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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27276 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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Since no one's posting...

The dollar is done dude. It was nice while it lasted. But I believe that the U.S. dollar's reign as a universal reserve currency has ended. Over time fewer countries will hold U.S. treasuries and do business in U.S. dollars.

But why?

The dollar is a bad investment. How would you feel about holding a currency that is controlled by the government of a foreign country? You'd feel pretty bad if that country is $35 trillion in debt and will need to print trillions more every year to have any hope of even making the interest payments.

China is dumping U.S. treasuries and buying gold instead. It just makes financial sense.

U.S. treasuries are suffering their worst bear market possibly ever. Let's say you bought TLT (a long-term treasury ETF) at its peak in 2020. Today, you'd be down by more than 50% in real terms. What is supposed to be a "safe" investment becomes very unsafe in the presence of inflation.

The long-term picture isn't much better. Since the end of the gold standard in 1971, gold has outperformed U.S. treasuries. Simply buying and holding a lump of rock is better than holding the debt of the U.S. government. And the government was actually in good financial health for most of those years, unlike now.

The U.S. is not a trustworthy partner. Before Russia invaded Ukraine, Russia held about $600 billion in currency and gold reserves. About half of those reserves, $300 billion, were held in the West. After the invasion, those reserves were frozen. Now, they are now likely to be given to Ukraine.

Because of this, there is no reason for a country like China (or any other country for that matter) to store their wealth in the West, or to hold U.S. dollar-denominated assets. It's all conditional on U.S. allegiance.

For most countries, trade with China is more valuable than trade with the U.S. China now dominates most of the world's industries, and the trend continues to point in that direction. Third world countries often have much stronger trade ties with China than they do the U.S. They export natural resources and import Chinese goods. Increasingly, they can do without U.S. goods and services. Do what we say or otherwise you can't have our, um, Microsoft Excel licenses...

As this process strengthens, China will be able to lean on these countries to do business in Yuan, or perhaps in some resource-demoninated currency.

Okay, so the dollar is done. What comes next? Probably nothing major. I don't think that the Yuan will become the reserve currency, or that we'll move back to the gold standard (although global reserves will be held increasingly in gold). But the U.S. dollar will no longer be the uncontested reserve currency. The world will once again be multipolar, with the U.S. just one of multiple competing forces, and not necessarily the strongest one.

In the long run (10+ years) I expect gold to significantly outperform treasuries.

Russia

China

Having friends like these compromises one's values. Marginally higher economic growth isn't worth abetting genocide. I'm quite happy to see them take their ball and go home.

It would be nice if we could! Unfortunately China is embedded in every supply chain. They have us by the balls and they know it.

But that also applies vice versa no? The American market is the wealthiest in the world. Lose it and all those factories making Iphones and Temu widgets collapse. There is no other market that can match it. And given China's upcoming population problem and their huge corruption problem, I don't see much incentive for them to pull the trigger on economic MAD. Especially because many of their elites are being enriched by it.

It's kind of a weird standoff. They build all the stuff that we need. In exchange, we give them ... a place to dump their overproduction.

But somehow it does seem to work. China would probably face severe disruptions if their plastic vomit factories had to close overnight.

Well, what is the upper bound of ideological difference that you are willing to tolerate from a trading partner? Russia is one matter in which the US is still lucky to have a great number of affluent nations sharing its majority perspective; China is frankly a wash; and on the topic of Israel, you might find yourself actually having the opposite perception on who is genociding whom from all but a small handful. It's all well if you say you will reject the sinful outside world and stay in your righteous bubble, but nations trade with each other because it's advantageous for them - moral righteousness does not on its own beget food, science or missiles, and at least the hypothetical extreme case of an isolated America-Israel alliance shunning everyone else as genocide abetters vs. the rest of the world trading freely with each other even as there are occasional local scuffles would probably not develop in the favour of the US in the long term even considering its geographical and human capital advantages.

  1. Tlt bad investment. You compared long term investments where the market was priced at 0% (historically high prices) to now higher rates. This is just bond math. Interest rates change. T-Bills did not lose any money. 30 year bonds are a bet on rates.

  2. US took Russias money. If I have $20 of Jeroboam’s money in my pocket. And you Jeroboam punched me in the face he shouldn’t be surprised when I don’t give him his money back. Seems rational. The funny thing before Jeroboam punched me in the face he knew he was going to punch me in the face. Yet he also knew I had his money. Why didn’t he get it back before punching me? Something something there are good reasons why Jeroboam had his money in my pocket before punching me and it’s very sticky.

  3. No accounting for a risks free asset versus a hunk of metal that only has value if someone else values it. Gold is a Ponzi scheme depending on a new sucker getting talked into owning gold. The Dollar is not a Ponzi scheme. People have to use it and if they don’t use it a military takes them and puts them in jail.

Edit: Too emphasize point 2. His argument for dollar weakness is the dollars greatest strength. Russia chose to go to war with America. They fully knew we would confiscate $300 billion. And could not liquidate before going to war. I complain that Apple is incredibly sticky and people just buy IPhones so they don’t look ghetto with green text. The dollar is so sticky you can go to war with America and can’t get rid of the dollar.

...

Americans use traditional SMS messages to text each other, instead of Whatsapp like everyone else. When you text another iPhone from your iPhone, it actually uses a different app called iMessage that doesn’t cost money and the text appears in a blue bubble. If you text an Android user from an iPhone, the text appears in a green bubble and costs money (or consumes a bit of your plan, or whatever).

European countries do often have cheaper data than the US, but that's not the main reason why Americans use iMessage. The main reason is that early smartphone adoption in the US was extremely iPhone centric for anyone (a) under 40 and (b) not-poor. That has only grown more skewed over time. Premium Android phones in the iPhone price range are almost unheard of in the US - especially outside some first-gen immigrants from China/India (who use WeChat/Whatsapp). In Europe a lot of early smartphone adoption was HTC/Samsung/Sony Android devices; it's not uncommon for PMC types to have thousand dollar Samsung Galaxy whatever phones, although the trend is still toward iPhone in the long term. Not a single one of my American coworkers has an Android, ever.

This means that in a work group or social environment in the US for middle-class and above people, setting up a chat on iMessage is always an option, whereas in Europe even if 3/5 or 8/10 people use iPhone, you still use Whatsapp to include the others.

Premium Android phones in the iPhone price range are almost unheard of in the US

I don't think so. The nicer Samsung phones (S and Note) are fairly popular. At least among the people I know.

As of February 2024 iPhones had a 60.77% share.

Premium Android phones in the iPhone price range are almost unheard of in the US

That seems overstated. If you walk into any carrier store, at least half the shelf space is usually for higher end Samsung, Motorola, Google, or even OnePlus devices. Maybe it's because I'm in the midwest, but Android easily outnumbers iPhone among my friends and family.

iPhone has 80% marketshare among 18-24 year olds in the US, and well in excess of 80% marketshare among high income millennials too. Phone retailers (including carriers) love Android because they make more margin on their phones (a deal Samsung etc readily agree to in exchange for store space). For reference, after the iPhone X (2017), Apple cut margins for resellers (which obviously include carriers) to sub-4% in many cases. Samsung resellers make more like 6-7%, so it's a huge difference for the retailer if you sell 10,000 $1000 iPhones vs 10,000 $1000 Samsungs.

LOL i love the way you phrased this. As an Expat American it's incredibly annoying that my home country is still stuck on SMS messaging, and they just take that as a default ("texting") to where it's hard to even describe anything else to my friends back home.

Russia chose to go to war with America.

Glad we are admiting that Ukraine is just a proxy state for America. So the US can bomb, invade and occupy countries left and right and have proxy states right on Russia's border and there are no sanctions. However, other countries have no real legal protection and are left to the wims of American for whether their dollars are worth something or not.

There is a reason why this system isn't going to be stable.

Russia wanted Ukraine in its sphere, America wants it in its sphere. There's nothing original about this exact kind of proxy conflict, they've been happening between these very parties since 1945. If Russia or China (or anyone else) wanted to sanction the US and allies for supporting Euromaidan, they obviously could. They don't because it's transparently not in their interest.

In other words there is no rules based international order, there is just powergrabs. If that is the case then it is expected that other countries will be weary of the US and their power. Why be vulnerable to a country that is nothing more than extractive empire? The US has a problem and it is that the rest of the world is no longer far behind the US and therefore they can't bully countries to submission.

Because it's completely unclear that predation by China or (in some regional cases like Central Asia/Middle East/Caucasus/Baltics/Eastern Europe) Russia would be any better, when in fact it would likely be much worse. Sure, you can be a free agent with no permanent alliances, but that leaves you like the Philippines would be if they went full neutral; completely open to Chinese aggression. Much of the Pacific prefers the US to China. India is obviously fearful of China. In Africa and Latin America the factions are more mercenary, as we see. In Europe the bargain is that being part of the US alliance vs China is necessary to guarantee American support versus Russia.

In other words there is no rules based international order

Yes of course. So strange that this is such a bitter pill for some people.

It's not. It's the people acting like there is such a thing that are hard to deal with.

“Extractive Empire”

Many a MAGA and probably some leftist would argue we are the exact opposite of an extractive empire. Thru things like free trade and open borders we actually weaken our empire and act not in our own best interest. We sacrificed our industrial base to China. I myself will argue we give too good of a deal to otherwise in terms of security guarantees. I agreed with Trump when he says he would kick countries out of NATO who are not contributing to NATO military strength. America does subsidize the national security of a lot of rich nations (I am looking at you Germany).

We offer a very good deal for a country to be a country that uses dollars. We let them not spend on national defense and dump their products on the U.S. market. While America will flex our muscles with our rules at times we also offer them very good terms that are against our interests all the time.

deleting old posts for privacy

Both can be true. The US becomes a financial empire with the rest of the world buying lots of money from the US. The rest of the world is forced to prop up American real estate markets and financial markets while the expensive dollar makes it cheap for Americans to import. The US empire is great for finance, insurance, real estate and the military industrial complex. It is not good for manufacturing. The world is has to send products to the US in order to get dollars, the US gets products for free but all the money printing makes the US too expensive for a large portion of the population.

That’s also why nobody really wants to have to be tied down to you. To hand your money to another person and be tied to their rules if they want the money back. China doesn’t want dollars after seeing what we attempted to do to Russia over Ukraine. Disconnected from the banking system, assets frozen, and a massive divestment campaign were attempts to hamstring the economy of Russia once it broke the Western world’s rules. China wants Taiwan. China also known it will get similar treatment if it invades. Hence they don’t want dollars.

Gold I think is less of a Ponzi scheme than government fiat currency. Gold is an established global market, it has uses in industrial manufacturing, and in making jewelry. It’s therefore not dependent on the fiscal system of any single country the way a fiat currency would be. Not only can the country in question take your money back, but it can inflate their currency to the point of worthlessness (see Zimbabwe). They could also end up becoming a failed state if there’s a prolonged political crisis of some sort. If we end up in Boogaloo Civil War, the value of the dollar will fall by quite a lot because the USA will lose credibility as a stable country. The dollars right now is propped up by being backed as the currency that oil is traded in, but this could change and in fact both Russia and China want to change it. If that happens, you lose a major reason that people ever wanted the dollar. To cut this short, to be tied to the dollar means being tied to the fortunes of the USA, which, while it used to be a sure thing, may not continue to be as steady. Gold isn’t tied to the fortunes of any country therefore, no matter what happens, it’s not going to be devalued by the failure of that state.

Re point 3

As between gold and T bills, the only asset with intrinsic value is gold (it is used frequently in electronic manufacturing).

The uses of gold can be broken down to:

  • A, 49%: "it is shiny"
  • B, 44%: "everyone else thinks it is precious"
  • C, 6%: "It does not oxidize and is conducting electricity well, making it the ideal material for contacts"

A and B are of course interlinked -- gold chains make a good signal of "I am rich" because it is universally accepted as precious, and the fact that gold is both rare and in demand for jewelry makes it precious.

But if A and B were to somehow to go away, the price would tank dramatically, and industrial demand would not save you from a price crash -- especially if all the central banks were to put decades of world production on the market because gold was no longer an efficient way to store wealth.

Julia Child (in a TV documentary) once demonstrated that gold would be a great material for cookware.

Why didn’t he get it back before punching me? Something something there are good reasons why Jeroboam had his money in my pocket before punching me and it’s very sticky.

Is there not an obvious OPSEC explanation? You had a prior understanding that you and Jeroboam were in good relation and that he was literally investing in the relationship, with the expectation that it was a long-term investment. If he suddenly asks for his money back, you're gonna start wondering what he's up to, what's changed, why is he acting so weird? Imagine Avon Barksdale saying, "Yo String, I love what you've been doing with investing our money, but actually, I'd like to just withdraw my half. Cash. Right now. What am I gonna do with it? I don't know; nothing in particular. I just like looking at it." Even high-level corporate folks are often required to have significant investment in their own companies, and questions are asked if they seem to be withdrawing too much. "Do they know something? Are they thinking that this corporate partnership is becoming a bad deal? Might they jump ship?" If having the investment is essentially known to all parties to be, in part, a trust mechanism to indicate whether everything is normal and good and that defection can be "punished" by confiscating part/all of that investment, sudden withdrawal of that investment may contain a lot of signal. Maybe dude just wants to build a new mansion or buy twitter or something... but maybe...

In the international realm, there is a delicate balance between quietly trying to organize your affairs to try to make your regime more sanctions-proof and retaining enough ambiguity about the likelihood that you're going to suckerpunch someone.

Opsec explanation seems fine to me. Yes if you liquidate your dollar account the world would be asking why are you doing that and assume it’s something like war.

That being said I am not sure Russia was capable of liquidating dollars even if they wanted to.

They could have gone to Goldman Sachs and told them here is $300 billion give me gold. They would move the price of gold significantly. Then they do war. Let’s say they win war. Now they want to use the gold to buy real things. Selling 300 billion of gold would drive the price down. A second issue is now the global market doesn’t like Russia. Trading in gold gets a negative reputation. Maybe Chile’s central bank wanted more gold but now gold is known as Russian money and buying gold helps bad people.

My point is I agree their is an opsec angle but de-dollarizing into something else is perhaps impossible but definitely not easy.

