Tanista
10mo ago
Have any one of a half-dozen DR accounts tweet it and there's at least a 12% chance Elon Musk signal-boosts it within the week.
Tanista
10mo ago
Okay, let's grant that nationalists are being overly charitable when they assume their enemies are driven purely by altruism towards foreigners (though some clearly are driven by that to a substantial degree). The obvious reason they feel this way is that their enemies continually attack them for their lack of altruism but whatever.
Let's say that what's actually happening is that altruism is one factor but some of these policies are seen as good for Americans overall and some are especially good for certain Americans who benefit disproportionately from the cheaper labour of migrants without concern for any externalities they impose on the rest of the populace.
What's Hanania's point then? "Well, ackshually, it's the nobles who benefit from all of the slave labour, not the slaves!" is technically accurate but so what?
You can argue that anti-globalist positions are stupid, but the fact that they're fighting globalists who happen to be fellow citizens doesn't change that they're nationalists.
Imagine a man who pays little attention to balancing his checkbook and doesn’t put much effort towards organizing his finances. At the same time, he lives in a state of absolute paranoia that his wife might occasionally give a dollar to a homeless person.
First of all: I've gained a lot of contempt for homeless people so I might actually feel this way. I've never felt more like a fool when I gave a former regular on our street money for "food" only to realize he was actively turning down free food from nearby restaurants. Even if I was making bad decisions with my money I'd still be annoyed at my wife for being a gull. I'd still be annoyed that said person gets to hang around stinking up the neighborhood even more, encouraged by our trusting folly.
But replace "homeless person" with "Christian or LGBT charity" and it becomes clear why someone might not want their money going to groups that may say nice things but are advancing causes they find troublesome.
Now replace voluntary donations with taxes.
Tanista
10mo ago
Yes. This infamous discussion between Bernie and Ezra Klein gives away the game. Not everyone is a Kleinian, but you would be a fool to believe that people like that are driven by purely pragmatic calculus about the benefits to Americans.
It also doesn't help that one side maintains a final card they can play: false consciousness.
Feminists do this all of the time: feminism is good for you too and, where you disagree, it's because you simply haven't had enough feminism.
I simply don't believe some of these claims. I've heard a few economists blithely write off the downsides of immigration as "an allocation problem", as if that makes it a matter of a couple of dials for some bureaucrat to fiddle with. Let's grant that immigration has been great for Canada. That doesn't change that the fundamentally political Gordian knot of increasing housing supply still exists so everyone feels squeezed. It's not going to be dissolved by an efficient market because it's a matter of geography,regulations and the interests of some groups over others. Hanania is a libertarian so he does get this, until he doesn't want to.
And, even if I did believe them, I know no nationalist has ever won the debate by saying "I'll take the tradeoff". They just get written off as ignorant.
Empathy doesn't require reciprocity. Sympathy does. The word has gone the same way "tolerance" has: skinsuited for a rhetorical advantage.
If you're unempathetic you don't have a meaningful disagreement, you're just ignorant. That sort of knowledge isn't finite. Meaningful sympathy, the sort that imposes costs, is always a limited resource and generally parochial and isn't inherently increased by empathy . The question at the heart of politics is where that line is drawn.
I would rather have perfect empathy than have perfect sympathy and be Wolf's moral saint.
Tanista
10mo ago
But they shouldn't do that. If morality means anything at all, you must stick to it even when it is personally inconvenient.
Even non-divine command deontological systems depend on the rule being a good thing overall. It's fine for a rule to be bad sometimes.
But if the rule you followed consistently brings you and all you value to defeat it is not a good rule.
The whole thing is already fraying. The fewer whites there are the weaker the ability of the progressive class to both maintain harmony despite the contradictions in their coalition and the fewer "racists" you can tax without accidentally harming a fellow coalition member.
And you can get sucked into so many loser positions that people who don't see their identity as being cheerleaders for some minority coalition can just opt out.
People like Jasmine Crockett writing off complaints about DEI and AA as just the complaints of mediocre white men (as if SFFA didnt involve Asian complaints) are just sad to me.
It's like watching an addled actor recite an outdated script and waiting for applause that'll never come.
How old-fashioned is tabula rasa liberalism really?
