ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
This claim has always sounded like an excuse to me, because I have only ever heard it from people who are middle or upper-middle class, while families much poorer than theirs both in this country and abroad are somehow able to raise multiple kids.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
Asians can make good content, but their lack of personal charisma puts them at a distinct disadvantage in an American setting. This seems to be what Harvard's "personality scores" were trying to get at and what people mean when they complain about Asians being a bunch of boring interchangeable nerds. In my experience this is mostly a product of cultural differences and will start to disappear as the proportion of recent immigrants in the Asian-American population goes down.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
Only for certain subpopulations. Others, for example New England whites, are comparable to Europeans in this regard.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
Better than them causing a civil war in a first world country.
Your proposal itself would be enough to start a civil war in a first world country. The "we" in your case is not some silent majority of Europeans but a tiny minority that would first have to carve a bloody swathe through your own kin to seize the kind of power needed to conduct mass deportations.
It is the Laestadians, traditionalist Catholics, and other rapidly growing Christian sects who have the right approach, as they have the potential to weather the coming storm and outbreed the other survivors.
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
Driving on an open highway obviously makes you feel more free than waiting for a train, but I don’t think driving in a city where you have to stop every block for stoplights or pedestrians and then spend half an hour looking for parking (and then can't drive yourself home from a bar if you've had a few drinks) compares all that favorably to taking the subway in terms of agency.
One of the problems here is trying to apply one-size-fits-all transit solutions. Being so pro-train that you want high-speed rail from California to New York is just as silly as being so pro-car that you bulldoze apartments to build an interstate through downtown Manhattan. The difference is that the former is the sole province of internet meme groups, while the latter is quite close to actual policies in the tristate area under Robert Moses.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
They'd be idiots to do so, as being the world's primary human capital magnet accrues compounding advantages over time that are simply irresistible and possibly even insurmountable, as we see now with China's stagnation.
Whether you consider these advantages at all depends on your metric of success. If you value something else more than material economic gain or technological development, then all the GDP growth in the world is not going to sway you. I wouldn't swap out my family members for people who were smarter and more productive if I were given the choice; for many people the same goes for their countrymen.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
I at least wouldn't have any problem with that in theory. I don’t see the point of trying to freeze the ethnic map of the world at any particular point in time, as these things are always in flux. In practice, however, the things I do care about (cultural practices, crime rates, behavior) are so highly correlated with national origin that the simplest approach is to screen by background rather than thoroughly vet every individual immigrant to get only those that will assimilate well.
When I have visited Scandinavia in the past, the thing that annoyed me about immigrants there wasn't that they were nonwhite, it was that many did not seem to speak the local language, and I came close to berating several shopkeepers in my broken Swedish for their lack of respect towards their new home.
Cultural homogenization or breakdown of law and order are much worse outcomes in my eyes than racial replacement, and to the extent that they can be disambiguated (and perhaps they can't, this a point of disagreement), I don’t particularly care about the latter.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
This isn't going to make you feel any better, but for many, if not most, people outside of the US the term "American" carries more weight than "white" only because they are taken to be synonymous. It is considered patently obvious to my Asian relatives that their (American-born, monolingual English-speaking children) are not "Americans" and that neither are blacks or hispanics, regardless of how long they have lived here. If you learn any Asian language you will hear such sentiments expressed regularly.
While I think our experiment in separating the concepts of nationality and ancestry has been noble and well-intentioned, its modern defenders would do well to remember that what they are fighting against is nearly the full weight of human nature along with the culture and mindset of every other civilization on the planet.
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
I would describe the difference as being the amount of situational awareness that is required. In a walkable city with good transit (e.g. most cities in East Asia), I don't need to pay attention to where I am going or who is around me. I could stumble drunk from one end of town to the other at 3 in the morning and never be mugged or otherwise accosted. I can relax on the subway and read a book or listen to music, confident that none of the other passengers is going to start a fight or spill something on the seats. If I drop my wallet on the street, it will either be left exactly where it fell or some random person who passed it will find me to return it.
