assman
1d ago
I was curious about this the other day since discussing increasing autism rates seems entirely pointless without distinguishing between non-functional autism and “nerd++” autism so I asked ChatGPT whether there’s research showing an increase in non-functional autism. It led me to this paper https://autismsciencefoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/CDC-Profound-Autism-Statistics_ASF-Copy.pdf which shows that rates of non-functional “profound” autism have been increasing, albeit at a slower rate than ASD generally. This is somewhat convincing that there is something real about increasing rates of autism but could also still be an artifact of more people seeking diagnosis. The one thing that stuck out that makes me think the whole “increased autism” thing is probably fake though is that prevalence of “profound” autism in black children is almost double what it is for white children. My thought is it’s all just Goodhart-ing by school districts to get more special education funding and create more excuses for problematic/low-performing students.
assman
1d ago
There’s definitely some cynical politicking involved here but the autism thing seems to be one of Trump’s personal hobbyhorses given he was tweeting about it back in like 2012.
assman
1d ago
I don’t know whether Buttigieg as VP would have moved the needle. But the issue with what was in the book is that it’s indefensible by the current year democrat worldview. If she had actually chosen Buttigieg and lost, saying that his homosexuality was a detriment due to the bigoted American public would have been okay. By saying she couldn’t have chosen him because the bigoted American public wouldn’t accept a gay VP she’s using the same logic as a company saying they can’t choose a gay CEO because the shareholders are bigoted, or a retail store saying they can’t hire a black guy because their customers are racist. It’s a banal observation to note that insert politician is being hypocritical, but this little controversy is funny to me because I don’t think her ghostwriter caught the rhetorical bind this passage would put her in. I think it was intended to be uncontroversial in the same way as saying her loss was due to the voters being racist/sexist, but ended up backfiring
I don’t think it’s a Motte and Bailey. Maybe some people on Twitter are claiming every last immigrant needs to be deported but even that is hyperbole. People wouldn’t care if it was just cutting edge STEM researchers, renowned surgeons, etc. But instead what is happening is that entire towns are being overrun by Indians making $120k working in IT at a bank or something, plus their parents that they bring over and their citizen children. I guess an economist would say this is good, they’re net taxpayers and not criminals, but I don’t see how this materially benefits the nation like they’re working on the Manhattan project or founding Nvidia or whatever. It just feels like additional competition for the ~1 SD above the mean citizen who makes up the bulk of the mid-middle to upper-middle class of the country for some marginal positive effect on the government’s balance sheet, plus all the more qualitative negative effects of increased diversity.
I work in public accounting. You do not need to be particularly smart to work in accounting. You need a college degree, about a ~105 IQ, and an okay work ethic to be a good employee. Every firm I’ve worked at big and small has tons of H1B employees because you can underpay them (as in like $50k for an entry level vs. $65k for an American in the same position), promote them slower, and not worry about making them a partner one day. What benefit does this bring to the country? It’s laughable to call a 23 year old doing outsourced bookkeeping for some guy’s plumbing business “high-skilled” in any meaningful sense. It’s absolutely grating hearing people claim the US economy relies on these “high-skill” workers as if the majority of them are doing groundbreaking technical research. Accounting is a perfect career path for our replacement-level college grads who just want a safe, steady job. But nobody is majoring in it anymore since the pay sucks and the hours are terrible because firms can just hire indentured servants to fill any labor shortages. If we just made the H1B system conditional on paying the employee $250k we’d get all of the benefits of the actual high-skill immigrants and not the army of Indians undercutting everyone who just wants a normal boring office job.
assman
6mo ago
I think you misread the second part. How do we deport you if you were NOT apprehended at the border and fingerprinted? If you’re caught at the border we have proof you illegally entered and biometric proof of your identity. But if you were never apprehended or fingerprinted- what is stopping you from claiming you’re a citizen? ICE can detain you but they have to prove you’re NOT a citizen to deport you. I don’t see how this is possible without significant investigation time given we don’t have any mandatory national photo ID system.
