DimitriRascalov
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User ID: 450
Isn't the obvious objection here that during the first period, citizenship and power in institutions mostly rested with WASPs and similar demographics while in the second one, although immigration had been restricted, now a large share of the native born population consisted of (descendants of) Italians, Irish etc., i.e. ethnic groups that down to the present day have markedly different attitudes towards redistribution or even things like free speech in comparison to English- or German-Americans?
Unless the hope is that quasi-accidental effects like 'diversity reduces societal cohesion -> less unions form -> unions can't interfere with growth' outweigh this, I'd wager that continually adding more people who come from countries that practice more distribution and, when asked in surveys like the GSS, explicitly say that the government should intervene more and reduce income inequality, will in fact eventually result in a society that redistributes more and values economic freedom less.
After we reopened our borders government spending and union participation went back down
Maybe I'm misinterpreting you or you meant spending coming back down from the highs of WWII, this claim doesn't seem true, whether for overall spending or social spending in particular, both of which have a strong upward trend starting in the early 20th century.
DimitriRascalov
2mo ago
Eh, the Italians were relatively Republican (as were the Germans) while the Irish leaned Democratic (AFAIK there's still a decent-sized partisan gap between Americans of German or Italian ancestry and those with Irish ancestry.).
In the GSS, Italians lean more heavily Democrat than the Irish and both are significantly more Democrat than Republican. In this sample, the only white categories that don't lean Democrat overall are the British, the Scandinavians and the Germans & Dutch.
DimitriRascalov
3mo ago
Is this true? This is what I could find online:
- (via Wiki) This paper from the 90s claims based on census data that between the 60s and 80s intermarriage rates between blacks and whites were much higher in the Western US than in the South. In 1980, 16.5% percent of all marriages involving a black person were with someone from another race on the West Coast in comparison to just 1.6% in the South.
- This map by Pew shows no obvious trend in the South. Metro areas in Texas and Florida have high rates, but basically the same as SF or LA and not that far above Chicago or NY. Elsewhere in the South it looks like average or slightly below to me. (caveat: this is for all races, not just black-white, and it's just urban areas)
- As a proxy for intermarriage, although 56% of all black Americans live in the south, just 41% of mixed-race Americans with black heritage do so. Naively, this seems to point to higher intermarriage rates outside the South, although this might be skewed by internal migration.
DimitriRascalov
4mo ago
I think the idea is that people in those times, especially pagans, saw supernatural forces as much more involved than people today do. The sun is Helios himself driving across the horizon, plagues or earthquakes were sent by God, the coin you put in a grave will be used to pay Charon etc. Given that context, a virgin birth doesn't violate nearly as many assumptions about how the world (usually) works as it would even for a typical contemporary theistic account of reality.
DimitriRascalov
4mo ago
Wouldn't this only work if you are in a profession that contributes significantly to the capital stock? If you're a hairdresser or professional athlete, you can be as extra productive as you want, nothing you do during your work life aside from having children will make goods and services any more abundant (societally) at the time when you need them in your old age.
DimitriRascalov
5mo ago
France does have birthright citizenship (with some minor, practically pointless limitations), along with a host of cultural habits such as not asking anyone about their race or insisting that everyone with their passport really is a Frenchman. Their outcomes aren't much better than anywhere else in Europe, arguably even worse, given that something like a plurality of race riots in post-1945 European history happened there.
Yes, yes, yes, I know 3rd or 4th generation college educated immigrants are all SJW's who complain about America all the time. Well...what's more American than that?
You seem to imply some sort of seamless assimilation here. That's simply not the case. Persistent differences in voting patterns and political attitudes between post-Hart-Celler immigrants and the legacy population are pretty well known, but even within the ostensibly fully assimilated white group there are significant differences. A US without e.g. Italians or Irish would be much hostile to the welfare state or restrictions on free speech.
DimitriRascalov
8mo ago
A more interesting question is why obesity came out of nowhere in the mid-20th century and exploded from the 1970s onwards.
