We've always been at war with Eurasia

[OttoVonBismarck]

An interesting analysis, Otto, but I think the emphasis placed on fertility rate doesn't follow from the facts.  According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_fertility_rate), Canada has a lower fertility rate (1.53 births per woman) than Sweden (1.80), which is the lowest in the Scandi countries.  Yet Canada doesn't seem to suffer the problems you note.

I'd argue the real issue with immigrants there is that they do0n't become Swedes or whatever, not that they expect to live in the lap of welfare-state luxury.  Some who come are refugees, for sure, but these refugees don't identify as potential Swedes (or whatever) and so don't make an effort to fit in - this is just temporary, after all.  I'd want to see the results for the second and third generations before I accepted an argument that this represented a permanent change.

That's actually the core of what I had originally said. I don't believe a neutral analysis of my post would suggest I was implying any state that receives a high degree of immigration relative to natural growth is destined to end up like Scandinavian countries + several other European states. Rather I was saying when the population of "bad eggs" out numbers the "good folk" because of immigration the state will have very little ability to salvage itself.

It really is immigration neutral. If for some reason 65% of natural born Americans woke up tomorrow and became lunatics who felt it was appropriate to kill their daughters for dishonoring the family or to rape a woman because her younger brother saw a female classmate without her head scarf on, I posit the country would essentially be fucked because the bad would outweigh the good.

In the case of Scandinavia it is exactly the problem that eventually the worst parts of Scandinavian society will, if trends continue (obviously a major caveat), outnumber the best parts of their society that make it work and have made it work for the past generations. The means of getting to that point will be runaway immigration of bad types combined with lower natural birth rate, and that is how I would typically assume such a situation would occur, but I could posit some other ways it could happen. This argument says nothing about all states which have high immigration rates, but rather ones where it will lead to the anti-social cancers outnumbering the core society itself.

[OttoVonBismarck]

What brings it down, IMO, is the loaded language; immigration is "invasion,"  "right Americans" excludes all poor people (and there seem to be just three groups:  "right Americans"/"middle class and wealthy Americans"; "white trash;" and "poverty-stricken urban blacks"), the claim that 1960s rape laws had penalties that were "like a slap on the wrist," etc.

Right, but mind the medium--and I was never presenting myself as a neutral observer, and never have.

Post-1960s rape laws in the US, for instance, didn't seem to lessen the penalties at all; what they did was change the definition of the term and the requirements for conviction

While throwing aspersions at others arguments let us note that if I am to give this statement notable weight I am accepting it tacitly that you have performed some extensive study of a large portion of American jurisdictions statutes on rape. Instead I suspect you spent a cursory amount of time gathering evidence to support an argument.

But either way, that is more than I did since I was speaking entirely off of vague recollection, remembrances of interviews and opinion pieces that were not sourced and etc. Mind however that my argument was not and really isn't one designed or particularly intended to be held up to great scrutiny. Nor do I have the investment in it to care much what happens to it.

I will say that in many cases the biggest change in criminal sanctions was not a period in which statutory penalties were decreased and then increased, but rather a period in which judges and juries started sentencing people more leniently and making use of alternative forms of punishment as they became available. Much of the reactionary crime legislation of the 1980s and 1990s was really more about "truth in sentencing", in effect removing much of the significant discretion judges and juries used to have. So instead of being able to sentence someone anywhere from 6 months to 50 years for a crime, States slowly started to create much, much tighter ranges. At the Federal level just as an example (and this is one you can look up) the discretion a Federal judge has under the Federal sentencing guidelines is usually only a few months one way or the other. (Note that after U.S. v. Booker it was found that Congress could not make the Federal Sentencing Guidelines binding on Federal judges. However judges still tend to follow them, and when they don't statistics demonstrate that it is far more likely they punish someone above what the maximum recommended by the guidelines.)

Another issue was that for many years judges and juries only vaguely influenced what the sentence would be. For example someone might be sentenced to a range instead of an actual sentence. So if I rape someone I might be sentenced to 5 to 30 years. Where I fall on that spectrum would be based on things like good behavior credit and the judgment of parole committees. So two inmates sentenced for the exact same criminal act (assume they were equally complicit partners in a felony) and sentenced to the exact same range could have vastly differing release dates. For example one could be released 5 years into a "5 to 30" and the other could be released 30 years later. Where the public truly became concerned was the plight of the inmate who had to serve the maximum, but instead the inmate who followed the rules and got out early and then reoffended in spectacular fashion.

[Duque de Bragança]

I read somewhere a few weeks ago that when the State Dept. started mandating DNA testing for "family reunification"-type refugees, they found about 80% of Somali "family members" to be fraudulent.

That would explain why the "immigrationist lobby" is against it in France as well and successfully vetoed it

How many Somalis does France take in?

It was all for candidates for family regrouping.

[Tamas]

It was over us playing a joke on Marty.

FB martyred himself histrionically for the Marty cause.  Marty was cool about it though.

no. Marty was in his first-hour rage fit over it, FB felt that as a friend he had to take a stand for him. This lead to his ragequit, which was followed by Marty's predictable crawl back.

[Siege]

Why can't people stay in their own countries?
If they don't like it there, they can go and do something about their own goverments, wheather it takes violence or not.
They have to stay in their countries!
We should KILL all immigrants!!!

Oh wait....
Nevermind.

[Jacob]

Sorry, I'm not going to keep responding to your posts since all you do is attempt to provoke me and I would rather not play that game.

Your call, of course.

Now, if it's the provocations that piss you off (and they're not a one way thing) my suggestion to you is to ignore the posts you think are meant to provoke you and respond to the civil posts.

That's what I do with you, except on the occasions I feel up to tangling a bit.

[Slargos]

Apparently it would be immoral to deport him because "it would just mean some non-swedish woman would be raped instead".

I have changed my mind. They need to be cleansed by fire.