coffee_enjoyer
☕️
No bio...
User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
8hr ago
Those who insist that White people are natural “individualists” have no knowledge of the history and spirit of Europeans, and their inability to intuitively see their error should make you suspect of everything they say about cultural and political topics. I mean, you can pick any decade of Western history from before the late 19th century to see that White men have never construed their identity as individuals first and foremost, but as belonging to male organizations of civic, political, and religious natures — and that these comprised their whole identities, that they seldom had a thought of their individuality beyond collective affinities, and that they willingly and even joyfully gave their lives up for the interests of these collectives. Charitably, these people are using a definition of “individualist” that is so far removed from what any normal person would understand as to make its usage utterly worthless, like insisting on using the word “big” to refer to something small. Or perhaps most charitably, they are engaged in a psy-op to make you believe that White people are inherently slave atoms divorced from collective enthusiasm in a bid to make you a permanently powerless slave consumer, and they are doing this on purpose, and this is most charitable because it means they aren’t just incapable of perceiving the theory of mind behind any historical era. (Barring a few exceptions, like Emersonian Self-Reliance et al). I cannot understand how someone can read about the communist movements and fascist movements of the 20th century and come away with thinking, “oh yeah, this part of the world is individualist, they are chiefly interested in themselves”.
The tribes that White people have formed in history have been uniquely based on fraternity, or brotherly love. This separates them from the oriental whose tribes have been based on pure genetic similarity or submission to authority. Western men gathered to drink alcohol, distribute honors, and sing songs together; there is hardly a note in Chinese history of a volitional organization involving group singing like you find all throughout the West. This might be why people mistake them for “individualists”. But medieval guilds, Freemasons, Rosicrucians, monasteries, political alliances, communism, early Christianity, Greek mystery cults, fascism, etc etc were all about collective identity. White people are naturally collective-oriented, just like every other type of human. But their penchant has always been brotherhood, and especially brotherhoods based on just distribution of resources. Because, like many primates, if the leader of the primate band is hoarding resources we would very much like to form a coalition to destroy them. This is all natural, primitive. (In Christianity we wait joyfully for God to destroy them, while shaming them while they live.)
Anyway, the reason you do not have a tribe in Western culture is for the following reasons:
-
The psy-op that tricked you into including women in you social organizations, which immediately destroys the capacity for brotherly love by making everything about seducing whichever girl is prettiest. Absolute vibe-killer.
-
The psy-op to make you associate “brotherhood” and “collective purpose” and “glory and honor” with traumatic imagery from the holocaust
-
the psy-op to make you deferential to the rich, when the power behind social organizations has always been the loosening of resources from the wealthy, either through shaming them or honoring them for their endowments
-
the elimination of brotherly love from educational literature, unless it is portrayed negatively, like in a separate peace. Similarly, the elimination of coalition building in literature
-
The eradication of European patronage networks, where Patronage is the wellspring of social love. (Minorities of course can continue doing this)
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1d ago
I don’t think anyone would think that this woman is Jewish; I assumed she was pure Anglo. These two examples were chosen because they were at the top of their respective competitive fields, while having a dishonest disposition, and it’s reasonable at this point to think that dishonesty is somewhat mediated by genes, probably via guiltproneness and neuroticism. Maybe she came to mind to me because her lover was a South Asian man. There are low-trust people in every culture, but not at the same frequency.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2d ago
I am skeptical that Hindu and Muslim immigrants will remain homogenous over time. Muslims seem to marry other Muslims from wherever (see Mamdami) and Hinduism may be uniquely weak when transported (Brahamical prohibitions on traveling overseas are for a reason: it’s one thing to persuade your kid to worship the gods in front of a three thousand-year-old temple ground where everything has lore and pedigree, another when it was built 10 years ago across from a Burger King in a town named after the wrong kind of Indian). Sikhs will probably be a bit more resilient as they have an ethnireligious component, and “Sahaj” is indeed Sikh. The issue I see with Indian migration is rather that the country seems dysfunctional, corrupt, and unaesthetic, and it’s not wise to bring its population into America when the relationship between quality of country and quality of immigrant seems to track well in most cases. The addition of a high IQ individual is not necessarily good if it comes with other bad traits as the history of American corruption attests (Elizabeth Holmes, Adam Neumann, etc). It’s probably the case that a high-trust and high-empathy 90iq is better than a corrupt 110iq. And this will be an even worse problem in the AI age as meritocracy becomes increasingly difficult to instantiate. At the same time, India is so diverse that I imagine there are probably sub-populations that are the highest trust in the world (what are the Jains doing? Can we bring Parsis here?) but I doubt anyone is looking into that properly.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
4d ago
As in, he’s not Ed Harris in the Truman Show manipulating the reality around us with control and insight behind the curtains. (There was a funny meme going around of Trump getting orders from Ed Harrison, but unfortunately I can’t find it again)
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
5d ago
His strategizing on social media has just been bad. There’s no excuse. The sort of mistakes that would take a normal person hours to devise on purpose in a room with high ceilings. “Criticize the Pope while the cultural moment has conservative influencers drifting to Catholicism… now depict yourself as Jesus. Make sure to put a demon figure in the background”. “Write the first presidential Alhamdulilah… on Easter. Then don’t write another tweet for Easter. Then post another Alhamdulillah a few days later”. “Call for civilizational destruction, to remove America from the moral high ground. Post it widely so military service members know to refuse your orders”.