T-Bills did not lose any money.

T-bills never "lose" any money. If you hold to maturity you will get paid... in dollars. But tell that to the people who bought 100-year Australian bonds that are now trading 96% under what they paid for them. A promise to pay in 2050 dollars is worth only as much as the buying power of those dollars. In this case, probably not much.

If I have $20 of Jeroboam’s money in my pocket. And you Jeroboam punched me in the face he shouldn’t be surprised when I don’t give him his money back. Seems rational.

But it's also rational when the other kids on the playground wonder "Why, exactly, does this other kid have MY money in HIS pocket. Let me ask for it back."

No accounting for a risks free asset versus a hunk of metal that only has value if someone else values it. Gold is a Ponzi scheme depending on a new sucker getting talked into owning gold. The Dollar is not a Ponzi scheme. People have to use it and if they don’t use it a military takes them and puts them in jail.

The dollar is a medium of exchange. And yes, we are mostly forced by the government to use it. But, like gold, it doesn't have intrinsic value. If the supply of dollars is increased, their value goes down. That why treasuries are not a risk-free asset. It's true that you will get paid back. In dollars. But there's no guarantee how many goods and services you can buy for those dollars.

Peter Zeihan thinks that dollar can't be touched easily simply by nature of the U.S. being more prosperous and stable than any other country if things go south.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=LiR54FPQiCs&t=309s

Peter zeihan should put his money where his mouth is and demonstrate how stable Detroit and Atlanta are by riding through them on a bicycle at 1 am.

It doesn’t matter in an emergency situation. Teenagers in Detroit or Atlanta gangs aren’t the Houthis, the US government could easily pacify lawless parts of the country in minutes, not even hours.

...

Why you gotta ruin my dreams like that man.

The US government doesn’t need minuteman ICBMs to pacify urban centers. The regular police could easily do it- these aren’t cartels.

Political will is the reason these places are the way they are.

...

Zeihan thought that China was just about to collapse for the last 15-20 years.

Look at what he says here:

https://www.businessinsider.com/stratfor-predictions-for-the-next-decade-2010-1#iran-pacified-6

Iran pacified, China implodes, US ascendant. If you squint at it he gets some things right (India and Africa irrelevant, Russian movement towards Europe). Other things are dubious, Turkey as regional leader? Maybe, sort of? But the key trend of that decade was the continued growth of China in all domains. He was effectively all in on China shorts and should have lost all his reputational currency with that biggest and most failed investment.

He doesn't deserve any more reputational capital.

I know you won't respond, but several of your justifications are humorous.

The dollar is a bad investment. How would you feel about holding a currency that is controlled by the government of a foreign country? You'd feel pretty bad if that country is $35 trillion in debt and will need to print trillions more every year to have any hope of even making the interest payments.

China is dumping U.S. treasuries and buying gold instead. It just makes financial sense.

U.S. treasuries are suffering their worst bear market possibly ever. Let's say you bought TLT (a long-term treasury ETF) at its peak in 2020. Today, you'd be down by more than 50% in real terms. What is supposed to be a "safe" investment becomes very unsafe in the presence of inflation.

The long-term picture isn't much better. Since the end of the gold standard in 1971, gold has outperformed U.S. treasuries. Simply buying and holding a lump of rock is better than holding the debt of the U.S. government. And the government was actually in good financial health for most of those years, unlike now.

Your long-term picture argument is what undermines the broader point. If gold has outperformed US treasures for nearly 50 years, and yet US treasuries have been a preferrable investment for nearly 50 years, that in and of itself is an indication that there are factors other than performance vis-a-vis gold (or other rocks) that are driving decisions of what makes something a good or bad investment. Some of these aren't mysteries- there are reasons that no one is trying to go back to a gold standard currency, let alone China.

Your next argument also undermines the specific supporting argument of China. China isn't dumping U.S. treasuries in favor of gold because gold is a better performer- again, your 1971 gold performance argument undermining the point- but because China is preparing itself financially for a conflict with the United States to mitigate sanctions risk, despite the demonstrated preference for the sanctions risk options instead of gold when the future sanctions risk was lower.

Ultimately, the value of an investment isn't in its own return, which your argument here focuses on, but in relation to the context and the alternatives. Even an investment that loses money can still be the preferable investment if the others would lose more. This is why the 35 trillion number of US debt is a big scary number used in isolation, but less so in relation to GDP (the nominal ability to pay), and even less so in like-to-like comparisons of total debt-to-GDP ratio comparisons with other prospective poles. It's not that it's a good metric- it's that while the US is in a league of its own in the ability to have debt, it's not in a league of it's own in managing debt, especially with peer economic poles. (The PRC debt-to-GDP ratio beyond government debt, for example- the whole property market financial crisis.)

The U.S. is not a trustworthy partner. Before Russia invaded Ukraine, Russia held about $600 billion in currency and gold reserves. About half of those reserves, $300 billion, were held in the West. After the invasion, those reserves were frozen. Now, they are now likely to be given to Ukraine.

Because of this, there is no reason for a country like China (or any other country for that matter) to store their wealth in the West, or to hold U.S. dollar-denominated assets. It's all conditional on U.S. allegiance.

The counter-points to this is that the Americans and Europeans have been sanctioning state and non-state actors for decades now, and seizing assets of parties who declare themselves in general conflict for centuries. Anyone surprised by the Ukraine War seizures was not paying attention, either to contemporary geopolitical finances in conflict or to historical contexts.

There is nothing new about it, and just as the threat of seizure in the west for reasons of crossing Western government red lines never went away, the reasons why countries would keep wealth in the west vis-a-vis somewhere else remain the same as they did a year ago- which is to say, it's a better system to store in at scale, unless you foresee yourself coming into direct conflict with the Western countries.

Big surprise, don't park your funds with people you may go to war with, or with whom you are trying to economically blackmail with energy cutoffs. The question isn't whether the US or West would do this- they have and did- it's who you think won't do this on equivalent or even less grounds.

For most countries, trade with China is more valuable than trade with the U.S. China now dominates most of the world's industries, and the trend continues to point in that direction. Third world countries often have much stronger trade ties with China than they do the U.S. They export natural resources and import Chinese goods. Increasingly, they can do without U.S. goods and services. Do what we say or otherwise you can't have our, um, Microsoft Excel licenses...

As this process strengthens, China will be able to lean on these countries to do business in Yuan, or perhaps in some resource-demoninated currency.

Both of these China proposals ignore the limits of China's abilities.

For a resource-denominated currency, the core issue here is that if you have a resource-denominated currency, you need to be able to provide it in scale at demand, which is precisely what cracked the gold standard repeatedly and broke it in favor of fiat currencies. The global financial system is too large in scale for any reasonable value-resource to be actually stockpiled and providable on demand in case of bank runs, and China in particular is a demonstration of that if you look at the recent property crisis, and then consider what would have happened if the Chinese government was legally obligated to provide X-ounces of Whateveronium.

What they'd do- or rather, what they wouldn't do- goes into the other main challenge in Chinese currency, which is the lack of liquidity due to the capital controls. China tries to lean on other countries to do business in Yuan, it makes loans more favorable on the condition that their in Yuan, but the issue with Yuan is that China runs a marcantile trade policy and makes it very hard to move capital wealth outside of the country at scale vis-a-vis using it in China to buy something for export or to reinvest. That's fine and dandy for bilateral trade, but that's antithetical to a reserve currency, which serves as a medium for countries doing trade NOT with the reserve currency country, but to move it in and out and outside of it.

Okay, so the dollar is done. What comes next? Probably nothing major. I don't think that the Yuan will become the reserve currency, or that we'll move back to the gold standard (although global reserves will be held increasingly in gold). But the U.S. dollar will no longer be the uncontested reserve currency. The world will once again be multipolar, with the U.S. just one of multiple competing forces, and not necessarily the strongest one.

A transition to a more multipolar geopolitical order is precisely what will continue to bolster the power of the American Dollar's role in the global ecosystem as the main reserve currency, while crushing the viability of a gold standard reserve currency.

Trading currencies are at the most risk if they are engaged in conflict zones, as the countries backing them have their economic environments shaped by the risk perceptions not only of the country, but what it takes for the supply chains to reach the country. The more potential conflict zones there are to intercept those links, the less stable the supply chains, and the more the capital needs somewhere relatively stable to wait.

A more multipolar world order is not a more peaceful one, and the more the Eurasian rim is broken apart by pole-on-pole conflicts, like we saw with the Suez Canal route being decimated by the broader Israeli-Iran conflict, the more the capital looks for somewhere relatively more stable. There's only one integrated continental economy with minimal external resource dependencies in the world, and that's in the north-western hemisphere.

At the same time, however, the more conflict-engaged currency blocks will run into the costs of financing and funding more conflicts, which goes to the same issue that gold-backed countries had with the much smaller economies of a century ago. WW1 costs of war and related debts snapped the gold-standard currencies, and the US dropped a gold standard because of the costs that came with having to honor that conversion while being a reserve currency.

You can be a reserve currency, or a gold-standard currency, but you can't be both unless you can actually provide the gold on demand. The US at the height of its financial supremacy over the non-Soviet block couldn't afford that for long. A financial pole of the multipolar order who tries will quickly be drained until it's no longer a meaningful pole, or it drops the option.

Can I just post a link to a dollar vs. anything chart without that being considered rude? The dollar is as strong as it has ever been. This was a lot of wasted digital ink.

It's not doing so well against Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is a speculative investment vehicle, it has nothing to do with anything. The dollar hasn't devalued by 800000% since bitcoin came on the scene.

OK, the dollar's doing poorly against bitcoin, shares, real estate and commodities (via inflation). It's roughly even on silver and doing badly against gold.

The only thing the dollar compares well against is other currencies (which are fundamentally the same kind of thing). So a dollar v anything chart would not prove that the dollar was strong, as your argument suggests. Unless by anything you just mean currencies.

I do mean currencies, since that is what everyone uses. When was the last time you bought something with bitcoin or gold or the deed to your house?

Do you want deflationary money so that it pays to hoard it and do nothing? There is a reason we have target inflation numbers instead of target deflation numbers. What you're talking about isn't the dollar "doing poorly" it is inflation, it is a feature not a bug.

Yes, I want deflationary money. Right now it pays to leave money in the bank, not very much but it does. If everyone did that, the economy would implode. The economy works on the principle that people want more than measly 1-2% returns, they want lots more money so they invest it and lend it out, accepting some risk. Furthermore, the economy is inherently supposed to be deflationary, that's what technology does. Prices are supposed to fall.

People don't go 'oh I need a dishwasher, I will wait 6 months for them to become 1% cheaper', that's not real human behaviour. People want things now so they buy them now, often without even needing them.

Inflationary money pumps up huge asset bubbles, immiserating those of us who need homes (all but a few). Inflationary money is exploited by governments and central banks for political advantage. It funds stupid and unnecessary wars without obviously raising taxes or taking on real debt from real lenders. It is a huge boon to special interests and a cost on the general public.

Most people own a home, so isn't inflation good for more people than it hurts on the housing side? There were plenty of wars before MMT and target inflation numbers, more I would venture to say. What is a "real lender" if not the American people who voted in the reps and president who are wasting money on stupid wars of adventure and choice? Perhaps you're right and deflationary money doesn't cause recessions and depressions, but it tends to correlate with them pretty well. The reasons for that are complex and often it is demand destruction or market failure, not the deflationary nature of the currency causing the issue.

Home ownership is currently at 65% So 2 out of 3 people live in a home they "own". Mostly with a mortgage that is always getting cheaper to pay. It was at almost 70% before home prices deflated in 2009 and really caught a lot of people with their pants down.

More comments

It would be rude, yes.

You'd be better off asking the question: "if the dollar is so weak, why does it compare like chart?"

It would also be odd, since not only was the strength of currency not particularly relevant to the argument, but the strength of a currency and the strength of an economy are two separate items, and have been for many a century.

No argument from me.

jeroboam is blocking me so I had only your comment to go on. Sorry about that.

I was under the impression you can respond to people blocking you, just that they don't see it.

It would be odd if you posted such a link in response to a post that didn't make any arguments depending on dollar strength, but it might make a bit more sense in response to the OP.

There's only one integrated continental economy with minimal external resource dependencies in the world, and that's in the north-western hemisphere.

That's assuming, of course, that the US doesn't enter a spring and autumn period. It's functionally impossible to reestablish hegemony in North America after it's broken.

It also assumes that alien space bats don't replace north america, or that the Galactic Empire from long long ago and a galaxy far far away doesn't have a multi-generation death star show up and shoot down, and a lot of other ruinous things, yes.

I'll take my bets on this, for similar reasons that I don't bet that China will devolve into civil war in the next few decades, and some additional american contexts as well. This is not the first political realignment process the US has gone through, and it's not even the most turbulent period of political violence in the current leadership generation's experience, and while I am happy to note that This Time Is Different (because social media exists), I've never been convinced by arguments of civil war or equivalent options.

The simplistic and correct issue with a gold backed currency is the supply of gold does not correlate with productivity growth + population growth + 2% inflation (can ignore the inflation but I think modestly positive inflation is positive).

If the growth of the gold supply is 1% and my above equation is 5% you end up needing the risks free interest rate that balances demand for risks free savings and the demand for investment to have a positive 4% nominal rate. Historically, I actually read the book, 4% nominal rates have been mostly the peak interest rates (for govvy debts or equivalent lowest risks debt).

For whatever reason the market clearing interest rate is below 4% you will see gold being better than investing. Since the currency is backed by gold the currency becomes better than investing. Which basically causes people not to invest which causes a depression.

Alternatively you could live in a world on the gold standard where Elon Musks invents a magic gold making machine. He can increase the gold supply by 50% per year. At this point a gold standard is hyperinflation. The reverse side still indicates that there is a lack of correlation between gold supply and changes in economic activity. This scenario is roughly speaking the Spanish Empire.

How about silver? There’s an interesting phenomenon where silver prices rise faster than gold ahead of anticipated inflation and rn the Shanghai exchange price for silver is higher than the western exchange.

If you like excitement, can I recommend natural gas futures?

