OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
22hr ago
Sure - I'm an Australian, party discipline is much stronger here, and in practice we all know that we're not really voting for our local MP, but rather for the party that MP represents. Even so, in this system I do believe that MPs of the party in Opposition are democratically justified in opposing the Government's policies. Labor's crushing election victory this year does not obligate the remaining Coalition MPs to cooperate with whatever Labor wants to do; neither did the Coalition's decisive 2013 win obligate Labor to refrain from acting against the Coalition Government. That would go against the whole point of having an Opposition.
The point I'm trying, perhaps clumsily, to make is that I think it's bad faith to use a presidential 'mandate' as a reason for why members of congress should not oppose that president's policies, if they and their party think it necessary to do so.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I can see nothing in the constitution that says that states or communities are not allowed to welcome migrants. I think you're reading a kind of racial bias into it? I know you didn't mention specifically, but I think it is significant that this conversation is about Korean migrants, and not white or black migrants from elsewhere in the US.
It seems to me that you are assuming, on a highly speculative basis, that Georgians are strongly opposed to living alongside Koreans. I see no evidence of that, nor that the democratic will of Georgians is to get rid of this Korean community, Koreans in general, or Asians in even more general.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Isn't the consequence of every individual seat's election a mandate for that elected congressperson? No individual congressperson is bound by a presidential mandate. They are responsible to the constituents below them, not to a president above them.
I repeat my position that Republicans in congress have zero obligation to be acquiescent to the will of a Democratic president, and Demicrats in congress have zero obligation to be acquiescent to the will of a Republican president. Mandates, if they exist at all, do not work like that.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Are you a Georgian? I still haven't seen any evidence that Georgians hate Koreans or are opposed to their presence in the state. Why should it be the null hypothesis that Georgians want these people out? Nothing in the top level post quoting the WSJ indicated that natives have any problems with the Koreans, and the Koreans seem to contributing well to the local economy and cultural acclimatising to American ways, including by taking English names. I can find the full article by archiving it and there seems to be positivity there, including by Georgian government officials. Some local union workers have complained, but it also seems like most of these Koreans have come legally, consistent with Georgia's laws.
I mean, this mostly seems like a model minority situation to me. Koreans have mostly come to Georgia via the legal process, which Georgians themselves established via their state government, and those that have come have respected the local culture, worked hard, and tried to fit in.
Now, sure, maybe native Georgians hate them for some reason and want them to go, but you can't just assume that as your starting point. Be careful not to typical-mind here - maybe you don't think Koreans should live alongside Americans, but it is hardly clear that that is a majority opinion in Georgia.
At any rate, some Koreans coming to Georgia to live and work there, if consistent with Georgia's existing laws, cannot be said to constitute 'replacement' in any reasonable sense of the word.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
In what way does Pelosi's comment have any bearing on that?
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I'd argue that you're indulging in word games more than I am - in this case, comparing Koreans to weeds while implying that resources in Georgia are scarce, or that the presence of Koreans reduces prosperity for others. I think this is a misrepresentation of the scenario. Is the state of Georgia like your garden bed? Are the Koreans choking out native Georgians? That's not clear at all.
It's not even clear how race or ethnicity is relevant - if the issue is that Koreans consume more resources, wouldn't it also be a problem if native white or black populations increase? All people consume resources. We just generally don't view this as prohibitive because Georgia possesses ample natural resources (nobody is starving!) and because people produce resources as well.
The metaphor you're making just doesn't make any sense.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
What does that have to do with the point under discussion?
OliveTapenade
2d ago
Why do you say 'native white' specifically? I said myself that I think a community has the right to determine its own conditions of entry, but in the case of Georgia, that existing community is not exclusively white. Wikipedia tells me that about a third of Georgians are black, which sounds about right for a former Confederate state. Judging from this it sounds like it's been like that for a long time, and I'd bet that most black Georgians are descendants of people who've lived in the state for centuries. So I find it a bit odd that you specify 'the native white population', since the native population of Georgia in this context seems like it would include an awful lot of blacks as well. Do they not count, for you? If not, why not?
On a side note, I also notice that, per Wikipedia's chart on live births by race of mother, the black birthrate in Georgia is going down faster than the white birthrate, though the overall number of black residents is increasing slightly faster, presumably due to immigration. Notably comparing 2010 to 2022 on USAFacts, the populations of every racial group in Georgia have increased, including whites. It seems hard to say that Georgian whites are being 'replaced' if they are increasing in number.