There is no 4d chess happening behind the scenes. These mistakes are in his area of mastery, which was messaging and reading the room. I assume the mistakes he’s making with the war and negotiations are even worse.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
6d ago
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
6d ago
Compared to Israel, which is a territorially-ambitious religious state that condones the rape of prisoners and the incineration of the homes of minorities, and was literally founded on acts of terrorism to expel minorities, Iran comes across like a Sweden or Norway. Israel consciously starved the women and children in Gaza, causing 40% of the population to go days at a time without eating, which is quite costly and immoderate. Shouldn’t Iran be able to defend themselves from such a state?
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
6d ago
The word “civilization” is never used to refer to just the political faction currently in power. If you google “Chinese civilization”, you will not find anyone using this term as a stand-in for Xi’s current regime. So this would be a brand new use of the term. The content of the tweet also goes against your interpretation as Trump claims there already has been total regime change:
A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?
So he can’t just be referring to the regime, as there has been “complete and total regime change”.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
7d ago
They had a growing nuclear medicine program, while facing sanctions which had the practical effect of limiting their medical imports:
https://theintercept.com/2023/06/12/iran-sanctions-medicine/
https://dw.com/en/iran-sanctions-mean-life-saving-medication-in-short-supply/a-74825554
https://www.neimagazine.com/news/iran-unveils-new-nuclear-medicine/
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
7d ago
It’s worth noting the extent to which America has exported terrorism:
-
We pressured Saudi Arabia to fund Wahhabi mosques globally as part of our fight against the Soviet Union
-
We supported the Mujahideens to the tune of 4 billion USD
-
We produced millions of violent jihadi textbooks for the youth in Afghanistan (lmao)
Of the ~100 Islamic terror attacks in America since the 90s, virtually all of them have been Salafi-Wahhabi and none of them have been Shia (Iranian).
If you make the bottom workers too poor to buy stocks, then of course most stocks will be owned by the super wealthy. What is this argument intending to communicate? It’s not a preferable outcome for the wealthy to own most of the stocks rather than the poor, neither is it preferable to take wealth that could belong to the poor and place it in stocks. Because when they sell the stocks they waste the profit, whereas the poor can transfer the profit to wellbeing. The question is who gets the wealth as represented in the ownership of stocks. I mean, even the point of GDP is wellbeing, and the point of technology is wellbeing, so if you’re trading suffering for Metric Go Up then you’ve kind of missed the point of why humans are even interested in development in the first place.
so has the demand as the immigrants were on both sides of the transaction
No, and it’s important to understand why this is isn’t the case. The demand does not decline commensurate to the decline in supply from the restriction of the labor pool, because the low wage worker does not use Amazon at the high rate of the middle class and wealthy. There are many, many services that are used by the well-off and not used by the poor, and if you have to pay the poor more, you will not see a decline in demand among the lowest income brackets due to the price increase. Fitness centers are a great example of this — a very profitable industry which employs the poor but which the poor infrequently use. What happens if the gyms have to pay their poor employees more? Well, they can’t price the gym membership more — it’s already priced at the highest amount the consumer (middle class and above) is willing to pay. They can’t go out of business, because it’s a profitable industry, eg Lifetime Fitness making the founder half of a billionaire. So what happens? Profit that would go to the owners simply goes to the poor, there is literally nothing else that can possibly happen. And this is how it should be, because the idea of someone becoming a half-billionaire by creating a line of shitty gyms is insane.
Additionally, the case of Amazon, if the low wage class as a whole makes more money then they are more likely to use Amazon. Because all of the speculated (but incorrect) price increase of Amazon is, literally, just going to pay the poorest workers.