Seriously, though, silver is very volatile. On average, I'd expect silver to increase by 7% a year as it has done since they stopped making coins out of silver. But the volatility will be very high, and I can easily see drawdowns of 50% at various points.

Im pretty heavily invested in natural gas stocks, although not as futures.

Really more interested in pointing out weird shit in the silver market consonant with a shift away from the dollar, not trying to sell anyone.

Right on. I rode the silver train in 2020 and did okay.

Gold is trading at like 80 times silver which is much greater than its historical ratio and also "God's ratio" of 10-1. It's also apparently useful in some green energy shit, not sure what. Maybe the silver bulls will have their day again.

I recall the typical ratio was more like 16:1. Of course, God would use the 10:1 ratio, but there will always be something about powers of 2 that attracts me.

The long-term picture isn't much better. Since the end of the gold standard in 1971, gold has outperformed U.S. treasuries. Simply buying and holding a lump of rock is better than holding the debt of the U.S. government. And the government was actually in good financial health for most of those years, unlike now.

Gold Bugs love to talk about the price of gold since 1971. But the performance really depends on what year you start in. Turns out 1971 was an exceptionally good time to purchase gold, as it had just been deregulated and could be bought for like $50 an ounce because no one was paying attention. By the end of the decade it had already boomed to a price similar to what it is now, like $2000 an ounce. And there have been several boom and bust cycles since then. It's (ironically) not really a long-term, buy-and-hold investment, but something that can maybe save you during a big market crash but can just easily tank. Treasuries have outperformed over almost any period other than starting in 1971.

Incidentally- treasuries right now have a great interest rate and are still rock-solid safe. This might be the time to just park your money in bonds.

By the end of the decade it had already boomed to a price similar to what it is now, like $2000 an ounce.

Not quite. Gold very briefly spiked in 1980. It reached a high of $843 for a single day. It's true that if you somehow managed to top-tick this speculative bubble, you'd have performed poorly.

The returns for most periods after 1971 look decent.

It's (ironically) not really a long-term, buy-and-hold investment, but something that can maybe save you during a big market crash but can just easily tank.

It's actually a wonderful buy and hold investment. What it isn't is a low-volatility investment. And it's pro-cyclical so it almost certainly won't save you during a market crash either. Gold is best as a hedge against a period of high inflation when other assets perform poorly.

Incidentally- treasuries right now have a great interest rate and are still rock-solid safe. This might be the time to just park your money in bonds.

5% is not great by historical measures, but I agree the Fed is likely to lower rates in the next 2 years which might make long-term treasuries a decent investment in the short run. If they lower rates, the new bonds at 2% or whatever will be terrible investments. But you will get paid back. In dollars.

In the long run (10+ years) I expect gold to significantly outperform treasuries.

My question is, so what? What do I, a retail investor pleb with barely six figures saved, mostly in things like equities and 401k, do with this information?

Do I look for Vanguard Gold funds, instead of broad market indexes? Do I take the $20k in my savings account earmarked for a bathroom remodel and convert it into gold and silver? Do I buy Bitcoin and make sure I have self custody?

These predictions have been coming for years, and I suppose they are finally coming to fruition. I remember back in 2009 I used basic macroeconomics to predict large inflation, which never really materialized until 2021, when all sorts of other factors could have been the cause.

My question is, so what? What do I, a retail investor pleb with barely six figures saved, mostly in things like equities and 401k, do with this information?

Not much. We're probably just all going to have to be poorer for awhile as stagflation bites.

Here's what I'd do. Over time, I'd stop putting new money into bonds. While I'm actually somewhat bullish on treasuries in the 2-5 year time frame, they are doomed to suck in the long run due to the massive U.S. deficits. Personally, I think a 10% allocation into precious metals (either physical or in funds) make sense and will diversify your portfolio. But over time equities have outperformed gold.

And for the love of God, do NOT buy gold miners.

And for the love of God, do NOT buy gold miners.

What's so bad about gold miners?

Decades of horrible performance and capital destruction

Given Burdensome's comment, I suspect this means "don't invest in the companies actually prospecting and mining for gold, gold production is near-flat and is practically a money sink."

Which, given the apparent propensity for gold to value upwards, would suggest that the amount of new gold being mined from Earth is at a trickle.

And for the love of God, do NOT buy gold miners.

Second this. Gold has done very well over the last few years but gold miners are basically flat. The market doesn't expect gold miners to be able to keep a lid on their production costs in the medium term (which might tell you something about other firms).

When I dabbled in gold, and I still hold some in fact, I just bought 1 oz American Gold Eagles. Then when I wanted to sell them, I took them to my local dealer and got I think 97% of spot for them. I did this in 2020 in anticipation of buying a house (which didn't happen that year), and then again in 2021 (closed that year). I came out about $1000 ahead on $13,000 invest in 2020, and $3000 ahead on $7000 invested in 2021. On my remaining gold I'm $6000 ahead on $8000 invest.

Gold wouldn't be my first thing I'd invest in. But it worked out well enough as a hedge against inflation. That said, my BTC and my brokerage account have absolutely crushed my gold gains. But if BTC were scary to me, or I didn't have the fortitude to weather a stock crash without selling the bottom like a rube, gold has never been worth nothing. Harder to panic sell too.

I remember back in 2009 I used basic macroeconomics to predict large inflation, which never really materialized until 2021, when all sorts of other factors could have been the cause.

And like the joke about predicting 10 of the last 3 recessions, that's not prediction. The large inflation in 2021 was the result of events which began in late 2019, and could not have been known in 2009.

The weaponization of the dollar has been one of the worse policy decisions in the history of our country. The only reason we've been able to float such insane deficits, and largely skate through innumerable corrupt bailouts or foreign wastes of lives and treasure, is because our debt to GDP ratio doesn't matter. Because the dollar isn't just backed by our own economy, but all the goods in the world that trade in dollars. It's a cushy gig if you can get it, and we've gone and made getting off the USD a national security issue to any country that values its sovereignty.

I see people mock dedollarization. That the process of getting off the USD will be so painful for these countries that they'll never do it. And I can't completely discount that. But it does stink of hubris, and countries may judge (correctly) that the pain of getting off the dollar is less than the pain of staying on it.

The weaponization of the dollar has been one of the worse policy decisions in the history of our country.

There's a joke to be made here about which historically terrible policy will be bumped out of the top 5/10/15/25, but there's too many to make it work well.

I see people mock dedollarization. That the process of getting off the USD will be so painful for these countries that they'll never do it. And I can't completely discount that. But it does stink of hubris, and countries may judge (correctly) that the pain of getting off the dollar is less than the pain of staying on it.

Part of the issue that leads to the mockery is framing it as 'getting off the dollar' in the first place. It treats the dollar as a mechanical instrument issue which will be resolved if your substitute the medium with something else, as opposed to a financial system issue which doesn't actually need a dollar currency to be exchanged to still work.

My main issue is that I agree with all this, but I've been crying "wolf" a long with Ron Paul for more than a quarter century now.

Our deficits and foreign policy have seemed like intractable problems to me for so long I don't understand how we're still going, that anyone can justify buying T-bills with our attitude towards spending.

It just feels all made up. At least until the military industrial complex falls a couple more notches.

You say that weaponization of the dollar was bad policy, but then you give examples of a long list of bad policy decisions the US government would not have been able to pursue if it couldn't borrow infinite dollars.

To me it sounds like the Western governments would in general be better managed if they faced some budgetary constraints.

I sincerely hope so.

Alternately, it could result in no more Western governments. During Rome's constant decline and mismanagement, hardly anybody in any position of power ever went "Woah woah woah, we have straight up squandered our resources! This can't go on forever! We gotta get on the right track!" Of the few who tried, many were put to the sword when the dependents of the state revolted at austerity. Of the few who survived that bottleneck, their meager accomplishments were often squandered and set even further back by their unworthy successors. And eventually, at the end of it all, the empire entirely dissolved, overrun by foreign tribes with foreign customs, and a cult worshipping what arguably killed the empire was left in it's place.

I think it's far more likely there is no Unites States of America, replaced by a confederation of racialized kingdoms (none of which are white), loosely paying lip service to an institutionalized cult of woke dedicated to constant polemics about the sins of whiteness, and good riddance to them all.

About half of those reserves, $300 billion, were held in the West.

USD in USA were a little fraction of it (about $10 billion IIRC), most were Euro-nominated in EU. Total value estimate in USD is just a convenience.

Erik Prince was on Tucker Carlson. It was nearly two hours, and I enjoyed most of it. They talked about Ukraine, the CIA, republicans, Afghanistan, drone warfare, surveillance, smartphones, and much more.

https://x.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1792963714779426941

https://rumble.com/v4wl5or-erik-prince-cia-corruption-killer-drones-and-government-surveillance.html

Also youtube, somewhere.

I wanted to transcribe this part, and talk about it. Approximately 1:09.

EP: There's a lot of people that are considered American citizens that probably shouldn't be considered American citizens.

TC: I agree with that completely, but an actual American, someone who grew up here.

EP: Fair. But the left has devalued American citizenship, it should mean something to be an American. I mean, a Roman citizen: it meant something.

TC: I mean a Venezuelan gang member who's here illegally is every bit as American as you, who was born in Western Michigan, so yes, I'm quite aware of that.

EP: Anchor babies, birthright citizenship, all of that must go.

TC: Yeah, you wonder if we've reached where that is impossible for the country to act in its own interest just because of the changes due to immigration.

EP: I read a lot of history, and I know that things have been a lot worse in certain societies, and corrective events can be shocking and traumatic to people but it's still possible.

I have not been shy about voicing my thoughts on citizenship, so to hear them echoed in some part on a platform like this was interesting and unexpected.

What other societies is he talking about? I am most familiar with the Reconquest, where the mohammadeans were driven out of Iberia over centuries. That fits pretty well with what Prince is saying. I'm less familiar with the partition of India, by religion, then the separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan. This seems less relevant. What else is there? And what would that look like in the USA and Europe?

There's plenty to talk about from this conversation. The parts on drone warfare were particularly interesting to me, but didn't seem to fit with the rest of this post. And I'm out of time, so I post this as-is without any further commentary.

Anchor babies, birthright citizenship, all of that must go.

This shows a shallow understanding of the US immigration system.

Here are the common ways you can get a visa -> green card -> citizenship:

  • Illegal immigration -> anchor baby -> wait 25 years -> Green card (400k? closest thing to stats)
  • Refugees (150k/yr) (relatively low by historic standards)
  • Lottery (50k/yr) (constant number since 1995.)
  • High skilled visas -> green card (Green card sponsorship is rare unless you're making 6 figures) (300k/year)
  • Marriage and minor dependents (600k/yr)

So which of these do you disapprove of, how much lower should each of them be ?

No one likes illegal immigration, so that's a moot point. The rest seem to be more so about identifying legitimate cause (actual marraige, real refugees, real need for immigrant labor) than the nature of the visa itself.

No one likes illegal immigration, so that's a moot point.

I think everyone would prefer if those illegal immigrants were legal immigrants, but there are some people who's order of preferences are legal immigrants > illegal immigrants > fewer/no immigrants, and some people who are fewer/no immigrants > legal immigrants > illegal immigrants.

Who are the people whose preference is "legal immigratns > illegal immigrants > fewer/no immigrants"?

Open-borders libertarians, I think? They'd prefer lots of immigration, all legal by default. But as is, they're heavily sympathetic to people coming to America, any way they can, to make a better life through hard work and free enterprise. The first place I looked was "Reason", and their top article right now is "Trump's Mass Deportation Plan Is Anti-American", making the case largely on moral grounds:

But this conversation is about much more than monetary costs. It's about the government wielding force against largely peaceful, nonviolent residents who help create vibrant American communities. It's about whether deploying police officers, National Guard members, and the military to extract undocumented immigrants from their homes and workplaces in raids is consistent with American values. It's about the civil rights and due process violations that will inevitably occur if this plan comes to fruition.

In the interest of completeness, don't forget "legal immigrants > fewer/no immigrants > illegal immigrants."

Illegal immigration -> anchor baby -> wait 25 years -> Green card (400k? closest thing to stats)

Why are you ignoring the anchor baby? You know, the foreigner who just got citizenship immediately for no reason.

Refugees (150k/yr) (relatively low by historic standards)

Why should I care about people who have been approved, and not those who claim asylum in order to enter the country legally, who have not yet been approved or denied?

Twenty-eight out of the last thrity-one months have had encounters increase year over year. I only stopped counting because they don't give me FY20 information. The increases in FY22 are practically doubling, and they still rose in FY23 and so far in FY24. That's not low by historic standards, that's an insane invasion by historic standards.

This number should be 0. Maybe once upon a time it made sense to allow refugees into the country. Maybe in the future it will make sense again. Today, I want it all shut down.

Lottery (50k/yr) (constant number since 1995.)

I do not think we should be letting anyone in via lottery, but I appreciate sortition as an allocative tool. If this were the only immigration I wouldn't care, and we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Marriage and minor dependents (600k/yr)

Nope, I don't want chain migration or more foreigners of any kind, for any reason. Certainly not children and women who aren't going to contribute, anyway. When we imported Chinese workers in the West, we didn't import their women. This was the correct choice, and we should reinstate it.

No one likes illegal immigration, so that's a moot point.

Incorrect. Revealed preference shows many people, mostly Democrats, like illegal immigration. Other coethnics like illegal immigration. NGOs who get paid by the feds like illegal immigration.

Given your misrepresentations already, especially about refugees, I have a hard time addressing this in good faith.

Chinese men and women immigrated to America starting in the 1850s. I don't have stats on the proportions, but some amount of women also came over similarly seeking economic opportunities and fleeing the economic mess that was China circa 1850.

My understanding is that the ratio of Chinese men to women in 19th century America was something like 20 to 1. Add to that the fact that many of those women were prostitutes in Chinatowns and it's pretty clear why there's hardly anyone left descended from that particular wave of immigrants, apart from a few white Californians who have an Asian blip on their 23andme results.

"Your understanding" is, respectfully, "just trust me, bro". But yes, some significant portion of 19th century women immigrating to America were prostitutes. Chinese included.