Anyway, what would happen if you submitted a referendum to all native Georgians on immigration policy? You might have to define 'native Georgian', but I see no way of defining 'native Georgian' that would restrict it only to whites, since there is clearly a very large non-white population whose ancestors have been resident in the state for centuries. But let's say we poll everybody who is resident in Georgia and who had at least one ancestor resident in Georgia in 1950. What would they vote for?
The answer is that I don't know. I don't think you know either. Georgia is a red state, but not that red - Stacey Abrams won 45% of the vote in 2022, and 48% in 2018. Its house of reps is 100 Republicans to 80 Democrats. There's clearly a left in Georgia and we might expect them to be more sympathetic to immigration - and of course, many on the right, including moderate Republicans, are sympathetic to a level of immigration as well. I'm not convinced that Georgians would overwhelmingly vote to kick Koreans out. There's clearly an appetite in Georgia for cracking down on illegal immigration, and Brian Kemp has signed bills to that effect, but I can't find much recent about legal immigration. This 2025 poll suggests that most Georgians want illegal immigrants to have some path to residency - if true I can't imagine them being more hostile to legal immigrants.
What position do you think Georgians would all vote for? Ending all immigration? Banning all Asian immigration? Nonwhite immigration? What is it that you think Georgians want?
OliveTapenade
2d ago
I mean, my take on the broader question is that it's undoubtedly true that migration changes the character of a community - it changes its make-up in terms of ethnicity, language, religion, genetics, custom, and much more.
I also think that it is entirely reasonable for a community to have an internal discussion about how they want to change in the future, if at all, and to take organised action to ensure that they only change in ways they want, rather than ways they don't want.
That means that, for instance, if a community values being ethnically, linguistically, religiously, etc., homogenous, it can pursue policies to that effect.
The relevant question in most Western contexts is whether any given we does value that, and perhaps more importantly, whether we should value that. When we as a community make migration policy, what are our priorities? What goals are we serving?
In practice I think it's usually economic growth, and that tends to overwhelm everything else. But often people do claim different goals or motivations - the right often talks about cultural compatibility, or the left talks about compassion and hospitality. At any rate, this is a good internal debate to have.
I pressed NYTReader a bit because what that situation looked like was a community that was changing in terms of overall make-up due to an influx of Korean immigrants, and it wasn't clear that the natives were opposed to that immigration, or that the immigration was contrary to the wishes of the Georgia legislature. (Granting, hopefully, that the legislature is the preeminent forum in which the internal discussions or debates that I mentioned happen.) Hence my wanting to ask - what should be the priorities here? Why? What values or principles motivate your reasoning on this subject?
OliveTapenade
2d ago
Sure, that's why I was probing you a bit about what the lines are, in order to precisify what your concerns actually are. I didn't want to leap to conclusions and assume the worst.
That said, I'm not particularly keen on you outsourcing your opinions to someone else. Dean is a very articulate poster here, but one thing Dean cannot do is tell me what NYTReader thinks.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
If the concern is cultural change, I think that's valid, and I'm open to a discussion about that.
That is, though, I think a different concern to 'demographic replacement'? I take demographic replacement to suggest an agenda of, well, replacement - that is, not just a community changing through migration and integration of people of new cultural backgrounds, but rather the elimination of the existing population, and new people taking its place.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
Oh, sure. I expect both Democrats and Republicans to make up rules on the spot to justify whatever it is that's in their advantage to do. Neither side is particularly scrupulous or principled.
What I mean is just that, in this context, I don't see any reason why the Democrats shouldn't try to do things that they think their voters might want, or which will obstruct their political opponents. Trump winning the presidency in 2024 does not imply that the other side ought to sit down, shut up, and let him do whatever he wants.
Jonah Goldberg often criticises the concept of a 'mandate', and I think he's broadly correct. If we're going to invest a lot in mandates, every individual member of a congress has a mandate, and in the case of Democrats, that seems a lot like a mandate to oppose the Republicans, or oppose Trump. "You lost fair and square" is a bad objection to Democratic congressmen pursuing their own mandates. Politics is always going on all the time, power is always being renegotiated, and no side is entitled to their enemies laying down arms.
Just reversing partisanship isn't always a good tool, but it is helpful sometimes. If it were a Democratic president and obstructive Republicans in congress, would the same people agree that Republicans lost fair and square and ought to just let the president do what he wants? I don't think so. I think they'd want congressional Republicans to use all the leverage they have to extract concessions or limit what the president can do.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
Is the native population declining? Your quotes didn't say that, and as noted I can't read the article.
I think degree matters as well. If a native population goes down by 1% while at the same time some migrants move in, I wouldn't consider that replacement. I think the word 'replacement' suggests a wholesale removal. Is anything like that going on?
