pans down to two live cats walking across the grass in front of a run-down fence, with a voice on the video warning: “There go a cat right there. His ass better get missin’, man. Look like his homies on the grill!” We spoke with the author of the video, who asked to remain anonymous but confirmed its time, location, and authenticity. He told us that he was picking up his son last summer, when he noticed the unusual situation. “It was some Africans that stay right next door to my kid’s mother,” he said. “This African dude next door had the damn cat on the grill.”  We then identified the home by matching it to the visuals in the video and cross-referencing them with the eyewitness. When we knocked on the door of the first unit, a family answered, telling us they were from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and that all of the surrounding units were occupied by other African migrants. One of the residents told us that her former neighbors, also from Africa, had lived in the adjacent unit until last month. They had a blue grill and the father would find meat in the neighborhood. “Her dad was going to find meat,” she said. “Her dad was going, holding a knife.” The current residents also showed us a blue grill of the same make and model as in the video, which the former neighbors had abandoned after they moved out. There were at least ten cats wandering around the complex and another resident complained that they were breeding on the property.  According to the original witness, whose son was friendly with the neighbors, there was no doubt about what happened last summer. “They was barbecuing the damn cat!” he said. His son’s mother had previously witnessed the family butchering a mammal on the street, but the cats on the barbeque put him in such a state of shock, he felt the need to film it. To be clear: this single incident does not confirm every particularity of Trump’s statement. The town is Dayton, not Springfield; cats alone were on the grill, not cats and dogs. But it does break the general narrative peddled by the establishment media and its “fact checkers,” who insisted that this has never happened, and that any suggestion otherwise is somehow an expression of racism. It takes only a single exception, however, to falsify a hypothesis, and the logical next step, for any honest broker, is to ask if it is happening more often, and elsewhere. It is not implausible. Many developing nations, including the Congo and Haiti, have traditions of animal sacrifice or consumption of what Americans would consider household pets. And if this occurred in Dayton, where the migrant population is relatively small, it could be going on down the road in Springfield, where it is relatively much larger. Independent journalists are already on the hunt and could reveal more. The Daily Wire has dispatched a reporter to Springfield to investigate. The Federalist has published a police report with allegations that a group of Haitians emerged from a city trail with dead geese in hand. Ohio’s attorney general, Dave Yost, has backed up this claim, arguing that citizens with such firsthand knowledge “would be competent witnesses in court.” There is a legitimate debate to be had about migration and culture. All immigrants bring with them a particular tradition, which, in the case of countries such as Haiti and the Congo, can include practices that many Americans find disturbing. This cultural divide causes understandable consternation for non-migrants living in the rougher parts of places like Dayton and Springfield. They don’t enjoy the luxury of many in the establishment media, who can maintain a safe distance, condescending to those who raise the alarm while not even bothering to investigate anything themselves.  These revelations do not mean that assimilation is impossible, but the establishment will need to engage in a more honest debate, rather than simply smearing critics as racists and conspiracy theorists. One can make the case for migration, but one cannot, at the same time, deny that it comes with costs—which, in this case, seem to include a pair of flayed cats on a blue barbeque in Dayton, Ohio."
Addendum: The most amusing cope I got in response to posting this was to continue denying that I had presented any evidence. The guy also claimed that testimony wasn't evidence or proof, and that I should Google the definitions of those words, and I told him to complain that the legal system considered it evidence because it convicted people based on testimony.

Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on X - "CBS News has published a response to the “Cat Eaters of Ohio” story. It’s a supremely dishonest and completely partisan report, but let’s break it down, to show exactly how the establishment media maintains its lines of propaganda.
 The CBS report hinges on two arguments. First, CBS writes: “The video shows what appears to be animal carcasses on a grill. The man filming the footage alleges, without evidence, that they are cats.” Without evidence? The eyewitness directly observed the incident and took a video recording of it—both of which are firsthand evidence. But CBS’s apparent standard, when such evidence violates the establishment narrative, is: Don’t believe your lying eyes.  The report also quotes Dayton’s Democratic mayor, who says there have been “absolutely zero reports of this type of activity.” Which is true, but does not contradict the evidence at all. Nobody filed a police report, so there would be no police report—and the absence of a police report does not mean that something did not happen. This is a convenient way of ignoring the evidence, and laundering lies through friendly media apparatus.
What did CBS not do? Journalism. The network, which has massive resources, did not send a reporter to the scene, interview the eyewitness, interview the neighbors, investigate the visual evidence, conduct background research, or provide a detailed analysis. They simply adopted “don’t believe your lying eyes” as their standard and repeated an empty, evidence-free statement from a partisan political figure.  Now, I’d like to take you through exactly how we produced the story and analyzed the evidence. This is precisely the case that I made in the original piece, that the establishment media is more interested in denial and obfuscation, even when the evidence points the other way...
This farmer, who has processed thousands of animals per year, confirmed that it could not be a chicken in the video... This surgeon, who also has practical experience with animals, explained that the proportions of the animal, particularly the “ileum-to-scapula distance,” resemble a mammal, more specifically, a cat, rather than a chicken...
The CBS News report is not credible and does not make any attempt to investigate the facts. Rather, it simply denied the eyewitness account and firsthand video as “without evidence”—a logical contradiction—and copied a statement from the Democratic mayor, who also did not investigate the matter. There is no indication that CBS sent a reporter into the field, conducted any interviews, or provided any visual analysis. There is no indication that CBS even knows where the incident occurred, something that took our team some time on the ground. As I wrote in my original piece about the story, the establishment media wants to maintain a line of propaganda and wish away any evidence to the contrary, appealing to authority rather than evidence. This is dishonest and does a disservice to productive debate."

Still Boneless on X - "Everything you’ve read over the last couple of days has been about one small town. Just one. Now multiply the children, pets, property damage, etc. by thousands. This is the most important story in the country."

Escaping Conscription

A soldier ran up to a nun. Out of breath he asked, “Please, may I hide under your skirt. I’ll explain later.” 

The nun agreed…

A moment later two Military Police ran up and asked, “Sister, have you seen a soldier?”

The nun replied, “He went that way.”

After the MPs ran off, the soldier crawled out from under her skirt and said, “I can’t thank you enough, sister. You see, I don’t want to go to Iraq.”

The nun said, “I understand completely.”

The soldier added, “I hope I’m not rude, but you have a great pair of legs!”

The nun replied, “If you had looked a little higher, you would have seen a great pair of balls…. I don’t want to go to Iraq either...