alfromspace

The context doesn't make what Franklin meant any different.

Being an adult citizen, which is exactly what the founders meant, and is really not at all open to interpretation. In the parlance of the time, well-regulated meant well-equipped, and militia meant every armed adult male. This is crystal-clear in the federalist papers, and various writings, passages, and speeches from the exact same people who wrote the damn thing.

"Mayor John V. Lindsay, who took office in 1965, was determined to break this cycle, to put low-income projects in middle-class neighborhoods. He tried, memorably, in 1971 in Forest Hills, Queens, figuring that the community’s predominantly liberal Jewish population would not object to the arrival of three 24-story towers. He was wrong. The construction site was soon overrun with angry protesters."

I have to wonder, does anyone, yourself included, want projects in their neighborhood? And more importantly, is there evil dirt in 'bad' neighborhoods that makes housing projects become high-crime ghettos, and if we just build them in middle-class neighborhoods with good dirt instead, everyone's going to behave and make it a nice place to live?

I can tell you, living in an extremely liberal, formerly low-crime small city that in the past decade decided to "put low-income projects in middle-class neighborhoods" and even offered section 8 vouchers to random people from a big city hundreds of miles away to move in, it's been a catastrophe. Spreading crime and dysfunction around isn't really better than quarantining it.

Don't forget:

-Ah, the federal government pushed/incentivized us to give mortgages to people who have poor odds of paying them back

-Economy or housing market downturns a bit

-A bunch of people can't pay their mortgages

-Major recession

Imagine if instead of constantly building horrific low-income housing projects to (fruitlessly) retroactively "solve" the problem of middle and lower-class people being unable to afford housing in major metropolitan areas, we didn't poison the market in the first place by treating housing as foreign investment vehicles.

It could be - but it's also important to note that number is lower than it's ever been, not many do succeed in getting married, and only 14% of respondents had financial reasons for not being married. I think there's a lot to do with the modern zeitgeist in the "too young/not ready" and "looking for the right person" categories.

Not necessarily. I'm more criticizing the alternatives I mentioned. And more broadly their lack of stable relationships, either with romantic partners or families.

The biggest factor in America's high divorce rates is, by far, the advent of no-fault divorce starting in the 70s.

I think there's also something to the cultural tropes and propaganda we've seen since then portraying marriage as dull, monotonous, and oppressive while lifting up devoting one's life to an office job, travel, and 'exciting' flings as the path to self-fulfillment. When nothing could really be further from the truth - there's a reason millennials and gen-zers are horribly depressed and dying enough deaths of despair from drugs and suicide to bring down the average lifespan.

I can't speak for the OP, but just so we don't a priori pin opposition to diversity campaigns as indefensible, I really loathe them. It's a real position people have!

Who's being convinced by statements like that?

They're sorry they were caught.

We can complain about conditions in child protective services, too. No system is perfect. I suspect this is a tactical criticism, and the conditions aren't the real objection, but rather the fact that we're not just releasing everyone to freely live in the interior.

Are you implying unwanted mass immigration was bad for the native Americans? Is it good for the Europeans now?

You can absolutely go to jail for misdemeanors.

Everyone is separated from their kids when they're arrested. This is a fake scandal.

As for poor living conditions, it isn't really a systemic or intentional thing. Conditions vary by facility. Some are remarkably fine, some are strained beyond their capacity. That's not really their fault. Let's apply some agency to the people coming across the border, rather than just ICE. Personally, I wouldn't think to illegally sneak into a country, refuse to leave, then complain about not getting dental care and a comfy bed fast enough. Spare me. How about we just not let them in?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/the-head-of-ice-c...

On the other hand, nobody wants public housing projects being set up in their nice neighborhoods...often for good reason. The once-safe neighborhood where I grew up once had a grocery store - the lot was bought out by neighborhood housing, a low-income development was planned, locals complained, locals were called racists and NIMBYs, development was built anyway - and now there's no grocery store, no parking, shootings and burglaries are regular occurrences, and kids don't play outside.

The problem isn't solved by spreading poverty and dysfunction around rather than concentrating it - it just makes it everyone's (read: your) problem.