When contrasted with that type of city, driving a car feels about like walking in a bad neighborhood i.e. I need to pay attention to everyone around me at all times or someone could get hurt. Of course, if the only kind of transit you have ever ridden is the sort where you also need to watch everyone on board for potential risks, then it is strictly inferior to driving outside of places as congested as New York. Many of the differences of opinion on this issue seem to stem from people who have only experienced one of these systems not comprehending the other.
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
Modern racial and class politics are not some constant of the universe. What was created by man can be undone by man. Better public transit isn't even the most compelling reason to do so, but are you so willing to abandon our cities to being shitholes unworthy of the third world?
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
The failure mode of tough construction site man is "I had/have it hard so y'all should too".
Whether this is a failure mode or not depends on the specific details of "having it hard." Making your children exercise every day is being harder on them than letting them lounge around on the couch watching cartoons, but the outcome is better; making your children exercise until they throw up or pass out from heatstroke is being too hard on them. There can't be any universal rules at this level of abstraction because people's definitions of hardness are conditional and based on their own experiences; some tiger parents need to be told to take it easy and some parents who are spoiling their kids should be encouraged to be more strict.
As an aside, for an example of a culture whose members took shunning pleasures to the extreme but was nevertheless quite successful, look no further than Puritan New England, which banned everything from music to sports but also produced an outsized number of great scientific and literary figures. I've even heard it speculated that New Englanders had a longer life expectancy than all their colonial neighbors because their food was so bland that people inadvertently practiced the sort of calorie restriction that leads to longevity in laboratory mice.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
This framing describes pretty well how many American liberals see things, but my understanding of the conservative point of view is that the division is between those who wish to be "colorblind" and resent being categorized in racial terms at all, and those who embrace racial identity politics as a way to gain power. To them, what the woke left would call "white" characteristics are simply aspects of American culture that do not belong to any particular race. This is of course different from the typical dissident right/white nationalist framing, which is to just take the woke liberal framing, invert it, and make it even more restrictive.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
I use the term "Amerikaner" to refer to the white American ethnos-that-isn't-quite-an-ethnos, though this would in theory exclude people who still retain a strong European immigrant culture and include any Jews who are thoroughly assimilated.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
That's all true, but "I am unwilling to have a child if doing so means compromising on a middle class lifestyle for them or me" is not the same thing as "I cannot afford to have a child." Having known people whose parents gave them away to another family as children to keep them from going hungry, this is not a trivial distinction. We'd also be better off if those same prospective middle class parents were willing to make more economic compromises for the sake of raising children, as those children will turn out more or less the same regardless of which school district or extracurricular activities they're in.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
Those cores weren't designed by or built for Mestizos...
No, but they were built by Mestizos for a white overclass, which is the same thing we would get in the US even for the most extreme possible levels of immigration, except that some of that overclass will be Asian as well.
Is San Salvador now as nice as Copenhagen?
To me, yes. Copenhagen is flat and boring and the people are (by my American standards) standoffish, rude, and lazy. San Salvador also has much better food and it isn't dark half the year (I should note that while I have visited Denmark, Sweden, and many South American countries, I have not been to El Salvador specifically). That's not to say that much of the architecture in Copenhagen or Stockholm isn't jaw-droppingly beautiful, and they are definitely places I might choose to live...if they weren't inhabited by Scandinavians.
I think The EROEI crowd are peak oilers who couldn't accept that they lost and cooked up some new doomer nonsense.
I mean I don't see any issues with the ROI concept itself. It's a bit of a tautology, but at least it gives us something quantitative that could be updated with new or better data.
In the case of agricultural production, the counterargument to your figures would be that recent increases in crop yields and the green revolution are dependent on artificial fertilizer produced by the Haber-Bosch process, which in turn is dependent on fossil fuel energy that has a decreasing ROI over time. This belief could be falsified by evidence that new sources of oil and natural gas (e.g. shale, tar sands, etc.) do not in fact have a lower ROI than older ones, that nuclear or renewable energy technologies are scalable to the same extent with similar or better returns, or that there are cheaper alternative sources of fertilizer.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
we are constantly told that the tiniest hint of bias against certain races (blacks and jews in the US) is massively dangerous and a slippery slope to literal genocide
Yes, woke leftists say that, and they are wrong. Copying them doesn’t make that argument any better.
