HonoriaWinchester
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User ID: 3468
HonoriaWinchester
1mo ago
My observation and experience is that they're part of a newish culture (not really "woke," more its '90s-vintage predecessor, though I guess some of them have evolved with it) that assumes that opposition to immigration is motivated by racism/bigotry/xenophobia, and therefore is not amenable to argument. That's why they don't bother to argue. (Rounds off to arrogance / attitude problem.)
(I think some might claim they tried to argue in the past and it didn't work. Because of "the rubes'" racism/bigotry/xenophobia. So they learned not to bother. I might argue that hey friends, that was ~50 years ago, times might have changed? But for people who were raised by parents who had "learned that lesson" in the 70s-or-so, it's not a decision they themselves made, it's a thoughtless assumption they grew up with and haven't thought to reconsider.
I'm not different. I just happened to experience an SJ mobbing around 2010 and I reacted by reconsidering my assumptions, including "If I was targeted like this and didn't deserve it, I guess some of those other (previously targeted, now anathema) people I'd been thoughtlessly dismissing as Obviously Evil Racists maybe didn't deserve it either, I'll see what they actually have to say." Others just...weren't lucky enough to have had that type of experience.)
It's epistemic closure / a mental trap. I'm enough adjacent to them (that is, "third culture kid" types) that it makes me sad. They've culturally evolved "into a corner." Their assumptions prevent them from course correcting. It's just...sad.
Oh and (for the same sad reason)--
The reasoning goes "We won't have enough people; this will give us more people; this is what we need to do."
(You can see some of this in The [End of the] World] [is Just the] Beginning; I think it's fair to summarize his position as "Countries won't have enough people; I politely acknowledge some citizens fear potential negative consequence of this, but this will give some countries more people; the countries that will be able to do this are the lucky ones, because all the other countries won't have enough people and the consequences of that are what matter.") It never occurs to them to check if these specific people will actually help the problem or not. In theory it seems like they would (goes the thought process); why wouldn't they?
Their culture assumes the blank slate. It wouldn't occur to them that one group of immigrants might improve the situation and another group might worsen it. All groups are interchangeable. Anyone saying groups might not be interchangeable is doing so out of racism. And this isn't a consciously-held, easily-questionable "belief," it's a bedrock assumption (like yes they'd agree all groups are interchangeable, why are you asking, are you racist? But it's not a belief they typically have to apply consciously, it's an unconsidered assumption).
Kind of fits in with Toynbee's "the ruling class loses creativity and gets stuck in old modes of thinking which prevent flexibly responding to new problems" theory.
HonoriaWinchester
1mo ago
Since you mention Nikki Haley (who BTW has Sikh heritage), I assume by the filters "we" had you mean the US. Your comment just sparked a memory of Air India 182, which happened in the '80s and was perpetrated by Sikh militants who had immigrated to Canada from India. The Wikipedia article on Air India 182 comments that "by the 1980s, the area around Vancouver, British Columbia, had become the largest centre of Sikh population outside India." The large numbers may suggest Canada may have done little "filtering" at that time...?
HonoriaWinchester
1mo ago
[I'm speaking generally of many different countries' leaders around the world when I say: I believe] It's because they think they need more workers or else everything will be even worse. They think a declining population is "the end of the world" / has worse consequences than anything else, so they HAVE to shore up population numbers, by any means necessary.
[IMO] They're wrong. They've overlooked how bad the consequences of other things can be. A declining population is not the only possible situation with very bad consequences. But it's what they think.
Is "Prioritize maintaining population numbers over everything else, therefore coordinate with desperate skill to knowingly go against the wishes of your people, all with a self-satisfied attitude/assumption of knowing better than the benighted rubes" stupidity or treason? IMO could be described as either. The attitude problem encourages the hostile "treason" assumption. But I call it, really, hubris.
They think they're doing the right thing for the people they think they know better than. Well, and I think I know better than them.
(BTW. I realized this most thoroughly and clearly from reading The [End of the] World] [is Just the] Beginning by Peter Zeihan. Great title BTW. And he details what he expects the consequences of depopulation will be.)
I will point out that those who were raised Blue were raised to give a fuck. "We on the left do not blacklist," etc.
(There is a perspective that might say: "It is those who were raised as, what we were raised to consider, 'whackadoo fundies,' who left 'fundieism' and identified as joining the left, who went on to apply the attitudes learned by being raised as 'fundies,' toward their new political positions. And since their, often 'Quiverfull,' parents had way more kids than our parents (who had never even heard of 'Quiverfull' and we only learned about it from adults 'joining us' who had been raised that way), their numbers totally swamped ours and the 'left' that we were raised in is no more.")
(Which kind of...illustrates cultural shift as a result of uncontrolled migration. Even though it had been welcomed by the "victims" because "we need all the numbers we can get.")
Meanwhile I grew up during a time this kind of thing was happening to Unitarian Universalists where I lived. "We're losing numbers, let's welcome all those 'Bridget Loves Bernie,' and similar Catholic-Protestant, marriages etc....wait what's happening to our religion..."
Could summarize as, the UUs (I endorse this) and "the left" (maybe also) thought they were getting new full members who wanted to assimilate and would take direction, and then were stunned to find that the new members...well...just didn't. To grab a metaphor from my long-gone geeky adolescence, I guess you could say the UUs (and "the left"?) thought they were offering "free as in speech" (:wince: or...software) and the new members thought, or acted as if, they were being offered "free as in beer." (Newcomers interpreted certain things as the "pure licentiousness" their cultures of origin had perceived them as, but that was never what was meant by the original adherents; but with the newcomers' numbers so great, that turned out not to matter.)
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