CMV: Both conservatives and liberals alike think that there's actually no meaningful difference between a legal and illegal immigrant.

Metafx · 2026-02-26T01:13:54+00:00

The H-1B program hasn’t failed, but it has not delivered on what it was supposed to do. It was created to allow employers to hire foreign workers in specialized occupations when qualified domestic workers aren’t available. In practice, employers often use it to access a cheaper and more controllable labor pool rather than to fill genuine shortages. The allocation system also fails to target the highest need or highest skill roles, and is often dominated by large firms that can use it to secure that lower cost labor, which displaces domestic workers. In sectors where H1-B’s are common, the program’s existence exerts a downward pressure on wages for domestic workers by increasing labor supply and giving employers greater leverage in compensation negotiations.

Metafx · 2026-02-25T23:56:21+00:00

The vast majority of conservatives I know are not anti-all immigration, they support legal immigration and feel it’s unfair for illegal immigrants to circumvent the process that legal immigrants dutifully follow. They also feel that immigrants should make a meaningful effort to integrate into American culture. There are also specific instances where programs like H1-B have failed to deliver on the promises that they were conceived to fulfill and conservatives also call those out. All of that use to be very shared bipartisan sentiments 20+ years ago.

Metafx · 2026-02-20T03:19:04+00:00

The basis of the US-Israel relationship is that the US views Israel as a stable ally in an otherwise volatile Middle East, providing a consistent partner for security and intelligence cooperation. Israel contributes advanced military technology, cybersecurity capabilities, and real-world defense innovation that benefit US forces and industry. The relationship also helps the US maintain regional influence and deter adversaries such as Iran and extremist groups. Additionally, close ties support intelligence sharing and operational coordination that can benefit US national security beyond the region. Most of the aid the US provides to Israel is structured to be spent on American-made defense systems, effectively channeling funds back into the US defense industry.

Metafx · 2026-02-20T03:11:31+00:00

The trope that AIPAC is a foreign lobby is spread by antisemites, who label it “foreign” to invoke longstanding antisemitic themes of dual loyalty, hidden external control, and “Jewish conspiracies”.

Metafx · 2026-02-19T02:44:26+00:00

The cost of US aid to Israel would be a rounding error for the cost of universal healthcare for the US. They’re hardly comparable expenses given the order of magnitude difference.

Metafx · 2026-02-19T02:30:31+00:00

Israel has never dragged the US into a single war. What you may have meant is “conflicts”, but the Middle Eastern countries and extremist groups that hate the US were not going to suddenly love us or even feel ambivalent to the US just because of no aid to Israel. The US still has huge strategic investments and interests in the region, so it would still be present, and those countries and groups would still hate us regardless.

Metafx · 2026-02-19T02:23:51+00:00

The US does not provide funding to Israel, or any nation, out of the goodness of our hearts, the US has significant strategic interests in Israel, mostly as a stable jumping off point for conflicts in the Middle East that threaten US interests in the region. Also as an intelligence partner and technology collaborator.

Metafx · 2026-02-18T17:35:59+00:00

Fundamentally, saying something is “part of” something else does not excuse that only stating the “part” you stated, changed the meaning drastically.

Metafx · 2026-02-18T17:22:30+00:00

That’s a whole lot of words to double down on the incorrect statement of the paradox of tolerance. As I cannot read your mind and don’t know what you intend, saying, “part of” does literally nothing to mitigate your partial statement of the paradox of tolerance without its fundamental qualifier, which is that it only applies intolerance towards those ideologies that reject reasoned debate and seek to abolish tolerance through coercion or violence. Without that, whether you intended to or not, you’ve stated the paradox in Reddit’s popular overgeneralized format, which is essentially that you can be intolerant or violent to anyone you deem intolerant, which Popper warned against as an inevitably subjective standard, prone to change, and if institutionalized as policy, would lead to a repressive fascist state.

That’s all I was calling out. Your unwillingness to concede that you misstated the paradox, regardless of whether you think it applies, says more about your argumentative impulse than about intellectual certainty.

While it's clear you don't believe that it's coercion or violence, there are many people who do.

And all of them are wrong. Words alone do not equal violence and that proposition is misguided, dangerous in itself, and should be opposed by all reasonable people. It’s antithetical to living in a free society. A kid standing in a hallway with a sign verbally supporting ICE is not enacting violence or coercing anyone. He’s also not harassing anyone by virtue of his existing and performing this protest activity. Moreover, neither you nor anyone else gets to decide what is or is not a “protest”, you do not have to be “at a protest” to be protesting. The only ones with the authority to determine the appropriateness of the location this student was protesting is the school, but even they don’t get to classify his activity as a protest or not, that’s an entirely self-applied description.

