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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   31608 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025

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Drive through certain areas there and you'll be hard-pressed to find a single sign in English. You’ll see Mandarin, Vietnamese, Korean

In 1910, there were 2.7M German speakers and 544 German-language newspapers in the US. As we all know, the result was a Germanization and Nazification of the US as seen in the documentary series "the Man in the High Castle". Except that no such thing happened, the German-Americans are today mostly integrated into mainstream English-speaking society. As are the immigrants which came from Ireland, Scotland, England, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Iberia, Italy, and so on one hundred years ago.

In 2011, the US had 1.1M people who spoke Korean at home. I don't know how many newspapers they have in the US, Wikipedia has a grand total of two Korean-language newspapers with articles. In time, most of their descendants will certainly be fluent in English. (Given the cliches about East Asians, I would not be surprised if it turned out that most of them are fluent and have actually read more Shakespeare than the median White American.)

The US has been integrating (not assimilating in the borg sense) people of various origins for about as long as it has been a thing. What you observed is part of that process.

Also, my gut feeling is that either for cultural or HBD reasons, East Asians are severely underrepresented in gang criminality, religious motivated violence and the like.

Except that no such thing happened, the German-Americans are today mostly integrated into mainstream English-speaking society.

I think it's noteworthy that the proximal cause for this was a war waged by America against the mother country, with no small amount of pressure applied to assimilate. We do not really do that at all any more. More likely the opposite, I think: by the undisputed teachings of anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and anti-American intellectual output, assimilating to hegemonic values generally and white capitalistic American values specifically is morally wrong.

FWIW multiple studies have found that on most relevant metrics (English/other language usage, crime, social and vocational integration) Hispanics today are tracking where Italians were.

East Asians are severely underrepresented in gang criminality, religious motivated violence and the like.

East Asians do organised crime so well organised and so quietly that they basically never cause enough outrage for a democratic government to do anything. No bodies found, no shootings, no nothing.

Is this just an unfalsifiable assertion or is there actual evidence?

If you want sources you can spend hours reading, same as I once did, I recommend this article in 'The Diplomat' (US state dept rag)

https://thediplomat.com/2021/03/how-asian-drug-trafficking-networks-operate-in-europe/

For the drug situation. Czech lands have the highest amount of meth metabolites in wastewater.

https://www.euda.europa.eu/publications/eu-drug-markets/methamphetamine/use-in-europe_en

Homicide data (one of the lowest in Europe):

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/cze/czech-republic/crime-rate-statistics

Alternatively, you can read what the finest wholly made in America LLM wrote:

||The Czech Republic stands as a principal European nexus for methamphetamine production, though its methodology defies the common image of industrial-scale super-labs. Instead, the landscape is characterized by a diffuse, atomized network of small, clandestine "kitchen labs" (varny), often run by independent local producers. This decentralized model is sustained by a prolific cross-border smuggling operation which funnels in the requisite precursor chemicals—chiefly pseudoephedrine extracted from over-the-counter medications—sourced in vast quantities from neighboring states with more lenient regulations, particularly Poland. The resulting crystalline product, known locally as Pervitin, is renowned for its exceptional purity.

The sheer volume of this production substantially outstrips domestic demand, cementing the trade's status as a primarily export-oriented enterprise. The primary beneficiary of this illicit commerce is Germany, with the bordering states of Bavaria and Saxony serving as the main entry points and consumption markets. A considerable flow also moves into Austria and, to a lesser extent, other neighboring nations. The product's high purity, coupled with its comparative affordability against narcotics from other global sources, ensures its persistent demand across Central Europe. The architecture of this trade is sophisticated, with a distinct division of labor between production and logistics. While Czech nationals typically oversee the chemical synthesis, the overarching trafficking operations are dominated by Vietnamese organized crime syndicates. These groups function as the logistical linchpins, orchestrating the procurement of precursors, consolidating the finished product from the myriad independent producers, and then managing its intricate and highly effective smuggling into foreign markets. This bifurcated structure creates a resilient criminal ecosystem, where the disruption of individual labs does little to impede the larger trafficking network.

Perhaps the most striking paradox of the Czech meth trade is its detachment from high-level violence. Contrary to the violent archetypes associated with large-scale drug trafficking, systemic, gang-related homicides are conspicuously absent. The country maintains one of the world's lowest homicide rates, and the narcotics enterprise does not significantly perturb this statistic. While isolated acts of violence intrinsic to any criminal milieu do occur, the operational structure of the trade—which minimizes direct turf wars between rival syndicates—and the broader societal context of low violent crime mean that the Czech case utterly defies the conventional, blood-soaked narco-state narrative.||

In my opinion this was a disasterclass by Musk and extremely embarrassing for him. He didn’t like the bill… fine. But to completely burn the bridge with Trump after already burning the bridge with all Democrats? Unhinged behavior.

