ResoluteRaven
No bio...
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
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
11mo 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
10mo 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
10mo 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
11mo 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
11d 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
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
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
9mo ago
I think being a relatively isolated island continent helps a lot with maintaining that policy. It's a lot harder to refuse someone when you have a land border and you can see the poor masses longing to get in, which is why most western nations have out of cowardice tried to outsource the job to Central American or Middle Eastern countries that have fewer qualms about kicking people out by force. It also seems to me that Australia has relatively few immigrants from populations that restrictionists like to complain about e.g. Hispanics, Arabs, Africans (black Africans to be precise, I know there's a lot of Afrikaners in Perth), so that may have something to do with its success as well.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
It is a crime against humanity to shaft their futures and potential livelihoods for social engineering.
Are their livelihoods actually negatively affected by being denied admission to Ivy League schools? My impression is that by future income and most other material measures of success there isn't any effect. In the same way, when Jews were kept out of Harvard all their Nobel Prize-winning scientists went to CUNY instead, and didn't seem any worse off for it.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
barbarian recruitment preceded what was essentially the barbarian expulsion of non-European people on the continent vis-a-vis the destruction of the multi-racial Roman empire
I wasn't aware of any expulsion of non-Europeans on the part of the post-Roman Germanic kings. My impression was that the multiethnic urban Romans simply died out on their own due to below-replacement fertility rates, repeated sackings of major cities during Justinian's wars of reconquest, and the subsequent plague. Their replacement by peasants from the countryside with a more traditional conservative culture was the most likely source of any moral "cleansing" of the former empire, rather than the influence of the small and soon assimilated Germanic minority that ruled them for a time.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
Does this mean you think black people are more genetically predisposed to violence?
I think American blacks are culturally (strongly) and genetically (not as strongly) predisposed to violence, and that those genetic predispositions are to some extent shared with southern whites i.e. not from slave ancestry, but from slaveowner ancestry. Black people elsewhere would have to be analyzed independently, as they don't share all of these characteristics. In some multiethnic countries like Mali, the black agricultural population is less violent than the lighter-skinned desert pastoralist population.
Can I ask what your politics are? I think you're consistently one of the best commentators here.
Thanks, I appreciate it. I have a mixture of Asian-style social conservatism and more classically American liberal beliefs i.e. on a personal level I follow the typical "immigrant parent" line, on an intermediate scale I think of Tocquevillian-style local democracy as an ideal, and on a larger scale I align more or less with Hobbes or Xunzi. When I'm feeling witty I call this Confucianism with American Characteristics.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
I mean, communist societies were theoretically universal in the same way that Iran is theoretically tolerant of gay people because it gives them the option of getting a sex-change surgery instead of being executed for sodomy. Social class may seem like a category less intrinsic to the individual than race, but as far as adults are concerned I would argue that isn't so, and even to the extent that it was that in some cases liquidation of class enemies was even worse than genocide of particular ethnic groups because there was no clear stopping point and it was easier to keep throwing people into the meat grinder for increasingly arbitrary reasons e.g. wearing glasses in Pol Pot's Cambodia.
ResoluteRaven
10d ago
The point is that those are the same people. They say the same things in person that they do online because below a certain age there isn't a difference in their minds and you have to treat it as such.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
New Hampshire has always seemed like the odd man out in New England to me due to its strong Scotch-Irish/Libertarian heritage, but I digress.
Having considered it more, I suppose I can agree with a version of your thesis that goes like this (writing this out more for my own understanding than yours):
What those in the early-20th century called Progressivism produced a generation of technocrats (including Wilson, Hoover, FDR, etc.) who for several decades controlled both political parties while fighting a (to them very real and serious but to outsiders insignificant) battle amongst themselves. The technocrats recently lost control of the Republican party and what many HBD-believing folks on the new/dissident/alt/whatever-right are trying to do is re-establish the yang to the Democrats' yin while ignoring the bubbling cauldron of resentment into which both the current elites and their would-be shadow elites are soon to fall.
I could find similar quotes online by white nationalists planning their own long march through the institutions. That doesn't mean I should assume any policy proposal such people might agree with is being directed by them and must be fought tooth and nail to keep us off a slippery slope towards racial separatism. Playing culture war whack-a-mole makes you look crazy to outsiders and weakens one's position, whether you are a wokescold arguing about Halloween costumes or a conservative grandstanding on behalf of steak and bacon.
More options
Context Copy link