There's an obvious point that young men are most willing and able to immigrate or take other massive risks. Are you claiming a particular point about 19th century Chinese immigrants supportable by historical evidence? Or did they bring the standard crew of mid-19th-century immigrant women with them?

My source was the following passage I remembered reading from The Chinese in America by Iris Chang:

Back in 1880, on the eve of the Exclusion Act, the male-female ratio in the ethnic Chinese community was more than twenty to one—100,686 men and 4,779 women. By 1920, deaths and departures had reduced the male Chinese population, while a small number of births had increased the female population, but there were still seven Chinese men for every Chinese woman. One significant cause of this disproportion was that U.S. immigration policies prevented Chinese workingmen from bringing their wives into the country. The law automatically assigned to women the status of their husbands, so if their husbands were categorized as “laborers,” their wives would be, too, making them ineligible for admission to the country. Only the wives of bona fide Chinese merchants were welcome.

So the arrival of any Chinese female in the United States was a rare event. From 1906 to 1924, only about one hundred fifty Chinese women secured legal permission to enter the United States. Then the Immigration Act of 1924 was enacted, prohibiting the entrance of any foreign-born Asian woman. Aimed primarily at ending the practice of Japanese mail-order brides, it hurt the Chinese American community as well: from 1924 to the end of the decade, not a single Chinese woman was admitted to the United States.

No one likes illegal immigration, so that's a moot point.

Excuse me what? Have you not been following the news recently? Or do you not count the tsunami of illegal crossings as illegal immigration?

Why should an opoid addicted piece of white trash who was born to two parents who were white trash deserve American citizenship more than a Venezualen who fled socialism and crossed the Darien Gap just to participate in the greatest nation on Earth? That's purposefully inflammatory I know, but I do strongly believe that immigrants to America will rarely make natives lives worse, and often will in fact improve their lives through providing stuff like cheap farm labour. That's not an universal law, I look at Europe and see how terrible they are at integrating immigrants and wouldn't propose they open their borders because I don't think they could handle it. But immigrants are an amazing source of strength for America, one that should be harnessed.

and often will in fact improve their lives through providing stuff like cheap farm labour.

If you mean crash the price of labor, than sure. Or take the H1Bs for the opposite spectrum of job sophistication. Absolutely NONE of the random Indians and Eastern Europeans imported to work in high tech jobs are strictly needed. There are plenty of capable developers at home.

None? The unemployment rate for developers is very low. If the H1Bs all left tomorrow, there would not be enough developers remaining to fill their positions.

Copy pasting monkey working on a dead product is not a position that needs filling. Perhaps with labor tightening there would be a focus on the new constraining variable (human capital) to determine what product should be worked on. An army of AI assistant chat app developers is creaming the fat off the top just like DEI admins, only less visibly. No one misses Google Hangouts and no one will miss Tesla Full Self Driving (do not get me started).

Don’t know when you last used FSD but the latest iteration was very good. It is nice having a co pilot and they don’t need much improvement to have a robo taxi. That is a game changer

Doesn't seem like a serious argument without an actual analysis of how many developers are employed in this and the actual value add thereof.

Especially when developers are paid fantastic sums. The company has every incentive already to prioritize human capital. We're not talking about Walmart greeters.

I suspect with ZIRP on the way out we'll see more tech companies tightening their belts. The reality of it is that most tech companies are horribly over staffed (look at Twitter, where allegedly 80% of the employees were let go, with no ensuing technical disaster that was, nonetheless, oft predicted.) There have always been theories floating around as to why these companies become so bloated with dead weight employees: FAANG hires anyone remotely competent and gives them make-work to keep them from their competitors, was a common belief.

I think the reality is a bit more nuanced than that and less strategic: headcounts bloat because when you're already making good money, the easiest way to increase your status is to increase the number of people "working under you". So projects which could reasonably be handled by one "10x developer" get spun out into entire teams to make the lead look better. And his boss is happier because now he is responsible for more people, which makes him look even more important, and so on. With fat enough margins (and/or a zero interest rate environment) this process can continue for a very long time. It's how a firm like Dropbox winds up with over 3000 employees.

I work on boring tax software for a megacorp, and our software development velocity would actually improve if we fired our entire offshore team (based in India). We would need a small transition period (due to them apparently intentionally siloing important information) but currently they cause more issues than they fix. As a small example, one of the third party tax accounting softwares that we integrate added a new authentication method in late 2022 or early 2023, I can't recall. I spent an hour or so to add support for it to the API client wrapper that I maintain (that gets used by all of our products for integration with this third party software). The only changes required on the part of the other products using my wrapper is a ~5 line code change, a new column in the database to track if customers are using the new or old authentication method, and updating an existing form (where users enter their API credentials) to allow users to choose the type of authentication they want to use. The data required by the new auth method is actually a subset of the data required by the old method, so the form needs hardly any modifications.

In spite of this, my offshore coworkers have spent almost a year and a half having regular meetings about implementing these changes, planning, "technical discussions," etc. And I've had to attend the vast majority of them, wasting mountains of my time. Oh and I'm not allowed to implement these changes myself in the 30 minutes or so it would take to do them, they're very protective of the things they work on and actively inhibit and block anyone who tries to improve their shitty code. And they refuse to read the documentation that I've written.

So basically my offshore coworkers have wasted 10+ hours of my time over something that should have taken a single dev 30 minutes (plus a change request to our DB admins I guess). And this for over a year and a half now.

no one will miss FSD

FSD drives me door to door on almost every trip I take. I think a lot of people would miss it. Probably all the people who think it’s worth $200/mo would, and even the people paying $100/mo would too.

Proponents of capitalism tell me that when labor becomes cheaper, the extra profit doesn't all go to the executives and shareholders, but also makes the product/service cheaper.

Yes, the proponents of capitalism are completely correct here.

It technically depends on the elascity of demand, but pretty much nothing has demand so inelastic that there'd be no cost decrease at all

Even as Facebook was hiring lots of folks, it was still painful to find enough people to grow teams to actually manage all the work that needed doing. I had positions go unfilled for up to nine months.

When you need to hire the 99th percentile it helps to grow the pool by throwing in a couple of billion Indian and Chinese engineers.

Europe is worse off not primarily because they are worse at integrating but because they get a worse quality of immigrant. They get primarily sub-Saharan Africa and Arabs. To date only sort of Iraq has been able to maintain law and order in the Arab world without a dictator with no problem using violence.

Immigration is likely still a net negative for America but I would be far more radical if I were in Europe.

Flights are also getting cheaper. And NGO’s more sophisticated that in the near future we might get European quality of illegals. We are already seeing Chinese etc flying into Latin America, burning there passports, and claiming asylum. And since China won’t take them back since they are aware who they are they suddenly have real asylum claims.

Well, at least statistically, that Venezuelan hasn't learned any lessons fleeing socialism and will try to impose a similar system here. So they weren't so much fleeing socialism as fleeing poverty created by their own (collective) choices.

Is there any data on what kind of Venezuelans we're getting? Just one of the Dem's official programs appears to have flown in 400,000 of them already this year, not counting any who walk over the open border.

Is there any vetting being done at all? How many of them are just being emptied out of prisons in Venezuela to get rid of them?

Just one of the Dem's official programs appears to have flown in 400,000 of them already this year,

Source?

None that I know of other than what I've heard out of the state's attorneys office which is that people from south of Mexico are now making up about 50% of felony DUIs

Because the opioid addicts ancestors almost certainly helped to build the wealth of this nation and the Venezuelans did not?

The world fundamentally changed when oil powered machines got good enough to replace animal power (and human power) to create goods. Every nation should have implemented immigration controls designed to admit the people best able to thrive in that environment (creative geniuses bright enough to invent new machines). And shared the wealth with their former laborers, just because we missed that doesn't mean we should repeat it if AI takes the bar to contribute productively to society even higher.

False dichotomy, there's no reason to tolerate really bad behaviour among your own people or allow immigration from totally different peoples.

If your son is a total deadbeat loser who molests your daughter, you can kick him out or punish him. That you have some finite, natural obligation to family does not also mean you are also obliged to let random people into your home to stay permanently, regardless of whether they pay rent or not.

Some immigrants are obviously high-value and very economically productive. Others are negative value, El Salvadoran gangsters for instance. States should seek to siphon off the highest-value migrants while rejecting the low-value migrants. But even then, high-value migrants can be dangerous. What if they seek to manipulate your politics and embroil your country in foreign struggles? What if they employ nepotism or favoritism to privilege lower-value coethnics for future employment once they reach positions of influence? Are they loyal to your country when the chips are down or will they move on to greener pastures?

Immigration is a very sensitive and dangerous matter that should be approached with caution. The gains are concentrated (cheaper labour, expansion of consumer base, higher house prices) but the costs are harder to perceive and diffuse (social trust, pension/health costs, political unity and the erosion of institutions).

Why should an opoid addicted piece of white trash who was born to two parents who were white trash deserve American citizenship more than a Venezualen who fled socialism and crossed the Darien Gap just to participate in the greatest nation on Earth?

Why should my poor, mentally ill, uncle be given better treatment by my family than a random homeless person?

You know what they say about one man’s modus ponens …

I know what they say, but I also know that only a couple of very weird people would endorse that conclusion. "I have equal obligation towards family and random strangers" is both rare, and mentally and societally unhealthy, and I'm not going to take seriously any system of morality that requires it.

People here have a habit of taking seriously the most absurd of conclusions without ever doing sanity checks on them.

the left has devalued American citizenship

What does that even mean (aside from the obvious white supremacist angle)? Citizenship is not a scarce resource.

I mean a Venezuelan gang member who's here illegally is every bit as American as you, who was born in Western Michigan, so yes, I'm quite aware of that.

What does this mean?

Anchor babies, birthright citizenship, all of that must go.

Opposing birthright citizenship is contrary to the ancient traditions of our people and thus unAmerican. But then, Erik Prince is a Dutch fifth columnist and not to be trusted.

deleting old posts for privacy

What? Ancient traditions of a 300 year old country? One that didn't even exist at the founding of the country and was just a quirk of a post civil war law meant to force Southern states to accept Blacks as citizens.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but birthright citizenship was an explicit component of British Common Law since 1608 (see pgs. 698-701), although it was not initially raised in terms of immigration. However, this legal paradigm was broadly accepted in the United States to apply to children of foreigners (see pgs. 706-708). There were two principal exceptions: children born of foreign emissaries and children born of occupying soldiers.

I can already hear you typing, "But Scarecrow, didn't Lord Coke also declare that infidels were perpetual enemies of the crown, and so could not gain citizenship?" This is true (See footnote 295). "Didn't the U.S. not extend citizenship rights to Native Americans who were born on U.S. lands?" This was true initially, but was changed. "Didn't the document you just link to say that citizenship was extended to 'the children even of aliens born in a country, while the parents are there under protection of the government...'" These are all true.

However, these facts do not imply that the tradition of birthright citizenship does not comport with its' practice today. Lord Coke's argument was specifically about infidels and with respect to the Christian religion. As the government of the United States was and is a secular state, there is no fundamental source of permanent opposition which could justify this position. American Indians were not granted citizenship because they were understood as citizens of treaty-making nations independent of the United States, and this was expressed by Chief Justice Marshall. Even children whose parents were deported were able to remain in the United States (see Expelling the Poor.

I recognize there is more of a debate to be had here, but I think you were far too dismissive and ignored the much older heritage of the idea.

In case the allusion to Dutch fifth columnists didn't make it clear: I am mocking appeals to tradition, which are typically appeal to cherrypicked history at best and are often wholly imaginary.

OP has posed a fairly ridiculous standard for who ought to qualify for American citizenship which has literally never applied and which, if applied, would disqualify the man he is approvingly quoting. The US has had unambiguous birthright citizenship for the majority of its existence (and a somewhat more patchwork de facto arrangement before that), as well as open borders or a functional equivalent. I somehow doubt that OP wants that aspect of late 18th/early 19th century policy back.

What does that even mean

Welfare, benefits, legal aid, and increasingly, as in this week in DC and already elsewhere, voting.

An enticing thesis in other contexts, but not here, as they are clearly speaking in reference to people who have American citizenship who feel they didn't deserve it and given the broader context of their conversation.

as in this week in DC and already elsewhere, voting

Also part of the ancient traditions of America

Yes, but what isn't in the ancient traditions of America is welcoming every vagrat who shows up on our shores. When those non-citizens were allowed to vote, they were essentially the same ethnically and culturally as the existing population, and when there were small differences in language or religion, the relative population size was also smaller.

I would be thrilled if we could reclaim the ancient traditions of America.

It literally was. The US had functionally open borders until the late 19th century, when it was decided that vagrants were fine as long as they weren't Chinese.

When those non-citizens were allowed to vote, they were essentially the same ethnically and culturally as the existing population

"These German and Irish papists can never be truly American"

I believed this as well, until I read Hidetaka Hirota's excellent book Expelling the Poor. It documents very compellingly how states with major ports like Massachusetts and New York frequently turned away immigrants arriving from Ireland who were judged to be at risk of entering poor houses. Massachusetts actively deported Irish immigrants from poor houses, including some illegally deporting some Irish who were citizens of the US.

The reality is that prior to the federalization of immigration policy, states have more leeway than is discussed in popular culture to restrict immigration and did use it. While I think historical US policy was more welcoming to immigrants than the policies today, I do not think the US had a policy of virtually open borders.

I'm aware of such policies, but as far as I know the number of people turned away or expelled on such grounds was fairly negligible relative to the overall scale of immigration (tens of thousands over decades versus tens of millions of arrivals). To make an analogy to a hypothetical modern US policy, if the US today said something to the effect of "anyone can obtain legal residence if they aren't a known criminal, mentally ill, or physically incapacitated", I wouldn't have a problem calling that "open borders" even if there are technically some minimal qualifications.

Also of relevance is that these policies weren't universal, and if NY or Boston weren't taking, you'd simply see people going to Baltimore (and indeed a lot of people did).

I agree that deportations were historically less common in the past (by a factor of 5 or 10 after adjusting for foreign born population size.) I think these deportations were still sizable representing around 1% of the immigrant population in 1880 around when the policies ended. I agree that if there were only minimum qualifications, I would consider the US had virtually open borders. I don't share the view that the only criteria were criminality, mental illness, or disability. Instead, it seems clear that some policies were specifically targeted at the Irish, and the poor Irish explicitly, in addition to the aforementioned criteria. The fact that the states with the largest ports had anti-immigrant policies makes me hesitant to characterize US policy as virtually open borders.