When king/arch-merchant alliances turn sour, the king always wins and the arch-merchant ends up dead or bankrupt. I would have expected Kekius Maximus to remember his Roman history better.

But SGV wasn't really changed. It was empty before. In 1950 there were 20K people. In 2025 there are 2M.

One thing that distinguishes the US from Germany (and others, idiomatically) is that we have the space (physical and liminal) for such growth. We love growth. Filling an empty valley with 2M bustling people isn't displacing anyone that was already there.

If there's anything historically novel it's been the consistent belief in the frontier as ever widening.

America, by contrast, is attempting something unprecedented in history: to maintain national coherence while undergoing massive demographic transformation without any clear cultural center holding it all together. How much change can a country absorb before it becomes something else entirely? And does that change matter? It’s not that immigrants are bad or incapable. That’s not the point. The point is that America is trying to do something historically novel: become a post-ethnic, post-historical nation that binds together people with radically different origins, languages, and values using only a kind of civic glue—and lately, even that glue seems to be dissolving.

Laughs in European.

The question comes down to: can a country stay the same [...].

Let's just stop you right there chief.

No.

Same people, different people, doesn't matter: the future is going to be different.

I don’t think this feud is about immigration.

Musk was pro-H1B, and Miller is opposed, but this bill has no impact on H1B immigration and both Miller and Musk are opposed to illegal and low skill immigration. There are, of course, Republicans who support those things (those with big ag constituencies, construction and meat processing donors etc), but it’s not at the heart of this conflict.

The core of it is Musk has libertarian or classical liberal beliefs about the deficit, while Donald Trump doesn’t care about it at all. Trump has always borrowed as much as he could and thought about how to pay it back later. Sometimes he did, sometimes he didn’t, but he somehow always made it. Donald Trump’s entire career is a lesson in not worrying about going deep into debt. He is not about to start caring deeply now. DOGE was fun for a while, but as Musk quickly realized that almost all major spending was Medicare, Medicaid and defense (which Trump’s political instincts tell him, correctly, that he can’t cut) they were always going to be at loggerheads.

Miller is solely focused on immigration and therefore needs the bill to pass to give him more money and therefore more options re the border, but the reality for him is that congress needs to act to really change the immigration situation long term barring a curveball like SCOTUS allowing the president to end birthright citizenship or some kind of actual mass deportation apparatus capable of locating, detaining and deporting 3.5m+ illegal migrants per year spinning up magically in the next few months - neither of which will happen.

In the end, possible AGI weirdness aside, this will probably end with a fiscal and therefore political crisis of great magnitude followed by ‘emergency, temporary’ tax rises and medicare/medicaid cuts some time in the near to medium term future.

all major spending was Medicare, Medicaid and defense

There is also the biggest budget post by far: social security.

social security honestly has never seemed to be as big of an issue. Certainly the demographic slowdown is a bit concerning for anything like this, but you can tweak the ages of eligibility and uncap the payroll tax and you have pretty much fixed it.

Medicare/Medicaid/health spending in general....much thornier problem.

but you can tweak the ages of eligibility and uncap the payroll tax and you have pretty much fixed it.

Like yes, but actually no. Just because the government could raise the age of social security doesn't mean they will. In fact, I am deeply and profoundly confident they never will, unless the country is in active meltdown.

I cannot imagine a better way to get BTFO in a western election.

Although France did it, and it's not repealed yet, so maybe it's possible.

The Obama-era democrats passed the ACA, got annihilated in basically every election other than POTUS '12 for quite a while, but the ACA still stands.

So it isn't a problem because you plan to cut entitlements and raise taxes? How does that make it different from any other unfunded entitlement?

because the cost of social security benefits and the cost of medical spending are growing at two very different rates.

Normally I'd agree but the situation is already unsustainable and rapidly spinning out of control. Massive fiscal reform needs to happen soon and I doubt that cuts to future entitlements that obviously were never going to happen would garner more opposition than cuts to current entitlements.

You’re eliding two very important questions:

  1. Which Americans are getting replaced?
  2. Which immigrants are replacing them?

For example, in Los Angeles, Latinos have totally replaced blacks in many neighborhoods. This process has not simply been a matter of numbers; there have been many instances of actual racial violence, in which Latino gangs have intimidated blacks into moving away. As David Cole has extensively documented, this has been an overwhelmingly positive development for the city. Even foreigners who speak broken English are, on the whole, preferable — in terms of their crime rates, their effect on civic life, their contributions to the economy — to native English-speaking black Americans.

