wanye Profile picture
Sep 5 3 tweets 1 min read Read on X
I’m sorry, I’m really not trying to be shocking here, but did we or did we not have a massive problem of Italian organized crime in the United States?
“And it all worked out in the end!”

OK, maybe, but, like, a country’s existing *living* residents are not obligated to endure a century of growing pains on the grounds that everything will kind of even out by the time their great great great grandkids are alive.
A lot of defenses of immigration start from the position that the immigrants of 125 years ago have mostly assimilated today, but this ignores the conflicts that the people of that time had to work through to get here. You can’t just start all the way at the end and argue that if it all worked out, then there are no downsides. The downsides were pretty big for the people who lived through them.

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More from @wanyeburkett

Sep 14
Like so many things in our current discourse, I feel similarly about liberals. Like, what I think is that I know what they think they mean by, “having been born somebody else,” but they don’t understand what I think I mean by, “having been born somebody else,” which means I actually have more information than them and I understand this problem space better than they do. In fact, I understand their own position better than they do, because they literally cannot even conceive of the opposite position.
The biggest clue here that I’m right is that of course literally everybody can, “imagine what it would be like to be somebody else.”

Short of brain damage or mental retardation or something, this is a universal human capability. Literally everybody can do it.

What we’re being asked to do, though, is something much more extreme, which is to accept the claim that you actually could have been born somebody else, that your soul was floating around in the ether and then randomly assigned to a uterus at conception.

This insane metaphysics is far beyond imagining yourself as somebody else.
“Try to imagine yourself as somebody else, think through the motivations you’d have and the constraints you’d face” is a perfectly fine thought experiment whereas, “you literally could have been born somebody else” is an insane pseudoscientific metaphysics with absolutely no relationship to reality as we actually find it.
Read 4 tweets
Aug 23
Just in the first 10 minutes of this he puts the video interviews of suspects in the park that night up against footage from the Netflix show. In the show, the kids are playful and laughing. They are a little aggressive with some cyclists, patting them on the back as they bike past. They come upon some older guys robbing someone and stand back, mouths agape, surprised and perhaps even horrified by what they're seeing.

Meanwhile, in the real life interviews they all admit that they entered the park to do violence -- to beat on people and rob them -- and, further, that this was a favorite pastime, something they'd done many times before.

It's shameful.Image
In the show, they stumble upon other people doing a robbery and are horrified. In their testimony they admit that they entered the park to rob and beat people.

It's just so completely shameful. How do you make such straightforward propaganda and live with yourself?
He cuts to an interview with the director who says that she wanted to humanize the boys, to ask the viewer to "interrogate" all that they think they know about supposed criminals like them.

I mean, sure; you can just lie about what happened. It's true that they're more sympathetic characters if you lie about what they did.
Read 7 tweets
Aug 23
This kind of stuff has pretty negatively polarizing effect on somebody like me. I think if you just broke it down to its most base level, you'd find that not many issues have a bigger gap between what normie liberals think and I what I do.
Even where we have disagreements, my views on, say, abortion or immigration or welfare remain consistent (if not perfectly so) with mainstream normie liberalism. But I just cannot understand knowing anything about this case and nevertheless choosing to feature these men specifically in the party's biggest night.
You could conclude in your mind that they probably didn't do the rape in question and I wouldn't think less of you, but I still wouldn't celebrate them, feature them in the party's biggest moments.
Read 7 tweets
Aug 22
Observe that countries around the world have wildly diffferent customs and cultures. Observe that I rather quite like our culture and customs just the way they are. Observe that culture is in some sense zero sum. Are you still baffled? Is this chain of reasoning really so hard to follow?
Just do a kind of reductio ad absurdum. Replace every American with somebody from a Muslim country. Do things get better here for women and gay people? Do any laws regarding religious freedom change? People around the world believe different things! They have wildly different views on American-style freedom. They can change the law!
Liberals sort of imagine that everybody around the world wants exactly the same things in life, desires the same freedoms Americans enjoy, and that their countries only ever have governments in opposition to those freedoms because of a few autocrats who subvert the will of their people.

But, you know, that’s just a thing they assert without evidence. In fact, it appears that people around the world *genuinely* disagree about a lot of stuff.
Read 5 tweets
Aug 13
This exact conversation appears in city and urban planning subs ad naseum and it's always this same fight about whether it was the decline of manufacturing or the darkly malevolent hearts of white people that led to urban decline.

No mention of crime or riots. Image
Also no mention of technology, of the baby boom, of the pollution in cities before the Clean Air Act. No mention of the automobile, which is probably *alone* enough to explain a significant portion of suburbanization.

They only know dumb race and class arguments.
We're like 3 or 4 generations into the view that this is what smart people think it *means* to be smart. The explanation is race and class. And by "race" we of course just mean that white people are malevolent. Completely incurious people repeating cliches about redlining.
Read 6 tweets
Aug 9
In an every day sense, people who live in bad urban neighborhoods in the United States are less affected by actual violence than they are by young men who have hardened themselves to violence. The issue is one of the almost constant implicit threat of violence. If you’re paying attention, what you notice in nicer neighborhoods or in suburbs is that nobody in your every day life is posturing in a way that’s designed to indicate to that they are ready for physical violence if necessary.
I have a theory that men are more sensitive to this than women, which might explain why some conservative men appear to liberals to be more, “afraid” of big cities. I think what’s happening is that these are men who are especially attuned to implicit threats of violence and who are correctly picking it up everywhere they go in urban areas.
When my wife and I are out in a city I will often clock a guy doing this and then it will distract me for as long as he is present in my environment and my wife can sometimes get kind of annoyed because I seem distracted and she’s not sure why.
Read 6 tweets

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