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That just seems disingenuous to me. When was the last time you agreed with the government’s position but disagreed with its implementation because of which government  was enforcing it? It just feels like an [insert argument here] approach rather than an honest defense of ones position. 

But immigration IS the way things are - there has been non-stop immigration in perpetuity to the U.S. for the last 500+ years. I do appreciate the honesty of this position though I disagree that it's valid. It's the appeal to tradition fallacy. 

I can accept the other relevant factors people mention (like culture); however, people never seem to want to address the immorality of what happens when people are NOT allowed to immigrate legally in tandem with the other factors that they do want to discuss. I'm not only talking about the poverty or danger people are relegated to just by the very nature of where they're born, but also the fact that enforcing immigration laws is often brutal and inhumane. We all saw the pictures of Haitians being rounded up by agents on horseback like cattle. Yesterday a 7 year old Venezuelan girl drowned in the Rio Grande as she was attempting to cross into Del Rio with her mother. The mother lost her grip and the child was swept away. These are things to consider in the complexity of the discussion as a whole. 

The current "labor shortage" is more about not having enough people willing to work certain jobs for certain wages because they have more options and opportunity (but notice how nobody's talking about low unemployment and rising wages under Biden like they were for Trump). Your local Taco Bell might be staffed by white teens, and that's great, but there are plenty of memes, angry Facebook posts and data from the Dept of Labor showing a lot of jobs simply aren't being filled.  I've had bad experiences from staff shortages. 

That is an interesting thought. I can't even imagine how dramatically different the world is going to be in general in like 5 decades. 

They are very insular and help each other to a degree, but a lot of them are actually on welfare. It's unclear how much of the welfare is really needed. A lot of people suspect they are just exploiting government services which could be antisemitism... ya know, the whole "Jews are super cheap" trope... but there is also evidence of it.

There were multiple Essene prophets before Christ.  The most famous is John the Baptist.  Multiple early Christian-like cults worshipped John as the Messiah and lasted through the second century.  One small group called the Mandeans continue to worship John as the Messiah today.  Josephus does document John's beheading by Herod although he does not specifically identify John as a Messiah claimant or any interactions with a Messiah named Jesus.  John's baptism of Jesus is almost certainly a second century artifact written to combine the followers of John and the remaining Essenes into a Christian tradition.

So, very like Jesus we know that there were multiple contemporaneous biographies claiming the same name and role but we have no hard evidence for a single individual biography suggesting preferment.  Like Jesus, many contradicting traditions and claims arose in the centuries after.  Like Pontius Pilate, we know that some of the Govt officials mentioned in the text were real and contemporary.  Like the disciples, contemporary individuals with names like Will Scarlett do appear in church records and census data around Nottingham.  Sounds very analogous to me. I guess I'm not surprised that if that this is a question of faith for you that you might weigh the evidence with a different scale than I but I think it is very reasonable to assert these two cases as analogous- and, as I say, the one that doesn't involve faith gets called fiction without much controversy.  Personally,  I don't find much fault in applying the same perspective to an analogous character in an analogous body of literature.

Which takes us back to the question of religious testing for Congresspersons.  The first sentence of the First Amendment prohibits Congress from respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.  Since Crenshaw is prohibited by the Constitution from promoting Christianity publicly do you think its appropriate for constituents to demand such unconstitutional demonstrations?  Do you think its appropriate for Citizens to be teaching 10 year old girls such unconstitutional practices?

We shall inseminate it with artificial growth via ad spam and embrace the Chinese bit coin market to generate revenue to help this site flourish. 

So we agree that no hard evidence exists. We can also agree that its rational to suppose that Christ existed.  My point is that in the absence of such evidence how can you fault an individual for claiming fiction?

Josephus, the best historian closest to events, documents some fifty Jesus like figures claiming prophetic status in the decades contemporaneous with Christ's hypothesized lifetime

and reading the Gnostic gospels pretty clearly demonstrates that more than one biography was recorded as Gospel  by scattered and diverse Christian communities in the first century and slowly edited down to a single biography by the fourth century.  While it is very reasonable to suppose that at  least one Jesus-like figure claimed Messiah in the first century, the biography laid out in the bible seems to be a restless and inconsistent amalgamation.

We know that there were multiple real biographies that claimed to be Robin Hood during John I's reign but we also know that Sir Walter Scott condensed and wove those stories into the popular re-telling we have no problem calling fiction today.

It doesn’t make sense to believe that Jesus was a purely ahistorical figure like Odysseus

• Let's remember that when Dan Crenshaw says that Jesus is a fictional character he is reflecting the consensus of  global history, anthropology, theology, and science:  No hard evidence exists proving Jesus Christ's existence as a man on Earth in history.  So, let's take a deep breath and remind ourselves that Crenshaw is the only one speaking the well-established American wisdom to that girl and all the haters are mad because Crenshaw didn't assert a non-fact as a fact to a young child in the audience.
  

