Where's the sexism in my comment? I'm not assuming that straight women are doing all the cock-sucking, nor am I neglecting the existence of gay men, lesbians, bisexual folks of all stripes, asexual people or other people who just plain don't suck cock. I'm just assuming, to a first approximation, that their contributions toward aggregate cock-sucking cancel out. If roughly half of the world has penises, then some half, and not necessarily the _other_ half, of the world is sucking them.
I'm not trying to be snide, I just suspect you're assuming a reading of my comment that I don't endorse. Plenty of people besides straight women suck cock, and the world is better for it.
I'm merely pointing out that the term "cocksucker", when used as a term of derogation, is actually pretty unsavory.
While it's unclear to me whether it's ever off-topic to point out problematic slurs (would you think similarly if the OP had written "they got rid of a faggot..."?), I guess this exchange signals a mutual agreement between myself and the modal HN user about whether we want to interact.
> [P]eople born in this country have more rights to the money being created here than foreigners. Asian countries feel the same way about foreigners. Asian countries are, typically, a lot less open to foreign worker immigrants than is the U.S.
I would like to know why being born in a given country should entitle you to more or less opportunity than anyone else who wants to do business in that country.
I would settle for an explanation of how bad immigration policies can be justified by pointing to states with worse ones.
I fear you are confusing positive with normative claims, even if your highly doubtful positive claim is true. How do you make the citizens of a given state better off on average by preventing them from engaging in mutually voluntary associations with whomever they want?
When you read that San Jose is one of the fastest growing cities in the US, do you conclude that San Jose will soon be a desirable place to live and do business, or that undeserving foreigners from other states are "taking San Joseans' jobs?"
The fact that the OP is confusing a positive claim: "states often exhibit little or no regard for the people outside their boundaries" with a normative claim "states _ought_ to act that way" is plainly evident.
That counties and countries are two different things is also obvious, but you need to offer reasons to believe that they are morally distinguishable with respect to economic growth and immigration.
Your analogy doesn't hold. San Jose is not a country, and it has no legal right to prevent US citizens from entering its borders. If (eg.) more people enter than its hospitals or roads can comfortably handle, then it can appeal to the Federal government for assistance. The US cannot.
I don't think the original statement is entirely true either - I can think of plenty of countries which don't promote the well-being of their citizens - but I would class those as broken countries, rather than trying to say that the notion of a country is broken. Certainly most western countries exist to benefit their citizens.
The analogy holds precisely for the reason that San Jose does not consider itself beleaguered by the influx of immigrants who want to live there. The fact that you could entertain thought experiments in which the net consequences of immigration are negative (e.g., a giant flashmob of 50 million people immigrates simultaneously) does not suffice to show that San Jose's hospitals and roads are overwhelmed in the actual world.
In the actual world, San Jose is not in fact appealing to the federal government for assistance; it is reaping the benefits that attend a growing metropolitan population and tax base. On average, San Joseans are better off when more people become San Joseans, for all the same reasons that New York is a more desirable place to live (as measured by the demand for housing) than Wichita.
I've never claimed that there are no states who do not take their citizens' interests into account. I claimed that states often take little or no consideration of the interests of non-citizens. In absolute terms, for example, malaria is a much more pressing human affair than corn subsidies. But corn subsidies primarily affect people within the US whereas malaria primarily affects people outside the US, so corn subsidies dominate malaria in contest for the attention of the US government.
There are plenty of cases where immigration can be negative, particularly in the short term, so controlling the amount of immigration makes sense.
In the case of corn subsidies you can argue that the political process has been derailed in favour of special interest groups. If you follow the chain from corn -> HFCS -> diabetes and heart disease, it's not even acting in the citizen's best interests.
Similarly, it's also trade issues that make malaria worse than it has to be. Screens for windows would make it much less likely to spread - but the material is too expensive for most of the people who really need it.
I don't mean to distract with the examples of corn subsidies and malaria. I don't think it's terribly difficult to find a plethora of examples in which a state's concern for rather trivial internal affairs dwarfs its concern with globally momentous affairs that happen not to affect its citizens. The fact that the spread of malaria could be, but has not been, mitigated by relatively cheap counter-measures just goes to show.