OliveTapenade
2d ago
You said in place of. What's your evidence for that? I just distinguished between addition and replacement.
I don't have a Wall Street Journal subscription, so I can't read the article itself, but I would be very shocked if the WSJ was pushing a line about demographic replacement - especially since the portions you've quoted sound sympathetic to the Koreans.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
I think most of it is just economic, to be honest. The two-party consensus is that large-scale immigration is necessary for economic reasons - more workers enable more economic growth, and it fills out the bottom of the population pyramid, which is declining due to demographic transition. (For non-conspiratorial reasons - no one's scheming to reduce the native birthrate, and in fact the birthrate decline is global.)
When asked, neither party usually says that's the reason, though if pressed they will usually mention it as one among others, but I think it's the core reason and most of the rest is rationalisation.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
The unpopularity of the Democrats is part of Klein's point, though. Their own base is unhappy with them, it seems partly because they are not perceived as doing enough to fight or to interfere with Trump's agenda.
And... they would seem to have a reasonable mandate to do that. Opposition parties are, in fact, supposed to oppose the government party and hold it responsible. The Democratic members of congress have obligations to represent the people who elected them and to make decisions that they perceive as in the interests of the country as a whole. The American constitutional system does not ask representatives to shut up and roll over just because the president is from a different party.
I don't think a government shutdown is a good idea myself, or a good move for Democrats, but Democrats absolutely should use the positions they have to do things that their voters want, or that they think is good for the country, and both those principles mean opposing some of what the government is doing.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
You're going to have to spell that out for me.
Koreans, really? It's demographic replacement by the least fertile demographic in the world?
At any rate, it's not clear to me that addition constitutes replacement.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
See below - I think that precision when it comes to identifying an opponent is instrumentally good.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
I'd argue that factional differences among one's opponents are relevant for understanding those foes, even if for only tactical reasons. If nothing else, if you approach this particular drama by concluding you need to attack Christians, you're likely to be quite ineffective, because they weren't the ones who got this done.
For what it's worth, my view on the object level issue is:
It's rather shady to go after payment processors specifically, as a way of putting pressure on other platforms. Collective Shout would have been better or more honest to make their cases to Steam or Itch.io directly.
It would be reasonable for platforms themselves to make decisions about what they want to host, including NSFW content; there would be nothing in principle objectionable about Steam or Itch.io making such decisions.
I think it would be best for society overall if a platform like Steam made a decision not to host porn. This is because I think it's socially beneficial for porn to be at least somewhat taboo or embarrassing; since Steam is the default game platform, what it hosts helps to set the standard. So I think Steam shouldn't host NSFW games for the same reason that YouTube doesn't host porn. Itch.io, on the other hand, is pretty heavily into the pornographic/NSFW space already, and it makes more sense for it to lean into its niche.
That said I do not think the government ought to compel Steam or other companies to offer or hide certain content, from the top down.
I am willing to accept tactical compromises on issues like this - for instance, Steam hosts porn currently, but Steam tries to avoid hosting 'hateful' content, and if the definition of hateful continues to expand, I could see a case for total content-neutrality as a compromise. However, at present I think total content-neutrality is unlikely to happen. In principle, though, I agree with you that total neutrality would be a decent Schelling fence.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
Some people have blamed activist religious groups on aggressively lobbying the payment processors for this crackdown.
Can we look for specifics here? This comes from Collective Shout, which is not a religious organisation, and in their FAQ claim that the accusation that they're "easily offender, prudish, moralisers, or religious fundamentalists" is a deflection tactic used by others in bad faith.
As a prudish religious person myself, I don't think there's anything bad with being one, but the idea that we specifically were behind this seems false.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
I'd argue that media coverage is misleading, though - Collective Shout and Melinda Reist are best understood as feminists. Their own self-description is entirely secular, and their feminism tag suggests some crossover with the movement. I searched their website with the tag 'Christian' and most of what I found was references to the male lead in Fifty Shades of Grey.