I agree that the lack of universality is important. Personally, I would welcome the devolution of immigration policy to the states. I suspect this would result in much higher levels of immigration.

I mean, yes, obviously. He's not so subtly hinting at ethnic cleansing before Carlson hits the brakes and changes the subject.

I think in general for me, I want people here who generally want to contribute, are loyal to America over their home country, and aren’t net drains on resources. So I’d want people to learn English, get a job, and put down roots.

That's happening. The idea that immigrants are benefits sponges who refuse to learn English or get a job is a nativist shibboleth, not a description of reality. Hispanics have higher LFPR than the general population, have a similar likelihood of serving in the military to NH Whites, very high intermarriage rates, etc...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civis_Romanus_sum

But also: Eric Prince is certainly not a dumb person.

Yes, actually. I mean, I'm mostly familiar with the value of citizenship during the Republic, but there were literal wars fought by the Latinates for the right to be full citizens of Rome. It came with voting rights, and I seem to recall it also provided more legal protections and other rights.

Famously in the Bible, in the book of Acts, Paul's Roman citizenship affords him special treatment. See Acts 22:25-29.

A genuine question I have for the people who don't like immigrants here: In your ideal world what would you have the immigrants who come to the west do when they get here?

I've heard people complain about immigrants drawing welfare when they don't work; I've noted all the complaints about immigrants driving down pay and making the job market more competitive when they work normal people jobs and I've sure as hell seen all the attacks launched upon them when they come and take over the very top of society to rule the natives beneath them.

So my question very simply is: given that immigrants aren't going to stop coming any time soon, what should they be doing that will make them acceptable in your eyes?

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They need to love the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Founding Fathers. They need to be non-violent, prosocial, and always happy to help a neighbor.

The percent of immigrant population would ideally be between 5-10% to accommodate integrating them into our culture without American culture being upended too quickly. Currently the percent of the foreign born population is 13.9%

I would be very sad if the percentage dropped to 0%. We are a nation of immigrants after all. But I would hate for America to stop being America.

We are a nation of immigrants after all.

We are a nation of pioneers, settlers, and frontiersmen, not immigrants. The former civilized wild lands and built civilization in the wilderness. The latter are following their nose to where the money spigot is leaking. They are not the same.

Am I going to doubt the fact that the people who came to America were not pioneers? No. Were they also colonists who engaged in the genocide of the Native American people, and came here for the profiteering of the "New World"? Yeah.

Yes, but I'm not going to feel guilty that my ancestors were conquerors spreading the light of civilization into the wilderness.

I'm also going to remember that when unrelated foreigners show up on our shores, we should be wary of welcoming them, lest they displace us as we displaced those who were here before.

In short, I don't know what point you think you're making, but I know what point I take from your reply.

Very few Americans, and I am a huge American propagandist and booster, were actual frontiersmen and wilderness explorers. Maybe 1 or 2 percent ever did that and everyone else flowed in after. I've spent more time in the woods than an average person from 1820.

Half of my family was not frontiersmen. They came to the East Coast fleeing starvation and lived in a city. My grandfather joined the police force, his four sons followed suit. His brother died in Korea. They are proud to be American. I think there is room in the American Story for tales such as these.

...

law & order they remember from their childhood back.

Crime is still lower than it was in the 1970s-1990s pretty much everywhere in the 1st world, and everyone who can actually remember the bad old days knows this. The only people who see brown faces on the streets and assume that crime is out of control are American racists.

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...

Murder is the easiest crime to count, and OWID has homicide rates falling since a 1990s peak in every Western European country with decent data (except Sweden, which has a migration-driven uptrend since 2010 but is still below the peak). In the UK, crime measured by the Crime Survey for England and Wales has been falling consistently since 1995 - this is a victim survey so results are not affected by willingness to talk to cops, and the scope of crimes counted has been consistent over time. I don't know how to find the equivalent survey data for other countries.

I live in London, and the drop in crime since the 1990s is as viscerally obvious as it was in post-Giuliani NYC. Before you quibble, I have been to the alleged "Islamic no-go zones" in Tower Hamlets, and some of the individual estates that have been taken over by Muslim gangs were so rough beforehand that the Muslim gangs were an improvement - just like when Mexican illegals take over a black neighborhood of a US city, the fall in crime is real.

...

The only people who see brown faces on the streets and assume that crime is out of control are American racists.

This is an absolutely absurd and willfully uncharitable straw-man. Crime peaked in the 1990s at extremely high levels, and serious crackdowns were required for the subsequent gradual draw-down. That draw-down reversed in 2014, IIRC, and 2020 wiped out something like two decades of progress in the fastest increase in the crime rate ever recorded. Crime is in fact out of control in many areas of the country. Further, there is reason to believe that the federal statistics on which our analysis depends are significantly less reliable than they have been previously, given that the FBI recently made significant changes to its data collection practices and has failed both to collect data and to ensure that the data it collects and presents is accurate.:

In 2019, 89% of agencies covering 97% of the population submitted data, but by 2021, that coverage plummeted to less than 63% of departments overseeing just 65% of the population. Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City all failed to submit crime data. To increase participation, the FBI relaxed the NIBRS requirement in 2022, allowing agencies to report via the legacy system.

But many other cities, such as St. Louis, which had transitioned to the new method, still struggle to comply and submit partial or faulty data. The FBI compensates by relying more heavily on “estimation,” or informed guesswork, to fill in the gaps and produce aggregated data.

And the figures the agencies do report to the FBI do not match the agencies’ publicly reported figures. For Baltimore, the FBI reported 225 murders in 2023, but the city reported 262 — which means the FBI left out 37 murders. In Milwaukee, the police department reported a 7% increase in robberies, but the FBI showed a 13% drop. Nashville’s own data tallied more than 6,900 aggravated assaults in 2023, but the FBI counted only 5,941, leaving almost 1,000 of those offenses “missing.” This trend is consistent across the board: While 2022’s FBI city-level figures track the police’s own data, the 2023 numbers consistently undercount offense totals. Any year-to-year comparison overstates decline.

Other measures of crime levels undermine, or at least muddle, the veracity of the FBI’s data, which rely on “reported” offenses by victims and law enforcement themselves. The federal government’s own victims’ survey, which attempts to capture the gap between the number of actual offenses and the number reported to police, shows much higher offense rates than the FBI does. Moreover, a rising share of victims are failing to report their victimizations at all. In 2022, only 42% of violent crime victims and 33% of property crime victims bothered to report the crime to police.

People are not worried about out-of-control crime because they "see brown faces on the streets". We are worried about out-of-control crime because we are watching video of stores being looted without repercussions, and then watching businesses retreat en-masse from the cities. We are watching video evidence of vicious crimes being committed against the innocent while the authorities stand idly by. We are watching the authorities willfully nullifying the laws we've enacted through the democratic process in favor of signaling their own virtue. We are watching the criminals they refuse to police and incarcerate wreak havoc on our communities, and we're watching law-abiding citizens who attempt to intervene or resist be hammered by the full force of the state.

We are, in fact, suffering a sustained crime wave. That crime wave is very clearly the result of a series of intentional Blue Tribe actions: a sustained propaganda campaign to foment racial discord throughout the country, deliberate institutional support for and approval of large-scale, organized political violence, and a widespread policy of minimizing policing, prosecution and incarceration of all sorts of crime. The connection is so blindingly obvious that it cannot be addressed without unacceptable damage to Blue Tribe's cultural position, and so it is being ignored until the passage of time provides sufficient fog to allow them, per standard protocol, to be blamed entirely on the Red Tribe outgroup. In the meantime, tens of thousands of additional blacks will be murdered, hundreds-of-thousands to millions of additional blacks will be victimized by criminals, black participation in crime has increased dramatically and will continue to do so, and majority-black communities have been and will continue to be blighted by all the attendant ills of living without effective rule of law. All of this has happened before, is happening now, and will happen again. In another decade, people will admit it, on the condition that it is all attributed to an amorphous, undefinable "legacy of racism in a fundamentally white-supremacist society", and then in another decade or two the process will repeat in its entirety. All this has happened before, and will happen again, until Blue Tribe's social controls are broken for good.

Crime is still lower than it was in the 1970s-1990s pretty much everywhere in the 1st world, and everyone who can actually remember the bad old days knows this

Are you sure this isn't more of a US / Anglosphere thing? Sweden went from a left-wing meme about the glories of social welfare and prison rehabilitation, to a right-wing meme about the dangers of immigration. Data from any country that has the guts to record the ethnicity of criminals tends to show that whatever crime they have, is mostly attributable to immigrants.

The only people who see brown faces on the streets and assume that crime is out of control are American racists.

What is this bit supposed to bring to the discussion? If it turns out you're wrong, are you going to admit to your racism, or does it only go one way?

US is likely to lose WW3 pretty soon (~5 years )

Can you please elaborate? Maybe even in separate thread? Or please send me the links if you wrote about this previously.

...

I'm not the best person to answer this question, since I don't dislike immigrants, and the current world is so far away from my perfect one that it renders your ennture question moot, but generally it's about loyalty. Leave your past loyalties behind, and endorse the host population as your tribe, and we're good.

Everything that's talked about around this subject - jerbs, crime, language, culture - is just a proxy for that.

This is like saying, how should an unwanted house guest behave to make him living in my house acceptable to me? There's literally nothing he can do, I do not want him to live in my house. I don't hate you, I just don't want to live with you! Why do you insist not only on living with me (understandable), but claiming that it's wrong for me to have any preference in the matter?

Given that immigrants are not going to stop coming any time soon, the best/most likely course is an informal or quasi-formal caste system that puts social pressure against dysgenic mate selection and social pressure towards eugenic mate selection. That is much more likely than mass deportation, which is an enormous operational and political task.

An informal caste system could be established and transmitted purely memetically, and it's much more plausible. And if there were more radical political measure to be taken, that would have to be a first step in any case. Something like tiered citizenship would only be fathomable if such a memetic system has already taken root deep into public consciousness.

Tiered citizenship would be my preference, even above deportation, but the above would be a pre-requisite for that to be remotely possible. It would reinforce the cultural norms around mate selection. It would gatekeep welfare to people who deserve it and keep incentives aligned.

By dint of being Colombian, and not American, I would hope that he was not a citizen at all.

Colombian guy who runs a dealership in my town.

I thought the heyday of Colombian dealership was long past.

It's a shame that boxy cars went out of fashion by 2013, there's a joke about moving bricks to be made here.

Work jobs that pay enough in taxes to cover their and their dependents burden on government at all levels, and stop voting for policies that harm me (either to help them, or which help nobody).

I want them to convert to the local religion(or be a quiet atheist), I want them to do everything they can to not be annoyingly different, I want them to completely abandon all loyalty to the country they came from, I want them to not comment about how strange things are to them here, I want them to not advocate for their own identitarian concerns and police the locals’ behaviour, I want them to introduce zero social divisions that will suck up previous collective mental energy, I want them to keep their heads down for at least a few generations, and for godsake I don’t want them seeking the pity of the sentimental half of the local population with a saviour complex. My country has one visible minority ethnic group which has done a very good job of this, and so they have been awarded with trust. Other ethnics groups have not been awarded this same trust, and until they have I would like to keep their immigration to sub 200/ year.

Personally I'd much rather productive labor market participants, ideally having a work-related visa contingent on a job paying >80th percentile and with their employer having to provide a clear plan towards how they will in future enable that role to be filled by locals. There are definitely some downsides of this form of migration. I feel that the moment for unskilled/refugee migration has largely passed in developed economy due to the relative lack of jobs fit for purpose, and the modern welfare & medical-welfare states meaning that they are ultimately massive value extractors with multi-generational timeframes to even begin to break even.

It's not like there aren't alternate solutions. I'm not advocating for the West to be literally Qatar when it comes to guest workers, but there is clearly a market for people from the developing world coming to participate in developed economies without a vector for citizenship or participation in the welfare state.

Truthfully? I just want the country I grew up in back.

I want back a justice system and a police force that punishes crime, regardless of "disproportionate impact". I want back a world where I'm not skipping over 50% of the job listing because they explicitly say they have a focus on "marginalized people" for the role. I want back a country where it doesn't feel like we can't have one single nice thing because some third worlder does some third world shit and ruins it. I want back a country where our government isn't a naked racial spoils system. I have no illusions that the government was never corrupt. Just like I have no illusions that my auto mechanic is probably fleecing me. However, my auto mechanic, despite probably ripping me off somewhat, at least also keeps my car running. The government is just handing out sinecures to nakedly incompetent diversity hires, and meanwhile the country is falling the fuck apart.

I want back a country where I'm not awash in naked anti-white propaganda, and it doesn't feel like my government is oozing hate out of every pore at me.

If these wishes could be accomplished without violent expulsion, I'd be down. It felt like we had all these things in the 90's. Maybe that was an illusion. I don't know. Maybe the 90's was the top of the roller coaster, where for a brief moment the acceleration has almost cancelled out your velocity, before you plummet straight to hell. I no longer know what to believe that I'd say publicly about "multiculturalism". But privately, seems to me it's only going to end in genocide, and I'm not confident about who's.

As far as I can tell, the primary beneficiaries of "disproportionate impact" policies and hiring of "marginalized people" are black people. The people advocating and voting for these policies are white people.

How and when did this come about? Well, affirmative action dates back to the sixties, and was well underway in the nineties. As for where all these black people came from, if I remember your family history correctly, I am afraid you will have to blame your ancestors.

As for where all these black people came from, if I remember your family history correctly, I am afraid you will have to blame your ancestors.

Regrettably so. We were on the wrong side of both the revolution and the civil war. 'Won' both.

I've said this before, I'll keep saying it: solidarity with the far threat against the near enemy. progressive whites do not view normie whites as their own kin, the normie is the enemy to be subjugated. blacks are merely the enemy of normies so advancing blacks is useful. if blacks all turned out to be value aligned witb normies the progs would abandon them, just like the progs abandoned asians and now latinos. in the competition for cultural supremacy, the prize is being the dispenser of the systems spoils. that the fruits are withered because the normies tending the orchard have been replaced by blacks (or in europe muslims) is not a possibility entertained by progs.