Exactly when will it be okay to do something about it more serious than complaining on the internet?
When they do something worse to you than marginally reducing your chances of getting a job.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
While I agree that smart people often overestimate the intellectual capabilities of people with average or below-average IQ's, the claim that violence is associated with a particular IQ range seems extremely tenuous. Intelligence is important but it isn't the sole determinant of personality, and while there is a correlation between lower IQ and violence in the US owing to the particular populations present here, the opposite trend can be observed in Mexico, where murder rates are lower in plurality indigenous regions than in plurality white ones (Conquistadors were a mean bunch).
ResoluteRaven
1d ago
That could help adjudicate the question of whether the Ukrainian resistance is an authentic homegrown phenomenon, or if it's largely being sustained by Western pressure.
I am confused by the belief many here express that Ukrainians are being hoodwinked into fighting against their own interests and better judgement, considering the number of examples we have of the West trying to convince a people to fight with the full force of economic and political propaganda and failing spectacularly e.g. Bay of Pigs, South Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela. There's simply no way you can sustain a high-intensity war for over two years on smoke and mirrors if the population is ambivalent, and the moment they become so the front lines will collapse like those of Tsarist Russia or Imperial Germany in 1917-18.
As to your point about the draft, it seems to me like it would only be dystopian if you see the entire concept of nation-states as such. You don't stop being a citizen of your country when you go overseas; they can still make you pay taxes, have you extradited to stand trial for crimes, and compel you in any number of ways. The suspension of consular services for a month is a relatively mild measure as far as these things go, and will probably just create a small undocumented population in several countries. If the Polish or Estonian governments ever start grabbing Ukrainian refugees off the streets and deporting them to the front lines in unmarked vans at Zelensky's request (and if I were a refugee who didn't want to fight, I would definitely want to stay out of countries that hate Russia so much that this is even conceivable), I'll agree that they've gone too far.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
It seems to me that it's the fraction of angry young men you have on your side that matters more than the absolute number. If your side has all the kids, then you will have disproportionate power regardless of how many octogenarians hate your guts.
I mean, the way things are going I could definitely see people in the future using "N-word" as a minced oath. It would certainly be amusing to see a kid try explaining to their teacher or angry parent that they called someone "an N-word, but not the N-word."
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
The risk of myocarditis from covid infection is greater than the risk from covid vaccination. It is true that all viral illnesses may have lingering effects. I was more implying that we may expect a greater amount from one to which we are immunologically naïve than from something like the common cold or annual influenza. I was not implying that any specific individual with a mild vaccine reaction would have been killed by a covid infection, only that it would have been slightly more severe. At a population-scale that results in a greater overall number of deaths and complications. It is also unclear to me by what mechanism the nanolipid particle is supposed to be harmful outside of causing minor inflammation at the site of injection.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
It seems to me that for an ethnicity to exist in practice, you need a critical mass of people to identify with it to the exclusion of other identities, and that is what "Americans"/Amerikaners/white Americans of colonial British heritage/[insert your preferred neologism here] lack. Ukrainians are fighting a war not to get lumped in with the Russian ethnicity and Palestinians have fiercely resisted decades of attempts to group them with Jordanians or Egyptians, but I doubt even a lizardman's constant of your founding stock American ethnicity conceive of it in the same terms you do or would lift a finger to assist any political mobilization on their behalf (unless it were disguised as garden variety civic nationalism, which is what liberals have been paranoid about for decades despite it almost never happening).
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
I don’t see a huge death rate, I see voluntary reports of deaths that occured close to the time of vaccination clustering...close to the time of vaccination.
The fact that many people are unable to take prescription drugs frequently or consistently enough for them to be effective at treating their illnesses is not usually considered an argument against telling them to do so.
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