With one child per couple, both families absolutely poured resources into that child. Instrument lessons, best schools, huge pressure to succeed, huge investment in that child starting a family. Now it's seen as shameful to not offer that level of support, and this makes people less likely to have kids because they can't afford it. 

We could always make immigration easier if we're concerned with not having enough people to live or work here. The irony (against the Republican argument that Dems want more immigration for votes) is that most immigrants are socially conservative and hostile to socialism. 

I could see that. There are more Jews here than in Tel Aviv. More than one in four Brooklyn residents is Jewish. Most are Orthodox which tend to vote Republican.  An interesting trend indeed. 

Did you get better than her?

No, no, no. Your asking the wrong question. The real question is: "Did he get the girl?"

I remember you told me a story once upon a time about your old neighbourhood being rolled over by an immigrant wave. I genuinely felt for you then and I think any politics that doesn't never knew a home itself. I think the right makes more sense than the left really. Some of it touches on racist sentiment, but why shouldn't it. It's a hyper-individualistic world. One side would make their politics around coddling some group of people. The other side knows nothing of this group, resents being made out the bad guy, sees gangster rap and gang violence. Politics of resentment, it makes sense. I'm not saying that's yours. Yours is definitely a fuller politics. But those are my ideas of the American right. 

There's one part of the left then that's a politics of the plenty. I think you and Double_R are both good dudes. His politics wouldn't deprive anyone of anything he has. Yours knows it's not so simple as that. I would say that's the entire difference between you. 

There's more of the left though. I really don't even know where to start haha. There's something suicidal there. I had ideas about it before, but I can't properly remember them.  Maybe I'll come back to you. 

Uncle Ted in his manifesto explained this quite well. When liberals protest it is out of a sense of emptiness they need to fulfill. Ted explains it better, but their activism is not because they even believe in their own cause, but as an attempt to feel important and worthy. I don't know his opinion On right wing activists.

Immigration won’t solve anything long term since this is happening almost everywhere

The magical castration stuff is especially bonkers, and is a perfect example of footbinding-esque mass medical malpractice that will be looked back on with complete bewilderment centuries in the future. Aside from that festering boil called England and, strangely enough, Iran, I think most people in the rest of the world are completely bemused/horrified by it.

So my idea is that a culture of politics plus some few real and contentious issues fosters in people a practised affront and which is then a doorway to all sorts of silly shit.

I think that's a great point and huge cause for concern. I do wish there was more fact checking in the other direction.

I get that, but I still have to adamantly point out that social sites aren't even close to being monopolies. Your kids probably won't use Facebook - they'll have long moved on to something else.

My dad told me a story once about the horses. Back when they were workhorses, come winter, my grandfather would bring them down the forest and set them loose, not to be looking after them over winter. Then came spring and he'd go down again and stand at the edge of the forest and give a whistle and they'd come back to work. Doesn't that sound like magic. I would have loved to see it. Reminds me of fucking Gandalf and Shadowfax.

Philosophical discussion about the family vs. individuals

In order to establish "immorality," one would first have to establish an undue deprivation of that to which another has claim. And even if the recipient of an inheritance were to squander his or her wealth, he or she would have the right to do so.

I grew up on a farm wondering after the work that my grandfather did to make it what it was. No diggers, rotavators, none of the modern day machinery that I'm accustomed to. There's stone houses all over the farm, still standing, they boggle my mind even looking at them. It's like a monastery up there. Ditches, dikes, perfectly flat fields. A huge expanse of land. He made hay by hand. He cut turf with the slean. No slotted houses, no milking machines, no slurry spreaders. And the place was immaculate until the day he died. My dad brought him a power hose when he was old and not much left in him and we could have buried him with it. He never left it out of his hands. Long way to come from handpumps and shallow wells. He died of farmer's lung. I couldn't put a number on my inheritance.

I don't much know what the moral of that story is, but I think about it a lot. Especially as a programmer these days. I put hours and hours of work into a thing and there's nothing there. I'll leave behind a bank account. 

I am a rather radical guy on it, if it were up to me the world would be completely fair, I mean as in parenting the same, childhood the same. One world nation pure fair start in life.

That's obviously unrealistic as things are so am I gonna look out for my own if I can post-death? Fuck yes.

Therefore, you cannot deduce the cause of that feeling from the feeling itself. If you have a general feeling of love or being watched over by a larger being, and you refer to this feeling as "God" - then the relation between the meaning you personally ascribe to God and the religious concept of God still remains completely indeterminate.