DimitriRascalov
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User ID: 450
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.
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
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
10mo 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.
Three days ago, my hometown Berlin witnessed an event (German news article) that combines several culture war flashpoints into an almost absurdist melange: a cyclist was driven over by a concrete mixer truck (who was at fault is unclear at the moment, initial statements by the police indicate that the cyclist fell over by her own and that the driver could not react in time, though he might still be at fault for driving too close to her), the driver, as he was leaving his vehicle to call for help, was attacked and wounded with a knife by an unknown and currently fugitive homeless* person, resulting in him needing hospital care, and finally, to top it all off, the special emergency service vehicle purpose built for rescuing people stuck under heavy vehicles was hindered in its approach to the scene of the accident by a traffic jam caused by climate activists who had glued themselves to one of the main highways of the city, losing valuable time and forcing personnel that had made it to the scene to "improvise", in their own words. The woman has died of her injuries today, the driver will survive, as far as is known.
It goes without saying that this story has something for everyone: car drivers vs bikers & new urbanists; crime, homelessness and decay of public spaces; climate activists vs people wanting to go about their day without disruption; and of course the extra comedic cherry on top that this happened in Berlin, notorious for incompetence and embarrassing gaffes.
In the days that followed, several notable people weighed in on social media. One particular take by one of the luminaries of German climate activism quickly made waves on social and legacy media for its display of a pretty cold-bloded pragmatism:
#cyclist mortally injured: "special vehicle for lifting the truck came late due to blockades and the traffic jam they caused"
shit, but don't be intimidated: it's climate fight, not climate cuddling & shit happens.
(image of the now deleted original)
Now, this guy in particular was always pretty radical, but until now this exact scenario was always waved away as something improbable that no activist of good conscience would allow to happen. As already mentioned, after the backlash he quickly deleted it and apologized, but his output since then has been to basically affirm the content of the tweet in a more polite tone, and the scene around him seems to agree AFAICT.
The last few months have seen an increase in highly visible stunts by climate activists, most notably a constant flow of people gluing themselves to the glass casings around famous paintings throughout Europe's museums. Highway blockades such as the one from this event are becoming a regular occurrence here in Berlin and other large German cities. It seems as though climate activism is becoming more and more serious. Up until now, reactions have been more annoyed than angry, with most people I talked to or saw posting on social media dismissing these activities as childish stunts. This and the rather unapologetic stance of the people involved might change things a bit. It remains to be seen if the reaction will be a decrease in happenings as activists are slapped down by prohibitive fines or a further radicalization. Demographically, the protestor seem to be a mixture of almost entirely urban and college-educated young people and a few younger Boomers and older Gen-Xers. I don't know if that's the stuff which refinery bombers or electricity-cable cutters are made of, but perhaps an event approaching significant eco-terrorism might be on the horizon.
* I remember reading something to this effect initially, but that seems to have been retracted or deleted. For now, nothing but the assailant's gender is confirmed.
DimitriRascalov
3mo 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
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
1yr ago
My first reaction when I heard of Musk's plans here was that this does indeed sound a bit harsh, however, that was before I found out that Twitter apparently employs 7500 people. I get that Musk is controversial and has enough of a reputation by now that many people will view his suggestions with instinctive disapproval, but even as someone who doesn't like his personality, I can't help but agree with him here: what are they even doing with 7k people? When was the last time Twitter rolled out a significant feature?
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
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
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.
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
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
1yr ago
Maybe you think that the EU is less united than it appears, and winter will be harder than Europeans are prepared for.
This is definitely a side note to all the other things going in this thread, but I can't help but wonder how this will play out. I just received a notice from my German gas provider and the price per cubic meter has gone up x5, that's on top of a 60% increase in electricity price. Fortunately my wife works at a place where they're legally obligated to keep the heating on, I do WFH and am unusually cold-resistant and whatever else we'll actually consume fits comfortably in our budget, but not everyone has that privilege.
Across Europe, there will be a large number of people that will be unable to pay for some of the basics of life this winter. Assuming that they'll not just be content to lay down and die, this might have serious consequences starting from cascading economic consequences of non-payment of absurd utility bills to populist parties surging in support. Another thing to consider is that this winter we're still able to largely run off of Russian gas which filled our storage tanks over the summer. That won't be the case next winter.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
It wasn't until after Biden's assuming of office that ultra-rapid vaccination rollouts, universally, became the cause celebre of the progressive press
Speaking of Biden, here's a pretty famous quote from July 2021:
You’re not going to — you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.
I have no doubt that specific scientific writing was clear that a reduction in infections was a probabilistic thing and might wane as time goes on, but here you have the most powerful man in the world, whose administration was trying to mandate the vaccines in various ways and is still requiring them for entering the country as a foreigner, confidently stating that they confer sterile immunity. I'd say that outweighs whatever science reporting or personal anecdotes from upper-class London you can bring to the table.
Throwing in my own anecdotes, the German press was absolutely completely on the same wavelength as Biden here, solid looking and repeated promises about immunity against infection were like 95% of the reason I myself got vaccinated. A common talking point in German (social) media in early 2021 was how Israel had "vaccinated away" its Delta wave. For months on end, even as the divergence steadily shrank and several scandals in data collection undermined its trustworthiness, public health authorities and their lackies in the media obsessed over the differences in unvaccinated and vaccinated case rates, a talking point that is now completely forgotten.
Mainstream COVID discourse was 100% thoroughly permeated with the idea that the vaccines are going to stop transmission up until late summer 2021. This only started to go away in the fall and died completely with the emergence of Omicron.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
How would whatever governing entity that's doing this force the refugees to stay there? Even within rich countries like here in Germany the government bureaucrats tasked with dealing with asylum seekers often find it very hard to keep them in the unknown 10k rural town they were assigned to. There are tons of stories how migrants are sitting in Calais, a completely fine and rich First World city, waiting for an opportunity to make it over to the UK.