assman
6mo ago
Do you have any ideas for how to deal with the large population of immigrants that weren’t apprehended at the border? The recent wave all seemed to come under the strategy of ‘allow yourself to be apprehended, claim asylum, don’t show up to your hearing’ because the government was allowing it. But even with this giant population of illegal immigrants known to the government, Trump is having a hard time deporting them due to legal process issues. For the massive population of those who aren’t already known to the government, how would we deport them if they just say they are a US citizen and make the government prove that they aren’t? It’s more likely that we overturn birthright citizenship than change the law so that US citizens can be apprehended and be made to affirmatively prove citizenship or get swiftly deported. We’d need some sort of mandatory national ID which would be opposed even by a significant contingent of Trump voters.
assman
6mo ago
I am very pro-mass deportation but it seems nearly impossible to do at scale in practice with current laws regardless of the money/political capital thrown at it. I understand that we haven’t even really been trying to enforce immigration laws and have in fact been showering illegal immigrants with money and benefits, but even if we stop all of that, I don’t think we can make a serious dent in the illegal immigrant population.
I’m Jose Gonzalez from Mexico, I cross the border illegally without being apprehended, and go live at my cousins apartment in El Paso. I work as a day laborer paid in cash, don’t have a bank account, and have never had a formal interaction with the state where my fingerprints or anything were taken. ICE raids my workplace and I tell them I’m Jose Gonzalez, I’m a US citizen, and I don’t say another word the whole time. How could they affirmatively prove that I’m not? I don’t understand how anyone who wasn’t apprehended and fingerprinted at the border can be deported without significant time being put into an investigation. What’s the way around this unless we can change the law so that the burden of proof is on the individual to prove citizenship?
It seems possible that a lot of the recent wave that claimed asylum could be deported, but I’d imagine that still leaves ~5-10 million who did it the old fashioned way. I think the only way to seriously mass deport is to make it impossible to work as a non-citizen, which would be massively disruptive to agriculture, restaurants, construction etc. in the short term and would be extremely difficult and probably have costly effects to the economy (as far as the costs of compliance for small businesses, not strawberries being more expensive) to enforce perpetually.
assman
6mo ago
That makes sense but what went differently in the late 90s/early 2000s in Russia compared to other post-soviet countries that did integrate around that time (Poland, Hungary, Romania etc.)? All started out as ramshackle and corrupt but around that time went in a different direction. Was the resistance to integrate more from the Russian elite/Putin not wanting to? Or was the resistance more on the western side?
assman
6mo ago
Is there an ELI5 reason why Russia wasn’t fully brought into the fold of NATO/EU/“the Western world” after the collapse of the Soviet Union? I’m pretty ignorant of the full history here, but I would think that given the politicians there were willing to peacefully dissolve the USSR that they wanted to fully integrate with the US/Europe. I would also think that the US/Europe would be eager to integrate Russia given that they’ve done so for most of the former eastern bloc countries, but obviously it hasn’t turned out that way.
assman
6mo ago
Fair enough- I’m no expert on the state of the battlefield and maybe there’s no ceasefire that Russia would agree to. But between “continue slowly losing now” and “pause, then maybe continue to lose later” it’s not obvious which is the better choice (maybe Putin drops dead, maybe European arms spending actually materializes). And if the Ukrainian war effort is completely reliant on the US, and the US thinks trying to get a ceasefire done is beneficial I think it’s the US’s right to insist on it. It just feels like Trump is being called pro-Russia for trying to negotiate while the Europeans get to LARP as serious defenders of the post-war order, when ultimately they aren’t willing to risk world war 3 over this conflict either.
assman
6mo ago
I think we should defend them fully because we have a formal defense treaty with them.
assman
6mo ago
I feel like so much of the Ukraine discussion avoids the object-level, do the “pro-Ukraine” people think that if we continue the status quo (US/NATO funding the war but not willing to put boots on the ground), that Ukraine can actually win? As someone who doesn’t think so, I feel like trying to get a ceasefire done ASAP is the right move both practically and morally. I understand the value of deterring wars of aggression and that Russia is morally in the wrong etc. etc. but I feel like trying to freeze the conflict in place gives more credibility to US/NATO deterrence and saves thousands of young men’s lives, compared to funding the war until Ukraine collapses spectacularly just to impose the maximum costs on Russia. I see people online argue that Russia would collapse before Ukraine does if we just maintain or somewhat increase current support, but Trump doesn’t seem to think so and the European politicians just speak in moralism and world war 2 analogies. If Trump sees things the way I do, that financial/material support is just delaying an inevitable Ukraine loss and this isn’t worth risking world war 3 by putting boots on the ground, then it doesn’t take any evil motives to think that trying to end or freeze the conflict as soon as possible is the best course of action.