As for where all these black people came from, if I remember your family history correctly, I am afraid you will have to blame your ancestors.

If we were truly to accept this argument, we could strictly limit affirmative action to ADOS, rather than all Americans of African lineage. On the other hand, maybe this could be acceptable: it would rule out race-based favoritism on behalf of, for example, Barack Obama and Claudine Gay.

I am against affirmative action in general, but I think there are some progressives who are on board with that.

What if my ancestors didn't own slaves, and in fact fought to free them? Do I get a prize?

I'm still waiting for my prize for being the first of my ancestors to even be born in the western hemisphere, so I'll let you know.

You're your own ancestor?

Though art God. Drink water, grow closer.

They weren't a problem when they were slaves. Your ancestors fighting to free them are why we're in this mess.

You know why the south lost and Rome fell right? Slavery is as bad for the owners as it is for the slaves. It stifles every good thing in humanity and promotes the bad. Most surviving cultures have figured that out.

Slavery was a bad idea, and should never have been implemented. You might as well blame Kulaks and wreckers for the failures of Communism. Your ancestors should, in fact, have picked their own damn cotton.

You call it slavery, I call it animal husbandry. It worked just fine and while cruelty to animals sucks, domestication is not evil. Often it's a pretty great deal for the animals. Nature is harsh and wild animals are generally worse to each other than their human masters.

My ancestors are at fault inasmuch as they failed to adequately anticipate the fatal flaw in voting-based government, which is the incentive to expand the franchise to those who should never have had it in exchange for political support and dominance over the responsible opponents who refuse to stoop so low.

I'll go ahead and agree that modeling your fellow man as animals, or more specifically, social mammals, and then using animal husbandry techniques on them is valid. The same soothing and awareness and empathetic techniques work on both. I do notice that- "animals" being a slur is completely unfair both to humans and to non-human animals.

But chattel slavery was piss poor animal husbandry. As evidenced by its fruits. If your animals are suffering, you're not doing a great job. If you are in physical conflict with your animals, you have failed to engage with them emotionally. This is the smell of your mandate of heaven rotting beneath your mismanagement.

If your animals can learn read and write and become functional independent general intelligences that can potentially engage with high society and you aren't bothering to cultivate that. You fail druid class!

We allow all kinds of hot takes, including "slavery was good, actually," as long as you can argue the case civilly and in accordance with our rules.

You've broken a few of those rules, notably "Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument" and "Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion."

Sometimes people really want to say something about a particular group of people, because this is what they really, honestly believe. Things like "Jews are vermin," "Women aren't sentient," or "Black people are animals." And when we mod them for saying these things, they complain that we are "protecting the feelings" of the group they despise. Well, no, we don't care that you might hurt someone's feelings (arguing that blacks have lower IQs and higher criminality, or that women are hypergamous, or that Jews have disproportionate power in Hollywood, likely hurts some people's feelings, but you are allowed to say that). But it's one thing to describe your grievances with the behavior of a group, and quite another to declare they are less than human and should be treated as such.

Assuming you are not just trolling, pretend there are black people participating here (sometimes there are) and that you aren't trying to insult and denigrate them (even if that's what you do want to do - you may not).

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You call it slavery, I call it animal husbandry.

Humans aren't animals. Animals can be safely disregarded. Humans cannot. That is the distinction.

Often it's a pretty great deal for the animals.

And yet, they don't seem to have appreciated it, and because they are humans and not actually animals, their lack of appreciation is in fact dispositive.

My ancestors are at fault inasmuch as they failed to adequately anticipate the fatal flaw in voting-based government, which is the incentive to expand the franchise to those who should never have had it in exchange for political support and dominance over the responsible opponents who refuse to stoop so low.

I do not believe Abolitionism won because its supporters expected to reap new voters. All evidence I've seen indicates that it won because its supporters considered chattel slavery an intolerable evil, and were willing to make considerable sacrifices to eradicate it. I believe they were correct in this estimation. If you wish to disregard the humanity of Africans, I certainly cannot stop you. Leave them in Africa, and it's no business of mine what happens on the other side of the world. Bring them here and you make them, and by extension yourself, my problem.

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No, you can sit in the same bucket with the white Ellis Island immigrants, who also never owned slaves.

Genocide? This word has lost almost all impact through overuse in the current landscape. It also has a specific definition that is apparently being lost along with all meaning. The word was coined in 1944 by a Jewish Lawyer named Raphael Lemkin to describe what the Nazi regime had done. You think we're going to be in cattle cars soon? or are you talking peaceful demographic replacement? Those are 2 very different kinds of "genocide".

You should know that somebody took your comment, combined it with the comment of @SecureSignals below, and posted in the /r/BlockedAndReported weekly discussion thread. I first assumed it was you yourself, but then I saw it's two different comments glued together.

ETA and it's gone. You can find the traces, a few replies of the "are you okay?" kind. It wasn't me, and I'm very curious what was the purpose of it all.

Great. See if I end up needing another new account soon. Nothing good ever comes of being noticed.

And because my comment wasn't yet visible to common users by the time of deletion, the culprit must be one of the motte mods, dun-dun-dun! But seriously, good luck, man, I remember the shitstorm with your previous account.

Is there really a culprit? A crime? I don't know the tone of the comment over there, maybe it was totally mocking, but I also don't really share the fear that someone might notice us anymore. We're not on reddit, we are free of the gigajanny's tyranny.

It was not quoting those two comments, somebody was posting them as one and under their own name. Very weird. You can head to https://old.reddit.com/r/BlockedAndReported/comments/1cw6mpn/weekly_random_discussion_thread_for_52024_52624/l5bwmui/ and see that the replies line up with the contents of the posts by @WhiningCoil and @SecureSignals. Maybe one of Iconochasm, JTarrou, professorgerm, SerialStateLineXer, or somebody else who I don't know, caught it, but it stayed up for such a brief period that I doubt it. One could take these two comments and ask people in that thread if they recognize the result.

I'm tired of this matter, back to lurking for months. Peace.

With 2 comments you say this?

And because my comment wasn't yet visible to common users by the time of deletion, the culprit must be one of the motte mods, dun-dun-dun

Really, now?

I doubt very much any mod did that. Here's an alternate hypothesis: given the recent spate of trolls spinning up alts to post flamebait and then deleting all their comments, it is far more likely it was one of them. You know, like a brand new account with a great deal of familiarity with the details of motte posting, whose only two comments here are to helpfully inform us about that now-deleted post.

Did you not get that I was joking, really? Teaches me to try to do right by a person whose posts I've consistently liked for my years of lurking. If I wanted to cause drama, I could have brought up his previous identity and what forced him to create a new account, not do this weird who-knows-what-this-is that just happened.

Yeah, I'm not good at being subtle.

That's a fascinating sub with much wrongthink; has Reddit become more tolerant or is this sub just flying under the radar until they get the inevitable ban? I stopped browsing Reddit when they banned CCJ2, so I don't know how things go over there nowadays.

Good news!

The people that hate you now already hated you in the 90s. Affirmative action was already going strong and third worlders were already ruining nice things with their third world shit.

It felt like we had all these things in the 90's. Maybe that was an illusion. I don't know.

Presumably you were a kid, so that helps. It also helps that this was in the pre-internet or later the dialup era, when people were generally less ‘pilled of broader ongoings.

However, I would agree in the estimation that things have certainly gotten worse since then: Affirmative action stronger; anti-white propaganda more naked; government more explicitly a racial spoils system; justice system and police force more anarcho-tyrannic and “disproportionate impact” pearl-clutchy.

If these wishes could be accomplished without violent expulsion, I'd be down.

I could also be down for some flavors of “with.”

The people that hate you now already hated you in the 90s. Affirmative action was already going strong and third worlders were already ruining nice things with their third world shit.

The difference is just time and accumulation. Mass immigration to the U.S. started in the 1970s and really got going in the 1990s before going insane in the Biden era.

In the 1990s, the effects of immigration weren't that notable in most places even if the seeds were already sown.

Mass immigration started in the 1850s.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/01/30/immigrant-share-in-u-s-nears-record-high-but-remains-below-that-of-many-other-countries/

And mass immigration was stopped in the 1920s, thereby allowing multiple contentious immigrant groups to assimilate. Furthermore, until the 1970s, almost all U.S. immigration was from European countries. Not counting slavery, of course.

Given that we were near record highs in 2019, imagine what 10 million more illegal immigrants has done to that number.

Efforts to "contextualize" the unprecedented wave of immigration we've experienced post-2020 are typically historically ignorant.

Ten million more illegal immigrants since 2019? What's the methodology for that estimate?

The total illegal immigrant population in 2021 (the latest I could find estimates for) was 10.5M, down from 12.2M around 2009.

I'm having a hard time this comment is being offered in good faith. Do you think the border crisis is just made up and the number of illegals has actually decreased since 2009? All those cities claiming they are overwhelmed... it's all just fake? If so, I can forgive you. Google seems to want you to believe that. They are really, really, determined to skew the information here. It's actually breathtaking how heavily their thumb is on the scale here.

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=illegal%20immigrants%20per%20month%202024#ip=1

But, yes about 10.8 million illegals have entered the country since Biden took office:

https://homeland.house.gov/2024/03/26/factsheet-nationwide-border-encounters-hit-nine-million-on-secretary-mayorkas-watch-in-the-worst-february-in-decades/

I'll admit this article has a partisan spin. But it's based on DHS data. I could find an unbiased source if Google would let me or if I felt like running errands.

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For all the talk about Biden and Obama keeping the border secure by performing border rejections and spinning up ICE, no one ever acknowledged that Biden was seen by migrants as the opening of the gates. Migrants are motivated to gp to the USA by promises made to migrants such as DREAM and sanctuary cities, migrants are drawn to europe by weakness and riches for the taking.

The irony of developmental economics is that as western aid becomes more efficient at making poor countries richers, it just gives them resources to make a trip to the promised land. Refugee laws were made when only neighbouring countries would flood your border, now you can get a trip on Air India to Canada or get coyotes to set up food and water and transport on your way to the promised land. The only thing that will stop migrants flooding borders is the rejection of any benefits to these people, including NGOs hiding them from police and illegal work. You westerners have no idea how to deal with these culturally disruptive peoples and the rubber band will snap back soon.

You westerners have no idea how to deal with these culturally disruptive peoples and the rubber band will snap back soon.

The thing about rubber bands is that if you stretch them too much, they don't snap back; they break.

In my ideal world we would simply take a page out of the Islamic playbook and install a version of the kafala system in America. Immigrants work for fixed terms, with the privileges of the labor rights that don't exist in the Gulf states (employers can't withhold your wages or confiscate your passport etc.), and are rotated out at the end of their terms with no expectation of permanent residency or citizenship.

It's not complicated at all, and in practice we see Muslim states in the Gulf that are majority-helot and still structurally and culturally stable. I'm not advocating for anywhere near those proportions, but if the Kuwaitis and Qataris can understand that their supposed brethren in Pakistan and Indonesia will not be alchemically transformed into good Arabs by the magical power of ummah solidarity, we should stop pretending that our civic myths mean much to immigrants, who are by nature essentially just mercenaries.

When I was in high school I was part of a politics club that I started with a friend of mine. As we were looking to grow the size of the club I invited a junior of mine to join the club, and he invited his friends. When we were voting for who should be the president, that junior of mine had invited more of his friends and they all voted for him rather than the current president. That was a lesson in being careful who you invite into your space and the potential pitfalls of a democracy. Nothing they did was technically wrong, but we felt wronged in losing what was something we started to newcomers, so we just split off and formed another club.

Immigrants coming with wildly different ideas and values who don't assimilate remind me of that experience. There is a lot of effort in giving immigrants, especially unvetted undocumented illegal immigrants, the right to vote and change the shape of this country. Unlike my time in high school, we can't just easily split off and form another country.

I don't have a problem with immigration as a concept in and of itself, as my parents are immigrants and nearly everyone living in the US today have their roots in immigration. To be honest, I'd rather the US take in high-IQ, well-mannered, conscientious individuals from other countries so that their intelligence is used for the benefit of the US. The biggest problem with immigration right now is the large number of undocumented illegal migrants coming into the country.

Illegal immigrants who do work tend to fill in the role of low-skilled labor. These are jobs nobody is willing to work at the rates employers are willing to pay due to the high minimum wage. Low-skill jobs should go to low-skill workers for the value it's worth, typically teenagers and other people who haven't had time to learn/pick up skills. States like California may have high minimum wage but their economy is also full of illegal migrants working under the table for below minimum wage pay. That means less taxes are paid, but in California, they are still eligible for a whole slew of welfare-type assistance programs.

The immigration problem is less a problem with immigrants specifically and more a problem with the system that incentivizes the wrong type of immigrants to keep coming. There is a short-term incentive to bring in a bunch of outsiders, from economic benefits for a country that isn't able to sustain its growth through its birthrate, to bringing people that would vote for your party instead of the opposition party, but the consequences in the long term are dire.

Would a second generation American of Hmong descent who still speaks Hmong to his parents (though English is his preferred language) qualify?

Assuming the child of two Hmong parents, the child is Hmong, regardless of where in the world he is born, and regardless of where he lives his life.

What about a third generation Hmong American who only speaks English to her children from a marriage with a white man?

Assuming four Hmong grandparents, she is Hmong, and will always be Hmong. Living here or there won't change that. If her husband is descended by the male line from 1775 colonial stock, then she is the Hmong mother of (half) American children. Her grandchildren will likely be American, but it depends on their other parent. And if her husband is of more recent stock than that, then no, not really. I don't consider hyphenated Americans to be Americans, and that applies to Irish- and Italian- just as much as African- or Asian-.

Part of what would help me consider her children and grandchildren American is if they considered themselves American, and not hyphenated-American.

What about Americans of German descent who celebrate Von Steuben Day?