If you're amazon where do you cut services first? In the expensive places where rich people live and will pay high prices or the run down towns you're so concerned about?
As per above, if the low wage class is earning more, than they will use more of Amazon’s services. Right now they use much less of Amazon. They would use more if they are paid more. All of the cost increase goes to the wages of low earners while the cost is shared equally among all the classes. In your theorized example, lower, middle, and higher class may have to spend an extra $1 on a package, and that $1 goes only to the lower class wages, which means that Amazon will actually make more in low wage areas than before. It’s just that middle and upper classes pay more, which they should. But in actual reality, Amazon is already priced as high as they can make it for the middle class and higher class. If they could price it higher, they would have already. Any cost of labor increase will affect Amazon more than it affects, say, CostCo, or any other warehouse-style model.
recession in 1920
That’s because of the addition of a surplus of workers the following year. This proves my point. The recession began after the period were looking at.
Attributing the gains from the scaling up of the ford assembly line to Immigration Quotas is silly and breaks with your whole theory
You just have to look at the areas most affected by immigration disruption: https://www.kansascityfed.org/research/research-working-papers/immigration-disruptions-and-the-wages-of-unskilled-labor-in-the-1920s/
“All four analyses support the same conclusion: during the 1920s, low-skilled workers in labor markets who experienced larger adverse shocks to their labor supply as a result of the disruptions to immigration were being paid higher wages.”
The mechanization came after. (Also, there was still too much immigration in this period, from Mexico and Canada.)
The illegal immigrants with literally nothing to their name do it
The illegal immigrants have their own illegal immigrant job network and sometimes illegal housing network. And even if they didn’t, the argument “but the poorest people in the hemisphere live on the streets until the find a job” would not be a compelling option for Americans who do not want to risk homelessness. And remember that the illegal makes more in “wealth” because of the difference between their purchasing power here and of their family back in, say, Guatemala.
Do you have any clear evidence you can present that restricting the pool of low wage workers makes their lives worse off? Literally every study shows them having greater wages and QoL when this happens.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
8d ago
You know that people invest in order profit later. And you know that the category “frozen assets” includes a lot of frivolous waste (large properties, private jets, art, watches, jewelry). And you know that, were these business owners compelled in their business career to pay workers more, the money they put into frozen assets would have went to these workers.
Where is the redistribution coming from because of preventing immigration?
Because you have to pay workers more to retain them; they are more valuable; the owner cannot reduce the QoL and wages as much as possible. Workers can bargain for a greater share in the profit.
Almost all of higher labor costs are passed on to the consumers
This is essentially saying, “Jeff Bezos would keep increasing the price for Amazon if he had to pay workers more so that he magically makes the same amount of profit as today.” This is incorrect and it should be obvious why it’s incorrect. Amazon cannot raise their prices so much that people stop using their services. At a certain point it becomes too high for the consumer to pay. There is a ceiling to the price of Amazon that cannot increase, and if you pay the low wage workers behind Amazon more, eventually most of his excess profit transfers to these workers. Because there’s a cap on the pricing of Amazon.
Again, this has been shown repeatedly in all real world scenarios. After the 1920s Immigration Quotas. Higher wages after the 1918–1919 Spanish Flu. After the Bracero Program ended. You realize that if your theory was right, you should be able to find a real world example where there was a significant artificial restriction in low-wage labor which reduced the wages of the lowest wage earners? Doesn’t it make you suspicious that this… doesn’t exist? And it has only ever been shown to increase their wages and bargaining power? And shouldn’t this be sort of obvious?
You don't need to take months off to find a job
There are two things to this: (1) when low wage earnings are sufficiently high that a laborer can actually quit in between jobs when dissatisfied with his conditions, this is excellent for the bargaining power of their class, as it penalizes companions with a low QoL. Wages are not high enough for low wage earners to do this without risking financial catastrophe. (2) It’s not realistic for a low-wage earner today to pick up and move across the country to wherever they can make more, even if they know they can make more. They don’t have the wealth to do this. It’s expensive to do it, they risk immediate homelessness if it fails, employers will not help them relocate and they may not be able to find someone willing to lease to them.
