There was a book written at the turn of the twentieth century called The Passing of the Great Race. I believe it influenced Hitler’s Mein Kamf. You need to know about this book only because it is obviously complete bullshit. It is written by a white AngloSaxxon man to demagogue immigration. The immigrants he is demagoguing are Catholic Irish and Italian immigrants.

You know, today everyone from Europe is just called “white,” but back then white Anglo Saxon Protestants (WASPs) were afraid it meant the doom of their way of life and the end of the purity of their ethnicity and thus an end to the vague whatever-is-was-exactly-nobody-knew exceptionalism that made the WASP culture great which they thought is what made America great. Sound familiar?

The author divided the Caucasian demographic into three additional “races” and tried to make the case that mixing with Irish people and Italian people would spell the end of what made his own “race,” the Nordics he called it, great. This is obviously pseudoscience and nonsense, and literally no one cares anymore, which makes the book nonthreatening and highly educational. I am a descendent of Anglo-saxxon, Italian, and Celtic immigrants. According to this bastard (who Hitler had kind words for), I am what’s wrong with America. So it’s funny that as a politically-conservative Mormon, I used to fall for the argument that America’s impending white-minority status was something to worry about. But it’s already happened before, and nothing bad happened. We all mixed together and several generations later, no one alive thought the same way. In hindsight, the arguments being trotted out back then are fucking embarrassing, but it’s a lot of the same shit being said today, only about Latino Catholics.

Latinos are hard-working, God-fearing Christian people. Studies have shown that crime generally has not gone up at all just because there are more and more of them immigrating here and having big families (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-06/what-s-the-real-link-between-crime-and-immigration). They are exactly the kind of people you would think the Republican Party would make a conscious effort to bring into the conservative coalition, assuming the conservatives are as nonracist as they keep saying. If they ever figured out that Latinos are normal people (just from a culture descended from colonial Spain as opposed to colonial England) who just want to work and make a living and be happy like everybody else who lives here, and also if the GOP ever changed their stances away from heavy-handed “America First” immigration policy, made more an effort to be color blind, and took a more worker-friendly policy approach while also talking up Christian values, then the Democrats would be doomed. A full third of Latino voters voted red in 2016 mainly because of Trump’s pro-life promises.

That would suck to lose our reproductive rights, but also if the GOP became the kind of party that suddenly appealed to older Latinos, that wouldn’t be so bad either, because it would mean a significant shift away from white supremacism had taken place. I could work with that. There is a secular trend among millennials and Gen Z among all demographics, so despite the increasing diversity of America, the number of Catholics has more or less stayed the same. The future of this nation as it stands now (just looking at trends) is an ethnically diverse and culturally secular one, and I’m excited. We just need the reactionary whites who are scared of brown people to not fuck it up.

Here’s another gem: the number of people who self-identify as “white” on the census has actually gone up, not down (https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/22/upshot/more-hispanics-declaring-themselves-white.html). If it weren’t for the damned census question distinguishing Hispanics from non-Hispanics, no one would even be able to tell what was happening by looking at raw census data. So, crime has not gone up and the number of people identifying as white has not really gone down AND the number of Catholics has remained steady. Religion is in decline only because your kids think it sucks snd they don’t wanna believe it anymore; it has nothing to do with any grand anti-American Clinton conspiracy to import Marxist agents from Mexico. And if you think that’s a credible and serious thought to be worried about, go fuck yourself.

We’re going to mix together. It’s already happening. In several generations, no one is going to care. Nothing will be fundamentally different from the way things are now or the way things have been before. We’ll probably think of new ways to be racist when we start getting large immigration waves from China or wherever is next. Global Warming is happening, and there’s going be waves of tens of millions of people migrating away from the coasts as sea levels rise over the next century. If conservatives hate the diversity they have now, oh boy oh boy, you guys done fucked yourselves over with your ignorant climate change denialism.

But there’s actually nothing to be worried about. We shouldn’t have a leaky border — I’m not defending “open border” policies — but I am saying that the people who came in that way are actually not bad folks and maybe we should make them legal and bring them in, seeing as how they’ve already integrated and shit. More Latinos would vote conservatively at least on social issues stuff if they weren’t worried about Trump deporting sus abuelos y sus tios. La familia es más importante para los latinos de lo que muchos gringos parecen sentir por sus propias familias.

