Reveal Your Uncool Conservative Beliefs Here

yeah i didn’t even want to get into all that but i’m glad someone is

This is the uncool conservative beliefs thread ...

Fascism is even less cool

Even Hitler Imported Guest Workers

o_O

I'm reading "The Wages of Destruction" by Adam Tooze -- it is about Hitlerian economics

The development of fracking is overall a good thing

I mean I can't complain that it keeps me supplied with cheap natural gas for cooking with

the kind of wildcat strike of a take this thread needed

Calling a white person who lives in the US a "colonizer" is stupid

despite the risk of it being snatched by a bandit, the best way to cool off a freshly-baked pie is still to set it on a good old fashioned open windowsill, no matter what elon musk says

one of these is not like the other:

A hundred years apart but the same angst - on the left Edward Munch (1919) on the right Tracey Emin today. A cathartic exhibition @royalacademy pic.twitter.com/cgA9uMWFhz

— Philip Mould (@philipmould) December 13, 2020

is that actually how they were installed? Is that some weird angle they were photographed at? Horrible, I say -- the centers don't appear to be aligned ... my conservative belief

nah you can see the frame cut off in the Emin

Agree that fracking is a "net" good thing, especially if properly regulated. Much of the progress in replacing coal (more than halving greenhouse emissions), and building out renewable energy over the past 15 years in the U.S. was only economic because natural gas was < $4/mmBTU, rather than the $15+ it was headed towards in the 00s. Till longer term electricity storage comes down in price, every MW of renewables is backed up with a MW natural gas plant on standby. The harms (intrinsic to fracking) come from poor wastewater disposal, and like all natural gas production, there should be wellhead monitors for methane leaks.

xp Jim: I'm talking about legal immigration, too. Want better conditions for labor? Make it scarce compared to capital.

I know you're talking about "legal" immigration too, you dolt.

your "just asking questions" rhetoric is the "intellectual" equivalent of the brick through the window my parents got as a young couple because my dad was a refugee

Sanpaku, your earlier post posits that "legal" immigrants and Americans are distinct categories -- as both of those things: fuck you and your moral vacuity pretending to be rationality.

Sanpaku: making labor scarce since _____

1934?

Are you guys willfully misreading Sanpaku? People here on H1-B Visas are not Americans and would not refer to themselves as Americans, any moreso than a person here on a student visa.

Moreover, Sanpaku only referred to "Americans" in connection with the clause of his sentence about "free trade," i.e. forcing Americans to compete with people in other countries.

I guess to be fair he said "legal immigration including..." so maybe I misread lol

Want better conditions for labor? Make it scarce compared to capital

i'd like to gently suggest that this is a nonsense in the context of capitalist market economics

Anyway, I think his larger point stands irrespective of semantics. My take on it is that the problem comes not from "immigration" per se, but from the use of immigration to force an unlevel playing field and reduce wages. H-1B visas are nothing other than that.

every reference to immigration as being bad because it distorts the labour market relies on ignoring the point that capitalism depends on distorting the labour market, by whatever means available

however you word it, it's fascist propaganda

that's silly

Was Marx a fascist?

Groucho or Harpo?

is it? or is the notion of a national labour market in a massively globalized economy where the proletariat doesn't even belong to the nation that provides the majority of a nation's commodities silly?

i can comfortably agree with a lot of Marx's thought and recognise that he was analyzing societies that were radically different to today's societies.

i can also watch striking workers complain about immigrant labour on tv while dressed head to toe in clothes manufactured outside their own nation

Marx didn't give much of one fuck about the Nation State

Let me know when you crack the problem of organizing labor on a global scale. Until then we're stuck with the nation state.

that's a different question, but socialism is international or it's meaningless. immigration isn't a cause of low wages any more than population growth is.

or perhaps more relevantly, any more than industrialisation or mechanisation is.

Also, Sanpaku's whole point was to recognize the ways in which these forces have impacted the standard of living of Americans and that that in turn gave Trump an issue to seize. I don't think the answer to that is to deafly say "actually immigration is good," it's to concretely show Americans how their standards of living can be improved without making enemies out of immigrants. One of those ways would actually be MORE legal immigration, but on a level playing field and one that makes citizenship easier to attain rather than a dual-track guest worker type system.

acknowleding legitimate concerns about immigration has never been a force for good

i think part of the problem is that the genuine arguments in favor of immigration get hijacked by neoliberal think tank types who really do just want to use immigration to push down wages. The way that is done is by creating a class of immigrants that doesn't have full rights and is scared to organize or fight back because, among other things, they might be deported. That's what has actually happened over the past few decades.

Actually immigration is good and Sanpaku is a fascist

i'm happy to accept Sanpaku isn't a fascist if they say so, they're just repeating fascist tropes in this instance

immigration isn't good or bad

silby had Sanpaku’s number the first time tbh

yall i knew sanpaku was full of shit years agin, just saying

ago, agin and agin

agog

his demos were better

you guys are being ridiculous. You're saying "repeating fascist tropes" as if saying anything that has tinges of something fascists also say is equivalent to uttering a spell that conjures up fascism.

i'm saying that talking about immigration as problematic outside of any concept of capitalist exploitation is using the language of the far right. i specifically quoted this

Want better conditions for labor? Make it scarce compared to capital

sanpaku specifically referred to legal immigration in general so we can talk about temporary foreign worker visas til the cows come home but he's talking about immigration as per se a bad thing for Americans (not including those pesky immigrant Americans naturally)

as to the economic arguments. one country pursuing protectionism while the global economy is defined by free trade is a non-starter for obvious reasons. and as to restriction of immigration as an economic panacea: I guess we could look to Japan, a famously low immigration society, their economy has only been stagnating since ... 1990

and this is still predicated on some notion that a nation's labour is somehow intended to supply the needs of that nation itself? when has that ever been true?