If the wealthiest top 1% of households in America have at least $14mil, and the class as a whole possesses 55 trillion in wealth, then there is necessarily a lot of wealth wasted on things that are not required for the happiness of these 1% of households. And so we can improve a comical amount of lives in America by simply halting immigration. If this wealth were originally compelled to be redistributed annually (because no surplus of workers), we are talking about 1-3 trillion to be distributed. That’s giving the bottom 100 million working Americans (the bottom 60%) between 10k and 30k annually. We are also talking about lower housing costs and lower stress-related healthcare costs. We are also talking about a more efficient economy as the workers are actually able to pick up and move for greater wages (simply not realistic for many working Americans right now, and they can’t bargain if they can’t afford to quit for a couple months). We are also talking about less educational waste as people see that they can live comfortably without a college degree. Then we will see gains in civic participation, with all of its myriad benefits. &tc
It’s a big deal for me that this wealth is wasted because, at the end of the day, we are trading the blood and lives of the poor so that the flooring in a wealthy person’s bathroom is more colorful. We are looking at the mangled corpse of a child in a drunk driving accident, knowing of course that alcoholism and life stress are linked (and in any case treatment costs money), and we are saying “this is just the price we pay so that an investment banker gets a yacht”. This is not a rational trade for the statistically-informed looking at the predictable cofactors of misery. I think this is just allowing the poor to die so that the rich are more comfortable.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
9d ago
destroyed 80% of missile industry
Where are you reading this? Is it Caine’s remarks here? https://youtube.com/watch?v=aCCkrjlfyVk
There is a difference between “destroying 80% of the industry” and what I’m hearing from General Caine:
-
“attacked 90% of weapons factories” does not tell us what percentage of their total weapons’ industry has been degraded
-
80% of missile defense facilities being “gone” does not tell us about their ballistic missiles, or even what percentage of total missile defense has been gone, as their significant facilities are all below ground and only the numerous less important small-scale facilities are above ground. (Theoretically, you can destroy 80% of the missile defense facilities while only damaging 10% of the total missile defense production line).
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
9d ago
These things comprise a large part of the consumption of the rich in America. Is it possible you resent the poor for having a genuine moral claim to the resources that the wealthy waste?
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
9d ago
Too many houses, houses that are too large, too many private pools and other unnecessary amenities, expensive overseas luxury good purchases, too many cars, too many vacations, too many private jets (15k), etc etc etc
Just extraordinary waste which we know, scientifically, does not measurably influence happiness. It is entirely reasonable to design an immigration policy which forces the rich to depart from the resources they waste, so that the resources are necessarily transferred into the lower and middle classes.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
10d ago
I am otherwise fond of everything Leo has said, fyi. It’s just that the migrant / deportation issues are cataclysmically bad in the longrun for what I value.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
10d ago
I think there’s an argument to be made that Portland Oregon briefly had one of the highest qualifies of life for young Americans before gentrification (and before the migration of crazy people — a separate matter). There are certainly cases where gentrification is harmful. But while we can secure the interests of the poor by simply saying “close the migrant floodgates”, handling something like gentrification within national borders is more complicated… But ideally you do want your cities to be overflowing with young adults who can afford rent and have extra time on their hands, as this promotes art / culture / etc. Are American remote workers doing this in Mexico City? Perhaps not. Maybe they insufficiently participate in the local economy.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
10d ago
I’m not sure why it would work like this. If we consider it all per capita, shouldn’t China need an even larger pool of laborers given their manufacturing and mining sectors? But they’re getting away with far fewer laborers per capita while sustaining an absolutely dominant domestic industry. And their wages are continually rising across income levels!
https://old.reddit.com/r/economy/comments/142c9t2/manufacturing_wages_in_china_have_risen/
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
10d ago
Lampedusa is entirely irrelevant except for African migrants. It’s a tiny island with less than 7k inhabitants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lampedusa
Lampedusa is an infamous island since it's been a major receptacle for illegal migrant boat crossings
Yes, exactly what I said. African economic migrants, mostly Muslim, mostly military aged males. Great priority for a Pope, to promote the destruction of Europe even as Catholicism dies in Europe.
The word "Lampedusa"
You aren’t familiar with the history and practice of Catholic wordplay. You can start with the famous etymologies of Isidore of Seville: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymologiae (pro-tip: the etymologies are not real). It is no coincidence that on America’s 250th anniversary, the institution which supports the replacement of Americans with Hispanic Catholics and protested their deportations, and which pretends to act as a light unto the nations, is visiting Lampedusa the African migrant island known solely for importing Africans into Europe.