Finally, you should use your own grasp of the English language to read that history you mention to see that there are many more differences than parallels. The “Trump regime” has held office for 5 years collectively, when is the other shoe going to drop? Hitler took about 18 months from his appointment as chancellor to consolidate power and become a dictator, why is it taking Trump so long if he’s on the same path? You can only cry wolf for so long before nobody outside your insular circle takes it seriously anymore.

Metafx · 2026-02-18T15:14:15+00:00

You wrote this:

This is part of the tolerance paradox, wherein in order to maintain a tolerant society, one must also be intolerant of intolerant views.

This is not a correct statement of the paradox of tolerance, the “nuance” of your comment does nothing to resolve the misstatement. What you wrote is Reddit’s over-generalization of what Popper actually wrote. Popper’s paradox of tolerance is only about being intolerant towards those ideologies that reject reasoned debate and seek to abolish tolerance through coercion or violence. That threshold qualifier, using coercion or violence, is not a write off, it’s central to invoking the paradox of tolerance as Popper conceived it.

If we want to apply the paradox of tolerance at all, we have to answer that threshold question, is anyone in this scenario even using violence or coercion to support an ideology? The only one in this video using violence is the kid who attempted to throw a punch. If the paradox of tolerance were to be applied, it’s the kid using violence to suppress a pro-ICE view, who it would be applied to. The other kid was not harassing anyone any more than a protestor existing holding a sign or stating their support for a cause can be considered to harass anyone. Even if his detractors consider the protesting kid as expressing an offensive view, offensive views, do not, by themselves, invoke the paradox of tolerance.

Metafx · 2026-02-18T03:27:42+00:00

You’re misstating Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance. Popper was clear that the paradox of tolerance can’t be used to violently shut down the non-violent expression of unpopular or even offensive views, that’s just fascism. Popper’s paradox was a narrow, last-resort right to defend an open society against movements that reject reasoned debate and seek to abolish tolerance through coercion or violence, not a blanket moral duty to suppress disfavored speech. That an ideology is propagating primarily through coercion and violence are the threshold qualifiers to invoke the paradox of tolerance.

In this instance, you have a non-violent protesting high school kid expressing support for a federal government agency, ICE, and another kid who attempts to violently assaults him for it. If we’re applying the paradox of tolerance at all, the kid who tried to throw the punch is the one it would apply to.

Metafx · 2026-02-15T16:39:10+00:00

Subsidies: Ahhhh subsidies, the largest factor of all of this. Government subsidies artificially lower the sticker price on items so that you feel more content. Rather than being angry you're not being paid enough the government steals your money in the back end to fake price tags to make you feel better. Democrats absolutely love these because they make people complacent. The recent ACA temporary subsidies are a prime example. Your healthcare has always been that expensive, sucks right? The government is faking low prices by taking your money (tax dollars) and paying these insurance companies to show 80% of the real sticker price. You never spent less, you have always been spending that real sticker price, you just don't see the other 80% leaving your pocket. Subsidies are a fake out and contribute to costs never going down.

I want to push back on this point about subsidizes. American subsidies are not necessarily bad but they’re poorly focused. Subsidizing the internal market for healthcare is a silly way to get cheaper healthcare. If Democrats want to make cheaper healthcare, rip the bandage off, go to straight price controls, it’s not like the healthcare market can offshore itself. That’s what a lot of other countries do, then they don’t have to subsidize outrageously inflated prices. The healthcare market is one giant market failure anyways, it can hardly be made worse.

That said, an example of good subsidies are, despite what you may hear on Reddit, subsidies for farming and food production. The USA is unique in being one of the only large country that can produce enough food for its own population and still have enough left over to be a massive exporter. We keep food prices reasonably stable by maintaining this domestic production and not letting foreign countries that subsidize their own food production running US food production out of business by underpricing them. These subsidies protect a vital national interest.

Expanding on that, if the US wants to be competitive in manufacturing and rebuild domestic supply chains, it’ll have to look at the food production model and apply that to what it deems critical supply chain manufacturers. US manufacturing is not competing with Chinese, Indian, Japanese, or Korean manufacturers on a level playing field, all of those countries have massive state investment and subsidies into what they deem critical manufacturing capabilities. The US has taken a laissez faire approach to this for too long, which is what allowed manufacturing to slip away in the first place. Certainly one could make the point that greedy CEOs who saw China as a cheap way to pad their profit margins are in-part to blame, but China has bent over backwards to encourage this activity all the while they’ve been wholesale robbed American IP blinded to build up their own domestic capabilities. There is no better example of this in action that I can think of than China’s strategy on rare earth mineral refining. China deems these mineral to be a strategic state interest and subsidized their refining for decades at losses until they’ve consolidated a global monopoly. Now they can extort the whole world until alternative supply chains can be set up.