Obesity is defined as being above the threshold of a BMI of 30. Imagine a population where currently everyone has a BMI of 25, but it starts to increase by 1 every year from now. What would the corresponding graph like the one you linked look like? It would be 5 years of no change, until in year x+5 obesity "explodes" to 100%, despite the fact that the actual causal trend has been going on linearly for 5 years!
If we look at actual weight itself to avoid thresholding effects like I described above, there doesn't seem to be anything special about the 70s at all, they're right on trend. There's other data like discussed in this that indicate that the surge in weight had already begun around WWI, subsided a bit around the Great Depression and accelerated again in the immediate aftermath of WWII.
DimitriRascalov
9mo ago
There is no ill will against Poland in Germany by and large. Apathy and condescension, yes, but no bad blood. The people from the former eastern territories are dead or soon will be and their descendants don't recognize themselves as such, so basically no one has any real historical grievance against Poland. Negative feelings are reserved for admonishing Poles about LGBT rights or abortion.
There'd be little enthusiasm among the general populace, but if Poland asked and genuinely needed assistance the German government would definitely send help. NATO commitments and ethics aside, they would do it for the sole reason of it being an excellent addition to the post-WW2 German national mythos.
DimitriRascalov
9mo ago
It's likely that the author of the article misread the original study. Here's the source the article was referencing probably, it's the bar chart titled "Zufriedenheit mit der Bundesregierung". 20% are happy or very happy with the current government, the rest is not.
Depending on the degree of precision you want to achieve, you can of course argue about every single tree line in Pomerania or Silesia, but the arrangement post-WWI followed ethno-linguistic lines pretty well at the eastern border of Germany. This wasn't some completely intractable question, it was solved fairly well at Versailles. The remaining minorities on both sides of the border were geographically distributed in a way that precluded easy solutions but also not that significant in terms of numbers. On top of that several mixed areas got their own referendums to clear remaining doubts.
DimitriRascalov
10mo ago
Even pro-UA accounts like Julian Röpcke are conceding that Ukraine is losing lots of armored vehicles with very marginal gains.
I don't think this says quite what you seem to want it to say. Röpcke is strongly pro-Ukrainian and fills most of his feed with praise for successful Ukrainian actions, true, but from the very start of the war he has had the tendency to wildly blow the potential consequences of any Russian success out of proportion in order to play up the "desperate Ukrainian heroes repelling the onslaught of the Russian horde"-angle to a hesitant German audience.
Leopards and Bradleys being lost in a weird traffic jam not even at the line of contact is a bad look for sure, but the fact that people like Röpcke immediately went into panic mode over it tells us next to nothing either way.
DimitriRascalov
10mo ago
Go on /r/transpassing and sort by top all time. Even the MOST passing transwomen on Reddit as voted for by their own peers don’t pass. And that’s in posed photos!
To be fair, this is not as strong a point as you're making it out to be, given that you already know that each of these people is trans by virtue of the subreddit's name. I agree that many of these pictures look obvious but I'm not sure whether I'd have the same confidence if these were presented in a gallery of portraits of random cis and trans people.
On the rest I agree entirely. It reminds me of this post by @Walterodim. For any given measure men can come arbitrarily close to the female standard, but combine multiple and the difference becomes clear as day almost every time. From a probably highly curated sample like the top posts from your link a number could plausibly be women going by the image alone, but I've never met someone in real life where the full package including voice, stature, body build etc. didn't tip me off immediately.
DimitriRascalov
10mo ago
We're still at a point in time where the vast majority of both hard and soft power is held by natives in Europe. Of course you have things like Sunak becoming prime minister, but in general civil servants, people staffing museums or galleries, engineers in some Volkswagen factory, journalists, university professors, members of parliament, people belonging to a society concerned with Egyptian archaeology, orchestra musicians and so on are much more likely to be ethnically European than the general population.
In other words: the human bedrock that maintains the edifice of European civilization is, while it's definitively getting quite old, still there and hasn't changed much in its composition as a consequence of mass migration. Of course, such elements of the newcomers that have joined these ranks immediately stop having children in most cases, so they don't provide a long-term solution as well. I don't think there will be some brutal civil war or anything as dramatic as the Powell quote, but I wouldn't consider the hypothesis entirely disproven until all of the institutions that are maintained by people in the 40-70 age range are gone/replaced and things are still fine.