There’s also something I’ve never understood about regressive Mormon politics on immigration and anti-Latino sentiments in Utah. Latinos are Lamanites, aren’t they? Isn’t the promise of the Book of Mormon that when the nonHispanic white Gentiles reject God, a remanent of the Lamanites will rise and tear in pieces and none shall deliver and that the remaining nonHispanic white believers would ally themselves with this remnant to establish Zion? The Book of Mormon says that in multiple places, especially in third Nephi. Mormons must not believe their own book, because if they did it seems like they would have pounced on the opportunity to proselytize among these new Americans and not offend them by generally holding such antagonizing views of them. Instead we’ve got these white supremecist DezNat dumbasses and all of these America First Trumpists ruining the church’s big chance to bolster its falling numbers in the country where it was born and thus shore itself up.

The only reason I was ever scared of Latino immigrants is because I listened to propaganda that told me that the evil Democrats were going to use them to overthrow my religious liberties. But, I’m of the opinion today that my religion sucked and also no one is plotting to do that. It was yet another delusion I was under. I never thought Latinos were migrating into my country and moving next door to me to hurt me. I just had some funny ideas about Democrats’ intentions.

About that, Clinton did talk about “open borders” in a leaked speech, but it was meant in context for the ears of international bankers and commercial interests (https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/oct/8/hillary-clinton-dreams-open-borders-leaked-speech-/). She wasn’t plotting to destroy the white race through “mass immigration”; she was only plotting to enable the kind of free trade that just as an externality hollowed out factory towns in the rust belt — that’s all. Lol. I mean, there are rational evidence-based reasons to dislike the woman, but conspiracy theories about Latino caravans at our border was just never one of them.



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 03/22/2021 06:29PM by Cold-Dodger.

Additional thoughts: it is not fair that domestic workers subject to minimum wage laws have to compete with people who work under the table for wages lower than it is even legal to pay American citizens.

BUT

We have more options available to use than going full police-state on “illegals.” Make them legal. Bring them in. The only reason we don’t even think about that is racism. It’s just racism. There’s no other other reason. They’re already here, and they already contribute to our economy, and their kids are already learning English and mingling with ours. Just bring them in somehow and let them stay. Give them a path to citizenship. The “damage” is already done, and we can at least spare ourselves the logistical nightmare of deporting millions of people (which will never happen) and putting a police state into effect that will terrorize everybody and still not accomplish the thing it was originally created for — to preserve the white majority. Just let it go. It doesn’t matter.

If American commercial interests are deliberately importing millions of undocumented immigrants, it is to exploit them for them for cheap labor and to keep wages low for everyone else. It has nothing to do with an organized war coordinated by globalist liberal elites to destroy the white race. It has nothing to do with racism at all, although it uses the racism of working class white people to prevent working people in all races from seeing their common cause and uniting against their exploitation. Undocumented immigrants are too scared of deportation to unionize and flex collective bargaining rights, (which is by the way also why they’re too scared to commit crimes at higher rates than native-born Americans).

The whole reason this started was because back in the eighties, there was an irrational fear of the several million undocumented Latinos we already had. No one humanized them and thought about the economic pressures in their home countries that persuaded them to come to the United States. Reagan offered a grand compromise: he would pardon those ones at that time in exchange for more stringent anti-immigration laws and also laws making it harder to work legally as a noncitizen. The idea was to prevent the situation from getting any worse, but it did, and here’s how:

It got worse in part because it was harder to travel back and forth between borders, so more people were coming not just to work but to stay and they were bringing their families with them, because otherwise they would be separated perhaps permanently. The method of choice was actually allowing their green cards to expire and just never letting immigration authorities catch them. Most of it had nothing to do with illegal border crossing. Another reason it got so bad is because we signed an open trade deal with Canada and Mexico. It was good for American business, but it was lousy for the Mexican labor market. The pre-NAFTA Mexican labor market, especially in agriculture, depended on a lot of manual labor, and small mom and pop farms just couldn’t compete with big modern American agribusiness with all of its tech-reliant practices moving down there once tariffs and international trade regulation was out of the way and outcompeting everyone else. Millions of Mexican workers just didn’t have anything to do anymore or anywhere to go but north. If that’s not something we wanted to happen, we shouldn’t have done NAFTA or at least made sure that Mexican labor got a better deal out of it. But of course, one of the main reasons the managerial class in the USA wanted it this way is because Mexican labor is far cheaper, so it happened, and it was a raw deal for working people in both countries.