For you to call it a "completely irrelevant island”
Do you know how frequently popes visit this island? Do you know the last time was 13 years ago? Do you think it’s a coincidence that Leo chose to visit on the 250th anniversary of America, after spending all year crying about deportations because his dying institition requires a perpetual supply of Latin Americans (else they have to sell off their churches to the very Muslim migrants whom they supported coming in)?
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
10d ago
China has more innovation than Europe even controlling for their population. Sizably so.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
10d ago
An actual labor shortage means that every business owner who owns two mansions and three cars has to sell one of their mansions and one of their cars unless they want to lose their entire income and become homeless. No one in America has ever experienced an actual labor short. There are only labor shortages in very narrow subspecialties. If Amazon for some reason needed an experienced Lisp or COBOL engineer, then Amazon needs to spend money to recruit one. Then the sub-occupation of Lisp programmers have a better QoL, and Bezos’ QoL stays exactly the same because he has so much money that it can no longer increase his QoL. We have more than enough wealth wasted (genuinely wasted) at the top, that we can artfully redistribute it to the poor by simply preventing the addition of more low-wage workers.
Things that people want or need to be done, don't get done
Nope. It means that the people who want or need something done need to pay more to have it done, otherwise the employee will stop working and find somewhere else to work. You only need a very small amount of “temporarily can’t do it” or “need to do it suboptimally” to accomplish this, only 1 out of 1000 projects, a civilizationally-irrelevant amount. When the QoL and wages of the lower class increase, then they can actually afford to quit their job for months to find a better one, and can actually afford to move to other parts of the country to find a better position. It’s a race to the top in terms of QoL and wellbeing. It’s only bad for the rich who hate the poor. Consider landscaping. A rich person always wants pristine landscaping. In the wealthy areas of the east coast I am familiar with, they universally spend exorbitantly on landscaping and nearly all the employees are illegals who don’t speak English. (The oversees of more sophisticated projects speak English). They are worked to exhaustion and have to eat outside under the shade of trees. What happens when we restrict the labor pool here? If the landscaper doesn’t want to be worked to exhaustion or piss in a bottle, he can quit to find a firm with better QoL; the firms have to compete over QoL in order to retain workers; everything improves for everyone, except the ~0.1% of wealthy properties which did not want to pay more to secure the QoL of the poor. That person may have to hire a local kid to do spotty landscaping, which is also good for the poor. Or maybe the grass grows a little taller (the horror!).
I think what you’re getting at is, “I want to trade the suffering of the poor for greater tech development”. If we compel them to keep working really hard, while their life may be miserable, it’s worth it for the rest because they get more goodies, like 4k VR porn and even more addictive algorithms. But this doesn’t even apply in America, because if you wanted more tech development you would want to restrict the supply of tech employees, whereas we are saturating the field with Indians and Asians. Now all the creative techies do not have the stress-free working conditions or the income affordance necesssary to really dive into passion projects. I mean some do, but only the most conscientious and industrious, ie not the most creative. So you actually have the worst of both worlds here. Not only do we trade the stress and tears of the poor for more waste at the top, but we even trade the stress and tears of our technologically-interested creatives for more waste at the top. If you wanted more tech development, you would want to restrict tech jobs, particularly in regions known for less creativity and less start-up potential. We have done the opposite. We have guaranteed less innovation, and instead we have Mark Zuckerberg 80 billion dollars on the MetaVerse, and Bezos space vanity projects. I will admit that Musk buying x was a good thing though.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
10d ago
In real life, when you restrict the labor supply then quality of life and technology improves: https://history.wustl.edu/news/how-black-death-made-life-better . And when you saturate the labor pool, wages for the poorest drop: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/wage-impact-marielitos-reappraisal-0
China has genuine technological growth far exceeding ours without saturating their labor pool with new workers. Europe has little technological growth despite saturating their labor pool with new workers.
American Uber drivers would be making a killing if it weren’t for mass migration.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
10d ago
A first-generation Indian will trivially find a partner back in India, this is what many first-gen Indians who move here or in Canada do.
do you think Americans moving to lower cost of living places (which has a negative impact on the economy and housing for locals) is evil
It would be a good idea for the locals of that country to protest unless they are inevitably prevented from living in their own cities. It is not evil to to take advantage of something legal, it is evil to harm the poor in your own nation through pernicious immigration policies.
passport bros
Well it’s certainly not a preferable outcome. And I imagine it harms dating in the subject country. But that’s a lot different than what we’re talking about.
If I have any amount of alcohol I can’t sleep, it gives me a stimulant effect for some reason. So I don’t drink except for the rarest extended family occasion.
More options
Context Copy link