DimitriRascalov
11mo ago
I'm unsure if this framing illuminates much. If I, without your consent and neither any pressing need nor benefit to you or anyone else, performed a procedure on your house that gives it a <0.01% p.a. chance of spontaneously collapsing the tiny probability of something happening in your lifetime would not be a convincing defence. That the risk is small doesn't matter when there is no reason why anyone should tolerate being exposed to it in the first place, which is a significant difference to things like driving which you brought up in the post above.
That might end up being the same thing. It doesn't need to actively kill humans, deciding that it needs some finite resource like fossil fuels more than humans do would kill billions without any intervention more aggressive than blocking access to production sites. It seems plausible that an all-powerful AI might not mind people living in pre-modern farming communities, but that would also mean huge reductions in QoL and the number of humans around.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
Nothing, I'm just too absent-minded apparently.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
Yes, in the context of the overall economy you're completely right and maybe this was a dumb way to put it. However, I meant for this to be more of an example regarding the point of the speed of expansion. In a toy economy like Ricardo's with only various forms of text work as goods in demand and an advanced LLM and office workers as the only productive forces, the comparative advantage that office workers might have is rendered irrelevant by the fact that the AI model is practically infinitely scalable, that's what this was supposed to illustrate.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
Comparative advantage relies either on high demand or limited means of production. In the classic Portugal & England example by Ricardo both countries have a fixed amount of labor, so although Portugal is better at producing both cloth and wine it makes sense that it focuses on wine and England on cloth, because England has a comparative advantage in cloth. But if either the demanded quantities are small enough that Portugal can cover them on its own or the amount of Portuguese labor grows to that point, there's less or even no need for trade with England anymore and the Portuguese economy can take full advantage of being more efficient at producing both goods.
Accordingly, in order for human comparative advantage to hold against automation it would have to be the case that demand growth outpaces the speed at which automated productive capacity can be expanded. Given that ChatGPT can already talk to thousands of people at the same time while robots outside of heavily constrained environments still struggle to perform basic tasks that are very simple for most humans, I'd say that competitive advantage for humans will break down first in the areas where LLMs are best at.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
Sadly no, as far as I can tell. Here are the latest ones with German subtitles, if that helps (though they might not be available in some countries). I found this guy on YouTube who translated the subtitles of an entire episode from 12 years ago, but that seems to be the only such effort on the internet.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
Are German television shows always based in Berlin, or in Munich?
Partially as a result of the defeat in WWII and the Allies' desire to decentralize the German media, Germany maintains a large amount of regional public broadcasters. There are no less than 9 regional TV channels (each covering 1-3 federal states) in addition to two flagship channels (one from Berlin, the other from Mainz) dealing with national and world events (e.g. news or large sports events) plus an additional 10 channels for specific audiences (children) or covering more niche things (high culture, theater, documentaries, that sort of stuff). All of these are broadcasting 24/7. As you can imagine, that's a huge amount of screen time to deal with and especially the regional channels make sure to fill a lot of that with locally relevant stuff.
As an example: the long running and very popular German police crime drama series "Tatort" consists of several different police precincts all across the country, always produced by the respective regional broadcaster. There's even one from Vienna and Zürich. Across the weekly screenings of new episodes throughout the year, a viewer will be taken to big cities such as Berlin or Frankfurt but also smaller towns like Saarbrücken or Weimar.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
And in fact, those people abandoned the old identity, founded on faith and honor, in favor of novel ideologies based on race or class, which led to swift ruin.
Maybe this is meant as a broader point including communists and Nazis, but in what sense was the French Revolution built on race? Didn't it explicitly found the tradition that the French state still insists on of not enquiring anything about ethnic heritage? And with regards to class, I don't think that pre-Revolutionary France can be described as a society not based in significant amount of class. A core grievance fueling the revolution was the perceived decadence of the nobility, a social class that justified its position at least partly using class based ideology like the divine right to rule.
