kool_guy

they absolutely were

Mollie was born in 1974, meaning birthright citizenship was already in place for 100 years before she was even alive. What’s been so bad about America during her lifetime that she pines for a return to the 1860s?

And one of the biggest differences of all, along with the four or five I've already outlined, is that America in the 1880s was still to a large extent unsettled. There were only 38 official states in 1880. We had a frontier. Immigrants could come here and help to literally build the country. Now the country is built. Every part of it is settled. Immigrants aren't coming here and building a homestead on the Wyoming frontier or whatever. They are coming here to take advantage of what has already been built. An entirely different situation. Night and day. Immigration today is different in kind. Any rational person can see that.

It's amazing that these decrepit neocon imbeciles have gotten every major issue wrong for 40 years and just absolutely insist on keeping their streak of unbroken wrongness alive at all costs. Yes, 27 million people immigrated here between 1880 and 1924. The difference is that they came here legally, there was no welfare state for them to leach off of, they were not flooding in from dysfunctional lawless third world hellholes, and they actually desired to assimilate into American culture. Oh and we had 250 million fewer people living in the country at the time. So in other words, it was nothing like our current situation. At all. Not remotely.

The last few days have exposed just how much of the left still carries a colonial mindset. A Palestine flag or a triangle in your bio means very little if your solidarity ends the moment Palestinians or other Indigenous peoples assert the right to define our own values, norms, and future. Decolonization isn’t just opposition to mass killing. It means Indigenous people reclaiming the right to shape our own society on our own terms, not having Western political, cultural, or social standards imposed on us all over again.

Quality of life policing is fundamentally individualist and anti-social contrary to this idea of it preserving the public good, it only creates more avenues for justice-involvement, like your comrades getting slammed against a platform pillar for dozing off in a subway car.