Here’s a tweet in which a famous advocate of open borders for people says that he wants closed borders for commerce:
In other words: Honduran and Venezuelan coffee bad; Honduran and Venezuelan migrants good.
Is there any philosophical inconsistency in wanting to increase the tide of migrants washing into the U.S. while simultaneously refusing to buy goods and services from foreigners who’ve elected to stay in their home countries?
Buying coffee from Honduras enables Hondurans to live comfortably in Honduras. This is bad because it disincentivizes them from seeking asylum in the U.S., which is the most desirable outcome.
Of course the real issue is allowing Persons Of Color to seek asylum in a country with systemic racism and institutionalized white supremacy where they can’t possibly be safe, but perhaps we’ll be able to give them reparations in the future to make up for that.
Don’t worry, if you can replace all the existing citizenry, the racism should be wiped out. I think this has all been thought through.
I think you give Biden too much credit. If you’ve watched him throughout his career, he’s a serial gaffe artist and misspeaker extraordinaire who pretty much says whatever he thinks his audience at the time will buy. It doesn’t matter how outlandish, inconsistent or just plain false, cringeworthy or embarrassing it is, if it’s a talking point he read off a sheet of paper and extemporaneously interjected into a statement, that’s fine as long as it sounds good to him at the time. At first he was surprised the documents even existed. Then there weren’t any more of them. Then there was no further comment. Then his daughter was a social worker, but she hasn’t been one for eleven years.
This kind of exaggeration, revisionist truth-telling, embellishment, deflection and outright fibbing has been a Biden trademark for as long as I can remember, and in his old age as his problems pile up, the tendency has gotten worse. He’s got half of that old man’s “I don’t care what anyone thinks anymore” mixed with a pressing need to clean up all the messes. The history is long and storied; no doubt someone has compiled a comprehensive list, and it’s a doozy.
You are an engineer and an academic by training and discipline of mind: you seem to expect some kind of reasonable coherence from the most important elected official in our country, as you might for anyone serious in a position of great power and responsibility. You’re reaching too far to find much of that in Joe Biden, and it was a concern for the Democrats all the way through the 2020 election and beyond.
Here he is 16 years ago – when he was 64. What has changed except that he’s gotten slower, less coherent, and more gaffe-prone?
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=409917437761234
This is the guy Republicans are finding tough to beat? It says a lot about how bad everything has become.
BTW he loves that little kicker at the end of that clip: “You think I’m joking!” He repeated that just a day or so ago when talking about his daughter’s career as a social worker. I think he throws it in there reflexively when he knows he’s telling a whopper or a highly-embellished story he wants his audience to swallow, aw-shucks like. It reminds me of the way some people say: “And the TRUTH of the matter is…” when they know they’re telling a tall tale through their pearly whites.
Alex: I don’t think it is surprising that Biden, or anyone else who is a Democrat, is tough to beat. If we model American voters as trying to recapture some of the 50% of the economy that is government, the majority’s best hope is typically a Democrat because the majority of Americans benefit from a larger government (government employee, receiving means-tested benefits, on traditional welfare, married to government employee, government contractor, income too low to pay significant income tax, etc.).
@philg: No, it isn’t surprising anymore. Around where I live, people resort to all sorts of semi-nefarious goings-on in order to get or keep their government jobs. What’s even more hilarious is the dirty joke level of voter turnout for most town elections. Forty people with a private Facebook group can run the town.
A couple of years ago I had a doctor appointment and when I arrived, the receptionist was someone I thought I recognized. Sure enough, she was from here, and I said to her: “Are you voting today? It’s the big day!” She looked at me sideways and said: “Oh, there’s an election today? I didn’t know!”
I had personally mailed postcards to the entire town informing every single household with a registered voter about the upcoming election. Also, I knew where this person lives and she drove past all the election day signs on her way to work. None of it registered, like it wasn’t happening.
So the usual suspects ride to election or reelection, most people don’t care, until it comes time to complain, then they grumble a little bit and go back to doing what they were doing. Someone organized who wants to plant a candidate in a plum job has an easy time.
What did you expect… reason and consistency from leftists?
Their entire ideology is fundamentally based on denial of objective reality in favor of postmodernism (consensus “reality” based on collective belief – a sort of shared metaphysical solipsism – thus insistence on forcing everyone to conform to their speech codes, and also Lenin’s famous dictum drummed into every Soviet kid’s head: “An idea which took over the masses becomes a material force”*).
Since this is basically a sort of magical thinking, leftism attracts those who are driven by emotions and conformism, and are seeking magical wish fulfillment instead of actually expending effort learning, thinking, and working. In other words, a sort of a person easily manipulated by psychopathic politicos offering promises they transparently cannot and do not intend to keep.
* “Material” in socialist parlance is synonymous with “objective” (so their theory of society is called “materialism” – the insistence that only economics is driving social relationships. Which is demonstrably false, so Lenin invented this escape clause. You see – a belief can be material force, too!).
Soviets, like modern Chinese, ended up with a sort of pragmatic communism mostly discarding this moronic postmodernist philosophy and replacing it with obedience rituals, using the same words as essentially meaningless liturgy. Those who resist participating or challenge it are punished. So, for example, Soviet academic dissertations in hard science were a curious mix of ritualistic introduction (demonstrating mastery of the sacred language) followed by the totally unrelated hard-core realist scientific body. You now can see the very same kind of dualism developing in Western academia where the very same biologists who firmly understand that you cannot change karyotype from XX to XY with surgery or hormones cheerfully mouth their support for transgenderist belief that sex is not biologically fixed (in mammals – there are species which do change sex!)
The Party hierarchy uses the power to dish out the ideological punishment to rule. Practical communism is basically a quasi-theocracy.
So this Lenin’s dictum is widely understood as rather trivial “If many people really believe something they can band together and kick the shit out of unbelievers”.
American Left, being uneducated** clowns, is blissfully unaware of the actual intellectual underpinnings of their cult.
** I use classical definition of edication as teaching broad knowledge and understanding of the culture, not as specialist training in a specific trade. By this definition modern people are shockingly uneducated. Religions at least provide some form of cultural awareness (though not understanding or breadth) – so the religious Right is a lot saner than the atheist Left, though just as illiberal (“liberal” in the original sense, not as newspeak euphemism for “marxist”).