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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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Personally I always thought Texas and other border states were just playing national politics with the border crisis. Creating a crisis as an issue to run for re-election on.

https://www.axios.com/2022/10/07/new-york-adams-emergency-migrant-buses

NYC has received 17k migrants since April. That seems tiny compared to what Texas has dealt with.

Adams said the city is receiving on average 5-6 buses a day. I will assume 40 people per bus or about 240 a day. That’s about 75k a year and he says it will cost the city a billion a year.

Now 75k a year of migrants is probably NYC fair share of migrants for how many are coming. NYC population around 9 million or 1/35 of the US.

He says it’s not an issue they asked for, but they did declare themselves a sanctuary city.

Maybe Adams is actually a Republican. Because his complaining is exactly what Republicans would want from busing them for political reasons. Conversely maybe Texas GOP complaining about migrants was not just politics but a real issue they were having trouble dealing with. I assumed it was politics.

I think this also shows some weaknesses with the blue city state capacity. The basic agreement before was we have some globally competitive people we can tax a lot to fund our local poor plus civil servants. Blue cities aren’t that good at building more housing and infrastructure anymore. It’s about $20k a year for them per migrant. Texas and the south can just give them a mortgage for $20k to buy a used a trailer and use their land which can house multiple people though jobs might be a problem theirs only so many meat processing plant and ranch hands you need.

Honestly NYC should just ship them to Chicago and write a $20k a head check. There’s plenty of abandoned property on the southside that needs people (though has violence issues but better than where they came from).

If Adams was going to be a good Democrat he should just pay the tab and tell Abbot he will take his proportional share.’

Does anyone have predictions on how this country will look when half of its citizens have a standard deviation lower IQ on average?

Let me rephrase this. Is there any way this won’t be a catastrophe which, in 500 years, people will look back on as a lesson in how nations fail? There’s no possible way that tens of millions of lower IQ people added to a nation is good for the nation, right?

The US depends much more on those with 3-4 or higher standard deviation higher IQ than it does having a mass of 100IQ people. The latter already just believe what smarter people come up with and work in jobs, entertain themselves, in ways said smarter people come up with. Whereas the latter ... physics, philosophy, finance, law, math, engineering, etc.

So if you're worried about tens of millions of lower IQ people added to the nation, why not worry about the hundreds of millions of similarly lower IQ people already here? There are still 15% of the population below a standard deviation anyway.

We have a generous welfare state, no IQ requirements for voting and award jobs and university admissions based on a racial spoils system. Adding a bunch of low IQ people is a complete disaster. If we were a dictatorship with no welfare state then yeah it wouldn't make as big of a difference.

Would it, though? Let's say the new people are, on average, 94 IQ. Are the existing 100IQ voters really competently evaluating political philosophies and candidates, or are they mostly just led by politicians and media on either side? If 150M 95Iq people were airdropped into the US right now, or the next generation was significantly dumber ... it would suck, but society wouldn't collapse. You just can't have a 95IQ person write a compiler, no matter how much affirmative action wants it.

Or - a bunch of 94IQ people wouldn't destroy society, because the existing 94IQ people and existing 100IQ people don't. And both are, relative to having much more intelligent and smart and passionate etc people, worse for 'the nation' or 'the people' or anything.

I don't think voting is about evaluating competing philosophies or that 100 iq people would be competent at doing that, I think it's about getting what you want. People with an IQ of 90 are plenty smart enough to realize that they can get what they want by voting for the party that will take from the middle class and give to the poor.

A dumb person can't write a compiler but he can certainly have a job as a compiler writer. There's no law of nature that says we have to give jobs to the people who are capable of doing them.

I don't follow the argument about ratios. It's harder for the smart people to support welfare payments for X + 150 million than it is for just X.

I guess it depends on what you mean by 'collapse'. I don't think the US will stop existing, but I think life will get drastically and permanently worse for me and my family.

It's the same issue as the race/IQ debate. You have people who are 130Iq on this site arguing that the US going from 100IQ to 95IQ is a CATASTROPHE. But what about the gap between 100 and 130? And for racism - ok, blacks are some number of points less. But - ">130IQ people" are 30 points higher than the average american. Isn't that a much more important bit?

It's harder for the smart people to support welfare payments for X + 150 million than it is for just X.

Yeah, but the solution is for the 130IQ people to have more children, or do eugenics, in either case. The difference between 100 and 95 is swamped by 100 - 130.

People with an IQ of 90 are plenty smart enough to realize that they can get what they want by voting for the party that will take from the middle class and give to the poor

this is not that stark. A lot of poorer people still vote R, esp if white. Also ... don't the democrats want higher taxes on the rich, and the republicans want lower taxes on the rich? I don't have a preference on the issue, but have never understood the 'take from the middle class' argument.

I guess it depends on what you mean by 'collapse'. I don't think the US will stop existing, but I think life will get drastically and permanently worse for me and my family.

Can you name a specific way that'll happen?

You have people who are 130Iq on this site arguing that the US going from 100IQ to 95IQ is a CATASTROPHE. But what about the gap between 100 and 130?

To be fair, if there were a country with an average IQ of 130, for them it would be a catastrophe to be reduced to an average of 100. It's possible that, for a fixed percentage of 130 IQ people a country might have (assuming it's a low percentage), having a population average of 100 is still going to get you a significantly better standard of living than a population average of 95, even if the gap between 100 and 130 is much larger.

I'm not arguing that intelligence doesn't matter, it does, I'm explicitly arguing that the difference that matters is the 130/160 vs 100, as opposed to native 100 vs migrant 95. It just sounds like a reductio ad absurdum