The American managerial class, the people who own all the things and employ all the people, the “job creators” as it was once brainlessly put, do not care about me or you or Mexicans or anybody or what color we are or what language we speak. They want profits, and they don’t care how they get them as long as the people don’t dismantle their corporate empires as punishment for their transgressions against our common humanity.

Also, if you consider what I’m saying, you’ll realize that there are valid reasons that perhaps a rust belt swing voter who voted for Obama twice would take a chance on someone like Trump. Clinton’s “open borders” positions were known — her support for NAFTA and her desire to do a TransPacific Partnership (TPP) with Pacific Rim countries were known quantities. Working class voters knew it would mean more job loss, so they took a chance on someone else who was saying some of the right things, just mixed with lots of fucking xenophobia too. It was a bad man in retrospect who never cared about them, but if we demonize all of the Trump voters and fail to see why Trump appealed to the ones who just want their jobs back from overseas and want to see their factory or coal towns thrive again, we’ll miss the point and leave conditions in place for another Trump to rise or for the same Trump to come back again, this time with vengeance in his eyes and a working knowledge of the levers of power. That is dangerous, especially for nonwhite Americans.

We have got to communicate with these people — white voters in deep red Trump country — and show them that Latinos are not the reasons they suffer. Their life expectancy is falling because for decades they’ve been hysterically anti-socialist, even anti-social-democratic (mixed welfare state/free market system), and supportive of far right economic policy that helps corporations grow and not help workers’ wages increase. There is a burgeoning labor movement in the likes of people like AOC and Ilhan Omar, but the Americans who need it worst are spurning it because of their damned xenophobia and sexism and tendency to ignorantly conspiratorialize. These women (the “squad”) are their best fucking friends in congress in terms of trying to improve their quality of life, and they can’t see it because they’re the wrong color or the wrong religion. Fox News exploits this, because Fox News is run by big business interests. To be honest, the other networks aren’t all that better most of the time. Ilhan Omar for example has been smeared by CNN as an anti-semite because she dared say “Jews” and “money” in the same sentence but she was only talking about the Israeli lobby in DC and their ability to influence American politicians through campaign contributions and other favors.

Just like my rejection of religion helped me to see many things clearly, my rejection of my hysterical anti-Marxist prejudices also helped me to see even more things more clearly. I am not advocating open communism; I’m just pointing out what the world looks like to an exmormon white boy from Arizona with progressive sympathies and who doesn’t want to see the world burn down around him because he lives in it and just learned to like it.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 03/22/2021 07:52PM by Cold-Dodger.

I am (thanks to the considerable personal sacrifices made by my Aunt Tomi when she and her family of birth lived in Oklahoma) a born Angelina, for which I will always be grateful to her. (She has been dead for over thirty years now, and I still thank her every day for what she did for me personally.)

Directly because of her and the personal sacrifices she made, my parents met here and I was born in La Ciudad de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula (which you likely think of as Los Angeles, or L.A.).

I was raised in a highly bi-lingual (English/Spanish) environment, with lots of Latinos (some of whom descend from the original Spanish, and later Mexican, colonists, beginning when Cabrillo made land in the San Diego Bay in 1542). Spanish geographical and personal names (plus Spanish-language radio and TV) are around me twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year.

Here is what I have learned in my life: by most Anglo standards, Latinos are incredibly family-focused. Their overwhelming priority is virtually always family.

As an extended community, they are also incredibly work-oriented. Despite the Anglo-culture imposed, negative social prejudices which have very often affected them since the 1800s (when Anglos began moving to California in large numbers), as a group Latinos work incredibly hard, and often (as a group) for ridiculously low wages.

Without Hispanics, California's economy would begin crashing almost immediately.

Without Hispanics, our California governments (state and local) would begin crashing almost immediately.