Are Mexicans the population group I would ideally prefer to take over those parts of LA? No. Obviously I’d prefer a million white Danes, or a million Japanese. I don’t personally want to live in a heavily Mexican neighborhood and listen to awful Mexican music at 2 in the morning. But the Mexicans are undeniably a step up from what was there before, even though they were undoubtedly a foreign population replacing a “heritage American” ethnic group. The fact that blacks have some ineffable historical “claim” to be a long-standing part of the fabric of American culture is of very little importance compared to all of the observable material aspects of day-to-day life.

Similarly, if a million Vietnamese immigrants streamed into West Virginia and displaced the native hillbilly whites, West Virginia would be a better place to live for anyone who remained. There would be a short-term culture shock, as those immigrants’ English fluency would be low, their customs unfamiliar, etc. But within one generation, educational outcomes in the state would likely skyrocket as a result of the introduction of a conscientious and academically-diligent population, in comparison to the “founding stock” who had been there before.

Now, obviously, the outcome would be different if instead of a million Vietnamese it was a million Afghans. Appalachian white trash are a quite dysfunctional population, but they’re still way better than Afghanistan. (I am speaking, of course, in term of population averages; there are, of course, plenty of Appalachians who are good Americans, and plenty of Afghans who are good people.) I’d even rather live among ghetto blacks than among Afghans. Speaking about “replacement migration” as a pure negative is misguided.

Now, this is all separate from the question of whether or not it’s legitimate for elected political representatives to consciously think and act this way about their own people. It’s all well and good for me, a private citizen, to opine about how my black fellow citizens should get run out of town by Japanese foreigners. But if I had actual power to effect these changes, wouldn’t I owe some debt of care to the current constituents over which I serve? Can a purely elitist technocratic government, shorn of any sense of obligation to the people it rules (however imperfect and suboptimal those people may be) truly be said to have any legitimate mandate?

Ultimately that is the great political question of our time. To what degree is populism (however attenuated) simply a mandatory obligation of a government? How much do the elites owe to the least functional, least successful elements of their own society? (And how much can they realistically get away with, if they decide not to take the desires of their constituents into account, before it all comes crashing down?)

awful Mexican music

Mexican music is objectively better than the slop being pumped out in the US these days. I spend a lot of time around lower class mexicans at work, and it's mindblowing how many of them listen to melodically complex folk music played on real instruments.

I dunno, the compas play a lot of reggaeton these days.

I don't care how good it is, I don't want to hear it blaring through my windows. Or my walls (been there, done that).

You seem not to actually be paying attention to anything going on in American popular music today, if you think that there is no “melodically complex” music being “played on real instruments”.

I think America is already dead. There are almost certainly other theories, but look at the utter collapse of our state capacity.

Sometimes I see people point to Vietnam as the point where America "lost the ability to win wars", the first Iraq War not withstanding. We can fight wars. We can fight wars for decades. But we haven't achieved our geopolitical goals after a war in decades.

But there is more to running a nation than adventurism over seas! Sadly since Obama basically the state has failed at every initiative it ever undertook, and fails harder, faster and more obviously as time goes on. And yet people connected to government keep getting fantastically wealthy!

The corruption and graft is so out of control, we've become like Africa where nothing gets built, but the people accepting the contracts all live in mansions. And it's hard to ignore that the multi-ethnic low trust society we've all been forced into seems to have paved the way for this.

I'm no longer confident the US will be around in my old age. I just wonder which ethnic group or coalition will be lead by some modern day Atilla or Clovis will seize control of large portions of the US under a forced "reorganization" of state and federal power because the feds no longer have the state capacity to stop them. After all, we've seen such a decline in state capacity everywhere else, why should we expect them to hold the country together, push comes to shove? You think the 20 million illegals that flooded the country, or the 60-100 million descendants they'll have in 50 years in their ethnic ghettos care about the continuity of the American project? They came here for a better life, and that doesn't necessarily include us.

I’ve always put this somewhat before that. Around the start of the 20th century the idea that the West as a civilization was good and right and its ideas were good and right we’re already declining. Vietnam was more unveiling than the change itself. You can look to almost any institution you care to name, and in the 19th century they were self-confident, willing to impose themselves, and seen as obviously right and good, and the way forward is to impose those values and ideas on the world. Western Christians in 1840 were trying to impose Christianity on colonies. Now those colonies are more orthodox than Western churches who now apologize for ever taking Christianity seriously. In the past, it was self evident that imposing western ideas on the rest of the world was making the world better. Today, we have teach-ins to make sure that no one thinks that democracy, human rights, free trade, or science are better than tribal authoritarian governments that put women in tents and refuse to let them speak.

I submit that Western civilization is old and has various serious philosophical illnesses. Most of them are not fatal if treated in time. But I don’t think they will be.

I understand and mostly agree with what you’re saying in the first part, but blaming it on immigration in the second is a non sequitur. It seems like a multi-faceted problem and likely more of a “good times make weak men, weak men make…” more than anything else.