I think you have plenty of fair points, the realpolitik aspects of whether it’s better to be shamelessly hypocritical or to be principled can be debated forever. There are certainly some people posting mostly unobjectionable things that are getting caught up in the cancellation fervor. Agreed that being a partisan of one side or another makes you blind to your own side’s transgressions. But, as one of those partisans, doesn’t keeping score of the specific behavior matter a little bit…?
Forgetting all of the higher profile public figure type cancellations of the 2014-2024 woke era. In 2020 the national health authorities currently in the midst of recommending lockdowns throughout the country announced that racism was a bigger public health issue than COVID and sanctioned “protests” over a career lowlife felon who died in police custody after swallowing a bag of fentanyl while waiting for the ambulance to arrive. There were riots across the country throughout the summer causing billions of dollars of damage to property, with reporters of major news networks calling them “mostly peaceful” while cars were burning in the background. Major Democrat (and even many Republican, at the beginning) politicians solicited donations to bail out those arrested in the riots, and campaigned for various “defund the police” style reforms in major cities. Rioters were mostly given slaps on the wrist, and the policy changes led to a massive increase in homicide rates. In the midst of all of this, regular-ass people (in addition to tons of higher profile celebrities, politicians, professors, businesspeople) were not only being cancelled/fired/publicly shamed for being unsupportive of the “current thing”, but for sentiments deemed racist years in the past. Regular-ass people were being accosted by minorities and being filmed and publicly cancelled for not kissing their feet. It’s hard to exaggerate how widespread this behavior was. I was in college at the time and there were people making anonymous Twitter accounts posting screenshots of random high school classmate’s Facebook posts from when we were literally 12 years old. There were hundreds if not thousands of students who had college admissions revoked for social media posts from when they were in middle school. There was a professor fired for saying a different word that sounds like the N word. Companies were paying exorbitant fees to DEI consultants to tell everyone they were racist no matter how fervently they denounced racism. In just one example of higher profile news, the NBA players threatened to cancel their season due to an insufficient response to a multiple-time felon being shot while attacking the police with a knife as he was trying to kidnap his children. Shortly after the worst of the Floyd summer subsided, there was a whole other cancel culture brouhaha regarding Covid vaccines where you could be fired from your job for not taking them.
In contrast, you have a few news anchors, an unfunny late night show host and a relatively large number of normies “cancelled” for in many cases publicly supporting or excusing the very recent political assassination. Charlie Kirk, whatever you think of his political opinions or tactics, was an upstanding citizen participating non-violently in political discussion.
Some number of these cancellations are wholly unjustified I’ll agree, but people are not being successfully cancelled for being democrats, not being republicans, being democrats 10 years ago, or not being republicans 10 years ago. Normies are not scared that they tweeted an unrelated left-wing opinion when they were 12. They aren’t in trainings at their job about being too anti-white. Pro-assassination posts on normie Twitter still routinely get 300k likes from face accounts. The wokes did have a super-power for a while, they got a significant contingent of the country to support their policies, won the 2020 election, and had normies completely afraid to publicly disagree with them for years. It wasn’t until Elon bought Twitter and Trump narrowly missed having his head blown off that the vibe shift occurred. It’s hypocrisy in that it’s “cancel culture” sure, but also not really. I think a norm that you shouldn’t publicly celebrate the assassination of political talking heads that are otherwise upstanding citizens just because they have the same political opinions as your boomer uncle is good. I think a norm that you shouldn’t do things that circa 2020 woke morality deems racist is wrong. No hypocrisy.
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