Nothing Cremieux and co. are saying would be a shock to liberals of many centuries (well, maybe their Oriental simping). Even when civil rights and egalitarianism became an issue a lot of people may have been for legal equality but not a pretense of blank slateism, especially if it's enforced at the cost of their own rights to sovereignty and freedom of association. They definitely considered gender blank slateism to be nonsense.
While tabula rasa liberalism has some roots in thought experiments about the state of nature that go back to early liberalism, most people didn't actually live by the sort of thorough-going refusal to accept innate group differences and the existence of an underlying human nature in practice until very, very recently.
And that "wokeness" follows that ideology because it cannot live up to its promises but has shown that that ideology is a useful way to erode certain liberal principles (like freedom of association) to create a more powerful state that theoretically could.
I don't think they could pay enough to get all the groups like Somalis out, and many of them won't want to leave regardless. At the very least, you will have to do the mean things that offering money is supposed to avoid first. And the consequences of that sort of thing is unclear.
I came from a safe poor country. We didn't live like kings but we were relatively well-off (middle class) by national standards. We still left.
Because if someone has a condition you can't get an MRI. You can't send your kids to a university worthy of the name (if you send them to the West as a non-citizen they'll squeeze you since it's the easiest way to raise tuition*, so there goes a chunk of that money). You can't always avoid the graft and corruption. You can't always avoid the shitty roads in the rainy season. You're constantly being taxed in a variety of ways: you have to organize your own electricity and water , have to dodge shitty cops, have to worry about family members on a small salary. There are very few good jobs and the economy is going nowhere.
And everyone knows that the West is better and no guarantee that you'll be first man in the village, for as long as European power maintains it, (and I'm being charitable in assuming that this is a thing that can be casually done and that Europeans have the will for pseudo-colonialism, the fact that you think it would be easy and would be done merely through diplomacy doesn't augur well) will be as good. It's inherently unstable and not a particularly bright future.
This shit might work on the Polish but I don't think there's any point in pretending there'll be anything genteel about ethnically cleansing people back to certain nations.
* At least in Canada. Much easier to raise fees on foreign students.
Tanista
10mo ago
If they are not, then it’s a policy choice to deport. If they are citizens, it is better to encourage them leave through (1) monetary enticement and (2) permitting Swedes full freedom of choice in businesses and institutions to exclude them if so desired and (3) enhancing native birth rates (which Israel is doing right now in Israel proper, and I don’t criticize this).
This isn't going to make people go back to Somalia.
Either you break the citizenship contract (or admit some citizens are more equal than others) or they're staying.
There's nothing left. Within those parameters there's no solution (besides genocide) except maybe to have stayed in Gaza and controlled enough of the border with Egypt to tamp down on smuggling and perhaps break the whole thing into a bunch of units that'd be expensive to manage in blood and money. But Trump, the alleged ally of Israel, was one of the people to push for the ceasefire because the war had bad headlines and everyone was exhausted.
So going back to the status quo is all that remains.
There's nowhere to put the Palestinians. Forcing them on Egypt or Jordan risks the entire state collapsing or worse, becoming a Palestinian launching pad.
Bring them to the US a la Freddie DeBoer? Even if Trump wasn't who he was, it'd make the American-born Irish's flirtations and funding of the IRA look mild in comparison. Even Europe must have limits to its masochism. There's ample evidence they're bad (or delusional) neighbors.
The displacement - Phase 1 - can't happen, and America simply isn't going to dedicate the necessary troops to manage a non-ethnically cleansed Gaza for Israel. So I guess Israel is just going to have to live with it and the US will send them weapons and a carrier if things get really hairy.
Putting aside the morality of demographic warfare, the Arabs have very successfully put Israel in a box here.
Tanista
11mo ago
I stand corrected then. I tried to watch it but didn't stick with it personally.
Also: does Macron always do this, take such a direct, visible hand in cultural products like that? IIRC he interfered in Mbappe's transfer saga too.
By comparison, Emilia Perez is an oscarbait movie that everyone will forget in a couple years.
Maybe. But right now it jumped into the public's view and it's in the way of some very competitive people getting Oscars.
That just pushes it one step back. How did the patriots lose control of their institutions to self-hating people with a totally different religion? Why can't they be claimed back?