According to the link, this festival was generated out of whole cloth in the 70s, well after the Germans were mostly successfully assimilated (forcefully, by suppressing their language, culture, and customs, the way we should be doing to Mexicans). So I would consider someone who celebrated Von Steuben Day to be less American than someone who celebrates George Washington's Day, and would interpret it as setting aside an American identity to pick up a German one.

Or maybe to frame the question more concretely, what level of assimilation is required in order to be American?

Americans are the descendants of the 13 colonies. Specifically, they are the descendants by the male line, because that's what it means to be a people. The level of assimilation required is to marry your daughters to American men, and to leave your sons in the old country.

It's pretty close to how foreigners are defined in Japan and South Korea. Being born on the dirt doesn't make you Japanese.

Is Kipling British, or Indian?

You'd be surprised how quickly this is changing. Most East Asian cities these days are full of Southeast Asian and Indian immigrants, and mixed-race children are approaching double digit percentages of the next generation. While the locals are still much more anti-immigrant than in any Western country, the path from where they are to where we are seems pretty clear and they are only a few decades behind us. The Japanese of today let in immigrants out of perceived economic necessity, just as pagan kings accepted baptism for political reasons, but their children and grandchildren will be true believers.

I'm sorry to hear that.

Most East Asian cities? I think non-majority, non-East Asian ethnicities are typically a very small share of population (1-2%).

Even if in absolute terms the percentages are small compared to the US or Europe, the change has been rapid and very noticeable, particularly if you visited Tokyo, Seoul, or Taipei 20 years ago and only went back recently (I will amend my statement to exclude mainland China, where the percentage of foreigners has fallen since the pandemic). The proportion of East Asian or East Asian-looking (i.e. Vietnamese) immigrants is also significant in terms of things like running into people who don't speak the local language well, although they may be indistinguishable to outsiders.

I think 1-2% is enough to be able to notice, especially when they tend to be concentrated in certain areas, such as in the restaurant business. Just watched a video of a Korean guy walk through a busy market and like 1/4 of the workers were from Nepal and that wasn't even the point of the video.

Americans are the descendants of the 13 colonies.

Hilariously, this standard would exclude Mr. Prince himself (descendant of Dutch immigrants).

Are my grandparents (born and raised in the US) not Americans but instead Irish because they are the descendants of Irish immigrants and not any anglos from the original colonies?

Was President van Buren not an American?

Was President van Buren not an American?

Abraham Van Buren was born in Albany, New York on February 17, 1737, the son of Marten Pieterse Van Buren (1701–1766) and Dirckje (Van Alstyne) Van Buren (1710-1798).[1][2] The fifth of nine children, he was a descendant of Cornelis Maessen, a native of Buurmalsen, Netherlands who had come to North America in 1631.

Nope, he's exactly what I was talking about when I said descendants of the thirteen colonies. An ideal example, frankly, because his family had been in the land since damn near as soon as possible.

My own grandmothers are neither American, despite being born here. I consider them to be European from the countries where their ancestors hailed. Both married American men and had American children. So no, your and my grandmothers are not as American as van Buren.

I admire your incredible ideological consistency. Modern society is so massively skewed in the other direction.

And as obscure historical note Van Buren is the outlier president in that he is not a descendant of Irish or anglos. He is the only president not descended from or closely related to King John of England. Including Obama through his mother. Van Buren is the only German outlier bucking the trend.

On the other hand my grandparents are almost caricatures of "all American" people. They happen to be the descendants of Irish immigrants, like many almost-caricature examples of Americanness. But being an American transcends the national origin of your ancestors according to common understanding.

Specifically, they are the descendants by the male line, because that's what it means to be a people.

That's just not true though. It was especially not true before agriculture and pastoralism, but even after that it isn't true. The Basque are more R1b then the other Iberians, but they are a separate people, because memes and genes are distinct. Scandinavians have very diverse y-chromosomes, but aren't any less a coherent people because of it. Most people's are of diverse lineages and some cultures are even matrilineal or bilineal. To say nothing of people's who just adopted an entirely new culture without much gene flow, like the Magyars or the hyphenated Americans you consider yourself above.

As far as historical examples of ethnic cleansing go, there's the expulsion of the Acadians by the British, pretty much everything that happened in the Balkans from 1821 to the present including the expulsion of Muslim Turks and Albanians from newly independent Christian nations and vice versa, Soviet deportations of Crimean Tatars, Koreans, Ukrainians, etc. to Siberia and Central Asia, the partition of Cyprus, and most recently the flight of Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh after its conquest by Azerbaijan. The last time Western leaders condoned such a campaign was the removal of Germans from Eastern Europe, and in addition to being the culmination of the largest war in human history it was Soviet boots on the ground actually carrying it out, not Americans and Brits.

For such a thing to occur in America today would require either the rise of an authoritarianism as overwhelming as China's or a level of interpersonal animosity and cultural segregation much greater than I have observed in my travels (I can't speak much for Europe and suspect that their Muslim communities are more separate and alien to the majority than any immigrant enclaves here), and in either case the lines would be drawn in ways orthogonal to simple ethnic identification i.e. a government that could would deport whatever groups it found troublesome regardless of their background and any sort of civil war in the US nowadays would feature Hispanic Trump voters on one side and white progressives on the other and I'm honestly not sure which faction would be more diverse by the progressives' own standards.

Soviet deportations of Ukrainians

This is insane. Russia did bad thing in 2022, so we are now free to invent any events in the past.

Are you claiming that the Soviets did not conduct forcible populations transfers or that there weren't any with the explicit goal of ethnically cleansing Ukrainians? The latter is debatable depending on how you read the intentions of officials charged with dekulakization, pacification of territory annexed from Poland, and the establishment of borders in Eastern Europe at the end of WWII i.e. were they deporting Ukrainians because they were Ukrainians or did the people who were expected to cause trouble just happen to be Ukrainian? Either way, the original question was more about logistics than motivation so I think it remains relevant.

Of course they did. I understand inserting Ukrainians into your previous comment is not central to your point, but inventing things that didn't happen is worrying. Deporting Ukrainians which numbered in tens on millions was a non-starter, even if Soviets wanted to do so, Koreans and Crimean Tatars were less populous.

Forcible transfer of populations is considered a crime against humanity, so expect any nation that does it to have all kinds of sanctions leveled against it.

Not if you are America or America aligned and America supports it. International Law in practice is what America says it is.

Not in America, it's not. Keep your foreign treaties to yourself, please.

Black crime being unpunished due to racial considerations drives whites out of productive suburbs to leave impoverished wastelands in its wake. If that doesn't count as population transfer then stripping property rights of criminal noncompliants doesn't count either.

...Is this a genuine question?

Suppose the police stop enforcing most laws in an area. They'll still show up for murders or rapes, after the fact, and they'll respond to gunfire, but they ignore threats or assault and battery or destruction of property or theft. Their clearance rates for crime are low, and after a while people stop calling them for "minor" offenses because they won't arrive in time and certainly won't do anything about it. They continue to arrest people for really serious crimes, but not in proportion to a very significant increase in serious crime and arrests for the "less serious" crimes drop through the floor. The crime rate is now ten, fifty, a hundred times what it was before. Crime is now ubiquitous, and the area is fundamentally unsafe to live or work in, and the police clearly have no intention of changing this state of affairs.

How would you describe the above scenario?

You're conflating two different things: the inability of the police officers to address crime versus their unwillingness or willful disregard.

I don't think I am. I didn't say anything about why the police stopped enforcing the law, and I'm not sure why it matters much whether they do it through inability or through unwillingness or willful disregard or for some other reason. Nor is it obvious that those categories can be easily disambiguated. If a community refuses to cooperate with the police, the police will be less effective. If prosecutors refuse to file charges, or judges and juries refuse to hand down appropriate sentences, the police will be less effective. If mayors or governors order the police to stand down, perhaps because racial tensions create the risk of rioting or other serious violence in response to police action or because policing is percieved as unjust, police will again be less effective. If police feel that they are unsupported or at significant risk from criminal violence or from unfair treatment by the system, or as you say underfunded, understaffed, underpaid, they will be less effective.

Of the above factors, I am extremely skeptical that "underfunded, understaffed and underpaid" accounts for a significant portion of the policing failures we observe currently or historically. Likewise, I am quite skeptical that "unwillingness or willful disregard" is a sufficient explanation. Racism is the standard explanation, but fails to explain why the same patterns persist when both the cops and the civil authority commanding them are themselves black.

Ethnic cleansing suggests a deliberateness, i.e., desegregation was enacted to introduce crime into white communities and force them to relocate.

Alternatively, desegregation was executed by the authorities because they believed it would result in peace and harmony. When the results were otherwise, they doubled down on ideology rather than admit error or change course. Desegregation was supported by institutional actors, through "blockbusting" for example, because it gave them a way to directly profit from the situation through actions that would be generally perceived as virtuous. It was supported by normal black people because it offered them the promise of a better life, which they wanted desperately. It was supported by black criminals because it gave them a ready supply of victims. It was supported by the police because they were ordered to support it.

I do not see why specific motivations enter the picture. Desegregation was mandated, and when the immediate result was a rapid and uncontrollable increase in black-on-white violent crime, authorities and institutions refused to engage with the actual nature of the problem, but simply continued implementation of the mandate.

From Scott Cummings' Left behind in Rosedale, excerpts here, full book here.

"Do you think the elderly whites are getting singled out as easy marks?" I asked. Thinking for a minute, he responded, "Probably." We talked more about the problem. He thought that both elderly whites and black elders in Rosedale were being victimized by teenagers. Both were easy marks; but old whites were likely considered easier. The people downstairs, he thought, were exaggerating their problems only insofar as many laid the blame at the doorstep of the youth program. "Our kids are pretty good," he said. Otherwise, he observed, "Yeah, they're probably gettin' fucked over." "What do you think can be done about the situation?" I asked. "With old white people living in a black neighborhood?" "Do you want a straight answer?" he asked. "Yes," I replied." He said that in a couple of years the problem would go away. Pretty soon there would be no elderly whites in Rosedale. Consequently, it wasn't worth investing a lot of time and energy worrying about it. There were too many other issues and problems confronting the neighborhood and black people generally.

[...]

At that time, these events were abstractions, newspaper accounts of racial crises in some other community, hatred in someone else's backyard. I had even heard liberal, white colleagues within the university rationalize these events as somehow being just retribution for America's violent legacy of racial oppression. One colleague remarked to me: "Their ancestors were probably yukking it up when blacks were being lynched by Klansmen."

Whites left because they were being beaten, robbed, raped and murdered at an appalling rate, and no one who mattered was willing or able to do anything about it. They were driven out through unrestrained, lawless violence, which resulted from the deliberate policies of the authorities and powerful social institutions, and which those authorities and institutions did nothing to address or prevent. All of this had an explicitly racial component in both the motives for implementation, the disastrous effects, and the reasons those disastrous effects went unaddressed. How is that not ethnic cleansing?

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Forcible transfer of populations is considered a crime against humanity, so expect any nation that does it to have all kinds of sanctions leveled against it.

Somehow the victors of WWII escaped this inevitable punishment for their forcible transfer of Eastern European germans.

If the populists actually win, they'll be in the same position to define the rules and carve out whatever Schmittian exception is necessary to do what they will.

the rise of an authoritarianism as overwhelming as China's

Even China does not attempt to deport the Uighurs to its Central Asian allies.

Both Churchill and Stalin seemed to think Slav nativist sentiment in the Slavic lands would be common postwar and so were onboard with the expulsion of Germans in anticipation of the great power struggle over those lands. I think the Poles themselves may actually have been less concerned, but I might have forgotten.

I thought the Polish and Czechoslovak governments-in-exile had been enthusiastic about the expulsion. Even the interwar Polish government sought to induce Germans to emigrate through the same sorts of measures as adopted against the Jews (e.g., selective nationalization of industries dominated by the wrong ethnicities). As far as I know it was only Belarusians and Ukrainians that they considered to be practically assimilable.

I really don't get why people go straight to ethnic cleansing. It's a political non-starter for one unless we're on the brink of collapse, and there is several steps in-between here and there that are much more reasonable. Every single larger european country used to be multiple regions & ethnicities that didn't really identify as one, and there are quite a few accidents of history which would have led to a very different structure; Burgundy as an independent entity, or a much larger (or smaller, or integrated) Austria, or a mostly-unified Scandinavia, and so on. That the current shape feels so "solid" was the result of a deliberate process of propaganda and suppression of minority identities. The only reason why we nowadays can be so laizze-faire with european minority identification is precisely because of this process. My mom didn't speak high german for example, only low german, but was bullied in school even by the teachers until she could speak "proper" german. My parents only taught high german to me. And this obviously was toward the far end, both in time and in tameness, of the process.

There is so much we can change; We can tie welfare to much more stringent requirements, enforce a common language, or for a more extreme option we can require extensive civil/military service with explicit statements of loyalty. And there's even some "positive" actions still lacking; For example, I personally know an arabic guy who fell into alcoholism bc he was literally not allowed to work for multiple years due to his legal status, and he wasn't willing to engage in illegal work (in itself a laudable quality, even if it arguably was wrong in this case!). Many of the more extreme options will probably result in some levels of emigration, but that's still very different than forcibly removing people of which a decent percentage would likely have been willing to adjust.

I really don't get why people go straight to ethnic cleansing.

If we stopped giving welfare to immigrants, absurd NGO charities, legal protections, etc., most would self-deport overnight. Is that ethnic cleansing?

The government pays tax dollars to NGO charities that coach migrants on how to apply for asylum. The government pays tax dollars to buy plane tickets for migrants and put them up in hotel rooms or other temporary shelters. Squeeze these programs a little bit and the flow stops.

Living on welfare in the United States is a miserable experience.

It's clearly better than what they got at home!

How about stopping welfare full stop? It fixes so many things...

Most welfare is welfare-for-the-old, not welfare-for-the-poor. Westerners find the Indian alternative to welfare-for-the-old a lot less attractive than just ponying up on tax day.

  • Social Security: 5.5% of GDP
  • Medicare: 3.2% of GDP
  • Not having your demented mother-in-law around the house: Priceless

There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's the fiat currency printing press.