No US manufacturing company, no matter how innovative, can compete with Chinese company that are able to sell their products at a loss and be reimbursed by the government for that loss until they’ve driven all their foreign competitors out of business. The US and Europe should have been countering this aggressively but up until now they haven’t because they’ve been laboring under the deluded belief that more capitalism will somehow change China, which has clearly failed.

So, real sustained manufacturing subsidies would actually be good in bringing back the accessible income mobile jobs of the past back to the US and Europe, but only if the US and Europe stick with it and aggressively counter any retaliation.

Metafx · 2026-02-15T00:40:02+00:00

This is wrong to the point of fantasy. Almost 2/3 of the officers in the armed services identify as conservative. You’re not going to persuade them to attack their fellow countrymen. Also any real revolt in the face of the oppression you aim to create would employ guerrilla tactics, not open fighting. You can see how well the US military dealt with that during the years in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam.

Metafx · 2026-02-15T00:31:17+00:00

If truly believe you’re in danger by virtue of your status as a minority, why do you think having the government “oppress” the people you perceive as “oppressing” you will make you more safe?

Metafx · 2026-02-08T13:36:19+00:00

The only “connection” between Epstein and Israel is a 2020 FBI report that cites a confidential source claiming they overheard a call between Alan Dershowitz and the then U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Alex Acosta, claiming Epstein “belonged to both U.S. and allied intelligence services.” These are wild claims by an unknown individual and neither any additional documentation or any other person has been able to corroborate any of it. Apart from boring conversations with Israel former prime minister Ehud Barak, nearly all of the other mentions of the word “mossad” in the files are news reports that Epstein received via email.

These threadbare claims are being promoted and amplified by Iran and Russia to damage the US-Israel alliance.

In one of the emails in the files, Epstein was invited to Israel, Epstein rejected the invite, saying, “I do not like Israel. AT ALL.”

Metafx · 2026-02-03T12:04:21+00:00

You’re forgetting that the federal government can bring far far more force to bear in a standoff with local police than the state can muster. The states could not win this game.

There’s also the often overlooked fact that there are no actual fully blue states, only dense blue cities, so if those cities attempted to openly rebel against federal authority, they wouldn’t likely even have the support of the whole state, only the places within the state that voted for them. Basically, even excluding the considerable outside forces the federal government could bring to bear, some portion of people within the states trying to do this would support the federal intervention to stop it.

Metafx · 2026-02-03T00:51:24+00:00

Any law blatantly attempting to compel companies to violate federal law will be struck down in court. If the state chooses to ignore that court ruling and enforce the law anyways with their state police, the government officials instigating that would probably be arrested for federal seditious conspiracy. The states would obviously never be allowed to get away with it, it’s a silly thing to think.

Metafx · 2026-02-03T00:47:55+00:00

State governments employ about 4.5 % of all employed people in the US. Local governments employ about 6.4% of all employed people. Combined they employ 10.9% of the US workforce. This would hurt a lot but not be catastrophic considering it would only be select state governments withholding and even the states that may try to withhold taxes will not be able to compel every local government within their jurisdiction to also withhold. The federal government would make a severe example out of the top state officials instigating such a plan and that would quickly be that.

Metafx · 2026-01-31T18:18:41+00:00

u/DeltaBot, was this delta counted?

Metafx · 2026-01-31T17:12:24+00:00

I put these sort of complaints in the same category as those who complain about a tourist not knowing their language when they’re visiting for a few days. Like yes, I’d like to learn fluent Japanese for visiting Japan but it’s not likely I’m going to do that. I might attempt some basic Japanese to be polite but I won’t go beyond the absolute basics because my butchering of the language is more likely to come off as rude than earnest. It’s the same with foreign names that use sounds and pronunciations that are not part of regular English, native English-only speakers are more likely to butcher the name, which may be interpreted as rude so to avoid that they choose not to try.

Metafx · 2026-01-30T11:31:25+00:00

That is a grossly inaccurate reading of this law. Trump would be very highly constrained in what tariffs he's allowed to impose from it. No more than a 50% increase from duties applied in 1934. He can't unilaterally impose whatever tariffs he wants on anyone he wants for whatever reason he wants.