Also, when your country is run by 70+ year olds, all decisions are short-termist by definition. A 30 year cares about the future, a 70 year old is gonna be dead in the future!!

Everyone has their complaint and diagnosis tho. For libertarians it’s the switch off a gold standard #WhatHappenedIn1971. For progressives it’s the wealth gap and not enough gibs tearing apart the social fabric. For you, it’s brown skins ruining the inner city and tekkin jerbs.

Realistically, it’s a polycrisis and probably just what happens when an empire ages. Get a plan B and get out if things get too bad!

Seventy year olds are fully capable of caring about the generations to come. Indeed, financially secure seventy year olds (which presumably describes the elderly in the political class) are among those best suited to think in generational terms. If they don't, that's a deep cultural problem, and electing younger folks may mitigate it but will not solve it.

Talking to the boomer/elderly people I know, the thing that outrages them the most is either when their stock portfolio goes down rapidly, or any talk of cuts to social security/medicare.

Those doesn’t really seem like benefits to the younger generation who needs to pay for gibs, besides the obvious “when you’re my age, you’re gonna need some good healthcare”

That has not been my experience with elderly people. Many are confused by the conditions on the ground, sincerely don’t know how expensive their benefits are(after all, they’re not paying for it), and think the stock market benefits everyone.

Others feel bad for young people due to the cost of housing these days, and although they won’t sell their paid off houses that’s because they need to live somewhere. I’ve said before that among my extended family in the ArkLaTex region old people with money are expected to spend it helping out younger relatives get started, either by co-signing loans or direct gifts(or occasionally through coresidence). But more generally, I don’t get the hate over boomer consumption because it is, generally, much lower than the consumption of working people who criticize them on the basis that their resources should be reallocated. Cruises are, on the scale of vacations, pretty cheap. Retirees aren’t DoorDashing much. And boomer housing wealth isn’t actually something they can do much about.

I don’t get the hate over boomer consumption because it is, generally, much lower than the consumption of working people who criticize them on the basis that their resources should be reallocated. Cruises are, on the scale of vacations, pretty cheap. Retirees aren’t DoorDashing much. And boomer housing wealth isn’t actually something they can do much about.

Their health care counts as consumption as much as those other items do.

It falls in the same category of ‘not something they can do much about’ as housing wealth.

DoorDash is like something a communist would invent as a parody of capitalist decadence. A private taxi for my burrito? Give me a fucking break!

Now that you mention it, the poor doing gig work(I suspect because they can't pass a drug test to obtain more stable incomes) as the private taxi for burritos is so on the nose that I wonder why the numerous and extremely loud modern-day socialists aren't loudly pointing it out.

I mean, literally I have no mental model of more than occasional doordash orderers. It's just so much cheaper to either buy groceries or, uh, go out to eat the regular way, and doordash gives a worse product due to the food being cold. With modern prepared meals you don't even have to be good at cooking, you can buy microwaveable stuff at Aldi/Walmart/Kroger. I get that sometimes you want to order lots of food instead of leaving the house, but that niche was already filled by pizza, and I guess a third party delivery app for catering orders made sense but lots of people seem to be using it for individual meals.

Yeah, when you realize something like half the federal budget goes to elderly people who had a whole lifetime to save up it's kind of black pilling.

Yup. A functioning society might instead give these sort of social payments to women aged 25-35, which renew for 10 years if you have 2+ children.

But instead we give it to the oldest generation, who also has the most wealth of any generation on average…

a functioning society would have women getting "social payments" on condition they behaved well and through their husbands as part of a family unit

a functioning society has no need for "young women" to get social payments at all and certainly not for having children which they would do naturally in a functional society

it's the dysfunctional ones which believe they have to support women who are already making horrible choices otherwise they go without shelter or starve; giving money to women, especially without conditions, would give them more choice which they would use to avoid family formation, break apart existing families, and avoid having children which has been well demonstrated by the last 80 or so years

the cultural institutions and expectations which coerced them into doing it anyway in 1950-1970 are now long gone and we see the results

it's far better the boomers burn wealth in an open pit than expand social payments to women

Ok then do “young married couples” payments, 25-35 yrs old + 10 years for 2+ kids.

No need to get all autistic-ragey about it…

All my peers are worried about financial pressure and difficulties with having kids. Falling birthrate is a problem, so do subsidies?

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I'll feel less bad about Social Security if ever convinced the only alternative is UBI For Women and Single Mothers.

UBI for women or, God forbid, single mothers would crater family formation (even down from the abysmal levels now), spike divorces, and likely reduce fertility (especially for the women I would want to have more children)

I'm honestly puzzled why others on this board think this is a good idea. It would be far better for the boomers to burn money in open pits or pave half the wilderness with hospitals and retirement homes than to spend the money doing this.

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