I am not claiming that immigration is an unalloyed good, nor that there are no caveats to consider. I am claiming that freedom of travel is a human right, and that this freedom is largely compossible with the flourishing of the new states into which immigrants move. I just cannot locate any moral claim I have against people who want to move to the part of the world circumscribed by US borders, nor any moral obligation they would have to recognize one. Where is the argument? I can certainly understand that citizens in certain industries would prefer that immigrants with similar skill-sets not immigrate, but protection from competition is not a human right.
What makes someone a citizen? In the US, being a citizen is a birthrate or comes via a long, tedious bureaucratic naturalization process. Other countries have different definitions of citizen.
IMHO citizenship by birthright is a pretty absurd notion, but its largely the default for historical reasons tied to war and conscription. Originally governments only gave you the right to citizenship in exchange for the ability to send you to war to protect often economic interests.
The world would be for more efficient and interesting is the "market" for citizenships were far more liquid and people could easily choose their government the way they can already do internationally by moving from state to state and city to city.
Kiswahili has implosive stops, which are pretty weird for English speakers, but it's certainly possible to make yourself understood if you treat implosive consonants like their closest English counterparts.
As a Bantu language, Kiswahili also has a very elegant (and reasonably regular) noun class system that makes grammatical agreement easier, IMHO, than in Latin or Greek. On the whole, I'd agree that it's among the best bets for an English speaker interested in learning a non-Indo-European language.
Even so, the rubric only shows that Michigan is willing to overlook academic shortcomings in their efforts to recruit athletic talent. Academic and athletic talent still might be correlated in the general population, while sampling bias from the university admissions process over-represents dumb jocks and under-represents dumb non-jocks.
For example, suppose the academic ability of jocks is normally distributed about 105 with a std dev of 15, whereas non-jocks are normally distributed about 100 with the same std dev. If the cutoff for admission is 110, but athletic talent gives you a 20 point bonus, then you're your comparing mean aptitude in a sample of non-jocks, given that every observation is >= 110, to the mean aptitude in a sample of jocks, given that every observation is >= 90. Under those conditions, you'll find a 10 point difference in favor of your sample of non-jocks, even though the population mean for jocks is higher.
I think you alluded to this point in an earlier reply, but it's worth spelling out.
This fun article by Andrew Gelman and Deborah Nolan shows that it's practically impossible to create a coin that will demonstrate a bias when flipped, unless the coin is allowed to bounce: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/dice...
Budweiser has rice in it. So what? So do Asahi and Kirin of Japan, Bintang of Indonesia and Efes of Turkey, and nobody has such a hate on about them. Lots of the people who claim to hate Budweiser will out of the same mouth discourse long and pretentious about the merits of sake. Rice is a perfectly sensible bulk grain to make beer out of if you want a light lager, particularly in countries like America which grow a protein-rich strain of barley. Plenty of real ale types will maintain that Anheuser-Busch uses rice in its brewing in order to save money, which shows a worrying lack of curiosity, as anyone making this argument can’t possibly have looked at the price of rice and the price of barley. Adolphus Busch in 1876 was a German master brewer of exactly the sort that beer nuts go gooey over, he was trying to make a high quality beer (as proved by Budweiser’s use of expensive Saaz hops), and he decided that the best way to brew a lager was to use rice.
> You make it sound like Anwar al-Awlaki had a beer with al Qaeda so we decided to whack him.
Well, that's practically all that we know-- he was killed for propagandizing on behalf of some terrible ideas. But it isn't illegal to propagandize on behalf of terrible ideas, whereas it is illegal to execute US citizens because you find them loathsome and geo-strategically inconvenient.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could learn publicly what Anwar al-Awlaki actually did, and whether his actions were criminal? As far as I can tell, it's unclear whether anything al-Awlaki did would actually satisfy the "imminent lawless action" test in a civilian criminal court. I suspect the senior officials responsible for his assassination understand this too, which is why they would prefer to dispense with the niceties of extradition and trial.
So here's where we find ourselves: in a world in which the US government openly assassinates US citizens who have not been convicted of any crime, and no one bats an eyelash.
