this is the Britain option, where you just import young foreigners to make up the workforce and accept that your country isn't going to be the descendant of what it used to be in a generation or two
Note that Britain doesn't have a thriving economy, because flooding your country with people and assuming that they will magically fix the economy because GDP=economy is stupid and most politicians and civil servants couldn't touch grass in a garden center.
It's comedy but this fictional game show portrays the feeling of trying to be honest in Britain quite well: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ksBrraaVAxQ
Corvos
12d ago
The spirit of the law is clear, but you can't enforce the spirit of the law. You can only enforce the letter, and anything where a company is allowed to do their own advertising on their own platforms just encourages consolidation and rewards megacorps at the expense of all the small people. I suspect that if you try to add epicycles to close these loopholes then the megacorps will pay thousands of dollars to clever people who will work harder than the 5 minutes I spent here and find cleverer loopholes.
This seems unnecessarily defeatist. The law is ultimately semi-formalised human judgements, and humans are perfectly capable of making judgements without rigid rubrics. You just need a 'safe zone' of examples that are fine, a 'lawless zone' of examples that are not fine, and a 'here be dragons' zone in between. The reason that megacorps frolic so happily is that lawyers are too lawyer-brained to actually apply the spirit of the law when working out loopholes in the letter of it is so much more fun and rewarding, and because governments don't actually want to apply it. When they do want to apply it, suddenly the corps fall in line.
Corvos
13d ago
The theoretical American commitment to liberty makes them unable to say 'we want to reward patriotic and pro-social behaviour' so they end up finding weird and awful metrics for it.
Corvos
13d ago
My understanding (perhaps wrong) is that Tony Abbott basically forced through hardline illegal immigration restrictions against huge protests from both sides of the isle right before immigration massively ramped up due to easy travel. The problem is that the numbers are so big in other countries, and the use of migrants so structural, that getting from America’s ‘default yes’ to Australia’s ‘default no’ is extremely difficult. Though IMO Trump should definitely do this.
I can see that, and would probably agree with you if I had read any of his books after age 12 or so. I think that if you are mature enough to consider the morality involved, or its sociological implications, you are too old for the books. Dahl was so successful because he had the mind of a kid, and he famously didn't get on with adults.
Corvos
13d ago
Dahl’s stuff is popular with 10 year old kids because it’s irreverent of the pieties of adulthood (though fifty years out of date now). The fact that you wouldn’t read it to your child is part of the appeal.
Corvos
13d ago
Part of it I suspect is that everyone knows the government will never, ever voluntarily give up revenue and control, so it's more a question of 'would you like at least some of the money the government steals to come back to you'? Especially since they're the only things that aren't means-tested.
If so, the fact that the left now fulminates on pseudo-anonymous tumblr rather than spreading open anti-white, anti-male material on their employer's official blog and Slack channel would be more of a win for the Trumpian right than anything else IMO.
I also think that left-wing whites have an entirely unjustified confidence in their own future. Demographics are what they are. One day, as usual, the left will look at the ‘utopia’ they memed into existence and realise that it has no place for them.
Corvos
14d ago
There’s a bunch of Japanese words that will not stick. I’d list some but I don’t remember them…
Corvos
14d ago
Just off the top of my head Shakespeare / Wuthering Heights / Jane Austen / Tolkein / Dickens esp. A Christmas Carol / arguably Kipling / Lovecraft.
Yes, there's a fierce winnowing process, in part because public attention is a limited resource. But look at Lovecraft, for example. Lovecraftian horror became a genre, there are lots of parodies and cutesy anime Narth???tep and Lovecraft-lite stuff, and the racial elements are toned way down, but broadly there are works which play it straight released every year and the genre is in rude health precisely because works are still being released which respect its spirit.
(Reminds me that I want to play Still Wakes the Deep).
Corvos
15d ago
Art isn't like people, it doesn't have a fixed expiry date of seven-score years and ten. The difference between rejuvenation and 'using the rotten corpse as a finger-puppet' is whether it holds true to the original spirit and people still like it. Politics is very relevant to that.
Corvos
16d ago
No babe i follow her because it's Christlike to befriend prostitutes. Her too. Yeah and her
I see you too are a devotee of William Gladstone.
