5 ms·

One of my in-laws who immigrated from Italy with a big family has a "command center" with a computer he trades stocks on and a few TVs and it drives me nuts whe

One of my in-laws who immigrated from Italy with a big family has a "command center" with a computer he trades stocks on and a few TVs and it drives me nuts when he watches Fox News and they are talking about the dangers of "chain migration" which is exactly what his family did to great success. YouTube is all over the place. You really can get great stuff but are you always a few clicks from blackpill hell: "men suck", "women suck", "famous consumer brands that have lost their way", "it all sucks", ...

malfist 5mo ago
Absolutely. It's a very thin line to go from "just pointing out a problem" to "everything is a problem" to "everything is broken" to "nothing I can do will change anything" and then people disengage in the process and politics and everything else becomes the domain of whoever can shout the loudest with volume, rhetoric, or money. To quote Mon Mothma in Andor: I stand this morning with a difficult message. I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest. This Chamber’s hold on the truth was finally lost on the Ghorman Plaza. What took place yesterday… what happened yesterday on Ghorman was unprovoked genocide! Yes! Genocide! And that truth has been exiled from this chamber! And the monster screaming the loudest? The monster we’ve helped create? The monster who will come for us all soon enough is Emperor Palpatine!
- dottjt 5mo ago
  I think the "nothing I can do will change anything" is actually a predominant theme that's emerged over the past decade. I don't know if you've watched any of Adam Curtis' documentaries, but his documentary HyperNormalisation explores this in great detail (most of this documentaries have a similar theme I've found). Edit: Apologies, I think I mean his documentary: Can't Get You Out of My Head. Essentially it asserts that all revolutions fail, because the people who attempt to overthrow simply become the new guard.
  - sidrag22 5mo ago
    Adam Curtis docs are wonderful. I've grown so accustomed to when people suggest a doc, its some youtuber that posts a doc once a week and utilizes the youtube documentary style to disguise how poorly executed it is. Adam Curtis is certainly not that, for anyone considering this suggestion.
  - Terr_ 5mo ago
    Night Watch (2002), by Terry Pratchett. > People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. Additional context: The city is being (mis-)ruled by a paranoid dictator, whose brutal secret police don't care too much about if you're innocent. The cynical protagonist is frustrated that some of the resistance is also extremist or at least overly-optimistic about what's going to happen next.
    - Loughla 5mo ago
      My favorite quote from any novel comes from that book as well; "Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions. People die, and nothing changes."
      - SoftTalker 5mo ago
        "Meet the new boss..."
  - PaulHoule 5mo ago
    God that guy pushes conspiracy theories I haven't heard anywhere else!
toast0 5mo ago
25 years ago, my italian grandmother was the same way. No command center, but still wildly anti-immigration; probably stoked by the news. She immigrated as a child, technically naturalized twice (she was naturalized through her fathers naturalization, but married an italian citizen in Italy and renaturalized through his naturalization... because the citizenship of a married woman was determined by her husband's citizenship back then), but definitely in favor of pulling the ladder up. "They should follow the rules, like I did" Never mind the rules were a hell of a lot easier to follow back then. I've seen the paperwork, it wasn't much; if you were from an acceptable country, it was pretty close to show up, get a job and be stable for a year or so, then you can naturalize. Nearly impossible if you came from the wrong country though. Even 'chain migration' for most relationships takes a lot longer than that, and you have to wait for your visa priority date to come up. If you're from an impacted country, some of the waits are quite long. If you don't have qualified family, and you don't have qualified employment, there's a very small visa allocation for lucky people.
- somenameforme 5mo ago
  The historic reason attitudes towards immigration changes is because of scale. This [1] page has a nice graph of the foreign born US population. Towards the end of the 19th century it hit 14.8% which led to significant pushback that culminated in various laws and acts against immigration. That's precisely where the paperwork started to form. Following those acts and laws, immigration declined to a valley of 4.7% foreign born in 1970. Then it began rising again with more permissive/enabling acts playing a significant role in driving such, like IRCA under Reagan. In any case we're now up to 15.8% with no end in sight, and history is, as always, not just repeating, but practically plagiarizing itself. [1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findings-about-us-immigrants/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findi...
  - saghm 5mo ago
    > history is, as always, not just repeating, but practically plagiarizing itself Every time in US history that there's been an influx of immigrants, there were people spouting essentially identical arguments to the ones they're spouting now (stealing jobs, lack of assimilation, etc.), and every time it's turned out to be basically a non-issue in the long run. I've long had the opinion that most of the people vehemently "against illegal immigration" would probably have basically the same opinion if the numbers were identical but everyone followed the processes they claimed to support, and seeing how the current administration is trying to deport refugees of color while expanding the programs for only white South Africans feels like a pretty transparent confirmation of that.
throw-the-towel 5mo ago
Shit, the jokes about "monitoring the situation" are actually true.
Ray20 5mo ago
> they are talking about the dangers of "chain migration" which is exactly what his family did to great success Where is the contradiction here?
- jacobolus 5mo ago
  One is people's lived experience: "Hard-working families immigrate to a land of better opportunity and build a life for themselves, integrating as upstanding members of the community." The other is nativist propaganda: "Hordes of scary 'aliens' are coming to take your jobs and destroy your way of life, bringing their drugs and crime and turning your neighborhood into a trash heap. They might even eat your pets!" People have difficulty noticing that the second story is supposed to be a description of what they or their ancestors personally lived as the first story; people compartmentalize and sometimes believe the propaganda version even though it directly contradicts their lived experience.
- PaulHoule 5mo ago
  Well they did it and got prosperous by successfully contributing to the economy and improving it for all of us. In Binghamton there are Turkish immigrants who run Middle Eastern restaurants which our extended family love to go which are so much like the Italian restaurants that Italians still run and I'll see a teenager hanging out there who seems so much like an Italian teenager. A person seeing that similarity could (and should) have a sense of "these people are going to come here and contribute and pay taxes and grow the economy to help support me" which is what the outcome is most of the time.