In very large part because of all of the different strengths Hispanics have brought and contributed to all Californians, California is the global powerhouse (by economy; by culture, by intellectual pursuits) that it first began to become during the 1849-1855 California Gold Rush.

Within our greater California population mix, we have many contributors: European, Asian--Californians come from everywhere on the globe, actually--but what makes us the state that we are is in very large part the contributions (family; hard work; cultural, etc.) made by our Hispanic Californians over the last five centuries.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 03/22/2021 10:39PM by Tevai.

Tevai Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Without Hispanics, California's economy would
> begin crashing almost immediately.

And if CA's economy crashed, the national economy would as well. That's not a matter of theory: it's a matter of basic arithmetic.

Lot's Wife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Tevai Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > Without Hispanics, California's economy would
> > begin crashing almost immediately.
>
> And if CA's economy crashed, the national economy
> would as well. That's not a matter of theory:
> it's a matter of basic arithmetic.

Yup!!

Utah was part of Mexico when it was first settled by the mostly-Anglo Mormons. The forty-niners passed through Mormon territory in the way to California, and that’s when the mountain meadows massacre happened. The Mormon Battalion was part of the American war against Mexico to help Texas secede from Mexican sovereignty. They took Texas and most of northern Mexico, and the Mormons fell under American jurisdiction once again. Texas was a classic case of illegal immigration (Anglos) overwhelming the locals (Latinos) until they eventually outnumbered them, so I guess the reverse which has happened in the last few decades is only fair, except Latinos aren’t doing it to grab territory. Latinos have gotten as raw a deal over the last two centuries of American Manifest Destiny as anyone else. The disregard for American immigration law is largely because this was originally Mexico anyway. They have as much right to settle this land as any Anglos from the eastern seaboard, maybe even more so because they’re indigenous to this continent and the rest of us are not, especially if Anglo Americans are going to keep drifting towards a far right “might makes right” kind of Nationalism that rejects international law.

Our economy would have contracted if they hadn’t come. They’re just another wave of immigrant labor the likes of which America has always used and depended on. They’re woven throughout the history of the region since before any Anglo set foot west of the Mississippi River, and yet we act like they’re not supposed to be here. It’s only a bunch of American Exceptionalist solipsistic hogwash that sees them as a problem.

Cold-Dodger Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> It’s
> only a bunch of American Exceptionalist
> solipsistic hogwash that sees them as a problem.

"American Exceptionalist solpsistic hogwash?"

You'll probably get reported for describing them* that way.


Edited to transoform "him" to "them" as necessitated by a poster below.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/23/2021 03:05AM by Lot's Wife.

Cold-Dodger Wrote:
-----------------------------------------------------
> Latinos have gotten as raw a deal
> over the last two centuries of American Manifest
> Destiny as anyone else. The disregard for American
> immigration law is largely because this was
> originally Mexico anyway. They have as much right
> to settle this land as any Anglos from the eastern
> seaboard, maybe even more so because they’re
> indigenous to this continent and the rest of us
> are not, especially if Anglo Americans are going
> to keep drifting towards a far right “might
> makes right” kind of Nationalism that rejects
> international law

Might does make right

Also the north and east of America were never part of Mexico.

Also Latinos are not indigenous, they are the result of interbreeding between Spanish and Indians to varying degrees. "Indios" are on the bottom rung of the social scale in Latin America (or the next-to-bottom anyway.)

anonyXmo Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Might does make right

Really? Because that would mean you approved of the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, Mao's Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's slaughter of 25% of his countrymen, and Hitler's massacres of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, Slavs and other groups.

It would mean that you applauded the 9/11 attacks, Timothy McVeigh's mass murder. It would mean you would accept your lot if someone more powerful than you enslaved you and your family.

All for the best in this best of all possible worlds, right? Or would you exempt yourself and your friends from the moral principle you just pronounced?


---------------------
> Also the north and east of America were never part
> of Mexico.

Irrelevant; obviously irrelevant. CD was describing the American Southwest.


-------------------
> Also Latinos are not indigenous, they are the
> result of interbreeding between Spanish and
> Indians to varying degrees. "Indios" are on the
> bottom rung of the social scale in Latin America
> (or the next-to-bottom anyway.)