That's before considering that the refugees would have to settle next to a potentially aggressive and still dangerous neighbor.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
Barely. As the other post mentioned, it's only until April, but, more importantly, it's only three locations for which no new fuel will be purchased. That means that in January at the latest all three plants will have to greatly reduce their power output in order to be able to run all the way into April, at least according to the company maintaining operations.
It should also be mentioned that this decision was only reached after months of discussion. As late as two days ago it seemed plausible that the original end date (the new year) would stay simply because the parties in the governing coalition couldn't agree on this. It has only happened now because the chancellor used a special and very rarely used provision in German law that allows him to shutdown any debate within the (executive branch of the) government on its course of action.
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.
The only point I'm making is that receiving a jillion dollars' worth of NATO aid didn't help the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan much, so there's hardly a guarantee it'll help Ukraine.
What does helping Ukraine mean to you? The last big movement of the war, the Kherson retreat, was enabled by Western long range artillery making the supply situation of the Russians on the western side of the Dnepr untenable. There are hours of video material showing how Western weapons are being used effectively by the Ukrainian forces.
The Afghan army, aside from never receiving gear as advanced as Ukraine, had a fundamental issue with morale. This is not the case in the current war AFAICT. The comparison with Afghanistan seems like a stretch to me.
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
1yr ago
Let's go best case scenario. Even if these immigrants do end up integrating into Western society and adopting their values - I'd say that's definitely still something one should be worried about. Western culture itself seems absolutely intent on stirring up racial animosity between the groups, as well as creating and maintaining a threat narrative that paints whites as being deserving of contempt regardless of whether they actually did anything or not.
Another point here is that even if the ideal version of integrating into Western society works out instead of the one where the different ethnic groups are living in strife, that still leaves such a society on the very same long term path OP is complaining about, unless a lot of other things radically change as well. Migrants who are productive, who attain academic degrees, who don't make constant tribalistic or ethnocentric comments have birthrates very similar to the ones of Western white majorities. The problem of demographic replacement applies to "good" minorities just as well as to whites!
I brought it up on the old place a while ago and it's an illustrative example: probably the most famous and accomplished migrants (of Turkish heritage at least) here in Germany, BioNTech (known through the Pfizer vaccine) founders and married couple Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, have just one child, despite their fabulous wealth. Meanwhile, the Arab crime families of major German cities like the Abou-Chacker- or Remmo-clan are expanding demographically at a fast pace.
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
But what if it goes mainstream, and from subconscious to conscious?
In some ways, it kind of has. The overwhelming consensus in mainstream discourse is the environmental model of intelligence/capability/doing-well-in-modern-society: if you have loving parents, went to a good school/college, had good nutrition etc. you're going to be more likely to be successful in a wide range of metrics and the mentioned things are causally affecting this. At the same time, a common narrative is how certain groups, e.g. ethnic minorities, the poor or people from the Global South have less access to things like Spanish immersion daycare or well-funded schools, i.e. exactly the things that are supposed to boost intellectual capability.
The obvious conclusion when considering these ideas together is that at this very moment, even if it's subject to change and also the result of unethical acts like Colonialism or racial segregation, generally speaking a rich person will be smarter than a poor person, a white one smarter than a black one, a westerner smarter than a third-worlder. This also goes for a lot of other things education/the environment in general is sometimes said to cause in people, e.g. open-mindedness, kindness or critical thinking. Taking the environmental model seriously, all the disadvantaged groups should be seriously lacking in these things, at least in comparison to people with stable finances or those going to Harvard.
Now, obviously no one is shouting exactly that from the roofs in mainstream media. Instead, a popular approach, often documented in this space, has been to say that certain groups are lacking by Western/white standards, but only because those standards were implicitly or explicitly constructed to systematically supress other, equally valid ways of knowing and societal conduct. A well-known incarnation of that idea is the now-removed chart that the NMAAHC had on its website for a short while (1, 2, 3). This isn't quite the same as a full on 4chan IQ-redpill link dump and it's also not attributing anything to genes, but it's still acknowledging significant and pervasive (and therefore hard to change) group differences all the same.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
... reads exactly like "race is a social construct" except you're constructing it in a way convenient to your particular (somewhat idiosyncratic) white nationalist sentiments.
That just gets back to the common Motte-and-Bailey of "race is a social construct", doesn't it? On a narrow reading, it clearly is, as OP's personal account of racial categorization provides evidence for. On the reading with the further implication of "... and therefore whatever racial groupings are often used are entirely arbitrary [and have no grounding in biology whatsoever]", which is the one that's often meant when the phrase is used in arguments, I'd say it's clearly not, and OP provides a few reasons to think that, e.g. phenotype or various degrees of admixture.
In other words, I don't see the own-goal here, OP seems clearly aware that racial categorization draws both from cultural attitudes and genetic facts. You could basically read his posts as: "this is my social construction of whiteness, here's why I think it captures something about objective reality and why it's socially useful".
Maybe I misunderstand something here, but why would this be unfair? Aren't there a number of ideas that are unchanging or at least variable only in a narrow space of possibilities? Take something like the laws of logic for example, they are as far as anyone knows eternally true, and what's more they seem to be intuitively undeniable and, in a manner of speaking, to impose themselves on any rational mind and, failing that, at least the material reality of the irrational.
In other words, it does seem to be possible for God to put ideas into the minds of all humans that are relatively stable and undeniable by any serious thinker. Why did he not do that for belief in himself?
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