malfist 5mo ago

Absolutely. It's a very thin line to go from "just pointing out a problem" to "everything is a problem" to "everything is broken" to "nothing I can do will change anything" and then people disengage in the process and politics and everything else becomes the domain of whoever can shout the loudest with volume, rhetoric, or money. To quote Mon Mothma in Andor: I stand this morning with a difficult message. I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest. This Chamber’s hold on the truth was finally lost on the Ghorman Plaza. What took place yesterday… what happened yesterday on Ghorman was unprovoked genocide! Yes! Genocide! And that truth has been exiled from this chamber! And the monster screaming the loudest? The monster we’ve helped create? The monster who will come for us all soon enough is Emperor Palpatine!

dottjt 5mo ago
I think the "nothing I can do will change anything" is actually a predominant theme that's emerged over the past decade. I don't know if you've watched any of Adam Curtis' documentaries, but his documentary HyperNormalisation explores this in great detail (most of this documentaries have a similar theme I've found). Edit: Apologies, I think I mean his documentary: Can't Get You Out of My Head. Essentially it asserts that all revolutions fail, because the people who attempt to overthrow simply become the new guard.
- sidrag22 5mo ago
  Adam Curtis docs are wonderful. I've grown so accustomed to when people suggest a doc, its some youtuber that posts a doc once a week and utilizes the youtube documentary style to disguise how poorly executed it is. Adam Curtis is certainly not that, for anyone considering this suggestion.
- Terr_ 5mo ago
  Night Watch (2002), by Terry Pratchett. > People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. Additional context: The city is being (mis-)ruled by a paranoid dictator, whose brutal secret police don't care too much about if you're innocent. The cynical protagonist is frustrated that some of the resistance is also extremist or at least overly-optimistic about what's going to happen next.
  - Loughla 5mo ago
    My favorite quote from any novel comes from that book as well; "Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions. People die, and nothing changes."
    - SoftTalker 5mo ago
      "Meet the new boss..."
- PaulHoule 5mo ago
  God that guy pushes conspiracy theories I haven't heard anywhere else!

toast0 5mo ago

25 years ago, my italian grandmother was the same way. No command center, but still wildly anti-immigration; probably stoked by the news. She immigrated as a child, technically naturalized twice (she was naturalized through her fathers naturalization, but married an italian citizen in Italy and renaturalized through his naturalization... because the citizenship of a married woman was determined by her husband's citizenship back then), but definitely in favor of pulling the ladder up. "They should follow the rules, like I did" Never mind the rules were a hell of a lot easier to follow back then. I've seen the paperwork, it wasn't much; if you were from an acceptable country, it was pretty close to show up, get a job and be stable for a year or so, then you can naturalize. Nearly impossible if you came from the wrong country though. Even 'chain migration' for most relationships takes a lot longer than that, and you have to wait for your visa priority date to come up. If you're from an impacted country, some of the waits are quite long. If you don't have qualified family, and you don't have qualified employment, there's a very small visa allocation for lucky people.

somenameforme 5mo ago
The historic reason attitudes towards immigration changes is because of scale. This [1] page has a nice graph of the foreign born US population. Towards the end of the 19th century it hit 14.8% which led to significant pushback that culminated in various laws and acts against immigration. That's precisely where the paperwork started to form. Following those acts and laws, immigration declined to a valley of 4.7% foreign born in 1970. Then it began rising again with more permissive/enabling acts playing a significant role in driving such, like IRCA under Reagan. In any case we're now up to 15.8% with no end in sight, and history is, as always, not just repeating, but practically plagiarizing itself. [1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findings-about-us-immigrants/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findi...
- saghm 5mo ago
  > history is, as always, not just repeating, but practically plagiarizing itself Every time in US history that there's been an influx of immigrants, there were people spouting essentially identical arguments to the ones they're spouting now (stealing jobs, lack of assimilation, etc.), and every time it's turned out to be basically a non-issue in the long run. I've long had the opinion that most of the people vehemently "against illegal immigration" would probably have basically the same opinion if the numbers were identical but everyone followed the processes they claimed to support, and seeing how the current administration is trying to deport refugees of color while expanding the programs for only white South Africans feels like a pretty transparent confirmation of that.

throw-the-towel 5mo ago

Shit, the jokes about "monitoring the situation" are actually true.

Ray20 5mo ago

> they are talking about the dangers of "chain migration" which is exactly what his family did to great success Where is the contradiction here?

jacobolus 5mo ago
One is people's lived experience: "Hard-working families immigrate to a land of better opportunity and build a life for themselves, integrating as upstanding members of the community." The other is nativist propaganda: "Hordes of scary 'aliens' are coming to take your jobs and destroy your way of life, bringing their drugs and crime and turning your neighborhood into a trash heap. They might even eat your pets!" People have difficulty noticing that the second story is supposed to be a description of what they or their ancestors personally lived as the first story; people compartmentalize and sometimes believe the propaganda version even though it directly contradicts their lived experience.
PaulHoule 5mo ago
Well they did it and got prosperous by successfully contributing to the economy and improving it for all of us. In Binghamton there are Turkish immigrants who run Middle Eastern restaurants which our extended family love to go which are so much like the Italian restaurants that Italians still run and I'll see a teenager hanging out there who seems so much like an Italian teenager. A person seeing that similarity could (and should) have a sense of "these people are going to come here and contribute and pay taxes and grow the economy to help support me" which is what the outcome is most of the time.