Why is this relevant? The topic is the displacement of people who were in a region first. If you don't think that matters, then you agree you have no right to your home or any other property.


------------------
I'm pretty sure you don't apply your moral principle--might makes right--uniformly when it comes to yourself. And when that happens, accusations of hypocrisy are likely to follow.

What difference does it make what I "approve" / disapprove or "applaud" or otherwise? My judgment is not relevant and definitely not of any power to affect anything in the past.

I don't know what it means whether I "apply" this principle to myself or not, I wouldn't have any choice. I pay taxes because I have to or I'll get in trouble so in that sense (and whatever else involving the government usually) I already submitted or accepted that power over me . . I generally stay out of people's way because it's less trouble and they don't give me trouble back.

People get displaced from regions all the time and have throughout history. The "indigenous" were constantly displacing each other for centuries before whitey came over.

I really don't own my property because even assuming the mortgage was paid off I still have to pay property taxes every year, basically a forced perpetual rent on the land or else the government will take it by force.

> I really don't own my property
> because even assuming the mortgage
> was paid off I still have to pay
> property taxes every year, basically
> a forced perpetual rent on the land
> or else the government will take it
> by force.

Nice pity-party you’re throwing for yourself!

Without government to back you up, anyone could tell you to give them your property and if they had the power, saying no wouldn’t be an option.

No man-made system is fool-, or knave-proof, but efforts are made to keep getting better.

C’mon, join us here at our Pollyanna Party!

What I am about to write may sound esoteric and tengential (if not completely off-topic), but I promise to tie it up to a very important point made by Cold-Dodger in his original post.

In 2016, the Braille Authority of North America (BANA for short) voted to change parts of the braille code being used by blind people to come in line with the rest of the braille world (outside of the United States) and to make it easier for computer programs developed to translate items into braille to perform this function with less human oversight. New codes were created for parenthesis marks, and old abbreviations for the words to and by as well as the abbreviation for the double d (two d's in a row in a word) were removed from generalized use in literary braille. The removal of these abbreviations is supposed to make it easier for those learning braille to distinguish between a period and the double d (which used the same symbol) and the explanation point and the word to (which, again, used the same symbol). Any braille books produced after 2016 by the National Library Service for the Print Handicapped (formerly the National Library Service for the Blind--NLS is the abbreviation in either case) must use this new unified braille code; by the same token, all blind children being taught braille must now be taught using the new Unified braille code instead of the older English standard braille code.

I learned to read braille during the 1970s using that older standard code and I still use that code today for my own personal writing. I think that the updated code is too bulky and will actually force braille books to encapsulate more volumes than they do now (for reference, the Vest Pocket Dictionary which covers a small volume in print covers 7 volumes in braille using the older standard English braille code).

In the end, however, it doesn't really matter what I think or what braille code I use in my personal daily life. All new braille books will be under the updated code, and blind people just starting school will be taught the Unified English Braille Code and *only* the Unified English Braille code. Give it about a hundred years, and even the memory of the older standard English code will be gone.

What I've just said about the Braille code applies to the generational and racial changes eluded to by Cold-Dodger in his original post. The criticisms that the older generations made about the generational and racial changes were quite accurate according to the way they thought things should be. The thing is that when these people died and the next generation took over, they didn't worry about the same kinds of things that their forebears did, and we saw changes in race relations and immigration laws for the better, at least in my view. We're now a few generations down from the author that Cold-Dodger was pointing to in his original post, and I'll wager that if that author were alive today, he'd cringe at the racial mixing of today's generation, because even if it meant nothing to them, it would still mean everything to him.

It's true that "Indios" are looked down on and suppressed in South America.

There is the Caste System, prejudice, and injustice in just about every country in the world. The tired, old "might makes right" rears it's ugly head everywhere, including here.

The Spaniards forced the Incas to fill rooms from floor to ceiling with gold and silver. The Incas figured that since the Spaniards were so greedy for gold, that they must want to eat it; so the Incas force fed molten gold down the Spaniard's throats.

The gold amounted to 16,000 pounds, which by today's standards, would be around $416,000,000. There was about 32,000 pounds of silver; not sure what today's value of silver would be.