Corvos
18d ago
Of course. I was just amused by the massive discrepancy in posting - I originally assumed it was a new account.
Corvos
18d ago
Amusingly, @LykovFamilyBand joined the Motte the same month you did. (S)he just has 4 comments to your 4700.
Corvos
18d ago
I do think of it that way
My apologies, I thought you were describing an essentially static model, with occasional perturbations producing results better than a random shuffle but with no meaningful mobility. I think it's more fluid than that.
That is achingly slow!
This on the other hand is the core of the matter. It is. That's the tradeoff. The positive side is less energy wasted on striving, but more than that, it's having some idea what the future holds. It's as easy to fall as to rise, after all. Parents have no way of knowing if their children are going to have anything like their status, and devote huge amounts of effort to trying to make it so, which is corrosive for the childrens' wellbeing and for the social structures that the parents kick over if they're in the way. Parents aren't even sure they're going to be able to maintain their own social status in a couple of decades. It seems to me that this contributes to a very scrambling mine mine mine atmosphere that is completely unable to make long-term investments because there is no guarantee you're going to be around to collect on those investments.
But as I say, it's a genuine tradeoff and people are going to land in different places on what they want to trade off.
Corvos
18d ago
there's only so much damage a delirious granny can do with a plastic spoon
That sounds like a film script waiting to be written. I'm picturing Die Hard in an old people's home.
Corvos
18d ago
It's a feedback loop, which if anything makes the effect more powerful. I think absent heavy coercion you will struggle to change it for immigrant populations, but the more important point is that even if you do, you are still dumping masses of new genes into the pool. The overall character of the pool will be changed no matter what you do.
Corvos
18d ago
You can’t help but equivocate between counting ancestors and “character of the nation” bullshit.
'Culture is downstream of genetic personality traits' is the missing element that ties these together. Not stupid stuff like eating rice vs. potatoes, but 'in-group vs out-group preference', 'openness to experience', 'sensitivity to impurity', 'tendency towards religious experiences', 'collectivism vs. contrarianism' etc.
Corvos
18d ago
ISIS are special, though. Even Al Qaeda thought they were bugnuts.
In general, protestors and revolutionaries are often very unrepresentative of the majority (look at the countries closer to home). That may not be the case here, but historically Western observers have had serious problems with predicting the moods of fundamentally alien countries.
Corvos
18d ago
As someone who is somewhat aristocratic (my family did not pay for Oxbridge's anything, but 200 years ago they probably could have) you are misunderstanding how it works. Think of it as meritocracy with a sliding window and a small momentum factor.
Rather than the intelligent rising to the top after a major shakeup and then camping there until the next revolution, people broadly rise or fall through their lifetimes. My family were long ago pretty influential. They made many bad choices and a few good ones, and went from 'we own a castle and a good estate' to 'we own a farm and a small business' to 'sorry, kid, I gave everything to an exotic dancer' and then back up to 'decent upper-middle class' through the generations.
This results in a society which is marginally less meritocratic but involves considerably less striving. Your brilliant father would have been unlikely to go from hauling crates to owning (a chain?) of hospitals, though it did happen, but would likely have gone from hauling crates to second-in-command of the hauling company, married to a nice girl of a higher class, with children who raised in the style of that class and who would move upwards or downwards from there according to their own ability. Especially since brilliance is more clear when IQ is slightly higher variance in your profession.
That's how. Like, Amazon and Twitch are separate brands and people use them for separate things, and everybody with eyes can see that. It's not a grand political dilemma like the Minneapolis car incident.
The 'safe zone' is 'you make cola and you advertise your own cola'. The bad zone is 'you run an advertising agency'. 'you make cola but you advertise life insurance from your life insurance subsidiary' is well within 'here be dragons' and you're risking serious issues. It's like when you threaten massive fines for disinformation and everyone bans anything that could even possibly look like something government might consider disinfo. You don't actually have to tolerate autistic winkling out of loopholes.
Could you give some examples? My model of the world is broadly 'if people want what you are trying to sell, they will go looking for it'. If people buy something and they like it, they tell their friends or they write reviews (I am okay with free samples to review sites etc.). But the idea that 'no, you don't know you want this yet' is IMO a lie that advertisers and salesmen tell themselves and deserves very short thrift.
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