Broadly looking at the pre-modern West class ideology permeates everything. Greece had all the politicking about who gets to be a citizen, Rome had the patricians and the plebs, the Migration Period sees a bit of a flattening of class hierarchies due to the general anarchy and Germanic influences but emerges into the Middle Ages as highly rigid and stratified societies. Maybe I'm misreading what you mean by "class based", but I don't see any kind of ideological novelty when French radicals and later socialists start thinking in these terms in the 19th century, just that it's now coming (at least partly) from below rather than exclusively from above.
Reading the title of the post I was sad initially at the more limited scope going forward, but given that Aretha Franklin and another less well-known rap album are on the list, I guess it's a small mistake?
Speaking of IS Ellipsis: can you shed some light on your discovery process? I've never heard of it, a YouTube upload has 12k views and on Spotify the group's highest tracks barely crack 100k. Given that this is an underground rap album from 2005, before the age of easy discoverability via Google, YouTube/Spotify algorithm or things like bandcamp I'm left wondering how stuff with limited reach like that shows up on someone's radar.
Thanks again for doing this, I somehow never knew about the Talking Heads live album and it majorly sweetened a long drive.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
This sounds plausible, but I can't imagine these sorts of arguments are doing much to dull the pain of a linguistic group that is forced to send its children into an alien education system aimed at least in part at eradicating its uniqueness. I agree that better cooperation can be to the benefit of a group and language certainly is good vehicle for that, but that presupposes that the people in question see themselves as part of the group that stands to benefit. My impression of Canada is that at least the Quebecois don't seem all that eager in that regard.
Well, one can advance a claim that had Paris not created a French nation, they'd all be speaking German now, or maybe speaking their regional dialects while being lorded over by Germans.
I think that a France that centralized to a much smaller degree than the real one is a timeline with so many possible changes from our own that I don't think one can get much insight from such a hypothetical. The only attempt by Germany that could plausibly be construed as taking over France in its entirety was WWII (and maybe WWI), but there's no telling if that would have even happened in a world where Normandy, Aquitaine and Occitania existed instead of France. Late Medieval/Renaissance Germany eventually let go of the Netherlands after they had drifted apart too much culturally and politically, so it's not like that sort of scenario is inevitable in our world.
I'd also add that the French kings maintained a somewhat centralized state and lorded over peasants with local languages/dialects just fine for centuries before the arrival of the great homogenizing that lead to the current situation. I'd say that your argument applies much better to the Germans, given that absolutist France was very successful in picking off small German speaking principalities along its eastern border. That Alsace speaks French instead of Alemannic is the result of France being able to keep its conquests into the age of modernity when it got to destroy the local language via mass culture and schooling (of course in the case of Alsace thanks due to a large helping of German idiocy and brutality).
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
While that certainly can be true for individuals, I'm not sure that this is the average case as for how it plays out in practice on a large scale. German language schools for the stateless Western Slavs that exited the Middle Ages under the rule of the German lords of Brandenburg and Saxony and generally kept their language as a distinct people all the way into the 20th century didn't result in a vibrant bi-lingual community, but in their slow motion death as a people. Foreign language schooling has been similarly destructive for regional dialects or distinct languages all over Europe, most notably in France. Picard and Occitan are basically gone, Breton is currently still in the process of being killed.
It's certainly not the way I'd word it, but I think that "infinity migrants" does capture something about how this is treated in mainstream discourse. Does European leadership have an actual end state where all of this is going to lead to in mind, a certain ratio of natives:immigrants where they'll close down the borders? I don't think so. Instead, there is a vague sense that immigration is good and that, as long as people are willing to come, we should continually take in a significant number, whether on moral or economic grounds. At least that's how I'd describe most European political organizations from the center leftward on this topic.
I'm now old enough that I can remember three distinct phases of a few months to maybe a year where politicians were making migration-skeptic noises and sometimes even went through with some measures that mildly decreased the inflow for a while (like the recent border police controls here in Germany). These were triggered by momentary increases in the number of arrivals or terrorist attacks. Of course, these phases came and went and in the meanwhile, the numbers go up and up, sometimes slower, sometimes faster, but always up. Infinity is an exaggeration, but it's the direction things are and have been going towards for all of living memory.
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