Similar thing happened to a good friend of mine. I don't recall the exact numbers, but she got a raise from something like $11.50 to $13/hr. Suddenly no longer qualified for the pretty nice state Medicaid plan, and had to pick up some godawful high deductible, high premium plan that covers virtually nothing from the Obamacare marketplace. She pays at least $150/month for it in premiums, is nowhere near the deductible, and so far it's refused to cover an MRI two doctors have ordered for her. Plus she lost dental and vision coverage - just had to pay $300 out of pocket for a cleaning and x-rays.

Something's very wrong when making more money makes you poorer and less healthy.

The founding fathers also didn't want anyone voting but white landowning men who paid property tax.

Discredited and debunked are words that desperately need to be retired. The vast majority of the time, they much more accurately could be replaced with "unpopular" or "disliked by the authority I'm about to appeal to".

Why are open-plan offices being pushed so hard, relentlessly, everywhere, all the time - when nearly everybody hates working in them, and all evidence points to them being unproductive and harmful?

What if they disagree with your premises? I'd rather be your enemy than ally if all I can do is nod my head like an idiot puppet at all of the terribly misinformed social justice rhetoric you're throwing at me.

How many more black people than white people per capita commit crimes, and have interactions and altercations with the police?

I can show you the answer for New York City: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_... The crime of shooting is very striking: Only 2.2% of perpetrators are white.

No thanks. I don't want there to be more Americans, I want there to be a better quality of life for the Americans that exist now and their descendants.

I don't see how it figures that more people packed into the same territory competing for a dwindling pool of resources is good for my country, even if the hundreds of millions of newcomers are eventually "Americans". I support controlled immigration when it benefits our country, but immigration for the sake of growing our population seems monumentally foolish. Housing, education, and healthcare are already scarce resources - let's focus on how to build our country into a better place to live for the people who are already vested in the system. In before "they'll pay for our pensions!" - debunked, more like "we're already paying for their food, housing, clothing, education, healthcare, and children", at least when it comes to illegal immigrants.

Also, for the environmentally-conscious - people moving here, a high per-capita carbon emissions country, from low per-capita carbon emissions country, is contributing to climate change. It's very frustrating to see publications from Wapo, to Time, to NatGeo encouraging Americans to stop having children to fight climate change, while simultaneously supporting high levels of immigration that contribute very significantly to increasing our population.

I doubt we'll keep on trucking with the status quo until the planet is uninhabitable, but there will be pain.

It's interesting to see people pining for cubicles. It feels like yesterday when cubicles were looked at as the ultimate symbol of corporate dullness and soul-suckery.

If only we knew how much worse it could get.

Why don't you tell us what your positions on those topics are? I'm trying to look below the surface here.

I didn't see the citation when you first posted. I don't doubt it's valid, but the issue I had up the comment thread was with the theory that lowered faith in medical institutions is because of anti-vaxxers and fear of incarceration and deportation. Your source says nothing of the sort.

There's a tricky game being played. For instance, everyone is "against open borders", but they're for decriminalizing border crossing, against deporting anyone, and want free healthcare, housing, and education for everyone irrespective of legal presence. Then people cook up these theories about various forms of law enforcement supposedly promoting crime and disease by making people fearful of taking preventative actions, and we're expected to consider these arguments in isolation and believe you when you say "no one is arguing for" the thing every word you say argues for.

Maybe you two should try arguing in good faith.

Oh goodness. Citation needed.

And I'm curious whether you happen to be independently against deportation and incarceration. I suppose we'd better open the borders and prisons just to prevent disease, right? Or maybe there's a broader ideology at play here.

The atmosphere cares even less about per capita than per country. It doesn't care about whether we "do our share" either.

I'm seeing a lot of rhetoric and no substance. Yawn.

That's great, but Europe could dial all emissions to zero right now there would be virtually no impact. Even the US doing the same would hardly put a dent in climate change's trajectory, and the issue people have is that we can't simply assume that if we overhaul our entire economies at ruinous cost, China (over 2x America's emissions now and increasing every day), India, Russia, etc will be inspired to get on board. We need a binding global solution. Domestic solutions seem worthless to me.