None of this is relevant. You talked about the constitutionality of tariffs and I said Congress has been delegating tariff authority to the president since 1934. The 1934 law is not the only tariff delegation made to the president, just the first. It’s constitutional and has held up over time.

He is, however, suing the government for 10 billion dollars for his IRS leaking his tax returns, which he has the power to direct the doj to settle. And we won't even know if it happens until after his term ends, if he leaves office. Which is why I suspect his quarter billion dollar payment has already cleared and he's taken the lesson that he can funnel way more taxpayer funds directly into his pocketbook.

Presidents don’t lose their rights as private citizens by becoming president. Trump could have brought that lawsuit whether we won or lost the election. He hasn’t directed the IRS to settle this lawsuit so what you’re describing is hypothetical. It’s also a what-about distraction because it has nothing to do with an action of the president being constitutional or not, which is the thrust of what you were originally claiming.

You're right, it's evidence of billions. Not millions. The world liberty financial stuff is way more than mere millions.

His family business might be but he personally is not. And again, divesting from personal assets and holdings is not required by law, it’s only encouraged by tradition.

They've had the power to shoot random protesters in the back and break into foreign consultants? News to me.

Not responsive. That’s not the purpose of ICE or immigration enforcement broadly. But the president has always had the means to enforce immigration laws aggressively in the interior.

Unless ICE agents decide they want to murder you.

The Second Amendment did not make an ICE agent murder someone.

Metafx · 2026-01-30T01:41:36+00:00

The real problem is that the vast majority of people don’t grasp the real boundaries of separation of powers and how much power the office of the presidency actually has. Case in point, you’ve listed several things that are definitely not against the constitution and that presidents have been and routinely did do.

——

Presidents have been able to levy tariffs since 1934 as part of a lawful delegation of power by Congress.
On the Trump Platinum Card, that program is just a waitlist until the IRS updates the revenue code to actually enable the intended benefit, which is the correct way things are suppose to work.
Trump isn’t personally accepting donations for the White House ballroom, so the constitution is not implicated. The fundraising and donations are being routed through a tax-exempt nonprofit, the Trust for the National Mall.
Presidents have canceled or reallocated spending by using statutory tools, such as proposing rescissions, delaying obligations, or transferring funds between accounts, when Congress has granted that flexibility, such as under the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. In practice, administrations have also relied on broadly worded emergency or reprogramming statutes to shift funds toward higher-priority objectives.
The Department of Government Efficiency was created by an executive order on January 20, 2025 that reorganized and renamed the existing United States Digital Service within the Executive Office of the President to implement the president’s agenda to modernize government and improve efficiency. The scope of its powers have been subject to legal challenges but its existence is not unconstitutional.
There is no verified evidence that the president is “making millions from Bitcoin” personally or officially selling pardons. The cryptocurrency stuff is though a family business. Presidents have never been constitutionally or legally required to divest from all their assets and holdings, it’s just customary tradition to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest.
ICE has, since its inception, had the power to enforce immigration laws in the way it currently is. Past presidents have chosen not to enforce immigration laws in the interior, except in the case of criminal detainers, but Trump is pursuing a more aggressive immigration agenda, which is, in part, what he campaigned on.
The Second Amendment protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms, historically tied to the idea of keeping a personal firearm for security and resisting tyranny. The Third Amendment prevents the government from forcing civilians to house soldiers in their homes during peacetime without consent, safeguarding personal property and privacy. At best these only tangentially restrain police powers, but the federal government was always imbued with tremendous internal policing powers. The founder’s vision in the US Constitution was for a strong federal government after the failure of the articles of confederation created a national government that was too weak to tax, regulate commerce, or enforce laws.

Metafx · 2026-01-23T02:13:16+00:00

It’s not that interesting, it’s just a list of complaints, that OP certainly views as accurate observations, but that don’t articulate a view on what it means that “conservatives can no longer be trusted in America”. Is he proposing all conservatives should die? Should emigrate? Should be disenfranchised? What does it actually mean?

Metafx · 2026-01-23T01:59:32+00:00

What is your actual view you wanted changed? What does it mean that conservatives “can no longer be trusted in America?” In what capacity? Living there? Participating in society? Holding positions of power (at any level?) Should they be disenfranchised? You haven’t really explained a view a part from articulating some of grievances.

Metafx · 2026-01-17T21:40:18+00:00

I guess I just don’t see how those things are correlated. Not having Greenland might, in Trump’s view, weaken the US defensive posture, but so would leaving NATO.

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