The US is showing that some people are willing to fight back against inverted patriotism but a lot of this stuff happens cause one group of people just seem to care more. Their enemies would be perfectly happy going home and not worrying about the curriculum or other details that much. In fact, they may be so disconnected that the people they'd agree with the most seem insane to them
And, sure , let's grant that high capacity states could, if they marshalled all of their willpower and resources, rid themselves of all of the problems of political Islam. I think the idea that because it started relatively harmless and easy to uproot that it'll stay so is very naive though. At a certain point you're not using them. It's just how life is.
Cowardice is self-reinforcing.
Tanista
11mo ago
True but with huge caveats. Sometimes it isn't really the same movie that's being reexamined; the movie is "better" because Scott released a new cut that people preferred. Kingdom of Heaven is a very notorious example, probably Blade Runner too, though I think it was vastly better received than KoH.
Movies like Exodus haven't become better received in time. Prometheus and Alien: Covenant are still highly divisive (depending on where you stand Prometheus may have aged worse because of what Alien: Covenant did to its dangling plot threads).
Movies like Gladiator and American Gangster were well received at the time.
Ideology has little to do with it I think. He doesn't give a shit about accuracy in general if it contradicts what he wants to do - one of the major complaints about Napoleon afaict. Gladiator certainly wasn't historically accurate and yet was very good.
Scott imo has always been a high variance director. The problem with Gladiator 2 and some of his other stuff -compared to The Last Duel for example - is that the script is awful.
The new problem he has though is that he's old and seems to want to bang out movies while he can and so just takes the path of least resistance. A cinematographer of his was complaining about it recently iirc.
Gladiator also had a messy script but he and Crowe pulled something amazing from it. He may simply not have the stamina to do that any more.
I think some of these complaints are legit and some are typical progressive culture warring. I think a huge does of the criticism of Emilia Perez is that a white guy made a movie about a “Brown” without being excessively apologetic, and if the nationalities were reversed (ie. a Mexican made a movie about France), no one would care.
Didn't Emily in Paris get shit for its unrealistic portrayal of Paris? And that was just a random show. It didn't get 13 Oscar nominations which naturally puts more of a spotlight on things. As I said on reddit on the same topic: people hate Crash, a movie about fighting racism, more than worse movies because it won Best Picture.
My general impression is that the backlash from Mexico is organic and this gave people in America something to rally behind (the lead actress being incredibly unwoke, hilariously so, didn't help*). You've given good reasons for Mexicans to consider this film absurd and, frankly, I don't really have much sympathy. This movie is probably only being rewarded because it's seen as a moral milestone for white libs, so it is fair to note that it violates those standards.
When called on not casting Egyptians in Exodus: Gods and Kings Ridley Scott just said "nobody is going to go watch Mohammed Whogivesafuck" and went about his day. The attack is working on this movie because it's seen in a different light than a purely commercial project.
Prompt: what is a rational approach to assigning sacredness in society, especially when it comes to comedy? Is it ok to joke about the holocaust? Is it ok to joke about 9/11? Is it ok to joke about Muslims? If my best friend’s son dies in a horrible freak accident, is it ok to make a joke about that the very next day? Where should the lines be drawn? How do we distinguish between personal lines and broader societal lines? My sense is that the progressive left has conquered this space in the popular culture, but I haven’t seen a coherent alternative beyond 4chan “make fun of everything” culture. Are there better models out there?
I hate sounding even a bit like Kulak but these discussions seem utterly pointless to me. A lot of norms around sacrality are basically arbitrary. The group that cares more, that is more intolerant and more willing to fight decides. In the absence of an already unifying set of beliefs you're just gonna have to fight it out.
Roman norms around sacrifice and emperor worship were sacred until they weren't. European countries have free speech norms (a non-arbitrary example) yet the fact that psychos will semi-reliably kill you for drawing Mohammed has set a new taboo. Meanwhile, other groups that theoretically have more power have allowed the statues of their great men and icons of their people to get torn down and tabooed even when it makes no sense.
I don't see any coherent throughline in a lot of the things that happen, but they happen anyway because one party imposes its will.
Things are sacred if you'll pay a price for violating them. This is why warring tribes smashed the idols of their opponents. It was a theological argument: either your god doesn't care about you, or he cannot do anything.
