Pets For Dinner

Granted the pet eating is probably fictitious, but there is wild duck eating, bad driving of unlicensed drivers, resource strains, and white CEOs who throw the natives under the bus as he happily hires cheaper immigrant labor. (I can't imagine his life has been peachy since that interview came out. I imagine he regrets saying all that stuff.)

Horace

I heard Vance say recently in an interview that the pet eating memes are the only reason anybody is talking about the real issues. I think he knows they are nonsense, but I also agree with him that they have been useful to get people thinking and talking about this.

George K · "Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08

LuFins Dad

@Horace said in Pets For Dinner:

Good take here from my favorite young commentator:

Link to video

Granted the pet eating is probably fictitious, but there is wild duck eating, bad driving of unlicensed drivers, resource strains, and white CEOs who throw the natives under the bus as he happily hires cheaper immigrant labor. (I can't imagine his life has been peachy since that interview came out. I imagine he regrets saying all that stuff.)

That was an excellent video. I just shared it on the town’s FB page.

George K · "Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08

From 6 months ago...

"I've heard it as well, but I've not seen proof."

89th

Well Muir (ABC) did say the city manager said "there is no evidence" and "no credible reports", which seems accurate even with the above video showing there were calls (without proof) about it.

Horace

@George-K said in Pets For Dinner:

From 6 months ago...

"I've heard it as well, but I've not seen proof."

Why would anybody call the city manager about their pets being eaten? Wouldn't they call the cops instead? Obviously, the city manager is lying about those calls. Also, obviously, the city manager is a Russian operative.

jon-nyc

LuFins Dad

In the meantime, more and more is coming out about the new business model of not outsourcing to third world countries, but to bring third world countries here, instead.

Doctor Phibes

@LuFins-Dad said in Pets For Dinner:

In the meantime, more and more is coming out about the new business model of not outsourcing to third world countries, but to bring third world countries here, instead.

Who are you calling Third World, you hillbilly?

? Offline

Inside of Springfield.

https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/wanderland/exotic-cat-eaters-springfield-ohio/

tl;dr

Springfield, like many similar cities, had been suffering from a declining population and economic stagnation when it joined a number of other Rust Belt cities in an effort to actively recruit immigrants to settle there. The town fathers may not have had 12,000 Haitians in mind, but that is what they got—and the results were pretty good: Contrary to the rhetoric you hear from Vance et al., employment went up, not down—and wages went up, too. In fact, Springfield handily outperformed nearby Dayton—and the country as a whole—in wage growth coming out of the COVID-19 downturn. And where population is increasing and wages are rising, some things—notably housing—will typically get more expensive. The Haitian newcomers, who are in the main legal immigrants under “Temporary Protected Status,” do use a lot of social services—those who are eligible have made heavy use of programs such as Medicaid—but they also work a lot of hours and put a lot of money into real estate, buying houses and commercial properties to start businesses of their own.

And that is where this gets politically interesting. With the Haitians working overtime—McGregor, the Pentaflex CEO, reports losing Haitian workers because he couldn’t offer them as much overtime as they wanted—and putting their money into houses, landlords who had been participating in affordable housing voucher programs widely used by the preexisting (largely white) population of Springfield began shifting to offering their properties on a market-price basis, and found Haitian renters willing to pay. From the traditional conservative point of view, the Haitian story in Springfield is, at least in part, a success: Hard-working people got jobs and put in a lot of hours and drew assets out of the subsidized welfare-state economy into the free market. Which is great if you are the ghost of Milton Friedman but a real inconvenience if you are an underemployed denizen of Springfield looking for a subsidized housing arrangement and unwilling to match the … rigorous Caribbean work ethic? … of your new neighbors.

Vance has turned Solzhenitsyn’s maxim on its head: “Let the lie come into the world, but only through me, and only if I get something good out of it.” A man who is not suffering from whatever disease of the soul with which Vance is afflicted would have a hard time even imagining wanting to be vice president—of all petty things!—that bad. A different and better sort of man would understand that bearing false witness against 15,000 poor and vulnerable people in the pursuit of political power is the same as bearing false witness against anybody else.

But I’ll give Vance the last word. Here he is on Twitter, back when Twitter was Twitter and J.D. Vance was J.D. Vance: “Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this, I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us.”

jon-nyc

More detail. Nice that the lady apologized. Maybe Trump/Vance can learn from her.

LuFins Dad

In the meantime, her daughter can’t find work because the Haitians are doing it for half the wages…

The New Coffee Room

Pets For Dinner