I can see no evidence that Collective Shout are a Christian organisation of any kind. Reist herself is a Christian, but that on its own hardly seems like an issue.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
I think this is fair. He's a powerful disruptor, but not a builder. It is safe to say, I think, that the old GOP is dead and gone, but Trump provides no central ideas or organising principles for the new one. The centre of Trump's movement is Trump himself, and his most distinctive policy preferences (e.g. tariffs) seem idiosyncratic to Trump, rather than penetrating more widely into the base. My biggest concern with the GOP or Red Tribe is what they will become after Trump. There is clearly a lot of energy and organisational power there, even if there is a void of actual beliefs. If anyone, after Trump, is capable to capture most of that energy - and that's a big if - then whatever direction it goes in will reshape America again.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
I'm not sure how much I qualify as 'scared' of Trump, but I at least dislike and oppose him, which I suppose makes me a minority here? The thing is, though I think he's a terrible president and generally a disaster for America, I spend most of my time talking about him trying to calm down people to my left, who I think have fixated too much on the wrong comparisons (re: fascism, Nazism, etc.). To me the more productive comparisons to Trump are more like a Latin American strongman, or perhaps like Jonah Goldberg's metaphor of Trump as a Mafia boss. He's corrupt, self-centered, unprincipled, and deeply transactionalist - he is motivated by Trump as a brand, not by any concept of American national welfare, or even American ideals.
I feel more 'resigned', I think, rather than afraid or indifferent. To me the case for hope around Trump is that, in his corrupt flailing, he destroys that which ought to be destroyed, or inadvertently opens up a kind of space for new growth. The case for fear or despair is that he destroys that which much must be preserved, or opens up a space for more organisedly malignant actors in the future. Personally I am not strongly invested in either reading.
That might give me a more mundane view of Trump, I suppose? What I see is a petty individual who has great talents for communication and self-presentation, but very little talent for organised governance, who's in power but doesn't have a strong vision for what to do with power beyond use it to establish "I am the greatest!" over and over. In a sense, I think many on the left and on the right make the same mistake in attributing him too much power, making him either devil or saint.
Of course, none of that means that he's not dangerous. There are a lot of things a venal egoist might do that are bad, even if he has no vision. But what I expect to see, I suppose, is more American decline, mostly in the direction that America was already going, while Trump and his allies try to stand on top of the scrapheap. I see a bigger risk in neglect than in sabotage.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
I notice this even in famous literature for men. Surely, say, the Iliad is a work that is in large part about men expressing emotion? Achilles sulks, he rages, he cries, and he generally bares his heart. If I think about cinema, men showing their emotions seem like some of the most beloved moments: Vito Corleone mourning his son, for instance. If you watch, I don't know, Breaking Bad, it seems to me that there are lots of emotions on display; Jesse in particular is very open with his feelings. The most iconic moments from that show - Walt's despairing laughter at his money being stolen, Walt crashing to the ground in devastated grief, Jesse's angry-crying "he can't keep getting away with it!", etc., they're often explosions of emotion. If we get more lowbrow, men love, say, Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings, and the last I checked their male casts are quite emotive.
It seems more complex to me than just the rule that men shouldn't display emotion. I think the rule is that male emotional displays must be appropriate. A man who reacts emotionally to a small stimulus shows himself over-sensitive; a man who does not react emotionally to a large stimulus shows himself inhuman.
When compared to women, I think there are maybe three things going on.
Firstly, the kinds of emotions appropriate for men and women are different. Men are meant to react to some experiences that women do not, and vice versa. For instance, it would be appropriate for men to cheer, cry with joy, or hug each other if their sports team won the grand final, whereas stereotypically women might not react to that. Emotional reactions to competitive activities in general seem to code more masculine. By contrast, something like nurturing or tenderness codes more feminine and therefore is appropriate for women in a wider range of contexts. So each gender may have differently-shaped spaces of acceptable emotional expression.
Secondly, the modes of emotional expression appropriate for men and women are different. Take the sports example again - it's okay for men to cheer, dump containers of gatorade on each other, whatever, whereas that would look a bit more odd from women. If a woman is very happy, though, she has her own script for how to express that. Likewise for things like sadness or anger - a woman might go and cry in the bathroom, and a man might head out back and kick a rock, and those both seem like expressions of emotion, even though one is feminine and one is masculine. If you are only looking for feminine forms of emotional expression, you'll see that women do them and men don't, but that doesn't mean men aren't expressing themselves. They're just not expressing themselves in that way.
Thirdly, the line of appropriateness is in a different place. Above I talked about small and large stimuli. What's the line between them? Plausibly the threshold for acceptable emotional expression for a woman is lower than it is for a man; this would also mean women tend to express themselves more frequently. But once the threshold is exceeded, men can express themselves as well, and if they don't, something is wrong with them.
I find it helps to think of tradition as a river, rather than something static. Tradition is, inherently, a record of change. To be 'traditional', to be part of a tradition, is to be aware of and shaped by all the river's upstream flow. It is not to be exactly the same as the part of the river that was upstream, and neither is it to recreate the conditions upstream perfectly today.
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