* Although, ironically, she's unwoke in a progressive sense: her hatred of religion seems to universal, it's just her bad luck that she's not capable of managing the cognitive dissonance that comes with pretending brown religions from manifestly more conservative backgrounds are somehow not worse than her native faith. That's a middle class Anglo superpower.
They're not subsidizing Nigerian daycare. They're subsidizing life-saving treatment.
If you mean "why don't they cut them off so they have fewer kids": a) see "not everything is about TFR"; some people think it's good that people don't die actually, even if they'd have six kids at their funeral. That is insect logic. b) it's unclear that making their lives more precarious will stop them. They had a higher TFR before. Maybe they'd have fewer kids the less they needed to hedge against disaster.
I don't think the sorts of people who do this stuff are particularly interested in boosting the number of kids every African woman is having, quite the opposite. They're likely the sorts who also support family planning and female emancipation and education that they hope will have the same effect on Africa's TFR as it's had elsewhere. I think we discussed Macron stating this explicitly a while ago.
If you want to go that route you might gain from the soft power and proven competence that comes from stopping people from dying.
Tanista
11mo ago
Oh, would you or any of the natalists prefer to live in the high TFR paradise of Niger? Ridiculous to pretend that's the only meaningful metric.
the point of sending Colombian planes at his expense
I'm pretty sure this happened after Trump made his threats, which would make it a face-saving measure.
I think he just overplayed a bit. Trump is odious to many so they want to stand up to him, anyone familiar with American politics saw he was very constrained in 2016 both within and outside his administration so I suppose you can be forgiven for thinking you can make hay of a symbolic issue to get a win.
Tanista
11mo ago
I mean I think most liberals see standing and power and prestige as a dinner party kind of way. They see it as popularity, being invited to cool parties, and so on. It’s a false view of power and prestige in my view. You can like someone and laugh at them at the same time. You can think of them as wimps and fools and still invite them to parties.
I kind of get this with a lot of European countries/Canada. They're just not as powerful as the US so I suppose they should lean on moralism and their alleged values-based leadership, especially when dealing with the States.
It's an odd thing for the American left to have internalized though. But I guess it comes from their unrelenting critique of American power and the use of force.
Tanista
11mo ago
Yeah, I'm not going to pretend to have a strong mental model for the President of Colombia but this seems like a stunt to push the line and see how much you can get away with. And that sort of thing spreads.
If the military planes were the issue why approve and then suddenly cancel while the flight is in mid-air except to make a point? There must have been a bunch of less visible ways to do this.
I think someone got high on #Resistance copium and didnt realize this isn't 2016.
People can spew whatever line they want about migrants not being criminals in their own country, but it is a bit optimistic to expect to scuttle a US Presidential priority without consequences.
That said, now that Trump has his "Day 1" photoshoot maybe some discretion is advisable. As you say, if he actually gets his druthers the planes won't stop. The smoother it goes the better.
Well, yes.
I was thinking/hoping I was missing some more recent event.
Tanista
11mo ago
When was the last time a terror attack or some other disaster truly unite Americans?
I honestly find it hard to remember...
You're not quadrupling the US immigration intake with 120+ IQ types. You're not getting that average even with current numbers. Family reunification alone will drop it too low.
In practice you're just going to have the H1B debate all over again
An often mocking term for one who is seen as overly progressive
I'm not going to bother answering @Ancient_Anemone's question since naraburns has given a good one and asked the questions I'd want to. To answer before they actually substantiate their own claims would be to expend an asymmetric amount of effort, which is very common in this particular debate.
So I'll ask a question of my own to the board while I have the chance, since it doesn't seem worthy of a top level post: it seems like "SJW" disappeared when it became low-status like "woke" seems to be now. The very people who once proudly used it as a self-descriptor simply abandoned it. Why do we think that didn't happen with "woke", and instead there's an insistence that the term (when used by enemies) doesn't refer to anything?
I assumed that it has something to do with "woke" being very old and thus dear to progressives, but "social justice" is apparently very old too. Maybe because you can still claim "social justice" without the now-cringe "warrior" element while you'd have to abandon "woke" entirely? Maybe it's because "woke" is associated with black people and standpoint epistemology makes it easier to claim the anti-woke are ignorant? Is it really just that "woke" is more facially vague?
It's unclear that Trump can even deport all of the people Biden let in.
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