Not having your demented mother-in-law around the house: Priceless

A simple question then: Why would you marry your wife then if you can't stand your mother in law? Sounds like the western courtship and mate selection process has some issues if mother in law problems are so common. Remember when you marry someone you're not just choosing your spouse but rather you're choosing your inlaws too. We also have lots of mother in law issues in our cultures to the point that the wife/mother in law tussle is one of the staples soap writers use for their dramas, but it's never seen as OK to throw out your elders and generally eventually people find a compromise all the parties are happy with.

Plus your children will get 25% of their DNA from your mother in law, which means they'll probably be somewhat like her. Choosing a mother in law you dislike is indirectly choosing your children to be more predisposed towards traits you dislike compared to a mother in law you like.

Also you do realise that some day you will be the parent in law getting booted out of the family home to be "cared for" by strangers, yes?

All this reminds me of the opining lines to Gertrude Stein's "The Making of Americans":

Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop!” I did not drag my father beyond this tree.”

Plus your children will get 25% of their DNA from your mother in law, which means they'll probably be somewhat like her.

Assuming these undesirable traits are not in your wife, that means that they probably will have less than 25% of any DNA associated with the traits, or more likely, the traits are just learned and not genetic.

Depends quite a bit on the particulars, but in general terms no. As I wrote:

Many of the more extreme options will probably result in some levels of emigration, but that's still very different than forcibly removing people of which a decent percentage would likely have been willing to adjust.

As long as you give people the option to adjust, the requirements are clearly aimed toward creating a sustainable state with citizens that hold a shared identity and they are reasonably attainable for the great majority of people, them leaving out of their own accord is not meaningfully "ethnic cleansing" in my view. The change can obviously still be bad in many other ways, though.

The issue here and where the anti-immigration people will fundamentally disagree with you is you assume the issue with immigrants is mostly cultural assimilation and not biological assimilation. It’s assuming if you suppress minority culture they will turn into good Protestant Americans. Biological assimilation is still possible but requires even more extreme measures. Germany is quite dull today. We wiped out an entire generation of their fighting men. Central America similar went thru a big filter with the Spanish. I believe England was executing something like 1% of their lower class for a long time. One theory of Ashkenazi is the ethnicity faced strong selection pressure for entering the merchant class and thus selecting for IQ. There are processes to biologically assimilate a people, but in the modern world that is an order of magnitude more extreme. The U.S. too this day has failed to assimilate the African American population.

Genetic engineering could be a potential solution in the near future.

While the theory about how medieval executions drove a certain kind of evolution is cute and somewhat plausible, I consider it far from proven. If you asked me numbers, I'd say 20% to be true in broad terms, 40% to be true directionally but too weak pressure to be notable, and 40% to be just wrong. There is also the problem that executions have been a mainstay of cultures everywhere. As I remember, the relevant paper was OK in terms of "this is a theory, and it somewhat fits with some available evidence" but bad in terms of "this theory is actually significantly better than competing theories".

Much more plausible to me is simply that the cradle of humanity from which most non-africans descend was a pretty strong bottleneck with, among other things, multiple neurology-related mutational sweeps. Secondly the civilisational band of europe - middle east - asia has exerted pro-civilisation pressure over literal millenia, and from the available evidence the centre of highest development has changed multiple times. The problem with arabs really isn't biology, the moment they bother to assimilate they're pretty good citizens. That argument applies much more to (sub-saharan) africans, which still are a pretty small minority here.

In addition, I happen to be a pretty strong proponent of genetic engineering anyway.

In addition, I happen to be a pretty strong proponent of genetic engineering anyway.

I too very strongly support genetic engineering. However I expect that even if we did this the low grade whites left wouldn't be partcularly happy about the enhanced negro who is now better than them and starts taking his new rightful place in society. I expect they will still complain just as much about that state of affairs as they do about the current one (much like how they complain today about black Nigerian Elites).

And even if you raised these whites to the same level as the upgraded blacks the complaining still wouldn't stop. What were litanies against people sucking on the welfare teat will become jeremiads against the minorities driving wages down.

Arabs have a genetically low IQ today because extremely high rates of cousin marriage drive down their intelligence(a side effect of Islam). Arab Christians have IQ scores on par with north-western Europe. It’s not implausible that ancient middle easterners had IQ more similar to Europeans than to their modern descendants.

I’ve been led to believe, perhaps falsely, that this should only account for about 5 IQ points. I suspect (not epistemically well-founded) that the Christian non-Ashkenazi Jewish IQ advantage in the Middle East could derive partially from wealthier, more educated segments of society being more resistant to conversion (like recusants in England). Middle Eastern Christians sects and Jews (and maybe Druze, Yazidis, other religious groups? I’m not too familiar) always strike me as resembling unusually large, Indian-style jātis

There’s probably a lot of factors behind Maronites having the highest IQ in the Levant, including Jews as a whole(although not if you split out ashkenazim). Recusants being wealthier is probably a factor too, but I think the cousin marriage effect is exaggerated by generations upon generation of inbreeding. There might also be a factor of women being more resistant to conversion with intelligence, in particular, due to Islam having a deserved reputation for treating women more poorly than Christianity.

The U.S. too this day has failed to assimilate the African American population.

Americans spent centuries taking strong and specific action to keep the races separate and thus specifically prevent assimilation. The Latin American countries were considerably more successful in assimilating the slavery-descended populations to the general population.

Americans spent centuries taking strong and specific action to keep the races separate and thus specifically prevent assimilation.

And then when they stopped trying to keep them separate, whites were ethnically cleansed from the centers of what used to be world-class cities. Assimilation did not happen, but ethnic cleansing of white people did.

I cannot imagine an America where segregation still exists.

I did not upvote it, and generally consider SS's positions unacceptable. Nevertheless, I suspect that you are likewise not "imagining" how desegregation actually operated, what it actually aimed to do and what the results actually were. It is entirely possible that leaving segregation in place would have been better for black people themselves then the reality of what we actually did. Likewise, segregation could have been brought down voluntarily and piecemeal, rather than being imposed top-down, and that almost certainly would have been preferable. It's hard to imagine how it could have gone worse, strictly from the perspective of the blacks themselves.

Buying mansions in the DFW suburbs is now considered ethnic cleansing? Also, there are tons of white people walking around Manhattan. The whites seemed to have rebounded well from the genocide.

  • -11

That's not what he's referring to.

Most of the people living in the DFW suburbs had not previously been living in Dallas proper; they moved to the area.

Honestly I was just fired up about the phrase “ethnic cleansing”. Felt like such an insane phrase to use for people moving to the suburbs.

  • -10

Nobody gets fired up about a similarly charged phrase for people moving to the suburbs, when that phrase denigrates those doing the moving rather than those providing the impetus to move. I refer, of course, to "white flight".

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But not an insane phrase to use for cohesive communities being destroyed by newcomers who inflict wildly disproportionate, racially-organized lawless violence on them, with the tacit support and approval of institutional actors. That most of the community members escape with their lives by promptly fleeing, losing their community and much of their wealth and resources in the process, does not change the fundamental nature of the situation. Nor does that nature change when the fleeing is conducted under color of law, through sale of their property.

And, key to the ethnic cleansing claim, the authorities let it be known they've been told not to stop the violent blacks from terrorizing the whites.

...

If one of them had, say, 5 % of African-derived ancestry, would you know it? That's what assimilation largely meant in the Latin American context.

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I was talking specifically about Africans.

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"Mass deportation of undocumented immigrants" is considerably different from "Mass deportation of immigrants and their descendants in general".

...

And what would that look like in the USA and Europe?

I think large scale population transfers are possible in the EU, but only if Islamist terrorism gets much worse and more common. People at the fringes of the AfD, Zemmour’s faction in France will hint at it already. Nevertheless, there’s a long way between hinting at it and doing it, which would come with extreme opposition, constitutional hurdles and require absolute control of the political system, so I still think they’re unlikely. Also, that’s like level 10 on a menu of policy options that European countries haven’t even pursued yet after stuff like forced assimilation, banning certain religious institutions, internal population redistribution to break up ethnic ghettos, more aggressive banning of religious dress, taking children from parents to be educated in the national culture, forcing state employees and welfare recipients to show various kinds of loyalty to national identity and so on (even if you don’t think they will work, they will probably all be tried before mass deportation).

In the US they’re never going to happen. Most white Americans don’t have anywhere near the baseline racial animus toward Central Americans that many white Europeans have toward migrants from the Islamic world. Plus they’re largely Christian and don’t commit terrorist attacks (which serve as large, dramatic, visually arresting spectacles that drive nativist sentiment in Europe much more than increases in crime or general social tensions). They’re not beheading random white civilians in positions of power and yelling ‘viva la raza’ while they do it. In the UK, Australia, Canada and NZ I don’t see it happening either. These people have very little ethnic identity, even compared to, say, modern Germans and Swedes.

"What it would look like" in Europe would probably be the forced population swaps between Greece and Turkey after World War I, or the ethnic cleansing of Germans from Eastern Europe after World War II. There already exists a model for this in Europe, it's happened before. But nothing like this happens without state force and a willingness to resort to violence, which means nothing of the sort will happen as long as people continue to believe (as they do in Europe) that they just need to vote harder to solve the problem.

There is no public desire on a large-enough scale in the modern US or Europe for the kind of forced population movements that the alt-right wants. Which means that voting or no voting, it is not going to happen any time in the immediate future. It is not going to happen through voting because the people who want it are outvoted. It is not going to happen outside of voting because the people who want it to happen are outnumbered and outgunned by the people who do not want it to happen. Personally, I doubt that it will ever happen. Attitudes towards these things have simply changed enormously since 80 years ago and the number of non-whites in the US and Europe is growing too slowly to cause some sort of shocked paradigm shift among white people.

Today.

I honestly think in 20-30 years Europe has a very good chance of radicalizing. At some point the costs of immigration will be too high for the college educated living in expensive neighbors not to notice the issues.

Then again San Francisco exists so perhaps I am wrong.

Honestly if I were a billionaire the best way to turn people against immigration is probably funding programs sending elites to study in different areas. And notice the different quality of life in high and low trust societies. Then some gentle nudges discussing why that is so.

Then again San Francisco exists so perhaps I am wrong.

When I was in SF, the derelicts who were making the place unlivable were far more likely to be black-looking (i.e. presumably ADOS blacks) than any of the immigrant groups people are complaining about. If I had to guess, I would say the second-largest subgroup were white American druggies.

San Francisco is a churning hub of naive liberals turning into centrists in their mid careers and retreating to hide in suburbs somehow free of homeless and blacks. If you want to turn San Francisco liberals away from immigration, don't send them on junkets, force them to find a replacement tenant before they can physically leave their degrading rental properties in the 'diverse' city.

Agree, a reversal of immigration is impossible. That's why its imperative to fix our broken immigration and asylum systems, because immigration is one of the few policies that can never be undone.

Almost all disasters are temporary. It took Europe only 10 or 15 years to recover from WWII. Countries like Poland have more or less completely recovered from Communism in 30 years.

But immigration can never be recovered from. It is one of few things that will permanently change a country.

You can recover from immigration. Race riots are a GREAT way to let someone know they aren't welcome and should make all effort to shape up, fight, or get out. The same forces that compels police to stand aside and let masses of muslims rape white children will cause the police to stand aside as Hamlet Towers is burnt to the ground: can't arrest all of them with our small police and the prisons are full. Europeans are seen as weak pussies because 60 years of German-Franco-Anglo peace has been sustained by an incompetent enemy and football. Violent migrants thinking weak peoples will stay weak and docile in the face of islamist violence should remember that the Europeans did in fact have superior martial arms and valor to take their lands, and the Europeans can do so again with enough motivation.

Hamlet Towers

Tower Hamlets, the place is called Tower Hamlets (and no it's not a complete shithole, the bourough includes Whitechapel which yes is pretty bad but also all of Canary Wharf which is the No 2. main finance center in London).

You can recover from immigration. Race riots are a GREAT way to let someone know they aren't welcome and should make all effort to shape up, fight, or get out.

Certainly it worked in the US in the 1960s. But you need the connivance of the state to allow the riots to run unchecked.

Race riots are a GREAT way to let someone know they aren't welcome and should make all effort to shape up, fight, or get out.

Race riots have to be pretty fucking bad for people to go back to Africa or Pakistan, especially the way things are going now in some of those countries. Frankly, I don't know that you can make it bad enough except on pain of death. And, of course, people will react to that.

Even worse, you run the risk of radicalizing the biggest - by mass - obstacle to this sort of thing: Good Whites who want to fight Nazis. It's not gonna be a stretch if you're actively ethnically cleansing via violence.

They don't have to go back, they just need to be smacked into submission and change their ways or reveal their own desire to fight against whites and have their evil exposed. Good whites are the ones now edging towards race riots and I can't blame them. Europe is where a race riot is likely to start next, and the arabs who crow about breeding out the europeans and stealing the spoils for themselves are in for a rude awakening.

Maybe. Or maybe two world wars killed off the most valorous Europeans, leaving only the weaker and more docile to have kids. Then consider the demographic changes wrought by two or more centuries of emigration, where the majority of the most cantankerous, adventurous, and ambitious relocated to America. Finally, add in modern birth rates, and it begins to seem somewhat likely that the present-day stock of Europeans is rather different than their forebears of 200–500 years ago.

"What it would look like" in Europe would probably be the forced population swaps

These aren't going to happen and if they were going to happen it's far more likely it would be whites getting booted off to Madagascar or someplace instead of non-whites being the ones kicked out.

In which countries? The US? Seems laughable.

As for others, maybe I'm way too optimistic about human nature (pessimistic? wypipo's openness and low ingroup loyalty is to my benefit) but I think any situation that gets bad enough to enforce population transfers via gun is going to mean a significant change in the current attitude (which seems to be a mix of delusional complacency and arrogance that assumes that the only real threat is other, more reactionary Westerners.) that makes all of this seem like a fait accompli.

For this debate this might be the funniest immigrant and take I have seem. I agree with the take he’s assimilated. He crosses the border and complains how easy it is, he’s a good guy, but America should be afraid of who’s getting in.

https://x.com/quantian1/status/1793659716532662642

Peak humor this

This guy might be the most stereotypically Turkish Turkish man I have ever seen. His way of thinking is the Turkish mindset perfected. Also his phenotype and accent is just spot-on


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