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Cake day: April 1st, 2022

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  • What do you mean by boosting ‘the economy’? GDP (PPP) per capita? Median wages? Labor productivity? A nebulous all-encompasing concept of a country’s production, distribution and trade? It’s not a meaningful term on its own, it’s usually just a rhetorical trick in mass media to make it sound like shareholders making more money is somehow good for the country.

    I was not talking about the abstract grand scheme of things, like benefits from their diverse experiences and overall population benefits, I’m talking about the direct immediate effects on worker wages. Due to social circumstances, companies can, and often do, save wage costs by replacing local labor with immigrant labor they can underpay, and with the special case of illegal immigrants, even pay illegally small amounts. Immigration increases the reserve army of labor that compete for lower wages. This is happening in my workplace, actually, not with immigration but with outsourcing, the human resources department are replacing trained capable local workers with undertrained workers in countries with lower labor costs and regulations (e.g. India) purely to cut wage costs. But the principle is the same, outsourcing like this only applies to work capable of being done remotely (e.g. call centers, graphic design, tech work), for manual labor then immigration has a similar benefit to a business owner.

    Once again, I’m not talking about whether immigration is beneficial, (and like I said, I believe it is) I’m talking about how immigration is used by the owning class to reduce wages and enrich themselves.



  • “men are the root of all evil”

    I’ve never heard this claim, only “money is the root of all evil”.

    Patriarchal society is profoundly harmful, but that’s not an issue that divides sex or gender - patriarchal culture also directly hurts men. Men aren’t immune from its problems simply because patriarchy systematically positions them above others. We can generalize this false-attribution error to other identity conflicts like sexuality, race, ethnicity, appearance, etc., it’s easier to notice and then blame the tangible benefactor rather than identify the underlying system and its roots.


  • I am not anti-immigration because I prioritize social factors in my country’s situation, but that is a real position that people make valid arguments for.

    Immigration is a real economic factor used by the owning class to lower wages. It exploits both local and immigrant workers. Look at Trump voters complaining in the news about how anti-immigration has ruined their workforce - they were exploiting immigrants to save money instead of paying local workers a (…relatively) reasonable wage.



  • Why does this argument assume violence is always evil?

    There are plenty of situations where non-violence is not effective, where an attacker does not want or need co-operation, making non-cooperation merely non-resistance to evil. Sometimes the only realistic way to disobey violence is with targeted counter-violence or the threat of counter-violence, we don’t always have the luxury of non-violent tactics available to us.

    Even groups like antifascist orgs emphasize that non-violent tactics are generally preferred, and I agree completely, but ultimately, there are many real-world situations where non-violent methods just aren’t applicable. This is important to realize if we want to stop evil.